The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative North American Literature

R. Nischik, R. Nischik, R. Nischik

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137413901
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A first of its kind, The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative North American Literature provides an overview of Comparative North American Literature, a cutting-edge discipline. Contributors make important interventions into multiculturalism in North America and into U.S.-Mexico and U.S.-Canada border literatures.

Section 1

Charting the Territory

1

Comparative North American Studies and Its Contexts: Introduction

Reingard M. Nischik

This book develops a particular analytic approach to the literatures and cultures of North America, elaborating upon a transnational and at the same time comparative perspective on these countries,¹ an approach we may call “Comparative North American Studies” or, when focused largely on literature, as is the case in this handbook, “Comparative North American Literature.” The handbook is meant to chart relevant methodologies and major issues of Comparative North American Literature and to help this approach find its place in the ever-changing constellation of dealing with the United States and Canada and studying them across the disciplines. This recent approach to the study of the United States and Canada is presented at a time when both American Studies and Canadian Studies have been reorienting themselves, opening up in the wake of globalizing tendencies not only in economics, politics, and technology, but also in the context of literature and culture. This process has resulted in a tendency toward “transnational” (i.e., reaching beyond national borders) or sometimes even “postnational” approaches to literature (i.e., contesting the conceptual validity of nation-states in a globalized world), paying tribute to the effects of complex migratory movements as well as to national borders as a colonial overwriting of Indigenous conceptions of what is now designated as “North America.”² Since there are few methodological publications yet on Comparative North American Studies,³ this introductory chapter will approach the topic by first embedding it into the context of American Studies, Canadian Studies, hemispheric studies, and global studies. It will then deal with the method and value of comparative literature studies, before sketching the key reasons why Comparative North American Studies, and Comparative North American Literature in particular, form a promising, timely paradigm for dealing with the literatures and cultures of the United States and Canada and, finally, charting particularly relevant areas of concern. While this contextualizing introduction delineates the wider fields within which this project is situated, the exemplary chapters to follow take a cultural studies approach to literary texts and literary studies as their prime objects of comparative, theoretically oriented analysis in dealing with selected, particularly relevant areas of Comparative North American Literature.

Surveying the field(s): “America” versus American Studies, “Canada” versus Canadian Studies, “North America” versus North American Studies

One major problem with charting a new approach to the literatures and cultures of the North American continent is the unstable usage of the basic terms implied: What does “North America” mean? In fact, what does “America” mean? And what then do “American Studies” encompass? Similarly, if the word “Canada” refers to the nation-state north of the United States, do “Canadian Studies” therefore also involve studies of the nation of Quebec and of the First Nations? And what is the American continent in the first place; does it encompass North and South America or do these areas make up two separate “continents”?⁴ To preview the answers to such questions pointedly, if not provocatively, American Studies does not really deal with “America” (but with the United States only), Canadian Studies does not really deal with (all of) Canada (but mainly with the English-speaking part of the country), and North American Studies do not really deal with “North America” (but mainly with the United States and Canada only), depending on one’s definitions of these terms. In the following, I sketch such problematic terminological and conceptual issues, before briefly dealing with more established transnational approaches potentially encompassing “North America.”

Diana Taylor went to school in Mexico, then moved with her Canadian parents to Toronto, and is now a professor in New York, thus having lived in all three countries that are, at least in a geopolitical sense, regarded as constituting “North America.” Taylor describes the American hemisphere as an “oddly shaped landmass misidentified, mislabeled, and misrepresented from the moment of the first European explorations” (D. Taylor 2007, 1416). The trouble is indeed still noticeable with the designations “America” as well as “American Studies”⁵ and “Canadian Studies.”⁶ As Taylor reports, in Mexico she was taught “that América was one, conceptually singular. Nuestra América, we shared a continent” (1416).⁷ In Canada, Taylor’s classmates wondered where Mexico was anyway. And in connection with the United States she learnt that “America” really designated (only) the United States, while the rest of the hemisphere, which should include Canada, was referred to in the plural form, “the Americas” (1416). Taylor mentions a Mexican cabaret artist who once sarcastically joked about this confusion of terms, with both the United States as well as the whole hemisphere being called “America”:

These people came and they named themselves “Americans.” But American American, because the others became Mexican American, Peruvian American, . . . Paraguayan American, Canadian American . . . but the whole damn continent shouldn’t be named “America” so what is an American American. Nothing! Absolutely nothing! (qtd. in D. Taylor 2007, 1422)

This statement seems just as confusing as the terminology referring to the “American” continent and its various parts, and an “American American” seems indeed a nonsense designation—though it is actually a logical consequence of the traditional—partly encompassing, partly particularizing, and thus inconsistent—usage of the term “America.”⁸ With the United States, the continent’s politically and economically dominant country, having appropriated the term “America” exclusively for itself, what is at stake in such a pars pro toto naming are, of course, power constellations. “North America,” then, actually designates a larger territory and cultural space than “America” in the sense of “United States,” namely that of the United States plus Canada—and sometimes also Mexico, depending on which one of the diverse circulating definitions of “North America” one uses.

Geographers generally consider North America to include “all of the mainland and related offshore islands lying north of the Isthmus of Panama” (Vianna 1979, 551). Geopolitically, then, Mexico is part of North America (see also a few North American agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement [NAFTA] and the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation [NAAEC], which include Mexico; bilateral North American agreements between the United States and one of its northern or southern neighbors, however, are in the majority). Some scholars even wonder whether Central America (which includes Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Belize, and the southernmost states of Mexico) belongs to North America as well (cf. Webster’s New Geographical Dictionary 1972, 232). The cultural and linguistic difference between the northern and the southern parts of the Americas is captured more accurately by the terms “Anglo-America” (encompassing the United States and Canada, though in this case disregarding Quebec) and “Latin America” (encompassing Mexico, Central America, and South America), a distinction that can be traced back to the middle of the nineteenth century (cf. Mignolo 2007, 57; Spivak 2003a, 118n.27). Confusingly so, the designation “Latin America” is sometimes also used interchangeably with the term “South America.”

Hence, what we regard as “American Studies” or “North American Studies” does not refer to clear-cut geographies and agendas, but is subject to political, institutional, and, last but not least, personal practices, which are geared to traditions and cultural hierarchies, yet may change over time. Consequently, “North American Studies” rarely deals with Mexico—the present book mirrors this state of affairs—because Mexico’s history, culture, and language are often regarded as belonging to Latin or South America, not to North America (as suggested in the definitions above) and, relatedly, because of institutional as well as practical, linguistic reasons (many professors and students of US American and Canadian Studies do not speak Spanish⁹; on the inclusion of Mexico into [Comparative] North American Studies see chs. 10, 9, and 2). On the other hand, we may consider it a welcome effect of the much-touted transnational turn (see ch. 17) that the concept “North American Literature” tends to be no longer regarded as another synonym for US American literature but is increasingly seen as encompassing both US American and Canadian literature, as practiced in this handbook as well.¹⁰

Widening the scope of the continental designation and the research paradigm in this way diversifies matters considerably, not least since “North American” understood as US American and Canadian also involves Quebec and thus, strictly speaking, two “official” or predominant languages of the countries concerned, English in the United States¹¹ and English as well as French in Canada.¹² Then, too, “North America,” even if understood as encompassing “only” the United States and Canada—as even dictionaries suggest nowadays¹³—and in spite of economic endeavors such as NAFTA, is not regarded as a cohesive unit by many inhabitants of the area. As Rachel Adams formulates: “North America is a place that few would call home, a concept that is more the invention of politicians and economists than the product of its inhabitants’ collective imagination” (ch. 2, 42). The opposite applies, however, to the continent’s Indigenous population. Canadian First Nations and Native American communities often do not acknowledge the national border between the United States and Canada as it shows no regard for tribal communities. It separates, for instance, Canadian Mohawks and American Mohawks or Canadian Blackfoot from American Blackfeet. Canadian writer Thomas King consequently calls the border between Canada and the United States “an imaginary line. It’s a line from somebody else’s imagination” (in Rooke 1990, 72). Doing so, he points to the imperialistic aspects of cartographic practices, which in its drawing of borders and renaming of places and regions ignored and elided existing Indigenous geographical, topographical, and social concepts of the space the whites invaded (see, however, ch. 5 on the effects the national border nonetheless exerts on Indigenous communities in the United States and Canada). In the non-Native community, too, a new North American sense of “home” might be on the rise (for instance, in environmental or climatic terms): Thus Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, during a stay in France, tweeted on December 21, 2012: “Now returning to N. America (in time for storms, I gather . . . ).” Atwood confirmed in an email to me on January 29, 2014, that she definitely returned to Toronto after that tweet, and thus was on her way “home” when she referred to North America.

In any case, the nevertheless considerable differences between US and Canadian cultures may be traced back to the almost antithetical, at least highly divergent etymologies of the very naming of these two countries, both colonial in origin. The name “America” probably goes back to the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci, who, in a letter of 1504 (printed one year later), labeled the landmass “discovered” by Christopher Columbus (during his four voyages to the West Indies and the southern American continent between 1492 and 1504) Mundus Novus, “New World.” Vespucci’s term “New World” thus indirectly also refers us to the fact that America, from a European perspective, was invented rather than “discovered” (E. O’Gorman 1961 [1958])—presenting a projection screen for many powerful dreams and myths (such as Brave New World, Atlantis, El Dorado, Arcadia, Paradise on Earth) that preceded the continent’s appearance on European maps. The name “Canada,” in contrast, has hardly had anything dreamlike or mythical about it (there is, for instance, no “Canadian Dream” parallel to the “American Dream”): its etymology is much more grounded. The country’s name refers to the multicultural makeup of North America right from the beginning of European exploration: “Kanata” was originally a Huron-Iroquois word meaning “village” or “settlement.” After Jacques Cartier had used “Kanata” for his exploration reports in the 1530s and 1540s, the term saw gradual territorial extensions over the centuries, until in 1791 the name “Canada” was used officially for the first time in the Constitutional (or Canada) Act (see Higgins 2008, 38). Another possible explanation for the name “Canada” also goes back to European exploration. Some reports have it that early Spanish or Portuguese explorers, disappointed at not finding gold or other riches in the northern part of the continent, derided the country as “aca nada” or “cà nada” (meaning “here nothing”). This is certainly a drastically different view of the northern part of the continent compared to Christopher Columbus’s description of the Caribbean Islands as a land of “honey” in his 1493 letter to Luis de Santángel, or Arthur Barlowe’s enthusiastic account (of Roanoke Island, part of today’s North Carolina) in The First Voyage Made to the Coasts of America of 1584, in which the author imagines the sweet smells of America before he has even set foot on the continent. The tremendous differences in national mythology—or, in the case of Canada, the formerly often alleged lack of national myths or master narratives (cf., however, concepts/myths like the North or, more recently, multiculturalism; see Mackey 1999; and chs. 12 and 3)—may thus be traced back to the very first texts about “America” and “Kanata” in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

In today’s usage, the name “Canada” and particularly the adjective “Canadian” are as unstable and contested as their American counterparts. Whereas the instability concerning the term “America” centrifugally points toward the entire hemisphere, with respect to Canada the instability is inward-oriented, especially concerning the province of Quebec, which in November 2006 acquired through the Canadian parliament the status of “a nation within a united Canada.”¹⁴ Looking back on a centuries-long history of survivance of French culture as a kind of enclave surrounded by mainly English-speaking nations, many of the French-speaking Quebecers no longer consider themselves to be “Canadian” or “Canadien” but rather “Québécois.” Interestingly so, the Québécois prefer to think of themselves as part of “l’Amérique” rather than of “Canada.” After two hundred years in which “Frenchness” had been the “touchstone” (Rolfe 1992, 140) of their collective identity, the Québécois have, since around the middle of the twentieth century, also begun to look for and embrace their “Americanness” (américanité; see Rolfe 1992 and ch. 8). Separatist Québécois scholars thus even argue that their French-language literature is not part of Canadian literature, which is one reason why my book History of Literature in Canada (2008), encompassing literature in Canada written in both English and French, is called precisely that (rather than “History of Canadian Literature”). Indeed, as Winfried Siemerling states, “the discussion of the literatures of Canada . ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Section 1   Charting the Territory
• Section 2   Perspectives on Multiculturalism
• Section 3   French-Language and English-Language Cultures in North America
• Section 4   Regions and Symbolic Spaces
• Section 5   National, Transnational, Global Perspectives
• Contributors
• Works Cited
• Index