Positionality

I learned something yesterday. I learned that I'm grateful that I graduated from university in 1986 - not including my year in Geneva for post-graduate studies, which was more important to me as a personal experience than as an academic one. I also learned a new word: positionality. I'm pretty sure that word did not exist 38 years ago, or if it did, it was rarely mentioned. And it has nothing to do with sex.

This new word (to me) "positionality" was used by a Teaching Assistant (TA) marking my daughter's assignment for a first year university course on the Holocaust. In brief, my daughter was given 700-800 words (roughly two to three pages) to review a three-page excerpt from an essay by a group of historians writing about the memoir of a Czech Holocaust survivor who emigrated to the US after the war. The memoir was published in the early 1970s, making it one of the first memoirs of its kind to be published. Until the late 1960s and early 1970s there was little appetite for discussing the Holocaust, and virtually no readership for the writings of survivors, either in the general public, or in the academic community. The notion of a Holocaust memoir - a familiar literary genre today - did not exist to that point in time. 

The tide started to turn with the widely publicized Eichmann trial in 1961. By that time, the generation of Holocaust survivors, fifteen years after the end of the war, had had enough time to re-start their lives, and to begin reflecting on their experiences. The televised Eichmann trial demonstrated that the major perpetrators were still being brought to justice and held to account for their crimes, and that successful prosecution required the testimony and eye-witness accounts of survivors. There was also the sense, among the many survivors who had the courage and fortitude to build new lives, that recounting their wartime experiences could serve as a warning for future generations. In the 1960s, the first courses in 'Holocaust Studies' started being offered, and not just as an adjunct to other fields of study such as history, political science or sociology, but as their own area of study. This generated in academia a demand for primary source publication. A wider public interest in Holocaust memoirs developed, especially with the airing of the 4-part television mini-series called "Holocaust" in 1978 in the US.

The assignment given my daughter was to 'analyze' a three-page excerpt of an academic review of an early memoir of a survivor of the Thereisenstadt ghetto who was later deported to Auschwitz and eventually emigrated to New York to re-build her life. It's a truly courageous story, significant for the mere fact that it was one of the earliest memoirs, but also because it provides critical information to academics interested in establishing factuality of this tragic historical event, and to give future generations a detailed sense of what the horrible conditions were actually like.

My daughter made these points in her allottted 800 words. The TA grading her essay commented that although good, the essay did not adequately provide the author's 'positionality' with regards to Czechoslovakian Jews, situating her experience before the war and her later experiences as an emigre to the US. Remember, the assignment was not asking her to read the memoir, nor did it ask her do additional research on, for example, what life was like for the Jewish community in Czechoslovakia before the war, or even how Thereisenstadt was established and the purpose it served for the Nazis etc. All interesting subjects to be sure. And the excerpts she read provided no reflection of the author (except as a cautionary tale for future generations) about why she decided to publish her experiences. Anything said about that would be pure speculation. I immediately understood that the TA wasn't clear on her own assignment, or just expected more than was reasonable from the parameters provided.  

But it was the use of that word 'positionality' that really set me off. Group Speak, I thought, made-up jargon - academics love making up lingo. I looked it up, and the term exists. According to Wikipedia:

"A positionality statement, also called reflexivity statement or identity statement, is a statement wherein a person (such as a researcher or teacher) reports and discusses their group identities, such as in a grant proposal or journal submission. They have become commonplace in certain fields of social science, especially within the United States. Positionality statements focus on an "author's racial, gender, class, or other self-identifications, experiences, and privileges", based on the idea that the author's identity can, intentionally or not, influence the results of their research."

Ah, so 'positionality' is a byword for 'privilege'. Fuck her and her damn Marxism, was my first response to the TA's comment. 

My second response was, does it actually matter to anyone, least of all the author of a Holocaust memoir, what her 'positionality' is - except of course that she was a Jew born in Europe at possibly the worst time in history to be that? As for the historian's 'positionality' who analyzes a Holocaust memoir, are we supposed to make something significant of that? Is determining 'positionality' supposed to teach us anything about a memoir? Have academics lost their minds? The TA was explicit that my daughter had (unfortunately) treated the assignment as a 'literary' exercise. She apparently did not do enough to pick at the scant textual bones she was offered using ill-conceived academic tools to drain the marrow out of them. My daughter's reaction was frustration, because this is the TA who will be grading her final exam, and fear. 

I certainly get the fear.