Insurgent Desire: The Third World College Strike and the University’s Libidinal Economy

• In Event: (Re)Engaging Ethnic Studies in American Studies: The Possibilities of Creation, Solidarity, and Student Organizing

Abstract

In 1968-69, the Black Student Union (BSU) and the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) engaged in a 167-day campus strike at San Francisco State College, which birthed the Department of Black Studies and the first and only College of Ethnic Studies. As a multi-racial strategic alliance, the BSU and TWLF politically mobilized in order to challenge the university’s investments in global white hegemony and settler colonial logics. As such, these organizers understood that the university was a key site for the (re)production of U.S. imperialism and served as fertile ground for the struggle against U.S. empire. They advocated for redistributive mechanisms that would ensure minoritized people’s material and psychological welfare both inside and outside the university.

Drawing on archival materials from the San Francisco College Strike Collection, this paper examines how BSU and TWLF posed a threat to both the political and libidinal economies of the university. As the university produced and regulated institutional desire in ways that naturalized its affective and material functions, the BSU and TWLF fought to reconfigure these attachments, desires, and forms of identification in ways that upended the university’s material and affective authority. I take seriously journalist Dikran Karagueuzian’s firsthand account of the strike when he writes in Blow It Up (1971), “Now, instead of the relatively dull days they [protesters] had previously spent on campus, they enjoyed the warmth and excitement of social commitment. A feeling of solidarity usually followed strike activities, and support of a common cause served as an introduction which carried its own recommendation. Many student observers were to comment on the increased sexual activity which accompanied the strike.” Here,⁠ Karagueuzian invites us to think about how radical students’ insurgent forms of affiliation and politicized intimacy disturbed the university’s regulation of social bonds and collective pleasure. If, as I argue, the university operates not only as a “knowledge factory” but also a fantasy factory for U.S. empire, this paper asserts that the BSU and TWLF’s insurgency disrupted both the university’s political and libidinal economies, exposing and refusing the normative attachments that discipline political desire within the university’s narrow boundaries. As universities today remain central sites of struggle, the BSU’s and TWLF’s vision offers urgent lessons for rethinking not just what or how knowledge is produced in the university, but also the ways in which political desire animates a significant apparatus of an aging U.S. empire.

Biographical Information

Aaron Allen is an assistant professor of American studies in the School of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies in the New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences. He specializes in post-civil rights racial politics and critical university studies. His current book project looks at how discourses of multiracialism and interracial intimacy have circulated in universities in California since the post-civil rights era.

Author

• Aaron Allen, Arizona State University