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  • Globality and the Ends of the Nation-FormA Response to Edward Watts
  • Chandan Reddy (bio)

American Literary History and Early American Literature have orchestrated a unique textual space to produce dialogue and exposure between scholars in early American literary studies working in interdisciplinary topical areas that directly transact with the study of late modernity, such as postcolonial inquiry, and cultural studies scholars, such as myself, who are consciously bound to this earlier and constitutive instance of modernity and yet whose work is primarily on the cultural politics and “archives” of contemporary US late modernity. Edward Watts’s concise and lucid essay begins this dialogue. The essay, by positioning the US as a settler social formation akin to New Zealand, Australia, and other Anglo-English settlements, makes important and absolutely crucial arguments for global comparative thinking, for breaking with American exceptionalist orientations in our inquiries and methods, and for situating the literary theorization of textual forms as central to expanding the social and political possibilities that we as scholars, intellectuals, and teachers within the educational apparatus “train” as imaginable.

These opportunities are as rare as they are necessary. For it is only through interdisciplinary and cross-period conversations that we will be able to advance intellectually in our collective efforts to generate modes and areas of thought in the university and in literary studies that are adequate to the immense global cultural heterogeneity that frames at once our modern historical “beginnings,” for which early period studies of literature and the humanities more broadly operate ideally as ethical guardians, as well as our contemporary moment. In our moment, that global cultural heterogeneity is mediated in part by mid-twentieth-century decolonization and antiracist struggles that jointly transformed the contemporary US university. Ours is a moment in which the Western humanities of the Anglo-European tradition must address a more diversified professoriate and student body than that tradition has needed or been willing to claim as [End Page 459] constitutive. This is a consequence of the fact that since the twentieth century, this tradition lodged itself within the secular university as the protective enclosure and reproductive apparatus for that tradition.

Addressing first modern beginnings, it is precisely the issue of the production of racialized cultural difference out of geohistorical heterogeneity by the normative epistemological, interpretive, and political forms of modernity, namely disciplinary knowledges that reproduce the citizen-subject of the nation-state, that I would like to address in my response. I understand this to be a central concern of university-based postcolonial critique since its start in the late-1970s with the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978). And to the degree that Watts gathers together a number of critical scholars of early American literature that he identifies as “Saidians”—David Kazanjian, Malini Johar Shueller, and Amy Kaplan, for example—who, in his estimation, share a single paradigm and critical position against which he seeks to differentiate, we might pause for a moment to recall the central insights of Said’s Orientalism, as relevant today with the US engaged in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for the last seven years as it was in its original moment of reception.

Based on what he argues is the tendency of “Saidian critics,” Watts implicitly suggests, and rightly so, that Said’s Orientalism grossly reduced the dynamism, multivocality, and instability of the Orientalist and tropicalist discourses that sought to constitute colonial social relations. As Lisa Lowe argued in her Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (1991), when critics reduce Orientalist conditions to a single binary of colonizer and colonized, in which the former univocally constitutes the latter, they inadvertently produce managing monoliths (or overly regulative categories) for assessing the dynamic historical process of imperial and colonial social formations under global constraints. Doing so grossly underestimates the complex determinations that organize, constrain, and transform colonial discourse. Though Watts argues against and in contradistinction to “Saidian” critics of early American literary history, Lowe’s insight is particularly acute in the works of Amy Kaplan and David Kazanjian. For is this not exactly what Kaplan means when she speaks of the “Anarchy of Empire,” of its instability and ambiguities in enunciative positions of dominant and residual...

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