Moving Forward: Cultural Knowledge, Identity Politics, and the Academy

In my first-semester doctoral English seminar Teaching Literature, we strategized different techniques to create syllabi that embraced diversity within various cultural experiences. Those conversations reflected the need to incorporate diverse cultural knowledge within our classrooms. The omnipresence of identity discourse within the academy presents an opportunity to evaluate the development of interdisciplinary programs that situate cultural knowledge in institutional spaces. Roderick A. Ferguson’s The Reorder of Thingsand Robyn Wiegman’s Object Lessonspresent two unique contemporary reflections that move beyond the initial origin of interdisciplinary programs to explorations of how the academy has simultaneously changed and remained consistent.

The Reorder of Thingsrepresents Ferguson’s philosophical meditation on identity. He begins with a rhetorical analysis of African American artist Adrian Piper’s creative collage Self-Portrait 2000. Ferguson uses the image to assess “the ways … technologies of power began to work with and through difference in order to manage its insurgent possibilities,” via the theorization of 1960s’ and 1970s’ student movements and their subsequent influence on the development of interdisciplinary discourse communities (4). Ferguson’s theorization of power extends Foucault’s interpretation of authority in The History of Sexualityas a series of “aims and objectives” that demonstrate how “state, capital, and academy saw minority insurgence as a site of calculation and strategy,” which transformed minority knowledge into opportunities for “adaptive hegemonic practices” (6). Distinguishing his claims from Foucault, Ferguson contends that the cultural exhibition of minority difference within the academy has seemingly indicated material change, yet substantive redistribution of power on college campuses has not occurred. Thus, his departure revises assumptions that the academy remains separate and subordinate to state and capital, by highlighting the academy’s archival purpose. The academy’s archival function upholds conservative values by embedding the desire for membership within interdisciplinarity.

He contends that since World War II, archiving has simultaneously determined minority admission and membership within institutions of higher learning by continually shifting “how to best institute new peoples, new knowledge, and cultures and at the same time discipline and exclude subjects according to a new order” (12). Born from this complex need to archive, the interdisciplines operate as an “ensemble of institutions … that offered positivities to populations and constituencies … to offset their possibility for future ruptures … and recognition” (13). However, Ferguson claims that interdisciplinary programs should engender a “counterarchive” that recognizes historically cultured experiences to secure minority legitimacy and status. By consistently subordinating experiential cultural knowledge, Ferguson inadvertently demonstrates the difficulty of accomplishing counterarchival practices.

Wiegman similarly considers the function of the academy as the impetus for her politics of identity study in Object Lessons, but unlike in the case of Ferguson her concern rests within the divergent and convergent patterns of kinship between academic programs. Wiegman considers the consequences of restructuring academic colleges and departments and the formation of new disciplines for increasingly diverse student and professorial populations. She shifts the discourse surrounding identity politics from formation to the continual institutionalization of identity knowledge “by their transit through the university” (7). Specifically, she chronicles “academic fields” and their respective “institutional contexts” to explore “a specific object relation in order to consider how it shapes a field’s political pursuits” (8). Wiegman adopts Donald E. Pease’s concept of the “field imaginary,” or the critical knowledge in a field of study, as an avenue to negotiate the growth of identity knowledge within academia. This analysis considers the various manifestations of divergence within and between disciplines. Within women’s studies programs, she chronicles the struggle to delineate self-affirming vocabulary by replacing the word “women” with “gender.” Within this narrative struggle, Wiegman explores the “transferential work” that categorizes the identification of key disciplinary terms and core values within critical practice (90). While she acknowledges the value of delineating core values and terminology, she ultimately questions the practicality of this endeavor.

Wiegman transitions from divergence within feminism to divergence as praxis within...