I want to dedicate my remarks to my parents, both ancestors now. To my mother, an elementary school teacher who, even though she had earned a master’s degree, did not know the fullness of my work as an academic but who knew enough about how much I valued this work to excuse my disappearances during visits home during the holidays. When I heard her tell my visiting aunt, who one day inquired of my whereabouts, that I was in our home library “getting out my lesson”—I was preparing for an MLA presentation during the December convention days—I knew my mother was rooting for me to win. And to my father (a math and science teacher turned architect and contractor), who, despite my repeated requests, pretended to forget each year to build me a window seat because he knew I’d get lost in books and forsake people, when the only reason to read books is to understand people.

For the better part of the last ten years, two projects that might best fit in the “life’s work” category have consumed a considerable amount of my time and imagination. By and large, they are unrelated to each other, in terms of scope. They do share, however, my abiding interest in recovering what Toni Morrison has called “invisible ink”—meaning that “lies under, between, outside the lines, hidden until the right reader discovers it” (Source 348). It is this invisible ink that exists beneath, between, and outside the obvious, meaning that is in the structure but is still unfixed. It must be created. I mention the consistency of thought here because some of what you hear will be familiar—in some cases I’ve doubled down on ideas; in other cases, I’ve evolved. In short, I want history to be kind to me in its consideration of my conversation with myself on the page and otherwise. Morrison figures prominently in the first project, which tries to make legible the invisible ink that is her work as an editor of nearly fifty books at Random House Publishing Company. As fascinating as this project—titled Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship—is to me (and hopefully to others), it would be a bit parochial to use it as a flash point for our time together this evening, especially in these trying times.

The second project turns on the challenge of unlocking the potential laden in the academic enterprise. It is an aspect of this ambitious undertaking I’d like to consider tonight. Allow me a brief digression to contextualize my unwavering if constructed belief in the power of higher education to solve real-world problems.

This is my home state. So I’m attentive to most things Louisiana. Some missteps are more personal to me than others. Take for example the current challenge to S.B. 8, the state’s congressional map that was passed in 2024. Before S.B. 8, only one of the state’s six congressional districts was made up of majority-Black voters. Considering that roughly one-third of the state’s population is Black, a group of Black voters went to federal court stating that Louisiana’s map violated section 2 of the federal Voting Rights Act.Footnote ¹ A federal court in Louisiana decided to throw out the old map from 2022, thereby requiring Louisiana to draw a new congressional map, named S.B. 8. It created a second majority-Black district—the Sixth Congressional District—spanning from Baton Rouge to Shreveport. In 2024, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld the federal court’s ruling on S.B. 8. Soon after, however, a group of Louisiana voters identifying themselves as “non-African American” sued the state, contending that the new map was unconstitutional racial gerrymandering (Howe). A federal court agreed, which, in turn, required Louisiana to throw out S.B. 8 in the upcoming 2024 elections. Also in 2024, the Supreme Court decided to put the lower court’s decision on S.B. 8 on hold, thereby allowing Louisiana to use the new congressional map during the 2024 elections. But in June 2025, the Supreme Court announced that it would hear new arguments regarding S.B. 8; we can reasonably predict how that will end.Footnote ²

This whole matter takes me back to early 1990s when I hurried from school to my father’s office to do population data work before data science technologies reached the rural south. It was my job to use pins on a map affixed to a cork board to color-code registered voters by race in the parishes of north and central Louisiana. My father, himself a local elected official, was part of a statewide initiative orchestrated by those who dared to argue that redistricting in Louisiana should absolutely be informed by the state’s racial demographics.Footnote ³ We won that battle; the war continues.

There was a kind of fearlessness among his generation. They believed a better world was possible. They had seen meaningful improvements in their lifetimes.

I tell this protracted story to give you a sense of my father’s belief in group-oriented self-determination. Every problem had a solution. For serious problems beyond his peers’ unreasonably vast skill sets, they didn’t look to the hills. They looked to the universities. My father’s response, in particular, to anything that confounded his dancing mind was some version of this: “look like to me they could figure this out at Grambling (or at Southern, or at LSU).” My father, a well-educated man, could, like me, slip between standardized and colloquial English effortlessly. But there was invisible ink in his “look like to me” phrasing. It was meant to convey the push/pull synergy between the everyday people and the university people they counted on to support their grassroots efforts.

The solution center was often contingent on the problem. A rural location problem: Grambling would have an answer. An engineering problem: Southern would. Animal husbandry problem: LSU was the logical source. I adopted his faith in universities to provide solutions to problems of the human condition. I did not do so uncritically. I, too, witnessed how communities changed when faculty members who were committed to those communities saw their wellness and investment as a two-way street. Communities invested in faculty members through their tax dollars, and faculty members invested in communities as co-laborers in the project of creating a great society. In short, the right-wing contemporary notion of higher education acting against public interest was never a consideration in our household or community. Even the life of the mind as its own pursuit added value to the world they were trying to build.

If we can accept the assumption that real-world problems can be solved at universities—as I clearly have—we can also assume that humanities disciplines like language and literature study have something meaningful to contribute to the academy’s problem-solving potential. And since my academic work is in literary studies, it should not be surprising that I often look first to the novel as a springboard, as a point of entry into my stubborn insistence that the university is a place where we can figure things out. “Look like to me… .”

Why the novel specifically? In Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o argues that fiction can hold a special, an irreplaceable, place in a thinker’s critical arsenal.Footnote ⁴ It was only fiction, he suggests, that could create “the critical bridge to cross the gulf between reality as lived and reality as imagined experience, between the text without context and the colonial world, between imperial forces and the quest for freedom” (Williams, “Fiction Redux” 39). He notes:

The novel that does some of the work I think necessary to confront what we might call the “language and literature studies” situation brought on by neocolonialism and that, accordingly, serves as a kind of urtext for my remarks is Ayi Kwei Armah’s 2013 novel The Resolutionaries.

Here’s how the publisher describes the book on its dust jacket:

The novel is indeed about Nefert and her friends’ resolve to throw off colonialism and neocolonialism once and for all. But The Resolutionaries is also very much about the politics of language—interpretation, translation, and creation. Their work as professional translators and interpreters at conferences informs the novel’s setting almost exclusively, and it is the core of the novel’s context. Nefert’s depression is a result of her growing discontentment about the role she plays maintaining the status quo. Speeches are given—often using the latest buzzwords to discuss a long-standing problem being featured at the conference as a newish crisis. She interprets the speeches from whatever language the remarks are given in to the language the hearer prefers. Even as she tries to translate objectively, purely as a professional, she is sickened by the circumstantial inertia that characterizes the conferences on the one hand and the intentional inaction on the other. Her gift of languages shifts from burden to opportunity, finally, when she joins forces with colleagues who share her giftedness, and they begin to use their skills to be active participants in a concerted effort to solve Africa’s problems instead of simply translating rearticulations of these problems to no end other than perfunctory conference resolutions.

The novel indirectly raises three discourses to which I want to call our attention. The first is the usefulness of critique as a critical literary studies skill. The second is the challenge of content mastery. And the third is the reclamation of Africa as a centerpiece in the history of the humanities.

Ask any literary studies professor what their best students do well, and nine times out of ten the responses will be related to some aspect of insightful critique, often made possible by careful close reading. This skill, quintessential for English majors, enables readers to practice not only “Didafa (literally ‘reading the signs’),” as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., articulates in The Signifying Monkey, but also “itumo (literally ‘to untie the knot of knowledge’)” (11). At its best, close reading is, as James Metcalf describes, “a technique of illumination whose field of vision focalizes its aesthetic object afresh.” Without this skill, which is crucial for English majors and invested readers alike, certain matters like “influence [are] almost certainly too subtle to be traced in other than close textual reading” (Gates, Figures 36). Considering that every “literary work of art is a system of signs that may be decoded with various methods” (38), as every humanities practitioner knows, close reading is central to understanding the relationship between form and content. Great works of literature do not just expect close readings, they demand them.

The Resolutionaries is itself a function of Armah’s resolve to critique the elite’s determination to sustain rather than eliminate chronic poverty, ignorance, and technological incompetence so that Africa’s resources remain profitable commodities to everyone except the Africans. Most good literature offers some element of critique. Armah (in good company with others) fictionalized and prefigured what Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò argued nearly ten years later in Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and Everything Else). What makes The Resolutionaries more exacting in its critique of the elite than Elite Capture and similarly important scholarship, however, is the self-reflection at the heart of Armah’s text. Nefert narrates her awareness of the ways she and her fellow translators and interpreters are complicit in the exploitation of their fellow man:

What Nefert’s friend Benga helps her realize is that collaboration with European domination is not the only option for the translator and interpreter. Rather, they can and should accept the jazzman’s dilemma—“Finding freedom inside closed spaces” (41).

This is our work as humanities faculty members. It is not ours exclusively, of course. But it is ours particularly. Where is freedom inside the closed space that is the academy? And where is this freedom in the closed space that is the world?Footnote ⁵ The answer to both questions requires a clear articulation of freedom, which is no easy feat. A short but near perfect scene in the prologue of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man makes the point.Footnote ⁶ Trying to make sense of his own ambivalence, the narrator comes upon an old woman singing a spiritual who, paradoxically, loves her master who fathered her children. The old woman tells the narrator that she loved something else more than the master, however—freedom. “Old woman, what is this freedom you love so well?” the narrator asks. “She looked surprised, then thoughtful, then baffled. ‘I done forgot, so. It’s all mixed up. First I think it’s one thing, then I think it’s another. It gits my head to spinning. I guess now it ain’t nothing but knowing how to say what I got up in my head.’” The passage speaks so well to the challenges we have faced and continue to face in establishing critical terms to better understand and articulate our present reality. What does freedom mean in the context of today’s reality? And then, how do we learn to say “what we got up in our heads”? As the prologue intimates, articulating freedom can be a difficult task.

Because the old lady cannot articulate her idea of freedom, she chastens the narrator, telling him to leave her alone. The lady’s son hits the narrator for making his mother cry. “But how?” the narrator asks, to which the son replies, “Asking her them questions, that’s how. Git outta here and stay, and next time you got questions like that, ask yourself!” Her son’s outburst is instructive and rhetorically relevant. We need to define things for ourselves. His use of the vernacular, too, reminds the narrator that any notion of freedom he crafts for himself must integrate his intellect, enabled by his formal education, and his folk wisdom, enabled by life experiences and a determination to survive. “Look like to me… .”

Nefert picks up on this theme of self-definition and its relation to rhetoric in The Resolutionaries. Hiring someone to help with her son and moving her mother into her home removed “some of the fog of anxiety” she was experiencing as a conflicted intellectual. But there remained a part of her desire no one could access. She concedes:

What a close reading of Nefert’s lament reveals is that she has two problems, both of which she eventually resolves fortunately. She has the rhetorical problem of articulation and the challenge of connecting her work to a feeling of communal wellness.

What she comes to know is what we must all come to know: that the responsibility of the willful intellectual is to make some adequate sense of an ever-changing complex situation. And this must be done without the limitations of binaries or an overemphasis on rhetorical machinations. Building a vision of freedom, more concretely described as a vision of the society we want to live in, cries out for new definitions, yes, but for new arrangements as well. It is our task to define who and what we want to be with as much intellectual precision and integrity as possible.

As Nefert infers, this is gut-wrenching, anxiety-inducing, healing work. To find freedom in closed spaces, high among our tasks is combating the fictioning of democracy, the nefarious work the very languages and literatures we teach has done and continues to do. Wole Soyinka makes a similar argument in his 2012 collection of essays, Of Africa. In the chapter titled “Fictioning of the Fourth Dimension,” Soyinka articulates four schools of “fictioning.”Footnote ⁷ One mode is propelled by the spirit of adventure; a second is shaped by commercial motives; a third emerges as an internally driven, power-inflected process of imaginative construction carried forward by their successors; and a fourth is most often undertaken by those who have been—and frequently remain—oppressed. Of most relevance here is Soyinka’s point that fictioning is a political act that enables “the curse of repetition, albeit in disguised, even refined forms” to continue unbroken (66). Structural change remains elusive, and the well of attenuation and the tree of forgetfulness win the day.Footnote ⁸

I want to shift here from the global to the local, from one Black Nobel laureate in literature to another.

The fictioning of democracy happens everywhere, typically in stages and predictably beginning with a mythology that is highly nationalistic. This is the work of national literatures. But as Morrison tells us in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, the invisible ink of the brand of democracy she was most intimately familiar with—American democracy—obscures the fact that freedom for one acquires its value at the expense of an other. This ultimately means that what is embraced as freedom is actually a quasi freedom rooted in an unchecked anxiety of a full range of fears—which Morrison argues reveals itself in American literature as the “fear of being outcast, of failing, of powerlessness, … fear of boundarylessness, of Nature unbridled and crouched for attack; … fear of absence of so-called civilization; … fear of loneliness; of aggression both external and internal. In short, the terror of human freedom—the thing they [Americans] coveted most of all” (Playing 37). If Morrison is to be believed, human freedom is, at once, the great desire and the great terror.

The greatest defense against fictioning is (re)memory and its pedagogical corollary, content mastery, a second discourse Armah foregrounds in The Resolutionaries. In a short statement he titles “A Conversation with the Reader”—more legibility of otherwise invisible ink—he reveals that the novel began in his imagination as a straight satire, mocking how comically absurd it was for intellectuals to use their language skills to ensure their relevance while, conversely, ensuring that there would be no end to “chronic poverty, ignorance or technological incompetence” (i). But the characters grew more complex and were no longer satisfied with their role in maintaining the status quo, and they began to imagine how they might use their skills to help create a better society as a whole, not just for themselves. Their will, however, ranging from enthusiastic to reluctant, was not enough.

First, the characters needed to break the inhibitory orthodoxy their education and training had imposed on them, an orthodoxy that said a society at peace with itself and others was not possible and that there was no intellectual heritage on which they could draw to even imagine that kind of peace—peace that meant more than the absence of war. In Armah’s view, and in mine, the best way to enact this pursuit is by “accessing the intellectual record of African antiquity, something their [and our] formal education had been designed to convince them [and us] could not possibly exist” (ii). Armah goes on to say:

The challenge is one of content mastery. The response by the characters in The Resolutionaries to this challenge is forming working groups to take advantage of their collective skills. When Benga and Jehwty, the two characters who issue the charge to the others, outline their plan, Sali, the outspoken skeptic, spits back, “you’ll never find a group of African intellectuals ready to think of solutions to our problems. You can find thousands eager to sit in offices collecting salaries from foreign charities, taking road trips, submitting reports saying they’re solving African problems, so please give more grants, more aid, more per diems” (66). But never to find solutions. Jehwty fights back and says if he cannot find a group, he will form one. Benga leans in to the idea. Sali asks when and where, but her tone is no longer skeptical but curious. Right after she agrees to join the group, Jehwty coyly announces that they will meet at eleven forty-five the next morning—just after they are given their per diems.

By the end of the novel, Sali has made the turn and joined the group. Jehwty and Benga’s patience, empathy for her position, clarity of vision, willingness to listen, and commitment to building with others are all necessary to compel Sali and the other skeptics at least to try to forsake the tree of forgetfulness. But it is the insistence of a keynote speaker at the conference on language that even in a post-post-Shakespearean world that it should not be argued that Caliban’s display of humanity is not enlarged when Caliban accepts Prospero’s language as a gift that is the final straw. Prospero’s humanity grows, too, in this scenario because Prospero shares his gift of language with Caliban. The keynote speaker insists that Prospero’s “bringing the giver and recipient together in a bond that is not tribal, not parochial, but eminently universal” is to be lauded (423). The expectation for Nefert to interpret Caliban’s invisible language as nonexistent—she was also to ignore his audible grunts that registered his resistance to the absurdity he was experiencing—was their breaking point. Those who could had an obligation to restore his memory, history, and intellect and not just for Caliban and in the spirit of historical restitution but for humanity and in the spirit of nonviolent universalism.

This brings me to the final discourse that The Resolutionaries raises and that I want to call our attention to—the reclamation of Africa as a centerpiece in the history of the humanities and, importantly, beyond rhetorical gesture. I started this talk noting that I have been thinking about the broad strokes of this project for years. The first essay I wrote as a junior faculty member because my soul cried out for it was an essay on W. E. B. Du Bois’s notion of broad sympathy, the idea that the learned person, no matter the race, ethnicity, or nationality, could be characterized by their knowledge of the world and their relation to it.Footnote ⁹ Du Bois was clear that there was no singular center. Whatever your culture is should be at the center of your knowing, but that center is one of many concentric circles. And that connectedness gains its greatest meaning in its relation to the world. Broad sympathy closes the distance instead of closing the gate, understanding that in seeing the other we see some aspect of ourselves.Footnote ¹⁰ The essay was inspired by two lines I read on a syllabus from the Introduction to the Humanities class that was the source of much consternation during the 1968 student protest movement at Howard University. Here are those lines: “The illiterate is not affected by the printed page. But the uncritical reader is deeply, unconsciously influenced without having any chance to understand or change what is happening to him.” The students argued that the sprinkling of some Black texts among the great books of Western thought left them too little chance to understand or change what was happening to them. The next year, this prologue, with a common disclaimer, was added:

Gestures are made. In the syllabus’s notes for The Odyssey, students are reminded that the oldest known “traveler’s tale,” “The Shipwrecked Sailor,” is an obvious source for Homer, is from Egypt, is dated around “2000 B.C.,” and “tells of a shipwreck in which a hero, a sole survivor, floats ashore on a piece of timber and finds himself on a marvelous island… . Another kind of tale … had to do with a journey down into the region of the dead.” Though the syllabus does not offer a title, this latter tale references the stories in The Book of Coming Forth by Day and Night, also called The Egyptian Book of the Dead by Western scholars.

As the characters in The Resolutionaries know, it is hard to decenter the West, the first and second rise of Europe specifically, as the point of departure and the point of reference for the study of the laws of nature and our relation to society in ancient civilizations. But as John Henrik Clarke reminds us in the foreword of African World History Project: The Preliminary Challenge, “When Europe was born, Africa, particularly Egypt, had had a ten-thousand-year walk in the sun politically and culturally and was now tired from its long journey” (x).Footnote ¹¹ He goes on to note, “The challenge of the Nile Valley created Egypt. The challenge of Egypt and the Mediterranean islands eventually created Rome and Greece. The challenge of Rome and Greece eventually created Europe” (x). We know this, and still. And yet. We will not commit individually or collectively as humanities scholars to achieving deep understanding and consideration of the oldest of civilizations and then to understanding how the traditions, thoughts, beliefs, and values of those civilizations have been transformed and reimagined in more “modern” civilizations. We are unwilling to pay the price of the ticket, even when the stakes are high. It may seem counterintuitive, but it is in the moment of crisis that the need for slow, deep thought becomes most acute. Armah warns:

Our craft includes educating ourselves, enacting and exporting democracy and freedom, practicing eloquence, and observing humanism—in all its historical depth. The politics of deep thought: do it, explore it, debate it, promote it, experience it, be it, support it, adopt it, accept it, pursue it, embrace it, be it, be it, be it, be it.

I return to Morrison in these final moments and to the other project I mentioned at the beginning to offer, heavy-handedly I admit, the Morrison as editor project as bookends for my remarks. I open Toni at Random in a reporting style, chronicling her remarks on a panel about publishing at the Black Writers’ Festival at Howard. The deck was stacked against publishing revolutionary thinking at mainstream houses, she admitted.

Someone asked what could be done to combat the dire situation. “‘Rather than waiting for the leader or waiting for the huge magical formula,’ she admonished, ‘what is needed is commitment.’ She declared matter-of-factly, ‘All the money in the world doesn’t create commitment. You can have it and shoot everything that walks on four legs and decorate your office. But if you don’t have the commitment, if you don’t love anybody, it doesn’t make any difference… . There is one other thing and there’s always been that other thing. That’s us! We are all we got’” (Williams, Toni at Random 8–10).

We must do this work; we must pay the price of the ticket. We simply must—’cause we all we got. Are we enough?