> berber carpet bomb wrote:
> > i guess what really irritates, joanna, is that you have all kinds of
> > attitudes about identity politics, but you have never once shown
> yourself
> > actually familiar with their writing
> >
> > ...
> > in other words, you act as if you came up with the critique that has led
> to
> > developments like this book edited by Anzaldua. And yet, *they* came up
> with
> > it way before you ever made a post to this list. They were writing about
> it
> > in the 80s for pete's sake. and not one word of attribution is given
> them
> > when you claim your criticisms. if you were familiar with the terrain,
> you
> > wouldn't dare write like that.
> >
> I have never claimed familiarity with the philosophers/activists of
> identity politics...except for reading all the big feminists of the
> sixties... I wonder too whether close acquaintance with academic writing
> is really needed to understand the phenomenon. After all, it permeates
> everything that has been written/experienced/articulated in the last
> thirty years.
>
> My "critique" goes back to 1974 when I saw something like an emerging
> working class movement unwinding into many useless threads of identity.
> In 74 I was 20 and my critique was mostly a gut peasant-like feeling
> that identity politics was many kinds of Dead End. As it has proved to be.
>
> I'd say more, but I couldn't parse your first para "..but that is
> precisely..." so I'll stop here.
>
> Joanna
first -- my apology for being snippy mustn't have reached the list. I'm sorry for being snippy. I should have found a better way of saying this.
You deride academic feminism, but you can go read non-academic women of color write about the same issues. they didn't learn this stuff in class. they learned it in life. e.g., if you go to donna's blog, http://the-silence-of-our-friends.blogspot.com, you can read around about her own coming to terms with racism -- of her own. ditto every other blogger i mentioned. they don't have to be in academia to get this, though reading books by these folks helped them articulate the issues.
moreoever, while you deride academics, the fact is that has been about the *only* place, particularly for women of color, to reach anyone at all. and for them, it was probably particularly important to counteract the middle class profesionalization young men and women of color are likely to encounter in college. to prevent what Michael Eric Dyson talks about as a form of intraclass warfare waged by middle class blacks against working class blacks.
so, I'm not so sure that it's a bad thing for men and women of color to encounter ideas that radicalize them via academics -- and secondarily via various cultural productions produced by people who went to college.
I think there's a way to address the issue you raise -- Wendy Brown's work, but also others -- is crucial for understanding the limits of identity politics, but without necessarily making such stark generalizations made here. There's a critical book on my Amazon wishlist, too lazy to find the title, but it's about the problems with academic ghettoization of ideas. If academics are so fucked up, why the hell are they writing books critical of academia -- and there are MANY who do, including the very feminists you deride. The radical feminists were some of the biggest proponents of the idea that academia was nothing but malestream thinking and the only way women could change the world was leave and produce outside of it. But that did NOT make them any better at articulating a politics that embraces, say, a class analysis. Instead, they just stayed largely in the rut they'd carved out for themselves.
A lot has changed in the thinking of even the women who were there in 1974. it might be worth reading them, especially men and women of color who have to think a whole lot harder about ID politics than any white woman every imagined.
As for my para, it was unclear. It is precisely people who understand the limits of the id politics you'[re talking about who are opposed to Obama. I provided examples of bloggers that I know about. i'm sure there are plenty more. And I think it is white people who are enamored of the identity politics you complain about who are rah rah Obama, precisely because they think his blackness will make him progressive.
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