Undisciplining The Interdisciplinary

After reading both Christina Sharpe’s In The Wake: On Blackness and Being and Michael Ralph Troillout’s Silencing the Past in close proximity, I have been thinking a lot about the nature of interdisciplinary work, and more specifically what it takes to be an interdisciplinary scholar. For Sharpe, it requires not just an interdisciplinary exchange of ideas and methods but a process of undisciplining. Christina Sharpe writes that “for black academics to produce legible work in the academy often means adhering to research methods that are “drafted into the service of a larger destructive force,’ thereby doing violence to our own capacities to read, think, and imagine otherwise. Despite knowing otherwise, we are often disciplined into thinking through and along lines that reinscribe our own annihilation, reinforcing and reproducing what Sylvia Winter has called our “narratively condemned status.” We must become undisciplined,” (13) Though many academics recognize that disciplinary work, and history more specifically, is what Trouillout refers to as a negotiation of power, the process of moving beyond the bounds of a single discipline is often conceived of on the individual level. One can use methods from a variety of fields, can engage literature across disciplines that do not often speak to one another, and even present one’s research is varying formats: academic articles and books, creative non-fiction, blog posts, tweets. But still, if this work is done on an individual level, we aren’t actively “undisciplining” ourselves from within that constant negotiation of power.

Even my new field, American Studies, a field many USIH bloggers and readers are familiar with, is engaged in a certain disciplining. Though to be trained in American Studies is often to be trained in different methodologies (I am using literary and cultural analysis, archival research, and ethnography in my dissertation), American Studies can and often is conceived of as its own field, a field with a teleology of its own, an academic organization, and a flagship journal. In my transition from academic history to American Studies, I have become cognizant of the ways in which I am being disciplined in being interdisciplinary-I can bring together methods and literature but I am not being asked to “undiscipline” myself, to reimagine the field, reimagine my work as a negotiation of power. And to be clear, this isn’t a slam against American Studies but instead a questioning: can anything conceived of in the university itself, complicit in violent methodologies and the violent legibility mentioned by Sharpe, avoid “reinscribing our own annihilation?”