“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’. 

…there are far more of us who are working to push boundaries, embrace the art of research, challenge colonial frames and forms, and interrogate our academic inheritances than the ‘establishment’ structures want to allow for. Yet, even with our critical and decolonially-aspirational values, we consistently find ourselves defaulting, as teachers, writers, reviewers, and editors, to structures we’d rather not endorse. So, what now? What next? What does critical mass in higher education transgression and transformation look like? …

…Social media-driven activism warns us that “silence is violence,” but inside that silence I am struggling to negotiate an underlying constellation of conflicting visions and reductive slogans, loaded symbols, and simplistic appeals to action that weaponize shame and embolden other silences. It is within this constellation that I center my own continuing call for immediate and unconditional ceasefire in Gaza…

… As we venture towards the postmodern era, which Arendt was straddling and which we now are fully immersed in, art is less accessible, but perhaps more transcendent. In this dangerous new landscape, in which we insist upon rebelling against the human condition (implication: against our own guaranteed existence as a species), it may be that our engagement in the transcendence offered through art offers us a way forward as we grapple with the loss of the public sphere. …

The clouds above Bread Loaf are moving through the sky with confident purpose, while I am still, limbs contorted in an adirondack chair with my spine crunched up against the back. –No.– I’m static, not still. I’m squirming. I’ve forgotten how to wear pants. For over two years, I’ve been sporting pandemic pajama fashion, and the waistband of jeans now seems permanently oppressive. My ears itch from the mask bands, the black flies are carnivorous, I can’t decide if I’m hot or cold, and a caterpillar just dropped onto my keyboard. I think wistfully of the blue velvet chairs in the library, but I can’t bear the thought of another minute with my face trapped. Outside, no one is breathing in my immediate vicinity, and the wind is dispersing opportunistic pathogens, relegating them to rightful oblivion. Static, yet I am back in the world. …

Last week, the US Supreme Court declared my body to be the property of others in thirteen US states (and counting). For some of us, born after 1973 (and without other contributing factors of identity that have continued to rouse the obstruction of bodily rights across the half-century that followed the landmark decision of Roe v. Wade) this is the first time. For some of us, this is a historical rewind, unwelcome dèjá vu after so much activism to force the personal into the political sphere in the 60s and early 70s. For some of us, this is an old, tired story, written deep into the contours of our DNA after generations of enslavement (physical, medical, existential, corporate). This is not my country’s first tangle with embodied politics, and we knew it was coming. This is a blow of scope, as remnants of erased histories and dystopian fiction have come to roost once again, in the flesh of millions. …

… It has been twenty months since January 9, 2020, when the WHO first suggested a link between a mysterious pneumonia and a novel coronavirus in Wuhan province. In Tarot practice, the twentieth card of the Major Arcana deck symbolizes judgment, absolution, awakening, rebirth. Across those dark and stagnant months, we’ve invoked the four horsemen and tasted the nine circles of hell, condemned ourselves to judgment and begged for absolution, hoping all the while that it’s not too late to catch a piece of redemption from angels above. …

… It is inevitable that institutional structures and policies that are informed by the conventions of the broader culture will also represent aspects of existing cultural conflicts, as these structures are sustained by the dominant cultures surrounding us and are cultivated in our consciousness before we are able to form abstract thoughts. Our challenge, if we are to authentically address the complexities of institutionalized, structural injustice, is to engage questions that will help us build the foundational values that we cherish into our very systems, acknowledging that, in many areas, this is uncharted territory. …

I woke up in the early hours of November 9, 2016 to a changed country. Or, more accurately, a country unchanged, but finally and bombastically exposed in dramatic irony; on that day, we lost the privilege of denial of the terrors that many of us had been nominally willing to condemn, in moments of convenience, but could never agree to commit to expunging for good. I wondered, when confronted with the dawn of an unwelcome new era, by what forces did we decide to anoint these terrors, to elevate them and endorse them so brazenly? Was I witnessing a regression, a reckoning, a dystopian revolution? Or, at my most optimistic, could I hope that this was the death rattle of a colonialist vision whose time had long passed, a final battle cry for a Civil War that never really ended, both sides falling victim to their narratives of uninvited manifest destiny? Perhaps, in the wake of this death rattle, we might finally make space for a long overdue reconciliation. …

Last Minute Graduation Speech for the UWC-USA Class of 2020

So, I’ve been thinking about ceremony. The word traces back through Old French, Medieval Latin, Old Latin, and probably Etruscan, to convey “sacredness,” “awe,” and “reverent rites,” with a sense of the ancient. Solemn, ancient rites require preparation...usually... We’re rushing this one a bit, but isn’t that one of our defining skills at UWC-USA? Wait until three days, three hours, or three minutes before something is due, cry a little (or a lot), throw up our hands and say, “this will never work, I’m quitting, I can’t even,” and then pull out one of the most magical and compelling pieces of creation that humanity has ever seen? I’ve seen you do this, over and over again. And so, our Last Minute Graduation Ceremony follows suit, in all of the glory and splendor of the UWC-USA way: exceptional, at the last minute, because we didn’t have any other choice. …