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| Dana A. Williams, Jericho Brown, and Jesmyn Ward |
My own MLA this year was mostly focused on Digital Humanities panels and African American literature panels -- that's mostly where my head has been for the past couple of years -- though I did attend a few other things, including an interesting Queer studies/theory panel with Judith Butler, a panel on "Palestine and Postcolonial Literature," and a panel revisiting the category of the "New Woman," with interesting papers on Pandita Ramabai and Alice Dunbar-Nelson.
I also presented myself on a panel on Friday afternoon connected to the “Responsible Datasets in Context” grant project I was on; if you’re interested in learning more about that, please visit our project website.
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In African American literature, this is a special centenary – it’s the 100th anniversary of Alain Locke’s groundbreaking anthology The New Negro: An Interpretation, which has often been cited as the starting point for the Harlem Renaissance. There were at least three panels that I saw relating to that event; I went to at least some of all three.
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As I mentioned, I also went to a thoughtful queer studies panel, responding to the 20th anniversary of Judith Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself. As with the Critical AI panel I mentioned above, this one consisted of speakers who published essays in a special issue of Differences devoted to the topic. That special issue can be found here. Essentially, the panelists were all inspired by Butler’s work, and some of them found ways to apply her relatively abstract arguments about identity and relationality to specific questions of queer and trans identity. There was also a nice paper by Leigh Gilmore that was more focused on intellectual history – the friendship and correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy.Below is a more detailed overview of the specific panels I attended, divided into two sections, 1) African American Literature Panels and the Plenary, and 2) Digital Humanities Panels. *
1. African American Literature Panels and Plenary
The Plenary: Jesmyn Ward and Jericho Brown.
The overall highlight was probably the plenary, with two famous local writers, Jesmyn Ward and Jericho Brown, in conversation with MLA President Dana A. Williams (who teaches at Howard, but is also from Louisiana). Both writers (and Dr. Williams) have connections to this part of the South. Though she is from Mississippi, Jesmyn Ward’s second book, Salvage the Bones, dealt with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Ward also teaches at Tulane University.
Jericho Brown was astonishing – vulnerable, emotional, and sharp. He had a moving take on how frustrating it’s been for Black writers to see the reversal of anti-racist sentiments around the country in recent years – the backlash that’s led to the reelection of Donald Trump, book bans (often focusing on books about people of color), and anti-DEI initiatives. He described how when Claudia Rankine’s Citizen was published, it felt like it was doing powerful work, but only two years later, Donald Trump was elected President for the first time. I was also really impressed by Brown’s reading of his own poems towards the end of the session.
Dana A. Williams was also quite good as the moderator and interlocutor, I thought. She had sharp questions and thought-provoking anecdotes, including a memorable account of being in a graduate seminar the day Tupac Shakur was killed. Her professor, Eleanor Trailer, was ready to talk with the students about the significance of the loss in the context of many losses of Black leaders through the 1960s and 70s: “He was a prince without a kingdom!”
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Session 63: “The Harlem Renaissance: A Centennial Celebration” I missed some of this session with Carla Kaplan, William J. Maxwell, Ernest Mitchell, Miriam Thaggart, and Richard Yarborough, all of them fairly accomplished scholars of African American literature. The speakers all acknowledged the limitations of the “Harlem Renaissance” as a term and as a focal point for teaching African American literature, but there wasn’t a concerted interest in challenging the term. The most interesting conversations to my ear came up with respect to teaching: the Harlem Renaissance remains a powerful and recognizable period that tends to be legible to students.
People on the panel also recommended some off-the-beaten-track possibilities for teaching, including Rudolph Fisher’s Walls of Jericho and Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun. In the Q&A, Bill Maxwell described the vision of the Harlem Renaissance as a fundamentally optimistic concept of what Blackness could mean fifty years after Emancipation. It was, as he put it, “Anti-Afro-Pessimistic.”
Panel 495, “The New Negro at One Hundred,” was a session sponsored by the College Language
Association, an organization that was founded in 1937 as an alternative organization to the MLA, supporting Black scholars. It remains vital today, as the strength of the scholarship on this panel demonstrated. Panelists were Barbra Chin (Howard, Angel Dye (Rutgers), and Carlyn Ferrari (Seattle U.). I was most interested in Carlyn Ferrari’s paper on the problematic gender dynamics of The New Negro anthology. Alain Locke was famously uninterested in women, and while there is a nominal presence of poets who were women in the anthology, men like Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay are given pride of place. That said, the essay towards the tail end of the anthology by Elyse Johnson McDougald, “The Task of Negro Womanhood,” does some real and important work articulating a Black feminist sensibility
The Q&A was lively, with Venetria Patton, a co-editor of the influential African American anthology Double-Take announcing her presence and indicating that her approach to anthologizing in some ways corrected the oversights of the original New Negro anthology.
Jennifer Wilks of the University of Texas also made an important point, along the lines that it can be helpful to teach the periodicals themselves – anthologies can “flatten out” the story we want to tell about the moment these writers were living through.
Session 515, “Harlem, Mecca of the New Negro in a Global Context: The Survey Graphic Special Issue and The New Negro Anthology at One Hundred,” was sponsored by the Modernist Studies Association, and here panelists took a very different approach. Here the emphasis was on the original magazine version of the anthology, which was as a special issue of the magazine Survey Graphic.
Here I was most interested in Whit Frazier Peterson’s paper about Countee Cullen’s poem “Heritage,” which was published in a slightly different textual form in Survey Graphic than the final version of the poem. The Survey Graphic version also had four images that Cullen’s poem appears to be engaging. The Survey Graphic version of the poem, with images, can be found here. The version of the poem as published in Color (no images, but with a dedication to Harold Jackman and some textual changes as well) can be found here. Frazier Peterson engaged with David Kirby’s reading of the poem as a “Black Waste Land,” suggesting that reading makes more sense in connection with the revised version of the poem. The Survey Graphic version is more directly in dialogue with representations of pre-colonial African cultural artifacts.
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It was not specifically an African American literature panel, but I really enjoyed Session 633 - Archive, Seriality, Form: Visibilizing the Methods (and Messes) of Periodical Studies Twenty Years On. Here, one of the speakers, Shawn Christian, was specifically focused on African American periodicals, and the respondent and chair, Adam McKible, has also written on these topics.
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Session 672 - Show Your Work: Foregrounding the Literature and Labor of Black Digital Humanities Projects was another session that featured mention of several interesting DH projects. Kenton Rambsy, of Howard University, showed some really impressive data visualizations from his project, The Black Literature Network. Here is a specific example I thought was pretty powerful and revealing.
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2. Digital Humanities Panels
I was a little surprised by the drift of Session 119, “Book History and Digital Humanities,” which featured several practitioners whose work I knew already (Ryan Cordell, Elika Ortega, Whitney Trettien) as well as some junior scholars who were new to me (Alex Wingate and Natalie McGartland). All of the panelists were interested in the intersection between the material history of the book as a technology – and at least some have physical maker spaces where they show students how to operate physical letter-press printing presses, and make their own books and zines. In a way, the material history of the book helps us think through what might be happening as the technology of book creation is changing in the digital age. (It is not ending, all of the panelists would I think agree.)
At a moment when reading habits are changing, and people are increasingly experiencing text as immaterial, there’s a real appeal to learning about how books have been made – how they work, what they do. I kept thinking of the appeal of vinyl records as an analog to this dynamic. One concern I had going in was whether this might be a form of nostalgia or a vintage fetish (i.e., steampunk, but for the printing press – Printpunk?). The panelists made a pretty compelling case that there’s more to it.
Along those lines, I just wanted to give a short plug for Elika Ortega’s new book coming out on Stanford University Press:
Binding Media. Print-Digital Literature (March 2025 – Stanford University Press)
https://www.sup.org/books/binding-media
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Panel 325, Code Switch: Digital Humanities of Peoples and Languages on Occupied Lands, had three speakers whose work was new to me, Lorena Gauthereau (University of Houston), Cana Uluak Itchuaqiyaq (Virginia Tech), and Elena Foulis. I was especially interested in the projects Lorena Gauthereau mentioned and described, including:
Arte Publico Press (see esp. their “Best Practices” page).
US Latino Digital Humanities (USLDH)
Puerto Rican Literature Project
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On the final day, I also attended a panel called “691 - 404 File Not Found: Deleted, Discarded, and Defunct Projects in the Digital and Data Humanities.” The panelists, Mallen Clifton (Stanford), Lauren Coats (LSU-Baton Rouge), Jessica DeSpain (SIU-Edwardsville), Maura Carey Ives (Texas A&M), Tess McNulty (UIUC), and Em Nordling (Emory), all had interesting reflections on what happens when DH projects go defunct – or reach their natural endpoint.
Lauren Coats reflected on the end of Archive Journal, which she founded, and which ran from 2010-2020. Jessica DeSpain talked about the Recovery Hub for American Women Writers, which remains active, though they have struggled with discoverability. (Canonicity, one finds, is extremely sticky, and it’s hard to help people get interested in voices they hadn’t heard of before if they didn’t know to look.)
Maura Carey Ives also mentioned a project I want to check out, the Endings Project at the University of Victoria.
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The final panel at MLA I attended was session 743, “The (Im)Possibility of a DH Textbook,” with a group of pretty familiar DH scholars, including Brian Croxall, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Katherine D. Harris, Lauren Klein (who sent in a pre-recorded video), Alan Liu, Kenton Rambsy, and Stephen Ramsay. Many of the speakers here were also at a panel in 2011, “The History and Future of the Digital Humanities.”
One additional starting point for the panel was the recent anthology, What We Teach When We Teach DH, and specifically Gabriel Hankins’ essay in that anthology.
Lauren Klein sent in some comments over video, acknowledging that some have begun to suggest that “DH is over”; another way of thinking about the current institutional status is that DH has actually become so comfortably ensconced that it’s no longer the “next big thing.”
I left the panel thinking it’s unlikely there will be an official “DH Textbook” anytime soon. There are, of course, many many DH anthologies out there to choose from
Katherine Harris did mention a resource I had somehow missed previously, “Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities,” an open-access, peer-review resource, where a group of 60 odd curators collected 10 digital resources each, which might be useful in the DH classroom.
https://digitalpedagogy.hcommons.org/
https://digitalpedagogy.hcommons.org/keyword
https://digitalpedagogy.hcommons.org/keyword/Fiction
Another book that was mentioned at the panel was Digital Futures of Graduate Study.