Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities: Methods, Reflections, and Approaches to the Global South

264 Pages·2016·2.576 MB·English

by  Shalini Puri, Debra A. Castillo (eds.)

THEORIZING
FIELDWORK
IN THE
HUMANITIES
Methods, Reflections, and
Approaches to the Global South
Edited by
Shalini Puri and
Debra A. Castillo
Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities
Shalini Puri • Debra A. Castillo
Editors
Theorizing Fieldwork
in the Humanities
Methods, Reflections, and Approaches to the
Global South
Editors
Shalini Puri Debra A. Castillo
Department of English Department of Comparative Literature
University of Pittsburgh Cornell University
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA Ithaca, New York, USA
ISBN 978-1-137-60331-9 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-349-92834-7 (eBook)
ISBN 978-1-349-92836-1 (softcover)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-92834-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016958189
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C
ontents
Acknowledgments vii
About the Contributors ix
List of Figures xiii
1 Introduction: Conjectures on Undisciplined Research 1
Debra A. Castillo and Shalini Puri
Part I Memory, Conflict, Contestation 27
2 Finding the Field: Notes on Caribbean Cultural Criticism,
Area Studies, and the Forms of Engagement 29
Shalini Puri
3 Women’s Naked Protest in Africa: Comparative Literature
and Its Futures 51
Naminata Diabate
4 Aesthetics in the Making of History: The Tebhaga Women’s
Movement in Bengal 73
Kavita Panjabi
v
vi CONTENTS
Part II Place, Performance, Practices 93
5 Locating Palestine Within American Studies: Transitory
Field Sites and Borrowed Methods 95
Jennifer Lynn Kelly
6 Absent Performances: Distant Fieldwork on Social Movement
Theater of Algeria and India 109
Neil Doshi
7 Ethical Dilemmas in Studying Blogging by Favela Residents
in Brazil 131
Tori Holmes
8 Reading Delhi, Writing Delhi: An Ethnography of Literature 151
Rashmi Sadana
Part III Medium and Form 165
9 Daily Life and Digital Reach: Place-based Research and 
History’s Transnational Turn 167
Lara Putnam
10 Lessons from the Space Between Languages: Notes on Poetry
and Ethnography 183
Renato Rosaldo
Part IV Institutions, Organizations, Collaborations 191
11 Researching the Cultural Politics of Dirt in Urban Africa 193
Stephanie Newell
12 Accidental Histories: Fieldwork Among the Maroons
of Jamaica 213
Paul Youngquist
13 Engagement and Pedagogy: Traveling with Students in 
Chiapas, Mexico 235
Debra A. Castillo
Index 253
A
Cknowledgments
Many of the contributors to this volume along with several fellow travelers
first gathered as a group in March 2014 at the University of Pittsburgh for a
two-day colloquium on “Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities” to share
our work in progress and talk about its underpinnings. It has been a stim-
ulating and convivial collaboration across disciplines and generations. To all
who were present, our thanks. Special thanks to Yveline Alexis, Reid Andrews,
Tyler Bickford, Laura Brown, John Frechione, Christine Leuenberger, Neepa
Majumdar, Scott Morgenstern, Imani Owens, Mina Rajagopalan, Kirk Savage,
Peter Trachtenberg, and the students in Shalini Puri’s graduate seminar
“Interdisciplinary Methods in the Humanities” (2014, 2015).
We gratefully acknowledge generous support of our efforts by the University
of Pittsburgh’s Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences Faculty Scholarship and
Research Grant, a Humanities Center Faculty Collaborative Research Grant,
the Center for Latin American Studies, the English Department, the Charles
Crow Fund, and the staff of the Center for Latin American Studies. Shalini was
also the grateful recipient of the University of Pittsburgh’s University Center
for International Studies Faculty Fellowship, which laid the groundwork for
this project.
At Cornell University, thanks are due to the Center for Engaged Learning
and Research; the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, which
co-supported many of the students in the study abroad course led by Debra
Castillo; and especially International Programs in the College of Agriculture
and Life Sciences, the administrators for the field course, and alumni from the
International Agriculture and Rural Development course (IARD 401/4010)
who did fund-raising to support it.
We are especially grateful to Sara Abraham, Laura Brown, and Lara Putnam
for their far-reaching comments on earlier versions of the Introduction.
Thanks to the anonymous press readers and to the editorial team at Palgrave
Macmillan—Brigitte Shull and Paloma Yannakakis. Melissa Castillo-Garsow,
Jarrell D. Wright, and John Kennedy provided valuable assistance with various
aspects of research and manuscript preparation.
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Duke University Press kindly granted permission to reprint “Finding the
Field: Notes on Caribbean Cultural Criticism, Area Studies, and the Forms of
Engagement” by Shalini Puri. It first appeared in Small Axe 41 (July 2013):
58−73, a special issue entitled “What Is Caribbean Studies?”
Above all, deep thanks to the many people in our various fields for the con-
versations and insights that animate the entire project.
A C
bout the ontributors
Debra A. Castillo is Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow, Emerson Hinchliff
Professor of Hispanic Studies, and Professor of Comparative Literature at
Cornell University. She is the past president of the international Latin American
Studies Association. Among her most recent books are Cartographies of Affect:
Across Borders in South Asia and the Americas (with Kavita Panjabi) (2011),
Mexican Public Intellectuals (with Stuart Day) (2014), and Despite all Adversities:
Spanish American Queer Cinema (with Andrés Lema Hincapié) (2016).
Naminata Diabate is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Cornell
University. A scholar of sexuality, race, biopolitics, and postcoloniality, she
researches African, African American, and Afro- Hispanic literatures and film.
Her recent writing on these subjects has appeared in journals and collections of
essays. One of her forthcoming essays is “Genealogies of Desire, Extravagance,
and Radical Queerness in Frieda Ekotto’s Chuchote Pas Trop” (Research in
African Literatures). Currently, she is working on two book projects: “Naked
Agency: Genital Cursing, Biopolitics, and Africa” and “Same-Sex Sexuality and
Digitality in Africa.”
Neil Doshi is Assistant Professor of French in the Department of French and
Italian at the University of Pittsburgh. He is presently completing a manuscript
titled Staging the Novel: Bodies of Francophone Algerian Culture, which studies
the relationships between theatrical and prose forms in Francophone-A lgerian
literature.
Tori Holmes is Lecturer in Brazilian Studies at Queen’s University Belfast,
Northern Ireland. Her main research interests are in digital culture and the
texts and practices of urban representation in Brazil, particularly relating to
favelas. She has broader interests in digital ethnography and ethical and
methodological issues in interdisciplinary research on digital culture. She
is a member of the Digital Latin American Cultures Network and one of
the founders of REBRAC (European Network of Brazilianists working in
Cultural Analysis).
ix
x ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
Jennifer Lynn Kelly is a University of California President’s Postdoctoral
Fellow in the Department of Communication at University of California, San
Diego. She received her PhD in American Studies with a Portfolio in Women’s
and Gender Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. She is currently
working on her first book, a multisited ethnographic study of solidarity tourism
in Palestine. Publications related to this research appear in American Quarterly
and are forthcoming in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.
Stephanie Newell is Professor of English and Senior Research Fellow in
International and Area Studies at Yale University. Her research focuses on the
public sphere in colonial West Africa, particularly newspapers and pamphlets.
She has published widely on the cultural histories of printing and reading in
West Africa, and on the spaces for local creativity and subversive resistance in
colonial-era newspapers. Her most recent book is The Power to Name: A History
of Anonymity in Colonial West Africa (2013).
Kavita Panjabi is Professor of Comparative Literature and Coordinator of the
Centre for Studies in Latin American Literatures and Cultures at Jadavpur
University, Kolkata. Her book Unclaimed Harvest: An Oral History of the
Tebhaga Women’s Movement is forthcoming with Zubaan and the Indian
Institute of Advanced Studies. She has edited Poetics and Politics of Sufism and
Bhakti in South Asia: Love, Loss and Liberation (2011) and co-edited Women
Contesting Culture: Changing Frames of Gender Politics in India (with Paromita
Chakravarti) (2012) and Cartographies of Affect: Across Borders in South Asia
and the Americas (with Debra Castillo) (2011).
Shalini Puri is Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the
author of The Grenada Revolution in the Caribbean Present: Operation Urgent
Memory (2014) and the award-winning The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social
Equality, Post-Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity (2004). Her edited collec-
tions include The Legacies of Caribbean Radical Politics (2010), Marginal
Migrations: The Circulation of Cultures within the Caribbean (2003), and
Caribbean Military Encounters (with Lara Putnam).
Lara Putnam is Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh. Her
publications include Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of
Race in the Jazz Age (2013), The Company They Kept: Migrants and the Politics
of Gender in Caribbean Costa Rica, 1870−1960 (2002), and over two dozen
articles and chapters. Work in progress uses examples from the history of
Venezuela, Trinidad, and Grenada to explore methodological and theoretical
dilemmas within history’s transnational and digital “turns.”
Renato Rosaldo is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology as well as social and
cultural analysis at New  York University. He is the author of Ilongot
Headhunting, 1883−1974: A Study in Society and History (1980), Culture and
Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (1989), and The Day of Shelly’s Death:
The Poetry and Ethnography of Grief (2014). He is also the editor of many