Engl notes
Introduction - The text maps the interplay between political-economic normativity, cultural normativity, and sex/gender normativity. It argues that black cultural assimilation and heteronormativity reinforced U.S. Cold War positions, and vice versa; official antiracism victories (e.g., desegregation, civil rights acts) stabilized certain political limits, interpretative tendencies, and economic forces that extended U.S. and transnational capitalist structures of racial domination. As Mary L. Dudziak observes in Cold War Civil Rights, "The United States government used the perceived progress of the civil rights movement as a potent tool to counter Soviet accusations of American hypocrisy abroad."
Liberal Multiculturalism emerges when racial liberalism’s hegemony breaks apart by the mid-1960s due to internal contradictions, opposition from alternative antiracisms, and changing material/geopolitical conditions.
After the Civil Rights Act of , the Cold War civil rights platform—emphasizing desegregation, symbolic equality, and tolerant whites—proved inadequate for addressing stark economic and social inequality, especially in increasingly impoverished urban centers facing white flight.
The long civil rights era’s radical impulses resurfaced in race-based social movements that rejected cultural normativity, Americanism, and liberal political settlements shaped by Cold War racial liberal orders. These movements included: Black Power, Black feminism, Chicano nationalism, Asian American civil rights, American Indian sovereignty, queer movements, third worldism, women of color movements, and the New Left.
These movements sought psychic decolonization, nonexploitative ethico-economic orders, internationalism aligned with the third world, and new powers for new collectivities.
The U.S. as “antiracist savior of the free world” could no longer rationalize its global power amid waning Cold War tensions and transnational capitalist development targeting the global South.
Liberal Multiculturalism (mid-1960s–1980s)
The late-1960s to early-1980s period saw liberal multiculturalism attempting to absorb or defuse radical antiracisms while addressing multiracial populations (including large waves of immigrants after Immigration and Naturalization Act) and post-Keynesian crises.
Liberal multiculturalism incorporated radical antiracist materialisms while using cultural authorities (literary discourse, etc.) as a technology to productively align antiracist knowledges with capitalism’s next phases. Critics note that "what began as a radical critique of power structures was often re-packaged as consumable 'diversity,' diluting its transformative potential."
Fused cultural and political activism: radical antiracisms treated culture as a materializing force for liberation, reorganizing institutions, daily life, and personhood toward new collective possibilities.
James Smethhurst’s claim (paraphrased): the Black Power/Black Arts distinction is moot because Black Power tied artistic activity to black self-determination; the author argues this fusion comes from a materialist cultural understanding.
Key insight: culture is a materializing process linked to global decolonization and psychic/political/economic decolonization for postcolonies and internal colonies.
The late-1960s/1970s campus insurgencies challenged the power of traditional universities to produce knowledge; demands included third-world colleges, black/ethnic studies, La Raza studies, Asian American studies, Native American studies, and women’s studies. These demands aimed to democratize the university’s authorizing power and to bind knowledge to multiracial democratic power.
By the early , estimates suggest more than black and ethnic studies programs had been founded on U.S. campuses.
Higher Education and the Transformation of Knowledge (1970s–1990s)
Between and , total college enrollment rose from to million; by , enrollment reached million. The majority of growth occurred at public universities.
In , of all students were enrolled in public institutions.
Black enrollment expanded most through institutions other than HBCUs between and , nearly doubling.
The – downturn marked the beginning of a broader shift: U.S. universities transformed into central sites for recalibrating the state, capital, and citizenry for post-Keynesian times.
From the onward, universities began producing professional-managerial classes tailored for a free-market, multinational-capital economy, and for knowledge production that supported globalized industry, finance, and information sectors. A college degree increasingly delineated success from failure in a postindustrial economy.
Despite enrollment growth, white enrollment tended to concentrate at the top of an increasingly stratified system; overall black enrollment declined from onward. Diversity discourse coexisted with persistent racialized economic inequality and a belief in fair competition as a sufficient explanation for disparities.
Radical antiracist movements maintained a tenuous foothold in universities, even as knowledge about minoritized differences was repurposed to fit post-Keynesian policies.
The academy’s essential function, per Ferguson, was to manage minoritized difference through validation, certification, and legibility, thus generating forms that reinforced hegemony rather than disrupting it. As Roderick A. Ferguson elucidates, "the university functions not merely to include, but to discipline and administer difference, bringing it into legible forms that ultimately sustain existing hierarchies."
The pieces of management of racial difference in the – included socializing students as multicultural subjects, commodifying racialized cultures, setting terms of social solidarity, and generating orders of difference that explained differential valuations of human life.
The Counterinsurgency and the Ford Foundation’s Role; English/Literary Studies in Liberal Multiculturalism
The Ford Foundation played a leadership role in funding Black Studies programs that sought to diversify curricula for a predominantly white institution, while avoiding support for Black Power/Black nationalist approaches or community-activist work. As one analysis notes, "such philanthropic interventions often sought to integrate diversity while simultaneously neutralizing its more radical, anti-capitalist dimensions."
This shift redirected knowledge production toward curricula that taught tolerance and integrated differences, rather than fostering more radical community-based knowledge production.
English departments and literary studies bore the major burden of activating minority difference for post-Keynesian times; liberal racial liberalism had defined literature as a tool for Americans to understand racial difference, a notion expanded to transnational times to cultivate a multiracial professional-managerial class.
The canon wars of the – showed the tension between canonical Great Books proponents and advocates for diversifying curricula; the debate was framed as a battle between assimilative pluralism and positive pluralism.
The canon wars helped liberal multiculturalism defeat critical multiculturalism by misrepresenting new knowledge produced by social movements and expanding sanctioned racial difference knowledge into extraliterary domains (discipline policies, admissions, hiring).
Statistics and observations from the period: about of universities made curricular changes to accommodate multiculturalism; changes were more likely in English departments than in other disciplines, highlighting literature’s central role in producing liberal-multicultural ideology.
The canon wars elevated the visibility of multiculturalism as a policy and cultural program, ultimately shaping how universities trained future professionals to internalize liberal-multicultural antiracism as part of their identity and mission.
The regime of liberal multiculturalism framed race as representation and cultural recognition, often dematerializing material disparities; it promoted a form of “pluralism” that prioritized individual rights and aesthetic culture over addressing structural inequalities. This approach, as one observer comments, "allows for a celebration of difference that conveniently sidesteps the messy realities of economic exploitation and systemic disadvantage."
Liberal Multiculturalism as Regime of Official Antiracism (1980s–1990s)
Liberal multiculturalism functioned as a normative power that integrated antiracist discourse into socialization and education through two- and four-year colleges; it instilled in students destined for professional, managerial, and technocratic roles a sense of antiracist identity and social mission.
It linked biopolitics with rationalization to explain life chances: upward mobility for a few and downward mobility for most, legitimating racialized inequality as the result of fair competition. As critics highlight, "the rhetoric of 'fair competition' often masks deep-seated structural disadvantages that continue to disproportionately affect racialized communities."
The idea of a “we are the world” multicultural nationalism framed U.S. expansionist capitalism as a universal mission of diversity; this ideology justified domestic downsizing and international expansion under the aegis of antiracism.
The international dimension portrayed development as a path to a just, pluralistic world system with neutral markets; it suggested that U.S. multiculturalism could be exported and replicated abroad.
Literary studies were central to socializing elites into a progressive, but often regressive, public policy framework, aligning corporate humanism with a de facto new apartheid in practice.
Objects of discourse in liberal multiculturalism included literary anthologies, diversity courses, and multicultural literature; these acted as vehicles for disseminating liberal-multicultural ideology whether or not actual reading matched the described experiences.
Three protocols for liberal-multicultural literature as discourse:
1) Literature as information retrieval, where the author’s racialized identity is crucial for representativeness and voice, tying information to ideologemes of authenticity.
2) Multicultural literature as testimony to race-differentiated history and present, within a master narrative of civil rights triumph.
3) A multicultural work as a commodified form of racialized cultural property, reinforcing consumerist diversity and legitimating the manager-class’s position.White students were interpellated as multicultural subjects within the dominant liberal-multicultural frame, often assuming authentic familiarity with racialized communities while benefiting from racial capitalism.
The canons became emblematic of post–civil rights era, and reading them became a rite of passage for white students, serving as a way to participate in antiracist activism as consumers, aligning with racial capitalism.
This framework reinforced white privilege as the new mode of whiteness, while diversity discourse normalized benefits for those who resembled the liberal-multicultural ideal, even as economic inequality persisted.
The same discourse also interpellated racialized and non-Western students as multicultural subjects, requiring them to accept multicultural terms as authentic representations of their histories and identities; this included normative expectations around recognizing diversity as asset to the new economic order and endorsing permissible articulations of racial histories.
The result was an aestheticized representation of material conflict and racialized violence, contributing to the production of racialized privilege and stigma within communities of color.
Neoliberal Multiculturalism (mid-1990s onward)
By the mid-, global capitalism embodied a neoliberal economy: free trade, financial liberalization, deregulation, privatization, and the expansion of international financial/regulatory institutions (World Bank, IMF, WTO) that pressured states to comply with free-market policies.
Neoliberal sovereignty describes a mode where the state’s power is attenuated in favor of capital, and governance centers on market distribution of resources and the rationalization of life under capitalist logic; this includes the biopolitical management of life and labor.
The concept of differentiated citizenship (per Aihwa Ong) describes how some people (high-value capital) receive protections and rights in multiple locations, while others are devalued and excluded from full citizenship within neoliberal circuits of value.
Liberal multiculturalism’s racialized schemas were insufficient to code privilege under neoliberalism’s differentiated citizenship; the old frames could not fully attach antiracist value to global capitalist expansion.
The mid- and early saw a wave of global social movements (labor rights, environmentalism, anti-trafficking, indigenous rights, anti-economic colonialism, LGBTQ rights) that exposed neoliberalism’s uneven system of capital accumulation. Notable events include: the Seattle WTO protests; Cochabamba, Bolivia protests against IMF structural adjustment and privatization (); the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre (); and the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples ().
Official liberal-multicultural procedures have proven insufficient to disguise or sublate the differential exploitation revealed by these movements.
Neoliberal multiculturalism is termed the third phase of race-liberal hegemony. Official antiracisms had previously attached to nationalist discourses to justify capitalism; in the neoliberal phase, multicultural formalism abstracts race issues from concrete human groups and codes an economic order into the discourse of difference.
Neoliberal-multicultural formalism uses difference as a valorized knowledge domain, aligning ethical, moral, technical, and political stances with neoliberal aims. Examples include privileging certain global citizenship identities (e.g., affluent Arab/Muslim women who embrace luxury goods) as global citizens, while stigmatizing those lacking resources or dispositions.
Institutions that produce neoliberal-multicultural discourse are diffuse: U.S. universities, global universities, international NGOs, think tanks, UN, global media, international regulatory bodies, and multinational corporations all contribute to a shared discourse.
U.S. universities have become key racializing institutions under neoliberal multiculturalism, operationalizing differentiated citizenship and certifying individuals as multicultural global citizens. They train elites in the codes of racial privilege and stigma that undergird biopolitics.
Aihwa Ong notes that universities attract a multicultural, multinational, mobile population, shaping individuals with traits like egoistic individualism and self-enterprise that align with neoliberal capitalism.
Literary studies have reinforced neoliberal biopolitics by interpellating elites as multicultural global citizens and by providing readers with information about global difference under the rubric of multiculturalism.
Literature as a discipline has expanded beyond English/foreign-language departments to business, political science, and nursing schools, using global literatures to add a global dimension without requiring specialized knowledge.
Azar Nafisi’s Reading “Lolita” in Tehran exemplifies neoliberal multiculturalism in the popular nonfiction genre, presenting a diasporic female scholar who positions herself as a global citizen through encounters with canonical English-language literature.
Despite the financial crisis, neoliberal sovereignty remains intact: old aims of official antiracisms (e.g., housing, college access) have fueled global speculative capitalism; the material well-being of racialized communities often suffers in the busts that follow booms.
Race radicalism challenges neoliberal multiculturalism by insisting that race and racism are not reducible to cultural difference or consumer diversity but are rooted in the global capitalist order.
Race Radicalism and Literary Texts (postwar–contemporary)
The postwar race-liberal hegemony has never been seamless or complete; power is inherently contradictory and produces its own undoing, enabling alternatives to emerge.
The demand that racialized subjects conform to official antiracist narratives about their “incorporability” generates resistances, misfits, and non-correspondences; race-liberalism cannot fully absorb these, giving rise to race radicalisms.
Race radicalism refers to materialist antiracist thinking and politics that foreground the unevenness of global capitalism as the primary race matter; it emphasizes the differential violence and exploitation that official antiracisms often obscure.
The author demonstrates that racial-liberal, liberal-multicultural, and neoliberal-multicultural anti-racisms have all labored to marginalize, misrecognize, or subdue race-radical antiracisms, though these radical currents intermittently emerge within the same institutional networks that sustain official antiracisms.
The category of race radicalism is intentionally expansive: it includes pre–racial break antiracist codes (anticolonialism, pan-Africanism, popular front era activism) and later movements (– race-based self-determination movements, indigenous and labor movements, migrant movements).
The unifying feature of race radicalism is the effort to rupture the consolidation of race as a sign with cultural/ideological/political/material forces of official antiracisms and to reconsolidate race as a sign with the forces of worldly and radical antiracisms that analyze race within the genealogy of global capitalism.
Radical antiracisms can sometimes be found within literary texts themselves; literature offers bracketed truth conditions that enable challenging sanctioned knowledges and imagining materialist antiracisms that are difficult to articulate within official discourse.
The author emphasizes that you cannot be antiracist without opposing oppression; yet liberal antiracisms have dematerialized antiracism to the extent that oppression becomes banal, ubiquitous, and largely unaddressed in policy and practice. Cornel West famously stated, "Justice is what love looks like in public."
The critique uses vivid examples of contemporary oppression (e.g., food production laborers and exploitation embedded in everyday consumer life, trafficking, and persistent racial disparities in wealth) to illustrate how pervasive racialized harm remains even in a society that proclaims antiracist commitments.
The author argues for a new materialist antiracism, grounded in a two-way rearticulation of empirical reality and epistemology: reenergizing the material power of reading, teaching, and the humanities to transform social life.
The final citation of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls for careful reflexivity: without a responsible humanist critique, diversity can become a cover for avoiding hard questions about power and oppression.
In sum, race radicalism seeks to return race to the center of political-economic analysis, linking literary texts to lived social struggles and insisting on material transformation rather than mere representation.
Toward a Materialist Antiracism (Conclusion and Call to Action)
The author posits that racialization must reverse direction: instead of legitimizing extremely uneven systems of accumulation that devalue some lives, racialization should signal the necessity of changing material conditions.
Achieving this requires the two-way rearticulation of empirical reality and epistemology through the cultural power of reading, teaching, and humanities disciplines.
The final question quotes Spivak to urge caution: without considering what/who counts as the ‘human,’ diversity efforts risk becoming hollow or exclusionary in practice.
Overall aim: manifest the grounds for a new materialist antiracism, one that foregrounds the structural, economic, and political dimensions of race in a transnational capitalist world.
The author emphasizes that the roots of radical antiracism are present in literary texts themselves and that literature can serve as a space to imagine and enact materialist social change.
Key People, Works, and Concepts to Remember
Combahee River Collective Statement: “We are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual and class oppression and see as our particular task the development of an integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking.”
Moraga and This Bridge Called My Back: foundational text for women-of-color feminism; emphasizes the materiality of culture and collective writing as social practice. Moraga described the “materialism in this book lives in the flesh of these women.”
Grace Hong: notes on women-of-color feminism’s use of literature to reveal power dynamics in knowledge production.
James Smethhurst: discussion of Black Power vs. Black Arts—art as political priority and self-determination.
Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition: frame for understanding race radicalism as a materialist antiracism grounded in black cultural matrices and struggles against racial capitalism.
Aihwa Ong: concept of differentiated citizenship and analysis of neoliberal sovereignty and global citizenship formation tied to U.S. universities and global capital.
Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: example of neoliberal multiculturalism in popular nonfiction and how global literature is used to produce global citizenship narratives.
Key Dates and Figures (for quick reference)
: Civil Rights Act; liberal civil rights platform emerges within Cold War context.
: Immigration and Naturalization Act reshapes multiracial demographic and political landscape.
–: campus protests and establishment of Black/ethnic studies programs; over programs by early .
–: stagflation and shift from Keynesian policy to a free-market orientation.
: growth of diversity management; the university reshapes itself toward professional-managerial-output; enrollment growth but with rising racial disparities in outcomes.
: Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind highlights canon wars; : Stanford’s Culture, Ideas, and Values program debate.
: canon wars culminate; multiculturalism becomes mainstream in curricular changes (roughly of universities changing curricula).
: WTO protests in Seattle; : Cochabamba water protests; : World Social Forum in Porto Alegre; : UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
The text often references the period from the through the as the era of neoliberal multiculturalism and the corresponding shift in the sites and instruments of antiracist politics.
Glossary of Key Terms (quick reference)
Liberal Liberalism/Liberal Multiculturalism: antiracist framework that integrates diversity within liberal political and economic order.
Neoliberal Sovereignty: governance that centers market logic, privatization, deregulation, and differentiated citizenship.
Race Liberalism: a framework that uses liberal ideals to address race but often obscures material inequalities.
Race Radicalism: materialist antiracism that foregrounds capitalism’s uneven effects on different racialized groups.
Canon Wars: debates over whether English/literary curricula should be expanded to include diverse authors/canons or maintain traditional Western canons.
Multicultural Literature Protocols: the three protocols described above for how literature is used within liberal multiculturalism (information retrieval, testimony of history, and commodified cultural property).
Differentiated Citizenship (Aihwa Ong): people are valued differently within neoliberal systems, leading to varied rights and protections.
Global Citizenship: a liberal multicultural ideal tied to elite, cosmopolitan, multinational subjectivities rather than universal rights for all.
Post-Keynesian Downsizing: economic restructuring that reduced state-led welfare and redistributed via markets.
Internal/External Colonies: concept referring to the ways in which racialized populations are governed within the state and through global capitalism. > A final reminder from the text: literature can be a space to challenge sanctioned antiracist knowledges because it allows for a bracketed truth imperative and challenging conceptualizations of power; a new materialist antiracism seeks to harness that power to transform material conditions rather than merely reform discourse.