Text by Michael Levenson
(You can also read a PDF of this essay, as it first appears in print in the Fall 2011 issue of the Arts / Sciences magazine.)
The name for my field and vocation, the humanities, is not accidental. We humans want a name to fit the shape of our needs for value-making, past-preserving, significance-wresting, and future-imagining. Still, it’s become a journalistic tic to say the humanities are in crisis. Students want practical training; policy makers want more math; humanists don’t create economic value. True enough. They only show what value is worth.
The humanities aren’t in crisis. The rest of the world is. In too many corridors, people are distracted, infatuated, overwired, underinspired. And when I say “world,” I mean the real, global world—which, of course, is a risky thing to mean. If you say it fast enough and often enough, the word “global” catches on the back of your tongue and makes you sound foolish (try!). It should. It’s the word of the moment, the chant of the new millennium. Saying it, however, doesn’t let anyone off the global hook. Circuits of power and money are spreading everywhere, like international sushi. We need the countervoice of a global humanities initiative, something that recognizes that the problem is planetary, that it links scientists and humanists, that the conversation needs to happen on every continent, and that the call is urgent.
Speaking as and for myself, I admit to being slow to grasp the reach of a common venture. For too long, my planetary horizon narrowed pleasingly to one other place. London has been my parallel universe ever since I graduated from college, and it becamethe strange twist in my life, this continual return to a second harbor. It wasn’t the theater or the galleries or the accents or the tea that drew this English professor over the pond, not that I don’t love these as much as anyone could. I went because there was more life: more difference, more sameness, more churning human stuff.
For the past fifteen years I’ve taken students to London in the summer, and I’ve watched many of them change out of recognition. First they see something or someone “other,” and then, much more profoundly, they see themselves being seen as Other. That’s when insularity ends, and you realize the globe is round; you could roll somewhere else before you noticed. Many of the students have returned to London—to work, to live, a few to marry. Most of them begin to feel a version of what I feel. You begin to think of London as if it were a person. You worry about it when you’re not there. You get excited when you see gawky, goofy images (Big Ben! Look!). You get teased by friends (can’t you go anywhere else?).
Finally, I saw that though it is the British capital, London is no longer simply an English city. It’s the world’s metropolis, the one place where all the nations (almost all) and their languages fill the streets. This is what I came to like best, swimming in the stream of the full human multitude. In any tube car in the Underground, English is one of the minority languages, and white one of the minor colors. I’d taken London as a destination, and then found it was a doorway.
Lucky me, that a year ago, I had a chance to visit universities in China and Delhi. And happy me, that I went at a time when my hosts wanted nothing more than to talk about what was ahead for literature
and history, philosophy and the fine arts, religious studies, and classics. On my last afternoon in Delhi I had a late snack with two new, but now enduring, friends, Brinda Bose and Prasanta Chakravarty of the English department at the University of Delhi. She teaches modernism, feminism, and postcolonial study; he’s a specialist in the literature and culture of the English Civil War; together they comment regularly on culture past and present for the Hindu, a widely circulated newspaper.
We talked and thought, joked and teased; and then the idea formed in the cloud of our conversation: we would launch a global humanities initiative. We would contact others, who would contact other others.
We didn’t need permission to arrange to meet in Charlottesville, then back in Delhi, in China and then in Australia. We would ask questions about international modernity, about cultural relativism, about secularism and faith, about the politics of culture. These questions would intersect with institutional matters, such as curriculum and budget, the narrowness of politicians, the caricatures by journalists.
The initiative that my friends and I imagined over cups of tea in India now has a physical home here in the College of Arts & Sciences. The Institute of the Humanities & Global Cultures will have its official inauguration at U.Va. after spring break in 2012. The Institute will stir reflection and conversation; it will host workshops, conferences, lectures and readings, and link humanists to others with similar aspirations around the world. Later this spring, our original group will meet for its first conference here in Charlottesville. Next August, the four of us in the College who secured a grant for the Institute—Rita Felski (English), Krishan Kumar (Sociology), Kevin Hart (Religious Studies) and I—will travel to a second event in Delhi. When it concludes on the 11th of August, I’ll join Brinda Bose in beginning a graduate seminar on the career of Virginia Woolf, which will run through the fall term.
Two weeks later I’ll return to Charlottesville and begin a seminar with the same focus on Woolf. After three more weeks, Brinda will fly from Delhi, and we’ll teach together in a classroom near Jefferson’s Lawn. Then she’ll return to her students in India. I’ll stay here, but all the time the two groups of students will be mailing and consulting, teaming up in research partnerships, swapping ideas that can be brought into the separate discussions. Once or twice, we’ll look at one another through a telekinetic something-or-other, and in these ways, we’ll begin living up to our humanity and the humanities. Teaching Woolf across the waters is bound to change a great deal for all of us. Will she seem more English, less worldly? Will our perceptions spread or converge? Will British modernism lose its monumental shape when seen through the eyes of former colonial peoples? Will we learn what the cultures share as a group, what they see differently? Can we read better when we read together?
The Institute of the Humanities & Global Cultures is ready to be made and molded by all who care to join. The only thing I have to give is everything that’s in me. I know well that even a buzzing particle of global humanism is just a particle. Whether our institute and initiative will work or wilt is down to whether we collaborate until the embers flare, the conversation warms, and the ears burn.