On Coloniality, Racialized Forgetting and the “Group Effect”: Interrogating Ethnic Studies'...

On Coloniality, Racialized Forgetting andthe “Group Effect”: Interrogating Ethnic

Studies’ Meta-Narrative of Race

VRUSHALI PATIL*

Abstract Against the backdrop of collaborative antiracist struggle, this paper con-siders knowledge about race constructed by contemporary ethnic studies. Examin-ing narratives of self, history and purpose produced by ethnic studies, it argues thatthese narratives highlight processes of racialization at the level of received ethnicgroups while eliding cross-group processes. It argues that the hyper-visibility ofracialization at the level of distinct groups, coupled with the invisibility of cross-group processes, creates a “group effect” which has significant implications foralliance-building and solidarity. It ends with a discussion of some possibilities forcountering the group effect.

Introduction

On May 11, 2010 Arizona’s governor signed a law banning schoolsfrom teaching classes that advocate ethnic solidarity, are designedfor students of a particular ethnic group, or “promote the overthrowof the US government.” Although aimed at Chicano Studies, thisincident should disturb every ethnic studies’ “contingency”: as US“minorities” continue to grow and the majority’s majority status isfurther threatened, ethnic studies can expect growing fear, anger,and backlash.1 Thus it has never been more imperative for differentethnic studies fields to think in terms of interconnection and inter-dependence. Indeed, ethnic studies itself emerged amidst thegrowing post-war transnational, Afro-Asian challenge to globalracial hierarchy and the collective demand of peoples of color formore inclusive knowledges. And yet in many ethnic studies’ spacestoday, particularly those focused on one designated group, a pre-dominant metanarrative of race compels a racialized forgetting ofthis collective history. That is, to the extent that Black Studies,Chicano Studies, Asian American Studies and others produceknowledges about distinct groups with separate histories, concernsand interests, they reify the meanings, experiences, and possibili-ties of group difference. They foreground a designated racializedgroup, rendering others not merely invisible but irrelevant for thisquery.

* Vrushali Patil is Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department ofGlobal & Sociocultural Studies at Florida International University and maybe contacted at [email protected].

Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 27 No. 3 September 2014DOI: 10.1111/johs.12057

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Ethnic studies as a field began as an effort to include the per-spectives of racialized peoples and minorities within higher edu-cation, with an emphasis on ethnic consciousness, identity andpride (Yang 2000, pp 4–5). In recent years, debates over identityhave been critical. Within black studies, while an Afrocentric per-spective has sought to counter Eurocentrism with the histories,perspectives and culture of peoples of African descent (see forexample Asante 1998), others (see for example Gilroy 2000) havecountered that such an approach is essentialist and problematic.A further challenge is made by those who focus on issues ofdiversity having to do with class, language, religion, culture,national origin, and circumstance of entry into and history withinthe United States of the variant groups glossed as “Asian Ameri-cans” or “Chicanos,” for example (La Belle and Ward 1996, p 84).Some argue that such complexities render any particular construc-tion of group-ness exclusionary by nature. Finally, fields such asWomen’s and Gender Studies and Queer Studies have also posedadditional challenges, as they have foregrounded the complexity ofethnic experience and identity in its intersection with issues of sex,gender and sexuality. Ultimately, such challenges have contributedto debates over whether the ethnic group is a legitimate unit ofstudy.

My concern here is less with such now familiar debates overidentity politics (see Hall 1992; Gilroy 1998; Gilroy 2000; Nayak2006) and more with prospects for alliance-building across putativedifference. While the highlighting of inter-group connection issometimes associated with an “apolitical” focus on the complexityand fluidity of racial process, and its bracketing with the experi-ences of particular groups and social justice for those groups, theseare not mutually exclusive approaches. From the perspective ofsocial justice, inter-group connection and collaboration has alwaysbeen a central dimension of decolonial struggle, including thestruggle for a different university. Even more, such collaborationwas also meaningful substantively, as it recognized historical inter-connections in the racialization of different peoples. If racial con-ception and expression must be connected to the colonial conditionwithin which it was forged, to its subsequent globalization and to itsrelational process, wherein racial dynamics across spaces andtimes are actually interconnected (Goldberg 2009), I suggest that atissue here is a misplaced emphasis on the scale of the racializedgroup in what are fundamentally multi-scalar phenomena. Withsuch a focus, despite the multi-scalar dynamics of racialization (atthe individual, group, national, international and other scales),group-focused ethnic studies grants hyper-visibility to some scaleswhile others remain largely invisible. In doing so, it naturalizes

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© 2014 John Wiley & Sons LtdJournal of Historical Sociology Vol. 27 No. 3 September 2014

group difference and severely weakens the possibilities for collabo-ration. For those concerned with group experience and socialjustice, the recognition of the impacts of group distinctions inresponse to their strategic deployment in the exercise of power isclearly legitimate and necessary; however, such distinctions cannotbe assumed, but must be historicized, spatialized, and situated inrelation to broader cross-group strategies of racialization.

Centering Multi-Scalar, Cross-Group Histories of Racializationand Resistance

In 1969 the third world Liberation Front (twLF) went on strike atSan Francisco State University and the University of California,Berkeley. Confronting their campus administrations, this multi-ethnic coalition of student groups demanded their classroomsteach about the struggles of third world peoples, with new curri-cula, increased minority admissions, staffing reforms, and the for-mation of a Third World College (University Communications 2009).Two features of this coalition are important. First, the term “thirdworld” signaled a trans-national consciousness and politicizationwhich moved beyond state borders to make connections betweendomestic and broader histories of racism and colonialism. Indeed,“the international movements for independence . . . were viewed asrelated to the demands of U.S. Third World minorities for politicalpower” (Asian American Community Center History Group ND).Additionally, despite particular experiences of racialized brutality,violence, and exclusion (i.e., slavery, colonization, genocide, immi-grant restriction), the coalition emphasized a common cross-group,inter-ethnic history of racism. Indeed the boundaries between dif-ferent student struggles comprising the twLF were themselvesporous, with people and ideas moving back and forth (Ferreira2003). As such, the twLF refused to disengage domestic fromtransnational dynamics or to sever the concerns of differentiallyracialized peoples from each other. While it recognized racializationat the level of the group, such articulation was but one part ofa broader analysis that highlighted cross-group connections. Assuch, the twLF’s critique was complex, comprehensive and inclu-sive. Challenging colonial notions of racial, ethnic and nationaldifference, I argue that its critique was decolonial.

As Aíbal Quijano suggests, in this so-called postcolonial momentwhat endures is a “coloniality of power” wherein colonial-eraracializations continue to operate at the most fundamental levels(2007); and resistance strategies that seek to deconstruct suchmeanings have been termed decolonial (see Lugones 2007). Indeedwhile colonialist writers certainly produced ideas of difference

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concerned with specific groups, which were inevitably complicatedby their varying subjectivities, interests and agendas, this variationand fluidity nevertheless proliferated within a larger framework ofself-other. Thus these variegated productions developed alongsideand within the identities, interests and agendas of particular colo-nial states and further still, largely within a certain “idea ofEurope,” which pivoted around notions of civilization, Christianity,European norms of gender and heteronormativity, and emergingnotions of private property, rationality, self-control, and self-mastery. Thus in various colonial encounters with indigenouspeoples, Africans, and Asians, racialized peoples were understoodas “deviant” in their gender and sexuality, godless, and animalistic,and as excessively instinctive, emotional, and unable to properlywork the land. A more comprehensive analysis of racialization incolonial modernity, then, requires a multi-scalar approach thatacknowledges differences and commonalities among the “objects” ofsuch racialization, as well as their interconnections.

Considering international law, for example, a common notion ofdifference in relation to civilized Christian Europe coupled withputative inter-group difference based on perceived distance fromEurope translated into differential recognition and rights for dif-fering others (Keal 2003; Anghie 2005; Patil 2008). Anghie arguesthat colonialism itself was central to the constitution of interna-tional law, as it was forged out of the attempt to create a legalsystem that could account for relations between the Europeanand non-European worlds in the colonial confrontation, andinternational lawyers over the centuries maintained a basic dis-tinction between the civilized and non-civilized (2005). Within thisgeneral dichotomy, the law distinguished among three categoriesof humanity, the civilized, the barbaric, and the savage, giving adifferent political recognition to each. While the civilized enjoyedplenary recognition, the barbaric received partial recognition,and the savage, “mere human recognition” (Grovogui 1988,p 185).

From the Enlightenment, emerging theories of unilinear develop-ment and progress attempted to classify differing others accordingto their supposed “stages of development” (Wesseling 1997, p 35),and “naturalist” discourses of the absolute rights of the civilizedbegan to compete with more paternalist “historicist” theories of theneed for the former to “develop” and “civilize” their others (Goldberg2002). In the League of Nations Mandates System, for example,absolute rights versus paternalistic development created a precari-ous system wherein differing others would have vastly differingfates. To be sure, the Mandates system institutionalized the pater-nalistic language of beneficent colonial rule:

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[for] peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions ofthe modern world, there should be applied the principle that the well-being anddevelopment of such peoples form a sacred trust of civilization . . . the tutelage ofsuch peoples should be entrusted to advanced nations . . . this tutelage should beexercised by them as Mandatories on behalf of the League (Article 22, Covenant ofLeague of Nations. 1919).

And yet in accordance with the differential recognition granted todiffering others in earlier periods, the mandates system similarlydistinguished between territories according to their degree of“advancement” or “backwardness” (Anghie 2005, pp 121–2), creat-ing three different classes of mandates, classes A, B, and C. Whileclass A consisted of the former Turkish territories, B and C werecomprised of territories from Africa and the Pacific. Only the firstwere considered developed enough “to be brought to” (eventual)independence, while the second two differed little from other colo-nies (Grimal 1978). The United Nations largely inherited thissystem, with a similar distinction between trust territories, whichwere to be brought to eventual independence, and non-self govern-ing territories, which were to continue in their dependent statusindefinitely (Patil 2008, p 29). Additionally the discourse of the levelof development replaced that of advancement versus backwardness(ibid).

While “difference” between differentially racialized peoples hascertainly proliferated on a variety of levels from the early colonialperiod, and such “differences” had real life consequences, wecannot forget that these differences have always been produced andcirculated within a larger global framework of racialization andindeed are meaningless outside of this framework.

Beyond international law, we can also see such differential yetinterrelated racializations at the scale of the colonial and post-colonial United States. The European conquest of indigenous landsin the Americas was greatly aided by the aforementioned narra-tives, as was African slavery to the new world, and the eventualcolonization of Mexican land and importation of Chinese labor(Takaki 1979; Stannard 1993; Morgan 2005). Beginning with inde-pendence, the republican leaders of the new nation were concernedto maintain distinctions between civilized citizens and others,seeking to protect the nation’s “homogeneity” and “purity”, andimmigration laws sought to ensure that the new nation wouldremain white. Of course, parallel to the differentiations discussedabove, different peoples were distinguished in various ways. Forexample, while the Chinese were “negroized” akin to African Ameri-cans, at the same time, they were distinguished as more intelligent(Takaki 1979, pp 216–219). And yet, in stark contrast to republicanideologies which incorporated white men and women as fathers and



mothers of the new nation, African Americans, Chinese and Mexi-cans alike would be allowed a presence only as (cheapened) labor(Dill 1988). Indeed, the new nation would turn to the cheapenedlabor of racialized peoples generally for its development from aprimarily agrarian economy into an industrial center (Takaki 1979,p 63).

In this, the situation of Native Americans was unique as the firstinhabitants of the land. Some distinguish them from ethnic minori-ties as national minorities, or previously self-governing peoples whohave been incorporated into states in which they do not constitutethe majority group, and who should possess particular kinds ofrights therein (see Kymlicka 1996). In one sense, then, whileAfrican Americans, Mexicans and Chinese were often (though notalways or evenly) sought as sources of cheapened labor, NativeAmericans were continually forced off their land and eventuallyonto reservations (Takaki 1979, p 64).

Despite this atypical manner of incorporation into the new state,however, the continuities between the racialization of Native Ameri-cans and other groups are undeniable. As Widener (2003, p 142)notes in his comments on California, thus, “early state statutes andconstitutions conflated all nonwhites, describing ‘Negro, Mongo-lian, and Indian’ as generic terms.” Focusing on African Americansand Chinese in this context, he writes:

[like blacks] the Chinese also dealt with lynchings, segregated institutions, andprohibitions against interracial relations and court testimony . . . like blacks, theChinese were taken as fearsome sexual predators, eager to prey on drug-addled anddefenseless white women (ibid).

Such parallel racialization continued until World War II, after whichthe fates of each community diverged. With the Civil Rights move-ment, for example,

Asian America found itself explicitly cast as a new other, whose story challenged thenecessity of minority mobilization . . . [contributing to] the development of the modelminority concept [which] gained speed following the urban rebellions of the 60s andclimaxed during the Reagan administration (Widener 2003, pp 168–80).

I reference Widener’s work here for one simple reason. It highlightsthe shifting, interconnected racialization of communities so oftenfrozen today in distinct, even oppositional terms.

Centering Interethnic Alliances

This vast, interconnected and multi-scalar system of racializationhas been challenged by an equally vast network of interethnic

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dialogue and alliance-building—also at multiple scales. At thetransnational level, at the Pan-African Conference in 1900, Du Boisspoke of “the darker races . . . the millions of black men in Africa,America and the Islands of the Sea, not to speak of the brown andyellow myriads everywhere”; and his 1911 Universal Races Con-gress in London was attended by representatives of both Pan-Africaand Pan-Asia (Mullen 2003). The brutalities of World War I spurredsuch gatherings further, and nationalist rebels from across theglobe now sought to share ideas and make connections among theirmultiple oppressions (Widener 2003; Adas 2004, pp 97–8). In thisvein, Ho Chi Minh offered an “intercolonial” approach linking thesituations of “black, brown and yellow indigenes,” and LamineSenghor called for Afro-Asian solidarity (Edwards 2003, p 21). In1927, anti-colonial activists and intellectuals attended the firstmeeting of the League against Imperialism, the name of whichdirectly critiqued the imperialism of the League of Nations’ Man-dates System (Prashad 2007, p 21). This emerging “Third World-ist”mobilization led to the historic 1955 Bandung Conference andhelped create the radical African-Asian People’s Solidarity Organi-zation, which convened the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Confer-ence in Cairo in 1957. This collaboration was instrumental inpassing the 1960 UN Declaration on the Granting of Independenceto Colonial Countries and Peoples, which initiated legal decoloniza-tion around the world (Patil 2008).

Within the US, too, black internationalists participated in theideological struggles and radical linkages forged during this period(Widener 2003). Langston Hughes wrote anti-colonial poetry andfocused on antiracist solidarity (Jones and Singh 2003), and DuBois positioned Afro-Asian connections as central to the worldrevolutionary struggle (Mullen 2003, p 219). In California, thefuture scene of the twLF protests, African Americans and AsianAmericans forged “insurgent if fragile communities of meaning ‘ina dialectic of international questions and local communities’ ”(Widener 2003). The Japanese American left especially supportedthe African American community, and Asian American movementorganizations like the Yellow Brotherhood modeled themselves onthe Black Panthers (Mullen 2003).

Significantly, such theorizations did not neglect group-levelracialization, but placed it within the larger context of racializationat multiple scales. Thus the struggles of the multiethnic twLF for adifferent university were one part of a larger coalitional challenge tocoloniality both “above” and “below” the nation-state that had beengaining momentum across the globe since at least the interwaryears. And, critically, the twLF situated itself within this broadermovement.



Of course, these interethnic productions were not infallible. Thedeployment of cultural and gender essentialisms and varying sortsof group reifications were ongoing problems, as were intergrouptensions and hierarchies. Most of these analyses were also deeplymasculinist (Patil 2009), with anti-imperialist women who chal-lenged the bounds of gender ideology sometimes pushed out(Barbieri 2008). Finally, the seductions of the nation state producedan anti-colonial yet nationalist critique in the UN (Kelly and Kaplan2004; Patil 2008; Patil 2009). Thus the inter-group dialogue abovemust be situated within the social, cultural, and politico-economiccontexts of its production, and does not offer a panacea for theentrenched problems of coloniality. Nevertheless, excavating thehistories of interrelated racialization, as well as inter-group collabo-ration and resistance creates new “cartographies of possibility”(Verges 2003) for decoloniality in the contemporary moment.

Ethnic Studies Today: Narratives of Self, History and Purpose

It is against the backdrop of the multi-scalar, cross-groupconnectivities highlighted above that we must consider the meta-narratives of racialized history, struggle, and experience producedby US ethnic studies. While my examination is not exhaustive,below I consider stories of the emergence of different group-focused ethnic studies fields.2 Due to their greater prevalence, Iconsider here varying historicizations of African American Studiesin particular.

One such history claims:

The origins of [Black Studies] can be traced to the ferment that began between1918–1929. It was during this period that black scholars actively participated in themass awakening of the general black population that was precipitated by the socialand cultural renaissance of the era. . . . The 1960s witnessed the rejuvenation of thecivil rights movement, which provided the atmosphere for the question of BlackStudies to become a major innovation in higher education. Campus protests createdthe subsequent pressure for the recognition and proliferation of Afro-Americanstudies programs (Turner 1997, p 100).

In contrast, consider this:

In the 60s, deteriorating economic conditions gave rise to increased student discon-tent with higher education. In California, and particularly in the Black and otherThird World communities near San Francisco State College, students began todevelop their own ideas about the role and responsibility of the college . . . [which]provoked unrest and discontent in Black and Third World communities. The strikecalled by the Black Student Union was based on a myriad of issues and grievancesaffecting various campus groups . . . The strike gained the support and joint par-ticipation of various Third World student organizations, including the Asian-

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American Political Alliance (AAPA), Mexican-American Student Confederation(MASC), the Latin American Student Organization (LASO) (Anderson and Stewart2007, pp 30–1).

In these two versions, we see two competing frames. The latternarration not only mentions the parallel and connected concerns ofother groups, it also highlights their active support, providing asense of the solidarity of the student strikes. In contrast, the formerfails to even recognize the presence of “others”. This foregroundingof connection versus separation and singularity is also evident inother narrations of different ethnic studies fields provided byMuñoz, Jr (1984) and Okihiro (2007) versus Flores (2001), HarrisJr, (2001), and Jones (2001), respectively – with most narratorsfalling into the separation and singularity camp.

Some in this latter camp go even further:

Black Studies and Ethnic Studies have been in conflict, with gains in Ethnic Studies. . . often coming at the expense of Black Studies. Black Studies clearly came first,propelled by Black students’ demands in the late 1960s . . . Most involved in EthnicStudies frankly acknowledge that Black Studies was the first to appear as a distinctdiscipline. (Jones 2001, pp 118–43).

Here, not only is Black Studies positioned in (hierarchical) opposi-tion to ethnic studies, this is a zero-sum relation in which the gainsof one come at costs to the other. In reaffirming these oppositionsrather than critiquing the institutional context that might (re)pro-duce such tensions to begin with, thus, Jones perpetuates themetanarrative that differentially racialized groups have no historyof and indeed no reason for cooperation.

How are we to understand this transformation from the coalitionof the twLF to today – from the twLF’s intergroup analysis to thedisconnection and even hostility of today? Below, I highlight threefactors that I believe contribute to this shift.

1. Managed Multiculturalism: From Anti-Racism toCultural Diversity

While ethnic studies need not be multicultural (Okihiro 2007), thedominant multicultural context after WWII had critical conse-quences for the institutionalization of US ethnic studies. While themeanings, possibilities and impacts of this context are character-ized differently by different authors ( see Goldberg 1994), my focushere is on a particular post-war articulation which critiqued thelanguage of race but not necessarily the notion of group differencethat the concept is premised on. At the international level, UNESCOwas active in producing a form of anti-racism that has been



critiqued as recycling some of the very ideas it opposed. In particu-lar, the language of cultural/ethnic difference replaced that of race,with the narrative of racial difference differentially situated on ascale of evolution replaced with one of respect for and preservationof “cultural difference”. Hence culture replaced race, but continuedto do the same work as race, and this notion of difference was“carried through into multicultural approaches to education,policymaking and activism (Lentin 2005, p 379; Patil 2008, pp133–34).”

In the US in particular, this form of multiculturalism imaginesdifferent pan-ethnic formations as “discrete” communities (Jonesand Singh 2003, p 5). Pluralism premised on such discrete com-munities is produced and circulated in this “managed” multicul-turalism by multinational corporations and a centrist, corporateuniversity which markets cultural diversity as one part of theservices it provides its clients (Goldberg 1994, pp 7–8). In Prashad’swithering critique, this is a

bureaucratic multiculturalism . . . [that] reinterpreted antiracism as the promotionof diversity . . . [adopting] a pleasant attitude toward the discrete cultural historiesof different parts of the world . . . [and that] embraced bourgeois cultural diversity aslong as white supremacy and corporate power could be set aside (Prashad 2006,p xx).

In such a setting, thus, racism is rendered an individualized ratherthan a structural or institutional matter (Mohanty 1993), and thepossibilities of a “critical multiculturalism” (Goldberg 1994; Gordonand Newfield 1996) are mitigated. Fundamentally intergroup,multi-scalar processes are severed and in their stead emerges a(neo)liberal production of cultural/ethnic difference.

2. The Politics of the Academy

Within the broader climate of this managed multiculturalism, aseries of political negotiations and translations further shaped theinstitutionalization of student demands in the academy. Themanner of institutionalization produced disparate fortunes for dif-ferent ethnic studies contingencies, severing their struggles andpositioning them in opposition to each other. To be sure, the“success story” of ethnic studies is attested by the proliferation ofboth comparative and group-specific ethnic studies academicunits, though in the shifting political climate there has beenretrenchment (Cole 1991). These academic units have been accom-panied by the emergence of professional associations such as theNational Association for Interdisciplinary Ethnic Studies, theNational Council for Black Studies, the National Association of

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Chicano Studies and the Association for Asian-American Studies,as well as associated academic journals, “all of which demonstratethe increasing permanence and professionalization of the study ofrace and ethnicity in the US by the late 1970s” (Gutierrez 1994,p 159).

As the new academic units were established, however, either asinterdisciplinary undergraduate programs or departments, bothencountered the limits of the academy’s new multiculturalism.Administrations preferred “mainstream” scholarship. Given thesocial movement context of its emergence, the academic legitimacyof ethnic studies was continually in question, and the connection tocommunity service and empowerment further exacerbated thissuspicion (Butler 2001). The departments were ghettoized, whilethe interdisciplinary programs often lacked academic coherence orintellectual integrity (Marable 2001, p 51). The more prevalentprograms were also less secure institutionally and resource-wise(Gutierrez 1994, pp 158–9). Finally, the euphoria of the sixties didnot last. Government violence and repression of movement leaderstempered early optimism. This was accompanied by a decline inprograms for the poor and minorities and the lessening of “guilt-induced” efforts by white institutions and individuals (Cole 1991,p 139).

Within this (precarious) institutionalization, moreover, differentgroups were acknowledged and addressed differentially. Forexample, Guiterrez argues that while the larger public was thenwilling to endorse strong moral and political arguments regardingslavery and its legacy, this was not the case for the grievances ofother groups. Thus Black Studies fared better than its counterparts(1994, pp 158–9). In 1996, there were about 45 Black Studies fulldepartments, 17 Chicano and Puerto Rican Studies departments,and 8 Asian American Studies departments (Marable 2001, pp50–1). Over time, private foundation funding perpetuated thisunevenness. Between 1972–1988 for example in absolute dollars,the largest recipient of private foundation funds was African Ameri-can Studies, followed by Native American Studies and thenChicano/a Studies, with Asian American studies receiving nogrants during this period. Regarding ethnic studies generally, theFord Foundation was a major player. Since 1969, Ford grantedalmost 30 million dollars for Afro-American, Hispanic and NativeAmerican studies, with half of this going to Afro-American studies(Griffin 2007).

While these patterns point to a distinct (and in some ways quiteunderstandable) “advantage” for African American Studies, Fordfavored “less militant” approaches, serving to discipline AfricanAmerican studies and dampening radicalism (Griffin 2007). There



were similar consequences of the need for funding for other pro-grams, as well. For example, a major founder of Asian AmericanStudies argues that the need for funding from private foundationsnecessitated a rhetorical style of a moderate liberalism. In a fundingproposal for Asian American Studies, she describes how she madethe argument that Asians were minorities “like blacks,” since up tothat time only African Americans were considered to be minorities.The deliberate choice of the term “minority” over more radicallanguage such as “Third World peoples” was an attempt to placatefears of the white majority (Chan 2005).

The managed multicultural context elaborated above, whichprivileged a certain depoliticized production and circulation of“cultural/ethnic difference,” as well as the institutional, politico-economic and cultural realities and limits of the post-war, post-civilrights university setting, posed certain challenges for the buildingof ethnic studies. Relatively little administrative support, fewresources and the context of competition amidst growing conser-vatism served to pit differentially acknowledged contingenciesagainst each other, providing little incentive to focus on multi-scalar connections or intergroup solidarities. Ultimately, as Fergu-son argues, universities responded to the social justice demands ofmovements like the twLF with a “will to institutionality.” That is,administrative power sought to both restrict collective, oppositionaland redistributive aims of social justice movements and to affirmdifference in order to demonstrate institutional protocols and prog-ress, simultaneously. The demands for social justice, thusly, wereincorporated by the university as modes of difference, the pro-perties and functions of which would be determined by adminis-trative power. Thus, this will to institutionality did not merelyincorporate or reflect difference, but was fundamentally a mode ofsubjectification which would determine how difference was to berecognized and so the legitimate bounds of difference (2008, pp163–167). Critically, I would argue that this will to institutionalityencompassed not only the academy but the broader higher educa-tion institutional complex, including governmental and privatefunding agencies, corporate interests, and the encompassing politi-cal culture. Thus the group effect is a charge, an imperative, aninterpellation of this institutional complex – and as I discuss below,ethnic studies has largely acquiesced.

3. “How We Got Here”: Narrating the History of Ethnic Studies

To be fair, I believe this acquiescence is an unintended consequenceof a third contributor to the meta-narrative of group distinctivenessand disconnection: the very real and understandable desire of

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individuals to tell the stories of their communities. Of course, animportant component of the multi-level analysis of the twLF wasthe need for a recognition, visibility and legitimation of the experi-ences and histories of different racialized groups. I suggest that theproblem is not in the telling of these stories but in the manner oftheir telling. In the aforementioned narrations of Black Studies, forinstance, the meta-narratives of singularity and separation versusinter-connection and alliance are political choices. However, whileboth more or less co-exist in ethnic studies today, the above factorscome together to privilege the metanarrative of singularity andseparation in particular, serving to produce a “group effect.” Suchan effect further encourages this metanarrative and furtherinscribes the coloniality or power.

Of course, my intention is not to argue that different groups donot have legitimate, group-specific concerns. For example, a veryreal issue is brought up in relation to American Indian Studies byCook-Lynn and Howe, who argue that Native Americans are not US“ethnic groups” and that the model of ethnic studies with itsconcepts of slavery, immigration, assimilation, multiculturalism,diversity and post-colonialism are based on the experiences of othergroups, while Native Americans care about sovereignty, national-ism and the “third world.” Consequently, they argue that theattempt to fold American Indian Studies into US ethnic studies isdeeply problematic and parallels US attempts to ignore FirstNations’ claims of sovereignty and territory (Cook-Lynn and Howe2001, p 163). While this argument points to real tensions in theethnic studies paradigm, the themes identified here for NativeAmerican Studies recall the initial transnational critique of thetwLF, which also concerned itself with issues of anti-colonialnationalism, independence, and sovereignty.

My broader point is that despite the varying concerns of differ-entially racialized groups, the distinction between group level expe-riences and a focus on interconnection and interrelationships is afalse choice. Manning Marable argues that “most ethnic studiesscholars do not fall into either trap. Rather, we recognize both theprofound divergence and parallelism in the social construction ofethnicity (2001, p 56).” Perhaps Marable is correct in this regard.Nevertheless, within the aforementioned institutional context,ethnic studies is

increasingly embracing isolationism and protectionism in a defensive circle-the-wagon mentality for the small, hard-won gains on college campuses . . . Thehistory of collaboration and common struggle that brought about these conces-sions in the first place is often ‘lost’ or ‘forgotten’ as demagogues . . . vie formost-favored minority status with the dominant administration (Ho and Mullen2008, p 8).



Following Okihiro, as “the transnational color line at the 20thcentury’s start narrowed into nationalist struggles in Africa andAsia by the century’s midpoint . . . ethnic studies, which beganamid postcolonial nation-building, lost its bearings in the thicketof identity politics and nationalism . . . [with the same] policing ofthe borders . . . [the same] patriarchy and heterosexuality (2010).”Regarding the institutional and political-economic context too, ifthe radicalism of anti-colonialism became disciplined by the chal-lenges of navigating the nation-state system and global capitalism(Patil 2008), one might argue so does ethnic studies face verysimilar challenges in the post-war, post civil-rights US universitysetting.

From Coloniality to Relationality

If the contemporary “will to institutionality” recognizes only discreteethnic/cultural groups as legitimate subjects, the questionbecomes one of how to work against the institutional forces thatcompel the group effect, of how to disrupt the racialized forgettingthat proliferates in ethnic studies and re-center the “conscious andcontradictory experience of contacts among cultures . . . producedin the chaotic network of Relation” (Glissant 1997). The followingdiscussion is preliminary, serving as an invitation and a beginning.I highlight scattered discussions and practices, bringing togethersubstantive and institutional tactics that can be used.

Substantively, some scholars highlight the parallel, intercon-nected histories of racialization (and resistance) of different groupsacross one or more racial formations. The historical record is repletewith such cases, and the first section of this paper is culled fromthis scholarship. Recall the aforementioned work of Widener(2003), for example, who examines the shifting, interconnectedracialization within the US racial formation of communities oftenassumed today to have starkly distinct experiences, interests, andagendas. Across racial formations too, we can examine howracializing discourses of primitivism, savagery, and orientalism,and their associated tactics, travel globally; their continuities anddiscontinuities; and the enabling and constricting factors thatmatter for their movement. Goldberg argues that such work mustmove from a comparative focus on discrete racisms to relationalprocesses among and between racisms:

it is not just that Gaza is like . . . the Warsaw Ghetto . . . Rather, that Israeli militaryofficers are on record as explicitly invoking the Warsaw Ghetto as a model forthinking about how to regulate the Palestinian refugee camps suggests that theWarsaw Ghetto provides a model . . . just as early twentieth century British and

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German concentration camps in Africa . . . became models for the Nazis almost halfa century later (2009, p 1277).

In this vein, while much work on the dynamics of Aryanism inthe European, North American and South Asian contexts prolifer-ates, this work largely exists separately, speaking to issues ofracialization within one setting only. And yet, what might a frame-work that seeks to build connections among the movements ofAryan ideology across various spaces and its situated articulationand institutionalization at the height of global British hegemonyversus the pre and postwar periods versus today’s neoliberalism tellus about connected and shifting geographies of racialization withincolonial modernity? Similarly, consider the impact of work thatjuxtaposes the variant racialized femininities made legible in thelanguage of contemporary multiculturalism, including the genitallymutilated African woman, the Muslim woman subject to veiling andhonor killings, and the Indian woman subject to dowry murdersand “suttee”. Such a conjunction points to the (gendered) repro-duction of older geographies of racialization in the contemporaryneoliberal university. Interestingly, while such constructs mighthave been built on the exclusion of others’ voices, that todaymulticulturalism seeks out the affirmation of “authentic insiders”(Narayan 1997) demonstrates its dynamism. Likewise, work whichforges new connections between over-capacity prisons, immigrantdetention centers, and the far flung locales of secret and extra-ordinary renditions makes visible emerging geographies ofracialization. Such an emphasis on parallel and interconnectedhistories, hence, would both move beyond group-specific analysesto make connections among seemingly disconnected racismsacross time and space and highlight the need for a multi-scalarapproach that connects group-level phenomena with more macroand micro processes.

Second, some scholars are examining interconnections amongdifferential racializations. For example, some have written on theearly American racialization of African Americans as permanentlysavage in relation to Native Americans as savage but civilizable(Goldberg 2002), a construction that served to legitimate differentstate policies regarding the two groups. Parallel observations havebeen made for the (geographically and temporally specific) differen-tial construction of Cuban Americans in relation to Haitian Ameri-cans and Irish Americans in relation to African Americans. In thisvein, we can examine how relational distinctions of model versusproblem/criminal, patriot versus terrorist, and citizen versus illegalalien also legitimate different but ultimately interconnected statepolicies against differentially racialized groups. The relational



dimension is underscored by the fact that the criminal Latino orblack male of yesterday has partially receded in the face of today’sMuslim terrorist. Today the non-Muslim racialized young man mayhave new opportunities for citizenship and belonging, primarily viahis performance of patriotism and willingness to defend the nation.And yet, such belonging is at best tentative – never quite secure norirreversible. A relational approach highlights such interconnec-tions, while a group-specific focus which neglects such relationalconstructions not only dissuades alliance-building but often actu-ally distorts inter-connected racialization processes.

Finally, institutional tactics to center interconnections are alsoemerging, including cross-group collaborative efforts around areaand group-specific journals, conferences, and grant writing (seeJones and Singh 2003; Ho and Mullen 2008). Anti-racist feminists,in particular, have been pioneers in this regard. For example in1980, Barbara Smith helped to create what might be the first pressto focus on the writing of women of color, the Kitchen Table: Womenof Color Press. In 1983, it published the groundbreaking ThisBridge Called my Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, acollaborative effort by primarily working class Chicana, NativeAmerican, Asian American and African American lesbian-identifiedwomen. Helping to instantiate “women of color” as a new politicalcategory (Davis and James 1998), this work constituted a majorchallenge to the whiteness and heteronormativity of the monolithicwoman of Women’s Studies at the time (Higashida 2008, p 224). Itwas subsequently followed by the 1990 Making Face, Making Soul:Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color, which soughtto further “deepen the dialogue between all women and . . . take onthe various issues – hindrances and possibilities – in alliance-building (Anzaldua 1990, p xvi)”. Such work necessarily trans-formed the substantive and political horizons of Women’s Studies.Substantively, scholars explored how (gendered and sexualized)processes of racialization impacted differentially racialized womenin distinct yet inter-connected ways (see, Dill 1988; Nakano Glenn1992). Even more, the focus on connected, inter-group processes inparticular enabled anti-racist feminists to theorize collaborationwithout resorting to a problematic politics of identity. Regarding themoniker “women of color,” for example, Angela Davis clarifies thatit is not based on identity in the traditional sense:

A woman of color formation might decide to work around immigration issues. Thispolitical commitment is not based on the specific histories of racialized communitiesor its constituent members. But rather constructs an agenda agreed upon by all whoare a part of it. In my opinion, the most exciting potential of women of colorformations resides in the possibility of politicizing identity – basing the identity onpolitics rather than the politics on identity (in Davis and James 1998, p 320).

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More recently, Andrew Jones and Nikhal Pal Singh have co-editeda special issue of the journal positions (2003), and Fred Ho and BillMullen have co-edited a volume (2008), both of which seek to bringtogether and highlight work on Afro-Asian historical, cultural andpolitical connections. It is precisely this sort of work, which fore-grounds interconnections in both processes of racialization andresistance, which has the greatest potential to deconstruct thegroup effect.

Conclusion

The century long struggle against coloniality was answered in theacademy with an interpellation of distinct cultural/ethnic groupsand a concomitant demand for racialized forgetting. Once at theforefront of this struggle, today ethnic studies has a choice. It caneither surrender to the group effect, or in the language of MichelPêcheux, it can disidentify (see Pêcheux 1975). In other words thestories of the past, and of self, identity and history that we remem-ber and tell, are political choices about the present and the future.“How might we begin to sketch a new ‘cartography of possibilities’that can break out of the enclosures of neocolonial color lines andthe insularity of ethnonationalist identity politics? How can westrive to articulate an alternative universality against the existingracial limitations of modern imperialisms, nationalisms andhumanisms” (Jones and Singh 2003, pp 3–7)? If the targeting ofChicano Studies and the banning of ethnic studies in Arizona tellsus anything, it is that ethnic studies still needs the coalitions ofthe past. Even more, an adequate analysis of contemporaryracialization requires new coalitions in the present. Otherwise, wewill simply be less equipped to deal with the coming challenges ofthe 21st century.

Notes

1 As my discussion concerns not only ethnic studies programs/departments but also ethnic studies sub-areas within more traditionaldepartments, I will use the non-capitalized ethnic studies to designate thisbroader entity.

2 Varying terms are used for different fields, including Afro-AmericanStudies/Africana Studies/ Black Studies/African American Studies;Chicano/a Studies/Latino/a Studies/Puerto Rican Studies; and AmericanIndian Studies/Native American Studies. In this paper, I will use thenames for a particular field interchangeably.

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