Three lecturers in the School of English (Stella Bolaki, Mike Collins and Will Norman) will be presenting research papers at the forthcoming British Association for American Studies Conference to be held at The University of Exeter in April. The topics of the papers reflect the diversity and richness of research on American themes in the School of English but are also united by a collective focus on the subject of “transnational America”, an approach that has all-but entirely reshaped scholarship in American Studies in the last ten-to-fifteen years. Broadly conceived “transnational American Studies” presumes that the national culture and literature of the USA developed, and continues to develop, in dialogue with other national cultures and traditions. Stella’s panel draws on a volume of essays on Audre Lorde she has co-edited that is contracted with The University of Massachusetts Press.
Here are the abstracts and panel proposals. We invite comments and responses:
Stella Bolaki: Audre Lorde’s Transnational Legacies
1. Audre Lorde and the Black Diaspora
Stella Bolaki (University of Kent)
Although Audre Lorde’s involvement in the African-American Civil Rights and Black Arts Movement and the feminist and lesbian/gay movements in the United States have been documented both by the research community and outside academic circles, the transnational dimensions of her legacy, especially within Europe, have not been systematically researched to date. This panel forms part of a larger project, a collection of essays I am currently putting together with Sabine Broeck on Lorde’s transnational legacies. My paper will provide an overview of this project and some critical thoughts on the depth and range of Lorde’s intellectual and activist commitments, as well as on the challenges of documenting black diasporic histories to produce an “alternative” archive. The following three papers will explore Lorde’s transnational sisterhoods and enduring legacies in three different contexts (Germany, Switzerland and Britain) through a range of critical approaches and perspectives.
2. Transracial Feminist Alliances? Audre Lorde and (West) German Women
Katharina Gerund (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg)
My paper seeks to uncover the degree to which Audre Lorde’s interactions, connections, and/or coalitions with black and white German women might offer a role model for transracial feminist alliances. On the one hand, I will focus on white women’s reactions to Lorde’s work and presence in the 80s and early 90s and analyze the preconditions, possibilities, and limitations of transracial feminist alliances that emerge from these encounters. On the other hand, I will include Lorde’s conceptualizations of solidarity among and between black and white women specifically. I will read these two perspectives in connection with Ruth Frankenberg’s seminal work on critical whiteness studies (situated within feminist discourse) and Aimee Carrillo Rowe’s work on transracial and transnational feminist alliances. On the whole, my presentation will identify and analyze some problematics of gender solidarity which emerge from the particular case study of Lorde’s connection to German women while also contributing to a broader critical discussion of the limits and possibilities of women’s coalitions ‘across the color line.’
3. Audre Lorde and Black Women in Switzerland
Zeedah Meierhofer-Mangeli (Consultant for Women Peace, security and Development, Resource Center for Black Women)
Drawing on my own encounters with Audre Lorde in the mid-1980s, this paper will look at the specific ways she inspired and mentored the work of Black women in Switzerland – the Meeting Place and Resource Centre for Black Women in Zurich was one of the results of Audre’s mentoring – and the personal challenges she posed to me regarding my own growth and process around issues of feminism and the sisterhood of Black women in the diaspora. The paper will focus on the cultural legacies of Lorde’s work and her views on identity, solidarity, sexuality, and working across difference, with special emphasis on her pivotal role in the formation of a Black European feminist subjectivity and the rise of black feminist consciousness movements and interest groups across Europe.
4. “Black feminism is not white feminism in blackface”: Using Audre Lorde to Develop a Black and Asian Women’s Rape Crisis Service within a Feminist Collective
Suryia Nayak (University of Salford)
Audre Lorde’s statement that “Black feminism is not white feminism in blackface” in Sister Outsider invokes the interdependency of difference with the inherent political and epistemological problems, paradoxes and ambivalence of the constitutive ‘Other’. My paper offers a critical analysis of this statement to illustrate how it shaped the development of a grass roots Black and Asian Women’s Service within the context of a feminist collective in Manchester and Trafford Rape Crisis in the UK. The essay will show how Lorde’s political writings in Sister Outsider have and continue to facilitate an understanding and experience of negotiating the complexity of “relating across our human differences as equals” and “working towards an interdependency of difference” whilst recognising the interlocking and mutually reinforcing vectors of race, gender, class and sexuality.
Will Norman: Remapping Transnational Modernism
Programme
Joanna Pawlik, “Transnationalizing the Regional, Regionalizing the Transnational: the case of Circle magazine 1944-48”
Tara Stubbs, “American Modernists and the Celtic Revival”
Will Norman, “Modernism, Postwar Intellectuals and the Failure of ‘Atlantic Civilization’”
Rationale
This panel brings together three modernist scholars who are building conceptual frameworks for thinking about early to mid-twentieth century US literature, art and intellectual culture in transnational terms. Drawing on recent work on transnationalism in both American and Modernist Studies, the panel aims to provide a snapshot of three related approaches to a central problem: how to reconcile the centripetal, cosmopolitan impulses of modernist cultures with demands for local and domestic autonomy? Beginning with the socio-political shifts which accompanied US regionalism, Irish decolonization and World War II respectively, these three papers explore the ways in which aesthetic form mediates between cultural and political geographies. Together the three papers are intended to continue the ongoing conversations about transnationalism in our disciplines and to provoke debate about methodologies and frameworks for future research.
Panelists
Joanna Pawlik is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester. Her research addresses transnational modernisms, with a particular emphasis on legacy of Surrealism in America. She has published on the influence of Antonin Artaud on Beat writers, Ted Joans and African American Surrealism, and the queer Surrealism of Brion Gysin. She is currently working on a monograph, Remade in America: postwar legacies of Surrealism, exploring the reception of Surrealism in American literary, artistic and activist cultures between 1941 and 1975.
Tara Stubbs is a University Lecturer in Literature and Creative Writing at the Department for Continuing Education, Oxford University (OUDCE). Her monograph, American Literature and Irish Culture, 1910-1955: the Politics of Enchantment, will be published in summer 2013. It uses a transatlantic framework to consider the ways in which American modernist fiction and poetry was rejuvenated and shaped by cultural and political movements in Ireland during the period.
Will Norman is a lecturer in American literature at the University of Kent. His monograph, Nabokov, History and the Texture of Time was published by Routledge in 2012 and he is now working on a book-project exploring how European émigrés responded to the American culture industry in the mid-twentieth century. “The Big Empty: Chandler’s Transatlantic Modernism” will be published in Modernism/modernity in 2013.
American modernists and the Celtic Revival
In Autumn Journal, Louis MacNeice described the Celtic Revivalists’ Ireland as ‘a world that never was / Baptised with fairy water’. Likewise, within contemporary critical circles, it is easy to dismiss Celticism as a fanciful, archaic construction: as Daniel G. Williams argues, nowadays it is ‘either associated with an outmoded racial conception of identity, or is seen as an internalised form of colonial discourse established in the writings of Ernest Renan and Matthew Arnold’. But for some American modernist writers, the enchantment of Celticism – as conveyed and celebrated by the Revivalists – offered a certain promise despite, or even because of, its unreality. American literature from The Book of American Negro Poetry to white Southern literature has claimed Celtic affiliations; but in modernist writers such as Marianne Moore, John Steinbeck and Wallace Stevens we find a response to the folklore and history surrounding the Revival. This response is curiously cultural, finding expression through literary affinities and often glossing over racial or national issues. In her poem ‘Spenser’s Ireland’, Moore critiques the ‘American Celticism’ of the parochial novelist Donn Byrne; in his late poem ‘Our Stars Come from Ireland’, Stevens draws inspiration from his correspondence with the Irish poet Thomas MacGreevy thanks to a transatlantic exchange of Celtic ideas; and Steinbeck draws on his love of Celtic crosses and folklore to inspire his blurred religious and cultural affiliations. This paper discusses, therefore, some of the ways in which Celtic Revivalism shaped, and was in turn re-shaped by, the works of American modernist writers.
Dr Tara Stubbs
University of Oxford
Transnationalising the Regional, Regionalising the Transnational: the case of Circle magazine 1944-48
George Leite’s Circle magazine ran from 1944-1948 and played an important role in the fomenting of what were termed the Berkeley and, later, the San Francisco, Renaissances. It published a diverse array of poetry, prose and criticism from Bay Area moderns, as well as drawing on a smaller pool of national and international contributors. As an editorial from 1944 explained, the magazine defined itself in opposition to partisanship or dogmatism, noting that ‘[w]hen technique becomes a school, death of creation is the result. Eclecticism is the only approach to Art in which there is no death. CIRCLE is completely eclectic.’ Its idiosyncratic sampling of modernist practices and production eschewed literary allegiances in the pursuit of creativity, even as this approach was firmly rooted in the region’s heritage of pragmatism and anarchism. The magazine’s title symbolized its modeling of literary relations in the theatre of modernism: ‘A circle can be measured beginning at any point’, went the inaugural issue’s editorial, ‘we decided to start our measure on the West Coast’. The eponymous circle suggests continuity and motion, rather than separation and stasis, indicating that the magazine’s disregard for taxonomies of form mapped onto its challenge to literary identities defined by location, an undisguised rejection of the privilege accorded to modernists in metropolitan centres, namely New York. This paper uses Circle as a case study through which to think relations between regional, national and transnational modernisms, paying particular attention to the role of the Second World War in both enabling and constraining these interactions.
Dr Joanna Pawlik
University of Manchester
Modernism, Postwar Intellectuals and the Failure of “Atlantic Civilization”
In an interview given in Horizon in 1945, André Malraux heralded the imminent birth of an “Atlantic Civilization” representing a gathering of world culture in the US, “different from all its beginnings, even from the United States.” My paper takes the failure of such utopian intentions as a starting point for mapping out the fractured circuits of Franco-American intellectual exchange in the immediate postwar years. At this time, French figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and André Malraux were staking a claim to a transatlantic cultural legitimacy which sought to affiliate “le grand cinq” of Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Cauldwell and Dos Passos to French existentialist paradigms. Embarking on extensive lecture tours of the US and concerted publicity drives, these figures attempted in different ways to fulfil the vision of an “Atlantic Civilization.” On the other hand, the mid to late 1940s saw the retrospective institutionalization of interwar European modernism as the dominant model for highbrow culture by the New York intellectuals, and their rejection of much of the American literature of the 1930s admired by the existentialists. In the fraught exchanges that ensued, which for example saw Sartre accused of “metaphysical Stalinism” and Beauvoir’s arrival in the US likened to that of an alien descending from a spaceship, the very possibility of a transnational culture was put under threat through misunderstanding, misrecognition and the manoeuvring for power within the cultural field. My paper, accordingly, seeks to locate and reconceptualize this pivotal moment of transatlantic cultural history as part of a broader set of tensions between domesticating and universalizing cultural impulses in the early Cold War.
Dr Will Norman
University of Kent
Mike Collins: Dickens’s “Illimitable Dominion”: Transatlantic Print Culture and the Spring of 1842
This paper explores the role played by Charles Dickens’s 1842 American tour in shaping Edgar Allan Poe’s editorial “line” for the May 1842 edition of Graham’s Monthly Magazine. I read this issue of Graham’s partly as a response to what Poe’s friend George Lippard referred to as the “farce” and “humbug” surrounding Dickens’s tour, revealing important (though previously unacknowledged) subtexts within several of the issue’s most famous articles, Poe’s review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales and his short story “The Masque of the Red Death”.
Contributing to recent critical interest in situating literary texts within the wider context of the antebellum print-public sphere, I show how Poe used Graham’s to comment on how Dickens’ tour brought into sharp relief the influence of class and status on transatlantic, nineteenth-century, literary culture. In particular, through close reading of “The Masque of the Red Death” I demonstrate how Poe subtly drew upon a well-known exposé of Dickens’s lodgings in New York (written by Walt Whitman for the penny-paper Aurora) to inform the short story’s discussion of class, status and rights of access. Following this, I then suggest that the argument Poe made in his review of Nathaniel Hawthorne about the importance of “invention, creation, imagination [and] originality” to the “prose tale” is usefully considered in the same context, as an American romantic response to the popular hysteria surrounding Dickens.