The Imperial University

The student protests of 2015 have brought renewed urgency to the emergent field of critical university studies (cus). While many cus texts focus on the particular challenges of the post–September 11, 2001, neoliberalizing university, the essays in The Imperial University historicize and theorize the field with particular attention to how historical logics of racism, warfare, and nationalism have constituted the American academy. Scholars from diverse fields including sociology, literature, ethnic studies, and gender and sexuality studies bring historical, literary, and (auto)ethnographic methodologies to bear on the imperial university: the editors' term that foregrounds the university's functions in managing domestic and foreign populations for the American state. The essays are divided into four sections: “Imperial Cartographies” examining knowledge production about empire's “others”; “Academic Containment,” considering the imbrication of academic freedom and the containment of anti-imperialist dissent; “Manifest Knowledges,” focusing on the liberatory potentials and epistemic limits of academic knowledge production; and “Heresies and Freedom,” examining the limits of academic freedom as a privileged object of struggle for academics. Several contributors, including Laura Pulido and Steven Salaita, examine the disciplinary nature of tenure-track appointments, drawing attention to unspoken rules that reward scholars who produce knowledge about race, gender, and nationalism without materially threatening the imperial structures that maintain the American academy. Contributors such as Ana Clarissa Rojas Durazo and the Collective of Antiracist-Feminist Scholar Activists examine the ways fields meant to be liberatory spaces for critical race work can reproduce the “heteropatriracial” ordering of the imperial university (p. 188

Academic freedom · American studies · Discipline · Dissent · Empire · Higher education · Humanities · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Academic Freedom and Politics · Critical Race Theory in Education · Gender Studies · Law · University Challenges and Reforms

• From Self-Authorship to Self-Definition

  W K Okello•Journal of college student…•2018

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