I. General Bid'ness
- Next session is November 27: Lea gives last presentation.
- Our last UNBanned Books session will be on November 27 with Marcellis and Nicole.
- Please remember that you don't need to do an RR during your presentation week. Your slides (canva or google slides) will also reboot on the website any time you revise, no matter which presentation version you email.
- The subpages for this semester have been moved around a bit. Hopefully, this makes the weekly agendas easier to find.
- Next week, an overview of your final project will be uploaded to D2L. We will review it on November 27, but it will be available on D2L for review beforehand and I'll give more options besides the zine.
II. Announcements (we will have an Opening Writing next time):
We will end early today and not have a break so that I can make it to the Graduate Council Council Meeting. We will end at 3:15pm.
All The Hype... from Grace
III. Focus on "Abolitionist University Studies"
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A. Spotlight on Ruth Wilson Gilmore
B. DISCUSSION of Abolitionist University Studies
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OUR CHEAT SHEET: Theory vs. Critique & Short Circuiting
1) Definitions/Purposes
Such an institution resists both theory and strategy alike because of how fixedly it attaches to what we need and value in the world... Abolition thus offers the occasion for thinking about the university in ways that the institution itself might otherwise render impossible. And in doing so it may offer an occasion to trouble the institution as we know and inhabit it—and as it inhabits us...What would an abolitionist approach to the university say yes to? (p. 2)
Such an institution resists both theory and strategy alike because of how fixedly it attaches to what we need and value in the world... Abolition thus offers the occasion for thinking about the university in ways that the institution itself might otherwise render impossible. And in doing so it may offer an occasion to trouble the institution as we know and inhabit it—and as it inhabits us...What would an abolitionist approach to the university say yes to? (p. 2)
What kinds of spaces, relationships, ways of knowing, and even institutions might an abolitionist approach to the university bring into being? (p. 3)
The university’s appearance of necessity is no mere mirage but rather the effect of its centrality within settler colonial and racial capitalist regimes of accumulation. To turn the university into an object of analysis, a site of intervention, and a resource to be exploited ... frees us from the conflation of universities with education, study, and the production of knowledge and, instead, to see universities as complex terrains with many conflicting and intersecting modes of world-making. (p. 3)
More practically, to think the university through an abolitionist mode entails approaching our study of and relationship to such institutions through a combination of social critique and a willingness to struggle to think and build the impossible. We have chosen this name, a name that positions the university as the object of abolition, in an effort to short-circuit the university’s claims of a priori goodness, as a way of making the university newly available for thinking. (p. 3)
2) The Romantic Un-thinking
[We] steal the sheen from the university’s romanticized history... the dominant popular and scholarly narratives about U.S. universities [that] tend to portray “progress” with linear distinctions between past, present, and future... An abolitionist approach unearths the counter-memories of people who have been buried in the dominant histories, people who have resisted the dominant worldmaking project and created alternatives. (p. 4)
[We] steal the sheen from the university’s romanticized history... the dominant popular and scholarly narratives about U.S. universities [that] tend to portray “progress” with linear distinctions between past, present, and future... An abolitionist approach unearths the counter-memories of people who have been buried in the dominant histories, people who have resisted the dominant worldmaking project and created alternatives. (p. 4)
3) "Post-Slavery University" [post-slavery does NOT mean abolition... it is simply the fact of what we are in]
We argue for the importance of understanding the “post-slavery university.” By centering this new concept, we aim to emphasize the unfinished work of the abolitionist movement by situating US universities after the Civil War as continuous with a broader terrain of struggles pitting what Du Bois called the “counter-revolution” of capital and property against abolitionism and Reconstruction. In other words, with the formal end of slavery, capital aspired to use the post-slavery university for accumulation by other means. Bringing our periodization up to the present, we analyze the university’s dominant modes of accumulation within the broader contemporary accumulation regime: individual accumulation (and individualization itself) through education, institutional accumulation, the circulation of capital, the expropriation of labor, and the non-circulation of wages (i.e., from the perspective of students’ wageless labor). (pp. 4-5)
We argue for the importance of understanding the “post-slavery university.” By centering this new concept, we aim to emphasize the unfinished work of the abolitionist movement by situating US universities after the Civil War as continuous with a broader terrain of struggles pitting what Du Bois called the “counter-revolution” of capital and property against abolitionism and Reconstruction. In other words, with the formal end of slavery, capital aspired to use the post-slavery university for accumulation by other means. Bringing our periodization up to the present, we analyze the university’s dominant modes of accumulation within the broader contemporary accumulation regime: individual accumulation (and individualization itself) through education, institutional accumulation, the circulation of capital, the expropriation of labor, and the non-circulation of wages (i.e., from the perspective of students’ wageless labor). (pp. 4-5)
4) The Chic of Scholarly Critique & Its Service to Capital
Critique is not simply a practice but a mode of institutional reproduction. It allows us to experience ourselves as if we are outside of the institution while remaining firmly ensconced in its liberal narrative of self-valorization. Unconvinced of the university’s beneficence, abolitionist university studies makes visible the university’s practices of self-valorization and seeks to short-circuit them. (p. 5)
Critique is not simply a practice but a mode of institutional reproduction. It allows us to experience ourselves as if we are outside of the institution while remaining firmly ensconced in its liberal narrative of self-valorization. Unconvinced of the university’s beneficence, abolitionist university studies makes visible the university’s practices of self-valorization and seeks to short-circuit them. (p. 5)
It valorizes detachment and dialogue with well-meaning liberals where we prioritize the abolition of the existing order through militant organizing.... Moreover, critique is too easily recuperated into universities’ production of surplus value in the form of prestige, faculty activity reports, grades, and credentialed subjects... Part of the point here is to untether theory, as situated practice, from critique, as the product of commodified intellectual labor, in order to make some space beyond the mode of institutional reproduction that critique entails. (p. 7)
5) Anxious Self-Study of Slavery as New Brand Management
Many recent efforts by a number of well-resourced and elite universities to acknowledge their historical complicities (and in some cases active involvement) in slavery and the slave trade have taken the form of public relations campaigns. Partly because they are able to take for granted the progress narrative put into play by the Golden Era university narrative—in which the university’s social function is taken for granted as ameliorative—these efforts are able to presume a university past that is radically discontinuous with the university present. Through reports, public statements, special task forces on university history, and the renaming of buildings, the knowledge form itself is thus called upon to do the work of redress. Brand management, today’s university officials understand, involves “owning” one’s institutional history. (pp. 8-9)
Many recent efforts by a number of well-resourced and elite universities to acknowledge their historical complicities (and in some cases active involvement) in slavery and the slave trade have taken the form of public relations campaigns. Partly because they are able to take for granted the progress narrative put into play by the Golden Era university narrative—in which the university’s social function is taken for granted as ameliorative—these efforts are able to presume a university past that is radically discontinuous with the university present. Through reports, public statements, special task forces on university history, and the renaming of buildings, the knowledge form itself is thus called upon to do the work of redress. Brand management, today’s university officials understand, involves “owning” one’s institutional history. (pp. 8-9)
[We] refuse the university’s constant and obliviating self-absolution. Toward these ends, we need critique, certainly, but we need also to be unsettled by critique’s privileged place in the institutional epistemology of the university, in which the status it enjoys as a good in itself is enshrined by the same logic deployed by the university’s public relations wing. Public critique and public apology share in common their probative value in demonstrating the university’s commitment to the subject of self-consciousness. (p. 11)
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(2:45-3:15pm)
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UnBanned Books with Kelly and Victoria |
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