Roderick Ferguson is a crucial figure in comparative race studies, which I think he would prefer to call “comparative racialization” to stress how race has been socially and materially constructed. In The Parvenu Baldwin and the Other Side of Redemption: Modernity, Race, Sexuality and the Cold War (1999), Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (2004), and Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization (2011), which he co-edited with Grace Hong, Ferguson has developed a powerful version of cultural sociology, distinguished by its emphasis on the semiotics of a wide range of social media. The Reorder of Things is particularly impressive in this regard, given its use of such different works as Adrian Piper's collage Self-Portrait 2000; student proposals for Lumumba-Zapata College (College Three) at the University of California–San Diego; Paul Alexander Juutilainen's documentary Herbert's Hippopotamus (1996); selected works in the US literary canon; African American literature and activist scholarship; and a wide range of Continental theorists, including Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Rancière. Such a diverse group of methods and media for interpretation are necessary, Ferguson argues, if we have any hope of understanding, much less changing, the postmodern collaboration of the academy, capital, and the state. Beginning with his deconstruction of Derrida's reading in The Eyes of the University (2004) of Immanuel Kant's Conflict of the Faculties (1798), Ferguson disputes their claim that the university is “subordinate … to the state and civil society” by arguing that our postmodern universities produce the national culture and concepts of truth on which the political economy depends (9).

Ferguson's post-Marxian critique of the university's role in producing and then regulating minority difference is indebted to theorists in ethnic studies such as Lisa Lowe, David Lloyd, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Cedric Robinson. Unlike Christopher Newfield's argument that the corporate university's emergence has come at the cost of the class mobility promised by the modern university, Ferguson considers the promise of upward mobility to be an integral part of education's regulation of minorities.Footnote ¹ Economically marginalized, legally defined, and then commodified in educational curricula, queers and people of color are identified and either tolerated or repressed by these hegemonic forces. No longer merely a worker, the postmodern subject incorporates a broad spectrum of economic and social practices of production and reproduction, including epistemologies or how we know the world.

In Ferguson's materialist analysis, there is a dialectical relationship between the production of minority difference in the 1970s student movements that led to academic ethnic studies programs and the economic and political disenfranchisement of African Americans in this same period. The reproduction of nationalist, masculinist, even heterosexual values by student and black power and black nationalist movements was contrary to their revolutionary and utopian aims. Ferguson's historical dialectic seems to trap large progressive movements in the mirror of hegemonic power, creating opposition that can be predictably accommodated by the neoliberal state with the help of its educational apparatus.

Ferguson's own utopia depends in part on the “little acts” of ordinary people, reminding me of Ruth Gilmore's advocacy of the anti-prison group Mothers Reclaiming Our Children, in the conclusion to Golden Gulag (2007).Footnote ² Ferguson includes in such small gestures against neoliberalism the otherwise neglected work of the scholar–activist in the mundane activities of designing a syllabus, developing a research question, drafting a job position, even writing the dreaded memo. To be sure, it is good to have such ordinary academic work recognized for its potential transformative effects, but it also sounds very much like a defense of deconstructive practice at the edges of a political economy that is capable of tolerating all the differences it has produced. Ferguson analyzes brilliantly the problem we face as educators, intellectuals, and artists interested in reforming the neoliberal state, but the new forms of political solidarity and organization remain elusive.