Transcendental Islam: The Worlding of Our America: A Response to Wai Chee Dimock

A good scholar will find Aristophanes & Hafiz & Rabelais full of American history.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journal

Rather than taking our measure of time from the stipulated beginning of a territorial regime[,] I propose a more extended (and seemingly off-center) duration to rethink the scope of American literature. This produces a map that, thanks to its receding horizons, must depart significantly from a map based on the short life of the United States. It takes us to a time when this nation was nowhere in sight, though the world was already in full existence. What is the relation of American literature to that world?

Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents

1. Hemispheric Islam

In Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (2006), Wai Chee Dimock takes blistering aim at the nation-based model of literary studies on which the field of American literature has long depended, refusing the nation-state as the integral unit of literary analysis and positing instead the epic counter-scale of the planet in its place. Assembling an archive that plumbs continents and millennia and takes the entire human species as its core subject (rather than delimiting itself to a territorially bound subset of humans, called “Americans”), Dimock has theorized a vastly abstracted framework for re-reading American literature, organized around the decidedly non-national coordinates of what she calls “deep space” and “deep time.” In this issue of American Literary History, Dimock extends the work of Through Other Continents in several notable ways, in particular taking up the question of hemispheric American studies and placing pressure on that field’s framing assumptions, just as Through Other Continents placed pressure on the nation as the unit of study. This is initially counterintuitive, since the project of hemispheric American studies and Dimock’s own more “planetary” project would seem to have a great deal in common. Both are examples of the larger transnational turn throughout the humanities, and both pursue that transnational agenda through a method that Dimock has called “scale enlargement” (Through 5, 32)—an attempt to decenter the nation by radically expanding the scope of inquiry beyond the spatial and historical limits associated with any one bounded nation-state. Despite that core similarity, however, Dimock sets out here to distance and differentiate her approach from that of hemispheric American studies, making many of the same argumentative moves on the hemisphere as a unit of analysis that she and other postnational scholars have tended to use to distance themselves from the nation. She notes, for example, that the idea of the hemisphere is a kind of “notional” fiction (as the nation is); that it is built on an accident of geography (so that privileging it amounts to a kind of “implicit geographical determinism” “giving one directional axis an automatic primacy, and redistributing the prerogatives of the world accordingly”); that the hemisphere is almost as geographically limited and bounded as the nation is (when compared to the planet); and that our sense of the history of the hemisphere is likewise limited (compared, again, to that of the planet). Though the hemispheric paradigm has had a long and storied radical contingent (she cites José Martí, for example, as well as more recent incarnations of this radical desire, such as the work of José David Saldívar), Dimock finally rejects the idea of an autonomous western hemisphere as the invention of white Creoles and later US statesmen (from Monroe to Dulles), a model she would like to find a way “to decenter” and “denaturalize” because it is, in the end, colonialist and inevitably US based.¹

Against “the two Americas” posited by hemispheric American studies, Dimock poses the alternative of “the Islamic world map.” As Claire F. Fox has noted, Islam can denaturalize all kinds of nation-based Americanisms, in large part because it “is not easily subsumed into existing US-based religious, geographical, racial, and ethnic taxonomies” (642). As such, it does enormous work for Dimock here—work that was begun in 2006 in Continents, which contains the seeds of several of the arguments made...