Musings on the Annual Modern Language Association Conference

The hockey game had just ended, so crowds of jerseys were bustling about, mixed in with the academics sporting tweed jackets, scarves, glasses, and the necklace nametags that were assigned to all those attending the annual MLA conference. To add to the excitement, music was streaming loudly from a radio station trailer that was set up just between the Staples Center and the restaurant where Susie, my mentor, and I were dining. There were young people break dancing in the middle of L.A. Live—a lively pedestrian area filled with hotels, restaurants, clubs, entertainment venues, and cafes. As Susie and I shuffled through the crowds toward our hotel room, which was blocks away, I started to lament the fact that this experience was coming to its end and that I would have to wait another year before having this opportunity again. I had spent the last three days moving in and out of conference rooms, bumping into the professors who had worked with me on my thesis, overhearing conversations about whether or not a text changes if it switches media, watching PhD candidates nervously prepare for the interviews they had scheduled with university search committees, and attending panels that starred big timers and thus were so packed that people were sitting cross-legged between the rows. This was my first MLA conference, and there was no way I could have possibly prepared myself adequately for what it would become to me.

When Susie and I finished fighting the crowds in the street and finally reached our hotel room, we debated about whether or not we had the energy to wake up early to see another big-timer, Spivak, who was on the panel titled: “Is the Postcolonial South Asian?”  Susie used the word saturated to reason her reluctance, and I identified completely with that feeling. Saturated with the wonderful knowledge that was still soaking into my mind, saturated with red wine, with poetry readings, with books, with rich cheeses, and with the buzz that the entire experience created.

Susie is a full professor, and this is her first time presenting at the MLA. It’s a big deal, the MLA conference. It’s the biggest and most well-attended event for our field in the academy, and being only a month out of my master’s program made my presence there feel more than intimidating…it was unnerving. The conference is four days long and this year featured 821 panels (granted, 32 of those panels were cash bars and receptions…at least academics know how to unwind after such mental exercise). When trying to decide which panel to attend, one has an average of 38 options, making the fact that you must make a choice feel entirely unfair and cruel. Generally I tried to attend the panels that were specific to my fields of interest, but when you add into the mix that certain panels feature big-time theorists, writers, poets, professors, scholars, activists, and the like, making your selection becomes a kind of war of the worlds in your mind. When I saw Gloria Steinem’s name of the program for a Feminist Studies Conversation panel, I felt the same surge of excitement that sped up my heart rate when I was ten years old and watching a New Kids on the Block concert on television, and I decided to ditch my previous obligation (a poetry reading by Dana Gioia) to attend it.

But the apex of my time at the MLA conference came at an unexpected moment. I thought nothing could top co-presenting a paper with Susie on the Ah Quin Diary, especially when a flood of enthusiastic questions came in for us during the Q & A session that follows each panel. I knew it was a very rare occurrence for someone at my stage in the academic journey to be a presenter at the MLA conference. I knew that I was working on a unique and important project that would help define and shape my career and interests in a profound way. Being at the conference with my name in the program was a monumental point in my career as a graduate student and scholar, and I thought nothing could top it.  However, when I attended a panel that featured Judith Butler, a theorist whose work I had used in my thesis, I felt like I was at the pinnacle of my sensations. It felt surreal to be sitting there in her midst, like I was somehow legitimized as an academic and grandfathered into the world of academe. I felt like I belonged there.

My fate as an academic is still unknown to me. I find out by March whether or not I will be beginning my doctorate work this fall. And even if the doctoral-granting gods open the golden doors of the institution to me, the world after the PhD is growing ever frightening and dim. However, regardless of the fate that awaits me, I know that, for me, there is no other career or field as magical and exciting and enlivening as the one I endeavor to enter. This weekend taught me that it is not enough to be in love with ideas and learning and literature—one has to breath it, feel it, touch it, taste it, and live it. It sustains me.