i dug this photo up from the institute of the black world archives (at the schomburg center) in 2010. i was wynter’s research assistant at the time. i lived then, as now, in oakland, california, and three times a week made the long aggravating commute from the lower bottoms in west oakland to the wynter’s house in the oakland hills
i was also writing a chapter on wynter for my dissertation. hence me finding this photo, in the midst of an intense two weeks of through and cataloguing documents, including an unpublished 900+ page manuscript wynter had written.
i took this photo of wynter’s picture then. when i got back to oakland, i showed it to her, with no prompting.
her response was with a characteristic wynterian curiosity:
“is that me?”
the photo ultimately became the cover of the great katherine mckittricks volume on wynter. i’m proud to have made a tiny contribution to that wonderful work.
ok i think i’m coming back. @lazz convinced me i can be drafty and incomplete here. even on the “old” tumblr that i miss, i’d lost my capacity to be vulnerable, or to be messy out loud, by the end.
better to come back, moreover, knowing who in the old world was and was not an ultrazionist this whole time. better to come back with a sense of the fact that the tumblr return to the “second wave,” whatever that means, had pretty wide ranging implications.
some of which was maybe, inchoately, a quiet effort to smuggle the most conservative political reflexes of that moment into the present. some of which was to return to the radicalism that we desperately need in the now even as the material conditions militate against any of it.
i’m writing this from bed, unclothed, with a partner asleep next to me and a v-shaped sliver of light across my chest. i miss the old tumblr and i don’t know why and i don’t know if i want it back or if it’s another instance of me simply wanting more, which i always do. better to turn back, or forth, with that in mind.
[Image: Angela Y. Davis, then a UC San Diego graduate student in Philosophy and an Acting (probationary, non-tenure track) Assistant Professor of Philosophy at UCLA, lecturing at Royce Hall, UCLA, in 1969.]
I'm working on a book on black studies, women's studies, and how the university became neoliberal. At the heart of this project is thinking about how major shifts in the organization of university labor were articulated through the processes by which women's studies and black studies were institutionalized. I shared a couple quickly-written thoughts on these questions on Twitter for National Adjunct Walkout Day. I'm reposting them here nearly verbatim, with some minor edits for context and clarification. Rather than as final or conclusive statements, I'd offer these as points of departure for thinking about how we got to the here and now that is the university today.
Thesis 1: The tendency to reduce adjunctification to a simple or mechanical symptom of neoliberalism forgets all that's political in “political economy.” It forgets, in other words, that the very reason to speak of political economy is to acknowledge that economy is not destiny.
2. Adjunctification did not happen all at once but is the gradual, contested, and non-inevitable result of various experiments with university labor. In the late 1960s and 70s, university administration, the primary class engaged in this experimenting, became extremely well-organized within and between institutions. (By the mid-1970s, in fact, university admins began to see their work as scientific, starting conferences & journals to organize b/w institutions.)
3. Those forms of experimentation were racialized and gendered. Problem is, admins really didn't know what they were doing at the moment. They miscalculated the kinds of investment that'd be required by the late Keynsian use of universities to absorb surplus populations. Chief among these surplus populations were black and brown youth, who in the late 60s were disproportionately unemployed. In Living for the City, Donna Murch says that in Oakland, for example, black youth unemployment was above 25%. We can't understand the expansion of universities outside of the management of this phenomenon. This was important because 1960s capital was still interested in demonstrating geopolitically that capitalism did not inherently produce and reproduce racial inequalities. This, of course, is a geopolitical situation that we cannot take for granted over fifty years later.
4. University administrations expected that black & brown youth would arrive at college and just be happy to be there. Okay, no, not really. But they expected that the primary expense they'd have to deal with in admitting these new populations would be in remedial education. They had no expectation that admitting black and brown students would trouble the epistemological foundations of the university. Or the contents of what was considered valid knowledge. Or the dominant modes of organizing and practicing instruction in the university.
5. Faced with demands for them, university administrations sought to get black studies, women’s studies, and ethnic studies on the cheap. They’d already sorta found a way to do so b/c of the massive enrollments in the newly emergent Cal State and Community College systems. They also didn't have the faculty capacity to respond fruitfully to those enrollment numbers. They responded by instituting experimental colleges in which students taught their own classes.
6. Black studies in the 1960s starts where no one wanted it to end—in student self-organization. In student self-organization, that is, under conditions of exploited and casualized student labor. And if those are its conditions of possibility, no analysis of black studies can even flirt with the idea of completion without a deep engagement with the contradictions and contractions of academic labor and knowledge production in the university.
7. Yet in spite of intense and militant black labor organization in the 60s (best example being the League of Revolutionary Black Workers), many radical black academics at the forefront of the black studies movement subordinated labor questions to other strategic priorities with regard to how the field should be organized. We have lived with the unanticipatable consequences of the subordination of these questions to this day. Its extended consequences are recognizable in the fact that we cannot recognize what's specifically _political_ about adjunctification. Because we've retrospectively explained adjunctification as a simple symptom of an economic arrangement, rather than a political strategy to stem the tide of organized intellectual radicalization (and the costs related to it), we can't fully appreciate the extent to which adjunctification is in fact a strategy that aims to enact political repression, directly or indirectly.
8. Before 1968 there was no such thing as the adjunct professor as we know it today. (This is not to say there was no precarious labor in the university, or that that precarity was not of a specifically political nature. As Bob Blauner has shown, in the University of California, five times as many non-Academic Senate workers than tenured/tenure track professors were dismissed in the 1940s and 50s for refusing to sign the anti-communist oath in the University of California.)
9. The point is that adjunctification did not congeal into an explicit & repeatable political-administrative strategy until '68 and after, and that the initial way of making adjunctification acceptable among university professors at the time was to introduce it in the fields that the predominantly white and male professoriate saw as least essential within the university, and as the greatest threat to their own authority and professional self determination. We can't understand adjunctification without understanding how it emerged through forms of consensus perpetuated not only by university administration but by the credentialed majority of the university professoriate itself. I don't see a way of doing so outside of careful attention to the conditions that made black studies and women's studies possible.
10. In women's studies specifically there is a long history of grad student labor going unrecognized or treated as inconvenient/disposable. This dovetails with a longer history of the extraction of women's reproductive labor in the context of academic production. (Ever heard of a steno pool?) When one looks to the history of the generation and extraction of surplus value in the 20th century university, there is a disappeared history of women's work that manifests in and as academic knowledge production at every level of the process. When we teach This Bridge Called My Back, for example, do we remember to teach it as an outcome of non-tenure track academic labor? Moraga and Anzaldúa, after all, were working as lecturers in the Cal State system. Do we neglect to remember how much of the buildup to the trial of Angela Davis (i.e. her firing at UCLA and the UC Regents-coordinated neo-McCarthyist witchhunt) turned on whether and to what extent black Marxist feminism could live in the university? When Davis was hired as a probationary (proto-adjunct) professor at UCLA, these were the questions being worked out. We rarely acknowledge them today, to our detriment.
From Korean American Coalition to End Domestic Abuse:
In July 2014, Nan-Hui Jo, a single Korean mother and survivor of domestic violence, was separated from her six year old daughter, Vitz Da, and arrested on claims of child abduction. In 2009, Nan-Hui fled to Korea with Vitz Da to escape physical and emotional abuse by her then-partner and father of the child, Jesse Charlton, a combat veteran of the Iraq War with PTSD and anger issues. Using a common manipulation tactic to control a partner’s attempts to regain independence, Charlton retaliated by reporting Nan-Hui for child abduction. Last July, when Nan-Hui arrived with her daughter to Hawaii, she was handcuffed, arrested, and immediately separated from her daughter. Nan-Hui has not seen her daughter in over seven months.
Charlton has publicly testified about his repeated violence against Nan-Hui, confirming that, on one occasion, he “grabbed her by the throat and threw her against the wall.” Charlton has also admitted that, on a separate occasion, he “broke his hand hitting the wall and punched the car’s steering wheel.” When Nan-Hui fled and attempted to rebuild her life, Charlton “sent emails saying he was ‘considering spending thousands of dollars on a scary bounty hunter.’” These incidents of violence are only the public ones against Nan-Hui. Like many survivors of domestic violence, Nan-Hui was concerned that if he had hurt her, that he would hurt the child. According to a study funded by the U.S. Department of Justice, 30 to 60% of perpetrators of intimate partner violence also abuse children in the household. As advocates for survivors of domestic violence, we know that domestic violence thrives behind closed doors, away from the eyes and ears of the public.
yes, #blacklivesmatter. but sometimes when i hear folks say this, my gut reaction is to think "fuck you for even giving air to the notion that one might doubt it." that black lives matter should be the kind of fact that needs no saying.
it's the world arrangement that burdens us with the task of saying it at all that is the problem. to many this is obvious, yes, but i think we need to take seriously the possibility that the compulsion to affirm it implicates us in the continued production of a lethal absurdity. yes, #blacklivesmatter. it must be said, but i'm troubled at the notion that there is something of comfort or relief to be found in the saying.
the point here is not, or at least not only, to offer a resounding "yes" to the question of whether or not black lives matter. the point is to render obsolete and impossible the world-making project that makes the value of black life—in and for itself and with others—a question at all.
Class Prep: Trying to map—in a vulgar but systemic way—the biopolitical structure and gendered techniques of Latin-Christian Europe's (post-Doctrine of Discovery) approach to enslavement and settler colonialism in Africa and the Americas. Emphasis here is on the ways in which the mission of saving souls and the mission of accumulating wealth (in the form of lands and of bodies-as-commodities) operated as two sides of the same coin as the mode of producing wealth converged with the mode of producing, and reproducing, Christianity as an imperial project.
(so, wow. i haven't been on much recently--still trying to figure out how to fake the prof thing until i make it. or don't. but thanks to everyone who's been reading this thing for a while. more to come soon.)
(just to be clear: no, i'm not going to actually write that on a student's paper. this is not because i consider myself to be above a pedagogy of shaming in approaching masculinist habits of mind. it's because it'd be far too individualized and punitive an approach toward intervening in a ideology that this student is in no way alone in holding. what i likely will do, however, is read some revised version of it to the class in which i'll stress that it's this privatized labor that we need to account for when we're thinking about "how labor power is produced and reproduced when it is daily consumed." but i'm glad that my rantypants tendencies are appreciated. by the way, hi, tumblr. it's been too long.)
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