Panelists Focus on Future of Ethnic Studies Research

A group of distinguished scholars discussed the future agenda of ethnic studies at a symposium Friday afternoon, calling for less theory and more practical, community-based research.

The symposium, "The Future of Ethnic Studies: New Agendas in Curriculum, Research and Theory," was organized by the Faculty Committee on Ethnic Studies (CES) and was attended by about 100 people.

Its primary goal was "to help generate faculty and student interest and facilitate dialogue in ethnic studies," according to Leo O. Lee, chair of the CES and professor of Chinese literature.

The conference came on the heels of a flurry of new ethnic-studies offerings at Ivy League schools, including new majors at Yale and Brown. Last month, the English department at Harvard created for the first time a permanent junior Faculty position in Asian-American literature.

The symposium was the first time that the Faculty CES, formed in 1993, had organized such a conference.

But student groups--notably the Ethnic Studies Action Committee and the Academic Affairs Committee of the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations--have in recent years organized rallies, conferences and teachins on Asian-American, Latino and Native American studies.

Friday's symposium was meant to foster a free flow of ideas on approaches toward ethnic studies.

Mania Diawawa, chair of Africana studies at New York University (NYU), said he found black studies and African studies to be inadequate upon his arrival at NYU in 1992.

"I was unhappy with black studies, which was essentially history from slavery to present day," he said. "It was identity studies and African studies...basically gathered information for the State Department so they know how to 'help' Africa. I didn't fit into either category.

"All we have are theories of colonization," he added. "They don't teach you how to see Africa."

Instead, having recently been to Johannesburg, he discovered Africa in its rich culture.

"I began to look for Africa in its music, its art, in public places, market places," he said. "This is where Africa meets black America."

Benjamin Lee, co-director of the Center for Transcultural Studies in Chicago, agreed that existing theories in ethnic studies are deficient.

"I won't buy anything sold on the American theoretical market," he said.

Benjamin Lee stressed that much of ethnic studies was contemporary studies and not an established field.

"Discipline is not good with contemporary studies," he said. "There are no archives with contemporary studies. You must create it."

Some scholars are working to create those archives. Jack Tschen, one of the panelists and director of Asian American studies at NYU, has worked on documenting Chinese-American history by doing field work in Chinese-American communities.

"The complexity of their lives defy any theories in the academia," he said.

He added that culture is "not situated in abstract theoretical context but located in historical experience."

Dilip Gaonkar, co-director of Afro-American studies at Northwestern University, discussed the importance of case studies in approaching ethnic studies.

"Most objects [in ethnic studies] are episodic," he said. "The question for ethnic studies is how would it choose its objects."

But Gaonkar said he believed that theories cannot comprehend these episodic objects.

"Ethnic episodes are like seizures, you cannot politically react to them but only reflect on them afterwards," he said. "That's what the writers, the filmmakers are trying to do--what rationalizing and theorizing can't."

Recognizing the United States as a "fissured and fragmented culture space," Doris Sommer, professor of Romance languages and literatures, said the United States itself remains ripe for greater study and introspection.

"[The U.S. is] a complex cultural map...If we can understand America as not just what makes us Americans but what makes us black Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos...if we can focus on those incommensurable identities, making transparent our differences will bring about a celebration of differences," she said.

The "search for home" of second- or third-generation immigrants in America seemed to be another favorite topic.

Juan Flores, who will be a visiting professor at Harvard in the spring, told an anecdote about a place he visited in Puerto Rico populated by Puerto Rican-Americans who had returned to Puerto Rico. The people there spoke English better than Spanish, he said. They "went home, but not quite home," he said.

Flores called it "a diaspora within a diaspora."

Michael Hsu '98, chair of ESAC, said he found the symposium insightful.

"I particularly enjoyed Dilip Gaonkar's presentation on the problems of losing the object-domain in cultural studies--this is a mistake Harvard is prone to make, given the tendency in the social sciences to lose touch with reality and expound in one's theories," he said in an e-mail message.

The ESAC is a student group whose main agenda is to help start an undergraduate concentration in comparative race and ethnic studies, which ESAC described in a flyer as "the study of how racial and ethnic distinctions affect communities of people as reflected through their histories, literature and cultures, and also through their relationship with legislation, politics and economy."