{"id":5649,"date":"2020-10-13T22:04:30","date_gmt":"2020-10-13T14:04:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ijaps.usm.my\/?page_id=5649"},"modified":"2021-02-03T12:50:41","modified_gmt":"2021-02-03T04:50:41","slug":"interrogating-the-value-of-humanities-and-the-arts-in-the-time-of-the-pandemic1","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/ijaps.usm.my\/?page_id=5649","title":{"rendered":"Interrogating the Value of Humanities and the Arts in the Time of the Pandemic"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Shirley Geok-lin Lim
University of California, Santa Barbara<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The special issue for this inaugural publication of the International Journal of Asia Pacific Studies is timely for the entire planet, not just for the Asia Pacific region.1<\/sup> Like everywhere else, the Asia Pacific territories are enduring an extreme existential spasm in the age of COVID-19. That the journal has invited contributors to speak (implicitly) in support of the Arts and Humanities in this moment of global upheaval, when the coronavirus pandemic continues to wreck human lives, economies, traditional ways of living, and the norms that regulate social exchange and relations, needs some unpacking. The pandemic\u2019s challenge to systems of education in every nation is daily evident: the threats to the lives of pupils and teachers, students and faculty; the scramble to replace classroom pedagogy with remote\/distance learning, and the class inequities\u2014no longer deniable\u2014these shifts expose; and the on-going anxieties of irrecuperable losses that will mark a 21st century younger generation. These are immense material problems that press on every community\u2014scholars, teachers, parents, children, politicians, professionals and common citizenry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Humanities as a matrix of scholarly disciplines that has over at least five centuries legitimised institutions of higher learning form a significant site for the \u201ccreative destruction\u201d the pandemic has wrecked seemingly in every human enterprise. Universities forced to undertake radical changes in modes of knowledge delivery in order to counter the pandemic\u2019s spread must inevitably deal with rising questions from parents and students on the value of conventional areas of instruction in a world so chaotically and unpredictably destabilised. Merely repeating the usual defence of the Humanities disciplines, in retreat since the 1950s after the ascendency of the Sciences (today collectively gathered as STEM disciplines\u2014Science, Technology, Economics and Mathematics), no longer suffices. As a scholar and creative writer who has been engaged with university teaching and administration for over four decades, this interrogation of the value of the Humanities is long overdue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the United States, a nation that historically has admitted practical, vocational and anti-intellectual tendencies, the Humanities have seen losses in financial support, student registration and prestige for a number of decades. Humanities departments have revised mission statements, changed curricular offerings, and more significantly shifted paradigms, as in the interdisciplinary dimensions and linkages now common in Humanities divisions. Nonetheless, even after the post-World-War 2 global collapse of Western colonialism, in Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and California, five Pacific Rim territories in which I have had the privilege to study, teach, research and write, the Humanities have managed to maintain much of the prestige they possessed in the early 20th century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The institutionalisation of the Humanities as knowledge based on the philosophical principles of the Enlightenment formed the ground for the rise of the universities in Europe, and the Humanities developed and established basic requirements for undergraduate studies under the rubric of \u201cWestern Civilisation.\u201d There is little need to rehearse here the trajectory of Spinozian dualistic, bifurcated thought, instating the primacy of Logos, the Mind or Reason, over the subordinate dimension of the Body, i.e., Passion or the Irrational. This dualism operated to structure superior and inferior halves, e.g., Man and Woman, Mind and Body, Reason and Passion, White and Other, Colonial and Colonised, Citizen and Immigrant, and other value-loaded polarities. Postcolonial scholars, pre-eminently exampled in Edward Said\u2019s theoretical and critical texts, have persuasively contested the racialised biases that not so subtly coloured the Humanities curricula taught in European-style tertiary institutions, and so worked to unravel the Enlightenment construction of \u201chuman\u201d that through the perversions of European colonial exploitation ironically dehumanised Otherised peoples.2<\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The teaching of Humanities disciplines that have their origin in Western civilisation has shaped an academic discourse embedded in a discursive universe inextricable from Western pedagogical praxis; as Althusser (1971) might note, the Humanities is an aspect of regulatory ideological state apparatuses (whose initial node lies in the colonising West\u2014Britain, Italy, Spain, United States, etc.)\u2014to generate, support, protect, transmit and reproduce socio-political elite values separate from those of religious institutions. The \u201cHumanities\u201d as a related set of Western-values-loaded ideals\/disciplines\/arts, on the one hand, have unequivocally benefited peoples across time and space, uplifting much of humanity from nasty, short and brutish lives to social conditions that by the end of the 20th century saw growing areas of the globe where prosperity, longevity and other markers of human development increased. On the other hand, Western colonial systems of economic exploitation and predatory capitalism also have unequivocally damaged entire populations, as evidenced in the historical record of slavery and indentured labour, and the extinction of indigenous natives, cultures and languages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My essay interrogates the Humanities even as their present pedagogical chaos might seem to call for defending their status. What, after all, is the good\/purpose\/place of the Humanities\u2019 ideals, disciplines and praxis when so many of the norms that define humanity have disappeared or are threatened, when our common danger is paradoxically fraying global ties, bonds, dependencies, relationships, obligations and responsibilities that have for almost a century saved us from a third world war? Mina Karavanta and Nina Morgan\u2019s chapter (2008, 324\u2013353), rethinking humanism and the global hybrid (figured, as I have argued, in the Western-inflected Humanisties disciplines that form the praxis of educational institutions worldwide), maps the contradictions and tensions that are more and more evident in the practices and discourses of everyday life, surfacing wherever the West interacts with the rest of the planet; that is, in the vast liminal body of \u201cthe global hybrid.\u201d They argue the \u201chumanism\u201d that originated in the philosophies associated with the Enlightenment has given rise to the construct of a \u201chyperreal\u201d Europe, one which is embedded in the historical materiality of colonial evils and complex class\/capital\/manifold interlocking struggles and its opposing idealised Other of fraternity, equality and democracy. The Humanities\u2019 current political concern re-energises textual and literary studies with a turn away from the identity politics of nationalism toward a global hybridity \u201c[to] fashion a \u2018different kind of humanism that\u2026[is] cosmopolitan\u2019\u201d (Said 2004, 11). Opposed to this cosmopolitanism, Karavanta and Morgan pose Jacques Derrida\u2019s deconstructionist quasi-dismantling of Western logocentric philosophies as an instantiation of  \u201cmoments of undecidability\u201d (2008, 335) demanding a reconstellating of critical studies to shake up Humanities disciplines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The pandemic, underscoring the entire globe as single and vulnerable, vividly illumines the Humanities disciplines (literature, history, languages, linguistics, performing arts, art history, etc.) as inadequate in any continuance of identities of subjects as national, ethnic, gendered, individual and so on. Instead, arguably, the pandemic hails into consciousness what may be theorised as a hybridising global commonality. Border lockdowns only temporarily delay communal transmission in a nation. The globe is as safe from COVID-19 as its weakest territory. This science- and data-based fact shakes the foundations of the Humanities in their traditional formations, foundations that have persisted despite the totalising net of capitalism thrown in with European genocidal colonialism and postcolonial critiques of Western intellectual discursivity, the traumas of two world wars, the obliterating entry of the nuclear century, and the present Anthropocene epoch of climate change and mass extinctions. The Humanities\u2019 Western-values bias for and valorisation of the individual over community may be more critically viewed through the lens of the different trajectories of the pandemic\u2019s spread, as in the lower mortality rate for Asian nations that early adopted social practices to contain the virus versus the United States where an idealogy of individual freedom prevails and ensures the failure of mitigation of community transmission.3<\/sup> More complexly, the Cartesian \u201cI think, therefore I am\u201d turn to Mind that has given us the successes of the Sciences has also more darkly generated the global dsytopic industrial conditions that have so degraded environments that humans appear hapless to counter catastrophic climate change. The Humanities that are complicit with the narrow values of Western individualistic freedom (\u201cI think, therefore I am\u201d), I argue, will do well to shift their paradigm to absorb the Africanist teleology of \u201cUbuntism,\u201d a term that translates as \u201cI am because we are,\u201d to foreground principles of social interdependence and collective responsibility.4 <\/sup>Arguably, this Africanist ethos of \u201cI am because we are,\u201d inflecting the societies that have best mitigated the deadly spread of COVID-19, must also inflect 21st century Humanities in the age of pandemics, together simultaneously with the Enlightenment\u2019s emphasis on Mind that undergirds the work of the Sciences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Humanities in Asia Pacific universities can only be intellectually strengthened by the destablising shakedown the pandemic is trending. In fact, towards the turn of the 21st century, the Humanities significantly embraced interdisciplinarity and cultural studies, acknowledging that their primary focus on texts and theories ignores and neglects dynamic synergies potent in creative work. English departments that were losing majors adopted popular Creative Writing programmes, broadening the overlap of the Arts  and the strongly archivalist endeavours of Humanities disciplines. Creative non-fiction, never mistaken for academic writing, is now almost universally accepted as a valued genre in literary studies. Parallel interdisciplinary changes explain the rise of Journalism departments and the present respect enjoyed by journalists, newspaper investigators and reporters. This overlap in the age of the pandemic, under conditions of lockdowns, is turbocharged by today\u2019s major fast-evolving means of connection and communication. Social media (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, emails, etc.) have resulted in floods of creative art produced in self-isolation and circulated via mass communication.  That is, the pandemic arguably has hastened by decades tendencies that affect and redefine the Humanities AND the Arts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Globally, locked-down and self-isolated people have fixed on televised\/filmic news, clips, documentaries and more. Globally, people separated in space may be commonly informed by journalists\u2019 reports and by first-person human stories of and from front-line and essential workers in hospitals, mortuaries, cemeteries, migrant camps and refugee cages, places once unimaginably foreign, and resorts and neighbourhoods that some may intimately recall. Interviews giving voice to abused women, elderly in care-homes, children orphaned by the virus, entire food-insecure communities on the cusp of starvation, everywhere COVID-19 has unequally devastated the planet\u2014these images play in lockdown rooms and can be replayed at the touch of a button.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even as these technologies enable the spread of toxic pandemic-associated conspiracies and disinformation, artists have seized these tools to produce and share writing, music, murals, graffiti, dance and all sorts of creative expressions in cyberspace. These 21st century social-media platforms in the age of pandemic \u201cself-isolation\u201d underline many humans\u2019 desire and insistence for meaning, even as unemployment, social breakdown and spreading infections and deaths threaten to undo the meanings and values of our pre-pandemic lives. These \u201cself-isolated\u201d individuals\u2019 desires for connection and solidarity are clearly a variation of \u201cubuntism\u2014\u201cI am because we are\u201d\u2014and in this crucial way, these arts are inextricably also the Humanities.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the same time, counter-intuitively, I view the poetry I write as an autonomous act whose vitality, I believe, persists as long as I persist in my humanity. Unlike my academic work in the Humanities, my poetry does not exist for me as an extant body of knowledge to be taught, examined and extended. My poems perform instead a search<\/em><\/strong> for value, for meaning. They create something out of nothing, see form which is not visible until discovered through the act of composition. Emily Dickinson famously noted that she knows it is poetry when she feels like the top of her head was taken off. Similarly, for me the value of poems lies in their intrinsic intensity of being, evidenced in their formal design\u2014their aesthetics. Whether poets are creating in an age of health or sickness, of pandemics or herd immunity, their work\u2019s value resides in the conviction of the art and not in the valuation of public readings, publishers and book buyers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The poems I continue to write, almost sixty-five years after I first tried composing a poem at the age of ten, may well not be valuable to anyone but myself. If and when a reader finds signifying meaning in my poems, this Other has created his\/her\/their own value for the poems. It is this faith in the intrinsic value of poetry that produces my memory poems, as in these tracings of my Malacca homeland, childhood and Malaysian peddlers:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before and After Leaving Malacca<\/em><\/strong>\n\nBefore and After<\/em>: never\nknew it as a child. Not that\nexact phrase. Learned it\nin the days that followed.\nEach day remarkable\nmoments, nothing if not\nalone, all presence\nof streets reduced to\nthe incurious narrow\nriver meeting the salt\nin slow sedimentation,\ntwo hills, ruined walls,\ntall standing tombstones\noverwritten in a language\nlong foreign even then\nin the lands from where\nit had come. Foreign\nin ancient hometown ruin,\ninland waters\u2019 slow\ngullies, and Before<\/em>\nAnd After<\/em> like single\ndays strung on present\nabsence\u2014this mnemonic\nwhereby my lyrics are strung.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Convent Lessons<\/strong><\/em>\n <\/em>\n     Old nun of a piano teacher\nrapped my wayward fingers\nwith a fierce-some wooden ruler,\nstopped the music one hot afternoon.\n     Giddy young art teacher,\nsmiling, knuckled my head,\ndammed my flowing colors to red-\neyed teary smeary trickles.\n     Bible Studies teacher\nstood me on a high stool,\nchalk in mouth and drip-drool\non blouse. Pushed me out the room\n     to stand all day, children watching,\nobedient. She turned my eyes\naway from her ruled lies,\nwhite on blackboard. Listen!<\/em>\n     The bad child beside who\npinched when I cried taught me\nby the class door: Turn! See<\/em>\nyour Muses, Poetry and Justice.<\/em><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Value<\/em><\/strong>\n\nMongering had gone out of style:\nfishmonger who\u2019d tossed slippery flounder,\nun-gutted, into my mother\u2019s basket;\nironmonger who\u2019d soldered our battered\npan with a fiery rod; my favorite\nnewspaper-monger who rang his bell\nfor the month\u2019s old news, cents to the weight\ncarted away on his bicycle.\nToday\u2019s new mongers get into the news\nwith venerable gods\u2014Fear, his troupe,\nRumor, War and Hate\u2014borne into view,\ntraded hourly in our households, grouped\nsaviors for a souvenir picture,\nbranding with burning cross our world\u2019s future.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
However, when my poems thematise the problematic Present, they clearly draw upon the Humanities as source and resource for content. These two poems, delimiting the present of global warming and anonymity of social media, must be parsed in their shared liminal values with Humanities\u2019 social criticism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At the Supermarket<\/em><\/strong>\n\nI get into my car\nand drive to the supermarket\nat the edge of recorded heat\nto stare at ice creams\u2014sugar\nand milk, silvery crystals all\nthe way from elsewhere, from slow\ncows, hormone-pumped pregnant.\nShivering in the aisles (fall\npre-set for the sun-stricken)\npacked with humans, everywhere\npacked with us, reaching, getting,\nlining up, rows on rows, humans\nquick to pride, mouth busy, face\nwanting cool earth rare in a hot\nplanet, smiling at babies\nwelcomed to the human race.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Faceless<\/em><\/strong>\n\nWhat Facebook cannot record:\nthe pleasure of being faceless,\nan atom in the sunlight\nthat is an atom in a universe\nthat is an atom in the universality\nof mysterious dust.\nUnder the ocean\u2019s weight, crevices\nun-glimpsable from Princess cruises\nheld up by the buoyancy\nof the ocean\u2019s water\nthat is the faith in all voyaging.\nThe faith in the crevice\nwithin the body into which all\nthings fall, memories of milk,\nolive pits and bitter\nwine dregs, lees of buoyant years\ndeep in the hole the body holds.\nImagine the holes that pierce\neach body, the crevices\nunder Facebook\u2019s oceanic weight,\nun-glimpsed selfies, invisible\nposts, the possibilities\nof being an atom, one atom\nin a shining text that is one\natom in a universe that is\nan atom in the universality\nof mysterious dust.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
A major overlap, addressed over the lifespan of my writing, between my poetry and Humanities\u2019 extrinsic values lies in my fascination with the puzzle of language itself. My poetry returns again and again to the puzzle of what writing is, does, can and cannot do, makes, unmakes, cures. Metapoems such as these, I hope, have value for other obsessed writer-holics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Poet\u2019s Confession<\/strong><\/em>\n \nI am a poet. I get everything\nwrong. Love is actually pain may be love.\nToday is always yesterday. Tomorrow,\ntoo late, never comes. You are (prove\nit!) seldom you, often mistaken for me,\nwho doesn\u2019t know who I am, whose\nexistence is existentialist\ndoubtful. Life\u2019s meaning\u2019s also dubious,\nessentially a question that\u2019s hardly\nquestioned.\n               Who gets it are not poets,\nare whom a poet disdains like she disdains\ngrammar. Except when she needs it\nfor crafting meaning, some meaning, a few\nmeanings: a right and a wrong meaning,\nexcept as I get everything wrong.\nAt least I\u2019m right about that one thing.\nWhich is more than those who are not poets\ncan be graded for, who get even that wrong,\nwho figure they are right, righteous, never\nwrong, guided by everything strong:\nself or idea or profit or God, or blessed\nby love. Ah, I grant them that happiness.\n <\/em><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
To Writing<\/em><\/strong>\n\nWriting, that grew strangeness and love\nof strangeness, sang together music\nand noise unequal to my fixed\npage\u2019s choreography. She, basic\nand first, grows weary, and I\nam at a loss as how to physic\nher. She has no appetite for Fancy\u2019s sweets.\nLists of what\u2019s forbidden lengthen\nas she slips from the itinerary\nI can\u2019t put down, estranged, sullen.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Writing in Silence<\/em><\/strong>     \n\nThe poem writes in silence,\n     silence not the mind\n               chattering in the outer cold,\ncold not the loneliness\n               of years without a sound,\nsound not the soot\n               of fire long burned out,\nsoot not the muteness\n               of women who\u2019ve forgotten speech,\nspeech not the room you enter,\n               blank squares where portraits were hung,\nportraits not the poems\n               hooded in silence,\nalthough the poem writes in silence.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Finally, some moments arrive unasked, playing at play, content to be happy poems. I value these rare poems as everyone values what we cannot count on, that drops in when least expected, as in the Praise Song celebrating one consequence of the pandemic, the return of Nature\u2019s wild animals as humans retreat into their homes. Such transcendent joy stays only for a moment, transience leaving its imprint of meaning to puzzle as a poem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Praise Song for the Pause<\/em><\/strong>\n\nPraise the morning fog\ndrying in the morning sun.\nPraise the dry April streets\u2019\nabsence of puddles.\nPraise absence, the hustling\nstreets\u2019 busy absent.\nPraise the busy, the loud birds\u2019\nchittering play, hidden in leaves.\nPraise the quiet snails, horns\nhidden, persistent on adobe.\nPraise the persisting outdoors\u2019\nferal cats and coyotes.\nPraise the feral world,\nsuddenly unafraid.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
What Comes After?<\/em><\/strong>\n\nWhat comes after the chrysalis?\nPerhaps sun and flight.\nWhat comes after the butterfly?\nPerhaps darkened light.\nWhat comes after the dragonfly?\nPerhaps perfect quiet.\nWhat comes after lonely silence?\nPerhaps new delight.\nWhat comes after white spring blossom?\nPerhaps purple plum.\nWhat comes after years and losses?\nPerhaps parts and sum.\nWhat comes after a question asked?\nPerhaps wisdom?<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Moment<\/em><\/strong>\n\nWe all deserve a happy ending,\npoor and rich, high-born and runty.\nParadise gleams with the early morning\nbird pecking at grass seeds in a dry\npatch, happy seed in the happy\nbeak, a moment of morning\nhappiness, seizing endings as ending.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n
NOTES<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
  1. My thanks to the Editor-in-Chief, Grace V.S. Chin for her invitation to contribute to this inaugural issue and for her editorial comments which have helped sharpen my commentary.<\/li>
  2. Said\u2019s (1978) critique of Western representations of the Middle East remains controversial, but has proven foundational in its influence on later postcolonial deconstructionist re-readings of European canonical literatures.<\/li>
  3. EU and Scandinavian nations, unlike the USA, also managed to contain and mitigate the pandemic\u2019s deadly spread, modelling a third ideological path balancing individual freedom with national security.<\/li>
  4. \u201cI am because we are,\u201d or \u201chumanity towards others,\u201d is the translation of \u201cUbuntu,\u201d a Nguni Bantu term meaning \u201chumanity.\u201d Philosophically \u201cthe belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity,\u201d \u201cUbuntu\u201d has become more widely known outside of Southern Africa after it was popularised in the 1980s and 1990s through Desmond Tutu\u2019s theology that helped shape South Africa\u2019s Truth and Reconciliation Commission\u2019s policies. (Wikipedia, accessed 27 July 2020 https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ubuntu<\/a>)<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n
    \n\n\n\n
    REFERENCES<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
    Althusser, L. 1971. Ideology and ideological state apparatuses. In Lenin and philosophy and other essays<\/em>, trans. Brewster, B. New York: Monthly Review Press.
    Karavanta, M. and Morgan, N. 2008. \u2018Another insistence\u2019: Humanism and the aporia of community. In Edward Said and Jacques Derrida: Reconstellating humanism and the global hybrid<\/em>, eds. Karavanta, M. and Morgan, N., 324\u2013353. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press.
    Said, E. W. 1978. Orientalism<\/em>. New York: Pantheon.
    ____<\/strong>. 2004. Humanism and democratic criticism<\/em>. New York: Columbia University Press.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
    \n\n\n\n
    ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTOR<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
    \"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
    Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, Professor Emerita at University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), is an Asian\/Transnational\/American\/U.S. Ethnic Studies and Creative Writing scholar who has served as Chair of Women\u2019s Studies UCSB, and English Chair Professor at The University of Hong Kong. She\u2019s received several awards, including Multiethnic Literatures of U.S. and Feminist Press Lifetime Achievement awards, and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Crossing the Peninsula<\/em> (1980). Her memoir Among the White Moon Faces<\/em> (1996) won the American Book award. She\u2019s published ten poetry and three short story collections; two novels and a children\u2019s novel; and edited numerous anthologies and critical texts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
    Shirley Geok-lin LimUniversity of California, Santa Barbara The special issue for this inaugural publication of the International Journal of Asia Pacific Studies is timely for the entire planet, not just for the Asia Pacific region.1 Like everywhere else, the Asia Pacific territories are enduring an extreme existential spasm in the age of COVID-19. That the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"yoast_head":"\nInterrogating the Value of Humanities and the Arts in the Time of the Pandemic | IJAPS<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/ijaps.usm.my\/?page_id=5649\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"16 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/ijaps.usm.my\/?page_id=5649\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/ijaps.usm.my\/?page_id=5649\",\"name\":\"Interrogating the Value of Humanities and the Arts in the Time of 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