Doing Justice with Rachel

IF 1.1 2区 历史学 Q1 HISTORY
Sharon Block
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Fuentes and Christine DeLucia address the need to incorporate ethics into history-making grounded in Black feminist studies and Indigenous studies, respectively. Finally, SJ Zhang, an early career literary scholar, brings emotional resonance to her vibrant intellectual analysis of chronology and community. Hodes's reflections include a full-circle moment. My first publication appeared in the Sex, Love, Race volume that she edited.1 There I compared Rachel Davis and Harriet Jacobs to elucidate how slavery and race structured the possibilities of raped women's experiences of and responses to sexual violence. I struggled through scores of drafts of that essay while on a postdoctoral fellowship at the Omohundro Institute (OI), trying to compensate for the fact that my dissertation ended up focusing more on power and patriarchy than individual women's perspectives: their lives had been subsumed under the need to make rape a legitimate topic for historical study. Looking back, I suspect I had neither the skills nor the training to imagine methodological possibilities that seem obvious today. As a new Ph.D., I struggled to fit myself [End Page 715] into the constraints and commands of the historical profession. I wanted my work to be legible to those in positions of authority (especially those on hiring committees), and I was less sure that I should make myself fully legible. My commitment to confronting inequities, my personal pain for the people I studied, my fear that claims of meritocracy were not meant for me—all of these seemed far too personal to share with a profession that sometimes seemed less than welcoming. It felt far safer to be a historian of rape behind the privilege of an Ivy League Ph.D. and a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship. Several of the Forum writers picked up on my discussion of the contested role of advocacy in historical study in \"Rewriting the Rape of Rachel.\" As I noted, when I was first writing about rape, senior colleagues would publicly warn me about the dangers of what they labeled advocacy history, under the rationale that not-white-male historians were unable to write objectively about their group's history. Even today, when more professional historians embrace historical advocacy to bring the past to bear on the present, there can still be skepticism about advocating for the present to outrightly inform the past.2 In a 2023 New Yorker article, historian David Blight is quoted stating that \"there are tendencies these days among younger historians, but not just younger historians, to sometimes put advocacy ahead of scholarship,\" as if the two are necessarily in tension.3 DeLucia offers a valuable corrective, sharing with WMQ readers just a few of the impactful social and economic justice efforts that operate near the setting of Rachel's life. As critical university studies scholars have shown, \"the great majority of mobilizing arises from community imperatives and lived needs for existence and well-being, not as outcomes of university committees or scholarly monographs.\" How can we better enable connections between, in DeLucia's words, the \"work of historical scholarship and future-facing justice transformations\"? Likewise, Zhang asks scholars to \"[combine] a desire to know what happened in the past with the urgent creative relation-making necessary to our present survival.\"4 [End Page 716] Zhang's evocative essay leaves me grateful that a new generation is far less bound by perceptions of archival limitations that wedged historians toward narrowed narrations and blinkered habits of engagement. 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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Doing Justice with Rachel Sharon Block (bio) I am honored that the scholars in this Forum took time away from other commitments to respond to my article. I am especially grateful for the ways their generative and generous responses have offered me the gift of further reconsideration. Credit also goes to William and Mary Quarterly editor Joshua Piker for putting together a wonderful group of multigenerational interlocutors—their Ph.D.s span almost three decades. Martha Hodes is able to reflect on the early development of the history of sexuality. Lara Putnam entered the profession around a decade later at the turn of the century and brings her expertise in microhistory and digital humanities methods. Midcareer scholars Marisa J. Fuentes and Christine DeLucia address the need to incorporate ethics into history-making grounded in Black feminist studies and Indigenous studies, respectively. Finally, SJ Zhang, an early career literary scholar, brings emotional resonance to her vibrant intellectual analysis of chronology and community. Hodes's reflections include a full-circle moment. My first publication appeared in the Sex, Love, Race volume that she edited.1 There I compared Rachel Davis and Harriet Jacobs to elucidate how slavery and race structured the possibilities of raped women's experiences of and responses to sexual violence. I struggled through scores of drafts of that essay while on a postdoctoral fellowship at the Omohundro Institute (OI), trying to compensate for the fact that my dissertation ended up focusing more on power and patriarchy than individual women's perspectives: their lives had been subsumed under the need to make rape a legitimate topic for historical study. Looking back, I suspect I had neither the skills nor the training to imagine methodological possibilities that seem obvious today. As a new Ph.D., I struggled to fit myself [End Page 715] into the constraints and commands of the historical profession. I wanted my work to be legible to those in positions of authority (especially those on hiring committees), and I was less sure that I should make myself fully legible. My commitment to confronting inequities, my personal pain for the people I studied, my fear that claims of meritocracy were not meant for me—all of these seemed far too personal to share with a profession that sometimes seemed less than welcoming. It felt far safer to be a historian of rape behind the privilege of an Ivy League Ph.D. and a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship. Several of the Forum writers picked up on my discussion of the contested role of advocacy in historical study in "Rewriting the Rape of Rachel." As I noted, when I was first writing about rape, senior colleagues would publicly warn me about the dangers of what they labeled advocacy history, under the rationale that not-white-male historians were unable to write objectively about their group's history. Even today, when more professional historians embrace historical advocacy to bring the past to bear on the present, there can still be skepticism about advocating for the present to outrightly inform the past.2 In a 2023 New Yorker article, historian David Blight is quoted stating that "there are tendencies these days among younger historians, but not just younger historians, to sometimes put advocacy ahead of scholarship," as if the two are necessarily in tension.3 DeLucia offers a valuable corrective, sharing with WMQ readers just a few of the impactful social and economic justice efforts that operate near the setting of Rachel's life. As critical university studies scholars have shown, "the great majority of mobilizing arises from community imperatives and lived needs for existence and well-being, not as outcomes of university committees or scholarly monographs." How can we better enable connections between, in DeLucia's words, the "work of historical scholarship and future-facing justice transformations"? Likewise, Zhang asks scholars to "[combine] a desire to know what happened in the past with the urgent creative relation-making necessary to our present survival."4 [End Page 716] Zhang's evocative essay leaves me grateful that a new generation is far less bound by perceptions of archival limitations that wedged historians toward narrowed narrations and blinkered habits of engagement. She advises building on the...
和瑞秋一起伸张正义
与蕾切尔·莎伦·布洛克一起伸张正义我很荣幸本次论坛的学者们从其他工作中抽出时间来回应我的文章。我特别感谢他们富有创造力和慷慨的回应,让我有机会进一步反思。《威廉与玛丽季刊》的编辑约书亚·派克也要感谢他,因为他组织了一群了不起的多代对话者——他们的博士学位跨越了近30年。玛莎·霍兹能够反思性行为历史的早期发展。劳拉·帕特南在大约十年后的世纪之交进入了这个行业,带来了她在微观历史和数字人文方法方面的专业知识。职业生涯中期的学者玛丽莎·j·富恩特斯和克里斯汀·德卢西亚分别以黑人女权主义研究和土著研究为基础,探讨了将伦理学纳入历史创造的必要性。最后,张sj,一位早期的文学学者,在她对年代和社会的充满活力的理性分析中带来了情感共鸣。霍兹的反思包括一个完整的循环时刻。我的第一篇文章发表在她编辑的《性、爱、种族》一书中在那里,我比较了蕾切尔·戴维斯和哈丽特·雅各布斯,以阐明奴隶制和种族是如何构成被强奸妇女对性暴力的经历和反应的可能性的。在奥莫亨德罗研究所(Omohundro Institute,简称OI)做博士后的时候,我艰难地修改了那篇论文的几十个草稿,试图弥补我的论文最终更多地关注权力和父权制,而不是女性个人的视角:她们的生活被纳入了让强奸成为历史研究的合法主题的需要之下。回想起来,我怀疑自己既没有技能,也没有受过训练,无法想象今天看来显而易见的方法论可能性。作为一名新博士,我努力使自己适应历史专业的约束和要求。我希望我的作品对那些掌权的人(尤其是那些在招聘委员会的人)来说清晰可辨,但我不太确定我是否应该让自己完全清晰可辨。我致力于对抗不平等,我为我所研究的人感到痛苦,我担心精英统治的主张并不适合我——所有这些似乎都太私人了,无法与一个有时似乎不太受欢迎的职业分享。作为一名研究强奸的历史学家,拥有常春藤盟校的博士学位和享有声望的博士后奖学金,感觉要安全得多。论坛的几位作者在《重写蕾切尔的强奸》(rewrite the Rape of Rachel)中提到了我对倡导在历史研究中有争议的角色的讨论。正如我所指出的,当我第一次写关于强奸的文章时,资深同事会公开警告我,他们称之为“倡导历史”的东西很危险,理由是非白人男性历史学家无法客观地书写他们群体的历史。即使在今天,当越来越多的专业历史学家接受历史倡导,将过去与现在联系起来时,仍然有人对提倡现在直接告知过去的做法持怀疑态度2023年《纽约客》的一篇文章援引历史学家大卫·布莱特的话说,“如今在年轻的历史学家中,不仅是年轻的历史学家,有时倾向于把主张置于学术之上”,似乎这两者必然处于紧张状态德卢西亚提供了一个有价值的纠正,与WMQ的读者分享了一些有影响力的社会和经济正义的努力,这些努力在雷切尔的生活环境附近运作。正如批判性大学研究学者所表明的那样,“绝大多数动员源于社区需求和生存和福祉的生活需求,而不是大学委员会或学术专著的结果。”用德卢西亚的话来说,我们如何才能更好地将“历史学术研究与面向未来的司法转型”联系起来?同样,张要求学者们“将了解过去发生的事情的愿望与我们当前生存所必需的迫切的创造性关系结合起来。”张的这篇令人回味的文章让我很感激,因为新一代的人很少受到档案限制的束缚,这些限制使历史学家倾向于狭隘的叙述和狭隘的参与习惯。她建议在…
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来源期刊
CiteScore
1.40
自引率
12.50%
发文量
52
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