Why I love teaching, again

As the semester winds down, particularly the one before summer, professors and students anticipate the end with relief and a sense of gratitude. I taught my last class Thursday evening. It was the first time I had taught a late evening class, not the time slot that best fits my natural rhythms. I blew out of there at about 10 p.m. The day had been unseasonably hot and it was still warm. I rolled down the windows, cranked the music, and drove home. School’s out for the summer!

Not quite – there’s that small matter of all those papers to grade. I sat down today with a set of short essays that I had asked my students in my graduate seminar on Advanced Historiography to write, reflecting upon the kind of historian they were or hoped to become. I had assigned a similar exercise at the beginning of the course and was curious to see what, if anything, had changed. As I read these personal reflections, I found myself genuinely touched, amused, and moved by turns.

Having taught theory for some time to both undergraduate and graduate students of history, I know that it often produces a crisis of confidence. After a few weeks in my class, one student began to seriously consider giving up the study of history altogether. She was reminded, however, of childhood incidents that convinced her she was a born historian: a fascination with graveyards, genealogy, King Tut, the Titanic, the Holocaust, the history of the saints. She persevered despite my class, not because of it. Another student compared her trajectory through the course to the process of grieving: denial (surely I am intelligent enough to grasp this, right?); anger (how could these theorists expect me to understand their jargon – “long durée, thick description, structure, superstructure, etc. – I was drowning in a sea of words”); and finally, grudging acceptance as thoughts like “what would Marx say about this?” began to creep unwittingly into her brain. One more ruefully promised to give Hegel, Kant and Marx, “another visit once I’ve recovered from them.”

So was I engaging in a form of inhumane historical boot camp? Putting them through hell in the form of never-ending impenetrable prose and expecting them to be grateful for it at the end? Certainly, that was not my intent. However, I did notice early on the development of the course a kind of esprit de corps and camaraderie derived, perhaps, through a sense of shared suffering. Hmm, maybe I could pitch this as a reality show? “Survivor: Historiography,” anyone? Who will get voted off this week? I know, me; then everybody could go home and read something else.

Not quite. For some students, there was no crisis of confidence at all. One student began his semester as a self-defined “conservative, religious, organized, military, teaching historian” and remained so, with the caveat that he now has a better understanding of why that is so. Another confidently rejected nearly every model discussed in the class. In an essay entitled “ I am not that name,” echoing the title of a book I had assigned, she defined herself as an historian by what she was not: “I am not a universalist, an objectivist, an academic, an archivist, and most of all, I am not a theorist!” She concluded, “ I am part of the great loss of center to which Novick so disparagingly referred. I know as well, I have little or no interest in writing history just for other historians. And I don’t put much stock in false binaries.”

Other students found the study of theory empowering. Said one: “I am an agent… I am part of the construction, deconstruction and production of knowledge.” She also saw theory as a window into the psyche; rather poetically writing: “ I am but a body imprisoned by the constructions of my soul…. The insights of these scholars help me begin to take bricks out of my invisible prison, allowing for a window to a more conscious reality. Yet the walls still stand, and I remain enclosed…. Deconstructing the prison of my Foucauldian soul allows me to better see myself as well as the world around me.”

In a quieter and more humorous vein, another student admitted to some initial apprehensions, having been told previously by another professor that he was “a content person rather than a theory person.” He asked: “Would I learn that I was in fact a crusty, scaly antiquarian, who was better suited to do history in an earlier century? Would I have to read an occasional book by Robert Utley to maintain my intellectual hygiene in the anticipated swarm of obfuscatory theoretical pontifications by bald French philosophers? I discovered the answer to both of these questions is a singular, resounding ‘no’!” And finally, one student who first described himself as an “historical mutt,” asked suggestively, if inconclusively, “ is it possible to teach a new dog old tricks?”

They also mused on the age-old question, “what is history?” Art with rules? A discipline that “prompts and undergirds that which is inhumane”? An antiquated form of storytelling that has been disrupted by the “elitist wankfest” of deconstructionism? Had deconstruction enfeebled the body of history: “inconsistent and scattered, flailing about without a backbone… a bunch of randomly piled vertebrae trying to survive?”

In the end, however, nobody lost faith in the power of the historical narrative. Most expressed an unwillingness to write only for ourselves, “that by writing to an exclusively academic audience we run the risk of turning our field, which is populist and democratic in nature into a bastion of elitism.” There was a strong preference for simplicity of language and clear and accessible prose. And for those that teach children for a living, an awareness of historiography would inform their teaching in the future. One teacher asked if state standards require her to teach on 19th century industrialization to high school students and has only one week to do it: “what do I emphasize? Do I teach about the robber barons and other great men? Do I teach about the horrors of child labor using the photographs of Lewis Hine? Whatever I decide, it needs to be a purposeful decision with some idea of historiography inherent in my choice.”

Unexpectedly, these short meditations provided for me a vivid composite portrait of a diverse group of people who spent sixteen weeks dealing with challenging intellectual material in each other’s company every Thursday night in the spring semester of 2009. So I have taken the liberty of preserving this experience into a composite historical snapshot, a micro-history if you will. I felt that this class was memorable enough to commemorate in some sort of durable form. See, it really happened! Depending on your preference, call it a “fact” or a “linguistic trace.”

I found myself humbled as I read these short meditations. Aside from including some mighty fine and highly personal writing, they also suggested that struggling with this material changed the way that the class (myself included) thought about history and about themselves. No teacher can expect more than that. To conclude: one student reflected “ I sometimes wondered why my professor chose to torture us.” She added, “my mantra throughout this class was the professor’s promise to us on the first night of class that we would feel smarter after taking this class. She was right.”

What can I say?

Thank you all.

Thinking about difference

Lately I have been thinking a lot about how human beings perceive difference. This, of course, is an occupational hazard. Much theoretical ink has been spilled on how human societies and individuals deal with difference – psychologically, culturally, historically, linguistically: “I and thou,” “Self and Other,” “sign, signifier, and signified,” the evocative and provocative “free floating signifier.” As scholars, how do we/can we/should we represent people unlike ourselves? What are we to make of physical difference, the most dramatic example being male/female, and the gender constructions based upon those anatomical distinctions? Racial difference which is less physically marked but no less socially important? The less immediately visible categories of religion, ethnicity and class conveyed through verbal and non-verbal forms of communication: dress, gestures, ritual, conversation? Finally, as privileged intellectuals, can we represent those differences without being dismissive, condescending, patronizing, presumptuous, or just plain wrong?

I believe that we can and should speak of difference, if for no other reason than, as an historian, I am required to translate the thoughts and actions of people from the past in ways that make sense to my own time and place. If this can’t be done, I’m out of a job. So I try. Students sometimes challenge my attempts – rarely on epistemological grounds, more frequently on identity-based claims. Every time I teach the history of slavery and race relations, for example, I know that at least one student will wonder what an uppity white girl from NJ could possibly tell them about the history of their own people. On a few occasions, students have said as much to my face. This doesn’t really offend me. I advise them to stick around for a few weeks and if they don’t like what they see, drop the course. No big deal.

Race also comes up because of what I don’t teach. I once had a colleague who told her students that I was a racist due to my failure to include material on Native American history in my undergraduate historiography class. This did offend me – until my sense of humor kicked in. True, Native American history wasn’t in a syllabus that covers the history of history from Herodotus to the present in 16 weeks. It does include material about identity-based history (working class/women/African-American). I cover indigenous history in my Latin American history classes and I also do research on Brazilian Indians, but as she barely knew me, she wouldn’t have known that. Had she, I suspect her ire would have only increased. Not only do I assign books on Native American history written by non-Native Americans, but I am attempting to write Native American history myself. Given my identity, could I hope to do so properly?

Moving beyond academic pettiness, the perception of difference, of course, has huge consequences in everyday life. It typically justifies wars, massacres, genocides, and all sorts of socioeconomic and political discrimination. It should go without saying, however, that although human beings may have an innate propensity to create oppositional categories to make sense of their world, difference need not be the basis of inequality or exclusion. Why can’t difference simply be … different?

When thinking about such heady ideas, I have found it useful to take a step back and observe how children deal with living in the world. This leads me to what got me thinking about all of this in the first place. A few months ago, my kids started taking African dance classes. My eldest daughter was exposed to African drumming and dancing two years ago at a summer camp and has been begging for lessons every since. I finally located a class for children sponsored by the African American Performing Arts Center, a lovely facility that promotes a variety of cultural activities. My youngest daughter tried a few classes and quickly dropped out. Why? She felt self-conscious. Why? Because she was different. “Mommy,” (delivered in an overly loud stage whisper) “I’m the only one that’s white.” Interestingly, despite the fact that her kindergarten class is almost evenly divided among Hispanic, black, Native American, and white kids, and this never seems to have been an issue, being the only one that was different mattered. No problem; she plays with other siblings who are stuck there during dance class.

My older daughter, however, has been all but color blind since she was very small. If anybody thinks it’s strange that this fair blond kid likes African dance, they haven’t said so. The dance community consists of African American kids and their families, some biracial couples and their kids, and some white parents who have adopted African kids. There’s a few African and Haitian families as well. Nice folks.

While going through the whirlwind of rehearsals leading up to the first performance of the “African American Performing Arts Youth Ensemble,” however, one could not escape constructions of difference. I overheard one adult volunteer attempting to herd a bunch of kids running amok into some kind of order, trying to sort out names. She asked Renee, “are you Ruth?” “No, she answered, “Ruth’s the white girl.”

The white girl. Of course, she is. As her mother, this revelation should not have come as a surprise. But in a certain sense, it did. This is probably the first time she’s been identified with reference to her race. Since “white” is the dominant racial signifier in US society, there is rarely cause to specify. Towards the end of the dress rehearsal, the dancers formed a “solo circle” which allowed any child who felt so moved to go into the center and dance while the remainder of the group clapped. The Brazilianist in me instantly recognized this as a “roda” a circle or “wheel” that one sees in Brazilian samba. Sometimes the kids went out alone, sometimes in twos or threes. Ruth went out with two girls but as they hadn’t coordinated what they were going to do, it didn’t work very well. Later she said, “mom, I felt weird being out there with Diandra and Isis.” “Why?” I asked. Whiteness, it turned out, had nothing to do with it. “Because they’re so tall,” she said. “I felt really short.”

The performance, by the way, was great. It had absolutely nothing to do with elitist, intellectual qualms about white people appropriating the cultural forms of the “other.” The drums were loud, the dancing was great, the applause genuine, the occasion heartfelt. My kid was out there having the time of her life, dancing with verve and a huge, radiant smile. She took my breath away.

A final post script: at the dinner following the performance, one of the drummers asked me if I was the parent of the “tall, blond girl.”

I had to laugh.

Writing History

I have been thinking about writing a lot lately.  This derives, in part, from teaching a graduate seminar on historical theory this semester.  The reading list is not for the faint-hearted: Kant, Hegel, Marx, Gramsci, Levi-Strauss, Bourdieu, de Certeau, Foucault, Derrida, Spivak, to name a few.  The texts are dense at best, obscurantist at worst.  I am confronted weekly with the implicit, and sometimes explicit, questions: “Why are we reading this?”  “How can this help me to be a better historian?”

I am still working out these questions for myself.  Theory has enriched the ways in which I think about the extent to which human beings exercise free will or are bounded by the cultural norms and institutional constraints of their societies.  It forces me to be honest about what information I can or cannot derive from a documentary source.  It causes me to question how narratives are constructed, for what purposes, and by whom.  And it makes me confront the reality that there are no hard and fast lines that distinguish fact from fiction.  That said, most theoretical works would be all but impenetrable to the average reader.  They are tough going even for specialists who have been trained how to read them.  The conundrum remains, how do I convey these theoretical insights without restricting my readership to a narrow audience of other intellectuals with advanced degrees like myself?

One option is that I need not concern myself with a wider reading public.  Academic acclaim is not based on the number of copies one sells or the length of time that elapses before one’s work goes out of print.  Academics generally derive a fairly trivial amount of their income from book sales.  As an aside, I should add that a colleague of mine who wrote a guide entitled, ironically enough, Writing History, earns enough in royalties on that title to pay for his five kids’ summer programs every year.

However, I am also reminded of a recent comment by a student who argued that we need not feel apologetic or defensive for having come up with a specialized, professional language with which we can communicate specific, nuanced ideas to colleagues.  Certainly, researchers in the hard sciences feel no such compunction.  However, I find myself caught between the desire to produce a well crafted, evocative story and to probe its theoretical intricacies in a sophisticated way.  Can one do both?

This dilemma came to a head recently in another class.  I had assigned a recently published book that was well reviewed but that I had not read before ordering it.  Oops!  Upon reading it, I found it simply dreadful, but it was too late.   Every theoretical buzzword and concept was prominently displayed, overblown claims were made on the basis of inadequate or inconclusive data, in short, content-free jargon.  I felt that I had been bludgeoned by the equivalent of badly designed, dysfunctional kitchen sink.  A rather large one.  Even worse, I found myself having to justify to my students, why I made them waste their valuable time and money reading this thing.  I opted for contrition and some reflections on how and why the peer-review process can go badly wrong.  I was genuinely disillusioned that the editorial process, such that it was, had served this scholar so poorly.

Around the same time, a guest speaker came to speak at a workshop in our department.  This was Camilla Townsend, an historian of the Americas writ large, and coincidentally, a long term friend of mine.  Cami and I met as girls at a convention sponsored by the Wizard of Oz Club.  We were both fans of L. Frank Baum and even as a 12 year old, her gifts as a writer were already apparent.  We lost touch and found each other about ten years ago at a history conference, discovering that we had both become historians of Latin America and the Atlantic World.

Cami is a beautiful prose writer.  She examines figures that have been written about so much that you’d think there would be nothing left to say.  Pocahantas.  Frederick Douglass.  Malitzin, also known as La Malinche, an indigenous woman captive who served as Hernán Cortés’s translator during the conquest of Mexico.  But through a careful and imaginative reading of the limited documentation about these individuals, she causes us to rethink what we think we know.

After her visit, I read her Pocahantas and the Powhatan Dilemna which had been sitting on my shelf unread for some years.  Quite simply, it was lovely.  It was the first history book that I have read purely for pleasure in probably ten years or more.  She was quite clear about what she thought could be verified and where she was on shakier ground.  Her voice and methodological interventions, however, remained unobtrusive and did not distract from the compelling story she told.  I was reminded of advice once given by the writer we mutually admire. L. Frank Baum.  In a 1902 editorial entitled “What Children Want,” Baum wrote: “the language employed should be simple and unadorned.  As for a moral, children are quick to discover and absorb one, provided it is not tacked up like a warning on a signpost.”  Substitute “theoretical framework” for “moral,” and these might serve as guidelines for the historian as well.

During Cami’s talk, a colleague commented on the quality of her writing and asked if it “every got her into trouble.”  A strange question at first glance.  The implication was that writing too well could be bad.  Cami responded that, “yes,” if one writes too accessibly, one runs the risk of not being taken seriously.  The analysis and hard work that goes into one’s interpretation can be overlooked if one doesn’t hit the  reader over the head with it.  One can also write for one’s colleagues in the manner respected by the profession in other contexts.  It is a matter of pairing style with venue and intended audience.

I am left with the thought that for the historian, a theoretical foundation might best be utilized as if one were a ballet dancer.  The best dancers wear their training lightly.  They distill years of specialized training and bloody hard work into gestures of astonishing lightness and beauty.  The effort is concealed; in fact it is necessary to do so in order for it to appear effortless.  Perhaps I can aspire to that in my writing.  If I use  theory to inform my conclusions and qualify my claims, that may suffice.  I would like to write something that is beautiful, yet substantial, definitive not because it includes every empirical factoid but because the prose lingers in the mind.

Maybe I also should rethink how I use footnotes.

A passionate answer to a tired question

The tired question: “Is history an art or a science?”

This kick-ass answer is from a revved up student (I liked it so much that I asked permission to post it):

“It IS both; the skill, the craftsmanship of the individual historian, becomes manifest, if it exists, in the blending of the two in the ‘finished’ work. The now-standard way of finding the eigentlich gewesen, the insistence on primary sources and thorough research, those things that we can directly touch, all these things are the science. The art is the assemblage and the way that the historian interjects him/herself into it, which he or she must, either hypocritically proclaiming objectivity or swimming naked in pools of subjectivity…the historian’s presence in history is an inevitability too often closeted.

I want history that is out of this closet. I want history that I can touch, breath, feel; I want history that scares me, that staggers me, that sets me back, that’s too dangerous to know, that makes me laugh and makes me cry and makes me sick, history that pulls me deeply, darkly within it and then throws me back out like my puppy spits a hidden carrot out of her kibble.

And I want it without footnotes.

* * * * * * * *

And for the record, it’s stuff like this that makes me love teaching.

Engels and patriarchy

Perhaps it’s no surprise that the man who described monogamous marriage at its best as “a wedded life of leaden boredom which is described as domestic bliss” might inspire some additional commentary. (He never formally married by the way). His cynicism about middle class marriage aside, is Engels’s broader argument about the material bases of gender inequality convincing? Or as David commented, only partly tongue in cheek, are men inherently jerks who subordinate women simply because they can? Rebecca has asked me to post the following in hopes of continuing yesterday’s conversation.

Right before the break, we discussed the impact of marriage on modern times and the role of women in past and contemporary marriage pairs. This made me think of an article I read in Ms. magazine awhile back. It discusses the role of the housewife in relation to the phenomenon of Desperate Housewives. I personally have never seen the show, but the large following ensures that I know a little about the plot. Basically, how does popular culture affect our understanding of what is acceptable in terms of marriage? A couple years ago, it was Sex and the City (another show I’ve never seen), which portrayed the ability of single women to live their own, independent lives. I know at the end, however, they all had their fairy tale ending, complete with true love and a man in the picture. Going from that supposedly independent lifestyle to Desperate Housewives seems a little backward to me. This may not seem directly related to Engels but am a fan of relating theory to present day life and how various things affect culture. Below is the link for the article in Ms.

http://www.msmagazine.com/spring2005/housewifewars.asp

Also, below here is Heidi Hartman’s article in Signs.

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0097-9740%28198121%296%3A3%3C366%3ATFATLO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Q

About the issue of work…Engels demonstrates the division of labor as detrimental to women for several reasons. First, once men’s “work” starts being monetarily rewarded, they are given dominion over women’s “work” that is usually unpaid. Second, when men start working outside of the home, there is a clear demarcation of where supposedly valued work should be performed. Thus women get marginalized and their activities are deemed inferior. Jeanne Boydston’s Home and Work discusses this idea and analyzes the historic transformation of women’s value in the capitalistic society. I am just wondering how given this information and the ever present notion that housework is not actually “work”, how do we as supposedly enlightened people overcome this dichotomy? It’s rather depressing because still women do the majority of housework despite their increased participation in the “workforce” (which is a problematic term, but I’ll let it go for now).

Comments?

What is history?

What is history?

I ask this question every time I begin teaching historiography, not because I think there is an answer but to determine if the students think that there is one. If, by the end of the class, they report that they thought they knew what history is but have become completely confused, then I feel that I have done my job well. To claim to have pinned history down with certitude would likely involve complacency, arrogance, reductionism, or some combination of the three. I would like to believe that I am neither complacent, arrogant nor reductionist; however, my failure to come up with a conclusive definition of history is not proof of that.

Perhaps it is easier to begin by identifying what history is not. It is not objective truth with either a lower or upper case “T.” It does not repeat itself. It is not a science and, contrary to what the German philologist and historian Leopold von Ranke asserted, it does not “show what really happened.” The facts do not speak for themselves. Rather, historians piece together incomplete, often opaque, fragments of the human past in an attempt to make that past intelligible to their present. In so doing, history says as much, if not more, about the concerns of the individual historian than the past.

One response to the reality of historical contingency and/or relativism has been to reduce it to its simplest terms. For Herodotus, history simply meant “inquiry.” Carl Becker simplified history as “the memory of things said and done.” The British philosopher of history, C. G. Collingwood maintained it was simply “thought about thought,” the relationship between thought and its object. These statements are so simple that it is difficult to argue with them. However, they all suggest history’s inherently subjective nature.

Does subjectivity invalidate historical inquiry? One student cogently posed the following challenge to the discipline. He argued that historians still maintain the fiction that some degree of objectivity is possible in historical writing. However, we are deluding ourselves: “objectivity” is really no more than a consensus of subjectivities, or as he phrased it “an orgy of subjectivities.” The idea of “rationality” is also subjectively constructed. Therefore, historians should abandon any claims to being a social science or rational form of inquiry. History thus becomes a form of fiction, no less and no more.

This critique, pursued to its logical conclusion, could apply to many other branches of human inquiry as well, particularly those that style themselves as “scientific.” Does subjectivity preclude us from investigating the human past? I say, “ no.” I believe that human beings order their existence historically (borrowing again from Carl Becker’s commonsensical approach), that much of our identity is constructed in relation to our idea of the past (real or imagined), and that we are inescapably subjective. We cannot fully know the bases of our subjectivity but by writing about the present or about the past through the eyes of the present, people in the future may be able to discern, however dimly, what gave our lives meaning. So maybe we are writing for the future, not in an obvious and futile attempt to “learn from the past” or avoid its “ mistakes,” but to provide idiosyncratic, particularistic suggestions about how we searched for meaning in the human past.

On a lighter note, piecing together a narrative version of the human past by using disparate bits of physical evidence that have been preserved is a lot of fun. If you can present your interpretation artfully, all the better. And there’s a certain voyeuristic thrill to be had by prying into the past of people who are no longer around to defend themselves.