Glad I wasn’t, on the basis of this account by Scott Jaschik. And ‘there’ being a meeting of the Modern Language Association in San Diego:
This past week, about 8,000 professors and graduate students gathered here for the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association. Most came for job interviews, to catch up with old friends, and to attend some of the 763 panels of scholars. But among the panels on topics ranging from Hawthorne to Asian cinema to “The Aesthetics of Trash” were a surprising number of sessions dealing with the war in Iraq, terrorism, patriotism, and American foreign policy.
Not that there was much actual debate. In more than a dozen sessions on war-related topics, not a single speaker or audience member expressed support for the war in Iraq or in Afghanistan. The sneering air quotes were flying as speaker after speaker talked of “so-called terrorism,” “the so-called homeland,” “the so-called election of George Bush,” and so forth.
The approach to the war was certainly wide-ranging – from cultural studies to rhetoric to literature to pure political speechifying. In a session on “Shock and Awe,” Graham Hammill of Notre Dame traced the ideas behind the initial bombing back to the Roman historian and orator Tacitus’s idea of arcana imperii, which translates roughly as “mysteries of state.” Like Roman emperors who used rhetoric to sway the populace, Hammill argued, the Shock and Awe campaign was a rhetorical gesture aimed at demonstrating US power as much as flattening Baghdad.
At a different panel, Cynthia Young of the University of Southern California spoke about how the White House uses Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell “to create a distorted multiracial mask on imperialism.” “What does it mean,” Young asked, “when imperialism comes wrapped in a black bow?”
…..
The MLA’s deliberative body, the Delegate Assembly, adopted by a landslide margin of 122-8 a resolution supporting “the right of its members to conduct critical analysis of war talk” despite government efforts to “shape language to legitimate aggression, misrepresent policies, conceal aims, stigmatize dissent, and block critical thought.”
…..
The closest public challenge to the prevailing geopolitical views at the MLA came when one professor asked a panel that had derided American responses to 9/11 and Iraq what a good response would have looked like. She didn’t get much of an answer, left the session, and declined to elaborate on her question.But a young professor of English who followed her out the door to congratulate her did offer some thoughts on politics at the MLA. Aaron Santesso of the University of Nevada at Reno described himself as being “on the left” and sympathetic with much of the criticism of the war in Iraq. But he said that the tenor of the discussion “drives me nuts.” “A lot of people here don’t want the rhetoric to just be a shrill echo of the right,” he said.
Just a few years ago, he noted, the Taliban was regularly attacked at MLA meetings for their treatment of women and likened to the American religious right. Now, there is only talk of how the United States has taken away the rights of the Afghan people.
The gathering no doubt saw itself as ‘speaking the truth to power’. It’s time a few more of them woke up to a different desideratum: ‘speaking the truth to bullshit’. Especially notable here is imperialism’s ‘black bow’, and the asserted right to critical analysis, so evidently under threat in San Diego. (Hat tip: Matt Kramer.)