Commentary: Hemispheric Partiality

Abstract

The advantages to be gained from reimagining American literary history along hemispheric lines emerge clearly enough in essays brought together for this special issue of American Literary History. The hemispheric dimension puts yet another stake through heart of unquiet corpse of American exceptionalism, while at same time, through its inscription of a north-south rather than an east-west axis, interrogating what Ralph Bauer has called Euro-centric epistemological assumptions about literary value (8) in relation to Americas. It also highlights increasing importance of multilingualism to American literary study, a point exemplified most obviously here by Vera M. Kutzinski's piece on reception and circulation of Langston Hughes's work in Latin America and different meanings associated with his texts there. Above all, hemispheric studies serve purpose of, in Walter D. Mignolo's words, accentuating the ratio between geohistorical locations and knowledge production (121). This involves a form of radical demystification, a process which emphasizes how modem epistemology narcotized its own locus of enunciation and projected an idea of knowledge as universal designs from particular and hidden local histories (123). Rather than attempting to identify ontology of specific locales in old area studies manner, Mignolo has preferred to deploy what he calls border gnosis (12) to open up questions of cultural difference.