Atefeh Akbari

Barnard English goes “global.”

By Iris Eisenman

Illustration by Nini Vilac

Not too long ago, Professor Atefeh Akbari could be found in the labyrinthine recesses of the LeFrak offices. Now, I had the pleasure of speaking with Akbari in her cozy office on the fourth floor of Barnard Hall, with plenty of natural light flooding the room. The change of environment is a reflection of her career’s progress at Barnard. Akbari is arguably the face of the English department’s recent efforts to expand and globalize their literature offerings. 

Just four years ago, Tarini Krishna, BC ’23, referenced Akbari in a Blue and White article discussing the Barnard English Academic Program Review and the absence of a global literature requirement for Barnard English majors. That very word, “global” is nearly inseparable from Akbari in various course listings, inspiring me to revisit Krishna’s questions. 

In my first week of Global Literatures in English, a new Barnard English course taught by Akbari, she was quick to pull the rug out from under our feet. Before reading any of this literature of the “Global Anglophone,” we spent class working through a layered critique of the field of study and its recent emergence from the online scholarly forum Post45. Unmoored from the comfort of labels and classification, Akbari has since taken us on a journey through literature that, just like her, cannot help but interrogate the connections between the English language and the world.

What follows is our conversation on the blurry borders between literary disciplines, navigating the creation of curricula, and this scholar’s continuous pursuit of our shared humanity between the lines.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

…

The Blue & White: What brought you to work for Barnard’s English Department?

Atefeh Akbari: I actually worked at Barnard as a term assistant professor for six years before I became an assistant professor. Barnard was responding to students who wanted the curriculum to be more diverse in its offerings. The English Department recognized and responded to the need for hiring more faculty, whether it’s in time periods or in subject matters that weren't offered, to essentially expand their courses for interested students. There’s an interest on students’ part to read narratives from across the world. I’m now teaching two new courses that weren’t offered before.

B&W: Would you say that when you were initially hired, you were filling a slot? 

AA: Absolutely, you’re one hundred percent correct. In my experience, I’ve seen that there are needs that the department has that they want to fulfill pretty quickly. But once you become … tenure track, you become a more active member in the department in terms of defining the nitty gritty of the curriculum. No matter the position, this is something I like about Barnard: professors, more often than not, regardless of their status, design their own courses. They write it from scratch themselves.

B&W: You come from a Comparative Literature background. How has that informed your instruction in an English Department? What does the decision to work for the Barnard English department versus the Barnard Comparative Literature Department look like?

AA: From the very beginning, I was always housed in an English department; not just at college in Iran, but also at a graduate level when I did my PhD at Columbia. At Columbia, I was very invested in working with languages other than English, in doing literary analysis to essentially build bridges to other literary traditions. What are the ways we could enrich our discussions if we look at other places? 

In my case, there’s this very rich tradition of modern Persian literature that is in conversation with English literature. I was thinking about this article that I read by Catherine Brown called, “What is Comparative Literature,” and she talks about trying to reach “maximum common ground.” I like doing that. And not just in terms of what an English department traditionally looks like, or how I fit into that. I would say, on a human level, to me it’s just thinking about people whose work I’ve been reading for such a long time and really admire and have learned from, whether it’s Edward Said or Gayatri Spivak. Edward Said is always seen as a humanist ultimately, and that’s something we also talk about, the challenges of that and context in which that kind of humanism might fall short.

B&W: You attended Columbia for your PhD. That put you into a legacy: the origin of Postcolonial Studies. That sphere of academia rested on the shoulders of Edward Said, and then Spivak. What would you say about falling into that tradition?

AA: It gave me the language to start understanding my experience as an Iranian woman. My training in the University of Tehran was very traditionally English. It was toward the end of my Master’s degree when I first learned about Postcolonial Studies. Like you said, Columbia is essentially seen as the birthplace of Postcolonial Studies because of faculty like Spivak and Said. It gave me the opportunity to read their work more carefully, more robustly in conversation with their students. It has determined very much how I teach, how I think, and how I write.

B&W: In 2022, a former Blue and White writer, Tarini Krishna, wrote about the ongoing Academic Program Review for the Barnard English Department. At the time, there was a possibility of instituting a Global or World Literature requirement for the English major. What are your beliefs on the merits of such a requirement and what do you think is contributing to its continued absence? 

AA: What is seen as required? I have mixed feelings about this term. First of all, that APR review was concluded. There’s always been in the department, as far as I can tell, a series of conversations that students had with prior department chairs that first led to this term position in global literature. The reason why this position was advertised was because the department always understood that this was a gap, not just in terms of their course offerings, but in terms of the makeup of the department. In other words, they were very serious about wanting somebody as an active and long-term member of a department who worked on global literatures. 

In terms of the requirement, the reason why I have mixed feelings is because what I like about our major is that it’s very open. The students can fulfill the major for themselves in ways that are meaningful to them. There are period requirements, however. For example, we have the Renaissance Colloquium, which I’ve been teaching for a few years. Starting next year, my section of the Colloquium will be a Global Renaissance. So, even if it’s a requirement period-wise, students who don’t want to do the more traditional Renaissance offering have the opportunity to take that.

B&W: You believe that a Global Literature requirement would be confining?

AA: I think so.

B&W: Do you feel that same way about the American [requirement]?

AA: I don’t think so. Ultimately, who does English belong to? When we use the term, “Global Anglophone,” it can start expanding the language in ways of not confining ownership of the language. We were talking about qualities that ties a language to a place. In English, it seems like there are ways in which it might start to lose that quality. If you’re learning about an English literary tradition, I don’t think you can do that properly, as it were, without thinking about American language.

B&W: The roots.

AA: You have to look at its history, its big names. Who were people reading? How were they responding to it?

B&W: There’s a historical component.

AA: Yes, and you can’t put that out. You can’t ignore it. From where I’m standing, a lot of what I’m teaching was not even written in English. I’m teaching texts in English translation. If we’re thinking about “global,” what I’m offering is this. To ask a student that this must be an English major requirement—that doesn’t seem logical to me. So if we want to make this global component a requirement, we need to be clear about how we’re defining it. 

B&W: In the recent past course listings for “global” English literature courses, I found The Global Novel, Persian Poetics and World Literature, World Literature Revisited (I and II), Exophonic Women, and Literature of Anti-Colonialism. The first four of those were all taught by you. How would you describe the relationship between this current course, Global Literatures in English, and these past courses that are no longer offered? What is new about this particular course?

AA: As I mentioned earlier, I am now on the tenure track. I am creating a portfolio when it comes to my teaching and my research. At a place like Barnard, we value teaching, but research is valued just as much. I am telling a story about who I am as a scholar. Those courses that I taught in these past few years that aren’t offered anymore, there are elements within those courses that…

B&W: …build upon each other toward your following courses?

AA: Exactly.

B&W: How does this course build off of those previous ones? I am curious about the name, as it doesn’t seem like you made it. If you did, were you unsure about it?

AA: I was talking about the design of this course with our Department Chair Professor Ross Hamilton. I’ve always had trouble coming up with catchy names, so this was a name that he suggested. It’s clear, but I always like to ask students, let’s think about terms together. We want to question them and what we don’t want is to accept them at face value. On the first day of class, we’re questioning everything. One thing I wanted to do in class is to think about our relationship to another language. If you’re reading a book that seems like it’s from a faraway land, or the original wasn’t in this language, you’re always aware of the fact that, “I’m reading in translation.” We can still do that when reading these books. It happens in more subtle ways. So it forces the student to …

B&W: … break out of that conception of translation as just an act within a text.

AA: Exactly.

B&W: I’ve observed that many students believe in the futility of translation. Do you share that same idea of the impossibility of language to replicate experience? 

AA: You might remember, on the first day of class, I was quoting from the Iranian poet Ahmad Shamlou. The title of his collection is called Elegies of the Earth. The translator, Niloufar Talebi, in her introduction, writes this sentence: “translation is one hundred percent loss and one hundred percent opportunity.” When we talk about language, we must consider the fact that language contains within itself a history, a literary and cultural tradition. But at the same time, we can not essentialize language, nor fetishize this non-transferable aspect of language that renders any translation futile. One thing I’ve been trying to do, to get us to sort of think about in class, is that at the same time that we talk about language and its connection to history, the fact that a language contains within itself a history, a literary tradition, cultural traditions. But to also not essentialize language, to fetishize this, these sort of non-transferable aspects in a language that therefore renders any translation futile. It’s important work. Translation pushes us out of our provincial ways of thinking and living, but to focus on that gap too much takes away from our experience.

B&W: I was also thinking about aesthetic and political representation. I noted that in our discussion of the play Translations by Brian Friel, you pointed out the playwright’s assertion of its contents being focused on language and not politics. Then we followed this discussion up with another play, English by Sanaz Toossi. In both discussions, our class was primarily geared towards political discussion of the text. I felt that I observed you making some attempts for our discussion to be reoriented towards aesthetics and craft of the plays, focusing on close reading instead of the political implications of the works. How do you find the current student body’s balance of these two ideas? Do you often find students eager for the political or aesthetic slant in discussion, and do you feel like the students' curiosities and priorities are aligning with your curricula?

AA: Another question I love. I try to return the students to the text so they don’t have conversations that are politically abstract. I would be perhaps the last person to say that these texts are apolitical. This is why I actually want to spend so much time on the readings themselves. I have prioritized depth over breadth for us to spend time with the language. Yes, ostensibly, we’re reading texts that are written in English. But what is the texture of this English? We can have political interpretations as long as they’re precise. We also do want to let the text guide our conversation, as opposed to larger and sometimes amorphous political discussions that, like I said, are not always grounded in reality. 

I see students who are interested in reading narratives that fall out of the so-called traditional English curriculum. They are interested in Postcolonial Studies. They are aware of this concept of “decolonize the curriculum.” I don't think they are fully aware of what that entails. Part of what I’m trying to do is to read texts that are literary narratives that contain within themselves history of colonialism. But they’re such different histories and we need to know details about them. We also can’t read all of these narratives as allegories for their people…Let’s read them just as we would read, say, Jane Austen? And we would really pay attention to the language and not see it solely as a book about England at the time.

B&W: I feel that a common critique of the treatment of any sort of text written by a minority in America or someone who is not from an Anglophone country is that it’s stripped of its idiosyncrasy. Like you said, they could be treated as the way Austen might be treated, or Shakespeare. How do you think this course and similar courses contribute to the active construction of a global or alternative “canon?” 

AA: I thought a lot about the syllabus and about what I would include. Even as a person who is teaching classes in global literature, ultimately I’m invested in reading and literary analysis. So I want students to read. Granted, there are books that are part of the canon, whether it’s Postcolonial Studies or a World Literature canon. This is the same reason of what I was saying earlier in terms of this term “decolonization” being used more publicly—I want students to really understand what that means. Ultimately, the constellation that I’ve put together in this particular syllabus is an argument of its own.

B&W: Would you say that this is a long-term personal argument or do you feel that the specificity of each course renders its own argument?

AA: I think both of those things. I would mostly agree with the first way that you [said it]. It’s definitely evolved.

B&W: In our course description, you wrote: “We will learn and discuss this term, ‘Global Anglophone’ along with the ways in which this term has been challenged. What would it look like to take the term at face value and not interrogate it?

AA: It’s perhaps impossible for me personally, because of my scholarly interests. I have, as far as I can remember, been invested in the question of translation. I grew up bilingual. I worked as a translator of text, but also a simultaneous interpreter. Some people would argue, if you look at what I’ve published, if you look at my doctoral dissertation, that I am technically not a Global Anglophone scholar. Global Anglophone might be a way to diversify our offering while maybe having to sidestep some of the thorny questions. I have never been good at sidestepping thorny questions. The students are curious about the questioning of these terms that we feel like have been passed down to us, that we should just accept them and work within those parameters. I can’t see myself teaching this class in any other way without this questioning, this upending of expectations.

B&W: What is your vision for the Global Renaissance [Colloquium] course, seeing that you’re going to be spearheading that as well?

AA: One of the founders of Comparative Literature in an American setting is Charles Bernheimer. He says Comparative Literature has this sort of being haunted by otherness and that’s actually what its strength is. But he also makes the argument, and I’m quoting him here, “our haunting has been most often by culturally familiar ghosts.” My Global Renaissance hopefully will be about being haunted by culturally unfamiliar ghosts. To not sound too idealistic, that is ultimately who I think I am. In times where we feel perhaps more divided than ever, I’m always looking for ways to underline our shared humanity. That’s what I believe in. There are ways in which an underlining of humanism falls short if we think of it as our organizing principle, but it doesn’t mean that we can’t try.