University of California, Berkeley

Post-Doc, African American Studies

University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellow

Thesis Title: Disciplinary Matters: Black Studies and the Politics of Institionalization

About

Disciplinary Matters investigates the institutional and ideological formation of black studies in the United States.  Drawing from recent scholarship that has sought to define the origins of black studies in the U.S. university system, this dissertation attempts not to settle but to open up different ways of asking the questions with which it is preoccupied—what is black studies?  What does it mean to ask that question from a contemporary perspective?  Toward this end, my object of investigation is not only black studies itself, but also the kinds of thinking, the material resources, and the structures of power that have made the field possible.

Using a methodology derived from Marxist theorizations of ideology, feminist analyses of power, and critical analyses generated inside black studies itself, I read moments of black studies’ institutionalization as dynamic political events.  I reconstruct such events, which include the formation of The Journal of Negro History (Chapter One), the establishment of the Institute of the Black World (Chapter Two), and the emergence of Black Women’s Studies (Chapter Three)—from an archive that includes periodicals, foundation archives, anthologies, and canonical texts in black studies.

Combined, the method and the archive allow for an approach that makes visible social relations that are often masked in analyses of institutionalization.  Through critiques of the self-inauguration of the black male elite in the institutionalization of Negro History (in Chapter One), the epistemological consequences of black studies’ relation to philanthropy (in Chapter Two), and the normalization of heteropatriarchal ideology in Chapter Three, Disciplinary Matters provides an account of black studies where moments of profound, even radical intellectual possibilities blur with moments of suppression, exclusion, and ideological closure.  Through this blurring, this dissertation’s attempt to unsettle the question of what black studies is serves also as a way of posing the question of what black studies might have been, and what it still might be.