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....

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.

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.

Have Some Fun While I'm in Sendai

Hey kids, you know I'm feeling good about this Saturday's almost-finished talk when I was confident enough this afternoon to interrupt my final edits for a half an hour to announce this contest over at Mostly Harmless. Figure some of the literary/theoretical folks on the CitizenSE blogroll might enjoy taking part in an effort to produce the best parody of Hilton Kramer blaming postmodernism for the Bush administration--or more generally the best parody of a Bush administration dead-ender trying to come up with a fig leaf for finally jumping ship. Betcha ya didn't know Hawthorne would approve of such a contest....

Why, Indeed?

Yes, well, given that I have a draft due tomorrow (late, of course), the final version due Thursday evening (even later) and the talk in Sendai on Saturday (how did March 3 come so soon?!), don't expect me to be blogging much this week, either. But what I can do is try to explain what an antebellum (and earlier) U.S. literature specialist is doing participating in a lecture series sponsored by the Tohoku Association for American Studies on "The United States of America: Its Present and Future," talking about "The End of the American Century in Contemporary U.S. Literatures."

Here's the abstract for the talk:

My talk surveys the ways in which nine contemporary American women novelists have represented and reimagined new world slavery, borders, and history. In it, I show how Paule Marshall, Gayl Jones, and Toni Morrison have renavigated Atlantic slavery; how Gloria Anzaldua, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Karen Tei Yamashita have remapped North American borders, and how Maryse Conde, Bharati Mukherjee, and Octavia Butler have rewritten "American" history. At stake in these efforts, I argue, is more than a reconsideration of the American literary canon or the relationships among U.S. literatures. It is, more crucially, a break with the assumptions of the American Century and the first steps toward a transnational, postcolonial history of the Americas, and the world, since Columbus.

First obvious connection to my writing on this blog: Paule Marshall and Toni Morrison.

Second obvious connection: "postcolonial."

Third, less obvious (unless you've checked out my home page), connection: the talks and teaching I've done, conveniently summarized for you on my c.v..

What do these suggest? That in my teaching and research, I am about as familiar with the not-quite-latest U.S. literatures as I am with the not-quite-earliest, if not with the scholarship (much less the bloggership) on the former. That I particularly like to write and teach about the ways in which recent U.S. literatures establish dialogues with older literatures and histories. And that this talk is something of an attempt to convey to a general audience why they should be as interested as I am in the authors and issues I address in it.

Part of the impetus for the talk also comes from my (admittedly limited) knowledge of the American literary canon in Japanese universities, which I addressed a bit in terms of Hawthorne not that many posts ago. From what I've seen, there isn't much interest in teaching American literature after modernism, or, to hedge my bets a bit, that there are far more resources devoted to pre-1960 than post-1960 U.S. literatures. And that even in the post-1960 courses, there's less attention paid to the "multicultural" and "multiethnic" dimensions of contemporary American literary culture in Japan than in the U.S. So part of what I want to accomplish in the talk is get my audience excited about nine fairly recent women novelists who I believe represent a new trend, if not quite a new movement, in American literature today, and do my little part to help expand and rethink the Japanese American literary canon.

But part of the impetus also comes from the ways in which received notions of identity politics (as always-already essentialist, exclusionary, divisive, cooptable, opposed to class politics, etc.) have affected reactions to these and other writers in the U.S. and Japan. That is, I've seen a tendency among some contemporary and twentieth-century Americanists to deploy this negative sense of identity politics to delineate an emerging post-1960 U.S. literary canon that purportedly avoids its traps. Writers like Bellow, DeLillo, Doctorow, Mailer, Nabokov, Pynchon, Roth, and Updike are in for their virtuosity, longevity, ability to contain multitudes in their fiction, and so on, while non-white-male authors' fame rests on their not being white males more than on their talents. According to my colleague Adrienne McCormick, you can see similar moves in poetry criticism in the 1970s through 1990s, as well, particularly criticism that attempts to differentiate theoretical from multicultural/multiethnic poetry and valorize the former. So what I want to try to get at in my talk is where I see the nine non-white, non-male writers I'm focusing on differing from this admittedly rear-guard effort to establish a "traditional" post-1960s U.S. literary canon--and to do so in formal, thematic, and political terms. Ultimately, I want to suggest that the attempt to establish a "traditional" post-1960 U.S. novel canon is itself a kind of identity politics, and that we need a different way of demarcating "periods" in the post-WW II U.S. novel than those that received notions of identity politics tend to provide us with.

This is where my title's invocation of "The End of the American Century" comes in. I want to argue in my talk that we can identify a period in U.S. literatures that runs from, say, 1945-1995, which I'll call "The American Century." And that the novelists I'm focusing on, whose works span roughly 1965 to the present, are in some ways posing an alternative to the novels of the American Century and in other ways part of an emerging period that I at first thought to call "The Atlantic Century" but have since decided not to attempt to give a name to it (with the Black Atlantic and the Asian Pacific being so popular, and no clear sense of how long this new period will last, as it's still ongoing, "Atlantic Century" seemed wrong on many counts). "New World Literature" springs to mind, as well, but it's still not very good. Anyway, my point is not names but what it means to be writing from within the American Century (even if you're writing against its assumptions) and what it means to stop writing from within it.

More on this...later.

What Would Hawthorne Say About a Two-Week Blog Hiatus?

Not much. Nothing compared to the dents on his writing schedule caused by Brook Farm or his various political appointments. Don't sweat it. (He'd probably appreciate the irony that CitizenSE's average daily hit count didn't decline all that much over the past two weeks, as well.)