Sometimes a Hawthorne blog just needs to relax and revel in the cuteness at the end of a nice spring day. Perhaps onechan is a little Pearl-like in what follows, interjecting herself into an adult conversation and all, perhaps not.
***
SCENE: Last night, at spaghetti place in YouMe [Dream] Town Plaza (a mall). CONSTRUCTIVIST, TSUMA, and ONECHAN waiting for food to arrive. IMOTO happily chomping on spoon. Somehow the conversation has turned to the concept of kawaii [cuteness].
TSUMA: A Japanese celebrity was saying on tv that the meaning of "kawaii" has changed over the years. It used to mean "kawauso"--pitiful--but lately it's become a word that Japanese teenage girls use to bond over. It's like showing you're part of the group.
CONSTRUCTIVIST: So is it possible to disagree over whether something is cute? Like, would you ever say, "kawakunai" [not cute]?
TSUMA: Kawaikunai.
CONSTRUCTIVIST: [realizing once again he has a lot of studying to do before taking the placement test in April] Yes.
ONECHAN: It's like gucha-gucha skaato. [TSUMA laughs.]
CONSTRUCTIVIST: What? What does that mean?
ONECHAN: Gu-cha...gu-cha. [CONSTRUCTIVIST looks at TSUMA.]
TSUMA: Wrinkled.
ONECHAN: Gucha-gucha skaato. Kawaikunai.
CONSTRUCTIVIST: [Pause, then gets it.] Ah, a wrinkled skirt isn't cute!
TSUMA: I wonder if that's what the older girls at the yochien have been telling her?
***
Would have staged this scene at Mostly Harmless, but have been doing so much daddy blogging there lately it was starting to read like a diary. Plus it would have completely overshadowed my not-quite-live-blogging the PGA and LPGA tournaments that are coming to a close today at Doral and Superstition Mountain, respectively.
Certainly Hawthorne appreciated the power of little kids to steal scenes--after The Scarlet Letter, did he ever give one a prominent and repeating role in any of his later novels? I'm too frustrated over the state of my internet access tonight and eager to check the golf results to answer that myself!
Sunday, March 25, 2007
What Would Hawthorne Say About This?
Pandagon Weekend Blogging: sweetness and light from Berube.
WAAGNFNP Weekend Blogging: defeat and despair from JP Stormcrow.
Just wondering.
WAAGNFNP Weekend Blogging: defeat and despair from JP Stormcrow.
Just wondering.
Saturday, March 24, 2007
From Narratorial Racial Aesthetics to Authorial Racial Politics (Part III)
For earlier posts in this series, click the "Old News" label. We're jumping right in today at the end of Chapter 2!
***
So where has this exploration of the narrator’s explicit racism and implicit racialism gotten us? Has it helped us answer the question of Hawthorne’s racism, or only raised its stakes? Assuming for the moment that Hawthorne shares his narrator’s views, is our only response that in matters of race as opposed to aesthetics, Hawthorne consistently “reinforc[ed] wrong by a blindness which seems the very counterpart of his clear vision in his own realm”? Or has the strict separation between politics and aesthetics implicit in this answer been rendered untenable, given the intimate interrelation between the picturesque and racialism we have just witnessed in “Old News”? But is the assumption that Hawthorne shares all his narrator’s views warranted? Might he only share some of them--or perhaps even none? If Hawthorne is neither as racist nor as obtuse as his narrator, could he actually be seeking to undercut his views? If so, which ones?
We may begin to answer these questions by emphasizing the author/narrator distinction and assuming that Hawthorne was not simply expressing his own views in “Old News.” Indeed, recent trends in Hawthorne scholarship encourage us to believe that this may not be an arbitrary assumption. As Allison Easton has characterized the tales and sketches comprising Hawthorne's early unpublished collection, The Story Teller,
Easton’s survey of Hawthorne’s earliest fiction suggests that at the very least he was exploring different narrative personae for purposes of artistic exploration and that at most he was creating different narrative persona for particular historiographical or political ends.
A rapid survey of early historical sketches not connected with the Story Teller project that nevertheless engage colonial American history in a manner similar to “Old News” illustrates the degree to which the attitudes of Hawthorne’s narrators determine the way the same events are reported. The Puritanic narrator of “Dr. Bullivant” (1831), like the anti-Puritan narrator of “Old News,” focuses on transformations in the American colonies, but this time in the 1670s, which he describes in terms of the traditional narrative of declension, blaming the escalating “degeneracy” of the times on the “increasing commercial importance of the colonies, whither a new set of emigrants followed unworthily in the track of the pure-hearted Puritans” (36-37). By contrast, the anti-aristocratic narrator of “Sir William Pepperell” (1833) attributes the corruption of the Puritan errand not to the 1670s but to the period of the French and Indian Wars, describing the effects of the war in precisely the same terms that the pro-aristocratic narrator of “Old News” would describe the Revolutionary War (170-171). Similarly, Hawthorne would return to the period of the French and Indian Wars in “Old Ticonderoga” (1836) and “A Bell’s Biography” (1837), treating the landscape in much the same way as he treated the colonial newspapers in “Old News” in the former travel narrative (385-389) and utilizing a vigorously pro-democracy narrator in the latter who emphasizes the equality of man (480-486). And all the events in “Old News” are reported in Grandfather’s Chair (1841)--including a similar description of New England slavery--except that here it is the 1730s rather than the 1750s that are characterized as Anglophilic and luxurious, and in no complimentary terms: “the simplicity of the good old Puritan times was fast disappearing” in the face of “a pompous and artificial mode of life, among those who could afford it.”
If this brief survey warrants the claim that Hawthorne’s views do not completely coincide with the narrator’s in “Old News,” then a range of possibilities emerges. Perhaps, like the narrator in the third section, Hawthorne is trying in the first section to “exemplify, without softening a single prejudice proper to the character which we assumed,” that those who held to the racial attitudes of eighteenth-century New England “were men greatly to be pitied, and often worthy of our sympathy” (274). Perhaps Hawthorne is attempting to unsettle his anti-slavery readers with the same kind of temporal leaps that the narrator describes at the opening of the third section, when he moved from immersing himself in the “monarchical and aristocratic sentiments” of the 1750s to examining newspapers from the 1770s, in which “such sentiments had long been deemed a sin and shame” (269). Perhaps, that is, Hawthorne is trying to immerse his readers in the racist and pro-slavery sentiments of the 1730s, so that they, too, feel “as if the leap were more than figurative” and come away temporarily “tinctured . . . with antique prejudices”––in other words, so that they better understand the force and appeal of such sentiments (269). Perhaps, then, just as the narrator is trying to exonerate loyalists in the late 1770s, Hawthorne is also trying to make his readers experience how “pardonable” it was for Puritans to have been slave-holders in the late 1730s (274). In this view, Hawthorne would see his role as akin to the narrator’s--to defend unpopular past views from uncharitable presentist readings.
Or perhaps what he is trying to do is more subtle and less supportive of the narrator’s views. Perhaps, that is, Hawthorne is dramatizing the way in which the narrator moves from trying to gain an understanding of a position that was scoffed at in nineteenth-century New England, to sympathizing with it, and finally to advocating it. Perhaps, then, what happens in the first section of “Old News” is a similar, but implicit, version of the process the narrator explicitly glosses at the opening of the third section: “Our late course of reading has tinctured us, for the moment, with antique prejudices” (269). According to this view, Hawthorne sees his role as demonstrating the power of reading to contaminate temporarily the narrator’s--and by extension, any reader’s--thinking. Rather than sharing his narrator’s sympathies for and clumsy advocacy of eighteenth-century New England slavery, he is simply attempting to show how the narrator came to hold such views.
Or perhaps Hawthorne is more subversive than analytical toward his narrator’s perspective. Perhaps he is suggesting that the racism of the first section is precisely one of those “antique prejudices” to which the narrator’s problematic historicist proclivities make him particularly susceptible. Perhaps, that is, “Old News” is a critique of the narrator’s style of and attitude toward historicization. In his effort to find instances of merriment and beauty to brighten his view of what he imagines as a Puritan-dominated 1730s, he is willing to excuse, and indeed aestheticize, the slavery in which “the merriest part of the population” is held, seeing it as “a patriarchal, and almost a beautiful, peculiarity of the times” (256, 257). According to this view, Hawthorne would be emphasizing the contrast between the narrator’s sarcastic invocation of beauty in the third section (“It is the beauty of war, for men to commit mutual havoc with undisturbed good humor” [274]) with his earlier willingness to see New England slavery as beautiful--in order to imply that the narrator himself is committing “havoc with undisturbed good humor.” Perhaps, then, the joke is really on the narrator, for, like the “specimens of New-England humor” he dismisses as “wearisome” (252), his own attempts at ethnic humor are also “laboriously light and lamentably mirthful; as if some very sober person, in his zeal to be merry, were dancing a jig to the tune of a funeral-psalm” (252). Perhaps, that is, Hawthorne is framing the narrator’s own “zeal to be merry” in the first section of “Old News” as something akin to dancing a jig to the tune of the funeral-psalm of racist enslavement and supplantation.
Perhaps.
***
To be continued....
***
So where has this exploration of the narrator’s explicit racism and implicit racialism gotten us? Has it helped us answer the question of Hawthorne’s racism, or only raised its stakes? Assuming for the moment that Hawthorne shares his narrator’s views, is our only response that in matters of race as opposed to aesthetics, Hawthorne consistently “reinforc[ed] wrong by a blindness which seems the very counterpart of his clear vision in his own realm”? Or has the strict separation between politics and aesthetics implicit in this answer been rendered untenable, given the intimate interrelation between the picturesque and racialism we have just witnessed in “Old News”? But is the assumption that Hawthorne shares all his narrator’s views warranted? Might he only share some of them--or perhaps even none? If Hawthorne is neither as racist nor as obtuse as his narrator, could he actually be seeking to undercut his views? If so, which ones?
We may begin to answer these questions by emphasizing the author/narrator distinction and assuming that Hawthorne was not simply expressing his own views in “Old News.” Indeed, recent trends in Hawthorne scholarship encourage us to believe that this may not be an arbitrary assumption. As Allison Easton has characterized the tales and sketches comprising Hawthorne's early unpublished collection, The Story Teller,
The artist figures of the early 1830s are . . . critically presented[;] their views are tested and their poses not necessarily validated. These narrative figures are personae adopted as deliberate exercises in point of view, much as the narrator in ‘Old News’ opts to tell the last part of the sketch through the eyes and voice of an old Tory. This strategy is further developed in the sketches in particular, which set out to explore how the scenes would look through different people’s eyes.
Easton’s survey of Hawthorne’s earliest fiction suggests that at the very least he was exploring different narrative personae for purposes of artistic exploration and that at most he was creating different narrative persona for particular historiographical or political ends.
A rapid survey of early historical sketches not connected with the Story Teller project that nevertheless engage colonial American history in a manner similar to “Old News” illustrates the degree to which the attitudes of Hawthorne’s narrators determine the way the same events are reported. The Puritanic narrator of “Dr. Bullivant” (1831), like the anti-Puritan narrator of “Old News,” focuses on transformations in the American colonies, but this time in the 1670s, which he describes in terms of the traditional narrative of declension, blaming the escalating “degeneracy” of the times on the “increasing commercial importance of the colonies, whither a new set of emigrants followed unworthily in the track of the pure-hearted Puritans” (36-37). By contrast, the anti-aristocratic narrator of “Sir William Pepperell” (1833) attributes the corruption of the Puritan errand not to the 1670s but to the period of the French and Indian Wars, describing the effects of the war in precisely the same terms that the pro-aristocratic narrator of “Old News” would describe the Revolutionary War (170-171). Similarly, Hawthorne would return to the period of the French and Indian Wars in “Old Ticonderoga” (1836) and “A Bell’s Biography” (1837), treating the landscape in much the same way as he treated the colonial newspapers in “Old News” in the former travel narrative (385-389) and utilizing a vigorously pro-democracy narrator in the latter who emphasizes the equality of man (480-486). And all the events in “Old News” are reported in Grandfather’s Chair (1841)--including a similar description of New England slavery--except that here it is the 1730s rather than the 1750s that are characterized as Anglophilic and luxurious, and in no complimentary terms: “the simplicity of the good old Puritan times was fast disappearing” in the face of “a pompous and artificial mode of life, among those who could afford it.”
If this brief survey warrants the claim that Hawthorne’s views do not completely coincide with the narrator’s in “Old News,” then a range of possibilities emerges. Perhaps, like the narrator in the third section, Hawthorne is trying in the first section to “exemplify, without softening a single prejudice proper to the character which we assumed,” that those who held to the racial attitudes of eighteenth-century New England “were men greatly to be pitied, and often worthy of our sympathy” (274). Perhaps Hawthorne is attempting to unsettle his anti-slavery readers with the same kind of temporal leaps that the narrator describes at the opening of the third section, when he moved from immersing himself in the “monarchical and aristocratic sentiments” of the 1750s to examining newspapers from the 1770s, in which “such sentiments had long been deemed a sin and shame” (269). Perhaps, that is, Hawthorne is trying to immerse his readers in the racist and pro-slavery sentiments of the 1730s, so that they, too, feel “as if the leap were more than figurative” and come away temporarily “tinctured . . . with antique prejudices”––in other words, so that they better understand the force and appeal of such sentiments (269). Perhaps, then, just as the narrator is trying to exonerate loyalists in the late 1770s, Hawthorne is also trying to make his readers experience how “pardonable” it was for Puritans to have been slave-holders in the late 1730s (274). In this view, Hawthorne would see his role as akin to the narrator’s--to defend unpopular past views from uncharitable presentist readings.
Or perhaps what he is trying to do is more subtle and less supportive of the narrator’s views. Perhaps, that is, Hawthorne is dramatizing the way in which the narrator moves from trying to gain an understanding of a position that was scoffed at in nineteenth-century New England, to sympathizing with it, and finally to advocating it. Perhaps, then, what happens in the first section of “Old News” is a similar, but implicit, version of the process the narrator explicitly glosses at the opening of the third section: “Our late course of reading has tinctured us, for the moment, with antique prejudices” (269). According to this view, Hawthorne sees his role as demonstrating the power of reading to contaminate temporarily the narrator’s--and by extension, any reader’s--thinking. Rather than sharing his narrator’s sympathies for and clumsy advocacy of eighteenth-century New England slavery, he is simply attempting to show how the narrator came to hold such views.
Or perhaps Hawthorne is more subversive than analytical toward his narrator’s perspective. Perhaps he is suggesting that the racism of the first section is precisely one of those “antique prejudices” to which the narrator’s problematic historicist proclivities make him particularly susceptible. Perhaps, that is, “Old News” is a critique of the narrator’s style of and attitude toward historicization. In his effort to find instances of merriment and beauty to brighten his view of what he imagines as a Puritan-dominated 1730s, he is willing to excuse, and indeed aestheticize, the slavery in which “the merriest part of the population” is held, seeing it as “a patriarchal, and almost a beautiful, peculiarity of the times” (256, 257). According to this view, Hawthorne would be emphasizing the contrast between the narrator’s sarcastic invocation of beauty in the third section (“It is the beauty of war, for men to commit mutual havoc with undisturbed good humor” [274]) with his earlier willingness to see New England slavery as beautiful--in order to imply that the narrator himself is committing “havoc with undisturbed good humor.” Perhaps, then, the joke is really on the narrator, for, like the “specimens of New-England humor” he dismisses as “wearisome” (252), his own attempts at ethnic humor are also “laboriously light and lamentably mirthful; as if some very sober person, in his zeal to be merry, were dancing a jig to the tune of a funeral-psalm” (252). Perhaps, that is, Hawthorne is framing the narrator’s own “zeal to be merry” in the first section of “Old News” as something akin to dancing a jig to the tune of the funeral-psalm of racist enslavement and supplantation.
Perhaps.
***
To be continued....
Thursday, March 22, 2007
Liverpool, the Slave Trade, and Hawthorne
More lazy blogging and blegging today! This time it's inspired by a short article in the 21 March 2007 Japan Times that gives a brief history of Liverpool and the slave trade; an online version isn't available, but you can check the history out for yourself here, here, here, and here (for starters). What does this have to do with Hawthorne? Let me quote from the end of the first chapter of my manuscript:
One of the things I have to do is find out if anyone has addressed this issue since I last researched it. Besides the resources I have at the three universities in Fukuoka I'll be teaching at in a few weeks, there's also Google Scholar. So I have some fun detective work ahead of me the next few weeks! Anyone want to help me out by pointing me to the best sources? Do I need to schedule a research trip to Liverpool?
Hawthorne’s comments in a letter of June 14, 1854, to George Sanders, an opponent of abolition, neatly encapsulate many of the issues we have been tracking in this chapter. In one sense, Hawthorne’s remarks seem uncannily applicable to his own career. Sanders, who had rebuked the exiled Italian revolutionary leader Giuseppi Mazzini for implicitly criticizing U.S. slavery in a public letter to an English abolitionist society, asked Louis Kossuth (who had taken a neutral position on slavery in his celebrated tour of the United States) for his response to Mazzini’s remarks, and then sent all the relevant materials to Hawthorne, requesting his opinion of them. After praising Sanders’s own response in his letter to Mazzini, Hawthorne continued:Now, as to Kossuth’s reply, I do not know but that I ought likewise to be satisfied with that. . . . I do not like it well enough to be glad that he has written it. Is it quite worthy of him? Does he not trim and truckle a little? Will not both parties in America see that he does so?--or suspect it and accuse him of it, whether justly or not? Doubtless, he says nothing but what is perfectly true; but yet it has not the effect of frank and outspoken truth. I wish he had commenced his reply with a sturdier condemnation of slavery; it would have operated as a stronger sanction to what follows.
Of what sort of consequence is my opinion? But there it is.
Perhaps Hawthorne’s own position on slavery could be seen as analogous to Kossuth’s; as a Northerner, practically a foreigner to Southern society, Hawthorne simply kept his abhorrence of slavery to himself, maintaining neutrality for the sake of maintaining the Union. Perhaps he even was offering a subtle critique of his own writings on slavery in his response to Kossuth’s letter, wishing that he himself had offered “a sturdier condemnation of slavery” so that his position for neutrality would not be mistaken as anti-black or pro-slavery. Certainly, this is a sentiment many of Hawthorne’s readers would endorse; like Hawthorne on Kossuth, they, too, often seem to be wishing that Hawthorne had “trim[med] and truckle[d]” less, so that his own positions would have the “effect of frank and outspoken truth.”
In addition to reading Hawthorne’s letter as a subtle admission of regret or an allegory for our own dilemmas as critics who want to see in Hawthorne a ratification of our own values and beliefs, we might also treat the letter as a clue to the social circles in which Hawthorne traveled as consul to Liverpool during the Pierce administration. We know, for instance, that London consul Robert Campbell was suspected of Confederate sympathies, and that Hawthorne’s successor at Liverpool, Nathaniel Beverly Tucker, was a Confederate agent. Hawthorne’s question to Sanders, “Of what sort of consequence is my opinion?” not only may be another version of his characteristic self-deprecating humor, but may also have been implying a set of genuine and pointed questions: Who wants to know? Why did you ask my opinion? How will you make use of this letter? To my knowledge, no study of Hawthorne carefully considers the full range of his activities in Liverpool, the former slavery capital of the world, and one of the last bastions of pro-slave-trade politics in early nineteenth-century England. By the time Hawthorne arrived, of course, times had changed. But it would be an interesting project to consider which Liverpool Hawthorne saw. What I am trying to suggest is that treating the question of Hawthorne’s racial politics in the most pedestrian, practically empiricist manner--in terms of the people and projects with which he aligned himself at different times and in different places--may be the best way of investigating them.
One of the things I have to do is find out if anyone has addressed this issue since I last researched it. Besides the resources I have at the three universities in Fukuoka I'll be teaching at in a few weeks, there's also Google Scholar. So I have some fun detective work ahead of me the next few weeks! Anyone want to help me out by pointing me to the best sources? Do I need to schedule a research trip to Liverpool?
New Worlds for All: Encounters and Plantation (1492-1776)
Picking up from my latest latest crazy idea post, I want to spend a little more time discussing the understanding of American literature I was trying to convey at the end of my Sendai talk. I plan to go through each of the periods I identified there in separate posts over the next few weeks, starting with the first today. But before that a bit from early in the talk where I explained why I like "The American Century" rather than "postmodern culture" or "Cold War culture" as the name for the period comprising mid-to-late (or later) twentieth-century U.S. literatures. It sets up rather concisely and specifically the way I'm thinking about periodization in general:
By the time I returned to these issues at the end of the talk, all I had time to mention about the first period--"New Worlds for All: Encounters and Plantation (1492-1776)"--was: "As Anzaldua, Conde, Silko, and Yamashita show, encounters between European explorers, traders, and settlers with indigenous Americans and with enslaved Africans took place across the hemisphere, and different kinds of plantation complexes emerged."
Today I would add "creole cultures and" before "plantation complexes" and would have made it clearer that my name for the period was borrowed from the title of a Colin Calloway book. And if I hadn't been so pressed for time, I would have noted that in this sentence, I was condensing several courses' worth of material and engaging new scholarship on early America (particularly Thomas Bender's A Nation Among Nations, Tony Hall's The American Empire and the Fourth World, and Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker's The Many-Headed Hydra). In fact, if I had been speaking in the talk to specialists rather than members of the public who happened to be involved in Tohoku University's Open University program that semester, I would have divided this huge colonial Americas (Columbus to Declaration of Independence) period into several and been more specific about my acknowledgement that the closing date for each set of national literatures would change depending on when each American nation's independence movement formally began. And I would have discussed the larger curricular context in which I believe this literary focus should be embedded: an approach to the history of the Americas that does for students something like what Charles Mann's 1491 (and the new scholarship it attempts to survey and popularize) does for its readers, namely, try to offer a non-Eurocentric history of the Americas before the Europeans' arrival.
This is because in order to identify what made Columbus's arrival the beginning of "new worlds for all," one must compare pre- and post-1492. What was it about the initial and ongoing encounters among European explorers, traders, settlers, and indigenous Americans that lead to so many changes around the world and in the hemisphere? What creole cultures and plantation complexes emerged as Europeans, Africans, and Americans (each grouping characterized by relatively equal--and quite large--spans of cultural, social, and political diversity) continued to interact with each other (in all kinds of ways)?
So that's a precis of the way I'm conceptualizing the "first" period in American literary history. Please see my courses for more details on how I've taught these issues in the past. If anyone wants access to the ANGEL space of my Introduction to American Studies course from the fall, where I pulled a lot of my ideas for the talk together--particularly in the recommended readings not mentioned on the syllabi--feel free to contact me. I also have a brief bibliography of new work on the colonial Americas period that I can email to anyone who's interested. Some of the most interesting and influential work in American Studies has been going on in this period over the past couple of decades, so I'll be returning to it after a tour through the later ones.
The standard way of dating the origins of the “American Century” is to go back to Henry Luce’s pre-Pearl Harbor 1941 essay of that title, in which he argued that America needed to take up its responsibility to advance freedom and prosperity throughout the world. Proponents of this view thus hold it to be an anti-totalitarian concept, tied both to America’s subsequent fights in World War II against fascist regimes and in the Cold War against communist ones. Radical historians tend to date its origins earlier, to the 1898 liberation of the Philippines from Spanish rule and subsequent multi-year occupation to put down a Filipino independence movement. Hence, they consider the American Century to be a much more ambiguous if not imperialist concept. For now, I’m less interested in the “American Century” as a contested concept and more in the way it provides us with a useful name for a period that has posed major problems for U.S. literary historians. Most agree that modernism was the defining literary movement of the early twentieth century in the U.S. and Europe, but when did that period end and what name should the new period following it be given? The two most popular alternatives, postmodern culture and Cold War culture, both have and raise problems.
Postmodernism is a vague and baggy term that meant different things in post-W.W. II literature than it did in architecture, literary criticism, theory, or the dozens of other specialized discourse communities in which it was first used. Moreover, using it to name a period commits you to a movement-centered approach to literary history--say, from neoclassicism and gothicism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries to romanticism and transcendentalism in the mid-19th century, to realism and naturalism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to modernism and postmodernism in the rest of the 20th century. This can hide the existence of or distort the features of other literary movements in each period, misleadingly imply that older movements don’t continue into later periods, and present literary history as if it were completely separate or autonomous from other histories.
Using the Cold War to name a period avoids these problems, but commits you to a larger periodization scheme based on wars--say, from the Revolutionary War to the War of 1812 (1776-1815), then to the Civil War (1815-1865), then to World War I (1865-1918), then to World War II (1918-1945), then to the Cold War (1945-1989). This not only downplays the significance of major wars like the Mexican and Spanish-American wars, but also forces you to shoehorn literary history into the confines of military history. Including wars you think are important runs as much of a risk of putting writers who were responding to common events and issues in separate periods as excluding seemingly less important wars risks lumping very different writers together.
I don’t want to imply that my alternative term, “the American Century,” is without its own problems, but it does enable you to develop a periodization scheme that connects literary and other histories without privileging one and making the others conform to it. Moreover, it allows me to put forward the idea that literary periods overlap. If we date the American Century’s origin to 1944, when it was clear that the U.S. was winning the Pacific War and would play a major role in defeating Nazi Germany, this suggests that its early years overlap with an earlier period whose name I will unveil at the end of this talk. Moreover, we don’t know yet if the American Century has already ended or, if it has not, when it will. Some think that the Vietnam War and the oil crisis in the early 1970s marked the end of the American Century, but the Bush administration seems even more committed to military escalation than Johnson’s or Nixon’s. Others argue that the recovery of Germany’s and Japan’s economies in the 1980s signalled the end of the American Century, but American capitalism made a comeback in the 1990s and seems to have weathered 9/11 reasonably well. Still others suggest that the twenty-first century may be a globalizing century, a Chinese century, a century of resource wars or climate change or technological revolution.
By the time I returned to these issues at the end of the talk, all I had time to mention about the first period--"New Worlds for All: Encounters and Plantation (1492-1776)"--was: "As Anzaldua, Conde, Silko, and Yamashita show, encounters between European explorers, traders, and settlers with indigenous Americans and with enslaved Africans took place across the hemisphere, and different kinds of plantation complexes emerged."
Today I would add "creole cultures and" before "plantation complexes" and would have made it clearer that my name for the period was borrowed from the title of a Colin Calloway book. And if I hadn't been so pressed for time, I would have noted that in this sentence, I was condensing several courses' worth of material and engaging new scholarship on early America (particularly Thomas Bender's A Nation Among Nations, Tony Hall's The American Empire and the Fourth World, and Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker's The Many-Headed Hydra). In fact, if I had been speaking in the talk to specialists rather than members of the public who happened to be involved in Tohoku University's Open University program that semester, I would have divided this huge colonial Americas (Columbus to Declaration of Independence) period into several and been more specific about my acknowledgement that the closing date for each set of national literatures would change depending on when each American nation's independence movement formally began. And I would have discussed the larger curricular context in which I believe this literary focus should be embedded: an approach to the history of the Americas that does for students something like what Charles Mann's 1491 (and the new scholarship it attempts to survey and popularize) does for its readers, namely, try to offer a non-Eurocentric history of the Americas before the Europeans' arrival.
This is because in order to identify what made Columbus's arrival the beginning of "new worlds for all," one must compare pre- and post-1492. What was it about the initial and ongoing encounters among European explorers, traders, settlers, and indigenous Americans that lead to so many changes around the world and in the hemisphere? What creole cultures and plantation complexes emerged as Europeans, Africans, and Americans (each grouping characterized by relatively equal--and quite large--spans of cultural, social, and political diversity) continued to interact with each other (in all kinds of ways)?
So that's a precis of the way I'm conceptualizing the "first" period in American literary history. Please see my courses for more details on how I've taught these issues in the past. If anyone wants access to the ANGEL space of my Introduction to American Studies course from the fall, where I pulled a lot of my ideas for the talk together--particularly in the recommended readings not mentioned on the syllabi--feel free to contact me. I also have a brief bibliography of new work on the colonial Americas period that I can email to anyone who's interested. Some of the most interesting and influential work in American Studies has been going on in this period over the past couple of decades, so I'll be returning to it after a tour through the later ones.
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Hawthorne on the WAAGNFNP
It's hard to say what Hawthorne would say about the We Are All Giant Nuclear Fireball Now Party. I suspect part of him would have enjoyed it and part of him would have condemned it. As the author of "Earth's Holocaust" and "Chiefly About War Matters," he may well have earned himself a proleptically posthumous membership, though.
Racial Aesthetics and Narratorial/Authorial Intention, Part II
Picking up where we left off last week, I focus today on the narrator's use of the picturesque as an index of his stated intentions and unstated assumptions, particularly with respect to the racialized aesthetics it reveals. Next week, I'll get into some of the issues involved with trying to locate Hawthorne's intentions for creating such a narrator.
***
The picturesque is crucial to “Old News” in various ways. But chief among its effects is its “partial concealment of [the] possible implications” of the narrator’s endorsement of the old Tory’s racialism, the way it sets the narrator “free either to imagine a usable past or to make an unusable past disappear.” Dennis Berthold has written that the picturesque
Together with canny observations by Jean Fagan Yellin and Lauren Berlant, Berthold’s linking of the picturesque and nationalism can help us pin down the combination of racialism and aestheticism that unites the three sections of “Old News.” Yellin puts her finger on the pictorial, panoramic quality of “Old News” and its nationalist connotations when she notes that “To [Hawthorne’s] readers, the[ slaves] perhaps served to identify the scene as American in much the same way that the inclusion within a single canvas of representatives of the three races--red, black, and white--identified as American the paintings of Hawthorne’s contemporaries.” Similarly, and even more provocatively, Berlant’s analysis of the rhetoric of “Chiefly About War Matters” leads her to conclude that, for Hawthorne, “slavery makes America intelligible. . . . Slaves, in short, are not persons, not potential citizens, but are part of the national landscape and of the deep memories that sanctify it as politically a ‘country.’” Together, Yellin and Berlant’s emphasis on the function of slaves in the picturesque mode of nationalist landscape painting helps us understand that Berthold’s contrast between “civilization” and “wilderness” is as implicitly racialized as McWilliams and Newberry’s narrative of “civilization” to “fratricide.” And, more important, they help us understand what Hawthorne’s sketch is really about and what his narrator is really after.
***
Now jump back, if you will, to the concluding quote from the manuscript in last week's post. For it sets up my next points:
***
[E]ven more significant than the narrator’s explicit defense of New England slavery and the appeal to racism that underlies it is the implicit racialism of his conception of American national identity. When we consider that the publication of Hawthorne’s sketch coincided with what historian Larry Tise has called “an ideological revolution whose influence was decisive for the shape of proslavery thought in the antebellum period,” however, we can begin to get a better sense of the stakes of the racial aesthetics of “Old News.” The link that the picturesque formed between a racist defense of slavery and a racialist conception of American nationality gains added significance in light of two of Tise’s key moves. First is his summary of early nineteenth-century debates over slavery: “Although much of the debate centered on the morality of holding Negroes in bondage, the future of slavery and the disposition of the Negro was linked irresistibly to the shape and destiny of America.” Second is his argument that by the end of the 1830s, American social thinkers “were far less concerned with the lessons of the American Revolution than with those of the French Revolution. They spoke more frequently of the warnings of Edmund Burke than of the ideals of Jefferson.” Taking these two points together, the fact that Hawthorne’s narrator in “Old News” implicitly endorses the old Tory's denunciation of the Revolution, when considered with the Burkean ring of his politics and aesthetics, suggests that “Old News” must be understood in relation to the discourses that Tise identifies as crucial to 1830s racial politics in America. For Hawthorne to choose to write about slavery and to feature denunciations of the Revolution was itself a significant act, no matter that his sketch focused on eighteenth-century New England and regardless of his precise relation to his narrator....
[W]hen Hawthorne decided to write on slavery in January 1835, he was quite aware that he was entering into dangerous and contested territory. The signals that he sent in “Old News” were interestingly mixed. At a time when “foreign interference” in American institutions was denounced with an intensity often approaching paranoia, Hawthorne features a narrator who ventriloquizes an old Tory’s diatribe against French influences and who regrets the Revolution’s separation of the Americans from the English. His narrator’s emphasis on shared racial ties among Anglo-Americans irrespective of national boundaries could well have been an implicit critique of the North’s tendency to denounce an “English plot” against slavery and the United States; many in the North saw the English abolitionist George Thompson as a “symbol of a well-planned British plot to destroy the American way of life” by sowing “seeds of war, rape, and carnage through the United States.” By emphasizing the racial otherness of the French, Indians, and Negroes, in other words, Hawthorne’s narrator could well have been seeking to create a mutual enemy that would consolidate English and American ties.
Indeed, the links between Burkean aesthetics, tolerance toward slavery, misgivings about the Revolutionary War, and a racialist conception of American nationality in “Old News” suggests that Hawthorne’s narrator, if not Hawthorne himself, was pursuing a particularly virulent racial project that historian Larry Tise has identified as “proslavery republicanism”....
Hawthorne’s narrator, then, was somewhere in the vanguard of a new racism in January 1835. Rather than being a Northern echo of what was a predominantly Southern ideology, the views expressed in “Old News” were part of a new anti-abolitionist ideology that provided the intellectual framework for later “positive good” defenses of slavery. The turn to Burke that Tise identifies is crucial to “Old News.” Although Burke has been celebrated in one recent intellectual history of the concept of race for his “attempt to reassert the political ideas of Aristotle” against the beginnings of a turn to ideas of blood, Kultur, and Volk that would eventuate after 1815 in a full-blown ideology of race, “Old News” suggests that Burke’s anti-racialism was easily jettisoned by those in America who would take up his critiques of the French Revolution. In fact, the narrator’s racial Anglo-Saxonism suggests instead that Hannah Arendt’s claim that “Burke contributed to an essentially English view of race by emphasizing entailed inheritance as the basis for English liberty” was more relevant to the American context; Hawthorne’s narrator echoes Burke’s emphasis that “ties of inheritance” are “as strong as links of iron” in “Old News.”Indeed, one could argue that the narrator’s project in “Old News” is precisely to engender an anti-abolitionist white nationalism in his readers, to use Burke’s own aesthetics to racialize his politics.
***
So I'm interested in people's thoughts on Burke and race, 1830s anti-abolitionism, Tise on proslavery argument. What do I need to be rethinking and further developing in this attempt to historicize the racial aesthetics and politics of Hawthorne's narrator in "Old News"?
***
The picturesque is crucial to “Old News” in various ways. But chief among its effects is its “partial concealment of [the] possible implications” of the narrator’s endorsement of the old Tory’s racialism, the way it sets the narrator “free either to imagine a usable past or to make an unusable past disappear.” Dennis Berthold has written that the picturesque
provided Americans with a congenial, respectable, eminently civilized standpoint from which to study and enjoy the wilderness. To the strong national ego already evident in political Independence--the wilderness-subduing, westward-moving “I”--the picturesque added a controlling aesthetic vision--a wilderness-subduing “eye”--to help organize, shape, and even half-create a native landscape compatible with the civilization that was encroaching on the rugged forests and mountains of the western borders.
Together with canny observations by Jean Fagan Yellin and Lauren Berlant, Berthold’s linking of the picturesque and nationalism can help us pin down the combination of racialism and aestheticism that unites the three sections of “Old News.” Yellin puts her finger on the pictorial, panoramic quality of “Old News” and its nationalist connotations when she notes that “To [Hawthorne’s] readers, the[ slaves] perhaps served to identify the scene as American in much the same way that the inclusion within a single canvas of representatives of the three races--red, black, and white--identified as American the paintings of Hawthorne’s contemporaries.” Similarly, and even more provocatively, Berlant’s analysis of the rhetoric of “Chiefly About War Matters” leads her to conclude that, for Hawthorne, “slavery makes America intelligible. . . . Slaves, in short, are not persons, not potential citizens, but are part of the national landscape and of the deep memories that sanctify it as politically a ‘country.’” Together, Yellin and Berlant’s emphasis on the function of slaves in the picturesque mode of nationalist landscape painting helps us understand that Berthold’s contrast between “civilization” and “wilderness” is as implicitly racialized as McWilliams and Newberry’s narrative of “civilization” to “fratricide.” And, more important, they help us understand what Hawthorne’s sketch is really about and what his narrator is really after.
***
Now jump back, if you will, to the concluding quote from the manuscript in last week's post. For it sets up my next points:
***
[E]ven more significant than the narrator’s explicit defense of New England slavery and the appeal to racism that underlies it is the implicit racialism of his conception of American national identity. When we consider that the publication of Hawthorne’s sketch coincided with what historian Larry Tise has called “an ideological revolution whose influence was decisive for the shape of proslavery thought in the antebellum period,” however, we can begin to get a better sense of the stakes of the racial aesthetics of “Old News.” The link that the picturesque formed between a racist defense of slavery and a racialist conception of American nationality gains added significance in light of two of Tise’s key moves. First is his summary of early nineteenth-century debates over slavery: “Although much of the debate centered on the morality of holding Negroes in bondage, the future of slavery and the disposition of the Negro was linked irresistibly to the shape and destiny of America.” Second is his argument that by the end of the 1830s, American social thinkers “were far less concerned with the lessons of the American Revolution than with those of the French Revolution. They spoke more frequently of the warnings of Edmund Burke than of the ideals of Jefferson.” Taking these two points together, the fact that Hawthorne’s narrator in “Old News” implicitly endorses the old Tory's denunciation of the Revolution, when considered with the Burkean ring of his politics and aesthetics, suggests that “Old News” must be understood in relation to the discourses that Tise identifies as crucial to 1830s racial politics in America. For Hawthorne to choose to write about slavery and to feature denunciations of the Revolution was itself a significant act, no matter that his sketch focused on eighteenth-century New England and regardless of his precise relation to his narrator....
[W]hen Hawthorne decided to write on slavery in January 1835, he was quite aware that he was entering into dangerous and contested territory. The signals that he sent in “Old News” were interestingly mixed. At a time when “foreign interference” in American institutions was denounced with an intensity often approaching paranoia, Hawthorne features a narrator who ventriloquizes an old Tory’s diatribe against French influences and who regrets the Revolution’s separation of the Americans from the English. His narrator’s emphasis on shared racial ties among Anglo-Americans irrespective of national boundaries could well have been an implicit critique of the North’s tendency to denounce an “English plot” against slavery and the United States; many in the North saw the English abolitionist George Thompson as a “symbol of a well-planned British plot to destroy the American way of life” by sowing “seeds of war, rape, and carnage through the United States.” By emphasizing the racial otherness of the French, Indians, and Negroes, in other words, Hawthorne’s narrator could well have been seeking to create a mutual enemy that would consolidate English and American ties.
Indeed, the links between Burkean aesthetics, tolerance toward slavery, misgivings about the Revolutionary War, and a racialist conception of American nationality in “Old News” suggests that Hawthorne’s narrator, if not Hawthorne himself, was pursuing a particularly virulent racial project that historian Larry Tise has identified as “proslavery republicanism”....
Hawthorne’s narrator, then, was somewhere in the vanguard of a new racism in January 1835. Rather than being a Northern echo of what was a predominantly Southern ideology, the views expressed in “Old News” were part of a new anti-abolitionist ideology that provided the intellectual framework for later “positive good” defenses of slavery. The turn to Burke that Tise identifies is crucial to “Old News.” Although Burke has been celebrated in one recent intellectual history of the concept of race for his “attempt to reassert the political ideas of Aristotle” against the beginnings of a turn to ideas of blood, Kultur, and Volk that would eventuate after 1815 in a full-blown ideology of race, “Old News” suggests that Burke’s anti-racialism was easily jettisoned by those in America who would take up his critiques of the French Revolution. In fact, the narrator’s racial Anglo-Saxonism suggests instead that Hannah Arendt’s claim that “Burke contributed to an essentially English view of race by emphasizing entailed inheritance as the basis for English liberty” was more relevant to the American context; Hawthorne’s narrator echoes Burke’s emphasis that “ties of inheritance” are “as strong as links of iron” in “Old News.”Indeed, one could argue that the narrator’s project in “Old News” is precisely to engender an anti-abolitionist white nationalism in his readers, to use Burke’s own aesthetics to racialize his politics.
***
So I'm interested in people's thoughts on Burke and race, 1830s anti-abolitionism, Tise on proslavery argument. What do I need to be rethinking and further developing in this attempt to historicize the racial aesthetics and politics of Hawthorne's narrator in "Old News"?
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