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Introduction: Untimely Ancestors

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Book cover Ethnic Modernism and the Making of US Literary Multiculturalism

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Abstract

Sorensen shows that Zora Neale Hurston, Younghill Kang, D’Arcy McNickle, and Américo Paredes participate in a distinct mode of modernism that critiques the constrained position of ethnic subjects within modernity. Furthermore, he demonstrates that these authors share a central concern with contemporary practices of critical multiculturalism. This genealogy has gone unrecognized because current practices of literary recovery tend to pass over the profound negativity of these works in order to produce a celebratory model of literary history in which the injustices of the past are undone in the present. The chapter elaborates an alternative mode of literary history that emphasizes the untimely aspects of recovery movements and provides a more dynamic account of the participation of ethnic writers in literary modernism.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In David Palumbo-Liu’s account the project of critical multiculturalism “explores the fissures, tensions, and sometimes contradictory demands of multiple cultures, rather than (only) celebrating the plurality of cultures” (“Introduction,” The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions, and Interventions, ed. Palumbo-Liu [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995], 5.

  2. 2.

    These novels, like “the belated and revisionary bildungsromane of modernism” that Jed Esty studies, challenge and complicate the traditional bildungsroman’s teleology of development (Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fictions of Development [New York: Oxford University Press, 2012], 18).

  3. 3.

    Tell My Horse [1938] (Berkeley: Turtle Island, 1983), 235–6. Henceforth cited parenthetically.

  4. 4.

    Stephen Ross, “Introduction: The Missing Link,” Modernism and Theory: A Critical Debate, ed. Stephen Ross (London: Routledge, 2009), 6, original italics.

  5. 5.

    Ibid., 6.

  6. 6.

    Jameson calls modernity “a unique kind of rhetorical effect” and “a trope” in A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (New York: Verso, 2002), 34. Friedman gestured ambivalently at a narrative understanding of modernity in “Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/Modernism” Modernism/Modernity 8.3 (September 2001): 503–5 (henceforth cited as “Definitional”). She embraces the narrative account more wholeheartedly in “Periodizing Modernism: Postcolonial Modernities and the Space/Time Borders of Modernist Studies” Modernism/modernity 13.3 (September 2006): 426 (henceforth cited as “Periodizing”) and “Planetarity: Musing Modernist Studies,” Modernism/modernity 17.3 (September 2010): 477–8 (henceforth cited as “Planetarity”).

  7. 7.

    Mary Louise Pratt, “Modernity and Periphery: Towards a Global and Relational Analysis,” from Beyond Dichotomies, ed. Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi, (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003), 27–8.

  8. 8.

    Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 32.

  9. 9.

    Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, “The Name and Nature of Modernism,” in Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890–1930 (New York: Penguin, 1991), 27.

  10. 10.

    Jonathan Flatley, Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 32.

  11. 11.

    Ibid., 32.

  12. 12.

    Ibid., 83.

  13. 13.

    Viet Thanh Nguyen, Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 7.

  14. 14.

    Ralph E. Rodriguez, “Chicano Studies and the Need to Not Know,” American Literary History 22.1 (Spring 2010): 181.

  15. 15.

    One index of this situation can be found in Kenneth Warren’s What Was African American Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). Warren’s titular question has been adopted by scholars of other ethnic literatures such as Kirsten Silva Gruesz in “What Was Latino Literature?” PMLA 127.2 (February 2012): 335–41 and Timothy Yu, who raised the rhetorical stakes in “Has Asian American Studies Failed?” Journal of Asian American Studies 15.3 (October 2012): 327–9.

  16. 16.

    “Introduction,” The Ethnic Canon, 3.

  17. 17.

    The fullest expression of this critique is Walter Benn Michaels’s The Trouble with Diversity (New York: Henry Holt, 2006).

  18. 18.

    Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 1.

  19. 19.

    Berlant includes “upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and lively, durable intimacy” among these frayed fantasies (Cruel Optimism, 3).

  20. 20.

    Avoiding this developmental narrative destabilizes the ethnic canon in keeping with Palumbo-Liu’s sense that “an ethnic canon should be always in revision and contestation, its critics conscious of both its historical and ideological constructedness and their own pedagogical goals” (“Introduction,” The Ethnic Canon, 14).

  21. 21.

    On the identity industry see John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, Ethnicity, Inc. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 22–9. On culture as a resource see George Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 9–13.

  22. 22.

    The untimeliness of recovery offers one way to address what Eric Hayot has called “the near-total dominance of the concept of periodization in literary studies” (On Literary Worlds [New York: Oxford University Press, 2012], 149).

  23. 23.

    Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 4–5. In taking up Love’s ideas in my discussion of ethnic modernists I respond to Love’s suggestion that “attention to backward modernism might be helpful in exploring the aesthetic strategies of modernity’s others” (6).

  24. 24.

    Ibid., 27.

  25. 25.

    Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Utility and Liability of History for Life,” Unfashionable Observations, trans. Richard T. Gray (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 86–7.

  26. 26.

    Nietzsche’s Unzeitgemässe has been translated as “unfashionable,” “untimely,” and “out of season.” For a discussion of these translational choices, see Richard T. Gray, “Translator’s Afterword,” Nietzsche, Unfashionable Observations, 396–400.

  27. 27.

    Walter Benn Michaels is the leading exponent of the “strong containment” version of new historicism among scholars of twentieth century literature of the United States. For Michaels, “It seems wrong to think of the culture you live in as the object of your affections: you don’t like or dislike it, you exist in it, and the things you like and dislike exist in it too” (The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism, [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987], 18). For a consideration of the role of new historicism in modernist studies, see Andrew John Miller, “Fables of Progression: Modernism, Modernity, Narrative,” Modernism and Theory, 176–89 and Scott McCracken, “Modernism and the Moment of Defeat: Response to Andrew John Miller,” Modernism and Theory, 190–4.

  28. 28.

    Jerome McGann, “Introduction: A Point of Reference,” Historical Studies and Literary Criticism, ed. Jerome McGann, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 11.

  29. 29.

    Grosz theorizes time, history, and politics in The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004) and Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).

  30. 30.

    Grosz, The Nick of Time, 8.

  31. 31.

    Ibid., 179.

  32. 32.

    Ibid., 187.

  33. 33.

    For important efforts to theorize periodization in literary studies, see Hayot, On Literary Worlds, 147–70, the essays collected in Virginia Jackson, ed., On Periodization: Selected Essays from the English Institute (Cambridge: The English Institute in collaboration with the ACLS, 2010), and Ted Underwood, Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of English Studies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013).

  34. 34.

    Baker argues “that judgments on Afro-American ‘modernity’ and the ‘Harlem Renaissance’ that begin with notions of British, Anglo-American, and Irish ‘modernism’ as ‘successful’ objects, projects, and processes to be emulated by Afro-Americans are misguided” (Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987], xvi). Similarly, Saldívar distinguishes Paredes’s work from that of the canonical “generation of the post-World War I European and American high modernists” in “The Borders of Modernity: Américo Paredes’s Between Two Worlds and the Chicano National Subject” in The Ethnic Canon, 74. Vizenor goes a step further by arguing that tribal traditions and trickster discourses are postmodern in the Preface to Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures, ed. Gerald Vizenor (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989), ix–xiii.

  35. 35.

    Palumbo-Liu, “Introduction,” The Ethnic Canon, 20.

  36. 36.

    Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz discuss the expansion of new modernist studies in “The New Modernist Studies” PMLA 123.3 (May 2008): 737–48. Hayot provides a less sanguine view of the attempt to remake modernist studies in On Literary Worlds, 2–6.

  37. 37.

    Patricia Clare Ingham, “Amorous Dispossessions: Knowledge, Desire, and the Poet’s Dead Body,” in Elizabeth Scala and Sylvia Federico, eds., The Posthistorical Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 16.

  38. 38.

    I undertake this reassessment in the spirit of Maura Nolan’s claim that rather than offering an opportunity to transcend historicism, the present moment offers “the best perspective on what is valuable [about historicism as] a mode of thought or a theoretical perspective” (Maura Nolan, “Historicism After Historicism,” The Posthistorical Middle Ages, 63).

  39. 39.

    See, for example, work on little magazines such as: Suzanne Churchill and Adam McKible, eds., Little Magazines and Modernism: New Approaches (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); Suzanne Churchill, The Little Magazine Others and the Renovation of Modern American Poetry (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); Adam McKible, The Space and Place of Modernism: The Russian Revolution, Little Magazines, and New York (New York: Routledge, 2002); Mark S. Morrisson, The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001); and Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

  40. 40.

    The work of the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage project housed at the University of Houston, which publishes recovered texts through Arté Público Press, offers fellowships, and sponsors a biannual conference, is only one example. For a discussion of this project, see Rodrigo Lazo, “Migrant Archives: New Routes in and out of American Studies” in Russ Castronovo and Susan Gillman, eds., States of Emergency: The Object of American Studies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 36–54.

  41. 41.

    See “A Net Made of Holes: Toward a Cultural History of Chicano Literature,” Modern Language Quarterly 62.1 (2001): 1–18; Life in Search of Readers: Reading (in) Chicano/a Literature (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003); and “Recovering Chicano/a Literary Histories: Historiography Beyond Borders,” PMLA 120 (May 2005): 796–805.

  42. 42.

    Martín-Rodríguez, Life in Search of Readers, 150.

  43. 43.

    See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 3–16.

  44. 44.

    Ibid., 6. See also Simon Gikandi’s claim that Caribbean authors “cannot adopt the history and culture of European modernism […] but neither can they escape from it” Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 6.

  45. 45.

    On Literary Worlds, 156.

  46. 46.

    Hart, Nations of Nothing but Poetry, 116.

  47. 47.

    Eric Hayot, Haun Saussy, and Stephen G. Yao, “Sinographies: An Introduction,” Sinographies: Writing China, eds. Eric Hayot, Haun Saussy, and Stephen G. Yao (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), xi.

  48. 48.

    Ibid.

  49. 49.

    Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 99. Agamben theorizes potentiality in the essays collected in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford University Press, 1999).

  50. 50.

    Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 121–122.

  51. 51.

    Ibid., 125.

  52. 52.

    Ibid., 123.

  53. 53.

    Ibid., 126. Flatley argues persuasively that structures of feeling are more important than Williams himself recognized (Affective Mapping, 24–7).

  54. 54.

    Moretti, “The Slaughterhouse of Literature,” Modern Language Quarterly, 61.1 (March 2000): 207–27.

  55. 55.

    Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History (London: Verso, 2005), 17.

  56. 56.

    McGann, “Introduction: A Point of Reference,” (17).

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  1. Colorado State University, Fort Collins, USA

    Leif Sorensen

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© 2016 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Nature America Inc.

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Sorensen, L. (2016). Introduction: Untimely Ancestors. In: Ethnic Modernism and the Making of US Literary Multiculturalism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57019-2_1

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