THEORIZING

FIELDWORK
IN THE
HUMANITIES
Methods, Reflections, and
Approaches to the Global South

Edited by
Shalini Puri and
Debra A. Castillo
Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities
 Shalini Puri  •  Debra A. Castillo
Editors

Theorizing Fieldwork
in the Humanities
Methods, Reflections, and Approaches to the
Global South
Editors
Shalini Puri Debra A. Castillo
Department of English Department of Comparative Literature
University of Pittsburgh Cornell University
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA Ithaca, New York, USA

ISBN 978-1-137-60331-9 (hardcover)   ISBN 978-1-349-92834-7 (eBook)

ISBN 978-1-349-92836-1  (softcover)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-92834-7

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 Contents

Acknowledgments   vii

About the Contributors   ix

List of Figures   xiii

1 Introduction: Conjectures on Undisciplined Research   1

Debra A. Castillo and Shalini Puri

Part I  Memory, Conflict, Contestation  27

2 Finding the Field: Notes on Caribbean Cultural Criticism,

Area Studies, and the Forms of Engagement  29
Shalini Puri

3 Women’s Naked Protest in Africa: Comparative Literature

and Its Futures  51
Naminata Diabate

4 Aesthetics in the Making of History: The Tebhaga Women’s

Movement in Bengal  73
Kavita Panjabi

v
vi  Contents

Part II  Place, Performance, Practices  93

5 Locating Palestine Within American Studies: Transitory

Field Sites and Borrowed Methods  95
Jennifer Lynn Kelly

6 Absent Performances: Distant Fieldwork on Social Movement

Theater of Algeria and India 109
Neil Doshi

7 Ethical Dilemmas in Studying Blogging by Favela Residents

in Brazil 131
Tori Holmes

8 Reading Delhi, Writing Delhi: An Ethnography of Literature 151

Rashmi Sadana

Part III  Medium and Form 165

9 Daily Life and Digital Reach: Place-based Research and 

History’s Transnational Turn 167
Lara Putnam

10 Lessons from the Space Between Languages: Notes on Poetry

and Ethnography 183
Renato Rosaldo

Part IV  Institutions, Organizations, Collaborations 191

11 Researching the Cultural Politics of Dirt in Urban Africa 193

Stephanie Newell

12 Accidental Histories: Fieldwork Among the Maroons

of Jamaica 213
Paul Youngquist

13 Engagement and Pedagogy: Traveling with Students in 

Chiapas, Mexico 235
Debra A. Castillo

Index 253
 Acknowledgments

Many of the contributors to this volume along with several fellow travelers
first gathered as a group in March 2014 at the University of Pittsburgh for a
two-day colloquium on “Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities” to share
our work in progress and talk about its underpinnings. It has been a stim-
ulating and convivial collaboration across disciplines and generations. To all
who were present, our thanks. Special thanks to Yveline Alexis, Reid Andrews,
Tyler Bickford, Laura Brown, John Frechione, Christine Leuenberger, Neepa
Majumdar, Scott Morgenstern, Imani Owens, Mina Rajagopalan, Kirk Savage,
Peter Trachtenberg, and the students in Shalini Puri’s graduate seminar
“Interdisciplinary Methods in the Humanities” (2014, 2015).
We gratefully acknowledge generous support of our efforts by the University
of Pittsburgh’s Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences Faculty Scholarship and
Research Grant, a Humanities Center Faculty Collaborative Research Grant,
the Center for Latin American Studies, the English Department, the Charles
Crow Fund, and the staff of the Center for Latin American Studies. Shalini was
also the grateful recipient of the University of Pittsburgh’s University Center
for International Studies Faculty Fellowship, which laid the groundwork for
this project.
At Cornell University, thanks are due to the Center for Engaged Learning
and Research; the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, which
co-supported many of the students in the study abroad course led by Debra
Castillo; and especially International Programs in the College of Agriculture
and Life Sciences, the administrators for the field course, and alumni from the
International Agriculture and Rural Development course (IARD 401/4010)
who did fund-raising to support it.
We are especially grateful to Sara Abraham, Laura Brown, and Lara Putnam
for their far-reaching comments on earlier versions of the Introduction.
Thanks to the anonymous press readers and to the editorial team at Palgrave
Macmillan—Brigitte Shull and Paloma Yannakakis. Melissa Castillo-Garsow,
Jarrell D. Wright, and John Kennedy provided valuable assistance with various
aspects of research and manuscript preparation.

vii
viii  Acknowledgments

Duke University Press kindly granted permission to reprint “Finding the

Field: Notes on Caribbean Cultural Criticism, Area Studies, and the Forms of
Engagement” by Shalini Puri. It first appeared in Small Axe 41 (July 2013):
58−73, a special issue entitled “What Is Caribbean Studies?”
Above all, deep thanks to the many people in our various fields for the con-
versations and insights that animate the entire project.
 About the Contributors

Debra A. Castillo  is Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow, Emerson Hinchliff

Professor of Hispanic Studies, and Professor of Comparative Literature at
Cornell University. She is the past president of the international Latin American
Studies Association. Among her most recent books are Cartographies of Affect:
Across Borders in South Asia and the Americas (with Kavita Panjabi) (2011),
Mexican Public Intellectuals (with Stuart Day) (2014), and Despite all Adversities:
Spanish American Queer Cinema (with Andrés Lema Hincapié) (2016).
Naminata Diabate  is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Cornell
University. A scholar of sexuality, race, biopolitics, and postcoloniality, she
researches African, African American, and Afro-­Hispanic literatures and film.
Her recent writing on these subjects has appeared in journals and collections of
essays. One of her forthcoming essays is “Genealogies of Desire, Extravagance,
and Radical Queerness in Frieda Ekotto’s Chuchote Pas Trop” (Research in
African Literatures). Currently, she is working on two book projects: “Naked
Agency: Genital Cursing, Biopolitics, and Africa” and “Same-Sex Sexuality and
Digitality in Africa.”
Neil Doshi  is Assistant Professor of French in the Department of French and
Italian at the University of Pittsburgh. He is presently completing a manuscript
titled Staging the Novel: Bodies of Francophone Algerian Culture, which studies
the relationships between theatrical and prose forms in Francophone-­Algerian
literature.
Tori  Holmes  is Lecturer in Brazilian Studies at Queen’s University Belfast,
Northern Ireland. Her main research interests are in digital culture and the
texts and practices of urban representation in Brazil, particularly relating to
favelas. She has broader interests in digital ethnography and ethical and
methodological issues in interdisciplinary research on digital culture. She
is a member of the Digital Latin American Cultures Network and one of
the founders of REBRAC (European Network of Brazilianists working in
Cultural Analysis).

ix
x  About the Contributors

Jennifer  Lynn  Kelly  is a University of California President’s Postdoctoral

Fellow in the Department of Communication at University of California, San
Diego. She received her PhD in American Studies with a Portfolio in Women’s
and Gender Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. She is currently
working on her first book, a multisited ethnographic study of solidarity tourism
in Palestine. Publications related to this research appear in American Quarterly
and are forthcoming in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.
Stephanie  Newell is Professor of English and Senior Research Fellow in
International and Area Studies at Yale University. Her research focuses on the
public sphere in colonial West Africa, particularly newspapers and pamphlets.
She has published widely on the cultural histories of printing and reading in
West Africa, and on the spaces for local creativity and subversive resistance in
colonial-era newspapers. Her most recent book is The Power to Name: A History
of Anonymity in Colonial West Africa (2013).
Kavita Panjabi  is Professor of Comparative Literature and Coordinator of the
Centre for Studies in Latin American Literatures and Cultures at Jadavpur
University, Kolkata. Her book Unclaimed Harvest: An Oral History of the
Tebhaga Women’s Movement is forthcoming with Zubaan and the Indian
Institute of Advanced Studies. She has edited Poetics and Politics of Sufism and
Bhakti in South Asia: Love, Loss and Liberation (2011) and co-edited Women
Contesting Culture: Changing Frames of Gender Politics in India (with Paromita
Chakravarti) (2012) and Cartographies of Affect: Across Borders in South Asia
and the Americas (with Debra Castillo) (2011).
Shalini Puri  is Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the
author of The Grenada Revolution in the Caribbean Present: Operation Urgent
Memory (2014) and the award-winning The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social
Equality, Post-Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity (2004). Her edited collec-
tions include The Legacies of Caribbean Radical Politics (2010), Marginal
Migrations: The Circulation of Cultures within the Caribbean (2003), and
Caribbean Military Encounters (with Lara Putnam).
Lara  Putnam  is Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh. Her
publications include Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of
Race in the Jazz Age (2013), The Company They Kept: Migrants and the Politics
of Gender in Caribbean Costa Rica, 1870−1960 (2002), and over two dozen
articles and chapters. Work in progress uses examples from the history of
Venezuela, Trinidad, and Grenada to explore methodological and theoretical
dilemmas within history’s transnational and digital “turns.”
Renato Rosaldo  is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology as well as social and
cultural analysis at New  York University. He is the author of Ilongot
Headhunting, 1883−1974: A Study in Society and History (1980), Culture and
Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (1989), and The Day of Shelly’s Death:
The Poetry and Ethnography of Grief (2014). He is also the editor of many
 About the Contributors  xi

books, including Anthropology of Globalization (with Jon Inda) (2001) and

Cultural Citizenship in Island Southeast Asia: Nation and Belonging in the
Hinterlands (2003).
Rashmi  Sadana  is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at George Mason
University and received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.
She is the author of English Heart, Hindi Heartland: The Political Life of
Literature in India (2012) and co-editor (with Vasudha Dalmia) of The
Cambridge Companion to Modern Indian Culture (2012). She is currently
writing an ethnography of Delhi’s new metro rail system.
Paul Youngquist  teaches English at the University of Colorado Boulder. For
several years, he and Professor Frances Botkin of Towson University have
helped organize the annual Charles Town International Maroon Conference in
conjunction with the Quao Day Celebration held in Charles Town’s Asafu
Yard. He writes on Jamaican marronage, British Romanticism, contem-
porary music, and science fiction.
 List of Figures

Fig. 2.1  Cubana and Aeroflot planes at the abandoned

Pearls Airport, Grenada 33
Fig. 2.2  Planes at Pearls Airport, rainy season 34

xiii
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Conjectures on 

Undisciplined Research

Debra A. Castillo and Shalini Puri

A number of years ago a comparative literature graduate student came to

Debra’s office in Cornell University to inquire about possibilities for funding
fieldwork she hoped to pursue in Mexico. When asked what specifically she
wanted to do there, she said, “Honestly, what I really need to do is to breathe
the air and eat the food.” Debra told her she needed a more compelling aca-
demic justification in order to satisfy the evaluators.
Years later, looking back on this incident, we might well ask if the stu-
dent had a point, under-theorized but implicit in the blunt statement of
her underlying need for something that sounds—on the face of it—all too
distant from the objective, academic work we are traditionally taught to
aspire to. Perhaps she was reaching for something she could not yet name—
something like Renato Rosaldo’s invocation of the value of “deep hanging
out,”1 or Rebecca Solnit’s account of walking in a place as a valuable kind of
“reading with one’s feet,”2 or Michel de Certeau’s discussion of the impor-
tance of walking in the city,3 or Stuart Hall’s metaphorical direction of
cultural studies toward the “dirty crossroads”4 where popular culture and
the high arts meet. All point to the gains of emplaced and embodied cul-
tural encounter, in James Clifford’s words: “embodied activities pursued in
historically and politically defined places”5; or in Anand Pandian’s eloquent
phrasing: “an enchantment with the unknown promise of worldly circum-
stance.”6 Such phrases are starting points for our exploration of fieldwork
in this volume.

D.A. Castillo (*)

Department of Comparative Literature, Cornell University, Ithaca, USA
S. Puri
English Department, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, USA

© The Author(s) 2016 1

S. Puri, D.A. Castillo (eds.), Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-92834-7_1
2  D.A. CASTILLO AND S. PURI

For there is no institutional consensus in literary studies specifically or in

the humanities in general on the value of such work; still less is there insti-
tutionalized opportunity for it. In fact, recurrent motifs in the experience of
scholars who want to undertake such research have been skepticism, caution,
discouragement, deferral (until after the dissertation, after tenure, after…),
and an intense sense of constraint. Sometimes the discouragement stems not
from skepticism but from a desire to protect fellow scholars from institutional
consequences; it recognizes, in other words, that notwithstanding routinized
invocations of interdisciplinarity, our disciplines rarely reward such work or
make allowances for the time it takes.
Nonetheless, those of us who have found ways to undertake fieldwork have
found it an indispensable tool, one that has transformed the practice, goals, and
conclusions of our scholarship. In fact, other recurrent motifs in our experi-
ence of fieldwork have been gratitude for the richness of ongoing relationships
forged in the field, the possibility of collaborative work, invigoration by the
felt connection of academia with the world outside it, a sense of our writing as
one part of a larger shared project, and intense pleasure at the conjunction of
sensory and intellectual cognition.
Doing fieldwork in the humanities thus often involves strangely dissonant
experiences of intellectual exhilaration and intersubjective connection on the
one hand and disciplinary isolation and professional incomprehension on the
other. We are enriched by the knowledge that we gain through place-based
research; yet, this knowledge is often largely incompatible with the conven-
tions of scholarship in which we are professionalized. This volume is both
for those who are deeply immersed in fieldwork in the humanities and for
those of us who would like to be so, such as the graduate student who said to
Shalini after hearing a talk she gave at a conference in Essex: “I didn’t know
you could use material like that as evidence. I went back and rewrote my talk
after hearing yours.” We hope she will find in this volume an emerging com-
munity of scholars with whom to think. For, indeed, when we find others
attempting fieldwork in the humanities, it is like finding family one didn’t
know one had.
In our experience, it is quite typical that the methods that humanities-based
fieldwork emerges from and forges, the decision points along the way, remain
largely invisible or backstage or appear only in brief allusions onstage. Many
of our field-based conversations do not show up explicitly in our writing yet
nonetheless infuse and transform the entire project. One goal of this volume
is thus simply to launch a public conversation among scholars doing fieldwork
in the humanities, to make such methods more widely visible without seeking
to standardize them.
Our claim, then, is not that there are no scholars in the humanities doing
fieldwork. On the contrary, there are a number of inspiring examples of
fieldwork-­based humanities study, often located at the fringes of disciplines, or
dispersed across the muddled undisciplines that may be highly praised but are
somewhat institutionally homeless. What we want to do is to articulate, share,
 INTRODUCTION: CONJECTURES ON UNDISCIPLINED RESEARCH  3

and refine our practices; to compare our varying understandings of fieldwork in

our different disciplines, most of which have no public discourse on fieldwork
and offer no training in how to conduct it.
Cultural studies was an early practitioner of fieldwork when it emerged
as an interdiscipline in the 1960s, breaking away from literature in response
to massive social upheavals around race and empire, self-consciously an irri-
tant that hoped to produce a pearl in the oyster shell of academic life, as
Stuart Hall put it.7 Cultural studies at that time turned to sociology and a
range of ethnographic practices to realize its promise. But even a cursory
sampling of recent cultural studies readers reveals that the center of grav-
ity of its canonized versions has long since shifted away from fieldwork.8
Some of the energy, sense of political urgency, and turn toward fieldwork
as a method that characterized early incarnations of cultural studies now
also animates the newer field of public humanities (including the work of
Brooks, Cooper, Harney and Moten, Jay and Graff, Nussbaum, Sommer,
Woodward, and the Critical University Studies series published by Johns
Hopkins University Press, to name a few).9 Unlike cultural studies, however,
the public humanities have gained institutional currency and legitimation
in a technocratic environment where it has become necessary to justify the
usefulness of the humanities and where interdisciplinarity is often a form of
resource consolidation.
Fieldwork-based projects have also been important in contemporary art his-
tory and architecture. Likewise, a handful of historians led the way in making
oral histories a recognized and legitimate archive for their discipline; Bourdieu
describes his research as “fieldwork in philosophy”; and feminist cultural
geography, music and ethnomusicology, scholarship on popular culture and
everyday life have all turned to fieldwork. So too have scholars in emergent
disciplines and interdisciplines such as sound studies; the movement outward
from literary studies to music studies; performance studies at the intersection
with literature and theater studies or with ethnography, testimonio studies, and
subaltern studies.10
There is also an emerging group of scholars who explicitly define their proj-
ects in the context of literary fieldwork—albeit often by way of references that
are as tantalizing as they are brief. We might include Muniza Ahmad (Indian
Muslim literature), Lara Maconi (Tibetan oral literature), Emily Lethbridge
(Icelandic sagas), Tim Frye (Panama), Béquer Seguín (Cuba), Catalina Neculai
(New York). Sean Heuston in his book Modern Poetry and Ethnography offers
an extended meditation on poetic fieldwork; Renato Rosaldo describes his
study of grief in The Day of Shelly’s Death as ethnographic poetry; and Saidiya
Hartman describes her 2008 Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic
Slave Route as an exercise in literary fieldwork.11
In his brief article, Seguín acknowledges that fieldwork is “a strange task”
for a literary scholar.12 Ahmad issues a clear call to action: “The role and meth-
odologies of fieldwork in the literary sphere are far less clearly defined than
in other disciplines, such as anthropology or history. Yet with the gradual
4  D.A. CASTILLO AND S. PURI

e­ xpansion of literary studies in Europe and North America towards the litera-
tures of Africa, Asia and the Middle East, together with the growing emphasis
on interdisciplinary perspectives, this aspect of our research would surely ben-
efit from collective discussion.”13
Joan (Colin) Dayan’s remarkable study Haiti, History and the Gods offers a
relatively early example in this brief genealogy. Dayan uses the term “literary
fieldwork” to describe the novelistic achievement of Marie Chauvet’s Fonds
des nègres: “using a literary text as data that can test, confirm, or enhance facts
from other sources.”14 Dayan argues that Chauvet’s novel offers historical
insights that are lost in empiricist and nationalist records, and provides an
opportunity for questioning generic divisions between fact and fiction. The
term “literary fieldwork” could well be applied also to Dayan’s own work and
to name what is at the heart of the richness of that work. In a 2013 interview,
Dayan acknowledges the pivotal role of her time in Haiti: “I traveled to Haiti
for the first time as I worked on the book, met Aubelin Jolicoeur in the lobby
of the Oloffson, discovered vodou and nothing was ever the same again.”15
Dayan also credits anthropologist Michele-Rolph Trouillot’s question “[t]o
what extent do ‘local initiative and local response’ account for motion in the
system?” as guiding her own work. Paying tribute to the significance of his
work, she observes: “This insistence on the local … set the bar for everything
I wrote, not only my writing about Haitian historiography and literature, but
also my engagement with the practical quandaries of the rapprochement of
anthropology and literary criticism, what I later called ‘literary fieldwork.’
What he referred to as a ‘methodology for the study of particulars as sources of
change in their own right,’ was for him an enduring bulwark against over-
simplification…. [It] was to engage with details that led to nothing short
of revelation.”16 To our knowledge, the aforementioned essay and interview
are among the few places where Dayan writes about the profound ways in
which the conjunction of literary text, the lens of the local, field exposure in
Haiti, and her own experience of the US south’s racial history transformed
her work.
Similarly, Gayatri Spivak in Death of a Discipline speaks of her transforma-
tion as a scholar associated with French high theory, after she takes on work as a
teacher in rural West Bengal, asking herself of the relationship between her work
as an activist and an academic: “How is it possible to reconcile what I touch in
the field––other people––with what I teach for a living––literary criticism?”17
What Spivak calls “open-plan fieldwork” (35, 50), a fieldwork that emerges
from her activist experience and is not standardized into a Euro-US model
academic code (37), becomes integral to the disciplinary alliance she imagines
between area studies and comparative literature. The supplementation of one
with the other would provide a counterpoint to monolingual models of world
literature (global English) that bow out of deep or sustained engagement with
place or history. And it would infuse traditionally social science-heavy models
of area studies with the desires of the humanities. Thus, area studies’ deeply
grounded place-based research would be combined with disciplined literary
 INTRODUCTION: CONJECTURES ON UNDISCIPLINED RESEARCH  5

attention to language as an active cultural medium (9) and to forms of knowl-

edge that do not readily translate into policy—for literature’s generalizations
are unverifiable (44, 50); it offers prefiguration rather than prediction (48; see
also 44). Combined, such practices exemplify and enable “learn[ing] to learn
from below” (36) and contribute to the formation of “counterglobalizing net-
works of people’s alliances” (35), indeed to imagining the human itself not in
terms of identity categories but rather as an orientation, “intended toward the
Other” (73).
In Learning Zulu, Mark Sanders explicitly links language learning to such
projects. He describes learning Zulu, a language he plots in relations to the
dense linguistic histories of power in South Africa, as making reparation toward
a language for a crime.18 This reparative quality directed toward the violent
history of colonization, and one that is deeply entangled with missionary prac-
tices and policies, is something to which he is acutely attentive as a South
African of white descent. And he observes: “A learner of language—any lan-
guage—always follows a pattern of making mistakes and accepting correction”
and “since the native speaker determines what is correct—it is also a perpetual
process of reparation, of undoing of error.”19 Learning the languages of the
global south, engaging them through fieldwork, thus crucially recalibrates the
relations between self and other.
Years earlier, Mary Louise Pratt challenged diffusionist, assimiliationist, and
other models of culture and language based on homogeneity by reframing col-
onization and the Americas as a “contact zone” in which one needed to reckon
with the active role of subordinated others in shaping culture. From the disci-
pline of media studies, Wendy Willems more recently called for more ethno-
graphic work as a way of studying the south on its own varied terms rather than
through the complacencies of “normative dewesternization,” which represents
“‘the Other,’ but from within the prism and norms of ‘the Self.’”20 In her study
of minority writers in the Americas, Doris Sommer reads the range of textual
mechanisms by which minority writers install difference, distance, delays, and
blocks to ready access in their texts; she reads these maneuvers as resistances
to being neutralized or assimilated to dominant codes. Comparative literature
and anthropology scholar Vincent Crapanzano describes one of his goals in
writing his ethnographies thus: “to create … a kind of conceptual turbulence
in the reader.”21 Both Doris Sommer’s literary examples and Crapanzano’s
description of fieldwork potentially produce similar kinds of conceptual turbu-
lence, an estrangement and revaluation of the self through an encounter with
the Other.
One of the questions at the heart of this book is what happens to literary
studies when it shifts the medium of its encounter with difference from text
to everyday life, or more precisely, when it doubles the textual encounter with
lived encounter? How does that movement between a bounded text and the
unbounded, unfinishedness of life matter? At the core of all the foregoing
examples is a notion of encounter. What fieldwork in the humanities does is to
shift the humanities’ medium of encounter.
6  D.A. CASTILLO AND S. PURI

We do not claim, of course, that humanities fieldwork can only usefully

occur in the global south or on subaltern or disenfranchised subjects. Such a
suggestion would concede to the universalist pretensions of the north, whereas
for us part of the value of fieldwork, whether carried out in the north or the
south, is precisely, as Dipesh Chakrabarty put it, to provincialize Europe (and
by extension the North more generally).22 In such a project, fieldwork is valu-
able whether undertaken in relation to subalterns or elites, and whether these
populations are located in the global north or the global south. It could con-
tribute to the renewal of Victorian studies in Britain or urban studies in the
contemporary USA or any number of other undertakings.
However, much of the most exciting contemporary work is indeed com-
ing from engagements and entanglements with the south. And this volume is
offered also as an intervention in postcolonial studies; it is in relation to this
field that we have focused our efforts. We use the term “global south” rather
than postcolonial studies or decolonial studies because it has a life outside aca-
demia. And unlike the term “third world,” it signals the particular transna-
tional reorganization of a still unequal world after the end of the Cold War and
after the faltering of anticolonial nationalisms. However, like “third world,” it
refers to a locus of solidarity and contestation that seeks futures more demo-
cratic than those held out by first world capitalism, developmentalism, and
sub-imperialisms within the south.23 Thus, though fieldwork may productively
be carried out in any part of the world, many of our preceding examples as well
as the essays gathered in this volume have undertaken fieldwork on the global
south with the goal of checking and countering material inequalities and epis-
temic privileging of western/northern and elite southern norms.
Because Shalini and Debra’s shared home discipline of literary studies has
been one of the most resistant to fieldwork, we emphasize in this collection
the work of scholars who are forging theoretical and methodological interven-
tions there. We can imagine another volume that might focus more on music,
cinema, and art history. We hope that this one will offer a start at making more
readily available to scholars in the humanities an understanding of the ratio-
nales, methods, dilemmas, risks, and gains of fieldwork. And we hope that it
will contribute to the legibility of fieldwork in our disciplines and to the legiti-
macy of undertaking it. Every discipline has its preferred scholarly centers of
thought and key thinkers, its variation on a citational index. But in that prefer-
ence it also delegitimizes certain sources and voices. We believe that fieldwork
draws on an abundant and too often inadmissible field of knowledge, a vast
shadow archive that one might call the MLA Works Uncited.

Humanities Fieldwork and Anthropology

Fieldwork in the humanities is often framed by two stammered apologies—“I

know I’m not an anthropologist, but….” and “I know I’m supposed to be a
literary critic, but….” Thus, a few words are in order about the relationship
of fieldwork in the humanities to fieldwork in anthropology. The centrality
 INTRODUCTION: CONJECTURES ON UNDISCIPLINED RESEARCH  7

of fieldwork to anthropology and the latter’s long history of self-critique and

rethinking of its methods make it an obvious interlocutor for us. Moreover,
literature and anthropology share an obvious focus on narrative and represen-
tation; much has been written on the poetics of ethnography, including literary
components such as setting, point of view, texture, detail, voice, and character.
Less commonly noted is that anthropology’s historical emphasis on language
learning, philology, and folklore also overlaps with literature, and that these
emphases have played a crucial role in the division of people into the categories
of modern and premodern.24
This brings us to both the promise and the problem of anthropology for
people working on the global south. On the one hand, it offers a capacious
archive on nonwestern/southern cultures and a great deal of self-reflexivity
about fieldwork. But on the other are anthropology’s inescapable historical
associations with the colonial enterprise, its holistic models of culture, its privi-
leging and exoticizing of remote others in enclosed cultures, its frequent mis-
understandings of native knowledge, its imbrication with positivist science, and
the problems and privileges built into the lone (male) ethnographer model.25
Already a generation ago, in 1988, Clifford Geertz pithily captured some of
those criticisms in a list of fieldwork “don’ts”: Don’t commit: ethnographic
ventriloquism, text positivism, the illusion of dispersed authorship, confession-
alism, minimization of the authorial role.26
It is precisely such risks that prompt Kofi Agawu, writing out of ethnomu-
sicology, to reject social scientific certainty and to call instead for “an aban-
donment of ethnography and an embrace of fiction.”27 In fact, he urges “a
rejection of all first-level, ostensibly objective descriptions, and a substitution of
second- or third-degree suppositions, some of them openly speculative, none
of them realist.”28 Indeed, fiction from the global south has often thematized
the figure of the anthropologist in critical terms, most famously perhaps in
Achebe’s conclusion to Things Fall Apart, in which the colonial anthropolo-
gist’s cursory account of the Igbo is given the lie by the entirety of the preced-
ing novel. Similarly, in Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The Ethnographer,”
the cross-cultural encounter transforms the ethnographer so completely that
he altogether abandons the academic ethnographic project and its driving
assumptions.
A key figure in the literary turn of anthropology, James Clifford, found in
fieldwork a crucial legacy, albeit one in need of reexamination. He expanded
the term “fieldwork” to explore something akin to what Mary Louise Pratt
calls “contact zones”––systems of interlocking travel, dwelling, and displace-
ment that might include fieldwork in the city where one lives or in virtual
spaces. Moreover, in a formulation not unlike Spivak’s “learning to learn
from below” and counter-globalizing networks, Clifford insisted on the need
to rethink the relation between fieldwork and homework29 and to redirect
fieldwork toward different kinds of knowledge practices—in the field and at
home—that could better be described as “alliance building” and community
collaborative practices.
8  D.A. CASTILLO AND S. PURI

In 2004, Vincent Crapanzano likened field research to montage, describ-

ing anthropology as an “interstitial discipline” with affinities with both
literature and philosophy: “less … a social science than … a philosophical dis-
cipline––in the Kantian critical tradition but by no means in a Kantian way––in
which the limits of human understanding, of our cultural pretense, are laid
bare.”30 Such thinking anticipates the controversial decision by the American
Anthropological Association in 2010 to remove the word “science” from its
mission statement.31
Liisa Malkki, too, has an expansive understanding of both ethnography and
fieldwork. For her, ethnography is not just a form of writing: “Ethnography,
understood here as situated, long-term empirical field research (as opposed
to its other meaning as a genre of writing and a practice of representation), is
simultaneously a critical theoretical practice, a quotidian ethical practice, and
an improvisational practice.”32 Malkki points to both the centrality of fieldwork
in the discipline and the creativity, flexibility, and variations within it. According
to her, there is not and has never been any unified practice designated by the
term “fieldwork”; rather, improvisation has been constitutive of anthropologi-
cal fieldwork: “a tradition of improvisation” (180). Ultimately, what defines
anthropology is not that it studies culture; so do many other disciplines. What
defines it, argues Liisa Malkki, is a sensibility (162–163).
We believe that literature shares this sensibility. For both disciplines explore
the embeddedness of everyday life in larger social structures and the embod-
ied experience of macro-events. Both also pay attention to the singularities
that escape (or are sacrificed to) systemic analysis; they are finely attuned to
the static of the local that disturbs the frequencies of the global and betrays
the blind spots of many a macro-narrative. Their relationship to culture is not
predictive or instrumentalist. Instead, they may dwell in the uncertain possi-
bilities of subjunctive rather than in the declarative or imperative. At their best
they enter into dialog in an open spirit that does not insist on first knowing
“for what?” or positing in advance the value of the outcome as a condition
of conversation. Across all the divergent and sometimes fragmentary practices
of fieldwork that contributors to this volume have undertaken, it is perhaps
­elements of this sensibility rather than any particular practice or method of
fieldwork that we share and that we seek to infuse into our disciplines. As
Anand Pandian puts it  in  Reel World,  “the most crucial significance of the
sensory and affective turn that so many disciplines have taken in recent years”
is the “chance to confront and engage the open-ended unfinished nature of
life, to follow things as they happen, to fold the uncertainty and vulnerability
of living relations into the very substance of our intellectual work” (16). One
reason we were drawn to the image by Saul Landell on the cover of our book is
that it evokes an awareness of partiality, of realities glimpsed or implied beyond
our fields of vision, of the labor and lenses involved, of the work of lifting the
mirror, of reflection on and of similarity and difference.
There are also elements of anthropology that the humanities often do not
share but would benefit from. For example, as Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson
 INTRODUCTION: CONJECTURES ON UNDISCIPLINED RESEARCH  9

observe, anthropology is one of the few disciplines that routinely dialogue with
a wide cross section of people rather than only experts and elites.33 Such exten-
sive dialogue is a necessary but not sufficient condition for relativizing rather
than naturalizing one’s own cultural norms and values and for understanding
one’s self in relational terms. Yet while such exchange with a wide range of
people in the course of their everyday lives is the stuff of literature, literature
as a discipline and literary criticism as a practice have no tradition of exchange
with nonexperts. Moreover, the disciplinary rejection of authorial intent, use-
ful for enhancing interpretive autonomy, is significantly more problematic if
one thinks of authors, critics, and readers and people outside the academy as
having potentially shared projects in a shared world to which we all contrib-
ute from our different disciplinary and social locations. It is such questions of
collaboration, learning from below, reciprocal translation, and exchange with
nonexperts that are beginning to be seriously addressed by public humanities
scholars.
There is something else that is appealing and potentially useful about the
modesty of scale that immersive methods like those of anthropology and some-
times area studies permit. Literature departments, jobs, and publishers push us
to claim ever-larger tracts of land or ocean over which we wield expert com-
mand, in what risks becoming a present-day version of Thomas Babbington
Macaulay’s belief, stated in his 1835 “Minute on Indian Education,” that “a
single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature
of India and Arabia.”34 The logic of the market place and profit is to claim
scale; the logic of cost reduction to reduce the number of experts working on
the south: “just” one author, “just” Trinidad, “just” the Caribbean, just the
Americas, just immigrant literature will not do. In disciplined circles, we are
often required to speak in the name of world literature (preferably alongside
primary specialization in British and/or American literature). In a technocratic
university or a practical skills-ruled university, even literature itself does not do.
“Too narrow” is the dismissal that haunts the postcolonialist who tries to dwell
in one place for too long, the person who is held responsible for continents,
centuries, and entire language families. Insistence on the value of and focus on
the local is a useful corrective to such arrogance.

Guiding Questions
As we work out the practices and gains of fieldwork in the humanities, anthro-
pology has consistently been a fellow traveler. Yet given our quite different
disciplinary histories and trainings, and given the different status of fieldwork
in our disciplines, it will not be surprising that “fieldwork” in this volume
may also signal practices different from most anthropological understandings,
despite their range.
Few of the essays in this volume emerge from year(s)-long fieldwork, which
remains a norm or ideal in much anthropology. Indeed, we have deliberately
used the term “fieldwork” rather than “ethnography” in this volume to hold
10  D.A. CASTILLO AND S. PURI

open a distance between the two terms, so as to clarify that in our usage a
written ethnography may not be the end goal or result of fieldwork. What hap-
pens to fieldwork when it shifts discipline, shifts form, shifts audience, shifts
medium, shifts end point, and shifts traditions of interaction? When the book
is only one possible endpoint? In most of the chapters in this volume, informa-
tion gleaned from the field is routed back into an undisciplining inquiry rather
than into an ethnography per se, though—of course—as a published volume,
one route continues to be that of academic exchange.
Alive to the fact that fieldwork looks different in different disciplines, we
asked our contributors to reflect on the following questions: What made you
turn to fieldwork? How did it extend, shift, or transform your scholarship?
How did it change the questions you asked or the answers you arrived at?
How did it surprise your expectations and hypotheses? How do the histories
and orientations of your discipline in the humanities inflect your visions of
fieldwork? In what ways were the questions you asked enabled by, informed
by, or grounded in your discipline? In what ways did you break with traditional
practices of your discipline? What forms of interdisciplinarity did you practice?
How do you understand the relationship of your fieldwork to the practices and
questions of social science fieldwork? What are the similarities and differences?
What kinds of conversations between social science and the humanities were
necessary or enabled by your project? When did you find your disciplinary
vocabularies particularly well suited or particularly inadequate for the tasks at
hand? What are appropriate terminologies? (For example, “research subject,”
“informant,” “interviewee,” “interlocutor,” and “collaborator” all encode and
distribute power differently.) What counts as data? Most disciplines have some
notion of what constitutes precision: Was it relevant to the work you did? What
kinds of ethical dilemmas and protocols arose for you in the course of field-
work? What forms of accountability might fieldwork facilitate that we might
ordinarily not develop in the humanities? How can fieldwork contribute to the
project and methodologies of a humanities-informed comparative area studies?
What have you found to be some of the most powerful examples of humanities-­
based fieldwork, to which you turned for help? How might fieldwork contrib-
ute to the goals of the humanities? How might it expand the topics and scope
of humanities inquiry? What are the gains and methods of fieldwork if the topic
of investigation is not contemporary? In short: What does it mean to theorize
fieldwork in the humanities?

On Theory and Theorizing

In some ways, the term “reflection” carries less baggage than “theory” or
“theorizing.” But we retained the term “theorizing” in the title of this book
because one of our interests is precisely to think about how fieldwork sur-
prises theory: How context surprises absolutes, what lives or dies hidden in the
folds of macro-explanations, what kinds of generalizations fieldwork yields or
 INTRODUCTION: CONJECTURES ON UNDISCIPLINED RESEARCH  11

refuses, and how daily practices surprise our disciplinary or theoretical models.
Such surprises appear as productive dissonances.
There is a certain irony to the fact that the thick description or distilled
detail that literary scholars so value in literature—close attention to the mani-
festations at the micro-level of systemic phenomena; texture, affect, point of
view, intensely embodied description, setting; contextual rather than absolute
knowledge—is something that we often purge from our criticism.35 This leaves
us in the position of the historians ruefully invoked by the Popular Memory
Group: “Hence the feeling not uncommonly experienced in reading secondary
interpretations of first accounts: we wish the bloody historian would go away
and let us listen to the account itself! It seems more interesting, more nuanced,
more complex and actually more explanatory than its secondary appropriation
allows.”36
Colin Dayan, too, notes the theoretical power of Truillot’s work: it “moves
from the ground up, from the little facts or minute incidents that are most
often overlooked in favor of sweeping claims or familiar assumptions, to
arrive at ‘new cultural patterns’ that yet preserve the ambiguity and nuance—
and, ultimately, the power—of lives lived on the periphery but not outside
of what Albert Memmi once dubbed ‘the game of history.’”37 Along similar
lines, Anand Pandian describes his anthropological writing as seeking “to lead
readers accustomed to looking chiefly for arguments back into the empirical
thickets from which these arguments arise.”38 Fieldwork is inseparable from
experience, but, as Pandian reminds us, drawing on Raymond Williams’ his-
tory of the word “experience” in Keywords, although one trajectory of the
word signals immediacy, authenticity, or absence of reflection, another links
it to experiment: “Experience is a matter of experiments with life, an arena of
conjectures, trials, and difficult lessons.”39 We believe that fieldwork involves
the latter sense of experience: not merely travel or presence but also consid-
eration, reflection, analysis, trying, and testing.40 As Pandian puts it, freshness
of insight lies in “travers[ing] the line between empirical life and conceptual
possibility.”41
Thus, the forms that theorizing take in this volume vary dramatically––in
their degrees of abstraction, narrative style, and formal experimentation. This
range of form can be attributed to many things, including individual stylistic
preference; different practices, experiences, and goals of fieldwork; different
scholarly conventions of the authors’ home disciplines; and the particular tra-
ditions of fieldwork that authors are in conversation with. There is no self-­
evident, recognizable, or preexisting model or genre for theoretical writing on
fieldwork in the humanities. Nor should there be. We read, therefore, with an
ear for both the harmonies and the dissonances across chapters, and hope that
both will be generative. Perhaps under-specifying the terms “theorizing” and
“fieldwork” is a virtue at this point—their very fuzziness allows a necessary
capaciousness and openness of experience, a recognition of an at least tempo-
rarily undisciplined engagement with place.
12  D.A. CASTILLO AND S. PURI

On Privilege
The hushed archive, the ivory tower, the lettered city––all these are emblems
of the privileged separation of researcher or knowledge from that messy thing
we called everyday life. They remain the ruling images and the most recogniz-
able models for literary scholarship. But in contrast to the model of the solitary
researcher in the isolation of the library, fieldwork depends on immersion. It
requires the researcher to navigate a cultural space dense with meanings and to
register its resistances, debates, and active subjectivities. Such encounters jolt
one out of complacence. Interruption is part of the point.
Literary scholarship (along, perhaps, with philosophy) is one of the dis-
ciplines of the humanities to which fieldwork has been most alien. As noted
earlier, art history, music, performance studies, and media studies tend to make
more provision for travel to sites of cultural production under study, though
it is hardly the case that they routinely permit lengthy stays. Moreover, the
extent to which their focus is on interactions with the place or its people var-
ies widely. Sometimes our disciplinarily sanctioned trips to archives have the
spin-off benefit of allowing an encounter with the place outside the archive at
the same time. But for scholars of the global south, it is often the case that the
archives are housed in the global north, and so even a tangential practice of
fieldwork is elusive.
Yet if the creative space and scholarly solitude of a room of one’s own rep-
resent privilege, so, very often, does heading to the field. Fieldwork, especially
when it involves travel or extended dwelling away, can be expensive; and work-
loads and institutions often withhold the kind of time it requires. Even so,
independent scholars and artists, grassroots intellectuals, and scholars working
at less privileged universities in the north or south find ways of undertaking
lower-cost fieldwork, for example, drawing on and developing thick associa-
tions with local or neighboring rather than distant subjects.
Academic publication in a globally dominant language is itself often both
an expression and a measure of privilege. Our volume does not escape this
privilege or the risks it entails. One of the structural risks of publication on
fieldwork is that it will disproportionately involve research by scholars based in
elite institutions in the global north. This volume consists mostly of contribu-
tors based in the global north who work on the global south.42 Yet, we believe
the structural risk is worth taking, especially since our disciplines in their more
conventional forms are hardly innocent of power. Publication of scholarship
on the global south, whether fieldwork derived or not, is already skewed by
location––and no less consequentially so. The risk of northern scholars (mis)
representing the global south needs to be weighed against the possibilities that
fieldwork offers to counter erasures of the global south.
At the same time, fieldworkers located in the south publish work which may
or may not be in dialogue with the northern theory du jour, may be written
in languages other than English, and may be read in different print circuits
from English-dominant or international scholarly circles. And scholars involved
 INTRODUCTION: CONJECTURES ON UNDISCIPLINED RESEARCH  13

in fieldwork may also choose to direct their fieldwork not toward academic
publication but toward the arts, social policy, teaching, or community activ-
ism. We would thus like to think the academically oriented forms of fieldwork
represented in this volume alongside a range of other fieldwork-based projects.
To note just a few examples: 1998 Fest’Africa project brought ten African
writers to Kigali to facilitate an organized, collective, artistic commemoration
of the genocide through the lenses of fiction.43 The Jamaican theater group
Sistren has for decades now created fieldwork-based theater, involving writing
and acting by community members. Marlon James’ novel A Brief History of
Seven Killings undertakes a literary fieldwork akin to that which Dayan saw in
Marie Chauvet’s novels; it offers a kind of literary ethnography of Kingston’s
gang culture, an anthropology of violence, as it were. Field-based progres-
sive responses to the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in Delhi after the assassination of
Indira Gandhi included street theater across Delhi that sought to build solidar-
ity across warring communities; other forms of solidarity work such as help-
ing victims file compensation claims  and publishing  an investigative report
which was distributed in the immediate aftermath of the riots and was based
on  interviews carried out by the People’s Union for Democratic Rights and
the People’s Union for Civil Liberties44; and  anthropologist Veena Das’ study
Life and Words.45
We hope that this volume and related undertakings will be of use to collab-
orative efforts in the humanities, ranging from co-authorship to north-south
alliances and projects, to south-south collaborations and the public humanities
more generally. We invite you to walk with us through the chapters that follow,
which navigate a range of disciplinary, historical, and cultural landscapes.

Chapter Summaries
The chapters in this volume involve various forms of emplaced cultural com-
munications and share insights gleaned from the interactions of everyday life
and cultural texts. Without exception they are in dialogue with nonacademic
spaces and people. The book is divided into four sections representing strands
in this dialogue with fieldwork.
The first section, “Memory, Conflict, Contestation,” includes chapters by
Shalini  Puri, Naminata  Diabate, and Kavita  Panjabi. Puri’s chapter leads the
volume, not only for its relevance to this section but also because it was the text
that launched our collaborative project and was shared reading for the partici-
pants; it is the only chapter that has been previously published. Puri’s chapter
reflects on how fieldwork, her encounter with the physical space of Grenada,
transformed her approach to the memory of the Grenada Revolution, enabling
her to dwell on artistic production in relation to the cultural geography of
Grenada and to everyday utterances and practices. Thus, she shows how her
fieldwork on memory of the Grenada Revolution both originated in and
extended literary studies, and how it enabled alternatives to psychoanalytic
14  D.A. CASTILLO AND S. PURI

approaches in memory and trauma studies. Moreover, it changed her sense of

who her interlocutors were.
Diabate’s inquiry began as a conundrum. As a woman from Côte d’Ivoire,
she was astounded that African and African American Studies in the USA did
not register most of the women from the continent or the rich range of agency
and response she had seen in them. Diabate uses what she calls “retrospective
observation” to draw on cultural experience acquired and events witnessed
when she lived in Côte d’Ivoire; she combines this with fieldwork she under-
took after the place became an object of intellectual inquiry. This reencounter
as an academic with the place where she grew up included discussing with
women their understanding of their practices of genital cursing, contesting
literary silences, and reading the discrepancies among literary, journalistic, and
anthropological accounts of women’s agency. For example, she opens up the
theoretical discussions of scholars like Giorgio Agamben to supplements that
their Euro-American-based grounding has ignored. And she calls to account
critics who lavish care on the women protagonists of the novels they read, yet
ignore entirely the women whose lives in some mediated way the literature
represents. Retrospective observation and fieldwork were crucial not only to
her being able to answer her questions but to ask them in the first place.
For Panjabi, fieldwork enables a rethinking of philosophical understand-
ings of aesthetics. Her chapter is grounded in an oral history project in which
she interviewed women participants in Bengal’s Tebhaga movement in the
late1940s. She explores how the affective impact of witnessing the starvation of
peasants in the Bengal famine became a critical mobilizing force for the urban
activists she interviewed. Those interviews, the affect and recalled excitement
of the women, the recurrent tropes in their accounts lead Panjabi to argue for
restoring to aesthetics its lost currency as a mode of “sensuous cognition” and
prompt insight into the ways that poetic truths and historical activism may
reinforce one another.
The second section, “Place, Performance, Practices,” includes chapters by
Jennifer Kelly, Neil Doshi, Tori Holmes, and Rashmi Sadana. Each of these
scholars uses fieldwork methodologies to shake up theoretical and disciplin-
ary understandings of core concepts from post/colonial studies, performance
studies, or presumptions about “the literary” itself.
Kelly undertook fieldwork on anticolonial Palestinian tourism in response
to the numerous Christian, Zionist, birthright, and diplomatic tours of Israel
that shape Israel’s place in American imagination and policy. Prior to her
fieldwork, she thought of the tours of Palestine as “justice tourism,” but as
a result of fieldwork she came to think of them as “solidarity tourism,” a less
resounding term that better captured the flawed but necessary practice struc-
tured by the demand of the privileged that Palestinians provide evidentiary
weight for their claims. In the course of explaining how she navigated institu-
tional constraints and how those constraints shaped the particular fieldwork
methods she developed, Kelly also offers us detailed glimpses of and insights
from her field notebooks, including observations about the expressions of
 INTRODUCTION: CONJECTURES ON UNDISCIPLINED RESEARCH  15

shop owners when tourists promised they would “come back later”; the ways
Palestinian tour guides corrected Israeli tour guides’ narratives; the shared
pedagogical labor that tour guides and teaching assistants both perform; the
tour guides’ boredom with the repetitive nature of their work even as they
recognized it as politically and economically necessary; and a running account
of Kelly’s and others’ expectations and the disruption of those expectations.
She traces how her training in American Studies enabled her to frame the
topic in terms of US militarism and empire; how coursework in anthropology
enabled her to trace the daily effects of empire, militarism, and colonialism;
and how her literary training enabled her to refuse evaluative approaches to
solidarity tourism.
Doshi’s fieldwork ranges across Algeria and India. He explores the spaces
where Algerian playwright Abdelkader Alloula’s controversial plays were once
performed––disenfranchised city spaces that remain urgently present, though
the performances themselves have been largely silenced. He combines an
encounter with that space with what he calls “distant fieldwork” as a partici-
pant observer in JANAM, an Indian street theater group in New Delhi that
shared many aspects of Alloula’s political vision and formal techniques. Putting
together the space of Algeria with the performances Doshi participates in with
the JANAM theater group, he imagines the contours of Alloula’s absent play.
Holmes focuses on the ethical implications of fieldwork. Her project com-
bines study of web-based communities with place-based communities and
fieldwork, including extended interviews with bloggers. She explores blogs
produced by favela dwellers in Rio, raising questions about the relationship
between literature and literacy and between cultural works and the human
practices surrounding them. The choice to treat web producers as “research
subjects” or “authors” involves a series of other considerations that need to be
weighed––the risks of erasure, the protections of invisibility, the gains of recog-
nition, the implicit allocation of more or less authority in each term.
Sadana’s experience as an intern at Granta (where she helped determine
which essays would be selected for publication) made her a participant observer
in a center of Anglophone publishing.46 Her subsequent immersion in Delhi
as an insider/outsider decentered Granta’s model of “many Englishes” and
became instead a study of English as one of India’s many literary languages.
She reflects here on her book English Heart, Hindi Heartland: The Political
Life of Literature in India, which studied the literary life of Delhi and the
multilingual circuits of publication, sale, and recognition that are embedded in
the geography of the city and its neighborhoods. Her newer project explores
the remaking of circuits of mobility and sociality by Delhi’s metro rail. Sadana
thus traces the logic of her movement from being a student of literature in
Britain to an anthropologist researching the literary in Delhi. Throughout the
chapter, Sadana explores the ways in which while doing fieldwork “you are
your method, and you are part of your research, and yet it is not about you.”
“Medium and Form” includes discipline-interrogating meditations by his-
torian Lara Putnam and anthropologist Renato Rosaldo. Putnam notes that
16  D.A. CASTILLO AND S. PURI

­istorians’ expanding access to digitized sources means that international

h
research now requires less and less international residence. This has been an
unacknowledged driver of history’s “transnational” turn. She explores the
gains, risks, and trade-offs of the digital turn in the discipline of history, urging
that digital research be undertaken in conjunction with place-based research
that has been a foundation of historical method. What, she asks, might the new
digital technologies drive into the shadows?
Rosaldo’s chapter may be thought of as a companion piece to his essay “Notes
on Poetry and Ethnography” (which appears in his much-lauded sui generis
book, The Day of Shelly’s Death), where he devises the term “antropoesis” or
ethnographic poetry to describe the poetry in which he weaves together his own
grief at the death of his wife, his family’s grief, and Ilongot practices of grieving;
his experience of grief transformed his understanding of the Ilongot and of the
very project of anthropology. In the chapter at hand, he comments on the eth-
nographic poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa and Naomi Shihab Nye, addressing not
only cultural translation but also linguistic translation. As someone familiar with
the American racial field, who weighed in on the translation of Komunyakaa’s
poem on Vietnam into Spanish, he reads Komunyakaa’s poem as a continua-
tion of the civil rights struggle by other means. His chapter in this volume is a
meditation on what a poet, translator, and ethnographer may have in common.
The final section––“Institutions, Organizations, Collaborations”—with
chapters by Stephanie Newell, Paul Youngquist, and Debra Castillo, offers
examples of ways that engaged scholarship can shake up institutional practices
or redefine hierarchical assumptions about collaboration.
Newell’s chapter centers on the ubiquitous presence of dirt in discourses
about urban Africa and notes its crucial role in the ideological work of o ­ thering.
Through a collaborative and comparative study of Nairobi and Lagos, she
draws attention to alternative, cosmopolitan, and vernacular discourses of
dirt that surfaced in fieldwork and in social media in a polylinguistic context.
Newell explores methodological questions that arose out of her collaborative
and comparative multisited fieldwork, including the limits of comparing differ-
ent colonial histories and natural resources of structurally similar African cities;
the coincidental but highly consequential outbreak of Ebola in West Africa in
2014, which rendered her planned comparisons between Lagos and Nairobi
infeasible by literally changing daily interactions; and the gaps between proto-
cols prescribed by the project’s international funding agency and what material
conditions on the ground permitted.
Youngquist explains the circuitous route by which a Romanticist interrupted
his archival musings on Marcus Rainsford’s account of the Haitian Revolution,
to follow up on a hint about Jamaica, and ended up collaborating on a regular
basis with Charles Town maroons on their annual conference. In the course of
his often playful narrative, he describes the importance of “lateral listening”
for his method; he also describes fieldwork as “collaborative, immersive, mul-
tiple, and inconclusive,” involving both the systematic study dear to his archival
roots and the illuminating, often maddening, negotiations of knowledge held
 INTRODUCTION: CONJECTURES ON UNDISCIPLINED RESEARCH  17

in the ambient oral histories that contradict and supplement the sparse and
biased archival record.
Finally, Castillo addresses fieldwork as a practice of engaged pedagogy in the
Study Abroad course she often teaches in Chiapas. She explores the encounter
between privileged Cornell students and underprivileged indigenous people
in Mexico, looking for practices of cultural translation as well as incommen-
surability, and explores the opportunities the course offers to learn on and in
different cultural terms. Castillo draws on the Zapatistas’ understanding of
“acompañamiento”—the practice of walking with someone—a word that sug-
gests collaboration, proximity, and a slowed pace as crucial elements in learn-
ing. She proposes it as a model for our own scholarly practice.

Coda
We share our experiences of fieldwork here without wishing them to become
standardized, prescriptive, or paradigmatic. Fieldwork is not the only route
to knowledge. Its insights come with no stamp of assurance or authenticity.
Our own knowledge is vulnerable and our interlocutors in the field have no
special or privileged knowledge. Everyday life is no more transparent than liter-
ary texts. But fieldwork offers different archives, different media of encounter,
different methods of engagement, different interlocutors––and thus poten-
tially different insights––that can deepen our understanding of others in a way
that also involves an estrangement and reassessment of the self. To return to
Clifford’s term, this is the “homework” that fieldwork makes possible.
The Cuban author Alejo Carpentier provides a context for the student
who needed to go to Mexico to eat the food. According to Carpentier, to
­understand the Nanjing massacre, one needs to breathe the air of that city; to
understand Mexican literature, one needs a basic grasp of that nation’s phi-
losophy of cooking.47 Carpentier elaborates on why this in-country fieldwork
is even more crucial in the global south than it is in the north: He argues that
the “universal” images of the pine and palm so familiar in poetic texts need
to be set against the ceiba and the papaya, which he describes with a lush bar-
roquism. In his paired juxtaposition of the pine and palm versus the ceiba and
papaya tree, in each case the first tree of the pair represents a symbol linked to
primordial sacred practices, while the second tree provides exotic or everyday
fruit, depending on the geography—dates, perhaps, or papayas. How does one
talk about the ceiba, without telling the story of Africans in the Caribbean, or
of the deep Mayan respect for the world tree, now hybridized with European
Christian overtones in “traditional Catholic” practices?
Global markets now make papayas available to consumers across the globe,
but they cannot speak to the conjunction of the ceiba and the papaya, or capture
the fragrance of the selva, or the taste of freshly picked fruit in the mouth. The
same cultural observation can go in the opposite direction, though Carpentier
does not speak of this aspect; a Puerto Rican student once observed that
she never understood the attraction of eating an apple until she came to the
18  D.A. CASTILLO AND S. PURI

USA. How does a North American explain cranberries to someone from other

latitudes without talking about Thanksgiving and the history of that maligned,
celebrated holiday in the USA? When does a mango eaten far from the trop-
ics materialize nostalgia or desire—in a tropical immigrant or London dweller
who has never left home? When does it become a mouthful of stereotypes of
tropicality or mischievous counter-stereotypes?48 Such interactions with every-
day life, of which fieldwork is a sustained practice, in which we encounter facts
folded into their intricately textured lived experience are also an inoculation
against cultural laziness and intellectual shortcuts.
Similarly, it is one thing to know that Afghanistan has more people maimed
by land mines than any other country in the world and quite another to grasp,
as we did from Nadeem Aslam’s novel The Wasted Vigil, that in bazaars in
Afghanistan shoes may be bought not in pairs but singly. Aslam reminds
us, too, that there is no reason to fetishize fieldwork. Fieldwork is neither a
requirement for nor a guarantee of insight. Indeed, Aslam wrote a first draft
of his brilliant novel without ever setting foot in Afghanistan. And then he
went there.49

Notes
1. Clifford Geertz credits the phrase to James Clifford in “Deep Hanging
Out,” 69–72, 69. James Clifford credits it to Rosaldo. Routes: Travel and
Translation in the Twentieth Century, 56.
2. Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, 70.
3. Certeau, “Walking in the City,”  91–110.
4. Hall, “Race, Culture, and Communications,” 336.
5. Clifford, Routes, 8.
6. Pandian, Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation, 280.
7. Hall, “Race, Culture, and Communications,” 337.
8. In fact, Angela McRobbie noted this trend as early as 1994, calling for a
return to analysis of the terrain of lived experience in conjunction with
Gramscian cultural analysis. Postmodernism and Popular Culture, 39–41.
Ann Gray’s Research Practice for Cultural Studies: Ethnographic Methods
and Lived Cultures is an important correction to this trend. It understands
itself as an effort to answer the questions “What is cultural studies?” and
“How does cultural studies understand culture?” and to study its ethno-
graphic methods and aid the development of research projects. It is no
coincidence that Gray herself is trained in the tradition of the Birmingham
School of Cultural Studies, where ethnography was a particularly signifi-
cant method. The closure of Birmingham’s Department of Cultural
Studies in 2002 as part of a top-down “restructuring” speaks to the pre-
cariousness of institutional space for such work.
9. Harney and Moten’s work is a radical iteration of the public humanities
imagined as fugitive undercommons within a largely corporate university;
 INTRODUCTION: CONJECTURES ON UNDISCIPLINED RESEARCH  19

they would see their work as being at odds with the project of remaking
the American university that is the goal of many of the other public
humanities scholars named here.
10. For examples, see Bibliography and Further Reading. Interestingly, sev-
eral humanities projects in such disciplines have gained funding through
the National Science Foundation, which has been more ready to institu-
tionalize fieldwork, given the sciences’ privileging of empirical data
collection.
11. Sean Heuston, Modern Poetry and Ethnography: Yeats, Frost, Warren,
Heaney, and the Poet as Anthropologist; Renato Rosaldo, The Day of Shelly’s
Death: The Poetry and Ethnography of Grief; and Hartman, “Across the
Atlantic Slave Route.”
12. Seguín, “The Texture of Literary Fieldwork,” 9.
13. Ahmad, “Notes on Fieldwork.”
14. Dayan, Haiti, History and the Gods, xviii.
15. “Dread and Dispossession: An Interview with Colin Dayan.”
16. Dayan, “And Then Came Culture,” 141.
17. Spivak,  Death of a Discipline, 36. Subsequent citations appear as paren-
thetical references in the main text.
18. Sanders, Learning Zulu: A Secret History of Language in South Africa, 7.
19. Sanders, 12–13.
20. “Beyond Normative Dewesternization,” 8.
21. Crapanzano, Imaginative Horizons: An Essay in Literary-Philosophical
Anthropology, 3.
22. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and
Historical Difference. Several of the aforementioned cultural studies
­scholars in fact undertook fieldwork in Britain. See Bauman and Briggs for
an elaboration of Chakrabarty’s ideas in relation to anthropology.
23. Aside from the innumerable critiques that accompanied the institutional-
ization of postcolonial studies in the US, for later redirections of the field,
see the literature on the global south and decolonial studies, for example:
Shu-mei Shih and Francoise Lionnet, eds., Minor Transnationalism, espe-
cially the essays by Koshy and Behdad; Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of
Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options; Ramón Grosfoguel,
“Decolonizing Post-colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political Economy:
Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality,” 1–37; and
the journal Global South.
24. See Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs, Voices of Modernity: Language
Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality.
25. For a brief history of paradigms and traditions in anthropology, see George
W. Stocking, “Paradigmatic Traditions in the History of Anthropology,”
712–27.
26. Geertz, Works and Lives, 145. Subsequent citations appear as parenthetical
references in the main text.
20  D.A. CASTILLO AND S. PURI

27. Agawu, Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Positions,

170.
28. Agawu.
29. Clifford, Routes, 85.
30. Crapanzano, Imaginative Horizons, 5, 11.
31. See Nicholas Wade, “Anthropology a Science? Statement Deepens a Rift.”
32. Malkki,  “Tradition and Improvisation in Ethnographic Field Research,”
164. Subsequent citations appear as parenthetical references in the main
text.
33. Gupta and Ferguson, Anthropological Locations, 36.
34. Macaulay, “Minute on Indian Education.”
35. An extreme example of this is the model of “distant reading” that scholars like
Franco Moretti have undertaken, a systematizing project for understanding
world literature, in which distance and the omission of the rich details of real-
ity and close reading are conditions of both inclusion in the canon and theo-
retical knowledge. Distant Reading, 48–49. Data-driven digital analysis is key
to his method. See also Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus’ claims for “surface
reading,” which also contest close reading practices. “Surface Reading: An
Introduction,” in “The Way We Read Now,” 1–21.
36. Popular Memory Group, “Popular Memory: Theory, Politics, Method,”
228.
37. Dayan, “And Then Came Culture,” 142.
38. Pandian, Reel World, 280.
39. Pandian, 16, 293.
40. Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Revised Edition,
126–29.
41. Pandian, “The Time of Anthropology,” 566.
42. However, see the chapter by Kavita Panjabi for an account of fieldwork by
a scholar located in the global south; and see the chapters by Stephanie
Newell and Paul Youngquist for examples of fieldwork that involve signifi-
cant collaboration with southern academic researchers or grassroots intel-
lectuals. Examples of such collaborations beyond our volume include the
University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Latin American Studies’ 2015 theme,
“Leading from the South,” the Latin American Studies Association’s
“Otros saberes” initiative, and numerous other engaged learning projects
involving collaborations with southern-based intellectuals, artists, and
activists. Humanities-informed centers of study located largely in the global
south include transnational research and collaborations such as the Inter-
Asia Cultural Studies Society, the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and
Criticism which is “an exploration of global conversation based in the
south” (http://www.jwtc.org.za/), and the Center for the Study of
Developing Studies in New Delhi. See also the collaborative and interdisci-
plinary “Planned Violence: Postcolonial Urban Infrastructures and
Literature” project convened by Elleke Boehmer at Oxford University that
studies London, Delhi, and Johannesburg (http://plannedviolence.org/).
 INTRODUCTION: CONJECTURES ON UNDISCIPLINED RESEARCH  21

43. See Nicki Hitchcott, “A Global African Commemoration: Rwanda: Écrire

par devoir de mémoire,” 151–61.
44. People’s Union for Democratic Rights and the People’s Union for Civil
Liberties, Who are the Guilty? Report of a joint inquiry into the causes and
impact of the riots in Delhi from 31 October to 10 November 1984.
45. Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary.
46. Reading Sadana’s book in conjunction with Diabate’s chapter, one cannot
help but wonder how many fictional African women languished in the
reject bins of other publishers, unfit for marketing needs driven by sensa-
tionalist depictions of victimization and niche readerships.
47. Carpentier, Tientos y diferencias, 30.
48. See John Agard, “English Girl Eats Her First Mango,” 39; and Mohsin
Hamid, et al., “How to Write About Pakistan.”
49. Interview by Harriett Gilbert, The Word, BBC Radio World Service,

October 14, 2008, http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/programmes/
the_word.shtml.

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 PART I

Memory, Conflict, Contestation

 CHAPTER 2

Finding the Field: Notes on Caribbean

Cultural Criticism, Area Studies, and the 
Forms of Engagement

Shalini Puri

This is how she would come to know a place, listening for its four o’clock in the
morning.
—Dionne Brand, In Another Place, Not Here

When I think back to the work I have done that has been most satisfying to me
and that has had a vigorous life both inside and outside the academy, I think
of my study of dougla identities and poetics in Trinidad in the 1990s (where

This essay first appeared in Small Axe 41 (July 2013): 58–73. Copyright 2013.
Small Axe, Inc. All rights reserved. It is republished here by permission of the
present publisher Duke University Press, www.dukeupress.edu. Versions of sections
of this chapter have appeared in Shalini Puri, “Memory-Work, Field-Work: Reading
Merle Collins and the Poetics of Place,” in The Routledge Companion to Anglophone
Caribbean Literature, edited by Michael Bucknor and Alison Donnell, 490–498
(London: Routledge, 2011). I am grateful to audiences and interlocutors at various
venues in the Caribbean, the USA, Canada, and the UK for their feedback on
presentations I made on this material, and to participants at the “What Is Caribbean
Studies? Prisms, Paradigms, Practices,” held at Yale University, on 1–2 April 2011, for
which I wrote a draft of this essay. Special thanks to Deborah Thomas, Lara Putnam,
Nancy Glazener, Thora Brylowe, and the reviewer for Small Axe for their suggestions
on an earlier draft.

S. Puri (*)
English Department, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, USA

© The Author(s) 2016 29

S. Puri, D.A. Castillo (eds.), Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-92834-7_2
30  S. PURI

dougla refers to the mixed descendants of Afro- and Indo-Caribbean people)

and of my research on cultural memory of the Grenada Revolution.1 Both proj-
ects began as explorations of literary silences or archival absences. It was these
absences in what Cecilia Green once referred to as “undocumented societies”
that impelled me to the field.2 Part of the project became to help assemble an
archive and to witness in the one case, the lived experience of dougla identities,
and, in the other case, the subterranean memories of the Grenada Revolution.
In the former instance, a complex overlay of accreted race-color hierarchies,
racialized electoral politics, and cultural nationalist control over women’s sexu-
ality colluded to silence dougla experience yet also to construct dougla iden-
tities as potential sites of resistance. In the case of Grenada, the problems
of slender resources for archiving that are faced by any small and impover-
ished nation of the global south were compounded by the destructive forces
of hurricanes, state censorship, and the bombing of the country by the USA.
(When the USA bombed the radio station, for example, the nation’s radio
news and calypso archives were destroyed.) For both research projects, then, I
turned to a kind of improvised fieldwork, one that offers an important route to
knowledge and expression unavailable in print; to disallowed or delegitimized
knowledges; to localized or vernacular rather than globalized knowledge and
memory; to transient expressions of popular opinion; and to exploration of
controversial issues about which people were not willing to speak publicly.
Common to both research contexts was that my encounter with the “field” in
question—Trinidad and Grenada, respectively—and with its inhabitants trans-
formed the study.
In this chapter, I will focus on the Grenada project to explain how and why
a literary critic began to practice fieldwork; address the need to carve a space
for fieldwork in literary-critical practice; and contribute to the development of
a shared public discourse about fieldwork in the humanities. In the process, I
will comment, from my home discipline of literature, on the relationship of
my work on Grenada to various other fields, disciplines, methodologies, and
practices––to cultural studies, area studies, anthropology, cultural geography,
and memory and trauma studies.
A brief note on the Grenada Revolution and its fall may be useful to con-
textualize the project: the Grenada Revolution was the first and only socialist
revolution in the Anglophone Caribbean; it also drew on various Black Power
and other regional radical movements. Lasting from 1979 to1983, the revolu-
tion made significant gains in such areas as mass political participation, employ-
ment, housing, health, education, and workers’ and women’s rights. Although
Maurice Bishop, the prime minister, remained a highly popular figure, the
revolution was justly criticized for its intransigent suppression of dissent, over-
centralization of power, and failure to hold elections. In October 1983, a
split surfaced in the party leadership on the issue of whether there should be
joint leadership between Prime Minister Bishop and Finance Minister Bernard
Coard. In a series of events too complex to summarize here, the crisis esca-
lated, and on 19 October 1983, Bishop and several of his closest comrades
were executed. A “Revolutionary Military Council” took over and placed the
 FINDING THE FIELD  31

island under shoot-on-sight curfew. On October 25, the USA invaded, ending
any remaining chance that popular revolutionary forces might regroup. The
imprisonment, trials, and appeals of the “Grenada 17” (those convicted for the
executions, including Bernard Coard) stretched from 1983 through 2007. The
last of the Grenada 17 were released from prison in 2009. The bodies of their
slain comrades have not been recovered or given proper burial. The Grenada
Revolution has remained an organizing fracture in the national memory—not
just along the lines of Right versus Left but within the Left itself. It has also
cast a long shadow on leftist political organizing and imagination in the region,
making an engagement with its legacies all the more urgent.
The project I had originally planned was a literary close reading of a few novels,
essays, and poems about the Grenada Revolution. It was to have been a fairly rec-
ognizable literary-critical project, in which my inquiry into the pasts and futures
of leftist politics in the region would be disciplinarily mediated through close read-
ings of literary form. When I actually went to Grenada in 1998, it rapidly became
clear to me that my planned approach was not tenable. I came to believe that place
was not accidental or extraneous to the memory of the Grenada Revolution but
fundamental to the very structure of that memory, deeply linked to the topogra-
phy and scale of the island. There is of course a well-established tradition of schol-
arship that theorizes the links between memory and place.3 But Grenada presents
a particularly compelling and unusual instance. The contrast between the public
discursive silence on the subject of the revolution and the visual presence and
rumbling subterranean memory of the revolution was so striking that it was an
almost physical shock. How did Grenadians live with that contradiction—between
the visual and the written, between the publicly (un)spoken and the whispered
word? In the context of the massive silencing of the Grenada Revolution, land-
scape emerged as the site of traces of the revolution and of negotiations over its
memory: the bombed-out People’s Revolutionary Government headquarters at
Butler House (ironically, demolished in 2007 to make way for a new hotel); Fort
Rupert (now restored to its colonial name, Fort George), where one side of the
revolutionary leadership executed the other and where both the bullet holes and
the cement that attempts to cover them up are still visible; the ruins of a mental
asylum that the USA bombed; and abandoned Cuban and Soviet planes on the
old airfield. Such visible material residues of the revolution meet one everywhere.
The landscape is also dotted with memorials—memorials to fallen US sol-
diers, a modest sign pointing the way to the “Maurice Bishop Highway,” the
recently renamed Maurice Bishop International Airport, the plaque to those
executed at the fort. There are also plans for memorials to Cubans who died
during the invasion. Such memorials represent both state-choreographed
memory and the results of sustained and organized pressures on the state
to honor the revolution’s memory. The landscape also features eruptions of
popular memory in the form of graffiti and murals: “Grenada-Cuba Friends
Forever” or “Maurice Bishop Lives” or “March 13 is our history.” (The revo-
lution came to power on 13 March 1979.)
Moreover, the land holds not only material historical traces of the revolu-
tion but also powerful emotional geographies.4 The very topography and scale
32  S. PURI

of Grenada are linked to people’s memories of events in 1983: thousands of

people stormed security barricades to release Prime Minister Maurice Bishop
from house arrest and swelled the streets in broad daylight as they went to Fort
Rupert. Even if one was not among those thousands, one could still hear the
sounds of gunfire across the island, see columns of smoke rising, and scramble
up on a hill and see the crowds as panic overtook them. It was a highly pub-
lic, highly spectacular moment of collective euphoria that quickly turned into
equally spectacular trauma. The sheer sensory immediacy of it all is heightened
by a scale that prevents violence from being experienced as distant, abstract, or
anonymous.
Caribbean literature and painting have a long tradition of preoccupation
with place and landscape. From colonial and tourist representations of the
landscape, and refutations of such representations, to laying claim to a land to
which the majority of its inhabitants came in chains or servitude, to ecologi-
cal efforts toward a sustainable future, landscape has had such prominence in
the literature that Glissant refers to it not merely as setting but as a character
implicated in the action.5 Moreover, given that landscape is an emblem of the
local and the particular, it offers a metaphor for a locally grounded politics.
Representations of Grenadian landscape often urge the translation of Marxist
theory into local terms, or imagine an indigenized or vernacular Marxism.
They have also thus functioned as an argument for political accountability to
the local. The local idiom of landscape also offers a vernacular memory; in
this sense, landscape is the visual equivalent of Creole. Finally, in a context of
both the self-imposed repression of traumatic memory and a state-led punitive
apparatus for sympathy with the revolution and its memory, landscape and its
representations become a way of visually asserting that which has been verbally
silenced. It also offers a way of situating memory outside the body, thereby both
sparing the body punishment, and locating memory in a public and accessible
space. In literature about Grenada, from Merle Collins’s poem “Shame Bush”
to V.S.  Naipaul’s essay “An Island Betrayed” and beyond,6 as well as in the
conversations I had with many Grenadians, the poetics of land are so strong,
and make such powerful arguments for the analytical importance of place and
locality, that it seemed to me misguided to study the poetics on the page with-
out engaging the place off the page. To understand a Caribbean poetics and
a cultural memory that is so thoroughly mediated by place, fieldwork offers a
barely tapped resource for Caribbean literary criticism.
One aspect of my project developed by reading literary and extraliterary
landscape in Grenada alongside each other as sites of memory; another read
literature in relation to other arts; a third developed by reading literary narra-
tives alongside nonliterary narratives by Grenadians with whom I was in con-
versation. Interaction with a range of Caribbean people other than scholars,
artists, and experts became integral to the project. It is largely as a result of
moving outward from the page to include the other forms of engagement
that fieldwork involves that my project became one of witnessing: to study the
visual traces of the revolution in the landscape; to study the agonic silences,
 FINDING THE FIELD  33

both state- and self-imposed; to locate fragments of memory, to listen for its
murmuring; and to contribute to the creation of spaces for public speech on
the topic.7
Perhaps an example would help. It is one that concentrates many of the
foregoing claims. In the north of the island, at the old airfield at Pearls, which
the revolution sought to replace with a new international airport at Point
Salines (the airport the USA claimed was being built for military purposes),
lie two abandoned planes, one Cubana and one Aeroflot. For 25 years they
have remained on the runway of the old airport. In a state and public discourse
where memory of the Grenada Revolution remains largely repressed, these
planes are neither official commemoration nor popular remembrance. They
are in fact the very antithesis of an official commemoration. There is nothing in
them of the sentimentality that surrounds ruins. Birds perch on the propeller;
goats graze in their shadow; weekend car races take place on the old runway.
One entrepreneurial Grenadian has floated the idea (thus far unsuccessfully)
of moving the planes to make them a crowd-drawing prop in a restaurant he
hopes to open. Left as debris or garbage, more eloquent in their materiality
than any commentary, resistant to interpretation as any kind of “message,”
their persistent presence is a powerful provocation. To see them is to confront
the stubborn residue of history.

Fig. 2.1  Cubana and Aeroflot planes at the abandoned Pearls Airport, Grenada.
Source: Puri 2007
34  S. PURI

Fig. 2.2  Planes at Pearls Airport, rainy season. Source: Puri 2007

One rainy season when I was there, the planes were partially submerged,
so overgrown that from certain angles they appeared to merge with the hills.
The two planes raised several of the questions that were to become the focus
of my book: the question of submerged but residual memory, the question of
the relationship of the Grenada Revolution to the rest of the Caribbean (here
embodied by the Cuban plane), and the vexed question of how Marxist theory
inhabited the local landscape. How does the language of revolution and of
working-class consciousness inhabit (and transform) a geography that is imag-
ined and lived in terms of parishes—St. George, St. David, St. Andrew, and
so on? Does the very distance of these planes from the center of memory and
censorship, the capital of St. George’s, protect them from removal? What other
discreet residues of the revolution might exist in Grenada, notwithstanding the
repression or demonization of the revolution’s memory? And where should
one look for them? How is the memory trace represented by those planes on
the old airfield different from the commemorative function (carried out by
the state under popular pressure) of the 2009 renaming of the Point Salines
International Airport as the Maurice Bishop International Airport?
I arrived at my sense of the urgency of studying place not via theory but
because of my own physical encounter with Grenada and because of the
prominence of place in discursive accounts of the revolution. But it also fit
with my developing theoretical dissatisfaction with dominant cultural studies
 FINDING THE FIELD  35

accounts of globalization, which seemed to me to be privileging space over

place with considerable loss of analytical insight.8 My research on cultural
memory in Grenada in the period 1979–1983 sharply brought home the fact
that all memories do not cross borders with equal facility; not all memories
are internationalized or globalized. For example, if one looks at the images
from that place that is so often hailed as placeless or as the highway that con-
nects all places—the Internet—one finds that four days of the US invasion of
Grenada are documented over 100 times more than four years of the Grenada
Revolution. Where, then, are those memories of the revolution, memories that
have been rendered local? Where can one find such vernacular memory? How
does the Grenada Revolution surface in the commonplaces, as it were, of every-
day Grenadian life? And how does “everyday Grenadian life” surface in other
parts of the globe—in diasporas to London, Toronto, New York; in its regional
diasporas, to Trinidad and Venezuela; in places to which solidarity workers
returned, such as Jamaica and Cuba? Surprisingly, Angola, too, turned out
to be a scene of memory of the Grenada Revolution, for many Cubans who
served in Grenada were sent to Angola after the fall of the revolution and their
return to Cuba. If Grenada was the “place” I was most immediately studying,
all these other sites were part of the “area” of study.
My decision to go to Grenada was simultaneously one person’s effort to
practice a cultural studies redirected toward “place” over “space” and an effort
to both claim and contribute to a reimagined area studies, which, for all the
legitimate critiques that have been levied against it, remains a rubric for aca-
demic study that takes place, fieldwork, and language study seriously. The
funding for the project came almost entirely from area studies centers, which
remain the primary funded source of support for research involving travel
that is available to me as someone who works in an English department. Any
insights—either about Grenada or about methodologies for humanities-based
inquiry into the Caribbean—that might derive from my attempt to synthesize
literary-critical training and field-based inquiry thus owe a tremendous debt to
area studies.
At a moment when area studies programs are being aggressively defunded
in favor of global studies programs in the name of fiscal efficiency and a trans-
formed geopolitics, it is worth remembering the risks of jettisoning area studies
and the gains of reimagining it.9 For both practices and critiques of area studies
are themselves placed. In its search for vernacular rather than global memory,
area studies fieldwork can seek out Gikuyu or Urdu or Creole, not just Global
English. Fieldwork may, in fact, be no more and no less than the equivalent of
immersion for foreign language learning. Area studies enables scholarship that
“dwells” on the nonmetropolitan places of the global south and that focuses on
not only metropolitan migrants but also peripheral subalterns.10 It was in fact
the founder of the largest area studies exchange program in the world, Senator
William Fulbright, who remarked: “Most Americans can never remember what
most people can never forget.” Imaginative practices of area studies can be
crucial allies in the battle against such forgetfulness.
36  S. PURI

It was with a discomfiting awareness of my lack of training in field-based

inquiry that I embarked upon this project, which an anthropologist colleague
informed me consisted of “mixed methods qualitative research.” Even such a
rudimentary summary characterization of what I was attempting was unavail-
able in my discipline. Fieldwork-based practices in literature and the humani-
ties more generally have much to learn from anthropology’s own self-critique,
rejection, and reinventions of practices of fieldwork and ethnography.11 The
twin risks of populism and paternalism are never far from any practice of field-
work. Certainly, to represent a culture is to exercise power, yet it would be
a grave mistake to think that literary critics and the keepers of the canon are
innocent of power.12 In fact, all academic credentialing or “expertise” is by
definition a claim of power/knowledge. As Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson
remind us, however, “Anthropology departments continue to be among the
few places in the Western academy not devoted exclusively or largely to the
studies of the lives and policies of elites.”13 My fieldwork was animated by a
paucity of documentary resources, an overrepresentation of elite documents
among them, and a desire to put existing archives into dialog with the spoken
narratives of uncredentialed Grenadians.
For the most part, the humanities simply have no public discourse at all
about fieldwork; those of us who undertake it, do so without training and
mostly in isolation, improvising our own rough tools as we stumble along. This
chapter is both an argument for the importance of fieldwork in a Caribbean
literary and cultural studies and a modest effort toward articulating and refin-
ing the humanities’ own untheorized practices of fieldwork.14
My own working-through of how to approach the project necessarily
involved trying to articulate the relationship of my practices to those of anthro-
pology, the discipline that has the longest standing and most clearly articulated
practices and theorizations of fieldwork. What could we learn from anthropol-
ogy, and what could we contribute? Given that fieldwork is marginal to one
discipline and foundational to another and that social-scientific inquiries and
humanities inquiries into culture have substantially different disciplinary his-
tories, are the possibilities and problems of fieldwork different for literature
and anthropology? Since many of us in the humanities who do fieldwork do
so without models or training or the benefit of a public discourse on the sub-
ject, let me briefly outline how I went about it: I had no training in interview
methods or data collection; I made no claims to be engaged in a “scientific”
study of culture or of an event; given the marginality and even unintelligi-
bility of fieldwork-based scholarship in literature, there was no chance that I
could find institutional support to undertake fieldwork for the lengths of time
supported in anthropology departments. Repeated shorter stays over a span
of 11 years, but concentrated in 3 years, would be the best I could manage.
Studying a migratory society such as Grenada’s, and the aftermath of a trau-
matic transnational event, also required travel to England, Toronto, New York,
Barbados, and Jamaica for the purposes of interviewing. For lack of time and
funding, I was unable to travel to Dominica, Cuba, or Guyana for the purposes
 FINDING THE FIELD  37

of research, though I was able to be in conversation with diasporic Dominicans

and Cubans who had been involved with the revolution and with others at
community or scholarly gatherings outside the region.
I prepared for the study in a fairly typical fashion: reading all that I could
find on the topic of the revolution in every discipline; reading newspapers and
primary documents (such as minutes of party meetings, stamps released in
the revolutionary and postrevolutionary period, etc.); studying monuments,
memorials, and exhibits in Grenada and at a US military base, the struggles
over them, and what they chose to remember and to disavow. I followed the
continually updated and truly remarkable website Grenada Revolution Online
(and learned much from the very fact that it needed to be continually updated,
for it indicated that in many ways, the Grenada Revolution is a still-unfolding
event). I followed recent eBay trades of the spoils of the 1983 war against
Grenada; I watched YouTube posts by US combatants in the invasion and
studied the ways they understood the relationship of Grenada to other US
wars; I participated in a call-in radio show. Through the Grenada Broadcast
Network archives and personal contacts, I tracked calypsos that commented
on the revolution. I photographed the landscape. In the course of fieldwork,
I did over 40 interviews, ranging from a half-hour single interview to repeat
interviews that ran up to three hours. Some were planned and prepared, where
I went in with a list of questions; others were entirely fortuitous conversa-
tions that were sparked not by my questions but by unsolicited comments
by people with whom I was in conversation. (Indeed, the very fact that the
revolution might surface at surprising moments in conversations about other
things was itself illuminating to me.) My interviews almost certainly did not
fit any model of a scientific sample, but equally certainly I sought out a wide
cross section of people. Among those I spoke with were the surviving political
leadership of the revolution, people who had been supporters of the revolu-
tion but subsequently broke with it, members of opposing political parties,
dissidents who were imprisoned by the revolution, union leaders, actors, play-
wrights, poets, novelists, painters, calypsonians, current politicians, historians
of Grenada, members of the National Youth Organization, church groups,
journalists, members of cooperatives, members of the People’s Revolutionary
Army, members of left groups from elsewhere in the region, travel guides,
rastas, schoolteachers, students, and African American and English solidarity
workers. I began with the names that appeared in the documentary records—
those who had held public office, for example—and slowly formed networks
that led me to other more grassroots participants in or dissidents from the
revolution. As the project developed, I became increasingly interested in forg-
ing a relationship with people beyond the length of an interview, in under-
standing their wide-ranging desires in telling me a story, and in writing a book
that was sensitive to those desires. If there was a thoroughness to the method,
it emerged in a fairly haphazard and unschooled way.
Though the methods of anthropology and literature have historically been
quite different, a basic affinity between them lies in their interest in micro-­
38  S. PURI

processes, in how the “big events” of history are experienced by ordinary

people in daily life. It is perhaps not coincidental that the Haitian novelist
Jean Price Mars was an ethnologist or that the Caribbeanist anthropologist
Richard Price has also written a novel. There are several other such examples
of overlaps between social-scientific and literary projects, both in their wit-
nessing and documentary impulses and in their inquiries into representation
itself. There is thus, for example, a resonance between Dionne Brand’s coming
“to know a place, listening for its four o’clock in the morning,” and Clifford
Geertz’s notion of “thick description.”15 Similarly, the sociologist and nov-
elist Erna Brodber observed that she wrote her first novel, Jane and Louisa
Will Soon Come Home, as a fictional case study because no formal academic
case study or sociological data existed.16 Merle Collins’s novel Angel sought to
record and reclaim the expressions and beliefs of the many Grenadians whose
opinions were not considered legitimate academic sources for inclusion in
her ­dissertation.17 Whether as object of anticolonial satire (Chinua Achebe’s
Things Fall Apart) or interrogation (Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost), or as
fellow traveler (someone also interested in the lived experience of nonelites),
the anthropologist is often an interlocutor in postcolonial literature.18 Such
examples predate and develop independently of both the “literary turn” in
anthropology in the 1980s and the move of literature toward cultural studies
at around the same time. These shifts in the 1980s represented critical experi-
ments and practices of interdisciplinarity.
This interdisciplinarity is by no means an abandoning of one’s discipline.
Thus, my fieldwork was deeply informed by my literary commitments. It
was by centering subjective narratives that I hoped to understand the long
shadow of the Grenada Revolution and its fall. This is literature’s strength.
For though there are several excellent social-scientific studies of the Grenada
Revolution, many of them motivated by solidarity with Grenada and an invest-
ment in democratic leftist politics, the disciplinary demands of objectivity in
the social sciences have sometimes limited their ability to explicitly address the
subjective dimensions of the Grenada experience. Let me offer some examples
of the discipline-specific questions with which I went to Grenada and that I
continued to develop and revise: Why is so little literature written in Grenada
set in the period after 1983 (i.e., after the fall of the revolution)? What is the
relationship between the political ending of the revolution and the failure of
new narrative beginnings? What were the favored genres for telling the story of
the Grenada Revolution? Epic? Tragedy? Romance? Why did the defeat of the
Grenada Revolution not generate a literary form like the testimonio that was
so common in neighboring Latin American revolutionary politics of the same
period? Why was it that in several texts that were clearly and centrally motivated
by a desire to work through the legacy of the revolution, to house its memory
adequately, and to make peace in a restless, numbed, or divided nation, the
revolution’s entry into the texts was markedly delayed? How did the small scale
of Grenada surface as a consideration in the literature and in the calypso—vari-
ously as material fact, political constraint, ethic, poetics, and shaper of genre?
 FINDING THE FIELD  39

Fieldwork and literature enable forms of experiential and imaginative

engagement, respectively, that are crucial for any far-reaching solidarity. A par-
ticular form of cultural studies, fieldwork can exceed discourse analysis-based
forms of cultural studies, engaging with the people who utter texts and with
the contexts that move them. Fieldwork invites us to achieve a textured and
embodied knowledge of place. Gayatri Spivak faults the complacencies and
blind spots of some varieties of global feminism on grounds that “they can-
not imagine what they know.”19 It was by experiencing the scale of Grenada
outside the realm of the book that I better grasped the impact of scale on
poetics, ethics, the distinctiveness of Grenada’s political sensorium, and the
forms that conflict and reconciliation took there. In my previous research on
Grenada, for example, I “knew” that the island was small; I “knew” that this
had consequences for kinship, for the practice of politics, and for the long-­
lasting trauma of the fall of the revolution (for the dead were neighbors, family,
members of the same church—they were not anonymous people). It took the
experience of fieldwork for me to able to imagine the scale as lived reality and
to at least begin to subjectively understand it. It was also critical to my resist-
ing the ways in which the small size of Grenada and many Caribbean nations is
pathologized and their histories are trivialized. The scale of Grenada makes it
all the more important to think through such questions as, How does a revo-
lution that claims world historical significance and ambition fit into 12 by 21
miles? How does one understand the role of small islands in global histories
of revolutionary politics? Can Grenada illuminate such histories in significant
ways? How do human agency and material landscape limit and define each
other? How does scale shape a political sensorium? Can Grenada call us to
other abandoned memories of violence? Instead of focusing on scale primarily
as disability or constraint, could one not ask if it enables particular forms of
insight or forgiveness? What has and what might an aesthetics based on a par-
ticularly small-island Grenadian poetics of place play in achieving reconciliation
and resolution? How have aesthetic and everyday practices outside the grand
gestures of epic and tragedy offered ways to lay claim to a collective in which
there are deep conflicts?
Without question, my fieldwork was thoroughly grounded in literary train-
ing. Yet, how might fieldwork break with or refashion literary study? For I
believe that humanities fieldwork and its attendant methodologies have the
ability to transform and expand the very objects of our disciplinary inquiry. If
anthropology has been criticized for fetishizing the “remote local village,” then
cultural studies—at least as it has been housed in English departments—has
historically focused on easily accessible urban populations to the exclusion of
analysis of the globe’s large rural populations. Fieldwork could serve as a useful
corrective. At the most basic level, fieldwork in Caribbean studies also bears on
what forms of cultural production we are able to study. For example, it is an
important means of correcting our disproportionate study of and reliance on
print, film, and other mass media (a disproportion which my own work has cer-
tainly not escaped). In the absence of fieldwork, the medium-specific insights
40  S. PURI

of drama, dance, and the embodied practices and performances of everyday life
are lost to us and do not feed into our “general” knowledge about a region.
(To draw on metaphors of migrancy, we might say that drama and perfor-
mance are the stay-at-home country cousins of the novel or cinema; they are
unable to cross borders with the same ease. Fieldwork makes the effort to travel
to them.)20 Fieldwork is also better able to understand not only spectacularly
transgressive cultural practices (like dancehall or carnival) but also the quieter
everyday. In doing so, fieldwork makes scholars better able to connect the
print or verbal text with its contexts. In Grenada, when I ask people to share
their memories, I am able to listen not only to the content of their words, but
equally to the pauses, to the lowering of a voice, to the fact that the memory of
the killings over 25 years ago still make someone’s hair stand on end. Fieldwork
thus enables one to study literary texts as part of a wider ensemble of embodied
resources and practices. It also remains one of the most important academic
models we have for speaking to ordinary people. In the case of Grenada, it is a
form of political witnessing. Literary fieldwork invites us to put two questions
into dialogue, to treat the question “What did people write?” as a subset of the
broader question: “What did people do?”
My experiments in literary fieldwork made clear that they held in tension at
least two models of literary reading: a New Critical model, which emphasizes
the text as a complete system or an artistic totality, and an alternative model
which emphasizes the porosity of literary texts. Literary fieldwork is interested
in the multiple forms of traffic (and roadblocks) between the literary arts, the
other arts (such as calypso and visual arts), and the placed everyday. It recali-
brates the relationship between the literary, the historical, and the everyday. For
example, one thing that emerged from numerous conversations was that when
working-class people spoke to me, they often used the same motifs, dwelled on
the same places, expressed the same incomprehensions and incredulities that
I might otherwise have regarded as elements of more exclusively literary or
novelistic form. Combined with fieldwork, the discipline-specific form of close
reading that I practiced resulted in the de-privileging of literature by under-
standing it in relation to other artistic and everyday practices. My fieldwork
thus addressed not only the exceptionality of literature but also the ordinari-
ness of literature—an ordinariness which in this case might be understood as
something to celebrate rather than lament.
Moreover, the value of fieldwork lies not least in the way that it renders the
researcher vulnerable to history. When a researcher reads in a library, nobody is
reading her back. When one reads in the field, one is constantly being scripted,
being made the object of a counter-gaze, and is thereby forced to confront not
only one’s geographical but also one’s historical location. This is one sense to
which one might apply Gupta and Ferguson’s argument that fieldwork should
be understood not so much as a study of the local, in traditional terms, but
rather as a study of location.21
Fieldwork in Grenada also offered important supplements to dominant
trauma studies models, which in my view do not fit the particularities of the
 FINDING THE FIELD  41

Grenadian experience of revolution. One obvious reason is that, unlike the

more-analyzed cases of collective trauma—the Holocaust, slavery, the genocides
and massacres in Rwanda, Guatemala, Argentina, and El Salvador—the num-
bers of the dead in Grenada were relatively small: 14 people murdered, some
others killed trying to escape, some dissidents held and tortured, nothing like
the tens of thousands or millions in the cases upon which trauma studies most
often focuses. The predicament of Grenada could not be understood and would
likely not be approached at all if one thought of it in terms of numerical scale.
Similarly, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in Grenada was
much less significant than in South Africa’s much-studied example; hopes for
genuine resolution and reconciliation in Grenada have been much less likely to
be routed through the TRC or other state-led efforts than through artistic and
other daily practices. Moreover, the state played a different role in the Holocaust
or apartheid or slavery from that which it did in the Grenada Revolution. The
Grenada Revolution was in many ways a joyous, egalitarian, and emancipatory
project. The revolution expanded some democratic processes, even as it cur-
tailed other freedoms. I did not find in most trauma studies accounts ways to
understand the particular experience of betrayal grappled with by Grenadians
who had invested their hopes in the revolutionary state or to grasp the funda-
mentally mixed legacies of the Grenada Revolution and the profound tension at
its heart: a conflict between its democratizing and its authoritarian impulses.22
This misfit of available theoretical models forced me to the field.
In my own practice, I de-emphasized one of the key resources of trauma
studies: psychoanalysis. The medicalized discourse of psychoanalysis places the
analyst in a different relationship of authority with respect to the patient or cli-
ent or text than the one I as a fieldworker wished to occupy. As the anthropolo-
gist Veena Das eloquently puts it in her study of Partition and communal riots,
implicitly contrasting anthropology to psychoanalysis, “I do not break through
the resistance of the other…. I allow the knowledge of the other to mark
me.”23 When I have heard resonances between Grenadian poetics and psy-
choanalytic theory, I have deliberately delayed recourse to the psychoanalytic
“version” or translation, so that (to draw a lesson from Merle Collins’s story
“The Walk”) psychoanalysis—and theory more generally—cannot be used as
a shortcut or a replacement for the walker’s knowledge and for the forms of
engagement it enables.24 It is via the aesthetic and vernacular theorizing that
I have encountered through fieldwork that I have sought to give Grenadian
experience priority, registering its autonomy from the weight and models of
two paradigmatic models of trauma—the Holocaust and New World slavery—
so that it does not sink under the scale of those global tragedies or the scholar-
ship they have generated. Fieldwork in Grenada has for me been a practice of
listening to the local refrain, as Merle Collins urged, and of learning to think
with the land. It is thus perhaps better thought of as a practice of apprenticeship
than a form of expertise.
This also raises the question of how for us, as literary critics, the very forms
of our arguments and their composition might be marked by that encounter.
42  S. PURI

Anthropological fieldwork has traditionally involved explicit reflection on pro-

cess, something that is notably absent in most literary criticism. How a reflec-
tion on process might shift the forms and thus the “content of the form”25 of
literary criticism remains to be seen. As Paul Thompson observes of oral his-
tory interviews, “The nature of the interview implies a breaking of the bound-
ary between the educational institution and world, between the professional
and the ordinary public….The reconstruction of history itself becomes a much
more widely collaborative process, in which nonprofessionals must play a criti-
cal part.”26 What imprint might such an engagement with nonspecialists leave
on the form of our writing and scholarship? What invitations to translation
might it make? Approaching fieldwork as apprenticeship and witnessing has
fundamentally changed my sense of who my interlocutors are as a literary critic
and to whom I am accountable: not only to fellow critics, or to writers like
Ramabai Espinet or Erna Brodber or Merle Collins, or to other Caribbean
intellectuals, but also to a host of Grenadians who will in all likelihood never
read my book: the lady who runs the roti and take-out shop in Excel Plaza,
the guard at Richmond Hill prison, the librarian who guided me through the
Grenada Broadcast Network’s music archives, the calypsonian who hummed
out fragments of calypso recordings that were destroyed or calypsos that were
never recorded in the first place, or the Bishopite taxi driver who mistook me
for CIA. With each of these people I have engaged in the richness of conversa-
tion. They have led me to think that perhaps my task is not literary criticism but
literary conversation, a more dialogic project.
Their insights, observations, advice, and cautions transformed my research
agenda. I explicitly asked many of these interlocutors what they would like to
be known about the Grenada Revolution, what they wanted my study to do,
what advice they had for me. As in any conversation, there is plenty of scope for
disagreement. A situation as fraught with conflicting memories as in Grenada
leaves no room for the illusion that experience is necessarily authentic or that
fieldwork grants unmediated access to it or that by speaking to such people
epistemological privilege is assured; no such populism need be involved in the
practice of fieldwork. But thinking through the intensity of conflicting memo-
ries and toward a project of reconciliation also clarifies that the object of scholar-
ship cannot merely be to be right.
What I am trying to get at is that literary fieldwork can ground a form
of subjective engagement and political solidarity with people as they navigate
forms of power to which fieldworkers also have a relationship. For me, liter-
ary fieldwork as an element of a humanities-based area studies is one way of
contributing to what Rob Nixon has called a “transnational ethics of place.”27
Perhaps the disciplinary sensibilities of the humanities can help to insist on the
value of fieldwork even though it is by no means a rapidly convertible hard
currency. An overwhelming fraction of knowledge I have gained through field-
work can never be “cashed” to explicitly appear in my book (not least because
some of the most important parts of the conversations were entrusted to me in
 FINDING THE FIELD  43

confidence), but it nonetheless forms the spine of the entire project and trans-
forms its entire sensibility.
Perhaps these arguments for fieldwork in the humanities are belabored
articulations of what should be common sense. My hope is that fieldwork will
become common practice.
***
In a wonderful response to a talk I gave in Toronto in 2006, where I insisted
upon the particularities of the Caribbean as a region, the Jamaican playwright
and scholar Honor Ford-Smith remarked:

But what place? Havana or Santiago, Kingston or Accompong, Ponce or Fort-

de-­France, Pétionville or Cité Soleil in Haiti, in Roseau or Bassetere, Brooklyn or
Brixton or Port Limón, Costa Rica? This litany of names imposes a kaleidoscopic
awareness of the complexity of a region which only becomes a region when one
is outside it, as Rinaldo Walcott is fond of pointing out.

What I want to take from Ford-Smith’s irreducibly particular incantation of

Caribbean places is this: “space” is not nearly as messy, does not trip one up
nearly as much as place does—with its contradictions, its conflicts, its incom-
prehensions, its confounding of still necessary generalizations, and its challenge
to find generalizations that work. And that is why I keep returning to this dif-
ficult, difficult list of places, which continues to humble and inspire me. They
remind me that I call myself a Caribbeanist only at my peril (what do I know of
Blanchisseuse or Port-au-Prince or Brokopondo?); they chastise me with a map
of my ignorance. I approach this map sometimes through fieldwork, some-
times through analogy, and sometimes through an act of faith in the glimpsed
regional integrity of the Caribbean. It is to these heterogeneous places and the
people whose hopes they shape and hold that I dedicate my efforts.

Notes
1. See Shalini Puri, The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post-­
Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity, Chaps. 6 and 7, and earlier confer-
ence papers in Trinidad on the subject; and The Grenada Revolution in the
Caribbean Present: Operation Urgent Memory.
2. Cecilia Green, in conversation with the author.
3. To name but a few, see Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space; Edward
Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study, 2nd ed. and Edward
Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History; Joel Sternfeld, On this
Site; Tim Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction; Pierre Nora, Realms of
Memory, vols. 1–3; Stephen Legg, “Reviewing Geographies of Memory/
Forgetting,” 456–66; Steven Hoelscher and Derek H.  Alderman, eds.,
“Memory and Place: Geographies of a Critical Relationship,”; and Simon
Schama, Landscape and Memory.
44  S. PURI

4. For a theoretical account and diverse set of case studies, see Mick Smith,
et al., eds., Emotion, Place and Culture.
5. Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 71. For other examples that address
the significance of landscape in the Caribbean, see Wilson Harris, Palace of
the Peacock (1960); Derek Walcott, The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory;
Olive Senior, Gardening in the Tropics; Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea;
Krista A. Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics; Elizabeth M. de Loughrey,
et al, eds., Caribbean Literature and the Environment; and Maria Cristina
Fumagalli, et al., eds., Surveying the American Tropics.
6. Collins, “Shame Bush,” 50–52; Naipaul, “An Island Betrayed,” 61–72.
7. The National Democratic Congress, which held power from 2008 through
2013, created more space for public reflection on and commemoration of
revolution than previous governments did.
8. See Casey, The Fate of Place, for the argument that after Aristotle, and
particularly with Husserl, philosophy increasingly came to treat place as a
mere modification of space to its detriment.
9. Several works are particularly illuminating of some significant recent debates
that touch upon these concerns. Masao Miyoshi and Harry Harootunian,
eds., Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies, at the theoretical level
is largely critical of area studies, and focuses mainly on Japan and Asian
Studies. Some of the best essays in the book, however, practice precisely the
kind of revised and reflective area studies that I think we need. Ali Mirsepassi,
Amrita Basu, and Frederick Weaver, eds., Localizing Knowledge in a
Globalizing World: Recasting the Area Studies Debate, is both critical and
reconstructive of area studies. Gayatri C. Spivak, Death of a Discipline, pro-
vides a compelling argument for comparative literature and area studies to
transform one another. Her argument focuses on the importance of study-
ing the languages of the global South and on comparative literature as one
form of practicing area studies. Paul Zeleza, “African Studies: A Global
Perspective” (paper presented at the conference on Area Studies, Diaspora
Studies, and Critical Pedagogies, University of Toronto, 30 March–2 April
2006), reminds us of those histories of area studies, particularly African
Studies, that predate the Cold War and its imperatives. Dipesh Chakrabarty,
“Reconstructing Liberalism? Notes toward a Conversation between Area
Studies and Diaspora Studies,” 457–82, specifically addresses the role of
diasporic scholars in reformulating the relationship and practices of area
studies and diaspora studies. And Karla Slocum and Deborah Thomas,
“Caribbean Studies, Anthropology, and US Academic Realignments:
Insights from Caribbeanist Anthropology,” 553–565; and Sidney Mintz,
“The Localization of Anthropological Practice: From Area Studies to
Transnationalism,” 117–33, defend area studies over global studies.
10. This was the motivating sentiment behind Shalini Puri, ed., Marginal
Migrations: The Circulation of Culture within the Caribbean. Even a
cursory sample of scholarship on Caribbean migration reveals that in
­
scholarly practice Caribbean migrations to North America and Europe
 FINDING THE FIELD  45

(and usually to their largest cities) often stand in for Caribbean migrations
to other places.
11. See, for a small set of examples, Ruth Behar, The Vulnerable Observer:
Anthropology that Breaks your Heart; James Clifford and George Marcus,
eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography; Arturo
Escobar, Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes; Gustavo
Lins Ribeiro and Arturo Escobar, eds., World Anthropologies: Disciplinary
Transformations in Systems of Power; Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of
Cultures and Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author; Akhil Gupta
and James Ferguson, eds., Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and
Grounds of a Field Science; Faye Harrison, Decolonizing Anthropology:
Moving Further Toward an Anthropology for Liberation; George E. Marcus
and Michael M.J. Fisher, Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental
Moment in the Human Sciences; Richard Price, Travels with Tooy: History,
Memory, and the African American Imagination; David Scott, Refashioning
Futures; George Stocking, The Ethnographer’s Magic and Other Essays in the
History of Anthropology and Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic
Fieldwork; Michael Taussig, The Magic of the State and I Swear I Saw This:
Drawings in Fieldwork Notebooks, Namely My Own; as well as the aforemen-
tioned Clifford, Mintz, and Slocum and Thomas. Oral history and cultural
geography might be considered sister disciplines to literature, in terms of the
marginal status fieldwork has in relation to the mainstream of their disci-
plines. For a small set of examples of a now substantial body of literature on
oral history and its relationship to the discipline of history, to which it has
been a not always welcome latecomer, see: Thomas L. Charlton, et al, eds.,
Thinking about Oral History; Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, eds., The
Oral History Reader; Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and
Other Stories; Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History, 3rd ed.;
Elizabeth Tonkin, Narrating Our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral
History; and the journal Oral History. Key axes of debate about the status
and legitimacy of oral history sources have been whether those sources are
as reliable as traditional documentary sources; whether their divergences
from fact might be a source of insight rather than error, allowing one to
glimpse social desire, imagination, and symbolism; and how to properly
interpret narratives through adequate attention to their structuring forms
and genres. See Alessandro Portelli, “What Makes Oral History Different?”
in Perks and Thomson, Oral History Reader, 63–74, esp. 68.
12. While the position of the ethnographer and the complicity of anthropol-
ogy in imperial and colonial enterprises have received much c­ omment, one
might well recall that William Shakespeare didn’t exactly arrive in the
­colonies with no strings attached; Thomas Babbington Macaulay wrote his
1835 “Minute on Indian Education” advocating that English be used
­specifically to create a governing “class of persons, Indian in blood and
color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect”; the rise
of the novel in India is intimately tied to a history of prizes offered by the
46  S. PURI

Crown; T.S.  Eliot and Ezra Pound continue to provide cultural capital;
and the Nobel Prize for Literature continues to be an arbiter of literary
value and indeed of what political questions and responses may be rewarded
in literature.
13. Gupta and Ferguson, Anthropological Locations, 36.
14. It is part of a larger collaborative project.
15. Dionne Brand, In Another Place, Not Here, 68; Clifford Geertz, “Thick
Description”: 3–30.
16. See Erna Brodber, “Fiction in the Scientific Procedure,” in Selwyn Cudjoe,
ed., Caribbean Women Writers: Essays from the First International
Conference, 165.
17. Merle Collins, in conversation at my graduate seminar on Literature and
Revolution, 31 January 2008.
18. Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart; and Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost.
19. Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 50.
20. The annual conference of the Caribbean Studies Association in 2009

began a new performance track that serves a valuable function in enabling
the circulation of nonprint texts and enabling interaction between critics
and performers and artists.
21. Gupta and Ferguson, Anthropological Locations, 5.
22. For an extended and insightful treatment of this claim, see Didacus Jules,
“Education and Social Transformation in Grenada, 1979–1983.”
23. Das, Life and Words, 17.
24. Collins, “The Walk,” 86–93.
25. Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical
Representation.
26. Thompson, Voice of the Past, 12.
27. Nixon, “Environmentalism and Postcolonialism,” 239.

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Jules, Didacus. 1992. Education and Social Transformation in Grenada, 1979–1983.
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———. 1998. What Makes Oral History Different? In The Oral History Reader, eds.
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 FINDING THE FIELD  49

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 CHAPTER 3

Women’s Naked Protest in Africa: Comparative

Literature and Its Futures

Naminata Diabate

Authentic thinking, thinking that is concerned about reality, does not take
place in ivory tower isolation, but only in communication.
—Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1970

You didn’t pick your battles, your battles picked you. Don’t sweat it. The chal-
lenge will be figuring out how you are going to be responsible to them.
—Neville Hoad, 2011

The publication of The Report on the State of the Discipline by the American
Comparative Literature Association, which explores the direction that the
field might take in the future, constitutes a prime opportunity for new con-
cepts, theories, interpretive frameworks, and methods. I highlight the impor-
tance of fieldwork for Comparative Literature based on two interrelated
claims: one, that fieldwork offers us the opportunity to make contact with
certain marginalized groups, those with no access to the conventional chan-
nels of knowledge production, but whose lives get impacted (in)directly by
our academic initiatives; and two, that given disciplinary specificities such
as language abilities and international experiences, Comparative Literature
offers uniquely promising possibilities for developing a theory of fieldwork in
the Humanities at this time.
I make these arguments in relation to my investigation of women’s naked
protests in several African societies, where female genitals are considered

N. Diabate ( )
Department of Comparative Literature, Cornell University, Ithaca, USA

© The Author(s) 2016 51

S. Puri, D.A. Castillo (eds.), Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-92834-7_3
52 N. DIABATE

dangerous, and their threatening exhibition constitutes the ultimate weapon

mature women wield in desperate circumstances to punish their male targets
just like warriors wielding their deadliest weapons. Given its cultural potency,
this most dangerous female-gendered act has been documented since the four-
teenth century but not analyzed. And despite its proliferation in contemporary
Africa, the meaning of this retributive act is misunderstood.
My forthcoming book, Naked Agency: Genital Cursing, Biopolitics, and
Africa, explores the differing and conflicting meanings that genital cursing
encounters in Africa (African Studies). The exploration of the unrecognized
history of women and their potent forms of political intervention also contrib-
utes to two other fields: biopolitics and (postcolonial) feminism. The relatively
recent conversations on nudity by Jacques Derrida, Elizabeth Grosz, Jean-Luc
Nancy, and Giorgio Agamben frame nudity outside of Judeo-Christian domi-
nant accounts of the state of innocence, truth, and vulnerability in order to
highlight its subversive aspects. These subversive aspects reside in the prolif-
erating meanings attached to the event of nudity, especially in its biopolitical
configurations (exposure for political dissent). Expanding these accounts, my
book argues that genital cursing (literal and biological death of the target of
female nudity) revises current theorizations of biopolitics by foregrounding the
agentive possibilities that may inhere in vulnerability and precarity. The new
theoretical framework that emerges from this study is “naked agency,” which
names a space between nakedness and power, and a reading praxis that privi-
leges the dialectical movement between positions of victimhood and power.
The concept alludes to the unsolicited, yet generative, encounter between
African local cosmologies about exposed tabooed skin, Africanized political
institutions, and dominant accounts of nakedness as a state of vulnerability,
truth, and innocence. Additionally, I seek to disturb the commonplace images
of rape, mutilation, and pathology associated with women’s bodies in Africa
and also to fundamentally reframe the approach to the difficult question of
sexuality and power in studies of women by offering a way out of the facile
opposition between mere victims and sovereign subjects that informs much of
that field.
Given this new account of the kind of social and political work that specific
exposed skins can do, the reflections by Derrida, Grosz, and Nancy scream for
specifications. These specifications are useful because what I term “the secular-
ization of nudity,” thinking of it outside the Judeo-Christian tradition, takes
the North Atlantic world as empirical data for conceptualizations whose appli-
cations will be universalized. Thus, my contribution is to enrich these reflec-
tions on the exposed skin of genitals drawing on data from Africa. To do so, I
draw on African visual art, film, novels, medieval oral stories, and journalistic
coverage of protests and activism––alongside fieldwork. This chapter explores
the place of fieldwork in my project, how and why fieldwork became a neces-
sary part of the book’s inquiry.
 WOMEN’S NAKED PROTEST IN AFRICA 53

“YOU DIDN’T PICK YOUR BATTLES, YOUR BATTLES

PICKED YOU”
Naked Agency: Genital Cursing, Biopolitics, and Africa evolves out of frustra-
tion and hope. The seeds of my frustration were sown when I began study-
ing African literature in the USA. To my initial amazement, the stereotypical
images of women I encountered, especially in fictional texts that were pub-
lished, circulated internationally, and counted as world literature,1 were radi-
cally unlike the women I knew in my neighborhood in Côte d’Ivoire, West
Africa. My critique of the pressures and rewards of the international market
extends to both African and non-African writers. Given the nature of avail-
able images in literature, literary critical work was limited to problematics and
approaches that lack variety, thereby strengthening the commonplace narrative
accounts of victimized female bodies. It is in the constriction of range that
resides the symbolic violence at work in literature and literary criticism.
Having moved from Côte d’Ivoire to the USA to pursue my doctorate, I
was especially sensitive to the images of wounded and violated women’s bod-
ies. As a Malinké woman whose local culture was shaped by a misinterpretation
of Islamic doctrines, I became convinced that my body was and always would
be the locus of my subjection to the Malinké patriarchy, its erroneous ver-
sions of Islam, the heteropatriarchal modern state, and global configurations
of discursive and material powers. In more concrete terms, how was I sup-
posed to feel reading the sobering story of Salimata, the childless, tormented,
circumcised wife of Fama, the protagonist of Ahmadou Kourouma’s The Suns
of Independence (1968)? The answer is “depressed.” Just like Nnu Ego, the
protagonist of Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood (1979), I considered
myself a “prisoner of my own flesh” (187).
In the majority of internationally circulating fictional narratives from and
about Africa, two major trends emerged. First, images of women’s sexuality
were shaped primarily by the rhetoric of cutting (clitoridectomy and infibula-
tion), violation (“corrective rape,” rape as war weapon, marital rape), overre-
production, and pathology (HIV/AIDS, prostitution).2 All are images I have
come to call collectively the pervasive picture of negative sexualities. These
texts feature a wide spectrum of violence enacted on female bodies, thereby
“restaging” the paradigm of victimization. The result is the relative absence of
“sexually” powerful and inspiring female characters. The problem is not that
the literature depicts violence against women or the victimization of women.
The problem is that it does not depict enough else: the ways in which women
resist, defy, inspire, risk, wield power, negotiate, are complicit, and much, much
more. Such commonplace depictions arguably emerge from and certainly con-
tribute to the politics of what Nigerian novelist Teju Cole has called in 2012
“the White-Savior Industrial Complex.”3 Hence, the postcolonial reimaginings
of lives in Africa and the theorizing to which they gave birth were at odds with
the world I grew up in and with.
54 N. DIABATE

The frustration turned delight that led to the book, which Neville Hoad, my
dissertation codirector, framed as “You Didn’t Pick Your Battles, Your Battles
Picked You,” involved a lengthy process of archival work (excavation) and selec-
tion. Like Toni Morrison’s epiphany about the ways in which blackness heav-
ily impacted form in American literature, and which led to her Playing in the
Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), my chapter about how
fieldwork broadens the scope of literary criticism “rises from delight, not disap-
pointment” (4). It emerges from what I know about which forms of subjective
embodiment defy our liberalism-informed ways of reading and what counts as
politics and as agency. It arises from insights that are not acquired through con-
ventional sites in the humanities such as books, lectures, and courses, but from
life experiences, smells, and scenes, what Martin Bulmer in Sociology has called
“experience recollected in academia” (254), or retrospective observation, or
the native-as-stranger approach. Bringing these insights to bear on women and
their embodied forms of contestation has the potential to enrich conventional
literary criticism.
My focus in this chapter is the scarcity of fictional narratives that offer a
wide range of perspectives, and the dearth of problematics that explore ritual
nakedness. I am not arguing against the transformative power of fiction or
that dominant narrative accounts and analyses contain no hint of reality. My
point is that the constant discursive restaging of oppressive violence against
female characters and the problematics of victimhood and empowerment in
existing investigations affect how female readers view themselves. Amidst
this limited problematic of victimhood and these images, female characters
were often denied the possibility of “performing the roles” of “‘survivor,’
‘fighter,’ and ‘community member,’” a point similar to that which Kimberly
Wedeven Segall made in the context of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation
Commission (619).
In order to deepen our understanding of the way nakedness can be read
as forms of punishment and an index of precarity in Africa, it is essential to
explore multiple perspectives that are unsanitized and unsubordinated to ideo-
logical investments.4 Given the scarcity of fictional narratives and social sci-
ence research on female exposure for purposes of cursing, informal interviews
with ritual activists and other scholars should become part of Comparative
Literature’s method. We need to explore such questions as: What drives one to
disrobe in defiance? What subjective states does it generate? What does it mean
to resort to one’s last “weapon”? How is one perceived in the community of
peers for disrobing against a male family member?
I read the literature against other practices to which I had been exposed,
particularly ones in which the power of the female body and motherhood could
be mobilized to curtail the prerogatives of patriarchal and state stylistics of
domination. Of course, women also found other routes to resistance and self-
empowerment. In my childhood neighborhood in the capital city of Abidjan in
Côte d’Ivoire, in order to resist verbal and physical abuse and to punish outra-
geous male family members, the nonliterate and economically disenfranchised
 WOMEN’S NAKED PROTEST IN AFRICA 55

women resorted to using their bodies, capitalizing on the fear that men in the
community have of female sexuality, which they have been taught to regard
as dangerous. Flashing taboo body parts, threatening a man with menstrual
cloths, or touching men’s food or clothing with secretions considered repug-
nantly sexual often made men listen or comply in instances where other mecha-
nisms of resistance had failed. Similarly, as a Malinké and Muslim, I had learned
that I should not challenge my mother. In my community, the prevailing belief
posits that mothers are endowed with a specific form of power, the ability to
invoke a curse with their genitals and breasts, which could materialize in the
form of a ruined future, insanity, or death.5
This threat was actualized in a neighborhood incident that I witnessed 15
years ago. The incident, drawn from my retrospective observation is impor-
tant for its qualitative nature.6 A young man, in his twenties, was in an argu-
ment with his mother; it became heated. Against all expectations, the man
refused to concede to his mother, who declared in anger: “The child that
I could have washed down the drain and which I decided to keep is not
respecting me.” She continued to explain her shame of being disrespected
by the fruit of her own womb. So extreme was her experience of shame that
the mother ran out of their house with her uncovered breasts which she
held, screaming: “If I did not get on my knees to push out of my womb, if
these breasts did not feed you, if I did not go into labor for hours in order
to give you birth, you would fail in life!”7 The mother proceeded to recite a
litany of other survival challenges that they faced as a working-class family.
Her litany, anger, and, most importantly, the resolution in her voice terrified
the neighborhood that had gathered, and the community was stunned that a
mother had reacted with this ritual curse. The young man’s father was equally
dumbfounded as he explained to my father later that week that he could not
fathom why his wife decided to “spoil the harvest that she has worked so hard
to secure” and why “she has cancelled her life insurance on her deathbed.”
When almost a decade later the young man passed away after an illness, leav-
ing behind a widow and two daughters, rumors circulated that his mother’s
curse had materialized. It remains unclear to me if the mother was to blame
for the young man’s death.
The beliefs undergirding the rumors regarding the man’s death were dis-
seminated by word of mouth, evening storytelling, but most importantly by
several cassettes of recorded versions of the Epic of Sunjata by popular Malinké
performers known as Djeliw and which constituted the main source of enter-
tainment in the neighborhood.8
The most widespread piece of oral literature in Francophone Africa, The
Epic of Sunjata is also the oldest recorded example of genital cursing in Africa.
Part history, part legend, the Epic recounts the titular character’s ascension in
1235  to the throne of the Mande empire which, at its peak, stretched from
the Atlantic coast south of the Senegal River to Gao on the east of the middle
Niger bend, making it the most important empire in West Africa at the time.
Popular oral versions as well as Djibril Tamsir Niane’s 1965 Sundiata: An Epic
56 N. DIABATE

of Old Mali consign female characters to their roles as mothers and sisters,
downplaying their political impact in the Mande Empire and their contribu-
tion to Sunjata’s success during the epic battle between him and his nemesis,
King Soumaoro Kanté. However, other versions, Aliou Diabate’s and Jeli Mori
Kouyate’s, in recorded cassettes highlight women’s contribution through geni-
tal cursing to the building of the Mali empire.
I incorporate these cassette-recorded versions of the epic into my analysis
of genital cursing for two main reasons, topical and formal. Topical reasons
include the contributions of women that they highlight. On the formal level,
attention to their texts in their improvisations, variations, and performances
deepens our understanding of how literary texts absorb and contribute to
contemporary street and public cultures. This kind of attention reveals forms
of cultural productions that traditional Comparative Literature does not usu-
ally explore. In order to contextualize them, I draw on exchanges I have had
with anthropologists such as David Conrad,9 Kassim Koné, Ryan Skinner, and
Barbara Hoffman10 in the USA who work on Malinké societies, and on my rela-
tionships with Malinké people living in the United States to substantiate and
interpret the dynamics of such moments in my neighborhood. For instance,
Kassim Koné comments on genital curses among the Malinké:

A woman’s use or threat to use her genitalia to curse a male relative or any male
falls into the category of danka but there is no special term for this except descrip-
tive expressions such: ka i julankolon bila ka X danka (to strip one’s private parts
and curse X); or ka fini bila ka X danka (to get out of clothes to curse X). Any
woman may threaten any man to curse them this way if there is ground for it. Any
senior woman may use this threat to curse anybody on the proper grounds.…
Mande males are socialized to fear/respect female genitalia for socio-cultural
reasons.11

As Koné and others suggest, the mother’s act and the reactions that it engen-
dered correspond to the belief in many rural and/or working-class Malinké
communities that mature women and mothers have the authority and status
to mobilize their anger for purposes of punishment or resistance. By baring
their nether parts, wielding menstrual cloths, and invoking their wombs and
the pains of childbirth, these women can use their bodies and their symbolic
positions as their weapons against individual and collective acts of violence and
violation. When all else fails, these culturally sanctioned modes of speech and
action are the kinds of power that women reach down for, seize, and wield like
warriors who reach down for their deadliest weapon. And so I wonder, “Why
can’t I read, even intermittently, about echoes of my life in narratives that pur-
port to depict African women?”
Back in 2008, I was frustrated by the seeming invisibility of the cultural prac-
tice of genital cursing in fiction and in theorizing of agency and subjectivity in
African literary studies. Like Limatkazo Kendall, who went to Lesotho looking
for her “kind” [lesbians], I went on a “mission” to locate echoes, glimpses, and
parallels of my lived experiences in fictional narratives from and about Africa.
 WOMEN’S NAKED PROTEST IN AFRICA 57

My goal was multipronged; first, I wanted to uncover these other stories, the
stories of women who live in crippling material realities, those without access to
the conventional channels of knowledge production, and who often use these
modes of contestation. Their experiences, I thought and still think, may teach
us important aspects of what it means to be a resistant subject in spaces that
Achille Mbembe compellingly calls “deathscapes.” By exploring their forms of
contestation, I sought to reflect on the significations of disrobing that are not
readily accounted for in dominant liberal definitions of victimhood and agency.
Second, I sought to complicate the pervasive pictures of negative sexualities.
My chapter is not prescriptive about the kinds of fieldwork appropriate for
Comparative Literature. But my own practice of fieldwork draws heavily on
information recollected as retrospective observer and native-as-observer, in
conjunction with online exchanges and informal interviews. I argue for the
need for such steps and methodologies to be acknowledged as part and parcel
of literary criticism.

HUNTING AND UNCOVERING
Unable to locate literary fiction on genital cursing in my immediate environ-
ment, in 2008, I submitted inquiries to multiple academic listservs, includ-
ing H-Africa, H-Français, H-French Colonial, H-Minerva, H-West Africa,
H-Caribbean, H-African American, H-Women, H-MedAnthro, and H-History
of Sexuality, with the title: “Fictional Texts on Genital and Menstrual Curses.”
The response to my query was encouraging. Given the number of emails, it
appears that list members were aware of the practice and that my experiences
and assumptions were not isolated. Several emails referred me to texts that did
not in fact represent genital cursing. It seems that given the familiarity with
the topic, members thought that they had read about it. These false leads and
mistaken referrals explain the divide between the scarcity of literary fiction on
naked protest and its widespread use on the continent, hence the necessity of
fieldwork to expand our understanding of the few precious texts that depict
them. This scarcity somewhat confirmed my observations that for understand-
able reasons, novelistic representations and most critical scholarly inquiries
have been apprehensive of theorizing the ways in which women have shown
to be powerful in their use of ritualized nudity. For instance, several suggested
Sembene Ousmane’s Bouts de Bois de Dieu (1960, God’s Bits of Wood), Ngugi wa
Thiongo’s The River Between (1965), Buchi Emecheta’s The Slave Girl (1977),
and Francis Bebey’s La poupée ashanti (1973, The Ashanti Doll [1977]).
French historian of women in Africa, Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, emerita
of Université Diderot Paris 7, wrote: “When political riots flourished in Côte
d’Ivoire, at the beginning of the 1950s (there was a published French parlia-
mentary report on the question), I remember that women demonstrated their
nudity in the countryside to express their discontent.” Coquery-Vidrovitch
was referring to the anticolonial collective genital cursing which is studied in
both Henriette Dagri Diabate’s historical monograph, La Marche des Femmes
58 N. DIABATE

sur Grand-Bassam (1975), and N’dri Assie-Lumumba’s Les Africaines dans la

politique: Femmes Baoulé de Côte d’Ivoire (1996).
However, from an unlikely place, H-net MedAnthro, I found two precious
texts, Obinkaram Echewa’s I Saw the Sky Catch Fire (1992) and American psy-
chologist Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s vignette “Rwandan Women” in Women Who
Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype (1992).
Estes’s work is a collection of reinterpreted folklore: mythical stories and fairy
tales, whereas Echewa’s novel remains the most iconic representation of naked
protest in postcolonial Africa. Published in the USA, Echewa’s novel includes
a fictional reconstruction of an actual event, the 1929 Women’s War, in which
thousands of Igbo women in a collective genital shaming gesture showed their
naked buttocks to horrified soldiers and British colonial administrators in pro-
test against female taxation and the colonial incursion in Igboland. Further
inquiries to Stephen Belcher, through H-net West Africa, combined with my
knowledge of the aforementioned Epic of Sunjata, led me to American anthro-
pologist David Conrad’s compilation, transcription, translation, and publica-
tion of Aliou Diabate’s and Jeli Mori Kouyate’s versions of the oral literature.
Popular oral versions as well as Djibril Tamsir Niane’s 1965 Sundiata: An
Epic of Old Mali consign female characters to their roles as mothers and sisters,
dismissing their political impact in the Mande Empire, while Diabate’s and
Kouyate’s versions highlight women’s contribution through genital cursing
to the building of the Mali Empire. With the help of Conrad’s materials, I
argue for a longer history of genital shaming in political settings, dating from
medieval West Africa, and am therefore able to contest the claim that dates
the politicization of female bodies to the colonial era. In these ways, I sense
that my insider’s knowledge of Malinké society allows me to retrieve more
ethnographic data than I could have otherwise done. At play here is the valu-
able interaction of inside/native knowledges, ethnographic data, research, and
textual training, which provides a deeper understanding of certain phenomena
while bringing in the women who deploy their nakedness and their lifeworlds
to enrich our picture of Mande society.
Although I found only two fictional texts, historians and anthropologists
suggested several relevant sources. A new question emerged as a result: How
does one account for the divide between the plethora of anthropological sources
and the scarcity of fictional narratives on women’s genital cursing? Based on my
research in the history of publishing in Africa, I propose that factors contribut-
ing to the scarcity of fiction on the subject include secrecy around questions
of sexuality, the late development of women’s formal education and fiction
writing, the long-standing masculinist tradition of the publishing industry, the
fragility of published fiction (the books go out of print), and the need to “sani-
tize” the pathologized image of the female body.
My efforts in hunting for and uncovering these sources, with the stum-
bling blocks, false leads, and mistaken referrals to texts that in fact did not
depict genital cursing, should be understood as part of literary analysis and
not be ghettoized in the preface. Typically conceived, the affects involved in
 WOMEN’S NAKED PROTEST IN AFRICA 59

producing archival work often get relegated to sections of the books that often
do not count as rigorous and compelling literary criticism. This is unfortunate
because (a) the initial frustration launched the search and (b) the affect sustains
one and enables completion. The literary critical project from start to finish was
thus framed by ethnographic experience.
Literary criticism and archival work are crucial avenues for preserving cul-
tural records about African societies. Although those activities do not neces-
sarily involve perusing library shelves and leafing through boxes of books, they
are important to African Studies, given the fragile nature of published fiction in
and about Africa. Aware of the challenges of locating my sources, literary critic
Lisa Moore observed during my dissertation defense, “Your work underlines
the importance of archival work. Books and film were hard to get a copy of.
Even though these texts are recent, they’re ephemeral. You’re both identifying
a tradition and creating it” (2011). In other words, literary criticism becomes
a way to preserve these emerging but fragile archives.
Literature Programs have not formalized sources of funding and the time
to conduct specific forms of fieldwork, as Shalini Puri accurately argues in
her chapter on the subject, “Finding the Field: Notes on Caribbean Cultural
Criticism, Area Studies, and the Forms of Engagement” (2013). But, per-
haps Comparative Literature may consider forms of the field that involve the
Internet and the ease and connections it enables. It could certainly give greater
recognition and legitimacy to the significant role that resources such as H-net
provide. Indeed, without resources such as the H-net listservs and the kinds
of connections that they provide, my book project would have been harder
to conceive. Moreover, methodological innovations in the social sciences in
recent decades, their questioning of objectivity and the neutrality of ethnog-
raphers, and their turn toward the literary should surely increase the affinities
between Comparative Literature and the social sciences.

EXISTING ARCHIVES AND THEIR LIMITS

The plethora of anthropological and historical materials on naked protest
remained fundamentally unsatisfying, given their etiolated accounts of rit-
ual nudity, and their negation of a crucial aspect of states of resistance and
victimhood and their temporariness. So in my attempt to move beyond
what Chimamanda Adichie calls the “single story,” the single story that
seems to stage ad eternam women’s bodies as overworked, cut, raped, and
diseased, I uncovered two other single stories that feature in disciplines
other than Literature: on the one hand, the tendency to romanticize ritual
nudity, and on the other, to read defiant nudity as backward and immoral. I
was then productively caught up in multiple stories that pulled in different
directions.
The romanticizing trend, with its triumphalist rhetoric, may be classified
under what Lila Abu-Lughod has called in her study of the Bedouin of Egypt,
“The Romance of Resistance” (1990), or what Amanda Anderson, speaking
60 N. DIABATE

of the Victorian-era scholarship, has termed “Aggrandized Agency” (2011).

These empowering yet problematic analyses are especially visible in several
studies as scholars, male and female, African and American, uncritically rescue
from oblivion these female-gendered forms of contestation.12 In their accounts,
they bring to the fore a submerged image of women in Africa and considerably
complicate the conventional images that portray women as victimized by their
tradition. These critics displace these ubiquitous images by showing that the
convergence of new public politics and old traditions produces a distinctive
subject position that writes African women into the new political configura-
tions of their respective countries.
For example, using the Igbo cosmogony and the figure of Aje to read
Echewa’s novel, Teresa Washington celebrates the women’s use of the
divine powers of their bodies in their resistance against British colonialists.
Washington’s approach, which sheds much-needed light on Igbo society, seeks
to critique patronizing Euro-American feminist attitudes toward “victimized”
African women. Most importantly, by rejecting Western epistemologies, it aims
to showcase a supposed African authenticity: “Although condemned to eternal
victimhood by some feminists and international organizations, Africana women
possess abundant revolutionary skills and abilities, and they have used them
against slavers, colonizers, and their oppressors. The tools they brandish to
obtain their goals, however, may vary depending on circumstance and locale”
(Washington 134). In the process of retrieving and “brandishing” authentic
African women’s powers, what disappear are the limitations of their weapons.13
Indeed, obsessive writing back to and answering the wrong done by the West,
as Achille Mbembe would call it,14 often results in equally sweeping counter-
generalizations rather than in a rich description of African women and their
diversity.
Using cosmological frameworks to explain contemporary ritual nakedness is
just as problematic as reliance on dated anthropological sources. In his analysis
of the Nigerian women’s 2002 threat to strip in protest of multinational oil
companies in Nigeria, Philips Stevens explains the potency of their act, rely-
ing heavily on anthropological sources with ethnographic data produced pri-
marily during colonial and postindependence eras by psychiatrist Raymond
Prince (1961) and anthropologists Robert Ritzenthaler (1960), Mary Douglas
(1966), Caroline Ifeka-Moller (1975), and Shirley Ardener (1973). His resul-
tant analysis frames genital cursing as endlessly powerful and self-empowering.
Although colonialism and neocolonialism cannot have completely erased
century-old beliefs, to use colonial and precolonial anthropological data to
explain present-day women’s deployments of their ritualized nakedness is a
questionable methodological approach. It is equally problematic, given the
work of detraditionalization in societies that are becoming increasingly pre-
carious, and in a time when women and men are experiencing the effects of
processes of gender restructuring. In that space, a precolonial and nativist
explanatory matrix that relies essentially on the historical importance and mys-
tical values of “genital power,” itself predicated upon reified gender norms,
 WOMEN’S NAKED PROTEST IN AFRICA 61

does not offer a broad and complex enough understanding of the dynamics of
victimhood and contestation.
Opposed to those social scientists who celebrate the protesters as self-
determining subjects are zealous religious leaders, postcolonial statesmen, radi-
cal journalists, and bloggers who castigate them for their inability to speak the
language of modernity and frame their modes of contestation as immoral and
backward. For example, on September 24, 2001, during the presidential elec-
toral campaigns in the Gambia, about 30 “starkly naked” women performed a
ritual to denounce “what they claimed was a distasteful ritual by [sic] opposi-
tion to ‘sacrifice’ a dog for election purposes.” The ritual participants carried
empty calabashes, cursed, swore, prayed, and dug a hole over which some sat
while the rest continued to chant in anger. Days after the protest, reacting to
the women’s ritual, and as the journalist accurately predicted, leaders from
multiple religious denominations vehemently condemned the women and their
ritual. Their condemnatory terms included “irreligious,” “public indecency,”
“vile and repugnant,” “anti-Islamic, antisociety and anticultural,” and they
called on the government to take tough measures against the protesters to
prevent this kind of action from taking hold in the Gambia. That these reli-
gious leaders conflate this mode of political participation with backwardness
and immorality reflects their rejection of long-sanctioned cultural practices and
their aim to manage unruly subjects, those whose supposed unbridled tradi-
tionalism holds the power to misdirect the postcolonial state from its well-oiled
march toward economic development. The aforementioned examples reveal
both the pressure to write the story of African women into frames of tradition
and modernity and the inadequacy of doing so.
Moreover, how can one explain the divide between academic discourses
in the Humanities and news reports? This question refers to the proliferation
of worldwide news reporting about female protesters’ uses of ritual forms of
exposure in Africa. The late 1990s onward saw a wave of news about genital
flashing and other rituals during national political crises. This recent wave fol-
lows its mobilization in Africa’s past, especially during the anticolonial strug-
gles. With the resurgence of democratic aspirations and growing precarity due
to neoliberalization, several parts of sub-Saharan Africa have experienced this
massive politicization and weaponization of naked female bodies. In 2012,
these forms exceeded the boundaries of the African postcolonial nation-state,
when Ivorian women in France demonstrated, using stained menstrual cloths,
to protest against the neocolonialist practices of France and the United Nations
in Côte d’Ivoire.
Existing studies also tend not to consider the backlash that the women expe-
rienced. These backlashes can take quite drastic forms, from desecration to
arrest to murder (Côte d’Ivoire 2002, 2011, Nigeria 2002, Ghana 2008). In
2002, at the outbreak of the civil war in Côte d’Ivoire, elderly women of the
female society, Adjanou, who were performing their purifying ritual in order
to bring peace to the country, were kidnapped and killed by alleged rebel sol-
diers. In March 2008, hundreds of Liberian women war refugees in Ghana
62 N. DIABATE

staged month-long demonstrations and even publicly exposed their genitals to

demand that they either be sent back to Liberia with $1000 instead of $100
or be resettled in the West (Essuman-Johnson 2011; Omata 2012). Reacting
to the Liberian women war refugees’ nudity, Ghanaian authorities arrested and
drove them away from the refugee camp.
The Ghanaian interior minister, Kwamena Bartels, on the BBC News Africa
program, even threatened to forcibly repatriate the protesters to Liberia,
because, he said, “When women strip themselves naked and stand by a major
highway that is not a peaceful demonstration.”15 Several observers established
a connection between this case and the women of the Niger Delta’s threat to
disrobe in 2002. Yet despite these useful speculations, no interviews of the
Liberian women war refugees exist to refute or confirm these claims. Attention
to the women’s living conditions in a refugee camp might yield a reading that
differs from existing analyses. For instance, what does it mean to demand legal
recognition using nonlegally recognizable forms of claims making? What hap-
pens when one inscribes agency while sharing similarities with the Agambenian
naked life, a body denied legal and political rights?

GENITAL POWER OR NAKED AGENCY?

These various situations, the diversity of the continent, and the changing gen-
der norms behoove us to avoid monolithic frameworks as reading lenses. Often,
“symbolic” and cosmological paradigms function as metanarratives that obfus-
cate local voices and intentions. As Max Weber, drawing on Kant, observes:
“concepts are primarily analytical instruments for the intellectual mastery of
empirical data and can be only that” (106). He goes on to posit that reality is
markedly rich and that concepts are abstract and poor. More importantly for
my point, Weber analyzes the relationship between reality and concepts and
highlights “the danger that the ideal type and reality will be confused with one
another” (101). Overgeneralizations erase women’s lived experiences which
seem to elude scholars’ and observers’ mode of recognition. Framing corporeal
modes of contestation such as genital cursing as endlessly powerful or eternally
victimizing ends up replicating the sterile methodology of unitary reading.
My own opinion is that dire material conditions and the lack of options
weighed more heavily in women’s decision to disrobe than did their innate
beliefs in the mystical power of their bodies, as symbolic and anthropological
readings would assume. Attention to lived experiences and the affective states
that prompt women to mobilize these practices in public would yield more
nuanced and supple theorizing. Interviews with the Liberian women war refu-
gees after their protest might have shed light on their intentions and choice of
defiant exposure. Their status as refugees akin to the Agambenian homo sacer
is informative as well. Their narratives, along with those of the Gambian ritual
participants, would have been useful in producing a more accurate reading
of their ritual nakedness, or whether or not they themselves would view their
actions in this context.
 WOMEN’S NAKED PROTEST IN AFRICA 63

As things now stand, there are materially exposed bodies with inaudible
voices, for nowhere do the voices of these participants get heard. They move
from invisibility to spectacularized visibility and spectacular silence/ing.
One reason for this is the women’s refusal to engage verbally with journal-
ists, given their understanding of their ritual and the possible language bar-
riers between them and journalists. The implications of their rituals are thus
articulated by the commentators through their own background knowledge.
For instance, in the Gambian women’s case, according to reporter Lamin
Dibba, when he attempted to interview one of the women, he was “flatly
rebuffed, with an excuse that he was too young to even witness what they
were doing.” A decade later, in Côte d’Ivoire, when women of the female
secret society—the Adjanou—refused to speak with journalists during their
standoff with Laurent Gbagbo’s government about the desecration of their
ritual, journalists were left to speculate on the message of the women’s curse.
For instance, the reporter of the newspaper Le Mandat filled in the blanks
for the reader:

These are very serious hours; a spiritual warfare is taking place. This warfare is
waged exclusively by a few well-versed women. This is not a war for men and
they have to keep away for this is off limits to them. We are in the spiritual realm
here; (according to the African tradition, most specifically the Ivorian), power
and dominion (strength) belong to women.16 (my translation)

Reporters often assign meanings to these threatening exhibitions of bodies that

are utterly at odds with the meanings that the women may give to their acts.
They may frame ritual nakedness as protest, whereas participants may see their
actions as cursing. Or observers may present the act as peaceful forms of action
sensu Gandhi or Martin Luther King, whereas participants hope to highlight
violent aspects of their action by wishing a myriad of misfortunes on the tar-
geted males—impotence, infertility, incurable diseases, and death.
Women’s refusal to engage verbally with journalists and commentators
leaves a void that the rhetoric of the exposed body may fail to fill. Yet their
refusal demonstrates the distinction between silent and silenced and powerfully
connects to what Doris Sommer has called in Rigoberta Menchu’s withholding
of information “the audible protests of silence” (32).
The dearth of material exploring women’s emotions, strategies, and ratio-
nales increases the possibility of their being ventriloquized or misread. Here is
what the mother who disrobed 15 years ago said in an informal conversation
with me in 2010: “I was in pain beyond words, and I needed to teach him
a lesson.” She traded her position of victim and wounded to that of agent
and teacher in the sense of teaching her son a lesson. Given these fluctuat-
ing positions of wounded and teacher, of one both pained and inflicting pain,
protest nudity and its various manifestations need to be more subtly theorized,
and lived experiences may provide the most promising avenues for such an
endeavor.
64 N. DIABATE

Working through these materials, sources, and dilemmas has led me to think
of ritual nudity more in terms of naked agency than genital power. Naked
agency names a space between nakedness and power, and a reading praxis
that privileges the dialectical movement between positions of victimhood
and power. The concept alludes to the unsolicited yet generative encounter
between African local cosmologies about exposed tabooed skin, Africanized
political institutions, and dominant accounts of nakedness as a state of vul-
nerability, truth, and innocence. More specifically, the overdetermination of
women’s bodies on which the putative power of genital shaming is predicated
may be eroded in certain spaces. Kinship structures and family-based networks,
with their enforced accountability and responsibility, are also eroded with rapid
urbanization and individualization. While ritual disrobing elicits fear and shame
in men in a rural area, or in family settings, in urban spaces genital shaming
may fail, for there anonymity and tenuous kinship bonds confer a certain kind
of agency on individuals and postcolonial authorities. Thus, the idea of naked
agency, a phrase that holds in tension two putatively dichotomous states. One
has to continually maintain the delicate balance between acknowledging the
courage necessary to mobilize these forms of contestation and the possible
backlash (arrest and physical violation) that the women may face. Attention
to the complex meanings of female bodies holds the possibility of a broad
theorization of female sexuality in Africa. But, until we recognize these body-
centered forms with their limitations, we will continually theorize no more
than our own critical fantasies, anxieties, and projections.
Each individual anecdote or incident I have recounted also raises the ques-
tion of scale and in/commensurability—in the movement from one woman
(in incident in the neighborhood) to the collective (women in Ghana and the
Gambia). How does the kinship setting relate to the national setting? How
does one transition from a familial involving a mother in pain in a familial set-
ting to a national context in which women activists display outrage?

HOSPITALITY IN COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

One could argue that literary criticism needs no interviews with ritual partici-
pants in order to arrive at more nuanced and accurate readings of ritual genital
exposure. Fictional texts, research in the social sciences, and newspaper articles
can produce what literary critics need should they prefer historical, sociologi-
cal, or gender critical approaches to formalist and deconstructive reading praxes
because of certain ideas that they seek to bring to the forefront.
But, to read Echewa’s I Saw the Sky Catch Fire for what it can tell us about
our contemporary world may not suffice. In this case, despite its dense textu-
ality, the narrative reimagines a colonial setting with its attendant beliefs and
gender norms that may not help make sense of contemporary deployments of
ritual exposure. The historical and cultural contexts operative in the narrative—
men’s violent reaction to female genitals, the power of kinship networks—
might not find their equivalences in the postcolonial city. I would even argue
 WOMEN’S NAKED PROTEST IN AFRICA 65

that precarity in the postcolonial city with necropolitics as a normalized gov-

ernmental rationality creates a sense of danger that people living in the colo-
nial era could not imagine. Indeed, in the postcolonial city, the population
becomes the surplus and is left prey to multiple forces, including corrupt post-
colonial bureaucrats, multinational companies, war machines, evangelists of all
stripes, and the Bretton Woods institutions with their Structural Adjustments
Programs (Mbembe 2003).
Yet similarities do exist between the two worlds, the rural colonial village
setting of the novel and the postcolonial city, and comparison is the work of my
discipline. For instance, the killing of more than 100 Igbo women following
their genital shaming act by soldiers recruited by the British colonial administra-
tion in 1929 could productively be compared to the 2002 killing of the Adjanou
performers in 2002. Moreover, the rhetoric of the “spirit-induced madness”
and of “a sudden overflow of premenstrual or postpartum hormones” or “spon-
taneous combustion” that the colonial administration uses to dismiss women’s
political rationality parallels the vitriolic rhetoric that religious leaders used in the
Gambian case. In that sense, there are few differences between the women; they
converged in oppositional terrains with regimes of power that refuse to share
in their epistemes. The feelings and strategies of the characters may enable the
reader to imaginatively engage with the Liberian women war refugees. So the
conventional approach of reading novels to make mediated sense of reality can
potentially yield powerful insights. However, such an approach has limitations
that can potentially be avoided if one makes contact with women activists.17 As
Paolo Freire argues in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, “Authentic thinking, thinking
that is concerned about reality, does not take place in ivory tower isolation, but
only in communication” (64). I thus propose that we consider the other direc-
tion, in which an analysis of interviews with women can help illuminate other
aspects of the novel that may not otherwise be available.
With time, resources, and institutional blessing, I will analyze Echewa’s
novel in light of interviews with the women, rather than try to understand the
Liberian women war refugees solely through I Saw the Sky Catch Fire. Relying
exclusively on the novel to make sense of living beings when one has the ability
to approach them constitutes an ethics of detachment (with its agentive pos-
sibilities for the reader).18 I would like to see Comparative Literature practice a
more humane ethics of hospitality. It is in that sense that literary critic Neville
Hoad’s insight, “The challenge will be figuring out how are you going to
be responsible to them (The battles that picked me) (2011),” continues to
shape my connection to the topic and to the agents who collectively mobilize
naked protest on the continent. I doubt that Hoad meant “being responsible
to them” in the material sense of feeling responsible for ritual participants.
What I think he meant was to be mindful of the impact of my readings on the
ways in which the topic will be received in the future. In this essay, I try to push
further his invitation.
An example of such an effort might be to join David Conrad in his
compilation, transcription, translation, and publication of several recorded
66 N. DIABATE

Malinké oral studies. Conrad’s research made possible my book project, and
given the precarious nature of these emerging archives, I am convinced of
the importance of his transcription and translation projects. An investment
in these kinds of projects or in contemporary ritual participants as living
beings, an attempt to understand them, to validate in a way their inten-
tions and emotions is an urgent enterprise—and one to which Comparative
Literature can contribute. Just as importantly, the actors’ thoughts, regrets,
or sense of triumph following their ritual exposure might prove illuminat-
ing for the field of Comparative Literature. Ultimately, if the novel and its
imagined people give us the latitude of detachment because the stakes are
low, how accountable do I feel to the activists whose actions my scholarship
is supposed to explain?
In a recent lecture about her much-discussed essay, “Is It Ethical to Study
Africa?” (2007), Amina Mama offers compelling ways to engage the women
that she features in her documentary, The Witches of Gambaga (Fadoa Films
2010). Among her actions was maintaining a relationship with the women
by returning to screen the film, even years after the shooting of the docu-
mentary. Similarly, American anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli has provided
expert assistance to the aboriginal communities in their land claims against
the Australian government. Povinelli has analyzed the lives of these commu-
nities in books such as Economies of Abandonment (2011) and The Empire of
Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality (2006). These
examples demonstrate how one can engage with “ordinary” peoples in an ethi-
cal way.
As a discipline that understands itself as cross-cultural, transnational, trans-
medial, and interdisciplinary, and with its emphases on multisided narratives,
cosmopolitanism, translation, and postcoloniality (Melas 2007; Apter, 2006;
Damrosch, 2003; Spivak 2003), comparativists should be readily equipped to
adapt specific methodological practices that do not necessarily get accounted
for using conventional disciplinary perspectives and assumptions. Thus, prac-
titioners of Comparative Literature may be able to formulate a powerful the-
ory of fieldwork in the humanities. The high-theory and Euro/US-centric
Comparative Literature that Gayatri Spivak critiques and worked to change
in the Death of A Discipline (2003) is slowly giving way to a revised and more
hospitable discipline. That hospitable discipline is what Rey Chow invokes
in “The Discipline of Tolerance” (2011). In calling for opening the already-
permeable borders of the discipline, I encourage fieldwork that will increase its
investment in marginalized people and voices, sources of wisdom, and topics
for the continued relevance of Comparative Literature. Given the long his-
tory of silencing marginalized groups, those with no access to the dominant
channels of knowledge production, given the ease of mobility and the greater
access to information enabled by digital technologies, and given the rethink-
ing of what constitutes knowledge in the social sciences, it seems to me that
the Humanities should make contact, encounter the subjects whose lives are
impacted (in)directly by our academic initiatives.
 WOMEN’S NAKED PROTEST IN AFRICA 67

NOTES
1. Examples of childless and psychologically tormented female characters
include Buchi Emecheta, The Joys of Motherhood (1979), Ahmadou
Kourouma, The Suns of Independence (1968), Aminata Sow Fall’s L’appel
des Arènes (The Call of the Wrestling Arenas) (1982); prostitution in the
works of Wole Soyinka, Nuruddin Farah, Cyprian Ekwensi, Mongo Beti,
and Sembène Ousmane; female genital surgeries in Frieda Ekotto’s
Chuchote pas trop (2001), Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s The River Between (1965),
Waris Dirie’s Desert Flower (1998), Nurrudin Farrah’s From A Crooked
Rib (1970), Evelyn Accad’s The Excision (1994); HIV/AIDS: Phaswane
Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001), Carolyne Adalla, Confessions of an
AIDS Victim (1996), Viola Kala’s Waste Not Your Tears (1994), Bento
Sitoe’s Zabela, My Wasted Life (1996).
2. The larger framework of postcolonial feminism to which this chapter con-
tributes has produced a number of excellent works on the constricted
range within which women from the Global South have been produced.
These texts include Gayatri Spivak’s foundational 1985 essay, “Can the
Subaltern Speak?,” Gloria Wekker’s The Politics of Passion: Women’s Sexual
Culture in the Afro-Surinamese Diaspora (2006), Saba Mahmood’s Politics
of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (2005), and Lila
Abu-Lughod’s Writing Women’s Worlds: Bedouin Stories (1993).
3. In a series of tweets and later in an article “The White-Savior Industrial
Complex” (2012), Teju Cole reanimated centuries-old debate around the
stereotypical images of the continent and its peoples in the west. These
depictions and the interventionist and “making a difference” politics they
give rise to satisfy American sentimentality without critiquing the geopo-
litical and structural systems that create the images in the first place.
4. In “Finding the Field: Notes on Caribbean Cultural Criticism, Area
Studies, and the Forms of Engagement,” Shalini Puri carves out a space of
possible conversation between literary criticism and fieldwork with reasons
similar to mine and which include the “paucity of documentary resources,
an over representation of elite documents among them, and a desire to put
existing archives into dialogue with the spoken narratives of un-creden-
tialed Grenadians” (66).
5. This account of the effects of defiant women’s bodies is not specific to
African contexts as countless historical and anthropological sources, too
many to list here, suggest. La Guerra de las Gordas by the Mexican writer
Salvador Novo, translated into English as The War of the Fatties and Other
Stories from Aztec History (1994), is an important literary text. In this play,
Novo dramatizes how during the war with the Mexicas the battalion of
armed men of the Aztec army was defeated by naked women and their
milk: “the most hair-raising battalion bursts into our ranks. They came up
shouting and slapping themselves on the belly. We were so shocked we
couldn’t move. And when they got close to us, they squeezed their chichis
68 N. DIABATE

and bathed our faces with squirts of warm, thick milk!” “The secret
weapon! The atomizing pump!” added Axayacatl (54).
6. Given the setup of the neighborhood which functions more like an
extended family compound than a conventional one, joys and traditions
are communally shared. In this sense, for better or for worse, children are
more often than not exposed to adult conversations.
7. Such cultural expressions of counter-shaming are not unique to the
Malinké or Agni of Côte d’Ivoire. For example, among the Yoruba, Chief
O. lajubu recounts that the threat may go: “Except it were not I that gave
birth to you from my womb/Except it were not I that fed you from my
breasts/That so and so would befall you” (“References to Sex,” 156).
8. The Jeliw or djeli (women and men) specialize as oral historians and enter-
tainers; see Conrad, Sunjata and Koné, “When Male Becomes Female.”
9. David Conrad, email message to author. November 20, 2012.
10. Barbara Hoffman, email message to author. February 25, 2013.
11. In an email communication with Kassim Kone, associate professor at
SUNY-Cortland. Quoted with his permission.
12. See Laura Grillo, “Catachresis in Côte d’Ivoire”; Phillips Stevens,
“Women’s Aggressive Use”; Teresa Washington, Our Mothers; Susanna
Awason, “Anlu and Takubeng”; Susan Diduk, “The Civility of Incivility”;
and Paul Nkwi, “Traditional Female Militancy.”
13. The celebration of public undressing has the potential to be empowering, and
yet it can also misrepresent the experiences of the embodied subjects. (See
“Yorubas Don’t Do Gender: A Critical Review of Oyeronké Oyewumi’s The
Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses”
[2003]). Bibi Bakare-Yusuf critiques similar authenticity-construction schol-
arship in Oyeronké Oyewumi’s The Invention of Women (1997).
14. In “African Modes of Self-Writing,” Achille Mbembe describes such intel-
lectual practices as Afro radicalism and nativism or the metaphysics of dif-
ference (2002).
15. “Ghana to expel female protesters” BBC News Africa. 18 March 2008. http://
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7302243.stm. Accessed 15 October 2015.
16. “L’heure est très grave; un véritable combat spirituel se déroule. Ce combat
spirituel est mené exclusivement par des femmes averties et bien triées. Ce
n’est donc pas une affaire d’hommes qui, d’ailleurs, doivent se tenir loin.
Nous sommes dans le domaine spirituel et ici, (selon la tradition africaine,
surtout ivoirienne) la force et la puissance appartiennent à la femme’” (K.A).
17. According to Gayatri Spivak, “literature remains singular and unverifiable”
despite the legalistic work of literary criticism. A Critique of Postcolonial
Reason, 175.
18. In African Intimacies (2007), Neville Hoad argues for the value of fiction
and literary criticism in entering the painful terrains of the questions of
sexuality and race in that “the stakes become lower. And mistakes need not
be fatal” (22).
 WOMEN’S NAKED PROTEST IN AFRICA 69

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 CHAPTER 4

Aesthetics in the Making of History:

The Tebhaga Women’s Movement in Bengal

Kavita Panjabi

During the Bengal famine of 1943, there was an unprecedented explosion of

women’s activism. The membership of the Women’s Self-Defence League, or
the Mahila Atma Raksha Samiti (MARS), shot up from about 500 members in
1942 to 43,500 in 1943. This additional number of 43,000 included young
college-going women, largely first-generation literates, rural and urban home-
makers, as well as peasant women themselves, most of whom had never been
part of any movement ever before. The MARS had been established in 1942
to co-ordinate the self-defence activities of several women’s groups that had
sprung up right across Bengal in response to the threats of sexual attacks by
the British and US soldiers flooding the cities during World War II and the
Japanese soldiers in the far-eastern parts of the state. Within a year of its initia-
tion, which was marked by the onset of the “man-made” Bengal famine, the
MARS expanded unpredictably, in both size and nature of work.1 What was it
about the famine that had caused such a massive upsurge in women’s political
participation in Bengal?
I have shown elsewhere how the solidarities of care that urban women
forged during the famine were transformed into a politics of care with thou-
sands of women confronting the government, demanding redress.2 The reason
that I cite my earlier work on the famine and MARS here at some length is
because it serves as a concrete launching pad for an elaboration of the ways
in which emotional affect actually mobilizes history. The kind of engagement
with history that the women cited involved the move from a factual “knowing”
of events to a concretized “understanding” of them, that is, from the generally
epistemological to the more specifically hermeneutic. Explaining the dynamics
of such “understanding,” Gertrud Koch asserts that “whatever knowledge we

K. Panjabi ( )
Department of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India

© The Author(s) 2016 73

S. Puri, D.A. Castillo (eds.), Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-92834-7_4
74 K. PANJABI

have in terms of facts that we believe to be true remains ‘dead’ as long as we fail
to make use of it to interpret, communicate and mediate those facts. The real
‘life’ of knowledge, which goes beyond mere factual information, in this sense
then is that which enables us to understand or explain meaning, intentions,
personal acts, emotions and reasons” (395).
In the context of the urban MARS women, I had realized that the knowl-
edge of the famine too had come to them as a “dead” fact, till such a time that
personal acts of witnessing the suffering of the peasant women and children,
and the emotional impact it had made on them, had brought it to “life.” The
urban women were deeply disturbed by its impact; and their affective response
to it, of distress and outrage, propelled them into political activism and dreams
of a just future. The scenario, as I have described it earlier, was thus:

In 1943 the streets and by lanes of Kolkata resounded with the haunting cry of
“Ektu phayn de ma” (“Mother give me some rice water”), as thousands of starv-
ing peasants streamed in from the villages, all in search of food. Urban women
did not even have to step out of their homes to witness this hunger, for often
emaciated peasant women would turn up at the kitchen window, desperate to
save a dying child. This was the condition in the other towns and cities of Bengal
too … 3 million people had died due to starvation and the epidemics that fol-
lowed the famine; … 4.8 million of the rural poor had turned destitute; 6 million
were affected in all; families had sold their children, husbands their wives, and
women and girls had taken to prostitution to raise money for food.3

Urban women talked of the impact of seeing skeletal corpses literally littering
the roads and lanes of Kolkata and women carrying bodies of dead children,
as well as of having peasant women and children die before their very eyes.
The witnessing of such suffering led to a grim determination to combat it,
and urban activists of the time whom I interviewed talked about how it was
not mere knowledge of the devastation of the famine, but the deep affective
impact of it that finally drove thousands of them to join the langarkhanas—
soup kitchens—set up by the Communist Party (in the absence of adequate
response from the British government) and run largely by the MARS to aid in
the relief work. Renu Chakravartty, an Oxford-educated woman who became
one of the most prominent activists in Bengal and a leader of the MARS, nar-
rated her experience thus: “Their heart rending cry 'Give us the rice water
you throw away’ still rings in the ears of those who witnessed the nightmare
of those days. Women were just skin and bone and their children gasping for
their last breath.”4
Likewise, Ila Mitra, an urban middle-class woman from Calcutta, who went
on to become one of the legendary leaders of the Tebhaga peasant women’s
movement, explained her reasons for joining the MARS, emphasizing that:

The source of my inspiration was the famine. I learnt to understand that it was
a man made famine and I could see helpless people die in thousands. Actually I
did not have any plans to join politics. I used to be busy with my music, drama,
 AESTHETICS IN THE MAKING OF HISTORY 75

sports etc. But then I saw the famine, and heard their cry for phayn. Once I gave
a woman phayn and she died the instant she had it. I saw it. Actually after one has
starved for many days, even a little food is dangerous. I experienced this when I
was in jail myself. There we went on a number of hunger-strikes, and when we
had to break one, we never did so with solid food. We used to take liquid for
seven days and then gradually move to solid food. But at that time I knew noth-
ing. I saw her die with my own eyes. …Gradually I had come to know that this was
all created by the English people. They had large amounts of rice but they were
sending it to soldiers and creating the famine. Then I saw that the women of the
Mahila Atmaraksha Samiti were serving these poverty stricken people in Bidhan
Sarani and other places. I joined them spontaneously. (Emphases mine)

Further, the deep sorrow and horror of witnessing such suffering also led to
a questioning of the reasons for it. Women, young and old, went on from the
experience of the langarkhanas to join study groups—often clandestine—set
up by the Communist Party (CP) in schools, colleges and local clubs, and thus
began to develop a systematic understanding of political economy, class rela-
tions and imperialism. The langarkhanas thus became the sites for the affective
and subjective transformation of urban women; they became launching pads
for the awakening of political consciousness; and thousands of women who
had initially come to lend a hand in relief work began to join the MARS and
the CP. The women’s movement that ensued within MARS during the famine
years constituted a powerful and moving pre-history of the Tebhaga women’s
movement of the late 1940s and 1950s, and I have elaborated upon it at much
greater length in my oral history of the latter—what I wish to share here is the
power of the exciting and vital relations between aesthetics and lived history
that gradually dawned upon me as I continued, across 15 years, to delve into
and put together an oral history of the Tebhaga women.5
Moved by what they saw, women like Ila Mitra,6 who had “no plans to
join politics,” joined the famine relief work “spontaneously.” Yet, clearly, this
was not merely a spontaneous affective response, because it translated into
actions that went beyond the immediate famine relief work and continued for
decades; the memory of the famine also led large numbers of women to join
the Tebhaga movement in 1946, and fed into other post-Tebhaga movements
too, shaping decades of history. After the immediate pity and fear of the devas-
tation had been purged, something had become clear to these women, some-
thing that had had endured and motivated them into continued action across
entire lifetimes, as their recollections even 50 years later demonstrated; it was
not only their consequent intellectual understanding of the political economy
of imperialism and feudalism, and it was something more lasting than affective
impact.
A subjective and poetic process of affective response to the Bengal famine
lay at the core of consequent historical transformations, and I claim it to be
a “poetic truth” of history, for, notwithstanding all the post-structuralist cri-
tiques of “Truth,” that which transforms history cannot but be a part of the
76 K. PANJABI

“truth” of that history. Such “truth” originates in individual subjectivity, but

transcends it to shape historical change in entire populations.
Such poetic truth of history is premised on subjectivity in the sense of the
affective, aesthetic response to events; yet the mobilizing force of history to
which it gives us access does not inhabit the shaky ground of individualized
subjectivity. For when such poetic truth animates an individual and mobilizes
her into historical action, it is an event of an order that has the capacity to
animate entire populations; and the factity of such poetic truth resides in the
impact of history on the future, in the concrete mobilization of acts, be they of
leadership, resistance or survival.7
Aesthetics is pervasively central to everyday living, so why is it limited to
the arts? Historical events, political upheavals and human actions impact indi-
viduals and societies with affective force, we respond with joy, exhilaration,
determination, anxiety or fear. Further, such impact is not limited merely to
our affective responses; it inspires resistance or transformative action, motivates
competition or revenge, results in mass dislocations, or causes withdrawal or
resigned submission. In December 2013, the sorrow and fury against the rape
and brutalization of a young woman on a bus in Delhi sparked off nationwide
protests across India and led to major reformulations of law and policy; dur-
ing the 1947 partition of India, actual widespread communal violence was the
reason for the massive dislocations in the western part of the subcontinent, but
on the eastern side it was largely the disproportionate fear of such violence that
led to the exodus of 3.5 million Hindus from East Pakistan to India; and dur-
ing the freedom struggle that led to the independence of India and Pakistan in
1947, oral legends of the courageous battle of the Queen of Jhansi against the
British in the First War of Independence in 1857 found their way into one of
the most popular nationalist poems that inspired resistance, against colonial-
ism, that was born out of a joyous pride in thousands of Indians.
As such, aesthetic response serves as a springboard and catalyst for subse-
quent actions and, hence, actually shapes future history too. These dimensions
and dynamics of lived experience, such as may be revealed through analyses of
the aesthetic impact of historical events, are not normally accessed by main-
stream historiography; for they can be gleaned only from attentive listening
and sensitive questioning in lived interactions “on the field” with the subjects
of the history, and through close textual analyses of subjective accounts, draw-
ing upon the approaches of literary as well as sometimes performance studies
to bring to the  surface the powerful but subterranean currents of aesthetic
processes that catalyze future histories.
It is curious indeed that our focus on aesthetics sidesteps the affective power
at work in everyday life and remains restricted to “the arts.” Aesthetics has
been extended from the domains of literature, music, performance and the
visual arts to the material, audiovisual and cinematic arts, and even gourmet
cooking and embroidery, but has then been kept confined to them, while daily
living and labor, production and consumption, commerce, governance, politi-
cal movements and, of course, war are relegated to the social sciences. The
 AESTHETICS IN THE MAKING OF HISTORY 77

separation of “art” and living is so entrenched that it is almost as if there were

nothing artistic, beautiful or affective about our everyday actions or lived rela-
tionships and negotiations. The compartmentalization of scholarship into the
humanities and the social sciences is certainly one of the basic factors that
has kept aesthetics in the realm of the humanities, yet it has to be acknowl-
edged that this compartmentalization has not been as effective the other way
around—for we certainly have trained the lenses of history, politics and eco-
nomics on the arts and humanities. So the question as to why we have refrained
from taking the lens of aesthetics to history and other social science practices
still remains a confounding one, and perhaps the answer to this lies in a much-
elided dimension of the notion of aesthetics that I will address in a later section.
In order to comprehend why we have arrived at such a limiting compart-
mentalization of our conceptual approaches to knowledge, and to begin to
redress the losses incurred in our comprehension of historical transformations,
one would need to step across not just disciplinary boundaries but also the
borders we have drawn between our notions of “art” and “life.” I began to do
this inadvertently, in my search for an understanding of the Tebhaga women’s
movement that had taken place amongst the peasants of undivided Bengal in
the late forties and early fifties of the twentieth century, and of which we had
no written history.
The fact that I could actually arrive at this understanding of the ways in
which such borders between “art” and “life” impoverish our understanding
of history, and also move on to develop some understanding of the dynam-
ics of history from the vantage point of a researcher in the humanities, was
because of the availability of grants for fieldwork in oral history. The Sephis
Grants Programme of The Netherlands was one such rare funding agency
that had begun to support South-South research and was open to interdis-
ciplinary research across the humanities and social sciences too, and it was
this programme that supported my research. There is of course a significant
body of fieldwork-based research done by scholars in the humanities in India,
largely in the areas of linguistic surveys and analyses, oral epic traditions,
folklore and performance, and much of it is in Indian languages. Much of
it has been done without any funding, largely in the areas inhabited by the
researchers, as a sheer labor of love. There is also some funding available
for teachers for interdisciplinary research in the form of major and minor
research grants, from the University Grants Commission, the funding body
for public universities in India. So it is not impossible to find proposals, sent
in by teachers of literature departments such as English, titled A Feminist
Ethnography of Banjara [Gypsy] Women on the UGC shortlist8 or another
titled Documentation and Deciphering of the Traditional Medicinal Folklore
of Tribes in Southern Western Ghats on its final list.9 By and large, however,
most of the projects sent in by teachers of literature relate to literary texts, or
to enhancement of language and communication skills. The UGC, however,
has also set up a Special Assistance Programme (SAP) for departments of
repute in every field in the humanities and social sciences, and interdisciplin-
78 K. PANJABI

ary research is encouraged in these. So if I were to start work of this kind

today, I could actually get funding for it in the Centre for Advanced Study
under the UGC’s SAP in my own department (albeit not for international
research as yet).10 Funding is now possible, albeit in limited realms, for inter-
disciplinary fieldwork such as this in India. It is the conceptual borders divid-
ing disciplines that have yet to be dismantled.

ORAL HISTORY AND SUBJECTIVITY

Oral history comes to us structured in gestural and verbally articulated lan-
guage as well as in narratives. Straddling both academic faculties, the humani-
ties and the social sciences, oral history is also unique in its critical focus on
subjectivity, for it is the analyses of subjectivities—that structure and inform
oral narratives—that yield the insights to which the purportedly “objective”
historiography, sourced from archival records has no access. It is also no won-
der that it is from the late 1960s, when a critical focus on subjectivity began to
inflect academic research in the social sciences11 that most of the groundbreak-
ing oral histories, and holocaust histories based on survivor narratives, began
to make their mark.12 The attention to subjectivity transformed and expanded
the realm and signification of historiography, bringing the focus back on to the
dynamics of lived realities. This pivotal focusing of oral history on subjectivity
in a large body of works, including those just cited, is unique because it com-
bines close textual literary and aesthetic analyses of narrative representation
and enactment with the insights of memory studies, historiography, and critical
theory harnessed into analyses of the lived history narrated. As the dynamics of
human subjectivity became a focal point of oral history, issues of representation
also began to occupy center stage in the readings of oral narratives.
The term “subjectivity,” as I have used it in my own research, relates to a
historically and socially constituted subject, and specifically to the embodied
female subject of history, hence also one constituted materially.13 Further, this
subject of history is not just subject to, and thus constituted by the forces of
history, but also one capable of agency. In addition, I realized that the activists
whose narratives I documented were subjects constituted not just by “subjecti-
fication” to the current forces of inequity and oppression, or a party ideology,
but also by actual “practices of liberation.”14 The subject of history is subject to
the forces of history, but is also simultaneously an active subject that mobilizes
future history. It thus stands as a thinking, knowing, affective subject, that in
turn shapes history. Hence, subjectivity also connotes the area of symbolic activ-
ity that “includes cognitive, cultural and psychological aspects … [and] forms
of awareness such as the sense of identity and consciousness of oneself…” [italics
mine].15 In this, subjectivity serves as a prism of history via the dynamics of
interiority catalyzed by the impact of historical events. For, as Portelli asserts,
“Subjectivity is as much the business of history as are the more visible ‘facts.’
What informants believe is indeed a historical fact (that is, the fact that they
believe it), as much as what really happened.”16
 AESTHETICS IN THE MAKING OF HISTORY 79

Central to oral history are memories of lived history, and memories, like
everyday life, accrue complexity infused with subjectivity, aesthetics and affect.
Memory is a selective process contingent upon the subjectivity of both the time
and the force of the event memorized and the time and conditions of recall.
In this, it links the subjectivity of the past which recorded certain memories
selectively for posterity and the subjectivity of the present which chooses only
certain selections of these memories for reclaiming. Why did certain memories
stay with us and not others? Why do they speak to us now? These are telling
questions that simmer beneath the surface of history.
Memory also safeguards the aesthetic dimensions of life and their mobi-
lizing power—of that which is unspeakable, of love that transforms, and of
affective transformations. Celebrated since time immemorial in poetry, these
have, curiously, found little place in what we call history today. Thus, there are
bound to be contrasts, even tensions, between readings of memory and read-
ings of history.
Far from sharing history’s claims of objectivity, memory is in fact extremely
slippery—for it is mediated through affect; it is shaped by desire or fear, by
joy or apprehension or even a sense of loss. The useful question then is not
about the accuracy of memory, but actually about how its mediations articulate
a relationship to the past in the present. Why is memory catalyzed in certain
situations and not in others? Why is it suppressed, or even non-existent in some
cases? These are critical questions: for fragmented, discontinuous memories, or
an absence of memory may well be telling of the violence and silences of lived
histories that fall out of the pages of historiography.
Analyses of narrativizations of memory then enable us to comprehend the
impact of historical events on subjectivity; and the aesthetic response of individu-
als and communities subject to the affective impact of historical events is what
mobilizes history—this is where aesthetics plays a pivotal role in the shaping of
history. The lens of subjectivity is invaluable in that it provides access to both
epistemological and political standpoints, and this became evident specially in
the accounts of women activists; this is because their narrative subjectivities
were layered both with the affective impact of historical events as they unfolded
for them in their politicized realities and with the ways in which politics was
in turn textured by their standpoints and agency. Predicated thus, subjectiv-
ity then “embraces not only the epistemological dimension but also that con-
cerned with the nature and significance of the political” (emphases mine).17
Subjectivity hence offers itself as a link between the aesthetic workings of interi-
ority and the external workings of politics; it is on such grounds of subjectivity
that both the humanities and the social sciences become indispensable—even
as they both stand to benefit from it.
In the logic of the above-mentioned arguments that are built upon my
own experience of “fieldwork” across years, but also substantiated by pioneer-
ing scholars in oral history such as Passerini and Portelli, there is one missing
link. This link has to do with the connection between affective response and
knowledge and between aesthetic dynamics and epistemological standpoints.
80 K. PANJABI

For while the urban women’s actions were of course informed by a powerful
rational response to the oppression of the times, further buttressed by their
theoretical training, the affective impact of the suffering was the mobilizing
factor. How then does affective impact, that has to do with the emotions,
translate into the epistemological standpoint from which history is mobilized?
The answer to this critical question eluded me for more than a decade, but it
was finally with close, sustained reflection upon the verbal—and facial—articu-
lations of the peasant women I had interviewed, and my own engagement
with aesthetics in literary studies that the connections between affective impact
and an epistemological standpoint powerful enough to mobilize thousands of
women into political activism across decades began to dawn upon me.
There was a persistent refrain that had echoed across my conversations with
most of the peasant women. When I asked them what the experience of being
part of the Tebhaga movement was like for them, their eyes would light up, a
joyous smile would appear on their faces, and while one would describe it as an
experience of ananda (profound joy) and another as mazaa (fun or pleasure to
the point of contentment), yet another would say it brought her shanti (peace).
It was too persistent a refrain to be ignored—for refrain it was, of a sense of
deep enjoyment and rich satisfaction, echoing across this variety of words they
used to describe what it was about that lived history that had stayed with them.
What also struck me was that this was not of the order of a spontaneous emo-
tional response, for it was more than 50 years since they had participated in the
movement, this seemed to be more of the order of an aesthetic quality, replete
with spirit, yet possessing a quiet, honed confidence.
It was thus that I began to train the lens of aesthetics onto subjectivity—and
history. This process was reinforced by the acknowledgement, by oral historians
to whom I am deeply indebted for my understanding of the role of subjectivity
in the making of history, of the connections between aesthetics and knowledge.
Portelli does observe that “aesthetics is a form of knowledge,”18 and Passerini
elaborates that subjectivity connotes the area of symbolic activity that “includes
cognitive … aspects.”19 I realized that the emergence of the contemporary
engagement with subjectivity, which has also become a bedrock of oral history
scholarship, has made it imperative for us to reassess the role of aesthetics—and
of the relationship between affect, cognition and agency—in the making of his-
tory. The argument I wish to make here then is about the critical role of aesthet-
ics in the workings of subjectivity—and hence in the transformation of history.

AESTHETICS, SENSUOUS COGNITION, AND THE 

CONSTITUTION OF SUBJECTIVITY
This question of aesthetics in the workings of subjectivity brings us to the
other, more pervasive reason for the absence of aesthetic study in the “social
science” fields—of lived realities, political movements and oral history. The
contemporary focus of aesthetics on perfection of sensitive cognition and
 AESTHETICS IN THE MAKING OF HISTORY 81

beauty elides the much wider scope of aesthetics that relates to the process
of cognition through affect. As Marcuse has observed, “The basic experience
in the aesthetic dimension is of sensuousness, not of sensuality (appetitive),
but of sensuousness (sensitive cognition), the nature of which is ‘receptiv-
ity’, of cognition through being affected by given objects.”20 More recently,
Simon Gikandi, in his insightful study of the problematic relationship between
slavery and eighteenth-century aesthetic culture, has described sensuousness
as a “singular investment in the senses as a mode of understanding human
experience.”21 Bowie too relocates aesthetics within the larger field of pro-
cesses of sensuous perception and its role in the constitution of subjectivity:
“From being a part of philosophy concerned with the senses, and not neces-
sarily with beauty—the word derives from the Greek ‘aisthánesthai,’ ‘perceive
sensuously’—the new subject of ‘aesthetics’ now focuses on the significance of
natural beauty and of art…. The crucial new departure lies in the way aesthet-
ics is connected to the emergence of subjectivity as the central issue in modern
philosophy, and this is where the relevance of this topic to contemporary con-
cerns becomes apparent.”22 In the humanities today, it is this much narrowed
concern of aesthetics with beauty and perfection of sensitive cognition in what
is perceived as art (which narratives of political movements are not), that has
resulted in the virtual elision of the affective constitution of subjectivity in lived
realities. I hope to show how vital it is to restore the larger concerns of aesthet-
ics, and its role in the constitution of subjectivity, not just to the “humanities”
but also to the “social sciences”—if we must continue to insist on such divisive
categorizations.
Aesthetics was not always limited to its contemporary concern with the
appreciation and criticism of beauty, or with the study of artistic perfection. The
eighteenth century witnessed the recognition of a valuable mode of accessing
knowledge in human life that was formulated as a critical element of aesthetics,
and this was the process of “sensuous cognition.” The very term aesthetics was
coined in 1735 by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (from the Greek aisthanes-
thai, “to perceive”) in his dissertation Meditationes philosophicae23; and in the
first of his major two-volume work Aesthetica (1750, 1758), he framed his aes-
thetics as a theory of cognition, that even as it constituted the “art of beautiful
cognition” was simultaneously also the “art of the analog of reason” and thus
also a “science of sensuous cognition”: “Aesthetics (theory of the liberal arts,
lower doctrine of cognition, the art of beautiful cognition, the art of the analog
of reason), is the science of sensuous cognition.”24
This sensuous cognition was the “missing link,” between affective response
and knowledge, that I refer to above. Baumgarten delineated the term to
mean “a science of how things are to be known by means of the senses.”25 In
his analysis, “18th Century German Aesthetics,” Paul Gruyer highlights that
Baumgarten also introduced “an emphasis on the emotional impact of art”
even as he defined aesthetics conceptually as an “analogue of reason,” and in
doing so, “open[ed] the way for much more radical reconceptions of aesthetic
82 K. PANJABI

experience in Germany.”26 He also draws attention to Baumgarten’s delinea-

tion of aesthetics as an episteme, and retraces its philosophical journey thus:

Baumgarten’s Meditations on Poetry conclude with his famous introduction of the

term “aesthetics”: “The Greek philosophers and the Church fathers have always
carefully distinguished between the aistheta and the noeta,” that is, between
objects of sense and objects of thought, and while the latter, that is, “what can
be cognized through the higher faculty” of mind, are “the object of logic, the
aistheta are the subject of the episteme aisthetike or AESTHETICS,” the science
of perception. (Meditations, §CXVI, p. 86)

As Moore observes, Baumgarten introduced aesthetics “as an independent

sphere of philosophical inquiry, cognate with, but separate from, the truths of
logic and morality” (1).
The same century that witnessed the emergence of this critical awareness of
the connection between aesthetics and epistemology, however, also created the
ground for the eclipse of all but rational modes of cognition, and aesthetics lost
currency as a mode of cognition. Herder was one of the few to recognize the
dangers of such an eclipse of affect:

Though many Aufklärer were prepared to accept the dissociation of the intellect
and emotions as the price of progress, Herder most certainly was not. He strove
to bridge the growing gap between the affective and rational sides of our nature,
keep in check the enlightened despotism of Reason, and unleash the full potential
of the human spirit. Herder was one of the few contemporaries who seemed to
grasp the revolutionary implications of Baumgarten’s enterprise. For aesthetics,
according to Baumgarten’s understanding, is not just a philosophy of art but
also—indeed, primarily—the “science of sensuous cognition.”27

Thus a critical casualty on the eighteenth-century checklist of damage done

by the deification of reason was the recognition of sensuous modes of cogni-
tion, and in this elision was obscured a critical mode of non-conceptual forms
of human access to knowledge.28 If Herder was critical of the dissociation of
intellect and emotions, of the rational and affective dimensions of life, Marcuse
was even more trenchant in his appraisal—terming this to be a “subjugation”
of sensuous faculties by reason and “their repressive utilization” in the utilitar-
ian project of “progress”:

To Kant the aesthetic dimension is the medium in which the senses and the intel-
lect meet…. [T]his mediation is necessitated by the pervasive conflict between
the lower and the higher faculties of man generated by the progress of civili-
zation—progress achieved through the subjugation of the sensuous faculties to
reason, and through their repressive utilization for social needs.29

What is absolutely fascinating is that both Greek tragedy and Sanskrit aes-
thetic theory focus on the opposite—they elaborate the ways in which pro-
cesses of the sensuous faculties, affect and emotion respectively, lead not to
 AESTHETICS IN THE MAKING OF HISTORY 83

their “repressive utilization” but to “intellectual clarification” and “heightened

states of cognition.”
Since the late twentieth century, catharsis has also been interpreted as “intel-
lectual clarification.”30 The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics31 fur-
ther identifies two significant variations on “intellectual clarification” that have
been suggested: “emotional (as well as intellectual) clarification (Nussbaum)
and ethical clarification (Wagner).” In fact, in consideration of these strands, it
categorically emphasizes the emergence of a “new intellectual vision” from the
new emotional perspective that arises from the witnessing of tragedy:

Since the new blending that is attained in the cathartic process is psychic, it must
involve a new emotional perspective and even, arising from that, a new intellec-
tual vision. A wisdom is distilled from tragic suffering, and the person is pathei
mathos (taught by suffering) as the chorus in Agamemnon sings. The tragic suf-
fering, and the ensuing intellectual calm have produced in the spectator a new
insight into what the plot of the drama, its action—which is to say, its meaning in
motion—most essentially represents.32

Closely relevant to the urban women’s response to the suffering during the
famine is Nussbaum’s explication of catharsis as “clarification,”33 which is not
necessarily intellectual, but can also take place independently through emo-
tional responses; furthermore, this emotional response itself is capable of facili-
tating an understanding of our values:

I have argued that, in his [Aristotle’s] view, tragedy contributes to human self-
understanding precisely through its exploration of the pitiable and the fearful.
The way it carries out this exploratory task is by moving us to respond with these
very emotions. For these emotional responses are themselves pieces of recogni-
tion or acknowledgment of the worldly conditions upon our aspirations to good-
ness. Golden’s view of clarification is that it is a purely intellectual matter…. This
interpretation … is unnecessarily Platonic. Katharsis does not mean ‘intellectual
clarification’. It means ‘clarification’—and it happens to be Plato’s view that all
clarification is an intellectual matter. We can ascribe to Aristotle a more generous
view of the ways in which we come to know ourselves. First of all, clarification, for
him, can certainly take place through emotional responses, as the definition states.
Just as, inside the Antigone, Creon’s learning came by way of the grief he felt
for his son’s death, so, as we watch a tragic character, it is frequently not thought
but the emotional response itself that leads us to understand what our values are.
Emotions can sometimes mislead and distort judgment; Aristotle is aware of this.
But they can also, as was true in Creon’s case, give us access to a truer and deeper
level of ourselves, to values and commitments that have been concealed beneath
defensive ambition or rationalization.34

The connection that Nussbaum, interpreting Aristotle, draws between emo-

tional response and our understanding of value is extremely critical for oral his-
tory—for it provides access to modes of historical mobilization that take place
beneath the surface of dominant rationalism, and sometimes even against the
direction of its flow.35
84 K. PANJABI

This sense of clarification, distilled from an emotional experience, or bhava,

of insight into the core signification, or rasa, of a representation, forms the
backbone of Sanskrit aesthetic theory too. However, the range of affects that
comes under the purview of Bharata’s Natyashastra is not limited to pity or
fear; it is far more encompassing of human experience and includes rati (love),
utsaha (heroism), krodha (anger), jugupsa (disgust), hasya (laughter), vismaya
(wonder), soka (sorrow) and bhaya (fear). The corresponding rasas are srin-
gara (erotic), virya (heroic), raudra (furious), bibhitsa (disgusting), hasya
(comic), adbhuta (marvellous), karuna (sadness/compassion) and bhayanaka
(terrible).36 Referring to both Sanskrit aesthetic theory and bhakti theology,
William M. Reddy elaborates:

Both … insist on the difference between everyday particular emotions, called

bhava, and the refined, generalised moods created by poetry, drama or ritual,
called rasa, literally nectar or extract…. This distinction parallels the Greek dis-
tinction between passion and reason. Rasa generalises in the same way that reason
does …. just as reason is the tool by which Westerners suppose that they abstract
generalized types and conditions from specific circumstances. The passion that
unites Krishna and Radha is a form of rasa. It is therefore a mistake to call it
‘passion’, insofar as the Western concept of passion has to do with the appetites,
affects or obsessions of specific persons locked into this-worldly action settings,
that is, to what in Sanskrit are called bhava. Rasa is no delusion; it is a heightened
form of cognition, a means of apprehending a higher reality.37 (emphasis mine)

The transition from bhava to rasa then is one from individualized emotional
affect and passion driven by personal desire, to a refined, abstracted mood, or
rather disposition,38 that is not only a heightened form of cognition but also
a means of apprehending a higher reality that transcends the individualized
sensuous experience. It is thus the sensuous experience of bhava that leads to
its own transcendence; this transcendence takes place through the cognitive
element of sensuousness, to the philosophical realization of the rasa, literally
the juice or the quintessential flow of meaning that lies at the core of the expe-
rience of bhava. The rasanispatti or the “realization of rasa”39 is the realiza-
tion of the abstracted knowledge that transcends the individualized affect of
the bhava and leads to the abstracted philosophical wisdom garnered through
sensuous cognition. The state of attainment of rasa thus amounts to the attain-
ment of a disposition, an enhanced or refined quality of mind and character.
The attainment of a disposition, involving the realization of abstracted
knowledge or philosophical wisdom, is thus also simultaneously the attainment
of a standpoint. This standpoint thus may be arrived at through a process born
out of sensuous cognition independent of rational modes of cognition, but
may also combine with rational thought in further enhancements of perspec-
tive. The affective impact of the suffering of the famine, and the emotional
sorrow and pity that would have been the spontaneous responses to it, had
translated into the heightened form of cognition of karuna, or sadness and
 AESTHETICS IN THE MAKING OF HISTORY 85

compassion, that was simultaneously a disposition that constituted character,

and that had become the springboard for political action.
When the MARS and Tebhaga leader Manikuntala Sen recollects the “magic
of the times” or says “The dream of socialism was in the air and the young
shared it,” there is a resonance with Passerini, who, referring to the transcen-
dental quality of a certain kind of Italian politics in the 1960s, terms it as “a
way of recognizing transcendence in the secular sense.” What is significant here
is that Passerini explains this to be a “shared project of … forcing the march
of history by means of a participation capable of interpreting it and restoring
objectivity to it thanks to an affirmation of extreme subjectivity.”40 How can
an affirmation of extreme subjectivity restore objectivity to a march of history?
In the context of Sanskrit aesthetic theory, Reddy draws upon the insights of
Siegel41 to explain how the aesthetic theory of universalization gives meaning
to individual acts wherein an individual, emotional, sexual experience, that per-
petuates entanglement in the everyday world of pain and pleasure, can become
a means of transcendence through aesthetic appreciation or the poetic act:

Contrasting rati (everyday sexual love) and srngara rasa (spiritual eroticism),
Siegel remarks, Rati is the basic emotion which in literature crystallizes into the
aesthetic experience of love the srngara-rasa. It is the feeling of love that Radha
experiences in relation to Krishna; the rasika’s potential for that feeling enables
him to empathize with Radha (or Krishna) and through that empathy to experi-
ence rasa as a literary connoisseur or as a Vaisnava devotee or as both. The rasika’s
own experience of love, or rati, enables him to perceive the rasa in the literary
or devotional work and thereby to move from the immanent delight of his own
experience, Radha’s or Krishna’s experience, to the transcendent joy of the uni-
versal experience. (57)

Such transcendence and aesthetic universalization are of course not limited to

literature or religion alone, for they inform the appreciation of all forms of art;
the point, as may well be evident by now, is that the human faculty of aesthetic
appreciation is not limited to the arts; it is at work in the daily dynamics of
lived history and in political struggle too. Thus, one way of understanding the
significance of Passerini’s description of secular transcendence as that “shared
project of … forcing the march of history by means of a participation capable
of interpreting it and restoring objectivity to it thanks to an affirmation of
extreme subjectivity” is through the process of aesthetic universalization, in
which the deeply subjective experience facilitates an objective understanding
of history.
There also seem to have been interesting modes of gendering at work both
in the recollections of the Tebhaga movement and in its lived realities. Women,
especially peasant women, in contrast to all men, showed no hesitation articu-
lating an aesthetics of joy that is evident in their articulations of mazaa, shanti
and ananda, for they were completely at ease narrating subjective experi-
ences and relatively freer than the men of the pressures of narrating a rational
86 K. PANJABI

“objective” history, yet, what their tones and laughs signified was that at the
core of their deeply subjective articulations of joy was an unshakeable sense of
defiance and triumph. The expressions of joy were simultaneously also expres-
sions of victory over oppression, of the thrill of solidarities that had actually
succeeded in curtailing the sexual and the economic exploitations of the feu-
dal lords. Embedded deep in the expressions of aesthetic joy was a confident,
objective understanding of history, of not just a recognition of the power their
collective solidarities had wielded but also of the power within themselves that
they had realized in the process. The aesthetic universalization of their intense
individual subjective experiences of joy and triumph had led to an objective
understanding of the deep interconnections between personal power within
and collective political power wielded against their oppressors. And closely
linked to this understanding was a critical facet of their lived realities—while
the men had been busy analyzing, strategizing, and projecting into the future,
focusing on the efficacy of their political strategies and the economic goal of
the Tebhaga movement, the women had quite unobtrusively been structur-
ing social relations of bonding, aesthetic pleasure, and caregiving amidst the
extreme hardships and violence that governed their lives. The objective knowl-
edge would of course not have bypassed them that these nurturing, intersub-
jective social relations eventually became the political bulwark of the Tebhaga
movement.42
Given the resonances of Sen’s recollections of the “magic of the times”
and “the dream of socialism [that] was in the air,” and Passerini’s observa-
tion about a “way of recognizing transcendence in the secular sense” that was
a “shared project of … forcing the march of history,” one is tempted to ask
what the nature would be of an aesthetics of liberation. Ironically, it is Foucault
himself who has not only acknowledged the aesthetics of existence, drawn our
attention to new, emergent forms of subjectivity, and thus prepared the field
for a re-examination of the relationship between aesthetics of subjectivity, but
also drawn attention to a subject constituted by liberation:

It is notable that towards the end of his life Foucault himself, who had been
one of the main sources of the idea of the death of the subject, became con-
cerned with an “aesthetics of existence’ and with the invention of ‘new forms
of subjectivity”—something which, of course, already requires an inventor that
would itself seem to have to be some kind of subject. In an interview in 1983
Foucault suggests that the “transformation of one’s self by one’s own knowledge
is, I think, something rather close to the aesthetic experience,”43 and in 1984 he
states: “I do indeed believe that there is no sovereign, founding subject, a univer-
sal form of subject to be found everywhere… I believe, on the contrary, that the
subject is constituted through practices of subjectification, or, in a more autono-
mous way, through practices of liberation.”44 If the subject can be constituted by
‘liberation’ there must, though, be some way in which one can conceive of what
a free subject might be.45
 AESTHETICS IN THE MAKING OF HISTORY 87

If the subject may be constituted by liberation, then one of the tasks of aes-
thetic theory would be to elaborate what the aesthetics of liberation may be.
This chapter is a sequel to and an attempt to return to and explore the
issues of aesthetics I had raised in my book Unclaimed Harvest. There, I had
explained how the song—“In the Fragrance of the Wet Earth We Dance in
Joy”—that they would dance to in ever-widening circles of solidarity during
the Tebhaga movement, evoked, in full sensuousness, the dance of the crops
and the love of the earth that they tilled. It was far from the traditional lan-
guage of politics, and actually touched upon the core of their lives, the core
that was threatened.
Discussing subjectivity and the workings of aesthetics, Bowie asserts: “The
aesthetic object affects the subject without the subject wishing to determine
the object. Neither are the subjects slaves to language: the capacity for situated
linguistic innovation will be fundamental to the subject”46 I have shown in
the above-mentioned chapter the workings of some of the aesthetics of lib-
eration that transcend traditional political discourse in the women’s song and
dance and in the vocabulary too that describes their experience of being in the
movement; for the words they use—ananda (joy), mazaa (enjoyment), nasha
(intoxication), shanti (peace)—are all indicative of a powerful affective experi-
ence of liberation. These expressions mark linguistic shifts in the conventional
vocabulary of political struggle, as do other vocabularies that they forged for
other experiences, such as the deep connections between antorikota o andolon
(inwardness and the movement); or the coming together of love of beloved
and love of people in joint struggle with the man one loved, in a premer jomir
khoj (a search for the terrain of love). All these are expressive of linguistic inno-
vations in the making of new political subjectivities. For them, it was an aes-
thetic of subjects constituted through practices of liberation.
This understanding of the Tebhaga women’s movement is but a drop in
the ocean; there is much to be done to make up for all the opportunities for
understanding the historical transformations of human culture that we have
lost in the centuries in which we have turned away from the play of aesthetics
in enriching our lived realities.

NOTES
1. The Bengal famine is often referred to as the “manmade famine” because
it was due not to a scarcity of crop but to the British imperial diversion of
rice for the war effort and consequent “mismanagement”—the feudal
landowners controlling release of production, and the class traders hoard-
ing crop in the face of scarcity. For more on the famine, see Mukerjee,
Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India dur-
ing World War II. See also Jean Dreze and A.  Sen. Hunger and Public
Action, 46.
88 K. PANJABI

2. Panjabi, Unclaimed Harvest: An Oral History of the Tebhaga Women’s

Movement.
3. Panjabi.
4. Chakravartty, Communists in the Indian Women’s Movement, 27.
5. The Tebhaga peasants’ movement, spearheaded by the Communist Party
of India, was launched by landless sharecroppers against feudal lords right
across undivided Bengal in 1946. It was marked by the participation of
over 50,000 women, both rural and urban. See Kavita Panjabi’s, Unclaimed
Harvest for a detailed oral history of the Tebhaga women’s movement that
ensued within the context of this peasant movement, and specifically Chap.
3 for an elaboration of the history of MARS.
6. Ila Mitra, Personal interviews by Author (Kolkata: February 12, 1997,
March 11, 97, Sept. 17, 97).
7. See Kavita Panjabi, Unclaimed Harvest. This is not, however, a claim for
the ethical value of such poetic truth, for the power of affect of course
applies to all social movements, not just progressive ones. As I had asserted
in the very following paragraph of Unclaimed Harvest, “The poetic truth
of historical mobilization is not ethically value laden in itself, it only bears
an explanation of mobilization on the basis of a perception of an event and
its affective impact, and there is every likelihood of a clash of poetic truths
occurring in volatile, contested contexts, especially where the social, politi-
cal or economic stakes are high” (np).
8. See http://www.ugc.ac.in/pdfnews/2313343_English.pdf.
9. See http://www.ugc.ac.in/pdfnews/8448621_mrprecommendedcaseslist.
pdf.
10. An example of a unique space created for interdisciplinary, fieldwork-based
research in the humanities is in the realm of non-governmental organiza-
tions (NGO). The People’s Linguistic Survey of India, conceived as a radi-
cal movement, was launched in 2010 by Professor Ganesh Devy to update
the existing knowledge of the languages spoken in India, especially the
tribal and the dying languages. It also involves documentation of oral sto-
ries and songs in these languages, and the research is being conducted
under the aegis of the NGO Bhasha Research and Publication Trust.
11. Blackman, Cromby, Hook, Papadopoulos and Walkerdine, “Creating
Subjectivities,” 1–27.
12. See Bibliography for examples specifically in the work of Passerini, Butalia,
Menon, Bhasian, Portelli, Laub, Young and Koch.
13. See Chap. 2, ‘The Retroactive Force of Interiority: The Conscience of
Oral History’ of Unclaimed Harvest.
14. Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture, 50.
15. Passerini, “Work, Ideology and Consensus under Italian Fascism,” 54.
16. Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other. Stories: Form and Meaning
in Oral History, 50.
17. Passerini, “Work, Ideology and Consensus under Italian Fascism,” 54.
18. Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli, x.
 AESTHETICS IN THE MAKING OF HISTORY 89

19. Passerini, “Work, Ideology and Consensus under Italian Fascism,” 54.

20. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 176.
21. Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste, 222.
22. Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity from Kant to Nietzsche, 2.
23. Gregory Moore. Introduction to Selected Writings on Aesthetics, by Johann
Gottfried Herder, 1.
24. As translated by Andrew G Cooper and Matthew McAndrew in The
Bloomsbury Anthology of Aesthetics, 158.
25. Guyer, “The Origins of Modern Aesthetics,” 15.
26. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/aesthetics-
18th-german/.
27. Moore, 3.
28. This elision is of the extent that Baumgarten’s Aesthetica, written in Latin
in 1735, has, to my knowledge, never been translated in the full into
English. Sections 1–27 of a total of 613 sections have been translated into
English by Andrew G Cooper and Matthew McAndrew in The Bloomsbury
Anthology of Aesthetics (2012) cited in this essay. The first complete
translation into German (Mirbach) too became available only in 2007.
29. Marcuse, 179.
30. See Leon Golden, Aristotle on Tragic and Comic Mimesis; Stephen
Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics; Donald Keesey, “On Some Recent
Interpretations of Catharsis”: 193–205.
31. Greene et  al., editors, The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics,
215.
32. Greene et al..
33. See Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness Luck and Ethics in Greek
Tragedy and Philosophy.
34. Nussbaum, 390.
35. Values thus derived may of course be based on misleading emotions or
distorted judgements, as may be the case with members of fundamentalist
movements the world over; this makes it all the more important for us to
recognize the connections between emotional response and commitments,
as well as the misleading emotions and distorted judgments that may shape
commitments by which human beings choose to wreak havoc on the
world.
36. Sujit Mukherjee, A Dictionary of Indian Literature: Beginnings-1850,
325.
37. Reddy, “The Rule of Love,” 50
38. I am grateful to Tridip Suhrud for drawing my attention to the significance
of this dimension of being—and of course becoming—in the transition
from the experience of bhava to rasa.
39. Mukherjee, A Dictionary of Indian Literature: Beginnings-1850, 265.
40. Passerini, Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 132.
41. Lee Siegel, Sacred and Profane Dimensions of Love in Indian traditions, as
Exemplified in the Gı̄tagovinda of Jayadeva, 58.
90 K. PANJABI

42. Cf Chap. 4 of Unclaimed Harvest, “‘Meyera Andolone Antorikota

Aanlo—Women brought an Inwardness to the Movement’: Redefining
Political Agency, Creating Affective Solidarities” for a detailed exposition
of this process.
43. Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture, 14.
44. Foucault, 50.
45. Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity from Kant to Nietzsche, 12–13.
46. Bowie, 12.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Notes, Indexes by Dagmar Mirbach. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag.
Baumgarten, A.G. 2012. Aesthetica. Trans. Andrew G.  Cooper and Matthew
McAndrew. In The Bloomsbury Anthology of Aesthetics, eds. Colin McQuillan, and
Joseph J. Tanke, 158–162. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Blackman, Lisa, J.  Cromby, D.  Hook, D.  Papadopoulos, and V.  Walkerdine. 2008.
Creating Subjectivities. Subjectivity 22: 1–27.
Bowie, Andrew. 1990. Aesthetics and Subjectivity from Kant to Nietzsche. New  York:
Manchester University Press.
Butalia, Urvashi. 1998. The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India.
Viking: New Delhi.
Chakravartty, Renu. 1980. Communists in the Indian Women’s Movement. New Delhi:
People’s Publishing House.
Dreze, Jean, and A.  Sen. 1993. Hunger and Public Action. New Delhi: Oxford
University Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1988. Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings
1977–84. New York: Routledge.
Gikandi, Simon. 2011. Slavery and the Culture of Taste. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Golden, Leon. 1992. Aristotle on Tragic and Comic Mimesis. Atlanta, GA: Georgia
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Greene, Ronald, S.  Cushman, C.  Cavanagh, J.  Ramazani, P.F.  Rouzer, H.  Feinsod,
D.  Marno, and A.  Slessarev, eds. 2012. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and
Poetics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Gruyer, Paul. 2014. 18th Century German Aesthetics. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, ed. Edward N.  Zalta. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/
entries/aesthetics-18th-german/
Guyer, Paul. 2004. The Origins of Modern Aesthetics. In The Blackwell Guide to
Aesthetics, ed. Peter Kivy, 15–44. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Halliwell, Stephen. 1986. Aristotle’s Poetics. London: Duckworth.
Kant, Immanuel. 2010. Transition from Popular Moral Philosophy to the Metaphysic
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Kingsmill Abbott. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/au/.
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Koch, Gertrud. 1997. ‘Against All Odds’ or the Will to Survive: Moral Conclusions
from Narrative Closure. History and Memory, 9(1/2): 393–408.
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Ravaging of India during World War II. New Delhi: Tranquebar Press.
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Panjabi, Kavita. 2015. Unclaimed Harvest: An Oral History of the Tebhaga Women’s
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 PART II

Place, Performance, Practices

 CHAPTER 5

Locating Palestine Within American Studies:

Transitory Field Sites and Borrowed Methods

Jennifer Lynn Kelly

My route to studying solidarity tourism in Palestine was a relatively circu-

itous one. I came to my master’s degree coursework from an undergraduate
background in feminist studies and literature with an emphasis, in both, on
comparative colonial studies. During those undergraduate years, I appreci-
ated the inclusion of work like Edward Said’s, but wondered why so little
of his work on Palestine (or, often, any work on Palestine) ever entered into
the syllabi I encountered. As I began my graduate work, I charted a course
of Middle East studies and American studies, where I grew increasingly con-
fused by American Studies’ focus on US empire and interest in detailing US
foreign policy in the Middle East, combined with what I saw as its relative
unwillingness to broach the subject of Israel/Palestine in any sort of sustained
way.1 I wrote my master’s thesis on the representational practice and political
economy of US Christian Zionism as a small contribution toward centralizing
Palestine within American studies. I understood US Christian Zionism as an
infrequently discussed, yet hugely influential, bloc of US support for both
Israeli occupation and aggressive US foreign policy in the region. A large part
of my research for this project detailed the use of “tours” of the West Bank by
Christian diplomats, senators, and pastors in the USA. I traced the import and
implications of those Christian Zionist senators who made proclamations, like
Senator James Inhofe did on the House floor in 2002, that Israel should keep
the West Bank because “God said so,” or statements like those of the then
House majority leader Tom DeLay when he declared that he “toured Judea
and Samaria and stood on the Golan Heights” but “didn’t see any occupied
territory.” “I saw Israel,” he explained.2

J.L. Kelly ( )
Department of Communication, University of California, San Diego, USA

© The Author(s) 2016 95

S. Puri, D.A. Castillo (eds.), Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-92834-7_5
96 J.L. KELLY

Because tourism, Christian Zionist and otherwise, has been so central to

bolstering the narrative that Israel “made the deserts bloom,” during my
PhD work I wanted to turn to Palestinian organizers to understand how they
negotiated and responded to these Zionist forms of travel. I began to research
Palestinian anti-occupation and anticolonial forms of tourism: what, in my
early graduate work, I called “justice tourism,” but what I came to call solidar-
ity tourism, a description less laden with moral certainty. In my subsequent
writings on solidarity tourism, I have come to understand the phenomenon as
a far more uncertain venture: one that cannot be dismissed as either “disaster
tourism” or “occupation voyeurism,” nor one that can be hailed as justice in
and of itself.
Further, because I took forms of Zionist tourism like birthright tours and
Christian Zionist senators’ post-tour proclamations as the starting points for
my inquiry, I initially positioned Palestinian solidarity tourism as a “response”
to Zionist tourist itineraries. For this reason, before I began my fieldwork, I
intended to structure my dissertation as a series of snapshots of “Palestinian
responses.” I planned to write one chapter on Christian anti-Zionist pilgrim-
age as a response to Christian Zionist tourism; one chapter on Palestinian olive-
planting tourist initiatives in response to Israel’s uprooting of Palestinian olive
trees and its widespread practice of having tourists plant a tree in Israel before
they leave the country; one chapter on Jewish awareness-raising trips on the
occupation in response to Birthright Israel; and one chapter on queer Palestine
solidarity tours as responses to Israeli “pink-washing” campaigns in the form
of LGBTQ birthright trips. My dissertation proposal detailed this approach,
outlining an agenda predicated on the assumption that I could look at these
tourist initiatives both as responses and as separate from one another. However,
since dissertation proposals are, as I heard one advisor describe them, elaborate
works of fiction, this is not the research project I ended up writing.
My study of solidarity tourism in Palestine, by default, necessitated field-
work. I couldn’t talk about Palestinian tourism without talking to tour guides,
in the same way that I couldn’t talk about solidarity tourism without talking
to the tourists themselves. As an American studies scholar, with a capacious
approach to method understood as a given, but with no training in those meth-
odological potentialities, I turned to anthropology as a way to learn how to
answer the questions I wanted to ask. I emailed anthropology professors to
petition for spots in their classes, doing the explanatory work of describing
my project and the promissory work of explaining that I made sense in their
seminar even though I came from an interdisciplinary field with an unruly
approach to method. I culled the study of empire and the inquiry into its
taxonomies from the texts on comparative colonialisms I encountered as an
interloper in those anthropology classes. The questions I learned to ask, and
the way I learned to find answers to them, are approaches I learned from read-
ing ethnographies in anthropology courses, from reading my colleagues’ eth-
nographic work, and from hearing about their fieldwork experiences in our
shared classes. These are methods and questions I borrowed, essentially, from
 LOCATING PALESTINE WITHIN AMERICAN STUDIES 97

a practice of listening, which was as voracious as it was disciplined, to carefully

crafted ethnographic research. In many ways, then, I credit American studies
with teaching me how to ask questions that centralize the structuring forces of
US militarism, empire, and war making, and anthropology with teaching me
how to see the daily machinations of these processes and listen to the contours
of their effects. As such, ethnography became my method not because it was
predetermined by my field, but because the questions I asked and the answers
I sought required ethnography as a tool.
In the spring of 2012, I took a preliminary dissertation trip to parse out
how solidarity tours to Palestine took shape, who went on them, and what
role they played in anticolonial movement building. As an unfunded doc-
toral student in what is itself an underfunded American studies department,
I was only able to make this initial trip after being awarded a small univer-
sity research grant, which, after paying for tour fees and airfare, left me with
enough money to conduct only three weeks worth of preliminary research.
On this short research trip, I went on several tours: one weeklong itiner-
ary, many guided city walks, and various day trips. I spoke with tour guides,
volunteers, local participants, cooks, bus drivers, and international tourists. I
went to Palestine with questions like why tourism? and why now? The answers
I received reshaped the questions I asked. I began to ask what solidarity tour-
ism felt like, what its organizers believed it did, and what strategies they used
in their work. I asked how long they had been doing this work and why, when
its effects were difficult to discern and when the labor itself was, as they often
reminded me, either tirelessly repetitive or, if some new interruption broke
the repetition, dishearteningly worse: more roadblocks, more checkpoints,
more military zones.
The questions I brought to my research were formed, in large part, by my
training in American studies. The questions American studies taught me to ask
centered on US foreign policy in Israel/Palestine: how solidarity tourism took
shape when it did and why it took shape in the way it did. On this early dis-
sertation research trip, I sat in an East Jerusalem café after an alternative tour
of the nearby Israeli settlements with Abu Hassan, an independent tour guide
out of Jerusalem. He explained his own arrival at solidarity tourism as a useful,
if transient, strategy. “It’s the only thing left,” he almost shrugged. “We’ve
tried violent resistance. We’ve tried negotiations; we’ve tried peace talks; we’ve
tried complying with what the U.S. told us to do by working toward a two-
state solution. The only thing left is to show the international community what
is happening and compel them to do something.” My training in American
studies taught me to hear his assessment as a description of a historical trajec-
tory of multiple, shifting iterations of Palestinian struggles for freedom from
occupation. My background in Palestinian Studies allowed me to hear, in his
words, a growing cynicism and disillusionment with the US-led peace process.3
“Showing the situation on the ground,” he suggested, had become an unlikely
last-ditch effort to end the occupation. His matter-of-fact assessment, under-
scoring the deception inherent in positioning the USA as an “honest broker”
98 J.L. KELLY

in what far too many call the “Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” was a narrative
thread I learned to focus on as a student of US empire.
At the same time, the questions I brought to my research, and the way
my research questions changed shape in the field, were indebted to the time
I spent in anthropology classes. “For every hour of participant-observation,
write for four,” one of my committee members who did ethnography advised
me before I left for fieldwork.4 I tried, and failed, to write that much, given the
rushed, frenetic way I ended up having to do fieldwork, but I did write—a lot.
When I went on a tour, I took pages and pages of notes. In Field Notebook 1,
there are descriptions of the weather on the day of the first tour, notes on the
questions tourists asked, notes on their expressions, their surprise, their frus-
tration as they attempted to understand what they were witnessing. Scrawled
across the pages of multiple notebooks are notes on how tourists described
what they saw; one tourist marveled at the settlements scattered across the
hills of the West Bank as the first day turned to dusk, and mused, “They look
just like honeycomb!” There are notes on how they understood their pres-
ence in Palestine and notes on how they rationalized their inaction before this
moment. I took notes on tour guides’ repeated refrains, the things I knew, as
someone who also lectures before a sometimes recalcitrant audience, that they
wanted their audience to remember, the things they honed in on and overem-
phasized, the concepts and histories they needed the tourists to take home with
them. I took notes on the expressions of shop owners when tourists promised
they would “come back later”; I took notes on the youth selling bracelets
in the streets of Hebron and on the way tourists ignored them, at best, and
berated them, at worst. I took notes on the words of shop owners and farm-
ers as they welcomed tourists into their homes, the stories they told, the food
they served, the evidentiary weight of occupation they presented to tourists via
their narratives, their merchandise, their olive trees. During tours and after, in
poring over these notes and stacks of others, in sitting through and listening
to interviews, in writing through the process, I came to understand what else
these moments reveal. I began to articulate the ways in which solidarity tours
are organized around the demand to provide evidentiary weight, how tourists
wait for Palestinians to provide them with evidence of their displacement—both
for tourists themselves and for their awaiting audiences back home. What is
crystalized in moments like these are the historical ways in which Palestinians
have not been constructed as truth-telling subjects and the resultant privilege
that inheres in the demand for Palestinians to provide evidentiary weight of
their own, extremely well-documented, dispossession.
My field notes go on to trace the asymmetries of power and privilege that
animate tourists’ travels. In Field Notebook 3, there are snapshots of scenes
like the one in Nablus when a tourist asked, eagerly, what happened to a
wall that had been blackened by some unknown event. “Oh that?” the guide
shrugged. “Someone was just spray-painting their bedframe against the wall.”
The tourist, visibly disenchanted, resumed the walking tour, mumbling, “Oh,
I thought it was like a bomb or something.” In Field Notebook 5, there are
 LOCATING PALESTINE WITHIN AMERICAN STUDIES 99

descriptions of walking tours of depopulated spaces inside Israel’s 1948 bor-

ders, of the passages from Palestinian refugees’ memoirs that Israeli tour guides
read aloud to tourists, of the neighborhood tour guides led tourists through,
describing expulsions of Palestinian residents and showing tourists the outsides
of their former homes. There are notes on how long tourists lingered at which
houses, the fragments of what they said to each other, the ways Palestinian
tour guides corrected Israeli tour guides’ narratives, and the political and emo-
tional stakes of each correction. In Field Notebook 7, there are descriptions of
what tourists asked each other on olive-picking programs, how they introduced
themselves, what constituted their ice breakers, and how they made sense of
occupying space and sharing experiences with people they would otherwise
likely never meet. There are notes about how tour guides answered the same
questions multiple different tourists asked them, the questions they, in turn,
asked tourists, the assumptions tourists held about Palestine—and about their
role in Palestine solidarity movements—that tour guides worked consistently
to redirect.
My notebooks are filled, too, with the themes that cropped up in my inter-
views with tour guides, the surprising ways they described their labor, the
ways they heard my questions, the ways they envisioned their pedagogy, and
what else took shape in the space of the interview: who interrupted the inter-
view and for what, what jokes were told, what insights emerged over scores
of cigarettes and endless tiny cups of strong coffee. These field notes, I think,
were made possible by my years of eavesdropping in anthropology courses:
my years of reading and re-reading the intimate writings of my friends and
colleagues in ethnography courses that were structured, thankfully, like writ-
ing workshops; my semesters of wading happily through thick descriptions;
the studying I did in my living room, in coffee shops, and in campus libraries
about the significance of the descriptions of details from interviews—not of
the “interview material,” but of the space of the interview itself, like in Susan
Harding’s descriptions of the nuances, and invasiveness, of evangelical wit-
nessing, or Veena Das’ descriptions of children playing under the table during
recitations of the violence of partition.5
But neither American Studies nor my pilfered anthropological training pre-
pared me, formally, for fieldwork.6 I traveled to Palestine for my “official field-
work” during the fourth year of my PhD program. In my program in American
Studies, however, there was no space written into either our timeline or our
teaching requirements for fieldwork.7 Because our stipends were so directly
sutured to our teaching responsibilities, there was no space or expectation
that PhD candidates in American studies would spend any time during the
PhD not on campus teaching. In order for fieldwork to emerge as a possibility,
in addition to the methodological training—or modeling—I borrowed from
anthropology; I also looked outside not only my department but also my insti-
tution for fieldwork funding. And, unlike my colleagues in anthropology, the
time and space, and even community, for learning the formulas and processes
for applying to grants such as the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the National
100 J.L. KELLY

Science Foundation were not institutionalized in my department. While I

applied for grants like these that were, quite literally, outside my field, I also
applied for, and received, the Palestinian American Research Center (PARC)’s
field-based research grant, which provided the generous funding for the entire
duration of my dissertation research in Palestine.
Because PARC grants do not cover a full year of fieldwork, I stretched my
fellowship to cover the cost of the tours I went on, transportation to and from
my interviews in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and inside Israel’s 1948 bor-
ders, and my living arrangements over the summer and fall of 2012. In the
spring of 2013, I would have to return to Austin to teach the courses that
enabled my funding for the rest of that year. In addition, I conducted my
research while on a tourist visa, which expires every three months, so I both
exited and reentered Israel/Palestine during my fieldwork in order to (try to)
renew my visa. My ability, moreover, to enter, exit, and reenter Israel/Palestine
has everything to do with my legibility, to Israeli authorities at checkpoints
and in passport control booths, as solely a “tourist” and not as someone with
familial ties to Palestine.8 Had they assumed that I was in “Israel” to go to
“Palestine,” my experience at passport control would have been very differ-
ent.9 Every entry and exit was haunted by the anxiety that they might Google
my name, read my work, see that I am a signatory to the boycott of Israeli
academic and cultural institutions, deny me entry (or reentry), and foreclose
(the rest of) my research.
Because of the size of my research grant and because a potential denial to
reenter Israel loomed on the horizon of my three-month tourist visa, I tried to
condense a year’s worth of research into a four-month period, completing 35
interviews and researching 35 tours during my cumulative time in Palestine.
When I wasn’t on a tour, I was traveling to and from interviews, charging my
phone to record conversations, printing Institutional Review Board (IRB) con-
sent forms, chatting with tourists on worn bus seats, sending emails to set up
subsequent interviews, or sitting in offices and on picnic benches asking tour
guides about their work. The frenetic pace of my fieldwork, coupled with the
slow pace of my interviews themselves, was laden with the anxiety to learn as
much as I could during the first three months in case those three months were
the only ones I had. The slow ethnography of the texts I love was, in some
ways, not available to me with the piecing together of external grants, the small
departmental funds, and the teaching stipends that made up what was sup-
posed to be my “fieldwork year.” But I tried to make up for this deficit with
the slowness of my interviews, each one lingering with the tangents inherent
to tour guides venting about their work, each one drawing out connections
between the entitlement of the demand for evidentiary weight, the redirection
of the impulse to volunteer, the boredom of repetition, and, yet, the imperative
of narration.
As my fieldwork began, the more I sat with the knowledge my interlocu-
tors shared with me, the less I began to position these forms of tourism as
“responses” and the more I began to understand solidarity tourism as part
 LOCATING PALESTINE WITHIN AMERICAN STUDIES 101

of a longer trajectory of varying and varied forms of Palestinian resistance to

Israeli settler colonial expansion. For example, in a follow-up interview dur-
ing my fieldwork year, the year after our first meeting, Abu Hassan qualified
his initial assertion. Rather than positioning solidarity tourism as a last resort
for Palestinian sovereignty struggles, he described that solidarity tourism is
“part of the struggle now.”10 “If the third intifada happened tomorrow,” he
explained, “our strategies would change.”11 Abu Hassan’s efforts to clarify the
place of solidarity tourism within a larger context of contemporary Palestinian
resistance demonstrated, for me, how some Palestinian tour guides and orga-
nizers have embraced, consistently, albeit ambivalently, a wholly imperfect
strategy. Solidarity tourism is, as guides are often the first to admit, a strategy
that is both flawed and temporary. For Abu Hassan and many of the other
guides and organizers I spoke to, it is a strategy that both negotiates and nar-
rates the confines of colonial rule at the same time that it enumerates and works
to circumvent the manifold Israeli (and US-backed) strategies of containment
that fracture the landscape of Palestine. It is a strategy, and also a business, that
is as provisional as it is malleable.
This understanding of solidarity tourism as a transient and flawed, yet politi-
cally important, strategy echoed across many of my interviews and has subse-
quently shaped my conclusions and restructured my questions. For this reason,
in ways that I think have often frustrated some audiences, I have refused an
evaluative approach to solidarity tourism in Palestine. Learning from the work
of scholars across the humanities and social sciences who question the certainty
of evaluative approaches, I have refrained from positioning solidarity tourism
as either “good” or “bad,” as either voyeuristic and exploitative or, alterna-
tively, liberatory and redemptive. I have instead sat with the ambivalence of the
practice and I have explored how it is both embedded in and working against
histories of sustained displacement in Palestine. This approach exceeds the dis-
ciplinary boundaries of my training; this refusal to “choose” is one I learned
from literature, from feminist studies, from postcolonial studies, from cultural
studies, from anthropology, from American studies, from critical tourism stud-
ies, from critical ethnic studies. It is one I have learned from reading ethnog-
raphies with an American studies perspective, from learning how to study US
empire and Israeli settler colonialism without predetermining the answers to
my research questions by, in the words of Ann Stoler and Karen Strassler, “cast-
ing for the colonial.”12
This approach, this non-choosing, also required that I follow the afterlife of
the tours not to find out “if they work,” but to ascertain what kinds of ques-
tions, restructuring, or inertia they may have engendered. Because of the trun-
cated amount of time I had to spend in Palestine, and the potentiality that I
wouldn’t be allowed back in upon renewing my tourist visa, I interviewed tour
guides and organizers in Palestine with an urgency that didn’t, in turn, trans-
late to the tourists. With the tourists, I instead made the time to do interviews,
via Skype, both in between and around my other obligations, my teaching, and
my travel to conferences. These interviews, too, were slow, but simultaneously
102 J.L. KELLY

animated by the slow time of technology, the gaps and lulls after each sen-
tence, the frozen screens, the failed attempts at reconnecting. My field notes
from my Skype interviews are peppered with question marks. My voice on the
recordings repeatedly urges interlocutors to start over: “The last thing I heard
was….” The questions I asked centered on the themes that surfaced: their feel-
ings of shame and guilt, the extent to which their feelings enabled their action
and/or inaction, what they learned, what they forgot, what they couldn’t for-
get, what resonated, how their time was spent before, during, after the tour.
My fieldwork, across all sites, surprised me. I listened for the latent assump-
tions, looking to document the voyeurism of tourism, for descriptions of “disas-
ter tourism,” for evidence of disregard. With my interviews with tour guides,
when I asked them what it felt like to repeat these narratives of displacement
for rotating audiences, when I expected them to talk about the difficulty in
consistently narrating and renarrating their dispossession, they answered with
descriptions of how they negotiated the boredom of repetition. This revealed
the many ways in which solidarity tourism is, among other things, a job, and a
job that can, as jobs are wont to do, be boring. With tourists, when I expected
them to describe how they “experienced” occupation, how they “saw what it
was like,” they instead talked about their awareness of their distance from the
occupation while they were in Palestine, the racialized privilege that enabled
their movement and foreclosed the very same movement of Palestinians in
the West Bank, the apartheid practices they not only witnessed but actively
embodied. There were moments like the time I sat in a loud café with an Israeli
anti-Zionist activist, hoping the recording app on my phone was document-
ing her voice over all the noise, when I asked her if she ever got irritated with
having to repeat things to American audiences that they should already know.
Taken aback, she looked at me: “Why should they already know? Their media
tells them nothing.” The generosity in this assessment startled me as much as
my question had startled her. At the same time, I watched tourists predict-
ably gawking at checkpoints, slowing the line, making people late to work; I
watched tourists disappointed that spray paint wasn’t the remnants of a bomb;
I watched tourists scream at street kids trying to sell them trinkets; I heard US
tourists describe, in interviews, Israel/Palestine as, somehow, “the first place
they ever saw racism.” The content of my interviews thus refused the expecta-
tions I brought to my fieldwork and simultaneously refused a linear, straight-
forward, uncomplicated, evaluative assessment.
I also brought to my fieldwork not only my own expectations but also those
of all the many other activists and scholars who have rolled their eyes know-
ingly when I explained that I work on solidarity tourism in Palestine. I carried
with me the expectations of those who assume an inherent difference between
the “political work” of delegations and the exploitations of its crass cousin
tourism, or those who think there is a world of difference between the work
of weekly anti-occupation protests and the work of leading tourists through
the West Bank. Instead, I found tour guides who lead protests on Fridays,
delegates on Tuesdays, and tourist groups on Wednesdays. I found a practice
 LOCATING PALESTINE WITHIN AMERICAN STUDIES 103

of narrative labor that is deeply interconnected with other forms of protest in

Palestine, but simultaneously aware of itself as a job, a business, and a site, if
only aspirational, of anticolonial strategizing.
My fieldwork was also scripted by my interdisciplinarity and the questions
my undisciplined training has taught me to ask. I followed threads of narra-
tive tangents in ways that I can only attribute to my interdisciplinary training.
When tour guides paused to read from memoirs, I refrained from treating
those pauses as solely the “material” of the tour. Instead, I followed those
moments of the tour—like when Israeli tour guides described the theft of
books in 1948, for example—to ask more about what these moments reveal
about the processes of settler colonialism in Israel/Palestine. I detailed what was
emphasized from each memoir on the tour, what went missing in translation,
what libraries were looted, what books ended up where, and what the theft of
books, or as documentary artist Benny Brunner has called it, The Great Book
Robbery (2012), says about dispossession. I wrote about photography exhibits
like Emily Jacir’s Ex Libris, which documents the 30,000 books appropriated
by the Israeli state in 1948 from Palestinian homes, libraries, and institutions,
to show how these fragments from the tour do not occur in a cultural vacuum,
but exist alongside a constellation of cultural productions, films, and art instal-
lations on the looting of Palestinian libraries.13 When I described how tour
guides across the West Bank invite tourists to help plant olive trees on land
threatened by Israeli settlement expansion, I followed tour guides’ allusions
to trace a much longer history of dispossession; in doing so, I worked to pro-
vide, for readers, a history of Zionist afforestation—the punitive uprooting of
Palestinian olive trees and the deliberate planting of cypress and fir to cover up
the destruction of Palestinian villages—that has accompanied Israeli statecraft
and began even before the establishment of the state.14 History and literature
and film and art do not form the backdrop for my interviews and participant
observation on tours, but, in fact, complete them. In this way, my fieldwork
was, itself, a practice of interdisciplinarity.
As a whole, however, my project is incomplete. It is incomplete, literally,
in its shifting transition from a dissertation to a book. But it is permanently
incomplete, in that my fieldwork, perhaps like all fieldwork, wasn’t as long
as it could or should have been, I didn’t get to ask everything I wanted to,
or include everything I imagined, and it was stitched together through only
fragments of training, time, space, and funds. In my particularly compressed
version of fieldwork, and precisely because I take up the study of mobility,
travel, tourism, and the racially structured access to all of above, I didn’t “stay
in the field,” but traveled, with the mobility of a tourist, back and forth, on
multiple tours, with multiple guides, in multiple spaces. Because my move-
ment was not policed, I was able to take tours in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Nablus,
Ramallah, Bethlehem, Hebron, Beit Sahour, and Al Khader. Because I was
not surveilled, I was able to do interviews in cafés and offices on both sides
of the Green Line. And, because of my passport, I could follow the tourists
home. I did interviews in Texas, New York, Pennsylvania, and California. I did
104 J.L. KELLY

interviews from my living room, over the phone, over Skype, and over email.
The multisited nature of my fieldwork was thus not only predetermined by my
discipline(s), my department(s), and my institution(s) but also made possible
by my own expansive mobility in a field site structured by the colonial logics
of racialized containment.
Fieldwork in Palestine enabled me to analyze solidarity tourism in a way that
troubles how we understand “solidarity” and how we understand “tourism,”
looking not only at the limitations of each, nor only at their radical potential,
but at the uneven and asymmetrical ways they take shape in colonial contexts.
Interdisciplinarity, and particularly interdisciplinary American studies, allowed
me to understand solidarity tourism as a shifting and transient strategy now—a
strategy that, however inadequate, refuses to treat the USA as a honest broker
and refuses to treat settler colonialism in Palestine either as “intractable” or as
a “conflict,” two designations that are too easily and too frequently assigned to
Israel/Palestine in the contemporary lexicon of occupation. Fieldwork as inter-
disciplinarity has structured my questions, and continues to shape my study,
as I work toward not the “completion” of this project, but the necessarily,
and perhaps productively, incomplete analysis that will emerge from these bor-
rowed methods and transitory field sites.

NOTES
1. It’s worth noting that this was in 2006–2008, and thus far before the
American Studies Association’s 2013 endorsement of the Palestinian call
for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. The field’s relationship to
Palestine, thankfully, changed significantly in the intervening years.
2. James Inhofe’s statement is referenced in Melani McAlister’s “Prophecy,
Politics, and the Popular,” 781, and also cited in Jane Lampman, “Mixing
Prophecy and Politics,” 4. See also Lawrence Davidson, “Christian Zionism
as a Representation of American Manifest Destiny.” It is important to also
bear in mind that James Inhofe is the same senator who, upon release of the
Abu Ghraib photos, said he was “more outraged by the outrage” (Gregory
Hooks and Clayton James Mosher, “Outrages against Personal Dignity:
Rationalizing Abuse and Torture in the War on Terror,” 1630) and who,
notwithstanding the Red Cross Report, which maintained that “between
70 percent and 90 percent of the persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq
had been arrested by mistake” (Red Cross Report, in Mark Danner:
Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror, 3),
exclaimed, “[T]hese prisoners, they’re not here for traffic violations. If
they’re in Cell Block 1-A or 1-B, these prisoners, they’re murderers,
they’re terrorists, they’re insurgents. Most of them probably have American
blood on their hands, and we’re so concerned about the treatment of these
individuals” (Hooks and Mosher, 1628). Tom DeLay’s statement is refer-
enced in Barbara Slavin, “Don’t Give up 1967 lands, DeLay Tells Israel
Lobby.”
 LOCATING PALESTINE WITHIN AMERICAN STUDIES 105

3. Work on disillusionment with and/or disdain for the US-brokered Oslo

Accords is as voluminous as it is varied. For some examples, see Edward
Said, Peace and Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace
Process; Raja Shehadeh, Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing
Landscape; Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: an Everyday Occupation;
Rashid Khalidi, Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. has Undermined Peace in
the Middle East; and articles like Ilan Pappe’s “More Oslos: The Two-
State Solution Died Over a Decade Ago.” For an extended meditation on
the potentially generative politics of cynicism in Palestine, see: Lori Allen,
The Rise and Fall of Human Rights: Cynicism and Politics in Occupied
Palestine.
4. My other committee members—from disciplined and undisciplined fields
across the humanities—weren’t quite sure how I intended to incorporate
interviews and participant observation into my research, but trusted that I
would figure it out.
5. Susan Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and
Politics; Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the
Ordinary. I have endless gratitude to Ann Laura Stoler for assigning eth-
nographic work that changed the way I understood colonial rule, and the
detritus it leaves in its wake, and Kathleen Stewart for running her classes
like writing workshops, which changed the way I wrote about what I was
trying to understand.
6. Though conversations with my colleagues in anthropology have, more
than once, confirmed that their “formal training,” too, consisted solely of
reading ethnographies rather than being taught how to do ethnography.
Modeling our work on the ethnographies we read has emerged often as a
shared strategy in these conversations across disciplines.
7. In fact, with the increasing neoliberalization of the public university in the
USA, even shorter timelines have been introduced across campuses,
including at University of Texas at Austin, where I received my PhD. At
UT Austin, university officials have recently mandated a six-year cap on
the PhD in American Studies even though the majority of its PhD students
have to teach or serve as teaching assistants for one to two classes during
every semester in order to receive their stipends and many American
Studies PhD candidates do archival or ethnographic work, necessitating
more time spent researching before writing.
8. I detail this racialized policing of mobility in the book when I talk about
the vastly different experiences at Ben Gurion International Airport of
white participants on solidarity tours and Palestinian American participants
on solidarity tours, who are often detained before they are allowed entry
or deported and denied entry to their homeland altogether. See also:
Jennifer Lynn Kelly, “Asymmetrical Itineraries: Militarism, Tourism, and
Solidarity in Occupied Palestine.”
9. For more on the policing of Palestine solidarity at Israel’s borders, see, for
example, Robert Naiman, citing campaign organizer Mazin Qumsiyeh in
106 J.L. KELLY

“Welcome to Palestine: ‘Even Prisoners Are Allowed Visits,’” Al Jazeera

(April 14, 2012). The article details the “Welcome to Palestine” campaign,
or the Flytilla (referencing the Flotillas that have attempted to break the
siege on Gaza), wherein international activists flew to Ben Gurion and
declared that they were going to Palestine instead of the usual perfor-
mance of “passing” as a tourist to Israel in order to get to the West Bank.
These activists were not let in the country, and, often, were not even
allowed to board Israel-bound planes in their home countries, evidencing
not only Israeli restrictions on Palestinian movement but also Israeli
restrictions on Palestinian movement building.
10. Abu Hassan, interview with author, Jerusalem, August 30, 2012.
11. Abu Hassan.
12. Stoler and Strassler, “Casting for the Colonial: Memory Work in ‘New
Order’ Java,” 4–48.
13. Cynthia Cruz, “Silence is Enough: On Emily Jacir.”
14. For more on the afforestation projects that have accompanied Israeli state-
craft, see Shaul Ephraim Cohen, The Politics of Planting: Israeli-Palestinian
Competition for Control of Land in the Jerusalem Periphery and Ilan Pappé
and Samer Jaber, “Ethnic Cleansing by All Means: The Real Israeli ‘Peace’
Policy,” Mondoweiss: The War of Ideas in the Middle East. For more on the
connections between past and present uprooting of Palestinian olive trees
in the West Bank and Gaza, see Irus Braverman, “Uprooting Identities:
The Regulation of Olive Trees in the Occupied West Bank,” Raja Shehadeh,
“The Plight of the Palestinian Olive Tree,” and Samer Abdelnour, Alaa
Tartir, and Rami Zurayk, citing Oxfam and Ma’an Development Center,
in “Farming Palestine for Freedom: Al-Shabaka Policy Brief.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abdelnour, Samer, Alaa Tartir, and Rami Zurayk. 2012. Farming Palestine for Freedom:
Al Shabaka Policy Brief. Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network, July 2. https://
al-shabaka.org/briefs/farming-palestine-freedom/. Accessed 16 April 2014.
Allen, Lori. 2013. The Rise and Fall of Human Rights: Cynicism and Politics in Occupied
Palestine. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Braverman, Irus. 2009. Uprooting Identities: The Regulation of Olive Trees
in the Occupied West Bank. Political and Legal Anthropology Review 32(2):
237–264.
Cohen, Shaul Ephraim. 1993. The Politics of Planting: Israeli-Palestinian Competition
for Control of Land in the Jerusalem Periphery. Chicago, MA: University of Chicago
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Cruz, Cynthia. 2014, August 7. Silence is Enough: On Emily Jacir. Hyperallergic:
Sensitive to Arts & Its Discontents. http://hyperallergic.com/142225/silence-is-
enough-on-emily-jacir/. Accessed 1 September 2014.
Danner, Mark. 2004. Torture and Truth: American, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror.
New York: New York Review of Books.
 LOCATING PALESTINE WITHIN AMERICAN STUDIES 107

Das, Veena. 2006. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press.
Davidson, Lawrence. 2005. Christian Zionism as a Representation of American Manifest
Destiny. Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies 14(2): 157–169.
Harding, Susan. 2000. The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Hooks, Gregory, and Clayton James Mosher. 2005. Outrages against Personal Dignity:
Rationalizing Abuse and Torture in the War on Terror. Social Forces 83(4): 1627–1645.
Jaber, Samer, and Ilan Pappé. 2014. Ethnic Cleansing by All Means: The Real Israeli
‘Peace’ Policy. Mondoweiss: The War of Ideas in the Middle East, October 17. http://
mondoweiss.net/2014/10/ethnic-cleansing-israeli. Accessed 27 April 2015.
Lampman, Jane. 2004. Mixing Prophecy and Politics. Christian Science Monitor, July 7. http://
www.csmonitor.com/2004/0707/p15s01-lire.html. Accessed 23 November 2007.
Kelly, Jennifer Lynn. 2016. Asymmetrical Itineraries: Militarism, Tourism, and Solidarity
in Occupied Palestine. American Quarterly. Special Issue: Tours of Duty/Tours of
Leisure, eds. Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, Jana K.  Lipman, and Teresia Teaiwa
68(3): 723–745.
Khalidi, Rashid. 2014. Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. has Undermined Peace in the
Middle East. Boston: Beacon Press.
Makdisi, Saree. 2008. Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation. New  York:
W.W. Norton Company.
McAlister, Melani. 2003. Prophecy, Politics, and the Popular: The Left Behind Series
and Christian Fundamentalism’s New World Order. South Atlantic Quarterly
102(4): 773–798.
Naiman, Robert. 2012. Welcome to Palestine: ‘Even Prisoners are Allowed Visits’.
Al Jazeera, April 14. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/04/
201241484657679358.html. Accessed 14 May 2013.
Pappe, Ilan. 2013. More Oslos: The Two-State Solution Died Over a Decade Ago. The
Palestine Chronicle, September 26. http://www.palestinechronicle.com/more-
oslos-the-two-state-solution-died-over-a-decade-ago/#.Ukc3DWRoQ9B. Accessed
26 September 2013.
Said, Edward. 1996. Peace and its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East
Peace Process. New York: Vintage Press.
Shehadeh, Raja. 2007. Palestinian Walks: Frays into a Vanishing Landscape. New York:
Scribner.
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palestinian-olivetree/?_r=0
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Stoler, Ann Laura, and Karen Strassler. 2000. Casting for the Colonial: Memory Work
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 CHAPTER 6

Absent Performances: Distant Fieldwork

on Social Movement Theater of Algeria
and India

Neil Doshi

To work on political theater in Algeria amounts to research marked by absences.

Between 1989 and 2000, the country endured a brutal civil war that pit the
ruling Front de Libération Nationale (National Liberation Front, or FLN)
party against insurgent Islamist groups. Many of Algeria’s leading intellectu-
als died or fled into exile, and as the warring factions targeted civilians, the
dynamic cultural institutions that had led Algeria to be considered a “labora-
tory for pluralism” in the 1980s ground to a halt.1 Memories of violence con-
tinue to shape present-day Algerian civil society, and in the cultural domain,
the art and theater scenes still seek to recover the vitality that they enjoyed in
the two decades following independence in 1962.2 In this context, the study
of both Algerian theater history and postindependence drama illuminates the
trajectory of the young nation, making visible the desires of artists invested in
imagining alternative, democratic versions of national culture to that which
dominated postindependence Algeria.
Efforts to recuperate for analysis the work of major playwrights from the
pre–civil war heyday of Algerian theater grate with scholarly conventions of
performance studies. As a discipline that privileges the live, performance studies

I thank the Fondation Abdelkader Alloula and in particular Raja Alloula for her
support as I completed research in Oran. I am grateful to the University of Pittsburgh
Department of French and Italian, and the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences for
support received for research in Algeria.

N. Doshi ( )
Department of French and Italian, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, USA

© The Author(s) 2016 109

S. Puri, D.A. Castillo (eds.), Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-92834-7_6
110 N. DOSHI

maintains a bias toward the temporal present; indeed, the fieldwork so integral
to performance scholarship is all too often predicated on the simultaneity of
performer and spectator in space and time.3 What forms of performance studies
scholarship are possible where there is limited or no live performance? Focusing
on the work of the Algerian playwright and director Abdelkader Alloula, this
chapter explores how insights drawn from performance studies might be reori-
ented in the Algerian context and used to both address performances in the
past and nuance the reading of theater texts.
In June 2012, I traveled to Algeria to seek out actors who had worked
with Alloula and to visit the Fondation Abdelkader Alloula (Abdelkader Alloula
Foundation), which is dedicated to preserving the memory of his works.
Assassinated by radical Islamists at the height of the civil war in 1994, Alloula
was the leading Algerian playwright of the late twentieth century, most remem-
bered for devising Algerian performance forms that drew on local popular cul-
ture to challenge the conventions of the Algerian stage. Alloula’s vision for a
decolonized and democratic national theater was importantly shaped by his
career-long experience producing open-air community performance, through
which he addressed diverse and frequently marginalized nonelite publics.4
Undocumented and ill-addressed, Alloula’s non-proscenium production is
an expression of political desire, attention to which illuminates the alterna-
tive visions of national community that animated Alloula’s practices and repre-
sented broad hopes for the independent nation.
Alloula’s plays continue to be performed today, but few groups engage in
outdoor performance and there are no recordings of his work in open-air set-
tings.5 Any discussion of Alloula’s plays must further contend with an incomplete
archive, and the fact that a play or spectacle is a nonrepeatable, unrecoverable
event, subject to the specific conditions of its local performance.6 Bringing archi-
val findings and research conducted in Algeria into dialogue with fieldwork, this
chapter rereads Alloula’s play El-Adjouad (The Generous Ones) through both a
consideration of the cultural contexts in which Alloula worked and the analysis
of popular theater forms. I draw importantly on the study of analogous, popular
political theater in India to underscore how performances like Alloula’s create
spaces for multiple modes of social expression, or sociality.7 Rereading Alloula’s
text through this understanding of performance as site of social possibility, I show
how the El-Adjouad, the text of which was published after numerous stagings,
bears the trace of its performance history. Fieldwork sustains, in this analysis, heu-
ristic models of performance that serve to expand our reading of the theater text.

NATIONAL ALLEGORIES OF THE THEATER

Alloula’s work in Algeria’s prominent playhouses takes center stage in any
assessment of late-twentieth-century Algerian theater. He is remembered for his
innovative use of popular theatrical elements in mainstream performance and
for his ceaseless efforts to render the theater institutions in which he worked
accessible to wider audiences. His plays continue to be performed today, but he
 ABSENT PERFORMANCES 111

is remembered less for the radical political potential in his theater than for his
adaptation of local performance forms. In a personal interview, Alloula’s wife
Raja explained that alongside his professional roles, Alloula organized several
amateur theater groups that ran independently of the state-sponsored institu-
tions in which he was officially employed.8 He consistently sought to form links
through theater with marginalized publics, and by some estimates, he is said
over his career to have performed in front of tens of thousands of spectators
in open-air and nontraditional settings such as schoolyards, labor union head-
quarters, and factories.9
Alloula’s investment in open-air theater was shaped by aesthetic concerns as
much as by activism. Open-air performance enabled him to engage with sto-
rytelling forms and served as an inspiration for his production on the stages of
Algeria’s leading theaters. He adapted the local halqa (literally circle or round
point) storytelling form into his practice and, through it, sought to devise per-
formance forms that would break the Aristotelian conventions of classical the-
ater that he saw as hinging on the passive absorption of the spectator. Alloula
worked, in short, to develop an art that would simultaneously entertain audi-
ences and inspire broad reflection on the development of democratic national
culture in Algeria.10
Consideration of Alloula’s theater career expands the notion developed by
scholars like Bouziane Ben Achour, who have suggested that at their inception,
postindependence Algerian theater institutions were seen as a “vector for the
protection of the national spirit.”11 Understood through this metonymic rela-
tion between theater and nation, Alloula’s career tracks not only the central
role played by theater in defining the national culture of the new Algeria but
also the tensions that arose after independence about who would constitute the
national public and, by extension, the national polity. The brief survey of his
career that I offer here therefore frames discussion of both the historical condi-
tions that shaped Alloula’s interest in open-air theater and the national debates
to which it responded.
Following a period in which he acted with amateur youth groups and trained
with the renowned stage director Jean Vilar at the Théâtre national populaire in
France, Alloula joined the newly founded Théâtre national algérien (National
Theater of Algeria, or TNA) in 1963. The first years of the TNA were both
productive and marked by internal debate about such issues as the appropriate
language of performance (French, Arabic, or dialect) and suitability of French
adaptations on Algerian stages. These questions, and the lofty but vague ideals
for the edification of the Algerian masses (le peuple) that the theater set as its
mission, represent the larger social and political discussions that divided the
nation at its outset.12
In 1972, following the decentralization of the TNA, Alloula was named
head of the Théatre régional d’Oran (Regional Theater of Oran, or TRO).13
He arranged theater workshops, invited amateur groups to perform, and,
importantly, organized open-air theater performances, notable among which
was the play El-Meïda (The Table, 1972), performed in support of the so-called
112 N. DOSHI

Agricultural Revolution, a top-down, state-sponsored initiative to nationalize

agricultural production. Alloula devised the play collectively with his actors,
and then staged the play numerous times in rural Algeria to rally popular sup-
port. Describing the experience in a 1989 interview, Alloula observed:

We were taken [to rural spaces] to perform in open-air settings, literally on the
construction sites of the agricultural cooperatives that were being built. We had
left with an immense theater set which we had to progressively lighten as we
performed, since the spectators would sit in a halqa [in a circle] around the per-
formance area. This led the actors to adapt multidirectional techniques into their
method.14

Producing El-Meïda crucially sparked Alloula’s interest in the popular halqa

form, elements of which he sought to integrate into his stage theater practice.
Though El-Meïda represented initial support of governmental reform pro-
grams under President Houari Boumédiene, subsequent policies enacted by
the regime clashed with Alloula’s most fundamental beliefs.15 Though Alloula
made few political statements, his subsequent career was in some sense shaped
by tensions between his commitment to pluralism and the policies of a state
government increasingly intent on promoting a monolithic, Arabo-Muslim
vision of national identity.16
In 1976, Alloula was promoted to head of the TNA with the mandate to
revitalize the increasingly stagnant theater house. Alloula expanded the reach
of the theater, arranging in-house public educational programs and workshops,
and sending the TNA troupe to surrounding areas to perform on stages at a
further remove from the capital. As anecdotally reported, these outreach pro-
grams invited participants to work in both local languages and Arabic dialect
which, by the mid-1970s, the state sought to suppress as it imposed Modern
Standard Arabic as the national language.17 Only 11 months into his new posi-
tion, however, Alloula was discharged by the Minister of Culture Taleb Ahmed
Ibrahimi. Though the official record remains vague, critics have widely attrib-
uted Alloula’s dismissal to the incompatibility of his cultural vision with state
doctrine.18
Returning to Oran, Alloula resumed stage work at the TRO and subse-
quently produced the plays for which he is most remembered: El-Agoual (The
Sayings, 1980), El-Adjouad (The Generous Ones, 1985), and El-Litham (The
Veil, 1989). These plays notably allegorize the social tensions and instability
that marked the decade, one in which Algeria’s steps toward liberalization and
multiparty politics foundered as the country grappled with economic stagna-
tion and widespread poverty.19 In 1989, Alloula founded the independent the-
ater group Coopérative théâtrale du 1er mai (May 1 Theater Cooperative),
which included both TRO and amateur actors. The group adapted El-Adjouad,
developing the play through performance in open-air settings and in schools.20
As political violence escalated through the 1990s, radical Islamists targeted
Alloula, assassinating him in 1994.21
 ABSENT PERFORMANCES 113

FROM TEXT TO PLAY

Alloula’s turn to open-air theater can be said to be motivated by a perceived
rift between national institutions and public space, on the one hand, and a dis-
enfranchised, heterogeneous population, on the other. It overlaps with a wave
of activity in the 1970s and 1980s focused on non-proscenium political theater
and collective production.22
Working between outdoor and stage settings, Alloula sought to develop a
theater that was both in dialogue with transnational practice and representa-
tive of local form, and in this, he broke with the conventions that dominated
the Algerian stage through independence. In the essay “La Représentation du
type non-Aristotélicien dans l’activité théâtrale en Algérie” (“Non-Aristotelian
Representation in the Algerian Theater”), Alloula observes that the plays that
dominated the colonial stages through the twentieth century tended to be
melodramas, vaudeville acts, and the occasional performance of French clas-
sical theater. Such programming, he maintained, was outdated for a modern
Algerian stage: for him, colonial European theater was retrograde, and popu-
lar forms represented the way forward. This investment in  local culture was
partially mediated through Alloula’s study of avant-garde theater practitioners
who figured importantly in the revolutionary canon of writers assimilated by
the anticolonial movements of the 1950s and 1960s. Alloula cites the works
of such luminaries as Piscator, Meyerhold, and Maïakovski as having been
formative for his thinking, but he reserves a special place for Bertolt Brecht,
whom he describes in interviews as both his “spiritual father” and “kindred
spirit.”23 Through these authors, Alloula began to articulate the potential he
saw in local performance forms to devise a practice that would contribute to
the dis-alienation of the Algerian spectator. This new theater, Alloula declared,
would be “[…] guided by a vision aiming to revalue the social function of the-
ater […] a theater where the spectator abandons traditional roles as consumer
and observer to occupy a new position as co-creator.”24 Such statements reflect
Alloula’s affinity with Brecht and his critique of the tendency of plays popular
on the colonial stage to assume a passive, inactive spectator.
Where Brecht produced theater on proscenium stages for a largely bour-
geois public, Alloula’s open-air performance addressed marginalized audiences,
whose participation Alloula figured as being both physical and intellectual.
Performed at the ground level, with the audience surrounding the perfor-
mance area, Alloula’s open-air theater allowed for direct audience participation
sustained by moments in performance that allow for actor improvisation and
response to the public. But Alloula equally measured participation in terms of
the imaginative capacity of the spectator. As he explained it:

I am working to create a new role for the Algerian spectator…. [I]t is with regard
to this that the form of theatricality that I propose is guided by words, by speech,
both in the narrative and in the agency of the story. In a particular theatrical
mode, I ‘offer for listening’ [je ‘donne à écouter’] a ballad or a narrative, and I
invite the audience to create, to re-create with us, its own representation during
114 N. DOSHI

the performance. In this theater, the simultaneity of the action as speech and
speech as action work in the sense of giving the ear an opportunity to see and the
eyes an opportunity to hear [donner à l’oreille à voir et aux yeux à entendre].25

The synesthesia of hearing and sight in Alloula’s phrasing emphasizes the cen-
trality of the spectator to his thinking, and the importance he accorded to the
capacity of the spectator to engage in unencumbered, subjective interpretation.
Further, the statement fundamentally captures the modernity of his practice,
one that broke with the realist aesthetic of the colonial stage to explore mini-
malist form. Alloula used the practical limitations of an itinerant, open-air per-
formance that could only sparingly use props and costumes to his advantage, as
a means of encouraging his publics to create meaning out of combinations of
gesture, language, and silence.
As a local dramatic form, the halqa is focused on the interaction between a
storyteller (or goual) and a responsive public that circulates in and out of an
open performance space.26 Alloula is said to have spent countless days studying
performances—observing and conversing with goualine (storytellers) in mar-
ketplaces, studying popular poetry and the oral stories that halqa performers
adapted. For Alloula, the halqa allegorized a form of democratic practice rather
than a tradition, and as such, he would refer to it in his writings interchange-
ably as a “genre” and “perspective,” thereby underlying its value as an attitude
rather than as a set of unchanging formal conventions.27
But the “point” of open-air theater is its occasion. When bound and deliv-
ered for consumption by silent, isolated readers, Alloula’s plays read as vignettes
that capture glimpses of daily life, with the occasional political allusion. In their
printing, they seem to have lost that other life that they had, as a product of
social activism that engaged both acting bodies and spectators. How can we
open texts like Alloula’s to alternative readings? To cite Edward Said, who
asked similar questions about theory that travels, how might we better grasp
Alloula’s drama in the various places and times out of which it emerges, and
then measure the subsequent places where it reappears, even as nostalgic evoca-
tion of lost political promise?28

DISTANT FIELDWORK
Confronted with a silent Algerian theater, I reflect on these questions by draw-
ing more broadly upon theater-based fieldwork experience that I conducted in
India. I call this “distant fieldwork.”
From August 2004 to July 2005, I observed and participated as a member of
the theater group the Jana Natya Manch (People’s Theater Group, or JANAM).
Since 1976, JANAM has practiced open-air theater—or “street theater,” as it
is referred to there—to address marginalized audiences in urban and semirural
areas primarily in and around New Delhi. Like Alloula, the group values collec-
tive production and grounds its practices in both European avant-garde theater
and popular culture. Like Alloula, further, the group has had to contend with
 ABSENT PERFORMANCES 115

extreme violence. Founder Safdar Hashmi was brutally assassinated mid-perfor-

mance in 1989, and the collective has since been led by Safdar Hashmi’s partner
Moloyashree and the writer/director/actor Sudhanve Deshpande.
I draw here on my experience observing and briefly training with JANAM
to inform my reading of Alloula’s texts. In what follows, I juxtapose an analysis
of Alloula’s play El-Adjouad (The Generous Ones), refracted through a brief
account of the JANAM play Ā khrı̄ Julūs (The Last Strike), to trace how direct
experience of space and audience in performance can shape both notions of
textuality and the reading practices that one might bring to the dramatic text.
In what ways does the JANAM performance illuminate the reading of Alloula’s
play, facilitating the imagination of the text’s performative possibilities?
Produced in 1984, El-Adjouad is unquestionably Alloula’s most famous play,
and he himself acknowledged it as the one that moved closest to the realization
of his vision of modern Algerian performance. First performed in 1985 at the
TRO, the play continues to be staged today in both Algeria and France. In out-
door settings, Alloula’s May 1 Theater Cooperative developed and performed
portions of the play as did the eponymous group El-Adjouad in the late 1990s.
Texts of the play itself were published posthumously—a French translation in
1995 and Arabic versions in 1997 and 2009. As Lamia Bereksi has noted, the
differences between the 1997 and 2009 Arabic texts indicate that the text was
edited, indicating lack of an original (authoritative) script.29 The significance
of the observation takes on greater contour when aligned with recent work on
the relationship between performance and dramatic text. Commenting on the
ways performance studies has construed texts as “archives” in relation to which
ephemeral, embodied performance is the “repertoire,” William Worthen, for
instance, has suggested:

Theater often treats—or claims to treat—the book as a kind of regulatory reli-

quary, but it seems fairer to say that it’s precisely the practices of the repertoire
that intervene, imagining and creating the force of writing as performance. The
repertoire materializes the process of transmission […] that produces both a sense
of what the text is, and what we might be capable of saying with and through it
in/as performance.30

In the context of Alloula’s theater, following Worthen’s insight, I reverse the

tendency to measure performance against the text to ask how the text has itself
been imprinted by the different conditions of its staging.
Neither the Arabic nor French text versions of El-Adjouad present stage
directions, which is wholly consistent with a popular theater performed with
minimal décor. Further, one notes through the text that much of the dialogue
is arranged as direct discourse quoted in a narrative by storytellers; these dis-
cursive shifts are marked in the text by quotation marks in the French and
asterisks in the Arabic. In a context with few actors, one can imagine the play
being staged with two or three goualine performing the roles of the characters
they evoke. Conversely, in the sole video recording of El-Adjouad that I could
116 N. DOSHI

find, a copy of a 1985 performance at the TNA that was broadcast on televi-
sion, I noted a larger group of actors who would, as a goual narrated a story,
perform the corresponding scene on stage. The play’s narrative structure, orga-
nized as a mise en abime in which dialogues are embedded as direct discourse in
the text (i.e. characters narrate dialogues), permits a fluid staging.
Consisting of seven short independent scenes, the structure of the play also
lends itself to outdoor settings where spectators might frequently arrive and
depart. The analysis here will focus on “Er-Rebouhi,” the well-known second
scene of the play.31 The vignette rehearses a comical narrative in which the
eponymous hero of the scene, the poor steelworker Er-Rebouhi Habib, takes it
upon himself to save the animals of the municipal zoo, who, though under the
care of the local government, suffer from neglect and starvation. To remedy
the situation and preserve the public space, Er-Rebouhi organizes the youth
who live in his neighborhood/district, and together, they collaborate to deliver
food to the animals. As Er-Rebouhi makes his nightly feeding visits to the zoo,
the creatures cease to accept the substandard fare offered by the zookeepers
and are seen as having gone on “strike.” The authorities suspect that they
have succumbed to a pernicious external influence and work to identify the
miscreant who, in their eyes, is corrupting their animals. On one of his late-
night escapades, Er-Rebouhi is finally caught by the simple, but honest zoo
watchman. The bulk of the scene focuses on their dialogue and the gradually
shifting perspective of the watchman, who ultimately declares solidarity with
Er-Rebouhi’s cause.
Alloula frequently suggested that his work be thought of primarily in terms
of “social critique” rather than political engagement. For him, this entailed
a theater calling for social transformation, and “[…] the intervention of the
masses in social life, in the organization of social life more generally.”32 Criticism
has of course recognized the social relevance of Alloula’s plays, which, as they
celebrate the resourcefulness, guile, and common sense of his popular char-
acters, lampoon the inequities of the bureaucratic state. Critics have equally
attended to the language of Alloula’s plays, which employ local Arabic dialect
that Alloula painstakingly researched.33 However, importantly, these tenden-
cies are internal to Alloula’s plays; one can deduce as much by reading the texts
and consulting Alloula’s writings and interviews. I use fieldwork conducted
with JANAM to ask what modes of reading and understanding one might use
such that the lack of performance—or associated traces in the text that gesture
toward ways the performance might intervene in its specific contexts—might
be keenly felt. I argue that reading for the virtual space of performance entails,
in this play specifically, reading for moments of multiplicity, when the language
gestures to the contingency of the spectator in creating the performance.
Overlapping historical contexts, thematic considerations, and formal ele-
ments ground the comparison of JANAM’s and Alloula’s production. Both
JANAM and Alloula turned to open-air forms in the context of perceived auto-
cratic shifts at the level of state government that narrowed prevailing notions
of national community. In such situations, open-air theater represented a
 ABSENT PERFORMANCES 117

means to both affirm a pluralist vision of national belonging and inspire politi-
cal action. Further, both JANAM’s and Alloula’s inclusive political agendas
evolved in function of their association with trade unions and national com-
munist parties, which, by the 1970s, had become the outposts of radical leftist
thought in both countries. While JANAM has, since its inception, maintained
an explicit alliance with the Marxist Communist Party of India (CPI-M) and
the Central Indian Trade Union (CITU), the link is rather more indirect in
the case of Alloula. Though his plays regularly allude to unions or union-like
organizations, Alloula remained circumspect about identifying with any politi-
cal party; this is due, doubtlessly, to the fact that the FLN banned the PCA
in 1964 and never recognized its successor, the Parti d’avant-garde socialiste
(Avant-garde Socialist Party, or PAGS). Anecdotal evidence suggesting that
Alloula was a member of both the PCA and PAGS would seem to be borne out
by the fact that the name of Er-Rebouhi is a virtual anagram of the first name
of Berrahou Mejdoub, a PCA activist remembered for having organized an
agricultural trade union in the Tlemcen area (not far from Oran).34
Methodologically, JANAM and Alloula draw eclectically from the work
of avant-garde thinkers (most prominently Brecht) and local popular perfor-
mance. This translates formally into the arrangement of the performance at
ground level, with the audience in close proximity, frequently surrounding the
spectacle. In Alloula’s halqa and JANAM’s street theater, the open perfor-
mance space is seen as representative of a nonhierarchical, collective public
sphere. Crucially, both Alloula’s and JANAM’s plays draw widely from local
forms, conceived of not as a fixed, “folk” repository but rather as an evolving,
heterogeneous practice, and in this regard, their plays frequently incorporate
storytelling genres.35 Many of JANAM’s plays involve a sūtradhār (analogous
to the Algerian goual) who circulates in and out of the performance, alternately
commenting on events, addressing the audience, and playing a role.36 Further,
staged with few props, if any, both the Algerian and South Asian performance
rely on gesture and speech to create meaning.
The experience of the JANAM live performance illuminates a reading of
Alloula’s texts, suggesting performance possibilities in the open-air contexts.
Drawing on statements by both JANAM members and Alloula about the key
role played by audiences in outdoor performance, this discussion focuses on
spectator experience in the outdoor setting. I argue that one of the major
features of the type of open-air theater JANAM and Alloula practice is that it
produces possibilities for the imagination of autonomous forms of solidarity.37
Such moments are embedded in Alloula’s text and become visible through the
consideration of the dynamics of the analogous, South Asian performance.
During my fieldwork period, I had the opportunity to watch JANAM’s
Ā khrı̄ Julūs numerous times. I reflect on these experiences broadly, but focus
on one performance, which took place on March 22, 2005, in Mangolpuri,
an outlying area of New Delhi.38 First performed in early 2004, in conjunc-
tion with the CPI-M political campaign to defend the right to organized labor
protest in India, the play strikingly invokes both the internationalist discourses
118 N. DOSHI

of the early-twentieth-century labor movement and the anticolonial struggle

in its defense of labor protest as right.39 Ā khrı̄ Julūs focuses on two characters:
an unnamed Supreme Court judge and his driver/servant, Ramdin, who find
their car trapped in a traffic jam caused by a workers’ strike, which, as the judge
explains, will be India’s last labor strike following the Supreme Court ruling.
Other characters include the chorus, who appear in the performance as the
group of strikers causing the disruption, and the sūtradhār, or chorus leader,
who steps out of role in the transitions between scenes in the play to narrate
events and to provide background information. The play alternates between
scenes depicting dialogue between the judge and Ramdin and scenes involving
the strikers, the latter of which are notable since, rather than depicting a strike
procession, they feature short vignettes enacted by the strikers that are part of
the strike itself. Framed by dialogues between the judge and Ramdin, each of
the three scenes staged by the chorus draws from labor history to depict prece-
dents for worker protest, thereby justifying the present-day struggle. The expe-
rience of participating in the scenes in the rally hardens the judge, but Ramdin
emerges transformed and at the conclusion of the play, he himself goes on
strike—his defiance rendering invalid the judge’s own statement, issued at the
beginning of the play, indicating that this would be India’s final labor strike.
The proximity of JANAM performers and audiences facilitates moments
when the performance engages the spectators. For instance, at the outset of
the play, Ramdin describes the strike procession, gesturing in a broad arc that
construes the audience as participants in the protest. The action signals in a
real sense, the interruption to normal traffic flow that, as an instance of popular
mobilization, the street play creates. Such identification is highlighted at the
play’s conclusion when Ramdin joins the strikers, represented by the chorus,
and, as they chant slogans defending labor protest as a right, disperse into the
audience, thereby signaling once again possible identification between attend-
ing spectators and public protesters. Other moments in the play similarly incor-
porate the audience to different effect. For instance, in the final short scene
staged by the chorus/strikers (in other words, the embedded play), the actors
recreate the trial of four of the labor organizers accused of having instigated
the 1886 Haymarket riot. The arrangement of the scene, in which the accused
face the judge to deliver short monologues indicating the inhumane working
conditions leading to the strike, situates the audience as the jury. Whether
construing the audience as active strikers or deliberating jury, the play works
pedagogically to incite reflection on the principles behind the defense of labor
protest rights.
The JANAM performance makes readable moments in Alloula’s text where
one can similarly imagine meaning arising out of the enactment of the play, sup-
plementing or even supplanting the meaning of the spoken text. Consideration
of the spatial arrangement of spectators and JANAM performance transforms,
for instance, the reading of Er-Rebouhi’s interactions in the zoo. Having
entered the zoo at night, Er-Rebouhi delivers a long address as he distributes
food to the malnourished animals:
 ABSENT PERFORMANCES 119

Er-Rebouhi: Hello … hello my little ones good evening…. Shh! Quiet … this is
secret!
…
Today I’ve brought you some quinces... If I am not mistaken I would say that
the young ones stole them from Monsieur Hadj Brahim’s orchard. It’s pardon-
able … Pardonable … Monsieur Hadj Brahim is filthy rich…. He has money
growing out of his ears. Here!…40

The protagonist’s monologue, justifying his actions and expressing affection,

runs for two pages in the printed text of the play. Read in terms of the move-
ment of JANAM theater, one imagines the actor circulating the perimeter of
the stage, facing out as he speaks, addressing the audience, and effectively con-
fronting the audience with the possibility they might somehow identify with
the creatures subjected to the whims of the state. The frequent ellipses in the
printed text indicate the staccato rhythm of his speech, which I interpret as
corresponding to his movement between cages and signaling silences for pos-
sible audience response. The moment of identification of the audience with
the caged creatures is subsequently alluded to in the conversation between
Habib and the zoo watchman. In the course of their conversation, and as the
watchman realizes that Habib is in fact a well-known figure in the community,
Habib observes: “But look how these poor creatures follow the conversation
and desire themselves to speak, to give their opinion…. They too demand
democracy.”41 Er-Rebouhi’s comment sustains the allegory linking audience to
creatures as it expresses the relative silencing of Algeria’s minority and nonelite
populations in the postindependence era.
The watchman’s conversation with Er-Rebouhi also allows us to consider
the watchman’s gaze as a possible proxy for the spectator, and his subsequent
alliance with Er-Rebouhi can then be read as serving a pedagogical purpose in
the play. Er-Rebouhi frequently alludes to the fact that the youth with whom
he colludes are stationed around the park, keeping watch, and prepared to
intervene should anyone attempt to interrupt the plan to feed the animals.
These statements open yet another interpretive possibility, allowing for the
identification of the spectator with the Er-Rebouhi’s collaborators.
On the one hand, as with the JANAM play, the political role for the observer
is scripted—in the sense that to circulate in the zoo at night and to associate
with Er-Rebouhi is an act that the state finds threatening. On the other hand,
the halqa as an open form encourages circulation, and as such, its function is
as much the opening of spaces for dialogue as it is the presentation of a nar-
rative. The interpretation of the play—the situation of the audience vis-à-vis
the animals and Er-Rebouhi’s activist group, and the social implications of the
performance—is left open and depends certainly on the place of performance.
The one element linking all of these possible interpretations, however, is the
notion of an autonomous social organization, represented variously in the rela-
tionships that form between Er-Rebouhi, the youth, and the watchman. The
agency of all of the characters is predicated on free and voluntary association,
independently of structures imposed by the state.
120 N. DOSHI

Alloula’s vision of democracy hinged on an idea of social practice grounded

in a fundamental notion of equality. The idea emerges piecemeal in comments,
made in interviews, about both his production methods and politics in Algeria.
In a 1979 interview, for instance, Alloula explained his method of alternating
between collective production and single authorship of plays. For him, the
choice represented less opposing methods than a means to “allow large num-
bers [of actors] to create while also permitting individuals to thrive. Collective
creation, after all, entails the shoring up … of artistic potential in a framework
of exchange and confrontation, in a democratic framework.”42 The insistence
that Alloula placed on democratic processes as the basis for theater production
finds further iteration in 1985, when he was asked to comment on political
theater in Algeria. Alloula suggested that, “[i]t turns out that we don’t have
great [democratic] traditions to draw from. We are all learning what democracy
is. One sees this every day in union meetings for instance.”43 Such comments
illustrate how democracy represented for Alloula a horizon of symbolic mean-
ings that evolve out of social practice rather than state institutions.
Reading Alloula’s play through the JANAM performance suggests ways one
might extend Alloula’s discussion of theater composition to outdoor perfor-
mance itself as a space of negotiation, exchange, and confrontation. At the
most simple level, this is visible in terms of the organization of outdoor per-
formance, where audience members are free to circulate; performances inter-
rupt the flow of public life, opening spaces for passersby to become spectators
engaged in performance, or to interact with one another. At another level, as
plays like Ā khrı̄ Julūs illustrate, the arrangement of spectators around a perfor-
mance area creates openings in which the spectator’s attention is called to the
act of spectating; whether one is immediately proximate to the performance
area or withdrawn with an obstructed view (a view limited by other spectators),
one is immediately conscious of those nearby and those facing the performance
across the stage. One therefore both hears and sees fellow audience members
who, whether or not they participate directly in the performance, at least partly
occupy the attention of the attending spectator.
The attention audience members give to each other and their own spectator-
ship is integral to the performance, and indeed, contributes to meaning. As an
illustrative example, I turn to a moment early in the play Akh ̄ rı̄ Julūs, when the
judge and Ramdin found themselves stopped in the congestion caused by the
labor protest. As the judge deliberates how to extricate himself from the traf-
fic jam, Ramdin naively suggests that as an authority figure, the judge should
be able to issue an order to disperse the crowd. “What if you just snap your
fingers?” he asks. Clearly accustomed to the use of such gestures that serve as a
fillip to his decrees, the judge vainly snaps his fingers, much to the amusement
of the spectators closest to the stage. From the first moments of the play, the
crowd was clearly set up to expect the judge to be little more than a caricature,
so the action was unsurprising. What was notable, however, is that spectators at
a slight remove from the performance area, where the normal ambient noise was
more audible, could not hear the judge snapping his fingers. As I experienced it
 ABSENT PERFORMANCES 121

as well, when behind three or four other spectators, one has an obstructed view
of the stage, and not all the movements of actors are visible. In such a situation,
the spectator is reliant upon the audible and visible reaction of fellow audience
members, which provide cues as to what is transpiring on stage. It was common,
moreover, to observe that during moments of particular vociferous audience
reaction, spectators at further remove from the performance area would turn to
a neighbor to discuss what was understood as having happened.
These processes, in which interaction between performance and audience
activates different senses and shapes spectatorial attention, emerge out of the
live performance. Though impossible to read definitively in Alloula’s play, there
are nonetheless ways the text gestures to such dynamics. Consider for instance
the moment the watchman confronts Er-Rebouhi. When the latter reveals his
name, the watchman refuses to believe that the small disheveled man before
him is a figure of local renown. Incredulous, he states: “In truth, I don’t know
Er-Rebouhi Habib the steelworker…. But they say that he is tall, strong, and
hardy … According to what they say, he has presence…! But you….”44
Er-Rebouhi produces his identity card, but the Watchman suggests that as
he is unable to read, he cannot verify its holder’s identity, but what ultimately
convinces the watchman is Er-Rebouhi’s suggestion that his final proof would
be to call out, so that his collaborators—the youth who keep watch as he feeds
the animals—present themselves. Er-Rebouhi’s discourse and the suggestion
that he is accompanied by members of his community are enough to convince
the watchman of his interlocutor’s veracity. The watchman responds: “Ah,
that’s it then! That’s why from time to time they [Er-Rebouhi’s collaborators]
would stop to ask me the time or directions to the train station!... It was to turn
my attention elsewhere! It was a strategic move!”45 If one considers that the
watchman and the youth offer two different proxies that channel the audience
gaze, this moment marks one in which the watchman symbolically negotiates
his understanding of what he sees in terms of the Er-Rebouhis’s youth. In this
way, Alloula’s play figures in its content forms of joint or social spectatorship
that are the potential of the live performance.
As the criticism emerging out of the “sonic turn” in performance stud-
ies suggests, such experiences are not exclusive to outdoor theater forms.46
Theater critics are increasingly paying attention to questions about attention
as an active process that is shaped jointly by sound, visual stimuli, and the co-
presence of spectators. However, I would argue that in the case of a JANAM
play or Alloula performance, these experiences are integral to the political prac-
tices that the plays represent: in other words, to reuse Alloula’s terms, the
exchanges and confrontations out of which common political sensibilities are
forged hinge on the cues that audience members share. Read through recent
work at the nexus of phenomenology and performance studies, moreover, this
dynamic is linked to forms of embodiment.47 Considered as a form of exertion,
the act of attending—paying attention—can be understood as inscribing a dia-
lectic between body and the world. Through a physical layout that intensifies
the experience of attending audiences, the theater I address here intensifies
122 N. DOSHI

the embodying effect of attention through the triangulation of performance,

individual spectator, and collective audience.
To think of outdoor theater forms like JANAM’s and Alloula’s as engaged in
a politics that involves embodiment takes on even deeper significance when one
considers the demographic of their audiences. In the case of Alloula, open-air
collective forms began to flourish at the precise moment when minority and,
to a significant degree, nonelite populations were written out of the national
contract represented by the 1976 constitution.48 Whether audience members
engage the spectacle or simply enter the space of the popular performance—
a space where different forms of personal engagement become possible—the
JANAM example illustrates the ways audience members become comprehen-
sible to each other as acting, sensing subjects collectively forming an audience.
This is not to say that every performance is the same, or that the “success” of
any spectacle is measurable. Rather, in a context where the efficacy of genres
like street theater are all too often measured in terms of the physical transfor-
mation of space and the direct participation of the spectator, JANAM’s and
Alloula’s theater alert us to ways open-air theater is equally or perhaps even
more invested in opening spaces for fluid, intersubjective audience relations.
If the JANAM performance renders “readable” certain aspects of Alloula’s
performance, the space of Oran illuminates the local stakes of Alloula’s prac-
tices. As Raja Alloula had suggested to me, Alloula devoted his production of
open-air theater to the poorest quarters of the city—neighborboods like Ras
El-Aïn and Kouchet El Djir that house bidonvilles or slums. As areas the popu-
lations of which exploded in the 1970s during a period of heavy migration
from rural to urban areas, these neighborhoods are within the limits of the city.
Zoning and land use legislation hold little sway here, and ongoing municipal
efforts have repeatedly sought to relocate residents and demolish these “fave-
las,” as they are sometimes called.49 These neighborhoods are notable for their
relative proximity to the Oran zoo, and in a context where even today these
neighborhoods are deprived of basic municipal services, one can imagine the
public park as a flashpoint for tensions around public space and accessibility.50
Alloula’s play in fact makes an indirect allusion to these spaces. Speaking to the
watchman, Er-Rebouhi suggests:

Er-Rebouhi: This park is not far from the more popular districts… The well-off
don’t bring their children to this garden; they take them rather to Europe to see
animals and to enjoy distractions that we don’t have in this country. We believe
that this park is the park of the people, if you will. The park for the children, in
any case….”51

Er-Rebouhi’s mention of domestic economic disparity underscores his

shared class position with the watchman, and their shared project becomes
the reclamation of national space. There is little record of the condition of the
Oranais park when Alloula wrote his play, so I do not know if the preservation
of the zoo was indeed an issue. But what the present-day space makes palpable
 ABSENT PERFORMANCES 123

is that, whether or not the performance materially transformed communities

or spaces, there is an important political dimension of performance that fosters
the emergence of modes of relation in an audience that is otherwise invisible
and in an extreme state of dispossession.

CONCLUSION
Much current anthropological work focused on multisite fieldwork consid-
ers varying sites within a single cultural field or within the nation-state.52 In
this chapter, I have sought to work across cultural and political boundaries,
but without assuming the types of transference and equivalence sustained
by theories of universal theater or intercultural theater. To be sure, there
is an argument to be made recognizing that there are global discourses of
political theater focused on empowering forms of audience interaction. But
in this chapter, observations gathered during fieldwork serve less as a basis
for the generalization of commonalities across genres than as an illustration
of the processes and social dynamics of performance that can be fruitfully
applied to readings of Alloula’s scripts. In a context where Alloula’s texts
have tended to be celebrated for either their reference to “authentic” local
form or their political commentary, I suggest that live performance signals
alternative interpretive possibilities marked by moments of indeterminacy in
the text. Put another way, performance fieldwork focused on JANAM both
raises questions about the embodiment of Alloula’s plays and suggests that
the democratic thrust in performance hinges as much on the parody of exist-
ing power structures as it does on the creation of spaces for alternative modes
of sociality. The combination of proximate fieldwork in the strikingly still-
present neighborhoods of Alloula’s performance with distant fieldwork on
JANAM’s inspires a nuanced view of Alloua’s outdoor performance that rec-
ognizes the ways spectacle interrupts daily life to create spaces for the emer-
gence of democratic social relations.

NOTES
1. Luis Martinez, La guerre civile en Algérie, 1990–1998, 12. For an assess-
ment of the civil war that attends to the different Islamist factions involved,
see Abderrahmane Moussaoui, De la violence en Algérie: les lois du chaos.
2. Assia Djebar’s compelling memoire Les Blancs de l’Algérie narrates the
sense of personal and broader cultural loss that accompanied, during the
civil war, the passing away of many of Algeria’s major cultural figures. See
Assia Djebar, Les Blancs de l’Algérie. For an assessment of the lasting
impact of Algeria’s civil war on the nation’s social life, see Ahmed Cheniki,
“Le Théâtre Politique: l’expérience algérienne,” 8–9; and Kamel Daoud,
“The Algerian Exception.”
124 N. DOSHI

3. Regarding this simultaneity, which is sometimes referred to as “liveness,”

see Henry Bial, “Performance Studies 3.0.”
4. In this chapter, I have only addressed Alloula’s theater. Readers interested
in his work in cinema and his successful acting career may consult
Dominique, Bax, Kateb Yacine & Abdelkader Alloula: du théâtre au
cinéma.
5. Regarding contemporary outdoor performances of Alloula, the exceptions
are the performances staged in the late 1990s by the theater group
El-Adjouad, led by Kheireddine Lardjam.
6. For a useful assessment of performance in terms of “eventness,” see Elin
Diamond, Performance and Cultural Politics.
7. I define “sociality” as a dynamic, malleable relational matrix in which indi-
viduals interact. As such, in this definition, sociality indicates less ties or
bonds than ongoing, evolving processes of interaction. See Nicholas
J. Long and Henrietta L. Moore, eds., Sociality: New Directions.
8. “Amateur theater,” here, does not imply a qualitative distinction. The
expression has been used widely in Algerian theater histories to distinguish
full-time professional actors from those who are not—it is a simple short-
hand that does not necessarily convey a level of training or capacity for
theater work.
9. See Hadj, Dahmane, Le théâtre algérienalgérie : de l’engagement à la con-
testation and Raja Alloula, “Etre artiste, c’est toute une vie,” Abdelkader
Alloula (blog), January 27, 2007.
10. Alloula, See interview by B.K., “Tête à tête avec Alloula,” Algérie Actualité,
June 1–7, 1969.
11. Ben Achour, Le théâtre en mouvement Octobre 88 à ce jour, 29. Unless
otherwise indicated, all translations are mine.
12. Articles 1, 5, and 7 of the TNA’s founding charter clearly underscore the
central but still vague role the theater was to play in the edification of the
masses. See Algerian Ministry of Culture, Décret n° 63–12 du 8 janvier
1963 portant sur l’organisation du théâtre algérien (1963).
13. For a more detailed account of Alloula’s career, see bio-bibliographic
entries in Chowki Abdelamir and Association Abdelkader Alloula, En
mémoire du futur: pour Abdelkader Alloula.
14. Abdelamir, En mémoire du futur, 143–4.
15. Houari Boumediène had overthrown Algeria’s first president, Ahmed Ben
Bella, in 1965. Through his tenure as president, Boumediène consolidated
state power through an increasingly technocratic regime. For succinct his-
tories of 1960s Algeria, see Phillip Chiviges Naylor, France and Algeria: A
History of Decolonization and Transformation; Hugh Roberts, The
Battlefield Algeria, 1988–2002: Studies in a Broken Polity.
16. As part of a nation-building project, the Boumediene regime sought in the
1970s to pass reform establishing Algeria as a singularly Arabo-Islamic
nation with Modern Standard Arabic as its official language. While such
policies consolidated state power, they also alienated ethnic and linguistic
 ABSENT PERFORMANCES 125

minorities in the nation. For more, see essays on politics of language col-
lected in Anne-Emmanuelle Berger, ed., Algeria in Others’ Languages;
Stora and Majumdar, in Margaret A.  Majumdar and Mohammed Saad,
eds., Transition and Development in Algeria: Economic, Social and
Cultural Challenges.
17. For a history of language conflict in Algeria, see Mohamed Benrabah,
Language Conflict in Algeria: From Colonialism to Post-independence.
18. See Raja Alloula, “Etre artiste…” and Ali Hadj, “Alloula au Théâtre
National Algérien: Une expérience brisée nette.” Alger-republicain,
http://www.alger-republicain.com/Alloula-au-Theater-National.html.
19. Following Boumediène’s death in 1978, Chadli Benjedid assumed the
presidency to oversee an Algeria rendered instable by the oil crisis and
resistance to both the government liberalization schemes and policies
around Arabization. Such factors directly contributed to the rise in popu-
larity of Islamist factions. In 1989, to secure a mandate to govern, and to
comply with IMF terms of assistance, Benjedid ratified a new constitution
legalizing opposition political parties. Unexpectedly, however, the Front
du Salut Islamique (Islamic Salvation Front or FIS) swept the subsequent
elections. Alarmed at the possibility of an Islamic government, civilian and
military cadres (loyal to the FLN) overthrew President Benjedid and out-
lawed the FIS—sliding the country into civil conflict.
20. These interests in public theater are reflected equally in Alloula’s last stage
play, a free adaptation/translation of Carlo Goldoni’s Harlequin, Servant
of Two Masters (1993) that draws on commedia dell’arte forms.
21. The Front islamique pour le djihad armé (Islamic Front for Armed Djihad,
or FIDA) claimed responsibility for the killing, but the assassins were never
fully investigated after the war, since insurgent Islamists were granted
amnesty in 2005 to ensure a durable peace. Among the reasons posited for
the attack is that at the time of the assassination, Alloula had been working
on a modern, Arabic adaptation of Molière’s Tartuffe (The Imposter),
which was, of course, the famous eighteenth-century play that lampoons
the figure of the religious hypocrite.
22. Alloula’s most well-known contemporary was Kateb Yacine, who, after
establishing himself as Algeria’s leading Francophone author, ceased pub-
lishing and dedicated himself to producing forms of political outdoor the-
ater. For more on the open-air theater in Algeria, see Khalid Amine and
Marvin Carlson, The Theatres of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia: Performance
Traditions of the Maghreb; Hadj Dahmane, Le théâtre algérien: de
l’engagement à la contestation; and D.  Le Boucher and J.  Dumont,
“L’univers d’Alloula: témoignage de Lakhdar Moktari, comédien,”
253–60.
23. Abdelkader Alloula, interview by M’Hamed Djellid, October 1985,
“Abdelkader Alloula parle des Généreux, du théâtre,” transcript, Library of
the Institut du monde arabe, Paris. Lest one too quickly describe Alloula’s
work as derivative of European traditions, it should be remembered that
126 N. DOSHI

such categorizations are problematic, not least of all since Brecht’s own
work emerges out of his understanding of Chinese opera. For more on
Brecht’s genealogy, see Carol J. Martin, “Brecht, Feminism, and Chinese
Theater,” 77–85.
24. Alloula, “Abdelkader Alloula parle…”.
25. Alloula. My emphasis added; the use of quotes is as in the original tran-
scription of the interview.
26. For more on the halqa form, see Khalid Amine and Marvin Carlson, The
Theatres of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia: Performance Traditions of the
Maghreb.
27. Alloula’s vision of popular culture as practice might be usefully contrasted
with the general concept of “folk.” As David Lloyd has suggested: “[T]he
fetishization of ‘folk culture’ as a fixed and primordial expression of a tran-
scendental people is in fact most often itself an idée fixe of official state
culture deployed in the monumental rituals and ceremonies that perform
the identity of citizen and state. Popular culture continues its complex and
partially self-transforming, partially subordinated existence in the shadow
of the state.” See David Lloyd, “Nationalisms against the State,” 189.
28. Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 242.
29. See Bereksi Meddahi, Abdelkader Alloula: culture populaire et jeux
d’écriture dans l’oeuvre théâtrale.
30. William B. Worthen, “Antigone’s Bones,” 12.
31. The scene has in fact frequently been staged as a stand-alone perfor-
mance—most recently at the time of the writing of this chapter, in March
2015 at the TNA.
32. Mohammed Habib, Samrakandi and J. F. Clément, eds., Le théâtre arabe
au miroir de lui-même et son contact avec les créations des deux rives de la
Méditerranée, 16.
33. Alloula wrote all of his plays in the colloquial, Algerian Arabic, derija. For
my English translations of his plays, I have referred to the French transla-
tion that was prepared for the staging of the play in France in 1995 (trans-
lated by Messaoud Benyoucef), and in addition, I have referred to Lamia
Bereksi’s notes, corrections, and commentary on the published Arabic text
and its French translation.
34. For an account of a meeting between Alloula and Mejdoub, see Boualem,
Lechlech, “Quelques Souvenirs avec Abdelkader Alloula.”
35. As JANAM founder Safdar Hashmi famously suggested, “Tradition is to
be found in our lived atmosphere, over living environment; such tradition
naturally infuses our work and our experiments.” “Pāraṃparik Rūpoṇ aur
Devices ke Savāl,” In The Right to Perform: Selected Writings of Safdar
Hashmi, 57.
36. In the Sanskritic tradition, the sūtradhār (sūtra: thread; dhār: one who
holds) is the leader of the chorus. The sūtradhār is a narrator of events, a
commentator on characters, and one who holds the plot together.
 ABSENT PERFORMANCES 127

37. I use the term “autonomy” here to refer to forms of moral and political
agency in a context where persons are recognized as being socially embed-
ded and shaped by complex social determinants.
38. I choose this particular performance because it represented a performance
staged well after the play was devised, at a point when the broad narrative
of the play was stable—though small variances could be detected between
performances due to environmental factors, the attending audience,
sounds, and events particular to the site of performance.
39. In the landmark case T.K. Rangarajan vs. Government of Tamil Nadu and
Others in August 2003, the Supreme Court of India both ordered striking
government workers to end their work stoppage and issued a ruling that
denied government workers the right to engage in future organized labor
protest. The judgment set worrying precedent and represented a breach of
the International Labor Organization (ILO) conventions.
40. Abdelkader Alloula, Les Généreux: Les Généreux, Les Dires, Le Voile, trans.
Messaoud Benyoucef, 26.
41. Alloula, 33.
42. Alloula, interview by B.K., “Le cœur sur les planches.”
43. Kahoua and Saadi eds., Abdelkader Alloula, vingt ans déjà!, 25.
44. Alloula, Les Généreux…, 30.
45. Alloula, 34.
46. See Jim Drobnick, ed., Aural Cultures; Lynne Kendrick and David
Roesner, eds., Theatre Noise: The Sound of Performance.
47. See George Home-Cook, Theater and Aural Attention: Stretching
Ourselves.
48. As Jane Goodman has suggested, “It was as if the equality and ‘brother-
hood’ (fraternité) of all Algerians—a cherished national value in the after-
math of more than a century of subaltern exclusions—could be fashioned
only through a rubric of homogeneity.” “The Man behind the Curtain:
theatrics of the state in Algeria,” 782.
49. See “Les Planteurs, Ras El-Aïn, Kouchet El-Djir: Près De 41.000
Constructions Illicites Recensées.”
50. The degree to which spaces like Kouchet El Djir lack services is reflected
in the fact that many parts of these neighborhoods are only accessible by
foot due to poor roads/lack of clear pathways, and strewn rubbish.
51. Alloula, Les Généreux…, 30.
52. See, for instance, Lila Abu-Lughod, “Locating Ethnography,” 261–67
and George Marcus, Ethnography Through Thick and Thin.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abdelamir, Chowki, and Association Abdelkader Alloula. 1997. En mémoire du futur:
pour Abdelkader Alloula. Arles: Sindbad; Actes Sud.
Abu-Lughod, Lila. 2012. Locating Ethnography. Ethnography 1(2): 261–267.
128 N. DOSHI

Alloula, Abdelkader. 1969. Tête à tête avec Alloula. Interview by B.K. Algérie Actualité,
June 1–7.
———. 1979. Le cœur sur les planches. Interview by M. Blidi. Algérie Actualité, March
3–9.
———. 1985, October. Interview by M’Hamed Djellid. Abdelkader Alloula parle des
Généreux, du théâtre. Transcript, Library of the Institut du monde arabe, Paris.
———. 1995. Les Généreux: Les Généreux, Les Dires, Le Voile. Trans. Messaoud
Benyoucef. Arles: Actes Sud.
———. 2009. ‘Abd al-Qādir ‘Allūlah: dı̄wān a‘mālihı̄ al-kāmilah. Oran: Les 3 Pommes.
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———. 2014. Etre artiste, c’est toute une vie. Abdelkader Alloula Blog. December 29.
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el Gharb.
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Bereksi Meddahi, Lamia. 2012. Abdelkader Alloula: culture populaire et jeux d’écriture
dans l’oeuvre théâtrale. Approches littéraires. Paris: Harmattan.
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Cheniki, Ahmed. 2002. Le théâtre en Algérie: histoire et enjeux. Edisud:
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———. 2013, December. Le Théâtre Politique: l’expérience algérienne. Le Soir
d’Algérie 22: 8–9.
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Orizons.
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www.nytimes.com/2015/05/30/opinion/the-algerian-exception.html?_r=0
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The Journal of North African Studies 18(5): 779–795.
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National.html. Accessed 5 September 2014.
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Selected Writings of Safdar Hashmi, ed. Madhu Prasad, 50–60. New Delhi: SAHMAT.
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Manch, Mangolpuri, New Delhi, India.
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du Nord 33: 531–541.
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 CHAPTER 7

Ethical Dilemmas in Studying Blogging

by Favela Residents in Brazil

Tori Holmes

In an early, and influential, ethnographic study of the internet, anthropologist

Daniel Miller and sociologist Don Slater argued for the central importance of
empirical work for the development of this field of research:

Social thought has gained little by attempting to generalize about ‘cyberspace’,

‘the Internet’, ‘virtuality’. It can gain hugely by producing material that will allow
us to understand the very different universes of social and technical possibility
that have developed around the Internet.1

Inspired by this assertion, and taking up Miller and Slater’s challenge from a
language-based area studies perspective, I reflect on the place and contribution
of empirical fieldwork in a research project on digital culture in Brazil, which
looked at blogging by Brazilian favela residents. It combined analysis of digi-
tal texts with data collected on the practices involved in their production and
circulation. Situated within an academic trajectory that has moved from the
humanities toward the social sciences, becoming fundamentally interdisciplin-
ary in the process, the research attests to the feasibility and rewards of fieldwork
in the humanities, but also highlights some of the key challenges raised by
fieldwork in general, and fieldwork on digital culture in particular, to existing
humanities ways of working.
Drawing on this example from my practice, I present fieldwork as a process
and experience of “in-betweenness,” involving the crossing of imagined or real
boundaries between humanities and social sciences ways of working, between

T. Holmes ( )
School of Arts, English, and Languages, Queen’s University Belfast,
Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK

© The Author(s) 2016 131

S. Puri, D.A. Castillo (eds.), Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-92834-7_7
132 T. HOLMES

cultural works and the human practices surrounding them, and between
encounters on the internet and in person/in place. A hybrid form of field-
work, it creates a space for dialogue with both humanities and social science
traditions. However, the dual focus on texts and practices in relation to digital
culture required me to negotiate complex methodological and ethical issues
relating to the status of bloggers as human subjects or authors and to consider
the implications for the status of their content in the study. As a result, I argue
that humanities scholars should be open to learning and borrowing from dis-
ciplines more experienced in fieldwork, but also that the social sciences do not
offer all the answers for humanities projects, requiring us to develop our own
discourse. I hope to demonstrate, in particular, that there is an urgent need
for the humanities to engage with research ethics and to provide models for
combining the analysis of textual data with data collected through interviews,
interactions, and observations.

RESEARCHING FAVELA BLOGGERS: FOLLOWING THE CONTENT

AND FOLLOWING THE PEOPLE

The last 10 to 15 years have seen the emergence of a range of digital con-
tent about Brazilian favelas, for example, photography, audiovisual material,
and texts of different types produced by their residents. Reflecting the striking
growth in access to digital technologies in Brazil as a whole over this period,2
self-representational content has become available via blogs, Twitter, profiles
and groups on social network sites, photo- and video-sharing platforms, the-
matic websites, and citizen journalism initiatives, among others. This develop-
ment has worked against a long-standing and marked tendency for Brazilian
mainstream media and cultural production to employ stereotypes when por-
traying these areas of the city. Such external representations have often failed
to grasp and convey the complexity and diversity of favelas, positioning them
instead erroneously as homogeneous territories of poverty and violence, and
as extraneous and unconnected to the city proper.3 The representation of place
was thus a particular concern of my research on digital local content creation in
favelas, with blogs chosen as the primary focus for their more explicitly contes-
tatory stance on this issue, as well as their engagement with potential audiences
from outside the favela. However, the study also took into consideration other
digital platforms, such as email, and sometimes print formats, as a result of the
attention afforded to practices involved in the production and circulation of
blog content.
My decision to undertake fieldwork as part of the study was guided by my
core research questions, namely, How did residents of a Rio de Janeiro favela
represent their neighborhood in public internet content, and what tools did
they use for publishing and disseminating this content? Who was the intended
audience for these representations, and how did they differ from mainstream
representations of the favela? How did content creators “territorially embed”
their content?4 How did they negotiate the translocal visibility afforded by the
 ETHICAL DILEMMAS IN STUDYING BLOGGING BY FAVELA RESIDENTS IN BRAZIL 133

internet? What was the significance of these user-generated representations for

understandings of the city of Rio de Janeiro? My intention was thus not only
to analyze and interpret internet content produced by favela residents as “text”
but also to develop an understanding of the motivations and practices of those
involved in this type of activity and gain access to their own narratives and
interpretations of their blogging. While the focus on blogs and associated con-
tent means the study can be understood as “paraliterary,” the methodological
shift goes beyond the type of material analyzed, to the position from which the
engagement takes place.
My research led to the development of three in-depth case studies of indi-
vidual content creators from the Complexo da Maré area of northern Rio de
Janeiro. According to the census conducted by a local nongovernmental orga-
nization, Centro de Estudos e Ações Solidárias da Maré (CEASM), Maré was
home to 132,000 people in 2001,5 making it one of the largest favela com-
plexes in Rio. It is made up of 16 different communities and was recognized as
a formal neighborhood, or bairro, in 1994, although it continues to be widely
thought of as a favela. Maré is particularly visible in Rio de Janeiro and beyond
for its location (on the shores of Guanabara Bay and close to three important
expressways, including the main route into the city from the international air-
port), its historic association with palafitas (houses built on stilts over water,
now long gone), which led to a widespread and persistent perception of it as a
poor area, and its public security situation, with the presence in recent years of
a military police battalion, militias and rival drug factions in the area contribut-
ing to its marked stigmatization.6 In March 2014, Maré was occupied by the
Brazilian army, in preparation for the future installation of a Pacifying Police
Unit (UPP) in the area; the army withdrew in June 2015, when it handed over
to the military police (PM) as part of this process, but plans for pacification
were suspended in March 2016 due to budgetary constraints. Notably, Maré
has given rise to influential NGOs, which have taken a critical stance on the
representation of favelas (in particular CEASM, the Observatório de Favelas,
and Redes da Maré); it has also been the site of several community media initia-
tives, individual bloggers and other content creators. The activities of these dif-
ferent actors can be understood as contesting the terms of the area’s visibility.
My fieldwork on the work of bloggers from Maré lasted for 13 months in
2009–2010 and involved observation, participant observation, interviews, and
textual and visual analysis of content. The overall guiding principle was that of
“following the content.” This was a responsive and mobile practice, influenced
by anthropology, ethnography, new literacy studies, and internet studies,7 which
enabled me to track the circulation and framing of blog texts and to react to and
pursue connections arising in the content. In the context of my study, observation
meant monitoring blogs and other websites, including those of the mainstream
media, through regular visits and really simple syndication (RSS) updates,8 tak-
ing screenshots of new content and design features, following relevant links and
recording notes and my thoughts in my online field diary. I did not myself engage
in content production as a fieldwork strategy, but positioned the reception of
134 T. HOLMES

content as an active process and, in Crawford’s words, “an embedded part of

networked engagement—a necessary corollary to having a ‘voice.’”9 However,
as well as following content flows online, the methodology also depended on
the development of a rapport with bloggers and interaction with them on the
internet and face-to-face, in order to complement my own observations of con-
tent framing and circulation with the bloggers’ own narratives on their practices.
In this way, the “following the content” approach also implied “following the
people,” in an acknowledgment of the presence of “texts and practices, or con-
tent and people” at the heart of the study.10
For illustration in this chapter, I focus on the fieldwork relationship developed
with one of these Maré bloggers, whom I call A., and the analysis of her texts
and practices in response to the research questions outlined above. At the time
of the research, A. was a mature student and mother who ran her own literary
blog, served as the administrator of a literary community, or group, on the social
network site Orkut,11 and was using different internet channels to promote a col-
lection of short stories recently launched by a small Rio-based publisher, in which
one of her own had been included. These were relatively recent activities, and A.
was categorical and enthusiastic about the difference the internet had made in
her trajectory. She described the difficulties she had faced on returning to educa-
tion after a 15-year gap, not having a computer to use in carrying out research
for her pré-vestibular (university entrance) course, and having to physically go to
places to fill in forms by hand. When she heard that she had been accepted on
a university course, she finally acquired a computer of her own. Laughing, she
recalled her happiness at this moment, telling me, “When the computer finally
arrived, I said: man, the time has come, the world is mine! And really, that’s how
it was, more or less like that. It opened up an incredible window.”
Having identified the relevance of her digital output to my study (although
her literary texts did not explicitly mention Maré, her blog profile information
explicitly stated she was a proud resident of the area), I established contact by
email; the interaction then developed to include MSN chat sessions, further
email exchanges, and the inclusion of my email address in a mailing list of sorts
through which A. shared news about print publications, new blog posts, liter-
ary competitions, and other relevant information. I also met A. in person on a
number of occasions, in Maré and elsewhere, from chatting over a cold drink
when I went to the favela to collect my copy of the short story anthology men-
tioned above, to attendance at launch events for her later self-published books
at a cultural center in a suburban area of northern Rio de Janeiro, where I met
some of her friends and family. I also conducted an in-depth, recorded inter-
view at her home, part of which happened in front of her computer, looking at
her blog. In this way, my interaction with A. took place both in person and via
digital technologies, a common blend in contemporary projects.
At the same time, I monitored and took screenshots of the homepages of
A.’s blogs and specific posts on them, having informed her I was doing this.
Although her literary blog remained my primary focus, I also looked at the
other blogs she maintained, as well as other websites and web platforms where
 ETHICAL DILEMMAS IN STUDYING BLOGGING BY FAVELA RESIDENTS IN BRAZIL 135

her activities and publications were mentioned. I acquired copies of print pub-
lications produced by A., maintained notes in my field diary, and collected
other digital content sent to me by A. In the analysis and writing-up phase of
my research, I corresponded with A., as I did with other research participants;
engaged her in a review of relevant fieldwork data, including interview tran-
scripts and the discussion of follow-up questions; and consulted her on deci-
sions about citation from digital content and communications and the use of
screenshots.
The interaction with A. provided me with valuable insights into the circula-
tion of digital content, complementing what I was able to observe myself. This
applied not only to what A. told me about the reach of her own work, such
as her account of contacts established via her blog, and the number of cop-
ies of her first self-published book sold (as far afield as Uruguay, Venezuela,
and Spain, as well as to readers in the north and northeast of Brazil), which
showed her interest in establishing translocal connections via the internet and
her investment in affirming her local origins in Maré. My contact with A. also
shed light on the circulation of digital content produced and disseminated
online by other residents of Maré. On our first face-to-face meeting, we sat
in the courtyard of a small shopping complex, discussing the work of local
organizations, her university studies, and her plans to encourage the work of
other local writers. Her mention of a recent post in the forum of a Maré Orkut
community, which included a link to a blog post about a conflict in the favela,
revealed how that text was circulating and being noticed locally, complement-
ing my own internet-based observations of its trajectory.12
Fieldwork thus allowed me to approach digital content dynamically, and to
explore the communicative processes which took place around its production
and dissemination, particularly its framing through paratexts of various kinds.13
Although my fieldwork was a mobile practice which did not always involve
physical displacement, the observations and interactions carried out in front of
a laptop at home in Rio de Janeiro also generated physical trajectories to be fol-
lowed in the city, both to the favela of Maré itself and to other locations where
I met bloggers or attended events relevant to the research. When writing up
the research, I combined observational and interview data and field notes with
analysis of digital and sometimes print content. In the case of A.’s content, the
focus of the analysis was displaced from her literary texts to consider textual
and visual aspects of blog sidebars, headers and footers (including changes in
design and layout over time), blurbs, promotional information and prefaces for
self-published books, and communication associated with a writing competi-
tion developed by A. It was in these paratexts that a relationship to place was
most explicitly expressed.
The prominence A. gave in blog profile information to her status as a resi-
dent of Maré was striking and constituted an example of what Ramos calls
“territorial affirmation,”14 often involving the naming of specific favelas in song
lyrics, on clothing or in other imagery, which has become a feature of the work
of some favela residents, organizations and cultural producers precisely as a way
136 T. HOLMES

of combating discrimination. For a time during fieldwork, the right-hand col-

umn of A.’s literary blog included profile information under the heading “Who
I am,” which clearly situated its author as a favela resident and affirmed her
investment in generating her own representations of the favela: “I am proud to
call myself a resident of the Maré favela complex and by publishing my texts I
want to show that Rio’s favelas also produce art, poetry and beauty (and not
just criminals [marginais]).” There was an explicitly contestatory dimension
to this statement of intent, in its affirmation of territorial belonging and pride
and its attempt to reframe the meaning of a stigmatized neighborhood in the
popular imagination of the city.
A.’s pride in coming from Maré was repeated to me in email exchanges and
in our interview. I asked her to elaborate on her motivation for so explicitly
affirming a territorial identity and for working to establish opportunities to
support the work of other writers from similar backgrounds to her own, such
as a writing competition for local writers. As A. told me:

I don’t know if the mainstream media has any concern or desire to find out about
what we are up to here. That’s why with [the writing competition] I think I kind
of want to stick it down their throats … I mean, how can I put it, push things a
bit so that people see that it’s different, you know, that we live differently here.

The tone and scope of existing media coverage of favelas emerged as a compel-
ling motivation and reference for the production and publications of digital
content in all three of my blogging case studies, with media representations
considered variously shallow, stigmatizing, absent, disinterested or unrepresen-
tative. Bloggers thus sought to combat the negative visibility of favelas with a
differential, more nuanced (and sometimes outright positive) visibility, seeking
to make available broader and more diverse representations of favelas in gen-
eral, and Maré in particular.
Blog content itself, and the act of making it available, presented favelas
as sites of creativity and voice. In A.’s case, there was an explicit framing of
herself on the internet and in print as a university student, a teacher and a
writer from an area of the city often associated with violence and poverty.
She also posted posters and promotional material for events taking place in
Maré on her blog, giving a sense of local cultural life. In addition, she made
a concerted attempt to extend the recognition and concrete opportunities
resulting from her own burgeoning visibility to fellow residents of Maré. As
A. explained to me during an interview, she had been inspired by her own
success in using the internet to attract attention to her work and wished to
facilitate this for others:

When I started to see that things were working out for me, I thought, gosh, I’m
here, I’m a nobody …, and there are so many other nobodies here in my com-
munity, in my area. But they are just as talented as me, if not more so, so why not
… shine a light on them, why can’t these people also be noticed?
 ETHICAL DILEMMAS IN STUDYING BLOGGING BY FAVELA RESIDENTS IN BRAZIL 137

While A. put herself forward to exemplify Maré as a site of literary production

and cultural capital, she also established connections between the individual
and the collective, seeking to multiply the visibility already achieved, bring oth-
ers into the spotlight, and show that she was not exceptional.
One key difference between the approach adopted in my study and a con-
ventional humanities approach lies in the level and nature of the interaction
established with A. and the construction of this as a fieldwork relationship.
My inclusion in A.’s communications routine, my detailed following of her
blog over a period of time, attendance at relevant events, and the informal and
formal interviews I conducted with her provided a broader context for under-
standing her activities and motivations. This fits with ethnography’s “com-
mitment to try and view the object of enquiry through attempting some kind
of alignment with the perspective of those who participate in the research.”15
In the humanities, however, this type of alignment is not common. As Amy
Bruckman has noted, “Literary scholars and art historians who study famous
creative professionals typically do not view what they do as human subjects
research, even if they study living authors and artists, collecting data from them
directly.”16 Taking a historical perspective, Bruckman notes that the decline in
research engagement with authors in the humanities coincided with the emer-
gence of human subjects protocols in the medical and social sciences. Although
the advent of cultural studies, and its emphasis on popular culture, has gone
some way toward changing this, Bruckman argues that it is the emergence of
the internet that has thrown the place of human subjects in humanities research
into new relief.17 As cultural studies scholar Kate Eichhorn has highlighted, the
types of material and communicative processes developed on the internet raise
fundamental methodological and theoretical questions for a range of scholars:

Can “texts” that promote … interactivity and immersion … as well as some

forms of hypertext, continue to be understood as texts? At what point do these
“texts” become something entirely different? If so, what do they become, and
what might the phenomena in question mean to the ethnographer, the literary
theorist, and their respective disciplinary traditions?18

In my study on blogging by Brazilian favela residents, I conceived of bloggers

such as A. as human subjects from the start, with approval for the project given
by the relevant university ethics committee and methodological and ethical
guidance sought in the burgeoning literature on internet research. However,
it soon became clear that, in line with Eichhorn’s comments above, impor-
tant decisions were also required about the status of blog texts, and that this
decision-making could not happen in isolation from fieldwork interactions.
By beginning with focusing on bloggers as people engaged in practices, and
then moving to an awareness that the texts they authored were also central to
the project, I in fact experienced the opposite of Eichhorn, who planned her
research into ‘zines as a text-based study, and then became aware that she was
researching not just texts, but people. As Eichhorn notes, she had intended
“to escape to the imagined stability and containability of texts” (emphasis in
138 T. HOLMES

original) in that piece of research, but from the moment she requested ‘zines
by post from their authors, she “unintentionally initiated the process of nego-
tiating access to a community,”19 requiring her to develop an ethical stance on
her interaction with ‘zine creators. In my research on blogging, there was a
growing awareness that while the blog texts required attention, a conventional
literary studies approach to analyzing those texts would not suffice; an ethical
stance was also required toward them. The attempt to include both texts and
practices in the research thus positioned it between the conventions, and the
methods, of the humanities and the social sciences.

NEGOTIATING THE ETHICS OF VISIBILITY IN DIGITAL

CULTURE RESEARCH
Although helpful in many other ways, early methodological writing on inter-
net research was largely silent on ethical approaches to the internet under-
stood as a site of textual production, in comparison with the attention given
to the internet as a site where human subjects interact. A key issue regarding
internet texts is whether they can be considered “published” in the traditional
sense. Although it may be that some internet content can be considered public
enough to study without informed consent, such decision-making is a complex
process and one in constant flux, in terms of both the range of internet con-
tent available and the different ethical approaches taken by researchers working
according to different disciplinary traditions and forging new ones.
Sveningsson Elm proposes that rather than a dichotomy between public
content and private content, we should think of internet content in terms of
a continuum ranging from public to private, passing through semipublic and
semiprivate content, depending on the access settings of particular websites
and platforms; Bruckman suggests a similar continuum, from published to
semi-published and unpublished.20 However, Elm confesses her ongoing dif-
ficulty in taking “a clear stance” on the issue,21 drawing attention to the subjec-
tive dimensions of this question, for both researchers and creators of content.
As she points out, privacy is understood differently in different cultural con-
texts, and stances on research ethics depend on researchers’ backgrounds and
disciplines.22 Drawing a parallel with debates in literary theory about where
the meaning of the text is to be found (in the intention of the author, the text
itself or the interpretation of the reader/audience), she suggests, “No content
is ever either private or public, but potentially both, depending on who you
are asking.”23 The act of asking therefore takes on a central importance, even
if the ambiguities outlined above mean that the answer given may only be
one piece of the jigsaw for a researcher. Although bloggers such as those who
participated in my study are constantly negotiating the risks and opportuni-
ties associated with publishing content on the internet, there is a potentially
different set of issues involved in deciding—as a researcher working with such
material—how best to make it visible (or not) in research write-ups. While the
bloggers I interviewed expressed a view on this when asked, saying they were
 ETHICAL DILEMMAS IN STUDYING BLOGGING BY FAVELA RESIDENTS IN BRAZIL 139

happy for me to cite their content, they also all effectively told me that it was
up to me to make the final decision on this matter.
The potential invisibility of internet researchers when observing internet
content and practices, compared to similar research in non-mediated settings,
is one strong justification for making one’s presence known and engaging with
content creators in this way. However, even if it does not explicitly involve the
seeking of consent, contacting content creators can be problematic for human-
ities scholars, as it may immediately reposition their research into the human
subjects category (rather than the default arts and humanities engagement with
published texts), given that it implies some degree of interaction and thus a
move toward fieldwork, however limited. Trevisan and Reilly have suggested
that “Internet research ethics should remain informed by the disciplinary per-
spectives of those who study online communities,” calling for the development
of “discipline-specific frameworks.”24 Such frameworks are sorely needed in the
text-based humanities, to complement existing codes of ethics in disciplines
more experienced in fieldwork such as anthropology and sociology and to raise
awareness of the relevance of research ethics to all the branches of the humani-
ties (not only where research on digital culture is concerned). However, proj-
ects without a clear home discipline to serve as a fundamental reference may
continue to fall between the cracks, requiring researchers to stitch together
their own composite ethical and methodological frameworks—a potentially
productive process in itself. For research on digital culture, a major reference is
the Ethics Committee of the Association of Internet Researchers, which takes
an interdisciplinary and flexible approach in its development of ethical guide-
lines (rather than a code).25
In my study, a composite framework was required to link blog texts to the
relationships developed with their authors and the fieldwork process of fol-
lowing the content. Bassett and O’Riordan argue for the relevance of debates
in the field of life writing, and, in particular, the feminist oral history work
of Katherine Borland, to ethical decision-making in digital culture research.26
Borland affirms the contribution to be made by researchers in interpreting texts
acquired through fieldwork, but also the need to allow for alternative inter-
pretations by the creators of those texts. Researchers can analyze texts based
on their “knowledge, experience and concerns” and should not be dependent
on the validation of fieldwork participants.27 Yet Borland also recognizes that
there is much to be gained by maintaining an ongoing dialogue with the cre-
ators of texts throughout the research process and by providing a space where
multiple textual meanings can coexist and be negotiated. In other words, as
advocated by Bassett and O’Riordan, Borland provides a strategy for linking
texts to people as both authors and human subjects, allowing the researcher to
engage directly and critically with texts, while maintaining an awareness of their
origins in the life of another person.28
The ethics of authorship and interpretation, and the connections between
people and texts, are further complicated in digital research by the potential
“traceability” of direct citations from the internet if included in publications.
140 T. HOLMES

This characteristic of textual material published online, which cannot be con-

sidered either negative or positive in itself, argue Beaulieu and Estalella, forces
researchers to directly confront issues of “anonymity, visibility, exposure, own-
ership and authorship”29 when thinking about how to generate and present
data, questions that would not normally arise in the usual humanities engage-
ment with published literary texts. Aside from the convention of citing such
texts, the humanities would also traditionally include full bibliographical details
to enable readers to locate them for themselves. In the social sciences, on the
contrary, where research participants have tended to be understood primarily
as human subjects rather than as authors, the standard ethical requirement
when writing up research has often been anonymization and the use of pseud-
onyms to preserve the privacy and “locatability” of participants. The trace-
ability of internet content, and the ethical implications of this, thus potentially
poses a challenge to both of these traditions.
The overarching issue here is the relationship between protection and
accountability. Amy Bruckman raises the central question faced by many
researchers dealing with internet material when she asks: “Should [amateur
artists] be treated as vulnerable human subjects whose privacy needs to be
protected by hiding their online pseudonyms and real names? Or would that
rob them of a legitimate claim to credit for their creative work?”30 There are
complex issues associated with both citation and the decision not to cite. Such
decisions should be made based on individual research projects and wherever
possible in consultation with research participants.31 Some scholars, like Hine32
and Banks and Eble,33 have pointed out that not citing from internet con-
tent on principle would threaten the viability of carrying out, and publish-
ing, research into textual production on the internet. Marianne Franklin, who
developed her approach to quotation from internet forums over several years
of consultation with research participants, argues that “online texts and their
authors demand the same level of courtesy and citation rigor as any other writ-
ten source.”34 She also notes that she would “‘respectfully disagree’ with the
principle of absolute anonymity as a hard and fast rule for online research sce-
narios,”35 again emphasizing the need for researchers to be flexible, responsive
and consultative in developing approaches to the thorny issue of citation.
The challenges are particularly marked in projects focusing on textual pro-
duction on the internet by marginalized groups, which require researchers to
grapple with issues associated both with the digital context and the profile of
the content creators in question. The degree to which research participants
can be considered, or want to be considered, “public figures” varies drastically.
This was a factor in decision-making by Trevisan and Reilly, who took a selec-
tive approach to citation of digital material in their study of online disability
activism, opting largely to avoid direct citation of traceable material, but using
quotes “when the identification of the author was not possible or would not
cause specific ethical problems,” for example in the case of widely circulated
memes or when referencing content posted by what they call “core campaign-
ers” rather than “ordinary” users.36 Nonetheless, both Franklin37 and Bassett
 ETHICAL DILEMMAS IN STUDYING BLOGGING BY FAVELA RESIDENTS IN BRAZIL 141

and O’Riordan38 point to the risk of erasure if protection is prioritized over

attribution and accountability. Similarly, Banks and Eble39 draw attention to
the possibility of affording less authorship and agency to blog authors (such as
the young gay men they studied) by treating their work differently from that of
conventional published authors. One example of this, though not specifically
related to digital culture, is Érica Peçanha do Nascimento’s observation that
critical writing on the work of writers from the Brazilian urban periphery tends
to focus primarily on their sociological profiles, rather than the characteristics
of their literary work per se.40 In addition, some content produced by or for
marginalized groups can have the explicit goal of achieving greater visibility, in
the absence of mainstream media attention, as Bassett and O’Riordan noted
of the lesbian website they researched in the UK.41 The consideration of A.’s
attempts to reframe the Maré favela and its residents has shown that these
issues certainly had resonance in my own study, where bloggers were seeking to
diversify representations of their neighborhood and contest its stigmatization.
Nonetheless, this was one factor among several to be weighed up in my ethical
decision-making.
Beyond internet research, the anthropological convention of protecting and
anonymizing research participants has been questioned, with scholars query-
ing whether anonymity, which prevents research participants from responding
to research findings, “[is] truly always only for the purpose of protecting our
‘human subjects,’ or is it also about protecting ourselves?”42 In fact, Beaulieu
and Estalella argue that the increased traceability of data in internet research
could potentially offer new types of protection and accountability to research
participants.43 Where anonymity does remain a pressing concern, due to the
characteristics of the material or people under study, scholars like Beaulieu
and Estalella, and Ess,44 have suggested that alternative approaches to disguis-
ing field sites and participants may need to be developed in internet research,
such as paraphrasing or altering content, self-anonymization of the researcher,
or covert research. The idea of intervening in digital texts by editing them
to prevent their traceability may be a particularly challenging proposition for
humanities scholars, especially for those who wish to engage in analysis of
those same texts.
There are also powerful arguments for taking a cautious approach to cita-
tion of traceable internet content, based on a different stance toward visibility
as produced by digital technologies. The option to preserve visibility, by citing
and attributing content, may in fact mean amplifying that visibility, an inter-
vention in the politics of representation that is not neutral. The inclusion of
internet content in research publications may disturb the relative anonymity of
the internet, where a single post may not stand out, by “potentially bring[ing]
a readership to a forum which otherwise might not have that readership”
(emphasis in original).45 This could in turn “bring attention to […] bloggers
by those who would not normally know about them and thus possibly create a
conflict where none had existed prior to the reporting of the research in print
or at conferences.”46 These dynamics may also be affected by the amount of
142 T. HOLMES

time that has passed between content being posted online and its discussion in
research communications. Finally, the growth in access to digital technologies
and the ease of internet publishing means that research results are now more
widely available to a range of audiences, a positive trend in many ways, but one
that can also be unexpected and unpredictable and that requires academics to
be particularly sensitive to ethical concerns when writing up their research.
In my study, I employed an informal and conversational approach to ethics
and informed consent throughout the research process, asking bloggers (on
email, via chat, and in person) for input on issues, including whether or not to
quote directly from internet content and how best to identify them. I did not
use a formal consent form. Mention of research protocols such as confidential-
ity and anonymity occasionally prompted general teasing or dismissiveness, as
if it implied the bloggers might have something to hide, but I persisted with
this. This ongoing and regular consultation, as well as the insights gleaned
through fieldwork itself, proved important in decision-making about how to
deal with different data types when writing up the research. Overall, I opted to
preserve the visibility of the blog content and the place it represented, Maré,
thereby respecting the bloggers’ desire, and efforts, to change the terms of that
place’s social and cultural visibility. At the same time, I attempted to mask, to
a small degree, the visibility of the individuals in whose lives it originated. As
an approach approximating to Bruckman’s “light disguise” model, this sought
to protect the privacy of the people involved, while attributing the due impor-
tance to their content and recognizing the content’s place at the heart of the
study, alongside practices.
The decision to cite from content was informed by the bloggers’ view that
their content was in the public domain and that they were directly seeking a
nonlocal audience for their representations of their neighborhood. I focused
my citations on the blog content itself, and I explicitly sought consent for this
in the final stages of the research. This process worked slightly differently in
relation to each of the three bloggers. In one case, for example, responding to
a request by the blogger in question, I sent a list of blog posts (and specific
extracts from them) that I hoped to cite, for agreement and comment, rather
than for securing “blanket” consent for citation, which was given in other
cases, without the need for detailed negotiation. I only rarely cited from email
or Orkut communication with/by bloggers, again requesting explicit consent
where this was the case. In the case study about A., quoted material was largely
from “framing content” or nonliterary content, based on my understanding of
her, in the context of the study, primarily as a creator of local content rather
than as a literary author. In many ways, it was coincidence (or the result of the
serendipitous process of fieldwork) that one of the three bloggers in the study
was engaged in the production of explicitly literary content, as this was not the
focus of the study. However, all three bloggers could be understood as “ama-
teur artists” according to Bruckman’s terminology. Crucially, it was by avoid-
ing the literary nature of A.’s work and looking at the texts around her literary
texts that I developed insights about the importance of “framing content” in
 ETHICAL DILEMMAS IN STUDYING BLOGGING BY FAVELA RESIDENTS IN BRAZIL 143

expressing territorial embeddedness. At the same time, however, the fact that
much of A.’s content was literary, and that she was engaged in self-publishing
in print as well as on the internet, helped to surface reflections about the need
to consider authorship and its attribution in a hybrid study such as this one.
The option to refer to bloggers only by initials, and not to name or pro-
vide the addresses of the blogs where they published their work, was based
on a judgment that they were not well-known public figures, despite their
work being publicly available on the internet and their own negotiation of the
opportunities and risks associated with the circulation and potential visibility
of that content. For comparison here, albeit drawing on a case not involving
digital technologies, it is worth noting the rationale presented by Pandolfi and
Grynszpan for naming community leaders from four Rio favelas who contrib-
uted oral histories to their book: they were considered by the researchers to be
“public personalities who circulate widely and whose voices are recognized.”47
My assessment of the blogs I studied, and their authors, was that they were not
widely disseminated or known even in Rio de Janeiro, beyond certain circles,
and certainly not to some of the potential audiences for the research, both
Portuguese- and English speaking. In fact, A. herself commented on the visibil-
ity that the internet offered to amateur artists, when I interviewed her. Talking
about the various social network sites where she maintained a presence, she
noted that being on MySpace had been good because she had got to know
“artists who, like me, do not have space in the mainstream media, but who
have become well-known (notórios) on the internet, if we can put it like that.”
Despite my interest in this process, it was not my central focus, and I concluded
that it was not my role to amplify that visibility more than necessary, or to draw
attention to what might be considered “success stories” of the way the internet
was being used by favela residents, in the way that the media, or projects and
reports created by NGOs, the state or private foundations might do. As I have
pointed out elsewhere, drawing on the work of Silvia Ramos, not all of those
engaged in cultural and digital production in favelas are “the celebrities and
personalities […] which some favela-based projects cultivate and present to the
media” as a way of combating negative stereotypes about people who live in
favelas.48
There are many potential contradictions in researching digital mate-
rial designed to afford differential or affirmative visibility to a marginalized
social group, and then taking steps to mask that visibility when writing up the
research. Nonetheless, these precautions—such as my use of initials, the pseud-
onyms chosen by Bassett and O’Riordan, and the delinking of blog analysis
from fieldwork data by Banks and Eble (something which would be more dif-
ficult in a small-scale study such as my own)—can be justified, given the emer-
gent nature of this type of research and associated ethical frameworks, and the
ultimately subjective nature of decision-making on these issues. The measures
adopted in my study, where connections were established between texts (trace-
able internet content) and practices (data acquired through interaction) in case
studies focusing on individuals, reflect the particularities and emergent ethical
144 T. HOLMES

dilemmas of digital culture research, discussed above. They were also designed
to be faithful to the fieldwork context in which I encountered the bloggers and
their texts, and the process of developing rapport and trust, and ultimately of
securing their consent to participate in the study. Drawing on interview and
observational data and linking it to cited content from blogs contextualizes
and adds insights not available to an audience encountering the blogs on their
own. The attempt to separate the access given to texts and the access given to
people, at the point of reporting on the research, might seem curious, given
the earlier account of how these two ways of understanding the object of study
intertwined in the fieldwork. However, it also reveals how in a fieldwork-based
study of content creation on the internet, texts can indeed become more than
just texts, as suggested by Eichhorn. They cannot be detached from the tangle
of fieldwork interactions and other data acquired through fieldwork and the
responsibilities that these imply.

CONCLUSION
As this discussion has shown, research into digital culture may increasingly
bring humanities scholars into contact with authors (and different types of
authors) and require us to acknowledge that these subjects and interlocutors
are not just the producers of texts but also human subjects. Some of the chal-
lenges that arose in my study were specifically associated with the focus on
digital texts, such as the issue of traceability and the subjective dimension of
decision-making on the public or private nature of digital content, but others,
like the blurring of fieldwork participants’ status as authors and human sub-
jects, and the relative lack of models for combining data types associated with
different disciplinary traditions in a single study, could arise just as easily in
nondigital projects. Rather than offering a framework or model to be followed
by other scholars, I have sought to discuss some of the dilemmas that occurred
in my own study and how I addressed them.
An informed decision on the relevance of such questions needs to be taken
in the context of individual projects and fieldwork experiences, drawing also
on relevant ethical codes and frameworks. Wider awareness raising and train-
ing are required to equip humanities researchers to make such judgments, but
this process need not necessarily be onerous, and it may provide some pleasant
surprises. Like Hine, who asked participants in a discussion list she was study-
ing for their permission to quote material from its archives, and gained rel-
evant insights as a result, I found that in my study “[t]he ethical commitment
[…] began as a duty and turned into an interesting and useful engagement.”49
Indeed, the fieldwork component was one of the most stimulating aspects of
this research project on blogging by favela residents. Although the questions
that arose as a result of following the production and circulation of digital con-
tent and meeting its creators in person were challenging, they were also com-
pelling, precisely because they provoked me to think intensively and explicitly
about my own research processes and associated decision-making. The lack of
 ETHICAL DILEMMAS IN STUDYING BLOGGING BY FAVELA RESIDENTS IN BRAZIL 145

predetermined answers, in this case, was productive. Through reflection on

that fieldwork process, I have shown the gains of complementing the study
of texts with data on practices gained through interaction and observation,
but also the disciplinary and methodological certainties that can be lost as a
result. The ethical confusions and makeshift resolutions that are inevitable in
interdisciplinary projects that involve several different standards can be at least
partly addressed by sharing experiences and more explicit reflection on ethical
challenges in humanities fieldwork.
As I write this, six years have passed since the end of my fieldwork, and
four years since the end of the research project on blogging. Since then, I
have often reflected on the issues discussed in this chapter, and asked myself
if the approach I adopted was the “right” one. There is of course no “right”
approach; mine was the one that seemed appropriate, reasonable, and feasible
to me, as I carefully weighed up a range of factors and their possible impli-
cations. It arose not only from my original disciplinary training, in modern
languages, but also from my awareness of the conventions of other disciplines
and methods I was engaging with through the research and the “in-between”
space I had come to occupy. It was thus an “in-between” solution, as well as
one developed in response to a specific time and place and specific fieldwork
encounters.
Despite my best efforts, I have had only limited contact with A. since
completing the research. However, I have occasionally visited her blogs and
observed that she no longer appears to be publishing content in the way she
did at the time of my fieldwork. She may have migrated to other platforms, or
she may simply be busy with other activities. At the time of my fieldwork, all
three of the bloggers involved in my study were extremely busy, combining
their blogging work with study and/or work, and it therefore usually took
some time, with occasional rescheduling, before we were able to successfully
meet in person. Blogging was just one of the things that they did. Digital prac-
tices can shift and evolve over time, both in terms of the platforms used and the
time one has available for content creation. A whole host of other factors about
which a researcher cannot, and should not, even begin to speculate may affect
whether or not people are posting content online at any given moment. In ret-
rospect, citing local content without naming its authors or the blogs on which
it originated may serve as a strategy to focus the attention of readers of the
research on the blog texts and practices and the specific context out of which
they arose and in which they were encountered, rather than on the people in
whose lives they originated, lives that continued after the fieldwork ended.

NOTES
1. Miller and Slater, The Internet, 1.
2. For annual data, see http://www.cetic.br/pesquisa/domicilios/. For an
analysis of trends, see Gilda Olinto and Suely Fragoso, “Internet Use in
Brazil: Speeding up or Lagging Behind?”
146 T. HOLMES

3. For examples, see Janice Perlman, Favela: Four Decades of Living on the
Edge in Rio de Janeiro; Lorraine Leu, “The Press and the Spectacle of
Violence in Contemporary Rio de Janeiro”; Jailson Souza e Silva, and
Jorge Luiz Barbosa, Favela: Alegria e dor na cidade; Silvia Ramos and
Anabela Paiva, Mídia e violência—Novas tendências na cobertura de crimi-
nalidade e segurança no Brasil; Beatriz Jaguaribe and Kevin Hetherington,
“Favela Tours: Indistinct and Mapless Representations of the Real in Rio
de Janeiro.”
4. The idea of “territorial embeddedness” is borrowed from Hess’s work in
economic geography, where it conveys “the extent to which an actor is
‘anchored’ in particular territories or places” (Martin Hess, “‘Spatial’
Relationships? Towards a Reconceptualization of Embeddedness,” 177).
The term has been adapted here to refer to the inclusion of explicit visual
or textual references to place in digital content, understood as the expres-
sion of a relationship to place. For more on this, see Tori Holmes, “The
Travelling Texts of Local Content: Following Content Creation,
Communication and Dissemination via Internet Platforms in a Brazilian
Favela.”
5. Sousa Silva, “Censo Maré 2000: Uma experiência de coleta e geração de
informações socioculturais e econômicas numa favela da cidade do Rio de
Janeiro,” 15.
6. Sousa Silva, 15; Souza e Silva, et al., eds. O que é a favela, afinal?, 11.
7. For an in-depth discussion of this approach, see Tori Holmes, “Linking
Internet Texts and Practices: Challenges and Opportunities of
Interdisciplinarity in an Ethnographically Inspired Study of ‘Local
Content.’”
8. RSS is a technology that allows users to be automatically informed of
updates to the content of selected websites, often via what is known as a
feed reader.
9. Crawford, “Following You: Disciplines of Listening in Social Media,”
527.
10. Holmes, “Linking Internet Texts and Practices,” 138.
11. At the time of the fieldwork, Orkut was the most popular social network
site in Brazil. It has since been supplanted by Facebook.
12. See Holmes, “The Travelling Texts” for a full discussion.
13. Jonathan Gray draws on Genette’s understanding of paratexts as “the
thresholds of interpretation” and explains that “paratexts guide our entry
to texts, setting up all sorts of meanings and strategies of interpretation,
and proposing ways to make sense of what we will find ‘inside’ the text”.
Gray notes that the term “paratext” has not yet been widely used in com-
munication, media and cultural studies (Gray, “Television Pre-Views and
the Meaning of Hype,” 38).
14. Ramos, “Jovens de favelas na produção cultural brasileira dos anos 90.”
15. Horst and Miller, The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication,
167.
 ETHICAL DILEMMAS IN STUDYING BLOGGING BY FAVELA RESIDENTS IN BRAZIL 147

16. Bruckman, “Studying the Amateur Artist,” 224.

17. Bruckman, 223–224.
18. Eichhorn, “Sites Unseen,” 576.
19. Eichhorn, “Sites Unseen,” 569.
20. Sveningsson Elm, “Question Three. How Do Various Notions of Privacy
Influence Decisions in Qualitative Internet Research?”;  Bruckman,
“Studying the Amateur Artist,” 227.
21. Sveningsson Elm, 86.
22. Sveningsson Elm, 69, 73.
23. Sveningsson Elm, 82, 84.
24. Trevisan and Reilly, “Ethical Dilemmas in Researching Sensitive Issues
Online,” 1142, 1132.
25. Association of Internet Researchers Ethics Committee. “Ethical Decision-
Making and Internet Research: Recommendations from the AOIR Ethics
Committee,” 2012.
26. Bassett and O’Riordan, “Ethics of Internet Research.”
27. Borland, “That’s Not What I Said,” 73.
28. We can find echoes of Borland’s approach to personal texts in the work of
linguistic anthropologist Jan Blommaert, in his study of personal letters
whose author (Julien) he never met or interviewed. He defends this form
of textual fieldwork which did not include interaction with the author/
human subject of the texts, arguing that he mitigates the risk of silencing
Julien’s voice “by making my own interpretive procedures explicit (like
Fabian); and by showing my own subjectivity in these interpretive proce-
dures (like Bourdieu)” (Jan Blommaert, Grassroots Literacy, 89). What is
common to Borland’s work is the the careful separation of source text
from the researcher’s interpretation of it, and an explicit attempt to avoid
conflating conflating text and author, as a way of compensating for the
absence of Julien’s own interpretation of his text.
29. Beaulieu and Estalella, “Rethinking Research Ethics for Mediated
Settings,” 32.
30. Bruckman, “Studying the Amateur Artist,” 228.
31. Association of Internet Researchers Ethics Committee. “Ethical
Decision-Making.”
32. Christine Hine, Virtual Ethnography (London: Sage, 2000).
33. William P.  Banks and Michelle F.  Eble, “Digital Spaces, Online
Environments and Human Participant Research.”
34. Franklin, Postcolonial Politics, the Internet, and Everyday Life, 71.
35. Franklin, 203.
36. Trevisan and Reilly, “Ethical Dilemmas,” 1139.
37. Franklin, Postcolonial Politics, 203.
38. Bassett and O’Riordan, “Ethics of Internet Research,” 245.
39. Banks and Eble, “Digital Spaces.”
40. Érica Peçanha do Nascimento, Vozes marginais na literatura, 80.
41. Bassett and O’Riordan, “Ethics of Internet Research,” 243.
148 T. HOLMES

42. Shannon May, “Rethinking Anonymity in Anthropology: A Question of

Ethics,” Anthropology News 51, no. 4 (2010): 10.
43. Beaulieu and Estalella, “Rethinking Research Ethics,” 36.
44. C.  Ess, “Internet Research Ethics,” quoted in Wilkinson and Thelwall,
“Researching Personal Information on the Public Web,” 397.
45. McKee and Porter. The Ethics of Internet Research, 106–107.
46. Banks and Eble, “Digital Spaces,” 37.
47. Pandolfi and Grynszpan, eds., A favela fala, 29.
48. Holmes, “The Travelling Texts,” 265.
49. Hine, “Connective Ethnography for the Exploration of E-Science,” 623.

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Nascimento, Érica Peçanha do. 2009. Vozes marginais na literatura. Rio de Janeiro:
Aeroplano.
Olinto, Gilda, and Suely Fragoso. 2011. Internet Use in Brazil: Speeding up or Lagging
Behind? The Journal of Community Informatics 7(1–2). http://ci-journal.net/
index.php/ciej/article/view/835
Perlman, Janice. 2010. Favela: Four Decades of Living on the Edge in Rio de Janeiro.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ramos, Silvia. 2007. Jovens de favelas na produção cultural brasileira dos anos 90. In
“Por que não?” Rupturas e continuidades da contracultura, eds. Maria Isabel Mendes
de Almeida and Santuza Cambraia Naves, 239–256. Rio de Janeiro: 7Letras.
Ramos, Silvia, and Anabela Paiva. 2007. Mídia e violência—Novas tendências na cober-
tura de criminalidade e segurança no Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: IUPERJ.
Sousa Silva, Eliana. 2002. Censo Maré 2000: Uma experiência de coleta e geração de
informações socioculturais e econômicas numa favela da cidade do Rio de Janeiro.
Rio de Janeiro: Trabalho e Sociedade 2(3): 15–20.
Souza e Silva, Jailson de, and Jorge Luiz Barbosa. 2005. Favela, alegria e dor na cidade.
Rio de Janeiro: Editora Senac Rio.
Souza e Silva, Jailson de, Jorge Luiz Barbosa, Mariana de Oliveira Biteti, and Fernando
Lannes Fernandes, eds. 2009. O que é a favela, afinal? Rio de Janeiro: Observatório
de Favelas.
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Influence Decisions in Qualitative Internet Research? In Internet Inquiry:
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Wilkinson, David, and Mike Thelwall. 2011. Researching Personal Information on the
Public Web: Methods and Ethics. Social Science Computer Review 29(4): 387–401.
 CHAPTER 8

Reading Delhi, Writing Delhi: An Ethnography

of Literature

Rashmi Sadana

I am riding the Violet Line of the Delhi Metro with my three-year-old on

an elevated section of the train which runs high over the mostly lower lying
dwellings, markets, and roads. We are taking the long curve from Nehru Place
toward Badarpur, one of the wide expansive views of south Delhi made newly
possible because of the Metro. I am explaining and pointing, while she is look-
ing and inquiring when the woman sitting next to us asks me in Hindi if I had
always planned to teach my daughter English this early. The question makes
perfect sense to me, since middle-class Indian children tend to speak their
mother tongues until the age of five or six and only then get immersed in
English-medium education. Without missing a beat, I reply to her in Hindi
that I grew up in the USA, so I speak to my daughter in English and Hindi at
home. But I can sense her slight anxiety. Was this just another way for me to
get ahead? In this city of 16 million, language is mobility.
Delhi has been both a place to be and a research problem—in the sense
of something needing to be figured out—for some time. I say “problem”
rather than “object” since one is part of the city and so part of the place and
the problem. The question of “being there” has long been a feature of the
anthropological endeavor—even if “being” may have taken precedence of late.
I admit I am still caught up in the “there.” In this chapter, I outline how “field-
work”—the gathering of data through interviewing and observation, but also
the physical, emotional, and intellectual immersion in people’s lives through
sets of encounters in a place or set of places—not only enables certain kinds of
research but defines the research problem anew.

R. Sadana ( )
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, George Mason University, Fairfax, USA

© The Author(s) 2016 151

S. Puri, D.A. Castillo (eds.), Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-92834-7_8
152 R. SADANA

I have been doing fieldwork in Delhi since the late 1990s, first as a gradu-
ate student, then as a resident for five years, and now as a junior professor at
an American university who goes back and forth. My first project was about
literary language and the production of books, basically a humanities project
for which I attempted to create an anthropological method. In the process,
I ended up detailing the politics of English and Hindi through an ethnogra-
phy of publishers, booksellers, writers, translators, and literary officials.1 The
second is on the city’s new metro rail system, where I observe and participate
in the social life on the trains, track new forms of mobility, and analyze the
production of urban space. Both projects stem from my curiosity about what
I have experienced moving around the city. In both, rather than study discrete
communities within a city, as anthropologists are wisely wont to do, I have
perhaps less wisely taken on the task of identifying communities and sometimes
bringing them into being.
In what follows, I unravel how I came to define my fieldwork experience
as I went from being a student of literature, absorbed in textual analysis, to
an anthropologist researching the literary. It is through this cross-disciplinary
movement that I put into practice a fieldwork-based methodology for study-
ing literature. It is also a story of how the fieldwork itself came to define the
research and clarify the problems I was seeking to address. My problem to start
with was how to do fieldwork about books?

THE TURN TO FIELDWORK

In the early 1990s, as I was finishing a bachelor’s degree in English, the “boom”
in Indian fiction was in full swing. Salman Rushdie had won the Booker Prize
for Midnight’s Children in 1981 and Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy was about to
be published in 1993. Indian writers were gaining traction on the “global” lit-
erary stage. The “boom” was an English-only phenomenon, and that was part
of its allure. To be recognized by the Anglo-American literary marketplace,
with its major publishing houses in London and New York and its “interna-
tional” awards such as the Booker Prize, was and still is a defining moment, a
coming-of-age, as they like to say.2 Indians didn’t just know English, they had
mastered it.
In 1995, this recognition gathered force by the much-mythologized air-
plane flight that British literary agent David Godwin took from London to
Delhi after having read the manuscript of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small
Things. That novel, which not only won the Booker Prize in 1997 but also
became an international bestseller, would go on to help Godwin establish his
agency. Godwin now represents over 100 authors, many of whom come from
(and write from) South Asia and Africa.
When I interviewed Godwin at the Jaipur Literature Festival in 2009, he
told me that there were three things he saw in Roy’s manuscript in 1995 that
made him take that flight: (1) “The timing was perfect”—it was just before the
50-year anniversary of Indian independence; (2) the author was female, and
 READING DELHI, WRITING DELHI 153

women, said Godwin, were able to speak to the political and personal better
than male writers; and finally, (3) it was a “terrific book.”3 Talking to Godwin,
I came to see how that flight he took to Delhi was a dramatization of the selling
of the novel itself and a reversal: The “center” was seeking out the “margin.”
It became a “win-win” situation.
Yet, something is, or at least was, for me, clearly missing from a story like
this, of Indian writers’ arrival on the global literary stage (writers, whom, I
should add, I enjoyed reading myself). I knew from all the time I had spent in
Delhi that the languages around me were Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi. English
was there, but in particular places, at particular times, spoken by particular
kinds of people. I wanted to find out what got lost—not in translation, but
in transnational literary production. Why was India only being represented in
English? What was the relationship between Indian texts in English and those
in the 22 other official languages (spread across 29 states)? Surely this writing
existed in a multilingual context, but looking at how Indian novels in English
were read and received in the USA and the UK, one would never know it.
Other writers—Gabriel García Márquez comes to mind—made it globally big
in translation. Why not a great Hindi or Tamil or Marathi writer?
By this time I was increasingly reading translations of Indian writers (such as
Ismat Chugtai, Amrita Pritam, Rajee Seth, Ambai, Baby Kamble, and others),
albeit in an academic context. Nevertheless, this reading reminded me of and
connected me to what I experienced on Indian streets and in families: a deep
and lively multilinguality and, importantly, perspectives on life emanating from
a non-English-language worldview. By reading authors originally writing in
Urdu, Gujarati, Bengali, Malayalam, Kannada, and Telugu, to name a few of
the Indian languages (or bhashas as they are often called, to distinguish them
from English, which is now also an Indian language), what I thought was famil-
iar—modern Indian experience—became strange, and reading these works had
the effect of making me feel out of place. Out of place, and yet also producing
different kinds of recognition within me. I suppose that was when I started
to hanker for fieldwork—what I would describe as an intellectual longing not
merely to “be there,” but to connect the dots of the literary landscape in my
mind to the geography of the city and the linguistic histories of its residents.4
I started to “get there” while in London, working toward a master’s degree
in South Asia Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). In
the SOAS library’s teaching collection, we students from and of Africa, Asia,
the Caribbean, and other “outposts” voraciously read postcolonial theory in
the heart of the faded imperium. Texts in colonial languages (English, French,
Dutch, Portuguese, etc.) somewhat predictably became privileged as sources
with which to better understand the colonial project and to critique colonial
discourse. However, the texts themselves were often divorced from their politi-
cal and cultural contexts, or places, in order so that they might be understood
in a larger imperial context.
SOAS, of course, had been the linguistic finishing school for many a colonial
officer on his way out to “the field.” As I absorbed Edward Said on culture and
154 R. SADANA

imperialism and Ngũgi ̃ wa Thiong’o on language and colonialism, I started

to see the English language itself as being more about “place” than anything
else. By “place” I don’t just mean a particular geographic location, but rather a
particular political and cultural context, always in relation to other contexts. It
was around this time that I began to take note of publishers and places of pub-
lication with particular interest, and like many book historians, started to frame
the texts I was reading in new ways. I wrote a thesis about Midnight’s Children;
I thought maybe the answer would be in Rushdie’s heteroglossic text, with its
Urdu cadences and Hindi slang. (It wasn’t.)
In London, I also interned at the publisher Granta. In the 1980s, Granta
magazine had opened the world of international writing to me and had
inspired me to write to the then editor, Bill Buford. When I met Buford at
Granta’s Islington office, we agreed that I would read and report on book
manuscripts, but also come in on the occasional Saturday to go over “the slush
pile.” In a small way, I had become a participant observer at one of the centers
in the Anglophone publishing world. I recount this episode because without
knowing it then, reading those Granta manuscripts became the beginning of
my fieldwork.
In terms of contemporary literary distinction, Granta magazine symbol-
ized the postcolonial literary moment in 1980s Britain in that writers from
Commonwealth nations wanted to publish works in English. After all, the first
chapter of Midnight’s Children had been published in 1980 in Granta, Issue 3:
“The End of the English Novel.” In his editorial preface to that issue, Buford
had characterized the emergence of novelists like Rushdie as nonwhite former
colonial subjects, many of whom were now British citizens, who were “writing
back” in a style, language, and with an imaginary scope that seemed to be sur-
passing English (read: white) writing. However, what Granta also represented
was a disjuncture between those English-language texts in the slush pile and
the places they were coming from, originating from. And the point here is not
to fetishize place, but to understand it as a complex of linguistic and other
forms of politics.
We all had heard that Salman Rushdie had written Midnight’s Children, a
postmodern epic of modern Indian history, while sitting in north London—a
quaint footnote highlighting Rushdie’s multicultural, hybrid identity. It was
also a politically significant fact in 1980s Thatcherite Britain, when it was
important to see nonwhite writers as fully British. However, those kinds of
circumstances were certainly not representative of the vast majority of English-
writing aspirants from the formerly colonized world. Sifting through the slush
pile at the Granta office, those submissions became part of another exclusively
Anglophone literary sphere, albeit a multi-accented one. And that is what
made being published in Granta so special; you had made it in such a distinc-
tive way. It lifted one out of the literary margins and into the center. Which
is not to say that many, if any, slush pile submissions made it to the pages of
Granta. The manuscripts that made it to the pages of the magazine were the
solicited ones, that is to say, work that came via agents and the already-existing
 READING DELHI, WRITING DELHI 155

networks between agents and editors. Nevertheless, the desire and belief were
pervasive, even palpable (at that time), in the stamped, handwritten envelopes.
Postcolonial criticism, meanwhile, was taking all of these Englishes, of known
and rising postcolonial authors, and making its own analyses and theories—
important ones—about the nature of power, hybridity, mimicry, and resistance
in colonial and postcolonial worlds, where centers and margins were clearly
set out.
I started to see the English in India in a slightly different way, not as one
among many Englishes in the Granta slush pile, but rather as one among many
literary languages—spoken and written—in India itself. There was the signifi-
cance of literature in the imperium versus literature in the Indian context. And,
simply put, I came to want to understand the place of English in the Indian
context. I soon came to see Granta as an abstraction and distraction, rather
than a text or even context to be analyzed (at least by me).

FIELDWORK IN DELHI
The first summer I spent in Delhi as a researcher was disorienting. I wasn’t
sure how to research the literary. I mostly stayed at home at a family friend’s
apartment, reading novels under the fan and sometimes cooped up in an air-
conditioned room. This seemed safe, and I convinced myself that reading in
Delhi was the start of my fieldwork. It wasn’t really.
By the second summer, I knew I had to get outside. I took more walks,
whatever the weather. I went to the places where I felt some “sparks”—book-
shops in South Extension, Khan Market, and Connaught Place, which then led
me to more interesting ones on Asaf Ali Road, which is technically the dividing
line between “old” Delhi and “new” Delhi—the Mughal-era old city and the
British-era new one. The question of “old” and “new” has great resonance in
a postcolonial capital, with issues of tradition and modernity, precolonial and
colonial, seemingly burnished onto place names and urban forms. “Old” Delhi
and “new” Delhi are just kilometers apart; on the surface they feel quite dif-
ferent. In “new” Delhi, cars dominate as do roundabouts; you swirl around
colonial-era red sandstone buildings, past regal lawns and stately monuments.
In “old” Delhi, you walk or take cycle rickshaws, if you can bear to be pulled
along by someone else. A net of gullies leads through Chawri Bazaar, past the
Jama Masjid through to Chandni Chowk. You experience the density of popu-
lation as you walk through the lanes, which become so narrow at certain points
that if you look up, you can no longer see the sky. On the steps of the Jama
Masjid, you look across to Red Fort on one side and Chandni Chowk on the
other and still have some sense of the religious-secular-commercial relationship
sketched into the urban landscape a few centuries earlier. Now, with the Metro,
old Delhi and new Delhi are just two stops apart on the Yellow Line. The ruse
of old and new is finally being laid bare.
When I got the chance in 1998 to live in old Delhi, I jumped at it. I started
going to the Sunday morning book market in Daryaganj, a historic neighborhood
156 R. SADANA

just inside the walls of the old city. I explored the alleyways of Ansari Road and
started to take note of all the small publishing houses and book distributors. I
watched workers spill out of storefronts, standing in groups near chaat stalls or
sitting on buckling concrete steps in front of shops and businesses. I traveled
around the city more, at that time, pre-Metro, by bus and auto rickshaw or in a
six-wheeled, eight-passenger phat-phat. I carefully examined street bookstalls in a
variety of markets. What were people selling, how and which books were on display
and in which neighborhoods?
This wandering led me to start talking to booksellers and bookshop owners.
I then began peeping my head into publishing offices, talking to staff, mak-
ing appointments to interview owners. This was how I came to meet Ameeta
Maheshwari, the wife of one of the city’s most important Hindi publishers. I
later interviewed him, too, but it was in that first conversation with Ameeta
over chai and samosas that she talked to me about being more “in touch” with
one language over another at different points in her life. It was a good way to
begin thinking about the kind of multilinguality that most Indians experience
on a daily basis.
Other times I was shown around tiny offices with editorial staff typing at old
computers in attic spaces. This visual understanding of publishing also became
important as a way to open up the very idea of a book. I continued these activi-
ties and slowly started to see patterns. I would come to see how the story of
Ansari Road was linked to the development of post-Independence publishing,
and how book publishing went hand in hand with the promotion of Hindi
and English as co-official languages. I saw how the area of Daryaganj forged
the link between the material requirements of book production, due to its
proximity to the plentiful paper and binding markets of the old city and to the
distribution networks afforded by the nearby railway station.
I soon recognized Delhi as the site of the major publishing houses in English
and Hindi (from Rajkamal Prakashan and Vani Prakashan to Rupa, India Ink,
Penguin, Ravi Dayal), and this enabled me to start seeing the city as a literary
field. My wanderings started to resemble a method. I went to events at the
Sahitya Akademi, India’s National Academy of Literature, and a host of other
cultural and literary venues. At first, I relied on newspaper listings for events,
lectures, and meetings, crunched in extra small type at the bottom of pages in
newspapers such as The Times of India, the Hindustan Times (in Hindi and
English), and The Hindu. Then, as I got to know people, I got invited to
events, or often just had a sense of where to show up or whom to call. As the
writer Pankaj Mishra told me in one of my first interviews in 2001, there was
no real literary “scene” to speak of in Delhi. In some sense he was right, in
terms of there being—and this is what Mishra emphasized—the quality and
standards of writing, editing, and publishing that one found elsewhere and
were essential to creating an informed reading public leading to that somewhat
elusive literary scene. Yet, my sense was that there was something to be found
and discerned, even if it might not look the same, or feel the same, as it did
elsewhere. I started to see English in relation to the other Indian languages, or
 READING DELHI, WRITING DELHI 157

bhashas, especially when listening to writers who inhabited both worlds, such
as Gagan Gill, Nirmal Verma, Geetanjali Shree, and K. Satchidanandan. These
writers, who wrote in Hindi or Malayalam, were engrossed in the modernisms
and experiments of their own languages, but were also fluent in English. It
was often the relationships they had to different languages that became the
focal points of our conversations. It became a way for me to understand how
English was more than just a colonial language, how these writers, in fact, had
helped indigenize the language; and yet I also came to understand how their
literary production could only ever be in a language other than English, or
more precisely, their own mother tongue. These life histories and reflections
gave meaning to the ideological debates about English and Hindi that were
pervasive in Indian letters precisely because theirs was not a crude nationalism
or quest for authenticity.
The question of cultural authenticity in particular—which languages could
ever be considered truly Indian ones—became linked to what I came to rec-
ognize as the multiple hierarchies of language, between English and Hindi as
national languages and different manifestations of elites, between English and
the other bhashas, and between Hindi and the other bhashas. There were, of
course, hierarchies among the bhashas as well, often depending on issues of
class, caste, and script at increasingly local levels. This mapping of language
hierarchies made me see the field of Indian literature as one of competing
authenticities. I came to see literary language as a live wire and the global liter-
ary stage as a true fiction.
When I had conversations with publishers such as Ashok Maheshwari or
Ravi Dayal, who offered their own linguistic ethnographies of the city, a map
of the literary field began to emerge. As I connected my knowledge of texts to
places and people, I began not only to read differently but also to see how a
variety of literary practitioners were connected to each other and to recurring
notions, realities, and moralities of place. Most of all, I started to see how dif-
ferent languages stood for different things to different people, and what was
being created emotionally, intellectually, and politically—on the page, in their
lives, and in society—because of it. I came to see that my real “object,” or
rather, what mattered to people most, was their thoughts and feelings about
language, what I came to think of as linguistic subjectivities.
I got my first glimpse of this feeling for language as it related to the city and its
forms in two novels—Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi (1940) and Anita Desai’s In
Custody (1984). These novels were interesting to me because they were laments
for the lost Urdu culture of old Delhi, the walled seventeenth-century city
known as Shajahanabad. And yet both novels, written 44 years apart, were writ-
ten originally in English. I found this curious, and it gave me a clue about what
I was looking for in my interviews—the complexity of people’s sentiments about
language, their own contradictory feelings that could play out over a lifetime,
and how sentiments related to places they lived or were from or wanted to be in.
I soon moved from the institutional centers of literature to the outskirts of
the city, where writers can actually afford to live. I took long auto rickshaw rides
158 R. SADANA

across the bridges over the Yamuna River to East Delhi—a trip that I now make
by the Delhi Metro. I was drawn to one apartment block in particular that
housed several of the most prominent Hindi writers. Why did where they live
matter? I knew it did; I just wasn’t sure how. I slowly started to piece together
linguistic and literary locations in the city. The idea of cultural authenticity that
had such an obvious political dimension in literature in English versus the bha-
shas became more complicated when writers spoke of their own sense of place
in the literary worlds of which they were part.
The question of linguistic authenticity became more intimate and personal
in my conversations with writers such as Geetanjali Shree. I met her many times
over several years, always at her home, and we talked about her writing, but
also about where she lived and where she was from, the languages she came to
know, the ones she discarded, and how she tried to make literary peace each
day at her desk with the one she kept.
Shree defined to me her “use of Hindi” by the way in which she writes
“up to the limits” of a particular idiom. Her writing, then, is also about, per-
haps chiefly about, her own dialogue with the Hindi language, a dialogue that
partly occurs in English. When I told Shree that I had read both the Hindi
and English versions of her first novel, Mai, and found that each gave me a
different feeling, she started to describe how English and Hindi offer different
emotional registers in her text:

Many people say the English translation [of Mai] is better, that it is light and has a
bounce to it that the Hindi doesn’t have. When you are saying things like “I love
you” in English and compare it to the Hindi—Main tum se pyaar karti houn—the
Hindi is heavy in comparison. It depends what you are talking about of course.
The Hindi I write in is not a learned Hindi but the Hindi I grew up in, the Hindi
I spoke to my mother.5

In the case of the English-language editor and publisher Ravi Dayal, I met
him at his home in Sujan Singh Park in central Delhi. A neighborhood of
stately red-brick buildings, we sat in his English-style drawing room in the
English-speaking heart of the city. It’s not that people don’t speak Hindi there,
but it is the orientation of the area that gives it this linguistic bent. What was
interesting about Dayal was gleaned in his life history; he was a boy from the
hills essentially, and grew up with a double-consciousness, linguistic and cul-
tural. Dayal compared the dexterity of living in multiple languages with the
ability to straddle two civilizations: “To be familiar with Indian classical music
and Bach and Beethoven at the same time—some would say what happens is
that you don’t know either culture very well, that it’s always surface, a man-
nerism, but that’s not really true.” I took this to mean that Dayal did not think
of himself as English in taste and Indian in blood. And I also took it to mean
that what was “Indian” and what was “English” were not static cultural traits
or practices to begin with.6
What emerged from my interviews, then, were a series of correspondences
between “old” Delhi and “new” Delhi, this side of the Yamuna River and that,
 READING DELHI, WRITING DELHI 159

north Delhi and south Delhi, Delhi and beyond. The people I interviewed and
got to know over several years had their own linguistic and literary geogra-
phies; their stories became central to my descriptions of Delhi’s literary field.
In my reading of Delhi, my conversations with publishers, writers, and oth-
ers, and my analysis of texts suggest how the meanings of a language, from
the everyday to the ideological, emerge from the places in which language is
located and lived through. In this sense, individuals’ “feeling for language” is a
prism through which I came to analyze contemporary society.

THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF LITERATURE

The kernel of my field research experience that I carried around in my head
for several years was what I witnessed at a public translation conference at the
Sahitya Akademi. It could be thought of as a “dead fact” that came alive for me
during the process of my research.7 I had been in Delhi, interviewing Hindi
and English publishers, writers, booksellers, and others for some time, so I
already had a lay of the land. This “lay of the land” was understood not only
from the interviews but also from the routes I took to get to those interviews
and often what I found along the way. It was about how I came to know that
these were the people I should be interviewing, information I often gleaned
in casual conversation at various venues and events in town. Those events and
venues I discovered by reading newspapers and talking to people—friends,
scholars, and booksellers to start with. The “lay of the land” mostly came from
encounters I had outside any formal protocols. But those encounters at the
same time led me to the formal ones I needed to know about.
When I went to events at the Sahitya Akademi, it often seemed like the
public discussions and talks there were a distillation of many of the issues of
authenticity and language that were to become central to my project. In this
instance, I happened to hear8 the Bengali translator of Vikram Seth’s novel A
Suitable Boy give a provocative speech whereby she questioned the authentic-
ity of what the Hindi translator had done in his translation of the novel. She
chided the Hindi translator for having deleted passages from the original in
his Hindi version, and because those passages (about the skinning of cows
in relation to shoemaking) could be offensive to Hindus, she accused him
of pandering to a presumed upper-caste Hindu audience. The debate that
ensued became a launching pad for a discussion of the levels of authenticity at
play in the Indian literary field and the places that Hindi, English, and Bengali
occupied in that field: literary one-upmanship, forms of distinction, and com-
peting levels of authenticity. The Bengali translator was not only giving a pro-
fessional admonition to a fellow translator but also implicitly commenting on
how the Hindi belt has been more prone to communalism and giving in to
the forces of it.
I analyzed what transpired at this event, in the heart of Delhi’s literary world,
at an institution that managed and produced various hierarchies of language;
and I juxtaposed those insights with my analysis of the Hindi translation of
160 R. SADANA

A Suitable Boy in light of its English original and the concerns that the Bengali
translator had raised. I compared the English and Hindi versions of the texts
and found the omissions she had generally referred to in her talk but had not
specified. My task was a socially embedded literary analysis whose ultimate
goal was to understand how linguistic hierarchies operate through literature
and literary discourse in a postcolonial, independent India. I never set out to
write about A Suitable Boy, but its significance revealed itself in the everyday
politics of authenticity that happen in Delhi and are relevant to the national
and global literary stages of Indian literature. It also speaks to the everyday lit-
erary realities of translation and writing itself. The meaning of English in India
is of course infused with its colonial past, and yet, the everyday interactions
Indians have with English have much more to do with its relationship to the
other languages in its midst (in this case Bengali and Hindi) than any colonial
relationship per se.
If embarking on fieldwork threw up my idea of which texts to study, it also
opened up new arenas of questioning, and eventually, new texts in particular
social and political contexts that called out for analysis. The more interviews
I did, with publishers, booksellers, and writers, the more I saw connections
between the geography of the city and its literary outlets. These connections
also illuminated a relationship between public and private spaces that revealed
itself in layers, with the most public being bookshops lining Asaf Ali Road, for
instance, or in south Delhi markets; the next layer being literary institutions
like the Sahitya Akademi or the offices of publishers, which were more private
than the bookshops; and the final layer being people’s homes, both writers
and publishers.
The more research I did, the more my methods adapted to what I was see-
ing and listening to, and the more I saw how language ideologies existed not
only in political realms but also in everyday life. Fieldwork became a method to
link concrete lives to the politics of language and the production of literature.
Literature reflects and represents, but it is also produced and consumed under
particular social and political conditions. I listened to people and conversed
with them. I took my presence in the city seriously and became attentive to a
range of encounters in literary and nonliterary milieus. My point was never to
juxtapose the methods of ethnography with literary analysis for some kind of
layering effect, interpretation upon interpretation. Instead, my method was to
crosscut between ethnography and the study of literary texts. My aim was to
move across the literary field, from text to institution to publisher to author
or translator, highlighting and expanding on key ethnographic moments and
milieus. My ethnographic approach was not only a method, but became a vision
and argument for how to understand English in India and how to discern the
relationship between literature and politics in the world more generally.
The ethnography of literature, as I was starting to define it, was writing
about the places, people, and institutions that produce literature and the con-
nections between them. And it was about the resultant debates over cultural
authenticity—questions such as whose language was the real language of the
 READING DELHI, WRITING DELHI 161

people, which language could or should be used to express Indian social

realities—that were alive and central to a larger understanding about national
and regional identity formation, as well as India’s place in the world.
Rather than fetishize “the field,” I argue instead that the process of under-
taking fieldwork defined my research problem in ways that would have been
impossible if I had focused exclusively on texts and their contexts. In the pro-
cess of doing fieldwork on postcolonial literature in Delhi, “literature” became
publishers, booksellers, writers, translators, and literary officials. I created a
new method—the ethnography of literature—that connected texts not only to
the contexts of the city’s linguistic histories and geographic spaces, but to the
linguistic histories and subjectivities of the publishers, writers, booksellers and
others who are players and producers of the literary field.

CONCLUSION
The generic term “fieldwork” does not quite do justice to the kinds of life
experiences that undergird what historian James Clifford has called “an unusu-
ally sensitive method.”9 The experiential aspect of fieldwork—participant
observation—has been a hallmark of anthropological fieldwork, and as Clifford
writes, it “obliges its practitioners to experience, at a bodily as well as intel-
lectual level, the vicissitudes of translation.”10 Here the researcher’s experience
of place itself becomes the beginning of an act of translation. Clifford further
defines the practice of ethnography as “producing knowledge from an intense,
intersubjective engagement.” One could also take this to mean: You are your
method, and you are part of your research, and yet it is not about you. Instead,
you are an instrument or tool that not only enables the fieldwork experience
but also defines its parameters, akin to the way an archive might delimit a his-
torian’s research object. This dynamic, and personal investment in people and
places, has been both the promise and problem of anthropological fieldwork
for some time.
In her ethnography of television, Screening Culture, Viewing Politics (1998),
Purnima Mankekar writes that for her, the purpose of ethnography is not
merely to add to the empirical record of places (the old job description of the
anthropologist), but rather that ethnography, and by implication its method,
is a “strategy.” Mankekar explains in her introduction that she not only could
analyze television programs but also “must extend to the spaces occupied by
television in the daily lives and practices of viewers.” Her research objective
is to understand how the nationalist narratives found in television programs
interact with people, especially women and women’s identities vis-à-vis their
roles at home, relations with others, and places in society. The spaces where
women watch television, and where Mankekar carried out her fieldwork, are,
she writes, “the contexts in which texts (television programs) are interpreted.”
And therefore, she cannot delink text from context.11
In my research of Delhi’s literary geographies, I was not aiming for an eth-
nography of readers, of which there is a distinguished tradition in the sociology
162 R. SADANA

of literature12 and even an ethnography of reading.13 I see my own method

as more of an ethnography of literature rather than a sociology of one. In an
ethnography of literature, the very production of texts, over time and space, is
both anchored and brought to life in a set of people and institutions. Following
Mankekar, I see fieldwork itself as a strategy, in my case to excavate the levels
of cultural authenticity I saw at play in the debates over Indian literature and
identity. It was to see how the everyday politics of language undergirded liter-
ary discourse and production in the contemporary world.
In India, it was seeing books being sold on pavements and at stoplights,
often by children who could not read, that initially brought me into the
realities of language, class, and caste. This reality seemed less abstract than
the pages of Granta, and yet what I was witnessing was also a kind of
abstraction. Capital cities after all are about the projection of power and
order. Fieldwork has its own set of illusions, based on how you frame what
you see and how you understand your encounters. Now as I ride the Metro,
I see the literary map of Delhi I had carefully plotted whiz by me. Places
and people are connected more easily and quickly than before. The cultural
geography of the city is changing. What keeps me there is the sense of move-
ment and contingency.

NOTES
1. See Rashmi Sadana, English Heart, Hindi Heartland: The Political Life of
Literature in India.
2. See Sarah Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers and the Global Literary
Marketplace for a full accounting of postcolonial book prizes.
3. Author interview with David Godwin, January 23, 2009, in Jaipur, India.
4. For more on the concept of “being there” in contemporary debates within
anthropology, see John Borneman and Abdellah Hammoudi’s edited vol-
ume, Being There: The Fieldwork Encounter and the Making of Truth,
which argues for the experiential encounter of fieldwork over what they
see as the rise of textualism in the discipline.
5. Author interview with Geetanjali Shree, February 2001, in Delhi, India.
6. Author interview with Ravi Dayal, February 2001, in Delhi, India.
7. Thanks to Kavita Panjabi for her framing of this part of my research as
such.
8. I say “happened to hear,” but of course fieldwork is about repetition,
being there again and again, when much of the time nothing really striking
happens. I had been to countless events at the Sahitya Akademi and heard
dozens of lectures before stumbling on to this one. When I did hear this
one, I was immediately able to link it to other things people had said in
similar forums over the years. I was able to gauge its relevance, worth, and
uniqueness in the larger literary discourse.
9. Clifford, “On Ethnographic Authority,” 119.
10. Clifford.
 READING DELHI, WRITING DELHI 163

11. Mankekar, Screening Culture, Viewing Politics, 20.

12. For example, in her comprehensive study of Nigerian novels, Wendy
Griswold (Bearing Witness: Readers, Writers, and the Novel in Nigeria, 8)
writes of the “Nigerian fiction complex-made up of poorly integrated
parts, of markets and organization that are simultaneously global and
parochial, with people entering and exiting all the time.” Griswold neither
frames her research as fieldwork nor her study as an ethnography per se, but
her data includes extensive and multiple interviews with readers, writers,
and publishers. At the same time, her focus is not on a single place of pro-
duction of books and literary discourse. Rather, her invocations of place
are through the novels themselves and their representations of Nigeria,
long passages that are wonderfully weaved throughout the book and ana-
lyzed in juxtaposition to her interviews.
13. See Jonathan Boyarin’s edited collection, The Ethnography of Reading for
a series of articles on anthropologists’ engagement with textuality and cul-
tural constructions of reading.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Borneman, John, and Abdellah Hammoudi, eds. 2009. Being There: The Fieldwork
Encounter and the Making of Truth. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Boyarin, Jonathan, ed. 1992. The Ethnography of Reading. Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press.
Brouillette, Sarah. 2007. Postcolonial Writers and the Global Literary Marketplace.
London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Clifford, James. 2007. On Ethnographic Authority. Representations 2(Spring):
118–146.
Griswold, Wendy. 2000. Bearing Witness: Readers, Writers, and the Novel in Nigeria.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Mankekar, Purnima. 1999. Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of
Television, Womanhood, and Nation in Postcolonial India. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Sadana, Rashmi. 2012. English Heart, Hindi Heartland: The Political Life of Literature
in India. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
 PART III

Medium and Form

 CHAPTER 9

Daily Life and Digital Reach: Place-based

Research and History’s Transnational Turn

Lara Putnam

Academic historians are crossing borders as never before—or at least, their nar-
ratives are. Researchers are tracking ideas, people, publications, and commodi-
ties across territorial boundaries, no longer content to leave “where from?”
or “where to?” unasked. Whereas once the topic of many historical studies
could be summed up with a single national modifier—French artists, Dutch
women, Venezuelan exports, Nicaraguan popular culture—today nationwide
coverage and national closure are no longer presumed. Increasingly, we pursue
networks, circuits, and connection.
The collective shift has responded in part to critiques of the epistemological
errors of “methodological nationalism,” in part to ethnographers’ and sociolo-
gists’ accounts of the importance of the transnational fields created by over-
lapping circuits of migration, communication, and capital in the present day.
These interdisciplinary drivers of history’s “transnational turn” then received
key aid from technological shifts. Indeed, although the theoretical case for
transnational history has been under discussion for nearly two decades, most
historians’ practice remained anchored to subnational study. But in recent
years, the linked expansion of source digitization and web-based search has
made us radically more able to track connections and flows via written sources
regardless of place of publication, catalogued topic, or archive of origin—and
median practice has begun to change.

My thanks to George Reid Andrews, Shalini Puri, and Steve J. Stern for discussions
and feedback on this chapter.

L. Putnam ( )
Department of History, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, USA

© The Author(s) 2016 167

S. Puri, D.A. Castillo (eds.), Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-92834-7_9
168 L. PUTNAM

A world of possibility has opened up—but an untheorized-yet-vital tradition

of historical fieldwork is at risk. This chapter begins by reviewing the heyday
of historical fieldwork: two generations across which techniques of archive-
based social historical reconstruction were applied to societies outside the
North Atlantic core. Much, although certainly not all, of this work was done
by researchers trained in institutions within that North Atlantic core, whatever
their birthplace, and thus cross-border transit and intercultural residence were
commonplace accompaniments to international archival research. Within US
academia, the expansion of social history toward international targets found
crucial support in the federally funded area studies paradigm, which across
the Cold War era both valued the accumulation of place-specific expertise and
provided material support to sustain it, from language training to field research
grants to international scholarly exchange.
In the heyday of this overseas expansion of social historical inquiry, the
1980s and 1990s, there was spirited dialogue between anthropologists and
historians on multiple issues: hidden disciplinary geopolitics; the risks of teleol-
ogy, whether Marxian or neoliberal; the proper understandings of class, gen-
der, race, and ethnicity. Yet historians chose not to embrace as relevant to our
own practice the debate over the epistemology and implications of fieldwork
that was simultaneously under way. The fact that in-depth historical research in
notarial archives or parish records required long residence in place in the pres-
ent, as we worked to reconstruct the past, seemed to go without saying and
require nothing to be said.
Times have changed and that conversation needs to begin. The changes
under way in our discipline are shifting historians’ goals and methods in ways
that threaten to displace place-based research. By “place-based” I mean two
things: research guided by place, in the sense of seeking multidimensional
knowledge about a particular society, and research conducted in place, requir-
ing actual residence in the locale under study. The two are distinct, of course,
but are frequently synergistic. Each has been central to historians’ practice, and
each seems poised to become less so.
The drivers of change are external and internal. Area studies infrastructure,
hit by the one-two-three punch of left-wing critique, right-wing suspicion,
and federal budget crises, is defunded and decaying. Intellectual agendas that
cut across traditional “areas”—that highlight connections between Santiago de
Chile and Shanghai, say, rather than similarities between Santiago and Buenos
Aires—have accelerating cachet. Those agendas demand information gather-
ing at a global scale, which is now feasible as never before. For historians,
information means, first and foremost, texts produced in the past. The rapid
digitization of a long century of print production from around the world (its
chronological bookends set by the spread of printing presses and the horizon
of copyright protection) places extraordinary new tools in the hands of his-
torians who seek to trace border-crossing processes. Full-text search of mas-
sive web-based holdings, from Google Books to JSTOR and far beyond, can
instantly uncover all mentions of a particular individual, phrase, commodity, or
 DAILY LIFE AND DIGITAL REACH 169

town, tracing far-flung webs of connection and communication utterly invis-

ible via analog search.
Our new digital reach means that international presence and international
history writing are becoming uncoupled. From one angle, this is an exciting
leap forward. From another, it is an unacknowledged return to the past: it
replicates a key feature of metropolitan scholars’ practice in a bygone imperial
era. What risks being lost in this moment of twinned turns? Which choices in
regard to research design, method, and scholarly communication may help
build those pieces back in? These questions combine ethical with methodologi-
cal and interpretive dimensions. Do US-based scholars who move—literally
or figuratively—through multiple parts of the world in transnational projects
need to stop and listen along the way? Do they have an obligation to engage
with the scholars for whom those places are a daily reality, their histories a
lifelong mission rather than passing interest? When our research follows things
on the move, how can we also stay put long enough to report on the impact
on those who stay behind? To which “real people” are transnational historians
accountable? What spaces and practices can bring those people’s priorities into
dialogue with academics’ agendas?
The examples of area studies research and international social history sug-
gest that learning about place and learning in place—and through them, being
forced to think critically about your own place—can provide vital responses
to these dilemmas. But will transnational history in a digital age develop a
commitment to place-based research? There is no reason that it cannot, but
there is no reason it necessarily will. We need to take cognizance of the mul-
tiple ways place-based research matters, of how learning of place, learning in
place, and learning our own place go hand in hand, in order to ensure that
the historical profession’s transnational turn does not become, in practice, a
neo-imperial whirl.1

THE BRIEF HEYDAY OF INTERNATIONAL FIELDWORK

IN HISTORY: 1970–2010?

Social history originated with metropolitan scholars studying their own soci-
eties: England, France, the USA, Italy. Social historians pursued new ques-
tions and pioneered new methods for answering them. Usually the methods
required painstaking aggregation of data dispersed across documents,
aggregation both quantitative and qualitative. The best work found syner-
gies in combining the two. Pioneering social historians spent long hours in
archives compiling grain harvest totals or parish birth and death records.
Explanations for previously recognized historical developments, from rural
unrest to religious wars to economic growth, had to be rethought in light of
those reconstructions.
Before this early- to mid-twentieth-century social historical shift, history
had essentially meant the history of state formation, and thus all historical
sources sat in metropoles almost by definition. Only powerful and stable
170 L. PUTNAM

states, which had built centralized bureaucracies that curated the documentary
record such states required and produced, were understood to have histories
worth writing.
“Bottom up” social history embraced a different target field of subjects, one
not delimited to a small set of polities. People who had been ruled by unstable
states, shifting states, colonial states, or failed states were now recognized as
the protagonists of demographic, economic, social, and cultural processes just
as worthy of historical investigation, maybe more so. The range of sources that
had been made fruitful for metropolitan social history were discovered to have
counterparts in many parts of the world. In some cases, such documentation
was poorly preserved and partial, in other cases far more copious than any Euro-
American example. There were parish records everywhere the Catholic Church
had spread, from sixteenth-century Angola to twentieth-century Michoacán.
There were notarial archives and local officials’ tallies from across vast empires,
whether Ottoman, Hapsburg, or Qing. Lands once governed by Islamic or
Iberian rulers offered judicial records far more detailed than anything available
in the Anglophone common law realm.
The turn to such materials was not everywhere led by external scholars: in
some places, quite the contrary. The gathering tide of the social historical turn
coincided, for much of the world, with the post–World War II era of decoloni-
zation. As new governments were created, intellectuals and leaders within those
states embraced the task of writing national histories, often foregrounding tra-
jectories of rule. By the 1960s and 1970s, social histories written of and from
West Africa and South Asia and beyond joined those being written of and from
Europe, North America, and Latin America (where the new techniques were
embraced by local scholars eager to supplant the complacent historia patria of
that region’s postcolonial—nineteenth century, in this case—national elites).
In sum, by the 1980s, metropolitan researchers were routinely applying
social historical techniques to reconstruct past processes in faraway places,
which meant going there. Meanwhile nonmetropolitan scholars were pursuing
similar agendas through similar methods, combining time in local or national
archives in the place they were studying (and often were from) with—to the
degree funds permitted—time in the archives of former colonial centers. All
told, historians were in motion.
Let’s pause to consider the modal case: scholars heading off to research
the past of places distant from their societies of origin. Neither the complexi-
ties nor the generativity of this pattern—that is, of the experiential dimen-
sion of international social historical research—drew explicit notice, at least in
print form. Historians had some recognition of the need for critical awareness
within intercultural/postcolonial research, especially since as anthropology was
moving to study the past of the same range of places, the degree of overlap
between the disciplines was growing.2 So as anthropology questioned issues
of experience, power, and representation in fieldwork in the 1980s and 1990s,
some historians read along. But in general, historians did not treat the quotid-
ian experiences ancillary to archival research as something to be mentioned
 DAILY LIFE AND DIGITAL REACH 171

in footnotes or analyzed as methodology. Oral history indeed saw a boom in

fruitful theorization in that era, a time of heightened critical examination of
disciplinary truth claims more broadly. Yet the experiential learning that went
along with the residence-in-place demanded by international archival research
went largely unremarked.
Perhaps it was documentary historians’ sense that they were researching
a past about whose details and dynamics all living people were equally igno-
rant that naturalized the lack of debate within the profession over the possible
impact of foreign researchers’ particular ignorance as they arrived to dive in
to the archives. But to an objective eye, the scale of that ignorance was huge.
Northern historians heading off to research in the Global South, Western his-
torians heading off to research in the East, Brooklyn-raised researchers head-
ing off to Bremen were outsiders ignorant of many things in the places they
landed, quite apart from the ignorance of archival contents that they and local
residents shared. A locally raised 30-year-old had 30 years of accumulated
knowledge on topics ranging from the subtleties of language and intonation,
gesture, and expectation to the basic contours of partisan politics and regional
landscapes, labor systems and economic tides. A few years of book learning at
a distance offered no substitute, even in regard to the baseline contours, much
less in regard to the subtleties.
After six months of research, an outside researcher might well know more
about the notarial archives’ contents than anyone since the scribes who
inscribed them. But what other things had he or she learned along the way?
What realms of ignorance remained? And how did that new knowledge and
those persistent gaps shape the interpretation of the archival findings that she
or he then built? In order to find out, you need to track scholars down and ask,
because the importance of this kind of learning—of what we might think of
as a kind of “ethnographic dividend” that even non-ethnographers gain from
residence in place—was, among historians, rarely mentioned in print. As noted,
the disciplines of history and anthropology were intensely in dialogue in the
1980s and 1990s, with generative results. But it was a dialogue about concep-
tualizations, analytic vocabulary, and disciplinary divisions of labor. It was not
about the fact that historians were now increasingly themselves “in the field.”3
I once asked pioneering social historian Steve Stern whether his experi-
ence of living in Peru in the late 1970s had impacted his interpretation of
the sixteenth-century notarial sources he explored there, which formed the
basis for his landmark 1982 book, Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of
Spanish Conquest: Huamanga to 1640.4 What most struck him across those
long months in a very new place, he replied, was the way logics of reciprocity
structured everyday life, from the largest to the smallest exchange. His months
in the field were long, indeed stretching into years, because the methodology
he was enacting was painstaking. He sat in the chilly highland archives amid
thick tomes of scribe-written legajos and copied out longhand the details of
transactions over land, tribute, labor obligations. One might note the inef-
ficiencies of this artisanal process: or one might give thanks that it held him in
172 L. PUTNAM

Lima and Ayacucho long enough for his interpretive practice to benefit from
the ethnographic dividend of everyday life. Without the lived experience of
the specific, encompassing nature of reciprocity in the highlands, his reading
of the dynamics through which sixteenth-century Andean leaders approached
the challenges of Spanish rule, and ultimately found themselves transformed by
them, would necessarily have been different.
To the extent that technological change enables historians to decouple
information gathering from residence in place, such experiential learning is
imperiled. Does that matter? Having gained some sense of where international
research in history was coming from, let us now look at where it is going. Let
us explore the intense and in many ways invaluable impact of web-based access
to digitized sources on historians’ practice.

TRANSNATIONAL TOPICS AND DIGITAL REACH

In the coming pages you will read nothing about the kinds of cutting-edge
projects and innovative methodologies most often referenced under the head-
ings of “digital humanities” or “digital history.” Novel applications and skills
matter in their own right, of course, but what transforms quotidian practice are
technologies that transform quotidian practice. For historians, whose disciplin-
ary epistemology has long been premised on gathering as many contemporary
sources as possible linked to a particular topic in the past, and using knowledge
gleaned from each additional source to refine critical understanding of the oth-
ers, mass digitization and web-based search have been game changers. Finding
and reading is what we do, with occasional forays into tallying up. We can
now find things without knowing where to find them, which has never before
been true. Not only is research at a distance increasingly easy, but also tracing
things (people, ideas, commodities, publications) across multiple unpredict-
able locales has gone from extraordinarily difficult to routine.
What are the key affordances of web-based search for historians? Firstly,
speed. Web-based search offers near-instantaneous access to an ever-increasing
range of secondary sources (sources written by scholars or others about the
process of interest) and primary sources (sources generated by the process
directly: eyewitness accounts, protagonists’ declarations, ships’ manifests, birth
records). Contrast typing into a search box with the full course of its analog
equivalent, in which you go to a library to look in the card catalog to find the
name and location of a book that you search out on the shelves to look through
the index to find the right pages to look at the footnotes to see which primary
source might be useful, before—in the best-case scenario—heading back to
the catalog to find the location of copy of that newspaper/volume/document
collection before trekking toward different shelves to pull down the first exem-
plar from a multivolume set and settling in to begin, page by page, to search.
The importance of catalogs and indices in that account underlines the
impact of a second characteristic of digital search: granularity. Metadata remain
important, indeed, for certain digital humanities projects fundamental. But
 DAILY LIFE AND DIGITAL REACH 173

improvements in optical character recognition software means that the most

minor mention of your topic in digitized sources can now be discoverable
through full-text search, even if no one would ever have thought to flag it. It
is this characteristic that lets us look for things without knowing where to find
them and makes it possible for digital sources to reveal transborder connections
that no single scholar, however erudite, would ever have thought to attempt
to seek out. Of course, the flood of mentions that may be returned from a text
search of even a single newspaper database, much less an aggregated database
like JSTOR or Google Books or the Digital Public Library of America, is huge.
Historians have well-honed techniques for dealing with scant sources, from
triangulation to “reading against the grain.” We have not yet theorized how
to handle overabundance. As literary scholar Ted Underwood observes, “In a
database containing millions of sentences, full-text search can turn up twenty
examples of anything.”5 How to know how to weigh their significance? Here is
another conversation that needs to begin.
All of this would be of little import if digitization were only impacting a nar-
row chronological or geographical slice of the world’s past. It is not. Archives
and libraries from across ever more of the globe are posting not just print
items but manuscripts, images, maps. The digitization of local newspapers is
underway nearly everywhere papers have been printed. Ancestry.com adds
birth, marriage, and death records, passenger manifests, and census sheets from
across the globe at a dizzying rate. The portal now includes not only tens of
thousands of data sets (each one with, routinely, millions of records each) from
the USA, Canada, and Europe, but also multiple hundreds of data sets from
Oceania, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Such primary sources are not them-
selves history, but they are the building blocks of historical inquiry. They offer
new ways to answer certain questions historians have long been asking and the
potential to answer other questions we had not even dreamed we could.
The speed, granularity, and reach of digitization together mean that national
or regional expertise no longer functions as gatekeeper, a requisite or channel
for historical research. You do not need to know much about a place to find
sources from it, about it, or about things that passed through it. For historians,
in whose research practice national archives, national libraries, and national
historiographies have always been crucial, this is a fundamental change.
This does not necessarily mean place disappears from our research. On
the contrary, digital reach can allow us to engage place in ways both more
intentional and more precise. Rather than presuming that national borders
reflect the optimal scope of information gathering, or that world regions
defined by Cold War calculations reflect the optimal frame for interpreta-
tion, we can treat the geographic contours of an investigation as an empiri-
cal question, to be answered as the first step of an inquiry and fine-tuned
as it progresses. Which locales interacted most closely in a particular era?
A study of New Orleans at the dawn of the nineteenth century might be
framed along the refugee flows and capital flight that tied the port to Saint
Domingue/Haiti and Cuba. A study of New Orleans in the early twentieth
174 L. PUTNAM

century might follow the connections to Panama, Costa Rica, and Jamaica
that United Fruit’s banana steamers underwrote, while a study of the 1950s
would note that the same export and same fleet now tied New Orleans to
northern Honduras above all. Indeed some of the most thoughtful theoriza-
tions of what can and should characterize “transnational history” point to
this: a combination of spatially intentional research design and multiscalar
investigation, which seeks to assess linkages between causal dynamics at the
local, regional, and supranational levels.6
So digital search and attention to place can go hand in hand. But the decou-
pling of research practice from national/regional expertise on the one hand
and physical presence on the other can also allow researchers to remain igno-
rant of place in unprecedented ways. Indeed, today one can be pretty darn
ignorant about somewhere and still accumulate enough facts to write about
it. The kinds of contextual knowledge that non-digital search foisted upon us
whether we wanted it or not—the contextual knowledge gleaned from read-
ing the headlines on the dozens of newspaper pages that didn’t contain the
information we were looking for, or the dozen books we had to read in order
to begin seeking information about one battle, or the dozens of street vendors
we passed on the way to the archive—this contextual knowledge, unheralded
product of the inefficiencies of analog search, is increasingly stripped away.
Of course, history has not yet become a desk discipline, and archival bona
fides remain valued enough that it will not do so any time soon. Yet the total
time individual researchers spend in individual archives has already shrunk, both
because some digitized holdings have been made web available and because
documents are now captured so quickly via digital photography. As one col-
league at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica reports, only half joking:
these days if you see a graduate student from the USA in the archive in Spanish
Town, she spends four days photographing documents and then explains, if
you happen to ask, that she is leaving for Ceylon tomorrow. Why the visit at
all? is a reasonable question. Citing archival sources still confers crucial prestige
among historians, but this is increasingly a case of collective self-deception: we
take such cites to signal a kind of immersive fieldwork experience that ever-
fewer among us can or do make time for.7
Implicitly historians are accounting for the new efficiencies when, for our-
selves or our students, we promote projects that would have seemed unthink-
ably ambitious five or ten years ago. But can the knowledge needed to make
sense of those documents actually be absorbed any faster than before? Think
about the contrast between the speed of information gathering—which tech-
nology has so accelerated, for primary and secondary sources alike—and the
speed of information processing. Within quantitative analysis, the latter has also
been enormously accelerated by technology. But within qualitative analysis,
information processing depends on accumulated understanding that cannot be
simply sped in the same way.
Many of the changes above reflect efficiencies generated by decoupling infor-
mation from its physical form, physical form that required walking along library
 DAILY LIFE AND DIGITAL REACH 175

shelves or reading documents in the archive where they landed. Increasingly,

we don’t go to information: information comes to us. Yet these same efficien-
cies bring new disparities. Not everyone has a laptop and wifi. Not everyone
has access to JSTOR, to say nothing of for-profit databases. Meanwhile, some
of the scholarly practices that previously worked to counteract, or at least make
visible, disparities, are being eroded. The real-world friction of seeking infor-
mation in physical form generates light as well as heat. If we are going to leave
that practice behind, we had best think hard about what we are losing.8

PLACE-BASED RESEARCH: AWKWARD ENCOUNTERS

AND EVERYDAY LIFE

What does daily life in the place under study offer to researchers whose
topic of study is not daily life in that place? Many things. Residence “in the
field” imposes awareness of a longer chronology. Cities are palimpsests, vis-
ibly marked by layers of history. Those studying the present in place cannot
ignore that place’s past; those studying the past in place cannot ignore that
place’s present. Study in situ also makes us more likely to recognize in-country
scholars, who might be invisible on the global stage as seen from Northern
institutions. Visiting researchers, if they know what’s good for them, show
up at local universities and listen to what’s going on. They talk to people who
have forgotten more about their topics than they will ever know. They present
their own research and risk derision, distrust, or disinterest. Each reaction has
something to teach.
The same is true of conversations more broadly. As Shalini Puri notes,
“When a researcher reads in a library, nobody is reading her back. When one
reads in the field, one is constantly being scripted, being made the object of
a countergaze, and is thereby forced to confront not only one’s geographical
but also one’s historical location.”9 The experience of being asked to justify
your research by people whose story you have assigned yourself the right to
tell should be awkward. You have in fact overstepped your bounds; you do have
some explaining to do. Such encounters make evident the geopolitics of knowl-
edge. They also teach lessons not just ethical, but substantive. Do your inter-
pretations diverge from your interlocutors’, your priorities look different from
theirs? If you are lucky, people will put into words what they are thinking: why
has she come all this way, spending all that money, to study that, and yet seem
not to care about this? The point is not that they are necessarily right. They are
not sole owners of their place’s multiple truths. But dissonance between their
judgment and yours invariably points to something worth knowing.
Corrections are common, and essential. A single crystallizing anecdote can
show up your chosen categories of analysis as merely your particular categories
of practice.10 And so if you are going to use nonuniversal analytic terms—as
all terms are—perhaps there could be some utility in using terms closer to the
society you are studying, even if far downstream from there. Those terms may
176 L. PUTNAM

still mark an improvement. Let’s be honest: the privileged insight conferred by

total ignorance plus graduate training is likely overstated.
Not long ago, I realized that my first two books both end with a vignette
in which I recount being confronted, in a casual conversation, by how far
my categories of analysis were from the self-understanding of individuals
within the communities I was studying. So critical were those encounters to
my understanding of my topic, I see in retrospect, that I felt compelled to
break the “fourth wall” of academic history and speak directly about them
to my readers.11
Those two recorded examples reflect a broader, ongoing, quotidian engage-
ment that was fundamental to my research process—shaping both questions
asked and answers heard—yet is nowhere mentioned in my formal discussions
of sources or methods. Research in place feeds a kind of untheorized herme-
neutic circle through which one continually refines one’s awareness of things
one might wish to understand, and finds out, by taking lurching baby steps in
not-well-planned directions, how far away understanding lies. With some trepi-
dation, I’ll give two other examples, so fleeting that they would likely never
make it into print except in the present essay.
When I was 15 and learning Spanish for the first time, I lived as an exchange
student in Caracas. One day I painted my short fingernails bright red, and
my host sister responded with a sniff: “Uñas de cachifa.” Servant’s nails, she
explained; clearly not a compliment. I did my best to learn. But when a few
days later I tried to use my new vocabulary word in the kitchen, my host sis-
ter’s widened eyes warned me to a halt. Never say cachifa in front of the maid,
she scolded later. My host sister’s casual use of the insult, and then urgent
correction as to when not to use it, stuck with me. If pushed to analyze the
phrase uñas de cachifa, I might suggest that it captures both the intersectional
construction of class, gender, and respectability by the Venezuelan elite and an
embodied practice of resistance to that construct. That uñas de cachifa exists
as a local category bears witness to the insistence of women with nails broken
short by manual labor that they too have a right to feminine display. Or maybe
not. It is a fragment of an unfinished mosaic.
Last summer, I was speaking with a gracious Trinidadian matriarch about
her experiences as a young widow in the 1970s, when she traveled to Caracas
to work as a maid to support her children back home. She recalled with affec-
tion a friend (“Negro, like me, but Venezuelean”) with whom she ran errands.
“‘Juana’—she always called me Juana—‘Ven, quick, aquí.’” My interviewee’s
given name was Juanita, a common one in Trinidad. I was struck by the Afro-
Venezuelan woman’s insistence on calling her friend Juana, rather than Juanita.
Juanita, her actual name, would have sounded to the Venezuelan friend like
the Spanish diminutive of “Juana.” Perhaps calling a grown woman Juanita—
using the condescending diminutive as employers so often do with their maids,
maids they also call cachifas behind their backs—seemed to this Venezuelan
woman and fellow domestic like an insult to the dignity her Trinidadian friend
deserved. Again: or maybe not.
 DAILY LIFE AND DIGITAL REACH 177

These fragmentary anecdotes shape the ear I bring to archival research

about gender, labor migration, and race in Venezuela. They are just moments,
fleeting and distant; I would be foolish to think they articulate clear questions,
much less answers. It feels flatly wrong to fix them here in print. They are
not even research, much less research findings. But they pointed me toward
dynamics I had not noticed, and set me to listen for things I otherwise might
not. To note that quotidian encounters can illuminate one’s ignorance in help-
ful ways does not require romanticizing the knowledge gained. Neither before,
during, or after these encounters did I see the world from the subject position
of any of the other women involved. The encounters nevertheless increased my
understanding of the extent of things I didn’t know, and shaped my awareness
of the range of things that might matter.
French historian Arlette Farge has described in evocative detail the iterations
through which the historian becomes attuned to the subtleties of a particular
archive.12 What she does not stress is how far behind outsiders begin.
In 1915, in Port Limon, Costa Rica, a Chinese immigrant named Po Wo
A began courting Theresa D, the 18-year-old daughter of his Afro-Jamaican
neighbor. When Theresa became “with child,” Po Wo A’s older relatives pres-
sured him to break off the relationship. In distress, he wrote her this note.

Dear friend Miss

I am know you get to sick now let me sorry very much because I have not time
go to see you as soon as I see you to by and by. I am very love you and want marry
to you but is time very bad and my business every day very dull I cant manage
marry to do so please you must go to look next gentleman and marry to you you
must Dont vex and excuse me
I am yours Dear friends Domio Po Wo A

Furious, Theresa’s mother swept downtown to denounce him. Perhaps the

threat of legal action helped Po Wo A change his relatives’ minds. On October
22, 1915, he and Theresa appeared before the judge to be married.13
I cherish love letters from the archives: intimate, highly scripted, menda-
cious. Into this one I read a story of racial divides that endured in spite of
sexual intimacy across boundaries. (Among Chinese immigrants in Limon,
men outnumbered women by nearly four to one.) I happened to share the
note with a friend, a Jamaican anthropologist, who heard immediately what I
had not: the deep jamaicanness of Chinese English in Limon, marked by Po
Wo A’s use of “vex” as intransitive verb. The insight pointed to very different
range of questions about serial migration, culture, and connection. Maybe I
would have gotten there on my own … eventually … if I had lived in Jamaica
rather than Costa Rica. But no amount of text searching or digital photography
would have done it.
Above, I described Steve Stern’s comments on how the lived experience of
Andean reciprocity shaped his reading of sixteenth century notarial archives, as
an example of an “ethnographic dividend” that residence in place offers non-
ethnographers. I suggest we need to take cognizance of how crucial this expe-
178 L. PUTNAM

riential dividend has been for historians working from largely textual sources
to reconstruct the wide world’s past. The experiential dimension of research in
place is about developing an ear for local language and cultural cues. It is about
hearing what matters to others, and trying to scope your own ignorance. It is
about basic knowledge of material fact, and building a broad-based awareness
of which questions seem most urgent, to whom, and why.
Fieldwork in this sense seeks the organic accretion of diffuse contextual
knowledge. It is not identical to ethnography. Indeed, is it research at all? The
Human Subjects “Common Rule” defines research as “a systematic investi-
gation, including research development, testing and evaluation, designed to
develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge.” What I am attempting to
name is the value of unsystematic, context-specific learning that does not seek the
generalizable but instead the place-specific, the particular, the ungeneralizable.

CONCLUSION
We need a full accounting of the knowledge fostered by everyday life in societ-
ies under study—which scholars from within have in abundance, and scholars
from elsewhere can at least seek to acquire. Absent recognition of the intel-
lectual contribution of informal learning-in-place, digitally accelerated history
risks a collective neo-imperial turn. Have critiques of cultural essentialism and
origin-based truth claims diverted our attention from the opposite problem—
the risks of cultural distance? To the extent that history becomes a desk disci-
pline, researchers will study processes from afar, perhaps never even experience
themselves as outsiders to any particular place. But how, then, are they to assess
their own gaps in knowledge, and the consequences those gaps might have for
the interpretation of the sources before them?
Will historical research after the transnational and digital turns remain place-
based in practice? Not unless we insist on it. Look at graduate training. National
funding for area studies programs and language training is shrinking, even as
we push to expand professional preparation and build in new skills, including
digital skills. Meanwhile, time to degree is policed ever more tightly. Who has
time to just go somewhere and hang out? Yet if we stay home, or cruise past
at top speed, what will push us to note the legacies of the past in the present?
How will we see what transnational processes have meant for those who stayed
put? If history becomes a desk discipline, if historians based in the Global North
become a coterie of adept database divers, if historians based in the Global
South have fewer opportunities to confront their far-flung peers with the cos-
mopolitan truths of local knowledge, surely we all will be the poorer for it?

NOTES
1. In contrast to sometimes facile critiques of area studies, key analyses have
underlined the importance of the emplaced expertise it in practice fos-
tered. See Sidney Mintz, “The Localization of Anthropological Practice:
 DAILY LIFE AND DIGITAL REACH 179

From Area Studies to Transnationalism,” 130–131; Karla Slocum and

Deborah Thomas, “Rethinking Global and Area Studies: Insights from
Caribbeanist Anthropology,” 553–565; and Shalini Puri, “Finding the
Field: Notes on Caribbean Cultural Criticism, Area Studies, and the Forms
of Engagement.” 58–73.
2. See Bernard Cohn, “History and Anthropology: The State of Play,”
198–221.
3. This failure to connect then intensified over the next decade, as anthropol-
ogy engaged with “transnationalism” and “globalization” while many his-
torians remained absorbed with internal debates over the cultural/
linguistic/discursive turn. Anthropologists’ debates, from the late 1990s
and early 2000s, over the kinds of “multi-sited ethnography” that might
be apt for analyzing systems of long-distance connection raised issues quite
similar to those that theorists of “transnational history” would seek to
engage ten years later, but the latter rarely reference the former. See note
9 below.
4. See Steve Stern, Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish
Conquest: Huamanga to 1640.
5. See Ted Underwood, “Theorizing Research Practices We Forgot to
Theorize Twenty Years Ago,” 66.
6. See Bernhard Struck, Kate Ferris, and Jacques Revel, “Introduction:
Space and Scale in Transnational History,” 573–584; Pierre-Yves
Saunier, Transnational History; and Christian De Vito, “Micro spatial-
history of labour.” For relevant discussions of research design not explic-
itly linked to the term “transnational,” see Rebecca Scott, “Small-Scale
Dynamics of Large-Scale Processes,” 472–479; and Lara Putnam, “To
Study the Fragments/Whole: Microhistory and the Atlantic World,”
615–630.
7. Historian Sumathi Ramaswamy dubs this “archival parachuting.”
8. For the parallel concerns raised regarding multisited ethnography a decade
ago, and an array of responses, see George Marcus, “Ethnography in/of
the World System,” 95–117; Matei Candea, “Arbitrary Locations: In
Defence of the Bounded Field-Site,” 167–184; Mark-Anthony Falzon,
ed., Multi-sited Ethnography: Theory, Praxis and Locality in Contemporary
Research; Simon Coleman and Pauline von Hellermann, eds, Multi-Sited
Ethnography: Problems and Possibilities in the Translocation of Research
Methods; and George Marcus, “Multi-sited Ethnography: Five or Six
Things I know about it Now.”
9. Puri, “Finding the Field,” 69–70. See also Shalini Puri and Debra Castillo,
“Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities.”
10. On the distinction, see Rogers Brubaker and Frederick J. Cooper, “Beyond
Identity.”
11. Lara Putnam, The Company They Kept: Migrants and the Politics of Gender
in Caribbean Costa Rica, 1870–1960, 204; and Lara Putnam, Radical
Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age, 239.
180 L. PUTNAM

12. Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archive.

13. Archivo Nacional de Costa Rica, Serie Judicial, Remesa Limón Juzgado
del Crimen 1084 (estupro, 1915).

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brubaker, Rogers, and Frederick J. Cooper. 2000. Beyond Identity. Theory and Society
29: 1–47.
Candea, Matei. 2007. Arbitrary Locations: In Defence of the Bounded Field-Site.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13(1): 167–184.
Cohn, Bernard S. 1980. History and Anthropology: The State of Play. Comparative
Studies in Society and History 22(2): 198–221.
Coleman, Simon, and Pauline von Hellermann, eds. 2011. Multi-Sited Ethnography:
Problems and Possibilities in the Translocation of Research Methods. New  York:
Routledge.
De Vito, Christian. 2014. Micro Spatial-History of Labour. Paper presented at the
European Social Science History Conference, Vienna, Austria, April 23–26.
Falzon, Mark-Anthony, ed. 2009. Multi-Sited Ethnography: Theory, Praxis and Locality
in Contemporary Research. Farnham: Ashgate.
Farge, Arlette. 2013. The Allure of the Archive. Trans. Thomas Scott-Railton. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Marcus, George E. 1995. Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of
Multi-Sited Ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 95–117.
——— 2011. Multi-Sited Ethnography: Five or Six Things I know About it Now. In
Multi-Sited Ethnography: Problems and Possibilities in the Translocation of Research
Methods, eds. Simon Coleman, and Pauline von Hellermann, 16–30. New  York:
Routledge.
Mintz, Sidney W. 1998. The Localization of Anthropological Practice: From Area
Studies to Transnationalism. Critique of Anthropology 18(2): 117–133.
Puri, Shalini. 2013. Finding the Field: Notes on Caribbean Cultural Criticism, Area
Studies, and the Forms of Engagement. Small Axe 17(241): 58–73.
Puri, Shalini, and Debra Castillo. 2014. Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities. Paper
presented at the University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, March 28–29.
Putnam, Lara. 2002. The Company They Kept: Migrants and the Politics of Gender in
Caribbean Costa Rica, 1870–1960. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina
Press.
———. 2006. To Study the Fragments/Whole: Microhistory and the Atlantic World.
Journal of Social History 39(3): 615–630.
———. 2012. Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz
Age. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
Saunier, Pierre-Yves. 2013. Transnational History. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Scott, Rebecca J. 2000. Small-Scale Dynamics of Large-Scale Processes. American
Historical Review 105(2): 472–479.
Slocum, Karla, and Deborah Thomas. 2003. Rethinking Global and Area Studies:
Insights from Caribbeanist Anthropology. American Anthropologist 105(3):
553–565.
Stern, Steve J. 1982. Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest:
Huamanga to 1640. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
 DAILY LIFE AND DIGITAL REACH 181

Struck, Bernhard, Kate Ferris, and Jacques Revel. 2011. Introduction: Space and Scale
in Transnational History. International History Review 33(4): 573–584.
Underwood, Ted. 2014. Theorizing Research Practices We Forgot to Theorize Twenty
Years Ago. Representations 127(1): 64–72.
 CHAPTER 10

Lessons from the Space Between Languages:

Notes on Poetry and Ethnography

Renato Rosaldo

Certain forms of poetry resemble ethnographic inquiry in ways that I have

called (in Spanish) antropoesía (Rosaldo 2014). To summarize briefly what I’ve
said elsewhere, in poetry and ethnography insight derives more from concrete
particulars than from elegant generalizations. In neither case do specifics merely
illustrate an already-formulated idea or theory. Both are processes of discov-
ery rather than restatements of the already known. If the poet already knows
exactly where her work is going, there is no reason to write further. Similarly,
if the ethnographer has decided which theory to apply before examining the
data, there is no point in further inquiry. The antropoeta and the ethnographer
doing thick description dwell in a social context until they apprehend what was
not evident in the beginning. Such inquiry requires patience, careful observa-
tion, extended conversation, and faith that meanings, though not immediately
apparent, will be found.
The work of poetry is to bring into focus its central subject, whether it is
sorrow, affliction, joy, or humor. Its task is to bring social life closer and make
it tangible. It shows the contours of feeling and explores their shape. It is a
space to inhabit and comprehend. It allows the writer and reader to apprehend
powerful experiences and make them intelligible and vivid. It allows for the
exploration of human subjectivities. The world it investigates is intersubjective
rather than a merely subjective one where whimsical understandings abound.
On this occasion, I’d like to explore the ways that implicit cultural referents
shape the meanings of what is explicit. “November Twentieth” is taken in
Spain, for example, to refer to the date of the fascist dictator Francisco Franco’s
death in 1975. Nothing more need be said. November Twentieth by itself is a

R. Rosaldo ( )
Departments of Anthropology and Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University,
Brooklyn, USA

© The Author(s) 2016 183

S. Puri, D.A. Castillo (eds.), Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-92834-7_10
184 R. ROSALDO

cultural referent a Spaniard can safely assume her compatriots will understand.
I learned this the hard way in translating La alambrada de mi boca (The Barbed
Wire in My Mouth) by Ana Pérez Cañamares (unpublished manuscript), in
particular her poem “Veinte de noviembre.”1 She clarified the meaning of
“November Twentieth” when she saw that the cultural referent had been lost
on me. Her poem begins:

Te fuiste a morir en la misma fecha

que aquel que te había jodido la vida;
nada personal por su parte:
te la jodió a ti como a tantos otros.
(You went and died on the same date
as that guy who fucked up your life;
it was nothing personal:
you were one among many.)

I want to speak about translation, about how what happens in the space
between languages can be transformative in its social effects. In speaking of trans-
lation, I will draw on two examples. One concerns the art of the accessible poem.
The other explores the political poem, a form frowned upon, indeed virtually
forbidden in the USA. Both examples involve poets I admire, Naomi Shihab Nye
and Yusef Komunyakaa. Their work, in my view, is often ethnographic.
It’s hard to write accessible prose or poetry, but it’s critical in ethnography
and antropoesia. It’s just plain hard to make it look easy. In writing to be
understood, I’ve sometimes been inspired by what William Butler Yeats, in his
poem “Adam’s Curse,” famously said. “A line will take us hours maybe;/Yet if
it does not seem a moment’s thought,/Our stitching and unstitching has been
naught.” In other words, he worked and worked to write lines of poetry that
sing with meter and rhyme, yet read as if they were effortlessly dashed off.
Certain readers worry that prose or a poem they can understand is artless,
prosaic, merely a good story, certainly not a poem. That readers can be so dis-
concerted by accessible writing makes one wonder. Do they think poems are
beautiful words that can’t be understood? What comes to mind for me is what
a student said about my lectures in the first course I taught. “Your lectures,”
she said, “are pure poetry—beautiful. I can’t understand a word.”
Consider, for example, an accessible prose poem by Naomi Shihab Nye,
“Gate A-4,”2 that recently went viral on the internet (from now on I’ll call her
Nye for short). I should add that Nye would call her work a short prose piece.
I prefer to call it a prose poem because it is so artful and to locate it in the tra-
dition that runs from Arthur Rimbaud to Robert Hass. Her work as published
has no line breaks, though the internet versions usually added them. Her care-
fully crafted prose poem appears chatty, conversational, as if casually told to a
friend. Readers posted comments. They agreed that her work was beautiful,
but they wondered: Was it poetry? Prose? Or just a good story?
 LESSONS FROM THE SPACE BETWEEN LANGUAGES 185

The speaker of the prose poem by Nye begins by saying, “Wandering around
the Albuquerque airport Terminal, after learning my flight had been delayed
four hours, I heard an announcement, ‘If anyone in the vicinity of gate A-4
understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately.’”3 The scene is
initially set in the mundane—a delayed flight, though four hours is rather more
than usual. Then an announcement in an ominous key: at Gate A-4 Arabic
speaker urgently needed. Why the urgency? Terrorism? A profiled passenger
in handcuffs requiring interrogation? The reader’s imagination, as cocreator of
the poem, conjures no end of reasons for the urgency. In her succinct, under-
stated, matter-of-fact way, Nye artfully builds dramatic suspense by drawing
on her readers’ background knowledge of what it means to be a monolingual
Arabic speaker in the USA now.
Nye says, “Well—one pauses these days.”4 Indeed.
She then goes to her gate, which happens to be A-4. Once there, she finds
“[a]n older woman in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, just like
my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing.”5 A distressed flight ser-
vice person pleads with Nye for help. No sooner, she says, had they announced
the flight was delayed, than the old woman collapsed into wailing. The mystery
in Nye’s subtle mini-drama has grown.
The central subject of the poem seamlessly shifts to an interlingual space
as Nye speaks with the old woman in her halting, second-generation Arabic.
“Shu-dow-a, shu-bid-uck habibti? Stani schway, min fadlick, shu-bit se-wee?”6
These words, even if accented, are familiar to the old woman who grows calm
and stops crying. In talking with the old woman Nye learns that there has been
a linguistic breakdown. The old woman (mis)understood that the flight was
canceled, not delayed. A canceled flight would have been catastrophic for her.
She would have missed her appointment the next day for a necessary medical
procedure. Nye phones the old woman’s son who was to pick her up at the air-
port. They speak English. Nye then phones the old woman’s other sons. Other
calls follow—for fun, in Arabic—to Nye’s father and a few Palestinian poets.
Healed by conversing in her native language, the old woman begins laughing
and chattering.
Then a homespun epiphany. The old woman “pulled a sack of homemade
mamool cookies—little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates
and nuts—from her bag and was offering them to all the women at the gate.”
Nobody refuses. “It was like a sacrament.” All the women are covered with
powdered sugar. “There is,” Nye says, “no better cookie.”7
The airline joins the ritual process and servers, also sugar covered, pour
apple juice and lemonade for all. By now Nye is holding hands with her elder
and says, “This is the world I want to live in. The shared world.”8
And she concludes, “This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is
lost.”9
Nye’s art, as I have portrayed it, is to have carefully, in plain-spoken ways,
built suspense. The mystery culminates when we readers, looking over the
shoulders of the flight agent, see a crumpled old women wailing for no reason.
186 R. ROSALDO

The mystery dissolves once Nye arrives and speaks Arabic to the old woman.
The old woman has been wounded by a lethal mistranslation. When the old
woman finds herself in her home language, the mystery dissolves and her mood
and that of those around her shifts to joy and communion. Gate A-4 moves
from diffuse apprehension through an old woman’s severe distress to the joy of
her linguistic homecoming and communion with her fellow passengers.
In Naomi Shihab Nye’s superb prose poem, the figure of the translator, the
bilingual person, is central. That figure is the speaker of the poem, Nye herself.
By conversing in her second-generation Arabic, she transforms the social situ-
ation from one of mystery and distress to a joyous communion of solidarity.
Translation in this case produces healing.
In my second example, I am the translator, the bilingual person. However, I
am off stage, not a protagonist in the poem. It began this past June when poet
Yusef Komunyakaa sent me an email, asking if I could write a brief preface to
the Spanish translation of Dien Cai Dau (1988), his classic collection of poems
that chronicles his combat experiences during the Vietnam War. I then was
contacted by Juan José Vélez Otero, the Spanish poet who was his translator.
Let me quote from our email exchanges, beginning with his to me:

I was given your e-mail by Yusef. I am sure you have talked about the preface.
I think you speak Spanish, don’t you? It would be a good idea if you write the
preface in Spanish directly.

Our correspondence from that email on was in Spanish. After starting the pref-
ace, I asked to see the translation, and Juanjo wrote saying:

Te adjunto la traducción del poemario completo, así me haces un favor, y si ves

algún error o inexactitud puedes ayudarme y corregírmelo. Ya sabes, no soy
bilingüe.
(I’ve attached the translation of the entire poetry collection, so if you would,
could you do me a favor, and help me by correcting any errors or infelicities you
see. As you know, I’m not bilingual.)

In another email, he again asked for corrections to his translation and I found
the situation delicate. What if he would be offended by my suggestions? After
all, there are people who don’t like being told they’ve made a mistake, even if
they have requested corrections.
With trepidation I sent comments on the poem called “Re-creating the
Scene,” especially the following passage which alludes to the gang rape of a
Vietnamese woman:

The Confederate flag

flaps from the radio antenna,
& the woman’s clothes
come apart in their hands.10
 LESSONS FROM THE SPACE BETWEEN LANGUAGES 187

His translation, “the Confederate flag/la bandera de la confederación,”

though technically correct, did not make the connection with the fact that
the soldiers engaged in the gang rape were from Mississippi and that the
Confederate flag invoked a longer history of racism in America.
In response to his translation, I wrote Juanjo the following:

En Recreando la escena, la bandera de la confederación requiere una nota porque

es una provocación fuerte a los soldados norteños y negros. La bandera es de la
Guerra Civil de los años 1860s y suele significar que los que ondean la bandera
son sureños, racistas y de extrema derecha.
(In “Re-creating the scene,” the flag of the Confederacy requires a footnote
because the flag is a strong provocation to black and northern soldiers. The flag
is from the Civil War of the 1860s and in this context suggests that those who fly
it are southern, racist, and right wing extremists.)

Juanjo replied in this way:

Muchas gracias por tu ayuda. Eran cosas muy, muy importantes, sobre todo la
aclaración referente a la bandera de la Confederación.
(Thank you so much for your help. These things are very, very important
especially your clarification concerning the flag of the Confederacy.)

I dared not hope he would so welcome my suggested changes. The prob-

lem was Juanjo’s lack of background knowledge about the meanings of flying
a Confederate flag in the USA.  What the poet Komunyakaa can reasonably
assume an American reader will know is entirely lost on a poet who knows the
Spanish rather than the American national context.
Still feeling trepidation I went on, in another email, to suggest changes to
the poem “Hanoi Hannah” about a Vietcong propagandist:

“Hello, Soul Brothers.”11

The poem goes on to say the following:

“You know you’re dead men,

don’t you? You’re dead
as King today in Memphis.”12

“Dead as King today” refers, as American readers know, to the assassination

of Martin Luther King in Memphis on April 14, 1968. The poem continues in
the following manner:

“Soul brothers, what you dying for?”13

My suggestion to Juanjo was as follows:

188 R. ROSALDO

Aquí por “soul brothers” se entiende que son negros. Diría yo, tal vez, “Hola,
hermanos negros” en vez de “hermanos del alma.”
(The phrase “Hello, soul brothers” implies that the soldiers being addressed
are black. I would say, perhaps, “Hola, hermanos negros/Hello, black brothers,”
rather than “hermanos del alma/bosom buddies.”)

Juanjo responded with the generosity I had found before. He welcomed my

suggestions rather than defending his translation. He said:

Muchísimas gracias por las correcciones que me haces. Son importantísimas. Le

escribo al editor para que sepa que tengo que corregir algo … Gracias, muchas
gracias.
(Thank you so much for the corrections you’ve given me. They’re extremely
important. I’ll write my editor and tell him I have to make corrections … Thank
you, thank you so much.)

He went on to say we should do the best translation we could because

Komunyakaa’s splendid work deserves no less.
What I learned as I went over the Spanish translations in detail is how deeply
raced American English can be. A response Komunyakaa can reasonably expect
from an American reader is simply absent for a reader from another—in this
case Spanish—national context. When I reflected on this series of mistransla-
tions racism fairly leapt out to me as central to Dien Cai Dau. Dictionaries had
provided little help. The flag of the confederation, rather than the Confederacy
was given by the dictionary. Instead, what was required for the translation was
knowledge of implicit cultural referents, the background assumptions about
race and racism that are encoded in American English and history. From my
valuable collaboration with Juan José Vélez Otero what came into focus was
the deep sense in which the poetry in Dien Cai Dau is political, profoundly
antiracist. Thus, I wrote the following in my preface to the Spanish translation
of Komunyakaa’s exceptional work:

El poeta nos delinea una óptica anti-racista sobre el conflicto. El racismo estadoun-
idense aparece explícitamente en el poemario de los propagandistas del Vietcong
que intentan desanimar a los soldados Africano-Americanos.
(The poet depicts an anti-racist vision of the war. Racism in the United States
appears explicitly in the poems through the words of Vietcong propagandists who
were trying to discourage the African-American G.I.’s.)14

I now see Komunyakaa’s poems not only as a chronicle of combat in Vietnam

but also as part of the civil rights struggle by other means.
In this chapter, I’ve conflated the poet, the translator, and the ethnogra-
pher. I have done so to call attention to their similarities as mediators between
cultural contexts. They work to render one cultural context intelligible to the
other. They grapple with verbal texts rewritten in a language other than the
original or with verbal texts (whether poems or ethnographies) that try to make
 LESSONS FROM THE SPACE BETWEEN LANGUAGES 189

a social world, whether their own or another, intelligible. Here, they work with
implicit cultural referents that they may draw upon by assuming that their read-
ers share these understandings. These understandings become especially visible
in moments of mistranslation. Nye did so by invoking the urgent announce-
ment about the need for an Arabic speaker in the Albuquerque airport. She
could assume that her readers would recognize that such an announcement
would create apprehension for those who heard it. Komunyakaa also did so
by using the commonly understood, among his assumed readers, meanings of
flying the Confederate flag and addressing American GIs as “soul brothers.”

NOTES
1. Pérez Cañamares, La alambrada de mi boca, 18–19.
2. Nye, “Gate A-4,” 162.
3. Nye.
4. Nye.
5. Nye.
6. Nye.
7. Nye.
8. Nye.
9. Nye.
10. Komunyakaa, Dien Cai Dau (Wesleyan) 19.
11. Komunyakaa, 13.
12. Komunyakaa, 13.
13. Komunyakaa, 13.
14. Komunyakaa, Dien Cai Dau, Traducción, prólogo y notas de Juan José
Vélez Otero, 11.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Komunyakaa, Yusef. 1998. Dien Cai Dau. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University
Press.
———. 2014. Dien Cai Dau. Traducción, prólogo y notas de Juan José Vélez Otero.
Granada: Ediciones Valparaíso.
Nye, Naomi Shihab. 2014. Gate A-4. In Honeybee, 162. New York: Greenwillow Books.
Pérez Cañamares, Ana. 2007. La alambrada de mi boca. Tenerife, Islas Canarias:
Ediciones de Baile del sol.
Pérez Cañamares, Ana. n.d. La alambrada de mi boca. English Trans. Ana Pérez
Cañamares. Unpublished Manuscript.
Rosaldo, Renato. 2014. Notes on Poetry and Ethnograpy. In The Day of Shelly’s Death,
101–114. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
 PART IV

Institutions, Organizations,
Collaborations
 CHAPTER 11

Researching the Cultural Politics of Dirt

in Urban Africa

Stephanie Newell

This chapter reflects on the intellectual and methodological challenges that

arose out of the European Research Council (ERC) research project, “The
Cultural Politics of Dirt in Africa, 1880–present.”1 From 2013 to 2015, the
project comprised two African teams of early-career researchers who collabo-
rated with a local regional coordinator, me, and one another, in producing
research as well as data; after 2015, the project has comprised two Nigerian
researchers based at the University of Lagos. Drawing from a rich seam of
theoretical discourse in anthropology, critical theory, and cultural studies on
the topic of dirt and its associated terms—filth, waste, debris, contamination,
disgust, and trash—in global cities, the hypothesis of the project has been that,
while dirt permeates everyday life in urban Africa, it is more than an empiri-
cal substance: dirt is an idea, carrying with it a complex set of histories and
representations that shape local perceptions of community and the body and
influence people’s attitudes toward urbanization, neighborliness, and inward
migration to the city.
Dirt has been a potent category in European encounters with Africans for
over a century. European travelers’ accounts of the continent from the mid-­
nineteenth century onward repeatedly describe the “filth” of people who quite
clearly do not need to take a bath.2 Dirt also recurs as a literary trope in a
striking number of African novels, including, from West Africa alone, Cyprian
Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana (1961), Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not
Yet Born (1968), Sembene Ousmane’s Xala (1974), Ben Okri’s The Famished
Road (1991), and Veronique Tadjo’s As the Crow Flies (2001), where it is

S. Newell (*)
Department of English, Yale University, New Haven, USA

© The Author(s) 2016 193

S. Puri, D.A. Castillo (eds.), Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-92834-7_11
194  S. NEWELL

employed not only to describe urban degradation but to comment on postco-

lonial political corruption and the rise of antihumanist ideologies. My project
proposal initially arose from a core question raised by these various narratives:
What discursive function does dirt perform if it does not simply signify the
opposite of cleanliness? If dirt is not dirty, what ideological work does it do?
To some extent, this was a genuinely quixotic starting point in which tex-
tual theorizations and literary representations of dirt set a hypothesis in place
for a team of researchers to undertake fieldwork with contemporary urban
residents. Cervantes’ Don Quixote read so many outdated popular romances
that his perceptions of reality became distorted: convinced that he was a knight
errant of old, that his decrepit horse was a noble steed, and that local women
were damsels in distress, he rode forth to save the world, and in so doing,
offered a comic warning to readers against assuming that the repetition of plots
and character types in printed narratives adds up to anything like an accurate
description of the empirical world. Don Quixote’s rational sidekick, Sancho
Panza, runs after his master and repairs the damage, ensures Don Quixote’s
survival (and the survival of this targets), and sees the world through a real-
ist lens. While it is tempting to interpret Don Quixote as a comment on the
pitfalls of literary analysis and Sancho Panza as the exemplar of social research,
this chapter will attempt to reconcile any such extremes, showing the value
of fieldwork to textual studies and the value of qualitative textual analysis for
social research into African urban cultures.
Alongside its comic lesson against the misuses of literacy in consuming too
many popular novels, Don Quixote (Part I, 1605; Part II, 1615) anticipated, by
nearly 400 years, Edward Said’s important understanding that the textual (and
visual) productions of knowledge in contexts of colonial power

can create not only knowledge but also the very reality they appear to describe.
In time such knowledge and reality produce a tradition, or what Michel Foucault
calls a discourse, whose material presence or weight, not the originality of a given
author, is really responsible for the texts produced out of it.3

Whether located in archives or art galleries, on bookshelves, newspaper stands,

film racks, or digital platforms, Said’s point is that texts and images are always
mediations of realities, offering a wealth of historically specific information
about people’s opinions, perceptions, prejudices, self-understandings, aesthetic
preferences, memories of the past, and dreams for the future. These ordinary
daily texts contribute to people’s experiences and help to form the urban imag-
inaries that underwrite this project.
“Fieldwork” is an alien word to many literary scholars. Terms such as
“fieldwork” and “methodology” come out of a social research framework in
which texts comprise data for content analysis, interviews—whether one-to-
one interviews or focus group discussions (FGDs)—have topic guides, and
may be structured, semi-structured, or open, and content analysis may be
qualitative or quantitative, each with its own careful subdivisions and range of
 RESEARCHING THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF DIRT IN URBAN AFRICA  195

­ ethods. Even the act of observation has its own strategies (structured, par-
m
ticipant, ethnographic, etc.). If social research fieldwork takes place in archives,
using manuscripts, reports, digital resources (“e-data”), or published materi-
als, methodological rigor and transparency are ensured through clearly artic-
ulated sampling and coding techniques. By contrast, the fieldwork methods
employed by literary scholars can be described at best as “close reading” and
“random qualitative sampling.” I therefore want to bring some of the tech-
niques and tools of African literary studies into contact with other disciplines
in the humanities and social sciences, not least ethnography and media and
communication studies. In approaching the theme of dirt through literary and
cultural mediations, and the theories and conversations such texts generate, I
want to ask questions, firstly, about how diverse dirt-related concepts are used
in mainstream and social media in and about Africa—with literary narratives
treated as a subset of these broader media—and, secondly, about the ways
African urban dwellers make use of these mediated interpretations of urban life
to report back on and think about their environments.
Key scholars in European cultural studies have transformed our under-
standing of the history of urban cultures through their attention to the place
of filth in Western cities. Georges Bataille’s ideas about excess, urbanization,
and (post)modernity have had a major impact on discussions of contempo-
rary urban cultures and postmodern theories of waste and public spaces in the
West.4 Similarly, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White’s classic study, The Politics
and Poetics of Transgression (1986), posits dirt and disorder—by which they
mean the slum and the sewer—as the starting point for an understanding of
“social division and exclusion” in European cultural history.5 Their book gives
dirt (and disgust) a “poetics,” enriching and extending Mary Douglas’s famous
formulation that dirt is “matter out of place.”6 Stallybrass and White examine
the dense language surrounding urban dirt in mid-nineteenth-century Britain
in order to understand the many binary oppositions—including suburb versus
slum, rich versus poor, clean versus dirty, health versus disease—that emerged
as the defining features of public health discourse in the Victorian period and
after. Such understandings of public health, as parts of this chapter will suggest,
provided an influential framework for British urban planners in colonial Africa
in the early twentieth century in their reactions to the contagious potential-
ity of freely circulating “native” bodies, particularly prostitutes, homosexuals,
women, and children, in tropical cities such as Nairobi.
Recent publications on the cultural history of dirt in colonial and postcolo-
nial locations break out of conventional “dirt versus cleanliness” molds in new
ways, showing how the subject of dirt—in both senses of subject, as a topic
and a person—is a great deal more complex and culturally meaningful than
suggested by its binary oppositions with bodily cleanliness or moral purity.
This work is exemplified by Adeline Masquelier’s edited collection, Dirt,
Undress, and Difference (2005), which contains ethnographic essays on the
topic of bodily transgressions through acts of undressing, bathing (or not), and
ideas about dirtiness in diverse global settings.7 In relation to Africa, ­several
196  S. NEWELL

localized studies of discourses about dirt have also been published, includ-
ing Ashleigh Harris’s (2008) examination of the Zimbabwean slum clearance
policy, “Operation Murambatsvina” (“one who detests filth,” “drive out rub-
bish”) and Timothy Burke’s (1996) outstanding study of the history of soap in
Zimbabwe.8 These publications draw attention to the underlying cultural and
historical processes that produce dirt as a classification for cultural encounters
and sexual morality, providing models for our understandings of dirt in our
project.
After three weeks of intensive teambuilding and research methods train-
ing in the UK at the start of the project, the six researchers returned to their
respective cities—Lagos and Nairobi—for the pilot period, during which they
undertook semi-structured interviews and FGDs using topic guides designed
in collaboration with the team. Of particular concern to all of us during this
start-up period were the methodological challenges of transcription and trans-
lation from local language interviews into English. Given the importance to the
project theme of nuanced translation and interpretation, the researchers were
encouraged to exchange transcripts with one another and, during our fort-
nightly conference calls involving all team members, to discuss transcription
and translation methods. Such discussions were informed by the large body of
published work on translation studies in the context of cultural and postcolo-
nial studies. Given the necessity of translation work across multiple languages,
this was not a project in which a “principal investigator” (PI) could prescribe
the content or interpret the data produced by the researchers. Indeed, the
translation work required for interview transcripts of necessity positioned the
researchers as vital interpreters of their data.
As part of the knowledge exchange and reflexive activities of the project—in
our fortnightly reports, fortnightly online meetings, and through the project
blog—we reflected on the practicalities of our methods in research contexts
that were anything but “ideal.” While I remained relatively secluded in various
colonial archives, researching the histories of dirt in colonial cities, the proj-
ect researchers faced methodological challenges that often directly countered
the strict ethical guidelines prescribed by the European Research Council. In
Kenya, for example, Rebeccah Onwong’a and Anne Kirori were forced by
necessity to adopt what they termed the “Participant Exchange Focus Group”
model in crowded, low-income areas of the city. This model described how a
departing focus group participant was spontaneously replaced, over a period
of 40 minutes, by a new participant without the say-so of the interviewers.
While FGD numbers remained consistent, faces changed as people continu-
ously entered the semi-open spaces in which discussions took place. Private
room hire was not possible in these areas, not only because of the lack of
local facilities but more significantly because members of the communities con-
cerned—especially women—were unwilling to risk accusations of “secrecy” by
fellow community members if they entered closed spaces with the facilitator.
Anne Kirori described the situation thus:
 RESEARCHING THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF DIRT IN URBAN AFRICA  197

On my part I would say “participant exchange” during a Focus Group Discussion

has been my remarkable experience. What I mean by this is that: you start an
FGD with 10 participants, and after exhausting the first topic, one or two of the
participants leave the group and are replaced by another participant who is new
and quickly gets absorbed into the discussion. This then means you might end
up with different people from the ones you started with. In my case I only had 2
constant participants in an FGD of 13 people. The other 11 kept exchanging and
new ones coming. The most interesting bit is that it never affected the quality of
data, and the discussion became more exciting as we progressed. The discussion
was mainly about current and emerging issues such as Ebola, teenage pregnancy,
culture degradation, people’s lifestyle changes/behaviors just to mention a few.9

Data from FGDs such as these were deemed unusable by the ERC’s ethical
advisor on the grounds that the introductory statement describing the proj-
ect and participants’ rights in FGDs was not reiterated to each subsequent
entrant to the FGD, and informed consent was not therefore obtained from
every participant. This is but one example of the many methodologically chal-
lenging situations that arose for the researchers in the field, through which
the European funder’s exemplary ethical standards were impossible to meet in
real-life urban contexts.
My own work focused on archival and historical materials relating to the rise
of dirt as an interpretative category in nineteenth-century European traders’
writings about West African consumers of global commodities. I focused on
the journals of Thomas M. Knox, an employee of the soap manufacturer Lever
Brothers, who traveled overland from North to Central Africa in the mid-­
1920s in order to assess the capacity of West African markets to increase their
consumption of imported Lever Brothers products and their production of the
raw materials, especially palm oil, required for soap manufacture in Britain.10
Knox’s chief objective was to wean local consumers off their own locally manu-
factured equivalents to Lever Brothers’ soaps. This study of colonial travel-
ogues compared Knox’s negative responses to the strangeness of others in the
1920s with similar reactions of other British travelers and traders in Africa in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: for Knox, Lagos was “a town
of unspeakable squalor … [I]t is the nurse of disease. Filth everywhere.”11 How
unique, the project asked, was Knox’s identification of the source of the filth:
“Everything reeks of dirty natives.”12
A year before Knox’s travels, Percival Christopher Wren, author of the best-
selling adventure novel Beau Geste (1924), also described Lagos in what had
already become a familiar shorthand for the city, referring dismissively to “the
rubbish-heap called Lagos, on the Bight of Benin of the wicked West African
Coast.”13 In these and other colonial-era accounts, any physical dirt associated
with the city is reattached to the body of the “dirty native.” Again and again
in the archives for West and East Africa, I found that references to filth and
dirt were used in travelers’ and traders’ accounts of the continent to judge
people, rather than things, by negative moral standards. Visual observations
198  S. NEWELL

about the stranger’s consumption habits were repeatedly processed by Knox

and his peers into meaningful (for readers at home) opinions and projections
about the stranger’s habitus. Drawing from the Victorian tradition of writing
about industrial slums in Britain, Knox, Wren, and their compatriots in Africa
added race to the category of class, and in so doing, used the category of filth
to transform visual perceptions of other cultures, or otherness, into the vis-
ceral category of disgust.14 Knox and his peers were vectors for a distinctive,
shared anti-cosmopolitan discourse that, as this chapter will suggest, continues
to have global currency in contemporary public discourses about “disgusting”
and “unnatural” types of behavior, most especially relating to urban dwellers’
sexual morality.
As the researchers on the project begin to code and analyze their media
and interview data in the coming months, we expect to extend this network of
negative connotations of dirt by adding a layer of positive associations to dirt-­
related terms, particularly when the broad category of dirt is filtered through
the lens of “waste,” “trash,” and other local terms for what people throw away.
For example, project researcher John Uwa has found that when Lagosians
reflect on the entrepreneurial work of mobile toilet owners, who install facili-
ties in low-income areas and charge a small fee for use, or on the work of
“scavengers,” still regarded by some local elites as untouchable human “scum”
for picking over the city’s municipal and informal trash heaps, the potential
for income generation from “dirt” is appreciated by many people, even if they
would not personally undertake such work.15 Whether dirt still remains dirt in
this context of economic transformation is a question for further consideration.
“The Cultural Politics of Dirt in Africa” began as a “tale of two cities,”
proposing a comparative historical study of Nairobi and Lagos as two African
cities with structural similarities, including comparable positions in World Bank
indicators of poverty ratios, life expectancy, and urban development. Both
cities contain a plethora of unplanned spaces in which the majority of resi-
dents depend for their survival upon informal networks of financial and social
support, as well as highly visible planned urban spaces such as public parks,
municipal rubbish dumps, and gated private housing estates. The popular nar-
ratives and commentaries generated by these diverse urban spaces give rise
to common themes in Kenyan and Nigerian media—shared with many other
African cities—such as concerns with people’s sexual lifestyles, political corrup-
tion, poverty and wealth, immigration, religious toleration, pollution, and the
environment.
Three portfolios were developed for the researchers: first, “Public Health
and Environment,” for which researchers would identify resources and build
relationships in the fields of public health, environmental strategy, and waste
management. Key areas of their research included interviews with public
health users, providers, and NGOs and with users of and residents on or living
nearby waste management sites. Second, “Education and Schools,” for which
researchers would look into the ways children and young people interpreted
the connections between urbanization and dirt, urbanization and hygiene, and
 RESEARCHING THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF DIRT IN URBAN AFRICA  199

urbanization and migration. Third, “Media and Communications,” for which

researchers would focus on cultural production in the public sphere, includ-
ing newspapers, radio and television documentaries, popular music, popular
films, television soap operas, online blogs, local publications, and other popu-
lar urban media. For this last  portfolio, work included the regular sampling
of media materials, in-depth interviews and FGDs with media producers and
audiences, and the sampling of newspapers, blogs, and broadcasts.
As the two teams of researchers progressed with their fieldwork in health
centers, schools, and media outlets in Lagos and Nairobi, however, with each
pair of researchers using shared topic guides, similar research methods, and
regular online meetings to ensure the stability of methods for comparative
analysis, many of these similarities started to be overshadowed by differences
on the ground. Lagos and Nairobi started to populate the topics in different
ways, not least because the beginning of fieldwork proper, February 1, 2014,
coincided with the outbreak of the Ebola virus in West Africa.16 From February
onward the Nigerian media and public discussion were dominated by Ebola
stories, months before the arrival in Lagos of the Liberian-American civil ser-
vant, Patrick Sawyer, dubbed in the Nigerian press as “the Liberian weapon of
mass destruction” who brought the virus to Lagos in July 2014 and infected a
number of health workers.17
While Ebola exemplified many themes of the project and focused our
minds—along with the rest of West Africa—on the transmission of the virus
from one contagious body to another, it had a further distorting effect on the
comparative framework. The content of our interviews and FGDs diverged
significantly across the continent: in one city, basic urban practices such as
handshaking, entering a bank, visiting a barber’s shop, and queuing for public
transport became sources of extreme interpersonal anxiety, while in the other
city life continued as before, with one or two popular songs circulating about
the socially disruptive effects of Ebola in the west of the continent.18 “We
couldn’t go out to relate,” reflected one Lagosian focus group participant in
January 2015: “There was this risk people would withdraw their hand” dur-
ing a greeting, causing intense social embarrassment and public humiliation.19
“You [were led to] assume anybody has Ebola,” reflected another Lagosian
on urban fears of transmission: “You don’t want to know where it’s coming
from. People would not shake hands. People would withdraw hands because
of Ebola, they feared they would contract it.”20
Besides the obvious differences generated by such crises to the stories about
urban encounters that residents tell in Lagos and Nairobi, residual differences in
the two countries’ colonial and postcolonial histories also impact on the shape
of present-day urban cultures and the interrelationships of residents. Lagos is a
multiethnic coastal city, an African “melting-pot” of religions and peoples with
a history of trade and migration closely connected to the trans-Atlantic slave
trade and its abolition. With the British colonial annexation of Lagos in the
1850s, and with passenger and cargo ships plying the West African coast well
into the twentieth century, the city formed the last port of call in a network
200  S. NEWELL

of trade ports along the West African littoral, including Freetown, Monrovia,
Sekondi-Takoradi, and Accra, bringing visitors and residents from the entire
region and as far afield as Syria and Brazil (the “Saro” community of ex-slaves
came to Lagos from Brazil via Sierra Leone).21 Long-established Anglophone
elite families with pan-West African surnames moved freely through these
migratory networks, building houses according to their cultural identifications,
practicing as doctors and lawyers, setting up newspapers and political parties,
and marrying across “British West African” territories.22
Unlike the historic city of Lagos, Nairobi required no annexation by
Europeans. Established in 1896 on swampland owned by the Uganda Railway,23
it grew from a small inland transport depot, where Europeans and Indian rail-
way workers and traders built stores and houses, with a skeletal provincial gov-
ernment “miserably housed in corrugated iron structures,” into a sprawling
capital city.24 From its inception as a residential space, race and the control of
land were key structural factors in the organization of trade and town planning
in Nairobi. Kenya’s status as a settler colony, attractive to European residents
who came to farm in the fertile highlands, and to set up businesses in the late
nineteenth century, made the city more akin to colonial Harare and the towns
of apartheid South Africa than to the “white man’s grave” on the other side of
the continent, where Europeans rarely settled permanently.25
Kenya’s centuries-old history of trade and religious exchange focused
largely on Mombasa, with its pronounced Arab-Islamic urban influences, and
its ancient trading networks with the Indian subcontinent along the famous
spice routes. As with Lagos, flows of trade in slaves and ivory in the nineteenth
century created a versatile “polyethnic, mercantile and predominantly Islamic
People of the Coast,” out of which Swahili emerged as the dominant language
of urban East Africa.26 As the settlement of Nairobi grew into a town, and
thence a city, these established coastal relationships were reflected in the pres-
ence of South Asian and Arab-Islamic populations engaged in trade, the civil
service, and the professions, for whom Kenyan languages coexisted with the
languages and literatures of the Indian subcontinent.27
One key word stands between the easy comparison of postcolonial Kenya
and Nigeria: oil. The discovery of “black gold” in eastern Nigeria in the after-
math of the civil war in the early 1970s and the vast oil wealth it generated for
the state produced political affects that reverberate into the present.28 Nigeria’s
postcolonial history is marked by a rapid succession of military dictatorships in
the struggle for control of the oil-rich economy, culminating in the murder-
ous regime of General Sani Abacha (1994–1998), whose list of executions and
assassinations included the international author and oil industry ­antagonist,
Ken Saro-Wiwa (1941–1995), who campaigned for ethnic minority rights
in the Niger Delta region. The term “kleptocracy” accurately describes the
country’s postcolonial governments until recently, and fraud and violence have
become so embedded that the declared anticorruption measures of the cur-
rent, democratically elected government of ex-military-dictator Muhammadu
Buhari barely touch upon a resolution to these entrenched problems.29
 RESEARCHING THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF DIRT IN URBAN AFRICA  201

While the above offers little more than a snapshot of the two cities’ com-
plex political, economic, and cultural histories, the blatant message for a liter-
ary scholar entering the field of urban cultural studies is that cities cannot be
read like books: one cannot simply compare the opinions and preoccupations
of urban dwellers as one might capture and contrast literary characters and
themes in texts from diverse cities, even with the sophisticated insights made
possible by comparative literature and postcolonial theory, with their attention
to the nuances of history, identity, and place. As fieldwork for “The Cultural
Politics of Dirt” progressed, what appeared on the surface to be common
broad themes in African urban media—such as poverty and wealth, immigra-
tion, religious toleration, sexuality and sexual promiscuity, waste and the envi-
ronment—were found to mask localized differences that generated vital gaps
of non-comparison with implications for comparative literary as well as cul-
tural studies. In producing knowledge about Lagos and Nairobi, we required
a framework through which difference could be theorized in productive ways.
Towering above all these factors, however, was the obvious drawback of
deploying an Anglophone term, “dirt,” to support an ambitious multicul-
tural investigation into diverse people’s opinions and perceptions about urban
experience. The category was useful only as a starting point for conversations
about urban experience. In a fieldwork context, “dirt” required immediate
(dis)qualification, not least in the polyglossic environments of two large cit-
ies where street noise is in Yoruba, Nigerian Pidgin, Hausa, Swahili, Gikuyu,
Sheng, Arabic, and a multitude of other African and international languages.
While media and interview data were superficially comparable through the
shared themes listed above, and through the fact that the media is dominated
by English in both countries (although Swahili is an important literary and
media language in Kenya), urban dwellers’ preoccupations were, unsurpris-
ingly, specific to their cities of residence rather than continent-wide. As the
research teams in Nairobi and Lagos analyzed contemporary media discourses,
interviewed diverse urban residents, and conducted FGDs, the last thing par-
ticipants wished to do was compare policy from country to country, to identify
shared themes, or to compare themselves with the residents of African cities on
the other side of the continent.
While the people of the cities resisted easy comparisons, two premises of the
project have remained in place from the outset: first, that the qualitative, inter-
pretative, subjective approach of arts and humanities disciplines can contribute
to the social sciences by showing how “texts”—broadly interpreted to mean lit-
erature, media, and the stories people tell about themselves and other people—
merit close attention for the ways in which they mediate urban r­elationships
and resonate with past ideologies. Cultural representations (“texts”) and popu-
lar interpretations (by readers/audiences) have a close relationship to people’s
social and economic experiences, helping to structure and define the ways
people think about themselves and others in the city. Whether articulated in
the media or in the exchange of opinion, popular representations impact on
people’s daily lives and help them to reflect on their relationships with others,
202  S. NEWELL

especially in cosmopolitan urban environments where a scarcity of resources

often generates social and cultural networks between strangers. Socioeconomic
conditions in both Nairobi and Lagos generate interpersonal understandings
and relationships of trust between people of otherwise vastly disconnected
backgrounds. In asking about the ways in which African city dwellers under-
stand and represent themselves and their environments through media, films,
literature, and the exchange of opinion, therefore, this project insists not only
on the relevance of narratives and textual interpretations to urban scholarship
but also on their significance in “creat[ing] not only knowledge but also the
very reality they appear to describe,” helping to shape what scholars of global
cities term “urban imaginaries.”30
A second premise remained in place across these often incomparable urban
cultural contexts. A recurrent turn toward the “dirtying” of particular popula-
tions in public discourse was observable in the press releases and speeches of
politicians and parliamentarians, especially presidents, during the period of the
project. On many occasions, their sentiments were reiterated uncritically in
the mainstream media, while they were often fiercely debated—both for and
against—on social media platforms.31 In February 2014, during the start-up
period of fieldwork, with Ebola dominating the press in West Africa, President
Yahya Jammeh of the Gambia was widely reported as describing homosexu-
als as “vermin” who should be tackled like malarial mosquitoes.32 Nigeria’s
Goodluck Jonathan preempted Jammeh’s position, signing into law the “Same
Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Law” in January 2014, not only banning same-sex
marriages with prison sentences of up to 14 years but also criminalizing “shows
of same-sex public affection” with up to 10 years’ imprisonment and reinforc-
ing colonial-era legislation against sodomy with the promise to “cleanse” and
“sanitize” society of what a previous Nigerian president, Olusegun Obasanjo,
had already labeled “unnatural” and “un-African.”33 In East Africa at the same
time, Uganda’s long-standing president, Yoweri Museveni, explained his tough-
ened anti-gay legislation using associations learned directly from the discourse
of dirt and bodily contamination discussed earlier in this chapter in relation to
colonial discourse, describing gay people as “disgusting” and “abnormal” and
strengthening the colonial-era law outlawing sex acts deemed to be “against
the order of nature.”34 Kenya’s president Uhuru Kenyatta followed suit, crimi-
nalizing homosexuality with up to 14 years in prison and introducing contro-
versial anal testing to prove or disprove homosexual activities.35
In country after country across the continent at this particular time,
colonial-­era laws against homosexuality were strengthened, accompanied by
substantial public discussion in the media and in churches about acceptable
and ­unacceptable, natural and unnatural, palatable and disgusting sexualities,
including considerable public protest, in Kenya at least, against the legisla-
tion and the accompanying rise in homophobic violence.36 Given how often
this public discussion revolved around homophobic hate speech, I started to
wonder whether such highly charged and politically productive discourses—
designed to generate a common enemy, to isolate and target a “not-me”
 RESEARCHING THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF DIRT IN URBAN AFRICA  203

among the majority—stemmed from colonial-era (re)iterations of cultural dif-

ference through the supposedly empirical category of dirt. The connections
with the archival materials by Knox and his 1920s peers are manifest: in both
cases, expressions of disgust and hatred are regarded by those who articulate
them as “natural” and instinctive, rather than as ideological, precisely because
they involve a set of visceral reactions to the preferences of strangers.37
This chapter does not have the scope to examine why African cultures that
are renowned historically for their accommodation of diverse sexualities have
allowed their politicians and religious leaders to use the public sphere for
homophobic statements that remain largely unchallenged by opposition par-
ties. The key seems to lie in the attempts of public figures such as parliamen-
tarians, pastors, and imams to harness the media—the “public sphere”—for
political and moral campaigning, over and against the discreet toleration of
diverse sexual preferences to be found among numerous ordinary people. To
attempt to understand this homogenizing current in the contemporary pub-
lic sphere, a comparative perspective remains not only feasible but necessary,
first, geographically between instances of homophobic hate speech in Nairobi
and Lagos, and second, historically, between colonial-era and contemporary
expressions of disgust at the behavior of strangers. (The category of strang-
ers here includes foreigners, or locals as encountered by foreigners, but it also
includes members of subcultural groups such as LGBTI people who are rou-
tinely denied access to public spaces such as conference centers and hotels).
A popular truism about historical research is that it gives access to attitudes
and ideologies that have subsequently become outmoded and that, as a conse-
quence, stand out to later generations of scholars in shocking, entertaining, or
perplexing ways. For historians of empire, such gaps and differences—especially
when exposed in documents in the archives—can enrich our understanding of
why particular beliefs and behaviors arose in particular social and political con-
texts, how they were negotiated between different constituencies, such as the
Colonial Office in London and respective colonial governments, if and how
they were challenged, and how they ultimately came to pass into policy or
disuse. In tension with this idealistic notion of archival transparency, however,
are the practical and intellectual challenges of cultural “retrieval” projects, par-
ticularly relating to research into the underlying beliefs and prejudices that may
have shaped particular policies.38 Instances of homosexuality and homopho-
bia are particularly difficult simply to identify in the archives. At most, the
method best suited to this type of research involves speculative, queer reading
in between the lines of documents where insinuations, euphemisms, and adjec-
tives such as “unwholesome” and “unspeakable” appear: these are often the
closest a present-day researcher can get to descriptions of diverse local sexuali-
ties in the colonial period.39
In testing the usefulness of “dirt” as a heuristic for this broad, generalizable
anti-cosmopolitanism that connects Lagos to Nairobi, and both contemporary
cities to colonial-era discourse, in the larger project from which this chapter is
drawn, I also focused on letters, memos, and minutes sent between colonial
204  S. NEWELL

officials in Nairobi in the early twentieth century on the topic of sanitation

and public health in order to identify the continuities, and highlight the gaps,
between contemporary homophobic discourse in the public sphere and similar
anti-cosmopolitan currents in the colonial period. The starting point for this
comparison is the understanding, drawn from the field of hate studies, that a
characteristic of dehumanizing discourse is the fear of cross-contamination by
other people and that the metaphor of humans as pollutants—waste, trash,
dirt, vermin—is one of the chief features of both racism and homophobia.40
If hate speech cannot be detached from the history of dirt, not all references
to the dirt or dirtiness of others should be categorized as hate speech. On
many occasions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the binary us–
them ideology embedded in this use of dirt marks the limits and failures of the
traveler’s representation of other cultures, but, in addition, European travelers
use dirt-related concepts to express fascination for, or befuddlement about,
other cultures, rather than “hatred” of the other.41 Traders in particular could
not afford overt hate speech because they wished to transform the consumers
of locally manufactured (thus “dirty”) products into consumers of imported
mass-produced commodities from Europe.42 The dehumanizing gesture that
characterizes hate speech, whereby the other is transformed into vermin or
trash for elimination, could not therefore be allowed to dominate the traders’
responses to the bodies of potential consumers. Rather, dirt is converted into
the expression of a desire to understand, and thence to transform, local com-
munities, and it therefore operates as the mediating category, rather than the
stopping point, for the traders’ unfamiliar encounters.
The point is that whether expressed as hate speech or, viscerally, as physical
revulsion, the category of dirt performs a failure of cross-cultural understand-
ing—and culture, as mentioned earlier, is taken here to include sexual sub-
cultures as well as ethno-linguistic cultures—on the part of the commentator,
whose observations about others, when released into the public sphere of print
or other media, have the power to dramatically affect a person’s future. When
viewed as a failure of individual perception, located outside the power structures
of the colonial state, the church, or postcolonial governments, the language of
filth, applied to others, contains some potential for cross-cultural understand-
ing, at least when the onlooker recognizes the gulf separating himself from
his object of interpretation.43 Again and again in our research, the teams have
found homosexual tolerance among small groups and individuals who identify
as heterosexual. Such liberalism in small FGDs and one-to-one interviews com-
pares starkly with public discursive spaces such as newspapers and broadcasts.
Outside the Anglophone framework that has dominated the above analysis,
and outside the public sphere of print and mass media, one can find count-
less positive valuations of people’s bodily encounters with dirt, including the
aesthetic properties of earth as a beautifying substance for people and dwell-
ings, and its long history of uses in masquerade, sculpture, recycling, compost,
building, decoration, and leisure. Indeed, if regarded solely as earth, or mud,
dirt is removed from the moral, evaluative realm of disgust. Other examples
 RESEARCHING THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF DIRT IN URBAN AFRICA  205

are more relevant: in numerous East African jokes, excreta and the presence of
vermin are treated as signifiers of wealth, such as the Sheng jokes in Nairobi
about the presence of flies on a person’s mouth, or around a person’s anus
when they fart, being a sign of an enviably rich diet44; or the mocking colonial
descriptions of Kenyan women for whom the “fine heap of dung by the door-
way proclaim[s] her husband’s wealth.”45
Dirt is a catchall interpretive category that includes moral, sanitary, eco-
nomic, and aesthetic evaluations of other cultures. Part of the reason for its
resilience in scholarly discourse is that diverse interpretive categories converge
into one resonant category, ranging from missionary understandings of local
sexualities and colonialist understandings of domestic hygiene through to
contemporary television images of slum life in postcolonial cities. For obvi-
ous reasons, therefore, while dirt has been a vital category in epidemiologi-
cal and environmental research in so-called developing countries, scholars in
the global humanities have tended to avoid approaching the topic in the style
of Stallybrass and White and their Western counterparts in cultural studies,
because of its capacity to perpetuate the very stereotypes about global cities
that it is ostensibly utilized to critique.
The physical degradation of Lagos, the largest city in Africa with nearly 18
million inhabitants, has earned it labels such as “mega-city of slums” and “the
dirtiest city in Africa.” International media attention has remained focused on
the rubbish heaps and squalid informal settlements of Africa’s sprawling cit-
ies.46 Significant as dirt might be as an anti-cosmopolitan heuristic, questions
remain about what social and ideological work it undertakes as a scholarly cat-
egory. Does it help to produce the very histories in which it is deployed as an
explanatory tool? Would our conclusions about the failures of urban sexual tol-
erance, past and present, be different if we included diverse African languages
and a multilayered linguistic approach?
Dirt is a source of fascination for Western publics and scholars alike, as evi-
denced by the popularity of the Wellcome Collection’s exhibition of global
artifacts, “Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life,” in London in 2011, and
by the plethora of dirt-related monographs since the turn of the twenty-first
century. This raises broader questions about the intellectual validity of a the-
matic approach to colonial and postcolonial cultural history. Whether one’s
chosen theme is dirt, cleanliness, sexuality, gender, or another of the multi-
farious “ways in” to cultural history, the primary methodological challenge for
scholars adopting a themed approach is to preserve the cultural complexity of
the chosen global cities while also creating space for non-reductive h ­ istorical
and transnational comparisons. Key methodological questions accompany
such projects: Are African cities better studied in comparison with one another
within an assumed global (or postcolonial) network, or in their specificity as
singular cultural entities, incomparable by too many factors for their super-
ficial similarities to be productive? In thinking about a comparative themed
approach in global arts and humanities fieldwork, it is necessary to interrogate
the benefits of articulating a common topic for analysis (such as dirt) over and
206  S. NEWELL

against a non-themed approach (such as the study of urban cultures and popu-
lar culture).
If social research is to literary studies what Sancho Panza is to Don Quixote,
this chapter has attempted to highlight the significance of texts to social his-
tory and urban studies. Without ignoring the extreme conditions and conflicts
under which the majority of urban Africans live, the fieldwork for this project
has focused on the ordinary lives of urban subjects and their responses to con-
temporary conditions in the domains of material, popular, and textual culture.
From this locally situated, individualized perspective, African urban subjects
and African urban texts can be studied for the ways they represent and cre-
atively respond to the flows of local and international people, commodities,
and resources in their cities.47 Focusing on the lives of ordinary people—and
the stories they read and narrate—alongside institutional and infrastructural
issues, the project tries to emphasize the flexibility and improvisation to be
found in African urban cultures, as well as how, where, and in what languages,
anti-cosmopolitan discourse operates, and to understand the contexts in which
such discourse emerged historically in order to draw attention to the plethora
of other local connotations of dirt and dirt-related terms that do not have their
origins in a history of hate.

Notes
1. “The Cultural Politics of Dirt in Africa 1880–present” was funded in
Lagos and Nairobi by the ERC (AdG 323343) between Sept. 1, 2013,
and June 30, 2015; from July 1, 2015, the project in Lagos has received
generous funding from the  Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf
Memorial Fund and  the MacMillan Center for International and Area
Studies at Yale University. The researchers on this project were/are:
Stephanie Newell (principal investigator); Olutoyosi Tokun, John Uwa,
and Jane Nebe at the University of Lagos, with the support of the
Regional Coordinator Dr. Patrick Oloko; Anne Kirori, Job Mwaura, and
Rebeccah Onwong’a in Nairobi from Feb. 1, 2014, to June 30, 2015.
Far more than “research assistants,” from the outset the team members
wrote regular blogs for the project website and worked on presentations
for dissemination at conferences.
2. See Stephanie Newell, “Dirty Whites: ‘Ruffian-Writing’ in Colonial West
Africa,” 1–15; Stephanie Newell, “Dirty Familiars: Colonial Encounters
in African Cities,” 44–64.
3. Said, Orientalism, 94.
4. Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess. See Julian Pefanis, Heterology and the
Postmodern: Bataille, Baudrillard, Lyotard ; Michael Thompson, Rubbish
Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value.
5. Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 126; see
also William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson, eds, Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and
Modern Life.
 RESEARCHING THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF DIRT IN URBAN AFRICA  207

6. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution

and Taboo.
7. Adeline Masquelier, ed., Dirt, Undress, and Difference: Critical
Perspectives on the Body’s Surface.
8. Ashleigh Harris, “Discourses of Dirt and Disease in Operation
Murambatsvina in Zimbabwe,” 40–50; Timothy Burke, Lifebuoy Men,
Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption, and Cleanliness in Modern
Zimbabwe.
9. Anne Kirori, 6 November 2014.
10. Newell, “Dirty Familiars.”
11. Knox, “Niger Company Ltd.: Diary of Tour Through the Congo and
West Africa,” ms. 72.
12. Knox.
13. Wren, Beau Geste, 6.
14. Newell, “Dirty Familiars.”
15. Between 2005 and 2015, during his term as head of the Lagos Waste
Management Authority (LAWMA), Ola Oresanya ran a public relations
campaign aimed at transforming people’s perceptions of municipal road
sweepers and waste disposal employees. Where Lagos sweepers in 2005
were regarded as shameful and unmarriageable, and hid their faces from
public view while they worked, Oresanya employed teams of “beautiful
ladies” and insisted that they worked with uncovered faces in order to
effect cultural change. A careful media management strategy accompa-
nied this process (Interview, 8 January 2016).
16. Ebola started in Guinea in December 2013 and spread to Liberia and
Sierra Leone early in 2014. By July 2014, the first case had reached
Nigeria. According to World Health Organization (WHO) figures, just
over 11,000 people died from the virus, with three times that number
infected, but the WHO acknowledges that these figures vastly underes-
timate the actual numbers.
17. “Ebola: How 50-Year-Old Nurse and Mother of Four Succumbed to
Death After Treating Liberian Weapon of Mass Destruction,” This Day
Live, August 10, 2014. http://www.thisdaylive.com/articles/ebola-
how-50-year-old-nurse-and-mother-of-four-succumbed-­t o-death-
after-treating-liberian-weapon-of-mass-destruction/185934/.
18. The most popular song was “Ebola! Don’t Touch Your Friends,” the
theme song from Malaria Ebola (directed by Evans Orji, Evanix
Merchandise Production, 2014. 41 min), one of several Nollywood
movies about the virus. An American rap song, “Ebola (La La)” by
Rucka Rucka Ali was also popular in Nairobi, with its emphasis on the
racism of travel restrictions on black people, including “Don’t let the
Obamas on the plane.”
19. No. 4, FGD Lagos: January 2015 (Informed consent and anonymiza-
tion procedures have been implemented for all interviews). FGD
chaired by John Uwa, Jane Nebe, and Olutoyosi Tokun.
208  S. NEWELL

0. No. 5, FGD Lagos: January 2015.

2
21. Whiteman, Lagos: A Cultural History, 14–15.
22. Whiteman, 30; Kristin Mann, Marrying Well: Marriage, Status and
Social Change Among the Educated Elite in Colonial Lagos; Karin
Barber, ed., Print Culture and the First Yoruba Novel: I. B. Thomas’s
“Life Story of Me, Segilola” and Other Texts.
23. Rather like the East India Company (est. 1600) and the notorious
British South Africa Company (established by Cecil Rhodes in 1889),
the Uganda Railway had its own police force and judiciary.
24. White et  al., Nairobi: Master Plan for a Colonial Capital. A Report
Prepared for the Municipal Council of Nairobi, 11.
25. Colonial debates about the racial segregation of Nairobi revolved not
around whether but how to go about the social engineering of the
town. As late as 1948 (a date that coincides with the institutionalization
of the apartheid policy in South Africa), the lengthy government study,
Nairobi: Master Plan for a Colonial Capital discussed different forms of
racial segregation, with extensive input from a team of white South
Africans and inspiration from the model adopted in Southern Rhodesia
(HMSO 1948).
26. Simba, “Street Life: The People of Dar es Salaam,” 66.
27. Postcolonial migrations into Kenya include South Asian refugees from
Idi Amin’s expulsions in the 1970s and, since 2003, Darfuri refugees
from west Sudan. In Nairobi’s changing cultural map, new trade net-
works are visible with the numerous Chinese restaurants serving Chinese
personnel involved in infrastructure projects.
28. Falola and Heaton, A History of Nigeria, 181–208.
29. For an outstanding study of corruption in Nigeria, see Smith, 2007.
For a commentary on oil politics, see Michael Peel, A Swamp Full of
Dollars (2011). The discovery in 2012 of crude oil deposits worth
$10 billion in northern Kenya generated concerns among some polit-
ical commentators that an already unequal economy will become less
re-­distributive and more “Nigerian.” See Wolfgang Fengler, “Will
Oil Be a Blessing or a Curse for Kenya?” Africa Can, Nov. 4 2012,
http://blogs.worldbank.org/africacan/will-oil-be-a-blessing-or-a-
curse-for-­k enya-lessons-from-indonesia-and-the-rest-of-the-world;
“What Kenya can learn from Nigeria’s Oil Industry,” Afritorial,
March 27, 2012, http://afritorial.com/what-kenya-can-learn-from-
nigerias-oil-­industry/. The dramatic drop in global crude oil prices
has slowed the exploitation of oil in Kenya (Immaculate Karambu,
“How Kenya’s oil boom went bust,” Daily Nation, October 6, 2015,
http://www.nation.co.ke/lifestyle/smartcompany/How-Kenya-
oil-boom-went-­b ust-/-/1226/2899924/-/14rah82z/-/index.
html).
30. Said, Orientalism, 94; Christoph Lindner and Miriam Meissner,
“Globalization, Garbage, and the Urban Environment,” 1–13;
 RESEARCHING THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF DIRT IN URBAN AFRICA  209

AbdouMaliq Simone, For the City Yet to Come: Changing African

Life in Four Cities.
31. The discursive spaces offered by social media in Lagos and Nairobi, and
many other themes in this chapter, will be developed in subsequent
publications arising from this project.
32. “Gambia’s Jammeh Calls Gays ‘Vermin,’ Says to Fight Like Malarial
Mosquitoes,” Reuters, February18, 2014. http://www.reuters.com/
article/us-gambia-homosexuality-idUSBREA1H1S820140218.
33. Adam Nossiter, “Nigeria Tries to ‘Sanitize’ Itself of Gays,” New York
Times, February 8, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/
world/africa/nigeria-uses-law-and-whip-to-sanitize-gays.html?_r=0;
“Nigeria Anti-Gay Laws: Fears Over New Legislation,” BBC. January
14, 2014, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-25728845.
34. E. Landau, Z. Verjee and A. Mortensen, “Uganda President: Homosexuals
are ‘Disgusting,’” CNN, February 25, 2014. http://edition.cnn.
com/2014/02/24/world/africa/uganda-homosexuality-interview/.
35. Jonathan Cooper, “Kenya’s anti-gay laws are leaving LGBT community
at the mercy of the mob,” The Guardian, October 8, 2015 http://
www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/oct/08/
kenya-anti-gay-laws-lgbt-community-mercy-of-mob.
36. Elsa Buchanan, “LGBT in Kenya: ‘Government Needs to Stop Violent
Anti-Gay Attacks,’” International Business Times, September 28, 2015,
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/lgbt-kenya-government-needs-stop-
violent-anti-gay-attacks-1521533.
37. President Obama told President Uhuru Kenyatta on a visit to Kenya in
July 2015 that the country’s antihomosexuality laws resembled the
politics of racial segregation in America’s “Jim Crow” era. See Michael
Lucchese, “Obama Compares Kenya’s Anti-Gay Laws to Jim
Crow,”Breitbart. July 27, 2015. http://www.breitbart.com/national-­
security/2015/07/27/obama-compares-kenyas-anti-gay-laws-to-
jim-crow/).
38. Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and
Colonial Common Sense.
39. For a discussion of queer reading in the archives, see Stephanie Newell,
The Forger’s Tale: The Search for “Odeziaku.”
40. David Livingstone Smith, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave,
and Exterminate Others .
41. Newell, “Dirty Whites.”
42. Newell, “Dirty Familiars.”
43. This gender-exclusive category is necessary given the domination of the
sources for this chapter by men.
44. See Miriam Maranga-Musonye, “Literary Insurgence in Kenyan Urban
Space: Mchongoano and the Popular Art Scene in Nairobi.”
45. FCO 141/6436: Arthur M.  Champion: “Native Welfare in Kenya,”
September 1944, item 4.
210  S. NEWELL

6. See Michael Davis, Planet of Slums.

4
47. Simone AbdouMaliq, Introduction to Urban Africa: Changing

Contours of Survival in the City, 1–26; Jennifer Robinson, Ordinary
Cities: Between Modernity and Development.

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Simone, AbdouMaliq. 2004. For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four
Cities. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
———. 2005. Introduction. In Urban Africa: Changing Contours of Survival in the
City, eds. AbdouMaliq Simone, and A. Abouhani, 1–26. Dakar: CODESRIA.
Smith, David Livingstone. 2011. Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and
Exterminate Others. New York: St Martin’s Press.
Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. 1986. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Stoler, Ann Laura. 2009. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial
Common Sense. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Thompson, Michael. 1979. Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
White, L.W.T., et  al. 1948. Nairobi: Master Plan for a Colonial Capital. A Report
Prepared for the Municipal Council of Nairobi. London: H.M. Stationery Office.
Whiteman, Kaye. 2014. Lagos: A Cultural History. Northampton, MA: Interlink Books.
Wren, Percival Christopher. 1924. Beau Geste. London: John Murray.
 CHAPTER 12

Accidental Histories: Fieldwork Among

the Maroons of Jamaica

Paul Youngquist

Fieldwork: for those with a scholarly interest in Caribbean plantation cul-

tures, the word conjures unsettling images: cane bills and fresh bundles,
millstones, trash piles, and hot vats of sugar. It describes the labor of enslaved
Africans, who cut the cane, hauled the trash, and packed the hogsheads of
raw muscovado. The plantation’s hardest work was fieldwork, and the slaves
who did it were valuable assets. Ledgers list them with cattle and livestock
in neat columns labeled “Field Negroes.” Those days may be gone and
with them chattel slavery as a necessary cog in the machinery of mercantil-
ist capitalism. But a whiff of something unpleasant still attends the whole
enterprise of fieldwork, at least in the humanities. It’s not what we do. Our
work occurs in classrooms, libraries, and special collections. Or (with a little
luck and funding), it might take us overseas—usually to metropolitan cen-
ters of high culture and fine cuisine. Fieldwork is for cultural anthropolo-
gists and other obsessives of the vernacular—a word whose very derivation
calls up slavery (from verna, domestic slave). I don’t mean to compare the
contemporary academy to a sugar plantation. That would be fatuous. But I
do mean to suggest that a certain kind of academic labor, especially in the
humanities, remains devalued to the point of neglect as a means of produc-
ing knowledge. What could fieldwork possibly have to do with writing liter-
ary criticism?

P. Youngquist (*)
Department of English, University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, USA

© The Author(s) 2016 213

S. Puri, D.A. Castillo (eds.), Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-92834-7_12
214  P. YOUNGQUIST

Into the Field
That was my attitude for well over a decade after receiving a PhD in English
literature—or would have been had I possessed the ability to say so. But I
didn’t. Fieldwork mattered so little that it would have been pointless to dismiss
it. Why would a physicist dismiss astrological calculation? It just doesn’t apply
to subatomic particles. Similarly, fieldwork just didn’t apply to literary texts.
That’s what I was taught by omission. I received my training as a professional
reader and interpreter of literature at a time (the mid- to late 1980s) when
the old pieties of New Criticism were giving way to the bold pronouncements
of new “theory.” The preferred strategy of the New Critics—close reading—
sealed off the literary text from outside influence and empowered the trained
reader to perform marvelous feats of interpretation through careful, perhaps
mandarin, analysis. “Theory”—really theories—came to change all that, liber-
ating the literary text to a panoply of invigorating contexts: psychoanalytical,
metalinguistic, historical, economic. Those days felt like a time of upheaval and
new beginning, and while it may not have been heaven to be alive in that dawn,
it was at least exciting.
My field was British Romanticism. Traditionally, it consisted of poetry writ-
ten by six male geniuses (as they were called then): all radical (at least cultur-
ally), most university educated (nominally anyway), several dead at an early
age (by natural causes). It was the perfect field for close reading and formal
analysis. But the advent of theory challenged the complacency of those prac-
tices, decrying the exclusion of women writers, the fetishizing of form, and the
historical amnesia that characterized traditional studies of Romanticism. The
latter criticism hit me particularly hard, and I resolved, after a brief flirtation
with Heidegger, to take history for my guide and practice literary criticism
with a historicist twist. Romanticism, after all, was a thing of the cultural past,
a revolutionary literary movement with clear historical antecedents, most obvi-
ously the French Revolution. The populist thrust of that upheaval, at least in
its initial phase, made critical historiography with its leftist bent attractive, and
a close encounter with Foucault taught me how I could move laterally from
literature to other kinds of writing (then called discourse) to claim that, for all
its Romantic ferment, British culture during the last decade of the eighteenth
century was a pretty carceral business, with its expanding war against France,
traffic in human chattel, and colonial empire. Historicist criticism allowed me
to deploy professional chops as close reader of literature on other kinds of texts:
medical, political, diplomatic, economic.
As I did, I came to find those texts as engaging as literature, to the point
that I lost interest in maintaining generic distinctions between either them or
the kinds of knowledge they purveyed. Discourse drew literature into history.
Documents turned history into fodder for a new kind of criticism concerned
less with what texts mean than what they might do if assembled in certain ways
toward particular ends—maybe progressive ends. Historicist criticism (of a
genealogical sort) opened me up to work that New Criticism couldn’t approve.
 ACCIDENTAL HISTORIES: FIELDWORK AMONG THE MAROONS OF JAMAICA  215

I became enamored of documents, detritus, realia. I went archival. Ten years

out of grad school and I felt set for life. Have text will travel.
As Shalini Puri relates in “Finding the Field,” silences can be voluble.1 In
my archival wanders, I encountered one that was especially loud and frustrat-
ing: the Haitian Revolution. Seven years in a graduate program then ranked
tops in the country and not one of my esteemed teachers had mentioned it.
Imagine my surprise. Working on a book about deformed bodies in British
Romantic culture, I became transfixed—or rather repelled—by William Blake’s
depiction of tortured Africans in his engravings accompanying John Gabriel
Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Year’s Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes
of Surinam (1796).2 These images led me to investigate eighteenth-century
black rebellion throughout the Atlantic. Inevitably Haiti reared its hydra head.
The only successful slave rebellion in history occurred as Romanticism began
to flower—not as a new beginning but as the summation of over a century
of black resistance to European slavery. In my search for English accounts of
this black dawn, I soon found my way to Marcus Rainsford’s An Historical
Account of the Black Empire of Hayti (1805), an eyewitness account of the
Haitian Revolution written by a Captain in His Majesty’s Army, specifically the
Third West India Regiment.
A British eyewitness account of the Haitian Revolution? Here I encoun-
tered a second silence, blown like a bubble inside the first. Reading Rainsford’s
book, I learned that the British invaded St. Domingo (as they then called the
French colony on the island of Hispaniola) in 1793. I learned they occupied
much of its coastal rim until driven from the island by Toussaint L’Ouverture
and rebel blacks in 1798. And I learned the eyewitness account containing
these revelations had never been republished since its original appearance in
1805. To the silence surrounding Haitian revolution, add the silence sur-
rounding British counterrevolution. These silences were becoming deafening.
Someone should edit Rainsford’s book, I thought, and let his history speak its
piece about black rebellion and white reprisal. Then came a second thought,
as compelling as it was daunting: that someone should be me. I knew nothing
of editing, and I lacked the credentials the book’s subject seemed to require,
those of a bona fide historian. But I could read anything and I knew my way
around the archive. I put together a proposal and soon found myself prepar-
ing a scholarly edition of Rainsford’s book in the company of a collaborator,
Grégory Pierrot.3
We began hunting factoids. So little was known about Rainsford, as soldier,
author, and, as it turned out, artist, that any information proved invaluable no
matter how minute. Our odyssey in pursuit of this mysterious servant of empire
and grudging advocate of black soldiery would add a small chapter to the annals
of the micro-history of bibliography, but what matters most is the way it affected
my work. Thanks to Rainsford and problems posed by editing his book, my sense
of field began to shift: from period to place, from Romanticism to the colonial
outposts of British culture, specifically Jamaica. Rainsford forced me out of the
archive and into the field, confusing my work in ways I have yet to understand
216  P. YOUNGQUIST

fully. Or maybe he vastly multiplied archives, liberating me from a subjection to

documents, to text, as the condition of critical engagement. At his behest, or
rather that of his book, I traveled to Kingston, Jamaica, to rifle through the man-
uscript collection at the National Library. My aims were specific. I was looking
for documentary evidence that Rainsford had actually been in Haiti—to corrob-
orate his claim to have served as a recruiter of black soldiers. I was looking too for
more information about an incident he recorded involving British deployment of
bloodhounds against Jamaican Maroons in rebellion. Dogs? Maroons? I wanted
to learn more about both than Rainsford’s book told me.
And I would, but not the way I expected. I did find documentary record
that Rainsford received payment in Port-au-Prince for his service as an officer in
His Majesty’s Army—at a time when he claims not to have been there.4 Which
was interesting. But what I learned of the Maroons was frustrating to say the
least. Independent blacks living in Jamaica’s all but impenetrable interior, they
rebelled in 1795, or rather a particular group of them did, those living in a
place called Trelawney Town in the Parish of St. James, northwest of Kingston.
The documentary evidence, however, hardly offered a disinterested picture of
their rebellion. Little wonder: the British wrote it. By all accounts—letters,
histories, journals, records of the Jamaican Assembly—the merciless ferocity
of those Maroon savages more than justified the use of weaponized dogs to
subdue them. And a notably humane use it was too, given that the troops
accompanying their handlers never once gave orders to set them loose. Terror
pure and simple—terror inspired by man-eating dogs—brought the Maroon
rebellion to a swift, inevitable finish.5
The documentary record left me disgusted. Color me innocent, but I
expected better of the British, who in theaters other than war at least occa-
sionally seemed capable of acknowledging the humanity of people different
from themselves. One sunny afternoon, I left the National Library demoralized
about archival work, which seems to reveal only as much as the British, in their
imperial literacy, wanted anyone to know. I met up with my friend and col-
league Frances Botkin of Towson University’s English Department, committed
to as many Red Stripes as it took to work through my confusion. She was happy
to oblige. I should mention how very much I owe to Fran, maven of the field,
who first encouraged me to explore Jamaican archives as a source of material
not available in the metropole depositories in London and Kew.
Fran is sitting at the Senior Common Room bar on UWI campus sipping a
rum and water when I arrive. We talk for a while, mostly about the con game of
archival scholarship, its investment in documents about as disinterested as army
ordnance. A tall man wearing an African amulet around his neck and a serious
look on his face walks up and begins talking to Fran about things I do not
understand—Maroons, an invisible hunter, the cost of buses, an A ­ fro-­centric
fashion show. Before I know what has happened, or exactly how, I’ve been
recruited to help organize a conference he’s conjuring to coincide with the
annual Quao Day celebration in Charles Town. Fran’s done so before and
shares his vision of a gathering of scholars in Charles Town’s Asafu Yard. Now
 ACCIDENTAL HISTORIES: FIELDWORK AMONG THE MAROONS OF JAMAICA  217

it’s known as the Annual Charles Town International Maroon Conference.

Then it was a leery dream. The tall man dreaming it and charming me into
doing likewise was Colonel Frank Lumsden of the Charles Town Maroons.
Near the end of our conversation that bright day, Colonel Frank did some-
thing that in retrospect strikes me as magical: he took from his pocket a well-­
handled document and started methodically to unfold it on one of the black
metal tables. “See this?” he asked. “This is a map of Charles Town. It proves
Charles Town can never be sold. See all these plots around it? These boundaries
and lines? They mark private property. These lots have deeds. They can be sold.
But this blank space in the middle is not private property. No deeds to it exist.
It’s held in common, common Maroon property. Charles Town can’t be sold.
It’s Maroon land. Forever.” At the time, I only dimly understood the point of
Colonel Frank’s lesson in cartography. In retrospect, however, I see it was a
bold declaration of indigenous rights, an act of anticolonial counter-­mapping
that lays claim, not merely to a represented territory but more completely to
a whole way of life, grounded in that Maroon common and sustained by col-
lective ownership without deed. Colonel Frank, appearing like some ancestral
spirit, offered an antidote to the archive. His account of the Maroon common,
a counter-memory to documentary evidence and its legal and cultural lega-
cies, pushed me further into the field. Knowledge about the Maroons should
include Maroon knowledge, and fieldwork alone could harvest it. I agreed to
help with the Colonel’s conference.

Colonel Frank Does the Weather

June in Jamaica that year was wet; the rainy season came early. The conference
seemed to be going well. Participants had all arrived on the designated day
in Kingston from their various places of origin: Canada, the USA, Suriname,
England, Senegal. The Coaster Fran booked to transport them to Goblin Hill,
a tired but lovely resort near San Antonio, made its way with slow ease over the
Blue Mountains—and through the rain—thanks to the sure hands of the driver
Neville, a big man with a quiet smile. He would ferry us back and forth daily
from Goblin Hill to Charles Town too.
We convened the conference in the Asafu Yard, the sacred communal space
in Charles Town where Maroons gather to dance, deliberate, and, in the old
days, study war—an enclosed green about double the size of a vacant lot, the
wall rimmed with a short roof of corrugated zinc. A raised platform flanked the
far end, decorated for the conference with green creepers, yellow bunting, and
a cow’s skull nailed to the transom above. A podium twined with philodendron
stood to the left of a looming pile of loudspeakers and a badass mixing board.
These Maroons were Jamaican, after all. Colonel Frank and his minions had set
up chairs beneath a drab canvas field tent, its walls rolled up and roped.
Two early panels of paper presentations seemed to interest the sparse
audience, which included three or four Maroons sitting against the far wall,
smoking. I talked about bloodhounds, Fran about the notorious outlaw
218  P. YOUNGQUIST

­ hree-­Fingered Jack. Other participants presented papers on Maroon mili-

T
tary practices, Maroons in Dominica, marine Maroons scooting from island
to island in canoes. Colonel Frank had opened our ceremonies with a bless-
ing performed in tandem with Solman, a Saramaka Maroon from Suriname:
they spoke patwas in unison, part of whose vocabulary they shared (flashes of
mutual understanding crossing their faces), punctuated by sprays of white rum
sucked up from the calabash each cradled in his hands.
But now the afternoon was dragging on. Lunch seemed long ago, our par-
ticipants were growing restless. They needed some diversion. The schedule
included an outing to Quao’s Village, a nearby clearing a few miles up the river,
where—even under gray skies—they might enjoy the view of the mountains
misted by cloud, or splash a little in the cool water.
But where was the bus? Frank had agreed to provide a bus to transport
conference participants to Quao Village. Our man Neville was off on another
booking. Our printed program promised a bus. Our people were milling. Our
event was on the brink of disorder. Fran was growing impatient: “It’s getting
late. We’ll disappoint them. Do something, say something, will you?”
Clouds churned above the ridge. Colonel Frank stood still staring into
them. I tentatively approached him.
“Excuse me. Colonel Frank. We’re wondering about the bus. For our con-
ference participants. You know, to Quao Village? You said you arranged a bus?”
Colonel Frank turned his stare on me, into me.
“What bus?”
“Quao Village. The River.”
“There is no bus.” He pursed his lips, a look of intense gravity on his dark
face.
“But how…”
Colonel Frank interrupted, his voice turning staccato. “Look at me. Look at
me. Tell me this: is it raining today in Jamaica?”
“Yes, Frank, it’s raining today in Jamaica.”
“Is it raining today in Charles Town?” He raised a hand above his head.
“No, Colonel Frank. It’s not raining here. Not yet.”
“I’m doing that. OK?” He turned away from me with contempt.
Fran, who had observed the exchange, gave me that “what now” look.
“How should I know? We’ll make do. Tell them no Quao Village. Or I
will.”
Colonel Frank kept the rain at bay for another 90 minutes. Then the skies
released their burden and we ran for shelter under the tent. Sounds of rain were
everywhere.

Ambient Knowledge
Fieldwork takes two forms for me in Jamaica. One is the Charles Town
International Maroon Conference, now an annual event that, like an ersatz
season, regularly affects the weather of my professional life. The other is harder
 ACCIDENTAL HISTORIES: FIELDWORK AMONG THE MAROONS OF JAMAICA  219

to identify and describe, partly because it overlaps with the work of the con-
ference. It involves learning about Jamaican Maroons—often from them—in
both systematic and unsystematic ways. Systematic study flatters my archival
instincts. It requires that I learn all I can from documentary sources treating
the Maroons, and where better than in Jamaican archives? I’ve logged a lot of
time in Kingston at the National Library on East Street near the sea. It holds
most of the primary printed material pertaining to Maroons: Edward Long’s
History of Jamaica (1774), Bryan Edwards’s The Proceedings of the Governor
and Assembly of Jamaica in Regard to the Maroon Negroes (1796), R.C. Dallas’s
The History of the Maroons (1803), Bryan Edwards’s monumental The History
Civil and Commercial of the British Colonies in the West Indies (three volumes
with occasional remarks about Maroons, 1801), The Journals of the Honourable
Assembly of Jamaica, The Votes of the Honorable Assembly of Jamaica, and The
Laws of Jamaica, to name a few titles. Manuscript material makes interesting
reading too, from the letter books of the Jamaican Assembly and its agents to
private accounts of Maroons in rebellion to military reports from the field.
The Jamaica Archive in Spanish Town, half an hour on the bus west from
Kingston, offers an abundance of related documents. The stuff that most
interests me remains in manuscript: hearings from slave courts, assizes, and
the King’s Bench, rosters from Maroon towns, original patents and deeds,
Parish minutes from St. Andrews and St. James, the Freedman’s Book of
Kingston: all the discursive detritus of colonial domination. However biased
these documents, they provide an infrastructure for encountering a history
that exceeds British colonial history. Jamaican Maroons, even after decades
of guerilla harassment in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries,
might not have emerged as an independent people without the assent of the
Assembly of Jamaica. Their indigeneity bears a British stamp. The archival
record illuminates this British bias built into being Maroon—and tests its pre-
sumptive authority.
Maroons are creatures of negotiation—literally. Their warrior leaders, Kojo
and Quao, each negotiated a treaty with a representative of His Majesty the
King of England (in 1738 and 1739, respectively), gaining independence for
their people in perpetuity. The treaties’ terms are surprisingly simple, if in some
ways deeply vexed: a substantial grant of land to be held in common, service
to the Crown as the island’s police force (returning runaways and squashing
rebellions), presence of white superintendents on Maroon land, and certain
limits on Maroon legal authority. The British printed the treaties in myriad for-
mats (a transcription of Kojo’s appears in Dallas’s History, for instance), little to
the benefit of an illiterate people.6 No matter: superintendents were required
to read them aloud to their Maroon communities three times a year.
The documentary record establishes, with all the empirical force such
records traditionally assert, that being Maroon in Jamaica involves inhabiting
history—and being inhabited by it—in several constitutive ways, at least from
a British perspective: Maroons share a lived relation to a legacy of resistance
to colonial domination, to land held in common forever, and to complicity
220  P. YOUNGQUIST

with the very powers they fought against for independence. To say the least,
Maroons today have a complicated relationship to this history. The archival
material that documents it has given rise to a formidable body of scholarship
on Maroon heritage spanning from Mavis Campbell’s meticulous examination
of the record in The Maroons of Jamaica 1655–1796: A History of Resistance,
Collaboration, and Betrayal (1988) and Nova Scotia and the Fighting Maroons:
a Documentary History (1990) to Kathleen Wilson’s astute “The Performance
of Freedom: Maroons and the Colonial Order in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica
and the Atlantic Sound” (2009).7 Such historical scholarship sustains what
passes in the academy as the official institutional memory of the Maroon peo-
ple. It’s how I first came to know them. It’s an important resource not only
for learning about their heritage but also its willful destruction, most patently
in the aftermath of the uprising that became known as the “Second Maroon
War,” when the Jamaican Assembly called out the dogs, scotched the rebel-
lion, and ultimately transported the entire Maroon population of Trelawney
Town off the island to, of all places, Halifax, Nova Scotia. The more I studied
archival records, the more interested I became in that underreported incident
in the annals of benign genocide as an episode in the larger history of the
Jamaican Maroons.
The more I studied the archival record in Jamaica, however, the less com-
fortable I became with its version of events. The problem was not that, when
closely examined, such information proved inconsistent or ambiguous. In fact,
documentary history wielded an imperious authority—as long as I remained in
the archive. After I left the library, however, and started talking about my work
to Jamaican people—in taxis, buses, bars, markets, rum shops, and on streets,
beaches, and conference panels—far different stories began to emerge, frag-
mentary, incoherent, and allusive, but no less confusing for their vernacularity.
Some I barely understood, coming as they did in the unwritten patwa—or
rather patwas—that constitute everyday speech for Jamaicans.
Conversations after working hours left me with the sense that history is not
the whole story: “Maroons? They were the first Jamaican freedom fighters.”
“Maroons! Don’t talk to me about Maroons. They betrayed us.” “I know they
independent. They do that festival up there, you know, in Accompong.” “My
grandmother was a Maroon. I never been to her town, though.” “They just
bounty hunters. Hunted runaways. Bad people.” “Never heard of Trelawney
Town.” “Dogs? Bloodhounds? Yeah they used them against us slaves.” “They
have their own land. They’re not Jamaicans. They’re their own people.” “I
like Maroons. My mother likes them—they’re authentic. They invented jerk.”
“Killed a lot of slaves, Maroons. Worked for whites. Bacra give them guns.”
Or this summation, shouted by an elderly Jamaican man named Inus Austin
through the gaps in his teeth: “Maroon-dem dead and gone!”
I had not come to Jamaica to conduct fieldwork, but the field neverthe-
less came to me. Streets outside the archive teemed with bits and pieces of
vernacular memory that sometimes corroborated, sometimes contested the
official history sanctioned by documentary evidence. What would happen if
 ACCIDENTAL HISTORIES: FIELDWORK AMONG THE MAROONS OF JAMAICA  221

I began to listen to those ambient memories, reversed the relation between

written and spoken words, and allowed the latter, in all their ambiguity and
dubious intentionality, to shape my understanding of the Maroon past? I’d
compromise my disinterestedness as an observer of the historical record, of
course, by inserting myself into the circuit of its communication. But what I
lost in objectivity (a term without much weight for a literary critic anyway), I
might gain in multiplicity: the proliferation of perspectives on a past irreducible
to a single (documentary and imperial) account. That these perspectives come
charged with emotional investment only adds to their force and explanatory
power. If as Walter Benjamin suggests, time doesn’t pass—it accumulates—
then it piles into the present unevenly, in messy heaps or cacophonies of cross
talk.8 Archives were all around me, in the world I walked through on my way
to the National Library (across Parade and down King’s Street, the smell of
piss and blast of dancehall hanging in the air) as much as in the air-conditioned
reading room on its second floor.
One form fieldwork has begun to take for me, then, involves the accumula-
tion of an ambient knowledge of Maroon history: myriad counter-histories
that drift through the heads and the hearts of everyday Jamaicans, taking flight
in the improvisational play of conversation. This is fieldwork without a man-
ual, unconstrained by the disciplinary imperatives of history, anthropology,
or various ethnographies. It moves in slow motion, less devoted to verifiable
results than more qualitative, fuzzy outcomes: encounter, acknowledgment,
exchange. I am interested now to know what people know about Maroon his-
tory, not in order to create a definitive counter-hegemonic account, but to
qualify the official story by the small measure of such persisting if whispered
memories. This ambient knowledge accumulates with time over the course of
multiple visits to Jamaica and a lot of listening. It’s not the kind of knowledge
that makes for powerful grant proposals. It nevertheless enriches the work I
now do. It vastly multiplies possibilities for intellectual and social engagement
with a history as alive as the people who remember it.
This form of fieldwork as I practice it, or perhaps as it practices me, requires
acknowledging a few precepts. First, it is immersive: you can’t do it without
being in the field, which is to say immersed in the place(s) and space(s) of
ambient knowledge. I spent many years in documentary archives before dis-
covering that other kinds existed in the open all around me. Indeed, immersion
in this open is the vital condition of the kind of encounter, acknowledgment,
and exchange yielding the many histories that exceed official history. Second,
fieldwork is errant: you can’t plan its outcomes in advance, partly because you
are involved in producing them. Ambient knowledge isn’t just there like some
dusty tome on a bookshelf. It occurs as the effect of immersive encounters and
exchanges. It happens—and it happens to and through you. Errancy names the
accidental itinerary comprising your encounters with others, relations—how-
ever fleeting—that spark knowledge in the field. Third, fieldwork is multiple:
you can’t pursue it in a single archive. Fieldwork multiplies your archives. It
plays documents against stories against music against dances against rumors
222  P. YOUNGQUIST

against reports against… . It produces ensembles of incommensurable memo-

ries, assemblages of contestable claims. By multiplying archival resources, field-
work aspires to more than its conclusions can ever say. Perhaps it remains less
a practice than a poetics of discovery in the sense Édouard Glissant implies
in his peculiar use of the word “relation”: “Relation, or totality in evolution,
whose order is continually in flux and whose disorder one can imagine for-
ever.”9 Fieldwork, or the totality of ambient knowledge in evolution.

Tracking Trelawneys
I was determined to learn what I could about Trelawney Maroons from the
Maroons themselves, any way I could, even if it meant driving on the wrong
side of the road. Ethnographers do it all the time, I thought: talk to people
and produce Significant Insights. I would dive into living history and come
out soaked with Maroon memory. What else could I do? The documentary
record petered out in the mid-nineteenth century. All it left me was a bunch of
names: Mary Brown, Sarah M’Gale, or Mary Ricketts—Maroon women who
had returned to Jamaica in 1841 from Sierra Leone, where the Trelawneys
had finally been transported by the British after five cold, desolate years in
Nova Scotia. I could spend days in the Island Record Office at J$850 an hour
to discover only their death certificates. Big deal. They might not even name
the right Sarah or Marys. I wanted more. I wanted stories. I wanted Maroon
memories of Maroon history—not as the British recorded it, but as Maroon
mothers and fathers and grandmothers and grandfathers handled it and pol-
ished it and passed it on to coming kin.
Hadn’t Kenneth Bilby, the great ethnographer of Jamaican Maroons, done
that work already, compiled those memories? Naw, he was after the Afro-creole
core of Maroon culture. Even if there were such a core, a guy as white as me
wasn’t going to get near it. I didn’t have time or funding to hang out in Charles
Town romancing the elders and establishing cultural cred. On my budget all
I’d get was the usual ersatz ritual repackaged for public consumption: a little
lecture on the Asafu warrior, a sneak peek at Kromanti Play. I wasn’t pursuing
primal memories anyway, hushed accounts of “first time” or ancestor fete-men.
I was tracking unknown histories of known events, alternative versions of what
historians—Edwards and Dallas or Campbell and Grant—thought they knew. I
wanted to tap a vein of living memory. It would bleed revelations. All I needed
was a car to get out of Kingston and some dim inkling of where to drive.
It was Fran who supplied the latter, sitting at the bar at Red Bones in the
hard morning sun. A semester teaching at UWI Mona Campus and ­researching
the exploits of Three-Fingered Jack had, apparently, introduced her to the
majority of the island’s inhabitants. “Wakefield,” she blurted when I asked. “I
hear Trelawney Maroons still live around Wakefield. I mean. Descendants. You
need to talk to this lady up there named Mama G. She’s their racial memory.
Ha. Get it?”
I got it. It was all the hint I needed to rent a car. “Wanna come?”
 ACCIDENTAL HISTORIES: FIELDWORK AMONG THE MAROONS OF JAMAICA  223

“I wouldn’t let you go without me, whitey.”

“But who’s Mama G?”
“Rasta woman. Also an activist. I heard she lived three years off the grid
without money, building shelters for women with nowhere to go, teaching
them crafts so they could earn a few J and maybe live independently. She knows
all about the Trelawneys.” Fran called City Guide for a taxi to Fiesta Rentals
on Waterloo.
I completed the necessary paperwork while she palavered with a gorgeous
blue grouper hiding in the kelp of the lobby’s saltwater aquarium. A smiling
attendant brought a small green sedan to a halt out front and stepped out,
holding the door open and beckoning. It was a Toyota, its plastic hubcaps zip-­
tied to the wheels. I slid into the driver’s seat on the car’s right side. Fran rode
shotgun on the left. I looked at the wheel. I looked at Fran. Everything was
backward. Where was the key? I groped with my left hand and found it. The car
started with a shiver. I coaxed it slowly down the driveway toward the Waterloo
as Fran waved the grouper goodbye.
“You gotta navigate,” I said. “Make sure I end up in the right lane. I mean
the left. The one that won’t get us killed.”
“My God, watch out!” I slammed the brakes. She turned to me, all teeth.
“Just kidding! Let’s go.”
The first few turns were tricky, like entering a mirror. Cars, busses, trucks,
and motorbikes roared toward us in a reversed dream of vehicular homicide.
But I adapted.
We took a right on Constant Spring Road and headed up through Stony
Hill, winding our way out of Kingston on the A-3. It followed the twisted
spine of the Blue Mountains, under a thick shag of palm and breadfruit, along
cliffs dropping to misted vales. The traffic was maniacal. Battered Japanese
imports whined past us on steep hills and narrow curves. Lumbering Coasters
packed with passengers pulled around slow trucks, coming straight at us until,
by some heart-pounding miracle, they swerved and missed. My hands fused to
the steering wheel as my right foot worried the brakes as we drove: past the jerk
places at Junction, past the turnoff to Scott’s Hall, past Tapioca Villas, through
banana, coconut, and more banana groves as the road leveled toward the sea.
We took a left on the roundabout outside Annotto Bay, heading toward
Port Maria on the A-1, the road opening out to something like a highway,
speed limit 80 kph. I relaxed and Fran chattered. Next stop Wakefield.
An hour and a half later we were bumping along the deeply potted road
from Martha Brae. Route taxis passed like screaming hummingbirds. I refused
their invitation to hurry. The land was flat, expansive—plantation land, open to
the sun. Occasional stone columns loomed up from brambly creepers, evidence
of old sugar estates, long gone. Wooden shacks dotted the road, set back 20
or 30 feet, built above the ground on short stone piles, porch in front, paint
fading.
“What do we do once we get to Wakefield? It’s just ahead.”
Fran thought about it. “Library maybe?” She had the instincts of an archivist.
224  P. YOUNGQUIST

We bounced by a hand-painted sign, “Wakefield, Trelawny Parish.” On the

left stood a small plank structure glowing orange in the hard light. Big block
letters on its main gable read “Wakefield Library.” I pulled in.
It was shuttered tight, doors obviously locked.
“What now?”
“Police station, maybe? Cops know everybody.”
More good instincts, even if police made me nervous. We drove straight to
what appeared to be Wakefield’s town square, gas station on the left side of
the road, police station on the right, a faded white-and-blue building behind a
chain link fence with a clock tower rising above it, graceful Arabic numerals on
the clock face, hands pointing permanently to ten and four.
We stepped onto the plank porch to be greeted with a wave by a policeman
in a natty uniform speaking into the receiver of a massive cordless phone—an
ancient artifact from the 1970s. He smiled and raised the index finger of his
free hand, soliciting our patience. I couldn’t make out what he was saying in
his burly patwa, but he soon finished, smiled broadly, and held out a hand:
“I’m Corporal Palmer of the Wakefield Constabulary. How may I help you?”
His striped shirt was authoritatively spotless, his blue trousers were perfectly
pressed, and his striped epaulets were peculiarly compelling. Badge 1269.
“We’re looking for Trelawney Maroons,” Fran said in her frank way. “Know
any?”
The question inspired in Corporal Palmer full-body contortions of mental
consideration. Fist to chin, he said, “I see. Maroons. Maroons. Who would
know about Maroons. To whom could I direct you. I have it!” His finger shot
back into the air. “Mr. MacDonald. Yes. He’s an old Rasta. If anybody knows
about Maroons, it would be him.”
“How do we find this, uh, Johnson?” Fran was a stickler.
“MacDonald. Take this road straight from here. Five or six miles. The road
turns to dirt. You wind past a river, then you come to a fork and you take the
left, bear left, and then you go another mile or so. When you come to a cross-
roads, Dehaney Crossroads, you will see a shop on the right. Someone will be
sitting in front. Ask him where is Mr. MacDonald. Tell him the police sent you.
You’ll find him. Mr. MacDonald lives near there.”
We thanked Corporal Palmer heartily. I snapped a picture of Fran standing
next to him on the porch, and we were off, bumping between the potholes.
“Tell them the police sent us? That’ll inspire trust.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Obviously he wants us dead. But who said field work was
easy?”
Six miles feels like 60 on a rural Jamaican road. Churches outnumbered
domiciles: Baptist, Methodist, Church of God, Latter-day Saints. We found
the fork and stayed left, and after driving past some thick foliage came sud-
denly upon a crossroads. Dehaney Crossroads? A shop on the right, festooned
with “Rumbar” pennants, stood directly across from an old stone chapel with
casement windows, “The United Church of Jamaica and the Cayman Islands”
 ACCIDENTAL HISTORIES: FIELDWORK AMONG THE MAROONS OF JAMAICA  225

according to a sign in front. I parked next to the shop. Fran got out of the car
and approached the guy sitting on a folding chair in the shade.
“Hey. Sir. Do you know a man named Mr. MacDonald? We’re looking for
Mr. MacDonald.” The guy looked confused, like he didn’t understand. He
stroked his face. He puffed his cheeks. Without saying a word, he rose, turned,
and tottered off the shop’s raised planks into the bush. Fran turned to me (I
was still behind the wheel) and, raising her hands palms up, shrugged.
“What now?” she mouthed.
“We wait,” I mouthed back. Which we did.
The guy returned in a few minutes. “Him no home,” he said, shaking his
head. My heart sank a notch. “Him at him brother.”
“Where’s that?”
The guy lifted his arm and pointed across the road to a half-finished house,
the ground floor painted peach, rebar sprouting like mad antennae where the
second floor should be. “Der.”
“There? There! Thanks.”
I got out of the car. We walked across the road to Mr. MacDonald’s broth-
er’s house and knocked on the clean white door.
Sounds within: a small crash, a hushed shuffle. The door opened.
“Mr. MacDonald?”
The man was indeed an old Rasta. He wore thick locks neatly tucked into a
knit black-and-orange tam. A tattered gray beard dangled in clumps from his
weathered face. Reed thin and bare to the waist, he wore a bright purple towel
about his nethers and green flip-flops on his feet. His knees were rickety and his
toes were gnarled. His face had the fuddled dignity of a man awakened from
a deep sleep.
“Ya, maan. I’m MacDonald.” We told him of our quest for Trelawney
Maroons. We asked him what he knew about them, lore, stories, anything.
He smiled warmly. “Maroons. Maroons.” He paused. “I could teach you
about Rastafar-I. But Maroons. I don’t know so much. I tell you who can tell
you. Wait here.” Mr. MacDonald shuffled back inside his brother’s house.
Rustling within.
He returned a few minutes later clutching something in his fist and shuffled
past us into the dirt road. Pointing to the heavens, in a sweet, low voice, he
said, “Reception.” He began studiously punching numbers into an old cell
phone the size of a passport. He put it to his ear, cocked his head, and waited
for a connection.
“Hello. Simba? Simba. Listen, maan. I have a couple here wants to know
about Maroons. Can you talk to them? OK.” Mr. MacDonald thrust the phone
at Fran.
She took the device and started shouting into it—about Maroons, about
Trelawney Town, about Emporer Haile Selassie, about Maroons again. She
used the word Simba several times.
Pregnant pauses and fierce nodding.
226  P. YOUNGQUIST

“Yes. Yes. OK. Simba, thank you. Many thanks. Zine. Thanks, mon. OK.”
She handed the phone back to Mr. MacDonald and thanked him too. He nod-
ded kindly, jiggling the knots of his ragged beard.
“You’re welcome. Bless.” The cool of his brother’s house beckoned. He put
the fingers of his two hands together, and with a barely noticeable bow, turned
and disappeared inside, tam, towel, and cell phone.
I didn’t say a word to Fran until we were back in the car. Then I said one
word.
“So?”
“So I know who we need to talk to.”
“Who?”
“Mama G.”
“Fran, we knew that.”
“Yeah. But now we know where she is.”
“Great. Finally. Where do we find her? She live nearby?” I was eager.
“Kingston.”
“Kingston?”
“Word. Kingston.”

Space Is the Place

The second form fieldwork takes for me is the annual Charles Town International
Maroon Conference. I call it fieldwork because it takes place in the field and
it’s a helluva lot of work. The original vision for the conference belongs to
Colonel Frank: an academic gathering to coincide with Charles Town’s annual
Quao Day celebration on June 23, the great warrior’s birthday. Two days of
panels in the Asafu Yard involving an international array of scholars of marron-
age and one day of festivities celebrating Maroon culture, history, and identity.
First Fran and then I came on board as organizers of the event’s academic
days. Frank would handle the cultural celebration on Quoa Day. The appeal
for me lay in the event’s weirdness—a conference about Maroons convened
with Maroons: on their terms, in their space, toward ends I believed in but
didn’t really understand. To scholars from abroad it might look like a Jamaican
getaway, a three-day junket in the Blue Mountains on the underdeveloped
side of the island, away from the tourists and the Rent-a-Dreads and the other
detritus of credit card colonialism. To Colonel Frank it provided an occasion
to advance a double agenda of associating intellectual integrity with Maroon
culture within Jamaica and projecting a progressive image abroad. To Fran
and me it offered the opportunity of an extended stay in Kingston for several
weeks prior to the event, justifying grant applications for travel support and
summer flight from American malaise. Divers are the motives, unpredictable
the outcomes.
Organizing the annual Charles Town International Maroon Conference
offers rewards that swing between revelation and benign nightmare. None of
it could happen without the Fran’s energies. Her ability to imagine and sustain
 ACCIDENTAL HISTORIES: FIELDWORK AMONG THE MAROONS OF JAMAICA  227

the event year after year is nothing short of miraculous. I work with her in my
small way to solicit and vet paper proposals, communicate with participants,
create panels, print promotional material, coordinate transportation, arrange
lodging, provide food and beverage, handle confusion and complaints, and
generally troubleshoot—all the administrative splendors that attend conference
organization. There’s a difference, of course: this conference occurs in Jamaica.
We receive no institutional support to run it. Funding comes entirely from con-
ference fees. We work closely with the Charles Town Maroon Council to pro-
duce an event that conforms to their expectations and needs. We find ourselves
relating to a wide range of people and organizations in Jamaica: the National
Library, the Jamaica Institute, the Jamaica Archive, Digicel, the University of
the West Indies, its program for Rastafari Studies, the University of Technology
in Kingston, Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts, the
Jamaica Union of Travelers Association, the Liguanea Club Hotel, Red Bones
Blues Café, Tony’s Bar, the Maroon Indigenous Women’s Circle, City Guide
Taxi Service, even the office of the US Ambassador to Jamaica. This kind of
fieldwork involves multiple fields. As a result, it requires multiple border cross-
ings too: between classes, communities, garrisons, parishes, even (not that we
always know it) gang territories. It takes imagination, persistence, patience,
charm, luck, and a lot of listening to do this work. Patwa would help enor-
mously, but neither Fran nor I have it. So we make do. We get things done.
Barely.
We’re in a very peculiar, maybe precarious position. We’re caught up in
a Maroon micro-politics we only dimly understand. When Colonel Frank
expresses his wish that the academic event we organize add something seri-
ous to the Maroon cause, he’s positioning Charles Town and the conference
it hosts as a progressive alternative to Accompong, the most prominent of
Jamaica’s Maroon Towns. Accompong has acquired that reputation by hosting
a festival of its own for many years on January 5 commemorating the signing
of the treaty with the British. It’s made Accompong in a sense the “official”
Maroon community of Jamaica. The festival feels like a county fair held in
almost impenetrable hills at a high altitude: the crowd, the hustle, the buzz;
cheap goods laid out on blankets, pigs’ heads on open barbecues, reggae blast-
ing from banks of loudspeakers; dancing, drumming, speeches by Maroon
colonels, edifying words from Jamaican government officials. The Accompong
Maroon Festival celebrates Maroons in a nationalist context under the banner
of unity as Jamaica’s first freedom fighters, its independent indigenous people.
Unlike Accompong, situated deep in cockpit country where steep moun-
tains and narrow defiles restrict easy access, Charles Town’s location just a few
miles inland from Buff Bay always made its borders unusually porous to outside
influence. Colonel Frank’s vision is frankly and unapologetically international.
He views the conference at Charles Town as an opportunity to create a world-
wide web of connections in the name of marronage: among scholars from
different institutions and countries, among indigenous peoples from all over
the globe, and among both those groups and the local Maroons they come to
228  P. YOUNGQUIST

know. He’s taking the high ground morally and intellectually in the belief that
convening an academic conference in the Asafu Yard in the company of living
Maroons will associate Jamaica’s first freedom fighters with something more
than trinkets, photo opportunities, and political rhetoric. In part, he has suc-
ceeded—if bringing scholars and Maroons from around the world to Charles
Town constitutes success. The former have come from England, Canada, the
USA, Puerto Rico, Suriname, Venezuela, Barbados, Jamaica, Senegal, and
Australia. Maroons have visited primarily from Suriname and Canada. During
the three days of the conference, Charles Town becomes a center for global
inquiry into the history, future, and persistence of marronage. Jamaican indi-
geneity opens to transnational encounters and cross-cultural exchange. These
effects are oddly in keeping with Charles Town’s history as a Maroon com-
munity. Anthropologists seeking to study “true born” Maroons preferred
more isolated communities like Accompong or Moore Town. But this legacy
of cultural “contamination” gives Charles Town today its unusual readiness
to accept visitors from around the world and tolerate their commentary on
Maroon history and tradition. For Colonel Frank, Charles Town provides a
platform from which to preach—and cultivate—awareness about Maroons in
Jamaica and around the world.
Its porosity makes Charles Town a strange place to practice fieldwork. It
doesn’t sustain the specificity usually constitutive of “place” in an anthropo-
logical sense. The old distinction between place and space, the local and the
global, collapses to the point of pointlessness, a quaint heuristic that gets little
lasting purchase on everyday life.10 Charles Town retains a cultural and histori-
cal particularity, of course, incommensurable with anywhere else in Jamaica, let
alone the globe. It has its rum shops, its customs, its families, its burial ground,
its Maroon traditions that make it Charles Town, a place apart. But perhaps
because of the nature of our work in this particular field, Fran and I find it
impossible to segregate place from space, even for the purpose of promoting
Maroon history and culture.
While the Asafu Yard is indeed a sacred Maroon place, center of communal
palaver and organization, I heard it first before I saw it, its titanic sound system
blasting Burning Spear into the blue mountainsides around us. Ricardo and
the guys who run the soundboard play a mix that runs from reggae to rock
steady to hip-hop to rock and roll: loud and bone stirring. Digicel has seen to it
that nobody with a spare J goes without a cell phone (red and yellow signs are
everywhere: “top up here”). Instant access is island wide—once when we were
lost in the heart of cockpit country, Fran whipped out her phone and made a
dinner reservation in Kingston. Laptops drink up information from around the
world and spew it out in the Asafu Yard. And while I wouldn’t for a minute
understate the privilege that attends my institutionally funded mobility and
the agency it enables—especially in the field—I remain aware too that Colonel
Frank does a masterly job of directing it toward ends that, in his view, benefit
Charles Town in particular and Maroons in general. Place and space interpen-
etrate, shifting the form and function of both. Maroons dance and drum in
 ACCIDENTAL HISTORIES: FIELDWORK AMONG THE MAROONS OF JAMAICA  229

the moonlight. Scholars visit, participate, and go. Their encounters produce
incremental changes, and in ways I neither fully celebrate nor bemoan. That’s
part of the outcome of fieldwork as we’ve been practicing it in Jamaica. Charles
Town the place globally becomes—as academics, Maroons, and other Jamaicans
interact to ponder the persistent freedoms of marronage.
It goes the other way too. Sometimes the field returns to change its work-
ers: the places they inhabit, the things they do. Academic knowledge, for
instance, might happen differently than it usually does. Material for publica-
tion that Fran and I have been gathering from the Charles Town International
Maroon Conference includes work by contributors who might not qualify as
scholars in the academic sense but whose contribution has nevertheless been
important for all participants, among them Colonel Frank Lumsden of the
Charles Town Maroons; Fidelia Graand-Galon, Ambassador Extraordinary
and Plenipotentiary of the Republic of Suriname to Trinidad and Tobago; and
Gloria Simms of the Maroon Indigenous Women’s Circle. Our hope is to pro-
duce a published volume mixing scholarly with Maroon knowledge, academic
and indigenous voices speaking to and maybe against each other. As fieldwork,
the conference promises not definitive conclusions so much as continuing
interactions, of which such a book might prove inspiring testimony.
But the conference can have more direct effects also, whose implications may
be difficult to gauge. A while ago Fran and I invited Colonel Frank to attend
a panel we were part of at the annual convention of the Modern Language
Association. To our surprise, he agreed to come. From his conference to ours:
this time Colonel Frank would play the global, and we’d host him in Boston,
our meeting place for that year’s convention. He cut an intriguing figure in
his lavender sport coat, sitting behind a long table at the front of a room
packed with scholars of British Romanticism, many of whom Fran and I knew.
Panelists gave their talks in the usual way, to the usual respectful applause.
Then came Colonel Frank’s turn. He moved slowly toward the podium, hold-
ing his paper in one hand, his other in his jacket pocket. He stopped at the
microphone and leaned slightly. “I want to thank you for this opportunity to
speak.” And then he spoke a few words in patwa that Fran and I have come to
associate with sacred occasions. The academics in the audience, some in slacks
and some in jeans but all listening politely, watched as a little pint bottle of
Wray and Nephew white rum made its way from Colonel Frank’s pocket to his
lips. It tipped up. He took a long swig. With a slow sweeping motion of his
head, bottle held motionless before of him, Colonel Frank spewed an arc of
rum over the audience, effectively baptizing the front row. He smiled gently
and proceeded to read his paper. His Maroon ancestors loved what they heard.

Postmodern Global Jamaican Indigene

We finally found Mama G one warm January afternoon sitting in a tent in the
yard of 28 Fairbourne Road on Kingston’s east side, just past Mountainview
and down a block from the police station. The house she inhabited with her
230  P. YOUNGQUIST

extended family was a wreck. It had caught fire several weeks earlier, burning
not quite to the ground, but no thanks to the fire brigade. Their trucks showed
up with half-empty tanks. When the water ran out, the brigade made the best
of a bad situation and got busy looting. Now the house was uninhabitable.
Several colorful camping tents made a makeshift shelter out front.
Fran and I arrived with a pineapple and a six-pack of Red Stripe, gifts she
insisted we offer out of respect. Mama G sat on a box near a mosquito-net
window in a spacious blue tent. She was surrounded by crafts, presumably hers:
a partly finished painting of Rastas dancing in front of a distant slave ship, a
crown made from coconut skins decorated with cowry shells, a T-shirt embroi-
dered with the words “Roots Uprising,” and several strings of red and black
beads. A laptop with a blinking stick modem sat open on a battered bar stool.
What little I’d learned about Mama G since our initial pursuit led me to
expect a cross between Nanny of the Maroons and Mother Teresa. Her repu-
tation as women’s activist was formidable. Two years at the University of the
West Indies studying social work were enough to convince her that academic
training would be of little help to women subject to the domestic blandish-
ments of white rum and a machete. She quit school and threw herself into
activism, traveling the island wherever women needed help—without financial
backing, not a Jamaican dollar or penny. Her Maroon Indigenous Women’s
Circle taught traditional crafts to help Jamaican women achieve and maintain
economic independence. She was an outspoken proponent of Maroon culture,
a Kumina dancer, and a self-declared Rastafar-I priestess.11 Her family’s reggae
band, Roots Uprising (their equipment all lost in the fire), played the full sonic
mythos of Rasta culture, truth in riddim, that indomitable backbeat.
Mama G was small and thin. She smiled wearily as we entered her tent,
offering her left hand more for us to notice than to take. “Bless,” she nodded.
“Bless.”
Tight locks trailed to her waist. Her ganja eyes were fierce. She wore a loose
blue shirt and a long course shift. Her sandals were the color of her feet. “Sit,”
she said, gesturing to an old office chair and a camp stool. “Tanks for coming.”
Fran offered her a Red Stripe, which she took with distant warmth. “Thanks
for seeing us.”
As Mama G rummaged for a bottle opener, a little girl, maybe four years
old, entered the tent carrying an oblong object wrapped in tin foil. Beads dot-
ted her braided hair. “This pickney my gran-datta. You go now, Cookie. Leave
me talk.” The girl handed Mama G the foiled thing, looked long at Fran, and
ran out of the tent with a squeal.
Mama G picked up a little paring knife with her right hand and began
unwrapping foil with her left, revealing a steaming ear of grilled corn. She cut
small chunks for Fran and me. “Eat,” she said. “It’s good.”
So we ate.
And we talked. And we listened.
It would be pointless to transcribe our conversation. I only understood part
of what Mama G said anyway. But I had no trouble comprehending that we
 ACCIDENTAL HISTORIES: FIELDWORK AMONG THE MAROONS OF JAMAICA  231

were in the presence of a woman who was dreadfully alive. Mama G fired away
with ballistic precision at the targets of her enmity: Jamaican politricks, the
abuse of women, the mistreatment of Rastas, the stupidity of Maroon colonels
who refused to recognize her Trelawney heritage. The whole time she stabbed
the air with her little blade, a hungry two inches poking between her thumb
and knuckle.
Fran asked if she would be interested in attending the conference in
Charles Town.
“Charles Town,” she said, looking at the floor of the tent. “Charles Town.”
She launched into a diatribe, best I could tell, denouncing contemporary
Maroon governance. All the colonels were men. That made no sense. Granny
Nanny, the great guerilla bane of the British and only Maroon national hero,
was a woman.12 Mama G felt excluded from Maroon leadership. Wasn’t she
Maroon? Wasn’t she Trelawney? Trelawney Town should have a colonel too.
Maybe a woman colonel. Just because the British transported her people—ille-
gally—to Nova Scotia for resisting downpression, Trelawney Town deserves
no voice in Maroon affairs? No representation? No respect? Maroon colonels
were no better than the British. The same tricks all over again. Like the treaty.
It was a trick.
Mama G looked at us in disgust. She pulled a little Nokia phone out of a
skirt pocket and checked her credit. Apparently our interview was over.
“But yes,” she said, as if to the phone. “I’ll come to the conference in
Charles Town. Take a place alongside the Colonels.” A faint smile curled her
lips. “Make them see me. Make them remember. Not all Trelawney Maroons
left Jamaica on those boats to Halifax. Some run into the bush like their
ancestors. Some come back from Sierra Leone too. Settled near Wakefield.
Blended in.”
I suggested that the fate of those returning Maroons was lost to history.
“History?” Mama G snapped her head in my direction. “British write his-
tory. They write it wrong. On purpose. Like Flagstaff Mountain. From on top
you can see Falmouth. See anybody coming, troops, whatever. Dallas says the
British put a gun up there during the Maroon War. It wasn’t the British. It was
Maroons. Tiefed a cannon and drag it up dat hill. Call Gunsy Hill since den.
Still call Gunsy Hill. By dem who rememer. You unnastan?”
Mama G looked me dead in the eye. In English as polished as any King’s,
she said, “You can do plenty of research, professor, but you need inspiration
too. Remember inspiration.”

Postscript
We would bring Mama G to the conference later that year. Colonel Frank
expressed discomfort at the idea of including a Maroon representative from
defunct Trelawney Town, let alone a self-appointed female leader. But Mama G
crept on stage anyway during opening ceremonies, carrying a bag containing a
large wooden ankh, a conch, and a laptop. She blew the conch before reading
232  P. YOUNGQUIST

her paper from the laptop’s screen, ankh perched on the podium beside her.
She spoke of indigenous women’s rights and children’s dreams and life and
all and I and I. “What is Jamaica today is Nanny’s.” Fidelia Graand-Galon,
Suriname’s ambassador to Trinidad and Tobago—and a Maroon—listened
intently with the rest of us. “There is no poverty in this world unless you
want to accept it.” Later, Fidelia would invite Mama G to Suriname to attend
a gathering of indigenous women activists. Fran and I helped raised funds to
send her by soliciting donations from conference attendees. The meeting of
these two Maroon women from Jamaica and Suriname has brought an interna-
tional dimension to the Maroon Indigenous Women’s Circle, which promises
to extend its reach even further: to Belize, Canada, Australia, wherever Mama
G’s indomitable trod leads. Such are the unforeseeable effects of fieldwork
in the humanities. It’s not the fieldwork that matters most. It’s the work the
fieldwork makes possible.

Notes
1. Puri, “Finding the Field,” 58–73.
2. See Richard Price and Sally Price eds., Stedman’s Surinam: Life in an
Eighteenth-­Century Slave Society.
3. The edition eventually saw daylight as Marcus Rainsford, An Historical
Account of the Black Empire of Hayti.
4. Account Book of the Deputy Paymaster General, Hispaniola, 1796–97, MS
237, National Library of Jamaica.
5. See Marcus Rainsford, An Historical Account of the Black Empire,
251–256; Bryan Edwards, The Proceedings of the Governor and Assembly
of Jamaica, in regard to the Maroon Negroes; Votes of the Honourable
Assembly of Jamaica, 1795; R. C. Dallas, History of the Maroons from
Their Origin to the Establishment of the Their Chief Tribe at Sierra
Leone, 2 vols 41–171; “Parliamentary Intelligence: House of
Commons; Blood Hounds in Jamaica,” Times (London), March 22,
1796; as well as various manuscript accounts at the National Library of
Jamaica. My interest in this episode led to Paul Youngquist, “The Cujo
Effect.”
6. For a complete transcription of the two treaties, see Laws of Jamaica,
1681–1758, 258 and 278, respectively.
7. Among the growing scholarship devoted to Jamaican Maroon history, see
Mavis C.  Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica: a History of Resistance,
Collaboration, and Betrayal, 1655–1796, and Nova Scotia and the Fighting
Maroons: A Documentary History, Studies in Third World Societies, Vol. 41;
Carey Robinson, The Fighting Maroons of Jamaica; Bev Carey, The Maroon
Story: The Authentic and Original History of the Maroons in the History of
Jamaica, 1490–1880; John N. Grant, The Maroons in Nova Scotia; Kathleen
Wilson, “The Performance of Freedom: Maroons and the Colonial Order
in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica and the Atlantic Sound,” 45–86; Kenneth
 ACCIDENTAL HISTORIES: FIELDWORK AMONG THE MAROONS OF JAMAICA  233

Bilby, True Born Maroons ; and Werner Zips, Black Rebels: African Freedom
Fighters in Jamaica.
8. Benjamin filtered through Ian Baucom, Spectres of the Atlantic: Finance
Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History, 24.
9. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 133.
10. Loosely considered, “place” here refers to local geographies of habitation
and memory and opposes “space,” which refers to more abstract geogra-
phies of international politics, economics, and communications. Jamaica
teaches me to see them as inextricably interwoven, however urgent the
claims of locality. On the importance of the latter to fieldwork, see Edward
Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History, Tim Cresswell, Place: A
Short Introduction, and in a Caribbean context, Shalini Puri, “Finding the
Field.” Space roughly equates with the networked world of globalization,
as described for instance in Zygmut Bauman, Globalization: The Human
Consequences.
11. Mama G’s assimilation of Rastafari to the lost heritage of the Trelawney
Maroons is a canny act of cultural recovery and affirmation. On the origins
of Rastafari, see Richard D.E. Burton, Afro-Creole: Power, Opposition, and
Play in the Caribbean, 90–155. See also Barry Chavannes, Rastafari and
Other ­African-­Caribbean Worldviews and Rastafari: Roots and Ideology for
a detailed exposition of belief and practice, as well as Werner Zips, ed.,
Rastafari: a Universal Philosophy in the Third Millennium. Finally, for a
full sense of its cultural, political, and spiritual force, see Yasus Afari,
Overstanding Rastafari: “Jamaica’s Gift to the World.”
12. On Nanny as a national hero, see Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Wars of
Respect: Nanny, Sam Sharpe and the Struggle for People’s Liberation.
Nanny’s image appears on the Jamaican 500 dollar bill.

Bibliography
Account Book of the Deputy Paymaster General, Hispaniola, 1796–97. n.d. National
Library of Jamaica, MS 237.
Afari, Yasus. 2007. Overstanding Rastafari: “Jamaica’s Gift to the World”. Jamaica:
Senya-Cum.
Baucom, Ian. 2005. Spectres of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy
of History. Durham: Duke University Press.
Bauman, Zygmut. 1998. Globalization: The Human Consequences. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Bilby, Kenneth. 2005. True Born Maroons. Gainesville, FL: University Press of
Florida.
Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. 1977. Wars of Respect: Nanny, Sam Sharpe and the Struggle
for People’s Liberation. Kingston, Jamaica: API.
Burton, Richard D.E. 1997. Afro-Creole: Power, Opposition, and Play in the Caribbean.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Campbell, Mavis C. 1988. The Maroons of Jamaica: A History of Resistance, Collaboration,
and Betrayal, 1655–1796. Granby, MA: Bergin & Garvey.
234  P. YOUNGQUIST

Carey, Bev. 1997. The Maroon Story: The Authentic and Original History of the Maroons
in the History of Jamaica, 1490–1880. Gordon Town, Jamaica: Agouti Press.
Casey, Edward. 1998. The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. Berkeley, CA: University
of California Press.
Chavannes, Barry. 1994. Rastafari and Other African-Caribbean Worldviews and
Rastafari: Roots and Ideology. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.
Cresswell, Tim. 2004. Place: A Short Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.
Dallas, R.C. 1803. History of the Maroons from their Origin to the Establishment of the
their Chief Tribe at Sierra Leone, vol 2. London: Longman and Rees.
Edwards, Bryan. 1796. The Proceedings of the Governor and Assembly of Jamaica, in
regard to the Maroon Negroes. London: John Stockdale.
Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor, MI: University of
Michigan Press, 1997.
Grant, John N. 2002. The Maroons in Nova Scotia. Halifax: Formac.
Laws of Jamaica, 1681–1758. 1795. St. Jago de la Vega, Jamaica: Alexander Aikman.
Nova Scotia and the Fighting Maroons: A Documentary History, Studies in Third World
Societies. vol 41. 1990. Williamsburg, NY: Department of Anthropology, College of
William and Mary.
Parliamentary Intelligence: House of Commons; Blood Hounds in Jamaica. Times
(London), March 22, 1796.
Price, Richard, and Sally Price, eds. 1992. Stedman’s Surinam: Life in an Eighteenth-­
Century Slave Society. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Puri, Shalini. 2013. Finding the Field: Notes on Caribbean Cultural Criticism, Area
Studies, and the Forms of Engagement. Small Axe 41: 58–73.
Rainsford, Marcus. 2013. An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti. Eds. Paul
Youngquist and Grégory Pierrot. Durham: Duke University Press.
Robinson, Carey. 1993. The Fighting Maroons of Jamaica. Kingston: Collins and
Sangster.
Votes of the Honourable Assembly of Jamaica, 1795. 1795. St. Jago de la Vega, Jamaica:
Alexander Aikman.
Wilson, Kathleen. 2009. The Performance of Freedom: Maroons and the Colonial
Order in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica and the Atlantic Sound. William and Mary
Quarterly 66(1): 45–86.
Youngquist, Paul. 2012. The Cujo Effect. In Gorgeous Beasts: Animal Bodies in
Historical Perspective, eds. Joan B. Landes, Paula Young Lee, and Paul Youngquist,
56–72. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Zips, Werner. 1999. Black Rebels: African Freedom Fighters in Jamaica. Kingston: Ian
Randle.
———, ed. 2006. Rastafari: A Universal Philosophy in the Third Millennium. Kingston:
Ian Randal.
 CHAPTER 13

Engagement and Pedagogy: Traveling

with Students in Chiapas, Mexico

Debra A. Castillo

Readers can follow up on topics addressed here with key references in the
bibliography.If we do not trespass (not necessarily violently), if we do not go
beyond our cultural norms … we can never be free. To free ourselves is to tres-
pass, and to transform… To trespass is to exist. To free ourselves is to exist.
—Augusto Boal (xxi–ii)

It’s early June and once again I’m in San Cristóbal de las Casas, at the Fortaleza
de la Mujer Maya (FOMMA) facility on Avenida Argentina No. 14 in Barrio
de Mexicanos (a nice transnational crossing, I’ve always thought), to watch a
performance of Viva la vida. It’s the rainy season and—fortunately for us—
the day is overcast.1 Too often I’ve been here with a group of students who
have found it hard to concentrate with the heat and light pouring through the
skylights onto the theatrical space, splashing over the audience and making us
drowsy. This day we’re as ready as we can be to appreciate this event.
Last Spring, on campus in Ithaca, New York, I gave them lectures and read-
ings on Mayan theater in Chiapas; in the Spanish section, they’ve watched
the interview with Petrona de la Cruz Cruz and discussed the excerpt on our
course website from the play we are about to see; we’ve had relevant guest lec-
tures by colleagues in El colegio de la frontera sur (ECOSUR) in San Cristóbal
as well as ECOSUR in Tapachula via videoconferencing, and have learned from
presentations by local Cornell scholars in the fields of nutrition, sociology,

D.A. Castillo (*)

Department of Comparative Literature, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

© The Author(s) 2016 235

S. Puri, D.A. Castillo (eds.), Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-92834-7_13
236  D.A. CASTILLO

public health, anthropology, and history, among others. Since we arrived in

Chiapas, we’ve met with the dedicated students and faculty at one of the inter-
cultural universities, the Centro Maya de Estudios Agropecuarios in Palenque,
part of the Universidad Autómona de Chiapas system. We have accompanied
them to the field, and have been inspired by the fieldwork-based curriculum
and research-team approach to multilingual indigenous tertiary education. We
have read and discussed Héctor Sánchez’s report on the issues surrounding
health care in Chiapas, both before leaving our home campus and with Héctor
himself in a generous follow-up meeting the day before. Héctor has also agreed
to accompany us to the clinic in San Juan Chamula.
We have with us today in FOMMA a bilingual medical doctor who works
in San Andrés Larrainzar, at the intercultural maternal health facility, Snail
Ansetik Vokémolol, who will take part in the post-play discussion, and we have
already scheduled a visit to her facility to meet the traditional midwives a little
later in the week. One of the students, who hopes to do graduate work in
public health, will, in fact, be doing her eight-week internship in San Andrés;
another, a graduate student in performance studies, had originally hoped to
intern with FOMMA itself, but has accepted a position with a local children’s
theater instead. I expect they will be particularly invested in this performance.
A woman enters the performance space with an incense burner and lights
the copal; soon a thick, fragrant smoke fills the area as Mercedes Sosa’s “Gracias
a la vida” plays (Argentina meets Mexico again, I think to myself). A few inter-
national FOMMA interns join us in the audience, along with an indigenous
woman and her child, who seemed to just happen in on the performance.
The play opens when Sebastiana, a heavily pregnant woman in traditional
indigenous clothing (the particular styles of skirt and huipil2 generally identify
their origin, but the women in this group mix costumes from Chamula, San
Andrés, Zinancatán, Cancuc, and other communities), comes into the perfor-
mance space. She has already been in labor far too long, but in the next few
minutes is seen contending with a philandering husband and a well-meaning
but too traditional mother, Dominga, who wants her to drink traditional teas
to alleviate her pains. A neighbor brings the midwife, who wisely counsels call-
ing an ambulance immediately.3 However, Sebastiana dies in childbirth, leaving
her daughter Lunita behind.
Years later, Lunita (who dresses in Western-style clothing) is on the brink of
womanhood and the wise elder Tomasita gives her sane and forthright advice
about sex and contraception. Her future husband, a supportive young man
with whom she falls in love while watching the classic María Félix film, María
Bonita, brings her to the clinic for regular appointments throughout her preg-
nancy, as well as for her childbirth. Lunita gives birth to a healthy child in
the local clinic, attended by a doctor in a white lab coat. The play ends with
the celebration of life, and the five actors coming to the front of the perfor-
mance space, in silence, with signs that read: “Luchemos por nuestro derecho de
vivir”; “El embarazo es bonito pero también mortal. Acude al medico”; “Nunca
Más”; “¡Ya basta! No más muerte”; “Debemos de llevar el control prenatal libre
 ENGAGEMENT AND PEDAGOGY: TRAVELING WITH STUDENTS IN CHIAPAS, MEXICO  237

y responsablemente” (Let’s fight for our right to life. Pregnancy is nice but also
deadly. Go to the doctor. Never again. Enough! No more death. We must take
charge of free, responsible, prenatal care). The talk back begins.
I am in the field, doing fieldwork. I am, moreover, co-teaching Cornell’s
most venerable fieldwork course, “Experience Latin America.” Created in
1967, this yearlong course has been taught continuously since that time, with
organized field trips in many different sites around the continent. Currently,
we organize it as a spring preparation course, followed by summer fieldwork
(divided into two- or ten-week options) and a fall reflection course, leading to
either a deeply researched report to the internship organization or a profes-
sional paper.4 Since 2009, we have been focusing on Chiapas, Mexico, as our
specific study site.
While originally designed for needs of international agriculture majors and
professional master’s students, in recent years, the course has been opened
(through cross-listing and my collaboration) as an even more multidisciplinary
cross-college project. Students come from crop science, tropical agriculture,
watershed management, regional planning, nutrition, assorted health careers,
hotel administration, government, linguistics, along with a few from literature
or performance studies. I am a professor of comparative literature, a Latin
Americanist, a Mexicanist, with research interests in performance and border
studies. I’m pretty sure I’m an imposter, and am surprised that anyone takes
me seriously, but then again, they have to: I’m giving them a grade.5
San Cristóbal itself has in the last 20 years enjoyed a significant increase in
tourism deriving from international interest in Zapatismo, the indigenous rev-
olutionary movement that exploded on the world scene along with the imple-
mentation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, on January 1, 1994.
Local Ladino (nonindigenous) authorities are happy to support and commer-
cialize this tourist interest, though nearly 20 years later, their relations with the
Zapatista communities still remain prickly. Likewise, performance events in the
FOMMA space attract tourists, Western feminists, and international academ-
ics. De la Cruz, in one of many interviews,6 notes that the women of FOMMA
have long been aware that their agenda (sexuality education, self-reliance for
women) is both familiar and amenable to international audiences; their primary
goal, of course, is to speak to and serve the needs of indigenous women.7 It is a
constant balancing act for them to retain the high-paying tourist income while
not portraying a “folkloric” version of their traditions or compromising their
core mission,8 and they are profoundly aware of (sometimes articulators of) cri-
tiques of well-meaning efforts by past and present government organizations,
like earlier projects of the Instituto Nacional Indigenista (INI), which had been
promoting theatrical performances in the highlands as a mechanism to address
prevention and care of disease since the 1950s.
Thus, the indigenous woman who joined our group for the performance
may be here for a sewing or a bread-making or a literacy class. Or she may
want to study acting, or mask making. The long-term interns to FOMMA sit-
ting next to us are probably channeled through NYU’s Hemispheric Institute
238  D.A. CASTILLO

(local people know FOMMA by the cofounders, Petrona de la Cruz and Isabel
Juárez; on the NYU website, the same space is called “Centro hemisférico de
performance y política en Chiapas,” and it has been supported by significant
Ford Foundation9 and NYU funding). I, of course, am uncomfortably aware
that I have commissioned this performance and that my students, for all their
background preparation, are the least invested in FOMMA of any of the other
audience members. This is something that I know will come out in our class
discussion that evening as their worries that they are behaving as, or (even
worse, from their perspective) will be perceived as, tourists in this site. Some of
them have shaky Spanish; none of us speak Tsotsil.
Most of the articles that I have read in journals dedicated to engaged learn-
ing and pedagogies of fieldwork take a similar form. They include anecdotes,
lessons from the field learned by both students and faculty, descriptions of
learning outcomes and student evaluations, a cautionary aside, and generally a
note of self-praise: this is the best course ever, and it has profoundly changed
people’s lives. So let me get that out of the way: this is a fabulous course, aca-
demically sound, field tested with hundreds of students over a nearly 50-year
history, a model for other universities, though admittedly difficult to institu-
tionalize and staff because it is a full-year course, taught every year. It changes
peoples’ lives—the evaluations consistently tell us so.
My current co-instructor and I have intensified the field component—suc-
cessfully arguing to the Dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences
that while a two- or three-week field visit (the standard for most courses of this
sort nationally as well as in our home institution) fulfills the minimum require-
ment of the major, it by no means constitutes “real” field work. Thus, we have
created the summer internship/research program, supplementing what is now
a two-week overview trip in Chiapas with an eight- or ten-week field experi-
ence, matching students to organizations early in the winter semester so that
they can arrive in San Cristóbal ready to contribute substantially, whether it is
doing community census work, coordinating women’s health workshops, mak-
ing a film, doing soil sampling, building ecological stoves, working with youth
theater, or doing master’s research or PhD dissertation work.
Few humanities graduate students take the course. Despite the widespread
concern about the “crisis” in the humanities, the demoralizing recognition of a
weak job market for literary scholars, the vague but general attraction of social
justice work, and the widespread discussion of a need to retool our curricula,
within my university humanities fieldwork has little purchase among PhD stu-
dents. Perhaps it’s a failure of communication, or of imagination. Kathleen
Woodward’s comment sounds very familiar to me:

Despite the repeated calls over the past twenty-five years for a renewal of the
civic mission of higher education, professionalization continues to hold tenacious
sway and is largely understood to contradict the purposes and practices of public
scholarship, which, in turn, is dismissed under the demoralizing rubric of service
or the paternalistic rubric of outreach.10
 ENGAGEMENT AND PEDAGOGY: TRAVELING WITH STUDENTS IN CHIAPAS, MEXICO  239

The imagined contradiction between the profession and the public as

expressed in the uninspiring rhetoric of public service has consequences.
Woodward comments:

I cannot help but remark that some of the conversations about civic engage-
ment, public scholarship, and the public humanities in the United States betray
a distinctly anti-intellectual strain … We find references to the importance of
social development, community development, and economic development, but
not intellectual development.11

She adds, “In fact, I wonder to what extent the very phrase ‘civic engagement’
is a stumbling block for the idea—and ideal—of the commitment of schol-
ars to larger social purposes and intellectual goods.”12 From this follows the
conundrum: we know that we need the kind of revitalization of the humanities
implied by substantive and sustainable engagement, such as fieldwork, but find
current models uninspiring or intellectually empty.
Part of the challenge of imagining a space for public humanities within our
local intellectual dialogues relates to the narrow, engagement-and-outcome
language of the kinds of reports we perpetrate in our various administrative
roles. Another part of the challenge is locating hermeneutical and method-
ological structures and strategies from which to think more productively. Yet I
would like to believe that if in certain US academic circles the idea of the pub-
lic intellectual may seem “a soft oxymoron” (Garber), a subject for knowing
snickers among the US-centric theory heads, throughout the hemisphere the
concept is regaining the immediacy and vitality that had been slowly eroding
since the late 1960s in the USA and the heyday of the Zapatista movement in
Mexico in the mid-1990s. We might do well to take advantage of opportuni-
ties to learn from our colleagues in Latin America who have long histories of
serious engagement with the organic and the intellectual public intellectual as
central to major policy and intellectual debates. FOMMA cofounder Isabel
Juárez comments:

All women are intelligent, the problem is that we sometimes don’t develop our
intelligence well … because we are sometimes scared, fearful about our neigh-
bors, about our family … but if you think about your personal situation not tak-
ing into account the other people around you, you’ll find a way out, you’ll have
to look for it, you’ll have to knock on the doors, because nobody will come here
knocking at your door and go, like, do you want to do this?13

II
Our medical doctor contact has been kind enough to set up the visit to San
Andrés Larrainzar, where we will tour both the Western-style and traditional
facilities. The focus on maternal health is an explicit key priority in the state,
and there are special challenges involved in getting indigenous women to
come to clinics. Thus, the bilingual medical practitioners in San Andrés have
240  D.A. CASTILLO

focused their efforts on reaching out to the traditional midwives, or parteras,

to provide them with tools that will help them in their distant communities,
to open lines of communication in Tsotsil with San Andrés professionals when
the parteras recognize dangerous childbirths in process, to create a culturally
appropriate physical space for local women who need or choose to give birth
outside their homes, and to organize parteras in shifts of two at a time staff-
ing that space.14 Colleagues in San Andrés have sponsored workshops and
exchanges of information on traditional medicines and traditional childbirth
practices; all the parteras who have participated in their program have earned
badges exactly like those worn by the Western-style practitioners, and wear
them proudly over their traditional huipiles when they are in the clinic in their
regular shifts.
Officials have built a facility to the specifications of the indigenous advisors,
including rooms for spiritual cleansing with herbs and copal, a temazcal (or
steam bath) for new mothers and babies, and a communal kitchen for family
celebrations of birth. Snail Ansetik Vokémolol sits side by side with the Western
clinic, sharing a wall and a door, offering the opportunity for immediate stabi-
lization care if the mother’s or child’s life is endangered, and quick ambulance
service to San Cristóbal (less than an hour away), if the situation merits. Since
so many Western-trained medical practitioners staffing clinics throughout high-
land Chiapas are young people from distant parts of Mexico—none of whom
speak any of the local languages—who are doing their stint of required public
service after graduation from medical school, this initiative is extremely excit-
ing to us. It includes local medical professionals who speak Tsotsil, working
with respected elders and local assemblies on a collaborative project, breaking
down cultural barriers, creating comfortable spaces for women to give birth,
while saving lives.
We have been honored to have eight of the parteras with us today, rather
than the two we expected, women with soft hands, soft voices, and deeply
wrinkled faces, who pat us gently while speaking in Tsotsil, explaining how
they came to their vocation, their pride in their work, their commitment to this
new facility. Some of what they are saying reinforces for the students Victoria
Patishtan’s comments on how the FOMMA play reflects traditional childbirth
practices: how respect for the husband prevents many women from seeking
Western medical care, how their fear that their child will be stolen or changed
in a clinic paralyzes them. We see the need to accommodate traditional prac-
tices such as ritual cleansing with copal, the steam bath for child and mother,
the herb and chile tea to encourage letting down milk, the sharing of a soup
made from a hen for a girl and from a rooster for a boy.
We are in the midst of a translated conversation with them, drinking coffee
they made for us in the kitchen, when the director of the hospital interrupts
us, with considerable fanfare, to introduce the regional medical administrator
and the local mayor, both Ladinos (i.e., nonindigenous). The mayor, wear-
ing a San Andrés huipil and a Western pantsuit, has arrived with her publicity
team, including a professional photographer. Our class meeting that night is
 ENGAGEMENT AND PEDAGOGY: TRAVELING WITH STUDENTS IN CHIAPAS, MEXICO  241

dominated by speculation about how and to what extent our group became
sidetracked as an unwitting political player in the upcoming elections.
We know that neither the state nor the federal government is meeting its
obligations under international and national law with respect to access to
health providers. Marginalization, discrimination, and structural inequalities
have all been documented in damning detail, although lack of complete and
appropriate census data in Mexico makes a fuller understanding of the depth
of the problem more difficult.15 According to the 2010 Mexican census, there
are 112 million Mexicans. The difference between a dominant culture mes-
tizo person and an indigenous person is largely defined by the language they
speak, and approximately 12.7 million Mexicans belong to one of the 68 ethnic
groups speaking languages other than Spanish as their mother tongue, with a
heavy concentration in the south of the country. The 2009 federal law outlin-
ing respect for diversity is very indifferently enforced. Chiapas is a young state,
with 47 percent of the population under 15 years of age. Almost 50 percent
of indigenous women have no formal schooling at all (versus a claimed 88.6
percent for the country as a whole). Stunting, a serious result of prolonged
malnutrition, is at a shocking 54.7  percent level in the state. While medical
practitioners know that delay in seeking care can result in maternal and child
death, which in Chiapas is far above the national norm, the distances, often
impassible roads, distrust of Western-trained doctors, and the fear of losing a
day’s work prevent people from seeking care.16
How do I help my students understand the mayor and the partera? How do
I understand them myself? We scholars in the humanities who are doing field-
work, who are teaching fieldwork, and who are publishing fieldwork-derived
scholarship urgently need to refresh our critical methods. We are all aware that
literary work in the humanities academy privileges the solitary genius model
and single-authored publications over collaborative projects; the same is still
largely true of culture studies, where one would expect more truly interdis-
ciplinary work. We are dissatisfied. There is little space for alternative episte-
mologies, little recognition that such epistemologies even exist. We find most
theoretical and methodological models inadequate to our material. Perhaps,
I think, it is more useful for us Latin Americanists, speaking about a Latin
American context, to draw from Augusto Boal17 and Paulo Freire rather than
Alain Badiou and Michel Foucault.
The Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire is best known for his landmark
study, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a work that advances his proposal for bringing
together scholarship and activism in a practice of critical pedagogy, founded
upon true collaboration. He is a theoretician profoundly anchored in practice,
a practitioner deeply invested in theory: “I never advocate either a theoretic
elitism or a practice ungrounded in theory, but the unity between theory and
practice. In order to achieve this unity, one must have an epistemological curi-
osity.”18 His theoretical work likewise engages an ethics and practice of inquiry,
as a form of continual, respectful questioning and dialogue: “For apart from
inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge
242  D.A. CASTILLO

emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impa-
tient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the
world, and with each other.”19
There is no doubt that this pedagogical style resonates deeply with our
preferred form in literary and cultural studies: the Socratic method of asking
questions to provoke critical thinking in our students. For many of us, this
discussion format is what distinguishes humanistic inquiry. Furthermore, the
most important qualities of our scholarly work also involve the posing of ques-
tions that we are likely to be unable to answer, and where the well-formulated
inquiry is the ultimate goal of the investigation. Freire takes this method a step
further, from the structure of a privileged questioner and her unanswerable
questions, into the construction of knowledge through dialogue between indi-
viduals who are presumed to have both a stake in and a significant contribution
to the knowledge generated. He warns, though:

In order to understand the meaning of dialogical practice, we have to put aside

the simplistic understanding of dialogue as a mere technique … On the contrary,
dialogue characterizes an epistemological relationship. Thus, in this sense, dia-
logue is a way of knowing and should never be viewed as a mere tactic to involve
students in a particular task.20

Later, he adds, “Understanding dialogue as a process of learning and know-

ing establishes a previous requirement that always involves an epistemological
curiosity about the very elements of the dialogue.”21
Freire contrasts the dialogic model most pointedly with what he calls the
“banking” concept of education, in which the teacher is imagined as the pos-
sessor of knowledge, carefully doled out to the students in palatable doses,
whereupon students become the collectors of materials and information depos-
ited in them. Interestingly enough, Freire defines this model at its core as a
failure in a certain kind of storytelling:

A careful analysis of the teacher-student relationship at any level, inside or outside

the school, reveals its fundamentally narrative character … The contents, whether
values or empirical dimensions of reality, tend in the process of being narrated
to become lifeless and petrified. Education is suffering from narration sickness.22

In contrast, says Freire, “In problem-posing education, people develop their

power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in
which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality,
but as a reality in process, in transformation.”23 This theoretical framework can,
of course, be applied to any pedagogical situation. Freire, however, is particu-
larly interested in the hierarchical structures of knowledge that constrain the
oppressed, keeping them in an unfree state:

The central problem is this: How can the oppressed, as divided, unauthentic
beings, participate in developing the pedagogy of their liberation? Only as they
 ENGAGEMENT AND PEDAGOGY: TRAVELING WITH STUDENTS IN CHIAPAS, MEXICO  243

discover themselves to be “hosts” of the oppressor can they contribute to the

midwifery of their liberating pedagogy. As long as they live in the duality in which
to be is to be like, and to be like is to be like the oppressor, this contribution is impos-
sible. The pedagogy of the oppressed is an instrument for their critical discovery
that both they and their oppressors are manifestations of dehumanization.

Liberation is thus a childbirth, and a painful one.24 Suddenly, I am back in

San Andrés Larrainzar, in our interrupted discussion with the parteras, and the
way that knowledge passes and does not pass between indigenous people and
Ladinos in authority, between us and the parteras, and think again about the
pedagogies of the oppressed and the performance of caring in politics.
In the 2008 preface to his Theatre of the Oppressed, fellow Brazilian Augusto
Boal reminds us: “When we study Shakespeare we must be conscious that we
are not studying the history of the theatre, but learning about the history of
humanity. We are discovering ourselves. Above all: we are discovering that we
can change ourselves, and change the world” (ix). I am a comparatist, not
a political scientist or a medical professional. I’m a literary and performance
studies scholar brought up in the USA, so I cannot help but be reminded of
Mercutio’s famous monologue in Act 1.4 of Romeo and Juliet. Romeo wor-
ries that he may be dreaming too much, dreaming too close to the truth, and
Mercutio tells him to chill out. The monologue begins: “I see Queen Mab
hath been with you. /She is the fairies’ midwife. …” Romeo gets annoyed
with his friend after he has been going on for a while and interrupts: “Peace,
peace, Mercutio, peace!/Thou talk’st of nothing.” Mercutio responds: “I talk
of dreams…”

III
The devastatingly poor health conditions in Chiapas have been extensively
documented, to the shame of the entire country, and this lack of basic health
services was explicitly one of the reasons for the Zapatista uprising, better
health care one of the movement’s key demands. It is striking, though, that the
Zapatistas have maintained a very firm line on rejecting all government health
programs and initiatives, meaning that the regional clinics in the Zapatista-­
controlled areas have a very fluctuating access to health care personnel and
materials (mostly via donations from abroad, or from local medical practitioners
who sympathize with the cause, combined with traditional medical practices).
Visiting the Zapatista caracol, or administrative center, in Oventic has always
been the absolute highlight of the field trip for our students, for reasons that
seem to me both clear and inexplicable. If there is one thing that students in
Ithaca, New York, know about Chiapas, it is that it is the site of the world’s first
postmodern revolution and that revolutionary fervor is kept alive in the juntas
de buen gobierno (good government councils) of the Zapatista municipalities.
Everyone wants to be part of that history. None of my students wants to think
very hard about how the revolution has evolved in the almost 20 years since the
244  D.A. CASTILLO

uprising first came to international notice. No one wants to hear about “Zapa-­
tourism.” They all want to go to Oventic, the site of the big convocations in
the early years of the revolution, the ones they’ve all seen pictures of, and read
about in the communiqués, studied in their history and literature and govern-
ment classes. They dream of a chance encounter with subcomandante Marcos,
but, at best, they will meet local Tsotsiles, some of them born after the 1994
revolution, all of them young subsistence farmers from resistant municipalities,
raised in the nearly 500-year-old tradition of rejection of outsiders.
I never know how much time to plan for Oventic. It certainly requires a
huge effort on our part, and that of our local collaborators, to get in the gate.
Someone has to go personally to Oventic over the winding roads up to the
isolated administrative site with a letter from us to get preliminary permis-
sion. In this way, our participation in the performance of Zapatismo has begun
before we even set foot in the state. When we go to Oventic, on the appointed
date and time, that performance takes certain ritual forms. We need to bring
passports and have them laboriously checked—against the list we sent, against
whatever criteria they apply this year; since we don’t speak the language, we
can only guess what they might be talking about among themselves—and we
need to be prepared to wait—a half hour, two hours—until the junta decides
whether or not we can enter. Most of the time we are allowed in, with the
standard warnings: no conversation with anyone, no pictures of people, no
pictures at all until the junta officially gives their formal approval. We need to
stay together as a group and only go where the silent, masked and armed guide
allows us to go. Sometimes the guide is bored and rushes us up and down the
hill, only delaying at the small shops where we are encouraged to buy souve-
nirs. We notice that the prices are higher than in the Santo Domingo market
in San Cristóbal, but buy the T-shirts, the handkerchiefs, the DVDs anyway;
there are bragging rights involved in giving friends back in Ithaca genuine
purchased-in-Oventic articles.
Some of the times we get to meet with the junta, who may be more or less
patient with us and may or may not answer our students’ questions. (One time
they asked us to write up all our questions on a single piece of paper, and while
we waited outside, they conducted other business and debated how to answer
for an hour or so. When we were allowed in the meeting room, the spokesper-
son said something like: we will answer questions 1, 3, 10, 18, and 32. Which
they did. One sentence each, no follow-up.) Sometimes, only I am allowed
in—a huge disappointment to everyone, since I’m generally the one person
in the group who has been there many times already. But the authorities ask
who is the leader, and as the professor, fluent Spanish speaker, and (probably
equally important for the junta) group elder, that person has to be me. Once
we were allowed to peek into the clinic. Twice we were allowed down into the
school complex.
This visit, from my perspective, has been a particularly good one. We only
had to wait outside for a half hour or so, and we brought with us from San
Cristóbal a brilliant young indigenous anthropologist, a Zapatista student-­
scholar known to people from the region. He generously provided ­information
 ENGAGEMENT AND PEDAGOGY: TRAVELING WITH STUDENTS IN CHIAPAS, MEXICO  245

and context all day, before arrival and in Oventic itself, answering endless ques-
tions. The junta was busy with other matters, and decided to receive only me
(a severe blow to at least one dedicated young scholar). I tried to console him:
the spokesperson for the junta, a woman, spoke to me only very briefly—I
suspect her Spanish was minimal, one reason among others not to entertain a
group of foreign students.25
Gregory Jay asks us to think about the question of how humanities can advance
social justice goals. He notes that “it is difficult to see how humanities scholar-
ship can advance community cultural development in quite the concrete ways
demonstrated by projects in art, theater, and music”; nevertheless, the context
of the current paradigm shift in higher education creates a need for humanities
scholars to rethink our teaching and research. He contends that “the future of
the humanities depends upon … the organized implementation of project-based
engaged learning and scholarship.” Like Kathleen Woodward, Jay is allergic to
the implications of the “outreach” model, with its hierarchical presumptions
about academic relations to knowledge, and profoundly in favor of promoting a
much more participatory project of learning with and from the community.
Woodward helps us to think about how the methodologies and skills we
have already developed in our humanities training can serve us well in field-
work projects:

But in the humanities, communities of inquiry often come into being through
the articulating of questions, which are often inchoate in the beginning and can
never be definitively answered. Communities are formed around questions; they
are communities of the question. In the humanities, inquiry adds context that
ever widens and deepens; this is what has been famously called thick description,
and to this I would add thick theory. In short, I believe that the work being done
in the public humanities can give life to the uninspiring generalities … What is
ultimately at stake in the public humanities is a form of scholarship and research,
of teaching and learning, that honors commitment and concrete purpose, has a
clear and present substance, reduces the distance between the university and life,
and offers civic education for all involved, revealing the expansive future of the
humanities in the present and in public.26

In our class discussion after our visit to Oventic, I resist the temptation to
give the students one more lecture about Zapatismo, and push them to more
­complex articulations of their questions. I remind them that the key concept in
the Zapatista educational project, which rejects all federal government–spon-
sored Education Ministry programs and textbooks, is acompañamiento (walk-
ing with someone). How can we take this concept seriously as an intellectual
proposal and apply it to our own scholarly practice?

IV
Zinacantán is one of my favorite places in Chiapas, and Tonik one of my favor-
ite people. It’s a stunningly beautiful town, where most of the men work in
the flower industry (greenhouses cover the valley, and the water is profoundly
246  D.A. CASTILLO

­ olluted by runoff from the many pesticides and herbicides), and all the women
p
dress in matching elaborately handwoven and embroidered clothing, bursting
with flowers, with colors and designs determined annually by the local council.
The same local council has instituted a fee for non-Zinacatecs to enter the city
limits, turning the entire community into a kind of tourist park.
Tonik is a local weaver, has over the years become a good friend, and I
admire her tremendously. She is a shrewd businesswoman, a talented artist, and
a force of nature. She was in her mid-twenties when I first met her, and had
already innovated how textiles are sold in Zinacantán, by welcoming tourists
into her home, inviting people to watch her and her sisters weave, or encourag-
ing them to take a turn at the backstrap loom, offering them tortillas ground
from local corn, then inviting them to playact in a typical Zinacatec wedding.
She even does catering on the side. Her Spanish is excellent; she is learning
some English to better interact with her customers.
Tonik left home very young, fleeing an abusive father, eventually bringing
her five sisters and her mother under her roof to live and work with her. She
is the matriarch, though her mother and brothers have to be brought in on
any official consultations with city council authorities. She sets the agenda for
production and decides how the business will be run. She has encouraged all
her sisters to finish at least middle school (she has been trying to do so herself,
part time in the evenings) and has sacrificed so that they can even go to high
school. Several of her sisters are now married, including one who has married a
bilingual elementary school teacher, and who is herself very committed to edu-
cation in Tsotsil. Tonik says, for her part, that she knows she can never marry;
men in her town don’t like women who are too strong, or too independent,
and she crossed the line when she set up her own house, consolidating her
undesirability when she had her father put in jail.
We’ve just come from San Juan Bautista, the famous church in San Juan
Chamula, where chickens are regularly slaughtered, and Coca-Cola, along with
the local distilled corn alcohol, posh, and multicolored candles help shamans
and healers intercede with the saints for their clients’ health. We’ve toured
the clinic catty-corner on the main plaza to the church and have spoken with
the young doctor there—a woman from Tijuana doing her public service
who speaks excellent English. Zinacantán shares a language and culture with
Chamula but is perhaps more westernized27; as an indication, there is a sign on
the church door saying: prohibited to kill chickens in the church.
I ask Tonik what she and her family do when someone gets sick.
Stay in bed and drink teas until I get better, she says.
And if that doesn’t make you better?
I call a curandera to come with remedies.
And if that doesn’t work?
I go to the church and pray.
And if that still doesn’t work?
Then I would call a shaman28 to treat me, since his prayers are stronger than
mine.
 ENGAGEMENT AND PEDAGOGY: TRAVELING WITH STUDENTS IN CHIAPAS, MEXICO  247

And then?
Then, I climb the mountain with the shaman, because on the top of the
mountain we’re closer to God, and he can hear our prayers. Then I’ll surely
get better.
We’ve climbed this mountain once, with Tonik leading the way through town
and up the narrow and winding path, over drainage pipes and small streams,
past farm fields perched precariously on hillsides. Elegant in her purple-and-­
blue skirt and cape, flip-flops on her feet, she scrambles sure-­footedly over
roots and up steep muddy inclines, the rocks made slippery by the day’s rain.
All the way up she talks continuously: about her family and her business, about
the times of year and festivals when it is most efficacious to climb to the shrine
at the top, about the offerings that one needs to carry with them. The small
shrine is a concrete shelter smelling of copal, housing three simple green crosses
decked with pine (a syncretic image, I know, with Christian iconography over-
laid on the ancient Maya symbol of the ceiba, the world tree that unites the
heavens and the undergrounds). Here the Zinacatec Tsotsil woman is closest
to God; here prayers are answered and people are healed.
At no time does Tonik ever mention going to the clinic.
The view is spectacular.

Notes
1. The field notes are composites of several years in Chiapas, rather than a
report on any single fieldtrip.
2. A huipil is the blouse worn as part of a traditional indigenous woman’s
clothing. It is elaborately embroidered, often handwoven, and the colors,
the placement of embroidery, and the images used are specific to a com-
munity and often prescribed by the indigenous authorities on an annual
basis—thus, local women like Tonik from Zinacantán can tell you not only
what community the huipil is from, but what year. See also Walter Morris,
Textile Guide to the Highlands of Chiapas.
3. FOMMA has always been an all-woman troupe, so women take on the
male roles. We always watch the performances in Spanish; when they travel
to more distant highland communities, the presentations may be in ­Tsotsil,
or mixed Tsotsil, Spanish, and some Tseltal (Isabel Juárez is more com-
fortable in that language, though most of the other key performers are
Tsotsil speakers).
4. This course has served as a model for many other courses of this sort,
including the 15-year-old field course to India, and parallel courses for
countries ranging from Ecuador to Tanzania to Indonesia, some of them
organized by veterans of the Latin America course who have returned to
Cornell as faculty members, or who previously served as faculty for the
Latin American course.
5. The course has evolved considerably over the nearly 50 years since it was
inaugurated, both with respect to the field sites and in terms of professorial
248  D.A. CASTILLO

investment and pedagogical styles. In its current form, it is a yearlong

course that begins with a spring semester overview course, co-taught by
faculty from agriculture and arts and sciences, including an additional dis-
cussion section for students who will be participating in the summer field
trip/internship options. Students in that course do research papers on a
topic of their interest related to Chiapas and develop work plans in col-
laboration with the organization with which they will be interning. We
have been closely collaborating with the Tecnológico de Monterrey in
Veracruz for the last couple of years, so some meetings are joint, via live
videoconferencing. Students from the two campuses meet in person dur-
ing the field visits, and each day’s activities are concluded by a round table
discussion and analysis session. During the following two months, interns
meet weekly for small group discussions, facilitated by a TA appointed by
the faculty, and write weekly reflection papers posted on a shared Google
doc site. In the follow-up course in the fall, students develop final meta-­
reflections, reports to their hosting institutions, and a final presentation
open to the public.
6. See Adriana M. Manago and Patricia M. Greenfield, “The Construction of
Independent Values among Maya Women at the Forefront of Social
Change: Four Case Studies,” 1–29.
7. Petrona de la Cruz mentions that when she first became pregnant, she did
not know having sex could result in a baby (Manago 9). María Francisca
Oseguera speaks of how powerful the FOMMA workshops were for her in
creating a space to speak about women’s sexuality and sexual pleasure,
something she never experienced with her husband. She now teaches these
workshops herself and comments that her audience is not limited to high-
land women: “One university student has a husband and still she doesn’t
know what is sexuality…. It surprised me a lot when I spoke to her about
the clitoris of a woman, she didn’t know” (Manago 20).
8. The mission statement, inscribed on the wall of the facility reads as follows:
“Grupo de mujeres indígenas que imparten talleres creativos, productivos y
culturales para mujeres, jovenes y niños (indígenas). El objetivo principal del
grupo es el teatro, así como alfabetización y lecto-escritura tsotsil-tseltal.
­Contamos con servicio de guardería.” (Indigenous women’s group that
offers creative, productive, and cultural workshops for indigenous women,
youth, and children. The principal objective of the group is the theater,
along with alphabetization and reading-writing in Tsotsil and Tseltal. We
have childcare service available.) The story of the complex relations among
INI, Sna Jtz’ibajom, FOMMA, Harvard, and NYU, as well as ongoing
collaborations with the Laughlins, Diana Taylor, Ralph Lee, Amy
Trompetter, and other northern performance consultants is well estab-
lished and need not be rehearsed here.
9. Castro Santana, “Aplicaciones del teatro en la construcción de la identidad
Tsotsil: FOMMA,” 71.
10. Woodward, “The Future of the Humanities in the Present & in Public,”
110.
 ENGAGEMENT AND PEDAGOGY: TRAVELING WITH STUDENTS IN CHIAPAS, MEXICO  249

11. Woodward, 116.

12. Woodward, 117.
13. Manago and Greenfield, “The Construction of Independent Values among
Maya Women,” 13.
14. There are approximately 5000 parteras working in Chiapas, the majority
Tsotsil or Tseltal speakers with no formal training. Along with their train-
ing, San Andrés parteras are all given basic medical instruments, as well as
cell phones to communicate at need with the clinic. See Juan Pablo
Mayorga, “Parteras, ‘los pilares’ en la lucha por reducer las muertes mater-
nas.”
15. Sánchez Pérez et al., Excluded People, Eroded Communities, 5, 51.
16. See Sánchez Pérez, Excluded People; the Mexican census bureau, Instituto
de Estadística y Geografía. http://www.inegi.org.mx/; Federico Navarrete,
Las relaciones interétnicas en México.
17. Another thread to follow: Doris Difarnecio, who has been working with
FOMMA since 1999, and is now serving as director of the Hemispheric
Institute in Chiapas, came to Chiapas originally to direct FOMMA plays,
and has given the women training in Boal techniques.
18. Freire and Macedo, “A Dialogue: Culture, Language, and Race,” 382.
19. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 72.
20. Freire and Macedo, “A Dialogue,” 379.
21. Freire and Macedo, 382.
22. Freire, Pedagogy, 71.
23. Freire, 83.
24. Freire, 48–9.
25. Students who participate in the internships will inevitably have many

opportunities to interact with Zapatista as well as non-Zapatista munici-
palities and individuals, as well as spend more time at Oventic and/or the
other caracoles. This is quite different from a few hours during a fieldtrip
doing “Zapa-tourism,” and both we and our hosts know it.
26. Woodward, “The Future of the Humanities,” 117, 123.
27. There is a very rich body of anthropological work on these two communi-
ties, sometimes called the most studied towns in Mexico, due to the
Harvard Chiapas Project, which under the direction of Evon Vogt, lasted
from 1957 to 2000.
28. I’m simplifying here, since there are different words for traditional healers,
spiritual healers, elders, and shamans, all of whom have varying degrees of
ability and power.

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 Index

A Ethics of Study, 65, 66 (see also Diabate,

aboriginal communities, 66. See also Naminata; Mama, Amina)
Povinelli, Elizabeth Gambia, 61–5, 202, 209n32
Abu-Lughod, Lila, 59, 67n2 Ghana, 61, 62, 64
Achebe, Chinua homophobia, 202–204
Things Fall Apart, 7, 38, 46n18 homosexuality, 195, 202, 203, 204,
Achour, Bouziane Ben, 111, 124n11 209n34, 209n37
acompañamiento, 17, 245. See also Kenya, 196, 198, 200–202, 205,
Zapatismo 208n27, 208n29, 209n35,
Adichie, Chimamanda, 59 209n37, 209n44 (see also Nairobi;
aesthetics White, L. W. T)
aesthetic response, 76, 79 mutilation, 52
Baumgarten A.G., 81, 82, 89n28 Nigeria, 53, 60, 163n12, 193,
Gruyer, Paul, 81 198–202, 207n16, 208n29 (see
Marcuse, Herbert, 81, 82, 89n20, also Lagos; Whiteman, Kaye)
89n29 rape, 52, 53, 59, 76
Sanskrit aesthetic theory, 82, 84, 85 same-sex marriage, 202
affect, 11, 14, 58, 59, 72–82, 73, 84, 87, South Africa, 5, 19n18, 41, 54, 200,
88n7, 200 208n23, 208n25
Africa Uganda, 200, 202, 208n23
Algeria, 15, 109–27 urban Africa, 16, 193–210
Côte d’Ivoire, 14, 53, 54, 57, 58, 61, victimhood (see victimization)
63, 68n7, 68n12 West Africa, 16, 53, 55, 57, 58, 170,
cutting, 53 193, 199, 202, 206n2, 207n11
dirt, 193–210 (see also Newell, women’s naked protests, 51–68 (see
Stephanie) also Diabate, Naminata)
East Africa, 197, 200, 202 women’s sexuality in, 52, 53, 55, 57,
ebola, 16, 197, 199, 202, 207n16, 58, 64, 68n18
207n17, 207n18 Zimbabwe, 196

Note: Page numbers with “n” denote notes.

© The Author(s) 2016 253

S. Puri, D.A. Castillo (eds.), Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-92834-7
254  INDEX

African American studies, 14 non-proscenium political theater, 110,

African studies, 44n9, 52, 59. See also 113
Diabate, Naminata; Newell, open-air theater, 110–114, 116, 117,
Stephanie 122, 125n22
Agamben, Giorgio stage directions, 115
Homo Sacer: The Sovereign Power and Théâtre national algérien, 111,
Bare Life, 14, 52, 62 125n18
Agawu, Kofi, 7 Théatre régional d’Oran, 111, 112,
agency, 14, 16, 39, 52–57, 62–4, 77–80, 115
113, 119, 127n37, 141, 152, 228. amateur artists, 140, 142, 143. See also
See also naked agency Bruckman, Amy
Ahmad, Muniza, 3, 19n13 American Anthropological Association, 8
Algeria. See also Algerian theater American Comparative Literature
civil war, 109, 110, 123n1, 123n2 Association, 51
Front de Libération Nationale, 109, American studies, 15, 95–106
117, 125 Anderson, Amanda, 59
Islam, 109, 110, 112, 124n16, anonymity
125n19, 125n21 in anthropology, 140–43 (see also
Modern Standard Arabic, 112, Holmes, Tori)
124n16 in the humanities, 144
Parti d’avant-garde socialiste, 117 of human subjects, 132, 137–41
radical islamists, 110, 112 light disguise, 142 (see also Bruckman,
Théâtre national algérien, 111, 125n18 Amy)
Algerian theater Anthropology. See also Behar, Ruth;
French classical theater, 113 Clifford, James; Crapanzano,
National Allegories, 110–12 Vincent; ethnography;
open-air theater, 110–114, 116, Ferguson, James; Gupta, Akhil;
117, 122 Malkki, Liisa; Pandian, Anand;
spectator, 110–114, 116–122 Rosaldo, Renato
Ali, Ahmed anonymity in, 140–2
Twilight in Delhi, 157 criticisms of, 7–8 (see also Geertz,
Alloula, Abdelkadar. See also Algerian Clifford)
theater literary turn, 7–9, 38–39 (see also
audience participation, 113 Clifford, James)
collective production, 113, 114, 120 literature, similarities to, 7–9
colonial European theater, 113 traditions of, 8, 9 (see also Stocking,
community theater, 110, 116, 119 George W.)
democratic national theater, 110, 113, anticolonial, 6, 7, 9, 14, 16, 38, 57, 58,
114, 120 60, 61, 76, 96–7, 101, 103, 113,
El-Adjouad, 110, 112, 115, 124n5 114, 118, 217, 219, 220. See also
El-Agoual, 112 decolonial studies; postcolonial
El-Litham, 112 studies
El-Meïda, 111, 112 Antropoesis. See also ethnography;
Fondation Abdelkader Alloula, 110 Rosaldo, Renato
halqa storytelling, 111, 112, 114, Antropoesía, 183, 184
117, 119 Antropoeta, 183
goual, 114, 116, 117 apprenticeship, 41, 42
goualine, 114, 115 Arabic
mise en abîme, 116 Modern Standard Arabic, 112, 124n16
 INDEX  255

Archive Women’s Self Defence League, 73. See

archival absences, 30 also Mahila Atma Raksha Samiti
archival fragility; in Africa, 59 (see also (MARS)
Diabate, Naminata) Beverley, John
archival records, 12, 17, 36, 78, 161, Testimonio: On the Politics of Truth, 3, 38
168, 177, 194–197, 215, 219, Bharata’s Natyashastra, 84
220–222 Bilby, Kenneth, 222, 233n7
national archive, 170–171, 173–175, biopolitics, 52, 53
216, 227 (see also privilege) Birmingham School of Cultural Studies,
area studies, 4, 9, 10, 29–46, 168, 18n8. See also Gray, Ann; Hall,
169, 178 Stuart
Aristotle, 44n8, 83, 89n30 Bishop, Maurice, 30–32, 34, 42.
art history, 3, 6, 12 See also Grenada
Aslam, Nadeem memorials to, 31
The Wasted Vigil, 18 Black Power, 30
assimilation, 233n11 blog
Association of Internet Researchers blogging, 131–48
Ethics Committee, 139, 147n25 literary blog, 134–136
authenticity, 11, 42, 123 Blommaert, Jan, 147n28
cultural, 157, 158, 162 Boal, Augusto, 241, 243
in Africa, 60, 65, 68n13 Booker Prize, 152. See also Roy,
linguistic, 158–160 Arundhati; Rushdie, Salman
authorial intent, 9 Borges, Jorge Luis, 7
authorial role Borland, Katherine, 139, 147n27,
in anthropology, 7, 9 147n28
authorship Bourdieu, Pierre, 3, 147n28
online, 139–141, 143 Bowie, Andrew, 81, 87
avant-garde, 113, 114, 117 Brand, Dionne, 38, 46n15
Brazil. See also Holmes, Tori
blogging, 131–48
B digital culture, 131, 132, 138–44
Banks, William P., 140, 141, 143 favela, 15, 131–48
Bassett, Elizabeth H., 139–41, 143, internet use, 145n2
147n26 military police, 133
Bataille, Georges, 195, 206n4 Orkut, 134, 135, 142, 146n11
Bauman, Richard, 19n22, 19n24 Rio de Janeiro, 132–5, 143,
Baumgarten, A.G., 81, 82, 89n28. 146n3, 146n5
See also Moore, Gregory Brecht, Bertolt, 113, 117, 126n23
Aesthetica, 81 Briggs, Charles
Behar, Ruth, 45n11. See also Voices of Modernity: Language
anthropology Ideologies and the Politics of
Bengal Inequality, 19n24
famine of 1943, 14, 73, 74,75, 87n1 Brodber, Erna, 42
Kolkata, 74 Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come
Mahila Atma Raksha Samiti, 73. Home, 38
See also Mahila Atma Raksha Bruckman, Amy, 137, 138
Samiti (MARS) amateur artists, 140, 142
Tebhaga Women’s Movement, 73–90 light disguise, 142
(see also Mitra, Ila) Buford, Bill, 154. See Granta
256  INDEX

Bulmer, Martin, 54 Christian Zionism

Burke, Timothy, 196, 207n8 Christian Zionist tourism, 95, 96, 104n2
Clifford, James, 1, 7, 17, 18n1, 45n11,
161, 162n9. See also anthropology
C Routes: Travel and Translation in the
calypso, 30, 37, 38, 40, 42 Twentieth Century, 18n1
Campbell, Mavis, 220, 222, 232n7 Coard, Bernard, 30, 31
capitalism, 6, 213 cold war, 6, 44n9, 168, 173
Carey, Bev, 232n7 Coleman, Simon, 179n8
Caribbean Cole, Teju
Anglophone Caribbean, 30 (see also White-Savior Industrial Complex, 53,
Grenada; Puri, Shalini; Trinidad) 67n3
landscape, 29–46 (see also Glissant, collaboration
Édouard) collaborative work, 2, 7, 9, 13, 16,
literature, 32, 44n5 20n42, 42, 193, 241
painting, 32, 230 Collins, Merle
Caribbean studies, 29, 36, 39, 44n9, Angel, 38
46n20 “Shame Bush,” 32
Carpentier, Alejo, 17 “The Walk,” 41
Casey, Edward, 43n3, 44n8, 233n10 colonialism, 7, 15, 16, 45n12, 58, 60,
caste, 157, 159, 162 65, 76, 96, 101, 103, 104, 113,
Castillo, Debra A., 1–21. See also 153–155, 160, 194–197, 199,
Chiapas; Zapatistas 201–206, 208n25, 219, 232n7, 226.
study abroad, 17 See also anticolonial; colonization
Catharsis. See Aristotle; Katharsis colonization, 5
Catholic Church, 17, 170 Communist Party
census, 133, 173, 238, 241, 249n16 Communist Party of India (CPI-M),
Central Indian Trade Union 88n5, 117
(CITU), 117 in Bengal, 74–75
Cervantes, Miguel de Parti d’avant-garde socialiste (PAGS),
Don Quixote, 194, 206 117
Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 6, 19n22, 44n9 Communist Party of India (CPI-M),
Chakravartty, Renu, 74, 88n4 88n5, 117
Chat, 134, 142 community performance, 110
Chauvet, Marie, 4, 13. See Fonds des nègres comparative literature
Chiapas. See also Zapatismo hospitality in, 4, 5, 44n9, 64–6, 201
Centro Maya de Estudios Conrad, David
Agropecuarios, 236 Epic of Sunjata, 55, 56, 58
El colegio de la frontera sur genital shaming, 58, 65, 66
(ECOSUR), 235 contact zones, 5, 7. See also Pratt, Mary
Fortaleza de la Mujer Maya Louise
(FOMMA), 235–40, 247n3, Coquery-Vidrovitch, Catherine, 57
248n7, 248n9, 249n17 cosmopolitan, 16, 66, 198, 202–6
huipiles, 240 Côte d’Ivoire
maternal health, 236, 239; parteras, Adjanou civil war, 61, 63
240, 241, 243, 249n14 Malinké, 53, 55, 56, 58, 66
San Cristóbal de las Casas, 235 naked protests, 51
San Juan Chamula, 236, 246 Crapanzano, Vincent, 5, 8, 19n21, 20n30.
Universidad Autónoma de See also anthropology; montage
Chiapas, 236 Crawford, Kate, 134, 146n9
Chow, Rey, 66 Creole, 32, 35
 INDEX  257

Cresswell, Tim, 43n3, 233n10 research; ethics of visibility,

cultural authenticity, 157, 158, 162 138–44
cultural capital. See also Holmes, Tori digital field work, 16, 66, 131–2, 134,
in Maré, Brazil, 137 138–145, 147, 169, 172–5, 178–9
cultural criticism digital history, 172
Caribbean cultural criticism, 29–46 digital humanities, 172
cultural norms, 9 digital spaces
cultural politics, 193–210 Banks, William, 140, 141, 143,
cultural studies. See also Stuart Hall 147n39, 148n46
place vs. space, 35, 43, 44n8, 101, Eble, Michelle, 140, 141, 147n33
112–17, 119, 120, 122, 123, 132, digitization, 167, 168, 172, 173
145, 152, 160–2, 169, 226, 228, dirt. See also Harris, Ashleigh; Knox,
233n10 (see also Puri, Shalini) Thomas M.; Masquelier, Adeline;
culture Newell, Stephanie; Stallybrass, Peter;
cross-cultural, 7, 66, 204, 228 White, Allon
folk culture, 126n27 cleanliness, 194, 195, 202, 205
in Lagos, 197, 205, 206n1
in Nairobi, 200, 205
D Slum, 122, 195, 196, 198, 205
Dallas, R. C., 219, 222, 231, 232n5 in Zimbabwe, 196
Das, Veena, 13, 41, 46n23, 99, 105n5 discipline/disciplinary
database, 173, 175, 178. See also JSTOR anthropology, 4, 9, 11, 13, 36, 38, 39,
Dayan, Joan (Colin), 4, 11, 13. See also 77, 101, 139, 170, 171
Fonds des nègres; literary fieldwork; English, 12, 15, 35, 37, 39, 75, 77,
Haiti, History and the Gods 143, 151–63, 177, 188, 196, 201,
de Certeau, Michel, 1 214–16, 231, 246
decolonial studies, 6, 19n23. See also hospitable discipline, 66
global south; postcolonial studies interdisciplinarity, 2, 3, 10, 103,
Delhi 104, 146n7
Delhi metro, 15, 151, 152, 155, 156, literary criticism, 4, 9, 32, 42, 53, 54,
158, 162 57, 59, 64, 67n4
New Delhi, 15, 20n42, 114, 117, 155, literary studies, 2–6, 10, 13, 80, 104,
157, 158 146n7, 195, 206
Old Delhi, 155–158 dispossession, 98, 102, 103, 123
Derrida, Jacques, 52 Don Quixote. See Cervantes, Miguel de
Desai, Anita Doshi, Neil, 109–27. See also Algerian
In Custody, 157 theater
Diabate, Aliou Dougla, 29, 30. See also Trinidad
Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali, 55, Douglas, Mary, 60, 195, 207
56, 58
Diabate, Naminata. See also African studies
archival fragility, 59 E
genital cursing, 14, 52, 55–8, 60, 62 East Jerusalem, 97, 100
Malinké, 53, 55, 56, 58, 66, 68n7 Eble, Michelle F., 140, 141, 143
naked agency, 52, 62–4 Ebola, 16, 197, 199, 202, 207n16,
retrospective observation, 14, 54, 55, 57 207n17, 207n18
women’s naked protests, 51–68 Echewa, Obinkaram
diasporic, 35, 37, 44n9 I Saw the Sky Catch Fire, 58, 60, 64, 65
digital culture Edwards, Bryan, 219, 222, 232n5
citing sources, 135, 139–142, Eichhorn, Kate, 137, 144
144, 145 elitism, 241
258  INDEX

Emecheta, Buchi everyday life, 3, 5, 8, 9, 12, 13, 17, 40,

The Joys of Motherhood, 53, 67n1 76, 79, 160, 170, 172, 175–178,
The Slave Girl, 57 193, 205
Empire. See also US foreign policy; US excess, 195, 206n4. See also Bataille,
military Georges
US empire, 95, 97, 101
engagement, forms of, 29–47
Epic of Sunjata, 55, 56, 58. See also F
Diabate, Aliou; Diabate, Naminata; Facebook, 146n11. See also Internet
Kouyate, Jeli Mori; Sundiata: An famine, 14, 73–5, 83, 87n1
Epic of Old Mali Farge, Arlette, 177, 180n12
Escobar, Arturo, 45n11 favela
Espinet, Ramabai, 42 blogging, 131–48
Estés, Clarissa Pinkola favela tours, 146n3
Rwandan Women, 58 media coverage, 132, 133, 136,
ethics 141, 143
in Comparative Literature, 51–68 female bodies
in Digital Culture Research, in Africa, 64, 58 (see also Diabate,
138–44 Naminata; naked agency)
Ethics Committee of the Association of power of, 54–56, 60, 61, 63, 67n5
Internet Researchers, 139 romanticization of, 59
of hospitality, 65 victimized female bodies, 52, 53
of Internet research, 137–9, 141 (see feminist studies, 95, 101
also Bassett, Elizabeth H.; Ferguson, James, 8, 36, 40, 45n11
O’Riordan, Kate; Reilly, Paul; field diary, 133, 135
Trevisan, Filippo) field notebook, 14, 98, 99
in the study of Africa, 66 fieldwork (see also Anthropology)
ethnography as apprenticeship, 41, 42
ethnographic poetry (see antropoesis) distant fieldwork, 15, 109–27 (see also
ethnographic practice, 3, 7–10, Doshi, Neil)
18n8, 36, 97, 137, 161, ethics, 39, 42
221, 222 field notes (see field diary; field
ethnographic ventriloquism, 7 notebook)
of the internet, 131 (see also Miller, field research, 8, 20n32, 159
Daniel) fieldwork funding, 1, 19n10, 35, 59,
of literature, 151–63 77, 78, 99, 100, 178, 227, 238
methodological nationalism, 167 humanities-based fieldwork, 2, 3, 6, 7,
multi-sited ethnography, 179n3, 10–12, 18n9, 19n10, 35, 36, 39,
179n8 (see also Coleman, Simon; 51, 131, 152, 153, 213, 232,
Hellermann, Pauline von; Marcus, 238, 239, 241, 245
George E) in-betweenness, 131 (see also Holmes,
of reading, 162, 163n13 Tori; Institutional Review Board
of television, 161 (see also Mankekar, (IRB))
Purnima) interdisciplinarity, 2–4, 10, 38, 66, 77,
virtual ethnography, 147n32 88n10, 96, 103, 104, 131, 139,
ethnomusicology, 3 145, 167
European Research Council (ERC), 193, lateral listening, 16, 214 (see also
196, 197 Younquist, Paul)
 INDEX  259

open-plan fieldwork, 4 Ghana, 61, 62, 64, 68n15

pedagogy, 17, 235–49 (see also Gikandi, Simon, 81
Castillo, Debra) Glissant, Édouard, 32, 44n5, 222, 233n9
practice, as a, 3, 12, 17, 18, 36, 41–43, Poetics of Relation, 44n5, 233n9
131, 135, 152, 221, 222 global English, 4, 35
retrospective observation, 14, 54, 55, global south, 5–7, 12, 17, 19n23, 20n42,
57 (see also Diabate, Naminata) 30, 35, 44n9, 67n2, 171, 178
social-science fieldwork, 8, 10, 38, 195 Godwin, David, 152, 153, 162n3
terminologies; collaborator, 10; Golden, Leon, 83, 89n30
informant, 10; interlocutor, 10; Google books, 168, 173
interviewee, 10; research subject, 10 graffiti, 31
value, 1, 6, 40, 42, 178, 194, 213 Granta, 15, 154, 155, 162. See also
first world, 6 Buford, Bill; Sadana, Rashmi
focus group discussions (FGDs), 194, Grassroots Literacy. See Blommaert, Jan
196, 197, 199, 201, 204, 207n19 Gray, Ann, 18n8
Fonds des nègres, 4 Gray, Jonathan, 146n13
Ford Foundation, 238 Green, Cecilia, 30, 43n2
Ford-Smith, Honor, 43 undocumented societies, 30
Fortaleza de la Mujer Maya (FOMMA), Grenada, 13, 30. See also Bishop, Maurice
235–40, 247n3, 248n7–9, 249n17 Calypso, 37, 38, 40 (see also Coard,
Isabel Juárez, 238, 239, 247n3 Bernard)
Foucault, Michel, 86, 88n14, 90n43, Cubans in, 31, 35, 37
194, 214, 241 Grenada Revolution, 13, 30–38, 41,
Franco, Francisco, 183 42, 43n1
Franklin, Marianne, 140, 147n34 Truth and Reconciliation
Freire, Paulo, 51, 65, 241, 242, Commission, 41
249n18–20 Grosz, Elizabeth, 52
Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 51, 65, 241, Gruyer, Paul, 81
249n19 Gupta, Akhil, 8, 36, 40, 45n11, 46n13,
Frye, Tim, 3 46n21
Fulbright, William, 35
Fusco, Coco, 23
H
Haiti. See also Port-au-Prince; Rainsford,
G Marcus
Gambia, 61–65, 202 Haitian Revolution, 16, 215
garbage, 33, 208n30. See also dirt; excess L’Ouverture, Toussaint, 215
Geertz, Clifford, 7, 18n1, 38, 45n11, Hall, Stuart, 3. See also Birmingham School
46n15 of Cultural Studies; cultural studies
genital cursing, 14, 52, 53, 55–58, Harding, Susan, 99, 105n5
60–62 Harney, Stefan, 3, 18n9. See also public
genital power, 55–57, 60, 62–4. humanities
See also naked agency Harris, Ashleigh, 196, 207n8
genocide, 13, 41, 220 Harrison, Faye, 45n11
geography. See also landscape Hartman, Saidiya, 3
cultural geography, 3, 13, 30, Hass, Robert, 184
45n11, 162 Hate speech, 202–4
emotional geography, 31 hate studies, 204
260  INDEX

Hellermann, Pauline von, 179n8 Bhashas, 157; Bengali, 153; Hindi,

Hemispheric Institute, 237 152–154, 156–160;
Heuston, Sean, 3, 19n11 Punjabi, 153; Urdu,
Hindi, 15, 151–4, 156–60, 162n1 153, 154, 157
historiography, 4, 76, 78, 79, 173, 214 British government, 74
history Central Indian Trade Union (CITU),
lived history, 75, 78–80, 85 117 (see also Communist Party of
oral history, 3, 14, 17, 42, 45n11, 75, India (CPI-M); Delhi)
77–80, 83, 88n2, 88n5, 88n13, English-language literature, 154
88n16, 139, 143, 171 English-medium education, 151
place-based, 15, 16, 167–80 Indian fiction (see also JANAM);
social history, 168–70, 171, 206 “Boom” in, 152; translations
transnational turn, 16, 167–80 (see also of, 152–163
Putnam, Lara) Kolkata, 74
HIV/AIDS, 53, 67n1 multilinguality, 153, 156 (see also
H-net, 58, 59 partition)
Hoad, Neville, 51, 54, 65, 68n18 Women’s Movement, 73–90
Hoffman, Barbara E., 56, 68n10 informed consent, 138, 142, 197,
Holmes, Tori, 14, 15, 131–48 207n19
in-betweenness, 131 Institutional Review Board (IRB), 100
holocaust, 41, 78 interdisciplinarity, 2–4, 10, 38, 66, 77,
homogeneity, 5, 127n48 88n10, 96, 103, 104, 131, 139,
homo sacer. See Agamben, Giorgio 145, 146n7, 167
hospitable discipline, 66. See also internet
Chow, Rey anonymity, 140–2
humanities. See also digital humanities blog, 15, 132–9, 141–5, 196, 199,
humanities-based fieldwork, 2, 3, 6, 7, 206n1
10–12, 18n9, 19n10, 35, 36, 39, citing sources, 135, 139–142,
51, 131, 152, 153, 213, 232, 144, 145
238, 239, 241, 245 (see also email, 57, 132, 134, 136, 142
literary fieldwork; public social network, 132; Facebook,
humanities) 146n11; MySpace, 143; Orkut,
Social Justice, 238, 245 134, 135, 142, 146n11
human subjects internet studies, 133. See also Miller,
protocols, 137 Daniel; Slater, Don
in social sciences, 78, 132, 137, interview. See also ethnography
138–141, 144, 147n28, 178 methods, 36
hypertext, 137 oral history, in, 42
Islam
in Algeria, 109, 110, 112, 124n16,
I 125n19, 125n21
Igbo, 7, 58, 60, 65 in Côte d’Ivoire, 53
cosmogony, 60 Israel
immigrant literature, 9 birthright-Israel, 96
imperialism, 75, 154, 169 Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 97, 98. See
India also Kelly, Jennifer Lynn; Palestine
Bengal, 4, 14, 73–90 US role, 97, 98
 INDEX  261

J learning from below, 5, 7, 9

Jaipur Literature Festival, 152 Lethbridge, Emily, 3
Jamaica. See Maroons; Rastafari liberation, 45n11, 78, 86, 87, 109,
Kingston, 216, 219, 226, 229, 230 233n12, 242, 243
James, Marlon, 13 life writing, 139
A Brief History of Seven Killings, 13 linguistic authenticity, 158–160
JANAM, 15, 114, 115–23, 126n35 literary studies, 76, 133, 137, 206,
Jana Natya Manch (JANAM or People’s 241, 242
Theater Group) African literary studies, 56, 59, 195,
Âkhrî Julûs (The Last Strike), 115, 118 201 (see also comparative literature)
Deshpande, Sudhanva, 115 literary criticism, 4, 9, 30, 36, 39, 56,
Hashmi, Safdar, 115, 126n35 42, 53, 59, 64, 67n4, 68n17,
Moloyashree, Hashmi, 115 68n18, 213, 214
sûtradhâr, 117, 118, 126n36 use of anthropology, 4, 5, 7, 9
Jay, Gregory, 245 literary theory, 138 (see also world
JSTOR, 168, 173, 175 literature)
Judeo-Christian, 52 literary fieldwork, 3, 4, 13, 19n12 39,
40, 152–155, 160, 194, 214. See
also Dayan, Joan (Colin)
K Haiti, History and the Gods, 4 (see also
Kant, Immanuel, 62, 82 Hartman, Saidiya)
Katharsis, 83 Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the
Kelly, Jennifer Lynn, 14, 15, 95–108 Atlantic Slave Route, 3 (see also
Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and James, Marlon; Puri, Shalini)
Society, 11, 20n40. See also Williams, literary reading
Raymond close-reading, 20n35, 31, 40, 195, 214
King Jr., Martin Luther, 63, 187 New Critical model, 40
kinship, 39, 64 literary silences, 31, 32. See also archival
Knox, Thomas M., 197, 198, 203, 207n11 absences
Koch, Gertrud, 73–4 lived experience, 11, 18, 8n8, 30, 38, 39,
Komunyakaa, Yusef, 16, 184–9, 189n10, 56, 62, 63, 76, 172, 177
189n14 lived history, 75, 78–81, 85–87
Dien Cai Dau, 186, 188, 189n10,
189n14
Koné, Kassim, 56, 68n11 M
Kourouma, Ahmadou, 53, 67n1 Macaulay, Thomas Babbington, 9, 45n12
The Suns of Independence, 53, 67n1 Maconi, Lara, 3
Kouyate, Jeli Mori, 56, 58 Mahila Atma Raksha Samiti (MARS),
73–75, 85, 88n5
mainstream media, 132, 133, 136, 141,
L 143, 202
Lagos, 16, 193, 196–203, 205, 206n1, Malinké societies, 53, 55, 56, 58, 66,
207n15 68n7. See also Diabate, Naminata
Landell, Saul, 8 Malkki, Liisa, 8, 20n32. See also
landscape Anthropology
in literature, 153 Mama, Amina,
poetics of land, 32, 171 ethics of study, 66
262  INDEX

Mankekar, Purnima, 161, 162, 163n11 mixed methods qualitative research, 36

Marcuse, Herbert, 81, 82 metro, 15, 151, 152, 155, 158, 162
Marcus, George E., 45n11, 179n8 metropoles, 169, 216
Maroons Mexico. See also Castillo, Debra
Accompong, 220, 227, 228 Chiapas, 235–49
Asafu Yard, 216, 217, 226, 228 Indigenous, 17, 236, 237, 239–241,
Charles Town International Maroon 243, 244, 247n2, 248n8
Conference, 217, 218, 226, Middle East studies, 95
227, 229 Mignolo, Walter, 19n23
Charles Town Maroons, 16, 216, 217, Miller, Daniel, 131, 145n1, 147n15
227, 228, 229 minority writers, 5
as depicted by British, 215 Minor Transnationalism, 19n23
Granny Nanny, 230, 231 Mitra, Ila, 74, 75, 88n6
Jamaican, 216, 217, 219–22, 224, mobility, 15, 66, 103, 104, 105n8, 133,
226–31, 232n7 (see also Bilby, 135, 151, 152, 228. See also
Kenneth; Campbell, Mavis; Tourism
Wilson, Kathleen) of researchers, 15
Maroon Indigenous Women’s Circle, montage, 8
227, 229, 230, 232 Moore, Gregory, 89n23
in Nova Scotia, 220, 222, 231, 232n7 Moretti, Franco, 20n35
(see also Campbell, Mavis) Morrison, Toni,
Quao Village, 218 Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the
Saramaka Maroon, 218 Literary Imagination, 54
in Suriname, 215, 217, 218, 228, Moten, Fred, 3, 18n9. See also public
229, 232 humanities
Trelawney Maroons, 220, 222–225, motherhood, 54
231, 233n11 multilinguality, 15, 153, 156, 236
Marxism, 32, 34. See also Communist murals, 31
Party of India (CPI-M) music studies. See ethnomusicology
Marxist theory, 32, 34
Masquelier, Adeline, 195, 207n7
Mbembe, Achille, 60, 65, 68n14 N
deathscapes, 57 Naipaul, V.S., 32, 44n6
McRobbie, Angela, 18n8 Nairobi, 16, 195, 196, 199–205, 206n1,
media studies, 5, 12, 146n13 207n18, 208n25, 208n27
memorials, 31, 37. See also graffiti; murals naked agency. See also Diabate,
memory Naminata
memory studies, 14, 30, 34, 78 in Gambia, 61–65
popular memory, 11, 20n36, 31, 33 genital power, 55–57, 60, 62–4
traumatic memory, 32 in Ghana, 61, 62, 64
vernacular memory, 32, 35, 220 naked women’s protests, 52, 62–64,
Menchú, Rigoberta, 63 67n5
methodology, 2, 3, 4, 6–9, 14, 16, 17, nudity; ritual nakedness, 54, 55, 57,
18n8, 30, 35–37, 39, 51, 54, 57, 59–65; secularization
59, 60, 62, 66, 96, 97, 99, 104, 112, of nudity, 52
117, 120, 132–134, 137, 139, 145, Nancy, Jean-Luc, 52
152, 156, 160–162, 167–172, 176, National Science Foundation, 19n10
179, 180, 193–197, 199, 203, Neculai, Catalina, 3
205, 217, 239, 241, 242, 245. neocolonialism
See also fieldwork in Africa, 60, 61
 INDEX  263

New Delhi. See also Saldana, Rashmi; P

Metro Palestine
JANAM (People’s Theater Group), 15, birthright tourism, 14, 96
114–123, 126n35 checkpoints, 97, 100, 102
theater. See also JANAM justice tourism, 14, 96
Newell, Stephanie, 16, 20n42, occupation, experience of, 97, 98, 102
193–210. See also African studies; Palestinian American Research Center,
dirt 100
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, 57, 67n1, 154 refugees, 99
Niane, Djibril Tamsir, 55, 58 solidarity tourism, 14, 15, 95–7,
Nigeria, 60, 61, 163n12, 198–202, 100–2, 104, 105n8 (see also
207, 207n16, 208n28, tourism)
208n29, 209n33. See also tour guides, 15, 96–103
Stevens, Philips Pandian, Anand, 1, 8, 11, 18n6, 20n41
Nixon, Rob, 46n27 Panjabi, Kavita, 13, 14, 20n42, 73–90,
transnational ethics of place, 42 162n7
Non-Governmental Organizations Unclaimed Harvest: An Oral History of
(NGO), 88n10 the Tebhaga Women’s Movement,
in Maré, 133 87, 88n2, 88n5, 88n7
normative dewesternization, 5, 19n20 paraliterary, 133
Nova Scotia, 220, 222, 231, 232n7. paratext, 135, 146n13
See also Maroons Partition of India, 41, 76, 99. See also
Novo, Salvador, 67n5 Das, Veena
Nussbaum, Martha, 3, 83, 89n33 Passerini, Luisa, 79, 80, 85, 86, 88n12,
Nye, Naomi Shihab 88n15, 89n40
accessible poem, 184 patriarchy, 53
Gate A-4, (2008), 184–6, 189n2 Malinké patriarchy, 53
patwa, 218, 220, 224, 227, 229
peasant women, 73, 74, 80, 85
O pedagogy, 17, 51, 65, 99, 235–49. See
observation also Castillo, Debra; Freire, Paulo
participant observation, 57, 98, 103, Study Abroad, 17
105n4, 133, 161 Pérez Cañamares, Ana, 184, 189n1
retrospective observation, 14, 54, performance studies, 3, 12, 14, 76, 109,
55, 57 110, 115, 121, 124n3, 236, 237, 243
Ondaatje, Michael, sonic turn, 121
Anil’s Ghost, 38, 46n18 personal texts, 147n28
online source. See also Franklin, place-based research, 2, 4, 16, 167–80
Marianne; internet poetry
citation of, 140 accessible poem, 184 (see also
oral history. See also Thompson, Paul; antropoesis)
Tonkin, Elizabeth poetic truth, 14, 75, 76, 88n7
The Oral History Reader, 45n11 political poem, 184 (see also prose
orientalism, 206n3, 208n30. See also poem)
Said, Edward political movements, 76, 80, 81
O’Riordan, Kate, 139, 141, 143, politics of care, 73
147n26, 147n38, 147n41 popular memory, 20n36, 31, 33
Orkut, 134, 135, 142, 146n11. See also Popular Memory Group, 11
internet Port-au-Prince, 43, 216
Oslo Accords, 105n3 Portelli, Alessandro, 45n11, 78–80, 88n12
264  INDEX

postcolonial studies Rastafari, 227, 233n11

center, 153–155 (see also decolonial rationalism, 83
studies; global south) reciprocal translation, 9
margin, 153–5 Reddy, William, 84, 85, 89n37
postcolonial city, 64, 65, 155, 161, reflection, 10, 11, 42, 44n7, 52, 80, 111,
199–201, 205 118, 143, 145, 157, 237, 248n5.
postcolonial feminism, 52, 67n2 See also theorizing
postcolonial theory, 153, 201 (see also Reilly, Paul, 139, 140, 147n24, 147n36
Spivak, Gayatri) research participants. See also research
Povinelli, Elizabeth, 66 subject
practices of liberation, 78, 86, 87. See also accountability to, 140, 141
Foucault, Michel protection of, 141
Pratt, Mary Louise, 5, 7. See also contact research subject, 10, 15
zones Rimbaud, Arthur, 184
primary source, 172, 173 Rio de Janeiro. See also favela
principal investigator (PI), 196, 206n1 Centro de Estudos e Ações Solidárias
privilege, 7, 12–13, 17, 42, 98, 102, da Maré, 133
176, 228 Complexo da Maré, 133
racialized, 102, 104, 105n8 Rosaldo, Renato, 1, 3, 15, 16, 18n1,
prose poem, 184–6. See also Hass, 19n11, 183–89
Robert; Nye, Naomi Shihab; Roy, Arundhati, 152
Rimbaud, Arthur The God of Small Things, 152
prostitution, 53, 67n1, 74 Rushdie, Salman
pseudonyms, 140, 143. See also anonymity Booker Prize, 152
psychoanalysis, 13, 41, 214 Midnight’s Children, 152, 154
public health, 195, 198, 199, 204, 236, Rwanda, 21n43, 41, 58
238, 241
public humanities, 3, 9, 13, 18n9, 239, 245
public persona, 143 S
public sphere, 117, 199, 203, 204. Sadana, Rashimi, 14, 15, 21n46, 151–63
See also Sveningsson Elm, Malin Said, Edward, 95, 105n3, 114,
on the internet, 138, 140, 143 126n28, 153, 194, 206n3. See also
publishing houses, 152, 156 orientalism
Punjabi, 153 Sanders, Mark, 5
Puri, Shalini Sanskrit, 82–5
Anglophone Caribbean, 29, 30 screenshot, 132–5
literary fieldwork, 3, 4, 13, 19n12, Seguín, Béquer, 3
40, 42 self-published, 134, 135
place vs. space, 35 sensuous cognition, 14, 80–7
Putnam, Lara, 15, 167–80 Seth, Vikram, 152, 159
A Suitable Boy, 152, 159, 160
sexuality, 30, 52, 53, 55, 57, 58,
Q 64, 68n18, 196, 198, 201–205,
qualitative analysis, 174 237, 248n7
quantitative analysis, 174 sharecroppers, 88n5
Siegel, Lee, 85, 89n41
Skype, 101, 102, 104
R Slater, Don, 131, 145n1
Rainsford, Marcus, 16, 215, 216, slavery, 41, 60, 81, 89n21, 213, 215,
232n3, 232n5 233n8. See also Hartman, Saidiya
rape, 52, 53, 59, 76, 186, 187 slum, 122, 195, 196, 198, 205, 210n46
 INDEX  265

sociology, 3, 54, 139, 161, 162, 235 theater

solidarity movements, 99. See also Palestine archives, 115, 216 (see also Algerian
Solnit, Rebecca, 1 theater; Alloula, Abdelkadar;
Sommer, Doris, 3, 5, 63 Aristotle)
South Africa, 5, 19n18, 41, 54, 200, colonial European theater, 113, 114
208n23, 208n25 direct discourse, 115, 116
Truth and Reconciliation Commission European avant-garde theater, 114
(TRC), 54 French classical theater, 113
Spain, 135, 183. See also Franco, Francisco Indian, 15. See also JANAM
November Twentieth, 183, 184 mise-en-abime, 116
spectator, 83, 110–14, 116–22 monologue, 118, 119, 243
role in theater, 110–12, 117, 120, 122 national allegories, 110–12
Spivak, Gayatri open air, 110–114, 116, 117,
Death of a Discipline, 4, 7, 19n17, 39, 122, 125n22
44n9, 46n19, 66, 68n17 political theater, 109–111, 113, 116,
open-plan fieldwork, 4 119, 120, 121, 123, 125n22
Stallybrass, Peter, 195, 205, 206n5 repertoire, 115
Stern, Steve, 171, 179n4 spectator, 110–14, 116–119, 120–2
Stevens, Philips, 60, 68n12 street theater, 13, 15, 114, 117, 122
Stocking, George W., 19n25, 45n11 theater studies, 3
Stoler, Ann, 101, 105n5, 106n12, Théâtre national algérien (see Algerian
209n38. See also Empire theater)
Sommer, Doris, 3, 5, 63 Théâtre national populaire, 111
storyteller theorizing, 10–11, 41, 53, 56, 57, 62,
goual, 114, 116, 117 179n5, 179n9. See also reflection
goualine, 114, 115 theory, 4, 10–12, 20n36, 32–4, 41, 51,
Strassler, Karen, 101, 106n12 66, 78, 81, 82, 84, 85, 87, 114,
Stuart Hall, 1, 3 138, 153, 179n8, 183, 193, 201,
Study Abroad, 17. See also Castillo, Debra 206n4, 214, 239, 241, 245
subaltern studies, 3, 6, 35, 127n48 thick association, 12
subjectivity, 12, 38, 42, 54, 56, 75, thick description, 11, 38, 46n15, 99,
76, 78–87, 88n11, 89n22, 90n45, 183, 245
114, 143, 144, 147n28, 157, third world, 6, 232n7. See also global
161, 183, 201 south
resistant subject, 57 Thompson, Paul, 42, 45n11
suburb, 134, 195 The Voice of the Past: Oral History, 45n11
Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali, 55–6, 58. Tonkin, Elizabeth, 45n11
See also Diabate, Aliou; Kouyate, Jeli tourism. See also Zapa-tourism
Mori; Niane, Djibril Tamsir critical tourism studies, 101
Sveningsson Elm, Malin, 138 Israeli tourism, 15, 99, 103
justice tourism, 14, 96
Palestinian tourism, 14, 96
T solidarity tourism, 14, 15, 95–7,
taboo, 55, 207n6 100–2, 104
tabooed skin, 52, 64 traceability, 139–41, 144. See also
Tebhaga peasant movement, 74, 88n5 Holmes, Tori
Tebhaga Women’s Movement, 73–90 translation, 9, 16, 17, 18n1, 20n42, 32,
territorial embeddedness, 132, 143, 146n4 41, 42, 44n9, 58, 63, 65, 66,
Testimonio, 38. See also Beverley, John 89n28, 103, 115, 124n11, 125n20,
testimonio studies, 3 126n33, 152, 153, 158–61, 184,
text positivism, 7 186–8, 196
266  INDEX

translocal, 132, 135 Certeau, Michel; Puri, Shalini;

transnational, 6, 16, 20n42, 36, 42, Solnit, Rebecca
44n9, 66, 113, 152–153, 167–80, Washington, Teresa, 60, 68n12
205, 228, 235. See also Minor Weber, Max, 62
Transnationalism West Bank, 95, 98, 100, 102, 103,
transnational literary production, 153 106n9, 106n14. See also Israeli-
trauma Palestinian Conflict
collective trauma, 41 White, Allon, 195
trauma studies, 14, 30, 40, 41 White, L. W. T, 208n24
Trevisan, Filippo, 139, 140, 147n24 Whiteman, Kaye, 208n21
Trinidad, 9, 29, 30, 35, 43n1, 176, 229, Willems, Wendy, 5
232. See also Puri, Shalini Williams, Raymond, 11
Dougla, 29 Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and
Trouillot, Michele-Rolph, 4 Society, 20n40
Truth and Reconciliation Wilson, Kathleen, 220, 232n7
Commission (TRC) Witches of Gambaga, The, 66
in Grenada, 41 witnessing, 14, 32, 38, 40, 42, 74, 75,
in South Africa, 41, 54 83, 98, 99, 162
Tsotsil, 238, 240, 244, 246, 247, 247n3, women’s activism
248n8, 249n14. See also Chiapas Aggrandized Agency, 60
Anderson, Amanda, 59
in Bengal, 14, 73–90
U naked agency, 52, 62–4
Underwood, Ted, 173, 179n5 naked protests (see also Diabate,
United Kingdom, 141, 153, 196 Naminata); in Gambia, 61–65;
United Nations, 61 in Ghana, 61–62, 64
urban space, 64, 152, 198, 209n44 romanticizing trend, 59, 177 (see also
urban studies, 6, 206 Abu-Lughod, Lila; Anderson,
urban women, 73–5, 80, 83 Amanda)
Urdu, 35, 153, 154, 157 Tebhaga Women’s Movement,
US foreign policy, 95, 97 73–90
Middle East, 95 Women’s Self Defence League (see also
US Military, 37 Mahila Atma Raksha Samiti)
Women’s War, The 1929, 58
Woodward, Kathleen, 3, 238, 239, 245,
V 248n10, 249n26
victimhood, 52, 54, 57, 59–61, 64 World Bank, 198
victimization, 21n46, 53 World Health Organization, 207n16
Vietnam War, 186. See also Komunyakaa, world literature, 4, 9, 20n35, 53. See also
Yusef; Rosaldo, Renato global English
Vilar, Jean, 111 World War II, 73, 87n1, 170
Vodou, 4. See also Dayan, Joan Worthen, William, 115, 126n30
Wren, Percival Christopher, 197, 198,
207n13
W
Wade, Nicholas, 20n31
Walcott, Derek, 44n5 Y
walking, 1, 17, 18n2, 18n3, 98, 99, 174, Yeats, William Butler, 184
245. See also Collins, Merle; de “Adam’s Curse,” 184
 INDEX  267

Youngquist, Paul, 16, 20n42, 213–33 juntas de buen gobierno, 243

YouTube, 37 Oventic, 243–5, 249n25
subcomandante Marcos, 244
Zapa-tourism, 244, 249n25.
Z See also Burke, Timothy;
Zapatismo, 237, 244, 245 Harris, Ashleigh
Zapatistas, 17, 237, 239, 244. See also Zimbabwe, 196, 207n8. See also
Castillo, Debra Zapa-tourism; Burke, Timothy;
Caracol, 243 Harris, Ashleigh