Last semester, I taught my freshman lecture course, Cultures and Contexts: Muslim Spain, on Mondays and Wednesdays. The morning after the election, virtually everyone present in the class — myself included — was out of our minds with grief. Many students did not attend that day and I instructed my teaching fellows not to take attendance or penalize absences. “If they’re not here,” I said to them, “it’s because they need to be somewhere else.” This was in line with directives that would ultimately come down from the official level at the college, encouraging faculty to take post-election dips in performance into account when calculating grades. Someone else was supposed to have lectured the morning after the election, but had let me know late the week before that she wouldn’t be able to make it in the end; with one extra lecture to write, I looked at my schedule for the week, figured I’d watch election results with friends until 9 o’clock when Hillary would have it all wrapped up, and then go home and write. Of course that’s not what happened, and I ended up screening the medieval Islam section of Simon Schama’s The Story of the Jews in class on November 9. It was not my most stellar pedagogical move ever, but it was the best I could do that morning.
At that point in the semester, we were just up to a brief excursus into Christian Spain and France, looking at 1391 as a political and cultural turning point; and because of the nature of the material in the syllabus ringing with such obvious echoes of the hatred being directed first at Muslims, but also at Jews, in those last days of the campaign as throughout it, I thought that I had to address the election and its aftermath in some form.
I struggled over that weekend with how to do that. In a class of 72 mostly-anonymous students in a deeply divided country, I had to assume that some were Trump voters or supporters; and in fact, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic vandalism on campus in the following weeks would prove the audacity of the Trump supporters in our midst. I voted against George W. Bush in the first election I could, but I always hated it when my own college professors would make their political views, as aligned as they were with my own, a part of their teaching. Now that I am on the other side of the desk, I still believe in keeping political views out of the classroom; but at the same time, I think that opposing Trump is a moral choice and not wholly a political one. And for me and for my friends and colleagues who will be targets of a Trump administration and the neo-Nazi affiliates he is choosing to employ, opposing Trump is also an act of self-defense. Opposing those who would treat me as less American because I am Jewish is not a political act. Supporting unequivocally my students who will be treated as less American and perhaps even less human because they are of Mexican descent or African-American or Muslim is not a political act.
Ultimately, I decided to give a historiographic lecture about the materials through which we come to know about the events of 1391 and about how different forms of writing function in charged political circumstances. In particular, I built on the interview given by David Nirenberg in the runup to the election about how his understanding of the function of Twitter in political discourse was informed by his archival practice. This was all very easy to work into the class not only because of the content but also because of the students’ ongoing research essay project, in which I was very much emphasizing attention to genre — both of their sources and their own essays.
Archival practice was implicated in how I delivered the lecture, too. Normally I teach from notes, but since I was straying much further into contemporary issues than I normally do, and even though I did not consider my lecture that day to be a political one, I knew that a possibility existed of a student going to the dean to complain. So instead of lecturing from notes on that Monday after the morning after, I wrote out almost my entire lecture so that I could show the dean verbatim what I had said, were it to come to that. Since I had the whole thing written out, I had thought about posting it ablog, but couldn’t decide, in the end. But at this intersection of Twitter, history, hate, and the archives, with new questions being raised about the implication of Twitter in the destruction of presidential archives, I thought back to this lecture and thought it was time to share it. You’ll find it after the jump: