Wanted: A New World Studies

Land Sliding: Imagining Space, Presence, and Power in Canadian Writing, By W. H. New, University of Toronto Press, 1997

Border Theory: The Limits of Cultural Politics, Edited by Scott Michaelsen and David E. Johnson, University of Minnesota Press, 1997

One of the changes overtaking literary and cultural studies in the last few years is the rise of a body of scholarship that takes for its object the making of American cultures and of a transamerican culture from an interdisciplinary perspective. I have provisionally imagined a label for this kind of work: New World studies. ¹ Neither a methodology nor a conventional field defined by history or geography, New World studies can be understood as a set of practices that investigate the givenness of local, national, and transamerican worldviews through the collation of literary representation and social fact. While the study of a national literature might frame a poem or an essay in one set of terms, an approach to the same text drawn from New World studies might reframe it in alternative contexts to bring out its investments in matters that run beyond national boundaries and enter it in a transnational dialogue. Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein, and Jimmy Santiago Baca are only three US writers whose productions absorb both national and transnational perspectives; likewise, the literature of abolitionism, regionalist narrative, and Beat poetry are examples of stock Americanist topics that take on a different aspect in a wider context. While it might be considered a subset of comparative literature or a collocation of that and other disciplinary orientations, New World studies is neither unified (in the sense that any one of its projects must rehearse all the available standpoints) nor heroic (in the sense that its practitioners are understood to have New World studies itself, rather than more immediate outlooks, in mind). It exists in the relations between discrete projects, and its only project is to put these into conversation with one another. ²

The provisoriness of New World studies suggests that it will draw from other emergent approaches, which will continue to speak as themselves but will gain a wider context from being put adjacent to others. Imagine a dialogue among the New Historicism of the early modern period, American studies, and the minority literatures of the US, Latin American studies, and postcolonial scholarship; imagine this dialogue transmitted through an alembic of interdisciplinarity that includes not only historicism and cultural studies but human geography and social theory. This critical activity is still awaiting a John Crowe Ransom, someone who has watched as several distinct streams of practice come to a crossroads--much as Ransom saw the New Criticism emerge out of the work of T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, and Yvor Winters--and will advertise: Wanted--A New World Studies. Of course, there are a number of transamericanists now working, and the notion of a hemispheric American literature and culture has already had a certain vogue. But many of the most urgent questions of theory and methodology either are still ahead or are now being engaged in the several venues of New World studies. Seldom in open conversation with each other, these approaches are still largely incommensurate; they implicitly comment on, and sometimes compensate for, but often do not learn from each other.

In this essay I will consider two recent books that participate in what I am calling New World studies. Both lay out problems and opportunities for transamericanist scholarship: one treats Canadian literature, the other Latino and Latin American. Both are in a polemical dialogue with their immediate fields, challenging the conceits (such as "land" and "border") on which those fields rely. They are instigations to a critical reconception of Canadian and Latino studies, respectively. And they speak, unawares, to each other. One book directs an exemplary attention to how geography and rhetoric accommodate each other to make and unmake national identity, but chooses not to engage with some of the most obvious literal and figurative borders...