During their 2025 MLA talk on universities and democracy, which elaborated on questions of assemblage and freedom amid the crisis in US democracy, Judith Butler posited a “doubling of critique and imagination.” “Literature,” they argued, is essential to democracy because it “remakes time and space” in “imagining beyond the imaginable” toward a “collective assembly in impossible time and space.” Butler’s words, we think, point to ways literary and cultural studies scholars and scholarly work might be able to lead a more human, freer rethinking, coupled with reimagining, of academic diaspora and migrancy in time of democratic crisis.

In using the adjectives “human” and “freer” we have in mind:

• Lévinas’s understanding of “the human” as that which, in offering its face to the Other, prohibits its reduction to an object of violence. This theory of hospitality - inevitably a telos, a messianic ideal - calls humans to regard the face of the Other while presenting their own (Lévinas, Difficult Freedom [1990], 3-10; Butler, Parting Ways [2012], 54).
• Butler’s continuing work on academic freedom and freedom of expression, especially Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015), which considers the utterances and the instantiation of “publics” inherent in the visible co-presence of bodies. Ironically Butler, one of the leading exponents of Lévinasian ethics, has become an object of US state repression, their name on a list of putatively antisemitic faculty marked for official doxxing and state surveillance.

Butler’s Haskins Prize lecture at April’s ACLS meeting extended their analysis via “the figure of the wall” in thinking academic freedom under siege and its ties to constitutional rights to expression and assemblage. The “wall” of “infrastructural conditions” – institutions; organizations; networks – may be besieged, but at the same time may set aside and preserves a fluidly mobile space, a home in exile, for expression, imagining, critique. The virtual wall requires and protects the imagining of the impossible and its explication beyond temporal and spatial limits.

This panel imagines from precisely such an entanglement of literary and scholarly imagining. Working from our expertise in communicative networks, publics, and media, migrations/ migrancy and their long, including affective and intellectual, histories, and repressive and liberatory deployments of linguae francae, three speakers will offer analyses of infrastructural besiegements and propose imaginings otherwise. We are scholars based in Canada and the US, one of us from India, at different career stages: a doctoral candidate and a newer and a longer-standing associate professor, from departments of English language and literatures, English and writing studies, and Arabic. Raj Banerjee will consider William Godwin’s Caleb Williams as an intellectual in exile within the “lingua frankensteinia of English”: an imperial lingua franca that at once provides a platform for state power and enables liberatory networks powered by language critique and play. Nate Greenberg will show how Trump administration attacks on global civil society initiatives - especially social networking activites in the Middle East after 9/11 – participate in a global “ideological network. . . opposed to the flow of. . . democratization and liberalism,” the ironic shadow of democratization and, ironically, their culmination. Miri Burgess will consider the careers of two liberal intellectuals under state threat - Matthew Carey and Thomas Paine, participants in the “international republican conversation” of the 1790s - in light of the financial, social, and mediatic infrastructures they build to enable their communications, actions, imaginings, and communities in exile between Dublin, Philadelphia, Paris, and the Atlantic basin. Our 10-minute position papers will be followed by a structured invitation to colleagues in literary and cultural studies to bring other historical and/or unconventional imaginings of migrancy and exile to bear on the current crisis with eyes toward the reimagining and future thriving of intellectual life and publics, and toward future networks and a-topic academic spaces.