584: Weekly Position Paper #2: The Scholar as Public Intellectual

One central issue that recurs throughout the collection Calling Cards is the issue of navigating multiple discourse communities — middle class professoriate, working class white communities, African American communities that are distrustful of edumacation, and more. While the authors of this collection often discuss their own and others’ navigations of these discourse communities — their movement between and among various communities — the text is, primarily, meant for an audience of academics. As Anne Green asks in the “Last Words” at the end of the book, “who is the audience?” (263).

As public intellectuals, it is often difficult to navigate various publics. What I love about this book — its complicated look at various confluences of identity and how marginalized identities can go so ignored in various contexts — also makes the content problematic when it comes to various other publics. How, I wonder, does the information, or even the type of discourse, in this book, get circulated among other publics? I’m reminded of Christian Weisser’s Beyond Academic Discourse, in which he argues that composition scholars need to make connections to various discourse communities (127) and “speak to any group outside of the academy” (125). It seems complicated, however, when the discourse of the academy (deconstruction, complication, situating oneself) is often so foreign to other discourse communities. I’m thinking of Lisa Duggan’s essay “Queering the State,” in which she notes that the discourse of queer theory “resists translation into terms that are cultural legible and thus usable in consequential public debates” (567). Though the language of the essays in Calling Cards is fairly accessible, it still speaks in a discourse that might (or perhaps even will) sound foreign and off-putting in many liberal and “essentialist” circles.

How then, might we conceive of our future responsibilities as public intellectuals when it comes to issues of difference and speaking to various discourse communities?