Social Movements, Institutions, and Multiethnic Literatures of the US

Jeffrey's Lawrence's "Mobilizing Literature" inspired an immediate and excited response, especially from scholars who ensconce themselves thoroughly in the often-forgotten literary histories of social movements. What has emerged in this broad discussion — and what is represented within this very cluster — is a consensus that Lawrence is largely correct in theorizing the institutional turn in literary studies, both in its affordances and its shortcomings.  

What's also clear, however, is that his diagnosis misses an important part of why institutions carry so much weight: because institutions are where social movements have often gone to survive. Especially given the continuous antagonism toward leftist social movements, institutions (universities, specific academic programs, publishing houses, paraliterary worlds, literary journals, and the such) have historically been spaces of intense debate regarding support for activism. This becomes particularly true in the fight within academic and literary institutions over the meaning (and practicability) of concepts such as multiculturalism, and also in figuring out the place of disciplines often grouped under the umbrella of cultural studies. In the wake of the Berkeley-centered Free Speech Movement, the worldwide social upheavals of 1968, and beyond, cultural studies has been central to the bridging of social movements and academic institutions; this is, crucially, why fascists attack those bridges, seeking to sever and thus control the links between universities and the communities in which they exist. 

At Post45, to speak a bit immodestly, we are a bit split on our assessments of how thoroughly, as Lawrence has put it, "the cultural materialist framework" and "the institutionalist framework" have, together, "set the agenda for critical debate."1 In my estimation, this direction of Lawrence's argument is convincing, especially in how he's diagnosing an academic narrowing of focus, a narrowing perhaps due to larger pressures of financialization and the emergence of conglomerate publishing. (It is important, of course, to recognize the power these instutitions have in shaping literature.) Has there been a homogenization of interpretive contexts, external pressures that shape texts, and literary history more broadly?  

I am also sympathetic to a central, unspoken claim in Lawrence's article. Lawrence is critiquing the unruly and unchecked whiteness of "the cultural materialist framework" and "the institutionalist framework." n+1 and, to be frank, Post45 have long been coded as institutions steeped in academic and para-academic whiteness. For that matter, postmodernism, as a field of inquiry and as an aesthetic tendency, has been linked to primarily white authors in the same way that modernism, decades earlier, was historicized and split off from the energetic, innovative literature being written in Harlem, San Juan, Chicago, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Managua, Buenos Aires, and Manila. (Consider, even, how modernismo, which emerged in Latin America decades prior to the temporal bookends of Anglophone and Francophone literary modernism, has been conceptually split off and unlinked from the European-focused modernisms that dominate canonical accounts of literary historical development.) 

Even as important work in Black studies and Asian American studies, in particular, has occurred in the pages of Post45's two venues, Post45: Peer Reviewed and Post45: Contemporaries, as well as in its regular graduate and faculty symposia, there remains a larger legacy and assumption of whiteness that can certainly be painful, and that often makes us defensive. Lawrence's critique gestures toward the significant, assumed whiteness at the heart of the institutional turn in literary studies.  

While Post45 has indeed been resisting its initially constitutive whiteness for a significant amount of time, it's a transformation still in process. What ought to come next, perhaps, is a refusal of this institutional whiteness. We have internationalized our cluster contributions at Contemporaries, and we have published significant clusters on Latinx poetry, John Keene, Tan Lin, Postcolonial Keywords, RuPaul's Drag Race, Samuel Delany, Hallyu, and the legacies of 9/11, among many others. This transformation was driven by one of the most important figures in Post45, as an institution: Sarah Chihaya. Chihaya's innovative work in Contemporaries — indeed, her work in establishing the shape that Contemporaries continues to take, especially during the years that Dan Sinykin, and then Michael Docherty, Gloria Fisk, Tyler Tennant, myself, and now Rachel Greenwald Smith have all edited (and co-edited) the venue — speaks precisely to the how Post45 has made space for vast methodological approaches that are not anchored in institutional analyses. 

This gets to another crucial point: the study of social movements has often been turned into a study of literature that has been incorporated into academic institutions and their multiculturalist frameworks. Perhaps as a way of addressing (or ignoring, actually) the systematically-maintained whiteness of the literary field, literary institutions and academic departments splice social movements into how they represent themselves to readers, students, and colleagues; this is an admirable impulse, while also being a domestication of social movements. The work of multiculturalism as an institutional(ist) strategy, as Stuelke notes in this cluster, has been roundly criticized by Jodi Melamed and Roderick Ferguson, among others, for its capitulation to the logic that sustains the very institutions that desire multicultural inclusion. My own book, Coalition Literature, traces how the multiethnic literary imagination moved from coalition to multiculturalism, and how the latter is so often a capitulation to the organizing principles of institutional power, an attachment of desired social transformation to institutional power. 

Yet, as Randy J. Ontiveiros observes about Latinx studies, "Because it emerged out of grassroots activism, the discipline of Latina/o studies has long been interested in social movements."2 Fields and disciplines that push against the homogeneity of institutional frameworks continue to center social movements. The problem may well be, perhaps as Lawrence would acknowledge (even if he does not go so far), that these social movements have faced various forms of institutional capture, largely coalescing around the university as a site of contestation and academic debate. The affordances of the academy long seemed clear: funding, publicity, a community of like-minded scholars, space for dialogue, and so on. In 2025, however, the academy's benefits are at significant risk, and social movements linked to institutions are clearly being targeted by reactionaries and the mediocre intellectual parasites that glom onto these fascists for clout. 

We can see an earlier response to the problems of institutional capture in Kenneth Warren's 2012 book, What Was African American Literature? The challenges of theorizing a discipline as a transhistorical institution becomes clear in Warren's periodizing argument, and one important answer we can glean from his work is to seek the constantly renewing force of literary movements that resist institutional capture: the Civil Rights movement, for example, as a decisively shaping literary force whose contours reside in political and aesthetic forms, rather than concretizing into an institutional form per se.  

Published in the same year as Warren's What Was African American Literature?, Cheryl Higashida's Black Internationalist Feminism: Women Writers of the Black Left, 1945-1995 takes up a crucial aspect of movement politics and aesthetics: leftism as a crucible of social movements, many of which are misapprehended as institutionally bound and obligated. Kate Baldwin's Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters between Black and Red, 1922-1963 (2002) turns to internationalism, rather than institutionalism, to understand multiethnic movements inflected through anticolonialism, socialism, and antiracism, and how significant this international turn was for Civil Rights era African American literature, in particular. Patricia Stuekle's 2021 book The Ruse of Repair: US Neoliberal Empire and the Turn from Critique is perhaps one of the most skeptical takes on institutional capture, particularly given the assimilation of political resistance's language into the self-justifying logic of academic disciplines, which crucially abandon the often dangerous stakes of resistance and refusal that characterize anticolonial and leftist social movements. 

In light of the work done by Warren, Higashida, Baldwin, Stuelke, and others — Steven S. Lee, Juana María Rodríguez, Irvin Hunt, Alan Wald, Mary Helen Washington, Margo Natalie Crawford, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and more — we can see why, perhaps, so many of the essays in this cluster point almost entirely to non-white and often multiracial social movements that decisively undo the whiteness of literary and artistic institutions. This cluster excitedly adds to the conversation by noting the many, many possibilities made visible by attending to social movements and the aesthetics that emerge from them. 

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Francisco E. Robles is Assistant Professor of English, Latino Studies, and Gender Studies at the University of Notre Dame, as well as the co-editor, with Rachel Greenwald Smith and Gloria Fisk, of Post45: Contemporaries. His book, Coalition Literature, was published in March 2025 by Stanford University Press, in its Post*45 Series.

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