The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference Roderick A.Ferguson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.

Abstract

The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference Roderick A. Ferguson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.A central demand of the student movements in the United States throughout the 1960s and 1970s was an opening of the academy through the creation of new courses, departments and schools, increased enfranchisement through the enrollment and hiring of non-white students and faculty members, and a challenge to conventional pedagogies of minority difference. However, as this sophisticated and thoughtprovoking study illustrates, the rise of interdisciplines through new departments and fields on race, gender, sexuality and ethnicity represented not only a challenge to hegemonic depictions of minority difference by state, academy and capital but also an opportunity for minority culture and the politics of difference to be appropriated by these same networks of power.Contrary to conventional poststructuralist and postmarxist theories which have neglected these social movements and the rise of interdisciplines, Ferguson stresses the need for new theoretical perspectives which seriously consider the impact and effect of new fields such as race studies, ethnicity studies and queer studies on the academy. Building on Foucault's reading of the strategic nature of power relations {The History of Sexuality, 1990) and Stuart Hall's critique of institutionalisation (Cultural Studies and Theoretical Legacies, 1993), the author develops a rich theoretical framework centered on minority difference being identified by institutions of power as something that could be absorbed into their own aims and objectives. Ferguson highlights the inherent contradictions of the student movements in simultaneously working to innovate and add new meaning to critical discourses on minority difference whilst at the same time attempting to formalize and institutionalize this difference in a way that made it presentable within the university system.The opening chapters chart the rise of the interdisciplines and the proliferation of minority difference in the post-war period, situating these transformations within the broader context of a fragmenting national culture which had historically presented itself as homogenous and the changing role of the American academy, which became more heavily invested in difference as part of sweeping changes within the US university system. Ferguson skilfully links localised case studies of the contestation and reproduction of minority difference such as the Lumumba-Zapata movement at the University of California in the late 1960s and early 1970s to the broader co-option of revolutionary movements by imperial and constitutional projects to bolster the global US political economy. He complicates the credit attributed to black studies in leading the charge to the institutionalisation of racial studies by examining its role in helping to midwife interest in minority difference (110), although at points the attempt to map multiple discourses of minority difference within the academy and the community becomes tangled. …