On the 2nd of January 2023, members of the parliamentary group of the German far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) raised 14 questions to the Federal Government concerning the “evaluation of gender studies”. Their questions concern the impact that gender studies have on “the design of laws, national action plans and equality initiatives of the Federal Government”[1]. This hasn’t been covered in German - nor international - news. It has become the norm. Gender studies aren’t the only research field that have been under the radar of the far-right, be it in Germany, in Europe or in the United States. In France, social sciences or “humanities” have been accused of being “misguided forms of ideology that do not respect the basic principles of the research profession”[2]. Numerous disciplines and their associated researchers have been labeled as “islamo-gauchistes” (islamo-leftists), “wokistes” (wokists), “séparatistes” (separatists). Not only by the far-right, but also by Macron’s government. In the United-States right-wing voices have coined the term “snow-flakes” to describe young people on university campuses that are supposedly “over-sensitive, easily offended or ‘triggered’ and unable to engage with contentious ideas and debates”[3]. If we read between the lines, this moral panic that has emerged in numerous countries and contexts translates a deep fear. The fear of universities becoming spaces of (legitimized) critic towards the status quo that, of course, must remained uncritiqued in order to maintain the power-dynamics it feeds off of (and further creates). As Yasser Louati puts it beautifully: “The controversy around Islamo-leftism and the subsequent witch hunt express another not so admissible opinion: that universities are there to legitimize the status quo, not to question it. To reinforce white supremacy, not to abolish it. To welcome people of color only if they stay in their place, not to speak up. Critical thinking is allowed only when it reinforces established social norms.”[4]
But universities welcome students as diverse as the population of France, Germany and other countries who “subsequently bring with them different points of view on history, sociology, and political science because of their different experiences.”[5] Yet those experiences, rather than being viewed as assets, as a way to broaden our spectrum of understanding of the world and the numerous ways it can be read and experienced, are seen as threats. In a white academic world still hanging on to the idea of “axiological neutrality”[6], scholars with diverse racial and/or social backgrounds are constantly scrutinized - their professionalism and their objectivity called into question.
Valérie-Ann Edmond Mariette, a Black scholar now working on her doctor thesis in history in the Antilles denounces how, when she studied in France at the prestigious EHESS, she was constantly asked to justify her research topic choice. Way more than her white comrades were. She blames the field of history and its obsession with a supposedly required “distance” between the researchers and their research topic[7]. As a Black woman, her “proximity” to her topic – an investigation of the role attributed to music and danse during slavery – was deemed problematic. Although I am a big advocate in favor of positionality, in all disciplines and for all scholars, I despise how positionality is forced upon non-white scholars. While so many white scholars are never called upon reflecting on their own position and biases, non-white scholars are constantly brought back to it. White biases aren’t assumed to disrupt nor threaten the oh-so-dearly protected notion of “universalism”. A notion that Mame-Fatou Niang and Julie Suaudeau invite us to reclaim rather than dismiss. But they invite us to think of a new kind of universalism. They imagine a “pluriversalism”, a dynamic, fluid, and malleable universalism: “never completed, always to be clarified and redesigned”[8]. They are aware that this term has been coopted and more often rimes with social control, domination, and eurocentrism than it does with diversity, inclusion and acknowledgment of diverse experiences. The argument of speaking “in defense of a threatened universalism” is used to discredit researchers raising issues of gender, class, race, disability or any other oppression. They are accused of “dividing”, of focusing on identities and creating differences rather than highlighting universally shared traits and struggles. They are turned into the “true” racist, the sexist, the classist, the ableist. As Sarah Ahmed puts it: “Given that racism recedes from social consciousness, it appears as if the ones who "bring it up" are bringing it into existence. (…) Those who talk about racism are thus heard as creating rather than describing a problem.”[9] Furthermore, when it comes to racial issue, critical race theorists or researchers working with an intersectional lens become the true racists because they focus on race in a supposedly post-racial and color-blind society. Alana Lentin uses to term “frozen racism” to describe the way by which, in far-right rhetoric, “real racism” is fixated “solely in historical events” which make “the continuities between racisms past and present (…) undecideable”[10]. Countering these profoundly problematic narratives is crucial. Not only by showing how little we are taught about colonization and the “racism of the past” but also by highlighting the continuum of that violence and the erasure in our contemporary world. In the German context for example, Natasha A. Kelly underlines the importance of introducing and institutionalizing Black German History and Black Studies not only for the “historical references” highly needed in a country where “Black German history is not acknowledged” but also for the development of “present and future ideas”[11]. A perspective shared by Saidiya Hartmann who writes: “As I understand it, a history of the present strives to illuminate the intimacy of our experience with the lives of the dead, to write our now as it is interrupted by this past, and to imagine a free state, not as the time before captivity or slavery, but rather as the anticipated future of this writing.”[12] Saidiya Hartmann rewrites the past in the hope of creating a better present and future. She shatters the narratives and the status quo and underlines how racism is far from frozen in the past.
Furthermore, Saidiya Hartmanns tool of “critical fabulation” invites us to welcome creative writing into academic research. Her methodology disturbs what is expected of a historian. She works with archives but also invites fiction into her work. She breaks down disciplinary barriers and she isn’t the only Black scholar who does so. As Bianca C. Williams writes, so do many Black feminist anthropologists for example: “It is not incidental that these calls for more creative, community-focused, and liberatory anthropologies are often pushed forward by Black feminist anthropologists (and their allies).”[13] Here again, disruption. How can one have a community-focused approach inside an institution where students are trained “to be effective within capitalist structures, the market and the workplace”[14]? In an educational system that pushes towards competition, rather than collaboration. How do we build and represent community when other students and researchers are our “enemies” in the battle towards obtaining scholarships and/or promotions? Here I ask myself, is the “wokism” feared by the far-right even possible inside an institution that doesn’t invite creativity but feeds off conformity, regardless of the discipline? On that note, Bianca C. Williams acknowledges that these creative methodologies used by Black women anthropologists, while they have generated “theoretical, pedagogical, and methodological innovations”[15] have also contributed to their “further marginalization” and a lack of integration of their work into the canon. These choices to disrupt the status quo of knowledge production – “a white-male-controlled knowledge validation process”[16] - do not come without a price. The price of erasure, of invisible work, of not being taken seriously. But does that mean that any and all creativity should be left aside? That non-white scholars should just conform to white-centric and Eurocentric ways of producing knowledge and that white scholars shouldn’t question their understanding of knowledge production? Or does it mean that this knowledge must be produced solely outside of academia?
Over the last decades, we have seen disciplines that emerged from activist struggles and fights be introduced into universities: gender studies, anti-/de-/post-colonial studies, Black studies, disability studies, animal studies, etc. What does it mean for questions that used to be dealt with outside of university to now enter institutions? Does that unavoidably mean that they lose their political power? In the 2000s, as she was teaching what could be referred to as gender-studies in South Africa, Mary Hames’s opinion on that matter seemed rather categorical: “The 'disciplining' of women's and gender studies as programs formally set up as intellectual orthodoxy challenged the transgressive nature of feminist activist thought, and this kind of mainstreaming into the academic project slowly killed liberatory practices and activism.”[17] An opinion that Hortense Spillers seems to partially share, as she says: “In other words, there are women in this country today who legitimately wonder, what happened to their movement? But it went to the university. To the disciplines.”[18] What happens when those issues enter white and patriarchal institutions? What is lost? Would Audre Lorde declare that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”[19]? Should we agree with far-right activists and advocate for the prohibition of those fields inside academic institutions, not because we think that it “politicizes” universities but on the contrary because we fear it will depoliticize issues that inherently are or should be? I like to think that there is another way around this and so does Fania Noel. Fania Noel self-describes as an “Haitian-born, French Afrofeminist organizer, thinker, and writer”[20] and she is also a scholar at The New School for Social Research in New York. She reclaims the term “guerilla intellectual” coined by Guyanese politician and scholar Walter A. Rodney in 1970s. Rodney believed that access to higher education was crucial to the liberation of black people and could become “a means to black empowerment” but only if knowledge was “used to advance the cause of liberation.”[21] He therefore distinguished between the “guerilla intellectual” and the “armchair philosopher”, convinced that “mere academic debates and theorizing were ineffective against so formidable a force as neo-colonialism.”[22] To him, the role of the guerilla intellectual was to use “his privileged intellectual resources for reevaluating and redefining the world from a black perspective”[23] but most importantly, it was always about the intellectual creating “a linkage between the theoretical underpinnings of his convictions and the practical realities of the experiences of the masses”[24]. He advocated for academia to not only stand in solidarity with revolutions and social change, but to serve as a consciousness raising tool against imperialism, racism and other systemic power structures.
Fania Noel calls upon Black and other marginalized scholars to themselves become guerilla intellectuals inside white institutions. She gives concrete examples of how she herself lives out this guerilla in her work, by for example refusing to obey citation politics[25] and actively fighting against the “carceralization of knowledge”[26] by rendering this knowledge accessible to those outside university. Both Noel and Rodney engage in activism outside university and embody a posture that merges theory and praxis. They view themselves as agents of a revolution that goes far beyond the walls of the university but also needs soldiers inside it. As Maisha Auma puts it, it is crucial that non-white scholars access academic positions to “dislodge institutional whiteness”[27]. In order to do so, scholars should always think of theory and practice as interconnected. Hakima Abbas says they should “inform one another”, since “we can’t make revolution without the two”[28]. As Fania Noel says, it’s about entering those institutions that are by essence conservative, Eurocentric and white-centric but as guerilla intellectuals who ask themselves: “What can I expropriate from these mainstream institutions, for my own people?”[29]
Of course, this question holds a very different meaning for a Black feminist scholar than it does for me, as a white scholar whose people do not need further platforms. “My people” are represented in the institutions, “my people’s” visions, concepts, languages, ideas are being heard, read, cited. But as a white cis queer woman, I have learned so much from the voices of those that were made inaccessible and inaudible to me. Those voices that I had to go look for and that taught me more about myself than the voice of “my people” (mostly cis white men) had ever done. To conclude, I understand the far-right’s panic around universities becoming “woke spaces full of snowflakes”. They have everything to lose. Because the more voices get access to knowledge production, the more concepts will be coined to express and make sense of the “pluriversality” with which we experience life, the less gate-kept will our imagination - and the world will allow it to create - become. And I truly believe that our imagination is the basis of revolution.
[1] Deutscher Bundestag, Parlamentsnachrichten, “AfD fragt nach Evaluation der Gender Studies” URL: https://www.bundestag.de/presse/hib/kurzmeldungen-928146
[2] My translation : « remises en cause les sciences sociales en tant que sciences, en ce qu’elles seraient des formes dévoyées d’idéologies ne respectant pas les principes élémentaires du métier de chercheur et de chercheuse », in
Claude Gautier, Michelle Zancarini-Fournel, « Questions brûlantes de notre temps », in De la défense des savoirs critiques. Quand le pouvoir s'en prend à l'autonomie de la recherche, Claude Gautier, Michelle Zancarini-Fournel (Ed), Paris, La Découverte, « Petits cahiers libres », 2022, URL : https://www.cairn.info/de-la-defense-des-savoirs-critiques--9782348073069-page-187.htm (p.187)
[3] Aurelien Mondon, Aaron Winter, “Liberal Racism”, In Reactionary Democracy. How racism and the populist far right became mainstream, Verso, London, 2020, p.77.
[4] Yasser Louati, « What Does Islamo-Gauchisme Mean for the Future of France and Democracy? », Berkley Forum, 14 May 2021, URL: https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/responses/what-does-islamo-gauchisme-mean-for-the-future-of-france-and-democracy
[5] Ibid.
[6] Referring to the concept coined by German sociologist and economist Max Weber “werturteilsfreie Wissenschaft”
[7] Conference on the 13 January 2023 entitled – « L'université peut-elle être un espace de luttes politiques? » (Can university be a space for political battles ?)
[8] Mame-Fatou Niang, Julien Suaudeau, Universalisme, Collection Le Mot est Faible, Anamosa, 2022.
[9] Sara Ahmed, „Feminist Killjoys (And other willful subjects)”, The Scholar and Feminist online, Issue 8.3, 2010, http://sfonline.barnard.edu/polyphonic/print_ahmed.htm.
[10]Alana Lentin, and Gavan Titley, The Crises of Multiculturalism: Racism in a Neoliberal Age, London; New York: Zed Books, 2011, p.49.
[11] Lukas Door, „Natasha A.Kelly über Rassismus – ‚Uns vereint das Deutschsein‘“, Taz, 18.05.2021, URL: https://taz.de/Natasha-A-Kelly-ueber-Rassismus/!5767569/.
[12] Saidiya Hartmann, “Venus in Two Acts”, Small Axe, Vol. 12, n°2, p. 1-14, 2008, URL: https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/241115, p.4.
[13] Bianca C. Williams, “Black Feminist Citation Praxis and disciplinary belonging”, Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 37, Issue n°2, pp. 199–205, 2022, URL: https://journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca/article/view/5368/746.
[14] Mary Hames, “Teaching Black, Teaching Gender, Teaching Feminism”, in LEWIS D. and BADEROON G. (eds), Surfacing: On Being Black and Feminist in South Africa, Johannesburg, Wits University Press, 2021, p.64.
[15] Williams, Bianca C., op.cit, p. 203.
[16] Patricia Hill. Collins, “The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought.”, Signs, 14 (4), pp. 745-73, 1989.
[17] Ibid, p. 64
[18] Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartmann, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Shelly Eversley, Jennifer L. Morgan, “‘Whatcha Gonna Do?’: Revisiting ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book’: A Conversation with Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Shelly Eversley, & Jennifer L. Morgan.”, Women’s Studies Quarterly 35, N°1/2, p.299-309, 2007, URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27649677.
[19]Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.”, in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Ed. Berkeley, 1984, pp. 110- 114, 2007.
[20] Cf her website: https://vudelabas.com/afrofeminist-thinker-writer/
[21] Tunde Adeleke, “Guerilla Intellectualism: Walter A. Rodney and the Weapon of Knowledge in the Struggle for Black Liberation.” Journal of Thought, Vol. 35, n°1, 2000, URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/42589603, (p.44).
[22] Ibid, p.49.
[23] Ibid, p.45.
[24] Ibid, p.41.
[25] By refusing to cite racists or alleged sexual assault perpetrators in her academic work for example.
[26] Conference on the 13 January 2023 entitled - L'université peut-elle être un espace de luttes politiques? (Can university be a space for political battles?)
[27] Vanessa Eileen Thompson, Denise Bergold-Caldwell, Christine Löw (Ed.), “Black Feminisms: Entangled geopolitical, historical and contextual backgrounds in conversation – Interview with Hakima Abbas, Maisha Auma, Noémie Michel and Margo Okazawa-Rey”, Femina politica, Vol n°2, 2021, URL: https://doi.org/10.3224/feminapolitica.v30i2.10, (p.125)
[28] Ibid, p.125.
[29] Cf Hakima Abbas, Ibid, p. 130.