from Race, Poetics & the University

Geoffrey Jacques, continued

the Pulitzer prize that year. Around this time, Aldon Lynn Nielsen was part of a Los Angeles Review of Books panel discussing the newly-published book by University of Chicago professor Kenneth Warren’s, What Was African American Literature? (Harvard University Press, 2011). Some of you might remember this notorious little tome. Aldon suggested I look into the book, and I had recently heard Warren talk at the City University of New York Graduate Center (CUNY). My immediate response to Aldon was —“I can’t think of ‘what is African American literature’ on the day Manning died.” 

I still teach the essay drawn from that book that appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, and the work it does as a provocation still resonates. The reason I’m raising all this now is because these memories bring another thought to mind, hence the main point I wanted to make here: the question isn’t about quantity or quality; the answer is social equality. In thinking about that, I was also thinking about how we do scholarship, what it means when we do it, in particular, when it comes to scholarship on African American poetics. For context, let me share some different thoughts about my very fraught relationship to Langston Hughes, and his role as an object of literary study in my own professional career.

That relationship is fraught in this sense: the “lost” chapter in my book, A Change in the Weather: Modernist Imagination, African American Imaginary (University of Massachusetts Press, 2009), was to be on Langston Hughes. I’ve always thought about why I skipped writing it. It’s as if I just forgot to do it. On the one hand, though, the permissions fees demanded by the publisher of Hughes’s books might have been a factor. On the other, I think the reasons may also have to do with the following story. 

I was teaching at Lehman College about 15 years ago, and preparing to give a talk at the Modern Language Association that year. I went to my chair—I was in a temporary full-time position, one of only two only full-time faculty positions I’ve ever had, both of them temporary—and I told him that I’d been invited to talk about Langston Hughes at an MLA panel. His response was a dismissive “Humph.” He barely looked at me. I’d been under the impression that this was supposed to be a big deal. In someone else’s cosmology, that might have been true. But in his cosmology, the fact deserved no congratulations, or any words in response at all. 

I’ve been thinking about that in relation to a couple of other questions. What is it we think about when we think about Black literature in the academy?  This problem goes to the issue of canonization, but it’s also about what it is we teach when we teach literary texts. Connected to this is the question of how do we value Black writers. What role do they play in both teaching and scholarship? What is the “thing we do” when we conduct these inquiries? What ideas govern those inquiries? Among the issues these questions bring to mind have to do with “key words.” 

When we talk about Black literature, many people think along lines authorized by terms or concepts like “aberration,” “subjection” (“racial subjection”), “abjection, “dysfunction,” and “impoverishment.” A look, for example, at the titles of winners of the Modern Language Association’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize, given to “an outstanding scholarly study of black American literature or culture,” can also be instructive in this regard. It’s kind of amazing if you think about terms like “madness,” “crisis,” “catastrophe,” or “ruin,” and what these words might mean when they become defining identifiers of entire wing of the discipline of literary studies. This is the scholarship that seems most acceptable to the institution, scholarship that wins promotions and tenure. Under the conditions of the neoliberal university—I’m not confident about this term, but I’ll use it for the moment—it’s about who has power. The question is who has real power in the university, which in the United States in 2018 employed nearly four million people—fewer than forty percent of whom were teaching, research, and service faculty, with forty-six percent of those being part-time employees. The crisis of the university is a crisis of the bureaucratic revolution in the university. It has to do with everything we know and complain about, like the diminishing role of faculty in university governance, and with the rise of the administrative apparatus in the university. It’s a Thermidorian-bureaucratic revolution. What that means in this context is that the majority of the teaching personnel of the university occupies a marginal as well as central position in the university at the same time. From a financial and administrative point of view, and with regard to the question of power, the majority of the faculty is marginal. Many universities across the country are either becoming or are already majority adjunct and part-time faculty. Yet the teacher, now stripped of all power to influence the policy of the university, remains the central reference point for the student.

What does all this mean in terms of the canonicity of Black literature? How does all this relate to the title of my original talk at the colloquy last March, which was “Towards a Forensic Inquiry into Race, Poetics, and the University”? Let me return to Langston Hughes, and his place within the university. Lauri Scheyer, in her recent remarks on this panel, opened the door to a very important point, and that is when you are going to look for Black literature in the university and where it has the most robust respect, it is not necessarily going to be in literature departments. It’s going to be in places like the composition and rhetoric domain (a diminishing factor), sometimes in creative writing, and, oddly enough, in places like departments of education. That’s where you will find the teaching of Black literature. 

What about the literature department? One thing that’s shocking is the absolute diminishment of courses focused in these departments on single writers in general. There just aren’t that many, as I look at the “forensic” evidence. While the writer hasn’t disappeared from the literature department altogether, the previous balance between writer and topic in course offerings has, to a significant if understudied degree, given way to the dominance of the topic course. In 2013, I taught a course on Langston Hughes at the University of California Santa Barbara, and at the time it seemed that I was the only college faculty person in the country teaching a course on Hughes and the only syllabus in the country focusing solely on his poetry and poetics. (I looked.) 

The departments that housed my course were not Black Studies or English, but the Writing and Literature department of the university’s College of Creative Studies, a sort of honors college for art, writing, and science students. (This department now seems wholly given over to creative writing courses.) One remarkable aspect of that class was the response of the graduating literature majors. The course focused exclusively on Hughes’s poetry, and the lit majors repeatedly expressed surprise that in all their education they hadn’t run into anything quite like Hughes’s work. To them, Hughes’s poems sounded more contemporary than almost anything else they’d read in their other classes. Some students were under the impression that they’d been thoroughly schooled in the Literature of Modernism, only to find the most relevant modernism in the margins, as it were. 

Reflecting on this experience has led me to do a slight examination of dissertations. I looked into how many dissertations, among those listed in the ProQuest database this past spring, had the term “Langston Hughes” in their title. The number was seventy-two. Gwendolyn Brooks has had thirty-five, Amiri Baraka has had thirty-three, and Paul Laurence Dunbar has had sixteen—that’s going back to 1940. The first dissertation title with Hughes’ name in it goes back to 1962. For comparison purposes, Ezra Pound’s number is 362, Yeats’ is 389, TS Eliot is 677, Auden is 150. (I did this research on three dozen poets.)

Can we draw any conclusions from these facts? I don’t know that we can. I don’t want to be dogmatic. My choice to search for dissertations that had “Langston Hughes” (and the others writer names I mention) in titles aimed to uncover both whole treatises, as well as those that devoted a chapter to the writer in question. And yet my research created nevertheless a snapshot rather than representing a thorough search. It is also the case that some Black writers, like Toni Morrison, and to a lesser extent, James Baldwin, have a much larger status and visibility than most. But even here, we might consider questions of what we might call tone. Let’s consider whether students learn about these texts solely as examples of lack, or whether, and to what degree, the focus of inquiry turned elsewhere, such as to structure, play, signification, pulchritude, or plentitude. We might gain, then, from asking ourselves what might it mean, what might these numbers suggest, if we can measure Hughes’ footprint, or those of the other Black poets that I’ve mentioned, in this way. Can these numbers tell us something about their relationship to and status in the discipline? Can we use these numbers as a window into the relationship between the term “Black literature” and the deployment of power relations within both the academy generally and in the discipline of English, specifically? What does it mean that, even now in this country, you can get at least as a master’s degree in English, and certainly get through a general education program, and not read a single work by a Black author? I think that’s possible. It shouldn’t be. I’m not at all sure it is impossible to get through a PhD program and not read a single work by a Black author. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was possible. 

*

To go back to the forensics, what does it mean that in half a century—longer than that, in fact—that Langston Hughes has had the kind of footprint he has had in the university, in terms of the number of dissertations that examine his work? My personal view is that there can be no such thing as a short list of great American writers that doesn’t have Hughes’ name on it. If that supposition is true, then we might conclude that the place of Black literature within the discipline of literary studies suffers from a kind of precarity that’s more insidious than many of us seem to think. 

When considering these issues, it seems hard not to come to the conclusion that the continued marginalization of African American writers in English departments and the increasing marginalization of the humanities in the academy are related parts of the same process. This marginalization is not one of exclusion only. Indeed, my concern is with the terms of inclusion. What concerns me is a type of “inclusion” in which equality is still deferred to. This also, and perhaps more importantly, involves a rhetorical marginalization as well. It has long been my contention that a thorough study of Hughes’ poetry would undermine the rhetorical power of the standard narrative that continues dominate modernist literary studies. For now, however, that proposition remains a hypothesis.

Hughes is often taught and considered to be a modernist artist who is, as it were, out on a limb, rightly identified with the Harlem Renaissance; but that identification also serves as a kind of limit. His influence on the vernacular turn of mid to late 20th century U.S. poetics as a whole is still subjected to almost total silence. His influence on white poets, or on US literature generally, is sometimes mentioned but rarely explored. This condition is not a function of a lack of documentary material from which scholars can draw. It is a function of the legacy power relations that continue to dominate literary studies, as well as a consequence of the power relations within the university generally. Our problem, then, is not just one of correction, but one of the imagination. The clarity with which the graduating seniors in my “Langston Hughes, Poetics, and Criticism” class of 2013 saw themselves as having been robbed because Hughes had been heretofore excluded from their educations is the clarity the rest of us need when we consider the still-elusive question of what, exactly, equality might mean in the pursuit of a better knowledge of our discipline in particular, and of our culture as a whole.

Duriel E. Harris, continued

to which some people have been pressing for a return, has been, for some time, problematic, to say the least. So that kind of energy. “Let's return to...” How about let's not.

In the context of decreasing funding for public education, institutions like ISU have kept afloat with tuition dollars. So that means there’s a real push for enrollments—a heightened incentive to satisfy parents’ desire for the traditional, open campus, as opposed to the online learning we have in place across the board right now, the emergency pivot to distance learning that’s been implemented in the effort to keep bodies safe and alive such that they might live to teach and play and learn another day.

This situation, this incentive to meet consumer demand is putting pressure on senior leadership, whose eyes are clearly on the bottom line and the preservation of the endowment, putting pressure on them to keep their eyes on the prize and the yield of compounded interest in lieu of catastrophe. Now, of course, the larger situation we face is a bit catastrophic—a global pandemic—but I suppose it depends on who you are talking to. 

This difference in perspective reminds me of something that occurred to me almost as an afterthought at Naropa’s Capitalocene summer session. Something I spoke out loud, offhand: They are the capitalists, we are the bodies. And that phrasing, with its critical juxtaposition, has been playing in my head, as I’ve been thinking about the relationship between, on the one hand, this demand for pre-pandemic normalcy and open economy, this intense pushback against calls for safety for workers’ bodies; and, on the other hand, the preservation of these bodies to live to see another day, particularly those folks facing more heightened risk due to race, age, and other vulnerabilities of embodiment: disease, comorbidities, et cetera, and those folks with many of these elements converging, at once, as the material and symbolic reality of their bodies.

Simultaneously, we have a focus on the rhetoric of DEI and attention to ways to signal an investment in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) without expending additional resources, which, especially now, shifts to an expectation of additional labor and increased productivity for those who are truly invested in the work—and that's more labor, increased productivity with fewer resources: less time, fewer fiscal resources, and diminishing human resources. So, we're talking about a context of budget rescission and cuts in staff, diminishing assistance with everyday paperwork and decreasing administrative support for the pursuit of external grants to fund publications like Obsidian and other public facing DEI initiatives. Simultaneously, there is institutional insistence upon the recovery of indirect costs at high research rates for even predominantly creative endeavors. 

Our mission at Obsidian is to support the creative production of contemporary Black writers and artists around the globe, and to publish scholarship and criticism from folks throughout the community in support of the makers and making of Black literature and art. So criticism is there, but we are fundamentally committed to ensuring that that culture itself is being produced—and that it gets out there and is engaged by audiences. So in this climate, we contend with the additional challenge of scarcity and austerity models that pinch, wring, and squeeze every ounce of energy from the community even to the insistence upon recovery of indirect costs for creative endeavors that draw very little upon research facilities and administration. This is particularly costly to students, faculty, and staff interested in investing in diversity, equity, and inclusion as it comes at the expense of our increasingly vulnerable bodies.

So I’m thinking about the impact on these venues for critical-creative Black thought, and critical-creative thought by Indigenous and other people of color, and the folks who are incredibly vulnerable at those intersections of identity. Defunding and compounded cuts to resources, lead to increasingly unsustainable practices of overwork and inevitably failure. As such you may be in a situation of trying to find another host [institution] in order to survive. It is something that has happened to Obsidian on several occasions. 

The impact just on journal administration is disheartening, limiting the capacity to deliver more creativity, to do more than just put out a book, but instead to support the writers and artists who are entrusting you with their work, to be able to cultivate work of younger and emerging writers. So you have less and less capacity to do any of that. To engage with innovative material, experiments that you can’t even categorize, but to know “it’s moving me.” Especially if it is transgressing boundaries of genre and form, you’re trying to think about how to appropriately put this work forward, get it to the rest of the world. This scrambling for resources puts stress on that capacity. And that can result in any number of manifestations on the continuum of possible outcomes: from the journal and publishing platform folding and the legacy meeting its death, to the other end when you have just enough stress—which is eustress (versus distress)—to flourish. Consider this time when Blackness is in vogue, with increased stake-holder buy in, with other ways of being created from the tension of the moment. This possibility of flourishing leads me to the last thing I wanted to say, just thinking about this relationship between creativity and imagination, and innovative necessity.

We have a kind of crisis in leadership, when we have insufficient analyses, insufficient critical apparatus, insufficient depth and breadth of understanding of the fundamental role of equity, diversity, and inclusion in making a world in which everybody is able to thrive. There is a cost to racism. And  insufficient attention to that cost, and limited creativity and innovation coming from folks in senior leadership…it’s the paradigm. The models being used are insufficient, very limited. 

At the same time we fortunately have examples in these journals and other venues of folks thinking creatively and enacting possibility through their poetics, pushing against boundaries, making work that challenges genre, forms, and language to suggest different paths towards liberation, how we get free. For example, my mind settles upon avery r. young and his embodied intuition, and the way his work pushes beyond containment, even to the point of challenging the sound tech who’s trying to record him—as avery walks out of the room, out of the building, down the street to perform, led by spirit. And you have critical-creative works by Alexis Pauline Gumbs who is giving witness and withness, writing with Hortense Spillers, M. Jacqui Alexander, Sylvia Winter. And thinking about my own work, I ask: What does it mean to be in relation? How can we mean it? How can we get out of the matrix? How, how we get free, how do we get free?

This is a transformative potential I recognize, so we are focusing on it for a forthcoming issue of Obsidian, looking at the relationship between inhabiting/being body and having these experiences: LGBTQIA Black folks making, writing, and being positioned to contend with even more innovative necessity—because there’s even less space. There’s even more that has to be opened, disrupted, some of that having to do with one’s one family. We can talk about this from many different vantage points—i.e., someone having to come out all the time, because they’re not “read” as being LGBTQIA, and just the incredible richness of the experience of what it is to manifest in any one of these identities. Some of this is gender and some of this is not. When we put all these identities together, we sometimes don’t recognize the tremendous diversity that’s there, represented by those letters. In my experience, it’s like there is an increasingly small number of folks who are prepared to recognize how crazy it is—whatever you’re dealing with. There’s the full matrixes of meaning shaping how you negotiate the world through multiple modes of identity, including disability, and people only getting a part of it. Some people getting the “Black” part, or the “queer” part, or the “gender” part, but not the totality as a dynamic phenomenon—that being lost upon many folks.