In fact, one of the first comments to John was angry, almost hostile, not at John but at those trend-sucking fad-mongerers out there. The speaker underscored how much they hated us, and averred that no matter what we did, they'd still hate us, so why not do as we pleased and be damned. (At this distance I can't recall the guy's words; I'm just trying to project his emotion.) I promptly stood up and endorsed the talk; Dick Kohn, a senior historian in the field, said something Kohn-like and equivocal; and pretty soon that was that.
Not long ago I e-mailed John: "Each year I encourage my new mil his [military history] advisees to read your 1997 piece on the Embattled Future of Academic Military History. Recently I re-read it myself and it occurred to me to ask: to what extent, if any, do you see the field picking up on your suggestions about the potentialities of gender history and the new cultural history?"
"I could do a dandy update of the 1997 article, a kind of 'news from Lake Wobegone,'" John replied--and then went in a whole different direction, so beyond that one comment I know little of what he thinks. I do know that he put his money where his mouth was, and earlier this year published a book entitled Battle: A History of Combat and Culture .
He designed the cover himself, by the way. Pretty sharp.
I'll talk about John's book in a future entry. But I've left the job search and my encounter with Steve Hyland for far too long and need to get back to the main story line.
Now and again I like to join my grad students for beer. Truth be told, I acquired much of my own graduate education around the tables of various campus bars, and so did most of my peers. I join my students not to hold court--and they seldom show any sign they'd like me to--but rather to see what's going on, to see if they're having the same kinds of dialogue that I recall having as a grad student. By and large, they're not. That's because they don't have Matt and Cindy.
Matt Oyos was a grad student in military history sent to the OSU program by Pete Maslowski, his adviser at the University of Nebraska ("where the 'N' stands for 'knowledge.'") Cindy Wilkey was a women's historian and a born social director. They met, fell in love, and willy nilly brought the mil his and women's history grad students into frequent, joyous contact. I never had so much fun in my whole life.
It wasn't just the shared merriment, though there was plenty of that. It was the way we talked to each other about our fields. Hmm. Come to think of it, mostly the way the women talked to us. No doubt about it, we got an earful, enough to make me sit in on a readings course in women's history and start buying books in the field, a practice I've continued ever since.
Not as much of that cross-pollenization goes on around here these days as I would like. Students do interact across fields, but mostly socially, not intellectually. This seems especially true for the mil his grad students, who to my mind display a troubling incuriosity about anything aside from military history--and a rather blinkered military history at that.
Students like that need a Steve Hyland, who is an enthusiastic ambassador for the Latin American history that is his area of specialization. Other students joke that he's into the "fajita-zation" of the department, mindless of the fact that the fajita is Tex-Mex cuisine . . . and shit, I just italicized fajita, thereby implying that English constitutes a sutured entity from which "foreign" terms can and must be distinguished. Damn, I hate it when that happens.
Well, Steve and I got to talking, and in the way topics have of just showing up when you drink beer, we got to talking about critical race theory and whiteness studies, which I know a good deal about; postmodernism, with which I have a nodding acquaintance; and subaltern studies and postcolonialism, which were basically just phrases to me. Steve happily sketched the basics of the latter two movements--where, when, and how they originated, the tensions between them--"Can the subaltern speak?"--and where they seemed headed. It was a blast. In my experience, most people conversant with this stuff treat it like a secret language (which is kind of odd considering the radically democratic impulse that powers it). Moreover, he made it seem as if I could pick up this "pomo" and "poco" stuff without much trouble--although I had just spent the last several years getting a feel for the theoretical literature on race/racism; and constantly had the impression that there was still something out there which I was completely missing.
I saw--or thought I saw--the relevance of subaltern studies and postcolonialism in my race/war project. But no way was I going to be dumb enough to embark on learning all that stuff by myself, the way I had the first time (though I suppose I can excuse myself by saying I had no idea of what I was getting into.)
If I were going to do this, I'd want input from someone who'd made the journey herself. Consequently I emailed my colleague Donna Guy, a distinguished full professor in my department:
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First, I want to tell you how impressed I've been with Steve Hyland this quarter. He's done a terrific job as my TA for History 151 and I have been enormously impressed by him in a number of ways, not least because of his obvious excitement about his own field and his intellectual curiosity about others. This is a student whom we as a Department want to cultivate, because I'd bet real money he's going to go far. As you may know, for several years I've been examining race and war in 19th century America. It's been a steep learning curve for me, since I had almost no graduate training to draw upon, and the literature on race and racism is immense. Just as I was at last becoming fluent in critical race theory, whiteness studies, and the like, I have come to the realization that I need still more skills, and that post-colonialism and subaltern studies are probably the place to acquire them. |
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Thank you for your comments about Steven. We have all been dazzled by his energy and amazed at his progress. It is a delight to see him develop his wonderful intellect and manage his amazing organizational ability. As for your own tale of reinvention, I think everyone should reinvent him/herself at some point in their life, and I guess it is your time. Want to chat for a while before the departmental meeting? You could come by my office at 2 if you have the time. Donna |
Next day I stopped by her office, we strolled over to the library coffeehouse, and over some pricey java she asked what I was doing with my project and why I thought I needed an infusion of poco. I explained to her that the book examined the ways in which American warfare not only reflected but at certain junctures shaped the invention and articulation of white racism. After a short discussion she was convinced that I already possessed the right conceptual tools for the job. I was heartened but at the same time a tad disappointed. The idea of learning that poco stuff had kind of gotten a hold on me.
That was last Tuesday. On Thursday the Latino/a Studies Committee met with Marco Gonzales--by now you've pretty much lost track of Marco, right?--and in the afternoon he gave his job talk before the assembled English department. Again, I can't get into the substance of the talk just yet, but I was surprised by its humanity, its disillusionment with both "traditional" moral absolutes--which are all too often mere power plays--and the free-floating moral indignation that is the best postmodernism can muster. I didn't really expect that. Nor did I expect his solution, or the way in which that solution sounded reminiscent of the Jesus depicted in the gospels. I inquired afterward and sure enough, he had looked at liberation theology and seemed to respect it.
So Marco surprised me. And I think I surprised him too, as a military historian who understood that from the pomo, poco point of view, I work, knowingly or not, for Pharoah's army. During the rest of his visit we conversed enough for him to see that I was serious about subjecting my work, the project of military history, to the same scrutiny a postcolonial scholar would bring to it.
My hoped-for goal was not to abandon the field of military history, but rather to emancipate it from its de facto role as apologist, celebrant, and adviser to the status quo. Or as I had already put it in a post to H-War:
military history is essentially about nation-states and their forces, not violent resistance to those states (except by other states). If one's research focuses on counterinsurgency, that's military history. If insurgents--unless with an eye to "learning lessons" that can be applied to counterinsurgency--then apparently it isn't.
There seems little space in this agenda for much that would fall under Joe Guilmartin's useful "working definition of war":
War is the use of organized, socially-sanctioned, armed violence to achieve a political, social, or economic objective.
War is an inherently politicized term, and governments that can do so almost invariably define what is and isn't war to suit their own purposes. Joe's deceptively simple definition gets around this problem by stating only that the armed violence be organized and "socially-sanctioned"--a phrase that intentionally allows for sanction by non-governmental groups. By this definition, "pirates," "banditti," and "terrorists" can also be said, quite rightly, to be engaged in war.
I'm starting to fade out here, so let me bring this first entry in for a landing. Last evening I assembled every "cutting" edge book I could find on my book shelves, then went to Borders and got a few more. They're not all pomo, poco, or lit crit, but they all share the quality of being radically engaged:
Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States -I had an older edition already, but this one gets all the way to the "War on Terrorism";
Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks - a foundational document in critical race theory;
Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present - I'd read it before, but without understanding its relationship to postcolonialism;
Edward W. Said, Out of Place: A Memoir - which joins four other books by Said I already have; Said was a founding figure in postcolonialsm;
Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. - title speaks for itself.
Well, I guess that brings the notional reader up to speed. And if, as John Lynn maintains, "military history has been compelled to take 'the cutting edge' like a bayonet in the guts," then I guess I'm about to commit the intellectual equivalent of seppuku.
Damn. That privileging of English again. The italics are so offensive!
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