An Open Letter to the Leadership of the Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English, cc: English Literature Curricular Leaders and Teachers Everywhere:
To open this letter, I would like to linger for a moment in the long and storied wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s (1963) Letter From Birmingham Jail, James Baldwin’s (1970) open letter to Angela Davis, Audre Lorde’s (1979) open letter to Mary Daly, and Eve Tuck’s (2009) Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities, as seminal works of the public epistolary genre. These letters offer insight into a long tradition of US-based scholarship and activism that models a practice of refusing the boundaries of our canonical entrenchments and rejecting the limiting epistemological paradigms that those entrenchments work to preserve.
In honor of this tradition, I note that I am by no means original in representing the ideas I bring to the fore in this letter. I am filling zero ‘gaps’ in research. I am contributing zero novel ideas to the field. I am, rather, hitching a ride with countless teachers, scholars, artists, and activists before me who have shouted these ideas into the winds of a multitemporal colonial hurricane. That this letter still needs to be written, despite its phenomenal unoriginality, is the point. Though exquisitely derivative, its content remains unfamiliar enough to enough people practicing and administrating in the fields of English literature to raise my very tired eyebrows, over and over again. I find myself saying, with a deep sigh, from the bowels of Deep Hall of Lincoln College, at this culminating point of my Bread Loaf career, “Here, hold my Pimm’s cup,” while I begin a very tired story that itself began long before I entered it.
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“This is theory, not literature.”
Thus began a labyrinthine conversation with a Bread Loaf administrator tasked with assessing the viability and categorization of a directed research and writing proposal for credits in British Literature: Beginnings through the 17th Century and British Literature: 18th Century to the Present (Distribution Groups 2 and 3). The project proposal in question emphasized a study of manifestations of the well-worn concept of the ‘Lyric Subject’ across ten centuries of British lyric poetry. The poems selected for study in the proposal indicated comprehensive attention to every named era of British Literature. No works were proposed for inclusion beyond those commonly accepted as representative of the ‘standard’ British English lyric canon.
The project was classified as ‘World Literature’.
As the location of literary origin of all works in the proposal was explicitly the large North Atlantic island often referred to as Great Britain, the offense that sparked a categorical denial of the project’s belonging to the requested distribution requirements appeared to be in the nature of the approach to the works in question. In other words, it was a question of method, rather than content, though the distribution requirements themselves list no allegiance to any particular methodological approach. An approach grounded in poststructural, transnational, and decolonial poetics, each component well-established in contemporary literary criticism worldwide, was deemed in this instance to be lacking in … something. That something was never defined, leading me to the conclusion that the something is representative of a hegemony that prefers to persist unacknowledged, while remaining a powerful actor in the background of the entire Bread Loaf experience.
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I use this story as a foil through which I invoke the alternative worldbuilding practices and promises of the public (political) epistolary genre. There are (at least) two politics at issue here: the politics of distribution and the politics of classification. (Any time we make a determination as to what is permitted to belong in a specific category, we are making a political decision. Categorization is inherently political. Sorry, Aristotle, but I said what I said.) Both politics sit inside the larger politics of what it means to be made and remade as ‘Other’ in the silent interstices of unacknowledged institutional structures.
This story, while specific to my experience as a Bread Loaf student, is also a global trope, with versions repeated across the world-spanning complex of universities modeled after Eurocentric systems. It is in that global (and globalizing) context that I offer both a critical analysis (in the vein of poststructuralist practitioners of sociolinguistics and Foucauldian discourse theories) and a set of suggestions (in the manner of the globally-sourced speculative fictions and world-building practices of literary resistance that have been working on the margins of colonial-legacy canons for centuries). Thus, in the vein of Black feminist refusal and reworlding praxis, here I write into futures I would like to see manifest, rather than the settled future we are so often expected to tolerate. (Shoutout to Evie Shockley’s life-changing Ecopoetics, Black Aesthetics, and the End of the World as We Know It course during the 2023 Bread Loaf Monterey session for the inspiration here.)
But first, we must begin with a bit of theory.
Beyond the awkward mechanics of theory vs. literature, there are even more insidious implications lurking. The practice of coding a comprehensive study of the British lyric canon as ‘theory’ rather than ‘literature’, and then, placing it in an elective category of ‘world literature’, is a practice bursting at the seams with unacknowledged (and limiting) biases and assumptions. That the imagined category of ‘theory’ curiously lives inside the named category of ‘world’ literature is one such bias. That the catch-all category of ‘world literature’ exists as separate from categories of ‘British’ and ‘American’ literature is another such bias. That certain works from certain locations deserve to be offset from the category of ‘world’ is another iteration of this bias. That the Rest of the World (i.e., non-British, non-American, and English-as-first-language writings from the postcolonies) is ‘other’, is another embedded bias. That certain approaches to theory belong in this ‘other’ category, while some (notably Eurocentric) approaches remain unacknowledged as being theory, raises another set of biases. And so on. The questions that emerge from this binary pairing of “theory not literature” include: Which authors count as British? Which authors count as English? Which theoretical approaches count as legitimate in a study of English literature? Which theories and authors must be relegated to the margins of a study of English literature, optional and thus undervalued against the whole?
This is not an abstract set of questions.
When the content already endorsed by the dominant paradigm is required, and that of divergent paradigms is elective, the hegemonies that content carries are perpetuated with the full force of institutional gatekeeping. Those of dominant identities and/or dominant persuasions can choose to escape knowledge of the Other in this structure. Those of Other identities and/or persuasions can never escape knowledge of the dominant.
When the dominant paradigm reflects political situations in which white supremacy, white fascism, patriarchal fascism, Christian supremacy and other reductive and oppressive frameworks are rising in political contexts worldwide and destroying efforts to work towards planetary justice, this is not an abstract problem. Those representing the dominant paradigm may yet be able to escape knowledge of existential threats (even as it affects them from underneath their consciousness); those representing Other paradigms are often the first to feel the effects of these conditions, such as migrants suffering and dying at the hands of unregulated ICE agents in the USA; entire small island nations under immediate threat of losing their home, citizenship, and place-based cultural identity to rising seas; asylum seekers in Europe struggling to receive services to support their basic needs; individuals worldwide living in resource-stretched areas with extreme economic instability who are most at risk from increasing rates and intensity of natural disasters; Indigenous communities losing access to sacred places because their colonizers have elected to use these land and water ‘resources’ for AI data centers. (This list goes on, and on, and on.)
Permission to not know is easily granted to those representing the dominant paradigm. For anyone else, the burden of proof is extensive, and the labor to do so is often unrecognized and unsuccessful, as those called upon to defend the viability of alternative fields of study as rigorous and well-established in their own right are consistently relegated to curricular sidelines by the mere classification as ‘optional’. Sylvia Wynter (2003) explores this concept through her coining of the ‘overrepresentation of [White, Western, Christian] Man’ as the universal standard bearer for the broader category of human (p. 329). Across this work (a lengthy article titled “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom”), Wynter offers a framework for interrogating common practices of bifurcation that continue to allow the White Western Christian Man to exist as the center, and place anyone else at the margins.
The English canon is a story of the overrepresentation of Man. It is other things, too, some of them remarkable, many of them independently worthy as literature; but these virtues do not absolve it of its overrepresentation problem. Wynter’s exegesis, along with related contributions from so many more scholars of various postcolonial, anticolonial, and decolonial traditions, is often called upon in contemporary scholarship in transnational poetics and politics. The web of fields engaging these concepts recognize the complexity of a deeply interconnected yet increasingly unequal and shamelessly violent world that continues to place English at the center of cultural, social, and economic capital, as it is the most widely spoken language globally, the language most often relied upon for cross-cultural communication worldwide, and a language of continued colonial-legacy dominance in patterns of globalization (cf. Ndlangamandla, 2024; Peña-Pincheira & Allweiss, 2025; Schöpf, 2020). This alone makes it necessary to interrogate the values, assumptions, and biases that the language carries along with it.
Here I call upon Dionne Brand’s (2024) understanding of language as a vehicle, responsible for “transporting ideas of the ‘normal’ at the level of syntax and feeling, marking the relation of, and between, objects” (p. 35). Brand’s Salvage: Readings From the Wreck, part memoir, part literary criticism, interrogates what she defines as “what comes to sit inside narrative writing (prose or poetry) as a result of the genesis, the action and long duration, of certain regimes in our material lives, certain relations of power, that make invisible or ordinary, or a given, those power relations.” She goes on to inquire as to “how those very power relations are embedded in the structure and form of storytelling, reproducing the architecture of these regimes” (p. 33). My imagined future is one in which no Bread Loaf student completes the program without intensely grappling with Brand’s questions. What architectures are we sustaining because we have not been taught to see them as architectures?
Curriculum is one path we have available to us to adjust the balance of our shared knowledge base towards planet-affirming ontologies and practices. Yet, more often than not, the epistemologies that support planet-scale justice are considered elective, whereas the epistemologies that further entrench the modern neoliberal values inherited from European colonial foundations are those that continue to hold sway in university approaches to program distribution requirements (among other practices). Bread Loaf appears to be leaning towards the latter trend.
Here is a partial list of topics that can be entirely avoided in a Bread Loaf master’s degree, depending on how one selects one’s courses: poetry; theatre; literature of the English postcolonies; postcolonial literary theory; anti-capitalist literary theory; transnational literary theory; disability; race; gender; class; sustainability; orientalism and exoticism in literature; African literature; Central American literature; South American literature; Asian literature; SWANA literature; Nordic/Arctic literature; Pacific literature; Indigenous literature; Queer literature; Black literature; literature authored by a woman; and so on. (To be clear, courses on these topics are often offered, but it is still entirely possible to avoid any or all of them across the duration of one’s degree program if one wishes and/or isn’t paying attention.)
Here is a partial list of topics that cannot be avoided in a Bread Loaf Master of Arts degree: (US-)American literature; British Literature: Beginnings through the 17th Century; British Literature: 18th Century to the Present; nation-state reinforcing frameworks implied by regional groupings of literature. It is also extremely unlikely that a student could make it through the program without being required to participate in: the objectifying framework of New Criticism-inspired literary interpretation; responding to the question “what was the author trying to say here?” or reflecting on what the author “might have meant” in a particular passage; essay writing that follows the traditional linear pathway of introduction → single thesis → analysis → conclusion; discussing writing craft as a phenomenon separate from any expression of oppression or violence in the passages under study. (Here I refer the reader to the poem about necrophilia and violence against female corpses in our erstwhile English canon of open letter lore, without citation. You probably know it. And if you do, ask yourself, “Why does this poem come to mind so quickly, of all the possible poems in the world that could be stuck in the long term storage of the mind? Who decided this one would be a candidate for canonization?”).
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As a small contribution to larger efforts of de- and re-canonizations, I offer a series of speculative fictions, presented as alternative frameworks for Bread Loaf distribution requirements. (Please note, in the fictions below, I use the term ‘literature’ expansively to accommodate any form of literary art: novel, short story, essay, poem, spoken word, graphic novel, play, film, song lyrics, incantation, etc.)
FRAMEWORK ONE: A Cross-Contextual, Cross-Modal Approach
In this framework, professors design courses that allow for broadly sourced literatures to come together in complex conversation. Students are expected to amass credits from each of the following categories, and all coursework must include a creative practice component:
Ancient Literature (from anywhere)
Literature of Historical Transitions
Contemporary Literature (from anywhere)
Diasporic Literature
Coloniality of English/Coloniality of Literary Forms
Literature in Translation
FRAMEWORK TWO: A ‘Literature-As’ Approach
In this framework, professors design courses to approach literature through the various roles it plays in the world, and credits are selected to offer students a breadth of understanding of these roles and functions:
Literature as Art
Literature as History
Literature as Sociopolitical and Cultural Commentary
Literature as Propaganda
Literature as Transgression
Literature as Reworlding
The English Canon as Social and Political Actor
FRAMEWORK THREE: A Microcredit Approach
In this framework, students are responsible for a percentage completion (percentage dependent on how many categories are imagined) of an extensive list of microcredits that ultimately add up to 10 credits for the degree. Courses of the standard 1- and 2- credits designate multiple microcredits, and shorter intensives are also possible. This allows for a wholesale disruption and constant rearrangement of categories, emphasizing the fractal nature of knowledge.
An extremely partial version of the macro-categories of a microcredit list could involve topics such as:
Identity Themes (e.g. race, sexuality, disability, the body, age, family, ancestry, religion)
Emotional Themes (e.g. love, shame, rage, despair, revenge, ennui)
Situational Themes (e.g. migration, minoritization, discrimination, genocide, diaspora, ecological crisis, statelessness, illness, identity crisis, cultural transitions)
Genres (e.g. horror, comedy, tragedy, absurdist, biography, fairy tale, children’s literature)
Theories (e.g. New Criticism, critical theory, decolonial theory, poststructuralism, feminist theory, queer theory)
Praxis (e.g. fiction writing, poetry writing, playwriting, memoir writing, decolonizing English teaching methods, nonlinear grammars)
Eras (e.g. ancient world; Islamic golden age, transatlantic colonial era, Victorian era, post-industrial globalization era)
Places (e.g. US-Mexico borderlands; diasporic communities in Britain; Indigenous ancestral lands and contemporary reservations, post-Soviet nations; border-contested places; island nations, climate-stressed nations and places)
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Like all distribution requirements, each of the options above privileges a different set of values. These options are just a few imagined reorganizations, though the possibilities of rearrangement are endless. Each of these imagined futures for Bread Loaf represents an approach that attempts to honor the responsibilities scholars, teachers, and engaged citizens face in the polarized and polarizing world we (and our students) are moving through, and that treats literature as a practice that is always in conversation with the legacies of the past, the demands of the present, and the live spaces of possible futures. Our promotional materials draw from language like this repeatedly – our challenge is to build a curriculum to match this vision.
As scholars, learners, and teachers, we are continually faced with questions of the value of dominant canons in contrast to marginalized or yet-to-be defined approaches and methods, and we are regularly subjected to the force of inertia in disciplinary entrenchments that suspend engagement with these tensions in contemporary educational practice. The work we do with respect to the maintenance or transformation of our inherited canons and the methods of analysis that have settled into the cracks of those canons has the potential for significant influence in both cultural reproduction and cultural transformation.
We also have an opportunity (and, I believe, an overarching responsibility) to meet this existentially-fraught historical moment with political intentionality and respect for complexity that places social and ecological justice, sustainability, and life-affirming systems change at the center of our work. What that means is different for each of us. It may involve various permutations of digging into the past, imagining the future, drawing lines across time and space, holding space within porous boundaries, and pushing beyond boundaries that present themselves as static and unyielding. All of these are possibilities within the realm we refer to as academia, and each has varied potential for impact.
How we choose to engage the project of meeting the moment determines quite a bit about what possibilities may emerge when our work meets the world. Some approaches sustain entrenched power structures and reinforce limiting conditions, whereas others encourage us to interrogate and resist the background conditions that bind us. I suggest that, at this moment, entrenchment narratives (often expressed unconsciously) are especially noxious in the broader context of planet-wide existential uncertainty, and that we owe our colleagues and our students a renewed commitment to interrogating our narratives that is worthy of the challenges we face.
With hope, love, and gratitude (especially for those who have been writing/telling these stories and teaching these values for centuries – and including so many of the colleagues and professors I have been honored to learn from at Bread Loaf),
Melinda Russial
July 2026
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References:
Baldwin, J. (1970). An Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Y. Davis. History is a Weapon (Website). https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/itcitmbaldwin.html
Brand, D. (2024). Salvage: Readings from the Wreck. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. (Kindle Edition).
King, Jr., M. L. (1963). Letter from Birmingham Jail. In Why We Can’t Wait (2011, originally published 1964). Beacon Press.
Lorde, A. (1979). An Open Letter to Mary Daly. In Sister, Outsider: Essays and Speeches (2012). Crossing Press.
Ndlangamandla, S. C. (2024). The coloniality of English proficiency and EMI: Decolonization, language equity, and epistemic (in)justice. International Journal of Language Studies, 18(1). 105–130.
Peña-Pincheira, R. S., & Allweiss, A. (2025). Conquistador–settler grammars: Borders and
boundaries of the colonial geographies of language. The Modern Language Journal, 109, 511–527. https://doi.org/10.1111/modl.13019
Schöpf, C. M. (2020). The coloniality of global knowledge production: Theorizing the mechanisms of academic dependency. Social Transformations: Journal of the Global South, 8(2), 5–46. https://doi.org/10.13185/3372
Tuck, E. (2009). Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities. Harvard Educational Review, 79(3), 409–427.
Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument. The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257-337.