Of America

Marianne Hirsch·
Columns by Marianne Hirsch

Originally published in the Summer 2013 MLA Newsletter

What does it mean, in 2013, to be the Modern Language Association of America? What map is covered by the MLA’s location and activities? Should this map evolve? If so, how?

The MLA is the world’s largest scholarly society in the humanities, and it aims to serve a worldwide community of scholars and teachers of languages, literatures, and cultures. It fulfills this aspiration well in a number of areas. The MLA Job Information List posts openings from universities all over the world. The MLA International Bibliography is the preeminent worldwide research tool for literary studies; its sales reach across 50 countries; 22 out of 120 field bibliographers work outside the United States; and there are more than 25,000 entries annually in European, Asian, African, and Latin American literatures. The seventh edition of the MLA Handbook has recently been translated into Chinese. The MLA’s publication series Approaches to Teaching World Literature, Options for Teaching, World Literatures Reimagined, and Texts and Translations provide teaching materials for, theoretical reflections on, as well as translations of texts written in numerous lan­guages and emerging from diverse literary traditions. The series Teaching Languages, Literatures, and Cultures offers analyses of new language-teaching methodologies, research, and curriculum design for a number of commonly and less commonly taught languages. Writers from around the world are among the MLA’s honorary fellows.

The MLA offers travel grants so that regular and life members residing outside the United States and Canada can attend the convention. Still, only between 4% and 5% of participants attending the last three conventions traveled from abroad. And only 13% of MLA members reside outside the United States (8.75% outside the United States and Canada).

The association divides its work into two large and inclusive parts: English and, variously, “foreign languages” (as in the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages) or “languages other than English.” Only one-third of MLA members work on nonanglophone languages and literatures, and, of these, European languages are far more widely represented than languages from other parts of the planet. One need only consult the MLA Language Map, however, to see that none of these languages is “foreign” in the multilingual United States, and “other than” underscores a linguistic hierarchy that makes it all the more challenging to multiply language fields within the association.

I know I’m not alone in finding the MLA’s imperial “of America” troubling and the split between English and “foreign” languages frustrating. What are some alternative terms? World languages? The US MLA? North America? Or simply the Modern Language Association?

These recalcitrant lexical stumbling blocks should not obscure what we all know: that a vast number of our members, including those who are ostensibly in English, are bi-or multilingual; that we have origins, as well as personal and professional ties, all over the world; and that we work in multiple languages and in numerous planetary networks of intellectual exchange. These ties are as deep as they are vast, and they are visible in our individual and collective work. But how can the association more fully reflect these interrelations?

The Executive Council has recently renewed its commitment to “internationalizing” the MLA. Efforts to expand the representation of underrepresented world languages (Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, and more) and to facilitate pedagogical and scholarly work on less commonly taught languages are already under way, and membership from these fields should increase accordingly. Beyond that, we need to pause and ask what it means to internationalize a scholarly institution responsibly at a moment when globalization is a buzzword mobilized throughout the academy in response to economic, political, and so-called security priorities.

The MLA’s multifaceted projects provide ample reasons for a broad international membership. What is more, the MLA’s structure as a multilingual and interdisciplinary organization can offer models of collaboration and exchange with other scholarly associations. The humanities are neglected and underfunded in the age of economic globalization, and the MLA’s advocacy work on behalf of language and literature has implications beyond the United States’ borders. A growing international membership would spur more robust discussion about these urgent issues as well as promote deeper collaborations in a variety of fields at the annual convention and on MLA Commons, where online capabilities foster less costly networks of intellectual communication.

A project initiated by the Executive Council represents a new approach to internationalizing. In the past, the MLA has held small symposia on specific topics in various cities in the United States. The council is contemplating col­laborating with colleagues in several parts of the world to organize MLA international symposia, which would be structured around pressing issues in the humanities and held every three years.

Many of us have attended international conferences and experienced the divergent approaches emerging from distinct traditions of scholarship and teaching. We have also encountered the pauses occasioned by difficulties in translation, by miscommunications and misunderstandings that can occur as we cross borders. For example, do colleagues in Argentina or Brazil feel included by the prepositional phrase of America in the MLA’s name? A conference in the southern part of the hemisphere would have to address these prepositional and geographic designations. As we organize international symposia through the MLA, we need to build pauses and untranslatabilities into the discussion. Doing so, we can enrich our reflections on how language, history, and place shape the production of knowledge. And we can try to foster multilingual and multilocal professional links that begin in different locations and create new connections across borders.

In the near future, MLA international symposia might address topics such as translation, migration and diaspora, environmental criticism, medical humanities, religion and secularism, and media studies. Building on these sym­posia, might we envision future MLA working groups, with live and virtual participation, that would engage in active collaborations across national, linguistic, and disciplinary frontiers? Actually, the association’s name does not preclude this since, according to the OED, of originally meant not “connected with” or “referring to” but “away” or “away from”—as in “south of the border,” for example. Being “of America,” the MLA would then also be moving outward, away from its borders, however construed. Might we thus also look toward a Modern Language Association with conventions located beyond America?

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  1. What was it about this particular President’s column that sent me bolting for the door, the garden gate and into the forest, now pathless, with a stock scream from Munch lodged in my throat? What acknowledgment of truths that had made of my kind lapsed academics, mute consignees of an omnipresent BUT which punctuates every sentence of every work we read from the interpreters of culture? What hit so close to the bone that I cannot muster a comme il faux comment for this space, with emotion recollected in tranquility?

    “Of America”—not us. But I must stop with “we” and “us,” “my kind.” For those who are not “of” live singularly. How does the nationhood of culture terrorIze?

    This narrative “I” has lived in three distinct cultural spaces vying with each other for hegemony—the Soviet Bloc, America and Western Europe. Despite the lip service paid to “internationalism” by the one, “multiculturalism” by the other, and “liberty, equality, fraternity” by the next, the “I,” because it strayed, got knocked down a peg at every stop.

    The terror “OF” began with communist building blocks, when “I” was pushed in front of a streetcar by a gang of three at ten, because “I” (though a Jew and cosmopolitan) recited works for class by the iconic poet of the people. Get thee to Disneyland, thought “I,” but got transplanted instead to the land of Cleve, where deportation back to the Internationale threatened for years if “I” didn’t let the American husband wreak havoc on imported mother and child.

    All this, admittedly, occurred outside the purview of academe. So what did institutional space enclose (in its darkroom for converting negatives) when officially all centers were being folded out and panopticons condemned?

    That the terrorism of Nation invested critical space McCarthy-fashion as late as the 90s becomes clear from the case of two foreign graduate students who, well respected by mentors and peers alike, were failed on their doctoral exam (and only they) to everyone’s surprise, not for lack of knowledge (and not by the examiner). Both candidates had taken on sacred cows of the canon—Shakespeare and Jefferson, the one from the perspective of the “Turk,” the other from that of “color.” And when it came to Notes on the State of Virginia, the reader that had passed the exam with flying colors received a midnight visit from the colleague to whom he owed his (slightly corked) career, and when the other thundered “Fail this!” he obliged. This came to light straight from the darkroom and the horse’s mouth. By the time appeals were heard, upheld and sealed, and the two candidates rehabilitated to the light, they no longer felt “Of America.”

    Perhaps had they kept to safer pastures (their respective cultures) to peruse, they could’ve made it to home base. As it turned out, they fell through the looking glass where all was baseless and far removed from home.

    After obtaining a doctorate in what certain establishments of higher learning mistook for “environmental studies” (and drank from) though it was clearly labeled “cybernetics and cultural theory” (deadly poison!), “I” crossed the ocean with Barthes, Foucault and Derrida kicking and screaming. The reason for their tantrum soon became apparent. On arrival, immediately applying myself to the plying of my trade (not as environmentally friendly as some thought), “I” found the Frankish version of the MLA of America (and like “green-ish,” not so frank), the American Studies Association of France, pointing an accusing finger and furrowing its brow. They had taken one appalled look at my credentials “Of America” in American Studies and unloosed their pen (as mighty as the sword in practicing national terror): “This candidacy cruelly illustrates the excesses of certain American college departments who recruit students into what can only be called an enterprise of mystification. The French University shall never resign itself to these savage importations of philosophy much of which is of French origin anyway, but recycled to the point that it is but a shadow or parody of the original. Unless the candidate undertakes the drafting of a real dissertation culminating in a real defense in one of our own universities, the right to teach [American Studies] in this country is denied.” Which was seconded by: “What would like to pass itself off as the methodological rigor—if not the terrorism—of theory, is just a culture replete with ready-made ideas, a parody of itself. This, it must be understood, is not what the present reader considers a true education. The right to teach [American Studies] in this country is denied.”

    After five years of trying to prove myself a worthy Frank, “I” did at last obtain the right to be an American in Paris. But cultural nationalism pursues at every step.

    Upon submitting the book which speaks with a migrant voice (to some a contradiction in terms) to publishers and agents of Anglo-Saxon ilk (for while speaking in tongues, “I” will remain “Of America” for good), the following objections have been raised: “You’re Eastern European. I already have one on my list. Besides, your book has nothing to do with England.”; “Your manuscript is well developed, with beautiful writing that presents a moving story. Regretfully, we have to decline. While our readers like it, the fact that we are dependent on arts funding (only available to Canadian authors) is too much of a consequence given the state of the industry. In better days, we could publish more non-Canadian authors.” Idem, idem, idem.

    “There was a child went forth every day [and] all became part of him,” but the child did not become a part of anything. Even cosmopolitanism excludes. In the recent Routledge Handbook of Cosmopolitanism Studies (ed. Gerard Delanty), “rooted cosmopolitanism” has rooted out the rootless cosmopolitan, and not one out of the forty five articles in the volume addresses the state of not belonging (or the plight of the Roma, for that matter, which go hand in hand). Denied a voice again, my kind get our vicarious communal pleasure from reading Marquez and Morrison.

    This is why I feel profoundly grateful to Professor Hirsch for throwing open the doors of her community of immigrants to outlandish, migrant voices. This move took courage at a time when the collapse of western economies has goaded the national beast, if certain of my own university colleagues’ and students’ anti-Arab, anti-Jewish and anti-Chinese slurs are any indication of the direction of the wind.

    Building on Professor Hirsch’s premise, I would like to submit a modest proposal. Our university curricula have us all pegged—from Area Studies to Comparative Lit, what is compared are national/regional (and therefore fixed) identities, not to mention the tidy languages and literatures of multiculture. In order that Jack-in-the-box be set free, I propose the establishment of “Migrant” or “Cosmopolitan Studies Institutes” on the principle of the “Humanities Institutes” of the 80s/90s crossing disciplines. Their faculty would be hired not as a game of pigeonhole, but on the strength of their diverse hybridizations. How better to prepare our students for a multi-polar world? And how better to wrest power from the globalizer in favor of the globalized? Like the Social Engineering of the 1950s, “Globalization Studies” prepares the technocrat for conquest. “Migrant Studies” prepares resistance by exposing “international” as meaning “among nations.” Maybe then “I” can cross the Atlantic once again, knowing that “I” might fare better than the friend who with her Yale degree hot off the press roamed China for two years to wind up her days as department secretary and not head, for having strayed.

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