Description

Refusing Neoliberal Diversity Work in the Imperial University
Virtual Panel Session, AAG Annual Meeting 2021
Organized by Will McKeithen (University of Washington), David K. Seitz (Harvey Mudd College), and Farhang Rouhani (University of Mary Washington)

In October 2006 at the "Feminism and War" conference at Syracuse University, Black feminist and communist philosopher and organizer Angela Y. Davis (2008) warned that U.S. nationalist and imperialist uses of the term "diversity" have "colonized histories of social justice" and "promote a hidden individualization of problems and solutions that ought to be collective" (24). Challenging feminist complicity in the U.S.-led Global War on Terror, Davis argued that "'diversity' is a concept that provincializes the relationship of people within the U.S.A. to the world" (24).

Davis's insights draw on longer histories of internationalism and anti-imperialism in the Black radical tradition (Robinson 2000, Featherstone 2012), centrally including Black and transnational feminist critiques of nationalism, colonialism, and empire (Ransby 2003, Bloom and Martin 2012, Broeck and Bolaki 2015, Alexander 2015). Her words reverberate with critiques of the seductions of bourgeois nationalisms and imperialisms across a range of discrete and overlapping discourses, from feminist (Mohanty 2003, Farris 2017) to queer (Puar 2007) to Asian-American(ist) (Chuh 2003) to Latinx (Pulido 2006, Moraga 2011) to disabled (Snyder and Mitchell 2010, Schalk 2016), and with Indigenous refusals of settler colonial recognition (Simpson 2014, Coulthard 2014, Daigle 2019). Finally, Davis's critique proves salient in an era when Black and other "diverse" "faces in high places" (Taylor 2016) continue to be deployed to legitimate nationalist, colonialist, and imperialist institutions. The scholars noted in this CFP model modes of questioning and refusing the strategic use of "diversity" by institutions, including academic institutions, that continue to fail to meet the more-wide ranging and transformative demands of Black-led and Indigenous-led, abolitionist and anti-capitalist movements rising up worldwide (Bledsoe and Wright 2018).

Fifteen years after Davis's prescient warning, the U.S. media and much of mainstream academic discourse vacillate between a fixation on "internal" enemies (Black Lives Matter, immigrants, antifa) and flirtations with a new Cold War against China, as the U.S.-led Global War on/of Terror rages on, largely ignored (Pain 2010). Academic geography is not innocent here. Our discipline has a long history of service to imperial, nationalist, and colonial projects (e.g. Smith 2003, Schuurman and Pratt 2002), and it must be admitted that since the decolonization movements of the mid-20th century, these projects have been keen to enlist a "diverse" range of academic subjects on self-serving terms. Consider the AAG's recent and uncritical celebration of former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, whose in many ways quite positive "domestic" civil rights legacy is complicated by his approval of drone killings in Yemen, mass surveillance, and prosecutions of an historic number of government whistleblowers and journalists, including Black whistleblowers (Democracy Now 2014, Intercepted 2019).

At the very same time as images of our "diverse" communities are used to manufacture consent for the U.S. empire, "diverse" geographers are disproportionately burdened with astonishingly high levels of unpaid service work, with Black, Indigenous, and People of Color scholars, particularly precarious and junior scholars, often asked to do the most of all. The June 2020 statement of the Black Geographies Specialty Group Executive Committee and the September 2020 statement of the chairs of the Queer and Trans Geographies, Disability, Latinx Geographies, Black Geographies, and Indigenous Peoples' Specialty groups urgently underscore the uneven geographies of labor, resources, and power within the discipline itself.

Given these conditions and constraints, we envision this paper session as an important opportunity for differently positioned critical geographers to reckon with how U.S. imperialism, settler colonialism, and nationalism attempt to enframe and coopt our work through "diversity" and related terms, and to reflect on the large and small ways in which we can refuse that work and stay focused on the work that matters to us and the communities and movements to which we are accountable. We welcome a conversation addressing topics including but not limited to:

Black, Indigenous and other internationalisms
BDS and anti-apartheid movements
Transnational feminisms
Pinkwashing, femonationalism, homonationalism, ablenationalisms and related phenomena
"Greening" the military and ecological antiwar critiques
Black, Asian, Indigenous, Latinx, queer and feminist socialisms, anarchisms, and antiwar movements
"Diversity" in military recruitment and the military-industrial complex
Anticolonial and decolonial traditions
Internal colonialisms, Black Power, Yellow Power, Red Power and the Young Lords as anti-colonial rebellions
Moving beyond "recognition vs. redistribution"
The "internationalist" visions of "domestic" social movements
Diversity work, overwork, burnout and the demands of institution-building
The simultaneous necessity and insufficiency of representation
Challenging attacks on ethnic studies and affirmative action
"Diverse" faces in high places and alternatives to imperial multiculturalism

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