I had a marvelous time giving a lecture at the University of Wyoming this Tuesday to my impressive colleagues in UWyo’s History Department and their terrific graduate and undergraduate students. I left feeling a lot better about the scholarly project I’m working on right now—I feel strongly motivated to push through the last phase of the active research and to continue writing it up.
I will say that Laramie is not the easiest place to get to, so I’m glad to be on solid ground after being on three separate flights yesterday. On a map, Laramie looks like it’s close to Fort Collins, Boulder, Denver, Cheyenne, the Rockies, Casper, and even the Black Hills. In practice, that’s true, but only for part of the year—I got the 411 from folks about how I-80 and I-25 are pretty much undriveable for a fair amount of the winter. Weather in other places feels like an abstraction a lot of the time—it only makes the news when it is catastrophic in some fashion. That might be one reason that the subtle drip-drip=drip of climate change is hard for us all to process in a felt, embodied way. You can see the temperatures and the precipitation, but you can’t feel what the practical encumbrances—and affordances—of climate are in different places, sometimes places that are only 45 minutes apart as the crow flies.
One more data point for why I think you can’t replace being somewhere as a way to understand it. That’s especially important for historians, because frequently we’re writing about places that do not exist any longer, in the sense that the way they looked back then is not how they look now. But without the baseline of understanding the lay of the land in physical, experienced terms, you’re missing the foundation required to envision what it was like at some past moment.
Other things on my mind as I catch up on the news and retune my attention.
Jacob Zuma, 81 years old, has been ruled eligible to stand for election again in South Africa despite a wealth of plainly criminal misconduct as well as grotesque incompetence as a leader. I always like to talk with my students about how the United States and South Africa are complicated mirrors of one another, often in a mutually unflattering way, but this is taking that a bit far. Zuma, like his American counterpart, frequently exhausts my ability to step back and think more deeply about the meaning of his political survival, as I get overwhelmed by my feelings of contempt and despair. When I can muster it, I see in him some of the same things I see in Trump, both personally and structurally. A kind of micropolitical canniness that isn’t a product of discipline or intellect, that works in part because of a complete lack of ethical constraint—an accurate emotional-intuitive reading of the people in a given room, and how most of them can either be bought off or intimidated. A relentless need for a kind of performative dominance but an indifference in some sense to being manipulated or suborned in other ways. A sense of connection with a population who are right to feel alienated from the more-or-less neoliberal alternatives but also basically being buoyed up by political mafiosi—state-capturing predators and small-scale kleptocrats. It’s not enough to brush either of them off as scumbags or the standard-bearer of deplorables—there’s something in the mess in both cases that anybody wanting a better outcome has got to learn to deal with rather than just belittle and ignore—but most days I just feel bitter, dyspeptic and despairing about it all.
It’s strange how scholarship works over the long haul of a career. I’m teaching Achille Mbembe’s famous “Aesthetics of Vulgarity” essay in today’s class and as I re-read it in preparation, I had that exciting, disorienting moment where I realized that I had so internalized Mbembe’s analysis over years of reading it and assigning it that it had become a key theoretical underpinning of what I’m doing now. Which in turn catalyzes my current re-reading and makes the essay feel new to me. That’s a great example of what scholarship can be, in miniature—how it’s not just a straight line towards knowing more, but also a cycle towards understanding what we know, then questioning that understanding, then understanding it again in light of new knowledge.
Speaking of cycles, I recommend that folks read Evan Goldstein’s lengthy profile of Glenn Loury at the Chronicle of Higher Education, which substantially discusses Loury’s upcoming tell-all autobiography. I may have something to say about Loury’s career as a whole in reaction to this. I am always interested in folks who really work towards what I think of as originality via heterodoxy, and I think Loury has wanted to be that kind of person, but I have often felt—and feel even more now—that he’s been more like a peripatetic wanderer between orthodoxies rather than someone trying to think his way into a completely new perspective or space. In that, he might actually be the poster child for American public intellectuals—to achieve prominence, one has to make sense within the narrowly circumscribed polarities of conventional opinion. Intellectuals and artists who do their own thing can’t be in the same circulations, even if they’re also not terribly digestible within conventional disciplinary hierarchies of relevance or achievement.
Also speaking of cycles, an off-hand compliment on Bluesky drove me to re-read something that originated on my previous blog, “On the Humane Digital”. It’s an interesting thing to read something you wrote a while back and experience it almost without remembering the experience of writing it and then having it republished elsewhere. Occasionally I find that an embarrassing experience, even more so on digging up unpublished drafts that I abandoned (thankfully). But sometimes it’s pleasing, as in this case.
Feeling heartbroken by news of a colleague’s death. There are faculty and staff in any university or college who manage to make everybody around them feel that they are in the right place, at the right time, doing what they were meant to do. My colleague did that, simply by being who they were. You couldn’t abstract that into a workshop or a procedure or a training session. That’s why some people are so important, so foundational: the entirety of who they are makes “community” into a real word, a lived idea. And their absence diminishes everyone. Think about the colleagues who do that for you in the place you are, and treasure them.
A nice round-up and reflection; but want to especially thank you for your words about the College's recent loss of a wonderful, humane person. They will be sorely missed.
First, Timothy, my condolences on the loss of your colleague. Recently, my friend the historian Cita Cook died, and although we never worked together, she was such a supporter of my work, and such a joy.
As for visiting the places we study, I have long borrowed the phrase I heard from English lawyers: the locus in quo, the scene of the crime. I'm currently running circles in America like a crazed Ms. Pacman, exploring places disdained by city folk. They're all worth a visit, aren't they, including Laramie.