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57 2 Contradictions in the Emergence of Ethnic Studies This chapter returns to the founding of ethnic studies at San Francisco State College in order to investigate the competing ideas of autonomy expressed in students’ demands and how they shaped the development of the field. My analysis centers on keywords in the student discourse of the time: autonomy, self-determination, consciousness, and relevance.1 What did these terms mean to the various actors who used them? How did they function in the discursive framing of events and ideas? I am less interested here in the actual mechanics and history of these programs than in reexamining some of the questions and challenges that they posed to the institutional structures and norms of the American university. Although this history is well known in Asian American studies , I contend that a number of issues were either left unresolved or never explicitly identified in the first place and that returning to these questions may help us evaluate the current and future state of the field. In exploring how autonomy became one of the main concepts in students’ demands for ethnic studies, I argue that what autonomy meant to the students was almost wholly opposed to what it meant in institutional discourse. It was, however, the openness and ambiguity of the term that made it a key point of articulation in material and ideological struggles over the shape and direction of ethnic studies. Since it could be defined in opposing and contradictory ways, it enabled the appearance of agreement even when there was substantial disagreement, but by the same token, once the Third World Strike was broken, it also facilitated the reversal of the original aims of ethnic studies by bringing it into line with institutional norms. Besides the question of autonomy, this chapter also investigates the black studies curriculum that was developed in the Experimental College at SF State as an index of ethnic studies’ relation to the traditional forms of higher education. Even though the black studies curriculum opposed 58 Contradictions in Ethnic Studies the regular university curriculum as an instrument of institutionalized racial dominance, black studies courses in fact were nearly a mirror image of a traditional liberal arts curriculum, except that instead of defining itself in terms of “Western culture,” it defined itself in terms of black culture. This should certainly provoke some reconsideration of what students were demanding in their slogan of a “relevant education.” However students understood what a relevant education meant in theory, what it meant in practice was the transformation of blackness into a form of cultural capital because this was the only way that black studies could be institutionalized in the university. Accordingly, I propose a general model for the historical development of “Asian American” identity as a history of capital accumulation. That is, rather than casting it simply in political terms, I suggest that we can understand the emergence of an “Asian American” identity as a political solution necessitated by structural barriers to the accumulation not of material capital but of cultural capital. When it entered the academy, Asian American studies had conflicting political and institutional agendas, which have largely been analyzed in terms promulgated by either cultural nationalism and identity politics or, more recently, theoretical discourses of antiessentialism and the politics of difference. These oppositions designate one’s relation to the group, and as I have argued, the debates within these conceptual paradigms seem to have led to certain intellectual and political impasses. This chapter offers instead a different set of terms with which to revisit the struggles that shaped the origins of Asian American studies and ethnic studies as well as the future of these fields. I argue that in order to go beyond dichotomies of identity and difference, we must construct a new paradigm not defined by the boundaries of the group or category but by the relations and strategies of groups or agents with regard to the specific forms of capital and the fields in which they are produced. I identify in the formation of Asian American studies two somewhat discontinuous registers, which I call the politics of mobilization and the politics of representation. These are correlated with the categories of the real class and the theoretical class discussed in chapter 1, but they do not line up with dichotomies such as those of nationalism and assimilationism, integrationism and separatism, and identity and difference. Rather than the politics of Asian American identity, mobilization and representation have differing relations to cultural capital...

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