Background: Identity Politics, Theory, and the Classroom

In the aftermath of 9/11, progressive scholars in the United States university, now more than ever, see the importance of developing a social vision that both handles global issues all of us face yet also gives meaning to our own local experiences that inform who we are. The recent events have taught that the deconstruction of identity, experience, and nation in scholarship presents limitations in fostering understanding in the university classroom and beyond. Social inventions, though invented, affect the globe in very real ways. We are finding that identities, for example, are no doubt socially produced, but are nonetheless enormously important, not only because they bar or grant us access to certain parts of society, but also because they are made from and make our world. Identities influence our readings of texts, our social and moral views. At this time, then, the challenge facing free thinkers is not to deconstruct such knowledge-granting concepts but rather to take them seriously as particular sources of insight with general human import from which scholars and students, activists and community members can benefit.

In 2001, several scholars committed to developing this workable notion of identity politics began a nationwide research project called the Future of Minority Studies. Scholars from a variety of disciplines became attracted to this project out of a dissatisfaction with the use of contemporary theory in dismissing programs for identity politics as necessarily essentialist and in need of dismantling, at a time when the issues of race and the numbers of minority students and scholars are growing. Those involved in FMS gathered at major universities from coast to coast to explore the role of identity in ethnic/minority studies and its ramifications for diversity initiatives, multiculturalism, feminism, and internationalism. Project organizers use the term minority to refer broadly to members of subjugated social groups in the U.S. and abroad.

From these meetings, scholars have mobilized a new social theory attendant to a wide range of theoretical and practical issues yet grounded in moral universal definitions of the self, human rights, dignity, and respect. Project participants have contributed to an entire volume of essays which develops and presents work in “post-positivist realism,” Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism (University of California Press, 2000), as well as an anthology of essays on realist teaching, Twenty-First-Century Feminist Classrooms: Pedagogies of Identity and Difference (Palgrave, 2002). The research project has become international, with a conference held last year in India, and a recent retreat in the Dominican Republic. Scholars involved in FMS have contributed to a new anthology on realist theory and internationalism, The Future of Minority Studies: Redefining Identity Politics (Palgrave, September 2004). Last fall, here at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the English Department funded the organization of the Minority Studies Reading Group, attended by graduate and faculty members who have been interested in the realist theory of identity. To build on the year’s research findings, participants in the Project for the Future of Minority Studies now plan to move their work forward to explore three important areas in ethnic studies and theory: reading, teaching, and social ideas.