GOOD OMENS FOR SCHOLARSHIP
The MLA Handbook,
Eighth Edition (2016), bids us to consider the probability of having a single "set
of guidelines, which writers can apply to any type of source" (Handbook, rear cover). This new edition may be less intimidating
than the Seventh or the Sixth, and it may minimize anxiety about scrupulous
documentation in the age of the digital.
Nevertheless, we should not put older editions of the Handbook out to pasture, because the new
one seems more a supplement than a replacement.
It lacks the solid advice about research and writing we found in Chapter
1 of the Seventh, and not all of us want to visit The MLA Style Center, the open access online companion. Neither in documentation nor in the vast
range of scholarship is it prudent to drift with the wind.
Indonesian Notebook: A
Sourcebook on Richard Wright and the Bandung Conference (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2016), edited by Brian Russell Roberts and Keith Foulcher, is
a good omen that scholars who refuse to get lost in the brothels and mazes of
theory-whipping can be productive long-distance runners. Roberts and Foulcher have used impeccable
literary historical scholarship in producing a book that maps new territory for
studies of Richard Wright's life, works, and prophetic acumen . Indonesian Notebook is exceptionally
valuable for anyone, including political scientists and historians, who is interested in what world literature
created during the Cold War period actually challenges us to interpret.
When we truly revisit
Wright's The Color Curtain: A Report on
the Bandung Conference (1956), armed with the generous amount of
contextualizing matter that Roberts and Foulcher translated from the
Indonesian, we are stimulated to ask just what did Wright see and hear at the
conference and during his conversations with Indonesian intellectuals. What inspired Wright to quite accurately
speculate that the world of 1955 was a crucible for multiple forms of terrorism
rooted in religion? And what did Wright reveal in his lecture "The Artist
and His Problems" (published as "Seniman dan Masalaahnja" in
Indonesia Raya on May 22, 1955) that might have informed his decisions about
what essays to include in White Man,
Listen! (1957)? The winding path of
scholarship may take us to Ethan Michaeli's The
Defender: How the Legendary Black
Newspaper Changed America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016) to
discover why John Sengstacke assigned Ethel Payne to cover Bandung for the Chicago Defender and to James McGrath Morris's Eye on the Struggle: Ethel Payne, the First Lady of the Black Press
(New York: Amistad, 2015) for a choice bit of information about how the U.S.
government used CIA funds to enable Payne and Wright to attend an Asian-African
conference. I shall soon write at
greater length about Indonesian Notebook
which, as Amritjit Singh aptly remarks, "reminds
us that the quest for equality must confront the stubborn local socio-economic
realities throughout the globe" ( Indonesian
Notebook, rear cover blurb), because
I do want to confront the stubborn actualities of political designs and
literary meanings. Fortunately, there is no single set of guidelines for that
task.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. April 14, 2016
