A panel at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association annual meeting in November plans to discuss how to use classes on Southern literature as “Trojan horses” to “build common cause with campus protest movements.”
The call for papers asks how instructors can fight “anti-immigrant policies” and “trans*-exclusionary politics…with attention to the limitations and vexed histories of our disciplinary methods?” Especially when it is so dangerous to do so – you know with “state legislatures’ push for ‘campus carry’ and attempts to defund diversity initiatives at their public universities.” We’ve all followed with aghast, I’m sure, how liberal professors and gender theory crusaders have been regularly shouted down by mobs of conservative students and have been disinvited from speaking at schools because of their progressive politics.
What is “vexing” indeed is the attempt to use Southern writers, who in the past have stood against the sort of “technocapitalism” that is now all too happy to throw its weight behind transgender causes, and who were generally wary of federal overreach.
But literature professors have been bringing politics into the classroom for 50 years now – which is why the humanities are flourishing at the moment – so I’m sure they’ll figure out a way. In fact, the latest issue of PMLA (the journal of the Modern Language Association) has a section of “Manifestos from, for, and about United States Southern Studies” with plenty of heady and transgressive theories. It should make for some entertaining beach reading if you haven’t bought that Don Delillo novel yet.
