Organizers
Jill Jarvis (Assistant Professor of French, Yale U; Memory Studies MLA Executive Committee member)
Enda Duffy (Professor of English, UC Santa Barbara; 20-21c English and Anglophone MLA Executive Committee member)

Presider
Jill Jarvis (Yale)

Presentations
Enda Duffy (UCSB)
Zoë Henry (English PhD Candidate, Indiana U)
Erin Baldwin (English PhD Candidate, U of Toronto)
Susan Stanford Friedman (Hilldale Professor, Virginia Woolf Professor of English and Women’s Studies, UW Madison)

**All participants are already MLA members and all have agreed to participate in this panel if it is accepted.
**Jill Jarvis is also scheduled to serve as presenter in a different special session, “Viral Memory.” We do not anticipate conflicts or a need to replace members of this proposed session.

Description & Rationale

The monumental status ascribed to the year 1922 in scholarship on English-language modernism makes the 2022 centenary an occasion to reflect critically on the processes of canon-formation and commemoration at play in literary studies. ‘The Waste Land,’ Ulysses, and Jacob’s Room—all published in 1922—are lodestar texts canonized by certain formulations of literary modernism (such as Michael North’s influential Reading 1922) that have also been deeply destabilized on multiple fronts (see, for instance, Bad Modernisms; Indigenous Vanguards).

We are now in a time of toppling monuments and recalibrating collective sense about what histories should and should not be commemorated (Rhodes Must Fall; Black Lives Matter; Me Too). This panel brings together four speakers—deliberately inviting a balance of senior scholars and doctoral students—who will together consider the implications of this anti-monumental turn for literary monuments and movements. Each speaker differently takes up our prompt to question periodizing norms, radically rethink canonical theoretical paradigms, and reread literary monuments in a new time.

The proposed panel has been jointly organized by a member of the Memory Studies and of the 20th-21st c. English and Anglophone MLA Executive Committees. We recognized the 2022 centenary as an opportunity to think against commemoration, and to reignite reflection about ongoing processes of canon-formation in light of pressing questions of justice.

Each of our four speakers will deliver a concise presentation of not more than 12 minutes. This will create time for at least 15 minutes of collective discussion at the conclusion of the session. The presider, Jill Jarvis, will ensure that the session timing flows smoothly.

Program

1. Enda Duffy will launch with “Shipping Forecasts : Global Flows, Future Modernisms.” Duffy calls on modernist critics to salvage some modernists by rereading them as text-ganglions of the planetary flows of goods, information, and people. He will also lay out a call for a new modernism of deportees, migrants, and diasporas—an oceanic modernism of infra-national commerce that centers those who are oppressed, voiceless, and stateless.
   
   
2. Next, Zoë Henry asks “What is this ‘Black’ in Black Modernism?” Henry turns to Langston Hughes’s The Weary Blues, a text that Hughes wrote in 1922 while working on a ship that was part of a ‘dead fleet’ of World War One vessels. By re-positioning Hughes as foundational rather than tangential to the formal innovations typically credited to white writers, Henry demonstrates how the move to recast ‘Black modernism’ in contradistinction to other ‘modernisms’ has paradoxically pigeonholed Hughes and his contemporaries (Nella Larsen, Richard Bruce Nugent and Wallace Thurman) and prevented full appreciationof their contributions to a historicized modernist aesthetic.
   
   
3. In “The Other 1922: May Sinclair and Canonical Erasure,” Erin Baldwin examines the historical intersection of feminism and modernist studies, turning our attention to a 1922 novel by the overlooked British modernist writer May Sinclair, Life and Death of Harriett Frean. Through this act of alternative commemoration, Baldwin highlights an ongoing need to perpetually question and reformulate modernist canons by revitalizing the erased and disregarded work of feminist writers such as Sinclair.
   
   
4. Susan Stanford Friedman concludes with “How (not) to Monumentalize Woolf: Kabe Wilson’s Woolfian Inhabitations of Bloomsbury, Black Power, and the Black Lives Matter Movement.” This introduces to us a contemporary multi-media artist’s recycling of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell in “On Being Still” (2020), Wilson's diary-form reflections mirroring Woolf’s Sketch of the Past and paintings of Brighton recycling Bell’s angle of vision. Friedman shows how the Covid-19 pandemic, Black Lives Matter movement, and overthrow of Bristol’s slavetrader monument permeate Wilson’s recycling of early twentieth-century modernism. Friedman will connect this to Wilson’s “Dreadlock Hoax” performance (2014) and novella Of One Woman or So—by Olivia N’Gowfri (2014) that reassembles the words of A Room of One’s Own in the context of racism and Black Power.