Interdisciplinarity and Collaborative Writing in the Humanities: Lara Saint Paul and the Performativity of Race

Why is collaborative writing regarded with distrust in the Humanities, while in the Sciences articles by multiple authors are standard practice? A possible answer can be found in an essay by Donald Pease that explores the transition from the medieval figure of the auctor to the concept of ‘genius’. Pease argues that the ‘genius’ was an elitist and solitary figure whose ability to interpret modernity was said to come from innate qualities rather than from his presence in the world. At the beginning of the twentieth century, when writers became professional figures, literary critics emerged, appropriating those interpretative skills which were formerly associated with ‘geniality’. The figure of the critic inherits from the ‘genius’  an aura of infallibility, which includes the ability to understand better than the author what his or her text wants to say. This supposed omniscience does not allow much space for collaborative discussion. Perhaps co-authoring is so rare in the Humanities because of the continuing influence of this idea.

We – the authors of this blog post – are siblings. We have co-written an article about Silvana Areggasc Savorelli – also known as Lara Saint Paul, an Italian singer and television personality of Eritrean origins – which will be published in the 2018 Cultural Studies Issue of Italian Studies. One might think that organising a collaborative project is easy for people who have known each other their whole lives. Indeed, our individual research has benefited from mutual encouragement, feedback, and an ongoing conversation on methodological perspectives. Nonetheless, writing this article has been a way of meeting again, after years of living and working in different countries. More importantly, we felt that our respective experience in researching critical race theory (Simone) and Italian popular culture (Cecilia) could complement each other’s perspectives in the analysis of the performative construction of race in Savorelli’s star persona.

Fig. 1: Lara Saint Paul in the 1970s. David, ‘Lara: Ecco chi è la tua vera mamma!’, Settimana extra: attualità, politica, cultura, 20 July 1973, p. 8.

Our collaboration began long before the writing process, with the collection of primary sources. For example, given Cecilia’s experience analysing television resources, she gave Simone practical advice on archive access and collection of metadata from the RAI catalogue in Rome. The web facilitated the work by offering a wide range of open-access material that could easily be exchanged remotely. For instance, some photographs of album covers were found on www.discogs.com, while some film clips and television performances were accessed on www.youtube.com. Photographs of print magazine articles that we took at the archives were easily shared electronically. Our analysis led us to conclusions that we might not have reached if researching and writing on this topic separately. For instance, Cecilia’s expertise in 1960s fashion was key to highlight when race was arguably constructed in relation to American paradigms rather than Italian colonial models that Simone was more familiar with. Simone shared the importance of migration in changing the Italians’ perception of people of African origin in the late 1980s, which influenced a change in Savorelli’s media representations.

In our experience, collaborative writing has helped to break down boundaries between disciplines and to enrich analysis. We believe that academic knowledge is always produced in and through a dialogue rather than being ‘a one-way relation’ between the scholar and his or her ‘object of study’. Ian Cook and others call this effect ‘God Trick’ and explain it as follows:

The ‘object’ is out there. It’s waiting to be discovered, collected, processed as ‘data’. By researchers using established methods. In a systematic manner. […] Their ‘texts’ are matters of fact. There’s no doubt about that. (2005: 16-17)

Instead, Cook presents a different model that accounts for the ‘positionality and the situated nature of all [academic] knowledge’ (2005: 17) by 

giving the ‘researcher’ and the ‘audience’ an active role in the relations between the ‘text’ and the ‘object of study’ and […] making the relation more than one-way traffic. ‘Texts’ are suspended in, and constructed out of, these relations. And the researcher is in the thick of this. (Cook 2005: 17)

This paradigm involves a relational element, which becomes evident in collaborative works. Cooperation allows us to demystify the abstract relation between the researcher and the object of study. To show that knowledge originates from a dialogue locates the researchers’ activity within a set of power relationships broader than just those expressed by the omniscient figure of the ‘genius’ or the one-way relationship between a single author and a ‘text’ to analyse.

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