August 21st, 2007
When passion makes ideas travel in memory of Katharine Newman
The MESEA Executive Board, 2003: Alfred Hornung, President; William Boelhower, Vice-President; Heike Raphael-Hernandez, Program Coordinator; Rocio G. Davis, Secretary; Dorothea Fischer-Hornung, Treasurer.
Katharine Newman has been called the Founding Mother of MELUS. As the current executive board of MESEA, we are honored to claim that her vision of ethnic studies was fundamental not only for multi-ethnic studies in the United States, but in Europe as well.
In the early eighties in Europe, Dorothy Skardal (Norway) and William Boelhower (Italy) began actively collaborating with the MELUS organization and publishing in its journal. When Wayne Miller, then the journal’s editor, came to Italy and Boelhower was appointed book review editor in 1982, ties between scholars of ethnic literatures in the United States and Europe began to thicken. Beginning with the 1980s, Dorothy Skardal and William Boelhower inaugurated a series of EAAS (European Association of American Studies) workshops on immigrant literatures within the larger biennial conference format and these encouraged further dialogue between European and American scholars. This forum became what we might call the first MELUS outpost in Europe when workshop members decided to set up their own European journal; In Their Own Words, under the editorship of Boelhower, had a short but intense life of four issues over as many years.
Behind all these efforts, of course, was Katharine Newman, who repeatedly encouraged Skardal and Boelhower to start MELUS-type activities in Europe. Through letters and mutual friends, her presence confirmed for us that the study of multiethnic literatures and cultures was not only necessary but urgent, and that European scholars had a central role to play in making the MELUS project the new cultural studies paradigm of the 1980s and 1990s. Unlike the States, European societies still had no clear perception of themselves as multicultural, and mainstream interest in issues such as immigration, citizenship, rights discourse, and transnational identity was practically zero. In this context, European scholars found the lifeline with MELUS to be a major source of support and legitimation. The MELUS journal was one of the few organs where scholars from European countries could publish and read about the latest theoretical developments in this field. For the Winter issue of 1985, in fact, Skardal and Boelhower edited a special MELUS issue titled “European Perspectives.” Such collaborative efforts went a long way to creating a community of scholars across the Atlantic divide. And today that community has become a donnee for all of us.
After those years of mutual inspiration, MELUS Executive Committee members back in the States started to consider making these collaborations more substantial and official. During 1994-95, the idea of MELUS chapters abroad was born. For MELUS Europe, one can indeed claim with pride that the end product was the result of concerted efforts by a variety of scholars from both sides of the Atlantic who made the idea of MELUS Europe their own. In early 1995, the then MELUS President, Amritjit Singh, started talking to Bill Boelhower, who was invited as the opening keynote speaker to the annual MELUS conference in Providence, R1, in April 1995. As a Fulbright scholar at the University of Munich, Germany, in 1995-96, John Lowe officially approached Alfred Hornung and William Boelhower on behalf of the MELUS Executive Committee to serve as members for the MELUS Europe steering committee. In April 1996, Heike Raphael-Hernandez was invited by Amy Elder and Amritjit Singh to join the steering committee. After the annual MELUS Convention in Greensboro, North Carolina, Boelhower and Raphel-Hernandez began to draft executing steps, and by 1997, MELUS Europe had a functioning steering committee, consisting of Hornung, Boelhower, Raphael-Hernandez, Giulia Fabi, Dorothea Fischer-Hornung, Susanne Opfermann, Helmbrecht Breinig, Alison Goeller, Wolfgang Binder, and Rocio Davis. Together they shared the vision: MELUS Europe as a “home” for those scholars in Europe researching the wide and varied field of US ethnic literatures.
As exhilarating as the concept of MELUS Europe was, it was also intimidating: Would others respond because they too felt the need? How could a founding conference be financed? Where could we hold it? Many of these questions were answered by the overwhelmingly positive response to the call for papers for the First MELUS Europe Conference, which was held in Heidelberg in June 1998 as a joint project of the University of Maryland in Europe and Ruprecht-Karls-Universitat, Heidelberg with Dorothea Fischer-Hornung and Heike Raphael-Hernandez as the organizers of this founding conference. The “founding moment” was a heady one, with over 200 scholars, students, and friends from several continents meeting to join in a leap of faith that global scholarship and understanding were indeed necessary and possible. Nellie McKay, Frances Smith Foster, Amritjit Singh, John Lowe, Daniel Walden, and Cheng Lok Chua, as veteran members of MELUS, as well as Manju Jaidka from MELUS India, came to Heidelberg to support the fledgling new organization. Since Heidelberg, three more conferences have been held in Orleans, France in 2000; Padua, Italy in 2002; and Thessaloniki, Greece in 2004. The conference in Thessaloniki also marked the launch of the organization’s new journal, Atlantic Studies, to be published with Routledge twice a year.