[lbo-talk] Texas school board drops Jefferson, adds Calvin

[Jeffrey Fisher]

Speaking purely anecdotally, my own experience in graduate school in the
period identified was that there was a very active debate, among grad
students as well as faculty, about the value of various postmodernisms.
There were those in, say, history and american studies who insisted that
derrida and foucault were the modern satans, and those who defended them,
but both sides found themselves organizers in a graduate student
unionization effort, and in fact it's often in that context that we had
those fights. "Postmodernists" among the faculty included those who sided
with us and those who sided against us. David Montgomery, of course, was
very prominently with us. James Scott, on the contrary, took the position
that he was indifferent (you know, not believing in organization -- and I do
like his work, btw). David Brion Davis, a big-time slavery scholar with whom
I did not work, but whom I recall as pursuing scholarship within a fairly
solidly Marxist approach, brought up one of his TAs on charges when she
participated in a grade strike. This is just my recollection of my
experience in the 90s, but in general I'm inclined to think that people who
want to stay on the sidelines -- or play to power -- will find ways to do
so, whatever their predisposition towards theory or whatever. In fact, a lot
of the opposition we got from faculty was not that there was no "true"
justice to fight for, but that we as privileged TAs were distracting people
from the real fight, which was about *really* poor and oppressed peoples.

I think the problem that raised this question, specifically approaches to
the question of feudalism, is a result of a certain kind of historicism that
both Marxists and postmodernists would reject, although perhaps it is in
fact a sort of outgrowth of both kinds of approaches, or a merging of them.
But then I'm generalizing perhaps too broadly about both sets of traditions
when I say that.

On Sun, Mar 21, 2010 at 11:03 AM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu>wrote:


> I agree, it's entirely five minutes ago.  And I also think some interesting
> people were included in its quite elastic boundaries - Lacan, for instance
> (whom
> Chomsky seems to have liked but thinks became "a quite conscious
> charlatan").
>
> But we were talking about what questions were within the limits of
> allowable
> debate in history graduate departments ca. 1975-2000.  Crudely put (and it
> was
> pretty crude), the collapse of the academic left in those days and its
> replacement by identity politics meant that pomo became a collecting vessel
> for
> "radicals" who didn't want to risk their careers. One could be
> intellectually
> radical ("all is indeterminate"), foursquare on racism, feminism, etc.
> (THAT'S
> not indeterminate), and thus risk no confrontation with power, academic or
> political.  The result was the comfortably quiescent intellectual
> institutions
> that we've enjoyed for a generation.  --CGE
>
>
>
> Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>>
>> On Mar 21, 2010, at 11:01 AM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>>
>>  And I wouldn't exculpate postmodernism - among other things a
>>> non-innocent
>>> way of avoiding dangerous questions.
>>>
>>
>> Given the horrified reactions of so many to "postmodernism" - which I
>> thought
>> had been getting obsolete, but evidently not - I don't get this claim. It
>> seems to make lots of people, mainstream and Marxist, very uncomfortable.
>> And
>> I'm not really sure to whom this vague word is supposed to apply -
>> Foucault?
>> He certainly didn't avoid dangerous questions about madness,
>> incarceration,
>> sex. Butler? Ditto. Etc.
>>
>> Doug ___________________________________
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