| Popis: |
I approach the question of whither race studies in the context of teaching a firstyear seminar here at Duke, “Prison, the U.S., and the Citizen”: a course that has, as part of its curricular mission in Duke-specific institutional terms, ethical inquiry. This course has driven home for me in particular ways the inability of general public discussion—what my students are aware of in abundance but which they understand as “natural”—to accommodate elaborated and unelaborated discourses for cathected critical engagement, e.g., white supremacy and its connection to prison, the history of the U.S. state, and the idea of the citizen. If those of us who participate in teaching, research, and public intellectualism frequently take as our object of critique the limitations of the liberal bourgeois subject, we must also run up against the difficulty of moving our students from that hegemonic subjectivity to something more specifically critical. But this semester, I have run into another form of difficulty. Since there seems to be no location for even the much-derided liberal bourgeois subject to exist, the obstacle looms before me of helping to move my students from their internalization of the dominant narrative that explicitly and implicitly structures their active and passive acceptance of the massive carceral state, to a position of awareness: first, that they are living out such a state of affairs; and then, a realization that this state of affairs is in no way natural or inevitable; i.e., I nostalgically long for the simple presence of a liberal bourgeois subjectivity as a starting point in the classroom, as an |
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