The Dilemmas of Ethnic Studies in the United States: Between Liberal Multiculturalism, Identity Politics, Disciplinary Colonization, and Decolonial Epistemologies

Abstract

I. INTRODUCTION Ethnic studies in United States represents a contradictory space within which two hegemonic discourses (identitarian multiculturalism and disciplinary colonization) and a counter-hegemonic one (decolonial epistemologies) condense and enter into debate and struggle. In contrast to parts of world, ethnic studies in United States emerged as a part of civil rights movement for racialized minorities. In late '60s and early '70s, a number of student strikes and university occupations were organized by these minorities, leading to creation of African-American, Puerto Rican, Chicano, Asian, and Indigenous studies programs in many universities all over United States. This epistemic insurgency was key to opening of spaces in universities for professors from ethnic/racial groups suffering discrimination and/or with non-Western epistemologies in areas which were up to that point monopolized by white professors and students and Eurocentric epistemologies privileging Cartesian ego-politics of (Grosfoguel 2008a). In contast to Eurocentric epistemology in Westernized universities which is characterized by privileging of a Western male canon of thought and study of other as an object rather than as a knowledge-producing subject--concealing at same time and of knowledge through which white academics and intellectuals think--the entry of professors of color through affirmative action programs and creation of ethnic studies programs aimed at studying problems confronting oppressed minorities constituted an important change in production of academic knowledges. At that time (late '60s and early '70s), many of those minority professors were activist intellectuals who privileged geo-politics of and of over ego-politics of in production of knowledges. This represented a break, for first time in Westernized universities, with subject-object dichotomy of Cartesian epistemology. Instead of a white male subject studying non-white subjects as objects of assuming a neutral, privileged viewpoint not situated in any space or body--i.e., ego-politics of which allows subject to claim a false objectivity and epistemic neutrality--we have a new situation in Westernized universities in United States in which subjects from racialized minorities study themselves as subjects who think and produce knowledges from bodies and spaces (the geopolitics and body-politics of knowledge)--approaches which had been routinely subalternized and inferiorized by Westernized racist/sexist epistemology and power. Moreover, it can also be said that their work questioned hegemonic white understanding of racialized minorities which sought to make latter responsible for marginalization and they experience in United States (for example, paradigms of the culture of poverty and modernization theory), thereby concealing rampant racism of that society (Grosfoguel 2003). Not only did this challenge epistemic racisms/ sexisms that recognize only production of theory by white/male Western subjects while non-whites are assumed to produce only folklore, mythology, or culture but never knowledge equal to that of West, it also opened up potential for decolonization of knowledge, by also challenging Cartesian ego-politics of of Western Social Sciences/ Humanities and counterposing to this geopolitics and of of subaltern subjects. I say potential, because this decolonial process is not complete and faces several obstacles. This article seeks to identify these obstacles which ethnic studies still confront. However, it is necessary first to clarify some concepts that are indispensable for our discussion. …