An Open Letter on the Future of the Program 

I work between American Studies, poetics, and the history of the idea of blackness (some people say that my field is Africana Studies, but that’s not how I see it), crossing back and forth between these in everything I write or think about. I want to try to identify some of the challenges of doing this work under the program’s current configuration and outline some wishes for a student-of-the-future with similar or related interests.

When I came to the Graduate Center in Fall 2007, identifying as a person interested in black persons and poetry, I cobbled together a course of study that leaned heavily on the course offerings of Wayne Koestenbaum, Ammiel Alcalay, Jerry Watts, Robert Reid-Pharr and Joan Richardson. From them, I learned that I was an Americanist, that poetics was a field, that my interest in theory was stronger than I had imagined. I also learned that scholarship organized around a period of time inside a single discipline (English literature) would frustrate both my conceptual instincts and my writing goals.

I wrote a prospectus and the first section of my dissertation without accepting that I could work or think successfully (uncramped and uncompromised) under the rubric of American Studies. I credit my experience at Futures of American Studies in the seminar of Donald Pease (an experience made possible by Duncan Faherty) with teaching me that there was a place for me in American Studies. And, I credit the guidance of my dissertation supervisor, Jerry Watts, who supports me and my work in ways that I will never be able to thank him for, but mostly by accepting that my scholarship is, as he says, “fundamentally unorthodox” – but it is scholarship, anyway – whose aims relate to the fact that I am a writer who works, in addition to other genres, in the genre of literary criticism, which sometimes requires some methodological invention.

I’m not suggesting that my particular combination of choices and capacity/incapacity can guide the department. I am suggesting that the department actively invites the fundamentally unorthodox applicant and enjoys a reputation based in part on its ability to support “nontraditional” graduate students like me: people who come to graduate study after another career (law, in my case), “older” students (I was 35 when I started the program), and the most weirdo of all, people who are poets. It looks to me like all of these creatures are going to become endangered in the future, and I think that should not happen.

I am not speaking here to the pressing economic questions that will face students who advance beyond year five of the Program under the current funding model. I continue to be shocked by what is essentially the withdrawal of support for these students and the burden that withdrawal places on individual students and EOs to treat their funding as exceptions and favors. Some of these issues include the availability of affordable health insurance, protections for students who choose to become parents while in graduate school, and the specific economic pressures on nontraditional students.

1) American Studies, Poetics as Interdiscipline and Gauge

At no point during my time here have American Studies priorities within the department been clearly articulated (at least not to me), nor do I know of any interdepartmental initiative to think through the professional impact of non-period specific, interdisciplinary work for Americanists or others, with respect to the job market. I don’t know what professionalization could mean if it does not mean being prepared to look different from other candidates. I am saying that I work in an interdiscipline not because I want to act perverse but because I am perverse. I continue to believe, not against all evidence but against some, that the fact that I publish poems actively and think and write about poetics outside the official channels of professional English Studies, signals something about the future of the profession. Which is that the fact that I am here likely means that more like me will be coming (I’m just not that special). The department can and should be prepared to meet poet-scholar people halfway by making some effort to acknowledge the field (inside American Studies in my case, but some will be elsewhere), the kinds of work we produce, and speak to the professional demands of our market with intelligence and foresight. I think this preparation and initiative will serve lots of students who do truly interdisciplinary work, not just poets, but definitely poets.

2) American Studies and Diversity

I am thankful for the leadership of Revolutionizing American Studies, led by Duncan Faherty and Kandice Chuh. The Black Atlantic at 20 conference, especially the brilliant, inspired remarks of Robert Reid-Pharr, and related events were intellectual highlights of my time at the Graduate Center.

I don’t think it’s controversial to note that efforts to articulate a vision for American Studies as a potent attractive force in the department, going forward, and as a voice of reason with respect to the need to end the Program’s somewhat technocratic “hands are tied” approach with respect to its recalcitrant whiteness have been met with resistance, at best. It is not for me to answer the question of how and why American Studies faculty haven’t coalesced within the department in these matters, or why the very idea that the Program should become stronger in American Lit and American Studies, harnessing the energy of faculty and students working in an expanding, politically engaged area should be undesirable. How could it harm this department to have more students and faculty committed to a vision of racial and economic justice in the contemporary world?

I’d like to see American Studies continue to lead in efforts to increase the department’s many possible diversities by continuing, whenever possible, to strengthen its course offerings relating to race and class-based critique in any and all periods, to pursuing appointments of faculty who demonstrate commitment to teaching and mentoring students of color, who are capable of connecting historical study of literature to the contemporary in meaningful, rich ways, whose scholarship impressively ranges across disciplines and fields to make new territory.