Dismissing Outsider Discourses
Our newest Cliopatriot, Manan Ahmed (Welcome!) has raised a very interesting question: the Arab scholars’ habit of ignoring outsider perspectives, particularly inconveniently analytical ones. But it’s not a particular habit of the “Arab Mind” or whatever you want to call it. It’s a very common bad habit of scholars the world over.
How many American historians of US history are aware of the American Studies scholarship which the world produces? How many of that small percentage consider that scholarship to be of any real interest? (Actually, we have someone “on staff” here at Cliopatria who might be able to answer that question, Israeli Americanist Mechal Sobel. I hope she’ll jump in with her experiences.)
I'm in the same boat, of course: I'm an American scholar of Japan, and while my scholarship seems to be of interest in Anglophone circles (more on the ASPAC experience when I’m back home next week), and might even be noted by a few local historians in my subject area, the odds of a mainstream Japanese historian of Japan considering the work I do of interest or worthy of comment are nearly zero. I don't take it personally: there's a vast, high-quality literature on Japan in English (and several other languages) and the Japanese only very rarely even notice that it exists. The last two Pulitzer-prize winning Japanese history books (one deserved it, one didn't) were translated into Japanese, and sold quite well: the market for popular history writing there is very strong, the books were on sensitive subjects, and the prizes gave the work a sort of"ohmigod, people are reading this stuff, we should know what they're saying about us" cachet....
The blanket dismissal is wrong, but there are some things about it that make sense. For example, in Japanese historiography, there is a powerful Marxist strain, which has produced a plethora of scholarship on some subjects, and very little on others. There's also the nationalistic strain, similarly distorting. And local history is very much antiquarian rather than analytical (not too different from most non-academic local history in this country). American (and many other nationalities’) scholars of Japan have come to the history with very different questions, and very different theoretical tools and personal agendas, and have collectively produced a scholarship on Japan that is very hard to integrate with the Japanese historiography.
Then there is the language barrier. My Japanese is good (rusty, except in reading comprehension), but I don’t claim to be a great writer in Japanese nor a professional-quality translator: it would take me forever and a day to translate even a chapter of my dissertation into that language on my own (and it would take me longer to explain to my tenure/promotion committee what I was doing). So the odds that a Japanese historian would be aware of my work, interested, and able to read it are long. (Yes, the vast majority of educated Japanese have a working reading knowledge of English when they graduate but like any language skill, it atrophies if not used).
I’m a great believer in the positive power of broader and more diverse communication, and it’s getting better. But there are real obstacles, even in academia.