Thursday, March 22, 2007

Liverpool, the Slave Trade, and Hawthorne

More lazy blogging and blegging today! This time it's inspired by a short article in the 21 March 2007 Japan Times that gives a brief history of Liverpool and the slave trade; an online version isn't available, but you can check the history out for yourself here, here, here, and here (for starters). What does this have to do with Hawthorne? Let me quote from the end of the first chapter of my manuscript:

Hawthorne’s comments in a letter of June 14, 1854, to George Sanders, an opponent of abolition, neatly encapsulate many of the issues we have been tracking in this chapter. In one sense, Hawthorne’s remarks seem uncannily applicable to his own career. Sanders, who had rebuked the exiled Italian revolutionary leader Giuseppi Mazzini for implicitly criticizing U.S. slavery in a public letter to an English abolitionist society, asked Louis Kossuth (who had taken a neutral position on slavery in his celebrated tour of the United States) for his response to Mazzini’s remarks, and then sent all the relevant materials to Hawthorne, requesting his opinion of them. After praising Sanders’s own response in his letter to Mazzini, Hawthorne continued:

Now, as to Kossuth’s reply, I do not know but that I ought likewise to be satisfied with that. . . . I do not like it well enough to be glad that he has written it. Is it quite worthy of him? Does he not trim and truckle a little? Will not both parties in America see that he does so?--or suspect it and accuse him of it, whether justly or not? Doubtless, he says nothing but what is perfectly true; but yet it has not the effect of frank and outspoken truth. I wish he had commenced his reply with a sturdier condemnation of slavery; it would have operated as a stronger sanction to what follows.

Of what sort of consequence is my opinion? But there it is.


Perhaps Hawthorne’s own position on slavery could be seen as analogous to Kossuth’s; as a Northerner, practically a foreigner to Southern society, Hawthorne simply kept his abhorrence of slavery to himself, maintaining neutrality for the sake of maintaining the Union. Perhaps he even was offering a subtle critique of his own writings on slavery in his response to Kossuth’s letter, wishing that he himself had offered “a sturdier condemnation of slavery” so that his position for neutrality would not be mistaken as anti-black or pro-slavery. Certainly, this is a sentiment many of Hawthorne’s readers would endorse; like Hawthorne on Kossuth, they, too, often seem to be wishing that Hawthorne had “trim[med] and truckle[d]” less, so that his own positions would have the “effect of frank and outspoken truth.”

In addition to reading Hawthorne’s letter as a subtle admission of regret or an allegory for our own dilemmas as critics who want to see in Hawthorne a ratification of our own values and beliefs, we might also treat the letter as a clue to the social circles in which Hawthorne traveled as consul to Liverpool during the Pierce administration. We know, for instance, that London consul Robert Campbell was suspected of Confederate sympathies, and that Hawthorne’s successor at Liverpool, Nathaniel Beverly Tucker, was a Confederate agent. Hawthorne’s question to Sanders, “Of what sort of consequence is my opinion?” not only may be another version of his characteristic self-deprecating humor, but may also have been implying a set of genuine and pointed questions: Who wants to know? Why did you ask my opinion? How will you make use of this letter? To my knowledge, no study of Hawthorne carefully considers the full range of his activities in Liverpool, the former slavery capital of the world, and one of the last bastions of pro-slave-trade politics in early nineteenth-century England. By the time Hawthorne arrived, of course, times had changed. But it would be an interesting project to consider which Liverpool Hawthorne saw. What I am trying to suggest is that treating the question of Hawthorne’s racial politics in the most pedestrian, practically empiricist manner--in terms of the people and projects with which he aligned himself at different times and in different places--may be the best way of investigating them.


One of the things I have to do is find out if anyone has addressed this issue since I last researched it. Besides the resources I have at the three universities in Fukuoka I'll be teaching at in a few weeks, there's also Google Scholar. So I have some fun detective work ahead of me the next few weeks! Anyone want to help me out by pointing me to the best sources? Do I need to schedule a research trip to Liverpool?

New Worlds for All: Encounters and Plantation (1492-1776)

Picking up from my latest latest crazy idea post, I want to spend a little more time discussing the understanding of American literature I was trying to convey at the end of my Sendai talk. I plan to go through each of the periods I identified there in separate posts over the next few weeks, starting with the first today. But before that a bit from early in the talk where I explained why I like "The American Century" rather than "postmodern culture" or "Cold War culture" as the name for the period comprising mid-to-late (or later) twentieth-century U.S. literatures. It sets up rather concisely and specifically the way I'm thinking about periodization in general:

The standard way of dating the origins of the “American Century” is to go back to Henry Luce’s pre-Pearl Harbor 1941 essay of that title, in which he argued that America needed to take up its responsibility to advance freedom and prosperity throughout the world. Proponents of this view thus hold it to be an anti-totalitarian concept, tied both to America’s subsequent fights in World War II against fascist regimes and in the Cold War against communist ones. Radical historians tend to date its origins earlier, to the 1898 liberation of the Philippines from Spanish rule and subsequent multi-year occupation to put down a Filipino independence movement. Hence, they consider the American Century to be a much more ambiguous if not imperialist concept. For now, I’m less interested in the “American Century” as a contested concept and more in the way it provides us with a useful name for a period that has posed major problems for U.S. literary historians. Most agree that modernism was the defining literary movement of the early twentieth century in the U.S. and Europe, but when did that period end and what name should the new period following it be given? The two most popular alternatives, postmodern culture and Cold War culture, both have and raise problems.

Postmodernism is a vague and baggy term that meant different things in post-W.W. II literature than it did in architecture, literary criticism, theory, or the dozens of other specialized discourse communities in which it was first used. Moreover, using it to name a period commits you to a movement-centered approach to literary history--say, from neoclassicism and gothicism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries to romanticism and transcendentalism in the mid-19th century, to realism and naturalism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to modernism and postmodernism in the rest of the 20th century. This can hide the existence of or distort the features of other literary movements in each period, misleadingly imply that older movements don’t continue into later periods, and present literary history as if it were completely separate or autonomous from other histories.

Using the Cold War to name a period avoids these problems, but commits you to a larger periodization scheme based on wars--say, from the Revolutionary War to the War of 1812 (1776-1815), then to the Civil War (1815-1865), then to World War I (1865-1918), then to World War II (1918-1945), then to the Cold War (1945-1989). This not only downplays the significance of major wars like the Mexican and Spanish-American wars, but also forces you to shoehorn literary history into the confines of military history. Including wars you think are important runs as much of a risk of putting writers who were responding to common events and issues in separate periods as excluding seemingly less important wars risks lumping very different writers together.

I don’t want to imply that my alternative term, “the American Century,” is without its own problems, but it does enable you to develop a periodization scheme that connects literary and other histories without privileging one and making the others conform to it. Moreover, it allows me to put forward the idea that literary periods overlap. If we date the American Century’s origin to 1944, when it was clear that the U.S. was winning the Pacific War and would play a major role in defeating Nazi Germany, this suggests that its early years overlap with an earlier period whose name I will unveil at the end of this talk. Moreover, we don’t know yet if the American Century has already ended or, if it has not, when it will. Some think that the Vietnam War and the oil crisis in the early 1970s marked the end of the American Century, but the Bush administration seems even more committed to military escalation than Johnson’s or Nixon’s. Others argue that the recovery of Germany’s and Japan’s economies in the 1980s signalled the end of the American Century, but American capitalism made a comeback in the 1990s and seems to have weathered 9/11 reasonably well. Still others suggest that the twenty-first century may be a globalizing century, a Chinese century, a century of resource wars or climate change or technological revolution.


By the time I returned to these issues at the end of the talk, all I had time to mention about the first period--"New Worlds for All: Encounters and Plantation (1492-1776)"--was: "As Anzaldua, Conde, Silko, and Yamashita show, encounters between European explorers, traders, and settlers with indigenous Americans and with enslaved Africans took place across the hemisphere, and different kinds of plantation complexes emerged."

Today I would add "creole cultures and" before "plantation complexes" and would have made it clearer that my name for the period was borrowed from the title of a Colin Calloway book. And if I hadn't been so pressed for time, I would have noted that in this sentence, I was condensing several courses' worth of material and engaging new scholarship on early America (particularly Thomas Bender's A Nation Among Nations, Tony Hall's The American Empire and the Fourth World, and Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker's The Many-Headed Hydra). In fact, if I had been speaking in the talk to specialists rather than members of the public who happened to be involved in Tohoku University's Open University program that semester, I would have divided this huge colonial Americas (Columbus to Declaration of Independence) period into several and been more specific about my acknowledgement that the closing date for each set of national literatures would change depending on when each American nation's independence movement formally began. And I would have discussed the larger curricular context in which I believe this literary focus should be embedded: an approach to the history of the Americas that does for students something like what Charles Mann's 1491 (and the new scholarship it attempts to survey and popularize) does for its readers, namely, try to offer a non-Eurocentric history of the Americas before the Europeans' arrival.

This is because in order to identify what made Columbus's arrival the beginning of "new worlds for all," one must compare pre- and post-1492. What was it about the initial and ongoing encounters among European explorers, traders, settlers, and indigenous Americans that lead to so many changes around the world and in the hemisphere? What creole cultures and plantation complexes emerged as Europeans, Africans, and Americans (each grouping characterized by relatively equal--and quite large--spans of cultural, social, and political diversity) continued to interact with each other (in all kinds of ways)?

So that's a precis of the way I'm conceptualizing the "first" period in American literary history. Please see my courses for more details on how I've taught these issues in the past. If anyone wants access to the ANGEL space of my Introduction to American Studies course from the fall, where I pulled a lot of my ideas for the talk together--particularly in the recommended readings not mentioned on the syllabi--feel free to contact me. I also have a brief bibliography of new work on the colonial Americas period that I can email to anyone who's interested. Some of the most interesting and influential work in American Studies has been going on in this period over the past couple of decades, so I'll be returning to it after a tour through the later ones.

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Hawthorne on the WAAGNFNP

It's hard to say what Hawthorne would say about the We Are All Giant Nuclear Fireball Now Party. I suspect part of him would have enjoyed it and part of him would have condemned it. As the author of "Earth's Holocaust" and "Chiefly About War Matters," he may well have earned himself a proleptically posthumous membership, though.

Racial Aesthetics and Narratorial/Authorial Intention, Part II

Picking up where we left off last week, I focus today on the narrator's use of the picturesque as an index of his stated intentions and unstated assumptions, particularly with respect to the racialized aesthetics it reveals. Next week, I'll get into some of the issues involved with trying to locate Hawthorne's intentions for creating such a narrator.

***

The picturesque is crucial to “Old News” in various ways. But chief among its effects is its “partial concealment of [the] possible implications” of the narrator’s endorsement of the old Tory’s racialism, the way it sets the narrator “free either to imagine a usable past or to make an unusable past disappear.” Dennis Berthold has written that the picturesque

provided Americans with a congenial, respectable, eminently civilized standpoint from which to study and enjoy the wilderness. To the strong national ego already evident in political Independence--the wilderness-subduing, westward-moving “I”--the picturesque added a controlling aesthetic vision--a wilderness-subduing “eye”--to help organize, shape, and even half-create a native landscape compatible with the civilization that was encroaching on the rugged forests and mountains of the western borders.


Together with canny observations by Jean Fagan Yellin and Lauren Berlant, Berthold’s linking of the picturesque and nationalism can help us pin down the combination of racialism and aestheticism that unites the three sections of “Old News.” Yellin puts her finger on the pictorial, panoramic quality of “Old News” and its nationalist connotations when she notes that “To [Hawthorne’s] readers, the[ slaves] perhaps served to identify the scene as American in much the same way that the inclusion within a single canvas of representatives of the three races--red, black, and white--identified as American the paintings of Hawthorne’s contemporaries.” Similarly, and even more provocatively, Berlant’s analysis of the rhetoric of “Chiefly About War Matters” leads her to conclude that, for Hawthorne, “slavery makes America intelligible. . . . Slaves, in short, are not persons, not potential citizens, but are part of the national landscape and of the deep memories that sanctify it as politically a ‘country.’” Together, Yellin and Berlant’s emphasis on the function of slaves in the picturesque mode of nationalist landscape painting helps us understand that Berthold’s contrast between “civilization” and “wilderness” is as implicitly racialized as McWilliams and Newberry’s narrative of “civilization” to “fratricide.” And, more important, they help us understand what Hawthorne’s sketch is really about and what his narrator is really after.

***

Now jump back, if you will, to the concluding quote from the manuscript in last week's post. For it sets up my next points:

***

[E]ven more significant than the narrator’s explicit defense of New England slavery and the appeal to racism that underlies it is the implicit racialism of his conception of American national identity. When we consider that the publication of Hawthorne’s sketch coincided with what historian Larry Tise has called “an ideological revolution whose influence was decisive for the shape of proslavery thought in the antebellum period,” however, we can begin to get a better sense of the stakes of the racial aesthetics of “Old News.” The link that the picturesque formed between a racist defense of slavery and a racialist conception of American nationality gains added significance in light of two of Tise’s key moves. First is his summary of early nineteenth-century debates over slavery: “Although much of the debate centered on the morality of holding Negroes in bondage, the future of slavery and the disposition of the Negro was linked irresistibly to the shape and destiny of America.” Second is his argument that by the end of the 1830s, American social thinkers “were far less concerned with the lessons of the American Revolution than with those of the French Revolution. They spoke more frequently of the warnings of Edmund Burke than of the ideals of Jefferson.” Taking these two points together, the fact that Hawthorne’s narrator in “Old News” implicitly endorses the old Tory's denunciation of the Revolution, when considered with the Burkean ring of his politics and aesthetics, suggests that “Old News” must be understood in relation to the discourses that Tise identifies as crucial to 1830s racial politics in America. For Hawthorne to choose to write about slavery and to feature denunciations of the Revolution was itself a significant act, no matter that his sketch focused on eighteenth-century New England and regardless of his precise relation to his narrator....

[W]hen Hawthorne decided to write on slavery in January 1835, he was quite aware that he was entering into dangerous and contested territory. The signals that he sent in “Old News” were interestingly mixed. At a time when “foreign interference” in American institutions was denounced with an intensity often approaching paranoia, Hawthorne features a narrator who ventriloquizes an old Tory’s diatribe against French influences and who regrets the Revolution’s separation of the Americans from the English. His narrator’s emphasis on shared racial ties among Anglo-Americans irrespective of national boundaries could well have been an implicit critique of the North’s tendency to denounce an “English plot” against slavery and the United States; many in the North saw the English abolitionist George Thompson as a “symbol of a well-planned British plot to destroy the American way of life” by sowing “seeds of war, rape, and carnage through the United States.” By emphasizing the racial otherness of the French, Indians, and Negroes, in other words, Hawthorne’s narrator could well have been seeking to create a mutual enemy that would consolidate English and American ties.

Indeed, the links between Burkean aesthetics, tolerance toward slavery, misgivings about the Revolutionary War, and a racialist conception of American nationality in “Old News” suggests that Hawthorne’s narrator, if not Hawthorne himself, was pursuing a particularly virulent racial project that historian Larry Tise has identified as “proslavery republicanism”....

Hawthorne’s narrator, then, was somewhere in the vanguard of a new racism in January 1835. Rather than being a Northern echo of what was a predominantly Southern ideology, the views expressed in “Old News” were part of a new anti-abolitionist ideology that provided the intellectual framework for later “positive good” defenses of slavery. The turn to Burke that Tise identifies is crucial to “Old News.” Although Burke has been celebrated in one recent intellectual history of the concept of race for his “attempt to reassert the political ideas of Aristotle” against the beginnings of a turn to ideas of blood, Kultur, and Volk that would eventuate after 1815 in a full-blown ideology of race, “Old News” suggests that Burke’s anti-racialism was easily jettisoned by those in America who would take up his critiques of the French Revolution. In fact, the narrator’s racial Anglo-Saxonism suggests instead that Hannah Arendt’s claim that “Burke contributed to an essentially English view of race by emphasizing entailed inheritance as the basis for English liberty” was more relevant to the American context; Hawthorne’s narrator echoes Burke’s emphasis that “ties of inheritance” are “as strong as links of iron” in “Old News.”Indeed, one could argue that the narrator’s project in “Old News” is precisely to engender an anti-abolitionist white nationalism in his readers, to use Burke’s own aesthetics to racialize his politics.

***

So I'm interested in people's thoughts on Burke and race, 1830s anti-abolitionism, Tise on proslavery argument. What do I need to be rethinking and further developing in this attempt to historicize the racial aesthetics and politics of Hawthorne's narrator in "Old News"?

Monday, March 19, 2007

Hobgoblin Brought Down by Little Minds

If you go back to this post, you'll see that the links in it are dead. This is because BikeProf has decided to pull the plug on The Hobgoblin of Little Minds. My title gives you the "shorter" version of his explanation and conveys something of my regret that another person good at Blogging While Academic has left Blogoramaville U.

In addition to losing a fellow antebellum-era quotation dropper--and a book event we had planned for the summer on our blogs--BikeProf's absence also means I stand to lose my perspectives on the lit-blogging world that his posts, blogroll, and sitemeter stats all provided me access to (particularly if he decides to pull a Billmon by pulling his last and first posts). More important, I lose a colleague who combined his many passions in a single blog, someone who approached reading, teaching, writing, walking, and riding with equal and infectious enthusiasm, which earned him a diverse, active, and (by CitizenSE standards, at least) large readership.

CitizenSE, too, strives to straddle several worlds. The academic worlds of antebellum, 19th C, and contemporary American lit; the transregional literatures of the Black Atlantic and the Extended Caribbean; the global cultures of gender, race, ethnicity, colonialism, imperialism, and trade. The readerly worlds of the book-of-the-month-club, Oprah's Book Club, and lit-bloggers; the relatively focused searches of high school, undergraduate, graduate, and continuing ed students; the relatively random searches of those looking for parenting anecdotes, commentary on popular culture, or adventures in metablogging; those momentarily curious about a comment by The Constructivist on someone else's blog. Not to mention the professional/personal, work/life, America/Japan worlds....

How has it been working out so far? With the new semester starting in less than three weeks, it's too soon to tell. But I can report that I gave four talks in the past four months--a personal record I hope to extend--all of which were easier to write and better pitched to their audiences than anything I've ever delivered before. I have finished editing one chapter of my manuscript, made slow progress on the second, begun rewriting the last, and first-drafted parts of several new ones on and off CitizenSE. So blogging here has increased my overall professional productivity, and with a better teaching and commuting schedule in the spring than the fall, I expect and need this to continue, particularly since I return to a 4-3 load mere weeks after turning in my grades at the three Fukuoka universities I will be teaching at this coming semester.

I will admit to some frustration that sitemeter is showing about 1/3 the average daily visitors to CitizenSE than to the for-some-time-now-group-authored Mostly Harmless blog that I created "for fun" in January, mostly to avoid cluttering this one, give my other interests an outlet, and experiment with a wider variety of styles and moods. But it makes sense to me: before I began blogging again, after taking a sabbatical from what has now become Objectivist v. Constructivist v. Theist, I was mostly visiting the blogs I had the most fun reading and commenting on (mostly the killer Bs--Berube and Bitch). In fact, managing three quite different blogs--and blogrolls--has given me a chance to give some blogs I refused to link to on what was then O v. C a new chance and discover old and new ones I had never heard of or looked at. So even though I only read the newspapers here in Fukuoka when I can, get my multiple magazine subscriptions late or not at all, and can't understand kids' anime, much less the evening news, I feel relatively well-read and well-informed. And I don't even use RSS, which one of the Great Blogging Scotts recently informed me may be a way people are reading CitizenSE without showing up on the sitemeter stats. (If any RSSers would care to delurk, even if just to let em know how to track [and proudly display!] the "subscriptions" to the CitizenSE "feed" [sorry for the scare quotes; I'm still stuck in Web 1.969], it would be much appreciated.)

Perhaps the most gratifying moment in my short blogging career, though, came after the tsuma actually sat down and read a little bit of my blogs last week. She asked me if I'm saving what I'm writing. I told her that google is likely a safer place for my brainstorms than any drive, disk, or memory stick, but secretly I was pleased she thought there was something worth saving here and elsewhere. I'm giving myself until August to develop and incorporate CitizenSE's contribution to that total into a manuscript worth publishing in the ambitious form I envision for it. But more on that (hopefully) this Saturday....

So best wishes to BikeProf in his new endeavors. Here's hoping he makes a bloggy comeback before he gets tenure!

Friday, March 16, 2007

Just a New Way of Periodizing (and Conceptualizing) "American" Literature, That's All; or Adventures in Lazy Blogging, Part II: The Sequel

Remember those extravagant claims I alluded to making in my Sendai talk? Well, here's the most extravagant of all of them. With its implications.... Hey, end on a high note, right? (The talk, not the blog--don't get your hopes up!)

***

What, then, is the new understanding of U.S. literary history that the works of Anzaldua, Butler, Conde, Jones, Marshall, Morrison, Mukherjee, Silko, and Yamashita make possible? I identify six periods in U.S. and new world history from Columbus to the present: 1) New Worlds for All: Encounters and Plantation (1492-1776); 2) After the Great War: Revolution and Constitution (1763-1815); 3) Manifest Destiny: Expansion and Consolidation (1803-1896); 4) A New Nation: Modernization and Migration (1877-1952); 5) The American Century: Hegemony and Transformation (1944-?); 6) Contemporary U.S. Literatures: Transnationalism and Globalization (?-). While the specific dates and names of each period will vary for each nation in the new world, the processes identified in the subtitles will remain fairly consistent across the hemisphere.

As Anzaldua, Conde, Silko, and Yamashita show, encounters between European explorers, traders, and settlers with indigenous Americans and with enslaved Africans took place across the hemisphere, and different kinds of plantation complexes emerged. As Conde and Mukherjee hint, the aftershocks of England’s catastrophic victory over France in the great war of the eighteenth century paradoxically created the conditions for the age of revolutions across the hemisphere. As Butler, Jones, Morrison, Silko, and Yamashita suggest, newly independent nation-states across the Americas dealt with the conflicts that came with expansion and consolidation, including border wars, civil wars, and Indian wars. As Jones, Morrison, Silko, and Yamashita reveal, most nation-states in the region then embarked on a process of modernization, which included a strengthened central government, industrialization, urbanization, and immigration. As Anzaldua, Marshall, and Silko suggest, the U.S., as one of the most successful modernizers in the hemisphere, and rivalled only by England, Germany, Japan, and Russia in the world, established itself as a rising power during this period, which meant that its neighbors got a preview of the American Century well before the Middle East and Asia did.

Of course, these nine writers represent a fraction of the U.S. literatures that make possible this new understanding of national and hemispheric histories and that lead me to suggest that the key processes of our time are competing versions of transnationalism and globalization. Also, even all the U.S. literatures that could be linked to these processes are only a small fraction of the literatures of each nation-state in the hemisphere, many of which represented, responded to, and influenced past and present processes quite differently than U.S. literatures have.

With this in mind, the periodization scheme I have laid out here today points the way to a large-scale collective project for Americanists around the world: understanding the interrelations, interactions, and interweavings among the literatures of the new world; mapping the ways in which the intranational, international, and transnational network of U.S. literatures links up with those of other literatures of the Americas; making sense of the juxtapositions, parallels, and other patterns that such a mapping makes possible, in a way that forges new understandings of the relations between literary and other histories; and trying to settle the questions hovering about the end of the American Century and the emergence of something new from it. This is a huge project, but if we want to make sense of the past, present, and especially the future of literatures in and outside the U.S., if we truly believe that another world is possible than that of the American Century, this is what I believe scholars of my generation should be working on in coming decades.

***

So yes, read the nine novels listed in the labels below and get a new understanding of what constitutes American literature and how to organize its study, plus a new perspective on the history of the world since Columbus....

Thursday, March 15, 2007

Six-Word Spoilers

Think of this post as a mash-up of norbizness (happily ruining movies for the rest of us since 2004) and Scott Eric Kaufman (riffing on Wired's six-word stories by sf writers). Inspired by what has to be SEK's summary of "Roger Malvin's Burial"--"The hunter squeezes. His son falls."--I present the following spoilers of well-known Hawthorne novels and tales. Have fun IDing them in the comments.

Walk in woods: no good end.

He loved her? WTF?!

Don't touch the girl! She's poison!

She learned to love the letter.

Their marriage ends families' feud--hopefully.

Obsessed scientist purifies wife, killing her.

Hawthorne was such a hopeless romantic (that is, in the romance sense--and not the medieval one), wasn't he? Feel free to add your own in comments, including improvements on these!

Oh, and if you write them yourself, why not submit your best to SJ Rozan's Six Word Stories blog?

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Adventures in Lazy Blogging: From the Sendai Talk

This was the set-up for the rest of the talk--it consists of a reading of my title, “The End of the American Century in Contemporary U.S. Literatures.” Should I have been invited to the speaker series that Tohoku University put together? Should they have withheld my honorarium? Inquiring authors want to know!

***

Let’s start with the second part of my talk’s title, “in Contemporary U.S. Literatures,” which pointedly refuses to identify a core culture that would constitute the mainstream of American literature today. Due in part to the incredible and accelerating diversification of literary production, distribution, and reception in the United States over the course of the twentieth century--not just of region, class, ethnicity, race, gender, religion, but also of publishers, formats, genres, audiences, traditions, movements, and more--many Americanists agree with me that it is better to refer to “U.S. literatures” than “American literature.” For one thing, “U.S. literatures” acknowledges that the U.S. does not have a monopoly on the term “American,” which can refer as easily to a continent or hemisphere as to any of the many literary traditions in the Americas. For another, “U.S. literatures” troubles the link between “nation” and “literature” presumed in such concepts as “national literature,” suggesting instead that there can be many literatures within a single nation-state. So one of the things I will do in this talk is introduce you to the multiplicity of contemporary U.S. literatures--and particularly to their interrelations, interactions, and interweavings.

To do this, I will focus on African American writers Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, and Octavia Butler, Afro-Caribbean writers Paule Marshall and Maryse Conde, Asian American writers Bharati Mukherjee and Karen Tei Yamashita, Latino writer Gloria Anzaldua, and Native American writer Leslie Marmon Silko. Each has participated in multiple U.S. literatures in her career. Butler, for instance, has made major contributions to both African American literature and science fiction. Mukherjee, Marshall, and Yamashita have all participated brilliantly in the literature of immigration but have also contributed to their different ethnic, racial, and diasporic U.S. literatures. Anzaldua, Yamashita, and Silko have all written literature of the U.S. West and of the borderlands, but could be grouped separately as Texas, California, and Arizona writers, respectively, not to mention in their respective pan-ethnicities as Latino, Asian American, and American Indian, or in their respective ethnicities as Chicano, Japanese-American, and Laguna Pueblo. As these few examples show, precisely because individual writers contribute to and have been influenced by multiple literatures inside and outside the U.S., it would be wrong to conclude that “U.S. literatures” means the dispersal of a unified national literature into several separate literatures with little in common. Rather, “U.S. literatures” constitute a complex and dynamic network that is at once intranational, international, and transnational.

So in part this talk tries to move us from the debates over canonization that have dominated public discussion of contemporary multicultural and multiethnic American literature to the debates over periodization implied by my title’s temporal focus: “The End of the American Century in Contemporary U.S. Literatures.” That is, rather than obsessively asking, “who counts as a major American author?” “which U.S. literatures make up the mainstream of American culture?” we ought to be asking other questions, like “what patterns or shapes have U.S. literatures formed in the past?” “what have been the relationships within, among, and between U.S. literatures?” “what might they reveal about the commonalities and differences in U.S. society?” Of course, there are any number of ways to identify literary periods in the U.S.--centuries, wars, and literary movements spring most readily to mind--which are all more or less arbitrary. Nevertheless, there’s a lot at stake in the process. To understand why, let’s look more closely at the first half of my title.

“The End of the American Century,” alludes to two of the most influential attempts by U.S. conservatives to shape the contours of a post-Cold War national consensus. One is “the end of history,” the idea Francis Fukuyama advanced in 1989 that history has reached its endpoint and achieved its purpose by revealing that the global extension of capitalist liberal democracy is humanity’s ultimate social destiny. The other is the neoconservative Project for the New American Century, which William Kristol convened in the spring of 1997 to advocate for “American global leadership,” advance “a strategic vision of America’s role in the world,” and stiffen the nation’s “resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests.” By combining the two phrases in the way I do, I aim to expose tensions within and between them--and put them to other ends than their authors intended. On the one hand, I want to suggest that Fukuyama’s vision of the end of history is circumscribed by the logic of the American Century; on the other hand, I want to suggest that Kristol’s American Century may well be in its last throes, so to speak. Unlike my talk last Saturday, when I explored the political and economic implications of the end of the American Century in Asia at the Japan-America Society of Fukuoka, today I look at the end of the American Century from a literary perspective. My core argument is that contemporary U.S. literatures, as exemplified by the writings of the nine women writers I feature in this talk, help us historicize the American Century, reexamine its logic and assumptions, and speculate about what may come after it.

Today, then, I’ll move from considering the origins and endpoint of the American Century to examining how Marshall, Jones, and Morrison have renavigated Atlantic slavery, how Anzaldua, Silko, and Yamashita have remapped North American borders, and how Butler, Conde, and Mukherjee have rewritten “American” history. I’ll close by using the insights their works provide us with to offer a new periodization scheme for U.S. literary history and to suggest what may be at stake in the reconceptualization of relations between U.S. and other literatures that it entails.

***

Want more later?

Monday, March 12, 2007

On Racial Aesthetics and Narratorial/Authorial Intention, Part I

From "Old News":

There is a good deal of amusement, and some profit, in the perusal of those little items, which characterize the manners and circumstances of the country. New-England was then in a state incomparably more picturesque than at present, or than it has been within the memory of man; there being, as yet, only a narrow strip of civilization along the edge of a vast forest, peopled with enough of its original race to contrast the savage life with the old customs of another world. The white population, also, was diversified by the influx of all sorts of expatriated vagabonds, and by the continuous importation of bond-servants from Ireland and elsewhere; so that there was a wild and unsettled multitude, forming a strong minority to the sober descendants of the Puritans. Then there were the slaves, contributing their dark shade to the picture of society. The consequence of all this was, a great variety and singularity of action and incident.


This is a passage I devote more than a few paragraphs to in the second chapter of my manuscript (although now that I think of it, the middle section of the first chapter may work better as a stand-alone intro, so this may well become the manuscript's third chapter). I'll give you my initial reading of it here:

To the narrator, contrast brings out the "manners and circumstances" "of “New-England"--"a narrow strip of civilization” somewhere between "the savage life" of "the original race" and "the old customs of another world." New England civilization, that is, is composed of "the sober descendants of the Puritans," and it is opposed to the "wild and unsettled multitude" of Indians, "expatriated vagabonds," Irish and other European "bond-servants," and, of course, "the slaves, contributing their dark shade to the picture of society." Here, the narrator distinguishes between Anglo-Puritan "civilization" and the greater "society" of the colony, which forms a "strong minority" to the Puritan majority. The picturesqueness of the scene, it seems, is a result of the "great variety and singularity of action and incident" brought about by the presence of a diversified white population surrounded by the savage life of Indians and the dark shade of the slaves. Indeed, even the arrangement of Native Americans, whites, and slaves into a foreground, middleground, and background--with the emphasis placed on the middleground--corresponds to Gilpin's rules for picturesque aesthetics. The picturesque intervenes to domesticate the double dangers of excessive difference and roughness and of excessive sameness and dullness. It not only allows the historical tourist to enjoy the aesthetics of the scene before him, it also gives him a structure through which he can unobtrusively emphasize the presence of the Puritans.


This is a small part of my set-up for one of my core claims in the chapter that "the narrator in 'Old News' presents a story not of 'civilization to fratricide'--this formulation misses the implicit racialization of both 'civilization' and 'fratricide' in the sketch--but instead one that moves from a period of increasing Anglo-American solidarity to a period of contention and separation." I elaborate on this claim as follows:

When the "Old News" narrator says that he loves to see a man "keep the characteristics of his country," he precisely does not mean to include that "alien race, generally incapable of self-direction," whose enslavement he tacitly defends, as even a potential member of that citizenry. On the contrary, no matter how "familiarly" "intermixed" with the Puritans "under the domestic sway of our fathers," the slaves' only function in his narrative is to contribute "their dark shade to the picture of society," to offset the virtues of the Anglo-Puritan civilization of colonial New England. Slavery can be viewed as "a patriarchal, and almost a beautiful, peculiarity of the times" because of the narrator's commitment to picturesque aesthetics. Ultimately, then, what "Old News" is about, what holds the three sections of the sketch together, is what makes the United States "America." And what apparently makes its citizens "Americans" is a combination of shared ("English") blood and commitment to picturesque aesthetics. Hawthorne's narrator implicitly defines America as a country composed of the descendants of the Puritans. The picturesque effect that he attempts to achieve is not simply antiquarian, then, not simply an attempt to leave an impression of the pastness of the past. Rather, it is the simultaneous racialization and aestheticization of the Anglo-Puritan origins of the American self.


Got a lot to do today, so I'll stop there before getting into the issue of the relation between Hawthorne's narratorial persona's intentions and his own intentions in the sketch, but as I'm revising this chapter over the next few weeks, I'll be posting from it when it fits the programming schedule. There's been a lot of new work on the picturesque, race, and colonialism that I have to examine to see where and how I need to revise the chapter still further.

Dramatis Personae

It occurs to me that my use of Japanese and references to my family members here on CitizenSE may be confusing or off-putting to most of the people who come here accidentally through google or other web searches. And even my handful of semi-regular readers will no doubt appreciate a playbill. Plus, I don't have time to do any serious blogging today--or, apparently, if you look over the most recent third of my posts here, for the past month or so. In any case, one of the reasons to blog is to tell funny (and other) stories about your family. So without further ado, may I present...

CitizenSE Dramatis Personae

[note on pronouncing Japanese: the alphabet consists of variations on the vowels (spelled here phonetically) "ah" "ee" "ooh" "ay" (or "eh" if you're Canadian) and "oh" (such as kah-key-koo-kay-koh); all syllables end in vowels; double vowels means drag the vowel sound out for another beat, although often people in Japan represent the dragged out "oh" sound as "ou" instead of "oo," mistakenly thinking that's any clearer (there's no good solution--"ohhh" looks stupid and sounds kinda pornographic, for instance, but until Americans learn to read hiragana and katakana, we're stuck with romaji)]

The Tsuma, She-Who-Will-Not-Be-Mentioned-on-Blogs: just call her the International Women of Mystery I'm married to; also known as mama or okaasan to the musume futari.

Musume Futari: our two daughters, who have too many aliases to list here.

Onechan, Uh Oh Diva Girl: our older daughter, the sansai onnanoko (3-year-old girl), who goes to yochien (a Baptist pre-K day care/school arrangement for half the day, even though the only Christians in the family are the awesome Catholic family my brother married into), loves Pretty Cure, Dora, and PowerPuff Girls (even though we haven't yet let her see the original version), likes to wear skirts ("I want to be a girl!"), and responded to my joke that there ought to be a Cure Yada ("no way!") to go with Cure White, Black, Egret, Dream, Rouge, Mint, Lemonade, and the rest) with a pause for thought followed by the suggestion, "and a Cure Cough-y!" Yup, she's a comedian, too. (We've all been coughing off and on since January.)

Imoto, Happy Sporty Science Girl: our younger daughter, the juukagetsu akachan (10-month-old baby), who not only can do all the things I bragged about a couple of posts ago, but also is into opening and closing doors, standing up in her stroller, dropping things to see what happens, putting everything in her mouth, screeching with delight, giggling, expressing frustration in all kinds of hilariously cute non-verbal ways, and trying to learn to walk and imitate the words coming out of our mouths at roughly the same time (onechan would always swing from one to the other in that awesome 6-18-month transformation from barely-rolling-over baby to a toddler).

Baba, Gigi, Grandma, Grandpa: the Japanese and American grandparents, respectively.

Various tomodachi (friends) of the kazuko (family), to be named later. There--fun, easy, and quick. Maybe will be able to actually do a close reading tomorrow. We'll see.

Sunday, March 11, 2007

In Which My Self-Nomination for Father of the Year Is Not To Be Taken Literally

Following Bitch Ph.D., I have a story to tell y'all about the onechan and me. We were at the mall in Kashii--the place where last time we went, we all got seriously sick for the first time in Japan that I remember--and had quite the scare. I lost our sansai onechan for about 15 minutes in a large clothing store. No harm done--a nice lady working there saw her crying, calmed her down, took her to the bathroom (because she said she told her to go oshiko), got her name and age out of her (thank you, yochien, for helping us drill that into her!), and paged us. So here's what Hawthorne would say--exercising his usual artistic licence--in his nomination speech for my Father of the Year Award, describing the first words the tsuma said to me upon catching up with her and the onechan:

"Ethan, meet Wakefield."

Thank you, thank you. Next show at 9:30.

Seriously, it would have been the worst 15 minutes of my life, but during a crisis--like, say, last week when the juukagetsu imoto was choking on a slice of cabbage that onechan and I were grating for their mama that had fallen from the grater onto the floor and gone straight into her mouth when we weren't looking--I'm scarily calm, I've discovered to my relief (better than panicking, right?) and dismay (why so many crises?). Still, the one distracting thought that slipped through my crisis mode this afternoon was the mental image of onechan wandering off (to look at some of those skirts we had just gone to the changing room to tell her mama she liked, I thought, while I was fumbling with the mall stroller and our stroller and agreeing with the tsuma that imoto and I would chase onechan down--but no!) and the thought that that would be my last sight of her.

Phew. Thank god Japanese workers take service so damn seriously and that Fukuoka is so family-friendly. I am truly baka.

Friday, March 09, 2007

A Few Crazy Ideas

My weekend posting is going to have to be shorter and crappier than usual in the foreseeable future, as I switch back to a regular work schedule on weekdays starting next Monday, which means both onechan and imoto will be needing more attention when I'm back home.

Have I mentioned here that in the last two months, imoto has started standing/cruising/walking (at least when you hold her hands or when she makes her way to a stroller and starts using it as a walker!), clapping, waving goodbye, babbling (from "emma" to "mama" and this kind of "dadadadadadadada" thing that may well be addressed to me, not to mention "upffffff" and screeches of delight, frustration, or outrage of all kinds--quite a step up from crying to be held when I come home from work, which was the first big development in her relationship with me), teethed her way to her (at last count) first 4 teeth coming in (two bottom middle ones first, then the corresponding two top one)? Or that onechan has been moving her ratio of "I'm a big girl"/"I'm a baybeeeeeee" closer to 4-1 over the same time period? (Could it be that the Uh Oh Diva Girl is figuring out that imitating her younger sister is not a winning strategy for a three-year-old? Could it be that going to the Baptist yochien and seeing how all the older kids act is good for her? Signs point to "yes.") She's also gotten really into drawing and is doing a lot of cool arts things in her yochien, plus making some new close frends. My point here is that we're right in the middle of our favorite baby phase (from rolling over to walking and talking) for imoto and witnessing a major transformation in onechan's life (the end of the terrible twos, which we thought happened last spring, but never underestimate the intelligence of a two-year-old--she was perfectly capable of figuring out what worked for the atarashii akachan and using it for herself [but for a year?!!!--yup]) in the CitizenSE household, and I want to be there for as much of it as I can.

So, a list today. Projects I'm considering for the post-Fulbright future:

1) EDITING: Reading Hawthorne in Showa Japan has a nice ring to it, eh? Here's the plan: I contact the NH societies of the U.S. and Japan before leaving Fukuoka with a proposal to edit a collection of essays that translates/collects representative work from the most influential Hawthornists of Japan during this period (asking the NH Society of Japan to do the selecting and share the bill for translating with the NH Society of the U.S.) and publishes short responses from the most influential Hawthornists of the U.S. (as selected by the NH Society of the U.S.). My contribution would be coordination and an introductory essay that compares/contrasts the developments of Hawthorne Studies in the two nations during this time period.

2) CONFERENCE: I want to organize an international conference on the cultural politics of U.S. literatures and literary criticism in Japan. Obviously, one of the big turns in U.S. literary studies of the past couple of generations has been toward historicizing the reception and cultural work of "classic American literature" and of tracking the politics of literary reputation and the formation of what's taken to be the "traditional" American literary canon. This has extended in the U.S. into studies that do the same kinds of analyses, not of American literature, but of Americanist literary criticism. To give a few examples of famous people doing both kinds of work, think Tompkins on gender, Lauter on Melville and modernism, Pease on the Cold War, Kaplan on U.S. imperialism...the list goes on and on. So what I envision is finding out who's doing that same kind of work in Japan and around the world by organizing an international conference on the subject. By casting my net wide--inviting work from the late Tokugawa period to the present, rather than focusing on a specific period--I get to highlight the best new work in and on Japan in the U.S. Obviously this would be of interest to postcolonial studies, as well, given Said, Spivak, Bhabha in general and specifically Gauri Viswanathan's trailblazing work on English Studies in India, Annika Hohenthal's work on English in India, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan's "Learning from Said" (in Politics and Culture 1 [2004]), and so on.

3) RESEARCH: I need to get my language abilities in Japanese to the point where I can read literary criticism in Japanese passably well to do this, but I want to eventually be able to contribute my own little pieces to the larger work that the conference would feature. Given my primary specialty, I would most likely focus on the cultural work of studies of antebellum U.S. literatures, but I would have to be flexible and see what the most revealing literary criticism turns out to be. What I'm particularly interested in is the range of responses by Japanese Americanists to the U.S. occupation of Japan and how the politics of American Studies in Japan relates to--and what it may reveal about--larger debates in Japanese society over American culture over the course of the Showa period.

So there you have it. I'm going back to a 4/3 teaching load in August, doing my best to avoid immersing myself in service as I consciously chose to do when I first got the job (on which more later), and still have three major and several minor projects to complete without a leave in the foreseeable future (having decided to use mine with the Fulbright, rather than save it for my return), but hey, a guy can dream, right? Or rather, a guy can get back to work for the next 5 months and see how close he can come to wrapping up the ongoing projects....

Thursday, March 08, 2007

Pop Hawthorne

All right, folks, it's time to explore the wild world wide web of Hawthorne. Just for you, I've culled out the whining about having to read Hawthorne in school, the adult sites that reference Hawthorne, the undergrads and the book clubbers, plot summaries and meandering musings--just to bring you the more interesting non-specialist Hawthorne-related pages. What do you think they reveal about the ways he is perceived by non-specialists? What do you see as the relation between these pop Hawthornes and the various academic Hawthornes?

FILM: The Scarlet Letter (주홍글씨 2004) (Screen: An Asian Film Blog)
MUSIC: The Parallel Universe (Noise Filter)
MUSICAL THEATER: Pearl: the Musical (Katie Kring)
LITERARY FANDOM: Lovecraft on Quantum Physics (Chris Perridas)
POLITICS: Hypocritical Bush the Dictator's Friend (Buddy's Bemusings)
PARENTING: Of Goths, Satanism, and Teenage Quicksand (John Botscharow)
SPORTS: Hockey as Written by Nathaniel Hawthorne (Sitting in the Stalls)
SELF-HELP: The Scarlet Letter (All About a Girl)

FYI, Susan Cheever has a new book out this year, American Bloomsbury, that deals in part with Hawthorne.

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

In Which I Make Extravagant Claims

Claims too extravagant to blog just yet. You'll have to click on this link to my talk in Sendai for the Tohoku Association for American Studies to see just how extravagant I can get--trying to praise the achievements of 9 prolific women writers in 45 minutes, to offer a new periodization scheme for American (in the hemispheric as well as national senses) literary history, that sort of thing. For those who do click and read, is there anything worth developing further in "The End of the American Century in Contemporary U.S. Literatures"?

OK, got to go get ready for onechan's first field trip! Of course the whole family is going along...I wouldn't miss it for the world!

[Update 3/10/07: I'm much prouder of this as an inadvertent International Women's Day post than the one I did over at Mostly Harmless on March 8--clearly I should have switched my March 6 and March 8 posts over there!]

Jee Yoon Lee on the Oriental Hester

Gotta love the synchronicity--just about the time I was blogging on Salem and "the Orient" here at CitizenSE, Jee Yoon Lee of the University of Michigan published "'The Rude Contact of Some Actual Circumstance': Hawthorne and Salem's East India Marine Museum" in ELH 73 (2006) 949-973. As they say in these here parts of blogoramaville, read that gosh darn thing in its entirety. But if you want my summary and reactions, read on.

Picking up where Charles Goodspeed left off in 1945 and Luther Luedtke did in 1989, Lee argues that "Hawthorne's literary imagination is powerfully grounded in the material objects from the Orient," that "the letter A becomes the icon, the index, and the symbol of the material culture displayed in Salem's East India Maritime Museum," that the narrator of the novel "accentuates the story of the Puritan Hester into a figure, a symbol Orientalized by contact with the material circumstances of Salem's East India trade," and concludes:

If Hester's letter A figures her as a woman, composed in part by words referring to her Oriental characteristics, then the things that grant her or the A she wears "a positive, a relative, and a composite meaning" are those things that can be found in the visual narratives of Salem's East India Marine Museum. In The Scarlet Letter, a distinct communal culture takes shape as Hawthorne transfigures the material culture of the Orient into a letter in the shape of a Salem Oriental Hester Prynne.


Along the way, Lee brings together scholarship on material culture, visual culture, and icons, images, and symbols; historicizes Salem's India trade, its museum commemorating the trade for 19th C visitors, and needlework in 19th as well as 17th C New England; provides good readings of three scenes from The Scarlet Letter--"Hester at her needle, at the Governor's Hall, and upon her death"--that "illustrate the commingling of the material culture of the East India Marine Museum and the writing materials of the Orient"; and cites the obligatory big names in Hawthorne scholarship (Bell, Bercovitch, Berlant, Colacurcio, Luedtke, Ryskamp, and Tompkins) along with a couple of surprises (Crain, Goodyear). I learned a lot from every section of the essay and several times kicked myself for not noticing things Lee points out on my own. The best moment in the essay for me is when "Hester catches a glimpse of herself in the Governor's armor, and sees herself as if she were a spoil from a foreign war"; here, Lee emphasizes the museum-like qualities of Bellingham's hall, juxtaposes them with the display of "the dried head of a Fijian displayed in the East India Marine Museum," and concludes that "Hester emerges as an object bejeweled by her embroidery, defined by her expression of an Oriental nature, a fictive equivalent of the exotic material things displayed at the East India Marine Museum."

Of course, any essay necessarily has roads not taken, but it was disappointing to me that even here, in the strongest and most original moment in the essay, Lee doesn't link violence against Fijians with the literal historical referent in the armor reflection scene--the Pequod War--or address the way in which the Governor's bond-servant--"a free-born Englishman, but now a seven years' slave"--who ushers Hester into the mansion, impressed by her letter and her airs, frames the entire scene with a slavery/indentured servitude reference. Lee's readings could have been enriched by pursuing these and other links between the multiple "others" of the Puritans in The Scarlet Letter. But even within the parameters of her essay's chosen focus, some troubling problems emerge.

The biggest problem is the essay's repeatedly raising "and then...?" and "so what?" questions without adequately pursuing answers to them--or at least answers Hawthorne specialists would find particularly original. "The presence of the Orient in [Hawthorne's] daily life" matters because it "gives credence to the idea of an Oriental Hester"--which is important because...? Hawthorne "re-imagine[s] Hester within the context of the Oriental influences of his times"--to what ends? with what effects? As I noted here around the same time this essay came out, Hawthorne revealingly shifts from undeveloped reveries of the height of Salem's Oriental trade, "when India was a new region, and only Salem knew the way thither," to the (invented) discovery of the scarlet letter, which sparks his imagination and inspires his novel (or so he claims)--yet Lee never mentions this moment. Nor did Lee or ELH's readers or editors catch an error, when she attributes a line from "The Custom-House" in which the narrator discusses his imagined characters' resistance--figured revealingly as "the tribe of unrealities"--as a description of the scarlet letter itself. In avoiding engagement with Berlant's actual arguments about Hester's needlework, or (ahem) my arguments about Mukherjee's revisions of The Scarlet Letter in The Holder of the World (which she could have built on as well as criticized on solid grounds), Lee reveals the thinness of her engagement with Hawthorne scholarship relevant to her main argument and misses an opportunity to develop its implications and stakes. What is Hawthorne's relation with his protagonist and his narrator? To what ends does he Orientalize Hester? How do Lee's findings impact debates over Hawthorne's depictions of racism, sexism, and colonialism in his fiction?

From a quick google search, this essay looks to be one of Lee's first published pieces from her dissertation. From the little that I've seen of her other work on race and Hawthorne, I think Lee is well on her way to a promising Hawthorne section of an impressive book manuscript. If she can find a way to make her work on The House of the Seven Gables reflect back on her revisions of this chapter-to-be on The Scarlet Letter, she'll be in a great position to follow through on the achievements of and the potential revealed in this essay.