I caught this recent story in the Cornell Daily Sun and thought it was pretty interesting.
The idea makes sense… I think. I’m just not sure how I feel about it. In my truncated college career, I studied “English Literature” and understood what that title meant. Nowadays, I still read a great deal of “English Literature” written by folks of many colors and many nations, translated from many original languages, into English. So…
Anyway, here’s the article:
During the English department’s first faculty meeting of the fall semester, faculty members of color introduced a proposal — to change the department’s name.
The new proposed name — “the department of literatures in English” — would mark a distinct change in the department’s branding, helping to eliminate what Director of Undergraduate Studies Prof. Kate McCullough, English, said was the “conflation of English as a language and English as a nationality.”
Earlier this month, a significant majority of the department approved the change, and is now awaiting approval from college administration.
The decision to demand such a change was spurred by this summer’s resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement following George Floyd’s death, according to Prof. Carole Boyce-Davies, English, one of the original proposal writers. As a result, the faculty felt a sense of obligation to react in their own department.
“Faculty around the country — not just faculty of color, but faculty in general — began to look at the institution to see how we can help advance a discourse that challenges structural forms of racism which get reproduced in students and in teaching over and over again,” Boyce-Davies said.
Other faculty simply recognized that it was time that the department’s title represented what it was really focused on: literature written in English.
