Languages, Literatures, Pedagogies: The MLA, Africa, and Diaspora Studies

Abstract

How do the literatures of Africa and its diaspora fare in the present structure of the Modern Language Association? Let me begin by suggesting that they appear to do better than the literatures of Asia or Central Europe. Since French, English, and Portuguese are commonly spoken in the parts of the African continent that were subjected to the corresponding colonial presence and educational policies, those who have appropriated European languages and made them their own are, understandably, the African writers most taught in the U.S. academy (e.g., Mariama Bâ, Assia Djebar, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Sony Labou Tansi, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, or Nuruddin Farah). Francophone and anglophone African literatures have been represented in MLA divisions and on panels for some decades now, and they constitute a “canonical” corpus of African texts in a colonial language; but lusophone and hispanophone African literatures are practically invisible, although writers such as Paula Tavares, Mia Couto, and Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel deserve to be better known.But what of indigenous languages? As a national association with a sizable global membership, the MLA can only benefit from becoming more inclusive of world literatures in the many languages that are taught in the United States today. But to do so, it will have to rethink its mission. Making room for new languages and literatures means reducing the number of divisions that represent only thin slices of European and American literary history but have been the MLA's staple fare for too long. These divisions serve to reinforce outmoded hiring practices that block innovative research and teaching. The MLA has weathered many storms over the past decades, including the infamous culture wars of the 1980s, the demand for social diversity, and the inclusion of controversial new paradigms. In the present conjuncture, the association is merely being asked to show itself even truer to its stated mission—coverage of “modern” languages—and to rise to the challenge of language diversity and world literature study.Current divisional structure predicated on the periodized units of a linguistically narrow canon suggests adhesion to what anthropologists call an “ideology of salvage”: the tendency to hold on to a taxonomy that assigns value to shopworn paradigms of literary history without sufficient regard for the multiplicity of cultural influences that inform canonical texts yet remain hidden in plain sight because of readers' lack of linguistic or cultural competence and their inability to recognize exogamous influences. When established critical conventions keep eras and areas apart, it is more difficult—if not impossible—to develop transversal approaches that can lead to important new insights and thus revitalize the study of canonical texts. In my work on Charles Baudelaire, for example, I have demonstrated the importance of the Creole cultures of the Indian Ocean to the development of his poetic imagination and to his appropriation of foreign terms such as “cafrine” in his prose poem “La belle Dorothée.”1The intellectual and methodological questions this approach raises are too numerous to address here. Suffice it to say that the fundamental issue concerns what is acceptable ground for comparison among differently situated traditions in a multicultural academy. How can we “do justice to past and current postcolonial and global contexts?” ask Rita Felski and Susan S. Friedman in their introduction to a special issue of New Literary History.2 “Why compare” at all, questions R. Radhakrishan, if our practices reinforce “the hegemony of centrism”?3 To which Friedman replies, “Why not compare?” adding that it's possible to compare in ways that “expand the voices put in play” and that “open up dialogue and new frameworks for reading and acting in the world.”4This requires literacy in lesser-taught languages and cultures. Wendy Belcher's Abyssinia's Samuel Johnson: Ethiopian Thought in the Making of an English Author (2012) is a stellar case in point.5 Belcher studies the influence of the Ge'ez language on Johnson and shows that ancient African thought had a crucial impact on this eighteenth-century figure. To read Johnson's Irene or Rasselas now is also to be aware of his unique incorporation of African discourse and Ge'ez traditions. The book opens exciting new vistas, and it ought to give pause to the skeptics.To the extent that unevenly matched traditions have been the site of fertile cross-pollinations, it is only by building up new literacies and competencies that we will begin to do justice to the less recognizable but no less important influences on the canonical works we value and study. What is certain is that so long as the MLA maintains the English/foreign languages structure that allots disproportionate space to monolingualism within that structure, our best efforts to “compare modern literatures worldwide” will only be a pious hope, and the widespread social and intellectual consequences of bi- or plurilingualism for pedagogy, identity, and nation building will remain underrecognized and hence understudied by literary scholars.The MLA should therefore make it a priority to reexamine its binary separation of English from so-called foreign languages. The vibrant contemporary presence of many languages right here in the United States makes the MLA's basic structure increasingly irrelevant. Linguistic diversity has always existed on the ground in the United States, a fact reflected in the early multilingualism of American literature, as Marc Shell and Werner Sollors remind us.6 But its role has been invisible to literary scholars who specialize in monolingual traditions reinforced by the MLA's separate domains. We need to understand better how this linguistic diversity both reflects the changing face of the country and affects our educational institutions.Global patterns of migration continue to transform many regions of the country into increasingly diverse territories, a fact that raises numerous questions. What is the relationship between what we teach and who we are as a nation? What do we value, how does our curriculum reflect these values, and to whom are we accountable? What is the role of a venerable national organization like the MLA in the face of contemporary social and linguistic transformations? To what degree should it reflect these realities? Must it protect established languages and consider the priorities of existing university curricula? Or should it lead the way and push for change? Change that does not merely replace the old with the new but acknowledges the interpenetration of cultures across time and space.Despite its best attempts to be global, to serve a national community of educators who themselves have responsibilities to their institutions and students, and to keep up with “trends” (its own term), the MLA has been unable to think through these realities and to articulate the potential professional consequences of plurilingualism. We need to open a serious discussion about how these realities are transforming our practices of higher education, especially in public contexts where the pressure to think questions of pedagogy and citizenship together has given rise to ethico-political debates on the need to do away with inaccurate notions of the “foreign” in a country of immigrants.Another worry is the potential misuse of terms I employ in my title: “Africa” and “diaspora.” These have been adopted as convenient methodological and critical conventions, yet they can serve to confuse a number of issues, since processes of self-fashioning can be at odds with politically useful and expedient connections based on racial, ethnic, or cultural markings. As Stuart Hall put it in his 1990 thought-provoking definition of “diaspora”: The “New World” presence—America, Terra Incognita—is therefore itself the beginning of diaspora, of diversity, of hybridity and difference, what makes Afro-Caribbean people already people of a diaspora. I use this term here metaphorically, not literally…. The diaspora experience as I intend it here is defined not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of “identity” which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity.7 In his essay, Hall goes on to echo Frantz Fanon's eloquent description of “those points of identification, those positionalities” that allow a people to build a sense of purpose and cohesion.8 “National culture,” Fanon stresses, “is not some congealed mass of noble gestures … less and less connected with the reality of a people. [It is] the collective thought process of a people to describe, justify, and extol the actions whereby they have joined forces and remained strong” in ways that transcend mere racial identification and thereby build robust and effective coalitions.9Language and literature play a role in nation-building processes, whether in European, American, or postcolonial contexts, generating the kind of hybridity that Hall emphasizes as he echoes Fanon's sense of what can enable or reinforce a strong polity of engaged but diverse citizens whose presence illustrates the internal multiplicities of the nation.I keep returning to this idea of the “nation” even though our goal here is to discuss ways of doing comparative world studies because, as I see it, the two are closely intertwined. The American practice of comparative literature is inflected by our internal, national, modalities of everyday comparativism. Life in a multiracial, multilingual polity is a succession of encounters that generate continuous comparative reflection and reaction: I am like X, but unlike Y, yet we all are Americans … or are we?10 I speak English and Creole, I may teach my children French and Spanish, encourage them to learn Arabic, Chinese, or Japanese … so that they will be open to the world. But wait: this multilingual world is right outside our door; what I am in fact doing—and hoping to achieve—is to teach them how to be better citizens of the United States.11Processes of subject formation have been the crux of a multitude of historical and theoretical debates, some initiated and developed on panels and fora at the MLA convention. These debates have also allowed notions of race, class, gender, and sexuality to be honed into the important analytical concepts that they remain. Discussions of multilingualism as a crucial component of this diversity in the American academy have however been all too rare. In fact, cultural studies seems to have given rise to the view that interdisciplinarity is the key to diversity—not language study. One case in point is the amazing multiplication of divisions under the rubric “Interdisciplinary Approaches” that, it seems to me, presuppose the use of English-language material only (original or in translation). There are now sixteen of those divisions, plus thirteen for English literature and eight for American literature: that's thirty-seven for monolingual English studies (and one might add the eight in genre studies to that total). By contrast, there are a total of twenty-three for French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Portuguese combined, and only five under the classification “Other Languages and Literatures” (i.e., African, East Asian, Arabic, and Slavic and East European).As both Marjorie Perloff and I have argued on different grounds in our respective essays in Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism (1995), making English the lingua franca of comparative literary study is a convenient but misguided shortcut that only reveals the limitations of monolingual cultural comparative studies.12 “What we seem to fear, as a profession,” I note in my essay, “is the messiness of globalization and the risk of contamination that might result from the democratization of the idea of literature as an intersubjective practice” that puts into relation a multiplicity of possible idioms and languages, beyond the list of familiar European ones.13This was and is especially true today when dealing with African literary and cultural studies. For some scholars, the very idea of indigenous African or Creole languages and literatures remains a vague, almost unreal notion even when increasing numbers of migrants are arriving in the United States who are fluent in regional English or French as well as several other indigenous languages and their creolized mixes (I am thinking of Ethiopians, Eritreans, and Senegalese in Los Angeles, Nigerians in New York, Mauritanians and Ghanaians in Ohio, Somalis in Minnesota, Haitians in Miami or Chicago, and so on). For others, African languages are synonymous with orality, hence hardly deserving of “literary” study and more suited to anthropological or sociological scrutiny. But, as Eileen Julien points out, “The coexistence and reciprocity of oral and written languages … characterizes most societies, regardless of their degree of technology,” and that is the case even more so now that new technologies of virtual communication are fast transforming what we understand as “literature.”14 Furthermore, too many received ideas about “African” orality simply overlook the existence and increasing critical importance of written Ethiopian traditions, as Belcher's study of the role of Ge'ez manuscripts in the global production of the European canon indicates.The languages with the most prestige in the MLA are the ones linked to the history of European colonialism. Perhaps because of this, French has been conflated in a certain way with cultural and theoretical elitism by the same scholars whose unselfconscious use of English does not allow them to question the imperium of global English or to consider the history of the multilingual United States and the face of its own francophone or creolophone populations of Maine and Louisiana. In the 1980s and '90s, scholars of French and francophone studies (myself included) were busy scrutinizing the French language for its ethnocentrism, a concept to which we were introduced in 1967 via Jacques Derrida's De la grammatalogie with its two-pronged critique of cultural anthropology's tendency both to privilege logocentric societies (the ones that use “writing” and thus appear to rely on the fixity of linguistic meanings) and to construct artificial notions of homogeneity and purity for its own ideological and methodological purposes.The type of deconstructive inquiry that allowed us to question established categories of thought and analysis produced many anxieties about the nature of our common public culture, its internal differences, and the role of education in either transcending or reinforcing such differences. It also opened a salutary reexamination of the terms used to describe and study notions of identity, culture, and nation, as well as their translations into concepts that may or may not meet received standards of citizenship. When the political fortunes of an outmoded ideology of “one nation, one language” acts as a screen for the otherwise obvious linguistic diversity that has always existed in every region of this country, it becomes difficult for scholars willingly to step outside of conventional models of a monolingual national and educational culture.Yet it is not just the presence of “world languages” right here in the United States that needs to be stressed but also the role they play in defining the hybrid identities of a majority of Americans who share this characteristic with Stuart Hall's Creole Caribbeans. The fundamentally transnational nature of life for multilingual Americans will remain woefully underexplored unless we are willing to consider the overlapping or intersecting temporalities of different language groups.The relative prestige of a language is tied to the global political fortunes of the territory with which it is most clearly identified, since on the international stage, the unit of measure (of status and prestige) remains the nation. The problem, however, is that languages are tied less to nation-states than to cultural groups. Even a language used by a majority may not guarantee power and prestige for its users if it is not the culturally dominant language of the country or region. As I have pointed out, wherever colonial languages are present, even when spoken by a minority, the scholarly focus will be primarily on literatures in the colonial idioms that generate greater legitimacy. Hence, of course, the greater visibility of francophone or anglophone African studies at the MLA. This is a vicious circle that can only be broken if more students become familiar with the long-standing written as well as oral traditions of the African continent (and its influential musical forms, for example).Take Swahili, a language currently spoken by 100 million users—of whom under 10 million are native speakers (by contrast, French is spoken by 60 million in France and 220 million worldwide, 115 million of whom are spread across thirty-one francophone African countries).15 Swahili is the lingua franca of the Indian Ocean coastline of Africa, from southern Somalia to Mozambique, Zambia, the Comoros, and the Seychelles. It is “the language of hybrid cultures, drawing its linguistic resources from other African languages, Arabic, Persian, Hindi, and the colonizing European languages. In spite of the hybridity of the cultures that inform it, the synchronic stability of Swahili has been ensured by its long poetic canon and two hundred years of lexical control,” as Simon Gikandi writes in “Contested Grammars: Comparative Literature, Translation, and the Challenge of Locality,” the chapter he contributed to the new Blackwell Companion to Comparative Literature.16 Gikandi adds: “Swahili has an insatiable ability to absorb texts from other cultures. Indeed, the precondition of modern Swahili poetry is intertextuality,” which makes it an ideal medium for comparative literary analysis.17Shouldn't both Ge'ez and Swahili find their way onto panels dedicated to comparative world literature at the MLA? Perhaps they have at one time or another—but to do so they must compete with a host of other indigenous African languages since there is only one division for all African literatures.Now, with regard to the African diaspora, we know that a variety of Creoles emerged out of plantation societies—and the histories of those plantation societies are fundamental to understanding U.S. cultures as well as those of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Ocean worlds.18 According to linguist Derek Bickerton, “Creole languages originated in the most advanced cultures of their day,” namely, “slave colonies [with the] industrial technology and systems of disciplined mass labour which [Western powers] later … generously bestowed upon their own citizens.”19 Challenging the belief that Creole is but an impoverished residue with little historiographic depth, Bickerton and others have defended Creole as a basic model for the origin of all languages, including English.20In Entwisted Tongues: Comparative Creole Literatures (2000), George Lang argues that there is a striking analogy between the historical profusion of baroque art and the proliferation of Creoles. Adopting a global vision of history, Lang shows both the modernity and postmodernity of Creole artistic production, with its dubbing, doubling, and cloning that produce pastiche and parody and decenter all hierarchies. “Creoles make a compelling case against hierarchical ranking of cultures in terms of innate qualities and for their open and rigourously relativist comparison,” he concludes, having demonstrated, in his erudite and important study, the relevance of this field of vernacular culture to comparative studies.21 “World literature, the proper topic of comparative literature as a discipline,” as he explains, “is founded upon this incessant commerce of models, each of which is adopted and adapted according to the needs of the target culture, and without the input of which any culture would eventually suffocate and die.”22 In recent years, the rise of postcolonial studies has helped focus attention on the varieties of languages in contact in the francophone and anglophone areas of the world. This development is an important component of the changes that the field of comparative literature needs to absorb and that the MLA can and should better enable by taking concrete steps to change its current administrative structure.