2021 Presidential Theme: Persistence
The presidential theme for the 2021 MLA Annual Convention is Persistence.
The humanities is now compelled to fight for its own survival and to mark the path for persistence during intensely challenging times of intensified precarity and tenuous grounds for hope. Humanities scholars are especially alert to the precarity of our profession, the university, and the prospects for our students as we face contingency, attacks on academic freedom, heightened anti-intellectualism, xenophobia and racism, the emancipation of social hatreds, and the dominance of market values. As civil rights are suspended for individuals blocked at borders and climate change threatens the earth, what part should literature and language scholars play in uncovering and creating practices of persistence that can lead to new conditions of life in and outside the academy? As a collective potential, persistence is not to be understood as individual heroism. Nor is it a metaphysical guarantee. It is a force, figure, and concept bound up with endurance, survival, defiance, willfulness, resistance, and flourishing, but also with dead ends, social death, and extinction. For those for whom survival can in no way be taken for granted, what kinds of expression, including writing, and strategies emerge to document the struggle and forge a path toward futurity? If academic work is to become responsive to the conditions that imperil life and livability both inside and outside the academy, what forms should it take? What experiments can we make? What new collaborations appear both imperative and promising?
I encourage members to submit proposals for sessions that focus on the future of the humanities; the institutional and political conditions of our professional lives; contingency and pedagogy; literature and science, including the humanities and climate change; social movement literature; the racial imaginary; the undercommons; indigenous writing; LGBTQI literature and visual culture; poetry, literature, and history of people of color; disability studies; literatures of loss, resistance, and survivance; queer and trans theory; the persistence and precarity of students, especially first-generation college students; the potential extinction of lesser-known languages, and its implications for language teaching; university studies; prison writing; poetry, memoir, oral history, autotheory, and life writing in the context of historical struggles against economic exploitation, apartheid, systemic racism, colonial powers, and occupation; border and migration studies; performance studies; Romantic poetry, for the present; the mixed legacies of vitalism and materialism; utopia and dystopia studies; new pessimisms and optimisms; philosophical and literary work on life and the living; and the role of both creative and critical work in the humanities in transforming the public world.
I look forward to seeing all the ways in which MLA members reflect on this theme at the Toronto convention, and I hope that you will join us there.
Judith Butler