“Who’s ‘We,’ White Man?”: Scholarship, Teaching, and Identity Politics in African American Media Studies

Abstract

[..]the student's underlying assumption that academic interest is based on identity is a reductive correlation that presumes that inter- est and authority are narrowly confined to racial and ethnic categories as well as gender and sexual orientation, ignoring the porousness and instability of these concepts. For African American media studies in particular, the issue of authority and its attending privilege (who can talk about whom) is a vexed one, since part of the historical problem is that those in the dominant culture have presumed to speak of-and for-other groups.;The author considers the question of how race matters for academics and the identity of Other in scholarly inquiry, taking the assumptions underlying a student course evaluation and tying them to her own investment in African American film studies.;