23
Globalization
Literary history is always presentist in its orientation, reinventing narratives of the past in accordance with contemporary concerns, and considerations of globalization at the turn of the twenty-first century have served to frame the entire trajectory of American literary history in a new perspective. Although the discourse around contemporary forms of globalization has been quite distinctive, the notion of ideas that are in scope universal rather than particularistic, global rather than national, has an extensive provenance. Just as the emphasis on multiculturalism in American literary study of the 1990s led to revisionist accounts of Hispanic encounters in the sixteenth century, so this chapter will start from the contemporary moment and will then trace the idea of globalization back through American cultural history, to suggest what traditional narratives centered upon the emergence of national identity tended to leave out. Whereas national narratives have often attempted to present themselves as the purveyor of universal values, notably in Cold War myths about the benefits of American “freedom,” a more self-conscious focus upon the methodological framework of globalization would concern itself explicitly with ways in which local or national designs interface with a world wide web.
Globalization since 1980 has been impelled by various factors, the most conspicuous of which is a revolution in communications technology that has made the transfer of ideas and commodities across national frontiers much easier, and which in turn has left the economies of nation-states more exposed to rapid transfers of global capital by transnational corporations and others. It was in the 1980s, according to Roger Burbach, that “finance capital began to exert a more decisive influence over state policies” (7), with cuts in public funding running alongside a shift from labor-intensive to capital-intensive industry, as a process of economic globalization was driven by the “transnationalization” of production and of capital ownership (25). All this happened quite suddenly: as Thomas L. Friedman remarked, when Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992 virtually no one outside exclusive government circles had access to email (10), and it did not become widespread in universities until a year or two later; but by the end of the 1990s, email forms of communication, to which national frontiers were no impediment, had become equally ubiquitous as, and distinctly cheaper than, conversations on the telephone. In the last two decades of the twentieth century, there was thus a convergence of different types of social formation, with the widespread availability of information technology (in international forms such as satellite television and mobile phones as well as the Internet) running alongside, and indeed arguably helping to bring about, the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. This meant that the “three worlds” theory, the established basis for familiar assumptions about the geopolitical and geocultural order since World War II, gave way to a new perception that the world was, in fact, interconnected in a single system or network. As Michael Denning observes, the term “globalization,” with its implication of amorphous boundaries, effectively superseded “international,” the “keyword of an earlier moment,” which tended by contrast to indicate a process of interaction across still stable national domains (Culture 17). The classic statement of globalization by Arjun Appadurai in 1996 posits five dimensions of global cultural flow – ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes – all of which testify to ways in which various forms of social, economic and ideological capital circulate transnationally. Noting the absence of “isomorphism” in new conceptions of locality, Appadurai proposed instead “the configuration of cultural forms in today’s world as fundamentally fractal” (Modernity 46).
In recent American literature, the hard edges of globalization have been represented most obviously by writers such as William Gibson, a native of South Carolina whose science fiction narratives now project versions of technological displacement from his base in Vancouver, British Columbia, and Don DeLillo, whose later novels such as Cosmopolis (2003) and Falling Man (2007) have focused on the more dehumanized qualities of financial markets and global terrorism. The multibillionaire hero of Cosmopolis regards “data itself” as “soulful and glowing, a dynamic aspect of the life process,” as expressed in “the eloquence of alphabets and numeric systems, now fully realized in electronic form, in the zero-oneness of the world, the digital imperative that defined every breath of the planet’s living billions” (24). The globalization of American literature during this period was also underwritten by the increasing prominence of English as an international language – not, usually, as a replacement for local languages, but as something to run alongside them, a lingua franca – and this was also interwoven with the exponential growth of information technology at the end of the twentieth century. As David Crystal has explained, the “world status” of the English language was primarily the result of two factors: “the expansion of British colonial power, which peaked towards the end of the nineteenth century, and the emergence of the United States as the leading economic power of the twentieth century” (59). This increasing viability of English as a world language thus helped to create a new, international version of it as an agent of communication, most obvious perhaps in the truncated codes used by air traffic control systems and the like, and this again helped to disseminate the idea of American culture as a global rather than a narrowly nationalist phenomenon. Much of Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) is set in Japan, with Gibson (who did not himself visit Japan until 1988) claiming that he prepared for the novel by observing “Japanese tourists” in Vancouver and by taking the street scenes for his fictional Chiba City “from a Japan Air Lines calendar” (McCaffery 285). Even if this is not literally true, it exemplifies ways in which local and global jostle together linguistically and culturally in his work. Rather than romanticizing the idea of exile, as did Ernest Hemingway and the members of his “Lost Generation,” Gibson’s narratives prefer creatively to dissolve categorical divisions between home and abroad.
When the idea of “a global society” began to be widely discussed at the beginning of the 1990s, its emergence was frequently understood in progressive terms as what American scholar Betty Jean Craige in 1991 described as a “clash between traditionalism, manifesting itself in nationalism, and cultural holism, manifesting itself in globalism” (396). Cultural holism, as defined by Craige, involved “a widespread appreciation of diversity, which multicultural education fosters” (400), and a capacity for “appreciating … the world’s variety of human expression” (397). This emollient liberal thesis was taken up and adjusted by Francis Fukuyama, whose 1992 book The End of History identified not environmentalism or multiculturalism but the “spread of a universal consumer culture” (xv) – along with the natural ally of a free market, “prosperous and stable liberal democracies” (12) – as the benevolent forces whose global dissemination would eventually put paid to the jealously guarded interests of local tyrants. Political theorist Anthony King concurred with this conception of globalization as universalism, arguing in 1991 how the basic paradox of globalization was the way its exposure of seemingly new horizons led to a sense of societal and ethnic difference grounded upon identity politics, a reaction that effectively served to obscure the common social and economic sources that in fact produced such diversity: “the degree to which cultures are self-consciously ‘different,’ ” wrote King, “is an indication of how much they are the same” (153). Slavoj Žižek, in a 1997 essay, similarly linked the newfound popularity of multiculturalism in institutional terms to the rise of multinational capitalism, arguing that both involved trading in commodified versions of diversity, where sentimentalized versions of cultural pluralism and difference could exist alongside a political investment in the new liberal world order.
This kind of latent complicity between national tradition and a rhetoric of multiculturalism has been internalized by much of the most popular ethnic writing in the United States over the past two decades, where there has often been an effort to domesticate globalization, to represent it not as something disturbing or disorienting but as a prospect fundamentally consonant with larger American narratives. The 1996 novel by Chinese American author Gish Jen, Mona in the Promised Land, draws upon the iconography of a “promised land” to evoke a world where the fluidity of social and ethnic transformation (in this case, a metamorphosis of Chinese into Jewish) can be valorized: “Tell them this is America,” says the heroine’s best friend, “anything is possible” (84). This notion of infinite possibility is associated here with old American pioneers such as Lewis and Clark (148), and ultimately with Ovid’s testimony to the powers of change, flux, and motion, as cited in the novel’s epigraph (viii). It is also noticeable how much of Jen’s narrative takes place in educational settings, both Mona’s high school and her elder sister’s Harvard, thus creating for this rite-of-passage novel something like a pedagogic imaginary, where coming of age involves being initiated into the moral circumference of American civic life. Even Ovid is being read in Mona’s high school English class, and indeed at one point the novel draws this analogy between education and civic life directly, saying how Mona
understands that this is how life operates in America, that it’s just like the classroom. You have to raise your own hand – no one is going to raise it for you – and then you have to get ready to stand up and give the right answer so that you may gulp down your whole half-cup of approval. (67)
It is true that there are in Jen’s novel elements of pastiche and irony hedging in all these invocations of a promised land, an iconography that is both evoked and revoked simultaneously. What this book does suggest, however, are the powerful institutional and pedagogic reasons for wanting to cling to an idea of national promise, even at a time when the theoretical premises of US exceptionalism have been all but exhausted.
Various other well-received American novels during the first decade of the twenty-first century represented national and religious difference in terms that Crèvecoeur in the 1780s would have endorsed, seeing them as a crucible within which a new definition of the United States as a global society could be forged. Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (2003) is centered on a native of Calcutta, Ashoke Ganguli, who does his doctorate in electrical engineering at MIT and then gets a job at a university in Massachusetts, where he teaches for the rest of his life. Despite his arranged marriage to an Indian woman and the family’s frequent trips back to India to visit relatives, this is basically a novel of immigration and assimilation, where the protagonists learn ultimately how to participate in the American way of life. It is true that there is a continuous emphasis throughout the book on displacement and doubling, with Ashoke taking his son’s name from the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol, a historical figure who also spent most of his adult life outside his native country. “Being a foreigner” is described here as “a sort of lifelong pregnancy, a perpetual wait, a continuous feeling out of sorts” (49); and that sense of estrangement extends to the next generation, as Gogol’s marriage to his fellow Bengali immigrant Moushumi fails, with their shared ethnic heritage being unable finally to overcome their everyday cultural differences, and Gogol himself coming to feel that a sense of things being “out of place and wrong” (287) is part of his lifelong destiny. Nevertheless, the lucid realism of Lahiri’s novel ultimately aligns itself in many ways with the promise of America. Symptomatically, during a high school expedition where he is taken to visit a seventeenth-century New England graveyard, Gogol feels himself linked to “these ancient Puritan spirits, these very first immigrants to America” (71); and the refrain of his mother, who is appalled by this educational expedition and says it could happen “only in America” (70), reinforces the sense of American exceptionalism that pervades this narrative. As if to emphasize again the philosophical continuities between “classic” American literature and these new ethnic formations, Lahiri’s more recent collection of stories, Unaccustomed Earth (2008), takes its title from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), with the epigraph to Lahiri’s book quoting directly from “The Custom-House,” Hawthorne’s prefatory essay to his novel: “My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth” (xi). In this way, Lahiri aligns herself with Hawthorne to imply clearly how a process of multicultural transformation is in accord with an American spirit of assimilation and with the practice of putting new wine in old bottles.
Similarly Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland (2008) is set in the posttraumatic landscape of New York after 9/11, where the hero, a native of Holland who has married an English woman and who now works on the American stock market, has all kinds of bureaucratic tussles with the federal Department of Homeland Security. Nevertheless, what really takes the interest of Hans van den Broek here is the evolution of cricket in America, inspired by a chance meeting with a native of Trinidad, Chuck Ramkisson, who has drawn up all kinds of business plans to build a sports stadium and market cricket in the United States. As the novel goes on, it becomes clear that this is not purely a pipe dream: according to the latest census, so we are told, there are nearly a million English-speaking West Indians in the New York metropolitan area, and at one point Hans joins Chuck and his friends in a sports bar to watch a cricket match between Pakistan and New Zealand being “broadcast live from Lahore” (51). Chuck also persuades Hans that cricket actually has a long buried history in America, that “Benjamin Franklin himself was a cricket man” (14), and that the “first international team sports fixtures anywhere were cricket matches between the USA and Canada in the 1840s and 1850s” (98). These are established facts, and they lend the novel’s transnational dimension an air of historical authenticity. At the same time, cricket clearly represents an alien culture in terms of mainstream modern America. Chuck says at one point, “You want a taste of how it feels to be a black man in this country? Put on the white clothes of the cricketer. Put on white to feel black” (13). And later on, after Chuck’s shady connections with the gangster world have caused him to be murdered, his former business associate Farek Patel says, “There’s a limit to what Americans understand. The limit is cricket” (243). The idea here, as Chuck himself puts it, is that for all of their global ambitions, “Americans cannot really see the world. They think they can, but they can’t” (204). There is, in other words, a tension in this novel between a theoretical receptiveness in the United States to the impulse of globalization and the kind of entrenched, defensive mentality that actually characterizes the country in its fearful post-9/11 state.
The way that Hans attempts to reconcile these two contradictory forces is by remapping the history and terrain of the United States to encompass its Dutch origins. This provides the source of the novel’s title, Netherland, which speaks not only to the country of the Netherlands but also to the idea of a land beneath the country’s topography, a “nether-land” in that double sense. Describing himself at one point as a Rip Van Winkle figure, Hans also imagines the American countryside outside New York morphing into the landscape of Netherlanders and Indians that comprised Dutch national territory in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. All this is highly reminiscent of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, at the end of which the narrator Nick Carraway links Gatsby’s home landscape of Long Island with “the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes” (140). What O’Neill’s novel does, in effect, is intertextually rewrite The Great Gatsby for the twenty-first century, redescribing the history of America as properly a multiethnic phenomenon, and correlating the promise that Carraway finds in Gatsby with the willingness to make “a go of things” that Hans admires in Chuck (158). For all of its multiethnic inventiveness, then, Netherland, like The Namesake, ultimately acquiesces in a traditional myth of American exceptionalism, of America as a “providential country” (86), where the new conditions of multiculturalism have been harnessed in the name of a refurbished and updated national narrative.
What such textual superimposition tends to ignore, however, is the way The Great Gatsby itself was written and published at a specific historical moment, 1925, that was quite different in terms of its institutional politics from the contemporary culture of globalization. It was this period between the two world wars in the first half of the twentieth century that saw the emergence of American literature as a discrete nationalist phenomenon. The consolidation and standardization of the United States after the Civil War had led to the legal suppression of French in Louisiana in 1868, after which time the language could no longer be taught in the state’s secondary schools, while the establishment of monolingualism as US national policy was strengthened around the time of the First World War, with former President Theodore Roosevelt declaring in 1917, “We must … have but one language. That must be the language of the Declaration of Independence” (Shell 8). The controversial nature of Roosevelt’s agenda at this time was highlighted by the intense debates in the 1910s about how immigration and multilingualism could or should contribute to US national life. In a 1914 book entitled The Old World and the New, Edward Alsworth Ross, a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a particular favorite of Roosevelt’s, argued that an influx of new immigrants who did not share fundamental American values was damaging to the US body politic. Despite being much more receptive to the immigrant condition, Randolph Bourne’s essay “Trans-National America,” which appeared in Atlantic Monthly in July 1916, similarly took for granted “the failure of the ‘melting-pot’ ” (107) and the need for “the great American democratic experiment” to find other ways of defining “American nationalism” (117), perhaps through some form of “dual citizenship” (120). For Bourne, global America was essentially a federal rather than a nationalist entity. “[T]here is no distinctively American culture,” he wrote (115): “What we have achieved has been rather a cosmopolitan federation of national colonies, of foreign cultures, from whom the sting of devastating competition has been removed. America is already the world-federation in miniature” (117). H.L. Mencken’s The American Language, which first appeared in 1919, also made a point of emphasizing how the American vernacular was a polyglot phenomenon made up of words from many tongues other than English, while the first Cambridge History of American Literature, which was issued in four volumes between 1917 and 1921, included in its final volume two chapters on “Non-English Writings” (Pearce 280), noticeably more than subsequent versions of the Cambridge History have done. In the 1910s, in other words, the extent to which American literature and culture should (or should not) be seen as exclusively English was a widely debated topic, with the conservative position of Roosevelt and Ross being fiercely contested by the more inclusive politics of Mencken, Bourne, and others.
As Neil Smith has written, however, this “first formative moment” of globalization, between 1898 and 1919, was checked in the United States by a series of factors that induced America to retreat further from international engagement: the Russian Revolution, labor disquiet and perceived socialist threats at home, and later the rise of fascism in Europe. In 1919 the US Senate rejected participation in the League of Nations, thereby heralding what Smith calls “a deglobalization of sorts” (454) and helping to ensure that paradigms of multilingualism and dual citizenship were taken off the public agenda. The passage of the 1924 Immigration Act radically reduced entry to the United States by some 85% of what it had been on the eve of World War I (Kerber 737), and by the 1920s there was a more pronounced emphasis on American literature as a nationalistic endeavor. This was shown by the establishment in 1921 of an “American Literature” section at the Modern Language Association, a group that published its collective manifesto The Reinterpretation of American Literature under the editorship of Norman Foerster in 1928, and by the inaugural issue of the journal American Literature in 1929. The burgeoning of mass communications in the 1920s thus overlapped with a new culture of academic professionalization that was easily translated into popular pedagogical terms, with the nationalist focus of American literature ensuring its place even in secondary school curricula (Renker 30). Just as The Great Gatsby prides itself on patriotically extolling the “fresh, green breast of the new world” (140), so John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) advances its nationalist credentials by altogether ignoring the Mexican workers who actually formed a large proportion of the agricultural labor market in California during the 1930s, so as to present instead a narrative of decent white Americans being victimized by the economic system.
This version of “racial populism,” as Michael Denning has described it (Cultural 267), depends upon the kind of systematic repression of global narratives that was endemic to American literature and culture in the first half of the twentieth century. This did not, of course, mean that such discursive models of globalization did not exist, sometimes in embryonic forms, but the institutional pressures of the time were generally pulling in quite another direction. The culminating critical work of this period, F.O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance (1941), is characteristic of the late 1930s in its nationalistic emphasis and its insistence on appropriating historical figures as resources for a progressive political agenda. The “rebirth” of Matthiessen’s title consequently carries a triple connotation: not only aligning the English Renaissance with its American nineteenth-century equivalent, so as to boost the cultural status of the latter, but also revivifying the utopian dimensions of Transcendentalism as a counterpart and correlative to the communitarian ethos of Popular Front and New Deal politics in the 1930s. In the way he seeks to collapse chronology and make all time analogous to itself, Matthiessen thus imitates discursively the Emersonian strain that he writes about. Matthiessen was, of course, also party during the interwar years to Foerster’s project of academic professionalization, particularly in the way he sought to establish writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Herman Melville as totemic figures in the pantheon of American literature. Indeed, Matthiessen’s project helped to validate approaches to these canonical figures after World War II that regarded them as exemplars of US democratic freedom, rather than as writers engaged at many different levels with the shifting epistemological and geographic frontiers of the American scene.
It is true, of course, that nearly every American writer from the first half of the twentieth century can usefully be reinterpreted from a global perspective. This has obvious relevance to the more ostentatiously cosmopolitan modernists – Ezra Pound in 1917 specifically designated “provincialism” as “the enemy,” writing that “isolation” (171) was a form of “ignorance” (160) – while Anita Patterson has also argued recently for the repositioning of Langston Hughes within “an extensive transnational literary network” encompassing André Malraux, Bertholt Brecht, Pablo Neruda, and others (94). None of this, however, changes the political pressures toward cultural homogeneity or the academic pressures toward the standardization of national types that framed the conditions within which writers of every era were read and understood in the United States at this time. Robert Frost’s comment in a copy of North of Boston inscribed to Régis Michaud in 1918 about how he was “as sure that the colloquial is the root of every good poem as I am that the national is the root of all thought and art” (693) did not, of course, mean that he sought to disregard the influence upon his work of non-Americans such as Edward Thomas; rather, Frost saw his task as to translate global and classical cultural forms into a specifically American idiom. The idiosyncrasy of this nationalistic approach lies in the way it incorporates geography itself as a mode of allegory, promoting the American environment as the source of its own intrinsic meaning and value. What this suggests also is that globalization should be understood not simply as a historical phenomenon, but also as a critical perspective through which American literature of earlier periods can be reframed. One of the most significant aspects of globalization is the way it potentially recuperates latent or implicit counternarratives that were systematically passed over when the institutional matrix of American literature as an academic subject was being consolidated in the middle years of the twentieth century. The recent efforts by Anna Brickhouse and Kirsten Silva Gruesz to highlight the pervasiveness of Hispanic cultural influences within canonical nineteenth-century American literature – in the writing of Longfellow, Hawthorne, Stowe, and others – are only the most visible manifestations of a process of critical reorientation in the twenty-first century that has taken many different forms and shapes, all of which have served to reconfigure US writing in relation to a much wider global sphere.
This process of globalization, then, has the potential to open up the American literary canon in significant new ways. Rather than applauding authors for their inclination to focus primarily on domestic scenes, a global rereading of the American literary tradition would focus more on ways in which the local and the universal coalesce and collide. For instance, the old quest for signs of literary nationalism served to marginalize entirely Richard Alsop’s epic poem of the late eighteenth century, The Charms of Fancy. Alsop’s major poem was written mostly in the mid-1780s, though it was not first published until 1856, long after the author’s death in 1815. Alsop had affiliations with the Connecticut Wits, a group of poets normally written off as conservative pedants who remained altogether blind to the emerging American Romantic spirit; but in The Charms of Fancy Alsop brought together the two sides to his interests, the comparative mythologist and the American patriot, and the result is a remarkable long poem in four cantos that self-consciously situates the formation of the new republic within a global context.
Like the poets of sensibility and the early Romantics – such as William Collins and Philip Freneau – Alsop is attached to images of ruin and desolation, and in the final canto he evokes the “mouldering relics of magnificence” at Thebes (183), going on to prophesy a similar fate of obsolescence for the United States even before the life of the new nation has properly begun:
And shine, Columbia! mid thy favor’d skies,
Some future day may see in dust o’erthrown,
With brambles shadow’d, and with brake o’ergrown. (197)
This ubi sunt theme is unexceptional, of course, but what makes The Charms of Fancy unusual is the way it associates this poetic convention of melancholy with the more specific global remappings of time and space that were taking place in the late eighteenth century. In the first canto, Alsop discusses how Indian civilizations in America have been “Lost in the ocean of revolving years” (35), how remains of “ancient fortifications” have been found in Ohio (40), and how there have been various theories, some of “wild Invention” (36), to explain this mysterious disappearance of a civilization that a thousand years earlier appeared to be flourishing. In the second canto, this comparative mythology is theorized in spatial terms, as Alsop surveys the old civilizations of Egypt, India, Africa, Japan, Korea, Tibet, Borneo, China, and other places. Europe, he says, merits only a “slight mention” (44) on the grounds that it is too familiar already, since Alsop’s primary concern here is to bring to light regions of the world whose cultural achievements have been unjustly neglected:
Shall Greece and Rome, those thread-bare themes of praise,
Alone deserving claim the poet’s lays? …
With servile step pursue the common road.
The way-worn paths so oft by poets trod;
While yet unsung Palmyra’s charms remain,
Unsung the wonders of Egyptia’s plain? (65–6)
For Alsop, the political establishment of the United States in the 1780s as a new world involved just that: a new world, a reconfiguration of conventional geopolitical maps, since the advent of US political independence served effectively to rebalance the entire globe. Alsop effectively conflates geography and history, spatial enlargement and temporal promise, by describing the first survey of “Japon’s extensive isle” as a “distant region of the new-born day” (66); and he writes in this second canto of how it was a “thirst of knowledge” that led “Adventurous Cook” (57) to discover new lands on his voyages to the Pacific in the 1770s:
Wide o’er the immense of seas, in southern skies,
Within itself a world, New Holland lies … (51)
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Where e’er he [Cook] roves, see gladdening islands heave,
And worlds unknown their shrouds of darkness leave. … (57)
The notes to this canto comment extensively on the kangaroo first described by Captain Cook, on the scientific observations of Joseph Banks (who accompanied Cook on his first Pacific voyage), and of how “The island of New Holland [Australia], by far the largest hitherto discovered, is two thousand miles in length, and surpasses Europe in the number of its square miles” (79). Alsop’s annotations here reveal a marked curiosity about geographic and scientific facts – the Chinese, he notes, “have possessed a standard Dictionary of their language, from nearly two hundred years before our era” (102) – and his metacritical framework suggests ways in which the romantic melancholy that pervades The Charms of Fancy is buttressed by a more hard-edged sense of temporal and spatial relativity.
Cultural reactions to globalization in the United States, then, have been intertwined with the larger question of the nation’s relation to questions of universalism, and to the often tense interaction between universal and particular. The exceptionalist thesis, which provided an epistemological ground for the study of American literature and culture for many years, held that the country was a protected space, immune from global currents and uniquely favored by providence: Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams in 1796 of his wish to see an “ocean of fire” between the United States and Europe (1044). Such isolationism has, of course, been challenged over the last 50 years by critical perspectives that have sought to highlight categories – including race, ethnicity, and gender – that could never be circumscribed so comfortably by nationalist concerns. Yet tension between local and global remains a constant theme throughout US literary culture. Thomas Paine in 1776 designated America as an “asylum for all mankind,” rather than just for Americans, and indeed in Common Sense he specifically related this notion of emancipation to a universalist model, writing of how “Freedom hath been hunted round the globe” (100). The question of how America’s heritage relates to the Enlightenment is a crucial one, and the relative marginalization of eighteenth-century writers within the traditional American literary canon testifies to an academic framework where nineteenth-century Romanticism rather than eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism has long been the preferred point of institutional origin.
In Rethinking American History in a Global Age, however, Thomas Bender argues against the “near assimilation of history to national history over the course of the two centuries following the invention of the modern nation-state” (2), and he calls instead for a “thickening” of American history in order to “deprovincialize” it (9–10). Just as Langston Hughes in “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1921) posits an alternative source for American culture in the Congo and the Euphrates, so Walt Whitman in “A Backward Glance O’er Travelled Roads” (1888) acknowledges continuities between his American poems and prior Old World models of “great poems receiv’d from abroad and down the ages.” While continuing to insist that “really great poetry is always … the result of a national spirit” (584), Whitman at the end of his career admits he would never have been able poetically to affirm his New World ideals of “democratic average and basic equality” if he had not stood “with uncover’d head” before the “colossal grandeur” (576) of “Homer, Eschylus, Sophocles, the old German Nibelungen, the ancient Hindoo poems, and one or two other masterpieces, Dante’s among them” (577–8). For all of his emphasis on “autochthonous song” (584), then, Whitman’s poetry encompasses a comparative spirit where global narratives are translated into national forms. Again, the focus is not so much upon local mimesis in itself, but on the ways in which the local and global are symbiotically intertwined with each other, and within this equation Whitman’s poems describe a kind of circle whose radius expands and contracts in accordance with shifts in nationalist emphasis and perspective. There has been some interesting work recently from Wai Chee Dimock and others on ways in which Transcendentalism related to Islam, Hinduism and other world religions outside an accustomed American orbit, and all this suggests ways in which forms of globalization impacted dominant national narratives of US literature in the nineteenth century (on Emerson and Asian religions, see Buell 169–98).
Similarly, the frequent attempts in our day to revise anthologies of American literature so as to balance the time-honored “Puritan origins” story by including Hispanic encounters, from the sixteenth-century writings of Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and others, speak to a kind of globalization process in reverse.1 In this sense, the alternative version of the New York past inscribed in O’Neill’s Netherland epitomizes the kind of revisionist impetus that has become characteristic of the globalization thesis in general. Influenced in part by poststructuralist conceptions of the malleable nature of historical narratives, exponents of globalization in various different fields have sought to redescribe American cultural history as a transnational phenomenon comprising multiple border zones and intersections, rather than one determined merely by unilinear teleologies of immigration and assimilation. Empire, published in 2000 by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, argued against older notions of spatial sanctity by suggesting that twenty-first-century conceptions of imperialism would involve not the establishment of a “territorial center of power” but “a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers” (xii; emphasis in original). In January 2001, similarly, PMLA published a special issue on “Globalizing Literary Studies,” whose general hypothesis was that nation-based approaches to literary study had simply become superannuated: such ideological “coherence,” suggested Paul Jay, “was rooted in a cultural moment that has passed” (43). In all of these cases, a discourse of globalization was mobilized in order to dismantle what were thought to be the increasingly archaic structures of national narratives.
It is, however, abundantly clear from events of the first decade of the twenty-first century – notably 9/11, but also the global financial crisis of 2008 – that there are what Appadurai in 2006 called many “darker sides to globalization” (Fear 3). Appadurai contrasted the “high globalization” theory prevalent in the 1990s (Fear 2), when an ebullient rhetoric of open markets and free trade predominated, to “the phenomenon of grassroots globalization, globalization from below” (Fear x–xi), that has become more visible since the turn of the millennium. This new dynamic of transnational activism first came to general prominence in the riots at the World Trade Organization ministerial conference held in Seattle in 1999, when there was widespread protest against the negative effects of transnational corporations on domestic environments, but the subsequent widespread misery brought about through cumulative domino effects after the collapse of the US subprime mortgage market in 2008 was ample testimony to how closely the world’s national economies are now interlinked. In addition, as Appadurai notes, terrorism might aptly be described as “a kind of metastasis of war, war without spatial or temporal bounds” (Fear 92), a phenomenon that updates the idea of war for the global age. “Terror divorces war from the idea of the nation,” writes Appadurai (Fear 92), and he consequently calls terror “the nightmarish side of globalization,” one that “cannot be divorced from certain deeper crises and contradictions that surround the nation-state” (Fear 33).
In truth, though, such “contradictions” have always been endemic to globalization processes of many different kinds. Expansive global horizons have long carried as their shadow the prospect of a systematic destabilization of local identity, something that has often carried as its corollary a threat of violence, either literal or metaphoric. The disruptions wrought in the heart of the American republic by the twenty-first-century War on Terror or the First World War of 1917–18 are not altogether different in kind from the threats to the US body politic about which Adams and Jefferson were concerned in the 1790s, in the wake of the French Revolution. Globalization in the United States has a long history, but it is a checkered history, and to trace the fluctuations in its fortunes over the course of two centuries is to bear witness also to how the concomitant narrative of cultural nationalism has similarly ebbed and flowed. Exceptionalism and globalization might thus be regarded within the American domain as different sides of the same coin, symbiotically attached to each other, but destined always to present alternative faces to the world. While globalization should not, of course, be regarded as a universal panacea for American (or any other) culture, it is equally a force whose long-term significance cannot be disregarded. While the larger fate of globalization in the twenty-first century remains uncertain, it seems unlikely that US literary studies will ever be able again simply to locate itself “in the American grain,” in the way William Carlos Williams recommended at the historical moment of the subject’s nationalist emergence in 1925. For better or worse, such nativist impulses and exceptionalist assumptions have in the twenty-first century been forced to enter into negotiation with more extensive transnational currents, and the historical map of American literature has necessarily been redrawn to reflect this wider global provenance.
Note
1. See, for example, The Heath Anthology of American Literature, edited by Paul Lauter, whose multicultural emphasis deliberately takes issue with Bercovitch’s Puritan Origins thesis.
References and Further Reading
Alsop, Richard. The Charms of Fancy: A Poem in Four Cantos, with Notes. Ed. Theodore Dwight. New York, 1856.
Appadurai, Arjun. Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Bender, Thomas. “Introduction: Historians, the Nation, and the Plenitude of Narratives.” In Rethinking American History in a Global Age (pp. 1–21). Ed. Thomas Bender. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
Bercovitch, Sacvan. The Puritan Origins of the American Self. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975.
Bourne, Randolph. “Trans-National America.” 1916. In War and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays, 1915–1919 (pp. 107–23). Ed. Carl Resek. New York: Harper and Row, 1964.
Brickhouse, Anna. Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Buell, Lawrence. Emerson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Burbach, Roger. Globalization and Postmodern Politics: From Zapatistas to High-Tech Robber Barons. London: Pluto, 2001.
Craige, Betty Jean. “Literature in a Global Society.” PMLA 106, no. 3 (1991): 395–401.
Crystal, David. English as a Global Language. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
DeLillo, Don. Cosmopolis. New York: Scribner, 2003.
DeLillo, Don. Falling Man: A Novel. New York: Scribner, 2007.
Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. London: Verso, 1996.
Denning, Michael. Culture in the Age of Three Worlds. London: Verso, 2004.
Dimock, Wai Chee. Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. 1925. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Foerster, Norman, ed. The Reinterpretation of American Literature: Some Contributions toward the Understanding of Its Historical Development. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1928.
Friedman, Thomas L. The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Globalized World in the Twenty-First Century. London: Allen Lane-Penguin, 2005.
Frost, Robert. Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays. New York: Library of America, 1995.
Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1992.
Gibson, William. Neuromancer. 1984. London: HarperCollins, 1993.
Gruesz, Kirsten Silva. Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. 1850. In Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, I. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1962.
Hughes, Langston. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” In The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, I: The Poems: 1921–1940 (p. 36). Ed. Arnold Rampersad. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001.
Jay, Paul. “Beyond Discipline? Globalization and the Future of English.” PMLA 116, no. 1 (2001): 32–47.
Jefferson, Thomas. Writings. Ed. Merrill D. Peterson. New York: Library of America, 1984.
Jen, Gish. Mona in the Promised Land. New York: Knopf, 1996.
Kerber, Linda K. “Toward a History of Statelessness in America.” American Quarterly 57, no. 3 (2005): 727–49.
King, Anthony D. “The Global, the Urban, and the World.” In Culture, Globalization and the World System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity (pp. 149–54). Ed. Anthony D. King. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991.
Lahiri, Jhumpa. The Namesake. London: Flamingo, 2003.
Lahiri, Jhumpa. Unaccustomed Earth. London: Bloomsbury, 2008.
Lauter, Paul. Ed. The Heath Anthology of American Literature. 5th ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.
Matthiessen, F.O. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1941.
McCaffery, Larry, ed. Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991.
Mencken, H.L. The American Language: A Preliminary Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States. New York: Knopf, 1919.
O’Neill, Joseph. Netherland. London: Fourth Estate, 2008.
Paine, Thomas. Common Sense. 1776. Ed. Isaac Kramnick. London: Penguin, 1976.
Patterson, Anita. Race, American Literature and Transnational Modernisms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Pearce, Thomas M. “American Traditions and Our Histories of Literature.” American Literature 14, no. 3 (1942): 277–84.
Pound, Ezra. “Provincialism the Enemy.” 1917. In Selected Prose 1909–1965 (pp. 159–73). Ed. William Cookson. London: Faber, 1973.
Renker, Elizabeth. The Origins of American Literature Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Ross, Edward Alsworth. The Old World in the New: The Significance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People. New York: Century, 1914.
Shell, Marc. “Babel in America.” In American Babel: Literatures of the United States from Abnaki to Zuni (pp. 3–33). Ed. Marc Shell. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Smith, Neil. American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Viking Press, 1939.
Trent, William Peterfield, John Erskine, Stuart P. Sherman, and Carl Van Doren. Eds. The Cambridge History of American Literature. 4 vols. New York: Putnam, 1917–21.
Whitman, Walt. “A Backward Glance o’er Travelled Roads.” 1888. In The Complete Poems (pp. 569–84). Ed. Francis Murphy. London: Penguin, 1975.
Williams, William Carlos. In the American Grain. New York: Boni, 1925.
Žižek, Slavoj. “Multiculturalism, or the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism.” New Left Review, 225 (September–October 1997): 28–51.