Dickens, in his infatuation with the orphan, anticipates Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, which argues against interpreting everyone’s life experience in terms of the Oedipal conflict’s family drama.

The article addresses a topic of pressing but long-­standing concern to many in the higher education community: the disproportionately low number of African American faculty members in English, assessing the facts of the situation and how they might be addressed effectively.

Compiled to support the work of the ADE Ad Hoc Committee on the
Status of African American Faculty Members in English, this scholarship review is not comprehensive. Much of the relevant literature treats diversity and equity issues in higher education broadly, a consequence of the difficulty of obtaining reliable data on specific disciplines and…[Read more]

The members of the MLA Committee on the Literatures of People of Color in the United States and Canada noted at a recent meeting that they often make generalizations about humanities doctorate recipients and faculty members of color that would benefit from the light that systematic national data might shed on them. This report responds to the…[Read more]

Declining numbers of majors have become a pressing concern for chairs of English and Foreign Language departments. With the celebration of STEM disciplines and students’ and parents’ concerns about the job prospects for humanities graduates, English and Foreign Language department chairs find themselves needing to fight for the health of our…[Read more]

Gay black representations of the phallus subvert recognizable images of the gay/black phallus, and they draw on a tradition, however brief, of writers who have also possessed and spoken from the gay/black phallus. In thus circumventing symbolic castration,
Saint’s progeny effectively engage in a tentative yet decidedly agentive elaboration of gay…[Read more]