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Race and the Academic Institution

August 28, 2005

Chow, Rey. Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies. Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1993.

August 28th 2005 Posted to Race and the Academic Institution, Race, Gender and Sexuality, Race and Globalization, The Pleasures of Teaching Race

Addressing topics as diverse and as reciprocally relevant as theory, pedagogy, feminism, literature, music, and the media, Writing Diaspora argues for a rigorous reappraisal of cultural studies. Chow is wary of the explosion of area studies and cultural studies in the Western Academy, noting that “cross-cultural” study, with its attention to difference, can in fact reinscribe colonial “othering” and risks remaining “trapped within a type of discourse that is geographically deterministic and hence culturally essentialist” (7). (Read the article)

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August 25, 2005

Donato, Rubén. The Other Struggle for Equal Schools: Mexican Americans During the Civil Rights Era. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1997.

August 25th 2005 Posted to Race, Literacy and Pedagogy, Race and the Academic Institution, Pedagogy and Mixed Race, Latina/o American, Court & Policy Issues

In this book Donato explains that while many scholars have focused on the African American struggle for equal education during the Civil Rights movement, few have focused on the Mexican American community during this period. Donato summarizes this “silent” history, using as his primary example Brownfield School District in northern California. Donato writes that in Brownfield, “The concern for respecting and preserving the cultural identity of Mexican Americans found itself at odds with the traditional values of the Brownfield school system and the larger white community…Despite the claim that Mexican children were being processed by a neutral school system, public schools across the Southwest were rife with ethnic, linguistic and class biases. If one of the prime values of the Brownfield schools was uniformity, then there was an inherent conflict between the organization of schools and the desires of the Mexican American community” (10). (Read the article)

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Rumberger, Russell W. and Gloria M. Rodríguez, “Chicano dropouts: an update of research and policy issues,” Chicano School Failure and Success. Ed. Richard R.Valencia. 2nd Ed. London: Routledge/Falmer, 2002, 114-146.

August 25th 2005 Posted to Race, Class and Pedagogy, Latina/o American, Court & Policy Issues

In Ch.4 of Valencia’s anthology, Rumberger and Rodríguez address the issue of Chicanos’ high dropout rate, citing the fact that “in 1999 the dropout rate for White, non-Latinos was 7.3 percent, compared to 12.6 percent for Black, non-Latinos and 28.6 percent for Latinos (U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Educational Statistics, 2001, Table 106)” (Rumberger and Rodríguez 114). Rumberger and Rodríguez examine the individual and institutional factors that contribute to this high dropout rate, identify the economic and social consequences of large numbers of Latino dropouts, and offer several programmatic and policy-based solutions to the dropout problem. (Read the article)

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August 18, 2005

Hennessy, Rosemary. Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse. New York: Routledge, 1993.

August 18th 2005 Posted to Race and the Academic Institution, Race, Gender and Sexuality, Race, Class and Pedagogy

Hennessy’s objective is to converse with and argue for a materialist feminism that is rooted in rigorous theoretical inquiry and that also addresses the material inequality necessitating feminist movements. She chooses the term “materialist feminism” instead of “Marxist feminism” because the latter ignores the sexual division of labor. Hennessy explains “materialism” to mean “material life in the form of human activity” (37), and she correspondingly expands her definition of “feminism” to include the ways this material life is played out along the “multiple axes of race, class, gender, and sexuality” (xv). Wary of the conservative strain she detects in some postmodern critique and multiculturalism in the academy, Hennessy argues for a Gramscian-informed, post-Althusserian “Global Analytic” and an understanding of discourse as an ideology that can be counterhegemonically mobilized for a feminist politics. (Read the article)

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Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, eds. Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1991.

August 18th 2005 Posted to Race and the Academic Institution, Race, Gender and Sexuality, Race and Globalization

A compilation edited by Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism is comprised of essays generated by the 1983 international academic conference on “Common Differences: Third World Women and Feminist Perspectives.” The primary issues addressed in the collection include the troubling representation of a monolithic “Third World Woman” by Western feminists, the tension between cultural specificity and political alliance across cultures, and the role of activism and “real” women’s experiences in academic discourse. Organized into four parts, “Power, Representation, and Feminist Critique,” “Public Policy, the State, and Ideologies of Gender,” “National Liberation and Sexual Politics,” and “Race, Identity, and Feminist Struggles,” the book includes essays from fifteen authors who differ in their opinions about but who each address feminism in terms of multiple oppressions and identities such as gender, sexuality, race, and class. It is only by acknowledging each individual’s or each individual culture’s specific multiple and often contradictory identities that feminism can theorize effectively and succeed politically. The book as a whole, then, levies a critique of a more traditional, gender-based Western feminism. At the level of the academy, a revision of feminism would demand greater attention to the multiplicity of voices; more of an experiential, activist approach to academic work; and, implicitly, a rethinking of teaching practices along these more inclusive and rigorously critiqued feminist lines. (Read the article)

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August 17, 2005

Valencia, Richard R., Martha Menchaca and Rubén Donato, “Segregation, desegregation, and integration of Chicano students: old and new realities”, Chicano School Failure and Success. Ed. Richard R. Valencia. 2nd Ed. London: Routledge/Falmer, 2002, 70-113.

August 17th 2005 Posted to Race and the Academic Institution, Pedagogy and Mixed Race, Latina/o American, Court & Policy Issues

In the third chapter of Valencia’s book, Valencia, Menchaca and Donato explore the issue of the segregation of Chicanos in public schools. They begin by providing an overview of the history of Chicano segregation, beginning with the post-1848 decades following the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. In addition, they paint a picture of Chicano school segregation today and offer several practical solutions. (Read the article)

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Valencia, Richard R. Chicano School Failure and Success. 2nd Ed. London: Routledge/Falmer, 2002.

August 17th 2005 Posted to Race and the Academic Institution, Pedagogy and Mixed Race, Race, Class and Pedagogy, Latina/o American

This book is a compilation of the most recent research being done on the historical, political and social factors contributing to what Valencia describes as “the persistently, pervasively, and disproportionately, low academic achievement” of Chicano students (4). In his introductory chapter Valencia provides an historical background of Mexican Americans as a conquered people who have always been subject to language suppression and cultural exclusion (7). He then outlines the main factors contributing to Chicano school failure today, which include: (Read the article)

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August 10, 2005

Darder, Antonia and Rodolfo D. Torres. After Race: Racism After Multiculturalism. New York: New York UP, 2004.

August 10th 2005 Posted to Race and the Academic Institution, Critical Race Theory and Pedagogy, Race and Globalization, Pedagogy and Mixed Race, Race, Class and Pedagogy, Latina/o American, The Academy

In this book, Darder and Torres critique the concept of “race” in contemporary political and academic rhetoric as a mask for the class oppression that underlies late capitalist American society. “The problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of “race”—an ideology that has served well to successfully obscure and disguise class interests behind the smokescreen of multiculturalism, diversity, difference, and more recently, whiteness,” write Darder and Torres (1). Darder and Torres focus their Marxist analysis on the United States education system, and specifically on the key issues of bilingual education, standardized testing, critical race theory and Latino studies departments. They argue that if any real changes are going to be made in educational policy, the concept of ‘race’ must be dismantled and the underlying class issues revealed and critiqued. (Read the article)

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August 8, 2005

Valenzuela, Angela. Subtractive Schooling: U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999.

August 08th 2005 Posted to Race and the Academic Institution, Pedagogy and Mixed Race, Latina/o American, The Academy

This groundbreaking book reports the findings of Valenzuela’s three year ethnographic study of immigrant Mexican and Mexican-American students at Juan Seguín High School (a pseudonym) in Houston, Texas. According to Valenzuela, the much-studied achievement gap between first generation Mexican immigrants (who tend to have a pro-school attitude and perform well) and second or third generation immigrants (who typically have an antischool attitude and perform poorly) can be traced directly back to the schools themselves. Valenzuela argues that, “For the majority of Seguín High School’s regular (non college-bound) track, schooling is a subtractive process. It divests these youth of important social and cultural resources, leaving them progressively vulnerable to academic failure” (3). (Read the article)

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August 3, 2005

D’Souza, Dinesh. Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus. New York: Free Press, 1991.

August 03rd 2005 Posted to Race and the Academic Institution, Race, Gender and Sexuality, The Academy

D’Souza writes that there is a “victim’s revolution” underway across U.S. college
campuses, a movement conducted “on behalf of minority victims” and seeking to “put an end to bigoted attitudes with permit perceived social injustice to continue, to rectify past and present inequities, and to advance the interests of the previously disenfranchised” (13). This revolution, D’Souza critically observes, is altering higher education admissions policies, curriculum, and student life. Analyzing episodes at Berkeley, Stanford, Howard, Michigan, Duke, and Harvard, D’Souza concludes that the “controversial claims of the new politics of race and sex” (20) are actually promoting “an education in closed-mindedness and intolerance, which is to say, illiberal education” in the name of liberal education (229). (Read the article)

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