Read on Twitter
Okay. so: how does this happen? https://twitter.com/kwazana/status/1300397553603604481
First, repair. Whatever else be sure that the faculty of color/black faculty who work with you are tired. If they have checked out, it’s not because they are “difficult” or “conflict-prone” - it’s because they’ve had so much thrown at them
...that the fraternal model of country club collegiality that departments tend to hold everyone to just can’t apply to what is asked of faculty of color
So just: repair. A great model for that is the statement by the @Chicago english department. Just saying out loud what everyone knows is true about our discipline, is one great step toward repair. There’s more but start there.
2. Envision. Envision a field of study that does not simply reproduce itself. Envision tomorrow’s literature department. Make it bigger and more capacious.
Imagine hiring in a field you know nothing about from within the parameters of what matters to that field. So don’t export the local norms of close reading, of literary-critical performance, of local bro norms of being That Guy. Through that out. Invite difference in.
3. Examine your hiring practices. Have frank conversations about how hiring works in your institution. What do you mean by such terms as “fit,” “excellence,” “relevance,” “impact.”
4. Involve students. Ask students what they want more of. Ask the students who aren’t in your department why they aren’t there and what they want more of.
5. Examine your enrollment demographics. Which students don’t you reach and why.
6. Examine your tenure and promotion patterns. What could you do to better support and promote a faculty body organized around difference, equity, justice and redistribution.
Why write threads like this? I’ll tell you a story. I’m a first-generation university student. Literally the first woman, on either sides of my family, ever to get a degree. During my second year at university, I dropped out. It wasn’t by choice, another story for another day.
I got a job in a women’s shelter in Etobicoke in Canada and worked there for four years. Best work experience of my life, if one of the hardest.
We used to work 18 hour shifts, starting at 4pm and running through to 10am. None or not much sleep, intaking women and children at some of the worst moments in their lives.
The shelter was on a cul de sac & didn’t have bulletproof windows; sometimes men would come by looking for their wives. Sometimes the police, banging on the door looking for “lost” or “missing” women who had actually let their husbands know they had left, but they didn’t like it
Sometimes, I’d be up in the middle of the night waiting for a woman to come in, smoking my way through my second pack of smokes (I smoked two packs a day then! gross but I totally miss it) and I’d read poetry. It was so heavy in that room and in that house.
And, ironically enough while smoking like an idiot, poetry let me breathe. I read Dionne Brand, Audre Lorde, TS Eliot, Keats, woman of color anthologies, metaphysical poets, everything. Reading poetry helped me find a reason to return to school.
That thing that reading did for me, which felt of the place I was reading, and of the moment I was reading in, and yet part of something bigger - it helped propel me into a different kind of future. That future would have been fine, but it wouldn’t have been this one.
Why can’t we open the doors of literature to more people? To more kinds of people? Why can’t we believe that it is important for students to see themselves in their teachers and in their readings?
What I’m trying to say here is: I read everything, with everything else. I didn’t know what canon wars were, I just read.
White, and other, defenders of white literature: why can you not be convinced that if you just allow yourselves to move aside from the centre of your narratives, that in the long run the entire field will be revitalized?
why can’t we put everything alongside everything else. horizontalize literature.
