Summer 2002
Black (un)like me: scholar Pabst dismantles stereotypes
Photo by Marcus Halovi
Naomi Pabst (B.A. '93 summa cum laude, English & African-American Studies) is the intellectual enemy of the stereotype, the easy generalization, and the sweeping statement. As a newly-minted scholar of African-American studies and the history of consciousness, she defines her subject loosely as "what people think of when they say the word 'black.'"
But let her audience beware; she refuses to be straitjacketed by any monolithic definition of blackness. In a discourse where blackness is assumed to be male, heterosexual, and, above all, American, Pabst is interested in investigating the further reaches of black experience through the lens of feminism, alternative sexuality, and what she refers to as "transnationalism"--the influences of non-American culture.
Pabst contends that some of the traditional assumptions of black studies can be, well, a little narrow. She notes the subtle and not-so-subtle dominance of American sensibility, for example, in the field. "If you a read a title like "Black Feminist Thought," she says, "You can rest assured [that the thought in question] is going to be American."
What engages Pabst is what she finds on the margins of the black experience.
It's a territory that she knows fairly well from personal experience. Although the 33-year-old scholar insists, "I don't want to reduce what I do to my own experience of marginality," nevertheless she concedes that, as a biracial child growing up in Canada and Germany, her experience was not typical of conventional definitions of black culture.
But then, her point is that many African-Americans--including black cultural icons--did not have "typical" experiences.
Take Langston Hughes, for example. The great African-American poet is often considered the black "folk laureate." says Pabst. "Yet he was a cosmopolitan expatriate--a citizen of the world. Somehow he's been co-opted as a spokesman for 'the folk.'"
The problem, says Pabst, lies in overly narrow definitions of what constitutes "blackness": "Questions of black authenticity can become so absurdly narrow. [Feminist scholar] Michele Wallace has joked that [genuine] black people can't even wear shorts. That's for white people. Supposedly you can't love Mozart and Picasso and still be black."
A newly awakened fascination with definitions of black culture was one of the key factors that drew Pabst to undergraduate education at the U. She arrived in Minnesota one summer almost by chance. "I went to Minneapolis on a vacation to visit friends and relatives," she recalls, "and I stayed on. I got a job and I started at the U as an extension student. Then I fell in love with black studies.
"There was nothing like this [I realized] in Canada. Above all, [Professor of African-American Studies and English] John S. Wright got me on this path. He turned me into a scholar. I was pushed, challenged, and nurtured."
Wright remembers his former student well. "Naomi is clearly one of the best students I've ever had," he says. "She had extraordinary abilities; she thought rigorously and wrote gracefully."
Wright also remembers that Pabst could stand up for herself. He describes teaching a seminar where Pabst was one of the few undergraduates in the class. Finding oneself surrounded by graduate students, he notes, "normally cows the undergrads."
Not Naomi Pabst. "Naomi had great poise and confidence," Wright recalls. "She insisted on functioning as a peer in the seminar." And she was up to the task.
Wright thinks that Pabst is a natural for an academic career. "We always joked," he says, "that she planned to come back someday and take my job when [I was] ready to be put out to pasture."
Wright shows no sign of slowing down any time soon, so Pabst has looked a little further afield for career opportunities. After graduating from the U, she earned a Ph.D. in the history of consciousness from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 2000. Then came Woodrow Wilson and W.E.B. DuBois fellowships at Harvard. This fall, Pabst takes up a tenure-track position in the Department of African-American Studies at Yale, with a secondary appointment in American studies.
Pabst is the single mother of a three-year-old daughter, whom she calls the "secret of whatever small success I can thus far claim." Otherwise, the great satisfactions of her life these days appear to be rooted in the realm of the intellect. "The life of the mind," she says, "is an utter joy to me." Paraphrasing a quote from Toni Morrison, she says of her work, "I'm writing what I would like to read."