Surname 1
Yu Han
C LIT240
Jan 15th
Summarize The Introduction of “Represent and Destroy” for a Specific Community
The introduction of the book “Represent and Destroy” presents the theory of racial
formation and the systems after World War II. The post-war race-liberal orders follow a
genealogy of phases including racial liberalism, liberal multiculturalism, and neoliberal
multiculturalism. I share the summary of this book to the group of friends who are my course
mates, to show how race remained central to the global events during this period and the antiracist believed that there existed no difference between the European oppression, racial
segregation, and the colonial rule.
The material politics of antiracist knowledge provides the historical and theoretical
background of the post-World War II racial break. It gets described as the setting of the
condition for the sea change in the racial orders of the world and the consolidation of anti-racism
in the US. The break introduced a new racial project that replaced the white supremacy
characterized by its anti-racist and liberal capitalist. The post-World War II racial break gets
defined as the global accumulation of the socio-political forces that combined to remove the
ancient world racial system.
The racial break got produced by the anti-racist and the anti-colonial movements who
were against the racial violence and white supremacy in the US. Significantly, the break
managed to bring about change in the expansion of democracy through decolonization and
gaining of independence. It also led to the introduction of new civil rights, empowerment, racial
Surname 2
desegregation, and implementation of policies by the States that recognized subdued cultures.
The anti-racist movements politicized race, increased its contradiction, and demanded the end of
white supremacy. The incomplete racial formation resulted to racial dualism consisting of two
contradicting worlds of white supremacy and racial justice.
The idea of racial break makes Melamed develop the foundation of his discussions. He
argues that the racial break period was complete and it has given rise to the modern racial project
of anti-racist and liberal capitalist that surpass the abilities of white supremacy rather than
replacing it entirely. He contradicts the opinion of former scholars like Winant who proposes that
the period remained incomplete.
The world embraced capitalism rule that constituted a racialized global structure. White
supremacy entered the modern cultural systems and created a racialized Western knowledge
based on political and economic racial projects. Racial capitalism clarifies the economic
dimension of racial developments. It indicates that racialism remains a force and a historical
agency of capitalism as long as the racial directions of the modern society get persuaded by
development, expansion, and organization of the capitalist relations. The break period can
therefore get described by the combination of the forces of colonial capitalism, white supremacy,
and the state of the nation patterns.
Racial liberalism escalated from the geo-historical conditions of the racial break. The
global conflict of the race at the onset of the racial break facilitated the movement towards
equality and establishment of racial liberalism networks. The networks remained aimed at
absorbing the new ideological concepts, and develop the abilities to manage the emerging racial
orders. The Federal government realized the necessity to centralize race issues and incorporated
the knowledgeable Blacks who got nurtured by the early racial-liberal contributors. Some used
Surname 3
the already published handbooks like the “American Dilemma” that suggested the significance of
race and anti-racism in the racial-liberal world.
The American race problem got linked to political issues which characterized the Negros
as an opportunity to legitimate itself as the leader of the decolonizing world. Racism also got
related to the attitude and prejudice of the Whites hence a psychological and moral issue
Melamed 21). Achieving racial justice in such society meant including the African-Americans as
part of the community of Americans. It encompassed equal opportunity, possessive
individualism, abstract equality, and market liberties that promoted anti-racism.
The difference between the pre and the post-racial liberalism break is that the former
concentrated on changing the attitude of the Whites, the latter focused on a country-wide social
engineering. The latter remained aimed at creating a culture in America where Whites had no
prejudice and the Blacks absorbed as part of the US community. Racial liberalism constituted the
provision of education programs on understanding the Blacks and their living conditions. It also
included the production of materials on national reforms, education initiates and race relations.
The circulation of race novels got aimed at unifying racial-liberal ideologies, to understand race
matters, and to influence subject formation by the creation of race liberal identities.
Racial liberalism, therefore, presented itself as the model that made the market economy
non-political by the inclusion of the African-Americans. It also provided the ideology explaining
the increasing class inequality with the Blacks racial formation, the rise of professional AfricanAmericans and explains why the Us invests in postcolonial nations. Racial liberalism remains
connected with the normative of politics, economy, culture for the assimilation of the Blacks.
Surname 4
Liberal multiculturalism occurred after the downfall of racial liberalism which faced
opposition from alternative anti-racism (Melamed 27). It got introduced to manage the growing
social and economic inequality through stressing on desegregation, symbolic equality and
tolerant from the whites. There existed need to find ways to politically mobilize race beyond the
limits set by racial liberalism which incorporated anti-colonial of the racial break period making
it official anti-racism. Liberal multi-culturalism re-instated such limits by defusing the materialist
anti-racism of the new based race. It also deployed literary discourse as a cultural idea to make
the knowledge of anti-racist productive for the next phase of developing capitalism.
Liberal multiculturalism worked as a powerful anti-racism model of normative through
nation-wide projects based on education and socialization in colleges. It gave training to students
to become professionals and internalize liberalism as part of their sense of identity and social
mission. Also, its knowledge increased the bio-political explanation of the class inequality and
the living conditions of the Blacks. It produced the understanding that made the racially diverse
middle class acceptable, allowed for post-Keynesian, and then expanded the transitional
capitalism abroad. It also provided weak terms of social solidarity and affirmation of positive
cultural pluralism. Globally, it made America get the description of the internalized model of
global diversity.
Neoliberal multiculturalism developed in the 1990s as a world-historical configuration of
governance and social life premised on the idea that the market remains better than the state at
distributing resources and managing human life. It signifies how the neoliberals govern the biopolitical life to govern and rationalize forms of humanity. At the global stake, it has led to
differentiated citizenship that ensure governments protects the vulnerable to capital from whether
they are citizens of the nation or not.
Surname 5
The rise of social movements who fought for anti-racism through diverse issues during
this period to identify the hand of neoliberalism’s uneven system of capital accumulation. The
sovereignty of neoliberalism requires the knowledge of systems that rationalize its bi- politics
hence has to conduct monopoly over the social practices that impact its beliefs. It managed to
disguise the idea that neoliberalism is a form of racial capitalism. Neoliberal multiculturalism has
striven deracialized anti-racist references and concepts associated with multiculturalism.
Globally, it has produced difference as a valorized area of knowledge and has ideologically
correlated ethical, technical and political positions towards transformation to what benefits
neoliberal agendas. Ironically, the restricted goals of anti-racism in the United States has formed
the foundation for capitalism globally.
In conclusion, the introductory chapter presents the concept of racism and anti-racism in
the United States and even globally. It also describes the phases of development of antiracism by
giving the race-liberal systems consisting of racial liberalism, liberal multiculturalism, and
neoliberal multiculturalism.
Surname 6
Work cited
Melamed, J. “Represent and Destroy: Producing Discourses of Certainty with Official AntiRacism.” University of Minnesota Press, 24, 2011, pp. 1-50.
SURNAME 1
YU HAN
C LIT240
JAN 25TH.
ANALYSIS OF A SCENE FROM THE FILM ‘KILLER OF SHEEP’
Perhaps it would be imperative to state that there is a need to view the context of the film
from a wider sociocultural aspect that it represents rather than just a piece of literature. It is a
film that took more than three decades before it was produced and maybe, it is a story of modern
America. It has been described as a film that highlights various aspects of the American society
together, piece them together and give the viewer a feeling that borders on realism. Perhaps, it is
as real as it appears since one cannot help but develop a sentiment of attachment to some of the
depictions, which almost feel non-fictional.
The essay will focus on how the scene of the children playing by roadside tell a wider
context of the African American society and the widening gap that continues to haunt the
Americans between the rich and the poor. It is a reflection of the ignorance that the society has
taken to the real issues that some Americans face, and the mirage that is the American Dream. If
the dream exists, the film demonstrates that it applies selectively.
There is the use of intercuts as the children who are playing and the adults as an
illustration of the various contradictions. There is the intercut of a child who is darting behind a
plywood shield repeatedly. It is at this instance that the camera shows two groups of children,
who are playing in what can be described as ‘a rubbish-strewn wasteland, throwing rocks at one
SURNAME 2
another from behind barriers’ (Dittmar, 153). One of the boys is hurt in the process, and he starts
crying, coupled with bleeding. The other boys gather around, forget about their play and it turns
out the boy is not badly hurt. The children drift to the rail system and idly throw stones at the
passing trains. Interestingly, the scenes of these children are unrehearsed, and this shows one of
the major inclinations that the essay seeks to highlight; of inequality.
The children are doing this because they do not have the toys to play with. One child puts
on a scary Halloween mask and is harassed because he is confused as an adult in such a mask. It
would be important to create a link between this scene and what Stan does, of herding the sheep
to their noose, clipping them to a conveyor belt and then watching them as they bleed to death. It
is the ignorance of these two groups, the sheep who feel contented to die without fighting back,
and without any significant contribution.
The children are also ignorantly playing, unaware of the stakes that poverty holds for
them, and the odds that they have to deal with, to have a better life than Stan. It is the life of a
family that lives with values and nobility, but with minimal opportunities. The people lead a
contextual life, limited by their opportunities or lack of it, and go nowhere.
Is this how the people who lack opportunities in the American society have to contend
with? It is not the intention of the essay to take racial sentiments, but the film makes a case for
this aspect that would make the overlook of this aspect an injustice to the implication of the film.
The statistics are there for scrutiny, and it all starts with the fact that most of the African
Americans have one-seventh of the average income that is enjoyed by their white counterparts. It
is a national shame that is contrasted by the indifference of the children who are playing with
rocks, and perhaps the bleeding is a foreshadowing of the future that awaits them. It is an
allusion to the difficulties that such children have to face in the so-called ‘land of opportunities
SURNAME 3
for all.’ It is what the scene seeks to bring what the creator could have been trying to show; how
it feels to be a stranger in a strange land, that one is supposed to call home.
The butcher and the butchered is one analogy that could perhaps show the helpless
nature, and the might that those who have the means wield over the innocent and the vulnerable.
Is this what ails America? That there is a clique that has the rules to bend, even if it is to the
detriment of the masses? It is a debatable question, but what is not in dispute is that the African
Americans do not have equal opportunities in such a war. The general feeling that the film
communicates is that no one is getting ahead, no one is making any tangible progress, whether
actively employed or not, and this is what one needs to ask, regarding the reality, has the
opportunities in America been evenly distributed for all?
There should be more than a question of opportunities when it comes to these issues. That
racial equality is just but a mirage, and that opportunities in America are just but restricted to a
few individuals. The major issue is that of values, and whether in a capitalist society such as the
USA, is there a space for a virtuous life? The film does not seem to show on where it falls on the
aspect of values and how it seeks to educate its audience.
Perhaps, it is the realization that America should be the last country to talk about values
and virtues, because individualism is the most celebrated societal aspect. It is an issue that could
serve to offer some insight on what has been ailing the society, with children resorting to drug
abuse, escalating divorce cases because of the economic constraints and this does not make any
sense on how the values are supposed to help in such a society. It would be imperative to
retaliate that the film seeks provoke a debate, from a moral aspect and the sociological views that
it raises, and the economic relation, with regards to opportunities available for the American
masses, especially the African Americans.
SURNAME 4
If so, why has the inequality gap continue to rise? There have been strides, but what of
the taxes, the cost of living and other fiscal factors, who do they favor? Is the country becoming
a land of indifference such as the child playing or the sheep being led to a slaughterhouse, hope
not!
SURNAME 5
Works cited
Dittmar, Linda. "All that Hollywood allows: Film and the working class." Class and the College
Classroom: Essays on Teaching (2013): 153.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/30/movies/30kill.html
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For additional information about this book
http://muse.jhu.edu/books/9780816678624
Access provided by University of Washington @ Seattle (5 Oct 2015 03:46 GMT)
Introduction
Producing Discourses of Certainty
with Official Antiracisms
Represent and Destroy presents a new theory of U.S. racial formation
and of world-embracing racial systems after World War II, as well as
a new historical-materialist understanding of U.S. literary studies as a
critical site of geopolitical struggle around the meaning and significance of race. It argues that as white supremacy gradually became
residual after World War II, it was replaced by a formally antiracist,
liberal-capitalist modernity whose driving force has been a series of
successive official or state-recognized U.S. antiracisms: racial liberalism (1940s to 1960s), liberal multiculturalism (1980s to 1990s), and
neoliberal multiculturalism (2000s). These antiracisms have functioned as unifying discourses for U.S. state, society, and global ascendancy and as material forces for postwar global capitalist expansion.
This book focuses on the material politics of antiracist knowledges,
particularly on how official antiracisms have established control over
the discourses of rationality regarding the practices that impact the
constitution of successive state-capital formations, from state-oriented
Cold War expansionism to post-Keynesian market-oriented transnational capitalism to contemporary neoliberalism. Represent and
Destroy identifies the incorporation of antiracism into postwar U.S.
governmentality as decisive. It has limited sanctioned antiracist discourses to those that take for granted the benevolence of U.S. global
ascendancy and integrate the knowledge architecture of state-capital
formations (e.g., property rights, free markets, and financial deregulation) into what racial equality may signify, and what may signify as
racial equality. In contrast to antiracist struggles led by social movements, official U.S. antiracisms since World War II have disconnected
❯ 1 ❮
2 ❯ Introduction
racism from material conditions, even as they have detrimentally limited the horizon for overcoming racism to U.S. global capitalism.
Represent and Destroy further identifies official or state-recognized
antiracisms as liberal modes of instituting normative and rationalizing power. It attributes the efficacy of antiracisms in this regard to the
trick of racialization, a process that constitutes differential relations of
human value and valuelessness according to specific material circumstances and geopolitical conditions while appearing to be (and being)
a rationally inevitable normative system that merely sorts human beings
into categories of difference. In other words, racialization displaces its
differential value making into world-ordering systems of difference,
concealing its performative work with its constantive work. As official
antiracisms validate some orders of difference and make others illegible, they exert their strongest influence in a viral fashion by shaping the
content of modern knowledge systems (e.g., law, politics, and economy) and delimiting permissible expressions of personhood. Racial
liberalism, liberal multiculturalism, and neoliberal multiculturalism
have innovated racial procedures beyond color lines, often incorporating antiracist terms of value, so that new terms of racialized privilege
emerge (liberal, multicultural, global citizen), along with new terms of
racialized stigma (unpatriotic, monocultural, illegal). Flexible privilege/
stigma divides precipitate out of the conditions for which they provide
sense making; symptomatic and descriptive, racialization naturalizes
the privileges of those who benefit from present socioeconomic arrangements and makes the dispossessions of those cut off from wealth
and institutional power appear fair.
Throughout, Represent and Destroy stresses the importance of literary studies for producing, transmitting, and implanting race-liberal
orders. This importance follows from the postwar institutionalization
of literature as the most efficacious tool for Americans to use to get
to know difference—to describe, teach, learn about, and situate themselves with respect to racial difference and to know the truth about the
difference that racial difference makes (or does not make). Represent
and Destroy examines the importance of specific literary studies discourses for the active historical-material production of successive
Introduction ❮ 3
official antiracisms. It examines how race novels were key for disseminating racial liberalism throughout Cold War national culture and for
consolidating a powerful historical bloc of race relation philanthropies,
social scientists, culture and publishing industries, and federal government agencies. It investigates literary multiculturalism as a powerful
cultural technology for generating liberal multiculturalism, with U.S.
universities serving as a prominent institutional base for managing minoritized difference in post-Keynesian times. Finally, it considers how
discourses of global literature function within a network of globalized
information industries (including universities) to circulate information
bits that accord with neoliberal policy and agendas by passing them off
as literary knowledge. In sum, Represent and Destroy offers an antiracist
critique of U.S.-led global capitalism and an anticapitalist critique of
dominant forms of U.S. racism, attentive to the material politics of antiracist knowledges and, especially, to the prominent role of literary studies in disseminating racial discourse. Conversely, it unearths a strong
and vital race-radical tradition of materialist antiracisms—a consistent
opposition to official antiracisms—that has used literary texts and
other cultural forms to make visible the violences of race-liberal orders
and to impel desire for something better.
This critical introduction has three parts. The first provides the historical premise and theoretical foundations for my investigation of the
material politics of antiracist knowledges in liberal-capitalist modernity.
It includes a discussion of what Howard Winant has called the racial
break as setting the conditions for a sea change in world racial orders
and for the eventual consolidation of official U.S. antiracisms. It then
examines features of liberal race hegemony in general: how official antiracisms have operated as modes of normative and rationalizing power,
how they have extended racialization procedures beyond color lines, and
how and why literary studies has become a primary cultural technology
for producing official antiracisms. The second part provides a genealogy
of race-liberal orders. For each phase—racial liberalism, liberal multiculturalism, and neoliberal multiculturalism—the genealogy considers
the following: its conditions of emergence, its historical-material production, its regulative narratives for knowing race matters, its prominent
4 ❯ Introduction
racializing terms and criteria, its articulation of race and capitalism, and
the forms of literary studies that have disseminated it. Though the book’s
chapters investigate each phase in greater detail, the genealogy allows for
a comprehensive look at how knowledges about racial difference have
been made to work for postwar U.S. ascendancy and U.S.-led capitalist globalization. It also draws attention to the crises within, transitions
between, and continuities among official antiracist formations. The third
and final part of the introduction discusses a strongly concatenated system of resistances to official antiracisms—a race-radical tradition of
materialist antiracisms—whose roots are readily found in literary texts
themselves (in contrast to literary studies discourses).
The Material Politics of Antiracist Knowledges
In his recent scholarship Howard Winant, the preeminent sociologist
of race in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, offers a historical account and theory of the post–World War II racial break. I take
Winant’s historical description of the racial break as a key premise of
my study. Yet in theorizing racial formation after the racial break, I part
ways with Winant and consider the break to be more productive of
an epochal shift—a sea change in racial orders—than Winant allows.
Although I agree with Winant that the racial projects of white supremacist modernity have continued after the racial break, I argue that the
break itself instantiated a new worldwide racial project that complexly
supplemented and displaced its predecessor: a formally antiracist,
liberal-capitalist modernity articulated under conditions of U.S. global
ascendancy. I examine how it was precisely the entrance of nonredistributive antiracism into the administrative and rational apparatuses
of the U.S. state and into the social and political relations of global
capitalism that decisively produced racial hegemony after the break
(and signaled white supremacy’s partial deactivation). Furthermore, I
recognize the racial break as a fundamental transition because it corresponded to a shift in the nature of power that Roderick Ferguson and
others describe as an intensification of normative power (or the power
of the normative), whereby legitimate violence has been increasingly
Introduction ❮ 5
exercised through norms that impose legibility and illegibility and attach punishments to transgressions of norms. Indeed, I propose that
official antiracisms—the freedoms they have guaranteed, the state
capacities they have invented, the subjects they have recognized, and
even the rights they have secured—have enabled the normalizing violences of political and economic modernity to advance and expand.
Winant describes the post–World War II racial break as “a global
accumulation of sociopolitical forces—demographic, experiential,
institutional, and ideological—that combined to discredit and finally
undo the old world racial system.”1 Its ruptural force derived from the
unprecedented “centrality of race in all the major social upheavals” of
the period, which began with World War II, extended to the decolonization struggles and conflicts of the early Cold War, and engulfed
metropoles, colonies, and ex-colonies alike.2 The events of World
War II politicized the historical violences of white supremacy and allowed antiracist activists to link the horror the world expressed at the
Nazi genocide of European Jews to racisms existing throughout the
world, demonstrating affinities between European fascism, racial segregation, and colonial rule. After the war anticolonial and antiracist
movements were able to draw upon the experiences of millions of war
veterans who were returning to the Jim Crow U.S. South and colonial
homelands with a broader perspective of racial oppression as a global
issue. Massive migrations from the world’s rural South to its metropolitan North, ignited by postwar labor demands, also laid the demographic foundations for racially based social movements seeking inclusion in the metropoles and independence in the colonies. Moreover,
the ideological Cold War between the United States and the Soviet
Union made race a prominent issue. At stake in the Soviet Union’s propaganda highlighting racial violence in the United States was whether
capitalist relations could be separated from white supremacy and
whether political systems in the West could accommodate postcolonial nations and people of color as equal states and citizens.
Under such conditions, as Winant describes, massive mobilizations
of racially based social movements were able to draw on transnational
resources, ideas, and political leverage. Overlapping, interconnected,
6 ❯ Introduction
and forceful, the challenges that antiracist and anticolonial movements
launched against the institutions and ideologies of the old world racial order produced the racial break, a rupture profoundly resituating,
both symbolically and politically. They exposed white supremacy to be
a hollow ideology of force used to dominate nonwhites and appropriate global resources. And they won expansions of democracy beyond
racial exclusions, including decolonization and political independence, new civil rights laws, desegregation, enfranchisement, and the
adoption of state policies to recognize and value subjugated cultures.
Yet despite the undoing of stark racial dictatorship, the racial break,
according to Winant, was incomplete: “[F]or all their achievements,
insurgent movements of the break period were unable to realize a fullscale repudiation of the past.” Rather, “the product of all this struggle
and conflict was ‘merely’ reform—incorporative, hegemonic reform.”3
For Winant the partial and incomplete racial break has passed into
a period of racial interregnum. His theory of racial formation after
World War II is one of racial dualism where “two openly contradictory
world-historical racial projects co-exist”: white supremacy (adapted
for postcolonial conditions and the end of legal inequality) and “partially institutionalized legal and social commitments to racial justice,
universalism, pluralism, and democracy.”4 His important theory of racial hegemony developed out of this idea of racial dualism. Though his
position cannot be adequately summarized here, for Winant the hegemonic racial common sense that has developed is an incorporation of
some elements of recurring mobilizations for robust racial democracy
and the neutralization of others. His understanding of the contemporary world racial order is one in which newly mobilized commitments
to substantive racial justice continually confront new adaptations of
essentially white supremacist social stratifications, initiating further
hegemonic adjustment and negotiation.5
The genealogy of U.S. racial formation I offer proceeds from an
alternative premise. Rather than an incomplete racial break leading to
an extended period of racial dualism, I theorize the racial break as complete in the sense that its contradictions and tensions have given rise to
a new worldwide racial project, a formally antiracist, liberal-capitalist
Introduction ❮ 7
modernity that revises, partners with, and exceeds the capacities of
white supremacy without replacing or ending it. My account of racial
hegemony in the United States is organized by the three successive
phases I identify for it: racial liberalism, liberal multiculturalism, and
neoliberal multiculturalism. These officially antiracist racial orders
have faced (and sometimes failed to manage) a spectrum of challenges
from more radical (e.g., noncapitalist, feminist, and indigenous) antiracisms and from resurgences of white supremacy. The introduction’s
second section examines the historical-material production and the
racial logics of each of these three phases.
First, though, let us look in greater detail at the advance of a formally
antiracist, liberal-capitalist modernity over a white supremacist modernity. The contemporary analysis of modernity as a racial project comes
out of a long and deep intellectual tradition that appeared aboveground
in the 1940s in seminal texts such as Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery
and W. E. B. Du Bois’s The World and Africa and developed into a modern critical discourse in scholarship by C. L. R. James, Cedric Robinson,
Charles Mills, David Theo Goldberg, Michael Omi and Howard Winant,
Lisa Lowe, Étienne Balibar, and others. To summarize, the emergence of
a global order through a world-embracing system of capitalism, nationstates, colonies, and imperial rule was able to constitute itself as a global
social structure only to the extent that it was racialized. By representing
and assigning meaning to human identities, white supremacy made it
possible to locate all human individuals and collectives within an emerging world social order. White supremacy also allowed for an overarching
and unequal system of capital accumulation by inscribing race on bodies
as a marker of their relative value or valuelessness. As white supremacist
codes and references entered into modernity’s cultural and epistemic
systems—creating distinct repertoires of interpretation, representation, evaluation, and description—they racialized Western knowledges,
making the constitution of modernity as much a knowledge-based racial
project as it was an economically and politically based one.
Cedric Robinson’s theory of racial capitalism clarifies the economic dimension, explaining that because “the development, organization,
and expansion of capitalist relations [have] pursued essentially racial
8 ❯ Introduction
directions [in modernity],” racialism is to be considered a “material
force” and a “historical agency” of capitalism, with no outside between
the two.6 Stuart Hall’s theory of a “valorized ideological domain” clarifies the political dimension by helping us to understand white supremacy (before the racial break) as the metapolitical discourse of modernity,7 a “unifying discourse . . . wired up very directly to . . . a particular
structure of power” with “very strong ‘lines of tendential force’ articulating [race] to political, economic, and ideological structures.”8
Using Hall’s terms, the post–World War II racial break can be
thought of as rupturing the “lines of tendential force” that articulated together and coconstituted white supremacy, colonial capitalism,
imperial geopolitical rule, and the nation-state pattern. Yet the rupture did not—indeed could not—displace race as a valorized ideological domain. Rather, the antiracist and anticolonial movements of
the break period politicized race, heightened its contradictions, and
demanded resolution also in terms of race, namely the end of white
supremacy and its global order. As white supremacy was called into
question, racial inequality was finally recognized not only as a problem but as the problem, the crux of everything wrong and unequal in
governance, economy, and politics.
The reorderings of the world that antiracist and anticolonial movements had envisioned, as they contested the white supremacist structuring of modernity, were multiple and diverse. Many foresaw decolonization as ending the dominance of white nations over colored ones
(to paraphrase Du Bois). They hoped dismantling white supremacy
would end capitalist exploitation, and they predicted that the demise
of Eurocentrism would invigorate stagnated cultural systems and compromised patterns of peoplehood.
Yet the dominant reordering that came to pass was the inauguration of a formally antiracist, liberal-capitalist modernity under the
management of U.S. global ascendancy. The result of the process was
a new and old role for race as a unifying discourse. Limited and nonredistributive official antiracisms, wired up to particular structures
of power, together articulated political, economic, and ideological
structures. No longer was it the mesmerizing narratives of the white
Introduction ❮ 9
man’s burden but those of liberal antiracisms—of reform, of color
blindness, of diversity in a postracial world—that explained (away)
the inequalities of a still-racialized capitalism. The genealogy in the following section considers how successive regimes of official antiracism
have organized and placed human beings within world-embracing
systems of rule, accumulation, and rationality while naturalizing uneven distributions of power and resources as fair, temporary, or just. I
consider the enormous productivity of successive liberal antiracisms
as they have structured the production and the multiplication of the
freedoms, identities, rights, institutions, and knowledges required by
new versions of racial capitalism and suprastate complexes of effective
governance.
The United States was in a good position to manage a transformation in the world racial system after World War II because its own internal dynamics mirrored those of the historical juncture, and both had
become combustible.9 The United States was at once a recognized colonial power and the archetype of a postcolonial state, having undergone
an anticolonial revolution against a European power. As Mary Dudziak
and Penny Von Eschen document, the United States achieved hegemony after World War II by linking its national racial crisis to global convulsions against white supremacy. America’s ability to resolve its highly
visible Negro problem—in other words, to secure the appearance of
African American equality—was to legitimate the United States as a
providential nation with the capacity to lead a new world postcolonial
order. Meanwhile, Soviet claims during the ideological Cold War that
white supremacy suffused Western-style political democracy and
transnational capitalism put the future of both at stake. Responding
to such pressures required the United States to develop a framework
for race matters that portrayed race as a contradiction to modernity
rather than one of its structuring conditions. It had to signify that racial
domination (past and present) was not constitutive of liberal freedoms
but in contradiction with them. Racial liberalism, the first official U.S.
antiracism, achieved this through a framework that conceived of racism as prejudice and promised to release liberal freedoms from racial
restrictions by extending equal opportunity, possessive individualism,
10 ❯ Introduction
and cultural citizenship to African Americans. Insofar as racial liberalism successfully managed internal racial dynamics for U.S. Cold War
leadership, it became an organizing discourse of the U.S. state and society. Insofar as the United States became a hegemonic global power,
racial liberalism came to structure its fields of global intervention.
From this account of the transition from white supremacist modernity to a formally antiracist, liberal-capitalist modernity, we see that
liberal antiracism first entered U.S. governmentality during the early
Cold War specifically as a geopolitical racial project that associated
Americanism with the benefits of capitalism. This constitutive condition has had broad consequences for antiracism in the United States
since World War II. I discuss these consequences in detail for racial
liberalism, liberal multiculturalism, and neoliberal multiculturalism
in the following section, but here it is useful to outline some general
attributes of postwar race-liberal orders. Whereas placing the United
States in the history of European colonialism had energized earlier
antiracisms led by people of color, after the victory of racial liberalism
official antiracisms in the United States have remained under the injunction to take U.S. ascendancy for granted and to stay blind to global
capitalism as a racial-political matter. Liberal antiracisms have both
disconnected race from material conditions and linked antiracism to
the expansion of U.S.-led global capitalism. Whereas in the 1940s political economic critiques of racism made race appear as an index for
the inequalities of capitalist modernity, after the racial break official
antiracisms have not only have suppressed this reference but also lent
antiracist codes to the pursuit of new forms of capitalist development.
Furthermore, official antiracisms create conditions that have required
the health and the security of the U.S. state to be one of the primary
goals of antiracism. These constitutive tendencies have composed a
field of racial politics in the U.S. that compels antiracist discourses to
validate culturally powerful notions of the U.S. nation. Conversely,
state-sanctioned antiracisms have repressed counternationalisms and
deflected criticisms of U.S. global power.
The most important feature of U.S. racial formation after the racial
Introduction ❮ 11
break has been the productivity of antiracist knowledges for (and as)
normative modes of power. Social theorist Max Weber posits that
Western states began to operate their monopoly on legitimate violence through the proliferation of social norms in the early twentieth
century, when mass citizenship became their operative ontology.10
From a critical race studies perspective, however, the shift away from
white supremacy toward formal antiracism has enabled liberal modes
of instituting power to expand and intensify as putatively antiracist
social norms have saturated more domains of social life and interpellated racialized subjects previously disciplined primarily through
overt applications of force. Tropes such as race reform, racial progress,
racial integration, ending racism, bringing in excluded voices, and living in
a postracial society have become the touchstones for racial projects that
recalibrate state apparatuses, expand the reach of normative power,
and implant norms during the performative constitution of human
subjectivities. By controlling what counts as a race matter, an antiracist
goal, or a truism about racial difference, official antiracisms have structured legitimate knowledges in the domains of law, public policy, economy, and culture. In a society in which normative power is pervasive,
control over the means of rationality is as important as, if not more
important than, control over other social forces. Thus, liberal antiracisms, which institutionally validate some forms of difference and
make others illegible, have exerted their strongest influence in a viral
fashion through the knowledge systems of liberal-capitalist modernity.
Why do these state antiracisms function so well as modes of normative and rationalizing power? The power of racialization lies in its constituting differential relations of value and valuelessness according to
reigning orders while appearing to be (and being) a normative system
that merely sorts human beings according to categories of difference.
Racialization converts the effects of differential value-making processes into
categories of difference that make it possible to order, analyze, describe, and
evaluate what emerges out of force relations as the permissible content of
other domains of U.S. modernity (e.g., law, politics, and economy). Critical
race theorist Nikhil Singh describes a similar process of value making’s
12 ❯ Introduction
displacing itself into systems of difference when he defines racialization as “historic repertoires and cultural and signifying systems that
stigmatize and depreciate one form of humanity for the purposes of
another’s health, development, safety, profit or pleasure.”11
Racialization does not function, therefore, only at the level of ideology, attaching positive or negative meanings or narratives to preexisting
forms of humanity. Rather, racial knowledges are materially produced
discourses that both constitute and are determined by the historically specific material circumstances and geohistorical conditions for
which they offer comprehension and sense making. They do not just
arrange human beings along a pregiven scale of value. Instead, they are
at once productive and symptomatic of the total value making (such
as political value and economic value) that secures specific historical
configurations of personhood, human organization, and relations to
the natural world as possible, imaginable, and sustainable. Differently
stated, racialization’s trick of displacing and disguising differential value
making within world-ordering systems of difference reifies and ensures
a baseline for social possibility and legitimate violence.
For white supremacist modernity (which does not cease to exist),
racialization procedures constructed orders of difference around a
color line that symbolically collapsed into phenotype other categories
of privilege and stigma (rich and poor, advanced and backwards, moral
and immoral). Such stark color-line racialization was especially productive for a world system organized by colonial capitalism, imperial
rule, and Herrenvolk nation-states and that disciplined the people it
devalued or exploited through physical force (warfare, imprisonment,
starvation) and exclusion. In a formally antiracist, liberal-capitalist
modernity, racialization procedures have become unevenly detached
from color lines. To organize racialized privilege and stigma, they have
independently and flexibly employed the criteria that white supremacy
historically has collapsed with color, and they have innovated new criteria, often using nationalist and antiracist terms of value. Racialization
beyond color lines coheres with the flexibility and needs of complexes
of effective governance and economy in post-Keynesian times, which
Introduction ❮ 13
have increasingly exercised legitimate violence through proliferating
norms that render some forms of humanity and their social imaginaries rational and others irrational, some legal and others illegal, some
criminal and others law-abiding, and so on.
To understand racialization beyond color lines in liberal-capitalist
modernity, Singh’s definition of race, “historic repertoires and cultural and signifying systems that stigmatize and depreciate one form of
humanity for the purposes of another’s health, development, safety,
profit or pleasure,” is useful for two reasons. First, it reminds us that
before and after the racial break the primary function of racialization
has been to make structural inequality appear fair. Second, it shows
that racialized privilege and stigma need not reference phenotype.
Rather, after the break categories of privilege and stigma determined
by ideological, economic, and cultural criteria have overlaid older, conventional racial categories to the extent that traditionally recognized
racial identities—black, Asian, white, Arab—occupy both sides of the
privilege/stigma divide. This divide itself is always on the move, precipitating out of the material circumstances it rationalizes (i.e., makes
available for reason and portrays as necessary).
Codes of racialized privilege and stigma after World War II have
been overlapping and diverse and have included an intensification of
codes of patriotism, heteronormativity, and cultural normativity and of
those signifying class or professional status. Importantly, official antiracisms have conferred privilege or stigma according to conformity
with limited repertoires of antiracist value, which themselves have normalized and stabilized contemporary political and economic arrangements. Thus, during periods of racial-liberal, liberal-multicultural, and
neoliberal-multicultural predominance, newly privileged racial subjects have emerged—the white liberal, the multicultural American,
and the multicultural global citizen, respectively—along with newly
stigmatized racial subjects, including the un-American, the overly race
conscious, the monocultural, and the illegal. Using such terms, official
antiracisms have made inequalities appear fair, and they have represented people exploited for or cut off from distributions of wealth and
14 ❯ Introduction
institutional power as outsiders to antiracist liberal subjectivity—or
multicultural subjectivity—for whom life can be disallowed, even to
the point of death.
Since World War II, the material politics of antiracist knowledges
have had a singular influence over fields of social possibility in the
United States and beyond. By securing normative orders of difference
and allowing legitimate violence to be exercised upon norm violators,
the knowledge systems of official antiracisms have articulated together
to a high degree of rational and biopolitical orders. Racialization has
coded human beings into regimes of social value precipitating out
of suprastate complexes of governance (e.g., the U.S. Cold War state
and its leadership for state-oriented transnational capitalism or neoliberal sovereignty in the era of George W. Bush). At the same time,
official antiracist discourses, incited by metanarratives of race reform
(in which racism constantly appears to be disappearing), have produced permissible narratives of difference that disseminate into and
condition knowledge systems. Under such constraining conditions,
forms of humanity win their rights, enter into representation, or achieve a
voice at the same moment that the normative model captures and incorporates them as Negro American (racial liberalism), Asian American
(liberal multiculturalism), diversity (neoliberal multiculturalism), and
so on. And much more is at stake than purely ideological or cultural
incorporation. Rather, for each of these historical junctures the terms
of entrance into liberal-capitalist modernity, which official antiracist
knowledges police, has secured the prepolitical conditions required
for normal politics and the extraeconomic conditions required for
continuing material relations of production.
In this light, Chandan Reddy’s recent discussion of the material
politics of modern Western knowledges is especially salient for antiracist knowledges. According to Reddy:
[M]odern Western knowledges . . . have been productive of
certain expressions of personhood, experience, historical
process, materialism, and so forth, while foreclosing other
historical, material and epistemic organizations of subjectivity,
Introduction ❮ 15
historical process, and the so-called natural world. . . .
Moreover to the degree that these knowledges have a universalizing [and thus incorporative] scope, they reproduce the relations of violence, uneven personhood, and non-equivalency
for which they were originally productive and symptomatic as
the prerequisite for their continued use and coherent and integrative functioning in our present political modernity.12
Along these lines official antiracist knowledges have reproduced normality as a changing same: the faces and qualities ascribed to the beneficiaries and the dispossessed have changed up, but the nongeneralizability of capitalist wealth has remained the same.
Literary studies has been a foremost cultural technology for producing, transmitting, and implanting official antiracist knowledges. In
this role literary studies has come to play a uniquely powerful part in
producing commonsense notions about race in the United States after
World War II, for better or worse. It is important to stress that literary
texts themselves are not at issue here, rather literary studies as materially produced discourses. The specific literary studies discourses
in mind—ones that describe what, how, and why literature has participated in the work of antiracism—are not to be thought of as mere
vehicles or mediums for liberal antiracism. Instead, the relationship is
one of a part to a whole, with literary studies discourses (e.g., race novels) networked into and participating in the totality of discourses and
practices that have constituted a specific antiracism (e.g., racial liberalism). In fact, one of the processes through which liberal antiracisms
have achieved and managed hegemony has been the designating of
a privileged relationship between literature and difference. Liberal
antiracisms have had to repeatedly institutionalize a notion of literary
texts as practical and effective tools that Americans can use to get to
know difference. This privileged literary register has been consistent
with liberal antiracist frameworks that portray race as a cultural, psychological, or social problem—as a matter of ignorance, irrationality,
feeling, or habit—to be corrected in the name of liberal-capitalist modernity rather than as internal to its political and economic structures.
16 ❯ Introduction
Important to note is that liberal antiracisms have not theorized literature or reading. Instead, they have simply presumed that the antiracist
values ascribed to literature are immanent in literary texts themselves.
In this way liberal antiracisms have manufactured their own transparency. Such displacement and transparency may be thought of as characteristic of liberal modes of instituting power, where norms confer
legibility and illegibility and seem to operate uncoercively, apolitically,
and in private.
The genealogy in the following section alienates historical forms of
literary studies, including race novels, multicultural literature, and literatures of global diversity, from their conventional representation within
race-liberal orders. It instead analyzes these forms as uniquely potent
modes of official antiracist knowledges that in the manner already described, have articulated together the biopolitical and the rational in a
way that makes systemic nonequivalences appear temporary, inevitable,
or benevolent. The potency of race novels, multicultural literature, and
other forms of literary studies has come from their capacity to compel
reading practices and to teach and transmit epistemic habits that forcefully encode the readers’ social and material world by using liberalantiracist terms of difference so that the evaluations of racial liberalism,
liberal multiculturalism, and neoliberal multiculturalism appear to be
the whole truth of the matter in terms of reason, experience, and selfidentification. The epistemological work of literary modes of antiracist
knowledges can be broken down into three functions that are not independent of one another but can be separated for analytical purposes.
First, notions about literature and race have helped liberal antiracisms produce and police national culture, its terms of social solidarity, and the requirements for cultural citizenship. Second, they have
trained readers, especially those destined to play professional and managerial roles in social orders, to internalize liberal-antiracist norms as
part of their sense of identity and social mission. Third, by privileging
reading literature as a way for dominant classes to come to know racialized others intimately (racialized because dispossessed by economic
orders), liberal antiracisms have made it possible to disseminate highly
ideological truths and information bits as authentic and substantive
Introduction ❮ 17
knowledge. As shown in the following section, literary studies has operated on all three levels for each phase of official antiracism. Yet different
tasks for literary studies have taken precedence at different times, with
race novels focusing on reconstituting U.S. cultural citizenship; literary
multiculturalism, on nationwide projects of socialization and education; and literatures of global diversity, on transmitting information bits
that account for neoliberal policy and agendas.
The following genealogy identifies the concrete mechanisms by
which literary studies have been incorporated into official racial orders, bringing into high relief the shifting role and importance of U.S.
universities, literary studies at U.S. universities, and more informal
or popular literary studies outside of universities. For racial liberalism sociology departments at institutions such as the University of
Chicago and Fisk University played a key part in disseminating an
understanding of literature as a tool for antiracist social transformations, as did powerful race relations philanthropies and publishing and
culture industries. For liberal multiculturalism English departments at
U.S. universities performed the anchoring role, disseminating liberal
multiculturalism into other university departments and officializing
multiculturalist categories in extraliterary and extra-academic domains,
such as post-Keynesian economic and public policy. For neoliberal
multiculturalism U.S. universities and university-based literary studies have acted in a supporting role because discourses of difference
are increasingly produced by globalized information and culture industries, by institutions of international civil society (e.g., the United
Nations, international NGOs, think tanks, and global media), and by
global economic regulatory and global security agencies (e.g., international regulatory agencies, multistate alliances, and multinational
corporate entities).
A Genealogy of Postwar Race-Liberal Orders
For each phase of official antiracism, this genealogy briefly considers its conditions of emergence (the political and economic imperatives that shaped it and that it stabilized), its regulative narratives for
18 ❯ Introduction
knowing race matters, its total historical-material production (the primary institutional complexes that produced and circulated its meanings), the forms of literary studies that generated and transmitted it, its
racializing schemas of privilege and stigma, how it naturalized global
capitalist development and inequality, and how it can be thought of as
a normative mode of power. The book’s chapters discuss these procedures at greater length for each specific juncture (racial liberalism in
chapter 1, liberal multiculturalism in chapter 2, and neoliberal multiculturalism in chapters 3 and 4). This genealogy comprehensively systematizes the development of official antiracisms in the United States
from the postwar period to the first decade of the twenty-first century,
giving attention to transitions and continuities between phases, where
some of the most important developments have taken place.
Racial Liberalism
The racial break comprised the geohistorical conditions that gave rise
to racial liberalism. Yet racial liberalism has a history before it became
the first state-recognized antiracism that is instructive to consider because it set the conditions for postbreak racial liberalism’s regulative
framework for knowing race matters.
Prebreak racial liberalism first coalesced in the mid-1930s out of a
web of alliances between Southern race liberals, Northern philanthropists, liberal sociologists, and African American intellectuals. Dismayed
at the incapacity of New Deal programs to alleviate African American
serfdom in the South and what this revealed about Jim Crow racial despotism, powerful Northern philanthropies hitherto working mostly
in the field of education—the Carnegie Corporation, the Rockefeller
Foundation, and the Julius Rosenwald Foundation—refocused their
efforts to target Southern racial discrimination. During the mid-1930s
and early 1940s, their work was redirected into three channels. First,
Northern philanthropies gave considerable financial resources and political backing to white Southern liberals in an attempt to mainstream
their participation in Southern culture and politics. In turn, Northern
philanthropies essentially adopted the white Southern liberal platform
Introduction ❮ 19
of accommodating segregation while seeking to make good the equal
aspirations of Plessy v. Ferguson’s separate but equal ruling. Second,
Northern philanthropies sought to strengthen a black intelligentsia.
Influenced by Duboisian ideas of a leadership role for a Talented Tenth
and by New Negro Renaissance philosophies positing art as a means to
represent black self-determination and virtuosity, foundations directed patronage to poets, writers, artists, and intellectuals. The emphasis
on building a black cultural leadership was consistent with an overall
strategy favoring social development over directly confronting Jim
Crow laws and institutions. Third, Northern philanthropies funded
the rise of the liberal social sciences and thereby the dissemination of
knowledges framing racial inequality through the rubric of the Negro
problem. Philanthropy thus put its faith in social engineering, the idea
that the gradual adjustment of white Southern beliefs and attitudes
was the most effective method for improving racial conditions.
At the onset of the crises of the racial break, as global conflicts
came to be coded in terms of race and it became imperative for U.S.
leadership to demonstrate a movement toward greater equality, the
networks of racial liberalism were well positioned to nationalize, to
absorb new ideological content, and to develop new capacities to
administrate emerging racial orders. In the federal government, philanthropies such as the Rosenwald Fund, the Carnegie Corporation,
and the Rockefeller Foundation had had a place at the table, when it
came to race issues, since the time of Franklin D. Roosevelt and their
sponsorship of his Black Cabinet. As it became necessary for the federal government to centralize race issues, the government could draw
from a pool of talented black and white leaders whose careers early
racial-liberal philanthropy had nurtured, including W. W. Alexander,
Ralph Bunche, and Robert Weaver. After the racial break, race relations
professionalized. The liberal social sciences, now with the backing of
the academy and the federal government, as well as philanthropies,
envisioned social engineering on a national scale to create a racially
inclusive U.S. national culture and an unprejudiced citizenry.
Postbreak racial liberalism’s watershed text was an epic socialscientific study of midcentury U.S. racial conditions. Entitled An
20 ❯ Introduction
American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944),
it was commissioned by the Carnegie Corporation in 1937 under racial
liberalism’s earlier dispensation. The strength and reach of its influence
testified to the sway that racial liberalism held over multiple domains of
U.S. postwar life and society. For nearly two decades after its publication,
An American Dilemma dominated popular and scientific understandings of race. It was a national bestseller, a handbook used by members of
Congress, an authoritative text within the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, and psychology, and a guide for U.S. foreign policy.
The primary tenets of An American Dilemma illustrated the controlling propositions that qualified knowledge and thinking about
race and antiracism as relevant and actionable in racial-liberal postwar orders. First, An American Dilemma framed its study of America’s
“race problem” as a geopolitical issue. Specifically, it characterized “the
Negro” as “America’s Opportunity” to legitimate itself as leader of a
decolonizing world.13 The study rhetorically linked liberal antiracism
to U.S. postwar global ascendancy in the register of nationalism and
manifest destiny by, for example, describing a providential purpose
for antiracist transformation in which “America, saving itself [from
its racial dilemma], becomes the Savior of the world.”14 Second, the
study declared racism to be, at base, a psychological and moral issue,
a problem of white attitude or prejudice. As the introduction stated,
“The Negro problem is a moral dilemma . . . a problem in the heart
of the American.”15 Thus racial liberalism consigned all other racialized domains and procedures—political, economic, ideological—to
obscurity as marginal or epiphenomenal. Third, An American Dilemma
described racism as a historical contradiction to rather than historically compatible with liberal freedoms, especially the American Creed,
a national social ethos for which “the main norms . . . are centered in
the belief in universal equality and rights to liberty.”16 It thus valorized
a set of altruistic Americanisms—abstract equality, individual rights,
and market liberties—as the substantive content of antiracism. Along
with the social reengineering of white attitudes, achieving racial justice
for An American Dilemma meant including African Americans in the
community of the American Creed.
Introduction ❮ 21
In An American Dilemma the changes between prebreak and postbreak racial liberalism can be tracked, and the emergence of new
schemas of racialized privilege and stigma that matured with postbreak racial liberalism can be identified. Here, privilege shifts from
white Southern liberals, who were to be responsible for correcting
white Southern attitudes in the prebreak period, to all white liberal
Americans, who in the postbreak period were to become moral heroes
by ridding themselves of racial prejudice and skewed beliefs. As antiracism was absorbed into U.S. nationalism, liberal white Americans
became felicitous national citizens and privileged racial subjects,
which preserved a form of white privilege beyond the permanent crisis in white supremacy, whereas other whites were racially stigmatized
as prejudiced or intolerant and scapegoated as the cause of continuing
structural inequality.
The concept of African American culture as an index of racial progress was also revised. Prebreak racial liberalism focused on proving
black excellence through black arts and culture, but postbreak racial
liberalism used African American success in all fields to prove that
America was making strides in freeing itself from the corrosive effects
of white supremacy. The indexical use of black success had an enforcing
function in that it incorporated African American personhood within
racial-liberal orders under conditions that demanded conformity with
U.S. nationalism and cultural normativity. Under Cold War conditions
that idealized American national culture and under which a cultural
model of race replaced a biological one, African American culture
formations were evaluated as healthy or pathological on the basis of
whether they matched normative American patterns. According to An
American Dilemma, the “Negro” was to be judged either “thoroughly
American in his whole outlook and perception of the world” or ridden
with pathologies caused by racism. As the study stated, “In practically
all its divergences, American Negro culture is not something independent of
the general American culture. It is a distorted development, or a pathological condition, of the general American culture [italics in original].”17 As
with liberal or prejudiced white racial formations, here racial-liberal
repertoires conferred privilege or stigma according to conformity
22 ❯ Introduction
with limited repertories of antiracist value. Racial-liberal racialization
made racism appear to be disappearing by esteeming presumptive
healthy African American formations, even as it devalued formations
that did not accord with U.S. national cultural normativity—from
pan-Africanists to gay and lesbian persons—and permitted these to
be disallowed or punished as pathological. Thus racial-liberal terms
of difference depoliticized and secured in advance the differential
value-making processes inherent to Cold War Americanism and stateoriented transnational capitalism.
Finally, whereas prebreak racial liberalism concentrated on changing white Southern attitudes, postbreak racial liberalism envisioned
a national project of social engineering. Its goal was to remake U.S.
culture as a whole so that white Americans would lose their habit of
prejudice and African Americans would be seen as culturally embodying the U.S. nation. Racial liberalism’s governing narrative of race reform was to institute a massive and multifaceted program of national
education designed to dispel prejudiced belief, replace it with accurate
knowledge about African American lives and conditions, and popularize new images, histories, and narratives attesting to the racially
inclusive nature of U.S. citizenship. The historical-material production of racial liberalism included networks of institutions dedicated to
national reform, including civic organizations, philanthropies, federal
government initiatives, culture industries, schooling and university
initiatives, and the newly minted field of race relations.
Although social scientists often presumed that U.S. national culture
was to be fixed by the interventions of sociology, racial liberals actually
put more faith in a literary form, the race novel, as a means to transform
white America’s attitudes. They defined literature as a tool for social engineering that was able to communicate the truth of black consciousness
and conditions to white Americans with more emotional power than
that of mere sociological case studies. Racial-liberal philanthropies, such
as the Julius Rosenwald and Guggenheim foundations, awarded authors
grants to write novels designed to improve racial understanding. Major
publishing houses, such as Doubleday and Harper Brothers, defined race
novel as a publishing category. They relied on liberal philanthropies to
Introduction ❮ 23
bring them authors and gave out awards for the best literature on race
relations. The national media publicized literary awards, turning race
novels into national best sellers. At the same time, the educative and diplomatic apparatuses of the federal government disseminated discourse
about race novels, recommending their integration into the nation’s public schools and publicizing them to European and decolonizing nations
as proof of racial progress. During the period of racial liberalism’s ascendancy, literary texts by Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Chester Himes,
Ralph Ellison, Willard Motley, Lillian Smith, Laura Hobson, Ann Petry,
John Griffith, and Harper Lee were processed through these networks
and produced as race novels.
Creating a circular feedback loop that mutually reinforced the
symbolic, cultural, and ideological value of both race novels and racial
liberalism, race novel discourse, in defining race novels as a privileged
mode for getting to know difference, forcefully ratified racial-liberal
regulative narratives and orders of difference. And none of this reinforcement depended on acts of reading or the rhetorical performances
of literary texts. Rather, the circulation of race novel discourse alone
functioned (1) to unify racial-liberal ideology; (2) to direct habits of
interpretation, thus controlling what counted as a race matter and constituting and validating information about race; and (3) to influence
subject formation by creating the conditions for people to self-identify with racial-liberal identity categories. It is important to note that
racial-liberal discourse never theorized what it was to read but rather
assumed the transformative power it attributed to race novels resided
within the texts themselves.
Race novels were presumed to concretize racial liberalism’s ideologemes, including the power of sympathy, liberal whites as heroic agents
of reform, and the moral hazards of racial prejudice. Though these
motifs could be found in texts designated as race novels (especially
those written by white authors, notably Lillian Smith’s Strange Fruit,
John Griffith’s Black Like Me, and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird),
they were mostly found in discourses about race novels circulating in
popular culture, the media, the social sciences, and the race relations
industries. In narrating the heroic white liberal as a privileged national
24 ❯ Introduction
and racial subject, racial-liberal discourse simultaneously recruited
whites for nationalist agendas, justified white privilege, and provided
a protagonist for narratives that made the case for U.S. global leadership. In addition, race novel discourse taught interpretative habits
and reading practices that could be applied beyond literature to the
social text itself. These restrained what was intended to be taken as
true about race (from racial conditions to African American identity)
to what could arouse white benevolence or sympathy, making attitude
a litmus test for what counted as racial knowledge. Racial-liberal reading practices, which conceived reading literature to be information
retrieval of the most intimate and immediate kind, made it possible
to portray racial-liberal terms of difference as the whole truth of the
matter. At the same time, race novel discourse encouraged whites to
internalize affective dispositions and to cultivate a race-liberal political identity. Thus, race novel discourse stabilized a field of social and
moral value that made it possible for white Americans to comprehend
the act of reading a novel as (and as a substitute for) an active politics
of social transformation.
Racial-liberal reformism evaded recognition of the collective responsibility of white Americans for material and institutional inequity by blaming racial prejudice on inadequate knowledge, flawed
reasoning, and the isolation of whites from blacks. Consistent with
the new will to know that racial liberalism implanted in U.S. national
culture, race novel discourse provided fitting objects of knowledge. Its
representations of African Americans identified the fitness of some to
culturally embody the nation and appeared to provide evidence for
new categories of racialized privilege and stigma. Under the aegis of
using literature as an advanced system for information retrieval, race
novel discourse performatively constituted certain representations
of blackness as facts. First, race novel discourse secured the enduring
trope of the damaged Black psyche, of African Americans as victims
psychically wounded by racism. The character of Bigger Thomas in
Richard Wright’s Native Son exemplified the truth of this trope for
racial liberals.18 Second, for racial liberals race novels testified to the
Americanness of African Americans and their underlying cultural
Introduction ❮ 25
sameness with white Americans. This was, for example, the message of
James Baldwin’s writing for the Julius Rosenwald Fund. Finally, racial
liberals praised the evidence of African American patriotism that race
novels supposedly provided. (In fact, representations of black patriotism were to be found mostly in race novels written by white authors,
such as Bucklin Moon’s Darker Brother.)
Race novel discourse figured African Americans as objects of
knowledge, not as readers, yet its implicit ideological address to African
American readers was a regulative one, providing normative models
of personhood as the representational terms of existence offered to
African Americans in exchange for incorporation into U.S. political
modernity. Along with these normative models, African Americans
were directed to internalize limits for acceptable antiracist politics that
are referred to as the Cold War civil rights compromise.
Thus racial liberalism gave the U.S. state the capacity to define new
rights, freedoms, and identities, along with new socially permissible
violences. It put all sanctioned antiracist discourses and initiatives
under the injunction to take U.S. ascendancy for granted and to remain
blind to global capitalism as a political or racial issue. In particular, the
content of the American Creed—equal opportunity, abstract equality, possessive individualism, and market liberties—came to define
the substantive meaning of antiracism, thereby naturalizing racialized
capitalism. As racial liberalism presented the United States as the universal model for a racially integrated nation, it also universalized U.S.style capitalism as an antiracist good. It made the market economy
nonpolitical (for race matters) by making African American entrance
into it the basis of antiracism. It provided a valorized ideology that
explained increasing class inequality within African American racial
formation, the rise of a black professional and managerial class, and
U.S. capital investments in postcolonial nations.
If racial liberalism is considered as a mode of normative power
that articulated together the biopolitical and the rational, its orders of
difference can be seen as having assigned legibility and illegibility to
domains ranging from the economy to personal identity. Its regulative
narratives, such as the American Creed, wove a web of interconnections
26 ❯ Introduction
between political economic normativity, cultural normativity, and
sex and gender normativity, so that black cultural assimilation and
heteronormativity reinforced U.S. Cold War positions and the latter
impelled the former. Thus the real victories that came from official,
state-recognized antiracism in Cold War America—the breaking of
Jim Crow, support for integration, civil rights acts—also stabilized
political limits, interpretative tendencies, and economic forces that
readjusted and inevitably extended U.S. and transnational capitalist
structures of racial domination.
Liberal Multiculturalism
By the mid-1960s racial liberalism’s hegemony broke apart and collapsed under the pressure of its own contradictions, opposition
from alternative antiracisms, and changing material conditions and
geopolitical circumstances. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act
of 1964, it became increasingly clear that the Cold War civil rights
platform, which stressed desegregation, symbolic equality, and the
goodwill of tolerant whites, was inadequate for addressing egregious
economic and social inequality, especially in urban centers increasingly impoverished by white flight. The radical impulses of the long
civil rights era, not beginning, ending, nor contained by racial liberalism, resurfaced strongly in race-based social movements that actively
rejected the cultural normativity, Americanism, and settlements on
liberal political terrains that both shaped and were determined by
Cold War racial-liberal orders. Although diverse and nonanalogous,
these movements—Black Power, black feminism, Chicano nationalism,
Asian American civil rights, American Indian sovereignty, queer, third
worldist, women of color, the New Left—sought psychic decolonization, nonexploitative ethico-economic orders, an internationalism
aligned with the third world, and new powers for new collectivities. In
addition, the metanarrative of the United States as the antiracist savior
of the free world could no longer successfully rationalize U.S. global
power in an era of lessening Cold War tensions and transnational capitalist development targetting the global South.
Introduction ❮ 27
Following the stagflation of the early 1970s and the dismantling of
Keynesian policy in favor of a free market economy and a state reoriented to stimulate capital growth (rather than to secure the full employment and welfare of citizens), new terms of social solidarity were needed to disguise the disunities of post-Keynesian downsizing at home,
capital flight abroad, and the growing class power of elites. At the same
time, racial liberalism’s black/white racializing schema and criteria for
privilege and stigma could not encompass a multiracial population
(including large numbers of immigrants from Latin America and Asia
after the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act) nor
provide a formal understanding of post-Keynesian crises and terms for
state-capital management. Circumstances in the late 1960s and 1970s
opened up how race could be politically mobilized beyond the limits
set by racial liberalism. By the early 1980s and into the 1990s, however,
liberal multiculturalism had reinstated such limits. In the same way
that racial liberalism became an official antiracism by incorporating
and defusing the more radical anticolonial antiracisms of the racial
break period, liberal multiculturalism incorporated and abstracted
the materialist antiracisms of the new race-based movements. Liberal
multiculturalism likewise deployed literary discourse as a cultural
technology to make antiracist knowledges productive for the next
phases of capitalism’s development.
Scholars of the period’s race-based social movements have remarked upon the high degree to which they fused cultural and political activism. James Smethhurst has argued, for example, that the
distinction between Black Power and Black Arts “is moot” because,
for the former, “artistic activity [was] made an absolute political priority and linked to the equally emphatic drive for the development
and exercise of black self-determination.”19 I contend that such fusion
proceeded from a materialist definition of culture and an antiracist materialism. For radical antiracisms, cultural and political activism, alike,
were seen to be the practice of liberation—of bringing a transformed
world into concrete being by performatively (re)constituting communal life: its institutional and social structures, everyday experiences,
and expressions of personhood. The point was to create art, culture,
28 ❯ Introduction
and politics that were functional, committed, collective making, and
symbolically and materially resituating. The focus on culture as a materializing process followed from a rejection of the cultural normativity
that racial liberalism imposed in the name of antiracism. It was in step
with global decolonization and the charge to make culture work for
psychic, political, and economic decolonization of both postcolonies
and internal colonies. It followed from the resources that race-based
movements found in their own communities of origin, including the
heterogeneous and nonanalogous cultural practices of internally diverse American Indian, Caribbean, African, African American, Asian,
Latino, Chicano, lesbian and gay, and immigrant, refugee, and diasporic communities. In addition to the still-existing forms of the old
Left—the pan-Africanists, the Socialists and Communists, the trade
unionists of color, the mother and grandmother foot soldiers of the
Southern civil rights movement, the earlier migrants to the United
States who came across borders or oceans or from reservations to the
cities—race-based social movements made their own bases of support in their own communities in grassroots activism, in schools and
universities, in neighborhood block associations, on reservations, in
youth groups, in community theater and arts organizations, in selfdefense leagues, in religious groups, in women’s clubs, in political action committees, in street gatherings, in writing workshops, in feminist
collectives, and in fraternal organizations.
While all the race-based social movements of the era contradicted
some of the regulative positions of the Cold War U.S. state, the contradictions were sharpest in the case of black lesbian feminism and
women-of-color feminism. As Roderick Ferguson has discussed,
revolutionary and cultural nationalisms intersected with liberal U.S.
state ideologies in their investment in heteropatriarchal discourses and
their call for the regulation of nonheteronormative formations. Black
lesbian and women-of-color feminism arose, however, out of an intersectional analysis of interlocking systems of oppression, including the
relations between gender and sex regulation and the exploitative forces
of global capitalism. In the words of the Combahee River Collective
Statement: “We are actively committed to struggling against racial,
Introduction ❮ 29
sexual, heterosexual and class oppression and see as our particular task
the development of an integrated analysis and practice based upon the
fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives.”20
Because of concern with how structural social and material processes subjectified women of color—that is, how aggregative and
exploitative procedures of race, class, gender, and sexual regulation
were experienced as the concrete realties of life—black lesbian and
women-of-color feminism were strongly committed to culture as a site
of material struggle. As Grace Hong has put it, women-of-color feminism “seized upon the imaginative function of literature and culture
for different ends [than did the nation-state], revealing and intervening into the dynamics of power that subtend the production of knowledge.”21 The seminal anthology that launched the most studied version
of women-of-color feminism, This Bridge Called My Back, was thus an
expression of women-of-color feminism as a political movement by
virtue of its having been an act of the writerly imagination conceived
as social practice.22 Beginning from the recognition of the dynamic
interrelation between the epistemological and the empirical, Moraga’s
statement about the anthology’s authors, that “the materialism in this
book lives in the flesh of these women,” described collective writing as
collectivity making in the vein of manifesting “something else to be.”23
This sense of the materiality of culture allowed an experiential analysis
of women’s lives to be the basis of a politics, even as women-of-color
feminism remained fundamentally anti-identitarian (disorganized notions of a stable identity) and understood coalitions of difference as at
once relational and contestatory.
The insurgencies that took place on college campus in the late 1960s
and 1970s can be viewed as profoundly materialist antiracist activism.
Demands for third-world colleges, black and ethnic studies departments, La Raza studies, Asian American studies, and Native American
studies were attempts to seize the authorizing power of massive racializing institutions and the material power to produce, validate, and
bind knowledge to multiracial, democratized power. Such demands
were made through protests, boycotts, and community street rallies
30 ❯ Introduction
and under the blows of police batons, first in California and then
throughout the country. The transformation of universities was seen
as key to liberation struggles as “students revolted against an education
designed to create in them a pliant workforce and demanded a thirdworld college attentive to their working-class, raced communities.”24
Seeking to radically democratize universities, students demanded
open admissions for nonwhite students and an education relevant
to the concerns of exploited communities. Demonstrating a savviness to the power relations subtending knowledge production, they
demanded autonomy for black and ethnic studies faculty and community review boards. Even with the defusal/refusal of the students’
most radical demands, the insurgency was unstoppable to the extent
that more than five hundred black and ethnic studies programs had
been founded on university campuses by the early 1970s.
Between the 1970s and the early 1990s, universities, especially
public universities, were extremely contestatory institutions. On the
one hand, through the 1970s and into the 1980s, universities were
still charged, at least rhetorically, with working toward the goals of
Keynesian times: to prepare the largest possible number of students
for participatory democracy and full employment. Ironically, the institutionalization of black and ethnic studies in the mid-1970s can be seen
as a radical, more inclusive vision of the Keynesian mission.25 Between
1970 and 1980, enrollment increased from 8.5 to 12 million and, by 1992,
stood at 14.2 million. The vast majority of such increases occurred at
public universities; for example, in 1986, with a total college population of 12.3 million, 77 percent of all students were enrolled in public
institutions.26 Black enrollment experienced its greatest expansion at
institutions other than historically black colleges and universities between 1960 and 1980, with enrollments nearly doubling.27
On the other hand, the economic downturn of 1973 to 1975 was
also the beginning of the massive transformation of U.S. universities
into one of the central institutions for recalibrating the state, capital,
and the citizenry for post-Keynesian times. Increasingly throughout
the 1980s, universities changed their human and knowledge outputs
by producing professional-managerial classes required for the new
Introduction ❮ 31
economy (free markets, multinational corporations, and development) and producing knowledge and research that were capitalizable
for globalizing industrial, financial, and information economies. No
longer an institutional base for middle-class power, universities were
incorporated into the stratification and assault on the middle and
lower classes as a college degree increasingly became the dividing line
between success and failure in a postindustrial economy.28 While universities prepared the members of marginalized groups that they had
deemed the most valuable for incorporation into multiracial managerial classes, they abandoned large majorities to the devastating consequences of deindustrialization and resegregation and the accelerating
control of the economic prerogatives of private capital over black and
brown lives. Although enrollment in public universities grew, there
was a whitening at the top of an increasingly status-stratified system,
while racial enrollment gaps increased and overall black enrollment
declined from 1980 onwards.29 Ironically, the rising popularity of diversity in university management and business administration proceeded
from the same consensus that accepted severe and permanent racialized economic inequality as unproblematic, seeing it to be the result
of fair competition.30
Although the alternative knowledges and the transformative material goals of radically antiracist social movements never gave up
their tenuous hold at universities (and today have developed critical
new forms and projects), knowledge about minoritized difference—
especially racial and cultural difference—was made to work for postKeynesian social and economic policies. To this end, U.S. universities
used their capacity to adapt and produce knowledges symptomatic of
and productive for the new circumstances of the 1980s and 1990s. In
fact, as Ferguson has argued, an essential function of the academy in
this period was to manage minoritized difference—to run difference
through its machinery of validation, certification, and legibility to generate forms that augmented, enhanced, and developed hegemony rather than disrupted it.31 For the purposes of this study, the many components of the management of racial difference at U.S. universities in the
1980s and 1990s—from socializing students as multicultural subjects,
32 ❯ Introduction
to commodifying racialized cultures, to setting the terms of social solidarity, to generating orders of difference that explained the differential valuation of some forms of humanity over others—revealed the
importance of U.S. universities for actively producing liberal multiculturalism as the second phase of postwar official antiracisms.
The counterinsurgency against the materialist cultural activism of
radical antiracist movements and the incorporation of racial difference
into the knowledge architecture that reconsolidated race-liberal hegemony happened simultaneously and began with the restrictive affirmation of Black and ethnic studies programs. In the case of Black studies,
as Noliwe Rooks has documented, the Ford Foundation played a leading role by providing generous support to programs “that viewed Black
Studies as a means to diversify a predominantly white curriculum and
institution and to promote integration” while “avoiding supporting”
programs committed to community activism or Black Power/black
nationalist approaches.32 The greater support for Black studies programs was concentrated on restructuring curricula for mostly white
students, which led to more knowledge produced to teach tolerance
and augment traditional disciplines and less knowledge produced
from below to create new horizons of social possibility.
English departments and discourses of literary multiculturalism
did, however, the lion’s share of the university’s work of activating minority difference for post-Keynesian times. Previously, racial liberalism had defined literature as a privileged tool for Americans to use
to describe, teach, learn about, and situate themselves with respect
to racial difference. The idea had been articulated mainly in popular
culture, but in the 1980s the idea of literature as a privileged tool for
getting to know difference definitively entered U.S. universities. There,
it was fused with a preexisting imperative for literary studies to socialize citizens by teaching them a national cultural tradition presumably
embodied in canonical American literature. This call was expanded
for transnational times into a charge for literary studies to inculcate
in large numbers of young people the appropriate sensibilities for a
multiracial, multicultural professional-managerial class.
The cultural processes of the canon wars of the 1980s and 1990s
Introduction ❮ 33
shaped U.S. literary studies into an effective technology for producing liberal multiculturalism as the second official, state-recognized
antiracism. Indeed, the productiveness of concepts of literature and
literary value for the racial projects of liberal multiculturalism, as well
as the importance of universities for conditioning large numbers of
young people into the dominant racial order of things, explains the
otherwise baffling amount of national attention given to the canon
wars. As Bethany Bryson noted in Making Multiculturalism: Boundaries
and Meaning in U.S. English Departments, “the Cultural Left and Cultural Right . . . shared an extraordinary premise: that every time an
English teacher put together a reading list, the future of the nation
hung in balance.”33 The nation on the whole seemed to agree. During
Reagan’s second term in office, Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American
Mind (1987) became a national best seller and a neoconservative manifesto; the national media reported incessantly on the controversy surrounding Stanford University’s attempt to replace its required Western
Culture program with the Culture, Ideas, and Values program (1988);
and a Newsweek cover story alerted the nation to the dangers of a new
form of brainwashing called “political correctness” being imposed on
college campuses (1990).
The canon wars were a political battle conducted in the register of
academe. They staked out positions that allowed neoconservative and
liberal-democratic politicians alike to bond with their constituencies.
Yet inside the academy, the main result of the canon wars was to enable
liberal multiculturalism to defeat critical multiculturalism. Debates
about literature misrepresented the new knowledges produced by
social movements, clearing the way for sanctioned knowledges about
racial difference that precipitated out of and were felicitous for postKeynesian state-capital relations to expand into extraliterary domains,
including other academic disciplines and university policies on admissions and hiring.
The canon wars have generally been narrated as a battle between irreconcilable antagonists. In one corner Great Books advocates defended excellence against mediocrity and national unity against cultural
relativism. In another corner those who advocated for diversifying
34 ❯ Introduction
curricula argued that our common culture was a multicultural one
with all constituencies deserving representation. Yet from another
angle both of these positions can be seen as competing visions within
pluralism, with canon defenders advocating for an assimilative pluralism and canon integrationists for a positive pluralism. Their common
pluralism was what most foreclosed the radical cultural materialism
of oppositional antiracist movements. Pluralism as the horizon for
thinking on race matters restricted permissible antiracism to forms
that assented to U.S. nationalism and normal politics and prioritized
individual and property rights over collective social goals. It reduced
culture to aesthetics and then overvalorized aesthetic culture by ascribing agencies to aesthetic culture all by itself, apart from social and
material forces. Thus liberal multiculturalism’s stress on representation
and cultural recognition screened off differential power, dematerialized conceptions of race, and marginalized antiracisms that addressed
material disparities in racial outcomes.
The canon wars were one kind of counterinsurgency against 1970s
social movements, but it must be remembered that the full complement included police violence, COINTELPRO repression, and the
figuring of grassroots communities as criminal, burdensome, and disposable. The legacies of these social movements are alive, however, and
universities remain contestatory spaces where conditions occasionally
allow for the flourishing of fields such as critical ethnic studies or projects like Norma Alarcon’s Third Woman Press. Yet the success of the
canon wars in shoring up liberal multiculturalism, aestheticizing race
issues, and thus deflating the materialist antiracisms is apparent from
the fact that during the 1980s “the word ‘multiculturalism’ became a
pseudonym for canon expansion.”34 Likewise, the fact that of the 92
percent of universities that made curricular changes to accommodate
multiculturalism during this period, the changes “were more likely
to happen in English than any other discipline” further affirms that
literary studies was the university’s chief producer and transmitter of
liberal-multicultural ideology.35
As a regime of official antiracism, liberal multiculturalism worked
as a mode of normative power in the 1980s and 1990s chiefly through
Introduction ❮ 35
nationwide projects of socialization and education based in the greatly expanded system of two- and four-year colleges. In particular, it
trained students destined to play the roles of professionals, managers,
and technocrats in government or corporate bureaucracies to internalize liberal-multicultural antiracism as a part of their sense of identity and social mission. Additionally, liberal-multicultural knowledges
articulated the biopolitical and rational together to a high degree to
explain the simultaneous upward (for a very few) and downward expansion (for most) of life chances in African American communities,
on American Indian reservations, in urban Indian country, in the traditional and new locations of Chicano/a and Latino/a life, and amid
diverse and increasingly class-stratified Asian American and Asian
immigrant populations. By providing the understanding that made
the erosion of a racially diverse middle class permissible (along with
neoconservative color blindness), liberal multiculturalism allowed
for both the post-Keynesian downsizing of minimally redistributive
government programs at home and the expansion of transnational
capitalism abroad.
Liberal multiculturalism provided weak terms of social solidarity,
enjoining Americans to affirm a positive cultural pluralism by recognizing that “we are the world.” This multicultural nationalism was a
development of the prior thesis that the United States was a nation of
immigrants, which had unified modern American whiteness a generation before. With the inclusion of people of color, the thesis could then
be reworked to describe the United States as an internalized model
of global diversity. Its logic justified applying the ethnic model of immigrant social mobility to people of color (dissimulating race as the
same thing as ethnicity in the post–civil rights era) and disguised U.S.
expansionism as merely a universal nation fulfilling its destiny. “We
are the world” also structured the new economy. U.S. multiculturalism
became the cultural model in which capitalist social relations were
arranged and exported, inserted, or infiltrated into other locations.
At home liberal-multicultural ideology persuaded Americans to accept capital flight abroad in the name of being antiracist and cosmopolitan. Abroad, it indicated to the countries of the global South that
36 ❯ Introduction
development was not a revival of civilizationist imperialism but a path
to a just, pluralistic world system where neutral free markets would
enrich culturally diverse nations.
Literary studies at U.S. universities socialized future members of the
professional-managerial class, whether white, of color, or international, into progressive constituencies for regressive public policies and a
grossly unequal system of global capital accumulation. That is, it taught
them to perceive themselves as antiracist and multicultural, which was
in line with the period’s corporate humanism, in a manner that allowed
the material conditions for a new apartheid between haves and have
nots to flourish. Students received pastoral care that integrated liberalmulticultural concepts into their sense of self-actualization and prepared
them to manage populations abandoned to the punitive effects of postKeynesian policies.
In identifying literary studies as a means of producing, disseminating, and implanting liberal-multicultural ideology, I refer to such things
as literary anthologies, diversity courses, and multicultural literature as
objects of discourse within the field of li...
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