Exit Survey: The Terrain of Struggle

Abstract

Exit Survey: The Terrain of Struggle Nadine Attewell (bio) In the autumn of 2020, the Department of English at Cornell University voted to become a Department of Literatures in English. Writing about the change in Brittle Paper, faculty members Carole Boyce Davies and Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ invited “other English departments in the US and the West” to join Cornell in dismantling “a colonial monument [that] has been hiding in plain sight in American universities” by recognizing that “there are multiple literatures and many ‘englishes’ ” (n.p.). Despite the vanguardist tone of their essay, the shift in thinking that the new name is intended to signal reflects broader conversations in the field, fueled by the efforts of Black, Indigenous, and other racialized faculty to craft transformative pathways forward in a time of pandemic, continuing colonial and racist violence, and deepening climate crisis. Neither are these conversations—again, despite how they are often framed—a recent phenomenon. In their essay, Boyce Davies and Mũkoma acknowledge the precedent of the University of Nairobi’s Department of English, which voted to become a Department of Literature in 1968 (for Mũkoma, a familial and a disciplinary inheritance). However, as Carolyn Cooper noted in an article for the Cornell Sun published soon after, they neglect others, such as the creation in 1994 of a Department of Literatures in English at Cooper’s own [End Page 13] institution, the University of the West Indies. Even now, Cooper suggested, the “radical process of decolonization [continues] to be compromised by insidious cultural imperialism,” the thirst to be first (n.p.). In this essay, I want to sidestep the question of what such changes might (or might not) achieve. Rather than map current conversations about the state of the field, or prospects for its further transformation, I am interested, rather, in what Sara Ahmed would call the histories of their arrival, that is, the labour that was the condition of possibility for their emergence, performed by many people over many years, and unevenly documented if at all (Queer Phenomenology 44). The Cornell announcement caught my eye because it was at Cornell that I began my professional career in English, as a doctoral student in 2000. Reading the news, I made note of the fact that the department’s current complement of specialists in postcolonial, Black, and Indigenous studies includes very few holdovers from that era, an artefact of people not getting hired into tenure-track positions, or not getting tenure, or fearing not getting tenure, or feeling demoralized by their colleagues’ battles for tenure, or struggling to live in a very small, very white college town in rural upstate New York. I was reminded, too, of the work of the Radical Caucus, an activist collective of fifteen Cornell English doctoral and mfa students, who in April 1998 released a startlingly detailed and wide-ranging “Report on the State of the Department.” How might their labour, experiences, and projects haunt more recent efforts to transform the study of anglophone literature at Cornell and other institutions? As I write (it is August 2021), universities are announcing the results of a year of especially intensive hiring in Black, Indigenous, and critical ethnic studies. But consider the departures that “faculty renewal” at once entails (as people leave jobs to take up new ones) and covers over: the people who did not get jobs, were not tenured, could not continue on; the people who got sick or passed away. After twenty years in English departments of one kind or another, I recently left a position in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University to begin a new job at Simon Fraser University, where I am appointed in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies and direct the undergraduate program in Global Asia. Among my networks, I am just one of a number of racialized and Indigenous literary scholars to have changed jobs, in some cases out of English departments altogether. Each moved for reasons that were deeply personal to us. What we shared, however, was a profound sense of exhaustion, a marker of the ongoingness of the institutional struggles in which we have long been...