Cross-Disciplinarity contra Identity Politics (and dogma)

Hello all,

Let me begin with a touchy but elucidating experience most of us have confronted:  General Education. Most of us -- most college students period -- damn it. Why? Because we see some, if not all, of these classes that fall outside our primary foci as impediments on our pursuits -- especially for those who had aspirations for, and now are obviously in, graduate school. But General Education is not inherently at fault -- it's its practitioners (and eventually, will likely be us, for the future academics). The vast majority of our general education professors fail to ever tie the relevance of the course to a larger framework (i.e. LIFE). And even for those courses which do not have a clear or immediate relationship to our individual experience, they still embody an alternative practice (for better or worse) of interrogating the world. And this is important, because this is a fundamental reality of human existence, in every conceivable domain, including our specific fields.

Granted, as an English Literature student (and more broadly, a student of the Humanities), cross-disciplinarity is inherent to my subject matter. Stories are made up of the same properties of life, and meaning is an effect of the various relations of these properties. To put it a different, but related, way, stories have contexts, and those contexts are limitless, while bound still bound to life, if only to be transformed by our imaginations (the means through which we experience the world). And given the variety of properties, contexts, and consequently, characters, Literary Studies, done responsibly and in a sophisticated manner, needs to engage with these variables on their (i.e. YOUR field's) terms.

So what is the significance of these two paragraphs? Let us take a phenomenon like Identity Politics as our counter-weight:  most simply (and perhaps slanted, to illustrate the point), identity politics are the politicization of specific groups to the exclusion/neglect of others. I'm gay or black or poor or woman or disabled, and I -- as a member of this specific group -- am oppressed. Now, where the specific histories and manifestations of oppression for each group are important, when they begin to be foregrounded as isolated causes (a symptom of this approach), the larger collective oppression of peoples is forgotten, impeding on the recognition of a collective struggle and the possibility for collective mobilization -- the real means for change.

What cross-disciplinarity -- as does General Education and Literature, WHEN DONE RIGHT -- embodies and promotes as a practice is the negotiation and synthesis of a variety of variables/perspectives/problems, giving way to the recognition 1) that we are all taking different approaches to different but related problems -- the world/our existence/the existence of others being the common denominator -- and 2) that real change requires collective change, bringing with it the challenge of taking into account other perspectives/discourses, and simultaneously the possibility of revolution (be it scientific, aesthetic, and/or political).

PS Do not let the failure of a specific moment of practice cast a shadow on the significance of the practice itself. In fact, you are all the more prepared to make it work the next time around. And there will, or ought to be, a next time...