Visibility politics alibi oppressive structures- shifting focus from object to subject is crucial to effective resistance

(Ruth Wilson, Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics and professor of geography in Earth and Environmental Sciences at The City University of New York, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation)

“Symbolic contingencies,” E. San Juan Jr. writes, “can metamorphose into nodes of condensation in programmatic goals and actions.”3 The object status of African American women in the Academy is that of Decorative Beasts. That is, we are fixtures embodying Le Carré’s seventeenth century image of exclusion/marginality and his nineteenth century image of imperialism/exoticism plus the supporting base for the entire modern edifice: slavery/commodity itself. Decorative Beasts are alibis for the Academy, living symbols whose occasional display is contingent on the Academy’s need to illustrate certain ideological triumphs: capitalism, for example, or Christianity, equality, democracy, multiculturalism. If we keep in mind the representations of marginality/exoticism/commodity, but shift our analysis from object to subject, we initiate a political and cultural metamorphosis enabled by economic conditions. From this strategy Decorative Beasts, as symbolic contingencies, seize agency. That is, we become able to negotiate positions from which to disarticulate the power of the alibi—through our goals and actions to instigate insurgency and provoke transformation. How is this so? The Academy is in crisis. The effects of two major upheavals in the political economy of the Academy during the contemporary moment (World War II to present [1991]) condense in this historical conjuncture. The first upheaval consisted of the Academy’s reluctant then boosterish growth occasioned by federal fiscal interventions and the baby boom. The second is the Academy’s intensive but decentered efforts to maintain discursive practices and non-discursive operations into the debt-ridden and demographically alien near future. I hope to show (using Cornel West’s formulation) that there are “conjunctural opportunities” in, as it were, the interstices of “structural constraints.”4 The crisis provides a “window of opportunity” for Decorative Beasts’ access to the money, time, space, books, and equipment, and people constitutive of and constituted by the Academy. The window will not stay open long; the area beyond is not reserved in any particular name. The conjuncture unrolls, and with it a corresponding revolution. Who is in the vanguard?