A few weeks ago, my twin teenage daughters gave me a lesson in how to talk to Siri, the female ghost in my new smartphone. “Ask her a question,” said […]

As many of you know, I focused on the Common Core Standards Initiative in my recent column.

Members of this group may also be interested in the following sessions at the 2015 convention in Vancouver:

Session 160: The End of Remediation?

Thursday, 8 January, 7:00–8:15 p.m., 224, VCC West

Program a…[Read more]

Traveling between established seasonal encampments in a rich ecological system that was a crossroads for trade, the native peoples of the Vancouver area communicated in many languages and across many borders. Were some of those languages, now classified as dialects, mutually intelligible in the precontact past? It would be tempting but reductive to explain the difficulty of answering such a question in terms of the distinction that the historian Pierre Nora draws between cultures with customary memories, which he associates with orality and embodied habits, and cultures with history, which he associates with critical reason, the capacity for nostalgia, and, above all, historiography in its root sense: the writing of history. His distinction between memory and history is challenged by the past and present language situation of Vancouver, as are two other distinctions important both to the city’s history and to my presidential theme, Negotiating Sites of Memory: the distinctions between ancient and modern and between colonial and postcolonial. There are obviously contexts in which it’s meaningful to oppose these terms as names for earlier and later periods, but the notion of a linear succession of periods in a Newtonian uniform flow of time becomes an obstacle to thought about sites with histories that have been, and continue to be, sites of contested memory and interpretation.

The aboriginal peoples of Canada, Peter Kulchyski argues in Like the Sound of a Drum, had ancient modes of writing on the land and on the body as well as modes of communicating aurally across space by drum. These semiotic systems are, however, not only ancient but also modern; Kulchyski shows how they are being “reconfigured and redeployed” in ongoing negotiations among parties with competing understandings of modernity and private property (17). The parties don’t come to the table with the rough parity usually required for successful negotiations. One sign of the asymmetry is the endangered status of all of the more than thirty indigenous languages of British Columbia (“First Nations Languages Program”). The people who welcomed Vancouver to their inlet spoke a language now identified as Hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓, one of three closely related tongues grouped under the English term Halkomelem and also categorized, more generally, as a version of Central Coast Salish. Today, there are few speakers who describe themselves as fluent in Hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓, and there are none at all in the Tsleil-Waututh community (“Hul’q’umi’num'”). Yet the number of indigenous language learners in Vancouver is growing, with support from the University of British Columbia’s First Nations Languages Program and community Web sites, such as Qwiqwel.com, which highlights the Hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ word qwiqwel, “to make a speech.”

Making speeches, listening to them, and sometimes interrupting, translating, interpreting, and debating them are activities that MLA members regularly practice as well as reflect on. These are also the activities that I hoped my colleagues would analyze and illuminate under the rubric Negotiating Sites of Memory. As I have thought more deeply about this theme during a summer filled with relentlessly terrible news about failed negotiations and proliferating acts of violence in many parts of the world, I have had moments of despair about the theme’s conceptual and ethical complexities. As a valuable alternative to war, negotiation may in some circumstances work as “a discussion or process of treaty with another (or others) aimed at reaching an agreement about a particular issue [or] problem” (def. 2), but negotiation can in other circumstances signify “manipulation” designed to get around an obstacle (def. 4). Negotiators may be at odds among themselves, and the fruit of a long negotiation may at times involve no more than an innovative phrase acknowledging that a problem exists in the eyes of both parties. A striking example of such a modest but still significant result of a negotiation over a site of memory occurred in June when the Vancouver City Council voted unanimously to acknowledge that the modern city occupies the “unceded traditional territory” of three indigenous peoples who have small land “reserves” within the city’s borders: the Musqueam, the Squamish, and the Tsleil-Waututh (Austin). “Unceded territory”: it’s a thought-provoking phrase both for citizens of Vancouver and for those who visit from other countries that have appropriated the lands of indigenous peoples and see those appropriations as events belonging to the past. “Unceded territories” puts indigenous people’s claims to their lands squarely in the present while also implying that negotiations should continue in the future.

Among the more than two hundred sessions that MLA members have organized in connection with the presidential theme, many address bracing questions about the concept of negotiation and about the modern academic field of memory studies. The roundtable “Transnational Memories: Sites, Knots, and Methods,” for example, questions “sites of memory” as an “assumed framework” for a field that has been “linked from the outset to national memory cultures, institutions, and sites.” Other MLA sessions, however, dissociate sites of memory from physical monuments, museums, and forms of commemoration approved (and often funded) by modern nation-states. There will be sessions on the print form of the edition, silent films, sixteenth-century composting practices, French Renaissance menus, troubadour poems, medieval Iberia, the early modern erotic body, the human brain, and queer archives—all considered sites of memory from various theoretical perspectives. There will be discussions of geographic sites of contested memory and analyses of texts that reconstruct the memories of slaves, prisoners, and poets. Many of the sessions conceived under the rubric of the presidential theme engage with what Michael Rothberg has analyzed as “multidirectional memory” that is “subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing” (3). Memory is also subject, of course, to forgetting. The ancient Greeks figured forgetfulness, Lemosyne, as the twin sister of memory, Mnemosyne, and both goddesses will be invoked at the upcoming convention. I hope you will be able to attend it. If you do and are not a Canadian citizen, please don’t forget your passport. Borders between sovereign states, even ones that have friendly relations, are serious social constructions.
Note

Written names for indigenous groups and languages have varied over time and are not standardized now; the First Peoples’ Cultural Council provides a useful guide to orthographic issues at http://www.fpcc.ca/language/toolkit/Orthographies.aspx. ↩

Works Cited
Austin, Ian. “Vancouver Sits on Unceded First Nations Land, Council Acknowledges.” The Province. The Province, 27 June 2014. Web. 25 Aug. 2014.
“First Nations Languages Program.” University of British Columbia. Faculty of Arts, U of British Columbia, 2014. Web. 25 Aug. 2014. <http://fnlg.arts.ubc.ca/FNLG1.htm>.
“Hul’q’umi’num’ / Halq′eméylem / hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓.” First Peoples’ Language Map of British Columbia. First Peoples’ Heritage Language and Culture Council, n.d. Web. 25 Aug. 2014. <http://maps.fphlcc.ca/halkomelem>.
Kulchyski, Peter. Like the Sound of a Drum: Aboriginal Cultural Politics in Denendeh and Nunavut. Manitoba: U of Manitoba P, 2005. Print.
“Negotiation.” Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford UP, 2014. Web. 25 Aug. 2014.
Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009. Print.
Vancouver, George. A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific. 6 vols. London: J. Stockdale, 1801. Print.

If you haven’t yet exercised your right to vote to approve or disapprove of the Delegate Assembly’s decisions at its January 2014 meeting, I hope you will do so this weekend. Voting ends at 12 […]

As the MLA’s 2014 President, I’d like to remind you of a point made by Rosemary G. Feal, our Association’s Executive Director, in an email to members last week: “Your participation in voting is […]

It is our pleasure to announce that the Executive Council has approved a proposal for a new division and discussion group structure starting with the 2016 convention. As cochairs of the working group that developed the proposal over three years, with broad-based consultation among individual members, numerous MLA committees, and the Delegate Assembly, we are delighted to introduce the new structure and to invite you to become involved in implementing it. We know you will have lots of questions, and you will find answers to many of them here.

This extensive review was the first in forty years. It aimed to respond thoughtfully to intellectual changes that have occurred since 1974, which have affected the kinds of work done in long-established MLA fields while also contributing to the formation of new fields.

Several priorities guided the multifaceted review process:

a commitment to the deep study of language, literature, and their histories
the protection of small fields, including the study of less commonly taught languages
the attempt to minimize hierarchies and exclusions among fields, large and small
the aim to lessen the divide between English and foreign languages in the MLA
the desire to add new fields in emergent areas

As you review the new structure, you will find much continuity as well as a number of significant changes.

For the sake of democratization and simplification, the distinction between discussion groups and divisions has been eliminated in favor of the single category forums.
The forums are grouped under nine rubrics, which are meant to enhance the legibility of the new structure while allowing intellectual exchanges within and across categories. Forums are arranged alphabetically within these nine rubrics:

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies
Genre Studies
Media Studies
Rhetoric, Composition, and Writing Studies
Language Studies and Linguistics
Theory and Method
Transdisciplinary Connections
Higher Education and the Profession

Forums will be reviewed every five years and will thus have regular opportunities to study their histories and their plans for the future.
Each forum will have a group site on MLA Commons for year-round communication.
Many new forums have been preapproved by the council and can hold sessions as early as 2016.
Members may propose additional new forums starting with the 2018 convention.
A new kind of convention session, the three-year seminar, is geared to specialized topics that call for sustained attention beyond that which is offered by the special session format. They will be introduced for the 2018 convention.

As we introduce this new structure, we are keenly aware of the many negotiations and imperfect compromises that produced it. The discussions in which we have engaged with many of you during these last three years have been both invigorating and humbling. We are grateful for the time and thought you put into your comments. We learned from them all, and they led us to think hard and in new ways about how to negotiate among many differing ideas and stakes in the future of the MLA.

Beginning this process, we knew that we could not actually complete it, if completion meant devising a structure that would stand unaltered for decades. We hoped to provoke a conversation among members about the shapes and priorities of our fields. This conversation has certainly occurred, and it has produced a structure that includes, as a constitutive element, a process of regular review.

With this letter, we happily announce that one phase of the conversation has concluded, and we look forward to the new phases that will occur at MLA conventions, in MLA committee meetings, and on MLA Commons. Our thanks go to the working group (Srinivas Aravamudan, David Bartholomae, Brent Edwards, Carla Freccero, Mary Louise Pratt, Richard So, and Patricia Yaeger); to members of the Executive Council, who gave us much advice; and to all MLA members who commented on the various drafts circulated over the past year. We also thank Rosemary G. Feal, who encouraged us at every step of the way, and the many MLA staff members who contributed to the revision process and who will now be working with the membership on implementation. We can’t wait to see how members use the new structure to expand their interests at the convention and on MLA Commons.

Sincerely,

Margaret Ferguson, President
Marianne Hirsch, Immediate Past President

Related Materials

An Introduction to the New Forum Structure
List of MLA Forums
FAQ about the New Forum Structure
Instructions for Establishing New Forums

See Ravitch, as well as Cody (“I Was among Those”), who provides a list of the members of the original drafting group. The CCSSI Web page refutes (as a “myth”) the charge that there were few teachers involved with the drafting of the standards. ↩
See Ravitch on the issue of corporate influence. The CCSSI tests are being developed by the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium. Both won federal grants to develop their tests. They are reviewed at http://www.fairtest.org/. ↩
For ACTFL’s alignment of its standards (also called the Five Cs: communication, cultures, connections, comparisons, communities) with the Common Core ELA standards, see http://www.actfl.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/Aligning_CCSS_Language_Standards_v6.pdf. ↩
See Cody, “Why”; Chua. ↩
David Steiner, dean of the School of Education at Hunter College, City University of New York, will also participate in the panel on text complexity; he has done valuable work on K–16 education. ↩
See the articles by Ravitch, Stimpson, and Graff, drawn from papers they presented at the 2014 MLA Annual Convention. ↩

Works CitedChua, Paul. “Centralized-Decentralization Emerging in Singapore.” International Education News. Intl. Educ. News, 25 Mar. 2014. Web. 2 Apr. 2014.
Cody, Anthony. “I Was among Those Who Reviewed the Common Core in 2009.” Education Week Teacher. Education Week Teacher, 6 Nov. 2013. Web. 30 Mar. 2014.
———. “Why Bill Gates Is Wrong on Class Size.” Washington Post. Washington Post, 5 Mar. 2011. Web. 29 Mar. 2014.
Common Core State Standards Initiative. Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2012. Web. 30 Mar. 2014.
Graff, Gerald. “Clarifying College Readiness.” Profession (2014): n. pag. Web. 30 Mar. 2014.
PISA 2009 Results: Overcoming Social Background—Equity in Learning Opportunities and Outcomes (Volume II). Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. OECD, 2010. Web. 2 Apr. 2014.
Ravitch, Diane. “Common Core Standards: Past, Present, Future.” Profession (2014): n. pag. Web. 30 Mar. 2014.
“Starting the Alignment Conversation.” Luminafoundation.org. Lumina Foundation, 18 Oct. 2013. Web. 28 Mar. 2014.
Steiner, David. “Our Dogmatic Slumbers.” Profession (2007): 141–49. Print.
Stimpson, Catharine R. “Beware, Be Wary.” Profession (2014): n. pag. Web. 30 Mar. 2014.

Again, as at previous stages of the CCSSI process, the great potential of the educational reforms is…[Read more]

This debate pits small farmers practicing “sustainable” agriculture against Big Agriculture in various complex ways. In grocery stores, classrooms, and lecture halls in Davis (and elsewhere), I have come to see some intriguing connections between current debates about farming and a set of texts about farmlands produced in England from roughly the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries. These texts focus on the practice known as “enclosure,” and they are relevant, I think, to contemporary debates not only about meat, grain, fruit, and vegetable production but also about humanities education as a public good. The following anonymous seventeenth-century poem protests the enclosure of communally held land:

The law locks up the man or woman
That steals the goose from off the Common,
But lets the greater villain loose
That stole the Common from the goose.

This poem anticipates Simon Fairlie’s account of enclosure as “the subdivision and fencing of common land into individual plots which were allocated to those people deemed to have [individual] . . . rights to the land enclosed.” For over five hundred years, English writers of pamphlets, agricultural treatises, legal documents, and works now classified as literary argued about enclosure even as the process of privatization steadily progressed. Fairlie, the editor of the British journal Land and a former farmworker who now makes scythes, and books, for his living, sums up the enclosure debate succinctly: “Proponents and ‘beneficiaries’of enclosure insist[ed] that it was necessary for economic development or ‘improvement,’ and those against (including the dispossessed) claim[ed] that it deprived the poor of their livelihoods and led to rural depopulation.”

What might these debates about the disposition and use of agricultural land in the past tell us about what is going on in higher education in the United States today? Higher education is a mixed sector, private and public, each of which makes its own claims to contribute to a good that is common not because it is equally available to all but because it benefits society as a whole. Both private and public colleges and universities often give scholarships to low-income students, and both types of institution receive various forms of government funding. As state support for public colleges and universities declines, they increasingly seek private subsidies, and both types of institution rely on their wealthier students (and parents) for tuition revenue. The distinction between private and public in higher education is blurring, raising urgent questions about whom institutions of higher education are and should be serving. For some who criticize public colleges and universities for failing to serve the needs of taxpayers, higher education does not look like a public good at all; instead, it looks like a consumer good whose value is properly determined by the market. From this perspective, public universities and colleges must become more productive, trimming waste and increasing quantifiable output. From another perspective, however, public colleges and universities cannot serve their students, present and future, unless the faculty members are able to work and teach in an environment that allows certain kinds of inefficiency. What seems like a wasteful place to some may be a generative environment for transformative teaching (where outcomes cannot be predicted), for basic research in the sciences, and for scholarly inquiry in the humanities.

The MLA has been and must continue to be an articulate participant in debates about the humanities’ claim to preserve and create a distinctive kind of wealth. Our own version of a common, in the form of a Web platform launched in January 2013, MLA Commons, allows members to express their views, to collaborate with one another, and to discuss documents produced by the MLA and its members. MLA Commons enabled more than a thousand members to comment last fall on a draft proposal for the organizational revision of the association’s intellectual structure. MLA Commons is not only generating new kinds of communication among members but also fulfilling its legacy as an example of innovative sharing. The City University of New York gave the MLA the software of its CUNY Academic Commons; with many changes made by the MLA’s talented staff, the software—held in common with no exclusive ownership—will now be passed on to other scholarly organizations.

Further, at the MLA’s recent convention in Chicago, there was a Delegate Assembly “open discussion” focused on strategies for strengthening higher education as a “public good.” The discussion, which will continue at next year’s convention in a session sponsored by the Delegate Assembly Organizing Committee, confirmed and extended arguments made by James Grossman, the executive director of the American Historical Society. At the same Chicago convention, the MLA presented the first Chicago Humanities Summit with the Chicago Humanities Festival and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; the plenary session, introduced by the 2013–14 MLA president, Marianne Hirsch, focused on the academy’s report on the state of humanities education, The Heart of the Matter. Through the Executive Council’s new subcommittee on K–16 collaborations, the MLA is exploring new avenues of communication with our humanities colleagues in primary and secondary education, especially but not only with those who have been tasked with implementing the controversial Common Core State Standards.

It seems as if ideas about the common, along with innovative practices enabled by the experiment in a global common called the Web, are everywhere up for discussion: as common endeavor, common core, and common good, among others. The poem I quoted earlier suggests that enclosure of common land in England was a story of winners and losers, despite the claims made by the enclosers for a more efficient agriculture. As humanities educators, we should make it part of our shared task to monitor both past and present claims for the common good and to defend the place of the humanities in any version of the good that can be truly held in common. We must also attend to what is not always considered part of the “humanities” but is covered by any idea of what is humane: the fate of the goose itself.
Works Cited
Fairlie, Simon. “A Short History of Enclosure in Britain.” Land 7 (2009): n. pag. Web. 24 Jan. 2014.

Grossman, James. “Disrupting the Disruptors.” Inside Higher Ed. Inside Higher Ed, 16 Dec. 2013. Web. 24 Jan. 2014.

The Heart of the Matter. American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Amer. Acad. of Arts and Sciences, 2013. Web. 27 Jan. 2014.

Welcome to the Modern Language Association. As the MLA’s 2014–15 president, I would like to introduce myself and to comment on some of the association’s current activities and goals for the […]

97. Children’s Literature and the Common Core

Thursday, 9 January, 3:30–4:45 p.m., Belmont, Chicago Marriott

Colleen Flaherty has written an interesting article for Inside Higher Education about the LoR proposals and your comments on them through the third week of August. She […]

Thank you, Cynthia! This is a really interesting new thread!  And I’m sure you’re right that the CC standards as currently written could prompt changes in the ways in which students choose […]