Learning and Unlearning Between the World and Me and Hunger of Memory: Confronting Neoliberal Multiculturalism

• In Event: Un/Learning: Latinx Praxes

Abstract

As Jodi Melamed defines in her book Represent and Destroy, neoliberal multiculturalism enables the “procedures [that] convert the effects of differential value-making systems into normative orders of difference” (41). Neoliberal multiculturalism furthers a narrative to “make acceptable inherited and systemic inequalities within historical formations of U.S. global ascendency and capital development” (41). This paper aims to show how writers of color have either embraced or rejected notions of “neoliberal multiculturalism” particularly in regards to education. This discussion analyses both Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory (1982) and Ta-Nehisi Coates in Between the World and Me (2015) to examine the negotiations they face over time as they subscribe or reject whiteness and racial capitalism. Although published in 1982, Hunger of Memory more so functions to legitimize the agenda of neoliberal multiculturalism for it solidifies notions of colorblindness and the embrace of public life (the American mainstream) and upward mobility as valid. On the other hand, Between the World and Me functions to resist the dangers of neoliberal multiculturalism by acknowledging systematic oppression. In this presentation, I examine the negotiations both Rodriguez and Coates face as they learn and unlearn whiteness and racial capitalism through their educational journeys. I ask: How do these text use memory and memoir as a site of cultural negotiation and struggle? What is revealed through Rodriguez and Coates, and how might we read the long discourse—from 1982 to 2015—as one tethered and animated by the realities of code-switching, negotiation, and resistance within and outside of academic institutions?

Author

• José Héctor Cadena, University of Kansas