E3W Literature | University of Texas

By Any Other Name: Black Studies, Multiculturalism, and Airport Bookshops

Wahneema Lubiano is Associate Professor of Literature and African and African-American Studies at Duke University. She was one of the founders of the Ethnic and Third World Interest Group at the University of Texas at Austin in 1988. This interview was conducted through email in the month of February 2008.

Jeremy Dean: Can you begin by speaking about the early days of the Ethnic and Third World Interest Group at the University of Texas at Austin twenty years ago? What were your hopes for e3w at the start?

Wahneema Lubiano: I remember that we thought of ourselves as making visible bodies of work and thought that had been under-circulated against an erroneous and parochial insistence that ethnic and third world literatures and discourses were underdeveloped. I remember that we took seriously the institution as a site of engagement on the ground of a social history that produced selective institutional ignorance. I remember that we were quite incredibly invigorated by the questions and discussions that we knew had caught the attention of people across the hemisphere and around the world. And I remember the excitement we felt about the project and the response of many people to the project—I felt buoyed by the excitement.

JD: Any good stories to share about the bad old days?

WL: There are so many half-remembered stories and pieces of stories that they jostle each other in my mind into a kind of rich but incoherent mass that’s hard to untangle—late night discussions at each others’ houses over food and drink, different kinds of formal discussion fora on campus especially during the time of the shantytown, continual considerations over what to call the program until finally we had worn ourselves out over various permutations of what came to be Ethnic and Third World Literature program. I find myself smiling even as I think about those moments because everywhere I’ve been since my days at UT Austin, whenever I was part of making some new entity of thought, the groups of which I’ve been a part have gone through the same struggles over naming—as if the right name, the right description, would ward off critique of the undertaking, or at least ward off friendly fire from our allies in thought and politics. But if there’s one consistent thread in every bit of story that I can recall it’s the feeling of caring and affection that we felt for each other, our comrades, and our students as we struggled with defining and detailing the project.

JD: The table of contents for this anniversary issue of The E3W Review of Books, following the careers of the e3w Interest Group’s founders, is divided between various ethnic and area studies, African, African American, Mexican American. What do you think is the relationship between broadly conceived ethnic and third world formations, like the interest group itself, to these more specialized fields?

WL: I think that the connecting thread is the reality of the social history that produced those rubrics for thought and reading. George Lipsitz has described our urgency as a struggle against the homogenizing of the neoliberal market that empties out the particularities of time and place; I think of e3w as an assertion of the importance of particularities even as the rubrics themselves might change, be superseded, or be revised with regard to what those rubrics seek to name or explain. The formations don’t have to stand for all time in order to function as important placeholders for moments of thought, for the naming of social complexities. I care about the work of speaking to and learning from the struggle that made those formations visible or at least recognizable. And those struggles are still fully with us. So even if the broad names of the particular formations need more emendation, I’m cool with that.

JD: The e3w Interest Group was founded at the time of protest for divestment in South Africa—you mentioned the shantytown set up on University of Texas campus above—how do you view the connection between African American studies and the broader contexts of a global “color line”?

WL: I think, as Robin Kelley and Cedric Robinson and numerous others have demonstrated in their work and their accounts of not only the formation of Black Studies but its continuing projects, that it has never lost sight of the political practices of elites that make use of racialization and ethnicity as formidable weapons in the work of social control. I would myself describe the global color line as a global color fog since it moves in a less easily defined manner than the word “line” suggests to me, but that’s a minor quibble. What the idea tells us is that it is purposeful, that it delineates and divides, that it is held to much in the way that a military front is purposed and held, that one can see other sides from different positions along that line, and that it is meant to make unequal apportionment of material and ephemeral resources seem organized and inevitable.

JD: This section of the Review is dedicated to the memory of John Warfield and we interview Ted Gordon later in this section. Would you like to speak at all about your work with the Center for African and African American Studies while you were at UT?

WL: My work with that center was as important to me as my friendships and my alliances around all matters political and social in the years that I spent in Austin. I describe myself as a Black Studies intellectual and that description comes from my recognition of the larger knowledge projects that made me. I have never been able to think of myself as an intellectual without something filling in the rest of the sentence as a form of purpose: I am a Black Studies intellectual because of the need for mind work (Lipsitz’s phrase) in the service of not just black people in the world but in the service also of understanding what has made them “black.” The Center was a material embodiment of a project that I joined and a project that had made me recognizable to myself even before I joined it at UT. Warfield was part of a long process by which I figured out how my own work might have institutional ballast.

JD: Could you comment on the institutionalization of multiculturalism on American campuses—I know you’ve written about this issue a lot, and that you and Ted co-wrote an essay on the topic in 1990 that was published in The Daily Texan and reprinted elsewhere?

WL: Ted and I never expected any institution to be a home for the sharp-edged critique that we saw in multiculturalism. We saw multiculturalism emerging out of the struggle of folks to intervene in institutional practices, to make use of larger political realities to help transform business as usual in K-12 education as we saw black and other folks of color struggling to change that system, and to make use of the space we and our allies had access to in order to make knowledge production attend to larger social relations. And we knew even then that institutions would always work to blunt the edges of interventions into their ordinary practices even as they accommodated some aspects of the challenges of those interventions. So when I read and hear people arguing that multiculturalism isn’t radical because institutions have transformed it into the presentation of a smorgasbord of cultures, neoliberal choices of subjectivity, or diversity management, my response is yes, of course, that is what institutions do. So where’s your struggle to sharpen the project that the term multiculturalism tried to instantiate: the struggle over resources inequitably managed within the confines of the institution whether public education or the academy? Ted and I insisted that multiculturalism demanded attention to struggle, not the happy recitation of cultural difference as part of what the university or the educational system would serve up to consumers. We insisted that difference was material, not just a production of different understandings of the world. And that hasn’t changed for me.

I think that what I sometimes hear in the critique is the unspoken hope that the right terms of a struggle, the masterful rubric, description, account, or theory of struggle, will always remain expropriation proof. But we’ve been producing accounts, theories, rubrics, descriptions, etc., long enough (if we take into account centuries of struggle) that we ought to know such things are always up for grabs, always available for some use other than that intended. If Monsanto (for example) can make use of multiculturalism as advertising, as justification for yet more seizure of resources, and as diversity management among its work force, should we be surprised and dismayed, or should we work to make what the term named, a challenge to material domination in the sphere of education and knowledge production exercised as the Enlightenment right of a single and erroneously described “culture,” a project with ever-renewed and sharpened ambitions?...Call the project what you will and rename it every time the older name seems to lose its luster, but continue the work that the project once tried to name in its moment.

JD: Let’s turn to another anniversary: 2007 marked ten years since the publication of your edited collection, The House That Race Built. The essays in The House That Race Built were originally given as papers at the Race Matters Conference at Princeton in 1994, which you organized—can you tell us a little about that gathering and its relationship to what was going on in American politics at the time? West alludes to the 1992 LA Uprising in his Introduction to the book from which the conference took its name; was that the ultimate catalyst for the conference and collection? What else was going on?

WL: The gathering came out of my desire and that of my colleagues there to talk about race and racism with the languages and work of a set of scholars who we thought had something to say from different disciplinary apparatuses. It’s work that could have gone on anywhere and with any number of people. What made it possible at Princeton in that moment was money that American Studies under Arnold Rampersad’s direction put up, the visibility of Toni Morrison and Cornel West that made contacting people and enlisting them in the project easier, and my interest in the work of the particular scholars who said yes to participation. Establishing funding for the conference was important because we wanted it to be a free conference (not even sliding scale). We wanted Princeton to spend its money on the conference, and we didn’t want anyone who might be able to attend to be put off by a registration fee. More than 1500 people attended. Many of them were students and teachers from local high schools (Trenton, New Brunswick, etc.), community organizers, grad students, faculty, and others.

When contacting participants, I began with a set of questions that animated how I described the conference, questions that, as is typical of my long-winded conversational style, are way too lengthy to reprint here. The questions described the relation of the work of each invited scholar to six panels addressing race in different ways: history and change, class and labor, the intersections of gender and sexuality, the state and creating the national subject, ideology and aesthetics, and the urban terrain—space, identities, and political economy.

The LA uprising was important as was the tumult over the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. People wanted to talk and my colleagues and I thought it was a good time to confirm what the book that Morrison and I worked on, the Anita Hill book [Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construciton of Reality (1992)], had seemed to make clear—that people were interested in hearing what left-oriented politically-engaged academics had to say about topical issues. The book could not possibly capture the excitement of the moment of the conference; the “regular folks” who comfortably inhabited the space of Princeton’s buildings (we had overflow sites with huge television monitors in, as I recall, six rooms in addition to the main auditorium), who talked and challenged the speakers.

JD: Do you have any other interesting anecdotes to share about the conference or publication of the volume itself?

WL: One of the most exciting moments went on in the very first panel which included Stephen Steinberg, Howie Winant, and Evelyn Higginbotham. Cornel West was sitting in the front row and Stephen’s presentation, which centered on Daniel Patrick Moynihan among other figures and issues, included his critique of Cornel’s Race Matters. During the question and answer period Stephen and Cornel had a quite lively exchange around Stephen’s critique that was really smart and interesting, but the excitement came from the audience’s participation with Cornel partisans and Stephen partisans shouting out comments and appreciations. People were jumping up and adding their comments to whomever it was on the floor at the time asking questions or making comments into the microphone, people would alternately cheer for Stephen or Cornel, and at one point when someone in the audience shouted at Cornel that Stephen was right, Cornel turned around, mock-glared at the speaker, and then laughed.

At that point Stuart Hall stood up and began speaking, saying “I want to put my body between Cornel and some of his interlocutors…” and went on to say really interesting things about the relation of Stephen’s critique of liberal management of race and Cornel’s attempt to open up a discussion of the underclass. Joy in argument was apparent as was excitement over what was at stake in the larger context of thinking about race and social relations.

JD: I’m curious about the use of the word “Terrain” in the original Pantheon title and its omission from the ‘98 Vintage reprinting of The House That Race Built?

WL: The change in the subtitle came from Random House’s decision to try to sell more books by the use of subtitle language that the marketing department thought was more accessible to the wider audience they hoped the paperback would reach. My original use of terrain in the conference and in the hardback edition of the book was meant to direct our attention to the relation of the US as an idea with specific histories and the US as a specific space, a physical surface, a set of surface features, a space of specific characteristics, an image projected within a specific set of deployments. And since, for my intents and purposes, the marketing of the book was the means by which the book might get into places where one did not generally see Left arguments and analyses, I could live with the decision. Random House got the book into places like airport bookshops, and I was happy about that; I wanted people to see the book.

JD: One of the strengths of The House That Race Built as a whole, I think, is its critique of liberalism on the issue of race. Can you expand a little on the complicity of the Left in the ongoing failure of US democracy?

WL: The connection of the word “Left” with complicity makes me uneasy because what I understand as “Left” plays so little part in the US, so I try to keep the use of it separate from the use of “liberal” which I understand more easily in terms of complicity. The “Left” that I think about is the small segment of folks who think that political liberalism is of massive assistance to the oligarchy that runs the country and that includes the consistent failures of US democracy across its interests—nowhere more apparent than in the past few years’ outright assault on the remnants even of the mechanisms of constitutional law. The critique of the contributors to the book is a consistent calling out of liberalism as the management of race to the benefit of our corporate plutocracy; this is ground that has been gone over so thoroughly by any number of thinkers that I don’t have anything to add to it. Maybe what I should say is that a critique of liberalism’s limitation with regard to race and racism is part of the commonsense of The House That Race Built.

JD: Your own essay in the collection, “Black Nationalism and Black Common Sense,” does important work in causing us to question our assumptions about what is resistant. In The House That Race Built you write “There is no way of being outside the state.” In your contribution to Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power, you write “power is never completely successful.” I don’t mean to suggest that these statements are contradictory; rather I’d like to hear you elaborate on the role of the critic in this predicament, at once furthering state power, but also calling attention to its operation?

WL: The first statement is, I think, a reasonable description of the conditions of our existence, the conditions not of our choosing that Marx tells us exist even as we try to make a little history; the second statement is, I think, a way to describe the fact that we try. History isn’t over (regardless of how much neoliberalism tells us that it is); critics of this moment, of the US state, continue to make use even of the messy tools of our predicament in order to make visible what neoliberal fog sometimes makes hard to see, to resist social inequality and to work for social justice. You never know ahead of time what will help in making another world possible.

JD: While you focus on the relationship of gender and race in your piece, a number of the essays in The House That Race Built foreground the intersection between race and class (David Roediger and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, to name just a few). These scholars seem to in part be responding to critical attempts by academics and policy makers to displace racial with class politics. How do you yourself respond to the critiques of identity politics over the years?

WL: Identity politics is deployed as an epithet. Angela Davis said it best: identity comes from politics, not politics from identity. A struggle against racism is a response to material history, but also a desire to produce a coherent racialized subject. As far as my own thinking is concerned, the withering away of the white supremacist state will mean the abolition of the part of the struggle that articulates itself under the term “blackness.” I probably sound brusque, and I don’t mean to be; it’s simply that unless we’re willing to think more clearly about identity as a product of historical conjuncture and stop kicking it around as the disruptor of what some seem to think would be a revolution absent it, then we’re going to miss the means by which people come to terms with the constraints of their existence. Stuart Hall’s essay, along with the work of numerous scholars and thinkers, addresses this beautifully. So for me the critique of identity politics is simply lazy. It’s easier to kick at imaginary identity politics straw arguments or straw people than to think through what identity and identification as processes and accounts of subject generation that have to do with political engagement and struggle.

JD: As we discussed above, the essays in The House That Race Built emerge from a particular political moment in US history when the significance of race and race-based public policy was on the decline and yet racial hierarchy was being solidified. I’m wondering what you think of racial politics in the US today. Do the same problems exist? Will they ever go away or is that just the point?

WL: God, sometimes I think it’s worse especially insofar as the racialization and ethnicization of the world as the popularity of Muslim and Arab demonization proceeds apace. But even as I recognize the newer instantiation of older hierarchies, I see others who recognize that we are looking both at something new and something that is the same old thing at work, and I see the work of critique finding its place within the terms of resistance and opposition. I don’t know what will happen; the game isn’t over, and US prestige has faded significantly and that fading might give rise to new possibilities, new configurations.

JD: Let’s conclude this interview following a game you play in The House That Race Built, the rhetorical “Jeopardy” with which you close the two major sections of your essay. I’ll give you an answer and then you provide the question. The first category is “Primary Sources” and the answer is “Barack Obama.”

WL: What is something that both captures my attention and makes me confront again and again my own inadequacies?

JD: Postmodernism.

WL: Why do I wish I was smarter, more articulate, and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.

JD: Political Correctness and Kanye West.

WL: What would I talk about if I was really a cultural critic?

JD: Prince.

WL: Why can’t I sing?

JD: The Duke Lacrosse Team.

WL: What do Robyn Wiegman, Michael Hardt, and I have in common, or what’s in Social Text 93?

JD: The Jena 6.

WL: Why do I think young people matter?

JD: Transnationalism.

WL: What did I learn in black studies 101?