Prompt #1. My education taught me that identities are fictions—constructions that emerge in the interaction between the self and the world and which are potentially unstable, negotiable, revisable, etc. Identities may simultaneously be thrust upon us by the culture and worked and reworked by ourselves, depending on our relative privilege (wealth, access to power, freedom from social stigmatization and oppression, etc). If you are conscious, you may have the agency to craft deliberately an identity or identities for yourself—or you may do this without recognizing it as a process—or you may need to resist the identities society points you towards. None of this is solid—integral, inherent, immutable—but to an extent it is material, to the extent that cultural and individual experiences write themselves on our bodies, memories, neurology, physical habitus.
I am white, and so had the paired privilege and folly of not recognizing that whiteness was a cultural identity—even amid my education—until relatively recently, with the increasing centrality to my field of race and post-colonial studies, my friendship with scholars who study this stuff, its inevitable overlap with my own work, etc. Such is the effect of occupying the hegemonic, “unmarked” identity in a culture. Not only the racial reckoning of 2020 but the rise of white, Christian, patriarchal nationalism has emphasized the degree to which white maleness is an identity, and at present a vigorously contested one. This is one of those identities that the culture gives you, and I can’t disclaim it any more than I can decide to have been born somewhere else. Needless to say, the way I strive to occupy and to revise this identity, in my own life, is very different from those practicing White Identity Politics.
Also needless to say, Muncie Indiana, like most places in the United States, is a congenial setting for a white heterosexual male—more congenial than it is for anyone bearing any other identity markers. I feel like I can go anywhere I need or want to go safely, that my sense that I am allowed or belong there will go unquestioned, and that I can fade into the background if I want to.
My “self” is composed of a set of other overlapping identities to which I have more conscious (because, at least to some extent, chosen) attachments. 1) I’m an intellectual and an academic, someone who enjoys thinking above most things and has pursued a life in which thinking (and writing and teaching, which are subsets and applications of thinking) are central to my vocation. 2) I have working class origins which I happily own (although materially I’ve been out of the working class since I was about 25) and which I sometimes sentimentalize, because I think (in error? sometimes?) that it makes me interesting. I grew up in a small, struggling former mining town in Pennsylvania, inhabited by relatively recent descendants of Irish and southern and eastern European immigrant laborers, with Catholicism and capital exploitation and alcoholism and all the historical things that go with that. This town was in the distant but still gravitationally strong orbit of Philadelphia, around which my strong sports loyalties (nurtured in my family) and my metropolitan fantasies took shape; so, add to working class an overlapping identity of 3) Philadelphia/East Coast-identified. One way this plays out in everyday life is that I find Midwesterners frustratingly polite and unlikely to tell you what they’re actually thinking. 4) I have left-wing politics that are certainly not unrelated to #2 & 3 and which—this being the age that it is—are pretty central to my sense of self. Finally I see myself as 5) Culturally engaged, literate, arts-oriented: I seek out and befriend other people who like to talk about movies, music, art, travel, books, food, etc.
Muncie is just fine for most of this, especially socially, since I worked at the university and my local social network and friendships were formed there. (It is a bit of a problem actually accessing movies, books, art, good food, etc. in Muncie—a key reason that, though I worked in the city for 24 years, I lived in Indy and commuted for 23 of them.)
Prompt #2
This is a vast question, considering my long and central involvement in the Everyday Life in Middletown project. Generally, keeping diaries has overlapped with my intermittent practice of mindfulness meditation to make clear the salutary effects of paying conscious attention to the everyday. It seems good for my mental health to notice the things about me in the physical world, to have a sense of what’s going on in my mind and body; and periodically writing it down increases my consciousness of my mind/body/affect and gives me a little more agency in managing it. I’ve also certainly noticed that, on diary days, the process of the diary makes me notice more but at the same time gets me writing in my head, which means that—while I do notice things more fully on these days—I’m also in a representational rather than a fully receiving mode.
I enjoy the diaries as a practice of writing and observation.
I have learned 95% of what I know about Muncie as a result of the EDLM project, though not so much as a result of keeping diaries. Muncie is an interesting town with a distinct atmosphere (even as it replays some of the dynamics of other Rust Belt places) and a strong—if not always or entirely pleasant—local sense of place. I am very impressed with the people who work, professionally and/or as volunteers—on community regeneration, and I think that Muncie is blessed with a lot of these people. I also enjoy the dark humor that characterizes the sense of Muncie belonging for some people. Muncie of course is also a town where a lot of people suffer from today’s inequalities, power asymmetries, and social pathologies. Its history as the magic city turning Rust Belt, its undeniable resources of the university and the hospital, the social dynamics all this creates, the ways it and its people are navigating the historical transformations we’re living through—all of this I find extremely interesting. My sense of it all comes overwhelmingly from EDLM.