Middle Kingdom on the Margins: The Perilous Journey of Chinese into the MLA and Other radical Ruminations

I am addressing a subject about which I know nothing whatsoever, except for the fact that it does not exist. The description of a new aesthetic, or the call for it, or its prediction—these things are generally done by practicing artists whose manifestos articulate the originality they hope for in their own work, or by critics who think they already have before their eyes the stirrings and emergences of the radically new. Unfortunately, I can claim neither of those positions, and since I am not even sure how to imagine the kind of art I want to propose here, let alone affirm its possibility, it may well be wondered what kind of an operation this will be, to produce the concept of something we cannot imagine.

—Fredric Jameson, "Cognitive Mapping"

Fredric Jameson probably didn't have the Modern Language Association foremost in mind when he wrote those words, but when confronted with the awesome totality of the organization and, by virtue of the language in which I specialize, when I contemplate my marginality in it, or perhaps more precisely my lack of a place within it, I find the analogy suits the situation. Before us we have a colossus of literary, language, and cultural scholars at work on an array of themes and topics that span the intellectual landscape of the humanities today. The MLA is separated into various languages, geographies, disciplines, approaches, methods, genres, and national language literatures that are further divided into epochs, and there are comparative approaches as well. Beyond these divisions, we have the humble but stout "discussion groups" that serve as the incubators of future subdivisions of knowledge and pursuits. Altogether, they make up the foremost academic organization of its kind in the world, based in North America yet casting its net widely, attracting scholars from around the world for its annual meeting, and charged with the powerful task of arbitrating what is important in things literary and cultural and what is not.

Nevertheless, at the center of this organization is a hole, an absent center so stark that the fact that it is not everywhere remarked on cannot be due to its lack of importance but more likely to the fact that it is so gaping that its utter obviousness ironically serves as the veil that enshrouds its truth. And that emptiness at or near the center of the organization is Chinese: among all the ways of divvying up turf at the MLA, somebody left out the most spoken language in the world. Indeed, despite the bevy of divisions split along national languages, approaches, and comparative structures, despite the multiple divisions distributed to English, Spanish, French, German, and Italian, not a single division is devoted to Chinese. Admittedly, among the inequities of the MLA, Chinese is not the sole language disenfranchised, and my colleagues will certainly speak eloquently to their own respective languages and geographies. But Chinese is the most spoken in the world. And I hope we can agree that, its millennia of cultural heritage notwithstanding, Chinese is a modern language.

This then leaves us with the question of what is to be done. Would it suffice to simply add a division for Chinese? Would that be enough to satisfy us? Perhaps that small bone would be enough temporarily to keep the sinologists safely at bay. But what then of Japanese? Or Korean? Or, as my colleague Sangeeta Ray insightfully observes, what of Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil, Urdu, Kannada, Malayalam? And what of Javanese, Thai, Farsi, Vietnamese, Polish, Tagalog? I think you can see where I am going with this. The list of aggrieved is long, and Chinese is only the most glaring on that list. And to turn the coin back around to look once again at the MLA's present surface, how significant is sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish drama, or French medieval language and literature, or Chaucer? In a finite arena, who will gladly give up their space so that those camped outside the gate may enter and lay claim to some of the space...