Saturday, November 3, 2012

Intellect, Scholarship & Lingo that is Worlds Apart

When I was a young soldier in Valley Forge Surgical Hospital I became seriously interested in writing. While I had yearnings before, it was at the base library that I began checking out books on writing and expanded even more my reading lists. I also got to meet--and ended up debating--young soldiers from throughout the country, particularly those from the East Coast. Most came from good schools, having been drafted either after graduation from college or while taking a short break from the books. These easterners were not shy about expressing their disdain for someone they considered to be a country bumpkin from Texas with few literary or rhetorical skills. That I was Mexican and Mormon only re-affirmed in their minds that I was not very smart and even less intellectual.

They were right but it was not because I lacked brains, but rather that I lacked the kind of reading experience and the schooling that they had received given their economic and social status.  While I went on to read a lot, get a Ph.D. and write six books I imagine our "sophistication" gap has never narrowed. We simply valued education in a different way. For most of them education was about maintaining what they had and making more of it. For me, it has always been about learning to make a difference for other people. But probably just as influential in our divergence is that their education was Euro-American centric while mine has been Third World. Consequently, when we spoke we spoke with a different terminology and we contextualized the world differently even when we might have shared some political or ideological views.

I see that in my relationship with some of my colleagues here at the Y. What we are interested in determines much of what we study and pay attention to. And so we speak different scholarly languages. Consequently, when my colleagues who teach ancient Greece and Rome, the Enlightenment, or Atlantic World history speak and write, they all sound more intellectual and knowledgeable than I do. They know writers, philosophers, artists, etc that I have often never heard of.  Of course, the same applies to them in reverse when I am doing the presentations.

They go to different concerts, art shows, festivals and listen to some rather different music, much of which I have never gotten into. Their world is rather different from mine. And I would say very different from that of most Chicano and scholars of color. In conversations and discussion I find them intelligent but no more than I or even my colleagues who teach in other marginalized subfields in today's academy. A colleague who does western history and I often joke that while others in the department are traveling to Venice, Athens, Paris, Tokyo, etc. he visits Yuma, Arizona and I spend a lot of time in South Texas towns where I mostly eat Church's Chicken and "cool off" in hot-water hotel swimming pools.

He and I rarely connect our work and our historiography to the great works on the European continent and we rarely spruce up our prose with poetry, lyrics and musings from the "greats" which is common in those fields. So, what does this have to do with anything? Possibly nothing and maybe everything when it comes to scholarship.

The scholarly community is as class-based as anything else in our Western world. If you went to school in the Ivy League or the few other major universities in the country your job applications are likely to get you past the first cut, and your dissertation topics are likely to "sound" and be appreciated as rather innovative. You will, of course, learn and use "global" terminology. So instead of studying Puerto Rico, you are studying the Atlantic world and you won't study slavery in the south but a comparative Afro-Carribean world that stretches from the Bahamas to Brazil. Scholars' actual knowledge of  these areas is superficial by the sheer nature of their size, but the "large historiography" they manage make them sound like intellectual and profoundly knowledgeable scholars. In those disciplines you don't study people but races, not towns but global communities, and you don't necessarily worry about what happens to neighbors but you will be concerned with how national capitals interact.

Now, there isn't anything wrong with any of that but there isn't anything particularly great about that kind of scholarship either. I remember going to lunch with a candidate who spoke of the Atlantic world and used all kinds of comparative terminology, but at the end of the talk I figured he was simply talking about imperialism but from a different angle. I had no problem with what he was doing and he has turned out to be an incredible colleague, but in the end his work was not that much different than what others had been doing before. It was simply conceptualized with different terms and presented in a different way. And in an uncharacteristicly good scholarly prose.

I think sophisticated, Eurocentric terminology has its place but in of itself is not any better than what it is. I think most seasoned scholars understand this but not all young scholars do. It is the same thing in Latino history where for the last decade literary people who claimed history to be irrelevant a decade before are now using history with a literary bent to prove that others lack theoretical solidity. Instead of being what they purport to be, the "literary histories" they produce are often works with an over abundance of terminology and interpretation that makes the language more important than the actual history of a place or a people. I know, to them language is suppose to be more important. But them saying it does not make it so.

I'm not anti-post modernist nor do I discredit scholarship on whiteness, color, sexuality, literary criticism, etc., but I do believe that its adherents need to stop assuming that their scholarship stands above other more traditionally-written one. Some of them also need to deal more with documents, archival materials, oral histories, and, yes, stories and not just multiple layers of interpretations or play with words.There is much that we can continue to learn from their approach but its "originality" has worn off and it has to grow beyond its avant-garde, or as I like to put it, its dissertation/graduate school phase.

This brings me back to my original story. Much of this eastern "lingo" used against me then was just that "lingo". Now, I don't know what happned to most of those soldiers. Some probably went on to prominence in the fields they chose. But I'm sure that few of them ever thought I would amount to much given my Texas roots and my ethnic background. And as I mentioned earlier, if we were to ever meet again it is likely that my books, endowed chair and my academic reputation would probably not impress them much. And it would  not surprise me. Quite early I knew our worlds were, well, worlds apart. It was fine then and it is now.