Figuring the future in Los(t) Angeles

Abstract

This article examines Los Angeles' symbolic relation to the rest of the US, deriving from its multi-layered political, social, economic, racialized and environmental complexity. Metropolitan Los Angeles has become 'a dystopian symbol of Dickensian inequalities and intractible racial contradictions', according to historian Mike Davis. Rather than representing America's modernity, Los Angeles has come to symbolize 'the collapse of the American Century'. Accordingly this article explores the motives of African American writers in representing Los Angeles as a politically and environmentally disastrous living space and a figure for the state of the nation. The value that black writers place upon and celebrate in the multiple range of urban ethnicities is at odds, not only with the class and racialized political and economic hierarchies of the city which oppresses its black residents but also contrary to contemporary dominant models of American citizenship. The article considers work by Chester Himes, Octavia Butler and Walter Mosley and argues that within and without the borders of the US, labels like 'minority' or 'ethnic' literature ghettoize, marginalize and minimize its significance. Yet the work of these authors currently carries the weight of the search for a more ethical and moral sense of responsibility for the state of a nation skidding down the path of increasing inhumanity, injustice and disregard, not only for the majority of its own population but for the majority of the residents of this planet. These works are significant acts of dissent from the perpetuation of injustice in contemporary politics, from the increasing extremes of wealth and poverty, and from the parasitic relation of the US to the environment.     

Sui Sin Far's American Words

Abstract

This essay offers readings of three stories from Sui Sin Far's 1912 collection Mrs. Spring Fragrance: the title story, 'The Americanizing of Pau Tsu', and '"Its Wavering Image."' Each of these stories treats an episode of romance in a multiracial society as, simultaneously, a problem of reading and of writing in a contested culture. Each turns on a quoted passage from a poem, by Tennyson, Ban Jieyu, and Longfellow, respectively. (For the latter two stories, the sources have not previously been identified in published criticism.) Analysis of Sui Sin Far's subtle and transformative engagements with literary works from several national traditions both reveals new complexities in her fiction and has the potential to revise current views of literary history.     

'If we only had some of what they have' Ralph Ellison in Wales

Abstract

During his period as a merchant marine in the Second World War, the African American novelist Ralph Ellison was stationed in Swansea, Wales. His short story 'In a Strange Country', collected in Flying Home and Other Stories (1998), is based on these Welsh experiences, and there are two other unpublished Welsh-based stories among the Ellison papers at the Library of Congress: 'A Storm of Blizzard Proportions' and 'The Red Cross at Morriston, South Wales'. This article considers these stories as a basis for exploring the cultural and historical connections and correspondences between African Americans and the Welsh. In drawing inspiration from Ellison's critical writings, the article seeks to substantiate a genuinely comparative, transatlantic approach to literary and cultural texts. This approach leads to an exploration of the ways in which the diversity of the Welsh experience – manifested in language, politics and cultural practice – led Ellison to meditate in new ways on the issues of race, nationhood and identity that he would later famously address in Invisible Man.     

Abolition democracy and global justice

Abstract

As new social relations produce new kinds of social subjects, scholars in American Studies and Area Studies experience anxieties about disciplinary as well as geographic borders. The Civil Rights tradition of the 14th Amendment plays an important role within progressive American Studies scholarship, but in the course of seeking equality and exclusion within the USA, this tradition runs the risk of occluding the role of the nation in the world and its central role in creating and preserving inequality and injustice in other nations. An emerging emphasis on struggles for social justice without seeking state power encapsulates many of the most progressive impulses within Area Studies and transnational studies, yet this perspective runs the risk of occluding the enduring importance of the nation-state in inflecting global developments with local histories and concerns. The present moment challenges us to draw on both traditions, and to use each to critique the shortcomings of the other, while at the same time promoting an inclusionary, nonsectarian, and mutually supportive dialogue about our differences.     

Writing of home and home of writing Chinese American diaspora and literary imagination

Abstract

The Silent Traveller's Hong Kong Zhuzhi Poems (1972) by Chiang Yee provides an interesting case for study in relation to Asian American literary theory aesthetics for at least the following three reasons: First, Chiang's poems comment on the 'idiosyncratic phenomena' in Hong Kong, and the ambiguity and sometimes contradictions in his comments allow us to explore the issues of assimilation and Americanization and to get a good understanding of the meaning of 'home' to a Chinese diasporic poet. Second, utilization of the zhuzhi form, a tradition that has been largely abandoned in modern China, suggests the intrinsic value of the cultural tradition and emotional or psychological satisfaction to a Chinese diaspora. Chiang's tenacious adherence to the cultural tradition is a reflection of his yearning for an imaginary 'home'. Third, the use of the Chinese language underlines the poet's Chinese cultural sensitivity. A discussion of the form, content, and language of these poems illustrates the complexity of Asian American cultural and ethnic identity and the significance of the imaginary 'home' – a construction through writing where a diaspora may find a haven in displacement.     

The Literary Front of the Cold War: John Steinbeck as an Ideological Object in the Eastern Bloc

Abstract

The paper examines the ideological dimension of the reception of John Steinbeck in three post-communist countries, namely Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Slovenia. It discusses the prevalent mode of the writer's interpretation in the Eastern bloc which was governed by the political doctrines of the time. It is therefore often Steinbeck's politics, in the narrow sense of the word, that is scrutinized in the prefaces, afterwords, and reviews of his writings. The literary values are either marginalized or wholly ignored. Consequently, Steinbeck's criticism is determined by political correctness. It fails to consider the complexities of his work and treats the writer as an expedient object employed in the ideological campaign on the literary front.     

Left-wing isolationism,literature and ideology in America during the run-up to World War II Malcolm Cowley,Waldo Frank,Archibald MacLeish,Lewis Mumford,John Strachey and the New Masses

Abstract

In the run-up to the Second World War, the left in the US came under increasing pressure to conform to the increasingly totalitarian Stalinist line. The relation between literature, ideologies, political analysis and a world actually preparing for war became extremely complex and fraught. In October 1940, the American Communist journal, New Masses, denounced the well-known American writers Malcolm Cowley, Waldo Frank, Archibald MacLeish, Lewis Mumford and the British Marxist intellectual John Strachey as virtual Nazi sympathisers. This article takes a cartoon relating to the denunciations and reconstructs in historical detail the reasons for them. The stories throw a new and complex light on the sometimes surprising relations between ideology and literature of the period as well as adding a footnote to debates on pre-war American isolationism.     

Defending America against its devotees Presidential Address,First World Congress of the International American Studies Association,Leiden, The Netherlands, 22–4 May 2003

Abstract

This presidential address at the International American Studies Association's first world congress was composed while the invasion of Iraq was under way. Like the Vietnam War that was launched through an historic act of mendacity called the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the current pre-emptive war may be based on claims and ideological agendas equally suspect in their veracity that may well prove a watershed for American culture and paradigm-altering for American Studies. This first IASA presidential address traces the historical precedents of the National Defense Strategy of the United States of America of September 2002, since called the Bush Doctrine, and reads it as a Monroe Doctrine writ globally and as a new US Martial Plan that displaces the Marshall Plan on which the current American Studies field was founded. The portentous changes implicit in this displacement bode a transformation in the foundation of American Studies similar to the changes precipitated by the Vietnam War, with the difference that the global scope of American Studies as an international field today will resist the re-absorption of these changes into a national and nationalist project of US Americanism.     

'Totalitarianism', Treason and Containment in Catch-22 (and 1984)

Abstract

Critical writing on Catch-22 has often centred (quite naturally and understandably, it must be said) on concepts such as paradox, black humour and the absurdity of the human condition. Although these approaches have certainly not been without profit and have produced interesting readings, they have also tended to obscure, under the generic nature of such frameworks, the novel's patent political concerns — concerns which, moreover, are not at all unrelated to the usual critical preoccupations. In a similar way, although Catch-22 criticism has often relied heavily on the detection of literary allusions and influences at work in the text, a most obvious source of influence seems to have been generally ignored. This essay attempts to offer a different reading of Catch-22 based on the assertion that what the novel is really about is 'totalitarianism'. Its starting point is, therefore, a parallel reading bringing together Heller's best-known book with one of the central literary texts on 'totalitarianism' — George Orwell's 1984. Focusing initially on the similar way(s) in which the two novels construct what is called a 'totalitarian' atmosphere, the essay proceeds to briefly demonstrate the bearing of the 'totalitarian' problematic on another important '60s novel, E. L. Doctorow's Welcome to Hard Times, and to offer a fuller reading of Catch-22, including a summary excursion into the difficult question of how the student of '60s American fictions should approach the concept of 'totalitarianism'.