Walter Benn Michaels' The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (2006)
It seems that many left progressives seem to be stuck on the concept of identity politics as it has been complicated by diversity initiatives or, worse, as they've come to understand the concept of identity politics from their armchairs. These narratives usually involve a “controversial” book with vision and myopic people of color who demand inclusion through guilt and liberal sympathy but leave the status quo and inequality largely untouched, and intellectually unexamined.
Within the expressed constraints of this academic subgenre, the protagonist (usually an English professor) is endowed with a spell-breaking and “visionary” acumen that enables him (the protagonist is usually male) to blame diversity, identity politics and political correctness for “true” inequality and the ensuing emergence of an extremely popular and literal conservatism that ultimately separates us all. Astoundingly, these modern day Delphic oracles pretend to be unaware of the ammunition they are providing to conservatives of all colors (as might be gleaned from the current banter that passes for political critique in the related video below.)
Most often, the expressed truth-bearing qualities of such exercises neglect to consider, much less ask, “people of color,” especially those whose lived and theoretical sophistication comes from direct community engagement, how the practice of "equality of opportunity" is experienced on various fronts. The self-proclaimed Delphic oracles are like Dostoyevskian leftists: they love humanity abstractly but presume to know the other better than she knows herself. In so doing, they avoid a series of ethical questions that would otherwise move them to consider the conditions under which the subaltern can speak and even talk back.
And so I propose a new subgenre of the review that refuses easy identifications with authors who claim to be saving democracy or liberating the working classes from the people of color who implicitly don’t know any better and who are coddled by the spineless sympathizers who should know better; the ones who, through their largesse, purportedly allow it all to happen.
(Also see: The Twilight of Affirmative Action or the Trappings of the WSJ's Rhetorical Storehouse of Editorials?)
And now, as promised, to the banter that attempts to pass for political critique...
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An Interactive Blog to Accompany the Book
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Book Description
The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural Memory (NYU Press, 2007) tells the story of the United States Latino body politic and its relation to the state: how the state configures Latino subjects and how Latino subjects have in turn altered the state. This interactive blog continues some of the discussions initiated in the book and, in the process, expands the book’s obsessions by further interrogating national conceptions of Latina and Latino forms of personhood and how these have been written on the Latino body. (The book was published by NYU Press' Sexual Cultures Series.) Irreverent, polemical, visually provocative, and hopefully fun to peruse, the interactive blog is meant to persuade and influence conversations on and about the Latino body politic. Send related images, videos, art and text to me at lazlima@gmail.com. You can get the book directly from NYU Press and Amazon.
Book Blurbs
"Through a bricolage of carefully crafted textual readings, Lima has produced a text that traces the relationship between corporeality and citizenship by marking the process by which the Latino body has become historical. Situated in moments of national and bodily crisis, his archive is decidedly precise and imaginatively expansive, metaphorically rich and politically dynamic. Drawing on texts central to third world feminism, queer studies, and Latin and Latino American literatures, this work is as central to rethinking the American literary canon as it is to an invigorating remapping of Latino Studies."
—Juana María Rodríguez, University of California, Berkeley, author of Queer Latinidad
—Juana María Rodríguez, University of California, Berkeley, author of Queer Latinidad
"Lima's Latino Body promises to productively disrupt the business-as-usual of critical and scholarly practice in the still-emerging field of U.S. Latino studies; it will contribute directly to the next stage in the long process of what it itself terms Latino identity's 'becoming historical' in North American cultural, political, and intellectual contexts. For this reason alone, The Latino Body could not be more welcome, or more timely."
—Ricardo L. Ortíz, Georgetown University, author of Cultural Erotics in Cuban America
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