In rebellion against faux science, and in honor of Peripersonal Space who has announced that the dichohtomy between emotion and reason is false, I hereby designate myself a Hard Bloggin’ Scientist. Click on the badge and you will see what this entails.
As a Hard Bloggin’ Scientist I now call for solidarity with and sympathy for Chasing the Red Balloon. Read her blog. I have some related comments.
1. There is something about senior faculty members who have been through a lot of trouble and now cannot face the pain of their younger colleagues. I do not like this but I find even more odd and alienating those senior faculty members who have not been through much pain and who thus still evince the fresh faced, earnest attitude of good students. Of course everything is fine. If there is a problem, it is that you have not yet understood the system. Let me show you…
2. I have always meant to write a piece on the acknowledgments pages of academic books, in which people nowadays often reveal a certain amount about their personal lives. Traditionalist that I am, I prefer acknowledgments pages giving only those acknowledgments which are legally required, and then a cryptic dedication page consisting of words such as “To A.” or “In loving memory of B.”
That is because I find intimidating the long acknowledgments essays, in which people talk about their wonderful colleagues, students, and families, the brilliant librarians and students and the supportive and insightful colleagues they have, and the sterling grant funding “without which this project could not have been realized” they have received. My reaction is: if this work could not have been accomplished without so much wonderful support, what of the many who have less placidly bourgeois situations? Can we, too, work and achieve?
I think then of J.C. Mariátegui whose major work was accomplished outside universities, and of Frederick Douglass who flourished despite the opposition of my ancestors. And then I am able to “put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used.”
3. Chasing the Red Balloon writes this sentence on her recently deceased aunt: “It is interlocking pains and traumas that join us, not the false hope of progress.” I recently taught I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem and some of the students did not understand why it would have been against the aesthetic and political project of the novel to have the title character triumph in life through some form of liberal progress. But the novel, and much of Maryse Condé’s work, is precisely about those interlocking pains and traumas. Not everyone is permitted to triumph over these in a bourgeois way. And, to quote a phrase from my Arabic teacher whose English was imperfect and thus often poetic, not everyone has the bourgeois aspiration.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
I’m really not sure what to do about my supervisor’s often emergent ideological position that effuses pity at social isolation and appears to consider it to be pathological. The idea that Marechera, as an author, can be redeemed by showing him to have been in the mainstream after all is inimical to the spirit of the writer as he actually was. This all seems to stem from a liberal, postmodernist assumption that the Deity smiles upon community but frowns upon social isolation. The best posthumous redemption for Marechera would therefore be given in my ability to reveal that he was in a mainstream literary context (not writing naively and ferociously as he did at times).
And Nietzche, too, was given a full church burial and hailed as a blessed soul.
But the assumption that wallowing in the zeitgeist of general literary normalcy, or that one is legitimised when others are doing the same as one is doing, is a very foreign notion to my mind.
You are right. And social isolation is underrated!
I hadn’t thought of long acknowledgments that way–although I do find it ridiculous when they cross the line to brown-nosing or racing to the ivory tower. But I have to admit, I always imagined writing a long acknowledgment section if only because I really don’t believe that activist scholarship can be done in isolation, or that I have not benefited from the hard work of others, or that our ideas are truly our own. I wonder if acknowledgments can be a way to recognize the privileges of being academics and also challenge how knowledges are valued, defined and owned in academia. But at the same time, acknowledgments aren’t really a place where you can be absolutely truthful about the lack of support or the abuse that happens on the road to the book.
Alternative acknowledgments, perhaps? Benefit from the work of others, yes, but one cites them. Thanking librarians, especially if you’ve done archival research, is always a good idea, though. And thanking your friends for their input and support, I’m all for that.
i like the idea of “alternative acknowledgments” but i think if one is talking about, say, an academic publication or a science book or some other “strict” style of work, i would assume the editors would edit that section as well, so something like “to my new yellow napkin holder” – which is a real (i swear to god) dedication on one of the PhD dissertations i was reading a while back for something – probably wouldn’t fly, but dedications are a whole different topic…
New yellow napkin holder, OMG. One would think editors edit, but some books I’ve seen… and they do not seem to touch the acknowledgments much at all. The thing is that I think of academic publications as formal pieces of writing and I’d rather keep them dignified. I also like the text to stand alone, without so much information on who the author, their family and friends are. The mystery behind the name … and then as you see more by that person, you associate them with their other work and not with anecdotes on themselves. And their name retains its aura of mystery (until, of course, you go to a conference and see them, but that is another story). On the other hand I do like some of those prefaces that tell you how that person came to write that book, what went into forming their perspective.