Hala Halim on the proceedings of the annual convention of the Modern Language Association A truism, perhaps, but the annual convention of the Modern Language Association of America (MLA), an institution which dates back to 1883, is something of a rite of passage for young scholars in the humanities. With its division meetings, organised around national literature, period and/or genre, discussion groups, forums, special sessions and meetings of allied and affiliate organisations, and with presenters ranging from graduate students to eminent scholars and theoreticians, the MLA convention, unlike conferences devoted to a single discipline or a particular geographical region, allows for exposure to both scholarly trends within specialised fields and in the humanities as a whole in a North American context. Apart from the sheer size of the convention, the MLA is also a job market during which innumerable interviews for academic positions take place, making the event highly charged for many of the attendees. With Domna C Stanton, Graduate Center, City University of New York, as president of the MLA in 2005, the 121st convention which took place in Washington, DC from 27 to 30 December comprised some 794 sessions. The figure is cited by way of apology for the inevitable selectiveness of the account that follows. Among several speakers at the Presidential Forum, devoted to "The Role of the Intellectual in the Twenty-First Century," was eminent postcolonial Kenyan novelist and playwright Ngugi wa Thiong'o, University of California, Irvine. While moulded by language and history, central to "the logic of [the intellectual's] calling" is an "ethical dimension," asserted Ngugi. Through historical overview, literary allusion, intellectual autobiography and personal reminiscence, he outlined the challenges facing intellectuals since World War II. "Born under the shadow of the atomic bomb," Ngugi witnessed the stifling of "the hope generated by the intensified decolonisation" that followed World War II and the attainment of social and civil rights in different nations and communities by "the rivalries of the Cold War and the emergence also of the instruments for economic globalization, the Bretton Woods institutions of the World Bank, IMF and WTO. The Cold War is officially over but globalization is in full speed." Underscoring the division of nations into "members of the nuclear club" and those that are not, between nations that "possess wealth and the majority that possess poverty," Ngugi also spoke of the division between wealth and poverty within nations and went on to cite Brecht in a poem addressed to Danish working class actors inciting them to take part in the struggles "Of men and women of your time, thereby / Helping, with seriousness of study and cheerfulness of knowledge, / To turn the struggles into common experience and / Justice into a passion." Turning to the cultural rifts -- ethnic, religious, racial and nationalistic -- that paradoxically divide "a globe shrinking into a village because of information technology," Ngugi cited Aimé Cesaire who, in the course of castigating colonialism, writes, "it is a good thing to place different civilizations into contact with each other;... for civilization, exchange is oxygen." But the Kenyan writer had his own castigating to do, of the academy, for its tendency to shy away "from engagement with words like freedom, liberation, social justice, peace, nuclear disarmament to retreat into a modern scholasticism." He concluded that "Works of imagination and critical theories of all varieties can only weaken themselves by shying away from the challenge... Theory," he concluded, "must always return to the earth to get recharged with new energy. For the word that breathes life is still needed to challenge the one that carries death and devastation. In so doing the intellectual of our times will be working in the tradition of the First Intellectual who made the word become flesh." Introducing a session entitled "Human Rights as Comparative Discourse," arranged by the American Comparative Literature Association, Margaret Higgonet, of the University of Connecticut, Storrs, explained that the panel was put together to underscore that human rights are not solely a legal topic but one dependent on comparison for recognition. In the first paper, "Exile and the Place of Theory," Simon Gikandi, Princeton University, explained that his focus on literary theory and on a figure who rejects comparativism is meant to bring out how we think of the human in terms of inclusion and exclusion. His paper centred on a 1937 debate between FR Leavis and René Wellek. In contrast to Leavis, the father of English literary criticism who believed that it was only in English that a stable sense of shared values could be achieved and saw the function of criticism as safeguarding tradition against foreignness and hence comparison, Wellek, the cosmopolitan comparativist, construed the human as a product of universal values and ideals. In response to Wellek's criticism of his book on poetry, namely that it privileges stable language instead of speech and that it makes no recourse to philosophy, Leavis argued that he did not need to state his position in philosophical terms but could respond intuitively to a poem and saw criticism as founded on something self-evident. Eliciting from the debate the tensions between criticism and theory, between nativism and cosmopolitanism, Gikandi went on to trace the productive trajectories taken by figures such as Stuart Hall and Homi Bhabha, who needed to theorise and compare in a space of exile where inclusive notions of human rights can be elaborated, and contrasted them with Leavis' position. In "German Scholarship in Istanbul Exile: The Imperative for Interdisciplinary Work," Azade Seyhan, Bryn Mawr College, offered an investigation into the "exilic scholarship" carried out by German-Jewish and German professors who fled Nazi Germany in the mid-1930s and went to Turkey "to rebuild the Turkish university system". Discussing primarily Alexander Ruestow's three-volume book prepared in Istanbul, Ortsbestimmung der Gegenwart (an abridged English translation of which was published under the title Freedom and Domination ), Seyhan brought out from this and other texts by the "displaced scholars" a "critique of German modernity from a non-European site,... an important commentary on the survival of scholarship in and as translation, [and] the role of translation in the economies of national culture." In the last paper on the panel, "Disability and the Right to Have Rights," Tobin Siebers, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, entered into dialogue with Hannah Arendt's work, arguing for a human rights discourse in which the human is constituted as based on vulnerability and fragility rather than on rational thinking and physical health. If, as Tobin added, the association of disability with a particular group of people has been used to justify their exclusion -- as in the withholding of the vote from women and people of colour historically in the US -- then making fragility and disability central to the human community would make for a more inclusive human rights discourse -- for example by turning HIV into a human rights issue and not an African problem. A panel on "Love and Eros in Arabic Literature," arranged by the Discussion Group on Arabic Literature and Culture, moderated by Mohja Kahf of the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, comprised two papers, "Love and Power in Tawq al-Hamama by Ibn Hazm," by Ibtissam Bouachrine, Smith College, and "Eros Translatus," by Wail Hassan, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Analysing the gender politics in a number of anecdotes from the eleventh-century Andalusian writer Ibn Hazm's treatise on love, Tawq al-Hamama (The Ring of the Dove), Bouachrine asserted that love is largely portrayed in the Tawq as an agent that deprives lovers of reason and interrupts the social order. But, as she elaborated, it was clear that the concern in Ibn Hazm was for men's mental health in love. Pointing out that whereas Ibn Hazm openly discusses historical examples that demonstrate how women slaves undermined the Caliphate, the speaker suggested that he remained careful to attack the powerful women of his day indirectly and in a coded manner. The gist of Bouachrine's argument was that, writing at a time of political instability, Ibn Hazm used the theme of love as a veil through which to criticise Andalusian politics and warn against the feminine threat to the patriarchal order. Taking as his starting point the etymology of the word "translation," which he suggested hovers on the boundary between love and death, and dwelling on gendered metaphors associated with language, at once erotic and violent, Hassan suggested that if Eros and Thanatos are both translators, an ethics of translation becomes possible when the two are held together "in productive tension". If in some postcolonial theoretical texts languages "cannibalise" each other through imperialism, there is, he added, another approach that makes for a better story of comparative literature and postcolonial theory that can be told in service of dialogue. To this end, Hassan resorted to Abdelkebir Khatibi's Amour bilingue where the Moroccan writer theorises bilingualism as a form of love, and drew a parallel with Anton Shammas, the Palestinian writer in Hebrew who, in an interview in Alif journal, described writing in any language, even that of the coloniser, as a form of love. In contrast to these two writers, the speaker turned to Moroccan critic Abdelfattah Kilito's Lan Tatakallam Lughati (You Shall Not Speak My Language) where, the focus being on the coloniser rather than the colonised, bilingualism is cast as a mortal sin, and the erotic metaphors take on the form of bestiality. While bringing out the apparent linguistic separatism in Kilito's book, Hassan nevertheless suggested that it lays bare the anxieties of cultural chauvinism and makes an implicit plea for an ethics of translation. A special session devoted to "Gender in Arab Shakespeare Appropriations" comprised, among others, a paper by Margaret Litvin, University of Chicago, entitled "Ophelia Was Pushed: Arab Women on the Edge." Tackling Iraqi playwright Jawad Al-Asadi's Ophelia's Window, in which Ophelia witnesses and denounces Claudius' crime and her madness "allows her to say, albeit in veiled form, things potentially dangerous to the... regime," Litvin analysed the trope of women as truth-tellers in contemporary Arabic literature. She argued that, like historical women in Arab political struggles, such women characters highlight and present a rebuke to Arab audiences, as well as their male counterparts, for "cultural disintegration, dictatorship, and the threat of the West". In "Shakespeare versus Sheherazade: Arab Women Writers and Selective Literary Lineage," Zahr Said Stauffer focused on Diana Abu-Jaber's novel Crescent which, she argued, both rewrites Othello and updates the Arabian Nights by having a woman character have her uncle tell her stories, signaling an anxiety about authorial positionality. However, rather than Shakespeare and Sheherazade being mutually exclusive in Arab women writers, argued Stauffer, their texts adumbrated a literary hybridity between the closure of a written tradition in Shakespeare and the deferral and non-closure presented by Sheherazade. Responding to these and a presentation I missed, entitled "Glaring Stare: Ophelia on the Arabic Stage," by Yvette Khoury, King's College, London, Ferial Ghazoul, of the American University in Cairo, offered that Arab writers turn to Shakespeare partly because their postcolonial culture is a hybrid of Arabo-Islamic and Western elements, and partly on account of the widespread perception of Shakespeare, as "the Bard," as being synonymous with poetic prowess which invites literary responses in the Arab tradition of " mu'arada," a mode of intertextuality that seeks to counter and surpass in beauty the original. Turning to the gender issue, and citing an argument put forward by Moroccan feminist Fatema Mernissi to the effect that while in the West woman has traditionally been viewed as inferior, in the Arabo-Islamic world she was seen as strong, hence the need to control her, Ghazoul suggested that the figure of a strong Ophelia is underwritten by a gendered resistance to tyranny in that the female character is out to save both the family and the umma (Islamic community), resonating with the Arab trope of gendered strength " ukht al-rijal," or sister of men. In a session entitled "Arab Pop Culture Speaks Back," arranged by the Division on Popular Culture and presided over by Thomas Foster, University of Washington, Seattle, Mark Reid, University of Florida, gave a presentation entitled "Challenging and Resisting the Everyday Narratives of the Arab Male in Recent French Cinema" which compared the efforts of African-Americans and Latinos in the field of cinematic representation to parallels by North Africans in France, addressing specifically the way in which the film Adventures of Felix, by Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau, deconstructs notions about the sexuality of Africans and Arabs in the West. Next, Rebecca Dyer, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, in a paper entitled "Arab Pop Culture: Salam Pax's and Jehane Noujaim's Perspectives on the 2003 United States Invasion of Iraq," analysed a weblog written by a 27-year-old Iraqi under the blogname Salam Pax (who came to be called "The Baghdad Blogger") and Jehane Noujaim's independent film, Control Room, which depicts Al-Jazeera's operations during the war and its aftermath. The blogger, as a Western-educated Iraqi gay man purporting to be addressing his Arabic-speaking friend and former lover living in Jordan, often in "Arablish," was well-situated to provide critiques of Saddam's regime and "observe and comment on the hypocrisies of the coalition gearing up to attack Iraq". Similarly, Noujaim's documentary was read by Dyer as "a form of alternative media in that it presents material to Western audiences that had been unavailable, such as [Al-Jazeera's] methods of translating the news live to its Arabic-speaking viewers and the reactions of the Arab audience both to the rhetoric being used to justify the war and to the events unfolding in Baghdad" as well as, by filming the American PR machine in action, "the artifice and performance aspects of the US-led campaign". Contrasting Edward Said's notion of a public intellectual's role as "speaking truth to power" against Arundhati Roy's counter-position "that speaking truth to power is unnecessary in that the powerful already know very well the 'truth'," the speaker suggested that her two examples indicate "a recognition... that those who speak back to power directly are necessary, but sometimes one isn't granted an audience with the powerful, and the only way to speak to them is to help to shape public opinion so that the powerful are forced to adapt." The last paper on the panel, "Fajanaakun! Mooo? (We Surprised You! Didn't We?)," by Kenneth Seigneurie, Lebanese American University, co-presented by Hala Daouk from the same institution, analysed all manner of popular representations -- songs, banners, "theme" demos, poetry, anecdotes and graffiti -- deployed by the Lebanese in the year that has passed since the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Al-Hariri. Asserting that "in some ways Lebanon is the world writ small" in terms of the microcosm of identities it presents, the polarities of powers contending over it and the conjunction of First and Third World lifestyles within the country, the speakers contended that if the imagery they presented "played a key role in unifying a fragmented, multicultural society according to ethical principles" it was possible to suggest that "the use of representation in this uprising bears significance beyond its historical conjuncture to point the way toward an effective mass politics for the post- Cold War twenty-first century". Presiding over the session at which I presented, "Nonaligned Literature from Bandung to the World Bank," arranged by the Division on English Literature Other than British and American, John Hawley, Santa Clara University, put forward two reasons for the panel: to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Bandung, which was to launch the nonaligned movement, and to propose the term "nonaligned literature" as an alternative to "the Eurocentric bias implied in the term postcolonial literatures". In her presentation "Reexamining Indian Nonalignment: From Jawaharlal Nehru's The Discovery of India to Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things," Anna Guttman, Lakehead University, delineated the historical paradoxes in Indian nonalignment vis-à-vis the US and traced their reflection in contradictions within Roy's self-positioning as an anti- globalisation intellectual as reflected in her fiction where, the speaker suggested, the imagery both "challenges hegemony and reinforces it," and the plot, in positing the impossibility of neutrality, normalises transgression and simultaneously transcribes resistance as doomed. In "'To Battle Shell in the Oilfields': Ecocritiques of Capital, Masculinity, and Oil in Dionne Brand's At the Full and Change of the Moon," Jana Evans Braziel, University of Cincinnati, proposed the applicability of "ecocriticism" to the Caribbean context, especially Trinidad with its dependence on oil. Braziel analysed Trinidadian novelist Brand's critique of neocolonialism in At the Full and Change of the Moon through oil, narcotics traffic and the AIDS epidemic which primarily attacks the poor. Identifying the novel as "a work of nonaligned literature" the speaker focused on one of the male characters, described as "a soft man," whose tragic life and pathologisation she interpreted as a powerful indictment of the system.
