Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities

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 Department of English University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA Debra A. Castillo Department of Comparative Literature Cornell University Ithaca, New York, USA ISBN 978-1-137-60331-9 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-349-92836-1 (softcover) DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-92834-7 ISBN 978-1-349-92834-7 (ebook) Library of Congress Control Number: 2016958189 The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Cover illustration: 2015 Saul Landell Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Nature America Inc. The registered company address is: 1 New York Plaza, New York, NY 10004, U.S.A.

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 stimulating 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 conversations 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 collections 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, contemporary 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