the young people's professor

My decision.

Wow. Where to begin? I think I will always remember the summer of '06 as a time of great self-reflection and change. As many of my friends know, last spring I made the decision to enter Northwestern University's new PhD program in African American Studies, where I would have been starting anew beginning this fall. Naturally, this would have meant leaving New York City behind for a few years and moving to Chicago, Illinois.

Recently I made the single most difficult decision in my academic career by deciding to stay at NYU after-all. It came as a result of several issues. The decision was extremely difficult for me because as a young scholar I know it is never "good business" to pull out of an academic agreement at the last minute. Deciding not to attend Northwestern in August was rough, as I have a tremendous amount of respect for the faculty in African American Studies there and know how much they put into inaugurating this brand new doctoral program. I was honored to have been selected as apart of what will be NU's first co-hort of PHDs and was excited to be apart of the fantastic "black queer studies" empire there, but ultimately I knew that I needed to remain in New York City to tend to the things that I need to tend to here. I've been working through feeling guilty for several weeks now, and have been trying to reassure myself that the faculty and directors of Northwestern's program understand why I made the decision that I did, even if last minute, and that there are no "hard feelings." I hope that crew still has my back.

That being said, my "return" (or rather my staying-put?) to NYU has been hectic. But im good. And excited. Because the decision to stay here in New York rather than move to Chicago was so emotionally training, it actually forced me to think very seriously about my research, my long term career goals, and how to move towards the scholarly, political, and personal accomplishments i'd like to achieve. I can honestly say, as a result of all of this i'm actually "tighter" at my game than I have ever been.

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My coursework.

This is my last semester of coursework at NYU. I am taking three seminars and preparing for comprehensive area exams in the spring. I am also Jasbir Puar's graduate assistant. Dr. Puar is a queer transnational feminist scholar who does research on terrorism, biopolitics, and queer globalizations. She is visiting faculty in the department of performance studies this fall. My exam areas next semester are in Black Diaspora Theory (Black Diaspora Culture and Performance), Cultural Anthropology and Ethnography (Afro-Americanist Traditions) and Performance Studies: Methods, Histories, Frameworks. I decided not to do an exam area in Queer Theory because we can only choose three areas and the way I see it, when im on the job-market the "queer" nature of work is going to be self-evident and its really unnecessary for me to actually be examined in that field. But i'll-tell you, preparing for these exams have been a trip. I've even made a little blog just to keep all the readings together. For some reason seeing the book lists' online motivates me more than just seeing them on my desktop. Hey, whatever works right?

After December I have no other responsibilities in my department other than writing my dissertation and completing my area exams. The idea of being out of coursework and being able to devote myself full-time to nothing other than fieldwork, research, and writing is incredibly exciting. We'll see how that goes.

Another piece of news: I am also now in the program in culture and media in the department of Anthropology at NYU. The Culture and Media certificate from the Anth. department is essentially the equivalent of a master's degree, in the sense that requires an eight course, 32 credit sequencein Anthropology and Cinema Studies as well as production courses at the NYU film school. The purpose of the program is to train doctoral students who are interested in fieldwork to think about how documentary film practices can be used to document the communities in which they are doing research. The program basically trains students to be critical documentary filmmakers who can possess solid grounding in the history and theory of both anthropology as well as documentary cinema. The capstone project of the program is a self-produced, independent documentary film based on the training you receive from the video production courses at the film school. Obviously, my interest in the program came out of my long-time desire to eventually produce a documentary film on the contemporary house-ball scene, especially something that might us beyond the long overdue "Paris Is Burning" moment in the academy. So this program will allow me to do that, I hope.

Now, what this means of course is that even though technically I am done with coursework in December, I will still have committments in the culture and media program, though the directors of the program have been very lenient with me about waiving certain requirements and making sure this program enriches and contributes to my dissertation research rather than distracting me from it. So im excited about that.

This semester I am enrolled in the required History and Theory of Ethnographic Film core course. To round out my final semester I am in my advisor Jose Esteban Munoz's queer theory seminar and Tavia Nyongo's American Studies seminar on "Interracialism." Jose's course is particularly related to my dissertation research, which i'll explain in a minute. Here's the course description:

Queer Theory: Friendship, Belonging, Collectivity
Instructor: Jose Esteban Munoz

In an interview Michel Foucault famously stated that the relational task of the homosexual was to 'invent, from A to Z, a relationship that is still formless, which is friendship: that is to say, the sum of everything through which they can give each other pleasure.' This course considers theories and performances of relationality, with an emphasis on forms of mutual belonging and recognition outside of normative protocals. Much of the syllabus will draw from moments in the history of philosophy that will include excerpts from the work of Aristotle, Montaigne, Bloch, Foucault, Schmitt, Derrida, Virno, Agamben, and Plato. These sources will be used to think about relational configurations inside and outside the parameters of normative social practices and institutions. Recent work in queer theory that offers thick descriptions of particular modalities of queer relationality by authors like Jacqui Alexander, Samuel Delaney, Gavin Butt, Jennifer Doyle, Robert McClure, and Kathryn Bond Stockson will be engaged. Will we consider the "anti-relational thesis" in queer theory as represented in the work of Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman. Students will be encouraged to research different historical sites of what we will provisionally describe as 'queer relationality.''

As i mentioned, i'm also in Tavia Nyong'o's course on Interracialism. Here's that description:

American Studies Seminar: Interracialism
Instructor: Tavia Nyong'o

This course will survey the emergent field of 'critical mixed race studies' with a particular emphasis on the black experience in the Americas. How have people of African descent been alternately excluded from and incorporated into discourses of miscegenation and mestizaje? What role has performance played in the construction of racial categories like 'the mulatto' and 'the one-drop rule'? How have black people sought to alternately challenge and exploit those constructions? Has the trope of 'passing' helped preserve an essentialist concept of race amidst widespread racial mixing? Do recent developments around the performance of identity point toward a moment in black cultural politics that is leading us 'beyond passing'? We will read broadly and interdisciplinarily, examining the law, politics, performance, visual culture, literature, critical theory, statistics, sociology, philosophy and anthropology as various sites in which interracialism has historically been staged.

Jose and Tavia have been incredibly supportive of me over the past three years and its always a pleasure working with them. Im looking forward to ending coursework with these two as instructors. Now onto my research....

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My research.
My research deals with questions of racial belonging and kinship in the African diaspora, particular as they relate to ground-level sites of black performance. Methodologically speaking, my research approaches black expressive culture through the lens of fieldwork and ethnography, especially as these methods have been invigorated and conceptualized within the interdisciplinary sites of American Studies and Performance Studies. What can an emphasis on performance as both object of analysis and method of data collection bring to the study of African American kinship and queer kinship, particularly in moments when these two things are not mutually exclusive? I am particularly interested in how queer people of African descent labor to forge “spaces of belonging” amidst and in spite of various forms of exile and violence being directed towards their bodies. Grounded in ethnography and structured by theoretical frameworks in critical race theory, queer theory, and black diaspora studies, my research focuses on how black queer subjects negotiate “home” as both fictive space and material dwelling. In other words, my research centers on the question of how “home” moves in the queer black diaspora. My dissertation will specifically be based on my on-going fieldwork on the house-ball community of New York City, with additional fieldwork in Atlanta, Chicago and Washington, D.C. (though these sites will not be central to the dissertation). Jose Esteban Munoz will direct the dissertation. My on-going conversations with Tavia Nyong'o and Jason King have also kept me on my toes about this. Also, the brilliant feedback Roderick Ferguson offered on a conference paper I presented last year has really shaped the direction i've taken with this project. Ferguson is someone I would love to have as an outside reader. When I originally came to performance studies as a discipline, I did so with this dissertation is mind, but for a moment I was lured by the idea of writing a dissertation of black british visual culture and performance. I guess that was my graduate student moment of "going astray" before getting back on course. I'm very excited about this dissertation and looking forward to putting together my committee, pumping out an article that publishable somewhere, and probably presenting at the ASAs and AAAs next year.

So that's whats on my plate right now. This year is really all business. Im ready for it.

Posted by the young people's professor on 9/07/2006 at 4:36:00 PM | Permalink