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.<\/p>\n
Here are the abstracts and panel proposals. We invite comments and responses:<\/p>\n
Stella Bolaki: Audre Lorde\u2019s Transnational Legacies<\/strong><\/p>\n 1. Audre Lorde and the Black Diaspora Although Audre Lorde\u2019s 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\u2019s transnational legacies. My paper will provide an overview of this project and some critical thoughts on the depth and range of Lorde\u2019s intellectual and activist commitments, as well as on the challenges of documenting black diasporic histories to produce an \u201calternative\u201d archive. The following three papers will explore Lorde\u2019s transnational sisterhoods and enduring legacies in three different contexts (Germany, Switzerland and Britain) through a range of critical approaches and perspectives.<\/p>\n 2. Transracial Feminist Alliances? Audre Lorde and (West) German Women My paper seeks to uncover the degree to which Audre Lorde\u2019s 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\u2019s reactions to Lorde\u2019s 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\u2019s conceptualizations of solidarity among and between black and white women specifically. I will read these two perspectives in connection with Ruth Frankenberg\u2019s seminal work on critical whiteness studies (situated within feminist discourse) and Aimee Carrillo Rowe\u2019s 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\u2019s connection to German women while also contributing to a broader critical discussion of the limits and possibilities of women\u2019s coalitions \u2018across the color line.\u2019<\/p>\n 3. Audre Lorde and Black Women in Switzerland 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 \u2013 the Meeting Place and Resource Centre for Black Women in Zurich was one of the results of Audre\u2019s mentoring \u2013 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 4. \u201cBlack feminism is not white feminism in blackface\u201d: Using Audre Lorde to Develop a Black and Asian Women\u2019s Rape Crisis Service within a Feminist Collective Audre Lorde\u2019s statement that \u201cBlack feminism is not white feminism in blackface\u201d in Sister Outsider invokes the interdependency of difference with the inherent political and epistemological problems, paradoxes and ambivalence of the constitutive \u2018Other\u2019. My paper offers a critical analysis of this statement to illustrate how it shaped the development of a grass roots Black and Asian Women\u2019s Service within the context of a feminist collective in Manchester and Trafford Rape Crisis in the UK. The essay will show how Lorde\u2019s political writings in Sister Outsider have and continue to facilitate an understanding and experience of negotiating the complexity of \u201crelating across our human differences as equals\u201d and \u201cworking towards an interdependency of difference\u201d whilst recognising the interlocking and mutually reinforcing vectors of race, gender, class and sexuality.<\/p>\n Will Norman: Remapping Transnational Modernism<\/strong><\/p>\n Programme Rationale Panelists American modernists and the Celtic Revival<\/p>\n In Autumn Journal, Louis MacNeice described the Celtic Revivalists\u2019 Ireland as \u2018a world that never was \/ Baptised with fairy water\u2019. Likewise, within contemporary critical circles, it is easy to dismiss Celticism as a fanciful, archaic construction: as Daniel G. Williams argues, nowadays it is \u2018either 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\u2019. But for some American modernist writers, the enchantment of Celticism \u2013 as conveyed and celebrated by the Revivalists \u2013 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 \u2018Spenser\u2019s Ireland\u2019, Moore critiques the \u2018American Celticism\u2019 of the parochial novelist Donn Byrne; in his late poem \u2018Our Stars Come from Ireland\u2019, 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.<\/p>\n Dr Tara Stubbs Transnationalising the Regional, Regionalising the Transnational: the case of Circle magazine 1944-48<\/p>\n George Leite\u2019s 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 \u2018[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.\u2019 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\u2019s heritage of pragmatism and anarchism. The magazine\u2019s title symbolized its modeling of literary relations in the theatre of modernism: \u2018A circle can be measured beginning at any point\u2019, went the inaugural issue\u2019s editorial, \u2018we decided to start our measure on the West Coast\u2019. The eponymous circle suggests continuity and motion, rather than separation and stasis, indicating that the magazine\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Dr Joanna Pawlik Modernism, Postwar Intellectuals and the Failure of \u201cAtlantic Civilization\u201d Dr Will Norman Mike Collins: Dickens\u2019s \u201cIllimitable Dominion\u201d: Transatlantic Print Culture and the Spring of 1842<\/strong><\/p>\n This paper explores the role played by Charles Dickens\u2019s 1842 American tour in shaping Edgar Allan Poe\u2019s editorial \u201cline\u201d for the May 1842 edition of Graham\u2019s Monthly Magazine. I read this issue of Graham\u2019s partly as a response to what Poe\u2019s friend George Lippard referred to as the \u201cfarce\u201d and \u201chumbug\u201d surrounding Dickens\u2019s tour, revealing important (though previously unacknowledged) subtexts within several of the issue\u2019s most famous articles, Poe\u2019s review of Nathaniel Hawthorne\u2019s Twice-Told Tales and his short story \u201cThe Masque of the Red Death\u201d. 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 … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5521,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/englishresearch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/englishresearch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/englishresearch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/englishresearch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5521"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/englishresearch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/englishresearch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/englishresearch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6\/revisions\/10"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/englishresearch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/englishresearch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/englishresearch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nStella Bolaki (University of Kent)<\/p>\n
\nKatharina Gerund (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg)<\/p>\n
\nZeedah Meierhofer-Mangeli (Consultant for Women Peace, security and Development, Resource Center for Black Women)<\/p>\n
\nSuryia Nayak (University of Salford)<\/p>\n
\nJoanna Pawlik, \u201cTransnationalizing the Regional, Regionalizing the Transnational: the case of Circle magazine 1944-48\u201d
\nTara Stubbs, \u201cAmerican Modernists and the Celtic Revival\u201d
\nWill Norman, \u201cModernism, Postwar Intellectuals and the Failure of \u2018Atlantic Civilization\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
\nThis 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.<\/p>\n
\nJoanna 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.
\nTara 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.
\nWill 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 \u00e9migr\u00e9s responded to the American culture industry in the mid-twentieth century. \u201cThe Big Empty: Chandler\u2019s Transatlantic Modernism\u201d will be published in Modernism\/modernity in 2013.<\/p>\n
\nUniversity of Oxford<\/p>\n
\nUniversity of Manchester<\/p>\n
\nIn an interview given in Horizon in 1945, Andr\u00e9 Malraux heralded the imminent birth of an \u201cAtlantic Civilization\u201d representing a gathering of world culture in the US, \u201cdifferent from all its beginnings, even from the United States.\u201d 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 Andr\u00e9 Malraux were staking a claim to a transatlantic cultural legitimacy which sought to affiliate \u201cle grand cinq\u201d 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 \u201cAtlantic Civilization.\u201d 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 \u201cmetaphysical Stalinism\u201d and Beauvoir\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\nUniversity of Kent<\/p>\n
\nContributing to recent critical interest in situating literary texts within the wider context of the antebellum print-public sphere, I show how Poe used Graham\u2019s to comment on how Dickens\u2019 tour brought into sharp relief the influence of class and status on transatlantic, nineteenth-century, literary culture. In particular, through close reading of \u201cThe Masque of the Red Death\u201d I demonstrate how Poe subtly drew upon a well-known expos\u00e9 of Dickens\u2019s lodgings in New York (written by Walt Whitman for the penny-paper Aurora) to inform the short story\u2019s 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 \u201cinvention, creation, imagination [and] originality\u201d to the \u201cprose tale\u201d is usefully considered in the same context, as an American romantic response to the popular hysteria surrounding Dickens.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"