Sunday, September 15, 2013
I am still preoccupied, if not “obsessed,” with thinking about literature in terms of “narrowly geographic or strictly chronological frameworks” (Kolodny 3). If asked what I study, I’d still respond with a time period and geographic location (contemporary American, meaning US, literature). Initially, I had a hard time figuring out what different authors meant by “transnationalism”––the definition was not laid out clearly for me. After reading three or four essays I began to make connections between them and formed a vague idea of what it meant to study American literature transnationally. I immediately believed in the value of reading texts that were marginalized or took place in liminal, borderland spaces, but my initial question was how do we read them? I still wanted coherence––if we aren’t reading texts based on the nation or time period that they have in common, then what brings them together? My question was partially answered by Alemán, who discussed narratives from the Spanish conquest of Mexico in order to highlight how reading these texts “exhumes the legacy of conquest and racial rebellion that haunts the US’s hemispheric presence” (410). Reading conquest narratives not only has a place in American studies because they took place in the Americas, but because they serve as a “psychic projection,” as Fox puts it, for other narratives of conquest and oppression in US history, like “Indian removal, the annexation of Texas, and black slavery” (Alemán 410). So one narrative, located in a particular space and time, can illuminate other previously considered “unrelated” narratives, when they are read in the context of “‘frontier’ as a locus of first cultural contact” (Kolodny 3). Giles helped me understand the idea of this context and locus more clearly when he explained that “transnationalism seeks various points of intersection, whether actual border territories or other kinds of disputed domain, where cultural conflict is lived out experientially” (65). Understanding that transnationalism connects narratives through points of intersection, places where cultures collide and borders are drawn, helped me to take a step back from my geographical/chronological framework. I look forward to applying these concepts in the literature that we’ll read this semester as I continue to reshape the way I think about my discipline.
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Katie,
ReplyDeleteAmen on all counts. I think this all started to make better sense to me in Aleman's piece as well, because I was missing the practical methodology for these great proposals put forth by Kolodny, Giles (admittedly different) and Porter, et al. I didn't know what it looked like to do the things they were proposing we do. What complicates this whole thing for me is the application to the study of contemporary literature, which I would argue is at least a little more post/trans-national than the Early US Literature I have read. I suspect that the more we get into primary texts this semester, the more my current ideas about the early period are going to dissolve, but for now I see a bit more transnational application for someone like Colum McCann or Zadie Smith. I wonder if the works we're tackling in this course will prove more transnational and the contemporary works moving closer to something like post national.
You also mention the chronology piece, and I wonder what the flexibility is there. In the midst of these readings of early texts, chronology appears to be fairly fixed, I suspect due to the commitment to socio-historical specificity. I wonder what it would look to discuss an aspect of an early text, say an account of movement from New Orleans to Havana, to a contemporary account of that same movement. Would that comparative move be so historically fluid as to be unhelpful?
Katie,
ReplyDeleteI too am accustomed to thinking of a specific time period (mine would be eighteenth-century British Literature) and am concerned with “chronological frameworks.” I like how you kind of summarize the overall approach to transnationalism as it “connects narratives through points of intersection, places where cultures collide and borders are drawn.” It helps me to think of approaching literature with more awareness of the “contact zones” and not just fencing off the borderline as to what constitutes or affects American literature. I think our first novel we read in this class, Leonora Sansay’s Secret History; or, the Horrors of St. Domingo will be a good starting place for testing out this new approach to viewing American literature. It will help me I think to actually see how to apply these approaches (hemispheric, transnational, etc.) to a primary text.