National Memorial for Peace & Justice + Legacy Museum Now Open

National Memorial for Peace and Justice

Despite the fact that the US has a well documented history of nearly two and a half centuries of legalized enslavement (1640-1865/66), enshrined in the US  Constitution; nearly another century of legalized apartheid known as Jim Crow (1876-1960-1980s?) and multiple de facto forms of explicitly racialized and class segregation (continuing today); and centuries of racist terror and enforced white supremacist terror, policing, brutality, and violence against peoples of African descent (as well as Native Americans and other non-white peoples), there have been relatively few national or regional museums or monuments recognizing this terrible history.

The aftermath of a lynching

Across the US there (rightly) museums calling attention to the horrific Nazi Holocaust against Jewish people that occurred in Germany and across much of Europe from the 1930s through 1945. There are specific museums and commemoration cites honoring specific African American figures, regional events, and particular moments, like Civil Rights history. Yet until very recently, there were only a few general museums specifically recognizing African American history and culture, and almost none calling attention to the horrendous legacy of slavery, segregation and racialized terror, all of which have contributed in numerous ways to shaping the society in which all Americans live today.

A sculpture commemorating
the brutal history of chattel slavery

Thankfully, Americans and people from all over the globe are flocking to the architecturally stunning National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in Washington, which provides an exceptionally thorough overview and celebration of the richness of African American and Black life in the United States and North America. (I wrote about visiting the NMAAHC last February.) To the NMAAHC, as of a week ago you can also now visit a museum that acknowledges the legacy of lynching, one of the most horrific manifestations of racialized terror in American history, as well as chattel slavery and its many afterlives, which include the carceral state. The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, both projects of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), opened in Montgomery, Alabama 2 weeks ago on April 26, 2018. According to its website,

The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration is situated on a site in Montgomery where enslaved people were once warehoused. A block from one of the most prominent slave auction spaces in America, the Legacy Museum is steps away from an Alabama dock and rail station where tens of thousands of black people were trafficked during the 19th century....

The 11,000-square-foot museum is built on the site of a former warehouse where enslaved black people were imprisoned, and is located midway between an historic slave market and the main river dock and train station where tens of thousands of enslaved people were trafficked during the height of the domestic slave trade. Montgomery's proximity to the fertile Black Belt region, where slave-owners amassed large enslaved populations to work the rich soil, elevated Montgomery's prominence in domestic trafficking, and by 1860, Montgomery was the capital of the domestic slave trade in Alabama, one of the two largest slave-owning states in America.

and

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opened to the public on April 26, 2018, is the nation’s first memorial dedicated to the legacy of enslaved black people, people terrorized by lynching, African Americans humiliated by racial segregation and Jim Crow, and people of color burdened with contemporary presumptions of guilt and police violence.

Work on the memorial began in 2010 when EJI staff began investigating thousands of racial terror lynchings in the American South, many of which had never been documented. EJI was interested not only in lynching incidents, but in understanding the terror and trauma this sanctioned violence against the black community created. Six million black people fled the South as refugees and exiles as a result of these "racial terror lynchings."

This research ultimately produced Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror in 2015 which documented thousands of racial terror lynchings in twelve states. Since the report’s release, EJI has supplemented its original research by documenting racial terror lynchings in states outside the Deep South. EJI staff have also embarked on a project to memorialize this history by visiting hundreds of lynching sites, collecting soil, and erecting public markers, in an effort to reshape the cultural landscape with monuments and memorials that more truthfully and accurately reflect our history.

African Americans re-enslaved
through convict leasing

The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), established by public interest lawyer, author and MacArthur Foundation "genius" award-winner Bryan Stevenson in 1989, was long known for its impressive work providing legal aid to innocent death row prisoners and successfully exonerating a number of them, as well as its manifold efforts on behalf of economically and socially marginalized communities across the US. As Stevenson looked at the history of the US prison-industrial complex, the school-to-prison pipeline and unequal applications of justice that African Americans faced, and the larger, profoundly skewed narrative about race in the US, he realized that one component of maintaining the structures and systems that allowed this narrative to take root was the absence of public recognition of the history that had helped to create it and the structures of oppression now in place, and one key element was the occluded history of US lynching, which usually went unpunished by federal or state authorities--and in the case of the latter, often had their complicity or tacit acquiescence--and which helped to support and further white supremacy and inequality.

Newly freed African Americans
in the post-Civil War era

Moreover, the absence of public museums and venues commemorating this history have helped in allowing narratives of white and national innocence to take hold; what the public doesn't know cannot exist, right? Out of site, out of mind. It only happened down there or far away, etc. Slavery ended and that was the end of it, right? Furthering this, the absence and silencing of the names of the more than 4,000 lynched, of their stories and voices, their families' and communities' traumas, except in specific works of art (films, photographic exhibits, works of fiction and nonfiction, etc.), has allowed the horror to become abstracted and thus, to a certain degree, ignored and dismissed. And yet, it waters the very soil and sand on which every American treads, much as the dispossession, forced removals and slaughter of Native Americans, to name but another frequently obscured component of US history does as well.

Stevenson and a group of fellow lawyers spent years delving into this history, combing through archives to notate names and stories of lynchings across the South, and documented roughly 4,400 across the South (though there were lynchings all over the US, including in the North and West), from 1877 to 1950, which are featured at the Memorial site. As a result, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice redresses this long silencing and invisibility; its architecturally striking building housing the tribute to those who were lynched and the site on which it sits have drawn considerable praise. The latter venue was inspired by the unforgettably powerful Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, and by the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg. To quote The New York Times's Campbell Robertson

At the center is a grim cloister, a walkway with 800 weathered steel columns, all hanging from a roof. Etched on each column is the name of an American county and the people who were lynched there, most listed by name, many simply as “unknown.” The columns meet you first at eye level, like the headstones that lynching victims were rarely given. But as you walk, the floor steadily descends; by the end, the columns are all dangling above, leaving you in the position of the callous spectators in old photographs of public lynchings.

The magnitude of the killing is harrowing, all the more so when paired with the circumstances of individual lynchings, some described in brief summaries along the walk: Parks Banks, lynched in Mississippi in 1922 for carrying a photograph of a white woman; Caleb Gadly, hanged in Kentucky in 1894 for “walking behind the wife of his white employer”; Mary Turner, who after denouncing her husband’s lynching by a rampaging white mob, was hung upside down, burned and then sliced open so that her unborn child fell to the ground.

At the second site, the Legacy Museum makes the connection between the slavery and apartheid past and the present prison system, showing how the past evolved into a system that continues to wreak havoc on countless Black and brown lives. As the Times article notes, the Museum guides the visitor through the compelling argument that Stevenson have made for how this system is still operating, ending on the hopeful note encouraging voter registration and political activism. Like the NMAAHC, where I witnessed groups of students eagerly queuing up to visit, the Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice should be obligatory sites for American school children to spend time and study. Given the current state of our politics and society, the US can only benefit as a result.


The Guardian interviews museum founder Bryan Stevenson:

"White Silences": The Lyric Theory Reader Panel @ ACLA 2014

Lyric Theory Reader
Panel at ACLA 2014

Back in November 1999, the Poetry Society of America, in conjunction with then-US Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky and the New School Writing Department, presented a festival entitled "What's American About American Poetry." In preparation for the festival, the organizers queried a wide and diverse array of US poets on this very question, with the results posted on the PSA's website. (A decade and a year later, they surveyed another swath of contemporary US poets.) I was living in the metro area at the time and attended the festival, which offered numerous memorable and forgettable presentations.  One of the more confounding and unforgettable ones, which I believe I'm recalling correctly, occurred when poet Thylias Moss was describing the origins of poetry--hers, and one might say a good many others--and pointed not just to music and song, but everyday exchanges, in the kitchen, among family members, over fences, at church, and so forth. Which is to say, everyday speech, the vernacular, in the regular, often quotidian social performances of language.

On that same panel, the late John Hollander dismissively challenged Moss's assertion, suggesting that poetry's origins were loftier, and certainly not to be found in anybody's kitchen or conversations through a back door, but rather in European traditions going back millennia, to Ancient Greece. None of the other people on the panel--all white--openly or overtly challenged Hollander, which I found disappointing at the time and still do. Among my friends who were also there, I know I was not the only one who took umbrage at Hollander's tone and reply. I do know, however, that it was not until a later panel that day, I think, that Sonia Sanchez, in her gentle but forceful way, challenged Hollander's comments. The exchange led me to write a semi-found poem, weaving in quotes and notes I had taken that day, in one of my little black notebooks, which I believe I still have somewhere. I titled the poem "What's American About American Poetry," and shared an early draft with the Cave Canem listserve, which I was still then on. Among the lines directly dealing with the Moss-Hollander contretemps were:

a white silence
which is metaphysical

and a black silence
which is political and social

and, as aptly,

we keep coming back
to Eliot and Pound
to rebel against
the street and jazz

I thought of that conference and the Moss-Hollander exchange, as well as the "white silences," of that panel and so much more, as I sat at a panel on the new Lyric Theory Reader, edited by Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins yesterday at the American Comparative Literature Association's (ACLA) annual conference in New York, titled "Capitals," at New York University. Though I am not a member of the organization nor a comparativist by training or pedigree, and have never been to an ACLA conference (unless by happenstance), I thought I should attend since I do write and teach poetry and poetics, and am always interested in current and ongoing conversations both within and outside academe about both. During my entire stay at Northwestern I was involved in various ways with the poetry side of the undergraduate creative writing program (less so the graduate poets), and once the Poetry and Poetics Colloquium began during the last few years of my time there, I actively participated in many conversations around and discussions about lyric poetries and the "new lyric studies." I even made a point of setting aside and reading through the issue of PMLA which presented papers by Jackson and others, so as to be cognizant of this new turn in poetry and poetics studies. That PLMA section was an intellectual preview of the Lyric Theory Reader (Johns Hopkins University, 2014) which gathers a range of essays, many from the last 75 years of writing about American and European poetries, some as recent as the last few years, theorizing "the lyric" and lyric poetry. It is, by any measure, a compendium anyone teaching poetry today should consider perusing. 

A review of its contents, however, immediate point up a glaring problem that the composition of the panel, which included Jonathan Culler, Heather Dubrow, Herbert Tucker, and Charles Altieri, as well as Jackson and Prins, mirrored. (One panelist, Marjorie Perloff, could not attend, we were all told, because of a family issue.) In both the anthology itself there are, I think, only two essays by scholars who are not white (one is by an Iranian-American scholar whose recent work does explore poetries by poets who are not white, the other a non-US, South Asian scholar writing about Indian poetics), and perhaps others in the volume do go beyond the perfunctory in discussion poetries and poets who are not white. But it struck me that yet again, in 2014, both with this anthology and with this panel, on a topic that by its very nature is necessitates an attention to the historical, which in the US, as well as Europe, which entails thinking about Latin America, Africa, Asia, the Pacific world, and so forth, the topic and thematics of RACE WERE A GLARING OMISSION. It was what I think poet Harryette Mullen has called "aesthetic apartheid," which I will broaden to "literary critical apartheid" and "intellectual apartheid," since it is not just a matter of aesthetics, but an unconscious and conscious series of gestures and acts, of thought and speech, at the individual, institutional and structural levels, that keep up this process and practice of omission, exclusion and erasure. 

I will note Jackson did very briefly broach this omission as part of her concise remarks that concluded the panel discussion. She suggested that supplements to the anthology and the discussion which had just occurred might be necessary, in the process also noting queerness's absence from the panel's interlocutors (though "sexual difference" does merit a section of the book), as well as a lack of mention of "digital" writing as well, though one of the panelists, Heather Dubrow, as part of her remarks, did offer some sparkling insights on how scholars and critics might think expansively about social media in relation to public readings of poetry. She also mentioned a potential way of reconsidering the horizon of "address" in poetry that queer studies had opened up (I immediately thought of the idea of Michael Warner's work on "counterpublics," and of José Estéban Múnoz's work on "queer utopianism" as read through figures like Frank O'Hara, etc.), but did not, however, mention the topic of race. It was the unmentionable topic, by the panel and, it appeared, the mostly white audience. I attended with a friend, the scholar Dorothy Wang, whose brilliant new study, Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry, which was published late last year by Stanford University Press, treats this very topic in assured, nuanced fashion, from its introduction through each individual chapter, and we each realized that the other would have to be the person to speak up if it was going to happen.

Before I detail how that unfolded, I should note that all of the panel presentations did provide grist for thought, some more than others. Interestingly, I felt at times as if I were in a time warp, circa 1986-87 as an undergraduate at Harvard, since more than one of the panelists mentioned not only Paul de Man, who was still a much bruited, not yet publicly unmasked intellectual presence then (and a graduate of Harvard's comparative literature doctoral program in the early 1960s), but also Helen Vendler, who had, I believe, just arrived shortly before I graduated (and is also a Harvard Ph.D.), and, quite interestingly to me, New Critic Reuben Brower, whose famous Humanities 6 program had been the training ground for both Vendler and de Man, among many other major literary scholars of that era. On top of this, I had my sophomore history tutorial seminar (required of all students in every major, I think) in the Brower Room in Harvard's undergraduate residential hall Adams House! So, a high priest of literary theory, most specifically deconstruction (de Man), a critic whose work might be thought of as atheoretical in the post-1960s sense of that term (Vendler)--though any attempt to read and understand literature that entails any level of abstraction is, by another name, theoretical engagement--and a New Critic mostly forgotten today were central players in the exchanges that unfolded. All in all, it felt quite bizarre. A shockingly aggressive paper by Jonathan Culler, in which he directly attacked Virginia Jackson for what he claimed was an elementary error of formalist reading (mistaking a sonnet for a prose poem) by Charles Baudelaire, as part of a critique of a misreading of de Man, added to the bizarrerie. Jackson, in a gentle but incisive way, called him on his unaccountable aggression.

Afterwards, Dorothy and I approached Jackson and politely queried her about the complete absence of any overt treatment of race, or of any American scholars or critics other than one who were or are not white, in the Lyric Theory Reader, perhaps as clear a reflection of literary critical apartheid as one can get, and she was quite apologetic, going so far as to tell us that a highly regarded African American poet and critic had slammed the volume down in disgust after seeing its reinscription of critical and aesthetic erasure, and that two noted African American male scholars had been contacted to provide essays, but had been unable to do so. I noted to Jackson that Dorothy herself had just published a book addressing many of the issues we were pointing out--and providing a powerful way of reading Asian American poetry, as well as other poetries by writers of color, and white writers, who are, despite all evasions to the contrary, are racialized subjects too. There are any number of other Asian American, Latino/Latina, Native American, mixed race, and white critics, let alone African American scholars, who have written on lyric poetry and race, or who could have been persuaded to do so, for this volume. (I should note that I have not yet purchased or perused the reader, but have only viewed it and its table of contents online.)

Jackson responded by asking if we thought the panel reflected a particular critical oversight, and we both noted that the panel, like the anthology, was symptomatic of far deeper problems that white scholars and critics badly need to address. The US is not getting any whiter; American poetry has hardly been all white since its beginnings (the second published US poet was a black woman, Phillis Wheatley, and there have been a range of US poetries for over several hundred years), and criticism by scholars and poets and about poets who are not white, lyric poets, can be found with even a minimal amount of searching, even on Google. Yet as was the case with the "The Future of Literature" conference at NYU, this sort of racist blindness--and I am not going to ascribe bad faith to Jackson or Prins or anyone else, but what else do you call an approach which erases almost completely the very presence of people whose existence of constitutive of the thing being discussed, which is to say, lyric poetry in the Anglophone world, which by its very nature involved, as countless literary scholars and others have pointed out, colonialism, chattel slavery, imperialism, white supremacy, ethnocentrism, and so much more? I accept Jackson's apology, and acknowledge that she did appear quite distressed at the oversight, but the anthology is in print, it will circulate not just in the US but perhaps throughout the Anglophone world and beyond, and anything not in it will exist as a supplement, a material testament to the erasure the anthology enacts and embodies.

One might ask why anyone cares at all about an anthology that a group of scholars affiliated with the ACLA has compiled. I would answer that all one needed to do was look at the packed audience, filled with numerous young and many established scholars, not all of them white, and consider the future generations of students and scholars who, in the absence of more broadminded doctoral exam lists and committees, are internalizing the premise that the study of the lyric, of lyric theory, of lyric poetry in the Anglophone world, let alone elsewhere, by its very nature brackets off questions and issues of race. Anyone who has even a passing familiarity with American history, society and poetry knows how absurd this premise is, yet this theory reader suggests that this absurdity is just the opposite, a way of proceeding such that yet again, the element thing lying at the heart of the structures of American society and culture, our politics, our economics, our very being, does not exist, just as it did and does not exist in British or Commonwealth poetry (which is of course equally absurd). To the countless poets of the past and present who are elided and erased, of course, there is the recourse of doing their work and making the case for themselves. For the critics who are ignored or omitted, they must speak out. Yet at base, I come back to the following point: there is a name for why this sort of thing keeps happening. The people doing it need to name it, address it and own it.

"Re-Thinking" Literature @ NYU

As part of my preparatory remarks before my reading at Naropa University, I noted a "horrible" conference I'd attended only a week before. I also invoked the same event during my comments at the &Now Festival at the University of Colorado. In both cases I mentioned only that the conference took place at New York University. I didn't elaborate, but that's in part what a blog is for, isn't it? The international conference I was referring to at both events was "Re-Thinking Literature," and it ran from September 19th through the 21st this fall. Oxford (New College) faculty member Donatien Grau and NYU professor Tom Bishop were the organizers, and nearly 20 writers, critics, scholars, academicians, and theorists spoke over the three-day gathering.

So what was my beef? You probably know what's coming. In three days of pontificating about "literature," the conference featured not a single author, scholar or theorist of color, from the US or overseas, on a single panel, nor did a single panel or panelist, as far as I could tell, directly address or discuss literature by non-Europeans or non-Euro-Americans. Not one. Why? I don't know. It was not as if this French-slanted conference, one of whose organizers is a professor in NYU's French department, had no colleagues who could conceivably participate. The esteemed writer and critic Assia Djébar was, until a few years ago, a professor of French at NYU, as was the historian Sylviane Diouf, and among the NYU French department's current faculty there is J. Michael Dash, a major scholar of Francophone Caribbean literature, with Manthia Diawara, the scholar, critic, film-maker, and former head of NYU's Africana Studies department an affiliate. And that's just NYU's French department. (I can't speak about Oxford's faculty.) Perhaps he asked all of them, or one of the (m)any other faculty members of color working in and around literary studies in (m)any of NYU's other departments, whether they wanted to participate, and perhaps they all said no. Perhaps they all were busy.

Shelley Jackson (l) and Ben Lerner at the podium

But say they were not. One might then argue that the organizers intended that the conference, which included papers and conversations on a range of topics, including the relationships between literature and: art criticism and installations; religion; affect; cognition; and textualities, to name just a few of the topics, be primarily about what they saw as literature, which is to say, mostly European and Euro-American literature, unmarked by anything beyond and occupying nothing not somehow captured by the unnamed, unacknowledged and unacknowledgeable signifier of whiteness. I mean, it stands to reason that when one says the word "literature," a Platonic abstraction, one means only, can only mean, the literature of Europe and (some parts of) European America, no? Yes? So be it. But then why not just call the conference "Re-Thinking Euro-American Literature" or "Re-thinking Elite/High Literature by White People" or something similar, since the organizers made it clear that the vast corpus of literatures by everyone else across the world did and does not matter? There is privilege, there is entitlement, there is blindness, there is arrogance, and there is the expectation that because you have told yourself and others for centuries that you--or certain ones of you--are all that matter, that's all that's supposed to matter.

I should add that after a day of this stuff--and a report, by a friend, who attended and was aghast at the rambling mess served up by the conference's opening night speakers--I had had enough of what I have encountered for much of my adult life. I left them to their intellectually and hermetically sealed white room. It very well could have been the case on the final day, which I did not attend, that, even if all the speakers--and I should be clear that I do respect and admire the work of many of the participants--were white, perhaps one or several of them did look and speak past the self-constructed wall of Euro-American literary comfort, to acknowledge that there was and is quite a bit of other very vibrant work, in literature, literary and cultural criticism, philosophy, translation, etc., out there not centered on or produced by Europeans and Euro-Americans. If so, great for them.

I do wonder if any of them asked themselves why there were only white people on the panels. Did anyone verbalize this to Grau or Bishop? Did they see this as a problem and even mention it to each other? The audience certainly was not only white. If no one did ask such a question, I do wonder, what would lead them even to the threshold of doing so of their own accord? At any rate, my adult experience has been and continues to be that when it comes to the literary and the academic literary world, this sort of thing, a kind of de facto aesthetic and critical apartheid is still too prevalent.  Sometimes there are one or two tokens, or a panel in which all the people of color are bunched up together and only expected to talk about certain expected things. It's this way still in various pockets of American society, including popular culture. And in any case, as I noted about the "Re-thinking Poetics" conference at Columbia University a few years back, it represents a particularly perverse irony in a city like New York, the most diverse in the United States. Some "re-thinking" really does need to occur, but it's not just about literature.

That said, I did hear one talk I found quite intriguing, by Ben Lerner, whom I approached afterwards and briefly chatted with. I specifically noted the conference's whiteout cast to him, and he agreed it was not good. (I did not expect him, as an invitee and panelist, however, to say anything to Grau or Bishop, but perhaps he did.) Ben's paper was titled "Virtual Ekphrasis: Fiction as Criticism and Curation," and explored the idea of the novel--as opposed to poetry, a genre in which he has distinguished himself--as a curatorial site, a space "in which you can embed other artworks," and a "testing ground for aesthetic experience." An introduction of sorts both to his first novel, To the Atocha Station, and his forthcoming one, his talk was full of insights, but it circled around the key point that in "speculative" fiction, and not just in the commonly understood science fictional sense, you could write about "artworks not yet realized" or, to go further, that were and are "unrealizable."

As one example from the canon, he cited Henry James's famous story "A Madonna of the Future," a narrative about an artist producing a blank canvas (and which I thought of as I assigned John Ashbery's famous sestina "The Painter" as part of my fall undergraduate class's poetry component). This James story is often thought to dramatize the tyranny of artistic influence and resulting failure. In Arthur Danto's reading of the story, however, the philosopher and critic views James's character's Theobald's artistic production or lack thereof as a masterpiece, and a curator version attempts to convince the artist that his work is a harbinger of later artists like Robert Ryman, Alexander Rodchenko, Kasimir Malevich, and Robert Rauschenberg, and that what appears as failure in one age harbors potentiality for the future.

Ben linked this concept to contemporary novels written in the current moment of the "postmedium," which is to say, after the stability of particular media as we've known them, and also to our current aesthetic and social ontologies, where the status between art and life often blurs. He identified Rachel Kushner's National Book Award-nominated novel The Flamethrowers as exemplary in exploring this unstable status. In Kushner's novel the main character, Reno, is deeply interested in the artist Tony Smith and his idea of abandoning art in favor of situationism, experience. Kushner describes Reno's experience of temporality at times as a "trace of a trace of a trace," but Lerner was especially interested in the novel's depiction of her attempts to collapse art into life, and the links with 1970s art and earlier precursors, including Italian futurism and industrial design, via the figure of T. P. Valera, and the Valera bike--which occasioned, though Ben didn't discuss this, a prickly review from motorcycle enthusiast Frederick Seidel--which entailed entangling and collapsing art into life. Kushner, he said, organizes her novel around the dream of dissolving the line between art and life. Unlike recent works by Sheila Heti or Tao Lin, however, it doesn't stylistically or generically collapse the distinctions but virtualizes them.

As part of the Q&A portion, I asked Ben a question about the limits of liberal discourse, particularly in the face of incommensurable, globalizing alterities and competing rationalities--ideas I've been writing through a bit myself in my current fictional projects and thinking about after reading some of David Palumbo-Liu's critical work--and the novel's capacity to address and possibly resolve this crisis. He responded thoughtfully by talking about the relationship between novels and politics, though he did not really answer whether the contemporary American realist novel, so favored by the publishing industry and American literary culture-makers, could do what Palumbo-Liu has argued certain works, by writers such as J. M. Coetzee and Ruth Ozeki, have managed to. His talk nevertheless really got me thinking about questions of representation and futurity, the imagination and the possibilities or impossibilities--challenges--of depicting the possible, in art, and that, I guess, does entail "re-thinking literature," which ultimately did make attending the conference, for all its limitations, worthwhile.

Camille Laurens (l), Tom Bishop (center), and Jean-Pierre Toussaint (at podium)