Knowledge Production and Dispossessed People

One of the most important and illuminating critiques in Reproducing Empire comes in the epilogue, when Briggs takes up questions of production of knowledge.  She says “since at least 1980, the economic and cultural power of academic leftists and feminists and those they purport to defend have had radically different careers.”  In her view, by expecting dispossessed people to be both able and willing to discuss their own experiences and viewpoints, academics are setting up a kind of ideal of knowledge production as available equally to all.  This then reinforces the same kind of discourse the academics are purporting to critique, where the dispossessed people are excluded from the discussion because they are not taking advantage of (and thus not properly grateful for) the opportunities graciously provided them by the academic community.  

Briggs goes on to talk about the ways in which academics have used the experiences and stories of dispossessed people to further their own agendas.  In combination with the previously discussed discourse, this sets up a huge problem for dispossessed people’s participation in the generation of knowledge.  Not only do they have greater difficulty in gaining access to the means of knowledge production, but the knowledge they do produce is mediated by the ongoing appropriation of their stories to certain ends.  That is, there is a kind of belief among the academic community, and oftentimes the community more broadly, that they know all there is to know about what dispossessed people are going through and what should be done about it.  

There is thus a set of tensions academics face when producing knowledge about dispossessed people.  On the one hand, it is foolish to expect that said people will necessarily have the tools or the desire needed to produce the kind of knowledge that the academic community expects.  On the other, it is shortsighted to engage in scholarship about dispossessed people without taking into account the effects of using that scholarship for certain ends and taking steps to avoid that kind of appropriation.

How does Briggs, in framing her discussion of imperialism in Puerto Rico, engage with this set of tensions?  How might the academic community in general take these issues more into account in its own knowledge production?  What could be done to remedy these problems?  What implications does framing the discussion of these tensions in this manner (as a problem needing a solution) have?