Do You Have to Have a Home to Leave?

Abstract

This essay draws on diaspora theory’s longstanding focus on inheritance and generational prerogative in order to theorize the interdisciplinary identity of the South Asianist as the product of “reverse migration.” It proceeds from my own example: trained in interdisciplinary Literature and Rhetoric, I now work in a traditional discipline, English, as a scholar of South Asian Anglophone literature. My journey is contextualized as part of a larger, generationally-specific movement from interdisciplines into disciplines. Until recently, the typical trajectory was for a scholar to be trained in a traditional discipline like English, Philosophy, and History, and then leave to either found or take up residence in a program in Ethnic Studies, Area Studies, or Cultural Studies. The institutionalization of interdisciplines means that scholars of my generation made the opposite move. This essay challenges a longstanding, tacit consensus about earned, as opposed to inherited, interdisciplinarity. It reconceives interdisciplinarity as a mode of intellectual formation that confers a specific identity on student-scholars, who are then positioned to make interventions and contributions to the ongoing project of interdisciplinary field constitution.

Keywords:

• Interdisciplinarity
• South Asian Studies
• English
• diaspora
• reverse migration

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The conference was hosted by Stanford University and co-sponsored by UC Berkeley, UC Davis, and UC Santa Cruz, from May 9–11, 2010. The closing panel, “New Directions in South Asian Studies,” from which I am quoting Anjali Arondekar’s comment, also featured Raka Ray, Thomas Blom Hansen, and Sudipta Sen, and was followed by remarks by Sharika Thiranagama and Kamran Ali.

2 While the pioneering Birmingham School of Cultural Studies was founded by Richard Hoggart in 1964, departments like Duke Literature and Berkeley Rhetoric were not refashioned as cultural studies and critical theory programs until the 1980s and 1990s.

3 To be clear, Said was also critical of those who fetishize the exilic posture. Homelessness, he warned, could become an affectation, “dissatisfaction bordering on dyspepsia, a kind of curmudgeonly disagreeableness” (53).

4 In addition to Rhetoric and Literature, what I am terming “Critical Studies” programs include University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, Brown’s Modern Culture and Media, NYU’s Social and Cultural Analysis, History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz, Culture and Theory at UC Irvine, Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society at University of Minnesota, and Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford. As much distinguishes these programs from one another as what binds them. For a related discussion, see David Yaffe (1999); Yaffe describes Duke’s Literature program as an entity separate from English “that would advertise itself as ‘a new approach to literary study’ – a comp lit, cultural studies, and critical theory program rolled into one.” Also, at the time of this writing, Butler has disaffiliated from Rhetoric and is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at Berkeley.

5 For a useful discussion of the late nineteenth-century development of disciplines in the American university, see chapter 1 of Shannon Jackson’s Professing Performance (2004).

6 See also Chiang (2009) and Wiegman (2012).

7 As Robyn Wiegman’s work demonstrates, all disciplinary and interdisciplinary practices should be understood as identity-oriented and constituting. In her words, “the imperative to be a biologist, philosopher, political scientist, even a critical theorist is to partake in an identitarian project” (1999, 130).

8 Giridharadas writes: “My parents never imagined that they would leave India. I never imagined that I would leave America to return to what had become another India…And so I sensed when returning to India that I was not undoing my parents’ journey, but in some way fulfilling it. Like them, I was chasing the frontier of the future. Which just happened, in my case, to be the frontier of my own past” (254).

9 See the essays published in the Interventions special issue “From Postcolonial to World Anglophone: South Asia as Test Case,” in particular the following: Anam 2018; Bhagat-Kennedy 2018; Kantor 2018; Saxena 2018.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan

Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan is assistant professor of English and Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory at the University of Arizona. She is editor of “From Postcolonial to World Anglophone” (Interventions, 2018), co-editor of “1990 at 30” (Post45 Contemporaries, 2020), and co-editor of “Thinking with an Accent” (under review). Current book projects examine the American registration of Indian English literature as both postcolonial and ethnic, and narrative nonfictions on the rise of New India. Scholarly, journalistic, and creative publications are available from www.raginitharoorsrinivasan.com.