I had a student a while ago who wrote a line that stuck with me, about the Talmud being a book that assumes, from the very first page, that you’ve already read the Talmud. Being a new director of an academic unit is a bit like that. By the time you start, you’re already well in the middle of it, the mess and muddle of email chains that long predate you and meetings and reports about things you’re racing to catch up to. Where do you get a handle on something like the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies? What is it, even? A suite of rooms on the second floor of the Jackman Humanities Building; an ever-changing collection of people sometimes referred to (in those reports) as various percentage points; a list of courses, some aspirational and some long-dormant; a series of public events (see below); an institutional history whose origins I’m still plumbing; an organizing idea, which only sometimes seems to be doing the work of organizing. It takes a while to see it all, and I won’t claim I’ve managed that.
And yet we soldier on. The photos and event descriptions in this report, compiled by Katharine Bell, can give you some sense of what we’ve been doing. Even better, come to our events in person. I hope to see some of you at the welcome-back breakfast next January, to hear one of our speakers, and to join the get-together April and M.J. are planning. Or just drop by for a snack and a talk!
While the whole picture still eludes me, I’ve had a few tantalizing glimpses of DTS in action. A student, Petra Biddle-Gottesman, told me about Ken MacDonald shepherding his class around the neighborhoods, food halls, alleyways, and places of worship of “Transnational Toronto”; I spent some time with the president and vice president of our student union, April Yoo and M.J. Kotikela, hearing about what drew them to the major; I wandered around Evergreen Brickworks with some colleagues on our retreat; I valiantly struggled with reports and budgets with Antonela Arhin; and I pondered the changing meanings of diaspora and transnationalism with faculty at L'Espresso Bar Mercurio. Some days, I walk through the front door of that suite of rooms and pass a gaggle of students in the lounge and wish I had time to drop in, but I don’t, because I’m the Director and it turns out that’s an actual job. Even so, something in me lifts, as if were DTS holding me and not (as I feared at first) that I had to hold the Centre and keep it afloat. There is enough here, people doing their various things, that sometimes, even rushing to a meeting I’m late for, I can rest a bit on the ongoing web of this thing that holds us together.
Maybe this question of what DTS is comes down to the map Katharine and Petra put up near our front door, with the yarn showing the many places we come from, radiating to and from the place in JHB we also call, provisionally, home. You pin down some piece of it for a minute or two, but the whole is a complicated picture, with some parts here and some elsewhere. And maybe what you don’t so clearly see is the more precious for that.