Indiana Jones and the Labyrinths of Academia

by Andrés López Román

     As he laid down his fedora and whip he entered a labyrinth much deeper than any archaeological site. Once Indiana Jones recovered the Cross of Coronado, Academia awaited him at Marshall College, a quiet institution where routine came to be the norm and where he transformed himself from Indy the adventurer to Dr. Henry Jones, Professor of Archaeology. As if the classroom had a filter, change was inevitable, draining his sense of adventure in exchange for cultural shock. This sentiment would quickly catch up to him, finding him at the University; where the journey of learning becomes a red tape process, funding comes to be as dangerous as a gun and the quest goes as far as the paycheck. Still, Indiana Jones wasn’t willing to surrender his passion for History, past cultures or artifacts. The window from his office remained open, and the world wasn’t going to wait forever.

      If one opens a book on History, or more specifically Archaeology, the encounter with a disclaimer separating reality from the character of Indiana Jones would not be rare. Fantasy takes a center role in his movies regarding the way archaeologists work and how history is perceived. Nevertheless, you’ll see many students, writers and professors rooting for the main character in the Lucas and Spielberg franchise. The reason for this is that even though they are able to pinpoint myth from reality, they get to be entertained by these films as they identify themselves with certain circumstances surrounding the Indiana Jones world. Academics are not often chased by giant crushing boulders, Nazis or the occult, but then again, Indy becomes a metaphor of something lost within academia: passion for one’s field.

     As we become closer to the activities inside the walls of knowledge institutions, we find ourselves with a sad reality: The university community has become a drained place full of frustrations. We’ve become so absorbed by routines and financial survival that our fields of study are not what they should be, what they could be. We start pacing through comfortable zones, evading the search for higher questioning, and avoiding risks. Dullness becomes the norm and the hope of changes brought by newcomers becomes a scarce expectation since the newer generations quickly demotivate themselves as they step into an already ill environment.

Universities were once an elite within society since they represented a space of intellectual exchange related to knowledge and information. Lately this reality has come to be the symptom of a problem that rose quite some time ago: knowledge wasn’t accessible to the world outside of academia. We kept writing to ourselves, debating and destroying the work of others as if we were in a campaign for an absolute truth. In the meantime, society stopped caring about us, preferring the much faster and more accessible outlets of information: movies, video games and the Internet.

     The uncertainty within institutions and the frustrations related to the relevance of our work surrounds us with the sense of calling it quits. “When hysteria reaches academia, I guess it’s time to call it a career” (see Kingdom of the Crystal Skull...[its not that bad]). Popular culture has taken care of things while academics try to survive in a world of “You can but you may not.” However, that doesn’t mean that Academia doesn’t have a place in society. What it actually means is that it’s time to escape the claustrophobic and fungus-­‐ridden walls of our offices and go out, through the window, to connect once again with the world that we, in effect, inhabit.

Negotiating the Past: The Rise of History as a Pop Culture Phenomenon

By: Ricardo A. Serrano Denis

            History has often been accused of being footnoted fiction. It has been the subject of cross-disciplinary name calling that ends in inconsequential academic ramblings that do not further serious debates on the nature, meaning, and consequence of studying the past. One is easily jaded by such accusations in that they keep with a narrow frame of thought that restrains knowledge from evolving into an agent of human understanding. Instead, they make the production of knowledge a process of exclusive infighting amongst professional thinkers (meaning men and women trained for the academic world) that deviate from the original purpose of knowledge creation, making sense out of humanity. And this brings up questions.

            If History is fiction, then why is it not consistently studied in Literature courses as legitimate works of fiction? Why reduce the impact of its findings by relegating such works to the space of interpretation (a dirty word in the world of classic academia)? When did cataloguing something as fiction demean the subject matter of any kind of study? It is here that the whole point of pedagogical research collapses. History is nothing more than one of many outlets that produce information, in league with Sociology, Anthropology, Biology, Physics, Psychology, and many other disciplines tasked with the same thing. History produces information on a debatable platform (and I mean this in the most pedagogically productive of ways), subject to any and all kinds of discussion so long as its purpose stays within the sphere of understanding what it means, and has meant, to be human. Now, if anything, if we are to consider History fiction, then it should be feared as an academic phenomenon, and here’s why: History can be the most dangerous kind of fiction in the written world.

            The year 2012 saw America threatened by two atomic bombings, a violent middle-class revolution, and a foreign invasion dooming the city of New York to a repeat of 9/11-like destruction. These threats have two very distinctive things in common. First, they are conceptually configured in a language very much rooted in historical discourse. Revolution screams 19^th century French history and Cold War fears of Soviet dominion on a global scale; foreign invasion jettisons the sounds of revolution with a clash of ideologies and ways of life again rooted in Cold War bursts of paranoia; and atom bombs cloud reason by ringing the bells of past fears not lost but rescued for further political terror. And secondly, they were all represented as legitimate 21^st century dangers through superhero films.

             
            In The Dark Knight Rises, Batman faces his toughest challenge yet: a popular uprising of Gotham City’s people against the city of Gotham itself. This, of course, set upon the imminent danger of atomic destruction through an unstable reactor politically infused with meaning by Bane, the 99% personified in a man with a scary mask. Revolution, here, is framed as stable as history permits it to be, which means it is pretty unstable. Its disorganized structure resonates with mid-20^th century stereotypes of revolution painted Soviet red. The Dark Knight Rises updates said stereotype with contemporary imagery, positing the now infamous Occupy movement as a ‘natural’ continuation of an historic tradition (see Soviet Communism) already vanquished in what is slowly being considered ‘a long ago’ (back when history ended in 1991, according to Francis Fukuyama. The Free World had won and, hence, history reached its apex). This gives ‘Recent History’ a whole new meaning. The contemporary merges with the past in an attempt to establish continuity in humanity’s political struggle.

            Marvel’s The Avengers, on the other hand, rescues recent despair in an attempt at redeeming the past through current American foreign policy. As a race of space aliens threaten New York with their own brand of 9/11, Captain America (a World War II vet) leads a unit of heavily militarized superheroes ever watchful for enemy infiltrations inherently bent on disrupting the American way of life first, and later the world by consequence of the first objective. The Avengers rescues the ‘sleeping giant’ metaphor made famous by the Pearl Harbor incident of 1941 and inserts it into the American military experience of the 21^st century (this metaphor supposes the argument that the United State fell asleep on the war intelligence job and that it could have intercepted the Japanese surprise attack). The Avengers fend of the alien invasion but with heavy casualties. New York City, the film’s set piece battleground, is forcefully thrust into the still fresh echo of 9/11 in spectacular glory. In a sudden twist of fate, America’s heroes avert the invasion by saving the city from a prematurely launched atomic missile diverted by Iron Man into the alien ship that coordinates the original invasion, avenging heavy loss and giving America military triumph. The atom bomb, a Cold War symbol of fear, is revived as a supporting character in a grander narrative looking to make war make sense in the 21^st century. It evidently needs the past for that.

            And so, we are subjected to a revival of History through an effort rooted in fiction. A negotiation of past meanings is taking place in that the present looks to acquire new meaning in old symbols of fear and action. Popular culture is rapidly becoming a primary supplier of informational authority in all things considered political and historical. As a result, the validation of information is exponentially relying on its exposure on silver screens, video games, and comic books. Alan Moore (the author of Watchmen, and V for Vendetta) once wrote:

            History, unendingly revised and reinterpreted, is seen upon examination as merely a different class of fiction; becomes hazardous if viewed as having any innate truth beyond this. Still, it is a fiction we must inhabit. Lacking any territory that is not subjective, we can only live upon the map. All that remains in question is whose map we choose, whether we live within the world’s insistent texts or else replace them with a strong language of our own. (After the Fire, 1996)

            In calling History the most dangerous kind of fiction, we must acknowledge that it is dangerous precisely because it wears the cowl of ‘truth’, one which historians insist on wearing forevermore. We must remember that what historians consider secondary sources can quickly become primary sources for the general public. This is why I comment on superhero narratives, because the history that travels through them can end up teaching audiences more about the past than history books in general. A serious attempt at lighting History under continued debate can help by lessening the weight authority bears upon the discipline. It may lead researchers and thinkers to the realization that classifications only dampen the labor of information production, to the point of keeping knowledge bound to the chains of exclusivity. In the end, it doesn’t really matter if History is fiction or not. Either way, History continues to walk down the path of a regulator, trying to keep facts in check, even if fiction ends being more convincing in doing so.