Commentary Hemispheric Partiality

Commentary: Hemispheric PartialityAuthor(s): Paul GilesSource: American Literary History, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Autumn, 2006), pp. 648-655Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3876728 .Accessed: 24/04/2014 10:47

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Commentary: Hemispheric Partiality Paul Giles

The advantages to be gained from reimagining American literary history along hemispheric lines emerge clearly enough in the essays brought together for this special issue of American Literary History. The hemispheric dimension puts yet another stake through the heart of the unquiet corpse of American exceptionalism, while at the same time, through its inscription of a north-south rather than an east-west axis, interrogating what Ralph Bauer has called "Euro-centric epistemological assumptions about literary value" (8) in relation to the Americas. It also highlights the increasing importance of multi- lingualism to American literary study, a point exemplified most obviously here by Vera M. Kutzinski's piece on the reception and circulation of Langston Hughes's work in Latin America and the different meanings associated with his texts there. Above all, hemispheric studies serve the purpose of, in Walter D. Mignolo's words, accentuating "the ratio between geohistorical locations and knowledge production" (121). This involves a form of radical demystification, a process which emphasizes how "modem epistemology narcotized its own locus of enunciation and projected an idea of knowledge as universal designs from particular and hidden local histories" (123). Rather than attempting to identify the ontology of specific locales in the old area studies manner, Mignolo has preferred to deploy what he calls "border gnosis" (12) to open up questions of cultural difference.

In this sense, hemispheric studies perform the double duty of both illuminating aporias in universalist discourse and deconstructing the reifications of place that have become encrusted upon specific US regions.' Kirsten Silva Gruesz challenges here the static conception of an American "South" by reorienting southern US history and culture toward Central America and the Gulf of Mexico, and indeed one of the most obvious benefits so far of hemispheric studies in relation to the Americas-witnessed here in the essays by Gruesz, Guterl, Alemin, and Rivera-has been to focus more attention on the US-Mexico border as a discursive site for the construction of

doi: 10.1093/alh/ajl004 Advance Access publication July 7, 2006 ? The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]


American Literary History 649

American literary history. In relation to nineteenth-century studies, this has involved a noticeable deflection of attention away from the Civil War of the 1860s toward the US-Mexican wars of twenty years earlier. The romantic myths of Southern plantations which, as Tara McPherson has observed in Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (2003), effectively shored up a regional tourist industry as well as the traditional academic industry of Southern studies served also to underwrite a patriotic narrative of fall and redemption, wherein racial and sectional divisions would ultimately become reconciled within a more complete union. It is not surprising to find that this kind of sentiment should have enjoyed so much prominence recently through PBS documentaries and the like, since popular reactions against globalization all around the world have inspired many such nostalgic misrecognitions; it is, though, slightly surprising to find Civil War legends still so preva- lent within scholarly environments, although this perhaps exempli- fies ways in which nationalist assumptions have silently permeated and shaped academic outlooks. As Gruesz points out, one thing brought sharply into focus by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was the way in which ecological forces acknowledge no national bound- aries, and the rapid growth of environmental studies is another important factor pushing American studies toward an increasingly postnational matrix.

Despite all this useful work, the theoretical problems associated with any conception of hemispheric studies are not difficult to recognize. The idea of a hemisphere is no more or less of a cultural fiction than the idea of a continent: Mignolo reminds us how fif- teenth-century Christian cosmology named these land masses after the sons of Noah-Japhet, Shem, and Ham representing the spaces we know today as Asia, Africa, and Europe (130)-and this historical antecedent holds a mirror to the way in which any human form of territorialization is organized inevitably around personification. Moreover, unlike the privileged domain of the nation-state, neither continent nor hemisphere has enjoyed any coercive or (with the exception of a few economic trade agreements) legislative power to complement its status as a cultural fiction. One obvious pitfall of hemispheric studies, then, is the prospect of simply replacing nationalist essentialism predicated upon state autonomy with a geographical essentialism predicated on physical contiguity. To say, as Gruesz does in this volume, that "[i]n certain historical moments .. Veracruz and New Orleans resembled each other more than they did their respective national centers" is, on one level, no more than a tru- ism, since resemblances are as much cultural variables as differ- ences, and what one sees always depends on the frame in which one sees it. Mary Louise Pratt's influential notion of "contact zones,"


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dating back to the early 1990s, has spawned a whole series of studies based around cultural convergence and divergence at specific points of border crossing, but any model of hemispheric topography extrapolated from the idea of the contact zone would risk merely giving a new slant to traditional notions of spatial enclosure, whereby the new contact zones-southern California and Mexico, Florida and the Caribbean, and so on-supersede the privileged site of the metropolis (Paris, New York, and Chicago) favored by early- twentieth-century modernism as a laboratory for the exploration of cultural hybridity and miscegenation. Though the hierarchical mys- tique of a capital city has been supplanted by a more porous notion of the borderlands, the notion of a special zone, a charmed circle, remains the same.

One interesting aspect of this group of essays, by contrast, is the way they largely avoid the kinds of symbiotic equation that would allegorize specific places as locations embedded with storied signifi- cance. Ifeoma C. K. Nwankwo explicitly takes issue with what she calls "romantic hemispherism," the strategy that would simply replace nation with hemisphere as an enabling contextual and epistemological matrix for the production of meaning. Rather than adducing any organic relationship between culture and geography, Nwankwo's hemispheric reconfiguration of Martin Delany and Gayl Jones emphasizes that one "need not physically travel across geographical or national borders" to act on and act out of a sense of connection to African Americans in disparate sites. In this way, the alterity associated with hemispheric displacement brings into relief the arbitrary "racial classifications systems" of the Americas; Nwankwo shows how conceptions of racial identity are interwoven with national narratives and also how Delany's engagement with Latin America and the Haitian Revolution furnishes him with a way of imagining that identity differently. At the same time, there lurks within Nwankwo's essay an uneasy sense of how postnational narratives "have fostered a sense among some US African-Americanist scholars that US-focused US African-American literary studies is under attack and must protect/ defend itself against negation and/or dilution." Such fears of dilution emerge even more explicitly in Kandice Chuh's "anxiety over the consequences of losing focus on the historic and continuing power of the US nation-state in racializing and regulating Asianness within its borders." They manifest themselves as well in the reservations expressed by Jennifer Andrews and Priscilla L. Walton about potential obstacles to Native American agency: "to move toward a hemispheric model..,. at a time when many Aboriginals are attempting to make land claims and assert their sovereignty is to discount the need, however contradictory, for stable notions of the nation-state, which would allow such negotiations to take place."



These concerns, while understandable and important, speak not only to immediate political commitments but also to more covert professional investments, whose grim rubric often encumbers a need for scholarship to conserve its own parameters, to consolidate itself as an object of study. Andrews and Walton, in an effort to resolve this conundrum, resort to a version of Spivak's familiar tactic, strategic essentialism.2 It is worth remarking, though, how Paul Gilroy's Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (2000), which advocated the logical dissolution of racial categories entirely, was received much less favorably in the US academy than his earlier The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), which developed this idea of strategic essentialism more fully ("anti-anti-essentialist arguments," Gilroy called them [x]) and where the alignment of political praxis with contingent modes of racial formation was much more evident. Just as Gilroy's subse- quent elimination of racial categories was viewed askance, so there are expressions of concern in some of these American Literary History essays about the consequences of triangulation, about ways in which, for example, the different constructions of "Asia" in Brazil might serve to dissipate, rather than consolidate, the political impact of its presence in the US. Following Mignolo's pattern of "border gnosis," Chuh uses the work of Karen Tei Yamashuta to exemplify sites where comparative constructions of the US, Japan, and Brazil are played off against each other. Her essay seeks to negotiate a "complementary space" between "Asian-American studies," which "offers a national perspective" on "US culture and politics from the particular vantage of a domestic racial minority," and more explicit forms of hemispheric and transnational studies that would look "beyond the Americas and specifically to Asia in critical efforts to challenge the discursive centrality of the US." However, the extent to which these practices can remain "complementary," with Asian-American studies serving "at once as a technology for reflecting critically on US culture and politics and as a vehicle for analyzing the irregular emergence and kinds of modernities across the Americas," is one of the questions left open by her essay. Although Chuh seeks pointedly to alleviate "concerns that transnational paradigms will detract from specific emphasis on the US," she also acknowledges the inherent instability of her skillful critical bal- ancing act through the admission that any "specific knowledge" attributed to US culture will require "ceaseless interrogation."

Ceaseless interrogation is something we might all happily aspire to, but Chuh's essay does raise important questions about how more familiar kinds of work in US ethnic studies, developed as it has been largely within a nationalist framework, can or should relate to newer hemispheric paradigms. Given that nationalism



The hemispheric perspective might be said to function most sharply when it deliberately circumscribes its operations, seeking not to enclose an all- encompassing sphere but, rather, to illuminate points of discomfiting intersection where national formations find themselves twisted and reversed.

carries such a freight of historical and institutional meaning, with the hemisphere by contrast being hardly more than a tenuous carto- graphic phenomenon, it would seem absurdly utopian to imagine that nationalist templates could ever simply mutate into a benign hemispheric multilateralism. What is more interesting to consider is the way in which hemispheric studies might interface and interfere with dominant national typologies, deconstructing their ideological agendas and elucidating various blind spots in their intrinsically self- perpetuating narratives. In this sense, the hemispheric perspective might be said to function most sharply when it deliberately circumscribes its operations, seeking not to enclose an all-encompassing sphere but, rather, to illuminate points of discomfiting intersection where national formations find themselves twisted and reversed. Timothy Marr's critique of "geographical exceptionalism" and his invocation of "creolized perspectives" to describe the shifting relations of Islam and the Americas perform this kind of critical tra- versal admirably, as does Jesse Alemin's evocation of Mexico as a gothic space haunting the construction of US national identity, where the "confluences indicate how one country is already embedded within the history of the other." Jennifer Rae Greeson's alignment of writing about the Reconstruction South with "British Victorian travel-writing about Africa" turns linear assumptions about US imperialism inside out, focusing as it does not on the expansion of US interests overseas but on the defamiliarization of putatively domestic territory nearer home. John-Michael Rivera's important work on Lorenzo de Zavala similarly demonstrates how the explicit foregrounding of a transnational imaginary raises crucial questions about canon formation, since repositioning Zavala's travel narratives alongside those of his contemporary, de Tocqueville, highlights ways in which the latter's texts have been widely understood not as a parallel kind of transnational exploration but, in typical institutional fashion, as a naturalized account of the emergence of true American democratic spirit.

The hemispheric redescription of space also points, then, toward an equivalent remapping of time, a delineation of alternative genealogies for American literary history. Guterl's essay reimagines nineteenth-century US culture in relation to Jamaica and Haiti, what it nicely calls "the Scylla and Charybdis of the American Mediterranean," and, by considering "Caribbean history as a guidebook, of sorts, for the postemancipation South," he effectively places the US Civil War in a different temporal as well as spatial context. Andrews and Walton similarly discover through the work of the native and Cana- dian writer Thomas King a potential precursor to transnationalism, since the "irrelevance" of such national constructions to Native American culture leaves the US national imaginary itself exposed



relativistically as a contingent, latter-day phenomenon. In The Pro- duction of Space, Henri Lefebvre described ways in which the reorientation of cartography involves also a reorientation of history: "The production of space, having attained the conceptual and linguistic level, acts retroactively upon the past, disclosing aspects and moments of it hitherto uncomprehended. The past appears in a different light, and hence the process whereby that past becomes the present also takes on another aspect" (65). Rather than understand- ing the "links between language, literature, culture, and territory" to be "a neutral configuration" (Mignolo 235), hemispheric studies seek to make these assumptions themselves an object of inquiry. Marr cites Elena Glasberg's work on Antarctica as an example of how a particular geographic space "confounds national and hemispheric imaginaries," and one reason the hemispheric idea is useful is precisely because of its negative capabilities, the way its hypo- thetical domain works metaphorically to hollow out the power lines implicit within other kinds of bounded space.

When the "linguistic turn" first began to make an impact upon American literary studies in the 1980s, it drew many loud com- plaints from Americanists who felt that such an etiolated approach was morally anathema or otherwise foreign to their interests. What Shelley Fisher Fishkin described in 2005 as the "transnational turn" has, though, brought forth a much more muted response. Perhaps this is because internationalism, in whatever form, is not something most academics would wish explicitly to oppose. However, more circuitous forms of hostility have emerged in other arenas, manifest- ing themselves most obviously in institutional struggles-as, for example, those around Latin American area studies, many of whose established scholars fear, not unreasonably, that a buoyant transnationalism might become a Trojan horse that would eventually cause their professional domain to be swallowed up by the all-devouring monster of US academic imperialism.3 The thesis of geography scholar Robert David Sack, that "[t]erritoriality in humans is best understood as a spatial strategy to affect, influence, or control resources and people, by controlling area" (1), applies as much to academic as to any other kind of politics, and this notion of hemispheric studies can similarly be disconcerting to traditional interests of many different kinds because it threatens to disturb carefully par- titioned relations between territory and power.

Another common reaction to the prospect of the transnational turn among otherwise well-disposed graduate students and faculty takes the form of passive resistance and inertia. This is not the time- honored inertia of radiant idleness, common to many academics, so much as a sense of powerlessness, of the ultimate impossibility of the project: too many languages, too little time, an inexhaustible



range of material. This is, perhaps, another reason hemispheric studies should not lay undue emphasis on abstract or utopian models but should, instead, work pragmatically to find spaces where its theoretical interventions can make us see things differently. In a review of Shelley Streeby's recent American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (2002), for example, Robert McKee Irwin argues that Streeby's scholarship on US involvement in Mexico and Latin America remains ultimately too US-centric: "Her critical view of the representations of the United States and the Latin American other in this popular literature clearly transcends the myopia of some earlier critical readings of the period," he writes, "but does it really adequately take into account Mexican or other Latin American perspectives?" (521). Stringent critiques of this kind are always salutary, of course, but to wait for a criticism that "really adequately" takes all sides of any given issue into account is to be waiting interminably for Godot. Because of the subject's intrinsically expansive nature, there is always a temptation to accuse any specific example of hemispheric studies of not drawing its herme- neutic circle widely enough, of focusing too narrowly upon the specific angles of incidence most proximate to where the observer stands. It is arguable, though, that the hemispheric discursive matrix operates most compellingly as a kind of agent provocateur, a way of interrupting the smooth circuits of institutional power. Rather than seeking an imaginary plenitude or establishing any new internation- alist orthodoxy, it could be said to work best in a heterodox mode, cutting against the grain of naturalized custom and so forcing American literary history into unfamiliar shapes and patterns.

It is undoubtedly the case that the next generation of American literary scholars will need to be more fluent in a wider variety of languages than was thought necessary twenty years ago, but it would also be true to say that any quest for full multilingual (or mul- ticultural) competence is not only inhibiting but, ultimately, impossi- ble. If Werner Sollors's sardonic demystification of a "pastoralization of the in-group" (31) in his work on ethnicity twenty years ago could now be applied more generally to the sacred soil of the nation, it would also be true to say that pastoralizations of the out-group are equally counterproductive; instead, hemispheric knowledge might be said to emerge from a jagged conceptual space where the map of homeland security is traversed by unfamiliar cartographies. As this collection of essays suggests, then, the hemispheric approach raises the prospect for American literary history not of a new scientific method but of an intriguing partiality of perspectives. To acknowledge that all academic criticism is necessarily imperfect is only another way of saying it is at some level a communal enterprise, both diachronically and synchronically, since communities of scholars



necessarily enter into dialogue with each other through time as well as space. It is the partial advances being made now on all fronts that will ensure American literary history in 2006 will seem as outmoded in fifty years' time as the universalist white male assumptions of 1956 appear to us today.

Notes

1. On the white Southern fetishization of place, see Houston Baker's chapter "On Knowing Our Place" in Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing (1991), 102-63; and Jon Smith and Deborah Cohn, eds. Look Away!: The U.S. South in New World Studies (2004), 5-6.

2. For an account of some of these institutional struggles in relation to area studies, see Sophia A. McClennen, "Inter-American Studies or Imperial American Studies?" Comparative American Studies 3 (2005), 393-413. Mignolo describes "Latin American (area) studies" as an example of "the subalternization of cultures of scholarship" (188). 3. "[R]ather than define myself as specific rather than universal, I should see what in the universalizing discourse could be useful and then go on to see where that discourse meets its limits and its challenge within that field. I think we have to choose again strategically, not universal discourse but essentialist discourse" (Spivak 11).

Works Cited

Bauer, Ralph. The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: Empire, Travel, Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.

Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. "Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies-Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 12, 2004." American Quar- terly 57 (2005): 17-57.

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993.

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. 1974. Trans. Donald Nicholson- Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.

McKee Irwin, Robert. "The New American Studies: A Lesson from the

Borderlands." Comparative American Studies 3 (2005): 514-25.

Mignolo, Walter D. Local Histories/ Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000.

Sack, Robert David. Human Territori- ality: Its Theory and History. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986.

Sollors, Werner. Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1986.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. The Post- Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. Ed. Sarah Harasym. New York: Routledge, 1990.


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Issue Table of ContentsAmerican Literary History, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Autumn, 2006), pp. 397-655Front MatterIntroduction: Hemispheric American Literary History [pp. 397-405]The Other Country: Mexico, the United States, and the Gothic History of Conquest [pp. 406-426]"A Complete Though Bloody Victory": Lorenzo de Zavala and the Transnational Paradoxes of Sovereignty [pp. 427-445]"I Went to the West Indies": Race, Place, and the Antebellum South [pp. 446-467]The Gulf of Mexico System and the "Latinness" of New Orleans [pp. 468-495]Expropriating "The Great South" and Exporting "Local Color": Global and Hemispheric Imaginaries of the First Reconstruction [pp. 496-520]"Out of This World": Islamic Irruptions in the Literary Americas [pp. 521-549]"Yo tambin soy Amrica": Langston Hughes Translated [pp. 550-578]The Promises and Perils of US African-American Hemispherism: Latin America in Martin Delany's "Blake" and Gayl Jones's "Mosquito" [pp. 579-599]Rethinking Canadian and American Nationality: Indigeneity and the 49th Parallel in Thomas King [pp. 600-617]Of Hemispheres and Other Spheres: Navigating Karen Tei Yamashita's Literary World [pp. 618-637]Commentary: The Transnational Turn and the Hemispheric Return [pp. 638-647]Commentary: Hemispheric Partiality [pp. 648-655]Back Matter

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Commentary Hemispheric Partiality