Archives and Feelings

Space, Place, Archive, and Intruders: How Academic Labor has Produced an Academic

Julie Pavlick

November 28, 2013

¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 Dear Friends,
Here is the first draft of my paper. Do your worst 🙂 eek!

¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 Some students go to college to learn, others go to socialize. I was the student who loved the social community of the university, one that only slowed down during holiday breaks. I did not dream of becoming a professor, nor did I really think about what I wanted to be when I “grew up.” Aligning myself with Sara Ahmed’s happiness script, I figured that I would finish college, move somewhere warm, have some babies, and call it a day. I did not dream of this life in academia, but now I am here. I often think about where I would be if I was not in graduate school, and though I am never remorseful, the idea of bartending in Key West seems quite romantic at times. Is graduate school my queer art of failure? Maybe it is since I abandoned my original happiness script. My love of learning began developing late in my undergraduate career. I took an intense liking to African-American literature, reading every book that I could get my hands on. After I completed my bachelor’s degree, I spent some time working at Wal-Mart and that was when I decided that graduate school was the right choice for me. I missed the classroom environment where I never knew what I would learn that day. After being accepted to IUP’s master’s program, I threw myself into my studies and never looked back.

¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 Academic labor is something that I have begun to love, finding it more enriching with each passing day. First, I define academic labor as something that adds to the conversations being held within academia, or society. Yes, it may include homework, but much of labor comes from outside of the work that we are asked to do in the classroom. It cannot be limited to the university, for if so, it renders it impractical. What makes academic labor meaningful to me is when I can use it to comment on the society that I live in. The information that the labor produces can be used in accordance to many of the issues today. Through my academic labor, I build upon what I already know. With each text that I read, I compare it to the work that I have already accomplished. Maybe academic labor is too harsh of a term and we should call it academic enrichment, instead. I propose that we call it academic enrichment because we are enriching ourselves and deepening the information that is in our personal archive. The academics of the past have done wonderful work and when we read a piece of criticism, it is almost as though the academic labor builds upon one another. For example, when we read Roderick Ferguson’s text, we are not only getting his viewpoint, but we are also viewing his academic labor of the scholars before him. Everything is intertwined, and if we work diligently as academic laborers, we will find nothing but enrichment. I am interested in showing how the inner-politics of higher education can be detrimental and uncomfortable to those who inhabit the space. It is uncomfortable to have certain conversations with others, and yet we continually strive to have an open environment where we can talk about any issue with our students. As academics we are aware that we must publish, be current in our field, and create a solid reputation surrounding our work. As we move into our careers, our achievements make us strive to do better and to do more. As Alison Bechdel says, “The more you succeed, the more empty you feel, therefore the more you must succeed” (107). I have not reached a point yet where I feel that I can relax even for a weekend. I am reading as much as I can and getting involved with current issues in my field of study.

¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 I am working towards a PhD not only because I now love to learn, but also that it has become such a large part of who I am. The love of learning may have come later in life for me, but it is the determination that I bring to each objective that has rendered me successful. The love of learning has helped me transition into an intellectual of change. An intellectual of change is someone who is working towards modifying the academic world, including change in the classroom. I want the classroom to be an open environment where students are able to approach and discuss difficult issues. Each student learns differently and I want to be the one who is able to accommodate their needs. The intellectual growth that the students will achieve will be an equal influence from each other and the professor. I want to learn from my students in order to gain a fresh perspective on what is important in their lives. That is the pedagogical approach that I am looking to take as a professor, and it is very important to why I am here in the academy. The scholarly pursuits that I have are not unlike my pedagogical aspirations. I want to change the way criticism is read. I want students to be able to understand what I am writing so that they can share it with others. The field in which I am involved in is African-American literature, 1800-present. This literature could not be more worthwhile and relevant to the society that we live in today. I want students to be able to discuss the material with their spouses, children, families, etc. I want change to occur that gives spotlight to this extraordinary form of literature that is too often underprivileged in academia. I am here to explain and educate on African-American literature and the society that we live in in the most effective way. I feel indebted to scholars such as bell hooks who have been influential to so many people. Hooks has really opened my eyes to who I want to be as an educator. One of hooks’ ideas I take to heart is this, “I never ask students to do an in class writing assignment that I am not willing to do. My willingness to share, to put my thoughts and ideas out there, attests to the importance of putting thoughts out there, of moving past fear or shame” (hooks 21). We all need to be aware that we are not only professors, but people as well. When we open ourselves to vulnerability, our students may also be open to new ideas and expressing those fears or shame.  I feel responsible to many of the pioneers that came before me. I am deeply thankful for the African-Americans that were able to produce literature in the 1800’s, often risking their lives to do so. I am thrilled that their works are finally finding grounding within academia, and I feel responsible to teach and bring light to the material. I am constantly thanking James Baldwin for his groundbreaking texts in queer theory, all criticisms aside. I guess I could say that I am responsible to every text that has been written by an African-American, for it has become my vehicle of knowledge and understanding of the world around me.

¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0 Although African-American literature has shaped who I am as a person and within academia, it has not been a smooth journey.  I have been discouraged to follow the path of African-American literature because I am a white woman. People are troubled by my interest in this particular type of literature, and they have scoffed, thinking that I do not belong in this field. Biological essentialism is a term that has become second nature in my life, and in my field of study. A coarse definition would be that it means that we are born with certain characteristics due to our race, sex, etc. and because of those characteristics we act, or we are supposed to, in a certain way.  I tend to use the term quite often because in race studies, it is one of the aspects of culture that we are attempting to eliminate. Biological essentialism also entertains the idea that we are born different and therefore we cannot understand one another. This is one of the largest issues within our world today. Too often it is assumed that people are born a certain way and cannot understand other cultures, ways of living, etc. It should be brought to attention that although people may be born under different circumstances, that does not mean that they cannot relate to the issues that are at hand. Stephen Brookfield and Stephen Preskill explain, “One of the cardinal rules for discussion across class and ethnic boundaries is to begin by acknowledging the fact of diversity” (128). Our classrooms need to be open so that we can address these difficult issues and hope that through the discussion students will leave the classroom with a deeper understanding and ability to discuss what they have learned with others. One my sole purposes as a professor are to give the students the tools to talk about race, diversity, class, and gender outside of the classroom.

¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 0 My particular skin color has become more apparent and visible within academia than it ever has before. But it only became a problem when I expressed my desire to work within race studies. The normalcy of whiteness is fine as long as it does not appear anywhere near minority studies. I have been asked to discuss my race in a teaching philosophy. No, I will not. I will not insert a disclaimer about why I am teaching this material. I am teaching the material because it is worth reading, analyzing, and it is important. I was asked to address my race on my teaching philosophy because I want to teach a class about African-American literature. This further reiterates the assumption that you are only able to teach what you know. Do you know what that means if we are only able to teach what we know? That means that we are only able to learn what we have always known as well. If this were so, all of us women would be up shit creek regarding much of the literature that has been written in the world. Men could not teach Women’s literature, African-Americans could never understand most of the “classic” canonical literature, and God forbid any homosexual pick up a text written by a heterosexual author. See my point? I grow tired of defending who I am and what I want to teach.

¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 0 As readers, students, and scholars we are constantly shifting and being immersed in different ideas. Today we may be engulfed in Marxist theory, tomorrow Postmodernism. I want to teach my students that we are constantly in a state of flux, and who we are today is never the same person that we were yesterday. I want to express the openness I feel for all types of literature, but I want my passion for African-American literature to outweigh the burden of my skin color. I know that I was born to teach this particular form of literature, so when people talk about how we are unable to relate to others who are unlike us, it is a fallacy. In fact, it is that very notion that has helped to perpetuate racism, segregation in our schools, and the “invisible” class system.

¶ 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 0 The scholarly work that I am currently invested in deals with the idea of space, place, and sexuality in African-American literature. The driving force of these ideas comes from the marginality of African-American men regarding their sexuality. It is often assumed that African-American males are heterosexual, which silences much of the population. I want to give voice to the individuals who do not fit the stereotype of the masculine heterosexual man, and I am indebted to many writers that have come before me. In Eve Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling, she talks about performativity. Performativity has a great presence within African-American literature sometimes involving passing, or sexuality. Performative acts are often witnessed in African-American literature because race is socially constructed, and people must adhere to rules that are in place by the hegemony. Sedgwick speaks more about the performative utterances in Touching Feeling, but the language itself is produced by the patriarchy. Regarding patriarchy, another writer, Roderick Ferguson comes to mind. In his book, The Reorder of Things, he focuses on how the movements of the 1960’s have directly influenced academia, and yet the promises of today, a better “minority incorporation into social, political, economic, an academic realm” (4) seems impossible. There has been no fulfillment to the promises made, and many multicultural professors are stretched too far in the university. It is important to give voice to multicultural works by having it taught across multiple genres of literature. It should not be the responsibility of one professor to be the only scholar in the genre, for it only gives one perspective of the work. It would be as if only one professor was able to teach all works taught by white authors; it is just inconceivable.

¶ 9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 0 When I thought about what I wanted to teach in the university, I was perplexed. I continued to grow familiar with African-American literature, but it was not until I was introduced to James Baldwin did I know for sure the path that I was meant to trod. Although criticized for his lack of attention to race in many of his novels, Baldwin is a prolific writer of African-American and Queer literature. Baldwin’s novel, Giovanni’s Room, changed the way I read literature, and continues to shape my thoughts and feelings surrounding not only Queer literature, but African-American literature as well. Through his use of confinement regarding homosexuality in Giovanni’s Room, the room serves as a homosexual archive, one that can only be altered or interrupted by the intrusion of the heteronormative society.

¶ 10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 0 There are dozens of interpretations of the word archive, most often referred to as place to store materials that are considered valuable but not necessarily useful at the moment. We create public, private, and personal archives that are reflective of our history, society, and personal interests.  My personal archive is composed of things I have accomplished, failed, and what I wish to learn. For example, the Romanian language is close to my heart because it is the language that my friends that live in Moldova fluently speak. I do not have an extensive knowledge base about this language, but it is in the archive as a wish to learn. The point is that other people are able to change or alter archives. As much as we want to believe our personal archives are ours, it is almost impossible not to recognize that those items within the archive are sometimes influenced by something or someone else. In regards to this idea that others are influential to our own archive, I argue that these interruptions can illustrate the idea of haunting. The people, ideas, and material that we suppress in our archive can be positioned as ghosts. These archival ghosts reveal themselves in many forms, but it indicates that the items in the archive are never truly objects from the past. By the interruption of the ghosts, we are aware of the present and the action that we must take in order to fulfill these “ghostly matters.” As Avery F. Gordon discusses in her text, Ghostly Matters¸ she says, “…haunting is a shared structure of feeling, a shared possession, a specific type of sociality. I might even suggest that haunting is the most general instance of the clamoring return of the reduced to a delicate social experience struggling, even unaware, with its shadowy but exigent presence” (201). We cannot ignore the ghost, but we must act instead. We are constantly triggering ghosts in our archive, sometimes by our own digging, or interruptions from the world around us.

¶ 11 Leave a comment on paragraph 11 0 The intrusion of others in the development of the archive is something that we cannot always control. After all, it is an intrusion that is influenced by particular agendas. An agenda does not have to be a negative feature, but we must be aware that we are influenced by societal factors that shape the way we live and archive. I agree with Derrida when he says, “I shall choose it from up close to archive desire from up close to an impossible archaeology of this nostalgia, of this painful desire for a return to the authentic and singular origin, and for a return concerned to account for the desire to return: for itself” (85). Derrida was concerned with the idea that we have an intense desire to trace the archive to the original source. As scholars we are guilty of doing so, yet I argue that this is never possible due to the idea that many items in our archive are unable to be fleshed out by locating their origin. This builds off of the idea that because of the intrusion of others, we are not alone in constructing our archives, whether they are public or personal. Although we can locate the source of their origin, we truly have no grounds to accurately consume the material that we find. Instead of attempting to digest the information in our archives as pieces, maybe a better solution is to think of it as a piece of a puzzle that must be integrated with others in order to gain a sense of collectiveness.

¶ 12 Leave a comment on paragraph 12 0 Building an archive is something that we have been engaging in, whether it is consciously or unconsciously. Before I began to actively think about archives, I knew that there was some sort of collectiveness regarding my academic career and personal life, but I was having problems connecting the two. This is until I discovered that an archive does not need to be broken into categories. I have a collective archive of who I am in the various roles that I play, while intertwining the scholar that I hope to become. The items that I have archived are layered with more information that continuously builds into a larger sense of who I am in the process of becoming. Giovanni’s Room has impacted that archive by aiding in the understanding of how influential society can be, and how we can be neglectful of this idea of intrusion into lives. Giovanni and David built an archive in the room that they made love, but the heteronormative world’s intrusion broke the archive by conditioning David to question his love for another man. In the larger archive of Giovanni’s Room as a text, it can be positioned with the history of Queer theory, gay rights, African-American literature, masculinity, and other texts such as Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman. The main point I am trying to make is that no archive can be entirely isolated. This means that we cannot label an archive and its composition by one idea or theme. It is part of a collective that reaches out to many disciplines. So when we speak about the lesbian or feminist archive, we are not only looking at these particular identities, but also what has influenced this archive as a whole.

¶ 13 Leave a comment on paragraph 13 0 Archives are continually shifting. We like to think of them as something that is concrete and in the past, but it is impossible to do so. Walter Benjamin is really interested in the idea that the archive is never truly in the past, but an extension of the present moment. Benjamin makes the claim that we can never truly know the items in the archive because we are aware of what happened afterwards. Therefore, the material in the archive has directly influenced the present, which means it is not in the past until it completely forgotten. With the emergence of sub-fields in various disciplines, the archives continue to shift based on who is constructing the archive. It is important to remember that each archive has an author and their particular interest helps to shape what is included. Because of this idea, many authors attempt to exclude material by force. As stated before, this is an impossible endeavor because no archive can be entirely isolated.

¶ 14 Leave a comment on paragraph 14 0 Space, place, archives, and intruders are dominating my interest thus far in academia. The text that is most influential to the scholarly work I am currently invested in is Sara Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness. Not only does Ahmed discuss how happiness is structured as a heterosexual paradigm, but she also discusses the idea of the structures that give space to the acts of engaging in homosexual behavior. I am very interested in the idea of confinement in literature, particularly in African-American literature, regarding the idea that confinement allows for certain actions of resistance to the white heteronormative world. In Ahmed’s chapter “Unhappy Queers,” she discusses how attributing unhappiness to queers has allowed for positive outcomes through the allowance of a space for sexual acts to occur. She prefaces this chapter in the introduction by saying, “To kill joy, as many of the texts I cite in the following pages teach us, is to open a life, to make room for life, to make room for possibility, for chance. My aim in this book is to make room” (20). This idea of “making room” allows for additional space to discuss areas of study that are not traditional in the sense that they are outside of the heteronormative world. Ahmed is not seeking an inclusion into that world, but insisting that there are ways that allow a different kind of life to be lived, one that is outside of the happiness script. Through the analysis of Ahmed’s work, I conclude that there is a space outside of heteronormativity where gay individuals are able to not follow the happiness script that has been proscribed in our capitalistic and predominantly heteronormative society.

¶ 15 Leave a comment on paragraph 15 0 Ahmed uses the work that has been established by others in order to make a claim for creating a space that allows for action outside of the heteronormative world. I, too, am focused on how creating space allows the oppressed to function on their own terms, limiting the influences of the dominant power structure to intervene. Ahmed critiques the movie If These Walls Could Talk 2 in order to solidify her idea that there are spaces where homosexuality can flourish, and often these spaces reside in the confinement of the home:

¶ 16 Leave a comment on paragraph 16 0 The house is figured as a zone of intimacy; their love literally occupies the walls, keeping them busy. The house is not represented as property but as a space in which they have extended themselves: mementos, cards, photographs; queer intimacy leaves an impression on the walls (109).

¶ 17 Leave a comment on paragraph 17 0 Ahmed describes the house as a zone of intimacy which is an excellent example of homosexuality prospering in a private sphere. The house allows for a level of intimacy to happen, and it becomes a space of confinement. Confinement in this sense is not a negative term, but can be viewed as a dwelling that is not infused with heteronormative coding. It is a space that can be shaped and re-shaped according to desire. If Ahmed’s quest is “to make room” she does an exceptional job of doing just that. By allowing these spaces to be discussed, she is pushing back against the heteronormative world and their strict constructs of what happiness means. Queer intimacy can thrive through spaces that are constructed by them. If these spaces are built by the “unhappy queer,” then there is a positive progression in terms of making room for others by the choice of building a space for open sexuality to convene.

¶ 18 Leave a comment on paragraph 18 0 My personal archive will continue to shift in the future as all archives will, and the shift should be welcomed as a new way of approaching the material that interests us. Although change can be frightening, it can be an indication of growth, which is something I think we all aspire to. I look forward to recognizing new ways that literature and culture continue queering my fate, that impossible idea that we are the only authors that have a hand in composing our archives.

¶ 19 Leave a comment on paragraph 19 0  

¶ 20 Leave a comment on paragraph 20 0 Works Cited

¶ 21 Leave a comment on paragraph 21 0 Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2010. Print.

¶ 22 Leave a comment on paragraph 22 0 Bechdel, Alison. Are You My Mother? New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2012. Print.

¶ 23 Leave a comment on paragraph 23 0 Benjamin, Walter, Hannah Arendt, and Harry Zohn. Illuminations. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968. Print.

¶ 24 Leave a comment on paragraph 24 0 Brookfield, Stephen D., and Stephen Preskill. Discussion as a Way of Teaching Tools and Techniques for Democratic Classrooms. Hoboken: Wiley, 2012. Print.

¶ 25 Leave a comment on paragraph 25 0 Derrida, Jacques, and Eric Prenowitz. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1996. Print.

¶ 26 Leave a comment on paragraph 26 0 Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis, MN: Univ. of Minnesota, 2008. Print.

¶ 27 Leave a comment on paragraph 27 0 hooks, bell. Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom. New York: Routledge, 2010. Print.

You can follow any comments on this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.