Sophia Basaldua-Sun is an independent scholar of comparative literature. She received her Ph.D. in comparative literature from Stony Brook University. She lives in New York, where she spends her days working for Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
As a comparatist she works on Argentine, U.S., and French literature with a focus on turn-of-the-century prose depicting New York, Buenos Aires, and Paris. Her research goals are to contribute to the interdisciplinary work being done to connect urban studies and literary studies, and her contribution has been to explore the decolonial possibilities of the urban signifier “metropolis.”
Her work has appeared in journals like The Journal of Urban Cultural Studies and Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal.
She’s also the creator of The Metropolitanist, an academic microblog on Instagram, where she shares her research, reading, and where she used to review academic monographs.
You created The Metropolitanist as a way to make the study of the humanities more accessible, which is a mission we share here at The Hyacinth Review. What initially inspired you to start this work?
There were a lot of factors and events that led to me creating The Metropolitanist, but I think they all come together in the realization that the university classroom no longer seemed like the most effective way to either share humanities knowledge or advocate for the value of the humanities. My sense was that there was an eager audience beyond higher education that was interested in literature, but for professional reasons they couldn’t squeeze themselves into the confines of the academic classroom.
At the same time, there’s this preconception that the humanities, in our technology driven age, have no value, particularly because value as most people define it is economic value. The question that most humanities students have to face from a skeptical outside world is “what are you going to do with that degree?” As in, how are you going to get a job? Confronted with that question, students, understandably given the rising cost of higher education often paid for by student loans, tend to shy away from the humanities classroom not because of a lack of interest but because they need to know that on the other side of their degree is a job that will allow them to begin paying off their student loan debt.
There’s a lot one could say about the humanities and its relationship to the job market, and having made the leap to corporate work myself I can say that companies do actually value and look for candidates with humanities backgrounds, but that’s not why I made The Metropolitanist. When I decided to pursue a career in higher education I wanted to be a teacher and I saw an eager audience that didn’t have access. So I decided to create that space. I still don’t know if I do it particularly successfully, but I hope that people learn something from my feed not just about facts, but also about how to think, how to reason, and how to study.
What has been the biggest challenge you’ve faced while running The Metropolitanist?
I don’t think of The Metropolitanist as something that has necessarily been very challenging. It’s just sort of a fun hobby, and I try to keep it that way so that I don’t have to get too stressed about it.
A fun challenge was the aesthetic. I knew I had the intellectual content, but Instagram is an interesting marriage between the visual form of the image and the written form of the caption. The caption I knew I could take care of, but I’m not an artist, and developing a visual that naturally leads to the type of written content I produce was probably my biggest challenge.
Now I think I’ve got the aesthetic right, not that I’m not refining it, but to give one example: urbanism is a big part of my research, but beautiful travel photos of an urban environment don’t necessarily capture an audience that then wants to be told about scholarly urbanism. I’ve found developing an aesthetic around studiousness, reading, and writing creates a more natural transition from the initial impact of the image to the educational content of the caption.
Finding the right audience on Instagram and targeting them was another challenge. At first I imagined my audience as “everyone,” but of course everybody comes to social media to meet different needs. Taking myself as an example, I don’t want to study all the time. I get on TikTok and watch videos of pet birds a lot because they’re just amusing and I could use the relaxation. Now I think I have a better sense of where and how to capture the audience that is on social media for the kind of content I create.
Budgeting time and money have been more practical concerns. The easiest way to create content is to buy books and photograph them, buy stationery and photograph it. But I didn’t want the feed to be an endless parade of consumerism, so I needed to find a way to feature the same books over and over again in ways that would keep it visually fresh enough that again there was a match between the new material of the caption and the visual. I’ve found a lot of ways to accomplish that.
Time is the hardest. As a scholar I had next to no time because of the publish or perish paradigm. Now that I work 9-5 I have more time, but of course I also need to take time to relax and not turn everything into work, so I’m still trying to figure out how to balance work and The Metropolitanist, and that isn’t always fun. I do struggle with burnout and sometimes I fantasize about quitting. Still, I find the community that has found me to be really energizing, so I keep going and I look for ways to make the content production efficient by batch writing thematically. I’ve also scaled back from 7 posts a week when I started to 3 per week.
What is the most exciting thing to have come out of The Metropolitanist?
So many exciting things have come out of The Metropolitanist, it’s hard to say. But, I think probably going from an audience of 35 often unwilling STEM focused students in a classroom to a global classroom where almost 10,000 people have joined me on this account and where hundreds of people like, share, and save the posts. Thinking about the fact that so many people have voluntarily joined my project, and engage every day is definitely the most exciting part. Initially, part of what I set out to do was to prove that there was an audience for comparative literature (a field that has always been small and at risk of disappearing) and for humanities work more broadly. I think, collectively, we’ve proven that there is an audience for comparative literature.
Aesthetics are a big part of our magazine, but the study of Aesthetics can be quite narrow as it often focuses on 19th century Europe. Your work in comparative literature focuses on Argentina – how are Aesthetics approached in Argentine literature? Are there any Argentine works or authors who focus on Aesthetics that you can recommend to our readers?
I don’t really study aesthetics as a scholar, and Latin America since its Spanish colonization has been fundamentally defined by Europe, imperialism, and Eurocentrism so in a lot of ways the history of Argentine literature is a history of European aesthetics though with deviations.
Folks might look at modernismo, vanguardia, and boom literature. Borges obviously developed a unique aesthetic, if you like him then you should check out Macedonio Fernandez. For an aesthetic of the working class, which is my preference, you could look at Roberto Arlt, and for modernismo the poet Ruben Dario, who isn’t Argentine but Nicaraguan, still he made Buenos Aires his home and the home of modernismo. I would look at the scholar Julio Ramos’ book Divergent Modernities and Joseph Pierce’s Argentine Intimacies for considerations of aesthetics, Eurocentrism, and intentional and accidental challenges to it.
Many of our readers are writers and creators with busy lives who often lack the time to read as much as they’d like. What advice would you give to someone who is interested in reading more and getting the most out of their reading?
Well, I work a full time job in publishing, which doesn’t lead to as much reading as you might expect and if I read the way I should then I would have to be constantly trying to stay ahead of the market, so I get it. It’s tough to carve out time. I think the best advice I have is to do a little bit wherever you find the time. That’s the advice I often give for picking up long books as well, read a little bit every day but also don’t sweat it if you have to put the book down for a while, pick it up and come back to it. I’m starting to like flying because it’s one of the few places I get to read uninterrupted for hours.
I think it’s nice to keep a notebook for notes. I’ll often start by just writing down quotes I find striking. I also think it’s nice to take some time during a reading session (if I can find the time) to write down thoughts and reflections of what I’ve read. You may think you have nothing to say, but if I set a goal of one page I usually end up solidifying what I think about what I’ve read.
I love to read classic novels and old novels so if I really enjoy a book I might also do some scholarly reading by pulling articles from JSTOR or Project Muse and I think that’s also a fun way to extend the experience and get more of the book and its context.
One other way I cram in more reading is to keep a lot of ebooks on my phone, so any time I find a moment while I’m standing in a line, waiting on a restroom, whatever, I’ll take that time to read as well.
What would you consider key questions to ask when critically examining a piece of media?
To get more out of it I always like to start with simple questions:
What year was the book published? What is its original language? Who wrote it and have they written anything else I can read?
What is the point of view of the novel? Is it written in first person, second person, third person limited? Omniscient? What is the effect of the point of view (or points of view)? Whose point of view do we get and how does that fundamentally shape the narrative?
I was reading the recent National Book Award winning novel The Rabbit Hutch (which full disclosure the publishing house I work for published) and in that book there is a clear central character, but also a lot of chapters written from other perspectives, and finally a series of chapters in the first person but not from the point of view of the character I thought was the main character. Asking myself about this formal structure and its effects on the narrative as a whole really helped me interpret that novel in a way that I ultimately found satisfying.
In one of your Salon posts on Maison Metropolitanist you mention that one of your early Instagram goals was to find creative ways to present literary quotes. What is your favorite literary quote of all time?
I don’t know if I have favorite quotes per say, anymore, but two quotes that I loved when I was in high school and college, and that for me have been kind of the quotes I think of when I’m asked this question are the last lines of William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (I used this quote as my yearbook quote actually, when I was a senior in high school).
“Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum! which of us is happy in the world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?”
Then the other quote I always really loved is from Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence, which is a novel about art, aesthetics, and the life of a true artist.
“It is not difficult to be unconventional in the eyes of the world when your unconventionality is but the convention of your set.”
These are both quotes that, for me, make me ask myself about how to live, what actions to take, and what to spend my time/my life on.
Those who follow you on Instagram are well aware of the gorgeous stationery you photograph alongside your thought-provoking captions, so here’s a question that I’m sure you hear often: where do you source your stationery?
Everywhere all the time! I go to Amarillo Stationery for Latin American stationery, and then usually Yoseka Stationery for Asian stationery.
I really love Monarca Ink from Amarillo Stationery, they have amazing washi tapes by @letrasliterarias.mx. I have this little wooden box that carries ink that has been a travel gamechanger for me, and that’s from Amarillo Stationery as well, and of course I own many Apuntes Notebooks.
I get all of my Sailor fountain pens from Yoseka Stationery, and a lot of the notebooks I own that have tomoe river paper. Their store is really well stocked for fountain pen users. I buy all my sailor inks from them as well, and I want to venture out into more inks, but I haven’t really yet. They also sell a lot of amazing rubber stamps, so I get a lot of my stamps and PET tapes from their story.
Aside from notebooks with Tomoe River in them (I do a lot of my daily writing in a Hobinichi Cousin which is an A5 planner with daily blank pages), I really like Leuchtturm 1917 notebooks. When I was a bullet journaler those were what I used for bullet journaling, and now I keep a lot of my unstructured notes in Leuchtturms. I’m really itching to start using this forest green one, but right now I’m using one with a coral exterior and a dot grid.
Finally, I’m using a lot of Ferris Wheel Press inks because I’m one of their brand ambassadors. They do a lot of shimmer inks, but they’re very easy to use shimmers that don’t gum up the pen the way a lot of shimmer inks do, so I really recommend those for beginners who want to use shimmery inks because they’re just a little easier to use. In general, shimmers are more of an intermediate ink. My absolute favorite ink from them is one I really thought I would hate, which is Chidori Cherry Blossom. I didn’t think I was a pink ink person, but now I always keep one pen inked in it and I absolutely love it.
Finally, what media/music/miscellany have you been loving lately?
I don’t listen to a lot of music, but I do really like my Bizet station on Pandora. I really enjoy ambient noise videos on youtube, especially if they come with a fun virtual visual like an old library with a fireplace during a storm. I’m currently watching The Last of Us like everyone else, and then reading Leigh Bardugo’s new novel Hellbent, which is like a magical dark academia novel. I’m really enjoying that series. That’s sort of it, I think. My orchids are spiking, so I’m looking forward to getting some flowers from them soon.
Follow Along:
