Friday: Indigenous New England Literature

How many Native American authors can you name from New England? BESIDES Samson Occom and William Apess. At Plimoth, you'll be able to learn about a rich regional indigenous literary history, going at least as far back as Mi'kmaq hieroglyphics and as far forward as Narragansett children's poetry. Even better, you get to meet some talented contemporary local Native authors, hear them read, and buy their books.

On Friday afternoon (Session 3A at 2:15) we will have a roundtable discussion with editors of Dawnland Voices: Writing from Indigenous New England. This anthology, years in the making and about 600 pages in manuscript form, is under contract with the University of Nebraska Press; if we're lucky, we should see it sometime next year.

The book is organized by nation, and each nation has a community editor--a tribal elder and/or historian who selected and introduced the texts. Three of these editors will be on hand to discuss the project: Joan Tavares Avant (Mashpee Wampanoag), Dawn Dove (Narragansett), and Stephanie Fielding (Mohegan). It's awe-inspiring to hear how much they know about tribal writing, how they located and chose texts for publication, and how they presented them. This is grass-roots canon-building!

Friday evening, Joan will read from her book, People of the First Light; along with Larry Spotted Crow Mann (Nipmuc), who has published a book of stories called Tales from the Whispering Basket; Mihku Paul (Maliseet), who has a forthcoming poetry chapbook; and Mohegan Medicine Woman Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel, who has a new Victorian Gothic, Fire Hollow.

If you want to learn a little more about these and other regional Native writers, you can follow the blog, Indigenous New England Literature . We also have an "Indigenous New England Literature" book discussion group on Goodreads.com. And hopefully, before too long, students at UNH will be launching an online archive of regional indigenous literature. Stay tuned, and come on Friday!

Siobhan Senier
University of New Hampshire

Re-Envisioning, Re-Staging, and Retailing: National Identity and Ethnic Counter-Narratives

European immigrants and ethnic Americans are often viewed as exemplars of the American Dream. In the commonly told story, Jewish, Irish, and Italian immigrants arrive in America and struggle to find employment, but after much hard work and perseverance, finally achieve success and, in the process, exchange their native identities for normative, bourgeois American ones. Through the papers proposed for this panel, Daily, Hotten-Somers, and Schmitz will challenge this narrative in three different forums: business and immigration history, the theatre, and the novel. In each of these papers, the scholars engage in a re-telling of a master narrative of what it means to become and be American.

Katie Daily’s paper, “(re)Envisioning Jewish America: Counterfactual History in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and The Plot Against America,” considers Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America alongside Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union to understand the ways in which these two contemporary American Jewish writers employ counterfactual strategies to explore questions of American and ethnic identity. In pushing the bounds of history, asking readers to consider how we read the past, Roth and Chabon uncover the fracturing of identity that occurs as racial and ethnic minorities search for a place in the nation. Daily argues that such rewritings of history in the form of the postmodern novel offer ethnic counter-narratives that challenge conventional understandings of immigration and assimilation.

Diane Hotten-Somers’ paper, "Jewish America Awakes and Sings the Irish Blues: Sean O'Casey, Clifford Odets, and Working-Class Identities,” engages similar ideas as Daily’s in that it considers how Jewish-American immigrants constructed themselves in the face of an Anglo-American Protestant normative cultural identity. Through comparatively analyzing Sean O’Casey’s tenement drama Juno and the Paycock with Clifford Odets’ Awake and Sing!, this paper explores the ways in which Odets redraws the stage Jew by employing O’Casey’s prior strategies of rewriting the stage Irishman. Through their re-stagings, Hotten-Somers argues, both O’Casey and Odets provided not only more complicated theatrical representations of the Irish and Jewish-Americans, but also exposed the complex cultural-historical experiences of the early 20th-century urban, working-class in Ireland and America.

Paul Schmitz’s paper, “Urban Pastorals and American Dreams: Narratives of Business and Identity in New York’s Italian Community,” shifts the focus to another group of white ethnic Americans and their urban environs. Schmitz analyzes the ways in which Italian immigrants negotiated their identities through ethnic commerce, demonstrating that food retailing provided a crucial avenue of upward mobility for New York’s immigrant community. Schmitz argues that the retail food business—from pushcarts to corner groceries—played a fundamental role in the immigrants’ cultural conversion from an alien underclass to symbols of American enterprise. This paper is especially attentive to the tensions between the popular narrative of New York’s Italian grocers as a kind of “Old World,” urban underclass and the immigrant merchants’ own desires to master the narrative of the American Dream and the free-market system to serve their own aspirations for social mobility and assimilation.

These three papers individually address how white ethnic Americans negotiated, indeed reconstructed, their identities in the face of a normative, non-ethnic American cultural identity. At the same time, in positioning the stories of Jews, Irish, and Italians alongside each other, the panel as a whole highlights the advantages of a interdisciplinary comparative ethnic methodology, illustrating how attention to the similarities and differences between immigrant representations, histories, and experiences compels a rewriting of the myth of the American Dream.

Diane Hotten-Somers, Boston College

“A Very Yankee Sort of Oriental”: Cosmopolitanism and Orientalism in Henry David Thoreau’s Engagements with Eastern Religions

Until quite recently, due to the prevalence of the myth of American literary autonomy during the early national period, few studies have addressed the international influences upon American works. Following the work of Wai Chee Dimock, Paul Giles, Susan Manning, and Andrew Taylor which positions American literature as a form of world literature, this paper explores the interactions between American Transcendentalism and Eastern religions in the writings of Henry David Thoreau.

Segments of Eastern texts appear in Walden, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and his journals, and Thoreau translated Eastern texts into English (from French and German translations) in the “Ethnical Scriptures” column in The Dial. Thoreau’s writings on the East can be conceived in two ways. First, they reflect an emerging cosmopolitan American identity that features a positive opening to the richness of foreign cultures. For example, in the Artist of Kouroo parable, Thoreau combines Eastern and Western perspectives to create a culturally harmonious work. Conversely, Thoreau’s writing is as a continuation of a conventional Western Orientalist perspective that essentializes the East and uses its representation as a means of defining the West. In Walden Thoreau portrays the East as backward, mythologizes different religions and cultures, defines the East with a Western lens, and commodifies religious practice. Thoreau’s writings are therefore cosmopolitan and Orientalist and, this conflicted state of being reaffirms Laura Dassow Walls’ argument that the two identities frequently overlap.

While there has been a lull of scholarly interest in Thoreau’s connection to Eastern religions, my research paper aims to spark the debate by demonstrating the theoretically problematic nature of this relationship. Furthermore, given Thoreau’s foundational role in American literature, his works suggest that the early American canon was an international product that permeated borders.

Sarina Isenberg, Queen's University

Whose National Myth?

Any of us can easily recall numerous examples of the appropriation or reinterpretation of the mythic narratives and characters of the Old West by creative artists and writers from outside America—particularly in film, we think of Akira Kurasawa’s Seven  Samurai, Sergio Leone’s “spaghetti  Westerns” in the 1950s and 1960s or even more recently Willem Dafoe’s “le cowboy” character who arrives to console a grieving Parisian mother in Nobuhiro Suwa’s contribution to Paris, Je t’aime! (2006)  The appeal of the Old West myth with its larger-than-life characters and spaces seems to be global, rather than national.  But what can these reinterpretations of the Old West by creative artists from outside the US tell us about the cultural values that motivate them?  Are the elements of the Old West myths so universal that they can fit into any cultural context with a consistent meaning?  

My approach takes an intentional transatlantic context by comparing examples from 20^th century American and European, particularly German, interpretations of the Old West and its characters.  Through this approach I hope to show that the myth of the Old West is infused with values that reflect ideas and attitudes which are more indicative of European rather than American concerns.

Although his writings are hardly known in North America, the novels of the Wild West by the late 19^th century German author Karl May have exerted an influence on the national psyche of Germany for over a century, forming a fixed image of the American West for several generations of Germans that simply cannot be supplanted by the more recent imaginary visions of TV and film Westerns or by any actual first-hand experience of the American West.  In contrast to the North American stereotypes of Western characters, in May’s Western novels the Native American is the “good guy”, the hero, rather than the Cowboy.  May’s admiration for the Native American follows the European tradition of the “noble savage”, but May develops this stereotype even further as he imbues his fictional Western characters, the Apache Winnetou and his white (German) companion Old Shatterhand with personal credos and world views that reflect the author’s own commitment to the principles of the late 19^th century International Peace Movement.

Separated from May by two World Wars and much of Germany’s terrible recent history, in his famous 1974 performance piece, I like America and America likes Me, German artist Joseph Beuys revives the concept of the encounter with an essential spirit of the American West that can catapult modern man into a new ideal relationship with his surroundings.  Winnetou’s murder at the end of May’s trilogy signals the end of this noble race and Beuys begins his encounter at this tragic moment: “I believe I made contact with the psychological trauma point of the United States’ energy constellation: the whole American trauma with the Indian, the Red Man.”  Just as May’s vision of the American West was infused with the philosophical ideals of the International Peace Movement, Beuys too filters his conception of the American West through a philosophical system: the philosophy of spiritual freedom found in the writings of Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy.

Finally, the films of German director Wim Wenders present a much less utopian view of the American West.  From Paris, Texas (1984), his first collaboration with Sam Shepard, through Land of Plenty (2004) and Don’t Come Knocking (2006), his most recent collaboration with Shepard, Wenders examines the legacy of the Old West in the increasingly desperate lives of modern Westerners as they struggle with the loss of that legacy in the face of the social, psychological and political realities of the contemporary America.

What I hope to suggest is that the meaning of the Old West for an entire European nation over several generations can be vastly different from the meanings that our American culture imbues in this national myth.  This can have a significant impact on international understanding and particularly on the practice of and on the premises and purposes of American Studies in the US in comparison with our academic counterparts Europe.

Steven Bradley, Colorado Mesa University

Steve Wilson's (Literature) Post

Mythic Sales Figures: Jack Kerouac’s The Subterraneans and the Marketplace

Work is productivity.  Work is sex.  Work is moral. Work is art.  Throughout Jack Kerouac’s The Subterraneans, protagonist Leo Percepied struggles with his desire to “work,” in all these 1950s definitions of the word.  The novel portrays a young passionate writer seeking redemption from a capitalist system that values work over contemplation.  As we know from Kerouac’s biography, his own father found little practical value in his son’s writing, noting that Jack could not “be supported all [his] life.”  That the jargon of the day conflated work with sex adds to Leo’s conflicts: he enters a relationship with the half-black, half-Cherokee Mardou Fox as at once an experiment in race relations and a chance to prove his own masculinity. Mardou cannot reach orgasm, we learn from Leo; and he considers it his duty, and good works, to “cure’ her of this illness.  Moreover, since Leo wonders why his friends often call him a “fag,” and he reveals in a thinly veiled recounting of a night with fellow writer Arial Lavalina his underlying homosexual desires, his “work” on Mardou has restorative powers far beyond proving his worth as a productive member of the marketplace.  Thus, The Subterraneans compels us to consider the nature of work and commodity.  Of what value is art?  Of what value is ethnicity in a racist society?  Of what value machismo?  These and other questions rest at the center of Kerouac’s complex psychological text.

The Beat era has been highly marketable over the decades since Ginsberg’s “Howl” and Kerouac’s On the Road first appeared in the mid-1950s.  Coming at the birth of a truly global media, the Beats were commodified into pop culture icons almost from the first publication of their works.  Their own lives and images stood at times above their literary achievements in terms of market value.  Eventually Beat writers would be used to sell revolution in the 1960s and khaki trousers the 1990s, among many other products.  This commodification parallels the ongoing market strength of their books: Kerouac’s On the Road has sold some six million copies since its publication in 1957, and Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems over a million copies.  If appropriation by the marketplace is a sign of redemption for one’s “work,” the Beats have cleansed themselves of all their bohemian sins.

For these reasons, it is an interesting exercise to investigate the ways the marketplace has sold The Subterraneans to its buyers in the decades since its 1958 publication.  In the 1950s, a market that had traditionally been the purview of “potboiler” novels, the paperback trade, would broaden to include more serious works of literature.  Mass marketing of literary fiction adopted many of the methods employed to market dime store westerns, romances and crime novels: hyberbolic cover language, in particular, but also the use of cover art to attract buyers.  Such cover art provides us direct insight into the elements of texts that marketers considered saleable, as well as the ways those marketers viewed their audiences.  Our question, then, is to ask how The Subterraneans, a text on work and value, is sold in the marketplace.  What traits of the novel were saleable?  Did those traits change over time?  As one would expect, since The Subterraneans remains in print some 50 years after it first appeared, there have been many different covers and editions of the novel – in the US and abroad.  My analysis will be limited to US and UK editions, since I have had access to cover images from those markets.  No doubt one could undertake an equally revealing exploration of other foreign editions.  Kerouac’s marketability remains a worldwide phenomenon.

Steve Wilson, Texas State University-San Marcos

Melody Graulich's (Religion and Identity) Post

The Night the Stars Fell: Historical Convergences and Cross-Racial Histories on the Southern Plains

Cormac McCarthy begins his trilogy of southwestern history with the 1833 leonid meteor showers, which mark in his historical universe the birth date of the kid in Blood Meridian.  My presentation on the oral, visual, and written mythology about “the night the stars fell” focuses on the work of earlier historians who also saw the meteor showers as marking a moment of cataclysmic change. I suggest the meteor showers provide us with a historical crossroads of multicultural simultaneity, yielding a complex cross-racial history of the Southern Plains, complicating the relationship between myth and history.

Using slides, I examine the picture ledger of the Kiowa elder Pohd-lohk, as recorded in Momaday’s The Names, and the Bible quilts of the African American Harriet Powers, both born after 1833.  Neither was "literate" in our common use of that word, but Pohd-lohk was a celebrated storyteller and Powers a preacher.  Although their words were passed down through oral traditions, both insured that their historical and spiritual understanding would be recorded by their own hands, in visual media, a reminder that there are many kinds of literacy. Their creators saw the ledger and the quilts as historical documents and as acts of self-preservation.  Pohd-lohk viewed his ledger as "an instrument with which he could reckon his place in the world."  Powers referred to her quilt as a "sermon in patchwork."  Both used their creations to place the self within history and within a community. 

            One particular moment is central to both documents, both historical visions.  Pohd-lohk's "first page" chronicles "Da-pegya-de Sai, November, 1833 [when] the stars were falling," a moment that becomes central to Momaday's mythological and historical vision; his epilogue to The Way to Rainy Mountain begins, "During the first hours after midnight on the morning of November 13, 1833, it seemed that the world was coming to an end."  A central square in Powers's quilt explodes with a meteor shower, which she described as "The falling of the stars on November 13, 1833.  The people were frighten and thought that the end of time had come."  For Pohd-lohk, Powers, and Momaday, the meteor showers signify a cultural ending. Yet the world does not come to an end: the showers are a way for them to record a transitional moment of dramatic change and to establish historical continuity with their communities. 

            I conclude with the ledger book of Uncle Buck  and Buddy  McCaslin in Faulkner’s Go Down Moses.  Buck uses the “year the stars fell” to mark another transitional moment, the birth of “Tommy’s Turl,” son of Tomasina, a slave girl, and her father, the white patriarch Carruthers McCaslin. When Isaac McCaslin, largely reared by the half-black, half-Indian Sam Fathers, reads his father and uncle’s barely literate records and pieces together this racial crossing, the revelation leads him to “relinquish” his “birth right” and to remain childless.  On the night they fell, the stars revealed to Pohd-Lohk, Powers, Momaday, McCarthy, and Faulkner the burden of the history of racial injustice on the southern Plains—what to give up, how to go on.

Melody Graulich, Professor of English and American Studies, Utah State University

Two of the images discussed here:

"The Night the Stars Fell Square" from the Harriet Powers quilt:

Alfred Momaday, image from N. Scott Momaday's The Way to Rainy Mountain: