(re)evaluating the system

so i love my professor... he's a mexican scholar of latin american history who's about to leave ut-austin for uchicago. meanwhile, he's probably one of the realest professors out of the latin americanists (aside from my advisor). he's constantly going off about how we construct latin american history... for example, when we think of latin america in the twentieth century we immediately see images of peasant revolutions, corrupt governments, passion/sex, and macho men/submissive women... the issue is that we (i'm using the term we loosely) act like these phenomena exist only in latin america-- clearly the same things can be said about the united states and europe...

meanwhile, today's conversation focused on the role of the intellectual. as a scholar-in-training, i and many others that may read this blog aspire to someday publish articles and books that will aid in transforming the academy... but can we really? and how? true, we can insert various aspects of identity often ignorned by our counterparts into the field of history, anthropology, art, feminist theory, etc... but what about the revolution? how far will they let us go in being radical? i want to challenge captialist values that shape our social relations as collegues. i want to call people out on being pseudo-activists, on identifying as liberals and studying the "subaltern" (this term deserves some serious discussion in itself) but refusing to have them/us as neighbors. i want them to recognize that we all have political agendas in our research... clearly my saying fuck bullshit conservative canonial texts won't get me a degree... let's talk about why we are people of the united states studying latin america in the first place. let's ask ourselves how our research is going to help end poverty, rape, child abuse, and worker abuse. and what am i doing about this??? at the moment, nothing. but i still have hope for developing an agenda...

which brings me back to my professor. he mentioned that many scholars see history as liberatory. i don't quite understand how though. most of our research only reinforces the status quo... and concepts of liberatory are relative; our conceptualization of such terms are inherently subjective. everyone has their own idea of "revolution." where is our common ground?

he identified the catch 22 in writing history: we write about oppressed identities (race, gender, sexuality, etc) to attack discrimination and work towards liberation, but aren't we reinforcing binary constructions of difference in the process? social constructions of identity are, indeed, constructions. they're not real. but there are material realities to these constructions. so what do we do? many writers (some examples can be found in the literature produced during the harlem renaissance) chose/choose to define themselves as "american" and deny any racial affiliation. it pisses me off... but are they onto something? what is our plan? perhaps we should fight to create equality, but view it as steps towards a society without difference? is this even possible?

my professor also challenged us to think beyond writing books for academic audiences. most books are never read, especially not by the people whose stories we claim to be examining. and, for most of us, our language is not accessible... so do we write stories for those outside of the academy? what will we write about? who will publish them? will they be read, and how will they help transform the world? maybe books and articles are the wrong approach... how about documentaries? or community forums? how will we bring our scholarship back to the community? and what is the community?

just a few thoughts...