Through Other Continents

Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006)

This book is a call to think outside the limits of American literary study (and study of other literatures as well). Dimock calls for interpreting American culture as an extreme holism incorporating human experiences reaching back into "deep time" and across the globe, a paradigm she sees as best illustrated by the spread of religion and languages. (She also uses Deleuze/Guattari's rhizome idea to illustrate this.)

Articulating an understanding of humans as fundamentally connected through the experience of embodiment, she then goes on to destabilize any number of other supposed "connections" which create the categories by which we define our academic studies. "Eras," she argues, should be seen as more plastic; even death should not curtail our inclusion or exclusion of particular people in categories of inquiry (this is a post-human moment). Dimock argues that the nineteenth century, with its expanding scientific knowledge, created opportunities for some people to see themselves as part of a "species" instead of as nations.

An example of a person in the nineteenth century American scene whose thought must be seen as transcending these boundaries is Thoreau, whose interest in the Bhagavad Gita Dimock sees as a "translation" across time. (John Brown, she argues, is also translated "across death" by his actions and by Thoreau's writings.) The acts of reading, writing, and translation are all radical acts, she argues, which challenge the primacy of time and allow us to hear the dead and reaffirm connections between ourselves and those who live far from us. Ezra Pound and fascism; Henry James in Italy; Robert Lowell and Vietnam all show up in different chapters. Her final chapter, on Gary Snyder and Native American and Japanese thought about tricksters (liminal animal/human figures), animals and ecology, reaffirms her conclusion that embodiment points the way to connection and empathy.

Dimock is in the English and American Studies departments at Yale. She recently co-edited a book on transnationalism and literary studies, Shades of the Planet, with Lawrence Buell; has written a book on Melville and individualism; and co-edited, with Priscilla Wald, a special issue of American Literature which I should read: Literature and Science: Cultural Forms, Conceptual Exchanges (Duke UP, 2002).

Do Glaciers Listen?

Julie Cruikshank, Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005)

Cruikshank, a professor of anthropology at the University of British Columbia, specializes in the ways in which different types of knowledge - scientific, "folk," native - struggle to establish themselves as legitimate; and works in the Yukon and also sometimes in Siberia.

This book is about the way that native Alaskans (Tlingit and Huna in the St. Elias Mountains area) look/ed at glaciers, and the difference between their conception of glacier "consciousness" and the scientific bent of Western explorers with whom they have come into contact. Following Harold Innis' ideas about the way that empire establishes itself by eliminating alternative forms of communication and knowledge; Bahktin's belief that storytelling and folk humor can equal resistance; and Benjamin's understanding of the tragedy of the loss of interactive storytelling, Cruikshank looks at stories told by Tlingit and Huna elders about the place of social glaciers in their cultural history, and compares these stories to white/"scientific" conceptions of the glacier as natural fact.

Glaciers, to the Yukon women Cruikshank interviews, are social beings, sensitive to being excluded or made fun of, and obedient to laws of their own (for example, they hate it when you cook with grease nearby them; glacier travel requires boiled food only). There is a reciprocal relationship between men and glaciers - a relationship not recognized by white men, or at least not by most white men - John Muir is cited as an example of an American who approaches sensitivity when it comes to interactions with the natural world, although his insensitivity to the native people who guided him through that world troubles that approbation a bit.

In a weird coincidence, a couple of days after reading this book I read this article in the New Yorker about a composer who makes music according to the rhythms of various instruments which measure activity of the earth. It would be interesting to know what the Native Alaskans might think about this...

American Civilization

Title: American Civilization (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993; but written in 1950)

Author: Cyril Lionel Robert James (1901-1989), Marxist scholar from Trinidad. Through his life, which was lived in T&T, London, and America, CLR James engaged with various strands of Marxism (while he repudiated Stalinism). He was integral to the anti-colonial movement, and wrote on such subjects as A History of Negro Revolt (1938) and The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Rebellion (1938). He also wrote on dialectics, Melville, and cricket. Throughout his writing, he engaged with the theme that constitutes most of American Civilization's concerns: how should the individual human live within a system that continually seeks to dehumanize?

My review: Throughout this book, James sets up a series of dichotomies between civilization and barbarism (which he sees as regimes which, like Stalinism, decline to develop the potential of individuals); people and monopolies; freedom and slavery; and democracy and oligarchy. He never uses the word "Marxism," perhaps partially because he's trying to write this book to convince authorities to let him stay in the US even though his visa has expired, but partially perhaps because he's invested in the idea of finding a way forward that's not constrained by a particular ideology?

The history of America, he says, is the history of individualism: first, from 1776 through the middle of the nineteenth c, an individualism that finds expression; then, from the middle of the nineteenth c onward, an individualism that either gets perverted into monomania (as in Melville's Ahab, a character James sees as prescient) or gets subverted by the capitalist system. People in America, James thinks, are unhappy, and have been unhappy ever since the mid-nineteenth c, because secretly deep-down they recognize that the ideals of individualism and happiness have been hopelessly submerged by the realities of capitalism.

James says that America's lack of truly significant cultural production is due to these conditions. The writers of the American Renaissance mostly failed at expressing this thought, because they were the first to try to express the question of the relationship of the totally free individual to his/her society. This left them with exhilarating possibilities but a sense of formlessness (see Whitman). The mass culture of the forties and fifties is an example, for James, of the degree to which the mind of the masses has become sad and upset at the state of things - if the mass culture is an expression of the mind of the people, as James says it is, then the movies of the forties and fifties betray a deep fear at the state of society.

The connection between this mass culture and the state of mind of the American "negro" (as he says) is that the realization that society is not what it says that it is is a quintessentially American one - the frustration of the black American at the continual failure of white America to live up to its rhetoric. Similarly, American women are in despair because they are now responsible for creating, out of the home, the one site where society lives up to its promise.

James calls for the abolition of what he sees as the bankrupt intelligentsia, the training of workers in both technical and intellectual realms, and factory ownership by workers. Only by advancing this collective well-being, he argues, can the individual be truly well.

(A quote from James on the status of the intelligentsia, as epitomized by the scientist: "The most miserable of all are the scientists. They are slaves if ever there were any, mutinous and rebellious sometimes in words, but slaves. They make atomic discoveries and bombs and then go home and cry. When Germany was defeated, the contending powers each captured where he could, some of the most highly developed and trained scientists, the most highly developed and trained minds the world has ever known, and put them to work in Moscow or Washington. They work, do as they are told, find what they are told to find, like any laborer at a dollar an hour. And in free America, if any one of them dared to defy the authorities and declare he would have nothing to do with a bomb which would kill a quarter of a million people, the whole machinery of politics and propaganda would set to roll and leave him utterly crushed. He would probably find it impossible to continue scientific work at all. And yet, the real dilemma is in his own mind, he does not know whether he ought to or not. The Journal of the Atomic Scientists is one of the most pathetic publications in the world." [262])

Whither American Studies?

Or should it be "Whence American Studies"? A special group post about seven essays navelgazing the field, spread over several decades. Listed here chronologically, for reasons which shall become clear.

Susman, Warren. “History and the American Intellectual: Uses of a Usable Past.” American Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 2, Part 2: Supplement. (Summer, 1964), pp. 243-263.

Warren Susman died in 1985 when he was only 56, of a heart attack, while commenting on a paper at a conference. Yike! At the time of his death, he was teaching at Rutgers. His essays were collected that year in Culture as History, which I will be reading but haven't yet. Other books include one called Herbert Hoover and the Crisis of American Capitalism and one called Culture and Commitment, 1929-1945, both paperbacked in 1973.

This essay puts forth a chronology of the ways in which historians have used mythic and ideological characterizations of the past, creating stories or narratives in order to justify future actions. (See Bercovitch on this, too.) Susman points particularly to Turner's frontier thesis as an example of ideological history which announced new directions for the society. 1890-1940 was a period in which historical awareness, wielded by individuals "removed from the seats of power", was seen as a tool for creating better futures (it seems like he approves of this period?) However, since 1940, historians have been too interested in creating myths or narratives, which do not assume that human problems could be solved by an analysis of the past. It seems that Susman wants a new public history committed to problem-solving.

Wise, Gene. "’Paradigm Dramas’ in American Studies: A Cultural and Institutional History of the Movement.” American Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 3. (1979), pp. 293-337.

Although Gene Wise has his name on a prize given by the ASA for the best student paper, along with Warren Susman's, so I know he was important, he is not very evident on Google. There should be a permanently cached area on the ASA's site with biographies of these luminaries. I couldn't even find books of his on Amazon.

Regardless, this essay describes several "eras" in the history of American Studies, as distinguished by episodes he calls "paradigms." First is the era of Vernon Parrington, who wrote Main Currents in American Thought in 1927 with very little institutional support and, Wise says, kicked off the tradition of American Studies thinkers who, "driven by concentrated fury," try to create order with the "materials of American experience." We then move on to Perry Miller, author of Errand into the Wilderness (1956), who, while he had plenty of institutional support, also tried to "think through America" - in his case, from the standpoint of Puritanism.

While Miller was in graduate school, various other schools began to offer interdisciplinary programs, including Harvard and GWU. Harvard was the first to award a PhD in Am Civ - to Henry Nash Smith. The 1950s began to look like a "golden age", because of the flush of cash influxed into the field from sources like the Carnegie Corporation, But, Wise says, we can't forget that this cash was dirty money, and in order to get it we had to reinforce some kind of status quo. Here the myth-and-symbol school flourished.

During the 1960s, of course, criticisms arose, culminating with Bruce Kuklick's essay (below) which pretty much dismantled myth-and-symbol as a viable category of analysis. Wise uses Robert Merideth, who taught a course called "Culture Therapy 202" at Miami U in the late 60s, as the representative actor from this time period - Merideth saw the role of teacher as an adversarial one, and viewed AMS as a discipline that must "save" people from the culture.

Then we experience...Fragmentation. Wise views the discipline as a growing one, but believes that other, "legitimate" departments have begun to take over AMS' territory (American lit, social history) and wonders what the future will be like.

Kuklick, Bruce. “Myth and Symbol in American Studies.” American Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 4. (Oct., 1972), pp. 435-450.

Kuklick is on the faculty at UPenn, in the history department. He's interested in political, cultural, intellectual, and diplomatic history of the US (well, what else is there? he doesn't do environmental history, I guess). He's written nine books, including Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War, from Kennan to Kissinger (2007) and To Everything a Season: Shibe Park and Urban Philadelphia, 1909-1976 (1991 - that one's about baseball!)

This essay pretty much sounded the death knell of the myth and symbol school. Kuklick points out that conceiving of such a thing as a "myth" borders on accepting the idea of a Platonic "truth" - invests the "myth" with a life of its own, outside the minds of each person who believes in it. Moreover, myth and symbol indulges in the "what you mean, we?" fallacy - can a scholar really describe the function of a myth as it works for each and every person in the United States? and if not, which people are we talking about? Finally, who determines which works hold this mystical "myth" inside of them? Why pick Moby-Dick over any other novel? Just because you like it and think it's good? That's no way to operate, says Kuklick, referring specifically to Leo Marx and his Machine in the Garden, but also pretty much indicting the whole complex of ideas surrounding myth-and-symbol. Kuklick admits that he doesn't have another idea as to what American Studies should do to get around the problem.

Lears, TJ Jackson. “The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities.” The American Historical Review, Vol. 90, No. 3. (Jun., 1985), pp. 567-593.

Lears, on the faculty at Rutgers, wrote No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (1981), on my list for later, as well as Fables of Abundance: a Cultural History of Advertising in America (1994) and Something for Nothing: Luck in America (2003).

This particular essay looks at the ideas of Antonio Gramsci and asks whether they are applicable to American Studies' attempt to describe the functioning of culture. Lears likes Gramsci's reimagining of Marxian ideas of culture because it offers more wiggle room for the human element - rather than conceiving of culture as simply the false consciousness that the ruling class uses to convince everyone else to fall in line (the base/superstructure argument), Gramsci believes that each person renegotiates his/her relationship to the culture through an ongoing process. Occasionally, a person may act in a culturally "acceptable" way, even while thinking something different, or vice-versa. Lears argues that this works well in American culture, and believes that we should focus on studying language in order to understand these individual processes better. (Picture is of Gramsci, Lears' "wily Sardinian", not of Lears.)

Denning, Michael. "’The Special American Conditions’: Marxism and American Studies.” American Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. 3. (1986), pp. 356-380.

Denning, in the Yale American Studies department, writes on labor and culture in the US. His books include Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (2004), The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (on my list; 1997), Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working Class Culture in America (1987), and Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in the British Spy Thriller (1987).

Following Lears, this is another essay about Marx's relevance in the study of America. Why, Denning asks, has marxist (he lowercases it) studies not made a mark (ha) on American Studies? First, theorists tend to focus on Europe, even American theorists. Second, since American Studies came of age during the Cold War, its "totalizing" explanations of American culture could be seen as an alternative to marxist understandings. (Here Denning cites Daniel Boorstin, who testified in front of HUAC, as an example of this school of American Studies.) However, Denning claims, certain American studies writers have been working in marxist ways without explicitly acknowledging their debts to that tradition. A complete revision of the understanding of America would have to set aside "exceptionalism" - only once this is done can marxism be seen to be relevant.

Kerber, Linda. “Diversity and the Transformation of American Studies.” American Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Sep., 1989), pp. 415-431.

Kerber is in the history department at the University of Iowa. She specializes in gender, citizenship, and legal history. Her books include No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (1998); Toward an Intellectual History of Women (1997); Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (1980); and Federalists in Dissent: Imagery and Ideology in Jeffersonian America (1970).

This piece is actually an address to the ASA, given when Kerber was president. It's a look back at the places where American Studies has had "gaps", including histories of race, class and gender, but also takes care to point out that scholars *have* been working in those areas all along. Kerber calls for more work in the areas of science and technology (yay). In general, she calls on the ASA to move beyond the "constraints of cold war ideology" to study the workings of power in American society.

Lipsitz, George. “Listening to Learn and Learning to Listen: Popular Culture, Cultural Theory, and American Studies.” American Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 4. (Dec., 1990), pp. 615-636.

Lipsitz is the chair of the AMS department at UC/Santa Cruz, and got his PhD from the University of Wisconsin's history department. He's into race, culture, and social identity, as well as urban history and social movements. Books include American Studies in a Moment of Danger (2001; focuses on the effect of globalization on the idea of "the nation" and thus on American Studies as a whole), as well as The Possessive Investment in Whiteness (on my list; 1998) and Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (1994).

In this piece, Lipsitz calls for a type of American studies that could be flexible enough to look at culture in all of its permutations; resists "hypostatization into a method"; recognizes the way that nationhood plays a role in culture; and, interestingly, "understands that struggles over meaning are inevitably struggles over resources" (621). As of now, Lipsitz says, the most sophisticated cultural commentators in America are not academics but artists, writers, and musicians (David Byrne! Tracy Chapman?) This is partially because American studies has not really got on board with European cultural studies, clinging to questions of "what is American?", to the detriment of more interesting open questions.

Risk Society

Title: Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage Publications, trans. Mark Ritter, 1992; orig. published in German in 1986)

Author: Ulrich Beck, German sociologist, who holds positions at the University of Munich and the London School of Economics. His works revolve around globalization, ecology, individualization, and the changing nature of work. Among his other recent books are The Normal Chaos of Love (1995, written with his wife!); Ecological Politics in an Age of Risk (1995); The Reinvention of Politics: Rethinking Modernity in the Global Social Order (1996); Power in the Global Age (2005); and Cosmopolitan Vision (2006).

Review: Beck's "Risk Society" is a post-industrial order in which the logic of wealth will give way to the logic of risk: in other words, he who has the most toys does not win; rather, he who can best evade the dangerous consequences of everybody's toys is the winner. The unfortunate part is that complete evasion may be impossible, meaning that everybody is at risk from everybody else's modernizations. Modernity, Beck argues, has perpetrated supposedly unforeseen "side effects": many of his examples are ecological, such as radioactivity, pollution, environmental illness, etc. In these cases, the logic of progress, which called for technological advancement without thinking of the price, has created regression and danger of unforeseen types. Traditional structures of knowledge - government; science, as currently practiced - are insufficient to contain these dangers.

Beck calls for an increase in what he calls "reflexive modernization" - a phase of modernity in which science and technology will become constantly self-critical and self-regulating. He calls the state of mind which has allowed science and technology to operate without checks an example of "counter-modernity" - those who believe in sci/tech in a religious way are undermining the principles of open reflection and assessment upon which modernity should be founded.

Additionally, Beck analyzes the style of individualization which he sees coming about in a post-industrial society. Work, he argues, now requires people to be flexible and single. It also extends these requirements to both genders. Industrial society required that women remain in the household, so that men could work, but this was in and of itself anti-modern. Now that women have learned to demand equal personhood and prerogative, nobody knows how to handle the resulting conflicts within marriages. This riff on individualism seems a bit disconnected from the information on risk.

Julianne Moore as a San Fernando Valley housewife afflicted by environmental illness in the totally terrifying "Safe" (1995).

As for potential holes that could be poked, were one to be in a poking mood, many of Beck's conclusions, especially in the section on gender relationships and in his thinking on work, seem to apply mainly or mostly to European/American/Western society - and society of a certain economic class, at that. Beck would argue that the new politics of risk means that class will no longer matter, because risk will be spread over all human bodies. But his argument already kind of eats itself, because, as he writes, those with more money and education will do better at managing risks - will know what kinds of food not to eat, will be able to buy bottled water, live further away from chemical threats, etc. I can buy the idea that the threat will spread over a wider range of social class, but not that it will threaten all equally.

As for his thesis about individualization and how it is affecting gender relationships, I would argue that there are many, many societies in which women have not been able to perceive individualization as their due. This is still a Western phenomenon, and an affluent one, at that. Thus, the seismic changes Beck points to seem only to be seismic for certain sectors. Is he assuming that as goes Germany and the United States, so goes the world?

Photograph of four-year-old with lymph system severely affected by fallout from Chernobyl. Taken by Paul Fusco.

Other books I've read which use this theory: None I've read so far; I know some upcoming ones will, though.