2022 Presidential Theme: Multilingual US
The presidential theme for the 2022 MLA Annual Convention is Multilingual US.
When I first considered a theme for my presidential year, I was motivated by the urgency of naming and recognizing our multilingual reality, in a political context that strove to deny it. In the face of a devastating global pandemic, which has shut physical borders, it is all the more important to argue for cultural exchange and openness, from the teaching of languages in universities to the fostering of them in our public life.
The MLA can play a crucial role in imagining and supporting a linguistically diverse commons, to make language a tool of inclusion rather than exclusion. For those who care about the humanities, exploring and promoting multilingualism is one of the most significant contributions we can make to a diverse public sphere. At the same time, reconstructing multilingual roots productively complicates the history of the nation-state—particularly for the United States but also for many other polities, especially settler nations whose indigenous and interimperial pasts have been occluded. Our theme for the year is thus both contemporary and historical—an invitation to highlight the importance of contemporary multilingualism, while attending to the complex histories and erasures that have led to our present condition.
Multilingualism occurs in many spaces, both within and beyond the university. In keeping with the admirable recent focus of the MLA on the public humanities, I want to emphasize not just scholarly and pedagogical practices of multilingualism, but the ways in which MLA members can support a rich ecology of languages in their communities as in their institutions. How can our expertise promote multilingualism across civic spaces—in schools, public libraries, cultural, political, and artistic arenas? How do we make room for linguistic diversity not as an accommodation, but as a constitutive feature of the commons?
Sessions for the convention may wish to focus on language justice; multilingualism in poetry, theater, and other forms; strategies for multilingual access in various settings; multilingualism and the public, urban, and digital humanities; multilingual medical humanities; multilingualism and history; pedagogic approaches to multilingualism, including at the K–12 level; translation, interpretation, and activism; bilingual education; multilingual approaches to national literatures; preservation and revitalization of Indigenous languages; sign languages and embodied communication; scholarly collaborations across languages and disciplines; public humanities projects that engage multiple languages; and more.
After seeing the 2021 virtual convention draw over 5,000 engaged attendees, I know that our shared commitment to the MLA and to the exchange of ideas that it fosters is strong. Although we continue to face challenges, I hope you will join me in reaffirming the value of connecting with each other and that I will see you at the 2022 convention—whatever it may look like—as we meet to consider the Multilingual US.
Barbara Fuchs