The Extraterritoriality of the Literature for Our Planet

Abstract

The Extraterritoriality of the Literature for Our Planet DONALD E. PEASE THE GLOBALIZATION OF AMERICAN LITERARY STUDIES AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE PLANETARY LITERARY SYSTEM The field ofAmerican literary studies is undergoing a reconfiguration frolTI a nationalist to a global analytic fralTIe that has effected profound alterations in the concepts that the field depended upon, the institutional sites through which the field operated, the structures that guaranteed it, and the kinds of subjectivities that it required. American literary studies had forlTIerly been organized around an agreed-upon set of theoretical assulTIptions and lTIethodological procedures that underpinned Americanists' production of literary knowledge. Scholarship inAmerican literary studies was grounded in a lilTIited nUlTIber of objects that were produced at the intersection ofperiod and generic concepts. Americanist scholars rendered the field's thelTIes and values cOlTIpatible with an ideological consensus about what rendered the United States exceptional. But the globallTIovelTIents of transnational capital and lTIigratory labor responsible for the deterritorialization of nationstates have also disrupted the nationalist paradigm that interconnected AnIerican literary works, literary history, culture, and nation. The globalization ofthe literary reallTI has resulted in a shift in interpretive attention away from. explanations of how literary works function in relation to national cultures and toward an exalTIination of how postnational literatures ESQ I v. 50 1 1ST-3RD QUARTERS I2004 177 DONALD E. PEASE participate in the formation of deterritorialized contexts.I In reinstitutingAmerican literary studies outside a nationalist denom.inative, these processes of globalization have disconnected American literary history from its exceptionalist orientation. 2 Recent postnational iterations of the field of American literary studies, in their abrogation of the foundational statements correlating the scholarly prerogatives of American literature with the formative values of U.S. society, have also delegitimated the consensual fictions that had previ0usly organized the American literary studies community. In posing insuperable challenges to each of the constitutive elements -the literary object, historical periodization, generic classification, literary practitioners-that formerly stabilized the field, globalization has also communicated the crisis in the nation-state to Americanists who required the mediation of U.S. nationalism as the grounds for the coherence of their field identities. The postnationalizing effects of globalization on the field ofAmerican literary studies has solicited. intensely felt yet contradictory responses that have rendered the term "postnational" ideological in the Gramscian sense so that it has become an essentially contested category. A growling number of Americanist critics have taken up the term "postnational" as a banner under which to give expression to their allegiance to transnational formations-the Black Atlantic, transnational feminism, Aztlan, the Pacifie, Rim-that do not depend upon the territorial state as the most effective way to combat injustices in the global economy.3 But postnationalism has also fostered chauvinistic reactions from Americanists who have invoked the term to describe the United States as the superstate empowered to inscribe the foundational terms in the U.S. political vocabulary-capitalism, free enterprise, freedoms of expression and access, competitive individualism-within the newly globalized economic order.4It is because it goes above the nation-state and goes below it at the same time that globalization has resulted in these contradictory Inanifestations of the postnational. When it is articulated to the conceptual needs ofglobal relationships caused by shifts in the world economy, the term postnational describes 178 EXTRATERRITORIALITY OF LITERATURE the effect on the nation-state of the new global economic order that no longer finds in it a vehicle appropriate for the accumulation of capital or the regulation of labor. But when it describes the translocal solidarities of transnational advocacy networks like Oxfam or Amnesty International, or of the international projects offeminism, Act-Up, and the Green Party, that exist outside and work across territorial borders, the postnational signifies processes of resistance that keep globalization in check even as they simultaneously produce a very different sense of it. The one model demonstrates how a single planetary system tightens its grip on the most distant of global backwaters; the other :model brings into view a more complex system that is at once decentered and interactive. The former depends on transnational capitalism and the global economy, the latter on peoplehood and imagined diasporic communities .5 Insofar as they are informed...