From Hazal
We started this week’s discussion building on our earlier conversations regarding possible research strategies, conceptual frameworks, and literary forms that can initiate a dialogue among disciplines which otherwise seem to operate in their isolated silos. Our earlier class discussions drew theoretical frameworks and/or political concepts shared across disciplines forward as common vocabularies on the grounds of which dialogue across disciplines can flourish. On the other hand, this, we argued, comes at the expense of accessibility of social scientific and humanistic research for wider public audiences who would find the conceptual focus alienating. Our discussions throughout the semester added “essayism” that prioritizes ordinary language and experimental writing over conceptual rigidity as an alternative that can make knowledge production more accessible while at the same time bridging the disciplines. This time, however, we were confronted with concerns regarding increasing dissolution of boundaries between academic writing and more journalistic forms of non-academic public writing. Acknowledging public writing’s relevance for social and political praxis, we problematized potential uses and abuses of essayism, questioning the ways in which essayification of knowledge production relates to growing anti-intellectualism especially in authoritarian settings and its relationship to neo-liberal reconfiguration of systems of knowledge production.
Our discussions during this week’s seminar added new layers to all these unresolved tensions. To begin with, in the first half of the class, we reflected on Andrew Cole’s invitation to “simplification” in contrast to the rhetoric of problematization that dominates much of the contemporary humanistic research. Professor Cole’s invitation to “simplification,” we discussed, can help sidestep abstract (and also sometimes moralistic) language dominating humanistic research that hinders accessibility of the knowledge produced. Yet, at stake in Cole’s provocation is more than making social science research more accessible as his call to simplification itself represents a specific theoretical inclination in terms of understanding and experiencing the world. Central to this theoretical inclination is the ontological primacy that he attributes to space in understanding and addressing human condition. Hence, simplification in this framework involves writing from within the space, recognizing where you are, recovering space from writing, attending to material meanings of being in a particular built environment, and responding to those in research and writing. In this light, in the first half of our discussion, we questioned what other potential non-spatial departure points (such as language and time) for understanding human condition we can think of; what are the merits or limitations of attributing primacy to either of these? To what extent attributing ontological primacy to space may pave the way for rather universalistic and/or essentialist accounts? We also questioned how Cole’s emphasis on dialectics of space relates to, challenges, and/or goes beyond Marxian historical materialism that he is in dialogue with?
In the second half of the class, we focused on Baldwin’s Take me to the Water and Begin Again by Professor Glaude, where we encountered novel ways of “writing from space.” Both texts involved self-reflexive accounts of what happens to the selves of their authors in historical moments marked by the loss of faith or disillusionment in politics. Building on Baldwin’s emphasis on the interrelationship between the messiness of the world and one’s inner world, Glaude stressed autobiographical framing as a methodological commitment that would allow both for an analysis of overdetermination of social relations by race and also for “imagining a radically different way of being in the world.” This emphasis on inner world in both Baldwin’s and Glaude’s texts goes hand in hand with an interest in the body as a site of configurations of power and resistance that carries the marks of traumatic history while at the same time carrying a chance to begin new struggles again. Hence, I am curious how we can bring this emphasis on body, that registers temporal as well as spatial configurations of power, into a dialogue with Cole’s dialectics of space? What would implications of such a dialogue be for essentialism and universalism that might arise from exclusive focus on space?
During this second half, we also discussed the relationship between academic writing and public speech as a form of public scholarship. For this, Glaude described his engagement with public scholarship as an effort to try to bring the rich bibliography that informs his research into the confines of a sound-bite in order to change the direction of public conversation. Combining his intellectual background with a concern on “how to write of himself,” Glaude suggested, allows him to penetrate various publics at the same time. In Glaude’s and Baldwin’s writing, the potentials of essayistic writing and speech for penetrating into various publics find expression. On the other hand, the parallels and differences between essayism, affective storytelling, and sentimentalism were among the issues we discussed. While Glaude suggested that presence of emotion on text is different than sentimentalism, he added that separating the two from each other can prove harder in their reception which is beyond the authors’ control. Expanding on perspectives that approach sentimentalism as a way of developing new humanitarian agendas and/or achieving a sense of agency in the face of disempowering conditions by transforming private meaning into a public one (such as Gilroy) and its critiques (such as Arendt who dismisses familiarity with the suffering of others as “politics of pity”), I am curious to think further about essayistic writing’s relationship to sentimentalism and the potentials and limitations this relationship might entail.
From Angelika
Professor Eddie Glaude Jr. is a talented speaker who artfully wove together the history of James Baldwin, the history of his own life, the history of America, and the history of the Department of African American Studies at Princeton. After reflecting on the class, I realized that most of our discussion centered around the various spheres of relationality. First and foremost, Professor Glaude clearly has a strong relationship with James Baldwin, which Professor Glaude works to maintain as a form of dialogue, not reverence. In addition, writing for a non-academic press, and speaking on CNN to a non-academic audience, Professor Glaude works to relate his academic work to the public. He does this largely by maintaining the bibliography, or the “conversation had over time,” and nodding, or alluding to the canonical texts and conversations without engaging in the typical academic practice of signaling knowledge through extensive citation practices, or the simple listing of names in conversation.
Finally, Professor Glaude shared his experience creating the Department of African American Studies at Princeton. I found this story to be perhaps one of the most valuable histories I have learned in a seminar this semester. I was surprised to learn that the Department of African American Studies was founded around the same time as the Department of Neuroscience at Princeton. Professor Glaude argued that their departmental structure and merit were comparable because each department brought together professors with different methodologies to focus on a singular problem. As Professor Dolven noted in class, the case Professor Glaude made for a problem-based department stood in strong contrast to Professor Marshall Brown’s critique of the problem-based approach to urbanism. Personally, I found Professor Glaude’s explanation compelling. Professors with different methodologies collaborating to examine a singular (but of course very broad) problem seems to offer more opportunities for the rapid co-construction of knowledge than the more conventional model, where humanities departments are constructed of individuals who use the same methodology to each examine a very different location, subject, and/or historical period.
I am still mulling over Professor Glaude’s discussion of graduate students in the Department of African American Studies. Professor Glaude said that the department is not taking graduate students because it is unethical, given the current job market. Even though we have discussed the job market extensively in this class, Professor Glaude’s statement clearly shocked many of us. Given the fact that the Department of African American Studies is made up of individuals who are trained in specific methodologies and disciplines other than African American Studies, I wonder how the requirements for maintaining the department might differ from other disciplines. Might the Department of African American Studies feel it possible to be a top-tier department without training graduate students because future colleagues can train in other methodology-based disciplines before joining the department as a professor? In fact, might this multi-methodology construction of the department be advantageous, and something the department does not want to alter?
