eJournals

Contents Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . VII W INFRIED F LUCK , S TEFAN B RANDT & I NGRID T HALER Introduction: The Challenges of Transnational American Studies . . . . . 1 D ONALD E. P EASE From American Literary Studies to Planetary Literature: The Emergence of Literary Extraterritoriality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 J OHN C ARLOS R OWE European Lessons in Imperialism: A Letter to America . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 W INFRIED F LUCK Theories of American Culture (and the Transnational Turn in American Studies) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 R OB K ROES European Anti-Americanism: What’s New? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 T HOMAS C LAVIEZ Between Aesthetics and (Ethno-)Politics, Europe, America, and Beyond: Cosmopolitanism from Henry James to Toni Morrison . . . . . 97 P AUL G ILES Medieval American Literature: Emerson, Longfellow, and the Longue Durée . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 C ARSTEN S CHINKO America as Medium, or: Culture and Its Others. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133 R.J. E LLIS ‘East Is West’: Interhemispheric American Studies and the Transnational Turn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163 J UDE D AVIES Stupid White Men: Toward a Trans-Atlantic Politics of Stupidity . . . . . 189 W ALTER H ÖLBLING Americans and Their Enemies: Political Rhetoric and Real Politics . . . . 211 VI C ONTENTS L IOUBOV G UINZBOURG Imagining America in the 21 st Century: A Russian’s View from the Final Resting Place of William S. Burroughs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225 Z BIGNIEW L EWICKI American Studies: Divided Europe’s Last Stand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249 G ARY E DWARD H OLCOMB Claude McKay and Black Transnationalism: Bringing the New American Studies to Becoming-EU Europe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259 H ANNES B ERGTHALLER Ecocriticism, American Studies, and the Limits of Both: A German Perspective on the Internationalization of a New Discipline . . . . . . . . . 273 Contributors B ERGTHALLER , H ANNES . National Taipei University of Technology, General Education Bldg., Chung-Hsiao E. Rd., Taipei 106, Taiwan, Republic of China. E-mail: hannes.bergthaller@gmx.de. B RANDT , S TEFAN L. John F. Kennedy-Institut, Freie Universität Berlin, Lansstr. 7-9, 14195 Berlin, Germany. E-mail: slbrandt@zedat.fu-berlin.de. C LAVIEZ , T HOMAS . Institute for Cultural and Language Studies, University of Stavanger, 4036 Stavanger, Norway. E-mail: claviezt@zedat.fu-berlin.de. D AVIES , J UDE . Faculty of Arts, University of Winchester, Winchester SO22 4NR, UK. E-mail: Jude.Davies@winchester.ac.uk. E LLIS , R.J. Department of American and Canadian Studies, University of Birmingham, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK. E-mail: r.j.ellis@bham.ac.uk. F LUCK , W INFRIED . John F. Kennedy-Institut, Freie Universität Berlin, Lansstr. 7-9, 14195 Berlin, Germany. E-mail: fluck@zedat.fu-berlin.de. G ILES , P AUL . Faculty of English, University of Oxford, St. Cross Building, Manor Road, Oxford, OX1 3UQ, UK. E-mail: paul.giles@rai.ox.ac.uk. G UINZBOURG , L IOUBOV . Humanities & Western Civilization Program. University of Kansas. 1440 Jayhawk Blvd., Lawrence, KS 66045-7574, USA. E-mail: lag@ku.edu. H OLCOMB , G ARY . Emporia State University, 1200 Commercial Street, Emporia, Kansas 66801. E-mail: holcomb@emporia.edu H ÖLBLING , W ALTER . Institut für Amerikanistik, Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, Attemsgasse 25/ II, A-8010 Graz, Austria. E-mail: walter.hoelbling@ uni-graz.at. K ROES , R OB . Amerika Instituut, Plantage Muidergracht 12, 1018 TV Amsterdam, The Netherlands. E-mail: R.Kroes@uva.nl L EWICKI , Z BIGNIEW . Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities, Warsaw University, Nowy S´wiat 69, 00-046 Warszawa, Poland; Chair of American Studies, Card. Stefan Wyszynski University, Warszawa, Poland. E-mail: zbigniew.lewicki@uw.edu.pl. VIII C ONTRIBUTORS P EASE , D ONALD E. Dartmouth College, Hanover, 14 Sanborn House, NH 03755, USA. E-mail: donald.pease@dartmouth.edu. R OWE , J OHN C ARLOS . College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences. University of Southern California, 3501 Trousdale Parkway, University Park, Los Angeles, CA 90089-0354, USA. E-mail: jcrowe@uci.edu. S CHINKO , C ARSTEN . Universität Stuttgart, Institut für Literaturwissenschaft: Amerikanistik und Neuere Englische Literatur II, Geschwister Scholl Str. 23, 70174 Stuttgart, Germany. E-mail: cschinko@web.de. T HALER , I NGRID . Institut für Anglistik, Amerikanistik und Keltologie, Nordamerikastudienprogramm. Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, Regina-Pacis-Weg 5, 53113 Bonn. E-mail: ithaler@uni-bonn.de. W INFRIED F LUCK , S TEFAN B RANDT & I NGRID T HALER Introduction: The Challenges of Transnational American Studies Since the early 1990s, American Studies scholars have found themselves confronted with new challenges linked to the discourse of internationalization. Although the concept of “transnationality, a weaving back and forth, with the other lands, of many threads of all sizes and colors” 1 was by no means new to the discipline, it did not gain momentum before the end of the Cold War. At this time, the premises on which the field of American Studies was based were changing decisively; new parameters were developed to critically explore U.S. culture and discuss the role of America in a changing world order. Since then, American Studies scholars have rethought and redefined the political and theoretical tenets of their discipline, particularly by utilizing postnational and comparative approaches. Among other currents, three aspects of American Studies have moved into the foreground: 1.) cultural hybridities and border discourses (new structures of self-formation linked to changes in the cultural fabric of America), 2.) diasporic identities (the Black Atlantic as a counter-movement to modernity), and 3.) transculturations (the Americanization of European culture and, vice versa, the Europeanization of American culture). Today, the transnational and its siblings comparative, international, and postnational American Studies are often deployed to express an (un)conscious desire to transcend the national paradigm which has returned with a vengeance in America’s cultural imaginary. In his presidential address at the ASA’s 2006 annual conference, Emory Elliott puts transnationalism as “genuine inclusiveness and broad international collaboration” at the center of the American Studies Association’s future agenda. 2 Such a move, coming from a U.S. scholar at the beginning of the twenty-first century, aligns the current trend towards the transnational with the discipline’s traditional concern with itself, namely the urge to identify personal and, in effect, political involvement as a source of scholarly motivation. 3 Elliott allies himself with 1 Randolph Bourne, “Trans-national America,” Atlantic Monthly, 118 (1916): 86-97. 2 Emory Elliott, “Diversity in the United States and Abroad: What Does It Mean When American Studies Is Transnational? - Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 12, 2004,” American Quarterly, 59.1 (March 2007): 6. 3 See, for example, Leo Marx, “On Recovering the ‘Ur’ Theory of American Studies,” REAL, 19 (2003): 3-18; Paul Lauter, From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park: Activism, Culture, and American Studies (Durham: Duke UP, 2001). 2 W INFRIED F LUCK , S TEFAN B RANDT & I NGRID T HALER former ASA P resident Amy Kaplan by proclaiming “radical hope” as the motivation for transnational American Studies, thereby echoing George Lipsitz’s belief in historical transformation in times of utter despair: 4 “I look with radical hope to U.S. history, to the turns of events that can occur - that have occurred - when courageous people have challenged the dominant ideology and risked their lives, careers, and personal freedoms to join movements to end slavery […].” 5 The need for a transnational American Studies, then, seems motivated by an approach of “the-personal-is-political,” defining much of the work done by U.S. American Studies scholars today. Thus, Elliott’s agenda for American Studies establishes a consensus model based on the teacher-scholar’s political ideals: “How can we, through our teaching and research, more effectively generate developments that will lead to thoughtful citizenship and a more humane future? ” 6 A similar agenda for academic resistance can be found in Günter Lenz’s fervent appeal to enact “the transnational and intercultural discourses in real dialogues and debates among scholars from different parts of the world” 7 Thus conceived, American Transnational Studies can be used, in Alfred Hornung’s words, to foster a “reciprocal process of Transcultural learning.” 8 Recent years have seen number of important academic events at which the issue of “American transnationalism” was discussed controversially, sometimes passionately. The 2005 international symposium at the John F. Kennedy Institute in Berlin on “European Perspectives in American Studies: Histories - Dialogues - Differences” that constituted the point of origin for the essays collected in this volume stood in a prominent line of other meetings on the subject, namely the ASA conferences in 2003, 2004, and 2006, with ground-breaking presidential addresses by Amy Kaplan, Shelly Fisher Fishkin, and Emory Elliott. 9 This collection then gathers essays from both sides of the Atlantic and explores the stakes of transnational Ameri- 4 See Lipsitz, American Studies in a Moment of Danger (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2001). 5 Elliott, “Diversity in the United States and Abroad,” 6. 6 Ibid. 7 Günter Lenz, “Transculturations: American Studies in a Globalizing World - The Globalizing World in American Studies,” Amerikastudien/ American Studies, 47.1 (2002): 98. 8 Alfred Hornung, “Transnational American Studies: Response to the Presidential Address,” American Quarterly, 57.1 (March 2005): 69. 9 Amy Kaplan, “Violent Belongings and the Question of Empire Today - Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, Hartford, Connecticut, October 17, 2003,” American Quarterly, 56.1 (March 2004): 1-18; Shelley Fisher Fishkin, “Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies - Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 12, 2004,” American Quarterly, 57.1 (March 2005): 17-57; Elliott, “Diversity in the United States and Abroad,” 1-22. Introduction 3 can Studies by turning to its relationship with Europe, portraying local or demanding “outside” practices of American Studies (Guinzbourg, Lewicki, Holcomb, Kroes, Rowe), and addressing, or rather, challenging, the stakes of transnationalism by providing interhemispheric, cosmopolitan, planetary and transatlantic perspectives on transnationalism (Ellis, Claviez, Davies, Pease); positioning transnational American Studies in the history of the discipline and the humanities (Fluck); interrogating transnationalism through interdisciplinary approaches, such as ecocriticism (Bergthaller), media theory (Schinko), history (Hölbling) and cultural interrelations between the UK and the U.S. (Giles). The essays gathered here are also a result of the collaborative and interdisciplinary work done in and by the German research network “The Futures of (European) American Studies,” initiated by Elisabeth Schäfer-Wünsche, Katrin Amian, Michael Butter, and Ingrid Thaler, for which the symposium served as a kick-off event. 10 As Winfried Fluck has noted in his response to Elliott, just because one is not an American does not mean that one automatically brings an outside or comparative perspective to American Studies. 11 The essays collected in our anthology reveal and discuss the different ways of approaching and teaching American Studies in Europe and the U.S. but are also selected to highlight the differences in the practice, methods, and goals of doing American Studies in Europe and the U.S. rather than engaging in the desire for a political-scholarly consensus model. 12 Instead of pitting Europe against the U.S., the anthology reveals the differences within American Studies in Europe, particularly between Western and Eastern European approaches to the symbol of “America,” but also explores the possibilities of transnationalism as international collaboration. Many essays in this anthology make a passionate case for intense collaborations and coalitions within the discipline, particularly between the U.S. and Europe. In his essay on the emergence of “literary extraterritoriality,” Donald Pease encourages us to explore alternatives to what he calls, referring to Wai Chee Dimock, our “planetary order,” exemplified by the “Global Homeland State.” These alternatives, Pease argues, are encapsulated in the fates of Trinidad-born British thinker C.L.R. James and Russian poet Osip Mandelstam. Likewise, John Carlos Rowe’s essay “European Lessons in Imperialism: A Letter to America,” addresses the current refashioning of the nation in the 10 For more information on the research network, which is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), see <http: / / www.americanstudiesnetwork.de> 11 Winfried Fluck, “Inside and Outside: What Kind of Knowledge Do We Need? A Response to the Presidential Address,” American Quarterly, 59.1 (March 2007): 25. 12 See also Dana D. Nelson, “ConsterNation,” The Futures of American Studies, Eds. Donald Pease and Robyn Wiegman (Durham: Duke UP, 2002), 559-579. 4 W INFRIED F LUCK , S TEFAN B RANDT & I NGRID T HALER U.S. by positioning an “outside” or a new U.S. expatriate perspective for U.S. American Studies scholars in creating political coalitions among intellectuals and artists outside the U.S. Particularly by turning to Europe, Rowe argues, alternatives to the nation-state can be imagined. As Rowe espouses a notion of “world-citizenship” and new cosmopolitanism in order to internationalize American Studies, he turns to the contributions of European American Studies scholars, the transnational European Union, and recent work by Jürgen Habermas and Etienne Balibar. In the comparative study of Europe and the U.S., Rowe suggests, “a new ‘counter-force’ to U.S. globalization” as “models of transnational viable governance, of transitional situations, and their histories, of polylingual and multicultural collectivity, and of economies with at least some significant component of social care for humans less fortunate than us” can be developed. In his essay, Winfried Fluck argues that there is no fundamental opposition between theories of American culture and transnational American Studies, since transnational approaches also seek to gain insight into American culture. The history of American Studies, Fluck suggests, has always been closely linked to one specific project, namely the possibility of resistance, an issue which it shares with other fields within the humanities. In his view, transnational American Studies represent yet another way of going beyond “the dead-end analysis of cultural radicalism’s power analysis.” To qualify transnational American Studies as a renamed comparative theory is consequently misleading, since comparison is only one method that helps us to transcend the narrow field of national identity and thus to enable new possibilities for resistance. A similar desire for global(ized) alliances bound by political and academic affinities (and not by national interests and citizenship) is articulated in Rob Kroes’s discussion of recent anti-Americanism. Using as his starting point Le Monde’s sweeping statement immediately after 9/ 11 that “we are all Americans,” Kroes investigates the ways in which this newlyfound sense of solidarity has been absorbed in the past five years into a rhetoric of “unbridled Americanism.” While catering to an increasing anti-Europeanism among Americans, Kroes demonstrates, this rhetoric is rather designed to establish new barriers than lead to a truly transnational consensus. The terms cosmopolitan and planetary American Studies, used by Donald Pease, are also employed in Thomas Claviez’s essay on aesthetic and ethnopolitics. While pointing to the potential pitfalls of such terms, lying in their often universalist claims, Claviez proposes a distinction, as well as an interaction, between an “aesthetic” cosmopolitanism infused by the modernism of Henry James and Gertrude Stein and an “ethno-political” variety, as it is embodied in the works of W.E.B. DuBois and Alain Locke. What role, Introduction 5 Claviez asks, has Europe played in the production of American views on cosmopolitanism? Paul Giles, in his piece on Emerson, Longfellow, and the Longue Durée, moves in a similar direction, interrogating F.O. Matthiessen’s notion of the American Renaissance as a literature characterized by its investment in the national project. Giles shows that “American medievalism,” the Gothic in particular, of the antebellum period questions national genealogies by reconfiguring concepts of history and time, espousing “a much more extensive, unstable relationship between national identity and transnational cultures” instead. In the following essays by Carsten Schinko, Jude Davies, and R.J. Ellis, transnational and inter-hemispheric approaches are used to provide comparative methodologies in American Studies. In his essay on “America as Medium,” Schinko compares Winfried Fluck’s approach with the now dominant cultural radicalism represented by Paul Gilroy’s work on the black diaspora. Schinko thereby sheds light on the ways in which “culture” has to meet its conceptual others, “media” and “society.” Davies’s essay maps the ideological forms of “stupidity” in U.S. politics and media culture from the 1980s to the 2000s exemplified by the figures of “stupid white men” such as Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Moore, and the protagonists of films such as Wayne’s World, Forrest Gump, and Three Kings. Developing Avital Ronell’s distinction between “stupidity” (stupidity as plenitude) and “idiocy” (stupidity as lack), it argues that, while the identification with stupidity-as-plenitude has reinvigorated conservative forms of white male subjectivity for the public sphere, stupidity can also be performed in alternative ways. Ellis’s paper shows that the “new” American Studies never possessed a homogenous approach, instead constituting itself as a broad coalition and abandoning the “grand narrative” aspirations of the so-called myth and symbol school for more comparative foci. As Ellis proposes, it is now possible to make distinctions within this broad field, differentiating between three - although overlapping - perspectives on transnational America: intra-hemispheric studies; contingent hemispheric studies; and (albeit more tentatively) global studies. Comparing Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation and Gurinder Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice, Ellis identifies the diverse strategies in which these films explore the reductive paradoxes and inter-hemispheric lines enshrined in the phrase, ‘East Is West’ (the title of Manoj Kumar’s 1970 Bollywood movie). Many of the essays, as they seek to outline what “outside” perspectives in American Studies could be, or, indeed, if “outside” perspectives are actually possible, are intensely personal narratives in which the engagement with American Studies is informed by a sense of political activism with which one has been attracted to American Studies. The final five essays by Walter 6 W INFRIED F LUCK , S TEFAN B RANDT & I NGRID T HALER Hölbling, Lioubov Guinzbourg, Zbigniew Lewicki, Gary Holcomb, and Hannes Bergthaller stand for the growing interest within American Studies in interdisciplinary approaches. Walter Hölbling discusses exemplary literary, cultural and political texts by Mark Twain, Norman Mailer, and others, delineating three peculiarities in American thinking: a.) what on the American side is seen as justified defensive rhetoric in the face of an imminent external threat often comes across as an aggressive attitude outside the USA; b.) the rhetorical figures and images employed in this rhetoric are often out of sync with actual historical realities; c.) especially in times of national crises, this usage tends to gain a life of its own and may actually create the situation it supposedly tries to avoid. One aspect Eastern European scholars seem to share with U.S. American scholars is their intensely personal-political attraction to the field of American Studies. Lioubov Guinzbourg, for example, introduces us to specific views on the U.S. in the former Soviet Union, post-Soviet Russia, and other East European countries, stressing fears of U.S. hegemony in a free market economy. In her essay, she describes a diverse, creative and idealistically-inspired circle of Americans who maintain their obstinate dissident traditions “in the shadow of silent majorities.” Zbigniew Lewicki, on the other hand, envisions a transnational utopia of consensus from a decidedly Eastern European perspective. He asks us to reconsider the consensus model for a Eastern European American Studies perspective: “Being familiar with both types of experience: as citizens of Europe, Eastern or Western, and as scholars of America, we should be more engaged in debates on issues that are of common interest to both cultures.” Gary Holcomb, in contrast, who has repeatedly been to Romania as a Fulbright scholar, presents a U.S. perspective on the developments in Romania. Holcomb poses the question whether the field American Studies may enter the higher educational domain of translating the New in countries like Romania while at the same time re-collecting the lived modern, re-membering the Old (Left) when it was the new. Bergthaller’s piece outlines how a rapprochement between American Studies and ecocriticism, such as it has perforce occurred with the arrival of ecocriticism outside the United States, can benefit both disciplines by highlighting their respective blind spots. In Europe, Bergthaller explains, ecocriticism has arrived as a branch of American Studies - a development which reflects the fact that ecocriticism relies mostly on U.S. literature for its textual base. It is thus deeply invested in precisely those national myths which have formed the primary object of criticism within American Studies proper. This collection of essays testifies to a statement made in the March 2007 newsletter of the American Studies Association, according to which Transnational American Studies can be used to overcome the “institutional amnesia” of the global past promoted by commercial mass media and state Introduction 7 education,” bringing “academics and activism” closer together. 13 The collection attests to the multiplicity of approaches and concepts circumscribed by the term transnationalism when practiced as a conscious transnational and transatlantic project. “This concept of transnational American Studies,” Alfred Hornung adds, “is by definition political.” 14 It remains to be seen if the transnational project within American Studies will be able to maintain this politicization in convincing scholarly fashion. A transnational American Studies approach can only justify its politicized agenda if it continues to show that the assumptions of an American exceptionalism are untenable. Thus, it needs to ground its political aspirations in a further development and modification of its theoretical and methodological framework. This collection seeks to contribute to this challenging task. 13 “March 2007 Newsletter: Final Report of the 2006 Program Committee.” Official website American Studies Association. 24 April 2007. <ASAhttp: / / www. georgetown. edu/ crossroads/ AmericanStudiesAssn/ newsletter/ archive/ pdf/ ASA_%20March_ 2007.pdf.> 14 Hornung, “Transnational American Studies,” 69. D ONALD E. P EASE From American Literary Studies to Planetary Literature: The Emergence of Literary Extraterritoriality I The Globalization of American Literary Studies and the Emergence of the Planetary Literary System The field of American literary studies is undergoing a reconfiguration from a nationalist to a global analytic frame that has effected profound alterations in the concepts that the field depended upon, the institutional sites through which the field operated, the structures that guaranteed it, and the kinds of subjectivities that it required. American literary studies had formerly been organized around an agreed upon set of theoretical assumptions and methodological procedures that underpinned the Americanists’ production of literary knowledge. Scholarship in American literary studies was grounded in a limited number of objects that were produced at the intersection of periodizing and generic concepts. Americanist scholars rendered the field’s themes and values compatible with an ideological consensus about what rendered the United States exceptional. But the global movements of transnational capital and migratory labor responsible for the deterritorialization of nation-states have also disrupted the nationalist paradigm that interconnected American literary works, literary history, culture, and nation. The globalization of the literary realm has resulted in a shift in interpretive attention away from explanations of how literary works function in relation to national cultures and towards an examination of how postnational literatures participate in the formation of deterritorialized contexts. 1 The removal of the regulatory constraints of history and national territorialization from American literary works has coincided with the deregulation of the flows of commercial goods and the outsourcing taking place within the global economic order. National literature programs became meaningless after nation-states surrendered their sovereignty to interstate or common market regulations. In reinstituting American literary studies outside a nationalist denominative, these processes of globalization have 1 For a fine overview of the effects of globalization on American Studies, see Jan Radway’s “‘What’s in a Name? ’” Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 20, 1998, American Quarterly, 51 (March, 1999): 1-32. 10 D ONALD E. P EASE disconnected American literary history from its exceptionalist orientation. 2 In their abrogation of the foundational statements correlating the scholarly prerogatives of American literature with the formative values of U.S. society, recent postnational iterations of the field of American literary studies have also delegitimated the consensual fictions that had previously organized the American literary studies community. In posing insuperable challenges to each of the constitutive elements - the literary object, historical periodization, generic classification, literary practitioners - that formerly stabilized the field, globalization has also communicated the crisis in the nation-state to Americanists who required the mediation of U.S. nationalism as the grounds for the coherence of their field identities. The postnationalizing effects of globalization on the field of American literary studies has solicited intensely felt yet contradictory responses that have rendered the term “postnational” ideological in the Gramscian sense that it has become an essentially contested category. A growing number of Americanist critics have taken up the term “postnational” as a banner under which to give expression to their allegiance to transnational formations - the Black Atlantic, transnational feminism, Aztlan, the Pacific Rim - that do not depend upon the territorial state as the most effective way to combat injustices in the global economy. 3 But postnationalism has also fostered chauvinistic reactions from Americanists who have invoked the term to describe the United States as the superstate empowered to inscribe the foundational terms in the U.S. political vocabulary - capitalism, free enterprise, freedoms of expression and access, competitive individualism - within the newly globalized economic order. 4 The globalization of American literary studies, as we might summarize these observations concerning its effects, has resulted in disparate interdisciplinary formations that would change the epistemological objects and introduce an alternative politics of power and knowledge for the field. But the postnational does not operate on its own; it is a construction that is internally differentiated out of its intersection with other unfolding relations. When construed as participating in more pervasive struggles over the future dispensation of the global economy, postnational literary studies can serve 2 A succinct account of this dynamic can be found in Frederick Buell, “Nationalist Postnationalism: Globalist Discourse in Contemporary American Culture,” American Quarterly 50 (September 1998): 548-591. 3 For a range of perspectives on the influence of these transnational movements on postnational American Studies, see the various contributions to Postnational American Studies ed. John Carlos Rowe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 4 Perhaps the best example of U.S. global chauvinism can be found in Arthur Schlesinger, The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (New York. Norton, 1998). From American Literary Studies to Planetary Literature 11 the interests of corporatist elites as the progenitor of the neo-liberal values propagating a global marketplace. However this literary formation can also animate the subnational grassroots organizations mounted in opposition to these forces. If construed as participating in more pervasive struggles over the future dispensation of the global economy, American literary globalism would describe a contest between, on the one hand, the supranational state that serves the transnational corporations and facilitates its needs for exploitable labor, and on the other hand, the transnational social movements and subnational collective practices that seek to reorganize gendered and racialized capitalist relations around more equitable social and economic standards. 5 It is because it goes above the nation-state and goes below it at the same time that globalization has resulted in these contradictory manifestations of the postnational. When it is articulated to the conceptual needs of global relationships caused by shifts in the world economy, the term postnational describes the effect on the nation-state of the new global economic order which no longer finds in it a vehicle appropriate for the accumulation of capital or the regulation of labor. But when it describes the translocal solidarities of Transnational Advocacy networks like Oxfam, or Amnesty International, or of the international projects of feminism, Act-Up, and the Green Party, that exist outside and work across territorial borders, the postnational signifies processes of resistance that keep globalization in check even as they simultaneously produce a very different sense of it. The one model demonstrates how a single planetary system tightens its grip on the most distant of global backwaters; the other model brings a more complex system into view that is at once decentered and interactive. The former depends on transnational capitalism and the global economy, the latter on peoplehood and imagined diasporic communities. 6 5 In “Putting Global Logic First,” Harvard Business Review (January - February 1995), Kenichi Ohmae spells out how globalization serves the interests of multinational corporations, especially on pp. 120-122. Noam Chomsky discusses postnationalism from below in “The Politics of Knowledge,” in States of Mind: Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers on the European Mind, ed. Richard Kearney (Manchester: University of Manchester Press 1995), 48-49. 6 For an excellent discussion of globalization from below, see Arjun Appadurai, “Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination,” Public Culture 12 (Winter 2000): 1-20. “But a series of social forms have emerged to contest, interrogate, and reverse these developments and to produce forms of knowledge transfer and social mobilization that proceed independently of the actions of corporate capital and the nation-state system (and its international affiliates and guarantors). These social forms rely on strategies, visions and horizons of globalization on behalf of the poor that can be characterized as ‘grassroots globalization’ or, put in a slightly different way as globalization from below” (3). 12 D ONALD E. P EASE The differences between the postnational of the international left and the postnational of the transnational managerial class depends upon where the “post” in the postnational comes from and through which conceptual relays the postnational gets transmitted. The temporal dimension of the postnational sits in uneasy tension with a critical dimension that promotes the disengagement from the whole nationalist syndrome. The latter aspect comes into existence through a critique of nationalism in all of articulations. The tension between its temporal and critical aspects results in ambivalent significations for the postnational that become discernible in the following series of questions: Does the “post” in the postnational describe a definitive epistemological rupture or does it indicate a chronological deviation. Is the concept intended to be critical of or complicitous with the globalist economy? Is the postnational the time after nationalism or is it a different way of experiencing nationalism? And what are the implications of the postnational for contemporary geopolitics and the politics of subject formation? 7 Insofar as they are informed by profoundly different political and theoretical commitments and levels of analysis, the processes supportive of globalization from above might seem utterly irreconcilable with the planetary movements that propagate the imperatives of globalization from below. But in a series of groundbreaking essays that she has recently published, Wai Chee Dimock has attempted to change the contours of the discussion concerning the relationship between these two forms of globalization as well as their significance for American literary studies. At the very moment in which the reorientation of the field of American literature produced changes that seemed outside literary scholars’ control, Dimock has proposed that literature itself should be construed as one of the chief agents of globalization responsible for this reconfiguration. More specifically, Dimock has argued that the denationalization of the discipline of American literary studies should be understood as having been effected by literature’s power to violate the sovereignty of state territories and to cross the temporal barriers set up by periodizing accounts of literary history. Rather than complaining about American literature’s vulnerability to the forces of globalization, Dimock has described the planetary literary system as the agency responsible for having liberated American literature from its temporal and spatial constraints: “I propose a more extended duration for American literary studies. I call this deep time … For the force of historical depth is such as to suggest a world that predates the adjective 7 My formulation of these questions was influenced by and draws from Stuart Hall, “‘When Was the Post-Colonial? ’ Thinking at the Limit,” The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons, Routledge: New York and London, 1996, 242-260. From American Literary Studies to Planetary Literature 13 American. If we go far enough back in time - and it is not very far - there is no such thing as the United States. This nation was not yet on the map, but the world was already fully in existence.” 8 According to some accounts of world history, literature itself is a relatively recent addition to world history that emerged with the enlightenment as a way to produce public spheres that would represent the interests of a national citizenry. But according to Dimock, planetary literature functions as an agency within world historical processes that undermine nationalism from within. In Dimock’s account of its genealogy, American literature has not been disrupted by the recent acceleration of globalizing processes; American literature was, like all national literatures, the result of a mistaken categorization. It is because literature has always been global in its reach, as Dimock has explained her criterion for designating this mistake, that it is perforce irreducible to the provincializing homogeneities informing the study of national literature. Unlike scholars who describe globalization as a profound rupture with modernity, Dimock has adopted a world systems approach that describes world literature as the agent of the very long historical process responsible for the production of literary modernity. Planetary literature does not work in conjunction with the historical progression of nation-states, its transterritorial nature links it to the encompassing global processes - like Islam and the Roman and the Ottoman Empire - that were the primary agents responsible for the unfolding of world history. By thus aligning planetary literature with the historical processes that have effected the integration of the planet, Dimock has reversed the received understanding concerning the relationship between globalization and literature. As a long-term participant in world history, literature requires globalization theory as a template that is better suited to explain its staying power than nationalist paradigms. Dimock employs this reversal to celebrate the sovereignty of planetary literature at the height of the threats globalization has been described as posing to national literatures. Dimock’s planetary orientation to literary studies would appear to have enabled her to restructure the field’s crises and internal divisions into a formation that subsumes reactionary and radical postnationalist positions alike. It is because literature has always been a global formation, Dimock observes, that it is perforce irreducible to the provincializing assumptions informing the study of national literatures. As the composite effect of the acts of reading of global readerships, planetary literature brings into play disparate sets of temporal and spatial coordinates that exceed the finite 8 Wai Chee Dimock, “Deep Time: American Literature and World History,” American Literary History, 13.4 (2001): 759-760. 14 D ONALD E. P EASE scope of the nation. Rather than being territorially predicated and bounded by the geographical map, planetary literature holds out to its readers’ dimensions of space and time that are so dispersed that they can never be confined to that cartography. When resituated within Dimock’s deterritorialized planetary context, the contradictions between globalization from above and globalization from below would appear to merge into this syncretic formation that adapts national literatures to the otherwise disorganizing forces of the global economy. Upon redescribing American literature as one of tributaries of the planet’s literary system, Dimock recommends that literary scholars embrace rather than oppose the globalization of American literary studies. Dimock has demonstrated how this planetary matrix would reshape our understanding of American literature in the essays “Deep Time and World History” 9 and “Non-Newtonian Time: Robert Lowell, Roman History, Vietnam War.” 10 In each of these essays, Dimock described global literature as an emancipatory force able to liberate American literature from the nationalistic proclivities of its practitioners. But Dimock might be described as having inaugurated American literary globalism in a truly path-breaking essay that she published in the PMLA in 2001 entitled “Literature for the Planet.” 11 In this essay, Dimock supplied postnational American literary globalism with an origin narrative that connected the postnationalism from above through which the movements of planetary literature exceeded the containment powers of the Russian state with the forces of postnationalism from below that Dimock associated with a Russian writer’s struggle to resist Joseph Stalin’s despotic rule. “Literature for the Planet” wholly reconceptualizes the rationale for literature departments. In this essay, Dimock does not complain about the threats the forces of globalization pose to literature as a scholarly discipline, nor does she recommend procedures whereby literature departments might accommodate themselves to such threats. For Dimock it is not a matter of the processes of globalization uprooting national literatures from their foundations. In Dimock’s estimation, any effort to confine literature within a nationalist paradigm is bound to result in the reactionary essentialism that she finds typified in the Stalinist state. The disorientation experienced by literary scholars at the recent disruption of their field serves as the affective backdrop for Dimock’s origin story. 9 Dimock, “Deep Time,” 755-775. 10 Wai Chee Dimock, “Non-Newtonian Time: Robert Lowell, Roman History, Vietnam War,” American Literature, 74.4 (2002), 911-931. 11 Wai Chee Dimock, “Literature for the Planet,” Publication of the Modern Language Association, 116.1 (2001): 173-186. Hereafter, page numbers will appear in the text. From American Literary Studies to Planetary Literature 15 This essay drew upon the anxieties attending globalization’s effects on the study and teaching of literature so as correlate the emergence of the new paradigm with the representation of an act of dislocation that was infinitely more catastrophic in its effects. The discomfort literary scholars may have experienced at the emergence of literary globalism paled when juxtaposed to the following account of Osip Mandelstam’s harrowing encounter with the Stalinist state: The year was 1934, a year in which Osip Mandelstam lived in constant terror. Just a few months before he had committed political suicide by reciting a satirical poem on Stalin…. Mandelstam’s arrest came as expected. On the night of 13 May, 1934, about one in the morning, came a knock on the door. Mandelstam was taken by the secret police to their headquarters in the Lubyanka Prison, interrogated and later sentenced to three years of exile in Cherdyn. (173) According to Dimock, the deep temporal continuum undergirding the literature of the planet was revealed at the very instant in which state agents forcibly removed Osip Mandelstam from the spatio-temporal coordinates that had formerly oriented his relationship to the persons and events in his everyday life. After his arrest, Mandelstam’s renewed his relationship to literature by placing a copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy in the pocket of the jacket that he wore when the police removed him. Dimock explains Mandelstam’s inclusion of Dante’s medieval poem Divine Comedy among the very few articles that he carried along with him to Samatikha as the manifestation of the power of planetary literature to reinstate him within a literary domain that was irreducible to the spatial and temporal coordinates of the nation-state: It was not trivial that the medieval poem was still around, after hundreds of years, and in the Soviet Union no less. Its very existence gave Mandelstam a different reference point dimensions of space and time, not reducible to the arm of the Soviet government. Mandelstam’s love of Dante - the physical presence of the poetry inside his pocket - suggests that there is much to be said for literature as a continuum. This continuum extends over space and time, messing up territorial sovereignty and numerical chronology. (174) Dimock’s dramatic account of the Russian state’s suppression of Osip Mandelstam’s dissent and its dislocation of him from the precincts of the Russian state supply the scenario through which she acquaints her readers with the extraordinary spatial and temporal coordinates of the literature for the planet. Literature for the planet can do without the categorizations of historical periods and geographical nations because these specificities are comparatively oppressive, transitory and contingent. Not stuck in one national context - and saying predictable things in that context - a literary text becomes a new semantic template, a new form of the legible, 16 D ONALD E. P EASE each time it crosses a national border. Global transit extends, triangulates, and transforms its meaning. This fact alone challenges the power of the territorial as a determining force in literature. The space-time coordinates of any text are not only fluid when they first come into being, poorly captured by the map of geopolitics, they are also subsequently and unforeseeably revisable, influenced by their temporal and spatial displacements to play new tricks with static borders of the nation. (177) According to Dimock, it is the estranged sovereignty of this lifeform that triggers the implosion of nationalist constraints, and engenders the autoheteronomy of the literature for the planet. As a planetary form whose spatial and temporal determinants are resistant to the nation-state’s powers of containment, planetary literature subsequently filled in the vacuum left in the wake of the implosion of nation-based literatures. If the sovereignty of literature as a planetary phenomenon derives from its capacity to transgress the boundaries of nation-states and to subvert retroactively the temporal antecedents of nation-based literary histories, this sovereign realm could not be contained within the borders of the Soviet State that persecuted Mandelstam. In representing the origins of “literature for our planet” within this scenario, Dimock has deployed Mandelstam’s literary relationship with Dante as a pretext necessary to understand the operations of planetary literature. The return of deep time to a man who had quite literally run out of time becomes a privileged site for calculating the relative merits of planetary literature over Russian literature. Mandelstam’s transhistorical literary affiliation with Dante is portrayed as disclosing the sovereignty of a literary power that was contemptuous of the Russian state’s efforts to subdue its proliferation. In Dimock’s representation of it, Mandelstam’s exchanges with Dante did not merely evade the repressive apparatus of the Russian totalitarian order; they accomplished the transplantation of his literary works within the complex network of exchange and translation constitutive of the planetary literary order. “For the continuum between Dante and Mandelstam tells us (if nothing else) that the nation-state is not all, that when it comes to the extended life of the literary objects the inscriptional power of the state is not complete, just as its jurisdictional power is not absolute” (175). The operations of deep time and infinite space inherent to planetary literature resulted in a synchronization of Dante’s and Mandelstam’s literary projects that Dimock has described as a “relativity of simultaneity.” After these conjoined operations disembedded Mandelstam and Dante from out of their restrictive local contexts and relocated them within the sovereign domain of planetary literature, their literary affiliation instantiated an example of the planetary literature that materialized the object of Dimock’s study. From American Literary Studies to Planetary Literature 17 Dimock has borrowed the categories - deep time, alternative simultaneities and nonsynchronous nows - for thinking about literature’s role in the processes of globalization from Einstein’s relativity theory. Dimock’s essays transfer the symbolic capital sedimented within this scientific terminology onto the works inscribed within the archives in which the works of planetary literature are inscribed. In transporting the unimpeachable epistemological authority of Einstein’s theoretical concepts onto the discourse designed to explain planetary literature, Dimock has supplied this global institution with a master language to which nationalizing paradigms must default and defer. However the concepts that Dimock has drawn from the field of Einsteinian meta-physics tend to mystify the role that the global economic order has played in the integration of Dante’s and Mandelstam’s writings within the planetary literary system. If the “deep time” of the planet was chiefly responsible for decontextualizing Dante’s and Mandelstam’s literary practices from their cultural environments and for transforming them into literary commodities, world history’s longue durée would appear to have been informed by the global forces that have emerged in the recent acceleration. Indeed the symbolic deficit induced by the collapse of the nation and empire as established mediations for literary exchanges was not filled up by Einsteinian relativity theory. It was the global marketplace in literary goods that supplanted the nation-state as the agency responsible for determining the relative valuation of Dante’s and Mandelstam’s writings. No piece of writing can partake of the “deep time” of the planetary literary continuum unless it is first taxonomized as a literary work. Moreover before a literary work can attain the valuation Dimock has discerned in Dante’s and Mandelstam’s writings, it must have accumulated sufficient cultural capital in literature departments to justify its elevation to the rank of the canonical. Insofar as it is not a “natural” lifeform, planetary literature depends upon the continued viability of the institutions through which its archives are reproduced, preserved, translated and circulated. It is difficult to imagine how either Dante’s or Mandelstam’s writings might have survived as forms of “literature” without the support of the network of affiliated institutions (libraries, anthologies, national literature departments) responsible for their interstate literary commerce within the global literary marketplace. Dimock tacitly acknowledged this network when she delineated the nationalist topographies and historical periods that distinguished Osip Mandelstam’s twentieth century Russian from Dante’s fourteenth century Italian literature. But Dimock then treated these nation-based and historical determinations (and the network of global institutions responsible for their reproduction) as pretexts for a demonstration of the ways in which the 18 D ONALD E. P EASE sovereignty of planetary literature exceeded the governance of the Soviet Empire as well as that of any other authority whose provenance was less extensive than the planet. Even though her descriptions of Mandelstam’s political and literary transactions ostensibly refer to events that took place in the past, however, Dimock’s historical assertions are logically future-oriented in that they are made to predict the emergence of a planetary literary system in the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Empire. U.S. liberal values might be described as the invisible historical intermediary that has operationalized the futureorientation within Dimock’s historical narrative. The core political values of U.S. liberalism supply the terminology that tacitly link Dimock’s account of Mandelstam’s traumatic encounters with the Stalinist state with her representation of Mandelstam’s literary relations with Dante Alighieri. Dimock’s account of Stalin’s efforts to suppress Mandelstam’s writing takes place against the backdrop of the cold war. The literary exchange Dimock represents Mandelstam as having undertaken with Dante has compensated Mandelstam for the loss of power to dissent against the Stalinist state. The proto-Americanist freedoms of expression, access and mobility are the agents and outcomes of these symbolic exchanges. It is these core Americanist values that have exceeded Russia’s powers of containment and that the literature for the planet has disseminated through every simultaneity. Moreover the imaginary passports that planetary literature has issued to Mandelstam and to Dante to facilitate their travel across the time and space presupposes a planet whose topography is saturated with these liberal values. As should be clear from these observations, I find Dimock’s account of the emergence of planetary literature especially valuable for its having worked through the anxieties attendant to the redefinition of American literary studies as American literary globalism, and for the invention of the paradigm of planetary literature through which she has accomplished this feat. But I nevertheless do have questions about the forms of analogical reasoning through which she has produced the equivalence between planetary literature as a form of globalization that propagates Americanist liberal values from above and Mandelstam’s subversion of Russian nationalism from below. Dimock engenders this equivalence by way of an unstated homology and a substitutive displacement. Dimock constructs a homology between nation-based orientations to the study of literature and the reactionary essentialism typified in the repressive apparatus of the Soviet State. This homology subliminally correlates national literature professors’ anxious responses to the forces of globalization at the outset of the twenty-first century with Osip Mandelstam’s terrorization by the Stalinist State in From American Literary Studies to Planetary Literature 19 the middle of the twentieth. After producing these equivalences, Dimock has substituted Mandelstam literary exchanges with Dante for the crimes against the state of which Mandelstam stood accused by the state police. And following her characterization of the Mandelstam-Dante relationship as a metonym for planetary literature, Dimock effectively replaced Mandelstam with planetary literature as the agency accused of being an enemy of state: “Aiding and abetting the population of nows, all unsynchronized, literature stands accused as the enemy of the state.” (175) But the same “relative simultaneities” (with Dante) through which Osip Mandelstam was described as having evaded statist control also perforce disallowed any content to be attributed to these “nows” other than as signifiers of such evasions. By turning the literary relationship between Osip Mandelstam and Dante Alighieri into the origin of planetary literature, Dimock has abstracted the specific political challenge that Osip Mandelstam lodged against the Stalinist state. And this suppression of its political content tends to conceal the cross-national literary and political movements with which Mandelstam’s literary dissent was then affiliated. Dimock’s planetarization of Mandelstam’s literature is the effect of two inter-related acts of deterritorialization. Mandelstam’s writing is described as having become planetary when it exceeds the Stalinist state’s efforts to contain its movement within the confines of Russian geography, and when it surpasses Mandelstam’s efforts to tether this life form to his historically specific resistance to Stalin. Dimock has differentiated the planetary literary system from Russian territorialization on the one hand and from Mandelstam’s extraterritoriality on the other hand. And she has described the sovereign power of planetary literature in terms of its capacity to deterritorialize Mandelstam’s writings from two of the contexts - Russian literary history, formations of political resistance - from which they had formerly drawn their vitality. But if these deterritorializing effects are construed as the benchmark criteria that are determinative of planetary literature, Osip Mandelstam’s literary resistance to the Russian state would not meet the minimum standard for inclusion under this categorization. Osip Mandelstam did not in fact aspire to effect the deterritorialization of the poetry he addressed to the Stalinist state. In his poetry he cultivated a respect for a vernacular style of speaking and writing that prevailed before the Russian Revolution. 12 Indeed insofar as his poetry required that specific 12 In his “Introduction” to Richard and Elizabeth Mc Kane’s translation of The Voronezh Notebooks Victor Krivulin observes that “Before the Revolution, the ideals of the revolutionary terrorists were alien to Mandelstam. And after the revolution, he was sickened by the official exaltation of the ‘People’s Will’. But in the last years of his life, especially in the Voronezh period, as witnessed by the memoirs of his widow, he felt an unexpected and growing sympathy for those people, who looked on their own 20 D ONALD E. P EASE historical context for its efficacy, would not Mandelstam have construed planetary literature’s deterritorialization of his writings as a form of suppression comparable to the Russian state’s dislocation? After the “deep time” of the planet subsumes the incompatible temporalities underpinning Dante Alighieri’s and Osip Mandelstam’s highly localized practices into literature’s continuum, the “literature for the planet” resulting from this “relative simultaneity” lifts the tragic weight of history from Dante’s and Mandelstam’s writings. But the task of regulating the historical periodization and nationalist provenance of departments of Russian literature was irrelevant to the juridical and penal operations that followed his arrest. Moreover, the police agents who came knocking on Mandelstam’s door in the early morning of May 13, 1934 did not invoke Mandelstam’s readings of Dante’s Divine Comedy as warrant for their detainment of him. The proximate reason for his deportation was what Mandelstam’s interrogators at the Lubyanka Prison referred to as a political slander directed against Stalin (“the father of the peoples”) that they found evidenced in the following line from the poem in The Second Moscow Notebook entitled “The Stalin Epigram,” “We are alive but no longer feel the land under our feet.” 13 Dimock’s erasure of the power relations that shaped Mandelstam’s struggle with the Stalinist state coincided with the emergence of “world history” and “globalization’ as encompassing epistemological categories that deprived nation-states of their structural causality. But “world history” and “planetary literature” are themselves period concepts that were developed within the paradigm of global modernity. In privileging the expansionist imperatives of transterritorial movements like Islam or the Roman Empire, Dimock’s world history model tends to lose sight of subnational grassroots political movements like the one with which Mandelstam associated his poetry. The end of nation-based history that both “world history” and “planetary literature” presuppose has recently been invoked by Samuel Huntington and Francis Fukuyama as a justification for the nearly unchallenged dominance of the planet by the United States. In staging the emergence of planetary literature in these terms, Dimock has invested the unimaginably longue durée of deep planetary time with the comparatively modernist (and unfortunately others’) lives, as just a sacrifice for the liberation and happiness of the Russian peasant.” The Voronezh Notebooks: Osip Mandlestam Poems 1935-1937, translated by Richard and Elizabeth Mc Kane (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1996), 17. 13 This line is taken from The Second Moscow Notebook, and is quoted by Victor Krivulin in his “Introduction” to The Voronezh Notebooks: Osip Mandlestam Poems 1935-1937, translated by Richard and Elizabeth Mc Kane (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1996), 15. From American Literary Studies to Planetary Literature 21 rationality of U.S. liberal democracy. Michael Geyer has explained the orientation to events represented by exponents of world history in terms of the control that the dominant world power exercises over this discourse, In “dominating the world through its mastery of the technical and material means of global integration,” Geyer observed, the U.S. as the global hegemon has not merely subordinated every locale on the globe to its market logic it has also managed to control the discourse describing “the direction and outcome of world history.” 14 Dimock’s account of the operations of planetary literature would appear to engender an equivalence between the globalization of American literary studies and the Americanization of the planet. After the dismantling of the Soviet Union, the United States did indeed become the world. But Mandelstam’s fatal struggle with the Stalinist state did not materially contribute to this outcome. Nor did the United States play a role in Mandelstam’s conflict with Stalin. Given Mandelstam’s political and economic views, it is doubtful that Mandelstam would have found Roosevelt’s New Deal a viable alternative to socialism. Indeed had Mandelstam attempted to enter the United States as a political refugee from the Soviet Union in 1934, it is quite likely that U.S. immigration authorities would have denied him entry on the grounds that he was an unwanted political alien. As we have seen, Mandelstam’s literary relationship with Dante did not enable him to evade state agents. But if Mandelstam’s literary relationship with Dante across temporal and spatial boundaries could not interfere with the horrific experience of Mandelstam’s exile and death, what relationship does the continuum of planetary literature bear to the gravity of these catastrophic historical events? Can literature become instrumental to the survival of individual as well as collective forms of life without announcing itself thereby in collusion with the global hegemon? Can the writings of authors like Osip Mandelstam, who have been removed by the state from the planetary system emerge as a form of literature? If their writings are construed by the state as representative of a threat to its continued existence, how would the literary practices of writers like Mandelstam manage to find their way into print let alone elude the state’s efforts to suppress them? During the time of the bipolar organization of the planet, what happened to the literary works of individuals whose writings both the USSR and the USA found inimical to their statist prerogatives? If the literature for the planet appears to disseminate American liberal values globally, can American literature be globalized by literary practices that are incompatible these values. 14 Michael Geyer and Charles Bright, “World History in a Global Age,” American Historical Review, 100 (1995), 1051. 22 D ONALD E. P EASE In an effort to address these questions I want to offer an alternative origin story of the emergence of American literary globalism in an event that took place nearly two decades after Mandelstam’s displacement from his homeland when C.L.R. James quite literally deployed an Americanist literary masterwork to contest the state’s classification of him as an enemy of the state. However before addressing those questions within the context of an event that took place a half century ago, I need to establish some needed distinction between their situations. II Literature for Extra-Territorials in the Time of Planetary Emergency State Dimock invoked the moment of extreme danger in which Osip Mandelstam found himself on May 13, 1934 as foundational to the emergence of the planetary literary system. But it was not until after he retuned to Moscow from Voronezh in 1937 that the state decided to sentence Mandelstam to a death sentence in the Siberian camps. On May 3, 1938, Mandelstam was rearrested and ordered to serve five years in a Siberian labor camp. Following the state’s sentencing of him, Mandelstam was driven off in a lorry. Osip Mandelstam wrote his last recorded poem to Natasha Shtempel on May 4, 1937. He died on December 27, 1938, of heart failure in Vitorya Rachka, on the way to Vladivostok. The forced labor camp to which the Russian state sentenced Osip Mandelstam in 1938 was differentiated from Voronezh by the abrogation of his right to narrate or write about his condition there. While Mandelstam’s Three Vorozhev Notebooks supply ample testimony to his capacity to resist the incursions of the state, no record exists of the writing Mandelstam might have undertaken after he was rearrested and sentenced. 5/ 3/ 38 marked the traumatized instant in which Mandelstam was placed outside the temporal coordinates through which the Russian state kept its records. The temporal punctum into which Mandelstam then vanished completely dissevered him from the domain of recorded literature and history. 15 Despite the obstacles posed by the repressive powers of the state that banished him, there nevertheless did (and still do) exist what might be called extraterritorial circuits of communication that placed into circulation forms 15 Victor Krivulin claimed that while he was in Voronezh, Mandelstam “does not write, but literally speaks out, screams out and voices his poems.” The Voronezh texts were handwritten by his wife to his dictation. The last poem attributed to him was memorized by a campmate in 1938: “Black night, clustrophobic barracksm, plump lice.” The Voronezh Notebooks: Osip Mandlestam Poems 1935-1937, translated by Richard and Elizabeth Mc Kane (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1996), 21 and 14. From American Literary Studies to Planetary Literature 23 of writing produced by persons like Mandelstam who had been rendered extraneous to the planetary literary system. In an effort to suggest the ways in which this informal process of circulation and exchange might supply an alternative understanding of literature for our planet, I want to propose June 10, 1952, rather than May 3, 1934 as the date marking the emergence of American literary globalism. It was on this date that state agents interrupted the Trinidadian critic C.L.R. James’s research for the book he intended to write that summer on Herman Melville and removed him to Ellis Island. While he was detained there awaiting deportation hearings, James began work on Mariners Renegades and Mariners: the Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In. 16 After World War II, the national security state did not merely change the rules of the game of American politics. The rules and constraints through which the state regulated political discussion and debate altered American politics as drastically as had the Homeland Security State after 9/ 11/ 01. The state’s declaration of a global war against world communism authorized the partitioning of the globe into Three Worlds: the First World included member nations who embraced liberal democratic values, the Second World gathered under its banner the countries committed to the propagation of communism globally, and the Third World designated the newly decolonized populations of the so-called underdeveloped countries. This partitioning required political struggles that took place nationally and internationally to represent themselves within the discourse of the Three Worlds. The political rationality that legitimated the rules of this new game did not merely occupy a place within an already existing civil society. It instituted a public sphere as the terrain wherein political actors would normatively interiorize the rules and regularities upon which the new game of politics depended for its legitimation. This newly instituted public sphere was described as having been established by a rule of law that demanded as the precondition for its regulatory powers the autonomy of capital, owners and the market. Prior to the inauguration of the cold war, the public sphere was defined as a space that facilitated the non-coercive exchange of opinions and beliefs of every variety imaginable. But after the state defined the United States role in the world in terms of its global opposition to communism, only political ideas that presupposed the values of the free market, private property and the autonomous individual could be exchanged by subjects who had normatively internalized these values. 16 C.L.R. James, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2001). Hereafter, page numbers will appear in the text. 24 D ONALD E. P EASE The boundaries of the newly instituted public sphere were constituted out of the exclusion of political rationalities - revolutionary anti-colonialism, trade union socialism, communism - that had formerly been permissible forms of political expressions. As representatives of the terrain over whose political disposition the First World struggled with the Second World, immigrants from the newly decolonized “Third World” countries, like C.L.R. James were obliged to extirpate processes of thinking and interaction that did not conform to these rules. Because of his agitation on behalf of laborers’ rights, James was represented by the state as a migrant from the Third World whose political activities posed a threat to the American way of life. After the state pronounced him a security threat, James underwent a drastic change in juridical status that might be described as a dis-interpellation. Rather than categorizing him under any of the legal social positions - resident alien, national subject, prospective citizen - through which colonial immigrants were empowered to exercise their rights and liberties, the state’s dis-interpellation rendered James subject to the force of the law but deprived of the rights and privileges of a legal human subject. Having been stripped of every social and political prerogative, James was reduced him to the status of unprotected flesh. In the wake of this shift in his political standing, James was relocated on Ellis Island, a transfer station where the state herded up all of its unwanted residents in preparation for their complete removal. Ellis Island had been consecrated in the national imagination as the port of entry through which strangers, exiles, and political refugees passed on their way to becoming naturalized as U.S. citizens. But in turning Ellis Island into a deportation center, the Immigration and Naturalization Services disaggregated the Island as well as its population from the national territory. Upon removing the conditions of social belonging and political agency from James and his fellow detainees on Ellis Island, the state catastrophically transformed Ellis Island into a scene of generalized social death. At the time INS officers took him into state custody, James had been working on an interpretive study of Herman Melville. After having been uprooted from his everyday habitat by agents of the national security state, however James turned his detainment on Ellis Island into the occasion to return to his interpretive labors. James correlated the state agents forcible separation of him from the condition of universal humanity with the traumatic events that the Pequod’s crew had been compelled to undergo under the governance of Captain Ahab. James also depicted the site of generalized social death on Ellis Island as a historical correlative for the catastrophic shipwreck that the crew were compelled to undergo at the conclusion to Melville’s novel. The homology that James adduced between the narrative fate of the crew and the political fate of the refugees on Ellis Island drew From American Literary Studies to Planetary Literature 25 upon an equivalence that James discerned between the state’s violence towards him and the interpretive violence Americanist critics directed against the crew. Moby Dick was not for scholars of American literature merely an object of analysis; it had become one of the planetary agents responsible for the global hegemonization of Americanist values. Melville’s novel provided American literary studies with a frame narrative that included the same norms and assumptions out of which the public sphere was organized. This frame narrative accumulated its cultural capital through scholarly readings of Melville’s novel that reproduced, transmitted, and distributed normative assumptions that rationalized U.S. global dominance. The protocols that were tied to cultural axioms and interpretive norms that lay sedimented within this frame narrative ratified the United States exceptionalist status in the world community. The frame narrative rationalized the liberal values of freedom and individual autonomy that Americanists described as responsible for the progressive movement of world history. After Moby Dick was made to predict the world scale antagonism of the cold war, the narrative provided the state with an image of itself as overcoming the totalitarian order to which it defined itself as opposed. This frame narrative thereby assisted in structuring the constitutive understanding of the society that it purported to represent. But while he was on Ellis Island, James did not subjectivize the interpretive attitude that normalized U.S. hegemony. James instead interpreted this Americanist text by way of the mediation of the diasporic movements of the mariners renegades and castaway whom scholars in American literary studies had written out of the frame narrative for which Ishmael’s liberal values had served as the principle of integration. The crew were placeholders for the forms of life that the world historical processes responsible for global integration forcibly deleted from the planet. In justifying their displacement, Americanist literary scholars had allegorized the crew’s submission to Ahab’s overpowering will as a prefiguration of the masses under totalitarian rule. In describing them in terms of this discredited population, this line of interpretation treated the crew as if they were simply marking time until the traumatic shipwreck took their lives. Put starkly, the viability of the frame narrative presupposed the nonsurvivability of the crew. The crew’s absence from the representations and themes organizing the interpretive consensus about the frame narrative was believed crucial to the production of the narrative’s coherence. But in his interpretation of Moby Dick, James rethought the global reach of American freedom from the perspective of characters who were its victims. Construing Ellis Island as a site of resistance to the system’s powers of emplacement and exclusion, James produced a mode of literary survivability for the mariners, renegades and castaways whose catastrophic deaths had been had been 26 D ONALD E. P EASE justified by the Americanist interpretive community. In deploying Moby Dick to transmit the crew’s disqualified forms of knowledge and narratives, James opened up an interdiscursive space through which he undermined the state’s axioms and norms. As characters who lacked adequate representation in Melville’s text, the mariners, renegades and castaways belonged to a temporal dimension that could not be synchronized into simultaneity either with the frame narrative or with the planetary system that hegemonized its values. The mariners, renegades and castaways were internal to Melville’s narrative, but the Americanist interpretive community nevertheless represented them as external to the frame narrative through which they inculcated Americanist values globally. As an outside that was already inside the novel, the mariners, renegades and castaways produced a break in the seamless narrative of U.S. global power that James turned into a extra-territorial dwelling space. James thereafter deployed this discontinuity in time and space into a performative that empowered him to produce breaks in the seamless narrative of U.S. global power. Insofar as it added the matters that the Americanist literary critics had normatively excluded from their interpretations, James’s interpretation Moby Dick could not be included within the archive of planetary literature. The insights James recorded in Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In were not derived from the culture he described with such brilliance. James’s commentary transformed his status as a detainee into the factor that enabled him to criticize received definitions of nation, home community and belonging. If the site of his detention constituted a radical interruption of the interpretive position he had formerly subjectivized, James found a comparable interruption of authorial intentionality within the following passage from Moby Dick: If, then, to meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways, I shall hereafter ascribe high qualities though dark; weave round them tragic graces; if even the most mournful, perchance the most abased, among them shall at times lift to the most exalted mounts; if I shall touch that workman’s arm with some ethereal light; if I shall spread a rainbow over his disastrous set of sun; then against all mortal critics bear me out in it, thou just Spirit of Equality, which has spread one royal mantle of humanity over all my kind! (17) Rather than representing an event that has already taken place within the narrated action, the passage inscribes the scene from within which the narrating “I” is still deliberating over how to do narrative justice to his book’s actions, characters and events, As such, the scene alludes to the novel’s surplus eventfulness, the possible shape of the narrative that has not yet settled into Melville’s novel. The time in which this scene takes place is From American Literary Studies to Planetary Literature 27 not continuous with the action as already narrated within Moby Dick nor does it coincide with the narrating instances of the subject of narration. The passage introduces a difference between the manner in which the narrating “I” is predisposed to narrate the crew’s actions and the constraints that the narrator-protagonist, Ishmael, has imposed. When James takes up this passage that gives expression to the possible enunciations of a narrating subject, who is other than the narrator-protagonist Ishmael, he deploys it as an authorization to wrest interpretive authority away from Ishmael. At the site of this unfulfilled narrative contract, James aspires to relate a narration that has not yet been narrated and that Ishmael will not narrate. 17 In the title that he affixed to his book, James designates the site upon which he performed his writing - “the world we live in” - as a continuation of Melville’s scene of writing. And he construes his acts of writing as one of the possible referents for the clause “I shall hereafter ascribe.” The passage took on this allegorical significance for James because it designated a space of interrupted intention within Melville’s novel that was the correlative of the space James had occupied when the agents of the national emergency state had interrupted his commentary on “the story of Herman Melville” James thereafter reconceptualized this passage as the site where Melville’s literary project had been interrupted and required the supplemental account of his experiences on Ellis Island (“the world we live in”) for its completion. After quoting this passage from Moby Dick, James remarked that it is clear “that Melville intends to make the crew the real heroes of his book, but he is afraid of criticism.” (17) This statement has not merely provided this scene with an interpretive gloss. In the act of enunciating this statement, James has split himself into at once an interpreter of “the story of Herman Melville” but also a narrator-mariner who would relay the narratives of his fellow mariners that Melville was afraid to write. After discovering that the position in which he finds himself bears a direct analogy to the forms of protest and power in the novel, James undertakes the project of narrating the narratives that Melville would have written - were he not “afraid of criticism.” Melville’s scene of writing thereby became the locus for a change in James’s position from the “you” who was subject to the law’s power to the “I/ We” capable of doing narrative justice to Melville’s crew. James wrote from a position in between the Jamesian “I” the cold war state had dis-interpellated and the “I” Melville had promised to the mariners in the passage 17 For further discussion of these points, see Donald E. Pease “Doing Justice to C.L.R. James’s Mariners, Renegades and Castaways,” boundary 2, vol. 27.2 (summer 2000): 1-20. 28 D ONALD E. P EASE James cited. When James resumed his interpretive project on Ellis Island, he substituted the untenable position in which the culture had placed him for this as yet unoccupied narrative position within Melville’s text. James reentered Melville’s incomplete scene of narration, to actualize his intention to heroicize the mariners that Ishmael did not. But James did not turn to Moby Dick to synchronize a literary relationship with Herman Melville. James was unlike Osip Mandelstam in that he lacked any literary subjectivity that preexisted the position he occupied when he produced his commentary on Moby Dick. Rather than taking up a preexisting subject position through which to engage in a literary relationship with Melville, James was tethered to the mariners’ position through the “spirit of equality” that mandated him to supply narratives for the characters who could not become integrated within the market logic that the frame narrative of Moby Dick was circulating throughout the globe. In writing about Melville’s narration from the position of characters who had not been wholly subjectivized within “the story of Herman Melville,” James quite literally produced those previously unwritten subject positions. The lifeworld from which he had been dissevered when he was transferred to Ellis Island was supplanted by the form of life James assumed through his subjectivization of this unoccupied subject position within Melville’s text. If his acts of writing restored the pronominal privileges of the first person singular that the state had removed from James when it declared him a subversive, what James wrote about produced the first person plural privileges for “we” mariners, renegades, and castaways who were also lacking in subject positions in Melville’s text. James construed the “spirit of equality’s” interpellation of him as a textual remedy for the state’s banishment. The state had denied James the habeas corpus right to produce an account of his actions and intentions, But James recovered this right of narration when he occupied the subject position through whom the mariners, renegades and castaways would be supplied with the narratives Melville had promised. After the spirit of equality interpellated James to the signifier “mariners, renegades and castaways, James filled in the empty site of the state’s dis-interpellation with the narrations of characters that the frame narrative had represented as undeserving of survival. But the “spirit of equality” did not link James to the unmarked, disembodied citizen-subject. James considered the “universality” of the disembodied position to be a stand-in for the sovereign power of the state apparatus that had declassified him The “spirit of equality” instead interpellated James to the position of these subjectless subjects who were in need of James’s body for their survival. As their physically material referent, James quite literally subjectivized the figures who were lacking in subjectivity From American Literary Studies to Planetary Literature 29 within Melville’s narrative. Rather than personifying the unmarked disembodied subjectivity to which abstract universals were appended to produce the fiction of universal citizenship, James articulated the indelibility of his unprotected flesh to the mariners, renegades and castaways’ unactualized right to the narratives that Melville had promised. Because he lacked any other form of secure placement, James’s subjectivization of the crew’s as yet unnarrated narrative position became for James on Ellis Island what composing poetry had been for Mandelstam at Vorozhev; namely, a resolutely corporeal exercise. The material activity of writing enabled James physically to embody the subject position through which he spoke back to the powers of state that intended his physical expulsion. Writing thereby provided James with a way to inhabit and keep record of his biological presence within a geography for the bodily excluded. As he resumed daily the practice of writing about Moby Dick, the role of Melville interpreter inhabited a Jamesian body otherwise denied any position the state was obliged to recognize. After James quite literally took up residence within this incompletely realized passage from Moby Dick, he turned this site into an arena for the inscription of the crew’s unactualized narratives. Whereas previous interpreter’s had characterized the crew’s mass death at sea as punishment for their having submitted to Ahab’s totalitarian will, James represented the breakdown of Melville’s promise as the rationale for the crew’s catastrophe. But James’s restoration of the mariners’ missing narration entailed the production of knowledge that Melville had not granted them in Moby Dick. In associating his argument with the U.S. national security state with the mariners’ disqualified narratives, James transformed the terrain of Moby Dick into an alternative public sphere. Throughout the cold war, the newly decolonized countries acquired significance through their alignment with one or the other of the global hegemons that identified them with the systems of representation through which they administered and controlled their territories. But in his commentary on Moby Dick, James refused the discursive rules requiring that he identify himself with either Russia or the United States. Rather than agreeing to be constituted out of these categories of identification, he suspended the cold war’s rules of discursive recognition and disrupted the bipolar logic that the discourse mandated. Because his commentary could not be stably located for or against either of these positions, James’s reading opened up a space that was internal to Moby Dick but extrinsic to the frame narrative that imposed the cold war’s rules. James’s extraterritorial literary strategy was designed to cause the territorializing imperatives of the First and the Second Worlds to appear reversible rather than mutually exclusive. James might be described as having set himself against cold war rule by way of his identification with a 30 D ONALD E. P EASE secondary rule - to do narrative justice to the crew - that was internal to its code. The unacknowledged knowledge of the “meanest mariners, renegades and castaways” constituted alternatives to both forms of rule. In transmitting knowledge that brought into focus the power differentials of the political rationalities of the Three Worlds, James’s commentary on the mariners’ narratives bent the system of rules that had formerly regulated the interpretation of Moby Dick in a direction that linked it to historical processes that exponents of world history had ignored. James’s reading associated the crew who were victims of the processes of global integration in the nineteenth century with persons who were comparably victimized by the global processes that the U.S. continued in the twentieth. If world history lost track of subnational, anti-colonialist movements and diasporic movements that had not somehow already been encompassed either by the national or the imperial, the mariners’ narratives materialized a political formation at the site of this elision that called forth a past that had been repressed by the categorizations of world history. James’s commentary unfolded within a network of economic, political, and cultural exchanges whose routes were written off the official cartographies. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker have described the historical formation with which James associated his castaway reading as a “hydrarchy.” 18 The hydrarchy was a maritime world of labor and communitybuilding whose members were not regulated by the rule of law that rationalized the values of the global marketplace. The hydrarchy was populated by rogues, beggars, sailors, vagrants, and itinerant workers. These stateless, heterogeneous, geographically dispersed, multinational, and multiracial peoples participated in global diasporic routings that lay outside the cartographies of the maritime state. The highly uncontrollable, motley spaces on the ships of the hydrarchy and differed from the regulated spatialities of the colony, the nation, and the plantation. If the accumulation of international capital depended upon the exploitation of Atlantic labor, these embodiments of living labor effected breaks in that process After James turned this missing scene into a site for its transmission, his fellow detainees on Ellis Island provided the contraband knowledge that Melville did not articulate in Moby Dick. In producing what might be called the right to the right to narration for the characters who had been denied it in Melville’s text, James disrupted American literary studies’ monopoly over the interpretation of Moby Dick. In creating a site within the symbolic order for the communication of the crew’s formerly excluded knowledge, 18 Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headeed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon press, 2000). From American Literary Studies to Planetary Literature 31 however, James tacitly transformed this knowledge into the basis for an alternative social order. Overall Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: the Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In communicated two asymmetrical commentaries - about Moby Dick (“the story of Herman Melville”) and about Ellis Island (“the world we live in”). James’s interpretation of Moby Dick circulated through the official channels interconnecting the relays in the planetary literary system. But in recounting the narratives of his fellow detainees, James communicated the literary contraband of persons whose exclusion from the territories of both global hegemons - Russian communism and U.S. market liberalism - rendered them extraterritorials in the planetary system. When James transmitted these narrations through the literary vehicle that had formerly silenced them, he produced a form of literature for the peoples without literature that could not be included within the extant planetary literary system. But the literary formations that emerged at the site of this dual transmission should not to be understood as less developed forms of planetary literature. The renegades’ literatures are emergent in the sense that they communicate a different sense of the literary object, as well as its addressees and by way of modes of transmission that cannot be readily comprehended within existing theoretical and methodological hegemonies. James interconnects these two processes of literary transmission - planetary commentary on Melville’s story and the extraterritorial recountings of the experiences of occupants of Ellis Island - by way of an informal economy of the production, transmission and distribution of knowledge. The symbolic exchange James effected when he turned “the story of Herman Melville” towards “the world we live in,” also changed the contours of Melville’s narrative. In adding accounts of the knowledges produced by the mariners and renegades on Ellis Island at the conclusion of his interpretation of Melville, James imagined a different ending for the crew on board the Pequod. that was different from the fatal wreck to which Melville had consigned them James’s final chapter “A Natural but Necessary Conclusion.” added to his commentary on Moby Dick the heroic parts that Melville had promised the “spirit of equality” the “mariners, renegades and castaways” would play. But the new knowledges that James produced about Moby Dick and the “world we live” could not be integrated within the frame narrative that set Ahab’s totalitarianism into opposition to Ishmael’s liberal democracy. Their stories mounted forces of resistance to both of the superpowers comprising this bipolar apportionment of the planet. When he added to the frame narrative the non-integratable accounts of his fellow mariners, renegades and castaways from Ellis Island, these stories disrupted the norms sedimented within its frame. James thereby directly linked these 32 D ONALD E. P EASE alternative forms of literary production to the international social movements whose imperatives they corroborated. After he interpolated the stories of these refugees within it, James transforms Moby Dick into a medium that endows these political refugees with the properties of free expression and mobility normatively associated with Melville’s literary masterpiece. But upon passing their untold tales through his commentary on Moby Dick, James also effected a revolution in the field of transmission. Rather than continuing the literary protocols through which it had undertaken the Americanization of the globe, Moby Dick is quite literally overtaken in James’s text by the mariners, renegades and castaways who communicate their refugee accounts throughout all of the diaspora networks across the globe. The detainees on Ellis Island communicated by way of informal symbolic economies that materialized an interdiscursive space: “They pass to one another political articles in the popular press, and they discuss and fill in from personal experience.” The detainees endowed this space with forms of discursive creativity through which they communicated alternatives to the bipolar dispensation of the planet that Moby Dick was made to communicate. After he transmitted their untold narratives James transposed the detainees’ interdiscursive space into a geopolitical power. Their discursive creativity transformed this canonical masterwork that had been harnessed on behalf of circulating American values to deliver alternatives to it. In writing about Melville from within this passage that had not yet been fully subjectivized, James has multiplied the temporalities in which Moby Dick can be interpreted. James’s commentary on Moby Dick cannot engender a “relative simultaneity” - the empty homogeneous “now” interconnecting James and Melville within the timeful continuum of the planetary literary system - because the state’s deportation of him has rendered him nonnonsynchronous with the continuum undergirding the planetary literary system.. However the accounts of the mariners that James adds to his commentary do generate a radical futurity. The mariners renegades and castaways share the same chronotope - they occupy a place that is placed outside the social order and they hope for a new world. But the temporality animating the mariners’ tales is neither the eternal present of the literary classic, nor the past definite that historians deploy to keep track of completed past actions, nor is it the present perfect, the what has been of who we now are, of the literary memoirist. The events recounted within their narratives are more properly understood as transpiring within the future anterior. The future anterior links a past event with a possible future upon which the past event depends for its significance. The split temporality intrinsic to the future anterior describes an already existing state of affairs at the same time that it stages the temporal practice through which that state of affairs From American Literary Studies to Planetary Literature 33 “will have been” produced. In Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In, James correlates a past event - the collective revolt that did not take place in the past - as dependent on a future event - the dismantling of the global emergency state - by which the crew’s revolt will have accomplished it. When he links the revolt that had not taken place on the Pequod with the possible future repeal of the state’s emergency measures, the future repeal returns to the past to transform this virtual revolt into what will have been its literary precedent. As characters who lacked adequate representation in Melville’s text, the mariners, renegades and castaways belonged to a temporal dimension that could not be synchronized either with the Americanist frame narrative or with the planetary system that hegemonized its values. These figures do not produce a simultaneity with the past, and they call for a futurity that is not the future of the present. Their narratives might be described as producing a future for a past that world history excluded as the precondition for synchronizing the planet with the time kept by the global marketplace This past that had not yet become present could not become present within the themes, characters and representations organizing the frame narrative that Moby Dick was made to represent. It can only become present within the extraterritorial space by means of which the formerly excluded becomes more inclusive than the included. The extraterritorial past of the radically altered future will also consist of that which is refused from construction, the domains of the repressed, forgotten and the irrecoverably foreclosed. That which is not included is exteriorized by boundary as a phenomenal constituent of the sedimented effect called construction will be as crucial to its definition as that which is included; this exteriority is not distinguishable as a moment. Indeed the notion of the moment may well be nothing other than a retrospective fantasy of mathematical mastery imposed upon the interrupted durations of the past. 19 James’s description of his fellow castaways’ knowledge also characterizes his own project’s relation to the state. Having been classified by the state as an exception to democratic norms, James has discovered a way to turn the extraterritorial space in which the exception is located to his rhetorical advantage. Giorgio Agamben has analyzed the space of the exception with great precision. An exception “cannot be included in the whole of which it is a member and cannot be a member of the whole in which it is already included.” 20 19 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 245. 20 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University press, 1998), 24. The exception the state produces to engender the limits to the rule of democratic governance might also be understood to embody the rule that has produced the exception. As the limit internal to the national order but external to its conditions of belonging, the exception can consent to this non-position, or turn the limit into legal grounds for supplanting the entire order. 34 D ONALD E. P EASE When they are included within a political order, exceptions name what that order must exclude to achieve unity and coherence. Because they name the limit to a polity’s inclusiveness, exceptions also produce what might be described as the illusion of an enveloping border for the members of the nation-state who have not been excluded. As the member that the nation must exclude in order for the state to achieve coherence and unity, exceptions also designate the figures that a state produces when it establishes a historically specific concretization of the universalizing process known as nation-formation. But since the space of the exception cannot be integrated within the statist order, it also designates what we have called the space of extraterritoriality. Extraterritoriality names what is included within the planetary system as what must be placed outside the planetary order to produce the appearance of orderliness. Since the Global Homeland State has recently erected a planetary order in which the peoples across the globe have been deterritorialized, the peoples of the planet may now be in need of the extraterritorial literary imagination of writers like C.L.R. James on Ellis Island and Osip Mandelstam in Voronezh whose internal extraneity to the planetary order can engender alternatives to it. This is a much revised version of “The Extraterritoriality of the Literature for Our Planet,” ESQ, vol. 50, (2004): 177-221. From American Literary Studies to Planetary Literature 35 Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Appadurai, Arjun. “Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination.” Public Culture 12 (Winter 2000): 1-20. Buell, Frederick. “Nationalist Postnationalism: Globalist Discourse in Contemporary American Culture.” American Quarterly, 50 (September 1998): 548-591. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter. New York: Routledge, 1993. Chomsky, Noam. “The Politics of Knowledge.” States of Mind: Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers on the European Mind, ed. Richard Kearney. Manchester: University of Manchester Press 1995: 48-49. Dimock, Wai Chee. “Deep Time: American Literature and World History.” American Literary History, 13.4 (2001): 759-760. —. “Non-Newtonian Time: Robert Lowell, Roman History, Vietnam War.” American Literature, 74.4 (2002), 911-931. —. “Literature for the Planet.” Publications of the Modern Language Association, 116.1 (2001): 173-186. Geyer, Michael, and Charles Bright, “World History in a Global Age.” American Historical Review, 100 (1995), 1034-1060. Hall, Stuart. “‘When Was the Post-Colonial? ’ Thinking at the Limit.” The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons, Routledge: New York and London, 1996, 242-260. James, C.L.R. Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In. Hanover: University Press of New England, 2001. Krivulin, Victor. “Introduction.” The Voronezh Notebooks: Osip Mandlestam Poems 1935-1937, translated by Richard and Elizabeth McKane. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1996. Ohmae, Kenichi. “Putting Global Logic First.” Harvard Business Review (January - February 1995): 119-124. Pease, Donald E. “Doing Justice to C.L.R. James’s Mariners, Renegades and Castaways.” boundary 2, vol. 27.2 (summer 2000): 1-20. Rowe, John Carlos, ed. Postnational American Studies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Radway, Jan. “‘What’s in a Name? ’’ Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 20, 1998. American Quarterly, 51 (March, 1999): 1-32. Schlesinger, Arthur. The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society. New York: Norton, 1998. J OHN C ARLOS R OWE European Lessons in Imperialism: A Letter to America Washington, September 3. United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam’s presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting. … According to reports from Saigon, 83 percent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday. Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the Vietcong. Peter Grose, “U.S. Encouraged by Vietnam Vote; Officials Cite 83% Turnout Despite Vietcong Terror,” New York Times (4 September 1967), 2. On January 20, 2005, President George W. Bush declared in his second inaugural address that the United States would take up the “cause of liberty […] to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” Although the President claims that “this is not primarily the task of arms,” he insists “we will defend ourselves and friends by force of arms when necessary.” The rhetoric of global domination by military means, especially in the names of “freedom” and “democracy,” merely confirms the assumption of many critics that this administration has fully committed itself to an aggressive imperialist agenda. The President properly terms this new global agenda a “mission” and “vocation,” and his second inaugural is organized around religious language, biblical verses, and references to hymns. 1 When he claims that “Liberty comes to those who love it,” he clearly means to equate the name of “liberty” with the being of “God”: “Not because we consider ourselves a chosen nation; God moves and chooses as he wills. We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul.” The President’s ability to make such sweeping generalizations about humankind is based on his confidence in the teleological drive of history toward human liberation, concluding only with our divine salvation: “History has an ebb and flow of justice, but history also has a visible direction, set by liberty and the author of liberty.” The “shock 1 In “The Inspiration behind Bush’s Words,” Los Angeles Times, 21 January 2005, A22, Maura Reynolds notes that “like many of the signature speeches of his first term, President Bush’s second inaugural address was laced with religious language, biblical verses and references to hymns,” citing five separate examples (there are many more) in his seventeen-minute speech. 38 J OHN C ARLOS R OWE and awe” accompanying the U.S. military invasion of Iraq will now become the apocalyptic tongues of fire, the Pentecostal vision of a purifying global warfare in the causes of “liberty” and “justice: ” “By our efforts, we have lit a fire as well: a fire in the minds of men. It warms those who feel its power, it burns those who fight its progress, and one day this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world.” 2 The rhetoric and policies of the Bush administration have encouraged many critics to compare them with such modern predecessors as: German and Italian fascism, nineteenth-century British imperialism, and America’s own Manifest Destiny. Still other intellectuals have insisted that the combination of nationalist rhetoric of liberty and justice with Christian fundamentalism signals an even more reactionary appeal to premodern models, such as those holding together what Benedict Anderson termed the great “religious empires” of Islam and Catholicism in the Middle Ages. It is not really necessary to choose between these historical eras, because nationalism relies fundamentally on the religious politics it claims to displace. From within the modernization process, intellectuals like Max Weber could imagine optimistically that the nation-state might eventually replace faith with reason and religious hierarchy with social democracy. 3 Yet because nations had to legitimate themselves in competition with each other for economic and cultural reasons, they often drew upon the available rhetoric of belief to develop “national” or “civil” religions, whose symbologies were both deeply dependent upon and thus as irrational as formal religious orthodoxies. 4 The effort to specify the historical precedent for the current Bush Administration’s frightening mixture of nationalism, militarism, and religious fundamentalism is quixotic and should not detain us very long. U.S. foreign policies and the aggressive advocacy of human rights are logical consequences of nationalism at its historical limit; history is “repeating itself” simply because we have not imagined how to transcend the national form. Predictions of specific consequences of this “neo-nationalist” enthusiasm are bound to be either disappointed or exceeded, but what we can say at this particular moment is that alternatives to the nation-state are desperately needed. And because in this same crisis intellectuals, especially in the United States, have been abandoned as irrelevant, we need to reaffirm how 2 “Vow for ‘Freedom in All the World’: Text of the Inaugural Address,” Los Angeles Times, 21 January 2005, A22. 3 Max Weber, The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London: Routledge, 2001). 4 For a good account of the “civil religion” in U.S. social history, see Jay Mechling, “Rethinking (and Reteaching) the Civil Religion in Post-Nationalist American Studies,” Post-Nationalist American Studies, ed. John Carlos Rowe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 63-80. European Lessons in Imperialism: A Letter to America 39 necessary intellectual imagining is for a world desperately in need of a “new world order.” By the “intellectual imaginary” I want to include explicitly the imagination as an aesthetic function that operates in many different media, ranging from specialized scholarship to literature, film, and television with broad appeals to diverse audiences, often transnational in scope. If there is indeed a revival of the aesthetic function, then I want to argue that it should be the means of creating political coalitions among intellectuals and artists with the powers to remain outside or at least marginal to the existing and growing U.S. hegemony. I suggest that my advocacy of the particular European perspectives on American Studies developed in this lecture might also be extended to what I see as a new U.S. expatriate, whether remaining within the United States or choosing to live and work outside its geopolitical boundaries, who will continue this critical work and help build such coalitions for as long as it takes us to create new habitats for humanity. Since 9/ 11, terrorist acts around the globe have dramatized the international aims of al Qae’da and its related organizations. To be sure, the United States is a major target, which now looms even larger for Islamic terrorists precisely because of our response to such attacks, not just in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C. on September 11, but over Lockerbeigh, in Nairobi, in Beirut, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Bali, Morocco, and Madrid. Some of the early intellectual responses to 9/ 11, especially those coming from Europe, stressed the “human” and “international” costs of such terrorism and argued vigorously for transnational solidarity to oppose further civilian murders. These appeals to “humanity” were not overtly “unpatriotic” or “anti-patriotic,” but I now want to suggest that their tacit critique of patriotism should today be made explicit. “Nationalism” in the modern period binds us to a fictitious entity, which can be sustained only by elaborate symbolic means confirmed by “real” historical events. 5 Among the most “real” are those events which are so profoundly “imaginary” in their conception: wars. 5 Not all scholars agree that the nation is a fiction. Anthony D. Smith, “The Origins of Nations,” Nations and Identities: Classic Readings (Malden: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 2001), p. 332, advocates what he terms the “primordialist” view, which argues “for the ‘reality’ of nations, and the almost ‘natural’ quality of ethnic belonging” on which so many nations based their original social contracts, ranging from legal foundations to symbolic bonds. Smith argues that “National sentiment is no construct, it has a real, tangible, mass base. At its root is a feeling of kinship, of the extended family, that distinguishes national from every other kind of group sentiment” (333-334). But Smith’s very definition of the ethnies (“ethnic core”) on which most nations are built is composed of fictions historically justified and socially chosen. 40 J OHN C ARLOS R OWE However concrete and material warfare may be, it is always predicated on symbolic actions and resolutions. The very “occupation” of “territory” by “military personnel” rests on a fantastic assumption that the “control” of any “state” can be so managed. In fact, the “control” of a state is finally the work of social, legal, political, economic forces that operate within a nominal geopolitical “territory.” All of this is perhaps self-evident and yet often enough ignored at the peril of invading and occupying armies. The British attempted to “fence off” Malaya in order to trap and contain insurgents, as nineteenth-century colonists in Tasmania tried to “march” across that small island in the infamous “Black Line” campaign to eliminate the Aborigines. The DDR with the military support of the Soviet Union attempted to “wall off” East Germany, and Eastern European colonies of the Soviet Union virtually maintained an “Iron Curtain” to preserve totalitarian control of Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia during the Cold War. In the nineteenth century, the United States forced native peoples westward, away from growing population centers, then attempted to control them on reservations ultimately surrounded by Euroamerican communities. In the twentieth century, the U.S. has supported the partition of several nations, notably Israel-Palestine and Korea and Vietnam, resulting in political tensions so powerful as to erupt into open warfare in all these regions and producing no peaceful resolutions to date. None of these imperial efforts was ultimately successful, even if the harm done to generations of people living in these states still remains incalculable and unimaginable. Very few wars have resolved in lasting ways the conflicts that provoked them. To be sure, the human and financial cost of wars often lead to new balances of power that give the appearance of political solutions, but in most instances merely distort or refunction the underlying problems. Certainly this is the case in the present, ongoing war in Iraq, which now threatens to spread to Syria, Iran, and has related campaigns in the West Bank and Gaza - what the Bush Administration now terms “the Greater Middle East,” as well as Indonesia and the Philippines, among other sites. Although it is not yet a “world war,” it threatens to grow into one, especially if we listen to the rhetoric of the current U.S. administration and the President’s ambitions to “defend liberty” against “all tyrants” around the globe. History teaches us that such military conflict will do little to resolve today’s underlying global problems: the inequitable distribution of wealth, the concomitant inequality of the consumption of natural and human resources, the exploitation of labor especially along what Du Bois termed the “equatorial black belt,” the growing disregard for environmental protection by the industrialized elite, and the widespread neglect of pandemics like AIDS/ HIV and famine in regions and among peoples without “global representation” or other modes European Lessons in Imperialism: A Letter to America 41 of “visibility.” When such problems are stated this baldly, it seems incredible that first-world peoples have continued to ignore them or impossible that they will avoid the consequences of such neglect. The insistent emphasis in contemporary U.S. culture on patriotism legitimates such quixotic warfare by reaffirming the “friend/ enemy” binary and reinventing American Exceptionalism as a new Manifest Destiny: the adoption of American-style democracy around the globe as the only effective means of toppling tyrants and defending “human rights.” Living in the United States today, intellectuals are faced with the nearly impossible task of criticizing a rhetoric of patriotism deployed by the current Administration, reinforced by cultural work, and reproduced symbolically and psychologically by the majority of U.S. citizens, whatever their backgrounds or political affiliations. 6 I have argued under less dangerous historical circumstances that the critique of patriotism is urgently needed, even as I am aware that this is one of the riskiest tasks for intellectuals to undertake, in large part because the rhetoric of patriotism is so deeply entangled with an affective psychology that nationalist ideology, especially in the United States, has successfully manipulated. Louis Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” is now more than three decades old, but its focus on the psychological processes of interpellation offer us a renewed starting point for understanding the powerful personal appeal of patriotic sentiment. 7 My first claim, then, for how European perspectives on American Studies can be helpful in this particular historical crisis is that European scholars can use their intellectual and social positions outside the geopolitical and institutional authority of the U.S. nation to criticize the rhetoric of patriotism. If there are signs of a “new” expatriotism of intellectuals intent on reaffirming the promise of U.S. democracy by criticizing the imperial “democracy” 6 In a recent controversy, former University of Colorado (Boulder) Professor Ward Churchill has received death threats, been accused of being “inept” and “un-American” (by conservative commentator Bill Horowitz), and threatened with termination by Colorado Governor Bill Owens for Churchill’s comparison of workers in the World Trade Towers as “little Eichmanns,” on account of their complicity with the first-world nations’ hegemony in the new global economy and with U.S. military domination of the world. The issue has been tied to liberal criticisms of Harvard University President Larry Summers, who publicly claimed women did not have the same aptitudes as men for mathematics and science. The “free-speech issue” has now deflected the serious question about intellectuals’ rights to criticize the U.S. government’s foreign policies (even if I personally defend both Churchill’s and Summers’ rights to free speech, however stupid I consider both of those statements). For more on the free-speech issue at this moment in the U.S., see National Public Radio’s website and the specific link: www.freespeech/ npr.org. 7 Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971). 42 J OHN C ARLOS R OWE demanded by the current administration, then such an outside perspective should draw on the work of non-U.S. scholars in our field. I am asking for nothing new from the generations of European scholars in the field who have done just this sort of work, but today the opportunity to substitute alternative social models for the U.S. nation-state and versions of “worldcitizenship” for the model of U.S. citizenship should be led by intellectuals outside the borders of the United States. Since the First Gulf War, conservative political interests in the United States have coopted “American patriotism” for their own purposes, relegating the traditional role of the self-conscious, skeptical, and questioning citizen to the social and political margins and sometimes into effective exile. “Support our troops” was a popular slogan in the First Gulf War, which in the invasion and occupation of Iraq has become a nearly hysterical mantra to silence dissent and control a large but still minority anti-war movement in the United States. Displayed proudly on the windows of cars and trucks, the doors of businesses, even on T-shirts and jackets and dresses, the twisted “ribbon” used first to represent the solidarity of those people committed to fighting the pandemic of HIV/ AIDS, then adopted as the symbol of those contributing to the fight against breast and other cancers, is now the national symbol for those who “support our troops” in Iraq. The twisted ribbon as a sticker or decal invokes the “yellow ribbons” tied around trees during the Iran Hostage Crisis in 1980-1981 in both the Carter and Reagan Administrations to show support for the release of the 52 Americans held hostage by students in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. When those hostages were finally released by the Iranian government on January 21, 1981, Tony Orlando and Dawn’s 1973 popular hit, “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree,” was played as a joyous homecoming theme. During the First Gulf War in 1991, the George H.W. Bush Administration urged Americans to “display” yellow ribbons outside their homes to “support the troops” by expressing our desires to “welcome them home,” combining thereby the original populist and ostensibly anti-war sentiments in the Iran Hostage Crisis to “bring the hostages safely home” with the tacit conservative criticism of how veterans returning from the Vietnam War had been mistreated by anti-war demonstrators. 8 8 In the historical and imaginary “revisions” of the Vietnam War worked out in U.S. culture after 1975, conservative critics of our military and political failure in the Vietnam War often cited the American public’s failure to “support the troops.” In Coming Home, Sally Hyde (Jane Fonda) picks up her demobilized husband, Bob Hyde (Bruce Dern), at the Oakland Naval Air Station driving a sporty and classic (and expensive! ) Porsche Speedster. As he upshifts out the gate of the military base, he turns to the assembled anti-war demonstrators outside the fence and gives them the finger. Audiences cheered Dern’s “rebellious” gesture of contempt European Lessons in Imperialism: A Letter to America 43 Tony Orlando and Dawn’s song was based on an actual incident on board a southern bus heading for Miami, Florida. One of the passengers told the driver that he had just been released from prison, where he had served three years for passing bad checks. While in prison, the man wrote his wife to tell her she did not have to wait for him to serve his sentence, but if she was still interested she should let him know by tying a yellow ribbon around the only oak tree in the city square of White Oak, Georgia. When the bus passed through town, the driver slowed down and to the convict’s tearful relief the wife had tied a yellow ribbon around the town’s central oak tree. The driver phoned this story to the wire services, which spread it all over the country. Songwriters Irwin Levine and L. Russell Brown read it in the newspaper, then composed their million-selling song, which was released by Bell Records in February 1973 and by the week of April 23, 1973, was the number one popular song in the United States. Although Saigon did not fall to the North Vietnamese and the U.S. did not hastily evacuate military and diplomatic personnel until 1975, 1973 is the year of the negotiated peace accords between the U.S. and North Vietnam. Tony Orlando and Dawn’s popular song certainly owes its success not only to its reliance on the conventions of country pop music, a hybrid musical genre of growing popularity in the early 1970s, but to the optimism in the United States that the Vietnam War was finally over and at that date had been concluded “honorably.” The prisoner returning home to his devoted wife was a figure for the POW, many of whom like today’s Senator John McCain, had been tortured in the “Hanoi Hilton” and in explicit violation of the protections of prisoners-of-war guaranteed by the Geneva Convention. Of course, insofar as the Vietnam War remained to the very end an “undeclared war,” claims to violations of the Geneva Convention’s protections of combat troops could not be legally maintained. In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the “yellow ribbon” originally representing public relief at the end of an unpopular war and personal hopes for the anti-war demonstrators. During the 2005 NFL Super Bowl broadcast on the Fox Network on February 6, 2005, the St. Louis brewing company Anheuser-Busch showed U.S. troops returning from Iraq and walking through an airport to the spontaneous applause of strangers, culminating a black-out screen with the words, “Thank you,” followed by “Anheuser-Busch.” The next day’s NBC Evening News (February 7, 2005) did a special story on this advertisement and the overwhelmingly positive response it received from viewers, even though some critics noted that the advertisement was still designed to urge consumers to “buy beer.” Capitalizing on the “moral values” and “social responsibility” displayed in this advertisement, the Anheuser- Busch Co. assured Americans that the advertisement would be shown only once, marking thereby its special purpose. Written by Steve Bougdanos of DOB Chicago Advertising, the sixty-second advertisement clearly attempts to reverse the “Vietnam- Effect” of protesters challenging veterans returning from the Vietnam War. 44 J OHN C ARLOS R OWE for family members to come home safely, has come to represent an unequivocal patriotic zeal that substitutes “troops” metonymically for “our foreign policies.” The “yellow ribbon” has now taken on numerous different color combinations, the most popular of which is the red, white, and blue ribbon arranged to combine the American flag with the ribbon’s multiple connotations. “Support” for “our troops” means that we must support foreign policies of a State Department now controlled by the neoconservative philosophy identifiable with Vice President Dick Cheney, former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz (President of the World Bank from April 2005 - June 2007), and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. For most political analysts, President George W. Bush’s second inaugural address announces the return to power of these and other foreign policy neoconservatives in the place of so-called political “realists,” like former Secretary of State Colin Powell, current foreign policy critic Brent Scowcroft, and even former President George H.W. Bush, whose refusal to pursue the First Gulf War all the way to Baghdad to end Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship is considered by such neoconservatives to have been a fatal foreign policy and military error. 9 Patriotism employs a flexible rhetoric adaptable to a wide array of public discourses and cultural genres to substitute “feeling” for “thought,” sentiment for reason. What causes me to choke back the tears as my favorite sports team wins the championship, especially when it represents a city or a region in which I have never lived? How is it possible that large numbers of people from many different backgrounds, most of whom will never meet each other or, if they did, would find they have nothing in common, will embrace and sing together as “their” flag is displayed and “anthem” is played? In the County-and-Western hit, “Arlington,” Trace Adkins sings in the voice of a dead veteran of the Second Gulf War, who has recently been buried at National Arlington Cemetery, “a thousand stones” away from his “grandad,” who died fighting in World War II. 10 The veteran’s reward for service to his country is “this plot of land … for a job well done,” just below “a big white house [that] sits on a hill just up the road.” The “white house” is, of course, the Custis-Lee Mansion, the original estate on which National Arlington Cemetery was built when Brigadier General Montgomery C. Meigs appropriated the house and established a cemetery for the Union war dead on June 15, 1864. But Adkins’s “white house” also refers to the Executive branch of the government, thus aligning the dead veteran’s sacrifice and 9 Doyle McManus, “Bush Pulls ‘Neocons’ Out of the Shadows,” Los Angeles Times, 22 January 2005, A1, 19. 10 Trace Adkins, “Arlington,” Songs about Me (Liberty, 2005). Adkins declares himself a singer of “working class anthems,” so his sentimentalizing of death in the Second Gulf War helps legitimate the ongoing U.S. military exploitation of working-class military personnel (<http: / / www.traceadkins.com/ bio>). European Lessons in Imperialism: A Letter to America 45 patriotism with unquestioning support of the Bush Administration’s foreign policy in the Middle East. Adkins’s lyrics pun on the veteran’s “hometown” and his ultimate coming “home” to Arlington National Cemetery, glossing the “big white house … on a hill” as the proper destination for “the chosen ones” who have made such a sacrifice. The cemetery is “this peaceful piece of property,” which as “sacred ground” where the young man can “rest in peace.” Playing on the promises of the Bush Administration to protect Americans against “terrorism” and guarantee their “homeland security,” Adkins suggests that such policies represent a national consensus: “We’re thankful for those thankful for the things we’ve done,/ We can rest in peace, ‘cause we are the chosen ones,/ We made it to Arlington, yea dust to dust,/ Don’t cry for us, we made it to Arlington.” Of course, the Biblical reference links the Bush Administration’s foreign policies with the civil religion, just as allusions to the “city” (in this case,“a white house”) on “a hill” and the “chosen ones” recall the Puritan doctrine of supralapsarian Election. We know from Benedict Anderson and many other scholars that patriotism is an elaborate fiction sustained by countless cultural and symbolic acts, but we still find ourselves “stirred” and “moved” as flags wave, anthems play, and footballers score points. 11 It is still difficult to understand how such patriotism motivates individuals to die for a foreign policy toward a distant and relatively powerless nation - Vietnam or Iraq - posing no immediate threat to those individuals before they enter combat. As we know, Immanuel Kant was a vigorous opponent of wars and an early proponent of a “League of Nations” to avoid future wars. He considered nationalism to be the greatest stumbling block to his ideal of “world citizenship” that would discourage wars and achieve peaceful, rational human existence. 12 Although he does not condescend even to comment on the “irrational” character of patriotic sentiment and rhetoric, his critique of nationalism tacitly condemns emotive patriotism. Horace’s “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mourir” has been derided down through the ages, but sustained criticism of patriotism as an ideological tool and as a complex psychological interpellation is harder to find, in part because institutions of learning and cultural media are so often tied, whatever their critical perspectives, to the 11 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1995), pp. 37- 46, suggests that in print cultures much of this work is done by a shared national language and by the cultural work - from literary texts to daily journalism and news - that reinforces the “official language” or, in the cases of nations with several languages, reinforces the bilingual or polylingual character of that “imagined community.” 12 Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays on Politics, History, and Morals, trans. Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1983). Perpetual Peace was first published in 1795. 46 J OHN C ARLOS R OWE theocracies, kingdoms, republics, nations, or other states they inhabit and thus on which they depend. Some neoconservatives have attempted to equate “civic virtue” and “good citizenship” with “patriotism.” In his recent jeremiad, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity, Samuel Huntington complains that “elements of America’s business and intellectual elites [identify] more with the world as a whole and [define] themselves as ‘global citizens’. …” 13 Huntington takes a populist stance in the book, lumping liberal academic and multinational corporate “elites” together in an improbable conspiracy to denationalize the United States with immigrants, who in their refusal to accept the American consensus end up working out the “cosmopolitan” agenda of their allies in the university and corporations. Fixing on immigrants with legal or de facto dual citizenship and tagging them “ampersands,” Huntington fuels the recent rage against undocumented workers in the United States by insisting: “Previous immigrants maintained an ethnic identity as a subcomponent of their American national identity. Ampersands, in contrast, have two national identities. They eat their cake and have it too, combining the opportunity, wealth, and liberty of America with the culture, language, family ties, traditions, and social networks of their birth country.” 14 What links together these unlikely forces is finally their unpatriotic, anti-national, and perversely destructive impulses. We are saved only by the grass-roots Americans who constitute what Huntington terms the nation’s “‘patriotic public,” which is “foremost among peoples in their patriotism and their commitment to their country.” 15 As rational or historically accurate argument, Who Are We? makes no more sense than the shifting symbolism of those “yellow ribbons,” but in both cases a vague rhetoric of “patriotism” as necessary “consensus” holds both symbolically in place. Samuel Huntington is a frequent target of liberal criticism, of course, because his arguments rely so centrally on neoconservative rhetoric, especially by linking “values,” “faith,” and “nationalism.” Yet even more sophisticated and less obviously politically interested criticism has been directed in recent years at the new “cosmopolitanism” or what Robbins and Cheah have positively formulated as “cosmopolitics.” 16 The new “world or global literatures,” “post-nationalist” and “transnational” cultural and political projects, “traveling theory,” and “postcolonial theory” have been criticized 13 Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), p. 274. 14 Ibid., p. 192. 15 Ibid., p. 273. 16 Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, eds. Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). European Lessons in Imperialism: A Letter to America 47 for their totalizing impulses, their impracticality, and their tacit acceptance of (or at least failure to distinguish themselves from) unilateral, first-world globalization. In Cosmopolitanism, Kwame Anthony Appiah argues eloquently for the transnational ethics of the cosmopolitan, who takes “seriously the value not just of human life but of particular human lives, which means taking an interest in the practices and beliefs that lend them significance. People are different, the cosmopolitan knows, and there is much to learn from our differences.” 17 Appiah’s approach respects human differences, including those established by national boundaries and customs, but in doing so tries to develop an ethics that is not restricted to nation-specific knowledge and morality. As Appiah acknowledges, it is difficult for us to acknowledge the cosmopolitan ideal “that we have obligations to strangers,” but even the smallest “nation” is composed primarily of strangers. 18 What allows us to identify with “fellow Americans” (or Swiss or Ugandans) whom we do not know personally and not make the same connection with other human beings? The problem is in part the result of nation-specific knowledge, especially in the disciplines associated with culture and history. Whatever critical and educational purposes these disciplines may serve in the interpretation of the nation, they have done considerable work toward the legitimation of nations as discrete “objects” of study. 19 Cultural, economic, and political globalization makes patriotism and nationalism appear increasingly naive and irrational. At the same time that U.S. popular culture reinforces sentimental patriotism with work like Trace Adkins’ “Arlington,” it also calls attention to an ineluctable global awareness critical of the provincialism of the nation. The cross-over Folk-Country musician Steve Earle explains in the liner notes for his disc The Revolution Starts Now that he felt a special urgency when composing this album to “weigh in” on “the most important presidential election in our lifetime,” seven months away from the album’s release in May 2004. 20 The Country-and-Western melodies sound much like those employed by Adkins in patriotic songs, like “Arlington,” but Earle’s message is distinctly radical - in the spirit of what he terms the “radical [U.S.] revolution” - and global in perspective. The lyrics in “Home to Houston” recall countless Country songs celebrating the hard work of truckers, but Earle’s driver is making the 17 Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), p. xv. 18 Ibid., p. 153. 19 Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays (1981; rpt. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), p. 64, makes a similar claim about how “Literature” and “History” serve the “functional fantasy” of Western Civilization. 20 Steve Earle, The Revolution Starts Now (Sarangel Music, 2004). 48 J OHN C ARLOS R OWE run from Basra to Baghdad “with a bulletproof screen on the hood of my truck/ And a Bradley on my backdoor.” The trucker’s refrain - “God get me back to Houston alive/ and I won’t drive a truck anymore” - repudiates the conventional celebration of the trucker’s hard but honorable life, as well as the freedom of the open road. 21 Earle’s trucker may want to get back to Houston as quickly as possible, recognizing his mistake in participating in a war so far from home, but Earle makes it clear that one lesson of the Second Gulf War is that working people share common bonds that reach beyond national borders. In “Rich Man’s War,” Earle argues that U.S. grunts, like Bobby, are fooled by patriotism - “Bobby had an eagle and a flag tattooed on his arm/ Red white and blue to the bone when he landed in Kandahar” - in order to fight “a rich man’s war,” leaving at home “a stack of overdue bills” while “the finance company took his car.” In the same song, the Palestinian “Ali,” “the second son of a second son,/ Grew up in Gaza throwing bottles and rocks when the tanks would come/ Ain’t nothin’ else to do around here just a game children play/ Somethin’ ‘bout livin’ in fear all your life makes you hard that way.” Both Bobby and Ali answer the same call of “rich men,” who manipulate their workers as if they were children. When Ali gets “the call,” he “Wrapped himself in death and praised Allah/ A fat man in a new Mercedes drove him to the door/ Just another poor boy off to fight a rich man’s war.” 22 Customarily represented as religious fanatics in the U.S. media, Palestinian suicidebombers are identified by Earle as sharing a transnational cause with U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Cheah, Robbins, Appiah, and Earle are working out a new cosmopolitanism that should guide our efforts to “internationalize” American Studies. The curious hybrid term “international American Studies,” which in its very name appears to combine incompatible categories of world and nation, offers us an excellent opportunity to offer a sustained criticism of nationalism and its emotional complement “patriotism” from perspectives both transnational and “rational.” Much as I admire Kant’s intellectual rigor and his criticism of war and nationalism, I do not propose to revive the Enlightenment rationality he did so much to establish in the modern era. To be sure, I will not even be so foolish or daring as to attempt the elaboration of a post-enlightenment, genuinely “global” Reason, but I will suggest instead that whatever sort of analysis we identify with such an ideal cognition must be predicated on some capacity to think beyond the boundaries of discrete nations or other so-called 21 “Home to Houston,” The Revolution Starts Now, lyrics from <http: / / www.steveearle. com>. 22 “Rich Man’s War,” The Revolution Starts Now, lyrics from <http: / / www.steveearle. com>. European Lessons in Imperialism: A Letter to America 49 “sovereign” states. Perhaps such “global reason” can only emerge as a cognitive, analytical, polylingual method of understanding once we have begun to offer serious alternatives to the geopolitical entities that today constrain, provincialize, and structure “knowledge” and “reason.” The first task in this work is, then, profoundly theoretical: how can we disarticulate “reason” and “knowledge” from specific national or state interests? Denationalizing knowledge complements the work of decolonizing knowledge advocated by the postcolonial theorist Walter Mignolo, especially if we understand the historical relationship between the nation-state and colonial expansion. 23 And can we do so in ways that will escape the totalizing universals of the past, especially noticeable in the Enlightenment heritage of modernity? Another related task is more manageable, I think, and that is the work of theorizing alternative states to the “nation,” both drawing on premodern examples and late-modern, even postmodern alternatives. Liberalism within the nation-state is no longer a possible alternative to a “neoliberal ideology” that is profoundly conservative in its politics and yet rhetorically liberal. The failure of the Democratic Party in the last two presidential elections can be explained in part as the successful appropriation of liberal discourse not just by the Republican Party, but by most nationalist interests in the United States. John Kerry immediately engaged George W. Bush in terms of patriotism, and the only debate that really mattered was the one that pitted Kerry’s military service against Bush’s record in the National Guard. Once the campaigns focused on patriotism and its ineluctable complement, war, then it no longer mattered which candidate won. Had Kerry been elected, we would still be increasing troop numbers, military spending in Iraq, and postponing any coherent plan or timetable for withdrawal. European scholarly approaches to American Studies do not provide ipso facto the outside perspective on the United States I think we so desperately need. European views of the United States, even if we were able to generalize about them (which we cannot), are certainly not objective, and their intellectual models are often shaped by the national situations of the educational institutions and analytical methods on which they rely. A great deal of post- World War II European scholarship in American Studies reflects the impact of the cultural colonialism of the United States during and after the War. 24 23 Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 20, describes his method as “a pluritopic hermeneutic,” which allows the differences between Mexica (Aztec) and Spanish national knowledges, for example, to appear, thus challenging the hegemony of Eurocentric knowledge. 24 Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coca-Colonization and the Cold War, trans. Diana F. Wolf (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). 50 J OHN C ARLOS R OWE Reading that scholarship today with President Bush’s triumphalist call for the urgent “spread of democracy and freedom,” we might understand how this earlier enthusiasm for U.S. liberal democracy now sounds strangely like the neoliberal rhetoric of current U.S. foreign policies. Even with these qualifications in mind, we ought to remember that a good deal of postwar European scholarship about the United States focused on minority cultures, the unfulfilled promise of equal civil and economic rights, and the discrepancy between the realities of classist, racist America and its democratic ideal of a society free from class and racial hierarchies. To be sure, the European scholarship in the post-World War II period stressed these issues in part as a response to the racial nightmare of National Socialism and to a lesser extent the lingering legacies of aristocratic and monarchical class hierarchies. U.S. scholars visiting European universities in the 1960s and 1970s were often impressed with the institutional presence of courses, even curricula and programs, in African American Studies, Latin American Studies, North American Studies that included Canada, and Native American Studies. When academic reformers in the U.S. in the late 1960s and early 1970s struggled to establish curricula and programs in these (and other fields less represented in European universities, such as Women’s and Gender Studies), they were often reminded by their European colleagues that the U.S. was “behind” its European counterparts. I have long been convinced that had the U.S. professional organizations, such as the Modern Language Association and American Studies Association, taken more cognizance of these developments in Europe, we would have gained valuable knowledge and political allies in struggles that in the U.S. often took decades to be successful and survive to this day in constant states of fiscal and institutional crisis. To be sure, the inextricable relationship of nationalism and imperialism is another legacy that European scholars might have brought from their own histories to the revision of American Studies. With some notable exceptions, post-World War II European scholarship did not address the extent to which the United States in the twentieth century explicitly took on responsibility for the waning British and French empires, especially in the Caribbean, Pacific (Hawaii, Samoa, and the Philippines), Africa, Asia (the postwar Occupation of Japan; the “invention” of Taiwan), and Southeast Asia (Vietnam after the collapse of colonial French Indo-China). In certain respects, this neglect of U.S. imperialism is both curious and understandable, in light of the peculiar postwar occupation of Europe by the U.S. military, the beginning of what Chalmers Johnson has termed the U.S. “empire of [military] bases” in the late-modern period. 25 Despite the vigorous cri- 25 Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York: Henry Holt and Co, 2004), pp. 151-185. European Lessons in Imperialism: A Letter to America 51 tiques of U.S. “internal colonialism” by American Studies’ scholars in the U.S. in the Vietnam War years (1965-1975), a more far-reaching critique of the U.S. as a traditionally imperial or neo-imperial power was not part of the Western European scholarly approach to the U.S. between roughly 1945 and 1990. Of course, one notable exception would have to be orthodox Marxist interpretations of U.S. imperialism in Soviet-controlled satellites in the DDR and the rest of Eastern and Southeastern Europe, although those critiques vary drastically from versions of Leninist propaganda to tacit criticisms of Soviet-style imperialism. 26 Even today, only a handful of U.S. scholars have proposed to interpret U.S. cultural history in relation to a venerable and consistent (albeit changing) set of policies intent on North American, Western Hemispheric, and global territorial and economic expansion. Yet U.S. political history cannot be understood apart from very traditionally defined programs to control peoples and territory, ranging from “Manifest Destiny” through the colonization of peoples stolen from Africa to do slave labor in North America to the systematic removal and destruction of native peoples in western territory variously purchased and taken by force west of the Mississippi, to mention only the most familiar examples of “internal colonization.” Especially in the current political climate in the United States, I cannot overestimate the difficulty and yet the social and civic importance of educating the American people about their own imperial heritage and the democratic alternatives to it. In this work, I appeal to my European colleagues in American Studies, who bring their considerable expertise in the many different peoples and cultures of the Western Hemisphere, their traditional “area-studies” emphases on “North America” and “Latin America” for a more culturally and lingusitically comparative approach to the United States, and finally their intimate understanding of the United States as late-modern inheritor of modern European imperialism. In the United States, scholars like the late Edward Said, Amy Kaplan, Richard Slotkin, and myself represent the category of “tenured radicals,” whose opinions increasingly are contained within academic circles and are routinely dismissed as irrelevant by conservative public intellectuals, like William Bennett, Lynne Cheney, Dinesh D’Souza, Francis Fukuyama, and Samuel Huntington. Of course, the very phrase “U.S. imperialism” invokes an orthodox Marxist critique long considered an empty slogan and thus easily dismissed by association with the totalitarianism of bureaucratic state 26 See Ileana Marin, “Communist Romania on Imperialist America,” Communism, Capitalism, and the Politics of Culture Proceedings of the East-West American Studies Conference at the Center for North American Studies, June 2003, Frankfurt: ZENAF Conference Proceedings 4/ 2004, pp. 90-104. 52 J OHN C ARLOS R OWE Communisms around the globe. Western European scholars often face similar obstacles to the use of the term “U.S. imperialism,” insofar as they must struggle to distinguish Western-style Left intellectual views from those of orthodox (or “vulgar”) Marxism. We can avoid the problems of invoking the old Communist (and more recent Islamic) slogan “American Imperialism” by insisting on a globally and historically comparative approach to the term. U.S. imperialism must be understood historically in conjunction with nineteenth-century British imperialism and in competition with nineteenthcentury French and twentieth-century Soviet imperialisms. In addition, we may also need some new terms to discuss the U.S. legacy of imperial expansion and the control of populations, economic production, and markets, but we should not lose ourselves in the terminological, effectively nominalist, problems posed by the more substantive question: how can international scholars bring their different knowledge bases and their historical experiences to bear on the analysis of U.S. imperialism and its European heritage? Postcolonial theorists have explained at great and helpful length how non-Europeans, especially those from the colonized regions of the globe, bring the special understanding, along with the unique problems, of the colonized to the “critical study of colonial discourse.” Contemporary postcolonial theory attempts to get beyond colonial realities by understanding how they were socially, economically, militarily, even psychologically constructed. Postcolonial theory is always already the study of colonial and imperial histories. 27 And postcolonial theory has had a growing influence on American Studies, especially the international, comparative “new American Studies” which I advocate. 28 This intellectual tendency follows a more general critique of Eurocentrism extended in recent years to include Euroamerican privilege in the new global order. This critique of the Euroamerican hegemony has been reinforced by postcolonial calls for a new decolonization, which in some cases goes far beyond intellectual and cultural projects to verge on appeals for open resistance, in some cases revolution. What Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri term “the global multitude,” the core of their conception of a new proletariat, may be identified and thus organized in all the major cities of the world, as well as in the marginalized regions of “undeveloped,” third and fourth world nations, but they identify this new collective as coming from beyond the first-worlds of the U.S., Asia, and Europe: 27 John Carlos Rowe, The New American Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), pp. xvi-xvii. 28 See, for example, C. Richard King, ed., Postcolonial America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000). European Lessons in Imperialism: A Letter to America 53 Is it possible to imagine U.S. agriculture and service industries without Mexican migrant labor, or Arab oil without Palestinians and Pakistanis? Moreover, where would the great innovative sectors of immaterial production, from design and fashion, and from electronics to science in Europe, the United States, and Asia, be without the “illegal labor” of the great masses, mobilized toward the radiant horizons of capitalist wealth and freedom? Mass migrations have become necessary for production. … This is how the multitude gains the power to affirm its autonomy, traveling and expressing itself through an apparatus of widespread, transversal territorial reappropriation. 29 Hardt and Negri envision a new, third-world proletariat forging transnational coalitions that will topple late capitalism, finally achieving a Marxist global revolution. When read in the aftermath of 9/ 11 and the U.S. occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the final pages of Empire seem nearly clairvoyant with respect to the ongoing “war against terrorism” waged by the Bush Administration and the “resistance” offered by ever more loosely defined “terrorist” networks and cells. Yet their utopia is romantic and nostalgic, because they do not adequately take into account the enormous imbalances of military, political, economic, and technological power in the world today. There is another way to understand Hardt and Negri’s anticipation of our current global crises, if we conclude that the ongoing conflicts between the U.S. and guerilla factions are not likely to galvanize the “proletariat of the South” into any sort of effective reaction to growing U.S. hegemony. What is likely and seems to be unfolding is a succession of local instabilities, now “policed” almost entirely by the United States, sometimes with the mere patina of “allied support,” as is the case with Great Britain’s participation in Iraq, and unlikely to result in anything more than further, often unpredictable hostilities, either internal to the specific nation or in an entire region, as is certainly the case at present in Bush’s “Greater Middle East.” 30 Since the January 31, 2005 elections in Iraq, the “center” has failed to hold, and civil war has been well underway for more than a year, despite efforts in the U.S. media and government to “predict” the precise date when such an inevitable internal conflict might begin. Given the inequitable distribu- 29 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 397-398. 30 In applauding the “success” of the January 31, 2005 elections in Iraq, despite substantial evidence of the exclusion of significant portions of the population, especially Sunnis, President Bush claimed that “Today … the world is hearing the voice of freedom from the center of the Middle East,” as if to suggest he has already initiated his plan for “expanding liberty and democracy” to the very center of a region tacitly defined by him as undemocratic. Such “centering” of the region is entirely fictional, of course, albeit obviously self-interested. (“President Bush’s Speech” on the Elections in Iraq, January 30, 2005, Los Angeles Times, 31 January 2005, A12). 54 J OHN C ARLOS R OWE tion of economic, political, military, and cultural power, which does indeed leave the United States as the lone superpower, no successful “revolution from the South” (or any other region, for that matter) is at present imaginable, simply a continuing, increasingly undemocratic series of conflicts or a global “guerilla warfare,” in which human misery and suffering escalate. As Seymour Hersh has argued persuasively in “The Coming Wars,” the growing number of conflicts will increasingly be hidden from public view as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld succeeds in consolidating military intelligence and thus covert activities in the Pentagon and “downsizing” the C.I.A., in part due to the latter’s intelligence failures with regard to the Middle East and 9/ 11. 31 In the face of such prospects and in the absence of real social and political alternatives, the open advocacy of U.S. imperialism as promising a Pax Americana may seem strangely attractive to people from many different political positions. The preludes to such an imperial destiny, even cultural and political crusade, offered by Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington in the 1990s have now assumed near canonical authority in all U.S. quarters, except among the “tenured radicals” of the American professoriate. 32 One reason why the Bush Administration’s enthusiastic use of imperialist rhetoric in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq was not more vigorously criticized may well have been a certain begrudging acceptance of the idea that the only viable path to global stability could come from U.S. hegemony. Niall Ferguson’s Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (2003) is a testament to this position, arguing as Ferguson does that the United States is the proper heir to what Ferguson considers the “virtues” of British imperialism, among which he numbers: - the triumph of capitalism as the optimal system of economic organization; - the Anglicization of North America and Australasia; - the internationalization of the English language; - the enduring influence of the Protestant version of Christianity; and, above all, - the survival of parliamentary institutions, which far worse empires were poised to extinguish in the 1940s. 33 31 Seymour Hersh, “The Coming Wars,” The New Yorker (January 24 and 31, 2005), 40-47. Hersh quotes a former senior C.I.A. officer: “‘It is a fact of life today that the Pentagon is a five-hundred-pound gorilla and the C.I.A. is a chimpanzee’” (46). 32 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Avon Books, 1992) and Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996). 33 Niall Ferguson, The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2003), p. xxviii (first published: London: Allen Lane, 2002). European Lessons in Imperialism: A Letter to America 55 Finding many analogies between the historical situations in which Great Britain reluctantly undertook the management of a global empire in the Victorian era with the United States embarking on a formal empire in the twenty first century, Ferguson urges the U.S. to take up the “White Man’s Burden” Kipling in 1899 so infamously urged us to do at the end of the Spanish-American War and the beginning of the Philippine-American War, arguably the historical moment in which U.S. empire begins. Ferguson echoes Kipling: “The reality is nevertheless that the United States has - whether it admits it or not - taken up some kind of global burden, … It considers itself responsible not just for waging a war against terrorism and rogue states, but also for spreading the benefits of capitalism and democracy overseas. And just like the British Empire before it, the American Empire unfailingly acts in the name of liberty, even when its own self-interest is manifestly uppermost.” 34 Published less than two years before President George W. Bush’s second inaugural, Ferguson’s conclusion seems both prediction and promotion of that speech. There is, however, a third possibility that offers some optimism about the social, economic, and political promise of the future beyond the nation-state and imaginably beyond imperialist systems of global control. I propose that American Studies scholars everywhere take more seriously the model of the European Union with its economic cooperation among member nations, its rules for admission of new members, its gradual dismantling of political boundaries, and the emphasis within its member nations on social programs for their citizens. Is it possible to imagine a return today to a certain highly qualified “Eurocentrism” without reviving older Hegelian models of the relentless “evolution” of Western Civilization and the privilege accorded to European traditions? I do not wish to romanticize the present political realities of the European Union any more than I wish to embrace the quixotic utopian hopes of Hardt and Negri for a new proletarian revolution emerging from the South. On the issue of immigration alone, Europe is hardly setting an example of post-nationalist thinking at the current moment. Indeed, the governments of the Netherlands and Germany have instituted “tests” for admission of guest workers to their nations that are deeply troubling. The recent violent demonstrations by immigrant workers in Paris and the involvement of British-born immigrants in the July 7, 2005 underground and bus bombings in London are further indications that member nations of the European Union need to think differently, more in keeping with the transnational ambitions of their federation. 34 Ferguson, p. 370. 56 J OHN C ARLOS R OWE Several European intellectuals are attempting to imagine just such a transnational utopia for the European Union, including Jürgen Habermas in The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays (1998) and Étienne Balibar in L’Europe, L’Amérique, La Guerre: Réflexions sur la médiation européene (2003). In different ways, Habermas and Balibar consider the European Union one place to begin to theorize “cosmopolitan democracy,” even a “cosmopolitan community of world citizens.” 35 Habermas warns us that the European Union cannot unilaterally lead us to such cosmopolitan politics, especially in the face of the entrenched nationalism (and its commitment to modernization) of the United States: Of course, a renewed political closure of an economically unmastered world society would be possible only if global powers also involve themselves in the institutionalized procedures for building a transnational will-formation regarding the preservation of social standards and the redress of extreme social inequities. They have to be willing to broaden their perspectives on what counts as the “national interest” into a viewpoint of “global governance.” 36 For Habermas, any workable theory of “global democracy” would depend on coordinated reforms of such international organizations as the United Nations and “the institutionalized participation of non-governmental organizations in the deliberations of international negotiating systems.” 37 Étienne Balibar argues persuasively that Europe has learned the historical lessons of its national wars, of the terrible consequences of colonization and decolonization, and on the basis of such historical knowledge is capable of leadership in such areas as: collective security in a public international order; advocacy of progressive control and eventual universal disarmament (especially with respect to nuclear weapons); the primacy of political localism in negotiating regional conflicts exacerbated by the forces of globalization; and as a model for new glocal relations, the articulation of a European-Mediterranean confederation that might serve as an example of how to reduce the “fractures” in our presently warring conceptions of “civilization.” Balibar proposes such a utopian “Europe” not as a competitive military, economic, or political force, struggling to compete with the United States (or any other global power), but instead offering its own increasingly inclusive model of different states, cultures, languages, religions, and peoples as one of 35 Jürgen Habermas, The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays, trans. Max Pensky (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), p. 109. Die postnationale Konstellation: Politische Essays was first published by Suhrkamp Verlag in 1998. 36 Habermas, “The Postnational Constellation and the Future of Democracy,” The Postnational Constellation, p. 111. 37 Ibid. European Lessons in Imperialism: A Letter to America 57 ongoing “translation” and “mediation,” rather than “control” and “domination.” 38 Habermas and Balibar’s “postnational” theories and different bids for “global democracy” remain speculative and represent their shared indebtedness to Marxian internationalism, but they are especially interesting as approaches emerging out of European intellectual debates. Indeed, they impress me as integral to the sorts of public debates about such practical matters as disputes among member nations regarding the status of guest workers, the future of immigration, the European Union’s Constitution, and the future of the Euro as a unified currency. In the United States today, discussion of “postnational” alternatives to U.S.-style democracy seems restricted to academic conferences and even in their virtually ignored corridors the “postnationalist” and “cosmopolitan” possibilities are often dismissed as aery fancies. Even the obvious transnational implications of the current debates regarding the future of undocumented workers in the U.S. and their proposed criminalization in House of Representatives Bill 4437 have been quickly resolved by partisans on both sides as issues of U.S. citizenship and national affiliation. 39 Despite the reality of dual citizenship for many born in the U.S. to Mexican parents, public discourse has largely avoided alternatives to the binary of U.S. citizen or “foreigner.” Of course, just how the member nations of the European Union will address their complex and diverse immigration issues remains to be seen, but consideration of possibilities that go beyond national affiliation might well set an agenda for the transnational consideration of the future of immigrant workers that would influence Pan-American social and economic policies. Adapting such European perspectives as Habermas’s and Balibar’s to American Studies might thus help develop a new “counter-force” to U.S. globalization by comparing and contrasting the complex and intertwined histories of Europe and the United States as they work through nationalism, colonial expansion, imperial institutions, decolonization, and either recolo- 38 Étienne Balibar, L’Europe, L’Amérique, La Guerre: Réflexions sur la médiation européene (Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 2003), pp. 56-61. 39 The first public demonstrations against HR 4437 included prominent displays of the Mexican, Salvadoran, and other flags of the undocumented workers’ home nations, but these symbolic gestures were vigorously criticized by conservative politicians. In the demonstrations around the United States on May 1, 2006, the American flag was the most conspicuous national symbol. Although protesters insisted that “American citizenship” for the 11-12 million undocumented workers in the U.S. is their political goal, they still managed to challenge unilateral conceptions of the U.S. nation with such slogans as “We are Americans, too,” and “If God blesses America, then why do they hate U.S.? ” The latter sign was carried by a twelve-year old boy in the demonstration at MacArthur Park in downtown Los Angeles. 58 J OHN C ARLOS R OWE nization or a genuinely postcolonial transnational, international imaginary. There are, of course, many possible topics of interest in the comparative study of Europe and the United States, but none today is more urgent than models of viable transnational governance, of transitional situations and their histories, of polylingual and multicultural collectivity, and of economies with at least some significant component of social care for humans less fortunate than us, wherever and however they struggle to live. W INFRIED F LUCK Theories of American Culture (and the Transnational Turn in American Studies) I The title of this essay may seem curiously obsolete in the age of transnational American Studies, as if there were an unwillingness to acknowledge that American Studies is trying hard to cast aside notions of American exceptionalism and to deal with American culture no longer within the borders of the nation-state but transnationally. In effect, my title could be construed to illustrate what Amy Kaplan has called “the tenacious grasp of American exceptionalism.” 1 I am aware of this danger, but from my point of view the assumption that theories of American culture and transnational American studies stand in opposition to each other is misleading, for, despite the selfperception of many of its practitioners, transnational American Studies are still theories of American culture. In the final analysis, they have the goal of making us understand American culture better. One is reminded of a similar case, the well-known postmodern claim about the end of grand narratives which was itself presented as yet another sweeping, grand narrative about the postmodern condition. What happened was not that we had come to the end of grand narratives, but that one grand narrative - the Hegelian or Marxist one - was replaced by another one created by postmodern theory. Similarly, the concept of transnational studies does not mean that we have come to the end of American Studies and of theories of American culture, but that prior versions of American Studies and American culture are replaced by new versions. In this sense, transnational American Studies continue to be, in the words of Alice Kessler-Harris, “a battle over the idea of America.” 2 My point can be illustrated by reference to one of the classical calls for a transnational interpretation of American culture, Randolph Bourne’s essay “Transnational America,” in which he made the then bold claim that there is no distinctly American culture. And yet, precisely by making this claim, Bourne argues that American culture is different from other cultures, 1 Amy Kaplan, “The Tenacious Grasp of American Exceptionalism,” Comparative American Studies 2 (2004): 153-159. 2 Alice Kessler-Harris, “Cultural Locations: Positioning American Studies in the Great Debate,” American Quarterly 44 (1992): 299. 60 W INFRIED F LUCK because it has developed under conditions of its own. Thus, his own characterization of the transformation of European culture in the U.S. continues to be a description of American culture - not, to be sure, in terms of a unified national identity, but nevertheless as a culture with characteristic features of its own: “We have transplanted,” Bourne asserts with confidence, “European modernity to our soil …,” implying that in the process this modernity has taken on a new and different, in effect a unique form on American soil. 3 Bourne’s reinterpretation of American culture as a transnational culture thus remains a theory about the difference American culture makes: “America is already the world-federation in miniature, the continent where for the first time in history has been achieved that miracle of hope, the peaceful living side by side, with character substantially preserved, of the most heterogeneous people under the sun.” 4 Indeed, in this respect, America must be considered unique: “Only America” - remember that this is Randolph Bourne speaking! - “can lead in this cosmopolitan enterprise.” 5 One of the reasons why American Studies scholars are currently hesitant to acknowledge that, although American culture may not have developed autonomously, it has nevertheless developed under conditions of its own, is that they are afraid of being accused of exceptionalism. But there is confusion at work here. The term exceptionalism was coined to describe the ideology of a promised land and a chosen people. There is no logical reason, however, why, in rejecting this self-serving ideology, one also has to give up the idea that the development of American culture has taken place under conditions of its own - not necessarily conditions exclusive to the U.S., in effect, more likely conditions that are characteristic of modernity in general, but nevertheless conditions that are different in constellation and degree from those of other countries. 6 If we give up the goal of understanding and focusing on these different conditions, then we will be helpless in the face of a United States that, currently more than ever, is indeed dealing with other nations on conditions of its own. 3 Randolph Bourne, “Trans-National America,” in The American Intellectual Tradition, Vol. II: 1865 to the Present, ed. David A. Hollinger and Charles Capper (New York: Oxford UP, 1989), 158. 4 Ibid., 159. 5 Ibid., 161. 6 This is not to claim that American society is “unique.” On the pitfalls of the term “unique” see Ian Tyrrell: “Many American historians have accepted these logical difficulties and argue instead either for national uniqueness or national difference. Since all national histories are unique, there is nothing objectionable about this maneuver, at least in principle. Yet ‘uniqueness’ does have overtones of national superiority, and the concept has been used, for example by David Potter, in a sense that clearly implies exceptionalism.” Ian Tyrrell, “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History,” American Historical Review (1991): 1034. Theories of American Culture 61 It goes almost without saying that the development of a transnational perspective is a welcome new research agenda in American Studies. Early American Studies, especially in Europe, might be characterized as a re-education project, because the main goal was to prove that the United States, the new world power and leader of the Western world, possessed a valuable culture of its own and could be considered mature and civilized enough for its new role. In order to support this claim, one had to define culture as deep and condensed expression of a unique, “specifically American” identity and of exceptional national virtues linked with it. To grasp, in contrast, to what extent this culture was shaped by cross-cultural exchanges provides a healthy antidote. In my own research, I have recently taken up the question of classical American realism again, but now in the context of transatlantic relations which, for a long time, were obscured or disregarded in discussions of American realism. Undoubtedly, such international contextualization can provide a much clearer grasp of American realism’s origin and adaptation of the realist project. 7 On the institutional level, transnational American studies have also brought about a notable change in attitude on the side of U.S.- American scholars and the American Studies Association toward non-U.S. Americanists who are now actively encouraged and invited to contribute their own point of view. In this context, special praise should be given to Paul Lauter, Amy Kaplan, Shelley Fisher Fishkin and Emory Elliott, four of the last presidents of the American Studies Association who have been instrumental in this long overdue internationalization of American Studies. II However, if the project of transnational studies is to be taken seriously, it must also mean that scholars outside the U.S. do not just mimic the latest U.S.-American developments, but are self-confident and independent enough to develop their own perspective on them. This, in turn, means that we may be well advised to take a second look at the project of a transnational American Studies, as it has developed over the last years, even though we may be in basic sympathy with it as a new research agenda. Such a reassessment should start by looking at the underlying premises which have guided work in transnational American Studies and on which most of the work in this new line of research is based. This is actually what I mean by my title “Theories of American culture”: I am not referring to explicit theories - not 7 Winfried Fluck, “Morality, Modernity, and ‘Malarial Restlessness’: American Realism in its Anglo-European Contexts,” in A Companion to American Fiction 1865-1914, ed. Robert Paul Lamb and G.R. Thompson. (London: Blackwell, 2005), 77-95. 62 W INFRIED F LUCK to work by Alexis de Tocqueville, Van Wyck Brooks, Constance Rourke, Margaret Mead, John Kouwenhoven or Sacvan Bercovitch, to name but a few - but to a system of underlying premises about one’s object of study and the best way to analyze it. Consciously or unconsciously, explicitly or implicitly, all work in American Studies, transnational or not, is based on such assumptions, because otherwise we would not be able to make meaningful claims about a particular object of interpretation within a larger context. In fact, we would not have any object. When I decide to interpret a novel by Toni Morrison or Ana Castillo, at first sight I seem to be far removed from an abstract issue such as “theories of American culture.” However, there is no interpretation that is not embedded in a set of assumptions about why I have chosen this particular writer or novel, about whether and to what extent I consider her important for understanding American culture and so on and so forth. If she interests me as an ethnic writer, then such an interest is only meaningful in the context of assumptions about the role and importance of ethnicity in American society and culture which, in turn, imply, tacit assumptions about American society, its history, its power structures and the function of culture within the social system. Usually, we do not think about these matters, because we take our inspiration for the choice of a particular topic, writer or text from an already existing body of works, without thinking about the premises on which this work is based. However, as the recent critique of multiculturalism and its cooptation by the corporate state has demonstrated again, no approach is good or bad in itself. It always depends on what people are using it for. If one grasps this basic hermeneutical insight, then one cannot ignore the fact that there never was a period or approach in the American Studies movement that constituted itself simply by the innocent goal of trying to understand and explain American culture and society. Interpretations always already stood in the service of a particular view of American society and culture and were designed to legitimize a particular attitude towards it. Take the founding movement of American Studies, the so-called myth and symbol school. In its more interesting and ambitious versions, as, for example in the work of Henry Nash Smith, Leo Marx, Alan Trachtenberg, extending up to Richard Slotkin, the underlying goal, linking a range of very different studies on different topics, was to describe American culture as a modern culture with a specific potential for subversion and negation. 8 This, 8 The opening move for this approach was the redefinition of American romanticism as American Renaissance. But the methodological blueprint for almost all of the work of the myth and symbol school is contained in the (little known) essay by Leo Marx and his colleagues Bernard Bowron and Arnold Rose, “Literature and Covert Culture.” Elaine Tyler May is right when she says in her Presidential Address to the American Studies Association: “And although most of the myth and symbol scholars Theories of American Culture 63 in effect, was the basis on which the claim could be made that the United States had a culture worth speaking of. On the surface, the argument goes, American culture seems to perpetuate certain foundational myths such as the belief in progress or the regenerative potential of the frontier. But on a covert level, the major works of American literature are characterized by a unique potential for radical resistance, of saying “No! in Thunder.” Without ever discussing these premises explicitly, the myth and symbol school thus drew on a modernist aesthetics of negation and negativity in order to give America “real culture.” As Leo Marx puts it in the afterword to a recent reedition of The Machine in the Garden: “Nevertheless, The Machine in the Garden emphasizes a fundamental divide in American culture and society. It separates the popular affirmation of industrial progress disseminated by spokesmen for the dominant economic and political elites, and the disaffected, often adversarial viewpoint of a minority of political radicals, writers, artists, clergymen, and independent intellectuals.” 9 The critique of the myth and symbol school that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s raised all kinds of theoretical and methodological issues, but, in the final analysis, it was based on a fundamental disagreement about the underlying premise of the myth and symbol school, the possibility of aesthetic negation and the subversive potential of art. Leo Marx has recently provided a helpful description of what he calls the great divide in American Studies, and in the sense that a radical revision of our view of American literature and culture began in the 1970s, it seems fitting to use the term. 10 But there is also a striking continuity between American Studies B.D. and A.D., before the divide and after the divide, in the sense that the new radicalism did not give up the project of focusing on the possibilities of negation and subversion, or, to use a more comprehensive term on which I want to settle in the following argument, on the question of the possibility of resistance. All it did was to assess the prospects for resistance differently. accepted the existence of a national consensus, they remained profoundly critical of it.” Elaine Tyler May, “‘The Radical Roots of American Studies’: Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 9, 1995,” American Quarterly 48 (1996): 187. The myth and symbol school was part of “an oppositional tradition that drew on American literature and culture in order to criticize American society as a civilization governed by shallow visions of progress and material success.” Winfried Fluck, “American Culture and Modernity: A Twice-Told Tale,” REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 19 (2003): 69. 9 Leo Marx, “Afterword,” in The Machine in the Garden. Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. 35 th Anniversary Edition ( New York: Oxford UP, 1999), 383. 10 Leo Marx, “On Recovering the ‘Ur’ Theory of American Studies,” REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 19 (2003): 3-17. 64 W INFRIED F LUCK Starting with Sacvan Bercovitch’s redefinition of myth as ideology and American consensus, an amazing variety of revisionist approaches emerged in response to the myth and symbol school - from market-place criticism to new historicism, the New Americanists and their subsequent emphasis on the idea of empire. Despite their many differences, however, these approaches had one basic goal in common: they all wanted to demonstrate, although to varying degrees, that the idea of negation or subversion was a (liberal) illusion. 11 I have described this line of argument in a different context as transition from political to cultural radicalism. In political radicalism, dominant until the late 1960s, there are still institutions like progressive 11 This argument is put forward in more detail and with full references in my essay “American Culture and Modernity: A Twice-Told Tale”: “The main theoretical thrust of the revisionism ushered in by Sacvan Bercovitch’s and Myra Jehlen’s essay collection Ideology and Classic American Literature is to undermine claims of a possibility of negation: In the final analysis, they argue, dissent is really part of a ritual of consensus and, thus, coopted by the idea of ‘America’ […] The different camps in the revisionism that emerged with Bercovitch’s and Jehlen’s reconceptualization of myth and symbol as ideology stand for various stages in the radicalization of this argument: In marketplace criticism, the market, for critical theory source and symbol of the alienating effects of capitalism, has also begun to invade the work of American Renaissance - and other high-brow writers (cf. Jean Christophe Agnew, “The Consuming Vision of Henry James,” in The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History 1880-1980, ed. Richard Wightman Fox and T.J. Jackson Lears (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 67-100; Michael Gilmore, American Romanticism and the Marketplace (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985); in New Historicism, the point is no longer, as it still is in marketplace criticism, that even the writers of the American Renaissance could not escape the instrumental rationality of modernity, but that these writers, because of the power of their works, actually are especially effective agents of the system and hence complicit with it (cf. Mark Seltzer, Henry James and the Art of Power (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1984); Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (Berkeley: U of California P, 1987). This line of argument is further radicalized in the book Cultures of United States Imperialism by Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease, and in Race and Gender studies, which insists that the texts of classic American literature are pervaded by imperialism, racism, and sexism. Moreover, their presence in the text is not a remnant of past prejudices, but actually constitutes the text’s meaning, even where these texts do not explicitly deal with issues of race, gender, or empire. In order to identify this constitutive role of sexism, racism or imperialism, one therefore has to go to a deeper, covert level of the text. Critics working within Race and Gender studies, the imperialism-paradigm, and postcolonial studies thus reintroduce the idea of two levels of meaning but invert it: While in the myth and symbol school the double meaning of the text opens up the possibility of negation, it now reveals exactly the opposite, namely the illusionary nature of any hope for negation. In effect, the real horror lurks on the covert level, the former site of opposition, where things are worse than on the surface. Thus, the true extent of how deeply and comprehensively even an apparent art of negation is infected by the instrumental rationality of modernity is finally unmasked.” Fluck, ibid. 69-71. Theories of American Culture 65 political parties, or the labor unions, or the student movement, or simply the institution of art, that hold a promise for resistance or negation. In cultural radicalism, such hopes are rejected as liberal self-delusions, because for this type of radicalism the actual source of power does not lie in particular institutions but in culture and its processes of subject formation. 12 Under these conditions, the only remaining hope for resistance could be minority groups on the margins or outside of the system, which have not yet been fully submitted to processes of subjection. The subsequent debates in race and gender studies, multiculturalism, and postcolonial studies can best be understood as discussions about the potential for resistance that these minority groups have. III Seen from a focus on those underlying premises that have constituted and guided the field, American Studies, whether in its founding period or its current radical forms, have had basically one goal and one project, namely to investigate the possibility for resistance in American culture. This is not meant as a critique, however. On the contrary, with their project American Studies scholars are in good company in the humanities. The search for negation or resistance is by no means something that is restricted to American Studies. It is a dominant feature of almost all critical theories of modernity. In fact, if one steps back for a moment from the field of American Studies and looks at the emergence of the humanities as a professional field of study in the 19 th century, one might argue that without these critical theories of modernity and their search for negation or resistance, the humanities as a field of study would not have come into institutional existence and might not exist today. Let me briefly trace the outlines of this critical tradition in order to open up a new perspective on the development of American Studies and, eventually, also on the new research paradigm of transnational studies. The founding idea of most influential critical theories of modernity lies in the writings of Rousseau and German idealism and their claim that the instrumental rationality of modernity, that is, rationality severed from reason, leads to human self-alienation. Philosophers after Hegel like Karl Marx, Nietzsche, Max Weber, Freud, Heidegger, Adorno and Horkheimer, but also Foucault, all follow this line of argument and make it the point of departure for their critical discussions of modernity. Where they disagree is 12 Winfried Fluck, “The Humanities in the Age of Expressive Individualism and Cultural Radicalism,” in The Future of American Studies, ed. Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman. (Durham: Duke UP, 2002), 211-230. 66 W INFRIED F LUCK in the description of the extent to which instrumental rationality has already affected and invaded the subject, her psyche and her body. This philosophical analysis of human self-alienation led to emphatic claims for the saving powers of culture (and, eventually, to the institutionalization of the humanities as the place where we can study and cultivate culture), because culture is seen as one of the few counter-realms that is not yet pervaded by instrumental rationality and thus holds a potential for resistance against the self-alienating logic of modernity. The reason why high culture and high literature played such a crucial role for intellectuals and cultural critics of the 19 th century, so that they would finally become the centerpiece of the emerging philologies and still stand at the center of school and college curricula in the humanities, is not that these intellectuals were inherently elitist - many of them were not - and therefore drew on high culture and high literature as a welcome means of class distinction. The main reason is that, on the basis of their view of modernity, culture emerged as the main resource of resistance against what Max Weber would call the iron cage of rationality. However, culture could only play this role if it was not yet affected by instrumental rationality, in other words, if it constituted itself in, and through, negation. Modernism, as an aesthetic movement based on ideas of negation and defamiliarization, was a radicalized form of this view of culture as an adversarial counter-realm. In the 20 th century, critical theories of modernity were radicalized by cultural critics of the Frankfurt School such as Horkheimer and Adorno who gave the idea of instrumental reason an almost totalitarian dimension and then had to resort to hermetic avantgarde art as the only possible way to resist this totalitarian threat. This explains their chapter on the culture industry in Dialectic of Enlightenment (or Adorno’s infamous essay on jazz music) which have both been rejected by the Cultural Studies movement as examples of a highly prejudiced, elitist approach to popular culture. However, such criticism never bothers to understand the reasons why these widely acclaimed intellectuals would take such a seemingly “undemocratic” stand. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the triumph of the American culture industry signalled the final collapse of culture’s potential to overcome selfalienation, as it had been envisioned by Matthew Arnold and other cultural critics of the 19 th century, because mass culture, as a highly standardized and commodified form of culture, seemed to demonstrate that the forces of instrumental rationality had finally invaded the last possible realm of resistance, that of culture. This fear explains the almost hysterical pitch of their comments on the American culture industry which put off a following generation like mine that had grown up with American popular culture in the post-War years and could not simply dismiss its own cultural socialization as pathological. Theories of American Culture 67 In this situation, it was Raymond Williams who showed the way out. Williams introduced the concept of “a whole way of life” as key concept in Cultural Studies in order to locate resources for resistance not in single objects but in a particular “structure of feeling,” namely that of workingclass solidarity. Single objects within working-class culture may be without any aesthetic merit and are often lacking in taste and artistic skill, so that no negating potential can be attributed to them. However, the context of solidarity in which they assume their function in working-class life transforms their cultural significance. Their true function can therefore not be assessed by an interpretation of single cultural objects but only through an analysis of the whole way of life in which they are embedded. This was an ingenious New Left attempt to re-empower the working-class as an agent of resistance. For Williams, working class solidarity holds a much better prospect for resistance than high art because it possesses a collective dimension that high cultural forms lack. In other words: Williams does not suggest to transform literary studies into Cultural Studies because, in quasi anthropological fashion, he wants to do justice to the full scope of cultural forms of any given society. He argues for Cultural Studies as an interpretative approach in order to describe working-class culture as an exemplary culture of resistance on which hopes for withstanding the instrumental rationality of modernity can still be based. However, in retrospect this search for an institutional or social base for a culture of resistance has been a story of constant retreat. The development of British Cultural Studies after Williams provides a case in point. While Williams was still confident that the solidarity of working-class life would be able to resist the ideological impact of modern mass culture, Richard Hoggart in The Uses of Literacy already struggled with the realization that this mass culture had become the dominant form of working-class culture, so that the potential of working-class culture for resistance appeared seriously compromised. The following development of British Cultural Studies can be seen as a long drawn-out struggle against this disillusionment. One way out was to continuously redefine, and, in the process, to narrow down, the social group that could still be considered as holding a potential for resistance, a trajectory that, after the disenchantment with the working-class in the Sixties, led to certain youth subcultures, and then, after the revolutionary potential of these subcultures had also been questioned by an increasing commodification of “dissent,” to a redefinition of resistance as semiotic guerrilla warfare, as for example in Dick Hebdige’s influential study on style in youth subcultures. 13 In American Studies, a similar move to the margins can be seen in the ongoing romance with ethnic subcultures 13 Dick Hebdige, Subculture. The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge, 1979. 68 W INFRIED F LUCK and the tacit hope that they can take the place of the lost revolutionary subject, the working-class. While the British Cultural Studies movement tried to uphold an - increasingly more diffuse - hope that a social base could still be found for resistance, continental cultural criticism, in merging Marxism and structuralism, put the analysis of modernity on new grounds by arguing that invisible forms of domination had become more and more pervasive and effective, so that, in an act of voluntary self-submission for which Foucault’s interpretation of Bentham’s Panopticon became the inspiration, people had unwittingly internalized the system’s power effects and had subjected themselves to their own domination. 14 In place of “structures of feeling” and “lived experience,” key concepts in British Cultural Studies, discursive structures of interpellation and subject positioning became the new focus of cultural analysis. In Foucauldian discourse analysis, New Historicism, and Race and Gender Studies, the major goal of analysis is to make visible this assignment of subject-positions and to explain how cunningly cultural texts manage to produce effects of subject formation and subjection, up to a point in some radical forms of Foucauldian and neo-historicist power analysis where resistance appears to be only another script of the system. The different approaches within cultural radicalism have made some interesting suggestions to explain the puzzling phenomenon of the consent of the oppressed, but these suggestions have also created new problems. For, if power is all-pervasive, how is it still possible to think resistance? A comparison between Adorno and Foucault is instructive here. 15 Both of these critical theorists have provided powerful critiques of modernity in which the consequences of the enlightenment are radically reinterpreted: Instead of an emancipation of reason, we get a story of ever wider and more refined forms of systemic control. Both critics want to highlight the all-embracing nature of cultural forms of control by focusing on those dimensions of human existence that seem to be the most private, intimate and subjective, the psyche and the body. But whereas for Adorno the psyche is the realm where the deformation brought about by modernity is most consequential, because instrumental rationality has now also invaded the last possible source of unruliness, Foucault goes even further and considers psychic life itself as only an effect of the disciplinary regime of the body. This shift of emphasis is significant. The psyche, no matter how deformed and manipu- 14 Cf. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of Prison. London: Penguin, 1977. 15 For a helpful comparison of these two major critical theorists, see the essay by Axel Honneth, “Foucault und Adorno. Zwei Formen einer Kritik der Moderne.” In ‘Postmoderne’ oder Der Kampf um die Zukunft, edited by Peter Kemper, Hamburg: Fischer, 1988, 127-44. Theories of American Culture 69 lated it may be under conditions of modernity, still retains a last potential for subversion, because from the Freudian perspective, the unconscious can never be completely controlled. Foucault, on the other hand, erases even this last, though already faint prospect for resistance by eliminating interiority altogether, so that the body, in quasi-behavioristic fashion, becomes the passive object of disciplinary discursive regimes. Critics have pointed out that such a model of subject formation precludes any role for agency, but, what is perhaps more relevant, it also eliminates the nourishing utopia of Cultural Studies and American Studies, the possibility of resistance. It leaves the question unanswered what might prevent the insertion of individuals into the subject positions constructed by discourses of power. Thus, eventually even Foucault looked for a way out of the prison-house of discourse which he himself had constructed. In his late works, he finds a way to evade subjection by the forces of modernity through an ethics of self-care that is based on a pre-modern, pre-Enlightenment self. 16 The most influential revision within the Foucauldian paradigm, however, was provided by Judith Butler who locates resistance in moments of nonidentity created by the need to secure subjection by means of reiteration - moments that also open up the possibility of resignification. All of this is well-known by now, to be sure, and I am referring to it here only in order to draw attention to a logic - a logic of constant retreat as I have called it - in the analysis of social and cultural power that leads straight to current debates in American Studies. IV Butler’s solution of the resistance-problem has become a model for almost all of the following attempts in Cultural Studies to revive the idea of resistance without giving up the basic premise of cultural radicalism, that of an all-pervasive dominance of the system by means of discourses that create subjects and/ or subject positions. Performance and performativity, the performative deferral of meaning, and the nomadic subject have all played a role in this. But the attempt to get out of the theoretical dead-end of subjection has also found expression in a theoretical move away from the concept of the subject to that of identity. 17 In effect, the idea of multiple or hybrid- 16 Michel Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom,” in Ethics. Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: the New Press, 1997), 281-301. 17 For representative examples of this “new cultural politics of difference,” see Stuart Hall’s essays, “New Ethnicities.” In Black Film, British Cinema, edited by Kobena Mercer, 27-31. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1988; repr.: Stuart Hall. 70 W INFRIED F LUCK ized identities has become the new mantra in Cultural and American Studies on which all hopes for cultural resistance are now based. The reason is quite obvious: Under the highly pluralized state of modernity which Western societies have reached, it is no longer convincing to put one’s hope on a particular class or a particular social group, a particular subculture, or even a particular semiotic practice. All of this would be essentialism. There is no longer an outside of the system. The best one can hope to achieve, it seems, are short performative moments of non-identity in which we escape reification. This is the best one can hope for, because all other potential sources of resistance have been used up: High culture and art, self-culture and subjectivity, even interiority and the unconscious, at different points all hopeful candidates for resistance, have fallen by the wayside, because one after the other has been unmasked as being already pervaded by the unrelenting logic of instrumental rationality and its systemic power effects. In American Studies, we can observe the same trajectory of continuous retreat. Highbrow writers in the tradition of the American Renaissance who originally carried the hopes of the liberal tradition are now described as racist, sexist, imperialistic and complicit with the system. Avantgarde subcultures like postmodernism, or the idea of a subversive potential of pop art, have been discarded. For some time, American Studies put all hopes for resistance on marginalized groups and ethnic subcultures, until the critique of essentialism destroyed the equation of disenfranchised minority groups with resistance and left only the idea of a negating potential of flexible, multiple identities. All of this is the result of an increasingly radical and sweeping power analysis. If systemic power is all-pervasive, the hope for resistance can only be placed in the margins of that system, and if even the margins can no longer be expected to possess a quasi inbuilt oppositional potential, then only a flexible identity can function as a resort of last hope. This new utopia is often spaceor territory-based, for example in the emphasis on border zones, diasporas, or intermediate spaces, because, as the argument goes, such spaces force their inhabitants to adopt several identities and thus seem ideally suited to create models of resistance. But, theoretically speaking, another reason may be even more important. If a multiple identity is a general condition of modern life, then there has to be a criterion for determining when that identity is progressive. Thus, the liberation from Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, edited by David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, 441-49. London: Routledge, 1996, and “Who Needs ‘Identity’? ” Questions of Cultural Identity, edited by Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, 1-17. London: Sage, 1996, as well as Cornel West, “The New Cultural Politics of Difference.” In Out There. Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, edited by Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Trinh-ha, and Cornel West, 19-36. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990. Theories of American Culture 71 the trap of subject-formation often leads to a potentially crude materialism in which space determines identity. V We are now in a better position to understand the reason for the emergence of transnational American Studies and its theoretical significance. This emergence can be seen as a consequence of Cultural Studies’ and American Studies’ ever more desperate search for a configuration or location that would still be able to provide an oppositional perspective. In that context, transnational studies can be seen as yet another attempt to escape the deadend of cultural radicalism’s power analysis. Since, theoretically speaking, all potential resources of resistance within American society have been used up, the only possibility that remains is to go outside of the nation-state and to transcend its borders. To equate transnational American Studies with comparative studies can thus be misleading, because it is not comparison per se which is of interest but only one that can help to transcend a coercive national identity and thus open up new perspectives for resistance. This becomes obvious and can be observed in exemplary fashion in one of the founding texts of the new approach, Carolyn Porter’s essay “What we Know That We Don’t Know: Remapping American Literary Studies.” 18 Clearly, Porter’s call for comparative and transnational perspectives is not made for its own sake. It is made for a specific reason derived from her analysis of American society, her own theory of American culture so to speak. As I have argued in another context, “Porter’s remapping of the field is her answer to what can be called the Bercovitch-problem in revisionary American Studies, the seemingly all-encompassing power of American ideology to absorb all critical perspectives, so that a revisionary American Studies in search of a truly oppositional perspective now had to go beyond national borders. Porter’s redefinition and extension of American Studies is driven by the hope of regaining an oppositional counter-perspective, the ‘meztizo legacy of Latin America focalized through the Caribbean.’” 19 The search for the ever-elusive revolutionary subject, which has led from the working-class to youth cultures and on to victimized subcultures within the U.S., finally leads to outside perspectives which need no liberation from false consciousness, because their location 18 Carolyn Porter, “What We Know That We Don’t Know: Remapping American Literary Studies,” American Literary History 6 (1994): 467-526. 19 Winfried Fluck, “Internationalizing American Studies: Do We Need An International Studies Association and What Should Be Its Goals? ” European Journal of American Culture 19 (2000): 151. 72 W INFRIED F LUCK outside of the system provides them with a critical perspective that remains resistant to ideological absorption by “America.” Others have made the same point. Jane Desmond and Virginia Dominguez, pioneers in the internationalization of American Studies, think “that critiques, alternatives, and experiments seeking to unsettle the links between the production of humanities knowledge and existing hierarchies of power have not gone as far as we believe is both warranted and possible” and hope that a critical internationalism will help to resituate the study of U.S. culture within an understanding of global dynamics, which would, in turn, better elucidate the inequities and oppressions that currently plague U.S. culture. 20 For Djelal Kadir, the founder of the International American Studies Association, America can be decentered by analyzing America from “non-American points of view” and “non-American national agendas.” 21 In her response to his address, the then president of the American Studies Association, Amy Kaplan grants “that the project of (a critical) international American studies has the potential to undo the tenacious paradigm of American exceptionalism.” 22 Consequently, it is not transnationality per se, which interests Kaplan, not my example of the development of American realism in a transatlantic context, but certain “transnational configurations, such as the borderlands, the Pacific Rim, the Black Atlantic, and multiple diasporas” - spaces, in other words, that hold a promise of resistance: “Paying attention to new archives and international collaborative work,” Kaplan says, “has the potential to articulate new transnational sites for the production of knowledge that challenge the cohesive borders of a mythical America.” 23 Similarly, in the introduction to the essay collection on Post-Nationalist American Studies, edited by John Carlos Row, a more internationalist and comparative approach is recommended in order to contribute to “resistance to U.S. hegemony.” 24 And for Paul Giles, the current president of the International American Studies Association, “transnationalism serves to reveal the parameters of national formations and thus to hollow out their pressing, peremptory claims to legitimacy.” 25 Thus, transnationalism “involves an interroga- 20 Jane C. Desmond and Virginia R. Domínguez, “Resituating American Studies in a Critical Internationalism,” American Quarterly 48: 3 (1996): 476. 21 Djelal Kadir, “Defending America Against Its Devotees,” Comparative American Studies 2 (2004); quoted by Amy Kaplan, “The Tenacious Grasp of American Exceptionalism.” Comparative American Studies 2 (2004): 154. 22 Amy Kaplan, “The Tenacious Grasp of American Exceptionalism,” 154. 23 Ibid. 155. 24 Barbara Brinson Curiel et.a. “Introduction,” in Post-Nationalist American Studies, ed. John Carlos Rowe (Berkeley: U of California P, 2000), 3. 25 Paul Giles, “Dislocations: Transatlantic Perspective of Postnational American Studies. Transnationalism in Practice.” 49 th Parallel. An Interdisciplinary Journal of North American Studies 8 (2001): 1. Theories of American Culture 73 tion of the circulations of power”; 26 it is an analysis of power relationships and in this, “can empty out the power relations that lurk ominously within these kinds of imaginary identification …” 27 VI One rationale for the hopes put on transnationalism is derived from a particular view of globalization. In the age of globalization, the argument goes, borders have become porous and permeable and this, in turn, has weakened American national identity and created an identity-crisis which should be regarded as a new chance for resistance. However, from a European perspective, American national identity may be temporarily in crisis, but the shock and awe produced by recent developments in the U.S. has resulted from the way in which the U.S. have responded to this crisis. The United States are a paradigmatic, agenda-setting modern society, and no talk about the crisis of the nation-state can distract from the fact that there is enough nation-state left to affect all of us decisively. Globalization does not mean that American power becomes porous or is going away. It means that it is reconfiguring itself and may emerge in consolidated and perhaps even more effective forms than before. Thus, it is still a major issue for the rest of the world whether, how and to what extent it is subjected to, or affected by, American power. In this situation, the original goal of the American Studies movement - the analysis of the cultural sources of American power - continues to be as urgent as ever and the dissolution of this project in transnational studies would be a major mistake. What I am arguing, then, is that, far from going outside the U.S., we have to go back inside. Indeed, a claim can be made that the analysis of the United States has hardly begun, because the revisionism that has been dominant in American Studies in the last decades has focussed almost exclusively on refuting the liberal theory of American culture that stood at the center of American exceptionalism. However, critical concepts such as imperialism, capitalism, the state apparatus, even the term class, which were developed in the analysis of European societies, fail to grasp the historical constellations that have been developed by the United States: an empire that bases its power, Iraq notwithstanding, not on the occupation of territory but has developed unique, often barely visible forms of international dominance; a form of democracy that offers the amazing sight of a continued and stable dominance of business and social elites by way of democratic 26 Ibid., 3. 27 Ibid., 4. 74 W INFRIED F LUCK legitimation; or the fascinating spectacle of a culture that has transformed an egalitarian dream into a relentless race for individual recognition, a phenomenon and historical transformation of culture that was first analyzed by Alexis de Tocqueville in the second volume of his Democracy in America. Tocqueville’s study strikes me as still exemplary, not in its liberal premises, but in its approach to American society and culture, precisely because Tocqueville starts from the assumption that we do not really know yet what democracy in America really is, instead of assuming, as we have in the postwar years, that we always already know what it is, namely the opposite to totalitarianism, or, as in cultural radicalism, a mere cover-up of racist or imperialist designs. Does this mean to fall back into a myth of American uniqueness? Perhaps it is helpful at this point to clarify what we are actually referring to when we use the term “American” in analyses of American society and culture, for after all, it is one of the major promises of the transnational turn to finally get rid of the exceptionalist spell of the term “American” and the self-centered, narcissist forms of self-congratulation often coming along with it. “American” in the exceptionalist version refers to particular national characteristics (“Wesensmerkmale”) and particular national virtues. But there is another possible use of the word, in which the term “American” refers not to a mythic national identity but to a particular set of economic, social or cultural conditions that, for historical and other reasons, are different from those of other countries and nations. For example, the persistently strong role of religion in the United States is a by now rare phenomenon in Western countries and therefore an aspect of American society that we have to understand better, not only because of its theological, cultural, and social dimensions, but also because of its political consequences. This does not mean that we have to buy into the exceptionalist myth of a “city upon a hill.” Nor does a focus on specific conditions of development prevent us from acknowledging and applying transnational perspectives, if they help us to understand the role of religion in the U.S. better. In fact, as Randolph Bourne had already pointed out, a strong transnational dimension is part of the special conditions under which American society and culture have developed. If we define American Studies as an attempt to understand how the American system, American culture and the idea of “America” work, we are free to draw on comparative perspectives where these may appear useful, but we are not obliged to focus on metaphors of marginalization as the key to understanding the U.S. 28 28 To give but one example: The institute at which I am teaching in Berlin - the John F. Kennedy-Institute for North American Studies of the Freie Universität Berlin, an interdisciplinary institute consisting of six departments: history, political science, Theories of American Culture 75 Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. “Perennial Fashion - Jazz.” In Prisms. London: Spearman, 1967, 119-132. Agnew, Jean Christophe. “The Consuming Vision of Henry James.” In The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History 1880-1980, edited by Richard Wightman Fox and T.J. Jackson Lears, 67-100. New York: Pantheon, 1983. Arnold, Matthew. 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West, Cornel. “The New Cultural Politics of Difference.” In Out There. Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, edited by Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Trinh-ha, and Cornel West, 19-36. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990. Williams, Raymond. Culture & Society 1780-1950. New York: Harper & Row, 1958. —. The Long Revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961. R OB K ROES European Anti-Americanism: What’s New? “Nous sommes tous américains.” We are all Americans. Such was the rallying cry of the French newspaper Le Monde’s editor-in-chief, Jean-Marie Colombani, published two days after the terrorist attack against symbols of America’s power. He went on to say: “We are all New Yorkers, as surely as John Kennedy declared himself, in 1962 in Berlin, to be a Berliner.” If that was one historical resonance that Colombani himself called forth for his readers, there is an even older use of this rhetorical call to solidarity that may come to mind. It is Jefferson’s call for unity after America’s first taste of two-party strife. Leading opposition forces to victory in the presidential election of 1800, he assured Americans that “We are all Federalists, we are all Republicans,” urging his audience to rise above the differences that many at the time feared might divide the young nation against itself. There would clearly be no need for such a ringing rhetorical call if there were not at the same time an acute sense of difference and division. Similarly in the case of Colombani’s timely expression of solidarity with an ally singled out for vengeful attack, solely because it, more than any of its allies, had come to represent the global challenge posed by a shared Western way of life. An attack against America was therefore an attack against common values held dear by all who live by standards of democracy and the type of open society that it implies. But as in Jefferson’s case, the rhetorical urgency of the call for solidarity suggests a sense of difference and divisions now to be transcended, or at least temporarily to be shunted aside. This sense of difference had always been there during the years of the Cold War, but was contained by the threat of a common enemy. With the end of the Cold War, though, the need for a reorientation of strategic thinking was felt on both sides of the Atlantic that, if anything, only sharpened differences and divisions. Undeniably many changes that occurred during the 1990s are direct consequences of the end of the Cold War. To mention just a few of the obvious examples, the expansion of the European Union and of NATO into areas under the sway of the Soviet Union during the Cold War are attempts at reconfiguring the world that were clearly occasioned by the Soviet Union’s collapse. Similarly, the Balkan wars of the 1990s or Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait would likely not have occurred in the absence of the breakdown of an international balance of power and ideology and of patterns of clientism, typical of the Cold-War world. Most dramatically, perhaps, 80 R OB K ROES trans-Atlantic tensions, never absent during the Cold War but contained by the imperative of a joint defense against the Soviet bloc, now appear as clashing visions of the post-Cold War new world order. The words - “New World Order” - were coined by George Bush the elder, at the time of the first Gulf War, when briefly it seemed as if the framework of international institutions, centering on the United Nations, could finally come into its own. But the world has moved a long way away from those early hopes and visions. And we may well be asking ourselves the question whether the terrorist attack on symbols of American power on September 11 th , 2001, may not have been a greater sea change than the end of the Cold War. Or was it merely the catalyst that led America to implement a foreign policy approach that had been in the making since the early 1990s? If so, and it seems likely it is, America’s current foreign policy is clearly a response to its unique position of the one hegemon in a unipolar world, intent on safeguarding that position. A group of neo-conservative foreign-policy analysts took their cue from a White Paper produced in 1992 at the behest of Richard Cheney, then Secretary of Defense, entitled “The New American Century.” In 1997 they coalesced around the Project for a New American Century and founded a think-tank under that name. Their thinking hardened around a view of American foreign policy centering on military strength. Now, in the current Bush administration, they are in a position to implement their views. Parallel to this gestation of a foreign-policy view, in American society throughout the 1990s national rituals such as the Super Bowl increasingly blended the appeal of mass spectator sports with displays of military prowess and martial vigor (Kooijman, 2004). It may herald a militarization of the public spirit, propagated through the mass media. To some it is eerily reminiscent of earlier such public stagings, as at the time of the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany. It may have readied the American public’s mind for the later curtailment of democratic rights through the Patriot Act and the emergence of a national security state at the hands of the current Bush administration. In a recent article American philosopher Richard Rorty warned Europeans that institutional changes made in the name of the war on terrorism could bring about the end of the rule of law in both the U.S. and Europe. Remarkably, he forgot to mention that many of these changes had already come to the United States, without much public debate or resistance. 1 Much as the entire world may have changed in the wake of the Cold War, my focus shall be on the particular ways these changes have affected 1 Rorty, 2004. In a spirited response, as yet unpublished, Tomas Mastnak, currently a fellow at the International Center for Advanced Studies at New York University, took Rorty to task for ignoring recent trends in the United States. European Anti-Americanism: What’s New? 81 Europe and the United States, internally as well as in their trans-Atlantic relation. An important aspect is the way Europeans and Americans have begun to redefine each other, in response to a creeping alienation that has affected public opinion and public discourse on both sides of the Atlantic. If increasingly each side appears to the other as “Other,” as more alien than at any point during the Cold War, the construction of this perspective is not entirely new. It draws on older repertoires of anti-Americanism in Europe, or of anti-Europeanism in the United States, as illustrated by Secretary Rumsfeld’s snide reference to “old Europe.” Yet there may be a new, and more ominous, ring to these revived repertoires. They may also strike responsive chords among people who previously thought they were free from such adversarial sentiments. In what follows I wish to explore this new resonance. It is partly a personal account, an attempt at introspection, tracing emotional and affective shifts in the way I perceive and experience America. Let me begin with a necessary proviso. Recently, in a piece in the French newspaper Le Monde, Alfred Grosser reminded us that one need not be anti-American for opposing America’s foreign policy, nor an anti-Semite or anti-Zionist for taking Israeli government policy to task (2003, 8). He is not the first to make the point, nor will he be the last. The point bears making time and time again. Too often the cry of anti-Americanism or anti-Semitism is used as a cheap debating trick to silence voices of unwelcome criticism. Like Grosser I have studied forms of anti-Americanism for years, trying to understand what triggers it, trying to understand the logic of its inner structure, while looking at it from a rather Olympian height. More often than not the subject had seemed more meaningfully connected to the non- American settings where it appeared than to America itself. But like Grosser I now feel the need to make a point that had for so long seemed obvious. He and I and many others now feel a stronger urge to take our distance from the directions that American foreign policy is taking, and ironically are now confronting the charge that we have become anti-American. A topic of intellectual and scholarly interest has now assumed the poignancy of a private dilemma. Grosser and I and others know we have not turned anti-American, while having become critical of the turn American policies have taken. We are now facing the question of when a stance critical of specific American policies becomes anti-American. For that shift to occur, more is needed than disagreement, however vehement. Anti-Americanism typically proceeds from specific areas of disagreement to larger frameworks of rejection, seeing particular policies or particular events as typical of a more general image of America. Anti-Americanism in that sense is mostly reductionist, seeing only the simplicity of the cowboy and Texas provincialism in President George W. Bush’s response to terrorism, or the 82 R OB K ROES expansionist thrust of American capitalism in Bush’s Middle-East policies. And so on, and so forth. Entire repertoires of stereotyped Americas can be conjured up to account for any contemporary trans-Atlantic disagreements. To the extent that for people like Grosser and me the topic of anti-Americanism has come home to roost, the following section illustrates the beforeand-after quality of my involvement with the topic. It is in part a personal account of my attempts to keep my feelings of alienation and anger over recent trends in America’s foreign policy from alienating me from America more generally. It is the report of a balancing act. I happened to be in the United States on the dismal day of September 11 th , 2001. I had flown in from Washington DC to Logan Airport in Boston the previous evening, hours before knife-wielding terrorists hijacked civilian airplanes taking off from Logan. I stood transfixed in front of the television screen, impotently watching the second plane crash into the second of Manhattan’s Twin Towers, then seeing them implode - almost in slow motion, as I remember it. A year later I was back in the United States, watching how Americans remembered the events of the year before in a moving, simple ceremony. The list of names was being read of all those who lost their lives in the towering inferno of the World Trade Center. Their names appropriately reflect what the words World Trade Center conjure up; they are names of people from all over the world, from Africa, the Middle East, the Far East, the Pacific, Latin America, Europe, and of course North America - people of many cultures and many religions. Again the whole world was watching, and I suddenly realized that something remarkable was happening. The American mass media recorded an event staged by Americans. Americans powerfully re-appropriated a place where a year ago international terrorism was in charge. They literally turned the site into a lieu de mémoire. They were in the words of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, read again on this occasion, consecrating the place. They imbued it with the sense and meaning of a typically American scripture. It is the language that, for over two centuries, has defined America’s purpose and mission in the ringing words of freedom and democracy. I borrow the words “American scripture” from Michael Ignatieff. He used them in a piece he wrote for a special issue of Granta (Ignatieff, 2002). He is one of twenty-four writers from various parts of the world who contributed to a section entitled “What We Think of America.” Ignatieff describes American scripture as “the treasure house of language, at once sacred and profane, to renew the faith of the only country on earth (…) whose citizenship is an act of faith, the only country whose promises to itself continue to command the faith of people like me, who are not its citizens.” Ignatieff is a Canadian. He describes a faith and an affinity with European Anti-Americanism: What’s New? 83 American hopes and dreams that many non-Americans share. Yet, if it was the point of Granta’s editors to explore the question of “Why others hate us, Americans,” Ignatieff’s view is not of much help. In the outside world after 9/ 11, as Granta’s editor, Ian Jack, reminds us, there was a wide-spread feeling that “Americans had it coming to them”, that it was “good that Americans now know what it’s like to be vulnerable.” For people who share such views American scripture deconstructs into hypocrisy and willful deceit. They may well see their views confirmed now that America is engaged in an occupation of Iraq, advertised as an intervention to bring democracy to that country, while in fact engaging in acts that may well be war crimes in terms of international treaties that count the U.S. among its co-signatories. There are many signs in the recent past of people’s views of America shifting in the direction of disenchantment and disillusionment. Sure enough, there were fine moments when President Bush rose to the occasion and used the hallowed words of American scripture to make it clear to the world and his fellow-Americans what terrorism had truly attacked. The terrorists’ aim had been more than symbols of American power and prowess. It had been the very values of freedom and democracy that America sees as its foundation. These were moments when the president literally seemed to rise above himself. But it was never long before he showed a face of America that had already worried many long-time friends and allies during Bush’s first year in office. Even before September 11th, the Bush administration had signaled its retreat from the internationalism that had consistently inspired U.S. foreign policy since World War II, if not before. Ever since Woodrow Wilson American scripture had also come to imply the vision of a world order that would forever transcend the lawlessness of international relations. Many of the international organizations that now serve to regulate inter-state relations and give legitimacy to international actions bear a markedly American imprint, and spring from American ideals and initiatives. President Bush Sr., in spite of his avowed aversion to the “vision thing,” nevertheless deemed it essential to speak of a New World Order when at the end of the Cold War Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait seemed to signal a relapse into a state of international lawlessness. Bush Jr. takes a narrower, national-interest view of America’s place in the world. In an un-abashed unilateralism he has moved United States foreign policy away from high-minded idealism and the arena of international treaty obligations. He is actively undermining the fledgling International Criminal Court in The Hague, rather than taking a leadership role in making it work. He displays a consistent unwillingness to play by rules internationally agreed and to abide by decisions reached by international bodies that the United States itself has helped set up. He squarely places the United States above or outside the reach of interna- 84 R OB K ROES tional law, seeing himself as the sole and final arbiter of America’s national interest. After September 11 th this outlook has only hardened. The overriding view of international relations in terms of the war against terrorism has led the United States to ride roughshod over its own Constitutional protection of civil rights as well as over international treaty obligations under the Convention of Geneva in the ways it handles individuals, U.S. citizens among them, suspected of links to terrorist networks. Seeing anti-terrorism as the one way to define who is with America or against it, president Bush takes forms of state terrorism, whether in Russia against the Chechens, or in Israel against the Palestinians, as so many justified anti-terrorist efforts. He gives them his full support. He calls Sharon a “man of peace” and has pre-empted future negotiations between the Palestinians and the Israelis by supporting strategic Israeli positions regarding the Palestinians’ rights of return under international law, or Israeli settlement of occupied Palestinian land, which is against international law. If Europeans beg to differ and wish to take a more balanced view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Bush administration and many op-ed voices in the United States blame European anti-Semitism. This latter area is probably the one where the dramatic, if not tragic, drifting apart of America and Europe comes out most starkly. It testifies to a slow separation of the terms of public debate. Thus, to give an example, in England the chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, 2 said that many of the things Israel did to the Palestinians flew in the face of the values of Judaism. “(They) make me feel very uncomfortable as a Jew.” He had always believed, he said, that Israel “must give back all the land (taken in 1967) for the sake of peace.” Peaceniks in Israel, like Amos Oz, take similar views. Even more remarkably, in the wake of the recent rampage of the Israeli army in the Gaza strip that left 1600 Palestinians homeless, Tommy Lapid, the justice minister and the only Holocaust survivor in the Israeli government, declared that the house demolitions were inhumane. As the Guardian Weekly quoted him, he said: “The demolition of houses in Rafah must stop. It is not humane, not Jewish, and causes us grave damage in the world. At the end of the day, they will kick us out of the United Nations, try those responsible in the international court in The Hague, and no one will want to speak to us.” 3 Many in Europe, Jews and non-Jews alike, would agree. And they have the chance to do so, because Israeli voices like Lapid’s are being aired in the European press. Leading quality newspapers, in France, in England, in Germany, as well as in other European countries, do what top-notch journalism is all 2 See the interview in the Guardian on August 27 th , 2003. 3 Guardian Weekly, May 28-June 3, 2004, p. 7. European Anti-Americanism: What’s New? 85 about: to write contemporary history as it unfolds, with all its welcome and unwelcome sides. Leading journalists as well as editorial writers are not loath to say the unwelcome things and confront their readers with all the tragic complexity of life in the Middle East. Yet it would be hard to hear similar views expressed in the United States other than in the U.S. equivalent of the Soviet Samizdat voice of dissent: an equivalent that avails itself of the Internet for the spirited exchange of dissenting views. In the public realm there is a closing of ranks, among American Jews, the religious right, opinion leaders, and Washington political circles, behind the view that everything Israel does to the Palestinians is done in legitimate self-defense against acts of terrorism. Yet, clearly, if America’s overriding foreign-policy concern is the war against terrorism, one element tragically lacking in public policy statements of its Middle-East policy is the attempt to look at themselves through the eyes of Arabs, or more particularly Palestinians. A conflation seems to have occurred between Israel’s national interest and that of the United States, as in the case of Richard Perle, foreign policy guru in Washington government circles, who did not see any conflict of interest (personal or national) in drafting policy documents for Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party in Israel in 1997. Both countries, at the official level, share a definition of the situation that blinkers them to rival views more openly discussed in Europe. Among the pieces in Granta is one by a Palestinian writer, Raja Shehadeh. He reminds the reader that “today there are more Ramallah people in the U.S. than in Ramallah. Before 1967 that was how most Palestinians related to America - via the good things about the country that they heard from their migrant friends and relations. After 1967, America entered our life in a different way.” The author goes on to say that the Israeli occupation policy of expropriating Arab land to build Jewish settlements and roads to connect them, while deploying soldiers to protect settlers, would never have been possible without “American largesse.” But American assistance, Shehadeh continues, did not stop at the funding of ideologically motivated programs. In a personal vignette, more telling than any newspaper reports, Shehadeh writes: “Last July my cousin was at a wedding reception in a hotel on the southern outskirts of Ramallah when an F16 fighter jet dropped a hundredpound bomb on a nearby building. Everything had been quiet. There had not been any warning of an imminent air attack. … Something happened to my cousin that evening. … He felt he had died and was surprised afterwards to find he was still alive. … He did not hate America. He studied there. … Yet when I asked him what he thought of the country he indicated that he dismissed it as a lackey of Israel, giving it unlimited assistance and never censoring its use of U.S. weaponry against innocent civilians.” The author 86 R OB K ROES concludes with these words: “Most Americans may never know why my cousin turned his back on their country. But in America the parts are larger than the whole. It is still possible that the optimism, energy and opposition of Americans in their diversity may yet turn the tide and make America listen.” The current Bush administration, with its pre-emptive strategy of taking out opponents before they can harm the U.S. at home or abroad, in much the same way that Israeli fighter jets assassinate alleged Palestinian terrorists, in their cars, homes, and backyards, without bothering about due process or collateral damage, is not an America that one may hope “to make listen.” Who is not for Bush is against him. Well, so be it. Many Europeans have chosen not to be bullied into sharing the Bush administration’s view of the world. They may not command as many divisions as Bush, they surely can handle the “divisions” that Bush - the man who in the 2000 election campaign had portrayed himself as a uniter, not a divider - has inflicted on the Atlantic community, if not on Europe itself. If there is division now in the way that many Europeans “read” the events in the Middle East compared to Americans, it is surely a matter of different exposure to the daily news, which in Europe is presented less selectively, and in a less biased way. Even today, more than a year after President Bush declared the Iraqi mission “accomplished,” many American reporters in Iraq voluntarily embed themselves for their own safety in U.S. Marine encampments. As one correspondent, Pamela Constable of The Washington Post, described her experience: “I quickly became part of an all-American military microcosm” (Massing, 2004, 8). As Michael Massing argues in a piece in The New York Review of Books, if U.S. news organizations truly want to get inside events in Iraq, there’s a clear step they could take: incorporating more reporting and footage from international news organizations. Arabic-language TV stations have a wide presence on the ground. European outlets like the BBC, the Guardian, The Financial Times, The Independent, and Le Monde have Arabic-speaking correspondents with close knowledge of the Middle East. Reuters, The Associated press, and Agence France-Presse have many correspondents stationed in places where U.S. organizations do not venture. As Michael Massing writes in conclusion of his piece: “In the current climate, of course, any use of Arab or European material - no matter how thoroughly edited and checked - could elicit charges of liberalism and anti-Americanism. The question for American journalists is whether they really want to know what the Iraqis themselves, in all their complexity, are thinking and feeling.” (Massing, 2004, 10) It is a charge against a blinkered and parochial American journalism that is more generally made in European attempts at fathoming the depths of the divide between American and European public European Anti-Americanism: What’s New? 87 discourse. 4 A free press, as the highly regarded author and war correspondent Philip Knightley noted in Index on Censorship, would not reduce the post-September 11 debate to “abuse, incitement, personal attacks, inflammatory accusation and intimidation until many a commentator and intellectual, the very people whose voices we want to hear, have been cowed into silence.” (Knightley, 2002) Or driven underground, we might add, into the American Internet form of Samizdat dissent. But there may also be a deeper force at work. Tellingly, the Guardian referred to Tommy Lapid as the sole Holocaust survivor in the current Israeli government. If World War II memories may have resurfaced in his reading of the Gaza events, something similar may be at work on a more general scale among European audiences. Photographs from Palestine or Iraq may well bring back memories of German retaliatory action against villages in occupied Europe, they may also bring back remembered photographs of World War II atrocities used so powerfully in the education of Europeans regarding the enormity of the Nazi reign of terror. They trigger a submerged reservoir that Europeans do not share with Americans. Yet this basic difference need not drive the two sides of the Atlantic apart. When Europeans saw their tragic history repeat itself in the 1990’s Balkan Wars, in the end united action under NATO auspices put an end to the atrocities perpetrated there. Americans and Europeans in the end could share a reading in terms of crimes against humanity. Precisely such a shared reading of events in the Middle East and their implications for foreign policy seems to be lacking. A widely shared sense of outrage among Europeans, fed by the daily exposure to pictures and news reports from the Middle East, translates into impotent anger at an American Middle-East policy seen as lacking balance and fairness. There has been a resurgence of open anti-Americanism in Europe and elsewhere in the world. Not least in the Middle East, the area that has brought us Osama Bin Laden and his paranoid hatred of America, and of the West more generally. But if he can still conflate the two - America and the West - why can’t we? If Raja Shehadeh still holds hopes of an America that one can make listen, why don’t we? Let us face it: We are all Americans, but sometimes it is hard to see the Americans we hold dear in the Americans that hold sway. Those are the dangerous moments when clashing policy views may assume the contours of deeper, more fundamental differences - when difference translates into incompatibility, and the face of just one 4 See, e.g., the chapter “America and the World as America,” in Sardar, 2002, pp. 63-103. Similar best-selling indictments, in languages other than English, of America’s recent course in world politics and the failure of the American press to take an independent and critical position, are e.g., Leyendecker, 2004, Van Wolferen, 2003, or Artaud, 2004. 88 R OB K ROES president may seem to reflect an America that has changed its face more permanently and fundamentally. What different kind of face could that be? As some see it, it may have begun to show the effects of long-term cultural trends that increasingly set America apart from Europe. According to the World Values Survey, a long-term survey research project of the University of Michigan, the overall picture is ambivalent (Inglehart, 2002). America consistently scores as high as or higher than European countries when it comes to values to do with political or economic freedoms. Americans and Europeans share ideas of democracy and freedom and have a common interest in defending those ideas. But the Michigan project also looked at a different set of values and ranks countries along a conceptual axis ranging from traditionalism to secularism. Traditionalism comprises those views that give central place to religion, family, and country. At the other end we find the secular-rational values that emphasize individual choice in matters of life style and individual emancipation from older frameworks of affiliation such as the church or the fatherland. America’s position on this scale is exceptional among Western countries. It leans much more strongly towards the traditionalist end of the scale than European countries (with the exception of Ireland). Americans are the most patriotic of Western nations: 72% claim to be “very proud” of their country, thus putting themselves alongside such countries as India and Turkey. Religion - according to the survey the single most important gauge of traditionalism - positions Americans closer to Nigerians and Turks than to Swedes or Germans. And the differences with North-Western European countries have, if anything, only increased. Since the first survey, in 1981, America has grown more traditional, Europe less. Yet in terms of the other set of values, those of democracy and freedom, they have moved in tandem. From these survey data America appears as a country of a cultural ambivalence all its own, in an evolving idiosyncratic symbiosis of traditionalism and modernism. The historical dynamics of this symbiosis, with the growing influence of traditionalism, may well have contributed to the mutual alienation between Europe and America. Public discourse on either side of the Atlantic is losing its shared terms of reference. America’s political establishment has long been the safe haven of a secular, Enlightenment world view which it shared with political elites in Europe. Slowly but surely, however, traditionalism has made inroads into America’s centers of policy-making. Of the two main political parties, the Republican Party has targeted its political strategy toward the incorporation of the traditionalist segment among the electorate. The strategy is two-pronged. Contemporary traditionalism has thrived on the ongoing culture war against anything connected to the life style revolution of the 1960s. Its anti-modernism may European Anti-Americanism: What’s New? 89 remind us of an earlier high water mark of traditionalism in the 1920s, forever epitomized in the anti-Darwinian Scopes (or “monkey”) trial. At the time it may have seemed like traditionalism’s last hurrah. Yet with great organizational acumen it has made a remarkable come-back, waging a cultural war on the forces of moral relativism and libertarianism unleashed in the 1960s. Having gotten its act together politically it offers itself as a tempting electoral bloc to the Republican Party. Yet the Republican Party is not solely the passive recipient of such support. It has chosen actively to play on the cultural fears of the traditionalists, posturing as the champion of all those who see gay marriage, abortion, divorce and more such moral issues as defining the political agenda, while casting the Democrats as representing moral depravity. If we can discern two different Americas - the one modern and secular, the other centered on traditional values - they seem to coincide with one or the other of the two main parties. America seems to be split down the middle, with its two halves cohabiting in delicate balance. Visiting Europeans, journalists and diplomats among them, cannot fail to notice the wide-spread alienation from the Bush administration precisely based on a cultural rift as outlined here. This view has become common coinage in press commentaries, in Le Monde in France, in The Guardian in England, in the Frankfurter Allgemeine in Germany, to name just three of the more influential, opinionforming newspapers in Europe. Affiliating with the urbane and modern America, as many Europeans are wont to do, they may tend to exaggerate the “moral issues” divide as the single most important determining factor in the Republican Party’s electoral strength. For indeed, exit poll and public opinion data may well suggest that fear of a different sort has assured Bush’s re-election (Chernus, 2004). Against the backdrop of the war on terror, keeping its ugly face from the general public, yet cynically manipulating alarm stages, casting Bush as the decisive war leader while painting the opponent as a flip-flopper, the Republican Party’s electoral strategy has successfully managed to rally those voting on their fears behind it. There is an Orwellian 1984 quality about this, with ongoing low-level warfare and scare-mongering preparing a population to surrender their democratic freedoms. The highly partisan nature of such recent trends may remind Europeans that anti-Americanism is not the point. We may believe we recognize a generic Americanism in any particular American behavior, be it cultural or political. Yet the range of such behavior is simply too wide - ranging in culture from the sublime to the vulgar, and in politics from high-minded internationalism to narrow nationalism - to warrant any across-the-board rejection. Anti-Americanism, if we choose to retain the term at all, should be seen as a weak and ambivalent complex of anti-feelings. It does not 90 R OB K ROES apply but selectively, never extending to a total rejection of both forms of Americanism: the cultural and the political. Thus we can have either of two separate outcomes; an anti-Americanism rejecting cultural trends which are seen as typically American, while allowing of admiration for America’s energy, innovation, prowess, and optimism, or an anti-Americanism in reverse, rejecting an American political creed that for all its missionary zeal is perceived as imperialist and oppressive, while admiring American culture, from its high-brow to pop varieties. These opposed directions in the critical thrust of anti-Americanism often go hand in hand with opposed positions on the political spectrum. The cultural anti-Americanism of those rising in defense of Europe’s cultural identities is typically on the conservative right wing, whereas the political anti-Americanism of the Cold War and the war in Vietnam typically occurred on the left. Undoubtedly the drastic change in America’s position on the world stage since World War II has contributed to this double somersault. Since that war America has appeared in a radically different guise, as much more of a potent force in every-day life in Europe and the larger world than ever before. As we all know, there is a long history that illustrates Europe’s long and abiding affinity with America’s daring leap into an age of modernity. It shared America’s fascination with the political modernity of republicanism, of democracy and egalitarianism, with the economic modernity of progress in a capitalist vein, and with an existential modernity that saw Man, with a capital M and in the gender-free sense of the word, as the agent of history, the molder of his social life as well as of his own individual identity and destiny. It was after all a Frenchman, Crèvecoeur, who on the eve of American independence pondered the question of “What, then, is the American, this new Man.” A long line of European observers have, in lasting fascination, commented on this American venture, seeing it as a trajectory akin to their own hopes and dreams for Europe (Kroes, 2000, chapter 9). Similarly, French immigrants in the United States, in order to legitimize their claims for ethnic specificity, have always emphasized the historical nexus of French and American political ideals, elevating Lafayette alongside George Washington to equal iconic status (Foucrier, 1999). But as we also know, there is an equally long history of a French, and more generally European, awareness of American culture taking directions that were seen as a threat to European ways of life and views of culture. Whether it was Tocqueville’s more sociological intuition of an egalitarian society breeding cultural homogeneity and conformism, or later views that sought the explanation in the economic logic of a free and unfettered market, the fear was of an erosion of the European cultural landscape, of European standards of taste and cultural value. As I have argued elsewhere, the French were not alone in harboring such fears, (Kroes, 1996) but they European Anti-Americanism: What’s New? 91 have been more consistently adamant in making the case for a defense of their national identity against a threatening process of Americanization. The very word is a French coinage. It was Baudelaire who, on the occasion of the 1855 Exposition Universelle de Paris, spoke of modern man, set on a course of technical materialism, as “tellement américanisé … qu’il a perdu la notion des différences qui caractérisent les phénomènes du monde physique et du monde moral, du naturel et du surnaturel” (Lacorne, a.o., 1986, 61). The Goncourt brothers’ Journal, from the time of the second exposition in 1867, refers to “L’exposition universelle, le dernier coup à ce qui est l’américanisation de la France” (Ibid., 62). As these critics saw it, industrial progress ushered in an era where quantity would replace quality and where a mass culture feeding on standardization would erode established taste hierarchies. There are echoes of Tocqueville here, yet the eroding factor is no longer the egalitarian logic of mass democracy but the logic of industrial progress. In both cases, however, whatever the precise link and evaluating angle, America had become the metonym for unfettered modernity, like a Prometheus unbound. These longer lines of anti-Americanism, cultural and political, are alive and well today. And often the two blend into one. Whenever Europeans, particularly young ones dressed in blue jeans and T-shirts, rise in protest against American interventions on the world stage, they go out and smash the windows of a nearby McDonald’s (and there is always a McDonald’s nearby). As an icon of America’s global presence, it represents in the eyes of protesters America’s cultural imperialism, but it serves equally well as an emblem of political imperialism. The protest is facile and inarticulate, yet it serves to make a point against American power seen as overbearing and unresponsive. But how about the recent surge of anti-Europeanism in the United States? Given Europe’s daring post-World War II venture in the construction of a European Union, inventing proto-federalist forms in the search for a supra-national Europe, how do we account for the recent resurgence of anti-Europeanism in the United States? Having promoted and supported this European evolution for many decades, why have so many American opinion leaders now turned anti-European? In the vitriolic vituperation that has recently set the tone of trans-Atlantic exchanges leading American voices discard as the “Old Europe” those countries that criticize the drift of American foreign policy, while hailing other countries as the “New Europe” that are willing to follow in America’s footsteps. Robert Kagan contributed to this rising anti-Europeanism in the United States when he paraphrased the dictum that men are from Mars, women from Venus. As he chose to present the two poles, Americans now are the new Martians, while Europeans are the new Venutians. Never mind the gendering implied in his 92 R OB K ROES view that Europeans are collectively engaged in a feminine endeavor when they pursue the new, transnational and cosmopolitan Europe. He does make an astute point, though, when he describes the European quest as Kantian, as an endeavor to create a transnational space where laws and civility rule. As Kagan sees it, though, the Europeans are so self-immersed that they are forgetful of a larger world that is Hobbesian, not Kantian, and is a threat to them as much as to the United States. To the extent that Europeans still involve themselves in the larger world they tend to emphasize peace-keeping operations rather than pre-emptive military strikes (Kagan, 2003). Kagan and many others tend to forget that it has taken the United States about a hundred years to find and test its institutional forms and build a nation of Americans from people flooding to its shores from all over the world. It could only have done so while turning its back to the world, in self-chosen isolationism, under the protective umbrella of a Pax Britannica. Europe has had only some forty years to turn its gaze inward when it engaged in shaping the contours of a new Europe. During those years it enjoyed in its turn the protection of an umbrella, provided this time by the Pax Americana. This constellation came to an end along with the Cold War. Yet only then could the European construction fully come into its own, conceiving of the new Europe on the scale of the entire continent. It is a tremendous challenge and Europe needs time to cope with it. If it succeeds it may well serve as a model to the world, a rival to the American ideal of transnationalism, of constituting a nation of nations. If they are rival models, they are at the same time of one kind. They are variations on larger ideals inspiring the idea of Western civilization and find their roots in truly European formative moments in history, in the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment. Larry Siedentop places the formative moment even earlier in time, coinciding with the rise of a Christian view of the universal equality of mankind vis-à-vis God. As he presents it, the formative moment consisted in universalizing a religious view that in Judaism was still highly particularist, claiming an exceptionalist relation between God and the people of Israel (Siedentop, 2000, 190, 195, 198). This shared heritage inspired the first trans- Atlantic readings of what the terrorist attack of 9/ 11 signified. It was seen as an onslaught on the core values of a shared civilization. How ironic, if not tragic, then, that before long the United States and Europe parted ways in finding the proper response to the new threat of international terrorism. As for the United States, the first signs of its farewell to internationalism in foreign policy - to its Wilsonianism, if you wish - and to its pioneering role in designing the institutional and legal framework for peaceful interstate relations in the world, had, as I pointed out before, actually preceded 9/ 11. No longer does the Bush administration conceive of the United States as the primus inter pares, setting the guidelines for collective action while European Anti-Americanism: What’s New? 93 seeking legitimacy for action through treaties and United Nations resolutions. As the one hegemon on the world stage it now feels free to pursue its national interest through policies that one can only describe as unilateralist. It may seem like a throwback to the time of nation state sovereignty, a stage of history that Europe is struggling to transcend. Unspectacular and cumbersome as the European project may seem, it is already rich in achievement. It has brought together long-time enemies like Germany and France, it has admitted as democratic member states nations that quite recently knew fascist dictatorships, like Italy, Spain, and Portugal, or that were under the heel of military dictators, like Greece. It recently admitted nations that had lived under Communist rule since World War II. Turkey, a long-time member of NATO and since 1949 a member of the Council of Europe and subscriber to the European Convention on Human Rights, is now busy getting its house in democratic order so as to qualify for membership of the European Union. If the European project is successful - and this means the inclusion of Turkey - Europe, I strongly believe, would offer a model to the world, particularly the world of Islam or for that matter the state of Israel, of a civil and democratic order, multi-national and multi-cultural, far more tempting than the version of democracy brought under American auspices through pre-emptive military invasion. Those in support of what the United States are pursuing in Iraq, blithely call it a neo-Wilsonianism. I beg to differ. If there is a neo-Wilsonian promise, it is held by the new Europe, not the current Bush administration. In the European repertoire of the cultural critique of America, one observation may have gained in poignancy. Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre in France, or Oswald Spengler in Germany, have been among those who noted an absence in America of the European sense of the tragic. In the blithe meliorism of the American project to bring democracy to the Middle East, what is lacking is the awareness that the active pursuit of good ends may well result in achieving its opposite. As in classic Greek tragedy, the Gods may strike with blindness those they wish to destroy. In the case of America’s forward defense of democracy in Iraq, though, the blindness may be self-inflicted, as if its leaders were in a pathological state of denial. When the shocking pictures of systematic humiliation of Iraqi prisoners entered the public realm, President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld dismissed the acts as un-American. If this is what Americans did, it is not what Americans would do. America is inherently good. 5 Among many others, Romano 5 I am paraphrazing the comic Rob Corddry on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart: “It’s our principles that matter, our inspiring, abstract notions. Remember: Just because torturing prisoners is something we did, doesn’t mean it’s something we would do.” Quoted by Danner, 2004, 74. 94 R OB K ROES Prodi, president of the European Commission in Brussels, begged to differ. Never one to mince words, he affirmed that the Iraq tortures were war crimes, which, for him, made it difficult to see the American presence in Iraq as a peace mission. Others, of a subtler cast of mind, expressed similar views. Thus, in an interview in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on the occasion of his 75 th birthday (Habermas, 2004a), German philosopher Jürgen Habermas testified to his disillusionment and disenchantment with the current U.S. administration and its standard bearers. The experience was all the more painful since, as he acknowledged, he could not have come into his own as a philosopher of public space and democratic debate without the impact of America’s pluralist liberalism and its philosophy of pragmatism. Ever since he was sixteen, his political ideas had been nourished by the American enlightenment ideals, thanks to a sensible reeducation policy in the postwar years of American occupation in Germany. But now, in a recent book on the divided West, he has this to say: “Let us not delude ourselves: The normative authority of America lies in shatters.” 6 The official manipulation of public opinion and the rampant patriotic conformism he said he would not have deemed possible in the liberal America that he envisions. Let me return to the editor-in-chief of Le Monde, Jean-Marie Colombani. Like Habermas his feelings about America have followed a curve from affiliation all the way to alienation, only in a shorter time span. In a May, 2004, editorial entitled “Are We All Un-American? ” (Colombani, 2004), he comments on Rumsfeld’s facile dismissal of the Abu Ghraib abominations as un-American. If this implies a definition of true Americanism, it is one that Colombani refuses to share. As Colombani put it: “In the wake of September 11, we all felt ourselves to be Americans. Donald Rumsfeld would make us all un-American.” I tend to agree. If the Bush administration shows us the face of a self-righteous, arrogant, and unbridled Americanism, it is an Americanism that I oppose. 6 Habermas, 2004b. The quotation is from the interview in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. European Anti-Americanism: What’s New? 95 Works Cited Artaud, Denise, L’Amérique des néoconservateurs: L’Empire a-t-il un avenir? Paris: Editions Ellipses, 2004. Chernus, Ira, http: / / www.tomdispatch.com/ index.mhtml? pid=2068, 2004. Colombani, Jean-Marie, “Tous non-américains? ”, Le Monde Sélection Hebdomadaire, 22 May, 2004, 1, 9. Danner, Mark, “The Logic of Torture,” The New York Review of Books, LI (11) June 24, 2004. Foucrier, Annick, Le rêve californien: Migrants francais sur la côte Pacifique (XVIII e - XX e siècles), Paris, 1999. Grosser, Alfred, “Les hors-la-loi,” Le monde, Friday, 18 April 2003, reprinted in Le monde, Sélection hebdomadaire, (no. 2842, 26 April 2003), 8. Habermas, J., “Interview with Franziska Augstein,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, 138 (18 June, 2004a), 15. Habermas, J., Der gespaltete Westen, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2004b. Ignatieff, Michael, “What we think of America,” Granta, 77 (Spring 2002), 47-50. Inglehart, Ronald L., ed., Human Values and Social Change: Findings from the World Values Surveys (International Studies in Sociology and Social Anthropology, 89), 2002. Kagan, Robert, Of Paradise and Power: America and europe in the New World Order, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. Knightley, Philip, “Losing Friends and Influencing People,” Index on Censorship, January 2002, 31 (1), 146-55. Kooijman, Jaap, “Bombs Bursting in Air: The Gulf War, 9/ 11, and the Super Bowl Performances of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ by Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey,” in: Ruud Janssens and Rob Kroes, eds., Post-Cold War Europe, Post-Cold War America, Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2004, 178-94. Kroes, Rob, If You’ve Seen One, You’ve Seen the Mall: Europeans and American Mass Culture, Urbana/ Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Kroes, Rob, Them and Us: Questions of Citizenship in a Globalizing World, Urbana/ Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Lacorne, D., J. Rupnik, and M.F. Toinet, eds., L’Amérique dans les têtes, Paris: Hachette, 1986. Leyendecker, Hans, Die Lügen des Weissen Hauses: Warum Amerika einen Neuanfang braucht [The Lies of the White House: Why America Needs a New Start] Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2004. Massing, Michael, “Unfit to Print? ” New York Review of Books, LI (11) June 24, 2004, 8. Rorty, Richard, “Post-Democracy,” London Review of Books (1 April 2004). Sardar, Ziauddin, and Merryl Wyn Davies, Why Do People Hate America? Cambridge: ICON Books, 2002. Siedentop, Larry, Democracy in Europe, London: Penguin Books, 2000. Van Wolferen, Karel, De ondergang van een wereldorde [The Demise of a World Order] Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Contact, 2003. T HOMAS C LAVIEZ Between Aesthetics and (Ethno-)Politics, Europe, America, and Beyond: Cosmopolitanism from Henry James to Toni Morrison I Within the last two decades, a remarkable paradigm change is to be observed within American Studies - a change toward transnational studies. This turn is due to reasons both within and outside the discipline. In the name, and within the frame, of globalisation, calls are voiced to transcend the narrow frames of reference that national literatures and cultures provide. The paradigm change within the discipline of American Studies can be traced back to two related, though quite independent developments. Thus in the eighties the revisionist movement, whose influence lasts until now, has criticized the Myth & Symbol School for perpetuating, through its monomythical canonization of white Anglo-Saxon writers, American exceptionalism; scholars like Don Pease, John Carlos Rowe, Amy Kaplan and Robyn Wiegman come to mind here. While at the beginning this revisionist critique focused upon the task to expose the mechanisms of exclusion at work in the existing canon, and to supplement this canon with alternative ones, other analyses, such as those of Sacvan Bercovitch, have drawn our attention toward the problematic powers of integration that the American myths provide. In an argument that strongly echoes Herbert Marcuse’s concept of repressive tolerance, Bercovitch claims that the centripetal force of these myths proves capable not only to defuse any resistance toward the social, political, and cultural status quo, but even to use such opposition in order to sustain this very status quo. 1 If, then, the national resources of resistance potentially, if unwittingly, support the very structures they intend to change or even overcome, then the only option left is to look for such forces of resistance outside of the sphere of influence of the American rhetoric - that is, by enlarging the disciplinary 1 Cf. Sacvan Bercovitch, Rites of Assent (London: Routledge, 1993); Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon, 1964); on the connection between Bercovitch and Marcuse, cf. also my “Dimensioning Society: Ideology, Rhetoric, and Criticism in the Work of Sacvan Bercovitch,” in W, Fluck (ed.), The Historical and Political Turn in Literary Studies, REAL Vol. 11 (Tübingen: Narr, 1995): 173-205. 98 T HOMAS C LAVIEZ field though a comparative approach. One of the best and most renowned examples of such a strategy is probably Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic. The debate about multiculturalism and multi-ethnicity, however, ranges still further back in time, and back to another American myth: that of the melting-pot. This myth ignites - long before the revisionists’ intervention - the discussion how the U.S. relates to its diverse ethic groups and cultures. The socio-cultural debate about the melting pot, that arises even earlier than the publication of the founding texts of American Studies such as Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land and Leo Marx’ The Machine in the Garden, later rejoins and re-enforces the revisionist turn. While revisionism emphasizes the subtle strategies of exclusion and inclusion, multiculturalism pursues the search for potential and actual roots of resistance at the periphery of the national, such as the brothers Ramon and David Saldívar have done for the Chicano/ Chicana movement, Lisa Lowe has done for Asian-Americans, and Arnold Krupat has done for the Native Americans - to mention just a few. These developments were, moreover, accompanied and informed by the rise of poststructuralist theories, without which the turn to postcolonial studies and theories would have been unthinkable. Within this paradigm, a concept has regained attention and relevance that has existed within the philosophical tradition of Europe since 2000 years, and that also played a role in American culture and literature since the end of the nineteenth century - the time, that is, when the myth of the melting-pot also gained influence: that of cosmopolitanism. The renaissance of the concept of cosmopolitanism might partly be explained by the fact that, contrary to other rather vague notions like, for example, multiculturalism, it combines both descriptive and prescriptive aspects; a combination, that is, that allows for a critical reassessment of both the developments within the discipline of American Studies as well as those of globalization as such. On the other hand, the figure of the Cosmopolitan, the citizen of the world, itself is in need of revision, since it is being instrumentalized by both sides of the contemporary globalization debate. While the political and economic elites claim a cosmopolitan frame of mind that combines economic influence, geographical mobility, professional expertise, and cultural connoisseurdom - discredited, at times, by its critics as “frequent flyer cosmopolitanism” 2 - the ethos of openness toward alterity and the acceptance of the Other is used by others as a means against the equalization of the world in the name of instrumental reason. 2 Cf. Calhoun, Craig J., “The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travelers: Toward a Critique of Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism.” The South Atlantic Quarterly (Vol. 101, No. 4, Fall 2002) 869-897. Between Aesthetics and (Ethno-)Politics, Europe, America, an Beyond 99 This is the case in the theoretical works of Emmanuel Lévinas and Jacques Derrida. 3 The debate ignited by Nussbaum’s essay “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” which is documented in the volume For Love of Country, cannot be resumed here. What this debate makes clear, however, is that neither the concept of cosmopolitanism nor its definition is undisputed. What the different contributions to this volume do make evident is that a liberal conception of the tolerant citizen of the world, to which Nussbaum resorts in the tradition of the Stoics and Kant, is forced to open itself to different and other definitions of what cosmopolitanism is or may be, in order to avoid the assumption of a universal cosmopolitanism that ignores the very differences it set out to acknowledge. This, finally, leads to the paradoxical conclusion that, as Sidney Pollock and others in the introduction to a special issue of Public Culture point out, it is “uncosmopolitan” to categorically define cosmopolitanism, since every single definition excludes other possible definitions, which contradicts the basic idea of cosmopolitanism as such. 4 The complex of problems as I have outlined it so far lifts any theory of cosmopolitanism to a meta-theoretical level: Any attempt to define the concept of cosmopolitanism finds itself confronted with the very objections of essentialism and nationalism that it set out to overcome. Thus the question arises whether cosmopolitanism itself implies a set of universalist assumptions that contradicts its efforts to opening up towards what is different or other - a problem pointed out by writers as diverse as Carl Schmidt, Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Charles Taylor. 5 How, that is, do the axioms and assumptions proposed by cosmopolitan philosophers from the Stoics (Zeni, Diogenes, later Seneca, Plutarch and Cicero), and later in the wake of Kant’s works, relate to the fact that the sovereignty of definition as to what is to be considered cosmopolitan and what not is itself always embedded in a specific cultural context and part of a historically contingent genealogy? On the other hand, can a radical relativism that takes into account such contingencies operate at all with a concept such as cosmopolitanism? 3 Cf. Derrida, Jacques, Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000); On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (London: Routledge, 2001); Levinas, Emmanuel, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1981); Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969). 4 Pollock, Sheldon, et al., “Cosmopolitanisms,” in Carol Breckenridge et al. (eds.), Cosmopolitanism, Public Culture No. 4 (Durham: Duke UP, 2000) 577-590. 5 Schmitt, Carl, The Concept of the Political [1938] (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996); Enzensberger, Karl Magnus, Aussichten auf den Bürgerkrieg (Frankfurt/ Main, 1993); Taylor, Charles, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition: An Essay (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992). 100 T HOMAS C LAVIEZ One of the possibilities to avoid such a Catch-22 situation is to pursue theories of a “vernacular,” “situated,” or “local” cosmopolitanism, as they have been proposed by Homi Bhabha, Lorenzo Simpson, or Gayatri Spivak. These authors attempt a theoretically precarious combination of the local and the global in what has been labelled the “Glocal.” 6 Another recent approach, however, resorts to the concept of aesthetics, and more specifically, to literature, which is considered to have special qualities to transport and represent cosmopolitanism. Thus Bruce Robbins speaks about “tonal experiments” in novels such as Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day and Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, while Anthony Appiah goes so far as to declare the novel in general a cosmopolitan genre, in that it succeeds to combine local and individual horizons of experience with general or even universal human problems; an assumption to be found in a similar vein also in Martha Nussbaum’s works. 7 Often, Mikhail Bakhtin’s concepts of the dialogic and the polyphonic in the novel are referred to in this context, which begs the question, however, if the cosmopolitan can be reduced to the polyphonic and heterogeneous as such. There undoubtedly is a democratic impetus inherent in polyphony; it is, however, important to have a closer look at how the different voices are accorded weight, legitimation, and thus recognition, and on what ethical basis such recognition is withheld or given. As both generic, cultural, or conceptual generalizations about what “cosmopolitan” might mean carry quite a few problems in their wake, I would like to have, in what follows, a look at the American “Glocalism” of such modernist writers such as Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and Alain Locke, as well as at its postmodernist variety in Toni Morrison, famous contemporary voice of the African Americans in the last decades. The modernist authors whose works I mentioned above are all situated roughly between the turn of the century and 1940. A time, that is, on the one hand still highly influenced by the project of the consolidation of an American national culture, which started about 1850 with the works of the Transcendentalists and Whitman’s poetry, and was extended into histori- 6 Bhabha, Homi, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge 2004); Simpson, Lorenzo C., Technology, Time, and the Conversations of Modernity (London: Routledge, 1994); Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999). 7 Cf. Appiah, K. Anthony, “Cosmopolitan Reading,” in Vinay Dharwadker (ed.), Cosmopolitan Geographies: New Locations in Literature and Culture (London: Routledge, 2000) 197-227; Robbins, Bruce, “The Village of the Liberal Managerial Class,” in Vinay Dharwadker (ed.), Cosmopolitan Geographies: New Locations in Literature and Culture (London: Routledge, 2000) 15-32; Nussbaum, Martha C., “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” in For Love of Country (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996) 21-29; Poetic Justice (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995). Between Aesthetics and (Ethno-)Politics, Europe, America, an Beyond 101 ography by Fredrick Jackson Turner’s famous frontier thesis. A time, on the other hand, in which the melting pot was mainly interpreted, as Philip Gleason has shown, as an assimilative process designed to shed cultural idiosyncrasies and otherness in order to achieve what Alexis Tocqueville described as early as 1840 as “the general equality among the people” which he considered “the fundamental fact from which all others seemed to be derived.” 8 While what I have called the national-cultural consolidation of white America was fuelled mainly by the attempts to get rid of the sustaining influence of Europe and its aesthetic norms, the three authors that I want to have a closer look at are characterized by both a distance toward the American scene and a renewed interest in Europe. To use Europe as a backdrop against America was, however, by no means a new phenomenon of American literature at the turn of the century. Since the Puritans Europe has served as a screen on which - mostly favourably - to project American progress and successes. In words that could also be written by Emerson or Whitman, Cotton Mather as early as 1702 declared in the Magnalia Christi Americana: Let Greece boast of her patient Lycurgus …; let Rome tell of her devout Numa … Our New England shall tell and boast of her Winthrop, a lawgiver as patient as Lycurgus, but not admitting any of its criminal disorders; as devout as Numa, but not liable to any of his heathenish madnesses; a governour in whom the excellencies of Christianity made a most improving addition unto the virtues, wherein even without those he would have made a parallel for the great men of Greece, or of Rome, which the pen of a Plutarch has eternized. 9 Others have followed Mather, among the most prominent being Royall Tyler (The Contrast, 1787) and Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Marble Faun, 1860). A notable exception preceding the work of Henry James is William Wells Brown’s The American Fugitive, which depicts, in contrast to the former, America as savage and Europe as civilized, and not as decadent and antiquated, as which it was usually conceived. What develops, around the turn of the century, are two versions of cosmopolitanism which, although they overlap in various ways, ought to be distinguished. One is an aesthetic variety of cosmopolitanism which is reflected in the works of Henry James and Gertrude Stein; the other is what I would call an ethno-political cosmopolitanism that is first developed by W.E.B. Du Bois, but given a full and theoretically reflected expression in the works of Alain Locke. What characterizes all of these authors is a 8 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951) 3. 9 Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana; or, the Ecclesiastical History of New- England, ed. Thomas Robbins (1852, rpt. New York, 1967) I, 118. 102 T HOMAS C LAVIEZ degree of distance toward American culture; a distance toward what they conceive as its parochialism that either feeds into a narrow nationalistic literature that courts the taste of a market geared toward the “common man,” or whose narrowness and fear of the other or the unknown is expressed in simple racism. Both the parochialism of the Victorian world view and the parochialism of an American society hard put to deal with the newly freed slaves provided the hotbed for a new form of cosmopolitanism that was, however, expressed in different forms and designed to serve different ends in the works of James, Stein and Locke. II Let us therefore be of nowhere, but without forgetting that we are somewhere. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves For all of the above, however, the concept of cosmopolitan is intrinsically connected to the more general idea of civilization. While the nationalist outlook of a Whitman or an Emerson considers America as the epitome of civilization, James’ attitude toward America is more ambivalent. His early work, e.g., The American, is still characterized by the predominant stereotypical image of Europe as morally questionable and socially decadent. In his later novels - most notably The Ambassadors - he draws a more ambivalent picture of the relation between American and European culture. Especially the question of the moral superiority of modern America in comparison to a Europe still marked by aristocratic culture - especially and repeatedly evoked by the topic of the seduction of a morally innocent American hero by a “femme du monde” - acquires, in The Ambassadors, a more complex shape. 10 Many critics - among them, most notably, James himself - have considered The Ambassadors his most achieved novel in regard to the “international theme” so prominent in his oeuvre. 11 At the novel’s center is the concept of art as one of the tools to break up a narrowly nationalistic point of view in order to achieve a cosmopolitan broadening of horizon. Such a 10 Henry James, The American [1877] (New York: Penguin, 1981); The Ambassadors [1903] (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998). 11 James himself calls the novel “quite the best, ‘all round’” of his productions in his preface to it (xxxi); an assessment that, e.g., E.M. Forster shared in his Aspects of the Novel. On the cosmopolitanism of James’ writings, cf. Leon Edel, Henry James and the Cosmopolitan Imagination (New York: New York University Papers, 1967); John F. Desmond, “Flannery O’Connor, Henry James, and the International Theme,” Flannery O’Connor Bulletin 9 (1980) 3-18; Jessica Berman, Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of Community (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001). Between Aesthetics and (Ethno-)Politics, Europe, America, an Beyond 103 cosmopolitanism, however, entails a certain elitism which James himself was often accused of, and which thus reflects some of the reservations James harbored toward American democracy and its egalitarian structures. This democratic tradition stands in stark contrast to a still hierarchically structured European society whose cultural “openness” carries both aspects of aesthetic mundaneness and moral demi-mundaneness. Many critics have reduced the story to a simple clash of cultures. One pole is puritanically disposed Woollett, Massachusetts, to which the ambassador Lambert Strether tries to bring back the allegedly “lost son” of Mrs. Newsome, Chad Newsome, in order to then receive his “bounty” in the form of Mrs. Newsome herself. Paris, on the other hand, is considered by Mrs. Newsome and her likes the European den of iniquity which Chad has fallen into, but which he in the end manages to escape from - to the charms of which, however, the ambassador himself, Strether, finally succumbs. Although at the end of the story it becomes clear that Chad in fact has an affair to a married “femme du monde,” Madame de Vionnet, what has hardly been recognized by many critics is that James never really describes the fundamental change that Chad has undergone in Europe. Mostly, the attempts to explain Chad’s change are reduced to a mainly positive, though indescribable and finally inexplicable development he has gone through; or rather, the inscrutable driving forces behind it. The following quote is just one instance of many in the novel: “The phenomenon that had suddenly sat down there with him was a phenomenon of change so complete that his imagination, which had worked beforehand, felt itself, in the connexion, without margin or allowance… it was too remarkable, the truth; for what could be more remarkable than this sharp rupture of an identity? ” (96) 12 Most often, art and aesthetic experience allegorically replace genuine explanations for both his and Chad’s conversion. Strether’s own experience with Europe and the influence it has upon both Chad and himself is so overwhelming - though seemingly unrepresentable - that he finally urges Chad not to go back to Woollett and stays himself, thus declining the fortune of Mrs. Newsome offered for a successful intervention. 13 12 At no point in the novel does James indicate, let alone describe, how exactly Chad has changed, or what might have caused this change. 13 Although, as Terry Eagleton has pointed out, James hardly ever addresses problems of class in his novel, The Ambassadors is almost manically obsessed with questions of money, and is permeated by a “fiscal discourse.” Thus, even Chad’s magical change in Europe rests, after all, on his financial means to go and stay there in the first place, which becomes clear when Mrs. Gostrey draws a connection between the “vulgar industry” of the Newsome’s that provides the money for Chad’s adventures, and his reluctance to return: “Is it perhaps then because it’s so bad - because your industry is so vulgar - that Mr. Chad won’t come back? Does he feel the taint? Is he staying away 104 T HOMAS C LAVIEZ Lambert Strether, however, is by no means the self-defying hero who simply leaves all monetary calculations behind because he considers himself morally undeserving due to his betrayal of Mrs. Newsome. Not only does he urge Chad to leave Madame de Vionnet after having “all that can be got” out of her, adding that Chad’s “value has quintupled” (428) due to her positive influences on him - thus taking quite a fiscal view on what is, after all, a love affair. Declining both his own future with Mrs. Newsome as well as the one offered him by Mrs. Gostrey, his adviser in things European who offers herself as a kind of replacement for Mrs. Newsome, his moral integrity is, for him, purely a question of calculation; one which forbids him to gain any profit whatsoever from his European adventure. Which has Mrs. Gostrey say, in one of the finely ironic moments so typical for James: “It isn’t so much for your being ‘right’ - it’s your horrible sharp eye for what makes you so” (438). Moral instinct, that is, is replaced by moral calculation altogether. Thus, Strether finally displays the very calculating, monetary, Puritan morality that characterizes Woollett, Massachusetts. James’ main protagonist, then, is by no means the cosmopolitan archetype that many commentators have taken him to be. His calculating attitude still makes him an outsider to the sublimely incalculable otherness that Europe represents to American eyes; an otherness that cannot be captured by the monetary accounting that might “quintuple” one’s values by simply going there. There is no “assessing” otherness, no “accounting for” it, and that is why James himself consequently restrains from defining this otherness in any way. What art itself can do - both in the novel and as this novel - is only to expose the reader or spectator to this otherness, without in any way giving a ready-made example or model how to deal with it. Art, that is, resists familiarization; its task rather is, in the words of Russian formalist Viktor Shlovsky, to defamiliarize the view on objects and persons threatened to be reduced - by means, for example, of prejudices and stereotypes - to the already known and the allegedly familiar. 14 In fact, Europe finally remains impermeable to both Strether, to the prejudiced people of Woollett, and finally to the reader him/ herself; a hermetically sealed mystery neither not to be mixed up with it? ” “Oh,” Strether laughed, “it wouldn’t appear - would it? - that he feels ‘taints’! He’s glad enough of the money from it, and the money’s his whole basis” (42). Nevertheless, Strether feels uncomfortable when this topic is raised, as he answers Mrs. Gostrey’s inquiry whether he has been “paid in advance” to get Chad back: “Ah, don’t talk about payment! ” (52) 14 Viktor Shlovsky, “Art as Technique,” in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, ed. and transl. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965). Between Aesthetics and (Ethno-)Politics, Europe, America, an Beyond 105 to be accounted for by economic calculations or touristic usage, nor disclosed by simply reading a novel - not even a Jamesian one. III The intercourse of cities with one another is apt to create a confusion of manners; strangers are always suggesting novelties to strangers … the refusal of states to receive others, and for their citizens never to go to other places, is an utter impossibility, and to the rest of the world is likely to appear ruthless and uncivilized. Plato, The Laws Although Gertrude Stein’s view on Europe concentrates on Paris as well, her representation of it follows a completely different aesthetic program. Starting from her modernist project to free and unearth, by means of literary strategies taken from cubism, and through repetition, objects from the cultural and semantic sediments they have been covered with, the question arises as to how such a strategy fares once it takes on an “other” such as France. Similar to Tender Buttons, in which objects are freed of their semantic wastes of the past by means of repetition and almost Dadaistic connotations, Paris, France tackles an entire nation - a nation, moreover, that has been the object of many American stereotypifications from Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans to Star Wars. 15 As in James, art plays a decisive role in Paris, France; though I am afraid that I won’t have the opportunity to go into this aspect of her work in any detail. Starting from a picture of a Waterloo battle-scene that has influenced her picture of France since her youth, however, she takes up the generalizations that unavoidably go with any stereotype and extends them into absurd spheres. Thus statements such as “There is no difference between life and death in France” (13), “any French person has to have one child” (19), or “[a]ny French child can thoroughly understand everything” (102), throw an almost Dadaesque-satirical flashlight on the distorting absurdities of stereotypes and prejudices. Other, steadily repeated characterizations of the French as “fashionable,” “logical,” and “civilized” lose, in the context of their evocations, any cognitive and semantic potential. Moreover, very personal and particularized anecdotes allegedly designed to prove and support these stereotypes, on the one had subvert these very stereotypes, but on the other hand amount, in their total, to a very personal, if not idiosyncratic image of France. In connection with the stereotypes that function like two- 15 Gertrude Stein, Paris, France (London: Peter Owen, 2003). 106 T HOMAS C LAVIEZ dimensional screens devoid of any meaning, an image of France is evoked that seems very individual on the one hand, very strange on the other; an image that protects France and French culture against the reductive appropriation though these stereotypes. Paradoxically, however, her own generalizations about France and England serve to throw them into relief as compared to an adolescent and tumultuous America, a clear reference to the American Adam, as in the following quote: France who was the background of all who were excited and determined and created by the twentieth century but who herself was not at the time enormously interested. France really prefers civilization to tumultuous adolescence, France prefers that the adolescent learns reserve and logic and civilization and fashion as he emerges out of adolescence, France who thinks that childhood and adolescence should be felt instinctively as not an end in itself but as a progression toward the state of being civilized (119/ 20). What is special about Stein’s France is its attitude toward foreigners. In her usual, playfully hyperbolic style she states: After all to the French the difference between being a foreigner and being an inhabitant is not very serious. There are so many foreigners and all who are real to them are those that inhabit Paris and France … Naturally, they come to France. What is more natural for them to do than that? (18/ 9) It is “natural” since, as she elaborates, “[f]oreigners belong in France because they have always been here and did what they had to do here and remained foreigners. Foreigners should be foreigners and it is nice that foreigners are foreigners and that they inevitably are in Paris and in France” (20). Again, a deeper truth lies behind the childlike matter-of-factness of this statement: That France, in Stein’s view, does not exert the pressure to acculturate to is mores (whether that is indeed true for France is another question), but that it extends its hospitality to embrace difference, and not to dissolve it in an imaginary melting-pot. Paris, France, then, is way more than the “Stein for beginners” that the critics have mostly reduced it to; in its sometimes sardonic humour, it opens another way to deal with the irreducible strangeness of the culturally other, and the same time to satirically criticize one strategy to reduce this complexity: that of stereotypification. IV The problem of stereotypes - especially that of racist ones - has haunted another group of Americans even more urgently: African-Americans. The campaign against such parochialisms thus acquires a different - and Between Aesthetics and (Ethno-)Politics, Europe, America, an Beyond 107 more urgent - quality for them. Individuals such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke, however, are also characterized by a fundamental distance toward the dominating culture of America, and thus by a certain estrangement toward it. The turn toward an alternative culture - in Du Bois’ and Locke’s case, toward African-American culture - is inasmuch more problematic, as that the latter had been considered, in American culture, as second-rate, primitive, and undeveloped. What intellectuals as Du Bois and Locke were consequently asked to perform is a double task: On the one hand to create a place for African-American culture, but on the other hand to do so by forging coalitions with an audience and a readership beyond that of the contemporary literary market which reduces African Americans to roles between Uncle Tomism, minstrelsy, and a potential threat to white civilization and culture. In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois draws quite a bleak picture of the Black artist. He sees him darkened by the shadow of a vast despair. Men call the shadow prejudice, and learnedly explain it as the natural defence of culture against barbarism, learning against ignorance, purity against crime, the “higher” against the “lower” races. To which the Negro cries Amen! and swears that to so much of this strange prejudice as is founded on just homage to civilization, culture, righteousness, and progress, he humbly bows and meekly does obeisance. 16 (789) Du Bois, however, turns the tables upon those prejudiced against the alleged “barbaric” African-Americans by denouncing racist stereotypification as the real barbarism, and as a lack of education and civilization. Torn, that is, between the attempt to establish and revalue an own African-American tradition to provide the roots for something like an ethnic identity and selfconsciousness, and his own cosmopolitan education - in the face of which he sees both white and black culture wanting - the cosmopolitan internationalism of the later Du Bois tries to bridge the gap by forging alliances between the talented tenth of ethnically aware intellectual elites. It is these alliances that Du Bois believes to be able to leave behind and to transcend both the parochialism of a racist white mainstream culture as well as that of a black culture which three hundred years of oppression have left in rudimentary shatters. 17 16 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Cambridge: University Press John Wilson and Son, 1903) 5. 17 Cf. W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” in The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative Negroes of To-Day (New York: James Pott & Company, 1903). Among the first figures to forge a connection between and aesthetic and an ethnopolitical is certainly Randolph Bourne, whose 1916 essay “Trans-National America” - though steeped in American pioneer rhetoric, and arguing only on behalf of the Non-English, white races - argues against the parochialism of the Anglo-Saxon establishment and for a positive attitude towards alterity and difference. 108 T HOMAS C LAVIEZ This bridging, as the case of Alain Locke makes clear, is, however, a precarious theoretical challenge. Poised between a “cultural cosmopolitanism” and a “racial culturalism”, Locke combined the so-called “primitivism” of the Afro-American tradition with the elitism of modern art. 18 Both his philosophical background and his modernistic inclinations have induced critics to call him “Eurocentric to the tip of his cane” - which, interestingly enough, again connects his concept of cosmopolitanism with European preferences. Indeed, Locke tried to create parallels between African-American and Irish, German, Italian and Jewish folklores in a very sophisticated way, which brought him the reputation of being “the high priest of the intellectual snobbocracy.” 19 As Terry Eagleton has claimed with regard to James, Locke’s aesthetic mandarinism tended to completely disregard the entire realm of economy and class - the very aspects the late Du Bois would later put at the center of his Marxist views and writings. Locke, on the other hand, tried to tap the resources of African-American imagination in order to transcend ethnic and national boundaries by means of a “cosmic emotion such as only the gifted pagans knew, of a return to nature, not by the way of the forced and worn formula of Romanticism, but through the closeness of an imagination that has never broken kinship with nature.” 20 In the following, longer self-portrait, Locke pits the parochialism of Philadelphia against his own cosmopolitan views - views that he acquired by resorting to the classic European texts on cosmopolitanism: Philadelphia, with her birthright of provincialism flavoured by urbanity and her petty bourgeois psyche with the Tory slant, at the start set the key paradox; circumstance compounded it by decreeing me as a Negro a dubious and doubting sport of American and by reason of the racial inheritance making me more of a pagan than a Puritan, more of a humanist than a pragmatist …. Verily, paradox has followed me the rest of my days: at Harvard, clinging to the genteel tradition of Palmer, Royce and Munsterberg, yet attracted by the disillusion of Santayana and the radical protest of James (William James, that is) …. At Oxford, once 18 Cf. Paul Allen Anderson, Deep River: Music and Memory in Harlem Renaissance Thought (Durham: Duke UP, 2001). 19 George Schuyler, quoted in David Levering Lewis, When Harlem was in Vogue (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989) 149; 117. Whether, as Ross Posnock claims, cosmopolitanism “became the crucial term enabling Locke’s move from expatriate aesthete to race man,” begs the question, as it suggests Locke’s moving away from the first and toward the latter, which I don’t think is correct. Rather, his cosmopolitanism enabled him to achieve a theoretical precarious balance between the two. Cf. Ross Posnock, Color and Culture: Black Writers and the making of the Modern Intellectual (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998) 195. 20 Alain Locke, “Negro Youth Speaks,” in A. Locke/ A. Rampersad, The New Negro (New York: Touchstone, 1997) 52. Between Aesthetics and (Ethno-)Politics, Europe, America, an Beyond 109 more intrigued by the twilight of aestheticism, but dimly aware of the new realism of the Austrian philosophy of value; socially Anglophile, but because of race loyalty, strenuously anti-imperialist; universalist in religion, internationalist and pacifist in world-view, but forced by a sense of simple justice to approve of the militant counter counter-nationalisms of Zionism, Young Turkey, Young Egypt, Young India, and with reservations even Garveyism and current-day “Nippon over Asia.” Finally, a cultural cosmopolitan, but perforce an advocate of cultural racialism as a defensive counter-move for the American Negro, and accordingly more of a philosophical mid-wife to a generation of younger Negro poets, writers, artists than a professional philosopher. Small wonder, then … that I project my personal history into this inevitable rationalization as cultural pluralism and value relativism, with a not too orthodox reaction to the American way of life. 21 Interestingly enough, if one brackets the ethnic references in this quote, it could have been written by both James and Stein as well. As Locke, both James and Stein were strongly influenced by the philosophy of William James, though both remained, as did Locke, rather humanists than pragmatists; as Locke, both evince a “not too orthodox reaction to the American way of life,” and both despised the “provincialism” of a “petty bourgeois psyche” that they detested and that they, contrary to Locke, fled permanently. All three resort to Europe as an alternative reference point which offered for them a degree of sophistication not to be found in America. All three lived with the paradox that by necessity characterizes a cosmopolitan outlook, in that they retained and evinced, in their writings, both attachments and reservations toward their country of origin, as well as to the continent they frequently connoted with cosmopolitanism - Europe. All three emphasize the respect toward, and sometimes sublime inscrutability of, the other that a genuinely cosmopolitan openness entails. It is quite striking that, after almost 50 years of national consolidation and ethnic identity politics, this split between Europe and American as reoccurred. Both the parochialism and the imperial desires of contemporary America have led leading intellectuals of American Studies to turn toward Europe again after a phase in which America and Europe were simply thrown together under the label “Western culture” or “Western metaphysics.” Among those scholars are those who I have mentioned above; those, that is, who pursue a transnational approach toward American Studies. This is not to say that Europe holds some kind of key to cosmopolitanism; Locke’s lecture on cosmopolitanism from 1908 indeed calls for a rethinking 21 Cited by Horace B. Kallen, “Alain Locke and Cultural Pluralism,” Journal of Philosophy 54: 5 (1927) 122. 110 T HOMAS C LAVIEZ of the Eurocentric logic of cosmopolitanism. 22 In what is an almost prophetic warning against a frequent flyer cosmopolitanism, Locke warns that the cosmopolitan’s fetishizing pursuit of exotica or raw source materials among colonized peoples and nondominant populations hardly amounts to reciprocal exchange. This reciprocity, however, cannot be presumed as long as the process of ethno-cultural consolidation has not come full circle. Or, as bell hooks has put it so poignantly: “It is easy to give up your identity - when you got one.” 23 V Let us say yes to who or what turns up, before any determination, before any anticipation, before any identification, whether or not it has to do with a foreigner, an invited guest, or an unexpected visitor, whether or not the new arrival is the citizen of another country, a human, animal, or divine creature, a living or a dead thing, male or female. Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality The potentially tragic aspects of such a process of identity politics are something that newer literary productions such as Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, but especially Toni Morrison’s Paradise dramatize. In the face of the excesses of this ethnic consolidation, Toni Morrison’s Paradise points toward another cosmopolitanism beyond reciprocity; a cosmopolitanism of a radical, indeed impossible hospitality that echoes the philosophical works of Emmanuel Lévinas and Jacques Derrida. The choice of Morrison’s Paradise might strike some as surprising, being, as it is, set exclusively in the context of an all-Black, small American town called Ruby. In contrast to Silko’s all-comprising gesture in Almanac of the Dead, Paradise sketches a scenario in which the trajectory of emancipation started by DuBois and Locke comes full circle. The contrast between the convent that offers refuge to the five main female protagonists, and the all- Black town of Ruby, is a restaging of the American Dream under different ethnic presumptions. It can be considered as a brutally honest coming to terms with the reigning identity politics to which ethnic emancipation has lead at the end of the 20 th century. The strongly heterogeneous, persecuted group of women that finds refuge in the convent outside Ruby is facing a group of African American inhabitants of Ruby, whose diaspora - they 22 Alain Locke, “Cosmopolitanism,” paper read to the Cosmopolitan Club, Oxford University, June 9, 1908; quoted in Anderson, Deep River, 122. 23 bell hooks, “Postmodern Blackness,” Postmodern Culture 1: 1 (Sep. 1990) 4. Between Aesthetics and (Ethno-)Politics, Europe, America, an Beyond 111 were denied help and shelter from their way up from the South - ends in the founding of their ethnically exclusive city. Ironically, while the foundational mono-myth of white America has acquired a black face, its mechanisms of inand exclusion have stayed the same. It serves the powerful of Ruby as a legitimation, although or because, embodied in the oven that forms the centrepiece of the city, the founding inscription cannot be exactly deciphered, and lends itself to different and in fact contradicting interpretations. Morrison here brilliantly plays with the difference between the ambivalence of the founding myth and the possible ideological appropriations it gives way to; the difference, that is, between the open inclusiveness of the mythical basis, and the exclusiveness of the different ideological uses and abuses that more and more throw into relief an increasing heterogeneity that the leaders of the town desperately try to suppress and deny. 24 This attempt to preserve ethnic purity contrasts strongly with the openness and hospitality of the convent located outside the city, where everyone, independent of gender and color, is offered refuge. In another brilliant narrative move, Morrison right at the beginning informs the reader that there is one white woman among those who live at the convent; the novel never discloses, however, who of the five female protagonists the white one is. The convent, however, also serves as a temporary safe - or saving - haven for some, even male, citizens of Ruby. This fact - together with the one that the convent’s permanent inhabitants are all female, and that they do not distinguish between skin color - arouses the suspicion of the patriarchically structured Ruby and leads, in the end, to a ferocious and violent attack on the convent and its inhabitants. The dystopian end of Morrison’s story, I would argue, dramatizes in an extraordinary fashion what both Lévinas and Derrida have called the impossibility of an alternative conception of cosmopolitanism based upon the notion of a radical and thus impossible, hospitality. A hospitality that, according to Derrida, “irreconcilably opposes The law, in its universal singularity, to a plurality that is not only a dispersal (laws in the plural), but a structured multiplicity, determined by a process of division and differentiation” (Derrida, 79). What is so innovative about Lévinas’s and Derrida’s approaches to cosmopolitanism is that, by means of the concept of hospitality, they are able to reach both beyond the problems of identity politics and allow to conceptualize cosmopolitanism from the perspective not of those who travel, but those who receive and take in - a concept of hospitality that both Morrison 24 For a comprehensive analysis of the relationship between myth and ideology, see Thomas Claviez, Grenzfälle: Mythos - Ideologie - American Studies (Trier: wvt, 1998). 112 T HOMAS C LAVIEZ and Lévinas see strongly connected with a female aspect. 25 In what I take to be Morrison’s most courageous novel, this principle is reflected in the unconditional hospitality of the inhabitants of the convent. This hospitality and openness stands in striking contrast to the closed structures and rules of Ruby, whose insistence on ethnic purity, if not isolation, is ironically a result of a traumatic experience of hospitality withheld, when the founders, almost starving, where turned away by whites. In no other ethnic novel I know of is the connection between the dangerous consequences of identity politics and parochialism so intrinsically connected to the topic of hospitality as in Morrison’s Paradise. In this work, not only are the aesthetic and the ethnopolitical aspects of cosmopolitanism brought together; moreover, the open, highly ambivalent, but also tragic end of the novel, in which the citizens of Ruby attack and partly kill the female inhabitants of the convent, is one of the most successful dramatizations of what Lévinas has called the “allergic” reaction toward the other, as well as of what Derrida calls the “unconditionality” of a radical ethics of cosmopolitan hospitality. 26 Morrison extends her concept of hospitality by means of a cosmopolitanism that is certainly not Eurocentric - which, however, seems only adequate in a time of globalization as ours. Paradise, then, points to a new Glocalism beyond the limits of a non-committal liberalism so often connoted to cosmopolitanism; a cosmopolitan ethics highly needed to tackle the problems awaiting a world becoming more and more globalized. 25 Levinas has been repeatedly accused of a certain essentialism in connecting his concept of hospitality with that of the female; this, then, would certainly also be true of Morrison. Cf. Emmanuel Levinas, “Judaism and the Feminine Element,” transl. E. Wyschogrod, Judaism 18: 1 (1969) 33ff; Luce Irigaray, “Questions to Emmanuel Levinas: On the Divinity of Love,” transl. M. Whitford, in R. Bernasconi/ S. Critchley (eds.), Re-Reading Levinas (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1991) 109-118; Catherine Chalier, “Ethics and the Feminine,” ibid, 119-129; Tina Chanter, “Antigone’s Dilemma,” ibid, 130-148. 26 “This unconditional law of hospitality, if such a thing is thinkable, would be a law without imperative, without order, and without duty” (Derrida 83). P AUL G ILES Medieval American Literature: Emerson, Longfellow, and the Longue Durée While the very notion of medieval American literature might seem oxymoronic, the purpose of this essay is to consider ways in which such a formulation could not only make a paradoxical kind of sense but might also be seen as integral to the construction of the subject more generally. In fact, the idea of medieval American literature is hardly more peculiar in itself than F.O. Matthiessen’s once apparently oddball but now thoroughly naturalized conception of an “American Renaissance.” Matthiessen, working at Harvard at a time when the Ivy League establishment looked down condescendingly upon the vulgarities of U.S. culture, sought to justify his subject by aligning nineteenth-century American writers - Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Melville, and Whitman - with seventeenth-century English forerunners: Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Milton, Thomas Browne. Matthiessen’s polemical point was that, in terms of both thematic complexity and stylistic innovation, these American authors could be competitively evaluated “in accordance with the enduring requirements for great art,” with the tragic dimensions of Hawthorne and Melville embodying “certain indispensable attributes that are common also to the practice of both Shakespeare and Milton.” 1 Matthiessen’s parallelism was also indebted to the conception, widespread among the subject’s first generation of scholars, of the Elizabethan roots of American language and literature, a theory propounded by Harry Morgan Ayres in the first Cambridge History of American Literature, published in 1919, and subsequently popularized by H.L. Mencken and others. This kind of historical analogy has re-surfaced in more recent critical variations, such as Robin Grey’s consideration of the apocalyptic tenor of Emerson’s writing alongside the iconoclastic, regicidal impetus of Milton’s turbulent prose style. 2 In this sense, to talk about medieval American literature might be seen as nothing new, since it merely takes the old conceit of a metaphorical continuity between European and American literature and approaches it from a dif- 1 F.O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1941), pp. xi, xiv. 2 Michael Boyden, “Predicting the Past: The Functions of American Literary History” (Ph.D. thesis, Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven, 2006), 217-29; Robin Grey, The Complicity of Imagination: The American Renaissance, Contests of Authority, and Seventeenth-Century English Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997), 53. 114 P AUL G ILES ferent chronological perspective. The way in which this Elizabethan world of intellectual discovery and religious reformation was widely mythologized as a cradle of American liberties has, however, subsequently produced a peculiarly slanted version of the American literary domain. Part of the value of the Renaissance in the eyes of nineteenth-century American historians such as George Bancroft, William Prescott and Francis Parkman was the way in which it introduced a split between the progressive narrative of rational freedom on the one hand and the reactionary power of feudal aristocracy on the other. In this model, the humanism that began to emerge in the sixteenth century was positioned antithetically to, and indeed partially defined by, a backward-looking medievalism. Conversely, there was a great deal of interest and concern in the United States during the earlier part of the nineteenth century in how the new country might relate to the longue durée of the historical past. Lawrence Buell estimates that between 1790 and 1830 “historical works, including historical fiction, accounted for a quarter or more of America’s best-sellers,” climbing to an astonishing figure of more than 85% in the 1820s, and much of this popular interest can be explained in terms of a reaction against the dislocating, destabilizing conditions of the post-Revolutionary era. 3 Representatives of the new United States frequently tried to compensate for the catastrophic disorientation of suddenly finding themselves without a history by reintegrating the English past as their own, such as we see in Washington Irving’s tributes to Chaucer and Shakespeare in The Sketch Book (1819), or later in Thomas Bulfinch’s widely-read The Age of Chivalry (1858), which argued pointedly that Americans “are entitled to our full share of the glories and recollections of the land of our forefathers, down to the time of colonization thence.” Fifty years later, in 1908, Brander Matthews, a professor at Columbia, was still describing Chaucer and his contemporaries as part of Americans’ common inheritance. 4 All literary (and historical) traditions are retrospective fictions, of course, and the point I wish to emphasize here is a metacritical one, illustrating the complicated relationship between past and present in American literary history and the ways in which the institutionalization of the subject over recent times has tended to distort and occlude these complex anterior dimensions. For example, the myth of Puritan origins proposed by Sacvan Bercovitch led him to describe John Winthrop as significantly lacking a medieval utopia and of his sermon “A Model of Christian Charity” as substituting the figure 3 Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture: From Revolution Through Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), 195. 4 Kim Moreland, The Medievalist Impulse in American Literature: Twain, Adams, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1996), 5; Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Random House, 1991), 175. Medieval American Literature 115 of Christ for the more prosaic, worldly figure of the sheriff. 5 However, as Francis Bremer’s biography of Winthrop points out, this is largely to ignore the first forty-two years of Winthrop’s very active life, spent largely in East Anglia, where he would have encountered sheriffs (and other English officials) aplenty. Bremer argues that the pragmatic Winthrop sought subsequently to base the civil institutions of Massachusetts “on those of England rather than ancient Israel,” on existing worldly models rather than Biblical prototypes, having in his legalistic mind analogies between the colony of Massachusetts Bay and medieval states such as Normandy or Gascony, which paid homage to the King of France without, as a “point of government,” being administratively dependent on that country. 6 Bremer suggests that Winthrop saw New England as a parallel but not subordinate form of Old England, and one larger inference to be drawn from this is that consideration of a medieval legacy in American culture might help to tease out a different version of national identity, one neither so beholden to the idea of the nation state as an independent, autonomous entity, nor so concerned with the imponderable question of its “origins.” If the category of medieval American literature is an oxymoron, then so, of course, is that of medieval English literature. English historian F.W. Maitland in 1908 ascribed the very idea of the feudal system to the ingenuity of the seventeenth-century antiquary Henry Spelman, sardonically locating the “moment of its most perfect development” in the middle of the nineteenth century. (Maitland remarked that a good answer to the examination question “When did the feudal system begin? ” would be “1850.”) 7 More recently, Krishan Kumar has shown how the conception of Old and Middle English as a point of origin for an indigenous tradition of English literature was formalized only when Oxford and Cambridge set up their undergraduate syllabuses in English language and literature, in 1893 and 1917 respectively. Going back further, Christopher Cannon has also argued it was not until the end of the fourteenth century that a framework of romance became the dominant force for shaping a version of English literature, a definition that subsequently became a hegemonic instrument for marginalizing the more localized, experimental variants of English which had been widespread 5 Sacvan Bercovitch, “The Winthrop Variation: A Model of American Identity,” British Academy, London, 19 Feb. 1998. 6 Francis J. Bremer, John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2003), 308, 368. 7 F.W. Maitland, The Constitutional History of England (1908; rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979), 142-43. See also R.C. De Prospo, “The Patronage of Medievalism in Modern American Cultural Historiography,” in Bernard Rosenthal and Paul E. Szarmach, ed., Medievalism in American Culture: Special Studies (SUNY Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1987), 9. 116 P AUL G ILES in earlier centuries. 8 These ironies of continual back formation - what Raymond Williams called the “escalator” of history - are not, in themselves, surprising; but, despite all of the important work it has done over the past two decades, perhaps one of the drawbacks of New Historicist approaches to American literature is that they have tended to suppress the reflexive element that was crucial to Stephen Greenblatt’s approach to Shakespearean culture, the acknowledged incongruity of his attempt “to speak with the dead.” 9 Instead, in their focus on engagements between literary texts and U.S. domestic politics of various kinds, Americanists have often presented those relations as though they existed in transparent, self-evident forms. A projection of medieval American culture, by contrast, might be understood as a disjunctive defamiliarization of that conventional social state and as a precursor of transnationalism in the way it problematizes the conventional spatial and temporal circumference of U.S. cultural norms. As Lee Patterson has observed, there was in the nineteenth century “a Middle Ages of the right and of the left” on both sides of the Atlantic. A medieval dream of order, based around a Tory sense of feudal hierarchy, inspired various forms of anti-industrial feeling in the works of writers from Walter Scott and Benjamin Disraeli through to John Ruskin, while other more radical medieval partisans - William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites, for example - were more nostalgic for what they took to be the anarchic charms of the medieval era, its valorization of the individual craftsman and its happy ignorance of science and the machine age. 10 T.J. Jackson Lears has described how a similar version of medievalism as what he calls a “therapeutic world view” was also prevalent in late-nineteenth-century America, where biographies of the medieval saints proliferated as never before and where Charles Eliot Norton at Harvard was at the centre of a Dante cult emphasizing not the theology of the Middle Ages but its aesthetic curiosities and its supposedly natural morality, something which culminated in the writings of Henry Adams at the 8 Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003), 222; Christopher Cannon, The Grounds of English Literature (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004), 173. 9 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (1973; rpt. London: Hogarth Press, 1985), 9-10; Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988), 1. For the sardonic but telling comment that “what one hears when one hears the dead speak is actually the sound of one’s ‘own voice,’” see Walter Benn Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2004), 138. 10 Lee Patterson, Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1987), p. xi; Alice Chandler, A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-Century English Literature (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), 223. Medieval American Literature 117 turn of the twentieth century. 11 Others, though, took a harsher line towards what they took to be anachronistic American attachments to medievalism, with Mark Twain in 1883 famously castigating Scott’s “jejune” mystification of “an absurd past that is dead” and claiming the American South had become so enamoured of “the Walter Scott Middle-Age sham civilization” that its social and economic progress had been retarded “fully a generation.” 12 The other obvious resonance of medievalism within nineteenth-century American culture involved its treatment of Gothic scenarios. Whereas English Victorian Gothic could (and did) hark back to a specific historical era, American Gothic had no such visible legacy of medieval culture to draw upon, and it is a commonplace in discussions of American Gothic to suggest how its modes of representation consequently got deflected into more figurative forms. Donald Ringe traced its affinities with the dark underside of Enlightenment rationalism, Leslie Fiedler with the inchoate nature of psychosexual terror, Teresa Goddu and other with the long shadows cast by slavery. 13 The stories of Edgar Allan Poe, to take one example, draw frequently on medieval iconography, as with the images of a danse macabre, castellated abbeys and courtiers in “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842). Alfred Kazin saw this “esthetic medievalism” as exemplifying Poe’s rejection of progressive social politics, his implicit attachment to reactionary values and his stance as “an apologist for slavery, order, and hierarchy”; but Poe’s incorporation of a zone of necrophilia carries a more disruptive and disturbing charge, embodying a form of materialistic reaction that highlights what he took to be the incorrigibly abstract nature of American liberal democracy. 14 The emphasis on corporeal limitation exemplified by the danse macabre in “The Masque of the Red Death” operates as a counternarrative to the transcendental rhetoric that Poe despised, with the author here appropriating the culture of medievalism to throw a sinister reflection over U.S. national narratives of sentimental uplift. Besides being rebuked by Kazin for his conservatism, Poe was notoriously excluded from Matthiessen’s American Renaissance because of his supposed pessimism and his being “bitterly hostile to democracy.” Instead, Matthiessen placed Ralph Waldo Emerson at the centre of his magic circle of representative American writers: “To apply to him his own words about 11 T.J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture 1880-1920 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), p. xvi. 12 Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996), 468-69. 13 Donald Ringe, American Gothic: Imagination and Reason in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1982), 2-3; Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Criterion Books, 1960); Teresa Goddu, Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1997), 3. 14 Alfred Kazin, An American Procession (New York: Knopf, 1984), 94. 118 P AUL G ILES Goethe,” said Matthiessen of Emerson, “he was the cow from which the rest drew their milk.” 15 Matthiessen’s positioning of Emerson helped to establish the latter as a figurehead for canonical narratives of liberal individualism that epitomized patriotic values: John Updike, commending Emerson, wrote of how it was the “spiritual essence” of the American “self” not to be “dissolved in Oriental group-think, or subordinated within medieval hierarchy.” 16 But Emerson’s attitude towards “medieval hierarchy” was more complicated than this popular, patriotic view of him would imply, and his lectures on English literature, given in 1835, offer a very different picture from that more familiar to us from “Nature,” “Experience,” and the other heavily-anthologized essays. Whereas “Nature” in 1836 famously advocates an “original relation to the universe,” Emerson’s lecture on Chaucer, given on 26 November 1835, antithetically proclaims: “There never was an original writer. Each is a link in an endless chain … The greatest genius will never be worth much if he pretends to draw exclusively from his own resources.” What Emerson particularly admires about Chaucer is the fact that he is, as Emerson puts it, “never anxious to hide his obligations; he finally acknowledges in every page or whenever he wants a rhyme that his author or the old book says so.” Emerson thus sees the medieval English poet as emblematic of the fact that, as he puts it, “all works of literature are Janus faced and look to the future and to the past.” In this re-reading of the English literary canon, it is intertextuality and tradition that provide the basis for literary creativity, so that “the question of authorship,” says Emerson, “becomes unimportant.” 17 In his 1835 lecture on medieval romance, “The Age of Fable,” Emerson refers proprietorially to “our native English tongue,” positioning himself in a line of continuity with the tradition of English language and literature. He also portrays the “liberal and republican” Chaucer, in his deliberate break with the formality of Latin and turn to the vernacular, as an implied forebear of American writers working some 500 years later. 18 In this same 1835 sequence of lectures, Emerson recounts Michelangelo’s institutional tangles with the sixteenth-century papacy, referring to the artist with typical folksiness as “Michael,” and comparing his acceptance of the papal commission to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel “to the spirit of George Washington’s 15 Matthiessen, American Renaissance, p. xii. 16 John Updike, “Big Dead White Male: Ralph Waldo Emerson Turns Two Hundred,” The New Yorker, 4 August 2003, 81. 17 R.W. Emerson, “Nature,” in Nature, Addresses, and Lectures: The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, I, ed. Robert E. Spiller and Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1971), 7, and “Chaucer,” in The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, I: 1833-1836, ed. Stephen E. Whicher and Robert E. Spiller (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1966), 284-86. 18 R.W. Emerson, “The Age of Fable,” in Early Lectures, 253, and “Chaucer,” 278. Medieval American Literature 119 acceptance of the command of the American armies”; and yet what Emerson admires most about the Italian artist is precisely that he was “not a citizen of any country,” that there is “so little eccentricity” in his representations of, in Emerson’s concluding phrase, “the beauty that beams in universal nature.” 19 This is, of course, a very different Emerson from the one commonly celebrated for his hostility to the “courtly muses of Europe.” The emphasis here on “universal nature” also runs counter to Emerson’s more famous essay “Experience” (1844), which validates particulars, which defines the “true art of life” as “to skate well” on “surfaces,” and which is more obviously in line both with the tradition of American pragmatism that runs through William James and with the anti-essentialist emphasis that has become de rigueur in poststructuralism. 20 My point is that by foregrounding a highly selective version of Emerson’s writings - “Experience,” “The American Scholar,” “The Divinity School Address” and so on - American critics in the wake of Matthiessen have tended to hypostatize a partial version of Emerson as patriot that is not justified by a wider reading of his works. In his 1850 essay on Montaigne, Emerson writes: “The lesson of life is practically to generalize; to believe what the years and the centuries say against the hours; to resist the usurpation of particulars; to penetrate to their catholic sense.” 21 The idiosyncrasy of Emerson’s version of the “catholic sense” of things is that it always exists in a dialectical tension with terrestrial time, incorporating worldly history in order to disavow it. Just as Michelangelo, in Emerson’s interpretation, needed the worldly circumstances of Pope Paul III’s papal court to struggle against so that his statue could come away from the marble, so Emerson’s writing returns compulsively to a failed representation of history, deliberately turning away from a narrative of history as dates and events, causes and effects, and evoking instead an allegory of history as example. Because of the overt antipathy toward fables of the past in some of his writings - in “History” (1841), Emerson expresses disgust with the “shallow village tale that our so-called History is” - Emerson is sometimes thought of as antagonistic toward history per se rather than more specifically to the flat, empirical version of history that he associated with institutional annals. The target in Emerson’s sights in “History” is antiquarianism - “antiquary” is the last word of the essay - and he repeats here an obser- 19 R.W. Emerson, “Michel Angelo Buonaroti,” in Early Lectures, 112, 117, 99. 20 R.W. Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in Natures, Addresses, and Lectures, 69, and “Experience,” in Essays: Second Series. The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, III, ed. Alfred R. Ferguson and Jean Ferguson Carr (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1983), 35. 21 R.W. Emerson, “Montaigne, or the Skeptic,” in Representative Men: Seven Lectures: The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, IV, ed. Douglas Emory Wilson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1987), 104. 120 P AUL G ILES vation he had made in his 1835 essay “The Age of Fable,” about how its depiction of “magic, and all that is ascribed to it, is a deep presentiment of the powers of science.” 22 Emerson, in other words, reads history in Neoplatonic terms, seeking to obliterate categorical distinctions between then and now by reconceiving historical progression as a recurrence of eternal types. It is, however, clearly not the case that for Emerson the idea of medieval history is bunk; instead, he engages systematically with early English culture, exhuming it for his own purposes and reorganizing it in terms of a dialectic between past and present. Just as Emerson attributes the genius of Chaucer’s work to its qualities of intertextual traversal, so Emerson’s own originality consists precisely in spinning things around the other way, in turning tradition on its head, in intertextual argument and displacement rather than in positive statement. There is also a marked resemblance here to Montaigne, one of the subjects of Emerson’s Representative Men (1850), who similarly resisted the appropriation of history for one-dimensional political or religious purposes. Much to the displeasure of the papacy, which placed his work on the Index in 1676, Montaigne broke explicitly with the Christian tradition of historia, substituting instead the fragmentary form of the personal essay, a form that allowed him scope to suggest absences, omissions and alternative points of view which the authorities prefer officially to ignore or repress. 23 By reconfiguring the dogmatic allegory of historia as an allegory of example, Montaigne and Emerson both effectively disarticulate the more coercive directions of established cultural and political narratives and instead reimagine history as a more fluid, evasive field. One particularly interesting aspect of many antebellum writers is the way in which, during this embryonic period of American literature, they tend to reject the flat-footed narrative which would position the past simply as the chronological precursor of the present. Instead, they consciously foreground within their texts the shifting, permeable boundaries of time and space, suggesting how fiction and cartography, the writing of history and the writing of geography, are commensurate with each other. For these authors, only two generations away from the exhilarating but traumatic rupture of political independence, the question of how to go about delineating the map of the past was a complicated one, something to be negotiated only provisionally and with due recognition of the incongruities inevitably involved in that operation. To move backward through time, conjoining the 22 R.W. Emerson, “History,” in Essays: First Series. The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, II, ed. Alfred R. Ferguson and Jean Ferguson Carr (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1979), 22-23, 19; Emerson, “The Age of Fable,” 260. 23 Stephen G. Nicholls, “Example Versus Historia: Montaigne, Erigena, and Dante,” in Alexander Gelley, ed., Unruly Examples: On the Rhetoric of Exemplarity (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1995), 54-56. Medieval American Literature 121 era of national independence with a colonial, pre-colonial or pre-Columbian history, was equivalent to encompassing the country spatially by superimposing a rational grid on native landscapes that had been the province of many different tribal cultures and were not naturally susceptible to such linear designs. The idiosyncratic nature of Emerson’s medievalism involves an acknowledgement of such structural duplicities, thereby fulfilling his own criterion of poetic creativeness, which was that it involved neither staying at home nor travelling but, rather, a transition from one state to the other. Emerson himself used the term “trans-national” in 1845, in relation to the Bhagavad Gı ¯ta, which he called a “trans-national book,” and the general point here is that a genealogy linking American literature to medieval culture opens up a different kind of trajectory for the subject, one less obviously bound by the chronological constraints of the national period. 24 It is important to remember, though, that to Emerson’s contemporaries Matthiessen’s nomination of such a marginal figure at the centre of an American literary “renaissance” would have seemed wilfully eccentric. In their eyes, the much more obvious candidate for such a position would have been Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, by far the most widely-read author in nineteenth-century America, and one who, as professor of modern languages at Harvard until 1854, enjoyed academic and critical as well as popular acclaim: Hawthorne, for instance, placed him “at the head of our list of native poets.” 25 Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha appeared in 1855, the same year as Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, but the difference in the early reception of these two books could hardly have been greater, with Hiawatha selling 30,000 copies during its first six months in print. Emerson damned Hiawatha with faint praise when it appeared as a “safe” poem, “sweet and wholesome as maize,” while Longfellow reciprocated by writing to a friend that while he had been “much delighted” by Emerson’s oratorical style, he could remember “nothing” about his lectures afterward. 26 Although critical efforts have been made recently to re-evaluate the work of sentimental fiction writers of the nineteenth century - Harriet Beecher Stowe, Susan Warner, and others - there has not been an equivalent effort to reassess Longfellow’s central importance to the American literary canon. In part, no 24 Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1995), 404, 408; R.W. Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, IX: 1843-1847, ed. Ralph H. Orth and Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1971), 248. 25 Dana Gioia, “Longfellow in the Aftermath of Modernism,” in Jay Parini, ed., The Columbia History of American Poetry (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1993), 65. 26 Alan Trachtenberg, Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1880- 1930 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004), 84; Buell, New England Literary Culture, 437. 122 P AUL G ILES doubt, this is because he seems like such an irredeemably reactionary figure. Poe was in a distinct minority when he jibed in his reviews of the 1840s at “Professor Longfellow,” casting him as disablingly genteel and excessively long-winded, but by the Modernist era this view had become commonplace. Matthiessen, finding Longfellow’s work “swamped” by “European influences,” dismissed his style as “gracefully decorous,” a mode in which “[a]ny indigenous strength was lessened by the reader’s always being conscious of the metrical dexterity as an ornamental exercise.” 27 The fact that Longfellow was given honorary degrees by both Oxford and Cambridge tended to reinforce this popular understanding of him as an Anglophile renegade, as has the bust of him placed in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey in March 1884, within two years of his death. Yet the terms of Longfellow’s art were much more innovative than this stuffy reputation would imply, and to reconsider his significance within nineteenth-century American literature is to understand how, like Emerson, he conceived the temporal and spatial dimensions of the field not simply in relation to domestic politics or national agendas, but within a more expansive transnational framework. The Song of Hiawatha is, as its title suggests, a musical performance whose lilting, trochaic tetrameters make it easy to remember (and, indeed, to parody). In terms of American folk poetry, it has some of the qualities of Michael Wigglesworth’s The Day of Doom (1662), another poem in a memorable metre - “rocking fourteeners,” as Roy Harvey Pearce called them - which fully one-tenth of the population of New England in the 1660s knew off by heart. 28 Whereas Wigglesworth’s theme is the imminence of apocalyptic doom, Longfellow’s epic of pre-Columbian Indian life sets itself to possess the American continent, to reconcile and uphold the nation by binding it together through time and space. In the first part of the poem, “The Peace-Pipe,” the “Master of Life,” Gitche Manito, declares himself impatient of the “wrangling” among the various tribes: I am weary of your quarrels Weary of your wars and bloodshed, Weary of your prayers for vengeance, Of your wranglings and dissensions; All your strength is in your union, All your danger is in discord; Therefore be at peace henceforward, And as brothers live together. 29 27 Matthiessen, American Renaissance, 174, 34. 28 Roy Harvey Pearce, The Continuity of American Poetry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1961), 20. 29 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Poetical Works (London: Oxford University Press, 1904), 205. Subsequent page references to this edition are cited in parentheses in the text. Medieval American Literature 123 The allegory of political union outlined here has an obvious relevance for the United States six years before the outbreak of civil war. Just as Whitman’s Song of Myself, published the same year, deliberately tries to encompass many different regions of the country within its broad syntactic sweep - “At home on the hills of Vermont or in the woods of Maine, or on the Texas ranch” - so Longfellow extends a conception of sentimental brotherhood backward through time, envisaging the fractious Indian tribes within a magic realm of cross-sectional concord. 30 To read Hiawatha alongside, say, Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, a cycle of poems published in 1885 representing legends of King Arthur, is to be made aware of how the absence of a conventional historical narrative in Longfellow’s poem opens up space for more reflexive elements. Tennyson’s poem proceeds through a “stately” quality - there are many references to Guinevere as “the stately Queen,” her “tender grace and stateliness,” and so on - with the regular march of Tennyson’s iambic pentameters (a metrical form that William Carlos Williams called the “medieval masterbeat”) providing a framework within which feudal hierarchies appear as naturalized entities. 31 Tennyson, in other words, draws upon echoes of the English poetic tradition to lend his fictitious version of the royal realm an air of righteousness and verisimilitude. Longfellow, by contrast, constantly shifts between different levels, mixing anthropomorphism of the animal kingdom - the rabbit “Peering, peeping from his burrow” (234) - with the mythic narratives of Indian legend, as in part XVII, “The Hunting of Pau-Puk-Keewis,” in which Hiawatha’s enemy is changed into a beaver and descends to the beavers’ “wigwam” below the pond’s surface (256). Much of the recent criticism of the poem has focussed on section XIV, “Picture-Writing,” which foregrounds the art of deciphering symbols and emphasizes how, in Angus Fletcher’s phrase, “Longfellow thinks translatively,” turning foreign languages into a style of idiomatic American while continuing implicitly to acknowledge their distant provenance; but the overall effect of this in Hiawatha, which Alan Trachtenberg astutely called “a pretended translation,” is to create something like a mirage, where the “dreamy waters” (254) of Gitche Gumee conjur up a world wavering tantalizingly between absence and illusion, past and present. 32 30 Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, in Leaves of Grass, ed. Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett (New York: Norton, 1973), 45. 31 Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Poems of Tennyson (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1918), 588-89; William Carlos Williams, “The American Spirit in Art,” Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (Second Series), 2 (1952), 59. 32 Angus Fletcher, “Whitman and Longfellow: Two Types of the American Poet,” Raritan, 10.4 (Spring 1991), 140; Trachtenberg, Shades of Hiawatha, 74. On picture-writing in Hiawatha, see Virginia Jackson, “Longfellow’s Tradition; or, Picture-Writing a Nation,” Modern Language Quarterly, 59 (1998), 471-96. 124 P AUL G ILES Longfellow was an early admirer of Irving’s Sketch Book - the “first book,” he subsequently said, to fascinate his imagination - and the self-parodic mode of romantic irony that Longfellow practises here owes much to Irving’s example. 33 Longfellow was not only the most popular poet in nineteenth-century America but also the best linguist, with fluency in an enormous range of languages and the capacity imaginatively to relate his immediate American culture to a much wider range of circumstances. He was also a great enthusiast for opera - in January 1855 alone, while writing Hiawatha, he attended performances of Bellini’s I Puritani, Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia and Mozart’s Don Giovanni - and indeed, as Dana Gioia has observed, perhaps “the nineteenth-century poem that Hiawatha most resembles … is Richard Wagner’s libretto for Der Ring des Nibelungen.” 34 Longfellow shared with Wagner an interest in the refurbishment of medieval myth, while the musical dimensions of Hiawatha, particularly its stylistic emphasis on structural repetition, are exemplified in the way the poem has been accommodated within a much wider range of later musical adaptations, from sketches in Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9, From the New World (1893), to the song “Hiawatha,” the final track on Laurie Anderson’s Strange Angels (1989). Longfellow was also himself personally acquainted with Franz Liszt, with whom he spent an evening in Rome in 1868. The multi-media as well as the multilingual aspects of Longfellow’s work tended to perplex the New Critics, with Newton Arvin roundly declaring Judas Maccabaeus (1872) to be an “unsuitable” subject for poetry. Trained as they were to appreciate the complexity and internal tensions of lyric poetry, critics such as Arvin found Longfellow’s long poems too somnolent, “quite without dramatic energy or spirit,” something more like “an oratorio reduced to a few brief and rather thin recitatives.” 35 But the effect of an oratorio is precisely what Longfellow was striving for in Judas Maccabaeus: the poem chronicles the rebellion in 166 BC against the attempt of King Antiochus IV to impose his Greek religion on the Jews, and Longfellow wrote to Charlotte Saunders Cushman in January 1872 of how he would be “delighted” if his “tragedy … could be given with Handel’s music.” 36 Handel’s oratorio Judas Maccabaeus was first 33 H.W. Longfellow, “Address on the Death of Washington Irving” (1859), in Poems and Other Writings (New York: Library of America, 2000), 800. 34 Gioia, “Longfellow in the Aftermath of Modernism,” 88. On Longfellow and opera, see Charles C. Calhoun, Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), 209-10. 35 Newton Arvin, Longfellow: His Life and Work (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1963), 277-78. 36 H.W. Longfellow, The Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, V: 1866-1874, ed. Andrew Hilen (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982), 497. Medieval American Literature 125 performed in London in 1746, and Longfellow, as a frequenter of concerts given by the Handel and Haydn Society in Boston, would have been fully conversant with this musical genre. Handel’s oratorios were also for years dismissed as insufferably statuesque and tedious before a number of revivals in the latter part of the twentieth century drew out their more humane, humorous aspects, and the same qualities lie dormant in Longfellow’s longer narrative poems. One of the most idiosyncratic features of these poems is their discursive inclination, the way they consciously set their dramatic heroes within a worldly, contingent setting. For instance, in Michael Angelo (1883), there is a deliberate turning away from Transcendentalism in the way Longfellow shows the Italian artist trying to get his work done, refusing invitations to dinner, dealing with the tiresome business of papal politics, and so on. There are some similarities here with the tone of Emerson’s essay on Michelangelo, written nearly fifty years earlier, which also portrayed the Italian artist’s struggle between sublime aspiration and corporeal limitation, and in this sense the garruolous, anti-heroic tone of Longfellow’s poem has its own poignancy: Time rides with the old At a great pace. As travellers on swift steeds See the near landscape fly and flow behind them, While the remoter fields and dim horizons Go with them, and seem wheeling round to meet them, So in old age things near us slip away, And distant things go with us pleasantly. (811) Longfellow’s idiom here is one of deliberate anti-climax, and in this sense he has been particularly ill-served by critics such as Arvin, who complained of how the “full Titanism of Michelangelo, his demiurgic or demonic character, hardly emerges in any towering way” from the poem. 37 Whereas Whitman sought to transliterate history into myth through the apotheosis of a “divine average,” Longfellow was much more worldly in his concerns, not simply because of his own social circumstances but because an abiding concern of his works is how temporality intersects with the contours of the human imagination. 38 Longfellow also deliberately took issue with the cultural nationalists of his own day in the Young America movement who campaigned vociferously for confining the idea of American literature to a domestic provenance. Although his 1824 essay “The Literary Spirit of Our Country” expresses “a feeling of pride in my national ancestry,” his persona in the tale Kavanagh (1849), a work much admired by Emerson, takes issue with Young America 37 Arvin, Longfellow, 279. 38 Walt Whitman, “Starting from Paumanok,” in Leaves of Grass, 21. 126 P AUL G ILES by describing American literature as “not an imitation, but … a continuation” of English literature: a national literature is not the growth of a day. Centuries must contribute their dew and sunshine to it. Our own is growing slowly but surely, striking its roots downward, and its branches upward, as is natural; and I do not wish, for the sake of what some people call originality, to invert it, and try to make it grow with its roots in the air. 39 This understanding of literature as a “continuation” is commensurate with Longfellow’s interest in translation, which involves modification of existing texts rather than their invention ab nihilo. It fits as well with his interest in intertextuality, as in his Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863), whose form is deliberately modelled on that of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Longfellow switches the milieu from spring in fourteenth-century South London to fall in the nineteenth-century town of Sudbury, Connecticut - indeed, he considered calling the work “The Sudbury Tales” - and the work makes plentiful references back to the squires, scrolls and chivalry of Chaucer’s time, while spinning everything round to an American patriotic context. 40 For example, “The Landlord’s Tale: The Rhyme of Sir Christopher” looks back to Puritan times to recount the tale of Sir Christopher Gardiner, a Knight of the Holy Sepulchre, From Merry England over the sea, Who stepped upon this continent As if his august presence lent A glory for the colony. (455) Sir Christopher, who passes the time with the “roystering Morton of Merry Mount,” is said to have two wives in England and another “little lady” in Boston. What is striking here is how the author simultaneously evokes a Chaucerian framework and yet staunchly endorses New World values: Sir Christopher is dismissed as “only a Papist in disguise,” and, after being trapped by Indians, he is sent back to England by the Puritan governor (455). This tale, the culminating episode in Tales of a Wayside Inn, is one of two related by the landlord; his first tale, which comes immediately after the prelude, chronicles the story of Paul Revere’s ride during the revolutionary 39 H.W. Longfellow, “The Literary Spirit of Our Country,” in Poems and Other Writings, 791, and Kavanagh, in Poems and Other Writings, 756. Emerson wrote on 24 May 1849 thanking Longfellow for sending him a copy of Kavanagh, saying it had “the property of persuasion” and that he had read it “with great contentment … I think it the best sketch we have seen in the direction of the American Novel.” R.W. Emerson, The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, VIII: 1845-1859, ed. Eleanor M. Tilton (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1991), 215. 40 Calhoun, Longfellow, 232. Medieval American Literature 127 wars, and the fact that Longfellow chose two overtly patriotic stories as the bookends to his collection emphasizes where the sympathies of his poetic sequence lie. Associated with this stylistic intertextuality is a skill in the aesthetics of parody or doubling. Many critics have complained that no native author appears among the sources for Hiawatha, but the basis of the poem involves not authenticity but a kind of ludic quality that deliberately conjurs up what is impossible historically to represent, a picture of Indian culture in pre-Columbian times. The curious fact that the New York Times reviewed a parody of Hiawatha four days before reviewing Hiawatha itself suggests how integral this element of comic reflexivity is to the poem’s composition. Longfellow would have been acquainted theoretically with the art of doubling through his interest in German Romanticism, especially the writings of Jean-Paul Richter (on whom he lectured in 1840), whose grotesquely humorous works illuminate ironic disjunctions between everyday facts and ideal laws. Longfellow was also, of course, well acquainted with the literary history of the Middle Ages, on which he began lecturing as early as 1832, when he was 25 years old; and indeed all of his work, both creative and critical, involves a concerted attempt to expand the contours of American literary culture, to set it in a different relation to time and space from that imagined by Young America and subsequently taken up by Matthiessen and his followers. In 1874, towards the end of his career, Longfellow began publishing the 31 volumes of his Poems of Places, wide-ranging anthologies in translation of lyrics drawn not only from European literature but from Asia and the Arab world as well. It is this very multi-faceted quality of Longfellow’s work that has often disconcerted readers, particularly those more accustomed to literature as a form of subjective expression, a song of myself: “[t]here are,” wrote Christopher Irmscher, “so many voices that meet and merge in Longfellow’s works that, even to the author himself, it sometimes seemed they hadn’t been written by anyone in particular.” 41 But the positive aesthetic qualities associated with this style of impersonality emerge most clearly in Christus, Longfellow’s epic poem about “various aspects of Christendom in the Apostolic, Middle, and Modern Ages,” finally published in 1873. 42 Part One, The Divine Tragedy, reworks Dante’s Divine Comedy into an idiom of belatedness, and its focus again is on scenes of the ordinary, on dramatically playing off Christ’s gnomic utterances against the bewilderment of 41 Christopher Irmscher, “Longfellow Redux,” Raritan, 21.3 (Winter 2002), 119. 42 Longfellow outlined his plan for Christus in a journal entry of 8 November 1841. “Introductory Note,” in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Christus: A Mystery (1886; rpt. Honolulu: Univ. Press of the Pacific, 2002), 7. 128 P AUL G ILES onlookers. The peculiar genius of Longfellow is an eye for the comedy of the ordinary, for a Richteresque appreciation of the disjunctions between the quotidian and the marvellous. Pontius Pilate, who describes himself as operating the kind of “prudent and sagacious policy” typical of “Roman Governors in the Provinces,” is a typical Longfellow hero, someone full of hesitancy and worldly procrastination: I will go in, and while these Jews are wrangling, Read my Ovidius on the Art of Love. (673) Judas Iscariot, who complains of how he has never known “The love of woman or the love of children” (676), also comes across sympathetically here. Part of the point of Longfellow’s garrulous style is precisely how it fails to accord with both the conventional Puritan rhetoric of apocalypse and the strained discourses of Transcendentalism. Longfellow’s Christ, in fact, talks rather like Emerson in one of his lectures, mixing echoes of the Bible with aphoristic intensity: The wind bloweth where it listeth, and we hear The sound thereof, but know not whence it cometh, Nor whither it goeth. So is every one Born of the spirit! In Longfellow’s poetic world, however, Christ is always surrounded by skeptics. Nicodemus responds here to Christ in an “aside”: How can these things be? He seems to speak of some vague realm of shadows, Some unsubstantial kingdom of the air! (651) Christus is thus organized structurally around a pattern of bathos, where aspirations towards transcendence necessarily enter into dialogue with the limitations of the material world. This gives Longfellow’s poem a less euphoric feeling than those of Emerson or Whitman, but it introduces a ruminative, multilayered dimension that the writing of the Transcendentalists frequently lacks. The intertwining of theology with human comedy surfaces again in the second part of Longfellow’s trilogy, The Golden Legend, a dramatic poem set in the thirteenth century that was originally published in 1851. A scene of black comedy is played out when Lucifer, who has cannily disguised himself as a priest, hears the confession of Prince Henry of Vautsberg: “I come to crave, O Father holy/ Thy benediction on my head” (476). But there is a theological as well as a melodramatic point to this interlude, since Lucifer’s intercalation within his own figure of the properties of good and evil serves to reject the Calvinist principle that would hold these two categories distinctly apart. As a lifelong Unitarian, Longfellow would have endorsed the view Medieval American Literature 129 of Lucifer that “evil is only good perverted” (478), and the pertinence of this argument to The Golden Legend is underscored in its epilogue spoken by the Angel of Good Deeds, which declares that even Lucifer is “God’s Minister,/ And labours for some good/ By us not understood! ” (527). All this allows licence for a gregarious, latitudinarian account of the intersection of secular and religious history, epitomized here particularly by the representation of a miracle-play on the nativity in the third section of the poem. King Herod emerges in this masquerade as a hale and hearty fellow (“What ho! I fain would drink a can/ Of the strong wine of Canaan! ”), and he chirpily chronicles the Massacre of the Innocents in rhyming couplets: Now at the window will I stand, While in the street the armed band The little children slay: The babe just born in Bethlehem Will surely slaughtered be with them, Nor live another day! (489) The play-within-a-play here throws back light on the representation of Herod in the first part of Christus, and it emphasizes the ingeniously reflexive or academic elements in Longfellow’s poetic narratives, the way these chronicles of Biblical and medieval times, no less than Hiawatha, turn upon a poetic dynamic of pastiche and translation. (One might be put in mind of John Barth, another intensely reflexive writer from 100 years later who also enjoyed a career as a university professor and whose theoretical work also came out of an academic base.) This metafictional element is underlined by Prince Henry’s puzzled articulation of invisible worlds as anthropomorphic fictions: A dim mirage, with shapes of men Long dead, and passed beyond our ken. Awe-struck we gaze, and hold our breath Till the fair pageant vanisheth, Leaving us in perplexity, And doubtful whether it has been A vision of the world unseen, Or a bright image of our own Against the sky in vapours thrown. (515) The cumulative effect of these reflexive stylistics is not only generally to interrogate the relationship of present to past but also to resituate adjacent American history within a much wider and less straightforwardly linear framework. The final part of Christus, The New England Tragedies, evokes in its prologue the projection of history as an act of self-conscious recovery, a retrospective reinterpretation: 130 P AUL G ILES To-night we strive to read, as we may best, This city, like an ancient palimpsest … Rise, then, O buried city that hast been; Rise up, rebuilded in the painted scene … (564) This is the art of translation aggrandized into a philosophical argument, where all understanding necessarily involves a double principle, involving a paradoxical transposition between original and copy: For as the double stars, though sundered far, Seem to the naked eye a single star, So facts of history, at a distance seen, Into one common point of light convene. (565) In “John Endicott,” the first of the New England Tragedies, this admission of parallax necessarily works against the more apocalyptic proclivities of Endicott, governor of the colony, whose claims to prophetic truth are mocked by the Quaker, Edward Wilson. Although Endicott conceives of himself as a sublime figure, violently laying down Christ’s law and supporting the proposition of his minister that “There is no room in Christ’s triumphant army/ For tolerationists” (593), Longfellow’s more worldly poem is sympathetic to the circumstances that ultimately frustrate Endicott’s separatist design. The unlikely deus ex machina in this poem turns out to be King Charles II of England, who incurs Endicott’s wrath by issuing a Mandamus order forbidding the colony to persecute Quakers and instead requiring them to be returned to England, leaving Endicott to bemoan the power of the King and to look forward eagerly to a more serious “struggle” for political independence (592). The second part of this sequence, “Giles Corey of the Salem Farms,” continues this theme of intolerance by portraying the “tornado of fanaticism” (627) at the time of the Salem witchcraft trials, with Cotton Mather’s celestial typologies about the community “journeying Heavenward,/ As Israel did in journeying Canaan-ward” (603-04) being lambasted by Giles Corey’s wife Martha, who longs for “A gale of good sound common-sense, to blow/ The fog of these delusions from his brain! ” (608). One of the crucial points about Christus is the way it critiques New England exceptionalism by realigning the history of the province with that of former times and places, thus indicating how, as St. John remarks in the poem’s finale, “The world itself is old” and how “A thousand years in their flight / Are as a single day” (629). New England, in Longfellow’s imagination, is a continuation not only of Old England but of medieval Europe more generally, and the dogma that would insist on it as a site of purification and regeneration is, by Longfellow’s translative method, rendered null and void. Longfellow’s reinscription of the past as a longue durée highlights the way in which, as Russ Castronovo has observed, ambivalence toward Medieval American Literature 131 national genealogy became one of the defining features of antebellum U.S. culture. 43 In the first seventy years of the new republic the question of how to represent the past became a burning political issue, with evangelical understandings of the American Revolution as an apocalyptic new beginning balanced off against the views of those who, like Longfellow, sought to understand the new United States within a more amorphous historical framework. Medievalism is, of course, a distinctively European concept, and simply to apply the term directly to the very different circumstances of American culture would be incongruous, as writers such as Emerson and Longfellow well understood. Yet this kind of incongruity was no less apparent, if not quite so self-evident, in the ways in which Victorian moralists such as Augustus Pugin and John Ruskin were attempting around the same time to validate Gothic architecture as the ancestor of European civilization. Both cases involve the “deliberate anachronism” of an imposition of present concerns upon the past, since, as Jorge Luis Borges indicates in his celebrated fable of Pierre Menard rewriting Don Quixote, Victorian Gothic could never be the same as twelfth-century Gothic, even if they were identical in form. 44 Ruskin himself, in fact, acknowledged this potential for systematic irregularity in his Lectures on Architecture and Painting (1854): “Do not be afraid of incongruities,” he said, “do not think of unities of effect. Introduce your Gothic line by line and stone by stone; never mind mixing it with your present architecture; your existing houses will be none the worse for having little bits of better work fitted to them.” 45 The realm of English Victorian Gothic thus involved at some level an acknowledgement of the structural incompatibilities involved in any recuperation of the past, and, by extension, a recognition of how the idea of medieval England was necessarily a perspectival phenomenon. This metahistorical dimension was, however, considerably more pronounced in American literature and culture of the mid-nineteenth century, since, lacking a “natural” past, antebellum writers were forced to make up their history as they went along. It is medieval American literature, in other words, that highlights ways in which the very notion of medieval literature is always a retrospective cultural fiction. The situation of American literature changed considerably in the heightened patriotic atmosphere after the conclusion of the Civil War. By the 1870s, the study of American writers was beginning to enter the classroom, 43 Russ Castronovo, Fathering the Nation: American Genealogies of Slavery and Freedom (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1995), 4. 44 Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (London: Penguin, 1970), 71. 45 Ruth C. Linton, “The Glory of Gothic: Interior Décor and the Gothic Revival,” in Rosenthal and Szarmach, ed., Medievalism in American Culture, 71. 132 P AUL G ILES with Moses Coit Tyler publishing the first History of American Literature in 1878. Whereas Longfellow in the 1840s was interested in synthesizing older literary traditions with New World perspectives, Tyler was more taken with the idea of an unsatisfactory colonial history leading toward the emergence of a genuine American “spirit” around the time of the revolution, and it was, unsurprisingly, this version of the past that became more pedagogically popular. 46 This mirrored what was happening institutionally in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century, when Anglo-Saxon and medieval writing were being installed at the head of the English literary canon. All of this helped to cement the division of the two literary traditions, with the idea of a medieval American culture becoming something that could be invoked only in extemporaneous fashion, as in Henry Adams’s disquisition on the virgin and the dynamo in 1907. In Adams, the analogy between medieval mariolatry and the machine age works primarily on a formal level, suggesting an equivalence in terms of the structures of social iconography but representing the United States not as a medieval but as the quintessentially modern civilization. In the mid-nineteenth century, though, the idea of medieval culture was for American writers conceptually much closer to home. Widely read as they were in pre-1500 English and other European literatures, none of them instinctively believed that such writing should be construed as simply foreign or alien to U.S. interests; this latter assumption only hardened into dogma later, in the Americanist critical narratives from Tyler through to Matthiessen and beyond. Discussing the prose literature of exploration and empire between 1820 and 1865, Eric Sundquist observed: “Space, the promise of a boundless future, was translated into time … set in a moral framework in which self-discovery and national character were synonymous.” 47 This is not altogether untrue, of course, but it is only half the story. What American medievalism of the antebellum period highlights is not an idea of inherent possession of the landscape but, rather, a much more extensive, unstable relationship between national identity and transnational cultures. In this sense, Emerson and Longfellow do not so much ground their work upon native soil as situate it on a highly charged and fraught boundary between past and present, circumference and displacement, and the challenge each writer faces is in mapping out a discrete location for himself, in finding a space from which to speak. 46 Kermit Vanderbilt, American Literature and the Academy: The Roots, Growth, and Maturity of a Profession (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 81-99. 47 Eric J. Sundquist, “The Literature of Expansion and Race,” in Sacvan Bercovitch, ed., The Cambridge History of American Literature, II: 1820-1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), 144. C ARSTEN S CHINKO America as Medium, or: Culture and its Others I Europe vs. America? Let us begin with some banalities: to ask for European perspectives on American Studies - as discussions about the discipline’s aims and futures frequently do these days - necessarily relies on the assumption that there are transatlantic differences to begin with. While few will doubt the existence of such differences as a general finding, a good part of the challenge lies in attributing and evaluating the differences in questions - especially when it’s not so much society at large that is dealt with, but rather the interrogation of a distinct academic form of practice, in short: the self-reflection of American Studies, its past, present, and potential future(s) in different contexts, and, since we are talking about national organizations mainly, in different countries. 1 Any claim for European peculiarities should keep in mind that it is first and foremost the critical means - the theories and methods - that are put into focus worldwide. 2 The ‘America’ we are talking about is the medium of American Studies (which in turn is part of the humanities) more than anything else, and as such can, must, and will be deand reconstructed professionally. Heinz Ickstadt seems to agree: “For better or for worse, American Studies not only studies America but creates and reconstructs ‘America’ in its own discourse.” (2002: 546) A certain self-organization of scholarly knowledge production and dissemination is evoked by his use of the possessive pronoun, a moment that allows setting apart a specifically academic observation of ‘America’ from other forms of communication - less reflexive ones for example, or more popular ones, or more overtly political ones. 3 Yet at the same time Ickstadt, professor for American literature at 1 A number of associations have recently attempted to meet the call for a transnational perspective. Associations such as the CAAR, MESEA, EAAS or IASA try to transcend nation-state borders, thematically as well as institutionally. 2 Including the question asked by Henry Nash Smith in 1957: “Can American Studies Develop a Method? ” 3 Evidently, this self-organization does not deny the possibility of politically engaged positioning by scholars of any camp. In fact, the ideological base of most articulations can quite effortlessly be revealed. Yet, without any reflexive surplus, those articulations would not be circulating as scholarly communication too smoothly - a fact that might explain why we, at times, can appreciate the style, expertise or erudition of colleagues even if we tend to disagree with their ideological assumptions and political positions. 134 C ARSTEN S CHINKO the John-F.-Kennedy-Institute in Berlin, accepts self-descriptions put forward by the majority of his colleagues who frequently highlight the heteronomous design of this field of expertise. Approvingly, Alice Kessler-Harris is quoted, stating: “The heart of American Studies is the pursuit of what constitutes democratic culture.” This, according to Ickstadt, is “the most precise definition of the radical heritage of an American studies movement that had always aimed at having more than a purely academic agenda.” (548) To fulfill those extra-academic functions, however, an acceptance of academic self-reference will have to shun the hermeticism of ivory tower-erudition, a knowledge sealed off from the outside world. Rather, the scholar has - as minimal requirement - to be able to lead a steady “dialogue” with surrounding disciplines, to keep in touch with non-academic institutions, and the general public to get beyond the incessant presentation of clever interpretations for the professional in-group. This democratic ethos has been an important element of the self-understanding of most Americanists, indeed. 4 It is a pursuit that exceeds the thematic reference to a “democratic culture” and thus triggers off far more than another object of study: American Studies in its very practice has to transport egalitarian values and directives. To do so, the role of the scholar as a mere disinterested onlooker on culture and society has to be renounced. Far from exclusively relying on his or her reflexive competency, the task, according to another eminent German Americanist, is “to reunite the ‘scholar’ and the ‘citizen’ in a truly democratic society.” 5 What is at stake here is the balancing of the conflicting gravitational pull between the self-organization of an at least semi-autonomous academic discipline (and the institutional conditions it necessitates) on the one hand, and the quest for relevance ‘outside’ the university campuses on the other. Predictably, this balancing act has been performed differently in the respective American Studies organizations worldwide. What I try to do in the following, is first to give a brief outline of one way to conceive of transatlantic differences on an institutional level, focusing on Germany, more precisely on the intellectual climate of the FDR that has been decisive for the work of Americanist scholars, too. 6 In this setting, the 4 It is an ethos encompassing both, the left-liberal consensus of an older generation of Americanists and the New Americanists with their variants of a ‘radical democracy’ as outlined by Mouffe/ Laclau (1985). 5 An end to this “division of labor” has been envisioned by Günter Lenz and quoted in Ickstadt (2002: 548). 6 I am aware that a more elaborate version of such differences would have to be comparative, including at least American Studies in the Eastern German setting and its way into the present. Yet, my interest is systematic rather than historical and thus I consider the short sketch of the milieu I have been educated in appropriate. While Sabine Sielke (2006) in a current delineation and evaluation of American Studies prac- America as Medium, or: Culture and Its Others 135 core conflict separating older representatives of American Studies from the now dominating, highly politicized New Americanists has taken a slightly different route which can best be understood by contextualizing American Studies in the larger frame of the humanities and social sciences. The following part will then take its lead from a specific dispute within American Studies which carries an echo of these differences. I am referring to an opposition suggested by Winfried Fluck between his own more liberal approach to American Studies and what he calls the “cultural radicalism” of the now dominant New Americanists, represented most prominently in the U.S. by scholars like Donald Pease, Robyn Wiegman, or Amy Kaplan. Despite the fact that there is a well-established institutional exchange between Fluck’s Berlin and Pease’s Dartmouth, this academic conflict and especially the German side of it (along with the underlying theoretical presuppositions and value-structures) has not received the attention it deserves. 7 To enable a discussion, their role is taken over by yet another European observer Paul Gilroy, himself an influential British critic who has worked in Black Diaspora Studies, a field that, while following different routes at times, shares the post-national thrust of current U.S. Americanist studies as well as its politicization of academia. 8 These filiations notwithstanding, Gilroy, in contrast to his U.S.-colleagues, refrains from giving up the belief in the reforming capacities of modern societies altogether, refuses to cancel aesthetic considerations from his unique brand of Cultural Studies and Social Theory, and could thus be an appropriate partner for discussion. 9 tices in Germany focuses on the FDR as well, her approach is far more encompassing, though admitting that “even a sketch of this development could easily develop into a three-volume book project.” Less interested in such a genealogy, my essay strives for an understanding of general moods with much slower and far more indirect impact. 7 At a conference in Berlin, Pease had a short discussion with Fluck about his notion of the individual that might have shed some light on the issues. Still, the discussion did as yet not make it into print and the sheer disregard is symptomatic of the current selfcenteredness of U.S.-based American Studies, its almost fetishistic call for resistance in the face of an admittedly harsh political climate within the U.S. While the necessity of an engaged form of criticism will be attributed to these realities, and derives a good share of its legitimacy from the latter, the paradoxical outcome of the engagement are increasingly hermetic texts hardly received (and receivable) beyond academia - despite the self-confident posture as ‘public interventions’ or even ‘genuine dialogues.’ 8 Donald Pease was the most prominent guest of the New Americanists camp in Berlin. The prominence is due to two seminal publications in which Pease was involved, The Futures of American Studies, co-edited with Robyn Wiegman and the Cultures of U.S. Imperialism (1994), co-edited with Amy Kaplan. 9 Having chaired the African American Studies Department at Yale, Gilroy in 2005 returned to London as the first holder of the Anthony Giddens Professorship in Social Theory at the London School of Economics. 136 C ARSTEN S CHINKO What interests me most in my sketch (and, adding Gilroy, slight reconfiguration) of said dispute will be the conceptualization of media and society and the implications both of these terms carry when it comes to a delineation of modernity, and to “culture” as the most notorious key term of recent Americanist scholarship. Thus, I am less providing any clear-cut European perspective myself, but - if you like - work parasitically on an established distinction between ways of modeling American Studies supplemented by a nod from Britain. Such an approach is (or rather: can be observed as) located itself: my comparative observation of Gilroy and Fluck culminates in a “systems theory” perspective as elaborated by German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. Having reached a level of considerable critical acclaim in (unified) Germany, the reception of system theory’s remarkably interdisciplinary body of work within the U.S. has been less than significant so far. While academic twists and turns and fashions are always a result of multiple and often quite contingent reasons, part of the explanation for the disinterest can be found in the tackling of culture. Neither an integrative force (as in consensus theories) nor as a more antagonistic model of dissent, culture, for Luhmann (2000: 247), is “one of the most detrimental concepts ever to be invented.” Whether this alone provides a view from outside notoriously called for today, will have to be seen. In any case, it seems to me a perfectly paradoxical end-point when transatlantic (cultural) differences are at stake, and “culture” - reference point in most American Studies - has to meet its conceptual others. II Institutions as Atmo/ Spheres It is on the institutional level that transatlantic differences must first be outlined if we are talking about American Studies and its surrounding disciplines in terms of an organizational structure. The fact that, for better or worse, American Studies in Germany can hardly be said to be on the center of attention (as compared to German Studies within the humanities in Germany or the sciences in the larger university system) is of relevance here. 10 As with American Studies in the U.S., the most heated debates were led within the respective ‘national’ disciplines, if certainly not restricted to these. One might readily grant American Studies its uniqueness as a field of study and still heuristically conceive of the academic scene as a cluster, 10 Disregarding the asymmetries within academia that result from this marginality for a moment, one might well find positive side-effects of this situtatedness: greater tolerance for experimentalism, openness to the new. Needless to say, quite a few would happily trade the thrill of open scholarship for a better standing within the university and on the job market. America as Medium, or: Culture and Its Others 137 crystallizing around the respective (national) disciplines, or around formative disciplines such as sociology in the 1970s and - always trying to claim the king’s throne - philosophy. 11 What, then, are the decisive steps in the emergence of a German academic culture, who are the leading theorists influencing the debates, its Diskussionskultur? American Studies in Germany became institutionalized at a time in which “a characteristic historical compromise between the Nazi past and the democratic present continued to fuel a German skepticism toward any emphatic idea of democracy and freedom in the restorative climate of the postwar era.” 12 In such a climate, the formation of the DGfA in 1953 itself, an association whose official purpose according to its articles was and still is “to support American Studies in Germany on an academic basis and to help deepen the scholarly and cultural relations between Germany and the United States” has been a politically symbolic and highly charged act and as such one instance of the “cultural countertendencies” that “did emerge in conjunction with a more open attitude toward the West and the stabilization of a democratically constituted state in the 1950s.” 13 Here, a new voice emerged promising to counter the anti-Enlightenment sentiments, a vigorous factor in German culture at that time (and, if to lesser degree, even today). Twelve years later, a heated discussion aired on Sender Freies Berlin captured the dualistic zeitgeist by laying bare the intellectual lines of conflict. In this broadcast, Theodor W. Adorno, “the emigrant who had returned to Germany after the war and had already become the representative figure of left intellectualism” confronted Arnold Gehlen, “the intellectual on the right” who “had certainly not withheld his services from Hitler” and had in fact profited from the forced retreat of Jewish scholars like Adorno from the university system in Nazi Germany. 14 Soon, the discussion centered on the moral dilemma of reflexivity, and the problem of ‘political maturity’ so essential in postwar Germany. Asked by his interlocutor whether all people should be burdened with fundamental problems of modernity, Adorno spoke out 11 These days, media studies have become a candidate for such an academic pole position. See the discussions under headings such as “Medienkulturwissenschaften” introduced by S.J. Schmidt (1998), Jörg Schönert (1996) and others initiating the debate about chances and pitfalls involved in restructuring literature departments and even the humanities as such. Again, it is not a national culture that is most decisive but organizational necessities (state funding, orientation for students) that explains the nation-state orientation of these arguments. 12 Hauke Brunkhorst, “Tenacity of Utopia”, 128. 13 In the German original the goals are specified as such: “die Amerika-Studien in Deutschland auf wissenschaftlicher Basis zu fördern und zu einer Vertiefung der wissenschaftlichen und kulturellen Beziehung zwischen Deutschland und den Vereinigten Staaten beizutragen.” (Satzung, §2, Absatz 1) 14 Brunkhorst (1992: 128). 138 C ARSTEN S CHINKO against the exoneration favored by the anthropologist Gehlen and affirmed the need for a “complete responsibility and self-determination” instead. Hauke Brunkhorst, who brings to mind this seminal dispute, is convinced that “(h)ere we have all the essential components of an intellectual discourse that emerged first in favor of Adorno in the 60s, and then by Gehlen in the 70s.” (129) He then elucidates the underpinnings of the dialogue: “the thematic difference between them is between a premodern Aristotelian concept of reason, and one that is modern and, as it were, out-and-out Cartesian.” These characterizations should not be misunderstood as total affiliation, however. Neither does Gehlen deny the “contingency, alterability, and variability of modern institutions”, nor is Adorno interested in resurrecting the subject as autonomous entity outside the social. Yet, Gehlen relies on elites that successfully absorb the risks and challenges of a modernity in crisis, thus providing the exoneration needed without giving in to what he sees as “the anarchically dysfunctional solvent power” of an excessively reflexive culture, while Adorno insists on “the potential for reflection and freedom” as “present in equal measure in all human beings without restriction” (130). What makes their positions ideological is less a matter of intellectual respectability than a matter of immersion in the German postwar context. Brunkhorst writers: “Accordingly, Gehlen is interested in a therapeutic treatment of cultural crisis that draws narrow institutional parameters for transformation through freedom and reflection, while what Adorno would like to transcend is precisely institutional overdetermination, the restriction of reflection by the forces of ideology, economics, and bureaucracy” (130). Unfortunately, for Adorno the only existing ‘institution’ regarded capable of transcending those restrictions was art, more specifically, the modernist work of art which, given its complexity, was not necessarily accessible for nor appealing to the masses. In contrast, Gehlen’s anthropological model of exoneration through continuous institutionalization inevitably turns out problematic in a society that produced the Third Reich, and that just undertook its first steps towards egalitarian democracy. Unquestionably, it could not be of much help in denazifying the institutions. What has outlasted the narrower postwar context, though, is a fundamental dualism between functionalist and cultural approaches to society - an opposition soon evoked in the polemical title Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie published in 1971. 15 In this volume its editors, Jürgen 15 Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie - Was leistet die Systemsoziologie? (1971). According to Baecker (2003: 10), both Habermas and Luhmann share a fascination for the key term ‘communication,’ and while Habermas derives his emphatical notion of discursive rationality from that concept whereas Luhmann stresses the complexity buried therein, both their contributions can be seen “as strategies of denazification.” America as Medium, or: Culture and Its Others 139 Habermas and Niklas Luhmann, initiated what became a long-standing rivalry between two remarkable thinkers and more importantly still, one of the most influential controversies during the 80s and 90s. If the engaged left-liberal repositioning of the Frankfurt School in the work of Habermas dominated the earlier decade, Luhmann’s cool idiom became the “winner theory” (J. Hörisch) in a unified Germany. It has turned out an intellectual antagonism that is of concern for (German) Americanist interested in the larger institutional background for the unlike couple has been influenced by American scholarship - an influence that especially Habermas profited from, for it helped to break loose from the grip of the old polarity between Adorno and Gehlen who - despite their antagonism - share a rather negative attitude towards the United States. According to Brunkhorst, for Gehlen “the egalitarian concept of freedom in the Western democracies was in essence little more than a mixture of Bolshevism and Americanism - well intentioned at best, but certainly not something good.” (128) For the “acculturated bourgeoisie,” Culture with capital C was under attack by the anarchic forces of modernization and the supposedly ‘degenerating’ thrust of ‘Americanization.’ Evidently, Adorno’s perspective was more ambivalent in this regard; still, the Frankfurt scholar suffered in his Californian refuge, and while his most claustrophobic narrative of modernity, the Dialectic of Enlightenment, co-authored with Max Horkheimer, was an account of modernity at large, the book’s general argument about the dark underbelly of instrumental reason was hardly put in doubt by his experiences abroad. 16 A quite different perspective emerges in Habermas’ reflections. In a 2004 interview he talks about his “America” and the promise it has, until recently, lived up to: “For a European observer and a twice-shy child such as I, the systematic intimidation and indoctrination of the population and the restrictions on the scope of permitted opinion in the months of October and November of 2002 […] were unnerving. This was not ‘my’ America. From 16 Adorno’s speculations “On the Question: What is German? ”, a 1965-radio feature, reprinted later, reveal a rather ambivalent transatlantic perspective. Pointing out to the “fatal antithesis of Kultur and Culture” Adorno explains: “Following a tradition of hostility toward civilization which is older than Spengler, one feels superior to the other continent because it has produced only refrigerators and automobiles while Germany produced the culture of spirit. However, to the extent that the latter becomes established and an end in itself, it also has the tendency to detach itself from real humanity and become self-satisfied. In America, however, sympathy, compassion and concern for the lot of the weaker still flourish even in the omnipresent exchange economy (…).” (Adorno 1985: 126) To Adorno, this proto-capitalist society even displays “an energetic will to establish a free society” which “does not lose its goodness because the social system imposes limits upon its realization.” Thus, he concludes: “In Germany, arrogance towards America is out of place.” (127) 140 C ARSTEN S CHINKO my 16th year onward, my political thinking, thanks to the sensible re-education policy of the Occupation, has been nourished by the American ideals of the late 18th century.” 17 While those ideals feature a more abstract form of greatness, retrospectively given credit by Habermas, part of the abiding allure of “America” for him lies in a kind of democratic vernacular that goes along with the heterogeneous philosophical body of work known as pragmatism, and commonly referred to as quintessential American contribution to philosophy. In the 1980s, when Habermas succeeded in becoming (one of) the leading intellectual(s) of West Germany - the magisterial Theory of Communicative Action was published in 1981 - a part of his appeal was due to the reception of this democratic American thought, most notably that of C.S. Peirce and G.H. Mead. 18 In his quest to reformulate Critical Theory, pragmatism (and the affiliated symbolic interactionism) was of help by its open, processual philosophical mode, its focus on (collective) human agency and on communication as basic property of reality, and social experimentalism, and its democratic egalitarianism. 19 Here, one might surmise, was a theoretical account that provided the level of hope necessary to accompany the 68-movement’s long way through the institutions, a hope that neither Gehlen’s account nor Adorno’s pessimistic vision could engender. To Habermas, the democratic energy of pragmatism confirmed his belief in the United States as a country well-equipped with intact institutional structures - a core that not even the Vietnam War and other imperialist involvements were able to shatter. Translated into the political realm, pragmatism’s experimentalism opts for the rejection of any kind of symbolic politics that tries to bring social processes to a halt by (re-)establishing authoritarian representations, as these would interrupt the fundamental symbolic interaction between citizens along with its dialogic principles. Consensus, then, cannot be founded in an assumed stability of top-down representations but has to be the contingent and temporary end-result of an ongoing public debate. Based on tolerance and recognition this political procedure aspires to include all citizens. The emphasis on mutual processes of understanding has found its way into 17 “America and the World. A Conversation with Jürgen Habermas” Logos 3.3. (Summer 2004). 18 In Freedom and Culture, John Dewey, a key figure in pragmatism and another source of inspiration for Habermas, argues that “freedom of inquiry, toleration of diverse views, freedom of communication, the distribution of what is found out to every individual as the ultimate intellectual consumer, are involved in the democratic as well as in the scientific method.” (Dewey 1939: 102) 19 In his introduction to Habermas and Pragmatism, editor Mitchell Aboulafia quotes an interview in which Habermas talks about his introduction to Peirce, Dewey, and Mead by his friend Karl-Otto Apel in the early 60s. America as Medium, or: Culture and Its Others 141 Habermas’s concept of the “ideal speech situation,” in which “all participants pursue illocutionary aims without reservation in order to arrive at an agreement that will provide the basis for a consensual coordination of individually pursued plans of action.” (Habermas 1984: 295f.) The refusal of any kind of Staatsästhetik in favor of a routine of rational understanding, a Verfahrenstechnik, evidently has a specific urgency for a left-liberal intellectual in the German context, and the low-key, decidedly anti-aristocratic attitude of a communal ethos as evinced by John Dewey and others must have been a further confirmation for Habermas. 20 Within the academic realm, pragmatism’s egalitarian design, its optimistic outlook was the addition needed within the reformulation of Critical Theory. The appropriation was a move of undeniable political relevance, yet, to some, it stopped short off some of the key issues that move pragmatism closer to postmodern epistemologies and poststructuralist notions, close enough to endanger the project of modernity as envisioned by the Frankfurt scholar. 21 Maybe the label “Kantian pragmatism” (Th. McCarthy) best captures this sort of theorizing, relying as it does on some critical elements and a prioris that came close to turning some of the core assumptions on their head. For one, Habermas saved (moral, rational) universalism from the claim of a radical situatedness of communal understanding - communitarian rhetoric have to be a nuisance to someone as averse to a German Sonderweg and interested in a potentially global community of rational citizens in an ever-expanding world-society. Norms, mere contingent by-product of situated communal sense-making in stricter versions of (neo-)pragmatism, are elevated into a position of authority again. Remarkably distanced from his friend’s credo of “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” (Rorty 1991) Habermas would never abandon a critical vantage point enabling to provide the criteria necessary for appropriately describing and evaluating the conflicting self-descriptions of social actors. In short, his conception was far more normative than that of his American colleagues. Renouncing irrational aspects of human life such as emotions - admitted as simply another part of experience in much pragmatist studies - in almost exclusive favor of rational behavior, Habermas put a harsh limit on what a legitimate form of intersubjective understanding and social transaction might 20 Others, most prominently Karl Heinz Bohrer (1984; 1990), have called for a renewal of aesthetic representation to counter the ‘provincialism’ of the Bonn Republic and its main representatives, especially Chancellor Kohl. It is illuminating to contrast Bohrer’s view with Habermas’ surprisingly mild recognition of Kohl in his “almost bodily denial of any form of Staatsästhetik” as a figure of his generation (1998). 21 See Winfried Fluck’s “Introduction” (1999), in which he sees “striking similarities” between pragmatism and poststructuralism, while affirming that pragmatism - by revitalizing concepts such as agency and subjectivity “escapes the recent radical critique of essentialism in Western thought.” (ix) 142 C ARSTEN S CHINKO entail. 22 What this specific German re-interpretation of pragmatism amounts to is an open procedural experimentalism that nevertheless relies on stability and control functions best fulfilled by institutions (and commented on by an intellectual elite). The difference is not to be missed: Habermas hardly denies the lasting effects of functional differentiation - in fact, he is well aware of the dynamics of modern societies, most notoriously the centrifugal drift that separates spheres and their distinct kinds of rationality. Still, while these energies have been outlined most explicitely in the sociological classics of Europe, and tend to be downplayed in American pragmatism’s optimistic search for democratic citizenry, the German scholar absorbs the danger of disintegration by re-conceptualizing communication as having an in-built drive toward mutual understanding with universal aspirations. Nowhere is the quest for rationality within the second generation of Critical Theory more evident than in the rejection of poststructuralism as a danger to public discourses. According to Habermas, Derrida and Foucault have to be subsumed under the label “neo-conservatives” for they would not allow for a continuation of the emancipatory project of modernity. Yet, the rejection encompasses the level of form as well. French theory, with its predilection for paradoxes and ambivalences and its openly literary style is said to cancel the chance of mutual knowledge. Unable or unwilling to trace what people share, difference becomes the key word in this kind of scholarship - to Habermasians a fetishized formulation of otherness at best, and as such disallowing for any institutionalized negotiating. Now, it should be clear that my sketch comprises but the dominants of scholarly discourses. No one would seriously claim that the work of Adorno or Habermas (or other Critical Theorist) does not find support in today’s academic and intellectual world. Still, the integrative force of the moral position taken by the Frankfurt scholars soon had to face the postmodern skepticism - a skepticism that resulted in a further differentiation of academic discourses. Put differently, if for Habermas the political effects of poststructuralism were overshadowing its potential intellectual allure, the later reception for better or worse has been based on ideological grounds less and less. Soon to be received as neither a threat to democracy, nor a proto-fascist agenda, Derridean deconstruction and similar intellectual agendas became but one academic resource among others, the political ideological register less and less brought into play. 23 22 Recently, Habermas seemed more open to these irrational element, e.g. even accepting religion as possible resource for a modern identity. See his Glauben und Wissen (2001). 23 To some, this decrease of attention to ideological preconditions is a form of active forgetting - French theory has been influenced by thinkers under taboo in German intellectual life - Heidegger, Nietzsche, and more recently, the interest in Carl Schmitt. America as Medium, or: Culture and Its Others 143 If the notion of academia as controlled by leftist critics has been a delusion from the start, there nevertheless was and, to a limited extend, still is a cautionary tone when it comes to ‘irrational’ phenomena such as collective identity - a tone, I suggest, that can be attributed to the left-liberal consensus about the modes of inquiry more than to any actual contents. Reason and rationality in judgment and style, a distanced attitude toward the object of study, the avoidance of any overt political agenda were the main ingredients of this cooled-off posture. 24 The leading academic figures of today still adhere to this consensus, not the least as it seems to offer a form of intersubjective comparability hard to be found in more idiosyncratic readings. Aleida Assmann, Chair of the English department at the University of Constance, explicitly sets her own influential work on cultural memory apart from the more politically inclined Cultural Studies project. It was the smooth co-optation and co-operation of science and the humanities in the Third Reich, as Assmann recently explained, that was the main reason for the need for a more disengaged form of criticism: “While American and British cultural studies redefine culture in such a way as ‘to provide ways for thinking, strategies for survival, and resources for resistance’ for the marginalized,” Assmann observes, “German Kulturwissenschaften seem to do the very opposite; they cool rather than ignite, they ward off rather than encourage political action.” As one of the protagonists of a loose assemblage of interdisciplinary scholarship referred to as “Kulturwissenschaften” - notice the component “Wissenschaft” with its promise of positive knowledge - she accordingly focuses not so much on the political struggles of the excluded (and their perspective, or the identity politics these engender) but concentrates on the general medial means of sense-making (and the uses they enable) instead. This skepticism and disengagement, however, should not be conflated with an apolitical perspective, but can alternatively be read “as a barrier against fatal politicization,” in short, as a call for a different kind of politics. 25 The long-term research project she helped to initiate in the 1980s was aptly titled “Archäologie der literarischen Kommunikation” (J. and A. Assmann 1983), an archeology of literary communication. Following the foundational research of Eric Havelock and Walter Ong on orality and print technologies - decidedly in contrast to the more openly metaphorical Derridean notion of writing - they stress the shaping powers of media evolution when it comes to the structure of society as such, its organization of com- Others regard this as a moral overreaction that misses the fact that the institutions are well established and working, that in fact, one possible way of re-conceptualizing the humanities is as a form of ‘riskful thinking’ (H.U. Gumbrecht). 24 The avoidance of explicit politicization does, of course, not mean that the protagonists refrain from participation in debates outside academia. 25 Aleida Assmann, “Cultural Studies and Historical Memories” (1999: 91). 144 C ARSTEN S CHINKO munication, knowledge and cultural memory. The difference to Habermas’ rejection is significant: neither Derridean deconstruction nor Foucauldian genealogies of modernity are regarded morally corrupt. In fact, references to both authors can frequently be found in Aleida Assmann’s work. The reasons for privileging the Toronto School are quite profane, based on an academic decision: the decidedly non-systematic mode of French thought does interfere with her interest in giving theoretical contours to an archeology of modern communication. Well aware that language about media and communication will always be metaphorical, the scholarly control of the performative element becomes a matter of decision - should we allow or even highlight the excess, or is it better to present a coherent narrative of modernity despite the acknowledgement that it will turn out a contingent one? Assmann opts for the latter, believing the power of institutions to be a much more decisive factor than disseminatory forces of signifying practices. While according to the cultural memory paradigm the materiality of communication does not determine possible uses in advance, the correlation of cultural developments and self-descriptions with media evolution allows the Constance scholars to theoretically assemble potential subgroups (and their cultured self-description) within only one overarching cultural formation - in short: no irreconcilable differences here. Even if these formations do not have to end at nation-state borders, much of the work followed the reconstruction of national memories and one will justly argue that the ‘nation,’ far from being an nostalgic or overtly ideological category in their work, becomes operative for its promises of coherence, too. Indeed, this variant of cultural theory is rather interested in the systematic elaboration of its premises and in the careful reconstruction of its key terms. The lack thereof has been both, part of the appeal as well as the reason for the slow advent and at times even dismissal of Cultural Studies with its notorious indeterminate core vocabulary. III The Mediality of (Counter-)Modernity Without a doubt, scholarly knowledge is part of the global flow of information and thus the increased attractiveness of the Cultural Studies paradigm in Germany in the last years should not come as a surprise. Especially a younger generation of scholars endorses this decidedly post-disciplinary field of scholarship and among these its support might well be said to rival the status it gained within U.S. institutions. American Studies certainly has played a key role in popularizing poststructuralist thought (often filtered through U.S. Cultural Studies practices) in Germany. Indeed, one could argue that even those German Americanist scholars skeptical of French America as Medium, or: Culture and Its Others 145 theory and more at ease with pragmatist thought have taken up the very elements of pragmatism closer to postmodern theory and put them up against the prevailing universalist Habermasian version. 26 Thus, roughly speaking a ‘postmodern’ reading of pragmatism came into ‘dialogue’ with a ‘modern’ one within the work of an older generation of Americanists now approaching the end of their career. With a new generation the postmodern variant has then ruled the scene over the last decades, and it took a while until poststructuralist agendas had become canonical, and a return of pragmatism/ turn to neo-pragmatism could become an alternative. But where is the difference within the global academic enterprise if work done by German Americanists increasingly comes to resemble that of their U.S.-American colleagues? If the (re)turns resemble intellectual fashions, following transnational phenomena of institutional exhaustion, the need to ‘make it new’ is typical of Western modernity. To claim that the local has lost its impact would be premature. To look for intrinsic differences alone will not suffice, for it is the impact on local contexts, the way in which renewed academic practices feed into the local self-understanding that becomes decisive. Surely, the new generation of scholars will have another relation to the Third Reich - the single most important factor when it comes to a self-understanding of German society at large - as well as the narrower academic context, and to rapidly changing national semantics and imaginaries (most recently: “Wir sind Papst,” “Du bist Deutschland,” Klinsmann, Günther Grass). Finally, new and urgent social problems such as migration and diaspora issues were gaining attention and these realities were most explicitly taken issue with in Cultural Studies and related academic research agendas. As several scholars working in American Studies - among them Berndt Ostendorf, another scholar of Fluck’s generation - have already pointed out, however, there is quite a potential for projection going on in these often affective modes of research. 27 American Studies is most assuredly no exception to this. 26 Despite the closeness to postmodern theorems, pragmatism, as Winfried Fluck (1999) argues, tries to preserve some of the concepts that poststructuralist attacked: agency, subject, rational planning. 27 At a conference, Robyn Wiegman has problematized the “refused identification” in the work of the New Americanists who set out to re-describe the discipline by confronting the older practitioners head on. Yet, while the critique of exceptionalism has without a doubt contributed to a better understanding of the myth-and-symbolschool and earlier forms of knowledge production, the new generation of Americanists repeated some of the mistakes, as Wiegman self-critically argues. Any call for a disengaged model of scholarship however will hardly provide the solution to the problem of affective structures. Even the cold idiom of systems theory and its cult of disengagement is not beyond interest and desire. Its detached prose is a rather explicit form of engagement - a reaction to both the Third Reich and the 68-movements politicization. 146 C ARSTEN S CHINKO Wouldn’t it be possible that the fascination with minorities - think of the boom of African American Studies among German Americanists - has its sources less in the emancipatory potential of a politically motivated criticism but rather in the familiarity with which a multicultural foil prevents us from seeing another form of America, that of radical individualism? Would the embrace of minority cultures in German American Studies - seen from the angle of an Americanized Cultural Studies practice - in the end be highly dubious since it allows us to maintain some pre-modern nostalgia of true Gemeinschaft against the cold rule of modern Gesellschaft? 28 Furthermore, isn’t ‘culture’ as a key term of political debates completely taken over by the Right in Germany by now, which has learned their lessons reading Gramsci and Foucault all too well. 29 Of course, multiculturalist scholarship in its elaborate form is far from the dangerous naïveté of a Herderian völkish outlook, yet one still wonders about the ease with which the production of subjectivities along the lines of race or gender is frequently turned into an apriori of community in quite a few analyses. 30 All these speculations about and interpretations of latent motifs obviously should not be understood as a plea to drop Cultural Studies from the syllabis and research agendas along with its focus on the production of cultural identities and the formation of subjectivities - a move which in the face of global migration and pretty robust structures of stratification and social injustice would be quite cynical anyway. Critical tools can hardly be accounted for if put to inadequate use by some of its practitioners. What, then, could a less problematic use look like? One could follow Paul Gilroy who is skeptical not only about essentialist positions (most prominently Afrocentrism) but also about the abstract anti-essentialisms confronting the former (most notoriously the textualism of Homi Bhabha or Henry Louis Gates). Consequently, in his seminal contribution, The Black Atlantic (1993), the British scholar sets out to give contours to an “anti-anti-essentialist” black diasporic tradition. In many respects Gilroy would fall under the rubric of cultural radicalism in Fluck’s suggestive inventory, a mode of criticism the latter understands as being reliant on “the assumption of an all-pervasive, underlying systemic 28 Needless to say that the right has been far more successful in employing this corrupted distinction. To put it bluntly: the gut-level appeal to a primordial identity works better than a call for solidarity. 29 See Mark Terkessidis’s argument in Kulturkampf (1995). 30 Think of the notorious calls to ‘storytelling’ in Black Studies with its nostalgic and even primordialist connotations. While there certainly is a possibility of delineating a different mode of narration in the texts of African American writers, one should remain skeptical of the impact these are said to have on the psyche of its readers and on the organization of the so-called communities. See my Die Literatur der Kultur (2006). America as Medium, or: Culture and Its Others 147 element that constitutes the system’s power in an invisible but highly effective way.” 31 (Fluck 2002: 216) Indeed, Gilroy is utterly convinced of the structural pervasiveness of racism (and sexism) in Western societies and thus not restricted to the random symbolic and/ or physical violence of a handful intentional actors (even if that would make for a rather big hand). 32 Despite this crucial conviction, however, Gilroy clings to the belief in a reformist potential of modern culture. In the preface to his influential study, he tries to convince his readers “that the history and theory of the Enlightenment were worth understanding and arguing about.” (ix) One can be a relentless critic of the failings of individual thinkers, and the intellectual discourses they helped to establish and still “acknowledge the difficulties in making Kant stand in for the Enlightenment as a whole. It should be stressed that he does not himself conceive of genocide or endorse its practice against Negroes, Jews, or any other variety of people.” (2001: 60) In order to come to terms with the problematic, Gilroy uses Berel Lang’s notion of affiliation, “stronger than analogy or likeness although more oblique than that of direct physical causality.” 33 Such a qualification still enables Gilroy to put forward a radical critique of existing theories of modernity and modernization in order to “write the history of the black diaspora” as “something more than the corrective inclusion of those black commentaries” (1993: 45) overlooked so far. Consequently, that “something more” causes serious modifications when it comes to the temporality of the existing narrations of the modern - among them the idea of an American Exceptionalism - and thus both theorists under discussion, Fluck and Gilroy share an interest in the future (as temporality) and, moreover, find its traces in the expressive forms under scrutiny, i.e. in the black vernacular and the aesthetic production. As the respective formulations of this unusual correspondence will soon make clear, however, neither the formulation of futurity itself, nor the implications the theorists draw from them are identical. Traces of a black futurology buried within black music and literature can globally be found, and while he frequently refers to examples of black culture in the U.S., Gilroy - unlike Fluck - definitely would deny the USA 31 Fluck specifies: “The names for this systemic effect vary, including the prison-house of language, ideology redefined as semiotic system, the reality effect, the ideological state apparatus, the cinematic apparatus, the symbolic order, episteme, discursive regime, logocentrism, patriarchy, whiteness, or Western thought.” (216) 32 There is no way, then, to see racism’s lasting effects as the exception to a generally moderate, rational state and its public order - an marginalization of a troublesome phenomenon frequently played out by politicians. 33 Gilroy quotes Lang’s Act and Idea of the Nazi Genocide (Chicago UP, 1995: 189) in Against Race (2001: 60). 148 C ARSTEN S CHINKO and its brand of future-centeredness a particularly positive role in that play. Quoting Hegel’s famous remark, in which the philosopher of the Weltgeist consigned Africa to a condition of permanent historylessness while identifying America as the land of the future, “the land of desire for all those who are weary of the historical lumber-room of old Europe,” Gilroy even discredits any positive connotation when it comes to U.S.-American culture: “Remembering that provocative teleological sequence should compound our caution. It prompts us to ask how much contemporary reflection on the problems created by concern about the boundaries of self and community is really a consequence of the globalization of the American popular cultures that currently define so much of our anxious postcatastrophic modernity.” (2001: 338) Yet, not only white performances are to blame; a good share of current African American popular modes of expression (e.g. Gangster rap) falls under his sharp verdict, too. What Gilroy sees as (meager) cure against this most claustrophobic scenario is “the development of vernacular futurology” (347) beyond a modernist New, a semantics and imaginary (in both verbal and sonic form) that did not come naturally. Here, the cultural productivity of the black diaspora emerges as main source of inspiration. “The usurpation of the future by blacks involved them in struggles to throw off the shackles of the primitive and to win the right to address the future. This idiom did not come easily to political cultures dominated by the hermeneutics of memory.” It is a counter-culture of modernity (within modernity) from the angle of Du Boisean “double consciousness” that can best be found in a “grounded aesthetics” carrying the “congregational logic of antiphony.” (1993: 38) Such an aesthetic of the collective “is never separated off into an autonomous sphere,” Gilroy reasons, but will always entail a “grounded ethics” remindful of “the relations of domination that supply its conditions of existence.” (1993: 38) Thus, no differentiation of spheres takes hold in this narration of modernity with its focus on a (rather wholistic) black diasporic culture. 34 It is a ritualistic use of forms more than a process of institutionalization (and/ or abstraction, bureaucratization etc.) one encounters in Gilroy’s work, then, since the latter would imply the emergence of what has, according to some critics, become the Western version of aesthetics. Polemically condensing current critical positions on the latter, the result would read like this: a high-cultural elitism implying a cognitivist bias of a caste of supposedly disinterested, and most assuredly unfunky connoisseurs using the cultural capital of the canon to further confirm themselves 34 The postnational agenda supports the fluidity of sense-making, the transfer to other settings, the connectedness to different lifeworlds. Any restriction of national memory will almost necessarily be more concerned with the formation of a canon, the development of high culture, the emergence of elites who lay claim to the heritage. America as Medium, or: Culture and Its Others 149 and others of the superiority of their form of life while treating aesthetic productions according to the rules of commodity fetishism as works of art - something to put on the wall (or shelf) in order to impress their red-winedrinking friends of similar dispositions. Fortunately, Gilroy’s text is free of such tedious invectives, yet what he highlights marks the core difference: where there is no separation of spheres, where no functional differentiation nor Arbeitsteilung provide foundational structures, an alternative tradition can find its way into modernity, promising an alternative lived and shared form of aesthetic life. It is another modernity, “otherwise not outside” the Western episteme and as such in conflict with the institutionalized and bureaucratized official traditions it sets out to dismantle. 35 Black music offers a particularly rich body of examples for what Gilroy calls “the politics of transfiguration” - implying a fundamental change with the way we think, feel, talk - supplementing a mere reformist ‘politics of fulfillment’ that relies on the existing “structures of feeling,” propelled by the legitimate forms of institutionalized communication. Drawing on Ralph Ellison’s suggestive metaphor of the “lower frequencies,” Gilroy sees a sly activity of secret coding at work in black cultural expression, an activity once triggered off by the harsh realities of the policed slave camps. 36 He is convinced that the memory of this sly coding - the dangerous double talk, the roots of signifying as a less-than-playful necessity in the face of death - and the futurology buried therein can still be heard by acute recipients of black cultural productions. 37 That music should play the privileged role as the ‘hermeneutic key’ to black experience in a diaspora tradition should come as no surprise. Not only has music always been a decisive part of black articulation but its very rhythms allow Gilroy to put forward the notion of a ‘hidden public sphere’ in which the slave memory can be conserved and passed on. Easier than in the case of the written word, the suggestion of a medial transferal, bodily received in antiphonic rhythms works far more 35 It is not that politics and aesthetics come together again in this form of life, they are - according to Gilroy - inseparable to begin with and, as such, could hardly end up in an aesthetization of politics. 36 Ellison’s Invisible Man (1990: 581) is addressing the readers from within a hole in the ground. At the end of his picaresque narration, he ponders: “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you? ” The addresse, arguably, is the liberal reader whose abstract inclusionary protocols are simultaneously being put to test by the neo-picaresque novel as they are confirmed. 37 That Gilroy here departs from deconstructive as well as constructivist assumptions that both work against the ‘container metaphor’ of communication by highlighting the “exteriority of writing” (Wellbery 1992) and the system-relative and immanent production of past (and future) in the present respectively, should be evident. My interest, however, is slightly different, yet related, focusing on Gilroy’s use of music as core site of articulation. 150 C ARSTEN S CHINKO smoothly than in the visuality of print, so important in the advent of Western modernity and individualism, and so intricately linked to discursive regimes supporting the terror of slavery. However, the metaphorical vantage point of ‘double consciousness’ that sets off this diasporic tradition, is founded in the register of the visual: a double vision, simultaneously a ‘burden’ and a ‘gift.’ As with all concepts of alienation, the defamiliarizing thrust is born out of a print culture - not only does racism happen in fleeting moments of hate, it is fixed in a whole body of texts, high and low, official documents or materials of entertainment that open up multiple observations of the same representations and thus enable counter-representations. Print technology, in all its ambivalence, can be said to be the medial mode most strongly associated with the genuinely modern awareness of contingency. 38 This awareness encompasses both, the general experience and knowledge that things could be differently and are both neither impossible nor necessary as they are on the one hand, and the more culturally distinct form of black experience born out of violence on the other. The cure to the latter, specific form of awareness to the contingency of ascriptions in Gilroy’s work is a sonic community capable of producing alternative descriptions of the souls of black folks. Judged from the medial assumptions, the mode of integration of these remains a completely different one, though. There is nothing wrong with focusing on a singular mode of expression but Gilroy includes all different sorts including literary texts who hardly can be said to be non-semantic or transitory; when the “oral structures” are highlighted that will “definitely shape the aesthetic forms” and do so by the very antiphonal qualities disabling the advent of Western individualism one understands that the fluid and acoustic medium of sound is combined with an strictly interactional setting which forms the “core event of realtime, face-to-face performance.” 39 Literature, too, is approached from that angle. It is a strange modernity then, strangely devoid of material effects or signifying necessities, and most of all against the spatio-temporal dislocation known from print communication: the promise of distance, the reflexivity involved in the potential to read the same text twice, and other key factors in the making of Western print culture. Gilroy knows all this, of course, and groups the “various technologies - print, radio, audio, video” that happen to appear “in a wide range of settings at various distances” from the interactionbased core event. The “democratic, communitarian moment” rooted in those vernacular practices “which symbolize and anticipate new non-dominating relationships,” then, is based on a mode of communication that of course does exist, yet will have a hard time convincing the reader of its centrality in 38 See Luhmann (1992) for a elaboration on the notion of “Kontingenzbewußtsein.” 39 This, and the following quotation: Gilroy (2001: 190f.) America as Medium, or: Culture and Its Others 151 light of modern communication technologies. Put differently: that traces of said oral logic of antiphony and communal aesthetics will find its way into other medial forms is an assumption similarly shared by the Assmann camp. If - following McLuhan - every new media contains the older ones and can only be understood in a relation of difference to another medium, print communication can only be defined in its distance to sound. The Assmanns would grant that this relation might vary considerably, so one might well - if heuristically - set out to distinguish a specific black tradition by comparing alternative self-descriptions. 40 Yet, their media theoretical approach would also insist that the change of the dominant media of a society will inevitably restructure the ‘culture’ at large and therefore cannot be demographically demarcated to a special in-group and their collective experiences all that easily. By invisibilizing the materiality of the black codes and communications Gilroy himself seems to come dangerously close to what he earlier, and correctly so, chastised as ‘overintegrated concept of culture’ - correctly, since he has to suggest that black experience will by definition be linked to an exposure to specific sorts of communication while evading others, most evidently print communication which has been so central in the formulation of the modern episteme (e.g. the Foucauldian archive, the Weberian bureaucracy, Luhmann’s “cultivated semantics” of discrete social systems, etc.). 41 In counter-narratives focussing on black culture print technologies are frequently listed merely as part of a regime of oppression, suggesting one could get rid of it, invisibilizing the paradox of criticizing the regime by the use of its core medium. Along with his remaining emancipatory rhetoric grants print modernity a progressive potential; still his separation of fulfillment vs. transfiguration has a strong medial drift. (In another essay he even explicitly characterizes film and sculpture as non-vernacular modes of expression - leaving one to wonder why literature should be counted in? ) 42 Gilroy’s futurology, 40 To be observed by the observation of a cluster of ‘texts,’ not by unmediated bodily or psychic experiences. 41 When first delivering my talk, Donald Pease uttered his conviction that Gilroy’s goal was to poietically call into life the counter-imaginary of a black futurology, much less to suggest that these already exist. Leaving aside the argument that such a sort of political wish-fulfillment would again be produced by the right more successfully - and who would prevent right-leaning critics from doing so? - I am doubtful that there is a chance to simply feed this sort of noise into the system, once it is established as such, for the simple reason that culture is not a system. Again, how does transfiguration relate to fulfillment? Furthermore, such an argument carries us back to the question of political scholarship and its legitimacy. To invite such poietic models can hardly be restrictable to the scholars you like. Just to claim moral integrity will not prevent those you despise to do just the same - from ideologically different sites, with different goals altogether 42 Gilroy, “It’s a Family Affair: Black Culture and the Trope of Kinship” (1993). 152 C ARSTEN S CHINKO therefore, is an archive (sometimes semantic, at other times sonic) or a social imaginary based on the scholarly observation of a repertoire of fixed forms more than the communicative operations themselves which carry these representations as the ‘non-traditional tradition’ that Gilroy describes. In other words, the repercussions of orality in print epistemes might well result in a black counter-tradition within the West. Yet, the problem starts at a decisive point in Gilroy’s argument when he shifts from giving contours to a specific form of contingency, double consciousness, diasporically delineated to the quite normative elaboration of a specific form of mediality capable to capture the essence of black resistance and transferring it from time to time, from place to place. The ship, his main metaphor for the articulation and relation of a fragmented community and its fractured memory, is the vessel containing the secret (codes) - whatever the contingent content at different times and places will be. 43 Double consciousness, evidently, is still an apt concept to characterize the specific form of seeing the world in conflicting registers, yet it can fruitfully to be related to another, more fundamental form of contingency that is at the heart of modern society. To put it differently: that the experience of marginality and oppression has produced hurtful experiences as well as “the gift of second sight” (Du Bois), that it still does so, can hardly be denied - although it would be open to debate whether this still can be used as a description of a changing black culture in a post-soul era (Neal 2002; George 2004). Whether such experiences culminate in more than a semantic and when they do so, is quite another question. Furthermore, as Kenneth Warren has already pointed out in 1998, Gilroy runs dangerously close to a “reification of slave memory” and, doing so, suggests “that the emancipated and their descendants come fully equipped with a set of responses to their plight in modernity.” 44 No matter, one could add, what these plight will turn out to be: the next step in the career of a middle-class urbanite, the bare struggle for existence of a ghetto dweller, the complex strategies of an African American politician who has to level his interest in black politics with 43 It is here, in the highlighting of a cultural form of oppositionality that a more materialist criticism sets in. For a critique of Gilroy’s eclectic mix of materialist arguments with more culturalist ones see Kenneth Mostern, “Social Marginality/ Blackness: Subjects of Postmodernity” (1998). 44 Kenneth Warren, “Ralph Ellison and the Reconfiguration of Black Cultural Politics” (145f.) This hits a neuralgic point in the debates about a marginal vantage point. When Rorty argued that such a standpoint at the margins alone does not guarantee a position beyond the contingency of any type of world-making, Diedrich Diederichsen (1996: 62) rejected this rather bloodless credo by asserting that the oppressed do know one thing better for sure: what to get rid off. There is, to paraphrase Diederichsen, a significant difference between (an often diffuse) bourgeois alienation in a mass society and a situation of lived inequality and/ or racism. America as Medium, or: Culture and Its Others 153 the general party line. Commenting on Gilroy’s twofold politics, Warren stresses those intellectual and artistic contributions that are taking the inclusionary semantics of liberalism at their word but have been marginalized in The Black Atlantic. There is no doubt that being (or becoming) part of a ‘sonic community’ as envisioned by Gilroy can have therapeutic and compensatory effects on the marginalized, and, moreover, that this kind of membership without fees plays into postmodern identity politics, the politics of cultural recognition. Besides being a detestable and highly exclusive collective, however, the question remains how to relate that sonic counter-modernity to other accounts, especially more “acultural theories” (Ch. Taylor) of modernity that (either explicitly or implicitly) reflect the impact of print technologies on. As culture or sediment of tradition, finally, double consciousness is - once articulated and thus open to re-interpretation and signification - to be found in a ‘repertoire of forms’ that does not, in itself, carry the codes determining the uses or inviting the appropriate receptions. Again: is the alternative future a mere semantic occurrence in a modernity ‘traditionally’ allied with Western notions of futurity, i.e. progress, linear development, and the irreversibility of time within general structures? IV Smallest Units of Society Chair of the culture department at the JFK-institute in Berlin, Winfried Fluck belongs to a breed of Americanist scholars who still believe in the reformist potentials within modernity, who remember the promise of American democracy in postwar Germany, and who share the academic quest for intersubjective knowledge (as against a more idiosyncratic display of intellectual skills). 45 At the heart of Fluck’s account of American modernity one will encounter a Tocquevillean notion of the individual: conceived as smallest social unit, the individual is the motor of modernity which can best be characterized by “a way of life in which the elimination of the social hierarchies of aristocratic societies” leads to “the typically modern drama of an unstable identity no longer grounded in clear-cut immovable hierarchies.” 46 Democracy, then, is stripped off its emphatic undertones, and regarded as a dynamic process of de-hierarchization. Even communitarian semantics fail to live up to the promise of stability in a society that is endlessly becoming without knowing where it will end up. In fact, these depic- 45 In other words: who - while admitting that every form of knowledge production is situated as well as motivated - is unwilling to reduce the will to knowledge to a will to power. 46 Fluck (2003: 75). 154 C ARSTEN S CHINKO tions of collective life are a reaction to this radically open-endedness and, as such, especially prone to fall prey to the future, which in Fluck’s account is the key temporality in a modernity in which the old solutions and semantics fail to convince, in which traditions are fundamentally destabilized. 47 According to the Berlin scholar it is a “restless individualism” - not to be confused with semantic derivates such as individualist in the sense of an autonomous subjectivity - generating the driving force behind the U.S., “the unlimited dynamic of self-development unleashed by modernity.” 48 Needless to say, the individual has been a highly charged concept in current debates, and the struggle over Tocqueville is far from being settled; systems theory might be of help in clarifying some aspects of Fluck’s approach. 49 Coming from different theoretical backgrounds both, Luhmann and Fluck are interested in a comprehensive theory of modern society that is aware of existing phenomena of stratification and social injustice - as well as the resulting forms of protest and disaffiliation - but cannot be sufficiently described by these. As abundant as they might turn out to be, such phenomena of social asymmetry have to be explained as effects of the primary structures: functional differentiation in Luhmann’s sociological account, the modernity that engenders “expressive individualism” in Fluck’s. Regardless in how far the respective contributions reflect on their own contingency of observation, the structures these accounts delineate are irreducible part of a ‘reality’ beyond the contingent self-description of agents and other semantics. Again, not an overt political engagement but the longing for a consistent theoretical program - precision in the critical vocabulary, a reflexive use of a Leitdifferenz, which enables the larger argument in the first place, etc. - comes to the fore. 50 The question, then, is not so much whether Fluck (or Luhmann) would want to change the inequality in a given society or whether he is happy with the status quo; to change anything at all, a better understanding of the general workings of society, culture, and not the least, academic discourse, is the place to start. 51 While certainly well-read in Cultural Studies, Fluck would alienate a good share of its protagonists by claim- 47 Future, however, not as something teleologically to be approached but as unknown and unknowable horizon in a society in which risk calculation has taken the place of prognosis. 48 Fluck (2003: 76) borrows the term from Marshall Berman (1983). 49 For a critical assessment of Tocqueville, see Pease (1999). 50 Using Gilroy’s distinction, Fluck would argue in favor of a politics of fulfillment, a choice that in its more ‘liberal’ trust in the existing structures of communication and its value-structures carries a political element. 51 Ironically, Luhmann evaluates the use-value of his own theorizing. On the backjacket of his chef d’oeuvre Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, arguing in favor of a systematic understanding of modernity he reasons with mock modesty about future uses: “dann kann man besser sehen, was man machen kann.” America as Medium, or: Culture and Its Others 155 ing that “American Studies is a joint, interdisciplinary academic endeavor to gain systematic knowledge about American society and culture in order to understand the historical and present-day meaning and significance of the United States.” 52 Most assuredly, such an agenda strives for a comprehending of the dual workings of society and the individual. Consequently, its unease will result in tackling the now dominant theories of subjection and appellation. As the secret (or not so secret) motor of modernity, the individual is not located outside the social in Fluck’s account. However, as he insists in a critical assessment: “Individualization can only be thought of as subjection if, at least theoretically, a non-subjected individual is set as reference and norm for otherwise subjection could not be conceptualized as such.” This notion of a ‘non-subjected’ element within the social is certainly not an easy thought, and as his cautious ‘at least theoretically’ suggests, at first nothing more as a figure of non-identity. Yet, Fluck wants the individual as being more than just a figure: the smallest unit of the social that - as social agent - can feed back his experiences (of contingency, of being recognized, of not being recognized, of being recognized for the wrong reasons, or with the wrong registers) somehow into the social operations. 53 Thus the social realm is reconstructed from the perspective of the individual. That theoretical move in itself certainly does not stop the violence of representations, the ceaseless ascription of identities - yet it brings attention to the fact that both, the operationality of the individual psyche and the social attribution cannot be described simultaneously even though operating at the same time. Here, theorists of subjection would claim that Fluck by necessity falls back into reinstating some apriori identity, at least some phenomenological center of perception existing independently, and, in a strict sense, a-socially. Taking the individual as a starting point to assess the simultaneity, Fluck in contrast would argue in turn that the reliance on one modality/ temporality, i.e. the social, will turn out to produce reductive accounts. 54 Since they approach the problem from opposite sites, there cannot be a real understanding of the 52 Fluck and Claviez (2003: ix). 53 By dismissing any positive notion of this figure of non-identity, theories of subjection have to proceed without being able to talk about the role of and the potential for reflection as starting point of social change. 54 Judith Butler’s The Psychic Life of Power (2000) might well be the most refined attempt to come to terms with the operationality of society’s other, yet, even here, in her impressive study of subjection, she cannot successfully give evidence how the temporal openness of the iterative moment is processualized by the psyche and how this operationality can be fed back into the social - this is why more ambiguity, hybridity, and other terms of in-betweenness are what is finally offered, all terms well-known from text-based literary studies. 156 C ARSTEN S CHINKO irreconcilable model. Niklas Luhmann tries to solve this theoretical problem by excluding the ‘smallest unit’ from society: society, according to his brand of systems theory, consists of communication, not of people. In this account, psychic processes are not part of the operations of the social, while definitely not independent of those. 55 Psychic processes, most notably thoughts and emotions, are said to co-evolve with the whole of communications, find themselves in ecological niches opened up by communication at all times, but have an operational reality and temporality on their own: thoughts connect to other thoughts within closed psychic systems, whereas communications are conceived of as emergent reality. I will refrain from reproducing the complex redefinition of the structural coupling of these closed systems, each internally reconstructing its environment by differentiating between itself and its other (communication, bodies, other psyches). Instead, I want to highlight the related notion of “exclusion individuality” a notion that bears a striking resemblance to Fluck’s approach - yet, as sociological theory has the advantage of not being refuted as yet another permutation of American Exceptionalism. This detour allows an evaluation of Fluck’s reading of American culture through the lense of a general theory of modernity. In concurrence with Fluck, systems theorists argue that in modern society inclusion cannot be conceptualized as integration any longer, it rather “stands for communicative strategies of considering human beings as relevant. Inclusion is the social mechanism that constitutes human beings as accountable actors.” Conceived this way, the interplay between social and psychic systems can be described other than “as kind of containment or membership” that were convincing in older forms of society. What is called individuality or individualization then is the way in which people cope with social expectations.” These expectations change with the advent of modernity and its differentiation scheme. Here, “society is decomposed into perspectives of function systems which cannot become organized as a whole.” 56 Individuals (or, more precisely, their psyches, their bodies, etc.) are addressed differently by science, economy, politics, art, religion, educational institutions. All of these do not refer to individual wholeness but have specific expectations towards individuals: for economy and its media money, the only thing interesting is the difference of possessing/ not possessing. Accordingly, the individual person is treated rather as a dividual, but this 55 Post-humanist, often applied to systems theory seems a problematic label: for if the ur-difference disallows for any intentional control of the social by the individual actors, psychic systems are in a strictly operational sense inaccessible for the social. And vice versa. 56 Nassehi (2002: 127). America as Medium, or: Culture and Its Others 157 form of inclusion into the subsystem is total: even those unable to pay are thus very much included into this functional system. At the same time, modern society “depends on semantics of individuality that make it possible to relieve the function systems of any strict determination of individuality” in the first place. It is the singular human being who has to “handle this difference between individuality and dividuality, and that is what sociology usually calls individualization” (128). “Finally, the individual can only represent herself,” Fluck (2003: 74) writes, regarding American society as an especially radical variant of the modern episteme. Luhmann would probably accept and refuse this reading at the same time: the individual for him is outside the social and has to come to terms with his ‘identity’ ever anew, outside the partial grasp of functional systems. The term “exclusion individuality” refers to this specific ‘homelessness’, and highlights the modern self-reference of human beings as well as “the structural background of the semantics of individualization.” The randomness in modern representations of selfhood might thus be related to “the central paradox of modern individuality: a pattern that demands that no pattern at all should be followed.” Yet, while systems theory has its strong points in describing the ecological conditions for this social patterning of individuality, it shows a strong tendency to take a liberal account at face value, focusing on a “technique of distanciation” as well as “bourgeois exaction of a stable and continuous identity.” 57 Here, Fluck promises a far better grasp on the discontinuous and fragmentary affiliations, regarding the collectivist credo of group identifications and individualist self-fashioning as two tokens of the same coin, in short: as coping strategies in an era of expressive individualism. Doing so, he makes a sound distinction between the structural conditions and possible semantics of self-description. An elaboration on the social beyond Tocqueville, however, could provoke an even more systematic account, one that could help in understanding how the at times transitory affiliations and identifications relate to the “cultivated semantics” within social systems. For, as Armin Nassehi rightly points out, individualization happens within the functional subsystems as well, as a form of “inclusion individuality” emerging around symbolically generalized communication media such as truth, money, power (politics), law, belief, or art: “The function of these media is to increase the chance of connectivity of communication in a world in which precisely this is improbable.” (2002: 130) Here, as Nassehi points out, in these communicative forms of individuality, a link between systems theory and Foucauldian discourse analysis comes into view: “The economic system does not only anticipate individual decision-makers but also compels individuals to act as 57 Nassehi (2002: 129) 158 C ARSTEN S CHINKO utilitaristic subjects. The legal and the political system do not only attribute individualistically, but they also demand self-control and loyality.” (133) Put differently: the individual is not simply there, but always already generated. Yet, while a reflection on these subject formations urges us to abstain from any phenomenological center of attention, the forms of attentiveness, of processualizing meaning, of arousing the play of the imaginary will vary from one subsystem to another. This is less a matter of culture than of social structure and its forms of inclusion. V Medial Hybridity What about art and the aesthetic element of communication, we might then finally ask? Having taken its “cultural turn” American Studies as a discipline still is surprisingly cohesive in its focus on artistic productions, especially on literary texts as privileged sites of study. The fashion in which these texts are academically approached is highly variable, however. Fluck’s less drastic account of American modernity (if compared with the New Americanists dark vision) and culture is reflected in his reluctance to give up the aesthetic as a category which, as he correctly observes, has been supplanted by “the most neutral, the most dehierarchized concept” of “representation” in Cultural Studies. 58 In Das kulturelle Imaginäre Fluck delineates the modern American novel as a main factor in the “fascinating story of individualization.” Leaving aside that Luhmann would dismiss the anthropological model favored by Iser and culturally reformulated by Fluck, he nevertheless agrees in that art is regarded as that social system in which psychic processes are thematized as such. 59 Here, the contingency at heart of modern polycontextural society is finding an apt channel, promising increased individualization through intensified perception, enhanced complexity of second-order observation, or allowing for imaginary selfempowerment. While I cannot think of any meaningful concept of literature that does not take notice on these factors, I am less convinced that this must necessary lead to the (over-)emphasis on contingency. The notion of an “oral literature” might be a problematic one when applied to modern texts, downplaying the materiality of the printed word, the physical quality of a book (as well as the social conventions of silent reading) - still, one might get the impression that Fluck’s consistent history of de-hierarchization as well as Luhmann’s empty figure of systemic inclusion are based upon a 58 Fluck (2002: 84) 59 While the renunciation of anthropology in systems theory can be justified, Luhmann and his disciples would do well to re-integrate the imaginary into their approaches to art as a social system. America as Medium, or: Culture and Its Others 159 conception of contingency presupposing a very distinct sort of print culture, a culture that among other things favors individual (when compared to relatively weak communal) practices of sense making. It is here, that the question of modernity and mediality, as well as that of a counter-tradition might be successfully reformulated. In Gilroy’s account the experience of racism produced not only an alertness to contingency of modern ascriptions by and large affirming the asymmetrical status quo and perpetuating inequality. Furthermore, it has given birth to a culture of collective care that is at odds with what has been at the core of quite a few acultural theories of modernity: the structures of functional differentiation. The latter cannot be conceived without recourse to print technologies, to consecutive phenomena such as archivation, to the potential of re-reading and second-order observation, etc. There is no doubt that this danger to the coherence of cultural self-descriptions - for now we can not only observe how things are, but can observe others and their distinctions, their ways of world-making - can be downplayed even if differentiation is conceptualized as key element. Gilroy culturalist strategy is to highlight non-semantic rhythmical patterns even in written texts. For only then it makes sense to conceive of literary communication in analogy to call-and-response rituals in black church ceremonies. Fluck, I argue, presents a more phenomenological fundament of literary reading - that only in a second step is structured according to cultural diversity - by relying on a print-paradigm and its traditionally Western technique of reading. It is a paradigm that in its mediality urgently suggests a split between a perceptual psychic center and the object to perceive - much more than the fleeting sounds of (paradigmatically unrecorded/ live) music. This predilections structure the further assessment of the literary text. Two contradictory temperaments can help to grasp the medial differences: when Toni Morrison, key figure in black diaspora discourses, characterizes her own literary work, she refers to the aural (not oral) quality, the sound of the otherwise silent pages. Describing the way she achieves that special kind of sonic reality effect, that “language that does not sweat,” Morrison paradoxically points to the endless revisions, the comparison of one written version to another - a comparison that would neither be possible, nor a problem without print technologies. 60 It is the conservation of the printed page that makes possible the repeated readings in the first place. Will the (black) reader be able to read the text in the fashion intended? Possibly. Such a reader would look through the text, grasp its rhythmic patterns not so much cognitively, but perceive them almost bodily. Then, the meaning would not be the most decisive part of fiction. Rather, a mode of culturally 60 Morrison (1981). 160 C ARSTEN S CHINKO uplifting experience of belonging would be the main interest of Morrison’s production of presence though clever manipulation of symbols. The same reader could, however, give in to more hermeneutical urges and thus follow a more classic Western predilection for sense-making. 61 In fact, Morrison’s writing itself contains both, invitations for the more musical minded as well as more ‘meaningful’ writing. That her most prominent piece of work, Beloved, thematizing the drastic effects of Western regimes of writing, itself contains elements that are cryptic to a degree as to disallow for the first form of reception. As with all such operations, meaning is but the contingent product of this form of reading, re-reading, and interpretation. This brings us to the second example. In an occasional remark about his daily work, Niklas Luhmann recounts with astonishment: “it frequently happens, that - when looking for the right phrase, I see the pictures of the printed letters as mental images.” 62 This might well be an extreme form of processualizing printed words, more likely to occur in hyper-professional readers and writers than in the average consumer, and, more idiosyncratically explained with reference to Luhmann’s lifelong loyalty to his type-writer, his excessive archivation of the Zettelkasten, his life of reading - but maybe specialization is the whole point: if the marginalized finally find entry into the institutions, will the result be explicable with reference to a bourgeoisificational drift and, more tragically still, as a loss of culture, a loss of soul? 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Wellbery, David. “The Exteriority of Writing” Stanford Literature Review 9 (1992) 11-23. Warren, Kenneth. “Ralph Ellison and the Reconfiguration of Black Cultural Politics” REAL 11 (1995). 139-157. R.J. E LLIS “East is West”: Interhemispheric American Studies and the Transnational Turn New York[: ] Exploration here can go as deep as you let it. Have a Mexican tamale breakfast, catch a Bollywood flick, or simply grab a pizza. (City Break Secrets, 2005: 14) As City Break Secrets’s global ethnic sandwich (Americas/ Asia/ Europe) suggests they should, American Studies have now long had to abandon the exceptionalist “myth, symbol and image” and “Puritan origins” paradigms of the mid-twentieth century - paradigms that, as the century drew to its close, became ever more etiolated in terms of their perceived connection to post-structural understandings of the loci of history, politics, society and culture. Instead, what is sometimes labeled the “New American Studies” largely came to possess the field, treating with the recognition that American Studies were more complex, fluid and interconnected than such earlier paradigms allowed. 1 One thing that is perhaps particularly impressive about this “New American Studies” is the way that they have taken on a number of guises, each of these turning in different ways to post-colonial theory, and to cultural and gender studies in a process that in some commentators’ eyes, such as those of Gene Wise, made American Studies increasingly “parasitic” upon other fields - compared, that is, to the early, mid-twentieth century American Studies, which Wise saw as possessing a distinct methodology (Wise, 1979: 315). Wise over-states his case: the myth-symbol-image school had little claim to deploying a methodology of any rigor outside of some methods of (brilliant) close reading (also, as it happens, comparably found in literary and early cultural studies) and some knowledge of structural anthropology. So it is perhaps fairer to say that American Studies’ methods have always been largely “parasitic”. Consequently, in order to retain their pertinence when consolidating their remorseless interdisciplinarity in the late twentieth century, American Studies have always needed to be flexibly responsive to theoretical innovation. In this sense, it was inevitable that “new” American Studies would emerge, as a response to the very rapid late-twentieth century proliferation of new interdisciplinary methodologies, jettisoning “grand narrative” syntheses (just like those generated by the myth-symbol-image school) in favor of contingent, historically-specified analyses: of discourse and power, of hybridity, of transculturation, of 1 See, for example, Rowe, 2002. 164 R.J. E LLIS contact zones and interculturality, and - especially - of global flows in an increasingly transnational arena. Such work is post-Foucault, post-Said, post-Bhabha, post-Pratt, post-Beck and post-Butler. 2 It rejects the propensity of the “linguistic turn” to privilege indeterminacy over historicization, and has decisively turned back to history - and almost as often, in the process, it has come to take up transnational foci. Setting aside intra-U.S.-American flowerings of the new American Studies, compelling though these can be, I want to focus upon what I see as some of the main trends of the transnational “new” American Studies. Whilst it will not be possible to pick out all of these trends, I do want to distinguish between three (preliminarily), whilst also emphasizing that they are not generally as discrete in practice as my schematization suggests. Rather they substantially overlap, as will be immediately obvious - but this does not mean that distinguishing between them is fruitless. Firstly, there is what I will call an intra-hemispheric approach to American Studies. Within North and South America, this re-emphasis considers the multiple ways in which the U.S. and the Americas interact, and, increasingly, the multiple ways the Americas interact without the USA. So, for example, volume four number one of Comparative American Studies considers how it is necessary to attend not only to how Canada and the USA co-exist, but also to how Canada and the rest of the Americas interact (e.g., concerning issues of migration, refugee flight, asylum and how these redefine border spatialities). 3 The focus especially falls upon difference, diversity, hybridity, ethnicity, gender, and interculturality. Secondly, contingent hemispheric studies have expanded particularly rapidly. This is above all true of two trends: firstly Atlantic Studies - including transatlantic studies, cis-Atlantic studies and circum-Atlantic studies, 4 interleaved with the black Atlantic, the Red Atlantic, the Green Atlantic, the Jewish Atlantic and - of course - the White Atlantic, including the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Atlantic; 5 and secondly Pacific Studies - specifi- 2 See, for example, in particular, Foucault, 1981, 1989; Said, 1978; Bhabha 1990, 1994; Pratt, 1992, 1999; Beck, 1997. 3 See Comparative American Studies 3 (1), guest edited by Sarah Phillips Casteel and Rachel Adams, and in particular, their introduction (2005: 5-13). 4 For a discussion of how these terms can be distinguished, see Armitage, 2004: 16-21. See also, on the circum-Atlantic, Roach (1996). Armitage has even claimed that “we are all Atlanticists now” (2002: 11). Who “we” might be, here, is, however, somewhat opaque. Is he, for example, including my colleagues working in Japan? 5 See: Williams, 1944; Rodney, 1972; Mintz, 1985; Gilroy, 1993; Bailyn, 1996; Canny, 1999; Armitage, 2001; Whelan 2004; Rediker, 2004; Gabbacia, 2004. This is not to mention an Atlantic crossed by women’s movements. See, for example: Rupp, 1997; McFadden, 1999; Anderson, 2000. “East is West”: Interhemispheric American Studies … 165 cally Pacific Rim Studies, examining exchanges between Asia and the USA. 6 Both of these Oceanic hemispheres (the Atlantic and the Pacific) possess a long U.S. coastline, and in this sense both Oceans are contingent with the USA. Contingent American Studies’ re-emphases often fall upon permeable borders, contact zones, (post-) imperial and (post)colonial exchanges, and subaltern resistances. These hemispheric reorientations have more recently been increasingly accompanied by a third response, attending head-on both to globalizing changes in the world order, precipitated in large part by a new closeness between the post-industrial state and late corporate capitalism, and to the consequent blowbacks that have occurred, faced with the corporate’s increasing imperiousness regarding the marginalized and dispossessed. Most singularly this re-estimation has been accelerated by 9/ 11, but also by Lockerbie, Bali and Madrid - the list ever-lengthens. 7 More recently, environmental degradations have been moving back up the scale, subsequent to Katrina’s impact upon New Orleans. All this has thrown increased emphasis upon a new American Studies that can accommodate the global, as espoused, for excample, by Wai-Chee Dimock’s and - very recently - Donald Pease’s planetary perspectives, and by Rob Wilson’s, Kirstin Greusz’s and Susan Gillman’s “Worlding American Studies.” Each of these seeks to respond to an increasingly globalized planet. 8 In other words, a world perspective is sought, one overleaping monocular hemispheric studies (be these intra-American Studies, Atlantic Studies or Pacific Studies). A common criticism of these approaches is that they somehow rehearse the globalized imperialist pretensions of the U.S. State. To counterbalance this, such approaches needed to become closely attentive to the politics of representation arising from identifying othered dispossession as the result of victimization by an U.S. Imperialist center, or risk the charge of deracinated reductiveness being leveled. Yet all of these new American Studies have at least one thing in common. All, ironically, have increasingly come to call into question the intellectual foundations embedded in the term “American Studies”. Its long-assumed 6 See for example, Jones, Frost and White, 1993; Le Heon and Park, 1995; Frank, 1998; Okhiro, 2001. Frank’s determination to resist the claim to pre-eminence of the Atlantic is especially germane to my arguments in this essay. See, for example, his exchange with Peter Vries: Vries, 1998; Frank, 1998. See also Wong, 1997. 7 The term “blowback” is taken from Johnson, 2000. 8 See Wai-Chee Dimock’s forthcoming book (Dimock, 2006); Donald Pease proposed his term, “Planetary Studies” at the symposium “European Perspectives in American Studies” (February 2005); Rob Wilson, Sylvia Gruesz and Susan Gillman proposed their term in Comparative American Studies 2.3 (2004) - a special issue entitled “Worlding American Studies”. See, in particular, Gillman, Gruesz and Wilson, 2004. 166 R.J. E LLIS clarity of enterprise (“the study of America”), long buttressed by exceptionalist discourse, is confronted by what might be called the transnational turn, threatening its autonomy. Or, as one European Americanist perceived it, in near-despair, but in a cri de coeur that carried the day in the workshop in which he was participating at the European Association of American Studies (EAAS) conference in 2004, “we must hold on to the subject.” Heinz Ickstadt, in arguing that “American Studies should accept its name as its limitation and its boundary” fails to make clear whether he is joining this reversionary clarion call or failing to comprehend how permeable - how decentered - the label “American Studies” has become (554). We must hold on to the subject” is going to become a leitmotif of this paper. It is, simply put, unlikely that American Studies of any kind can in any way “hold on to the subject,” as (in John Carlos Rowe’s words) “the ‘new’ American Studies … reconceives its intellectual project as the study of the many different societies of the western hemisphere and of the different border zones that constitute this large region … revisi[ing] the traditional interdisciplinary methods of the field to be more comparative in scope” (Rowe, 2002: xiv, 4). Rather, it seems more plausible to agree with Donald Pease that the field of transnational American Studies will now (finally) emerge (Pease, 2001: 33). The sheer vigor of the transnational turn, which has seen four new “international journals” starting up in the last few years (Atlantic Studies, 2004ff.; Atlantic Literary Review, 2000ff.; Transaltantica, 2001ff.; Transatlantic Studies, 2002ff.) in the field of contingent (Atlantic) hemispheric studies alone, surely means the term “American Studies” must now at least be placed in inverted commas. Faced with such energetic transnational proliferation, in a sense the question becomes, how can “we” - whoever this “we” might held to be within an increasingly diverse community - “hold on to the subject” in any way. This paper, however wants to contend that some ‘holding on’ is necessary, even if the very concept of “America” constituting a “subject” is becoming increasingly contested, as the idea of “roots” is more and more often superseded by attention to “routes” 9 in an ever-globalizing world of flows and exchanges dominated by erosions of clarity concerning the distinction between space and place. As Ulrich Beck reminds us, “globalization means … above all … denationalization” (Beck, 2000: 14). If, as I have argued, American Studies’ theoretical parasitism demands contemporaneity in their methodological approach, then they must respond to this shift of emphasis. And this is what the “‘new’ American Studies” have done. In the ‘new’ American Studies’ shift of emphasis, focus has fallen upon movements, contacts, diasporas and crossings. Increasing attention is being 9 See Clifford, 1997. “East is West”: Interhemispheric American Studies … 167 given to various types of circulation, movement and migration, as in Gloria Anzaldúa’s 1986 Borderlands/ La Frontera: the New Mestiza. Thus Borderlands is dedicated “To you who walked with me upon my path …/ to you who brushed past me at crossroads.” Indeed, the book opens with Anzaldúa standing on “the edge where earth touches ocean.” and explores, celebrates and warns of the dangers of such movement: “a border culture in a constant state of transition … The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. Los atravesados live there … those who cross over, pass over or go through the confines of the “normal” … transgressors, aliens” (Anzaldúa, 1986: 3). At stake in these developments are issues of space and spatialization - the way space is conceptualized, and acculturated. Static understandings of nationstate are under siege, undermined by Édouard Glissant’s identification of how integrated yet boundless political, economic and cultural convergences of historical trajectories have transversally come about, in spite of the borders that cross through people and places (Édouard Glissant, 1997). All confidence in nation-based definition becomes dis-located by new modes of theorizing flows - a focus much better able to accommodate globalizing forces, most obviously and visibly those “top-down” ones fostered by international, multi-national corporate capitalism, its inter-governmental and NGO free market supports (such as the IMF, the World Bank, GATT, GATS), and its multifarious “soft” persuasive powers. These of course are not uniquely American, but the U.S.-American State and U.S.-American corporations’ huge economic reach, combined with their market penetration and advertising powers, continue to exercise a degree of domination within their thoroughly intercalated global networks. For example, as John Tomlinson points out, however much we may want to emphasize how corporations operate globally, and in this sense transnationally, many experiences are permeated by U.S.-American traces (Tomlinson, 1999). When I go to the cinema in the UK, I encounter distinctively U.S.-American elements to the experience, not only because the film is more probably than not a Hollywood-dominated co-production but also because I am asked to “deposit trash” (not throw away rubbish), invited to drink Coke and consume hotdogs or supersized portions of popcorn and required to listen to trailers using U.S.-American voiceovers. 10 So that, though Tomlinson may seek to talk about “global capitalist monoculture” (81), he can never quite escape Ziauddin Sardar’s and Merryl Wyn Davies’s apocalyptic conclusion that “the tsunami of [U.S.]American consumerist culture assimilates everything, exerting immense, unstoppable pressure on the people of the world to change their lifestyles … their values … their identity … [their] stable relationships, [and their] attachment to history” (Sardar and Davies, 2003: 10 I am here cannibalizing Tomlinson’s example (1999: 118). 168 R.J. E LLIS 121). This apocalyptic metaphor was formulated before the 2005 disaster in the Indian Ocean - an event which served as a vivid reminder that Sardar and Davies are rather too apocalyptic in what they say: both Tomlinson and they are right, in a sense. Yet their identification of the continuing pressure exerted by the USA is also reflected in the response of other, less tangible bottom-up resistances to such “globalism,” which are just as important if less obviously powerful: feminist, ethnic and ecological movements involving varieties of both productive consumption and antagonistic acculturation. 11 These latter resistances are encapsulated in Anthony Giddens’ definition of globalization as acting and living (together) over distances, across the apparently separate worlds of national states, regions and continents (Giddens, 1994). This acting and living together may involve technology, commodities and markets, but it can also involve information exchange, green ecologisms, migrations, dissent, opposition. The emphasis falls firmly upon processes. U.S.-American Studies, faced with such conflicting transnational and globalizing pressures, are consequently engaging with deconstructions of the integrity of globalization, identifying instead how it is not just a question of the erosion of national or regional borders in processes of intergovernmental or corporate co-option and control. Globalization is also a question of soft power, state (often U.S. State) dominance and slippery and multiple resistances. Conceptualising glocal/ local interfaces is by now no longer the preserve of corporate glocalisation strategies, as first developed by SONY, coiner of the term “glocalization” to define the process of corporate “thinking globally and acting locally” when grooming new markets for commodified co-option. 12 The new American Studies instead increasingly identifies how always already the local/ global may also be a process of resistance - the interaction of local yet trans-global communities in activities co-ordinated globally, exercised locally which is not to say that no “marketing” of such resistances is involved at all per se. Ulrich Beck promotes this idea when discussing his formulation, “globalization from below” - a formulation taken up by Elisabeth Gerle when contrasting “globalization from below” to “globalization from above” (Beck, 2000: 68 and passim; Gerle, 1995: 30 and passim; Gerle, 2000: 158-71). 13 “Globalization from above” can here be roughly equated with what Ulrich Beck defines as “globalism”, which represents globalization in terms of economic processes enshrined in the precepts of the free-market (as 11 I here take up a point made by Sabine Broeck at a recent conference at the Institute for United States Studies, a symposium occurring in March 2005. See also Campbell, McKay and Davies, 295-307. 12 See Robertson, 1992: 173-74. 13 See also Brecher, Costello and Smith, 2000. “East is West”: Interhemispheric American Studies … 169 understood by neo-liberals, first and foremost), producing a world market whose power is superseding political action, whether national or international (Beck, 2000: 9ff.). By contrast, “globalization from below” subsists in opposition to, critiques of and alternatives to these economic processes and their consequences. Gerle’s formulation usefully emphasizes the idea that globalization is not just a question of processes of global capital and its grand marketing movements, but also of alternative processes routed across borders and contesting their significance. As David Ludden points out, Gerle’s formulation, “participat[ion] in … global discourses.” might now well occur from “all world regions” (Ludden, 2001: 11). All this seems to suggest that “holding onto the subject” of “American Studies” is quixotic in the extreme. However, an emphatic cautionary note needs to be sounded. When all is said and done, all these globalizing developments have to be seen as in part subordinate to - and not untypically reacting against - the powerful omnipresence of the U.S. State, U.S. multinationals and U.S. export culture. What has to be immediately guarded against in advancing this caution is incidentally establishing a new kind of U.S.-American exceptionalism, rooted in a monolithic formulation of both U.S.-American dominance and an accompanying indiscriminately monolithic anti-Americanism. To allow such a picture to become established would be to fail to recognize how, in a transnational world of global finance, the “USA” cannot be homogenized in any simple binary polarization, just as “anti-[U.S.]Americanism” is never as simply monolithic as the phrase’s formulation suggests. For example, none of the top ten multinational corporations are wholly U.S.-owned; they are indeed multinational. At such a precarious moment, “American Studies” have inevitably come to reassess themselves: their reach, their range of reference and their ability to accommodate the global without themselves being sucked into some sort of intellectual quasi-imperialist take-over of world studies, as it were. To guard against this, there is an increasing sense of how a dialectic, or, more accurately, a dialogue exists, with full recognition given to the way global accommodations need to retain a sense of how such processual routes are still rooted in nation states, national economies, and cultural absorption of, resistance to and adaptation of “soft-power” exportations at various levels within these nation states and across them (Lenz, 1999). “American Studies” are consequently both internationalizing themselves more intensely, recognizing their own necessarily transnational make-up and harkening to the dialogues that exist in any such an undertaking. John Carlos Rowe calls this a process of re-conceiving “American Studies” as a “comparativist … study of … many different border zones … such as the Pacific Rim and the African and European Atlantics” (Rowe, 2002: xi-xv) and, I would add, perhaps more importantly, a process of reconceiving com- 170 R.J. E LLIS paratavist studies beyond these contingent hemispheric studies: something accommodating both intra-hemispheric studies like Mexican or Nicaraguan American Studies and other hemispheres too: Indian American Studies, Russian American Studies, Iranian American Studies, Iraqi American Studies - in Rowe’s words, an approach recurrently “more internationalist and comparativist” (Rowe, 2000, 5). Such an adjusted perspective is inevitable. It is driven by the pace and vigor of changes to the world order following the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the rise of radical Islam, and precipitated by a new closeness between the post-industrial U.S. state and late multinational capitalism - what I call a new U.S.-American state imperiousness, which has generated increased marginalization, dispossession and consequent blowbacks. What I want to focus upon now is the large gap that has opened up between the kinds of global emphasis these developments have generated on the one hand and the relatively established “new” American intraand contingent hemispheric studies on the other. I am aware that in describing this gap I am being a little bit reductive. Contingent American hemispheric studies, for example, inevitably also implicate other hemispheres - and their Area Studies. For example, an increasing stress on the Atlantic as a site of flows and exchanges cannot pass without impacting upon the various European Area Studies. In the same way the growing stress on the Pacific Rim impacts obviously upon Australasian Studies, Asian Studies, Chinese Studies, Japanese Studies. At its best such work explicitly bridges hemispheres, as when the Caribbeanists Antonio Benítez-Rojo takes up Édouard Glissant’s analysis of the Caribbean’s “originatings” as inextricably, boundlessly interwoven with Asian as well as African, European and American histories (Glissant, 1981; Benítez-Rojo, 1996). But what is less obvious, perhaps, is how, say, Pacific Rim Studies impact upon European Studies, since the likely world dominance, in economic terms, of the Pacific Rim for the next several decades fundamentally shifts the economic balance away from the old European “West.” What does this shift mean for American Studies? What is opening up, I contend, is a chance to address such interhemispheric issues, their routes and their roots - considerations which can help prevent too much focus on long-established and arguably well-rehearsed exchanges - for example, the transatlantic or U.S. intrahemispheric border studies. What is becoming needed, I argue, is the identification of a range of interhemispheric American Studies procedures, as U.S.-American Studies decenter themselves along a number of intercalated global axes. Groundbreaking work has been emerging in this respect for a while - of an increasingly ambitious nature. 14 14 See, for example: Price, 1974; Hu-Dehart, 1989; Lai, 1993; Lai, 1998; Kale, 1998. “East is West”: Interhemispheric American Studies … 171 Let me here provide one other example of how this might work: a comparative interhemispheric analysis of two international film co-productions, one Hollywood-style, the other Bollywood-style - both, more than by the way, seeking to interrogate their stylistic bases (Hollywood Studio and Bombay Film). The two films I want to subject to this approach are Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003) and Gurinder Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice (2004). The first traces the mid-life crisis of a middle-aged, fading Hollywood actor, on a run to Japan to make a substantial sum in a Japanese whiskey commercial film-shoot, and his quasi-romantic encounter with a bored and neglected young American female, trailing after her almost continuously absent celebrity-photographer husband. The second, as its title makes clear, is a remake of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Austen’s Bennet family becomes the Bakshis (with Elizabeth Bennet becoming Lalita Bakshi, Jane becoming Jayta, Lydia Lakhi, and Mary, Maya. The Reverend Mr. William Collins becomes Mr. Kholi, a nonresident Indian from the States, Fitzwilliam Darcy becomes Will Darcy, the son of a hotel magnate mother and George Wickham becomes Johnny Wickham, an itinerant backpacker known to Darcy because he is the son of a former employee and the impregnator of Darcy’s sister when she was very young). To subject these two films to an interhemispheric analysis is, of course, not to create a sufficient reading of either of them, but I think it is one that illuminates how having a dialogic sense of hemispheric exchange (or the lack of it) pays necessary dividends. Lost in Translation at first seems to be a trans-Pacific text amenable to contingent hemispheric analysis. It depicts the story of a species of brief encounter in Japan between an aging film star, Bob Harris, played by Bill Murray, and a “recently married” but neglected young woman, Charlotte, played by Scarlett Johansson. However, conspicuously, we are almost immediately forced off-hemisphere, as it were, since the story-line in large follows the story-line of David Lean’s UK film, Brief Encounter (1945) - the most obvious signal, this, of the film’s other and (as we shall see) dominant hemispheric orientation. I must immediately declare that I find Lost in Translation to be a poor film. One of the cause célèbres of the film is, apparently, what Bob Harris whispers into the ear of Charlotte at the very end of the film. We cannot hear what is said. And, more pruriently, speculation has focused upon what was actually said by the actors acting the parts, Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson. My reply is that this moment of unheard exchange is unheard precisely because it is an empty exchange. There is almost nothing to say about what their exchange might be. At its best is unworkable (as Bob’s copulation with the hotel’s nightclub diva makes plain); at its worst it is almost faintly pedophiliac, almost sub-Lolitan. Hence Bob’s and Charlotte’s 172 R.J. E LLIS final remark’s translation into inaudible digitized exchange, whilst the film over-indulges Bob Harris’ mid-life crisis. Yet the title, Lost in Translation, referring to the visit of these two Americans to Japan, seems to promise much. The term “Lost in Translation” precisely negotiates with the complexity of cultural exchange - the inevitability of some loss, yet, in that recognition, the possibility of some discovery. But, I want to ask, is anything being discovered in “Lost in Translation”? The short answer is: no. It might be argued that the film self-consciously thematizes the stereotypes produced by people both ignorant of and uninterested in the culture within which they have temporarily become located - if only potentially. But the film soft-focussedly allows Bob and Charlotte to remain in our affections and suffer only the most oblique criticism over their Western insularity, into which they keep retreating. Bob Harris departs Japan for the USA at the end, and we understand that Charlotte is to return Stateside soon. And, as in Brief Encounter (1945), a Western narrative model that keeps most of its two characters’ key exchanges insulated from the world (on a station platform), most of Bob and Charlotte’s key exchanges are framed by their near-insulation from Tokyo in an international hotel. Ironically, though, where Brief Encounter does not allow its two characters a proper final goodbye, Bob is allowed to leap out of his taxi and say his un-overheard goodbye to Charlotte, in one final sentimental softening of their story, keeping it yet further from any cultural engagement. Where Brief Encounter has a lot to say about the cultural complexities created by the disruptions of relationships attending a world war, Lost in Translation says little meaningful about the impact of globalization, since Bob’s and Charlotte’s relationship, which could well engage with this theme (Bob is after all in Tokyo to make a whiskey advertisement), instead segues off into romantic fantasy. “Do you ever get the feeling your whole life is being lived in an airport? ” one of the characters asks Tom Hanks in Terminal (2004). This is in the vein of the hackneyed joke about the globalized iterations of “international” airports and hotel rooms, if perhaps attended by a glocalizing touch: the art reproductions chosen to hang on the terminal or hotel walls. The experience of any hotel room is much, if not wholly to do with the expectation of going out. And go out the characters in Lost in Translation do. However, the Japan they go out into is a disastrous series of clichéd stereotypes. Yes, “their” Japanese are of short stature, so that, for example, Bob cannot adjust his showerhead high enough to stand under it. Yes, this “Japan” is inscrutable, as when the Japanese director of the advertising shoot gives long-winded directions to Bob Harris that are translated (in a very hackneyed joke) into a very few words of American that Bob finds incomprehensible. Yes, this “Japan” is framed by constant intimations of the excesses of globalization - “East is West”: Interhemispheric American Studies … 173 particularly towering skyscrapers, perhaps the most decisive intimation of U.S.-Americanization, at least prior to the skyscraper’s adoption as the universal symbol of corporate power and potency. And, yes, inevitably, an experience of a species of pole-dancing on the Tokyo strip is set against visits to the now largely deserted legacies of Japanese civilization. This disastrous, stereotypical Othering of the “Orient” shows little advance on the sort of reductive representation found in an 1892 text, “A Trip to Chinatown”. Albeit a text dealing with quite another (Chinese) set of reductive cultural stereotypes, “A Trip to Chinatown” disturbingly overlaps with Lost in Translation in the jokey reductiveness of its stereotyping. Both the 1892 and the 2003 text are replicating frozen representations that rely upon this frozenness to impede any relative ethnic dialogues: 15 The boy who is interested in the “Heathen Chinee” is rather rare in these days […] We can nearly all of us remember the picture in the old geography labeled: “Chinese selling rats and puppies for pies.” The picture shows a Chinaman with the ever-present bamboo over his shoulder and the wares of his trade dangling therefrom. […] The Chinaman is industrious and sober […] He is not credited with a vast amount of intelligence, yet he knows enough to let “whiskey”, “the foe of all mankind”, severely alone […] although the Chinaman does not drink whiskey, he has a worse habit in the form of opium. It was the writer’s privilege at one time to visit an opium den […] The habit is a terrible one […] It is perhaps not just to judge the Chinaman by those who come to America. It is said that only the lower classes come here, yet many of them have succeeded excellently in business […] Why there should be an enmity towards them on the part of so many of our people is a question we cannot answer. (Anonymous, 1891: 122) This essay centers upon a visit to a Chinese temple, and is accompanied by, an illustration of its altarpiece statue; Lost in Translation also takes this line: Charlotte’s visit to a largely deserted Japanese temple centers upon her gazing at a large altarpiece. Also “ever-present” in Coppola’s stereotypical reduction is short-statured inscrutability. What I want to suggest is that an interhemispheric analysis reveals just how unwaveringly Atlanticist these frozen stereotypical representations of the Chinese on the one hand and the Japanese on the other are. Just as the Chinese are either Othered or Westernized (as “industrious […] excellent […] businesss[men]”) in the 1892 essay’s undeviating Atlanticist discourse, so Lost in Translation anachronistically follows suit - even if the suit is now a Western business suit (as Western soft cultural forms generally dominate the screen). A key scene in this respect, is a particularly striking one set in an amusement arcade, where a young Japanese woman stands by distractedly whilst 15 See Bhabha, 1984. I perhaps, though, need to make it plain that I am not comparing the contents of these Chinese and Japanese stereotypes as their form. 174 R.J. E LLIS a person, probably her male partner (for this is left uncertain), plays with inscrutable style an arcade game under the static and manipulative gaze established by the eloquent camera-framing’s interaction with the mise-enscène (yes, I do want to praise much of the camera work by Lance Acord, and even some of Coppola’s directing). The Other produced in this sequence is incomprehensibly alien, a product of the Japanese “inscrutable’s” interaction with the Western arcade game, in a representation that quietly but steadfastly elides the significance of the global in the development of arcade games. It is a Northern Atlantic perspective in which we are stubbornly stuck. Seemingly more promising, fuller, is the juxtaposition of the meaninglessly vapid karaoke of a touring American starlet with the karaoke of the rather drunken Charlotte, Bob Harris and their chance Japanese acquaintances. In this scene the performances, as the camera angles and mise en scène contrive, assume some meaningful dimension of feeling. But such a contrast is undercut by the presence of the booziness and its attendant vapid warmth. It becomes another exercise in nostalgia (as the scene itself is not unaware), devoid of any cultural exchange. The potential for any productive cultural cross-consumption is simply elided. For, certainly, karaoke and arcade games, themselves clichéd representations, also offer the potential for incisive considerations of such cultural translation that are simply passed over: the adoption/ adaptation of Western pop-songs in/ to karaoke, a complex Japanese tradition of cultural transmission based on careful practice; or U.S. Western shoot-outs within arcade games remodeled as ninja confrontations. It is just not enough to represent these as sterile, meaningless losses, lost in translation (once again) - for these losses, I contend, carry with them some dialogic gains. That is to say, it is possible to represent what is going on in these cultural adaptations, to do with the status of authenticity, the role of originality, the importance of repetition and the cultural status given to the formulaic. But moving towards such an inter-hemispheric reading shows just how, ironically, Lost in Translation ensures that all of this is lost, as the film instead lamely center-stages a highly conventional, faintly pedophilic and deracinated Western romance, valorizing the individual. The film becomes mono-hemispherically Atlanticist, for all of its international production. All that is not lost in this translation, one might argue, are the fat bottom-line profits for the production company in this very safe co-production. 16 At this point I must emphasize that this analysis does not want to lose sight of the ways in which one Romantic Atlantic discourse upon the East 16 My thanks to Corey Creekmur for his feedback on my original paper, aiding me in developing my argument at this and other points. “East is West”: Interhemispheric American Studies … 175 precisely sees it as a source of divine wisdom and insight, of profundity and artistic simplicity, in a species of (predominantly aesthetic) incorporative Othering. Walt Whitman, with typical contradictoriness, encapsulated this almost 150 years earlier, in his 1860 poem, “Facing West from California’s Shore’ (145): Inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound, I, a child, very old, over waves, towards the house of maternity, the land of migrations, look afar, Look off the shores of my Western sea, the circle almost circled; For starting westward from Hindustan, from the vales of Kashmere, From Asia, from the north, from the God, the sage, and the hero, From the south, from the flowery peninsulas and the spice islands, Long having wander’d since, round the earth having wander’d Now I face home again, very pleas’d and joyous, (But where is what I started for so long ago? And why is it yet unfound? ). (Whitman, 1860: 145) The poem is deliberately drawing on the myth of the Westward progression of civilization, with its Romantic stress upon nostalgia and the transformative power of the imagination. This is indeed an Atlantic poem. Like Whitman’s later, better-known poem, “Passage to India”, “Facing West” draws on Bishop George Berkeley’s contention, in “On the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America”, that “Westward the course of empire takes its way/ […]/ Time’s noblest offspring is the last” (1726). But all is not quite lost in this poem: “Facing West” also reflexively decenters itself. The gaze across the Pacific may largely be an imperial one, but the look is also strained and anxious, aware, as Whitman’s later poem, “Passage to India” is, that the westward march of empire has not been a matter of unequivocal progress, and that something crucial has been lost as well as gained. It lacks Lost in Translation’s smugness. Though incorporating anxiety in this way is still very much in tune with the Western enlightenment’s metaphysics, the poem in the same dialogic moment is also undeniably re-valuing Western empire not in terms of lost Rousseauvian natural innocence but in terms of competing and interacting civilizations, with different orient-ations. The poem ends with elegaic open questions, but it also problematizes the West that the European-U.S.-American Atlantic constructs as the apex of civilization’s development. Crucially, in this respect, the poem recognizes in its very title that “Facing West from California’s Shore” involves, necessarily, facing “the East” - the “East” to the West of California - and implicitly draws attention to how, standing in California, one is standing, for those to the West (e.g., in Japan), in the East. The limitations of Western culture’s monocular viewpoint are established by this moment of interhemispheric heteroglossia. Momentarily, the poem decenters the Atlantic viewpoint’s geographical presumptions: East is West and West, East. 176 R.J. E LLIS In this way Whitman’s poem offers a disturbing problematization of culturally-specific geographical conventions of description (of the U.S.- American West, crucially, but also the “free West”). Focusing solely on the poem’s Atlantic referents would cause this awareness to be “lost”. In sharp contrast, Lost in Translation fails to embrace any such compensatory cultural resource, except in ludicrously cartoon-like and peremptory visits to tourist sights. This may offer a sort of stunted, fleeting critique of such Atlantic tourist Othering, as (just perhaps) does the near-sincere karaoke performed with Bob and Charlotte’s new Japanese acquaintances. But such readings involve an unconvincing stretch of the imagination. Not least, they are rendered unconvincing because of the strange decision to leave in the movie the moment when Bob sits in hospital waiting for Charlotte to emerge after her X-ray for a broken toe. This scene was set in an actual hospital in Tokyo, and resulted from the actor, Bill Murray, sitting in one of the hospital’s waiting areas and establishing unrehearsed, though, of course, half-staged exchanges with the chance Japanese patients around him. One of these stooges, for want of a better word, having established that Bob Harris/ Bill Murray is American, endeavors to indicate that America is a long way away, involving air travel around a large segment of the globe, but Bob, and in this instance, the actor, Bill Murray as well, cannot understand what the Japanese man is trying to convey. Ironically, the Japanese man’s resort to perfectly clear hand-signing in his attempt to establish communication is lost on BobHarris/ Bill Murray. Harris/ Murray makes no effort to understand the hand-signals at all, but instead immediately resorts to clumsy parody, intended to be comical (playing to the gallery of other Japanese patients and, one suspects, the film crew, too), even though the hand signals he neglects to try to understand need no translation. The minimal cultural engagement, the moment of dialogic interhemispheric awareness, required by both Bob and Bill Murray is simply not forthcoming. This failure is deeply ironic: the desire for cultural engagement is simply missing. An accidental, scathing meta-textual commentary is established, revealing the film as no kind of trans-Pacific text at all, quite unable to engage with the cultural processes with which it treats. All is lost in translation, indeed - even the straightforward sign-language of the Japanese man. Bride and Prejudice does rather better. It, too, is to do with translation - quite literally, since it is based loosely upon Pride and Prejudice. The most textured debt it owes to its novelistic origins is a pointed one revolving around how calculations of financial suitability lubricate the wheels of love and marriage in both nineteenth century England and twenty-first century India and its global diaspora - just perhaps because India is entering upon a phase of industrialization and capitalist commercialization in a way not wholly unanalogous to what was happening in late-Eighteenth Century England (this at least seems to lie behind its director, Gurinder Chadha’s “East is West”: Interhemispheric American Studies … 177 claim that “the themes [of Pride and Prejudice] are pertinent to India”). 17 But what is much more striking is the lavishly over-shot and over-cliched stereotypes offered: both in Amritsar and when the main Indian female protagonists and their parents travel abroad. Here, the ironic intertextual debt is not to Jane Austen, but to the Indian film industry, and particularly to the recent flowering of Bollywood that has seen its films penetrate not just the non-resident Indian community (NRIs), but also a wider audience - so much so that the travel guide publishing company, Lonely Planet has even taken to defining a classicNew York experience as one including taking in a “Bollywood movie” (City Break Secrets, 2005: 14). This new, more cosmopolitan Bollywood focuses very much on middle class NRI global travelers. 18 Bride consciously echoes these. But Chadha goes beyond the knowing, self-referential and ironic celebration of established clichés quite generally found in Bollywood productions by instead transposing and adapting another strand of Jane Austen’s text: its ruthlessly sharp satire upon contemporary mores. London becomes reduced to a vapid series of comically exaggerated clichéd depictions of the main London tourist sites. Stripped of its guts and deboned, this version of “London” parodically flops before the viewer, ready for easy tourist consumption. Similarly, Los Angeles, rather more recalcitrant material, is boiled down, in analogous fashion, by a montage intercalating the sign for HOLLYWOOD, LA’s beach strip, and some fleeting glimpses of LA’s signature architecture - all, inevitably, culminating in a helicopter trip to the Grand Canyon, with deliberately over-familiar aerial shots that succeed in containing (by dwarfing) its scale, as a cap to the sequence. This satiric celebration of international, contemporary, bustling tourist sites is in exact contrast to the heritage sites in Lost in Translation, which, empty of tourists and apparently neglected by modern Japan, are lifted out of time into a tourist pastoral of elegaic timelessness. In contrast to such colonial nostalgia, the London and LA portraits in Bride and Prejudice are carefully and deliberately often made obviously contemporary ones, featuring, for example, the London Eye and (pointedly) LA’s Walt Disney Concert Hall. A biting satire results (irony intended to hurt), reflecting upon the ways in which the tourist reflexes of the twenty-first century transnational upper middle-class (represented as the owners of the means of production - including tourist production, since Darcy’s family are hotel magnates) have 17 Gurinder Chadha, interviewed on the DVD of Bride and Prejudice, Los Angeles: Pathe, 2005. 18 See Srinivas, 2005. See also Booth, 1995; Thomas, 1995; Dissanayake, (2004). Srinivas’s article, which I first read in the middle of the writing of this essay, has been very helpful to me. 178 R.J. E LLIS not only connived in but fuelled the global reduction of London and LA. London and LA, in these tourist catalogues, are boiled down to an invariant series of visual clichés, that, more than incidentally, almost match the stereotypes of provincial India that the film also offers. Almost - but not quite, for where in India the stereotypical emphases fall upon exoticized depictions of crowded markets and streets, the Golden Temple and Goan beaches, London is trapped in a near-contemporary swinging cool Britannia mode and LA in lavish consumerism. It is a fiercely satiric critique of mutual Othered exoticizations, be they those of “Western” global tourism, of middle-class India, or of NRI circulations. In Bride and Prejudice, these various European, Indian or U.S.-American tourist Otherings are transparently veiled by what is on the surface merely sentimental celebration. My contention is that an inter-hemispheric analysis of this combination of montage and mise en scène shows how it is quite opposed to the nostalgic mendacities of Lost in Translation, which communicate nothing beyond the mere reinforcement of the Orientalist Othering borne within its stereotypes. Lost in Translation has a bitter-sweetness, but it is a depleted, Atlanticist bitter-sweetness, rooted in a crudely reductive reworking of the cultural legacies of Henry James and Nabokov concerning innocence and experience. The bitter-sweet mood of Bride and Prejudice, by contrast, is rooted in a recognition of the consequences of multinational incorporation of global tourism. The film complexly parodies the sweetly sentimental, subtly inflected and often selfironized hybridities of Bollywood - the mode in which the film is shot and produced in a pattern of double irony. Bride successfully intimates how such sugared commodification is also a cause for the bitterest anxieties, as culture is reduced down to some ghastly Disneyfied parody of cultural exchange. This is encapsulated in the film in four sharply satiric sequences. Firstly, in a Bollywood dream sequence, in which Lalita Bakshi’s unsuccessful suitor, the legal high-flyer, Kholi, has transformed the iconic hill-side signifier, HOLLYWOOD into KHOLIWOOD, as a signal of the shift to complex patterns of global financing of world movies (this a moment of exquisite self-reflexivity). Secondly when, as Darcy and Lalita dine in a Mexican restaurant in LA, a band playing at their table wears such absurdly large sombreros that these completely dominate their heads, masking their identities behind the stereotypical “Hispanic” headgear (whilst cocktail shakers ironically serve as castanets in the background). Thirdly, when Darcy and Lalita stroll along deserted sands, they find themselves suddenly strolling past a full gospel choir - the African American cultural icon parodically boiled down to its basic signifiers and bleakly placed on a sandy waste, in an image drawing plainly on Bollywood wish-fulfillment/ dream-sequence conventions, but also on that moment of diegetic/ non-diegetic fracturing to “East is West”: Interhemispheric American Studies … 179 be found in Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles (1974). Finally, Bride brilliantly turns the tables on “Western” propensities for imperial homologization of the “Orient” by cavalierly relocating the fountain in the courtyard of London’s Somerset House into Los Angles, with a geographical abandon exactly replicating that found in “Western” views of “the East.” Hence the title change from “Pride” to “Bride”: this film is all about marriage - the marriage of East and West, in terms of narrative, of form and of their ideological ramifications, in a shot-gun wedding imposed by the reach of global late Capitalism. More than incidentally this redactive reach has reified Jane Austen, trapping her writing in the amber of love and marriage adaptations that side-line her fiercely erotic satire; but it has also created a complex series of cultural gains and losses that the film patrols. Formally its syncretistic entwining of Bollywood and Hollywood musical conventions constitute a generally refreshing culture-lite romp through a narrative long afforded classic status; more darkly, the puzzlement and distaste evinced by her multinational watchers as Maya Bakshi performs an energetic and threatening cobra dance (during which the montage’s rapid cutting emphasizes the intensity of the dance) suggests the attendant processes of loss as the transnational takes hold: Maya’s dance lacks the necessary culture-liteness. This I think is the point of the central protagonist’s name, Lalita; her name deliberately sounds very like Lolita - as, indeed, someone in the film mishears it. The seductiveness of such hybridity, offering “young” (yet knowing) independent Indian Bollywood to jaded Humbert Humbert-style Hollywood palates, constitutes a complex, potentially disgusting trade. But it is one in which, in the last analysis, Chadha’s good humor is superseded by something approaching anger over continuing processes of imperial patronage. As she herself puts it, though “anger might be a bit of a strong word … all my films … might be dressed up as comedy, but everything I’ve ever done is always about making whoever’s watching […] think differently.” 19 Bride and Prejudice, at one of its poles of meaning, satirizes the NRI’s (and their movies’) “Khol i woodization,” as money’s power whisks the protagonists quite literally around the globe. And yet, as Kholi’s mispronunciation of America as Am’rica makes clear (so making America sound like Amritsar), such polarizations are crossed by complex flows of migration and diasporic exchange more difficult to unravel: Am’rica is becoming 19 See Gurinder Chadha, http: / / www.imdb.com/ title/ tt0361411/ board/ nest/ 16121321 (accessed 24/ 04/ 2005). From my point-of-view it is pertinent that Paul Giles in his Virtual America envisages Lolita as standing not just for the young America, knowingly open to Europe, but also American Studies. See Giles, 2000; see also Giles, 2002. 180 R.J. E LLIS increasing “Amritsar-nized” (as well as Hispanized), just as Bollywood increasingly draws on and feeds into Hollywood accommodations, as in recent Bollywood transnational Indian productions, featuring dialogic exchanges between an Indian middle-calls and their NRI relatives. The film, Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (K3G), 2002, is a prime example of this trend (Srinivas, 2005). One way of defining the distinction that exists between Bride and these recent NRI Bollywood films is to compare the representation of London in Bride and K3G. In both, London is in slightly retro swinging Cool Britannia mode: the two at first glance seem closely similar in their representation. But Bride does not share K3G’s undertone of moral disapprobation, deriving from a constant sense that the dynastic family’s exiled outposts are in danger of succumbing to the turpitudinous fleshpots of central London - even if this is conveyed in a slightly tongue-in-cheek way. Furthermore, Bride’s kaleidoscopic montage of London, so close to that of K3G, makes no pretence at representing NRI London life in the self-same process. Bride’s London sights are tourist sights only, not also “sets.” This is what they are in K3G: the film’s elaborate musical numbers are staged on signature tourist sites, fusing these sites with the film’s other “sets”. Bride declines to introduce such condensation. Even when a pursuit along London’s South Bank occurs, this is just after Wickham has taken Lakhi for a tourist ride on the London Eye: the narrative remains integrated with the plot. In this respect it os noteworthy that, in Bride, all the main dramas (apart from this pursuit) are set in modest West London suburbs around Southall (where Chadha was born). In this contrast in the way London tourist sites are condensed with dream-fantasy in K3G and integrated with plot in Bride resides the much sharper satiric edge to Brides’ presentation of central London. Both films are knowingly retro, both films present exaggerated stereotypical portraits, but only Bride sets up a subtle satiric dialogue between tourist visual excess and suburban mundanities. Such complexity has confused movie-goers: Chadha, especially in internet discussion lists, has been regularly slated for what is seen as her clumsy stereotyping. These attacks, I think, are provoked by the unavoidably messy way that Brides’s satirizations have to be carried in the self-same vehicle - an NRI Bollywood-style international commercial production - that the film, Bride , critiques. 20 The sharply satiric intent it in fact carries within it (and indeed Chadha’s underlying anger) passes such critics by. Perhaps this is because the complex interhemispheric translations in Bride and Prejudice become potentially deeply disturbing, if brought to the foreground - precisely where the elegaic Lost in Translation cannot meaningfully translate but rests in surface depiction. 20 See, for example, <http: / / www.imdb.com> and Ellis, 2007. “East is West”: Interhemispheric American Studies … 181 In any transnational Asian-American reading, Lost in Translation fails to become inter-hemispheric, and indeed, is not even a Pacific text at all. It is largely unable to engage with the cultural processes with which it treats, except when sharply, but tritely, and very much in the Romantic tradition, observing how Bob has chosen to sell his “integrity” to the advertising company making a Japanese whiskey advert, as part of his mid-life crisis - albeit for a large payoff (- a very familiar Atlanticist theme to do with a highly individuated “crisis”). This conceded, Lost in Translation otherwise fails to trade effectively between Brief Encounter and Japanese transnational postmodernities. Indeed, it is no kind of Pacific text, instead nestling within an Atlanticist discourse. It is clearly a dislocated Atlantic text, wrenched from its cultural hemisphere (shot in Japan) into a nexus of Western cultural discourses that allows for a darkly prejudiced misrepresentation of twentyfirst century South East Asia to develop. By contrast a text apparently avowedly Western in its inspiration, a pastiche of Pride and Prejudice, becomes a complex inter-hemispheric satire upon process of global homogenization in the cultural marketplace. Bride never offers any mendacious pretence at sentimentalized authenticity, but in its complex parodies exposes the blank colorfulness of late-capitalist bourgeois world tourism. This is self-reflexively alluded to when, near the end, Wickham and Lakhi dash into the South Bank’s National Film Theater in London, in the middle of a BFI Bollywood screening session, past a poster advertising the classic Bollywood production, Manoj Kumar’s East is West (Purab aur Paschim, 1970). The Hindi poster in itself (but only for Hindi speakers) underlines how Western geographical orientations constitute the hegemon’s global tradings. But, as Purab aur Paschim makes clear, underneath this there are the quotidian problems of negotiating “mixed relationships” in the face of prejudice, diasporic displacement and economic hardship. Bride’s sardonic allusion to how consumerist tradings smooth over such realities acknowledges the extent to which the pervasiveness of global exchanges across hemispheres renders yearnings for integral cultural authenticity as narrowly nostalgic - all too vulnerable to contamination by national ersatz-myths of origin that have simply lost their viability within rampant inter-hemispheric exchange - mostly under U.S. suzerainty. Where Purab Aur Paschim advances the central message, “You need India and India needs you. Be proud of India and let India be proud of you” (words spoken by the central protagonist, Bharat, the child of a freedom fighter - played by Manoj Kumar himself), Bride offers a more complex, inter-hemispherically informed consideration of the global plays between NRIs, Indians, Americanization and Empire (including a fading British Empire and a rising consumer-driven, U.S.-American corporation-dominated economic postcapitalist “Empire”). 182 R.J. E LLIS Faced with such texts as Bride and Prejudice and Lost in Translation, and the globalized socio-economic and cultural processes with which they treat, a new kind of approach to U.S.-American Studies is indeed necessary - one fundamentally informed by contact, hybridity, exchange, flow, migration and process, and alert to such issues of inter-hemispheric flows, (dis)advantaged exchange and (dis)location. A twenty-first century American Studies will inevitably have be more frequently and often “messily” comparative, accommodating the transnational but also introducing the inter-hemispheric as a constant corrective. As such it will return to the subject - yes, “hold on” to it - be it in terms of economics, resources, demographics or culture. Plainly, in all this, the bare term “American Studies” (which I have been carefully avoiding whenever U.S.-American Studies is the more accurate) hardly works anymore, its grand narrative projects laid all too bare. 21 There has long been an endemic unease in the rest of the Americas with the USA’s appropriation of the term, America - and for a very long time: at least from José Martí’s essay, “Our America” in 1891, through Édouard Glissant’s 1981 definition of the “Other America,” 22 to Felipe Fernandez-Arnesto’s insistence upon viewing America as a hemispheric term (Martí, 1891; Glissant, 1981; Fernandez-Arnesto, 2003). The apologists’ explanation that the USA lacks an adjectival form, thus excusing the term “American Studies” when talking of America, correctly enrages Gabriel Garcia Marquez: “When residents of the U.S. call themselves American, they are telling us they think of themselves as the only Americans. Actually these people are residents of a country without a name” (Garcia Marquez, 1983: 67). Such unease should become general in the new American Studies - of whatever kind. In this respect, it is notable how Jana Evans Braziel, in advancing her term, “trans-America” in order to “capture historic and hemispheric points of cultural contact in the Americans … [and] also current geopolitical shifts,” identifies different, over-lapping Americas: an America of European colonialist expansion and its contact-zone hemispheric practices of enslavement and hegemony; an America of U.S. world-wide imperialism and military intervention; and an America of geopolitical power and diasporic refiguring. Together, in overlapping fashion, these constitute her “America” - “an ideological, geopolitical, corporate, material and imaginary transnational complex” (Evans Braziel, 2004: 34-35). 21 Of course, it is not only within American Studies that these issues are being debated. See for example, Gibson-Graham and Gibson-Graham (2004). Their analysis emanates primarily from a geographical base (though Katherine Gibson-Graham is based in an “area studies research school” (405). 22 ‘… the other America is not “Latin” …. Before its dense and multiple significance, we seem to fade into insignificance” (Glissant, 1989: 117). On this subject, see also Rowe, 2002: 3ff. “East is West”: Interhemispheric American Studies … 183 Evans Braziel’s formulation brings me back to the need to “hold on to the subject” as we reconfigure the term “American Studies” - and following Evans Braziel, let me call this subject “corporate America.” Here I am trying to spin out a pun: not only the corporate U.S.-America of big business but also the material continental landmass, the body of the United States, with its vast, incorporated human and commodity reserves, no matter how acculturated and (re-)textualized we may hold its cultural corpus to be. This is the “homeland” of the U.S.-American State and of its hegemonic ideological and repressive apparatuses that are not simply going to go away. Recognizing this runs counter to any talk of “postnational deterritorialization.” There is, I want to suggest, something of a risk in being seduced by any such spatial metaphysics. The force of Henri Lefebvre’s formulation of a “politics of space” is clear to me: “Space … has always been political and strategic. If space has an air of neutrality and indifference with regard to its contents … it is precisely because it has been occupied and used, and has already been the focus of processes whose traces are not always evident.”(Henri Lefebvre, 1976: 31). 23 We cannot afford to formalize abstractly what is in fact a rooted place of power-plays and imperial dominance - enactments of the subtended relationship of the United States and the world. Stubbornly, the concept of the nation state, its place, will not implode imminently under globalizing pressures. “National pride” - that powerful investment Western culture in particular has in the idea of “nation”, which, for example, played its role in George W. Bush’s re-election, shows little sign of losing its grip. Though the sheer bulk of the USA’s military power and multinational corporate growth does not constitute the whole world story, and though any understanding of the world and the increasingly contested place of nation states within it will not remain the same because of a stubborn popular adherence to nationality, perhaps the idea of globalization requires some retention of an inter-hemispheric sense of national place within transnational space. This can then inform assessments of the “anti-Americanism” of critiques of “America”: to what extent is there due recognition of the implicatedness of transnational capital flows - both those of world economic systems but also those of cultural capital? Or to what extent is a reductive process substituted, isolating America within a self-reliant hemispheric location - a reductiveness having no grip upon processes of international exchange? In this sense, indeed, then, though “we must hold onto the subject,” this subject must be specifically recognized as both historically layered and globally implicated - with all its accretions of colonial and imperial economic (past) legacies and (present) aspirations. These are latterly interlaced with later-capitalist commodificatory opacities, of course, and sometimes challenged, but also sometimes 23 See also Soja, 1989. 184 R.J. E LLIS reinforced, by hybrid counter-discourses - diasporic, feminist, queer, proletarian - discourses of course not solely located in America, but infused with what I call inter-hemispheric ideological articulations - of either complicity or radical dissent. The historically layered, globally implicated subject, U.S.- America remains substantial enough, but to hold onto it always already requires intraand inter-hemispheric understandings. Consequently American Studies has to recognize that in its practice it needs to specify what sort of American Studies it is seeking to be: what, exactly, it is seeking to hold on to, and not leave it to the mendacious operations of implicit ideologies - to do (ironically) with the U.S. State’s intra-hemispheric (and, indeed, interhemispheric) desire for hegemony. The nostalgic term “American Studies” cannot constitute a deracinated stand-alone one, anymore. 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J UDE D AVIES Stupid White Men: Toward a Political Mapping of Stupidity Who other than the politicians who commit them bothers to complain about the stupidities of politics? Are the clever parts of politics any cleverer? Karl Kraus 1 It would be easier to pay off the national debt than to neutralize the power of OUR NATIONAL STUPIDITY. Frank Zappa 2 Since the 1980s a series of figures have emerged in U.S.-American politics and media whose apparent stupidity has validated and empowered their status as heterosexual white men. Across a broad political and cultural spectrum, from Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Michael Moore, to the protagonists of films such as Being There, the Bill and Ted, Wayne’s World, and Dumb and Dumber series, and television shows like Beavis and Butt-Head, South Park and The Simpsons, stupidity has operated, in the phrase of Matthijs van Boxsel, “not as a failing but as a force.” 3 Of course, for Bush and Clinton, as for Homer Simpson, the identification with stupidity can function negatively, as a form of abjection. But the force of stupidity in each case testifies to the lingering presence of patriarchal gendered and/ or racialized power. Playing dumb is generally a much less effective strategy - and consequently a much less common one - among people whose intelligence and abilities have historically been denied or stigmatised. In a powerful sense then, the “stupid white men” are a ruse of power for the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, a means of rejuvenat- 1 Karl Kraus, Dicta and Contradicta [1923]. Trans. Jonathan McVity, Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2001, p. 50. Thanks for their feedback, criticism and suggestions on earlier versions of this work to Andrew Blake, Merrick Burrow, Lisa Merrill, Simon Newman, John Pollack, John Carlos Rowe, Carol Smith, and Ingrid Thaler. 2 Frank Zappa with Peter Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book. New York and London: Poseidon/ Picador, 1989, p. 239. Thanks to Paul Williams, host of the 2005 Frank Zappa Memorial Barbecue, for drawing my attention to Zappa’s discussions of stupidity, which range beyond this quotation and the scope of the present essay. See therefore Ben Watson, Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play. London: St Martin’s, 1996. 3 Matthijs van Boxsel, trans. Arnold and Erica Pomerans, The Encyclopaedia of Stupidity. London: Reaktion Books, 2003, p. 20. 190 J UDE D AVIES ing conservative forms of straight white masculinity in the public sphere. In contrast to the pre-culture wars construction of masculinity in terms of exemplarity and pretentions to a neutral or universal perspective, male authority is reconstituted around the admission of its limitations, and even - as will be seen à propos Arnold Schwarzenegger - its errors. As Frank Zappa’s reference to “our national stupidity” quoted above suggests, such struggles over gendered power have wider implications. One of the paradigm’s furthest developments, discussed below, is Robert Zemeckis’s 1994 film Forrest Gump. Here, the force of his stupidity positions heterosexual white masculinity, in the person of the eponymous protagonist played by Tom Hanks, at the center of recent American history, and enables that history to be re-narrated in such a way as to heal the traumas of Viet Nam, Watergate, racism, desegregation, the rise of Black Power and student politics, and the culture wars. Gump’s explanation of Ku Klux Klan racism, “sometimes people do things that just don’t make no sense,” goes for all and any fractures in the nation, his limited consciousness authenticating the film’s redemptive national narrative. Yet “stupid white men” are not exclusively bound up with reactionary power. Rather, the identification with stupidity plays all the way across a political spectrum from the right-wing Republicanism of George W. Bush to his would-be nemesis the satirist Michael Moore. In Moore’s 2002 book Stupid White Men the term is used to indicate some of his political targets, but it could also could be taken to refer to Moore’s own on-screen persona. Long before his political opponents appropriated the term to describe him, it was clear that Moore utilized the pose of stupidity for a variety of strategic purposes, including to confront the powerful and test their apologetics, and to establish his own blue-collar credentials. 4 In television shows such as The Naked Truth and TV Nation and films such as Roger and Me (1989) and Bowling for Columbine (2001) Moore’s habitual method has been to present himself as an archetypal “ordinary guy” asking reasonable questions - questions which are frequently so obvious as to seem ignorant or stupid, but which are designed to have the effect of puncturing the aura of rationality around dominant economic and political discourse. It is only with Fahrenheit 9/ 11 (2004) that the persona shifts a little, since Moore is more explicitly intent on putting over an analysis of the War on Terror. Even so the film is largely organized around a series of simple, even simplistic, questions, whose aim seems to be to contest the Presidential persona of honest simplicity: What was George W. Bush thinking of as he carried on reading 4 Michael Moore, Stupid White Men and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation. New York: Harper Collins, 2002. David T. Hardy and and Jason Clarke, Michael Moore is a Big Fat Stupid White Man. New York: Regan, 2004. Stupid White Men: Toward a Political Mapping of Stupidity 191 to children when told of the first attack on 11 September 2001? Why were relatives of Osama bin Laden allowed to take flights from the USA? Why do law-makers not read the legislation they are to vote on? , etc. “Stupid white men” also resonates widely outside the Moore-Bush conflict. Presidents Ronald Reagan 5 and Bill Clinton have also been associated with different forms of stupidity, as has Arnold Schwarzenegger in his position as Governor of California. The television serial “The West Wing,” well-known for dramatizing U.S. political issues, devoted a 2002 episode to the question of the relative merits of intellect and stupidity as desirable Presidential qualities. 6 The episode is initialized when, after a television interview has ended but while the cameras are still rolling, the show’s fictional President Bartlet (Martin Sheen) calls his Republican challenger stupid. This apparent gaffe is subsequently revealed to be a deliberate move, a ruse of intelligence feigning a mistake in order to brand an opponent as stupid. How such a strategy may be linked to the information disclosed in this episode that Bartlett graduated summa cum laude with a major in American Studies, (and a PhD from the London School of Economics), readers may speculate for themselves. It was then for good reason that Richard Hofstadter, in his pioneering Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963), acknowledged anti-intellectualism as a redeemable heir to the Founding Fathers’ values of simplicity, individualism, and hostility to hierarchy, even as he excoriated the anti-intellectual strand that had been a powerful component of McCarthyism and still threatened the progressive civil rights project. This ambivalent national tradition renders “stupid white men” ideologically slippery, but the apparent fixity offered by many European perspectives on the USA is no better. U.S.-American power has provoked in Europe a populist anti-Americanism, whose embrace of the venerable binary of American stupidity versus European intelligence render it both reactionary and conceptually inadequate. 5 Rogin points out that Reagan presented himself as being highly ethical by virtue of what might be seen as three forms of stupidity: a basic inability to deliberately mislead, a simple faith in nation and God, and a natural, common-sense morality contrasted with an over-sophisticated world. See Michael Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie And Other Episodes in Political Demonology. Berkeley: U of California P, 1987, and Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City. Durham, NC.: Duke UP, 1997, p. 184. 6 The West Wing, “The U.S. Poet Laureate,” teleplay by Aaron Sorkin, story by Laura Glasser, directed by Christopher Misiano. First aired March 27, 2002. An unofficial transcript is available at <http: / / www.westwingtranscripts.com> (consulted August 31, 2006.) The show portrays intellect/ stupidity along partisan lines - the former valued by Democrats, and treated with hostility by Republicans, one of whom raises the question “Doesn’t it concern you that the smartest presidents have been the worst? ” citing John Quincy Adams and Woodrow Wilson. 192 J UDE D AVIES A mapping of stupidity then might be launched out of the juxtaposed epigraphs at the head of this essay. While the Austrian satirist Karl Kraus warns against the assumption that stupidity can be opposed in any direct way by intelligence, the American guitarist/ composer Frank Zappa responds directly to an ethical imperative to name that which is stupid. Zappa’s vernacular style precludes claims to expertise in such matters, but he nevertheless belongs to a recognisable American tradition of anti-anti-intellectualism. Another of his formulations, that “Stupidity has a certain charm - ignorance has not” (Zappa 241) is reminiscent of Richard Hofstadter’s more measured assessment of anti-intellectualism. But overall Zappa’s scorching critique is ideologically closer to that of H.L. Mencken, whose battles against censorship and American Puritanism anticipated those of the musician seventy years later. Mencken warned in a 1917 essay, “Puritanism as a Literary Force” that The Puritan’s utter lack of aesthetic sense, his distrust of all romantic emotion, his unmatchable intolerance of opposition, his unbreakable belief in his own bleak and narrow views, his savage cruelty of attack, his lust for relentless and barbarous persecution … have put an almost intolerable burden upon the exchange of ideas in the United States. 7 The instances of stupidity within the USA that Zappa cites - “people who shoot at you on the freeway, or the Rambos or Rambo-ettes who blow people away in shopping malls and fast-food restaurants with automatic weapons” (Zappa 239) - belong to another anti-intellectual national tradition, the Gunfighter Nation identified by Richard Slotkin, while Zappa’s description of U.S.-American externality - “we possess THE VERY BIG STUPID” - that is nuclear weaponry, anticipates the USA’s status as sole hyperpower, and the unilateralism of the George W. Bush administration’s War on Terror, as well as Avital Ronell’s 2002 description of the “sinister history” of stupidity in America (evidenced by racism and the regulation of immigration) as “destroying an alterity.” 8 However, as Kraus’s question suggests, and as Ronell demonstrates at length, stupidity is a philosophical and linguistic problem exactly because it resists being fixed, banished, put in its place, located. “Stupidity is everywhere” (37) as she puts it, echoing Gustave Flaubert. Her 2002 work Stupidity explores the term as the quintessential example of linguistic différance; the fundamental dissonance between grammar and text, or discourse and thinking. Thus Ronell begins by referring to “[t]he temptation … to wage war on stupidity as if it were a vanquishable object,” a war which is futile 7 H.L. Mencken, “Puritanism as a Literary Force,” 1917, quoted in Carl Bode, Mencken. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University P, 1969, p. 100. 8 Avital Ronell, Stupidity. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2002, p. 39. Stupid White Men: Toward a Political Mapping of Stupidity 193 because stupidity “exceeds and undercuts materiality, runs loose, wins a few rounds, recedes, gets carried home in the clutches of denial - and returns.” 9 Although this makes fantastical the traditional self-positioning of the intellectual as the foe and eradicator of stupidity, Ronell nevertheless maintains the ethical imperative that “[i]t is undoubtedly someone’s responsibility to name that which is stupid” (37). What follows is an attempt to fulfil this imperative. Anti-Intellectualism and the Presidential Persona: Hofstadter Redux The situation of “stupid white men” at the intersection of politics with television and film reinforces the importance of reading political personae as cultural forms, and in particular as more or less politicized performances of identity which interact with the political economy in which they are embedded. 10 United in launching the U.S./ UK invasion of Iraq in 2003, President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair justified the war to their respective constituencies very differently. Where Bush offered moral certainty, Blair presented himself as a man possessed of superior insight, of privileged knowledge - a would-be sophisticated player in global politics. Subsequently, the failure to discover the weapons of mass destruction whose existence was the pretext for the invasion, was hugely damaging to Blair, but it made little difference to Bush’s popularity, since his rationale was based more in moral right and machismo than on Intelligence. If Bush’s 9 Ronell, Stupidity, p. 3. Flow is a key theme in Victor E. Taylor’s exposition “Refusing Theory: Avital Ronell and the Structure of Stupidity,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 4: 2 (April 2003), at <http: / / www.jcrt.org/ archives/ 04.2/ taylor.shtml>; consulted August 26 2006, as Taylor signals by his choice of a quotation from another Ronell text, The Telephone Book, for one of his epigraphs: “Remember: When you’re on the telephone, there is always an electronic flow, even when that flow is unmarked.” 10 Ronell understands the performative nature of stupidity primarily in relation to philosophy and literature, as when she comments that stupidity “now belongs to the famous repertoire of Nietzschean poses, to the domain of fictions and the will to power” (4). This turn enables the project of Stupidity and has been profoundly enabling for my own work. However, I maintain the category of performance for several reasons. I am too much of a materialist to invest as heavily in philosophy and literature as Ronell does. More importantly, the category of performance allows us to contemplate stupidity simultaneously in terms of the politics of its forms, and as a set of cultural forms embedded in and shaped by power relations. This begs the question of the autonomy of stupidity as a cultural form in relation to political economy, a question to which this essay will return. 194 J UDE D AVIES approval ratings have fallen subsequently, this has been due to the high human cost of the war, especially among American service personnel, its extended duration, and the weakness of democracy in the post-Saddam Hussein Iraq. These very different leadership personae do not derive in any simple way from personality, but are identifiably shaped by specific national histories and cultural and political traditions. Some of these differences are suggested by the contrast between the slogan employed by Blair during the 1997 British general election, when his Labour party came to power: “Education, Education, Education”, and the articulate inarticulacy evidenced by the phenomena known as “Bush-isms.” The personae of George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan suggest that antiintellectualism can be mobilized as a political virtue in the USA in ways that are unthinkable elsewhere - though that is not to underestimate the emotional appeal to nationalistic ethnic fantasies made by far-right political parties in much of Europe. Thus the BBC television show “Deadringers,” which regularly features comic impersonations of politicians, in a show first aired in July 2003 had “Blair” as the straight man deliver a complex, balanced speech, while a “Bush” figure inset into the screen at top right, after the manner of signers for the hard of hearing, glossed it into monosyllabic phrases such as “U.S. good; ” “Evil ones dead.” Hence also the pointed British joke about the war in Iraq: “Bush is an idiot, but what is Tony Blair’s excuse? ” and the response of the British satirical magazine Private Eye to Bush’s re-election in November 2004. Riffing on the Republican slogan “four more years,” its cover proclaimed “Four Moron Years.” The popularity of such representations in Europe testifies to the continued power of venerable discourses of American exceptionalism both within and outside the USA, drawing upon the opposition between the supposedly youthful, un-cultured and democratic New World, and cultured, hierarchical, old Europe. Although this was never an innocent formation ideologically, what is most striking about it now is its anachronism, given the current global pre-eminence of the USA in the fields of elite culture like classical music, high literature, and Higher Education and the flow of banality westward across the Atlantic in the form of European mass culture such as the reality television formats exported to the USA: Big Brother (originated in the Netherlands), Survivor (Sweden), and American Idol (the UK.) This internal production of lowbrow culture and its transmission to the USA, should have rendered obsolete the European tendency to view the populist mass media in terms of Americanization. Yet on both sides of the Atlantic this distinction has proved remarkably resistant to such challenges. If Europeans flatter themselves by the comparison, conversely, within the USA stupidity as a political virtue took its place in the early 2000s within a revitalized cultural and political discourse of exceptionalism - a Stupid White Men: Toward a Political Mapping of Stupidity 195 discourse whose political valency between Republican and Democrat was often explicitly configured by reference to Europe. This is the context that stigmatized John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic party Presidential candidate, for his cosmopolitanism: his youth spent partly in Berlin, and his ability to speak French. The presidential campaigns in 2000 and in 2004 reinvigorated the current that had been exposed brilliantly by Richard Hofstadter forty years previously in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Hofstadter’s description of the prevalent view of intellect fostered by McCarthyism and the Cold War in 1950s and 1960s America, as “some kind of claim against the other human excellences for which a fatally high price has to be paid” encapsulates negative media depictions of both Senator John Kerry and his predecessor as Democrat candidate for the presidency, Al Gore. 11 It was even more potent as a weapon against Kerry because of his biographical links with Europe, and particularly with France, referred to by the Herald Tribune in February 2005, only half-jokingly, as a “blue state,” that is, one of the Democrat-voting U.S. states. The Presidential elections of 2004 saw the activation of stupidity as a neoconservative political posture defined against the intellectual as European - a construction with which many Europeans have proved complicit, whatever their conscious political affiliations with President Bush or his opponents. Hence the popularity in Europe of the work of U.S.-American cartoonists who present Bush as stupid, such as Doonesbury, of liberal commentators and leftist satirists in general, and of jokes about Bush’s stupidity. While within the USA, such satire may serve to rally support for intellectual values against that which is labelled stupid, and therefore address a need for change, outside the USA it frequently slides into a generalized sense of the stupidity of the nation led by Bush, and can thereby reinforce European assumptions of superiority. Thus, on a television show previewing the 2004 election for British audiences, the American comedian Rich Hall opined that ‘The real rift in America is not between races - it is between the stupid, and the really stupid.’ More prominently Michael Moore spent a year at the top of the British bestseller lists with Stupid White Men, before his film Fahrenheit 9/ 11 won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival in 2004, and played to packed cinemas from Salzburg to Glasgow. The limitations of this popular European view are demonstrated by contrasting transatlantic satirical depictions of Ronald Reagan during his presidency. The British television show “Spitting Image” featured a longrunning segment whose tone can be judged from its title, “The President’s Brain is Missing.” At the same time, the USA’s “Saturday Night Live” had 11 Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. New York: Knopf, 1963, p. 46. 196 J UDE D AVIES Reagan acting stupid while the cameras were on him, but, as soon as he is left alone in his office, reverting to a very knowing and intelligent persona, plotting world domination with his aides. Stupidity was key to the “teflon Presidency,” just as the lack of knowledge attributed to Reagan led later to his exoneration from responsibility for the Iran/ Contras debâcle. “They Misunderestimated Me” Like his opponents in 2000 and 2004, George W. Bush is of course an Ivy League graduate, and the nature of his “stupidity,” as honest simplicity, as populist style, as mendacious performance, or simple intellectual deficiency, is by now subject to several degrees of irony. Still, it is relatively easy to discern some of the ideological formations that determine the valency of Bush’s “stupidity,” that enable it to function as weapon rather than as deficit. His persona mobilises secular and Christian biographical narratives of self-help and re-birth to make a virtue of recovery from past fallibility such as alcoholism and drug abuse. Jacob Weisberg, editor at Salon.com and author of The Deluxe Edition of Election Bushisms describes this as a shift from one form of ignorance to another one much more popular with conservative voters. As the reformed alcoholic and born-again Christian, Weisberg argues, “Bush’s old answer to hard questions was ‘I don’t know, and who cares? ’ His new answer was, ‘Wait a second while I check with Jesus.’” 12 In this sense Bush’s “stupidity” explicitly identifies him with the neoconservative Christian right and promulgates its values. However, stupidity in the sense of the acknowledgement of limited subjectivity is part of the deep structure of Bush’s persona in ways that transcend this explicit political affiliation. Symptomatic of this wider appeal are comments such as his response, on the eve of high-level trade meetings in Argentina in October 2005, to a journalist’s question as to how he would deal with Hugo Chavez, the leftist President of Venezuela and focus of opposition to U.S. power in Central and South America. Bush replied “I will be polite to him. I am a polite person.” At one level, by (deliberately? ) missing the point of such questions, Bush cleverly sidesteps a raft of geo-political issues. But the real power of such responses, and indeed of Bush’s persona, lies in the performance of two contrasting forms of stupidity; forms that Avital Ronell has labelled “idiocy,” and “stupidity.” Ronell draws this distinction from a reading of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot: 12 Jacob Weisberg, “The Misunderestimated Man: How Bush Chose Stupidity,” <http: / / www.slate.com/ id/ 2100064/ > Stupid White Men: Toward a Political Mapping of Stupidity 197 The essential difference occurs in the perception of what can be known by the limited subject, and the degree of consciousness becomes a question of integrity: the idiot knows he is an idiot, names himself as such or confirms acts of diagnostic and social naming. The stupid subject, on the other hand, does not have this knowledge about himself […] He knows, he thinks, what’s up and never lets it get him down or turn his head around. The stupid man […] does not experience hesitation, is never caught up in the idiocy of undecidability. The stupid never question, whereas the Idiot concentrates one big question mark, an ineradicable stain, on the page of his destiny. (218-19) Implicit in Dostoyevsky, what Ronell makes explicit is the importance of the distinction between “idiocy” and “stupidity” as it relates to normative subjects, rather than as a means of differentiating between subjects defined as non-normal. The concern is less with the condition of marginalized others who lack the insight everyone else has, but rather a polarity between responses to the universal condition of limited subjectivity. While “stupidity” never doubts itself, in the case of “idiocy” consciousness of one’s fallibility leads into social interaction. At one pole is the closed, defensive rationalization of the limitedness of (heterosexual, white, male) subjectivity - stupidity as plenitude. Less familiar is its antithesis - stupidity as lack, whereby the acknowledgement of those limitations leads to a sympathetic engagement with the other. The appeal of Bush’s persona, powerful enough to be instrumental in securing two Presidential election victories, derives in part at least from its deployment of both of these, its alternating between stupidity as openness (“idiocy,” in Ronell’s terms) and stupidity as closure. The verbal mistakes, the acknowledgement of the limitations of perspective, and the explicit commitment to good manners, all suggest the positive engagement with the other that takes place under the sign of the idiot. But the moral certainty used to justify the exercise of military and economic power belies this consciousness of limited subjectivity, giving reign to stupidity as the “destruction of alterity” (Ronell 39): at the level of the individual, the refusal to contemplate the possibility of being wrong; at the national level, militarism and unilateralism. The combination of these two forms of stupidity, which can also be discerned in Ronald Reagan’s persona, in some ways reflects the institutional constraints of the modern presidency. By the early 1970s U.S.-American political commentators were remarking on the dissonance between the rhetoric of omnipotence and omniscience that surrounded the chief executive, and the actual limitations on presidential knowledge and power, both in terms of the necessity of devolving research and decision-making to advisers, and in terms of geopolitics. At the same moment the mediatization of political life epitomized in the phrase “the selling of the president” was becoming the 198 J UDE D AVIES focus of widespread discussion and some disquiet. Drawing these developments together from the disciplinary location of Political Science, Thomas E. Cronin saw the development of what was being called the “personalized presidency” as a response to the dissonance between popular investments in presidential power and the reality that … the American President is in no better position to control Bolivian instability, Chilean Marxism, or Vietcong penetration into Cambodia than he is to make the stock market rise or medical costs decline. 13 Introducing Cronin’s work in their 1973 collection Inside the System, Charles Peters and John Rothchild remark upon “the textbook illusion that one man, if he wanted to, could cure everything from inflation to conglomerates to pollution to crabgrass.” They imply that presidential omnipotence and omniscience are necessary fictions of the U.S. political process even though, cutting across this functional explanation, they do warn that “foreign and military affairs… have become increasingly seductive to modern Presidents faced with the necessity to prove their greatness.” 14 The observations of Peters and Rothchild, made at the height of America’s war in Viet Nam, appear prescient of the way in which the War on Terror temporarily redeemed the popularity of an administration mired in domestic problems and apparently powerless to ameliorate them. At time of writing, polls indicate that a majority of U.S.-Americans regard the invasion of Iraq as a mistake, and the administration’s ratings are low and continuing to fall. However, a brief comparison with Bill Clinton suggests that it is not the association with error by itself that determines popularity. As noted above, Bush’s appeal has rested to a partial extent on the appropriation by neoconservatives of religious codes of fallibility and redemption. This created a framework through which errors in Bush’s personal life such as problems with drugs and alcohol, could be forgiven and forgotten, in stark contrast to Clinton’s sexual incontinence, which resulted in long, drawn-out impeachment proceedings. Such frameworks are invaluable in determining whether error is read as evidence of humanity or evidence of incompetence, or worse. In this context Jacob Weisberg rightly emphasizes the importance of Christian religious ideas of being “born again.” But probably more important in activating and de-activating the association with stupidity is the manipulation of codes of class and race/ ethnicity. Absolutely crucial here is Bush’s assumption of a “good old boy” persona, both when being filmed “off duty” at his Texas ranch, and on public occasions, when he draws on 13 Thomas E. Cronin, “The Textbook Presidency,” in Charles Peters and John Rothchild (eds.), Inside the System: A Washington Monthly Book. New York: Praeger, Second Edition, 1973, pp. 6-19; pp. 18-19. 14 Peters and Rothchild, Inside the System, “Introduction,” pp. 3, 4. Stupid White Men: Toward a Political Mapping of Stupidity 199 blue-collar diction, and establishes personalised dialogue with interviewers and foreign heads of state. This recapitulates and updates Reagan’s self-presentation as the common man, equipped with moral compass rather than intelligent insight, but in a way that is strikingly thin compared to Reagan’s ability to embody feelings of national redemption. This thinness is however very important, since it is what, in large part, has enabled Bush to manipulate the association with stupidity to his own advantage, and in marked contrast to the way that coded signifiers of Blackness were used to villify Bill Clinton (as Toni Morrison demonstrated in her often mis-read 1998 New Yorker article on the construction of Clinton as the “first Black president.”) There is indeed a coded racism in many right-wing satirical cartoons and sketches, where Clinton was represented as “Bubba,” which drew on racial stereotypes to cement his identification with negative forms of stupidity. 15 Consider by contrast Bush’s use of the greeting “Yo Blair,” picked up by a live microphone at the G8 summit meeting in July 2006. “Yo,” employed prominently by popular cultural figures such as “gangsta” rap artists, and Sylvester Stallone in his film role as the Italian American Rocky Balboa, circulated widely in the 1980s and 1990s as a sign of authentic racialized and ethnicized blue-collar or underclass identity. But the frequency of its use, and its appropriation by white suburbanites or “wiggaz” had exhausted much of its authenticating power well before Bush used the term. 16 This very mobility, coupled with the gesture toward a racialized and ethnicized working-class identity enable Bush, or any similarly privileged subject, to control their performances of identity - to inhabit stupidity, yet also to maintain a distance from it, and at will to “come out of” such a performance. 17 15 See also Harry Shearer, It’s the Stupidity, Stupid: Why (Some) People Hate Clinton and Why the Rest of Us Have to Watch. New York: Ballantine, 1999. 16 See <http: / / www.urbandictionary.com/ define.php? term=yo> for a lively debate over the origins of “yo” in which the claims of African American and Southern Italian immigrants to Philadelphia are advanced. Less disputed among contributors to the site is the sense of the term’s exhaustion by its appropriation by more privileged white suburbanites. Thanks to John Pollack for drawing my attention to this issue. 17 Compare for example the 1990 Florida prosecution of African American hip hop artists 2 Live Crew, which turned on the question of the extent to which their misogynistic lyrics were a self-conscious performance. The defence of 2 Live Crew by the eminent African American literary theorist Henry Louis Gates could be seen as insisting on the complexity of Black performativity in the face of “stupid,” that is culturally ignorant, white juridical power predetermined to characterise Blackness as stupid. Yet if at the level of “race” Gates and the defence team successfully resisted the operations of stupidity-as-power, at the level of gender the group may be considered as performing stupidity as a means of cementing male power. The work, persona and career of the white hip hop artist Eminem also plays out many of these racial and gendered tropes of stupidity. 200 J UDE D AVIES Reading Ignorance Stupidly In the dramatis personae of the Bush administration as popularly understood by Europeans, and many Americans, ex-Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld was usually positioned as the embodiment of (evil) genius, Svengali to Bush’s Trilby. It is partly for this reason that Rumsfeld’s comments at a media briefing on 12 February 2002 attracted a degree of satirical attention. At the briefing Rumsfeld was asked, Is there any evidence to indicate that Iraq has attempted to or is willing to supply terrorists with weapons of mass destruction? Because there are reports that there is no evidence of a direct link between Baghdad and some of these terrorist organizations? 18 His reply was reported as follows: Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don’t know we don’t know …. 19 These comments were presented as a gaffe in the mainstream media and were widely ridiculed. Among the many citations in a crowded field, Rumsfeld was satirized in the online Salon magazine (predictably perhaps by a website that epitomizes liberal “cleverness” and disseminates Bush-isms), was featured in Bob Fenster’s 2005 book The Duh Awards and awarded the 2003 “Foot in Mouth” prize by the British-based organization the Campaign for Plain English, an annual citation for the “most baffling” statement by a public figure. 20 No doubt in part this reaction was due to Rumsfeld’s popular reputation as a clever manipulator. But these remarks are hardly “baffling” or comic. Rather, they quite accurately delineate the contingency of our knowledge of the world around us (Ronell’s sense of the limited subject, again) and in this case the state of military “intelligence” concerning the abilities and intentions of foreign powers. As such, these comments are far from “stupid.” They are, rather, deeply evasive. Rumsfeld’s intention is clearly to close off the question of the limitations upon military intelli- 18 Transcript: Defense Department Briefing, February 12, 2002; at <http: / / www.usembassyisrael.org.il/ publish/ peace/ archives/ 2002/ february/ 021301.html> consulted 2 December 2005. 19 Ibid. 20 See “Donald Rumsfeld ‘Honoured’ For Confusing Comments,” n.d., http: / / www. plainenglish.co.uk/ pressarchive.html, consulted 10 June 2006; Hart Seely, “The Poetry of D.H. Rumsfeld: Recent Works by the Secretary of State for Defense,” April 2 2003, <http: / / slate.com/ id/ 2081042/ >, consulted 10 June 2006. Stupid White Men: Toward a Political Mapping of Stupidity 201 gence, and to evade responsibility for the assertion of links, still unproven, between Saddam Hussein’s regime and global terrorist networks, which were the main justification given to U.S.-Americans for the invasion of Iraq. This particular briefing took place in the wake of an incident at Zawar Kili in Afghanistan, during which 3 people were killed by an American Hellfire missile. While the U.S. military initially claimed that the dead were highranking members of al-Queda, reports from Afghanistan suggested that these were three civilians doing nothing more subversive than gathering scrap metal. With this in mind, Rumsfeld’s comments become legible as, after all, a further strategic deployment of stupidity, by which violent deaths at the hands of the USA’s military are neutralised by being treated as mere operational incidents. This rhetorical manoeuvre keeps intact the exceptionalist rhetoric of the Bush White House made explicit elsewhere, as in October 2001, when Bush told a press conference How do I respond when I see that in some Islamic countries there is vitriolic hatred for America? … I’ll tell you how I respond: I’m amazed. I’m amazed that there’s such misunderstanding of what our country is about that people would hate us. I am - like most Americans, I just can’t believe it because I know how good we are. 21 Bush’s construction of the essential goodness and democracy of the USA as archetypal “known knowns” completes the ideological circuit. Any understanding of U.S. military activity as imperialism is forestalled. Dead civilians, Abu Ghraib, and civil war in Iraq are presented as not what “we” are trying to do, and therefore not “our” responsibility. “This is not what I’m trying to do: ” The Apology as Gendered Strategy A more individuated example of the deployment of stupidity as a neoconservative performance can be seen in an incident from the Californian gubernatorial recall election in 2003. Confronted with a series of allegations concerning his past sexual behavior, on October 2 nd the Republican candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger responded to allegations of groping and sexual harassment dating to as late as 2000, published in that morning’s Los Angeles Times. Addressing a crowd of supporters in San Diego, Schwarzenegger denied some charges, but, allowing that “wherever there is smoke, there is fire” he went on to apologize. “I have behaved badly sometimes,” he admitted, 21 “President Holds Prime Time News Conference,” <http: / / www.whitehouse.gov/ news/ releases/ 2001/ 10/ 20011011-7.html#status-war>, consulted 10 June 2006. 202 J UDE D AVIES and I have done things that were not right which I thought then were playful but now I recognize that I have offended people. And to those people who I have offended, I want to say to them that I am deeply sorry about that and I apologize because this is not what I am trying to do. 22 By paralleling an autobiographical narrative with a sense of historical changes in gender relations (the pivotal reference is to “things … which I thought then were playful”), the apology dismisses the social and political dimensions of such changes, and the feminist challenge to gendered hierarchies which brought them about. Instead, sexism is defined narrowly as behaviour inadvertently causing offence in the personal sphere. Having thus sequestered any gendered offence, Schwarzenegger turned immediately from his own status as a private citizen to envisage himself within the public sphere of politics. “When I am governor,” he continued, “I want to prove to the women that I will be a champion for the women, a champion for the women. And I hope that you will give me the chance to prove that.” 23 Having learned his lesson, the male self is envisaged as emerging from the personal sphere, where women are left behind, to do battle in the political arena on their behalf. These manoeuvres depend heavily upon Schwarzenegger’s star persona of protective hypermasculinity, but they derive ultimately from more wideranging neoconservative ideological formations of the 1980s and 1990s, formations that Lauren Berlant has termed the “privatization of citizenship.” Berlant argues that the “Reaganite revolution” must be understood in both cultural and political terms. As she explains, through an antipolitical politics that claims to be protecting what it is promoting - a notion of citizenship preached in languages of moral, not political, accountability - the national culture seeks to stipulate that only certain kinds of people, practices, and property that are, at core, “American,” deserve juridical and social legitimation. 24 The results of this cultural stipulation could readily be seen at the October 2 nd media conference. Schwarzenegger, flanked at the media conference by his wife Maria Shriver, was recognizable as belonging to the category Berlant identifies as the “modal normal American,” who “sees her/ his identity as something sustained in private, personal, intimate relations.” Defined against this are the “abjected, degraded, lower citizens of the United States 22 See “Arnold Apologizes for Bad Behavior,” Fox News 3 October 2003, and at <http: / / www.foxnews.com/ story/ 0,2933,98883,00.html>; see also “From Schwarzenegger, An Apology,” The Washington Post 3 October 2003 at <http: / / www.washingtonpost. com/ ac2/ wp-dyn/ A32971-2003Oct2>, both consulted 29 August 2006. 23 Ibid. 24 Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, p. 185. Stupid White Men: Toward a Political Mapping of Stupidity 203 [who] will see themselves as sustained by public, coalitional, non-kin affiliations,” 25 in this case the women imagined by Schwarzenegger as channelling their consciousness of shared grievance into a need for him as “champion.” Seen through this lens, Schwarzenegger’s bid to be taken as an advocate can be seen as more post-feminist than anti-feminist - taking for granted a feminist sense of gender solidarity, only to contain it by invoking prefeminist notions of separate spheres. Schwarzenegger’s claim that “this is not what I’m trying to do” acknowledges the limitations of straight white masculinity as a subjectivity, but uses this acknowledgment to reconstitute white patriarchal power. The holding of entrenched power (here the privilege of evading punishment for carrying out sexual harassment) is construed as a variety of honest stupidity, a failure of judgment that leaves intact the moral and ethical probity of the harasser. Error is narrativized as an initial step in a sequence of giving offence, becoming conscious of having done so, making an apology, and aspiring to make good that offence by some unspecified advocacy in the public sphere. While these responses may have been adopted by Arnold Schwarzenegger in good faith, they do nothing to alter existing power relationships. Rather, the privileges that the identity movements attacked are redefined by being framed ideologically in terms of error and mistake, from which the white male subject emerges with renewed fitness for the exercise of power. Strikingly, exactly these ideological forms have been identified by feminist critics in Hollywood cinema of the late 1980s and early 1990s; the socalled “male transformation” or “sensitive guy” films such as Parenthood, Regarding Henry, The Fisher King, Groundhog Day, and Schwarzenegger’s own Terminator 2: Judgement Day and Kindergarten Cop. 26 In retrospect, such films can be connected with another popular genre of the 1990s, which may be entitled the cinema of “stupid white men; ” including Wayne’s World, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure; Dumb and Dumber, and their sequels, and the later American Pie series. In all these films stupidity is performed 25 Ibid. 26 See especially the work of Susan Jeffords and Fred Pfeil. The forms of masculinity discussed in this essay, emerging as they do in the wake of such films as Regarding Henry, Lethal Weapon II, and the Schwarzenegger vehicle Kindergarten Cop represent a significant further and more confident step in the production of neoconservative subjectivities. While the early 1990s moment can be seen as responding to the downsizing of the wages of blue-collar white males, and to feminist and Black critique by a turn to the interior health of white masculinity and its rejuvenation in the familial sphere, the tendency identified here builds on and consolidates this position to produce a renewed and overtly politicised white male subjectivity for the public sphere. 204 J UDE D AVIES with a certain charm; in many of them stupidity turns out to be a winning strategy whether in terms of romance, career, or simply, in the case of Bill and Ted, completing a history assignment. Even when most abject, as in the Dumb and Dumber series, stupidity nevertheless succeeds in exasperating the non-stupid characters. In all of these, the portrayal of white masculinity as stupid serves to regenerate its agency, within genres which have very little engagement with the national dimension. That dimension was articulated explicitly in one of the most popular films of the decade, Robert Zemeckis’s Forrest Gump. Stupidity as Plenitude: Forrest Gump Reviewers of Forrest Gump spent much time decoding its eponymous protagonist, played by Tom Hanks, suggesting resemblances with Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, as well as European literary models such as Candide and the Good Soldier Schweik, and cinematic precursors Zelig, and the protagonists of Being There, Rain Man, and Regarding Henry. Indeed the appeal of Gump as Southern white everyman echoed aspects of Clinton’s persona, while the ethical value attached to his good manners anticipated elements of George W. Bush’s. Commentators also debated the significance of Gump’s stupidity - defined in the film by the attribution of an IQ 5 points below “normal.” A pivotal comment here is Mrs Gump’s advice to her son that “stupid is as stupid does,” a phrase which Forrest repeats throughout the movie and, as Robyn Wiegman suggests, seems to be intended to universalize his story. However, as its echo of the saw “handsome is as handsome does” implies, the phrase and the film are concerned with creating hierarchies within masculinity, in which women, as witnesses, have the symbolically crucial, but socially limited, power of making the final judgement, or in the terms used for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s apology, having something proved to them. Prominent as they are, discourses of gender and sexuality serve what is primarily a racial dynamic in Forrest Gump, reflecting the national traumas of the 1950s and 1960s, which it is the film’s ideological project to resolve in the terms prescribed by the neoconservative alliance between “business” values and the Christian Right. In work cited earlier Lauren Berlant has persuasively situated this project with respect to the coupling of a political trajectory of the privatization of citizenship with a cultural trajectory of expunging white guilt from American history. Building on this Robyn Wiegman has convincingly framed the film as an example of what she calls “liberal whiteness,” in which racially white subjects disaffiliate from Stupid White Men: Toward a Political Mapping of Stupidity 205 overt racism and invest instead in a notion of the U.S. as a post-traumatic society. 27 The success of the film in achieving this project alongside its popular and aesthetic appeal depends heavily upon the specific ways in which Gump’s stupidity is represented. As was registered in the multiple lineages proposed by contemporary reviewers, various traditions of stupidity, secular and Judeo-Christian, are utilized in order to frame the stupidity of Forrest Gump and make it symbolically resonant. So, he is in the words of P.J. O’Rourke “the ideal citizen for the modern world - a perfect idiot,” but also and simultaneously, in the epithet applied to Tom Hanks before the film’s release, “Hollywood’s last decent man.” 28 What this means for the film - and this is somewhat different from the satirical picaresque of Winston Groom’s 1986 novel, to which O’Rourke was referring - is to present Gump as a representative of a specific racialized and gendered identity (straight white masculinity), and simultaneously as the moral center of an apparently disinterested neoconservative narrative of national history. Forrest Gump the film was enjoyed by millions of Americans less for its rehabilitation of white masculinity, than for its use of the Gump figure as a surrogate for its redemptive narrative of U.S. history that dissolves away the tensions and shame of Viet Nam, the struggles for Civil Rights and desegregation, feminism, Watergate, et.al.. Most mainstream film critics observed in one way or another that the film’s overt message of social reconciliation and individual triumph over the odds was fatally compromised, and struggled to account for its popular appeal. 29 The particular forms of stupidity depicted in Gump are crucial in generating this redemptive narrative. In the first place, Gump’s stupidity corresponds exactly to the Dostoyevsky/ Ronell sense of term. It is manifested as dumbness, ignorance, an entire lack of self-consciousness, which extends to an utter failure to grasp politics, history (events such as the death of his best friend, an African American named Bubba, the shootings of John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and others happen, according to Gump, “for no 27 Berlant, Queen of Washington, pp. 180-85; Robyn Wiegman, “Whiteness Studies and the Paradox of Particularity,” in Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman (eds) The Futures of American Studies (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002), pp. 269-304; especially pp. 276-98. 28 O’Rourke quoted on the cover and first page of Winston Groom, Forrest Gump. London: Black Swan, 1994; Richard Corliss, “Hollywood’s Last Decent Man,” Time 11 July 1994, p. 58. 29 For a fuller account of the critical debate occasioned by Forrest Gump on its release, see Jude Davies, “White Masculinity in Crisis? Hollywood Multiculturalism in Falling Down, Uncle Buck, and Forrest Gump,” in William Boelhower and Alfred Hornung (eds) American Multiculturalism and the American Self. Heidelberg: Winter, 2000, pp. 321-48; pp. 339-42. 206 J UDE D AVIES particular reason”), and the meaning of his own racial whiteness. As Lauren Berlant puts it, Gump “is too stupid to be racist, sexist and exploitative; that is his genius and it is meant to be his virtue”(183). In fact this provides Gump with several “virtues.” At a basic level it enables the film to implicitly equate his own disabilities (his low IQ, and a leg problem that necessitates braces) with the social and political handicaps imposed upon African Americans in the South in the 1950s and 1960s. This lays the groundwork for the portrayal of all forms of inequality as personal injuries, which require personal, not social and political, solutions. The film’s running joke with its audience is that Gump’s good manners produce acts with a historical impact that he cannot possibly intend, and does not understand. Hence most strikingly he is shown helping to desegregate the University of Alabama, in one of the film’s celebrated uses of digital technology to insert him into stock footage of historical events. Oblivious to the surrounding demonstrators, police, and Governor George Wallace, Gump picks up a Black student’s books and escorts her through the doorway. Gump wanders through the national flashpoints of the 1960s and 1970s, from desegregation to the Viet Nam war to Watergate, with his gentlemanly heroism intact. At such moments, his dumbness acts as a form of wish fulfilment for white liberal investments in a colorblind society, and, more invidiously, his lack of self-consciousness also functions to mask racial and gendered privilege. In this post-identity politics, post-modern rewriting of Mr Smith Goes to Washington, manners substitutes for politics - just as they do when George W. Bush prides himself on his politeness in his dealings with political opponents such as Chavez. In all of these ways Gump’s stupidity plays an ideological function, which may give audiences a certain intellectual satisfaction in its conciliatory but asymmetrical national narrative. However, the film’s popular appeal probably derives as much from the more direct, less intellectual pleasures it offers, especially through its playful incongruities and Gump’s frank enjoyment of his body. The obverse of his lack of self-consciousness is his figuring as a simply appetitive self. By emphasizing his enjoyment of ice cream and soft drinks, and censoring the sexual desire for women described in Groom’s novel on which it is based, the film presents Gump as experiencing desire that is utterly divorced from social context and purged of any sense of lack. The only possible exception is the sense of loss occasioned by Jenny’s sporadic absences, but this pales into insignificance in comparison to the other protagonists, whose character is defined by the intense and debilitating lack that constitutes their felt relation to history. Bubba, Gump’s best friend, dreams of developing a shrimping business. He dies in Viet Nam. Lieutenant Dan, Gump’s superior officer, longs to die a soldier’s death, as his male Stupid White Men: Toward a Political Mapping of Stupidity 207 ancestors have done for generations, but he is instead merely disabled and symbolically emasculated. Jenny, Gump’s childhood sweetheart, has her attempts to “reach people on a personal level,” cynically exploited, and ends up dead of a strange unnamed virus. These are sympathetic characters. Activists of various sorts, Black Panthers, students, and anti-war protesters, are all presented much more negatively. In stark contrast, Gump’s stupidity brings with it a sense of plenitude and enjoyment of physical activity - eating, drinking, running, playing table tennis, and farting - the unruly body as pleasurably subverting the intellect. Stupidity as Lack: Three Kings If the figuration of Gump’s stupidity in terms of plenitude helps authenticate that film’s conservatism, the figuration of other “stupid white men” in terms of lack may suggest a different politics. Such a figure is Conrad Vig (played by Spike Jonze) in David O. Russell’s 1999 film Three Kings. Set in the immediate aftermath of the 1992 Gulf War, Three Kings was re-released in 2002-3 in protest against the prospective invasion of Iraq. The four central characters in the film are soldiers called up for Operation Desert Storm who set out to secure for themselves a consignment of gold bullion belonging to Saddam Hussein. One of these four, Conrad Vig, is constituted by lack to the same extent that Forrest Gump emanates plenitude. Stereotyped as Southern white trash, when fellow soldiers flashback to memories of home life with their families or jobs, Vig remembers taking potshots at some soft toys propped up on a wrecked automobile. He begins the film as an embodiment of stupidity-as-racist-closedness. He does not know the difference between friendly and enemy Iraqis, and he cannot figure out where he is - maybe Egypt, he says at one point - and at first he does not care. But as he discovers very quickly, he needs to know the difference as a matter of survival. During the course of the film Vig changes as a result of his recognition of his own ignorance, moving from “stupidity” to “idiocy.” He is warned off from using racist terms by a Black superior officer (Ice Cube), whom he quickly comes to respect and admire. Later, he goes on to develop a strong sense of brotherhood with Iraqi refugees, and, following his discovery that they have “a good shrine” he adopts their Islamic religion. But he continues to make mistakes, as when he ululates enthusiastically along with some female refugees, and the gender-specific nature of this cultural practice has to be explained to him. Vig’s idiocy is continually manifested in terms of encounters with ethnic and cultural difference. At each encounter, he discovers that his preconceptions are wrong, and this discovery often leads directly into the question of how he should behave with respect to 208 J UDE D AVIES ethnic and cultural others, and what responsibilities he has to them. His trajectory is one of a developing understanding of Iraqi, Moslem others, but he continues to make cultural mis-readings throughout the film - what he learns above all is that he always has much to learn. Conrad Vig’s character and narrative reverse those of Forrest Gump. Gump’s experience of stupidity as plenitude shields him from anxiety, protects him from the historical disasters that kill or maim his friends (enemy fire in Viet Nam, AIDS in the USA), and generally forestalls any possibility of change through encounters with other human beings. In passing through history unscathed, as a constant, Gump holds together the film’s ideological and playfully pleasurable strands. By contrast, Vig’s experience of stupidity as lack (or “idiocy”) induces him to change, propelling him to a positive engagement with people of a different racial and ethnic and national identity. And whereas Gump is magically protected, Vig dies. He is shot and fatally wounded by members of Saddam Hussein’s imperial guard, and the ending of Three Kings depicts the refugees taking his body into Iran for the Moslem burial he had requested. These contrasting dynamics are amplified in the films as wholes. Whereas Forrest Gump places the limitations of individual consciousness in a magical narrative of national healing, in Three Kings the limitations of individual consciousness are compounded with fractures within the nation and a sense of the limitations of nation-bound perspectives. Three Kings is a politically compromised movie. Its central narrative of the “three kings” - American soldiers who sacrifice their selfish plan to steal looted gold in order to help Iraqi refugees to safety in Iran - belongs firmly within American generic forms and modes of address, reproducing several of the “white savior” tropes described by Hernán Vera and Andrew Gordon. 30 But for all it limitations, the film does attempt to open up a space where the wish to escape domination can be construed as something other than the wish to be U.S.-American. And crucial to opening up this space is Vig’s idiocy, which acts as a reminder of the limitations of individual knowledges and national ideologies. Something of this was registered by none other than Bill Clinton, making a rare appearance as film critic, on the television show “Roger Ebert and the Movies” in February 2000. Clinton read the film as suggesting the need to face up to “society’s oldest, most primitive problem, our tribalism, our tendency to go beyond a natural pride in our group … [which results in] fear and distrust and dehumanization and violence against the ‘other.’” 30 Hernán Vera and Andrew M. Gordon, Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness. Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003. Stupid White Men: Toward a Political Mapping of Stupidity 209 As I have argued elsewhere, 31 following the critiques of John Carlos Rowe and Vera and Gordon, Three Kings is in some ways still unconsciously subject to the limitations of a Western, U.S.-centered perspective, especially in its blurring of distinctions between Shia and Suni Moslems and its use of the “white saviors” trope. The political valency of the film largely depends, therefore, on the question of its being contained within - or breaking through the limitations of - the national narrative. Three Kings is embedded in specifically U.S.-American cultural forms (war movies, regeneration through violence, counter-cultural critique, icons like football and George Clooney) and even in its internationalism, appears markedly “American” to non-Americans, whether Europeans or from the mid-East (Three Kings is popularly understood to be one of only two U.S.-American films banned under the Saddam Hussein regime, the other being South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut in which he was portrayed as Satan’s lover) or elsewhere. Perhaps the best example of this is the way in which the American soldiers reach out to save the Iraqi refugees, in a typically exceptionalist, “American” trope. Moreover, in its contestation of the 1992 Gulf War, the film has sometimes been read as calling for U.S. imperialism to be redeemed rather than rejected. In such readings, which director Russell has felt obliged to explicitly reject, the film’s depiction of the manipulation, abandonment and betrayal of anti-Saddam rebels in 1992, is seen as requiring further intervention to topple Saddam Hussein a decade later. The “three kings” of the film’s title, the three central characters played by George Clooney, Ice Cube and Mark Wahlberg, tend to be contained within these exceptionalist national and imperial ideologies by their status as “saviors” of the Iraqi refugees. It is the comparatively marginal figure played by Jonze, the avowedly limited subject, who suggests a break with such ideologies, since he joins the Iraqis, dies and will be buried by them. In order to activate the progressive potential of this formation of idiocy or “stupidity as lack,” found in the figure of Conrad Vig, it is necessary to shift from a national to an international or trans-national conception of politics. Such encounters could move the stupidity/ intelligence formation beyond the exceptionalist rhetoric and trans-atlantic binaries that, all too frequently, continue to constrain its understanding. While it would be simplistic to characterize the “stupid white men” of the 1990s and 2000s as precipitates of the widely discussed but notional “crisis of white masculinity” of the early 1990s, such figures are clearly conditioned by the problematizing of straight white masculinity’s claims to uni- 31 For a fuller discussion of Three Kings see Jude Davies, “‘Diversity. America. Leadership. Good Over Evil: Hollywood Multiculturalism and American Imperialism in Independence Day and Three Kings,” Patterns of Prejudice 39: 4 (2005), pp. 397-415. 210 J UDE D AVIES versality and normativity effected by the identity movements (civil rights, feminism, gay and lesbian liberation). The identification with stupidity has functioned as a strategic response to the prohibition on claiming universality, acknowledging the limited subjectivity of straight white masculinity but legitimating its agency nevertheless. The difference between Three Kings and Forrest Gump argues for a distinction between “idiocy” - or stupidity as lack, which has a progressive or liberal political character, and stupidity as plenitude, which is conservative. However, when we consider the sphere of politics, as opposed to culture, this opposition seems less effective. The persona of George W. Bush depends on the manipulation of both forms, stupidity as hostility to alterity, and, what appears as its opposite, a performance that acknowledges the limitations and fallibilities of individual subjectivity, anticipating and disarming criticism. Hence the above discussion of the films is concerned with the political values considered to be inherent in the forms of stupidity; their cultural politics, if you will; while Bush’s dualistic persona, and to a lesser extent those of Schwarzenegger and others, suggests that performances of stupidity must be understood as mere epiphenomena of political economy, overdetermined by political power and world-historical processes of a completely different order. Karl Kraus’s indifference would then be justified, stupidity and cleverness as the flipsides of one another, twinned strategies for the generation of political capital whose difference is only gestural, mere performance. This possibility cannot easily be dismissed. Nevertheless, in Europe it seems important to try to intervene in culture, in order to try to contest the simplistic, Euro-centric and nationalistic attitudes toward U.S.-American “stupidity.” At the same time, the homologies between a unilateralist foreign policy, and the various performances of stupidity with which the subject position of heterosexual white masculinity continues to be redeemed in U.S.-American culture, suggest a formative or causal relationship of some kind. And the stakes are high. As the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq has demonstrated, quite apart from the political economy of the Imperial project, the consequences of stupidity, in the forms of misrecognition and failure to plan, can be catastrophic. W ALTER W. H ÖLBLING Americans and Their Enemies: Political Rhetoric and Real Politics That the Heathen People amongst whom we live, and whose land the Lord God of our Fathers hath given to us for a rightful Possession have […] been planning mischievous devices against that part of the English Israel which is seated in these goings down of the sun, no Man that is an Inhabitant of any considerable standing, can be ignorant. I. Mather, A Brief History of the Warre with the Indians in New England […] Boston, 1676, 1; qtd. in Slotkin 83 Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a decade. […] States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic. George W. Bush. “State of the Union Address.” January 29, 2002 There are still governments that sponsor and harbor terrorists - but their number has declined. There are still regimes seeking weapons of mass destruction - but no longer without attention and without consequence. Our country is still the target of terrorists who want to kill many, and intimidate us all, and we will stay on the offensive against them, until the fight is won. George W. Bush, “State of the Union Address”, January 20, 2005 What on the American side is seen as justified defensive rhetoric in the face of an imminent external threat often, though not always, comes across as an aggressive-defensive attitude when viewed from the outside. Already Richard Hofstadter traced this particular aspect of American rhetoric in his book The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1966), and he found it characterized by the tendency to secularize a religiously derived view of the world, to deal with political issues in Christian images, and to color them with the dark symbology of a certain side of Christian tradition. Social issues could be reduced rather simply to a battle between a Good and an Evil influence. (xif.) There is ample evidence that variations of the original Puritan version of the “errand into the wilderness” have strongly colored official as well as popular American discourse in times of catastrophe, or fear of catastrophe, or in fictional scenarios of catastrophe. Over the years, these threats have 212 W ALTER W. H ÖLBLING had many faces, most of them external - wild nature, Indians, other religions and ideologies (Jacobins, Freemasons, Catholics), and foreign powers - from the Spanish and the French and the King of England to the Mexicans, Habsburgs, the German “Huns” in World War I, the Axis powers in World War II, World Communism with the USSR and China, and its outposts in Cuba, Vietnam, Chile, Nicaragua, and Grenada, and most recently the socalled “rogue states” and international terrorism. At various periods there were also immigrants from “exotic” countries (remember the restrictive Immigration Acts of the 1920s), cyber-terrorists, foreign drug-lords, and aliens from outer space. Some of these threats have also come from within - African-Americans, emancipated women, leftish unions, Hollywood, conspiring power-hungry politicians, entrepreneurs and scientists, alcohol, organized crime, communist spies, smokers, as well as supporters of dangerous movements like pro-choice, multi-lingualism, same-sex marriage, and so on. In short, seen from a European perspective, the unifying American master narrative seems to be in constant need of an identifiable threat, preferably from the outside, in order to maintain its persuasive power and to provide the necessary cohesion among increasingly differentiated political/ cultural/ ethnic interest groups within its dominion. My argument here is that since the time of William Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation and Mary Rowlandson’s paradigmatic first Indian captivity narrative (cf. Van der Beets), when nature and indigenous inhabitants of the American continent still constituted real dangers for the small numbers of European colonizers, there has developed what one might call an asynchronicity between the actual threats and the ones identified in the dominant discourse, i.e., the rhetorical figures and images employed in this discourse are often out of sync with historical realities. This implies, among other things, that 1. Survival and acceptance of traditional rhetorical and narrative concepts and images continue much longer than the actual historical situation would warrant. These constructs can be considered examples of a “storifying of experience,” as they employ specific symbol systems, myths, narrative structures and modes of discourse that are considered as adequate conceptual frames for the understanding of a historical situation. If they have sufficient explanatory power, these models of rhetorical sense-making persist as conventions even in the face of political and historical inadequacy. 2. Because of their familiarity they can easily be instrumentalized for political, religious, and economic purposes. 3. Even in the face of contradictory factual evidence, they can serve as formulaic rituals in times of crisis, uniting the nation against a real or imagined danger. Americans and Their Enemies: Political Rhetoric and Real Politics 213 4. In fact, the usage of these words sometimes tends to gain a life of its own which may actually create the situation it supposedly tries to avoid. A very obvious example are the American “Indians” as the ubiquitous enemies in U.S. Western novels and later on in Hollywood movies at times when, historically speaking, Native Americans had not been a real danger to the development of the nation for several generations. Similarly persistent, though different in its origins, is the image of the potent black male lusting after white maidens, in spite of the proven fact that the historical reality of the situation has been rather different. On another level, since the 1980s we can observe an “English only” movement in several U.S. states that tries to legally guarantee the use of English as the only official language. From a European view, this attempt is as pathetic as it is unnecessary: as if one could “protect” a language, in the first place; as if English (of all languages! ) needed any protection; as if knowing/ speaking more than one language would make you less “American”; as if the belief in common American values were dependent on one particular language. As it is, as early as 1889 Mark Twain’s satirical novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court radically questions the American auto-stereotype of the lone cultivator in the wilderness. The text clearly shows structural characteristics of the “captivity narratives,” but the traditional situation of the captive has been turned upside down. Here, it is not the representative of the civilized world who is permanently threatened with death and/ or moral degradation by his transfer into a “primitive” society. Rather, it takes Twain’s hero Hank Morgan, foreman of an arms factory, only a few years to uproot the social and spiritual order of King Arthur’s medieval England and threaten it with extinction. 1 That he cannot succeed in the end is due to the logic of the story but does not invalidate Twain’s critique which, one should remember, is voiced at a time when Native Americans in the USA come as close to extinction as ever before or after. While deconstructing, on the one hand, an outdated American auto-stereotype, Twain also presents us with an exaggeratedly drawn hetero-stereotype according to which Americans, seen from a European point of view, excel in practical ingenuity and business skills, but are rather naive, provincial, and underdeveloped as regards cultural sensibility and creativity. The Yankee 1 Daniel Aaron, The Unwritten War, 140-145, sees the novel primarily as Twain’s belated contribution to the Civil War, in which he did not serve personally. Given the comprehensive theme of the novel and its structural similarity to the “captivity narratives”, a more contextual socio-cultural interpretation seems appropriate: two years before the novel is published, the Dawes Act, an attempt to integrate American Indians into society, yields results that are about as fatal for the Indians as Hank Morgan’s reforms are for the medieval feudal system. 1890, the year after the publication of Twain’s book, the “Indian Barrier” is abolished and the American “frontier” officially closed. 214 W ALTER W. H ÖLBLING - with the best of intentions - as destroyer of a European medieval culture whose values and spirituality remain alien to him comes across as a glossy pop-art version of those fictional American travelers in Europe that populate the novels of Henry James since the 1870s (The American, 1877; Daisy Miller, 1878; The Portrait of a Lady, 1880/ 81) and try to re-assess, usually with moderate results, their relationship to the cultures on the other continent. Finally, Twain in this novel, with wonderfully ambiguous irony, not only reverses the conventional structure of the captivity narrative, he also expands it and makes it international: Now the wilderness to be cultivated is Old England, and the Indian braves here are the ancestors of the New World cultivators. Twain’s satire also implies that the new American interest in their European origins carries the seed of an expansionist re-conquest, given the fact that the American continent has been officially settled and new frontiers must be sought outside the continental USA. Not surprisingly, Twain’s novel does not seriously impair the validity of the national auto-stereotype of the righteous American hero defending Faith and Civilization against the onslaught of barbarian hordes. In World War I, this lends itself easily for use in the American view of the situation in Europe: Americans as “Knights of Democracy” in the “Great Crusade” against “the Hun”, in order to save “La Belle France,” “Innocent Belgium,” and “Classical Italy” (symbolizing European culture) from destruction - this conceptual framework projects the symbol system of the “captivity narratives” onto the international scale, complete with all the major components of missionary zeal, racial warfare, gender-specific roles of victim and savior, and their not so implicit sexual connotations. 2 Susan Brownmiller, in Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (1975), points to the far-reaching sexual aspects of the feminine allegorization of France in American propaganda of World War I: “The Rape of the Hun” became an instant byword in this country. It came to symbolize the criminal violation of innocent Belgium. It dramatized the plight of La Belle France. It charged up national patriotism and spurred the drive for Liberty Loans by adding needed authenticity to the manufactured persona of an unprincipled barbarian with pointed helmet and syphilitic lust who gleefully destroyed cathedrals, set fire to libraries, and hacked and maimed and spitted babies on the tip of his bayonet. As propaganda, rape was remarkably effective, more effective than the original German terror. It helped to lay the emotional groundwork that led us into the war. (44) 2 George Creel, chair of the Committee on Public Information instituted by President Wilson, describes in detail the work of his agency in How We Advertised America, (1920). Also see James R. Mock and C. Larson, Words That Won the War: The Story of the Committee on Public Information, 1917-1919 (1939); Harold Lasswell, Propaganda Technique in the World War (1938); and George T. Blakey, Historians on the Homefront: American Propagandists for the Great War (1970). Americans and Their Enemies: Political Rhetoric and Real Politics 215 With much less public rhetoric, the country that sends its soldiers across the Atlantic to “make the world safe for democracy,” over the period from 1898-1925 takes advantage of a Europe torn by nationalist animosities and war, and practices an expanded version of the Monroe doctrine among its southern and Pacific neighbors with military involvements in Panama (1908, 1912, 1925), Nicaragua (1909, 1910, 1912-25, 1926), Cuba (1898, 1906, 1912, 1917-1923, 1933), Mexico (1914, 1916-1917), Haiti (occ. 1915-1934), the Dominican Republic (1904: financial system; occupied 1916-1924), Honduras (intervention 1907), Guatemala (1921 coup against the president), and Puerto Rico (occupied 1898), as well as Guam (1898) and the Philippines (1898). One might argue that World War II is one of the few situations after the American War of Independence in which the dominant U.S. discourse of external danger corresponds to a real historical threat from external enemies. Beyond question is the broad consensus that resistance against the Nazis and fascists in Europe and their allied Japanese imperialists in the Pacific is justified on political and moral grounds. And though in its aftermath a few critical American authors like Norman Mailer, Irwin Shaw, John Hersey and others, while supporting the war goals, point to its potentially dangerous effects for the victors, their voices remain an influential minority. The dominant discourse tells the kind of story that follows the traditional master narrative, as Ward Just ironically sums it up in his study Military Men (1970): Since American wars are never undertaken for imperialist gain (myth one), American soldiers always fight in a virtuous cause (myth two) for a just and goalless peace (myth three). […] American wars are always defensive wars, undertaken slowly and reluctantly, the country a righteous giant finally goaded beyond endurance by foreign adventurers. (7) Historically, the outcome of World War II vindicates this self-image to some degree, but soon the escalation of the Cold War darkens the picture, internationally as well as domestically. U.S. foreign policy at the time includes the standard ingredients of exceptionalism, moral superiority, democratic mission, and The Enemy, now “World Communism.” In 1966, Senator J. Willam Fulbright, then Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, publishes his critical assessment of the U.S. government’s practice of seeing international aid programs as an instrument for maintaining an “American presence” and to spread the “Great Society.” He specifically mentions the then escalating Vietnam conflict and comments: These [aid] programs are too small to have much effect on economic development but big enough to involve the United States in the affairs of the countries concerned. The underlying assumption of these programs is that the presence of 216 W ALTER W. H ÖLBLING some American aid officials is a blessing which no developing country, except for the benighted communist ones, should be denied. I think this view of aid is a manifestation of the arrogance of power. Its basis, if not messianism, is certainly egotism. (236) In the same year that Senator Fulbright articulates his critique of U.S. foreign policy, the European mutant of a classical American movie genre becomes an instant box-office success in the U.S. (as did its European release one year before): Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The film apparently belongs to one of the most “American” genres but leaves few of the key elements of the traditional American Western unturned. The plot somewhat arbitrarily develops the chase of three gunmen after a batch of Confederate gold during the last years of the American Civil War. Individual exceptionality still plays a role but is no longer permanent or absolute. Moral superiority is virtually absent from the movie, the driving forces motivating the protagonists’ actions are greed and power, with occasional sadism thrown in for “emotion.” A democratic mission is nowhere in sight, neither by the few representatives of a civil society nor by the government institution in the movie, the Union Army, whose only two honest representatives are apaprently helpless against corruption in the ranks as well as against an incompetent higher command. The Enemy is practically everywhere - i.e., everyone who competes in the race for money and power. The Good (Clint Eastwood) has the upper hand when the movie ends, but we know that his streak of luck can end any time. There are no real heroes: The Good is only “good” compared to the calculated viciousness of The Bad (Lee van Cleef) and the mindless thuggery of The Ugly (Eli Wallach). The film projects a world torn by war; law and order are either inefficient or virtually absent, corruption is rampant, and individual survival depends on a loaded gun and the whims of fortune. In short, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, while claiming affinity to the genre of Western movies, radically deconstructs it; what we get is a morality play without morals. Though there are no overt political overtones, the film presents a world that must have appeared familiar to its contemporary audiences in the USA as well as in Europe in the mid-1960s. At a time when consensus in U.S. society is violently threatened by apparently unbridgeable differences, Leone’s scenes of senseless death and destruction in the Civil War not only reminds American audiences of the - until then - most painful period of their national history; it also calls to the ongoing war in Vietnam and allows for contemporary references and connotations. The identification patterns available in the movie are multiple and opaque enough to even be contradictory. For example: The battle scenes as well as the corruption and sadistic abuse of power portrayed in the movie speak strongly to those protesting Americans and Their Enemies: Political Rhetoric and Real Politics 217 against government authority, the selective draft, and the war in Vietnam. Because of the allegorical quality of the protagonists and the mythical story line, though, the movie also enables much more intriguing readings: U.S. Southerners can see “The Bad”as a representative of the Yankee North, and his death as poetic justice in the context of the U.S. Civil War. However, supporters of the Vietnam Conflict - which was, we should remember, officially a civil war between South and North Vietnam in which the South had appealed to the USA for help - also can easily allegorize “The Bad” as the cruel North Vietnamese (Ho Chi Minh), and “The Ugly” as the corrupt South Vietnamese regime which is repeatedly saved by U.S. intervention (“The Good”) just in the nick of time before its demise. In fact, in the episode where The Good ends his contract with The Ugly and leaves him out in the desert, contemporaries might establish parallels to the 1963 ‘removal’ of Ngo Dinh Diem by a military coup, with the quiet cooperation of the USA. On yet a different level, critical viewers can understand the shifting alliances between the movie’s protagonists in their pursuit of the booty as suggesting the U.S. foreign policy since the end of World War II, which starts off with a major reversal of the war-time alliance and continues to make liaisons of convenience according to the necessities of realpolitik. There is also a more general element in Leone’s film: it is, as today’s antiglobalization protesters would argue, the disturbing fact that individual existence is rather precariously at the mercy of global economic and power games, and that wars in this system have nothing to do with emotions, morality, religion, or ideology. This aspect is especially of concern to a society like the U.S., where the discourses of individual rights and freedom as well as of moral/ religious obligation have been one of the major pillars of the national cultural fabric and have constituted a dominant rhetorical element in the justification of all wars the U.S. have ever fought. The sociologist R.E. Canjar put this very succinctly in her 1984 essay: War, in short, is neither an emotional, moral, or political aberration; it is the socialized production of violence and its monopoly use by the state. […] Both corporate social life and corporate social death are materially produced by social means. It is for this reasons that such phenomena as the military-industrial complex occur. It has less to do with conspiracies than it is a routine outcome of a production process in which the means, methods, labor, technology and organization simultaneously serve, and often fail to distinguish between, the production of life and the production of death. (435, 437) The emotionally and morally arid world of Sergio Leone’s movie, which in effect suggests that killing is good business, has no place for this high rhetoric and, in fact, corresponds quite well to Joseph Heller’s terse and darkly suggestive alliterative statement a few years earlier in his novel Catch-22: “Business boomed on every battle front.” 218 W ALTER W. H ÖLBLING A response of a different kind to the American situation in the 1960s is Norman Mailer’s 1967 novel Why Are We in Vietnam? His answer to the title is a kind of fictional psychoanalysis of the collective American unconscious, illustrated by the story of a high-tech hunting party of Texan corporate executives in Alaska. But Mailer goes far beyond suggesting easy analogies between this hunting trip and Vietnam; he is looking for the roots of this unbridled joy of killing, of the fascination with high-tech overkill in the collective American psyche. He articulates his belief that at the bottom of it all are the accumulative and mutually reinforcing effects of repressive sexual norms, secularized versions of the Puritan work ethic, business interests of the military-industrial complex, American imperialism backed by an unbroken sense of mission, the belief in “manifest destiny”, and a holy fear of everything that does not conform to the WASP way of life - including the notorious suppression and commodification of the body, human or animal. Mailer’s most irreverent indictment of this American attitude appears in the middle of the novel when Rusty Jethroe, the leading CEO, having failed to prove himself as the top big-game hunter in front of his subalterns, distressedly ruminates about the possible consequences of this embarrassing situation: Yeah, sighs Rusty, the twentieth century is breaking up the ball game, and Rusty thinks large common thoughts such as these: 1 - The women are free. They fuck too many to believe one can do the job. 2 - The Niggers are free, and the dues they got to be paid are no Texan virgin’s delight. 3 - The Niggers and women are fucking each other. 4 - The yellow races are breaking loose. 5 - Africa is breaking loose. 6 - The adolescents are breaking loose including his own son. 7 - The European nations hate America’s guts. 8 - The products are no fucking good any more. 9 - Communism is a system guaranteed to collect dues from all losers. 9a - More losers than winners. 9b - and out: Communism is going to defeat capitalism unless promptly destroyed. […] 12 - The great white athlete is being superseded by the great black athlete. 13 - The Jews run the Eastern wing of the Democratic party. 14 -Karate, a Jap sport, is now prerequisite to good street fighting.[…] 17 - He, Rusty, is fucked unless he gets that bear, for if he don’t, white men are fucked more and they can take no more. Rusty’s secret is that he sees himself as one of the pillars of the firmament, yeah, man - he reads the world’s doom in his own fuckup. If he is less great than God intended him to be, then America is in Trouble. They don’t breed Texans for nothing. (110f.) While Increase Mather’s self-image in my initial quote can still be validated by religious beliefs and the historical situation, Rusty’s view of himself and the endangered state of White America comes across as the compensating aggressiveness of a power elite that tries to hide the lack of an ethical and ideal core of their claim for supremacy behind grandiose appeals to America’s God-given greatness. Americans and Their Enemies: Political Rhetoric and Real Politics 219 Mailer’s critique of 1967 has gained almost uncanny topicality in our days. We may recall that on March 8, 1983, speaking before church leaders in Florida, then U.S. President Ronald Reagan named the Soviet Union as the seat of “evil in the world.” With the collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1989, the demonizing Cold War rhetoric temporarily disappears from U.S. public diction, yet it immediately returns in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 9-11. For his 2002 “State of the Union Address” on January 29, President George W. Bush’s speech writers coin the term “axis of evil; ” apart from the fact that the two terms are “four-letter words”, they are a clever choice of phrase that evokes the Axis powers of World War II as well as the Cold War, and also suggests an American moral superiority of the fundamentalist kind. This rhetoric places the U.S.A. once again on the side of God in a primeval show-down against the forces of darkness in which American soldiers’ bodies - and their electronic and high-tech extensions - are the primary weapons. However, fairly obvious similarities may be misleading and can distract us from looking at more interesting aspects. Public statements like the “State of the Union” addresses have over the years developed their specific rhetorical conventions, and certain formulas have become an absolute necessity. (Cf. Goetsch and Hurm Rhetorik der amerikanischen Präsidenten seit F.D. Roosevelt). Especially in times of crisis or war, a depiction of “us” versus “them” in black and white has become part of the standard repertoire, as have oppositions like rational/ irrational, good/ evil, just/ unjust, freedom/ oppression, peaceful/ aggressive, brave/ cowardly, etc., together with the emphasis on the role of the USA as victim of aggression and/ or defender of a threatened. Likewise, and quite independent of the actual state of affairs, speakers traditionally confirm American strength and determination (“Yet the state of our Union has never been stronger …”), point to the uniqueness of this particular historical moment, and express their conviction that the nation will emerge victorious. In this 2002 State of the Union address, the combination of “war against terrorism” and “homeland security,” with the envisioned beneficiary effects of “safer neighborhoods” resulting from “the sacrifice of soldiers, the fierce brotherhood of firefighters […], stronger police […] stricter border enforcement […]” and America’s dependence on “the eyes and ears of alert citizens” convey connotations which for many European ears have an ominous ring. Let us situate this rhetoric in the context of recent American events: Major business malpractice (like the Enron, WorldCom, NYSE, etc. scandals), neglect of environmental concerns (the unsigned Kyoto agreement, oil projects in Alaska natural reserves, cutting of federal detoxification funding), blatant violations of civil liberties in connection with people detained indefinitely without legal assistance following 9-11, the creation of the Homeland Security Agency, the Patriot Acts, the decision to dramatically 220 W ALTER W. H ÖLBLING upgrade military weapon systems (the Pentagon budget is four times that of our annual Austrian state budget), and the recent revelations in testimonies before the Congressional 9/ 11 Commission as well as U.S. and British intelligence agencies reports on the actual state of information in regard to Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. What emerges looks like the profile of a society that is threatened domestically by a combination of political favoritism and ruthless business interests, and also besieged by an overpowering external enemy, and is determined to protect itself with the help of a superior military and all-out information surveillance, electronic as well as personal, appealing to values like “service,” “sacrifice,” and “fierce brotherhood.” Rusty Jethroe’s Jeremiad, the high-tech weaponry of the Alaska hunters, as well as the lethal “brotherhood” of D.J. and Tex, the two alter ego-like adolescent heroes of the novel who volunteer for Vietnam, come readily to mind. To make it clear - I am not commenting here on the pragmatic effectiveness of policies adopted by the current U.S. administration, nor do I intend to draw superficial analogies. What strikes me as worth contemplating are the structural and thematic affinities to Mailer’s satirical fictional analysis of U.S. society in 1967, then in another state of crisis. They seem to imply - and some people might find this a bit alarming - that conceptual changes in the mind of American leadership over the past 39 years have not been very significant. The “Domino Theory” and the “weapons of mass destruction” share a certain ringing rhetoric. The current structure of the G.W. Bush - Osama bin Laden - Saddam Hussein scenario, the “coalition of the willing” versus “the axis of evil,” “rogue states,” and global terrorism of the Islamic fundamentalist kind sounds very much like the biblical scapegoat ritual, about which James Aho in his 1981 study on Religious Mythology and the Art of War says the following: As a rule, in Judaism, Islam, and Protestantism, responsibility for the world’s sin is projected onto minority populations, strangers, and foreigners; those with tongues, customs, and pantheons alien to God’s faithful. In collectively objectifying evil and positing it upon this external enemy, a sense of cleanliness of His “remnant” is created symbolically. Analogous to the Levitical rite of the scapegoat (Lev. 16: 20-12), the projectors can “escape” from acknowledging the possibility of their own blemish. […] Thus, mythologically, the holy war will be fought between the absolutely righteous and the equally absolute incarnation of Evil. Insofar as it exorcises the objectified evil, the ferocity of the violence in the war must reflect the enormity of the crime against God and man. […] The Hebraic, the Muslim and Christian holy wars, both in myth and enactment, are among the most ruthless in human experience. (151) It conveniently allows both sides to “escape” from acknowledging the possibility of their own blemish by creating a Manichean system of absolute Americans and Their Enemies: Political Rhetoric and Real Politics 221 good versus absolute evil. This also seems to have become an increasingly accepted view in pop culture products, e.g. Lord of the Rings and similar recent box office hits. [Or, a rather quotidian - almost banal - example to illustrate the contemporary “official spirit” in the USA: In January 2005 I walked into a New Jersey Post Office, and while waiting in line I studied the display of the four latest special editions of stamps: one was against breast cancer, the other three featured John Wayne, a Purple Heart, and the National War Memorial. Coincidental - or not? Like they said in the 1960s: “Just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean they are not out to get you.”] On the U.S. side, the somewhat arbitrary shift in scapegoats - from the elusive Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda network to the more targetable Saddam Hussein - also provides the latest example of the aforementioned asynchronicity of dominant public discourse, whatever political, economic, and strategic motivations might be behind that move: The actual new historical causes of the contemporary danger - Islamic fundamentalist terrorism growing out of poor social, political, and economic conditions - are ignored in favor of a familiar threat (Iraq) that can be easily identified and attacked, though in historical reality it has not been a real global danger since 1991. Given the current situation, it is likely that the attitude of Europeans towards America will see yet another turn of the critical screw; but as European scholars we might do well to also make greater analytical efforts to understand what on the surface comes across as rather irreconcilable American opposites, e.g., fundamentalist religious beliefs and a free democratic system; or the claim that in U.S. elections “every vote counts,” though the actual voting/ counting of votes (mechanical or electronic) is subject to procedures that leave many Europeans stunned. I also think we should look even more closely at the extremely mediated and visual quality of everyday U.S. life, as well as on the impact this has on our understanding of democracy and its processes. Currently, for example, thanks to the rhetoric of the U.S. administration around the Iraq War, 50% of Americans actually believe that Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein co-operated, though serious evidence for that has not become public. America’s claim of exceptionality, and for leadership in the democratic world, increasingly has to defend itself against the charge that there is nothing special about the USA, that they, e.g., like any other imperial power in history, use military force whenever necessary to secure their interests, and only co-operate with the international community when it is expedient for American interests do so. In short, a reassessment of the role of America in a post-Cold War world will center on whether the USA can convincingly act as the leader of democratic nations, or rather come across as the global bully. It remains to be seen whether the official rhetoric will stay in sync with actual American realpolitik. 222 W ALTER W. H ÖLBLING Works Cited Aho, James. Religious Mythology and the Art of War. London: Aldwych, 1981. Bak, Hans, and W.W. Hölbling, eds. “Nature’s Nation” Revisited. American Concepts of Nature from Wonder to Ecological Crisis. Amsterdam: VUU Press, 2003. Brownmiller, Susan. Against Our Will. Men, Women and Rape. 1975. New York: Ballantine, 1993. Canjar, R.E. “The Modern Way of War, Society, and Peace.” American Quarterly, 36: 3 (1984), 434-439. Carter, Dale, ed. Marks of Distinction. American Exceptionalism Revisited. Aarhus: Aarhus UP, 2001. Dawes, James. The Language of War. Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War Through World War II. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002. Fulbright, William J. The Arrogance of Power. New York: Vintage, 1966. Goetsch, Paul, and Gerd Hurm, eds. Rhetorik der amerikanischen Präsidenten seit F.D. Roosevelt. Tübingen: Narr, 1993. “GOP USA: Bringing the Conservative Message to America.” Homepage GOP USA: A Division of Endeavor Media Group. N.d. 20 May 2007. <http: / / www.gopusa.com> Hofstadter, Richard. The Paranoid Style in American Politics. London: Cape, 1966. Hölbling, Walter. Fiktionen vom Krieg im neueren amerikanischen Roman. Tübingen: Narr, 1987. —. “Texts and Contexts: Lyndon B. Johnson’s Gulf-of-Tonkin Report and his Remarks at Syracuse University.” Die Rhetorik amerikanischer Präsidenten seit F.D. Roosevelt. Eds. Paul Goetsch and Gerd Hurm. Tübingen: Narr, 1993, 165-175. Just, Ward. Military Men. New York: Knopf, 1970. Leggewie, Claus. Amerikas Welt. Die USA in unseren Köpfen. Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 2000. Lundestad, Geir. “Empire” by Intention. The U.S. and European Integration, 1945-97. London: Oxford UP, 1998. —. “American European Cooperation and Conflict: Past, Present, Future”. In: No End to Alliance. The U.S. and Western Europe. Past, Present, Future. London: Macmillan, 1998. 245-262 Mather, Increase. A Brief History of the Warre with the Indians in New England […]. Boston: John Foster, 1676, p. 1; quoted from Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860. Middleton/ CT: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1973, 83. Neubauer, Paul. “American Landscapes of Terror: From the first captivity tales to twentieth-century horror stories.” In: Bak, Hans, and W.W. Hölbling, eds. “Nature’s Nation” Revisited. American Concepts of Nature from Wonder to Ecological Crisis. Amsterdam: VUU Press, 2003, 347-365. Rieser, Susanne. “Blow-Up: Spectacular Nature in Action Film.” In: Bak, Hans, and W.W. Hölbling, eds. “Nature’s Nation” Revisited. American Concepts of Nature from Wonder to Ecological Crisis. Amsterdam: VUU Press, 2003, 377-392. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993. Sollors, Werner. The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature. A Reader of Original Texts with English Translations. New York: New York UP, 2000. “New American Dream.” Homepage of The Center for a New American Dream. N.d. 20 May 2007. <http: www.newdream.org> “The Democratic Party.” Homepage Democratic National Committee. N.d. 20 May 2007. <http: / / www.democrats.org> Americans and Their Enemies: Political Rhetoric and Real Politics 223 “The White House.” Official Homepage of the U.S. federal government. Updated daily. 20 May 2007. <http: www.whitehouse.gov> “The White House: Officious Website of George W. Bush.” McJesus Ventures website. N.d. 20 May 2007 <http: / / whitehouse.org> Van der Beets, Richard, ed. Held Captive by Indians: Selected Narratives 1642-1836. 1973. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1994. “War on Iraq.” AlternetMedia News. 2007. 20 May 2007. <http: / / www.alternet.org/ waroniraq/ > L IOUBOV G UINZBOURG Imagining America in the 21 st Century: A Russian’s View from the Final Resting Place of William S. Burroughs We are asked to love or hate such and such a country and such and such a people. But some of us feel too strongly our common humanity to make such a choice. Albert Camus It is a world completely rotten with wealth, power, senility, indifference, Puritanism and mental hygiene, poverty and waste, technological futility and aimless violence, and yet I cannot help but feel it has about it something of the dawning of the universe. Jean Baudrillard, America Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, one of the leading first-hand observers of the rise of American democracy in the early nineteenth century, insisted that Americans live “in the perpetual utterance of self-applause,” and that “there are certain truths which Americans can learn only from strangers.” From the earliest days of U.S. history, by this count, foreigners have made numerous attempts to identify and explain the assumptions, implications, and inferences about American society, and the interrelatedness of its politics, manners and values, that cultural insiders often take for granted or simply fail to notice. Such outside observers, however, have often remained sufficiently detached to see more clearly the enormous diversity of life in the United States, and tended to generalize and universalize the American experience. This has been the case with several generations of my compatriots, citizens of the former Soviet Union, for whom America has remained a fanciful “other world,” encompassing numerous tall tales, dreams, and fears. Whether it has aroused jealousy, indignation, or adoration, it has often been viewed as an antipode to Soviet reality. For more than seventy years, the American profile in my native Russia had been excessively infused with an official ideology of class struggle, reinforced by limited access to American ideas, traits, and postures. U.S.-Russian relations were confined throughout this era to suspicion, misunderstanding, and alienation. It was near the end of this epoch that my appreciation for American literature developed into an exploration of American history, and the post-WWII societal phenomena which gave rise to American counterculture, and its condemnation of the country’s underlying social, political and religious values. I became attracted to this disaffiliation from the main- 226 L IOUBOV G UINZBOURG stream, the contradictions percolating through American history, and its obstinate dissenting tradition. It was this fascination with cultural and social otherness that led me to choose 20 th Century American literature as a major at St. Petersburg State University. Throughout the intervening years, I have grown closer to American letters, managing to translate my field of professional competence and knowledge of the history of American literature into a broader context of American Studies curricula. Yet, apart from a few courses in American literature, there was little opportunity for a thorough systematic analysis of the complexity of American society and its people, its larger cultural heritage, system of beliefs, behaviors, and symbols. When I was a student, and later, when I began teaching at St. Petersburg State, the access to American historical and cultural idioms was limited. There was little or no chance of traveling to the United States to facilitate an understanding of the range of controversies and dilemmas there, the elements of exclusion and marginalization, or the uniformity and pliability of public opinion, and intolerance towards dissent and unorthodox perspectives. The notion of America had attained an unprecedented degree of pure abstraction. Thanks to the end of the Cold War, and the impetuous and radical political changes in Russia, it has now become possible for me to challenge my professional orientation in American Studies scholarship. In 1999 I came to the University of Kansas (KU), in America’s heartland, as an exchange scholar, at the behest of the U.S. State Department, to work on curriculum development for teaching American culture back home. I found, through this experience, that the breadth of our field is as enormous as the country itself. I began to realize how challenging it can be for an outside observer to adequately assess the cultural and social diversity of the United States, and to project an accurate picture of America to the sprawling world beyond. That first twelve-month tour in Kansas provided me the impetus to come back to the States only two years later, to add to the depth of my participation in the process of dialogic openness, and to explore the relationships between our two countries, that appeared more extensive and congenial than the Cold War legacy had initially revealed, and to discover, not without surprise, the numerous features that Russia and America have in common. Russian-American relations have never been exclusively confined to the governments and foreign policymakers. Even in the most difficult times, relations between these two countries played out as public diplomacy. 1 1 From the very early days of the American state, relations with Russia were characterized by increasing trade and “natural curiosity about the outside world that people of both countries were developing.” It was often underestimated how much Americans actively participated in Russian economic, social, and cultural life and tended to study Imagining America in the 21 th Century 227 When given a chance to teach at an American University, I conceived it as an opportunity to mediate between cultures and peoples, and to stagger those historical and cultural boundaries that continue to be imposed upon the cultural and political space of these two nations. For the last several years, I have taught a course entitled “America through Foreign Eyes” at this public university not insignificantly situated in a small mid-western town known as the birthplace of the American Civil War, stronghold of abolitionist John Brown, site of the bloody Quantrill massacre, dreamland of a youth Langston Hughes, home for Frank Harris’ enticing sexual adventures, and “one of the secret centers of American writing,” 2 where Beat guru William S. Burroughs spent the last sixteen years of his life. Russian language and culture more than any other foreigners. It is also worth remembering that American influences in Russia were essential long before anyone thought of the U.S. as the sole remaining superpower. In the course of history, the two peoples gradually but inevitably were drawing closer together. Even after the Revolution in 1917 several organizations were formed to promote cultural interchange between the Soviet Union and the United States. These organizations enhanced popular understanding of and sympathy for the Soviet Union and intended to influence official U.S. policy favorably toward the Soviet Union. The Friends of Soviet Russia was one of the first and most well known organizations. The group was succeeded by the National Council on Soviet Relations and was chaired by Corliss Lamont - in various periods a leading proponent of civil rights, a director of the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, which successfully challenged Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Senate Subcommittee and other governmental agencies. In spite of the fact that the group was placed on Attorney General Tom Clarck’s list of subversive organizations, it survived the Cold War atmosphere of the fifties and the sixties. After the Soviet break up, however, none of the Friendship Societies previously affiliated with the Council remained active in any of the former Soviet republics. Instead there appeared a number of other grassroots U.S.-based organizations dedicated to exercising public diplomacy. Many of them are mentioned in Ruffin, M. Holt McCarter, Joan, and Upjohn, Richard, ed. The Post-Soviet handbook: A Guide to Grassroots Organizations and Internet Resources in the Newly Independent States. Seattle, London: University of Washington Press, Center for Civil Society International, 1996. On the history of Russian-American relations, the best source is the work in four volumes by Norman Saul of the University of Kansas. In Distant Friends, Concord and Conflict, War and Revolution, and the most recent Friends or Foes, Professor Saul provides a most comprehensive historic account, summary, and reference to other detailed works on the subject. The history and activity of The Friends of Soviet Russia and of The National Council on Soviet Relations documented in Jo Buhle, Mari, Buhle, Paul, Georgakas, Dan ed., Encyclopedia of the American Left. 2nd ed. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, 36. 2 This phrase was coined by Romanian-American poet Andrei Codrescu who visited Lawrence, Kansas in 1987 together with many other famous writers and poets to participate in Beat Generation poetry festival ‘River City Reunion.’ The phrase was put on the Lawrence Convention and Visitor’s Bureau website: <http: / / www.visitlawrence.com/ visitor/ arts/ > 228 L IOUBOV G UINZBOURG Coming from a society built upon the bedrock of Soviet ideology, having experienced first hand the consequences of an isolationist policy, I rushed to share with students my conviction that it is necessary to reconsider the assumptions that have divided the planet for centuries. For six consecutive semesters my classroom became a venue for discussing such topics as individualism and self-reliance, the persistence of religion as a public force, resentment against America’s invasive popular culture, U.S. global military dominance, unilateral foreign policy-making, and the tactics of aggressive preemption overseas. I intended to increase my students’ awareness of American influence throughout the world, to analyze the country’s role and responsibility in a rapidly changing world community, and to examine expectations of America expressed by Russians, as well as other nations and peoples. Teaching this course allowed me to reveal my own ambivalence towards America, and the nature of the emotional, psychological, and intellectual relationship that I’ve developed with the subject of my academic interest. In the course of my stay in the United States, I am still struggling to understand and adjust to the discontinuity between the fragmented ideal of an alluring America that had once been pieced together in my imagination, and a perceived American reality not previously critically evaluated within my recalcitrant Russian mind. It is the subject matter of my course, and a gradual recovery from my frustrations with America, that have motivated the content of this essay, written while residing and teaching in one of only two (out of 105) “blue” counties in the state of Kansas. I shall focus upon foreign, particularly Russian interpretations of American values, politics, beliefs, and symbols, and analyze changing attitudes towards America in the former Soviet Union and other East European nations. I’ll attempt to describe the disturbing contemporary trends of a new wave of fear and mistrust of the United States, expressed by Russians and other countries. I’ll also estimate changing attitudes simmering in Russia and elsewhere, as the world is overwhelmed by America’s hegemonic culture, ideology, and military dominance, especially in the milieu of a difficult process of economic recovery in the former Soviet block. I also hope to reveal the gradual shift in my own conceptualization of America. Finally, I hope to pay tribute to a historically-dramatic community I serendipitously stumbled into with the help of the American State Department’s international public relations efforts. Lawrence, Kansas remains one of those places obscured from the global view by its geographic and political isolation. Although it exemplifies a seeming organic civil unity which foreigners seek in the United States, it has been excluded from exported imagery of America, mostly because of its incapacity to mythologize itself. Imagining America in the 21 th Century 229 Upon my arrival, I was welcomed by generous, jovial, unassuming people, immediately taken with my origins in the former Soviet entity. To remain distinct among the natives in Lawrence is not a challenge, but rather an honor. While an embodiment of manifest foreignness, I have retained my status as an outside comparative observer, enjoying at the same time the opportunity to witness life here first hand, and measuring my experiences against my expectations. The decades of leaden Soviet anti-American propaganda had an enormous inverse effect on the Russian people. As famous Russian dissident writer Vassily Aksyonov recollects, the combination of vague pro-American feelings, and all-out anti-American obsessions caused a segment of Soviet society, mostly intelligentsia of his generation, to start leaning, sometimes unconsciously, in sympathy with America, “in matters aesthetic, emotional, and even to some extent ideological” (16). In spite of the atmosphere of confrontation, there was a variety of forces which encouraged positive, even favorable images of the United States. Among others, there were numerous translations of American literary classics that, though chosen by conservative state agencies for their desolate themes of American reality, often presented fanciful views of America and its citizenry. Many Russians were engrossed in James Fennimore Cooper’s adventure stories, the tales of Mayne Reid, epic poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and other authors who collectively created a literary imagery of an ever-expanding frontier, contributing to the American mythology. Readers delved into Emerson’s doctrine of self-perfection, rejecting engagement in a continuous struggle with society, and pursuit of social change. They contemplated On the Duty of Civil Disobedience with Henry David Thoreau, and sought for inspiration while mastering Edgar Allen Poe’s, “psychological intensities and obscurities” (Allen 80). 3 Others learned about Walt Whitman’s devotion to democracy in a conveyed Russian reflection of this “most American” poet’s “irregular lines and rhythms” of “soaked up Americanisms” (Allen 82-83). 4 With the flood of books pronounced to raise Soviet awareness of American realism, Theodore Dreiser and Eugene O’Neil 3 Among others, Poe was translated by Silver Age symbolists Konstantin D. Bal’mont and Valerii Brusov. Bal’mont translated five-volume series of Poe’s collected works that appeared in three editions. For more detailed analysis of Poe’s recognition in Russia see Allen, Robert V. “American Literature and Film” in Russia Looks at America: The View to 1917. Washington: Library of Congress, 1988, especially pp. 80-81, and Delaney Joan Grossman, Edgar Allan Poe in Russia: a study in legend and literary influence. Wurzburg, JAL-Verlag, 1973. 4 Allen writes that it was the young Kornei Chukovski and the older Konstantin Bal’mont who both published the first direct translations from Whitman including portions from “Drum Beats,” “O Star of France,’ and “To You.” See Allen 82-84. 230 L IOUBOV G UINZBOURG joined Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passos and Sinclair Lewis in disclosing “whole new areas of American thought, [and] new regional and cultural landscapes” as well as in revealing “facets of the American character, and many new points of view regarding the American scene” (G. Brown and D. Brown 16). Russians reveled in O. Henry’s humor, his ability to capture distinct American color, and “sheer narrative charm” (G. Brown and D. Brown 11). Many curiously followed Mark Twain’s descriptions of “the life of organized American society,” and were amused by the burning indignation and piercing sarcasm that the author “derived from its mores and foibles” (G. Brown and D. Brown 12). 5 Ernest Hemingway, Erskine Caldwell, and Richard Wright perpetuated Russian interest in their “psychological profundity, faithfulness in observation of human relationships, [and] breath of social understanding” (G. Brown and D. Brown 21). Numerous accounts 5 The editors of A Guide to Soviet Russian Translations of American Literature note that Mark Twain’s reputation in Russia has been larger than that of any other American writer excepting Jack London. Diligently guarding Twain’s heritage, Russians went so far as to accuse “reactionary American publishers” of deliberately suppressing the writer’s anti-imperialist and anti-racist essays. The article “Twain Suppressed, Russian Charges” in The New York Times 28 July, 1947 referred to Twain’s finest satire of imperialism, his essays “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” (1901), (in the The New York Times article cited incorrectly as “To a Human Being in Darkness”), and to “A Defense of General Funston” (1902), (also cited incorrectly as “In Defense of General Funston”), which, as Twain described himself in the following essay “General Funston vs. Huck Finn,” caused the banning of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The article in The New York Times claims that the charges are mere balderdash since both articles were reprinted several times. According to the newspaper, “A Defense of General Funston” was published in the biography of Mark Twain released by Harper & Brothers in 1924 under its modified title “Attack on Funston.” I checked Mark’s Twain’s Autobiography, edited by Albert Bigelow Paine, published by Harpers in 1924, the edition that was closest to the bibliographical description given in The New York Times. I could not locate the essay, either under its original, or modified title. I found only the reference to the infamous General Funston and Twain’s thoughts on Funston’s deceitful capture of Aguinaldo during the Philippine - American War. See Mark’s Twain’s Autobiography, edited by Albert Bigelow Paine, New York: Harpers & Brothers, 1924, 285. As for the second mentioned essay, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” I was able to find it in Europe and Elsewhere, the edition mentioned in the article, though the book was released not by Viking Press, as The New York Times claims, but by the same Harpers & Brothers. See Twain, Mark Europe and Elsewhere. New York: Harpers & Brothers, 1923, 250. A well-known in Russia anti-racist essay “The United States of Lyncherdom,” the title of which was used to name a collection of Twain’s essays translated and published in the Soviet Union in 1983, also appeared in Europe and Elsewhere. See Europe and Elsewhere, 239. Most of Mark Twain’s writings, speeches and interviews on the Philippine - American War were collected for the first time in only 1992 in a book edited by Jim Zwick Mark Twain’s Weapons of Satire: anti-imperialist writings on the Philippine-American War. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1992. Imagining America in the 21 th Century 231 of tramps, vagabonds, and the American “hobo” also appealed to the Russian public. Readers developed stronger taste for romantic adventures than for the explicit class consciousness not only in picaresque works of such writers as Jack London and Francis Bret Harte, but also in the autobiographical writings of poet Harry Kemp, “scholar tramp” Glen Mullin, and song writer Woodrow Wilson Guthrie. Some formed a vision of America traveling with ‘Charley,’ or following, in Yevtushenko’s words, “a drunken beatnik staggering along a well-lighted avenue” (Reilly 180). 6 Despite the state censorship which excluded many works, America was always given a chance “to speak for herself through her literature,” especially when other avenues of cultural understanding were closed. Jazz was another irresistible source of inspiration for those who rebelled against officially-sponsored mass ideology, in search of inner-directedness and privacy, apart from pervasive Soviet collectivism. One of the most profound books ever written on jazz, Black Music, White Freedom, was 6 Reilly writes that in 1967 the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko began to publish a series of poems about America that contained allegorical allusions to the Soviet Union. However, his allegories in such poems as “Girl Beatnik” or “Monologue of the Beatnik” must be difficult to decode in Russia, since most of the writers known as the Beat Generation, as well as their artistic vision and the whole culture associated with the Beats, had not been introduced to Russian readers for quite a while. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the monopoly of the government on publishing and translation has been replaced by a number of private publishers. They have brought out translations of those authors who had remained available only in English (unless they were translated and released in samizdat) and had been kept in so called “spets khran,” special departments in libraries where readers were allowed only by special permits, issued either in the academic institutions, or by party officials. Since the end of the 1980s the virtual flood of books has revealed to Russian readers dozens of unfamiliar past and contemporary writers. Among those authors translated in the 1990s were the Beats and their precursors. There appeared translations of Henry Miller, who had not been regarded with the deserved favor at home for a long time, and Charles Bukowski, who had been published in the States in various small literary publications for over thirty years. Kerouac’s On the Road, parts of which had been squeezed into literary journals in the late sixties, was finally pieced together and released in its entirety. The book was followed by Dharma Bums, Desolation Angels, The Subterraneans, and other works. As for the writings of William Burroughs, they had been condemned by Russian authorities on the same grounds that American zealous defenders of decency had used for banning the book from being published in the United States. It took seven years to release Burroughs’ Naked Lunch in the United States, where it had been gripped in a vice of censorship; it took almost thirty more years to publish the translation in Russian. The book was translated by V. Kogan and released in Russia in 1993, thirty four years after its first publication in Paris in 1959. The long - awaited Anthology of Beat Poetry, that included poems (most of them translated into Russian for the first time) of Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, and others, was finally published in Russia in 2004. 232 L IOUBOV G UINZBOURG designed and completed in Russia. 7 Its author, Efim Barban, editor and publisher of an unofficial Soviet jazz magazine Kvadrat (Chorus), is also known to Russians as Gerald Wood, a correspondent and host of a jazz program on the BBC in London. Barban believes that in the former Soviet block, jazz was never considered “as merely music, or entertainment, or even serious art,” but rather turned out to be a religious precept. He explained that “jazz throughout its history in the Soviet Union, had been the object of concentrated attention on the part of the authorities (no less than religion, or any other form of ideology)” (11). Besides, he argues, it “came to be an intelligible and acceptable form of spiritual resistance to surrounding reality,” allowing adhering Soviet citizens “to realize their spiritual and emotional aspirations” (11-12). Barban writes that in the culturally-isolated Soviet Union, deprived of any form of subculture, a wide audience did not even suspect that in the West too, “jazz has always been a kind of musical enfant terrible,” and that it often was not a sanctioned “part of the cultural establishment” (12). Rather, Soviet jazz enthusiasts identified this music with an imaginary Western way of life, juxtaposing it with the absurdities of Soviet experience and officially-propagated art forms. Jazz became “a kind of musical ideological subversion” and “with its free expression, swing, and the Dionysian atmosphere of the contact between performer and listeners” (Barban 12), could not fail to attract a wide, devoted audience of artistic nonconformists. This tendency was noted by American diplomats in Moscow, who observed that Leonard Feather’s “Jazz Club USA” was attracting many listeners to the Voice of America. S. Frederick Starr, famous jazz historian and author of the most comprehensive history of jazz in Russia and the Soviet Union, writes that in late 1954 Ambassador Charles E. Bohlen initiated the landmark program “Music USA” that made its debut in 1955 on Voice of America, with William Conover (243). Starr admits that the primary motive for establishing “Music USA” was political (244). Vassily Aksyonov also believes that in those days, at the beginning of escalated Cold War, jazz was “America’s secret weapon number one” (18). The writer recollects that 7 Efim Barban finished his book which according to Leo Feigin “deals with the philosophy, aesthetics and perception of the new music,” back in 1977. It had been circulating in self - published editions for twenty five years and finally was released in Ekaterinburg by the Ural State University Press in October 2002. More details about this publication can be found in a Russian weekly electronic journal Polnii Djaz. See “Knigi,” Polnii Djaz. No.39 (183) (30 Oct. 2002). 6 May 2005 <http: / / www.jazz.ru/ mag/ 183/ default.htm#amer>. Leo Feigin also mentions Barban’s work in his book writing that “some parts of this book have been translated into English; the whole book has not been published in the West.” See Leo Feigin, ed., Russian Jazz: New Identity. London: Quartet Books Limited, 1985, 11. Imagining America in the 21 th Century 233 in the 1950s and 1960s the VOA would beam a two-hour jazz program at the Soviet Union from Tangiers daily. “The snatches of music and bits of information,” Aksyonov recalls, “made for a kind of golden glow over the horizon when the sun went down, that is, in the West, the inaccessible but oh so desirable West” (18). With emphasis on individuality and personal expression, jazz “became a form of escapism, of flight from odious and depersonalized reality” (Barban 12). In a state where “natural and sincere manifestations of emotions were impossible,” jazz embodied the symbol of individual freedom. In a world where “everything was stifled by ‘social necessity,’” and where “the tiniest hint of hedonism or the erotic was outlawed,” (Barban 12), that music conveyed the images of a dreamland imbued with “American-type pool tables, Lucky Strikes or Camels, nylons, cocaine, and jazz recordings” (Starr 238). After relocating to the United States, Aksyonov, looking back, explained the pro-American sentiments in the Soviet Union during his youth. He wrote that in the 1950s, in the atmosphere of gloomy Soviet Puritanism, America was perceived as an imaginary “hyperreality.” The principal Western attraction was its unrestrained sexual perversion and availability of consumer goods. Aksyonov confessed that people were neither alienated nor disgusted by such perspectives. When Soviets imagined the West, they thought of “sex shops with plastic genitalia, nonstop porno flicks, prostitutes of both sexes, and nightclubs jammed with beautiful people sky high on dope” (Aksyonov 96). Ironically, in the Soviet Union, any controversial or compromising effort to challenge “the horrendous conventions and pities that afflict [American] hypocritical culture” had been blocked by officials along with blatant sexuality in advertisement, television, and films. Thus, while the puritanical culture of the United States had zealously regulated eroticism and constrained notions of sexual desire and physical passion, Soviets fantasized about American’s joyous sexual liberation. 8 Much water has flowed under the bridge since those times; blazing images have dimmed. Things that had “seemed better before, bigger, nicer,” “more sensible and less smelly,” for some reason have not been “quite up to snuff” (Aksyonov 5); I caught myself sharing Aksyonov’s sentiments, which he attributed to “the misanthropic miasmas heralded the onset of [his] own midlife crises” (6). Although it is still too early for me to be bewildered by midlife disillusionment, frustrations are building nevertheless. I have dis- 8 A perfect example is the ban on William Styron’s novel Sophie’s Choice in the USSR. In this and other books Styron defies American Puritanism and reveals the hurtful and alienated consequences of the lack of candor about sexual matters in the America in the late 1940s and the beginning of 1950s, which he refers to as a “sexually bedeviled era.” 234 L IOUBOV G UINZBOURG covered that American literature and music seem to reveal less to Americans themselves than they do to foreigners. I’ve learned that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a favorite book of Russian children, has been challenged for its profanity and racially offensive language in countless American public schools, having been banned many times in classrooms and libraries since its publication in 1885. 9 Upon entering an empty hall during a jazz festival at Kansas State University, I recalled Efim Barban’s dirge for the “social function of jazz.” Barban lamented that it had been taken over by pop and rock since their ‘ecstatic revelations’ “proved to be more effective for sexual sublimation than the comparatively sophisticated art of jazz” (13). My disenchantment became apparent when, in spite of Barban’s “truism”, I anticipated “pleasing” myself and my young daughter in one of the most renowned New York City jazz clubs. The mythical American jazz club had always had its own ambiance in my imagination. It vibrated with willfully harsh voices, boundless irrepressible rhythms, and spontaneous sax phrases, breathing so hard and hot. I had waited for a momentum extending to infinity, but it never came. On a recent visit to the city we could not enter the famous Blue Note to attend a performance because my minor daughter was not allowed upon premises where alcohol was served. Familiar with the disastrous consequences of alcoholism in my native Russia, I still could not digest the remnants of the “temperance crusades” which vary from state to state, seeming to reach an apogee in America’s greatest metropolis, of all places! As for “omnivorous passions,” they appeared to be producing a profound uneasiness, due largely to the same old paradox of American Puritanism. Many foreigners, who either happened to visit this country, or derived their impressions from U.S. cultural products and values on display at home, suggest that in the States “the original sin of sexual desire seems to have been displaced by the lust of consumerism” (Montero 50). British journalist Julie Burchill noticed that it all starts “with the sequined straitjacket of sororities and fraternities, Prom Queens and Kings,” and ends up with “talk shows” where people are sharing their “deepest, darkest inhibitions and fantasies” with millions (50). Burchill comments on the discontinuity between the European and American experience, claiming that “despite their tendency to use the television screen as a cathode confessional, Americans seem uneasy with their sexuality” (50). They are open, but not relaxed, she concluded. America has remained, on the whole, prudish and puritanical. In other words, the “frozen sexual moonscape,” has not changed since William 9 For other examples of banned books and authors in the United States see Hull, Mary E. Censorship in America. A Reference Handbook. Santa Barbara, California: Contemporary World Issues, ABC-CLIO, 1999. Imagining America in the 21 th Century 235 Styron challenged its repressive nature. 10 Founded by Puritans, America “embraced commercial sex,” but being at the same time a country composed of promiscuous Puritans, it is never going to be “exactly at ease with itself” (Burchill 50). As Jean Baudrillard noticed in his book America, sexuality in the United States “no longer has time to realize itself in human love-relations” (23). It “evaporates into the promiscuity of each passing moment,” dispersing into “a multiplicity of more ephemeral forms of contact” (Baudrillard 23). Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, American materialism has become tangible in the daily lives of its population. Sexuality, like everything else that destined to reappear as American simulation, has been gradually left behind in Russia and elsewhere as ‘a form of expression’ with its attributes everywhere on the display (Baudrillard 23). I thus learned from Baudrillard that there is really “no need to adopt a critical stance” with regard to America. There is nothing there “to criticize that has not been criticized a thousand times before” (29). To avoid frustration and disillusionment one should not leave “the fiction of America” (Baudrillard 29). Entering “America as fiction” has been the path of my compatriots who have developed an impossibly idealized or arrogantly distorted picture of the United States in their imaginations. America was excessively romanticized and generalized, its myth and realities have never been particularized within Russian traditionalist, communitarian mentality. When a young Vassily Aksyonov came to Moscow in the early 1950s, he discovered “whole pockets of America lovers” in the capital. He met them mostly among children of high ranking diplomats, party officials, and KGB members. In his book In Search of Melancholy Baby, Aksyonov reveals that America had a number of devoted allies among the Soviet elite, postulating that among Soviet rank and file, pro-American feelings often had an essentially material base (14). He writes that “people connected the word “America” with the miracle of tasty and nourishing food-stuffs” (14). Soviets fantasized a gigantic society across the Atlantic that “shows no intention of disappearing or disintegrating or sinking into decadence. It had no time. It turns its frenzied energy to making money, money, money, a squalid, unseemly proposition resulting in skyscrapers the likes of which the Old World has never imagined and a network of highways crisscrossing the nation. Instead of making revolutions, the workers are buying cars! ” (Aksyonov 11) 10 On sexuality in William Styron’s writings see, for example, Rhoda Sirlin, “Sex in Mid-Century America: ‘A Nightmarish Sargasso Sea of Guilts and Apprehension.’” William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice: Crime and Self-Punishment. Ann Arbor: UNI Research Press, 1990, 27-53. 236 L IOUBOV G UINZBOURG It seemed as if it was there, in the imaginary world behind the Iron Curtain, where with the help of a “variety of techniques, from greater permissiveness to an increase of technical fantasies,” the official goal of Soviet society was achieved. The stage of dialectic historical development, known as communism, associated itself in the Soviet popular imagination with a prosperous life. “American bounty surpassed the wildest dreams of the Soviet consumer, plagued then and now by never-ending lines and shortages” (Aksyonov 16). As Frederick C. Barghoom concluded in his book The Soviet Image of the United States: A Study in Distortion, “the admiration implicit in the Soviet program of “overtaking and surpassing” America industrially and technically fostered respect for America” (30). “We have learned a lot already and have still to learn a few things from Americans,” said Minister of Food Mikoyan, upon returning from the United States in 1936 (qtd. in Barghoom 30), with typical American food products, and a fast-food automat for Moscow in tow. 11 That same year, two respected and admired Soviet satirists, Ilya Ilf and Eugene Petrov returned from a tour of America, publishing in 1937 a book entitled in English translation, Little Golden America. Famous at the time, but largely forgotten now, it told Soviet readers what they wanted to hear about the States. The scene that unfolds along highways is a technological wonderland and consumer’s paradise of Soviet dreams, with all the supermarkets and fast food they aspired to, and still lacked (Woodward 105). Living in a state of constant shortage was reflected upon by many writers from the former Soviet block. Thus, a noted Croatian writer and journalist Slavenka Drakulic´, who has been called the Simone De Beauvoir of Eastern Europe, ironically described a Communist household as “almost perfect example of an ecological unit” (Drakulic´ 181). She would argue, however, that it had completely different origins stemming not from a concern for nature, but rather form a fear for the future. Drakulic´ explained two basic principles of such a unit; collecting and recycling. She remarked that collecting depended on different kinds of experiences in different Communist countries, in other words, on different degrees of poverty. But in almost all countries of the Communist block people would collect ‘foreign objects,’ anything from the West, “from a pencil or notebook to a dress, from chewing gum to a candy wrapper” (Drakulic´ 181). 11 Barghoorn writes that when Mikoyan returned in 1936 to the U.S.S.R. after a trip to the United States, he caused such typically American products as cornflakes and tomato juice to be placed in production and sold in Soviet food stores. He also had an automat opened in Moscow which was very like its American counterpart except that it sold vodka. High-topped tables at which one ate standing were also introduced. See Frederick C. Barghoorn. The Soviet Image of the United States: A Study in Distortion. New York: 1950, especially 21-35. Imagining America in the 21 th Century 237 Famous American writer from Romania Andrei Codrescu describes his visit to his native land for the first time in two decades and writes that though he had been fantasizing about his arrival as a celebrated author, he wished he had been “a Wal-Mart.” The writer sneers at the sight of himself spreading “my beauteous aisles to the awe-struck of Hermanstadt” and “feeding them senseless with all the bounty of America” (“Notes of Alien Son” 10). Codrescu asserts that the “hungry Russian’s vision of the West resembles the promise the fathers of Communism made the workers about the future. Consumerism, it appears, is the goal of Communism” (Codrescu, The Disappearance of the Outside 32-33). It has become the means of “satisfying the ever-growing demands of the working people.” Codrescu describes the expansion of markets, claiming that countries of the former Soviet block are “a homage to Henry Ford, not to Karl Marx” and assumes that markets have always been “primarily psychic: the meta-blue jeans arrive ahead of the real ones. Drunk on imaginary Coca-Cola, the Third World wills itself into the production-consumption cycle at a point even more menial than that eventually reserved for it! ” (Codrescu, The Disappearance of the Outside 195) America as a forbidden fruit exercised a significant effect on public thinking in Russia. The Soviet citizen’s fantasy of the West, with its radiant “mountains of blue jeans there, mile-high neon signs, fast cars, acres of window displays, pulsing neon jukeboxes, loose morals, plentiful spicy things” and other depravities, would make it attractive, desirable, but hopelessly inaccessible (Codrescu, The Disappearance of the Outside 32). That vision of a distant and alienated America, however, had relegated to oblivion the features that Russia and America have had in common. The idolized and romanticized perception of America veiled those resemblances that Walt Whitman described in 1881 as “deathless aspirations at the inmost centre of each great community, so vehement, so mysterious, so abysmic” (Whitman 259). Meanwhile, visions of Russia and America rising to prominence, whether as rivals or as sharers of the common destiny to challenge the European dominance, had entered political and intellectual thought long before the turbulent events of the twentieth century (Ball 15). When Alexis De Tocqueville completed his comprehensive and enlightening survey in the 1840s, America was far from being the superpower it is today. Nevertheless the author predicted that his object of interest could well become a great hope for the future of mankind, and that the impact of the society taking shape could have consequences far beyond the borders of the young nation. In some ways, Democracy in America deserves to be read as a prophetic work. Most prophetic is Tocqueville’s shrewd estimate of the country’s future relationship with Russia, and the coming 20 th century rivalry for global 238 L IOUBOV G UINZBOURG dominance between two nations I have called home, preventing my soul from being “controlled by geography.” De Tocqueville referred to “two great nations in the world which started from different points, but seem to tend towards the same end” (De Tocqueville 142). This Russo-American comparison was irresistible for Europeans, and it’s difficult to estimate whether these observers were more fascinated by the two countries’ differences or similarities. De Tocqueville alluded to Russians and Americans and concluded the first part of Democracy in America with the following: All other nations seem to have nearly reached their natural limits, and they have only to maintain their power; but these are still in the act of growth. All the others have stopped, or continue to advance with extreme difficulty; these alone are proceeding with ease and celerity along a path to which no limit can be perceived … The Anglo-American relies upon personal interest to accomplish his ends, and gives free scope to the unguided strength and common sense of the people; the Russian centers all the authority of the society in a single arm. The principal instrument of the former is freedom; of the latter, servitude. Their starting-point is different, and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe. (142) Half a century later Walt Whitman also noted that Russia and America though appeared so “distant, so unlike at first glance … yet in certain features, and vaster once, so resembling each other” (Whitman 259). Whitman pointed to the vast territories of both countries (by 1880 the United States had reached its full continental dimensions), and their embrace, however ambiguous, of multiculturalism, that implied “fusing people of diverse race and tongue into single national identities” (Ball 15). The so-called “equivalency thesis,” a proposition that disclosed a surprising resemblance between American and Soviet social organization, has palpitated in political, cultural and artistic realms since the emergence of the socialist state in 1917. While many radicals, as well as conservatives, in Europe regarded America as the polar opposite of Soviet Russia, a considerable number of Western European and American intellectuals persisted in stressing similarities between the embattled giants, whatever their ideological contretemps. Oswald Spengler found Americanism and Bolshevism 12 remarkably similar in their effects and controlling mechanisms. Both regimes, the philosopher believed, imposed a numbing standardization on life from controlling centers. According to Spengler, in the United States the danger came from the ubiquitous system of trusts, and in Russia from 12 It is worth mentioning that the word ‘bolshevism’ derived from Russian ‘bol’shinstvo’ (majority). Thus, Bolshevism stands for the priniple of “majoritarian rule” and coincides with America’s fundamental principle of government - popular sovereignty. Imagining America in the 21 th Century 239 the dominant party (Ceaser 179). Spengler warned that the resemblance to Bolshevik Russia is far greater than one imagines. He wrote that “there is the same dictatorship of public opinion in America as in Russia (it does not matter that it is imposed by society instead of a party), that affects everything that is left in the Western world [of Europe] to the free option of individuals” (Spengler 68) Despite the insistence of the propagandists of capitalism and socialism that these two economic systems are radically different, Spengler would claim that both systems promote “essentially the same kind of standardization of marketing and production” (Ceaser 180). In The Hour of Decision he would be indignant at standardized types of people in these countries and wrote that both in America and in Russia “everything is the same for everyone; there is one recommended type of male and especially female when it comes to a prevailing idea of the body, the clothes, and the mind; any deviation from or criticism of this type arouses general attention, in New York as in Moscow” (Spengler 68). Heidegger borrowed much from his predecessors in Germany, particularly Spengler, and constructed the powerful new symbols of America and Russia as “two nations embodying the two main variants of the modern situation” (Ceaser 189). Heidegger’s first reference to this symbolic interpretation of America occurred in a series of lectures in 1935, published in 1953 as An Introduction to Metaphysics. For Heidegger, America is the symbol of the crisis; it represents the greatest alienation of man, his profoundest loss of authenticity, and his furthest distance from “Being.” He also postulated that Americanism and Bolshivism both applied indiscriminately the driving principle of modernity and technology; both were shaped by the principle; and both were utterly oblivious of the ground on which the principle rested (Ceaser 189): 13 Europe, in its ruinous blindness forever on the point of cutting its own throat, lies today in a great pincer, squeezed between Russia on one side and America on the other. From a metaphysical point of view, Russia and America are the same, with the same dreary technological frenzy and the same unrestricted organization of the average man … Europe lies in a pincer between Russia and America, which are metaphysically the same, namely in regard to their world character and their relation to the spirit … the prevailing dimension became that of extension and number. Intelligence no longer meant wealth of talent, lavishly spent, and the command of energies, but only what could be learned by everyone, the practice of a routine, always associated with a certain amount of sweat and a certain amount of show. In America and in Russia this development grew into a bound- 13 As if echoing the German philosopher, William Burroughs made the following note in his journal on the 17 th or 18 th November, 1996: “Our pioneer ancestors would puke in their graves.” See Burroughs, William S. Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs. Ed. James Graurholz. New York: Grove Press, 2000, 2. 240 L IOUBOV G UINZBOURG less etcetera of indifference and always-the-sameness … Since then the domination in those countries of a cross-section of the indifferent mass has become something more than a dreary accident. It has become an active onslaught that destroys all rank and every world-creating impulse of the spirit and calls it a lie. (Heidegger 37, 45-46) “To be a good American you have to be a goddamn liar! ” echoed William S. Burroughs, in his diary half a century later (Last Words 2). 14 Although Heidegger points out the essential “metaphysical” similarity of these two nations and regimes, America emerged as the sole symbol of modernity and its crisis. Americanism, he wrote in 1942, is the purest form of modernity (Ceaser 189). “Bolshevism is only a variant of Americanism.” It’s the “most dangerous shape of boundlessness, because it appears in the form of a democratic middle-class way of life mixed with Christianity, and all this in an atmosphere that lacks completely any sense of history” (qtd. in Ceaser 189). 15 Heidegger’s rhetorical use of America as a symbol strongly influenced such authors as Herbert Marcuse and Jean Baudrillard. After WWII, Herbert Marcuse demonstrated, in One-Dimensional Man, how productive apparatus tends to become totalitarian to the extent that it determines individual needs and aspirations (Tytell 7), and results in a “comfortable, smooth, and reasonable democratic un-freedom” (Marcuse 1). At the end of the 1960s, his famous book became a dominant paradigm in critical thought. Marshall Berman, a noted analyst of the history of modernity, refers to Marcuse’s criticism while contemplating the dialectics of modernism in his book All that Is Solid Melts into Air: the Experience of Modernity. Berman points out that Marcuse enunciated the theme that would become the essential issue of modern philosophical thought. According to Berman, Marcuse proved that modernization of human lives at once inspires and enforces the modernization of people’s souls and “the masses have no egos and no ids, with souls devoid of inner tension or dynamism. Their ideas, their needs, even their dreams, are ‘not their own.’ Their inner lives are ‘totally administered,’ programmed to produce exactly those desires that the social system can satisfy, and no more” (Berman 28). Berman writes that Marcuse considered not only class and social struggles but also psychological conflicts and contradictions to have been abolished by the state of “total administration” (Berman 28). Marcuse was caught up with the Spenglerian idea of “dictatorship” in the United States, a regime comparable with the Soviet system that levels individualities into “one standardized type of American.” Because of 14 This remark was recorded by William S. Burroughs on November 17 or 18, 1996. 15 Ceaser cites Martin Heidegger’s “Hölderlins Hymnen” from Gesamtausgabe. Vol. 53. Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1975. Imagining America in the 21 th Century 241 the capacity of the “advanced industrial civilization” to “increase and spread comforts,” people “recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobiles, hi-fi sets, split-level homes, [and] kitchen equipment” (Marcuse 9). Marcuse’s descriptions of America as a “totalizing, inescapable system” have been echoed in Baudrillard’s theoretical reflections. The postmodern theorist elaborates on his predecessor’s critical perspective and also attributes the modernity and power of America to its “primitive mind-set” (Ceaser 238). Baudrillard further develops Marcuse’s prediction that “the horrors and the comforts” could both serve as the “forms of compulsion.” In his book America, “standardized people” have turned into the living dead, the malls are featured as big shopping graveyards, which dominate the artificial paradises of the suburbs: “The microwave, the waste disposal, the orgasmic elasticity of the carpets: this soft, resort - style civilization irresistibly evokes the end of the world” (Baudrillard 43). At the height of Cold War the increasing power of military enterprise, with its bases designed to contain a new enemy, the regimentation of people’s lives, and the hysteria of rabid anticommunism were far more damaging than any native communism (Tytell 6). America saw no less censorship of artists, filmmakers, and intellectuals than Soviet Russia. The whole country was gripped by “an irrational hatred that created intense fear and repression” (Tytell 6). As John Tytell described in his work dedicated to the post-WWII literary scene in the United States, “the patriotic blood-boiling became a convenient veil assuring a continued blindness to domestic social conditions that desperately needed attention” (Tytell 6). 16 For American Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, like for many other intellectuals in the United States and in Europe, the Cold War was “the imposition of a vast mental barrier on everybody, a vast anti-natural psyche. A hardening, a shutting off of the perception of desire and tenderness which everybody knows … [creating] a self-consciousness which is substitute for communication with the outside” (Ginsberg, “Interview with Thomas Clark” 58-59). After Ginsberg traveled to Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Russia, and Poland, he remained certain 16 See the introduction to one of the most comprehensive studies of the creative work of the Beat writers by John Tytell, Naked Angels. It seems that history has been truly repetitive. There has always been a tension between freedom and the desire to protect society or promote a cause in the United States. The censorship, the regimentation of people’s lives, the hysterical obsession with security has been back. The current administration’s assault on civil liberties, embodied in the USA Patriot Act, has been covered up with the speculations around security. Unfortunately this scenario sounds very familiar, at least for me, a native of a totalitarian state. After all, the abbreviation KGB stands for “The Committee of State Security.” It has the same meaning/ connotation as the title of the newly created Department of Homeland (State) Security. 242 L IOUBOV G UINZBOURG that “there’s no human answer in communism or capitalism” (“Interview with Thomas Clark” 48). No hope Communism no hope Capitalism Yeah Everybody’s lying on both sides Nyeah nyeah nyeah The bloody iron curtain of American Military Power Is a mirror image of Russia’s red Babel-Tower (Ginsberg, “Capitol Air” 746) William S. Burroughs, however, was not interested in discord between nations, and chose an interplanetary war as the conflict in Nova Express. In this way, instead of dual opposition between the two mighty states, power was exercised by a super-terrestrial apparatus of control: [T]he nova mob is using that conflict in an attempt to blow up the planet, because when you get right down to it, what are America and Russia really arguing about? The Soviet Union and the United States will eventually consist of interchangeable social parts and neither nation is morally ‘right’ … One’s ally today is an enemy tomorrow … (“Interview with Conrad Knikerbocker, 1965” 28) Many of those who escaped from behind the Iron Curtain expressed their disillusion with the “made-for-the-automobile urban wastelands of shopping mall America, where human beings are mere accessories of engines, textiles, and electronics” (Codrescu, Disappearance of the Outside 203). Andrei Codrescu warns about “the attack on unauthorized memory” and the danger for the imagination to be destroyed by “the manipulation of images” (Disappearance of the Outside 203). He describes the rapid disappearance of the differences between the crumbling Soviet Empire and the West. His theme echoes with his predecessors’ warnings and prophetic revelations, described above. The comparison might seem almost unimaginable for someone who didn’t make a trip “through the looking glass.” Like other immigrants, I began to recognize my “Old World neighbors in my new American acquaintances.” Two worlds are merging in my life, and at some point it is not essential any more whether my experience is real, or whether it is only a reflection. Codrescu foresees the convergence of censorship and imagemaking machinery. He predicts the dissolution of the old censor that ruled in the East, into the illusionary liberty of “devious oppressive power of image-based media” in the West and declines any ideological opposition that yielded the palm to the struggle for global reality (Disappearance of the Outside 206). 17 17 In The Disappearance of the Outside, Codrescu expresses his point of view that the two former oppositions of East and West will finally merge “in a new electronic globe.” He considers this trend as a dangerous one, since it is not “a good thing for human beings.” See Codrescu, Andrei. The Disappearance of the Outside. Imagining America in the 21 th Century 243 Since the Soviet Union’s collapse, which left the United States as the only power “marked out by the will of Heaven,” attitudes against American domination have taken shape. Russians began to recall what they had learned in Soviet school: “American world hegemony is merely a logical extension of the doctrine of American exceptionality and predestination. American society, based on this ideology, and Wilsonianism - with its emphasis on free trade, global democracy, and national self - determination - is just the modern cover for American hegemony” (Shiraev and Zubok 68). A number of former human rights activists and dissidents have now become supporters of Russian nationalism. Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Gleb Pavlovsky argued in Nezavisimaya Gazeta that “the end of the cold war was a triumph of American propaganda over irresolute Soviet elites. These elites longed to share ‘universal values,’ while ignoring that those values were, de facto, the ideology of American world domination” (Pavlovsky 3). The intervening thirty years have dispelled many illusions. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, it would have been difficult to imagine that anti- Americanism would become wide-spread among educated Russians who had formerly idealized life in the United States. But as initial euphoria began to evaporate, the rhetoric of the Cold War was retrieved. More than a decade after the Soviet collapse, historians and political scientists are wondering why many Russians are so ambivalent towards America. Eric Shiraev and Vladislav Zubok, authors of Anti-Americanism in Russia from Stalin to Putin, survey the ideas, insights and observations of a “volatile Russian mentality.” Published in 2000, the political observers examined the extent of growing Russian anti-Americanism as an essential component of Russia’s search for a new national identity. Several writers preceded Shiraev and Zubok, expressing very similar points of view. Thus, Vassily Aksyonov, for example, also examines why so many Russians were drawn to anti-American sentiments of such intensity “as to be termed hatred.” (Aksyonov 7) He found “something oddly hysterical about it all, as if America were not a country but a woman who has hurt a man’s pride by cheating on him” (Aksyonov 7). Aksyonov sees an emerging national inferiority complex as one contributing to the spread of anti-Americanism. A Russia no longer viewed as a major player on the world stage is a disappointing revelation for those who envisioned a much different post - Cold War world. Russian infatuation with America faded during the 1990s. Many commentators argued that Russians en masse blamed the United States for misguided economic leadership, and even explicit policies designed to weaken Russia, resulting in the comparative perception of a still-hostile, still-prosperous America. Émigrés and visitors from the East are contemplating their disillusionment. Andrei Codrescu explains that those consumer goods 244 L IOUBOV G UINZBOURG which “had been imbued with religious significance,” serving as the only consolation for the traumatic emigrant experience, lose their significance when plentiful, becoming “inanimate fetish.” When this realization settles over those who had left behind their kin, their friends, “[their] smells, [their] childhood,” they “rage against” their new country (Codrescu, “Notes of an Alien Son” 10). They deplore “its rudeness, its insensitivity, its outright meanness, its indifference, the chase after the almighty buck, the social isolation of most Americans, their deplorable lack of awe before what they had made” (Codrescu, “Notes of an Alien Son” 10). When Andrei Codrescu returned to the United States after visiting his native Romania, he “reeled about for a few days in shock.” Although he has been living in America for more than two decades, after his trip to the Old World everything seemed to be so new, “so carelessly abundant, so thoughtlessly shiny, so easily taken for granted” (Codrescu, “Notes of an Alien Son” 10). Slavenka Draculic´ also shared her frustrations with consumerism. After touring Bloomingdale’s, she recognized the fatigue that I myself experience every time I buy groceries. Draculic´ referred to a shared alienation towards copious material goods, common among those accustomed to a world of shortages. In an American supermarket or a department store “you are murdered by variations” and “by the impossibility of distinguishing the differences” between products (121). Draculic´ doesn’t want to accept that “multiplying.” “Plentitude” doesn’t make any sense to her. It becomes absurd “to look at so many things and so many kinds of one thing,” (Draculic´ 121). Her sentiments echo those of Maxim Gorky, who had discovered in Westerners the same “immense greed, a kind of fever, a wish to buy everything” more than a century ago. Time has not treated that “primordial hunger of consumerism” eloquently described by Gorky in City of the Yellow Devil. In his essay Gorky runs down brazen materialism, the monotony of a day’s work and the consumption of useless products hawked by ceaseless advertising. Gorky described how “in conspiracy against man … entire walls glitter with flaming words about beer, whiskey, soap, a new razor, hats, cigars … people come at its call, buy trash they don’t need, and watch spectacles that stupefy them” (28). Draculic´ would claim that her memories would not allow the Iron Curtain to fall in her imagination long after the real one had ceased to exit. When she visited New York in the 1990s she found herself caught between two sets of values, one “where beggars are not allowed at all, and the other where beggars are the consequence of capitalism” (Draculic´ 117). She writes that she was bound to be disappointed, largely because it was very difficult to make a clear distinction between image and reality, and because it is ultimately the promise, the illusion that counts, especially in a media-satu- Imagining America in the 21 th Century 245 rated world. Even though socialist states have collapsed, “the ideals” have not. Daraculic´ believes that these ideals of equality and justice, bred from the lack of ways, means, or goods necessary to establish “a real, visible, palpable class distinction between poor and rich,” were still with her when she saw poverty in America. She suggests that visitors from the former Soviet states are very attuned to visible signs of injustice. They “recognize the beggars, homeless people, bums, petty thieves, drunks, the sick, [the] junkies” and take it very personally. The Iron Curtain, according to a Croatian journalist, still exists. However, now it is made of “many facets of a different reality, of different ideals and meanings” (Daraculic´ 122). This prevents an instant “translation” into another pool of values that many people of Eastern Europe expect to happen. The very recent events in Ukraine, the so called “Orange Revolution” and its aftermath of political chaos, illustrated Daraculic´’s conviction that the “Iron Curtains” will stay with people for a long time, “in our memories, in our lives that we can not renounce, no matter how difficult they were and how hard we try” (121-122). Now that the bankruptcy of Soviet Communism has become evident to “everyone,” and a decent interval has passed since its collapse, the legacy of Heidegger’s America has reemerged in intellectual circles. Many argue that the conflict all along was never really about political regime forms, i.e. about Communism versus liberal democracy, but about something much more fundamental. With the diversion of the Cold War behind us, it is possible to focus on a real threat to humanity. That threat is the barren and empty humanism found in America and offered to the former Soviet block countries (Ceaser 212). As Andrei Codrescu concluded in The Disappearance of the Outside, “those ex-Communist interiors are now in their final stages of bureaucratic decay: their structures are complex ruins whose inhabitants dream only of escape. The escape they imagine is inevitably into the West, into the Eden of TV. The East spills infrequently into the West, its inert material made active by boredom” (198). After four years in this country, the idea of the United States has changed in my own imagination. In my survey of America I’m still guided by American national literature. Although preoccupied with a deeper analysis of this country’s literary legacy, and the dynamics of cultural changes throughout its history, I never disregard my own revealing personal experience. The image of the open frontier dreamt of in my Soviet childhood has dispersed, leaving no uninhabited land. The mythic character of America is now diffused, like any other ideological mystification. It disappeared in the brightness of the consumerist smile being tamed into a conformity that filed down and pushed away all the irregularities and protrusions. As a Russian national residing in the American heartland for four years, studying American history, society and culture, I’m inclined to agree with the notion that directed 246 L IOUBOV G UINZBOURG politics and constructed ideals might be imposed by the sway of the majoritarian conventional wisdom. “Tyranny of the majority,” identified by De Tocqueville at dawn of American civilization, has secured “the many” from the oppression by “one,” but it also made it equally impossible for “one” to be free from “many.” De Tocqueville was right when he warned against crushing conformist weight of public opinion that is destined to represses not only all contest, but all controversy. I have to admit the existence of the “disappearance of the outside” described by Andrei Codrescu in the following words: The institutions began to close in, to defend the marked (marketed) territories. The approaches to the Outside were rapidly repressed, bought out, colonized, internalized, and closed. The doors of perception were locked back up … Art was pressed into service. Its task: to create a world of strange new toys to keep everyone amused while the mending of fences and the repairing of walls took place … the social doors in front of the Oedipal doors were shut by the police with new paranoid fantasies about morality and race. The geographical doors were shut by closing any but the approved tourist tracks. The twin policemen of science and religion were posted at the doors of Mystery. Gates to all experimental endeavor came clanging down all over the place. (The Disappearance of the Outside 205) Yet, the study of alternative culture, developed in its condemnation of the mainstream conservative values, prevents me from thinking about the U.S. too simply and statically. By the good fortune of landing in the most “liberal” enclave in an otherwise mostly reactionary Kansas, the last hometown of one of the most renowned “outsiders,” Beat icon William S. Burroughs, I enjoy a diverse creative and idealistically inspired community of academics, writers, poets, artists, and dreamers (read “expatriates, escapists, renegades”) who continue to hold the bulwark of the outside, breaking the “shadows of silent majorities” in the pesthole of the evolution debate. I still hope to rediscover the intersections of dream and reality and free the image of America from “bitter rivalry, jealousy, and strife.” Imagining America in the 21 th Century 247 Works Cited Aksyonov, Vassily. In Search of Melancholy Baby: a Russian in America. New York: Vintage, 1989. Allen, Robert V. Russia Looks at America: The View to 1917. Washington: Library of Congress, 1988. Ball, Alan M. Imagining America: Influence and Images in Twentieth - Century Russia. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. Barban, Efim. “Soviet Jazz: New Identity.” Russian Jazz: New Identity. Ed. Leo Feigin. London: Quartet, 1985. Barghoorn, Frederick C. The Soviet Image of the United States: A Study in Distortion. New York: 1950. Baudrillard, Jean. America. Trans. Chris Turner. London, New York: Verso, 1988. Berman, Marshall. All that Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982. Brown Glenora W. and Deming B. Brown. Guide to Soviet Russian Translations of American Literature. New York: King’s Crown, 1954. Burchill, July “And Not too Swift, American Men May Have Sex on the Brain - but They Don’t Have Clue how to Think about Women.” The New York Times. 8 June. 1997: MS 50. ProQuest. Historical Newspapers The New York Times. 5 Mar. 2004 <http: / / proquest.umi.com> Burroughs, William S. “Interview with Conrad Knikerbocker, 1965.” Beat Writers at Work. The Paris Review. Ed. George Plimpton. New York: Modern Library, 1999. Burroughs, William S. Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs. Ed. James Grauerholz. New York: Grove, 2000. Ceaser, James W. Reconstructing America: The Symbol of America in Modern Thought. New Heaven: Yale University Press, 1997. Codrescu, Andrei. The Disappearance of the Outside: A Manifesto for Escape. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc., 1990. —. “Notes of Alien Son.” Reframing America. Albuquerque, New Mexico: 1995. Drakulic´, Slavenka. How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed. New York: Norton, 1991. Ginsberg, Allen. “Capitol Air.” Collected Poems 1947-1980. New York: Haper Perennial, 1984. —. “Interview with Thomas Clark, 1966”. Beat Writers at Work. The Paris Review. Ed. George Plimpton. New York: Modern Library, 1999. Gorky, Maxim. In America. Honolulu, Hawaii: University of the Pacific Press, 2001. Heidegger Martin. An Introduction to Metaphysics. Trans. Ralph Manheim. New Heaven: Yale University Press, 1959. Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston: Beacon, 1964. Montero, Mayra. “But Uncommunicative … Even Lovers Keep Their Distance from Each Other.” The New York Times. 8 June. 1997: MS 50. ProQuest. Historical Newspapers The New York Times. 5 Mar. 2004 <http: / / proquest.umi.com> Pavlovsky, Gleb. “Kak Oni Unichtozhili SSSR” (How They Destroyed the U.S.S.R.). Nezavisimaya Gazeta. 14 Nov. 1996: 3. Reilly, Alayne P. America in Contemporary Soviet Literature. New York: New York University Press, 1971. Shiraev Eric, & Vladislav Zubok. Anti-Americanism in Russia: From Stalin to Putin. New York: Palgrave, 2000. 248 L IOUBOV G UINZBOURG Spengler, Oswald. The Hour of Decision. Part one: Germany and World-Historical Evolution. Trans. Charles Francis Atkinson. New York: Knopf, 1934. Starr, S. Frederick. Red and Hot: The Fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union 1917-1980. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. Tocqueville, Alexis De. Democracy in America. Ed. Richard D. Heffner. 7 th ed. New York: Mentor, 1956. Tytell, John. Naked Angels. New York: Grove, 1976. Whitman, Walt. The Correspondence. Vol. III: 1876-85. Ed. Edwin H. Miller. New York: New York University Press, 1969. Woodward, Vann C. The Old World’s New World. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Z BIGNIEW L EWICKI American Studies: Divided Europe’s Last Stand? It seems that America is a very useful concept to manifest a presumed superiority over other nationalities: (we) the British, of course, understand Americans best, and (we) the Germans, almost as well; East Europeans, however, as next-of-kin of the “dirty emigrants” of the turn of the 19 th century, do not really qualify. I fully realize this is a politically incorrect statement, the verity of which is likely to be openly denied - and secretly confirmed. Does it also apply to the academia? Quite possibly so: being cut off from America, and from free academic life, for some 50 years (which was also when American Studies was formed) cannot be without consequences. I realize there is nothing personal about it (at least as a rule): my colleagues do not make a statement about me but about the whole group, defined in geographical, and first of all cultural terms. Even if the situation is similar in other fields of the humanities, this would not diminish the irony: it is through American Studies that the division of Europe can be clearly perceived. It is a very consequential paradox that the so-called process of European unification started at the time when Europe was divided: irrevocably, it seemed, and decisively. From its inception, therefore, the idea of unified, or united Europe concerned only one part of it, which came to be known as Western Europe, and included countries of western and southern parts of the continent (plus the British Isles). These countries owed their post-war prosperity to the Tehran-Yalta arrangements which put them out of Uncle Joe’s reach and within the scope of interest and assistance of Uncle Sam. The United States together with its funds, soldiers, and ideals have been very much a part of the (West) European reality for over six decades by now; in contrast these were all banned from the “Eastern” Europe for some fortyfive post-WWII years. However, the cultural division of Europe into two unequal parts is not a result of the WWII. For centuries, the eastern part of the continent was perceived as the domain of snow, vodka, Asian mentality and the ornately outdated Russian Orthodox church, while the southwest portion was presumably that of sun, wine, the Enlightenment, and Roman Catholicism with its dignified opposition, Protestantism. The post-1945 divide, however, differed from previous periods by its impenetrability. It was no longer a case of intuition, of perceived and interpreted signals, but of borders, guards and the iron curtain. It was onto such 250 Z BIGNIEW L EWICKI Europe that the United States descended, for the first time in its history. Its presence in Western Europe was real, for many all too real, with the “overpaid, oversexed and over here” catchphrase indicating the exasperation of at least some (West) Europeans at the hordes of young barbarians. Their Mid-Western manners, preference for the new and the mass-produced over the patina and historical significance was justifiably unnerving and soon produced another battle-cry of “Yankee, go home.” Or, to be more precise, go to your bases from where to protect us, but stay away from our streets and our women. And so was born the post-war anti-Americanism, one of the strangest sociological phenomena in view of what the (West) Europeans owed to American soldiers and John Marshall. The case of East Europe was equally irrational, though in reverse. There was no Marshall Plan money there, and no American soldiers, because our leaders and commanders had so decided. And yet this absence of the “real thing” produced a decisively positive, idealized concept of the United States, its might and its hope for the world. There was nothing wrong with imagined American soldiers, and life-saving UNRRA packages were stuffed with American goodies. Instead of being resentful at the Yalta sellout, the populace of these countries nurtured a naïve belief that very soon the good American President would annihilate Lords of the Kremlin and thus bring back happiness and prosperity to his faithful admirers on the Danube and the Vistula. In other words, Americans, who liberated France and many other countries, and freed Germany from Nazism, began to be perceived there as occupiers rather than liberators - while East Europeans, whom Americans had failed, continued to perceive them as potential liberators in whom all hope was vested. At the same time, crowds of Americans also arrived in Europe, which was being discovered not just by a Jamesean elite, but also by Lewisean goodnatured “simple folk.” Parallel to this, America encouraged Europeans to discover the New World - not as emigrants, but as observers and commentators. For much of its history, particularly in its early formative stage, anti-Americanism was fed by people who had never visited the country or who made just a perfunctory visit. The sentiment was thus fed by misinformation and/ or ignorance. After the WWII, even if America may have been a little too distant and too expensive for some Europeans, its domination of popular culture and mass media made the country an almost daily presence in (West) European homes. The reciprocal process of getting acquainted was democratic and portended an “era of good feelings” between the two worlds, once tension connected with the GIs diminished. The process was not always easy or sensible: the French parliament debated the menace of Coca-Cola and there were warnings in Italy that the American Studies: Divided Europe’s Last Stand? 251 drink would turn children’s hair white. Still, the other part of Europe could only hope for an opportunity to test those dangers. Instead of being subjected to the danger of Americanization in the form of Coca-Cola, chewing gum and Rita Hayworth movies, East Europeans were protected by several layers of almost impenetrable curtains. Deprived of real-life, tangible features, America became to them what it once had been for Thomas More: the land where Utopia could materialize. It is not that the process was homogenous throughout Western or Eastern Europe: feelings about America in Germany were different than in Great Britain. The United States was off-limits to Bulgarians until the 1989 events, while in Poland American literature started to be translated and published in 1956; soon after that, a Polish-language, U.S.-financed glossy monthly Ameryka entered the market, bringing stories and color pictures about American life and culture. But there were always limits: no political articles in the magazine, and no praise for the United States elsewhere. Still, there was progress. The first Fulbright exchange in American Literature took place at Warsaw University around 1960, and the first separate American literature section, with its own faculty and students, was created, again in Warsaw, in mid-1970s. Mimicking its history in the United States, though for different reasons, American Studies in post-communist countries started as studies of American literature. It was the only “neutral” field, and thus the only non-ideological academic venue to study the United States (though even this was not the case in countries such as the late GDR). To study political science, economy or even history involved identifying with the communist ideology, which for many was an unacceptable price. Still, when the concept of American Studies began to take shape as much more than enriched studies of literature, and as it made its way across the Atlantic, it reached only West Europeans, who had been in any case exposed to American values, and bypassed East Europeans, who would have profited most from the new holistic approach. There were, of course, many more significant areas where the iron-curtain division left one part of the divided Europe far apart from the other one, but this is no consolation. Catching up is always derivative: one does not start at the original point of departure but has to adapt to whatever part of the debate has already taken place - even if they do not agree with the results. And so, paradoxically, as Europe takes political decisions to enlarge and unite, our opinions about the United States and thus our approach to American Studies continue to keep us apart. Moreover, the role of American Studies in the United States has shifted over the last decade or so from being source-centered to being societycentered. Scholars are not satisfied with describing America, they aim at being part of the force that changes it; values are not only to be distilled and described, they are also to be improved. Soon after the 2004 election, I 252 Z BIGNIEW L EWICKI went to the annual American Studies Association meeting. Just about every session I attended included the ceremony, practiced far too frequently to be considered coincidental, of starting a paper by describing one’s dismay at Bush’s victory, or one’s despair over it which led variously to depression, refusal to read newspapers, or bursts of energy expended at organizing recount drives in Ohio. This came as no surprise to me, though. A few months prior to the 2004 election I visited several American Studies programs at U.S. universities and I was the only person at various meetings making a case for Bush. But the shocking element was that several faculty members approached me afterwards to say that they shared my views, but they felt they could not express them among colleagues for fear of being ostracized or worse. This is where the East European experience is particularly useful. The political correctness frame of mind, which informs so much of public and academic discourse nowadays, implies refusal to acknowledge the right to hold opinions considered inappropriate by the self-styled thought police. The intentions may be, and presumably are, noble and worthy: the need to educate, to eradicate prejudices, to improve the world. The results, however, are invariably censorship and, in one form or another, persecution: red-baiting style or social-realism style. The character of our profession is such that we frequently disagree with our colleagues - not only on trivial matters, but first of all on substance. It is too banal to state that there is nothing to discover in the humanities, but a lot to discuss, and it is of paramount importance to compare contradictory views. A colleague of mine, definitely not a Bush fan, recently spent some time at an American university, and reported his dismay at being unable to meet not just anyone who supported Bush, but anyone who would know someone who supported Bush. He described this not with glee, but with dismay because if there is something that scholars from “former communist countries” realize so much better than their colleagues, it is the danger of unanimity at the university. Whenever it happens, it is by definition forced and unnatural. Such concerns are rarely heard in the “Old Europe,” not because its inhabitants are less concerned with basic liberties, but because they may never have been subjected to the experience of being a silenced minority. And yet the question of the proper balance between the interests of the majority and the minority has been regarded as crucial by many theoreticians and practitioners of politics, including famous arguments in the Federalist Papers. We negotiate the American diversity “a la carte.” This is indeed where the true satisfaction with being an East European Americanist lies: in attempting to reorganize and improve one’s own society by suggesting it American Studies: Divided Europe’s Last Stand? 253 follows the best of American solutions and norms. Professional integrity, work ethic, community spirit, are among values that many societies would do well to adopt. We select what we believe is right, and reject what is not - not as “wrong” but as “irrelevant.” We project our hopes and fears onto America and react to these projections. Is this studying America - or creating it for the occasion? If it is the latter, then we deal with a process whose unfairness is the more blatant for the fact that Americanists can influence considerable home audiences with their interpretations of America - as well as with their misinterpretations of it. American Studies, as practiced abroad, is a tricky field indeed. Scholars and teachers of this discipline know much more about American civilization than anyone else in their respective countries, and can identify America’s ailments and imperfections much more easily than anyone else. Should we thus be trying to find faults with America and display them to those at home who would enjoy such spectacles - and who do not appreciate the broader context in which such imperfections complement, but do not dominate, the larger picture? But, then, if we hesitate to do so, would we not be exercising self-censorship, the vilest form of freedom denial? Or, reversely, is it our duty to try and explain America to America-bashers: perhaps a thankless task, but can we shy away from it? It is one thing, and an easy one, to join a crowd chanting “Down with Bush,” and another, and much more demanding, to try and explain why America and its duly elected president are doing what they are doing. We of all people know very well that the money America spends abroad could be used for any number of domestic programs. So - will America continue to be involved in the world, which means not only military interventions, but also various forms of assistance to foreign countries and individuals? I may have missed something, but I am yet to see a satisfactory European analysis of how to combine our need for America’s presence as the great equalizer (see Bosnia) with our desire to tie America’s hands whenever it suits a European country or two. The recent spate of controversy concerning American foreign policy deserves a closer analysis from the point of view of what our reactions to America tell us not so much about the United States but about ourselves. The western part of continental Europe is almost unanimous in its criticism of George Bush and his policies, while eastern Europe is significantly more supportive of his actions. If we disregard condescension, this difference will outline the fundamental difference in how we perceive our respective position in the global framework. Eastern Europe is much more uncertain about its position and future, much more aware of the instability of the present political situation. With obvious simplification we may say that it is the Cold War situation a rebours. Then, Eastern Europeans were convinced 254 Z BIGNIEW L EWICKI that whatever was, was permanent, while Western Europeans needed the United States to reassure them that there would be no change. Nowadays, the once insecure Westerners fear no danger from the East, and therefore are unwilling to put up with the inconvenience of following America’s lead and of hosting the GIs. Easterners, on the other hand, live in the state of flux: the Soviets are gone but Russians seem to enjoy applying various kinds of pressure, including the energy blackmail. The Western Europe, however, is perfectly oblivious to the plight of their Eastern neighbors. It is hardly surprising then that endangered countries, and people, turn to the United States. It is a rational alternative, and it corresponds very well to the naïve but real belief in the American Dream; besides, the United States has helped many of East European countries in the past and has built up considerable confidence credit with them. Still, this is perhaps where the views of Western and Eastern Europeans come close to each other: the fear of American domination which presumably leads to less than full sovereignty of countries that deal with the United States. In times of danger, recently as well as in a more distant past, countries have been willing to abdicate part of their sovereignty and trade it for protection. This was certainly true about Western Europe in the bipolar, Cold-War world. The fall of the Soviet Empire augured the era of peace and security with the resulting resentment of outside domination. What changed was the West European perception that American presence was no longer accepted as necessary for security, but resented as tantamount to domination. East Europeans, on the other hand, are not above accepting such pressure - perhaps because they have not seen much of it yet. East Europeans (Poles? ) and West Europeans (Germans? ) differ in their views on just about all aspects of America: arts, politics, security, economy; there is hardly an area where our perceptions are similar. And yet, even if a united Europe remains a vague notion somewhere on the horizon, our common historical experience (so what if sometimes on opposing ends) should call for a more unified understanding of an entity so much removed, in space and in historical time. It is not the case, however. This may be so because of the feelings of Europeans towards one another: some condescension, some resentment, inferiority and superiority complexes. Our respective attitudes towards the United States tell us a lot about how we, as Europeans, differ - at least Westerners from Easterners. The United States still commands considerable allure for East Europeans, which informs the general perception of that country by the population of former Comecon countries. Very frequently, it is not just the question of money: people continue to choose a risky adventure in the United States mostly because the American Dream is very much alive beyond the former Iron Curtain. The myth not just of making a bundle, but of limitless pos- American Studies: Divided Europe’s Last Stand? 255 sibilities, open space, a new beginning. One would be hard pressed to find Germans who would be willing to go down that road today, and the French have never been attracted to it anyhow - but many Poles, Slovaks or Hungarians still hope to start it all over across the Atlantic. This very positive vision of America also informs the public discourse of the subject. It is not that the general audience in those countries would accept only praise but that an excessively negative presentation would be looked at with suspicion, made even more pronounced by the fact that several decades of America-bashing by communists made people wary of such criticism. Particularly so that the attitude has carried over to the present Russian state, where a popular movie includes a hit song “Kill the Yankee.” Putting down America is perhaps understandable as a way to raise the self-esteem of one’s own nation; it also draws the attention of the criticized power. The case of France is particularly telling here. Apart from great many penetrating French studies of American colonies and the United States, the line of insensitive and plainly wrong French comments on everything American is unmatched. From early “arguments” (which Franklin and Jefferson tried valiantly, if also in vain, to refute) that both human beings and animals degenerate and shrink in size once they move to North America - to Jose Bove trashing a McDonald franchise. All this may of course be a result of the residual frustration of the French with their own culture - which they vent on Americans. But the Americans oblige by paying close attention to all this, much as one keeps touching an aching tooth: pain confirms we are alive. At the same time, does anybody care about East European views on the subject? To take just one example. The three most recent books on Anti- Americanism 1 discuss at length such attitudes in Germany and in France, in Latin America and in Asia, in Canada and in Africa. In none of them there is even a single mention of Eastern Europe as a cultural concept or of any of the constituting countries. The French or German attitudes are presented as “European perspectives,” with occasional sprinkles of Italian or Spanish views. One would think that Poland’s strong pro-American attitudes are sufficiently out of the ordinary to merit a least a brief discussion - particularly that they are frequently countered inside the country with a tendency to compare the U.S. to the former U.S.S.R as perpetrators of “equally” insensitive domination. But all this (and the same point can be made of other 1 Jean-Francois Revel, Anti-Americanism, Encounter Books, San Francisco 2003; Barry Rubin, Judith Colp Rubin, Hating America, Oxford University Press 2004; Understanding anti-Americanism, ed. with an introduction by Paul Hollander, I.R. Dee, Chicago 2004. 256 Z BIGNIEW L EWICKI East European countries) seems to matter so much less than one article by an obscure French essayist in a little magazine. Schade. Eastern Europe does not have a uniform history as regards its experience with the United States. There is Hungary, with its resentment of the American inaction in 1956; there are countries that were part of the Axis front, and there are countries, such as Poland, but also Czechoslovakia, that have never been enemies with the United States. Moreover, some of these countries owe their renewed national existence to the United States and President Wilson, while others may feel they had lost their status because of American intervention in Europe. But, then, Denmark and Portugal, or the Netherlands and Switzerland - or what grounds can we treat them as part of the same whole? The concept of Europe becomes more meaningful only when we imply its distinctiveness from, say, the concept of America. But the difficulty does not stop here. Is the European matrix, however different from its American counterpart, the same for Great Britain and Italy? And if not, how exactly do they differ? There is no question that such diversity continues to exist in Western Europe despite the fact that long membership in NATO has been a significant unifying factor. Can this diversity ever become a true unity? After all, the Pilgrims and Pennsylvania colonists differed by much more than they shared, and yet the adjustment process has been successful. This, however, may never happen in Europe - simply because while the American process was a classic bottom-up procedure, the European approach is just as clearly a top-down approach, whereupon governments agreed to bind together while populations of respective countries are much cooler to the idea of cultural unity and the unity of external goals. But the main problem is probably the lack of a unifying idea, of a common message that could help build the unity and dictate the attitude to the outside world. Not many colonists ever heard the phrase “errand into wilderness,” but great many of them knew that this was what they were doing; “no taxation without representation” and Manifest Destiny were the common denominators of how the country was born and grew. Unlike America, Europe is long on constitution but short on common and appealing concepts that could rouse people for trying and uniting common tasks. European Americanists, Eastern as well as Western, may not be able to do much about this particular fact, but there are fields where we can be most relevant to the topical issues of our countries and the United States. One such issue is immigration. The discussion of the problem is severely hampered by the constraints of political correctness. Nevertheless, Samuel Huntington is not shy about stating his views in his latest book, and goes straight to the heart of the problem, as so does Victor Davis Hanson in Mexifornia. American Studies: Divided Europe’s Last Stand? 257 How important is the issue of one common language for the unity of a nation as diverse as the United States? Is it also relevant for Europe as it tries to develop an alternative educational and professional system for those who refuse to learn the language of the land? And how about immigrants who insist on maintaining their own cultural and value systems, while disregarding or rejecting those of the country in which they have arrived? It seems that Americanists can be very relevant to their own communities if they partake in such discussions drawing on their knowledge of where the United States is headed nowadays. But also reversely: is it not an ideal place for European Americanists to become relevant for the American debate? It is unrealistic to expect Americans to draw on European experiences on their own - if only because of their understandable ignorance of a confusing multitude of such experiences. More than anybody else, we should be capable of translating and explicating how such dilemmas are handled, or mishandled, on both sides of the Atlantic. Another set of issues of cross-Atlantic relevance is racism, xenophobia, various ethnic prejudices. Not so long ago, after WWII and well into the 1960’s, Europe, having learned its lesson, seemed to be assuming more and more tolerant attitudes, while anti-Semitism, anti-Irishness, not to mention plain old racial segregation, were so much present in the American landscape. A generation or so later, such prejudices are absent from the public forum in America, and even in private they enjoy less and less acceptance, as proved recently by the fact that the Catholicism of Kerry or the Jewishness of Lieberman were hardly an issue in the voting booth. In the meantime, various European countries seem to move in the opposite direction. There is sufficient evidence coming daily from all corners of Europe to prove that instead of overcoming our prejudices we allow them to grow. Many features we admire in the growth of American civilization cannot be translated into the European reality. But this is one area that begs to be investigated, presented, implemented - and people best qualified to do so are the European Americanists. Too often, however, we allow ourselves to drift along with the easy adage that Europe is “traditionally tolerant” while America is “historically racist” and can offer nothing we can learn from. These may be some of the areas where we can, and perhaps should put more effort in acting as intermediaries between the culture we were born into and the culture we came to know professionally. After all, this cannot be said about politicians, or even diplomats, whose knowledge of other countries is more often than not merely perfunctory. Being familiar with both types of experience: as citizens of Europe, Eastern or Western, and as scholars of America we should be more engaged in debates on issues that are of common interest to both cultures. G ARY E DWARD H OLCOMB Claude McKay and Black Transnationalism: Bringing the New American Studies to Becoming-EU Europe In September 2004, I was debriefed on the task of American Studies in former Communist Europe. At the in-country Fulbright orientation for Romania, several representatives from the U.S. Embassy in Bucharest spoke to a room of grantees. One provided a useful update on poverty, political corruption, the treatment of ethnic and national minorities, and other social matters, and another gave practical information on living in Romania, such as how to evade pickpockets. One man introduced himself as a historian, and then enlightened the small assembly with a protracted outline of Romanian history. Almost all of the information he recited could be found in the back pages of my Rough Guide to Romania, but the man’s observations about the role of American Studies in post-transition Europe held my attention. The state historian’s narrative informed us of how American Studies played a vital part in Reaganism’s storied triumph over Marxism in Eastern Europe. American Studies was plain old American history; no familiarity with the cultural, much less the post-nationalist, 1 turn in American Studies surfaced in his talk. The historian’s address laid bare more than merely an embarrassing lack of knowledge about what has been taking place in American Studies over the past ten years, however. The post-9/ 11 aim of Fulbright, I was notified, is to continue to disseminate “American values,” to promote and foster democracy abroad, to continue manifesting the American cultural destiny, in particular in Muslim Middle Eastern and former Communist countries. It is probably unnecessary to say that American values and democracy may be translated as “free-market” capitalism, as this is a missionary project whose worth is beyond inquiry. In that now meta-month of September, the thirtyday phase on the American calendar that marks the bloody new birth of a nation, I learned that it was my turn to play a part in history. Pickpockets are a paltry matter when faced with the real menace. By teaching American Studies in Romania I would be contributing to the War on Terror. I acknowledge Hardt and Negri’s persuasive third-stage Marxist theory of panoptic global sovereignty, or Empire, as now “a series of national and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule” (xii). Due to 1 See Rowe, ed., Post-Nationalist American Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 260 G ARY E DWARD H OLCOMB globalization, in other words, isolated forms of nationalism - the concept that autonomous nations acting according to policies of self-determination - are obsolete. Hardt and Negri are unquestionably on to something, but this doesn’t mean that the American Hegemon is extinct. Indeed, the ordeal of 9/ 11 has provided new momentum to the schemes of American intercession, and the new hegemony is evident in former Communist Central Europe. The American post-9/ 11 cultural imperialist exceptionalism has been displayed insistently in the distinctly non-Deleuzian re-territorialization of Romania, facilitated by the country’s unctuous receptiveness toward the establishment of U.S. military sites, strategic launching pads for acts of “humanitarian interventionism” to Iraq. As the State Department historian suggested, going back to the 1960s and winding up with the coup d’état in Bucharest in 1989, American Studies in Romania represented a kind of vanguard for the propagation of Western capitalism and American nationalism. Americans teaching American Studies found an eager reception. For Romanian students, American Studies offered a sexy appeal, as America was antithetic to everything Romanian. As for Americans who taught American Studies, their mere presence in a Communist country all but personified the U.S. dissemination of anticommunist ideology. Now, under the current state of global affairs, the dissemination of Americanism arises from a different motivation than that of the Cold War period. When I applied for my second Fulbright, I had not been to Romania since I’d left in 1999, and during the hiatus friends and former students told me that the society was experiencing brisk change, including educational reform in the academic culture. So in my application to return to Romania I expressed an interest in observing how the academic culture, and specifically American Studies, had progressed since my last posting in the late nineties. My return to Romania therefore was motivated by an interest in seeing how American Studies had developed since the late transition period there. Also, I needed to write a draft of a book, and having a Fulbright would give me the time to compose. In other words, though he would insert me, interpellate me, as an emissary of the new American state objectives, the state historian’s conscripting of me as a New Warrior against Terror exhibited perfectly my position as an outsider. Nevertheless, though situated as an outsider in the Romanian academic culture, I was paradoxically in a position to observe how the Fulbright American Studies exceptionalist ideology collides with the New American Studies post-nationalist movement. My outsider status was both an impediment and something of an advantage. I should advise here therefore that my comments are mostly anecdotal and speculative - my views derive from being merely a spectator of the new Romania. Unlike the state historian I cannot claim to be an authority on the Old. I can only essay a rough guide to Romanian academic culture. Claude McKay and Black Transnationalism 261 New Negro, New American Studies During my year in Romania the subject of the book I was writing was the Jamaican Harlem Renaissance author Claude McKay. 2 I decided that it would be interesting for Romanian upper-level students to learn about my research and speculative analysis, so I taught a class I called Black Modernism. I thought that it would be instructive for the students to contemplate the inception of black literature at the moment when it both helped to shape while at the same time stage a confrontation with the cultural expressions of Modernism and the ideological manifestations of modernity. In addition, as a native ambassador of American Studies, I thought it would be a good way to articulate a few points about what has been taking place in its U.S. form over the last few years - an intelligence update from my office of homeland study. As my subject is the intersection of Modernist literature and the historiography of the New American Studies, I start with Michael Denning’s The Cultural Front: The Laboring of Culture in the Twentieth Century (1996). Denning traces the emergence of the New American Studies to the Popular Front of the 1930s, thereby rescuing the naissance of American Studies from the Cold War nationalist exceptionalist model. His work suggests that the allied developments of American Studies and populist leftism were made up of compound materializations. Alan Wald’s work validates this assertion. According to Wald, in dramatic contrast to the New Left attenuation of the “Old” interwar Left as a line-toeing congress of Orwellian prole automatons, Marxism and the Popular Front of the between-the-wars phase were composed of something like what Hardt and Negri would identify as Deleuzian multiplicities, incessantly adapting in order to struggle against ideology. Though Cary Nelson describes North American poetry of the 1930s in terms of a chorale effect, moreover, the chorus is anything but a bland Coca-Cola harmony. Nelson’s between-the-wars American poetry is a polyphony of countervoices, a version of the interwar Left that shatters the New Left attenuation of its antecedent as a homogeneous, kowtowing Old Left Marxism. Having placed Denning’s rearticulation of American Studies in the central position, I would complicate his claim now by interposing William J. Maxwell’s scholarship in New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars (1999). The scholarly work of New Negro, Old Left suggests that the twin advents of the New Negro movement and the Communist Party of the USA at the beginning of the 1920s pushes the point of origin for the cultures-of-impe- 2 Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance (University Press of Florida, 2007). 262 G ARY E DWARD H OLCOMB rialism model of American Studies back a decade further than Denning’s mid-thirties derivation. Tracing American Studies to the Popular Front, or its intellectual expression the Cultural Front - a compound mode of leftist politics that is more easily translatable to and more comfortable for the New Left culture of multiplicity - tends to bypass the uncomfortable fact that party Communism played the central role in articulating American Studies at its birth, a point of departure that Maxwell’s work won’t leave alone. While teaching my class on Black Modernism in Romania I talked about how I see the sources for American Studies as represented in such preliminary acts as McKay’s cultural analysis, memoir, and journalism, and even more forcefully in his fiction and poetry. As a means for approaching the difficulties posed by reading the 1930s writings of authors like Hughes, Sterling Brown, and Richard Wright through the bête-noir of Black Marxism, the class traced McKay’s often dissonant mingling of black nationalism, diaspora transnationalism, Communist and Trotskyist internationalism, and sexual dissidence in the 1920s. Teaching black Marxist writers presents difficulties in both the U.S. as well as in a former Communist totalitarian country, especially when one suggests that American Studies traces its dust tracks in the road to Marxist theory and practice. That is to say, within the critical field of American Studies, to paraphrase Derrida, no phenomenological outside to historical materialism exists. A knowledge of the esoteric origins of American Studies, sources that are essential and ineffaceable, presents a radical challenge to changes taking place in the Romanian academic culture. A becoming-EU nation, Romania is swiftly and frantically moving toward implementing the capitalist model in the university. This means that the Romanian university must adopt EU policies, including, a bit ironically, moving toward adapting to the standard American-style signs of public college “conversion”: the funding of professional training programs at the expense of academic studies, promoting the idea that university colleges and programs should seek privatized financing, and so on. Because of its multinational collective formation, the EU may appear to be refashioning a kind of leftist pluralism, a European version of multicultural, transnational politics. But the truth is, the European Union is a form of multinational corporate incursion; the EU’s variety of transnationalism is invested in expanding corporate, late capitalist borders, a fact that can be observed in the western European labor and resources grab taking place in post-transition economies like Romania’s. The relationship between the spread of EU economics to former Communist countries and the difficulties of teaching American Studies in Romania may seem indistinct. But I think that the association is crucial for the New American Studies as it advances an academic mode of internationalism. In countries like Romania, can the field of American Studies enter the Claude McKay and Black Transnationalism 263 higher educational domain of translating the New while at the same time re-collecting the lived modern, remembering the Old (Left) when it was new? Remembering the New By way of articulating the importance of politics and history as such matters intersect with race and nationalism, I found it useful to discuss with my class McKay’s FBI file, available through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Fetching the black author’s Red bones from the rightwing closet and inspecting the skeleton close up helped me articulate my view of the ethical task of U.S. ethnic literary study. Writing at the frontiers of the modern, McKay acted in material contest with capitalist and imperialist ideology. His 119-page Bureau of Investigation file demonstrates this with a vengeance. The dossier shows that the State Department began its rigorous surveillance of the black author when he went to Russia in the early 1920s to participate in the Fourth Congress of the Third International Soviet. 3 The bureau agents identify their black subject as a member of Communist front groups, a picturesque term now, a bit moldy around the edges, but in its time a lethal indication that the U.S. government believed it had the right to investigate anyone belonging to a suspicious cell, to update the terminology. The bureau archivists were right. Among such groups were the underground African Blood Brotherhood and the radical, racially integrated, and just as secretive Industrial Workers of the World. The substance of the bureau’s anxiety was that McKay would return and indoctrinate impressionable black laborers into joining the Communist Party of the USA, formed around the time when he was in Russia. When McKay was believed to be returning from Russia to the U.S. in 1923, the file shows, agents kept up anxious sentinels at key national contact points, exchanging fretful memoranda with intelligence on his movements. McKay, code name Sasha, is omnipresent, lurking at every port-of-call entry - in one communiqué entering from Canada, in another from the Caribbean. McKay is a one-man 3 The U.S. state’s obsessive interest in McKay’s radical doings led to agents becoming interested in, then amassing information about McKay prior to his visit to the Soviet Union, and probably through British Intelligence, another state-run organization that assembled a fat file on McKay, the bureau agents learned of his activities in London in 1921. Agents portray McKay as a special operative for Sylvia Pankhurst, publisher of the maverick radical socialist periodical the Workers’ Dreadnought. Identifying a journalist like McKay as a subversive agent is one way of describing a correspondent for a radical periodical, and in McKay’s case this is not an unmerited representation. 264 G ARY E DWARD H OLCOMB political tempest, an ominous force crossing the wide Black Atlantic Sea and bearing straight for America. Along with the depiction of McKay as a bohemian reprobate - he was queer - a noteworthy feature of the file is the portrayal of the black author’s interaction with Leon Trotsky. Trotsky submitted to an interview with McKay in Moscow; then the Bolshevik leader himself, stimulated by his meeting with the black intellectual worker, wrote an Izvestia piece titled “Answers to Comrade Claude MacKay” [sic], published in February 1923 - a bureau operative translated the article into English and placed it in the file, where I found it. In effect the doomed commissar formulates the concept of a Bolshevik-sponsored black Leninist vanguard, articulating the need “to have a small number of class-conscious negroes, young and devoted [who are] capable of connecting morally … with the fate of the international working class.” The influence of Trotsky from the mid-twenties up until the mid-thirties on McKay cannot be understated, a sway that the black revolutionary author’s twenties writings visibly demonstrates. In Russia Trotsky gave McKay a new logic for how blacks could employ and indeed extend Marxist practice. It is critical that Trotsky, Commissar of War in the early twenties, supplied McKay with the assurance that Russia would support blacks in Africa and the Diaspora in their revolutionary aims. Indeed, the purpose for McKay’s attending the Fourth Soviet Congress in the first place, as an envoy, as a representative, of the African Blood Brotherhood, was to attain this kind of pledge of support. Trotsky was expelled from Russian Communist Party in 1927, then forced to flee Russia the following year. A significant memorandum of history rests in the fact that while McKay lived as an émigré in Morocco in the late twenties, Trotsky lived in exile on the Turkish island of Prinkipo. Two years later the French colonial administration in Morocco would purloin McKay’s passport, and then when the author was called to explain why he was residing in Tangier without identification, the British counselor authority had an excuse to remove his right to travel in British territory. Prevented from returning to the U.S. because of his reputation as a notorious black Red, McKay, now an exile in a way he had never been before, found himself a colonial without a country. While in his exile, Trotsky articulated the “permanent revolution” theory, a scheme that was passionately critical of the Stalinist move toward consolidating power through a brutal Soviet state nationalism. My point was to clarify for my students the historical materialist act at work in McKay’s writings of the period. The date of Permanent Revolution’s publication, 1928, is crucial, as this theory is performed, adjusted through the idiom of Négritude, and merged with a kind of sexually dissident subterranean bohemianism, in McKay’s three consecutive novels of the late twenties: Home to Harlem (1928), Banjo (1929), and the yet- Claude McKay and Black Transnationalism 265 to-be published Romance in Marseille (c. 1929-1932), a novel he composed in Morocco. All three novels stage the theory of permanent revolution, the idea that anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist revolution must voyage beyond the boundaries of Russia to both the metropolitan core of capitalism, the Western nations, as well as their colonial territories in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. McKay’s adaptation of Trotskyist internationalism is the pluralistic political articulation of his Black Atlantic transnationalism. Here is where the challenge lies. On one hand, McKay’s Trotskyism represents a critique of state Communism, a resistance against the kind of psychotic totalitarianism Romania experienced. But translating McKay’s permanent revolution in the Romanian American Studies classroom means dredging up from the bottom of the Black Atlantic the very past that Romanians would like to see pitched indefinitely into the shadowy depths of the Black Sea. Yet even in U.S. American Studies little historical memory of the kind of radicalism McKay agitated for remains. I believe that one may trace a link between this loss of memory and post-9/ 11 political culture. The Right’s confidence that history in its materialist form has achieved mortality is demonstrated vividly by a section of the FBI homepage set aside to release files made available through the FOIA. The FBI website prominently displays an FOIA “Library,” with an electronic “Reading Room.” Enacted in 1966, the FOIA lurched along toothless for a decade until the tumultuous Watergate era in the mid-1970s, when Ralph Nader headed an effort forcing legislation that enabled the law (Foerstel 48-49). In the late 1970s the bureau was finally constrained to release files on figures like McKay. The agency had dragged its heals because they claimed that the FOIA files contained still sensitive material, and declassification would jeopardize national security (an argument the state of course still counts on, as other parts of the FBI website make clear). The FBI was justifiably worried about being revealed as an organization of Stasi-like fanatics, persecuting anyone who did not toe the line of narrow ideological beliefs - in other words, that the chief danger to the American public was, after all, not Communism but the U.S. State’s policing of Communism within. During the present time of obsession with international terrorism, however, the FBI is apparently no longer anxious about divulging classified information in the form of surveillance dossiers from the interwar period and even after. In fact, the FBI website readily avails the Internet surfer with formerly sensitive files through easy-access portable document format downloads, a prominent part of the bureau’s site being devoted to easy access to many dossiers, including McKay’s. Because of the relative lengthiness of the file, the McKay PDF “file” download is separated into two parts. The accessibility of the file isn’t surprising because the FBI has nothing to lose, as the threat posed by formerly dangerous radicals like McKay is no longer 266 G ARY E DWARD H OLCOMB viable. I suppose I might be grateful to the FBI for making the files so easily accessible, considering that only a few years ago obtaining such files, as Claire Culleton relates in her introduction to Joyce and the G-Men (2004), was such a grueling undertaking - as late as the late 1990s, the FBI placed mind-boggling barriers in the way of the legal right to use when it came to objects of surveillance during the interwar period. Culleton also talks about the fact that when she finally received the documents, most of the papers in Joyce’s file were almost completely lined out. So I guess I might also show some sign of gratefulness that, unlike Joyce’s twenty-page FOIA file, McKay’s is legible. But I don’t include a note of thanks to the FBI and State Department in the acknowledgments page of my book on McKay. One reason I have no gratitude toward the bureau is because the FBI site indicates no sense that the agency regrets the mayhem and malevolence of its past (or its present, it is almost unnecessary to say). On the contrary, the web page conveys an impression of the bureau being exceedingly pleased with itself - the evildoers were after all crushed and thereby silenced. Perhaps this demonstration of the certainty that material history is finished is best exhibited by the agency’s separate section devoted to “Famous Persons,” a celebrity files link to records kept on luminary targets of observation like Pablo Picasso and John Lennon. Beyond the general self-satisfaction of the FOIA notables page, with its collection of classified intelligence on such nefarious characters as Albert Einstein, César Chávez, and Martin Luther King, the celebrity files communicate a sense of titillation, of pornographic thrill: the promise of access to the boudoir of JFK and Marilyn Monroe. It is noteworthy that Richard Wright - second only to Paul Robeson, the most famous black Communist of the 1930s - succeeds in getting onto the site set aside for celebrated if disreputable personalities (as does Robeson). However, McKay, the most notorious black Red of the 1920s, does not make it onto the celebrity pages. Agents Brennan and Hurley, the feds responsible for collecting most of McKay’s file, would be no doubt simultaneously pleased and disappointed. Despite McKay’s historical disappearance, the file itself contains evidence of the black author’s creative powers, and one may see why the U.S., British, and French intelligence communities expended so much energy persecuting him. Even more than “If We Must Die,” the filers are captivated with McKay’s “America” (1921); the file contains a typed copy of the complete poem. Evidently the agents see in the sonnet all that is immoral and illicit about McKay. The date of the poem is vitally important. In 1921, while still in the U.S. and getting ready to make his way to Communist Russia - and a year before T.S. Eliot published The Waste Land - McKay penned a sonnet that lyricized the black radical poet’s rendering of twentieth-century angst, though a manifestly different kind of existential agony than the anxiety Claude McKay and Black Transnationalism 267 expressed by Eliot’s fragmented, ghostly voices of yearning for more stable times. Like black abolitionist James M. Whitfield’s 1853 169-line poem with the same title, McKay’s “America” is a piercing critique of the conventional allegory of mother country as fostering freedom. The sonnet alleges America to be the feral, pitiless jungle big cat mother: “Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,/ And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth,/ Stealing my breath of life, I will confess/ I love this cultured hell that tests my youth! ” (ll.1-4, Complete Poems 153). Distinguishing the maternal wild animal imagery throughout the poem is crucial. Written during a period of lynching mania, the poem’s upsetting of received sex/ gender conditions invalidates the racist representation of the uncontrollable black male, characterized by the blackfaced Gus in The Birth of a Nation (1915), whose single-minded desire is to assault patriarchal America’s most valued possession, the white woman. The poem undoes the racist sexual certitude by making the white female the antagonist. The primal jungle beast, America, is a creature that retains absolute control over the black son. In the discourses of nationalism, race, and sexuality, America is represented as female according to the convention of the white goddess Columbia, America’s alias popularly identifiable in the shape of the Statue of Liberty, the statuesque, stony-eyed, rather imposing lady in New York Harbor whose lamp lights the way for her Atlantic-crossing immigrants. In a left-wing toppling of the hegemonic verticality, capsizing the positions of the righteous Palmer agent and Anarchist infiltrator suspected of plotting to overthrow the government, America is obliged to sit in the hot seat, as McKay rotates the harsh light of interrogation in the direction of Columbia’s countenance, forcing the truth torch to shed its light on the impassive face of America. McKay’s little black bomb of a poem illuminates America as the animal mother whose instinctual violence takes the shape of exclusionist, ironically tribal nationalism. Charily portioning out her passions, America nourishes her fair-haired children with the sweetest morsels, but to her despised brood, her lesser offspring, she spoons out the “bread of bitterness,” effectively starving the black minority. A maternal creature that consumes the flesh of her own unwanted young, moreover, America is ironically a savage cannibal, the embodiment of darkest Africa in the Western Imaginary. In this way the poet versifies what it means for the black subject both to taste from the fruits of America and at the same time be devoured alive by her. That is, from the point of view of her abject black foundling, Mother America, the loving nurturer of all, is a cold-blooded wild animal, ripping into the flesh of the African American minority. Although in McKay’s “America” black people are refugees in the pays natal, the poem’s ambivalence is shaped by the fact that the child who has been grudgingly taken in nonetheless is devoted to his or her unwilling 268 G ARY E DWARD H OLCOMB guardian: “I will confess / I love this cultured hell that tests my youth.” The lost, abused “youth” cannot refrain from adoring the adoptive mother because America after all presents the possibility of ameliorative change, as she embodies the promise of the new, of birth. While the masses of the black minority must reconstruct an obliterated past, retrieve their disregarded, buried black history and try to build a culture in the teeth of a sadistic social order, racism - in other words, achieve the paramount aim of the Negro Renaissance - blacks must simultaneously, paradoxically embrace the New, the promise of the future. The speaker is still in his formative years of American literary history because the Harlem Renaissance’s New Negro, the photonegative unintended issue of modernity, is a being who has risen from the ashes of blackface minstrels Uncle Tom and Jim Crow, figures who have been made extinct by the collective African American defiance to racist hegemony. With its headlong surge toward the modern, America is the collective performance of phenomenological becoming itself, and is therefore the stage for revolution. Although, like the New Negro, America is a figuration of the New, the form that the transformation may take is yet unknown. America’s modernity, in other words, is both the solution as well as the problem for its hard-pressed black underclass, as the modern, American-style, is the kissing cousin of capitalism and imperialism, the close ideological relations of nationalism and racism. A resolute survivor of the early twentieth-century lynching frenzy, the budding black offspring has no alternative but to act as revolutionary, as justly disobedient child. The next six lines continue to evoke the image of America as the cannibalistic animal mother, as the youth, locked in a cage with her, is compelled to perform the act of big-cat tamer, cornered by the vicious beast. Yet ironically, Mother America feeds existence to her newborn. That is to say, mother country America, through a biological, inexorable regurgitation of the scraps of freedom - an act of nature that America, in her “vigor” and abundance, naturally cannot refrain from performing - supplies sustenance. Consequently, she supplies the sexually “erect” potency that is vital for regenerating the revolution that will effect her own downfall: Her vigor flows like tides into my blood, Giving me strength erect against her hate. Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood. Yet as a rebel fronts a king in state, I stand within her walls with not a shred Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer. (ll.5-10) The final quatrain puns on the darkness of the black speaker, the besieged dissenter, as he darkly gazes - as in Corinthians’ child who must finally grow up - into the future. The black son foresees America’s masterful experiment in modernity ultimately collapsing, its Lady Liberty granite Claude McKay and Black Transnationalism 269 promise ultimately going the way of Shelley’s nearly obliterated “Ozymandius” (1818), “king of kings.” And though one might think that this would cause the insurgent to exult, to look forward to dancing on America’s grave, it has the opposite effect: “Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,/ And see her might and granite wonders there,/ Beneath the touch of Time’s unerring hand,/ Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand” (ll.11-14). In the future, all that will be left of Lady Liberty is the pedestal. The idea of America’s annihilation makes the black anarchist mournful because America, distinguishing the horizons of Whitman’s lyrical democratic vistas, holds the promise of fulfillment. Nonetheless, its course, invested in capitalism, imperialism, and state nationalism - the combined cultural imaginary that jointly produces racism - seems destined, in a world engaged in bitter conflict, for disintegration. It is crucial that McKay generated “America” while planning to travel to Communist Russia, America’s dark Other, because it is necessary to understand that his existence in the Leninist Bolshevik nation, something of a second adopted country, helped shape his thoughts on his previously adoptive motherland. As he hesitantly consents to the prospect of Whitman’s optimism for America (an optimism Whitman nearly lost for the same reasons McKay verbalizes, as the black poet knows), he is also ambivalent about the sort of millenarian vision of modernity Eliot and his advocates are sure of. McKay’s signing of modern America does not evoke the image of a desolate zone, a cultural waste, where alienated human subjects live fragmentary existences. Particularly for the politically disenfranchised and socially alienated, America has the potential to give birth to Whitman’s ideal. A constituent of McKay’s post-nationalist critique is an interrogation of Whitman’s sanguine patriotism, radical though the “Good Gray” American poet’s democratizing verse vision was. But the genuine critique is directed at the kind of longing for a more refined age Eliot’s poetry performs. Though the black queer poet envisions a wasteland, the atrophy is localized in the nation, antithetic to the Eliotic Modernist general (non-national) and paradoxically ageless angst. The prospect of America’s dissipation, its waste of possibility being inherent in its action - becoming a wasteland is written onto capitalist, imperialist America’s future - is, that is, a revolutionary Marxist view. Translating the Vernacular of the New The difference between Romania in the late nineties, when I was first posted as a Fulbright lecturer, and the country as it is today is the historical borderland between the remains of the pathological bipolarity of the late Cold War and the surfacing of the pandemic of globalization. And the futures of 270 G ARY E DWARD H OLCOMB American Studies are situated at the center of this historical transformation. With the Bologna plan, a standardization of curricular implementation and objectives throughout Europe, young Romanians have no choice but to become EU students. As a result, as America’s star appears to be in position to fall and the European constellation seems poised to rise, students in countries like Romania, motivated by material incentives, may conclude that it is in their best interest to shift from North American to European study. In the age of standardization and globalization, what can American Studies offer to a becoming-EU student? This question bangs hard against the granite façade of Romanian academic culture. When they let me know that they liked my classes because I held open discussions of the material, my graduate students also told me that courses in the Romanian university habitually are taught in a vertical format. Since their end of term exams must reproduce the information that their professors have fed them, the students don’t engage in verbal exchanges about study materials. This means that they don’t generally take part in speculative discussions; students are thereby not given the opportunity to build the class knowledge base. The students informed me that the native style of teaching reflects a characteristic of the national identity, moreover, in that Romanians are discouraged from speaking out, from offering their opinions. This all may be somewhat subject to overstatement, but I could see that for Romanian students writing a seminar paper was more agonizing than it is for American students. There seemed to be three related, tangled reasons for the reticence to engage in class: (1) the society was conventionally reserved; (2) each student was afraid of being revealed as inadequate in front of peers; and (3) totalitarianism had punished expressions of individual thinking - and this disposition has lingered. Bright, well-trained Romanian students who were anything but docile commonly told me that Romanians are sheep, and blindly following Ceausescu was a characteristic demonstration of this problem. I would add to this that a contemporary byproduct of absolutist domination was that Romanians were prevented from building civil structures of progressive social action. The result was to generate not just omnipresent corruption but, in its way worse, also universal cynicism, a feeling that any kind of civic action is futile - and this frame of mind also lingers. In other words, the very rhetoric of progressive politics, where citizens form collectively in order to generate reform outside of formal political structures, is intrinsically a corrupted set of inherited discourses. An element of this way of thinking, as I understood it, is a residue of totalitarianism; for Romanians the language of progressivism is a dialect of Communism and therefore a degraded idiom. Romania’s nineties phase post-transition state was a structure of feeling that articulated the national discourse almost totally in terms of divesting itself of totalitarianism. Ceaselessly saying goodbye Lenin, Claude McKay and Black Transnationalism 271 post-transition was a postcommunist conception of national identity that continually checked in the rearview mirror to locate the national trajectory in relation to the signposts in history’s road. The post positionality is currently being replaced by the EU conversion culture, a condition that looks to a singular, stable future. Romanians are now in a position where they may speak their minds if they are of a mind to, but (like Americans), their national imaginary is - once again - under siege. The predicament with Romanian academics and students does reflect a deficiency of language, and maybe this is where Americans and Romanians have something in common. The deficiency of the language of progressivism is immanent in the very structures of making political meaning itself: in Romania’s case a language of reform that is as corrupted as state institutions. At a time when extensive corporatization and massive financial cutbacks hold sway in American universities, Romanian universities want to follow the American model. At a time when Colorado’s legislature, in a surreal, red-state misappropriation of affirmative action principles, threatened to refuse to pass the higher education budget until the state’s colleges could prove that they had hired a prescribed number of conservative professors, the Romanian state sees the U.S. as a partner in the War on Terror. What is happening in the U.S. reflects the loss of the very language of collective reform. If the language of progressive transformation may be written off in a country like the U.S., how can those positioned beyond the post in a country like Romania generate a new language, after Hardt and Negri, who follow Deleuze and Guattari, of the clued-in multitude? Like the state’s historian, I am convinced now that teaching American Studies in countries like Romania is essential. That is, I do want to do my part in a war on terror. My Romanian students were in or planned on entering potentially influential professions in fields like education and news media. I suggested to them that even if they did not head toward a profession where they did any scholarly work, current approaches in American Studies could provide useful critical equipment for engaging in popular action, both within and outside the university, the kind of intellectual work that would be crucial as the country turns from post-transition to becoming-EU Romania. My students made up tomorrow’s intellectual vanguard, to adjust Leninist terminology. In 1921, shortly before meeting Trotsky and seven years before starting the novel trilogy that would enact a literary form of black Trotskyism, McKay wrote “America”: “as a rebel fronts a king in state,/ I stand within her walls with not a shred/ Of terror …” (emphasis added; Complete Poems, ll.5-10). As the embassy historian said, American Studies can materially awaken Romanians and other becoming students of America to history. American Studies can participate in the war on terror. 272 G ARY E DWARD H OLCOMB Works Cited Buford, Tim, and Dan Richardson. The Rough Guide to Romania. London: Rough Guides Ltd., 2001. Cooper, Wayne C. Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Schocken, 1987. Culleton, Claire A. Joyce and the G-Men: J. Edgar Hoover’s Manipulation of Modernism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of Culture in the Twentieth Century. New York: Verso, 1996. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Claude McKay file, no. 61-3497. Assorted documents dated 16 Dec. 1921 to 31 May 1940, obtained under provisions of the Freedom of Information Act. 119 pages. —. FOIA Claude McKay file, no. 61-3497, Reading Room Index. Website with PDF file downloads. http: / / foia.fbi.gov/ foiaindex/ mckay_claude.htm. —. FOIA Famous Persons Listing, Reading Room Index. Website with PDF file downloads. http: / / foia.fbi.gov/ famous.htm. Foerstel, Herbert. Freedom of Information and the Right to Know: The Origins and Applications of the Freedom of Information Act. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999. Griffith, D.W., dir. The Birth of a Nation. Perf. Lillian Gish. Triangle Film Corporation, 1915. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. McKay, Claude. Banjo: A Story without a Plot. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1929. —. Complete Poems. Ed. William J. Maxwell. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. —. Home to Harlem. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1928. —. Romance in Marseille. Unpublished MS., Miscellaneous Claude McKay Papers. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. New York: New York Public Library. 1929-1933. Maxwell, William J. New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Nelson, Cary. Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left. New York: Routledge, 2001. Rowe, John Carlos. Post-Nationalist American Studies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Trotsky, Leon. Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects. 1928. New York: Pathfinder, 1969. Wald, Alan M. Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Whitfield, James Monroe. America and Other Poems. Buffalo: James S. Leavitt, 1853. H ANNES B ERGTHALLER Ecocriticism, American Studies, and the Limits of Both: A German Perspective on the Internationalization of a New Discipline I Globalizing (American) Ecocriticism Ecocriticism - simply put: the study of literature and culture from an ecologically informed perspective - has without question been one of the more remarkable success stories in the literature departments of U.S. universities over the past one and a half decades. 1 Since its emergence in the early 1990s, the number of ecocritical publications, of conferences held, and of panels sponsored have all been increasing at an astounding rate; so has the membership of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE), which since its foundation in 1992 has served as the field’s institutional center of gravity. A steadily growing number of U.S. universities now offer graduate courses in ecocriticism, several English departments have specialized on it, and a number of university presses have made ecocritical work a cornerstone of their publishing activities. Apparently, the new discipline has struck a chord in academia and found a viable formula for authorizing itself - no small prize, indeed, in an environment where the humanities are under constant pressure to assert their relevance. So, with reference to Jean-François Lyotard’s remarks about the fate of knowledge after the end of the grands récits, one might start by asking: What are the “new moves” that ecocriticism has allowed its practitioners to make? How has it changed the “rules of the game” of literary criticism? How has it performed? 2 Ecocritical scholarship rarely displays the same kind of interpretive finesse, the knack for finding unexpected twists in already canonized texts or for drawing startling parallels across a range of heterogeneous materials which have done so much to establish deconstructivism and New Historicism. Yet it has introduced a set of ethical concerns, of heuristic assumptions and didactic methods that have just as much of a claim to newness - enough 1 I thank Katrin Amian, Michael Butter, and Christine Gerhardt for their many helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. 2 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 52. 274 H ANNES B ERGTHALLER even to justify talk of an “environmental turn” in literary studies. 3 To a considerable extent, ecocriticism’s success is owing to the high expectations it has set for itself. As a discipline, it has lofty goals: It understands itself as a response to the ecological crisis and aims at reorienting the study of literature and culture in such a way that it may play a role in the overcoming of that crisis. Thus ecocriticism has followed the example of other fields of literary study and answered the question of its legitimacy by deferring to the higher authority of a generally recognized political agenda - an agenda whose stock is bound to rise in the future, warranting confidence that the relevance of the field will grow accordingly. Lawrence Buell has expressed these hopes with a measure of low-key triumphalism that might be somewhat unsettling to scholars from adjacent fields (who may, after all, be ecocriticism’s competitors in the zero-sum game for institutional resources): “If, as W.E.B. Du Bois famously remarked, the key problem of the twentieth century has been the problem of the color line, it is not at all unlikely that the twenty-first century’s most pressing problem will be the sustainability of earth’s environment […].” 4 The presupposition is that the countless, globally dispersed phenomena of environmental degradation and rapid ecological change can and should be understood as symptoms of a single, planetary pathology. An essential corollary of this agenda is that ecocriticism must by definition be a global venture: Since the effluvia of tailpipes and smokestacks do not stop at the borders of nation states, neither can ecocriticism. In this respect, too, many representatives of the discipline are rather sanguine. Michael P. Branch and Scott Slovic, for example, open their preface to the ISLE Reader, a collection of essays from the ASLE periodical re-published at the occasion of its tenth anniversary, with the following anecdote: The week we drafted this introduction, Scott received an e-mail out of the blue from the other side of the planet, from Brazil. At the time Scott was in Australia, familiarizing himself with the lively contemporary work of Australian environmental artists and scholars, when he received the message from a Brazilian student asking for assistance with an ecocritical graduate thesis on Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. The same week Mike Branch sat in the Nevada desert and opened a letter from a Swedish graduate student asking for advice regarding ongoing scholarship on Henry Thoreau’s attitudes toward nineteenth-century technology. 5 The authors marshal this story as evidence that ecocriticism has fully justified the high hopes with which it was begun. Within little more than a 3 Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism, 1. This is, of course, as much indicative of institutional conditions in the humanities as it is of actual changes in the research agenda. The threshold beyond which a trend can be declared a ‘turn’ has been steadily lowered in the recent past. 4 Buell, “The Ecocritical Insurgency,” 699. 5 Branch and Slovic, ISLE Reader, xiii. ISLE is the quarterly journal of ASLE. Ecocriticism, American Studies, and the Limits of Both 275 decade, it has grown from the preoccupation of a handful of literary scholars in the U.S. into a global enterprise, and for old hands such as Slovic and Branch, intercontinental counseling activities have become part of their daily bread: “These are not unusual experiences for us, and for many of our colleagues - one week the message comes from Brazil or Sweden, the next week from Taiwan, Poland, Germany, or Estonia, from China, Turkey, Finland, or India.” 6 The steadily growing number of ASLE affiliates around the globe seems to lend additional weight to their confident appraisal. 7 Yet there are reasons to be skeptical whether ecocriticism has indeed managed to internationalise itself as successfully as Slovic and Branch would like their readers to believe. After all, Maria and Henrik - the two students from Brazil and Sweden who must shoulder the burden of representing the new, international generation of ecocritics - are working on canonical U.S. American authors, and it is more than likely that they do so within the institutional framework of an English or, possibly, an American Studies department. Nor is the title of the only book published outside the Anglophone world which Slovic and Branch cite in their brief overview of the history of the new discipline apt to dispel these doubts: “[T]he first collection of Japanese ecocriticism: Environmental Approaches to American Literature: Toward the World of Nature appeared […] in 1996.” 8 The problem which this anecdote thus inadvertently highlights is that outside the U.S., ecocriticism has been received not as the autonomous new interdiscipline as which it is frequently cast, but rather as a new branch within the study of Anglophone literature - in other words, as a subdiscipline of English and/ or American Studies. This is true not only in Asia, but in Europe as well, and particularly in Germany. 9 While there have been occasional attempts from within German studies departments at universities in Germany to approach their subject from an environmentalist angle, these efforts remained more or less insular and never congealed into a larger critical project 10 - and they 6 Ibid. 7 Branches of ASLE exist in the U.K., Japan, Korea, Australia/ New Zealand; separate but closely related organizations have recently been formed for Europe (the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture, and the Environment, EASCLE) in 2004 and for India (ASLE India and OSLE) in 2006. 8 Branch and Slovic, The ISLE Reader, xvi. 9 As it is the situation in Germany that I am most familiar with, the subsequent remarks will draw largely on my knowledge of the latter; however, exchanges with colleagues from various other European countries have satisfied me that much of the following applies to their respective countries, as well. 10 One may point out, e.g., Jürgen Haupt’s study of 20 th century German nature poetry (Natur und Lyrik, 1983), Gerhard Kaiser’s Mutter Natur und die Dampfmaschine (1991), or Jost Hermands (Im Wettlauf mit der Zeit, 1991) and Gernot Böhmes (Für eine ökologische Naturästhetik, 1989) forays towards an “ecological aesthetics.” 276 H ANNES B ERGTHALLER never entered into a sustained dialogue with similar work that was concurrently carried out in the U.S. As far as German studies is concerned, those who tried to latch on to the work that was carried out under the new conceptual umbrella were mostly scholars working outside of Germany and particularly in the U.K., where a vibrant ecocritical community had established itself during the 1990s (parallel to and to a large degree independently of developments in the U.S.). The small number of scholars in Germany who have consciously engaged with ecocriticsm are, with very few exceptions, Americanists. This may indeed strike one as a curiously twisted state of affairs: In a country where environmentalism has actually managed to move from protest movement to governing party (thoroughly normalizing itself in the process), a country that prides itself on its status as a beacon of progressive environmental politics, ecocriticism has mostly fallen on deaf ears; yet it has flourished in the country that many Europeans like to cast as the ecological archfiend, where environmentalism has been on the defensive since the 1980s. What does this tell us about ecocriticism and American Studies, both in Germany and the U.S.? In each of these cases, a somewhat different set of circumstances specific to the respective nation and discipline come into consideration. While a comprehensive assessment would therefore be a tall order, indeed, the situation provides fertile ground for speculation about its potential implications. It might be seen, for instance, as raising the question to what extent the steady downward spiral of green politics in the U.S. has fuelled the development of ecocriticism by sending disenchanted environmentalists to seek refuge at their word processors, thus compensating for the lack of tangible progress on matters of policy (and tacitly reformulating environmental engagement in terms of individual therapy). On the other hand, it may give occasion to remind ourselves that the roots of environmentalism reach deep into the mythological substrata of U.S. national identity, and that concern about ecological crises had entered public debate in the U.S. at least a decade before it registered with the citizenry of European countries. Not too long ago, in the 1960s and 70s, it was the U.S. who set the global standards for environmental policy; when the government of Willy Brandt added the term Umweltschutz to the portfolio of his minister for agriculture in 1969, the neologism was modelled on the English term ‘environmental protection,’ then already a familiar notion to most Americans. 11 On a different note, the asynchronous development of environmental criticism in Germany and the U.S. might prompt some to comment on the lamentable disconnect between the ivory towers of academia and the rest of society, or to contrast the ethos of political disengagement that prevails in 11 Blumenberg, Vollzähligkeit der Sterne, 439. Ecocriticism, American Studies, and the Limits of Both 277 the German humanities with the calls for reinstating the role of the public intellectual so often heard in the U.S. Finally, it might lead one to dismiss ecocriticism’s precarious state outside the U.S. as but the growing pains of what is, after all, still a very young field, and to congratulate American Studies for once again breaking new ground in the literature departments of European universities. Historically predisposed to an emancipatory politics and the pushing of disciplinary boundaries, less settled in its ways than the traditional philologies, American Studies have already served as a bridgehead for the study of popular culture, as well as for gender and ethnic studies. 12 It may be tempting to add ecocriticism to this list - and the fact that ecocritical work on British literature has received considerably less attention in Germany than that concerned with texts from the U.S. could be cited as a case in point. Such an optimistic appraisal of the situation would flatter German American Studies and bode well for ecocriticism’s future, effectively implying that it is only a matter of time before ecocriticism will be firmly established on this side of the Atlantic. However that may be, for the purposes of this paper, I shall focus on a different line of thought - one that, while being less charitable to both American Studies and ecocriticism, may shed some light on the reasons for the latter’s continuing marginality, as well as on the peculiar relationship the two disciplines have entertained with each other. II American Studies and its Discontents That ecocriticism should have arrived in Germany as a branch of American Studies is both rife with ironies and entirely appropriate. It is appropriate, first of all, because for the most part, the texts which U.S. ecocritics have dealt with fall into the purview of American Studies - even if most of them have been and still remain marginal to the Americanist canon (with few notable exceptions, such as Gary Snyder and, of course, Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau). Not coincidentally, ASLE began as a spin-off of the Western American Literature Association, and, despite considerable efforts to broaden the textual base, works by American writers and/ or about the American environment continue to account for the bulk of ecocritical work. 13 Secondly, ecocriticism in the form in which it emerged in the early 1990s was steeped in assumptions that are characteristically U.S. American - assumptions, e.g., about the redemptive potential and spiritual significance of nature (especially wild nature), about the superiority of rural forms 12 Sielke, “Theorizing American Studies,” 62f. 13 Cf. Armbruster and Wallace, Beyond Nature Writing, 1-8. 278 H ANNES B ERGTHALLER of life, and more generally about the availability of nature as a normative base for social arrangements. These assumptions aligned ecocriticism with the mythological underpinnings of earlier versions of American Studies - revolving, as they were, around the story of American Adam’s Errand into the Wilderness of the Virgin Land; 14 however, to the same extent that this “field imaginary” has increasingly come under critique from within American Studies, they have served to propel ecocriticism onto a trajectory of its own. This already brings us to the chief irony about the route by which ecocriticism arrived in Germany. It had begun as an “insurgency” 15 against the aloofness of literary criticism from the ethical imperatives of the ecological crisis, and specifically against the postmodernist doxa that had come to hold sway during the 1980s. As such, it shared an impulse with a number of contemporaneous attempts to infuse postmodernism with a sense of responsibility - an impulse, however, that in the case of U.S. ecocriticism was largely spent on a wholesale rejection of “theory.” Despite occasional gestures towards Levinas, there were few actual points of contact with the exponents of the “ethical turn” in literary studies. In fact, within American Studies, the arrival of the New Americanists - with their heavy theoretical machinery and their stated programme of extirpating any and all vestiges of American exceptionalism from their discipline - made the intellectual climate even less hospitable to many of the ideas future ecocritics held dear. The latter have tried to resolve this problem by carving out their own academic niche, so to speak - one with a more favourable micro-climate. U.S. ecocriticism thus acquired much of its present shape through a struggle to extricate itself from American Studies as they are currently practiced. The fissures along which this rift was eventually to form predated not only the emergence of ecocriticism, but the near-hegemony of postmodern approaches that precipitated the latter, as well; and these fissures ran largely along regional dividing lines. In the introduction to his most recent book, Glen Love, an early protagonist of the movement, recounts that it was the publication of Leo Marx’ Machine in the Garden in 1964 which first prompted him to seek a critical approach that would pay its proper dues to nature. He credits Marx for turning attention in the right direction, while taking exception at Marx’ dismissal of the pastoral as an exhausted literary form and his concomitant failure to see its potential as a conductor for ecological consciousness: 14 Pease, National Identities and Post-Americanist Narratives, 3-6. For the affinities specifically between Lawrence Buell’s seminal The Environmental Imagination and R.W.B. Lewis’ The American Adam, cf. Giles, Virtual Americas, 12. 15 Buell, “The Ecocritical Insurgency.” Ecocriticism, American Studies, and the Limits of Both 279 What was to escape his conclusions was a sense of the ecological complexity of nature, the impossibility of its complete control by human beings, and the obstinacy with which Americans would resist any dismissal into history and literary irony of what Marx had rightly called ‘the root conflict of our culture.’ 16 Marx was unable to view the desires for rural idyll and a life in harmony with nature, which were stirring mightily just as The Machine in the Garden was published, as anything other than wishful thinking or, worse, regressive fantasy. Love, on the other hand, understood Marx’ stance as yet another expression of a deeply ingrained bias which prevented the academic establishment from recognizing the relevance of texts which took nature and people’s relation to it as their primary subject, a bias as whose stronghold he identified the urbanized East Coast. He cites what has become a locus classicus for the high-handed anthropocentrism and humanistic hubris supposedly characteristic of urban intellectuals, a sentence out of a rejection letter Norman Mclean received from an Eastern publishing house for his short stories about life in western Montana: “These stories have trees in them.” 17 And this dismissive attitude is more than a matter of literary taste: According to Love and many other ecocritics, the unwillingness to take at face value texts which engage with nature directly and in a manner other than ironical reflects the great occidental malady, the alienation from nature that is both a cause and a product of our ecologically destructive social practices. The strong regionalist component in Love’s resentments becomes more conspicuous when his retrospective account is paired with the praise that another early protagonist of ecocriticism was showering on a writer then on his way to become the ‘poet laureate’ of the U.S. environmental movement - just as the latter was coming into its hegira and Love began casting for an ecological perspective on literary studies. In one of the first pieces of criticism on the poetry of Gary Snyder, published in 1968, Thomas Lyon predicted that it would be the turn to ecology through which the literature of the western U.S., following the lead of Snyder’s pioneering work, would finally achieve planetary significance (and the world-literary status so stubbornly denied by the Eastern establishment): “[T]he West’s great contribution to American culture,” he wrote, “will be in codifying and directing the natural drive towards ecological thought: a flowering of regional literature into literally worldwide attention and relevance.” 18 The West of which Lyon speaks here is, of course, not a merely geographical region - it is “but another word for the Wild,” as Henry D. Thoreau would have had it, and while the latter went on with the oracular claim that “in Wildness is the 16 Practical Ecocriticism, 2. 17 Qtd. in Love, Practical Ecocriticism, 13. 18 “The Ecological Vision of Gary Snyder,” 36. 280 H ANNES B ERGTHALLER preservation of the World,” 19 Lyon spelled out the utopian expectations now lodged in this mythological terrain: “The enormous expansion and deepening of the conservation movement, the new interest in the ecological sciences, and the wide search for cooperative, sacral, communal forms are all evidence that we seem to be trying to raise our sights to a holy vision of the world as a unity.” 20 Of course, it did not take very long until a lot of people gave up even seeming to try, and the high hopes for an imminent ecological revolution of consciousness were gradually buried. Yet some of the basic outlines of the ecocritical project were already visible through Lyon’s visionary sketch of a truly ecological literature: Ecocriticism would be the discipline whose task it was to foster and appraise the development of this literature, and to help it fulfil its proper (“cooperative, sacral, communal”) function. There is certainly more than one reason why it took another two decades before this project came to fruition and ecology began to be more widely acknowledged as an issue relevant to literary studies. A major factor was without doubt the already-mentioned rise of postmodernism in the broadest sense. Within the constructivist epistemologies that now came to dominance, nature figured not so much as a ‘holy unity’ than as a rhetorical strategy for obscuring the power relations that underpin social hierarchies. Historically, the normative force ascribed to the facts of nature had usually happened to side with those in power; it had served to stigmatise homosexuals and to legitimize the subjugation of women and people of colour. Now it seemed no longer enough to distinguish between socially conditioned symbolic overlays and a ‘natural’ substrate of material reality. It became the task of the critic to ‘deconstruct’ nature, to demystify and expose it, even in its materiality, as utterly contingent on society’s systems of signification. As the distinction between the natural and the cultural is itself a cultural artefact, nature was to be understood not as a reality somehow preceding its own discursive inscription, but as the product of differences marked within discourse - in short, a ‘social construction.’ As Judith Butler, one of the principal exponents of this view, put it: “‘Materiality’ designates a certain power effect or, rather, is power in its formative or constituting effects.” 21 Of course, the majority of critics commonly identified with this view were not concerned with environmental issues, at all. When they spoke of nature, they were referring first and foremost to human nature; with the notable exception of ecofeminists, who explicitly tried to extend their cri- 19 “Walking,” 609. 20 “The Ecological Vision of Gary Snyder,” 35. 21 Bodies that Matter, 34. Ecocriticism, American Studies, and the Limits of Both 281 tique of patriarchal logic to the domination of the natural environment, 22 the question of how humans’ ecological embeddedness might properly be conceptualised simply did not figure within postmodern theory. Yet this omission itself could be (and was) seen as symptomatic, and it is not difficult to understand why the postmodernist agenda alarmed many crititics with environmentalist convictions - and not only those who were, like Lyon, aiming at a full-fledged re-sacralization of nature. The assumption that the ‘material world’ as a whole is merely a projection of social categories onto what is, for all practical purposes, an empty void, not only foreclosed any chance for encounter with the otherness of the non-human world; it also dismantled the authority of the natural sciences on whose findings the realization that there is something like an ecological crisis crucially depends. As Ursula Heise points out, social constructionism appeared to be implacably at odds with a movement “whose primary pragmatic goal was to rescue a sense of the reality of environmental degradation from the obfuscations of political discourse.” 23 Most of ecocriticism’s earliest practitioners were thus convinced that postmodern theory, with its alleged moral relativism, high abstraction, and cosmopolitan glamour, was bent on vaporizing the very basis for any kind of effective resistance against the forces of environmental destruction. How was one to speak truth to power if truth itself was but a function of power? The animus which energized their efforts was aptly summarized by Gary Lease and Michael Soulé: “Certain contemporary forms of intellectual and social relativism can be just as destructive to nature as bulldozers and chain saws.” 24 It was this view of contemporary literary criticism that lent the punch to Cheryll Glotfelty’s admonition to future ecocritics, in her introduction to the first anthology of environmental criticism: “If we’re not part of the solution, we’re part of the problem.” 25 III Ecocriticism, Deep Ecology and Ecocentric Identity Politics What being a part of the solution precisely entailed for literary critics was, however, not much clearer in 1996 than it is now, a decade later. From the very start, ecocriticism has encompassed a bundle of heterogeneous projects that were united more by their professed political goals than by any shared methodological premises. The far ends of the spectrum were marked 22 See e.g. Merchant, The Death of Nature; Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature; Warren, Ecofeminist Philosophy. 23 “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Ecocriticism,” 504. 24 Reinventing Nature? , xv-xvi. 25 “Literary Studies in an Age of Ecological Crisis,” xxi. 282 H ANNES B ERGTHALLER off by the unreconstructed poststructuralism of David Mazel’s readings of early U.S. literature, which relied strongly on theoretical tools on loan from gender and postcolonial studies, and by earnest attempts to ground literary studies in sociobiology or neo-Darwinism, such as those of Joseph Carroll or Glen E. Love. 26 However, to the majority of early ecocritics, by far the most important theoretical inspiration was Deep Ecology, a radical wing of environmentalism which took its name from the rejection of the “shallow” efforts at reform advocated by the movement’s mainstream. 27 Deep Ecology assumes as its basic premise that the root cause of environmental destruction is to be sought for not in the implementation of certain technologies, in a lack of prudence or predictive capability, or in the structural properties of modern society, but rather in the ‘othering’ of nature by the rationalist ideologies of occidental civilization. Unlike many non-Western and pre-modern cultures with their animistic beliefs in the subjecthood of non-human beings, Western modernity has posited a radical split between humans and nature, expelling the latter from the circle of moral consideration and effectively ‘silencing’ it. 28 The failure to recognize humanity’s actual oneness with nature, so the claim goes, allows the latter’s domination by the former to appear legitimate. The aim of the movement must therefore be to destroy the illusion of human separateness and to get people to acknowledge the intrinsic value of nature, i.e. the values which it possesses independently from those ascribed to it by human agents, merely by merit of what it is in and of itself. To use the vocabulary of Deep Ecology, the goal is to leave ‘anthropocentrism’ behind and work towards a ‘biocentric’ or ‘ecocentric’ vision, thus developing an ‘ecological self’ - a self that would thus be able to faithfully represent nature, both aesthetically and politically. Bill Devall, one of the movement’s foremost exponents in the U.S., has characterized the principle of ‘ecocentric identification’ underlying this process in the following way: “Humans are one of myriad self-realizing beings, and human maturity and self-realization come from broader and wider self-identification. Out of identification with forests, rivers, deserts, or mountains comes a kind of solidarity: ‘I am the rainforest’ or ‘I am speaking for this mountain because it is a part of me.’” 29 In what might strike some as an argumentative sleight of hand, Walter Benn Michaels has recently suggested that Deep Ecology ought to be looked 26 Mazel, American Literary Environmentalism; Carroll, Evolution and Literary Theory; Love, Practical Ecocriticism. 27 The term “Deep Ecology” is a coinage of the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess, who until his death in 2004 was also a leading thinker of the movement; cf. Naess, “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement.” 28 Cf. Manes, “Nature and Silence.” 29 “Deep Ecology and Radical Environmentalism,” 52. Ecocriticism, American Studies, and the Limits of Both 283 at as a mirror image of deconstruction: The proposition that the whole world can ‘speak’ to us (if only we would listen) is, Michaels claims, only another version - differently calibrated - of Derrida’s famous statement that there is no “outside of the text.” He identifies the shared “commitment to the materiality of the signifier (to the primacy of the mark) that makes the world into a text” as the theoretical base for the general shift from politics to ontology he sees as having occurred since the 1960s. 30 Their refusal to acknowledge that meaning is located on a different plane of analysis than that of physical causes and effects collapses the space in which arguments about values (both ethical and aesthetic) are possible, reducing the political options for both deconstruction and Deep Ecology to the defence of fixed identities and marking both as exponents of post-historicity. The question whether Michaels’s argument does justice to deconstruction as a philosophical exercise is beyond the scope of this paper; however, with respect to the cultural politics which deconstructionism and Deep Ecology were mustered to support, he is certainly correct. 31 It is remarkable how ecocriticism of the deep ecological stripe - while fashioning itself as an antidote to postmodern relativism and alienation from nature - has in fact reproduced the agenda of the various other revisionist movements which have swept through literary studies with the aim of transforming it from a purveyor of tradition into an engine of multicultural pluralisation. The programme advocated by many ecocritics amounts to what can be called ‘ecocentric identity politics.’ Nature is appended to the familiar list of socially marginalized groups, as in Lawrence Buell’s formulation: “[N]ature has been doubly otherized in modern thought. The natural environment as empirical reality has been made to subserve human interests, and one of these interests has been to 30 The Shape of the Signifier, 125. 31 In a sense, Michaels’s argument is less original than it may seem: Numerous ecocritics have tried to cure their discipline of its inbred aversion to theory by pointing out the affinities between Deep Ecology and deconstruction or other forms of poststructuralist theory; cf. Branch, “Ecocriticism”; Campbell, “The Land and Language of Desire”; Conley, “Ecopolitics”; Manes, “Nature and Silence.” Fittingly, these attempts tend to stress convergences in their respective political implications - most importantly, the breaking down of customary hierarchies; where they argue for conceptual parallels between the two, they are usually less than convincing. After all, Deep Ecology - like most forms of popular ecology - claims for itself a knowledge of nature that must take precedence over other ways of knowing it. Deep Ecology ‘decenters’ our ideas of nature only in order to consign humans to their properly peripheral place within it; this very act of redistributive justice presupposes a position from where the conflicting claims can be adjudicated (or, as often seems to be the case, the conflict itself adjourned). It is precisely the possibility of such a position that deconstructionism has put into question. For a more thorough discussion of this problem, cf. Bergthaller, Populäre Ökologie, 265ff. 284 H ANNES B ERGTHALLER make it serve as a symbolic reinforcement of the subservience of disempowered groups: nonwhites, women, and children.” 32 It is this conceptualisation of nature as an oppressed other that underlies Cheryl Glotfelty’s widely credited suggestion that ecocriticism follow the three-step model of feminist criticism as outlined by Elaine Showalter. In a first stage, ecocritics would be chiefly concerned with identifying and criticizing stereotypes (“Eden, Arcadia, virgin land, miasmal swamp, savage wilderness”) and with working through textual lacunae (“where is the natural world in this text? ”). 33 In the second stage, the principal task would be to recover, reassess and canonize a body of texts capable of representing the oppressed other, while the third stage would turn to the theoretical analysis of the epistemological and ontological fundamentals of the systems of domination, of their symbolical construction in literary discourse and language more generally. To what extent ecocriticism did indeed follow such a model of development is debatable. In any case, what figures in this schema as ‘second-stage’ work - i.e, the establishment of an ecocritical canon and a revision of the traditional hierarchy of genres - became the primary occupation for most ecocritics in the U.S. Keeping in mind Thomas Lyon’s claims for the Thoreauvian lineage, the literary domain which Glotfelty singled out as particularly promising for the purposes of canon formation cannot come as a surprise: [T]he hitherto neglected genre of nature writing, a tradition of nature-oriented nonfiction that originates in England with Gilbert White’s A Natural History of Selbourne (1789) and extends in America through Henry David Thoreau, John Burroughs, John Muir, Mary Austin, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez, Terry Tempest Williams, and many others. 34 About the texts of this tradition it was assumed that they could play a similar role for ecocriticism as, say, nineteenth century slave narratives and domestic fiction have for African American studies and women studies, respectively: They would provide a genealogy for the ecocentric identity ecocritics were forging, and serve as models for the required transition “from representation of nature as a theater for human events to representation in the sense of advocacy of nature as a presence for its own sake.” 35 As the circumspection of Buell’s phrasing already indicates, it is precisely at this point that the analogy between ecocriticism and other forms of critical revisionism runs into serious trouble. The problem is not only 32 The Environmental Imagination, 21. 33 “Literary Studies in an Age of Ecological Crisis,” xxiii. 34 Ibid. 35 The Environmental Imagination, 52. Ecocriticism, American Studies, and the Limits of Both 285 the notorious fuzziness of the term ‘nature,’ a term that lumps together a multifarious array of entities whose respective ‘interests’ are less than obvious, but obviously less homogeneous than the use of the singular implies - thus begging the question where and on what level of ecological complexity the elusive subjecthood of nature is to be located. 36 Furthermore, there is obviously a categorical difference between women’s literature or African American literature on the one and ‘the literature of nature’ on the other hand. Of course, women and African Americans have had their advocates, too - but, as Michaels rightly points out, “once their rights were acknowledged, [they] could speak for themselves (indeed, their ability to speak for themselves is part of what made it plausible to think of them as having the relevant rights in the first place).” 37 As nature lacks not only the ability to speak for itself, but even the ability to approve or disapprove of its own legal representatives, the question of how to distinguish between genuine advocates of its otherness and mere ventriloquists - between those who have actually achieved an ecocentric sensibility and those who merely fake it - is even more crucial to the project of an ecocentric identity politics than it is to African American Studies or gender studies, and less likely to be settled. Eric Todd Smith has aptly summarized this problem, in a manner that makes clear that what is at stake in ecocentric identity politics is ultimately not the subjecthood of nature, but rather the identity of its self-proclaimed advocates: 36 And it bears mentioning that its replacement with terms such as ‘ecosystem,’ ‘the nonhuman world,’ ‘the natural environment,’ or ‘the biotic community’ is hardly a remedy for this problem. The incompatibility between a deep ecological “land ethic” as it was first outlined by Aldo Leopold and an ethics of animal rights is a case in point: If the supreme value is “the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community” (Leopold, Sand County Almanach, 262), it is for example imperative to cull excess deer that threaten to obliterate a forest - an action which animal rights activists in their turn will have to condemn as murder. For a canonical discussion of this problem, see Callicott, “Animal Liberation: A Triangular Affair,” and Regan, The Case for Animal Rights, 362ff. The notion that ‘nature’s interests’ could be identified and advocated thus rests on the idea that the entities of which it is composed are bound together in a stable, harmonious order in which their conflicts are sublated. For Leopold, the biotic ‘climax’ (as postulated by the ‘dynamic ecology’ of U.S. ecologist Frederic Clements and his followers) fulfilled this function. The idea has a venerable pedigree: it can be traced back to natural theology. Natural theology provided the conceptual basis from which both the tradition of nature writing and the science of ecology developed. Scientifically, this view of the natural environment has been thoroughly discredited - ecologists now see ecosystems as characterized by perpetual disequilibrium and prone to unpredictable, sometimes catastrophic fluctuations; see Botkin, Discordant Harmonies, 51ff. 37 The Shape of the Signifier, 119. 286 H ANNES B ERGTHALLER [W]hen the authority for assessing the ‘environmental crisis’ is centered in a pure, if silenced, subject - nature - with whom we must communicate, the discussion has simply been deflected toward a debate over which ‘proxy’ legitimately represents nature’s interests. […] In the end, the question of ‘what the land means’ carries only as much weight as the person arguing for it; conflicting accounts of what nature ‘means’ will persist and the ensuing arguments will necessarily be over who has perceived the authentic meaning. 38 Ecocritical attempts to resolve this dilemma have generally taken the form of a rehabilitation of realist aesthetics, in tandem with a certain theory of subject formation. They have entailed claims about literature’s capacity to furnish ‘adequate’ representations of and to refer the reader to the natural environment; claims about the phenomenology of human involvement in nature; and about the relationship between these. What unites almost all of these attempts is the premise that direct and unmediated (save by previous reading) physical immersion in nature is essential to the production of a properly ‘ecological consciousness.’ In order to actualise the capacity of a literary text to ‘put the reader in touch’ with the natural environment, it is necessary that not only the author seeks out the experience of the latter, but that her readers do so, as well. Many of ecocriticism’s innovations in the area of didactics are directly based on this idea. Having students, in addition to their reading, keep diaries devoted to environmental observation or write essays on their experience of nature; taking them for hikes to familiarize them with the natural environment in their home region or to visit the landscapes evoked in texts read in class, even teaching whole classes in the outdoors 39 - all of these practices are based on the assumption that only personal, physical experience of the natural environment can afford students the knowledge which would allow them to appreciate both the literature of nature and nature itself. Their goal is the education of students in what is often referred to as “ecological literacy,” 40 an intimate knowledge of and emotional attachment to a particular ecosystem or bioregion. 41 Environmental literacy might be seen as a litmus test for successful ecocentric identification; it is conceived as the chief goal and a necessary precondition for both nature writing and for ecocritical scholarship. Since its dissemination is the primary goal of both of these forms, there is no clear dividing line between them. Just as the work of an admired nature writer can be adduced as theoretical support for an ecocritical argument, so ecocritics can incorporate anecdotal material into their 38 “Dropping the Subject,” 34. 39 - as John Elder, one of ecocriticism’s pioneers, has been known to do; cf. Christensen, “The Voice of Experience,” 205. 40 Cf. Orr, Ecological Literacy. 41 For the links between ecocriticism and the bioregionalist movement, cf. Lindholt, “Literary Activism and the Bioregional Agenda.” Ecocriticism, American Studies, and the Limits of Both 287 own work; the boundaries between academic and creative writing are deliberately blurred, as are those between the professional and the private lives of critics. As in the case of Lawrence Buell, their own life-stories may begin to echo those of their canonical authors and become a model for the process of transformation that each individual will have to embark on by itself: Thoreau’s career can be understood as a process of self-education in environmental reading, articulation, and bonding. […] To read [Walden] in light of antecedent drafts and journal material is to see Thoreau undergoing a partly planned, partly fortuitous, always somewhat conflicted odyssey of reorientation such as I myself have begun to undergo in recent years, such as it seems America has been undergoing, such as I am asking the reader to undergo by reconsidering the place of the environment in our conventions of reading and writing. 42 While Buell himself has largely refrained from giving his readers a more detailed account of his own ‘odyssey’, many other ecocritics have been less reticent in this respect. The fusion of personal narrative and literary criticism has become a hallmark of ecocriticism. Scott Slovic has coined the term “narrative criticism” for this genre; Michael Cohen has labelled it, much more pointedly, the “praise-song school.” 43 IV Provincializing (American) Ecocriticism In coming to the implications which this programme has for Americanists in Europe who are working within the field of ecocriticism, one might begin by stating that it puts them in something of a fix: If they were to take the agenda of ecocentric identity politics strictly by its word, they would have to cease being Americanists, and rather turn to the study of the literatures of the particular bioregion which they happen to call their home. Otherwise, they might end up in a position that from an ecocritical perspective would have to be denounced as unsustainable. 44 In the particular case of Germany, there are notorious precedents for the idea - so dear to most U.S. ecocritics - of revitalizing native forms of spirituality supposedly better able to nourish an intimate relation to the natural environment. While the historical affinity of green thought and Nazism in this country has too often afforded occasion for taking cheap shots at environmentalism in general, one may rightfully shudder at the idea what a German version of, say, Gary 42 The Environmental Imagination, 23. 43 Slovic, “Ecocriticism”; Cohen, “Blues in the Green.” 44 Which is to say, they may end up as I have ended up myself: knowing more about the environmental problems of the American West than about those in my home country, not to speak of those in my place of residence. 288 H ANNES B ERGTHALLER Snyder’s bioregionalist “ethnopoetics” could possibly look like. And even if we grant that reading Thoreau and hiking in the hills of a German Mittelgebirge may be combined in didactically profitable and even theoretically compelling ways, there are institutional hurdles to consider. The structure of English and American Studies departments in Germany rarely permits their faculty to specialize to the same extent as has become customary in the U.S. A teacher holding a chair for American Studies will be expected to be a generalist, and to cover much of the field in her seminars. Under such circumstances, the kind of continuous and deeply personal commitment required to make an ‘ecocentric’ approach even minimally plausible is difficult to make, to say the least. But perhaps the highest hurdle of all is that for cultural outsiders, the forms of ecocentric identification envisioned by ecocriticism of the Deep Ecological persuasion and exemplified by its canonical authors are too fraught with national myth to ever be fully convincing. This is most obviously the case with respect to the centrality accorded to wilderness, which ecocentric ecocritics tend to regard as the only space where nature can be experienced in its full otherness and phenomenological proximity. If such was indeed the case, ecocritics in Germany would have to concur with Aldo Leopold’s dire judgement on the state of nature in their country and save money for the next trip to the U.S. (or at least the old-growth forests of Białowiez˙ a). 45 Despite the efforts of Deep Ecology and its proponents within ecocriticism to extrapolate the specifically American cult of wilderness into an anthropological universal, most (if not all) forms of ecocentric identity essentially remain displaced forms of national (or regional) identity. How easy it is to reactivate the latent connection between wilderness worship and U.S. nationalism is forecefully illustrated by a statement Robert Redford issued to the members of the Natural Resources Defense Council in an open e-mail concerning the government’s plans for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; it could also stand as exemplary for the convictions professed by many ecocritics in the U.S., if only Redford had been a little less straightforward about the mythology which animates them - a candor obviously related to the date when the statement was issued, namely November 2001. Redford wrote: The preservation of irreplaceable wildlands like the Arctic Refuge and Greater Yellowstone is a core American value. I have never been more appreciative of the wisdom of that value than during these past few weeks. When we are filled with grief and unanswerable questions, it is often nature that we turn to for refuge and comfort. In the sanctuary of a forest or the vastness of the desert or the silence of a grassland, we can touch a timeless force larger than ourselves and our all- 45 “Deer and Dauerwald in Germany,” 460ff; Schama, Landscape and Memory, 37-74. Ecocriticism, American Studies, and the Limits of Both 289 too-human problems. This is where the healing begins. Those who would sell out this natural heritage - this spiritual heritage - would destroy a wellspring of American strength. 46 U.S. ecocritics will probably want to disclaim kinship with this ecologically updated version of American exceptionalism as it informs Redford’s statement, yet they generally subscribe to his transposition of ecology into the register of individual therapy. Even the more sophisticated varieties of eco-phenomenology that are put forward by some of them tend to present nature as a place of solitary contemplation where humans can take temporary leave from the habituated reflexivity of modern society and experience existential absolutes. 47 With the exalted position they accord to the individual’s consciousness and its redemption, these forms of ‘ecological spirituality,’ too, are deeply imbued with beliefs that spring not so much from the insights of scientific ecology as from U.S. civil religion; and again, there are reasons to be sceptical. It is not only that the vocabulary of ‘rootedness’ and ‘purity’ which this discourse is invested in has had disturbing political implications in the past 48 and is hardly adequate to tackle contemporary realities of displacement and hybridity. By putting the individual’s consciousness of and bodily immersion in the natural environment at the centre of their interest, ecocritics focus on what is, after all, only a tiny shred of the complex meshwork of eco-social relations - one that may have little relevance for an understanding of ecological crises, as Dana Phillipps has pointed out: “How aware one is of the environment, in the nature-writing sense of ‘aware’ […], is in the greater scheme of things simply not very important.” 49 The processes which the science of ecology describes and whose understanding is crucial for successful interventions into the relations between society and its natural environment take place almost completely outside the horizon of our natural sensorium. The spiritual bonding to the land that some establish by walking or farming it, however deeply felt, will never be a satisfactory replacement for satellite images and computer models; in fact, it may even turn out to be a distraction from the kinds of global transaction on which the fate of individual locales now hinges. It is in this context that Ulrich Beck’s dictum that our age is characterized by an “expropriation of the senses” needs to be understood. 50 And while one may grant that the ‘anaesthetizing’ effects of the new digital media do represent 46 “Letter from Robert Redford about ANWR.” 47 E.g., Abrams, The Spell of the Sensuous; Westling, “Virginia Woolf and the Flesh of the World.” 48 For an exemplary treatment of this matter, cf. Solnit, As Eve Said to the Serpent, 123-32. 49 The Truth of Ecology, 203. 50 World Risk Society, 55. 290 H ANNES B ERGTHALLER an obstacle to the remediation of environmental problems - after all, they make it much more easy for people to shut out an increasingly unpleasant world from their personal lives - it must not be forgotten that the concept of a ‘global environmental crisis’ is itself utterly dependent on the existence of these very same technologies. Considering all of the above, it is scarcely surprising that ecocriticism was received so reluctantly outside of the U.S., and it will also be apparent that the ecocentric identity politics of early U.S. ecocriticism are hardly an agenda that European Americanists should want to emulate, if so they could. At the same time, it will have become evident why ecocriticism stands to benefit from a rapprochement with American Studies - a rapprochement in which German scholars with in interest in ecocriticism have perforce been engaged in from the very start, partly because the limits of those models of ecocriticism described in the foregoing are, it seems, more obvious to cultural outsiders, partly because of the different disciplinary traditions and institutional settings within which they operate: Postmodern theory never dominated English departments in Germany to the same extent that it did in the U.S., and consequently did not generate the kind of resentment which drove much early ecocriticism - indeed, as mentioned above, the openness to new theoretical developments has been an important aspect of the self-image which German American Studies cultivated vis-àvis the traditionalism characterizing much of English philology, making the anti-theoretical animus even less appealing. Furthermore, their institutional affiliation required German practitioners of ecocriticism to integrate the field into an explicitly Americanist curriculum. A rapprochement between American Studies and ecocriticism entails not only a critique of the various forms in which the discourse of U.S. environmentalism has reproduced a politically debilitating national mythology, but also an exploration of how environmentalist concerns relate to the issues which have driven much Americanist scholarship of the recent past, i.e., first and foremost questions of race and gender. At least in the case of Germany, this has indeed been the preoccupation of Americanist ecocritics (or ecocritical Americanists): the focus here has frequently been on the intersections of ecocriticism with African American and gender studies, and more broadly on questions of environmental justice; the topoi of the American wilderness mystique were revisited less in a celebratory than in a coolly analytical (even if not entirely unsympathetic) fashion. 51 As pointed out above, one of the 51 To cite only a few examples: Gerhardt, “The Greening of African American Literary Landscapes”; Mayer (ed.), Restoring the Connection to the Natural World; Grewe- Volpp, “The oil was made from their bones”; Schäfer, Mary Austin’s Regionalism; Gersdorf, “Ecocritical Uses of the Erotic.” Ecocriticism, American Studies, and the Limits of Both 291 weaknesses of U.S. ecocriticism has been that the critical vocabulary with which it approaches its subject matter is frequently borrowed from the very same tradition which it sets out to study. Thus one of the most important assets that scholars with a grounding outside the U.S. (or, more broadly, the Anglophone world) can bring to the necessary dialogue between ecocriticism and American Studies is their access to an archive of texts that may offer a markedly different perspective on environmental issues, as some of the most interesting studies by German ecocritics go to show - one may point, e.g., to Thomas Claviez’s assessment of the environmentalist potential of American pragmatism from the perspective of Adorno’s critical theory, to Sylvia Mayer’s study of New England regionalist literature, which made extensive use of the typology of environmental ethics put forward by Angelika Krebs, or to the work of Ursula Heise, whose appropriation of Ulrich Beck’s theory of the risk society had a noticeable impact on the direction which ecocriticism has taken over the past few years. 52 In their refusal to measure American environmentalism by its own standards, all of these studies have contributed to its “provincialization,” as Rob Nixon has described the readjustment of perspective that will be required if ecocriticism is to overcome its “superpower parochialism” and develop into a truly transnational project. 53 V Greening American Studies Of course, an awareness of the limitations of U.S. ecocriticism is hardly a prerogative of ecocritics from outside the U.S. - as pointed out above, ecocriticism has always been marked by a large diversity of approaches, and with the rapid expansion of the field, many of the assumptions described in the foregoing have come under rigorous critique. Largely in response to these interventions, the last few years have already seen a pronounced shift towards issues of environmental justice and urban ecology. Lawrence Buell, a figurehead of the movement from its very inception who followed all of these developments very closely, has recently described them as nothing less than a “second-wave [of] environmental criticism.” 54 The fact that he choses the term “environmental criticism,” rather than ecocriticism, in order to identify his own work is in itself highly significant, gesturing as it is towards 52 Claviez, “Pragmatism, Critical Theory, and the Search for Ecological Genalogies in American Culture”; Mayer, Naturethik und Neuengland-Regionalliteratur; Heise, “Toxins, Drugs, and Global Systems”; Ursula Heise is, it should be added, of German extraction, but neither an Americanist nor based in Germany. 53 “Environmentalism and Postcolonialism,” 247. 54 The Future of Environmental Criticism, 8. 292 H ANNES B ERGTHALLER an acknowledgement of the limitations of some of the views that have become firmly associated with (first-wave) ecocriticism, and thus towards a broadening of perspectives. And if Buell’s new nomenclature recycles the analogy between ecocriticism and feminism already familiar from Cheryl Glotfelty’s programmatic statement of a decade ago, it may have a somewhat different valence today, as it coincides with changes in the environmentalist agenda that are, to quote Rob Nixon again, “similar to the mutation of feminism, which was often dismissed, twenty or thirty years ago, as white, privileged, and irrelevant to the needs of third world women.” 55 To put this point differently: It is finally becoming obvious that questions of ecology cannot be detached from questions of social justice. What this also means is that most, if not all of the emancipatory projects under whose flags American Studies sail today are intricately bound up with issues that have so far been relegated to the ecocritical domain, issues which they cannot bracket any longer without etiolating the political relevance of their work. When Janice Radway, in her 1998 presidential address to the American Studies Association, praised Americanist work that focussed on “intricate interdependencies,” she was referring only to “attempts to rethink nationalism, race, culture, ethnicity, identity, sex, and gender.” 56 Her call to untether the “analysis of community and identity formation” from “geography” and “national borders” is as apposite as ever, and particularly so for ecocriticism; yet she did not mention, even with a single word, the ecological interdependencies which will continue to shape the “cultural flows” that are her primary concern. 57 If American Studies has a crucial role to play in highlighting the limitations of ecocriticism, the converse is equally true. Aldo Leopold’s plea in his seminal essay “The Land Ethic” ought to be mandatory reading for Americanists. After so much time has been spent thinking about the cultural characteristics of the various colonizing nations, Leopold wrote in 1949, it is time now to ponder the fact that the cane-lands [of Kentucky], when subjected to the particular mixture of forces represented by the cow, plow, fire, and axe of the pioneer, became bluegrass. What if the plant succession inherent in this dark and bloody ground had, under the impact of these forces, given us some worthless sedge, shrub, or weed? Would Boone and Kenton have held out? Would there have been any overflow into Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri? Any Louisiana Purchase? Any transcontinental union of new states? Any Civil War? 58 55 “Environmentalism and Postcolonialism,” 243. 56 “What’s in a Name? ,” 53. 57 Ibid., 64. 58 A Sand County Almanach, 241. Ecocriticism, American Studies, and the Limits of Both 293 Lest some readers wrinkle their nose at the faint odour of nativism, one may add to this statement a scientific fact which Leopold could not have been aware of, but that only adds to the trenchancy his observations have for the transnational aspirations of American Studies: Kentucky bluegrass was not, as he believed, “inherent” in the region’s plant succession - it had been introduced by European colonists. 59 The central point here is that political and ecological conquest have usually gone hand in hand, as the many scholars in environmental history and the environmental justice movement who followed Leopold’s injunction have shown. 60 In an age of accelerating globalization, this linkage seems not only to hold faster then ever - its implications are becoming more wide-reaching, as well. The wholesale destruction which many of the poorest countries wreak on their ecosystems in order to satisfy the more affluent countries’ appetite for meat; the export of ecological risks to countries so desperate for short-term economic development that they cannot afford to enforce environmental regulations; the amount of violence inflicted around the world in order to safeguard the global economy’s supply of fossil fuels 61 - these are only some of the most blatant cases that go to show why approaches which purport to situate texts in the material history of a culture but fail to take into account the relation between this culture and the natural environment have to be considered as deficient. So it seems that a mutual learning process is in order. American Studies will have to acknowledge that there is an ecological dimension to the circulation of “ideas, people, culture, and capital” 62 which they take as their primary subject matter, and that this dimension imposes limitations on cultural processes. Like the boundaries of the nation state, ecological limits can be deconstructed, but this will not stop them from having material effects. In order to properly conceptualise the latter, American Studies will have to follow the example of ecocriticism in accepting, though not without certain reservations, the authority of the natural sciences and the necessity of procedures for establishing legitimate constraints on human interaction with 59 Stewart and Hebda, “Grasses of the Columbia Basin of British Columbia.” 60 The classic text being, of course, Alfred W. Crosby’s The Columbian Exchange (1972). A closer look at the development of the discipline of environmental history would reveal another ironic counterpoint to the problematic relationship between ecocriticism and American Studies: During the 1960s and 70s, ignored by mainstream historians, environmental history found shelter in the fold of American Studies; with the ascendance of the race, gender, class paradigm, it was gradually pushed out - synchronously to the emergence of ecocriticism - but has since become a mainstay of the historical profession. Cf. Hal Rothman, “Conceptualizing the Real.” 61 For a useful overview of the literature on the nexus between imperialism and environmental politics, cf. Simon Dalby, “Ecological Politics, Violence, and the Theme of Empire.” 62 Fisher Fishkin, “Crossroads of Cultures,” 21. 294 H ANNES B ERGTHALLER the natural environment. Ecocrititicism, for its part, will have to recognize that ecological limits are not simply material givens. Especially as they take on the shape of environmental risks, they depend on fictitious anticipations of possible futures; they are, as Beck writes, “neither purely factual claims nor exclusively value claims. Instead, they are either both at the same time or something in between, a ‘mathematicized morality’ […].” 63 Ecological limits, it must be concluded, can never be completely disentangled from the rhetorical strategies used in order to bring home (or, as it were, dissimulate) the consequences of their violation; nor can they be well understood in the complete absence of expertise from the natural sciences. Such conceptual hybrids pose a significant challenge to literary studies, and meeting this challenge will require further disciplinary cross-pollination, both within and beyond the limits of what used to be the humanities. Ecocriticism’s failure to demarcate for itself a distinct disciplinary territory, the fact that it has had to make do at the margins of established fields and has frequently blended into them, must therefore not be seen only as a sign of weakness - it might just be the price that has to be paid for experimenting with such new approaches and new theoretical vocabularies as will be necessary in order to come to terms with a subject matter so unwieldy and so pressing as the relation between society and ecology. If this be so, then it is time that American Studies foot their part of the bill. 63 “Risk Society Revisited,” 215. Ecocriticism, American Studies, and the Limits of Both 295 Works Cited Abrams, David. The Spell of the Sensuous. New York: Vintage Books, 1997. Armbruster, Karla and Kathleen Wallace (Eds.). Beyond Nature Writing. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2001. Beck, Ulrich. World Risk Society. 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Call for Papers Metaphors Shaping Culture and Theory That metaphors play an important role in the various discourses of our worldmaking has been known for some time. There are, however, some metaphors that deserve our special attention because by determining cognitive approaches and emotional stances they shape cultural trends as well as open up and delimit fields of theoretical investigation. Papers (MLA style sheet with end notes and Works Cited) adressing any of these aspects should be sent to Professor Herbert Grabes or to Professor Ansgar Nünning, Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen, Institut für Anglistik, Otto-Behaghel-Str. 10, D-35394 Giessen, Germany. Papers must be received by 1 October 2008 and should be sent in duplicate and on disc or cd.