The English Department and Graduate English Society support Black Lives Matter and the ongoing protests against systematic and institutional racism, sparked by the murders of George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Ahmaud Arbery and others. As teachers and scholars, we welcome the urgent, amplified attention to issues of equity and social justice. And we recognize that the critiques and calls for reform extend to the history and current practice of the teaching and study of literature, language and culture; and to the profession and its institutions, including at Stony Brook.

To demonstrate with action our commitment to anti-racist teaching, scholarship and administration, we list here some of the actions we have taken and plan to take to increase diversity, inclusion, and to communicate a better understanding of the complex, conflicted legacy of our field and its potential contribution to a more just, equitable society.

Actions Taken

The English Department has been home to anti-racist work, both by individual faculty members and graduate students and by the department as a whole.

• In the spring of 2020, the department held two Brown Bag luncheons open to faculty and graduate students on the following question: How Can We Enact Anti-Racist Pedagogy in English Classes at Stony Brook University?
  • February 19, 2020: Our emphasis was on understanding whiteness, sharing resources for anti-racist pedagogies, and unpacking and interrogating the white supremacist basis of academic language as we teach it.
  • March 4, 2020: We focused on the ways in which whiteness functions invisibly in formal organizations, and we explored ways to understand and disrupt how our own practices inadvertently encourage a white supremacist culture in our department and classroom practices, policies, and structures.

• Stemming from the Brown Bags listed above, we have established a Google Folder for Anti-Racist Teaching that includes links to many articles and books that support these efforts, most of them authored by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color). This resource is updated continuously by faculty and graduate students.

• Faculty members and doctoral students are engaged in summer reading that will shape the assignments in fall 2020 courses. In addition to reading literature by BIPOC, many of us are reading materials on the history of racism in our discipline as well as work that takes up anti-racist pedagogy.

• Faculty and graduate students remain committed to anti-racist scholarship and creative activities. For example, Dr. Simone Brioni is at work on a new documentary with/about Cameroonian Italian writer Geneviéve Makaping; Dr. E.K. Tan is writing an essay comparing the anti-Asian racism in the US and anti-African racism in China induced by the COVID-19 pandemic; Dr. Elyse Graham’s essays about refugees during World War II have helped to inform policy directives at Princeton University; Dr. Timothy K. August recently completed a book about aesthetics, immigration, and the racialization of refugee groups; and Drs. Michael Rubenstein, Jeffrey Santa Ana and Michael Tondre are all working on book projects that bridge ecocriticism and (post)colonial studies. Among others, Sarah Davis, Caitlin Duffy, and Sara Santos highlight race and works by BIPOC in their dissertation research.

• Much of the research and teaching of the English Department’s faculty, affiliates, and graduate students features texts by authors of color and anti-racist themes. The scope of courses offered by the department reflect this commitment. Some of these classes – for example, World Literature (EGL 111/112) and Global Film Traditions (EGL 121) – are offered every semester. Our special topics courses further demonstrate the department’s ongoing conversations about how language and literature can both challenge and perpetuate white supremacist, imperialist, and settler-colonizing ideologies. For Fall 2020, these include:

• • EGL 217 – Early American Literature (Newman)*
  • EGL 224 –  20th Century Literatures in English (Johnston)*
  • EGL 301 – Contemporary American Plays (Weitzman)
  • EGL 309 – Interdisciplinary Study of Literature: Non-Western Environmental Feminisms (Davis)*
  • EGL-369 – Topics in Ethnic American Literature and Culture: Magic Realism (Pallas)
  • EGL 492 – Honors Seminar: Migrant Literature and the Anthropocene (Santa Ana)
  • EGL 592 – Problems in Teaching Writing or Composition (Dunn).*
  • EGL 608 – Theories of World Literature & Global Culture (August)*

* Seats available

Each semester, the specific themes and texts of these courses evolve to better engage with current scholarship, events, and activist conversations.

Actions Planned

The English Department also commits itself to accomplishing a series of actions internally starting this Fall 2020.

• We will revise our learning objectives to explicitly reflect our commitments to anti-racist and decolonizing pedagogies.

• Likewise, and in collaboration with the student community, we will review the undergraduate English major curriculum to better support the anti-racist and activist work that so many of our students are now pursuing.

• We will share the anti-racist and decolonizing scholarship conducted by our faculty and graduate students (including scholarship by Dr. Simone Brioni, Dr Jeffrey Santa Ana, and others) on our department blog.

• We are organizing a Departmental Diversity Initiative in the Spring 2021 about Islamophobia, which will bring Somali writer Shirin Ramzanali Fazel to our campus.

• As part of a larger effort to reimagine how institutional resources such as the Poetry Center can become sites of anti-racist action, we will begin by focusing this year’s Text and Tea events on activist literature by BIPOC.

• In an effort to promote an ongoing engagement with anti-racist discourse and praxis, the Graduate English Society (GES) commits to hosting professional development and other awareness events that engage directly and practically with issues of racism and diversity in academia, specifically where it concerns the graduate student community. Such an effort will be extended to our annual English graduate conference, held each spring, which we will continue to make an increasingly inclusive space for anti-racist conversation and diverse representation through the chosen annual themes and accepted proposals. As we revise our GES Constitution in the coming months, we will incorporate a substantial anti-racist statement into the document, possibly under both Article III: Membership and Article VII: Impeachment (of officers). In short, the GES commits to making anti-racism and inclusivity key components in our conversations and actions as a graduate organization.

Beyond these steps, we are dedicated to continuously rethinking and deepening our anti-racist praxis as responsive collaborators within the university and our greater community. This work demands our imagination, effort, resources, listening, and willingness to take risks.

Aspirations

While the steps taken above can be pursued now or in the immediate future, we know the work of anti-racism will require long-term commitment and effort.

• In support of Stony Brook University’s Plan for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, we will continue to lobby our academic leadership to provide us with the resources necessary to hire specialists in African American literature, ethnic studies scholars, and/or faculty of color. We acknowledge that our department’s racial makeup reflects the academy’s history of exclusion and we know that the discipline of English has not always welcomed BIPOC faculty and students. We will actively seek to become the kind of department that BIPOC faculty and students will want to join.

• We have reached out to other units on campus such as the Department of Africana Studies and the Humanities Institute with the hope of organizing and hosting lectures, events, workshops, etc., to promote a better understanding racial justice among faculty and students.