Dr. Will Norman, Reader in American Literature and Culture and Director of the Centre for American Studies, recently undertook a Visiting Research Fellowship at the University of Sydney. He shares below an account of his trip, the ongoing project he furthered whilst in on study leave, and talks he gave at both the University of Sydney and the University of New South Wales.
Why would an American Studies scholar spend a month of their study leave in Australia? Besides the obvious attractions of escaping a snowy Kent for the balmy antipodean climes, it might seem a counterintuitive choice. The United States holds the vast majority of the archives relating to my field, and is a natural centre of gravity professionally. But this spring I spent a month as a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Sydney, working on my current project about the idea of complicity in post-1945 US thought and fiction.
Study leave, for those of us who have provision for it, provides an opportunity to escape from the maelstrom of teaching, marking, and administrative tasks that take up so much of our time and mental energies. It’s a chance to breathe intellectually, and to focus for a sustained period of reading and writing – not just essays and articles, but in my case dense monographs and absorbing novels – the kind of work I love and without which my research cannot get momentum. This time round, I had no need of archival trips and no conferences planned, but nevertheless I felt that physical distance from my habitual surroundings would help provide the mental space I needed to get this new book project properly off the ground. And so I applied to Sydney’s Visiting Fellowship scheme, in the hope that it would provide an auspicious environment for the kind of thinking I wanted to do.
In fact, Sydney has a vibrant research community of brilliant Americanists gathered around the United States Studies Centre, which provides a hub for research in the field, with regular talks and workshops. There I met with historians and film studies specialists, literary scholars and political scientists, poets and activists. Among them was Paul Giles, whose book Antipodean America explores the influence of Australia on American literature. Giles’ book takes as one of its starting points the comparative legacy of British colonial rule in the Americas and Australasia, and explores how Australia offered early US writers a sense of what the United States might have become. As an Americanist in Australia I constantly found myself thinking about parallels and divergences in the social and cultural imaginaries of the two nations in a way I had not anticipated. The inheritances of their colonial settlement include most prominently the histories of dispossession and violence against indigenous peoples, the political and social constitution of whiteness as a racial dominant, and particular ideologies of territorial occupation and the wilderness.
My project explores how complicity became an important and yet difficult subject for intellectuals and writers in the US from the end of World War Two up to the present. My starting point comes from complicity’s etymology, from the Latin complicāre – to fold together. To be complicit in a system is to be enfolded in it but unable to control it directly or take full responsibility for it. But how can one represent such a state, when one is already entangled in it? The part of the project I was working on at Sydney focuses on the late 1940s and early 1950s, and analyzes how writing from this period takes up in different ways the challenge of how to articulate complicity with racist and anti-Semitic prejudice. Two propositions crystalized for me in my reading and thinking. One was the idea that moments of complicity arise when one loses one’s attention on translating thought into language. The other was that complicity tended to be represented through particular configurations of racialized space.
I gave two talks during my fellowship, one at Sydney and another at the University of New South Wales. It was during the Q and A in the second, which concentrated on the “spaces of complicity,” that some of the resonances of my topic in the Australian context began to emerge. The spectre of complicity, it was suggested by one audience member, haunts several aspects of contemporary Australian culture, in relation to the long history of indigenous land rights and the treatment of migrants and refugees. The questions about racialized space I had been thinking about in the American context could also be posed here, where the policing of territorial boundaries and the way they are talked about play an important role in determining the visibility of complicity. In scholarly encounters such as this you find your thinking suddenly reoriented, demanding that you refine your conceptual horizons and think beyond conventional disciplinary boundaries. It is the kind of defamiliarizing yet illuminating moment that study leave is made for.