Context:

All of this has emerged from the way in which our Comparative Literature department at the City University of New York evolved over the past few years and how it affected our course of study, our choice of fields and approaches to research. Much like other universities, CUNY has been making changes within its sprawling educational system to accommodate the trends towards an unfortunate professionalization and corporatization of the academic world. Being in New York City, overt manifestations of these transitions came to the fore after the 9/11 tragedy as censorious organizations such as a Campuswatch and other more virulent forms ofconservatism in the media pushed the Humanities departments in different directions. Of course, some departments reacted and debated these changes, our Comparative Lit dept further embraced the atmosphere of censorship generated by the 9/11 tragedy. There is a distinct feeling that there is a renewed attack upon the university as a liberal institution and thus the intellectual and political discourse it generates is getting monitored in various ways. The academic world has become a mirror of political trends in this country and that there is an inextricable link between the two.

On the university front, we have tried to engage and confront these issues by questioning certain policy decisions and asking for changes within the extremely traditional Eurocentric reading lists, course listings, colloquium choices and so on. Since then, our department has become a place of ideological battle regarding the future of Comp Lit itself. Not only has it led to some polemical debates but it has led to the exclusions of many of us interested in more politicized fields of study. This departmental politics is merely a point of entry in what seems to be a greater malaise within academia in the United States. It seem that, on the one hand, departments and disciplines within the United States are transitioning into interdisciplinarity, studies of transnational literatures an intermingling of fields and methodologies while on the other hand, there is a renewed vigor to conservatism and the resistance to the breaking down of monolithic canonical structures, disciplinary models and more traditional ways of thinking through the field of the Humanities.

There are subtle and unsubtle processes of gatekeeping and constructions of boundaries within the institutions that transform the fields in which students undertake research, the theory that gets taught in the classrooms, the reading lists that get drawn up and the professional market that one tends to cater to. As much as all of this seems to be exceptional to our department, we have realized that many of these practices are also present at other departments and that in our case, they are merely hyper-realized. We have begun to detect, in fact, a sort of phenomena within the academic universe which all of us realized that it needed to be addressed, analyzed, and shared with other academics.