Accountabilities: Authority, Feminism, West

Abstract

A major resurgence of feminist thought and action is happening. New energy and fight is showing itself in US public and scholarly life alike. (1) It's political moment, to be sure--a moment of emergency in US accompanied by worldwide feminist mobilization and global Women's Marches of January 2017. A certain doldrums or feminist fatigue has been interrupted--a rude awakening and opening out from accumulated malaise laid on by Western world postfeminist and postracial neoliberalisms of last fifteen years. Clearly, a jostling on this scale does not appear without a history. This special issue of Studies in Novel, set in motion in summer of 2016 before election of Donald Trump, indicates one piece of that history. Edited by Sigrid Anderson Cordell and Carrie Johnston, issue chronicles work of cultural critics and literary scholars as they strategize about research on issues of women, gender, and sexuality, and geopolitical space of US West. An upcoming seminar in March 2018 of C-19, Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, led by Jennifer Turtle and Jean Pfaelzer, will be devoted to Feminist Critical Regionalism and Climate of Western Literary Studies, offering another sign that more focused work is coming. (2) Of course short and longer-end effects of these scholarly efforts, not to mention feminist activisms as they unfold in real time, is question of hour. Reading this special issue, one has sense that working on US from feminist perspectives is something of an extreme sport--you need to be in shape for it. as an imagination, as a material place, as a history, always seems to get upper hand, to take back immediately whatever benefit was gained through rebellion, refusal, or critical intervention. The reason for its particular force field of power, which scholars have written a great deal about, has to do with regional as a double for US nation--the story of settling is story of America. Perhaps major critical intervention of last twenty years in field of western literary studies is to delink region from nation and to reposition as global (Kollin), spectral (Tatum), relationally transnational (Hsu), a system of local/global Wests (Comer 2010), westness (Campbell), or border space (Saldivar). This repositioning has reframed regional analyses in transnational and critical regional directions in order to accomplish various kinds of intrusions on knowledges of empire as well as established radically alternative genealogies and lived geographies. Moreover, critical turn to Wests, to westness as a system and colonial world network, has brought phenomenon of settler colonialism into fore of critical field. The US is an example par excellence of not just Anglo settler logics and history (Wolfe, Veracini) but simultaneous and competing Spanish colonialities and modernities (Aranda). Settler maps, meanings, and place making has been made more textured still for US studies by way of enormous offerings of Indigenous studies. The recent expansion and depth of that field as a field (Allen), what it teaches about ongoing or enduring indigeneity (Kauanui), fact of thoroughly different and incommensurate understandings of place and territory (Byrd) that map over and inhabit so-called West toward indigenous histories and futures (Bernardin)--all of these have reoriented political and ethical stakes, and epistemological contexts, for scholars' work. Notwithstanding any of this activity, however, and not a surprise given imperial origin stories at stake, the of popular discourse--that place of proving and opportunity and settler sovereignty--bounces back in culture and politics with regularity and ease. What also bounces back is masculine whiteness of discourse. Even as field of US study has moved into transnational and global framings, and into a sustained reckoning with competing settler colonialities, there is not yet a simultaneously wholesale critical reckoning with nexus of racialized women, gender, and sexuality across these scales and histories (Comer 2015, 2016). …