Remember those extravagant claims I alluded to making in my Sendai talk? Well, here's the most extravagant of all of them. With its implications.... Hey, end on a high note, right? (The talk, not the blog--don't get your hopes up!)
***
What, then, is the new understanding of U.S. literary history that the works of Anzaldua, Butler, Conde, Jones, Marshall, Morrison, Mukherjee, Silko, and Yamashita make possible? I identify six periods in U.S. and new world history from Columbus to the present: 1) New Worlds for All: Encounters and Plantation (1492-1776); 2) After the Great War: Revolution and Constitution (1763-1815); 3) Manifest Destiny: Expansion and Consolidation (1803-1896); 4) A New Nation: Modernization and Migration (1877-1952); 5) The American Century: Hegemony and Transformation (1944-?); 6) Contemporary U.S. Literatures: Transnationalism and Globalization (?-). While the specific dates and names of each period will vary for each nation in the new world, the processes identified in the subtitles will remain fairly consistent across the hemisphere.
As Anzaldua, Conde, Silko, and Yamashita show, encounters between European explorers, traders, and settlers with indigenous Americans and with enslaved Africans took place across the hemisphere, and different kinds of plantation complexes emerged. As Conde and Mukherjee hint, the aftershocks of England’s catastrophic victory over France in the great war of the eighteenth century paradoxically created the conditions for the age of revolutions across the hemisphere. As Butler, Jones, Morrison, Silko, and Yamashita suggest, newly independent nation-states across the Americas dealt with the conflicts that came with expansion and consolidation, including border wars, civil wars, and Indian wars. As Jones, Morrison, Silko, and Yamashita reveal, most nation-states in the region then embarked on a process of modernization, which included a strengthened central government, industrialization, urbanization, and immigration. As Anzaldua, Marshall, and Silko suggest, the U.S., as one of the most successful modernizers in the hemisphere, and rivalled only by England, Germany, Japan, and Russia in the world, established itself as a rising power during this period, which meant that its neighbors got a preview of the American Century well before the Middle East and Asia did.
Of course, these nine writers represent a fraction of the U.S. literatures that make possible this new understanding of national and hemispheric histories and that lead me to suggest that the key processes of our time are competing versions of transnationalism and globalization. Also, even all the U.S. literatures that could be linked to these processes are only a small fraction of the literatures of each nation-state in the hemisphere, many of which represented, responded to, and influenced past and present processes quite differently than U.S. literatures have.
With this in mind, the periodization scheme I have laid out here today points the way to a large-scale collective project for Americanists around the world: understanding the interrelations, interactions, and interweavings among the literatures of the new world; mapping the ways in which the intranational, international, and transnational network of U.S. literatures links up with those of other literatures of the Americas; making sense of the juxtapositions, parallels, and other patterns that such a mapping makes possible, in a way that forges new understandings of the relations between literary and other histories; and trying to settle the questions hovering about the end of the American Century and the emergence of something new from it. This is a huge project, but if we want to make sense of the past, present, and especially the future of literatures in and outside the U.S., if we truly believe that another world is possible than that of the American Century, this is what I believe scholars of my generation should be working on in coming decades.
***
So yes, read the nine novels listed in the labels below and get a new understanding of what constitutes American literature and how to organize its study, plus a new perspective on the history of the world since Columbus....
Friday, March 16, 2007
Thursday, March 15, 2007
Six-Word Spoilers
Think of this post as a mash-up of norbizness (happily ruining movies for the rest of us since 2004) and Scott Eric Kaufman (riffing on Wired's six-word stories by sf writers). Inspired by what has to be SEK's summary of "Roger Malvin's Burial"--"The hunter squeezes. His son falls."--I present the following spoilers of well-known Hawthorne novels and tales. Have fun IDing them in the comments.
Walk in woods: no good end.
He loved her? WTF?!
Don't touch the girl! She's poison!
She learned to love the letter.
Their marriage ends families' feud--hopefully.
Obsessed scientist purifies wife, killing her.
Hawthorne was such a hopeless romantic (that is, in the romance sense--and not the medieval one), wasn't he? Feel free to add your own in comments, including improvements on these!
Oh, and if you write them yourself, why not submit your best to SJ Rozan's Six Word Stories blog?
Walk in woods: no good end.
He loved her? WTF?!
Don't touch the girl! She's poison!
She learned to love the letter.
Their marriage ends families' feud--hopefully.
Obsessed scientist purifies wife, killing her.
Hawthorne was such a hopeless romantic (that is, in the romance sense--and not the medieval one), wasn't he? Feel free to add your own in comments, including improvements on these!
Oh, and if you write them yourself, why not submit your best to SJ Rozan's Six Word Stories blog?
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Adventures in Lazy Blogging: From the Sendai Talk
This was the set-up for the rest of the talk--it consists of a reading of my title, “The End of the American Century in Contemporary U.S. Literatures.” Should I have been invited to the speaker series that Tohoku University put together? Should they have withheld my honorarium? Inquiring authors want to know!
***
Let’s start with the second part of my talk’s title, “in Contemporary U.S. Literatures,” which pointedly refuses to identify a core culture that would constitute the mainstream of American literature today. Due in part to the incredible and accelerating diversification of literary production, distribution, and reception in the United States over the course of the twentieth century--not just of region, class, ethnicity, race, gender, religion, but also of publishers, formats, genres, audiences, traditions, movements, and more--many Americanists agree with me that it is better to refer to “U.S. literatures” than “American literature.” For one thing, “U.S. literatures” acknowledges that the U.S. does not have a monopoly on the term “American,” which can refer as easily to a continent or hemisphere as to any of the many literary traditions in the Americas. For another, “U.S. literatures” troubles the link between “nation” and “literature” presumed in such concepts as “national literature,” suggesting instead that there can be many literatures within a single nation-state. So one of the things I will do in this talk is introduce you to the multiplicity of contemporary U.S. literatures--and particularly to their interrelations, interactions, and interweavings.
To do this, I will focus on African American writers Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, and Octavia Butler, Afro-Caribbean writers Paule Marshall and Maryse Conde, Asian American writers Bharati Mukherjee and Karen Tei Yamashita, Latino writer Gloria Anzaldua, and Native American writer Leslie Marmon Silko. Each has participated in multiple U.S. literatures in her career. Butler, for instance, has made major contributions to both African American literature and science fiction. Mukherjee, Marshall, and Yamashita have all participated brilliantly in the literature of immigration but have also contributed to their different ethnic, racial, and diasporic U.S. literatures. Anzaldua, Yamashita, and Silko have all written literature of the U.S. West and of the borderlands, but could be grouped separately as Texas, California, and Arizona writers, respectively, not to mention in their respective pan-ethnicities as Latino, Asian American, and American Indian, or in their respective ethnicities as Chicano, Japanese-American, and Laguna Pueblo. As these few examples show, precisely because individual writers contribute to and have been influenced by multiple literatures inside and outside the U.S., it would be wrong to conclude that “U.S. literatures” means the dispersal of a unified national literature into several separate literatures with little in common. Rather, “U.S. literatures” constitute a complex and dynamic network that is at once intranational, international, and transnational.
So in part this talk tries to move us from the debates over canonization that have dominated public discussion of contemporary multicultural and multiethnic American literature to the debates over periodization implied by my title’s temporal focus: “The End of the American Century in Contemporary U.S. Literatures.” That is, rather than obsessively asking, “who counts as a major American author?” “which U.S. literatures make up the mainstream of American culture?” we ought to be asking other questions, like “what patterns or shapes have U.S. literatures formed in the past?” “what have been the relationships within, among, and between U.S. literatures?” “what might they reveal about the commonalities and differences in U.S. society?” Of course, there are any number of ways to identify literary periods in the U.S.--centuries, wars, and literary movements spring most readily to mind--which are all more or less arbitrary. Nevertheless, there’s a lot at stake in the process. To understand why, let’s look more closely at the first half of my title.
“The End of the American Century,” alludes to two of the most influential attempts by U.S. conservatives to shape the contours of a post-Cold War national consensus. One is “the end of history,” the idea Francis Fukuyama advanced in 1989 that history has reached its endpoint and achieved its purpose by revealing that the global extension of capitalist liberal democracy is humanity’s ultimate social destiny. The other is the neoconservative Project for the New American Century, which William Kristol convened in the spring of 1997 to advocate for “American global leadership,” advance “a strategic vision of America’s role in the world,” and stiffen the nation’s “resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests.” By combining the two phrases in the way I do, I aim to expose tensions within and between them--and put them to other ends than their authors intended. On the one hand, I want to suggest that Fukuyama’s vision of the end of history is circumscribed by the logic of the American Century; on the other hand, I want to suggest that Kristol’s American Century may well be in its last throes, so to speak. Unlike my talk last Saturday, when I explored the political and economic implications of the end of the American Century in Asia at the Japan-America Society of Fukuoka, today I look at the end of the American Century from a literary perspective. My core argument is that contemporary U.S. literatures, as exemplified by the writings of the nine women writers I feature in this talk, help us historicize the American Century, reexamine its logic and assumptions, and speculate about what may come after it.
Today, then, I’ll move from considering the origins and endpoint of the American Century to examining how Marshall, Jones, and Morrison have renavigated Atlantic slavery, how Anzaldua, Silko, and Yamashita have remapped North American borders, and how Butler, Conde, and Mukherjee have rewritten “American” history. I’ll close by using the insights their works provide us with to offer a new periodization scheme for U.S. literary history and to suggest what may be at stake in the reconceptualization of relations between U.S. and other literatures that it entails.
***
Want more later?
***
Let’s start with the second part of my talk’s title, “in Contemporary U.S. Literatures,” which pointedly refuses to identify a core culture that would constitute the mainstream of American literature today. Due in part to the incredible and accelerating diversification of literary production, distribution, and reception in the United States over the course of the twentieth century--not just of region, class, ethnicity, race, gender, religion, but also of publishers, formats, genres, audiences, traditions, movements, and more--many Americanists agree with me that it is better to refer to “U.S. literatures” than “American literature.” For one thing, “U.S. literatures” acknowledges that the U.S. does not have a monopoly on the term “American,” which can refer as easily to a continent or hemisphere as to any of the many literary traditions in the Americas. For another, “U.S. literatures” troubles the link between “nation” and “literature” presumed in such concepts as “national literature,” suggesting instead that there can be many literatures within a single nation-state. So one of the things I will do in this talk is introduce you to the multiplicity of contemporary U.S. literatures--and particularly to their interrelations, interactions, and interweavings.
To do this, I will focus on African American writers Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, and Octavia Butler, Afro-Caribbean writers Paule Marshall and Maryse Conde, Asian American writers Bharati Mukherjee and Karen Tei Yamashita, Latino writer Gloria Anzaldua, and Native American writer Leslie Marmon Silko. Each has participated in multiple U.S. literatures in her career. Butler, for instance, has made major contributions to both African American literature and science fiction. Mukherjee, Marshall, and Yamashita have all participated brilliantly in the literature of immigration but have also contributed to their different ethnic, racial, and diasporic U.S. literatures. Anzaldua, Yamashita, and Silko have all written literature of the U.S. West and of the borderlands, but could be grouped separately as Texas, California, and Arizona writers, respectively, not to mention in their respective pan-ethnicities as Latino, Asian American, and American Indian, or in their respective ethnicities as Chicano, Japanese-American, and Laguna Pueblo. As these few examples show, precisely because individual writers contribute to and have been influenced by multiple literatures inside and outside the U.S., it would be wrong to conclude that “U.S. literatures” means the dispersal of a unified national literature into several separate literatures with little in common. Rather, “U.S. literatures” constitute a complex and dynamic network that is at once intranational, international, and transnational.
So in part this talk tries to move us from the debates over canonization that have dominated public discussion of contemporary multicultural and multiethnic American literature to the debates over periodization implied by my title’s temporal focus: “The End of the American Century in Contemporary U.S. Literatures.” That is, rather than obsessively asking, “who counts as a major American author?” “which U.S. literatures make up the mainstream of American culture?” we ought to be asking other questions, like “what patterns or shapes have U.S. literatures formed in the past?” “what have been the relationships within, among, and between U.S. literatures?” “what might they reveal about the commonalities and differences in U.S. society?” Of course, there are any number of ways to identify literary periods in the U.S.--centuries, wars, and literary movements spring most readily to mind--which are all more or less arbitrary. Nevertheless, there’s a lot at stake in the process. To understand why, let’s look more closely at the first half of my title.
“The End of the American Century,” alludes to two of the most influential attempts by U.S. conservatives to shape the contours of a post-Cold War national consensus. One is “the end of history,” the idea Francis Fukuyama advanced in 1989 that history has reached its endpoint and achieved its purpose by revealing that the global extension of capitalist liberal democracy is humanity’s ultimate social destiny. The other is the neoconservative Project for the New American Century, which William Kristol convened in the spring of 1997 to advocate for “American global leadership,” advance “a strategic vision of America’s role in the world,” and stiffen the nation’s “resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests.” By combining the two phrases in the way I do, I aim to expose tensions within and between them--and put them to other ends than their authors intended. On the one hand, I want to suggest that Fukuyama’s vision of the end of history is circumscribed by the logic of the American Century; on the other hand, I want to suggest that Kristol’s American Century may well be in its last throes, so to speak. Unlike my talk last Saturday, when I explored the political and economic implications of the end of the American Century in Asia at the Japan-America Society of Fukuoka, today I look at the end of the American Century from a literary perspective. My core argument is that contemporary U.S. literatures, as exemplified by the writings of the nine women writers I feature in this talk, help us historicize the American Century, reexamine its logic and assumptions, and speculate about what may come after it.
Today, then, I’ll move from considering the origins and endpoint of the American Century to examining how Marshall, Jones, and Morrison have renavigated Atlantic slavery, how Anzaldua, Silko, and Yamashita have remapped North American borders, and how Butler, Conde, and Mukherjee have rewritten “American” history. I’ll close by using the insights their works provide us with to offer a new periodization scheme for U.S. literary history and to suggest what may be at stake in the reconceptualization of relations between U.S. and other literatures that it entails.
***
Want more later?
Monday, March 12, 2007
On Racial Aesthetics and Narratorial/Authorial Intention, Part I
From "Old News":
This is a passage I devote more than a few paragraphs to in the second chapter of my manuscript (although now that I think of it, the middle section of the first chapter may work better as a stand-alone intro, so this may well become the manuscript's third chapter). I'll give you my initial reading of it here:
This is a small part of my set-up for one of my core claims in the chapter that "the narrator in 'Old News' presents a story not of 'civilization to fratricide'--this formulation misses the implicit racialization of both 'civilization' and 'fratricide' in the sketch--but instead one that moves from a period of increasing Anglo-American solidarity to a period of contention and separation." I elaborate on this claim as follows:
Got a lot to do today, so I'll stop there before getting into the issue of the relation between Hawthorne's narratorial persona's intentions and his own intentions in the sketch, but as I'm revising this chapter over the next few weeks, I'll be posting from it when it fits the programming schedule. There's been a lot of new work on the picturesque, race, and colonialism that I have to examine to see where and how I need to revise the chapter still further.
There is a good deal of amusement, and some profit, in the perusal of those little items, which characterize the manners and circumstances of the country. New-England was then in a state incomparably more picturesque than at present, or than it has been within the memory of man; there being, as yet, only a narrow strip of civilization along the edge of a vast forest, peopled with enough of its original race to contrast the savage life with the old customs of another world. The white population, also, was diversified by the influx of all sorts of expatriated vagabonds, and by the continuous importation of bond-servants from Ireland and elsewhere; so that there was a wild and unsettled multitude, forming a strong minority to the sober descendants of the Puritans. Then there were the slaves, contributing their dark shade to the picture of society. The consequence of all this was, a great variety and singularity of action and incident.
This is a passage I devote more than a few paragraphs to in the second chapter of my manuscript (although now that I think of it, the middle section of the first chapter may work better as a stand-alone intro, so this may well become the manuscript's third chapter). I'll give you my initial reading of it here:
To the narrator, contrast brings out the "manners and circumstances" "of “New-England"--"a narrow strip of civilization” somewhere between "the savage life" of "the original race" and "the old customs of another world." New England civilization, that is, is composed of "the sober descendants of the Puritans," and it is opposed to the "wild and unsettled multitude" of Indians, "expatriated vagabonds," Irish and other European "bond-servants," and, of course, "the slaves, contributing their dark shade to the picture of society." Here, the narrator distinguishes between Anglo-Puritan "civilization" and the greater "society" of the colony, which forms a "strong minority" to the Puritan majority. The picturesqueness of the scene, it seems, is a result of the "great variety and singularity of action and incident" brought about by the presence of a diversified white population surrounded by the savage life of Indians and the dark shade of the slaves. Indeed, even the arrangement of Native Americans, whites, and slaves into a foreground, middleground, and background--with the emphasis placed on the middleground--corresponds to Gilpin's rules for picturesque aesthetics. The picturesque intervenes to domesticate the double dangers of excessive difference and roughness and of excessive sameness and dullness. It not only allows the historical tourist to enjoy the aesthetics of the scene before him, it also gives him a structure through which he can unobtrusively emphasize the presence of the Puritans.
This is a small part of my set-up for one of my core claims in the chapter that "the narrator in 'Old News' presents a story not of 'civilization to fratricide'--this formulation misses the implicit racialization of both 'civilization' and 'fratricide' in the sketch--but instead one that moves from a period of increasing Anglo-American solidarity to a period of contention and separation." I elaborate on this claim as follows:
When the "Old News" narrator says that he loves to see a man "keep the characteristics of his country," he precisely does not mean to include that "alien race, generally incapable of self-direction," whose enslavement he tacitly defends, as even a potential member of that citizenry. On the contrary, no matter how "familiarly" "intermixed" with the Puritans "under the domestic sway of our fathers," the slaves' only function in his narrative is to contribute "their dark shade to the picture of society," to offset the virtues of the Anglo-Puritan civilization of colonial New England. Slavery can be viewed as "a patriarchal, and almost a beautiful, peculiarity of the times" because of the narrator's commitment to picturesque aesthetics. Ultimately, then, what "Old News" is about, what holds the three sections of the sketch together, is what makes the United States "America." And what apparently makes its citizens "Americans" is a combination of shared ("English") blood and commitment to picturesque aesthetics. Hawthorne's narrator implicitly defines America as a country composed of the descendants of the Puritans. The picturesque effect that he attempts to achieve is not simply antiquarian, then, not simply an attempt to leave an impression of the pastness of the past. Rather, it is the simultaneous racialization and aestheticization of the Anglo-Puritan origins of the American self.
Got a lot to do today, so I'll stop there before getting into the issue of the relation between Hawthorne's narratorial persona's intentions and his own intentions in the sketch, but as I'm revising this chapter over the next few weeks, I'll be posting from it when it fits the programming schedule. There's been a lot of new work on the picturesque, race, and colonialism that I have to examine to see where and how I need to revise the chapter still further.
Dramatis Personae
It occurs to me that my use of Japanese and references to my family members here on CitizenSE may be confusing or off-putting to most of the people who come here accidentally through google or other web searches. And even my handful of semi-regular readers will no doubt appreciate a playbill. Plus, I don't have time to do any serious blogging today--or, apparently, if you look over the most recent third of my posts here, for the past month or so. In any case, one of the reasons to blog is to tell funny (and other) stories about your family. So without further ado, may I present...
CitizenSE Dramatis Personae
[note on pronouncing Japanese: the alphabet consists of variations on the vowels (spelled here phonetically) "ah" "ee" "ooh" "ay" (or "eh" if you're Canadian) and "oh" (such as kah-key-koo-kay-koh); all syllables end in vowels; double vowels means drag the vowel sound out for another beat, although often people in Japan represent the dragged out "oh" sound as "ou" instead of "oo," mistakenly thinking that's any clearer (there's no good solution--"ohhh" looks stupid and sounds kinda pornographic, for instance, but until Americans learn to read hiragana and katakana, we're stuck with romaji)]
The Tsuma, She-Who-Will-Not-Be-Mentioned-on-Blogs: just call her the International Women of Mystery I'm married to; also known as mama or okaasan to the musume futari.
Musume Futari: our two daughters, who have too many aliases to list here.
Onechan, Uh Oh Diva Girl: our older daughter, the sansai onnanoko (3-year-old girl), who goes to yochien (a Baptist pre-K day care/school arrangement for half the day, even though the only Christians in the family are the awesome Catholic family my brother married into), loves Pretty Cure, Dora, and PowerPuff Girls (even though we haven't yet let her see the original version), likes to wear skirts ("I want to be a girl!"), and responded to my joke that there ought to be a Cure Yada ("no way!") to go with Cure White, Black, Egret, Dream, Rouge, Mint, Lemonade, and the rest) with a pause for thought followed by the suggestion, "and a Cure Cough-y!" Yup, she's a comedian, too. (We've all been coughing off and on since January.)
Imoto, Happy Sporty Science Girl: our younger daughter, the juukagetsu akachan (10-month-old baby), who not only can do all the things I bragged about a couple of posts ago, but also is into opening and closing doors, standing up in her stroller, dropping things to see what happens, putting everything in her mouth, screeching with delight, giggling, expressing frustration in all kinds of hilariously cute non-verbal ways, and trying to learn to walk and imitate the words coming out of our mouths at roughly the same time (onechan would always swing from one to the other in that awesome 6-18-month transformation from barely-rolling-over baby to a toddler).
Baba, Gigi, Grandma, Grandpa: the Japanese and American grandparents, respectively.
Various tomodachi (friends) of the kazuko (family), to be named later. There--fun, easy, and quick. Maybe will be able to actually do a close reading tomorrow. We'll see.
CitizenSE Dramatis Personae
[note on pronouncing Japanese: the alphabet consists of variations on the vowels (spelled here phonetically) "ah" "ee" "ooh" "ay" (or "eh" if you're Canadian) and "oh" (such as kah-key-koo-kay-koh); all syllables end in vowels; double vowels means drag the vowel sound out for another beat, although often people in Japan represent the dragged out "oh" sound as "ou" instead of "oo," mistakenly thinking that's any clearer (there's no good solution--"ohhh" looks stupid and sounds kinda pornographic, for instance, but until Americans learn to read hiragana and katakana, we're stuck with romaji)]
The Tsuma, She-Who-Will-Not-Be-Mentioned-on-Blogs: just call her the International Women of Mystery I'm married to; also known as mama or okaasan to the musume futari.
Musume Futari: our two daughters, who have too many aliases to list here.
Onechan, Uh Oh Diva Girl: our older daughter, the sansai onnanoko (3-year-old girl), who goes to yochien (a Baptist pre-K day care/school arrangement for half the day, even though the only Christians in the family are the awesome Catholic family my brother married into), loves Pretty Cure, Dora, and PowerPuff Girls (even though we haven't yet let her see the original version), likes to wear skirts ("I want to be a girl!"), and responded to my joke that there ought to be a Cure Yada ("no way!") to go with Cure White, Black, Egret, Dream, Rouge, Mint, Lemonade, and the rest) with a pause for thought followed by the suggestion, "and a Cure Cough-y!" Yup, she's a comedian, too. (We've all been coughing off and on since January.)
Imoto, Happy Sporty Science Girl: our younger daughter, the juukagetsu akachan (10-month-old baby), who not only can do all the things I bragged about a couple of posts ago, but also is into opening and closing doors, standing up in her stroller, dropping things to see what happens, putting everything in her mouth, screeching with delight, giggling, expressing frustration in all kinds of hilariously cute non-verbal ways, and trying to learn to walk and imitate the words coming out of our mouths at roughly the same time (onechan would always swing from one to the other in that awesome 6-18-month transformation from barely-rolling-over baby to a toddler).
Baba, Gigi, Grandma, Grandpa: the Japanese and American grandparents, respectively.
Various tomodachi (friends) of the kazuko (family), to be named later. There--fun, easy, and quick. Maybe will be able to actually do a close reading tomorrow. We'll see.
Sunday, March 11, 2007
In Which My Self-Nomination for Father of the Year Is Not To Be Taken Literally
Following Bitch Ph.D., I have a story to tell y'all about the onechan and me. We were at the mall in Kashii--the place where last time we went, we all got seriously sick for the first time in Japan that I remember--and had quite the scare. I lost our sansai onechan for about 15 minutes in a large clothing store. No harm done--a nice lady working there saw her crying, calmed her down, took her to the bathroom (because she said she told her to go oshiko), got her name and age out of her (thank you, yochien, for helping us drill that into her!), and paged us. So here's what Hawthorne would say--exercising his usual artistic licence--in his nomination speech for my Father of the Year Award, describing the first words the tsuma said to me upon catching up with her and the onechan:
"Ethan, meet Wakefield."
Thank you, thank you. Next show at 9:30.
Seriously, it would have been the worst 15 minutes of my life, but during a crisis--like, say, last week when the juukagetsu imoto was choking on a slice of cabbage that onechan and I were grating for their mama that had fallen from the grater onto the floor and gone straight into her mouth when we weren't looking--I'm scarily calm, I've discovered to my relief (better than panicking, right?) and dismay (why so many crises?). Still, the one distracting thought that slipped through my crisis mode this afternoon was the mental image of onechan wandering off (to look at some of those skirts we had just gone to the changing room to tell her mama she liked, I thought, while I was fumbling with the mall stroller and our stroller and agreeing with the tsuma that imoto and I would chase onechan down--but no!) and the thought that that would be my last sight of her.
Phew. Thank god Japanese workers take service so damn seriously and that Fukuoka is so family-friendly. I am truly baka.
"Ethan, meet Wakefield."
Thank you, thank you. Next show at 9:30.
Seriously, it would have been the worst 15 minutes of my life, but during a crisis--like, say, last week when the juukagetsu imoto was choking on a slice of cabbage that onechan and I were grating for their mama that had fallen from the grater onto the floor and gone straight into her mouth when we weren't looking--I'm scarily calm, I've discovered to my relief (better than panicking, right?) and dismay (why so many crises?). Still, the one distracting thought that slipped through my crisis mode this afternoon was the mental image of onechan wandering off (to look at some of those skirts we had just gone to the changing room to tell her mama she liked, I thought, while I was fumbling with the mall stroller and our stroller and agreeing with the tsuma that imoto and I would chase onechan down--but no!) and the thought that that would be my last sight of her.
Phew. Thank god Japanese workers take service so damn seriously and that Fukuoka is so family-friendly. I am truly baka.
Friday, March 09, 2007
A Few Crazy Ideas
My weekend posting is going to have to be shorter and crappier than usual in the foreseeable future, as I switch back to a regular work schedule on weekdays starting next Monday, which means both onechan and imoto will be needing more attention when I'm back home.
Have I mentioned here that in the last two months, imoto has started standing/cruising/walking (at least when you hold her hands or when she makes her way to a stroller and starts using it as a walker!), clapping, waving goodbye, babbling (from "emma" to "mama" and this kind of "dadadadadadadada" thing that may well be addressed to me, not to mention "upffffff" and screeches of delight, frustration, or outrage of all kinds--quite a step up from crying to be held when I come home from work, which was the first big development in her relationship with me), teethed her way to her (at last count) first 4 teeth coming in (two bottom middle ones first, then the corresponding two top one)? Or that onechan has been moving her ratio of "I'm a big girl"/"I'm a baybeeeeeee" closer to 4-1 over the same time period? (Could it be that the Uh Oh Diva Girl is figuring out that imitating her younger sister is not a winning strategy for a three-year-old? Could it be that going to the Baptist yochien and seeing how all the older kids act is good for her? Signs point to "yes.") She's also gotten really into drawing and is doing a lot of cool arts things in her yochien, plus making some new close frends. My point here is that we're right in the middle of our favorite baby phase (from rolling over to walking and talking) for imoto and witnessing a major transformation in onechan's life (the end of the terrible twos, which we thought happened last spring, but never underestimate the intelligence of a two-year-old--she was perfectly capable of figuring out what worked for the atarashii akachan and using it for herself [but for a year?!!!--yup]) in the CitizenSE household, and I want to be there for as much of it as I can.
So, a list today. Projects I'm considering for the post-Fulbright future:
1) EDITING: Reading Hawthorne in Showa Japan has a nice ring to it, eh? Here's the plan: I contact the NH societies of the U.S. and Japan before leaving Fukuoka with a proposal to edit a collection of essays that translates/collects representative work from the most influential Hawthornists of Japan during this period (asking the NH Society of Japan to do the selecting and share the bill for translating with the NH Society of the U.S.) and publishes short responses from the most influential Hawthornists of the U.S. (as selected by the NH Society of the U.S.). My contribution would be coordination and an introductory essay that compares/contrasts the developments of Hawthorne Studies in the two nations during this time period.
2) CONFERENCE: I want to organize an international conference on the cultural politics of U.S. literatures and literary criticism in Japan. Obviously, one of the big turns in U.S. literary studies of the past couple of generations has been toward historicizing the reception and cultural work of "classic American literature" and of tracking the politics of literary reputation and the formation of what's taken to be the "traditional" American literary canon. This has extended in the U.S. into studies that do the same kinds of analyses, not of American literature, but of Americanist literary criticism. To give a few examples of famous people doing both kinds of work, think Tompkins on gender, Lauter on Melville and modernism, Pease on the Cold War, Kaplan on U.S. imperialism...the list goes on and on. So what I envision is finding out who's doing that same kind of work in Japan and around the world by organizing an international conference on the subject. By casting my net wide--inviting work from the late Tokugawa period to the present, rather than focusing on a specific period--I get to highlight the best new work in and on Japan in the U.S. Obviously this would be of interest to postcolonial studies, as well, given Said, Spivak, Bhabha in general and specifically Gauri Viswanathan's trailblazing work on English Studies in India, Annika Hohenthal's work on English in India, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan's "Learning from Said" (in Politics and Culture 1 [2004]), and so on.
3) RESEARCH: I need to get my language abilities in Japanese to the point where I can read literary criticism in Japanese passably well to do this, but I want to eventually be able to contribute my own little pieces to the larger work that the conference would feature. Given my primary specialty, I would most likely focus on the cultural work of studies of antebellum U.S. literatures, but I would have to be flexible and see what the most revealing literary criticism turns out to be. What I'm particularly interested in is the range of responses by Japanese Americanists to the U.S. occupation of Japan and how the politics of American Studies in Japan relates to--and what it may reveal about--larger debates in Japanese society over American culture over the course of the Showa period.
So there you have it. I'm going back to a 4/3 teaching load in August, doing my best to avoid immersing myself in service as I consciously chose to do when I first got the job (on which more later), and still have three major and several minor projects to complete without a leave in the foreseeable future (having decided to use mine with the Fulbright, rather than save it for my return), but hey, a guy can dream, right? Or rather, a guy can get back to work for the next 5 months and see how close he can come to wrapping up the ongoing projects....
Have I mentioned here that in the last two months, imoto has started standing/cruising/walking (at least when you hold her hands or when she makes her way to a stroller and starts using it as a walker!), clapping, waving goodbye, babbling (from "emma" to "mama" and this kind of "dadadadadadadada" thing that may well be addressed to me, not to mention "upffffff" and screeches of delight, frustration, or outrage of all kinds--quite a step up from crying to be held when I come home from work, which was the first big development in her relationship with me), teethed her way to her (at last count) first 4 teeth coming in (two bottom middle ones first, then the corresponding two top one)? Or that onechan has been moving her ratio of "I'm a big girl"/"I'm a baybeeeeeee" closer to 4-1 over the same time period? (Could it be that the Uh Oh Diva Girl is figuring out that imitating her younger sister is not a winning strategy for a three-year-old? Could it be that going to the Baptist yochien and seeing how all the older kids act is good for her? Signs point to "yes.") She's also gotten really into drawing and is doing a lot of cool arts things in her yochien, plus making some new close frends. My point here is that we're right in the middle of our favorite baby phase (from rolling over to walking and talking) for imoto and witnessing a major transformation in onechan's life (the end of the terrible twos, which we thought happened last spring, but never underestimate the intelligence of a two-year-old--she was perfectly capable of figuring out what worked for the atarashii akachan and using it for herself [but for a year?!!!--yup]) in the CitizenSE household, and I want to be there for as much of it as I can.
So, a list today. Projects I'm considering for the post-Fulbright future:
1) EDITING: Reading Hawthorne in Showa Japan has a nice ring to it, eh? Here's the plan: I contact the NH societies of the U.S. and Japan before leaving Fukuoka with a proposal to edit a collection of essays that translates/collects representative work from the most influential Hawthornists of Japan during this period (asking the NH Society of Japan to do the selecting and share the bill for translating with the NH Society of the U.S.) and publishes short responses from the most influential Hawthornists of the U.S. (as selected by the NH Society of the U.S.). My contribution would be coordination and an introductory essay that compares/contrasts the developments of Hawthorne Studies in the two nations during this time period.
2) CONFERENCE: I want to organize an international conference on the cultural politics of U.S. literatures and literary criticism in Japan. Obviously, one of the big turns in U.S. literary studies of the past couple of generations has been toward historicizing the reception and cultural work of "classic American literature" and of tracking the politics of literary reputation and the formation of what's taken to be the "traditional" American literary canon. This has extended in the U.S. into studies that do the same kinds of analyses, not of American literature, but of Americanist literary criticism. To give a few examples of famous people doing both kinds of work, think Tompkins on gender, Lauter on Melville and modernism, Pease on the Cold War, Kaplan on U.S. imperialism...the list goes on and on. So what I envision is finding out who's doing that same kind of work in Japan and around the world by organizing an international conference on the subject. By casting my net wide--inviting work from the late Tokugawa period to the present, rather than focusing on a specific period--I get to highlight the best new work in and on Japan in the U.S. Obviously this would be of interest to postcolonial studies, as well, given Said, Spivak, Bhabha in general and specifically Gauri Viswanathan's trailblazing work on English Studies in India, Annika Hohenthal's work on English in India, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan's "Learning from Said" (in Politics and Culture 1 [2004]), and so on.
3) RESEARCH: I need to get my language abilities in Japanese to the point where I can read literary criticism in Japanese passably well to do this, but I want to eventually be able to contribute my own little pieces to the larger work that the conference would feature. Given my primary specialty, I would most likely focus on the cultural work of studies of antebellum U.S. literatures, but I would have to be flexible and see what the most revealing literary criticism turns out to be. What I'm particularly interested in is the range of responses by Japanese Americanists to the U.S. occupation of Japan and how the politics of American Studies in Japan relates to--and what it may reveal about--larger debates in Japanese society over American culture over the course of the Showa period.
So there you have it. I'm going back to a 4/3 teaching load in August, doing my best to avoid immersing myself in service as I consciously chose to do when I first got the job (on which more later), and still have three major and several minor projects to complete without a leave in the foreseeable future (having decided to use mine with the Fulbright, rather than save it for my return), but hey, a guy can dream, right? Or rather, a guy can get back to work for the next 5 months and see how close he can come to wrapping up the ongoing projects....
Thursday, March 08, 2007
Pop Hawthorne
All right, folks, it's time to explore the wild world wide web of Hawthorne. Just for you, I've culled out the whining about having to read Hawthorne in school, the adult sites that reference Hawthorne, the undergrads and the book clubbers, plot summaries and meandering musings--just to bring you the more interesting non-specialist Hawthorne-related pages. What do you think they reveal about the ways he is perceived by non-specialists? What do you see as the relation between these pop Hawthornes and the various academic Hawthornes?
FILM: The Scarlet Letter (주홍글씨 2004) (Screen: An Asian Film Blog)
MUSIC: The Parallel Universe (Noise Filter)
MUSICAL THEATER: Pearl: the Musical (Katie Kring)
LITERARY FANDOM: Lovecraft on Quantum Physics (Chris Perridas)
POLITICS: Hypocritical Bush the Dictator's Friend (Buddy's Bemusings)
PARENTING: Of Goths, Satanism, and Teenage Quicksand (John Botscharow)
SPORTS: Hockey as Written by Nathaniel Hawthorne (Sitting in the Stalls)
SELF-HELP: The Scarlet Letter (All About a Girl)
FYI, Susan Cheever has a new book out this year, American Bloomsbury, that deals in part with Hawthorne.
FILM: The Scarlet Letter (주홍글씨 2004) (Screen: An Asian Film Blog)
MUSIC: The Parallel Universe (Noise Filter)
MUSICAL THEATER: Pearl: the Musical (Katie Kring)
LITERARY FANDOM: Lovecraft on Quantum Physics (Chris Perridas)
POLITICS: Hypocritical Bush the Dictator's Friend (Buddy's Bemusings)
PARENTING: Of Goths, Satanism, and Teenage Quicksand (John Botscharow)
SPORTS: Hockey as Written by Nathaniel Hawthorne (Sitting in the Stalls)
SELF-HELP: The Scarlet Letter (All About a Girl)
FYI, Susan Cheever has a new book out this year, American Bloomsbury, that deals in part with Hawthorne.
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
In Which I Make Extravagant Claims
Claims too extravagant to blog just yet. You'll have to click on this link to my talk in Sendai for the Tohoku Association for American Studies to see just how extravagant I can get--trying to praise the achievements of 9 prolific women writers in 45 minutes, to offer a new periodization scheme for American (in the hemispheric as well as national senses) literary history, that sort of thing. For those who do click and read, is there anything worth developing further in "The End of the American Century in Contemporary U.S. Literatures"?
OK, got to go get ready for onechan's first field trip! Of course the whole family is going along...I wouldn't miss it for the world!
[Update 3/10/07: I'm much prouder of this as an inadvertent International Women's Day post than the one I did over at Mostly Harmless on March 8--clearly I should have switched my March 6 and March 8 posts over there!]
OK, got to go get ready for onechan's first field trip! Of course the whole family is going along...I wouldn't miss it for the world!
[Update 3/10/07: I'm much prouder of this as an inadvertent International Women's Day post than the one I did over at Mostly Harmless on March 8--clearly I should have switched my March 6 and March 8 posts over there!]
Jee Yoon Lee on the Oriental Hester
Gotta love the synchronicity--just about the time I was blogging on Salem and "the Orient" here at CitizenSE, Jee Yoon Lee of the University of Michigan published "'The Rude Contact of Some Actual Circumstance': Hawthorne and Salem's East India Marine Museum" in ELH 73 (2006) 949-973. As they say in these here parts of blogoramaville, read that gosh darn thing in its entirety. But if you want my summary and reactions, read on.
Picking up where Charles Goodspeed left off in 1945 and Luther Luedtke did in 1989, Lee argues that "Hawthorne's literary imagination is powerfully grounded in the material objects from the Orient," that "the letter A becomes the icon, the index, and the symbol of the material culture displayed in Salem's East India Maritime Museum," that the narrator of the novel "accentuates the story of the Puritan Hester into a figure, a symbol Orientalized by contact with the material circumstances of Salem's East India trade," and concludes:
Along the way, Lee brings together scholarship on material culture, visual culture, and icons, images, and symbols; historicizes Salem's India trade, its museum commemorating the trade for 19th C visitors, and needlework in 19th as well as 17th C New England; provides good readings of three scenes from The Scarlet Letter--"Hester at her needle, at the Governor's Hall, and upon her death"--that "illustrate the commingling of the material culture of the East India Marine Museum and the writing materials of the Orient"; and cites the obligatory big names in Hawthorne scholarship (Bell, Bercovitch, Berlant, Colacurcio, Luedtke, Ryskamp, and Tompkins) along with a couple of surprises (Crain, Goodyear). I learned a lot from every section of the essay and several times kicked myself for not noticing things Lee points out on my own. The best moment in the essay for me is when "Hester catches a glimpse of herself in the Governor's armor, and sees herself as if she were a spoil from a foreign war"; here, Lee emphasizes the museum-like qualities of Bellingham's hall, juxtaposes them with the display of "the dried head of a Fijian displayed in the East India Marine Museum," and concludes that "Hester emerges as an object bejeweled by her embroidery, defined by her expression of an Oriental nature, a fictive equivalent of the exotic material things displayed at the East India Marine Museum."
Of course, any essay necessarily has roads not taken, but it was disappointing to me that even here, in the strongest and most original moment in the essay, Lee doesn't link violence against Fijians with the literal historical referent in the armor reflection scene--the Pequod War--or address the way in which the Governor's bond-servant--"a free-born Englishman, but now a seven years' slave"--who ushers Hester into the mansion, impressed by her letter and her airs, frames the entire scene with a slavery/indentured servitude reference. Lee's readings could have been enriched by pursuing these and other links between the multiple "others" of the Puritans in The Scarlet Letter. But even within the parameters of her essay's chosen focus, some troubling problems emerge.
The biggest problem is the essay's repeatedly raising "and then...?" and "so what?" questions without adequately pursuing answers to them--or at least answers Hawthorne specialists would find particularly original. "The presence of the Orient in [Hawthorne's] daily life" matters because it "gives credence to the idea of an Oriental Hester"--which is important because...? Hawthorne "re-imagine[s] Hester within the context of the Oriental influences of his times"--to what ends? with what effects? As I noted here around the same time this essay came out, Hawthorne revealingly shifts from undeveloped reveries of the height of Salem's Oriental trade, "when India was a new region, and only Salem knew the way thither," to the (invented) discovery of the scarlet letter, which sparks his imagination and inspires his novel (or so he claims)--yet Lee never mentions this moment. Nor did Lee or ELH's readers or editors catch an error, when she attributes a line from "The Custom-House" in which the narrator discusses his imagined characters' resistance--figured revealingly as "the tribe of unrealities"--as a description of the scarlet letter itself. In avoiding engagement with Berlant's actual arguments about Hester's needlework, or (ahem) my arguments about Mukherjee's revisions of The Scarlet Letter in The Holder of the World (which she could have built on as well as criticized on solid grounds), Lee reveals the thinness of her engagement with Hawthorne scholarship relevant to her main argument and misses an opportunity to develop its implications and stakes. What is Hawthorne's relation with his protagonist and his narrator? To what ends does he Orientalize Hester? How do Lee's findings impact debates over Hawthorne's depictions of racism, sexism, and colonialism in his fiction?
From a quick google search, this essay looks to be one of Lee's first published pieces from her dissertation. From the little that I've seen of her other work on race and Hawthorne, I think Lee is well on her way to a promising Hawthorne section of an impressive book manuscript. If she can find a way to make her work on The House of the Seven Gables reflect back on her revisions of this chapter-to-be on The Scarlet Letter, she'll be in a great position to follow through on the achievements of and the potential revealed in this essay.
Picking up where Charles Goodspeed left off in 1945 and Luther Luedtke did in 1989, Lee argues that "Hawthorne's literary imagination is powerfully grounded in the material objects from the Orient," that "the letter A becomes the icon, the index, and the symbol of the material culture displayed in Salem's East India Maritime Museum," that the narrator of the novel "accentuates the story of the Puritan Hester into a figure, a symbol Orientalized by contact with the material circumstances of Salem's East India trade," and concludes:
If Hester's letter A figures her as a woman, composed in part by words referring to her Oriental characteristics, then the things that grant her or the A she wears "a positive, a relative, and a composite meaning" are those things that can be found in the visual narratives of Salem's East India Marine Museum. In The Scarlet Letter, a distinct communal culture takes shape as Hawthorne transfigures the material culture of the Orient into a letter in the shape of a Salem Oriental Hester Prynne.
Along the way, Lee brings together scholarship on material culture, visual culture, and icons, images, and symbols; historicizes Salem's India trade, its museum commemorating the trade for 19th C visitors, and needlework in 19th as well as 17th C New England; provides good readings of three scenes from The Scarlet Letter--"Hester at her needle, at the Governor's Hall, and upon her death"--that "illustrate the commingling of the material culture of the East India Marine Museum and the writing materials of the Orient"; and cites the obligatory big names in Hawthorne scholarship (Bell, Bercovitch, Berlant, Colacurcio, Luedtke, Ryskamp, and Tompkins) along with a couple of surprises (Crain, Goodyear). I learned a lot from every section of the essay and several times kicked myself for not noticing things Lee points out on my own. The best moment in the essay for me is when "Hester catches a glimpse of herself in the Governor's armor, and sees herself as if she were a spoil from a foreign war"; here, Lee emphasizes the museum-like qualities of Bellingham's hall, juxtaposes them with the display of "the dried head of a Fijian displayed in the East India Marine Museum," and concludes that "Hester emerges as an object bejeweled by her embroidery, defined by her expression of an Oriental nature, a fictive equivalent of the exotic material things displayed at the East India Marine Museum."
Of course, any essay necessarily has roads not taken, but it was disappointing to me that even here, in the strongest and most original moment in the essay, Lee doesn't link violence against Fijians with the literal historical referent in the armor reflection scene--the Pequod War--or address the way in which the Governor's bond-servant--"a free-born Englishman, but now a seven years' slave"--who ushers Hester into the mansion, impressed by her letter and her airs, frames the entire scene with a slavery/indentured servitude reference. Lee's readings could have been enriched by pursuing these and other links between the multiple "others" of the Puritans in The Scarlet Letter. But even within the parameters of her essay's chosen focus, some troubling problems emerge.
The biggest problem is the essay's repeatedly raising "and then...?" and "so what?" questions without adequately pursuing answers to them--or at least answers Hawthorne specialists would find particularly original. "The presence of the Orient in [Hawthorne's] daily life" matters because it "gives credence to the idea of an Oriental Hester"--which is important because...? Hawthorne "re-imagine[s] Hester within the context of the Oriental influences of his times"--to what ends? with what effects? As I noted here around the same time this essay came out, Hawthorne revealingly shifts from undeveloped reveries of the height of Salem's Oriental trade, "when India was a new region, and only Salem knew the way thither," to the (invented) discovery of the scarlet letter, which sparks his imagination and inspires his novel (or so he claims)--yet Lee never mentions this moment. Nor did Lee or ELH's readers or editors catch an error, when she attributes a line from "The Custom-House" in which the narrator discusses his imagined characters' resistance--figured revealingly as "the tribe of unrealities"--as a description of the scarlet letter itself. In avoiding engagement with Berlant's actual arguments about Hester's needlework, or (ahem) my arguments about Mukherjee's revisions of The Scarlet Letter in The Holder of the World (which she could have built on as well as criticized on solid grounds), Lee reveals the thinness of her engagement with Hawthorne scholarship relevant to her main argument and misses an opportunity to develop its implications and stakes. What is Hawthorne's relation with his protagonist and his narrator? To what ends does he Orientalize Hester? How do Lee's findings impact debates over Hawthorne's depictions of racism, sexism, and colonialism in his fiction?
From a quick google search, this essay looks to be one of Lee's first published pieces from her dissertation. From the little that I've seen of her other work on race and Hawthorne, I think Lee is well on her way to a promising Hawthorne section of an impressive book manuscript. If she can find a way to make her work on The House of the Seven Gables reflect back on her revisions of this chapter-to-be on The Scarlet Letter, she'll be in a great position to follow through on the achievements of and the potential revealed in this essay.
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Have Some Fun While I'm in Sendai
Hey kids, you know I'm feeling good about this Saturday's almost-finished talk when I was confident enough this afternoon to interrupt my final edits for a half an hour to announce this contest over at Mostly Harmless. Figure some of the literary/theoretical folks on the CitizenSE blogroll might enjoy taking part in an effort to produce the best parody of Hilton Kramer blaming postmodernism for the Bush administration--or more generally the best parody of a Bush administration dead-ender trying to come up with a fig leaf for finally jumping ship. Betcha ya didn't know Hawthorne would approve of such a contest....
Monday, February 26, 2007
Why, Indeed?
Yes, well, given that I have a draft due tomorrow (late, of course), the final version due Thursday evening (even later) and the talk in Sendai on Saturday (how did March 3 come so soon?!), don't expect me to be blogging much this week, either. But what I can do is try to explain what an antebellum (and earlier) U.S. literature specialist is doing participating in a lecture series sponsored by the Tohoku Association for American Studies on "The United States of America: Its Present and Future," talking about "The End of the American Century in Contemporary U.S. Literatures."
Here's the abstract for the talk:
First obvious connection to my writing on this blog: Paule Marshall and Toni Morrison.
Second obvious connection: "postcolonial."
Third, less obvious (unless you've checked out my home page), connection: the talks and teaching I've done, conveniently summarized for you on my c.v..
What do these suggest? That in my teaching and research, I am about as familiar with the not-quite-latest U.S. literatures as I am with the not-quite-earliest, if not with the scholarship (much less the bloggership) on the former. That I particularly like to write and teach about the ways in which recent U.S. literatures establish dialogues with older literatures and histories. And that this talk is something of an attempt to convey to a general audience why they should be as interested as I am in the authors and issues I address in it.
Part of the impetus for the talk also comes from my (admittedly limited) knowledge of the American literary canon in Japanese universities, which I addressed a bit in terms of Hawthorne not that many posts ago. From what I've seen, there isn't much interest in teaching American literature after modernism, or, to hedge my bets a bit, that there are far more resources devoted to pre-1960 than post-1960 U.S. literatures. And that even in the post-1960 courses, there's less attention paid to the "multicultural" and "multiethnic" dimensions of contemporary American literary culture in Japan than in the U.S. So part of what I want to accomplish in the talk is get my audience excited about nine fairly recent women novelists who I believe represent a new trend, if not quite a new movement, in American literature today, and do my little part to help expand and rethink the Japanese American literary canon.
But part of the impetus also comes from the ways in which received notions of identity politics (as always-already essentialist, exclusionary, divisive, cooptable, opposed to class politics, etc.) have affected reactions to these and other writers in the U.S. and Japan. That is, I've seen a tendency among some contemporary and twentieth-century Americanists to deploy this negative sense of identity politics to delineate an emerging post-1960 U.S. literary canon that purportedly avoids its traps. Writers like Bellow, DeLillo, Doctorow, Mailer, Nabokov, Pynchon, Roth, and Updike are in for their virtuosity, longevity, ability to contain multitudes in their fiction, and so on, while non-white-male authors' fame rests on their not being white males more than on their talents. According to my colleague Adrienne McCormick, you can see similar moves in poetry criticism in the 1970s through 1990s, as well, particularly criticism that attempts to differentiate theoretical from multicultural/multiethnic poetry and valorize the former. So what I want to try to get at in my talk is where I see the nine non-white, non-male writers I'm focusing on differing from this admittedly rear-guard effort to establish a "traditional" post-1960s U.S. literary canon--and to do so in formal, thematic, and political terms. Ultimately, I want to suggest that the attempt to establish a "traditional" post-1960 U.S. novel canon is itself a kind of identity politics, and that we need a different way of demarcating "periods" in the post-WW II U.S. novel than those that received notions of identity politics tend to provide us with.
This is where my title's invocation of "The End of the American Century" comes in. I want to argue in my talk that we can identify a period in U.S. literatures that runs from, say, 1945-1995, which I'll call "The American Century." And that the novelists I'm focusing on, whose works span roughly 1965 to the present, are in some ways posing an alternative to the novels of the American Century and in other ways part of an emerging period that I at first thought to call "The Atlantic Century" but have since decided not to attempt to give a name to it (with the Black Atlantic and the Asian Pacific being so popular, and no clear sense of how long this new period will last, as it's still ongoing, "Atlantic Century" seemed wrong on many counts). "New World Literature" springs to mind, as well, but it's still not very good. Anyway, my point is not names but what it means to be writing from within the American Century (even if you're writing against its assumptions) and what it means to stop writing from within it.
More on this...later.
Here's the abstract for the talk:
My talk surveys the ways in which nine contemporary American women novelists have represented and reimagined new world slavery, borders, and history. In it, I show how Paule Marshall, Gayl Jones, and Toni Morrison have renavigated Atlantic slavery; how Gloria Anzaldua, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Karen Tei Yamashita have remapped North American borders, and how Maryse Conde, Bharati Mukherjee, and Octavia Butler have rewritten "American" history. At stake in these efforts, I argue, is more than a reconsideration of the American literary canon or the relationships among U.S. literatures. It is, more crucially, a break with the assumptions of the American Century and the first steps toward a transnational, postcolonial history of the Americas, and the world, since Columbus.
First obvious connection to my writing on this blog: Paule Marshall and Toni Morrison.
Second obvious connection: "postcolonial."
Third, less obvious (unless you've checked out my home page), connection: the talks and teaching I've done, conveniently summarized for you on my c.v..
What do these suggest? That in my teaching and research, I am about as familiar with the not-quite-latest U.S. literatures as I am with the not-quite-earliest, if not with the scholarship (much less the bloggership) on the former. That I particularly like to write and teach about the ways in which recent U.S. literatures establish dialogues with older literatures and histories. And that this talk is something of an attempt to convey to a general audience why they should be as interested as I am in the authors and issues I address in it.
Part of the impetus for the talk also comes from my (admittedly limited) knowledge of the American literary canon in Japanese universities, which I addressed a bit in terms of Hawthorne not that many posts ago. From what I've seen, there isn't much interest in teaching American literature after modernism, or, to hedge my bets a bit, that there are far more resources devoted to pre-1960 than post-1960 U.S. literatures. And that even in the post-1960 courses, there's less attention paid to the "multicultural" and "multiethnic" dimensions of contemporary American literary culture in Japan than in the U.S. So part of what I want to accomplish in the talk is get my audience excited about nine fairly recent women novelists who I believe represent a new trend, if not quite a new movement, in American literature today, and do my little part to help expand and rethink the Japanese American literary canon.
But part of the impetus also comes from the ways in which received notions of identity politics (as always-already essentialist, exclusionary, divisive, cooptable, opposed to class politics, etc.) have affected reactions to these and other writers in the U.S. and Japan. That is, I've seen a tendency among some contemporary and twentieth-century Americanists to deploy this negative sense of identity politics to delineate an emerging post-1960 U.S. literary canon that purportedly avoids its traps. Writers like Bellow, DeLillo, Doctorow, Mailer, Nabokov, Pynchon, Roth, and Updike are in for their virtuosity, longevity, ability to contain multitudes in their fiction, and so on, while non-white-male authors' fame rests on their not being white males more than on their talents. According to my colleague Adrienne McCormick, you can see similar moves in poetry criticism in the 1970s through 1990s, as well, particularly criticism that attempts to differentiate theoretical from multicultural/multiethnic poetry and valorize the former. So what I want to try to get at in my talk is where I see the nine non-white, non-male writers I'm focusing on differing from this admittedly rear-guard effort to establish a "traditional" post-1960s U.S. literary canon--and to do so in formal, thematic, and political terms. Ultimately, I want to suggest that the attempt to establish a "traditional" post-1960 U.S. novel canon is itself a kind of identity politics, and that we need a different way of demarcating "periods" in the post-WW II U.S. novel than those that received notions of identity politics tend to provide us with.
This is where my title's invocation of "The End of the American Century" comes in. I want to argue in my talk that we can identify a period in U.S. literatures that runs from, say, 1945-1995, which I'll call "The American Century." And that the novelists I'm focusing on, whose works span roughly 1965 to the present, are in some ways posing an alternative to the novels of the American Century and in other ways part of an emerging period that I at first thought to call "The Atlantic Century" but have since decided not to attempt to give a name to it (with the Black Atlantic and the Asian Pacific being so popular, and no clear sense of how long this new period will last, as it's still ongoing, "Atlantic Century" seemed wrong on many counts). "New World Literature" springs to mind, as well, but it's still not very good. Anyway, my point is not names but what it means to be writing from within the American Century (even if you're writing against its assumptions) and what it means to stop writing from within it.
More on this...later.
Sunday, February 25, 2007
What Would Hawthorne Say About a Two-Week Blog Hiatus?
Not much. Nothing compared to the dents on his writing schedule caused by Brook Farm or his various political appointments. Don't sweat it. (He'd probably appreciate the irony that CitizenSE's average daily hit count didn't decline all that much over the past two weeks, as well.)
Saturday, February 10, 2007
Mrs. Hutchinson, Anyone? Or, Another View of Amanda
Shorter "What Would Hawthorne Say About L'Affaire Marcotte?":
Conclusion 1: The Latter-Day Puritanism of the right-wing critics of John Edwards's new bloggers (ably led by such fair and balanced sources as Michelle Malkin and Bill Donohue), with their attempts to affix such scarlet letters as AC (anti-Catholic), IH (intolerant hypocrite), and PM (potty mouth) to them, are part of a long-standing yet ever-more-efficient smear machine of "public women" (cf. Anita Hill, Lani Guinier, Patricia Williams....);
Conclusion 2: The Concern Trolling stance taken in the course of the national media's transmission of the right-wing noise machine (in such beacons of journalistic integrity and quality as The New York Times and Time) are a repetition of Hawthorne's narrators' strategies of representing Anne Hutchinson in "Mrs. Hutchinson" and Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter;
Conclusion 3: Lauren Berlant's analysis of the "Another View of Hester" chapter of Hawthorne's novel in The Anatomy of National Fantasy suggests that, as easily mockable as both Greater Wingnuttia and the corporate media are, the traditions they are drawing on run all the way back to the antinomian crisis, if not further, so we need to call attention to this bigger picture as we continue to beat down the manufactured scandal du jour.
Now to see about recovering the original post that new Blogger ate when I tried to save it!
Conclusion 1: The Latter-Day Puritanism of the right-wing critics of John Edwards's new bloggers (ably led by such fair and balanced sources as Michelle Malkin and Bill Donohue), with their attempts to affix such scarlet letters as AC (anti-Catholic), IH (intolerant hypocrite), and PM (potty mouth) to them, are part of a long-standing yet ever-more-efficient smear machine of "public women" (cf. Anita Hill, Lani Guinier, Patricia Williams....);
Conclusion 2: The Concern Trolling stance taken in the course of the national media's transmission of the right-wing noise machine (in such beacons of journalistic integrity and quality as The New York Times and Time) are a repetition of Hawthorne's narrators' strategies of representing Anne Hutchinson in "Mrs. Hutchinson" and Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter;
Conclusion 3: Lauren Berlant's analysis of the "Another View of Hester" chapter of Hawthorne's novel in The Anatomy of National Fantasy suggests that, as easily mockable as both Greater Wingnuttia and the corporate media are, the traditions they are drawing on run all the way back to the antinomian crisis, if not further, so we need to call attention to this bigger picture as we continue to beat down the manufactured scandal du jour.
Now to see about recovering the original post that new Blogger ate when I tried to save it!
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
Reading Hawthorne in Meiji Japan
I recently came across a great little collection of essays and stories, Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Introduction of an American Author's Work into Japan, which was a 1993 production of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society of Japan and the Peabody Essex Museum of Salem, MA. Its aims are modest but the possibilities it opens up are endless. Consider its answers to the following basic but crucial questions:
1) When were Hawthorne's works first imported into Japan and translated into Japanese?
The short answer is, in the last years of the Tokugawa period and the first years of the Meiji period, as Japan was opening to the world after centuries of seclusion.
Frederic Scharf focuses on the work of what became the Maruzen Company, Ltd., in importing Western books into Japan from 1869 to the present, but notes that Meiji government employees, Japanese students who studied in the West, and Western missionaries (who started arriving in Japan in 1859 although they weren't allowed to proselytize until 1873) also brought significant libraries with them upon their return or entry into Japan. He focuses on the influence of Peter Parley's Universal History, a textbook on world history Hawthorne co-wrote with his sister Elizabeth (although, as Fumio Ano points out, it took until the mid-20th C before a consensus was established among Japanese scholars, editors, and translators that Hawthorne was indeed the [co-]author).
Like Scharf, Ano notes that Yukichi Fukuzawa, mentor to the founder of Maruzen, was the first to bring a copy of Peter Parley's Universal History to Japan in 1867. He adds that selections from it were first translated into Japanese in 1871, but it wasn't until 1876 that an unabridged translation was produced. By the 1880s and 1890s, various works of Hawthorne's and biographical sketches of his life were appearing in textbooks and encyclopedias either imported into or produced in Japan. Women's Magazine began translating selected Hawthorne tales between 1889 and 1894, and other magazines like Waseda Literature, A Companion to the People, and New Magazine, as well as newspapers like Yomiuri and Kokumin, joined in during this time. However, The Scarlet Letter was not translated into Japanese until 1903, and the rest of Hawthorne's novels had to wait until what Ano calls the Hawthorne Renaissance that began around the centenary of his death: The House of the Seven Gables in 1964, The Blithedale Romance and The Marble Faun in 1984, and Fanshawe in 1990.
This was almost all news to me. Of course there are many books out there that provide better contexts on "the opening of Japan" (more comprehensive, less coded about the global politics of the late 19th C), but I simply hadn't looked into what those contexts meant for those who wanted to read Hawthorne in Japan, either in English or in translation. The level of detail in the book will likely appeal only to hard-core Hawthornists, but anyone who's interested in translation, interculturalism, globalization, colonialism, and the spread of English and of literature in English could find much of interest and use.
2) Why did Hawthorne's work enter Japan at this time?
Ano argues that "Hawthorne as an author was brought into the country almost solely as a vehicle for the adoption of English" during "one of the most agitated periods in the history of Japan," when those interested in modernizing Japan "used the advanced countries of the West as [their] models" in an effort to "imitate and assimilate Western culture."
Scharf agrees but emphasizes multiple motives among multiple actors. "One needs to view the initiation and development of the Maruya business of importing foreign books both in its educational context and as an integral part of Japan's clear objective of attaining equality as a participant in international trade," he emphasizes at one point in his essay. But he also notes that
David Cody also emphasizes the official effort to "open" Japan "to certain Western influences (including literature, to some degree) in order that it might achieve military, industrial, and material equality with the Western powers." He quotes Shinichiro Noriguchi's claim from 1966 that
But Cody also notes that
Again, the trends and variety and consequences of Meiji Japan's reasons for responding to Hawthorne were pretty much all news to me. Clearly there's much more that has been done--and to be done--on the politics of English language and American literature in Meiji Japan than in this book, but there are literally dozens of research projects suggested by these answers alone.
3) What was the early Hawthorne canon in Japan and how has it changed?
Ano and Cody agree that the early Japanese Hawthorne canon was very different from the post-1964 canon. Of the 49 Hawthorne tales translated during the Meiji period into Japanese, almost three quarters were selected from Twice-Told Tales, with "David Swan," "Fancy's Show Box," "The Great Stone Face," and "The Ambitious Guest" being most-often translated between 1889 and 1967. Both note that the kinds of stories I prioritized in my own top 10 Hawthorne lists went largely untranslated during this period. Cody concludes, "readers in Japan and America have differed in their sense of the relative importance of various works, although of late there has been a convergence of critical interest."
He also speculates that in addition to providing insight into world literature, Western thought, and American literature and history, Japanese readers may continue to be drawn into Hawthorne's works because his sensibilities "might have much in common with attitudes and affinities--spiritual or psychological--that we might think of as being traditionally Japanese"; his "interest in masks and outer appearances"; his "preoccupation with his ancestors, and the mingled sense of pride, duty, guilt, and resentment that characterized his attitude toward them"; and his "plight as a man both fascinated and repulsed by his immersion in the older, alien cultures that made it increasingly difficult for him to retain his sense of personal identity" in his years abroad in England and Italy.
Just getting your head around the pre-1964 Hawthorne canon in Japan is a major endeavor, so I won't comment on what fuels the post-1964 Hawthorne Renaissance. I do wonder if the contributors to this book are taking too much for granted about the institutionalization of Hawthorne in the U.S., not to mention the institutionalization of American literature. Millicent Bell, for instance, has pointed out that one way of understanding the perennial "Hawthorne problem" is in terms of gender: Hawthorne's career was aided by female critics like Elizabeth Peabody and Margaret Fuller, and he wrote many of his sketches and some of his tales precisely to reach the female audiences that "the damned mob of scribbling women" were reaching so successfully in his times, yet he also wrote the "dark" tales that writers like Herman Melville praised so effusively in "Hawthorne and His Mosses" and that later critics have come to value as his most important work. Which raises the question of what the Hawthorne canon looked like in the U.S. between 1868 and 1912. This seems to me the most relevant comparison to the Meiji-era Hawthorne canon. The fact that Sophia and Julian were doing all they could to shape public images of Hawthorne and his works during this time is worth considering, as are the racial politics of Civil War, Reconstruction, and post-Reconstruction America. I focus more on the latter in my dissertation, on which I'll blog later. Maybe much later.
The existence and stakes of a post-1964 gradual convergence in U.S. and Japanese Hawthorne studies are also worth exploring. This actually ties into a future research project of mine that I'll write about this Saturday if the musume futari's cousins allow me computer time at baba and gigi's place in Chiba. If I do get to that, I might also have time to throw out a few thoughts on an editing project that just occurred to me, as well, stemming from one of my frustrations with the book--that Cody's essay focuses on Japanese Hawthorne scholarship in English.
4) Which Meiji-era Japanese writers responded to Hawthorne's works in their own fiction and drama?
Ano points to Koshoshi Miyazaki (the novels White Clouds/Hakuun, 1887; Confession/Jihaku, 1908), the social reformer Naoe Kinoshita, Soseki Natsume (the novels Sanshiro, 1908; And Then/Sorekara, 1909; The Gate/Mon, 1910), and Shoyo Tsubouchi (the one-act play A Dream of a Millionaire/Aru Fugo no Yume, 1920) in his essay.
Sounds like I have some reading to do between semesters!
Speaking of which, I'm taking tomorrow off to turn in my grades for the fall 2006 semester--yeah! Next time from Chiba, then.
1) When were Hawthorne's works first imported into Japan and translated into Japanese?
The short answer is, in the last years of the Tokugawa period and the first years of the Meiji period, as Japan was opening to the world after centuries of seclusion.
Frederic Scharf focuses on the work of what became the Maruzen Company, Ltd., in importing Western books into Japan from 1869 to the present, but notes that Meiji government employees, Japanese students who studied in the West, and Western missionaries (who started arriving in Japan in 1859 although they weren't allowed to proselytize until 1873) also brought significant libraries with them upon their return or entry into Japan. He focuses on the influence of Peter Parley's Universal History, a textbook on world history Hawthorne co-wrote with his sister Elizabeth (although, as Fumio Ano points out, it took until the mid-20th C before a consensus was established among Japanese scholars, editors, and translators that Hawthorne was indeed the [co-]author).
Like Scharf, Ano notes that Yukichi Fukuzawa, mentor to the founder of Maruzen, was the first to bring a copy of Peter Parley's Universal History to Japan in 1867. He adds that selections from it were first translated into Japanese in 1871, but it wasn't until 1876 that an unabridged translation was produced. By the 1880s and 1890s, various works of Hawthorne's and biographical sketches of his life were appearing in textbooks and encyclopedias either imported into or produced in Japan. Women's Magazine began translating selected Hawthorne tales between 1889 and 1894, and other magazines like Waseda Literature, A Companion to the People, and New Magazine, as well as newspapers like Yomiuri and Kokumin, joined in during this time. However, The Scarlet Letter was not translated into Japanese until 1903, and the rest of Hawthorne's novels had to wait until what Ano calls the Hawthorne Renaissance that began around the centenary of his death: The House of the Seven Gables in 1964, The Blithedale Romance and The Marble Faun in 1984, and Fanshawe in 1990.
This was almost all news to me. Of course there are many books out there that provide better contexts on "the opening of Japan" (more comprehensive, less coded about the global politics of the late 19th C), but I simply hadn't looked into what those contexts meant for those who wanted to read Hawthorne in Japan, either in English or in translation. The level of detail in the book will likely appeal only to hard-core Hawthornists, but anyone who's interested in translation, interculturalism, globalization, colonialism, and the spread of English and of literature in English could find much of interest and use.
2) Why did Hawthorne's work enter Japan at this time?
Ano argues that "Hawthorne as an author was brought into the country almost solely as a vehicle for the adoption of English" during "one of the most agitated periods in the history of Japan," when those interested in modernizing Japan "used the advanced countries of the West as [their] models" in an effort to "imitate and assimilate Western culture."
Scharf agrees but emphasizes multiple motives among multiple actors. "One needs to view the initiation and development of the Maruya business of importing foreign books both in its educational context and as an integral part of Japan's clear objective of attaining equality as a participant in international trade," he emphasizes at one point in his essay. But he also notes that
The works of Nathaniel Hawthorne were especially well suited to the goals of the missionary agenda. They could be read as a means of learning rudimentary world history (Peter Parley's Universal History was definitely chosen for this purpose). They could also be utilized as English reading lessons (his stories were included in such series as Swinton's Reader). Even the missionary activities could benefit from the works of Hawthorne since they could be construed to be suffused with a morality that was essentially Christian.
David Cody also emphasizes the official effort to "open" Japan "to certain Western influences (including literature, to some degree) in order that it might achieve military, industrial, and material equality with the Western powers." He quotes Shinichiro Noriguchi's claim from 1966 that
"portions of Hawthorne's works often appear as part of English examinations for entry into Japanese universities" because "English teachers in Japan regard his works as ideal material for reading comprehension," and because his style "is based on the traditional English grammar, which Japanese students are required to study. In addition, educators hope to cultivate their students' insight into human existence, which Hawthorne treats both profoundly and symbolically."
But Cody also notes that
The fact that this apparently limpid, neoclassical prose style concealed or permitted so much complexity and obscurity--so many difficulties and ambiguities--may have delayed the appearance of his works in Japanese, for the authorities [i.e., the Japanese scholars' whose work he's relying on] agree that his work was not read for its literary qualities until much later [than the Meiji period], ostensibly because it seemed too gloomy for Japanese tastes, was too much concerned with religious matters, and, interestingly, seemed too "difficult" to translate.
Again, the trends and variety and consequences of Meiji Japan's reasons for responding to Hawthorne were pretty much all news to me. Clearly there's much more that has been done--and to be done--on the politics of English language and American literature in Meiji Japan than in this book, but there are literally dozens of research projects suggested by these answers alone.
3) What was the early Hawthorne canon in Japan and how has it changed?
Ano and Cody agree that the early Japanese Hawthorne canon was very different from the post-1964 canon. Of the 49 Hawthorne tales translated during the Meiji period into Japanese, almost three quarters were selected from Twice-Told Tales, with "David Swan," "Fancy's Show Box," "The Great Stone Face," and "The Ambitious Guest" being most-often translated between 1889 and 1967. Both note that the kinds of stories I prioritized in my own top 10 Hawthorne lists went largely untranslated during this period. Cody concludes, "readers in Japan and America have differed in their sense of the relative importance of various works, although of late there has been a convergence of critical interest."
He also speculates that in addition to providing insight into world literature, Western thought, and American literature and history, Japanese readers may continue to be drawn into Hawthorne's works because his sensibilities "might have much in common with attitudes and affinities--spiritual or psychological--that we might think of as being traditionally Japanese"; his "interest in masks and outer appearances"; his "preoccupation with his ancestors, and the mingled sense of pride, duty, guilt, and resentment that characterized his attitude toward them"; and his "plight as a man both fascinated and repulsed by his immersion in the older, alien cultures that made it increasingly difficult for him to retain his sense of personal identity" in his years abroad in England and Italy.
Just getting your head around the pre-1964 Hawthorne canon in Japan is a major endeavor, so I won't comment on what fuels the post-1964 Hawthorne Renaissance. I do wonder if the contributors to this book are taking too much for granted about the institutionalization of Hawthorne in the U.S., not to mention the institutionalization of American literature. Millicent Bell, for instance, has pointed out that one way of understanding the perennial "Hawthorne problem" is in terms of gender: Hawthorne's career was aided by female critics like Elizabeth Peabody and Margaret Fuller, and he wrote many of his sketches and some of his tales precisely to reach the female audiences that "the damned mob of scribbling women" were reaching so successfully in his times, yet he also wrote the "dark" tales that writers like Herman Melville praised so effusively in "Hawthorne and His Mosses" and that later critics have come to value as his most important work. Which raises the question of what the Hawthorne canon looked like in the U.S. between 1868 and 1912. This seems to me the most relevant comparison to the Meiji-era Hawthorne canon. The fact that Sophia and Julian were doing all they could to shape public images of Hawthorne and his works during this time is worth considering, as are the racial politics of Civil War, Reconstruction, and post-Reconstruction America. I focus more on the latter in my dissertation, on which I'll blog later. Maybe much later.
The existence and stakes of a post-1964 gradual convergence in U.S. and Japanese Hawthorne studies are also worth exploring. This actually ties into a future research project of mine that I'll write about this Saturday if the musume futari's cousins allow me computer time at baba and gigi's place in Chiba. If I do get to that, I might also have time to throw out a few thoughts on an editing project that just occurred to me, as well, stemming from one of my frustrations with the book--that Cody's essay focuses on Japanese Hawthorne scholarship in English.
4) Which Meiji-era Japanese writers responded to Hawthorne's works in their own fiction and drama?
Ano points to Koshoshi Miyazaki (the novels White Clouds/Hakuun, 1887; Confession/Jihaku, 1908), the social reformer Naoe Kinoshita, Soseki Natsume (the novels Sanshiro, 1908; And Then/Sorekara, 1909; The Gate/Mon, 1910), and Shoyo Tsubouchi (the one-act play A Dream of a Millionaire/Aru Fugo no Yume, 1920) in his essay.
Sounds like I have some reading to do between semesters!
Speaking of which, I'm taking tomorrow off to turn in my grades for the fall 2006 semester--yeah! Next time from Chiba, then.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)