ABSTRACT
This chapter revisits the resurgence of struggles to establish Ethnic Studies in the US during the 1980s/early ’90s as a direct manifestation of radical social movements. This period marks a new insurgency whose roots are partly based in 1980s resistance to neoliberal economic policies, heightened racial violence, international solidarity movements, and the potential radicalism of the Rainbow Coalition – a movement that was ultimately coopted on many levels, and helped make possible the Democratic Leadership Council and Clinton’s election. I suggest that what we call Ethnic Studies – what Okihiro correctly identifies as “Third World Studies,” was a university- and community-based political and intellectual insurgency, formed and matured within the context of a neoliberal order. Although this was the height of liberal multiculturalism, anti-apartheid, anti-imperialist opposition in Central America and Southern Africa, environmental justice movements, etc., it was also the era of NAFTA, Proposition 187, prison expansion, and policies that accelerated class and racial inequality. This period also marks the defeat of the Rainbow Coalition and Left internationalist politics of the 1980s, and the triumph of Clinton-era neoliberalism. The period not only spawned new social movements but new, insurgent scholarship, and key lessons for our contemporary crisis.
