[extropy-chat] FWD (PvT) Professors at war: Searching for dissent at the MLA

[Terry W. Colvin]

< http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2004/01/04/professors_at_war/
>

Professors at war
Searching for dissent at the MLA

By Scott Jaschik, 1/4/2004

SAN DIEGO -- "Why are you headed to San Diego?" asked the man next to 
me on the plane. "I'm going to a meeting of English professors to 
hear what they have to say about the war with Iraq," I replied.

"English professors? On the war?" The man smirked. "I can't imagine 
what they would have to say."

Plenty, it turns out. This past week, about 8,000 professors and 
graduate students gathered here for the annual meeting of the Modern 
Language Association. Most came for job interviews, to catch up with 
old friends, and to attend some of the 763 panels of scholars. But 
among the panels on topics ranging from Hawthorne to Asian cinema to 
"The Aesthetics of Trash" were a surprising number of sessions 
dealing with the war in Iraq, terrorism, patriotism, and American 
foreign policy.

Not that there was much actual debate. In more than a dozen sessions 
on war-related topics, not a single speaker or audience member 
expressed support for the war in Iraq or in Afghanistan. The sneering 
air quotes were flying as speaker after speaker talked of "so-called 
terrorism," "the so-called homeland," "the so-called election of 
George Bush," and so forth.

The approach to the war was certainly wide-ranging -- from cultural 
studies to rhetoric to literature to pure political speechifying. In 
a session on "Shock and Awe," Graham Hammill of Notre Dame traced the 
ideas behind the initial bombing back to the Roman historian and 
orator Tacitus's idea of arcana imperii, which translates roughly as 
"mysteries of state." Like Roman emperors who used rhetoric to sway 
the populace, Hammill argued, the Shock and Awe campaign was a 
rhetorical gesture aimed at demonstrating US power as much as 
flattening Baghdad.

At a different panel, Cynthia Young of the University of Southern 
California spoke about how the White House uses Condoleezza Rice and 
Colin Powell "to create a distorted multiracial mask on imperialism." 
"What does it mean," Young asked, "when imperialism comes wrapped in 
a black bow?"

Instead of Rice's August speech comparing the Iraqi "liberation" with 
the civil rights struggle, she recommended the writings of the 
African-American activist and writer Angela Davis, who once described 
her alienation from white Americans mourning the death of John F. 
Kennedy in 1963, but not the four young black girls who died in the 
Birmingham church bombing that same year.

Similar alienation is evident today, Young said, as the United States 
ignores the problems facing minority citizens while taking over 
countries where people do not look or worship like white Americans. 
"The new patriotism looks a lot like the old slash-and-burn 
imperialism," she declared.

Berkeley's Judith Butler, a superstar of gender and literary studies, 
drew a packed house with her analysis of Defense Secretary Donald 
Rumsfeld's bad grammar and slippery use of the term "sovereignty."

On a 2002 visit to Eritrea, in response to a question about the 
detention of dissidents there, Rumsfeld declared: "A country is a 
sovereign nation and they arrange themselves and deal with their 
problems in ways that they feel are appropriate to them." Beyond the 
noun-verb agreement problem with "country" and "they," Butler rapped 
Rummy's knuckles for redefining sovereignty -- in her analysis -- as 
"the suspension of legal rights."

When the United States is challenged over the detainees held at 
Guantanamo Bay, American officials assert that US courts have no 
jurisdiction there because we are not sovereign there, Butler pointed 
out. "We are using sovereignty to declare war against the law," she 
said, to nods throughout her talk and loud applause after it.

The MLA's deliberative body, the Delegate Assembly, adopted by a 
landslide margin of 122-8 a resolution supporting "the right of its 
members to conduct critical analysis of war talk" despite government 
efforts to "shape language to legitimate aggression, misrepresent 
policies, conceal aims, stigmatize dissent, and block critical 
thought."

Sometimes that critical analysis was aimed at elements of the antiwar 
left. While denouncing the "particularly evil cabal" that runs the 
country, Barbara Foley of Rutgers urged leftist critics to look 
beyond the distraction of "Bush's cowboyism" to "the Leninist notion 
of intra-imperialist rivalry" to explain US-European competition for 
domination of the oil-rich Middle East.

Anthony Dawahare of California State University at Northridge said 
that "whoever wins the war in Iraq, the working class people in Iraq 
and in the US will be subject to a dictatorship of the rich." In an 
interview, he said that unless Howard Dean challenged capitalism 
itself, student activism on his behalf would be "a waste of time."

Not that everyone at the MLA was preoccupied with Marxist analysis. 
Ask many of the graduate students or younger scholars what's on their 
mind, and they talk about finding a job.

The closest public challenge to the prevailing geopolitical views at 
the MLA came when one professor asked a panel that had derided 
American responses to 9/11 and Iraq what a good response would have 
looked like. She didn't get much of an answer, left the session, and 
declined to elaborate on her question.

But a young professor of English who followed her out the door to 
congratulate her did offer some thoughts on politics at the MLA. 
Aaron Santesso of the University of Nevada at Reno described himself 
as being "on the left" and sympathetic with much of the criticism of 
the war in Iraq. But he said that the tenor of the discussion "drives 
me nuts." "A lot of people here don't want the rhetoric to just be a 
shrill echo of the right," he said.

Just a few years ago, he noted, the Taliban was regularly attacked at 
MLA meetings for their treatment of women and likened to the American 
religious right. Now, there is only talk of how the United States has 
taken away the rights of the Afghan people.

Santesso said he gains a good perspective from his students, most of 
whom he characterized as "libertarian conservatives." Most of the 
debate at the MLA, he said, "would completely alienate my students."

Plenty of English professors share his views, Santesso said. And some 
of his colleagues are even conservative. They just avoid coming to 
the MLA.

Scott Jaschik, former editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education, is 
a writer in Washington.
© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.


-- 
"Only a zit on the wart on the heinie of progress." Copyright 1992, Frank Rice


Terry W. Colvin, Sierra Vista, Arizona (USA) < fortean1 at mindspring.com >
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