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Bridges to the Twenty-First Century: Making Cultural Studies—and Making It Work JUDITH NEWTON o n a c o o l o c tob e r m o r n i n g , a we e k past t h e d e a d line for this paper, I found myself still puzzling over how to begin. Feeling some guilt at inconveniencing the commentator and experiencing a twinge of incipient panic as well, I began to play with the panel—“Coalition or Collision: Di¤erence, Territory, and the Institution”—and to sketch the di¤erent ways in which each term might be said have entered into the process of forming a cross-race, cross-gender coalition at the University of CaliforniaDavis . This coalition consisting of one department and five programs— African American and African, American, Asian American, Chicano/a, Native American, and Women’s and Gender Studies—o‹cially came into being in 1995. In the spirit of writing on this new formation, I conducted lengthy interviews with several colleagues. My e¤orts to begin writing that October morning were not made easier by the fact that I felt bound to touch upon the messy points of discord within the separate accounts of the entangled history of such a coalition. Narrative One If I began with the term institution, which as good materialists my colleagues and I are often wont to do, I could see that for most of us administrations 2 6 5 appeared historically inclined both to ignore and to overemphasize the “di¤erences” among our programs, and in so doing to threaten variously the continued existence of our territories. “Collision” in each case, we would agree, had been an outcome. In the early 1990s, for example, the Dean of the College of Letters and Sciences had floated the idea of gathering the four programs focused on race and ethnicity into an Ethnic Studies program and had suggested the possibility of housing the programs together under American Studies. At UC Davis my colleagues universally agreed this had spelled collision city, and the dean’s proposal was voted down. In 1995 a somewhat di¤erent administration had proposed to divide the College of Letters and Sciences into three divisions—Humanities and Arts, Social Sciences, and Math and Physical Sciences. Each of our programs was then told to decide, as a discrete unit, whether it would locate its own little territory within the newly created Kingdom of Social Sciences or within that of Humanities. When faculty from several interdisciplinary units protested that for us a choice between Social Sciences and Humanities did not make sense, we were informed, in a meeting with a top administrator, that we had best fall in line. From now on, we were strictly warned, small programs like our own would find themselves lacking resources unless we proved that we were able to produce (mainly by drawing large numbers of students into our classes) and implicitly “outproduce” each other. As small territories, we were advised, our best option might be to merge with larger landholders, such as English or sociology. Narrative Two It was in response to this second move by the institution, a move that emphasized our di¤erences, encouraged further separation of our territories, and that threatened to set us on the road to permanent, competitive collision, that faculty from the future Hart Hall programs began to meet. It was in the course of these meetings, moreover, which initially focused on collision with the institution and on exerting control over how our di¤erences and territories would be defined, that a di¤erent sort of narrative began to emerge. This narrative, while preserving di¤erence, gave more emphasis to mutuality and while maintaining territory, spoke of crossing borders. Eventually this narrative would lead us toward coalition as an alternative to institutionally induced collision. It is this second narrative that dominates the notes I made during September 1995 and that, at the behest of my colleagues, I 2 6 6 / ju d i t h n ew to n later turned into an informal history. The following is constructed from these notes. September 15, 1995. I see that the idea of a separate division of “Ethnic and Women’s Studies” was being floated, but what actually came out of our meeting was a proposal to group all the interdisciplinary programs and graduate groups on campus in a separate, fourth division, with our own dean. When one colleague proposed that there was a danger...

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