Black Power, Yellow Power, and the Making of Revolutionary Identities

Chapter Three: Power and the Ivory Tower: Academics as Intellectual Guerillas

82 chapter three Power and the Ivory Tower Academics as Intellectual Guerillas Gidra and TheBlackPanther facilitated the guerilla’s move from image to identity position. This transition from subject tosubjectivity established the guerilla as a participant in American political discourse. With the broadening of this identity, those who believed in the anticolonialist ends embodied by the guerilla could take up the markers of this subject position even without engaging in combat. As militant activism fell out of favor, the guerilla figure drifted from its original military significance to become synonymous with militant resistance. In turn, some early activists-turned-academics adopted this subjectivity, envisioning the early Ethnic Studies, African American Studies, and Asian American Studies programs that they populated as vehicles to infiltrate and subvert academia. In this chapter, I consider how some academics took up the guerilla subjectivity, positioning Ethnic Studies as a critique of the mid-twentieth-century canon and positioning themselves as what Abdul JanMohamed termed “border intellectuals.”1 Most of the writers and activists involved with Gidra and The Black Panther were in college or college-aged. As Fabio Rojas notes in his chronicle of the development of Black Studies, FromBlackPowertoBlack Studies:HowaRadicalSocialMovementBecameanAcademicDiscipline,the university became an important site of interaction for radical activists and young people seeking to liberalize their educational experience. Expanding the curriculum to formalize Black and Ethnic Studies programs provided an opportunity for students and community activists to use their previous experiences with RAM, SNCC, SDS, and the Black Panther Party in campus protest movements. Of course, education had long been seen as a route for African American empowerment and community development; however, the 1968–1969 Third World Strike at San Francisco State College represents the moment when Black and Ethnic Studies programs, not just courses, were instituted as part of Academics as Intellectual Guerillas 83 the established curriculum in mainstream institutions of higher education . Significantly, this move required a sustained effort; Rojas notes that “universities did not formalize this knowledge in courses, curricula , or degree programs. This would happen only when nationalist politics prompted black students to demand new academic units and to stage strikes pushing for their creation.”2 Under pressure, San Francisco State and many other colleges and universities made space for Ethnic Studies courses; however, this concession was by no means the end of the struggle. The advent of Ethnic Studies went far beyond the addition of a few courses and majors. Just as this new field drew on the methodologies of history, sociology, political science, and literary studies, these fields adapted and changed as a result of the information and insights uncovered by Ethnic Studies scholars. Likewise, Ethnic Studies changed from a confrontational critique of American higher education to a field of study supported by the mechanisms of institutional authority and control endemic to academia: graduate programs, departmental status, dedicated hires, journals, conferences, textbooks, and course materials. Rather than rehearse the events that led to the development of Ethnic Studies, this chapter will focus on one of the most ubiquitous tools of higher education: the anthology. Anthologies have been an important tool in the effort to establish the autonomy of literary traditions. Thus, looking at the evolution of African American and Asian American literary anthologies during the late 1960s and early 1970s through the 1980s and 1990s provides insight into the struggle for primacy between the political and scholarly functions of literary studies. Though much has been written about matters of representativeness, the nexus of aesthetics and cultural politics, and, of course, canonization, I draw on a selection of Asian American and African American literature anthologies to analyze how scholars use the prefaces of these volumes to negotiate the tensions between activism and academics and establish themselves as subjects within discourses of academia. Among the chief concerns of activists in the Black and Yellow Power movements were losing the vestiges of mental occupation and rebuilding “authentic” identities. According to Fanon, colonialization wreaks both social and psychological havoc on the colonized. Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952; 1967) and Wretched of the Earth (1961; 1963) revolutionized identity politics in America by assigning a name to the system of social, economic, political, and psychoanalytic 84 Academics as Intellectual Guerillas oppression—colonialism—and outlining a remedy for the effects of that oppression—anticolonialism. Preeminent among these injuries is the mental colonization that associated the colonized with inferiority. These academic guerillas used...