In this interview, historian Matthew Guterl discusses his academic journey, focusing on race, citizenship, and history through a transnational lens. He highlights the influence of his educational experiences at Rutgers and the innovative nature of his scholarly work, including the exploration of 'fugitive spaces.' Guterl also reflects on his collaborative work on hotel life and its implications for understanding American identity and architecture.

1. INTERVIEW
FUGITIVE SPACES
Matthew Guterl on radical practices of history and citizenship
Interview by Henry Jacob Transcribed by Meera ShoaibJuly 17, 2020
How would you describe yourself in two sentences?
I am a historian of race and nation with a particular
interest in transnational cultural history. I am also a li-
felong affiliate of Black studies programs and American
studies programs and History departments.
I have come to approach history from the transna-
tional perspective as a college student. When did
you adopt and how have you adapted your own un-
derstanding of history over the years? I had the great
fortune to find myself in a fairly innovative and avant-
garde history programme in a small state college in
South Jersey. Black, Native, and racial history were core
constituents of its curriculum; that normalized things
for me. It created a set of expectations that the profes-
sional study of history was always about race, diffe-
rence, and power.
I also had the fortune as a citizen of New Jersey to move
through its university system and end up at Rutgers,
which was then and still is a wellspring of Black history.
Even more, I arrived when David Levering Lewis started
teaching graduate students again. I worked with him
and Deborah Gray White. That continued routinizing
a history of race and power for me. After all, this was
the 1990s at Rutgers; the question of social construc-
tions of race, class, and gender was already settled law
on campus. That also created a set of possibilities, or
certainties, for me as a budding scholar.
You noted that attending Stockton and Rutgers felt
like a “fortune.” You also alluded to the strength of
your undergraduate classes as well as the brilliance
of your mentors in graduate school. What classes
throughout your schooling have stuck with you
his morning I have the pleasure to sit down with Matthew
Guterl, Professor of Africana Studies and American Studies
and Chair of American Studies at Brown University. In this
engaging conversation,Professor Guterl and I will discuss space,race,
and the task of the historian today.
T
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2. most? I would say two in particular at Rutgers. Those
experiences were vivid then, and they remain so now.
Deborah taught the first and David the second.
Deborah had what I have since come to see as a very
lovely teaching style. But it was hard to realize that as
a student: she tore papers to pieces. When you were
done with them — even when you’d think you'd written
something beautiful and brilliant — she dismantled it
brick by brick. That being said, you still got an A in the
class, and in your annual reviews she still said the most
amazing things about you as a student. I continue to
think of hers as a model practice. As a pedagogue, I am
as critical as the situation needs but never let it be per-
sonal. In fact, deep criticism is inherently constructive
when it’s impersonal.
David taught an extremely difficult, yearlong seminar
in African American intellectual and cultural history.
Eight students started the class but only four finished.
The four that finished would be Khalil Muhammad,
Jelani Cobb, John Aveni, and myself. David expected
that we would read four or five books a week, but none
of them were at the bookstore. Early on, Jelani, Khalil,
and I developed a book buying network. Jelani was up-
town, Khalil was in New Jersey, and I was in Queens.
We scoured the local bookstores for used copies of Cro-
non’s biography of Marcus Garvey, for example. After
getting the book, we would hustle to read it and get it to
somebody else. Whether he intended to or not, David
fostered a commitment to collaboration and friendship.
We all learned to work together in that class by sharing
the labor of finding what we needed. Remember, this
was before Jstor, let alone Amazon!
I recognize the pleasure of selecting and obtaining
a book. I relied on used book vendors to get my
summer reading after my first year at Yale. Every
weekend, I spent hours poring over recommendation
lists online before choosing my next batch. I wanted
to have my own copies because I encountered many
of these classic Latin American authors for the first
time. I divided up my research and my literature in
two separate stacks, one came from Yale Library and
the second from another person’s bookshelf.
Because I could buy these novels for $1 or $2, I got
a lot of them. Even though I loved looking at other’s
traces in the pages, I stopped getting these se-
cond-hand books. They cost $1 for a reason; they were
dusty and smelled terrible so my mom said I couldn’t
have them anymore. I still remember the joy of seeing
one of those cardboard boxes waiting for me on the
front stoop. For me, it was going into these unusual
bookstores to get them. Back in the 90s, there were still
little bookstores full of used copies in New York. These
stores were archives of possibility. All sorts of people
came into them, sparking various interesting conver-
sations. The books that you picked up often contained
somebody else's thoughts in the marginalia. In a weird
way, we entered into these fugitive spaces. We picked
up another’s vital text when they had set it aside, then
shared it among ourselves. We were in collaboration
with a larger group of readers and thinkers.
I’m going to touch on a phrase you just mentioned
from — “fugitive spaces”. How do you engage with
this phrase from Fred Moten inside and outside of
your scholarship? Drawing on Moten’s work, I think
about fugitivity as a scholarly practice. But I also try
to broaden the concept beyond what Moten describes.
The attention that we pay to fugitivity is a necessary
In addition to many fellowships, Guterl
received the Mary C. Turpie Prize in 2010 for
distinguished teaching, service, and program
development in American Studies.
Photo courtesy of Matthew Guterl
“You must recognize
when you enter
a space that's off
center, off balance,
out of the limelight,
and contains
subversive or radical
possibility.”
ON THE NEXT PAGE
2 MATTHEW GUTERL

4. precondition to be an alert and alive citizen in the wor-
ld. You must recognize when you enter a space that's
off center, off balance, out of the limelight, and contains
subversive or radical possibility. This is what it means to
be citizens in the best, global, most compassionate sense
of the term. A person must notice when and where you
enter and leave these spaces, and also what power they
contain for others in them.
I would like to transition to your work on hotels.
Upon a cursory glance, the hotel might seem an odd
subject for you to explore. But as your comments de-
monstrate, studying these “off center” places such as
the hotel complements your research on American
identity. How would you place Hotel Life in relation
to your other works? That book originated out of my
lifelong friendship with Caroline Levander, a scholar of
literature and humanities at Rice. We planned to col-
laborate on a project related to 19th century travel to
the Caribbean. But we could not get it off the ground at
all. Eventually, we decided to focus on something that
neither of us had any expertise in and develop a third
space of scholarly knowledge.
We struggled for a year, unable to decide what we mi-
ght write about. We agreed to meet at the Hotel ZaZa
when I went to Houston for a conference. While sitting
in the lobby, we started talking about space. At some
point, Caroline said we should write a book about ho-
tels — that idea stuck. We started listing all the different
functions and spaces of the hotel. We discussed how the
hotel works to keep itself hidden, how it contains radi-
cal as well as conservative possibilities.
It turns out there's a very rich literature, much of it trade
literature, on the function of the hotel. By design, the
hotel is divided up into public and private space. You
can do whatever you want to in the private domicile of
the bedroom. We took about a year and a half to write
the book — and we completed every chapter by email.
This was a very personal project for me, not an anodyne
careerist publication. Even more, it has been great to
think not only about what the hotel is, but also what we
could do in that third space after completing this book.
When I opened Hotel Life, one name came to mind:
Foucault. How is this work in conversation with his
writings on the genealogy of disciplinary institu-
tions? At the beginning, we wanted to do for hotels
what Foucault did for prisons in Discipline and Punish.
That being said, we weren’t as keen to cover historical
terrain. We weren’t interested in what came before the
hotel, but instead in what came after. Unlike Foucault,
who very brilliantly uses case studies to condense his
arguments, we analyzed an institution whose very na-
ture is chimerical. The hotel, unlike the prison, has no
singular purpose. It tries to be whatever its guest wants
it to be. The hotel occupies a dissonant place in the
history of modern institutions. We wanted to exploit
this so we used a different scope. Instead of covering a
historical arc, we provided a core sample of the major
contemporary meanings of the hotel — the hotel as a
radical fugitive space, as a heterodystopia, as a horrific
space.
You published Hotel Life in 2015. Do you plan to write
a sequel? We believe that we will but don’t know when
we’ll do it. Our next project — which is still in its early
stages — started with Michael Jackson’s Neverland. We
started thinking about the notion of the American es-
tate, and this aristocratic notion of space in a country
that pretends to be a democracy. Think of mansions like
the Biltmore Estate. What is this royalist pretension,
where does it come from, and why does it stick with us?
While I was travelling in March for a conference, I re-
member marveling at the view of Austin from my ho-
tel room. I saw the stages of gentrification before me;
skyscrapers stood to my left and then in front of me
lay an imposing but uncompleted building filled with
4 MATTHEW GUTERL
“We’re not
talking about
memorialization per
se,but the vainglorious
symbolization of a
politically contentious
figure.”

5. construction workers and machines. Do you hold
onto any impressions of urban architecture from
your pre-quarantine travels? We went to the Highline
in New York City in late February. It’s fascinating — the
Simone Leigh sculpture was up at the north end right
underneath Hudson Yards. I remember looking at the
scale of Hudson Yards above us while trying to make
sense of why Leigh’s work was there. Hudson Yards, if
anything, is a vulgar, gross, giant thing. It’s beautiful and
awe-inspiring — it looks like science fiction — but it’s
just so enormous. It humiliates you. It obliterates your
ability to see anything else.
Let’s pause on the idea of obliteration. Like Hudson
Yards, monuments impose themselves upon viewers.
But monuments do not just overwhelm viewers be-
cause of their size; they articulate a certain — perhaps
contested — interpretation of the past. Quite literally,
monuments elevate a figure above the general public.
You’re up on a plinth, you’re on top of a column, you are
in white marble or bronze. You’re indestructible, hard,
and elevated. The very nature of their construction
lends to a very formulaic reading of what they project.
Monuments that take this up intentionally — and try to
square the politics symbolism of the image — often are
the ones that seem most garish. For example, the Teddy
Roosevelt statue outside the American Museum of Na-
tural History — which is soon to be removed — isn’t a
statute of Roosevelt alone. It’s a statue of him in relation,
and those relationships reveal a deeper argument. The
same is true of Mount Rushmore: those foreheads are
carved into a Native mountain for a reason. We’re not
talking about memorialization per se, but the vainglo-
rious symbolization of a politically contentious figure.
For me, the work of history isn’t about seeing something
in its natural, presumably divine, public manifestation.
It's not going to bother me to take a source off its plinth
and go into a basement, or even a garage. If all I have is
a photograph, that’s fine. Historians are trained to make
this sort of work come to life and recover things that are
lost. I don’t need the statue of Jeb Stewart or Robert E.
Lee in a public square in order to write about it.
At the end of The Inquisitor as Anthropologist, Carlo
Ginzburg suggests we as historians could learn from
inquisitors and anthropologists as we interpret ar-
chives. How do you approach the archive? Usually you
confront a bureaucracy that has expropriated the mate-
rial of your work, and has indexed it in some particular
way. As a historian, you push against the weight of that
organization to obtain sources.
Historians have used many metaphors to describe
their profession — archeologist, detective, etc. What
do you consider yourself? I had an odd, almost child-
like interest in the historian as a detective because I read
Robin Winks as an undergraduate. The ritualistic order
of police procedures and detective fiction fascinate me
and many of the historians I know. I think there’s so-
mething about the narrative structure of detective fic-
tion that allows for the reveal at the end, and the slow
build towards it, that mimics the way good historians
write about things. You don’t give it all away in the first
chapter: otherwise no one would read it.
I would also compare the historian to the writer, or
the novelist. You don’t time-travel back into someone’s
house and see the way things are laid out on their desk.
You’ve got to do that work in your head, which requires
creativity and innovation. In the last ten years, I’ve read
a lot of Black speculative fiction, about which I teach
a course. This helps me to get out of the groove I’m in,
and it recalibrates my expectations for the materials I
encounter.
This ties back to the beginning of our conversation
about fugitive spaces. How do these works of specu-
lative fiction provide radical visions of citizenship?
We read Kindred two weeks before students had to pack
up and leave in March. Kindred is about someone who
is relentlessly prepared. She’s a list-maker. When she’s
confronted with this strange time travel that happens
without explanation, she packs a bag, thinks about
what should go into the bag while exploring the rules
of time travel. We talked a lot about that as a model —
it’s almost a Black speculative Boy Scout tradition. That
conversation was good for everyone — the world is an
uneven place, and it’s more uneven for many people
than for me.
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