The Myth of "America" and the Politics of Location: Modernity, Border Studies, and the Literature of the Americas

PAUL JAY The Myth of 'America" and the Politics of Location: Modernity, Border Studies, and the Literature of the Americas surprising number of critics agree that the problem with ..American literary studies is its focus on "America." In her recent essay on the remapping of American literary studies, for example, Carolyn Porter observes that once compartmentalized by historical periods, American literature has been remapped first by African-Americanist and feminist critics and then by the flourishing scholarship on Asian-American, Native American, and Chicano literatures. These emerging fields have begun to undermine the fundamental terms by which American literary history must be comprehended and taught. Both the historical and geographical frames once dictated by the national, and nationalist, narrative of the US are collapsing, no longer propped up by either the synecdoche of a US read as "America" or the metanarrative by which "American" served to predicate human history's manifest/millenial destiny. (468)' The "metanarrative" to which Porter refers is a familiar one: American literature had its origins in the Puritan culture ofNew England and began to flower in a fully self-conscious way during the so-called "American Renaissance," when Emerson, and later, Whitman, wrote about the Arizona Quarterly Volume 54, Number 2, Summer 1998 Copyright © 1998 by Arizona Board ofRegents ISSN 0004-1610 166PaulJay necessity of grounding the nation's cultural and political identity in a national literature. The combined literary output ofEmerson, Thoreau, Melville, Whitman, Hawthorne, and Dickinson turned out, from F. O. Matthiessen's vantage point in the early 1940s, to constitute just such a literature. Revisionist critics like Porter are comfortable with qualifying or setting aside this narrative because they rightly see it as the invention of an Anglocentric, northeastern, religious, intellectual, and artistic elite. Certainly, the national literary narrative envisioned by Emerson and Whitman and later codified by critics like Frothingham, Goddard, Brooks, Parrington, and Matthiessen has a certain historical value, but it does not constitute anything like a general or comprehensive picture of something we ought to continue calling "American literature." The old narrative has a coherence, as Peter Carafiol has pointed out, but it is derived from an idealized myth of national origins and identity. Beginning with Emerson, Carafiol insists, nineteenth-century critics conflated "sentimental moralism and Christian idealism ... to describe a unified American cultural tradition independent of Europe" (43). For these critics, "the assumption of cultural coherence supplied the key to narrative coherence" (43). Engaged in an idealized search for origins, nineteenth-century American writers "used Transcendentalism as the funnel through which America's imagined Puritan origins passed to be transformed in the outburst of literary culture we have come to call the American Renaissance" (42). It did not take long for the "terms introduced into American discourse by romantic writers like Emerson and Thoreau" to be "co-opted and used" by later critics "to preserve an American corporate identity after die conditions that had justified America for earlier writers—a divine mission, external enemies, social and economic homogeneity—had become more rhetorical than real" (42)·2 Recently critics of American literature and culture have sought to counter these abstract ideals with a more concrete and historical focus on location. In this essay I want to discuss some of the ways in which "location" has been theorized by contemporary critics, particularly locations that are transnational and therefore associated with borderlands . American criticism has traditionally located its interests within national borders, achieving a central coherence for American literature by ignoring forms of cultural production that take place in the liminal The Myth of "America"167 spaces where national borders overlap. I will be endorsing the idea that our criticism can best be revitalized by paying more attention to locations that are between or which transgress conventional national borders —liminal margins or border zones in which individual and national identities migrate, merge, and hybridize. However, I also want to review some of the problems that attend such a shift in our attention, emphasizing in particular the need to historicize our analyses of locations within the Americas with reference to the kind of revised conception of modernity we get in Paul Gilroy's The Black Atiantic. Like Carafiol, Gilroy is interested in how...