Proposal for MLA 2019 Special Session
Recent years have witnessed a resurgence of populism, nationalism, and discourses of racial supremacy in traditionally liberal Western democracies, notably in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. While progressive coalitions and solidarity movements have mounted widespread resistance to these sociopolitical developments, we believe that illiberal trends in contemporary politics also call for concerted rethinking of the grounds of politics and the public sphere, particularly as they relate to entrenched structures of sexual, racial, and colonial power. In 1992, Bruce Robbins, reviewing Homi Bhabha’s DissemiNation, argued that Bhabha provided “a portrait of transnational hybridity as an increasingly unavoidable condition of emotional and intellectual life.” The failure of this hybridity to develop or take shape is not, we believe, a coincidence. While it may be tempting to explain resurgent nationalism as a rancorous reaction to economic loss and the fading of the “American dream,” such explanations ignore the possibility that the nationalisms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were not, in fact, built for decline. Instead, they contained the seeds of their ongoing vitality and repeated resurgence. To what extent, then, do today’s nationalist movements repeat or draw on the psycho-sexual and racialist fantasies that powered and shaped earlier “imagined communities”? To what extent are nationalisms, whether today or in the last century, formed in extended communities and networks that float free of regional location and nation state?
The first paper, Andrew Parker’s, “Nationalisms and Sexualities Thirty Years On” considers the legacy of the landmark volume of essays, Nationalisms and Sexualities (1992), which Parker edited with Mary Russo, Doris Sommer and Patricia Yaeger. Inspired by a pivotal interdisciplinary conference at Harvard in 1989, Nationalisms and Sexualities catalyzed the cross-fertilization of three fields - postcolonial studies, transnational feminism, and queer theory - and impelled these disciplinary sites to reconsider nation and nationalism as fundamentally intertwined with sexuality, setting the agenda for future work on biopolitics in many fields. Looking back on the conference with some appreciation of its contributions to literary/cultural studies and due acknowledgement of its limitations, Parker will be asking in this paper what has changed over the past thirty years in the critical analysis of the conjoined terms of the conference. He will describe how the conference came to be, the (unintended) effects it produced in several academic fields, and where its work may have fallen short given subsequent developments in transnational feminist and queer politics.
The second paper, Sandra Tomc’s “Redressing the Nation,” looks at the persistence of racialized U.S. nationalist stereotypes across historically disparate eras. The paper begins by looking at the extent to which early twentieth-century chroniclers of U.S. culture typified “America” as a land of soulless visual extravagance, distinguished by empty sparkle, flashiness, and vistas of highly coloured facades, lights, and signs. Modern scholars assume these commentators were recording empirical experience, that they encountered the United States in various phases of capitalist, consumer, and technological modernity that struck them as disorienting. Yet the idea of the United States as a succession of facades, lights, and colours did not originate in the twentieth century. These commentators were drawing on an existing descriptive rubric, summoning ideas about America and Americans that had been in wide circulation across the Atlantic world since at least the 1820s. Tomc’s paper traces the early history of this idea of America as a flashy, meaningless surface to its origin in the 1820s and 1830s, when it was associated primarily with gaudy, colorful clothes. She argues that discussions of the United States as a contentless visual extravaganza, rather than reflecting technology or modernity, were rooted in the early nineteenth-century emergence of racial and ethnic nationalism in Britain, Europe, and the U.S. In the wake of pressure in the first half of the nineteenth century to embrace racially and ethnically saturated national types, significant branches of U.S. nationalist culture developed national types distinguished by their refusal to divulge racial and ethnic affiliation. Elaborate visual surfaces purported to short-circuit precisely those visual signals that were thought to transmit racial and ethnic information.
Finally, John Culbert’s paper, “American Backgrounds: Edith Wharton’s National Topographies,” looks at the portability of U.S. nationalist projects. In her study of Edith Wharton’s travelogues, Janet Goodwyn argues that the author’s work ‘mark[s] out a specifically American topography’, and claims that this extends even to Wharton’s European writings, which link the ‘complementary’ landscapes of the US and Europe. This paper challenges Goodwyn’s analysis to argue that Wharton’s fraught identity as an American in exile causes her to conjure unconscious topographies of settler violence even in seemingly innocuous descriptions of European landscapes. By means of a reading of the travelogue Italian Backgrounds and the autobiographical A Backward Glance, Culbert offers a synthetic account of the spatial “background” of the author’s narrative topographies as allegories of a scotomized American past. A temporal “backward” impulse accompanies these narrative figurings of the nation, Culbert argues, with the result that Wharton’s failed detachment from her American roots is expressed in the author's ambiguous affinities with “primitive” lifeways such as those of alpine anchorites rhapsodized in Wharton’s Italian travels. As someone who takes a vow of confinement and stability, and whose penance is a denial of the privilege of movement, the anchorite echoes the author's own impeded progress, Culbert argues. The figure of the anchorite thus expresses the hobbling paradox of Wharton’s paralyzed journey, its backward impulses negating the very thrust of Wharton’s passionate flight into the ambiguous wilds, where her native continent is topographically overwritten by the European landscape.