I don’t have the bandwidth or venue to write the essay I would like to write about the crisis of the humanities, but: 1. English is not the same as the humanities and confusing one with the other fogs the discussion. 2. The enrollment drops are sobering but the difference…. Between enrollment in majors vs enrollments in classes is not insignificant. I teach classes with 30-75 students (no TA) for a program that has 20 majors in a good day. Humanities programs serve a lot of non majors without credit. 3. The distance between the strength of …

He pasado muchísimos días leyendo y releyendo los libros del Premio Sor Juana para un artículo sobre el Premio y la verdad es que me asombra que el Premio no tenga aún más visibilidad. Realmente las veintisiete novelas valen mucho la pena. Abro hilo con recomendaciones. Del ámbito mexicano hay autoras mexicanas cuyo reconocimiento y calidad están fuera de duda, incluso Garro, quien al recibir el Premio por Busca mi esquela recién comenzaba a ser revalorada, hoy en día es parte incuestionable del canon.

There is another important thing here. The mythology of STEM as the only thing is worth studying plays a role here not only in choice but also in preparation. Many students cannot even envision studying humanities (Which is not only English) because it has been gutted in K-12

https://twitter.com/AaronRHanlon/status/1353328939243077633

The justification for the humanities is the enormous sociocultural weight that culture still has in the public sphere, including a very robust literary world that is transnational.

That article on the closure of universities that I refuse to link or to mention its hack of an author (who is himself invested in private online companies), is just an example of how debates about academia are represented by either 1/x people like this author, privileged insiders out of rarefied bubbles that generalize their idiosyncratic understandings by presenting as fact their factual errors (like the salary claims) and by lending themselves to clickbait 2/x

There is a line of defense in (pretty much certain type of white liberal and conservative) writers and journalists that has emerged on AD, claiming that it will diminish creativity as people will not dare to write about others, thus impacting freedom of speech (thread) And the extreme version of this compares critics with book burners, or to fascists as Jeanine Cummins did herself in an interview they played at me in the BBC. Of course calling people from persecuted groups fascists and book burners is very rich and cynical.

Since people are super worried about whether white Americans are even allowed to write about Mexico, here is a thread about white Americans and Brits who wrote amazing books about Mexico admired by Mexicans. So if you want to begin with white writers to learn about Mexico, read: John Kenneth Turner wrote Barbarous Mexico, a very brave an important exposé of the Porfirio Díaz regime, which the American Press hailed at the time: utpress.utexas.edu/books/turbar

A topic in the American Dirt controversy was the ways in which Mexican, Mexican American and Chicanx literatures are marginalized from publishing. But as a scholar of Mexican literature written in Mexico in Spanish, there are complexities here (thread with book recommendations) As a I mentioned elsewhere, the Mexican and the Mexican American literary fields are distinct and often even unfamiliar with each other. And the colleagues of #DignidadLiteraria are doing an admirable work in addressing the marginalization of Mexican American lit.

My final thread on this, since, believe it or not, I do have to go back to my day job as an academic. One thing that has come out of the American Dirt controversy is various list of books by Latinx authors, which is great, But even these list miss great books by academics and journalists, some Latinx, some not, who have spent years and a great deal of work documenting questions of immigration, the border and Mexico, so here is a short, improvised and non-exhaustive list of great, readable books:

So I have been busy in another controversy, but I have been meaning to chime in on the "Hanging Out" piece on the "literary studies" (quote quote) and how frustrated I felt when reading (a thread) chronicle.com/interactives/h… I consider @V21collective , @Jeannemarie_1 and @seeshespeak dear friends, and I also love the work of Jonathan Kramnick and Edgar Garcia, so my objections are not to them or to anything they have to say. They all speak thoughtfully from their perspectives

So I think a lot of my friends have been following the controversy with American Dirt. Beyond the brilliant trashing by @lesbrains , the low quality of the book itself and the obvious racial politics, a few points need to be underscore (thread) first, trash full of nasty stereotypes about Mexico is all over the place. Just watch recent films like Rambo, Peppermint, Sicario, and The Mule, the last two of them praised by critics, as example. So in this sense American Dirt is an unremarkable product of US culture.