I've met an awful lot of people since I started grad school who see our field as apolitical, and I have a real problem with that. What we study and teach wasn't created in a vacuum. The writing of it, and our reception of it, is colored by innumerable histories, prejudices, and assumptions. Even the choice to look at something as a purely aesthetic object makes a statement about the relationship between Literature/literature and society. That's a context, and context (constituted of relationships and hierarchies) is political. And it's something we *have* to be aware of, if we want our work to have integrity.
Of course, the political in research is a different animal to the political in the classroom. Matthew M. DeForrest expressed it much better than I could a couple years ago on InsideHigherEd:
How often do we assign plays like Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People or essays like Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” or Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and then discuss the issues of war and civil rights that swirled around them yet limit the realm or discussion to the purely academic?
They often hear us speak. They do not often hear about what we do.
So long as we do not model behavior, students will not see anyone participating in the civic realm. The politicians they see on television aren’t real to them. They do not regularly see a person that they know and can personally identify with actively engaging in the civic discourse or hear about the struggle to choose the best course of action to make our towns better from an array of bad options.
What I am advocating here is not something tied to one party or political philosophy. Whether you are a left-leaning anthropology professor or a member of the right of center business school set, we should all be active participants in the civic realm and, importantly, our students should know that those activities are a part of our lives.
This blog, of course, is not a classroom, and so I feel perfectly free to impose my political position on you with impunity. So make a note: tomorrow afternoon, millions of people in the US and around the world will be gathering to celebrate love and take a stand for equal rights. I'm one of them, and I hope you will be as well. Check the links to find details about rallies near you.This song is "an anthem for the equal rights movement born from the passage of gay-marriage bans in the United States during the 2008 election. Footage in the video is from the candle vigil rally and protest march in San Francisco days after the election.
The song will be up on iTunes and other electronic stores for purchase in about four to six weeks (by mid/late December), and I [Sean Chapin, the awesome fellow who wrote the song] will be donating most of the proceeds to charity."
LYRICS:
When you're in doubt take my hand
I'll stand by your side tonight cause
We will be better when we are together and
We are united in love
When in despair take my arm
As I hold you close to me and
We will go farther when we are together cause
We are united in love
When you're feeling good
I'll capture the time
When you're feeling sad
I'll help you remember
When you're feeling fine
We'll stay on our path
When you're feeling bad
I will be there for you and
Our love will sing loud and strong
Our love will keep going on
When you're in fear take my heart
I'll give you a hug tonight cause
We will be better when we are together and
We are united in love
When you're in angst take my lead
I'll show you the way today cause
We will go farther when we are together cause
We are united in love
When we're feeling rich
I'll never let go
When we're feeling poor
I'll help you recover
When we laugh away
I'll give you a smile
When we shed a tear
I'll comfort you gently and
Our love will sing loud and strong
Our love will keep going on
When you don't know take my word
I am here to stay with you, cause
We will be better when we are together and
We are united in love
We are united in love
United we love
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2 comments:
I have a few quotations regarding our discipline being "nonpolitical" or even "apolitical" (I happen to totally agree with your views on that, Lady Audley). And so does Edward Said:
"No one has ever devised a method for detaching the scholar from the circumstances of life, from the fact of his involvement (conscious or unconscious) with a class, a set of beliefs, a social position, or from the mere activity of being a member of society"
and:
"What I am interested in doing now is suggesting how the general liberal consensus that 'true' knowledge is fundamentally nonpolitical (and conversely, that overtly political knowledge is not 'true' knowledge) obscures the highly if obscurely organized political circumstances obtaining when knowledge is produced."
I facetiously disagree with the first Edward Said quote. There HAS been a method devised for detaching the scholar from the circumstances of life and it is called the role of K-12 teacher! Haha. jk jk
Or am I?
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