Comparative Literatures, American Languages

Rey Chow argues that many comparatists, while claiming to make comparisons between one text and another, in practice tend to make comparisons only to a body of European texts that are at least implicitly accorded a kind of primacy over non-European texts. As models of a renovated "post-European perspective" on "the old/new question of comparison in literary studies," Chow evinces the work of a number of critics who focus on the literatures of "the Indian Subcontinent, Anglo Africa, Spanish America, the Mediterranean, and East Asia." Critics such as these, she writes,

have advanced the discussion of comparison by foregrounding, in their studies of the literary and other writings of those areas, the conflicts and incongruities resulting from the encounter with Europe that are manifest in the articulations of the native/indigenous traditions and identities. The aftermath of this encounter, a historically given condition that is regularly reinforced not simply as a meeting, a contact, or a conversation but specifically as an encounter with what is culturally superior—this aftermath is what I am designating by the term "post-European."

Rather than continuing to privilege in our work the version of colonialist history in which "the encounter with Europe" of "native/indigenous traditions and identities" was inevitably presumed to be an encounter of (native) cultural inferior with (European) superior, Chow urges other comparatists to join these critics in determinately relocating our practice in the "post-European" "aftermath" of the colonial scene.

A number of initiatives currently afoot in, and to some degree between, the fields of Americanist literary studies and American Indian language studies resonate strongly with the kind of transformation of the grounds of comparison that Chow is calling for, but I believe these developments also suggest that issues of multilingualism—which Chow sees as providing insufficient bases for a truly comparatist version of literary studies—are likely and perhaps necessarily to remain central for the foreseeable future.

Until recently, the languages and literatures of Native Americans have been a blind spot in the collective vision (or lack thereof) of most Americanist scholars. Only with the advent of the Native American literary renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s did Indian writing begin to figure in accounts of American literature, and even then still in a highly tokenizing fashion, with a novel by N. Scott Momaday or Leslie Marman Silko added to the syllabus or the chapter of recent literary history to reflect the expansion of the canon in this among other multicultural directions. But the indigenous peoples of the Americas and their descendants didn't start using language in ways we may understand as being literary in 1968, of course, and the respective editors of the most recent anthologies of American literature find themselves in the difficult position of trying to remedy this long preserved and historically overdetermined oversight in various, more or less obviously inadequate, ways. The editors of The Heath Anthology of American Literature made the crucially innovative move of placing a selection of Native American materials first in the unprecedentedly inclusive survey of American literature that they first published in 1990. Half of the forty-page section featured transcriptions of Tsimshian, Tlingit, and Zuni mythological narratives by Franz Boas and two of his students, John Swanton and Ruth Bunzel, respectively; most of the other half was comprised of narratives from such non-Boasian sources as Stith Thompson's Tales of the North American Indian (1929) and John Bierhorst's The Red Swan: Myths and Tales of the American Indians (1976).¹

Subsequent editors of major anthologies have tended to produce close imitations of the Heath editors' lead. Oxford's Early American Writings (2001) devotes three sections of only fifteen to twenty pages apiece to Native American writing in its over 1100 pages; the first opens the volume with a small selection of creation myths and trickster tales; a second is comprised of brief accounts of contact with European settlers; the third concludes the volume with a selection of Indian orations against the...