The New North American Studies

Culture, Writing and the Politics of Re/Cognition

Winfried Siemerling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781134307470
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Winner of the English Book Award, Grand Prix du Livre 2006 de la Ville de Sherbrooke.

In this original and groundbreaking study, Winfried Siemerling examines the complexities of recognition and identity, rejecting previous nationalized thinking to approach North American cultural transformations from transnational and interdisciplinary perspectives.
Using material from the United States and Canada as case studies and drawing on a wide range of texts and theorists, he examines postcoloniality and cultural emergence from the sixties to the present against earlier backgrounds. Siemerling's argument for a retheorization of the field takes on the full history of multiculturalism debates, including radical readings of W.E.B. Du Bois and Charles Taylor and their relation to G.W.F. Hegel, and challenging many of the models of multiculturalism in use today.
Tackling controversial subjects such as identity politics, The New North American Studies proposes a fresh outlook on the most central issues of North American cultural politics, from debates on canon formation to the role of racial and linguistic difference. Concluding with a look at the future of cultural difference, Winfried Siemerling's study is an innovative rethinking of the whole field of North American Studies.

1 Introduction

New World returns

The following study approaches North American cultural transformation from transnational, comparative, and interdisciplinary perspectives. It examines cultural emergence from earlier backgrounds through different multiculturalism debates and beyond in Canada and the United States. It works thus across boundaries that in Gregory Jay’s words “are less the origins of our history than the products of it” (1991:268; 1997:182). Jay’s remark is part of an ongoing debate about the role of national boundaries in the study of literature and culture, a debate that in the case of the United States includes the question of “America.” John Carlos Rowe, in his call for a “new” American Studies as a comparative discipline beyond national borders (Rowe 2002:xiv–xv), thus emphasizes that “the United States is not synonymous with America or the Americas” (xvi).¹ His comment echoes interventions like Carolyn Porter’s 1994 critique of “the synecdoche of a US read as ‘America’” (Porter 1994:468)² or Janice Radway’s “What’s in a Name?” (Radway 1999). Radway’s article, based on her 1998 Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, accelerated an entire field’s self-questioning whether collectively it “had compounded the imperial gesture whereby the United States had appropriated to itself synecdochally the name ‘America’ ” (Pease 2001).³ While answers to such questions are less than unanimous and vary across geographical, ideological, and institutional contexts, the multiple challenge remains of actually reading across borders, charting their uneven implications, and “figuring” what is articulated within, between, across, and through them. The work that follows here, conducted out of several national locations, pilots a route purposefully different from the one that heads straight for the wide narrows of the engulfing synecdoche of “America.”⁴

The choice of focussing here instead on contexts of “North America” evokes the very limits whose occultation is one of the burdens of United States Studies conducted under the name simply of America. In the collocation “North America” the second word refers clearly to a continent, not a country, and it includes cultures in North (of) America like those of Canada. North America is a relational designation that marks it as Northern part of a larger entity, which it does not claim to stand for or represent – yet which it could certainly draw on for contextual and differential self-understanding alike. This very emphasis on relational articulation invites as well other relational locations, for example in various Atlantic perspectives or those of the Pacific Rim. Not associated with any particular nation, North America sheds light on “America’s” shadows by evoking the limits of “nation,” and the liminal spaces of its borders. Such differential limiting of the projective reach of “nation” not only relativizes the entities in question, it brings them also into sharper focus. It delineates national articulation in its wider context, and in this process also brings it closer to similar issues in “hyphenated” identities within and across nations – such as questions of essentialism or the treacherous “recognition” that “takes place” in mainly prescribed patterns of cognition.

While North American perspectives can bring national cultures in relational view where otherwise they may not be seen or heard, they offer genuine differentiation mostly where they work “through” particular and distinct contexts, and these certainly include national ones. Gregory Jay, who calls for “The End of ‘American’ Literature” in favour of “Writing in the US,” responds to Porter’s critique of that re-articulated but still nationally circumscribed field with relevant questions about “nation” in the revised version of the essay (Jay 1997:169–213):

calling for an end to the study of a national American literature means calling for an end to the study of a national Mexican or Canadian or Columbian literature as well. Do “we” in the United States want to prescribe such an abandonment of local and regional cultural traditions? Do we have the right? Would this call for postnationalism return us to the widely discussed observation that the criticisms of identity politics arise just at the moment when those whose identities have been marginalized demand recognition?

(Jay 1997:182)

I think it is important to remember that identity formations, including articulations of national culture, have changing functions and relative values (as evidenced in Fanon’s reflections on national consciousness and culture, 1963:148–248, or Gregory Jusdanis’ The Necessary Nation, 2001). Such ambivalences of identity and recognition and their discursive formations are indeed at the very heart of this study.

Patterns of possibilities in which to think North American culture(s) are created in stories of cultural emergence, difference, and transformation. These articulate cultural change within North America, but also speak about the emergence of North American cultures against other backgrounds. I have placed here a number of such narratives in the magnetic field force of questions of “recognition,” and of a metaphor that has often served to recognize and reference the Americas, the “New World.” The “new” is, like “emergence,” a term of relation; it is also an incomplete translation of the unknown, limiting it to articulations of difference with respect to the old. This “translation,” as we will see, usually speaks in the recognized and recognizable language of the old, and thus displays, for better or worse, curious ironies or even outright contradictions. Such doubleness, I will try to show, has been a longstanding feature of the emergence of the new and of North America, from the irruptions of the difference and radical otherness of the “New World” beyond the shifts of what has been called “the age of multiculturalism” (Bernheimer 1995).

I am thinking here in particular of constellations that resist happy dialectic sublation in some “developmental” concept of emergence. Doubled texture and complex joining of often contradictory or paradoxical forms of cognition, combining recognition and re-cognition of categories in what I will call here re/cognition, seem to be the hallmark of cultural shifts and emergence. Discussing a problematic that will recur at several junctures below, for instance, Anthony Appiah thus qualifies as an “impossible project” the lifelong attempts of W. E. B. Du Bois – justly famous in this context for the phrase “double consciousness” – to come to terms with the contradictions of “race.” Yet Du Bois was not alone in being “unable to escape the notion of race he explicitly rejected”; Appiah registers a recurrence of “this curious conjunction of the reliance on and the repudiation of race” (Appiah 1992:46) in other contexts. A curious “conjunction” indeed, a coexistence of elements that seem to contradict and exclude each other, yet continue to emerge in a paradoxical double “unit.” Arnold Krupat, as I discuss in Chapter 5, critiques a related doubleness in the conjunction of ratio and natio in The Heirs of Columbus, Gerald Vizenor’s redeployment (from a “crossblood” Native perspective) of “Columbus,” that foundational signifier of the “New” World but also of colonization and oppression. While one can point to the contradictions, as these commentators do, it is also possible to detect and emphasize, in this curious bifocal mode of doubleness, a structure of translation that articulates the contradictory mode by which the “new” surfaces first through the structures of the “old.”

In my exploration of the apparently inevitable, even necessary, contradictions of recent and current cultural emergence, I will reference and query repeatedly both Du Bois’ paradigmatic attempts to think doubleness and contradiction, and the liminality of the “foundational” sign of “Columbus” and the metaphor of the “New World.” Bartolomé de las Casas, whose digest of Columbus’ log-book from the first voyage remains our sole access to that lost document, stressed the lack of usable comparison when he referred to the world after 1492 as “that time so new and like no other” (quoted in Todorov 1999:5, emphasis added). Tzvetan Todorov speaks of the “radical difference” of this “discovery” with previous European ones, in which some earlier knowledge always existed (Todorov 1999:4); and Stephen Greenblatt, as I will discuss in Chapter 2, sees the “incommensurability” of this moment of contact as an “absolute break” with “nothing comparable” before Columbus (Greenblatt 1991:54–5). To read discourses of emergence in such contexts today is to suggest that in some form the “New World” continues as such,⁵ together with cognitive predicaments and possibilities that contradict identical recognition, and suggest voyages of re-cognition and partial non-return.

“Recognition” restricted to the terms of the known – deductive predication – blurs and rescinds the newness of the new as such. It assimilates emergence as stage in the development of the known, and elides new constellations that announce themselves in incommensurability and contradictory doubleness. Raymond Williams helpfully contrasts “the emergent” not only with the “dominant” and the “residual,” but also with forms of incorporation into the dominant culture that resemble – but do not constitute – genuine recognition. The process of emergence is for him

a constantly repeated, and always renewable, move beyond a phase of practical incorporation: usually made much more difficult by the fact that much incorporation looks like recognition, acknowledgement, and thus a form of acceptance. In this complex process there is indeed regular confusion between the locally residual (as a form of resistance to incorporation) and the generally emergent.

(Williams 1977:125)⁶

Recognition based on the categories of the dominant, in this respect, potentially and paradoxically can be residual. Williams thus problematizes the question of recognition – a problematic central, as we will see, to Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk – in ways that link it directly to the instability of double consciousness and its attendant cognitive uncertainty. While recognition depends on a stable system of reference that establishes perspective, hierarchizes foreground–background relations, and allows for pattern matching, double consciousness on the contrary implies continuing vacillation between at least two frames of reference, a state of doubling, doubt, and unresolved encounter. In alternating perspectives and forms of parallel processing, elements of each system are here mutually re-utilized, re-functionalized, and re-cognized through the other system without terminal reconciliation.⁷ The necessity and possibility of such processes as a form of the “new” produces what I reference here as re/cognition. Narratives of emergence, I contend, routinely attempt recognition of the new by means of the old (and initially try to be recognized themselves in terms of the old) yet in that process exceed such replication, often in forms of double consciousness;⁸ if “successful,” they are failed attempts at identical return.

To think about the “New World” in terms of “newness” is profoundly paradoxical. As the terms “colony,” “return,” or “errand into the wilderness” suggest in aspects of their meaning, the enterprise of European settlement in the “New World” was directly predicated upon the assumption of replication of identity and sameness. If I base my account and analyses in the following pages to a considerable extent on the trope of “double consciousness,” it is partially because I think that the “New World” signifies both the persistent and successful attempts at replication that have motivated it as project, and at the same time the spectacular and productive failure (to borrow a term from the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins) of a “meme”⁹ – the combination of sameness (fr. même), memory, and repetition that seems to guarantee the replication of circular return and certainty. Circularity and replication are to some extent implicit in the Latin colere (“to cultivate”) and its past participle, cultus, from which the words colony and culture are derived; our understanding of “colony” adds the move in space that projects the replication of sameness elsewhere.

Inaugurated in expectations of replication, the “New World” was as much “discovered” as it was articulated through colonial projections that sought to decipher and recognize familiar patterns. These cognitive maps often consisted of texts. Perceptual constructions of the New World, natural as they may appear today, developed in figurative or literal acts of reading with particular histories and inter-texts (e.g. Grafton 1992). These processes of interpretation and projection were an integral part of voyages out in which discovery was undertaken with expectations of return; a physical return to the port of departure, initially, and often a commercial and political one in terms of goods and influence; in another sense, however, these expectations of return concerned also the intellectual, epistemological, or spiritual assumptions that had initiated the exploration: a search for confirmation of its reason and experiment, and for recognition of its guiding assumptions. Yet this search produced often multiple “returns” and forms of cognition.

If navigators read the sky’s natural constellations and the horizon around them, they were also interpreters who combined their own assumptions with the charts that had been drawn and narrated by others, and produced in various combinations of observation, imagination, and belief. One of the most influential narrative records of such acts of reading, Christopher Columbus’ log-book and reports addressed to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, demonstrates vividly the drive for confirmation and recognition of “reading” patterns, for example in the quest for China, or for the resources for another “crusade to liberate Jerusalem” (Todorov 1999:11). (By all accounts a devout Christian,¹⁰ Columbus also expected to read God’s work and writing in all creation). His (de)ciphering of what we call the New World produced thus a strange layering of, and oscillation between, his expectations and the experience of a recalcitrant reality that resisted such “recognition.” His voyage west followed his reading of Marco Polo’s voyage east narrated in the Travels.¹¹/ Like the Bible, Polo’s book was one of the main intertexts that “co-authored” Columbus’ narratives, in which he sought to recognize and confirm the prefiguration of Marco Polo’s Orient; at the same time he “recognized” and rewrote the “New World” in the language and with the names of Christianity and Spain, beginning with San Salvador (Guanahaní), Santa Maria de Concepción, Ferdinanda, Isabella, Juana (after Ferdinand’s son, Prince Juan) (Cohen 1969:115; Todorov 1999:27).¹² Guided by Polo’s Travels, Columbus “recognized” Hispaniola as Polo’s Chipango (Japan), assuming Cuba to be the Asian mainland: “Whether to the last he still believed that the coasts of Panama, and Costa Rica and the Mosquito coast of Nicaragua, which he explored on his fourth voyage, were also parts of Asia is uncertain. But it would seem so” (Cohen 1969:16). Yet while Columbus tried to hold on to his topography and the belief of having recognized what Polo had made known, the multiple cognitive departures and overdetermined returns of his enterprise pointed elsewhere. As Todorov remarks about “his crusading obsession”: “Paradoxically, it will be a feature of Columbus’ medieval mentality that leads him to discover America and inaugurate the modern era” (1999:12).

The most influential foundational narrative from the anglophone record of the New World, the Puritan search for a New Jerusalem and exodus to New England, also reread and projected previous Christian na...

Table of contents

• Cover
• The New North American Studies
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Comparative North American literary history, alterity, and a hermeneutics of non-transcendence
• 3 W. E. B. Du Bois, Hegel, and the staging of alterity
• 4 Double consciousness, African American tradition, and the vernacular: Henry Louis Gates and Houston Baker
• 5 Native writing, orality, and anti-imperial translation: Thomas King and Gerald Vizenor
• 6 Genealogies of difference
• Notes
• References
• Index