Why I Walked Out of the MLA for Good--And Why You Should Too (Guest Post)

MLA Convention New Orleans on January 11, 2025

by Anthony Alessandrini

'On the second day, we held signs with the names of scholars martyred in Gaza and lay down together on the floor outside the hotel ballroom where the MLA’s elected delegates were walking in to hold their assembly. every name every name every name. Many delegates joined us. “MLA is Complicit in Genocide,” read a banner we had painted and brought with us, from occupied Hawaiʻi. A die in is symbolic, a mere fractional representation of the scope and the volume of loss. every name every name every name. We lay in silence as the complicit walked around us.'  – Hannah Manshel, 'What Follows Whereas: Reflections on the MLA Walk Out for Palestine' 

How do you give a form to absence? How do you draw a line around a silence, in order to articulate it? How do you hold on to refusal such that it’s no longer a matter of simply saying “no” to what’s unacceptable but “yes” to what’s necessary?

 

These are familiar question for poets, and for those of us who teach and study and write about language and literature. For organizers doing the hard-headed work of banging our heads against the walls of our ever-more unjust and complicit institutions, they take on a different quality. The group of us who have been organizing around a BDS resolution within the Modern Language Association have found ourselves moving, often surreally, between these two registers. We’re scholars of language and literature up against an organization that claims to represent us, but whose actions reveal not just its complicity with the ongoing genocide in Palestine, but also its determination to silence anyone who attempts to contest this complicity.

 

For those who are new to the story, Rebecca Colesworthy’s excellent “Resigning from and to the MLA” and Chris Newfield’s earlier setting out of “The Story So Far” will get you up to speed. More recently, Hannah Manshel’s magnificent essay, from which I’ve taken my epigraph, describes the actions that MLA members took at the recent convention in New Orleans. These were intended to support our resolution and to protest our leadership’s repression, but most of all they were actions in solidarity with Palestinians resisting the hundred-year war waged upon them, with the unstinting support of our governments and institutions.

 

If we succeeded at anything—and I’m still of many minds about that—it was in turning what was meant to be a silence into an event. It was clear for months that MLA’s leadership was determined to make this all go away, with as little noise or attention as possible. They rejected our BDS resolution via a three-sentence email with no explanation and immediately removed it from the MLA website, even though it has passed through all the association’s logistical hurdles. When we tried to use an email list for elected delegates to discuss the situation, our messages were blocked. When the Executive Council finally deigned to put out an explanation, it was only accessible to members via a password, thus blocking it from a fuller public view. It was only due to unprecedented pressure from members, including nine former MLA presidents and 26 former EC members(including two current members who resigned publicly to protest the EC’s decision—something that MLA leadership has never publicly addressed, preferring instead to project a fictional sense of unanimity), that the Council finally put out a public statement—nearly two months after they had killed the resolution.

 

Silences, Secrets, and Lies

 

After two months of silence—and of attempts to silence us—what the MLA leadership finally said is objectionable in so many ways. The refusal to meaningfully acknowledge the context of the ongoing genocide being carried out by Israel and the United States—indeed, the refusal to even use the word “genocide” in a 3000+ word statement—belies the MLA’s rhetorical gestures towards social justice that form part of its mission statement, as well as its publications.

 

The cowardice of the Executive Council’s statement is clear, but it takes a bit more work to read out the deep disingenuousness of its argument. It boils down to this: the Council admits that anti-BDS laws do not prohibit an organization like the MLA from supporting the Palestinian BDS call. Moreover, the phrasing of our resolution—“we, the members of the MLA, endorse the 2005 BDS call”—makes it very clear that this is not an official position being taken by the organization. But the EC nevertheless frets that this will not be enough, and that the laws somehow are even more powerful than those who made them claim them to be. As we put it in an earlier response: “the leadership of the world’s most powerful association of writers and teachers has decided that words no longer have any meaning when confronted by unjust laws.” 

 

Instead we are told: “the Executive Council is guided by our lawyers’ assessment, which is that these statutes have been carefully crafted to withstand any challenges that assert that they restrict free speech.” We, the members, have no clue who “our lawyers” might be, but we do have the benefit of the views of other legal experts who have spent years assessing these laws. Here, for example, is the conclusion from a report by Palestine Legal: 

 

“Federal district courts in four states have ruled that these states’ laws, all of which require contractors with the state to sign pledges that they don’t boycott Israel, are likely unconstitutional and that boycotts for Palestinian rights are protected by the First Amendment. However, in each state, the legislatures changed the laws that were challenged so that they no longer applied to the plaintiffs in order to moot the lawsuits.”

 

The actual legal precedent, in other words, runs counter to MLA leadership’s inaccurate and dishonest claims. Rather than being “crafted to withstand any challenges,” when these state laws have come under legal challenge, they have usually been tweaked to allow plaintiffs who challenge them to exercise their First Amendment right to boycott for Palestinian rights. Zoha Khalili, Senior Staff Attorney at Palestine Legal, puts it even more clearly: 

 

“The MLA Executive Council's decision to prevent the Delegate Assembly from voting on the BDS resolution is a cowardly, anti-democratic move. It is also a misguided one: Even if the MLA chooses to prioritize mercenary interests over Palestinian lives, its flawed legal analysis fails to acknowledge that the resolution is simply an endorsement of the Palestinian call for BDS and does not bind the MLA itself to engage in a boycott. A purely expressive resolution like this one is protected speech that is beyond the reach of any anti-BDS law, even under the most repressive interpretation of our constitutional rights.”

 

But even this doesn’t get at what is most damning in the Council’s too-little-too-late statement. There is also a secret revealed there, albeit buried in the faux-legalistic language: the Modern Language Association, without informing or consulting with its members, has already capitulated to these laws by signing anti-BDS clauses in order to obtain contracts. Here are their own words on this:

 

“As of now, the MLA has contracts for the current year that include clauses in which we have affirmed that our association is not supporting BDS. If the membership were to pass a resolution to the contrary, we would be unable to renew these contracts.”

 

We don’t know how many anti-BDS clauses the MLA has signed, nor for how long it has been doing so. What we do know—only because members have pushed relentlessly against the silence and censorship of our leadership—is that the MLA is, officially, an anti-BDS organization. A different way to say that is: the MLA is, officially, a genocide organization.

 

It only remains to be added that the MLA has at no point made the slightest attempt to contest these laws—unlike, for example, the AAUP, which expressed its opposition to them back in 2018. Even as these laws have provided multiple occasions for repressing the rights of MLA members, the organization that claims to represent us has remained silent. In fact, it has failed to issue even the mildest public opposition to the repression of pro-Palestine speech on campus, despite the fact that the Delegate Assembly overwhelmingly endorsed a motion calling upon MLA leadership to do exactly this in January 2024.

 

Taking Our Labor Where It Belongs

 

But to be honest, I’m tired of making these points. I’m tired of the cowardice, complicity, disingenuousness, corporate mentality, censorship, and outright lies of the leadership of the MLA—and, consequently, of the organization itself.

 

I’m saying all this to say this: given its current structure, the Modern Language Association is unreformable. That’s why, in the days leading up to the convention, those of us who organized the resolution issued a call asking supporters to pledge not to renew their MLA membership. Here’s the exact wording of the pledge:

 

“As a direct response to the MLA Executive Director and Executive Council’s refusal to forward members’ resolution calling for an endorsement of BDS, I pledge to not renew my MLA membership and to resign from any MLA governance or leadership position I hold. I refuse to be affiliated with or financially support an organization that both silences its members and is complicit in genocide.”

 

The unofficial count of those who have signed on to this pledge is over 350. That includes more than 25 elected delegates, dozens of leaders of MLA forums that organize panels at the convention, and many members of other committees, all of whom have pledged to resign. The list is growing and should continue to grow. That’s why I’m writing this.

 

There are many things I like about this pledge. One of them is its open-endedness. There isn’t an “until…” It’s a refusal. In its actions around this resolution, the MLA has failed its members. Moreover, both by virtue of what it has done and what it has been forced to reveal, it has doubled down on its complicity in genocide—a phrase that I do not use lightly.

 

It’s not up to us to tell the MLA what it needs to do to get us back. We’ve seen what it is, and we’re done with it. We’ve also seen what other organizations have done differently, and we’ll bring our labor to them. 

 

In the days since the convention, I’ve had conversations with earnest supporters of the resolution who have not found this to be such a clear-cut choice. Isn’t there a way to stay and fight? Isn’t it letting the organization off the hook by not using this opportunity to demand that it do something to stand in solidarity with our Palestinian colleagues?

 

I sympathize. One unshakable part of my own political ethos is a loathing of telling other people how they should resist. But the point I’ve been making throughout is that the MLA is not set up to be a democratic institution that serves its members. What has been revealed to us, instead, is an organization that is in essence a publishing company that does some philanthropic work on behalf of “the humanities” on the side. 

 

Matt Seybold makes this clear in two brilliant articles that address MLA leadership’s suppression of the resolution, specifically its claim that the organization’s “financial profile” require it to do so. Seybold writes: 

 

“The Executive Council is claiming it cannot allow its membership to democratically consider the BDS resolution because membership dues are not a sufficiently large revenue stream to make members the primary stakeholders in their member organization, whose other revenue streams must be protected from and for MLA members, in order to deliver to members what they actually need, which is neither democratic authority nor, apparently, reduced membership or registration fees. The more times I read this passage, the more it becomes to me: We need our publishing business to pay for our publishing business.”

 

His conclusion is one that many of us share: “So long as revenue maximization is the top priority of the MLA, it will be doing far more harm to its member scholars, and the rest of us who care about literature and language research and instruction, than any bevy of handbooks, bibliography subscriptions, and teaching collections can arbitrage.”

 

I would add: the MLA has also made it clear that revenue maximization is a greater priority than the lives of our Palestinian colleagues. How could anyone calling themselves a humanist continue to belong to such an organization? 

 

The pledge to not renew membership is a direct refusal of this logic. Like a strike, it’s a call to drop our tools and walk off the job, to stop the infernal machine functioning. And like a picket line, it works via solidarity: no one can force you to join it, but its power comes from our numbers. I have no illusions that MLA leadership will be sorry to see me go; on the contrary, they can’t wait to see the back of me. But a mass exodus accomplishes something else.

 

The argument for staying that I take most seriously comes from MLA members who have been (as I have in the past) part of the leadership of forums dedicated to Arabic literature, or Black studies, or indigenous cultures and politics. These are spaces that those who came before us had to fight for, to carve out room within the general rule of white supremacy that still dominates the MLA, and literary studies in North America more generally. Many leaders of these forums are nevertheless resigning—in some cases, whole forum leaderships are resigning en masse—but they worry, rightly, about simply ceding those spaces. It is not a step to be taken lightly.

 

I can imagine ways that these spaces, and those of us who work in these minoritized fields, can migrate into organizations that have taken a stand against genocide. The most direct parallel organization would be the American Comparative Literature Association—which endorsed BDS in 2024 and has spoken out consistentlyon political issues—but also organizations such as the American Studies Association, Middle East Studies Association, Association for Asian American Studies, African Literature Association, Critical Ethnic Studies Association, the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, and the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies, to name only a few. Many of these organizations in fact endorsed the boycott a decade ago, and somehow, the sky has not fallen upon them; most of them are in fact thriving. And this is not even to mention whatever spaces we might imagine and create together going forward; after all, many of us are game for giving our free labor to causes and groups that reflect our values and politics. To continue to do so for an organization that does not, like the MLA, is on the other hand simply acceding to our own exploitation.

 

In fact, the other side of the argument for protecting these spaces carved out within the MLA is the extent to which MLA leadership has actively co-opted the labor of scholars and students working in these disciplines, especially scholars and students from minoritized communities, while simultaneously refusing to take part in struggles to defend these fields from the ongoing right-wing public onslaught (or—let’s be honest—taking any meaningful material role in addressing structural issues like the job crisis and the related exploitation of precarious academic labor). In its statement defending the suppression of our BDS resolution, MLA leadership had the gall to celebrate the fact that “two dozen convention sessions are focusing on Palestine”—as though they deserved thanks for the labor put in overwhelmingly by those of us who proposed the resolution in the first place! 

 

In this sense, the suppression of this resolution, a clear act of anticipatory obedience (the decision to kill the resolution was made a little over a week before Trump’s election), sets a very dangerous precedent. The 26 former EC members who called upon the current EC to reverse its decision conclude their open letter with an important question for MLA leadership: 

 

We are asking you to let us, as members of the MLA community, debate on whether we wish, as a collective, to take a position. To disallow us from doing so not only erodes our trust in the MLA with regard to Palestine, but with regard to any other possibly controversial matters. Will you stand strong as the Trump administration attacks things like Critical Race Theory, for example, or queer theory, or trans literature? Surely the new administration will punish scholars in these areas and impose penalties on those who defend them. Can members trust you to stay strong?

 

The words of outgoing MLA President Dana Williams, in an interview with Inside Higher Ed following our protests at the convention in New Orleans, provide an indirect but chilling response. “The association is the membership, we want to reiterate,” Williams insisted, against all available evidence; but she also pointed to “concerns about dividing the membership over endorsing the BDS movement, noting that ‘collegiality was one of many things that we were considering.’” Collegiality, controversy, divisiveness: for decades, these have been the words used to defend the status quo of white supremacy, in literary studies and academic institutions more generally. To think that the MLA will be a meaningful ally in any anti-racist efforts to come is dangerously wishful thinking.

 

Walking Out (For Good)

 

In fact, the question of “collegiality,” in a very different sense, is what leaves me with my own unshakeable conviction that our only choice is to walk out of this complicit organization. MLA leadership has made it very clear, for decades, exactly who counts, and who does not, as part of the MLA’s “we.” In our organizing around this resolution, we returned again and again to scholasticide—not just the complete and absolutely intentional destruction of all educational infrastructure, and the wholesale murder of teachers and students, in Gaza, but the decades-long scholasticide carried out throughout Palestine. As often as possible, we have used the phrase “our Palestinian colleagues.” That is to say: what is unfolding in Palestine, and has been for decades, is happening to scholars and students who should be (and in some cases, literally are) MLA members. 

 

Speaking only for myself, I have been on two different MLA panels in which colleagues from Palestine had to participate either virtually or by having us read their papers, because Israel’s travel restrictions prevented their right to free movement. In one session, I read a paper from a Palestinian colleague who teaches at Birzeit University in Ramallah—had to read it on her behalf, because she was not allowed to travel to be with us—which was largely about the attempts by faculty to keep the semester going while the campus was being raided daily by the Israeli army. And this was six years ago. Aside from endorsing a 2019 letter to Israeli authorities regarding restrictions on international academics working in Palestinian universities that was issued by the Middle East Studies Association, the MLA has remained studiously silent. How many of our colleagues have died, been imprisoned, or, in the most basic sense, been prevented from being here with us, in conversation with us, working alongside us in this supposedly international organization, during those six years of silence? Could any self-respecting scholar of Palestinian literature or culture ever be expected to set foot in the MLA after this?

 

To put it as plainly as I can: I can’t and won’t be part of an organization that isn’t even willing to speak out against the murder of people who are, or should be, MLA members themselves. It’s more complicated than that, but then again, it really isn’t.