Un/Blocked: Writing, Race, and Gender in the American Academy

Abstract:This essay examines writer's block (and flow) in the American academy. It critically maps the production of blocks in higher education policy, the organization of knowledge, and academics' lived experiences with inquiry. University studies scholars, such as Marc Bousquet and Christopher Newfield, have powerfully critiqued academia's corporatization. This work, however, at times glosses over the diversely felt impacts of institutionalized oppression on writing and learning. In contrast to university studies, faculty development literature has provided granular accounts of writing in a publish-or-perish climate, as in Robert Boice's classic Advice for New Faculty Members or Paul Silvia's How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing. The latter work, however, tends to offer individualized advice that risks exacerbating the very problems of the knowledge economy. The present essay underscores that written inquiry is both personal and political, bringing intersectional American studies together with university studies and affect studies to extend work on academe and social justice—such as Roderick Ferguson's The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference and Eli Meyerhoff's Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World. "Un/Blocked" argues that writer's block is less a psychological syndrome than a symptom of nationalist investments in academic writing as a way to manage knowledge, labor, and subject-formation. The slash in the title, then, marks writers' ongoing efforts to grapple with knowledge's terms and conditions—hard work that is part of academic inquiry itself.