Bielefeld
University in the western part of Germany seemed an unlikely place to make a discovery. Teaching for 30 years, facing a new group of students
on a regular basis is common practice for me. As far as I was concerned, my
trip to the University of Bielefeld for an intensive 4 day seminar “Gender and
Memoir” entailed another set of prepared lectures, knowing that I was going to a
meet interesting students whose comprehension of what I had to say would come
by way of translation. I had also
prepared myself also to expect little of the nuance that comes when there is
apparent cultural and/or ethnic reciprocity, even if the discussions are at a
high level of sophistication. What could
really happen in such a short span of time, I thought to myself.
I was
pleasantly surprised to find otherwise: fully engaged students, highly
proficient speakers and readers of the literature I had proposed we read, and a
entirely new set of questions and interpretations—as a result of the range of
disciplines the students represented. We have something to learn from those who
read literature with fresh new eyes, free from the predispositions that living
in racialized America brings.
But this
is not about those questions and interpretation, but about something else far
more valuable that I learned.
Let me
say at the outset that I have formed a healthy suspicion of all the post gaze
rhetoric that surrounds us. As far as I am concerned the only person who could
have explained what post-anything meant was Robert Young, the brilliant young
scholar who left us too soon, but not before he produced such amazingly clear
essays such as “Putting Materialism back into Race Theory,” (Red Critique 11: Winter, 2006). That clarity resulted from his full understanding
of the intersections of race, class and culture as they operated within
multinational capitalism. Robert easily became an economic theorist, cultural
translator and literary critic simultaneously, using ideology to explain and
not to suppress contradictions, proposing new ways for comprehending and giving
meaning to identity and experiential knowledge.
So while
I do appreciate the need to gain mastery of all the posts—and insist that my
students do the same, even if only to enact a linguistic turn more efficiently
and effectively—I have rarely found use for any of the post-gazes . . . until my encounter with the grad
students at Bielefeld. Rather than
become occupants of those coded spaces that contemporary literary studies teaches
us far too well to occupy, those prison house of elaborate discourses that
obscures both the objective and subjective realities of black life as most
people know it, the students took me on my first postracial journey. When I am in front of an almost always white
class in the US, I am keenly aware of my racial difference and the political
implications of that difference, the need to translate and to advocate, but there
in Bielefeld I was free to bring African American and transcultural literature to
life in ways that restored my pride in being who I was, a site of knowledge,
both subject and object (yes, to be gazed upon), uniquely positioned and
proudly self-reflexive.
It was
precisely their self-reflexivity that won me over. Though they were younger
than many of our US grad students, there were utterly capable of understanding
the pitfalls and the stakes of their own whiteness, more than willing that most
of my own colleagues in the US to incorporate it comfortably into our dialogues. Since I teach the same authors in the US—Rigoberta
Menchu, Edwidge Danticatt, Audre Lorde, Rebecah Walker, Maxine Hong Kingston, Hugo
Hamilton, in this case—I can only assume that it was the interaction with this
particular groups of students that created a third space, where the sense of
who we all were and where we all came from—Germany, the US and Belarus—were all
meaningfully connected. This transcultural
space, as it were, was the embodiment of that relationship between the
literature and our physical, material surround.
Did I forget that I was a Black American in Europe? Was I responding to
a brief respite from the daily grind of life in a racialized culture? Not at all.
Rather, I think these students are the beneficiaries of highly
self-conscious critical practice emerging out of the InterAmerican Studies
Program at the University of Bielefeld, where they are exposed to ongoing
interdisciplinary symposia and are daily participants in cultural productions
such as the highly successful journal by the same name Inter-American
Studies/Estudio Interamericanos. I,
as a second hand beneficiary, felt their energy, and we easily fed off one
another in our efforts to distinguish between transcultural and transnational
perspectives, between the politics of location and Karen Kaplan’s notion of
outlaw genres, and the challenges that autobiographical writing brings to our
understanding of identity, truth, and agency, especially when gender and class
issues collide and compete all too often with race. Whose language is valorized and when is it to
be trusted?. For these students theory is not a far reach from practice, and
their various projects for the class will bear this out in time.
I remain
a critic of the post-gaze phenomenon.
Yet if it never happens again, I will cherish my postracial moment with
the students at the University of Bielefeld. Perhaps this is what happens when
we are free to teach and learn without so many crippling shackles.
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