Published in the Spring 2026 Newsletter.
In this, my first president’s column, I begin by turning to the work of the person most responsible for my foray into the academy and the creative arts. Michael S. Harper was the Israel J. Kapstein Professor of English and University Professor at Brown University, where he taught from 1970 up until the time of his death in 2015. In addition to holding a revered place among the US poets of his generation, he mentored countless students, several of whom went on to become important contributors to African American letters, and he sent us into the academy with this admonition: “The Civil War is not over.”
One of the most lasting themes in Harper’s poems has to do with the consequences of amnesia. His 1972 volume of poems Song: I Want a Witness opens:
When there is no history
there is no metaphor;
a blind nation in storm
mauls its own harbors:
sperm whale, Indian, black
belted in these ruins. (1)
Harper references a historical sensibility unwilling to shrink from the more disturbing aspects of US history, including genocide, slavery, and environmental violence. But he insists that historical remembrance is not enough; we must also confront the consequences of amnestic failure. In the lines “a blind nation in storm / mauls its own harbors,” a country unwilling to see itself and its surroundings destroys all possibility for creating safe spaces in which US history, and past failures in particular, constitutes a form of archaeological investigation through which we unearth atrocities for which we must hold ourselves accountable.
In January 2014, I was scheduled to deliver a Martin Luther King, Jr., Day address at Moorestown High School in New Jersey. In the weeks leading up to the address, I received several communications from staff members and a student at the school. The history teacher who served as the faculty adviser to the club organized by Black and other minority students asked me not to discuss the death of Trayvon Martin during my address but instead to save my thoughts on his death for the breakfast I was scheduled to have with the minority students after the assembly. The Black student body president warned me that “[i]f anyone leaves your talk feeling bad about being accused of racism, we will be very upset.” And in a phone call on my way to the event, a vice principal, who identified himself as Black, reminded me that I had been invited to talk about Mahatma Ghandi, Nelson Mandela, and King as men whose commitment to love was “the reason we are in the position we’re in today with President Barack Obama.” When I said that such a position was ahistorical and a distortion of current events (especially since the “birther” movement questioning President Obama’s citizenship was in full swing), the vice principal canceled my talk. Ten minutes away from the high school, I turned my car around and headed back home.
The school administrators were afraid of being confronted by angry white parents who would be upset by their children’s being made to feel complicit with the violence and inhumane treatment of the oppressed in both the present and the past. What I find so disheartening is the school’s decision to adopt a false civility, a version of history planed of all its rough edges, so as not to leave splinters or break the skin.
The narrative Harper invites us to consider is one that offers sober, clear-eyed assessments of those moments when the country failed to live up to its promises. Harper’s goal is for us to generate an understanding of the nation’s history that could balance the nobility of its aspirations against the failures of imagination (race, gender, sexuality, and class) that led to the disenfranchisement and debasement of millions of its citizens. Harper often referred to W. B. Yeats’s idea that memories are old identities. Perhaps we must resist nostalgia not because it obscures our ability to turn away from blind acts of destruction but in order to embrace the new identities we author into being through leaps of faith.
My presidential theme for this year’s MLA convention is Emancipatory Narratives. I settled on this theme because I am a scholar of African American literature, which is filled with images of and metaphors for emancipatory gestures: Frederick Douglass’s declaration, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will”; Robert Hayden’s insistence that we must “master . . . love’s instruments” (47); Gayl Jones’s simple observation, in her poem “Deep Song,” “The blues calling my name. / She is singing a deep song. / She is singing a deep song. / I am human”; a character in Toni Morrison’s novel Home declaring, “Somewhere inside you is that free person I’m talking about” (126).
The Modern Language Association has been my professional home for my entire academic career, and I realize that what brings me to this unexpected position of MLA president is the leap of faith Harper took on a twenty-one-year-old undergraduate forty-five years ago. Harper saw past my false bravado and my fear that the academy would ever provide safe harbor, and he tutored me in ways that have continued into the present.
I am blessed to be president in a moment when totalitarianism has moved beyond mere impulse, mere passing thought, to become a concrete set of initiatives and acts that seek to disable and distort—if not destroy outright—our ability to express ourselves without fear of censure. First and foremost, I want to insist that you, the nearly twenty thousand people who constitute the MLA’s membership, are my partners in the effort to keep the humanities, in particular our commitment to the centrality of language and literature, in the forefront of intellectual, political, and social engagement. For I know from experience that we do this willingly: unbowed, unabashed, and undeterred.
Works Cited
Douglass, Frederick. “If There Is No Struggle, There Is No Progress.” Canandaigua, NY, 1857. School of Cooperative Individualism, cooperative-individualism.org/douglass-frederick_if-there-is-no-struggle-there-is-no-progress-1857-aug.pdf. Transcript.
Harper, Michael S. Song: I Want a Witness. U of Pittsburgh P, 1972.
Hayden, Robert. Words in the Mourning Time. October House, 1970.
Jones, Gayl. “Deep Song.” Iowa Review, vol. 6, no. 2, 1975, p. 11.
Morrison, Toni. Home. Alfred A. Knopf, 2012.