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.

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Want more later?

On Turning a Talk into an Article

A while back, I announced with little fanfare here that I've made a .pdf version of my Hawaii talk on Marshall, Devi, trauma, and mourning, complete with handouts, available to CitizenSE's legions of adoring fans. To depart from my usual habit of launching into close readings here, I want to talk a bit more generally about revision and publication plans for this piece.

One of the first things you'll realize if you read the whole thing is that I don't cite readings of either work from any scholars, critics, or theorists--much less mention the name of anyone besides the authors and their characters. If you've read any of my other work, or heard any of my previous talks, you'll know what a departure that was for me. If you've even just read a couple of my posts here, you probably can guess how difficult it was for me to do without close readings or citations for fifteen minutes. Of course, I did allude to controversies within and over postcolonial studies in general and particular debates over postcolonial identities (the theme of the panel), but I correctly figured that the panel wasn't going to draw too many people with any great expertise in the subjects I was addressing in the talk, so I kept my allusions issue-focused and accessibly-worded, so as not to bog down my larger argument. As I mentioned before, overall I'm happy with my choices and think the talk turned out more than halfway decent, despite all that I wanted to do that I didn't allow myself to do in it. (I've just finished a draft of an 18-page opus in an area completely, well, almost completely outside my specialty for a non-academic audience that I'll be revising over the next three weeks and delivering on the 24th, and all I can say is that those extra 10 pages make all the difference!)

The main reason why I didn't start citing other people in the talk is that I wouldn't know where or how to stop. While my prime sources were Cathy Caruth's brilliantly edited and introduced collection of essays, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, and David Kazanjian's and David Eng's equally accomplished and more recent essay collection, Loss: The Politics of Mourning, the list of people doing serious work on trauma and mourning is long and imposing--and the debates are serious, intricate, and difficult to follow. There has also been a lot of great work done on Marshall and a smaller amount, though perhaps even better, work done on Devi. Plus there's the larger traditions of critical and theoretical work on the Caribbean and on South Asia, the history of attempts to put marxism and psychoanalysis in dialogue with each other, and the ways both relate to the debates within and over postcolonial studies. So figuring out how to elegantly bring all that work to bear on developing and refining my own arguments is the challenge of turning this talk into an article.

Here's how confident I am in my larger project, though: I really can see this as a PMLA paper. Or, if I want to speak more directly to postcolonial studies folks, I could go for one of the journals that Amardeep Singh has provided links to--perhaps, in the spirit of aiming high, Ariel (it's too literary to aim for a journal like Cultural Critique, I think, and probably not Critical Inquiry's cup of tea). The point is, the eventual paper will be shaped by my understanding of its audience (first, the editors of the journal I shoot for, and only later their readers)--so it could become almost anything. What attracts me about PMLA is the potential to reach non-specialists as well as specialists, but assuming I'm successful, I would lose out on the street cred of getting into Ariel. I think at this point trying to jam it into the co-edited collection on trauma and melancholy that's been going nowhere fast for far too long is not a good idea. The point is to try to break the peer-review barrier!

So if anyone wants to give me any suggestions on the talk-->article process or even the talk/article itself, I'm all ears. I'm done with grading by the end of next week and working on another talk I'll be giving in Sendai in the first week of March while we're visiting family in Chiba, so I don't foresee turning serious attention to expanding the talk into an article until after we get back from Sendai.

This is definitely one of those old ideas of mine that's still new, so it would be smart to take advantage of a great teaching schedule from April to July to send out a big article to a major peer-reviewed journal and hopefully snag a good publication during my teaching leave. Because at the rate the book manuscript is (not) going, if I finish it next summer it will be a miracle, especially given the 4-3 load that awaits me just three weeks after I return to the States from Japan!

Now back to our regularly scheduled program of close readings and vain attempts to build a readership for the obscurest outpost of blogoramaville.

Why Water Imagery Matters in Hawthorne, Morrison, and Marshall

So we're heading out for Hawaii later today but I am so dissatisfied with my previous Hawthorne-Morrison posting I need to get this one off my chest before we leave and I begin my first-ever CitizenSE vacation.

Too long ago I suggested that Pearl's playing in the sea-side pool with her phantom-like reflection toward the end of The Scarlet Letter had something to do with the most puzzling part of Beloved's stream-of-consciousness monologues near the end of Beloved. It's almost as if Morrison asked herself, what if Hawthorne's pool represented a boundary between the living and the dead? what if Pearl and her reflection had somehow been able to "join" each other? or what if it were really a phantom in the pool and not her reflection? what would have happened if Pearl were possessed by her reflection? And then she imagined Beloved as a vehicle for giving her answers to these questions.

Well, there's another pool in The Scarlet Letter, this one formed by a brook in the middle of the famous forest where Hester and Dimmesdale reunite after seven years apart. Check out the language in these passages, but whatever you do don't dismiss it as mere filler, suspense-building, foreshadowing, or pathetic fallacy. To help you along, I'll italicize key SL phrases and break the flow of the passage in order to note Beloved resonances and crossings after them. So let's visit this forest brook and keep an eye on Pearl and her reflection:

It was a little dell where they had seated themselves, with a leaf-strewn bank rising gently on either side, and a brook flowing through the midst, over a bed of fallen and drowned leaves.

connection to "what it is down there" from the end of Beloved? could these leaves symbolize those who died in the middle passage or in attempted escapes from slavery or in post-slavery lynchings and other racialized violence?

The trees impending over it had flung down great branches, from time to time, which choked up the current, and compelled it to form eddies and black depths at some points; while, in its swifter and livelier passages, there appeared a channel-way of pebbles, and brown, sparkling sand.

think of the collar around the woman's neck in the middle passage scenes from the monologue for the choking up part; for the second, think of the compulsion to repeat or the compulsion to testify often associated with the kinds of traumatic experience Morrison not only writes on but makes crucial to the form of the novel (consider what triggers various characters' flashbacks and how the order in which events are narrated itself follows a traumatic logic--and think of the course of the stream in The Scarlet Letter as something like the form of Beloved

Letting the eyes follow along the course of the stream, they could catch the reflected light from its water, at some short distance within the forest, but soon lost all traces of itamid the bewilderment of tree-trunks and underbrush,

a line seemingly modified at the very end of Beloved....

and here and there a huge rock, covered over with gray lichens. All these giant trees and boulders seemed intent on making a mystery of the course of this small brook; fearing, perhaps, that, with its never-ceasing loquacity, it should whisper tales out of the heart of the old forest whence it flowed, or mirror its revelations on the smooth surface of a pool.

what does this stream connect to, Morrison might have asked--what is its source and destination? and just what do those trees symbolize? what might they be trying to block or hide? and what tales might the stream tell?

Continually, indeed, as it stole onward, the streamlet kept up a babble, kind, quiet, soothing, but melancholy, like the voice of a young child that was spending its infancy without playfulness, and knew not how to be merry among sad acquaintances and events of sombre hue.

Denver? the crawling-already baby? both?

"O brook! O foolish and tiresome little brook!" cried Pearl, after listening awhile to its talk. "Why art thou so sad? Pick up a spirit, and do not be all the time sighing and murmuring!"

But the brook, in the course of its little lifetime among the forest-trees, had gone through so solemn an experience that it could not help talking about it, and seemed to have nothing else to say.

The child went singing away, following up the current of the brook, and striving to mingle a more lightsome cadence with its melancholy voice. But the little stream would not be comforted, and still kept telling its unintelligible secret of some very mournful mystery that had happened

trauma and testimony key in Beloved--what traumatized the brook? is it like the voices Stamp Paid hears outside 124? what secret and mystery might Morrison pondered in the writing of Beloved....

--or making a prophetic lamentation about something that was yet to happen--within the verge of the dismal forest....

Just where she had paused the brook chanced to form a pool, so smooth and quiet that it reflected a perfect image of her little figure, with all the brilliant picturesqueness of her beauty, in its adornment of flowers and wreathed foliage, but more refined and spiritualized than the reality. The image, so nearly identical with the living Pearl, seemed to communicate somewhat of its own shadowy and intangible quality to the child herself.

Almost a metaphor for being possessed by your own reflection, isn't it?

It was strange, the way in which Pearl stood, looking so steadfastly at them through the dim medium of the forest-gloom; herself, meanwhile, all glorified with a ray of sunshine, that was attracted thitherward as by a certain sympathy. In the brook beneath stood another child,--another and the same,--with likewise its ray of golden light. Hester felt herself, in some indistinct and tantalizing manner, estranged from Pearl; as if the child, in her lonely ramble through the forest, had strayed out of the sphere in which she and her mother dwelt together, and was now vainly seeking to return to it.

There was both truth and error in the impression; the child and mother were estranged, but through Hester's fault, not Pearl's. Since the latter rambled from her side, another inmate had been admitted within the circle of the mother's feelings, and so modified them all, that Pearl, the returning wanderer, could not find her wonted place, and hardly knew where she was

sounds to me like Denver's and the baby ghost's reaction to Paul D's initial presence in 124....

"I have a strange fancy," observed the sensitive minister, "that this brook is the boundary between two worlds, and that thou canst never meet thy Pearl again."

ah ha! didn't I call it at the beginning of this post? and I didn't even remember this passage until I typed it in!

...alone as she was in her childish and unreasonable wrath, it seemed as if a hidden multitude were lending her their sympathy and encouragement. Seen in the brook, once more, was the shadowy wraith of Pearl's image, crowned and girdled with flowers, but stamping its foot, wildly gesticulating, and, in the midst of it all, still pointing its small forefinger at Hester's bosom!

again, we have "voices of 124"/"unspeakable thoughts, unspoken" connections, as well as the idea that Beloved was more than just a single person....

...And the melancholy brook would add this other tale to the mystery with which its little heart was already overburdened, and whereof it still kept up a murmuring babble, with not a whit more cheerfulness of tone than for ages heretofore

as if the tale of Beloved's death is part of a much-longer and much-larger mysterious, traumatizing history....

***

As long as I've got quotation fever, let me end by quoting from some related passages from Marshall's The Chosen Place, The Timeless People, which I think also influenced Morrison's coded allusions to the middle passage in Beloved:

It was the Atlantic this side of the island, a wild-eyed, marauding sea the color of slate, deep, full of dangerous currents, lined with row upon row of barrier reefs, and with a sound like that of the combined voices of the drowned raised in a loud unceasing lament--all those, the nine million and more it is said, who in their exnforced exile, their Diaspora, had gone down between this point and the homeland lying out of sight to the east. This sea mourned them. Aggrieved, outraged, unappeased, it hurled itself upon each of the reefs in turn and then upon the shingle beach, sending up the spume in an angry froth which the wind took and drove in like smoke over the land. Great boulders that had roared down from Westminster centuries ago stood scattered in the surf; these, sculpted into fantastical shapes by the wind and water, might have been gravestones placed there to commemorate those millions of the drowned.

...here on this desolate coast, before this perpetually aggrieved sea which...continued to grieve and rage over the ancient wrong it could neither forget nor forgive.

...they seemed to be puzzling over the sea in front of them which was so different from the mild Caribbean on their side of the island. Their wondering faces raised, they appeared to be asking the reason for its angry unceasing lament. What, whom did it mourn? Why did it continue the wake all this time, shamelessly filling the air with the indecent wailing of a hired mute? Who were its dead? Despairing of finding an answer they would turn away eventually and, leaving the young people romping in the surf, make their way slowly back to the village in time for the car race along the main road.

If you liked these passages from Marshall's novel, you might want to check out another passage I quoted on my other blog to honor the end of Le Blogue Berube. When I get back from my conference and blog vacation, I'll continue with the Hawthorne-Morrison thing, this time finally following through on the issue of specter evidence in "Young Goodman Brown" and Beloved!

Marshall, Devi, and Militant Mourning

Here's a long passage from Paule Marshall's The Chosen Place, The Timeless People, part of which I'll be discussing during my Marshall/Devi talk in Hawaii on Friday, featuring American radical anthropologist Saul Amron's response to Bournehills organic intellectual Merle Kinbona's room as he watches over her while she is in a kind of coma, rendered in free indirect discourse by the semi-omniscient, semi-objective narrator of the novel:

But the room expressed something more, it suddenly seemed to his own overtaxed and exhausted mind, something apart from Merle. It roused in him feelings about Bournehills itself. He thought he suddenly saw the district for what it was at its deepest level, the vague thoughts and impressions of months coming slowly to focus. Like the room it, too, was a kind of museum, a place in which had been stored the relics and remains of the era recorded in the faded prints on the walls [of slave ships and plantation labors and punishments], where one not only felt that other time existing intact, still alive, a palpable presence beneath the everyday reality, but saw it as well at every turn, often without quite realizing it. Bournehills, its shabby woebegone hills and spent land, its odd people who at times seemed other than themselves, might have been selected as the repository of a history which reached beyond it to include the hemisphere north and south.

And it would remain as such. The surface might be jarred as it had been by the events today [the closing of the Cane Vale factory in which the Bournehills natives who own land have traditionally brought the sugar cane they have grown and harvested on their own time to be processed]. People like himself would come seeking to shake it from its centuries-old sleep and it might yield a little. But deep down, at a depth to which only a few would be permitted to penetrate, it would remain fixed and rooted in that other time, serving in this way as a lasting testimony to all that had gone on then: those scenes hanging on the walls, and as a reminder--painful but necessary--that it was not yet over, only the forms had changed, and the real work was still to be done; and finally, as a memorial--crude in the extreme when you considered those ravaged hills and the blight visible everywhere, but no other existed, they had not been thought worthy of one--to the figures bound to the millwheel in the print and to each other in the packed, airless hold of the ship in the drawing.

Only an act on the scale of Cuffee's [leader of a slave revolt that freed Bournehills for a time] could redeem them. And only then would Bournehills itself, its mission fulfilled, perhaps forgo that wounding past and take on the present, the future. But it would hold out until then, resisting, defying all efforts, all the halfway measures, including his, to reclaim it; refusing to settle for anything less than what Cuffee had demanded in his time.

I know this is Close Reading Tuesday and all, but I have to follow this up with a passage from Mahasweta Devi's "Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha," for the juxtaposition of these two passages gets to the heart of my talk's argument about the meaning, significance and stakes of the similarities and differences between Marshall's and her take on militant mourning; in it, Pirtha can be compared to Bournehills, Puran Sahay to Saul Amron, Shankar to Merle Kinbona, and Bikhia to someone like Stinger or the residents of Bourne Island's Harlem Heights, a shanty town on the outskirts of Bourne Island's capital city (italics are reproduced as in the translation, to indicate words in English in the original novella):

Bikhia, the only discoverer of the embodied ancestral soul, gives everyone oil from a small bowl at the point of a twig in a ceremonial way.

Why does this boy observe the same rule in the matter of the form of the ancestral soul as is appropriate to the funeral rites of the formerly living? No one asks this question.

Did he see its death?

No questions asked.

Did he cremate or bury it?

No questions asked.

But the flow of excitement travels like a current of electricity.

Did the soul of the ancestors come in this way? Or didn't it?

Pirtha knows, it knows.

Did they fall into mourning at a dreadful news? Pirtha knows, it knows.

There are many rites after the oil bath, Pirtha will perform them as needed.

Puran realizes that the crisis of the menaced existence of the tribals, of the extinction of their ethnic being, pushed and pushed them toward the dark.

Looking at Bikhia's tawny matted hair, freshly shaven face,he understood they were being defeated as they were searching for a reason for the ruthless unconcern of government and administration. It was then that the shadow of that bird with its wings spread came back as at once myth and analysis.

This is a new myth. For the soul of those long dead will return hundreds of years later in the form of an unknown tired bird. Such a thing is probably not even there in their oral tradition.

But from now on they will wait in their suffering and in evil times for that shadow, otherwise this deception cannot be humanly explained.

Having drawn that stone tablet Bikhia is the guardian of the new myth. He will protect it.

And this mourning, this "oil bath" has given them an assurance. Now something has happened that is their very own, a thing beyond the reach of the understanding and grasp and invasion and plunder of the outsider....

Shankar says softly, "...But we will not leave Pirtha."

He looks around and says, "Why should we leave? Isn't this our place? Now no tribal will leave. The ancestors' soul let us know that all the places it visited are ours. Can anyone leave anymore, or will they leave?"

--Is that what it let you know? Who told you this?

--Bikhia.

Shankar says triumphantly.

Puran shakes and shakes his head. They will not leave, they will not go anywhere leaving those stones, hills, caves, and river. To the fertile fields, to the plains, where there is plenty of water, and many supports for survival.

--If they want to give us aid, let them give it to us here.

Spreading his arms, he says, "All this land was ours, the kings took it from us. They were supposed to return it to us, to whom did they give it back? No, we won't go anywhere. Let them give us our dues here."

Both Devi and Marshall draw intimate connections between mourning and militancy, in these and other passages where it either happens or fails to happen for native or outsider individuals. Where Marshall might be read as celebrating a kind of postcolonial melancholia, or at least a work of mourning so protracted and massive that it takes on aspects of melancholia, Devi might be read as celebrating the completion of the work of mourning, a move from individual and collective despair and depression toward hope and resolve. But both seek to subvert and reimagine classic colonialist and racist stereotypes--of backward, primitive peoples trapped in the past by their irrational attachment to ancestral lands and traditions; of the superiority of civilization, progress, modernity, modernization, development--by showing that trauma has a history and a presence, by showing that mourning has a politics and a promise. In a sense, the apparition and passing of the pterodactyl in Devi's novella plays a similar role that Cuffee Ned's rebellion and leadership during Bournehills' brief period of independence plays in Marshall's novel: both provide material for a new story, a new myth, a new sense of identity to be created out of a past and present that seem to offer little but oppression and exploitation--all of which offer resources for survival and endurance of the repeated repetition of the traumatic history of enslavement and conquest which forms the past of Marshall's novel and, in Puran's vision, at least, the likely future of the people of Pirtha in Devi's novella, long enough to perhaps change or end it.

The distance between the realistic reports the outsider protagonists end up submitting and what Marshall and Devi try to achieve in their fiction--and their relation--is worth developing further. But I'm going back to Hawthorne the next two days, then taking a break from blogging until we return from Hawaii on the 17th. I'll report on how the talk and conference went soon afterwards and then in February devote several posts to breaking the talk down into blog-post-sized chunks. Tomorrow I plan to return to the sea and Hawthorne's relationship to Mukherjee/Conde and Thursday before we leave for Hawaii to the brook in The Scarlet Letter and its relation to Beloved.

What Would Hawthorne Say About Marshall and Devi?

It's heartening to note that after his first two children were born in 1844 and 1846, Hawthorne didn't publish much until The Scarlet Letter in 1850. And that after his third child was born in 1851 he was only able to publish one novel and the Pierce campaign biography until the late 1850s (if you don't count what he did in 1851, which I prefer not to for the purposes of this digressive intro paragraph). Because after today's adventures in moving and settling back in in Fukuoka, it really hit home to me how much we depended on my wife's parents the past two weeks. Except for brief walks to the grocery store and one jackpot visit to the ocal discount shoe store, we didn't need to shop, and when the ladies did, Baba drove them around. Except for the occasional meal, my wife didn't need to cook, as Gigi is the acknowledged master chef of both families. Coming back home to a freezing and food-less apartment and realizing that the incipient migraine my wife was suffering from on the flight would go full-bore if we pushed it today, we sent mom and imoto to bed and dad and onechan to forage for supplies. The walking was fun, actually, and it was warmer outside than inside the apartment when we left, but by the end of our three-hour tour (half of which was playtime for onechan) it was no longer so warm outside, onechan was super-cranky (until she fell asleep), and dad was itching to work. But imoto was missing him and tsuma needed to arrange our three post-Hawaii trips (2 for conferences and 1 for a visit to the sister-in-law in Okinawa and endless sparring with her three Ultraman-Power Ranger-Boukenja-loving sons, ages 9 months to 5 years) and help me wade through the forms I need to fill out for the following academic year, which is why I'm not even starting this till 8:15 pm.

OK, so this has to be fast, as it's basically warm-up writing for the last push on the conference paper tonight and tomorrow before 3 of my last 4 classes of the semester meet on Tuesday and Wednesday. But basically because I have Hawthorne on the brain, I was finding moments in Marshall and Devi that seemed positively Hawthornesque to me. And it got me wondering what Hawthorne would have made of their fiction.

Both Marshall and Devi create memorable characters who are made representative of different groups and situations by the plots of the works they appear in. In The Chosen Place, The Timeless People and Imaginary Maps, at least, both use a semi-omniscient semi-objective third person narrator who's not quite a fully fleshed-out persona, but whose voice is interesting. Both mix historical, political, and psychological insights and write with a sense of the past and its continuing presence that Hawthorne would have found interesting, even if he would have disliked their politics. (I was trying to think of antebellum equivalents--Lydia Maria Child meets Harriet Beecher Stowe meets Margaret Fuller for Devi? William Apess meets Herman Melville meets Martin Delany for Marshall?)

For instance, consider the representation and function of Carnival in CPTP--how might it relate to stories like "My Kinsman, Major Molineux" or sketches like "The Procession of Life"? Or take the haunting of Harriet (mostly by memories from her past) and particularly the last scene we see of her before her presumed suicide--how might it relate to Judge Pyncheon in The House of the Seven Gables? How might Marshall's technique of jumping from one highly charged tableaux-like scene to the next relate to Hawthorne's similar mode of compression in The Scarlet Letter? Or take Devi's creation of representative female tribal figures like Mary Oraon and Douloti in Imaginary Maps--how might these women compare to Hester, Phoebe, Zenobia, and Miriam?

These are just random examples and not even the best, as my mind is already elsewhere. I'm certainly not trying to build a case for influence on Hawthorne's part or conscious re-vision on Marshall's or Devi's part. I'm just wondering what possibilities open up when you put Hawthorne alongside writers whose politics would absolutely oppose his yet whose narrative strategies and literary techniques can be related to his....

Trauma, Mourning, Marshall, Devi

One of the great things about being an academic is that you can do a lot of work in your head. Say imoto--who I may start referring to here as Giggling Science Girl (because she giggles at the drop of the hat and has amazing powers of concentration and observation for an 8-month-old) or Standing-Already Girl (uh, thinking through the Morrison reference there, that would be a no) or maybe just Grabby Girl (nothing is safe from her now that she can crawl and sometimes half-stand half-balance on chairs and small tables or the kotatsu I love to work on because it's heated)--wakes you up at 2 am, but it's too cold in the house to seriously contemplate getting out of bed and firing up the computer, the space heater, and the kotatsu, yet in the time it took to change her diaper and go to the bathroom the cold woke you up enough to get you thinking about everything you have to do the next day, so rather than aimlessly stressing, you can do something productive like come up with an outline for the conference paper you've been working on.

Normally I don't outline when I write. I write down a lot of notes and do a lot of brainstorming by hand, then type them and key notes from my research process into a Word document, type out some key quotations I know I want to use in the paper, and agonize over my introductory paragraph or three until I feel some confidence about my thesis, and then start into the body. When I start again the next day, I edit what I wrote to get warmed up, then pick up where I left off. This process continues until I finish the first draft. Then the serious editing starts. But more on my inefficient and time-consuming writing process later.

For this paper, however, I have to be much more disciplined than usual. Here's what the panel looks like:

Friday
Time: 3:00 - 4:30 PM 1/12/2007 Room: Waikiki III (Marriott)
Session Topic: Postcolonial Identities
Session Chair: Waggaman, Beatrice

Decolonization and Surrealism in Aimé Césaire’s Two Plays: "A Season in the Congo" and "Tragedy of King Christophe”
Waggaman, Beatrice Villanova University

Literary Vestiges of France in the Mississippi Valley
Metzidakis, Stamos Washington University in Saint Louis

Traumatic Displacements and Militant Mourning: Paule Marshall’s The Chosen Place, The Timeless People and Mahasweta Devi’s “Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha”
Simon, Bruce Kyushu University

The Colonial Poems
Puch-Bouwman, Jen The University of the South Pacific

Going third in a 90-minute panel means I have to keep it to 15 minutes, because I can count on the two people ahead of me to go over time (nothing personal, everyone does it) and I don't want the person going last to hate me for the rest of my life.

So here's the outline for the paper:

Outline (15 minutes, 7 pages)
I. Intro (1): key issues, debates, claims
II. Structural Similarities (2): the chart I'm preparing will allow me to do a faster plot summary than usual b/c I'll let my audience read the details
III. Detail Similarities (1): these are bonus details that allow me to clarify I'm not talking about influence and transition into the next, bridge section
IV. Differences (4): summarize via works' different perspectives on and uses of trauma/testimony and mourning/melancholia, using chart and quotes handouts--again, I can let my audience read the details, so I can keep this short
V. Significance of Intertextual Dialogue (3): I can use this section to spell out what I mean by "traumatic displacements" and "militant mourning" and make a case for the theoretical significance of the two works
VI. Stakes of Dialogue (3): the two works together provide a meeting-space for thinking through key issues facing activists and intellectuals today--a space for debate not consensus
VII. Conclusion (1): implications for postcolonial studies, black studies, marxism

Well, this is probably meaningless to anyone but me, but I did promise I'd give the update on the conference paper today. Little did I know when I made the promise that our flight leaves 6 am tomorrow morning, which means we have to get up at 4:30 am, or that the three-year-old's formal photos we put off taking until today would be a two-hour extravaganza, complete with hair (lots of it), make-up (lipstick only!), costumes (kimono and yellow princess dress), and lighting--or that the process would be so fascinating and horrifying at the same time that I had to get it all down on video"tape" and thus would be unable to do any real thinking about the paper during it--or that it would go on so long I'd have little time to write this evening. Long story short, it's time to put the girls to bed! Next post from Kyushu!

And Now for Something Completely Different

The next paragraph's "Faulknerian feat[] of subordination" should not be read by anyone not named Scott Eric Kaufman. If you want to find out what I think about Marshall, Devi, trauma, and mourning, I recommend skipping to the third paragraph. But if you're wondering what a Hawthorne blogger is doing blogging on something and some, uh, two other than Hawthorne, the next paragraph may do. And if you're interested in how not to write when writing a conference paper, the next paragraph will most certainly do. Oh, and if you love it when the author of a blog nobody reads tells inside jokes to himself, the next paragraph is a must-read. (Must fight temptation to tell anecdote about the SF story I wrote for my AP Chemistry class and how easily amused I am. Aaaargh. OK, done. Yes.)

"Old School" readers of this blog (that empty set) will no doubt recall it used to be "mostly about Hawthorne" (and still is, in its technorati profile--I'm that lazy!). New readers (and how do you afford your rock and roll lifestyle, may I ask?)--coming here from such generous linkers (and good titlers) as The Hobgoblin of Little Minds (I'd thank BikeProf in a comments on his post, but one of the annoying features of the new Blogger, one which makes you wonder why they put it in there, is its tendency to freeze when you try to post a comment--or wait, is that just a feature of the ancient computer I'm using here in Chiba?), Old Is the New New, and Quod She--will have already noted that it now is "chiefly about Hawthorne matters" (for reasons I'm sure I'll devote a boring post to when I run out of material for Monday blogging [yes, the obscurest blog in blogoramaville has a programming schedule]). The point is, I'm delivering a paper in Hawaii on traumatic displacements and militant mourning in Paule Marshall's 1969 novel, The Chosen Place, The Timeless People and Mahasweta Devi's "Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha," a short story translated into English by Gayatri Spivak in 1995 for Imaginary Maps in T-minus, oh, less than 8 days, so the Hawthorne blogging is going to be kept to a minimum the next few days as I try to tame the formless monster that began as a paper at the 1996 American Studies Association convention on trauma and diaspora in CPTP, evolved into a submission to a collection of essays that to my knowledge was never published, morphed into a paper I was planning to insert into one of the collections of essays that I'm supposed to be co-editing, and then refused to copy itself onto the memory stick that I brought to Japan last August, forcing me to start from scratch this semester as I bring in a new topic and new writer to an already-far-too-complex (and possibly lost) old essay. So good ol' Intertextual Thursday is going to begin the project of helping me not embarrass myself more than I normally do at academic conferences, even if the main purpose of this one is to see my parents and let them see their grandkids for the only time between the Augusts of 2006 and 2007. Oh, and to make up for my most humiliating job interview ever, during which I established personal records, hopefully never to be challenged again, in the categories of inability to think on one's feet, inability to hide how flustered one is, and rapidity with which one gives up on oneself in an interview. That's all.

Anyway, my third attempt to begin this post will begin, as I tend to do here, with a quotation. It's from my conference proposal that got accepted (with a close-to-$400 registration fee, I suspect most proposals get accepted--not that that's a bad thing--so judge for yourself whether mine is any good):

Although intellectuals and activists working to define and contest the boundaries and methodologies of postcolonial studies have since its inception emphasized the comparative, transnational, and indeed global nature of the field, they have so far failed to analyze together two works of literature that offer profound meditations on the meaning, significance, and stakes of colonial/racialized trauma/testimony and mourning/melancholia in their respective times and places: Paule Marshall's novel The Chosen Place, The Timeless People for the post-independence Anglophone Caribbean and Mahasweta Devi's "Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha" for post-independence India. This failure represents a missed opportunity to bring together not only two quite different colonial/post-colonial histories and regions but also two vibrant fields of study with quite relateable trajectories.

This paper proposes to show how Marshall's and Devi's texts both represent and enact the best kinds of literary, historical, ethical, and political connections and relations postcolonial theorists, critics and scholars have been calling for, marking out, and arguing over for the past two decades. In so doing, I will suggest a certain exemplarity in the intertextual dialogue between The Chosen Place, The Timeless People and "Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha," one that has serious implications for future developments specifically in postcolonial studies and more generally in the humanities. Attending to the formal, structural, and indeed theoretical similarities between the two works will allow me to address such pressing debates within postcolonial studies as how to recognize colonialisms' impact on differently colonized groups along with the deep structures of resistance practiced by such groups, how to assess nationalist, internationalist, and transnationalist forms of resistance, and how to respond to the difficult divisions between activists from the metropole and subjects in the periphery. But it will also allow me to address such pressing debates over postcolonial studies as its intellectual and political origins, geographical and historical scope, relation to other fields, and potential for transforming both academic practices and institutions and their publics.

It may seem that I am asking a medium-length novel and a long short story to carry an inordinate amount of weight in my argument. But a quick glance at their quite similar plots and themes alone should dispel this view. Marshall's and Devi's works, although produced in different decades and regions, in response to two quite different forms of colonialism and two ambiguously (post)colonial temporalities, tell basically the same story: a well-informed and well-intentioned activist from the metropole (in the former, a radical Philadelphia anthropologist who leverages the desperation of his philanthropist funders for a success story, not to mention a tax break, into control over an alternative-to-modernization development project in the Bournehills region of a Caribbean island suspiciously like 1960s Barbados that aims to build from local knowledge and practices, empower the poorest of the poor agricultural workers in the region, and model ecological, economic, and political sustainability; in the latter, a radical urban journalist who leverages his activist and government connections to travel to and report on the failure of public and private aid efforts in a famine-stricken tribal region suspiciously like 1980s India) slowly comes to realize the profundity of the limitations of his original project (due to local, national, regional, and international politics in the Cold War era), suffers a crisis with a female lover (the former on-island; the latter long-distance), experiences reality-bending events (the former a metaphorical 'road to Damascus' conversion experience; the latter a quite magically real encounter with the 'last of the pterodactyls'), and most importantly bears witness to the historical and contemporary trauma of the rural people of the region, yet finds himself unable to offer any kind of testimony to the world outside the region. The most both sympathetically-portrayed metropolitan intellectuals can offer to the people of the region is a kind of barely articulate recognition of what they have come to dimly understand as a massive mourning project by those people for centuries-old failed rebellions against enslaving/colonizing forces.

Even this bare structuralist analysis gestures toward the deeply entangled meanings, significances, and stakes of this common Marshall-Devi story of colonial/racialized trauma/testimony and mourning/melancholia. Teasing them out and using them to take positions on crucial issues within and over the past, present, and future of postcolonial studies--and their implications for both research and teaching in and curricula and institutions of the humanities--is the project of this paper.

OK, so, sound interesting? Anyone read either or both of these works? Or heard of these authors? Thought to analyze them together? Done so? I'm under the no-doubt-mistaken impression that I am actually the first to do this. I'm happy to find out I'm wrong b/c it'll save me loads of time and space in the article that will someday follow from this....

Oh, and before I start, let me note that I've already criticized my earlier Intertextual Thursday postings as not living up to their billing--not "really" being intertextual. I've failed to do more than identify links between two works (here, The Scarlet Letter and Beloved, a much-travelled path, but one on which there is always something new to notice)--failed, that is, to explore what follows from them. As you can see from my conference proposal, years of commenting on failed comparison-contrast papers from students have vaccinated me, if you will, against falling into this trap in the genre of proposal-writing. But following through on the promises made in proposals like this one, in a way that will be satisfying both to me and my audience (assuming I have one--my 1996 Marshall paper, for instance, featured a smaller audience than panel, and two-thirds of the audience was made up of friends of mine), is the challenge facing me this week. It's not just an issue of making my balky (and nebulous and missing--cf. 2nd para if you were foolish enough to actually skip it!) prose "talky" or of concisely introducing my audience to two authors and works, two regions and traditions of social/cultural analysis of them, two theoretical concepts and two intellectual/activist projects concisely enough to leave me enough time to develop and support my claims convincingly. It's the challenge of balancing enumeration of similarities and differences with tallying of meanings, significances, and stakes with the taking and defending of positions in academic and more-than-academic wars of position.

So I'll let you "all" see the "draft" this Saturday (even if it doesn't deserve the name), in a slightly revised version of CitizenSE's Latest Crazy Hawthorne Idea. Hopefully I'll be able to actually come up with a decent ending to one of my posts on this blog that day. I may actually have to hold myself to some standards if people are actually reading this blog!