Tina Lu, the 2025–26 president of the MLA, has chosen Family Resemblances as the presidential theme for the 2026 MLA Annual Convention in Toronto.
Wittgenstein writes about how difficult it is to come up with categorical definitions of what constitutes a game. Even a quick glance reveals so much diversity: “we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.” Wittgenstein moves away from the definition—whose essence is to exclude—to the inclusive metaphor of the family: “I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than ‘family resemblances’; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way” (Philosophical Investigations, Macmillan, 1958, pp. 31, 32).
It would be similarly almost impossible to come up with unifying characteristics of the MLA’s membership and our collective work. Nonetheless, it does not take a Wittgenstein to see all our family resemblances or the way in which our present moment places all of us not in precisely the same situation but in a complicated network of connecting challenges and opportunities.
This short passage by Wittgenstein has had an outsized impact in many fields, but perhaps especially literary studies, where it has turned out to be remarkably generative when it comes to considering genre, identity, and literary histories. This year’s theme invites conversations within traditions and about literal forms of kinship, but perhaps it can also spur us to reimagine the acts of comparison and relational thinking that are one core of our shared work.
I am honored to be the first Asian American and Asianist to serve as president of the MLA. As a scholar I contain even more minority identities: my work mostly concerns early modern Chinese sources and especially a kind of drama that originated in the area around Suzhou. Nonetheless, despite my niche corpora—and the fact that I have given my share of papers at the convention to an audience of less than a dozen—I’ve come to regard the MLA as one of my intellectual homes, a place of community and advocacy and a space for sharing our reading, writing, and teaching. With this presidential theme, I urge you to join me in considering our scholarly and professional familial and quasi-familial connections and in making the MLA into your intellectual home too.
I challenge my fellow members to come up with the most expansive, connective panels you can conceive of, to discuss as well as to mirror our “family resemblances”: panels that include not only scholars of different ranks from different kinds of institutions but also scholars of many different nations and fields. Finally, it’s my hope that these family resemblances might serve as ways to revive and renew allyships outside the academy and within. I encourage you to post a call for papers, and I look forward to our family reunion in Toronto.