On Presentism

ON PRESENTISM

Wai Chee Dimock's editor's column on "Historicism, Presentism,  Futurism" (PMLA 133.2 (2018): 257-263) may have strong impact, minimal impact, or no impact at all upon the thinking of MLA members and others about the utility of humanistic inquiry.  Nevertheless, the column reminds us of how dangerous it is to assume that 21st century scholars share common knowledge, or even value it, in the everyday practices of their lives and work.  If the Modern Language Association is most representative of what obtains in the sites of PWIs, it is reasonable to note that MLA and those sites possess a mere sliver of  cultural literacy regarding what has characterized learning, teaching, and production of knowledge at HBCUs since their emergence in the nineteenth century.  It is  matter of fact, which can be validated by research, that praxis at HBCUs values "situated pedagogy" more deeply than do privileged PWIs. To some degree, what Dimock might think is relatively new and exciting about presentism is an ancient and suspect topic at HBCUs.  The luxury of trivializing history as temporal process is possible but deemed repulsive at predominantly African American institutions of higher education.

During my undergraduate years at Tougaloo College (1960-64), I did not embrace presentism as " a fallacy that deforms the past in our own image" ( 257).  And during my teaching career at Tougaloo and Dillard University (1970-2012), I stressed to my students that they should cultivate awareness of being makers of history rather than objects of history.  My graduate experiences at Illinois Institute of Technology, the State University of New York at Albany, and the University of Virginia were peppered with a surplus of enactments of presentism and warnings about the bad faith Karl Popper criticized in The Poverty of Historicism (1957).  My more recent contention that I am pre-future and always politically incorrect has armed me against the dreadful assaults of historicism, presentism, and the fantasy extremes of futurism.  Being armed, however, doesn't endow one with total immunity.  I could make a fatal slip in one direction or another.

A single idea in Dimock's informative column is the source of my discontent, namely the suggestion that African American Studies is a likely candidate for experiments "with some form of strategic presentism" (261).  Dimock notes that African American Studies is "increasingly anchored by Afrofuturism in its recuperative and reparative engagement with slavery, a past whose afterlives are everywhere observable" and that "Afrofuturism has been at the center of an explosive scholarly conversation. In popular culture ---in music, art, and film…----this not-yet-realized future mediates past and present by making headline news…, a force in the here and now rivaled only by Shakespeare" (261).  Mein Gott. It is my personal belief (which may be isolated from what anyone else in the world believes) that African American Studies is foremost a tool for relentless analysis of life and death matters, a tool evolved from the pioneering thinking of David Walker regarding "situatedness."  If it is so easily co-opted and transformed into an academic toy, I feel obligated to intensify my use of terms of engagement as weapons in the combat zones where disabling "knowledge" is being forged by the humanist inquiry of my enemies of various colors and ideologies.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            June 21, 2018