Where Are All the African and Caribbean Critics? The MLA, Honorary Members, and Honorary Fellows

Abstract

It has long been?recognized that the various institutions of literature? its publishers, critics, bookstores, clubs, and more?have substantial effects on literature "itself," to the extent that one can reify that term. The growth of twentieth-century African literature, in particular, is powerfully a story of its institutions, from Presence Africaine and Heinemann's African Writers Series to the global fame, translation, and widespread adoption of Achebe's Things Fall Apart, to the increasing shifts of African school and university curricula towards African writers; to the awarding of Nobel prizes to Soyinka, Gordimer, and Mahfouz; to the continuing strug? gles for non-European-language publishing, and more. The present jour? nal is also an example. For thirty years Research in African Literatures has been a leading venue for the scholarly legitimization of African writing, particularly in North America. RAL has depended in turn on other insti? tutions, including the University of Texas at Austin, the Ohio State University, and Indiana University Press, and has long-term relationships with two organizations?the African Literature Association, and the African Literatures Division of the Modern Language Association?for whom RAL serves as official journal. Despite the importance of all such institutions, African literary studies scholarship has focused more on tex? tual and cultural analyses than on institutional critique. Though some studies can certainly be cited,1 institutional critique most often takes the form of paragraphs in larger works. In this commentary, therefore, I will offer one such institutional cri? tique, by addressing the Africanity of the Modern Language Association's lists of Honorary Members and Honorary Fellows, twin lists that anoint or recognize, respectively, the non-North-American world's most distin? guished literary scholars, and the entire world's most distinguished writers. I focus on these lists for several reasons. The Modern Language Association of America (MLA) is the largest and most influential literary society in the world: largest, by sheer number (over thirty thousand members); and most influential, in that its North American base rests on the richest educational system in the world. One feature of the MLA's size and scope is that it houses more Africanist literary scholars than any other organization on the planet. Recent data from the MLA indicate that its African Literatures Division has a membership of 573, its Francophone Literatures and Cultures Division a membership of 952, its "English Literature Other Than British and American" division a membership of 1043, and its Postcolonial Studies in Literature and Culture discussion group a membership of 2,306. Once overlaps among the lists are eliminated (since MLA members may join up to five divisions or discussion groups), the MLA can be said to house almost four thousand scholars with primary or secondary Africanist