24. Toor, "Writing Like a Doctor"

From http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2009/06/2009060901c.htm

Access: June 8, 2009 (bold-faced mine)

June 9, 2009

PAGE PROOF
Writing Like a Doctor

If graduate students in the humanities are not being taught how to write, how can we expect those in the sciences to do any better?

By RACHEL TOOR

I once asked my friend "Joe," a distinguished professor of history, how he taught his graduate students to write. He reminded me that I had sat in on his mini-lecture about the three different ways to begin an article or a book. Then he stopped talking and looked kind of pleased with himself.

"That's it?" I said.

Well, he stammered, he figured graduate students learned in some kind of osmotic process. They read a lot; surely while they did that they were picking up tips on how to write.

There were so many problems with that assumption that I think I probably started sputtering at that point. Having been an acquisitions editor of history books, I know as well as anyone that sometimes (often?) groundbreaking books with important arguments and exquisite research — field-changing books — are horrible examples of how to write. They end up being published, and read, but they should not serve as models.

The mere act of reading good books, if you are not stopping to scrutinize the moves and tools used by the writers, examining and dissecting the choices they have made and why they work, will do nothing for you when you sit down to write. If reading good literature was enough, I would have written the Great American Novel years ago.

A couple of summers ago, another friend of mine — let's call him "Godfrey" — an academic physician, had volunteered to drive with me from Spokane to Chicago, where he had to give a talk. I was en route to Upstate New York for the summer. Godfrey is a good friend. He is a fantastic conversationalist, a terrific athlete, and the best, smartest reader of my work. He is not, however, a great driver. When he gets wrapped up in talking, he forgets about driving and tends to slow to a traffic-jamming crawl.

Godfrey realized that he had three journal articles to finish. So after we'd done enough sightseeing through Montana and Wyoming and had a couple of small spats about where to get gas, we got to work. He drove. I had his computer on my lap. There was a half-eaten bag of Kettle Korn between us.

I started to read his manuscripts, and then made a few simple questions and comments: "Were you raised by wolves?" "How did you manage to graduate from such fancy-pants schools if you can't even write a sentence?" "Do you know what a sentence is?" "This is a comma." (Wild body gesture from the passenger seat.) "Learn what it does. You can't just sprinkle them on your prose like salt."

Whenever I ask Godfrey to explain his medical and scientific work to me — something I do frequently — I am captivated. He has the ability to get at the most interesting issues, to draw out the implications of what he's studying, and to explain them in ways that are fascinating. He knows how to tell a story in conversation. He knows which details will enhance suspense, which will come as a surprise.

But when it comes to putting it on the page, those skills desert him. He writes in simple, declarative, passive sentences. He endlessly repeats words and phrases. His language is complicated not only by terms of medical and scientific art, but by using unnecessary Latinate words when plain old Anglo-Saxon ones would do a better job. He has no idea how commas and paragraph breaks can be your friends, doesn't understand that adverbs are the refuge of the weak and lazy, and that semicolons, like loaded guns, should only be handled by those trained to use them.

In general, none of that has hurt Godfrey in his extensive publishing career. Having read a fair number of articles and grant proposals by his colleagues and peers, I would say he's no worse than most scientists and physicians, and better than many. Thankfully there are saintlike journal editors who follow in his wake to clean up the linguistic messes.

But there's something crucial here that often gets lost in academic writing (it's worse in fields like literary criticism and history). Because the work is so important to academics, sometimes they don't do a good job of convincing readers that they, too, should find it valuable. In many cases, the writer doesn't do a good enough job of explaining what the idea is, and then making the best argument for it.

When Godfrey told me that he'd had a manuscript rejected because the reviewers didn't get the importance of his findings, I explained that the failing was most likely his, not theirs. It's the burden of the writer to be clear and to let readers know why they should care. Far too many college freshmen start their papers: "In society today ... ," and then make some simplistic suggestion. To them I say, why should I believe you? That is an assertion, not an argument. You have to show me your reasoning, help me follow your train of thought. The strongest and fairest writers make the best possible case for the other side, and then show how and why it's wrong. It's more convincing to knock down a strongman, rather than a strawman.

If you want a journal to accept your paper, or a federal agency to grant you coin, you have to make clear what is at stake and why the reader should care. Then you have to put forward the strongest reasoning based on evidence you provide in the clearest language you are able to rally. And then you need to know when you need help.

One of the hardest lessons I learned as a book editor is that the only good editing is the editing the author accepts. I could be brilliant in figuring out what was wrong with a manuscript, but if I couldn't sway the author, my work was worth nothing. If I couldn't explain to Godfrey the value of a semicolon, he was never going to learn how to use one. Calling him names, I knew, didn't help (but neither did it stop me — we've been good friends for a long time).

If graduate students in the humanities are not being taught how to write — how to structure an argument, how to make clear what is at stake, how to build tension on the sentence level — how can we expect those in the sciences to do any better? In every field there is an overabundance of content to master. Where do you steal the time in the curriculum to work on the form? The assumption is that whoever has gone before you in the teaching has already covered the basics. Graduate professors think that their students got it in their undergraduate years; composition instructors believe that they don't need to teach grammar because their students learned it in high school. How many students, do you think, are learning that an understanding of grammar, syntax, and usage is integral to clear expression of thoughts? That knowing how to write well is the most important skill you can develop, regardless of your career path?

Most students don't think about argumentation after they get their required freshman comp course out of the way. They take this important course when they are overwhelmed by the newness of college and are least ready to learn about the complexities of rhetorical strategies. Composition 101 is probably the hardest class to teach; unfortunately, it is usually led by brand-new graduate teaching assistants. It's no wonder most people don't know how to make an argument.

Many students also never absorb the importance of writing outlines. I was reminded of that while looking over the grant application of a pulmonologist friend. Even though I don't know him well, I didn't hold back: This is terrible, I said. The structure doesn't make any sense. It's repetitive and redundant. Did you write an outline? He told me he didn't have time to write an outline. I tried to be patient and to explain to him what he apparently never learned in school: An outline is a time-saving tool, not the exercise in busy work that it seemed in junior high.

When I was a book editor, I rejected the work of a multitude of physicians. While I was always interested in how doctors thought about their work, most of them couldn't get the job done when it came to the writing.

Even now, when I get letters from my own physician giving me the results of lab tests, I cringe. Can I really trust someone to interpret complicated data if she can't maintain control over her sentence structure? Communication is the fundamental element of most professions. Writing, as Plato reminded us, is a risky business. It should be approached with fear and trembling. Doctors and scientists might sometimes need a reminder that they are writing for humans.

Rachel Toor is an assistant professor of creative writing at Eastern Washington University, in Spokane. Her newest book is, Personal Record: A Love Affair With Running, and her Web site is http://www.racheltoor.com. She welcomes comments and questions directed to careers@chronicle.com. For an archive of her previous columns, see http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/archives/columns/page_proof.

My input: Although I found his article thought-provoking and I agreed with some of the points he makes (such as the one about the brand-new GTA's), I don't think outlines are always necessary in writing. Many writers do not begin with an outline...

23. Kershaw, "For Teenagers, Hello Means 'How About a Hug?'"

My input: What I found interesting about this article is how different generations (difficult cultures?) interpret hugging differently and how Facebook influences teenager expressions. Also, a neologism: "Bromance." 

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From http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/28/style/28hugs.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print

Access on May 28, 2009. (All emphasis mine.)

May 28, 2009

For Teenagers, Hello Means ‘How About a Hug?’ 
By SARAH KERSHAW

There is so much hugging at Pascack Hills High School in Montvale, N.J., that students have broken down the hugs by type: 

There is the basic friend hug, probably the most popular, and the bear hug, of course. But now there is also the bear claw, when a boy embraces a girl awkwardly with his elbows poking out.

There is the hug that starts with a high-five, then moves into a fist bump, followed by a slap on the back and an embrace.

There’s the shake and lean; the hug from behind; and, the newest addition, the triple — any combination of three girls and boys hugging at once.

“We’re not afraid, we just get in and hug,” said Danny Schneider, a junior at the school, where hallway hugging began shortly after 7 a.m. on a recent morning as students arrived. “The guy friends, we don’t care. You just get right in there and jump in.”

There are romantic hugs, too, but that is not what these teenagers are talking about.

Girls embracing girls, girls embracing boys, boys embracing each other — the hug has become the favorite social greeting when teenagers meet or part these days. Teachers joke about “one hour” and “six hour” hugs, saying that students hug one another all day as if they were separated for the entire summer. 

A measure of how rapidly the ritual is spreading is that some students complain of peer pressure to hug to fit in. And schools from Hillsdale, N.J., to Bend, Ore., wary in a litigious era about sexual harassment or improper touching — or citing hallway clogging and late arrivals to class — have banned hugging or imposed a three-second rule. 

Parents, who grew up in a generation more likely to use the handshake, the low-five or the high-five, are often baffled by the close physical contact. “It’s a wordless custom, from what I’ve observed,” wrote Beth J. Harpaz, the mother of two boys, 11 and 16, and a parenting columnist for The Associated Press, in a new book, “13 Is the New 18.”

“And there doesn’t seem to be any other overt way in which they acknowledge knowing each other,” she continued, describing the scene at her older son’s school in Manhattan. “No hi, no smile, no wave, no high-five — just the hug. Witnessing this interaction always makes me feel like I am a tourist in a country where I do not know the customs and cannot speak the language.”

For teenagers, though, hugging is hip. And not hugging?

“If somebody were to not hug someone, to never hug anybody, people might be just a little wary of them and think they are weird or peculiar,” said Gabrielle Brown, a freshman at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School in Manhattan. 

Comforting as the hug may be, principals across the country have clamped down. “Touching and physical contact is very dangerous territory,” said Noreen Hajinlian, the principal of George G. White School, a junior high school in Hillsdale, N.J., who banned hugging two years ago. “It was needless hugging — they are in the hallways before they go to class. It wasn’t a greeting. It was happening all day.”

Schools that have limited hugging invoked longstanding rules against public displays of affection, meant to maintain an atmosphere of academic seriousness and prevent unwanted touching, or even groping. 

But pro-hugging students say it is not a romantic or sexual gesture, simply the “hello” of their generation. “We like to get cozy,” said Katie Dea, an eighth grader at Claire Lilienthal Alternative School in San Francisco. “The high-five is, like, boring.” 

Some sociologists said that teenagers who grew up in an era of organized play dates and close parental supervision are more cooperative with one another than previous generations — less cynical and individualistic and more loyal to the group. 

But Amy L. Best, a sociologist at George Mason University, said the teenage embrace is more a reflection of the overall evolution of the American greeting, which has become less formal since the 1970s. “Without question, the boundaries of touch have changed in American culture,” she said. “We display bodies more readily, there are fewer rules governing body touch and a lot more permissible access to other people’s bodies.”

Hugging appears to be a grass-roots phenomenon and not an imitation of a character or custom on TV or in movies. The prevalence of boys’ nonromantic hugging (especially of other boys) is most striking to adults. Experts say that over the last generation, boys have become more comfortable expressing emotion, as embodied by the MTV show “Bromance,” which is now a widely used term for affection between straight male friends. 

But some sociologists pointed out that African-American boys and men have been hugging as part of their greeting for decades, using the word “dap” to describe a ritual involving handshakes, slaps on the shoulders and, more recently, a hug, also sometimes called the gangsta hug among urban youth. 

“It’s something you grow up doing,” said Mazi Chiles, a junior at South Gwinnett High School in Snellville, Ga., who is black. “But you don’t come up to a dude and hug, you start out with a handshake.”

Some parents find it paradoxical that a generation so steeped in hands-off virtual communication would be so eager to hug. 

“Maybe it’s because all these kids do is text and go on Facebook so they don’t even have human contact anymore,” said Dona Eichner, the mother of freshman and junior girls at the high school in Montvale. 

She added: “I hug people I’m close to. But now you’re hugging people you don’t even know. Hugging used to mean something.” 

There are, too, some young critics of hugging. 

Amy Heaton, a freshman at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School in Bethesda, Md., said casual social hugging seemed disingenuous to her. “Hugging is more common in my opinion in people who act like friends,” she said. “It’s like air-kissing. It’s really superficial.”

But Carrie Osbourne, a sixth-grade teacher at Claire Lilienthal Alternative School, said hugging was a powerful and positive sign that children are inclined to nurture one another, breaking down barriers. “And it gets to that core that every person wants to feel cared for, regardless of your age or how cool you are or how cool you think you are,” she said.

As much as hugging is a physical gesture, it has migrated online as well. Facebook applications allowing friends to send hugs have tens of thousands of fans. Katie Dea, the San Francisco eighth grader, as well as Olivia Brown, 11, who lives in Manhattan and is the younger sister of Gabrielle, the LaGuardia High freshman, have a new sign-off for their text and e-mail messages: *hug.*

22. Kumar, "Declarations of Independence"

สิ่งที่น่าสนใจเกี่ยวกับบทความนี้คือ การที่ Kumar พยายามจะเปลี่ยนมุมมองของการเรียนการสอนใหม่ ไม่ใช่เป็นแค่เรื่องของ theory แต่เป็นสิ่งที่เกี่ยวข้องกับบุคคลจริง ๆ กับเรื่องจริง ๆ ที่เกิดขึ้นในสังคม แทนที่จะมาเขียนเรื่อง academic paper น่าจะเขียน genre ใหม่ ๆ ที่เปิดจินตนาการของเราให้กว้างขึ้น

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Source: http://www.theminnesotareview.org/journal/ns7172/credos_kumar.shtml#
Access on May 24, 2009

[All italics in original; boldfaces added]

Declarations of Independence
by Amitava Kumar | ns 71-72

I'm in an overheated hotel room in Beijing, reading a New Yorker travel piece about China by Jonathan Franzen. The essay is describing the ecological devastation caused by rapid development, but what stops me is a remark that Franzen makes about his Chinese guide. David Xu has "the fashionably angular eyeglasses and ingratiating eagerness of an untenured literature professor." In that throwaway phrase, in its quick malice and wit, I come home. Whether this is revealing of the traveler's loneliness abroad or not, I find myself thinking that I belong not to India or to the United States but to the academy. I realize that I'm a sad provincial; for years, I've been living in a place called the English Department. 

Which leads me to declare my first credo. The most significant turns in my scholarship, and in my writing, have been attempts to first fit into, and then violently move away from, the existing codes of naturalization for gaining citizenship in the English Department. Of late, this movement of mine has appeared very much like a person lurching away from an accident—for anyone who has just arrived at the scene it is impossible to judge exactly where the screams are coming from, but what is undeniable is the fact of the twisted wreckage and the smoke and the shock.

"Haven't you noticed how we all specialize in what we hate most?" This is the question posed by James Dixon, the protagonist of Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis. If there is abjection and fine defeatist humor there, it gets even better toward the end of the novel when Dixon is getting ready for his public lecture and quickly getting incapacitated with drink. In the course of his climactic, doomed lecture, our anti-hero will have proven himself unfit for the teaching profession and, more happily, drawn the approval of a rich patron who will offer him suitable employment in faraway London. But before this happens, while in conversation with said patron, Dixon declares: 

I'm the boredom-detector. I'm a finely-tuned instrument. If only I could get hold of a millionaire I'd be worth a bag of money to him. He could send me on ahead into dinners and cocktail-parties and night-clubs, just for five minutes, and then by looking at me he'd be able to read off the boredom-coefficient of any gathering. Like a canary down a mine; same idea. Then he'd know whether it was worth going in himself or not. He could send me in among the Rotarians and the stage crowd and the golfers and the arty types talking about statements of profiles rather than volumes and the musical... 

We know from Dixon's experience—and sadly, our own—how this talent for discerning boredom is the result only of a long intimacy with it. An intimacy nurtured over countless departmental meetings, lectures, corridor conversations, numbing conferences, not to mention attendance at academic parties, where neurotics are nearly as numerous as blowhards. 

You'd think there would be regular revolts against this culture of oppression. But we hardly witness any institutional uprisings. A few novels written about poisonous campus life, sure, but no prison breaks. In fact, going by what I have seen at the places where I have worked, it is more common to see the formerly oppressed slip easily into the role of the new, more brutal jailers. The behavior of some of my coercive colleagues in a department where I worked was regularly explained away as only the result of "past wounds" inflicted during the process of acquiring tenure. 

But I digress. I was talking about boredom. One of the things that can be said about much of postcolonial criticism is that it is boring, although it'd be more accurate to say that it is often unintelligible and boring. However, when I arrived in this country, in the late eighties, and read postcolonial critics for the first time, I was intrigued. They seemed such a welcome change from my teachers in Delhi. As an undergraduate at Hindu College, I would take a bus to the university. I'd look out of the window, and when we were crossing the gates of Nigambodh Ghat, I'd sometimes see men carrying in their arms little bundles wrapped in white. Each bundle was a child whose corpse was being taken to the river by the father. A small mute procession would follow some men, but often a man would be alone with his enormous burden. I would watch for a few moments from the bus—and then I'd arrive in class. My professors would be delivering lectures on Locke or Rousseau from notes held together with tape—the yellowing paper would flake off in little pieces when shaken in the air. 

The pedagogical climate appeared dramatically different when I came to the US. In this country, I suddenly felt that criticism was something that was both fresh and live. My teachers were the critics whose writings one read in academic journals. What I was being taught was original work. In some classes, such work also felt urgent. I had never read Edward Said before, or others whose names brought them somehow closer to me in my imagination, critics like Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. But I didn't share the belief, seemingly dear to the editors of special issues devoted to postcolonial theory, that the 3.2 million poor in Chiapas or the half-million beggars in Calcutta hungered to read debates between the elite of New York and New Delhi in the pages of scholarly journals. My indifferent education in Delhi meant that I hadn't received any real training in writing, academic or non. But it became clear to me, as the years passed, that I wanted the words I wrote on the page to be worldly, sensual, even personal. I was trying to make postcolonial theory look more like what the larger world associated with postcolonials like Salman Rushdie. Couldn't our analyses become more exuberant, imaginative, and even playful? I wanted very badly to be a writer, and any writer needs readers, but it seemed impossible that postcolonial theorists would ever acquire a real audience. 

May I posit a second credo here? A part of the search for readers is a search for venues that will publish you. I was fortunate to receive valuable support from this journal. As a beginning assistant professor, I published in these pages one or two critical pieces but also poems, photographs, and even a bit of doggerel verse written on the evening of Princess Di's death. And during those years, the journal's editors, Jeff Williams and also Mike Hill, collaborated with me in several discussions about academics and intellectuals who wrote for a wider public. While this was an often repetitive, and even self-congratulatory, exercise on our part, it also represented a demand for legitimation, and a search for a broader argument on behalf of a brand of writing that would earn us, if not hordes of readers, then at least tenure. 

I'm talking of events that occurred more than a decade ago. The book that earned me tenure was Passport Photos, a multi-genre report on what has been called immigritude. The book was published at a time when not only postcolonial theory but the entire enterprise of pure theory was beginning to lose its hegemony. I was very much aware that there were no people in postcolonial theory, and I tried to put in my book details of ordinary lives, including photographs and poetry about migrants. Tenure should have freed me to pursue more unconventional writing, but I have never again attempted the formal experimentation of Passport Photos. What tenure really allowed me to do was to quietly settle into the habit of writing what, til recently, I would have considered unexciting because it wasn't fragmentary or hybrid and relied on narrative, the style more associated with memoirs and long-form journalism.

In this turn toward more old-fashioned writing, I was helped by the emergence of a new, younger body of Indian writers who were just then making their mark in India as well as abroad. I'm talking now of the latter part of the nineties and names like Arundhati Roy, Pankaj Mishra, Amit Chaudhuri, Raj Kamal Jha, and Jhumpa Lahiri. I remember reading these writers and experiencing a great deal of excitement; I made an effort to get in touch with them, and some of these writers also became my friends. It couldn't have happened overnight, but in those days it seemed as if this single fact had allowed me to escape the small world of the English Department. For years, I had not read a single novel; now I began to read fiction written by both well-known and emerging Indian writers. This was also the time when the Internet arrived and, suddenly, the Indian newspapers I was reading were no longer two weeks old. This meant that the new fiction I was devouring no longer seemed to be reporting on an impossibly distant country. Cricket matches, riots, the deaths of politicians, murders as well as mergers, the release of Bollywood films, literary gossip, everything that was happening in India acquired an immediacy again. It became easy for me to write for the Indian newspapers and magazines that I was regularly reading on the Web. "Location, location, location" sounds very much like a postcolonial mantra, but it has amazed me—and this, too, amounts to a credo—how profoundly a writer's sense of the world, and also of fellowship, has been transformed by the emergence of the World Wide Web. You can be working at a disgustingly badly-paid job in an acrimonious English Department at the University of Florida, but when you sit down at the computer and are able to file a story for a newspaper in India, a story that will appear in its published form on your screen only a few hours later, it becomes easy to imagine that you have escaped your immediate setting.

A few years prior to the period I've been just describing, I had read an article by Frank Lentricchia that had been published in the now-defunct journal Lingua Franca. Lentricchia's essay, which was entitled "Last Will and Testament of an Ex-Literary Critic," was an odd, slippery text. One moment it seemed to be arguing against overly political literary criticism, but just when you were expecting an elaboration of an alternative literary approach, Lentricchia slipped into a more vociferous railing against the incompetence of all literary critics. In the end, you could forgive the essay's incoherence because the argument Lentricchia was putting forward was against any system or method of literary appreciation. All one could hope to do, and all that Lentricchia himself wanted to do, was become a worshipper of great literature. 

But this was not my aim. Unlike Lentricchia, I had much still to learn. About theory and criticism, and also about literature and the world. I didn't see myself reading the Indian writers I liked without exercising my judgment, and I certainly didn't want to write while pretending that I was in some kind of a trance. For good or bad, I was still very much a part of the academy. 

The best allies I found in developing a language of reading not only texts but also people and places were academics from my field, or fields close to mine, who were writing long narrative pieces as well as books that mixed memoir and analysis. 

One of my earliest models was Manthia Diawara's In Search of Africa. It was an inventive book and yet it performed the old task of story-telling. In the book, Diawara goes back to Guinea looking for his childhood friend. This search, spanning over the course of the entire book, becomes a way of introducing the reader to everything from the legacy of the dictator Sekou Touré to the traditional arts of the griots and mask-makers. Diawara also exercised an additional fascination over me. I had tried my hand at documentary photography for several years, and Diawara interested me because he was making documentaries about Africa. In a wonderful example of counter-anthropology, he had made a film called Rouch in Reverse about the classic French filmmaker Jean Rouch. Even In Search of Africa was actually the result of a documentary project of the same name. In elegant essays on photography, particularly in his studies of West African photographers like Seydou Keita and Malick Sidibe, Diawara would offer a language that I had wanted to use for so long. He wrote simply and yet with sensuous precision. Equally important, departing from the kind of sour, astringent critique that quickly becomes second nature to academic critics, Diawara celebrated the practice of art. He found joy in the work of street photographers, and his writing eloquently communicated that joy to the reader. After a decade of metacritical discourse about the constructedness of culture, it was refreshing to find in Diawara a sophisticated but honest search for authenticity and the good life. When I finished reading In Search of Africa, I couldn't wait to begin writing about Hindi poets struggling in obscurity, or the Indian novelists that I admired, and even the Bollywood filmmakers I had adored since childhood. 

There were also other writers from inside academia who helped me give shape to a narrative voice. The names that readily come to mind are Amitav Ghosh (In An Antique Land), Michael Taussig (Nervous System), and Edward Said (Out of Place). But perhaps the example that meant the most, and which I also offered to my students as a model, was Dreambirds by Rob Nixon. As a graduate student, I had read Nixon in the pages of the Village Voice or the Nation, and later still I pored over his magisterial book on V. S. Naipaul. But in Dreambirds, which came out in 1999, Nixon successfully enacted the turn I had been practicing in the privacy of my room, the transformation of the critic into a memoirist and travel-writer. Brilliantly using the ostrich and its migration across history and continents, Nixon had produced a book that was as much a rich cultural history of capitalism as it was a deeply affecting memoir about his own South African childhood. 

Later, when offering a course for graduate students that I had entitled "Top Ten Reasons for Doing Cultural Studies," I used Nixon's Dreambirds as a prime example. Apart from some of the books mentioned above, the other books on the course-list that semester were Michael Bérubé's Life As We Know It, Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickle and Dimed, Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor, and Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life. These weren't all books by academics, nor were these the only books used in that course; but these titles most clearly represented what I wanted my students to attempt in their writing. Not simply the range from the journalistic to the philosophical, or from the overtly political to the very playful, but also the right mix of the personal and the public. God knows, I was trying my best to do the same. I had long complained that ideological certainties arrived at in seminar rooms needed to be replaced by the real, often contradictory, complexity of people's lives, and now I wrote narratives that relied a great deal on reportage. This turn toward journalism, in some instances resembling what Andrew Ross calls "scholarly reporting," seemed to be the right response to the dead end of postcolonial theorizing. 

In the face of a dead critical vocabulary, what was needed were works of imagination. And I began to think that maybe even journalism wasn't the right answer, not conventional journalism anyway, with its pretense of objectivity and distance. We needed writing that examined entanglement, complicity, and compromise. In other words, writing that said clearly that there is no clean independence from anything. That too would be a sort of declaration of independence, I think. 

That there is no escape into pure certainty or into some antiseptic haven of academic political correctness. That radical statements made at venues like the MLA Delegate Assembly falsely assume that bold posturing will change the profession and indeed the wider world. That, if we were more honest, there would be in what we say or do more self-questioning and doubt. And that our writing should express that condition. I'm putting this down, somewhat crudely and almost like bullet points, and yet I realize that I should perhaps be doing a better job of it because for some years now I've adopted this position as a credo.

This position is far better described in a passage in V. S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River. The narrator is an African of Indian origin; he is named Salim and runs a shop in a turbulent republic that resembles Zaire. One night Salim is at a party at the home of a Western intellectual favored by the country's dictator. Two or three couples are dancing in the tastefully darkened room. There is music playing, Joan Baez is singing "Barbara Allen." And then other songs. Here's how Naipaul describes the scene:

Not all songs were like "Barbara Allen." Some were modern, about war and injustice and oppression and nuclear destruction. But always in between were the older, sweeter melodies. These were the ones I waited for, but in the end the voice linked the two kinds of song, linked the maidens and lovers and sad deaths of bygone times with the people of today who were oppressed and about to die.

It was make believe—I never doubted that. You couldn't listen to sweet songs about injustice unless you expected justice and received it much of the time. You couldn't sing songs about the end of the world unless—like the other people in that room, so beautiful with such things: African mats on the floor and African hangings on the wall and spears and masks—you felt that the world was going on and you were safe in it. How easy it was, in that room, to make those assumptions!