Doing the Hemisphere Differently: A Response to Ralph Bauer

As someone trained in postmodern theory, feminist theory, Chicana/o studies, and political activism, my focus on the later periods of American literature seemed inevitable. After all, the intellectual formations and identities I study did not exist prior to 1848, maybe not even prior to 1968. A focus on the present often coincides with a longing for history, a somewhat naive hope that history will provide the “facts” that underlie the contemporary. This is why my students always want me to give them history lectures. This is why scholars in Chicana/o studies, like myself, keep turning back to writers like María Amparo Ruiz de Burton (1832–95) in search of a foremother, when Ruiz de Burton herself would never recognize what Chicana/os mean when they talk about the Americas, identity, race, or the borderlands. Contemporary Chicana/os and Ruiz de Burton would not get along very well at all, in fact, but this disharmony is usually suppressed in order to create a genealogy for Mexican-descent writers in the US. It is true that scholars in my field often turn to the past only in its relation to our present (as in the Heath Anthology’s “exclusive geographic focus on those colonial territories that would later become the US”). We are hopeless postmoderns. Does this make us unfaithful to our origins? Ralph Bauer might say “yes.” However, I have never been very committed to faith.

It is good to be reminded that the US is a recent minority in the hemisphere, and I find Bauer’s argument to be vitally important. I totally agree that we need to rethink the orientation of American studies, which, even in its hemispheric modes, is still US-centric in its terminology, its questions, and its periodicity. It is hard work for those of us educated in the US to unlearn the narratives and definitions that govern US academic studies, and it is hard work to understand (and sometimes even to locate) scholarship from and about other nations in the hemisphere, but if we want to move past US exceptionalism, we must. We must expand our sense of history, we must encourage more multilingual education, and we must be willing to surrender our own narrow perspectives to wider and longer views. Let’s do it. Let’s declare our shared independence from the nation-state.

Bauer’s transnational approach to the hemisphere establishes a framework for needed dialogue between early Americanists and “later” Americanists. In terms of space, Bauer and I share the same terrain and the same commitment to viewing the Americas in hemispheric dialogue. In terms of method, though, our approaches differ in subtle ways, and I will focus on two of them in this response. The first is temporal. In critiquing the ahistoricity of the “proto-nationalist ‘origins’ model,” Bauer seems to be restoring a more (politically and historically) “correct” temporality with the prenational at the origin. In response to the inverted logic that assumes contemporary national formations as the governing principles for early American studies, Bauer returns us to a more properly chronological order in which the prenational period provides the source of polycentric hemispheric dialogue and in which Spanish norms preceded the British in the hemisphere. This is a helpful genealogy for contemporary American studies (if I might make so presentist a claim), providing a history of transnational intercourse without the US at its center. (Bauer might think more about how “transnationalism” among indigenous cultures would undermine the colonial temporality of his history, but that might go beyond the “American” narrative.) I find Bauer’s critique of the Heath Anthology’s US-centrism helpful not because the Heath “foreclosed on an understanding of these texts within their proper intellectual, historical, literary contexts” but because this critique suits my contemporary political and theoretical concerns. I would argue that the “context” for texts is relative, and I do not think the past is more “proper” than the present. Recent historiography has unmasked the historian in the history, the ways in which narratives of the past are constructed for the use of the present. Rather...