Coda: Inhabiting Institutions

Abstract

The coda clarifies the political stakes of this book’s argument. Reflecting on the gap between people’s lived experiences of the university and public defenses of it, it argues that nineteenth-century realist novels provide strategies for inhabiting the twenty-first century university. We, too, can find political inspiration in anachronisms. The coda shows that postcolonial and queer theory’s untimely presence in the academy resist the impulse to define the future as merely an extension of the present.