New Fields and Felt Truths

July 22, 2024

It may seem interesting that I am choosing to pursue training in such a privileged institution, that has not always been on the right side of human history - especially regarding BIPOCs domestically and globally, student and faculty protesters, and dissenters. I can only apply a Sedgwickian concept in stating this: studying a field such as oral history at an Ivy League is “Kinda hegemonic, kinda subversive”(Kosofsky Sedgwick 15). I hold the truth of Columbia’s past and present history and its world status, in tandem with recognizing the urgent need for oral historical intervention, and a deep, deep, knowing of myself.

Rebecca Schneider states that the Sedgwickian “kinda signifies incompleteness or partiality, and thus occupies an interval between otherwise binarized pairs” (12). Interpreting this through my own experience, this concept invites a conjunctive exchange from a “this or that” worldview towards an approach that makes space for "this" and "that". This approach holds multiple outcomes embedded with "potential, risk, and threat" (Schneider 12) and offers an alternative to binary interpretations. When I use this approach to contextualize my situation, it brings forward intervals of my own such as thought and sensation, reality and intention, and lastly, missions and how we choose to achieve them.

I also draw a lot of insight from Ann Cvetkovich's exploration of Memoirs, a complicated and sometimes problematic genre. While theoretical critique is ever-necessary, I am increasingly more concerned with whether things possess qualities or features I can use and give purpose. Cvetkovich references this exact predicament when she invokes “the activist principle of productive or alternative suggestion” (78). As a matter of praxis, by entering the “discursive fray about memoir by actually writing one,” (ibid.) Cvetkovich focuses on “what memoir can do for public discourse rather than being exclusively concerned with critiquing where it failed” (ibid). This school of thought can offer something new when weighing thorny decisions. Like Cvetkovich, I’m also considering productive and alternative suggestions. The robbery of space, re-purposing of functions, and use of tools defanged of their hegemonic power, are but some, spheres of action for a disenfranchised public.

In a time where the category of dignity is being eroded by human rights violations, genocides, unethical leadership and technocrats—and quite frankly, the dissipation of the human imagination—the power of witness, testimony, and archiving our humanness and the full scope of our “felt truths,” is crucial. Oral history prioritizes a relational, communal, and deconstructing methodology that injects the human element into “facts”, “truth”, and discrete units of “history” and “research”. My decision to study this field at Columbia University will likely remain a self-aware struggle. However, if training at OHMA can give me more skills to serve communities within spectrums of oppression, then that is how I will enter the fray. Understanding that this decision is attached to great responsibility cannot be overstated. All the same, I stay guided by this principle: the duty we have to ourselves, the duty we have to the world, the duty we have to our Creator, and how we survive and manage to meet the three.

Works Cited

Cvetkovich, Ann. Depression: A Public Feeling. Duke University Press, 2012.

Schneider, Rebecca. Vitality and Obsolescence in the Theatres of the Humanities: Or Sandra Bland and Hamlet. Academia.edu, www.academia.edu/14496138/Vitality_and_Obsolescence_in_the_Theatres_of_the_Humanities_Or_SandraBland_and_Hamlet. Accessed 19 July 2024.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. "Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel." GLQ, vol. 1, 1993, pp. 1-16. Gordon and Breach Science Publishers SA, queertheoryvisualculture.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/sedgwick_queerperformativity.pdf. Accessed 19 Jul. 2024.