Accountability and the Possibilities Discerned 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).