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]

.Using the concept of “third culture” from social theory, this article examines Charles Kingsley’s use of displacement in his children’s book The Water Babies (1863). In trying to portray the site of moral formation, Kingsley displaces his central character Tom – the new, interstitial “third culture” subject. Through Tom’s displacement, Kingsle…[Read more]

This article examines Allen Say’s use of cultural displacement in his books Tree of Cranes and Grandfather’s Journey. Allen Say is an award-winning, Japanese-American, picture book author and illustrator.

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]

The decline of the language requirement in English doctoral programs will have to be reversed if those in the English profession are to treat global and ethnic studies seriously, to refuse to replicate “spread-eagle” isolationism in their work, to research and teach world literature and English-language literature’s place in it responsibly, and t…[Read more]

Because academic freedom is a function of and entrusted to the corporate faculty, defenses of academic freedom must be articulated in the terms of curricula that are thoughtfully constructed according to disciplinary norms. But this potentially powerful system of protection is weakened when the faculty has little sense of how its curriculum fits…[Read more]

The story of the master’s degree in English and foreign languages since 1966 is most dramatically a story about women’s access to areas of study traditionally dominated by men and more generally a story about how economic shifts influence students’ degree decisions.

In some fields—notably, foreign languages—second majors make up an unusually large share of the students receiving degrees. If we compare the number of second majors in a field with the number of first majors, we see that second majors range from 3%–5% of the number of first majors in fields like communication and psychology to 10%–16% in economi…[Read more]

For the narrator of Invisible Man, the abjection of women and homosexuals operates at first as a discursive strategy for making the black male’s position more subjectively endurable, but the narrator must eventually confront this discursive strategy as an illusion of hetero-phallic agency, since he continually fails to acquire the sorts of i…[Read more]