A week ago, as soon as I returned from the national conference of English Studies, I sent a joint email to five young scholars who had discussed SF in their presentations. I presented myself as the Spanish representative of the Science Fiction Research Association and the author of a recent book on masculinity and SF. I explained that the purpose of my message was to establish contact for whatever they might need and invite them to, perhaps, join SFRA. Only one has replied so far, which is, to say the least, disappointing.
I think that this disinterest is part of a regrettable generational divide that I hinted at in my previous post, when I mentioned that no young scholars had attended the round table to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Cultural Studies in Spain, though the panel sessions were full of them. I didn’t approach any of these young scholars in person because I know the detrimental effect that ageing, keen women chasing young people has. I hoped that my approaching them would work better on e-mail but, obviously, that was not the case. Please, note, that in my time as a doctoral student I was the one approaching senior scholars, not the other way round. In any case, one of the reasons I stopped attending the national English Studies conferences is that I noticed the young scholars flocked together but did not approach any seniors, which felt awkward. At least in this last conference, I’ve made a lovely new young friend, whom I have met, I must say, through one of the most senior attendees (her former doctoral supervisor).
Plainly, something has changed. My friend Felicity Hand, who pushed me to attend my first conferences, explained to me that it was very important to meet senior scholars, for they might be part of tribunals I had to eventually face, my future peer reviewers, or just good contacts. So, I dutifully introduced myself to the ones she pointed out, or I understood to be key persons, after their talks. I’m not good at cold calling at all, but one thing led to the other and I more or less know everyone of relevance in English Studies in Spain between the ages of, say, 50 and 70+ (I’m myself 59). I realise that I hardly know any young scholars, though I’ve been collaborating with some and taken part, too, in a few tribunals and so on. Curiously, senior and junior members of AEDEAN, the national English Studies association, know me (as I could see) because I’m constantly sending CFPs and other information to the national email list.
This generational divide has very much to do with a deplorable habit of Spanish scholars: we don’t cite each other, despite our firm presence in the bibliography generated in our fields. Beginning more or less in the early 1990s, when I myself started my doctoral dissertation, the whole collective of English Studies scholars here in Spain has made a prodigious effort to be visible internationally. I remember being bowled over when Juan Antonio Suárez (U Murcia) published in 1997 Bike Boys, Drag Queens and Superstars (Indiana UP) for that was the first book that I knew about written by a Spanish scholar in English Studies published in a US university press. Since then, many of us have been publishing internationally both in journals and in university and corporate presses. Now young scholars expect to publish their dissertations with Routledge or Palgrave as a matter of fact, while it took me many years to teach myself how to approach them. I was told, you see?, by my seniors in the Departament that this was very difficult to do; it turned out that they themselves did not have that experience. Other seniors in other Departments did much better and were obviously far more helpful.
So, here’s my guess about what happened. When we started fighting to have our research published in Anglo-American journals and presses, we may have been afraid to sound provincial and, so, we didn’t quote from the work published locally in Spain, in lesser journals and presses. We quoted from the big names published in English, to establish our credentials as well-read scholars and to impress our peer reviewers. Our bibliographies may have occasionally included some well-known Spanish names (perhaps Ortega y Gasset or Unamuno, among the classics; perhaps sociologist Manuel Castells among the moderns), but they were composed 99% of Anglophone texts. If there were translations in them, these were of Russian, French or German names of the first rank, such as Bakhtin, Foucault or Habermas, not of English Studies scholars like us. Forget about citing bibliography directly in Spanish or any other language we may have known.
This habit of not citing our Spanish peers stuck and we did nothing, or very little, to cite them even when they had internationally acknowledged publications. I am myself guilty of this horrid sin. I know who is who in the fields I work in, but I have directly cited very few Spanish scholars. My justification is that their work, while of great interest, does not suit the purposes of my own research, though I grant that there is now plenty to choose from. The consequence of not citing each other is that our own students perceive a divide between what is quotable and what is not. Once, I had a master’s student who neglected to cite me in a paper on Star Wars, even though I had pointed out to her that I had a relevant book chapter on Darth Vader in a British book. When I complained, she replied that compiling a bibliography required a search for hard-to-find sources and that citing a teacher she saw frequently was too easy. Or something to that effect. If, in short, I could not even impress this student, who was going to cite me?
We do get cited, indeed, as our Google Scholar’s h index shows, but we are more frequently cited by specialists elsewhere rather than by Spanish scholars. This means that, if we are known at all, we’re known for the areas we work in, but not actually for what we’ve written. I may be known because I do research on Masculinities Studies and Science Fiction Studies, and I’ve published a ton in these fields, but I think that very few of the scholars citing my work are based in Spain. As doctoral supervisors, we should obviously do more in that direction, indicating to our students that their bibliographies should contain at least, say, 15% of sources written by Spanish scholars, including some in Spanish (or Catalan, Galician, Basque). If they get used to citing local scholars, we will be better known and this will increase the chances that the generational divide dwindles.
In that sense, one of the most harmful habits is the use for the theoretical framework of foreign names. You might object that the key names in any theoretical framework are invoked depending on their reputation, rather than their nationality, but I’m sure you will have noticed that whenever non-Anglo-American names are used as foundations for further research they have published in English. In part, this is because we know English but hardly any other foreign languages (how many of us can read in French, German, or Italian?). Yet, even in the case of scholars in our national circles who have published in English we hardly, if ever, use them as our theoretical framework, behaving a little like that MA student I’ve mentioned who refused to cite me. Somehow, we think that ideas coming from native speakers of English have more value than the ideas coming from those thinking in Spanish and, secondarily, in English. The exception is so rare that it’s truly endearing. A young scholar whose panel I attended in the AEDEAN conference cited mostly the Spanish members of the research project she belongs to, with high words of praise. This is as it should be, but, in our context, it was odd and even cloying.
An added problem, as we know, is that young scholars have scant resources and very often attend conferences just on the day when they deliver their paper. Socializing over coffee and meals, which is when networking truly happens, is, then, limited. Since few can afford the luxury of staying for the whole conference, they also miss key sessions with plenary speakers and, my guess, skip round tables in favour of panel sessions. Obviously, both junior and senior scholars participate in panel sessions but I’m not the only one among my peers to be attending fewer and fewer conferences. They are expensive, even with financial support from projects, count practically nothing for our CVs and, if you’re not into travelling (as I’m not) they become a disruption it takes days to recover from. So, it may be partly our fault that as senior scholars we have made ourselves less available to junior scholars, who, in turn, do not know that we exist.
I assume that matters are different in Spanish (or Catalan) Studies, in which most key names are Spanish, and in which most foreign specialists publish in Spanish. It’s a sort of mirror world of English Studies, though I remember from my early years as an undergrad taking some Spanish Literature subjects that there was a reverential respect for the foreign specialists I have never come across as a foreign specialist in English Studies. In Spain, we are generally grateful that a foreign person decides to invest their professional life into studying our culture, but, somehow, Anglophone persons seem to take it for granted that foreigners are interested in their culture… But I digress. Or maybe not, for perhaps that’s the root of the whole thing: Spanish culture has always taught us that we’re second rate in comparison to our Anglo-American betters, hence the bad habit of quoting them, not our Spanish colleagues. And, hence, the generational divide I’ve been talking about.
Our English Studies association, AEDEAN, and its yearly conferences survive in good health. The association is about to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary (it was founded in 1976) while the conference will do so in 2027, which is fantastic. There were worries at one point a few decades ago that the conference might die as scholars decided to attend more specialized meetings. Yet, since the conference works as a meeting point for friends and colleagues in all areas, and since many young scholars start their public careers in it, so far it is faring well. We might say that four generations of English Studies scholars have contributed: the one already retired, the one facing retirement in five to ten years, the one in the middle of their careers and the young scholars. More or less. The difference, I would insist, is that while the youngest generation are there, usually prompted by their PhD supervisors, they seemingly have no need to know who their seniors are. It’s part of a well-known generational presentism but, I insist, it’s a pity. Also, a waste of academic resources and a disparagement of recent achievements, leading to research that reinvents the wheel.
I’ll try to remember all I’ve written here next time I attend a conference and work harder to erode this generational divide.