The term “postnationalism” seemed to
jump out at me more than any other oft-used word among the eleven articles we
read for this week, each of them charting a new (or “new”) future for American
Studies that does not take for granted that nations are fixed entities with
essential (if undiscovered) features. I
will admit that I am fairly late to the postnationalism party and have much to
learn, having only recently learned of Habermas’s book on the subject and
numerous others in various fields. Yet,
one question dogs me regarding the use of postnationalism as a guiding
assumption and/or foundation for these lines of inquiry into Early US
literature: What is the relationship between the current 21st
Century development toward a globalized, postnational world and our studies of
Early American writing? I wonder if we
are not at some level projecting these developments of globalization (with
developments in mass media, global commerce, international judicial bodies, and
monetary regulation) onto the very different context of the Early American
period.
Paula Moya and Ramon Saldivar, in
their introduction to the 2003 special issue of Modern Fiction Studies, address
the question of postnationalism (and other “post-”s like it) squarely:
“Despite the current fascination in our disciplinary field for ‘posts’ of all sorts, and despite the need to rethink the presumed integrity and impenetrability of national borders, we argue that the category of the national is still salient for the study of modern literature” (4).
If there were not some sense of
cultural, political, and geographic phenomena demonstrating some striking
similarities of behavior and custom among a particular group of people, the
notions of hybridity and transnationalism would be null and void. There would be nothing to hybridize or
transverse. Yet
Moya and Saldivar note that even Benedict Anderson, in making the bold claim
that nations are social constructs, or Imagined
Communities, writes that the “idea of the national” is still, “the most
universally legitimate value in the political life of our time” (4). To put it another way, how can we be
postnational when our Twitter feeds and Facebook profiles still carry national affiliations?
Matt, you've asked the one question that preoccupies American Studies scholars. Are we behaving anachronistically, imposing contemporary theories of globalization on an older era when nation-states were still relatively new developments. It does seem silly to begin espousing the need to transcend/ignore/discard/diminish the nation, say, in 1800 or 1830, when the nation-state was still in its formative stages and the global economy had yet to eclipse sovereign state powers as the true force in organizing social experience. Thinking about a post-national nation, so to speak, doesn't mean that we have to drink the "kool aid" and dismiss all things national. A "frontier mindset," as you guys pointed out in class, means that the choice rarely comes down to either/or nation. Thanks for helping me think through this.
ReplyDelete"To put it another way, how can we be postnational when our Twitter feeds and Facebook profiles still carry national affiliations?"
ReplyDeleteI think this is an interesting idea to think about. We are ingrained with need to put things, people, and places within borders in order to understand them in an easy way. I think Kolodny et al. from last week's reading really hone in on the idea that academic disciplines are also guilty of this as well. From this week's reading, Fitzgerald and Wyss argue that we even create temporal boundaries within the discipline. Their analysis of Native American literature really helped me conceptualize how to think about teaching American literature across the temporal boundaries that we've created. Why is 1865 the boundary between "early American" and just "American" literature? For me, it creates a dichotomy that suggests that the pre-1865 moment is less-then or not-as-good-as what occurs after that imagined temporal boundary. Did everyone suddenly wake up on January 1, 1865 and declared themselves writers of "good" American literature?
Matt: I'm not really sure that we have reached a post-national state--especially in the US. While we may be a global player, we tend to dominate (quite aggressively)the world stage. We don't exactly blend in or play well with others. In fact, in many ways, I see various nations fighting to preserve their national identity, fighting against our capitalist encroachment (especially in the Mid-East), not wanting to move to a post-national state, trying to avoid the great melting pot of globalization. And I think that's true of our nation too--especially in light of 9/11 (and even the recent Miss America controversy). I think our populous, government, etc. has been struggling to identity what is American (think of all the romanticized American rhetoric of the Bush administration), which means for me, we are anything but post-national. But maybe I'm thinking of this too much in political terms rather than literary issues.
ReplyDeleteIn reply to Jessica: Stating the obvious, but the Civil War and the Reconstruction Era must have had something to do with that time boundary. The early nation of slave owners, pioneers, etc. versus the "new and improved" fully re-constructed, "civilized," America. I think it's a highly politicized and romanticized dichotomy. Something about the Civil War seems to have made our nationhood "official." Though we were officially separated from England and established nationhood in 1783,there still seems to be, in my mind, a colonial mindset, a connection to England (even in antagonism) that the Civil War seems to break once and for all. I'm no Americanist, so I could be completely off the mark, but I think it's that lingering colonialism of the early works that makes some Americanists think of it as "less-than."
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