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American Literature for a Post-American Era

Antonis Balasopoulos

Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell, eds. Shades of the Planet:
American Literature as World Literature. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton
University Press, 2007.  304 pp. $ 24.95 paper. ISBN: 0691128529.

It is one of the mordant ironies of the post 9/11 era that the objective
of the so-called “post-nationalist” turn in American Studies—dislodging
the study of American literature and culture from the parochial framework
of the nation-state—now seems at once precipitate and obsolete. It appears
precipitate to the extent that what followed it in the first years of this
century was a recrudescence of the most virulent forms of U.S. imperial
nationalism—an eventuality which, like that of 9/11 itself, appears to
have been as unforeseen by experts as it was profoundly consequential
for both the U.S. and the world. But the call for a “post-nationalist” critical
agenda also now strikes one as curiously beside the point, given the
fact that the project of overcoming the self-indulgent insularism that
dogged American Studies seems thoroughly ironized by what Immanuel
Wallerstein’s eponymous study prophetically described as “the decline of
American power.” The cumulative combination of waning consumer
confidence, corporate insolvency, rapidly expanding national debt, rising
inflation and currency depreciation has demonstrably burst the “bubble”
of U.S. global economic hegemony, giving considerable weight to the
forecasts of Robert Brenner’s The Boom and the Bubble (2003) a study
perhaps not accidentally published in the same year that Wallerstein made
his own, seemingly counterfactual, predictions. 

To put it otherwise, the kind of imperial nationalism the “new
American Studies” sought to challenge has proven at once both far more
recalcitrant to cultural dismantling than it had appeared to be, and more
exposed toward the structural realities of the world system than merely

https://doi.org/10.26262/gramma.v16i0.6441

https://doi.org/10.26262/gramma.v16i0.6441


cultural critique could ever hope to demonstrate. The title of Fareed
Zakharia’s recent The Post-American World (2008) is in this sense an apt
commentary on the historical fate of the preoccupations evidenced in John
Carlos Rowe’s earlier Post-Nationalist American Studies (2000): the vision
of a “post-nationalist” Americanism is now increasingly offset by a “post-
American” reality, one shaped less by the voluntaristic imperative to open
the disciplinary domains of U.S. history, culture and literature to the world,
than by the brute weight of a particular nation state’s economic decline and
the dissipation of its formerly hegemonic status.

Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell’s Shades of the Planet (2007)
—subtitled “American Literature as World Literature”—seems to me to
reflect a consequent uncertainty as regards the present state and future
prospects of the “post-nationalist” wager in literary scholarship. The
primary symptom of such uncertainty here is the frequently evasive or
unreflectively instrumentalized status of “literature” itself, and further,
the lack of a stead-fast exposition of its cognitive and epistemological
place vis-a-vis those geopolitical, spatial, and ecological markers the
volume’s title incorporates: “American,” “world” and “planet.” For one,
Dimock’s introduction to the volume assumes the crisis of the “fiction” of
U.S. territorial sovereignty, imaging it in terms not of literary or socio-
political history but in those of natural catastrophe, with hurricane Katrina
functioning as a means of bringing to the surface the nation’s reduction to
an “epiphenomenon,” a “set of erasable lines on the face of the earth” (1).
Such a formulation eschews direct engagement not simply with the
specificities of literary geography and literary history, but also with the
current, socio-historical circumstances of their study: on the one hand, the
affective and structural persistence of the nation notwithstanding the
ritualized blanket diagnosis of its decline, and on the other, the multiple
crises that have laid waste to much of its utopian, promise-based aura in the
United States itself (indeed, the impact of hurricane Katrina was one among
many recent reminders of the sorry state of infrastructure and welfare
investments in the U.S.). Dimock’s striking unwillingness to frame the
volume’s agenda in terms compatible with its nominal scope is further
evidenced in her foregrounding of the essentially mathematical concepts of
set and subset, whose conceptual implications—the provisionality of any
strategically chosen “set” of evidentiary analysis, the reversibility of the
hierarchy between “sets” and “subsets”—are anatomized both internally and
in relation to their refraction in the preoccupations of the essays which
comprise the volume. 

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The first and last of these—Jonathan Arac’s “Global and Babel:
Language and Planet in American Literature” and Dimock’s own “African,
Caribbean, American”—are in turn less centered on comparative textual
analysis or extensive theoretical excursions into emergent possibilities for
literary study than one might have cause to expect. Arac’s essay takes stock
of the pressures and challenges which the turn from Europe-centered
comparative literature to “world literature” embodies for an American
Studies largely shaped by traditional “area studies” models. The author
views the practical consequences of such challenges as involving
institutional investment in a “new language studies” (Arac’s program is
rather unreflectively grounded on the curricular basis of U.S. graduate
schools) that would focus on practical, quotidian foreign language skills
instead of traditional models of formal language acquisition. Juxtaposing
the homogenizing impact of the global to the diversification of “babel,”
Arac then proposes a re-excavation of the classics of the American literary
canon—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman,
Ralph Ellison—in search of a buried linguistic polyvocality, which in turn
is taken to provide fragmentary evidence of the socio-historical interaction
between continents, cultures, and peoples in the American contact zone.
Intriguing as it appears, the hermeneutic gesture proposed here is simply
that—a gesture, no sooner made than replaced with a renewed ethical
plea for institutionally nourished multilingualism, including linguistic
competence in “either non-Indo-European” or “global South” (34)
languages. Things take a similar direction in Dimock’s concluding essay,
which undertakes the task of complicating the hyphen in the category of
African-American literature by way of an extensive foray into linguistics.
Thus, existing linguistic contiguities between African languages and the
African-American dialect, the definition of creole and of the process of
creolization, the relationship between creole and culturally necessitated
bilingualism and the democratic universality implied in Chomskian
conceptions of syntactical deep structure are all mined for their implications
for the kinship of world cultures. Such kinship, Dimock argues, is “anything
but transparent,” taking as it does the form not of “linear descent” but
of “arcs, loops, curves”—“complex paths of temporal and spatial
displacement” (276).  As with Arac’s own essay, literature occupies a
quantitatively rather peripheral status, even if Dimock, unlike Arac, does
invest the literary with a certain kind of seemingly counterfactual privilege:
literary study takes over where linguistics stops, with the entry into the
analytical field of affect (rather than cognition) and of “nonverbal” or

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“preverbal” expressive media (290, 293)—music, dance, rhythm. Dimock is
particularly suggestive in discussing some such instances in the zone that
extends between U.S. and Caribbean literary engagements with the African
diaspora—Paule Marshall’s, Gloria Naylor’s, Derek Walcott’s, Wilson
Harris’—but the epistemological consequences of the paradoxical
connection of literary study to the non-verbal are rather underdeveloped. 

At the antipodes of Arac and Dimock’s suggestive but elliptical
forays into the significance of the literary in rethinking “America” in terms
of “planet” and “world” are Eric J. Sundquist and Ross Posnock’s excursions
into the East European entanglements of single U.S. authors, William
Styron and Philip Roth respectively. Antithetical as regards their informing
assumptions—Sundquist is meticulous in historically grounding and
critiquing the assumptions of Styron’s engagement with Polish invasion
and Judeocide, while Posnock privileges the freedom, unpredictability and
creativity of authorial agency in forging transnational networks of literary
affiliation—these two essays share a meticulous attentiveness to textual
particularities that comes at the expense of generalizable—that is to say,
theoretical—insight. This is the case more emphatically in Sundquist’s essay,
which is so attentive to the particularity both of the fate of Polish Jews and
of the overheated and slanted nature of Styron’s attempt to translate Polish
national tragedy for an American audience that it deprives itself of virtually
any potential for comparative usability. Theoretical underdevelopment is
also a significant, if more implicit, limitation for Posnock, whose tracing of
the “circles” of affective dispensation, aesthetic predilection and ontological
worldview, linking Emerson to Vaclav Havel and Milan Kundera and
subsequently to Roth, draws heavily upon an unreflectively deployed
assumption: namely, that the link between Emersonian individualism, East
European literary critiques of abstract rationality, and Roth’s espousal of
attentiveness to the irreducible complexities of human (in)experience are
somehow free of determinate historical and ideological ballast. Upon closer
scrutiny, however, the threads that form Posnock’s transnational literary
circuit—individualistic non-conformity, the distaste for organized and
collectively orchestrated social reform, and the distrust of ideological
abstractions—reveal themselves as anything but ideologically or historically
neutral. It is, quite clearly, the “Robespierrian” and “utopian” (148) specter
of Soviet communism that both overdetermines the Czech dissidents’ turn
to an author like Emerson and guides Roth’s own predication of his own
project on Czech dissident preoccupations with the hopelessly tangled,
irreducible, and unsolvable qualities of the “human stain,” one that in

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Posnock’s own ideologically symptomatic phrasing, dictates acts of
“aggressive disaffiliation from any collective ‘we’ ’’ (160).

In contradistinction, the most convincing and successful essays of
the volume manage a difficult balancing act, mediating between, on the
one hand, a theoretical and historical attentiveness to the constitution of
“national” and “global” and, on the other, an engagement with the specifically
literary means through which both “nation” and “world” are fleshed out,
elaborated upon, and concretized in American literature. The first of these
essays, Paul Giles’ “The Deterritorialization of American Literature,”
usefully periodizes the nationalization of the very concept of “American
Literature” in the span between the end of the Civil War and the global
economic crisis of the late seventies. Having shown how cartographical,
political and literary discourses contributed to the fashioning of a national
imaginary that privileged the diversity, inclusiveness, coherence, and
sublime exceptionality of the U.S. territorial state, Giles traces the economic,
cultural and political dimensions of the deterritorialization of this imaginary
in the period from 1980 onward. To this end, he provides a particularly
astute and revealing reading of the ways in which a number of contemporary
U.S. authors (William Gibson, John Updike, Leslie Marmon Silko) have
attempted to mediate the centrifugal pressures of (primarily economic)
deterritorialization. 

The significance of literary form as a means of mediation—between
self and other, between author and reader, between alternately diverging
and converging cultures—is the theoretical core of David Palumbo-Liu’s
“Atlantic to Pacific: James, Todorov, Blackmur and Intercontinental
Form.” In Palumbo-Liu’s thoughtful and reflective argument, “transnational
community” cannot be a “‘representation’ derived from the lexicon and
assumptions of the nation-state” but can only emerge through the “mediated
space of nonrepresentation” (197). The transnational thus becomes an
affair not of substantive narrative content as such but rather of the desire
to “find a form that allegorizes the near/far dynamics of in-forming
planetary thinking” (197). The author turns to the exemplary function of
Henry James’ “The Jolly Corner” in broaching the relationship between
architectural/spatial and literary form and in hence producing an interface
between literary aesthetics and the concern with the transformation of the
built environment that resurfaces in a series of national contexts, all
marked by a symptomatic attentiveness to James’ import. James’ own
oblique meditation of the social and aesthetic impact of the transformation
of the built environment of New York during his absence in Europe (a

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transformation ironically drawing upon Parisian architectural models)
resurfaces in Tzvetan Todorov’s own turn to James in the context of
elaborating a formalist poetics in the midst of Parisian urban and suburban
upheaval and protest in 1968; and then, across the Pacific, in the encounter
between Japanese debates on the aesthetics and politics of urban
architecture and the Japanese sojourn of New Critic R.P. Blackmur,
significantly a scholar both of James himself and of the mediating,
intersubjective dimensions of aesthetic form.

The third of these essays is also one that remains attentive to the
figural significance of space, though, in this case, the unbuilt environment
gains an analytical prominence it does not possess in Palumbo-Liu’s
study. Buell’s “Ecoglobalist Affects” wisely concedes that “there’s simply
no possibility that the nation form … will go away any time soon” (228)
and pays a welcome degree of attention to the ways in which ecocriticism
has continued to invest “putatively national modes and myths of landscape
imagination” with significance (228-29). Indeed, landscape ideology, from
“nature’s nation” to suburban “middle landscapes” constitutes a useful way
of rethinking U.S. history; by the same token, however, it unveils the
“transnational repercussions and/or interdependencies” (230) that shape
nominally “national” existence—from the system of price supports that
have sustained national ideals of American plenty to “automotive-based
transportation networks that make the United States increasingly energy-
dependent on foreign suppliers” (230). What Buell terms “ecoglobalist
affect” consequently becomes a means of aesthetically encoding existing
economic, technological, social and political forms of mediation between
the local and the planetary; the essay deftly threads together the partly
converging, partly jarring eco-global sensibilities of Wendell Berry, Silko
and Karen Tei Yamashita before examining the import of “figures of
anticipation” (235) in nineteenth-century landscape painting and early
twentieth-century literary depictions of farming [Willa Cather’s O
Pioneers! (1913)], and of the admixture of local and global detail in mid-
nineteenth century literature [Thoreau’s Walden (1854), Herman Melville’s
Moby-Dick (1851)] and science [George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature
(1864)]. 

Erudite, insightful and engaging, Buell’s essay, along with those of
Palumbo-Liu and Giles, promises the sustainability of transnational
American Studies beyond the end of the rhetorical, analytical and political
viability of Clinton-era “post-nationalist” sentiment.  What one would hope
for in the years to come is that American cultural criticism may develop a

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fuller, more comprehensive vocabulary with which to gauge the lineaments
of the present—one less schematically prescriptive or programmatic, more
attuned to the political and economic complexities that haunt “worlded”
knowledge-production, more thoughtful in explicating both the gains and
the limitations of literary scholarship as a means of dealing with what is
often removed from its increasingly residual domain, and more reflective
about the material, spatially and historically mediated grounds on which
“America,” “the world” and the “planet” take shape as figures of discourse
and vehicles of thought.

University of Cyprus
Nicosia, Cyprus

Works Cited

Brenner, Robert. The Boom and the Bubble: The U.S. in the World Economy.  New York
and London: Verso, 2003.

Rowe, John Carlos, ed. Post-Nationalist American Studies. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2000.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World.
New York: W.W. Norton, 2003.

Zakharia, Fareed. The Post-American World. New York: W.W. Norton, 2008.

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