An Open Discussion of MLA Forum Structure

Dear colleagues: 
I deeply appreciate the MLA’s efforts to rethink the organization of its divisions and discussion groups.
First, let me say that I support the proposal to dissolve the distinction between “discussion groups” and “divisions” into a new category:  “groups.”  Symbolically, at least, this change will go some way toward eliminating the intellectual hierarchy that the current distinction implies.  And as scholars of language, literature, and other media, we know that symbolic capital is important.  Yet words just as surely mystify.  Whether material distinctions also will disappear is less sure:  I note that the MLA still intends to apportion resources unequally, giving some “groups” one guaranteed session and others two during the proposed transition period.  To invoke Orwell, then, some groups will be more equal than others.
 
That said, I find the proposed “map” of networks—presently organized under the broad categories “Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies,” “Genre and Media Studies,” “Languages, Literatures, and Cultures,” “Language Studies,” “Teaching and the Profession,” and “Transdisciplinary Connections”—out of sync with the MLA’s interest in jettisoning tired intellectual frameworks and in promoting more dynamic, fluid, transversal modes of knowledge-making in research and pedagogy, activism and advocacy.  The subdivisions proposed in the “Languages, Literatures, and Cultures” category strike me as not as forward-looking as they could be.  Why atomize the world’s languages, literatures, cultures into ever more infinitesimal particles?  Why array these in such a way that they appear unrelated?  I for one would like to see the “Languages, Literatures, and Cultures” category revised along the transcontinental lines currently envisioned under “Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies,” and perhaps also along transhistorical lines that at once concede and resist current periodizations. 
Is there any unit, after all, that is not inherently heterogeneous—for all its apparent self-sameness—and therefore also inherently comparative? 
I will cite just two cases in point:  “African” and “Arabic.”  First, I strongly oppose the proposed subdivision of the current Division on African Literature into “Southern African” and “Sub-Saharan African.”  I echo the sentiments of many of the colleagues who already have posted here.  The proposed subdivision perpetuates a fundamentally Eurocentric notion, at least as old as Hegel, that Africa “proper” is “sub-Saharan Africa”; it also, as Ato Quayson has noted, reifies the egregious apartheid-era distinction between South Africa and a denigrated African “core.”  We would do well to recall the words of the South African writer and ANC activist Mazisi Kunene, who declared (in the pioneering trilingual, Third Worldist journal Afro-Asian Writings, in 1967), “There is a political fallacy which seeks to divide Africa into two segments:  Africa, South of the Sahara and Africa, North of the Sahara. […] Arabic literature of North Africa, Nigerian, and Ethiopian literatures are as much an African heritage as Japanese is part of an Asian literary heritage,” and the better-known words of Frantz Fanon, whose Les Damnés de la terre (1961) warned against the desire to divide Africa into an “Afrique noire” and an “Afrique blanche.”  I would suggest, then, that the current category “African Literature” be left as is—perhaps amending the present focus on literature be amended to “African Orature, Literature, and Media”—and the number of sessions accorded to the group expanded.  The current category holds far more intellectual integrity than the subdivisions proposed, and the capaciousness and productive ambiguity of “African” better serve local, regional, and transregional scholarship on the continent’s oratures, literatures, and media.
Second, while the proposed subdivision of the current Division on Arabic Literature and Culture into “Classical and Postclassical Arabic” and “Modern Arabic” is, on its face, less egregious than the proposed vivisection of Africa, here too the strategy—while well-intentioned and in fact supported by some of my colleagues in the field—unwittingly ends up dividing and conquering a relatively small (if strong) community of established and emerging scholars.  Here too I would propose that the MLA retain the category “Arabic Literature and Culture”—perhaps amending the name to “Arabic Literatures, Cultures, and Media,” which might better reflect the plurality of “Arabics” and modes of Arab cultural production that flourish in the world—and expand the number of sessions accorded to the group.  As other scholars have pointed out, some of the most exciting work in Arabic literary and cultural studies today challenges the modern (and deeply ideological) theses of “decline” and “renaissance” that often have sequestered the “classical” from the “postclassical,” the “premodern” or (denigrated) “medieval” from the “modern.”  To my mind, at least, keeping Arabic “one” would be far better, intellectually and politically, than subdividing it by period or geography, given that so many of us in the field are working now—and many more of us will—to challenge and redefine hermetic periodizations and geographies.

Dear colleagues: 
I deeply appreciate the MLA’s efforts to rethink the organization of its divisions and discussion groups. 
First, let me say that I support the proposal to dissolve the distinction between “discussion groups” and “divisions” into a new category:  “groups.”  Symbolically, at least, this change will go some way toward eliminating the intellectual hierarchy that the current distinction implies.  And as scholars of language, literature, and other media, we know that symbolic capital is important.  Yet words just as surely mystify.  Whether material distinctions also will disappear is less sure:  I note that the MLA still intends to apportion resources unequally, giving some “groups” one guaranteed session and others two during the proposed transition period.  To invoke Orwell, then, some groups will be more equal than others. 
That said, I find the proposed “map” of networks—presently organized under the broad categories “Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies,” “Genre and Media Studies,” “Languages, Literatures, and Cultures,” “Language Studies,” “Teaching and the Profession,” and “Transdisciplinary Connections”—out of sync with the MLA’s interest in jettisoning tired intellectual frameworks and in promoting more dynamic, fluid, transversal modes of knowledge-making in research and pedagogy, activism and advocacy.  The subdivisions proposed in the “Languages, Literatures, and Cultures” category strike me as not as forward-looking as they could be.  Why atomize the world’s languages, literatures, cultures into ever more infinitesimal particles?  Why array these in such a way that they appear unrelated?  I for one would like to see the “Languages, Literatures, and Cultures” category revised along the transcontinental lines currently envisioned under “Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies,” and perhaps also along transhistorical lines that at once concede and resist current periodizations. 
Is there any unit, after all, that is not inherently heterogeneous—for all its apparent self-sameness—and therefore also inherently comparative? 
I will cite just two cases in point:  “African” and “Arabic.”  First, I strongly oppose the proposed subdivision of the current Division on African Literature into “Southern African” and “Sub-Saharan African.”  I echo the sentiments of many of the colleagues who already have posted here.  The proposed subdivision perpetuates a fundamentally Eurocentric notion, at least as old as Hegel, that Africa “proper” is “sub-Saharan Africa”; it also, as Ato Quayson has noted, reifies the egregious apartheid-era distinction between South Africa and a denigrated African “core.”  We would do well to recall the words of the South African writer and ANC activist Mazisi Kunene, who declared (in the pioneering trilingual, Third Worldist journal Afro-Asian Writings, in 1967), “There is a political fallacy which seeks to divide Africa into two segments:  Africa, South of the Sahara and Africa, North of the Sahara. […] Arabic literature of North Africa, Nigerian, and Ethiopian literatures are as much an African heritage as Japanese is part of an Asian literary heritage,” and the better-known words of Frantz Fanon, whose Les Damnés de la terre (1961) warned against the desire to divide Africa into an “Afrique noire” and an “Afrique blanche.”  I would suggest, then, that the current category “African Literature” be left as is—perhaps amending the present focus on literature be amended to “African Orature, Literature, and Media”—and the number of sessions accorded to the group expanded.  The current category holds far more intellectual integrity than the subdivisions proposed, and the capaciousness and productive ambiguity of “African” better serve local, regional, and transregional scholarship on the continent’s oratures, literatures, and media. 
Second, while the proposed subdivision of the current Division on Arabic Literature and Culture into “Classical and Postclassical Arabic” and “Modern Arabic” is, on its face, less egregious than the proposed vivisection of Africa, here too the strategy—while well-intentioned and in fact supported by some of my colleagues in the field—unwittingly ends up dividing and conquering a relatively small (if strong) community of established and emerging scholars.  Here too I would propose that the MLA retain the category “Arabic Literature and Culture”—perhaps amending the name to “Arabic Literatures, Cultures, and Media,” which might better reflect the plurality of “Arabics” and modes of Arab cultural production that flourish in the world—and expand the number of sessions accorded to the group.  As other scholars have pointed out, some of the most exciting work in Arabic literary and cultural studies today challenges the modern (and deeply ideological) theses of “decline” and “renaissance” that often have sequestered the “classical” from the “postclassical,” the “premodern” or (denigrated) “medieval” from the “modern.”  To my mind, at least, keeping Arabic “one” would be far better, intellectually and politically, than subdividing it by period or geography, given that so many of us in the field are working now—and many more of us will—to challenge and redefine hermetic periodizations and geographies.