North American Literature and Global Studies Transnationalism at War

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American playwright Tony Kushners Homebody/Kabul , first performed in New York City in December 2001, yet written long before the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States, presciently dramatizes the geopolitical ties linking the United Kingdom, the United States, and Afghanistan. The play drew much controversy, which distracted from Kushners subtle themes of globalism, com-munication, language, and the vagaries of translation. The prefatory Notes to the published text include instructions for how the titular characterthe traveling British housewife known only as the Homebodyshould refer to a location she is familiar with (and which could be anywhere in London, Kabul, or elsewhere in the world), yet refuses to disclose to her audience. She doesnt mention its name, Kushner writes, instead, where the name would fall in the sentence, she makes a wide, sweeping gesture in the air with her right hand, from left to right, almost as if to say: I know the name but I will not tell you. It is the same gesture every time (T. Kushner 2004, 5). In the course of the play this site becomes increasingly unspecific: The home (She makes the gesture) away from home (ibid., 27). The Homebodys feigned disorientation speaks not to a desire to conceal any specific locality, but rather to how the play deter-ritorializes familiar expectations about narratives of global conflict.

I would argue that the Homebodys gestures also resonate with a tendency toward ambiguity in some critical discussions of globalization, which often refer to a presence as an absence, to a place as a part, to the specific as nebu-lous, to the certain as doubtful, to the stable as movable, and to everything as mutually constitutive and intertwined, in a wide, sweeping gesture reminis-cent of the Homebodys geographical vagueness. Certainly not all scholarship in the ever-expanding field of globalization studies evinces this feature. Yet the highest honor bestowed on the circuits of the global is quite often their unspeakability, their mysterious and mythic resonance; as one critic cynically puts it, A Zeus or a Satan comes to mind (OHara 2003, 19). As Kushner dem-onstrates, however, the challenge of globalization is very specific and may be

17 North American Literature and Global Studies: Transnationalism at War Georgiana Banita

10.1057/9781137413901.0024 - North American Literature and Global Studies, Georgiana Banita

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314 Georgiana Banita

best decoded by looking at how it aligns domestic and foreign spheres in the experience of war. This chapter then wants to circumscribe the question about the global dimensions of US and Canadian literatures to a scrutiny of how they imagine wars on proxy territories in which both countries have become entan-gled. In the filaments of these triangular narratives, I suggest, we can trace the fraught terrain of global North American Studies, not as a field that imposes a choice between the national and the transnational, or a reconciliation of both, but as an opportunity to compare two distinct visions of the global, visions that have been forged by conflicts in an international arena. 1

I also aim to use Comparative North American Studiesand more specif-ically US and Canadian literatureas a springboard not only for a unified study of North American literary production but also for an exploration of what it actually means to compare (juxtapose, balance, or relate) and how such comparison helps to reorient the field and its methodologies (see ch. 1, sec-tion titled Comparative Literature, Comparative methodology). What exactly do we contrast when we speak about American and Canadian literatures? In putting them side by side, do we genuinely respond to the specificity of these literatures, rather than simply applying generic comparative methods to the literary output of North America? How do these literatures map the world and each other? And what pedagogies for global studies do we derive from measur-ing them on the same scale?

Promises and limits of the transnational turn in North American literary studies

It is difficult to dispute or overestimate the importance of globalization theory for reading North American literatures at this time. Nor can we ignore the sus-ceptibility of global and hemispheric approaches to charges of neocolonialism, neoimperialism, interventionism, and economic exploitation (see ch. 1, esp. sections titled Continentalist approach and Global studies). 2 The most com-mon response to these charges has been that the proper reading of a boundary-straddling narrative is twofold, that it reconciles the near and the far, and that no single text can easily be subsumed to a single (often binary) rhetorical fram-ing, which means not only that so-called fictions of globalization (Annesley 2006) have been opened to various readings enfolding the global as only one aspect among many, but also that various literary works have been subsumed under a global aesthetic that may not have revealed itself as such at first sight. What I want to do is examine texts that, although apparently building on the binarism of global military conflict, are indeed uncongenial to the dichoto-mies of nationality and postnationality often proffered in defense of a global reading of literature. Instead, they suggest triangular modes of thinking by which the laws of asymmetrical warfare complicate the one-to-one comparison


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North American Literature, Global Studies 315

of one North American national literature to another. Before developing this idea, I first want to bring into dialogue two strands of criticism that rarely overlap, despite institutional efforts and intense postnationalist avowals on both sides, mostly because practitioners in one field seldom venture into the othermost likely as a result of rigid specialization. Transnational re-mappings of American and Canadian literatures are legion, yet they seem to proceed in somewhat inexplicable ignorance of one another. While Canadian studies of literature and globalization remain largely under the radar of US-based schol-ars, Canadian scholars too appear largely unaware of key works in comparative and transnational American Studies that have transformed the field. 3

A rich library of scholarship, both literary and, more broadly, cultural, has emerged around American Studies and Canadian Studies within an amor-phous and sometimes even defiantly obscure globalization studies. The term globalization itself is shrouded in an inflationary mystique in that it enacts the very process it inscribes, it travels easily, floating freely between different discourses, serving different interests (Newman 2007, 3). Spivaks related term planetarity denotes, in a somewhat obfuscating vein, a catachresis for inscrib-ing collective responsibility (Spivak 2003b, 102), where catachresis signifies a metaphor for which there is no adequate referent. Other scholars of global-ization write of the dim visibility and twilight in which new formations are not yet manifest (Edwards and Gaonkar 2010, 5). To bring clarity to this theoretical model, some studies of North American culture insist on a binary between commitment to nationalismas a socially and politically engaged paradigm whose task is to encircle and safeguard the nation, the language, and the peopleon the one hand, and a fuzzy post-, trans-, or internationalism that tries to level out all the borders that defensive nationalism has erected on the other hand. If it were to favor this model, Comparative North American Studies would become an exercise in judicious, two-pronged equilibration. The task would be neither to overlook the geographical and historical specificities of local conditions, nor to succumb to the utopia of globalization and the sov-ereignty of liquid capital.

However, the reality of how the nation and the larger world interact is not always (or not compellingly) a binary but often something much less balanced and clear-cut. To pursue this thought, I want to argue that we should pay closer attention to global armed conflict in general and contemporary asymmetric warfare because they involve both North American nations in ways that allow them to define and locate their worldliness. I think the ways in which the United States and Canada have participated in overseas wars over the past two decades reveal more about their distinct visions of the world than what we may glean if we registered the evolution of literary trends and critical disciplines as, largely, a characteristic of peacetime, when in fact quite the opposite is the case. US American and Canadian literatures have been influenced by international


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conflict to a greater extent than we may have been aware. To make sense of this influence is to redraw the map of globalized North American Studies in ways that take seriously and do justice to the inevitably violent tensions from which such synthesis grows.

But where exactly do we find ourselves in the history of the two disciplines I am enjoining here? Recent interventions in the field appear to have sounded the death knell of US exceptionalism as the enabling conceptual matrix of American Studies (see ch. 1, esp. section titled Major issues of Comparative North American Studies). This has, however, not dislodged the hold of familiar binaries. Janice Radway, in her presidential address to the American Studies Association in 1998, spoke of intricate interdependencies between the near and far, the local and the distant (Radway 1999, 10). And hers is not the only formulation espousing a dialectic arrangement. Drawing on what Sacvan Bercovitch in Reconstructing American Literary History calls a dialogic mode of analysis (Bercovitch 1986, ix) and on Bakhtins description of the novelistic form as a clashing plurality of discourses, Jos Saldvar, in The Dialectics of Our America (1991), proposes a similar model for a hemispheric agenda: This new critical cosmopolitanism neither reduces the Americas to some homogeneous Other of the West, nor does it fashionably celebrate the rich pluralism of the hemisphere. Rather, by mapping out the common situation shared by different cultures, it allows their differences to be measured against each other as well as against the (North) American grain (Saldvar 1991, 4). Binary thinking is equally explicit in Paul Giless agenda for an international American Studies that would seek to locate precisely those junctures where the proximate and distant illuminatingly converge and diverge (Giles 2011, 258). 4

Similarly, in a Canadian context, Herb Wyile tries by his own admission to steer between the Scylla of a homogenizing, parochial localism and the Charybdis of a potentially imperializing hemispheric scope (Wyile 2010, 58). Many years earlier, even Northrop Frye in The Bush Garden maintained that in our world the sense of a specific environment as something that provides a circumference for an imagination has to contend with a global civilization of jet planes, international hotels, and disappearing landmarks (Frye 1971a, iii). Frye diagnoses the emergence of a country that is post-Canadian, as it is post-American, post-British, and post everything except the world itself (249), which seems not to contravene the binary thinking that mobilizes transna-tional American Studies.

Sometimes the binarism between the national and the transnational is merely implied, for example in situations where only one term is explicit and something else is posited that surpasses the familiar ground. Caroline Levander and Robert Levine, in their introduction to the collection Hemispheric American Studies (2008), insistently seek to move beyond the U.S. nation in American studies (Levander and Levine 2008, 7; my emphasis). Smaro Kamboureli


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in her introduction to the agenda-setting volume Trans.Can.Lit prescribes a form of Canadian Studies that also contests the stateness, and boldly points beyond it, to an elsewhereness that is not yet legible (Kamboureli 2007, x; my emphasis).

Legibility is itself a site for reflection in this debate. Paul Giles, in The Global Remapping of American Literature, highlights not what we know but what we know that we do not know: the interplay, the Derridaean brisure , between circumference and its insufficiency (Giles 2011, 262) and main-tains that an awareness of ignorance is the shortest path to overcoming it. There is a similar sense of the salutary humiliation of not knowing in Carolyn Porters 1994 review essay What We Know That We Dont Know: Remapping American Literary Studies. The paradoxes of not knowing also inform Smaro Kambourelis negative pedagogy, which focuses attention on the kinds of knowledge that the framing of certain questions already forecloses, and recasts the object of knowledge as nothing other than the process leading towards ignorance (Kamboureli 2009, 25). Although it is certainly a truism that the more we learn about the world the more acutely we perceive our own igno-rance, we might expect such studies to reveal what we have, in light of a new transnational opening, actually learned. 5

To explain this cognitive gain, Walter Mignolo proposes what he calls border thinking or border gnosis, based on the spatial confrontations between dif-ferent concepts of history (Mignolo 2000, 67). Extrapolating from his critique of the Mexico border and its history, we could say that border thinking along the 49th Parallel likewise implies to think from both traditions and, at the same time, from neither of them (Mignolo 2000, 67). To stage this contra-dictory gesture, I turn to triangular formations that involve both the United States and Canada, yet recede from both. We cannot seem to entirely resist America as a foundational assumption. Nor will the field of Comparative North American Studies, though likely to forge a more heterogeneous narra-tive, succeed in dropping America entirely as a structural source of coher-ence, even if it intended to (see also ch. 1). What this chapter wants to provide instead is a productive geographical nonsequitur through a comparison involv-ing not only Canada as a foil to US culture but also a third region of conflict and instability, which could pry loose the idea of Americanness through the kind of vertical hyphenization we find in Kushners title: Homebody/Kabula delimiter that implies (as does the title of Canadian author Jane Urquharts Sanctuary Line [2010], the second text I will discuss in this chapter) an ominous separation that takes us out of the comfort zone of a monolithic US-Canadian reading of transnationality.

My remarks so far concern the binary-driven challenges posed to the lon-gevity of US exceptionalism by transnational and hemispheric approaches. As for how American Studies and Canadian Studies intersect on transnational


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terrain, there is still much to be done. Rachel Adamss Continental Divides (2009) is a landmark, as is Paul Giless discussion of virtual Canadas in The Global Remapping of American Literature (2011). Yet a cogent and consistent North American vision of transnational literature remains somewhat mired in the protoplasmic idiom of reorientation (Giles 2011, 252) into which these scholars have inscribed it. Complicating this sense that the field is strug-gling to find a sure footing is the fact that transnational literary studies in the United States and Canada have not been entirely coeval. On the US side, the global imagination dates as far back as William Spengemanns definition of American as everything having to do with civilization in the New World since the European discovery (Spengemann 1978, 135). In Canada, however, since some parts of the country were for a long time constructed as insu-lar, primitive, effectively lost in time (Wyile 2011, 26), transnational views of Canadian writing gained currency quite a while later. Although the influential Canadian critic A. J. M. Smith already wrote, in 1943, of cosmopolitan versus native poetry in his introduction to The Book of Canadian Poetry (and even earlier in a preface to another book, though rejected in its original form), his remarks were quickly dismissed as promoting colonialism under the guise of universal humanism (see also ch. 14).

Remarkable about the evolution of transnational Canadian Studies is indeed the strong resistance of many writers and critics to the project of read-ing Canada in a global context. 6 This resistance goes back to George Grants Lament for a Nation , which argues that the movement toward a world of con-tinental empires does not necessarily usher in a peaceful world order, but possibly a formation even more ferocious than the era of nationalisms (Grant 2005 [1965], 343). More recently, Stephen Henighan, in the accurately titled When Words Deny the World, rallies in defense of the nation against what he sees as the homogenizing impoverishment of planetary culture. Whether as Americas boring appendage or a country afloat in the ether of globaliza-tion (Henighan 2002, 105), how Canada sees itself when it looks beyond the nation does not sit well with the national project of identifying and safeguard-ing Canadianness. Frank Davey in Post-National Arguments (1993) laments the bifurcation of Canadian writing between individual interests and a deterritori-alized scene of global interaction, with the nation slipping between the cracks. The loss of sovereign Canada in the aftermath of the 1989 North American Free Trade Agreement signals to him the erosion of participatory politics on the national level, as well as the lack of an interregional consciousness of Canadian geographical space. Between the local and the global, where one might expect to find constructions of region, province, and nation, one finds instead voy-ages, air flights, and international hotels (Davey 1993, 25859).

In 1955, Hugh MacLennan hoped that by the year 2005 all traces of pro-vincialism would have vanished from Canadian culture, and Canadian


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cultural products would no longer compete in a minor league (MacLennan 1955, 1067). If we are to believe the editors of the seminal volume Globalizing American Studies (2010), however, the task for global studies is precisely to pro-vincialize (Edwards and Gaonkar 2010, 25)that is, to see in a local and spe-cific (but not unsophisticated) lighteverything that smacks of centrality and overbearing jurisdiction, including the major league aspirations MacLennan describes. MacLennan prescribes emancipation from narrowly self-centered mentalities, yet how does a struggle for global centrality make sense when cen-trality itself is being called into question? And how does a national culture so eagerly engaged in self-definition open up to a postnational literary imagina-tion? I think the defensive stance of many responses to a globalized CanLitpinioned as they are between assimilation into a US-dominant discourse at one end and complete dissolution among shapeless global entities at the oth-erdoes more to hem in the agenda of transnational Canadian Studies than anything we might find in Canadian literature itself. 7 Transnational Canadian Studies does not abandon the idea of Canadianness or national specificity as much as it emphasizes the Canadian sense of the world conveyed by works of literature in Canada, 8 while showing how national space has been and contin-ues to be productively redefined.

An obvious context to begin this redefinition is hemispheric American stud-ies, which, however, has been reluctant to significantly incorporate Canada (see also ch. 1, section titled Continentalist approach, hemispheric studies). While Winfried Siemerling and Sarah Phillips Casteel, both based at Canadian institutions, contributed to the remediation of this absence with their vol-ume Canada and Its Americas: Transnational Navigations (2010), Gustavo Prez Firmats landmark collection Do the Americas Have a Common Literature? (1990) would have benefited from a discussion of English Canada. Gretchen Murphys study Hemispheric Imaginings: The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of U.S. Empire (2005) likewise may have been enriched by a Canadian perspective, since the question of whether Canada was included in the scope of the Monroe Doctrine, by which the United States asserted dominance and responsibility over the Western Hemisphere, was highly contested and shaped policy in the region for decades. Interestingly, some comparative studies of American and Canadian literatures have avoided reification of their subject by aspiring to a broader assessment of global writing and culture. Eleanor Ty, for example, calls for a strategic alliance between Asian American and Asian Canadian cultural nar-ratives by citing their unfastened identities in the context of what she calls globality (Ty 2010, x). For better or for worse, the hemispheric inquiry itself in some places appears to have run its course. R. J. Ellis has turned instead to interhemispheric issues, their routes and their rootsconsiderations which can help prevent too much focus on long-established and arguably well-rehearsed exchanges (Ellis 2007, 170), exchanges that to his mind include


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US-Canada relations. Seen in this light, North American Studies do not seem as groundbreaking as these even more ambitious projects. 9 In ways that have also shaped my own approach in this chapter, Comparative North American Studies tend to rely on national literary traditions to make statements that go beyond the two nations, seeking to justify the significance of a binary com-parative approach by shedding light on a third element, be it identity concepts or, more broadly, the underpinnings of comparative methodologies.

I seek a thematic entry into the field through the representation of war partly because it imbues binaries and beyondness with a specific urgency that ties the comparative method to the politically consequential realities of military vio-lence. By focusing on war, I want to literalize what I earlier called trajectories of conflict 10 and their potential to historicize and redraw national borders. I can only address a small sample of texts here that stage such re-bordering. Beyond my central exhibits in this chapter, we may look to Guillermo Verdecchia and Marcus Youssefs 1997 play A Line in the Sand , which conveys an unsparing view of Canadian peacekeeping through the story of a Palestinian teenager befriended and subsequently killed by Canadian soldiers in a Qatari desert. How would we grasp the status of Canada as a border nation if we focused more attention on how faraway Baghdad in the midst of Operation Desert Storm introduces in Canadian national and domestic relations a renewed sense of an enemy (Marlatt 1996, 19)? How does Michael Ondaatjes Divisadero (2007) redefine the American desert as an ambiguous, deterritorialized borderland by turning to the Gulf Wars of the 1990s and 2003? For gamblers inhaling piped-in oxygen in Nevada casinos, the war is already a video game, taking place on a fictional planet (Ondaatje 2007, 53; see also Banita 2012b). How does the muddled mediation of such distant wars reorder the nearer geogra-phies of North America?

Postnational, postmortem: War as paradigm

War has at times been incorporated into the analysis of globalization, yet to a much lesser extent than we might expect. 11 Many analyses of global culture invoke war to some extent, but war and globalization have not cohesively and comprehensively been thought of together, either in one study or a series of more specific works. Butler in Frames of War writes of an overbearing notion of global responsibility that is intimately linked with war, in the sense that it responds to violence by instigating even more conflict. 12 Two reductions are at work here: that of globalization to US imperialism 13 and that of war to spe-cific and limited forms of violence, such as imprisonment or torture in the war against terror. While I see Butlers comments here, as well as her ideas on statelessness as a consequence of contemporary global warfare in Butler and Spivak 2007, as certainly valuable and productively controversial in a broader


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political sense, I want to consider the more precise features of warspatial deterritorialization, linguistic chaos, and moral ambiguityas an approach to the aesthetic of transnational North American literature. 14

It is in fact quite odd that global theory should be so reticent about war, given the ubiquity of political violence since the end of the Cold War, and even more surprising if we remember that Arjun Appadurais seminal Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996) includes a discussion of ethnic violence that locates its cause in the multidirectional cascades linking global flows and street-view politics. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire speak of a global civil war as a perpetual tool of Empire to maintain its hold and the flow of profitable production (Hardt and Negri 2004). There is no dearth of conceptualizations of war in discussions of more traditionally coercive transnational systems such as colonialism and imperialism. But a chief reason why war should play a greater role in analyses of globalization as an organizational form where national agency is more dubi-ous has to do with the specifics of asymmetrical warfare, and especially with how they manifest themselves aesthetically. In its conventional form, war rests on an imbalance of power between a dominant nation or alliance and the objects of military intervention. This imbalance may be unclear at the start and become evident in the process. With asymmetrical warfare or so-called small wars, the goal of inferior parties is no longer to win but simply not to lose, and the war becomes one of attrition, featuring small-scale confrontations in zones no longer conscribed by national borders. The globality of war thereby comes more forcefully into view. 15 I want to take Deleuze and Guattaris observations on the war machine in A Thousand Plateaus as a starting point for a tenta-tive way of linking war and globalization, building on how they both relate (or do not relate) to the nation-state. Deleuze and Guattari refer to what they call the war machine as irreducible to the State apparatus . . . outside its sov-ereignty and prior to its law: it comes from elsewhere (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 388). War both facilitates state formation and denotes the opposite of statehood, the diffuse and polymorphous location (ibid., 397) out of which a state inevitably has to constitute itself, the blurry background against which the borders of a nation are drawn.

This image helps us understand not only modern war (in its asymmetrical form as guerrilla fighting or terrorism) but also war literature. William Spanos contentiously turns, in the aftermath of Iraq, to the Vietnam War as an occa-sion to glimpse exactly the kind of amorphous space that belies the trium-phalist pronouncements of US exceptionalism. His reading of the Vietnam War in Tim OBriens Going after Cacciato (1978) crucially singles out the deter-ritorialized, structureless nature of that warindistinct from village to village among faceless enemiesin ways that recall Norman Mailers depiction of fighting Japanese troops in the Pacific as a gamble of vague, incomprehensible


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proportions (Mailer 1976 [1948], 716). OBriens novel lingers on the nonbe-ing of Southeast Asia (Spanos 2008, 164) and on the inability of the erratic and volatile war to cohere into a satisfying or at least momentarily comprehen-sible image of the world. My argument about war is thus an argument about transnational studies, and vice versa: If we agree that America is no longer a destination (Edwards and Gaonkar 2010, 17), both in the sense that it has divested itself of exceptionalist frames and in the further sense that leaving America for distant shores does not mean that one will rediscover America (or global copies of it), it is worth studying war as a transnational metaphor sepa-rate from the imagination of, say, immigrant or travel writing. War stories in a global arena introduce ideas of lost bearings, intentions gone astray, death, and mourning as essential to an understanding of transnationalism to an even greater extent than multicultural narratives, which may indeed end in tragedy but are not as centrally premised on the loss of life as war literature. Although critiques of imperialism do tackle the violence of war and conquest, global dis-course has often been associated with a humanist ethic of travel, contact, and communion. War, by contrast, uncovers the cruel nature of combatants and civilians involvement with distant nations in less than peaceable ways.

As far as I am aware, the only scholar of transnational American Studies to have explicitly and exhaustively enlisted war for a reading of postnational aesthetics is Wai Chee Dimock, who in a recent essay, like other Americanists I mentioned earlier, scrutinizes what lies beyond our powers of comprehen-sion and linguistic competence as readers and scholars. To have some idea of what our native tongue cannot convey, is surely one of the most powerful intellectual jolts we can get, she writes. What interests her is the multilingual-ism folded within monolingual formations such as narratives of war, because different linguistic layers could be pulling in opposite, partisan directions (Dimock 2010, 272). 16 Dimock refers to this inherent ambivalence of narratives as their switchability (ibid., 277), activated when a text is transplanted into a new signifying network. For Dimock, American Studies should be reorganized around the multilingual/multigeneric experience and articulation of war as a genealogy of sorrow that takes in the whole world (281). She discusses Kurt Vonneguts Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) as an example of war literature that dra-matizes moments of suture, replenishment, and compensation in an attempt to fill voids of wartime destruction. I take Edwards and Gaonkars proposal to rebuild transnationality on a stern narrative of no return as a starting point for a reading of war in North American literature that does not allow for the kinds of recuperative gestures Dimock concedes. 17

After the attacks of September 11 and the beginning of the War on Terror, the impact of global conflict on US writing inevitably gained greater curren-cy. 18 Previously, however, American world war literature often blocked from view precisely the world of the war. In the early twentieth century, because


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America was emerging suddenly from provincialism to the complexities of world power and mass warfare (Cooperman 1967, 39), the global implications of World War I took time to sink in. In Willa Cathers One of Ours (1922) and Edith Whartons A Son at the Front (1923), the war is primarily a French war. Whartons George Campton is initially resistant to the idea of war, declaring his allegiances international (32), but his pacifism must give way to the test-ing ground for masculinity that war afforded to the soldier protagonists of both Cather and Wharton. Yet even the most nationalistically bombastic nar-ratives of World War I recognize that Europe was no longer distant and of no consequence for American affairs. And because the focus is on the human deg-radation of the war, the diminishment of human lives and their expendability, we can discern in these fictions a transnationalism of the body, of suffering, as if the nation were not superseded by a postnational framework as much as undermined from below, from the individual level, exposing the common global DNA of basic human experience. Canadian fiction on World War I dis-played a similar pattern (most clearly perhaps in the 1931 novella Generals Die in Bed by Charles Yale Harrison).

Outside the sphere of literature, the sense of war as a postnational experience was even more palpable. The progressive writer and intellectual Randolph Bourne regarded the war as a realization of American trans-nationality. At a time when nationalistic war fever was mobilizing various US ethnic groups who sided with their countries of origin, his essay Transnational America (1916) made the case for remodeling the United States into the first international nation, a federal unit of variously affiliated groups. Bournes ideal thus builds on war enmity to envi-sion its opposite, a peaceable cosmopolitan federation of national colonies, from whom the sting of devastating competition has been removed (Bourne 1964b, 117). The late geographer and anthropologist Neil Smith saw in World War I a veritable turning point in US international relations: Before World War I, U.S. foreign affairs were narrowly hemispheric and increasingly arcane (N. Smith 2003, 182), but entry into the war paved the way for the increasingly global assertion of US interests. In World War II, Roosevelt enjoined Americans to take out their atlases and follow along with his fireside radio chats as he charted the wars progress (ibid., 438). The geographical expansion of the American sphere of influence and knowledge is thus closely linked to the bloodily contested geog-raphies of war. While the interwar period was dominated by US expatriates relo-cating to European literary capitals like Paris and London, after World War II Europe was no longer the only show in town for the American writer (Reynolds 2008, 3), with authors such as Pearl S. Buck, John Dos Passos, and Paul Bowles discovering their fascination with geopolitical cartographies that encompassed China, South America, and North Africa. This literary moment, not incidentally, coincided with the rise of postwar internationalism, which sought to order the tangled associations formed during the war, reconfigure US political hegemony,


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economic expansion, and military security, and undertake swift action in the service of humanitarian reform (Divine 1967).

Canadian governments, in contrast, are notoriously reluctant to go to war (as Iraq most recently showed) and have devoted themselves historically to dis-armament, peacekeeping, human security, and international law. As a result, Canadian war literature has less to say about global warfare than do American writers, partly also because Canada less often perceives itself (a small nation allied to larger powers) as deeply embroiled in transnational conflicts. As Marshall McLuhan observed, Canadian participation in past wars, whether in 1812 or 1914 or after, has never been on a scale to enable Canadians to identify with the total operation (McLuhan 1977, 242). 19 Consequently, Canadian war literature and literary scholarship do not always convey a clear sense of how war has shaped Canadian history and consciousness by opening up borders with nations other than the immediate neighbor to the south. The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature (Krller 2004) lists a limited number of titles, from A. M. Kleins The Second Scroll (1951, on the post-Holocaust experience) and Joy Kogawas Japanese Canadian perspective of World War II in Obasan (1981) to Dennis Bocks The Ash Garden (2001), a novel that aligns itselfthe-matically and in describing three lives affected by World War IIwith Michael Ondaatjes The English Patient (1992) (Dvok 2004, 166). Reingard M. Nischik, on the other hand, in her introduction to History of Literature in Canada, aptly refers to the two world wars as global political events similar in their effects to the Great Depression, and emphasizes the rejuvenation undergone by French Canadian writing as a direct result of the temporary relocation of the French publishing industry from France to Canada (Nischik 2008b, 17).

The apparent problem with World War I as an event of transnational mag-nitude in Canadian culture is the role of that war in Canadas emergence as a nation. Yet I think it is not so much the nation-oriented narrative of this war that should retain our attention, but how transnational perspectives can write it anew. That the Great War took place inside a static world, where the values appeared stable and where the meanings of abstractions seemed permanent and reliable (Fussell 1975, 21) obscures the dynamics of how different nations interacted to renegotiate such values and abstractions. During World War II, postnational concerns took a backseat to the modernization of the Canadian novel genre, a process that drew on the experience of the individual as separate from global visions. People felt thrown upon themselves, and the literature of the time underlines this inwardness. We need to look further back for a more apposite example of transnational triangulation involving the experi-ence of war, namely to Martin Delanys Blake; or, The Huts of America (186162), a narrative about Canadas harboring of fugitive slaves, written in Chatham, Ontario. Canadas role within the narratives abolitionist, hemispheric pan- Africanism has only recently drawn critical attention (Paul 2011). Even more


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can be inferred, however, from the protagonists involvement in an armed revolt in Cuba, clearly a significant location for Blake from a hemispheric view-point (Adams 2009, 6870), and doubly important for what it suggests about how distant conflict refracts on national American conditions.

Equally fascinating as evidence of a North American literary brotherhood-in-arms are two novels by Basil King, a Canadian writer and Anglican priest (also one of the founders of the Canadian Writers Association), who moved to the United States but retained a Canadian focus in large parts of his work, espe-cially in The High Heart (1917) and The City of Comrades (1919a), two novels that reflect on the Canadian-US relation through the two nations differently timed involvement in World War I (see also Novak 2000, 17). The romance structure organizing Kings novelsromance in Fryes sense of a cyclical movement of descent into a night world and a return to the idyllic world (Frye 1976, 54)is flouted, however, in the contemporary texts I will discuss later, where there is no return from war, and therefore no renewal, triumph, or national eulogy. While in Kings Going West (1919b) the protagonist does return from the war as a ghost, the transnationalism of failed connection I delineate in the following presupposes that the hero does not return, so the postnational gestures of the narratives I have chosen are amplified by their postmortem implications.

I will explore these issues by focusing on two texts, Tony Kushners Homebody/Kabul (2004) and Jane Urquharts Sanctuary Line (2010), to detail how they envision the global by juxtaposing North America with a distant Afghanistan. Afghanistan might seem a wily choice in terms of transnational war geogra-phy. But it is a country that since 9/11 has brought to mind a similar kind of nonbeing as that used by William Spanos to describe Southeast Asia during the war in Vietnam. To speak again with Dimock, Afghanistan is both deep time and denationalized space. It is frontier, wilderness, and virgin land all rolled into one, but in a state of worrying reversal, a distorted mirror image. As Imre Szeman writes, Under Bushs last term, Afghanistan settled into the semiobscurity of Grenada and Panama: one more name on the list of small states scarred by foreign intervention, drained even of the symbolic resonances that have accrued to names such as Vietnam and Cuba (Szeman 2011, 166). Afghanistan is appealing as a literary space because it signifies an absolute exterior, but also one that is largely imagined. Like the coffins of dead sol-diers being brought home as people watch from a distance while huddling on bridges and overpasses, as they do in Urquharts novel, Afghanistan has an emotional weight but not a geopolitical mass. For Kushner and Urquhart, to write about Afghanistan as an embattled arena of the global is equivalent to what may be called, with Adorno (1973), a negative dialectic, one that allows these writers to point out inside the literary imagination of North America a vexed exterior terrain, a no-mans-land, that at once escapes and inflects the imagination of American and Canadian nationhood.


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The Afghanistan paradox: Tony Kushners Homebody/Kabul

Kushners play finds itself on the cusp of what the author calls Might and Dothe possibility of disaster as we might imagine it and its realization at sur-prisingly close quarters. It is this tension that defines the ever-receding notion of an enemy in the global arenathe incomprehensible otherness that we rec-ognize as such precisely through its inscrutability. Kushner, I suggest, inter-venes in debates about transnational literature by transferring the imprecision of global discourse into a text that pivotsself-consciously and criticallyon ideas of confusion. I want to clarify this paradox at the heart of the play not by reading it through the prism of the 9/11 attacks, which it anticipated, but through its location just before and just after several conflagrations to which it refers overtly, implicitly, or by extrapolation: the Russian intervention in Afghanistan, which shaped the geopolitical map of the Cold War, Bill Clintons bombardment of terrorist training camps in 1998, the declaration of war con-tained in the attacks of 9/11, and the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Kushner himself admits he didnt imagine, when [he] was working on the play, that by the time we produced it the United States would be at war with Afghanistan (T. Kushner 2004, 142, An Afterword). Similarly, the protagonist of the play does not realize that her journey to Afghanistan will coincide with the resumption of bombings in the region. There is no question that Kushner seeks to define ways of living dynamically and democratically on a global scale (Vorlicky 1998, 5). How he does so in this text by turning to the personal and political toll of war is what I want to explore. 20

The play is set in London and Kabul immediately before and after the American bombardment of 1998 in retaliation for the bombings of US embas-sies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed more than two hundred people and injured thousands more. Kushner chooses Afghanistan less for its topical sig-nificance (which was much less obvious prior to 9/11) than for its embattled history and transcultural makeup. To illustrate the countrys cultural hybrid-ity, one of the plays epigraphs cites a history of Afghanistan that is relevant to the play in two ways. First, for the information it provides, and second, because it articulates the normative Baedeker of established historiography, which the play tries to circumvent. It does so by conflating the personal and the political as an inevitability of our time. Ours is a time of connection; the private, and we must accept this, and its a hard thing to accept, the private is gone . All must be touched. All touch corrupts. All must be corrupted (11). The Homebody, a British housewife addressing the audience from her kitchen table in London, opens the play with a protracted monologue in which she reads snippets from an outdated Nancy Hatch Dupree guidebook to the city of Kabul, stops to meditate on its outdated apercus, and responds with quips and reflections that bring the guidebook to bear on her personal life. And things


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do get very personal indeed, as she narrates her encounter with an Afghan hat vendor in London exile, which triggers a fantasy of lovemaking in distant Kabul. What gives this scene its frisson is the Homebodys obvious yearning for a physical embodiment of Afghanistans terra incognita as a deeplypun intendedinvaginated space of deterritorialization. A woman whose borders have only been broached by books (12), she yearns to be broached by some-thing more material, in this case the hand of the Afghan man sporting clearly chopped-off fingers that re-grow, imaginatively, inside the womans body. The ethereal promises of theory just will not do; this body claims a place and voice for itself and its necessities.

Another strategy Kushner uses to concretize transnationalism relates to lan-guage. In the Homebodys verbose mind, words need to be put to use in as many dimensions as possible, which force them to occupy new spaces and thus become deterritorialized. The meaning of some words is localized, whereas other phrases carry broader resonances that need space and distance to fully blossom. The elsewhereness of language thus holds and balances the human drama of global events. In the plays second part, the Homebodys daughter, Priscilla Ceiling, travels to Kabul to look for her motherwho has mysteri-ously vanished while looking for the apocryphal grave of Cain somewhere in the cityonly to find out that she has been brutally killed and that her body cannot be recovered. Khwaja Aziz Mondanabosh, a Tajik Afghan man who serves as Priscillas guide and interpreter, offers the young woman a sheaf of his Esperanto poems in the guise of a harmless dispatch to a friend in London, although their authenticity is questioned later on when a Taliban border guard claims they in fact contain secret information on weapons placement. I love its modern hyperrational ungainliness, the guide observes on the fake Esperanto of his fake poems, to me it sounds not universally at home, rather homeless, stateless, a global refugee patois (58). The idea of an Esperanto lit-erature bespeaks at once a desire for globalism and the pain of placelessness. The Esperanto poet also proposes that it would revolutionize cartography if his country featured as Afghanistan? on the map, the question mark a symbol for the potential of the land itself to dematerialize, like the countless people and bodies it caused to vanish. In a country that does not, as the question mark suggests, certifiably exist, one never arrives, nor is one expected to return.

Relatively late in the play (act 3, scene 2), Kushner introduces the Pashtun Afghan woman and former librarian Mahala, who cannot continue her work under the book-burning Taliban and instead seeks refuge with the Ceilings, hoping to immigrate to England. Milton, the Homebodys grieving husband, is struggling to maintain a coherent conversation with her. The hurdles are essentially linguistic, and the two attempt to overcome them by seeking con-nections between their respective occupations, she a librarian, he a network engineervocations that simultaneously invoke and satirize the span of global


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information networks and their (in)capacity for mutual comprehension. Theirs is thus a conversation in code, translating the personal into encrypted lan-guage. It is significant, then, that the principle Milton tries to communicate to Mahala involves what he calls duals, or pairs of two things which are alike but also opposite (120). One such dual pair, by extrapolation from the plays investment in bodies and nations in pain, is the duality between the self and communities of multiple selves, between near and far, between comprehension and obliquity. Kushner shows how dual elements are entwined without entirely missing the irony and to some extent futility of this dialectical balancing act. We could even read this play as a warning against the absolutism of relativity: Afghanistan is both at home and in the world, America and the globe, an open-ing to the other and a relationship with oneself. On September 11, 2001the inescapable extension to the wars described herethe visceral, material impact of the wide, sweeping gesture by which we vaguely denote being in the world spelled out what it really means for the home-body of America to lie in tatters. For Kushner, then, the question of globalism ultimately impinges on the body, which it recasts in a natural, organicist state of fluidity and borderlessness. Shelley Fisher Fishkin in her 2004 address to the American Studies Association talked about how the intimate realm of the body and the family never pivots on the nation but operates materially at a level closer to the skin of what it means to be human (Fishkin 2005, 24). Kushner gives a vivid demonstration that the natural transnational gene of the organism is not so much the living body as the corpse, the murdered, the massacred, the victim.

Jenny Spencer maintains that the play testifies to Anglo-American igno-rance in a post-9/11 setting that problematizes the lack of international exper-tise as politically harmful, linking such ignorance with Kushners own lack of first-hand experience of Afghanistan, a country to which he never traveled (J. Spencer 2007, 403). Kushners point, quite simply, is that truth cannot be accessed without the distortion of language and deracination; yet his method borders on the reification of inaccessibility for its own sake. The play mournfully talks about something unpronounceable inside, for which the grief-stricken Priscilla has no words (139). Only what cannot be fathomed counts here as human, just as we can only dimly conceive of the global and recognize it by the very dimness of its specter. To extol or excuse such impenetrability not only adds to the panoply of stereotypes around Eastern inscrutability, but also perpetuates a triad of equivocations: of global war, of literature, and of how literature can address military conflict in ways that allow aesthetics to make a difference. 21 The onus is on writers like Kushner to bestow on words the lucid-ity they need to acquire political meaning. Certainly Kushners idea of transla-tion as a trope that depends on the recognition of incomprehensible otherness justifies his inclusion in the play of people who cannot make sense of each other and of the various wars (personal or military) in which they partici-pate. As Emily Apter astutely notes in The Translation Zone , war is nothing but


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the continuation of extreme mistranslation or disagreement by other means (Apter 2006, 16). So precision, accuracy, and a sense of the right translation are needed to maintain the peaceful ideal of communication. Kushner does offer precision, but not in the way we might expect. Afghanistan is a mys-tery and the Homebody never returns from her journey, which is precisely the kind of deterritorializing narrative that links America with a global exteriority we too often subsume to another kind of Americanness, something for which we can easily devise a mediating language. The Homebodys disappearance, in ways that concretize the horror of war, is brutally specific: a young doc-tors monologue on the womans injuries paints a picture of her mauled body as clear as an X-ray. What Edwards and Gaonkar refer to as America global (Edwards and Gaonkar 2010, 27)a frustrating phrase in its logo-like discon-nectedness and lack of inflection (analogous in this sense to the plays title)is Cains Grave, the elusive tourist attraction that the Homebody is searching for and eventually, literally, finds.

Sanctuary North America

Jane Urquharts Sanctuary Line is easy to align with Kushners play, as they both rest on the same triangulation of North America, war, and the ambiguities of globalization. If Kushners Homebody/Kabul reads like an imprecise translation of an antiquated text, Urquhart employs a limpid, unprovocative register to indicate how Canadian fiction carries transnational resonances in its relation to the United States and the involvement of both countries in Afghanistan. The North American unit is envisioned here exclusively through war as a focal moment in conceptualizing the global.

The interest of Canadian war literature in the corporeal and absurdist hor-rors of warfare has created the impression of war as the frontier experience of isolated soldiers roughing it in solitude and without a sense of community or higher goal: In Canada, more than in Great Britain, and to a certain extent even in the United States, the convention [of war novels] has been intensely individualistic, for the very good reason that Canada has regarded the major wars of this century from a great distance (Novak 2000, 164). But this assess-ment detracts from the knotty entwinement of Canadian war literature with the constitution of the unstable, fluctuating Canadian national identity, which we can best gauge by scrutinizing its links with a war such as that in Afghanistan that is and is not national. Precisely because the engagement in distant wars is so diffuse, the question lingers as to exactly how involved one should be, how individuals participate in the war as a nation, become a nation in the process, or lose their hold on national sovereignty by joining the war effort. A focus on the individual throws light on the individualism that is always implicit in nationalist formations. It also shows that wars, in Alden Nowlans words, are nothing/on which to found a country (Nowlan 1996, 65)that is, not


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a solid or ethical foundation for national stability and consciousness. Instead, wars carve out a kind of hollownesslike the distant shadow of Afghanistan in Kushners playin which the nation comes to nestle.

There are several reasons why Homebody/Kabul and Sanctuary Line can be juxtaposed productively. The most important of these is that Sanctuary Line does not dramatize a departure and a return (as in many Canadian immigrant fictions of homeland travel). Like Homebody/Kabul , where a Western woman disappears and an Afghan librarian returns in her place, Sanctuary Line follows the plot of a similar disappearance and the return of a stranger in ways that make the void into which the two characters go missing appear more famil-iar and easier to imagine. In Sanctuary Line , the military strategist Amanda (Mandy) Butler is deployed to Afghanistan and repatriated in a coffin. As the military cortge passes beneath overpasses crammed with solemn onlookers, her cousin Liz, the narrator of the story, cannot wrap her mind around the inexpressible contingency of the improvised explosive device that killed the young woman. Her death seems all the more incomprehensible for Lizs and the readers lack of contextual knowledge about how Mandy lost her life in Afghanistan, a country whose name, Liz admits, they barely knew as chil-dren (25). Mandy herself barely mentions the war. She talks, instead, about a man with whom she has fallen in love, a fellow Canadian military mana Muslim, as it turns outas mysterious as the country itself (partly because he is hiding his religion). All manners of transnationalisms, both hemispheric and global, culminate here, as in Kushners play, in episodes of violence involving border crossings: the accidental death of a boy, Teo, whose mother emigrated from Mexico to work on the familys farm; and Mandys passage without return into Afghanistan. Mandys training already influences her view of terrestrial belonging even before she leaves for Afghanistan: She never looks down from her military plane at the orchards around Lake Erie where she grew up. Liz, the entomologist, likewise feels increasingly untethered from the moorings of birthplace and adolescence: Often that whole epoch seems so far from me that I cannot conjure it at all. Sometimes my only connection to it is the map made by the fine lines on a monarchs wing (Urquhart 2010, 55). The migratory patterns of the monarch butterfly that she closely studies operate as shorthand for the kind of volatility that moves people around and across borders and nations.

One could argue this is yet another attempt to draw the narrative into a global frame that ultimately gets drowned in equivocation. How, we may ask, do the hemispheric and global maps of this book overlap? The young Mexican boy dies as a result of a family clat caused by his mothers affair with her employer. Mandy also has an illicit affair in Afghanistan, yet this is not why she dies. Indirectly, however, the Kurdish Canadian man who appears to string her along, abusing her affection without requiting it, stands in for the nothing-ness into which she has vanished. When he visits Liz years later, it appears that


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his displacementfurtively Muslim in both Canada and Afghanistanwas even greater than Mandys. Submerged in time is an ever deeper displacement, namely the passage of the familys ancestors into the British colony of Upper Canada during the American War of Independence. Through these very differ-ent, subtly adumbrated conflicts, Urquhart registers war not as a national proj-ect or test of endurance, obduracy, or self-assertion. No one harbors patriotic feelings in this book, only a lostness that sets them adrift along aimless trajec-tories that do not end in a redeeming homecoming. The remembered world of the story is loosely held togetherand at the same time disbandedby memo-ries of war and the possibility of death. The butterfly effect does not denote here the causal reliance of globalization on local phenomena. Instead, it aligns the local and the global as subject to the same potential for catastrophe and the boundlessness of nonreturn: Thrown off course by a sudden shift of the wind, a butterfly will never reach its intended destination. It will die in flight, without mating, and the exquisite possibilities it carries in its cells and in the thrall of its migration will simply never come to pass (Urquhart 2010, 81).

I began this chapter by arguing that global discourse is often stymied by idi-oms of incommensurability. So why turn to this mystical vision of the global as absence, death, and a parable of definitively lost sons and daughters? How does the scattered emplacement of war casualties in this novel question the boundaries of nations? In Afghanistan, Mandys view of the personal dimin-ishment caused by war is perceptive and compelling. Like the Homebody, she sees in Afghanistan the same sense of emptiness that she herself shares: Ive seen Afghans build an entire life around the disintegrating fragments of the kind of social order we take for granted. And once Id seen that, I knew that I could build an emotional world around the smallest splinter of him, the idea of him, perhaps even the memory of him (Urquhart 2010, 204), she says of her elusive Muslim lover. Three features attach to the world here: In its essence it is affective, but it also draws on a localized splinter branching out into something bigger than itself, and finally it dissolves before we grasp it; in other words, what makes us notice it is its dissolution, just like we see Afghanistan only when it threatens to collapse. The blood flow of this world proceeds unimpeded until an artery becomes clogged . . . by war (Urquhart 2010, 204). In Urquharts world, war is thus what defines our understanding of scale. The limit of the globe is the limit of our cruelty, which stretches, in depth and lat-eral geography, with wars dominion: How frail each life is, Urquhart writes. We mow a meadow and kill a thousand butterflies. The racket of the mower, the sound of a fist hitting flesh, an American bomb striking a Middle Eastern cityperhaps in the way of these things the only difference among them is that of scale (227). The book does not provide a recipe for how to bring it all together into one well-organized cellular structure (ibid., 253)Canada, Mexico, America, Afghanistanas much as it transfers a seemingly empty experience of the global into the text, into the certain, palpable fullness of its


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voice, which proves that even the most contingent, harrowing moments in global conflict can be written about with sensitivity and precision.

Conclusion

Both American Studies and Canadian Studies are at a turning point in their for-tunes, and the challenges this juncture offers has the potential to shape both. We are all studying dying formations, with their archives simultaneously ossifying and fragmenting, Edwards and Gaonkar write (2010, 6), inviting precisely the kind of sombre reading I have offered, to shift the focus in dis-cussions of globalization away from the positive resonance of feeling global (Robbins 1999). Both Kushners Mahala and Mandys Muslim lover materialize unexpectedly at the end of these texts. What interests me about Kushner and Urquhart is their investment in war as the context in which such substitutions take place, substitutions that both the Homebody and the Canadian soldier have to pay for with their lives, and that help us rethink globalization in the shadow of Afghanistan. Extrapolating from these case studies, we can con-template both the opportunities and the problems that a focus on war poses for a comparative study of North American literatures. The opportunities lie mainly in the potential of war literature to articulate a more concrete vision of globalization, either by relating, as Kushner does in overtly political terms, to geostrategic conflicts and physical violence (remember the graphic death of Homebody in the play); or by writing about globalization, as Urquhart does, with both lucidity and lyricism. Other opportunities have to do with the abil-ity of war literature to create scenarios of disappearance that show the impact of asymmetrical warfare on American exceptionalism. The main problem stems from the tendency of these narratives to overstress ideas of legibility and transnational comprehension in ways that occasionally seem too close to the often obfuscating idioms of global theory to effectively counterbalance them.

Shreve McCannon, the Canadian character in Faulkners Absalom, Absalom! , locates the distinction between Canada and the United States in a memory deficit. What determines the lack of history for those who do not have it and the residues of it for those who do is the trace of war: We dont live among defeated grandfathers and freed slaves, Faulkners Canadian character says, and bullets in the dining room table and such, to be always reminding us to never forget (W. Faulkner 1936, 361). A comparative perspective that rotates on war not only divests the US American and Canadian literary canons of their national teleologies, but also suggests that North American Studies does not involve a sweeping global gesture vaguely connoting connectivity and cultural exchange. Rather, it reflects postnational conflicts of a more organic kind than the abstract flows of culture and the flexibilization of economies on a global scale.


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A martial approach to transnational literature also helps interrogate the curious tendency in North American literature to prefer to the direct bilat-eral conversation the distractions and displacements of inscrutable overseas engagements, which reflect back onto the North American cohabitation, mak-ing it new. Rather than deepening the illegibility of its global settings, the war narrative and its geopolitical cartographies slice across familiar coordinates to redraw the mutable boundaries of North America and redefine its global role. To return to where this chapter started, the musings of Kushners symbolic Homebody, let us remember that Kushner gives his heroine the choice between embracing the insights afforded by violence, and remaining on the culpable shore of ignorance or disinterest, safe from the flows that move the world. Prudence lures her away from an ocean that is deep and cold and erasing. Being so recklessly in the world, guided by an invalid atlas, might lead, and ultimately does lead, to perdition. And yet: how dreadful, really unpardon-able, to remain dry (T. Kushner 2004, 28). Kushner seeks here to clarify the vagueness of transnationalism by describing it as a realm of disorientation and violence. Seen from this angle, the Homebodys sacrifice demands that we assume responsibility for the material and painful scope of international involvement. In looking at literature in the United States and Canada as a North American unit, we cannot, therefore, ignore that to a large extent, this unit owes parts of its constitution and importance to histories of global con-flict in which both nations became embroiled. To reimagine North American literature transnationally is thus to approach it also through the prism of war not as a temporary blockage in the flows of globalization, but as one of their fundamental conditions of being.

Notes

1 As the title suggests, I find it necessary to refer both to transnationalism and to globalization in this context to denote two aspects of international discourse: one enmeshed in the materiality of economy and politics (what I call the global) and one that comprises cultural responses to these more concrete avenues of exchange and conflict (the transnational). I do not see much benefit, however, in too rigidly separating these concepts. Indeed this chapter aims to ground the often abstract vocabulary of both transnational and global theory (especially in its application to literature) into a palpable network of materialand, as the framework of war sug-gests, also soberingrealities.

2 When John Carlos Rowe raised the question of North American Area Studies in a recent essay, he did so from a perspective that rehearses the familiar quandary of how the hemisphere is only a neoimperial formation and reproduces at the disciplin-ary level the traditions of American centrality:

If we are committed, as I am, to the comparative study of Canada and the Americas, rather than to merely U.S.-centric American studies, however diverse we may make it, then how do we respond to the familiar challenge from Latin America area spe-cialists that our project is simply the next stage of U.S. imperialism stretching from


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the Monroe Doctrine through the Spanish-American War to the Pan-Americanism of the Cold War era? Finally, is not this commitment to hemispheric study of Canada and the Americas merely a revival of the much older continental model for area studies, replacing contemporary problems with even more insidious difficul-ties haunting us from the European imperial past? (Rowe 2011, 326)

Or, in the words of Canadian scholar Cynthia Sugars, how can we prevent the post-national field of American studies from becoming AMERICA writ large, with US culture as the new . . . universal? (Sugars 2010, 37; see also ch. 1, section titled Major issues of Comparative North American Studies). Rowes solution is to recommend for-eign language expertise and knowledge of local histories beyond the United States.

3 Even though generalizations on this issue may seem reckless, one cannot simply over-look the glaring absence of any references to the canon of transnational American Studies (Rowe 2000a, Kaplan 2002, Dimock 2006, Giles 2002 and 2011) in even the most recent discussions of Canadian literature and globalization (Kortenaar 2009, Dobson 2009, Ty 2010, Wyile 2011). The reverse is also true: while several new studies include sections on Canadian literature as part of a global reading of US literary cul-ture, such examinations (see, for instance, Adams 2009 and Giles 2011) do not find it necessary to invoke the work of Smaro Kamboureli and Roy Miki (2007), Cynthia Sugars (2004b), Laura Moss (2003), or Imre Szeman (2003). Cf., however, MacLean 2010.

4 A possible source of such formulations may be found in R. W. B. Lewiss foundational text The American Adam . Lewis describes the dialogical nature of American discourse as follows: The historian looks not only for the major terms of discourse, but also for major pairs of opposed terms which, by their very opposition, carry discourse forward (R. W. B. Lewis 1955, 12).

5 For an analysis of Canadian literature in a global context that focuses on a specific parameter of global knowledge, that of history and historical fiction, see Tunkel 2012.

6 This resistance goes beyond literary studies. John Ralston Saul writes in The Collapse of Globalism (2009) that globalization is already in retreat and has given way to a vacuum in which a new economic order is slowly taking shape. The alter-globalist Naomi Klein, whose parents moved from the United States to Montreal as resisters to the war in Vietnam, reports on the fences rather than the windows of global-ization (Klein 2002). Contrary voices can also be heard. Younger scholars espouse the view that Canada needs the transnational (Dobson 2009, xviii), while oth-ers, like Winfried Siemerling and Sarah Phillips Casteel, also insist that a defensive Canadian nationalism and self-protective instinct vis--vis the United States may inhibit the development of alternative paradigms of hemispheric American studies that Canadianists, with their historically weak nationalism and acute awareness of the imperial tendencies of the United States, are uniquely positioned to produce (Siemerling and Casteel 2010b, 10).

7 Imre Szeman rightly argues that it is not Canadian literature per se that aspires to write the nation into existence but rather Canadian criticism (Szeman 2003, 162).

8 Diana Brydons suggestion that TransCanada points towards a renewed federal-ism within a planetary imaginary comes close to a specifically Canadian vision of the planet, but she does not elaborate on how this manifests itself in literary works (Brydon 2007, 16). For details on aesthetic strategies emerging from this global vision of Canadianness, see Brydon and Dvok 2012.

9 Recent overviews of Canadian literature aimed at a global audience do not always reflect these developments, marginalizing the transnational dimensions of the field. The Cambridge History of Canadian Literature (Howells and Krller 2009) couples


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multiculturalism with globalization in a single chapter. The taxonomy it pro-poses raises various boundaries between races, ethnicities, and origins, so that a hybrid global consciousness is addressed relatively late, after the author, Neil Ten Kortenaar, has exhausted all neat classifications and is left with a handful of unclas-sifiable texts and writers, some of whom describe places that do not exist, or are not the origin of an immigrant lineage, prompting the question: What of Canadians relations to places that are not lands of origin? (Kortenaar 2009, 577). Because the global and the multicultural are discussed together, transnationalism as an expe-rience distinct from immigrant or migrant writing emerges here as a very recent literary phenomenon, thus occluding literature that mapped global contact zones before the upsurge of multiculturalism as a political issue and a literary imaginary since the 1970s (see also ch. 3). Predating the Cambridge history by one year, the History of Literature in Canada (Nischik 2008a), even though it does not highlight globalization in the organization of its material, usefully ranges between a politi-cally unproblematic, self-evident postnationalism as an attractive cultural asset of Canada (Nischik 2008b, 7) and a more unsettled view of an ominous post-Af-ghanistan Canada whose sovereignty is merely virtual, a computerized image of a national identity about which younger generations know little and care less (Grace 2008, 288).

10 Writing about identity oscillations in Canadian autobiographies of return to the homeland (in Kulyk Keefer 1998 and others), I suggested that the future of such binary geographical oscillations lies perhaps in a total dissolution of their dualism and a more profound engagement with passages and migrations on a truly global scale (Banita 2008, 400). In ways that were not clear to me then, the experience of externalized conflict as opposed to intergenerational tensions and identity crisis might go a long way toward concretizing this global scale.

11 See, for instance, Barkawi, who resituates war as an essential medium of global interconnection and exchange (Barkawi 2004, 123). This means not only that con-quering armies shape indigenous societies, or battlefields are exemplary contact zones of transnational culture, but also that since 1945, for example, war has helped constitute supranational political and military entities. Postcolonial theory is also witnessing a turn to war as a way into the violent, dirty, and immoral business of imperial administration, as Paul Gilroy has suggested (Gilroy 2005, 94). For him, planetary culture revolves around suffering, a vision that foregrounds rights and reparation, yet also implies the combat violence I am interested in here.

12 Bruce Robbins refers to those kinds of global responsibility that are not overbearing or violence prone as a new type of cosmopolitanism with the ability to inhibit US aggression in particular: With the Long Gulf War (the war against Iraq) now over, at least formally, but the war in Afghanistan celebrating its tenth anniversary in 2011, and others like these plausibly waiting around the corner, priority on the cos-mopolitan agenda should go to the problem of transnational aggression, especially ours (Robbins 2012, 2).

13 Neil Smith similarly conflates globalization and American power in The Endgame of Globalization , which interestingly revolves around the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to show the dismal failure of US global ambition: Insofar as American nationalism infuses the arteries of a globalizing capitalism like no other, it is also crucial to fol-low further the contradiction of an American nationalism coiled within contempo-rary globalism (N. Smith 2005, 16).

14 For some fascinating speculations on how the doctrine of preemptive war mobilizes the power of the imaginationmore precisely, the disingenuous transcoding of


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the aesthetic imaginary, its deployment in a particularly narrow set of applications in the political imaginary of the modern United States, and a consequent rescript-ing of the terms of a global community (163), see Palumbo-Liu 2006.

15 Global views and global war are closely linked. In her response to the Persian Gulf War of 1991, Judith Butler aligned the aerial, global view with the perspective of the sniper as figure for imperialist military power (J. Butler 1992, 11). To see the world aerially resonates darkly with the threat of the air strike, and in a broader sense modern warfare cannot be conceived without global and satellite mapping.

16 Shelley Fisher Fishkin also proposes that seeking out original perspectives within transnational American Studies should involve the study of Spanish-language sources, especially of the Mexican war. She adds: We might reexamine other wars, as well, from multiple vantage points, probing the range of ways in which U.S. mili-tary action has shaped societies around the world (Fishkin 2005, 24). Other schol-ars have occasionally invoked specific wars to make sense of the new transnational scope of American Studies. According to Heinz Ickstadt, the field began to question the coherency of its object of study partly as a result of the Vietnam War (Ickstadt 2002, 547). In the same vein, Donald Pease traces the revisions of the compacts with US citizens in the aftermath of the Cold War (George Herbert W. Bushs New World Order, Bill Clintons New Covenant with America, Newt Gingrichs Contract with America, and George W. Bushs Homeland Security State) to national and global irruptions of violence: the Persian Gulf War, the Waco conflagration, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 (Pease 2009, 45).

17 On the Canadian side, even though in current transnational criticism war does not play a significant part, it is worth noting that an emphatic stress on World War I occasioned the first manifestation of a North American exceptionalism in The North American Idea (1917) by James A. Macdonald (a Canadian editor and minister), an entirely forgotten collection of the authors addresses at Vanderbilt University in which, under the mantle of support for the pacifist movement of the time and for closer ties between the United States and Canada, Macdonald essentially expanded ideas of national righteousness to the international scene. His vision based on the British Empire as a fraternal union under ideals of justice was so off-the-mark as to seem almost ludicrous.

18 I discuss how post-9/11 fiction engages the global dimensions of the War on Terror (as well as of previous historical watersheds such as the Holocaust and the Balkan War) in Banita 2012a.

19 In an earlier essay, entitled Canada and Internationalism (1933), McLuhan encour-aged Canada to use economic leverage in lieu of military power to staunch the growth of European nationalism (see Cavell 2003, 198).

20 As it moved from London to the United States (East Coast to West Coast), the play, through its fascinatingly nomadic production itinerary (Dickinson 2005, 436), itself staged a transnational idea of performativity.

21 David Palumbo-Liu eloquently frames this question in the following words: How much otherness can we invite in from what is not readily available to our imagina-tion? . . . How much otherness is necessary to gain the benefits of being exposed to the lives of others without creating too much distance and alienation from our selves, fragmenting beyond recuperation our sense of reality? (Palumbo-Liu 2012, 35).


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Documents

North American Literature and Global Studies Transnationalism at War