Welcome to Haunting America

A warm CitizenSE welcome to my Fukuoka University and Kyushu University students in my two sections of Haunting America this semester. Given that we've spent a good amount of class time the first two weeks of the semester doing close, contextual, and comparative readings of Emily Dickinson's Poem #670 ("One need not be a Chamber"), today is a great opportunity for me to recap my reasons for assigning it to kick off our course and to summarize some of my own readings of it.

As we discussed this week, the key question this course revolves around is, "What is haunting (about) America?" (If you think of the "(about)" in the previous question as a kind of ghost--sometimes there, sometimes not--it'll give you another way to think about the title of the course than the reading I gave it last week in class, where I emphasized that the "Haunting" in "Haunting America" could be read either as a gerund or an adjective.) I chose Dickinson's poem because it's short and rich and opens up so well to the various ways of reading ghosts, spirits, specters, apparitions, and hauntings in American literature from colonial times to the present that we'll be experimenting with and reflecting upon this semester.

Last week, I asked you to consider several questions:

(1) What seems to be the point the speaker is trying to make in this poem? How would you paraphrase it?

(2) What do you find interesting about the way the speaker goes about trying to make it? (Consider, for instance, the use of imagery, metaphor, allusion, rhythm, rhyme, voice, and so on--all that elements that work together to constitute the "form" of the poem.)

(3) What is your reaction to the speaker's point? What questions does the poem raise for you?

These questions, although they overlap a bit, move from imagining the poem as a kind of dramatic monologue to considering it as a formal structure to examining your own response as a reader to it. In class this week we continued discussing them, and I linked our discussions to the "how to do things with ghosts" idea of the course, which attempts to encompass literary, religious, psychological, anthropological, sociological, historical, philosophical, theoretical, and political ways of reading hauntings. I compared Dickinson's moves in her poem to two of the best-known ghost stories from English culture--Shakespeare's Hamlet and Dickens's "A Christmas Carol"--to see what light classic Renaissance and early Victorian hauntings shed on Dickinson's poem. And we all broadened the comparisons still further, exploring how Anglo-American assumptions about and traditions of representing ghosts and hauntings are similar and different from the assumptions and traditions of the cultures you're bringing into the classroom. In what ways are Japanese ghosts similar to or different from American ones? Is it worthwhile to generalize about European and Asian traditions of hauntings and spirit possessions? Where do they overlap? Where do they diverge?

Of course, what happened in each classroom was unique. So I want to use the remainder of this post to pull together what I said in both classes about Dickinson's poem and how it connects to the course.

Literary. One way of reading "One need not be a Chamber" is as a metacommentary on the tradition of the literary gothic. This intertextual mode of reading the poem emphasizes its genre, its allusions to other works of literature, its playing with specific conventions of writing and with the expectations and assumptions readers bring to it. Dickinson's speaker constructs a series of metaphors that are based upon allusions to classic scenes from the popular gothic novels and stories of England and America. To what end? I'll let you all ponder that question!

Religious: Why does Dickinson's speaker emphasize the startling, dangerous, even horrifying nature of unexpectedly encountering "one's a'self" and discovering "Ourself behind ourself, concealed"? Why not celebrate such encounters and discoveries, along with her contemporary Walt Whitman, who in "Song of Myself" proudly proclaimed, "I contain multitudes"? Many critics have argued that it's Dickinson's lifelong fascination with New England Puritanism that helps account for her speaker's tone. Whether the speaker is emphasizing that the American Puritan interpretation of the Christian notion of original sin--their doctrine of humanity's total or innate depravity, of our essential fallenness--is the source of the "Or More--" that closes the poem or is suggesting that Puritan theology itself is horrifying is for you to decide.

Psychological: Of course, with all the speaker's references to the Brain and the self and the interior, Dickinson's poem engages topics that have interested psychoanalysts and psychologists of all kinds since the late nineteenth century. From Freud's readings of dreams and slips of the tongue to the latest technological advances in brain scanning, scientists have entered into the terrain that Dickinson attempts to map through metaphor in her poem. Here at CitizenSE, I've done my share of writing on trauma, which has been described as haunting, but Dickinson's poem also engages the uncanny, identity, and other aspects of consciousness, the unconscious, and the affective that can be grouped under "the psychological." What do ghosts and hauntings--and our reactions to them--reveal about us, our thoughts, feelings, beliefs, hopes, fears, desires, aversions?

Anthropological: Several decades ago, Laura Bohannon wrote a now-famous essay called "Shakespeare in the Bush," in which she reported on the reactions of an African tribe she was doing field work on to her retelling of Shakespeare's Hamlet, in order to clarify their cultural assumptions about ghosts and how they differed from her own. This is a classic example of the connections between literature and anthropology, but there are more recent ones, as well. Over the past few decades, ethnographers have become increasingly aware that the way they write up their field work matters--and in so doing have looked to various kinds of literature and literary criticism for inspiration, models, and warnings. So although no anthropologist can go back in time to observe and interact with Dickinson, we can imagine severals ways in which they might find her poem interesting and useful.

Sociological: Last week one of the books I passed around was by a sociologist; in Ghostly Matters, Avery Gordon argues that reading hauntings--in literature and life--should be part of the contemporary sociologist's skill set. Just as anthropologists tend to analyze contemporary cultures, sociologists tend to analyze contemporary societies, but certainly in both fields there are comparativists and historicists who analyze evidence from the past as well as the present, from the written record as well as from everyday life. There are many different kinds of sociological approaches to literature--a quick search on google scholar or the databases available through the Kyudai and Fukudai libraries will turn up some on Dickinson. (I encourage you to familiarize yourself with these research tools throughout the semester.)

Historical: Traditional literary historians are interested in the life and times of the author, in the sources of and influences on the author's works, in the author's motivations and intentions, and in the reactions of the author's readers; more recently, a range of newer historicists have attempted to question and extend this range of concerns and interests. As my comments on anthropological and sociological approaches to literature and to hauntings suggest, people working in these fields need to be interested in history to even turn to Dickinson in the first place, rather than focusing solely on the present. Reading "One need not be a Chamber" historically raises questions like, "When did writers begin to focus on the ghosts in our heads rather than out in the world? What does Dickinson's poem reveal about antebellum American conceptions of haunting?"

Philosophical: Dickinson's poem also engages issues and concepts that have interested philosophers for millennia (in the West, at least): the relation between mind and body, materialism versus idealism, rationality and the irrational, and so on. Those working on the philosophy of mind, the problem of consciousness, metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology may well be interested in what the speaker has to say.

Theoretical: The speaker relies on a series of binary oppositions--inside/outside, presence/absence, life/death, literal/figurative, safety/danger, spiritual/material--but also emphasizes the ways in which ghosts and hauntings trouble them. It's possible to read Dickinson's poem deconstructively, as well as in relation to the many varieties of literary and political theory that have traversed the globe since the mid-twentieth century.

Political: Ghosts often signal something hidden or forgotten or denied or disavowed, perhaps an injustice or a crime or a scandal. Throughout the semester, we'll be examining the political dimensions of literary hauntings, the ways in which writers use ghosts to comment on or reflect upon or otherwise respond to ethical and political issues in their own times and the ways in which we can use literary hauntings to illuminate similar issues in our own time. Certainly in a post-9/11 United States, Dickinson's poetic meditation on the relation between real and imagined threats is quite relevant; recent events in the world and on the campus of Virginia Tech have made all of us quite sensitive to the complexities and ambiguities of fear, horror, terror, and danger.

I hope you all find this post useful. If so, we should consider whether we want to start a class blog, in which we post our reactions to the short stories and novels we'll be reading in class for all the world (or that portion of it that finds its way to our site) to see. I'm open to it being a multiple-language blog, as well. Let's talk about it in class next week. See you then--and hopefully back here at CitizenSE!

Finally Getting Back to My Kyushu American Literature Society Talk that I Promised to Blog on Back in December

OK, so when I started CitizenSE, I never imagined that I'd be writing welcomes to my new students in Postcolonial Hawthorne on it. I conceived of it strictly as a scholarly blog and still do (despite the actual diversity of posts you'll encounter if you click on the Why CitizenSE tag on the sidebar or link in this sentence). I'm considering starting a Postcolonial Hawthorne blog that's for my students and me--and am interested in what "you all" think about it.

All of which bears only a tangential relationship to my aim in this post: to finally follow through on a promise I made at the very end of the very first CitizenSE post and share some parts of my rather autobiographical talk at the Kyushu American Literature Society annual meeting last December.

My basic goal for the talk was to puncture the image many in my audience might have had of the stereotyped Fulbright Visiting Lecturer. I didn't want to be the Distinguished Expert from the Heart of American Culture come to Lecture the Natives on the Proper Way of Reading American Literature. So how to avoid that role and demystify myself in such a way that some would want to get to know me and my work better after the talk and the meeting? (And that few would go away thinking, "What a Loser! He Doesn't Know the First Thing about Reading American Literature!") The approach that I took there is basically the same one that I've been taking in this blog: framing myself as someone in the middle of turning a dissertation into a book. So what I actually did in the talk was analyze how the project has changed from its first conception to its current incarnation. Or as I explained at the time,

My purpose is to convey my sense of the interrelationships between the fields of Hawthorne Studies, American Literary and Cultural Studies, Critical Race/Ethnicity Studies, and Postcolonial Studies in the past 15 years by delivering a kind of intellectual autobiography in which I analyze changes in the goals and methods of my approaches to what I have called “the race and Hawthorne problem.”

I identified three phases: conceptualizing the dissertation project; the research process and transformations of the dissertation; and teaching experiences and the transformations of the book manuscript. And I closed with some reflections on how Hawthornists have dealt with such problematics as gender, class, race, nation, region, and colony and predictions about the future of Hawthorne Studies.

So that'll be the "outline" for blogging this talk as time allows in the coming weeks. But as there's a thunderstorm rolling in to Fukuoka as I type and I need to do some copying, scanning, and uploading for my courses this semester, that'll have to do it for my first (or is it second?) CitizenSE two-a-day.

Manifest Destiny: Expansion and Consolidation (1803-1896); or; Welcome to Postcolonial Hawthorne Again

Welcome once again, Seinan Gakuin Postcolonial Hawthorne students, to CitizenSE. This is a continuation of my earlier introduction to the course and also of my even earlier attempt to offer a new periodization scheme for U.S. (and other new world) literatures. In it, I want to discuss the relationship between the "Manifest Destiny" period I identify in my title--which spans the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 that began the process of contintental expansionism that continued throughout the century to the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 that marked the close of the post-Civil War consolidation of a new political consensus in the re-United States--and the periods that came before it. All three periods are relevant to the question of whether it makes sense to think of Hawthorne and early American literature as "postcolonial." What are those three periods?

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)

In my original talk where I first broached this scheme, I linked these periods as follows:

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 [creole cultures and] 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 [slave revolts,] border wars, civil wars, and Indian wars.

The [bracketed phrases] include ideas I would add to the talk were I to give it today.

So a short way of describing the Manifest Destiny period would be to say that a recently-colonized and newly-independent nation became a colonizing power over the course of the 19th C. What makes this period relevant to the question of what is postcolonial in postcolonial studies is how people who originated the field responded to it. Because the U.S. became a colonizing power, it shouldn't be analyzed under the rubric of postcolonialism, which is about the ambiguities of liberation from 19th and 20th C European colonialism in Asia and Africa. That is, the founders of postcolonial studies saw the U.S. as a partner in 19th C European colonialism and a competitor and eventual successor over the course of the 20th C. Colonizing nations can't be postcolonial.

But later generations of postcolonialists and Americanists began to question this consensus. I've put on the course ANGEL space an early effort by Lawrence Buell among the recommended readings for our class's introductory unit to give you one example of this line of thinking. And I can put more if you're interested.

Here let me just note that it might be useful to see the two 20th C world wars as roughly equivalent to the 18th C's world war among European powers, something that the second chapter of Thomas Bender's A Nation Among Nations (which will also be among our supplemental readings for the course) made me start wondering about. If we see what is called the French and Indian Wars in the United States or the Seven Years' War outside it in Bender's perspective--as a global war that lasted for much of the 18th C--then the costs of Britain's victory in the war and the consequences of France's attempts to undermine its colonial rule that it could no longer challenge directly fed directly into what historian Lester Langley calls the age of revolution in The Americas in the Age of Revolution, 1750-1850. That is, Britain faced the dilemma of needing to raise money through taxes and tariffs on its overseas colonies to help finance its costly war, which, as with other colonizing nations at the time, led to unrest in the colonies and movements for independence. So Bender's and Langley's work raises the question of how different the first British Empire (in the Americas) was from the second (in Asia and Africa). And it suggests a parallel with the two World Wars of the 20th C: certainly in 1945 no European nation could afford to maintain its colonies and with the U.S. choosing to invest in Europe and Japan in the Cold War with the U.S.S.R. that soon emerged in the aftermath of W.W. II, the door was opened for decolonization and independence movements of all kinds in areas that had formerly been under the control of mid-20th C European and non-European empires. What we now call the Third World--the literally hundreds of new nations that formed in the decades after W.W. II, which tried to maintain their independence from the First (liberal capitalist) and Second (state socialist) worlds--may not be all that different from the non-U.S. independent nations of the Americas (some of which finally gained independence in this same post-W.W. II period).

But what about the U.S.? (And Canada, Australia, New Zealand, apartheid South Africa, and other white settler nations.) At most, critics of the Buell thesis argue, the excluded, oppressed, and marginalized groups in these nations could be considered postcolonial, in that there is no longer de jure colonial control of these populations as epitomized, say, in the movie Rabbit-Proof Fence or the boarding school policy in the turn-into-the-20th-C-U.S. (and as the movie suggests, other places). So recent non-European immigrants, American Indians and First Nations/indigenous peoples of all kinds, African-Americans and descendants of those enslaved by plantation-era systems of all kinds might possibly count as postcolonial in the U.S., but certainly not the U.S. itself.

But why not the U.S. before the Civil War, Buell asks. I encourage you to read his and others' arguments on these issues, now that you have my scorecard, because they will help you develop and test your own views on the central questions animating this course:

1) Was Hawthorne postcolonial? Why or why not?
2) What is at stake in conceiving of him as postcolonial or not? Why does it matter? Why should we care? What follows from our answer, either way?

So we'll start simply next week with a single Hawthorne story, "Roger Malvin's Burial." I'll be posting on it between now and then if you want to check in CitizenSE again, but I'll also be putting discussion questions on our course ANGEL space. Enjoy! And feel free to post your answers--and questions of your own--before we meet in class next week. See you in class Wednesday.

Note to my non-Seinan Gakuin students: I'm happy to enroll you in the course ANGEL space--just send me an email!

Conversations with Grandpa Jack, Part Two

Last Sunday, I closed a rambling piece by suggesting that Hawthorne would have problems with critics who excused his racial politics by reference to what Hug the Shoggoth scholar-blogger Daniel Gall criticized from a major Lovecraft scholar as "the temper of the times." Or, as I wish I would have told my grandfather--who raised similar concerns about my race and Hawthorne dissertation project--when I had the chance, "'Everybody was doing it' is no excuse, and, anyway, they weren't--and Hawthorne knew this better than anyone."

Well, as I read Gall's ongoing critiques of fan/scholarly attempts to canonize Lovecraft without adequately engaging his racism, I was reminded of the way I opened my manuscript's first chapter, "At Hawthorne's Tomb." For even though Hawthorne's canonization hasn't been in doubt for decades, the case for it was shakier for the first 50 years after his death than critics like Jane Tompkins and Richard Brodhead have argued. So first I'll give you all the first few paragraphs from that chapter and then come back around to other things I wish I could have told my grandfather on Hawthorne and race.

Not long after Nathaniel Hawthorne’s funeral on May 24, 1864, in Concord, Massachusetts, a trans-Atlantic discussion of the man, his works, and his legacy--a discussion, begun in the 1820s with the first review of Fanshawe, that has continued to this day--entered a new phase. In fact, there was an edge to this discussion that is not often recalled today. To be sure, eulogies and tributes from friends and colleagues that attested to Hawthorne’s genius poured out almost immediately. Arlin Turner reports in his biography of Hawthorne that, in addition to the printing of a letter by Hawthorne’s wife Sophia,

Holmes wrote for the July Atlantic a tribute, along with an account of his last interview with Hawthorne . . . saying in conclusion that in Hawthorne’s works he had “left enough to keep his name in remembrance as long as the language in which he shaped his deep imaginations is spoken by human lips.” Lowell declared afterward that Hawthorne’s was “the rarest creative imagination of the century, the rarest in some ideal respects since Shakespeare.” Longfellow sent Mrs. Hawthorne a poem, to be published in the Atlantic for August, with the title “Concord, May 23, 1864,” in which he echoes their forty years of mutually generous friendship. . . .

And in the nearly two decades before the 1883 Riverside Edition of Hawthorne’s collected works was to appear, a host of other tributes, reminiscences, retrospectives, and reviews appeared in the American and English intellectual press, many of which were occasioned by the posthumous publications of Hawthorne’s letters, notebooks, and unfinished romances. Perhaps it is the success of these early efforts to canonize and institutionalize Hawthorne that leads us to forget how contested his literary status was in the midst of the Civil War. Indeed, a mere day after his funeral, Hawthorne and his politics were attacked in obituaries in the Providence Journal and the Springfield Republican. Uppermost in many minds in the summer of 1864, that is, was the question of Hawthorne’s attitudes toward slavery and abolition. In fact, nothing threatened his literary reputation more at the time of his death than what Ralph Waldo Emerson in his notebooks referred to as Hawthorne’s “perverse politics and unfortunate friendship for that paltry Franklin Pierce.”

To understand the source of Emerson’s vehemence, we must turn to the publication of Hawthorne’s 1852 campaign biography Life of Franklin Pierce, which revealed to a national audience what his family, close friends, and careful readers of “Time’s Portraiture” (1837), “Jonathan Cilley” (1838), “The Sister Years” (1839), “The Hall of Fantasy” (1843), “Earth’s Holocaust” (1844), “The Snow-Image” (1850), and The Blithedale Romance (1852) already knew: not only was Hawthorne highly skeptical toward the myriad reform movements of his day, but he was also a staunch anti-abolitionist and supporter of the Compromise of 1850. Consider these passages from the Pierce campaign biography:

[I]t was impossible for [Pierce] not to take his stand as the unshaken advocate of Union, and of the mutual steps of compromise which that great object unquestionably demanded. The fiercest, the least scrupulous, and the most consistent of those who battle against slavery, recognize the same fact that he does. They see that merely human wisdom and human efforts cannot subvert it, except by tearing to pieces the Constitution, breaking the pledges which it sanctions, and severing into distracted fragments that common country, which Providence brought into one nation through a continued miracle of almost two hundred years, from the first settlement of the American wilderness until the Revolution. In the days when, a young member of Congress, he first raised his voice against agitation, Pierce saw these perils and their consequences. He considered, too, that the evil would be certain, while the good was, at best, a contingency, and (to the clear, practical foresight with which he looked into the future) scarcely so much as that;--attended as the movement was, and must be, during its progress, with the aggravated injury of those whose condition it aimed to ameliorate, and terminating, in its possible triumph—if such possibility there were--with the ruin of the two races which now dwelt together in greater peace and affection, than had ever elsewhere existed between the taskmaster and the serf.

Of course, there is another view of all these matters. The theorist may take that view in his closet; the philanthropist by profession may strive to act upon it, uncompromisingly, amid the tumult and warfare of his life. But the statesman of practical sagacity--who loves his country as it is, and evolves good from things as they exist, and who demands to feel his firm grasp upon a better reality before he quits the one already gained--will be likely here, with all the greatest statesmen of America, to stand in the attitude of a conservative. Such, at all events, will be the attitude of Franklin Pierce. . . .

Those Northern men, therefore, who deem the great cause of human welfare as represented and involved in this present hostility against southern institutions--and who conceive that the world stands still, except so far as that goes forward--these, it may be allowed, can scarcely give their sympathy or their confidence to the subject of this memoir. But there is still another view, and probably as wise a one. It looks upon Slavery as one of those evils, which Divine Providence does not leave to be remedied by human contrivances, but which, in its own good time, by some means impossible to be anticipated, but of the simplest and easiest operation, when all its uses shall have been fulfilled, it causes to vanish like a dream. There is no instance, in all history, of the human will and intellect having perfected any great moral reform by methods which it adapted to that end; but the progress of the world, at every step, leaves some evil or wrong on the path behind it, which the wisest of mankind, of their own set purpose, could never have found a way to rectify.

Hawthorne himself was certainly aware of how controversial his views were in a New England that was becoming increasingly anti-slavery following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850. In October 1852, in a letter to Horatio Bridge, he acknowledged that “the biography has cost me hundreds of friends, here at the north, who had a purer regard for me than Frank Pierce or any other politician ever gained, and who drop off from me like autumn leaves, in consequence of what I say on the slavery question. But they were my real sentiments, and I do not now regret that they are on record.” And in the following decade Hawthorne would not publicly acknowledge any significant change of heart or mind on “the slavery question,” as the 1853 publication of “The Pygmies,” the 1860 publication of The Marble Faun (particularly its controversial preface), the 1862 publication of his travel narrative “Chiefly About War Matters” in The Atlantic Monthly, and the 1863 dedication of Our Old to Franklin Pierce indicated. His composition of acerbic, purportedly “editorial” commentary in footnotes to the most controversial passages in “Chiefly About War Matters” dramatizes the extent to which he expected his views would be condemned as treasonous.

By the summer of 1864, then, to assess Hawthorne’s life and works was to assess his racial politics. As we shall see, this issue has resurfaced several times since then. In order to make sense of its most recent reappearance on the critical horizon since the 1960s, it is crucial that we familiarize ourselves with the terms of debate in the midst of the Civil War, for it is surprising how influential they have remained long after most people have forgotten them. Thus, in this chapter, after examining one key moment in the Civil War-era debates over Hawthorne’s racial politics and their relation to his literary status, I survey the ways that contemporary critics have approached similar questions and problems, and consider what happens when different protocols for reading Hawthorne’s racial politics collide in interpretations of “Roger Malvin’s Burial.” My aim in doing this is twofold. First, I wish to provide a preliminary map of the terrain on which different positions for understanding Hawthorne’s politics and poetics have contended. Second, I wish to focus our attention on what is at stake in such contentions over Hawthorne’s racial politics and broach something of the complexities that emerge when a given tale is read in relation to antebellum racial formations and projects.

This chapter, then, is more about how decades of criticism and scholarship have tried to make sense of Hawthorne’s racial politics than it is about what his politics actually were. The latter is a task I take up in the next chapter. Here, I consider what it is that readers do when they set out to analyze Hawthorne’s racial politics. What results is a chapter that falls somewhere between a polemical review of the literature and a historicized study of the racial politics of Hawthorne’s literary reputation as it has changed since the 1830s. At a time when we are still trying to ascertain the extent of Paul de Man’s collaboration with Nazi occupation forces in World-War-II-era Belgium and figure out what, if anything, his actions then have to do with his subsequent literary theorizing, it is particularly important that we reconsider the case of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Doing so just might provide a means of acknowledging the particularly American scandals of supplantation, enslavement, and conquest.

I'll avoid going all the way to lazy blogging Chapter 1 as I've been doing Chapter 2, but I do want to build on what I'm doing in both chapters here. For my original idea for this post was to argue that Hawthorne would have argued that certain historical figures' beliefs and actions are noteworthy in the present for what they reveal about their times--and that Lovecraft scholars who wish to see him treated alongside rather than beneath the modernist canons of early twentieth-century American literature would do well to analyze him in this way rather than defend the indefensible or seek to quarantine it off from the main body of his work (as the critics Gall criticizes seem to be doing).

But then I had a second thought--is this move possible only for authors who, like Hawthorne, have already been canonized? To say, as I argue throughout my intro and first two chapters, that Hawthorne is most interesting to me precisely for what his writings reveal about his times and the critics who attempt to analyze both, is, after all, not the strongest case that can be made for why others should be interested in Hawthorne in the first place. To some extent, I am depending on others already having an interest in Hawthorne--and those interests being institutionalized for long enough that I can count on them to persist.

And yet, I do think this move has a good chance of working for my manuscript's primary audience--people who have dismissed Hawthorne as a Dead White Male Author No Longer Worth Engaging and who have taken part in dismantling the idea of canonicity, constructing new canons, or were educated in either tradition--that is, a good portion of the academic book-buying public. If I'm right, then my original advice for aspiring Lovecraft scholars still holds.

And it turns out this is, after all, particularly Hawthornian advice. For when faced with critical injunctions to help construct a new American literature based on American history, models, and matters, he attempted to avoid writing patriotic pap or antiquarian trivia--he selected figures who, he felt, would illuminate their times and his. By focusing my manuscript's first half on an antebellum figure who is in some ways marginal to the key concerns of those working in Black Studies, multiethnic studies, critical race studies, and postcolonial studies--and who doesn't present nearly as many possibilities for inspiring examples as the overlooked writers who have been recovered or the canonized writers who have been reexamined by Americanists of the past two generations, I'm trying to focus our attention on what we still don't understand well about antebellum racial politics, and our own.

This is actually territory I mapped out in my Kyushu American Literature Society talk from last December and it takes me back to the reasons why I started this blog in the first place around the same time. There was so much I had to leave out of that talk that I wanted to explore further, I decided to put it in the blog, instead. So it might be time to unveil my plans for the manuscript and discuss how they have changed from the early '90s, when I first conceived this race and Hawthorne project whose incubation and delivery have been so, uh, long in coming. But as the second week of classes starts tomorrow and I have to do some blogging this week for my Postcolonial Hawthorne students, I will have to do some two-a-days or otherwise fiddle with my programming schedule to fit my teaching and research needs in the same virtual space. Seems unavoidable, as the timing is right for both.

A Newish Book on the Peabody Sisters

Caleb Crain recently put up a long review of Megan Marshall's The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism (Houghton Mifflin, 2005) over at Steamboats Are Ruining Everything. Sounds like another book I've got to check out, particularly for what it might reveal about Hawthorne's racial politics in the 1830s and 1840s (the book stops at 1843, for reasons Crain doesn't think much of, and from what he writes neither do I). But the review copy of Jennifer Weber's Copperheads just arrived in the mail today, so I can pace myself on this one....

Welcome to Postcolonial Hawthorne

A big CitizenSE hello to my Seinan Gakuin University students taking (or thinking about taking) my Postcolonial Hawthorne course. In today's post, I want to follow of up on one of the issues that I discussed with you in class today, which we'll be expanding on next week in class--namely, the relation between postcolonial studies and American studies, or, more simply, "How is 'postcolonial Hawthorne' not an oxymoron?"

Because there's a tradition in postcolonial studies that argues for the value of distinguishing Europe's former colonies that gained their formal independence in the twentieth century from those that gained it in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, it's worth taking this question quite seriously. The term "postcolonial" is baggy and contested enough, some critics argue, that it's just not worth it to open the door to former white settler colonies like the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, places where the descendants of the European colonizers came to hold and largely still hold political power over those places' indigenous peoples and their descendants. More generally, the question of where to stop arises: if U.S. literature is postcolonial, or at least has a postcolonial period, then why not any formerly colonized nation, any nation that once was under the power of a foreign empire and has since gained its political independence? (For instance, England under the Roman Empire, Hungary under the Ottoman Empire, Poland under the Russian and Soviet empires, Korea under the Chinese and Japanese empires, and so on.) To which I ask, why not?

I've argued in a recent conference paper that there is much to be gained from this expanded definition of postcolonial studies. As preliminary evidence, look at some of the work I've highlighted in this blog: Jee Yoon Lee's on The Scarlet Letter as well as my own on Hawthorne and Maryse Conde, Mahasweta Devi, and Paule Marshall (for example). Throughout the semester, we'll consider other evidence for the value of considering Hawthorne as a postcolonial writer and antebellum U.S literature as a postcolonial literature.

Today in class, I listed several reasons why it might make sense to do this. The United States's political independence coupled with its cultural and economic dependence; the shaky state of its nationalism; the role literature was expected to play in shaping a sense of nationalism and patriotism among American citizens; the ways in which American writers relied on and revised English models--all these (and more) begin to make the case for considering Hawthorne to be a postcolonial writer.

Tomorrow Saturday Next Monday, I'll discuss my case for a new periodization scheme for U.S. literatures, which will not only provide some historical background for Hawthorne's career as a writer, but also will help me flesh out a connection I suggested in today's class between early American literature and the literature of newly independent African, Asian, and Caribbean nations following World War II.

"I Will Choose Free Will"

As it's going to be awhile before I "have to" start not-quite-live-blogging the final round of the Masters at Mostly Harmless, as my working Monday will be quite busy tying up loose ends before the start of my spring semester at Kyushu U, Seinan Gakuin U, and Fukuoka U (you know, like finally posting my course syllabi and copying my handouts for Tuesday's and Wednesday's classes), as I'm rather surprisingly on a bit of a Hawthorne roll tonight, and as Hug the Shoggoth is sending me down memory lane, I'll start today's post with a question and a story.

Gall writes, in response to a comment of mine,

“The Custom House” seems like a playful and suave (and quite humorous, at times) vindication of his own artistic freedom, re-publishing it into the face of the audience even though, as he finds in these first few paragraphs, there may be complaints. That, this self-determination, made me wonder about that “evil star”-thing, in the first place--does he, the artist, have the means to escape/disable that destiny which keeps the other custom officers in that mouldy custom shack?

He's referring to this passage from "The Custom-House," by the way:

In the first place, my coadjutors were not invariably old; there were men among them in their strength and prime, of marked ability and energy, and altogether superior to the sluggish and dependent mode of life on which their evil stars had cast them.

So I didn't quite answer his question in the comment that is still awaiting moderation at the moment, and I'm not going to yet, because I have that story to tell. It's about my Mostly Harmless co-author whose book I recommended here (in comments). Back in the early '90s, he had discovered a copy of Melville's marginalia of Milton's Paradise Lost and was working on what I thought was a fantastic reading of Moby-Dick and other works in light of it, so of course we were talking about fate and free will a lot. He once shared lyrics of a response to a well-known Rush song (the key line of which supplies the title of this post) he wrote in his undergraduate days. Now, if I was a good storyteller, I'd share those lyrics with you, but you see I have this terrible memory (and I'm not talking about Sethe's). So you'll have to wait and see if "Sloucho" will visit the comments to this post to get to the climax of this little anecdote. Sorry.

In any case, my point in not-quite-telling the story is to explain my title, the irony (probably unintended on Rush's part, or at least I hope so because then it would be the same kind of irony that the only thing ironic about Alanis Morisette's "Ironic" is its title) of which I hope is clear by now. Which now allows me to get back to some kind of answer.

This is by way of Toni Morrison's Nobel Prize speech, "The Bird in Our Hand: Is It Living or Dead?" (1993), and her essay "Home" from The House That Race Built (1997)--two of her best pieces of writing, IMHO, and worth a read or reread right now. In these two meditations on language and stories (and everything they limn), Morrison suggests that the feelings of freedom a writer experiences while writing may be illusions masking a greater dependency--on the one hand, to oppressive conventions and structures, and on the other, to the reader's response. She counsels writers and critics to break with the former and embrace the latter. I think it's good advice, but I don't think Hawthorne took the first half of it. I think the declaration of independence from Salem that is "The Custom-House" is prey to all the problems with the U.S. Declaration of Independence. I think the pledge of allegiance to the republic of letters that is "The Custom-House" reproduces some of the same problems as the colonization of the Americas and the founding of the United States. So as much as he's trying to write himself into a different story-line in "The Custom-House" than the people he satirizes in it, I think he is as trapped by the national narrative as they are. In this, I differ from Lauren Berlant and others who try to find something hopeful in Hawthorne's "citizen of somewhere else".... And I'm leaning toward that being a choice of his rather than a destiny.

I'm purposely leaving all those "I think"s in the previous paragraph--something I always tell undergraduates to strike (either the "I think" or the entire sentence)--to mark my dissatisfaction with these summary statements. But I'm too tired to think straight now and too eager to see what's happening in the Masters to continue, so look for a late-day update to this start to a post--or later, if I'm inefficient at work today.