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Whiteness Studies and Institutional Autobiography From Activist Anthology to Academic Memoir Toward the end of the 1997–98 school year, the English Department at the University of Hawai‘i was in the final rounds of a three-year struggle over the revision of the undergraduate major. After a tense department meeting—one during which many assistant professors called the present curriculum colonialist and irrelevant to Hawai‘i students—a senior colleague (white, male) e-mailed a “campaign document” to the department ’s sixty full-time faculty members. In it he announced his interest in serving on the hiring committee. He promised, if elected, to screen for and oppose any job candidate whose application materials included terms such as “of color” or “colonial,” or who otherwise evidenced signs that she (his hypothetical applicant was a “she”) or her work was politically motivated. A barrage of department-wide e-mails followed: one expression of support; several admonishments to the writer for disrespecting junior colleagues; an incisive analysis of the “campaign document’s” racism and sexism by one of the faculty’s four women of color; memos calling the whole set of exchanges “silly”; and a few assertions from the campaigning colleague stating that his target was “jargon” and “cultural studies imperialism,” not people. This bit of departmental history and the related writings and events that I discuss in this chapter interest me because such stories constitute concrete ways that affirmative action is being rolled back in universities in informal and incremental as well as official and more clearly documented ways. They also point to a crisis during the 1990s in the relationship in the academy between the personal and the political, and provide a way to think about the role that identity politics and emotionally charged narratives about individuals play in shaping institutional politics. Working from the insight that “the personal is political,” women of color gave expression in the 1980s to collective forms of identity politics, often in the form of multigenre anthologies. Among the first and the most influential of these was This Bridge Called My Back (1981), edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa. This Bridge was instrumental in chApter 2 whiteness studies & institutional autobiography 29 creating a paradigm shift in the academy, one that enabled wide-ranging critiques of the academy’s discrimination against disempowered groups and progressive institutional and curricular reforms. In the late 1990s, however, a backlash occurred. Expressions of racism and sexism were often cloaked as intellectual arguments against theoretical language (“jargon”) and the politicization of the academy (“cultural studies imperialism ”). Furthermore, racist and sexist attacks often articulated with reactionary institutional practices that are supposedly politically neutral. At the same time, explicitly political positions—especially those premised on identity politics—were regularly dismissed on the grounds that they were either merely personal or only represented the interests of a “narrow” group. Such dismissals depended on seeing identity politics as a strictly personal rather than political formation, one interchangeable with any assertions of identity. Thus, in the 1990s and continuing well into the first decade of the twenty-first century, the meaning of “the personal is political” has become complex, various, and confused. Furthermore, as I explain below, my campaigning colleague’s e-mails indicate how the language of marginalization can be co-opted when affirmative action is under attack. Indeed, personal narratives based on identity politics deployed in anthologies such as This Bridge are even being used to perpetuate the individual acts of racism and the discriminatory institutional practices that these anthologies powerfully oppose. At the same time, as explored in this chapter through analyses of memoirs by white feminist academics, whiteness studies emerged in the 1990s as both a field that, in marking and historicizing whiteness, builds on the antiracist and feminist identity politics advanced by women of color in the 1980s, and, given the time and conditions of its emergence, can contribute to the recentering of whiteness that is evidenced by the departmental history discussed here. In one of his later missives, my colleague quoted a passage from Gloria Anzaldúa from a Norton anthology. In the passage Anzaldúa describes the rituals that she undergoes to begin writing. These include “wash[ing] the dishes or my underthings, tak[ing] a bath, or mop[ping] the kitchen floor.” My colleague used this passage—initially published in Borderlands/La Frontera—to denounce the proposed curriculum’s cultural studies component and to justify his “campaign document.”1 Noting that D. H. Lawrence, whom...

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