As I'm undertaking my research semester, spending three months in Germany, I'm beginning to realize more and more that the project I have chosen to investigate has a lot do with my personal history and my subject position. To some extent, this was true for my first book, where I applied my own history of having attended blues concerts at a young age and about my evolving consciousness of racialization processes and racial contentions, but it's much more true for my Krautrock project, as it deals with issues of national identity and belonging. Having brought my 6-headed German-American family with me to Germany, it brings up questions of what "home" means and how American/European ethnic identities are formed and transformed.
To put it in a different way: I catch myself being surprised at how little I have "accomplished" so far, how little I am interested in pursuing specific research tasks such as conducting interviews and going to archives and how much I am trapped in dealing with deceivingly simple issues such as who I am as an individual and who we are as a family. Don't get me wrong, I'm keeping busy writing book reviews, reader reports, preparing for a string of guest lectures at German universities, contemplating possible options of publishing my research as a book. What's becoming more important to me, however, is not so much that I can successfully continue to play the academic game and do all those things you need to do to get tenure, but that I am working on something that is meaningful to both me and an audience (no matter how small that audience may be). More meaningful than "just" getting tenure.
