I have not been very good about narrowing my professional interests. If forced to answer the "what do you do?" question, a query for which we are all supposed to have developed a glib, rote answer by the time we are ABD, I say something like "race and politics in the US and Africa. Plus some stuff on global terrorism. Oh, and sports." And it is true. These are all areas in which I have written, published, researched, and taught. But in a profession that sometimes seems to want to narrow its practitioners beyond the bounds of relevance, that answer sometimes meets with askance glances.
But here is the thing: So what? At the end of the day, shouldn't my work speak for itself? If some people think that a young scholar cannot pursue a variety of interests without actually seeing the work that the person has produced, if they simply use their own framework based on their limitations to decide what is within the realm of the possible, isn't that their problem, not mine? Since when is being a generalist a bad thing? Since when did trying to be a renaissance man become reason for scorn?
Like Malesic, I take some solace in one of his key points:
I take some comfort in knowing that in their research, many of the big names in the humanities deal with a broad range of topics. If resisting easy categorization is good enough for Martha Nussbaum (she of the 25-page CV), then it's good enough for me.
Some of the historians I most admire have a diversity of interests. Furthermore, historians tend to think thematically. Yet my interests do have a coherence -- I am a contemporary historian. I deal with currents in the twentieth century that are not all tied to one geographic nexus point. I am working hard on being a comparativist. So in my rather narrow chronoloogical focus, I end up wearing lots of hats -- I am a southern historian, but I am probably not your man if you want to discuss 18th century settlement patterns in Virginia. I look at global terrorism in places as diverse as Northern ireland and Israel and the South and South Africa. But i may not be the guy to talk to to get a sense of Ireland before the potato famine, or the Middle east since antiquity. I am an African historian, but I'll be the first to admit that my focus on things before the Scramble for Africa in the late 19th century is pretty episodic. I also acknowledge that in my breadth, there are blind spots. I know little about Asia, though for reasons I'll explain down the road, I may get the chance to go to China for a week or two this summer.
Is this so bad? Since when is the fact that I love and am conversant in sports and music and can talk across traditional scholarly boundaries a bad thing? And since when, short of looking at the work itself, is it even acceptable to dismiss someone's work because it crosses those boundaries? So what do I do? Lots of stuff. I cannot really answer it in one sentence. But do you want to grab lunch? We'll talk. I just got this great new album. I am worried about the Sox lineup when Bard catches for Wakefield. And I've been thinking a lot lately about the South African Treason Trials, the Baton Rouge bus boycott, and the Enniskillen bombing. Maybe it'll all make sense after a while. Or maybe not. It does to me.
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