E3W Literature | University of Texas

The Widening Diaspora: The Roots and Routes of the Center for African and African American Studies

This interview with Edmund “Ted” Gordon, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Associate Vice President for Thematic Initiatives and Community Engagement, and Director of the Center for African & African American Studies (CAAAS) at The University of Texas at Austin was conducted in person at the Center in February 2008.

Jeremy Dean: As you know, we have dedicated this special section on “Building and Renovating the House of Race” to the former director of the Center for African & African American Studies, John Warfield, who died last year. Can you tell us a little about Dr. Warfield?

Edmund Gordon: John was an activist scholar who was…very much interested in the relationship between the university and the community and was very much one who thought that scholars of color had responsibilities to their communities of origin, that their scholarship should be oriented towards the uplift of those communities. And he was instrumental in bringing together the black community here on campus with the black community off campus. Things that he did off campus are well known: creating the public radio station, KAZI [88.7 FM], founding the Black Citizens Task Force, which is the preeminent black grass-roots organization in Austin. He was the one who also pushed for, and I think was one of the original members of, the Citizen Review Panel of the Austin Police. He was also a leader on campus for things like bringing more black faculty members, actually black and Latino faculty members, and for increasing the black student body, both at the graduate and undergraduate level. He was also very active politically both on the campus and in the Austin community in terms of the interrelationships between Latinos and blacks—he and Gonzalo Barrientos, who ended up being a state senator, who was very much focused on La Raza and Chicano rights in Texas.

JD: I know there was controversy surrounding Dr. Warfield’s departure from CAAAS. What’s the story there?

EG: In ‘86, the Dean of Liberal Arts decided that the Center was too political, too involved in community, and not scholarly enough, and he asked Warfield to step down from the position of Center director. He installed another young African American historian, who was politically conservative, in that position. There was a great deal of protest from students and other faculty members, but there were enough black faculty members who were complicit with that move to allow it to stand. And the Center then went into a phase of much less activity and certainly negligible interaction with the local black community outside the University under the following two center directors. So, that’s that story.

JD: How does the Center today carry on the Warfield tradition of “activist scholarship”? I noticed that the CAAAS mission statement claims that you “promote the activist careers of your faculty members.” That seems like a radical thing to say given this history of suppressing such overtly politicized academics and apparently, admirably, you’re getting away with it.

EG: Well the university, you know, has changed to a certain extent and the notion of a connection between a university and a community is one that’s become quite popular not just here but elsewhere. So, there’s at least lip service paid to that. In terms of what the Center actually does, we have a discourse of connection with the community. And we attempt to support our faculty members in their attempt to do the kind of research, which is in conjunction with communities and responds to perceived needs of communities. But in practice…It’s a difficult balancing act because, of course, each one of our faculty members also has the demands of scholarship and advancement in the university to consider, survival in the university to consider.

JD: You don’t get tenure for organizing.

EG: No you don’t. So, we do try to support it and we also try to actively recruit people who are involved in that kind of way. But I would say that in the final analysis, we’re probably much better at what might be called, as a group, activism through cultural critique than activism through practical insertion in grass-roots struggle. And I think there’s a place for that, but I would personally like to see more of us do more in terms of the actual participation in grass-roots struggle. Although it is certainly clear that it’s very difficult to do both at the same time. And the cultural critique aspect of it is, I think, important as well. So one of the things that we are known for is creating an intellectual community that is in touch with, what most people would consider to be, the black radical tradition, which is critically, theoretically informed by black feminist perspectives and also critical race theory, particularly racial formation, and that provides us with a kind of activist perspective, even if it’s not always activism in the grass-roots sense.

JD: Is CAAAS’s emphasis on diaspora unique among similar centers at American universities?

EG: It’s somewhat unique. It was more unique when we started out in like ‘90, than it is now almost twenty years later. The notion of diaspora actually became all the rage maybe about ten years ago, now it’s died down a little bit, but in its aftermath there are a number of programs that have a diaspora focus. When we started out that focus, you usually had either African American studies or African and African American studies, and the most that others did might be to include in African American studies, or in African studies, the Caribbean, especially Anglophone Caribbean. And I think a lot of that had to do with language issues, etcetera, etcetera. We were one of the first programs that was a diaspora program, but also one of the first to really focus on the diaspora in Latin America and I think that’s relatively unique.

I think the focus on diaspora also has to do with the critical take that we try—that’s in some sense at the base of this intellectual community—one of the things we’re interested in is the proliferation of blacknesses or the proliferation of ways of being black or attempting to take an unessential kind of view of blackness. And what that means then is…its an effort to sort of think of blackness as in some sense a standpoint, but also to complicate that by thinking of the multiplicities of blacknesses that both exist but also can be and must be both negotiated and in some sense brought together in terms of creating a black standpoint. So, I think, yes, diaspora was relatively innovative in terms of what we were doing here, but more than that the attempt to maintain at least a strategic essentialist notion of blackness; at the same time trying to complicate that by thinking of the variety of blacknesses and multiplicities of blacknesses out there is also probably relatively unique, or certainly was.

JD: That reminds me of your own research among the “Creoles” of Nicaragua. In an article in The Journal of American Folklore, you describe how your “common sense” conception of blackness was complicated through your work in Bluefields. Do you still have the time to go back to Nicaragua?

EG: All the time; I have people there. And so I’m back in Nicaragua two or three times a year.

JD: In terms of broadening the inclusivity of diaspora, I’m wondering what you think about the relation between the African diaspora and other diasporas, like the South Asian diaspora or the Puerto Rican diasporas.

EG: We’ve always been interested in theorizing diaspora and theorizing diaspora means moving beyond the theorization of any one diaspora, but thinking about that as a social phenomenon or social process. And so for a while there—there was an African Diaspora Program in Anthropology—for a while, we were toying with the idea of dropping the African and just calling it a diaspora program. And at that point we really wanted to focus on the African and South Asian diasporas. Although when we first began the diaspora program, we proposed thinking about the Latino, particularly the Mexican American, experience, not so much as a kind of borderlands phenomenon, but as a diasporic phenomenon. Both those moves got undermined by various kinds of nationalisms and other kinds of political considerations and so none of those panned out. But in the way that we look at diaspora, most of us are interested in diaspora not as a racially specific phenomenon but as a social process.

JD: I want to push you, if you’re willing to go there, on what you mean by the different politics that emerge as an obstacle to that more expansive notion of diaspora? Especially since, in the context of political struggle, and certainly within the university, such alliances are important.

EG: The politics of it are that many people feel that there’s a specificity to these different kinds of positionalities that gets lost in the attempt to de-essentialize them. And that that specificity, and particularly the politics of it, remain so important that they shouldn’t be sacrificed…I think that most folks who are involved in these kinds of discussions would say that alliances need to be made. But I think that people would—well, I know, we’ve had the experience—people balk at losing what they would consider to be the necessary autonomy of the specific identities that are brought into alliance. And I think, specifically, when people get right down to it, the people who are arguing against bringing these things together, look at the calculus of race on the campus and say that there are still some folks who are far more marginal than others and, until those kinds of things are addressed, the specificity of certain issues and problems needs to be maintained.

JD: I know that you and Wahneema Lubiano co-wrote an oft-republished article, originally appearing in The Daily Texan, on the institutionalization of multiculturalism on American campuses, at UT in particular, could you briefly elaborate your critique here?

EG: Multiculturalism comes out of the folklorization and celebration of cultural or ethnic difference that goes hand in hand with the middle classization of the United States in which urban ethnic enclaves are broken down by the movement of white ethnics to the suburbs and then the mass commodification of US society and therefore the commodification of the folkloric aspects of ethnic culture. So it’s both the ways in which capital expands to commodify culture, and particularly cultural difference, at the same time as it makes a democratic gesture to the demands of certain nationalist politics, particularly African American politics, which creates multiculturalism. Multiculturalism then becomes a way to encapsulate nationalism. And campuses are not immune to that at all. So the push on campuses around the country to include black bodies and black knowledges becomes part of this proliferating notion of multiculturalism. Black students and then ultimately faculty members pushed to open up a space, the space is open, but then it becomes ethnicized. So the space of racial difference and nationalist politics becomes a space of ethnicity and multiculturalism. And is in that way defanged.

JD: Is it true that Title VI academic funding doesn’t cover diaspora studies?

EG: No it doesn’t and we don’t have Title VI for African studies either.

JD: Why is that?

EG: Well, we considered trying to do Title VI, but we decided that is was too formulaic, that it’s state-driven, and that it would force us to do too many things which we didn’t want to do with African studies. So, in answer to your question, yes, Title VI doesn’t cover diaspora studies—Title VI only really covers those regions of the world that the United States government thinks are strategic and wants to put money in, it’s Defense Department money, etcetera, etcetera. Diaspora is an intellectual, actually it’s a political construct, but it’s not a political construct which the state is particularly interested in.

JD: It’s inherently breaking out of state boundaries.

EG: Beyond national boundaries, absolutely.

JD: African theater is less strategic from that perspective than Arabic language.

EG: Absolutely. So we couldn’t apply for Title VI funding for African diaspora studies and we specifically decided that we didn’t want to do that for African studies.

JD: Can you briefly define your conception of diaspora?

EG: I conceive of diaspora as politics. It’s an attempt to express an extra-national standpoint from which to struggle against inequalities. It is a notion of autonomy. And so I also see diaspora as a process, as a political process of, as my friend João [Costa Vargas] would say, “radical becoming.”

JD: Thank you, Dr. Gordon.

EG: You’re very welcome.