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GIVEN the history of extensive contact between Europe and various nations of color and the propagation of European languages through this contact, and given the resulting fact that more people outside Europe than within speak modern European languages, racial diversity and foreign languages is not an especially absurd coupling. And yet, given the literary, historical, and cultural representational paucity of those peoples of various hues in the curricula and classrooms, as both professors and students, in departments of language and literature study, it would appear that the feasibility of such a coupling has only by fits and starts candidly been taken up. 1 Hence, when Elizabeth Welles invited me to offer some remarks on the subject, I immediately accepted. “Timely and untimely,” I thought. As language and literature programs investigate ways to increase their visibility and reclaim their importance in the college community, they should look to forming curricular alliances that they had previously thought incompatible or untenable. They should also step up recruitment of students and faculty members that they had in the past not necessarily ignored but certainly viewed as marginal to their existence and humanistic pursuits. However, liberal lip service to racial diversity, symbolic gestures, and tokenism (“Just one please”) have maintained a stronghold of sorts in the academy in general and in language programs in particular. Crises such as declining enrollments, the increased use of part-time and adjunct faculty members, tenure erosion, and a host of other cost-saving measures implemented by university administrators that affect numerous foreign language programs have of course jostled many of us from our reveries.
While curricula are being continually revamped to cash in on and accommodate the sciences and professional programs like management and while debates rage about teaching literature in translation (see Bugliani; Katz), racial diversity too has necessarily found a place in our strategies for reinvention.
In French, an area that I am most familiar with, the sad results have been that the global marketplace and utilitarian ethics, rather than genuine intellectual commitment and program building, have usually jump-started such discussions on racial and ethnic diversity. In a number of institutions, progressive curricular changes such as the addition of francophone studies to some French programs—an area of study, I might add, for which full-fledged academic legitimacy remains elusive—are, ironically, owing to the current fiscal crises. That is, although some departments commit resources such as tenure-track lines to francophone studies, seek textbooks with francophone dimensions, and structure components of language programs around the subject, others treat the field, in the words of the professor of English and African American studies Ann duCille, “as a pick-up game.” Essentially, as such specious theorizing and practice goes, anyone can teach the subject without prior training, for it is such a vacuous, trendy subject that training is superfluous.
Let me further clarify this discussion of francophone studies. I am specifically concerned with racial diversity—with the nonwhite French-speaking world. I don't mean to say that white populations, representing ethnic and cultural diversity from these parts of the francophone world, are not just as representationally marginalized in the curricula and classrooms because of their nonmetropolitan status. However, emphasis on cultural and ethnic diversity of this sort only obfuscates a discussion of race, perhaps at times a discussion of racism, as often happens when the terms cultural diversity and multiculturalism issue forth from neoliberal mouths (Gordon and Newfield).
I draw on francophone studies as a relevant racediversifying strategy for further reasons: (1) I have a particular interest in the study of the literatures, cultures, histories, and cinema of French-speaking countries outside of France; (2) the field is a relatively new and contested one in French literature and language programs; (3) it has typically been viewed as a way to attract minority students; (4) it is often cited as a way to spice up the traditional curriculum because its interdisciplinarity appeals to students and graduate students in the fields of cultural studies, comparative literature, and postcolonial studies; and (5) cultural diversity is proffered as one of language departments' most important contributions to the landscape of the American university. Hence francophonia , with its multiple cultures intersecting with race and linked by a common language (French), seemingly falls under the purview of the cultural diversity claims. In effect, francophonia requires an especially deep understanding of the complex history of French culture; it forces one to examine the intercultural in the context of exploring the cross-cultural.
The untimely aspect of this race consciousness, if you will, becomes nonetheless further complicated because of continuing assaults on affirmative action. Certainly anti-affirmative action legislation affects gender parity. Indeed, numerous studies, even those sponsored by conservative foundations, have shown that white females have been the greatest beneficiaries of affirmative action policies, yet media and political discourse on “preferences,” “quotas,” and “the intellectually challenged” in a bell-curve sense revolve conspicuously around racial minorities, namely blacks. Such race muckraking recognizes that it is more politically expedient to highlight the “other” as the “undeserved” than it is to focus on one's sister, mother, daughter, wife, if one is a white male, or oneself, if one is a white female. That misguided blacks, like Ward Connerly, and other nonwhites favor social policies like Proposition 209, the insidious California Civil Rights Initiative that aims to dismantle all affirmative action programs, including targeted outreach to minorities and women where they have been traditionally excluded or underrepresented, only attests to the measure of the efficacy of the inane rhetoric of color-blindness and the end of racism in the United States culture. The skewed logic of such rhetoric views any attempt to “level the playing field” or provide a modicum of racial justice as black or minority “preference” in a society that provides equal opportunity for all. In the face of dismally low statistics on the numbers of minority students and minority faculty members in institutions of higher learning (for ultimately the exclusion of minority students will affect the production of minority PhDs), such a stance reveals itself as disingenuous and sorely lacking in racial realism.
In the meantime, the discourse on the lowering of standards and on white displacement is played out most viscerally on blacks, as if the number of “mediocre” blacks admitted into the academic ranks as students and professors could ever equal the number of mediocre whites already in the academy. The hysteria over white displacement is palpable. The notion that professorial jobs and admission places at universities are white jobs, admissions places, and so on is at the root of this polemic. These presumptions, spontaneous as muscular reflexes, point to the material benefits of centuries of white racial privilege in the United States. The current wave of assaults on affirmative action, bandying, as they do, ideals outlined but hardly upheld by the writers of the United States Constitution, function, then, as racially protectionist, supportive of the status quo, and fundamentally discriminatory. Thus how does one tap into a potentially shrinking student body? In 1996, minority enrollment experienced “very limited growth” (Gose). The numbers for 1997, while not yet compiled, are predicted to be equally if not more discouraging, as a result of the national effects of the 1996 Hopwood versus the State of Texas ruling, which banned the consideration of race in admissions and financial aid policies at all Texas schools, and the passage of Proposition 209. How does one quell insecurities in certain academic quarters that view the goal of minority faculty and student inclusion as majority faculty and student exclusion? How should one go about revamping programs of study to include racially and culturally diverse materials and hiring specialists in the related fields without furrowing brows and again inciting anxious cries of exclusion, curriculum dilution, and canonical (read: white) displacement? And finally, with respect to increased visibility and program building, how does one convince chairs of the benefits of seeking out, say, joint appointments where salaries and benefits are often shared and interdisciplinarity encouraged instead of fretfully awaiting the unlikely reward of tenure-track lines wholly in their departments? I pose these questions to generate frank discussion among those of us proffering racial diversity as one of the salves for some of our programmatic woes. Even those of us who are safeguarded by multibillion-dollar endowments should, in good conscience, reflect on such questions.
Despite these caveats, cultivating diversity of this nature is not only pragmatic in these times of curricular retrenchment but also ethical in our current national crises concerning issues of race parity and privilege. On the whole, foreign language programs, never really having made an express commitment to racial diversity, are not in a position to renew such a commitment. But they can earnestly make one, and interdisciplinary programs such as African American studies are germane to such an undertaking. Let me say straightaway that what follows is a bit of standpoint epistemology, experimentally based observations, and recommendations from the front lines of a predominantly white research university where a two-year foreign language requirement is still in place and where the African American Studies and Research Center has joint faculty lines and office spaces, two administrative assistants, graduate teaching assistantships, a research center, and a relatively sizable budget.
As a jointly appointed faculty member in French and African American studies at Purdue University, I am always surprised by the looks of surprise I receive from colleagues inside and outside Purdue when I disclose my employment situation. Before proceeding to cite the numerous cultural exchanges shared among members of the African American, metropolitan French, and francophone communities, I generally recommend writings by Michel Fabre and Tyler Stovall. I sometimes evoke the names of the black expatriates Richard Wright and James Baldwin, if the person is versed in American letters, or of Josephine Baker as an African American French cultural icon, the 1930s bilingual journal La revue du monde noir / The Review of the Black World , and Jean Genet and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.
However, the scholarly line that I walk between French and African American studies encompasses but predates the twentieth century. I am a specialist in eighteenth, century philosophy, nineteenth-century literature, French national cinema, African American literary and cultural criticism, and francophone studies. When I was hired in the fall of 1994 by Purdue University, the French program was looking specifically for an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century specialist to offer innovative courses to increase enrollment, and the African American studies program wanted to expand in the area of African diaspora studies. just as French programs should never rigidly construct themselves as keepers of Continental literature, neither should, and rarely do, African American studies programs and departments envision themselves narrowly as United States-based. Many now call themselves Africana, African diaspora studies, Pan-African studies, or simply black studies, as they too are no less affected by the emerging internationalization of American universities. As our department is one of those conglomerations of languages and literatures, the jointly appointed hire could have easily and just as appropriately landed in another language or literature section such as Arabic, Spanish, or Portuguese.
In looking for veritable ways to cross the line between the two disciplines that would result in quantifiable outcomes, I began to do course development and cross-listing. Although cross-listing the two courses I teach each semester—one in each discipline—was not a stipulation of my contract, I put the strategy to use. Experimenting with teaching comparative francophone women's literatures in translation to nonmajors and in French to French majors and minors, who read the texts and wrote papers in French, resulted in increased enrollment in a literature seminar that would have risked cancellation because of low French enrollments. This course, I should add, is an African American studies course that I cross-listed into French with the aid of the language department's academic adviser. The French department continues to teach its courses in the target language. Moreover, the cultural, racial, ethnic, and disciplinary demographics in the classroom radically shifted, as these classes drew minority and majority students and students from French, English, creative writing, and African American studies. Discussion in English allowed naturally for critical analyses that were more intense and also more varied, because of the class composition. But more important, for most of the students—majors and nonmajors—who had never encountered writings by women from the francophone world, the cultural and race-gender differences and experiences described by the authors gave the students insight into other French-speaking cultures as well as French Continental culture and history.
In the arena of student recruitment, one should not expect that a mere linking up with a black studies program will net scores of minority student majors in the languages, who will then continue on in this bleak professorial market to pursue the PhD and fill the racial minority void in our departments and the academic community as a whole. The ground simply does not swell with students of color. Indeed, depending on the course subject, most African American studies courses are filled by nonminority students, in part because less than ten percent of Purdue's thirty-six thousand undergraduate and graduate students are African Americans, Latinos and Latinas, Native Americans, and Asian Americans. Furthermore, not all students of color are predisposed to take an interest in African American studies or any other ethnically marginalized area of study. Nonetheless, ties to Purdue University's Black Cultural Center—a place where students of all colors gather daily—extracurricular programming (lectures, film series, national and international conferences, a weekly radio newsmagazine), and a range of dynamic courses give the African American Studies and Research Center program high visibility in the university community and enable it to attract majors and maintain high course enrollments.
Purdue University's Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures and the African American Studies and Research Center are investigating ways in which to further strengthen their partnership and transmit the “imaginability” of this alliance as an intellectually rewarding and professionally viable course of study. With the aid of our study-abroad programs office, I have just completed a proposal for a jointly sponsored five week study-abroad program in the French West Indies that will offer French conversation and culture literature courses in diaspora studies. The African American Studies and Research Center has also begun to explore the possibility of awarding teaching assistantships to graduate students of French in need of funding who have interests in African and African diasporic studies.
In conclusion, I am pleased to say that in spring 1998, the French faculty voted to direct its next search for a tenure-track specialist in francophone studies.
The author is Acting Chair of French and Associate Professor of French, Film Studies, Comparative Literature, and African American Studies at Purdue University, West Lafayette. This article is based on her Presentation at ADFL Summer Seminar East, 4–6 June 1998, in New York, New York.
1 Spanish programs have been perhaps most diligent in incorporating diversity into their curricula and faculty as a result of increased interest in Latin American studies.
Bugliani, Ann. “Why Foreign Language Faculty Members Should Teach Literature in Translation.” ADFL Bulletin 29.2 (1998): 32–35. [Show Article]
duCille, Ann. Skin Trade. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996.
Gordon, Avery, and Christopher Newfield, eds. Mapping Multiculturalism. Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 1996.
Gose, Ben. “Minority Student Enrollment Up 3.2% in 1996.” Chronicle of Higher Education 5 June 1998: A32.
Katz, Michael R. “Teaching Literature in Translation: Whose Territory and Which Audience?” ADFL Bulletin 29.2 (1998): 36–38. [Show Article]
© 1999 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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