[This past
weekend was the 2018
Northeast MLA convention in Pittsburgh. It was a great time as usual, and
this week I’ll highlight some standout moments and conversations. Leading up to
a weekend post on how you can get involved in this great organization!]
On two
rightfully depressing special events, and their complementary closing messages.
At lunchtime on
Friday I left the conference hotel and walked a few blocks to the SPACE Art Gallery to hear
Professor David
Castillo’s talk on “Truth, Reality in the Age of Inflationary Media: Why
the Humanities are More Important than Ever.” Castillo began with various
Donald Trump quotes and Tweets, as part of a long first section (really the
majority of the talk) on the ongoing and indeed constant devolution of language
and assaults on truth, and things didn’t get much happier from there. There’s
great value, and real necessity, in compiling together even some of the
literally countless outrages and horrors that we’ve witnessed over the 15
months of the Trump presidency (and indeed the nearly three years since Trump
launched his 2016 presidential campaign), and Castillo did so with precision
and thoughtfulness, asking us to consider not only Trump’s own abuses but their
many enablers and influences in our political, media, and social landscape more
broadly. But that’s still never gonna be the most delightful lunchtime fare, y’know?
Later that
evening I attended the second of our two annual opening events, the keynote
address: Professor
Rob Nixon on “Environmental Martyrdom and the Defenders of the Forest.” Nixon
began his stunning and moving lecture by dedicating it to the memory of Berta Cáceres,
the influential and award-winning
Honduran indigenous and environmental rights activist murdered
in March 2016, and went on to tell, contextualize, and theorize the late 20th
and early 21st century stories of a number of such assassinated or
executed figures around the world. Besides the unquestionable value of
remembering and commemorating these individuals, there are of course any number
of crucial contemporary and longstanding histories and issues to which such
memories help us better connect, not only climate change and environmental
destruction but indigenous rights, class and economic activism, gender and
sexual assault, and the limits and dangers of globalization, among others. Nixon
both focused closely on the specific stories and yet consistently highlighted
those and other links with care and power. But that’s still never gonna be the
most delightful reception fare, y’know?
Obviously
delighted is not the only, nor often the most important, way that such talks
and events should leave us feeling, and so I don’t intend those parallel
closing sentences as a critique in any way. But as you all well know, I’m a
critical optimist, a role that perhaps does not require delight but
certainly needs some forms of hope. And I don’t believe it’s just my critical
optimist goggles that allowed me to see moves toward such hope in the final
sections of both Castillo and Nixon’s talks. The co-authored project from which
Castillo’s talk was drawn is provisionally entitled Humanities
to the Rescue, and he made the case explicitly not just for humanities in
academia or education, but for what the humanities—their stories, their skills,
their ways of thinking and being—can and must contribute to our society, now
and moving forward. Nixon’s optimistic closing was more subtle, as befitting
his even darker and more solemn subject; but to my mind his arguments for the
connections between humanity and human bodies and the forests, the environment,
our world—connections made tragically but also inspiringly clear but the lives
and deaths and legacies of environmental martyrs—offer a hopeful vision of how
we might move into a more sustainable and shared collective future. Both
Castillo and Nixon’s optimistic visions are tentative and fragile and very much
up in the air—but they’re there, and all the more crucial given the crises on
which much of their powerful talks focused.
Next recap
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. NeMLA
responses or thoughts? Other organizations or conferences you’d highlight?
No comments:
Post a Comment