The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (Difference Incorporated) - Softcover

Ferguson, Roderick A.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0816672792 ISBN 13: 9780816672790

Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2012

Synopsis

In the 1960s and 1970s, minority and women students at colleges and universities across the United States organized protest movements to end racial and gender inequality on campus. African American, Chicano, Asia American, American Indian, women, and queer activists demanded the creation of departments that reflected their histories and experiences, resulting in the formation of interdisciplinary studies programs that hoped to transform both the university and the wider society beyond the campus.

In The Reorder of Things, however, Roderick A. Ferguson traces and assesses the ways in which the rise of interdisciplines—departments of race, gender, and ethnicity; fields such as queer studies—were not simply a challenge to contemporary power as manifest in academia, the state, and global capitalism but were, rather, constitutive of it. Ferguson delineates precisely how minority culture and difference as affirmed by legacies of the student movements were appropriated and institutionalized by established networks of power.

Critically examining liberationist social movements and the cultural products that have been informed by them, including works by Adrian Piper, Toni Cade Bambara, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Zadie Smith, The Reorder of Things argues for the need to recognize the vulnerabilities of cultural studies to co-option by state power and to develop modes of debate and analysis that may be in the institution but are, unequivocally, not of it.

About this title

About the Author:

Roderick A. Ferguson is professor of race and critical theory at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minnesota, 2003) and the coeditor of Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization.

Review:

""The Reorder of Things" marks a bold and necessary intervention into our understandings of how (neoliberal) hegemony works at this moment--not simply to coopt, but to contain the very difference it makes into abstraction. This is a moment of fire when we are being called upon to kindle a different kind of radical collectivity. Roderick A. Ferguson is the ancient blacksmith forging a new alchemy, which we, too, can hammer out--but only if we dare." --M. Jacqui Alexander, author of "Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory and the Sacred"
"Especially now, when the rhetoric of crisis is the norm in discussions of the present and the future of the university, "The Reorder of Things "is urgently needed. Its persistent attention to the genealogies of minority difference--of racial formation, class divisions, and gender and sex systems--definitively establishes the academy as both a flashpoint for the crystallization of what we commonly understand to be sociopolitical issues and a major part of the machinery of history. Ferguson incisively, elegantly shows us how to think differently--how to think in and through difference--and in the process, changes the horizons of knowledge itself." --Kandice Chuh, CUNY/The Graduate Center

About this edition

• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0816672792
• ISBN 13: 9780816672790
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 280