Herman Beavers, the 2026–27 president of the MLA, has chosen Emancipatory Narratives as the presidential theme for the 2027 MLA Annual Convention in Los Angeles.
As you are no doubt aware, we find ourselves, as a democratic nation of laws and as a profession, at a crossroads. Now, the crossroads is a powerful metaphor; it symbolizes the human turmoil that is manifest at the intersection formed by possibility and risk. Possibility because the crossroads often signals the beginning of an adventure; risk because the consequences of a wrong choice can do us irreparable harm. But my training as a scholar of African American literature and culture has often led me to understand the power of counterintuitive thinking. Because emancipatory narratives are distinguished by their commitment to two bedrock concepts: the descriptive and the agential.
I reached this conclusion after consulting a number of commentators whose observations have guided me in difficult moments: James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison. Baldwin emphasized the importance of understanding that we would never be a functioning democracy until Americans accepted the fact of their guilt, that “to get past this guilt, you must act. And in order to act, you must be conscious and take great chances and be responsible for the consequences” (62). Ellison talked about how jazz music turned on the concept of antagonistic cooperation, where one plays both “with and against” (245) the members of the ensemble to cement a legitimate commitment to community building. Toni Morrison, in pithy fashion, said, “[I]f you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.”
Emancipatory narratives are committed to acts of description. They describe not only what it means to be oppressed or in bondage but the sensations that come with inhabiting liberatory space. Articulating emancipatory narratives involves the assertion of agency, even when those assertions are certain to invite resistance. Emancipatory narratives, at their best, involve what Robert O’Meally describes as becoming “careful listeners to what the others have to say, as each [speaker] pushes self and opponent to higher and higher levels of articulation” (3). In positing emancipatory narratives as a presidential theme, part of what I am insisting upon is the need for us to step back from our immediate circumstances in order to see that possibilities, be they the product of serendipity or desperation, are ever before us. Emancipation is a product of our ability to embrace and inhabit the voices of others, as they embrace and inhabit our own. There is absolutely no doubt that our situation is precarious. But I have identified the blues as the ultimate emancipatory narrative because, as Ellison wrote, it insists that we “keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in [our] aching consciousness” and “transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism” (129). It declares that even in the face of calamity and contradiction, we find ways to sing.
I hope that you will join us in Los Angeles as we find ways to sing together.
To propose a session for the 2027 convention, we encourage you to post a call for papers before 28 February. Session submissions will open in March.
Works Cited
Baldwin, James. “The Uses of the Blues.” The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings, edited by Randall Kenan, Pantheon Books, 2010, pp. 57–66.
Ellison, Ralph. The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, edited by John F. Callahan, Modern Library, 2003.
Morrison, Toni. “The Truest Eye.” O, The Oprah Magazine, Nov. 2003, www.oprah.com/omagazine/toni-morrison-talks-love.
O’Meally, Robert G. Antagonistic Cooperation: Jazz, Collage, Fiction, and the Shaping of African American Culture. Columbia UP, 2022.
