The Dilemmas of Ethnic Studies in the United States: Between Liberal Multiculturalism, Identity Politics, Disciplinary Colonization, and Decolonial Epistemologies

I. INTRODUCTION Ethnic studies in the United States represents a contradictory space within which two hegemonic discourses (identitarian multiculturalism and disciplinary colonization) and a counter-hegemonic one (decolonial epistemologies) condense and enter into debate and struggle. In contrast to other parts of the world, ethnic studies in the United States emerged as a part of the civil rights movement for racialized minorities. In the late '60s and early '70s, a number of student strikes and university occupations were organized by these minorities, leading to the creation of African-American, Puerto Rican, Chicano, Asian, and Indigenous studies programs in many universities all over the United States. This epistemic insurgency was key to the opening of spaces in universities for professors from ethnic/racial groups suffering discrimination and/or with non-Western epistemologies in areas which were up to that point monopolized by white professors and students and Eurocentric epistemologies privileging the Cartesian "ego-politics of knowledge" (Grosfoguel 2008a). In contast to the Eurocentric epistemology in Westernized universities which is characterized by the privileging of a Western male canon of thought and the study of the "other" as an object rather than as a knowledge-producing subject--concealing at the same time the geo-politics and the body-politics of knowledge through which white academics and intellectuals think--the entry of professors of "color" through affirmative action programs and the creation of ethnic studies programs aimed at studying the problems confronting oppressed minorities constituted an important change in the production of academic knowledges. At that time (late '60s and early '70s), many of those minority professors were activist intellectuals who privileged the "geo-politics of knowledge" and the "body-politics of knowledge" over the "ego-politics of knowledge" in the production of knowledges. This represented a break, for the first time in Westernized universities, with the subject-object dichotomy of Cartesian epistemology. Instead of a white male subject studying non-white subjects as "objects of knowledge," assuming a neutral, privileged viewpoint not situated in any space or body--i.e., the "ego-politics of knowledge," which allows the subject to claim a false objectivity and epistemic neutrality--we have a new situation in Westernized universities in the United States in which subjects from racialized minorities study themselves as subjects who think and produce knowledges from bodies and spaces (the "geopolitics" and "body-politics" of knowledge)--approaches which had been routinely subalternized and inferiorized by Westernized racist/sexist epistemology and power. Moreover, it can also be said that their work questioned the hegemonic white understanding of racialized minorities which sought to make the latter responsible for the marginalization and poverty they experience in the United States (for example, the paradigms of "the culture of poverty" and "modernization theory"), thereby concealing the rampant racism of that society (Grosfoguel 2003). Not only did this challenge the epistemic racisms/ sexisms that recognize only the production of theory by white/male Western subjects while non-whites are assumed to produce only folklore, mythology, or culture but never knowledge equal to that of the West, it also opened up the potential for the decolonization of knowledge, by also challenging the Cartesian "ego-politics of knowledge" of Western Social Sciences/ Humanities and counterposing to this the "geopolitics" and "body-politics of knowledge" of subaltern subjects. I say "potential," because this decolonial process is not complete and faces several obstacles. This article seeks to identify these obstacles which ethnic studies still confront. However, it is necessary first to clarify some concepts that are indispensable for our discussion. …