Because nothing is sufficient, we must use everything

“Because nothing is sufficient, we must use everything,” Rebecca Fullan recently remarked, which is how I’ve come to understand the relationship between academia and activism. Since beginning my Ph.D. program in English at the CUNY Graduate Center, I’ve struggled with the relationship between academic institutions and the grassroots, community-based, activist work that takes place on the streets (and other spaces). Instead of allowing a feminist interpretation of a text to substitute for, rather than inspire, political action, I want to ask how activism and academia can mutually inform one another without collapsing the meaningful differences between the two. How, for instance, is a class on African-American literature different from the #BlackLivesMatter movement, and how might the two work in tandem to take down the capitalist, white supremacist heteropatriarchy? In addition to troubling the activism/academia binary, I also want to emphasize that talking about feminism, antiracism, and material conditions of inequality from within a classroom will never be enough. I honestly hope that when students leave my class they feel uncomfortable and upset about our present, but also eager, desirous, and capable of changing it.

Read the rest of this post on the Critical Ethnic Studies blog.