The second event of the yearlong bicoastal conference entitled "The Future of Minority Studies: Redefining Identity Politics" was held at Cornell July 20 in Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium of Goldwin Smith Hall.
Dominick Lacapra, Cornell's Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor of Humanistic Studies, presented his paper "Experience, Identity, Objectivity," and Linda Alcoff, professor of philosophy and women studies at Syracuse University, provided a response and posed questions to the issues under discussion at the colloquium.
Organized by Michael Hames-Garcia, assistant professor of English at Binghamton University, this public dialogue was a prelude to a major conference that will be held in early October at Stanford University and is part of an ongoing project that seeks to examine the practical and theoretical implications related to the concept of "identity" and minority studies among a wide array of fields. Lacapra's paper will be presented at the conference at Stanford, and, as Hames-Garcia noted, it contributes significantly to questioning "the role of experience and objectivity in historical and philosophical inquiry relating to liberatory and resistant intellectual practice." Such notions are crucial to the development of minority studies.
The Colloquium on the Future of Minority Studies comes at what Cornell Professor of English Ken McClane has termed "a time of crisis in the history of minority studies." Scholars at Cornell, Stanford, Binghamton and elsewhere organized the conference in response to recent critiques of identity that have sought to reveal its political and theoretical limitations. For example, while essentialist conceptions of identity can be limiting by defining social groups in overly deterministic and narrow terms, poststructuralists suggest that because identity is inherently unstable, it is impossible to speak about categories of social entities in constructive ways. Such poststructuralist debates, some argue, have served to delegitimize all forms of identity politics and have led to a neglect of the significant contributions made by ethnic and other minority scholars. As a result, recent developments in ethnic and minority studies have been devalorized, they say, and identity has been increasingly disregarded as a meaningful source of knowledge.
Using the term "minority" broadly to refer to members of social groups that have been subordinated on the basis of ethnicity, race, sexuality and/or gender, the organizers of the colloquium are calling for an "imaginative reconstruction" on issues of identity, experience and politics. They seek to "move the discussion away from the debates over essentialism vs. constructivism in discussions about identity in order to foreground the role of minority education in a multicultural democracy." Many of these issues are addressed in the recently published anthology Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism. Co-edited by the colloquium's organizers Paula Moya, assistant professor of English at Stanford, and Hames-Garcia, this collection of essays explores a so-called "postpositivist realist" approach to issues of identity, experience and knowledge. In her introduction, Moya explains that a postpositivist-realist perspective recognizes that identity continues to play a crucial role in daily human interactions since, "Who we are -- that is, who we perceive ourselves or are perceived by others to be -- will significantly affect our life chances." She contends that identity cannot be disregarded as a false construction but must be understood as a dynamic paradigm that "has been a fundamental element of social liberation as well as in social oppression."
In addition to focusing on the ways in which identity affects such diverse areas as political theory, pedagogical practices, literary study and other scholarly fields, the colloquium also examines how a recognition of identity differences can lead to a commitment to basic values concerning human equality and political rights. As contributor and Cornell English Professor Satya Mohanty explains, through its appreciation of minority identity, a postpositivist-realist approach provides for a "complementary relationship between moral universalism and cultural pluralism." From this perspective, identity is perceived to be a powerful and objective source of knowledge. While recognizing that identities are fluid and do change according to different personal and social contexts, postpositivist realists also affirm that discussions about identity provide valuable insights. Mohanty suggests that recognizing and studying the experience of different subordinated groups will "help us to further our understanding of human welfare in general."
The next event in the colloquium will be a preview of the papers to be presented at Stanford and will be held at Binghamton on Sept. 8. In November, there will be a follow-up conference at Cornell.
| Cornell Chronicle Front Page | | Table of Contents | | Cornell News Service Home Page |