History Without Time: Thinking Race and Blackness after Civil Rights and in the Long Downturn
Open Access“History without Time: Thinking Blackness and Race after Civil Rights and in the Long Downturn,” argues that transformations in the humanistic study of race and racism since the 1980s are responses to the political impasses generated by the post-civil rights era and decades of economic stagnation. In the 1980s-1990s, scholarly debate in literary and ethnic studies gravitated around the contention that race and racism varied across space and time – a position known as “racial anti-essentialism.” In the post-2008 period, however, scholars, especially in Black studies, have advanced the endurance of race and racism – a position I term “racial ontology.” “History without Time” argues that the anti-essentialist and ontological approaches to race and racism respond not only to the ideological disciplining and institutional repression of 1960s antiracisms, but also to higher education’s transition to a debt-driven model. It further argues that this intellectual shift is haunted by broader conditions of indebtedness and precarity that increasingly define capitalism – what Marxist scholars call the “long downturn.” In contextualizing contemporary academic discourses of race and racism, I closely read seminal texts by scholars including Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Gloria Anzaldua, Hortense Spillers, and Anne Anlin Cheng to draw out traces of historical conflict sequestered in form and content, style and mood. I also draw on the historical and theoretical insights of critical race theory, critical ethnic studies, and critical university studies. Why, in our present, does scholarly inquiry gravitate towards the intransigence of racial domination and racial being? “History without Time” answers that question by locating these inquiries within entangled histories of antiracist contention, educational restructuring, and economic crisis. In the process, it shows that without engaging these historical conditions, the fields of American, Black, and Ethnic Studies – currently embattled over how best to theorize race and racism – will fail to reckon not only with the present limitations of anti-essentialism, but with the dimensions of our present that the ontological turn makes available for thought.
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