March 27, 2019: NeMLA 2019 Recaps: Homi Bhabha

[This past week we held the 50^th Anniversary NeMLA Convention in Washington, DC. It was a great time as ever, and this week I’ll highlight a few of the many standout moments and conversations for me. Lemme know if you’d like to hear or chat more about the NeMLA Board, the American Area, next year’s convention in Boston, or anything else!]

On three stand-out phrases from Homi Bhabha’s bracing and inspiring keynote address.

1)      Disappointed hope: The central focus of Bhabha’s talk was a reimagining of our current moment’s unfolding histories of migration and displacement, and his recurring image and phrase for those histories was “disappointed hope” (or, as he put it in one moment, “migration holds hope hostage”). Although of course the emphasis on disappointment is tough for this critical optimist (and advocate of hard-won hope) to hear, the phrase also reflects a key tenet of Bhabha’s talk and his current projects: his argument for the vital need of making the humanity and desires of migrants (rather than false worries about “crisis”) central to our responses and policies. So even if we see their hopes as disappointed or held hostage, we are nonetheless focusing on the hopes and perspectives that motivate these individuals and communities, and working to imagine solidarity based (as Bhabha argued throughout) on a recognition of their alterity to our own situation yet a concurrent empathy with their situation.

2)      Concentration and internment camps: The principal voice with which Bhabha put his own in conversation throughout the talk was Hannah Arendt. That included a key thread about her concept of “the banality of evil” as it appears in our own era, among many other engagements with Arendt’s ideas and arguments. Those engagements also meant that Bhabha was able to use both Arendt’s voice and her world (especially that of World War II) to further develop his own perspective on the 21^st century world and its challenges, however. And in one particular phrase, which I believe was partly echoing Arendt’s words but also extending them with Bhabha’s own perspective, he connected the 1940s to our own moment pitch-perfectly: describing a world in which those defined as “other” are put in “concentration camps by their foes and internment camps by their friends.” All too terribly true.

3)      Despair and Repair: As those first two items illustrate, Bhabha’s talk was, as I put it above and to say the least, bracing in its consistent engagement with some of the darkest moments and elements of our world, past and present. “I dwell in despair,” he put it succinctly and accurately at one point. Yet he followed that phrase with a recognition that he is “mindful of the need for repair,” and I can’t imagine a more concise duality through which to express my own goals of highlighting the darkest histories but working toward the light. As Hannah Arendt herself once put it, “In dark times [a phrase she used consistently to describe her epoch], we search for courage.” Indeed we do—and as I’ve argued at length, we cannot find such courage by eliding or ignoring the darkness, but rather through and beyond it. While that means I might quibble a bit with Bhabha’s use of “dwell,” I certainly recognize the need to acknowledge and engage with our despair—and then to work together on the vital need and goal of repair. I can think of few talks I’ve ever heard that made the case for each element of that equation more eloquently than did Homi Bhabha’s NeMLA 2019 keynote address.

Next recap tomorrow,

Ben

PS. NeMLA reflections to share?

March 26, 2019: NeMLA 2019 Recaps: My Toni Morrison Panel

[This past week we held the 50^th Anniversary NeMLA Convention in Washington, DC. It was a great time as ever, and this week I’ll highlight a few of the many standout moments and conversations for me. Lemme know if you’d like to hear or chat more about the NeMLA Board, the American Area, next year’s convention in Boston, or anything else!]

Out of my initial proposal “African American Literature and the Ironies of Freedom” came two great panels—here’s a quick recap of the four wonderful papers on the first, which ended up focusing on Toni Morrison’s novels.

1)      Laura Dawkins: Laura got the panel off and running with a multi-layered comparative analysis of Morrison’s Beloved (1987) alongside Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (2016), a novel that echoes and extends Morrison’s classic in numerous ways. Besides making a great case for how literary legacies can help us read and understand individual texts, Laura’s talk also engaged with both novels through an impressive balancing act: focusing on the traumas and horrors (of but not limited to slavery) that both feature; but arguing at the same time for how narrative provides a fraught but crucial vehicle for countering such traumas in both books. Like all seven papers across these two panels, Laura’s talk offered a bracing and an inspiring start to our conversations!

2)      Theresa Desmond: In the panel’s second talk, Theresa offered an excerpt from her recently defended dissertation on 20^th century reframings and revisings of images of single womanhood. In particular, her talk drew from a chapter on Morrison’s Sula (1973), and linked that novel’s title character and its other central women to the stereotypical images of the mammy, the jezebel, and the sapphire. I had never heard of the third stereotype, and that context both reframes Morrison’s novel and offers new windows into considering those other two types and the limited range of images presented to mid-20^th century African American women. But Theresa’s readings of how the two characters of Sula and Nell engage with these various images and their own trajectories also adds compelling to our understanding of both this particular novel and to other mid-century texts and contexts such as Betty Friedan’s “The Problem That Has No Name.”

3)      Shari Evans: Shari’s talk shifted our thematic focus a bit, using three Morrison novels (The Bluest Eye [1970], Paradise [1997], and A Mercy [2008]) to consider the limits and possibilities of moments and processes of becoming for individuals, communities, and the nation. I’m ashamed to admit that I haven’t had the chance to read A Mercy yet, and Shari not only reminded me that I need to do so ASAP, but made a compelling case for what that book helps us understand about the nation’s fraught origin points. I was particularly struck by her multi-layered reading of the novel’s images of communities and their multi-generational identities and stories, as exemplified by an oven that is transplanted from one town (where it serves its original utilitarian purpose) to another (where it stands in the center of town as a memorial to that past and how the community has moved beyond it). Yet that memorial is then defaced by younger residents, highlighting how stories and images of the past likewise continue to evolve with each generation and perspective.

4)      Rachel Schratz: Rachel finished up this great quartet of papers with an extended reading of another Morrison novel I haven’t had a chance to read in full, God Help the Child (2015). Her extended analysis of colorism in this most recent Morrison novel added important contexts to a social and cultural conversation that has become prominent in recent months (thanks in no small measure to the January Black-ish episode on that theme). Yet as with each of these four great papers, Rachel’s analyses went well beyond both one theme and even her focal texts, considering such vital topics as the duality of othering and sympathy and how both relate to the ironic but shared quest for freedom on which the panel’s title and through-lines likewise focused. As with all the best panels, these four papers staked their own claims but related to and build upon each other quite strikingly, creating a broader conversation that could have continued well beyond our allotted time.

Next recap tomorrow,

Ben

PS. NeMLA reflections to share?

March 25, 2019: NeMLA 2019 Recaps: Imbolo Mbue

[This past week we held the 50^th Anniversary NeMLA Convention in Washington, DC. It was a great time as ever, and this week I’ll highlight a few of the many standout moments and conversations for me. Lemme know if you’d like to hear or chat more about the NeMLA Board, the American Area, next year’s convention in Boston, or anything else!]

On two takeaways from a compelling creative reading and talk.

Sometimes a literary work becomes more and more relevant in the years after its release, perhaps in ways that would surprise even the author. I think that’s the case with Cameroonian American author Imbolo Mbue’s wonderful debut novel Behold the Dreamers (2016). Mbue’s overt focus is on recent social and economic histories, specifically those of the 2008 financial crisis and recession; one of her two central families features Clark Edwards, a high-ranking official at Lehman Brothers, and his disaffected wife Cindy and their two children. She thus initially contrasts and compares the experiences, perspectives, and versions of the American Dream of the novel’s other central family, Cameroonian immigrants Jende and Neni Jonga and their own two young children, to those of Clark and his family (for whom both Jende and Neni end up working in different capacities). But it is more than class or wealth that separate these families—throughout the novel the Jenga’s are fighting to avoid deportation and gain legal (or at least permanent) status in the United States, and it is those battles, always part of our history of course, that feel even more frustratingly salient three years after the novel’s publication, in the age of Trump.

I conceived of the above opening line about this evolution of Mbue’s book surprising even her before I had the chance to hear her read from and talk about Behold the Dreamers at NeMLA 2019’s opening night creative event. But interestingly enough, in that presentation Mbue likewise emphasized that she was her book and its characters mostly through the lens of class; she was specifically responding to a question about the relative absence of race from the book’s thematic engagements, and noted that for her class has been the dominant issue in both her own life experiences and her perspective on the world. Of course there’s no one identity issue or theme that informs human experiences and societies, and certainly the financial crisis in particular both reflected and affected class and social status in America in particular and striking ways. Yet the truth is that immigration status is at least as significant a factor in the experiences of the Jonga family as anything related to the 2008 crash—and if it’s ever been possible to see immigration status as separate from racial and ethnic communities and identities (and I’ve argued in many places that that’s never been the case), the last couple years have made clear just how intertwined those themes are. That doesn’t mean there aren’t multiple ways to read Mbue’s multi-layered novel, but I’m hard-pressed to imagine a 2019 reading that doesn’t engage with these themes of race and ethnicity.

Hearing an author speak about her own work is even more illuminating when it comes to topics like process, and on that note Mbue offered a particularly striking story. I knew this book was her first novel, but of course many writers have multiple projects in development before that first book is published, publish a number of short stories before landing a book deal, or in other ways have established careers or bodies of work prior to that debut novel. Yet in Mbue’s case, the opposite was true—not only had she not published any short stories, but if I understand her correctly she really hadn’t written any (and certainly hadn’t written any other novels). Instead, this novel emerged from her personal experience of the financial crisis on multiple levels—she was laid off from a job in New York City, was walking down the street out of work and increasingly impoverished, and saw a line of chauffeurs waiting to pick up Wall Street executives from their offices. Out of that combination of personal situation and social observation was born the initial idea for Behold the Dreamers, the first extended creative writing Mbue had ever worked on. Of course, she would then work on it for five years and have it rejected by (in her words) “every agent in America other than [her] agent,” which just goes to show that the road to an amazing, “overnight” success might be unique but still has some common threads across many writers.

Next recap tomorrow,

Ben

PS. NeMLA reflections to share?