E3W Literature | University of Texas

A Backward Glance and a Forward Gaze: Thoughts on the Past and Future of Ethnic and Third World Literatures at UT and Beyond

This interview with Dr. Barbara Harlow, currently teaching in the Department of English at The University of Texas at Austin, was conducted during the month of January 2008 in person by Molly O’Hagan Hardy.

Molly O’Hagan Hardy: Please share your memories of the start of the E3W Concentration at UT twenty years ago. Was it tied to the movement on campus to support divestment from South Africa?

Barbara Harlow: Tied to the movement to support divestment in South Africa, yes, certainly, but it was more contextual too. Perhaps one could say that the launch of e3w was tied to emergent—indeed related—interests in the department on the part of graduate students who…pressured new faculty to begin to teach outside of the traditional rubrics. Already in place at UT were Ben Lindfors and Ramón Saldívar, Ben in African literatures, and Ramón, who had been teaching modernism, but was also finishing up his first book on Chicano narrative. But there wasn’t any coherent or concerted curricular graduate program focused on ethnic and/or third world literatures, despite the research interests of graduate students such as Sonia Saldívar-Hull (one of our first Sequels speakers), David Attwell, currently head of the English Department at York University in the UK, and Mohammed Shoukany, a Saudi student finishing up his PhD, who has since returned to Saudi Arabia where he has been prominent in both academic and administrative posts. One has to give Wayne Lesser, graduate adviser then and now, credit as well. Thanks to Wayne, in response to the residual and/or emerging interest that students were emphasizing, my first teaching assignments were changed at the last minute to include a graduate seminar in “Literature and Colonialism.” It was a totally wonderful course for me. With the hires of Wahneema Lubiano and Ann Cvetkovich the following year, there came to be what one could call a critical mass. And Ben Lindfors has a way of accosting people in the hall with good ideas that have long-term visions, and so, e3w came to be launched.

That said, and remember too that these events—curricular and extracurricular—were taking place in the late ‘80s, when divestment from South Africa was very much an issue on college and university campuses across North America and there was a very active…divestment movement here at UT when I arrived in Fall 1986. When our program was approved two years later and the Austin American-Statesman decided to run a story on these initiatives, we decided that our photo op should be in front of the shanty that was located on the West Mall, the shanty being the symbol of not only the divestment demands on campus, but for other solidarity movements as well, from Palestine to Central America. Thus, while e3w was most decidedly connected to the divestment movement, it also engaged—and was engaged by—many other political movements—and their solidarity with each other—active at that time. Perhaps some students wouldn’t even remember them now, changed as our world politics seem, but it’s worth mentioning, as examples, the Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC) and the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), who worked together with more local activists, from the issue of erecting a statue in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. on the UT campus to support for the United Farm Workers (UFW). On the West Mall at that time, you could count on almost daily discussions, speakers, rallies, etc. being presented in support of divestment, demanding an end to Israeli occupation, mourning the massacre of Jesuits in San Salvador. Now there is a statue of Martin Luther King Jr. on the East Mall and a statue of Cesar Chavez on the West Mall. Twenty years can perhaps make a difference…That was the late 1980s, when we were still fighting the Cold War; the Berlin Wall hadn’t come down, South Africa was still under apartheid, and in the North of Ireland, there was still a full-fledged struggle against British occupation. That was a particular historical moment, and a very powerful one. For all of the injustices that academics and activists (to abuse that vexed binary) alike were responding to, it was also a very positive moment in terms of organizing people’s intellectual activity.

MH: When Naminata asked Professor Lindfors in her interview [also in this issue of the E3W Review of Books] about the current state of African literatures at the University of Texas at Austin, he ended with the lament, “The Third World continues to be underrepresented in course offerings in the English Department [at the University of Texas at Austin].” Do you agree or disagree?

BH: Let me start by saying that the very sentence that you just excerpted could well be the basis for our collective discussion on the occasion of “e3w@20.” When e3w was launched back in 1987-88, there was considerable discussion about just what to call it. We wanted the name to attend to the domestic, Americanist, Chicano/a issues with Ramón’s emphasis, African American with Wahneema, and relate to an international context as well. Not only was Ben working on Africa, but Elizabeth (B.J.) Fernea was teaching courses on the Arab Middle East. And then there were my own peripatetic interests. So, what were we going to call it? “Third world” as a term was problematic even then, and it could well be obsolete (but, I would still argue, not altogether useless) now. The citation from Ben is very interesting indeed—should the “third world” even be in our curriculum today, given that the so-called third world could have just been an historical moment—whose time came and went, so to speak?

To address the spirit of what Ben is saying though, on the one hand I would strongly disagree with his lament, because “ethnic and third world” as a concentration has, without engaging in too grandiose a moment of braggadocio, has been very effective in working with other concentrations and specializations within the English Department. And it must be said that the concentration was passed almost unanimously (only one nay vote) and with support from colleagues from medieval studies to modern British. One thinks now of colleagues like Lisa Moore in the eighteenth century and…Sam Baker in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, who are very much a part of our interest group and whose courses reflect that—Lisa’s course on transatlantic feminisms and Sam’s work on maritime empire, for example. One could think too of Helena Woodard’s work on Black Britain in the eighteenth century. And so on…English literary studies were already in the throes of radical change at the time and now UT’s English graduate program has contributed to making those changes happen.

What Ben is saying, however, might be that the singular identities once represented perhaps by the terms of “ethnic and third world” have been eroded or have shifted over the years. He mentions in his interview that, with his retirement, and despite persistent pressure, there has been no real effort to recruit an Africanist to replace him. Obviously, Ben himself remains in any case irreplaceable, but he’s right—African studies at UT is under-represented, and not least in the English Department…Nonetheless, it could be said that “ethnic and third world literatures” are now taught more than ever in our department. As Ben notes, Neville Hoad and Brian Doherty have made those concerns a critical component of E316K World Literature, and E360K, formerly “world literature in English,” now provides various opportunities for courses that reach beyond a once canonical, even hegemonic, literary geography. I regularly teach “Literature and Social Justice” under that rubric for example. So yes, Ben is right that across the UT campus, Africa has been egregiously, sorely, unconscionably, historically overlooked. But one also wants to champion efforts to redress those oversights, such as Toyin Falola’s annual Africa Conference at which many of our students and colleagues have presented papers. Along with Ben’s retirement came the retirement too of Elizabeth Fernea, whose contributions in Middle East Studies paralleled Ben’s in African Studies. Now, it’s our challenge to turn their influence and accomplishments into new imperatives and directions.

MH: Moving from our specific situation here at UT to the field more generally, I would like to point out that 2007 is also the 20th anniversary of your seminal work Resistance Literature. In it you explain Kanafani’s initial distinction of “resistance literature.” You write: “The very conditions of research into the literature of Palestine…provide the basis for a re-examination of literary critical methodologies and the definitions whereby a literary corpus is established.” Has this taken place? In what ways? What kinds of institutional changes have come from these changes in methodologies?

BH: It is hard to say. Reflecting back on twenty years of political change, we are also reflecting back over academic histories. The heyday of “theory,” which perhaps immediately preceded our innovations here in ethnic and third world literature, also allowed for them, maybe even instigated them. The schools of deconstruction, poststructuralism, minor literature, minority literatures, indeed area studies, etc. historically made it possible to disrespect some of the apparata that we had inherited as students professing literary criticism. Many of us came of academic age in those heady times of “high theory.” That was a particular moment in recent intellectual history that continues to haunt and provoke all of us. One of the challenges that remains now is to deconstruct or to dismantle in turn that investment in abstractionism, which is every bit as depoliticizing as the New Criticism had been before it, at least at this point. What is to be encouraged, and what struck me in the work of Kanafani and other writers involved in organized resistance movements and national liberation struggles at the time, is their sense of the immediacy of the historical context. Not that they were without visions or ideology, but theirs was also a grounded analysis with an—often dismaying, but also exhilarating—recognition of consequences, intended or unintended. Let’s go back then to the archives, the histories that they read and the histories that they themselves left. There is a trend in that direction—not at all a regressive one either, despite a lapsarian tendency toward hagiography as well. We need to be on guard.

MH: Is that why you tend not to put a lot of theory on your graduate course syllabi? You certainly know it, and you recommend it when you see fit, but you don’t tend to teach a lot of it?

BH: That’s right, I suppose. Neville [Hoad] has a good way of describing it—one should know one’s theory so well that it doesn’t show. Not that I “know my theory” all that well anyway, but too often, graduate students will stop by my office saying that they have a great topic for their dissertation, but they don’t have a theory, and if they could just get a theory…All I can do is look around and say, “Well, I am not selling any here. Try a door down the hall. There might be one going.” My sense is rather to see what questions are raised by the work and the moment. Let the material itself generate the search, the research.

MH: You have worked a lot with archives, from the work you did in Archives of Empire with Mia Carter and your current project on Ruth First, whose archives are housed at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, and you have written about archives in your essay “Sappers in the Stacks: Colonial Archives, Land Mines, and Truth Commissions,” which appeared in Edward Said and the Work of the Critic: Speaking Truth to Power (2000). Could you share with us some of your eureka moments while doing archival research?

BH: Maybe because I wish I was a historian. Seriously though, the sense of discovery and putting pieces together—this all probably sounds a bit naïve—but digging in those boxes, even in those dusty tombs of tomes that no one necessarily looked at, really does encourage one to think contextually in ways that we need to reconsider today. It is a very non-isolationist way to work. It is not just me and the text, or you and the text, but it is me and you and the text and the context of everything that everyone contributed to it, even though any one of us can only know some of all that. So, I do think it is worth burrowing and borrowing, but even so, one should not fetishize the archive either, which is what some historians tend to do. Mind you though, archives come in many sizes, shapes, and under sundry signatures. The materials that Mia and I consulted for “archives of empire,” were largely print materials (so blessedly available in the stacks of the PCL and other UT libraries), whereas the Ruth First collection includes manuscript material, correspondence, day books, the proverbial shopping lists, mimeographed manifestos, etc, the “ephemera” of a life, an era, a political struggle, and the daily challenges to get on, get by, make do, and write it all down.

This is something of what “sapping in the stacks” came to signify to me. The sappers, those engineering corps in the army who both placed the bombs, built the fortifications, and then when the war was over, had to go back and de-mine all the bombs that they had set and deconstruct those same battlements. We can think of ourselves as we go into the stacks as carrying out a bit of both tasks, especially with our writing in regard to what we unearth there. But at the same time, we are finding all sorts of booby-traps that were laid haphazardly and with considerable hazard by preceding generations. It does bring the sense of struggle—and risk—back into it all. There is no neutrality, and it does take a sort of multilateral effort to carry on.

With the Ruth First archive, each box is its own treasure trove, but I love browsing her agenda books, which are like her diary, or “Google calendar” from the ‘60s. One day will have on it, 8am take Shawn to school, 9am meeting with Oliver Tambo, 11am deliver manuscript to ANC, 2pm take Gillian to the dentist, 4pm pick up Robyn from school, then—5pm facial. Some items can be sensitive too, in terms of reading other people’s mail. Ruth First was not chary of words when she wanted to criticize her contemporaries. It also makes one a little bit self-conscious—and hopefully a whole lot conscientious—about using and abusing other people’s works and ideas.

MH: You teach a popular graduate seminar, “Literature and Human Rights.” In fact, I believe you are teaching it this semester. How is human rights literature similar to and different from resistance literature? How has the human rights discourse that has emerged in the academy informed the study of literature and your own work?

BH: I would argue, and I have argued, that resistance literature was an historical phenomenon. It was a literature written in the context of organized resistance movements in the era of decolonization. For the most part, those organized resistance movements, such as the African National Congress, the Irish Republican Army, Mau Mau (or the Land and Freedom Party), the FMLN, the FSLN, etc. have come to a different kind of political historical situation. This outcome is less true for the Palestine Liberation Organization, but even so, one would have to note that the PLO is not today what it used to be. National liberation struggles and resistance organizations were a critical and vital part of the process of decolonization and nation formation. Now we read and write in a post Cold War, post bipolar world, post 9/11 era, if you will; this is not to say that there are not still struggles and there is not something still happening, or that the distortions and the injustices are not still there, but the kind of participation that literary studies can envision needs to evolve, develop, revolve in response to contemporary pressures. Human rights is one of those opportunities, but human rights discourse also needs to be historicized—its Enlightenment past, its post World War II reincarnation, and today’s unjust regimes, like our own here in the United States. As David Kennedy, who teaches international law at Harvard, put it, the “most difficult heuristic is this: to take responsibility for more than we can see.”

MH: In October of 2006, at the American University in Cairo, where you spent last year as the head of the Department of English and Comparative Literature, you gave the annual lecture dedicated to the memory of Edward Said to coincide with his birthday. Your talk was entitled “Resistance Literature Revisited: From Basra to Guantánamo, ” and in it, you pose the question: “What can literature do, after all? Can the very noun itself, ‘literature,’ come to be used as a verb? Indeed as a transitive verb? In other words, what if we could all literature...?” This is a question I have heard you pose in graduate seminars as well. Could I ask you to answer your own question?

BH: I should contextualize those remarks. It was a really poignant opportunity for me to give that lecture, if only because my very first academic job was at the American University in Cairo for five years between 1977 and 1983. It was in that context—in the Arab Middle East in the early Camp David years (I arrived just as Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat was preparing his trip to Jerusalem and left a year after Israel’s horrific invasion of Lebanon in the summer of 1982 and the massacres in Sabra and Shatila)—that I was re-educated to resistance, in no small part through the intellectual generosity and political commitment of students and colleagues there. Not to get too maudlin about it here, it was through those ties that I first met Edward Said when I was back in the US for a year. As a result of that meeting, we became friends and so it was a very particular honor to give that memorial address in Cairo. “Resistance Literature Revisited”—there was a lot of baggage to that.

“From Basra to Guantánamo,” the subtitle, was also important because one of Kanafani’s earliest novellas (“Men in the Sun”) ended with Palestinian refugees cruelly dying on the border between Iraq and Kuwait, where they had hoped to find work. Now, with the current US assault on Iraq, Palestinian refugees living in Iraq have to find their way out again. Guantánamo is perhaps one of the more visible and notorious sites for mobilizing opposition to the nefarious project that the current US administration is waging around the world. In London, just the week before last, everybody whom I spoke with wanted to talk about Obama or Clinton. It was such a relief not to have to try to make excuses for George Bush. There is also the sense that the whole world is waiting for Bush and Co. to be gone, once and for all. They want to talk about Hillary, Barack, just to speculate that there might still be a future, that there can be a life after Bush. I read this morning an interview with Harold Bloom, which was actually really moving. Bloom referred to the devastation that the Bush administration has wreaked worldwide; apparently Harold Bloom always refers to Bush as “Benito Bush.”

So, what if we really could literature? What would we do? It may well be that we have all been literaturing all along, for better or for worse. What would and could—did—literature do? And what will we do with it? The word “rights” assumes, at least in part, that there are wrongs that need to be righted. Reporters and advocates have to observe certain protocols, and there are generic requirements for submitting human rights reports. That is very good, but they are not always a great read, so to speak. There is another kind of advocacy too: good books, a good novel, a good story about landmines or HIV/AIDS; however, none of those works would stand up in a court of law, the International Criminal Court, or sundry war crimes tribunals. On the other hand, nobody would even know, or fewer people would know, if they did not read about these issues in novels. So think about a work like The Kite Runner (2003), for example. In London again, I was talking with a friend, formerly the UNHCR representative in Cairo who now teaches classical Arab Literature, and the issue came up of the child who is sodomized and who is punished in the film. But then one must also think of the young Afghan actor who plays the child and the consequences for him. Has he in turn been abused by the makers of the film, the producer and the director? I think that he and his family are currently living somewhere in the UAE, that the film itself has been banned in Afghanistan, making it illegal to be found with a copy of it.

MH: At the close of your Acknowledgements in Barred: Women, Writing, and Political Detention (1992), you write: “To the graduate students in English and Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin: we are counting on you and your dissertations to do much of the rest.“ Could you speak about the scholarship in the field of ethnic and third world literature today?

BH: This brings us full circle, doesn’t it? The work that we have seen in the [Sequels] symposia that we’ve had is really good evidence of the graduate students making good on this and showing all of us new opportunities, new directions, moving beyond whatever it is we might have been professing. We now find ourselves learning from the new work that is coming our way. Just think back over the series of symposia, Mexican-American, Chicana, Caribbean, Irish, border crossings, “terror wars,” South Asian, Hawaiian indigenous literature. Former students exploring different formats and myriad generic possibilities, editing books, co-authoring texts with each other, such as Louis Mendoza and S. Shankar’s Crossing into America: The New Literature of Immigration (2003), editing special issues of journals, as was the case with Salah Hassan and Laura Lyons. And then the archival work by Maureen Moynagh on Nancy Cunard and Karen Steele on Maud Gonne. So, that is in terms of intellectual work and knowledge production.

Another feature that is really quite stunning for me is the ongoing collaborative efforts all of our graduates have done and continue to do. In perusing conference programs, you might notice a panel with one speaker from Columbia, another from Michigan, another from Indiana, and the fourth from Louisiana; it looks to be a very diverse panel, and indeed it is, but in fact, they’re also all e3w graduates. And we move on, carry on, write on.