[A few introductory words by DGB, then Julia and Navjit’s write-ups follow]
I will leave to Navjit and Julia the heavy lifting of documenting the two parts of our seminar today — but I do want to put down a few thoughts. We had a slightly longer first half of the class this week, because Professor Glaude joined us only for the last hour of the session. That left us a nice stretch of time in which to brainstorm/discuss the final project. We got into this via our shared document, where a number of us have put down some thinking — much of which reflects the meeting that you-all did when you met up together without me in the week before break. While I took a moment to sketch some of the structural elements that need to be in place to make something like this work (symmetrical/comparable “elements” that each individual can contribute; a manageable “deliverable” by dean’s date, with the possibility of optional additional project work to follow), the bulk of the conversation circled what seems to be emerging as a thematic/formal nexus: textual annotation (academic citation/footnotes/endnotes).
I am attempting here to paraphrase a ranging conversation, but it seems that there is interest in footnoting from several directions: the role of annotation practices in all academic work; the polyphony of annotation as a convocation of diverse perspectives; the layering and historicity implicit in citation; and various other things too. We spent some time on the basic problem of what text might lie at the center of a collective annotation exercise. And this feels hard. So much would quite literally “depend” on/from such a decision, and that weights the choice in a way that does not feel exactly comfortable. Could we write, or perhaps find/collect such a text? Perhaps. And this might help resolve the issue. I myself was drawn in that direction by the prospect of collecting language on campus — from the “ether,” as it were — by analogy to the remarkable origin of “Torrit Grey.”
About this time I reminded us that for all the immense openness and in effect infinite potentiality of the project we do have a very real center/focus: whatever final project we do, in whatever form, it wants to engage the question of the humanities as a “universitarian” project, and to do so in a way that manifests a critical/reflexive awareness of the disciplinary topologies of our moment (meaning the epistemic, economic, political, and historically contingent facets of the institutional organization of scholarly inquiry and associated pedagogy).
We spent a little time on the distinction between centripetal and digressive/centrifugal patterns in textual orientation. There are different implications to committing ourselves in one or the other of these directions. Formal implications and substantive ones too. At one point Juila asked about “creativity”: just how creative is it possible to imagine this final project really being? This was another moment where I tried to specify some “framework” stuff: yes, the project can be pretty creative, I think; however, whatever it shapes up to be, I need to feel that I can “defend” it as a final project in this graduate seminar.
Defend it before/against whom?
Well, really no specific person or persons.
But heuristically, let us say, I would want to feel like I could defend it (1) as a final project (2) by a group of graduate students (3) in this graduate seminar… if asked by a group of my professional colleagues to do so.
Practically speaking, I think that gives us quite a lot of range, because if we agree we are doing good/serious work (and that does not preclude the work being “playful” or “creative” or “defiant” or a lot of other things), then we should be fine. I also noted that the project had to include enough symmetrical/comparable individual work to permit me to discharge my institutional/administrative obligations. To some extent, that latter proviso does bear on exactly how much of the project can be “purely” “creative” (in a “this-is-a-short-story-I-wrote sense”), because it is not clear that everyone is going to feel equally interested in or competent to certain forms of creative making — and we need to find a kind of collaborative work that everyone can do.
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Enough on all that for now. But we have our work before us for next week in this regard — since I think we need to have something like a plan by the end of our session on 2 November.
What remains is to say a few quick words about Professor Glaude’s visit. In a somewhat indulgent way, I suppose, it was pleasing for me to reminisce with Eddie a little—since we have known each other for more than twenty years now, and our academic lives intersect going back almost an additional decade. This starts to be “history,” in a way, and thinking the university (this one specifically; the broader institutional form of universities in general) across more than a quarter of a century “from personal experience” has its own qualities. These are affectively notable (from the first-person perspective), but I do not mean to suggest that substitutes for critical insight!
That said, there was plenty of that on offer, I think, from Professor Glaude, who both sketched the evolution of “Black Studies” over nearly half a century at Princeton and elsewhere, and gave us a feel for his own professional/intellectual trajectory over the second half of that interval. All of us learned some things, I am sure. And there were some glimpses of the workings at that delicate nexus where administrative negotiations around salaries and hiring intersect with the wider conceptual/political visions of scholars. Sometimes the result is nothing less than the formalization of new spaces of inquiry!
-DGB
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[Julia here below, then Navit after]
In the seminar on Wednesday, much of our discussion focused on what we would like our seminar discussions to yield, as required in the form of a term end paper. Our discussions jostled to find a collective idiom for our creativity (something other than a conventionally accepted term paper), and this mostly manifested in a discussion around the several prefixes we could attach to the word “note”: footnote, endnote, or its allied concepts; annotate, keyword etc. Since my part of the write up focuses on the second part of the discussion, the second half of the seminar started first with the discussion of objects that Navjit had brought. There were two objects put on the table. One the Indic version of an earthen lamp, called the diya and other a form of rosary beads that her mother gave her when she first left India for the United States. The first object wanted to gesture towards other subversive histories that object used to have which getting obliviated with the globalization of the Indian festival Diwali, that is steeped in upper caste North Indian narratives erasing the other meanings that Diwali held especially for other castes and communities in India. The second object wanted to deliberate on the role religious objects and symbols continue to embody even as questions of economic and cultural aspirations ceaselessly are changing.
The object was interpreted by incorporating Vikrant dadawala’s timely essay in the point magazine on ‘Ethnic Studies’. What does this term mean anymore other than an identity politics? And given the insistence of the seminar on Anti- and Inter- disciplinarity, it seemed a timely question to what kind of knowledge is the translation of a religious object from the faraway lands of India in a seminar that is bound up with dilemma of avowing and disavowing enlightenment tradition of making, producing and discussing what knowledge is.
The entry of Professor Glaude into this discussion made an interesting continuation, not only because of his early work on religion but also his discussion on the question, fate and legacy of Black Studies, a question that further fragments the enlightenment traditions of knowledge formation by inserting experience (colonial, violent, raced) at the heart of the question of knowledge. It was a surprise to learn that African American studies department started its trajectory in a small Dickinson room in the 1960s while it would only become an official, independent department by 2015. Professor Glaude talked about the several black scholars at his time in different departments, a pedagogy that instilled several questions regarding Black Studies. Standing true to the lines, that he writes in one of the essays that eh shared, “History prepares the poor, the victims of unnecessary injustice, to spit at tradition, to blow up the laboratories, to despise all knowledge recklessly loosened from the celebration of all human life. And still, it lies there, the university campus, frequently green, and signifying power: power to the people who feed their egos on the grass, inside the gates.” In narrating the history of the African American Studies department and his own personal history of being a pedagogue, rather a black studies pedagogue, Professor Glaude brought the visceral experience of these words penned in one of the readings visibly present. In the end, Denise asked him about the question of solitude that he mentions in one of his readings and he answered by listing that as a task and a challenge. The class parted ways on some words by James Baldwin.
-JK
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[And Navjit…]
A seminar discussion is a particular genre — ideas flow in a way that is not necessarily linear, disseminating from different possible points of departure that feel rhizomatic, more often than not. These notes will take the form of some of those possible lines: forgive me for the silences, the empty spaces, the things unnoted.
We started the class discussion going back to the issue of the final project, now agreed upon footnotes. Some of the questions that arose had to do with form, content, and contingency. I think these might be very useful in the weeks to come and, as our project starts taking shape, we should maybe make decisions upon these inquiries. Namely: What is the relevance of footnotes now? Do we want to footnote a book (Benjamin, Kant, Mailer), a conversation (between us, between Princeton students, of the ghostly voices that float on campus)? Do we want to footnote a color (torrid gray), an official document (Princeton’s endowment and how it is invested), an object? Do we want to make a sculpture, or a book? And, if the latter happens, do we want the book to be a traditional one, or should we play with the format of a book itself (like the Babylonian Talmud) or the materials of the book (like with transparency and vellum paper)? Do we want the book to pass the mom test, as it was suggested by a classmate, or are we veering to esotericism instead? Would the footnotes be creative, like short stories under a text, or more provocative?
Navjit brought to class two sacred objects that refer to Diwali (as somewhat of an elitist fantasy), prayer beads and her own experience in America, and brought our attention towards a fantastic essay in The Point about contemporary ethnic studies: https://thepointmag.com/examined-life/ethnic-studies/
During the last half of the last, Edward Glaude joined us to discuss his experience in the formation of African American Studies, productively putting in dialogue several temporalities at the same time (Baldwin’s mid-century writings, the emergence of the field during 1968 and 1969, his own experiences in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, the present moment). He spoke about Bringing Back the Person first, as an emergent text within what he called an epistemic insurrection, i.e. a direct challenge to epistemic (willful) ignorance which had historically defined the university (“silence carries forward histories that have to be excavated.”) He brought our attention to the relationship between knowledge and experience, arguing that the centering of experience within the practice of own’s scholarship is a way, for him, to challenge knowledge itself.
Prof. Glaude went on to create a concise history of the emergence of African American Studies, between 1969 and 2022. He raised some important questions in this regard: What happens when a discipline that is, by definition, counter-cultural and subversive, becomes institutionalized? How does it happen, and what is lost? Some of the points that were brought into this history were the creation of the first African American Studies departments around the country (which Princeton carefully avoided), Glaude’s own shift from Religion to African American Studies, and some of the main public discussions and debates that allowed for this constellation of scholars from different discipline to converge within one area. Cornel West was pointed out to be one of the main figures within this process, particularly in his debates with Lawrence Summers, Leon Wieseltier, and his collaboration with other scholars like Kwame Anthony Appiah. Another remarkable point was the discussion in tandem with how Neuroscience was developing as a department, and the dual function of having both an institute and a department.
Finally, some of the closing remarks following a few questions had to do with the importance of solitude vis-à-vis individuality. Professor Glaude remarked here on the important idea of elsewhere, that is, places that are far from our central communities (Heidelberg, Paris, etc.) and that allow us to replenish, giving space to quiet our minds and care for communities at the distance. He also briefly talked about his role as a public intellectual, reminding us both that a fundamental change always happens at the level of the writing (not through accessibility, he said, but through clarity) and that some of the main challenges that we encounter at the university are the same ones that our society faces today.
-NK
