Race and the Foundations of Knowledge: Cultural Amnesia in the Academy - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0252072561 ISBN 13: 9780252072567

Verlag: University of Illinois Press, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

The hidden impact of race on modern ideals

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Joseph Young is an associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, LaCrosse, and the author of Black Novelist as White Racist: The Myth of Black Inferiority in the Novels of Oscar Micheaux. Jana Evans Braziel is an assistant professor in the department of English and comparative literature at the University of Cincinnati, and has coedited Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader and other books. 

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Race and the Foundations of Knowledge

Cultural Amnesia in the Academy

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Copyright © 2006 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-252-07256-1

Contents

Acknowledgments..............................................................................................................................................................................viiIntroduction: Cultural Amnesia and the Academy-Why the Problem of the Twenty-first Century Is Still the "Problem of the Color-Line" Joseph Young and Jana Evans Braziel.....................11. Putting Materialism Back into Race Theory: Toward a Transformative Theory of Race Robert Young...........................................................................................322. Commonsense Racial Formation: Wahneema Lubiano, Antonio Gramsci, and the Importance of the Nonpropositional Alexis Shotwell..............................................................463. Supreme Rhetoric: The Supreme Court, Veiled Majoritarianism, and the Enforcement of the Racial Contract Matthew Abraham..................................................................634. Legal Lines: Defining Racism in a Flexibility Matrix Tony Zaragoza.......................................................................................................................755. A Reversal of the Racialization of History in Hegel's Master/Slave Dialectic (Douglass's "Heroic Slave" and Melville's "Benito Cereno") Joseph Young.....................................946. "Dark-Faced Europeans": The Nineteenth-Century Colonial Travelogue and the Invention of the Hima Race Gatsinzi Basaninyenzi..............................................................1147. Toward a Political Economy of Racism and Colonialism: A Rereading of Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth Azfar Hussain..................................................................1278. Afrocentricity and the Eurocentric Hegemony of Knowledge: Contradictions of Place Molefi Kete Asante.....................................................................................1459. New Frameworks in Philippine Postcolonial Historiography: Decolonizing a Discipline S. Lily Mendoza......................................................................................15510. Between Unconsciously White and Mythically Black: European Race Discourse as Modern Witchcraft Practice James W. Perkinson..............................................................17411. "Blacks Who Had Not Themselves Personally Suffered Illegal Discrimination": The Symbolic Incorporation of the Black Middle Class Derrick E. White.......................................19712. Modernity, Persons, and Subpersons Charles W. Mills.....................................................................................................................................211Contributors.................................................................................................................................................................................253Index........................................................................................................................................................................................257

Introduction

Cultural Amnesia and the Academy-Why the Problem of the Twenty-first Century Is Still the "Problem of the Color Line"

Joseph Young and Jana Evans Braziel

We begin by evoking the words of the prescient W. E. B. Du Bois, who first wrote that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line" in an article entitled "The Freedmen's Bureau," which was published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1901 and republished as "The Forethought" of The Souls of Black Folk in 1903. Echoing Du Bois's words and sentiments in 2005, a little more than one hundred years after the publication of The Souls of Black Folk, we assert (yet are disheartened that we must) that the problem of the twenty-first century remains the "problem of the color line": moreover, the institutionalized foundations of race and racialized ways of knowing and the resolute cultural amnesia within the academy, even from within the most unexpected halls of that institution, have perpetuated, not solved, resolved, or even tepidly confronted this centuries-old problem. Cultural amnesia about the structuring forces of race, racialization, and even overt racism within the academy thus make it impossible to imagine "political culture beyond the color line," though some have admonished those who refuse to surrender that battle. We thus also borrow and echo sentiments from Charles W. Mills, who pointedly critiques the often vapid intellectual gymnastics of postmodernity in the concluding chapter of The Racial Contract: while we are sympathetic to some of the political ends of postmodernism, "ultimately, [we] see it as an epistemological and theoretical dead end, itself symptomatic rather than diagnostic of the problems of the globe as we [have] enter[ed] the new millennium" (129).

Race and the Foundations of Knowledge: Cultural Amnesia in the Academy offers both deliberate critical resistance to the historical erasures of public memory-most profoundly, perhaps, in the academy itself-and revisionist attempts to restore what has been erased within the cultural memory of the Americas. More specifically, it addresses race and the multitude of roles that race and racialization have played in the formation of academic disciplines and knowledge. Of all social sectors and public institutions, the academy most resolutely perpetuates a core set of ideas and foundations of knowledge (indeed, many hold this aspect to be its very principle and defining mission), and while it is a malleable, evolving body, it remains intractable in its racialized foundations, witnessed perhaps most visibly in recent debates and Supreme Court decisions about affirmative action, but no less palpably in its formation of disciplines and its constructions of knowledge. The modernist era, as Mills pointedly reveals in his contribution to this volume, has been plagued by contradictions of equality and disparity, personhood and subpersonhood, revolution and enslavement; rather than being exceptional to modernity, these contradictions are rather constitutive of it. One of the most devastating effects and consequences of dominant forms of cultural experience in the Americas has been the political subordination and cultural erasures experienced by African diasporic subjects in the so-called "New World." For African Americans hemispherically, douard Glissant explains, "There was the drawn-out damnation of the loss of family heritage, the erasure of collective memory, the initial trauma of the Middle Passage, the belly of the slave ship, the agonizing obliteration of old and familiar objects, and the need to master a plethora of new and frustrating tools.... And then there were all the forbidden tools: guns and other weapons, books, pencils, and notebooks" (Faulkner, Mississippi 162). Glissant's passage reveals the active forms of political subjugation and the pervasive forms of historical erasure that were part and parcel of the African diasporic experiences in the "New World." In this sentiment, Glissant echoes an earlier anticolonialist writer also from Martinique, Frantz Fanon, who wrote in The Wretched of the Earth, "Colonization is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native's brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Illinois Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2006
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0252072561
• ISBN 13: 9780252072567
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 280
• Herausgeber: Young Joseph, Braziel Jana Evans
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande