American Literary Regionalism in a Global Age (review)

Philip Joseph's American Literary Regionalism in a Global Age participates in "the ethical turn" of recent literary criticism. Without engaging directly with the thinking about literature and aesthetics that American pragmatism has inspired, Joseph nonetheless defines literature as a form of pragmatic exploration. Suffused by a continual return to "the disordered and contradictory living matter surrounding it," literature in Joseph's account resists categorical imperatives and ideological injunctions. It instead enacts an unending transaction with the everyday, focusing the reader's mind on how new events continually reveal the "limitations of one's judgments." Literature thus commits to "open-end critique" as its mode of knowing, and this habit of mind, for Joseph, is "a crucial resource, to be recognized and protected, in an increasingly globalized, interconnected world." When the kind of inquiry literature provides is "practiced in good faith," it leads readers to new forms of knowledge about themselves and their communities. Literature leads, that is, "to democratic judgments, informed by consideration of multiple viewpoints."

Teaching us as much about criticism as regionalism, Joseph, at his best, practices what he preaches. In his discussion of Abraham Cahan's fiction, he shows us how Cahan "test[s] his early faith," "poses" questions and "freely ponder[s]" contradictory views of the Jewish community, and "negotiate[s] between desires." The verbs Joseph uses throughout this chapter indicate how deeply a pragmatic mode of thought informs not only his approach but also Cahan's explorations of center and margin, citizen and immigrant, American and Jew. Resisting the conventions of both the Yiddish press and the mainstream American magazine culture where he published his work, Cahan depicts "Jews whose authenticity as Jews is unresolved and perplexing." According to Joseph, Cahan thus dramatizes his own equivocations about "the possible outcomes of Jewish relocation in America."

As is true of this chapter, much of the book engages us in a consideration of different points of view about the relations between the literary writer, his or her regionalist literary works, the local communities that the works are about, and the ethics of representation and citizenship revealed by the works and at play in the print cultures where they were published. In both moments of regionalist literary output that Joseph studies closely (the 1890s, 1920s, and 1930s), he sets up contrasts in order to consider and in a way validate diverging perspectives. First, he juxtaposes Sarah Orne Jewett and Hamlin Garland to examine a spectrum of beliefs about the responsibilities of regionalist artists to the local communities they represent. Then he stages a fascinating debate about literature, locality, and cultural authenticity through a contrastive reading of works by Mary Austin and Willa Cather. Joseph's investigation of Austin's complex racial politics and her anti-touristic, feminist, rigorously place-centered regionalist aesthetic is astute, for instance. And the legitimacy that he grants her matters all the more because he himself is more sympathetic to Willa Cather's aesthetic and views.

Joseph's reading of Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) most clearly demonstrates his claim that the regionalist works he studies and values, through their "recognition of the unencumbered subject as the starting point for modern conceptions of citizenship," help us to rethink academic debates about civil society and literature's continuing contributions to the public sphere. Yet if this approach is well-chosen to reveal Cather's peculiar genius, it proves less useful when applied to Zora Neal Hurston. Here we see that "justice" and the rationalistic terms and nationalistic concerns of civil society theory keep us at a distance from what is most interesting in Hurston's writing. In particular, Hurston's own abiding interest in the hybridized Afro-Caribbean and African American folk cultures, especially in the religious practices of Hoodoo and Voodoo, should have been brought to bear more fully on the investigation into the local, the global, and the role of the artist and her literature in negotiating between the...