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?

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.

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.

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!]