Introduction: Unsettling the Spectator

Introduction:Unsettling the Spectator Erika Behrisch Elce Art is an instrument in the war against the enemy. —Pablo Picasso When the Midwest Modern Language Association set its theme for the 2017 annual conference as "Arts and Activism," it was almost a visceral, instinctive decision. The results of the 2016 US election had just been announced, and we were in the middle of hosting the 2016 conference on "Border States." We of course pride ourselves on the topicality of our conference themes, but the aptness of that particular theme, at that particular time, was downright eerie. Cool heads had not prevailed that year; politeness, reason, and logic were rejected for inflammatory hate speech and fear-mongering. November 2016 felt bleak, and not just because of the weather; it appeared as a cultural threshold upon which we teetered, confronted with a realization that the push against isolationism, private greed, and intolerance had not been hard enough. With the 2017 conference theme, we made the collective choice not to curse that darkness but to light a candle within it, to articulate our identity as a public institution that doesn't just advocate for but insists on dialogue; that makes spaces for alternative voices to be heard; that renders visible and audible the everyday activism of people creating culture within a radicalized world; and that demands of its own members [End Page 5] a commitment to challenge the status quo. "Arts and Activism" was intended as a galvanizing theme, a statement that Humanities scholarship has the power—and the responsibility—to drive a dialogic wedge of dissent between the closed doors of populism. That the conference took place in Ohio kept the stakes high: hosting a Humanities conference in a "battleground state" when critical enquiry was being disavowed in the nation's highest offices politicized the very act of the conference itself. In truth, the conference could have taken place anywhere and we may have felt the same: with Humanities programs globally under threat from budget cuts, everywhere feels like a battleground. In the current cultural climate, to work in the Humanities is to be a social activist. When we all reconvened in Cincinnati in November 2017, we were amazed at the change in tone and energy. The more than six hundred–strong conference was a rally of colleagues; the theme inspired papers that linked arts and activism from every possible angle, extending well beyond traditional academia to reach across cultures as well as across time, linking protests and protesters through space and history as part of a global human movement. We see some of these fine, inspiring arguments continue to illuminate the world around them in the articles that are included in this issue. With this, our "Arts and Activism" issue, we insist not only that Humanities research effects change at all social levels, but that it must do so. One hundred thirty years ago, Oscar Wilde caught the conundrum in which we find ourselves today: "The nineteenth-century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth-century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass" (885). But whereas Wilde had the freedom, at least temporarily, to slip away from his critics, reducing their barbs to bubbles with his offhand conclusion, "All art is quite useless," it doesn't feel as though we have that freedom today (886). Our response must be closer to what Martin Luther King, Jr., said during the 1967 Massey Lecture series he recorded for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, "Conscience for Change": "If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness" (169). King was, of course, quoting Victor Hugo—one activist reaching back through time and culture to draw on an artist, who was, in turn, a powerful social activist himself. This points to the [End Page 6] importance of a community of dissent, in any time period and in any location: for any society or government to imagine that its citizens can do without disciplines that teach positionality, empathy, and the history and...

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