"Discipline is not good with contemporary studies," he said. "There are no archives with contemporary studies. You must create it."
Some scholars are working to create those archives. Jack Tschen, one of the panelists and director of Asian American studies at NYU, has worked on documenting Chinese-American history by doing field work in Chinese-American communities.
"The complexity of their lives defy any theories in the academia," he said.
He added that culture is "not situated in abstract theoretical context but located in historical experience."
Dilip Gaonkar, co-director of Afro-American studies at Northwestern University, discussed the importance of case studies in approaching ethnic studies.
"Most objects [in ethnic studies] are episodic," he said. "The question for ethnic studies is how would it choose its objects."
But Gaonkar said he believed that theories cannot comprehend these episodic objects.
"Ethnic episodes are like seizures, you cannot politically react to them but only reflect on them afterwards," he said. "That's what the writers, the filmmakers are trying to do--what rationalizing and theorizing can't."
Recognizing the United States as a "fissured and fragmented culture space," Doris Sommer, professor of Romance languages and literatures, said the United States itself remains ripe for greater study and introspection.
"[The U.S. is] a complex cultural map...If we can understand America as not just what makes us Americans but what makes us black Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos...if we can focus on those incommensurable identities, making transparent our differences will bring about a celebration of differences," she said.
The "search for home" of second- or third-generation immigrants in America seemed to be another favorite topic.
Juan Flores, who will be a visiting professor at Harvard in the spring, told an anecdote about a place he visited in Puerto Rico populated by Puerto Rican-Americans who had returned to Puerto Rico. The people there spoke English better than Spanish, he said. They "went home, but not quite home," he said.
Flores called it "a diaspora within a diaspora."
Michael Hsu '98, chair of ESAC, said he found the symposium insightful.
"I particularly enjoyed Dilip Gaonkar's presentation on the problems of losing the object-domain in cultural studies--this is a mistake Harvard is prone to make, given the tendency in the social sciences to lose touch with reality and expound in one's theories," he said in an e-mail message.
The ESAC is a student group whose main agenda is to help start an undergraduate concentration in comparative race and ethnic studies, which ESAC described in a flyer as "the study of how racial and ethnic distinctions affect communities of people as reflected through their histories, literature and cultures, and also through their relationship with legislation, politics and economy."