Interdisciplinarity, like other words, such as neoliberalism or globalization, has wide but seemingly endlessly varied use. Indeed, it is often used indiscriminately to apply to everything from a change of focus that is outside the substantive content of a discipline to the radical reorientation of methods and methodology to the call to escape disciplinary confines altogether. As someone who had the good fortune to receive an interdisciplinary graduate education at Rutgers (Women and Politics, Public Law, and Africana Studies as subfields) and begin her career in an “interdisciplinary” unit (what eventually became, in fact, a Department of Interdisciplinary Studies), I am well acquainted with the many debates surrounding the much-touted, but also still too infrequent, trek of not only boundary crossers per se, but also those who live in borderland spaces that merge and, at times, blur disciplinary lines. As a radical Black feminist political scientist and lawyer, interdisciplinarity has been a vital necessity for both theory and practice. Rutgers provided an intellectual space in which interdisciplinary approaches were deemed critical to mapping a feminist political science. In this essay, I briefly share some of the possibilities opened up by interdisciplinary investigation and its central role in ushering in a new political science.
As I have noted elsewhere (Alexander-Floyd Reference Alexander-Floyd and Herndon2004a), at its best, interdisciplinarity results in “(inter)disciplinary trouble,” in that it recognizes the reality of disciplinary boundaries—a disciplinary “matrix” (Butler Reference Butler1990), if you will—and seeks to displace and disrupt traditional modes of knowledge production from within this context. While viewing a subject from the vantage point of several disciplines (multidisciplinarity) or borrowing concepts to apply within the logic of existing disciplines (cross-disciplinarity) has its place, interdisciplinarity merges knowledge formations from different disciplines such that it creates something altogether new, knowledge that exceeds the bounds of its original points of departure (Newell and Green Reference Newell and Green1982). With this in mind, my own pursuit of Black feminist (inter)disciplinary trouble—what I describe as a Critical Race Black Feminist approach or Black feminist frame of reference—has integrated critical race theory, political science, and Black and mainstream feminist theory, across disciplines.
Indeed, as it relates to political science, a Critical Race Black Feminist approach allows a frame of reference that broadens and enriches existing lenses for interpreting gender and Black politics. Much of the research in Black politics and gender politics in political science proceeds with little or no coalescence. A Black feminist frame of reference foregrounds Black women as political subjects and seeks to understand the production of gender and its operation in Black communities, the broader U.S. society, and the Diaspora. It is grounded, as well, in a commitment to intersectionality, broadly defined. Intersectionality can be thought of as both an idea and an ideograph (Alexander-Floyd Reference Alexander-Floyd2012). As an idea, intersectionality refers to critical race feminist Kimberlé Crenshaw's specific formulations about the necessity of studying both race and gender as it relates to Black women and women of color more generally; as an ideograph, intersectionality is best understood as the broad ideological project in which women of color scholars have engaged to grapple with the mutually constitutive forces that have affected their lives. Crenshaw's work, in other words, must be set in relationship to a project that both predated, and in some ways exceeds, her specific contributions. My own work seeks to contribute to this ongoing project by assessing race, gender, class, and other aspects of identity, not as discrete or static entities that “link,” “interact,” or “intersect” per se, but as mutually constitutive and productive formations (Alexander-Floyd Reference Alexander-Floyd2007).
In addition to influencing the content of my work, a commitment to interdisciplinarity informs my choice of interpretive methodology and the method of narrative or frame analysis. As critical race theorists, as well as social scientists, have demonstrated, narratives and counter-narratives form the frameworks through which we conceive of and pursue politics, at both macro and micro levels of operation. Framing, I have argued (Alexander-Floyd Reference Alexander-Floyd2007), whether it occurs through devices such as storylines, tropes, metanarratives, or rhetorical strategies, is a key mechanism through which politics takes shape, and a Black feminist frame of reference that utilizes narrative analysis—a method associated with interpretive methodology—is critical for assessing the ways in which narratives in their various guises establish the parameters of public discourse, promote or undermine policies, and/or galvanize political behavior and action. Importantly, narrative analysis participates in the redirection of knowledge toward historically specific, localized knowledge production that disrupts the Western notions of rationality and scientificity that undergird positivist and neopositivist research paradigms.
Two examples from my own research on Black nationalism serve to illustrate how narrative analysis gives a fuller, more complex rendering of the political and social world. Traditional political science research on nationalism deals with it in a simplistic framework, comparing it to liberal intergrationism, as if it were its binary opposite. In this framework, nationalism appears as a more radical tradition, set on critiquing U.S. notions of equality and challenging the idea that Blacks should move toward accommodation to a political system that is inherently flawed. Such assumptions, however, are unfounded, as they suggest a timeless character to Black nationalism and fail to see how it has, in fact, shifted its elaboration in relationship to larger currents in U.S. politics (Johnson Reference Johnson2007; Robinson Reference Robinson2001). Also, although feminists have long discussed the centrality of gender to nationalism, most work in political science on the subject fails to take gender centrally into account and/or deals with it within the important, but still limited, terms of public opinion (see, e.g., Brown and Shaw Reference Brown and Shaw2002; Price Reference Price2009; and Valls Reference Valls2010).
First, a Black feminist frame of reference allows us to see how gender politics forms the operating logic of nationalist politics, and that Black nationalism, far from being a consistently progressive political force, is, in fact, supportive of hegemonic, conservative understandings of Black life. Indeed, the current focus on Black cultural pathology, which redirects attention for problems ailing African Americans from racism and structural factors to their own putatively wayward lifestyles and values, is bolstered by Black nationalist and other ideological camps in Black communities. This focus on Black cultural pathology and the drive to build Black families and shore up patriarchal Black male leadership in the home serve as a shared ideological ground for Black cultural nationalists and a White nationalist project identified with the state. Indeed, the historic Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 was driven by a conviction that family welfare recipients, particularly Black women, were leeching the public purse.
Second, a Black feminist frame of reference, which utilizes narrative analysis, helps us to read events like the Million Man March and policies, such as welfare reform or faith-based initiatives, in terms of their connection to broader political currents. Although most political science analysis of survey data on the March mines it to discuss racial consciousness or Black leadership styles, utilizing the same data sets, I have demonstrated that a gendered racial consciousness undergirds the Million Man March (Alexander-Floyd Reference Alexander-Floyd and Herndon2004b), a point that, despite the naming of the event, gets missed when we rely solely on traditional forms of quantitative analysis. Conversely, although most feminists do not link Black nationalism to the state, a political science orientation invites us to consider this relationship. Indeed, thinking through the narratives surrounding Black cultural pathology in a broad sense allows us to see its—and Black nationalism's—relationship not only to welfare reform, but also to seemingly less and/or unconnected policies, such as fatherhood and faith-based initiatives. The latter, for instance, was promoted because religious institutions were seen as the best vehicle through which Black communities and families could be socially rehabilitated.
A Black feminist frame of reference, therefore, demonstrates the relevance of interdisciplinarity, critical race feminism, and intersectionality to the production of a new political science. Political scientists have worked to reconfigure the discipline, making it more open demographically and methodologically and ultimately more politically relevant to people outside of academe and the formal corridors of power and industry. Producing this new political science cannot stop at merely making space for more people without challenging the methodological foundations of disciplinary knowledge. Key to this project is the formation of intellectual vehicles and spaces, such as the Women and Politics program at Rutgers, which invites and cultivates a fusion of what is best in the discipline of political science with theories, constructs, and questions from other fields. It allows us to converse with a broader community of scholars committed to studying politics and changing our world. In the end, multi- or cross-disciplinary approaches will alter, but not fundamentally transform, disciplines. Only (inter)disciplinary trouble, the deep integration of knowledge across disciplines, will allow us to generate a new scholarly praxis, and, hopefully, new political futures.
