Engaged or Enraged Scholarship? On the Disparate Acceptance of the Scholar-Activist Mode in U.S. and German American Studies
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.ˮ Although this exhortation was famously penned by a German political economist in the mid-nineteenth century – Marx – today, activist scholarship is widely accepted in the North American Humanities (and perhaps even mainstream in U.S.-based American Studies), while it continues to appear ‘curious’ to many in German American Studies and the German Humanities at large. Scholar-activism – which I use as a shorthand for scholars who engage in political activism regarding an issue that they also thematize in their scholarship, as well as for scholarship that makes its political commitments transparent – is rooted in the philosophical tradition of Pragmatism originating in the U.S., which judges a given proposition’s validity based on its usefulness. It was simultaneously popularized in U.S.-based American Studies in light of various emancipatory social movements of the twentieth century, the proliferation of identity politics that found its academic equivalent in ‘standpoint theory,’ as well as new historicism’s delegitimization of aesthetics as a dimension of inquiry, rendering ideology critique the dominant method of U.S.-based scholarship on American literary and cultural productions.
In the German Humanities, by contrast, the scholar-activist mode has not gained much acceptance, due to an awareness of academia’s ideological Gleichschaltung during the Nazi and SED regimes. After all, Marx’ above-cited statement was installed in golden letters in the lobby of the main building of Humboldt Universität (located in what was then East Berlin) in 1953: only those Humanities scholars whose work was deemed as furthering the political goals of the GDR’s Marxist-Leninist state doctrine were granted academic positions. Moreover, the lasting impact Enlightenment philosophy has had in the German Humanities has also contributed to the unpopularity of activist scholarship. Third, every field of knowledge production is conditioned by what Craig Calhoun calls the “hierarchical structure of scientific knowledgeˮ (xviii); to put things a bit provocatively, in German American Studies, research on Henry James or Thomas Pynchon endows a colleague with more symbolic capital than research on, say, African American women writers. In the Anglo-American realm, on the other hand, Americanist research that does not practice ideology critique will have to vie mightily for recognition. Unsurprisingly, researchers gravitate towards those topics that promise the most recognition in their respective fields of knowledge production.
Of course, there are a number of pitfalls when it comes to activist scholarship. For one, the Pragmatist imperative at the heart of activist scholarship demanded that the knowledge Humanities scholars produce be useful to the public; on the one hand, this has entailed research in support of emancipatory struggles, for instance, the African American quest for equality; on the other hand, the assessment of knowledge based on its ‛usefulness’ has allowed (private) university administrations to interfere with the research agenda conducted at their institutions, as the contributors of the volume The Entrepreneurial University: Engaging Publics, Intersecting Impacts have pointed out. Also, scholar-activism is done wrong when researchers assume that activism and scholarship are mutually exchangeable. Scholar-activism neither means that writing about political action is tantamount to engaging in political action; nor does it mean applying already established truths to a scenario of political importance. As Calhoun states: “[I]t is easy to elide the difference between contributing knowledge and analysis to social movements or other practical efforts and simply sharing in the general tasks of struggle. […]But if activist scholarship is to contribute all that it really can (and if it is to be appreciated well in either scientific or practical realms), it has to do so through production and mobilization of knowledgeˮ (xxi). In the realm of Americanist activist scholarship, a particular and common danger lies in practitioners’ disregarding the specific mediality and aesthetic strategies of the cultural productions they analyze. Obviously, however, it makes a difference whether a character in an Afrofuturist novel or a demonstrator at a Black Lives Matter march utters a statement.
Still, at a time when nationalism is staging a comeback and German society is becoming more heterogeneous in its composition, more of us ought to consider putting a topic that pertains to current public debates on our research agenda, while simultaneously staying mindful of the specific sources we analyze. This may also have exciting implications for the discipline of American Studies in Germany as a whole; as Calhoun states in view of activist social science: “The primary purpose of activist scholarship thus may be to address public issues or help specific constituencies. Activist scholarship is one way to make social science useful. But activist scholarship can also make social science better, providing occasions for new knowledge creation, challenges to received wisdom, and new ways of thinkingˮ (xxv).
References
Calhoun, Craig. “Foreword.ˮ Engaging Contradictions: Theory, Politics, and Methods of Activist Scholarship. Ed. Charles R. Hale. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. xiii-xxvi.
Hale, Charles R. (ed.) Engaging Contradictions: Theory, Politics, and Methods of Activist Scholarship. Berkeley: U of California P, 2008.
Rolin, Kristina. “Standpoint Theory as a Methodology for the Study of Power Relations.ˮ Hypatia 24.4 (2009): 218–226.
Taylor, Yvette (ed.) The Entrepreneurial University: Engaging Publics, Intersecting Impacts. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Katharina Motyl is a postdoctoral scholar at the American Studies department of the University of Tübingen. She is author of the forthcoming monograph With the Face of the Enemy: Arab American Literature since 9/11 and co-editor of States of Emergency – States of Crisis (Narr, 2011) as well as The Failed Individual (Campus, 2017). Katharina is currently working on her second book in which examines the interaction between cultural, legal, and medical discourses on substance addiction and social minorities from the Early Republic to the ‘War on Drugs’.