American Literary History

Hsu, Hsuan L., 1976-
Literature and Regional Production
American Literary History - Volume 17, Number 1, Spring 2005, pp. 36-69

Oxford University Press

Hsuan L. Hsu - Literature and Regional Production - American Literary History 17:1 American Literary History 17.1 (2005) 36-69 Literature and Regional Production Hsuan L. Hsu For readers, tourists, and politicians alike, the region often serves as a focus of nostalgia and a privileged site of geographical feeling. Both the architects of gated suburban communities and progressive cultural critics represent the local as the scale of familiarity, loyalty, and authentic experience, in contrast with the merely imagined community of the nation and the passionless economic space of globalization; in this view, the only hope for larger scales would be an expansion of local allegiances outward until the entire world is fused together into a "global village." Thus, one leftist geographer claims that global political movements must extrapolate from local experiences because "for most people the terrain of sensuous experience and of affective social relations (which forms the material grounding for consciousness formation and political action) is locally circumscribed" (Harvey, Spaces 85). But David M. Smith reminds us in an essay entitled "How Far Should We Care?" that such an outward expansion of locally rooted feelings would have to stop somewhere. Although he sets out to lay the groundwork for a "universal ethic of care," Smith's essay ends up affirming a "distance-decay" model of interpersonal sympathy in which feelings are attenuated by distance (15). But...