Decolonizing Diversity The Transnational

DECOLONIZ ATION AND “DIVER SIT Y”
Decolonizing Diversity:
The Transnational Politics of
Minority Racial Difference
Anneeth Kaur Hundle
Postcolonial scholars have long explored universal-

ist schemes within traditions of liberal political philosophy and pointed to the
historical production of inequality that undergirds supposedly meritocratic and
utopian liberal democracies. More recently, these interventions have helped
inform the interdisciplinary field of what is being called “critical university stud-
ies,” which interrogates both the “corporatization” of academic institutions and
universal ideologies of equality and meritocracy in the modern university in
liberal and secular democratic societies.1 This essay follows Damani Partridge
and Matthew Chin’s call (Introduction to this issue) to “interrogate diversity”
and build on the work of other critical scholars of diversity and the university in
relation to broader discussions about the decolonization of the university in the
global South and transnational contexts. It analyzes the politics of minoritized
and racialized difference in the university through three case studies: antiracist
organizing work in the anthropology department at the University of Michigan
(U of M), Ann Arbor, from 2006 to 2008; an analysis of the postcolonial patri-
archal nativist university at Makerere University in Uganda from 2013 to 2015;
and the study of the relationship between neoliberalism and diversity in the “new
research university of the 21st century,” the University of California, Merced
(UCM), from 2015 to 2018. Through the theoretical interrogation of both “diver-
sity” and “decolonization” as key concepts in contemporary university life, this
essay (1) offers a vision for a transnational “decolonizing diversity” approach that
serves as public and political pedagogy within and outside the university, and (2)
1. For a discussion of the field of “critical university studies” see Williams 2012.
Public Culture 31:2 doi 10.1215/08992363-7286837

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Public Culture provides intellectual and methodological interventions in contemporary mani-
festations of racialized minority difference — namely, (neo)liberal multicultural
formations of diversity. This approach does not locate racial difference in the
“diverse bodies” and domesticated forms of inclusion in the university, but in
the logics of longue durée imperial formations (Stoler 2008) and coloniality that
reproduce racial difference, linking the politics of race and racial inequality in
liberal universities of the North to those in the global South.2 I suggest that diver-
sity initiatives sustain the status quo of racial, economic, and epistemological
injustices in the university — and that a provisional yet meaningful intellectual,
methodological, and pedagogical practice of “decolonizing diversity” works to
produce a long-term and sustained critique of such processes.
The three sites mentioned above have been institutional homes for me, first as
a graduate student, then as a research and teaching fellow, and finally as a tenure-
track professor. They provoke questions about the transnational itineraries of both
“diversity” and “decolonization” as key concepts in the project of interrogating
the limits and possibilities of multiracial, plural societies and both inclusion and
exclusion in the modern university. The case studies in this essay bring into relief
the challenges of diversity discourses and practices of diversity governance in the
US university in relation to the analytics of global coloniality and critical race
theories, theories and practices of decolonization, and comparative conversations
and debates on “decolonizing the university” in postcolonial nations. Indeed, as
I discuss further below, current critical scholarship on diversity has studied its
deployment in universities in liberal-democratic contexts, but few analyses have
situated this body of scholarship in relation to the politics of universities in the
postcolonies of the global South.
In the case of US universities, I explore the ways in which, despite its poten-
tial deauthorization by neoliberal markets or by intellectual and political elites, a
decolonizing diversity approach responds to the hegemony of diversity discourses
in our institutions of higher education. This approach entails three elements: (1)
a commitment to intellectual life (which undoes assumed binaries between intel-
lectuals and activists in the university, as well as their reifications); (2) the critical,
continual study of both diversity and decolonization as key concepts circulat-
ing transnationally and in contemporary university life (this includes the ongoing
2. Yarimar Bonilla and Jonathan Rosa also use “decolonizing diversity” (2017) in their discussion
of the exceptional discourses that emerged in relation to the election of President Donald Trump in
2016.
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study of imperial formations, (neo)colonial power, anticolonial thought, and theo- Decolonizing
ries and practices of decolonization in global and comparative perspective; and Diversity
(3) practical, everyday strategies that unsettle “diversity hegemony” and that are
based on ethnographic, feminist, and reflexive methodologies — including what
I describe as “diversity countertactical work” at the University of Michigan and
in the University of California (UC) system. Finally, an analysis of “decoloniza-
tion as Africanization” at Makerere University provides lessons for the ongoing
possibilities and limits of racial and ethnic pluralism and multiracialism in the
context of “decolonizing work” in the postcolonial university. In all three cases, I
interweave my analysis and apprehensions with my subject position as a racialized
Sikh feminist scholar born in the United States who has transnational intellectual
commitments as the daughter of post-1965 immigrant parents to the United States
from Punjab, India. Location by immigration history and citizenship in the United
States, experiences in both northern and southern universities, and commitments
to a transnational life — which include encounters with different interlocking geo-
political formations of subjectivization, minoritization, and racialization — are all
critical to my analysis of diversity projects, racialization and racism, nativism, and
exclusion in various universities.
This essay is very much inspired by and written for graduate students in the
African university and undergraduate students in the United States who have
intrepidly asked their professors to meet them halfway in the project of making
sense of their institutional worlds during important years in their life journeys.
They have compelled me to consider the thorny contradictions of their experi-
ences: what it means to be recognized as “diverse” or “minority” but also, in
other respects, to be invisible subjects in the university. Indeed, the transnational
decolonizing diversity approach I outline below also ultimately allows one to
explore whether there is such a thing as an ideal universal university, or whether
the universities of the South have taken on or can take on distinctive formations.
Diversity as Starting Point
For many first-generation scholars and students in US universities, diversity prac-

tices and discourses, institutionalized through “DEI,” or diversity, equity, and
inclusion initiatives, have become a normalized mode of engaging with the poli-
tics of minority or racial difference in the university. Diversity projects in the
United States can be likened to what Michael Omi and Howard Winant (1994)
describe as “racial projects” and are thus linked to racial formation processes
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Public Culture in the US context more broadly.3 In this sense, diversity schemes have become a
post – civil rights integrationist project since at least the 1980s and the New Right’s
attacks on legal affirmative action in public institutions. As Partridge and Chin
note in the introduction to this issue, the complexities of the 2003 Grutter v. Bol-
linger Supreme Court decision led public universities to shift away from legal
affirmative action, which worked to redress historical inequality, in favor of diver-
sity initiatives that were increasingly shaped and retooled in the context of broader
ideologies of liberal multiculturalism and neoliberal capitalist governance in this
period, a tendency that has continued through the so-called “postracial” Obama
era and into the Trump era.
Indeed, there is a relationship between the rise of neoliberal policies from the
1970s onward and the management of racial difference: neoliberal policies autho-
rize market logics and the role of the market in governance; they also derive from
Western liberal philosophies that emphasize individual freedoms in relation to
modern state formation and the depredations of unequal capitalist societies (they
can range from the defense of individual rights and freedoms and civil liberties
among the liberal Left to the promotion of individual obligations of self-reliance
and self-management among the Right). While liberal policies have historically
promoted activist strategies that seek to level the playing field between racial
groups by promoting legal affirmative action policies to redress historical racial
inequality in the United States, the Right, espousing meritocratic ideologies, have
promoted a vision of a color-blind, equal-opportunity society that requires indi-
vidual solutions to structural, social, and historical inequality. Indeed, research
has shown that postracial ideologies emanating from both the liberal Left and the
Right have shifted “away from affirmative action and other legal forms of broader
social accountability,” have left increasing social inequalities unaddressed, and
have ushered in new forms of racial inequality in even major public universities
(such as the University of Michigan and the University of California system),
where student demographics do not reflect the demographics of the state or nation
at large, and where Native, Black, and Latino/a students and faculty continue to be
disproportionately underrepresented or absent from the university.4
3. According to Omi and Winant (1994: 56), “racial projects” are linked to racial formation pro-
cesses and do the work of making links between structure and representation around race in society.
Thus a racial project “is an interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial dynamics, and an
effort to reorganize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines. Racial projects connect
what race means in a particular discursive practice and the ways in which both social structures and
everyday experiences are racially organized, based upon that meaning.”
4. Matthew Countryman estimates that since voters approved the Michigan Civil Rights Initia-
tive (MCHRI), or Proposal 2, in 2006, 1,102 Black, Native, and Latinx undergraduate students were
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In a recent essay, Bonilla and Rosa (2017: 202) note: Decolonizing
Diversity
Postracial ideology reduces an antiracism to a rejection of biological racial
inferiority rather than calling for a dismantling of the colonial institutions
and power relations through which race is (re)produced. This ideology
contributes to a paradoxical investment in racial difference so long as it is
institutionally domesticated as diversity and inclusion. . . . The presence of
racialized bodies in strategic, often highly visible, positions is presented
as evidence that racism has been eradicated and racial equality achieved,
even while underlying institutional structures remain fundamentally
unchanged. In this context, racial diversity becomes a highly valuable
commodity and a powerfully legitimizing institutional force.
In this essay, I agree with and expand on the arguments of Bonilla and Rosa
and others to suggest that diversity initiatives have, first, engendered either the
absence or tokenized presence of underrepresented minority faculty and students
in the academy (a problem of racial access); and, second, stultified the means by
which one can discuss minority racial difference and inequality, particularly as
a problem of global racial justice. Finally, I argue that diversity initiatives (or the
lack thereof) can be linked to epistemic (knowledge-based) exclusion in the uni-
versity, and vice versa: epistemic exclusion is often inherently associated with the
absence of underrepresented faculty in the university.
In my experiences studying, working, and teaching in liberal academic institu-
tions, I have often found that minoritized scholars (both transnational elites and
US-born academics) respond to the above processes by vacillating between two
kinds of positions: (1) a general skepticism of “the race industry” or “the perfor-
mance of diversity” and an unwillingness to intellectually engage in questions of
White supremacy, racial inequity, or racial injustices in the university; or, (2) what
I have increasingly observed and describe as hegemonic “women of color (WOC)”
or “persons of color (POC)” essentialisms — the uninterrogated homogenization
and essentialization of racialized people according to liberal identitarianist prac-
tices, or the politicization of identity in the liberal university. Racialized faculty
and students, as one student described to me, must “self-tokenize” themselves and
essentialize the multiplicities and complexities of their identities, subjectivities,
not able to enroll or chose not to enroll at the University of Michigan. Likewise, Black and Native
students continue to be underrepresented on University of California campuses, including Riverside
and Merced, after the passing of California Proposition 209, in 1996, which amended the state con-
stitution to prohibit state governmental institutions from considering race, sex, or ethnicity in areas
of public employment. For more discussion, see Countryman 2017 and Munsayac 2018.
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Public Culture histories, and experiences to make political claims in institutional spaces that
possess no other terms or intellectual formations by which to engage with minor-
ity difference.
On the other hand, self-identified White, White-passing, and transnational
elite scholars may subscribe to liberal ideologies of universal equality and meri-
tocracy in the university, benefitting from both White supremacy and colorblind
racial ideologies and practices (see also Ajantha Subramanian in this volume, for
a comparative analysis of caste difference and privilege in India). White women
in the United States, for instance, have disproportionately benefitted from legal
affirmative action policies as well as diversity initiatives in the university —
additional research has shown that they have also been at the forefront of con-
servative anti – affirmative action movements (Crenshaw 2007). White-identified
scholars might also replicate some of the problematic tendencies of dialectical
antiracist activist work in the university (i.e., engaging in liberal allyship practices)
by uncritically promoting hegemonic WOC or POC essentialisms. As I discuss
further below, much of the intellectual labor of a decolonizing diversity perspec-
tive works to destabilize polarized, essentialized positions on minority racial dif-
ference in the university to more effectively articulate a collective and cross-racial
radical project for racial, economic, and epistemological justice in the university.
This postlegal affirmative action transition to the management of racial or
minoritized difference in the university, as expressed through the normalization
of diversity initiatives, ushered in a new wave of critical scholarship on the study
of diversity in the university across many disciplines, and even in the mainstream
press. Critical scholarship on diversity, in line with broader critiques of (neo)lib-
eral multiculturalisms in Western secular, capitalist democracies, suggest that
diversity, like “minority,” operates as a technology of governance that one is dis-
ciplined into as one encounters public space and institutions. In effect, it becomes
a safe way to talk about minority or racialized difference, rather than the more
taboo and threatening topics of race and racialization processes and what that
might entail: more candid and discomfiting conversations about racial formation
and race projects; race and its relationship to other systems of inequality; global
and national White supremacy; and racism, inequality, and racial justice.5 In the
5. On the complexities of discussing race and racial difference in society broadly, Omi and
Winant (1994: 54) observe that “there is a continuous temptation to think of race as an essence,
as something fixed, concrete, objective. And there is also an opposite temptation: to imagine race
as a mere illusion, a purely ideological construct which some ideal non-racist social order would
eliminate. It is necessary to challenge both these positions, to disrupt and reframe the rigid and
bipolar manner in which they are posed and debated, and to transcend the presumably irreconcilable
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field of sociocultural anthropology, for example, this shift from discussions about Decolonizing
race, racism, and justice to diversity, equity, and inclusion finds a parallel, some Diversity
scholars have argued, in the way in which the concept of “culture” is mobilized
to replace debates on the making of minoritized difference, racial inequality, and
the dismantling of racial systems and other power relations.6 Critical scholarship
on diversity, on the other hand, explores diversity initiatives as (1) hegemonic, neo-
liberal tools that manage difference and (2) ideologies, discourses, and practices
as ontological and epistemological sites of inquiry.7 Significantly, critical studies
of diversity in liberal-democratic contexts can at times paradoxically shore up
the terms of liberal inclusion through American and/or Western exceptionalist
approaches that avoid exploring the relationship between race and colonial power
in a global perspective — ignoring the politics of racial difference in southern uni-
versities in their analyses.
Generally, despite this emerging critical scholarship on diversity, diversity dis-
courses and diversity initiatives are still hegemonic in the US public sphere, in
public institutions, and in the corporate private sector. Beyond its inherent rela-
tionship to neoliberal governance, diversity has become increasingly ubiquitous
through corporatization and commodification, and even a profitable project for
academics in what has been described as “the neoliberal university” — these fac-
ulty and administrators might be identified with the liberal Left and yet gain
mobility and social capital in the university through their engagements with diver-
sity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. This is even more significant in our contem-
porary moment. At the time of writing, in 2017, the US academy is situated within
a political landscape that has shifted from liberal forms of racism and exclusion
relationship between them.” They also suggest that “a more effective starting point is the recognition
that despite its uncertainty and contradictions, the concept of race continues to play a fundamental
role in structuring and representing the social world. The task for theory is to explain this situation. It
is to avoid both the utopian framework which sees race as an illusion we can somehow ‘get beyond,’
and also the essentialist formulation which sees race as something objective and fixed, a biological
datum. Thus we should think of race as an element of social structure rather than as an irregularity
within it; we should see race as a dimension of human representation rather than an illusion. These
perspectives inform the theoretical approach we call racial formation” (55).
6. See, e.g., Baker 1998, Allen and Jobson 2016, and Pierre 2012.
7. See, e.g., Mohanty 2003, for an earlier discussion of “the race industry” in universities; Fer-
guson 2012, for a discussion of the institutionalization of minority difference through the “interdis-
ciplines”; Ahmed (2012, 2017), for discussions of “diversity work” and “the work of diversity” in
the university; Urciuoli 2016, for an analysis of the “neoliberalization” of diversity among college
students; and Berry 2015, on the comparative sociological study of diversity in the university, corpo-
rate, and not-for-profit sectors.
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Public Culture to ones with overtly White supremacist, nationalist, and Christian overtones. In
the post-Obama era, the silence of political leaders and the apparent weakening
of the liberal Left in mainstream politics have encouraged a resurgence of White
American nationalisms, resulting in highly visible public displays of racism, hate
crimes, and anti-immigrant and antiminority sentiment. There is an increase in
everyday instances of racist violence, ideologies and policies of mass containment
and exclusion, rising tensions in workplaces (even corporate ones, which should be
the ultimate site of neoliberal inclusion for minority groups), uncertainty regard-
ing the status of immigrants (in the wake of the repeal of Deferred Action for
Childhood Arrivals [DACA], travel bans affecting Muslim-majority countries,
and ongoing mass detentions and deportations), and a paralyzing inability to pro-
tect visibly racialized groups in liberal democracies (here I include the UK and
Canadian contexts as well). Most recently, the 2013 and 2016 Fisher v. University
of Texas (Fisher I and II) Supreme Court cases, Donald Trump’s rescinding of
Barack Obama’s progressive guidelines on the use of diversity policies in college
admissions, and Supreme Court Judge Anthony Kennedy’s retirement indicate the
reactionary Right’s interests in continuing to roll back race-based admissions and
hiring, placing legal race-based preferences and diversity, equity, and inclusion
initiatives at risk.8
Thus now more than ever, the state’s, and by extension the university’s, allegiance
to (neo)liberal values of inclusion and diversity, problematic as they are, is deeply
in question. A critical decolonizing diversity perspective explicitly challenges the
institutionalization of diversity discourses and practices that often capture and
reproduce the tendencies of the late (neo)liberal capitalist state and its proliferat-
ing liberal multicultural technologies. It examines how the institutionalization of
diversity and its attendant “diversity discourses” (and these discourses are not the
same everywhere!), diversity initiatives, and the tokenized appearance of pheno-
typical diversity among faculty and students often work to sustain the status quo,
reproducing racial inequality and other kinds of exclusions, including epistemic
ones, in institutions. This intellectual approach, through lived experience and eth-
nographic analysis, approaches the concept of diversity as a traveling signifier
with material, everyday implications. It is a scholarly project that explores diver-
sity as an “assemblage” or constellation of ideologies, discourses, and practices —
a cluster that masks more than it reveals.9 Thus unlike the polarized, often anti-
8. See Green, Apuzzo, and Brenner 2018; Gayle 2018.

9. Here I borrow the concept of “assemblage” from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987)
to emphasize social complexity in relation to diversity in social structure, representation, ideology,
discourse, and practice via its connectivity, fluidity, and multiple functions in institutional space.
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intellectual and reactionary responses to racial and minoritized difference in the Decolonizing
academy discussed above, this project asks us to strategically and creatively reap- Diversity
propriate (when and only if necessary!), unsettle, resituate, and potentially even
discard “diversity” to unearth political possibilities that open to new futures. In
the Trump era, when racialized communities and their intellectual work are under
attack in the university, perhaps this is an indispensable moment to not only revisit
conversations on diversity, inclusion, and representation at our institutions, but to
revisit them with the aim of reworking the norms and normalization of diversity
to explore other possibilities of racial, economic, and epistemological inclusion.
I use the phrase “diversity as starting point” to suggest that, for first-generation
faculty and students of color in the United States, their formation in the national
educational system, including its universities, involves processes of liberal citizen-
subject making in relation to late neoliberal capitalist/liberal multicultural gover-
nance. These processes entail context-specific and commodified forms of national,
community, minority, and identity making. They often result in identity-based
claims in relation to the hegemonic language of diversity in the university. Minori-
tized student-subjects, for example, are socialized to produce diversity statements
and pressed to essentialize their individual and community experiences from
junior high through the university or college experience and beyond, often to jus-
tify their presence in the university. Many students at UCM have discussed their
feelings of discomfort and irritation about these practices with me — indeed, stu-
dents are reflexive about how they are obliged to market, commodify, and brand
themselves into “diverse” citizen-subjects in the university to attain educational
access and resources. Education, here, is less a universal right than a revered
prestige commodity that requires both labor and emotional extraction to enter the
fold of a fictive inclusive universal humanity.
Based on my experiences learning and working in United States universities,
some transnational elites are less comfortable with critically engaging with diver-
sity discourses and diversity in the university. (And likewise, US-based scholars
often do not possess the analytical language or concepts to contend with racialized
difference in other national or global contexts.) In the United States, for example,
elites in the humanities can benefit from perpetuating colorblind epistemologies;
they may also be ill-equipped to engage with the challenge of understanding US-
specific liberal citizen-subject formation among college students. They often avoid
providing classroom pedagogies or intellectual tools to American students that
unearth alternative means of claim making in the university. In fact, more recently,
and in the context of increasing campus protests and movements by minoritized
students, university elites (including administration and faculty) demean student
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Public Culture claims and protest movements, often dismissing them as anti-intellectual or “lib-
eral” (in a reductive, pejorative sense — these strategies, unfortunately, are dan-
gerously in line with the Far Right; see also Ferguson 2017 on the neoliberal
demeaning of student protest movements). Elite dismissals can occur without
recourse to productive engagement with students or critical intellectual interven-
tions in the classroom and beyond in local communities, suggesting a retreat from
political critique in both the US university and the public sphere. Indeed, these
provisional observations, in tandem with the broader neoliberal transformation of
higher education, resonate with my own biography as a first-generation intellec-
tual in the United States academy with a postcolonial orientation and transnational
research and teaching commitments. How might we redress these intellectual and
pedagogical gaps through more effective transnational analyses of the politics of
minority racialized difference?
Decolonizing Diversity: Outlining an Approach
Recently, the concept of “decolonization,” with its transnational circulation, has

achieved a buzzword status in social justice – oriented communities and organiza-
tions, on college campuses and among campus activists, in academia and popu-
lar media. Scholars and commentators have warned that like other key terms of
sociopolitical analysis, decolonization risks becoming reified and increasingly
emptied of meaning, a metaphor abstracted from the intellectual and program-
matic work linked to the history of the political decolonization of indigenous
territories and lands, and increasingly co- opted by neoliberal market logics
(see Tuck and Yang 2012; Mbembe 2016). By using the phrase “decolonizing
diversity,” I stress the importance of moving away from reactionary positions
untethered from intellectual genealogies, historical processes, or complex forma-
tions of power and subjectivity. Instead I advocate “decolonizing diversity” as a
political/public pedagogy, methodology, and intellectual analysis derived from
careful engagement with global anticolonial thought and its histories, theories,
and practices of decolonization that are based on five interlinked realms of the
political, economic, cultural, social, and intellectual. Decolonization, in this more
expansive sense, means “the ongoing undoing of colonization” — historically by
anticolonial, nationalist political leaders, activists, and intellectuals and contem-
poraneously by communities and intellectuals in settler colonial contexts.
Theories and practices of decolonization are thus part of a much larger archive
of anticolonial thought: the study of settler and/or nonsettler colonial projects
and the colony itself, studies of colonial mind-sets and attitudes fostered in native
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people, and studies of the failures and limitations of anticolonial nationalist proj- Decolonizing
ects. Moreover, this expansive notion of “decolonization” as the ongoing undoing Diversity
of colonialism must also seriously engage with the intellectual histories and gene-
alogies, geopolitics, and circulation of the earlier materialist, Marxist anticolonial
nationalist approaches, including Black and Caribbean liberation thought and the
theory of dependency in political economy (Césaire 2001; Williams 1994; James
1989; Fanon [1969] 2005; Rodney 2011); postcolonial criticism and its focus on
the discursive, material, and psychic mechanisms that kept the colonial in place
(Said 1979; Spivak 1986; Bhaba 1994); and the more recent “decolonial” agenda
emerging from the Latin American context that is concerned with the making of
Western modernity, the “coloniality of power,” and the long history of anticolonial
thought in the Americas (Mignolo 2007; Quijano 2000). More recent circula-
tions of decolonial thought in the US academy build on the insights of Black and
Chicana feminisms, Afro and indigenous feminist thought, indigenous liberation
struggles in the Americas, and indigenous perspectives on Palestine (see Wynter
2012; Anzaldúa 2012; Lugones 2003; Pérez 1999; Barker 2017). Decolonizing
diversity entails an understanding of decolonizing methodologies in relation to
research, knowledge production, and social criticism (see Tuhiwai Smith 2012;
Sandoval 2000). Finally, this approach requires knowledge of recent conversa-
tions surrounding “decolonizing the university” in the global South that examine
the political, economic, and epistemic transformation of the university (Mbembe
2015; Pillay 2015).
By outlining these various trajectories of anticolonial thought and the pos-
sibilities of thinking about decolonization in the expansive sense, I suggest that
the decolonizing diversity approach requires the continual and critical study of
“diversity” and “decolonization” as historically laden concepts embedded within
specific local and geopolitical contexts. The intellectual analysis of diversity and
decolonization is married with some provisional, context-specific reconstructive
articulation in university struggles. The provisional reconstruction of complex the-
ories and ideas into political claims is important and necessary, despite the ways
in which postcolonial political elites may co-opt the ideology of decolonization to
antidemocratic ends, or even the ways in which university elites may deauthorize
student and community activists’ novel attempts to articulate decolonization dis-
courses and practices. Linking the praxis of deconstruction and reconstruction in
the decolonizing diversity approach suggests there are parallel and simultaneous
possibilities of both rejecting anti-intellectualism and claiming authority in the
articulation of political claims.
Some ways in which I have practiced the decolonizing diversity approach in
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Public Culture both the US and in Uganda is to ask students to clearly specify what they mean by
their various uses of “decolonial” or “decolonization” in their political praxis, sug-
gest readings and help facilitate reading groups to ground their activist practices,
and urge them to commit equal time to intellectual study and activist practice. As
a result of this process, several of my students have written and published analyti-
cal pieces on their social justice work in the university. This approach allows us
to advance a project of institutional transformation — politically, economically,
pedagogically, and epistemically — such that the purpose of the university is con-
tinually interrogated and assessed, that there is concrete experimentation with
problems of community,10 plurality, and “difference,” and that the experiences of
historically marginalized and minoritized people are constitutive and central to
the knowledge formations of the university. Indeed, I often remind my students
that the modern university has been advanced on imperialist and settler colonialist
projects, and thus it is always a shifting site of power even with and despite the
predominance of White access to universities and the inclusion of tokenized racial
subjects into its fold. Indeed, these forms of engagement allowed us to more radi-
cally align intellectual and political struggles in the university in a transnational
context that bridges the global North and South divide, even within the US univer-
sity. The decolonizing diversity approach requires a commitment to intellectual
life and divestment from American exceptionalism and parochialism by professors
and students as they work together to achieve common goals. Importantly, the
decolonizing diversity approach is never prescriptive but always subject to context,
intellectual examination, and continual critique in relation to shifting global and
local terrains of power.
A decolonizing diversity approach is also a methodology that enables practical,
everyday interventions in the liberal university. It visibilizes and denaturalizes
what I describe as the “liberal tactical work” that is embodied and deployed in
the concept of “diversity.” Liberalism, in its shorthand form here, is not used in its
everyday sense in the US public sphere, but refers to the complex terrain of intel-
lectual thought that emerged from Western European political philosophies and
settler colonial civilizational projects.11 For instance, a reading of John Locke’s
10. Distinguishing this broader sense of community from its normative usage in the liberal uni-
versity is essential. For example, I move away from the utopian and liberal multicultural invocations
of “principles of community” in the University of California system and advocate their reappropria-
tion and reshaping by marginalized student communities. For the UC Principles of Community, see
https://www.ucop.edu/local-human-resources/op-life/principles-of-community.html.
11. See Lowe 2015 for an important and recent discussion of the relationships between Western
liberalism, imperial trade, colonialism, and slavery.
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An Essay Concerning Human Understanding ([1689] 1998) provides evidence for Decolonizing
the historical accumulation, the weighty “imperial debris” (Stoler 2008, 2013), Diversity
of racial inequalities and structures of (in)tolerance for the other within political
society and in the modern US university. Thus contemporary diversity projects are
not only constituted through assemblages of contemporary (neo)liberal multicul-
turalisms but can be disaggregated into longue durée accretions of concepts and
ideas that continue to be foundational to the neocolonial apparatus of the modern
university. By visibilizing the historical weight of diversity projects, we can begin
to ask new questions. For instance, what would it mean to create universities in
which marginalized students are not merely tolerated, or assimilated within (neo)
liberal multiculturalisms and nationalist citizen-subject – making projects, but a
focal point for the making of a new university?
Sara Ahmed’s critical scholarship on diversity (2012, 2017) provides important
methodologies to denaturalize the institutionalization of diversity and the extrac-
tion of diversity labor in liberal universities. She uses the term diversity work, she
explains, “in two related senses: first, diversity work is the work we do when we
are attempting to transform an institution, and second, diversity work is the work
we do when we do not quite inhabit an institution” (2017: 91). Diversity work is
ultimately about tracing the work of diversity and what diversity actually does in
practice. Playing with Ahmed’s discussion of the job description of diversity work
as a “brick wall” in institutions (2017: 135), we learn about power and its deploy-
ment as we are confronted with diversity as a form of oppression and repression.
Thus, building on Ahmed’s notion of diversity work in universities in liberal-
democratic nation-states, I suggest that decolonizing diversity is about tracing the
key terms and concepts of minority difference in transnational contexts. More-
over, the decolonizing diversity approach foregrounds an analysis of racial dif-
ference in relation to imperial formations and global coloniality. It engages with
the experiences of postcolonial institutions in the global South and draws from
these experiences to enhance our interrogations of diversity projects and diversity
work in universities in the North. It is about crafting theory from below while we
inhabit institutions: it is about transforming institutions but also about producing
knowledge about them as we attempt to make them more habitable.
The practical aims of a decolonizing diversity approach work to denaturalize
the liberal tactical work of diversity in the university. Examples of this liberal tac-
tical work might be found in the ways that diversity can suddenly appear as noun
or adjective formations (the oft-repeated statements: “We have diversity,” “I enjoy
working with diverse students,” “You are a diverse person”). One might critically
interrogate “DEI” initiatives at the faculty, student, and staff level. One might
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Public Culture observe and reflect on, with intellectual curiosity, the affective forms of discom-
fort that racialized others encounter when they are confronted with diversity in
everyday speech, in faculty meetings, in fleeting encounters with colleagues and
students, and in administrative responses to racist incidents and student-led cam-
pus protests. Emotional responses preclude goodwill for, trust in, or loyalty to the
benevolent university. There is an explicit link between diversity discourses and
Euro-American imperialist and settler-colonial projects of deracination, domesti-
cation, and assimilation — emotions are one essential source for materializing the
subtle erasures of racialized and other forms of exclusion in the university. Finally,
this approach is related to and builds on the interrelated ideas of diversity work
and the work of diversity (Ahmed 2017).
The decolonizing diversity approach deploys a countertactics to liberal tacti-
cal work by privileging the historical, social, and political construction of diver-
sity — by utilizing the methodology of genealogy outlined by Michel Foucault
(1982) and undertaking a “history of the present” of our institutions. This diver-
sity countertactical work involves visibilizing the processes that are masked in
the sedimentation, naturalization, and reification of diversity concepts. Following
Ahmed’s methodology in her ethnographic work on diversity initiatives (2012,
2017), one might explore the relative mobility and immobility of diversity and the
associated technologies that manage and domesticate minority racialized differ-
ence. What kinds of diversity concepts have mobility, and why? Where do they
travel, and how? Which concepts associated with racial or minority difference in
general are stopped from traveling? Recently, for example, I observed the termina-
tion of a traveling modality of diversity in a faculty meeting. When some faculty
suggested the need for more diversity on the faculty (faculty from underrepre-
sented racial communities), other faculty members argued that “there can be no
single paradigm for diversity” and “diversity must be intellectual diversity.” This
moment revealed the ways in which diversity itself is subject to politicization/
political manipulation as it breaks down into its component parts: “faculty diver-
sity” versus “intellectual diversity” (read: minority racialized scholars ostensibly
interpreted as “affirmative action hires” versus unmarked White scholars who
have the capacity to bring intellectual innovation to the department).
The decolonizing diversity approach offers practical ways to anticipate, disrupt
and intervene within these mundane institutional moments. A recent conversation
with the vice provost for Faculty Affairs at UCM on the topic of faculty and stu-
dent welfare in the wake of the 2016 US presidential election exemplifies diversity
countertactical work. In our meeting, I opted to use the phrase minoritized faculty
instead of minority faculty. The vice provost seemed puzzled and thrown by this
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use of minoritization, a use that established an important institutional process of Decolonizing
becoming minority. This use of minoritization within a site of White hegemonic Diversity
power relations alerts us that “minority” is never a fixed or stable category but
continuously made and remade in the context of US racial formation processes. In
this case, the administrator asked me to explain what minoritization meant, which
I gladly did. He was surprised and made notes on his clipboard as we talked. I
explained that minoritization alluded to the making of minority difference in the
university and bypassed the normative workings of identity politics in the univer-
sity. In this moment, we experienced a collective breach in the everyday workings
of liberal multicultural processes. Here, everyday campus faculty diversity work
became an intellectual process — one that reworked reifications and uninterro-
gated categories of “minority” in an institution where minority is often a form of
commoditized capital.
In general, the decolonizing diversity approach is based on the assumption that
the effort to transform the university is always related to everyday existence in the
university, and existence in the university is connected to needing to transform
the university. Thus I describe all the universities in this essay as both “homes
and non-homes.” They are often non-homes for racialized and minoritized men,
non-Christian religious others, women, and queer subjects — especially those who
struggle with dispossession from higher education or the constraints and oppres-
sions involved in living an intellectual life because of sedimented histories of slav-
ery, colonial capitalism, state violence, and/or nationalist, communal and domestic
or family hetero-patriarchies. Universities are not always welcome, inclusionary
spaces for oppressed people, as recent American and South African student pro-
tests reveal (Ferguson 2017). Nor are universities always inclusive of the kinds of
knowledge that certain bodies and minds will produce — the cultures, languages,
epistemologies, or histories that might be brought to bear in the seminar rooms
of universities, for example. Discomfort, pain, and tension, as they arise in both
banal and precipitous ways, are evidence of transformation in the university.
Yet the university can also be a home for marginalized beings and bodies: a
sanctuary that allows for intellectual liberation, recovery and healing, self and
subject making. It engenders new forms of community and family for dispos-
sessed intellectuals. We push the limits of the borders, walls, and ceilings that
we are confronted with as we remake and fashion universities as homes — often
needing to travel to new havens in the process, becoming itinerant intellectuals.
In addition to borders, gates, brick walls, or ceilings, we can imagine universi-
ties as having corridors, windows, and hallways that allow for certain kinds of
mobility — where, why, and how does that mobility arise, and does it require the
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Public Culture language of diversity? What are the invisible, illegible, and hidden spaces and ter-
rains of the university where plurality and difference can flourish with abandon
and joy?
Decolonizing diversity draws on the trajectories and contexts of different kinds
of subjects; it is an homage to the particular — particulars that serve new univer-
sals. Faculty and students might approach decolonizing diversity through what I
describe as a transnational and diasporic “toolkit for institutional survival.” This
toolkit is constituted by the archives of anticolonial thought and critical diversity
studies discussed above, as well as the historical, cultural, political, and sacred
“libraries” that inform one’s location in society. In doing so, one valorizes par-
ticularities in relation to the simultaneous universalizing and identitarian tenden-
cies of the liberal secular university. The decolonizing diversity approach draws
on ethnographic methodologies such as participant observation and reflexivity.
It builds on feminist epistemologies and methodologies to critically engage with
diversity projects, produce knowledge on institutions, and transform institutions.
It can privilege subjective and affective knowledges. It draws on women of color,
postcolonial, transnational, intersectional feminist and queer of color perspectives
on the university — working from an archive of “counter-institutional knowledge”
that challenges the boundaries and limits of the university. Indeed, decolonizing
diversity is a feminist praxis, following Paulo Freire’s (2000: 87) concept and
notion of praxis as “the intersection of reflection, theory, and practice.” It entails
conscientization. Decolonizing diversity is related to the production and theoriza-
tion of knowledge on the university through lived experience, which can then be
remobilized to make universities habitable. Finally, I suggest that the decoloniza-
tion of diversity approach can be assembled from the particular to retool the more
universal mobilizations of diversity. Critical theories and approaches to decoloniz-
ing diversity derive from our experiences in northern and southern university con-
texts and reshape our normative understandings of the universal university — thus
reimagining its possibilities.
Diversity as Strategy? U of M and the Anthropology Diversity Initiative (ADI)
In 2006, the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative (MCHRI), or Proposition 2 (“Prop

2”) became legal in the state of Michigan. It ended all race-based preferences for
admissions in public education and for hiring and contracting in public employ-
ment. The MCHRI was later appealed and overturned, but the Supreme Court
upheld it in 2014. Indeed, MCHRI occurred in the context of the broader right-
ward shift in the American public sphere in which the conservative Right has
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overturned civil rights era – based racial justice work — despite the election of Decolonizing
Obama in 2008. I was a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology Diversity
at the University of Michigan during this time and observed this political trans-
formation surrounding race-based admissions at the undergraduate and graduate
level. I was also de facto engaging in diversity work and understanding the work
of diversity.
The local and state-level campaigns for Prop 2 energized many graduate stu-
dents in the anthropology department to organize politically around the end of
affirmative action and the challenge of diversity at the University of Michigan
(see Hundle 2010 for a more detailed analysis). Indeed, it was really the “loud
silence” surrounding the end of affirmative action and its possible effects on the
department that compelled graduate students to organize the Anthropology Diver-
sity Initiative (ADI). Our efforts began informally, when twenty-five students of
different racial/ethnic, cultural, and class backgrounds who were broadly inter-
ested in problems of diversity, race, and representation began to hold meetings
after hours in the unlocked, empty seminar rooms of the department. Many of
us were already involved in the graduate employees’ union or in other activist
struggles on campus. While informal, one-on-one conversations about racial and
minority difference, research, theory, and epistemology were always in progress
in the discipline and program, through ADI we began to connect these issues to
problems of structural inequality in the department. We focused on the lack of
working-class, immigrant, and Black students in the department, or alternatively,
their lack of access to anthropology. The question became: Who was missing in
our department, and why were they missing? Where were they going? Why, for
example, were American Cultures and Women Studies more welcoming depart-
mental homes to these students?
Together we worked on several initiatives to address the recruitment, retention,
and matriculation of underrepresented groups in the department. These activities
included organizing departmental meetings, researching inequities in the depart-
ment, consciousness-raising events, and one-to-one conversations about our con-
cerns with faculty, staff, and other individuals involved in admissions. Another
initiative involved collecting and publishing anonymous and confidential testimo-
nials in a newsletter that was distributed to faculty and graduate students (here, we
drew on the feminist tradition of testimonio in anthropology — the use of feminist
and ethnographic textual play that enacted a form of resistance). After one espe-
cially exuberant meeting, we circulated and distributed photocopied testimonies
with relish and humor throughout the hallways, entranceways, and public meeting
areas of the department. We also strategically posted them on bathroom doors and
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Public Culture slid them under seminar rooms. Indeed, as I reflect on our strategies as graduate
students at that time, I recognize the combined elements of intellectual analysis,
direct action and organizing, protest, and play that were involved in demands for
racial justice and diversity work in the department. Our after-hours meetings cre-
ated kinship, community, and new solidarities as we re-claimed both material and
epistemological place in the department.
We also confronted complicated landscapes of power, practical quandaries,
and collective worries. First, there was the debate on the merits and drawbacks
of utilizing diversity in the name of our group. We were critical of diversity — we
understood that it was a depoliticizing, repressive tool of management. But we
also agreed that diversity discourse would allow us to bridge the divide between
bottom-up graduate student claims and top-down administrative directives in the
department and in the university. In retrospect, I can say our challenge was trying
to articulate claims for racial justice and have discussions about race and racializa-
tion during what was rapidly becoming the postracial moment — a fate effectively
sealed by the election of President Obama in 2008. At that time, diversity was a
concept and discourse that had mobility in both our department and the wider
university. It was a safe symbol that contended with difference covertly and neatly.
Discussing racism and exclusion overtly was threatening and created tension. I can
still vividly recall the impressions of tension and fear in my body when I used the
words minority, race, or racism in meetings with authority figures.
The creation of solidarities along racialized and other lines of difference was
a source of conflict in our activist practices. As meetings progressed, anthro-
pologists of color felt that when they expressed their experiences of exclusion or
engaged in “race talk,” some White-identified anthropologists felt threatened and
excluded. Over time, the attendance of White anthropologists in ADI decreased,
and mostly racialized anthropologists of color bore the disproportionate burden
of formulating a response to the Prop 2 crisis and communicating concerns to
faculty and administration. While ADI ultimately engendered cross-racial soli-
darities among variously racialized individuals, including some White allies, our
work also required lessons in the practice of mobilizing identity. Resisting “racial
silencing” in the run-up to the Obama era by reinforcing and articulating racial
categories could involve the politicization of racial identities — these could quickly
devolve into problematic identity and oppressor/victim essentialisms; the elision
of the intersections of race, class, and gender; or exclusionary and self-serving
political claims.
In Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line, Paul
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Gilroy (2001: 105) explores the effects of racialized identity claims, or what he Decolonizing
calls “race-talk” or “race-ology,” arguing that identity Diversity
ceases to be an ongoing process of self-making and social interaction. It

becomes instead a thing to be possessed and displayed. It is a silent sign
that closes down the possibility of communication across the gulf between
one heavily defended island of particularity and its equally well-fortified
neighbors, between one national encampment and others. When identity
refers to an indelible mark or code somehow written onto the bodies of its
carriers, otherness can only be a threat.
Gilroy’s critique of essentialist identity politics and the “us vs. them” attitudes
that can impede solidarity politics is crucial. Indeed, the debate on racial justice
work and the problematic topic of what has been defined as “identity politics” is
ongoing in liberal Left and activist circles — and has reemerged in the national
public sphere with the resurgence of the Far Right in 2016. Beyond the rather
slapdash recourse to the phrase identity politics, the debates tend to fragment
along different axes. Some have noted that an “unmarked” White identity poli-
tics is always at play and is now becoming visibilized (see Partridge and Chin,
introduction to this issue). On the whole, antiracist leftist commentators argue
that race-based concerns become epiphenomenal to class struggles in the main-
stream US liberal Left and in academia (see Omi and Winant 1994). Others have
rightly pointed out that race-based justice work is often conducted on the basis of
elite class privileges. Indeed, some contend that racialized identity, or “identity
politics,” is a product of the ascendancy of neoliberalism in the US public sphere,
and thus “identity politics is class politics, or the left-wing of neoliberalism” (see
Reed 2009). In the wake of the 2016 election, social media commentators have
also suggested that the positing of a critique of identity politics by radical intel-
lectuals has worked, alongside the Right, to regressively undermine a theory of
racial capitalism and a truly intersectional approach to social justice and anticapi-
talist struggle, ultimately reinforcing complicities with White supremacy, neolib-
eralism, and heteropatriarchy. Indeed, I myself have often observed the ways in
which the appropriation of critiques of identitarianism, or identity politics, have
worked to foreclose discussions of race, racialization, and antiracism and under-
mined the grounds for racial justice work in relation to other axes of oppression —
ideologically, materially, and institutionally.
In my own anticapitalist, feminist, and antiracist praxis, I am influenced by
the work of Judith Butler (2011) and Roderick Ferguson (2003), who argue that
identity-based political claims are necessary for survival and coalition-building
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Public Culture but also require a persistent disidentification (see also the work of José Esteban
Muñoz 1999). (In another formulation, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak [(1985) 1996:
204] has referred to these political claims as “strategic essentialism.”) Identity,
prone to commodification by both the state and the market, effectively obliges
subscription to the very liberal principles of universal equality that are in ques-
tion. ADI required acknowledging the pitfalls of identity claims while working
through the ways in which identity and experience could be sources of radical and
dissenting knowledges as well as the basis for progressive mobilization. This more
robust confrontation with both diversity and identity, coupled with study groups
and close readings, may have helped us to better attend to the practice and process
of coalition building in relation to antiracist work. I suspect that much of this intel-
lectual work still needs to be done in our current political moment.
ADI required a “learning by doing” process, which is what diversity work
and ethnographic field research are all about. We were learning how to navigate
repressive norms and cultures of professionalism, specialization, and hierarchy
in academia that were often at odds with our work to disrupt majoritarian and
diversity hegemony and address race in anthropology. The department, as an insti-
tution, sought to discipline anthropologists in ADI, while the very same anthro-
pologists sought to institutionalize the aims of ADI within the departmental walls.
We tacked between using diversity strategically and recognizing its ambivalent
meanings and depoliticizing effects. We argued for the recruitment of “minor-
ity” students in departments while realizing that the presence of marked bodies,
no matter how few, led to tokenization and unrestrained claims of diversity in
institutions. We tried to talk about “race,” while vacillating between denounc-
ing its reality and arguing for its real social consequences. Indeed, this last issue
was especially vexing, as anthropology is a discipline that both denies biological
race and addresses race as a social construction in all subfields, while it tends to
eschew integrating postcolonial and transnational perspectives on race and power,
global and colonial history, or the study of racialization and race-making projects
in ethnographic studies.
Notwithstanding all these challenges, ADI allowed us to conceptualize the
department and the field as continuous spaces of critical inquiry. Bringing the
department into the ethnographic frame allowed us to imagine the possibili-
ties of a discipline that not only thought about race as a social construction but
understood the anti-antiracist work of social constructionism, particularly when
it obstructed conversations about the structural realities, lived experience, and
materiality of racial distinctions. ADI was an attempt to establish a certain reality
that race and anthropology mattered, in terms of departmental, community, and
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societal commitment. Claiming space to do diversity work, however challenging, Decolonizing
wrecked brick walls and created new passageways that led in directions different Diversity
from those of the institutionally bound order. They functioned to revitalize that
order with a creative vision for a democratic and decolonized future in which
anthropology had an important role.
Finally, although we did not use the language of decolonization in relation to
diversity, we recognized the limitations of the language of diversity in all aspects
of our work, both its frustrating confines and its exciting prospects, all within the
constraints of our departmental conditions.
Decolonization Work: The Postcolonial Nativist University
From 2013 to 2015 I was a member of the teaching faculty at Makerere Uni-
versity in Kampala, Uganda, as a research associate at the Makerere Institute
of Social Research (MISR).12 Makerere University allows us to consider the tra-
jectories of the modern, Euro-centric, Western university as it was exported to
the colonies under British imperialist control. The British colonial government
established Makerere College in 1922 as a small technical training school that
served the needs of the developing colony and of economic extraction to the
metropole. In 1950, Makerere was “refounded” as a university-level institution
that granted degrees from the University of London, ensuring a British influence
over the university in the context of anticolonial agitation (Sicherman 2008). In
1963, after independence, it was reestablished yet again, as the University of East
Africa, becoming an autonomous national university, Makerere University, in
1970 (Sicherman 2008). Indeed, the university underwent a multipronged “indi-
genization” or “Africanization” process to become an “African university” that
would educate sovereign Ugandan citizens and “build for the future” of the nation
(“build for the future” is Makerere University’s motto).
Without delving into the complex history of postindependence nation-state-
building or the turbulent decades of the 1970s and 1980s in Uganda, I briefly note
that the Ugandan experience epitomized an extreme manifestation of “decolo-
nization as Africanization,” which, coupled with the 1971 military coup by Idi
12. MISR, when it was still known as EAISR (the East African Institute of Social Research), was
an important site for British social anthropology. Well-known British social anthropologists such as
Audrey Richards and Aidan Southall, as well as Ugandan native anthropologists, conducted impor-
tant studies of “tribes” and communities in the colonial context. Since 2012 it has been through a pro-
cess of transformation under the intellectual leadership of the current director, Professor Mahmood
Mamdani, a Ugandan academic of South Asian descent who is also based at Columbia University.
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Public Culture Amin, included the mass expulsions of populations deemed foreigner and other,
including remaining British settlers and the Israeli, Kenyan Luo, and Asian com-
munities. Decolonization as Africanization is a phrase I use to indicate one of the
many routes that the project of decolonization and forming a new polity could
have taken. Rather than developing an inclusive, multiracial, and multiethnic pol-
ity based on the redistribution of accumulated racial and economic privileges,
new national leaders “Africanized” the economy, government, and institutions
by establishing new Black African nativist norms in which citizenship was exclu-
sively defined by indigenous Ugandan identity, ultimately creating a new class of
indigenous urban political elites who governed the nation. Patriarchal nationalist
initiatives also established masculinist and neotraditionalist, culturalist norms for
citizenship by governing the bodies of Ugandan women, who were exhorted to
wear long skirts, natural hair, and national dresses instead of mini-skirts, pants,
or weaves in the 1970s. Thus in Uganda today, the decolonizing nation is char-
acterized by unresolved and ongoing nationalist, nativist, and hetero-patriarchal
structures that tend to exclude nonindigenous ethnic and racialized populations as
perpetual immigrant others and that coalesce around the regulation of minority
difference, including racial and ethnic minorities, women, and sexual minorities.13
These exclusions often mark the institutions, landscapes, and walls of the postco-
lonial university, which I frame as the “nativist postcolonial university.” Indeed,
postcolonial structures and practices of nativism are often masculinist in nature
and are intimately linked to formations of nationalism and hetero-patriarchy.
As I navigated the vexed insider and outsider politics of the postcolonial institu-
tion, Makerere University was both a home and a non-home for me. As a US-born
Punjabi Sikh woman, I was variously racially marked as “Asian” and “mzungu”
(White or Western), owing to my expatriate status and US nationality. Although
I have distant family connections to East Africa, I did not have immediate fam-
ily in Uganda and was an outsider. I was also an insider because of my long-term
connections and access to East African Asian / Ugandan Asian and other new
migrant families and communities. My appointment as a research associate and
proposed long-term contract, which would have allowed me to have a full-time
faculty position in the university, was a politicized endeavor, as I was an expatriate
American citizen. I also understood that being the only PhD-holding woman of
South Asian descent on the teaching staff was politically and intellectually impor-
tant. I was helping to re-create an environment in which racialized Asian teaching
faculty were present in the university and could provide students with important
13. For further discussion and analysis, see Hundle 2015.
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course offerings and intellectual perspectives, particularly from a cross-racial and Decolonizing
South Asian diasporic perspective. At the same time, I had much to learn from Diversity
indigenous Ugandan colleagues about the importance of centering African epis-
temologies in the African university.
Being home and not at home at Makerere once again compelled feminist eth-
nographic practice that was not compartmentalized from the everyday tasks of
teaching or research. Indeed, feminist ethnography and its relation to diversity
work is not only applicable to Western or the US university; it is an important
methodology when navigating the nativist postcolonial university. The liberal
language of diversity is not mobilized in the latter context; instead, problems of
minority difference (whether racial or ethnic) are framed in both analytical and
quotidian ways that emerge from the local and historical context: ethnic affilia-
tion or ethnic politics; tribalism; or antiforeigner sentiment, anti-Asian sentiment,
and even Aminism. Once again, the nativist university compels us to ask, who is
missing from the university, and why, and how can those missing be reconciled
with a longer history of colonial violence, colonial privilege, and processes of
decolonization? The puzzle of racial and ethnic inclusion and exclusion, including
the place of ambiguous, transnational, and quasi-citizen communities of Asians in
East Africa (who are often economically privileged) continues to be unresolved,
in both the university and the nation.
Reworking the nativist impulses of the decolonizing nation is central to the
democratic and inclusionary possibilities of an African university that must always
reflect on its origins, its present conditions, and its future aims, including asking,
“What is the university for?” While struggles over racial and ethnic pluralism
at Makerere University are not at the forefront of discussions about institutional
reform, they do emerge subtly in private conversations, more overtly in adminis-
trative meetings, and in flashes of everyday tension among students, teachers, and
workers in the university. It is my hope that the critique of nativism at Makerere
University will be at the forefront of internal reform among Ugandan scholars and
will occur in tandem with other pressing issues, including the neoliberal commer-
cialization of Makerere, questions of access and equity for Ugandan undergradu-
ates of all backgrounds (including economically disadvantaged students, women,
LGBT students, and students with disabilities), the economic livelihoods of teach-
ing staff, and the reform of sexual harassment and gender discrimination in the
university (see important interventions by Kasozi 2003; Kwesiga and Ahikire
2006; Mamdani 2007). Decolonizing and transforming the African university
also entails epistemological, pedagogical, and administrative interventions and
reforms, most recently concerning important debates about the MISR program
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Public Culture itself. Indeed, African students, engrossed in the process of learning and becom-
ing intellectuals, approach these questions with fresh critiques in relation to the
interventions of earlier generations of postcolonial elites. Many students at Mak-
erere, for example, have been influenced by the decolonizing currents emerging
from other sites on the African continent, including the Rhodes Must Fall (RMF)
and Fees Must Fall (FMF) student movements in South Africa — movements from
which the fallout is still ongoing, of course.14
Thus in contrast to my experiences at U of M where claims for articulating
racial justice beyond race as social constructivism and within the constraints of
diversity discourse were incredibly difficult in the Obama years, in Uganda I was
always wary of the potential explosive violence entailed in the politicization and
mobilization of racial identity. In Uganda, these identities were fossilized through
colonial nativization and racialization processes (a hardening of ethnic and racial
identities that left no room for the complexity of identity or subject formation or
cross-racial and ethnic affiliations). In a nation grappling with its history of nativ-
ism, which includes postcolonial fascist projects of expulsion and mass extermina-
tion, race and ethnicity always seem overdetermined and with material lives and
itineraries of their own — eventualities that cast some “out of Africa” permanently.
If the U of M experience revealed to me the possibilities and limits of diversity
work, then Makerere University revealed the prospects, pains, and frustrations of
decolonizing work. In Uganda, I learned that creating space for a decolonized and
democratic East African future requires ongoing conversations about the necessity
for racial and economic justice without resorting to nativist solutions. This terrain
is fragile and precarious, subject to local contexts, and ever shifting. My hope is
that a decolonizing nation like Uganda, with its complex histories of multiracial
and multiethnic pluralism, its non-Western histories of anticolonial thought and
political protest, and its creativity and inventiveness will be able to forge novel
ethical, democratic, and decolonized projects beyond the demonstrated limits of
liberal multicultural ones. In this recasting of an African university, we might ask
how the historical and ongoing experience of decolonization informs the inter-
rogation of diversity in the global North.
Diversity as Public Relations: Branding the Neoliberal Research University
A more current engagement with the neoliberal nature of diversity work is taking
place at the University of California, Merced, established in 2005 and the newest
14. Some recent discussions, among many, on South African student movements include Nyam-
njoh 2016, Booysen 2016, Ramaru 2017, Pillay 2015, and Mbembe 2016.
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addition to the University of California system. The impulse for developing UC Decolonizing
Merced dates to the 1960 California Master Plan for Higher Education, which Diversity
sought to establish universal access to postsecondary education for California
residents in the University of California, California State University, and the Cali-
fornia Community College systems. In 1988, the UC Regents authorized planning
for a new campus on donated land in the agricultural belt of the San Joaquin
Valley, an impoverished region in the southern part of the Central Valley in Cali-
fornia. Historically underserved in terms of higher education, the region’s student
population has consisted primarily of low-income, working-class students of color
who attend community colleges in the Valley. The State of California has invested
$500 million in the construction and development of the university, and the UC
Regents (the main governing body of the UC system) has continued to support the
development of the campus despite 1990s federal and state budget cuts and the
2008 economic crisis. In short, while it made little conventional business sense
to invest in a new research university at the height of expanding global economic
restructuring, the Global War on Terror, the national financial crisis, and ongoing
federal and state-wide educational defunding, the UC maintained its commitment
to opening the university and serving primarily minority students in the Valley.
As an institution, UC Merced is based on the legacies of research and teach-
ing for what has been described as “the public good,” a notion central to the civic
myths of the UC tradition, particularly when it comes to abstract liberal multi-
cultural principles of inclusion, tolerance, and educational access for “diverse”
communities of Californian students. On the other hand, UCM is also based on
completely transparent neoliberal principles, and the developing campus has no
institutional memory of a “before neoliberalism.” Indeed, UC Merced, branded
as the “new American research university built in the 21st century,” masks its
inception and expansion by means of neoliberal development through its claims to
the UC system modeled in the 1960s, when the Californian higher education was
heavily subsidized and tuition free for the state’s then majority-White students.
In a recent paper, Ma Vang and I argue that UC Merced exemplifies the devel-
opment of the first major research university in the context of late American racial
capitalism, what we and other faculty colleagues at UCM describe as “ground
zero” of the neoliberal university, or a view into the future of the research univer-
sity and the UC system more broadly (Hundle and Vang, forthcoming). Indeed,
the technocratic, private-consultant-based development of the new research uni-
versity in an “underdeveloped,” peripheral region of California exemplifies settler
colonial expansion in the American West and parallels the languages and practices
of neoliberal developmentalism in the global South. Moreover, we argue that the
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Public Culture neoliberal research university is dependent on the commodification and commer-
cialization of diversity, such that diversity itself becomes a symbol evacuated of
substantive meaning. Discussions surrounding minority difference devolve into
reductive generalizations about diversity, and the substantive needs of underprivi-
leged and racialized students of color with complex immigration histories and
backgrounds are undermined.
For instance, the neoliberal conditions of the twenty-first-century research uni-
versity are often legitimized by what has been called, in technocratic language,
the “structural diversity” on campus. While the student body is majority of color,
most of the faculty and almost all of the administration identify as White (many
do not live in the Central Valley and tend to engage remotely with the institu-
tion, paralleling Silicon Valley business cultures). The university’s presence in
the Valley is often celebrated and expressed through a benevolent relationship to
its always already defined “local communities,” including “minority,” “first gen-
eration,” “underserved,” and “marginalized” students and communities, yet it is
often not clear who constitutes these students and communities — much less what
their experiences, histories, identities, and future goals may be. The celebratory
discourses surrounding UC Merced brand it as a meritocratic institution in the
Valley that will provide opportunities for the progress and “social uplift” of immi-
grant, working-class students and the communities of color that they come from.
The existence of UC Merced and its showcase diversity also serve to shore up
the legitimacy of the UC system at large in a time of rising racial and economic
inequities across all levels of the system.15 Providing access to higher education
for primarily first-generation and working-class students of color, while a legiti-
mate goal of the UC system, often detracts from the critical interrogation of the
quality, substance, and form of education provided to students, deemphasizes stu-
dent needs, and tokenizes and homogenizes the complexity of student communi-
ties and the conditions of their lives in the Central Valley.16 The opportunities of
UCM entail very real risks for the students that the institution purports to serve:
the marginalization of courses relevant to students’ cultural backgrounds, histori-
15. In addition to the repercussions of California Proposition 209 in 1996, which has led to the
decrease in underrepresented minority students in especially the coastal UCs, recent reports suggest
increasing income equities based on race and gender across all levels of employment in the system.
See “Pioneering Inequality: Race, Gender, and Income Disparities at the University of California”
(AFSCME 2018).
16. Student demographics at UCM: 86 percent of students are of color, 60 percent are first-
generation and working- class, and at least 33 percent come from the Central Valley — the rest are
evenly divided between Southern California and the Bay Area.
314

on 09 May 2019
cal experiences, and other interests; the lack of student housing, student centers, Decolonizing
and other spaces for intellectual, cultural, and self-development; and a dearth of Diversity
mental health resources and collaborative connections to local communities and
organizations. The educational model at UCM is driven by instrumentalist market
demands in which poor students of color are often groomed to become part of an
entrepreneurial labor force for an increasingly specialized economy in California,
becoming indebted in the process. One student also discussed the epistemologi-
cal (knowledge-based) problems of the university, confiding to me during office
hours: “Yes, this is a minority-serving institute, but is it meant to really serve us?
This campus is meant for White students, to make White students. There is a lot of
talk about diversity, but for me, this is a White space. I will have to go somewhere
else to get the education that is relevant to me.”
Finally, UCM provides insights into emerging assemblages: the neoliberal man-
agement of diversity, the neoliberalization of diversity, and diversity as neoliberal-
ism. Using UCM as a case study, it is possible to interrogate diversity through
the lens of “racial neoliberalism” (Goldberg 2008), suggesting that we are see-
ing emerging permutations of neoliberal diversity in the research university. One
important example of the neoliberal-diversity assemblage at UCM is the 2017
controversy in which UCM administrators allowed a New York Times journal-
ist to interview DACA-recipient students after the presidential inauguration of
Trump and ensuing calls to deport DACA students. UCM ostensibly sought to
brand and portray the university as a haven for DACA students in conjunction
with the UC Office of the President’s challenge and eventual lawsuit against the
Trump administration on the attempted rescinding of DACA. However, in her
article, the journalist in question not only described DACA students using harmful
stereotypes but also violated journalistic ethics around privacy and confidentiality
by publishing the real names, residential locations, and dorm room numbers of
college students (Brown 2017; Spayd 2017; Miller 2017). Unfortunately, UCM rep-
resentatives initially sought to defend what they viewed as positive national media
attention to UCM, only belatedly engaging with the concerns of undocumented
students and faculty allies on campus.
In a recent essay, Salvador Vidal-Ortiz (2017) discusses the “capturing” of
diversity by the market, arguing that,
in the view of corporate-minded academic administrators, the more
diversity there is, the more “experience” students gain. That, in coded
language, means more diversity allows US-born, non-Hispanic white stu-
dents to consume otherness and develop the appropriate skills at managing
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Public Culture difference (and a portrayal of their “tolerance” for difference) for when
they work with — not in — a “diverse” environment. This translates in a
direct gain — monetary and otherwise — for a majority white student body
that eventually becomes part of the work force. Their coded experience
with “diversity” allows for them to “manage” diversity without having to
address inequality. It also means disciplining students of color to assimi-
late to that diversity project — preparing them to abide by these unequal
work-force standards, to fit within that system.
To be sure, at UCM there are similar disciplining effects on students of color as
they are groomed to be entrepreneurial subjects and are taught “diversity-speak”
as a form of symbolic and social capital. An additional institutional effect has been
the heightened naturalization and political manipulation of diversity by racial-
ized students and faculty of color and White faculty and administrators while
racial and gender inequality has been maintained. At UCM, staff employees are
majority women of color from local immigrant communities in the Central Val-
ley, while administrators are mostly White men who do not live in Merced.
What would it mean to resist the diversity hegemony of the neoliberal university
through the decolonizing diversity approach discussed above? Could professors
adopt this as an intellectual method and pedagogical tool in their classrooms, and
could students and faculty collaboratively engage in the deep study and critical
analysis of neoliberal diversity models at UCM? How can these small shifts in our
relationship to the institution accrue into larger ones, such that we work toward the
broader political, economic, and epistemological transformation of the university?
And would it provoke deeper questions about the purpose of the UC system and
the research university in relation to our contemporary conditions and the shifting
racial demographics of the United States — questions that move beyond the stated
aims of universal access in the California Master Plan conceived in the 1960s?
Conclusions: Decolonizing Diversity Revisited
It is important to stress that the decolonizing diversity approach addresses the

problem of minority exclusion embedded in liberal meritocratic institutions
that no longer use the safety net of affirmative action programs to redress his-
torical and ongoing problems of racial and economic access in higher education.
This approach therefore also addresses the problem of tokenized minority bod-
ies in institutions that work to undermine both the possibilities of pluralism in
the university and plural forms of knowledge production in the university. Thus
the decolonizing diversity approach also draws on the decolonizing currents of the
316

on 09 May 2019
African experience and the interventions of scholars located in the global South Decolonizing
who have expanded upon the relationship between decolonization and epistemol- Diversity
ogy. For example, in his essay “Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of
the Archive,” Achille Mbembe (2015) calls for a decolonization that makes pos-
sible the “pluriversity” — a university that establishes epistemological space for
many universals and many modes of being and inhabiting the university, not just
one universal with many particulars, or “local communities” (see also Mbembe
2016). This goal would entail an interrogation of the Western university that went
“global” with European imperialism and colonization, exhorting us to explore
forms of knowledge and pedagogical models that emerge from non-Western
traditions.
The case studies at the University of Michigan, Makerere University, and
the University of California, Merced, allow us to interrogate both diversity and
decolonization through the transnational ethnographic study of minority differ-
ence and diversity and decolonization work; the possible appropriations of diver-
sity and decolonization by the state, elites, and the market; their relationships to
disciplining processes and subject making; as well as their utility for political
critique and programmatic change. The decolonizing diversity approach evinces
programmatic change that need not be revolutionary, militant transformation but a
product of slow, incremental change that ebbs and flows with stops and starts over
time. If decolonization, or working toward a decolonized future, means that one
recognizes that one continues to inhabit a colonizing structure that foregrounds
the universal claims of liberal citizenship based on racial and class hierarchies
and inequalities, one must interrogate both the modern university and diversity
not only as a national tradition “gone global” but also as a manifestation of neo-
colonial racial inequality and the politicization of minority and racial difference.
Indeed, the study of diversity requires serious, thoughtful investigations of global
and transnational histories, theories, and practices of decolonization, as well as
critical interrogations of key concepts of citizenship, community, and majoritar-
ian and minority difference. A commitment to intellectual study, ethnographic
methods, and transnational feminist methodologies and praxis in our encounters
with diversity work and decolonizing movements in the university are essential
practices in a slowly unfolding, long-term, and sustainable decolonizing diversity
approach.
Crucially, decolonizing diversity is not the sole work of senior professors who
sit on formal diversity and equity committees or even the prerogative of univer-
sity administrations. Undergraduate and graduate students in the university are
fully capable of critical engagement with diversity and decolonization. As dis-
317

on 09 May 2019
Public Culture cussed above, my own engagements with the decolonizing diversity approach have
spanned my experiences as a graduate student, postdoctoral researcher, and a
tenure-track assistant professor. Finally, this critical intellectual project occurs
within local contexts, when we work with the assumption that institutional homes
are sites of both estrangements and intimacies — that they can be field sites and
require ethnographic attention through reflexive methodologies. In doing so, the
discipline of anthropology, through its signature methodology of ethnographic
research, will allow us to continually refine the decolonizing diversity approach,
establishing space for alternative presents and futures in the university — new cul-
tures, philosophies, and epistemologies of citizenship, community, and difference
that will engender the redefinition of the university itself.
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DECOLONIZ ATION AND “DIVER SIT Y”

Anneeth Kaur Hundle

Postcolonial scholars have long explored universal-

Public Culture 31:2 doi 10.1215/08992363-7286837

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Diversity as Starting Point

For many first-generation scholars and students in US universities, diversity prac-

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8. See Green, Apuzzo, and Brenner 2018; Gayle 2018.

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Decolonizing Diversity: Outlining an Approach

Recently, the concept of “decolonization,” with its transnational circulation, has

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Diversity as Strategy? U of M and the Anthropology Diversity Initiative (ADI)

In 2006, the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative (MCHRI), or Proposition 2 (“Prop

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ceases to be an ongoing process of self-making and social interaction. It

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Decolonization Work: The Postcolonial Nativist University

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13. For further discussion and analysis, see Hundle 2015.

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Diversity as Public Relations: Branding the Neoliberal Research University

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Conclusions: Decolonizing Diversity Revisited

It is important to stress that the decolonizing diversity approach addresses the

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AFSCME (American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees)

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