Break out of the Prison House of Hierarchy!
Mukoma Wa Ngugi
To read a text with the eyes of the world; to see the world with the eyes of the text Ngugi Wa Thiong’o on Globalectics The call for public work by literary scholars is not predicated on a vague notion of doing a public good - the very survival of our profession depends on it. Undergraduate students are abandoning our literary world for the degrees that will eventually translate into dollars. At the tail end of the pipeline our graduate students cannot find employment. We need the support of the public if we are to stop the barbarians at the gates of our ivory towers - the politicians and university administrators who find us dispensable, and the conservatives who want a return to trade and commodity-centered education. Our last line of defense is the public, the taxpayers. I commute tens hours a week from Norwalk, CT to Cornell University in Ithaca, NY where I teach. To keep myself busy, I listen to physics podcasts produced by physicists struggling to explain to people outside their field and academia altogether, what is it they do, why they do it and why it matters. It is a difficult thing to take specialized knowledge that comes with theories embedded in theories, with formulas and vocabulary designed to ensure that each conversation does not begin with what Newton or Einstein discovered. But their efforts are rewarding, because I feel I have a very rudimentary understanding of physics as a history of ideas. True, knowing something about the Large Hadron Collider and its discovery of the Higgs Bisson particle will not put food on my table tomorrow, but I also know that understanding how the world works ensures that perhaps our species will be around a little longer. But the more immediate lesson for us in the humanities is this: when the Collider caused fear in the public that the search for the “god particle” (a term I now know physicists dislike) would lead to a second big bang thus destroying us all, physicists did not get defensive, instead they sought to patiently explain why that work was important, and how we would be safe, in a language the rest of us could understand. Because the physicists are trying to communicate with me, I care. I care enough to worry about their programs getting defunded. I care enough to defend, when called upon, the work of physicists to whoever will listen. Physicists know that being understood by the society at large is not only a good in itself, but that the growth of the field depends on we the tax payers having a rudimentary understanding of what they do, and why it matters to them and to us. Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 |
Essays in this Forum
Break out of the Prison House of Hierarchy!
by Mukoma Wa Ngugi A Globalectical Imagination by Ngugi wa Thiong'o World Literature and the Postcolonial: Ngugi's Globalectics and Glissant's Poetics by Duncan McEachern Yoon “You Are the Prisoner, the Discoverer, the Founder, the Liberator”: Contextualizing Decolonial Paths of Afro-Hispanic Literature in Latin America, Equatorial Guinea and Spain by Elisa Rizo Globalectics Beyond Postcoloniality by Carole Boyce Davies |