Where Are All the African and Caribbean Critics? The MLA, Honorary Members, and Honorary Fellows

It has long been--recognized that the various institutions of literature--its publishers, critics, bookstores, clubs, and more--have substantial effects on literature "itself," to the extent that one can reify that term. The growth of twentieth-century African literature, in particular, is powerfully a story of its institutions, from Présence Africaine and Heinemann's African Writers Series to the global fame, translation, and widespread adoption of Achebe's Things Fall Apart; to the increasing shifts of African school and university curricula towards African writers; to the awarding of Nobel prizes to Soyinka, Gordimer, and Mahfouz; to the continuing struggles for non-European-language publishing, and more. The present journal is also an example. For thirty years Research in African Literatures has been a leading venue for the scholarly legitimization of African writing, particularly in North America. RAL has depended in turn on other institutions, including the University of Texas at Austin, the Ohio State University, and Indiana University Press, and has long-term relationships with two organizations--the African Literature Association, and the African Literatures Division of the Modern Language Association--for whom RAL serves as official journal. Despite the importance of all such institutions, African literary studies scholarship has focused more on textual and cultural analyses than on institutional critique. Though some studies can certainly be cited, ¹ institutional critique most often takes the form of paragraphs in larger works.

In this commentary, therefore, I will offer one such institutional critique, by addressing the Africanity of the Modern Language Association's lists of Honorary Members and Honorary Fellows, twin lists that anoint or recognize, respectively, the non-North-American world's most distinguished literary scholars, and the entire world's most distinguished writers. I focus on these lists for several reasons. The Modern Language Association of America (MLA) is the largest and most influential literary society in the world: largest, by sheer number (over thirty thousand members); and most influential, in that its North American base rests on the richest educational system in the world. One feature of the MLA's size and scope is that it houses more Africanist literary scholars than any other organization on the planet. Recent data from the MLA indicate that its African Literatures Division has a membership of 573, its Francophone Literatures and Cultures Division a membership of 952, its "English Literature Other Than British and American" division a membership of 1043, and its Postcolonial Studies in Literature and Culture discussion group a membership of 2,306. Once overlaps among the lists are eliminated (since MLA members may join up to five divisions or discussion groups), the MLA can be said to house almost four thousand scholars with primary or secondary Africanist interests. ² The affiliation of the present journal, from its very first 1970 issue, with the MLA is another testimony to its reach. ³ Thus the writers and scholars honored by the MLA are a privileged group--an elite selected by the world's largest and most collectively influential literary association.

The core argument of this commentary is simple: For over one hundred years, up to and including the present day, the MLA's two Honorary lists, and particularly its honorary scholars list, have been terribly Eurocentric. Its scholars list, in particular, has systematically (or rather institutionally) excluded African and Caribbean critics, and it is time for that to change. In order to understand how this situation came to be, and what might be done about it, it will first be necessary to review the history of the honorary lists--those two pages many MLA members scan each year in each September's much-thumbed PMLA "directory" edition.

The MLA was founded in 1883 with an insurgent, culturally broadening, even "multicultural" vision: to challenge the dominance of classical and/or archaic language and literary studies (mainly Greek and Latin, but also...