Amitava Kumar on Reading, and Graduate School

This is a post born of exasperation and hope. Only one semester in, the rhythm of the graduate school seminar has settled, and it chugs forward on its well-worn tracks. The sheer intellectual excitement of opening a new syllabus, my eyes rapidly scanning for the texts I know I will enjoy, the smell of an open book, all haven't gone away. It's too soon for that. But occasionally a sense of futility sets in, especially the realization that reading is a mechanical, solitary act, carried out inside a mind that is never stable and never dependable. At what point will I lose it, will the jumbled letters no longer make words, sentences, and of course soundbites for my professional advancement? The historian has much in common with the accountant - poring over minuscule ephemera and producing reports that few read and of those, many ignore. But it's not the monotony or the self-consciousness about social importance that gets to me. It's the discussions. Young, full of facts and ideas, the graduate student spews out an endless stream of jabs, asides, musings, mumblings - his or her favourite thing, slicing and dicing the book lying passively on the desk. "Well I think that Subaltern Studies has gone too far this or the other way..." "So and so essentialises and totalises..." "Not contingent enough..." "Why doesn't this book start fifty years earlier or end twenty years later..." "Where are the voices of the women (men, if about women)..." Reading back over my blog, this poisonous habit of self-importance seems to have taken me over as well.

Let me pause. I am not saying that honest, robust critique should be banished from the academy. The spectre of scholarly fraud and/or misuse is always at the door, so we must keep it tightly shut. But we have also lost a sense of humility and wonder toward the academic text. The graduate student reads an article or book with violence in mind. Like a nosy badger smelling blood, we are trained to burrow for the "holes" in the argument and eviscerate everything in our path. It is little wonder so many grow up to be nasty, vindictive academics sneaking in cowardly jabs in footnotes and pompously battling over the molehill.

In a wonderful recent piece in Tehelka, Amitava Kumar asks us to rethink how we read the literary text. It's also a great blueprint for the nascent academic. He says, too many readers wish to be pundits, who "nurse a secret ambition to be described as someone who has read everything." Graduate students will surely recognize themselves. Also, underneath the ostensible spirit of impartial critique hides a deadness of thought: this "kind of reader will always try to sound knowledgeable, moral, balanced, and always, very reasonable."
Academic writers are as guilty of this sin as fiction writers: "I like that writer who doesn’t address the world from a position of Olympian superiority. It is even better when a piece of writing reveals how its writer’s admittedly partial or flawed vision offers special insight into the world. A reader who reciprocates in the same spirit, reading with empathy or hurt or imagination, produces what may well be a new text."
http://www.tehelka.com/story_main43.asp?filename=Ne300110essay2_the_reader.asp
The best discussions I've had in the classroom have been the free ones, when mouths run off from the script, when the student earnestly tries to engage the text, to see if it makes sense or strikes a chord, even to passionately denounce it (from a position of vulnerability, of course). Reading is work, but it is also productive and a joy. It need not lead to a great additive insight or building block for a field examination or paper. What is important is that some idea from the page has been turned over in the mind, has occupied if only a few minutes of one's day. This process requires above all the qualities of humility, openness and patience.

The rewards of an academic life are perhaps small, but none is more exhilarating than the discovery of previously unsuspected complexities. If this discovery makes academic life so antithetical to practical life, or what is nowadays interestingly called "the real world," it also renders academics themselves impatient. We're eager to broadcast our jadedness. This one's "over" Foucault, this one's "had enough" of this or that historiographical turn. The greatest violence we can do is hasty categorisation and the filing away of ideas. It's a surefire road to a closing mind, but even more importantly, to an unhappy mind.

Five Life-Changing Undergraduate Readings

As I rapidly approach the end of my undergraduate education, I look back at what I've accomplished academically in four years at Berkeley and I am tempted to conclude that it's all been rather mundane: semester followed by semester in an indistinguishable haze of half-completed readings, "winged" finals and papers, and beer-soaked celebrations.

There were, however, moments of genuine clarity and learning, when my perspective on the world shifted and I could suddenly think in a new way about a certain subject. I've thought of five assigned readings from my classes so far that have been able to accomplish this, in however small a measure. I do not include the many fascinating books and articles I've read for research or outside interest inspired by my studies, which would be far too many.


1) Intimacy and Terror: Soviet Diaries of the 1930s. Ed. Veronique Garros, Natalia Korenevskaya, and Thomas Lahusen. Trans. Carol A. Flath (New York: New Press, 1995). Read for Letters & Science 40: The Soviet Experience, Prof. Irina Paperno (Spring 2006).
This collection of diaries is a remarkable insight into the minds of ordinary Soviet citizens living during the years of Stalin's Terror. What is most surprising about these fragments of memory is how much the official ideologies of the state were a living force in people's daily lives. The most shocking example is that of Leonid Alekseevich Potemkin, a student who earnestly tries to become the "new man" and struggles through some unsuccessful attempts at getting a girl. In his clumsy yet charming words the glorious visions of Stalinist propaganda meet the banal facets of everyday life.


2) Jyoti Puri, Woman, Body, Desire in Post-Colonial India: Narratives of Gender and Sexuality (Routledge, 1999). Read for History 114B: Modern South Asia, Prof. Eugene Irschick (Fall 2007).
Indian women have been traditionally conceptualised by the West either as hopelessly sensuous and sexual or as repressed and traditional, in a perverse dichotomy borne of a heady brew of Orientalist, colonial, patriarchal and other nasty discourses. Puri's work is based on actual interviews with contemporary women, talking about their sexual lives and the challenges they face, from pleasing their husbands to understanding what it means to be an "Indian" woman in the 21st century.


3) Violent Environments. Ed. Nancy Peluso and Michael Watts (Cornell University Press, 2001). Selections read for ESPM 168: Political Ecology, Prof. Nancy Peluso (Spring 2008).
This collection of essays takes on dominant assumptions of environmentalist thinking, by debunking the idea of natural scarcity as a driver of conflict and challenging the violence of capitalist enclosures and conservation measures. Perhaps the most interesting piece is by James McCarthy, who does something completely unique in academia: applies the analytical tools of political ecology, normally used to defend local resource control by Third World indigenous peoples against big bad Western environmentalists, to the First World case of the Wise Use movement in North America.


4) Robert Reich, Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy and Political Life (Knopf, 2007). Read for Public Policy 103: Wealth & Poverty, Prof. Robert Reich (Spring 2008).
The main reason why this book makes the list is that having Reich as a Professor is one of the small yet incredibly rewarding perks of being a Berkeley student. What he says is not particularly original or controversial, but he has been able to express in clear language some basic truths of our age: that the economy has undergone a fundamental shift in the last thirty years so that I am now a "symbolic analyst," that corporations have no morality, and that we all have choices to make as consumers and citizens. The fact that I was taking Reich's class in the year of Obama's election and the beginning of the economic crisis makes it that much more of a timely and unforgettable read.


5) Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (University of California Press, 2005). Read for History 280U: Histories of the British Empire, Profs. Thomas Metcalf and James Vernon (Fall 2008).
Since I only read the first chapter, I hesitated to include it on this list. But Cooper touches on what is perhaps the most important concern animating my current scholarly interests: the tension between resisting the modernity of colonialism and the fact that colonised people often appealed to "Western" or "Enlightenment" notions of rights, citizenship and justice to make claims. Cooper uses the example of West Africa under French rule, but similar arguments have been made by Indian historians like Sumit Sarkar who have been very inspirational to me outside of my undergraduate curriculum.