Justin Van Wormer
There are doubtless a great many factors that we might identify as contributing strengths to the English Program. I think, though, that we might also trace many of those factors to a single ultimate source and might find that each factor arises in close relationship with New York City. Rethinking the Program in relation to the City can be generative path toward identifying and intensifying desirable traits of the Program and refocusing on local sites of critical inquiry and action. This focus helps define a critical space in which to be effective teachers and scholars. As a Program we can engage in “cutting edge” projects and fulfill the historical mission of CUNY to be of service to the often underserved people of New York City. I envision New York as an organizing principle for the Program in three different, but interlinked areas: resource, diversity, and what I am calling sites of critique.
I keep using spatial metaphors – the language of place, sites, spaces, paths, etc. – because the placeness of New York itself is the greatest resource the English Program has. This is a practical matter or sorts. Lots and lots of people would like to live and work in New York. Lots and lots of people do live and work in New York. We can add on to this all those institutions and places in New York that support our work as humanists and critics. I want to make sure that by advocating the orientation of the program to more fully engage with New York City going forward I do not therefore advocate for a purely contemporary or Americanist vision of the English Program. Part of the placeness of New York is the fact of multiple archives and the space to read them; the massive simultaneous reading of multiple texts is at the heart of the culture practice that New York projects as an identifying characteristic to the world. This idea of place includes everything from archival collections like those at The Morgan Library and The Schomburg Center to the simple fact that no other city in the United States can boast the sheer density of poetry readings and black box theaters that New York has. New York can, does, and ought to support committed scholars across disciplinary, periodization, and geographical boundaries. Shakespeare has a home here, so does Milton, so does Toussaint Louverture, and so does Bayard Rustin. We are the City University of New York; we are, as they say, in the thick of it.
What does it mean to be at CUNY? It means serving a racially, intellectually, and socioeconomically diverse set of students that reflect and represent the city itself. The geography of the CUNY system itself reflects the fragmented and compromised nature of the city’s past and present. Our campuses, like subway stations and expressways, are one way to trace the contours of the City and its flow of bodies and information. Our undergraduate students exhibit a diversity of an almost world historical scope for college students; and they move into and through the city on ancient lines of trade and migration. They also move in the space constructed for them by neoliberal capitalism. Uniting a consciousness of both historical circumstance and struggle with contemporary critical understanding of the political economy of the classroom and the city means having a clearer picture of CUNY. The Program itself ought to reflect that, too. We should concentrate on bringing CUNY undergraduates to the GC, attracting a diverse faculty, and enrolling a diverse student body from other sources. New York, the people who live here, and the people who would like to, allows us to use the program to help the professoriate look a little more queer, non-white, and female and better represent the voices and views of the people who live here. We should look like the City, we should look like CUNY, and we should be a place in which our academic projects engage with the diversity of the City.
New York City in its diversity provides several sites of critique, places in which to engage critically with culture and politics. The necessary work of institutional critique of the university in America can find no more fruitful grounds than CUNY where militarization, neoliberalization, and corporatization vie with a long tradition of activism, engagement, open admissions, and a mission to serve all of New York. Occupy Wall Street was an object lesson in the practice of different kinds of radical pedagogy, politics, and protest. Both of these necessarily implicate the ongoing privatization of public space in New York; what does it mean to be a public person in a privatized realm and what kinds of citizenship are available to us when we negotiate these spaces. There are not only site of critical contestation and struggle, but also sites in which to anchor projects of critique, advocacy, reading, and imagination. There are multiple diaspora literatures with presences in the City, composition and rhetoric as practiced by both teachers and students in our constituent colleges, and large and vital queer communities and communities of color. The history of New York also provides ample opportunities to read multiple literatures and histories, from Edgar Allan Poe’s magazine editing to W.E.B. DuBois’s influence on the Black Arts movement to the rise of queer activism and the GAA in the 1960s. None of these are objects to be analyzed through a microscope or a telescope, but places and practices in which we can anchor critical inquiry and examine the possibilities, ambiguities, and contradictions of politics, identity, and representation.
This concatenation of characteristics represents a web of mutually supporting factors which points in the direction the Program ought to move. We can focus student and faculty recruitment to increase diversity in the Program’s members, offer those faculty and students access to the cultural institutions of the City, and develop a strong focus on the kinds of critical inquiry that are vital to the future of the humanities and the academe. To do this, we ought to commit to expanding diversity and being responsible to the CUNY-wide mission to educate the disparate communities of New York City. This means creating an environment in which our program comes to look more like the city and responds to the conditions of the city. We ought to expand our capacity in diaspora literatures from Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America and the Global South generally. The CUNY Pipeline is a wonderful program, but I believe that more faculty diversity – and diversity of areas of study – will beget more student diversity. We ought to search out scholars whose work is also representative of and responsive to the critical questions that arise out of the milieu of the City. This is not to make us an Urban Studies program, but to move toward those scholars in all areas and periods of literature who work with and within the resources of New York City, be they a physical archive, a performative practice, a diasporic literary tradition, the financialization of the university, or the problems and possibilities of composition in New York City’s classrooms. Orienting this way will rely on existing strengths of the Program and CUNY, position the Program to move forward in fruitful and diverse ways, and fulfill the historic institutional mission of CUNY to educate and advocate for the people of New York City.
