Showing papers in "boundary 2 in 1992"

National Identities, Postmodern Artifacts, and Postnational Narratives

Abstract: In my introduction to the first volume on New Americanists,' I constructed an account of the phenomenon by way of an argument with Frederick Crews, who, in a critical review of New Americanists, identified himself as an established representative of the field of American Studies and denied New Americanists official recognition. I understood the precondition for a successful argument with Crews to be the conceptualization of an alternative disciplinary field, whose practitioners were constructed out of assumptions wholly different from Crews's. For the sake of this argument, I constructed a purely fictive theoretical scenario, assigning to Crews's field of American Studies a crisis in what I called its "field-Imaginary" (wherein abided the "field's fundamental syntax-its tacit assumptions, convictions, primal words, and the charged relations binding them together" [11]), which had already resulted in a dramatic transformation in the self-understanding of American Studies; that is, a complete overhauling of its ruling assump-

Screwing the System: Sexwork, Race, and the Law

Abstract: In 1760, a French philosophe coined the term fetichisme for "primitive" religion. Marx took the term commodity fetish and the idea of "primitive" magic to express the central social form of the modern industrial economy. In 1887, Freud transferred fetishism to the realm of sexuality and to the domain of erotic perversions.' Religion (the ordering of time and the transcendent), sexuality (the ordering of the body), and money (the ordering of the economy) took shape around the idea of fetishism, displacing

Terms of Assimilation: Legislating Subjectivity in the Emerging Nation

Abstract: In the United States during the nineteenth century, debates concerning the status of indigenous tribespeople and slaves register unresolved legal conflicts that troubled claims of national unity. In particular, two Supreme Court cases-Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) and Scott v. Sandford (Dred Scott, 1857)-demonstrate the genesis of these debates in the territorial expansion that similarly added urgency to the potent issue of states' rights. Both cases attempt to legislate the disappearance of the "Indians" and the "descendants of Africans," respectively, by judging them neither citizens nor aliens and therefore not legally representable. In so doing, however, these cases call attention to the symbolic processes

As I Lay Dying in the Machine Age

Abstract: The cultural transformation marking the New South was structured by a central dialectic: the dynamic relation between modernization and modernism. Various plans to rejuvenate the South after World War I urged the adoption of modernized modes of production, including tenancy and credit reform for farmers; crop diversification; increased commodity consumption; technological improvements, such as electrification and mechanization; cooperatives for equipment and supply purchasing; improved housing; reforestation and erosion work; and the development of small, local industry.1 Despite significant differences in the panoply of New South programs (for example, differences over the degrees of commitment to northern capital and management techniques, or over the extent to which black fortunes

Engendering Paranoia in Contemporary Narrative

Abstract: Paranoia is one of the more prominent issues taken up by contemporary North American novelists since 1960. Writers as divergent in matters of style and subject as Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Joseph Heller, Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon, Diane Johnson, Joseph McElroy, John Barth, Kathy Acker, Saul Bellow, Marge Piercy, Don DeLillo, William Gaddis, Ishmael Reed, and Margaret Atwood have represented paranoid characters, communities, schemes, and lifestyles; history, technology, religion, patriarchy, and bureaucracy have all been viewed as motivated systems that oppress the masses and disenfranchise the preterite. Of course, to generate a list of writers who, despite their differences, seem mysteriously to agree to represent paranoia as a way of knowing or acting in their fiction is a paranoid act, especially if one were to argue that this is the result of the operation of some manipulated cultural paradigm (conceived by whom? enforced by what agency?). Paranoia, like power after Foucault, ranges across the multi-discursivity of contemporary existence; it is as present in most of the current debates over canonicity and cultural literacy as it was in

The Nations of a State

Abstract: As noted in the preface, this piece constitutes the first half of a chapter as written by the late Edward H. Spicer. The second half, though further developing his ideas, is not specific to the American Indian and so is not included here. The final section printed here, which offers a pungent statement, is Spicer's conclusion to that chapter. The book was never completed because of his untimely death. 1. Edward H. Spicer, Cycles of Conquest (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1962). 2. Edward H. Spicer, "Persistent Cultural Systems," Science, 19 Nov. 1971, 795-800.

Nationalism, Hypercanonization, and Huckleberry Finn

Abstract: I am not an Americanist by professional formation, and as in the 1980s I came to focus my teaching and reading in American literature, I was struck by what seems to me, compared to other national literatures I know or have studied, a state of hypercanonization. By hypercanonization, I mean that a very few single works monopolize curricular and critical attention: in fiction, preeminently The Scarlet Letter, Moby-Dick, and Huckleberry Finn. These works organize most American literature courses in high school, college, and graduate school; they form the focus for many dissertations and books. I have found literary history the best means by which to engage critically with these works and with the institutional structures that produce their hypercanonicity, the best means to address the works while displacing

Postmodern Identities and the Politics of the (Legal) Subject

Abstract: Postmodernism has an alchemical sheen, the ability to conjoin with disparate words and impart a heady gloss to them, a frisson of difference, a catalyzing agency, the torque of the new. In just such a manner, the coming together of "postmodernism" and the Legal Subject, with the stern capital L of the Law intact, promises to be a dynamic coupling, postmodernism offering to put its delirious spin on the rigor, and fixity, of the body of law. Of course, in this scenario postmodernism carries all the significations of glamour and seduction, the law remaining an unwilling or at least staid partner in the dalliance. Equally galvanizing is the conjuncture of postmodernism with feminism, since feminism has a rather dutiful mien these days in contrast to the potential exhilaration given off by postmodernity, however misleadingly. These intertwinings give off theoretical sparks but also real tensions in praxis, especially when the issue is how to adjudicate the problems of identity in the real world situation of feminist politics. In addressing postmodernism as it carves out the terrain of identity, as a conceptual term, and then following the collision of this logic with the formidable dominance of

Introduction: Feminism and Postmodernism; Or, The Way We Live Now

Abstract: It may seem odd to echo Trollope in the introduction to a collection whose domain appears to be at the farthest remove from the vanished certainties of the world of the nineteenth-century realist novel. Yet, the boldness of Trollope's title can also serve to mark a strong boundary line for our own volume-in a quite simple sense, the awkward pairing formed by linking feminism and postmodernism is a description of our lives. The feminism practiced, theorized, and lived by many women (and men) today is set against, or arises within, the vicissitudes of a transforming postmodernity-as a set of practices, an arena of theory, and a mode of life. This may not be a comfortable dwelling place, but it does make up a world, a form of life (shifting the echoes to those notions of Heidegger or Wittgenstein which are apt here), with which feminism necessarily conjures. The animating idea of this issue is that postmodernism is, indeed, a name for the way we live now, and it needs to be taken account of, put into practice, and even contested within feminist discourses as a way of coming to terms with our lived situations. This is not to say that postmodernity is to be

Bodies and God: Poststructuralist Feminists Return to the Fold of Spiritual Materialism

Abstract: In contemporary feminist theory, no issue is more vexed than that of determining the relations between the feminine body as a figure in discourse and as material presence or biological entity. The debates surrounding this question in recent years have been the most highly charged, but also perhaps the most fruitful. -Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, Sally Shuttleworth, in their introduction to Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science

American Indian persistence and resurgence

Abstract: This collection celebrates the resurgence of Native Americans within the cultural landscape of the United States. During the past quarter century, the Native American population in the United States has seen an astonishing demographic growth reaching beyond all biological probability as increasing numbers of Americans desire to admit or to claim Native American ancestry. This volume illustrates a unique moment in history, as unprecedented numbers of Native Americans seek to create a powerful, flexible sense of cultural identity. Diverse commentators, including literary critics, anthropologists, ethnohistorians, poets and a novelist address persistent issues facing Native Americans and Native American studies today. The future of White-Indian relation, the viability of Pan-Indianism, tensions between Native Americans and North American anthropologists, and new devlopments in ethnohistory are among the topics discussed. The survival of Native Americans as recorded in this collection, an expanded edition of a special issue of boundary 2, brings into focus the dynamically adaptive values of Native American culture. Native Americans' persistence in U.S. culture-not disappearing under the pressure to assimilate or through genocidal warfare-reminds us of the extent to which any living culture is defined by the process of transformation. Contributors. Linda Ainsworth, Jonathan Boyarin, Raymomd J. DeMallie, Elaine Jahner, Karl Kroeber, William Overstreet, Douglas R. Parks, Katharine Pearce, Jarold Ramsey, Wendy Rose, Edward H. Spicer, Gerald Vizenor, Priscilla Wald

Techno-euphoria and the Discourse of the American Sublime

Abstract: The emergence of American literature in the first half of the nineteenth century centered around the evocation of a certain kind of representative landscape that, widely circulated as a foundational scene of American appropriation in the paintings of Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church and in the poems of William Cullen Bryant and Walt Whitman, not to mention Moby-Dick, for example, had identified and accommodated the emergence

The Politics of Nonidentity: A Genealogy

Abstract: and unexpected contexts result, with "the power to inform us about certain possibilities of the present-possibilities we had not seen before."2 The following pages suggest new possibilities of understanding the political responsibility of intellectuals by constructing a theoretical confrontation between various figures active from 1904 to the present. Together they comprise a genealogy for what I call the politics of nonidentity. The genealogy extends from Henry James of The American Scene to Michel Foucault, and includes Randolph Bourne, John Dewey, and Theodor Adorno.

Ambiguity and Alienation in The Second Sex

Abstract: 1. Page references to frequently quoted texts by Beauvoir appear in parentheses in the text and notes. I use the following abbreviations: SS = The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984); DSa = Le Deuxi6me Sexe, Coll. Folio, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1949); DSb = Le Deuxi6me Sexe, vol. 2; FC = The Force of Circumstance, trans. Richard Howard (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987); FCa = La Force des choses, Coll. Folio, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1963); FCb = La Force des choses, vol. 2; TA = Translation Amended. I provide references to the English translation first, followed by references to the French original.

Failed Cultural Narratives: America in the Postwar Era and the Story of Democracy

Abstract: Joan Didion begins Democracy by describing the novel she had started to write but which no longer seems tenable. As she develops her notes out of the "jettisoned cargo" (a recurrent image in the book) of her unfinished narrative, we learn that the story she intended to write focused on the family and affairs of Inez Christian, who grew up on Hawaii just after World War II, where her family ("in which the colonial impulse had marked every member"1) had become prosperous, involved primarily in real estate and construction. In 1955, Inez married Harry Victor, a sort of Kennedy Democrat, who became a United States Senator and then a failed presidential hopeful toward the end of the Vietnam era. This marriage uniting the Christians and the Victors, with their interests in the Pacific perimeter, had allegorical potential, underscored by the fact that prior to her marriage Inez had had an affair with Jack Lovett, a CIA operative also specializing in Pacific operations, and during the course of her marriage had kept in distant contact with him. The crucial event anchoring these fictions was

Feminism and Postmodernism-Another View

Abstract: The summer of 1991 witnessed a spate of popular movies with a strikingly similar theme. Each of these movies features a more or less middle-aged white man who is moderately to wildly successful in a highpressure, high-prestige occupation. Suddenly, because of the vagaries of his own body tissue, random violence, or a desire to forestall the onset of age, these men find themselves humbled, frustrated, and, as a result, miraculously humanized. In Regarding Henry, an amoral lawyer needs a bullet in the brain to rediscover his own ethics; in The Doctor, a heartless surgeon recovers his ability to care after a bout with a tumor; in Doc Hollywood, a cynical plastic surgeon finds love through mandatory community service in a small South Carolina town; and in City Slickers, a joyless New York professional delivers a calf and discovers the meaning of life. In the summer of 1991, the wilderness was located not in Wyoming but in corporate America; the enemy was not the "red man" but the system, the rat race

Francis LaFlesche's The song of flying crow' and the limits of ethnography

Abstract: Reprenant le recit d'un anthropologue indigene americain, Francis LaFlesche de la tribu des Omaha, « la chanson de flying crow », l'A. montre les limites de l'ethnologie. F. LaFlesche enregistrait les chansons de sa tribu afin de les etudier mais un jour il en decouvrit une nouvelle qu'il n'avait jusqu'alors jamais entendue et qui aurait ete ecrite par un de ses anciens camarades de classe « Flying crow ». L'A. s'interroge sur ce soit-disant compositeur.

Manifest Manners: The Long Gaze of Christopher Columbus

Abstract: Christopher Columbus was denied beatification because of his avarice, baseness, and malevolent discoveries. He landed much lower in tribal stories and remembrance than he has in foundational histories and representations of colonialism; nonetheless, several centuries later his mistaken missions were uncovered anew and commemorated as entitlements in a constitutional democracy. Columbus has been envied in a chemical civilization that remembers him more than the old monarchs and presidents. The dubious nerve of his adventures would be heard more than the ecstasies of the shamans or even the stories of the saints; alas, he has been honored over the tribal cultures that were enslaved and terminated in his name. The 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, for instance, celebrated his discoveries as an enviable beat in the heart of the nation. Antonin Dvofak composed his occasional symphony From the New World. Frederick Jackson Turner presented his epoch thesis, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," that same summer to his colleagues at the

Our Lady of MTV: Madonna's "Like a Prayer"

Abstract: White academic feminists and feminist intellectuals are currently enacting the wanna-be syndrome of Madonna fans, analyzed, along with fashion, by Angela McRobbie, and more recently by Lisa Lewis, as the complex and specific mode of interpretation, appropriation, and revision belonging to "girl culture" in Britain and the United States.' What better way to construct an empowered performative female identity than to claim for ourselves a heroine who has successfully encoded sexiness, beauty, and power into a

Plains Indian native literatures

Abstract: Chacun des deux AA. expliquent l'histoire de leur projet concernant la transcription, la traduction puis l'edition d'ouvrages en langue indigene. Le premier s'interesse a la collection de recits dictes par un chef religieux skiri pawnee, Roaming Scout, et enregistres par J. R. Murie et G. A. Scout. Le second travaille sur une collection de textes lakota (sioux occidentaux) ecrits par G. Sword au debut du 20 eme siecle. Ils montrent en quoi le contexte dans lequel ces textes ont ete elabores est important et en quoi ces sources indigenes sont incontournables. Transcription et traduction de ces textes se trouvent en annexe.

In the Golden Chariot Things Will Be Better

Abstract: Aziza the Alexandrian is a prisoner in the women's prison in Egypt, serving a life sentence for the murder of her mother's husband. Aziza, the main character in Salwa Bakr's recent novel The Golden Chariot Won't Ascend to the Heavens (1991), assassinated the man who had seduced her following her mother's death, when, despite his apparent promises to Aziza, he took another woman as his new wife. Aziza, meanwhile, plans to leave the prison in a golden chariot destined for the heavens, but she does not intend to leave alone. Bakr's novel describes not only Aziza's liberation project but also the life histories of the other women prisoners whom she has elected to accompany her in the chariot.

"At the End of the Day": An Interview with Mairead Keane, National Head of Sinn Fein Women's Department

Abstract: As National Head of the Women's Department, Mairead Keane has been responsible for finding out what concerns Irish women feel are important to their daily lives. Her position involves both working with other activists to advance those issues outside of Sinn Fein and formulating policies and developing educational programs that address those concerns within the party. Sinn Fein is a legally recognized political party, which operates through electoral politics in both the six counties of the North and the twenty-six counties of the Republic of Ireland to end the partition of the country resulting from British rule in the six counties since 1920. Although Sinn Fein rejects media constructions of itself as the "political wing of the Irish Republican Army," the party identifies with the goals of the IRA, while reserving the right not to endorse all IRA activities. Electoral politics is, of course, about representation, but in all thirtytwo counties of Ireland, Sinn Fein's access to representation is severely curtailed by legislation that prohibits interviews with members of Sinn Fein from being broadcast. In the six counties, the successful election to par-

Resisting History: Rear Window and the Limits of the Postwar Settlement

Abstract: In the preface to An End to Innocence (1955), his first critical work, Leslie Fiedler registers his misgivings about publishing a book of literary criticism in which so many of the essays are political. He sees himself as primarily a "literary person," and when he writes of politics, he does so only reluctantly.' But because he has lived through a crisis in liberalism that seems to him "a major event in the development of the human spirit" (1:xxiii), he feels justified in addressing issues not ordinarily considered lit-

Soft Boundaries and Relatedness: Paradigm for a Postmodern Feminist Musical Aesthetics

Abstract: I would like to acknowledge the assistance received at the 1991 Institute on "Philosophy and the Histories of the Arts," directed by Arthur Danto, co-directed by Anita Silvers, Gerrold Levinson, and Noel Carroll and sponsored by the American Society for Aesthetics and the National Endowment for the Humanities, in revising and completing this article. A shorter version of it was delivered at the 1991 Portland meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics. 1. See Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London: Methuen, 1985), for a concise description of the origins, development, and various camps and practitioners of feminist aesthetics. Also see Nancy K. Miller, ed., The Poetics of Gender (New York: Columbia University Press); and Josephine Donovan, ed., Feminist Literary Criticism: Explorations in Theory, 2d ed. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1989), for essays by and about many of the central figures of feminist literary theory. For theoretical essays on the visual arts, see Linda Nochlin, Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays (New York: Harper and Row, 1988); Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism, and the Histories of Art (New York: Routledge, 1988); and a special issue of

Transitional Narratives and Cultural Continuity

Abstract: Fiction that emerges from the immediate and consciously negotiated experience of radical cultural change constitutes a category of world literature with exemplary pragmatic value for contemporary criticism. American Indian writing provides some notable examples of transitional texts, in which the act of writing is simultaneously a development of an imaginative tradition and an attempted entry into a new cultural order without known precedent and beyond any anticipation implied by the cultural past. Such writing lets us glimpse the challenge of the unimaginable as it provokes experiments with form and content in order to increase the range of a society's imaginative resources. Of course, these general assertions have value only in relation to specific texts. One largely unpublished body of writing that promises to be a significant stimulus to thoughtful analysis of transitional texts when it is finally published was written by George Sword, an Oglala Sioux political leader, tribal court judge, and spiritual leader, who was born in 1846 and died in

An Interview with Jack Salzman, Director of the Columbia University Center for American Culture Studies

Abstract: Besides regular academic offerings, an extensive publishing program, and residencies for artists and writers, the Center for American Culture Studies, under the leadership of its founding director, Professor Jack Salzman, has sponsored more than sixty public programs focusing on issues of race and ethnicity. Of these, a dozen have centered on, or have significantly involved, Native Americans and their concerns. I interviewed Professor Salzman to elicit his special perspective on Indians in their relation to both urban problems (a majority of Native Americans now live in cities) and current debates about multicultural curricula.

"Greatness": Philology and the Politics of Mimesis

Abstract: "Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them." This essay addresses the cultural fantasy of heroes and greatness-the fantasy of "greatness" as something recognizable and objectified-and the ways in which that designation, that epithet, informs and structures our culture. Greatness, as a term, is today both an inflated and a deflated currency, shading over into categories of notoriety, transcendence, and some version of the postmodern fifteen minutes of fame.' Today, "greatness" sometimes functions rhetorically as pure boilerplate. For example, at the conclusion of the recent American trade embassy to Japan, the Japanese prime minister, Kiichi Miyazawara, having bluntly

The Navajo Nightway and the Western Gaze

Abstract: L'A. analyse l'ouvrage de J. C. Faris « The Nightway : a history of documentation of a Navajo ceremonial » constitue de l'histoire de l'origine du Nightway racontee par un homme medecin (H. Klah) et de 22 reproductions de peintures de sable. Il montre comment les Occidentaux peuvent percevoir le monde indigene.