Abstract
Sorensen theorizes recovery as a crucial enabling strategy for the development of contemporary multiculturalism and the new modernist studies that nevertheless can gloss over earlier texts’ profound critiques of modernity in favor of a redemptive version of literary history. Using a brief reading of Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo as a case study, he elaborates an alternative theory of recovery in which the untimeliness of recovered texts is no longer a scandal to be avoided or a wrong to be undone but instead a key source of their continued potential to disturb and disrupt the common sense of modernity.
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Notes
- 1.
See Margaret Cohen, The Sentimental Education of the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 20–5.
- 2.
Cohen, The Sentimental Education of the Novel, 25.
- 3.
Lazo, “Migrant Archives,” 37–8.
- 4.
Grosz, The Nick of Time, 186.
- 5.
Reed, Mumbo Jumbo [1972] (New York: Scribner, 1996), 218.
- 6.
This reader would also find that Reed’s reference is not an exact reproduction of the opening sentences of Bontemps’s introduction, which read: “Time is not a river. Time is a pendulum.” (Arna Bontemps, Black Thunder [1936] [Boston: Beacon Press, 1968], vii).
- 7.
Ibid., xiv. Bontemps lists Claude McKay’s Harlem Shadows, Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry, Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom, John W. Vandercook’s Black Majesty: The Life of Christophe, King of Haiti, W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, and James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man among the volumes targeted for destruction.
- 8.
Christopher Douglas, A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 284. For Douglas’s reading of Mumbo Jumbo, see 260–85.
- 9.
In Douglas’s account, the first stage of literary multiculturalism takes place in the 1920s and 1930s and is guided by an anthropological conception of culture. The second extends from 1940 to 1965 and favors a sociological account of culture.
- 10.
Douglas, A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism, 318.
- 11.
Ibid., 95–6.
- 12.
Douglas’s discussion of the different fates of Richard Wright’s and Hurston’s works as recovered texts shows that he is keenly aware of the cultural politics of recovery.
- 13.
Martín-Rodriguez, Life in Search of Readers, 1–3. See also the exchange between David Palumbo-Liu and Mark Chiang concerning the material and institutional construction of reading publics. Palumbo-Liu, “The Occupation of Form: (Re)theorizing Literary History,” American Literary History 20.4 (Winter 2008): 814–35 and Chiang, “Capitalizing Form: The Globalization of the Literary Field: A Response to David Palumbo-Liu,” American Literary History 20.4 (Winter 2008): 836–44.
- 14.
Spahr, Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2001), 4.
- 15.
See, for example, H. Aram Veeser’s claim that New Historicism enables critics to “study centuries worth of literature within capitalism on precisely its own terms” (“The New Historicism,” in The New Historicism Reader, ed. H. Aram Veeser [New York: Routledge, 1994], 3).
- 16.
Craig S. Womack, “Theorizing American Indian Experience,” in Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective, eds. Craig S. Womack, Daniel Heath Justice and Christopher B. Teuton (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), 406.
- 17.
Grosz, The Nick of Time, 117.
- 18.
The Surrounded was originally published by Dodd Mead in 1936 and was recovered by the University of New Mexico Press, which brought it back into print in 1964 and then issued a new edition in 1978, the year after McNickle’s death. Scribner’s first published both of Kang’s novels. The independent Asian American publisher Kaya Books issued a new edition of East Goes West in 1997, but The Grass Roof remains out of print. Their Eyes Were Watching God has the most complex textual itinerary; it was first published by Lippincott, reprinted in 1965 by Fawcett Publications, in 1969 by the Negro Universities Press, and again in 1979 by the University of Illinois Press before Harper’s brought it back into the mainstream in 1990. Most dramatically, George Washington Gómez, which was unpublishable in the 1930s, has gone through multiple editions since Arte Público Press, a successful publisher of new and recovered writing by US Hispanic writers based at the University of Houston, initially published it in 1990.
- 19.
Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 229.
- 20.
Ibid.,169.
- 21.
See the essays collected in Memory against Culture: Arguments and Reminders, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), especially “Forgetting Africa,” (65–76); “Forgetful Remembering,” (77–91); “Memory and Counter-Memory,” (92–105); “History, Memory, Remembering,” (106–18); and “Ethnography and Memory,” (132–42).
- 22.
Washington, “Foreword,” Their Eyes Were Watching God (New York: Harper & Row, 1990), xiv.
- 23.
Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” trans. Josué V. Harari, in The Michel Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 111.
- 24.
For a skeptical discussion of this narrative of arriving at maturity in the context of Native American literary history, see Owens Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 59–67.
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Sorensen, L. (2016). Interchapter: Desperately Seeking Untimeliness. In: Ethnic Modernism and the Making of US Literary Multiculturalism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57019-2_6
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