Since Kafka is on the menu, we note that it has been thirty years since we bid farewell to the annual meetings of the Modern Language Association. Time was, we would look in upon those inbred jamborees annually to savor the latest in reader-proof, politicized grandstanding. At some point, however, we felt that, like Macbeth, we had “supped full with horrors” and resolved to leave those annual exhibitions of narcissistic nullity to others. Life really is too short.
Nevertheless, someone called attention to this year’s festivity, which convened in the once-great city of Philadelphia. It was full of the usual perverse “sex in the head” (in D. H. Lawrence’s phrase ) nonsense: “Queer and Trans Multispecies Justice,” “Bodies, Bodies, Bodies: Theorizing Complex Embodiment,” “Queer Relationalities,” “The Place of Identity in Queer Studies,” “Group Sex,” etc. etc. There was also this little beacon of virtue-signaling tucked away in the online program under the rubric “mla Land Acknowledgment.”
We acknowledge that the territory on which we gather for the 2024 convention, the city now known as Philadelphia, is part of Lënapehòkink, the ancestral homelands of the Lenape people since time immemorial. We honor the Lenape tribal nations—the Delaware Nation, the Delaware Tribe of Indians, and the Stockbridge Munsee Community—whose governments now reside in different states as a result of colonial-settler violence and dispossession but who maintain ongoing relationships with their homelands. We take this opportunity to thank the original caretakers of this land.
It is not clear that airsickness bags were distributed along with this nauseating declaration.
We are not proposing to return to mla anytime soon. But amid the usual carnival of perversity there was one bijou we thought might interest our readers. No, it has nothing to do with, you know, literature. The denizens of the mla and indeed of the humanities departments of most of our universities wouldn’t countenance anything so retrograde. But how’s this, a session on “Vegetal Afterlives”?
“Advancing recent work in critical plant studies”—“critical plant studies”? alas, yes—“asking how plants offer vibrant models of resistance to environmental destruction through their persistent attempts to create a Plantocene, . . . panelists focus on the theme of vegetal resistance, considering how plants can offer models of resistance for human crises like systemic racism, unnatural disasters, and climate change.”
The real question that has to be asked, though, is how much had to go wrong that the largest and most prestigious professional humanities organization in the country would be home to such garbage. A dissertation on that subject might be very worth reading.
