Transverse Disciplines: Queer-Feminist, Anti-racist, and Decolonial Approaches to the University ed. by Simone Pfleger and Carrie Smith (review)

Reviewed by: Transverse Disciplines: Queer-Feminist, Anti-racist, and Decolonial Approaches to the University ed. by Simone Pfleger and Carrie Smith Faye Stewart Transverse Disciplines: Queer-Feminist, Anti-racist, and Decolonial Approaches to the University. Edited by Simone Pfleger and Carrie Smith. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022. Pp. xx + 379. Cloth $80.00. ISBN 9781487508456. What futures can be imagined for German studies? Appearing at a time of multiple and converging academic crises—including the widely-decried crisis of the humanities—Simone Pfleger and Carrie Smith's edited volume, Transverse Disciplines, speculates about where the discipline is going, what is possible, and how it might navigate changes necessitated by institutional mandates, financial urgencies, and political realities. The answers this book offers embrace heterogeneity and rethink the field, its positionality vis-à-vis diversity, and its relationships to other area studies and adjacent disciplines. Together with an international slate of contributors, Smith and Pfleger reframe this watershed moment as grounds for the fertilization and metamorphosis of both the discipline and our institutions by cultivating sustainable connections, fostering feminist collaborations, amplifying marginalized voices, and centering antiracist, decolonial, queer, and anticapitalist practices. Pfleger and Smith situate this collection as a rallying cry in the midst of intersecting emergencies. A 2021 preface, "Forging Alliances in the Burning Present," reflects on the book's publication at the junctures between three intertwined crises: the global COVID-19 pandemic; violence against Black and Indigenous, as well as other People of Color, and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement; and the ecological damage and multiplying disasters linked to climate change. If nothing else, they contend, these crises reveal our interconnectedness and interdependence while also exposing the unsustainability of attempts to "save" German studies, ensure its "survival," or make it more "resilient" by reifying disciplinary boundaries or tokenizing diversity initiatives. This urgent call for transformation echoes the work being done in other areas of the profession, such as by the DDGC Collective (Diversity, Decolonization, and the German Curriculum), whose co-founders Regine Criser and Ervin Malakaj contend in the 2020 edited volume Diversity and Decolonization in German Studies that the discipline is at a crossroads, and that the dismantling of racist oppression and a pivot toward social justice are imperative to reorient and reinvigorate it. Recent special issues, debates, and forum essays in The German Quarterly and Seminar also attest to the growing commitment to decolonization discourses and endeavors. The essays in "Indigenous and German Studies," a 2019 special issue of Seminar co-edited by Smith, together with Renae Watchman and Markus Stock, are cited by several contributors to Transverse Disciplines as especially formative in their thinking about disciplinary structures and epistemologies. How does one approach disciplines transversally? The contributions offer diverse visions. In a co-authored introduction, editors Pfleger and Smith explain their choice of the adjectival form "transverse" over other modifiers or prefixes to denote interconnectivity [End Page 175] achieved through dynamic movement, gathering, and community building (14). For Maria Stehle, "transverse" similarly "describes the reach across various conceptual entities or disciplines, to assemble anew, to defy existing structures, and search for new connection" (266). In the opening chapter, Claudia Breger historicizes the project of Germanistik, arguing that transversality always has been at its core. Taking to heart the model of education espoused by bell hooks in Teaching to Transgress, Jamele Watkins seeks to inspire others to challenge anti-Blackness by centering Black German studies in the curriculum. For Jennifer Hoyer, transversal intersections with non-humanities fields like mathematics produce novel methodologies and epistemologies. For Helen Finch and Evan Torner, the transdisciplining necessitated by the shrinking of language and literature programs leads to generative partnerships. Smith's own contribution assesses "well-functioning" yet largely invisible university infrastructures as stabilized by the pillars of critical antiracist, queer-feminist, and decolonial thinking (244–45). Transverse Disciplines offers a toolkit for transformation. It consists of a co-authored preface and introduction and three sections featuring fourteen essays by German studies and cross-affiliated scholars in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The first section, "Situating Disciplinarity: Diagnoses, Genealogies, and Possibilities," examines the humanities and Germanistik for opportunities to recompose them expansively and inclusively. Three of...

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