MELUS: A Community of Intellectuals, Scholars, and Teachers for Forty Years

Abstract

It is unclear to me now precisely when in the 1990s I read my first issue of MELUS. I do know that the journal was on my radar before I had become aware of MELUS as a literary society. My return to graduate school in 1988, after realizing the limitations of my Master’s degree in allowing me to pursue the type of scholarly writing that I had wished to do, resulted in my introduction to the journal. I believe that the first time I read the journal I was very likely in the M. D. Anderson Library at the University of Houston, although I also might have borrowed the volume from the library and read it elsewhere. Someone had told me that my scholarship might be welcomed in MELUS. And it was. I imagine perhaps skimming volume eighteen, but I vividly recall issue 19.3, “Intertextualities.” The cover displays a crossword puzzle interlocking names of ethnic US writers linking to the name Shakespeare prominently displayed in boxes near the center of the puzzle. I do not know whether my current feelings about that image were conscious to me in the 1990s, but now that image seems to make a powerful statement about the politics of the linguistic and literary results of colonialism, imperialism, settlers, displacement, migration, diaspora, ethnicity, and reconfiguration. In 1994, at the time of the MELUS 19.3 publication, I had been reading Native American and Asian American literature in addition to my primary scholarly interest in African American literature. That volume of the journal includes an article on writings by Rudolfo Anaya, whose Bless Me Ultima (1972) had enchanted me with its language and the power of its narrative. The issue also includes an article focusing on women’s voices in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976) and Isabel Allende’s The House of Spirits (1982). Kingston’s novel already had contributed to my pleasures in complex narratives. Novels by Toni Morrison and Gloria Naylor are the focus of another article connecting their writing to Shakespeare, and to round out the intellectual pleasures in the issue, Jack Kerouac is the subject of another scholarly article. Where else could I have found all of that? I was a fellow traveler and have remained so since that time. I probably joined MELUS in 1996 (although it could have been 1995 or 1997), as I recall wishing to attend the conference in Hawai’i yet not being able to do so.