In my last year as a camper at my old summer camp, I decided to take guitar lessons from an older friend who happens to be a fantastic musician. He had been playing guitar for a very long time, and he started off our lesson by describing his relationship (I do not use that metaphor lightly) with his guitar. “There are some days when everything will make sense and you won’t want to do anything except play guitar,” he said, “and then there are other days when you will be so frustrated and confused that you will want to take your guitar and throw it at the wall.” About ten years have passed since I first heard these words, and while I have let that dream slip away, this friend’s passion for music has inspired and haunted me to this day.
I know that in my life, the closest parallel to my friend and his guitar is my relationship with my research. I imagine this is true for many of you as well. My Master’s thesis has expanded upon a paper I wrote on the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, and it has been the toughest and most rewarding project I have ever encountered. I had my first “throw it at the wall” moment about a year ago while I worked on the original paper; unfortunately, it was not a figurative “throw it at the wall” moment. I naively decided that it would be “inspirational” to watch Hotel Rwanda and American History X while working on my papers on the Rwandan Genocide and Holocaust denial (warning: side effects may include literally throwing your belongings at your bedroom wall). Fortunately, I have since learned how to handle the doom and gloom of my research. For that matter, I have even seen it as a coping mechanism for personal struggles (no matter how bad things in my life may get, it is still, thankfully, machete-free).
A few weeks ago, I had a tough but very enjoyable assignment. I was asked to present my research along with a reading that inspired it. Presenting my research was the easy part; exposing others to some of the texts I read made me slightly uncomfortable. Given the nature of what I study, I wanted to be very careful about the readings I selected; not everyone has the stomach for everything I read (I even came close to vomiting--again literally--from a paragraph I read over Winter Break). Ultimately, I chose two book chapters that put human faces on the work that I do, which is often caught up in discussions of the number of people killed or the circumstances that shaped the conflict. The books--Paul Rusesabagina’s An Ordinary Man and Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will be Killed with Our Families--are both fantastic reads that remind me why I study what I do. First, as I have already noted, they put a human face to something larger than what most of us can fully comprehend. Second, they remind us that genocide is more than an event; it is a lasting process with very serious and complex long-term consequences. Third, they demonstrate that rhetoric plays a significant role in nearly every aspect of genocide. What I have noticed about my own scholarship is that it would not be nearly as stimulating, rewarding, or effective without the nonfiction personal stories that, more often than not, get left out of the final scholarly product.
This quasi-paradoxical realization made me wonder about the inspiration that others might draw from nonfiction works that border on mainstream sources. I recognize that I have probably set up a false dichotomy between “academic” and “mainstream” here, but I see a clear difference in my own reading, and I see both types as necessary, enjoyable, and invaluable, even though one type often upstages the other. I am curious about what role (inspirational, contextual, sense-making, etc.), if any, more “mainstream” nonfiction plays in other people’s research. This was the conversation that I had hoped for when I presented my research, but, given the organic nature of conversation, it took a different (yet no less satisfying or useful) path, so I thought I would open my questions to this forum:
What kinds of “mainstream” texts (loosely defined for both “mainstream” and “text”), if any, do you read in relation to your scholarly research? If you do not read “mainstream” sources, do you see any potential value in doing so? If you do, what role does such reading serve for you? How does such reading shape your research identity? Does the relationship between “academic” and “mainstream” sources mirror the relationship between “text” and “context”? Does it transcend it?
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