15 Getting Over Ourselves

Abstract

15 Getting Over Ourselves Mimi Thi Nguyen (bio) I enrolled in my first ethnic studies course as an undergraduate in 1993, and it was, to put it mildly, disappointing. Punk had given me my first radical education in US empire, the police state, and the riot, and gender and women's studies my second radical education in postcolonial and women of color feminisms. But what I remember most about that first ethnic studies course was the professor telling crude jokes about balls (specifically the correspondences between the relative heft of sports balls and testicles) and holding court about his arrests some thirty years ago, and that halfway through the semester I began skipping both the lecture and discussion sections except for exams. For a young woman of color feminist who understood herself as an activist, and had also become interested in what theory could diagnose about the failures of movements, the course was a wash. Even at twenty years old, I knew something about the obstacles of radical self-aggrandization. Even as I write this now, a white lesbian "superstar" intellectual stands accused of abuses of power made possible by her entrenched position within a structure and an enterprise, and her supporters twist themselves to justify these abuses through appeals to the radicalism of their own intellectual labor.1 As a number of us have said to each other throughout this latest debacle, everything is terrible. Here, then, is where I want to begin: where radicalism (an uneasy referent, as any student of social movements—or a predatory professor—knows), race, and the institutions of knowledge elaborate each other as objects of profound investment for both political capital and capital accumulation. What can we make of the machinations that anoint the radical intellectual as foundation and arbiter of radical knowledge, which is both the premise of their claims to "outsider" [End Page 343] status to the institution, but also to those goods that the institution provides to some and not others, including healthcare, tenure, and a paycheck? And how do we as scholars of power, in both senses as critics and as agents, narrate the crises we purport to resolve? There are questions I learned to ask and begin to answer through the interdisciplines that are my intellectual genealogies, including gender and women's studies and ethnic studies; these same interdisciplines that are my institutional "homes" reproduced and even amplified some of these conditions. So here I rehearse two modest proposals. First, we must account for the material conditions that support—or not—our labor. Second, our scholarship need not (and sometimes cannot) be commensurate with an identifiable activist project or form of resistance to be "properly" political. To put it another way: How does the valorization of certain intellectual labors foreclose possibilities for future collectivities, and necessary accounts of power? I For those of us in or from interdisciplines such as ethnic studies and gender and women's studies, our institutional histories as fields of inquiry and administrative academic units are often related (though in no straightforward manner, despite the conventional story) as histories of student upheavals and popular demands. From these histories arises the fiction that produces "the people" as an object of knowledge that claims and hails the radical intellectual as their interlocutor, translator, arbiter, or representative otherwise within the institution. This relation between "the people," "the community," and the old-fashioned "masses," and the radical intellectual has long been the occasion for reflecting upon the affinities and fault lines between forms (and categories) of movement work. In a still-crucial essay—one I read as an undergraduate, and which likely informed my bad attitude in that ethnic studies course—Trinh T. Minh-ha troubles the theoretical formation of "the masses" and the author or artist as their avatar, writing, "One invokes them and pretends to write on their behalf when one wishes to give weight to one's undertaking or to justify it."2 Or as Nick Mitchell observes in his schematic history of the "(critical ethnic studies) intellectual," the presumptive inseparability of representation in knowledge and representative in politics valorizes the intellectual as a figure of fantastical investment, especially for the intellectual herself.3 Both...