Negotiating Sites of Memory

The final paper I want to introduce from the Vancouver Presidential Forum is by Wai Chee Dimock, who reflects on negotiation as mediation and calls on university professors of language and literature to direct their attention to students, and potential students, in the growing population of incarcerated persons in the United States. Dimock, who asked her colleagues to think beyond the time and space of the nation-state in her study Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time, now invites readers to think about a way “higher education might intersect with the criminal justice system” through teaching “done under the rubric of a program called Alternatives to Incarceration (ATI).” That program exists in a number of United States cities, including New Haven, where Dimock teaches. She reflects on how she and other college and university educators might build pedagogical bridges between our sites of professional memory—Dimock’s key examples are passages from Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos and an iconic image of the cage in Pisa, Italy, where Pound was imprisoned during the last year of World War II—and the sites of memory of students who have spent time in prison and who can discover, through ATI, a temporary reprieve from their daily routine and, potentially, an alternative site of education.

Dimock’s forum paper, like those by Kulchyski and Ezrahi, can serve not only as a memento of the 2015 convention but also as a provocation to think of our work as readers of literature and as humanities educators through the lens provided by the notion of negotiating. The verbal noun implies the willingness to take risks, to engage in acts of “communication or conference” with one another for the purpose of “mutual agreement,” “settlement,” or “compromise” (“Negotiate,” def. 1a). We know of course that negotiations can be and have been undertaken in bad faith—as tactics for delay and as distractions for an interlocutor perceived as an enemy to be defeated by any means. Such negotiations make acts of speech and writing a cover for violence rather than an alternative to it. We also know that negotiation and lying have been intimately linked in history and that tactics of negotiation have often migrated from the battlefield to arenas of diplomacy and trade—and back again. The ancient Chinese had a collection of thirty-six proverbial nuggets of wisdom for achieving military success that are now touted as valuable strategies for CEOs seeking a competitive edge: for example, “kill with a borrowed knife” (借刀杀人), translated as “attack using the strength of another person” (Barkai 8).

Despite the compromised nature of the concept of negotiation in some anglophone educational and political contexts—the 2015 MLA subconference, which highlighted contingent labor issues in academia, was, for example, a call to action entitled Non-Negotiable Sites of Struggle—I hope that the papers from my forum can reanimate a meaning implicit in the Latin term negotium: its negative particle prefix tells us that whatever negotiating is, it is not the kind of leisure (otium) typically enjoyed by the Roman upper class. As Jacques Derrida argued about the ethically difficult kind of negotiation that is required “when there are two incompatible imperatives,” “[o]ne does not negotiate between exchangeable and negotiable things. Rather, one negotiates by engaging the nonnegotiable in negotiation” (13). Such negotiation rarely has a definitive ending, and it may well seem tedious and unglamorous work. In ancient Rome, it was often performed by verbally gifted servants acting on behalf of their masters’ desires. In doing this work, the negotiators were constrained in what they could accomplish; nonetheless, they can offer a model for us because they sometimes found ways to transform intransigent desires into propositions open to change and compromise.