A Whole New World

As seniors graduate this week and reflect upon their academic life at Harvard, they may ask themselves the question: How well has Harvard taught me to understand others in my world?

Those in math, engineering, and the sciences have learned a common language with which to communicate with fellow practitioners across the globe. Those in the social sciences cannot boast such concrete understanding, but Harvard’s Social Studies program has gone a long way toward promoting international concerns. Those in the humanities, however, may despair—although they may know everything there is to know about postwar Georgia bluegrass music or food imagery in Czechoslovakian spy fiction, their knowledge of the delicate interplay between cultural forces independent of nations may remain blighted. It is time to rethink how the humanities approach learning, and to usher in a new ethic of “transnationalism.”

Developments like the Internet already erode the traditional vision of a nation, spawning a multiplicity of ever more subdivided communities. It is entirely possible, and increasingly common, that one can feel a stronger sense of community with those in other nations with the same interests, than with people in the same nation with different interests (note American liberals’ respect for French liberals and incredulity at American neoconservatives). The subculture is the new culture.

It is this truth that humanities departments at Harvard (as well as other universities) fail to grasp, as their scholarship persists in imprisoning subjects within the iron cage of nationality. The History and Literature concentration, for example, starts from the idea that by studying a certain time and location, we can learn more about the culture people create. While this may have been true when the program was first designed over a hundred years ago, now an infinity of data is at everybody’s fingertips, and the specific community into which one is born is becoming increasingly incidental. Rather than be forced to study one or two nations, the way the program is set up now, students should be given the freedom to study larger “themes” like the roots of revolution or the rhetoric of religion, subjects which are inherently interdisciplinary and transnational.

To rebuke Hist and Lit too severely would be unfair, however. The program is largely dependent upon departmental course offerings, and “transnationalism” as a concept has not been adequately defined. In the words of anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, “No idiom has yet emerged to capture the collective interests of many groups in translocal solidarities, cross-border mobilizations, and postnational identities.” Ethnic or postcolonial studies—the two closest versions available today—examine only partially the variety of ways in which humans interact in time and space.

Luckily, the historical current does seem to be taking us into uncharted waters. As Hist and Lit Assistant Director of Studies Andrew Romig wrote in an email, “I think you’ll find that the academy in general… is moving toward more transnational categorizations, and that it will continue to do so with the increasing globalization of markets, communication systems, and systems of government.”

There are a number of ways to speed along this transition. Adding more courses like Philip Fisher’s “The Classic Phase of the Novel”, which features books including Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov” and Zola’s “L’Assommoir” in translation, is a good start. According to the syllabus, students study the novel in its different forms—as a “novel of consciousness” or a “novel of society,” for example. Students who aren’t fluent in Russian or French and would never have taken a departmental class studying these authors in the original language are given the opportunity to explore new cultures and ideas.

But classes like this are slim pickings, and even those that blur specific national distinctions like Fisher’s remain regionally focused. Though multiple survey courses on Western (meaning European) history, intellectual thought, and art are offered, an equivalent for other parts of the world is nowhere to be found. Despite research centers as far as Mumbai and Harvard’s claims to be an international institution, an odd whiff of Eurocentrism still wafts through the Cambridge air.

Of course, concerns about the responses to globalization and multiculturalism in the academy are not novel. In fact, this year’s General Education program was originally conceived as an antidote to the university’s increasingly specialized core curriculum offerings (“Dinosaurs and Their Relatives”, anybody?). As it stands, however, Gen Ed is essentially a reshuffling of existing courses into new subcategories—these pages criticized it as “little more than a muddled and insipid rehash of the old Core”—thus perpetuating the current country-specific system. The sole category that is even slightly comparative is “The United States in the World”, but answers to the question of what classes will be grouped into this category remain nebulous.

Despite these challenges, however, pursuing transnationalism in the academy remains vital. Its implementation will help humanities departments defend against irrelevance by granting them new credence as preparation for the real world, and will train students for a future in which the ability to understand multiple cultures is essential. Only then can Harvard become a truly 21st-century institution.



Jessica A. Sequeira ’11, a Crimson editorial editor, lives in Winthrop House.