Presidential Theme for the 2024 Convention: Celebration: Joy and Sorrow

Frieda Ekotto, the 2023–24 president of the MLA, has chosen Celebration: Joy and Sorrow as the presidential theme for the 2024 MLA Annual Convention in Philadelphia.

As we look forward to coming together for the 2024 convention, to coming together in the wake of difficult years when we were too often apart, we naturally reflect on what it means to reunite. Once upon a time, when human societies were circumscribed by the village or the microstate, public expressions of collective praise were how we breathed, synchronizing interpersonal, institutional, and intergenerational mnemonic systems.

The MLA convention for many is an act of commemoration, honoring our shared vocations as writers, teachers, and scholars. As we evoke feasting, we do so to provoke from within individuals the communal expressions of celebratory emotions, such as joy and sorrow. Taking into account cultural difference and the politics of celebration, the convention seeks to honor, with and through all senses, the multiple intersecting embodiments of the phrase “we praise.” For example, before our relatively secularized societies transformed feasts into festivities and show, anthropologists and linguists suggest that the feast was a religious moment of public communion. Feasting and commemoration, complex acts marking an event or day in eternity, are inseparable from complex local and global power relations. Not all communities interpret religiosity or express praise in the same way. As a result, celebration as a religious practice and idea is a field of study shaped by the historical experiences and preoccupations of settler colonialists from the global north and colonial métropole. These arbitrarily limited ideological and geographic confines to the imperial nation-states offer us an opportunity, in the wake of a global pandemic, to seek contributions that trouble the multiple, complex, and shifting meanings of celebration, religion, history, and identity.

The blues, which is said to come from the toil and sorrow of Black Americans in the cotton fields, contains an element of deep, calm joy. As Joachim du Bellay noted in the sixteenth century, “Qui chante son mal l’enchante.” The misfortune of the slave, like our contemporary workers and convicts, is sublimated by the blues, which transcends festivity and pleasure by an almost spiritual expression. Pleasure and gaiety become a kind of selfish enchantment that we enjoy together. This is in contrast with the blues as it was invented by brave Africans. Now it atones for our failings and conditions as the oppressed, whoever we are today. Amiri Baraka calls the blues the undeniable mark of the passage of African slaves to American citizenship. It is indeed in colonial English and with elements of their white masters’ culture that they sounded the first notes of their musical invention on American soil. Thus, the blues is an expression of lasting joy. It is redemption. Baraka rightly associates it with the expression of the “Black soul” (an entity difficult to define). The blues constitutes the Black man’s emancipation.

I invite members to reflect on celebration in all its senses. What does celebration mean for you, in 2023? I invite you to submit innovative and imaginative sessions that invoke ancestral forms of breathing together in expressions of praise that narrate happiness, joy, and pleasure within the community, from diverse traditions of religion, literature, film, and music, whether from the fifteenth century or today. Celebration cannot be isolated in theory or practice to an individual, or narrowly applied to one identity. Across time and space, through war and peace, often present in celebration is the spirit of “the many,” even when the material body is few, obscured, or absent. As we gather together in our personal and professional families and congregations, as artisans, educators, and students, egotistical enjoyment presupposes the invisible and silent participation of others. Sharing is what makes the party special. It might involve a dance, a carnival, a gala, a garden party, or a rave. We have fun together, we do the binge, the java, the shindig.

The emancipatory power of music is clearly measured against the blues’ great derivative, jazz, which is now associated in our imagination with pleasure and splendor. This is why, contrary to appearances, the supreme moment of splendor—and celebration—is the blues. The blues leads. It is the Latin gaudium, the inner joy that culminates in the plural gaudia as manifestations and vehicles of joy—a “blue” transport, which makes of all the miseries of the world the fuel of a liberating train (a spirit). E. M. Cioran, the French essayist of Romanian origin, appositely notes, “There is ferocity in states, except in joy. The word Schadenfreude, malignant joy, is a misnomer. To do evil is a pleasure, not a joy. Joy, the only true victory over the world, is pure in its essence, and is therefore irreducible to pleasure, which is always suspect both in itself and in its manifestations.”

However one takes it—in village dances, religious rituals and mass, reggae, carnival, electronica, rap, hip-hop, urban parties, etc.—celebration is the blues. It saves us from ourselves; it is lasting joy.

Possible approaches to the theme include

Blackness, race, and racial issues
Defining celebration, memory, religion, mythology, history
Problematizing keywords and concepts in the interdisciplinary study of celebration (public/private, objective/subjective, personal/political, realism/fantasy)
African American, Caribbean, Latin American, and African religious convergences
Hemispheric, comparative, and regional approaches
Migration, emigration, immigration
Empire and colonialism
Ethnic, Indigenous, women’s, and sex or gender studies and performance
Postcolonial, decolonial, and religious studies and their respective founders
Digital humanities, community-engaged, archival studies
Periodization in the study of nationalism and imperialism and of structural and cultural violence
Sources for the study of interdisciplinary, international, and intersectional celebration
Postcolonial, decolonial, and abolitionist emancipatory
Feminist phenomenology, autoethnography, speculative history, and critical fabulation
Secular, mystical, and mythological rituals of healing
Restorative, reproductive, and queer theory and praxis
Pessimism, futurism, utopianism

Post a call for papers for the 2024 convention, and join us in celebration.