Hobgoblin Brought Down by Little Minds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

***

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

Six-Word Spoilers

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

Walk in woods: no good end.

He loved her? WTF?!

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

She learned to love the letter.

Their marriage ends families' feud--hopefully.

Obsessed scientist purifies wife, killing her.

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

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

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.