“The Future of Our Worlds”
- 1 March 2008
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Duke University Press in Meridians
- Vol. 8 (2), 95-115
- https://doi.org/10.2979/mer.2008.8.2.95
Abstract
Taking as its point of departure an essay published in 1994 by renowned Black feminist Barbara Christian, this paper examines the U.S. university as a crucial site for contemporary transnational capital's management of race. The university adapts to the new demands of a globalized economy in at least two distinct but related ways. One is certainly in relation to issues of demography and access; in the deindustrializing economy of the United States, the university is complicit in the maintenance of wealth and resource inequities in a variety of ways. Thus, the question of whom the university excludes and whom it exploits is a very important one. However, any complete attempt to address the university's changing role under globalization requires a consideration of the university as an institution of knowledge production, a function that remains surprisingly underexamined. This paper examines these two questions—the economic and the epistemic—in relation to each other, by examining the university's management of racialized bodies as a function of its management of racialized knowledge. Indeed, if we take the university as an exemplary institution of global capital, we find that knowledge production is a key mechanism through which economic or demographic processes are organized. Against such a mobilization of knowledge, this essay situates black feminism as a site of alternative futurity.This publication has 14 references indexed in Scilit:
- The Ghosts of Transnational American Studies: A Response to the Presidential AddressAmerican Quarterly, 2007
- The Spirit of NeoliberalismSocial Text, 2006
- Introduction: Claudia Tate and the Protocols of Black Literature and ScholarshipThe Journal of African American History, 2003
- An Apartheid of Knowledge in Academia: The Struggle Over the "Legitimate" Knowledge of Faculty of ColorEquity & Excellence in Education, 2002
- In Memoriam: Barbara Christian (1943-2000)Callaloo, 2000
- Radicalising feminismRace & Class, 1999
- Grassroots Leadership Reconceptualized: Chicana Oral Histories and the 1968 East Los Angeles School BlowoutsFrontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 1998
- Coloring Epistemologies: Are Our Research Epistemologies Racially Biased?Educational Researcher, 1997
- Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of ColorStanford Law Review, 1991
- The Social Construction of Black Feminist ThoughtSigns: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 1989