Spring 2001
Timothy Brennan: Rebel, poet, cultural critic
Photo by Heidi Ehalt
TIMOTHY BRENNAN
Education
Ph.D. 1987, Columbia University
Professional history
1998 associate professor (now professor) of English and cultural studies and comparative literature (CSCL), U of M
1990-97 assistant and associate professor of English and Comparative Literature, State U of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook
Selected bibliography
At Home in the World: Cosmopolitan Now (Harvard U Press, 1997)
Cotranslated and edited Alejo Carpentier's La música en Cuba, with Alan West and Richard Schwartz (forthcoming, U of M Press)
Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation (Macmillan, 1989)
Best-kept secret
He learns the lyrics to Broadway musicals so he can "sing them endlessly on long car rides."
If he could, he'd have lunch with:
Aztec king Moctezuma in Tenochtitlan: "I'd love to eat tortillas with him in the palace. I'd give him advice on how to defeat Cortés. Perhaps this would have stopped, or slowed, the decimation of the New World Indians. If you're not trying to change the world, why go back in time?"
As a teenager in Milwaukee, Wisc., Timothy Brennan, an all-around accomplished kid--captain of the high school football team, editor of the student newspaper, and jazz pianist--was pegged to become a lawyer.
Today a professor of English and cultural studies and comparative literature, Brennan now admits, "My rebellion was to become a professor."
Although he didn't follow his father and grandfather into law school, Brennan nonetheless spent long hours deciphering manuscripts and worrying about injustices, both those he witnessed in the world and those he encountered in literary and historical texts as an honors student at UW-Madison in English and history.
Academic with street smarts
Brennan's education in cultural studies has never been limited to the academic world. Growing up in an Irish-Catholic family with seven brothers and sisters, he remembers a dinner table filled with word games and political arguments. Before college, he was "a would-be poet who actually went around giving public talks in poetry."
He also tried his hand at political organizing, declining a graduate position at Stanford to move to New York and work for the National Organization for Women and for Iranian and Nicaraguan political prisoner defense groups.
Drawing from this street-level education and his unbreakable habit of reading "a book a day," Brennan's research in academia knows no bounds. He has published scholarly articles on the works of Salmon Rushdie, rap music in Los Angeles, and the theoretical "genealogy" of cosmopolitanism, internationalism, and Americana.
The focus and purpose in all of Brennan's work is to understand the effects of cultural imperialism, especially on the "margins." Not above self-examination, Brennan also looks at the role of intellectuals in colonizing fields of specialized knowledge to create separate and elite academic enclaves accessible only to the initiated.
You might say that Brennan never left his circuit of public lectures on poetry, his circles of activism in New York, or his seat on the piano bench playing jazz music. He has simply combined all these facets into a solid and complex theory of post-colonialism that doesn't split easily between "high" and "low" culture.
Shunning elitism
"At its base, cultural studies is about turning the study of culture away from and beyond an exclusive focus on the elite cultural artifacts of books, paintings, symphonies, and so on," says Brennan. "It is suspicious of attempts to defend the moral and ethical guardianship of 'culture' by the intellectual elite."
Yet, he adds, neither does it support "some sort of market populism, whose primary interest is to express the popular will for the purpose of selling its cultural products. Cultural studies is populist and critical at the same time."
The description evokes Brennan himself, an activist academic who has found a congenial home in a state known for its distrust of elitism. Reflecting on his 1998 move with his spouse, associate professor of cultural studies Keya Ganguly, Brennan says, "I'm proud to be in Minnesota, which strikes me as having some of the best progressive traditions. I feel very fortunate to be here."