American Studies after Postmodernism 3031414489, 9783031414480

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RENEWING THE AMERICAN NARRATIVE

American Studies after Postmodernism Edited by Theodora Tsimpouki Konstantinos Blatanis · Angeliki Tseti

Renewing the American Narrative

Series Editor Sam B. Girgus, Nashville, TN, USA

This series calls for new visions, voices, and ideas in telling the American story through a focus on the creative energies and generative powers of the American narrative. As opposed to assuming a fixed, inherited narrative for the total American experience, this series argues that American history has been a story of inclusion and conflict, renewal and regression, revision and reversion. It examines the values, tensions, and structures of the American Idea that motivate and compel rethinking and revising the American narrative. It stresses inclusion of so-called “others” – the marginalized, the unseen, and the unheard. Rather than simply repeating the slogans of the past, the series assumes the American story demands and dramatizes renewal by engaging the questions, crises, and challenges to the American story itself and to the democratic institutions that cultivate and propagate it.

Theodora Tsimpouki · Konstantinos Blatanis · Angeliki Tseti Editors

American Studies after Postmodernism

Editors Theodora Tsimpouki American Literature and Culture National and Kapodistrian University of Athens Athens, Greece

Konstantinos Blatanis American Literature and Culture National and Kapodistrian University of Athens Athens, Greece

Angeliki Tseti American Literature and Culture Independent Scholar Athens, Greece

ISSN 2524-8332 ISSN 2524-8340 (electronic) Renewing the American Narrative ISBN 978-3-031-41447-3 ISBN 978-3-031-41448-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41448-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 Chapter 16 is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). For further details see license information in the chapter. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Eleni Mouzakiti/Untitled from the series “Prospect,” MA, USA 2022 This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Acknowledgements

This volume was developed out of an idea for an international conference that was meant to take place in December 2020 but was repeatedly cancelled and rescheduled due to the severe health crisis of the Covid19 pandemic. The ever-shifting, turbulent circumstances of these past few years urged us to move in the opposite direction and commit to producing a book that was launched with a one-day conference in March 2023. A significant number of our original contributors remained loyal with us throughout this difficult trip, and engaged in a generous exchange with unwavering dedication and commitment. Our first, most sincere, and wholehearted thanks goes out to them. But also, to the numerous scholars around the world whose previous engagements did not allow them to contribute to this volume, but whose enthusiasm, insightful comments, and unremitting interest during the first stages of this project encouraged us to persist, pursue this challenge further, and see it to a fruitful end. A particular word of gratitude is owed to playwright Naomi Wallace who graciously and most generously agreed to contribute. We are deeply honoured to have been offered an inspiring piece of passionate writing, which eventually became the starting point of this volume and sets everything in motion. We are grateful to everyone at Palgrave MacMillan who worked with us for the publication of this book: Camille Davies, who first showed interest in our proposal and warmly supported it through the review process and after, and Uma Vinesh, who moved the project forward and v

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was always available to guide and instruct in the kindest, most efficient way. Our entire editorial and production team have embraced this volume and supported us tirelessly throughout the publication process. We also wish to thank all the people who generously granted us the permission to use their work in our book: Christina Makri, for creating an image that was meant for our conference banner; Eleni Mouzakiti who provided us with the cover of our book; acclaimed artists Stephen Shore, and Alec Soth for allowing us to use photographs from their collections to “study America (photographically);” and award-winning writer Emma Donoghue and visual artist Margaret Lonergan for sharing with us the pictures they created for the novel Akin (2019). Last, but not least, a special thanks is owed to the people who actively and consistently support and participate in all our projects through the years: first and foremost, the Hellenic Association for American Studies (HELAAS), Fulbright Foundation Greece, as well as the English Department at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and the NKUA Special Account for Research Grants, for their support of our project and belated conference.

Contents

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Introduction: American Studies after Postmodernism Konstantinos Blatanis, Angeliki Tseti, and Theodora Tsimpouki

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The Last Word: Writing in a Time of Emergency Naomi Wallace

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Part I A Moment of Exigency 3

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Post-2020 Vision: The Alternative Universes of Future U.S. Election Campaigns Philip John Davies

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Studying America (photographically): From Walker Evans to Taryn Simon Kostas Ioannidis and Eleni Mouzakiti

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Sustainable American Studies: Intermedial Approaches to Climate Change Frank Mehring

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Posthuman(ist), Affective and Global Turns in Ecofiction and Ecocriticism: Philip Armstrong’s “Litter” Paola Loreto

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Part II Continuities 7

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Postmodernist Latinx Literature in the 21st century? the Writings of Giannina Braschi Cristina Garrigós Intersectionally Aware Urban Re-mappings of Self and Belonging after Postmodernism: Reading Angie Cruz’s Dominicana Efthymia Lydia Roupakia Aspects of Mediation: Deceit, Desire, and Post-postmodernity in Paul Auster’s The Locked Room Lona Moutafidou Juxtaposing Postmodernist and Classic Narratives in New Literacies: The Case of Role-Playing Games Dimitra Nikolaidou

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Part III 21st Century Tropisms 11

The Metamodernist Epiphanies of Daytripper Lee Konstantinou

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Transcultural with a Twist: Reading Americanah Contrapuntally Theodora Tsimpouki

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The American Photo-Novel in the 21st century: Familial Ties and Historical Kinship in Emma Donoghue’s Akin Angeliki Tseti Literary Translingualism in the 21st century: Mobilizing Affect Through Language Kornelia Dimova Slavova

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CONTENTS

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Electronic Literature at the Dawn of the 21st century: The Case of Reiner Strasser and M.D. Coverley’s ii-in the white darkness: about [the fragility of] memory Tatiani G. Rapatzikou Paradigms of Cyberculturalism in Post-postmodernity Mehdi Ghasemi

Index

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Notes on Contributors

Konstantinos Blatanis is Associate Professor of American Literature and Culture at the Faculty of English Language and Literature, University of Athens. He is the author of the book Popular Culture Icons in Contemporary American Drama (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003) and co-editor of the volume War on the Human: New Responses to an Ever-Present Debate (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017). Some of his recent articles include, “Broadway Rap Battles and the Crisis of Historicity: Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton,” Critical Stages/Scènes critiques 21 (2020) and “Rewriting Greek Tragedy/Confronting History in Contemporary American Drama: David Rabe’s The Orphan and Ellen McLaughlin’s The Persians,” The Journal of American Drama and Theatre 31.2 (2019). His research interests lie in American literature, modern drama, popular culture, media studies, and critical theory. Philip John Davies is currently Chair of the UK Political Studies Association’s American Politics Group and has also served as President of the European Association for American Studies, Chair of the UK Council of Area Studies Associations, and Chair of the British Association for American Studies. He is Former Director of the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library and Professor Emeritus of American Studies at De Montfort University. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford.

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He has published widely on many aspects of US politics, history, and society, with his most recent publications focusing on US elections and political communications. Cristina Garrigós is Professor of American Literature at the UNED (National University of Distance Education) in Spain. Her research interests include US contemporary literature, film, music, postmodernism, memory, and gender studies. She is the author of John Barth: un autor en busca de cuatro personajes (University of León, 2000), and coauthor of God Save the Queens!: Pioneras del Punk (66 rpm 2019). She has published articles and book chapters on authors such as Kathy Acker, Gloria Anzaldúa, Rabih Alameddine, Giannina Braschi, Don DeLillo, Ruth Ozeki, and Helena María Viramontes, among others. Her last book is Alzheimer’s Disease in Contemporary US Fiction: Memory Lost (Routledge, 2021). Currently, she is editing a volume on Women in Rock Memoirs: Music, History, and Life-Writing (Oxford UP, 2023). Mehdi Ghasemi is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Turku and a Senior Researcher at the University of Tampere, Finland. He is also a fiction writer, writing his books in the hybrid genre of “noveramatry.” He has already published six scholarly books, five fiction books, four book chapters and more than twenty scholarly papers in peer-reviewed highquality journals, including Orbis Litterarum, Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, Journal of Black Studies, Journal of Literary Studies, European Journal of American Studies, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Immigrant and Minorities, Contemporary Aesthetics and The CEA Critic. Kostas Ioannidis is Associate Professor of Theory and Criticism at the Athens School ofFine Arts. His essays have appeared in numerous scholarly volumes and journals. Hispublications include the books Contemporary Greek Photography, (futura & Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, 2008) and Three at Sea (MIET, 2018) a book he co-authored with Emmanouela Kantzia. More recently he published the book An “exquisitely hybrid art”: poetics of photography in the late 19th and early 20th century (futura, 2019) with which he was awarded the State Award for Essay and Criticism (2020). Over the past three years, he has been conducting research on a body of photographs of prisoners held in the Smyrna Central Prison (1919–1922), a research he continued as a Fulbright Scholar at the Clark Art Institute (USA) during the summer

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of 2022. Ioannidis is the principal investigator of the research program TECHNO-LOGIA and a member of the General Assembly of HFRI (Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation). Lee Konstantinou is Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland. He wrote Pop Apocalypse (Ecco/Harper Collins, 2009), Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction (Harvard University Press, 2016), and The Last Samurai Reread (Columbia University Press, 2022). He co-edited the collections The Legacy of David Foster Wallace (University of Iowa Press, 2012) and Artful Breakdowns: The Comics of Art Spiegelman (University Press of Mississippi, 2023). His current project is tentatively called “Platform-Art: Graphic Storytelling in the Age of Social Media.” Paola Loreto is Full Professor of American Literature at the University of Milan, Italy, and holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Rome III. She is the author of three book-length studies (on Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Derek Walcott). She has written a number of articles and essays on North-American and Caribbean literatures and has translated Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, Richard Wilbur, Philip Levine, Charles Simic, A. R. Ammons, Amy Newman, and some contemporary US ecopoets. Her latest research is in contemporary American poetry and poetics, poetry translation, world literature, ecocriticism and ecopoetry, and posthumanism. Frank Mehring is Professor of American Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen. His research focuses on cultural transfer, migration, intermediality, and the function of music in transnational cultural contexts. In 2012, he received the Rob Kroes Award for his monograph The Democratic Gap (2014). His publications include Sphere Melodies (2003) on the intersection of literature and music in the work of Charles Ives and John Cage, The Soundtrack of Liberation (2015) on WWII sonic diplomacy, Sound and Vision: Intermediality and American Music (2018, with Erik Redling), The Politics and Cultures of Liberation (2018, with Hans Bak and Mathilde Roza), Islamophobia and Inter/Multimedial Dissensus (2020, with Elena Furlanetto) or Beuys Land (2023, with Gerd Ludwig). Mehring unearthed a new visual archive of transatlantic modernism with articles, lectures, exhibitions, editions, and catalogues such as The Mexico Diary: Winold Reiss between Vogue Mexico and Harlem Renaissance (2016) and The Multicultural Modernism of Winold Reiss (2022). With

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Tatiani G. Rapatzikou and Stefan L. Brandt, he is the co-founder of the European Digital Studies Network and the online journal AmLit—American Literatures. He organized the first performance of the Marshall Plan opera La Sterlina Dollarosa and co-curated exhibitions on Winold Reiss, Joseph Beuys, the Marshall Plan, and Liberation Songs in Kleve, New York, Nijmegen, and The Hague. Lona Moutafidou is a Ph.D. candidate at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Her project focuses on family politics and the renegotiation of trauma and survival in the field of modern American Literature. She holds two B.A. degrees, in English and Italian Studies, from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She also holds an M.A. in Modern, Comparative and Postcolonial Literature from the University of Bologna, with a research scholarship in UCL. Her postgraduate studies were concluded cum laude with the thesis Cast Outside the Other’s Circle: Aberrant Lives in William Faulkner’s Fiction. Moutafidou has taught literature at the University of New York in Prague. Her recent publications delve into trauma and migration studies. Eleni Mouzakiti is a photographer, researcher, and curator of photographic exhibitions and publications. Eleni was a fellow of the State Scholarship Foundation (IKY), the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation and the DAAD—German Academic Exchange Service. Eleni has taught Photography courses at the Department of Visual Arts, Ioannina University, Greece and Creative Photography courses at the Hellenic Centre for Photography. From 2016 to 2018 she taught in the adult education program in photography of the Athens School of Fine Arts and from 2018 she teaches in the postgraduate program—M.A. in Photography and Visual Language—of AKTO College/Middlesex University, UK. Her Works belong to the Portland Museum of Art, Oregon, USA, the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, the State Museum of Contemporary Art, the ACG Art Collection, Yannopoulos Art Collection, and other private collections. Dimitra Nikolaidou Ph.D., is researching the relationships between TRPGs and speculative literature. She is a member of HELAAS, FORS, and the international War/Game research project coordinated by the University of Tromso. Her work has been presented at international conferences both in Greece and abroad. Her papers have been published in the WyrdCon Companion (2015), the Ex-centric Narratives journal

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(2018), and Wargames: Memory, Militarism and the Subject of Play (Bloomsbury 2019), while others are due to be published in The International Fantasy Reader by Palgrave Macmillan and 50 Years of D&D (MIT Press). Tatiani G. Rapatzikou is Associate Professor at the Department of American Literature and Culture, School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTh), Greece. She has written the monograph titled Gothic Motifs in the Fiction of William Gibson (Rodopi 2004), while she recently co-edited: Ethnicity and Gender Debates: Cross-Readings of the United States of America in the New Millennium (Peter Lang 2020); Visualizing America (in Greek) (HELAAS Digital Publications, National Documentation Center 2021); and the special journal issue The Cultural Politics of Space (2020: Gramma, Journal of Theory and Criticism). She is one of the founding members of two online peer/blind review journals (Ex-centric Narratives: Journal of Anglophone Literature, Culture and Media and AmLit: American Literatures) and of the EAAS Digital Studies Network (together with Stefan Brandt/Graz U and Frank Mehring/ Radboud U). Between 2019 and 2022, she served as the Director of the Digital Humanities Lab “Psifis” (AUTh). Her teaching and research deal with contemporary American literature, postmodern writing practice, cyberpunk/cyberculture/cybergothic (William Gibson), electronic literature, and print and digital materialities. Efthymia Lydia Roupakia is Assistant Professor at the School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, and currently Head of the Department of American Literature and Culture at the School of English. She holds a Ph.D. in English Studies from the University of Oxford, UK. Her Ph.D. and MPhil research was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK). Her research focuses on issues of multiculturalism and identity construction, inter-American studies, world literature in English, and ethics. Her publications include book chapters, and essays published in Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Atlantis, Literature Interpretation Theory, University of Toronto Quarterly, MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, and in other journals. She has also coedited a volume of essays on religion and migration published by Palgrave Macmillan (2017) and the special issue of Ex-Centric Narratives: Journal of Anglophone Literature, Culture and Media titled Religion, Mobilities and Belongings (2021).

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Kornelia Dimova Slavova is Professor of American literature and culture in the Department of English and American Studies, St. Kliment Ohridski University of Sofia, Bulgaria. Her publications are in the fields of American literature and drama, gender studies, and cross-cultural studies. Her current research focuses on translation for the theatre and translingual literature. Angeliki Tseti has been working on photography and literature, wordimage interactions, trauma and memory studies, historiography, genocide, and film. She has taught American literature and culture at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and she has published articles on photo-literature, specifically the works of W.G. Sebald, Jonathan Safran Foer, Aleksandar Hemon, and the photo-memoir of Daniel Mendelsohn, as well as on cinematographers Claude Lanzmann and Susanne Khardalian, in peer-reviewed academic journals and collective volumes. Her work also includes the translation and editing of Liliane Louvel’s book The Pictorial Third: An Essay into Intermedial Criticism (Routledge, 2018). Theodora Tsimpouki is Professor of American Literature and Culture at the Department of English Language and Literature, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. Her teaching and research interests focus on American realism, modernism and postmodern fiction, the 1960s, urban literature and theories of space, and posthumanism. She has published books and articles and has co-edited several volumes on American Literature. She is also one of the chief editors of Ex-Centric Narratives: Journal of Literature, Culture, and Media, an open access journal of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (https://ejournals.lib.auth. gr/ExCentric/). She was the Book Reviews editor of the European Journal of American Studies from 2001 to 2021. Naomi Wallace has written plays that have been produced in the United Kingdom, the United States, Europe, and the Middle East and include One Flea Spare, The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek, In the Heart of America, Things of Dry Hours, The Fever Chart: Three Visions of the Middle East, And I and Silence, Night is a Room and an adaptation of Returning to Haifa by Ghassan Kanafani and The Corpse Washer by Sinan Antoon (both adaptations co-written with Ismail Khalidi). Wallace’s

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awards include the MacArthur Award, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, Fellowship of Southern Writers Drama Award, Horton Foote Award, Obie, Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and the inaugural Windham Campbell Prize for drama. Wallace is currently writing the book for the new John Mellencamp musical Small Town. The second part of her Kentucky trilogy will be produced in France in 2024.

List of Figures

Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 5.1 5.2 5.3

Fig. 5.4 Fig. 5.5 Fig. 5.6

Stephen Shore, Queens, New York, April 1972 Stephen Shore, Farmington, New Mexico, June 1972 Alec Soth, Charles, Vasa, Minnesota Alec Soth, Buena Vista, Iowa Chart of four gateways to Topophilia. © F. Mehring Map of Walden Pond as surveyed by Henry David Thoreau Map of Concord for “Solo for Voice 3” in John Cage’s Song Books Mapping walking tours of Joseph Beuys’ 7000 Oaks in Kassel. © Stiftung 7000 Eichen, geoportal-kassel.de Map of Beuys-Land Installation between Nijmegen and Kleve, 2021. © Hubert Wanders Photographs in the landscape between Nijmegen and Kleve, 2021. © Frank Mehring

65 66 69 70 80 84 85 89 94 95

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: American Studies after Postmodernism Konstantinos Blatanis, Angeliki Tseti, and Theodora Tsimpouki

Underlying the title of the present volume are two central questions. The first one pertains to the import of the critical debate on the demise of postmodernism that has persisted over the course of at least the past two decades; while the second revolves around the multiple challenges that this time period signifies for the broad field of American studies. The overall discussion is inspired by the words of Ben Lerner’s narrator

K. Blatanis · T. Tsimpouki (B) American Literature and Culture, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, Greece e-mail: [email protected] K. Blatanis e-mail: [email protected] A. Tseti American Literature and Culture, Independent Scholar, Athens, Greece e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 T. Tsimpouki et al. (eds.), American Studies after Postmodernism, Renewing the American Narrative, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41448-0_1

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that “the world [is] rearranging itself” (2014, 32) and proceeds to attend carefully to the shared sense among a large majority of historians, philosophers, critics, and artists that major, epoch-making changes have been already underway since the 1990s and are still prominent in the current, early 2020s. Regarding the cultural domain in particular, an avalanche of alterations in our contemporary mode of living caused by technological progress and digitization has brought about the appropriation, routinization, and institutionalization of postmodernism’s aesthetics by mass culture (Hoberek 2007, 233, 235).1 Nonetheless, thus far scholars and critics have reached no agreement as to the historical aetiology of this change such as whether this period started with the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989, or established itself in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.2 Similarly, no consensus appears as yet in the visible horizon regarding the adoption of a single descriptive label for postmodernism’s successor. Yet, few voices would disagree that this is a period defined by widespread volatility and terminal insecurity. Writing in the 2000s, philosopher Zygmunt Bauman proposed the concept of “liquid modernity,” to underscore the current era’s key characteristic, where “change is the only permanence, and uncertainty the only certainty” (2012, viii) and proceeded to identify clearly the major source from which this unprecedented uncertainty stems; namely, the pervasive and consequential separation of power from politics that proves synonymous with the predicament of the contemporary, highly globalized world: Much of the power to act effectively that was previously available to the modern state is now moving away to the politically uncontrolled global (and in many ways extraterritorial) space; while politics, the ability to

1 Interestingly, historian Minsoo Kang dates “the death knell of postmodernism in the US [on] June 18, 1993,” with the release of The Last Action Hero starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Postmodernism’s “final demise” is confirmed, according to Kang, by “its total appropriation by mass culture,” as is the case with the film. 2 In fact, these two major historical events, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and

the collapse of the Twin Towers, on September 11, 2001, are linked, according to Philip Wegner; the second marking the repetition of the previous fall. As he puts it, “[T]he toppling of the World Trade Center buildings can be understood as a form of second death, an incident that repeats an earlier fall, that of the Berlin Wall in November 1989” (2009, 24).

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decide the direction and purpose of action, is unable to operate effectively at the planetary level since it remains, as before, local. The absence of political control makes the newly emancipated powers into a source of profound and in principle untamable uncertainty. (2007, 2)

If Bauman relates twenty-first-century liquid-modern era with the refashioning of individual identity and the blurring of national identity under global consumer capitalism, for his part, historian Robin D. G. Kelley, in a publication of 2017, discusses the exponential development of neoliberalism that indelibly marks the post-postmodern condition throughout the globe and in particular in the U.S. He explains the manifold and dire consequences of almost worldwide policies “that have [already] redistributed wealth upward, ripped away any real safety net for the poor, [as well as those of] free trade […] that destroy the environment and reduce much of the world’s labor force to semi-slavery [and, last but not least, to the ones] that cultivate popular ignorance, that reduce the body politic to civic illiterates” (2017, xiv). While we should keep at bay the tendency to equate the U.S. with the global world and the field of American studies with its worldling, it is imperative to remember that the earth-shattering mutations and inescapable instability that the present moment witnesses surpass the territorial/geopolitical and cultural limits of the U.S. Moreover, to this brief overview of global crises one must also add the parameter of a future that—similar to what holds true for all time periods—remains to a significant extent unforeseeable. As scholar Alison Gibbons contends “[w]hilst humans today might be in the epoch of the anthropocene, the future is—as yet—unwritten” (2019, 294). For all of the above-named reasons, this collection of essays sets out to explore what the interrelation between the present moment and its predecessor entails for contemporary American studies but also to unearth and thus question the remains of postmodernism, the phenomenon that “[w]ell over a generation ago arrived in the academic scene and [indeed] spurred a series of energetic debates that engaged the brightest minds on both sides” (Raab 2020, 1). If, as Bauman has demonstrated, “liquidity” is an apt metaphor when we wish “to grasp the nature of the present” (2012, 2), it seems appropriate on the part of some theorists and critics to seek out not the stabilities and solidities of the post-postmodern but the contiguities, intensifications, and oscillations as embedded expressions in the contemporary moment. In their effort to chart epistemologically and ontologically the current sensibility, Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin

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van den Akker conceived of the term “metamodernism,” which they define as an “oscillation between modernist and postmodernist” concerns, “between hope and melancholy, naiveté and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity” (2010, 5–6). At the same moment, Andrew Hoberek, for his part, has argued in favor of “a continuity with the postmodern project,” “to look backward as well as forward” (2007, 239–240), in order to unravel the “uneven, tentative, local shifts that in some cases reach back into the postmodern period and can now be understood in hindsight as intimations of a new order” (241). Akin to Hoberek’s account of postmodernism’s continuity is Jeffrey T. Nealon’s analysis of the present moment as “an intensification and mutation within postmodernism” (2012, ix), even though he introduces, in his own admission, the “ugly word” (ix) of post-postmodernism in our periodizing vocabulary. Despite its onomastic intent, Nealon’s post-postmodernism “repeats, albeit with a difference,” the postmodernism that preceded it (McHale 2015, 176, emphasis in original), with the main difference being no other than the intensification of global economic liberalization. Indeed, the contributors to this volume undertake the above outlined task at a moment when, it is thoroughly clear that “with the aging of postmodernism, some ideas have taken on the quality of a truth, the idea they were designed to oppose” (Raab 2020, 2). As Linda Hutcheon stated in The Politics of Postmodernism, “the postmodern may well be a twentieth-century phenomenon, that is, a thing of the past. Now fully institutionalized, it has its canonized texts, its anthologies, primers and readers, its dictionaries and its histories” (2002, 165). Two of the major challenges that this volume confronts relate, in turn, to the multifariousness as well as the direness of the issues with which the current age is fraught and the fact that the ever expanding debate on them follows multiple directions toward what prove to be more or less uncharted terrains. Regarding the exceptionality of these challenges, scholars Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru accurately note that: “Less and less relevant to the twenty-first century, modern paradigms appear increasingly unable to predict, let alone adequately explain, the global operations of technologically enhanced finance capital, cosmopolitanism’s struggle to reinvent itself from the ashes of post-empire Europe, and the risk environment brought about by the ever-escalating crises of world ecologies” (2015, xi). At the same moment, Elias and Moraru acknowledge that the

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present moment witnesses a plethora of theoretical responses and distinctively note that “the literature on post-postmodernism is now threatening to rival in volume the archive of postmodern theory” (2015, xxx). It is indeed impossible to counter-argue that what gives rise now to novel, ever-growing paradigms is no other factor than the manifold and severe crises that the world experiences in its present phase, well past the heyday of postmodernism. In this precise vein, scholars Robin van den Akker, Alison Gibbons, and Timotheus Vermeulen confer that “recent historical crises of ecological, economic or (geo-) political nature” (2017, 2) contribute to the phenomenon that they specifically identify as a “rebooting” of history. Undoubtedly, it is significant to recognize this return to history as one of the most redeeming aspects, if not the primary characteristic, of the contemporary moment. Yet, for an adequate assessment of the age, it is instructive to also consider historian Henry Heller’s contention that no matter what “the hegemony of postmodernist consciousness [had managed to impose for a number of decades] the sense of history [could] not be eliminated, but remain[ed] repressed and hidden in the collective subconscious which it trouble[d]” (2016, 146). The validity of observations of this type reconfirm that the world witnesses seismic changes and reformations after postmodernism and it is precisely for this purpose that a variety of terms for postmodernism’s successor emerge and gain lesser or greater currency. For their own parts, van den Akker, Gibbons, and Vermeulen endorse the significance of “metamodernism,” which they recognize as the main force responsible for this “rebooting” (2017, 2) of history. In precise terms, they further define “metamodernism” as “a structure of feeling that emerges from, and reacts to, the postmodern as much as it is a cultural logic that corresponds to today’s stage of global capitalism” (2017, 5); while, in relation to its manifestations through art they explain that it “both incorporate[s] and move[s] beyond postmodern authorial strategies by harking back, paradoxically, to modernist ‘upcycling’ of past styles, conventions and techniques” (2017, 10). As the above quoted lines testify, there is a pressing need at the moment for an entirely redefined critical lexicon that will be resilient, yet flexible enough to account for a condition that is literally in process and in progress. Furthermore, it is instructive to highlight that the endeavors of the above referenced three editors are evidently inspired and instructed by the example that Fredric Jameson’s seminal writings on postmodernity and postmodernism have set ever since at least the early 1980s. Honoring

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Jameson’s example, van den Akker, Gibbons, and Vermeulen not only anatomize the defining features of metamodernism but also engage courageously with the issue of periodization, supporting that the “shift from postmodernism to metamodernism should be situated in the 2000s” (2017, 14). Like Jameson, who has famously pinpointed the 1960s as “the key transitional period” (1988, 15) from modernism to postmodernism, van den Akker, Gibbons, and Vermeulen recognize the 2000s as the decade that witnesses this major shift toward metamodernism, given that it does accommodate full-scale, dramatic changes, the origins of which were already evident, nonetheless, in the 1980s while postmodernism reigned supreme. Thus, focusing on the U.S. context alone, it is impossible to downplay the consequences of mutations, a typical part of which scholar Jeffrey T. Nealon effectively summarizes in these words: The ’80s, in short, was the decade when the dictates of the market became a kind of secular monotheism in the US, thereby opening the door to the now-ubiquitous “corporatization” of large sectors of American life: welfare, media, public works, prisons, and education. (2012, 10)

Drawing yet again on Jameson’s path-breaking 1984 essay, Nealon’s Post-Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism offers an analysis of the cultural production of the present moment emerging roughly in the 1980s, through the lens of, what he calls, the “new economies,” that is, “post-Fordism, globalization, the centrality of market economics, the new surveillance techniques of the war on terrorism, etc.” (2012, 15). It is important to note that the moment one’s scope widens substantially it becomes clear that in the early decades of the twenty-first century not only the U.S. but most of the globalized world is subject to “the institutionalized drive towards financial instability, economic inequality, labour precarity and ecological disaster” (van den Akker et al. 2017, 16). It is precisely to these particular demands of the historical present that emerging theoretical paradigms—like the ones metamodernism promises—aspire to offer responses. Metamodernism is only one of the current trends and movements that are offered as eligible successors of postmodernism and which document, first and foremost, the fact that the effort to map the present is inevitably daunting, at all times. Following Linda Hutcheon’s declaration that “[p]ost-postmodernism needs a new label of its own,” and her “challenge to readers to find it—and name it for the twenty-first century”

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(2002, 181), a number of theorists and critics have been engaged in the onomastics of the new cultural phase, at times at the expense of more inclusive understanding of the contemporary period.3 One such label is Alan Kirby’s “digimodernism,” a term that aspires to describe a new cultural paradigm after the death of postmodernism and which underlines the recognition of an essential socio-economic and cultural change associated with the singular impact of the information technologies of our time. Kirby’s “digimodernism” “owes its emergence and pre-eminence to the computerization of text, which yields a new form of textuality characterized in its purest instances by onwardness, haphazardness, evanescence, and anonymous, social and multiple-authorship” (2009, 1). For her part, Katherine N. Hayles concurs that “[t]he materiality of digital media [is] completely enmeshed with the conceptual [break from postmodernism], and the present landscape cannot be grasped without considering the effects of both together” (2016, 209).4 While Nigel Raab specifically notes that “[t]he digital world is not incommensurable with postmodernism, but one cannot assume that postmodern ideas can operate in any environment” (2020, 4). Yet another eloquent and prominent case of this multileveled enterprise is precisely what the theoretical output of the “planetary turn” constitutes and which “presents itself, in response to the twenty-first-century world and to the decreasing ability of the postmodern theoretical apparatus to account for it” (Elias and Moraru 2015, xi). Elias and Moraru explain the indispensable value and unmatched contribution of “the planetary turn” as an “emerging worldview and critical theory, [in which] the planet as a living organism, as a shared ecology, and as an incrementally integrated system […] is the axial dimension in which writers and artists perceive themselves, their histories, and their artistic practices” (2015, xii). They also highlight that “[i]t represents a transcultural phenomenon whose economical and political underpinnings cannot be ignored but whose preeminent thrust is ethical” (xii). Earlier with his monograph of 3 Brian McHale views the proliferation of proposals for new periodizing markers as “[s]omething like a name-that-period sweepstakes has sprung up, mainly involving the affix in of an appropriate prefix to the term modernism: neo-, meta-, pseudo-, semi-, alter-, and so on” (2015, 176). 4 In her essay “Influences of the Digital,” Hayles names the successor period to postmodernism “digitalism” along these lines: “Like postmodernism, digitalism cuts across media, genres, and aesthetic traditions such as art history and literature, affecting a wide range of forms and practices across a spectrum of creative productions” (2016, 214).

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2011, Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary, Moraru had also introduced the term “cosmodernism” in an effort to elucidate the interconnectedness of the crises that mark the historical present and which prescribes that subjects across the globe—despite all types of differences and distances that can never be entirely eclipsed—are in essence correspondingly interconnected. Moraru contends that in the twenty-first century it is a grave mistake to ignore the value of a contemporary “cultural geography of relationality,” which allows us to assess adequately the present condition of “the world’s ‘parts’ such as people, nation-states, ‘spheres’ (and hemispheres), ‘regions,’ ‘civilizations,’ and racial-ethnic communities coming together and being by being with each other” (2011, 3 & 5). Distant and distinct as “metamodernism,” “digimodernism,” “cosmodernism,” and “the planetary turn” are as emerging critical methodologies of the contemporary, what underlies them all is the firm conviction that the critical lexicon of postmodernism can no longer be valid. At the same moment, it is instructive to note that all these phenomena that succeed postmodernism should never be seen as adversaries or rivals. Instead, the exceptionality of the challenges and the distinctive features of the crises that define the present moment prescribe that all such developments in theory and in practice come into synergy. As an eloquent example one may single out the unprecedented “centrifugal force” that scholars Theophilus Savvas and Christopher Coffman discern in twentyfirst-century American studies, which as their definition suggests can be adequately handled only when distinct theoretical outputs such as those that “metamodernism,” digimodernism” “cosmodernism,” and “the planetary turn” offer can be combined: “the increased centrifugal force of an American studies that seeks to look beyond the American centre (or perhaps, more accurately, to resist the notion that America is the centre), and to develop strategies for recognizing the world in the local” (2019, 206, emphasis in original). Equally illuminating regarding the significance of this synergy is Alison Gibbons’s shrewd observation that it would be detrimental to fail to recognize the “interconnections between climate change, late capitalism, and global politics” (2019, 282) at present and that as a result, “the end of nature forces humans to think historically—to place ourselves within a larger narrative of geological time and of human evolution […] to look back on ourselves in the historical present, to feel the affective force of our predicament, and contemplate how next to act” (2019, 293 & 295).

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Furthermore, the above brief overview of these novel paradigms sheds light also on the fact that, similar to what defined and informed the multileveled debate on postmodernism that persisted for most of the second half of the twentieth century, the currently “burgeoning critical conversation” (Elias and Moraru 2015, xii) pertains to all aspects of the human experience and thus it is present in interrogations of politics and economy as well as in assessments of technology and science and in appraisals of art and culture. It is precisely to this expansive character of the critical discussion on what it is that follows postmodernism that the contributions in this volume respond in inventive and instructive ways. It suffices to consider equally briefly here the vast range of areas of interest and the concerns that the term “post-postmodern” has already been employed to attend to and cover in the course of the past two decades. Thus, for instance, Jeffrey Nealon’s study of the concept of post-postmodernism does center, among other things, around the political condition of today’s highly interconnected world: capitalism itself is the thing that’s intensified most radically since Jameson began doing work on postmodernism in the 1970s and ’80s. The “late” capitalism of that era (the tail end of the Cold war) has since intensified into the “just-in-time” (which is to say, all-the-time) capitalism of our neoliberal era. (2012, x–xi)

Undoubtedly, the global financial crisis of 2008 and the ensuing sovereign debt crisis that affected several nations primarily in Europe, the aggressive recovery of capitalism in the 2010s and early 2020s and the concomitant right-wing populism on both sides of the Atlantic that has led to growing numbers of people “disaffected with neoliberal globalization, disenfranchised with representative democracy and at ease with the Internet as a means to discuss, cultivate and rally around shared frustrations (however disparate)” (van den Akker et al. 2017, 13) are parameters that no critical discussion of the present moment can fail to address. It is crystal clear that these are characteristics and phenomena that render the employment and use of the term “postmodernism” problematic, if not thoroughly impossible. In analogous terms, in the field of literature by the late 1980s and early 1990s, it became evident that the term “postmodernism” was no longer pertinent and that its successor was gaining ground very rapidly. Most

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genealogies of the “post-postmodern turn” in literature—and in particular in American literature—take David Foster Wallace’s theoretical pieces of writing of the late 1980s and early 1990s as the originary moment of this discussion. As Savvas and Coffman note: Foster Wallace argues for what he variously labels “hyperrealism,” “fiction of the image,” and “post-postmodernism,” a rejection of ironic modes and attitudes, which he sees as characteristic of postmodernist literature, and for a shift in the direction of a “single-entendre” fiction, one that finds authenticity by supplanting or supplementing the generally unproductive impulses of critique with those of constructive moral engagement and the recovery of language’s referential function. (2019, 195)

Within this context, it is instructive to consult also Lee Konstantinou’s insightful comment on the stance of “nonnaive noncynicism by means of metafiction” (2016, 174) that Foster Wallace adopted in an effort to confront what he deemed to be the solipsistic relativism of postmodernism. In his compelling book-length study, Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction, Konstantinou intervenes in the currrent critical debate by proposing a new kind of “postironic ethos” (285) that would take for granted the power of the marketplace to absorb oppositions, while, at the same time, it would explore new modes of collective engagement. What authors like Foster Wallace and then scholars like Savvas, Coffman, and Konstantinou, in their own turf, have been trying to configure over the past three decades is the validity and resilience of “twenty-first century literary trend[s] that resonate beyond the postmodern” (Gibbons 2019, 286). At the same moment, scholars, critics, and artists alike examine the political significance of post-postmodern trends in literature, in the fine arts, in culture in general. It is precisely in this vein that scholar Ralph Clare highlights the political dimensions of the trend he identifies as “metaffective fiction” in these words: “metaffective fictions seek, though not always successfully, to renew the potential of affect in a neoliberal age that is increasingly commodifying affective labour, leisure, and our everyday emotional lives” (2019, 266). The exact same target is what curator Nicolas Bourriaud recognizes for himself when he explains the political responsibility of contemporary art by introducing the term, “altermodern” along these lines:

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The use of the prefix “alter” means that the historical period defined by postmodernism is coming to an end, and alludes to the local struggles against standardization […] The cultural or social structures in which we live are nothing more for art than elements to be used, objects that must be examined and formally addressed. That, to my mind, is the essential content of the political program of contemporary art: maintaining the world in a precarious state or, in other words, permanently affirming the transitory, circumstantial nature of the institutions and the rules that govern individual or collective behavior. The main function of the instruments of communication of capitalism is to repeat a message, which is: we live in a finite, immovable and definitive political framework, only the decor must change at high speed. Art questions this message, and reverses it. (qtd in Ryan 2009, n.p.)

Scholars, thinkers, and artists as diverse as Savvas and Coffman, Clare, or Bourriaud elaborate in their own distinctive terms both on what it is that necessitates the emergence of all these critical paradigms at present in all spheres of human expression and creativity as well as on how and why it is that these new dimensions of the critical debate prove of primary—even if broadly defined—political significance. On the whole, all these endeavors which attempt to make meaning of the underlying condition of our cultural moment—disparate as they are— illustrate also how equally challenging it is to place one particular aspect or phase of time in relation to all others. Commenting precisely on the tough work that “the contemporary” as an inquiring mind undertakes, Giorgio Agamben sharply—even if by means of figurative language—observes: the contemporary is not only the one who, perceiving the darkness of the present, grasps a light that can never reach its destiny; he is also the one who, dividing and interpolating time, is capable of transforming it and putting it in relation with other times. (2009, 53)

Agamben’s invaluable insight problematizes the very daunting task that critics and scholars undertake as they engage with all these efforts of outlining terms, conceiving notions that will help them chart what it is that follows postmodernism. Moreover, despite this volume’s initial intent to follow closely sociopolitical and cultural developments in the contemporary U.S., what is made prominent in each one of its chapters is that the pressing matters and preoccupations marking the threshold of the twentyfirst century cannot be geographically restricted to U.S. territories. In

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fact, it is important to note how, while invited to work within the scope of American studies in particular, the contributors to this volume, U.S. Americanists and European Americanists alike, highlight the interconnectedness of the geopolitical, economic, environmental, and technological, but also national crises that define the historical present, and map trends and tendencies that elude the borders of the U.S. and unfold on a global scale. Acclaimed playwright Naomi Wallace, whose contribution to this volume precedes and, in many ways, sets the tone for the articles that follow, clearly marks these first decades of the twenty-first century as “a time of emergency.” Wallace’s “last word” of the title is meant not as “having the final say,” but as “an awareness of and aversion to finality” (19), as she succinctly explains. Declarative in nature, the article has a double intention, on the one hand to announce the emergency of our global condition and on the other to arouse concern and perhaps even action. This kind of multiform exigency that is mainly made manifest in the volatility and instability or our times, is the main concern of the first part of this volume, whether in what Philip John Davies describes as the elusiveness of party-political realignment in U.S. election campaigns, or the attempt to designate an accurate imagery of what, as per Kostas Ioannidis and Eleni Mouzakiti, America is (not), or in the well-discussed impact of the Anthropocene and its effects of the current climate crisis, also brought to the fore in the articles of Frank Mehring and Paola Loreto. On the one hand, this urgency pertains specifically to the state of crisis the U.S. finds itself in due to the imperial extensions of American power at the onset of the century; it accounts for the paramount necessity of recalibrating and renegotiating the nation’s identity and geopolitical role but also, significantly, it is a word of caution aiming to provide a corrective vision on the current situation within and beyond the borders of the American imperium. On the other hand, this time of emergency relates to “the ongoing crisis of the Anthropocene” that Loreto studies, the pressing issue of climate change and our reactions to it which often indicate, in Mehring’s words, a certain kind of “complacency, paralysis, and a sense of fatality” (78). For the authors in the first part of this volume, the answer lies in the interstices: it consists in a centrifugal movement away from the known, strongly held, established center and into uncharted territories, toward the different, the unknown, the liminal, the unfamiliar. As Wallace

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suggests, this is the time for active citizens to resist and defy corporate America’s stronghold on policy and language and to embrace the targeted and the marginalized. For Ioannidis and Mouzakiti, it is only by turning our focus to the images of the heretofore thought of as “hidden” and “unfamiliar” seeping through our media that we can truly behold and comprehend the multifaceted nature of America. What is more, these authors consistently underline the importance of creative, as well as critical processes, artistic activity and writing. Loreto places emphasis on the role of literature in order to suggest how exposure to it can contribute in crossing boundaries and evoking empathetic responses, or, to use her own words, “how a literary work could contribute not only to the radical change in our thinking about the world—and our place in it—but also to making it better” (104). She advocates the inclusivity and affective relationality inherent in posthumanism and world literature as the most relevant and promising response to the pressing demands of the present. Mehring, too, argues for sustainable American studies by focusing specifically on the environmental turn in literary and cultural studies and advocating the value of writing and the arts. He develops his concept of “Topophilia” by looking at “the interplay between literature and other art forms such as music, painting, photography, video, film, television, graphic novels, and performance cultures,” and discussing specifically Henry David Thoreau’s influence on John Cage’s work, as well as the BEUYS-LAND landscape installation project. Both scholars align with the other contributors of this part in sketching the present moment as a time of upheaval and shift, when the world rearranges itself and postmodernism cedes to the moment after. As the rigorous analyses in the following two parts show, this “time of emergency” is a time of transition that exhibits continuity as well as the emergence of new trends and tropisms. “Continuities,” the second part, features essays that return to the category of the “postmodern” and argue for the ongoing relevance of postmodernism to the contemporary condition, or reevaluate postmodernism in light of the historical, economic, and technological changes of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The search for continuities, however, presupposes a relative stability of the term’s definition with which to compare the current moment and explore its affinities with what comes after. At the very least, the divergent theoretical approaches to postmodernism and the conflicting values that were attributed to it—from its emphasis on linguistic play, ethical withdrawal, and resistance to politics

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to expressing an anti-authoritarian and subversive ethos to hegemony— denote the definitional instability of term. Nevertheless, enough time has elapsed for us to be able to discern more of the internal articulations and successive mutations of postmodernism. At the same time, searching for continuities with the “past” postmodern culture can provide an “entry point to the present,” as Agamben succinctly remarks (2009, 51). Agamben states, “[t]he present is nothing other than [the] unlived element in everything that is lived” (51). In the terms of this volume, the contemporariness of the articles inscribes itself in the present by revitalizing, re-evoking and recalling “that which it had declared dead” (Agamben 2009, 50). Thus, the technologically inspired vision which Lona Moutafidou and Dimitra Nikolaidou explore—be it the mediated subjectivity of Paul Auster’s narrator in The Locked Room or the tabletop role-playing game industry—has its origin in the postmodern past. While Moutafidou reads Auster’s novel as a harbinger of the modus vivendi of the twenty-first century, governed by digital mediation and surveillance, Nikolaidou sees TRRGs as evolving to recalibrate their relationship with postmodernism. Equally, both Cristina Garrigós’s discussion of contemporary Latinx writing and in particular Giannina Braschi’s United States of Banana (2011) and Lydia Roupakia’s reading of Angie Cruz’s Dominicana (2019) as crafting an intersectional gaze on urban New York, return in a renewed engagement with history and the contemporary moment, alike. In her United States of Banana (2011), Braschi, according to Garrigós, attempts to reaffirm the radical political potential of art by employing postmodernist aesthetics to critique what she considers to be fundamental flaws of contemporary U.S. politics. Similarly, Roupakia’s renewed attention in how metropolitan American urban space is experienced by female writers of diasporic, racialized background brings to the forefront an intersectionally aware complexity that challenges any straightforward celebration of belonging, inclusion and citizenship in the twenty-first century (162). In this sense, to be contemporary is to consider the continuities, to revisit “what was at the time ‘unlived’” (50) and to “return to a present where we have never been” (52), to paraphrase Agamben. Yet, more than anything else Agamben’s exceptional treatise on the “contemporary” referenced here focuses on the severe challenges that the present moment always signifies for the inquiring mind. As the philosopher characteristically asks, “what does he who sees his time actually see? What is this demented grin on the face of his age?” (44). Indeed, this

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inscrutability of “the demented grin on the face of [the] age” (44) is what intrigues and thus stimulates all efforts and projects of the types reviewed above that collectively point toward “a sensibility […] situated beyond the postmodern” (van den Akker et al. 2017, 12). The articles that comprise the final, third part of this volume, by the title “twenty-first century Tropisms,” aim precisely to address the validity of the multiple dimensions of this “burgeoning critical conversation” (Elias and Moraru 2015, xii) that defines the moment after postmodernism, to interrogate in original and inventive ways the cons and pros of the most prominent trends of this debate and, last but not least, to examine also their political significance. The discussion is initiated by Lee Konstantinou’s contribution which admirably attains all three goals. The scholar recognizes Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba’s graphic novel Daytripper (2010) as an exemplary occasion that allows him to interrogate a “burgeoning” twenty-first-century development that he himself identifies as “Mass High Culture.” Critical interest here revolves around the ways in which artifacts of this type do manage to secure for themselves a place within the force-field of neoliberal economy and yet succeed in revitalizing in unprecedented and rather unorthodox modes literary expression and production in today’s highly globalized world. The revitalization of literary expression and production in the twenty-first century, primarily in the U.S. context but also well beyond those borders, is what co-editors of the volume, Theodora Tsimpouki and Angeliki Tseti, also examine in their respective, individual contributions. For her part, Tsimpouki sheds light on the special weight of “transculturalism” in contemporary American literature. The essay recognizes Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2013 novel, Americanah, as a case study that allows us to evaluate why and how historical awareness constitutes always a higher aim but also a major challenge, no matter how valid and groundbreaking transcultural endeavors may be. In analogous terms, Tseti sees the hybrid, bimedial genre of the photo-novel as a compelling new form in contemporary literature. By means of her insightful analysis of Emma Donoghue’s Akin (2019), she attracts attention to the ways in which the post-9/11 crisis problematizes anew questions of collective and private identities and foregrounds issues of interdependence and relationality for the cultural imaginary in the twenty-first century. Last, the three articles with which the volume concludes undertake the task of deciphering this “inscrutable grin” (Agamben 2009, 44) on the face of the age. To this end they tackle not merely emerging trends of the current moment but larger phenomena of major sociocultural and

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political dimensions; namely, translingualism, digital literature, and cyberculturalism. Kornelia Dimova Slavova singles out the recent works of Aleksandar Hemon and Miroslav Penkov—two contemporary American authors of Balkan origins—as paradigmatic instances of translingualism that in direct contrast to postmodernist fictional modes endorse the value of affect anew and thus manage to bridge distances among different places, languages, and cultures. In her contribution, Tatiani Rapatzikou considers critically the digital turn that the very start of the twenty-first century marked. The scholar employs Reiner Strasser and M.D. Coverley’s e-poem ii-in the white darkness: about [the fragility of] memory (2003–2004) as a telling example that allows her to comment insightfully, among other things, on the risks of digital ephemerality. Finally, Mehdi Ghasemi reviews the current predominance of cyberculture across all spheres of human experience and proceeds to examine the most prominent characteristics of this entirely new sociocultural and economic period that has been already dynamically introduced by cyberculturalism in the present, early decades of the twenty-first century.

References Agamben, Giorgio. 2009. What Is the Contemporary? In What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays. Translated by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, 39–54. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2007. Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2012. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Clare, Ralph. 2019. Metaffective Fiction: Structuring Feeling in PostPostmodern American Literature. Textual Practice 33 (2): 263–279. Elias, Amy J., and Christian Moraru, eds. 2015. The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Gibbons, Alison. 2019. Entropology and the End of Nature in Lance Olsen’s Theories of Forgetting. Textual Practice 33 (2): 280–299. Hayles, N. Katherine. 2016. Influences of the Digital. In Postmodern/Postwar and After: Rethinking American Literature, ed. Jason Gladstone, Andrew Hoberek, and Daniel Worden, 209–216. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Heller, Henry. 2016. The Capitalist University: The Transformations of Higher Education in the United States since 1945. London: Pluto Press. Hoberek, Andrew. 2007. Introduction: After Postmodernism. Twentieth Century Literature 53 (3): 239–240.

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Hutcheon, Linda. 2002. The Politics of Postmodernism. New York and London: Routledge. Jameson, Fredric. 1984. Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. New Left Review 146: 59–92. Jameson, Fredric. 1988. Postmodernism and Consumer Society. In Postmodernism and Its Discontents: Theories, Practices, ed. E. Ann Kaplan, 13–29. London: Verso. Kang, Minsoo. 2005. The Death of the Postmodern and the Post-Ironic Lull. The Post-Ironic Lull: A Show and a Discussion. Exhibition Catalog. St. Louis: UMSL Galaxy, n.p. Kelley, Robin D. G. 2017. Foreword: We Hold the Future. In America at War with Itself , Henry A. Giroux, ix–xv. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books. Kirby, Allan. 2009. Digimodernism: How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern and Reconfigure our Culture. New York and London: Continuum. Konstantinou, Lee. 2016. Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lerner, Ben. 2014. 10:04. Toronto, ON: McClelland & Stewart. McHale, Brian. 2015. The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism. New York: Cambridge University Press. Moraru, Christian. 2011. Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press. Nealon, Jeffrey T. 2012. Post-postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Just-inTime Capitalism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Raab, Nigel A. 2020. The Humanities in Transition from Postmodernism into the Digital Age. New York: Routledge. Ryan, Bartholomew. 2009. Altermodern: A Conversation with Nicolas Bourriaud. Art in America, March 16. https://www.artnews.com/art-in-ame rica/interviews/altermodern-a-conversation-with-nicolas-bourriaud-56055/ Accessed 10 March 2023. Savvas, Theophilus, and Christopher K. Coffman. 2019. American Fiction after Postmodernism. Textual Practice 33 (2): 195–212. Van den Akker, Robin, Alison Gibbons and Timotheus Vermeulen, eds. 2017. Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect and Depth after Postmodernism. London: Rowman and Littlefield. Vermeulen, Timotheus, and Robin van den Akker. 2010. Notes on Metamodernism. Journal of Aesthetics and Culture 2: 1–13. Wegner, Phillip E. 2009. Life Between Two Deaths, 1989–2001: U.S. Culture in the Long Nineties. Durham: Duke University Press.

CHAPTER 2

The Last Word: Writing in a Time of Emergency Naomi Wallace

I would like you to consider the possibilities of the last word.1 Not the last word as having the final say, the ruling from on high, a monopoly of truth, or censored discourse. But the last word as an awareness of and aversion to finality; the last word as an annunciation of emergency and a resistance to the endgame of empire, late capitalism, and environmental destruction. I also want to consider the last word as a breath struggling to repeat itself: Breath as resistance. The last word is as much about the wonder of taking a breath—replenishing our organs with oxygen—as it is about the statistics of climate science and endless war. For as Terry Eagleton says, “Words are mere breath, but they can extinguish breath as well” (2019, 66). 1 The chapter is based on an essay that was first presented as keynote lecture at the 6th International Conference on American Drama and Theatre (Madrid, 1–3 June 2022).

N. Wallace (B) Skipton, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 T. Tsimpouki et al. (eds.), American Studies after Postmodernism, Renewing the American Narrative, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41448-0_2

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And therefore, quite obviously, I have to write about hedgehogs. I have been a hedgehog “carer” for years. As a child I grew up on the blue grass of Kentucky and it was from my father that I learned to raise and care for a variety of wild animals. My father, Henry French Wallace, was a journalist and farmer who never encountered an animal or insect he didn’t like. A tough man who worked outdoors no matter the weather, he didn’t even like to swat a mosquito. “A mosquito wants to live, just like you do,” he’d tell me and my siblings. My father would brake, no matter the traffic, for any turtle crossing the road. In those years, the police sometimes pulled my father over—and at times arrested him—for his opposition to the Vietnam War and working with the civil rights movement. But this time an officer pulled my father over after he had disheveled the traffic to save a box turtle. The officer warned my father that he was breaking the law by stopping for turtles. My father replied that while he understood the law, most likely the turtle didn’t. So when I moved to the U.K. with my family I was well prepared to deal with one of England’s most cherished animals: the hedgehog. A decade ago I could keep most of the injured or underweight hedgehogs brought to me alive—until they were ready to be released. Last Autumn, eleven out of fourteen that were brought to me took a last small breath and died. In the 1950s, close to 30 million hedgehogs roamed the U.K. But now their numbers have plummeted due to the destruction of hedgerows and the use of pesticides. This prickly critter of the night, that is an emblem of the English countryside, that inhabited the earth fifteen million years ago, that scurried out of the way of dinosaurs, is expected to be extinct in the U.K. in ten years. If these remarkable creatures travel into that dark oblivion of extinction, they will carry a piece of us—our capacity to fantasize and furrow and be fascinated—with them. “Thrice and once the hedge-pig whined,” (Macbeth 4.1.2) chant Macbeth’s three witches. Pliny the Elder, naturalist and naval commander of the early Roman Empire, also got hooked. “Hedgehogs,” he wrote in his Historia Naturalis, “fix fallen apples on their spines by rolling on them and, with an extra one in their mouth, carry them to hollow trees” (2004, 119). The sixth century’s Saint Isidore of Seville swore he’d seen hedgehogs collecting grapes on their spines to carry home to their young. And in 1867 Charles Darwin had it on good

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authority that hedgehogs had been seen in the Spanish mountains “trotting along with at least a dozen […] strawberries sticking on their spines […]” (2009, 355). These pronouncements are what Katherine Rundell calls, in “Consider the Hedgehog,” “wild untruths” (2019, n.p.). Hedgehogs, in fact, don’t eat fruit, nor do they store food for winter. Instead, they hibernate when it gets very cold and sleep their way into spring. Let’s connect the truth about hedgehogs to another truth: In 1959, when hedgehogs were still plentiful in England, the physicist and father of the hydrogen bomb, Edward Teller, told the American Petroleum Industry (API) that a 10% increase in C02 would melt the icecap and submerge New York. And, I would add, drive the hedgehog to extinction. “Time is running out,” Teller said (quoted by Kelly 2018, n.p.). The decline of the hedgehog and the American Petroleum Industry are intimately connected because sixty years ago the fossil fuel industry understood that they were poisoning our world. They even sent their own scientists to validate the science. And then they decided to take action, quickly: They buried what they knew, launching one of the most audacious and criminal cover ups in the history of the world. And now we have just under ten years (not the sixty we should have had) to lower carbon emissions sufficiently so that this fragile globe can continue to support us. As many of you know, half the earth’s animals are thought to have been lost in the last 50 years. Eighty-three percent of wild mammals and half of all plants have disappeared forever. We need to listen to the science about climate catastrophe and get upset and disturbed. We have to reclaim the last words: the summation, the elegy, the epitaph; we need to restate a vision of life on earth, the truth, the collective breath. As writers, students, teachers, and creative thinkers, I encourage all of us to grieve these losses, and alongside this grief, cultivate a vibrant anger at inaction and lies. Defy and deny the last word of the fossil fuel industry: profit. And yet we live in a culture that considers grief and anger to be abnormal and unhealthy. If you feel lost or afraid or sad, there’s a pill waiting at your doctor’s office to fix that, courtesy of a corporate medical establishment that makes billions from prescribing our pain. As one of America’s leading psychiatrists, Peter Breggin, suggests: Our medical establishment, as well as the social structures in which it embeds itself, tries to convince us that “to continually question and resist what our lives

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have become is pathological, that sorrow needs a pill, that longing or rejection of authority is an illness” (2007, 182). And of course there are other ways to inoculate ourselves. Are you lying awake at night, due to the inhuman border policies used against immigrants trying to get to a safer life or the murder of environmental activists in Central America and the Amazon? Therapy or cannabis oil works miracles. Unnerved at the increase in violence against black and brown and indigenous people, LGBTQA+ communities? Disturbed about the attacks on access to abortion and health care for women and gender non-conforming people, on the differently abled? There’s a Wellness app that can fix those unsettling emotions by teaching you to manage your breath. Unsure about the fairness of felony disenfranchisement or the caging of hundreds of thousands of people in prisons? Exhausted with hearing that there is no money for better wages, no money for free education? Anxious that you might lose your job and home? Stirred up at seeing your libraries shut down and the possibilities for your future suffocated? Massage can help, and various forms of yoga (and here I must confess that I do a lot of yoga!). Uneasy about the growing acceptance of censorship by Corporate America, or the silencing of truth tellers like Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning? Distressed by the murder of journalists, like PalestinianAmerican Shireen Abu Akleh, by IDF forces, within an illegal occupation bankrolled for decades by the US government? Mindfulness courses can calm that distress. Forlorn that both the Democrats and Republicans recently voted for the largest military budget in the history of this country or any country, including nearly $28 billion in nuclear weapons funding? Flaps out, wheels down, coming in for a smooth landing at a cool $738 billion dollars, encountering nary a blip of turbulence. Paying for that is clearly not an issue. Or for the near 800 U.S. military bases straddling the globe? The bottom line, the last word on this? Fifty-three cents of every dollar of the U.S. budget goes to the military-industrial complex; an endless supply of public money available for the dismemberment of others. So let us boldly refuse to make peace or compromise with the flagrant gangsterism of the free market system, the saturation of our society with military mentalities. Let us reject the seduction to smother ourselves in an ever-increasing pathological consumption. Let us be incensed at neoliberal capitalism’s deep-seated, racist character that continues to destroy and diminish and imprison so many lives.

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As one of our greatest historians, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1961, at the very end of his long life, “Today I have reached my conclusion: Capitalism cannot reform itself: it is doomed to self-destruction” (n.p.). His last words, so to speak. Words from below that seek to liberate rather than the words from on high that seek to close minds. Since WWII the U.S. governments (both Democrat or Republican) have practiced “American values” abroad by intervening in and bombing more than 70 countries. Almost always illegally and often covertly. Overthrowing presidents, conjuring coups, or more recently, assassinating recognized members of the state. These adventures were of course always precipitated by and predicated on the language of “freedom,” “democracy,” “Western civilization,” and “our best interests.” Abstract, opaque, and hollow last words repeatedly issued before missiles are launched. As for the dead of these imperial wars, the least we can do is bring them with us into any future worth making, counting their last breaths as precious last words: Our military adventurism in Korea killed 10% of their civilian population. Three million during the Vietnam War. More recently, 1.3 million deaths as a result of the U.S. “War on Terror” in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Yemen. The socio-economic, environmental, and human devastation left behind is beyond belief, almost beyond words. And the statistics continue to grow as the Middle East is squeezed between the violence and war caused by fossil fuel production and the climatic impact of burning those same fuels. Creating “failed states” and dismembered nations is what our governments have used our wealth to do, whether that be President Obama with his “Kill List” (talk about having the last word!) and drone strikes or President Bush unleashing in one year on Iraq, a country once called The Land of Dates, 88,500 tons of bombs. All done in our name. And most recently we have the aggressive foreign policy of the Biden Administration. President Joe Biden (a man who never met a war he didn’t like) has so far gifted tens of billions of dollars in military aid—almost twice the entire annual Russian military budget—to fund Ukraine’s response to the Russian invasion. Words about how the war could have been avoided; words about peace talks; words about NATO expansion and what democracy really means are lost under an oppressive barrage of good vs evil. Dissenting or alternative voices are silenced. The record of repeated interventions and invasions by the U.S. and its allies is wiped clean. One word, “Putin,” justifies spending more on the U.S. military than the next ten countries combined. The word “Putin” justifies

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the budgets for Build Back Better and a Green New Deal ending up in the coffers of the weapons manufacturers, including Raytheon, on whose Board of Directors the current Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, sat immediately before being chosen by Biden to run the Pentagon. Before the word “Putin,” governments were having to face the urgent responsibility of direct state intervention in the interests of their own citizens due to the pandemic and climate breakdown. Now, state intervention is firmly back in the business of selling weapons and war. We must urge diplomacy and peace to end the suffering and continued devastation in Ukraine by Russian forces. The Russian occupation must be stopped. War crimes must be investigated and the guilty charged. Simultaneously we must resist a narrowing frame of reference comparable to that during the Cold War and McCarthyism. It goes without saying that war machines—be they of any nation— are bad for the environment. Even in peacetime the U.S. Department of Defense is the single largest consumer of energy in the U.S. and the world’s largest consumer of petroleum. The military machine of the U.S. has a carbon footprint that exceeds that of nearly 140 countries. However, the Pentagon is aiming for net zero by 2050. Destruction with no ecological impact! Killing going eco! Death without carbon emissions! Unfunny joking aside: the scale and interconnectedness of the problems we face must be acknowledged and resisted. The cruel fact is that war makes money. It kills the many and rewards the very few. For you can’t make billions in the arms industry if you don’t use the weapons, if you don’t let’em rip. And letting’em rip has almost always meant, in the last fifty years, bombing what the Masters of War consider “sacrifice zone,” where brown and black people live, whether in South East Asia, Central America, or the Middle East. And naturally, those same weapons are then used by police forces around the U.S., also against the bodies of black and brown people engaged in acts of breathing and creating, which are, in themselves, acts of resistance. Resistance. A beautiful, breathing word; definitely one of our last words and the only “game” in town worth our engagement. And we need it now more than ever. And yet this word is also in need of rescue, of careful definition. Let us not confuse the notion of real grass roots resistance, most often created and led by queer people of color and black and brown women, with the so-called “Resistance” that continues to be championed by the liberal elite and mainstream corporate media. A socalled “Resistance” that worked to remove one leader of empire and

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install another more intelligent, graceful, and user-friendly: Joe Biden. Let us remember that this so-called “Resistance” helped nourish the same kind of administration that bailed out the banks in 2008 but put none of the criminals in jail, that cheered on a ferocious twenty-year war in the Middle East and lied about it to the tune of trillions of dollars for two decades—while hardly tweaking the systems of inequality and poverty at home. Speaking of flagrant lies, we like to believe that former President Trump’s record is exceptional, but it is not. His administration merely hopped on the moving walkway that former neoliberal administrations had carefully constructed. Oh yes, Trump was the worst of it. But as esteemed journalist Gary Younge wrote while Trump was in office, “Trump is an emblem of the free-market, white supremacist nationalism that is ascendant in this moment. Don’t question his sanity: ask how he got into office” (2019, n.p.). But while congratulating ourselves on a Democratic U.S. President, we still focus on Trump’s tortured linguistics and bad-mouthing; his, as it were, bad breath. Just to make sure that in the next election we’re still scared enough to vote to keep Trump from coming back. But hey, I too relish an anxious chuckle at Trump’s crude and aggressive ways, especially when speaking to foreign heads of state. Did you hear what was said to the Greek ambassador when he dared question the imposition of U.S. policies on their government? And I quote: “Fuck your parliament and your constitution…We pay a lot of good American dollars to the Greeks, Mr. Ambassador. If your prime minister gives me talk about democracy, parliament and constitution, he, his parliament and his constitution may not last long” (quoted by Younge, 2019, n.p.). When I first read that quote I thought: “Typical Trump!” But in fact this threat came from a Democrat, President Lyndon Johnson, in 1964 when the Greek government questioned the U.S. plan to partition Cyprus. And sure enough, three years later Greece was under brutal military dictatorship, backed by the U.S., from which it would not emerge for seven years. We had then, as we have now, a Global U.S. Empire held together by military violence. But for this “interference” in the affairs of a foreign country, President Lyndon Johnson was applauded, not threatened with impeachment, for he was merely enacting an “America first” policy that continues to this day.

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Speaking of America first, or rather Corporate America first, Coca Cola and the Dixie Cup company, like the oil and gas companies, worked to cover their tracks when it came to the anti-social consequences of their industries. Like the API, in the 1950s a consortium of industry groups got together to turn the spotlight away from their production of plastic and onto the individual’s responsibility to dispose of plastic waste. They enacted a massive media campaign (“Keep America Beautiful”) to make us the villains, the “litterbugs,” while they continued to trash our land and water. The plastics industry figured if they could trick us into believing that the solution to environmental degradation lay with the individual, they’d be let off the hook. They were, and still are. And so for decades these industries have had the last word; for decades the public has been unwittingly playing a game devised by corporate America. Individual lifestyle choices like household recycling, electric cars, and plant-based diets will not save us and are nowhere near enough to combat accelerating greenhouse gas emissions. Cultivating the notion that they can is ideological green-washing. These local and personal actions are worthy—they are moral choices—but they also help us avoid looking at the deep causal and contributory impact of the strangle-hold corporate America has on policy, on language, on our perception of ourselves. Our billionaire-owned media (and a large part of our mainstream environmental movement) treat the climate crisis as an equal opportunity threat whose deadly distributions are uniform, concocting a fog to obscure what we know: climate change hits the poor first and worst; hits hardest the “sacrifice zones,” those places and spaces where capitalism and empire have mined and felled and drilled, attempting to pulp a disproportionally black and brown work force of the best of their bodies, minds and spirits, before moving on to new spaces of extraction. One of the nostrums from the mainstream discourse is that climate disaster is “nos-culpae.” Our fault. As acclaimed novelist and frequent contributor to The New Yorker Jonathan Safran Foer would have it, the destruction of our climate and our inability to turn things around is due to our “individual apathy” (2019, n.p.). It seems we human beings are largely torpid, egotistical concoctions of gristle and bone that worship at no altar but our own interest. This is a convenient untruth for those who do not live on the front lines of societal collapse and ecological catastrophe. Individualism did not create, for instance, the widespread famine, unrest, and war from Tunisia to Lebanon, Sudan to Syria, and Yemen to Afghanistan. There are few words

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for the ridiculousness of finger wagging at our hoarding of self and stuff, while ignoring the systems that consign countless millions to face fire, flood, and fighting. There is no word in Jonathan Safran Foer’s world, no breath, about how the well-off West and North are fueling this climate breakdown through colonialism and racism, and how these interlocked systems have contributed to the destruction of our atmosphere, soil, and seas. Tracy Fernandez and André Floyd (Green America Magazine, n.d.) give us examples of how racism and environmental breakdown are interdependent. In 2009, the near 4 million tons of coal ash spilled from a Tennessee Valley Authority power plant were not equally distributed. This toxic ash was shipped 300 miles by train from the power plant site and dumped in a landfill in Perry County, Alabama. Out of sight, out of mind. But not out of sight or mind or body of the mostly African American population there. And when BP’s underwater oil well, Deepwater Horizon, burst in 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico? The heads of BP hired out contractors to clean up the oil-saturated sand and refuse from the 120 miles of Gulf coastline the oil well had devastated. Where did that waste go? Trucked to landfills, mostly in black communities in Florida, Alabama, and Louisiana. Today, twenty fossil fuel companies are relentlessly exploiting the earth’s gas, oil, and coal reserves, planning vast future projects, which are now termed “carbon bombs,” while touting their green credentials. The profits from these extractions can be linked directly to one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions in the modern era. One hundred companies are responsible for 71% of global emissions. The richest ten percent of the population produce half our emissions of CO2 . The poorest 50% account for one-tenth. But 775 billion a year, globally, and more than $20 billion in the U.S. alone go directly to subsidize the fossil fuel industry. This is our tax money. This is the sweat of our labor. And yet we wonder where the money is for new school books, free day care, and support for the disabled? Support for green jobs, public transport, clean water? Support for our vulnerable but ever resisting Trans community, especially our Black Trans communities, which are under increasingly lethal attack? Over and over we are told there is just no money for policies and projects that support human flourishing. The struggle for racial justice and the fight against environmental damage are one and the same. Floods, droughts, hurricanes, and fires go hand and hand with the shrinking spaces of social democracy. Our keen

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feelings of informed anger and loss, those dark liquid fires are just what we need to ignite our imaginations and us into action. We must not let those who created this emergency define the limits of our knowledge or efforts. We must not individuate this problem. Power rests not in what we do as individuals but as a collective. Personal morality is not the issue here. This is about global corporate power. But let’s turn from the pinnacle of the 1% plundering our common wealth back to the hedgehog and the average number of quills it sports as it snuffles along at night looking for beetles, worms, eggs, and small carrion: 6000. Once upon a time, hedgehogs were used to cure baldness: Mix the fat of a hedgehog with that of a bear and smear it on your scalp. This was physician William Salmon’s suggestion in 1693. If that didn’t work, he suggested, somewhat gleefully I believe, then hedgehog dung might do the trick as well. Over the centuries hedgehog skin and spines have been thought to help with diarrhea, kidney stones, toothache, and impotence. Sometimes the hedgehog was, and still is, encased in clay and roasted on the fire. This dish is known as hotchy-witchy. A hedgehog does not recommend it. The word Hedge-hog neatly combines flora and fauna; it is a quiet albeit spiky word. The loud word that we must incorporate in the same sentence is Emergency. For these are not two separate words or worlds. Yes, things are bad. And to make all the changes we need to make we’re going to have to get uncomfortable. Very. It’s enough to make those of us who have the privilege to do it, run off to an island! But if we do, we might find that island battling a rising sea level, as is the case for the Marshall Islands and Fiji and Tuvalu. The inhabitants there know that sea level rise is inevitable and their countries will likely have no future. But the indigenous of these islands refuse to just concern themselves with relocation. Instead, they are blockading Australian coal ships with traditional outrigger canoes, disrupting international climate negotiations, demanding more aggressive climate action. Pacific Islanders fighting back have a saying, “We are not drowning. We are fighting.” How will we use our last words, our last breath? How will we prepare for its coming? In Hamlet, Gertrude says to her son: Be thou assured, if words be made of breath, And breath of life, I have no life to breathe What thou hast said to me. (Hamlet, 3.4.198–200)

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That is to say: words count! “If words be made of breath.” My friend Joshua Casteel was a tall, vigorous, enlightened young man, blond haired and blue-eyed, who loved to read Shakespeare. He grew up a working class evangelical Christian in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I met Joshua at the University of Iowa, when he was struggling to choose between being a writer or, fluent in the Arab language, going into the U.S. Army. He chose the latter and in 2002, at twenty-four years old, Joshua was sent to Iraq as an interrogator with the 202nd Military Intelligence Battalion. At Abu Ghraib prison, Joshua was one of their best interrogators because he paid attention to words. He believed words worked better than torture, and he got results. Around his 100th interrogation, a self-professed jihadist changed Joshua’s mind, and life-path... through words. Joshua described the transformative experience with this prisoner, who not only challenged the presence of the U.S. occupation but Joshua’s own faith and humanity: “I was dumbstruck,” Joshua wrote in a letter home to his mother. “I left praising Christ, and thanking God for this enemy” (Casteel 2008, 101). In 2005 Joshua asked for and received an honorable discharge as a conscientious objector. He then wrote plays, including Returns, and a beautiful, important book called, Letters from Abu Ghraib (2008). Please. Read it. While Joshua did his duty in Iraq, he slept 100 yards away from an enormous army burn pit and in his final weeks there he had to man a second. Like his fellow soldiers, Joshua never used a mask when he worked. Batteries, chemicals, heavy metals, and arsenic all went into these burn pits, as well as dead animals, even human body parts, with jet fuel used as an accelerant. Macbeth’s witches would have been envious of these cauldrons. Clouds of black, toxic smoke spread out across the landscape. A few years after Joshua returned from Iraq, years he spent speaking out against the war, guided by his deeply religious convictions, he was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer. As his illness progressed, Joshua felt his empathy expand: “I feel a sense of relief that I get to share in the suffering of the Iraqi people. Because the Americans burned toxins in their fields and on their earth. In a certain sense it’s an opportunity to climb up on the cross with them” (quoted by Percy 2019, n.p.). Powerful last words. Joshua died in 2012 from tumors, which had spread from his lungs to his liver and spine and then to his arms, legs, and finally to his brain.

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I have a photo of Joshua when he visited my home in North Yorkshire, England, not long after he’d returned from Iraq, before he got sick. He is sitting on the rug in our kitchen holding…a hedgehog. One of the hedgehogs I then had in my care. One that would live. In the photo Joshua looks delighted that he is able to hold on to the animal without being quilled. “If words be made of breath.” Like Joshua Casteel, the Iraqi people breathed in the refuse of the burn pits, and also something more deadly: radioactive waste. The U.S. military, one of the prime drivers of climate breakdown, presently holds in the U.S. more than 500,000 tons of this toxic debris left over from the production of nuclear weapons and nuclear generators. So instead of storing the depleted uranium at great expense in “remote” sites (again meaning Native lands or in poor and black communities) the U.S. military hit on a bright idea: Recycling! Depleted uranium would be disposed of in faraway lands by recycling it into bullets and other weapons like the DU penetrator, capable of drilling a hole through the armor of tanks. When Iraqi tanks burned, American soldiers and Iraqi civilians breathed in the particles together. In the collective words of one of the most inspired organizations of our time, Extinction Rebellion: “Destroying our planet, this beautiful jewel, is an act of unforgivable vandalism” (n.d.). We must stop this vandalism. We must name the vandals. We must bring them down. But we can do so much more than react: We can create. As Robin Kelley, one of our most brilliant historians, repeatedly reminds us, “The best of our struggles are not reactions to misery but quests for freedom” (R. Kelley, pers. comm.). Creating itself is a quest for freedom. As is telling the truth, or remembering: putting things back together so that we all may breathe more freely. Today we have numerous radical justice movements challenging the interdependent evils of colonialism, war, and climate destruction. We can fire up our imaginations by joining and/or supporting these organizations. For instance, in the U.S. we can work to strike down laws that require government contractors to pledge not to boycott Israel. Illegal to boycott? What these McCarthyite laws are actually attempting to do is bury the right to resist injustice—in this case the illegal, brutal occupation of Palestine. For which our mainstream culture has been holding the last word way too long. Palestine: One of the most contested words in the world. For those of us who are white, and live in the U.S., we might join SURJ, Showing Up for Racial Justice (https://surj.org/), one of

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the largest efforts to organize white people—in accountability with liberationist, Black, POC, and indigenous-led organizations—explicitly around racial justice. SURJ’s work is to move white people, especially those with the most to gain from deep change, to choose multiracial solidarity and coalition politics. Wherever we live and work, we can acquire the skills of right-action and solidarity from those who have the most to teach us: the targeted, the marginalized, and the undocumented. For it is in these often disregarded communities of Standing Rock, Gaza, and Ferguson that resistance is at its most courageous and resourceful. And as we act and create, we must all the while remember what philosopher and activist Angela Davis instructs: That within these social justice struggles, “environmental issues should be ground zero… If we cannot guarantee the survival of the planet for the future then other struggles make no sense” (qtd in The Phillipian, February 21, 2020, n.p.). Yes, we have a unique, marvelous opportunity like we’ve never had before to create truly democratic systems, where people come before profit, where all sentient beings are cherished, where we can dream of strawberry-carrying hedgehogs and our dreams leave behind no radioactive waste. Moderation will not save us. Incrementalism will not save us. “The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists,” Dr. Martin Luther King said. “The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice?” (King 1963, 78). Let us become extreme thinkers, mapping out new systems without fossil fuel extraction and processing at its heart. As Nick Estes, historian and citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe writes, “Whereas past revolutionary struggles have strived for the emancipation of labor from capital, we are challenged not just to imagine, but to demand the emancipation of earth from capital. For the earth to live, capitalism must die” (2019, 257). In his last speech, King said “love will have the final word” (1964, n.p.). Love and justice being one and the same and they are necessities we cannot live full lives without. Before I end here, a few last words to clarify what we have been promised by the force of life itself: that our children will outlive us. That our children’s children will run freely across this earth, casting their wild shadows over the grass. That there will always be trees and oxygen and poetry and rivers and birds and melody and yes, even hedgehogs. That

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our human failings will forever be completed in the writings of Du Bois, Shakespeare, Adrienne Kennedy, Lorca, Kanafani, and Audre Lorde. That the best of our last words will be preserved for all time. But if we do not take radical action now, there will be a last word, a last sound, animal or human, and that word or sound will not be remembered because there will be no one left to hear it or record it. But this end is still avoidable. We are poised in a precarious place; perhaps it’s the one the poet Rainer Marie Rilke (quoted by Weidermann 2018, 238), writing in support of revolution in 1919, described as: Exposed on the mountains of the heart. Look, how small there, Look; the last hamlet of words, and higher, and smaller still, a last Farmstead of feeling. Can you see it?

References Breggin, Peter R. 2007. Brain Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry: Drugs, Electroshock, and the Psychopharmaceutical Complex. New York: Springer. Casteel, Joshua. 2008. Letters from Abu Ghraib. Ithaca, NY: Essay Press. Darwin, Charles. 2009. Hedgehogs. In Charles Darwin’s Shorter Publications, 1829–1883, ed. John Van Wyhe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Du Bois, W. E. B. 1961. Letter from W. E. B. Du Bois to Communist Party of the U.S.A., October 1, 1961. In W. E. B. Du Bois Papers. Series 1. Correspondence. https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b153i071. Accessed 19 May 2022 Eagleton, Terry. 2019. Humour. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Estes, Nick. 2019. Our History Is the Future. New York: Verso. Extinction Rebellion. n.d. https://rebellion.global. Accessed 17 May 2022 Fernandez, Tracy and Andre Floyd. n.d. People of Color Are on the Front Lines of the Climate Crisis. Green America Magazine. https://www.greenamerica. org/show-ga-blog?nid=5369. Accessed 21 May 2022 Foer, Jonathan Safran. 2019. Why Do We Refuse to Believe Climate Change Is Happening? Literary Hub (October 4). https://lithub.com/why-do-werefuse-to-believe-climate-change-is-happening/. Accessed 11 May 2022 Kelly, Sharon. 2018. “Time Is Running Out.” American Petroleum Institute Chief Said in 1965 Speech on Climate Change. DeSmog (20 November 2018) https://www.desmog.com/2018/11/20/american-petrol eum-institute-1965-speech-climate-change-oil-gas. Accessed 19 May 2022

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King, Dr. Martin Luther. 1963. Letter from Birmingham Jail. The Atlantic Monthly 212, no. 2 (August) 78–88. https://www.theatlantic.com/mag azine/archive/1963/08/the-negro-is-your-brother/658583. Accessed 19 May 2022 King, Dr. Martin Luther. 1964. Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech. The Nobel Prize. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1964/king/acceptance-spe ech/. Accessed 19 May 2022 Percy, Jennifer. 2019. The Priest of Abu Ghraib. The Smithsonian Magazine (January) https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/priest-abu-grahib180971013/. Accessed 11 May 2022 Phillipian Commentary: Letter to the Editor. 2020, February 27. The Phillipian. https://phillipian.net/2020/02/27/phillipian-commentary-letter-to-the-edi tor-6/. Accessed 28 March 2023 Pliny the Elder. 2004. Natural History: A Selection. Trans. John F. Healy. London: Penguin. Rundell, Katherine. 2019. Consider the Hedgehog. London Review of Books 41 (20): (24 October). https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n20/katherinerundell/consider-the-hedgehog. Accessed 18 May 2022 Shakespeare, William. 2016a. Hamlet. In The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd ed., ed. Stephen Greenblatt, et al., 1751–1906. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Shakespeare, William. 2016b. Macbeth. In The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd ed., ed. Stephen Greenblatt, et al., 2709–2774. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Younge, Gary. 2019. Donald Trump’s Sanity Is Not the Question. The Real Issue Is How He Got into Office. The Guardian (18 October) https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/18/don ald-trump-sanity-free-market-white-supremacist-nationalism. Accessed 17 May 2022 Weidermann, Volker. 2018. Dreamers: When the Writers Took Power, Germany, 1919. Translated by Ruth Martin. London: Pushkin Press.

PART I

A Moment of Exigency

CHAPTER 3

Post-2020 Vision: The Alternative Universes of Future U.S. Election Campaigns Philip John Davies

Post Insurrection America Even as the U.S. 2020 election campaigns were still ongoing the present volume’s central question “after postmodernism” pointed this author to an examination of the different futures envisioned by those competing to lead the USA. The rhetoric of the 2020 campaign adopted by the major party candidates sometimes reached into epic language. “I will be an ally of the light, not the darkness,” said Joe Biden at the Democratic National Convention on 20 August 2020.1 And the following day Donald Trump, addressing the Council for National Policy, claimed “I’m the only thing standing between the American dream and total anarchy, madness and

1 Caitlin Oprysko, “‘I will be an ally of the light, not the darkness’: Biden frames election choice as light versus dark, Highlights from Joe Biden’s Democratic presidential nomination acceptance speech.” Politico, August 20, 2020.

P. J. Davies (B) Faculty of Business and Law, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 T. Tsimpouki et al. (eds.), American Studies after Postmodernism, Renewing the American Narrative, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41448-0_3

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chaos.”2 The debates between observers over the connections between postmodernism, social media rhetoric, the rise of Donald Trump as a party-dominating political figure, shifts in the landscape on which partypolitical competition takes place in the USA, and the potential future relationships of the two major parties and their electorates offered other interconnected dimensions for examination. Had the dynamic behind these debates solely been driven by the actions of the Trump administration, the opportunity for such speculation might have ended when Donald Trump lost the election to President Joe Biden. But just as he had been an unusual president, Trump became an unusual former president, remaining hugely influential in the GOP,3 touted by many as a potential candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, and active in his support of Trump-friendly candidates in 2022 GOP primaries and mid-term congressional, state and local elections. Republican leaders who excoriated Trump for his role leading up to the 6 January 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol later backtracked to dismiss the significance of that riot against American democracy in their eagerness to attract the favour of the former president. Political debate and conflict are often followed by co-operation, compromise, and concession to bring a mutually acceptable accommodation into focus. In contrast, the post-2020 visions of the U.S. Democratic administration and its GOP opponents seem more like alternate universes. Indeed, they are operating in different realities. In his domination of the Republican Party former President Trump has made adherence to the Big Lie—the assertion that Trump won, and Biden lost—a touchstone of true fealty. The actions of President Trump, especially his bold use of social media, his uncompromisingly confrontational postures, and his cultivation of a populist following have helped in the construction of increasingly separated visions of U.S. politics and government among the electorate. The groundwork on which Trump could build was laid by the GOP’s longer-term strategy to facilitate a political realignment that could project conservative power into the foreseeable future.

2 Michael D. Shear, “Trump says he is ‘the only thing standing between the American dream and total anarchy’.” The New York Times, August 21, 2020. 3 GOP is an abbreviation of Republican Grand Old Party.

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Postmodern Politics? Shifts in the landscapes of political ideology and party-political strategy as well as the opportunities offered by new forms of political media in the United States have created unique opportunities for political discourse. Online discussions can illuminate and explore political realities. Fictions and speculations can sometimes act as heuristic, philosophical, and illustrative aids in intellectual investigation and debate. But some commentators baulk at the degree to which such tools can divert and potentially corrupt debate, rather than provide intellectual foundations. Quite often the resulting debate boils down to “where do you draw the line,” but much of the ire generated has been directed towards postmodernism. Matthew D’Ancona, for example, in his book Post Truth, congratulates the postmodernists for achievements that he considers remain standing: urging “readers to question and deconstruct language, visual idiom, institutions and received wisdom … [and more, to become sensitive to] … forms of power and ‘hegemony’ to which we would otherwise remain blind,” and on their “yearning […] for inclusivity, diversity, personal liberty and civil rights” (2017, 92). “At the same time,” he goes on to say, “the principal thinkers associated with this loose-knit school, by questioning the very notion of objective reality, did much to corrode the notion of truth. […] if everything is a ‘social construct’, then who is to say what is false? What is to stop the purveyor of ‘fake news’ from claiming to be a digital desperado, fighting the wicked ‘hegemony’ of the mainstream media?” (92). In 2016 Harvard political scientist Theda Skocpol sketched a twentyfirst-century history in which ultra-free-market political funders and a GOP leadership that has regularly mobilised voters with nativist, antiimmigrant, and racially charged tropes had stirred nativist populism within angry and resentful middle-class groups, shifting the Republican party politically to the right. According to Skocpol, “the GOP became ripe for a Trump-style hostile takeover” (2016). The late Laurent Berlant perceived a Trump “victory” even in 2012. In a blog on September 2nd of that year, she said: Many of you would say that Donald Trump was excluded from the Republican convention, has no traction as a political candidate, and is generally viewed as a clown whose spewing occasionally hits in the vicinity of an

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opinion that a reasonable person could defend. But I am here to tell you that he actually won the Republican nomination and is dominating the airwaves during this election season. He is not doing this with “dark money” or Koch-like influence peddling. He has done this the way the fabled butterfly does it, as its wing-flapping sets off revolutions. (2012)

It may have been that a GOP electorate, fed a steady diet of the ideas that Skocpol outlines, would have chosen increasingly conservative leadership, but it seems compelling that the opportunities offered by the rapidly developing tools of political communication played a significant part. Donald Trump, who was for some time considered by the existing GOP leadership to be a laughable, and unacceptable candidate for public office, adopted for some years Twitter and cable TV as his main communications outlets, and seized the Republican nomination and then the Presidency.

Realignment and Alternative Political Universes One device on which political scientists have drawn in the attempt to understand how the political landscape alters is the notion of realignment. Less favoured by scholars than it was, the idea of realignment retains an eerie grip in the world of U.S. elections, where it has contributed to the visions of political futures so different for the Democratic and Republican Parties that they almost seem to be operating in alternative political universes. Candidates, their campaign managers, and party leaders are driven, inevitably, by the desire to win the next election. But if that ambition is prime, the desire to find a key to holding an election winning advantage over a series of elections is the holy grail. There have been many variations on the realignment idea since V. O. Key suggested it in 1955, but there are characteristics that occur with some regularity in the various versions that have been posited. Realignment thinkers suggest that shifts in party-political dominance in the USA can be detected periodically in its history. These shifts are associated with several factors.

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1. There may be a significant expansion in the voting population, including the relatively sudden introduction of voting groups identifiably different from the previous norm, say through a change in the franchise, or a peak in migration. 2. Another associated factor can be some significant change in the institutional context in which elections and politics take place, such as the introduction of primaries, or the impact of television. 3. A new and especially significant issue—war, economic crisis, social crisis—might have emerged to split voting coalitions on different lines, prompting a shift of identifiable blocs of voters between parties in a fashion that promises to be long-lasting. 4. Meanwhile the coalitions that have underpinned inter-party competition for some years and the issues that have made these both logical and pragmatic have eroded, weakened, and generally are likely to have become less significant over time. 5. Finally, along comes a critical election (or series of elections that prove critical) when the altered electorate, subject to a changed electoral landscape, and stimulated by newly emerging big issues, changes the way it distributes its vote. If the new conditions and outcomes can be maintained over time, it can perhaps be called a realignment. The Realignment model was quite popular in the 1960s and into the last third of the twentieth century. A roughly generational cycle was identified by some of the scholars involved. The history of federal election results appeared to show a pattern in which one party would control the White House, the U.S. Senate, and the U.S. House for an extended period. Periods of divided party control, sometimes prompted by economic crisis or war, were brief. Political adjustments were made, and single party control returned. The cycle suggested that America was due for another critical election and associated realignment around the end of the 1960s or the 1970s. This did not happen and has not happened since. From 1896, widely accepted as a realigning year, to 1966 80% of elections resulted in single party control of the federal government. Since 1968 74% of elections have resulted in divided party control—an era unlike any in U.S. history. In subsequent decades scholars and, perhaps more importantly, party and campaign managers, carefully examined the entrails of each election for evidence of a realignment that would signal the return to

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more predictable party control. There was talk of “delayed realignment,” “rolling realignment,” and the extent to which this term had entered the political brain was demonstrated when Ronald Reagan spoke of a “historic electoral realignment” (Clines 1984) in the run-up to his re-election in 1984. In spite of such enthusiasm, no realignment recognisable from earlier models has occurred in the past 60 years. This does not dampen the yearning by leaders in both major political parties to see a realignment that will bring a stable period of political control for their party. Their visions as to how this can happen are totally different.

Democratic Demographic Determinism For Democrats the answer lies in the expectation that population changes show long-term growth among groups favouring their party, and longterm decline among Republican voting sectors. Between 2000 and 2020 Hispanics/Latinos grew from 7% to 13% of the U.S. electorate. Asians also doubled their proportion of the electorate, from 2% to 4%. Other non-white, non-black identifiers also grew from 2% to 4% of the total electorate. There are variations in voting behaviour within these groups—often associated with differences in national origin—but in 2020 these communities made up 21% of the electorate, and in total over 62% of them favoured Biden over Trump. In the first 18 years of the twenty-first century these groups accounted for 59% of all the growth in the U.S. electorate. Additionally, African Americans made up 17% of the growth, and whites, the only majority Republican voting group among these, grew by just 24% (Igielnik and Budiman 2020). Analysts including William H. Frey and Ruy Teixeira have spent their careers tracking these trends and have made the case for an almost inevitable demographically driven shift towards national political dominance by the more ethnically and racially diverse Democratic party.

Republican Retrenchment There was a moment after Obama’s re-election in 2012 when it seemed that the Republicans might address the challenge of rapidly diversifying that party’s electoral base, but the GOP instead has adopted a form of political trench warfare, digging in where they are strong, brooking no

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compromise, especially none that has a tinge of bipartisanship, and aiming to delay further the slow political impact of demographic change. The GOP can take this approach because various institutional elements of American government currently work in its favour. The constitutional provision of two Senators per state means the Republicans—generally stronger in smaller states than the Democrats—need fewer votes to elect a U.S. Senator. In 2020 the 50 Democrats and allied Independents in Senate represent 185 million people, the 50 Republicans represent 143 million. A similar provision with respect to the Electoral College again works in favour of the Republicans who took the presidency in 2000 and 2016 even while the Democrats led in the popular vote. In 2020 the Trump campaign almost pulled off a similar victory. There is no doubt that the GOP will in the immediate future continue to try to leverage their strength in medium sized states to win in the Electoral College. Apparently driven by the target of a shaping realignment in their long-term favour, and anxious that the predictions of Democratic-leaning change in the American population may be accurate, the Republican Party has chosen a very active response. The GOP has adopted strategies to leverage its party strength in ways that stretch the boundaries of democratic practice. At the state level, the Republicans launched the Redistricting Majority Project (REDMAP) in 2010. This directed campaign funds into state elections, gaining control of state legislatures and thereby of the power to redraw constituency boundaries both for state elections and elections to the U.S. House of Representatives. A report in 2017 from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University authored by Royden and Li estimated that the Republican party had an institutional advantage of 16 or 17 seats in the U.S. House concentrated major battleground states such as Michigan, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. In 2013 the Supreme Court led by Chief Justice John Roberts declared some provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights unconstitutional removing certain protections against discriminatory practices in elections at the state level. In 2019 the Court also declined to consider cases on partisan gerrymandering, classing this as a “political question” outside the remit of the courts. Most Republican controlled states have responded with legislation and actions that New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice 2021 Voting Laws Roundup characterises as voter suppression. Given

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these very different party visions of the potential for realignment, what do the prospects for a 2020s realignment look like?

Reviewing Realignment Significant Changes in the Population Overall U.S. population growth has slowed in the twenty-first century, but the nature of that growth has altered and continues to change. The proportion of foreign born in the total U.S. population grew from 4.7% in 1970, its lowest rate in over 150 years, to 13.7% in 2018. That is only 1.1% lower than the proportion of foreign born in 1890, its peak during a period commonly recognised as a boom era for migration to the USA (Budiman 2020). In 2018 25% of those foreign born were from Mexico. The many nations of the Caribbean, Central and South America accounted for a further 25%; Europe and non-U.S. North America constituted 13%, the Middle East and Africa 9%. The largest national groups after Mexico were China (6%), India (6%) and the Philippines (4%). Immigrants and their descendants are projected to account for 88% of U.S. population growth, and 17.9% of the U.S. population, by 2065. Asians, who have exceeded Hispanics in the number of new arrivals annually since 2009, are projected to be the largest foreign-born group in the USA by about halfway through the twenty-first century. These figures are dramatic, but their impact on the overall shape of the U.S. polity is modified by the existing structure of the population. The growth and diversity of immigrant populations has come at a time when the U.S. white population is ageing and losing fertility, and the growth rate in the long-term black population is plateauing. In 1965 Hispanics made up 4% of the U.S. population. Without immigration, fertility and age distribution alone were projected to take that figure to 8% by 2015. With immigration the actual figure was 18%. The Asian population was below 1% in 1965, and likely to reach only 1% by 2015 without immigration but reached 6%. The combined impact of these demographic shifts saw the black proportion of the U.S. population remain static (11% in 1965, 12% in 2015) and the white proportion of the population to drop from 84% to 62%.

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Changes in the Conduct of Elections and Politics The shifts in the structure of political communication in recent decades have been extraordinary. The major U.S. networks and major newspapers have lost their near monopoly on news delivery and public trust. Local papers have closed, and newsrooms been stripped of personnel. Internet and cable news outlets (including alternative TV channels) have grown to fill the void, with no effective regulation of the fairness or reliability of their coverage. The many social media platforms have provided a format through which organisations and individuals can effectively become their own discrete communications channels. Donald Trump provides a remarkable example of the influence that can be leveraged using these tools. This is especially significant in an environment where Democrats and Republicans increasingly use, trust, and mistrust quite different and barely overlapping groups of communication sources, creating what has become known as “echo chambers” in which political information and more worryingly disinformation are not interrogated or challenged. This growth of alternative, unregulated political communications systems that can target individuals and reach into the homes and phones of the population, driven by profit-motivations or by well-financed and/or ideologically driven individuals and groups has come at a time when traditional forms of political communications have declined. Union membership—a major vehicle for political education—fell from over 20% of U.S. employees in 1983 to below 11% in 2020 (Hess 2021). A New “Big Issue” The issues driving successive election campaigns tend to be similar over time, even if opinion about the appropriate policy responses change over time. Giant issues that divide the electorate in new ways are rare. There have been hints of crisis that might act in this way in recent years— for example the economic crash of 2008, U.S. involvement in the 2001 invasion of Iraq and its consequences—but nothing has had the electoral impact ascribed to the U.S. Civil War, or the Great Crash of 1929. In 1970 Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg, in their book The Real Majority argued that there was emerging a “Social Issue” on which the Republicans could grow their electoral support. The “Social Issue” was envisaged as a portfolio of policy areas which increasingly divided

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conservative and liberal voters. For some voters, single issues such as abortion rights override in importance all other matters on the political agenda. For others the Second Amendment’s protection of gun rights has an equal pull. When such powerful minority issues can be allied with similarly strongly held opinions in other groups one has the makings of a powerfully driven electoral coalition. The work of authors such as John Kenneth White on Culture Wars suggest to me a strong link with Scammon and Wattenberg’s “Social Issue.” Conservative advocates have managed to maintain abortion limitation as a major issue when most western countries have moved on, and most U.S. voters would like to. General concerns over “law and order” have become encased in angry if often confused debates on guns, defunding the police, police violence, black lives matter, and the “thin blue line.” Some have grasped a false interpretation of critical race theory to launch a broad attack on education policy and educators. Sometimes openly, but more often disguised, these disputes have racialized and gender-based elements. The willingness of Republican leaders to challenge science and evidence-based positions in the matter of America’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic has demonstrated a disregard for public health and an accommodation of conspiracy theories, dressed up as issues of freedom and liberty. The “Social Issue”/Culture Wars have provided an opportunity to shift and harden the nation’s electoral cleavages. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has added another international crisis with implications for American international relations and for its economy. The internal American debate on all of these issues seems consistently to be touched by the difference between communities increasingly defined by their position in the culture wars. Long-Term Erosion of Previous Electoral Coalitions There have been various sightings of a potential new electoral coalition in recent decades, but these have been more indicative of the directions of change as the Roosevelt Democratic coalition of the 1930s has steadily unravelled. The solid, and conservative, Democratic South has been replaced by a solid, and conservative, Republican South. The Democrats have become increasingly perceived as representing a bicoastal, urban, liberal group of states. The agricultural Midwest has drifted away

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from the Democrats, and the declining industrial Midwest and Northeast have become more contested by the Republicans. These shifts have been underpinned by racial, ethnic, gender, and generational differences in party-political support. Some observers claim that the new shape of party-political support in the USA indicates a shift roughly equally of the Democratic Party to the left and the Republicans to the right. Harvard scholar Pippa Norris disagrees, pointing out that in an international comparison the GOP position on ethnic minority rights and liberal democracy place it close to the Polish PiS (Law and Justice Party) and Turkish AKP (Justice and Development Party), while the Democrats remain firmly within the median of political parties in OECD countries. Party political managers devote a great deal of effort to tracking these changes, and a great deal of thought into developing strategies that might work in this shifting landscape to win and retain office for their candidates in any upcoming election. But a greater prize would be the creation of an electoral coalition that had the longevity to create a party-political advantage through a generation of elections. A Critical Election (or Series of Elections) Do the close fought elections of 2016 and 2020, look as though they might be critical elections, marking a realignment that will have longterm impact? Roderick Hart, in his 2020 book Trump and Us brings extensive qualitative content analysis to bear on Donald Trump’s rhetoric in a search for the link that this candidate, and president made with his audience, his constituency. Hart posits that Trump recognised in many Americans feelings of being trapped, besieged, weary, and ignored by those authorities who should be watching out for them. Trump did not look to theory, history, or aesthetics to construct his responses to these feelings. He embraced them, he told his audiences— people who felt overlooked, overflown, and abandoned—that he loved them. He reacted to their issues with such passion as to convince them he alone would hear and could solve their problems. And while he might sometimes transgress the rules of good behaviour, vicariously his supporters could find sharing in that behaviour rather thrilling, and they did not divert from the conviction that regardless of his many individual lies (30,573 according to Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post ) he was right about the larger truth.

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With skilful use of the soft power of modern web-based communications Donald Trump made himself, and the mutual love he shared with his populist coalition of supporters, the core agenda of the 2016 election, taking a victory in the Electoral College despite lagging by 2.9 million in the popular vote. He failed only by a whisker to gain re-election in 2020 even with an increased popular vote deficit of over 7 million popular votes. Biden’s 306 to 232 Electoral vote victory would have been overcome if Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin had gone to Trump. The total Democratic popular vote lead in these states was less than 43,000 votes, or 28 thousandths of one per cent of the total two-party popular vote. A vote swing of half that would have seen the Electoral College tied, and the election thrown into the U.S. House of Representatives, where Republican control of 26 state delegations would likely have delivered the White House to their nominee. President Trump would have been re-elected, with Republicans in control of the U.S. Senate, having gained seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, and in control of 27 governorships and 30 state legislatures in the country’s 50 states.

Leadership in the Future? The GOP’s actions before Trump, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s strategy of total non-co-operation with any proposal made by President Barack Obama, demonstrated that the politics of power was beginning to outweigh the search for policy solutions. President Trump led an administration that continued to reject bipartisan collaboration. Senator McConnell’s dealings with the Biden administration have indicated that this anti-co-operative approach has been sealed into the Republican Party. Donald Trump’s insistence on the Big Lie that he won the 2020 election by a landslide, that the Democrats stole the presidency, and that on 6 January 2021, he did no more than address a “loving crowd” of patriots who happened to be visiting Washington DC, has presented his party with a dilemma. While it seems clear that many in the Republican leadership would like to see the former president’s influence diminish, so far, most leading members of that party have chosen to kiss the ring. Demonstrators on January 6th brought with them a gallows to demonstrate their contempt for, and threat to, former vice president Mike Pence. More recently Pence, who may contest for the next Republican presidential nomination, dismissed the January 6th attack as “one day in

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January.”4 He has joined other Republican leaders in deferring to the former president’s charismatic appeal and massive fundraising potential among powerful sectors of the conservative electorate and found his own way of joining the ranks of the Big Liars. One key reason for this is the emergence of a political communications system which preserves and emphasises the contrasting and unconnecting visions of the political environment held by Democratic and Republican supporters. In spite of all evidence to the contrary a poll in December 2021 found that only 21% of Republicans believe President Biden’s election victory to be legitimate (Cuthbert and Theodoridis 2022). Trump played a large part in discrediting among his supporters previously highly regarded mainstream media sources such as CBS and The New York Times while simultaneously expanding the reach of less reliable sources such as Fox News. The result is that Democrats and Republicans trust a different array of news sources, and have no faith in the sources trusted by their political opponents. There have always been differences of this kind, but previously with some overlap. Now there is virtually no overlap. The divide is particularly marked between Liberal Democrats, who most trust CNN, The New York Times, PBS, NPR and NBC News, and Conservative Republicans, who listed CNN, The New York Times, and NBC among their most distrusted news sources. Liberal Democrats most distrusted Fox News, Rush Limbaugh (since deceased), and Sean Hannity, which were the top three trusted news sources by Conservative Republicans (Jurkowitz et al. 2020). With their followers so deeply connected to committedly ideological news sources, and estranged from sources outside this range Republican officeholders are beholden to an electorate that ties them even more firmly to the nativist, anti-immigrant, conservative culture wars positions that they have previously used to motivate their voters. As gerrymandering reduces the number of marginal congressional and state level legislative seats, and the party primary, in which the electorate is made up of the strongest party loyalists, becomes increasingly significant, this ideological pressure also becomes more intense. David Frum refers to this as the “Trump Cinematic Universe”—a place “so involute that only the most devoted fans can make sense of it” (2022). 4 CNN , October 5, 2021. https://edition.cnn.com/2021/10/05/politics/mikepence-january-6-sean-hannity/index.html.

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The Republicans have demonstrated that they are ready to continue to react to national elections that consistently give them fewer votes than the Democrats by leveraging structural advantages, weaponizing “culture war” issues, doubling down on gerrymandering and introducing screeds of discriminatory voter suppression legislation. This is their vision of nailing down in their favour a long-term realignment of party control in America. Their room for strategic manoeuvre away from these tactics is further limited by the emergence of a political communications system that allows the depiction of a political universe made almost completely of alternative facts. Meanwhile the Democrats continue to look for changing demography to bring them electoral victories. The speed of this change is limited by such factors as Republican strength in medium sized states, the influence of these states in the Electoral College and the U.S. Senate, and the ability of state legislatures to protect and expand Republican advantage through gerrymandering. There seems little doubt that the electoral coalition built in recent years by the GOP, and solidified by Donald Trump, could maintain its influence for some time.

Whose Opportunity? Despite the controversies of the Trump presidency, the Biden victory in 2020 and the lasting Democratic success in nationwide presidential voting this century, it is the Republicans who may have the best political opportunities in the foreseeable future. Incumbent administrations rarely do well in mid-term elections, and while the 2022 election was very close, the Republicans took control of the U.S. House to divide party control of the national legislature. The parties were by then fighting on an electoral map redrawn predominantly by Republican state legislatures no longer facing the restrictions of the Voting Rights Act. Republican non-cooperation in Washington, DC was partially successful in leaving President Biden’s legislative agenda stalemated in Congress. By the time of the 2024 elections, the GOP will face a primary season that will test the party’s loyalty to Donald Trump. At the same time Even so, President Biden will by then have a presidential record to defend, might find himself facing challenges for the nomination, and with 23 of that year’s 33 U.S. Senate elections featuring Democratic incumbents his party will present a huge target for the GOP to attack. The next nationwide redistricting of seats in state legislatures and in the U.S. House of

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Representatives will take place in 2032. The Democratic Party can still attract more votes, and win elections, but it will likely face institutional disadvantages in the U.S. electoral system at least until that time. A report published by the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics found that 41% of Biden supporters and 52% of Trump supporters responding to a survey agreed that “The situation in America is such that I would favor [Blue/Red] states seceding from the union to form their own separate country” (2021). Such a result is very unlikely, but the response underlines how deep mutual distrust has become. And there exists a foundation of underlying differences between these states. For example, Republican legislators regularly point to the cost of welfare programmes as draining money from their states into urban Democratic communities. In fact, Republican states are generally poorer than average, and a federal tax and benefits system that is in aggregate moderately progressive ensures Republican states on average receive more from federal transfers, while Democratic states pay more into federal coffers (Gordon 2021). This division is reflected also in voting patterns. The 521 counties that voted for Biden in 2020 accounted for 71% of the national GDP while Trump’s 2,564 counties represented only 29% of the economy (Muro et al. 2020). These figures mostly demonstrate the respective ability to produce wealth and the existence of genuine needs in different states. Progressive Democrats might applaud the redistributive nature of the system. On the other hand, increasing awareness that Democratic communities are producing a larger part of the nation’s GDP, contributing a larger portion to the nation’s programmes, generally supplying a larger number of voters for the presidential election, without commensurate political authority could intensify political divisions. Transparent discussion and negotiation might help reduce stress, but with the example of Donald Trump’s belligerent approach, and, with the support of their partisan media streams, the GOP in particular continues to press highly combative, uncompromising approaches to policy questions and political debates. Under these circumstances there is no guarantee that a realignment followed by a period of single party domination would dilute the tensions in the American political system.

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References Berlant, Laurent. 2012. The Trumping of Politics. Supervalent Thought, September 2. https://supervalentthought.com/2012/09/02/the-trumpingof-politics/. Accessed 4 March 2023. Brennan Center for Justice. 2021. Voting Laws Roundup, October 2021. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voting-laws-rou ndup-october-2021. Accessed 13 October 2021. Budiman, Abby. 2020. Key Findings About US Immigrants. Pew Research Center, August 20. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/08/20/ key-findings-about-u-s-immigrants/. Accessed 4 March 2023. Clines, Francis X. 1984. “Historic Realignment” Seen by Reagan on Election Day. The New York Times, October 31. https://www.nytimes.com/ 1984/10/31/us/historic-realignment-seen-by-reagan-on-election-day.html. Accessed 4 March 2023. Cuthbert, Lane, and Alexander Theodoridis. 2022. Do Republicans Really Believe Trump Won the 2020 Election? Our Research Suggests That They Do. The Washington Post, January 7. https://www.washingtonpost.com/pol itics/2022/01/07/republicans-big-lie-trump. Accessed 29 April 2022. D’Ancona, Matthew. 2017. Post Truth: The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back. London: Ebury Press. Frum, David. 2022. The End of Presidential Debates. The Atlantic, April 18. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/rnc-withdr awal-commission-on-presidential-debates/629580/. Accessed 29 April 2022. Gordon, Deb. 2021. Return on Statehood: How Much Value Every State Gets from the Federal Government. Moneygeek. https://www.moneygeek.com/ living/states-most-reliant-federal-government. Accessed 13 October 2022. Hart, Roderick P. 2020. Trump and Us: What He Says and Why People Listen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hess, Abigail J. 2021. Union Enrollment Has Declined for Decades, but Union Workers Still Earn 19% More. CNBC Make It, February 5. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/05/union-enrollment-declined-for-dec ades-but-union-workers-still-earn-more.html. Accessed 3 March 2023. Igielnik, Ruth, and Abby Budiman. 2020. The Changing Racial and Ethnic Composition of the U.S. Electorate. Pew Research Center, September 20. https://www.pewresearch.org/2020/09/23/the-changingracial-and-ethnic-composition-of-the-u-s-electorate. Accessed 13 October 2021. Jurkowitz, Mark, Amy Mitchell, Elisa Shearer, and Mason Walker. 2020. U.S. Media Polarisation and the 2020 Election: A Nation Divided. Pew Research https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/wp-content/uploads/ Center. sites/8/2020/01/PJ_2020.01.24_Media-Polarization_FINAL.pdf. Accessed 29 April 2022.

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Kessler, Glenn. 2021. Trump Made 30,573 False or Misleading Claims as President. Nearly Half Came in His Final Year. The Washington Post, January https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-fact-checker-tracked23. trump-claims/2021/01/23/ad04b69a-5c1d-11eb-a976-bad6431e03e2_ story.html. Accessed 4 March 2023. Key, V.O. 1955. A Theory of Critical Elections. Journal of Politics 17 (1): 3–18. Muro, Mark, Eli Byerly-Duke, Yang You, and Robert Maxim. 2020. BidenVoting Counties Equal 70% of America’s Economy. What Does This Mean for the Nation’s Political-Economic Divide? Brookings, November 10. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2020/11/09/biden-votingcounties-equal-70-of-americas-economy-what-does-this-mean-for-the-nationspolitical-economic-divide. Accessed 4 March 2021. Norris, Pippa. How Authoritarian Is the GOP Compared with Other Major Parties in OECD Societies? Very. The GOP Position Towards Ethnic Minority Rights & Liberal Democracy Is Close to Polish PiS and Turkish AKP, Although a Few Others Like Greece’s XA Are More Extreme. Twitter. https://t.co/5zTVhN2ulF, https://t.co/VqDdiqwdO3. Accessed 13 October 2021. Scammon, Richard, and Ben Wattenberg. 1970. The Real Majority: An Extraordinary Examination of the American Electorate. New York: Coward-McCann. Skocpol, Theda. 2016. Republicans Ride the Trump Tiger. Project Syndicate, May 30. https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trump-republicancreation-by-theda-skocpol-2016-05. Accessed 12 October 2023. UVA Center for Politics. 2021. New Initiative Explores Deep, Persistent Divides Between Biden and Trump Voters. https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/ articles/new-initiative-explores-deep-persistent-divides-between-biden-andtrump-voters. Accessed 13 October 2021. White, John K. 2002. The Values Divide: American Politics and Culture in Transition. Washington, DC: CQ Press.

CHAPTER 4

Studying America (photographically): From Walker Evans to Taryn Simon Kostas Ioannidis and Eleni Mouzakiti

January 6, 2021, the day a Pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol, was the day that, supposedly, Europe and the entire world exclaimed in horror about what America is (not). From both sides of the Atlantic newspapers and websites seemed to agree that what we saw was not America (2021). The photographs of the QAnon Shaman, the smiling guy stealing Speaker Pelosi’s lectern or the guy with his feet on Pelosi’s desk, although images decorated with plenty of Stars and Stripes or Confederate flags, represented something that many of us refused to recognize as (“true”) America. While we generally agree that America is something extremely fluid and multifaceted, it seems at the same time that we are captive to images that tend to solidify it. This does not seem to be unrelated to

K. Ioannidis Athens School of Fine Arts, Agios Ioannis Rentis, Greece e-mail: [email protected] E. Mouzakiti (B) Independent Scholar, Athens, Greece e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 T. Tsimpouki et al. (eds.), American Studies after Postmodernism, Renewing the American Narrative, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41448-0_4

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the tendency to represent America—more specifically the northern part of the continent—through photographs, a tendency which has been very strong already since the beginning of the twentieth century. Moreover, it seems that our desire to have a clear, stable image of America remains strong, although each of the ambitious attempts to represent the country aims to challenge the previous one by making America even more open and inclusive. In those representations there was always a certain amount of imagery, and a not unimportant one, which initially would not be considered as America(n) at all. It was another world, or someone else’s (who was not perhaps American enough) America. Robert Frank’s photographic series, The Americans, famously failed to find a publisher in the USA in 1957. Sixty years later, Frank’s world, “shrouded in an immense grey tragic boredom” (Durnial qtd. in Stimson 2006, 116), together with Stephen Shore’s or even Diane Arbus’ worlds, form a crucial part of our perception of America. In a somehow reverse manner, as we will see, the images of this, now typical, Trumpian America were already present in photobooks about a hidden America already in the early years of the twenty-first century. If we accept photography’s evidential (indexical) nature, the images discussed below document the fact that already from the 2000s there was something that we had ignored or that we considered completely marginal, as if from a completely different world. And this despite the fact that, as we will see, these photographers work toward making the marginal familiar to us. A kind of spatial issue was therefore the starting point of this paper, an issue that was linked to a number of questions: what do the worlds depicted in these photographic works contain, where are to be found those that we do not recognize as part of America? And how do we find and recognize them later as part of it? The ambition to answer all these questions over the course of about a century obviously exceeds both our capabilities and the scope of this paper. If anything emerged with certainty from the examination of bodies from photographic work starting with Evans and concluding with Taryn Simon was not so much a definite answer to the above questions as the observation that all these photographic representations of America which we examine, apart from opening our eyes to another world next to the one which looks familiar by embracing Whitman’s vision of “oneness in diversity,” are imbued with some kind of self-reflexivity. The photographic representations of America, in addition to constantly putting new limits on what is understood as America and American, thematize and call into question even

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convenient distinctions between modernism and postmodernism. So to discuss what comes after postmodernism, as the current volume attempts, becomes even more complicated. In the 1970s, in her seminal essay “America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly,” Susan Sontag detected the traces of an almost typically American Whitmanesque vision of “oneness in diversity,” of “psychic intercourse with everything” (1979, 31) in twentieth-century American photography. She concluded with Diane Arbus’ imagery and the 1972 MoMA retrospective dedicated to the photographer’s work. According to Sontag, Arbus’ photographs stand as a landmark because they “convey the anti-humanist message which people of good will in the 1970s are eager to be troubled by, just as they wished, in the 1950s, to be consoled and distracted by a sentimental humanism” (32–33). As she put it: “Arbus’s work does not invite viewers to identify with the pariahs and miserablelooking people she photographed. Humanity is not ‘one’” (32). The world, therefore, was not conceived as one anymore and this was to be discovered in the images of America. Regarding the other world, she added grimly that it is “to be found, as usual, inside this one” (34). In what follows we will examine three bodies of photographic work produced in the twentieth century and generally considered as landmarks, that is Walker Evans’ American Photographs (1938), Robert Frank’s The Americans (1958), Stephen Shore’s American Surfaces (1972–1973) and two photographic books published in the twenty-first, also considered important contributions to the field. These most recent works are Alec Soth’s Sleeping by the Mississippi (2004) and Taryn Simon’s An American Index of the Hidden and the Unfamiliar (2007). We will focus on the photographs that these collections contain, the texts that accompany the images as well as several other critical essays and reviews that have significantly shaped their reception. Bearing this in mind, we will attempt to distinguish the limits of the worlds they depict: how close and where in relation to what we each time conceive as (familiar) America is located another unknown, unfamiliar, hidden America. We will argue that notwithstanding their considerable differences what all these major photographic series have in common is that they engage in a discourse on the method of representation, or at least that is what the critics read on them: a photographic work with America as its subject should be not only about America and Americans but about photographic representation, as well. So, in accordance with the openness of the Whitmanesque vision, these iconic photographic series refrain from proposing any “immanent

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whole named America” as Alan Trachtenberg put it when commenting on Evans’ American Photographs , adding that “it is in the effort to achieve coherence that Evans’s America lies—not a finished thesis but a continuous process, less an idea than a method” (1989, 284). The catalog of Walker Evans’ American Photographs was first published by the Museum of Modern Art in 1938 and accompanied an exhibition of the same title held there from September 28 to November 18, 1938. It was the first one-person photography exhibition ever given by the Museum, as was declared in the press release. Evans reflected at length on the selection and sequencing of the photographs for the exhibition and the catalog. Images occupied only the right hand side of each page spread. There was no caption and the laconic, prosaic titles were kept to a list at the end of each of the two sections of the book. The first section consists of fifty photographs of Americans in their social environment (an “Alabama Tenant Farmer Family Singing Hymns,” a “Couple at Coney Island,” an “Arkansas Flood Refugee,” etc.), but also artefacts like billboards, paintings, sketches and graffitis on walls, interiors full of objects alluding to human presence, a car cemetery in Pennsylvania, pompous monuments in public squares. Interestingly, the first section opens with a photo of a “photo studio” in New York and a “Penny Picture Display” and closes with a decayed Louisiana plantation house and an uprooted tree. In the second section, comprised of thirty-seven photographs, the subject is American vernacular architecture: rural America and industrial architecture, mid-nineteenth-century American appropriations of gothic and renaissance models, “crumpled pressed-tin Corinthian capitals” and “debased baroque ornament” (Kirstein in Evans 2012, 197). In the catalogue of the MoMA exhibition of the American Photographs , writer, critic, dance impresario and Evans’ close friend, Lincoln Kirstein, was the first to describe the photographer’s method and the reader’s anticipated response. In an era when photographic prints were mostly deemed diaphanous representations of reality, the critic’s choice to highlight the method of reading them, “not as separate prints” but as a sequence, had important implications on making sense not only of photographs but of America and Americans as well. In his introductory essay, Kirstein describes Evans’ method and guides us as to how we should look at the photographs: Physically the pictures in this book exist as separate prints. They lack the surface, obvious continuity of the moving picture, which by its physical

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nature compels the observer to perceive a series of images as parts of a whole. But these pictures, of necessity seen singly, are not conceived as isolated pictures made by the camera turned indiscriminately here or there. […] Looked at in sequence they are overwhelming in their exhaustiveness of detail, their poetry of contrast, and for those who wish to see it, their moral implication. (2012, 194–195, emphasis added)

According to Kirstein the book deserves a close reading exactly the same way a poem does. The photographer’s eye “is a poet’s eye” and “it finds corroboration in the poet’s voice” (196). American Photographs “are not entirely easy to look at.” They “demand and should receive the slight flattery” of the spectators’ “closest attention” (200). The critic presents Evans’ achievement as the discovery of a new medium which lies between moving pictures and poetic diction. So the book is as much about its subject as it is self-referential. Stephen Shore, whose (“Warholian”) work we will discuss below, spoke about Evans as “the first postmodernist photographer” because “his work is very consciously structured. He makes choices that reference a vernacular style of imagery and adopt the cultural resonances that style calls up” (2004, 178). Regarding now Kirstein’s remark about the “moral implication” of Evans’ work, we take it to be an allusion to the responsibility one has every time one occupies a point of view from which to face human subjects or objects and their relation to humans. As a matter of fact, with respect to the latter, the critic argues that “[i]n Evans’s pictures of temples or shelters the presence or absence of the people who created them is the most important thing. The structures are social rather than artistic monuments. The photographs are social documents” (2012, 197). This of course has to do with Evans’ frontal, “objective” point of view, its “purity” and even its “puritanism” but it also carries some unexpected religious undertones. This is “‘straight’ photography not only in technique,” Kirstein contends, “but in the rigorous directness of its way of looking. […] Every object is regarded head-on with the unsparing frankness of a Russian icon or a Flemish portrait. The facts pile up with the prints” (198). According to Kirstein’s account, Evans’ images are like acheiropoiites eikones (icons), that is images not made by human hands. The mundane object (which is usually a building’s facade) is treated exactly like a human face “with unsparing frankness” (198). Moreover, the photographer’s invisibility imposes a quasi-religious attitude on the spectator.

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The close ties between the method of representation, the “human subject” and the role of photographs as “social documents” discussed in Lincoln Kirstein’s account of Evans’ American Photographs might be also detected in Jack Kerouac’s text accompanying Robert Frank’s The Americans. The “Swiss, unobtrusive, nice” Frank, as Kerouac described him, had moved to the USA in 1947. Soon he became Evans’ friend, protégé and assistant. In 1955 he applied to the Guggenheim Foundation for a fellowship. In his oft-quoted statement of intent he wrote: This project is essentially the visual study of a civilisation […] but it is only partly documentary in nature: one of its aims is more artistic than the word documentary implies […] What I have in mind then, is observation and record of what one naturalised American finds to see in the United States that signifies the kind of civilisation born here and spreading elsewhere. (Tucker and Brookman 1986, 20)

American flags covering faces and decorating walls, cowboys in the streets of New York City, black people attending funerals or riding the back seats of a trolley in New Orleans, people in front of jukeboxes and coffins occupy the pages of Frank’s collection. Echoing the dialogues established by the sequence of the American Photographs series, the image of a covered car at Long Beach, California is paired with a body covered with a blanket after a car accident on U.S. 66 somewhere between Winslow and Flagstaff, Arizona. Another compelling photograph, “Crosses on scene of highway accident - U.S. 91, Idaho,” is followed by an “Assembly line” in Detroit and a “Convention hall” in Chicago. This jarring combination of subject matters and motifs is accompanied by deadpan captions that Frank used right after the photographs. The book’s initial reception shows that America failed to recognize itself in Frank’s images. Jno Cook observed that “In The Americans, America stood still, frozen into a frightful pose between moments” (Stimson 2006, 118). And John Durnial added: “This is Robert Frank’s America. God help him” (Durnial qtd. in Stimson 2006, 116). This was not only Frank’s America, however. It was also Kerouac’s. In his accompanying text and with his cataclysmic rhythm, Kerouac floats constantly between describing Americans, the landscape and “Americanness” in Frank’s snapshots, and reflecting on the medium of representation whether poetic or photographic (Frank 1997, 5–9). It is remarkable though, and as far as we know it remains unnoticed, that Kerouac started

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his impetuous prose not with the impressionistic portraits of Americans he sketches in the biggest part of his text but by trying to capture the atmosphere, “that crazy feeling in America,” as he calls it (5). And he attempts this by way of listing objects depicted in the photographs: coffins and jukeboxes “the picture of a chair in some cafe with the sun coming in the window and setting on the chair in a holy halo,” that is, things that Kerouac admits “he never thought could be caught on film much less described in its beautiful visual entirety in words” (5). It might seem rather unanticipated to find Kerouac delve into methodological inquiry or self-examination but there are more than a few instances in his introduction to The Americans where he does both. Therefore, it seems that, in terms of methodology, he is much more concerned and sophisticated than his use of predicates like “American” and the like seem to betray at first glance. He is also willing to speculate about the future reception of the photographs in other media: As American a picture — the faces don’t editorialize or criticize or say anything but “This is the way we are in real life and if you don’t like it I don’t know anything about it ’cause I’m living my own life my way and may God bless us all, mebbe” … “if we deserve it” […] What a poem this is, what poems can be written about this book of pictures some day by some young new writer high by candlelight bending over them describing every gray mysterious detail, the gray film that caught the actual pink juice of human kind. (6–7)

There are two points we would like to make here. First, we would like to compare Kerouac’s introduction to Kirstein’s text and note that both of them see the photographic work as poetic work. Having developed “a tremendous contempt” for the “Life story,” that is for visual narratives (“god-damned stories”) “with a beginning and an end,” Frank took the decision “to follow his own intuition, to do it his way” “and not make any concessions” (Frank qtd. in Stimson 2006, 123). He gradually developed a taste for complexity, ambiguity and openness. “Something must be left for the onlooker” he insisted (Greenough 1994, 108). According to this view, photographs are not to be read as self-evident, transparent objects anymore, they should be read as poems. They are dense, packed with multiple meanings and must be approached as a sequence, with the onlooker moving backward and forward, spending time with each one and with the series as a whole. The complexity of Frank’s project called for

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a new method of working with photography and a new method of reading the visual series that resembled poetry reading. This new method had to be highlighted (in Kirstein’s and in Kerouac’s texts) because it stood in complete contrast to the conventional conception of photography as a universal language, as a language with no need for a dictionary. The second point was triggered by the way Kerouac describes the photograph’s materiality as well as, what he calls, the “human kind” materiality. According to Kerouac, the photographic image which the poet of the future will attempt to depict consists of “gray mysterious details” “that caught the actual pink of human kind” (Frank 1997, 6, 7). We find this quite interesting to pass unnoticed particularly when read in relation with Frank’s colorful albeit blunt phrasing in an interview he gave and in which he declared: “I need to be plugged into Network of Human Mayonnaise” (Stimson 2006, 121). This needs explanation because of the fact that Frank always felt like a stranger and believed that this had to do “with years of photography, where you walk around, you observe, and you walk away” (122). He also felt that if he talked to the people he photographed, his concept of the photograph would be lost (123). The art historian Blake Stimson talks about a “double-bind with identity—the longing for the bond of shared identification, for the experience of nation, on the one hand, and the sense of release from identity on the other” and he connects this with “a dream of anonymity, of relating without relating” and finally with “the dream of identity in abstraction, of identity found in genre, class, or category, of the social itself” (122). The metaphor of the “human mayonnaise” itself betrays this ambivalence which was not limited to Frank’s attitude toward “the social.” He once wrote in a biographical sketch published in English: “Ich bin ein Amerikaner” (131).1 But while in the case of Evans this ambivalence, to the extent that the term relates to his stance toward the social, is rather easy to delineate in visual terms taking into consideration the first section of American Photographs , in Frank’s case the situation gets more complex. Evans chronicled the social reality of the early 1930s with his straight, dispassionate “documentary style,” which nevertheless prompted Kirstein

1 The whole oft-cited sketch goes like this: “Grow up in Zürich—born in Zürich. November 9, 1924. become a Swiss in 1938 (?) 1947. Go to America forget about having become a züriçois. 1950. Marry in New York. Mary is her name. two children, Pablo & Andrea. 1955. trip across the States, and Delpire publishes Les Americains. Ich bin ein Amerikaner” (Stimson 2006, 131).

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to read his pictures almost like (religious) icons. Following his steps, Frank abandoned what Sarah Greenough characterized as the “lyricism” of some of his early work (1994, 110), drawing inspiration mostly from European photographers like Hungarian photographer André Kertesz. Nevertheless, one feels—paradoxically—that even the term “expressionist” might not sound far-fetched, which is exactly the case with a Byzantine icon that, although acheiropoiitos, is commonly read in similar “expressionistic” terms. A better assessment would place Frank in the space that opens between Evans and the Beat authors and poets he befriended. On the one hand, his photos do not seem to be born out of his relationship with the people he photographs, but on the other, he keeps no physical distance from them. He really seems to get into the pinkish flesh of the human mayonnaise, although he remains “ein Amerikaner,” that is, not exactly a part of the society which he documents, if we take into consideration the critical reactions his body of images evoked. Less than two decades later, Stephen Shore presented American Surfaces . First exhibited in the early 1970s, American Surfaces gradually occupied a place alongside Evans’ and Frank’s books. Shore, an Upper East Side kid and a Manhattan prodigy, famously got his work into the MoMA collection as a teenager, after his photographs had been bought by Edward Steichen. Later, while still a teenager, he photographed in Andy Warhol’s Factory. He, too, however was another outsider in America. During 1972–1973 he took a long road trip inspired by Bobby Troup’s “Route 66” and made photographs of “every meal [he] ate, every person [he] met, every bed [he] slept in, every toilet [he] used, every town [he] drove through” (Shore 2008). In a text he writes commenting on his journey, entitled “The Road Trip,” Shore speaks about the “magic litany of place names” contained in Troup’s song: “Now you go thru St. Looey; Joplin, Missouri and Oklahoma City is oh so pretty. You’ll see Amarillo; Gallup, New Mexico; Flagstaff, Arizona; don’t forget Winona, Kingman, Barstow, San Bernadino” (2008). He also refers to Nabokov’s Lolita and the list of the motels Humbert stayed in during his road trip with the 12-year-old girl: “all those Sunset Motels, U-Beam Cottages, Hillcrest Courts, Pine View Courts, Mountain View Courts, Skyline Courts, Park Plaza Courts, Green Acres, Mac’s Courts.” Shore concludes: Like Bobby Troup’s litany of place names, this has some of the incantational quality seen in American poetry from Walt Whitman to Allen Ginsberg (friend of Robert Frank and Jack Kerouac) […] These trips were

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all made by or described by outsiders. Even Kerouac was in some ways an outsider: while raised in Massachusetts, he was from a French-Canadian family and only spoke French until he was six. (2008)

More than 200 of the pictures, cheap Kodak prints on very glossy paper, were exhibited in the Light Gallery in New York City in 1972 (Fig. 4.1). They covered three walls of the room in the form of a three pictures high grid. As Shore himself made clear they were supposed to look like snapshots because he “was interested in visual naturalness” and he wanted to “show the multiplicity of images that surround us” (2004, 174). The critic A. D. Coleman wrote about the exhibition in the Village Voice: “American Surfaces is a group of 174 Kodacolor drugstore type prints of assorted meals, motels, cashiers, roadsides, and other items of contemporary Americana. These are mounted in three horizontal rows, looking for all the world like an endless game of visual solitaire devised to while away the eons in limbo” (1972). With much hesitation, Coleman attempted an evaluation: The specific concept behind this exhibit is not readily apparent to me, which would make me feel old-fogeyish as all get-out if I weren’t still young to not give a fuck. […] “American Surfaces” is thin, benumbing and banal. No surprises, as Ed Ruscha might say. Historians of the future will, of course, turn to this sort of material for the purposes of visual anthropology […]. Collectors of the future will also get into Kodacolor imagery—if only because there is nothing in a disposable culture which will not eventually be “collectible” as they say in the trade […]. (1972)

In this culture (of looking), everything, the rose bush and a telephone pole, a view of distant mountains and a wire fence “all have equal value,” notes Gene Thornton in the New York Times, in November 1976. According to the critic, Shore’s photographs “are bland and uncritical […]. They do not praise, perhaps, but neither do they blame” (1976). These are typical accounts of Shore’s photographs for the period of their first appearance. The images are nothing but a bland record of a disposable culture, typical pop art uncritical artefacts. Two decades later, however, their reception had changed dramatically. For art historian Heinz Liesbrock, such an uncritical stance was not a flaw since Shore’s “interest lies not so much in cultural criticism as in the actual process of discovery” (1994, 9). It seems that once again the Whitmanesque ethics of openness and discovery are mobilized to

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Fig. 4.1 Stephen Shore, Queens, New York, April 1972

offer the context in interpreting the photographs: “On his voyages of discovery, he [Shore] does not bring with him any fixed ideas about what is coming” (10). Likewise, the art critic and poet Peter Schjeldahl, unwittingly perhaps, turns to Henry James’ methodological discussion about strangeness, distance and the eye’s freshness in the oft-quoted preface of the American Scene (1907, v–vi). As he put it, Shore, the “hothouse New Yorker without a driver’s license,” could see every new place he visited “in ways that natives never do” whereas his art, “as art about the United States,” suggested “an improbable patriotism, spread-eagled between cosmopolitan pride and a vulnerable yen for identity” (1995, 87) (Fig. 4.2). In an article entitled “The Unlikely Beauty of Club Sandwiches Served on Faux-Wood Formica,” critic and writer Leslie Camhi states that Shore’s photographic diary through its “matter of fact-ness […] distills something of our nation’s character. Yet it’s also an oddly moving portrait of an anonymous, homeless soul adrift in a disposable culture and a forlorn landscape hovering between banality and grace” (2005). In this account. American Surfaces stands between the “sublimely laconic” and

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Fig. 4.2 Stephen Shore, Farmington, New Mexico, June 1972

“objective” images of Evans’ American Photographs and the subjective, almost diaristic, documentation of Frank’s The Americans. In the 2005 Phaidon edition of American Surfaces , critic and curator Bob Nickas who wrote the introductory text highlights the methodological and philosophical stakes involved. “This book becomes a meditation on what it means to be in the world, what it means to point a camera in one direction rather than another, and no matter what is being recorded, its subject is always photography itself” (7). So whatever the differences between American Photographs and American Surfaces the two series stand close enough even in terms of their alleged self-reflexive character. Both are books “as much as about photography as about America,” to remember Kirstein’s formulation. If, however, the postmodern character of Shore’s work lies somewhere, it is that in his case the method is considered to be the question. The methodological discussion does not concern so much the way of reading the images as in the cases of Evans and Frank, but their production and result. And it is poetry along with society that have disappeared from the discussion. Neither Shore’s proponents from

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the 1990s onward nor his critics from the 1970s considered the potential poetic quality of the photographs as a prerequisite for their appraisal. The deadpan humor and the impulse to record everything and everyone alive—features connected with conceptual art and its tautological leanings—are now sufficient enough to secure Shore a place in the canon of the masters of American photography. Shore’s method excluded the poetics, it only presupposed a “heightened awareness” (as Bob Nickas describes it) of one’s surroundings “over a protracted period of time” (9). Shore literally recorded “every meal he ate, every person he met, every bed he slept in, every toilet he used, every town he drove through” and in a stark opposition to both Evans and Frank he did this without adopting a single perspective in terms of vantage point and distance from his subject (2008). Shore’s “peripatetic trajectory,” to use Nickas’ words, resembles neither Evans’ frontality and distance, nor Frank’s opposite stance, the result of his need to be “plugged into Network of Human Mayonnaise” (Stimson 2006, 121). Shore’s avoidance of a method (as a methodological choice) might be detected in his reluctance toward sequencing. He seems to prefer not to provide any thread for the reading of his photographs adopting instead the recording machine’s impersonal attitude, an attitude which ends up in a series of random encounters with objects and persons. Therefore, American Surfaces tends to be a paradoxical impersonal diary and this cannot come without consequences. By laying claim to the camera’s anonymity Shore renounces any moral (and social) implication of his work. Furthermore, contrary to his two predecessors what his project seems to suggest is that the world is thus, one regardless of the method of inquiry. In stark contrast to Sontag who maintained that through her photos of pariahs with whom the viewer cannot identify, Diane Arbus demonstrated that “humanity is not ‘one’ and that there is another world inside this one” (1979, 34), what Shore seems to imply is that there is no other world to be found inside this one, this is the whole world (again), a world however with no intrinsic meaning to be found somewhere else. In more recent years, however, photographers have been, again, rather meek in terms of their pretensions to capture a total image of America. One of the most ambitious endeavors, which has already acquired an almost iconic status, has been Alec Soth’s, Sleeping by the Mississippi (2004). Soth, who was born and is still based in Minneapolis travels along the Mississippi River from North to South, from Winona, Minnesota to

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Venice, Louisiana, and takes pictures of landscapes and people (Fig. 4.3). The river itself is hardly present in his photos; he has no interest “in creating an economic or socio-political document about the river and its environs,” as Anne Wilkes Tucker notes in her essay included in the book (Soth 2017). Instead, Soth turns to poetry: he sees poetry as “the medium most similar to photography.” Tucker quotes Soth stating: “Like poetry, photography is rarely successful with narrative. What is essential is the ‘voice’ (or ‘eye’) and the way this voice pieces together fragments to make something tenuously whole and beautiful” (qtd in Soth 2017). Not unlike Kirstein and Kerouac, Tucker discusses Soth’s method and the “symbolic” function of certain objects which appear in his photos repeatedly. She also places Soth’s book in the vicinity of those by Evans and Frank. The “coherence of the project” is crucial to her verdict: While there are many differences in the three books, each photographer repeatedly uses certain physical objects symbolically within individual pictures and within the sequence of the pictures. Soth uses beds the same way Evans used cars and artifacts of American popular culture in American Photographs and Frank employed automobiles and American flags in The Americans. (2017)

We would argue that the similarities between Soth and his predecessors end here, that is, on the repetition of certain motifs. Unlike Evans, Frank and Shore, who entered as outsiders to an America which remained mostly unknown to them, Soth embarks on his journey along a river which is familiar to him as it is situated at the northern end of where he lives and, as Tucker notes, “is equally drawn by [the river’s] power, its lore and its physical grandeur.” “His first river road venture from Minneapolis to Memphis” was made when Soth was still in college (2017). Fittingly enough, the two accompanying essays in the photobook, one written by Tucker who is a photography curator and a second authored by Patricia Hampl, also known as “Queen of memoir,” are penned as memoirs of the two women’s childhood spent near the river. And contrary to what happened in the cases of Frank and Shore, the reception of Sleeping by the Mississippi has been unanimously warm already from its first edition. From the first moment the book was deemed a companion to the preceding two iconic works on America. Quite remarkably though, as discussed above, in almost the same year Shore’s American Surfaces was granted a similar place. What is more, although very different endeavors in terms of

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Fig. 4.3 Alec Soth, Charles, Vasa, Minnesota

method and philosophy, Shore’s and Soth’s projects are both considered new, groundbreaking collections to join the masterworks of the 1930s and the 1950s. This is not as surprising as it might seem at first glance though. Soth’s Sleeping by the Mississippi is inhabited mostly by outcasts (prisoners and prostitutes among other strange, religious people), while their personal belongings and stories (abandoned mattresses and empty beds) are seen as, in Tucker’s words, “vehicles for dreaming” (2017). The people depicted are not presented as Arbusian “freaks” and we feel we can easily identify with them. Through countless details that allude

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Fig. 4.4 Alec Soth, Buena Vista, Iowa

to sex, illness, crime, race, religion, music and death, their world, albeit a small one, might easily be ours, as well (Fig. 4.4). Indeed, this is not a big world, but it is a world full of meaning, meaning which comes not from social relationships but from personal stories some of which are strategically narrated by Soth in the book’s last pages. Soth is not the kind of Warholian cynic that Shore is. He seems to imply that there is some meaning in the world, but this meaning is strictly personal and transferable only through poetic language. Taryn Simon’s 64 images and accompanying captions, titled An American Index of the Hidden and the Unfamiliar, was published in 2007. Her photos are the result of thorough research, of time consuming contacts with institutions and organizations whose spaces are rarely open to the outside. In other words, her subject is the (invisible) infrastructure of the country, revealing sites, objects and spaces (research centers and institutes, nuclear waste storage structures, CIA headquarters, mints, testing centers

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of all kinds, “recreation” cages for death row inmates, etc.), but also dark sects of all kinds. The photographer has usually only a single chance. If she fails, in most cases she cannot return. The images are documentary, informative in a frontal, dry style, with the corresponding ethos and the resulting gravity. They document realities that are sometimes terrifying, sometimes paradoxical, bordering on the comic, but where the dark side eventually prevails (as for example in the photo of the self-proclaimed “President of the Republic of Texas”). They also carry an otherworldly beauty, sometimes even tending toward abstraction (e.g. in the nuclear waste storage structure), where darkness reigns (inevitable due to the subject matter). Although some of the people appearing here could be presented in a typical Arbusian fashion, Simon refrains from doing this. For example, the “knights” of Ku Klux Klan who could slip in the category seem more menacing than monstrously strange. In her dispassionate style, the photographer simply acknowledges their presence in American culture, without a trace of moralizing or side-taking. In his foreword to the book the novelist Salman Rushdie describes the (political) significance of the photobook as follows: “In a historical period in which so many people are making such great efforts to conceal the truth from the mass of the people, an artist like Taryn Simon is an invaluable counter-force. Democracy needs visibility, accountability, light” (Simon 2007, 7). In their introduction, Elizabeth Sussman and Tina Kukielski describe Simon’s working method thus: In compiling An American Index of the Hidden and the Unfamiliar photographer Taryn Simon assumes the role of a shrewd informant while invoking the spirit of a collector of curiosities, culling from the diverse domains of science, government, medicine, entertainment, nature, security, and religion. One commonality persists in her chosen subjects: each remains, relatively unknown or out-of-view to a wider public audience. These are the hidden and unfamiliar. Yet Simon is quick to admit that her selection process is random and the 62 annotated photographs comprising the series are by no means a system of classification. This is not an archive, but a time capsule. And as such, An American Index documents one artist’s journey, over a period of four years to uncover and examine subjects integral to America’s foundation, mythology, and the daily functioning. (Simon 2007, 11)

The methodological discussion once again dominates the interpretations. Here we have the photographer penetrating a hidden world to

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render visible its contents which are not merely poetic reflections of the inside or some solipsistic unity without inside and outside but invisible structures on which the outside rests and without which it cannot be understood (something like an archive). The boundary between the worlds—the familiar and the unknown—which in the case of American representations is sought as an integral part of America and which in the case of Shore (viewed as typically postmodernist) is no longer distinguishable, is once again visible in the cases of Soth and Simon. These worlds, however, the unfamiliar parts of America, now and for the first time need insiders to reveal them to the outside world. Shore attempts this with poetry, Simon with scrupulous documentation. Although the worlds that Soth and Simon presented to us as early as the first decade of the twenty-first century as America(n) contain many of the ominous elements that we eventually saw in the faces of the Capitol invaders we refused to recognize America in the latter. We preferred to see them as inhabiting completely separate worlds, worlds visible to us only in the books insiders make about them. Claiming visibility, making the existence of an intermediary unnecessary, the inhabitants of this unfamiliar America bring us again face to face with the tools we have to understand the world and represent it. Waldo Frank wrote in Our America that “in the seeking we create” America and “in the quality of our search shall be the nature of the America we create” (1919, 10). The photographic representations discussed in this article demonstrate the validity of this statement. This, hard to pin down, and always already elusive subject has served more as a mirror for ourselves, our poetry, art and methods of representation than as a window to America’s vastness, its sublime and forlorn landscape.

References Camhi, Leslie. 2005. The Unlikely Beauty of Club Sandwiches Served on Faux-Wood Formica. The Village Voice, October 25. https://www.villag evoice.com/2005/10/25/the-unlikely-beauty-of-club-sandwiches-served-onfaux-wood-formica/. Accessed 4 March 2023. Coleman, A. D. 1972. American Yawn, Irish Wail. The Village Voice, October 5. http://stephenshore.net/press/VillageVoice_Oct_72.pdf. Accessed 21 February 2023.

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Evans, Walker. 2012 [1938]. American Photographs: Seventy Fifth Anniversary Edition. Lincoln Kirstein and Sarah Hermanson Meister. New York: The Museum of Modern Art. Frank, Waldo. 1919. Our America. New York: Boni and Liveright. Frank, Robert. 1997 [1958]. The Americans, with introduction by Jack Kerouac. New York: Scalo Publishers. Greenough, Sarah. 1994. Fragments That Make a Whole Meaning in Photographic Sequences. In Robert Frank: Moving Out (Exhibition Catalog), ed. Sarah Greenough and Philip Brookman, 96–125. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art. James, Henry. 1907. The American Scene. London: Chapman and Hall. Liesbrock, Heinz. 1994. “That you o’erstep not the modesty of nature.” Stephen Shore’s Concept of the Image. In Stephen Shore: Photographs 1973–1993, ed. Heinz Liesbrock. Munich: Schirmer Art Books. Schjeldahl, Peter. 1995. Stephen Shore. The Village Voice, December 26. http://stephenshore.net/press/VillageVoice_Dec_95.pdf. Accessed 3 March 2023 Shore, Stephen. 2004. Uncommon Places. The Complete Works. New York: Aperture. Shore, Stephen. 2005. American Surfaces, introduction by Bob Nickas. London: Phaidon. Shore, Stephen. 2008. The Road Trip. Stephenshore.net. http://stephenshore. net/writing/theroadtrip.pdf. Accessed 11 November 2022. Simon, Taryn. 2007. An American Index of the Hidden and the Unfamiliar, foreword by Salman Rushdie, introduction by Elizabeth Sussman; Tina Kukielski. Göttingen: Steidl. Sontag, Susan. 1979. On Photography. New York: Penguin. Soth, Alec. 2017 [2004]. Sleeping by the Mississippi, essays by Patricia Hampl and Anne Wilkes Tucker. London: Mack. Stimson, Blake. 2006. The Pivot of the World: Photography and Its Nation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. “This Is Not America”: Europe Reacts as Trump Supporters Riot in US Capitol. 2021. Politico, January 6. https://www.politico.eu/article/donald-trump-uscapitol-riot-europe-reacts/. Accessed 11 February 2023. “This Is Not America”: World Gapes in Horror at Pro-Trump Insurrection. 2021. Los Angeles Times, January 6. https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/ story/2021-01-06/world-reacts-to-d-c-violence-this-is-not-america. Accessed 12 February 2023. Thornton, Gene. 1976. Formalists Who Flirt with Banality. The New York Times, November 14. https://www.nytimes.com/1976/11/14/archives/photog raphy-view-formalists-who-flirt-with-banality-the-photographs.html. Accessed 28 February 2023.

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Trachtenberg, Alan. 1989. Reading American Photographs: Images as History. Mathew Brady to Walker Evans. New York: Hill and Wang. Tucker, Anne W., and Philip Brookman, eds. 1986. Robert Frank: New York to Nova Scotia. Houston: The Museum of Fine Arts and The New York Graphic Society.

CHAPTER 5

Sustainable American Studies: Intermedial Approaches to Climate Change Frank Mehring

Climate Change and Sustainable American Studies Climate change is the most pressing issue for humanity to secure a prosperous future and the survival of our species in the twenty-first century. If the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius is going to be achieved, “urgent and drastic action is needed,” as the 2021 IPCC report argues (Allan, et al. 2021). Today, we are facing a paradoxical situation. In this regard, the American pioneer of Ecocriticism, Lawrence Buell, pointed to Henry David Thoreau as an early source of inspiration to engage in ecocritical projects and reflected on our intellectual paralysis (1995).1 Scientists broadly agree that human-driven factors are the cause of climate change, and most people are well-aware of issues related to 1 “We know much more than Thoreau did about how humans mispossess the environment but do less with what we know” (Buell 1995, 139).

F. Mehring (B) Department of Modern Languages and Cultures, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 T. Tsimpouki et al. (eds.), American Studies after Postmodernism, Renewing the American Narrative, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41448-0_5

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global warming, climate change, or the growing climate crisis. Why then are changes in our everyday behavior in terms of consumption, travel, and production of waste so frustratingly slow? In other words: we know so much but do so little. Even worse: Why are we often complicit in global pollution and aggravating the dangers of climate change? Popular culture is rich in using apocalyptic scenarios as a thrill for entertainment, be it in the genre of climate fiction, television series, theater, music, or computer games. Recently, the convergence of science fiction and catastrophic confrontations with climate change in real life has produced a new sentiment that can be described as a climate cynicism. While cynicism refers to an “improvised philosophy and a way of life disposed to scandalize contemporaries, subjecting their cultural commitments to derision” (Allen 2020, cover copy), the combination with a cynical attitude to climate change reflects an attitude of coming to terms with inevitable disaster. As such it is an indication of what Allen calls a “broader cultural malaise” that fosters complacency, paralysis, and a sense of fatality (6). For example, the protagonists in the apocalyptic satire Don’t Look Up (2021) find themselves in a perverted situation in the US. An astronomer at Michigan State University discovers that a gigantic comet is on its course to collide with the Earth in about six months with the potential to cause a planet-wide extinction event. However, neither American political leaders nor the media saturated public is interested in thinking about strategies to save the planet. “We’re too numb, dumb, powerless, and indifferent, too busy fighting trivial battles,” as Manohla Dargis summarizes the message of the film (2021). Don’t Look Up contributes to a communication practice on climate change that mainly builds on fear fostering feelings of denial, numbing, and apathy (Norgaard 2011).2 In the political sphere, developments to battle climate change are also marked by frustration. After 2017, the Trump Administration rolled back more than 100 environmental rules. The bulk of the rollbacks identified by the Times were carried out by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which (1) weakened Obama-era limits on planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and from cars and trucks; (2) removed protections from more than half the nation’s wetlands;

2 Per Espen Stoknes identifies a psychological climate paradox asking: how a potentially unifying issue could become increasingly divisive (2011, 7)?

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and (3) withdrew the legal justification for restricting mercury emissions from power plants. At the same time, the Interior Department worked to open more land for oil and gas leasing by limiting wildlife protections and weakening environmental requirements for projects. The Department of Energy loosened efficiency standards for a wide range of products. The failure of politics to efficiently act on climate change and the ever-increasing media reports on dramatic droughts, wildfires, water shortage, economic crises, and war has led to a growing sense of pessimism, hopelessness, and psychological stress particularly among young people and students (Ojala 2011; Nordgren 2021). Therefore, it is even more important to think about, produce, and showcase examples for active engagement, to provide fresh perspectives on how to respond to climate challenges, and to provide positive avenues for future work in “green technologies.” In addition to political and public attention to the ongoing crises related to climate change, fictional and artistic responses create a specific urgency. “Literature and art,” as Hubert Zapf argues, “represent an ecological force within cultural discourses” (2014, 236). Considering the colossal challenges of changing the direction of our way of life, it is striking that academic humanists and artists have not been central to discussions of climate change and sustainability (Lemenager and Foote 2012). If we agree with scholars such as Monroe, Plate, Sterling, and Orr, among many others, that education plays a central role in being committed to actively engage in climate change, then we have to rethink, revise, and restructure the way we teach—at school, on a university level, and in the public sphere.3 I argue that arts and culture have an immense, largely untapped potential to educate and engage students in working out new approaches regarding climate change. The question is: How can we as academics offer environments for critical, integrative, and reflexive approaches for creative imagination, experimentation, and perspective-taking (Bentz and O’Brien 2019)? In our work, the term “sustainability” needs to play a more important role. It might not only be a term that needs to be understood within and restricted to economic discourses but could also be successfully applied to the humanities. In her essay “Aesthetics of Sustainability,” the German artist and critic Hildegard Kurt sounded a wake-up call for the field of education, arguing that humanist education and the arts need to play a

3 See also O’Brien et al. (2013, 48–59). And Sterling (2001).

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new role with “symbolic and aesthetic creative practice” (238). Lemenager and Foote call for a sustainable humanities to begin a discussion of “how the humanities can contribute to sustainability” (573). They argue that sustainable humanities must be built on an interdisciplinary dialogue. Where is the “place” to develop, teach, and engage in a more sustainable American Studies? While the environmental crisis is a broad issue and not, as Buell explains, the “property of a single discipline” (1995, vi), American Studies has a particularly strong track record in critically investigating the illfated human interaction with nature spearheaded by the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) from a North American ferment or one of the ecocritical movement’s primary publications venue International Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE). In this paper, I argue that after the environmental turn in literary and cultural studies, we need to ask about new ways of producing, disseminating, communicating, and transferring knowledge in a more effective fashion to institutions outside of our academic environment. For example, Henry David Thoreau’s seasonal notebooks with their keen observations on flora and fauna are mined for evidence of global climate change bringing together traditional literary scholarship with climate change and Digital Humanities.4 More importantly, Thoreau’s urban matrix in Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854) can be linked to sustainable American Studies in multiple ways.5 Bringing the implications of global warming, potential resolutions, and ideas to change our way of life to the public sphere requires us, as Carolyn Merchant suggests, to understand the humanistic dimensions of climate change by looking at intersections including climate change and the arts, climate change and literature, climate change and religion, climate change and philosophy, and climate change and ethics/justice (2020). The intermedial and performative aspect of turning American Studies into a “sustainable American Studies” has a lot to offer to resonate with citizens. While intermediality as a theoretical concept has been most widely used with reference to “multiple discourses and modalities of experience and representation, as examined in aesthetic and other humanistic 4 See “Digital Thoreau” on RIDE—A Review Journal for Digital Editions and Resources. https://ride.i-d-e.de/issues/issue-4/digitalthoreau/. Accessed 15 July 2022. 5 See the connections between Thoreau’s environmental imagination and its repercussions in American avant-garde music in Mehring (2016, 259).

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traditions of communication research” (Paech and Schröter 2007), I am particularly interested in material mediality (rather than discursive intermediality or institutional intermediality) signaling discursive approaches to media, texts, images, and sounds that are interrelated.6 In comparison to communication theorists, my colleagues and I, as transnational American Studies scholars, are particularly interested in the interplay between literature and other art forms such as music, painting, photography, video, film, television, graphic novels, and performance cultures.7 In the following, I will trace how sustainable American Studies can be connected with a sense of place. Since the late 1990s, the humanities have explored the relationship of identity to different spaces from different disciplines shifting to concepts such as transnationalism or critical internationalism with theoreticians exploring forms of belonging beyond the local and national.8 Since the 1980s, “place” has made a kind of comeback in humanistic and social theory as a category of analysis (Buell 2001, 56). If “topophilia” described the emotional attachment to a place, sustainable American Studies needs to find an approach to connect our research and teaching to the places and spaces we work in. I suggest exploring the potential of “grounding” within a new theoretical and methodological framework consisting of four categories focusing on “topophilia.”9 The word is a compound consisting of the Greek term topos for “place” and philia for

6 Klaus Bruhn Jensen describes this interrelation as “material means of interaction” (5). He explains that the term denotes “communication through several discourses at once, including through combinations of different sensory modalities of interaction” (5). 7 See e.g., innovative research agendas presented in Gersdorf’s and Braun’s America After Nature (2016). 8 See e.g., Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, James Clifford, Aihwa Ong, Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, Ulf Hannerz, John Tomlinson, Homi Bhabha, Walter Mignolo, or Bruce Robbins, to name but a few. 9 This concept moves away from what Ursula Heise described as deterritorialization which she introduced in A Sense of Place as a means to envision “how ecologically based advocacy on behalf of the nonhuman world as well as on behalf of greater socioenvironmental justice might be formulated in terms that are premised no longer primarily on ties to local places but on ties to territories and systems that are understood to encompass the planet as a whole” (2008, 10). My argument ties in with concepts such as dwelling and an “erotics of place” as a basis for planetary thinking.

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“love of” referring to a sense of place10 : Theory, Organizational practice, Performance, and Outreach. In the following chart, the four categories of TOPO function as gateways to themes that will be laid and exemplified in the following sections (Fig. 5.1). From my perspective, sustainable American Studies has the potential to include issues related to environmental consciousness in the traditional format of teaching seminars. The goal is, for example, to link climate change with • History and Politics (with themes related to war, resources, migration, ideologies, ideological polarizations, smart power, etc.), • Arts and Culture (including representations of sustainability and waste in literature, social media, film, computer games, photography, or journalism, etc.), • Cultural Studies and Diversity (protest and activism, race, racism, colonialism, class, gender, indigenous peoples, Digital Humanities and climate change, etc.),

Fig. 5.1 Chart of four gateways to Topophilia. © F. Mehring 10 The poet W. H. Auden set out to define “topophilia” as a particular kind of attachment to landscape and environment. For a detailed account, see Hauser (2007, 1).

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• Urban Planning and Anthropology (with themes related to climate proofing cities, water management, climate neutral business planning, etc.). The list cited above can be expanded depending on the focus of different humanities programs and outreach projects. To engage with topophilia, we need to find ways to get outside of the academic laboratory to get a sense of place11 in the spaces we inhabit outside of the university campuses. Theories of grounding have already been explored in international spring or summer academies that bring people together from different American Studies programs. This kind of hybrid teaching based on excursions, academic walks, encounters with heritage institutions, NGOs, artists, and cultural agents should also encourage us to produce hybrid works combining art, criticism, ethnography, media studies, activism, and other outlets such as Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2015), Allan Sekula’s photo essay Fish Story on the effects of containerization on port cities (2002) or Rebecca Solnit’s Infinite City (2010), digital Land Use Databases (e.g., Center for Land Use Interpretation, CLUI), photographic DH mapping sites, apps, or interactive websites. In the following, I will further outline an innovative theoretical approach to “grounding” and topophilia. I will then interlink this approach with an artistic example from the US and the German–Dutch border region to outline a move toward a more sustainable American Studies. Furthermore, I will engage with the question “where is the place to do sustainable American studies?”

Theorizing Sustainable American Studies At the end of his overview of romances with American culture after WWII and the ensuing scenes of disenchantment through developments of cultural radicalism, the German-American Studies, theorist Winfried

11 For a critical approach to the definition of “place” in different national, ethnic, and cultural contexts, see Buell’s chapter on the “Elusiveness of Place” where he convincingly argues that “place” is a slippery category since it has both “an objective and a subjective face” (2001, 59).

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Fluck encourages European American scholars to embark on an adventurous quest: to search for a new form of emplotment of “America” which “U.S. American Studies does not seem to be capable of at the present time” (2009, 102). Generations of scholars in our field took it for granted that American culture and American goods had a major if conflicted role to play in the global campaign for democratization. This straightforward political instrumentalization of (cultural) production is today much less certain. When approaching American literature, culture, media, history, and politics as European and American academics in these times of accelerated political and cultural transformations, we believe that it is useful to better “ground” our scholarly analyses in the contexts in which they will be taking effect.12 Grounding is a research method and strategy that was first developed in the social sciences in the 1960s. The intellectual activity of grounding is soundly lodged in hermeneutics, connecting the traditional methods of textual interpretation with qualitative approaches that allow for the integration of field work, participant observation, interviews, and self-reflection into the standardized procedures of textual, cultural, and social analysis. This dynamic epistemological and methodological school should be adapted to our own purposes of conceptual thinking about the insights to be gained by American studies inquiry in an age of re-enforced borders and new border thinking.13 In sustainable American Studies I suggest we ground our work in a threefold manner: First regarding the premises, second, regarding the theoretical frameworks, and third regarding geographic dispositions and opportunities for research, case studies, and valorization. In the following, I will introduce transatlantic examples with a focus on the avant-garde artists John Cage and Joseph Beuys to outline the potential of sustainable American Studies via the concept of TOPO.

12 The concept of grounding transnational American Studies has been established and worked out by the author and Barbara Buchenau for the RUDESA Spring Academy, a cross-border collaboration between Radboud University (Netherlands) and the University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany). 13 See the mission statement by Barbara Buchenau and Frank Mehring for the Radboud

University, Duisburg-Essen Spring Academy RUDESA, see https://www.uni-due.de/imp eria/md/content/amerikanistik/rudesa_2018_mission_statement.pdf. Accessed July 15, 2023. The basis for the concept of grounding that has been laid out by Glaser and Strauss in The Discovery of Grounded Theory (1967). One relevant reinterpretation of grounding is Caraus and Paris’ edited collection, Re-grounding Cosmopolitanism.

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Organizational Practice: Mapping and Grounding in American Studies One of the most influential and creative forces in American music, John Cage, recognized a deep spiritual connection with Henry David Thoreau—the cultural icon of American culture who has been hailed as a patron saint of nature writing, a non-conformist, free thinker, hero of the counterculture, and a central figure in the American transcendentalist movement. More than a decade after the ground-breaking celebration of the “25 Year Retrospective Concert of the Music of John Cage” (1958), the composer had a revelation: “Reading Thoreau’s Journal I discover any idea I’ve ever had worth its salt” (1979, 4). He was particularly interested in the way Thoreau listened to the sound and noise of the place where he stayed, at Walden Pond. “He listened, it seemed to me, just as composers using technology nowadays listen. He paid attention to each sound, whether it was ‘musical’ or not, just as they do; and he explored the neighborhood of Concord with the same appetite with which they explore the possibilities provided by electronics” (1973, M n.p.). Thoreau approached his experience at Walden Pond with open ears and eyes, trying to free himself from pre-conceived notions of beauty and pleasure. He tried to make sense of the place he chose for his life experiment in various ways: by surveying the landscape, building a cabin, observing with all his senses, and transforming his experience into poetry and prose. A passage in Walden, which has become instrumental for many composers in the twentieth and twenty-first century, connects his sonic experience at a specific location around Walden Pond with a universal phenomenon (Mehring 2003, 381): “Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells, the Lincoln, Acton, Bedford, or Concord bell, when the wind was favorable, a faint, sweet, and, as it were, natural melody, worth importing into the wilderness. […] All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre” (Thoreau 1995, 119–120) (Fig. 5.2). In a similar fashion, Cage paid attention to what can be called “sonic geographies” the sounds and enjoyed their complexity in his own neighborhood. Cage established a way to create structured space in the notation of music that does not correlate with structured time in a performance. This structured space can be productively linked with Thoreau’s surveying of landscapes around Concord and his emphasis of walking as

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Fig. 5.2 Map of Walden Pond as surveyed by Henry David Thoreau

a means to sharpen his sense of sight and sound in the immediate environment. One of the most striking examples can be found in Song Books from 1970, a collection of short works by Cage with pieces of four kinds: songs, songs with electronics, directions for a theatrical performance, and directions for a theatrical performance with electronics. In several songs, Cage asks the performers to find ways to connect the sonic experience with the landscape which became the inspiration for Thoreau’s thinking and writing. For example, in “Solo for Voice 3,” the composer provides instructions on how to use the map, which Herbert Gleason prepared for the 1906 edition of Thoreau’s journal, as a means to create a musical score (Fig. 5.3). Using the map of Concord given, go from Fair Haven Hill (H7) down the river by boat and then inland to the house beyond Blood’s (B8). Turn the map so that the path you take suggests a melodic line (reads up and down from left to right). The relation of this line to voice range is free and this relation may be varied. The tempo is free. Change electronics at intersections and/or when mode of travel changes. Use any of the following words by Henry David Thoreau as text (Journal Volume III, 143). The different type/faces may be interpreted as changes in intensity, quality, and

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dynamics. Space on the page is left for the performer to inscribe the vocal path chosen from the map. (Cage 1970, 2)

Cage adds: “This solo may be accompanied by a tape recording of hawk sounds”. (2) The score reflects an imaginary walking trip in and around Concord. Combined with the entry from Thoreau’s Journals, the solo sends the musicians (and the audience) back to the transcendentalist literary world of inspiration around Concord to explore new ways of seeing and

Fig. 5.3 Map of Concord for “Solo for Voice 3” in John Cage’s Song Books

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listening. The musician participates in the act of walking by creating a score, which will form the basis for a performance and offer an aesthetic experience for the audience. The resulting musical piece is new at any time and in any space, it is performed. The excerpts of the journal on the hawk circling over a pine wood are both an expression of what Thoreau calls “poetry of motion” and an invitation to rediscover one of the canonized American dissenters as a precursor to an unpremeditated understanding of sounds.14 Cage said that “many people think that art has to do with understanding, but it doesn’t. It has to do with experience” (Uhl 2014, 57). He found inspiration and great music at the very place where he lived, for example in New York City’s 6th Avenue: “I do not have the feeling that anyone is talking. I have a feeling that sound is acting. And I love the activity of sound” (Cage 1991). Cage insisted that we have to examine and become aware of who we are as individuals, members of a society and inhabitants of this planet. He coined a wordplay which connected Thoreau’s insistence of place with our society at large—“whether it be Concord in Massachusetts or Discord in the World” (1979, 5). In “The Future of Music,” Cage linked a revolutionary new way of composing and listening not so much with structure but with processes (1979, 178). The distinctions between composers, performers, and listeners need to become blurry to bring about changes in the minds and spirits of people. More recently, the Canadian composer John Luther Adams followed Cage in connecting the work of Thoreau with a new way of listening to the sounds of cities and natural environments in works such as Arctic Dreams (2020) or The Place Where You Go to Listen (1994). The latter he conceived as an invitation “to slow down and listen more deeply, to pay closer attention to the beauty and mystery of each moment, here and now, in this very special place on earth.” Thus, Cage’s idea of conceptual art moves away from a traditional score to an open-ended process in which ideas are developed and new artistic forms are allowed to come into being. This

14 The musicologist Helga de La Motte-Haber sees the map as a simplified form of instruction compared to Cage’s earlier text-based instructions or the visualizations of musical signs such as his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra from 1958. Cage achieves an intensification and paradoxical simplification by presenting “a landscape as a text” (210). Bernd Herzogenrath points out that maps and mapping play a crucial role in Cage’s compositional practices in works such as Atlas Eclipticalis, Etudes Australes, or Etudes Borreales. He concludes that Cage is mapping the weather of music (2012, 227).

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open-ended process to sharpen one’s senses and inspire a more comprehensive perception of art in different environments was explored in Fluxus performances. The idea took root in the work of Joseph Beuys who was involved in some of the first Fluxus events in Germany.

Joseph Beuys and the Place of Sustainable American Studies “Art is the only form in which environmental problems can be solved,” Beuys declared (Reszke 2021, 281). There were pressing challenges in his time, particularly the 1970s and 1980s: forest dieback, acid rain, smog, oil crisis, Runway West, dangers of nuclear energy, escalation of the Cold War. Today, “generation Greta” calls on us to finally take the alarm bells seriously, because literally the forest is on fire. This raises the question: On the occasion of Beuys’ 100th birthday, is it worth taking another look at his approach of radically rethinking the intersection of nature, art, and politics? Joseph Beuys’ extensive body of work is grounded in concepts of humanism, social philosophy, and anthroposophy; it culminates in his “extended definition of art” and the idea of social sculpture as a Gesamtkunstwerk, for which he claimed a creative, participatory role in shaping society and politics. He emerged as an artist in the midst of post-war German reconstruction and claimed a unique role for art in the spiritual renewal of society, as opposed to a materialistic culture, and in the preservation of the environment. His aim was to infuse all spheres of life with the principle of creativity usually reserved for artists. Beuys saw art as the antidote to society’s ills, as a positive, healing force that could awaken individual creativity, activate political awareness, and stimulate social change.15

15 Beuys used a wide range of highly symbolic materials, such as felt, fat, or honey, which are closely related to the shamanic aspects of his practice that included performances, lectures, and educational actions. His interest in the generation, storage, and transmission of energy articulates his extensive reflection on the forces of nature. Teaching was an essential element of his artistic work and his anti-bureaucratic philosophy included debates and political activism intended to bring about social change through democratic discussions and actions. He brought politics into the traditional realms of art by converting his areas at documenta in 1972 and in 1977 into spaces for debate and discussion on issues ranging from human rights to ecological concerns.

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In his appeal “Aufruf zur Alternative” printed both in the Joseph Beuys Guggenheim catalog documenting his international break-through exhibition in New York in 1979 and the Frankfurter Rundschau, Beuys sounded a warning call about the crisis of climate change: “We are threatened with the complete destruction of the natural ground on which we stand. We are well on the way to destroying this basis by practicing an economic system based on the unrestrained plundering of this natural ground.”16 Beuys explained that art and artists must play a central role in thinking about climate change. While much of his work is conceptual, hermeneutic, and in need of an explanatory framework, his landscape art for the largest contemporary art exhibition in the world, the documenta in the city of Kassel, is easily accessible for an audience not trained in avant-garde performance art. With his work 7000 Oaks, Beuys created a symbiosis of city and nature by turning the planting of trees in cities into a social sculpture. The basalt stone next to the oak tree identified the spot of the performance. The place invited the viewer to ponder the function of nature in urban environments. While originally causing an uproar among citizens of Kassel who thought that Beuys had turned their hallowed space in front of the Fridericinianum museum into a site of rubble calling up memories from WWII, today, maps and QR codes invite visitors from all over the world to take a walk around green Kassel and engage with Beuys artistic vision (Fig. 5.4). The ambitious project had a strong participatory element. Rather than asking citizens and art lovers to enter the space of a museum, Beuys brought his art to the public at the very places where they live— the city spaces. Transported from former volcanos around Kassel, 7000 basalt stones were piled up on the field in front of the entrance to the neo-Roman museum building at the heart of Kassel. Beuys was not only interested in planting trees but giving each tree the aura of a piece of art. Therefore, next to each tree a basalt stone should be erected to identify the tree as part of a land-art performance project called “Stadtveraldungstatt Stadtverwaltung: 7000 Eichen.”17 The idea of the German term Verwaldung was to make towns and environments

16 The reprint in the catalogue in English was slightly shortened. Translation by the author. 17 Roughly translated without the rhyme scheme as city forestry instead of city government.

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Fig. 5.4 Mapping walking tours of Joseph Beuys’ 7000 Oaks in Kassel. © Stiftung 7000 Eichen, geoportal-kassel.de

in general “forest-like.”18 The first tree was planted by Beuys in March 1982 at the entrance of the museum. When all the remaining trees had been planted over the city of Kassel, the last of the 7000 trees should find its place next to the first one. The project was finalized five years later in 1987—about one year after Beuys’ death. The coordination office of the Free International University, founded by Beuys to foster interdisciplinary exchange to foster a comprehensive renewal of society, served as an open forum to reach out to citizens. Beuys encouraged them to offer suggestions where to best plant trees in their city. Despite the conceptual simplicity, the 3.5 million Deutschmark project proved to be quite complex in practice. For example, the city of Kassel explained that it was impossible to plant more than 60 trees due to water canalization, gas

18 See Beuys, “Interview” with Richard Demarco, 112.

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pipes, wires, asphalt, and general rules and regulations (Ursprung 2021, 282). Beuys considered the artwork as a project that should transcend the concrete geographical location. He felt that planting seven thousand trees was merely a first step. On being asked if he thought it should be a world-wide ongoing project, Beuys responded: “Everywhere, everywhere in the world … also in Russia …. There are too few trees … let us not speak about the United States which is a completely destroyed country” (1993, 112). Ultimately, Beuys saw in the planting of trees a new way of expressing love: “Love is the most creative and matter-transforming power … in this relationship I start with the most simple looking activity, but it is a most powerful activity; it is planting trees” (116). With this combination of the creative force of love, observing and planting trees, Beuys comes close to the concept of topophilia which I introduced earlier. The approach is local and at the same time translocal. The artistic approach to planting trees in densely populated urban centers guaranteed, for example, the American version of 7000 oaks in Chelsea that during road constructions the trees and stones were carefully protected as parts of an international land-art installation.19 Today, this US installation from 1987 intersects with the New York High Line which has become one of the most visited and cherished destinations in downtown New York. The former railroad tracks from the Chelsea meat packaging industries to upstate New York have been turned into a natural reservoir in which New Yorkers can take a stroll, take a rest, and enjoy the landscape art that has been integrated along the tracks. With the conceptual idea of planting trees to suggest an ecological and artistic symbiosis between urban and natural environments, Beuys is in line with what I have elsewhere called the urban matrix of early environmental leaders such as Thoreau. In the following section, I will put the concept of TOPO into practice and engage with the question: where is the place of sustainable American Studies in transnational perspectives? While Beuys has been celebrated as one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, few people are interested in the places where his artistic ideas originated from. If politics, economical systems, and even academics failed to bring about the change needed to battle climate

19 See Andrea Gyorody’s “Joseph Beuys’s Only Public Artwork in New York Temporarily Unearthed.”

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change, perhaps it is time to give art another chance and initiate a project on grounding.

Performance: BEUYS-LAND Joseph Beuys grew up in the border region next to Radboud University where I teach American Studies. What better location to put the TOPO-concept to a test! The project called BEUYS-LAND, realized with support of the Freundeskreis Museum Kurhaus and Koekkoek Haus Kleve as well as Museum Forum Arenacum, involved setting up a temporary landscape installation based on “grounding Beuys” by placing enlarged photographs of Beuys in the landscape of his youth (Fig. 5.6). The German-American photographer, Gerd Ludwig, composed the photographs for a comprehensive background story on Beuys’ geographical roots for the weekly ZEIT magazine. They depict Beuys at key locations in the natural landscape: on a meadow, on a dike next to the river Rhine (actually the Althrein, a side-branch of the river), walking through a poplar alley, next to a pollard willow (a typical tree in this region which is regularly cut at the head so that new sprouts emerge from dormant buds), a local pond, and at Schloss Gnadenthal, where one of Beuys’ heroes and spiritual alter egos once lived.20 The life-size enlargements are placed exactly at the locations where they were taken 43 years ago.21 The photographs in the natural environment unfold a different power compared to their presence in a museum space. They demand a new way of seeing. Henry David Thoreau noted a remarkable perceptual shift when he placed his household furniture outside in the grass. “So much more interesting most familiar objects look out of doors than in the house,” he explained in his seminal book Walden (110). The same is true for well-known photographs when they suddenly appear as large-scale reproductions face to face with landscapes in the outdoors. As when the sun shines on Thoreau’s furniture, the wind blows around it, blackberry vines wrap themselves around the table legs, the photographs 20 The photographs are published in their entirety for the first time under the title BEYUS LAND by Ludwig and Mehring. 21 I would like to thank the team of MA students in Transatlantic Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen, members of the Freundeskreis Museum Kurhaus und KoekkoekHaus Kleve e.V. and the Museum Forum ARENACVM for their support to realize this comprehensive project.

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also begin a new life of their own in interaction with the locations where they were taken more than four decades ago. The locations can be found on a special BEUYS-LAND map and a corresponding website so that citizens and students can encounter Beuys in the landscape between Kleve and Nijmegen—physically, aesthetically, and conceptually via topophilia, art, and climate change.22 While Beuys has been celebrated as one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, critical investigations of the natural environment he considered essential for his artistic developments represent a lacuna. BEUYS-LAND offers an opportunity for people to explore the artist’s vision of a more conscious engagement with the environment to trace one’s roots and grow roots in the vicinity. The installation encourages visitors to observe continuities and changes in the landscape. Some things have changed subtly, others more dramatically. One revealing example is the photograph taken by Gerd Ludwig in the village of Mehr, which shows Beuys in a pasture with a cradle and a dead rabbit. The avant-garde artist had not lost contact with formative elements and places of his childhood. The photograph oscillates between pedantic seriousness and humorous self-parody. At first glance, the landscape has changed imperceptibly. The idyllic impression is deceptive, though. The Lower Rhine Nature Conservation Station of the Naturschutzbund Deutschland e.V. (NABU or “Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union” is a German non-governmental organization) pays close attention to how modern agriculture affects the quality of the environment. “It still looks quite idyllic at first glance,” explains Dietrich Cerff

22 While many German museums such as Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, the Kunstmuseum Basel, or the National Museum of Art, Osaka, to name but a few of the international locations, dedicated an exhibition to Beuys, they have one thing in common: they work with items without the presence of the artist. Quite a few people argue that the humor and presence of Beuys were central to the success of his work. In museums, you encounter a work that is part of a time gone by. In the natural environment where Beuys grew up and found his inspiration, the organizers of the photographic installation wanted to create opportunities for students and families to encounter the artist as a human being. They used the photographs, produced live-size prints on aluminum, and placed them at the very location Beuys stood in 1978. At the prints, QR codes allowed visitors on bikes to access a map with background information on the location, related artwork, and quotations by Beuys to put the natural site into a larger biographical context. The corresponding website offered texts, images, and sounds to encounter the man and the artist. For further information, see Beuys Land (2023), the photography book by Ludwig and Mehring.

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of NABU, “but if you can read landscape, it also tells you about a number of problems.”23 The former diversity of grasses, flowers, and herbs that could still be seen in 1978 has been lost due to overfertilization. Cows received less medication, so cow manure featured a different quality with fewer strains than today. De-wormer medication creates problems for fly or beetle larvae that develop in cow manure. Mole mounds in the photograph are a sign of a living life under the turf. They are rarely seen today. Cows were sent out to the pastures as early as late January in the 1970s. Today, they are mostly kept indoors until April, or they never leave the mega barns at all. As pastures become more parceled out, wooden pasture stakes are also becoming fewer. They once provided welcome opportunities for insects such as wild bees to lay their eggs and reproduce in the holes. Heat records, drought of the century, drought, and bark beetle infestations not only cause problems for the trees in the nearby Reichswald, but also threaten to dry out the scours that are so characteristic of the Rindern landscape. In one of the photographs from 1978, we stand behind Beuys and look with him into the natural landscape of his youth over a little pond. Today, modern wind turbines can be seen on the horizon, pointing the way to a more sustainable energy supply in the future. What would Beuys have said about the green intervention in “his landscape”?24 (Figs. 5.5 and 5.6).

Outreach: TOPO BEUYS-LAND The TOPO project BEUYS-LAND was widely covered in German and Dutch newspapers. The journalist and photographer Freddy Langer was one of the many people who set off by bicycle to the Lower Rhine with open eyes and ears to sense resonances between Beuys and the Lower Rhine. After having engaged in the geographical practice of “encountering Beuys in the landscape,” he published a two-page article in the national German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung with a daily 23 Frank Mehring in conversation with Dietrich Cerff at the Naturschutzbund Deutschland e.V. at Naturschutzstation Niederrhein/Rindernon 23. March 2021. 24 At the end of 2021, the prints in the landscape were dismantled. In the years to come, as the organizers of the photographic installation, we want to continue our work on creating a sense of place for students, staff, and citizens to sharpen our senses and find new ways to see and hear through land- and cityscapes.

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Fig. 5.5 Map of Beuys-Land Installation between Nijmegen and Kleve, 2021. © Hubert Wanders

circulation of 250,000 copies. Next to the title “Saint Joseph we thank you. The photographer, the curator, and the journalist: A bicycle tour as a trio through the landscape of the Lower Rhine from one Beuys image to another”25 the article featured a map highlighting the landscape around Nijmegen and Kleve (Langer 2021, R1–2). Sandra Smallenburg from the Dutch national daily newspaper nrc reported extensively on the bike tour and the environmental project on art and climate change with the subtitle “Joseph Beuys in 1978 in the landscape of Rindern close to the city of Kleve.”26 Excursions have been organized with schools children, 25 “Heiliger Joseph wir danken dir. Der Fotograf, der Kurator und der Journalist: Eine Radtour zu dritt durch die Landschaft des Niederrheins von einem Beuys-Bild zum anderen.” Translation by the author. 26 The original Dutch reads “Joseph Beuys in 1978 in het landschap van Rindern, nabi Kleef.” Translation by the author. See Smallenburg, “Iedere Duitse stad wil een stukje van Joseph Beuys” C6–7.

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Fig. 5.6 Photographs in the landscape between Nijmegen and Kleve, 2021. © Frank Mehring

students, humanitarian service organizations, and cultural institutions. Students presented their research on climate change on the website www. ArtandClimatChange.com as podcasts or documentary videos. After the photographs were dismantled, QR codes are still in place so that visitors can access the information as an augmented reality tool and compare the photographs from 1978 with the landscape that unfolds before their very eyes. This project, thus, is based on Beuys’ work show in the New York Guggenheim Museum with its references to the connection between place, space, and art to the twenty-first century and returns to the roots of Beuys’ creativity in the landscape of his youth. Taking its cue from Thoreau’s artistic observations at Walden Pond more than one and a half decades ago, the photographic installation with its emphasis on place at the lower Rhine can function as a paradigmatic example for transnational perspectives on sustainable American studies to further explore intersections of art and climate change.

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Conclusion: Academic Realities in the Twenty-First Century The outline for a sustainable American Studies with its focus on topophilia is no doubt going to cause frictions with developments of budgetary cuts. They often leave departments and staff underfunded confronting them with ever growing restrictions in hiring models and work contracts. In the pursuit of excellence and branding, students are often seen as highly valued customers rather than intellectuals and potential trailblazers in creating a more sustainable future. If universities can create synergies between promoting themselves as beacons of sustainable humanities and fostering outreach projects at locations in close vicinity through the concept of grounding and topophilia, we are creating a win-win situation for our programs and the environment. I have exemplified that American Studies and transnational approaches are particularly suited to overcome the rhetoric of crises by engaging in new innovative theories, organizational practice, and outreach projects to connect climate change to the world we live in, the places that surround us, the narratives that shape our thinking, the media that inform our actions, the economy that sustains us, the arts that get us in contact with ourselves, our fellow-beings and the spaces we inhabit. As Lawrence Buell explained in his seminal study on the environmental imagination in the formation of American culture: “We know much more than Thoreau did about how humans mispossess the environment but do less with what we know” (2005, 139). How can we use our knowledge to re-possess the environment and preserve it? I argue that we need to integrate sustainable American Studies and the issue of climate change in our programs—at the very place where we are teaching. As the American novelist, poet, and environmental activist Wendell Berry would have it: “In the moral (the ecological) sense you cannot know what until you have learned where” (1983, 103). Engaging with the concept of TOPO can be the beginning of critically addressing climate change in as sustainable American Studies in transnational perspectives.

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CHAPTER 6

Posthuman(ist), Affective and Global Turns in Ecofiction and Ecocriticism: Philip Armstrong’s “Litter” Paola Loreto

In trying to answer the call for papers of the editors of this volume to reflect upon “what comes after postmodernism” in the twenty-first century, I was brought to ponder upon what I felt were groundbreaking and influential orientations among my recent research interests. It has been my belief for a while that two critical phenomena have imposed themselves on our attention in the age of the Anthropocene—globalization and the damage humankind is causing to the earth—and that the perspectives of world literature and ecocriticism are the heritage of the literary theory and criticism of past centuries to ours because they provide interpretations of the world that seem adequate to our perception of it, and offer possible solutions to the issues raised by those

P. Loreto (B) Department of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Mediations, University of Milan, Milan, Italy e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 T. Tsimpouki et al. (eds.), American Studies after Postmodernism, Renewing the American Narrative, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41448-0_6

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phenomena. Both perspectives have notably been either bred or nurtured in the U.S. The New Ecocriticisms in particular, as Greta Gaard names them in a recent article (2020), “have prompted the rise of econarratology, affective and empirical ecocriticism” (225). Alexa Weik von Mossner, too, remarks the importance of the merging of two crucial turns in contemporary theory—the affective and the material—which has produced effective tools of analysis such as the application of post-classical narratology to our interest in an embodied knowledge and the engagement of affect theory with material ecocriticism, with its focus on the narrative agency of the nonhuman world (2020, 132). My own way of conceptualizing the synergetic coming together of all these new theoretical and critical trends is to subsume them under a wider turn, which is the radical change in our way of thinking about human subjectivity assumed by posthumanism. Posthuman theorists such as Cary Wolfe and Rosi Braidotti have advocated a decentering of the human transcendent and privileged subject on the ground of its “embodiment and embeddedness… in not just its biological but also its technological world” (Wolfe 2010, xv). Wolfe has specified the how that is especially relevant to my research focus: a “rethinking of our taken-for-granted modes of human experience, including [our] normal perceptual modes and affective states […] by recontextualizing them in terms of the entire sensorium of other living beings and their own autopoietic ways of ‘bringing forth a world’,” which we share with animals because “we ourselves are human animals ” (Wolfe 2010, xxv). Braidotti’s “critical posthumanities” are also constructed upon an ontology of “the radical immanence, i.e. the primacy of intelligent and self-organizing matter,” whose posthuman subject is described as “relational, embodied and embedded,” on the basis of the claim of a continuity between body and mind, nature and culture (2019, 1). It is within the reframing of animal studies by the posthuman turn, subsuming in itself the affective and material turns of the new ecocriticisms, that I want to locate the analysis of my case study. Because I have also, always, been interested in literature and the literary, and in a formal, or aesthetic approach to it, the aim I have set myself for this article is to investigate how a literary work could contribute not only to that radical change in our thinking about the world—and our place in it—but also to making it better. Consequently, in order to contribute to the crucial inquiry of this volume, I explore the ways in which a short story about an animal, published in a kind of “ecoglobalist” collection,

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may prove effective in demonstrating the power of a literary text to affect the response of its potential readers to the vital debates of our times. The short story is “Litter,” by Australian author Philip Armstrong, which was published in the collective anthology Among Animals: The Lives of Animals and Humans in Contemporary Short Fiction, by Ashland Creek Press, in Oregon, in 2014. The mere circumstances of its coming into existence are proof of how world lit has been powerful in “wordling” the production of literature in the U.S.1 Since I was struck by the ecoglobalist intimations transpiring from the entire editorial project, I will begin with a prologue illustrating the qualities that define it as “world literature.”2 And since material culture constitutes a large part of a world lit approach, let me first introduce the publishing house and the volume as a whole, as phenomena of a new orientation in itself in the field of ecoliterary production and circulation. Here is how the Ashland Creek Press defines itself and its mission: “Ashland Creek Press is a vegan-owned boutique publisher dedicated to publishing books with a world view. We’re passionate about the environment, animal protection, ecology, and wildlife, and our goal is to publish books that combine these themes with compelling stories” (Ashland Creek Press website). A boutique press is a small publishing house that chooses to specialize in a very narrow subject area, usually in genres demanding a great level of expertise, which leaves little hope for a market share. Ashland Creek Press does not specialize in one genre—unless EcoLit can be taken for it3 —but surely devotes itself to environmental causes and creative writing, the two interests being tightly interwoven,

1 I am here using Christopher K. Coffman and Theophilus Savvas’s expression for what has been otherwise called the “transnational” or “planetary” turn in American writing (2021, 12). 2 When I use the label “world literature” to define one of the two main perspectives I am using in this essay, I mean the revitalization of an old approach to the writing and the evaluation of literature that was initiated in the beginning of the twenty-first century and has been carried on by David Damrosch and the Harvard Institute of World Literature. As it is well known, the idea of a global approach to literature was already being consciously formulated by Goethe in his idea of a Weltliteratur, and has by now, happily, been developed in manifold directions, ranging from the overcoming of a postcolonial theoretical frame to the methodology of digital humanities. 3 The link to their “Books” lists the following sections: All Books, Literary Fiction, Ecofiction, Books about Animals, VegLit, Young Adult, Short Stories, Oregon, Books for Writers.

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which was the reason of my interest in its products, that manage to fuse ethics and aesthetics. A quick navigation of their website will show how freshly, inventively, and dynamically they operate in the publishing business, promoting a world-wide production that serves a global environmental cause. Ashland Creek Press seems to be not merely activist, but active on the many fronts of education (classes and workshops), dissemination (ASLE meetings, Animal Rights National Conference), public outreach (Writers Fairs, Local Author Fairs, the YouTube channel Ecofictology, which defines itself as “the study of ecofiction, where ecology and fiction meet to create something beautiful”), and communication (a blog, a presence on Twitter and Instagram, and the online magazine EcoLitBooks, “an independent online journal […] devoted to books […] with environmental and animal protection themes”). They seem to be lively, entrepreneurial, locally rooted and globally projected, proactive, concrete, talented in networking and synergizing strategies (i.e., their collaboration with nonprofit organisms)—in one phrase, professionally engaged in a common agenda. The founders of Ashland Creek Press are Midge Raymond and John Yunker, both writers and editors. Midge is herself a world lit author (one of her novels was successively published in Australia, New Zealand, France, Italy, Germany, South Korea, and Ukraine), and John is also a screenwriter and a previous analyst and consultant in the technology industry. Midge contributed a story to the first volume of Among Animals, while John introduced it. A call for short story submissions for the third volume was opened when I began working on this article,4 which seems to be shaping the format of this collective sequel series into a new editorial formula. A look at the biographical notes of the authors of the first volume alone shows a very diverse repertory of educations, jobs and professions, origins and styles. Junior and senior writers of all genres display scientific and humanistic educations and employments in the publishing field but also in the field of science and especially environmental research and protection. Life activities range from writing and teaching to monitoring birds and founding Institutes for Tropical Marine Ecology; from building furniture and peddling wine to being a “horticultural enthusiast and chef” (Yunker 2014, 222); from observing animal behavior for the Research Department of the Los Angeles Zoo to 4 A “third edition of the pioneering book series” has now been issued (Ashland Creek Press website).

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“keeping a sharp outlook for the neighborhood bears” (221). Companies vary from strictly symmetrical groups of human and nonhuman animals (“two daughters, two dogs, two cats and two horses,” 218), to semisymmetrical groups of the same (“one human and two rescued rabbits,” 221), and seriously non-symmetrical groups of the same (a “husband and four cats,” and “in the company of animals,” 222). Habitats cover the whole extension from the city to rural Alaska; origins expand over the northern American continent, reaching out to New Zealand and Greece. Styles parade effects oscillating between an impassioned earnestness and conformity—reciting the expected list of publications and awards—and a playful, unconventional, creativity. What does this happily heterogeneous army of devotees have in common? Evidently, their cause, which exceeds the familiar and milder inclinations and involvements of previous New-Age generations. Here is how John Yunker introduces the volume: “we believe that literature has an important role to play not only in reflecting the world around us but in changing it for the better. This anthology grew out of a desire to publish writing that re-examines and re-imagines our relationship with nature—specifically with animals” (2014, 1). This is the trend in postpostmodernist writing that I wish to explore: the desire to restore the power of literature to represent and affect the world, hopefully from an ecoglobalist position, which may induce a re-thinking of our relations with the environment and to the world itself. A parallel trend in literary theory—affective ecocriticism—has founded this claim on affective science.5 In The Storyworld Accord, Erin James has used cognitive science to affirm that in trying to understand an activity we read about in a narrative we mentally simulate its action and context (2015, 19). In other words, that narratives—and I’d rather say literature—have the power to create worlds and thus increase in readers the understanding of different—and I would say new—environmental visions (3–4). I believe this power to pertain especially to literature because I agree with social anthropologist Tim Ingold, who understands imagination as the kind of thinking that “goes beyond the limits of the already thought” (Spencer 2020, 211); poetry as “laden with affective resonance” (211); and art in general as “leading the way to promoting ecological awareness” (214). Cognitive ecocriticism has demonstrated not only that the emotions we 5 For a rapid outline of the development of affective criticism, see Weik von Mossner 2020, 133.

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experience while engaged in reading are the same as we experience in life, but that, “since emotions create memories and drive behavior, there is reason to believe that such engagements might also resonate beyond the immediate reading or viewing experience” (Weik von Mossner 2020, 133).6 What I hope to demonstrate here is that my case study provides an answer to Bruno Latour’s question of “how do we tell such a story?” (2014, 3)—that is, how can we represent the environmental crisis in philosophy, science, or literature—and to the even more urgent, related question of “with what hope” of effecting a solution. The answer is by skillfully employing narrative techniques that revolve around one central strategy: forcing upon the reader a point of view which is different from his/her personal and familiar ones, that is, new. My argument of course raises the specter of the aporia inherent in the animal question—the acknowledged impossibility for us, human subjects, to know and represent life as experienced from the body and mind of any otherthan-human animal—which would doom to failure all our attempts to represent nonhuman points of view, or imaginarily let animals other-thanus “speak” for themselves. My contention, though, is that, given this undeniable impossibility, based on the equally undeniable impossibility to transcend our human perspective, the human faculty of imagination may be put to the service of a fictional construction that tries to represent a nonhuman-animal experience of life. Alexa Weik von Mossner has claimed that this can be done through “authorial strategic empathizing,” of which trans-species empathy is a practice, manipulating narrative point of view to make a reader vicariously experience injustice, and learn to care for its victims (2017, 83). Armstrong himself praises the double potential of the “sustained and deep illusion” that written fiction can offer of being inside another mind, which is a way of both “exploring how humans think and feel about other animals, and even speculating on how other animals might think and feel about us” (Raymond). The conditions for 6 Pilar Martinez Benedì, in her useful reflection on the intersection of cognitive sciences with literary studies that has resulted in cognitive literary criticism, reminds us that the inextricability of perception, cognition, and action was already posited by the ecological approach to human perceptual systems of James Jerome Gibson (1979; see also Raymond W. Gibbs Jr’s survey of the ensuing theories aligning perception with action). Moreover, the current theories of embodiment are strongly influenced by American pragmatism: see, for example, John Dewey’s frequent use of the expression “body-mind” to counter the Cartesian binary of mind and body (Martinez Benedì 2018, 55).

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actualizing this entire potential are the dedicated and ethical intentions a writer applies to the effort, his/her capacity for empathy, and—as we will see—some research work on his/her part. The key strategy is narrative empathy, whose techniques and results in “Litter” I want now to point out, showing how they sustain the author’s objective to render all that can be imagined of a dog’s cognitive experience of the world, and how this may raise a new, embedded and embodied consciousness of how we conduct our relationships with the nonhuman. “Litter” recounts a typical rainy day in a stray dog’s life, which serves as a frame to the apparently secondary (in fact primary) narrative of the animal’s recent relationship and co-habitation with a human couple, which takes up five of the eight sections of the short story and is told in the past, while the first, sixth, and last sections are told in the present. The story’s structure is essential, transparent, circular, and functional to the construction of meaning, which is based on a constant opposition of perspectives and values implying, of course, in the first place, the suggestion of a comparison. Human and nonhuman are constantly interpreted by one in the light of the other, until the circular structure is completed by a return to the initial situation. The ultimate sense of the story is difficult to assess with assurance: the reader gradually finds out that its protagonist is a stray and female dog who will remain stray and become pregnant, while, in the few hours in which the narrative follows her, an extended flashback lets the memories of her encounter with her “most recent human companions” emerge (Armstrong 2014, 108). The dog’s life with them is described first as a honeymoon, which later evolves into a tragedy as the man reveals the violent nature of his temperament. The use of antithesis as a key device in the construction of meanings is functional to the exposure of the humanistic idea of subjectivity as a human/nonhuman binary. However, antitheses are followed by a reversal of their interpretation which catalyzes a synthesis revealing “likely areas of common experience (senses, emotions, perceptions),” as Armstrong himself declares in one of the interviews with the authors that function as a brilliant hypertext to the volume. At the same time, though, he maintains that “we have an obligation to try and remember how different other species are from us,” a position that can be aligned with Gilles Deleuze’s idea of becoming animal, which Matthew Calarco mentions as an instance of the “indistinction approach,” the one he privileges in his systematization of critical animal studies (2015). Instead of insisting on how animals are like us (identity approach),

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or otherwise radically different in their singularity (difference approach), theorists of the indistinction approach focus on the ways in which we may be similar to them. Deleuze’s idea of becoming animal does not suggest that we simply imitate animals, or try to jump across species boundaries, but that we inhabit “zones of indistinction” with them, where “the traditional binary distinctions between human being and animals break down” (Calarco 2015, 57). Calarco illustrates these zones of indistinction with Deleuze’s own reference to Francis Bacon’s portraits, exposing human flesh as animal meat (Deleuze 2003), and Val Plumwood’s “shocking reduction,” produced by the experience of feeling prey to another animal—in her case a crocodile met during a kayaking accident (Calarco 2015, 58–61). Should I offer my own example from “Litter,” I would choose the experience, shared by the bitch and the woman, of falling victim to human violence. Furthermore, Armstrong renders this feeling of inhabiting a zone of indistinction through a handling of the narrative point of view that suggests, too, the sharing by the human and the nonhuman of an “embodied mind.” The narrator of “Litter” induces the reader’s assumption of the dog’s perceptual and cognitive systems, which reflect the complex notion of cognition—including bodily, affective, and largely unconscious processes—that cognitive literary criticism has recently derived from science (Martinez Benedì 2018, 31). What I find noteworthy, in Armstrong’s narrative technique, is how his antithetical constructions ultimately manage to both respect species’ boundaries—and their reciprocal, interacting agencies—and to dramatize the “zones of indistinction” the human and the nonhuman (may) inhabit. The escalation of violence on the part of the man is revealed through a series of clues—whose gradual shaping into a tragic meaning is another feature of Armstrong’s style I want to point out. The first one comes in the second paragraph, when the dog is presented as pricking her left ear and “the stump where the right one used to be” (Armstrong 2014, 107). The detail anticipates the event that works as the engine of the story’s action and which will be revealed in its climactic flashback scene. It also allows me to highlight the symbolism of the story, which endows details such as this with an enhanced power of signification, the dog’s ear being her privileged sense organ and tool for survival. In the same way, the lack of proper nouns makes the story emblematic of the human and canine conditions, and of their relations. These are again reversed when the use of a paradoxical vocabulary serves as an ironic commentary upon the centuries-old assumption of the human privilege of language

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as a marker of species divide and superiority: at their worst, the dog’s new human companions are said to “snarl” and “bark” at each other, to signal their beastly rather than their animal behaviors (111). Finally, the polysemous value of the story title alludes both to the “litter” that the stray dog represents in a human-governed society, and to the puppies to which she will give birth—life against death, again, and another narrative clue, this time to the denouement of the story. The second clue to the escalation of the man’s violence, though, is the dog’s perception of the “dark tones” in his scent, of “the authority in his sweat,” and “the bite of something” she cannot get clear […] yet (109). The antithetical construction of signs in itself is the next clue: the man is simply too gentle to the dog, which betrays falsity in the worse interpretation and a lack of emotional balance in the better. The man displays such a sensibility in approaching the dog that he crouches down and emits a calling whistle that will become his soundmark in the relationship with the animal, while holding out his hand to offer—of course—some sweet food (108–109). A final, decisive clue comes during a walking scene, when the dog is said not to like fetching sticks because “each time the man raised his hand to throw a stick, the woman flinched” (112). The hint is powerful, because it ends with a subtle notation on the part of the narrator, who adds: “A tiny movement. Imperceptible, but you perceived it” (112). This introduces my next observations about Armstrong’s style, which finally concern the pivotal narrative technique he develops in the story: the particular choice of a point of view, and especially its accurate construction. Focalization, in “Litter,” seems to answer the call for an embedded and embodied knowledge of contemporary posthuman and affect theory elaborated by the new ecocriticisms in combination with the empirical turn of the new materialisms. The story opens with the narrator’s address to a “you,” who remains semantically undefined until—I think—at least the middle of the second paragraph. In the first paragraph, this “you” is introduced as having spent most of each day of the rainy week dozing huddled in a side-door in an alley, smelling odors gathered by rain from the air, which made me think, in the first place, of a homeless person. In the second paragraph, the narrative of this you’s behaviors is continued, but the vocabulary used starts showing first its double sense, then, very soon, its unmistakable reference to a nonhuman animal. The you raises his/her head (we still don’t know his/her sex, at this point), pricks his/her ears, inhales, uncurls his/her rib-marked body, gets to his/her feet, and slowly stretches […] “back legs, front legs,”

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which is where I stopped and realized the “you” must be a dog. The rest of the narrative assumes a different meaning because the reader’s point of view—i.e., his interpreting expectations—has been shifted, and set. When the narrator says, “You shake all over, shrugging your winter coat into place,” or “Follow your nose,” we know it is a dog (107). In fact, the double sense of expressions that could be used literally for a dog and figuratively for a human regresses locally to one sense, but remains active throughout the story to elicit, when it is needed, a double, comparing perspective. The opening of the story sets in motion three narrative devices that construct its point of view: a narrative voice in the second person, a vocabulary that has often a double meaning, and the perceptual perspective of a dog, who will soon be revealed to be the story’s protagonist. About the choice of a narrative in the second person, so rare in fiction, Armstrong himself says: “In the end, I decided to write my story in the second person (‘you’) as a way of inviting the reader to try out my idea of what a canine world might be like, while at the same time—because use of the second person tends to remind us we’re engaging in something invented—remaining aware that it’s nothing but a human guess about that world” (Raymond). By enacting a (human) narrator’s voice that, in a conscious imaginary effort, lends itself to the expression of a dog’s world, Armstrong’s stylistic choice prevents all objections about the fallacy of any human attempt to represent a nonhuman animal’s world. Technically, the author here is not “lending a voice” to an animal, but consciously trying to imagine (in Ingold’s sense of the term) how the dog would express her world in words, which is what literature can contribute to the comprehension of that world. Accordingly, what follows in the story is the depiction of a dog’s Umwelt , the sphere of subjective perception and agency pertaining to every creature that the Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexküll has characterized as a soap bubble of individual perceptors and effectors through which the world is experienced (1992, 319). In the story’s first two paragraphs only, the narrator construes the perceptual and cognitive horizon of a dog through her daily activities (her dozing), sensibility to weather phenomena (as to damp gusts), and ways of reading human social organization, which is by remembering recurring coincidences between actions, such as the linear logic of knowing, by association, “that stores are closing soon” because “boilers are firing up for the night” (Armstrong 2014, 107). The work Armstrong has done in order to write the story consisted

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in “[t]wo items of ‘special research’”: reading “which is full of fascinating theories about how dogs experience the world,” and “the most important […] observing and having adventures with Lola, who was my beloved dog friend for sixteen years” (Raymond). The means he has used in writing the story to flesh out the dog’s Umwelt is the rendering of her physiology and behaviors. Some relevant traits are the crucial importance of smell as a way of experiencing the world, but also the generalized priority of physical perceptions that act as triggers of cognitive and emotional experience. While trotting “home”—which is another term that has a symbolic treatment in the story—the dog’s nostrils, in a beautiful synecdoche, “figure out who’s passed by and how often and how long ago, and what each one has eaten recently, and who is sick and who is well, and who’s randy and who’s not interested” (Armstrong 2014, 108). Canine modes of communication establish communities, to which this particular dog contributes by dribbling her own message (108). Her relation to space defines her encounters: fancy crossbreeds and toddlers, whose height she shares, and whose outstretched “paws” she sidesteps (108). One of the achievements of Armstrong’s narrative efforts in “Litter” is the representation of the dog’s emotions as expressed, once again, through her physiology, as when she celebrates the happiness of peeing and shitting as a way of “making home,” that is, making a place familiar by generating for herself a physical sense of belonging to it. The emotion of “being around humans” again, or living in a “house” (and here the term signifies the physical sense of shelter and safety) is remembered bodily: “Your body soon recalled what you’d known as a pup, your hackles smoothing under his hands, your jaws and ears loosening under his fingers” (109). The morning air is described as mixing with the dog’s nostrils materially, in their reciprocal particles: “Odor became flesh,” quotes a heightened, lyrical passage (110). Irrepressible barks of joy rise inside the dog, rushing from her chest and throat as an emotional response to the new companions, and are let fly out in metaphorical “great flocks” (110). This is the deft crafting of the point of view I was anticipating earlier, while talking about the climactic scene of the short story, which happens in section seven, the longest, the last but one in the sequence, the one that closes the long flashback, and the one I want now to resume in order to round up my discourse. The way in which Armstrong stages this scene is by working out a masterpiece of narrative empathy. Narrative empathy has

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been defined by one of its best theorists, Suzanne Keen, as “the sharing of feeling and perspective-taking induced by reading, viewing, hearing, or imagining narratives of another’s situation or condition” (2013). Among the core narrative techniques associated with empathy, Keen lists character identification, and narrative situation (including point of view and perspective), which mediates between author and reader (2006, 216). In order to elicit the reader’s empathy, in his characterization Armstrong seems to have chosen to focus on the specific aspect of the mode of representation of consciousness, while in shaping his narrative situation to have resorted, as shown, to the narrative person and the internal perspective on the character, which focuses here on the dog’s. Armstrong’s repertory seems also to parade all the three forms of empathy defined by evolutionary cognitive scientist Stephen Pinker: projection, perspective-taking, and mind-reading (2011, 860–61).7 Armstrong himself declares in his interview that “To me, the main thing that written fiction can do, better than any other form, is create the sustained and deep illusion of being inside another mind. It’s the nearest thing we have to mind-reading or telepathy.” While reading “Litter,” at certain moments we do feel as if we were in the dog’s body, perceived with her senses, were worked by her physiology, thought her thoughts, and read, with her, human minds—at least the one that finally saves her. What is extraordinary in the narrative of the escalation of violence in the story—which adds to its style the further qualities of drama, suspense, tragedy and even quasi-splatter fiction—is that it is fueled by the empathetic engine activated by our sharing the dog’s perceptual and cognitive world, or Umwelt . The dog is suddenly woken up one night by the harsh voices of the usual bickering of the couple. She intuits that “there was something else on its way” because she smells “something different in the formula of the man’s sweat,” and—in a beautiful, synesthetic hyperbole—hears “the prickle of hairs rising on the woman’s neck” (Armstrong 2014, 113). When the voices get louder, and the man starts beating the woman, the dog feels it blow by blow through her belly which is pressed against the wooden floor. When the beating is over, the man calls to the dog with the usual gentle whistle, but the

7 Projection is the “ability to put oneself in the position of some other person, animal, or object, and imagine that sensation of being in that situation”; perspective-taking is the “visualizing [of] what the world looks like from another’s vantage point”; “empathic accuracy” is “the ability to figure out what someone is thinking or feeling from their expressions, behavior, or circumstances” (Pinker 2011, 860–61).

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farce is over as well, and this time the dog’s response is another irrepressible behavior: the opening of her bladder and bowels, which unleashes her master’s anger. The man seizes the dog, who, responding to his emotional state, inserts a canine in his arm and runs it “down to his wrist, opening a long gash, bone-deep” (114). The man lets go but rushes to the kitchen to pick a knife, imprisons the dog in her leash and clamps her head between his knees. Another brilliant double sense generates another upturn of perspective: the man cuts off the dog’s right ear with “the blade that you’d often watched him use to slice your meat ” (my emphasis), a meat that changes in a second from nourishment to victim, in a reversed, animal version of Deleuze’s becoming animal, or Val Plumwood’s shocking reduction. The other ear hears the door open, and an eye contact between the dog and the woman prompts a form of mind-reading between them efficient enough to signify to the bitch a way of escape. This episode of human-animal communication through a trans-species language signifies in itself alone a very concrete argument for deciding the animal question. Moreover, it adds to Armstrong’s technique of perspective reversals and antithetical but complementary constructions of meanings: this eye contact is in fact the second one in the story, the first one having occurred, in the story’s beginning, between the dog and the man, when it conveyed the mutual understanding that the dog would accept the man’s invitation to go home with him. The near-sensational color comes at the climactic moment within the climactic scene, which is the cutting of the ear, narrated in this way: “The cut took only an instant, but you heard each fiber of flesh as it parted. Then you could hear nothing on that side but a muffled confusion, and where your ear had been you felt a burning trickle” (2014, 114). The second, extended synesthesia, the crude realism, the shockingly accurate and detailed description raise a powerful feeling of empathy in the reader. This in its turn provokes the impression of sharing a zone of indistinction with an animal, in this case the appalling one of feeling a helpless victim of violence. The felt, embodied sense of this vicarious, readerly experience seems to respond to Cary Wolfe’s suggestion that we call the other-than-human who is part of us the infrahuman, on the ground that we share with them material, biological experiences (2003, 17). In my own condensation of the founding turns of contemporary epistemology, in which the posthuman is re-conceptualizing subjectivity and agency in order to redistribute them in a diffuse, porous, and relational way, the notion of the infrahuman resonates with a group of others, also trying

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to emphasize the bio-/ecocentric interconnection between the self and the “earth others” (Braidotti 2013, 49): the enlarged vibrant matter of Jane Bennett, surrounding us as “an array of bodies” accommodating the “‘alien’ quality of our own flesh” (2010, 17–18, 112–13); the intraactions of Karen Barad’s agential realism, indicating an agency that is not an inherent property of an individual or human, but a dynamism of material forces (2007, 141)—an idea that Serenella Iovino and Serpil Opperman have developed into the “storied matter,” or material textuality, of their material ecocriticism. These are “configurations of meanings and discourses that we may interpret as stories,” which are co-produced by all material forms (including the human and the nonhuman, 2014, 7). Armstrong’s “pretending to be an animal,” in the same way that children do (but also “lots of cultural activities” do, that “find ways of letting adults do it,” such as “shamanism, carnival, wildlife documentaries, even certain sports” Raymond) translates the storied matter and re-animates the earth in the measure wished by Bruno Latour in his invitation to redistribute agency among all its actants before they become actors. Because “Story-telling is not just a property of human language, but one of the many consequences of being thrown in a world that is, by itself, fully articulated and active” (2014, 14), all subjects must be brought back to their common ground, the metamorphic zone where metaphors wait to connect their two sets of connotations, before we humans try, in literature, to voice our understanding of the stories produced by the network of relationships in which the infrahuman is embedded (2014, 13–16). What may come from such a complex narrative construction as “Litter,” reflecting our age’s posthuman disposition? The heuristic device of opposite but complementary perspectives may yield humorous echoes, such as in the case of the dog’s insistent barking in the night, which for the animal is an uncontainable expression of her joyful vitality, but for her neighbors is a senseless disturbance, which makes them shout out in protest. A happy selection of figures of speech effects amusing synecdoches that establish the dog’s perceptual world in a fresh way: the house refrigerator is indicated as “the white oblong in the kitchen corner” (Armstrong 2014, 111), and the television as a “buzzing box in the corner,” whose “shapes on the screen, without smell or vibration, meant nothing to you” (113). Be it humorous or tragic, though, most of the times this contrasting/comparing device reveals the superiority of the animal’s interaction with the world and all its agents. Armstrong’s suggestion may sound hyperbolic, here, but if closely followed appears to

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be founded on a close ethological observation and to serve his ethical, posthumanist aims. The infrahuman, as the acknowledgment of the part of us that we share with the other-than-human, may allow us to imagine the experience of a heightened perception of things, necessarily embodied and unavoidably embedded, that is, interrelated in an ecosystem of agencies in a permanent condition of autopoietic co-production of meanings. The perceptual powers of Armstrong’s dog are superior to that of her human companions, as well as her physical intelligence and—above all— her ethics. Her mode of living is relational. When she finds herself sleeping again in a house backyard kennel, she feels more vigilant not because of the new surroundings, to which she is used, but because she no longer has only herself to look out for (109): she immediately, spontaneously, sincerely feels responsible for her new friends. When the techniques of narrative empathy make us experience, imaginatively, the man’s violence through her body sensations and responses, it appears all the more traumatic because from the animal’s point of view they are completely insensate and gratuitous (I almost wanted to say inhuman). How may literature contribute to our twenty-first-century reappraisal of the world and re-envisioning of its agentic capacity?8 My answer is in the way that “Litter” makes us see the absurdity of our long-engrained, mis-grounded logic and mad behaviors, and points the way to a better understanding of us as part of the world in the assumption of conscious and responsible notions such as the infrahuman that is “part of us” (Wolfe 2003, 17). The saving move is the exercise of empathy as an instrument of knowledge, and the writing of literature as one of its imaginative enactments. Philip Armstrong lucidly claims this potential for fiction: “really well-written fiction has the capacity to allow the reader to experience forms of feeling and perception that are radically new and unusual, outside of the normal conventions — which means it can help expand our repertoire of feelings and perceptions about other animals, and about being animals ourselves” (Raymond).

8 This is how Diane Coole prefers to indicate Latour’s actants (derived from A. J. Greimas’s narratology) in order to temper the emphasis on the humanistic connotation of the term. “Agentic capacity” accommodates better anything that has the ability “to make a difference, produce effects and affects, alter the course of events by their actions” (2013, 459).

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References Armstrong, Philip. 2014. Litter. In Among Animals: The Lives of Animals and Humans in Contemporary Short Fiction, ed. John Yunker, 107–115. Ashland, OR: Ashland Creek Press. Ashland Creek Press website. https://www.ashlandcreekpress.com. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 2019. A Theoretical Frame for the Critical Posthumanities. In Transversal Posthumanities, Special Issue of Theory, Culture and Society Transversal Posthumanities 36 (6): 1–31. Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Buell, Lawrence. 2007. Ecoglobalist Affects: The Emergence of U.S: Environmental Imagination on a Planetary Scale. In Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature, ed. Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell, 227–48. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Calarco, Matthew. 2015. Thinking through Animals: Identity, Difference, Indistinction. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Coffman, Christopher K., and Theophilus Savvas, eds. 2021. After Postmodernism: The New American Fiction. London and New York: Routledge. Coole, Diana. 2013. Agentic Capacities and Capacious Historical Materialism: Thinking with New Materialisms in the Political Sciences. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 41 (3): 451–69. Deleuze, Gilles. 2003. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Translated by Daniel W. Smith. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ecofictology. YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mdAq5W f9zI Gaard, Greta. 2020. New Ecocriticisms: Narrative, Affective, Empirical and Mindful. Ecozon@ 11 (2): 224–33. Gibbs, W. Raymond, and Jr. 2005. Embodiment and Cognitive Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gibson, James Jerome. 1979. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Horowitz, Alexandra. 2009. Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell and Know. New York: Scribner. Iovino, Serenella, and Serpil Oppermann. 2014. Introduction: Stories Come to Matter. In Material Ecocriticism, ed. Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, 1–17. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. James, Erin. 2015. The Storyworld Accord: Econarratology and Postcolonial Narratives. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

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Keen, Suzanne. 2006. A Theory of Narrative Empathy. Narrative 14 (3): 207– 36. Keen, Suzanne. 2013. Narrative Empathy. In The Living Handbook of Narratology, eds. Hühn, Peter et al. Hamburg: Hamburg University. https:// www-archiv.fdm.uni-hamburg.de/lhn/node/42.html. Accessed September 14, 2022. Latour, Bruno. 2014. Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene. New Literary History 45 (1): 1–18. Martinez Benedì, Pilar. 2018. The Insuperability of Sensation: Indagini letterarie tra mente, corpo e affect. Napoli: La scuola di Pitagora. Pinker, Steven. 2011. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. New York: Viking. Plumwood, Val. 2000. Being Prey. Utne Reader 100 (July-August): 56–61. Raymond, Midge. 2014. An Interview with Among Animals contributor Philip Armstrong (“Litter”). 27 March. https://www.ashlandcreekpress.com/blog/ 2014/03/27/an-interview-with-among-animals-contributor-philip-armstr ong/. Accessed May 17, 2022 Spencer, Antonia. 2020. Ecocriticism and ‘Thinking with Writing’: An Interview with Tim Ingold. Ecozon@ 11 (2): 208–15. Uexküll von, Jakob. 1992. A Stroll through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds. 1957. Semiotica 89 (4): 319–91. Yunker, John, ed. 2014. Among Animals: The Lives of Animals and Humans in Contemporary Short Fiction. Ashland, OR: Ashland Creek Press. Weik von Mossner, Alexa. 2020. Affect, Emotion, and Ecocriticism. Ecozon@ 11 (2): 128–36. Weik von Mossner, Alexa. 2017. Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. Wolfe, Cary. 2003. Animal Rites: Animal Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Wolfe, Cary. 2010. What is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

PART II

Continuities

CHAPTER 7

Postmodernist Latinx Literature in the 21st century? the Writings of Giannina Braschi Cristina Garrigós

Can we speak of postmodernist literature in the twenty-first century? Can we speak of Latinx postmodernist literature?1 These are the two questions that open the discussion in this chapter. Even though when speaking of contemporary Latinx fiction recent criticism seems to favor terms such as radical, transnational, or transcultural, we can find in the works of some Latinx authors the use of techniques, such as intertextuality, irony, the intrusion of the author in the text, address to the reader, parody, irony, historiographic metafiction, that were pointed out by critics such as Ihab Hassan, Linda Hutcheon, Brian McHale, among others, 1 In general, literary critics use the gender-neutral term Latinx to refer to authors who identify with a Latin heritage while recognizing their American present. For the purposes of this chapter, we will consider Latinx, the writers of Latin American origin who currently live and publish in the United States, whether they write in English, Spanish, or in a mix of both. This includes Chicanxs (Mexican Americans), authors from Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Cuba, and different places from the Caribbean and Latin America.

C. Garrigós (B) National University of Distance Education, UNED, Madrid, Spain e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 T. Tsimpouki et al. (eds.), American Studies after Postmodernism, Renewing the American Narrative, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41448-0_7

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as defining postmodernism, along with the distrust in grand narratives.2 Hence, it seems pertinent now to analyze the presence of these characteristics in Latinx writing and to see whether the transgressive narrative tactics used by Latinx authors can be studied as postmodernist. To do so, after an introduction to the topic, this chapter will discuss the last book of New York-based Puerto Rican author Giannina Braschi, United States of Banana (2011) as an example of contemporary Latinx postmodernism. In my opinion, Braschi’s books, published from the last decades of the twentieth century to our days, represent the evolution of postmodernism that goes from the playful theatrical experimentation in Spanish of El imperio de los sueños (1988) to the linguistic games mixing Spanish and English of Yo-Yo Boing! (1998) and, finally, United States of Banana, equally experimental in form but with a more openly ethical and political program. Braschi’s latest work, and the first one written completely in English, is, as I hope to demonstrate, a clear example of the ethical attitude and radical aesthetics that defines Latinx postmodernism in the twenty-first century.

Cultural Hybridity and Postmodernism In 1994, Guillermo Gómez Peña, the Mexican performance artist, wrote an open letter to the National Arts Community verbalizing his distrust of terms like “postmodernism.” In his opinion, the “language of postmodernism is ethnocentric and insufficient. Terms like Hispanic, Latino, ethnic, minority, marginal, alternative, and Third World, among others, are inaccurate and loaded with ideological implications. They create categories and hierarchies that promote political dependence and cultural underestimation” (1994, 18). However, being aware that labels are necessary fictions, and that, on the other hand, the artists need to be seriously considered by the market and by the academic world, he admits that “in the absence of a more enlightened terminology, we have no choice but to use them with extreme care” (18). Gómez Peña, like John Barth before

2 Jean François Lyotard defined postmodernism as “the incredulity toward metanarratives” in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, xxiv.

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him, recommends using the term postmodernism with caution, and not confusing the road with the destination.3 The discussion on the use of labels such as postmodernism could be considered passé. Postmodernism, one could think, belonged to the twentieth century, and disappeared after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Or not? Indeed, many scholars think that postmodernism as a literary movement is over and long gone.4 Others, among whom I include myself, think that it has not disappeared completely, but it has rather evolved and undergone a transformation into something different. This evolution or transformation started by including the fiction of ethnic groups and minority writers with a preoccupation with non-essentialist issues. In that sense, the publication of the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Fiction in 1998 seemed to announce the beginning of a more plural view of postmodernism by including women and ethnic writers to join what John Barth calls the “usual suspects” (1995, 350).5 Besides authors of African American, Native American, and Asian American origin, four Latinxs were listed among the fifty-nine writers selected: Gloria Anzaldúa, Ricardo Cortez Cruz, Rosario Ferré, and Helena María Viramontes. Although, of course, like all anthologies, the list of authors included is necessarily limited, this publication gave way to a broader understanding of postmodernism, one that represented an evolution from the practice of the first generation, comprised almost exclusively of white Anglo men, that

3 In his essay “Postmodernism Revisited,” Barth points out that “[T]erms like Romanticism, Modernism, Postmodernism are more or less useful and necessary fictions: roughly approximate maps, more likely to lead us to something like a destination if we don’t confuse them with that they are meant to be maps of” (1995, 114). 4 Much literature has been devoted to this question, and no conclusion has been reached. Charles B. Harris wrote about “postmodernism’s wake,” while others offered new labels, such as “late postmodernism” (Jeremy Green), “post-postmodernism” (Robert L. McLaughlin, Stephen Burn), or “cosmodernism” (Moraru). Some considered it as a new era that comes out of what was done before (Hoberek) or spoke of a “postmodern post-mortem” (Hornung), and Mary K. Holland writes about “succeeding” postmodernism. In general, critics do not agree whether this new so called post-postmodernism implies a rejection or a development from classical postmodernism, in the same way that critics did not agree on whether postmodernism implied a rejection or a development from modernism. They all seem to agree, however, that there is something “quite” akin to postmodernism being produced in the twenty-first century. 5 Namely, authors such as Robert Coover, Stanley Elkin, William Gass, and John Barth himself.

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became more interested in the social, historical, and political aspects of literature adding gender and ethnic concerns to their texts. Associated with this new postmodernist literary scene came the issue of using the term postmodernist to refer to the subversive and radical narrative favored by authors who were skeptical of that label. In fact, there was some resistance among several ethnic authors and critics toward the use of the term postmodernism, which they saw as the result of a cooptative movement destined to project the image of ethnicity as exoticism. This resistance is explained by Fredric Jameson, who believes that microgroups and “minorities” (in which grouping he includes women and “the internal Third World,” as he calls it) often repudiate the idea of postmodernism because they associate it with a white and male-dominated group in power, an elite that can easily decenter their well-grounded and established identity (1991, 318). And yet, for Jameson, “‘the micropolitics’ that corresponds to the emergence of this whole range of small-group, non-class political practices are a profoundly postmodern phenomenon” (318). In this context, the use of the term Latinx to refer to people of Hispanic origin has meant, according to Ed Morales, the rise of “a new kind of nationalism” that has “created hybrid political practices that once tried to strip away the racism of Latin American mestizaje” (2018, 14).6 This celebration of hybridity as a valid and representative form of Latinx complexities indicates a new direction from former traditional postmodern practices.

Postmodernist Latinx Fiction Cultural critic Celeste Olalquiaga opens her book Megalopolis: Contemporary Cultural Sensibilities (1992) with the strong statement “[p]ostmodernism lives” (xi). In this work, she defends the metamorphic quality of postmodernism and its continuous transformation, which she finds very much alive in Latinx art (xx). Likewise, literary

6 It is not the purpose of this chapter to discuss Latin American postmodernism, something which has been done extensively by critics such as Antonio Cornejo Polar, Claudia Ferman, Julio Ortega, or Beatriz Sarlo. This chapter focuses exclusively on Latinx literature, that is, the literature produced in the United States by authors of Hispanic origin.

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critics Ellen McCracken, Fatima Mujˇcinovi´c, and Elisabeth MermannJozwiak have used the term postmodernist to discuss Latina literature. McCracken’s volume, New Latina Narrative: The Feminine Space of Postmodern Ethnicity (1999) includes studies on postmodern ethnicity as a commodity, autobiographical simulation, religious approaches, gender, and transgressive narrative tactics by authors such as Julia Álvarez, Sandra Benítez, Norma Cantú, Sandra Cisneros, Denise Chávez, Lucha Corpi, Carmen de Monteflores, Margarita Engle, Mickey Fernández, Roberta Fernández, Cristina García, Graciela Limón, Sylvia López-Medina, Demetria Martínez, Nicholasa Mohr, Pat Mora, Cherríe Moraga, Aurora Levins Morales, Himilce Novas, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Mary Helen Ponce, Alma Luz Villanueva, and Helena María Viramontes. For McCracken, this list would constitute the canon of what she considers the “feminine space of postmodern identity” (1999, 4). As she explains, “This book focuses on the subsequent flowering in the 1980s and 1990s of Latina women’s narrative, and its movement, after an initial marginalization, to the status of desirable and profitable postmodern ethnic commodity” (4). McCracken acknowledges that putting together women of different national origins does not imply a homogenizing view of Latinas by eliding “historical specificity, ethnic and racial differences, sexual preference, and varying class perspectives into a monolithic conception of the Latina narrative” (5). For her study of Latina postmodernism, the critic selects authors who grew up in the United States; she discards narratives written in Spanish (like those by Margarita Cota-Cárdenas, Erlinda GonzálezBerry, or Rosaura Sánchez, for instance), and she does not include Latin American authors such as Isabel Allende or Laura Esquivel, “writers in exile,” or the mass-marketed U.S. Latina fiction of Soledad Santiago (8). Five years after McCracken’s seminal work, Fatima Mujˇcinovi´c published Postmodern Cross-culturalism and Politicization in U.S. Latina Literature: From Ana Castillo to Julia Álvarez (2004), a book that was soon followed by Elisabeth Mermann- Jozwiak’s Postmodern Vernaculars: Chicana Literature and Postmodern Rhetoric (2005). Both studies include a defense of the use of the term postmodern to speak about the fiction of Latina authors. However, as Mermann-Jozwiak explains, there is still reluctance among Chicano scholars and writers, such as Raymond Rocco, Héctor Calderón, José David Saldívar, Tey Diana Rebolledo, Rosaura Sánchez, Beatrice Pita, or Paula Moya to use this term. These authors consider postmodernism ahistorical and apolitical, and therefore, not appropriate or concerned with Chicano agency and subjectivity. For

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instance, Rebolledo “rejects the (poststructuralist) death of the subject as not relevant to Chicano/a concerns” (Mermann-Jozwiak 2005, 9). In tune with this idea, Sánchez criticizes the “reduction of history and knowledge to textuality” (1987, 4). For her, although Chicano writers may sometimes use postmodern strategies, their production lies in “a heterogeneous literary space, as much modernist as pre-modernist” (7). Essentialist discourses and the preoccupation with a unitary subject are, for Sánchez, trademarks of Chicano writing and antithetical to postmodernist thought. For Mermann-Jozwiak, however, whereas some authors can be deemed essentialist, others put into question the notion of the unitarian subject which they consider a bourgeois construction. Rejecting a monolithic view of postmodernism, Mermann-Jozwiak sides with critics such as Chela Sandoval, who “most clearly and emphatically aligns Third World women’s work with postmodernism in her conceptualization of oppositional consciousness” (2005, 11). She introduces the category of differential consciousness, a practice enacted by U.S. Third World Feminists that reflect the mobility and flexibility of the postmodern subject. Sandoval, in “U.S. Third World Feminism: The Theory and Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World,” in fact, points out the works of third world feminists such as Cherríe Moraga, María Lugones, Audre Lorde, Bernice Johnson Reagon, and Gloria Anzaldúa as examples of a combination of postmodern consciousness and political practice which exists nowadays in decolonial feminist studies. Other critics, such as Rafael Pérez Torre, Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, or Norma Alarcón, share this view of the existence of intersections between the Chicanx narrative and postmodernism. Elements that Mermann-Jozwiak considers postmodernist are Norma Cantú’s snapshot photographs, Sandra Cisneros’s prayers in her short story “Little Miracles, Kept Promises,” which are vernacular versions of formal prayers, or the use of border Spanish, or Spanglish in Pat Mora’s poetry (2005, 13). She analyzes Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s “Literary Wetback” (1988) and Emma Pérez’s Gulf Dreams (1996) as examples of postmodern Latina vernacular art which is characterized by the dialogue between cultures, languages, and traditions coming from the marginal third space of the borderlands. For the critic, Gaspar de Alba’s portrayal of Third World women’s identity as fluid and shifting reminds us not only of Sandoval’s theory of oppositional consciousness and Anzaldúa’s idea of the border and the bridge, but also of Deleuze and Guattari’s

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theorization of schizophrenia (Mermann-Jozwiak 2005, 16). This type of postmodernist practice, which she differentiates from others, is a postmodernism of resistance that through a self-reflexive dialogue challenges both traditions as monolithic constructs (14). Moving away from essentialist paradigms, the literary examples mentioned above, and studied by McCracken, Mujˇcinovi´c, and Mermann-Jozwiak, represent transgressive artistic practices that these authors classify as postmodernist. They all have in common that they convey the rejection of a nostalgic attitude, the subversion of stereotypes, and the proposal of hybrid linguistic and cultural gender and generic performances that conform to a new latinidad. This new latinidad is constructed by a synergy of the Latin American heritage, U.S. cultural standards, and Latino identity concepts, which, according to Amanda Gerke and Luisa María González Rodriguez “is rooted in spatial and temporal concepts of culture that bring forth an exponential movement in various directions, which, though apparently chaotic, forms a cohesive identity” (2021, 4).7 This new latinidad, which Esther Álvarez López sees as a group of diverse facets, has a trajectory of social, economic, political, and cultural subordination that Aníbal Quijano called “coloniality of power” (2000, 533) and has expanded beyond the original geopolitical areas of Latin America “to include,” in Álvarez López’s words, “the diasporic, socalled postcolonial cities of the United States of America” (qtd. in Gerke and Rodriguez 2021, 85). This was the idea behind the project of the anthology Se habla español. Voces Latinas en USA (2000), whose main objective was to present Latinx authors who started publishing in the 1990s and whose texts did not have a nostalgic tone toward the countries of origin of their families. Most of the authors included in the anthology wrote their texts originally in Spanish, except for Junot Díaz, Ernesto Quiñonez, and Silvia Paternostro, whose texts were translated from English. Also, they often combine Spanish with English, using code-switching or Spanglish, and include references to music, films, or cultural iconography of both Hispanic and Anglo cultures.8 Whether 7 The term latinidad refers to the condition of being latinx. It should not be translated into English as latinity, since the very concept of latinidad includes the use of Spanish as an identity element (Gerke and Rodríguez 2021, 4). 8 The relevance of code-switching in Latinx literature has been studied by critics such as Juan Bruce-Novoa, Cecilia Montes Alcalá, or Lourdes Torres, among others.

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these authors were born in the United States or came later, cities like Los Angeles, Miami, or New York now become the location of their stories. The volume is structured in seven sections after different U.S. regions: “Welcome to Miami,” “Southern Comfort,” “South by Southwest,” “California Dreamin’,” “Central Standard Time,” “Look Eastward Angel,” and “New York, New York.” According to the editors, Edmundo Paz Soldán and Alberto Fuguet, as opposed to writers whose works were located in Latin America or the Caribbean, multicultural megapolises such as New York become now literary destinies for contemporary Latinx writers (2000, 17). One of the authors who appears in this anthology is Giannina Braschi, a Puerto Rican author who lives in New York and whose groundbreaking narrative style, especially in her latest novel, United States of Banana, emblematizes what we could consider contemporary Latinx postmodernism.

Giannina Braschi’s United States of Banana Braschi’s postmodernism has been the subject of discussion by critics such as Virginia Dessús, Adriana Estill, Cristina Garrigós, Madelena González, Amanda M. Smith, and Amy Sheeran. All these scholars agree in considering Braschi one of the most avant-garde authors writing nowadays in the United States and do not hesitate to use the term postmodernist to refer to her writings. Francisco José Ramos, however, is reluctant to apply a label to Braschi’s work arguing that it is such “a literary feat, which cannot be so readily pigeonholed into any category, be it “Spanglish” or the cultural marketing label of “postmodern literature”. And yet, Braschi herself has addressed this issue when asked if she considers her work postmodernist: My work is postmodernist. I know. Many people say it. For me, postmodernism is a lizard whose tail has been cut off, yet its tail keeps dancing [laughs]. That is postmodernism for me. Or like a chicken, a chicken whose head has been cut off, yet it still keeps walking without any idea of where it’s going. That is the poetry of postmodernism, which doesn’t know where it’s going, yet it still keeps walking. I know where I’m going. But there’s something about not knowing, about rambling decapitated, dismembered. There is something dismembered in postmodernism….If in the Renaissance we had the integration of the human being, the discovery

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of humanity, the return to our roots, I believe that globalization presupposes the disintegration of the human being, as memory, as history. (Qtd. in Garrigós 2004, 151)9

For the author, the postmodern subject is somewhat lost in a hostile universe where the human being is a puppet in the hands of bigger forces. In this context, Braschi thinks that it is the function of art to reflect this sense of disintegration. While the past is not better than the present, the author sees the postmodern era as a period where the negative effects of neocolonial capitalism and neoliberal politics become evident. In this sense, she agrees with Marxist critics such as Fredric Jameson or Jean Baudrillard in considering postmodernism as a period where neoliberal practices deprive the human being of any agency. However, Braschi’s position escapes Marxist essentialism by proposing a hybrid approach that places the revolution in the individual rather than in the group. The author has remarked that she prefers not to belong to any land or language. In effect, she lives in New York, away from her native Puerto Rico. Her writing is the result of the dynamic exchanges between the two cultures, the Anglo-Saxon and the Hispanic. As the writer claimed, “Yes, I am a hybrid. There are Spanish poets that I know by heart: I have Quevedo, I have Juan Ramón, I have García Lorca, Machado, Bécquer. I arrived in New York grounded in the poetry of García Lorca and Juan Ramón Jiménez. I also had the poetry of Eliot, Joyce, and Beckett” (Garrigós 2004, 150). In addition, we find many other writers—including Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dante, Petrarch, Neruda, Vallejo, Rubén Darío, Heiner Müller, and Gertrude Stein — whose voices and names resonate throughout the texts. In Braschi’s case, intertextuality is not only a postmodern textual strategy, but a constituent of her complex and multiple Latinx experience.

9 “Mi obra es postmoderna, yo lo sé, mucha gente lo dice. Para mí el postmodernismo es un lagartijo que le cortan la cola y la cola se queda bailando [risas]. Eso es el postmodernismo para mí. O como un chicken, un pollo al que le cortan la cabeza y todavía camina pero que no sabe dónde va. Esa es la poesía del postmodernismo, que no sabe adónde va, pero mientras tanto va caminando. Yo sé a dónde voy, pero hay algo en el no saber, en el deambular con la cabeza degollada, desmembrada. Hay algo de desmembrado en el postmodernismo. […] Si en el Renacimiento teníamos la integración del ser humano, el descubrimiento del hombre, volviendo a sus raíces del pasado, yo creo que la globalización supone la desintegración del ser humano como memoria, como historia.” Originally in Spanish (translation by the author).

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As Tess O’Dwyer argues in Poets, Philosophers, Lovers: On the Writings of Giannina Braschi, Braschi writes cross-genre works that are structural hybrids of poetry, fiction, essay, theater, manifesto, and political philosophy (Aldama and O’Dwyer 2020). Her co-editor Frederick Aldama, in turn, classifies her works as “radically experimental gender-binding titles” that “grow from a genealogy of Latinx letters, but do so from the avant-garde margins” (Aldama and O’Dwyer, 2020, 3–4). Braschi’s books “challenge the constructs of society and the expectations of readers” with an aesthetics linked to that of other canon-benders, both Latinx and planetary, cutting-edge contemporary artists (Aldama in Aldama and O’Dwyer, 2020, 5).10 The inscription of Braschi’s text in dialogue with other writers is articulated by Giannina when she points out that “with all the writers in my home, I hardly have time to write. They keep interrupting my writing. If I am listening to Joyce, Artaud storms into my brainstorm, interrupting Joyce who is hard to stop” (Braschi 2011, 46– 47).11 However, far from constraining her writing, the explicit presence of other literary voices in her text confers it with a metafictional aspect that can be labeled as postmodernist. Purposedly provocative and polemical from the title onward, Braschi’s latest book, United States of Banana, aims to awaken the dormant consciousness of the reader in general and of Latinx people, specifically Puerto Ricans, who, she thinks, must become aware of their possibilities and talent, which are currently wasted. Thus, in a twenty-first-century postmodernist fashion, United States of Banana combines an interest in formal experimentation with an ethical concern for the current political affairs and how they affect citizens, specifically Latinxs.12

10 Aldama cites Carmen María Machado, Elizabeth Acevedo, Mónica de la Torre, and Naomi Ayala among the avant-garde Latinxs writing today, and Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Pamela Lu, Zinzi Clemmons, and Sumana Roy, among the international authors who share an aesthetic affinity with Giannina Braschi (2020, 10). 11 For the sake of clarity, in this chapter, I will refer to Giannina as the literary character and Braschi as the author. 12 Braschi’s abstract and fragmented narrative and the sketchy dialogues in her work attracted Swedish cartoonist Joakim Lindengren, who became interested in drawing illustrations and adapting the second part of United States of Banana into the graphic novel format. The graphic novel was first published in Swedish in 2017 and edited in English with an introduction by Amanda M. Smith and Amy Sheeran in 2021. These critics consider Braschi’s text “a postmodern tour de force” (vii). According to them, Lindengren admires Braschi’s “madness” and her “cannibalization of literary history” (xiv), namely,

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This work presents the alter-ego of the writer, Giannina, on a mission with two well-known literary characters, Hamlet and Zarathustra, to liberate Segismundo—the protagonist of Spanish author Calderón de la Barca’s play La vida es sueño (Life is a Dream)—from the Statue of Liberty, where he is imprisoned.13 In Braschi’s text, Segismundo becomes the symbol of the Latinx. He is the embodiment of Puerto Rico, and his liberation is regarded as an event that marks the freedom of the country from the colonial oppression of the father (United States) and the mother (Spain). United States of Banana is divided into two parts: “Ground Zero” and “United States of Banana.” In the words of John “Rio” Riofrio, “United States of Banana, more than a novel, is an archeological layering of intertextual references culled from the canons of literature and philosophy... a manifesto, a call to arms about the US betrayal of its own ‘American’ ideologies of freedom, liberty, and democracy” (qtd. in Aldama and O’Dwyer 2020, 33). Thus, the first part of Braschi’s book, “Ground Zero,” is a collection of short chapters that, in the form of essays, offer a critique of the United States as a consumerist and materialist society that the author sees as the cause of the decay of Western civilization. The satirical input of the texts is evident in the titles of the chapters, for instance, “The Death of the Businessman,” “Piggybank,” “Chicken with the Head Off,” “Foreign Speaking English” or “Language of Mass Destruction.” The author uses the symbol of the piggybank as a critique of the American Dream and the role of the immigrant in this capitalist fantasy: “Is this the American Dream—the greedy need—and the grim reality of the need that is never satisfied because it is red and tasty like candy—but it has no funds

her appropriation of literary elements (characters, authors, and scenes) that she includes in her text. Lindengren tries to convey this intertextuality by “cannibalizing” art history in his work and including visual references to paintings by Munch, Dali, Magritte, Leonardo, etc. Both Smith and Sheeran agree in pointing out that the narrative techniques used by Braschi in her work and mentioned above (metafiction, intertextuality, pastiche, genreblurring, etc.) make United States of Banana a postmodern text (xii). In their words, “in USB, Braschi uses postmodernist techniques to arm a violent poetic assault on U.S. imperialism from a fervently Puerto Rican locus of enunciation” (xii). 13 Segismundo is the protagonist of the seventeenth-century Spanish play La vida es sueño, by Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1636). In this play, he is the Prince of Poland, imprisoned in a tower by his father, King Basilio, who had been warned that Segismundo would bring bad luck to his country and death to the king.

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to support the greed. This is Chinese torture” (Braschi 2011, 21). Likewise, Braschi uses the image of the dying chicken with no head, which she mentioned in her definition of postmodernism, to represent the situation of the author’s native country, Puerto Rico, and its free association with the United States. The political implications of United States of Banana are clear from the beginning, but Puerto Rico is not the only country that she sees as a chicken with the head off; the United States is also considered as such. The world is full of chickens with their heads off: “The president, the secretary of state, the businessman, the preacher, the vendor, the spies, the clients, and the managers—all walking around Wall Street like chickens with their heads cut off” (52). Having lost their heads, they have neither memory nor a sense of direction. Besides the social and political critique that is present throughout the book, Braschi’s aesthetics include experimentation with language, fragmentation, and pastiche, as well as the intertextual references to other works of art and the re-use of other literary characters. For instance, Hamlet and Segismundo, princes of Denmark and Poland respectively in their texts of origin, appear now in Braschi’s American text. Both Hamlet and Segismundo are in danger in their countries because they are the true heirs to power, but they are victims of political intrigues. Like them, Giannina, Braschi’s alter-ego, is a character who does not fit in her own country. She sees herself as an exile: Soy Boricua. In spite of my family and in spite of my country, I’m writing the process of the Puerto Rican mind—taking it out of context—as a native and as a foreigner—expressing it through Spanish, Spanglish and English— Independencia, Estado Libre Asociado and Estadidad—from the position of a nation, a colony, and a state—Wishy, Wishy-Washy, and Washy—not as one political party that is partied into piddley parts and partied out. (47)14

As said before, for Braschi, all literature is political in the sense of being ethical and connected with the external world. Hence, in her universe, authors and characters share a space that is not only literary but also real, 14 Braschi is referring here to the three political positions in Puerto Rico: those who want to be an independent nation (Wishy), those who want to be a full state (Washy), and those who want to remain as they are now: a Free Associate State, with some of the rights of a state, but no others. For instance, they cannot vote for the President of the United States. This last position is what Braschi calls Wishy-Washy.

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as it is driven by an engagement with the problems of the people. In this case, the Latinxs. Related to what Mermann-Jozwiak calls “postmodernism of resistance” (2005, 14), Madelena Gonzalez also considers that Braschi’s latest novel represents an example of a “poetics of resistance” (qtd. in Aldama and O’Dwyer, 2020, 24), where form and style reassert control over the novel as an artifact, while the creative imagination is regarded as a source of agency and transformative power. Braschi’s postmodernism, in Gonzalez’s words, “both encourages and resists a certain type of referential illusionist reading” (25). It deals with issues such as colonialism, migration, capitalism, and identity, which are openly discussed and criticized, but the text resists the temptation of oversimplifying solutions and providing readers with an easy way out. According to Gonzalez, United States of Banana constitutes a defense of “the unique role of the artist whose function is to reconnect with truth and authenticity through the aesthetic, emphasizing the artist’s role as seer and visionary whose poetry can be the source of a powerful transformation of reality” (23). Hence art can be a tool for change. In Braschi’s world, poets are game changers because they have access to the truth. This idea is explained by Gonzalez: Braschi’s novel suggests that art may be used as a weapon of delegitimation of these ubiquitous structures of control and their universalizing tendencies. It moves beyond the postmodern and the postcolonial to envisage the reinstatement of a different (ethical?) type of universal—based on love, feeling, the human heart—that can only be mediated through the romantic imagination of the artist, thus reasserting her uniqueness and importance as an exceptional individual. (27)

Braschi considers that in this world ruled by headless and heartless people, it is the role of the artist, of the poet, to enunciate the changes needed to transform society. Braschi holds a “hierarchy of inspiration” to make changes effective. This is explained in the last chapter of the first part, titled “Hierarchy of inspiration,” where she explains the relevance of the daemon, the duende, the angel, and the muse.15 While the duende 15 These elements (daemon, angel, muse and duende) come from Federico García Lorca’s “Theory and Play of the duende,” where he defines duende as “a force not a labour, a struggle not a thought. I heard an old maestro of the guitar say: ‘The duende is not in the throat: the duende surges up, inside, from the soles of the feet’... This ‘mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has explained’ is, in sum,

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has roots (folklore), the daemon has no roots (“he breaks the foundations”) (2011, 65). This aporetic condition—having roots but destroying them at the same time—is central to the author’s postmodernist aesthetic project. She rejects the notion of being rooted: “Roots should always be left behind. If you bring them to the present, you are a dead man walking” (65). Therefore, her writing rejects nostalgic attitudes: she thinks that looking back at the past and relying too much on one’s memory produce stagnation, which can only lead to death. To make the future possible, it is important to carry your past with you, bury it, and move forward, although she is aware of how difficult it is to bury the past. Thus, the second part of the book, “United States of Banana,” begins where her previous novel, Yo-Yo Boing!, ended: with Giannina, Braschi’s alter-ego going to the burial of the twentieth century.16 Between the publication of Yo-Yo Boing! in 1998 and that of United States of Banana in 2011, the author, and the world at large, witnessed the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and the subsequent response of the United States by launching a “war on terror.” Like many artists and intellectuals, Braschi considers these events as marking the end of an era and the beginning of a new one. Thus, when United States of Banana retakes the last scene of YoYo Boing !, the world has changed dramatically. In “The Burial of the Sardine,” the chapter that opens the second part of the book, Giannina, Hamlet, and Zarathustra meet at the Fulton market. Giannina carries a dying sardine on her back;17 Zarathustra is carrying with him the corpse of a man; and Hamlet is carrying Polonius’s dead body.The three characters decide to join forces to liberate Segismundo from his imprisonment in the Statue of Liberty.

the spirit of the earth.” https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Spanish/LorcaD uende.php. 16 Written in a combination of Spanish, English, and Spanglish, Yo-Yo Boing! (1998) is a cross-genre work that, through different fragments and dialogues, addresses the tension between Anglo-American and Hispanic-American cultures in the United States (Pérez). 17 Taken from the Catholic tradition of elentierro de la sardina, “The Burial of the Sardine,” this ceremony signals the end of Carnival and the beginning of the Lent season before Easter. Usually, it is celebrated in countries such as Spain and throughout Latin America with the burning of a symbolic sardine. A famous painting by Francisco de Goya, titled El entierro de la sardina (dated between 1793-1819) represents the scene of the burial as a festive celebration. It signifies the end of the past and the start of a new beginning.

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This part, which covers two-thirds of the whole book and gives it its title, is a play, with the city of New York, Liberty Island, and Puerto Rico as the stage. The dialogues in this section of the book are largely inspired by Plato’s Symposium. Socratic dialogue provides Giannina with a platform for engaging with other literary characters (Hamlet, Gertrude, Zarathustra, Segismundo, Basilio), other writers (Rubén Darío, Pablo Neruda, Antonin Artaud), countries (Puerto Rico, Cuba, Spain, England, China, United States of Banana), philosophers and sages (Socrates, Parmenides, Protagoras, Diotima of Mantineia, Nietzsche), as well as things and creatures (the Statue of Liberty, the Cockroach, Oliver the Exterminator), to reflect on global politics, liberty, the meaning of love, writing, life—in short, all the issues of concern to Braschi. These intertextual references conform to what Daniela Daniele calls “critical gamification of great books, quotations and wordplay, masters and disciples, authors and characters” (qtd. in Aldama and O’Dwyer, 2020, 117). Canonical texts, symbols, and myths are used playfully to address philosophical and political issues with a critical stance. For instance, the presentation of the greatest U.S. symbol, the Statue of Liberty, that becomes a character in this play, in a dialogue with Giannina and the other characters, evidences this humanization and gamification. The statue acknowledges that she has been deprived of any meaning and laments: “I am a trophy.... They say: Freedom! Freedom! But freedom means Anglo-Saxon Protestant rule oppressing the Latin, African, Asian, Arab, and Jew. When immigrants come looking for freedom, I suck their juice—under the surveillance or dread of labor without labor—of jobs without lightness of feet and creativity” (2011, 82). In this postmodernist revision of symbols, the author desacralizes canonical authors and characters, and even brings the Statue of Liberty to her knees presenting freedom as a failed trope: “I too am a slave of a system that doesn’t work any longer” (101). The questioning of the meaning of freedom is central to Braschi’s text. As Rolando Mendoza-de Jesús remarks, I would also argue that Braschi’s text runs against the grain of many contemporary ways of theorizing political action well beyond the Puerto Rican context, resisting simplistic notions of identity politics that go in tandem with an understanding of the political as a name for struggles around hegemony, while also insisting, against a certain reception of poststructuralism or postmodernity, on the need to disentangle notions such as

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freedom and sovereignty from their inscription within liberal and neoliberal political frameworks. (Qtd. in Aldama and O’Dwyer, 2020, 140)

Mendoza-de Jesús points here at a turn in worldwide politics nowadays: the inscription of the notion of freedom within a neoliberal and liberal framework. Thus, the word freedom, formerly associated with rebellion, renewal, and liberation from oppressive systems, becomes an empty word that can be used by any populist leader in the neocapitalist society. However, for Braschi, freedom remains the ultimate aspiration of the individual and the state in the contemporary world. And in this project of liberation, avant-garde art is necessary because it contributes to making change real. In the words of Gonzalez, the artist “must rediscover the link between art and life, between the poet and the multitude, find a compromise between her aspiration to the sublime and the constraints of representation, in short, reinstate authentic experience within the simulated or coded structures that have superseded direct experience” (qtd. in Aldama and O’Dwyer, 2020, 29). And so, there is in Braschi’s writing an urgency to connect with the audience to effect real change. She believes that art can make a difference and that by liberating her writing from constraints, she can awaken the conscience of those Latinxs that need to be freed from all forms of personal and political ties. Thus, in the chapter titled “The Wedding of the Century,” Gertrude, from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, representing Anglo-America, is going to marry Basilio, from Calderón’s Life is a Dream, representing the Spaniards. This union “will unite South America and North America” (Braschi 2011, 145). As a consequence, in Braschi’s world, the states will split into multiple independent states, and “Segismundo’s island of bananas—Puerto Rico” will be the first one to be free (164). After the “Declaration of war” and the “Declaration of love,” the book closes with the “Eradication of Envy: Gratitude.” This last chapter evidences the implication of the author with the personal and political liberation of the readers from everything, from both narrative and philosophical constraints, including our deepest beliefs: “At the end, I realized that even my opinions were all wrong,” asserts Giannina (262). This realization implies the deconstruction of the self, which she extends to the economic and political system in the United States of Banana. However,

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beyond the apparently nihilistic reflection, Braschi’s work offers a possibility for change through dialogue. As Giannina says at the end of the book in her dialogic monologue, Why defend yourself at the end—when you didn’t defend yourself throughout the multiple stages—you saw the progression of yourself—your multiple beings in their multiple relations to other beings—when all the multiple beings are there knocking on all the doors for the doors to open— to poets, philosophers, lovers. Even death has to be an open dialogue with life—it has to go on—to move along—not to enclose a body—but to open the body to the multiples and multitudes. (302)

Thus, United States of Banana deploys a postmodernist revision of (de)colonial history. Braschi’s writing resists the temptation to solve a difficult issue, such as the political status of Puerto Rico, from an essentialist perspective. Terms like freedom and cultural identity are problematized through the lens of philosophy and literature as ways to reach an understanding and knowledge that politicians do not seem able to achieve. Fiction becomes practical, in the sense that it does what no other form of gnosis and praxis can do: to find a union between apparently opposing forces, the colonizers and the colonized, by deconstructing them both through dialogue. It is in this sense that we can affirm that there is a combination of ethics and aesthetics in her work that signals the new tendency of postmodernist art. Likewise, the intertextual references and the re-use of characters from other literary texts are recurrent postmodernist characteristics meant to reinforce the notion of literature as a frame where all texts are connected. In this case, the re-utilization of literary figures and the intrusion of canonical authors in Braschi’s writings, including her own surrogate, do not only have a metatextual function, but a political one as well. Moreover, the inclusion of popular songs in the narrative, and the extensive use of dialogue in the work, which gives it its theatrical imprint, are ways to fuse memory with agency in this new postmodernist venture. This chapter has explored the pertinence of the use of the term postmodernism to approach the fiction of Latinx writers in the contemporary United States in general, and Giannina Braschi’s in particular. After discussing United States of Banana, we can see many aspects that could be considered postmodernist, having to do both with the aesthetics of her work and the critical discourse that it conveys. By revisiting the concept

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in relation to the writing of this author, we can conclude that postmodernism has not disappeared as a literary mode but has evolved and expanded to include politics in experimental literary forms and new ontological scenarios. Like Braschi, many Latinx writers also practice fiction that has been classified as radical or experimental. Their experiments with narrative forms, however, are not mere language games, but are committed to issues related to non-essentialist models of cultural and individual identities as well as to a very critical view of U.S. nationalistic principles. Their works explore the use of postmodernist narrative techniques, but also the political implications of the texts, in a more open way than their twentieth-century forerunners, and reflect on the deconstruction of subjecthood as an invisible whole. When reading these texts, it seems possible to say that postmodernism is still alive in the twenty-first century in the voices of Latinx authors, such as Giannina Braschi, as a poetics of resistance that rejects essentialist notions of identity and questions established values that need to be reconsidered for progress to be a possibility. Regarding the validity of the use of the term postmodernism in contemporary criticism, I would concur with Giannina when she says, “why shut doors at the end?” (2011, 32).

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CHAPTER 8

Intersectionally Aware Urban Re-mappings of Self and Belonging after Postmodernism: Reading Angie Cruz’s Dominicana Efthymia Lydia Roupakia

Introduction: Intersectionally Aware Re-mappings of Urban Space After Postmodernism The city has held a special place in the American literary imagination: often read as representing the challenges and rewards of the frontier experience that shaped American exceptionalism, the city has been glorified for its promise of freedom, possibility and renewal, much as it has been decried as a realm of corruption, violence and destruction. Narrative renderings of American urban experience have become part of the national imagination: not only have they reflected myths of the nation,

E. L. Roupakia (B) Department of American Literature and Culture, School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 T. Tsimpouki et al. (eds.), American Studies after Postmodernism, Renewing the American Narrative, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41448-0_8

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but they have also offered the ground for aesthetic innovations in literature that have performed radical political questioning of the foundational values and political institutions of the U.S. Modernism took its inspiration from urban experience: it translated the fragmentation, confusion and loss of epistemological and ontological certainty triggered by the disorderly forces of the city into an aesthetic art form that explored the meaning of renewal and reinvention, and thus epitomized the experience of the nation at the beginning of the twentieth century. Postmodernism in American literature further pursued modernist paradigms, much as it rebelled against them. The postmodern literary city was born out of changes in the material city: it reacted to a new urban sensibility spurred by a proliferation of images, surfaces, reflections, information and technologically enhanced experiences. Postmodern narratives of the urban challenged the readability of urban experience and its function as a metaphor for human existence at the end of the twentieth century. From the literary urban landscapes of Paul Auster, to those of Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahniuk, the postmodern American urban novel rewrote and decentered the city through (predominantly male) narratives of fragmentation, self-alienation and incommensurability. As Ihab Hassan and Nan Ellin have argued, postmodern urban novels dematerialized the city as text into a vortex of self-referential signs that could no longer be interpreted as meaningful (Hassan 1981; Ellin 2007). Whereas the city in postmodernism was portrayed as a “decentered, labyrinthine, discontinuous urban site that thrive[d] on tension between order and chaos, presence and absence, reason and imagination” (Beville 2013, 604) and represented—for its primarily male authors—the “physical manifestation of a culture of consumerist excess” (Bentley 2014, 175), the American metropolis seemed to dwindle as a source of inspiration for fiction writers at the end of the twentieth century. In their 2003 essay on postmodern culture provocatively titled “Whatever happened to the Urban Novel?” Bart Keunen and Bart Eeckhout tellingly proclaimed: “Almost no studies seem to be produced that still take the ‘urban novel’ and ‘city novel’ as a point of departure for a broadly synthetic and theoretically underpinned study of recent literary developments within the realm of mainstream, ‘high’ literature” (2003, 55). In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, cultural and literary critics have increasingly noted that urban fiction after postmodernism seems to depart from the endless play of signification employed by earlier writers, in favor of a more

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realistic mode of representation. Significantly, this post-postmodern form of realist writing retains a post-structurally inflected caution for grandnarratives surrounding identity construction and authenticity (Lopez and Potter 2001; Petrie 2008; Huber 2014). Scholars charting the gradual shift from deconstructive postmodern polemics to contemporary poststructurally aware literary reconstructions have opted for words pertaining to realism, truthfulness and authenticity to best describe the nascent trend. Irmtraud Huber offers some examples of the proposed terms used to describe the current reconstructive tendency in literature: among these are “‘Neo-Realism’ (Rebein), ‘Speculative Realism’ (Saldívar), ‘New Sincerity’ (Kelly), ‘Aesthetics of Authenticity’ (Funk) or ‘Aesthetic of Trust’ (Hassan)” (Huber 6).1 “The new kind of realism,” Huber underlines, “does not revoke postmodernist claims about the power of discourse and the inaccessibility of the real, about the fragmentation of the subject and the impossibility of truth. Instead, it acknowledges them even while it asserts itself in spite of them” (6). What literature that exhibits this reconstructive tendency seems to have in common is the momentum to look beyond postmodernism’s constant, often self-defeating, urge to fragment, to alienate and to subvert: bridging the rupture, without glossing inconsistencies and the permutations of power, seems to be the underlying drive in literary production of the new millennium. Contemporary feminist, diasporic writers of urban N. America look toward the reconstructive impetus of the realist mode for its potential to convey situated, embodied and critically aware negotiations of self and belonging in a network of global relations. Contemporary works by women writers of a diasporic and racialized background offer fertile ground for post-structurally aware, realist literary reconstructions of the impact of new mobilities, migratory movements and translocal identities. From Dionne Brand’s narrative reimaginings of Toronto (2005, 2014), to Nelly Rosario’s (2002) or Angie Cruz’s representations of New York (2019a, 2022), or Ibi Zoboi’s rewriting of Detroit (2017) and Nayomi Munaweera’s recasting of San Francisco (2017), such female writings exhibit a longing for a language that maps lived spaces and urban settings, yet at the same time allows for echoes of disjunctive colonial histories and inherited legacies of victimization to shape the urban narrative and impact the characters’ urban negotiations of self and belonging. 1 The studies Huber refers to are: Rebein (2009), Saldívar (2011), Kelly (2010), Funk et al. (2012) and Hassan (2003).

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Prompted by the recent spatial turn in the humanities, this essay addresses a shift in critical interest toward urban narratives that place women and racialized subjects at the center of critical attention. Feminist urban geographers, such as Peake and Rieker (2013) and Peake et al. (2021) Leslie Kern (2020) and Sharlene Mollett and Caroline Faria (2018), are increasingly applying an intersectional feminist approach to detail the interlocking systems of inequality that condition gendered urban experience. Intersectionality has offered a nuanced lens through which to reconceptualize resistance (Isoke 2013), and to redress the failures of powerblind feminism (Tomlinson 2019) and the blindspots of multiculturalism (Sloan et al. 2018). Feminist urban geographers have convincingly argued that the approaches to the “right to the city” developed by Henri Lefebvre (1968)—and subsequently by David Harvey (2012)—fail to include the perspectives of women of racialized and minority backgrounds in their definition and analysis.2 As an example of intersectional thinking on racialized female urban experience, one could mention the work of Escalante and Sweet on the complexities of feminist urbanism when it comes to migrant women and their so-called “right to the city” (55–56). According to Escalante and Sweet, women represent 75% of all world refugees and 52% of the total population of migrants, estimated at 220 million (55–56). These females are normally employed in informal low-skilled jobs, in domestic service or in sexual-related industries. This reality makes them more vulnerable within the urban spaces they inhabit, causing them to suffer double or triple oppression: gender

2 Henri Lefebvre’s study The Right to the City ( 1968) explored urban space as a nexus of networks and intersections with the goal of tracing the ways in which capitalism and commodification intensified spatial inequalities that denied urban inhabitants dignified access to urban life. According to Lefebvre, the city is public and its inhabitants have the “right” to claim it as a co-created space. In 2012, David Harvey expanded on Lefebvre’s concept of “the right to the city.” One of the main points Harvey put forward is that capitalist forms of government have, throughout the decades, promoted unjust geographies, which make urbanism a class phenomenon. Shedding light to the impact of economic inequality on urban spatial experience, Harvey saw the so called “right to the city” not as a right that already exists, but as a collective struggle by all who have a part in producing the city and creating the life in it, to claim the right to decide what kind of urbanism they want. Feminist social and cultural geographers have challenged the ways in which Lefebvre and Harvey’s concepts are not sensitive to collective differences, and do not challenge ethnic, racial or gendered power relations. See for instance Tovi Fenster’s “The Right to the Gendered City: Different Formations of Belonging in Everyday Life” (2005).

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and race often intersect with their immigration status, class and religious identities in ways that lead to reinforced exclusion. Their reinforced exclusion gives immigrant women added vulnerability in the streets, where not only do they themselves not know their rights, but most importantly people assume that they do not have any rights. If the ex-centric, racialized, female body has historically been excluded from the privilege of exercising authorship and power over its surroundings, how does contemporary intersectionally aware realist literature that inserts female, diasporic, racialized subjects within urban American landscapes invite readers to rethink and extend the concept of belonging and inclusivity? I employ the term “intersectionally aware realism” to refer to realist writing that opens up new ways for understanding experiences of discrimination and oppression by contextualizing differences that arise from the intersections of gender, race, class, ethnicity, sexuality and geographic location.3 As a highly particularized medium of reflection, literature challenges the use of social groupings that simplify the complexities of social life. Intersectionally aware realist writing, in particular, invites readers to recognize how categories such as “women,” “working-class people,” or “racial and ethnic minorities” have limited efficacy in portraying the complexities of contemporary transcultural reality, as they mask over differing expectations and experiences within and across such categories. In intersectionally aware fiction, individual characters derive varying amounts of privilege and discrimination from multiple intersecting systems of oppression that frame human experience. As individual characters occupy numerous and overlapping social locations, they simultaneously experience both discrimination and privilege. Thus, echoing Patricia Hill Collins’s words on interlocking systems of power, one may observe that in intersectionally aware writing “the matrix of domination contains few pure victims or oppressors” (1990, 287). Furthermore, the simultaneous vulnerability and autonomy experienced by characters in intersectionally aware realist texts opens up spaces to consider the questions of agency, resistance and coalition building within a productive context of power. Salient categories or social locations can never be predetermined or finalized, and consequently intersectionally aware realism, like intersectionality, “requires reflexivity and reflection on 3 Drawing on Patricia Hill Collins’s (1990) conception of multifaceted interlocking systems of power, intersectionality scholars see gender as taking meaning in relation to class, race/ethnicity, citizenship status and other social locations (Shields 2008).

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producing knowledge, precisely because knowledge production is laced with power” (Hankivsky 2014, 259). The selective reading of Angie Cruz’s 2019 novel Dominicana offered in the following section of this essay can be situated in the context of a current renewal of interest in narrative re-mappings of urban space that shift emphasis from an earlier postmodern preoccupation with fragmentation and dissolution, to a rethinking of the transcultural present and of urban belonging through the crafting of an intersectionally aware realism. Through the act of narrating the experience of mobility across urban space from the point of view of an undocumented young female immigrant, Angie Cruz’s Dominicana draws the reader into a cognitive renegotiation of the meaning of belonging, visibility, and one’s “right to the city” delivered in an intersectionally aware realist mode. The reader is called to navigate the intersectional complexity that is meticulously woven in the narrative, a complexity which blends colonial legacies, postcolonial antagonisms, migratory routes and recycled patterns of victimization within the urban setting of New York. My argument is that in Angie Cruz’s Dominicana female urban mobility is narrated, re-narrated and revised through the main character’s re-readings of her urban emplacement. These increasingly nuanced, and often conflicting, re-readings function as a feminist political act that (a) claims urban space, or the right to the city, for the diasporic, racialized and gendered protagonist positioned within the American metropolis; and (b) negotiates the limits of the language of rights when claiming space and visibility for the gendered and racialized bodies of illegal immigrants. Thus the urban landscape in Dominicana offers the context for the staging of the interlocking forces that condition the racialized, diasporic narrator’s growing intersectional awareness of her right to urban space—or the lack thereof. In this way, the novel can be read as indicative of the reconstructive tendency of realism after postmodernism, a realism driven by an optimistic ethics of transformation, which nevertheless paradoxically hosts the seeds of its own self-questioning critique.

Intersectionally Aware Re-mappings of Urban (Un)belonging in Angie Cruz’s Dominicana While the realist narration in Dominicana fleshes out Ana’s reconstructive transformation through her gradual insertion within New York urban space, Ana’s growth into intersectional awareness gradually cautions the

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attentive reader against a facile reading of Dominicana as a celebration of the American promise of democratic inclusion. Ana’s complex situatedness in the U.S. is defined by her limited access to public spaces and to the rights they represent. The selective reading of Cruz’s novel offered in this section of the essay traces some of the ways the intersectionally aware, realist city-narrative after postmodernism reflects both a nuanced sensitivity for located, reconstructive transformations, and a self-reflexive acknowledgment of the limits of discourses about human rights and social change. Dominicana is a first person narrative delivered in the present tense by the fifteen-year-old protagonist and narrator, Ana Canción. Ana is a mixed-race Dominican girl who in the opening sequences of the novel lives in the Dominican countryside. The first part of the novel is set in the Dominican Republic and highlights the conditions under which Ana and her family live and which eventually lead Ana to submit to familial pressure to accept an arranged marriage with a thirty-two-year-old Dominican man, Juan. Juan already resides in the U.S. and the marriage is arranged in order to eventually facilitate the immigration of Ana’s entire family to the U.S. Parts Two to Six of Dominicana offer a portrait of life in New York from Ana’s viewpoint. Ana abruptly transitions from an innocent teenager to an undocumented female immigrant and an underage wife who suffers domestic abuse at the hands of her husband. Significantly, the main plot is set in 1965, the year the U.S. invaded the Dominican Republic, a period in history which also coincided with the height of the Civil Rights movement in the U.S. Angie Cruz’s Dominicana employs an intersectionally aware realism to map the violent geographies of injustice and oppression that emerge from intersecting practices of colonialism, imperialism, economic exploitation and racialization. In order for the reader to appreciate the multidimensional axes of oppression which shape Ana’s experience in Washington Heights, New York, the novel weaves a multiscalar tapestry of dependencies that shape Ana’s experience of space and belonging prior to her migration. Gender, class, race and age determine the reasons and conditions under which Ana emigrates from her homeland; they shape Ana’s experience of domesticity in New York; and they also condition Ana’s means of navigating urban space and refiguring her sense of identity within the U.S. In the opening section of the novel, Ana and her family are portrayed living under dire conditions in a small house in the small town of Guayacanes near Santo Domingo. Ana, her parents,

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her three siblings and their two orphaned cousins all share the same limited domestic space. Their decrepit house floods when it rains and “the power outages can last fifteen hours at a time” (Cruz 2019a, 3). The family cannot afford to immigrate, and thus the marriage offer by paleskinned Juan Ruis, who already makes a successful living in New York, appears as a solution to the socioeconomic conditions that confine Ana and her relatives to poverty. It is important that the man Ana is forced to marry is presented as superior—in terms of class—due to his light-skinned countenance. From the opening pages the novel traces Ana’s complex relationship to race and colorism. Ana’s mother—who is of black ancestry and is phenotypically dark-skinned—pressures Ana to marry light-skinned Juan, for it would be “better for the children’s sake,” since “[d]ark children suffer too much” (38). It is important for the reader to be aware of the Dominican Republic’s racially stratified society, which has been branded by the legacies of colonialism and Dictator Rafael Trujillo’s racist regime.4 Ana herself is presented as a mixed-raced, light-skinned girl, whose green eyes are a “winning lottery-ticket” she has inherited from her white grandfather (11). Her blessing is also a burden, however, as Ana’s personal needs and desires, and even her basic human rights, become overshadowed by what is presented by the mother as Ana’s debt to her kin: an arranged marriage that will guarantee the family’s immigration to the U.S. Ana’s dreams of New York as a place that guarantees upward social mobility are violently shattered by Juan’s decision to give Ana a fake passport so as to facilitate her entry into the U.S. as an underage bride. Ana’s status as an undocumented immigrant comes to bear upon her already precarious position as an underage child-bride, and a poverty-stricken young woman whose lack of formal education and English language skills place her in a position of complete dependency upon her husband. Upon her arrival in New York Ana observes: “I feel ant small among all those

4 Discourses of anti-blackness and pro-European values made lighter skin-color a sign of status, for it connoted closer ties to Europe. For an insightful account of Dominican Americans’ complex relationship with the legacies of Spanish and French colonial forces that occupied the island of Hispaniola see Silvio Torres-Saillant and Ramona Hernández The Dominican Americans (1998). Even though Dominicana takes place in a twentiethcentury postcolonial context, the legacy of colonialism and American cultural imperialism determines the socioeconomic and racialized positioning of the female protagonist, Ana, both on the island and as an immigrant in the U.S.

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skyscrapers” (52). Juan shows her around the apartment, and as he “jiggles his keys” (55) he instructs Ana not to open the door to anyone (56). He then promptly departs without further explanation accompanied by his brother, César (57). Ana’s spatial confinement within domestic space is foregrounded throughout the first part of the novel through the recurring image of her looking outside the window from the sixth-floor Washington Heights apartment she resides in. Ana observes urban life unfolding on the streets below. Among the events Ana witnesses through her window is the confusion that follows Malcolm X’s assassination at the Audubon Ballroom (76–78). However, at this early stage of her life in New York, Ana has no understanding of the historical circumstances that frame her experience; she is unaware of Malcolm X’s role as one of the leaders of the Civil Rights movement, much as she is unaware of her own rights within her new sociocultural context. Days later Ana remarks: “I have not yet left the apartment by myself. Always with César or Juan. Most days I don’t leave the apartment at all” (79). In fact, as she admits, she doesn’t even have her own key: “Juan says he hasn’t had time to make a copy. Always an excuse” (79). Practically imprisoned behind the walls of domesticity, Ana succumbs to the traditional gender roles imposed: she takes care of the household and suffers abuse from her alcoholic husband. Juan ominously warns Ana: “Be careful, Ana. I have eyes everywhere, you understand me?” thus intimidating her into submission and spatial self-restriction (61). In Dominicana Ana’s experiences within private and public space become inextricably intertwined and are equally political. Ana spends weeks “cleaning and organizing” Juan’s apartment (64). When Juan calls her his “princess” and his “wife,” Ana scathingly observes that she sees herself mostly as “the flat-chested sister who had to do most of the chores” (65), thus linking her current position as a married woman in the U.S. to her prior role as a daughter in the Dominican Republic devoted to the wellbeing of her family. Ana’s internal monologue “[d]inner’s ready, will always be ready, until death do us part” (64) graphically illustrates the suffocating manner in which Ana perceives herself bound by gender expectations and traditional mores. Ana is metaphorically imprisoned by a sense of duty toward her family. She is completely dependent upon her husband and has no resources of her own in her new surroundings. She is subjected to physical, sexual and emotional abuse by Juan and her status as an undocumented immigrant places her more firmly in a state of

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precarity. In her study Precarious Life, Judith Butler explores the distinction between lives that matter, for they are deemed human enough to be protected, and those that are “unreal” and thus fall short of the claims of justice. “If violence is done against those who are unreal, then, from the perspective of violence, it fails to injure or negate those lives since those lives are already negated,” Butler argues (2004, 33). Ana is “unreal” in the sense that as an illegal female immigrant and an underage dependent wife she cannot claim her rights in America. In Cruz’s novel, Ana’s precarity and her susceptibility to violence are intersectionally defined by other dimensions of her identity, echoing Kimberle Crenshaw’s observation that “the violence many women experience is often shaped by other dimensions of their identities, such as race and class” (1991, 1242). Ana senses the ominous threat of physical violence permeating her every interaction with her husband, whose proclivity to violent outbursts further entraps Ana within their household. Ostensibly, Juan does everything he can to avoid the risk of allowing public opinion to intrude upon his private matters, thus further enhancing the social exclusion Ana experiences by virtue of her race and class. On one occasion Juan slaps Ana for disregarding his warning against opening the door to neighbors (69). Steadily Juan’s physical aggression escalates and Ana is systematically subjected to recurrent instances of marital rape (89, 90). When Ana finally ventures outside the apartment alone, it is because she has been summoned by Juan to run some errands for him (79). Juan’s rules and patriarchal dictums echo in Ana’s head and condition her movement through public space. They guide her negotiation of streets, her access to buildings: “Be careful. Don’t talk to strangers. Don’t go into any buildings that aren’t stores. Don’t look the police officers or drug addicts in the eye. Cross the street if necessary. And don’t snail about” (80) Juan admonishes. David Storey (2012) has shed light to the ways in which territoriality is deeply embedded in social relations. People are socialized into thinking about space in certain ways, by identifying with a particular locality, neighborhood or town. Urban fabric, in particular, is geographically racialized and gendered, and the contestation of spatial boundaries often leads to conflict. Juan’s warnings reflect his awareness of the ways in which Ana’s gender and racial characteristics and her undocumented status work cumulatively to position her as vulnerable potential target of aggression—whether by institutionalized space monitoring forces (“police officers”) or by other variously disenfranchised street dwellers (“drug addicts”). At the same time, one can argue that Juan uses the fear of

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public spaces he has instilled in Ana as a tool to further perpetuate her social exclusion. It should also be noted that Ana’s initial spatial confinement within domesticity also entails her lack of access to education, as Ana’s schooling in English is far from a priority for her husband, Juan (87). Thus, the language barrier presents yet another obstacle Ana has to overcome. When, in the aforementioned scene, Ana enters the post-office, as instructed by Juan, she immediately observes that “[e]verything is in English,” and the cashier “talks as if her mouth is full,” a comment that asserts Ana’s exclusion by virtue of her minimal English language skills (79). Ana nods at the cashier, without understanding what she is agreeing to (79). Nevertheless, for the first time Ana enjoys a sense of fulfilment, she feels included in the cityscape by virtue of interacting successfully with a city-dweller, the post-office cashier: “Once outside I high-five the sun. Wepa! Mamá, look, a real New Yorker, doing my errands, a fistful of money” (79). This first instance of successful communication with a stranger triggers a sense of self-vindication within Ana. It offers her a sense of confidence that comes with the feeling of recognition within a city that symbolizes the American Dream. Nevertheless, the irony behind the expression a “fistful of money”—which is nothing but a fistful of change Ana must deliver safely back to her husband—cannot go unnoticed by the attentive reader. Ana’s elation at communicating with a fellow New Yorker—so to speak—is short-lived. On her way back to the apartment, Ana comes across a police car and notices an officer writing up a ticket. The ever-present threat of deportation resurfaces, and Ana panics. Kimberle Crenshaw (1991) has duly noted the correlation between immigrant women’s legal status and their subjection to domestic abuse: it is often the case that their fear of deportation ensures that immigrant women prefer to endure marital violence than face the law as illegal subjects. It is not surprising then that Ana briskly chooses to run back to her abusive husband rather than seek official help. Ana retraces her steps in fear and loses her way in the crisscrossing city streets: Nothing looks familiar […]. The ground beneath me spins. The faces of strangers enlarge. Juan’s waiting, he’ll be late to work. A car slows down and rolls down his window. Words come out of a man’s mouth. I run (80). The city that appeared a promising site for cross-cultural communication when Ana left the post-office, after having successfully completed a transaction in a public service, is suddenly recast as a threatening, unfamiliar space. Ana metaphorically loses her bearings (“the ground beneath me spins”)

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and her surroundings transmogrify into a grotesque setting befitting a nightmare (“the faces of strangers enlarge”). The words gushing out of a strange man’s mouth are not heard: at this instance the mere physical act of communication is interpreted as a menacing act of potential aggression against her. The intersectionally aware realist narration in Dominicana fleshes out Ana’s gradual insertion within urban space in terms of her gradual acknowledgment of the complex situatedness that defines her access to public spaces and to the “rights” they represent. More precisely, Ana becomes more self-reflexively aware of the interlocking parameters of her spatial entrapment within domesticity. Ana’s first-person narration gradually includes implicit and explicit references to Juan’s experience of racialization in the U.S. and his concomitant financial and social struggles in New York (86). Ana becomes aware of the fact that Juan’s socioeconomic status as a Dominican immigrant limits his access to the job-market. Her perceptive descriptions also become increasingly more sensitive to her husband’s vulnerability in the public sphere. Ana notably observes that even though Juan “is a bull” in the house, “[o]n the street he looks small, vulnerable, even scared” (113). Thus Ana points toward a cyclical pattern of victimization, in which her husband holds the position of both a victim of American racial prejudice and a perpetrator of violence against his multiply disenfranchised wife. Indicative of the reconstructive thrust of Dominicana is the fact that the intersectional critique of patriarchy, racialization and neocolonial practices performed by the novel is attended by an eye for transformation and renegotiation of relationship patterns. It is worth noting that the two most powerful and deforming relationships that stand as sources of knowledge in Ana’s life, her relationship with her domineering mother and her relationship with her patriarchal husband, are gradually undermined for their stultifying impact. Yet the novel does not reject the role of motherhood, or the value of heterosexual partnership per se. Rather, it is by rewriting the narrative contours of her intimate relationships that Ana summons the power to claim her space within the urban landscape of New York. As the story unfolds, Ana’s illicit encounter with the transgressive forces of desire through her affair with her brother-in-law, César, marks a shift in Ana’s socio-spatial perception: they trigger a further sharpening of her awareness of her urban surroundings. Unlike Juan, César is not authoritarian or controlling; he treats Ana as an equal partner and

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gives her the space to experience agency and independence for the first time. The author herself has observed that Ana’s affair with César is one of Ana’s central acts of resistance (Interview with Vinson, 2019b). More precisely, as the violence and political instability increases in the Dominican Republic, Juan returns for a short visit to the Dominican Republic to take care of his business there. Juan leaves his pregnant wife, Ana, in the care of his brother César. When freed from her husband’s threatening presence, Ana finds herself free to indulge in geographic urban exploration and self-discovery within the streets of New York. During Juan’s absence César introduces Ana to a very different cityexperience, one that is suffused with potential and the promise of change. Ana starts attending the “free ESL lessons” organized at the rectory next to her neighborhood’s church (Cruz 2019a, 183). Notably, as Ana walks down the street on her way to attend her first ESL lesson, her mind starts issuing warnings that echo the many ways in which Ana’s cognitive perception of the urban world outside her domestic sphere has been marked by Juan’s patriarchal threats and her underprivileged sociocultural status: “What if immigration grabs me and takes me away like they did the sister of Giselle from El Basement?” (183). At the same time, her narrative trajectory is already one of self-revisioning and self-re-mapping, a trajectory further propelled by the knowledge that she is soon to become a mother, for she is pregnant with Juan’s child: I walk with my keys in my hand, to punch someone in the eye if they accost me. I know to introduce myself to the teacher – in English. Alo. Elooo. I’m no longer the child my mother shipped. I am about to become a mother. There’s no reason to be afraid. People walk the city streets every day and survive. I just need to mind my own business and when I see trouble walk the other way. (183)

Pregnancy makes Ana feel empowered. She progressively conceptualizes her relationship with her expected daughter as a transformative one, and envisions her as “[her] conspirator, [her] companera, [her] everything” (170). Experiencing pregnancy as an openness toward possibility and multiplicity, Ana becomes more self-consciously political as she begins to reflect upon women’s rights and their plight under patriarchal marriage arrangements. Ana wonders “[h]ow many women get to choose who to

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marry and can truly dictate their own life” and vows to raise her own daughter so that she “ha[s] choices” (160). It should also be noted that through her morally transgressive relationship with César, Ana also becomes familiar with alternative routes to making money that challenge the exploitative structures of the market economy. César, who works in the Garment District, among other places, teaches Ana how to sew (67). Most importantly, he introduces her to New York’s black market in small goods and services for, in his words, “in New York everyone needs a side hustle to survive. You can’t just wait until someone finds you a job, you gotta have skills and get that cash” (68). One may argue that making money and experiencing desire become the liberal and liberating factors that cumulatively propel Ana’s growth into what at a first glance could be read as autonomy and independence. Ana is allowed to explore her sensuality “[u]ninhibited, unconstrained, and free” (263). Ana’s gradual insertion within urban space and culture is similarly delivered through a narrative blending of possibility and desire and is textually mapped through Ana’s increasingly bold ventures into down-town New York. As she walks through the city, she observes, discovers and narrates urban space: “I go by the park near the river and watch the children play. I look into restaurants on Broadway and watch how carefully the waiters carry large trays filled with elaborate dishes” Ana narrates (191). Ana takes pleasure in strolling through the city and watching its inhabitants perform their daily routines. Ana’s trajectory is one of exploring neighborhoods beyond her own, of reorienting herself, acknowledging intersections and borders, detours and shortcuts. Nevertheless, Ana’s insertion into the urban landscape is never consolidated; she never occupies urban space comfortably. Her growing territorial knowledge is riddled by increasing intersectional awareness of the many ways gender, race, class and citizenship status combine to limit her movements, condition her spatial experience and limit her access to the pleasures of city-life. When Ana finally summons the courage to venture into the streets of central New York alone at night, the language she employs to convey her experience denotes knowledge of urban spatialities and the politics that define territoriality and make nocturnal New York potentially lethal for women like her: Against all the warning on the news about potential riots, about holdups and drive-by shootings, at this most dangerous hour, I turn east on 170th Street and head all the way to Amsterdam Avenue.

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I contemplate whether to walk on the road and risk getting hit by a drunk driver or to stay on the desolate and dark side-walks, where mice scurry. A chill crosses my nape. Someone has busted the lamps across the street, turning High Bridge Park into a black hole. If I venture into the park I will surely disappear forever. (258)

Dominicana depicts Ana’s profound desire to be incorporated in her urban surroundings, yet it also underlines her growing intersectional awareness of the powers that have marginalized her—and in all probability will keep on marginalizing her—within the urban metropolis. Ana may in the above excerpt appear cognizant of the tumultuous social and political context she is part of, being caught up in the Civil Rights riots of the 1960s; she may appear wary of different kinds of risk that the urban setting poses for women, and able to negotiate their parameters. Yet Ana’s bold claiming of presence and space within urban landscape does not suffice to redress the multiscalar practices of spatial injustice that constantly remind Ana of her vulnerable position within her urban surroundings as an immigrant woman of colour: I take long walks around the neighbourhood. I go into Woolworth and study all the bottles of lotions and hair products […] but the man behind the counter looks at me as if he doesn’t want me there. So much of the city belongs to other people. Not wanting trouble, I leave. (191)

Even though Ana is light-skinned for Dominican standards, her insertion within American urban space involves Ana’s experience of racialization through her exclusion from certain spaces reserved for white citizens only. Dominicana traces Ana’s journey toward feminist intersectional awareness, a journey that contributes to her understanding that social justice requires solidarity across different, albeit interrelated, groups beyond the realm of identity politics. On certain occasions she offers food to the underprivileged, “to the elderly who find refuge during the day under the large maple trees” on her way home back from English Class (223). Most importantly, Ana’s growth in Dominicana is graphically mapped through her transition from urban invisibility, into conscious mobility and, eventually, into political engagement through participation in an anti-war street demonstration. In one of her walks Ana comes across a

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march of protesters demonstrating against the Vietnam War. She joins the masses and becomes part of the collective: We march down-town against traffic, filling the streets, halting the delivery trucks, buses, and cars. Our breaths in sync […] The police hover nearby with clubs, waiting, waiting […] From my living room window, the protests seem loud and chaotic, but once inside of it, I feel weightless. (295)

Here, Ana actively takes part in stalling the flow of urban traffic and diverting the course of vehicles, thus impacting on the rhythms of the city that have shaped her own sense of urban embodied emplacement. The potential danger that the streets have always represented for Ana, here transmutes into a tool for collective empowerment. Ana links her arms to other protesters’ arms. Feeling strong as part of a collective rally for justice, she finally occupies urban space defiantly: Suddenly, we’re sitting. The traffic jams. There’s no turning back. I don’t care that my skirt will be full of street dirt. Chants rip through my body. Together we’re strong. So strong. This is why we sit. This is why we say no. This is why we link arms. (295)

Ana’s peaceful, yet provocative act of collective political resistance against the aggression and violence of war is a cry against all forms of injustice. Her reclamation of urban space in this scene goes beyond a localized claim for territorial recognition. Ana’s sense of entitlement to space and rights as a human being has acquired a transcultural and global political dimension. This final scene of political mobilization brings Ana from her living room window down to the streets, where she feels she belongs, for, emboldened by collective camaraderie, she feels “weightless” (295); she no longer “feel[s] ant small among all those skyscrapers” (52). In the closing sections of Dominicana the narrator’s hope for transformation and self-empowering change becomes even more accentuated. Within the space of a few pages Ana refuses to elope with César and abandon her family. Ana is joined in New York by her mother and younger brother, Lenny. She gives birth to a baby girl and is separated from her abusive husband, Juan, though they still live under the same roof because Ana cannot afford to pay her own rent. In the final scene of the novel, Ana

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is pushing her daughter’s stroller as she walks through her neighborhood in the company of her mother and younger brother (318). Ana enters the convenience store near her apartment and is greeted by the owner in the following words: “New York looks good on you, he says. You planning to stick around? I look out to see Mamá and Lenny. They’re all bundled up, eagerly waiting for me to return, their eyes wide and fresh. Yes, I say. Yes, I am” (319). Ana is determined to stay in New York. She hopes that now that she has an American-born daughter, she will be eligible for permanent residence (202). Ana envisions a future where her mother “will work at a lamp factory across the bridge in New Jersey,” and “when the baby qualifies for daycare, [Ana] will join her” (290). Ana admits that her mother and brother sleep in the bedroom with her. Her estranged husband, Juan, still shares the same living space with Ana and her family because they have “no choice,” until they “make enough money to cover the rent” themselves (318). Nevertheless, in spite of this precarious reality, Ana expresses deep hope about her future, as she says to her mother: “soon I’m going to go to school and study accounting so I know how to manage all our business” (318). The optimism registered in the closing pages of Dominicana is almost self-defeating. How should the reader interpret the novel’s final scenes? Ana rejects her husband and her lover and reunites with her mother, who transforms from the figure of quasi-patriarchal oppression that she has been all along, into a caring, enlightened mother figure and protector. Is this a celebration of Ana’s growth into feminist solidarity? Should Ana be read as a subject who is successfully incorporated into American urban topography and delivered into the empowering embrace of sisterhood? The novel’s emphasis on intersectional awareness and precarity invites the reader to surmise that the optimism heralded by the possibility of inclusion and solidarity in the closing sections of Dominicana matters, if only because it fosters perseverance among those systemically excluded. Despite the novel’s ambiguous ending, or perhaps encouraged by it, one can argue that an intersectionally aware realism after postmodernism, of the kind found in Angie Cruz’s novel, exhibits a dedication to the project of justice, even while acknowledging strong systemic resistance to change.

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By Way of Conclusion Angie Cruz’s Dominicana employs physical mobility through urban space and territorial knowledge to express a symbolic inclusion of a racialized, lower-class woman—and in this particular case an undocumented female immigrant—into the space of the American metropolis. In Dominicana the act of narrating the movement of a previously marginalized female character in an urban setting becomes a political statement: Ana’s urban mobility leaves an imprint on the fabric of New York; it disturbs and refigures urban landscape. At the same time, however, the female, racialized protagonist’s access to public spaces remains problematic and curtailed by interlocking forms of power that disenfranchise her. Thus, Cruz’s complex weaving of an intersectionally aware realism challenges straightforward claims regarding the right to the city of hitherto marginalized subjects. In the wake of critical legacies bequeathed by twentieth-century theorists of space, there has been a gradual shift in the way space is being perceived: rather than being approached as an experience defined by boundaries, space has been increasingly conceptualized as “social morphology” (Lefebvre 1974, 94).5 This “social morphology” is currently being mapped by theorists through a direct reference to the claims of political justice. In his study Seeking Spatial Justice Edward Soja has elaborated on the link between the notion of occupation of space and questions pertaining to human rights in urban settings. Soja argues that “there exists a mutually influential and formative relation between the social and the spatial dimensions of human life, each shaping the other in similar ways” (2010, 4). Or, as Doreen Massey has put it, space is always “under construction” (2005, 9). “Perhaps,” Massey has suggested, “we could imagine space as a simultaneity of stories-so-far” (9). It is in this sense that the literary inclusion in contemporary works of fiction of racialized, diasporic female characters narrating the city enriches the different kinds of stories told about American urban space so far, and thus invites contemporary readers to rethink and extend their understanding of the American metropolis, occupancy and belonging. Intersectionally aware realist writing about the urban by contemporary feminist, diasporic writers inserts previously marginalized female

5 In his 1974 study The Production of Space Lefebvre famously argued: “Space is a social morphology: it is to lived experience what form itself is to the living organism, and just as intimately bound up with function and structure” (94).

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bodies within N. American urban landscape. Emphasis falls on articulating the experience of situated emplacement in all its historically imbued complexity, albeit with an eye for reconstructive transformations. Intersectionally aware realist fiction after postmodernism reflects both a nuanced sensitivity for located, empowering revisions of belonging, and a poststructurally aware acknowledgment of the intersecting power structures that limit equal access to spaces and the rights they represent. Any discussion of the twenty-first-century feminist urban American novel after postmodernism must take into account the importance of contemporary writing by women of diasporic, racialized backgrounds that explore urban centers as loci for intersectional rethinking of belonging and civic inclusion.

References Bentley, Nick. 2014. Postmodern Cities. In The Cambridge Companion to the City in Literature, ed. Kevin R. McNamara, 175–187. Cambridge University Press. Beville, Maria. 2013. Zones of Uncanny Spectrality: The City in Postmodern Literature. English Studies 94 (5): 603–617. https://doi.org/10.1080/001 3838X.2013.795738. Brand, Dionne. 2005. What We All Long for. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Brand, Dionne. 2014. Love Enough. Toronto: Knopf Canada. Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. Collins, Patricia Hill. 1990. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Crenshaw, Kimberle. 1991. Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color. Stanford Law Review 43 (6): 1241–1299. https://doi.org/10.2307/1229039. Cruz, Angie. 2019a. Dominicana. New York: Flatiron Books. Cruz, Angie. 2019b. In Dominicana, a Child Bride Longs for Home. Interview by Arriel Vinson: Electric Literature, September 5. https://electricliterature. com/in-dominicana-a-child-bride-longs-for-home/. Accessed 9 March 2023. Cruz, Angie. 2022. How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water. New York: Flatiron Books. Ellin, Nan. 2007 [1996]. Postmodern Urbanism. Cambridge, MA and Oxford: Blackwell. Escalante, Sarah Ortiz and Elizabeth L. Sweet. 2013. Migrant Women’s Safety: Framing, Policies, and Practices. In Building Inclusive Cities: Women’s Safety

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and the Right to the City, eds. Carolyn Whitzman et al., 53–72. New York: Routledge. Fenster, Tovi. 2005. Identity Issues and Local Governance: Women’s Everyday Life in the City. Social Identities 11 (1): 23–39. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 13504630500100472. Funk, Wolfgang, Florian Gross, and Irmtraud Huber, eds. 2012. The Aesthetics of Authenticity: Medial Constructions of the Real. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Hankivsky, Olena. 2014. Rethinking Care Ethics: On the Promise and Potential of an Intersectional Analysis. The American Political Science Review 108 (2): 252–264. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43654371 Harvey, David. 2012. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. London: Verso. Hassan, Ihab. 1981. Cities of the Mind, Urban Words: The Dematerialization of Metropolis in Contemporary American Fiction. In Literature and the American Urban Experience: Essays on the City and Literature, eds. Michael C. Jaye and Ann Chalmers Watts. Rutgers University Press. Hassan, Ihab. 2003. Beyond Postmodernism: Toward an Aesthetic of Trust. angelaki 8 (1): 3–11. Huber, Irmtraud. 2014. Literature After Postmodernism: Reconstructive Fantasies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Isoke, Zenzele. 2013. Urban Black Women and the Politics of Resistance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kelly, Adam. 2010. David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction. In Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays, ed. David Hering, 131–146. Austin, TX: Sideshow Media Group. Kern, Leslie. 2020. Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World. London: Verso. Keunen, Bart, and Bart Eeckhout. 2003. Whatever Happened to the Urban Novel? New Perspectives for Literary Urban Studies in the Era of Postmodern Culture. In Postmodern New York City: Transfiguring Spaces—RaumTransformationen, eds. Günter H. Lenz and Utz Riese, 53–69. Heidelberg: Winter Verlag. Lefebvre, Henri. 1968. Le Droit a la Ville [The right to the City]: Anthropos. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991 [1974]. The Production of Space, trans. Donald NicholsonSmith. Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell. Lopez, Jose, and Garry Potter, eds. 2001. After Postmodernism: An Introduction to Critical Realism. New York: Continuum. Massey, Doreen B. 2005. For Space. London: SAGE. Mollett, Sharlene, and Caroline Faria. 2018. The Spatialities of Intersectional Thinking: Fashioning Feminist Geographic Futures. Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 25 (4): 565–577. https://doi.org/10. 1080/0966369X.2018.1454404.

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Munaweera, Nayomi. 2017. What Lies Between Us. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin. Peake, Linda, and Martina Rieker, eds. 2013. Rethinking Feminist Interventions into the Urban. New York and London: Routledge. Peake, Linda et al., eds. 2021. A Feminist Urban Theory for Our Time: Rethinking Social Reproduction and the Urban. Cambridge, MA and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Petrie, Windy Counsell. 2008. A Self-Reflexive Renewal of Realism: Aesthetic Developments in 21st Century Novel. In Postmodernism and After: Visions and Revisions, ed. Regina Rudaityte, 103–110. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Rebein, Robert. 2009. Hicks, Tribes and Dirty Realists: American Fiction After Postmodernism. Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky. Rosario, Nelly. 2002. Song of the Water Saints. New York: Vintage. Saldívar, Ramón. 2011. Historical Fantasy, Speculative Realism, and Postrace Aesthetics in Contemporary American Fiction. American Literary History 23 (3): 574–599. Shields, Stephanie A. 2008. Gender: An Intersectionality Perspective. Sex Roles 59 (5): 301–311. Sloan, Lacey M., Mildred C. Joyner, Catherine J. Stakeman, and Cathryne L. Schmitz, eds. 2018. Critical Multiculturalism and Intersectionality in a Complex World. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Soja, Edward W. 2010. Seeking Spatial Justice. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Storey, David. 2012. Territories: The Claiming of Space. New York and London: Routledge. Tomlinson, Barbara. 2019. Undermining Intersectionality: The Perils of Powerblind Feminism. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Torres-Saillant, Silvio, and Ramona Hernandez. 1998. The Dominican Americans. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Zoboi, Ibi. 2017. American Street. New York: HarperCollins.

CHAPTER 9

Aspects of Mediation: Deceit, Desire, and Post-postmodernity in Paul Auster’s The Locked Room Lona Moutafidou

Introduction Paul Auster’s novel The Locked Room is part of The New York Trilogy, published in 1985. City of Glass and Ghosts precede The Locked Room in printing order. In all three short novels the main characters are ordinary people who unofficially assume the role of a detective in a labyrinthine game of never-ending hypotheses. They find themselves trapped in paralysis while chasing the supposed person of interest. Like puppets at the hands of those who commissioned the detective-like job, the protagonists sink themselves in an aporia so consuming that they verge on the point of existential extinction. Even more, they are haunted by their ever-elusive

L. Moutafidou (B) Department of American Literature and Culture, School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 T. Tsimpouki et al. (eds.), American Studies after Postmodernism, Renewing the American Narrative, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41448-0_9

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target. Steven Alford stresses the trilogy’s challenge to conventional detective fiction: “[t]he solution to the mystery is not the discovery of the criminal ‘other,’ but how the other is implicated in the self-constitution of the investigator” (1995, 19). Steven Bernstein detects such a challenge in The Locked Room, encapsulated in the novel’s “narratorial unreliability, epistemological uncertainty and existential contingency” (1995, 88). Scott A. Dimovitz seems to be sharing a similar viewpoint when he delves into The New York Trilogy’s anti-detective nature, one which prioritizes “dispersal over accumulation, indeterminacy over conclusion” (2016, 615). The scholar goes on to emphasize the moment when Paul Auster’s trilogy departs from the realm of detective fiction and postmodernism altogether. This is when the “meaning-making” quest of the characters leaves the postmodern camp of philosophical solipsism and textual play and becomes an ontological reflection on the structures of a fragmented and partial subjectivity (Dimovitz 2016, 621), its dispersion reflected and arranged on the labyrinthine text-disoriented reader continuum. The impossibility to identify a single crime or a criminal, if any at all, is accompanied by the sense that “[i]nterpretation always mediates reality” (615). If interpretation is subjective and if this subjectivity is fractured and illusive, what becomes of reality when it is mediated by the interpretation of a fragmented self? This essay aims to build on the seminal presence of aspects of mediation in The Locked Room, and on the way in which mediation interferes with the perception of reality and the struggle between Self and Other. As mentioned above, the struggle between fractured subjectivities gets inscribed within the postmodern framework of Auster’s work the same time that it departs from it. The question then, becomes, in which other frameworks can one inscribe the said struggle? Starting with René Girard’s examination of mediated desire in the acclaimed Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, I aim to approach the unnamed narrator’s life as one governed by the haunting structure of triangular, mediated desire. Seeking to “expand the theoretical and hermeneutical reach of [Girard’s] fundamental book” (Antonello and Webb 2015, x), I then aim to build on the post-postmodern articulation of the concept of mediation as exemplified in Auster’s novel and as elaborated by contemporary scholarship (x). My aim is to show how Girard’s study can meet contemporary theories of a different order, the common denominator being an emphasis on processes and aspects of mediation. Hence, the second part of this paper weaves a parallel between the narrator’s mediated mode of

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existence and that of the individual in the contemporary era. The latter is massively governed by the digital mediation of the social media platforms, by effacement and dataveillance, as outlined by such scholars as Zara Dinnen, Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska, and Maria Los. This mediation seems to interfere with our perception of reality and the relationship between fractured Self and phantomatic Other, to remember Girard. All in all, the present reading of the multiple nuances of the notion of mediation in The Locked Room ultimately aims to show that the novel announces the hetero-conditioned modus vivendi of the times to come. In the same way that a 1961 analysis of mediation can open a meaningful dialogue with contemporary theories on our digital media-regulated lives, the narrator’s mode of existence can serve as an example of the formation and constitution of contemporary selfhood. This is one of the reasons why Auster’s “postmodern” text deserves a retrospective, post-postmodern analysis and, consequently, an organic place within American studies in the twenty-first century. Girard’s Mediated Desire and The Locked Room In Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, René Girard offers a thorough study of that category of desire which he names mediated, triangular, metaphysical. The scholar throws light on the mechanics of this type of desire as identified in the structure of major novels by Cervantes, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Proust, and Stendhal. Whereas in true love, as Girard explains, “the passionate person draws the strength of desire from within [themselves]” (1965, 2), in mediated desire “the disciple pursues objects which are determined for [them], or at least seem to be determined for [them], by [a] model […] [w]e shall call this model the mediator of desire” (2). As such, mediated desire presupposes the existence of three distinct yet interrelated poles: first the mediator, or model, secondly the subject of desire, or disciple, and, last, the object of desire. “The spatial metaphor which expresses this triple relationship is obviously the triangle” (2). A fundamental disorientation lies at the heart of this not spontaneous type of desire: “from the moment the mediator’s influence is felt, the sense of reality is lost and judgement is paralyzed” (4). The clouded judgment refers to the nature of the subject’s longing which, despite being borrowed, is not experienced as such: the movement of the genesis of this desire is “so constitutional and primitive that [the subject] completely confuse[s] it with the will to be Oneself” but, also, one self,

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since multiple mediations successively lead to the subject’s fragmentation (4, 91). In the scheme of triangular desire, feelings are also contingent on division and confusion. They can hardly be pure, uncontrived, and genuine. Namely, on a first level, the mediator acts as a pole of attraction for they either possess or covet that object for which the subject feels an irresistible impulse, an impulse which, in the final analysis, is tantamount to that invincible fascination with the mediator. Still, submissive reverence, intense malice, and impotent hatred also accompany that enchantment. Girard emphasizes the blending of fascination with hatred and the incapability of spontaneous desire when he explains that “the person who hates first hates himself for the secret admiration concealed by this hatred” (11). Hatred for the Other, then, camouflages hatred for the Self in the same way that the mediator’s desire informs the subject’s desire. But self-hatred is not solely rooted in secret, enslaved admiration for the Other. Ultimately, “the wish to be absorbed into the substance of the Other implies an insuperable revulsion for one’s own substance” (54). This revulsion may be akin to a feeling of metaphysical paralysis. As such, triangular desire is, last, called metaphysical in the sense that at its origin we can identify “the failure of a more or less conscious attempt at an apotheosis of the self” (63). If the fragmented self feels incapable of reaching apotheosis, a demi-God can serve as domineering model so that a dreg of the divine, metaphysical feeling can be experienced by the subject. But this, to recapitulate, will happen in indirect, mediated fashion through secret worship, paralyzed hate, and copied yearning. In what follows, I will present a close reading of The Locked Room implementing Girard’s theory on mediation with the aim to unearth the tormenting workings of mediated, triangular desire in the novel. The Locked Room takes the reader through a first-person narrative journey of seven years, from 1977 to 1984. The novel commences from the moment that the 30-year-old unnamed narrator, who lives in New York, receives a letter from Sophie, who is introduced as the wife of his former ex-best friend and classmate, Fanshawe. The letter includes an invitation to Sophie’s home, the main reason being Fanshawe’s six-month disappearance. During the visit the narrator is informed that, per his missing friend’s wish, he is to act as the trustee of Fanshawe’s manuscripts, the decision of publishing them depending solely on his own judgement. The narrator finds Fanshawe’s work exceptional and contacts Sophie for a publication plan. The narrator’s constant contact with Sophie, combined with an initial compelling mutual attraction, gradually leads to a romantic

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relationship. The success ensuing the publication of Fanshawe’s books, the relationship with Sophie and his taking care of Ben, Sophie and Fanshawe’s newborn infant, flood the narrator with a feeling of elation until the spell is broken. An unsigned letter arrives, presumably sent by the best friend himself. The letter instructs the narrator to act as if Fanshawe were indeed dead, and to continue fending for Sophie and Ben. The narrator decides to lock the letter’s reception secret inside him. From that point onwards, deceit overwhelms the narrator’s mind. He sinks into inertia, unable to continue his job as an article writer and incapable of composing that book on Fanshawe’s life as agreed with the publisher. The relationship with Sophie is gravely affected by the narrator’s predilection for solitude, his cheating on her with Fanshawe’s own mother and his desperate and unfruitful hunting of an untraceable Fanshawe in Paris. Fanshawe is the one to, finally, send a letter inviting the narrator to a meeting. After the encounter, the disappeared friend vanishes from the picture, the last piece of his patrimony being a red notebook featuring an explanation on his disappearance and entrusted to the narrator on that last meeting. One of the most fundamental elements that is established in the first pages of The Locked Room is the nature of the relationship between the narrator and Fanshawe—the first, following Girard, presented as the subject and the latter as the mediator. Reminiscing his childhood and teenage years with Fanshawe, the narrator admits that “I was [n]ever entirely comfortable in his presence. If envy is too strong a word for what I am trying to say, then I would call it a suspicion, a secret feeling that Fanshawe was somehow better than I was” (Auster 2011, 211). As Girard highlights, “rivalry only aggravates mediation; it increases the mediator’s prestige and strengthens the bond which links the object to this mediator. Thus, the subject is less capable than ever of giving up the inaccessible object” (1965, 13). Girard’s theory masterfully explains the narrator’s succumbing to the venerated and envied rival’s publishing request, a request which would bring the imitator close to the inaccessible object, namely, the rival’s success. The narrator’s fascination with the model’s accomplishment and his own inclination to self-deception is revealed when he conveniently confesses that “given the strain of reconciling myself to the [publication] project, it was probably necessary for me to equate Fanshawe’s success with my own” (Auster 2011, 233). Longing to copy and taste the rival’s success, the narrator boasts that his article on Fanshawe is one of the most exquisite things he has ever composed.

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The indomitable desire to savor the fruits of Fanshawe’s achievement is tied to the fatal, immediate captivation by another object within the demiGod’s realm, Sophie. It is not accidental that in the paragraph following the one just discussed, the narrator avows that “[u]nderneath it all was the desire to stay in touch with Sophie” (Auster 2011, 233). The two loci of desire are entwined to the degree that the subject’s judgment as to his motives is, per Girard (1965, 4), clouded and paralyzed. Sophie and success indeed represent the two poles of the narrator’s thwarted desire to get access to what the demi-God possesses or could possess. In his effort to explain how the former friend could ever abandon such a charming and beautiful wife as Sophie, the narrator resorts to another convenient conclusion: “Fanshawe had to be dead” (Auster 2011, 203). As Girard states, “the mediator can no longer act his role of model without also acting or appearing to act the role of obstacle” (1965,7). A persistent obstacle which had to be eliminated for, as the narrator admits, “[a]t this early stage, Fanshawe was still there with us... the invisible force that had brought us together […] [a]s long as we avoided the real subject, the spell would not be broken” (Auster 2011, 228). The spell refers to what Girard characterizes as “the evil spell of vain rivalry” (1965, 211), a spell which enables courtship the same moment that it impedes it. The outcome of obstructed access to the forbidden fruit is fired-up desire: “[T]he fact is, never was such a kiss, and in all my life I doubt there can ever be such a kiss again” with the narrator mentioning that “[he] spent the night in Sophie’s bed, and from then on it became impossible to leave it” (Auster 2011, 235, 236). As the story proceeds, the narrator claims access to another object within the mediator’s territory of “possessions,” namely, Mrs. Jane Fanshawe. At the early stages of his attraction to Sophie, the narrator is unaware of the model’s debilitating spell. Still, copulating with Jane Fanshawe immediately gives way to a bitter tasting of Fanshawe’s influence as well as of the wish to exterminate him. Thus, amorous fascination is, here, stripped naked, posing, following Roberta Rubenstein, as a desire to kill, “to annihilate Fanshawe entirely through this symbolic transgression of the incest taboo […] the ‘son’ (having already taken Fanshawe’s wife) acts out the forbidden Oedipal desire for sexual union with his mother” (2008, 258). “I was fucking out of hatred, and I turned it into an act of violence, grinding away at this woman as though I wanted to pulverize her. I had entered my own darkness […] I was using her to attack Fanshawe himself […] I wanted Fanshawe to be dead […] I was

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going to track him down and kill him” (Auster 2011, 268). Determination to locate Fanshawe conceals the drive to possess the rival and whatever he symbolizes—success, access to the female gender’s sex, attention, and affection. Yet, remembering Girard (1965, 10,13) this deadly wish is accompanied by impotent, paralyzed hatred; the resolution to acquire what Fanshawe has proved futile. As does the plan of tracing Fanshawe. In the next part of the story the narrator turns into a detective, or, as mentioned before, into an anti-detective. In a reversal of roles, the narrator reckons that “[t]he strange thing was not that I might have wanted to kill Fanshawe, but that I sometimes imagined he wanted me to kill him” (Auster 2011, 270). This realization leaves the narrator in severe self-doubt, and the robust armor of a god set out to destroy is shuttered. The disciple’s wish to eliminate the rival is yet another effect of imitation, that of Fanshawe’s own death wish. The narrator professes that after receiving Fanshawe’s letter, every attempt to imagine Fanshawe stumbles on “one impoverished image: the door of a locked room” (Auster 2011, 292).1 “This room, I now discovered, was located inside my skull” (293). Rubenstein studies the symbolic space of the skull as a site of memory (2008, 258). This memory resembles that of a traumatized individual in that it is fragmented (Van Der Kolk and Van der Hart 1995, 176). Fragmentation is further linked to the experience of the fractured self. Fractured and impotent because deprived of the sense of auto-inspired desire, the narrator verges on the limits of self-detachment, the memories of hunting Fanshawe in Paris subsequently only “com[ing] back in fragments […] as though [he] were watching someone else. None of it feels like a memory” (Auster 2011, 293). It could be argued that The Locked Room, is indeed, a study on the trauma of mediation. It stands as the narrator’s venture to compile a testimony of his struggle to get hold of that decentered, defeated self, “to actively pursue [Fanshawe’s traumatizing mediation] path and its direction through obscurity, through darkness, and through fragmentation, without quite grasping the full scope and meaning of its implications, without entirely foreseeing where

1 The locked room is the third symbol of enclosure and confinement associated with Fanshawe’s cryptic existence. The childhood toy box in which Fanshawe used to disappear without granting access to anybody else and the open grave in which he immerses himself hours before his father’s death symbolize “Fanshawe’s compulsion toward a death-like solitude... a drive established in childhood” (Bernstein 1995, 96).

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the journey leads and what is the precise nature of its final destination” (Felman 1995, 31). “But if One is always dependent on the Other, in order to know that Other, One would have to know One’s self” (Chénetier 1995, 38). Is selfknowledge the final destination of The Locked Room? Elaborating on the canonical conclusion of narratives of mediation, Girard breathes a scent of hope into the bleak scenery of self-disorientation and self-entrapment. “In renouncing divinity the hero renounces slavery... deception gives way to truth... hatred to love, humiliation to humility, mediated desire to autonomy” (1995, 294). “I don’t hate you. There was a time when I did, but I’m over that now” (Auster 2011, 306). With this phrase the narrator asserts his autonomy from the mediator in their last encounter in Boston. The meeting takes place behind closed, double doors, which enhances Fanshawe’s phantasmal presence in physical terms, this time. The narrator’s struggle to locate Fanshawe is annulled by a series of revelations which create an intertextual link to City of Glass and Ghosts. To be more specific, “like Stillman, Fanshawe claims to have been followed by a detective, Quinn; like Black, he says he traveled in the West; like Quinn, he claims to have camped outside Sophie’s apartment for months, observing Sophie... and the child” (Alford 1995, 28). The narrator’s killing plan is outsmarted, too, when Fanshawe announces that he has consumed poison. Yet, the phrase quoted at the start of the paragraph foreshadows the narrator’s final act of independence. Namely, moments before dying, Fanshawe bequeaths to the narrator a red notebook, reminiscent of the one where Quinn wrote his thoughts in City of Glass . The notebook features a supposedly eloquent explanation for Fanshawe’s actions. The narrator states his determination to not speak about the contents of the notebook for he “understood very little... each sentence erased the sentence before it, each paragraph made the next paragraph impossible... everything remained open, unfinished, to be started again” (Auster 2011, 313). One by one, he decisively throws in a bin the pages of a notebook which could represent the last, post-mortem, symbol of Fanshawe’s mediating influence. In this way, “[t]he hero triumphs in defeat; he triumphs because he is at the end of his resources” (Girard 1965, 294) doubly outsmarted as he is by Fanshawe, not able to comprehend the rival’s explanation for what he did. In “Within and Beyond Mimetic Desire” Luca DiBlasi investigates the concept of acknowledgment of our being both attacked and possessed by mimetic desire within earlier and later Girardian writings. The contemporary scholar explains that Girard’s

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mimetic desire resembles Derrida’s pharmakos by being simultaneously poison and remedy (2015, 47). DiBlasi continues stressing that, following Girard, mimetic theory, albeit being a narcissistic wound—since it foregrounds that desire is not as uninhibited as the modern individual would require it to be—also heals the wound. Examining this healing effect of the acknowledgment of a hetero-predicated defeat in The Locked Room, it could be argued that this is maybe why “for the first time [the narrator] has to look his despair and his nothingness in the face… falls into the abyss but instead he is supported by air” (Girard 1965, 294), boarding the train back home and leaving Fanshawe and the notebook behind.2 The Locked Room and the Post-postmodern Moment: From Girard’s Mediated Desire to Contemporary Media—Co-constituted Selfhood Hence ends The New York Trilogy. As the book was published in the mid1980s, one would wonder whether, following a rigidly temporal logic, it could be placed within the postmodern literary production spectrum. In “The Passing of Postmodernism: A Spectroanalysis of the Contemporary” Josh Toth gives an indirect answer to the question, asserting that “[t]he deathwatch began, one could argue, as early as in the mid-1980s... by 1989 the demise of postmodernism was, for most, an inevitability” (2010, 2). Toth’s remark aligns itself with Dennis Barone’s argument that “to read [Auster’s] fiction merely as illustration for a particular definition of the postmodern is to severely limit it” (1995, 6). It is hardly deniable that The Locked Room ostensibly exhibits features of the postmodern fiction. For instance, the present study touches upon the regenerating revisitation of the tropes of the detective fiction and focuses on the “iconic subject of postmodernism... the fluidity of identities and the fallacy of

2 For an insightful poststructuralist reading of The Locked Room, consult Alison Russell’s paper “Deconstructing The New York Trilogy: Paul Auster’s Anti-Detective Fiction.” The scholar studies the red notebook as an illustration of “Derrida’s writing ‘sous-nature’ —writing under erasure, a ceaseless undoing and preserving of meaning” (2010, 14). Regarding the end of the story and the physical unraveling of the red notebook, she mentions that “the semantic journey never ends but consists of a never-ending loop of arrivals and departures” (16). Applying Russell’s insight to the present reading, it could be argued that what is also never-ending is the journey into the self. Boarding the train back home can consist of multiple stops which can bring one to an always new departure point. Self-discovery can be self-regenerative, the sense of the self rising out of its former, mediated ashes, as in the narrator’s case.

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a unique, undisputed self” (Espejo 2014, 166). On a similar note, it has been argued that the trilogy offers a postmodern investigation of the split individual which “probes the peculiarities of the self” and of its challenge to “boundaries which conceal hierarchies (self-other)” (Barone 1995, 15; Hutcheon as cited in Alford 1995, 28). Such hierarchical structures have been studied here from the angle of mediation. It is exactly this angle, resonant of a postmodern preoccupation with the fractured self, which overwhelms The Locked Room to such a degree that it further endows it with a rigorous “after postmodernism” dynamic. To better explain this, we shall first refer to Irmtraud Huber’s study Literature After Postmodernism: Reconstructive Fantasies. Huber lists “‘neo-realism’ (Rebein and others), ‘renewalism’ (Toth), ‘aesthetics of authenticity’ (Funk), ‘new sincerity’ (Kelly), ‘performatism’ (Eshelman), ‘digimodernism’ (Kirby) […] [as] terms [which] attempt to designate the ‘post-postmodern’” (2014, 45). Studying the contents of The Locked Room from a global angle and bearing in mind the aspects of mediation analyzed therein, traits of both renewalism and neo-realism can be spotted in Auster’s novel. In her discussion of renewalism, Huber mentions that the possibility of the impossible recovery of meaning, truth and mimesis is predicated precisely on the ability to communicate this impossibility. What renewalism offers then, according to Toth, is “the possibility of shared recognition, even if what we recognize is the impossibility of recognition” […] This notable interest in communicative practices and responsibilities and in intersubjective connections could also be seen to respond to the increasing importance of communication and information in today’s world. (2014, 37, 41, emphasis in original)

The narrator’s incapability to report or reproduce the contents of the red notebook’s pages directly points to a sense of an impossible recovery of meaning. His humble acceptance that nothing makes sense and the communication of said acceptance to the reader points towards the recognition of the impossibility of a recognition which is founded on the nonsensical and undecipherable. Elaborating on neo-realism, Huber centers on the new modus operandi of metafictional comments. Their postmodern use as means of disruption of aesthetic illusion is replaced by their current implementation as means of fortification of the authorial voice in a conscious

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and contentious manner (26). “But the authenticity and sincerity of the narrative voice is asserted in the act of exposing its construction […] neorealist truth claims are fragmented ones of an entrenched, involved and subjective sincerity of first-hand experience” (27). In a most casual and unforeseen way, The Locked Room’s reader is exposed to the process of construction of the whole trilogy when the narrator confesses: The entire story comes down to what happened at the end, and without that end inside me now, I could not have started this book. The same holds for the two books that come before it, City of Glass and Ghosts. These three stories are finally the same story, but each one represents a different stage in my awareness of what it is about. I don’t claim to have solved any problems [...] I have been struggling to say goodbye to something for a long time now, and this struggle is all that really matters. The story is not in the words; it is in the struggle. (Auster 2011, 294)

The construction of the trilogy is hence predicated on the incessant struggle of a fragmented, fragile, and sincere subjectivity. The alert reader may detect Auster’s own presence behind the lines, a presence preestablished in City of Glass which features a detective called Auster. As Alford underlines, the narrator is Auster “so long as we understand both the terms ‘narrator’ and ‘author’ as standing for what we might call a locus of external space, one which nominally includes you, me and Paul Auster, author” (1995, 27). Keeping in mind Huber’s reflections, I now aim to present a dialogue between Girard’s approach to mediation, The Locked Room, and contemporary scholarship on mediation. Analysis will implement such concepts as the digital banal, becoming with media, effacement, and dataveillance. My purpose here persists on outlining the text’s global engagement with processes of mediation in post-postmodernity. Such processes will be shown to further render the unnamed narrator’s mediated mode of existence an example and a harbinger of the mediated modus vivendi of the individual in the digital media era. The fact that mediation constitutes our very being in contemporary times is underlined by Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska in Life After New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process. The scholars identify their objective as that of building not just a theory of mediation but a theory of life (2012, xv). They hence approach “mediation [as] becom[ing] a key trope for understanding and articulating our being in, and becoming with, the

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technological world, our emergence and ways of intra-acting with it, as well as the acts and processes of temporarily stabilizing the world into media, agents, relations, and networks ” (Kember and Zylinska 2012, xv, emphasis in original). Kember and Zylinska also stress our inability to separate ourselves from mediation, which is characterized as an all-encompassing, indivisible mechanism which both engulfs and shapes the contemporary individual. In The Digital Banal: New Media and American Literature and Culture, Zara Dinnen links post-postmodernism to postdigital information society and mediation. As the scholar argues, “[d]iscussion of post-postmodernism understands itself in response to the information society” and “is cognizant of many of the sociopolitical aspects of a new media life … as posthuman and nonhuman studies have made clear, the thinking, feeling, interpersonal subject is always mediational” (2018, 94). Following Kember and Zylinska, Dinnen defines the digital banal on the basis of the fundamental unawareness of the subject’s becoming with media and being subject to media. “In other words, the way we use media makes us unaware of the ways we are co-constituted as subjects with media” (2018, 1). The emphasis that both Dinnen, and Kember and Zylinska place on the process of becoming with and being co-constituted with media is resonant of Girard’s proposal of a comprehensive theory of desire and the intersubjective constitution of human identity (Antonello and Webb 2015, ix). A process of co-constitution is registered at the very first pages of The Locked Room which records the narrator’s co-constitution with the mediator, namely Fanshawe. “It seems to me now that Fanshawe was always there. He is the place where everything begins for me, and without him I would hardly know who I am” (Auster 2011, 201). This phrase cleverly ties the very beginning of The Locked Room to an observation on the incipit of the narrator’s existence. A sense of inescapable dependence on Fanshawe’s primordial presence in the narrator’s life reigns in the quote. In a similar fashion, The Locked Room is anchored on Fanshawe’s shadowy presence through a text which heatedly revolves around his character without seeming to treat him as the main protagonist. Fanshawe utterly seems to turn into a fundamental, founding condition for the text—it could be stated that he is the source of inspiration and the imaginative medium

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through which the writer reaches his audience, through which the narrator’s story is incarnated.3 Following Kember and Zylinska, the subject’s existence poses as indivisible from the medium. Going back to Girard, the phrase introduces Fanshawe as a ghostly mediator, the demi-God, the model. In a nutshell, he poses as that co-constituting Other-medium through whom the narrator contends to reach out to a fragmented self, one that, as he acknowledges, he would not know had it not been for Fanshawe. After Sophie’s announcement that Fanshawe wishes his former friend to act as a literary trustee, the narrator observes: “That was how it happened. I succumbed to the flattery of a man who wasn’t there” (Auster 2011, 210). But had not Fanshawe always been there? The observation discloses one of the main problematics of the text, related to the perception of time. This perception fuses the chronological distance separating the narrator’s present self-awareness—signaled by the word “now” in the initial phrase of the novel—and his immersion in self-deceit at the time that the events of the story take place. It could be stated that he is engulfed in what Dinnen pinpoints as perpetual present.4 The scholar describes the process of the subject’s becoming with media as “ongoing, unresolving, perpetually present” (2018, 163), one which “creates a condition of indeterminacy, a surface of questions and critique” (76). According to Dinnen, inertia is closely related to a mediated life. “By recognizing that the digital is banal we can understand our banal interpolations — our distracted swiping, our protracted userness, our unresolving present — as a condition of the computational” (11). All in all, the narrator’s self-constitution and his experience of the sense and passing of time are predicated on indeterminacy and suspension.5 As already seen, due to this condition the narrator frequently sinks into paralysis and protraction, whether this refers to his futile effort to write articles of his own, to the 3 For Girard’s approach to the relationship between the structure of incarnation and the writer’s spiritual metamorphosis consult René Girard, Resurrection from the Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky. 4 Dinnen’s observation seems to create a theoretical continuum between postmodernism and post-postmodernism. In “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” Fredric Jameson designates perpetual change and perpetual present as two of the living parameters of the postmodern individual in the era of multinational, consumer capitalism. 5 Such an experience reverberates with echoes of trauma too for “[trauma] stops the chronological clock and fixes the moment permanently in memory and imagination, immune to the vicissitudes of time” (Van Der Kolk and Van der Hart 1995, 177).

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composition of the antagonist’s biography, or to the inefficient chase of Fanshawe in Paris. Dinnen considers effacement a crucial, ghostly aspect of social media technologies. The scholar reminds us that in our effort to comprehend contemporary culture and the stories told about it, it is peremptory that processes of mediation be recognized as forms of effacement. “When a digital medium is working, it disappears from view,” which means that “‘the digital’ is a reification of the effacing condition of all media” (2018, 4). Likewise, in The Locked Room, Fanshawe’s mediating allure is tied to his disappearance from physical view. The proof that the narrator’s life is massively mediated by the vanished friend’s influence is that Fanshawe’s effacement interestingly harbors his absolute dominion over the former friend’s mind. To offer an example, the narrator’s effort to forget Fanshawe’s first letter—and, hence, the news of his being alive—fails. This happens since the antagonist’s physical absence from the narrator’s life masterfully hides a mental domination: “I now understand how badly I was deceiving myself... I was haunted, perhaps I was even possessed - but there were no signs of it, no clues to tell me what was happening” (Auster 2011, 244). The absence of signs serves to pin Fanshawe’s mediation against his effacement and, then, his effacement against his dominion. In her discussion on social media and, specifically, Facebook, Dinnen further links effacement to a deceptive feeling of efficiency: “the affective novelty of Facebook is its uncanny re-presentation of your life, but this is effaced and appears instead as efficiency” (2018, 6). Girard also stresses that the subject is beguiled when it misperceives the ghostly model’s influence as efficient and beneficial, namely when “[t]he desire to absorb the being of the mediator... often takes the form of a desire to be initiated into a new life” (1965, 53). This new life stands as an aspiring projection of a deceptively new version of the self. In The Locked Room’s case, Fanshawe’s effacement galvanizes a change in the narrator’s sentimental and professional life, a change initially perceived as utterly beneficial. Pondering on his fresh affair with Sophie and Fanshawe’s publication plan, the narrator affirms: “it gradually dawned on me that I had been given a second chance,” “[e]verything had changed for me” (Auster 2011, 245, 234). It is only some pages later that he faces the illusive nature of this second chance. Per Dinnen, the narrator’s life is uncannily re-presented, founded as it is on mediation and beguiling efficiency. Mediation is hence designed as “the instrument of [man’s] destruction [and] the very thing he needs

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to keep him alive” (Auster 2011, 256), that pharmakos which at once poisons and sustains existence in a deceptive re-presentation mode. It seems unavoidable that the re-presentation process of hetero-defined self-transformation should suffer from effacement too. Baudrillard was right to maintain that “capitalism is responsible for the crisis of representation in the postmodern age. Things no longer come across intact but so mediated by language that they end up bearing no connection to reality” (qtd. in Espejo 2014, 159). Considering Baudrillard’s remark within a post-postmodern framework, language, text, and image are three of the basic parameters which govern our highly mediated, social media lives. Lives which, like the narrator’s, obsessively center on a mediator, namely the ghostly audience of the social media platforms, and succumb to their self-molding by the so-called “influencers.” “The idea of witnessing selftransformation via the production of others’ multiple selves maps squarely onto the central concept of most social media, which implores users to create and circulate excess(ive) documentation of the self for reception and recognition by others” (Pearl 2019, 171). Self-transformation is hence not autonomous but tyrannically regulated not only by multiplicity and fluidity but, most importantly, by the Other’s approval, that model who, according to Girard, is both fascinating and abhorred. In The Locked Room, as we saw, the Other’s approval is of paramount importance to the development of the plot and to procedures of self-transformation. For instance, it seems that the narrator’s awareness of weakness is blended with his acceptance of Fanshawe’s editing and publishing proposal, while the whole decision is projected on the presumed praise of a disappeared Other. A digital life can be circumscribed by the use, circulation, and creation of data to such a massive degree that data can turn into the selfconstitutive molecules of our digital organism. In “Looking into the Future: Surveillance, Globalization and the Totalitarian Potential” Maria Los elaborates on our constant transformation “into bits and flows of information, which are processed into our multiple data doubles” (2006, 74). These split, fragmented selves can be exposed to relentless surveillance, so-called dataveillance, to the individual’s unawareness (77). Lack of awareness on the subject’s part as to the model’s controlling presence is one of the determining characteristics of Girardian mediation, too. Back to dataveillance, the fragmented, decontextualized information, collected for many specific purposes, may acquire

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a multitude of completely different meanings depending on its particular compilation, re-contextualization and application. As well, because of the ramified nature of data networks, it appears practically impossible to correct erroneous or twisted information. In this context, the notion of biographical truth loses any meaning. (Los 2006, 78)

In the context of The Locked Room, Los’s observation is reminiscent of the bits and pieces of information that the narrator struggles to collect so that he can compile the mediator’s biography. And because at the end it is revealed that the ghost has been the one surveilling the narrator, the process of compilation seems to be switching hands too, under the relentless rule of mediation. “Fanshawe’s writings – his manuscripts and letters – become a meta-writing that scripts the course of the narrator’s existence” (Bernstein 1995, 91). To be more specific, while the narrator is out gathering pieces of information on Fanshawe’s past, the reader discovers that what is being amalgamated is not Fanshawe’s past but the narrator’s present, dictated and overpowered by Fanshawe’s surveillance: “I watched you. I watched you and Sophie and the baby […] I followed you everywhere you went” (Auster 2011, 309). The mediator’s orchestrated plan of surveillance is accompanied by the letters and scarce but efficient communication with the subject. What essentially takes place in Boston is not a final meeting with the mediator inasmuch as a meeting of the narrator with his own fragmented double, with a mediated, deceived, hetero-regulated self. In this nightmarish fictionality of disoriented existence, the notion of biographical truth indeed loses its value. To add insult to injury, as we saw, the narrator’s memory during and after the tracking down days has become fragmented and, hence, questionable. The narrator’s final, triumphant acceptance that the contents of the red notebook erase each other and remain open and unfinished could equal a humble recognition of the fact that biographical truth, remembering Los, has lost its meaning. Much like Blue is perplexed when he reads his data double in Black’s notebook in Ghosts, the narrator is faced with a predicament while browsing the “book that had been written for [him]” (Auster 2011, 313): “The very nature of the data double phenomenon indicates that it both functions as truth and, given its multiplicity, versatility and arbitrary constitution, also negates the possibility of truth” (Los 2006, 87). “Modern society is no longer anything but a negative imitation and the effort to leave the beaten paths forces everyone inevitably into the same ditch” pessimistically remarks Girard (1965, 100). Can we work or

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at least imagine our way out of that ditch? Dinnen seems to be expressing an analogous concern: “In the particular geopolitical conditions of the wealthy, liberal democracies of the global North, this question often manifests in art as an issue of expression, authenticity, and mediation: how do we work with or move on from our mediated subjectivity?” (2018, 74). The answer may be lying in one of the novel’s most commented parts: We imagine the real story inside the words, and to do this we substitute ourselves for the person in the story, pretending that we can understand him because we understand ourselves. This is a deception. We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our own incoherence. No one can cross the boundary into another –for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself. (Auster 2011, 249)

The excerpt juxtaposes deception and mediation to awareness. Such an awareness may be, indeed, our pharmakos: the initial point of departure from our mediated subjectivity, following the cognizant acceptance of our mediated, existential conundrum, one predicated on effacement, on an unattainable metamorphosis, on the impossibility of meaning and, last but not least, the negation of the possibility of self-truth.

References Alford, Steven E. 1995. Mirrors of Madness: Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 37 (1): 17–33. https://doi.org/10. 1080/00111619.1995.9936478 Antonello, Pierpaolo and Heather Webb. 2015. Introduction. In Mimesis, Desire, and the Novel: René Girard and Literary Criticism, eds. P. Antonello and H. Webb, ix-liii. Michigan: Michigan State University Press. Auster, Paul. 2011. The New York Trilogy. London: Faber and Faber. Barone, Dennis. 1995. Introduction: Paul Auster and the Postmodern American Novel. In Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster, ed. D. Barone, 1–26. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bernstein, Stephen. 1995. Auster’s Sublime Closure: The Locked Room. In Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster, ed. D. Barone, 88–106. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Chénetier, Marc. 1995. Paul Auster’s Pseudonymous World. In Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster, ed. D. Barone, 34–43. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Di Blasi, Luca. 2015. Within and Beyond Mimetic Desire. In Mimesis, Desire, and the Novel: René Girard and Literary Criticism, 39–54. Michigan: Michigan State University Press. Dimovitz, Scott A. 2016. Public Personae and the Private I: De-Compositional Ontology in Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy. Modern Fiction Studies 52 (3): 613–633. https://www.jstor.org/stable/i26286891 Dinnen, Zara. 2018. The Digital Banal: New Media and American Literature and Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Espejo, Ramon. 2014. Coping with the Postmodern: Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy. Journal of American Studies 48 (1): 147–171. https://doi.org/10. 1017/S0021875813000698. Felman, Shoshana. 1995. Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching. In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth, 13–73. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Girard, René. 1965. Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Huber, Irmtraud. 2014. Literature After Postmodernism: Reconstructive Fantasies. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Jameson, Fredric. 1998. The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern 1983–1998. London: Verso. Kember, Sarah, and Joanna Zylinska. 2012. Life after New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. Los, Maria. 2006. Looking into the Future: Surveillance, Globalization and the Totalitarian Potential. In Theorizing Surveillance: The Panopticon and Beyond, ed. D. Lyon, 64–94. Devon: Willan Publishing. Pearl, Zach. 2019. Ghost Writing the Self: Autofiction, Fictocriticism and Social Media. English Studies in Canada 45 (1–2): 161–187. Rubenstein, Roberta. 2008. Doubling, Intertextuality and the Postmodern Uncanny: Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy. Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 9 (3): 245–262. https://doi.org/10.1080/10436929808580222 Russell, Alison. 2010. Deconstructing The New York Trilogy: Paul Auster’s AntiDetective Fiction. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 31 (2): 71–84. https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.1990.9934685 Toth, Josh. 2010. The Passing of Postmodernism: A Spectroanalysis of the Contemporary. Albany: SUNY Press. Van Der Kolk, B.A., and O. Van der Hart. 1995. The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma. In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth, 158–182. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.

CHAPTER 10

Juxtaposing Postmodernist and Classic Narratives in New Literacies: The Case of Role-Playing Games Dimitra Nikolaidou

In times of intense sociocultural shifts, when the world becomes unrecognizable, immersing oneself in the imaginary worlds of speculative fiction often serves not as escapism from the turmoil, but as a way to discern and possibly influence the shape of things to come. To quote Helen De Smedt and Johan De Cruz (2015), “[i]n some respects, speculative fiction and philosophical thought experiments are similar: both engage in mental prospection, including future thinking and counterfactual reasoning” (16). Speculative fiction has long served that particular role: authors such as Ursula LeGuin, Margaret Atwood and Haruki Murakami are renowned for having purposefully utilized the genre in order to illuminate aspects of cultural conflict, speculate on how these conflicts will evolve but also,

D. Nikolaidou (B) Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 T. Tsimpouki et al. (eds.), American Studies after Postmodernism, Renewing the American Narrative, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41448-0_10

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call for cultural and societal change. However, in the twenty-first century, attention should be also paid to another type of speculative narrative which is not attributed to a single author but is instead crafted collaboratively in the act of play, through a process of continual and often public, conflict and negotiation: the ephemeral, emergent narratives of Tabletop Role-Playing Games, or TRPGs for short. TRPGs are collaborative storytelling games first created as a genre in Wisconsin, U.S. in 1975. The ability of TRPGs to reflect and influence sociocultural trends is rooted in a narrative paradox. These games are purposefully inspired by formulaic, archetypal, or even stereotypical narratives (Mackay 2001; Bowman 2010); at the same time, the goal of any RPG, digital or tabletop, is for the player to become co-creator and produce a unique, personal narrative during the act of play. As a result, the conflict between the formulaic material and the participants’ narrative freedom often produces transgressive narratives that subvert the classical narratives on which the game is initially based. Furthermore, after the play has concluded, these transgressive narratives become part of the speculative canon through a multiplicity of avenues, contributing to the transformation of the culture that initially inspired them. To summarize the process, by having a reciprocal and dialogical relationship with popular culture TRPGs first allow participants to reinterpret the elements of speculative fiction, and furthermore, they inspire them to disseminate their reinterpretations. Given this process, RPGs have been recognized as a quintessentially postmodern artifact, despite their reliance on tropes, clichés and genre conventions. As aspects of these conventions are currently perceived as problematic and regressive (particularly in terms of sexism, racism and the establishment of a U.S. cultural hegemony), the interplay between classic narratives and postmodern player subversion is evolving into a cultural conflict mirroring (and also influencing) wider sociocultural change. The unfolding of this conflict takes TRPGs, which have been a postmodern artifact since their inception, into post-postmodernism territory; their inherent quality of challenging authorial and genre hegemony, which was initially aiming solely at creating opportunities for play, now transforms into a deliberate attempt to establish a new, inclusive speculative canon. The current chapter aims to examine this process through a dual, multiperspectival lens of cultural and narrative studies. The transmedial and multimodal nature of RPG narratives, offers us the opportunity to

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pinpoint several instances of conflict and negotiation, eventually highlighting the process through which postmodern narrative frames allow for the collective creation of new orthodoxies both in gaming and in Western culture in general.

The Ongoing Cultural Impact of Tabletop Role-Playing Games While increasingly popular since their inception in 1975, TRPGs have long been neglected by scholarship for a variety of reasons: rooted in pulp literature, they were regarded as a niche, escapist pastime which, with few exceptions, did not merit academic attention. However, in the last two decades, attitudes have shifted as TRPGs’ vast influence on culture was recognized, leading to the genre becoming an object of academic study. In the process, scholars have pinpointed the multiple ways in which TRPGs have exerted and continue to exert vast influence on Western culture. I am first going to summarize these influences below, and I will revisit them later in the chapter in order to analyze the process behind them in conjunction with their post-postmodern iterations. In The Functions of Role-Playing Games (2010) Sarah Lynne Bowman extensively establishes that TRPGs have the power to shape the identities of the participants. Adding to her arguments, I should note that it is commonly accepted, as well as well-established in scholarship, that narratives of all types are crucial in shaping our identity, our culture, our shared beliefs and our perception of ourselves and others. TRPGs however are not simply stories we consume but instead, they are particularly immersive stories we simultaneously create, consume and enact, and thus by engaging us in multiple levels, they are able to exert a more profound influence than novels or cinematic works. Furthermore, and perhaps further establishing the previous point, it has also been established that TRPGs have directly influenced a number of successful creators in the speculative field and beyond: Since the stigma surrounding the genre has receded, diverse creators working in a variety of media have acknowledged the impact which TRPGs have had on their work.1 1 These creators are too numerous to list however notable examples include authors David Mitchell, George R. R. Martin, China Mieville, Arturo Perez-Reverte and Sherman Alexie; filmmakers Will Wheaton, Joss Whedon, Jon Favreau and Kevin Smith; and bands such as Blind Guardian, Kyuss, Nightwish, Savatage and Midnight Syndicate. The influence

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Finally, as established by Esther MacCallum et al., TRPGS have “a broad reach throughout […] leisure culture” (184) and suggest that as a result TRPG terminology, tropes and narratives have been widely disseminated into general culture. At this point, I need to note that one of the reasons for the broad reach of TRPG influence lies in the fact that the genre has provided the inspiration behind digital gaming, a dominant form of entertainment in the twenty-first century. Multiple scholars have established the direct link between TRPGs and digital gaming2 ; their findings carry vast significance when establishing the ongoing cultural impact of TRPGS given that, with the advent of the internet, Western culture has eventually reached a point where, instead of games attempting to imitate life, life is trying to be more like a game (Schallegger 2018; Salen & Zimmerman 2003). In practical terms, in the year 2018, the gaming industry revenues reached 139 billion dollars, surpassing the revenues of the film industry for the first time. TRPGs then are providing an ongoing influence for the largest entertainment industry of our time. Given the extent of their influence, the need to study the narratives entrenched and produced through TRPGS, as well as their productive process, has become increasingly prevalent if we aim to understand current cultural narratives and attempt to predict future ones. Delving into these dialogical processes below allows for the examination of how they function in our post-postmodern world.

TRPG Narratives: A Process of Conflict and Negotiation As mentioned in the introduction, TRPGs emerged out of the wargaming community in Wisconsin U.S., in 1975. The first game in the genre was Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). It was originally published as three books, detailing both imaginary storyworlds,3 and a variety of rules for telling

these creators have had on Western culture further establishes the impact of TRPGs so far and their potential to continue exerting influence. 2 See Mat Barton (2008), Michael Tresca (2011), Dimitra Nikolaidou (2019) and Esther MacCallum-Stewart et al. (2018) who all establish the direct line between TRPG narratives, tropes and elements and digital gaming. 3 The storyworlds detailed in D&D were heavily influenced by authors of pulp literature. Influences include Tolkien, Vance, Moorcock, Lovecraft, Leiber etc.

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stories in these worlds. To actually play D&D, players each craft a character (termed PC, which is short for player character) in accordance with the rules contained in the books. Following that, they use these characters as vehicles in order to tell a story together, with the help of dice rolls. While many more role-playing games have been created since D&D was the first and most successful TRPG. Given its success, its continual evolution up to this day, and its influence on culture in general, it will serve as the main example in this chapter. Interestingly, from the very beginning, D&D narratives were a communal endeavor in more ways than one. Before examining this statement, it needs to be noted that there are two types of TRPG narratives. The first type concerns the Game Text narratives: the printed game text, created by a team of game designers, which describes the storyworld and sets the rules of the game. The players study the Game Text, and familiarize themselves with its narrative; however, during a game session, they are supposed to use this text only as a tool in order to collaboratively craft their own Emergent narratives. Emergent narratives are ephemeral, unique to each group and cannot be repeated. As stated above, both the Game Text narratives and the Emergent narratives, are collaborative endeavors. The Game Text is produced by a team of designers; additionally, it is expected that the lead designer will have taken into consideration player input during the creation of the game.4 However, the multiauthorial quality of TRPG narratives is truly made evident when examining Emergent narratives. The Game Texts are not considered to be an absolute authority on how the game should unfold; instead, they encourage players to keep only the rules that are suited to their group, and adapt the game to their needs during the act of play, prioritizing the story which the group intends to tell. Finally, and 4 For example, D&D’s game designers, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, were publishing their ideas and plans for the game in wargaming magazines and fanzines, requested advice from future players and incorporated their input into the final game text. They also met and played with them in conventions, such as Gencon. This process is not standardized. While the first editions of D&D were created utilizing player input, later editions accepted different levels of interference from the player base. New games might also not have access to as large and dedicated a community of players as D&D designers had. However, the overall level of requested input is high, and the gaming community is particularly vocal and participatory. This practice was taken up by other game designers who also requested input before releasing a game into the market. Most games publish various editions, in order to incorporate player feedback. For an overview of TRPG game design processes, see Appelcline’s Dungeons and Dreamers multi-volume treatise (2013).

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perhaps most importantly, whether a given group of players follows the printed rules or discards them, D&D and similar games require participants to tell their own story—the act of crafting a story is the act of play. Theoretically, there is no limit to what the players might decide to do as long as they all agree upon the direction the story is taking. No player dictates the final emergent narrative, although they all contribute to it. As posited above these narratives are then disseminated into culture, through various means. Indeed, participants often turn these narratives into novels, films, TV series, graphic novels and digital games; additionally, participants who do not become creators themselves, find their expectations of a fantasy narrative heavily influenced by their gaming experience.5 As a result, both the Game Text narrative and the Emergent narrative are bound to influence the direction of speculative narratives (and thus, given the increased popularity of the genre, mainstream narratives as well). Furthermore, as noted in the introduction, the narratives, terminology and structure of many digital games, which are increasingly becoming a decisive societal influence, are based on TRPGs.6 Interestingly, given that popular culture has always provided inspiration to TRPG designers and participants alike, these TRPG-inspired cultural artifacts will also in turn inspire new TRPGs, repeating the process ad infinitum and ensuring a constant reinterpretation and reimagining of narratives. As a result of these processes, both textual and emergent TRPG narratives are a product of constant conflict and negotiation, including conflict between the classic genre narratives versus the players’ desires. However, in the beginning, these conflicts and negotiations took place among demographically narrow communities. The first TRPG players were white, middle-class males. While their political affiliations were diverse, their ethnicity and gender were quite homogeneous; the subculture which they created was particularly close-knit, a fact reinforced by the negative attitudes which outsiders projected towards the game and its players. Additionally, only U.S. players had direct access to game designers through conventions, or letters to fanzines; the limited technology of the era prohibited overseas players from contributing to the

5 See Bowman (2010). 6 Scholarship has long established the direct link between digital gaming and TRPGs:

see Mackay (2001), King and Borland (2003) and Nikolaidou (2019).

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discourse.7 Consequently, even though conflict and negotiation were a constant (and well-documented) process, said process was open only to culturally dominant groups.

TRPGs as a Reflection of Dominant Culture To begin examining this conflict, D&D is used below as a case study in terms of a progressive/regressive dichotomy. At its conception, the game already reflected the conflicts of its era, though by taking pulp narratives as its source material, it included multiple sexist, racist and colonialist elements which were already being contested in mainstream culture. TRPGs are, as noted above, rooted in pulp culture: the main inspiration behind D&D Game Texts, as evidenced by various scholars, lies in the type of fiction encountered in inexpensive fantasy and science fiction magazines whose tropes and conventions were established in previous decades.8 These tropes and conventions incorporated various problematic attitudes towards minorities, women and homosexuality. These attitudes are evident in the first two editions of D&D: non-white races seldom appear in the game text, women are few and oversexualized, while homosexuality is never depicted. While the 1970s were a time of upheaval when previous orthodoxies were being challenged, TRPGs relied on familiarity and shared culture to facilitate gameplay: in order to gather around a table and immediately begin crafting a story together, participants require instant common points of reference, and the abundant tropes and stereotypes of pulp fiction, despite their problematic elements, provided this familiarity. This fact, combined with the narrow demographics of the first players, perpetuated exclusionary and discriminatory stereotypes at a narrative and cultural level: female players encountered a notoriously hostile environment and were driven away from the game, while people of color appear to be absent from the subculture. Attempts to implement changes that would make women, ethnic minorities and queer individuals more welcome to the subculture were met with resistance

7 Sociologist Gary Alan Fine recorded the demographics of TRPG subculture in Shared Fantasies (1983). 8 Both Peter Bebergal and Jon Peterson establish the clear connection between pulp narratives and TRPGs.

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(well-documented in dedicated magazines), with the common rationale being that the game would be less “fun” if changes were implemented.9 The scope of negotiations was also limited due to the fact that, despite often depicting pseudo-medieval storyworlds, D&D and most successful TRPGs, were created in the U.S. and thus reflected U.S. values. Some of these values were neutral, while others can only be labeled as problematic. In his The Evolution of Fantasy Role-Playing Games, Michael Tresca has highlighted the problematic aspects of dominant D&D ideas (first charted by Gary Alan Fine in 1983): the justified looting of other civilizations; the “us vs them” mentality; the sexism inherent in the demonization of sexuality and the idea that wealth denotes worth (2011, 38). Besides the problematic nature of the concepts themselves though, the fact that a genre as influential would be decidedly U.S.-centric contributed to the U.S. cultural hegemony. While other cultures did appear in D&D and various other TRPGs, their treatment was superficial and most games either utilized only cosmetic elements, or amalgamated entire continents into a single, unified culture. Even when visibility was afforded to non-U.S. cultures, the representation was lacking or even harmful.10 Finally, speculative fiction was not the only contributor to the problematic elements of D&D: as Daniel Mackay has demonstrated, players built their characters utilizing “fictive blocks” they pick up from popular culture including movies, TV series and cartoons; given that popular culture is dominated by U.S. cultural products, it follows that not only the game text but also the unique characters that players (including non-U.S. players) craft on their own, to use as storytelling vehicles, will be heavily influenced by U.S. culture in varying degrees. To summarize, TRPGs relied on sexist, racist and homophobic tropes as well as U.S. cultural hegemony in order to facilitate gameplay. However, along with their espousing of problematic elements, TRPGs also introduced progressive elements into speculative fiction, as well as the tools to further negotiate change. Both factors are related to their 9 Columns and letters chronicling the conflict can be found in the magazines Dungeon and Dragon, published by TSR and subsequently by Wizards of the Coast. 10 Different cultures received different treatment. The fantasy counterpart Sub-Saharan

Africa in D&D, for example, was presented as an uncivilized jungle, despite designers adding a disclaimer about the actual Africa including cities and civilizations; the rationale was that the game’s depiction was more suitable for fun adventures. Asia on the other hand was amalgamated into one civilization in Oriental Adventures, but designers mentioned repeatedly that this was a creative choice that did not do justice to the actual continent.

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postmodern qualities. The pulp and fantasy narratives on which the game was based might contain problematic elements but they were also fluid, as well as open to transgression and subversion,11 having inherited the ability of pulp to quickly mutate and expand in order to better reflect cultural shifts. Furthermore, despite their problematic elements, and despite their demographically narrow initial audience, TRPGs allowed players to take up both male and female roles while it presented gender-equal societies as Good and patriarchies as Evil. Additionally, the Game Text derided racism among humans. Further concerns over racism and sexism were always directly addressed by the game designers, even if actual progress on the game texts was relatively slow (yet continuous). These progressive elements reflected tendencies and conflicts already present in the culture of the U.S. in the 1970s and 1980s. Finally, another element which allowed for the quick evolution of the genre concerned subcultural norms. D&D designers were initially encouraging the creation of rival TRPGs, inviting not only the open exchange of ideas but also the expansion of the gaming genre. Moreover, producing a Game Text was not costly. This allowed for an abundance of narratives to steadily enter the subculture, and subtly challenge the problematic aspects of D&D. TRPGs future history and evolution suggest that these negotiations did take place, transforming TRPGs in the twenty-first century in a progressive cultural influence despite its limiting roots. Before focusing on the result of this evolution, and its wider cultural ramifications, it is important to examine the decidedly postmodern process behind it.

TRPGs as a Postmodern Artifact To discuss the post-postmodern TRPG narrative, we first need to understand the postmodern structure that enabled its emergence. The qualities that allowed for the transformation of the genre can be located in its postmodern nature: that is, its subjectivism, its inherent rejection of narrative authority and its urging to tell one’s own story in order to participate. René Schallegger in The Post Modern Joys of Role-Playing suggests that TRPGs are a thoroughly postmodern invention, well-suited to producing innovation. His analysis suggests that even if the original creators hadn’t envisioned the game in such terms, the genre quickly mutated into its 11 For an in-depth discussion on the fluidity and transgressive qualities of pulp fiction, see McCracken (2018) and Bloom (1998).

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current form: a reinvention of storytelling for an age where knowledge is a process of constant re-negotiation. For, language games of any kind have an important role to play in this negotiation: The essential role of “little narratives” for innovation is explicitly stated by Lyotard, and they are sociocultural countermeasures to the inadequacies of “the principle of consensus as a criterion of validation” […] Consensus itself is a problematic concept, because it implies the validity of the metanarrative of emancipation, while on a systemic level, it can become an instrument of power (ibid.). Dissent is the only force strong enough to change a given system, but it must be articulated appropriately in order not to upset the language game, or the reaction is terror, “the efficiency gained by eliminating, or threatening to eliminate, a player from the language game one shares with him” (1984: 63–64). Local and temporary games are required, not the revolutionary metanarratives of the modern mindset, since “an attempt at an alternative of that kind would end up resembling the system it was meant to replace” (1984: 66). (Kindle, Chapter 1, Location 264)

Roleplaying games then, like all postmodern language games, are a way to express dissent not in a way that inspires terror or ends up reestablishing the old systems, but through a process that happens almost unseen. Postmodernism does not “systematize, control or master narratives” (Kindle, Chapter 1, Location 347) it challenges our assumptions instead. The addition of multiple mass media discourses, of cultural mixing and globalization makes the process more complicated. In Schallegger’s own words, “When activated recipients engage in self-aware language games in a cultural logic that hybridizes commodification and critique, what results is an explosion of diversified meanings” (Kindle, Chapter 1, Location 887). Essentially, Schallegger concludes, the core of TRPGs lies in the storyteller’s question “what do you do now?” and the players’ answer; the latter feeds into the next question and out of that cycle, a narrative emerges out of chaos. Since there are no tools needed or financial concerns involved, and since these games blur the lines between producer and consumer, what emerges is an art form capable of producing cooperative meaning, a truly postmodern construct in which everyone can add their own elements, validated by communal assent. Schallegger notes that not even the published Game Texts are strictly required: participants can make their own games complete with rules and settings instead of

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buying the books. The combination of these factors, he suggests, makes TRPGs the most democratic medium possible. It can be argued that the broad, theoretical arguments can be validated by focusing on the narrative-crafting process that takes place during TRPGs. This focus also highlights the multiple avenues through which transgressions, reinterpretations and reclamations of narratives are then disseminated in society and culture. The basis for this argument is that unlike most cultural artifacts, TRPGs games are always multiauthorial in more levels than one. The game texts are crafted by multiple designers; apart from game texts, the official narrative is dispersed in a variety of media (books, movies, magazines and graphic novels), in which remediation constantly challenges orthodoxies. Most importantly, having consumed the official narrative, players are then requested to craft their own narratives, assisted by the constant reminder found in various game texts that there is no right way to play the game. As an important note, their emergent stories are not bound by commercial concerns; moreover, they are crafted in relatively safe environments, usually among friends allowing not only for experimentation but also for a more authentic mode of expression. Finally, due to globalization and the advent of the internet, these emergent narratives can now be shared across the world, inciting negotiations and contributing to the evolution of our shared culture. These developments need to be examined separately, in order to discover the process which transformed TRPGs from a game catering solely to a white middle-class male audience to a tool of negotiation and cultural progress, as evidenced by their current iterations.

Inherent Game Design Elements The analysis must begin with the Game Text, the first point of contact between the game and the player. I have already referenced the importance of player input during the creative process. To provide some examples, while the first edition of D&D was playtested in the U.S. among a limited number of friends in the U.S., the fifth edition of D&D was playtested by 175.000 participants worldwide before being released. Player input notwithstanding, the creation of a TRPG Game Text always includes the labor of a multiplicity of game designers and illustrators

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leading to a product that is always collectively created, affecting the narrative. Thus, unlike other cultural artifacts such as novels, TRPG game texts are more likely to include the input of diverse groups of people.12 The transmedial nature of TRPG narratives is another aspect of its multiauthorial narrative. While the Game Text is the only necessary component of play, the canonical narrative of most major TRPGs unfolds simultaneously in-game texts, digital games, novels, comic books, official magazines, and eventually movies which fans are likely to encounter. Apart from further widening the creator team, remediation constantly introduces new angles in the official narrative. To provide a simple example, in D&D, dark-skinned elves were depicted as evil, a remnant of racist attitudes inherent in the pulp narratives which inspired the game. However, once the game was made into a movie, U.S. cinematic conventions of the time suggested that some non-white characters should exist in secondary roles. As a result, “good” black elves did appear on-screen, thus becoming part of the game’s canon and countering the racist narrative of the Game text. A few decades later, this shift would find its way into the Game Texts themselves. Similarly, novelizations of the game have always included more female heroes than the Game Text introduces. In short, transmedial narratives allowed for narrative experiments that, having proven popular with the audience, were later included in the Game Text. The advent of the internet era contributed to the negotiations. Just like non-U.S. players were able to participate in the game, so were participants from non-U.S. countries allowed to participate in the ongoing conversations about the game, delivering input either directly to the game designers or indirectly through the discourse taking place in internet forums and later on social media. Additionally, TRPG participants could now publicize their own TRPG narratives through fan art (including fan fiction, webcomics, cosplay, fan movies and filking). This opportunity was particularly important to previously marginalized communities, who 12 Two examples are provided that showcase the importance of a diverse team of creator: (a) When White Wolf launched World of Darkness, it ensured that its team included women, queer people and people of color, in direct contrast to D&D’s then all-white, overwhelmingly male team, resulting in a narrative that directly addressed issues of racism and sexism as well as class struggle; as a result, it attracted a player base which reflected its designers. (b) Current D&D’s lead designer Jeremy Crawford who is openly homosexual stated that “I wasn’t about to have this book go out and not acknowledge that people like me exist” (see D’Anastasio 2017).

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might have enjoyed the game but had found the culture exclusionary or even hostile. Congregating on the internet, marginalized players created their own communities and were able to address their concerns or provide their own takes on the official material. In short, the multiauthorial nature of TRPGs, combined with new technologies, opened problematic narratives of speculative fiction to constant negotiations. Thus, the proven influence of TRPGs in the shaping of Western culture seized to be the exclusive influence of dominant groups. However, the most significant quality that ensures that TRPGs produce authentic narratives is the very process that produces their Emergent Narratives, which merits particular attention.

Inherent Elements of Emergent Narratives Commenting on the TRPGs as “moderated collective mediations” in The Joys of Post-Modern Role-Playing Games, Schallegger writes: “The blurring between producer and recipient, the postmodern activation of the consumer into co-creating meaning is a general feature of interactive media, but no other medium shows such a pervasive application of the principle” (2018, Kindle edition). During the act of playing, participants co-create meaning along with the Game Text, and the culture/subculture to which they belong. Once play commences, this negotiation happens organically: theoretically, the players are free to tell any story they desire. However, this process is not as democratic as the Game Text suggests. Despite claims of narrative freedom, players are heavily influenced by the Game Text since its guidelines, illustrations, and rules do suggest an optimal type of narrative. To use D&D as an example once again, the combination of illustrations, rules and text suggests a lighthearted but combat-centric and action-heavy game. Additionally, the players rely on previous fantasy narratives to guide them in crafting their story. To provide an example taken from D&D, players who decide to craft a wizard PC are likely to have encountered fantasy wizards in The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and even in Norse mythology. Once they decide to play as a wizard, the image of an elderly white man will present itself as an obvious choice. However, both during character creation and actual play, the concepts of (a) agency, (b) RPG immersion, (c) narrative identities, (d) collaborative narratives, and (e) the shifting narrative frame ensure that despite the influence of genre and culture the emergent narrative will, for

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most, subvert the suggested narrative. Before expanding upon these elements, attention must be drawn to H. Porter Abbott’s discourse in The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (2008). Porter Abbott suggests that narrative subversion can be linked to the fact that not all events in a story have the same importance. In a story, we have “constituent” events, which drive the story forward and make the story what it is. We also have supplementary events, which are not necessary and can be removed leaving the story still recognizable. However, supplementary events are important for the meaning and impact of the narrative. Barthes suggests that when a constituent event is removed the story is altered but when a supplementary event is removed, the discourse is altered (qtd. in Abbott 2002, 23). As Porter Abbott suggests, “there is more to narrative than story” and the power of a work is derived from that “more”; in a lot of classic stories, almost everything is open to revision as both change and recurrence are inevitable (23–24). TRPGs, which rely on classic stories, are no exceptions. Due to the elements which I will discuss below, players are allowed to remain true to the classic stories while shifting the supplementary events, thus altering the narrative. While producing an emergent narrative then, players will be guided by genre, cultural norms and game text in terms of constituent events, but the supplementary events can be negotiated. As a component of playing a TRPG, players constantly exercise agency, that is, (a) they create their character themselves and (b) they dictate what their characters’ desire to do or how they react to a given event. Additionally, playing produces immersion: Bowman suggests that immersion, which is described as the feeling of losing oneself to the game, is not only the sense of “being surrounded by an all-consuming environment but also relates to active engagement and agency within the experience” (2010, 378– 389). Immersion ensures that players exercise agency instead of blindly following formulaic plots. To provide an example, when immersed in a story, the character is more likely to react organically than to decide to act according to a classic plot previously encountered in a movie or novel of the same genre. This is enhanced by the use of narrative identities: while players do use Daniel Mackay’s “fictive blocks” (2001), taken from popular culture, they will rearrange these blocks into a character that fits their own goals. In A New Performing Art: The Fantasy Role-Playing Game, Mackay quotes Roland Barthes who posited that Western literature can be reduced to a handful of codes that authors “regurgitate” (2001, 37–38) in their pose, essentially re-contextualizing it. Roleplaying,

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Mackay suggests, establishes an alternate reality derived from popular culture reality; however, role-playing restores the product art of popular culture, using the mirage of an alternate reality to cover up the excess of popular culture instead. What seems like an escape is a restoration, a critical evaluation and potentially a recuperation of the social potential embedded in popular culture. This happens exactly because role-players bring their effective, subjective selves to the table and filter the concepts and images of their environment through that subjectivity. Their roles are built from their own feelings, which cannot be located in any type of research or study; they “fill in the blanks of popular culture” (81–82). This process is strengthened by the Shifting Narrative Frame, one of the major differences between classic narrative mediums such as oral storytelling or the written word. Jennifer Grouling Cover has noted that one of the main characteristics that differentiate TRPGs from traditional narratives is the constant oral shifts between the storyworld, the game and the real world (2010, 88). The players might be acting in character, stop to examine a rule that will decide whether an action they declared is allowed, comment on the fact that this looks like something seen in a movie, make a joke about the player’s choice and then re-focus on the story. What might surprise an outside observer, is that players are capable of remaining immersed in the game narrative despite the constant interruptions, the shift between the real world, the applications of dice rolls and rules. The shifting narrative frame, and the fact that healthy players retain their primary identity, ensures that players are not simply enacting a predetermined role but retain their connection to their personal mindset, ideologies and memories as well as immediate access to the wider cultural context. Simply put, despite playing a role in a classic fantasy narrative, the player retains their beliefs; if these beliefs are progressive, the player will resist acting in a regressive manner and will challenge such elements encountered within the story. Finally, this brings us to the role played by the collaborative nature of TRPG storytelling. Schallegger, focusing on the postmodern quality of TRPGs, suggested that “[t]he narrative of an RPG session is […] produced in a constant oscillation between the structure created by the ST and the ludic freedom enjoyed by the players… This constant feedback loop drives RPG narration” (2018, Kindle edition). It should be noted that this “shared” quality of TRPGs, while rendering them a fertile ground for negotiation, simultaneously necessitates the need to refer to a strongly established, pre-existing frame which makes it harder to subvert

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some norms as doing so might shatter both suspension of disbelief as well as the common frame that allow for the narrative to proceed smoothly. However, at the same time, other factors come into play. In order for the game to proceed, players need to develop and employ empathy. Thus, negotiation between storytellers, game text and player is constant in order to achieve the common goal of having fun.13 Thus, a character who harbors regressive beliefs will keep them out of their narrative in order to continue to collaborate with other players. Another issue would be that once a single player transgresses or subverts a trope successfully, i.e., if a player chooses as their character a homosexual or black wizard, instead of the archetypal white-bearded man, all players now share in the subversion of the narrative by playing along. Eventually, the narrative will be the sum of all character choices; while power dynamics are still at play, and marginalized players might hesitate to directly come into conflict with certain aspects of the game, immersion, narrative identity, the shifting narrative frame and finally agency ensure that eventually, negotiations will take place. Taken together, these intrinsic elements of TRPG narrative, which are possible only in a postmodern type of language game, assure that despite the limitations of genre, Game Text and cultural norms, once the players assume the role of narrators, a variety of factors allows them to subvert or even upend the textually prescripted narratives, revitalize tropes and transgress against suggested narratives upending expectations. These reclaimed narratives are then disseminated into Western culture in general through the process analyzed in the first part of the chapter: influence on participant identity, influence on future creators and direct influence on digital gaming. This exact process of global, continuous negotiation is what transforms the postmodern TRPG genre into a post-postmodern one, which transcends its initial aim of Play to become a wider, far-reaching narrative of progress vs regression that encompasses the entirety of speculative culture. Taking advantage of its postmodern structure, TRPGs now attempt to propose a post-postmodern narrative: instead of unfolding inside game

13 It should be noted that there is no guarantee that the negotiation will be successful. It is not unlikely for a gaming group to break down. Furthermore, it is likely that no player will contest the regressive elements present in the game. However, this does not change the fact that the game remains a field of negotiation even if players choose not to offer a challenge.

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books and across isolated gaming tables, the post-postmodern TRPG narrative presents itself as an amalgamation of game narrative, open global discourse and widespread creative influence, in which everyone is invited to contribute and further disseminate their contribution via a variety of means. Furthermore, despite being open to all who attempt to shape it, the post-postmodern TRPG narrative appears to have adopted a deliberately progressive and inclusive direction whose final aim is the reclamation of speculative narratives in general.

The Post-postmodern Aspect: Establishing New Narratives The decidedly progressive stance of post-postmodern TRPGs is evident first in the genre’s most popular games, and in the industry in general. The market leader, D&D, responded to cultural evolution by ensuring that the 5th edition (2015) would be actively inclusive towards queer and transgender people; it was also critically lauded for its treatment of race which upended fundamental tropes upon which the game was built (i.e., the relationship between race and moral alignment, the substitution of “race” with “species”). The second most successful TRPG of all time, World of Darkness (WoD 1991), was from the beginning a countercultural product, actively opposed to all forms of sexism, racism and homophobia. WoD immediately attracted people who would otherwise avoid TRPGs, including a significant number of women. Some of these changes were controversial; however, for the majority of other games available to customers, changes were subtle as they did not have to address a problematic history going back decades. Additionally, while D&D and WoD remain market leaders, Scandinavian and French TRPGs currently count themselves among the most successful ones in the market reflecting a departure from U.S.-centric narratives. Most importantly, even games that are based on heavily problematic storyworlds or genres, such as Call of Chtulhu or Deadlands Noir, have chosen to expunge these elements when remediating the literary narrative into their games, thus appropriating the genre and allowing the audience to experience the narrative without encountering the racism and sexism inherent in the original. Interestingly, some of these less popular yet established games are still required to negotiate with their own roots. Such an example would be Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu, which was introduced in 1981 and is currently in its 7th edition. H. P. Lovecraft’s work was notorious for its

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racist, sexist and anti-Semitic elements. However, in playing the game now, a participant is allowed to experience Lovecraft’s storyworld devoid of these elements. The same is true of Savage Worlds’ Deadlands Noir, in which players follow classical noir plots which have been cleared of the racist and sexist elements which were abundant in narratives of that era. In this way, both games repurpose, rearrange and essentially reclaim their respective genres, allowing a new generation to experience them without encountering the problematic elements of the original narratives. Another interesting aspect of this phenomenon is the treatment of historical injustice. When Dark Ages: Vampire was launched in 1996, the Game Text suggested that players who chose female characters should not have to endure the sexism of the Middle Ages, making up an ingame explanation of why gender equality was a given among vampires despite the situation in the mortal world. However, modern games such as Free League’s Vaesen (2020) take a different approach: they create a more gender-equal version of the past while keeping the rest of the historical background intact. In this way, they reimagine not a genre, but humanity’s actual past, adding another dimension to their speculative aspect and offering new avenues of philosophical experimentation. In short, despite the well-documented cultural conflicts of the gaming community, the post-postmodern TRPGs today appear to actively address and attempt to counter the problematic elements directly associated with their roots and offer instead the tools to expand speculative fiction towards an inclusive and progressive genre going forward. Even as the genre began as a regressive influence on culture, it has evolved into a progressive one, encouraging participants to reinterpret and reclaim problematic narratives such as those commonly found in Gothic, Fantasy and Noir literature. While the games have always invited participants to participate in classic narratives, their openly-negotiated post-postmodern iterations currently invite them to negotiate and reclaim these narratives instead, acting as agents of cultural change instead of perpetuating problematic ways of thinking.

Conclusions The relationship between popular culture and TRPGs has always been reciprocative. Wider cultural shifts are bound to find their way into emergent game narratives and, eventually, game text narratives. However, as discussed in the introduction, shifts in TRPG narratives are very

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likely to find their way back into the general culture. By turning away from problematic elements and towards progressive storyworlds and storylines, TRPGs invite audiences to follow into crafting new speculative orthodoxies. The gender-equal, post-racist societies imagined by current TRPGs are likely to be reflected in the work of creators which they inspire and the identities of the players which they help shape (including their taste as consumers). Through an organic, audience-driven process, this constitutes a further step into reclaiming classic narratives and reestablishing them as progressive in a post-postmodern world.

References Abbott, H. Porter. 2008. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Appelcline, Shannon. 2013. Designers and Dragons: A History of the Roleplaying Game Industry. Silver Spring: Evil Hat Productions. Barton, Matt. 2008. The History of Computer Role-Playing Games. Gamasutra.com. Accessed 7 February 2020. Bebergal, Peter. Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition Gets It Mostly Right. Boingboing.net. Accessed 17 March 2023. Bloom, Clive. 1998. Cult Fiction: Popular Reading and Pulp Theory. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Bowman, Sara Lynne. 2010. The Functions of Role-Playing Games: How Participants Create Community, Solve Problems and Explore Identity. Jefferson, NC: London: McFarland. Cover, Jennifer Grouling. 2010. The Creation of Narrative in Tabletop RolePlaying Games. Jefferson: McFarland. D’Anastasio, Cecilia. 2017. Dungeons & Dragons Promises to Make Its Adventures More Queer. Kotaku, 24 August. https://www.kotaku.com.au/2017/08/dun geons-dragons-promises-to-make-its-adventures-more-queer/. Accessed 18 February 2023. De Smedt, Johan and Helen De Cruz. 2015. The Epistemic Value of Speculative Fiction. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 39 (1): 58–77. Fine, Gary Alan. 1983. Shared Fantasy: Role Playing Games as Social Worlds. Chicago: The Chicago University Press. King, Brad, and Borland John. 2003. Dungeons and Dreamers: The Rise of Computer Game Culture from Geek to Chic. New York: McGraw Hill. MacCallum-Stewart, Esther, Jaakko Stenros, and Staffan Björk. 2018. The Impact of Role-Playing Games on Culture. In Role-Playing Game Studies: A Transmedia Approach, ed. Sebastian Deterding and José P. Zagal, 172–187. New York: Routledge.

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Mackay, Daniel. 2001. A New Performing Art: The Fantasy Role-Playing Game. Jefferson, NC: London: McFarland. McCracken, Scott. 2018. Pulp: Reading Popular Fiction. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Nikolaidou, Dimitra. 2019. The Wargame Legacy: How Wargames Shaped the Roleplaying Experience from Tabletop to Digital Games. In War Games: Memory Militarism and the Subject of Play, ed. Phil Hammond and Holger Pötzsch, 199–200. London: Bloomsbury. Peterson, Jon. 2012. Playing at the World: A History of Simulating Wars, People and Fantastic Adventures from Chess to Role-Playing Games. San Diego: Unreason Press. Salen, Kate, and Eric Zimmerman. 2003. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Schallegger, Reinhold René. 2018. The Post-Modern Joys of Role-Playing Games: Agency, Ritual and Meaning in the Medium. Kindle. Tresca, Michael. 2011. The Evolution of Fantasy Role-Playing Games. Jefferson: McFarland.

Selective Ludography Achilli, Justin. 2004. Vampire the Requiem. Stone Mountain: White Wolf Game Studio. Bridges, Bill et al. 2002. Dark Ages Mage. Stone Mountain: White Wolf Game Studio. Egerkrans, Johan. 2020. Vaesen: Nordic Horror Roleplaying. Stockholm: Fria Ligan. Fricker, Paul. 2014. Call of Cthulhu. Ann Arbor: Chaosium. Hensley, Shane. 2013. Deadlands Noir. Spring Valley: Pinnacle Entertainment. Mearls, Mike. 2014a. Player’s Handbook. Renton: Wizards of the Coast. Mearls, Mike. 2014b. Dungeon Master’s Guide. Renton: Wizards of the Coast. Mearls, Mike. 2014c. Monster Manual. Renton: Wizards of the Coast. Rein-Hagen, Mark. 1991. Vampire the Masquerade. Stone Mountain: White Wolf Game Studio.

PART III

21st Century Tropisms

CHAPTER 11

The Metamodernist Epiphanies of Daytripper Lee Konstantinou

Daytripper is a limited series first published in 2010 by the Vertigo imprint of DC Comics and collected into a single volume as a trade paperback in 2011. Critics have largely celebrated the series, not only as a successful graphic novel—but as something like literature. In World Literature Today, Rob Vollmar writes that Daytripper meets “all the expectations of great literature” and is a book that “demands” study (2012, 68, 69). It’s a “tremendous piece of storytelling that holds its own against any literary fiction you’ve been reading,” in the words of Jonathan H. Liu, writing in Wired (2011). A reviewer for NPR calls it a “gorgeous, expressive and poignant comic book/meditation-on-mortality” (Weldon 2011). Many of these reviews seem almost surprised by the artistic success of the book. After all, Daytripper emerged “from the grinding gears of the American mainstream comics industry,” as Vollmar puts it (2012, 69). It was published not by an arthouse press but by DC Comics (69). Is

L. Konstantinou (B) University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 T. Tsimpouki et al. (eds.), American Studies after Postmodernism, Renewing the American Narrative, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41448-0_11

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there a contradiction between the corporate origins of Daytripper and its artistic achievement? If there is, how is a book like Daytripper possible? Pursuing answers to these questions, this chapter investigates the place of art-comics within the milieu of the “grinding gears” of the American comic book industry, suggesting there’s no contradiction to be resolved. Instead, I argue, Daytripper is an example of what I call “Mass High Culture.” That is, Daytripper, and works like it, are produced within a highly segmented cultural marketplace that has created space for new forms of art, works which resemble what might once have been termed “high culture,” within the very heart of the Culture Industry. These new aesthetic products are not examples of middlebrowism or postmodern populism, as we might be tempted to argue. That is, these works do not efface the barrier between high and low; instead, they reestablish taste hierarchies, albeit in a different configuration, for a post-postmodern age, allowing new kinds of books to be published and new kinds of stories to be told. Serving as our tutor text, Daytripper will illustrate the shape of this aesthetic transformation of the American field of cultural production, not only for comics but more generally.

1. Created by Brazilian twin brother cartoonists Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá, Daytripper tells the story of the obituary writer and novelist Brás de Oliva Domingos across ten issues. Each issue focuses on a different, relatively unremarkable moment in Brás’s life, ranging from childhood to old age, and almost every issue ends with his violent and somewhat random death. At the end of the first issue, for instance, Brás (age 33) is shot in a bar where he has stopped for a drink. He drowns in the last panel of the second issue (age 21). In subsequent issues, he dies from a heart attack (age 41), getting hit by a car (age 28), being stabbed by his best friend (age 38)—and so on. After each sudden death, we read an obituary, written in the third person, highlighting the special significance of Brás’s death for that moment of his life. The next issue resumes, as if nothing has happened, at a different moment, either before or after the previous death. The obituary-writer-turned-novelist never learns of his multiple, mutually incompatible deaths, though the final two issues gesture towards the possibility that Brás has some awareness that something strange has been happening to him. Ultimately, the book never endorses a specific explanation for Brás’s demise. It’s not clear, consequently, whether we’re

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reading a work of realism, magical realism, or metafiction. By staging their hero’s recurrent random death, the brothers mean, as critics have suggested, to emphasize how every moment of one’s life is fleeting, irreplaceable, and subject to destruction. Moon and Bá use death to freeze the flow of life in aesthetic amber, retroactively rendering the ordinary moments of each issue newly beautiful, poignant, and/or meaningful. Daytripper was inspired by the most celebrated work in Brazilian literary history, the proto-modernist novel, Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas, by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis.1 Machado de Assis’s 1881 novel tells the story of Brás Cubas, who narrates the story of his life, in the first person, from beyond the grave in a series of short, eccentric, and charming chapters. He’s “not exactly an author recently deceased, but a deceased man recently an author” (5). Memórias Póstumas is famously cynical and pessimistic in its orientation, though some characterize the book as embodying a “playful nihilism” (Cei 2022). Machado de Assis was interested in the philosophy of Schopenhauer, and Brás Cubas concludes his narrative by suggesting that “upon arriving at the other side of the veil, I found myself with a small sum, which is the final negative in this chapter of negatives: I had no children; I did not bequeath to any creature the legacy of our misery” (291). In the view of Roberto Schwarz, the writing of Machado de Assis seems to represent a paradox. He’s a “master on the periphery of capitalism” (2001), living at the edge of the capitalist world-system of the nineteenth century, yet also exemplifying the transition from realism to modernism; Machado de Assis’s achievement was to formalize “a meticulous reply to the artistic and ideological questions of the Brazilian nineteenth century, themselves linked to the country’s peripheral position” (Schwarz 2001, 163). Daytripper doesn’t only allude to Machado de Assis through the creation of a narrator who might, like Brás Cubas, be looking back on his life from beyond the grave. In the graphic novel, Brás’s father is himself a wellknown Brazilian writer, one who names his son after Brás Cubas. We’re 1 The question of whether Machado de Assis was a modernist is, it turns out, a fraught question for literary critics. I use the term “modernism” broadly, to designate a range of innovations in the arts, and not to refer either to the specific vanguardist movements associated with Brazilian modernism in the 1920s and 1930s or (the rather different) “Modernismo” movement of the late nineteenth century most associated with Rubén Darío. For a set of essays that explore whether and to what degree Machado de Assis might be viewed as modernist, realist, or anti-realist, see the essays in Graham (1999). For a discussion of his relation to modernism, see also Antelo (2005).

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meant to understand that Brás (de Oliva Domingos) has felt enormous pressure all his life to live up to the severe expectations of his famousnovelist father. By naming him after the best-known character from the most canonical novel in Brazilian literature, the father puts the son into a fraught relation with literary history from the instant of his birth. The story of Brás’s life is, in many ways, an exfoliation of his anxiety about that relation. In this way, Daytripper explores the (very modernist) question of the vexed relation between biological and artistic paternity. Given these themes and allusions, we might be tempted to regard Daytripper as a signal example, in the field of comics, of what David James and Urmila Seshagiri call “metamodernism.” James and Seshagiri use the term to refer to literary works that return to the characteristic forms and themes of modernism in the contemporary period. Metamodernists place “a conception of modernism as revolution at the heart of their fictions, styling their twenty-first-century literary innovations as explicit engagements with the innovations of early-twentieth-century writing” (87). This description captures something important about the project of Daytripper. Indeed, the graphic novel engages not only with Machado de Assis but, as we will see, a larger conception of modernist art. Yet the graphic novel also does more than remediate the canonical mythos of modernism for a twenty-first-century English-reading public. The book also questions the power of the novel as a form to revive modernism. The book’s hero is, after all, a novelist, and the graphic novel therefore stages a jokingly literalized and repeated death of the author. If Brás Cubas is “a deceased man recently an author,” Brás de Oliva Domingos is an author who must be killed again and again (5). Comics becomes, in the hands of Moon and Bá, an alternative, more promising means by which to reanimate the modernist dream of an autonomous and fulfilled art. In this sense, Moon and Bá’s book supports the claim of Steven Shapiro that in the twenty-first century “the novel-form is losing its dominance in favour of other forms,” such as comics and television (2020, 120). However, the larger turn to metamodernism is not merely an uncomplicated restoration of modernism for a new century, but a reflection on the meaning of modernism from the perspective of an artistic world both disillusioned by and recovering from postmodernism. The metamodernists James and Seshagiri discuss—such as Tom McCarthy, Zadie Smith, and Kazuo Ishiguro—turn to a mythical vision of modernism to escape the limits of their time. If postmodernists critique the opposition between high and low culture, for example, metamodernists walk

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back or complicate that critique, refurbishing a vision of high culture for the twenty-first century. Artists who work in art forms historically denigrated by modernists, such as comics, do much the same, but their turn to modernism is complicated by that history of bad blood (see Konstantinou, “Modernist Funnies”). Comics’ uneasy artistic relation to modernism is especially evident among cartoonists who work for major corporate publishers, and this unease is most salient, I would argue, at the level of form, leading to important interpretive consequences. In the case of Daytripper, the troubled corporate assimilation of modernism manifests, formally, in the way the brothers renovate modernist epiphany. Daytripper constructs what I call “repeatable epiphany.” A “repeatable epiphany” should be a contradiction in terms. After all, epiphanies are said to arrive unexpectedly and only rarely. It “may be prepared for over long periods of time; but when the experience does come, it is not gradual but immediate” (Beja 1971, 14). It’s a form of secular spiritual insight “out of proportion to the significance or strict logical relevance of whatever produces it” (1971, 18). “[I]t was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care,” writes James Joyce in Stephen Hero, “seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments” (1963, 211). Delicate, rare, and unpredictable moments find a suitable form thanks to the “care” of the modernist artist. The epiphany is thus both rare as an experience and singular as a narrative device. How many epiphanies can a story or novel endure? In Daytripper, by contrast, epiphanies are manufactured reliably and practically on command. Moon and Bá train the reader to recognize that Brás will die on or around page 20 of every issue, and every moment of that issue therefore takes on added poignancy. This is especially the case after the second issue when the reader realizes something either supernatural or metafictional is allowing Brás to survive his repeated deaths. Brás himself is, of course, unaware of this poignancy. The final two issues of Daytripper partly naturalize his deaths by suggesting that the previous issues might be part of a dream Brás is having on his actual deathbed (Issue #9) or a fantasy Brás is indulging in after he refuses to treat his terminal cancer at age 76 (Issue #10). In these last issues, Moon and Bá to some degree mirror the core narrative conceit of Machado de Assis’s 1881 masterpiece, though unlike Machado de Assis they seem uninterested in critiquing Brazilian society. These exceptions notwithstanding, part of the point Daytripper seems to want to make is that Brás is too wrapped up in his petty neuroses and local problems and that

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he fails to appreciate the ordinary beauty right under his nose. Brás is sleepwalking through his own beautiful life, oblivious to the fact that he’s shooting off epiphanic sparks at every instant. Only we, and the implied narrator of the book, can retrospectively value the lost moment. Only we see that Brás’s life has a form. In this way, epiphany comes to seem like a permanent possibility of existence and is therefore subject to repetition. Moreover, the repeatability of epiphany means that Daytripper is potentially infinitely serializable. The book ultimately does end, but the brothers might easily have added a capstone death onto any random sampling of Brás’s life, making the series thirty or a hundred issues long. Such an extension would make for tedious reading, and at least one critic has complained that the repeated deaths are already tedious in the published version of Daytripper. “By about halfway through the book,” writes Chris Mautner in The Comics Journal, the device “starts to feel like little more than a plot gimmick,” with the reader thinking, “‘Gee, I wonder how he’s going to kick the bucket this time?’” (2011). We might endorse or resist Mautner’s assessment, but it does seem exactly right to call the repetition of Brás’s death a “gimmick,” albeit in something like Sianne Ngai’s sense of the term (2020). On Ngai’s analysis, the gimmick is a paradoxical aesthetic judgement that registers the ultimate futility of the capitalist promise to improve life through technological development. Under capitalism, productivity-enhancing technologies claim to save workers time but in practice they only, and necessarily, increase the duration and intensity of labour. To call something a gimmick is, of course, not only to make a judgement about technological development under capitalism but also to demean certain kinds of experimental artistic forms. Among its many paradoxes, the gimmick promises to be formally “unrepeatable”—it’s one quick trick that’ll solve all your problems—as well as to be a “device used ‘hundreds and thousands and millions and billions of times’”—the gimmick promises to work reliably, as often as you need it, to solve your problems (Ngai 2020, 72). Brás might keep dying forever, allowing readers to microdose on epiphanic insight on command. But at the level of the series as such, the narrative gimmick of repeated death as an engine of insight is (following Fredric Jameson’s writing on singularity) “a onetime device which must be thrown away once the trick—a singularity—has been performed” (qtd. in Ngai 2020, 65). Exactly no one is clamouring to read a sequel to Daytripper, and Daytripper’s potential for indefinite serializability is therefore not a mechanism for repeating the pleasures of genre. We’re not watching an episode

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of Doctor Who, which genuinely might go on forever, thanks to the narrative device of the Doctor’s regeneration. Rather, the brothers’ gimmick is a mechanism for cranking out literary epiphanies. Any moment of Brás’s life might retrospectively be narrativized in this way and thereby rendered epiphanic. Just add sudden death!

2. This is all just another way of saying that Daytripper is a work that aspires to the condition of modernist art within the technical constraints and publishing rhythms of the post-postmodern Culture Industry—an example of Mass High Culture. Artists working within this paradigm metabolize the demands of a neoliberal economy that celebrates creativity and the figure of the artist as central to economic growth, integrating high cultural assumptions, practices, and commitments into zones of aesthetic production previously removed from such concerns. At the same time, the making-mass of high culture transforms the idea of high culture. Aesthetic value, on this paradigm, comes to be associated with the figure of the creator-owner, who owns his own fiefdom of intellectual property and human capital and who sees his control of the conditions of production and reception in the market as central to his artistic practice. Contemporary artists are asked to embrace the idea, in short, that the autonomous artist must also be a kind of entrepreneur. Mass High Culture is a phenomenon that, I have argued, goes well beyond the world of comics, though its logic is especially salient in this world because of the way comics historically were taken, by many, to be constitutively excluded from modernism and the fine arts (Konstantinou 2020). And within the world of comics, no publisher more fully exemplifies what the attempt to make art in a corporate context looks like than Vertigo, the publisher of Daytripper. Vertigo was founded in 1993 by DC Comics editor Karen Berger, who sought to publish works for “mature readers” that did not easily fit within the parameters of the mainstream superhero narratives DC usually published. It closed shop in 2020, with its ongoing titles being absorbed into the imprint DC Black Label. During its storied run, Vertigo helped redefine the comics field and came to be especially known as a writer’s imprint. That is, it made stars out of its comics-authors— centring scriptwriters more than pencillers—and emphasizing that the work it published was both literate and literary. The imprint built on

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the popularity of adult-oriented comics in the 1980s and facilitated the rise of influential writers such as Jamie Delano, Grant Morrison, Warren Ellis, Peter Milligan, and Neil Gaiman, whose collective prominence was sometimes described as the “British invasion” of American comics, a description that both simplifies the real story but is also not entirely wrong (Licari-Guillaume 2022). Many, though by no means all, Vertigo books were creator-owned, though even books and characters owned by DC Comics—such as Swamp Thing, Doom Patrol, and Animal Man—were revised in ways that deemphasized their original connections to superhero narrative. These and other titles also came to be strongly associated with specific brand name authors. Indeed, Berger fought for and won the right not to feature the iconic “DC bullet” logo on the front of the books Vertigo published, concealing the brand name of the corporate author in the name of the brand name author (Round 2010, 16). As technologies of print improved, Vertigo also pioneered the use of the trade paperback format as a means by which to collect runs of ongoing series and limited series—bringing comics onto the shelves of high-street booksellers and big-box retailers. Julia Round observes, “[t]he new focus on the trade paperback and creator-owned work has… led to a preponderance of oneshot graphic novels or mini-/maxi-series with a finite end” (2010, 25). Overall, Vertigo was an essential player in the consolidation of the graphic novel as a respectable novel-like medium, yet it has always also had one foot in the mainstream, unlike other well-known comics publishers (such as Fantagraphics Books and Drawn and Quarterly), major publishinghouse imprints that publish comics (such as Pantheon), or avant-garde comics magazines (such as Arcade, RAW , Mome, and Kramers Ergot ). The example of Vertigo suggests that the boundary between alternative comics and corporate comics, art-comics and mass-produced comics, is far more porous than has generally been recognized. Daytripper and the conjoined careers of Moon and Bá more broadly exemplify this porousness. After being raised in the upper-class Bohemian Vila Madalena neighbourhood of São Paulo, Moon, and Bá, began their careers by writing comics in Brazilian Portuguese before transitioning to creating work for English-language audiences (they continue to live in São Paolo). David William Foster has suggested they started writing in English because “There is an association of the cultural vanguard [in Brazil] with the English language,” and because the English-language comics market is far larger than the Portuguese market (2016, 107). Indeed, one critic has lamented that in their turn to an English-language market Moon and

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Bá have “merely adopt[ed] a white middle-class perspective, making use of exotic stereotypes” in their representation of Brazilian society (Wrobel 2017, 109). Since their transition, the brothers have worked on various high-profile projects, working especially within the hybrid zone of corporate art-comics (produced by publishers such as Vertigo, Image, and Dark Horse). They have created art for Matt Fraction’s creator-owned spy series Casanova, which is still being published by Image. Bá illustrated the alternative superhero series The Umbrella Academy, written by Gerard Way, for Dark Horse, which has been adapted into a popular Netflix show. Moon has also illustrated a comic book continuation of Joss Whedon’s science fiction series, Serenity, and worked with Whedon on a one-shot sci-fi comedy, Sugarshock (2009), and the brothers together worked with Mike Mignola on the horror comic, B.P.R.D.: Vampire (2013). Their work in collaboration with other writers has gravitated towards the kind of high-concept genre fiction—spy thrillers, serious superhero narratives, vampire stories, etc.—that defines the corporate-alternative comics world. We should differentiate such high-concept genre work from the sort of writing Jeremy Rosen, Tim Lanzendörfer, and others have described as the “Genre Turn” of post-postmodern culture. The Genre Turn describes the turn of literary authors—such as Colson Whitehead, Jonathan Lethem, Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, Emily St. John Mandel, Ling Ma, and many others—towards popular genres. As Rosen notes, “at the same time [as these authors embrace popular genres], these writers attempt to differentiate their work from the great majority of popular production” (2018). That is, Genre Turn writers self-consciously come to popular genres as outsiders to those genres who are, usually, only temporarily visiting or seeking to discover what cultural resources this or that paraliterary genre might offer for their more respectable pursuits. Moon and Bá, by contrast, have worked within the existing system of corporate art-comics. The differentia of such corporate comics isn’t a turn away from paraliterature but rather, specifically, a turn away from superheroes as such, usually towards fantasy, science fiction, horror, and detective fiction, or when they do tell superhero stories, a deemphasis of the usual storytelling tropes of superhero narrative. One might see analogues in other media, such as the genre fiction of, say, HBO—think of shows such as The Sopranos, The Wire, True Detective, Game of Thrones, or The Last of Us which elevate traditionally masscultural and popular genres but do not fundamentally undermine the core logic of those genres.

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In their own (that is, in their noncollaborative) work, the brothers have tended to go further—to disavow or minimize popular genres altogether. De: Tales: Stories from Urban Brazil (2006) collects their short comics, which offer slice-of-life stories set in urban Brazil, and their book, Two Brothers (2015), is an adaptation of Milton Hatoum’s 2000 novel Dois Irmãos.2 In this noncollaborative work, which they characterize as an expression of their true artistic commitments, they seem to want entirely to evade any association of comics with paraliterary genres. Across various interviews, they admit that, yes, they read a lot of superhero comics growing up, but they also claim not to be particularly interested in making them, except in a few limited cases where they might be directly involved in creating new characters (such as The Umbrella Academy). Instead, the brothers emphasize that they want to create work that achieves what they characterize as a thematic and aesthetic universalism. Their work is focused, they say, not on popular genres but on “relationships and grown-up stuff” (Comic Con India). Their comics are, they tell another interviewer, “[m]ore about relationships [than anything else]. The surrounding of that can be anything [not just Brazil]” (Svik 2013). They cite not only other cartoonists but novelists as major sources of artistic inspiration, and their commitment to artistic universalism might arguably be thought to edge towards a kind of credulity towards the concept of the universal as such. Indeed, one critic (Mautner again) has called Daytripper a “very naïve, and very bourgeois book” (2011). The problem is, Mautner argues, Brás as a character—whom he deems “insufferable.” Despite his repeated deaths, “Bras [sic] never really suffers; not in any way that seems unjust or tragic, as happens to the rest of us sooner or later” (2011). I do not share Mautner’s negative assessment, but it seems undeniable to me that the brothers proffer a kind of universalism that would, at a previous historical juncture, have been regarded with extreme scepticism, to say the least. What the brothers’ commitment to universalism registers, in my view, is the way that narrative techniques historically associated with modernism change their meaning at different historical moments and in different national situations. If in Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas Machado de Assis develops “a complex, differentiated temporality” that, in the view of Schwarz, criticizes the views of the Brazilian bourgeoisie, Moon and Bá’s temporal experiments might seem 2 Both De: Tales: Stories from Urban Brazil and Two Brothers are published by Dark Horse Originals.

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either to be a regression to a precritical universalism or a self-consciously postcritical restoration of a sort of universalism that has elsewhere been disavowed (2001, 135). I will suggest the second interpretation is more plausible. Though their noncollaborative work has embraced an avowedly “universalist” aesthetic, Daytripper does not straightforwardly dispense with popular genres, which suggests to me that it would be better to see the book as a post-postmodern text rather than a regression to naïve universalism. I would specifically argue that the book allegorically sublimates the brothers’ ambivalent relationship to paraliterary genres in the figure of Brás’s work as an obituary writer. Brás’s obituaries represent market-oriented work, one of the least prestigious assignments a journalist can have, and a distraction from his true vocation as a literary novelist. Initially, he resists the idea that writing obituaries (rather than novels) has value, yet Daytripper takes great pains to suggest that Brás’s obituaries in fact have great power and might represent his most important writing. When a plane crashes, for example, killing 93 passengers, Brás works himself to the bone writing about the victims, reaching out to their families, making them feel attended to and seen at a time of terrible pain. But Brás is distracted because he worries that his best friend Jorge might have died in the crash. His editor explains to him that Brás needs to keep up the intensity of his work because “these people need some closure, and that’s why obituaries are so important. Without this, they can’t really let go” (141). Brás pours himself into his work and his wife tells him that his obituaries are “different, somehow. Deeper” (145). Commenting on the new quality of his writing, his editor says, “[e]veryone’s got their eyes on you now,” suggesting that Brás’s later career as a literary novelist might have emerged from this moment of public renown (147). In the figure of the newspaper obituary, Moon and Bá construct an allegory for their own position within the marketplace and their own hopes for what their comics (the allegorical counterpart for the obituary) might accomplish. Brás finds his voice and achieves his most universal relevance in massmarket work-for-hire, and like the epiphanies at the end of every issue of Daytripper, Brás produces on a large scale insightful, profound profiles of the dead. Whatever the brothers might say about their practice in interviews, then, Daytripper formally undermines Brás’s official vocation as a novelist while elevating his newspaper work, and it suggests (again at the level of form) that the graphic novel itself might be read as a series of obituaries. Indeed, as I have mentioned, every issue ends with an obituary

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for Brás written in Brás’s “universal” lyrical style. In this way Daytripper finds a figure that synthesizes market and art, making them seem almost coextensive. Daytripper symbolically kills the novel, again and again, and reimagines comics as a sort of highbrow obituary, a mass-market work that nonetheless has unique access to a power to meditate upon themes of ultimate importance. Many, though by no means all, critics regard the book as a success, as we have seen. Regardless of one’s individual assessment, it seems to me undeniable that the book means to reimagine the possibility of art surviving within the market, and that its form is only interpretable in the light of that intention.

3. I have been arguing that the brothers’ hybridized career and Mass High Culture more generally have an internally divided attitude towards genre. On the one hand, for Mass High Culture “genre” is simply a synonym for popular genres, and to the degree that a work operates as an example of paraliterary genres such as science fiction, fantasy, or detective fiction it fails to be properly literary or artistic. On the other hand, it is often these very popular materials that writers and artists working in the mode of Mass High Culture try to infuse with new literary life. If, as Eric Auerbach famously argues in Mimesis, modernist art “holds to minor, unimpressive, random events” and holds at bay “[g]reat changes, exterior turning points, let alone catastrophes,” then we can see why a literary approach to popular genres might be regarded as a difficult, if not contradictory, enterprise (546). The contrast between the unimpressive random event and the great catastrophe mirrors not only the relation between modernism and a certain kind of realism but also the relation between the literary as such and paraliterature. To focus on the ordinary lives of superheroes would seem to drain these fantastic figures of their raison d’être, though it is of course just such revisionist stories that were said to elevate comics in the 1980s. Analogously, to structure the story of an ordinary life in terms of a sequence of repeated (and endlessly repeatable) catastrophes seems strange, if not paradoxical. It is this interplay of the ordinary and the catastrophic that, as we’ve seen, structures Daytripper. And this interplay is described, again, by the cartoonist Craig Thompson in his visual introduction to the trade paperback of Daytripper. Thompson asks whether art enhances life or distracts from it. “The world of comics,” he asserts “has long been divided between two schools:

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FANTASY versus REALISM” (2014, 7). The realm of fantasy, embodied by “the DREAM” is “[c]learly a distraction.” But the realm of REALISM is “its own abstraction—distilling life to its most mundane, suppressing the dream with CYNICISM.” In Thompson’s view, Bá and Moon “dance between both, infusing reality with the sacred” (2014, 7). The “sacred,” in this binary, falls on the side of fantasy, superheroes, and escapism. Yet as we saw in our discussion of modernist epiphany, access to the sacred and the spiritual is precisely what the epiphany promises. The multivalence of the “sacred” structures the generic ambiguity of Daytripper more generally. Is the book an example of magical realism? Is it instead meant to be naturalized as a dream or fantasy? Is it an example of “unnatural narrative,” as Jan Alber and Brian Richardson might call it, or is the narrative ultimately redeemable within a realist ontology (2020)? The undecidability of these questions, I have been arguing, is the crux of the aesthetic means by which Daytripper can transcend the seeming contradictions of the cultural field within which it operates. It is the aesthetic terrain upon which the “comic as aesthetic object and the comic as industrial product almost square up with each other,” as Benjamin Fraser writes (2019, 215). What I have ultimately been trying to show is that Daytripper is not a work that defies the logic of corporate comics but is rather a work that represents its aesthetic fulfilment. This suggestion may seem perverse or even like a kind of contradiction, but in the neoliberal period such perversities abound. Mass-market comics can, in our highly segmented cultural marketplace, position themselves as art-comics, and the machinery of modernist epiphany can be internalized into corporate modes of storytelling. Indeed, the gimmick at the heart of Daytripper resembles other works of post-postmodern cultural production such as the repeated deaths of the protagonist of the Netflix show Russian Doll (2019–Present). The death of the graphic novel’s protagonist, again and again, is a formal means by which Moon and Bá transform an industrial aesthetic— the serialization of the comic book story—into a modernist aesthetic. Dramatic cliffhangers, characteristic of conventional forms of serialized storytelling, get repurposed into a means by which the previous moments of the issue we’ve just read become “timeless” and “universal.” Ultimately, Daytripper would be unimaginable and unintelligible apart from the development of a market-oriented art-comics field, whose contradictions it both exemplifies and finds a formal means of resolving. The broader point I would want to make is that critics often assume that works can only be counted as art if they resist or subvert a process of

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subordination to the market, but the example of Daytripper paints a more complicated and perhaps uncomfortable picture, not letting us so easily make such moralizing judgments, but also giving us leverage on the phenomenon of Mass High Culture, and suggesting that the study of our post-postmodern cultural world might have to reconsider orthodoxies about the relation of art and the market.

References Alber, Jan, and Brian Richardson. 2020. Unnatural Narratology: Extensions, Revisions, and Challenges. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press. Antelo, Raúl. 2005. Machado and Modernism. Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies 13 (14): 143–160. Auerbach, Erich. 2003. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Beja, Morris. 1971. Epiphany and the Modern Novel. London: Peter Owen. Cei, Vitor. 2022. Brás Cubas’s Playful Nihilism: Machado de Assis Laughs at the Voluptuosity of Nothingness. Contexto 38: 313–332. Comic Con India. 2012. Special Interview with Gaberial Ba [sic] & Fabio Moon, Creators of Daytripper. SDCC 2012. YouTube, July 23. https://www.you tube.com/watch?v=6m_Ceyr3AB4. Accessed 22 December 2022. Foster, David William. 2016. El Eternauta, Daytripper, and Beyond: Graphic Narrative in Argentina and Brazil. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Fraser, Benjamin. 2019. Visible Cities, Global Comics: Urban Images and Spatial Form. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Graham, Richard, ed. 1999. Machado de Assis: Reflections on a Brazilian Master Writer. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. James, David, and Urmila Seshagiri. 2014. Metamodernism: Narratives of Continuity and Revolution. PMLA 129 (1): 87–100. Joyce, James. 1963. Stephen Hero. New York: New Directions. Konstantinou, Lee. 2020. The 7 Neoliberal Arts, or: Art in the Age of Mass High Culture. Post45: Contemporaries, August 31. https://post45.org/2020/ 08/the-7-neoliberal-arts-or-art-in-the-age-of-mass-high-culture. Accessed 23 February 2023. Konstantinou, Lee. Forthcoming. Modernist Funnies. Modernism/Modernity Print Plus. Licari-Guillaume, Isabelle. 2022. Vertigo Comics: British Creators, US Editors, and the Making of a Transformational Imprint. New York: Routledge. Liu, Jonathan H. 2011. Daytripper Is Gorgeous and Haunting. Wired, May 31, 2011. https://www.wired.com/2011/05/daytripper-is-gorgeousand-haunting. Accessed 22 February 2023.

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Machado de Assis, Joaquim Maria. 2020. The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, trans. Flora Thomson-DeVeaux. New York: Penguin Classics. Mautner, Chris. 2011. Review of Daytripper. The Comics Journal, March 6. http://www.tcj.com/reviews/daytripper. Accessed 16 January 2023. Moon, Fábio, and Gabriel Bá. 2014. Daytripper: The Deluxe Edition. Introduction by Craig Thompson. New York: Vertigo. Ngai, Sianne. 2020. Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rosen, Jeremy. 2018. Literary Fiction and the Genres of Genre Fiction. Post45: Contemporaries, August 7. https://post45.org/2018/08/literary-fic tion-and-the-genres-of-genre-fiction. Accessed 22 November 2022 Round, Julia. 2010. “Is This a Book?” DC Vertigo and the Redefinition of Comics in the 1990s. In The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts, ed. Paul Williams and James Lyons, 14–31. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Schwarz, Roberto. 2001. A Master on the Periphery of Capitalism: Machado de Assis, trans. John Gledson. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Shapiro, Stephen. 2020. Speculative Nostalgia and Media of the New Intersectional Left: My Favorite Thing Is Monsters. In The Novel as Network: Forms, Ideas, Commodities, ed. Tim Lanzendörfer and Corinna Norrick-Rühl, 119–136. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Svik, Stefan. 2013. We Do Not Matter—Interview with Gabriel Bá and Fábio Moon. Comicgate, October 31. http://archiv.comicgate.de/interviews-inenglish/qwe-do-not-matterq-interview-with-gabriel-ba-and-fabio-moon.html. Accessed 22 November 2022. Vollmar, Rob. 2012. Review of Daytripper by Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá. World Literature Today 86 (2): 68–69. Weldon, Glen. 2011. Daytripper Explores the Quiet Moments That Shape A Man’s Life. And His Death(s). NPR, February 9. https://www.npr. org/2011/02/09/133607454/daytripper-explores-the-quiet-moments-thatshape-a-mans-life-and-his-death-s. Accessed 21 January 2023. Wrobel, Jasmin. 2017. Narrating Other Perspectives, Re-Drawing History: The Protagonization of Afro-Brazilians in the Work of Graphic Novelist Marcelo d’ Salete. In Literature and Ethics in Contemporary Brazil, ed. Vinicius Mariano de Carvalho and Nicola Gavioli, 106–123. New York: Routledge.

CHAPTER 12

Transcultural with a Twist: Reading Americanah Contrapuntally Theodora Tsimpouki

The critic Arianna Dagnino, who has written extensively on transcultural literature, claims that transcultural literature “may be considered the emerging genre, or the new ‘species’ in the big family of the literature of mobility” (Dagnino 2012). To this statement, I would add that this kind of decentred, transnational, and often translingual mode of literature may well become the dominant literary trend of the twenty-first century, superseding postmodernism both formally and thematically. Although in the past there have been many literary authors who had written in the tradition of exilic, postcolonial, diasporic literature, the current transcultural turn can be seen as an instance of paradigm-shift in contemporary American literary studies caused by the acceleration of globalization and economic interdependence, improvements in the technology of transportation and communication and the dramatic increase in population

T. Tsimpouki (B) American Literature and Culture, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, Greece e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 T. Tsimpouki et al. (eds.), American Studies after Postmodernism, Renewing the American Narrative, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41448-0_12

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flows and new forms of mobility. In other words, we are witnessing a turn away from postmodernism which, despite its emphasis on interdependence in time and space, seems to have run its course into transculturalism characterized by a transcendence of single ethnic, cultural, and linguistic barriers. Admittedly, over the last three decades, postmodernism has taken new routes, distancing itself from the epistemological scepticism, formal experimentation, and troubling correlation of reality and fiction, so characteristic of its earlier version. We are now witnessing a renewed interest in reality and engagement with history which bring about new modes of thought and generate new vocabularies with which to aesthetically represent contemporary culture. This article is an attempt to better understand contemporary transcultural experience, its features and weaknesses, through an analysis of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2013 novel, Americanah. Making reference to Edward Said’s illuminating contrapuntal perspective, I suggest that, while Adichie’s novel belongs to the current transcultural mode of literature, it does so in a critical manner; while it promotes interconnectedness and cultural transformation, it does not deny identification with communal and national affiliations. Moreover, although Americanah is not strictly speaking an American novel, it might be classified as such, since Adichie, a native-born and raised Nigerian, spends most of her life in the U.S. Additionally, the bulk of the narrative takes place in the U.S. and features a protagonist who negotiates between her lived experience of blackness in her homeland and the racialized experience of her black African subjectivity in the U.S. The article follows a twofold development. It begins with a brief discussion of the main theoretical views as they have been articulated by theorists and critics such as Wolfgang Welsh, Mikhail Epstein, and Arianna Dagnino and proceeds by drawing attention to some of the shortcomings concerning the scope of transcultural criticism. Among the concerns I isolate in the transcultural approach, I would count the appealing yet problematic empowerment of the individual on one hand and the lack of historical specificity, on the other. As I will explain later in more detail, if transculturalism is supposed to become a dominant literary trend, the term has to retain a certain theoretical consistency and steer clear of the traps of essentialism, ahistoricisity, and false generalization. In an attempt to remedy these concerns in the second part, I narrow down the focus of my analysis to register singular moments of transcultural exchange in Adichie’s Americanah. Taking heed from Stephen

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Greenblatt, who urges us to pursue the study of cultural mobility (2010) by remaining attentive to the historical specificity of the peculiar, particular, and local, on one hand, and following Edward Said’s “contrapuntal” analysis, which promotes “a double perspective that never sees things in isolation” (1996, 60), on the other, I offer a condensed reading of the novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who, in my opinion, problematizes the transcultural turn she has effectuated. In order to highlight the ubiquity of the term transcultural, Frank Schulze-Engler argues that “[f]ollowing in the wake of previous concepts in cultural and literary studies such as creolization, hybridity and syncretism, and signaling a family relationship with terms such as transnationality, translocality, and transmigration, ‘transcultural’ terminology has unobtrusively, but powerfully, edged its way into contemporary theoretical and critical discourse” (2009, ix). Indeed, in an attempt to supersede used-up concepts developed within the paradigm of postcolonial studies or “outdated” models of “single,” “self-enclosed” cultures, German philosopher Wolfgang Welsch first proposed transculturality as the appropriate concept to “articulate th[e] altered cultural constitution” (1999, 204) in a rapidly globalized world. Says Welsch: The description of today’s cultures as islands or spheres is factually incorrect and normatively deceptive. Cultures de facto no longer have the insinuated form of homogeneity and separateness. They have instead assumed a new form, which is to be called transcultural in so far as it passes through classical cultural boundaries. Cultural conditions today are largely characterized by mixes and permeations. (2009, 4)

Likewise, Mikhail Epstein sees transculture as “the next level of liberation,” a “third,” “broad way” of cultural development between the homogenization of (American) globalism and the separatism of multiculturalism (2009, 327, 329). Epstein even argues that transculture is the next stage of the ongoing human quest for freedom, “the freedom of every person to live on the border of one’s ‘inborn’ culture or beyond it” (334). From Epstein’s point of view, transculture becomes a “special mode of existence spanning cultural boundaries, a transcendence into ‘no

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culture’.”1 Transculture liberates the individual from the tyranny of one’s own culture—mainly “through interference with other cultures” (339). Bold, idealistic, and, to a certain extent, utopian as these assumptions may sound, they have opened the way to a number of critics to investigate literature from a transcultural lens. Arianna Dagnino focuses her research on literary works that “engage with and express the confluential nature of cultures overcoming the different dichotomies between North and South, the West, and the Rest, the colonizer and the colonized, the dominator and the dominated, the native and the (im)migrant, the national and the ethnic” (2013). Taking heed from Welsch whose main examples of transcultural identity-formation are writers, “no longer shaped by a single homeland but by different reference-countries” (2009, 8),2 Dagnino posits that “there is no doubt that at the forefront of the change of paradigm under discussion are those artists, writers, and sometimes scholars who have already experienced in the flesh and in their creative minds the effects of global mobility, transnational patterns, neonomadic lifestyles, and that in their creative (or critical) works have already captured and expressed an emerging transcultural mood” (2013). Following these footsteps, it is probably safe to assume, that the current transcultural turn may be considered relevant for describing our contemporary realities, and resonates aptly with most of the existing literary production. Despite the differences among critical approaches, what is perhaps shared across them all is that transcultural literature’s main difference lies in its resistance to appropriations by one single national canon or cultural tradition. Writing about “New Literatures in English,” Schulze-Engler, too, maintains that “the idea of ‘locating’ culture and literature exclusively in the context of ethnicities or nations is rapidly losing plausibility throughout an ‘English-speaking world’ that has long since been multi- rather than monolingual […] New Literatures in English themselves have long since become a transcultural field 1 “Ultimately, the human being exceeds all ‘genetic’ definitions” (2009, 335), Epstein argues. By “genetic,” he means one’s origins or predetermined nature which is synonymous to essentialist and deterministic single cultures (339). “[B]ecoming transcultural,” he goes on to say, is “moving into the open space of ‘no culture,’ the transcendental realm that relates to all existing cultures as they relate to nature” (335). 2 “What once may have applied only to exquisite subjects like Montaigne, Novalis, Whitman, Rimbaud or Nietzsche seems to be becoming the structure of almost everybody today,” Welsch contends in “Transculturality - the Puzzling Form of Cultures Today” (1999, 5).

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with blurred boundaries” (2009, x, xvi). Following this line of reasoning, Dagnino contends that authors of transcultural literature have—“in one way or another, freely or forcefully consciously or subconsciously, physically or virtually—made the voyage out of their national, linguistic, ethnic, or cultural boundaries” (2015, 152). Admittedly, the transcultural vision moves away from ethnic affiliations and national forms of identification, but there is no denying that there is a major shortcoming in the way transcultural processes are described as free and unconstrained and without awareness of the historical conditions that make certain subjectivities possible. Clearly, socio-historical conditions affect the formation of subjects, even though in a globalized and culturally “mixed” world, it is becoming increasingly impossible to think in terms of cultural purity or authenticity. Already in 1993, in Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said contended that: “all cultures are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated, and unmonolithic” (xxix). To this, we may add Greenblatt’s remark that even though “one of the characteristic powers of culture is its ability to hide the mobility that is its enabling condition,” “cultures are almost always apprehended not as mobile or global or even mixed, but as local” (2010, 252). Greenblatt concludes his manifesto of cultural mobility by reminding us that a “study of cultural mobility that ignores the allure (and, on occasion, the entrapment) of the firmly rooted simply misses the point” (252–253). Although there is general agreement among cultural theorists that local communities have never been monocultural, contained, fixed, or unified, transcultural critics tend to conduct their analysis independently from variable historical settings and without addressing the matter of historical specificity. In this sense, they tend to repeat the tendency developed to define postmodernist literature as essentially self-reflexive, basically exploring “its own linguistic and literary conventions” (Wesseling 1991, 3), without historical grounding. In fact, while transculturalism is premised on an understanding of culture on a global scale, it tends to conflate the distinct levels of the socio-economic and the political that Fredric Jameson famously diagnosed as postmodernism’s characteristic.3 3 According to Jameson in The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1984), postmodernism is not simply an aesthetic movement or a style but a periodizing concept that is linked to the emergence of a new kind of social life and a new kind of economic order. Postmodernism is conceived as the cultural dominant of the logic of late capitalism.

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The most salient problem of transculturality and related to the lack of historical specificity appears to be the notion of individual agency. Both Epstein and Welsch seem to agree that transculture tends to highlight a movement from the collective to the individual consciousness, where human beings are seen as “subjects able to dynamically select from a myriad of different cultural offerings what best suits them depending on the contexts and the circumstances” (Dagnino 2015, 127). Welsch makes the distinction between transculturality on the macro-level and on the micro-level. While the macro-level of transculturality refers to cultures as societies, the micro-level refers to the cultural identity of the individual, claiming that in the age of globalization, “we are cultural hybrids” (2009, 8). This move from community to individual, not only exposes the conceptual limits of transcultural approaches but also gives a misleading impression of the agency of the individual. In her book Transcultural Writers & Novels, Dagnino is keen to point out, following Welsch, that “individual agency and the right to a personal cultural choice and allegiance appear to be among the central tenets” of transculture (2015, 126), emphasizing human agency “‘with an affirmative position by the individual’[…] and the right to personal cultural choices, allegiances, plural affiliations, and multiple, multilayered identities” (140).4 However, the narrative of individual “empowerment” runs the risk of further mystifying and perpetuating asymmetrical social relations and unequal configurations of power between interacting populations and their cultures. Moreover, transculture’s “questioning of the dominance of group identity and its return to the individual as privileged site for cultural multiplicity” (Fischer 2016, 1) has contributed to re-imagining transcultural encounters and exchanges almost exclusively as positive, progressive, and potentially creative while obliterating views of the transcultural through the prism of homelessness, displacement, and unbelonging. As a consequence, for the most part, transcultural critical discourse has embraced transculture’s liberatory imagination and fluid character without being equally critically attentive to the historically sedimented

4 In the chapter entitled “Transculture, Transculturality, and Transculturalism in the

21st Century,” Dagnino summarizes seven central principles of transculturality, where item No 4 focuses on human agency, while the remaining 6 are: (1) a non-essentialized approach to culture, (2) blurred cultural borders, (3) culture and individual formation as a dynamic process, (4) cosmopolitan approach, (5) a humble cultural disposition, (6) the relevance of translingualism (2015, 140).

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differences, ignoring important material concerns of social groups and classes at the local level. This article, though, seeks to disrupt this kind of smooth narrative of conciliation and harmony, placing instead an emphasis on the ambivalent attachments of transcultural writers and their protagonists. Although the overall conceptual validity of transculture’s emphasis on individual agency and the right to a personal cultural choice, is unquestionable, it is also significant to underline the “sense of” individual and cultural “dissonance engendered by estrangement, distance, dispersion, years of lostness and disorientation” (Said 2001, xxxiii), that forced geographical displacement of people creates, according to Edward Said. Yet, the pain and bewilderment that are connected with exile, migration, and movement, simultaneously provide a plurality of vision which “promotes critical detachment and epistemological complexity” (Anderson 2009, 166). In an essay first published in 1985, “Reflections on Exile,” Said describes the condition of exile as contrapuntal: “Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that—to borrow a phrase from music—is contrapuntal ” (2001, 186, emphasis in original). Said’s contrapuntal perspective allows us “to be able to think through and interpret together experiences that are discrepant, each with its particular agenda and pace of development, its own internal formations, its internal coherence and system of external relationships, all of them co-existing and interacting with others” (Said 1993, 36). Adopting a contrapuntal reading of transcultural encounters (for example, between migrants, subalterns, exiles, and the metropolitan centre) might better account for the minor and unforeseen alterations with which individual agency manifests itself. Rather than anticipating radical selftransformation and self-transcendence as a result of such transcultural encounters, the counterpoint argument points towards the ambivalent, unstable, inconsistent nature and the ever-hybrid character of individual agency and empowerment. It should be made clear, however, that neither the increasing cultural complexity is questioned nor the inescapable process of intricate global connections and permeations is denied. Nonetheless, it is equally important to posit that such flows of movement, migration, and deterritorialisation are not necessarily beneficial for the individual and that globalization does not always foster cultural diversity. Put another way, the

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proliferation of scholarship underlining the freedom to shape one’s new cultural identity and calling this condition “transcultural” runs the risk of reproducing narratives of liberal individuality and individual aspiration, success, and social mobility, downplaying the experience of humiliation, inequality, disillusionment, and loss. Said’s suggestion of contrapuntal mediation, is especially compelling because it presupposes a balance of “half-involvements and half-detachments” (1996, 49) and promotes “a double perspective that never sees things in isolation” (60). Therefore, following Said, my reading of the transcultural experience involves an ongoing negotiation of competing allegiances, where the transcultural writer always already occupies an exilic, liminal space from where to perpetually question and re-evaluate cultural affiliations and national attachments. Americanah addresses issues of home and exile, cultural belonging, and identity-formation beyond colonialism and imperialism. Adichie explores the impact of Nigeria’s national past, as well as the country’s dense and complex social reality in the composition of individual and cultural identity vis-à-vis the transcultural sensibility developed by the “process” “triggered by moving […] outside one’s cultural and homeland or geographical borders” (Dagnino 2015, 2). The author depicts characters whose expanded subjecthood includes diverse and often contradictory qualities, and whose identity undergoes a cultural metamorphosis as a result of their transcultural experience. Just like their creator, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s characters in Americanah, inhabit culturally and geographically expanded spaces spanning across several countries, continents, cultures, and languages. The novel displays varied degrees of transcultural orientation that depend mostly on the specific historical and socio-economic context within which cultural exchanges occur. In other words, while the novel under examination engages with issues of contemporary mobility and hybridity which are proffered as preconditions for its protagonists’ challenging of cultural affiliations and assumptions, it does not demonstrate individual and cultural liberation, unburdened by constraints of race, nation, or history. The extent to which the transcultural perspective is achieved does not depend solely on individual agency but is affected by historical and socio-economic factors. At this juncture, I would like to harness Edward Said’s contrapuntal analysis to move back and forth between belonging and unbelonging, cultural choice or lack of it, in order to problematize the inconsistencies and ideological foundations of transculturality. To

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be more specific, rather than simply ascribing a positive connotation to cultural mobility and hybrid selves as advantageous conditions to interrogate dependence on native, inborn cultures, I propose to contextualize the debate over culture, identity, and hybridity through their protagonists’ predicament. Americanah is set in today’s globalized world, in various locations in Nigeria, the U.K. and the U.S. The writer depicts a coming-to-Americastory that revolves around issues of migration and race, but Americanah is also a coming-home narrative, describing the return to the homeland, not with sentimental nostalgia, but with a desire to explore the transformative impact of the transcultural experience. The novel begins with the female character, Ifemelu, who has traveled from postcolonial Nigeria to the U.S. to study on a scholarship. Through the use of an extensive flashback, which incidentally takes place in a heterotopic Hair Braiding Salon,5 the writer gives the reader the back story of Ifemelu’s teenage love, Obinze, their separation and promise to meet in America once he has finished college. From then on two parallel narrative storylines unfold that trace their different expatriate experiences, Ifemelu’s in the States and Obinze’s in the U.K., and their eventual return to Nigeria. The two reunite at the end of the novel, but their coming together is predicated on acceptance of the transformations their individual identities have undergone due to their interaction with and immersion in multiple cultures. At the same time, even though their return is motivated by attachments to Nigeria and social and familial considerations, it is not unconditional. Back in their home country, the characters act as agents of cultural change. Their homecoming involves negotiation and critique which unsettle traditional notions of affiliation and belonging. As a result of their transcultural experience, Adichie’s characters “develop multidimentional forms of identification which include the local and the global, in all the diversity and interconnectedness” (Gilsenan Nordin et al. 2013, xv). These transcultural processes of exchange and negotiation can be better understood contrapuntally: while the novel addresses issues of race, racial stereotyping, and prejudice at the intersection of class and gender, it does so by exploring these issues both from inside and outside, at home, and away from home. The transcultural 5 Hair as we shall see plays a very important role in the novel. In addition, the Hair Salon serves as a heterotopic space where diverse cultures and individuals meet and interact: Africans, African Americans, and white Americans.

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encounter that the novel depicts, uncovers the different ways of racial, economic, and gendered categorizing, dividing, and establishing hierarchies that are specific to the nation-state’s historical past, be it Nigeria, the U.K., or the U.S. At the same time, it should be noted that, although the characters’ process of identity-formation takes place in a migratory context, contemporary Nigerian identity is not depicted as monolithic and fixed, but as dynamic and open to Western influences. For example, because of their middle-class upbringing, both Ifemelu and Obinze, as well as their friends are exposed to various foreign (mostly American) cultural influences and, as a result, cultivate culturally diverse tastes in terms of music, TV shows, books, and hair fashion. Obinze, in particular, is fascinated with American culture: “Everybody watched American films and exchanged faded American magazines, but he knew details about American presidents from a hundred years old” (Adichie 2013, 67). He is depicted as “fluent in the knowledge of foreign things” (67) but he is far from being the only one. Through the stories of young men and women and their mobility and interaction with the West, local Nigerian culture is seen as polymorphous and diverse, involving familiarity with global culture. This way, the novel challenges contemporary notions of African identity, offering an alternative narrative to, what Adichie called, “a single story” that attempts to correct the misconceptions about Nigeria (Adichie 2009).6 As is quite common, literary narratives of migration tend to focus on the migrant’s experience of estrangement, otherness, exclusion from mainstream dominant culture, and displacement to the margins of society. Even though in Americanah, most characters do not migrate to flee from war, violence, hunger, or extreme poverty but in order “to escape from the oppressive lethargy of choicelessness” (Adichie 2013, 277), Obinze’s experience is depicted along the lines of the othering migrant. His attempt to get a visa to the U.S. is denied due to 9/11 immigrant restrictions, and his sojourn in the U.K. proves to be traumatic: as a result of his inability to find a decent job and his failed attempt to arrange a fake marriage

6 In her talk, “The Danger of a Single Story” Adichie attempts to deconstruct the

misconception that everyone from Africa comes from a poor, struggling background (04:49). As she observes: “So that is how to create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.” Adichie warns listeners that storytelling has the power “not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person” (2009).

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for citizenship status, he is apprehended, humiliated, and deported as an undocumented immigrant. Ifemelu’s migrant experience is more complicated: during her American sojourn, she becomes exposed to the complexities of racial aspects of identity which make her better understand her relation with her homeland (Nigeria). In the U.S., Ifemelu is awakened to the racialized colourcoding of American national belonging which in turn makes her examine more deeply her non-American black identity. As she explains: “I came from a country where race was not an issue; I did not think of myself as black and I only became black when I came to America” (Adichie 2013, 290). In addition, her occupation as a blogger offers her insights into the processes of racialization to which she is subjected as a black person in America. Her blog is called “Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a NonAmerican Black” and provides her with a digital space where she can post her thoughts related to racial issues. In one of the most frequently quoted posts of her blog, she writes: Dear Non-American Black, when you make the choice to come to America, you become black. Stop arguing. Stop saying I’m Jamaican or I’m Ghanaian. America doesn’t care. So what if you weren’t “black” in your country? You’re in America now. We all have our moments of initiation into the Society of Former Negroes. Mine was in a class in undergrad when I was asked to give the black perspective, only I had no idea what that was. So I just made something up. And admit it—you say “I’m not black” only because you know black is at the bottom of America’s race ladder. And you want none of that. Don’t deny now. What if being black had all the privileges of being white? Would you still say “Don’t call me black, I’m from Trinidad?” I didn’t think so. So you’re black, baby. (220)

Her interpersonal relationships and interactions with a variety of people also play a significant role in shaping her perspective in relation to blackness. More specifically, while in the U.S. she has two important romantic relationships, one with Curt, the wealthy white male who, despite his good intentions, fails to understand the nuances of racism; and another with Blaine, who is a Yale professor with a highly developed commitment to African American identity consciousness. While her relationship with

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Curt results in an increased awareness of the body politics of racial hierarchy, her affair with Blaine allows her to see herself in more expansive terms that go beyond African American blackness. What is more, as a woman Ifemelu is more sensitive to issues of beauty, sexuality, and embodied experiences of femininity. Her keen observations of American life give the reader a broad view of how black women are perceived and the impact that otherness has on their self-perception. Most black women, including herself, seem eager to sacrifice their own sense of personhood, if this means being accepted by the white dominant society and achieving the privileges of whiteness. In particular, non-white women tend to embrace “the ideology of White aesthetics” (Kang 1997), or what a critic dubbed “imperial aesthetics” which dictates what is beautiful in terms of bodily appearance (Yerima 2017, 639). This involves, according to the same critic, a preference for nonkinky hair that might be either straight or wavy, slim physique, and fair complexion as opposed to bigger, fuller physiques and darker complexions (642). As a matter of fact, as a new female immigrant in the States, Ifemelu fluctuates between Western types of aesthetics and those of her indigenous culture. For example, in preparing for a job interview, she is advised by a friend to “lose the braids and straighten your hair. Nobody says this kind of stuff but it matters. We want you to get the job” (Adichie 2013, 202). Her Americanized Aunt Uju rebukes her when she leaves her hair natural which she says is like “jute” and looks “scruffy” and “untidy” (216). Later in the novel, when she quits her job, a coworker who presumes she has been fired asks her: “You think your hair was part of the problem?” (212).7 British art historian, Kobena Mercer, is right to point out that: As organic matter produced by physiological processes human hair seems to be a ‘natural’ aspect of the body. Yet hair is never a straightforward biological ‘fact’ because it is almost always groomed, prepared, cut, concealed and generally ‘worked upon’ by human hands. Such practices socialize hair, making it the medium of significant ‘statements’ about self and society and the codes of value that bind them, or don’t. (1987, 34)

7 Finally, such is the significance attached to hair that, as it has been already noted, a large part of the story preceding Ifemelu’s journey to the U.S. is narrated from the hair braiding shop.

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Body size is another aesthetic expression inextricably linked to what is considered acceptable femininity. Thinness is not just the ideal of white aesthetics but it is also imbued with class significance. Rich people are white and thin, whereas people with bigger, fuller, and fatter bodies are mostly black, as Ifemelu observes during her train-ride from Princeton to Trenton. Moreover, the ideology of white aesthetic values according to which whiteness has become the paradigm of beauty itself, has produced racial ambivalence, affecting the way people of colour tend to value lighter skin amongst themselves as being more beautiful than darker skin. Americanah addresses issues such as hair straightening, skin bleaching, and thinness, which plague people of colour globally, wherever white aesthetics dominate. It unpacks the complexities and contradictions that black embodiment entails whenever white aesthetics have been internalized. As a matter of fact, white definitions of beauty that involve processes of bleaching skin and straightening hair have historically been used as means of oppression and subjugation. Adichie’s female characters conform not only as proof of their Americanization but also because these beliefs have been imposed on them by colonialism in their own home countries.8 The fact that Ifemelu chooses to reject models of idealized femininity upon her return to Nigeria involves an acceptance and a certain comfortability with her body size, hair, and skin complexion. Nevertheless, despite her migrant story of success, she still feels homesick and occasionally suffers from the painful experience of estrangement and dislocation. She admits that: She looked at the photographs of these men and women and felt the dull ache of loss, as though they had prised open her hand and taken something of hers. They were living her life. Nigeria became where she was supposed to be, the only place she could sink her roots in without the constant urge to tug them out and shake off the soil. (Adichie 2013, 6) 8 Interestingly, according to Oluwakemi M. Balogun, there are two different national beauty pageants in Nigeria, stemming from two distinct representations of gendered national identities. “The first pageant, ‘Queen Nigeria,’ whose winners do not compete outside of Nigeria, brands itself as a Nigerian-based pageant, centered on a culturalnationalist ideal, which is focused on revitalizing and appreciating Nigerian culture to unify the nation. In contrast, the second contest, ‘The Most Beautiful Girl in Nigeria,’ utilizes ‘international standards’ to select and send contestants to Miss World and Miss Universe, the top pageants in the world, and promotes a cosmopolitan-nationalist ideal, which remains concentrated on propelling and integrating Nigeria into the international arena” (2012, 357).

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The longer Ifemelu stays away from her native place, the more cut off “from the nourishment of tradition, family, and geography” (Said 2001, xxx) she feels, and home acquires a new meaning. More importantly, however, her American sojourn had taught her that racial bias is deeply embedded as normal practice in the systems, structures, and institutions that underpin American society. The impact of systemic racism and discrimination is the main reason that leads her to the decision to return. “Will she be able to cope,” has she been “somehow irrevocably altered by America” (Adichie 2013, 17) are the questions asked by her friends and relatives when she announces her intention to move back to Nigeria. Yet, it is precisely because of these transcultural encounters with places and people that she develops an expanded identity, that goes beyond national borders, as the title of the novel implies. The addition of the letter -h in the end of the term Americanah, denotes the formation of an identity which is neither Nigerian nor American. This newly acquired transcultural identity indicates her “freedom to live on the border of her ‘inborn’ culture” and beyond it, as Dagnino would have it (qtd. in Fischer 2016, 3). Adichie’s protagonists take advantage of their transcultural experience in order to “get back into place” (Casey 1993) and reestablish their sense of belonging. The last section of the novel, Part 7, beautifully recounts Ifemelu’s repatriation: it is described as a dynamic process which she welcomes with “the dizzying sensation of falling into the new person she has become, falling into the strange familiar” (Adichie 2013, 385). This new self is aware of the legacy of colonialism, political corruption, patriarchy, and gender inequality in her country. Her outsider’s gaze or, what a friend disapprovingly calls “looking at things with American eyes” (385), has helped her gain an insight into Nigerian culture. At the same time, her American sojourn revealed the depths of the country’s racial prejudice, dispelling myths of freedom and equal opportunity. Upon her return, Ifemelu demonstrates a “plurality of vision” that Said ascribes to exiles: “an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness … that is contrapuntal ” (2001, 191, emphasis in original). Moreover, she continues her successful professional blogging activity which makes it possible to construct a digital, dialogic all-inclusive space where Nigerians and “Nigerpolitans” (returnees) like herself, can meet and reshape their lives in the here and now. Keeping alive her attachment to her inborn culture as much as her newly acquired American gaze, her sense of being-part-of as much as being an outsider, she has reached this

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“special mode of existence spanning cultural boundaries,” as Epstein has defined it (2009, 335). She has become “transcultural” but with a twist: her transcendence into “no culture” is always already in place, never not emplaced (Casey 2000, 17–18).9 This is how Ifemelu describes the existential dynamics of her position at the end of the novel: “Still, she was at peace: to be home, to be writing her blog, to have discovered Lagos again. She had, finally, spun herself fully into being” (Adichie 2013, 475). I emphasized Ifemelu’s individual agency and her right to a personal cultural choice and allegiance, because these appear to be among the “central tenets” of transculture, according to Dagnino (2015, 126). However, the relationship between agency, locality, and socio-economic status was not adequately stressed. Much of the racism, sexism, and other cultural biases that constrain the life-choices of migrants and constitute barriers to their freedom, seem to be more easily overcome by the heroine, because of her awareness of her socio-economic status-based privilege. Especially when she returns home, she regains her privileged status which gives her the power to negotiate between her local interactions and global encounters. Moreover, her American citizenship gives her the right to travel freely between countries and around the world. It appears, then that the rhetoric of openness and individual choice builds upon, rather than eliminates, troubling socio-economic exclusions in which it remains thoroughly embedded. In more general terms, in prioritizing agency, the “transcultural agenda” to use Epstein’s term (2009, 347), leaves unexamined for the most part the intimate relation between individual power and historical and socio-economic specificity. To keep up with Said’s contrapuntal perspective, a thorough analysis of this transcultural novel ought to maintain historical and cultural specificity and be attentive to “the non-synchronous developments, histories, cultures, and peoples” to use Said’s words (1985, 102). As a matter of fact, Americanah would greatly benefit from reading through the prism of transculturality, that is, a reading that would highlight the novel’s hybrid characters and their movement across continents, nations, and cultures, and would avoid an over-exaggerated emphasis on individual agency and insufficient attention to the historical conditions of immigrants’ home country as well as those of host countries.

9 The protagonists’ return to their homeland showcases Appiah’s concept of “rooted cosmopolitanism,” a cosmopolitanism that is attached to a specific locale (2005, 232).

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From a broader perspective, it may be argued that transcultural literature can be considered becoming potentially a cultural dominant literary trend that gives expression to defining characteristics of our current era, such as global mobility and digital connectivity. At a moment of global radical uncertainty, when in Nancy Fraser’s phrasing, “the old is dying and the new cannot be born” (2019), transculturalism attempts to fill in the gap that classic postmodernist fiction—with its lack of referentiality and insistence on self-reflexiveness—has left behind upon its demise. In fact, with its emphasis on the decentred and anti-essentialist, transnational, and translingual aspects of literature, transculturalism may be seen as a possible artistic outcome of what follows postmodernism.

References Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. 2009. The Danger of a Single Story. TED, October 7. https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_dan ger_of_a_single_story?language=en. Accessed 23 January 2022. Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. 2013. Americanah. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. Anderson, Linda. 2009. Autobiography and Exile: Edward Said’s Out of Place. In Edward Said and the Literary, Social, and Political World, ed. Ranjan Ghosh, 165–175. New York and London: Routledge. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2005. The Ethics of Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Balogun, Oluwakemi M. 2012. Cultural and Cosmopolitan: Idealized Femininity and Embodied Nationalism in Nigerian Beauty Pageants. Gender & Society 26 (3): 357–381. https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243212438958. Casey, Edward S. 1993. Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Casey, Edward S. 2000. How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time. Phenomenological Prolegomena. In Senses of Place, ed. S. Feld and K. Basso, 3–52. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Dagnino, Arianna. 2012. Neonomadism and the Transcultural Turn in the Literature of Mobility. Paper presented at the “Digital Crossroads Conference,” University of Utrecht, June 28–30. https://www.researchgate.net/public ation/275652090_Neonomadism_and_the_Transcultural_Turn_in_the_Lit erature_of_Mobility. Accessed 23 January 2023. Dagnino, Arianna. 2013. Transcultural Literature and Contemporary World Literature(s). CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 15 (5): 7. https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.2339

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Dagnino, Arianna. 2015. Transcultural Writers and Novels in the Age of Global Mobility. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. Epstein, Mikhail. 2009. Transculture: A Broad Way Between Globalism and Multiculturalism. American Journal of Economics and Sociology 68 (1): 327–351. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27739771. Accessed 21 March 2023. Fischer, Bernd. 2016. Introduction: Transcultural Literary Studies: Politics, Theory, and Literary Analysis. Special Issue: Humanities 5 (4): 1–5. https:// doi.org/10.3390/h5040086. Fraser, Nancy. 2019. The Old Is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born: From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump and Beyond. London: Verso. Gilsenan Nordin, Irene, Julie Hansen, and Carmen Zamorano Llena. 2013. Introduction. Conceptualizing Transculturality in Literature. In Transcultural Identities in Contemporary Literature, ed. Irene Gilsenan Nordin, Julie Hansen, and Carmen Zamorano Llena, ix–xxv. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Greenblatt, Stephen. 2010. Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto. New York: Cambridge University Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1984. The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Kang, John M. 1997. Deconstructing the Ideology of White Aesthetics. Michigan Journal of Race and Law 2: 283–360. https://repository.law. umich.edu/mjrl/vol2/iss2/3. Accessed 21 January 2023. Mercer, Kobena. 1987. Black Hair/Style Politics. New Formations 3: 33– 54. https://fdocuments.net/document/black-hair-style-politics-kobena-mer cer.html. Accessed 6 April 2023. Said, Edward. 1985. Orientalism Reconsidered. Cultural Critique 1: 89–107. https://doi.org/10.2307/1354282. Said, Edward. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto & Windus. Said, Edward. 1996. Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures. London: Vintage. Said, Edward. 2001. Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays. London: Granta. Schulze-Engler, Frank. 2009. Introduction. In Transcultural English Studies: Theories, Fictions, Realities, ed. Frank Schulze-Engler and Sissy Helff, ix–xvi. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Welsch, Wolfgang. 1999. Transculturality—The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today. In Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World, ed. Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash, 194–213. London: Sage. http://www.westreadseast.info/PDF/ Readings/Welsch_Transculturality.pdf. Accessed 7 April 2023. Welsch, Wolfgang. 2009. On the Acquisition and Possession of Commonalities. In Transcultural English Studies: Theories, Fictions, Realities, ed. Frank Schulze-Engler and Sissy Helff, 1–36. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

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Wesseling, Elisabeth. 1991. Writing History as a Prophet: Postmodernist Innovations of the Historical Novel, 1–14. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Yerima, Dina. 2017. Regimentation or Hybridity? Western Beauty Practices by Black Women in Adichie’s Americanah. Journal of Black Studies 48 (7): 639– 650. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021934717712711.

CHAPTER 13

The American Photo-Novel in the 21st century: Familial Ties and Historical Kinship in Emma Donoghue’s Akin Angeliki Tseti

Any discussion or study of the relationship between literature and photography, or photography and literature, would necessarily have to start with the admission that this is nothing new. Indeed, interactions and encounters between the two date back to the invention, almost, of photography since, in Jane Raab’s words, “[l]iterature greeted photography warmly when the daguerreotype and calotype were announced in 1839” (1995, xxxv). Alliances and collaborations were established right from the start, with photography and its practitioners providing inspiration for character development, plot or even writing style and technique; literary texts being illustrated whether at their inception or in revision; photographers

A. Tseti (B) American Literature and Culture, Independent Scholar, Athens, Greece e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 T. Tsimpouki et al. (eds.), American Studies after Postmodernism, Renewing the American Narrative, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41448-0_13

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and writers preparing joint publications, prefacing each other’s works or collaborating in the context of a shared ideological matrix. Indeed, even though photography has never been formally viewed as literature’s “Sister Art”—in the way painting often was—the structuring, notation and/or editing, as well as the authorial decisions and staging involved in the composition of the photographic image, affirm a specific, inherent “affinity of photography with […] the realm of the written” (Brunet 2009, 7). Accordingly, any exploration of photo-texts or photo-novels, namely the composition of a narrative where neither medium is the parent figure and the production of meaning is dependent on the consideration of both, would necessarily have to acknowledge that the very first such example was published as early as in 1892. Georges Rodenbach’s short novel Bruges-la-Morte, however, remained a singular example of this genre for the decades to come, not to be coupled until 1928, with Andre Breton’s novel Nadja; and then, not to be paralleled with any other work of fiction until the publication of Hervé Guibert’s and W. G. Sebald’s photo-textual narratives,1 in the early 1980s and late 1990s, respectively.2 As a matter of fact, photo-literature did not actually emerge as a product of the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, the turn of the century, particularly in the U.S.,3 saw the publication of a significant number of works combining verbal text with photographs of different origins and subject matter—be it found or archival photographs, landscapes or familial instantanées, blurry stills of everyday objects and so on—in 1 See: Hervé Guibert, Suzanne et Louise (1980) and L’ Image fantôme (1981); W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants (1996), The Rings of Saturn (1998), Vertigo (1999), Austerlitz (2001). 2 Wright Morris’s photo-texts, The Inhabitants (1946), The Home Place (1948), and God’s Country and My People (1968) are not included, for the writer/photographer combines his pictures with a variety of textual forms, prose as well as poetry and quotes. Still, it is worth noting how, in the prefatory note to The Inhabitants, Morris described the ways in which in his work “[t]wo separate mediums are employed for two distinct views […]. Only when refocused in the mind’s eye will the third view result” (qtd in Wydeven 2001, 299). 3 Excluding poetry, autobiography and experimentation by photographers or cross

artists (following Sophie Calle), or essays, comments and meditations on a picture, a close observation of the lists of photo-works published annually reveals that the publication of (original or translated) photo-novels in the U.S. reaches double, occasionally triple numbers as in any other country. For the detailed lists see: https://sebald.wordpr ess.com/photography-embedded-fiction-lists/.

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diverse ways: writers chose to place the pictures in the paratext, as metatextual elements, or have them introduce chapters, or surface in mid-page and interweave with the verbal narrative. At the time of their publication, these photo texts were heralded as prime examples of postmodern hybridity and experimentation,4 eloquent expressions of the postmodernist perception of the photograph as an extension of thought, rather than sight, and an instigator of imagination; or original and inspiring attempts to address the post-9/11 preoccupation with the fragmentation of language and experience, the obliteration of meaning and the instatement of melancholia and acedia.5 Still, notwithstanding the—sometimes awkward, often underwhelming—attempts to place and canonize photo-novels within the existing genres or forms, to the point of downplaying or neglecting even the photographic element in the narratives, what is certain is that since the dawn of this century “there has been a marked acceleration, or, better perhaps, an intensification in thinking and writing about photography and literature as the relationship has emerged more fully into critical consciousness” (Welch 2019, 436). The particular workings and inherent qualities of the photo-textual modus operandi have been attracting increased scholarly attention and photo-novels are being discussed as carrying their own distinct attributes and relating to specific themes: to return to Welch, “photo-textual modes have been mobilized to explore themes of memory, identity, and selfhood” (2019, 437). In this vein, this article suggests that the proliferation of photo-texts— predominantly narratives of collective or structural trauma or life writing and photo-memoirs—in the twenty-first century, speaks of the establishment of photo-literature as a genre in its own right, with its own

4 Lance Olsen’s Theories of Forgetting (2014), for instance, is commonly discussed for

its “resistance to traditional narrative forms” (https://rhizomatic.org/) or its insistence on the materiality of the page, the postmodern experimentation with form and the reading choices one has to make; but never in the context of photo-literature and with reference to image-text interplay. 5 An eloquent example is provided in Mitsuko Kakutani’s review of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. Kakutani characteristically writes how the book “explores the nature of grief and the difficulty of human connection through the prism of 9/11” and investigates the ways in which “these private moments intersect with the great public events of history,” but does not elaborate on the manifold visual elements that she considers “razzle-dazzle narrative techniques” that would be better dismissed. https:// www.nytimes.com/2005/03/22/books/a-boys-epic-quest-borough-by-borough.html.

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distinct poetics, a dominant trend in both literary and cultural production. Taking Emma Donoghue’s Akin (2019) as a case in point that exemplifies structural or thematic patterns that are present in the vast majority of these works, the particular characteristics and themes of the photonovel will be explored in light of the special ties and affiliations they arguably extend. What is most striking, however, is that, as mentioned above, the emergence of photo-literature as a dominant trend in literary production and the publication of photography-embedded fiction and photo-texts overall, has been exponential specifically in the U.S. Is this special interest of the American publishing market and audience purely a continuation or an extension of the postmodernist affinity with hybridity and experimentation? Or does it also pertain to the troubled sociopolitical reality of contemporary U.S. and the timely issues of national identity and selfhood? Do these post-9/11 or “post Abu-Ghraib,” according to Aleksandar Hemon,6 works of fiction simply narrate the reign of melancholia and fragmentation? Or do they also reflect the country’s consideration of what Barack Obama called “patchwork heritage,”7 and an exploration of its position in the world? Following a discussion of the ways in which the verbal and visual components of Akin interact, overlap, and complement each other for the production of a single photo-textual compound that presents its own distinct attributes, this chapter proposes that the American photo-novel of the twenty-first century rises consequent to the country’s contemporaneous preoccupation with the trans- and intercultural ties that may be formed at a time of crisis, such as the post-9/11 era. The diverse, spatial as well as temporal, affiliative connections inspired and encouraged by the photo-novel, I argue, allow for self-reflection and self-representation 6 In an interview with Irina Reyn, Hemon highlights the importance of the publication of the Abu Ghraib photographs for an accurate description of the post-9/11 national state and crisis; he parallels these pictures to the photographic archives he uses in his photo-novel, The Lazarus Project, and states: “[i]t interested me how we were suddenly torturing people and taking photos of them … the picture of Lazarus being held up by the police captain—a dead immigrant that was suspected of something and killed just in case—was structurally identical to the Abu Ghraib pictures” (2010). https://www.guerni camag.com/not_melted_into_the_pot/. 7 In his Inaugural Address, on 20 January 2009, President Barack Obama said: “…our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus—and nonbelievers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth.” https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/ blog/2009/01/21/president-Barack-obamas-inaugural-address.

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through the stories of others8 ; and thus, prove particularly pertinent to America’s seeking to redefine and recalibrate itself.

“The Law of Closure”: Workings of the Photo-Novel Akin tells the story of Noah Selvaggio, a retired New York chemistry professor’s return to his familial past and present, situated respectively in the French Riviera and the U.S., as he embarks on a journey to his childhood Nice with a view to celebrating his eightieth birthday. Just a few days before his trip his plans and life are disarrayed by the chance discovery of an envelope containing nine photographs, “black and white, clearly old from the format … 1930s, ’40s maybe. Mostly taken in the street” (Donoghue 2019, 7); and a call from a social worker looking for a temporary home for Noah’s eleven-year-old great-nephew, Michael. Finding himself with no other choice but to take the boy along, Noah returns to the city he had left as a child with an odd companion, a constant source of bewilderment and frustration, whose perspective and tech knowledge, nevertheless, prove paramount in unveiling the photographs’ secrets and unearthing the familial past. As the protagonists roam the streets of Nice, visiting sites and pausing for meals, the subject of the photographs and the story of their making haunt all their conversations. The realization that the author of these photographs is actually Margot, Noah’s mother, is followed by more questions and, then, chance discoveries of clues scattered in the city or rendezvous with people who can shed light on the past, until Margot’s story is developed, slowly and progressively, like the photographic plate: Noah learns of his mother’s participation in the Resistance and her role in rescuing hundreds of Jewish children from the Nazi.

8 For Cathy Caruth, when historical events elude immediate understanding and/or voicing, representation may be possible “not as the story of the individual in relation to the events of his own past, but as the story of the way in which one’s own trauma is tied up with the trauma of another” (1996, 8). Leigh Gilmore, accordingly, writes about The Limits of Autobiography and representativeness in cases of traumatic experiences and suggests that the consequent distortions of memory and truth as well as the negation of the sense of belonging may be compensated through the telling of the story of another (2001, 1–15).

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Donoghue invests her novel with a particularly heightened degree of photographicity9 for the presence of the medium in Akin is manifold: there’s the image of the (fictional) famous photographer, Noah’s grandfather, Père Sonne, whose work constitutes the overarching imagery of the book; there is an abundance of references to composing, staging, shooting photographs; theoretical analyses and critical discussions stemming from Noah’s showing Michael their ancestor’s work and pinpointing the ingenious particularities and innovative technique of their making; mentions of the history of photography overall, through allusions to (real) famous photographers, such as Ansel Adams, Nadar, Man Ray, Cartier-Bresson or Robert Capa; and remarks over these artists’ preoccupations, their “choice of the aesthetic over the political” (Donoghue 2019, 100), or their “enshrining the lowly and the particular … to enact a symbolic, furious objection to Nazism” (101). With reference to the photographs themselves, while there are no actual pictures embedded in the verbal narrative, the cautious reader/ viewer is introduced to Akin with a set of four small, black and white, sharp-edged photographs acting as frontispieces,10 each occupying a single page. A fifth, annotated portrait of a young boy, writes a visual epilogue to the narrative, which, again, calls for an attentive reader/viewer, since the photograph is situated at the rear of the verbal closure and may easily be missed. The verbal narrative itself is fraught with fictional photographs, presented in ekphrasis, which arguably cover the whole gamut of photography: first, one encounters the old, “slipshod, unilluminating” (7), amateurish pictures in the envelope that, in themselves, represent the main genres of the art: 9 The term is coined by François Soulages—in juxtaposition to Tzvetan Todorov’s concept of “literarity”— to describe the process through which, when in collaboration with other arts, photography is incited to unfold its multivalence. According to Soulages, photographicity in a novel may emerge from a reflection on the medium’s attributes and characteristics, the inevitable connections to the themes of memory or death, the appropriation of technical photographic vocabulary, or from specific plot-related elements, such as the presence of photographs or photographers, photographic acts or posing, that are essential to the unfolding of the events. 10 The frontispieces of the book are created by image-maker Margaret Lonergan.

Donoghue’s decision to ask her friend to create the photographs in the envelope, rather than resorting to found photographs as other photo-novelists do, echoes earlier collaborations between writers and photographers for the creation of a photo-text and relates Akin in particular to Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project whose visual element is partly a collaboration between the writer and photographer Velibor Božovi´c.

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A Belle Epoque building … cropped at the fourth floor. An awkward closeup of a box, rectangular, inscribed with a circle, a dash on each side. This stock scene of a middle-aged couple on a bench, seen from behind. A woman with coiled hair, again from the rear […] A shot of children’s feet trotting by was cute in a generic way. Tree roots, not even particularly well framed [… ] one smiling boy with neatly combed dark hair […]. (7)

These flash at different times throughout the verbal narrative, alongside numerous—consistently ekphrastic—references and descriptions of Père Sonne’s photographic series, that are, in turn, juxtaposed to Michael’s selfies and Instagram posts, as well as news footage and images found on the Web as the two protagonists try to locate clues for their quest.

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In an interview to Shelagh Rogers,11 Donoghue notes that while inspiration for the Père Sonne storyline stems from Marguerite Matisse Duthuit’s biography,12 a photographer seemed preferable to a painter because photography, “such an interesting art form of the twentieth century,” was developing precisely at that time. Much more than this, however, the rise of photography as a marked feature in contemporary fiction is, perhaps, natural, given its dominance in the twenty-first-century media-sphere and the emergence of social media as an integral part of our everyday lives. In fact, photography has been taking precedence over the painting to such an extent and with such speed in recent literary production that, with reference to the image-text13 of the twenty-first century, it is rapidly assuming the role of pictura in the Sister Arts formulation. What is of import in the exploration of the photo-novel, however, is the photograph’s power to function as a narrative-generating matrix; more specifically, to invoke, imply or invite the unfolding of a story lying behind the depicted scene. Since this (temporal) unfolding is captured and conveyed through a single, “frozen” moment, a (spatial) image in a static frame, the narrative content of the photograph proves rather indeterminate and offers multiple ways of filling the gaps and achieving interpretation through imagination. Hence, the call to refrain from immediate interpretation and from succumbing to the fallacy of understanding upon the first viewing: in Susan Sontag’s words, “[p]hotographs … are

11 Interview by Shelagh Rogers on CBC’s The Next Chapter. https://www.cbc.ca/

radio/thenextchapter/full-episode-nov-23-2019-1.5365298/why-emma-donoghue-wan ted-to-write-about-family-generation-gaps-and-the-legacy-of-ww-ii-in-her-latest-novel-1. 5365300. 12 Henri Matisse’s daughter, an active member of the Resistance, was captured, tortured by the Gestapo in a Rennes prison and sentenced to Ravensbruck concentration camp. Her wartime experiences prompted, as Donoghue explains in the book’s cover, the story of Margot, Noah’s mother. In her note, the writer makes special reference to Hilary Spurling’s “extraordinary biography Matisse: The Life” and explains how she “decided to make Noah’s grandfather a photographer instead, because that could be called the key twentieth-century art form, and because photographs (pre-digital) have such uncanny power as evidence.” 13 The term is coined by W.J.T. Mitchell, in Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual

Representation, to “replace the predominantly binary theory of [the] relation [of pictures and discourse] with a dialectical picture” (1994, 9). Liliane Louvel opts for the term “iconotext” on the grounds that it “conveys the desire to bring together two irreducible objects and form a new object in a fruitful tension in which each object maintains its specificity” (2011, 15).

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inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation and fantasy” (1977, 23). Sontag’s perception of the medium’s inability to accurately represent reality independent of an accompanying narrative and, accordingly, her admonition to resist treating the photograph as merely a document but observe what lies beyond the surface is typically brought to the fore as Noah points to Père Sonne’s photographs and explains the techniques his grandfather used to “shock the eye” (Donoghue 2019, 223): “Can you find my mother in this one?” he asked. Taken from way above the stony beach of the Baie des Anges, when the shadows of the palm trees were long: dawn, or possibly dusk. An impatient click of the tongue, Michael poked the page. “That’s right.” A black blob that turned out to be a hat with its shadow; a small child, foreshortened, dragging a bucket and spade as if girding herself for the long day’s work of play ahead … or maybe tired from the day that was done. (103, emphasis added)

This is further accentuated each and every time the protagonists delve into the mysterious prints in the envelope and puzzle over their curious angles and evasive subject: when the “awkward close-up of a box, rectangular, inscribed with a circle, a dash on each side” (7) reappears a hundred pages later, for instance, Noah’s work and training conjure up diagrams of atoms and structures of dots and rings.

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It is only at a moment of sightseeing when he does not try to understand, nor take the picture at face value, that the hidden layers of the picture—partly—unveil themselves: Only when he finally tilted his face high enough did he spot the neoclassical bell tower in warm pastels rearing up against the sky and recognize the pattern from Margot’s photo: dash, circle, dash. It wasn’t a box or a tomb at all; he’d been looking at the image the wrong way, horizontally, when it was actually a vertical tower. The dashes were narrow-cut windows and the circle was a decoration between them. “Why on earth would my mother have taken a close-up of that?” (189–90)

The protagonist’s latter comment eloquently points to photography’s other inherent quality that is crucial to the development and orchestration of the photo-novel, specifically the medium’s idiosyncratic relationship to language as an act of speech that is performed in silence. A photograph always hides at least as much as it discloses. Further still, a photograph is always meant to trigger speech—whether as an image that “assembles in a common space a number of identifiable (nameable) objects” (Barthes

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1977, 35) and events that can be verbalized; or as a captured moment waiting to be commented upon and developed in/by language. Thus concealing as much as it exposes, the photographic image generates an indeterminate type of narrative that is “frozen” and static, a fragment emerging in the midst of the verbal diegesis, which unfailingly compels the reader/viewer to stop, linger, open their mind’s eye, observe and consider. The combination of verbal and visual elements, specifically the relationship of interdependence and reciprocity established between the two, is seminal for the development of a photo-textual narrative and the process through which signification is produced; for the interplay between the visual and verbal narratives, this “see-saw movement,” as per Liliane Louvel, “a fruitful oscillation between text and image, image and text” (2018, 18), amplifies these spaces and instances of stasis ensuing through the appearance of the visual and instigates contemplation. As I have argued elsewhere (Tseti 2016, 2020), when faced with these lacunae, these gaps, the reader/viewer may occasionally bring forth images that lie in their own reservoir yet consistently engages in a back and forth movement intended to place the image in the narrative and identify its provenance or verbal referent. This is true of all photo-novels to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the photographic saturation14 ; in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007), for instance, the appearance of the eponymous photograph in ekphrasis pauses the narrative momentarily, while in Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project (2008) the viewer/reader is compelled to return to the photographs that introduce each chapter in lieu of a heading, thus moving backwards through the pages of the book. No matter how often or to what extent such instances occur, however, the pace of any photo-textual narrative invariably reduces and its meaning wavers. Accordingly, while Akin is essentially not a photography-in-text type of novel—given that, as mentioned above, the manifest pictorial element is only placed in the paratext and may easily be missed—Donoghue writes a 14 When the photograph is embedded in the text and visible, the verbal narrative is more forcefully interrupted and more resolutely destabilized, as the viewer/reader occasionally resorts to the corresponding ekphrastic descriptions that, nevertheless, do not always coincide with the photograph figuring in the text. What is more, the actual appearance of the photograph-in-text signifies a manifest visual narrative projected upon the written and calling for a pictorial appreciation that will allow the viewer/reader to encompass and fully grasp the photo-textual compound in its totality.

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work of fiction that is suffused by photography and, consequently, induces constant shifts in the pace of narration which decreases on two levels, as the employment of the photograph functions not only thematically but also structurally. The numerous descriptions and talks over Père Sonne’s photographs or Michael’s selfies, for one, constitute overt moments of deceleration, where the narrative of the quest recedes in the background and attention is directed to the two protagonists trying to cross over their generation gap and establish a relationship between them. At the same time, the reader/viewer is also invited to take a pause from following the events of the protagonists’ sojourn in Nice and experience the interims of photo viewing by partaking in the descriptions and activating their mind’s eye to imagine or recognize: See how the pipe curves just above the floor, as it’s a tired person who’s longing to sit down? The paint flaking off at the join, and the rust eating into it? That drip forming at the seal, it seems to slow the moment right down. And Père Sonne took the shot from just the right angle so the pipe’s shadow would look like a liquid leaking out—like blood even. (87)

The passage between the verbal and the visual, however, is considerably complicated when reference is made to the oblique, lacking in artistry photographs in the envelope, for these stills are shrouded in mystery and resist interpretation. It is interesting to note that—having found the envelope amongst his mother’s belongings—Noah is attempting to reconstruct his parental past through a visual, rather than verbal (a diary or letters) text. His quest for knowledge is transformed, in effect, into a process of filling the gaps, what photographers call “the law of closure:” “Like closing a gap. The viewer fills in what they don’t see, what’s missing” (222, emphasis in the original). Thus reminding her reader/viewers of one of the photograph’s fundamental traits, Donoghue highlights the way in which the novel’s visual element—already never directly visible but only imaginatively reproduced—effectuates a perpetual return that essentially transfers the law of closure from photograph viewing to reading/ viewing the photo-textual compound overall. Thus, she writes the key to unravelling the workings of the photo-novel in general. As the stills in the envelope take turns to flash in the midst of the narrative and the questions continue, the pace of reading decelerates further and the reader/viewer is not only invited to engage with the photographs and picture their subject matter; they are also compelled to pause and

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contemplate on their knowledge of the contents of the envelope, to recall previous references and possibly try to determine whether the still in question has been mentioned before. The occasional textual distance between references plays a cardinal role: the “dandyish man with a cane, caught in profile” (7), lying at the top of the pile, for instance, does not resurface until page 199, when Michael and Noah visit the Museum of the Blue Resistance and the boy calls out: Is that your Mum’s guy? … No, down here. With the stick. Yes, the suave man leaning on a cane had a familiar air to him. This could very well be the dandy shown in profile in Margot’s photographs. (199)

Or the picture of the tree roots, the last photograph of the set to be identified and related to an actual location, which remains neatly placed amidst the others, hidden and unseen until page 230, at which point it may arguably have also been forgotten.

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The pattern in which these stills reemerge throughout the verbal narrative—namely, their appearance at regular intervals but never as a whole set—is essential in this process of engaging the reader/viewer: as Noah only focuses and tries to decipher one or some of the photographs each time, until all the pieces of the puzzle are identified and placed, the reader/viewer remains unfailingly involved to the end. For those who are well aware of the frontispieces, this experience is also quite possibly kinetically enhanced, with the turn of the pages, so as to compare the description to its visual counterpart and with the literal see-sawing of the gaze. This palpable kind of reading experience—simulating the leafing of a photographic album—and the back and forth movement intended to correlate the references to the envelope—simulating, in turn, the workings of memory—not only sustains the reader/viewer’s indispensable role in the production of meaning, but also invites them to do so through the lens of their own experience, in introspection and by association. Hence, the preoccupation with familial ties and kinship that pervades Donoghue’s photo-novel may develop into an overarching theme that expands both in time and in space. This is true of Akin and the parallels drawn between France and the U.S. as the protagonists become more acquainted with Nice, its past and its present, but it is also a dominant theme permeating the photo-novel in the twenty-first century overall. Herein arguably lies the American writers’ and audiences’ penchant for the photo-novel: invariably weaving an extensive nexus of affiliations that consistently spread from the structural—namely the involvement of the reader/viewer in the construction of meaning and alliances—to the thematic—and then not only horizontally, across borders, but also vertically, through time and history—photo-fictional narration may aim at individual as well as national representation-by-association; at a pace and from a distance which allows for both interrogation and recalibration.

“Roots and Routes”: Family Ties, Historical Kinship For the U.S., the advent of the twenty-first century was literally marked by a profound rupture: the watershed attacks on September 11, 2001, and the consequent collapse of the World Trade Center towers, ushered the country into an immediate state of numbness and silence. Followed, as Richard Gray argues, by a sense of falling, a descent from innocence to experience that resembled but could not match any previous

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such experience of conflict; and a process of observation, evaluation and (re)negotiation not only of America’s national identity (in crisis) but also of its geopolitical position and intercultural connection to the world. In Gray’s own words: [9/11] was a demolition of the fantasy life of the nation in that it punctured America’s belief in its inviolability and challenged its presumption of its innocence, the manifest rightness of its cause. It was also a dark realization of that fantasy life, in the sense that it turned the nightmare, of a ruthless other threatening the fabric of buildings and of the nation, into a palpable reality. (2011, 11)

The particular nature of the event, and the writers’ subsequent attempts to pinpoint the form that might adequately represent the traumatic experience, counter the failure of language15 and restore the fragmentation of meaning, are, I contend, paramount for the rise of the photo-novel. As most scholars have emphasized, while the Twin Towers were crumbling down, images were broadcast around the globe and—for the very first time—the whole world was watching, in real time. In tandem came the realization that—for the very first time—America was being invaded, attacked and devastated at home, in the heart of the mainland; the war was no longer on foreign soil and American borders were no longer impervious. The proliferation and reign of social media platforms notwithstanding, this enhanced visibility with which 9/11 was invested, alongside the writers’ disbelief in the usual meaning-making processes, which also resulted in the production of numerous works that conflated

15 Significantly, the failure of language is something all writers and philosophers agreed on in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. Toni Morrison, for instance, wrote about “the dead of September” and declared: “I have nothing to say” (Greenberg 2003, 1); while Jean Baudrillard, in Spirit of Terrorism, observed: “the whole play of history and power is disrupted by the event, but so, too, are the conditions of analysis” (2012, 3–4). Don DeLillo sought to formulate a response to what, for him, was an event that resided “outside imagining, even as it happened … [it] has no purchase on the mercies of analogy or simile” (2001, 39); and Jacques Derrida argued that “‘Something’ took place … but this very thing, the place and meaning of this ‘event’, remains ineffable, like an intuition without concept … out of range for a language that admits its powerlessness and so is reduced to pronouncing mechanically a date, repeating it endlessly” (Borradori 2003, 86).

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the verbal with the visual,16 proved seminal in the emergence of photography as a dominant visual mode. The medium responded to the writers’ renewed interest in articulating the silence and was promoted as the traumatic genre par excellence owing specifically to its “frozen” temporality, but also to the ways in which it parallels and imitates the workings of memory. As Ulrich Baer writes: [T]his possibility that photographs capture unexperienced events creates a striking parallel between the workings of the camera and the structure of traumatic memory […] because trauma blocks routine mental processes from converting an experience into memory or forgetting, it parallels the defining structure of photography, which also traps an event during its occurrence while blocking its transformation into memory. (2005, 8–9)

The photograph, therefore, was heralded as the most appropriate trope for the enunciation of the feelings of violation, vulnerability, confusion and precarity that America was experiencing at the time. Other than the promotion of the visual—specifically the photograph—as the most potent trope for the articulation of the void, however, what is of greatest import in the establishment of the photo-novel in contemporary America is, as mentioned earlier, the intricate web of affiliations ensuing from the genre’s modus operandi itself: the interweaving of the two elements and their synergy in inviting the reader/viewer to participate in the construction of meaning through the lens of their own experiences. And subsequently, the relations of kinship that unfailingly develop, both intraand extra-textually. Starting with the familial, the notion of what constitutes kindred and what fosters a sense of being or feeling akin take centre stage in Donoghue’s book—as is testified by the title—and becomes the dominant theme, symbolically reflected in the use of photography as well. Notwithstanding the fact that photography is an integral part of their common ancestral past, the boy’s constant picture taking is tantamount to Noah’s persistent preoccupation with the photographs in the envelope

16 See: Alan Gibbs’s Contemporary American Trauma Narratives; Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn, eds. Literature After 9/11; Kristiaan Versluys. Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel.

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and the unremitting effort to find the people or buildings depicted in them: as Michael seeks to build his (social media) profile and create his own identity, and Noah searches for his family past to be illuminated and confirmed, photography, in essence, becomes a symbol of both familial ties and kinship. This attention to family relations and belonging is consonant with the initial response and recurrent attempt by works of the now-known as “post-9/11 fiction” to assimilate the unfamiliar by nostalgically resorting to the old certainties and returning to the pieties of the home and the family. It is also concordant with the American photo-novel in general, registering familial relations as a dominant motif: to name a few examples, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005), is essentially a story about fathers and sons, unfolding around a boy’s quest for his father’s last message in the aftermath of the WTC attacks; while Daniel Mendelsohn’s Lost: The Search for Six of Six Million (2006) narrates the writer’s itineraries through archives and across continents with a view to tracing the lives and facts concerning the final moments of his great-uncle’s family that perished during the Holocaust17 ; Percival Everett also chooses to include photographs in his book Percival Everett by Virgil Russell (2013), which consists in a web of shifting plotlines that are held together through discussions in an old people’s home between father and son; and in Apeirogon (2020), Column McCann explores the conflict in the Middle East through the (true) story of two men, a Palestinian and an Israeli, who were brought together after having each lost a daughter.

17 Even though Mendelsohn’s book is characterized as a “non-fiction” memoir and

commonly placed under the autobiographical genre, the parts concerning his great uncle’s life and fate are imaginary reenactments compiled by the few facts collected by the writer. Lost is, in fact, yet another example of the reluctance to view the genre’s inherently mosaic structure as anything but hybridity and the inability to place photo-novels within one of the existing schemata.

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For all of these families, however, relations and experiences are never restricted to the domestic or even national sphere; events consistently unfold against the backdrop of a wider sociopolitical context, significantly stretching across and along territories and time. In Donoghue’s photo-novel, this is enacted via the return to the French Riviera and the ways in which the protagonists’ delving into their familial past develops into a journey down history’s dark passages to WWII, the persecution of Jews in France, the Kindertransport programme,18 and the Marcel network19 operating in Nice. The former movement, across space, is, perhaps, expected of Donoghue’s work since, as Emma Young writes, the writer often “uses the motif of travel and the tension between ‘roots’ and ‘routes’ to disrupt the concept of borders in terms of belonging” (109, qtd in Casey and White 2017, 103). The latter, through time, which occurs as Noah searches for the subject matter of the photographs in the envelope and leads to the discovery of his mother’s participation in the Resistance and the network run by Odette and Moussa Abadi in Nice, is specifically orchestrated around the visual component of the book and consonant to the characteristics of the photo-novel overall.

18 The “Children’s Transport” programme describes a series of rescue efforts between 1938 and 1940, which transferred thousands of refugee children, predominantly Jewish, from Nazi Germany, Czechoslovakia and the Netherlands to Europe, mostly Britain. 19 The Réseau Marcel, founded by Odette Rosenstock and Marcel Abadi in Nice, was responsible for saving more than 500 children between 1943 and 1945 in France, by providing them with false papers, identifying them as Christian and hiding them with Catholic families and institutions.

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In fact, these movements across time (towards a turbulent past) and space place Akin among an overwhelming majority of photo-novels that engage in the exploration of times of conflict and upheaval, specifically spanning across borders (predominantly in Europe). With reference to works of hidden intermediality—that is, including the visual in ekphrasis — one might mention Richard Powers’s Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance (1985), one of whose narrative strands is set in Germany during World War I; in relation to photography-in-text works, apart from Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, which draws parallels between 9/ 11 and the firebombing of Dresden, as well as Hiroshima, and Column McCann’s Apeirogon narrating the Arab-Israeli conflict, one should also cite Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project. Hemon’s book tells the story of a Bosnian immigrant in Chicago who embarks on a journey back to his native post-war Sarajevo while researching the story of another immigrant who had arrived in U.S. soil at the dawn of the twentieth century and died soon after by the hand of the chief of police as a result of xenophobia. It is one of the most eloquent examples of America turning

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to photo-literature with a view to investigating its perception of nationhood and its role in the geopolitical ferment and social unrest across the Atlantic and further. In all of these works, the parallels between diverse historical instances and geopolitical circumstances are drawn precisely owing to the complex interplay between verbal and visual narratives and the elaborate choreography they perform—irrespective of the extent to which the verbal narrative is needed to inform the visual component. The fissures created in the narrative by the detailed descriptions of Père Sonne’s photographic series, for instance, allow for the reader/viewer’s imagination to be activated and for further images to surface. Images that reside in their own personal reservoir and pertain to more, geopolitically separate instances of conflict. Taking Akin as an example, the workings of the photo-novel discussed above—the “see-saw movement” between text and image, calling for the participation of the reader/viewer in “filling the gaps”—lead to a realization and, possibly, comprehension of the recurrent historical patterns and motifs of hostility and persecution. Donoghue is quite explicit in this intent, perhaps more so than other writers, when, for example, Noah looks at the local papers and reads “about child migrants […] trying to get from Italy via Monaco into France, being kicked off the train at Nice by gendarmes ” (2019, 156); or when he tells Michael the story of Sainte Réparate and thinks: “The Mediterranean was full of drowned migrants, these days” (192). More than this, certain such references resonate with particular intensity when addressed to an American audience: for example, the mention of France being “so surveilled and militarized since this wave of attacks had begun in 2015, that half of its total forces were patrolling its own streets” (119), which points directly to the reign of fear and surveillance following the WTC attacks; or the narration of the truck attack in Nice, during “a street party for Bastille Day – that’s like the French Fourth of July – right after the fireworks” (137, emphasis added), which could, possibly, be reminiscent of the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013. For the by now engaged reader/viewer, who has been invited by the workings of the photo-novel to actively, affectively, partake in the interpretation process by tapping into their own experience, the possibilities of affiliative connections and detection of relations of kinship may point towards any direction. For Americans in particular, there is every likelihood that this elaborate process may be tantamount to a mirroring—and, consequently, historicizing—of the attacks as well as to the construction

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of analogy, mutuality, reciprocity and convergence. Thus, the—heretofore pronounced “singular,” unfathomable and indescribable—collapse of the WTC may be placed in a historical flow that allows for its consideration, interpretation and claiming, registered through an appreciation of, precisely, the nation’s “patchwork heritage” and “syncretic,” as per Richard Gray, nature (2011). Differently put, while maintaining the— preferred by post-9/11 fiction—return to the origins, the familial past as well as historical affiliations, the American photo-novel of the twenty-first century emphasizes these returns as a centrifugal movement that enables and invites an inspection of experiential kinship. Within the workings of these photo-novels, 9/11 may be viewed in the context of a longstretching “history of destruction,” to use W. G. Sebald’s words (2003); and the traumatic experience of the attacks is highlighted as singular yet not unique, partaking in, as per Michael Rothberg, a more extended “history of victimhood” (2009). This allows for the formation of alliances that revoke America’s perception of traumatic singularity by placing it within a continuum of life trajectories and experiences and by reconstituting the country’s sense of belonging; hence, America’s fractured sense of national identity may be re-negotiated and restored, precisely, through the stories of others and the ties that bind.20

In Lieu of a Conclusion Bringing the discussion of the contemporary American photo-novel to a conclusion, it is interesting to note that, writing more than twenty years into the twenty-first century, Donoghue differentiates from other photonovelists in that she makes a clear distinction between the photographic stills created and claimed by their authors—photographs that make part of photo-books, art collections, or private family albums—and the digitized, often anonymous, images circulating the web. Père Sonne’s photographic series, meant to depict characteristic groups and types of the times, to attract scholarly attention and be read as art, are occasionally juxtaposed to the digital, deliberately out-of-focus images Michael posts online, or the ones he produces on the screen of his mobile phone, in order to visualize stories of the November 2015 Paris attacks or the “blurred footage” of corpses lying on the pavement, “taken with a phone right after the

20 See note 9 above.

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attack” (138) on Bastille Day 2016, in Nice. Should one consider the proliferation of the photo-novel as consonant, or consequent, to the medium’s overall dominance in contemporary media-sphere, this is an aspect that remains to be further explored. What is currently certain, is that photo-literature is rapidly shedding the label of simply illustrated fiction and emerging as an actual genre in its own right, presenting its own unique traits; a trend and, perhaps, a canon of works that, while operating under the postmodernist view of photography as a veil, a trigger for the imagination and an extension of thought, cannot be satisfyingly categorized in terms of postmodernist hybridization and experimentation. In fact, photo-literature challenges the postmodernist emphasis on fragmentation by transforming its constituent components into an elaborate mosaic that reforms and reshapes its reader/ viewers’ (or viewer/readers’) perspective. While keeping the movement germane, in terms of theory or issues of enquiry, the photo-novel moves away from postmodernist individuation and decentered subjectivity to highlight convergence and interconnectedness. The spaces of stasis ensuing with every pause for (imaginary) viewing, each time the pace of the narrative decelerates, in conjunction with the thought processes involved not only in the mental visualization of the picture described but also, predominantly, in the act of filling the diegetic and hermeneutic lacunae, result in a composite mental picture that is never determined or fixed. Is this process consistently fraught with fragments of time and experience, or clues to connect and decipher? Not always so. When Noah returns to the envelope in the penultimate page of the book, he ponders over “the only picture that still baffled him […] An empty street” (334) and realizes that his mother “had caught a split second when nothing had been happening […] a respite from history […] a chance to catch your breath” (334). In effect, the discussion on the workings of the photo-novel should conclude with the admission that the stillness and stasis conveyed by the stills included in a photo-novel may merely effectuate a change of pace and the information provided by the verbal narrative may occasionally be lost. But when it comes to the American photo-novel specifically, it seems that this newly emerging genre carries special pertinence. As the exploration of these works shows, photo-novels are exceptionally endowed with the potential to signify the commonality of experience, even at a time of crisis, and relations of kinship through time and space. Hence, albeit nothing new, photo-literature seems to find a privileged place within the

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literary production of a nation seeking to heal its wounds and redefine itself; and rises anew.

References Baer, Ulrich. 2005. Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma. Cambridge, MA and London, England: MIT Press. Barthes, Roland. 1977. Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath. London: Fontana Press. Baudrillard, Jean. 2012. The Spirit of Terrorism. London: Verso. Borradori, Giovanna. 2003. Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Brunet, François. 2009. Photography and Literature. London: Reaktion Books. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Casey, Moira, and Eva Roa White. 2017. Unsettled Homes: Borders and Belonging in Emma Donoghue’s Astray. Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 50 (2): 103–125. DeLillo, Don. 2001. In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September. Harper’s Magazine, December, 33–40. DeLillo, Don. 2007. Falling Man. London: Picador. Donoghue, Emma. 2019. Akin. New York: Picador. Everett, Percival. 2013. Percival Everett by Virgil Russell. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press. Foer, Jonathan Safran. 2005. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. London and New York: Penguin Group. Gibbs, Alan. 2014. Contemporary American Trauma Narratives. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Gilmore, Leigh. 2001. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Ithaca and London: Cornell University. Gray, Richard. 2011. After the Fall: American Literature Since 9/11. Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. Greenberg, Judith, ed. 2003. Trauma at Home: After 9/11. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Hemon, Aleksandar. 2008. The Lazarus Project. London: Picador. Keniston, Ann, and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn, eds. 2010. Literature After 9/11. London and New York: Routledge. Louvel, Liliane. 2011. Poetics of the Ionotext, ed. Karen Jacobs, trans. Laurence Petit. Surrey: Ashgate. Louvel, Liliane. 2018. The Pictorial Third: An Essay into Intermedial Criticism, ed. and trans. Angeliki Tseti. London and New York: Routledge.

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McCann, Colum. 2020. Apeirogon. New York: Random House. Mendelsohn, Daniel. 2006. The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million. London: William Collins Press. Mitchell, William John Thomas. 1994. Picture Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Powers, Richard. 2010. Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance. London: Atlantic Books. Rabb, Jane M., ed. 1995. Literature & Photography: Interactions 1840–1990: A Critical Anthology. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonisation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Sebald, Winfried Georg. 2003. On the Natural History of Destruction, trans. Anthea Bell. London: Hamish Hamilton. Sontag, Susan. 1977. On Photography. New York: Penguin Books. Soulages, François. 1999. Du négatif au numérique: rupture ou continuité dans la photographicité? Paris: Publications Paris 7. Tseti, Angeliki. 2016. Photo-textual Narratives, Shared Experiences: The Multidirectionality of Traumatic Memory in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. In America: Justice, Conflict, War -European Views of the United States, vol. 8, ed. Amanda Gilroy and Marietta Messmer, 31–49. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag. Tseti, Angeliki. 2020. The “Outlandish Stranger”: Immigrant Identities, Phototextual Narratives and Ethnicity in Crisis in Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project. In Ethnicity and Gender Debates: Cross-Readings of American Literature and Culture in the New Millennium, ed. Tatiani G. Rapatzikou and Ludmila Martanovschi, 141–158. Berlin: Peter Lang. Versluys, Kristiaan. 2009. Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel. New York: Columbia University Press. Welch, Edward. 2019. État Présent: Literature and Photography. French Studies 73 (3): 434–444. Wydeven, Joseph J. 2001. “No Place to Hide:” Wright Morris’s Great Plains. Great Plains Quarterly 21 (4): 287–308.

CHAPTER 14

Literary Translingualism in the 21st century: Mobilizing Affect Through Language Kornelia Dimova Slavova

At the turn of the twenty-first century, under the pressure of modern technologies and changing social dynamics many popular “post” labels such as post-human, post-colonial, post-nationalist, post-ideology, postfeminist, post-communist, and others were dismantled. Postmodernism was not spared, either: some called it “a thing of the past” (Hutcheon 2002, 165), others announced its “gradual passing” (Toth 2010, 3), and still others proclaimed it “dead and buried” (Kirby 2009, 3). What came after it bended under the new regimes of digital connectivity, late globalization, and expanding multicultural networks but did not sever radically the connection with postmodernism as signaled by the labels of some of the new forms of literary production such as “cosmodernism” (Moraru 2011, 2), “metamodernism” (Holland 2013, 200), or “pseudomodernism/ digimodernism” (Kirby 2009, 1). On the ruins of postmodernism, there have emerged more flexible analytical frameworks beyond

K. D. Slavova (B) Department of English and American Studies, Sofia University, Sofia, Bulgaria e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 T. Tsimpouki et al. (eds.), American Studies after Postmodernism, Renewing the American Narrative, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41448-0_14

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binaries and borders, emphasizing exchanges across cultures, languages, and even species as evidenced in the new buzzwords such as transnational, transversal, transhuman, translational, transborder, translocal, transgressive, and so on.1 It is not accidental that in the post-9/11 context, Donald Pease sees globalization as a catalyst for de-centering and recentering of regions and the world, creating a possibility for imagining “non-state spaces and alternative Americas” (2015, 58). Starting from the assumption that “The United States is perhaps the prototypical transnational state formation” (1), the critic calls for an urgent practice of “transnational American studies,” which transcends the frameworks of American exceptionalism and multiculturalism, foregrounds the relationships between the U.S. and the world, and demands “greater attention to U.S. colonialism and imperialism, diasporic communities, Third World immigrants, and the relationships between the global world and America” (53). Literary translingualism in the U.S. is one of the trends in the twenty-first century American studies, which opens up the field transnationally, both inside and outside the U.S. Literary translingualism has existed as practice since antiquity but the term was introduced in 2000 by Steven G. Kellman, signifying “the phenomenon of writers who create texts in more than one language or in a language other than their primary one” (Kellman 2000, 8). Twenty years later the American scholar explains the growing popularity of translingual practice with the unprecedented mobility and migration in the first two decades of the twenty-first century but also with the power of translingual literature to create spaces for hyphenated American identities, a literature that explores the interstices or as he puts it, “the spaces, links and barriers between languages” (Kellman 2020, viii). In what follows I will try to illustrate the power of contemporary translingual literary practice to defy borders between nations, regions, cultures, traditions, and languages in the very act of creating interstitial forms of linking, living, and writing.2 There are two aspects to my discussion of literary translingualism: first, its potential to foreground exchanges between languages and cultures transnationally, and second, its capacity 1 The prefix “trans” contains a whole gamut of ambiguity, suggesting diverse meanings such as “across,” “beyond,” “through,” and/or “changing thoroughly.” 2 Translingualism stresses contacts, collision and intermingling of different languages, whereas bilingualism traces the author’s path from one discrete language to another, delineating a binary pattern.

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to engage with important issues emotionally through language—contrary to the decade-long trend in postmodernism to disregard emotions and affect. To develop these ideas, I will refer to two contemporary translingual authors, who were born in the Balkans but have lived and published in the U.S., namely, Aleksandar Hemon and Miroslav Penkov. Despite their differences in terms of mother tongue, style, generic preferences, and signature method, the two have a lot in common: both emigrated to the U.S. but have stayed connected to their home countries; both have abandoned a Slavic language and have chosen English as their new language; both have lived under communism and the Cold War, which have marked their writing; and finally; both have received prestigious international awards. Their background does not make them representative of American literature: their connection with Anglophone literature has been insufficiently discussed, the two usually being loosely lumped together under the umbrella term “literature of the East European diaspora.”3 Yet, their case of diverse similitude is worth discussing not only for placing the Balkans on the Anglophone literary map but also for energizing contemporary American fiction with new perspectives, multilingual sensitivity, and stylistic freshness—all enhancing literature’s capacity to involve readers emotionally. Translingual authors are naturally endowed with the gift of building affective bridges through language because as Kellman explains, language “enables and enlarges empathy—to adopt another language is to cultivate empathy for alternative modes of apprehension” (2000, 62). If the adopted language is seen as an entering point not simply to other alphabets and sounds but also to other cultures and people, does it mean that translingual literature carries greater affective charge? Can linguistic versatility enhance emotions circulating in the text but also between the text and its readers? How does the recent affective turn in the humanities compare to the emotional detachment of postmodernism and its “waning of affect” in Fredric Jameson’s terms? Before answering these questions, I need to pause to introduce briefly some major tenets of postmodernism. As a whole, feelings were downplayed by postmodern theory because of its general concern with surface, simulacra, questioning of reality and representation, lack of depth, and so 3 Among them are the Bulgarian-born translinguals such as Ilija Trojanow, Dimitré Dinev, Nikolai Grozni, Vladislav Todorov, Kapka Kassabova, Krassi Zourkova, Maria Popova, as well as the Russian-American writers Gary Shteyngart, Lara Vapnyar, and Maxim Shrayer.

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on, which emptied cultural production out of feeling. In his essay “Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” Fredric Jameson discusses the major features of postmodernism such as “a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense”: The end of the bourgeois ego, or monad, no doubt brings with it the end of the psychopathologies of that ego—what I have generally here been calling the waning of affect. But it means the end of much more—the end, for example, of style, in the sense of the unique and the personal, the end of the distinctive individual brushstroke (as symbolized by the emergent primacy of mechanical reproduction). As for expression and feelings or emotions, the liberation, in contemporary society, from the older anomie of the centered subject may also mean, not merely a liberation from anxiety, but a liberation from every other kind of feeling as well, since there is no longer a self present to do the feeling. (1991, 10)

As seen in the quote, the critic’s suspicion toward subjective emotion is grounded in the death of hermeneutic models of meaning in late capitalism as well as the so-called “death of the subject” (the postmodern assumption that there is no stable or unitary subject as the source of emotion). In the same passage, Jameson makes the provision that the above-said does not mean that the cultural products of the postmodern era are “utterly devoid of feeling, but rather that such feelings (or ‘intensities’) are free-floating and impersonal” (1991, 10). In the last thirty years after the publication of Jameson’s essay, the definition and the deployment of the concept “affect” have been subject to various interpretations and critiques, including by the author himself. In the interview “Revisiting Postmodernism” (2016), Jameson explains how the emergence of “affect theory” has forced him to rethink the term: “To sum up, what I really meant at the time was the waning of emotions” (152).4 It goes beyond the scope of this paper to discuss the reactions to Jameson’s affective hypothesis as they are contradictory and pull in various directions over the years. Some scholars (primarily associated with affect theory) attack his early understanding of the role of affect in shaping individual and collective life (Massumi 2002, 27; Berlant 2008, 4; Sedgwick

4 Jameson’s latest book The Antinomies of Realism has been seen as “recantation of the waning of affect theme”—see Pansy Duncan, “Once More, with Fredric Jameson” (2).

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2003, 108)5 ; others find Jameson’s statement critically, theoretically, and terminologically problematic, yet reappraise it, claiming that the theorist’s account of “euphoric intensities” makes him a progenitor of current theories of affect (Duncan 2017, 7; Pellegrini and Puar 2009, 27), whereas still others erase the gap between affects and emotions by using the term “feelings” (Terada 2003, 7; Ngai 2005, 21). Today the understanding of affect varies substantially and there is consensus neither on the definition of affect nor on the distinctions between affect, sensations, intensities, feelings, and emotions.6 The dominant understanding of “affect” follows Brian Massumi’s idea of affect as a “surplus of emotional experience that escapes confinement in the particular body” (2002, 35), i.e., located in relations and movement—as physical energy circulating between and among individuals through communication. Massumi’s understanding of affect as “spreadable emotion” in circulation is very pertinent for analyzing literary communication for several reasons: first, reading fiction is a shared event, offering possibilities of being and of becoming in a shared collective space; second, it is a site of emotional movement where readers are moved (i.e., emotionally transported) as they are involved in the event, opening to the other and/ or becoming the other; and third, it is an affective event where the audience experiences joy, pain, anger, anxiety, or catharsis directly, without mediation. Affect studies have much to offer to literary studies as literature is an affective domain, filled with feelings, relations, and engagement. For example, affect theory can explain better how specific literary structures such as the language of the text, implied tonality or the author’s emotions and self-references can trigger affective responses from readers and act over them. Due to the confusion surrounding the terms “affect” and “emotion” as well as Jameson’s revision of his own affective hypothesis retroactively, it is impossible to come up with any consistent terminology or interpretation of the postmodern disregard of affect. For the purpose

5 For example, Massumi claims the opposite: “Fredric Jameson notwithstanding, belief has waned for many, but not affect. […] If anything, postmodernism is characterized by a surfeit of affect” (2002, 27–28). Along similar revisionist lines Lauren Berlant declares: “We witness here, not the ‘waning of affect,’ but the waning of genre” (2008, 7). 6 See The Affect Theory Reader (2010), eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth where Massumi’s Deleuzian model of affect is the dominant affective paradigm but many other alternative models and debates are introduced.

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of the ensuing analysis of translingual literature, my understanding of affect is rather broad—inclusive of both the physiological and discursive aspects of feeling because they work together in literature. More than any other form of art, literature produces excitement and stimulates sensory responses but they are linguistically grounded, coded in/ through language. Therefore, affect in literature is related to the visceral reactions of the body but also the discursive shaping of that body. This understanding is suitable for the discussion of literary translingualism because being a discursive practice, translingualism foregrounds language. In light of the broader understanding, the question then becomes not how to define affect but how to intensify the affective charge in literary communication, reception, and composition. In what follows I will trace several mechanisms employed by Penkov and Hemon to engage the affective capacities of transnational readers such as encouraging emphatic reading through performing “the personal,” eliciting affective perceptions through emotion-laden words, provoking both affective attachment and detachment, relying on exaggerated affective gestures as well as mixing languages.

Affective Experiences: Penkov’s and Hemon’s Translingual Writing Translingual literature deals with experiences of exile, immigration, mobility, travel, journeys across space and time, as well as interlingual journeys—hence the diverse labels used to refer to it such as “exilic narratives,” “literature of postcolonialism and migration,” “expatriate fiction,” “transnational” or “transcultural” literature,” “diaspora” or “world literature”—to mention but a few of the relevant ones. Among its characteristics, it is worth mentioning its broad geographical reach, the combination of memories and experience as well as the interweaving of personal and national stories, the vibrant links between language and identity as well as language and emotions. Translingual writing has been used as a research tool by sociolinguists to study the power of language to shape one’s perceptions and identity. For example, analyzing translingual writers such as the Polish-born Eva Hoffman, Italian-born Tim Parks, Chinese-born Veronica Zhengdao Ye, and others, Mary Besemeres argues that through their autobiographical narratives translingual authors offer their readers not only insight into their immigrant experience but “a unique and important perspective on the relationship between language and emotions”

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(2006, 54). Other scholars also refer to autobiographical narratives as useful tools in the study of bilingualism and cognitive psychology: Robert W. Schrauf and Ramon Durazo-Arvizu claim that “memories are tagged by language”—i.e., when immigrants recollect “first language memories from childhood” in the second language, some of the emotional coloring of the events or situations is lost. But in the case where the “language of encoding and the language of retrieval are one and the same, the results prove to be more satisfying, as the intensity is greater” (2006, 307). Along this vein, Kellman insists that “nimble-tongued” translinguals are more “attuned to ambiguity,” endowed with “cognitive flexibility” and the ability “to balance two or more separate linguistic systems simultaneously, which demands greater awareness of the relativity of things” (2020, 14). To discuss further the affective charge of literary translingualism let us turn to Penkov’s East of the West: A Country in Stories (2011) and Hemon’s The Book of My Lives (2013). I have deliberately narrowed down my focus by choosing these two works as both are short story collections, both are semi-autobiographical, and both revolve around affective narratives from the Balkans, charged with strong emotions. These memory narratives are “tagged by language” in Schrauf’s and Durazo-Arvizu’s terms as their authors’ experiences have been embedded in shifting contexts of several languages; they present the paradox of writing about one’s homeland in a foreign tongue, of remembering one’s childhood in a language other than one’s mother tongue as well as defying monolingual restrictions in one’s adopted language. Miroslav Penkov was born in Bulgaria; in 2001 he went to the U.S. to study psychology and at the age of twenty-four published the collection East of the West: A Country in Stories (2011), which won the Eudora Welty Prize in Fiction, Best American Short Stories Award for 2008, the BBC short story award for 2012, and others. As the title suggests, his “country in stories” (emphasis added) is a re-creation of his native country in the form of eight vignettes, re-telling its past and present. In his recent debut novel, entitled Stork Mountain (2016), Penkov continues to “re-create” Bulgaria from a distance and in a foreign language: this time, depicting the magic history of Strandzha Mountain at the border with Greece and Turkey. Although East of the West: is not totally autobiographical, it is driven affectively by the category of the personal as many of the characters’ life-stories seem identical to the author’s experience. For example, Penkov’s characters are settled in mobility: they move

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between diverse geographical and fictional worlds, yet they always return home—either revisiting their native land physically or in their dreams and memories. Some are forcefully dislocated Bulgarians who live on the Serbian border; others are immigrants in the U.S., whereas still others are soldiers and heroes from the past who inhabit the characters’ imagination. It is important to mention that Penkov was not forced to leave his home country: he left because in the words of one of his characters, he “carried in his blood the rabies of the West, the drive towards the West like sickness, like madness” (2011, 55). He is a young nomad who enjoys the newly discovered freedom of mobility—nonexistent under communism. Like his protagonist from the short story “Buying Lenin,” he feels twice displaced: when he lives in Bulgaria, he dreams of America, but when living in the U.S., he dreams of his birthplace. Another strategy of performing the personal, employed by Penkov, is through interweaving personal stories with national stories. The stories in the collection cover centuries of traumatic history: from the Ottoman Empire and the Balkan Wars through the communist rule to today’s world, yet they are always remembered through the personal lens of the translingual author. What is extremely interesting is that Penkov chooses to revisit the country of his origin from a distance, in English. Writing about one’s origin is always painful, no matter what affective realm it touches upon—family, friends, favorite places, first love, or any other firsts. The native land has a highly emotional presence in Penkov’s collection: it makes itself felt in the dramatic story about the young lovers, who live separated on both banks of the river in a divided village. It is also evoked in the heroic tale about the Mountain protecting her children in grim times—a story told by a Bulgarian father to comfort his daughter during a tornado in the American South. The abandoned home is almost tangible in the story about a young Bulgarian living in the U.S., who tries to taste and smell home through the tactile images described by his grandpa over the phone: “If only I could borrow his eyes for an instant, if only I could steal his tongue […] fill my gaze with slopes, fields, rivers” (2011, 70). By migrating into a new environment and a new language Penkov adopts a more flexible transnational stance: his gaze from outside helps him deconstruct many stereotypes and myths about the Balkans and totalitarianism, presenting them with a mixture of nostalgia and self-irony. For example, the outside perspective relativizes the century-old binary East vs. West by showing that the West means nothing without the East and vice versa: in his literary universe Serbia is located to the West of Bulgaria,

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whereas Bulgaria constitutes the West for Turkey. As the ironic book title suggests, the East and the West have not simply geographical dimensions but also political (communism vs. capitalism), cultural (homeland vs. the Promised Land), national (Bulgaria vs. America), and mythical (ancient civilization vs. the New World). Penkov’s affective bridges between East and West, between past and present are built of legends, ideology, and strong emotions—they take the transnational reader on an exciting journey to an unknown magic land of heightened reality, bringing into it a fresh non-Western perspective. Aleksandar Hemon’s writing also revolves around the painful theme of origin, constantly looking back at his native Bosnia, while moving between the fictional worlds of former Yugoslavia, Canada, Africa, the U.S., Ukraine, and so on. In 1992, he arrived in the U.S. as a tourist and got stranded there because of the interethnic wars in former Yugoslavia. At the age of twenty-eight, he had to begin his literary career anew and re-invent himself in a new language. Hemon has published many short stories, novels, and essays—writing primarily about exile, alienation, war and media coverage, cultural differences, and otherness. He has won prestigious awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003 and a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation in 2004. The Book of My Lives (2013) is his most autobiographical book although the translingual writer has voiced his disregard for memoir and autobiographical writing, especially as practiced in the U.S. The collection is centered on the personal experience and the recollections of the first-person narrator/ author: Hemon as brother, son, husband, and father; Hemon as Bosnian and cosmopolitan, Hemon as writer and journalist. The narrator is the sum of his diverse selves coming from various locations, telling his own life story in multiple voices—a typical example of what Pease describes as “non-unitary citizenship” in relation to the transnational self or the diasporic other in today’s transnational world. Obviously, this is not a case of postmodern unstable subjectivity where the self is totally fragmented. On the contrary, the storyteller in The Book of My Lives brings back the significance of the subject of the narrative, as well as the linkages between the author, authority, and authenticity. James Wood has commented on Hemon’s proclivity to use his own name and family stories, arguing that “[m]ore than any other American novelist I can think of, he has made a kind of running autobiographical fiction of his actual circumstances” (2008, 82). Due to this “autobiographical veracity” and especially the

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presence of history and war in his works Wood considers him a “fabulist but not really a postmodernist” (84). Unlike postmodern fiction where the author is dead or implied or most often unreliable, in Hemon’s collection he is highly visible: the autobiographical translingual narrative reinforces the representation of the self through his position to others, other cultures, and other languages. The stories in the collection move between the two most significant sites in the coordinate system of Hemon’s own life: the book begins in Sarajevo with the birth of his sister in 1969, goes through his childhood, travels around the country and the world, and ends in Chicago, his second home. Native Bosnia is present directly and indirectly in the book: in the happy days of his childhood pranks, in the family dinner rituals or in the author’s ridiculous radio show SHTYTUS (“Sasha Hemon Tells You True and Untrue Stories”). However, multiethnic Bosnia is remembered also as “the blood-soaked stage of mad politicians” and a “minefield of revengeful people,” making the narrator feel “twice displaced—both physically and metaphysically,” filled with shame and pain (2013, 106). The translingual writer cannot contemplate his past in neutral terms: in his storytelling, he moves between affective attachment (when remembering his childhood) and affective detachment (in his recollections of atrocities and genocide). The Book of My Lives ends with Chicago—Hemon’s second home, one of the most ethnically and linguistically diverse American cities. In the story “If God Existed, He’d Be a Solid Midfielder,” the author describes with great warmth his Sunday soccer games by the lake with immigrants from Vietnam, Ethiopia, Peru, Italy, Bulgaria, and other countries. The soccer field embodies the soul of the multicultural and multilingual city where God performs the mission of midfielder, “putting people together and spreading love” (2013, 168). Chicago is represented as an affective space of both loss and discovery, of remembering and re-imagining, of “kennel life” and romantic love. Hemon’s strong self-identification with Chicago seems to compensate for his lost identification with a country that disappeared in the 1990s. For translingual writers, the relationship between place and identity has always been of special importance. Like Penkov, Hemon manages to build affective bridges between East and West, between memories and current events, between self and other, as well as author and reader in times of serious erosion of empathy.

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Affective Language in Penkov’s and Hemon’s Translingual Writing Making the deliberate choice to tell your life story to an international audience in an adopted language is not an easy decision. At the end of the collection East of the West: A Country in Stories Penkov thanks his parents and motherland, adding an apology: “My dear Bulgaria, who I return to, always, in my thoughts. And forgive me, beautiful Bulgarian language, for telling stories in a foreign tongue, a tongue that is now sweet and close to me” (2011, 226). Is this statement a plea for forgiveness or a declaration of linguistic independence? Does it really matter in what language an author chooses to present himself/herself? Empirical case studies with monolingual and bilingual speakers have demonstrated that culture and social environment influence the information that exists in a particular context. For example, Jeanette Altarriba argues that words that denote emotions occupy their own space cluster in memory, and the same words “may not be represented in the same way across a bilingual’s two lexicons” (2006, 252). In simpler terms, this means that when for the first time a person acquires a language, emotionladen words are usually the first ones being encoded in their memory, hence her conclusion that the way bilinguals process “emotionally-laden information in their second language is influenced by information from their native language” (252). Recent clinical studies in bilingualism have further explored the close interaction between emotionality and language from a neuropragmatic interdisciplinary perspective. Rafał Jonczyk’s ´ groundbreaking research on affect-language interactions in native and non-native English speakers proves that contextual information plays a crucial role in processing affect: The grounding of meaning in introspective and sociolinguistic experiences is pivotal for the representation of affective words. […] Affective experiences have a profound impact on the whole of our body, both internally and externally; hence they are believed to be grounded in a multimodal fashion. To date, a large body of cognitive and neurocognitive evidence has been collected in support of the embodiment of affective language.[…] Assuming that affective words in our first language are acquired in socially and pragmatically rich contexts, involving the multimodal experience of an affective state in behavior, acquiring a second language in a less natural, decontextualized setting may be devoid of such experiences, hence inhibiting the complex connections between what the word means and

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how it feels, i.e. the rich somatic, introspective, sensorimotor, or perceptual feedback it may elicit. (2016, 151, 153)

Obviously, the interactions between contextual and affective information in the language domain raise interesting questions about language emotionality, about the connections between affect and cognition, translingual and bilingual affect, etc. Language takes a central place in Penkov’s life and writing as represented in the short story “Buying Lenin.” The story revolves around the ideological and linguistic conflict between a grandfather and his grandson: the grandson is in love with the English language to the point of “obsession” (2011, 55), as he maniacally repeats tongue-twisters to break his tongue. Later, as a student in the U.S., he goes through several stages in his language love affair: from “being ecstatic and drunk on the English lexicon” through estrangement, despair, and silence to finally “being liberated by words” (60). For the young man, the English language is a symbol of the West, of freedom and opportunity, whereas for his grandfather it is the language of the enemy, of capitalism—“a rabid dog,” poisoning his brain and turning it to “crabapple mash” (56). In addition to the emotion-laden qualifications, the grandson describes vividly the visceral reaction of his grandpa when he hears the word “America”: “I could see the word dislodge itself from his acid stomach, stick in his throat and be expelled at last onto the courtyard tiles” (58). In the same vein, the short story is full of many affective gestures and performances of spoken and written linguistic acts: for example, the protagonist’s rituals of memorizing foreign words, his touching letter-writing and letter-reading ceremonies, Grandpa’s fanatical reading aloud Lenin’s collected works at the funeral of his beloved wife and later at her grave. The ideological battle between grandpa and grandson is presented through the verbal duels of the two as well as indirectly through the books they read: the local communist newspaper Douma (word) vs. The Oxford English Dictionary, Lenin’s Collected Works vs. The Bible. The exaggerated linguistic performances have a strong defamiliarizing effect: they foreground the role of language and slow down the narrative flow, making the reader inspect critically every word, as if participating in the communication between the two characters. As a translingual writer Penkov is extremely sensitive to language: for him, the mother tongue is the language of memory, childhood, ancestors,

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and the past, whereas English is a means of integration and communication in the global world. The very process of writing a book about his native country in his second language could be explained by varied reasons: the author’s desire to inform a transnational audience about Bulgarian rich culture and history, his attempt to come to terms with his double identity or as an experiment to re-create himself in a new language. Like the narrator from “Makedonija,” who listens to foreign radio stations to taste the acoustic otherness of Romanian, Greek, and English, concluding that “English sounds like a long word to me, a word devoid of history and meaning, completely free” (6), for Penkov, too, the English words are liberating as they are not burdened with the trauma of his country’s past. Yet, at other moments, the translingual author is frustrated with the adopted language as it cannot offer adequate equivalents. Such is the case with the protagonist in the story “Devshirmeh”—an expatriate living in the U.S.—who is driven by frustration and anger but cannot recover the emotion in English: Yad […] is what lines the insides of every Bulgarian soul. It’s yad that propels us, like a motor, onward. Yad is like envy, but it’s not simply that. It’s like spite, rage, anger, but more elegant, more complicated. It’s like pity for someone, regret for something you did or did not do, for a chance you missed, for an opportunity you squandered. All those feelings in one beautiful word. Yad. (201)

The example with the missing word in English demonstrates how affective experience is embodied in affective words, which in their turn, are grounded in the surrounding context—hence the tension between the “language of encoding” and “the language of retrieval.” Parallel to emotion and emotion-laden words Penkov uses many culturally specific Bulgarian words and phrases scattered throughout the English text— italicized, transliterated, or transcribed. Some refer to ethnographic and folklore details: samodivi, vampiri, karakonjuli, talasumi (193), komiti (9), sbor (27), terlitsi (28), mednik, feredje (204), zograf (34) whereas others are names of local food items and drinks (buhti, rakia (27), lipov chay (51), moussaka with tarator (52), gyuvech (36), parvak (45), popara (170). They add local color and authenticity to the narrative but also signal an emotional attachment to home. The reader can hardly decode their meaning, yet they introduce sounds and patterns distinctive of the author’s native tongue and create a sense of heterolingual experience.

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Writing between or among several languages and cultures changes the respective languages in contact by creating hybrid idioms or phrases. Penkov often translates Bulgarian idioms literally into English: such is the case with the old Bulgarian proverb “blood is thicker than water,” which metamorphoses into “blood is thicker than the ocean” (63); the idiom “chasing after the wind” is rendered as “run after Michael” or the twisted idiom “giraffes who could fly” (57) replacing the proper English idiom “when pigs begin to fly.” The interference of the mother tongue produces a strange effect—a sense of something unexpected and fresh entering the second language. Linguistic disruptions are to be found on the visual and acoustic levels, too: in the strange spelling of certain words with inserted Cyrillic letters: for example, Makedonija (2) and CCCP Creator Lenin (72, emphasis added) or in the Turkish words such as the unpronounceable Devshirmeh,7 which creates acoustic otherness with their multiple consonants and strange sounds. The mixture of the two language systems and alphabets produces a disruptive effect, making the reader pay greater attention, wondering about the unexpected combination. Parallel to mixing Bulgarian and English lexical units, Penkov mixes grammatical systems too: for example, he disciplines native words such as banitsas and galoshes by adding proper English suffixes for the plural forms or he changes the English syntactic rules by reversing word order: “Kabagaydi, they were called” (155). The resurfacing of patterns and features distinctive of the prior language decenters and destabilizes the structure of English. At more dramatic moments, it seems that certain iconic names or words from his native culture do not yield to English, as if resisting translation. For example, the title of a popular Bulgarian poem by the founder of Bulgarian literature is left untranslated: “A classic by Ivan Vazov. Az czm bzlgapqe, the poem went” (160). In a similar translingual manner, at the end of the book he addresses his parents in both languages: “My parents. Obiqam vi!” (226). The emotion word “obiqam/love” intervenes in Cyrillic and produces affective disruption: the author is so overwhelmed that he needs both languages to name the erupted feeling. Such violent and abrupt declarations of sentiments make critic Marianne Moore equate Penkov’s signature method with “a teenager slamming a door—ending a paragraph or an internal section with something devastatingly dramatic” (10). Such a poignant example 7 The word means “child levy,” an Ottoman practice of forcibly recruiting Christian boys to be trained as soldiers for the Sultan’s army.

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of “slamming the door” is the ending of the story Devshirmeh, when the mother tongue geysers suddenly through the textual surface. As the narrator’s great-grandmother—the most beautiful woman in the world— stands before the Sultan and the 5000 soldiers who have come to take her forcefully as his bride, she seizes the sword, uttering the words: “Azbezboysenedavam!” she says to the Sultan: “I will not let myself go without a fight. […] The Mountain wakes up. The wind stops blowing” (220). This moving scene is saturated with history and trauma, which could be hardly understood by transcultural readers. It is one of the rare moments when Penkov provides translation right away so that the “spreadable emotion” (in Massumi’s terms) can circulate unhindered. Some critics argue that Penkov refuses to translate the unfamiliar Bulgarian words because he wants “to create a communication gap between author and reader” in order “to communicate the immigrant’s experience of miscommunication” (Moussaffi 2018, 208). I believe that the parallel usage of both languages is more complicated than that. Translingual practice has a lot in common with translation: on the one hand, the author translates for his transnational readers his knowledge of Bulgarian history and culture in English words, whereas on the other, he “translates back” his own experience—a kind of self-translation of his past and present selves lived in different languages. Like a good translation, which does not erase the foreign so that it can fit in the receiving culture, Penkov leaves his Bulgarian “foreignness” to shine through the English text—raw, unexpected, and mysterious. To bring together the two language systems he employs “selective reproduction” (Sternberg 1981, 225) of separate Bulgarian words or phrases as well as creative hybridization of forms where the narrator deliberately mixes the code of discourse with the code of the very story as part of the so-called strategy of “translational mimesis” (Sternberg 225). Discourse hybridization creates an impression of heteroglossia by evoking the socio-cultural norms of the respective context, the communication among the characters, the sound, and the rhythm of the foreign language. For example, the vocative forms in Bulgarian dyadka, dyado, voivode, sine, Pavka (2–23), bate, gospozho (134), divak (159), nachalstvo (162), drugarki i drugari (141) or the daily greetings Dobroutro (13), Zdrasti, amerikanets (114), Oy, Planino (214) add to the foreign feel, as if addressing directly the (English) reader. The typical Bulgarian diminutive forms of address such as amerikanche, sinko, dechko, and tate, carry even greater emotional power as they enhance the emotional proximity among the characters,

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the two languages as well as the proximity between the author and the reader. Translational effects can be felt also in the suppressed sounds, in the broken syntactic structures or the embedded cultural connotations as seen in the following sentences from “Makedonija”: “trying to keep them under the fez” (11); “A few old men are still nesting on the benches […]” (15); “When the torches drown in night […]”(17);”Their love was foolish, the kind of love that, if you are lucky to lose it, flares up like a thatched roof ” (21); “I can do this myself. Let me, myself ” (23, emphasis added). Are these examples unconscious traces of the mother tongue or a deliberate act of linguistic deviance to Bulgarianize the text? We cannot give a definitive answer but what matters is that Penkov’s skillful language shifts produce excitable and non-cliché English language, a “thoroughly convincing American idiom that carries the history of the Balkans on its back” (Solomita 2011, 9). Hemon’s life-writing also “carries on its back” the history and poetics of the Balkans, full of emotionally charged experiences. However, the writer of Bosnian-Ukrainian descent has had a different relationship with the English language as he had to learn it at a later age as a foreigner in the U.S. Although in his youth he had read “piously” (Hemon 2013, 141) American writers in translation, including Salinger, Bukowski, Barth, and Barthelme, telling their own stories in a new language is not easy. In The Book of My Lives , he confesses that in the first years in the U.S. he felt “deeply displaced” with his “insufficient English, devoid of articles and thickly contaminated with a foreign accent. I could write neither in Bosnian nor in English” (152). After the initial paralysis, Hemon chooses to write in English because his mother tongue no longer relates to his experience in Chicago and because the languages of his past have been marred by genocide and ideology in the 1990s interethnic wars: after the wars, his native Serbo-Croatian was Balkanized into four separate languages (Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, and Montenegrin). As a linguistically and affectively divided person, the translingual writer processes the surrounding world in separate language systems. As the protagonist from “The Lives of Others” explains, “Complicated situation is reflected in complicated language,” so when asked, “What are you?” he answers, “I’m complicated” (24)—yet another tongue-in-cheek comment on the linkage between origin–language–identity. The mother tongue seems less visible in Hemon’s writing in comparison with Penkov. For him, the Bosnian language is both a site of memory

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and a tool of self-othering, appearing in the text through occasional transliterated words: names with strange sounds such as Zeko, teta Jozefina, and C´ciza (4), food items such as mileram, sarma, mazzolas (8), or toponyms such as Srebrenica and Sarajevo. The italicized Bosnian words are immediately marked as foreign as they appear in an American context, yet their major function is to introduce the cultural and regional specificity of the home country. For example, Hemon pays special attention to the lexical item raja (“a group of boys from the same neighborhood,” 8) as it is the first and smallest structural unit in the grammar of collective identification in Yugoslavia, starting with mala raja, moving through velika raja towards the “greater, if more abstract raja” (9) such as the Party, the nation, etc. The phrases mala raja and velika raja resurface in the collection; through them the author explains the mechanism of “collective affiliation and loyalty” in his former country (9), leading to the nationalisms of the 1990s, and the consequent interethnic wars. In this respect, English becomes liberating for the translingual as it is his primary tool for severing the automatic alliance between language, nation, ethnicity, and other forms of collective raja. By extension, the state of inbetween-ness can be liberating for his transnational audience too because as S. G. Kellman explains, readers, too, can “flaunt their freedom from the constraints of the culture into which they happen to be born” (2000, ix). Unlike Penkov’s obsession with the lexical and acoustic otherness of his native tongue, Hemon uses Slavic words sparingly, as if trying to cultivate an estrangement from his native country and to “expel himself from his raja” (12). He chooses to provide translation or explanation for the Bosnian words scattered throughout the text: Starastanica (“The Old Train Station” 7); Kino Arena (“movie theatre” 9), jalijaš (“street thug” 9), loga (“our base, the place where we could escape” 8), Bijelo Dugme (“famous rock band” 55), kafana (“a coffee shop, a bar, restaurant or any other place where you can spend a lot of time doing nothing” 18), Našidani (“Our Days magazine” 61), even a character’s name Tihomir (“Quiet peace” 52). The double strategy of translating and transliterating native words implies distancing: like a foreigner, he needs to connect to the meanings of these words, to translate the context rather than rely on their acoustic image or the intimate experience embedded in them. Perhaps, it is not accidental that his vocabulary is so specific, devoid of any abstractions and embellishments: “I have learned that war is the

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most concrete thing there can be, a fantastic reality that levels both interiority and exteriority into the flatness of a crushed soul” (Hemon 2013, 141). Because of the war, his metaphysics of suffering is not grounded in abstract or useless words; no beat-about-the-bush, no textual excesses or wasted meaning in his works; no “language of functional platitudes” or “comforting clichés” (230). Hemon’s writing style is one of minimalism, concreteness, and simplicity. Yet, this does not mean that his style is boring or unimaginative; he demonstrates linguistic ingenuity in many ways. His linguistic creativity triggers laughter through puns such as the changed name of the fast-food chain Taco Bell, which his sister calls “Taco Hell” (13), the dog’s name “cocktail spaniel” (84) or in the Bosnian joke about Mujo and Suljo, where he reproduces native colloquial expressions and idioms as if bending English to fit his native humor (19–20). At the same time, his language experiments differ from the playful postmodern style dominated by the understanding of life and reality as verbal constructs, making the reader skeptical or emotionally distanced. This is not the playful language of postmodernist texts by William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, or Donald Barthelme where there is nothing beyond the language games, just self-reflexivity and playful meta-fictionality. For example, Patricia Waugh comments on the style of Robert Coover in his short story “Panel Game” where the narrator is lost in a “maze of the myriad possibilities of meaning, of paroles with no discoverable langues: […] Back: Bach: Bacchus: bachate: berry. Rawberry? Strawberry” (345). In a similar way, language has no referential value in Donald Barthelme’s story “Brain Damage,” which begins: “At the restaurant, sadness was expressed,” followed by lists of abstract words, passive constructions, catalogues of sounds and rhyming words: “The world is sagging, snagging, scaling, spalling, pooling, pinging, pitting, warping, checking, fading, chipping, cracking, yellowing, leaking, shrinking and in dynamic imbalance” (Barthelme 1974, 6). This is yet another example of a rush of random words in a postmodernist style—what critics call “free-floating and impersonal feelings” (Jameson 1991, 10) or “replacing the materiality of writing as depthlessness, an endless play of linguistic substitution for its own sake” (Waugh 1992, 345). Hemon’s translingual words (and worlds) are not transparent, they carry deeper emotional meanings and greater sincerity and have preserved their power to elicit real feelings of anger, nostalgia, joy, or sadness.

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His vocabulary is emotionally laden, marked by strange word combinations, coinages, or imperfect collocations. He does not bend words and sentences to produce perfect English: by leaving traces of the mother tongue in the English text he creates a more authentic narrative, making the reader emotionally involved. Similar to Penkov, Hemon uses calquing and “translational mimesis” (Sternberg 1981, 225) to transpose meanings and emotions from the language of encoding into the language of retrieval: for example, literally translated Bosnian expressions such as “May I be struck by lightning if I’m lying” (112), “Let there be endless struggle” or “Let there be what cannot be” (77). The intermingling of languages stretches them, implying that one language is not enough. For example, in the very first story “The Lives of Others” the narrator describes how he is “orbiting around” his baby sister (3). The verb “to orbit” is not commonly used in English to indicate moving around someone but in his mother tongue it is common: regardless of whether this is a case of calquing or a metaphor, the produced effect is one of semantic innovation. At other moments, a more volatile word order or a redundant article or an adverb hint at the deeper presence of the mother tongue as in the following examples: “We threw at them rocks,” “we ate the sandwiches, drank the juices,” “I wanted everything to be the way it was, the way it already used to be” (10–13, emphasis added). Such cases of linguistic deviance suggest the author’s attempts at aligning the two systems next to each other, making transnational readers rethink their own relations to the primary language. Another important aspect of Hemon’s affective language is his restrained manner of presenting emotions—without seeking melodrama or sensation, yet extremely moving. The interactions between “contextual and affective information” in Jonczyk’s ´ terms can be seen in the subtle forms of processing affect: through the tactile remembering of the taste of vareniky (pierogi) or steranka (dough boiled in milk), which brings tears to his father’s eyes (37); through the affective sounds of the soft melody of Mozart’s lullaby, he sings in Bosnian to his sick daughter (214) or through the affective images of “blood-red roses,” which the people of Sarajevo created by filling with red paint the holes in mortarshell marks on the buildings after the war. His descriptions of suffering usually appear among descriptions of ordinary things, interrupting the flow of ordinariness, so that the “spreadable emotion” grabs the reader by the throat unexpectedly, producing a visceral response. I will try to illustrate this bursting of affect through “My Prisoner”—a story about

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the siege of Sarajevo when many Bosnian Muslims were imprisoned in POW camps or disappeared. The atrocities of the war are presented in the form of a letter, dated 15.5.1994, written by Veba—one of the few friends of the narrator who have stayed behind in Sarajevo. The contents of the letter, summed up in the emotion-laden words “portions of war shit and bathos” are scattered in-between funny episodes about the narrator’s youth and his sister’s love affairs, running parallel to discomforting scenes from the war. The letter contains very few graphic details about the daily beatings of Veba’s father in the camp or the suffering of the wounded soldiers: the battlefield is laconically presented as “the surface of the moon,” where “men fell, as a Bosnian idiom would have it, like bundles of wheat” (117). The writer turns to the Bosnian idiom as if only the native tongue could close the gap between the meaning of words and the perceptions they elicit. The very act of reading the letter aloud—years later, in a foreign country, constantly interrupted, going back and forth between the 1980s and 2006—looks like an exaggerated linguistic performance, an affective shared event where spoken words are exposed and circulated among author, characters, and readers. The broken syntax, the many dashes, and the occasional derogatory Bosnian words (untranslated) serve as additional tools of “puncture and rupture” (in Massumi’s terms) as the markers of the prior language puncture the narrative linearity, break its continuity, triggering affective circuits. The Book of My Lives ends with an attempt at linguistic reconciliation. After years of feeling displaced and split between languages, the Bosnian émigré finally finds “his personal infrastructure” (145) in Chicago, confessing: “Physically and metaphysically, I was placed” (138). The awkward phrase in the passive voice “I was placed” is full of ambiguity and layers of meaning: being anchored to a specific place, being positioned in terms of society as well as feeling at home. The palimpsest layering of the text—“an apt metaphor for literary translingualism” in Kellman’s words (2020, 1)—is yet another instance of the transformation of the immigrant into a “nimble-tongued” writer who has mastered and rejuvenated the English language, bending it in his own manner to exploit its semantic and emotional depth. It also indicates Hemon’s turning away from the playful and disembodied language of the postmodern style of his early writing—on the contrary, the language here is skillfully used to engage with the world and to mobilize emotions.

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Conclusion The discussed works by the American translingual writers Aleksandar Hemon and Miroslav Penkov, who work at the intersection of several languages, historical terrains, and cultural traditions, have demonstrated how American literature is opening up to the global world or what Donald Pease has defined as the “transnational turn” in American studies at the beginning of the twenty-first century. By mixing languages, styles, and registers creatively, the two writers question monolingual restrictions and control, demonstrating that languages are dynamic systems and can be revitalized through contact. Hemon and Penkov decenter and “deterritorrialize” universal English in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s terms through lexical and syntactic deviance, acoustic otherness, and linguistic experimentation. The analysis has revealed that literary translingualism not only intensifies transcultural and translingual flows on the contemporary literary scene but also intensifies the affective charge in literary communication, reception, and composition. The renewed commitment of translingual writers to material realities, connections, and emotions has demonstrated a certain movement away from the postmodern mode of estrangement, distancing, and self-reflexivity towards a mode of emotional engagement with important issues through language.

References Altarriba, Jeannette. 2006. Cognitive Approaches to the Study of EmotionLaden and Emotion Words in Monolingual and Bilingual Memory. In Bilingual Minds: Emotional Experience, Expression, and Representation, ed. Aneta Pavlenko, 232–256. Bristol, Blue Ridge Summit: Multilingual Matters. https://doi.org/10.21832/9781853598746-011. Barthelme, Donald. 1974. City Life. New York: Guilty Pleasures. Baumbach, Nico, Damon R. Young, and Genevieve Yue. 2016. Revisiting Postmodernism: An Interview with Fredric Jameson. Social Text 34: 143–160. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-3468026. Berlant, Lauren. 2008. Thinking about Feeling Historical. Emotion, Space and Society 1: 4–9. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2008.08.006. Besemeres, Mary. 2006. Language and Emotional Experience: The Voice of Translingual Memoir. In Bilingual Minds: Emotional Experience, Expression, and Representation, ed. Aneta Pavlenko, 34–58. Bristol, Blue Ridge Summit: Multilingual Matters. https://doi.org/10.21832/9781853598746-004. Coover, Robert. 1969. Pricksongs and Descants. New York: Dutton.

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Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1986. What Is a Minor Literature?” In Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, ed. Dana Polan, 13–33. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Duncan, Pansy Kathleen. 2017. Once More, with Fredric Jameson. Cultural Critique 97: 1–23. Gregg, Melissa, and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds. 2010. The Affect Theory Reader. Durham: Duke University Press. Jonczyk, ´ Rafał. 2016. Affect-Language Interactions in Native and Non-Native English Speakers: A Neuropragmatic Perspective. Cham: Springer. Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Hemon, Aleksandar. 2013. The Book of My Lives. London: Picador. Holland, Mary. 2013. Succeeding Postmodernism: Language and Humanism in Contemporary American Literature. London: Bloomsbury. Hutcheon, Linda. 2002. The Politics of Postmodernism, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. Kellman, S.G. 2000. The Translingual Imagination. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press. Kellman, S.G. 2020. Nimble Tongues: Studies in Literary Translingualism. Purdue: Purdue University Press. Kirby, Alan. 2009. Digimodernism: How Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern and Reconfigure Our Culture. New York: Continuum. McHale, Brian. 1987. Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Routledge. Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press. Moraru, Christian. 2011. Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Moore, Marianne. 2011. Looking for Home: Miroslav Penkov’s East of the West: A Country in Stories. ZYZZYVA, July 19. https://www.zyzzyva.org/2011/ 07/19. Accessed 8 March 2023. Moussaffi, Michal. 2018. Blood Is Thicker Than the Ocean: Language and Immigration in Miroslav Penkov’s East of the West. Dialogos XVIII (35): 207–214. Ngai, Sianne. 2005. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Pease, Donald. 2015. How Transnationalism Reconfigured the Field of American Studies. In American Studies as Transnational Practice: Turning toward the Transpacific, ed. Yuan Shu and Donald E. Pease, 39–63. Dartmouth: Dartmouth College Press. Pellegrini, Ann, and Jasbir Puar. 2009. Affect. Social Text 27: 35–38. https:// doi.org/10.1215/01642472-2009-004.

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Penkov, Miroslav. 2011. East of the West. A Country in Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Schrauf, Robert W., and Ramon Durazo-Arvizu. 2006. Bilingual Autobiographical Memory and Emotion: Theory and Methods. In Bilingual Minds: Emotional Experience, Expression, and Representation, ed. Aneta Pavlenko, 284–311. Bristol, Blue Ridge Summit: Multilingual Matters. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2003. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke University Press. Solomita, Alec. 2011. Lexicon Drunk. The New Republic, August 23: 12–13. Sternberg, Meir. 1981. Polylingualism as Reality and Translation as Mimesis. Poetics Today 2 (4): 221–239. https://doi.org/10.2307/1772500. Terada, Rei. 2003. Feeling in Theory: Emotion After the “Death of the Subject.” Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Toth, Josh. 2010. The Passing of Postmodernism. A Spectroanalysis of the Contemporary. Albany: SUNY Press. Waugh, Patricia. 1992. Stalemates? Feminists, Postmodernists and Unfinished Issues in Modern Aesthetics. In Modern Literary Theory. A Reader, ed. Philip Rice and P. Waugh, 341–360. New York: Routledge. Wood, James. 2008. The Unforgotten: Aleksandar Hemon’s Fictional Lives. The New Yorker, July 21: 82–85.

CHAPTER 15

Electronic Literature at the Dawn of the 21st century: The Case of Reiner Strasser and M.D. Coverley’s ii-in the white darkness: about [the fragility of] memory Tatiani G. Rapatzikou

Introduction When Reiner Strasser and M.D. Coverley (as a pen name with her actual one being Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink) created their online work in 2003–2004 with the title ii-in the white darkness: about [the fragility of] memory, they said that “it was not the erasure that mattered so much as the act of trying to recover what we no longer can identify” (“Author Description”). The emphasis that their words place here on the “act of

T. G. Rapatzikou (B) Department of American Literature and Culture, School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 T. Tsimpouki et al. (eds.), American Studies after Postmodernism, Renewing the American Narrative, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41448-0_15

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trying” to retrieve what could be lost or could not be identified sheds light not only on the main concept that drives their work, that of human vulnerability in the face of memory dysfunctionality, but also on the digital mechanisms they resort to so that such retrieval is made possible. The artists’ effort to tackle an essential human concern by resorting not to a verbally extended narrative but to an electronically programmable and (Flash) platform-based project should be viewed both in the context of the literary transformations and the extended use of digital technologies that took place at the start of the twenty-first century. Working for a period of over nine months and prompted by their own personal encounters with patients of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases, the two artists, without meeting in flesh but only working transatlantically via email, decided to put together, what Coverley describes as, an “interactive, contemplative memoir about memory” (Grigar 2021). In other words, the ii-in the white darkness attempts to respond to an unsettling human condition, that of memory loss, through the combination of a recognizable literary style (memoir) and experimental writing techniques (fragmentation, spatial and temporal dislocation) with technologically activated practices which are facilitated in the specific work through the use of Flash, a popular at the turn of the new century computer software and web-based platform. The intertwining of literary elements with digital modes of production corresponded to the sociocultural changes prevalent at the beginning of the twenty-first century that asked for diverse ways of capturing and articulating individual experiences. In particular, Rachel Greenwald Smith talks about the emergence in the 2000s of a “literary landscape [that] had become unanchored from any single descriptive periodizing term” (2018, 3) and the “dueling impulses” (3) that had emerged at a time of technological, socio-cultural, and political complexity. These observations shed light on the multiple transitions that occurred at the time because of an overall feeling of uncertainty and rapid change that was triggered at the start of the 2000s with regard to certain events, as is the 9/11 terror attacks, the war on terror, the access to broadband internet use, and the growth of digital technologies, that impacted not only the U.S. but also the rest of the world. These multiple forces at work informed and shaped the creative projects of the writers and artists that emerged at the start of the twenty-first century, who were now called to respond to a far more expansive terrain of challenges that asked for different means of expression and recording of human experience, deriving as part of the changes that were taking place at the time.

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This explains the movement away from the use of encompassing terms still prevalent at the end of the 1990s, as is that of postmodernism, since it appeared to be no longer adequate to absorb and explain the cultural, political, technological, and aesthetic upheavals and rippling effects that marked the dawning of the new century. Specifically, Andrew Hoberek says that “the proper response to this shift consists neither of assertions of postmodernism’s continued relevance nor of sweeping declarations of a potential successor but rather of concrete analyses of literary form and the historical conditions that shape it” (2007, 240). It is within such a context that the technological interventions that occurred at the start of the 2000s should be considered, as these are marked by technology’s automated processes that have led readers to an enhanced engagement with the digital textualities forming up during that period of time. On the basis of Greenwald Smith’s observations, one should also take into consideration the transition from mere readers to now “users of texts [that] can be understood to be immersed in a textual experience that is deeply affective, just as our engagements with technology during the decade […] were interactive, pleasurable, and sensorially engaged” (2018, 8). For this to be understood, one should focus on the experimentations that had already taken place in the early 1990s with the development of hypertext fiction, which made its appearance because of the computer writing systems that had already emerged in the 1980s. Scott Rettberg, in his exploration of these developments, states: During the early 1990s, a number of writers based at Brown University used Storyspace software to author hypertext fiction, establishing a writing community that would be essential to the development of contemporary electronic literature. A number of different hypertext systems were produced during the 1980s and 1990s, before the development of the World Wide Web, including systems designed specifically for writing. When Apple released the first Mac, one of its selling features was HyperCard – a simple program but one that was oriented in a very different direction: toward using hypertext and simple programming to enable users to create applications of their own with their own content and for their own specific purposes. (2019, 63)

What these remarks highlight is a completely different awareness of the creative opportunities digital technologies could now offer through the combination of hardware and software with already-established literary

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forms that would gradually pave the ground for the crafting of unusual— due to their computational elements—storytelling practices. With Coverley and Strasser’s work being the case in point in this article, one can claim that it serves as an example of the expansion and deepened exploration of the technological processes, with regard to software design and programming languages, that had already commenced in the previous century, but now, at the start of the new millennium, would lead to the survey of electronic writing practices and the eventual growth of what would be known as e-lit or electronic literature as part of the expansive use of web-based activities.1 As for the creators themselves, Strasser and Coverley serve as a good example of how the digital medium can also provide the space within which narrative collaborations can be forged and creative opportunities can be explored between people that come from different disciplines—writers, programmers, and artists—in addition to living in international locations. These realizations do mark an essential evolution in creative literary production with electronic writing developing in the 2000s into its own category to which Coverley and Strasser’s ii-in the white darkness belongs.2 The importance of such a development is further emphasized by Rettberg who points out that electronic literature “provides us with opportunities to consider what is happening to our situation within a world increasingly mediated by digital technology,” and that “works of electronic literature present us with crafted experiences that reflect changes wrought by the digital turn taking place in the nature of communication, textuality, society and perhaps even the structure of human thought” (2019, 22). The work explored in the current essay does certainly correspond to these criteria in its effort to elaborate on the human experience of forgetfulness and remembrance by resorting to a computationally activated text that makes use of sound, motion, minimum text, and images in order to structure a narrative that even 1 According to Rettberg “Electronic literature is a generalized term used to describe a wide variety of computational literary practices beneath one broad umbrella, defined by the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) as ‘works with important literary aspects that take advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand- alone or networked computer’” (2014, 169). As regards ELO, Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink notes that it “was founded in 1999 to foster and promote the reading, writing, teaching, and understanding of literature as it develops and persists in a changing digital environment” (2014, 174). 2 The specific work was initially published in January 2004 on Strasser’s website. In 2006, it appeared on the online anthology titled Electronic Literature Collection Vol. 1. In 2018, the ELO gave a copy of this work to the Electronic Literature Lab.

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though it resorts to recognizable writing techniques it does move beyond the boundaries of a conventionally—as regards its paper status and literary form—organized story. Taking ii-in the white darkness as a case study of the electronic writings that emerged at the beginning of the twenty-first century, one should consider that it is not simply a story about memory loss and retrieval but a digitally generated experience that draws on the information stored in the computer, the Flash-enabled mechanisms, and the readers’ own engagement plus interaction with it, as will be shown next.

Clicking on Pulsing Dots With the computer screen being the main interface that exists between the readers and Strasser and Coverley’s ii-in the white darkness, one understands that this marks a major shift in the storytelling practices of the time, with the computer now appearing to be a multifunctional tool able to be used in all kinds of practices as well as embedded into the readers’ everyday reality and actions. As for the story that Strasser and Coverley have put together, its effectiveness relies not so much on its content but on how it is displayed on the screen, which calls for a different engagement with its narrative. Specifically, the pulsing dots one views on the computer screen when the story is activated are doing so much more than simply creating a pleasing aesthetic effect. The readers are now intrigued to pay attention to a number of features, such as images, animation, and sounds in addition to the screen layout with regard to font types and sizes, letter shapes, and colors, which are digitally activated and dependent on the readers’ own clickable actions. Strasser and Coverley claim that they have tried to “capture in an interactive visual poem […] the loss of mind and self from a subjective point of view” (Grigar 2021). With both of them having embarked on the creation of ii-in the white darkness because of their own experience of taking care of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease patients, as already mentioned in the current essay, it is through the creation of multimedia artwork that they have attempted to convey to the readers/users/viewers the elusiveness that derives from the gradual fragmentation, fading out, and loss of memory. But can the experience of physical memory loss be captured by digital media? This is exactly the kind of cross-over Strasser and Coverley’s electronic work marks: the use of digital media in an effort to tackle deep-set human anxieties, which would be usually addressed in evocative

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and print-bound literary narratives. Actually, the act of remembering via the use of digital means activates another kind of process: it is through the interaction with various verbal, visual, and auditory stimuli that one is engaged in a synthesizing process of tactile movements, online navigation, and mental connection of the fragmentary information that appears on the screen. It is not accidental that reference is now made not simply to the readers who are invited to tackle the electronic work of ii-in the white darkness but to them being, at the same time, users and viewers. To be able to view and use a story, a different kind of reading is needed, which marks a departure from its usual understanding because of its connection with the book form. Lindsay Thomas talks about the “understanding of reading as interaction” and the “figuring [of] those who interact […] not as readers, but rather as users ” who are “centered on immersive experience rather than instrumentality” (2018, 189). This introduces an altered appreciation of the overall online experience ii-in the white darkness offers not so much in terms of its storyline, plot development, characters, and literary techniques, as it would be the case with a book-bound narrative, but in terms of the responses the act of interacting with it, as facilitated via the use of Flash, triggers. This becomes evident through the user’s gestural spontaneous actions while trying to track down the temporal and spatial connections between the non-linear materials that appear on the work’s interface, and, hence, on the computer screen. In particular, users both navigate around the available online space of the work and click on the various pulsating dots that appear on the grayish, curtain-like surface, becoming themselves in this way the ones who activate certain pieces of information on the screen, as these are retrieved from the computer’s own memory or stored data. Being actively involved in this process of clicking on dots that lead to the surfacing on the screen of various sensory cues, users get more and more involved in the experience the online work offers. Simultaneously, the kind of synergy that emerges between users and the computer interface constitutes an evolutionary step as to how stories can be told in the now widespread, at the start of the twenty-first century, electronic age. N. Katherine Hayles refers to this kind of interactive reading as a performance of feedback loops when she argues that “[t]he machine produces the text as an event; the reader interacts with that event in ways that significantly modify and even determine its progress; these readerly interventions feed back into the machine to change its behavior, which further inflects the course of the performance” (2006, 187). In the context of

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Strasser and Coverley’s piece, the kind of interactivity presented here is defined by the mouse clicks the user performs on the screen and the kind of text or image or sound that this gesture stimulates. Specifically, the first thing the users see when they access ii-in the white darkness, in addition to the curtain-like interface effect, is the gradually fading out sentence that reads as follows: “Just a whisper, at least, of the persistence of this memory, this forgetfulness.” With this textual remark, which serves as an entry point into the work, the simultaneous presence and absence of memory are highlighted; but as soon as the phrase disappears, the users are again confronted with the task of locating the active dots in the midst of lots of inactive ones that appear on the computer screen. As soon as a random dot is clicked, either a clear or blurry or sliding image of a random and unidentified location appears, staying active only for an instant. These images, appearing in media res, are not static but animating snapshots, for example, of rippling pool waters or of a changing-color sky or of lapping waters at a seaside or of blossomed sea daffodils. Images may also alternate with sounds, which could either be brief melodious tunes or mechanical hums or nature rustlings, again being generated in media res. The more one interacts with these stimuli the more effects can be activated, depending on the clicks the user performs on the online work interface: for example, the letters (“r,” “e,” “m,” “e,” “m”) and syllables (“re,” “be,” “me”) that comprise the word “remember” may start flashing on and off at various spots on the screen, or the phrase “a sunrise is a sunrise is a sunrise” slides through the screen while being laid over a sunset image, or the sliding image of a built location by the water appears on the left-hand side of the screen with the words “ …déjà vu?” flashing on the right-hand side and then followed by the sliding phrase, “I remember—I was there,” which remains visible when the initially appearing words fade away. All these examples constitute snippets that are dynamically generated on the computer screen as they are retrieved from the electronic work’s Flash-supported database, which is activated by the users’ own actions. For a story to be produced, the users should need to assemble all these pieces of information and organize them into patterns that could be read in multiple subjective ways. As for the meaning that could be extracted, this “emerges much as it does in poetry, less explicitly stated than hinted at by the way images conjoin, collide, and interact with one another” (Hayles 2008, 2016, 211), which also explains the artists’ own characterization of the ii-in white darkness, in an earlier comment, as a visual poem. Certainly, in addition to the visual

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and interactive elements of an online work, one should consider the role certain literary elements play in the overall effect, as is the case in the ii-in the white darkness with the use of the repetition of words, phrases, or pronouns as well as the repetitive loops that are activated every time the users click again and again on the pulsating dots that appear on the computer interface or with metaphors which are commented on further down. As a result, this attracts the users’ attention while facilitating the users’ absorption and immersion into the clicks performed and the scene that resurfaces on the screen. It should be noted that the more one interacts with the ii-in the white darkness, the more the generation of synthesizing effects, which should be attributed to the repetitive reemergence of the material stored in its database and to the perceptual and cognitive layering of the visual and verbal information absorbed by the users. For example, the image of a moving landscape and the gradual fading of the words that emerge at the bottom of its frame—“pass,” “pass by,” “passed by,” and “past …”—create, in addition to the visual and verbal effects, a metaphorical one that alludes to the ephemerality of the sensorial experience as well as to temporal and spatial fluidity. Also, the appearance of a landscape image at dusk with a bright lamp in the foreground, followed up by another sliding image of a panoramic but darkened landscape, which is then sliced up into thin visual stripes that slowly fade away, can again be understood metaphorically as a passage from an enduring to a gradually dissolved mind. All this digitally generated input, even though it has been programmed by the creators of the ii-in the white darkness, can only be stimulated by the user-computer Flash-facilitated interaction. Even though the work provides access, but only for an instant, to a diagram of possible dot connections if only one clicks on the dot found at the bottom of the work interface, it is not certain that these can be remembered. In just a few seconds, the grayish interface of the randomly flashing dots reappears and the users are invited to click again on them, paving in this way their own personalized path through the sounds, images, and textual segments the ii-in the white darkness is based on; these can be activated again and again, depending on the users’ random dot clickings, able to lead to numerous other data combinations and associations. Despite the synaesthetic effects and metaphorical meanings, the work can generate, Strasser and Coverley’s e-lit work serves as a creative response to the expressive potential digital media can be endowed with, which constitutes

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an essential awareness of the role information technologies are expected to play at the start of the twenty-first century starts. Certainly, all that the ii-in the white darkness can do reveals the programmable dynamics plus the malleability of the code used in the composition of the specific electronic work, which allows for an extensive array of computing processes to be executed all thanks to the Flash tool used. Lev Manovich states that all started changing in the course of the 1990s when “[t]he computer and other devices built on top of it, such as the mobile phone, came to be used for all kinds of nonwork activities because of its inherent multifunctionality and expandability: entertainment, culture, social life, communication with others” (2013, 311–312). This point sheds light on the formulation of a different attitude towards computer technologies, which, by infiltrating into all various facets of human socio-cultural life, have managed to increase their functionality and impact as well as their interactive potential and power. Also, Hayles talks about the “[r]eliable search engines, improved translation techniques, coordinated databases, data- and text-mining, text analytic algorithms, scanning and OCR technologies, and a host of other technologies [that] have in a sense domesticated data, turning it from an unthinkable complexity into a manageable ocean” (2016, 213). The way technology is described in this observation highlights its tangibility and accessibility in addition to its all-encompassing nature, which marks a major transition from the multinational networks of corporate capitalism in the 1990s to the pervasive hardware and software in the 2000s. Specifically, Fredric Jameson in his analysis of postmodernism talks about the “world space of multinational capital” plus “the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping on a social as well as spatial scale” (1991, 54); while Hayles resorts to “digitalism [that] cuts across media, genres, and aesthetic traditions such as art history and literature, affecting a wide range of forms and practices across a spectrum of creative productions” (2016, 214). A comparison between these two viewpoints turns one’s attention to the passage from the vastness and abstraction of the information systems of the internationally based corporations of the latetwentieth century to the digital software and internet applications plus developing hardware of the early twenty-first century. Surely, this is a realization whose analysis and exploration moves beyond the scope of the current essay but it does mark a shift in perspective in the way technological power is both distributed and understood at the opening of the new millennium. With individual creativity, as this is facilitated by the

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active use of digital technologies, being the case in point here, writers, artists, and programmers have come together in multiple creative ways through the utilization of digital tools. Through their ongoing development, since the early 2000s, multiple opportunities have been offered for the expansion of computer coding and multimedia affordances in textual and literary exploration. In the ii-in the white darkness, such a development becomes evident, as it was earlier mentioned, via the use of the Flash software which allowed the hypertextually built works of the 1990s to be reinforced in the 2000s with audio and visual elements. The users’ interaction with them could now lead to the generation of complex and synthesizing processes that derived from the loop mechanisms that were algorithmically regulated and executed because of the use of the particular web-based tool. Brian Kim Stefans writes that “[a]lgorithms are, in essence, chains of instructions that, when followed, provide reliable, consistent outcomes, […]. Computers utilize algorithms to provide a series of real-world effects for the user” (2018, 196). The data combinations that are facilitated by the algorithm that has been designed and the input provided when users are clicking on the digital work, as it happens with the ii-in the white darkness, is what has fueled creativity, while the extensive use of the World Wide Web at the start of the twenty-first century did lead to the wide distribution of such a work to a global audience. This marked the increased visibility of and interaction with the digital works that were produced at the time in addition to the proliferation of opportunities available for artists and computer programmers to work together—as is the case with Strasser in Germany and Coverley in the U.S. While collaborating on the ii-in the white darkness —despite the distance between them both temporally and spatially. The experience e-lit works offered at the start of the twenty-first century led to a renewed understanding of the role digital media can play in the reformulation and reorientation of literary writing and reading. Thomas claims that “engagements with digital technologies, […] demonstrate that the movement ‘beyond’ the information age involves more than a shift in terminology; it also involves changing attitudes about how to read novels in an era in which much of the reading we do takes place in digital, not print, form” (2018, 181). With this point in mind, one could claim that ii-in the white darkness is not simply an electronic work but a means through which one can gain a retrospective insight into how digital media and specific digital tools, as is the case of Flash, were able

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to boost creativity and imagination at the turn of the new century, which is what will be examined next.

Creating with Flash: The Affordances and Constraints of a Software Internet accessibility and Web 2.0 tools boosted the interactive and hypermedia profile of the web in the 2000s by offering users flexibility when navigating online and accessibility to various online resources. But it was Flash, as has been commented on already, whose name became synonymous with the development of a dynamic/non-static web and the opportunities it offered to artists for creative experimentation. Manuel Castells traces the changes that computer technology and digital networks have brought forward since the late-twentieth century to post-industrial societies with the emergence of “informationalism” which is geared, towards technological development, that is toward the accumulation of knowledge and towards higher levels of complexity in information processing. While higher levels of knowledge may normally result in higher levels of output per unit of input, it is the pursuit of knowledge and information that characterizes the technological production function under informationalism. […] Because informationalism is based on the technology of knowledge and information, there is an especially close linkage between culture and productive forces, between spirit and matter, in the informational mode of development. It follows that we should expect the emergence of historically new forms of social interaction, social control, and social change. (2000, 17)

The points raised here draw attention to the gradual dawning of a different kind of attentiveness as to what computers and their connection to a digitally powered network can do. The increase in the speed with which information is gathered and distributed, knowledge is produced and amassed, and users are connected is certainly heralding the shift to much more ubiquitous information technology systems where online communication and interaction, web platforms, and data exchanges are geared towards an expansive and powerful net. In the case of Flash, Stacey Mulcahy, a Flash developer, talks about the massive role the Flash community has played in the exchange of knowledge and experience: “Getting

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help in the Flash community is often just a forum or blog posting away. People are constantly posting experiments or insights that push the boundaries of the technology. It’s hard not to be inspired” (qtd. in Salter and Murray 2014, 9). Such a statement reinforces what has already been mentioned as regards the emergence of a different sense of proximity that has been launched between online technologies and users, which has paved the path for a proliferation of platforms of communication to be created and multiple creative synergies to emerge. For these changes to be understood, one should pay attention, in the context of Strasser and Coverley’s ii-in the white darkness, not only to its multimedia features but also to the Flash software used that has enabled the audio, visual, and verbal effects already presented in the previous section of this essay to occur. Coverley talks about the creation of “a timeline and layers that the phenomena of memory and erasure mirror” (Grigar 2021), referring in this way to the structural capabilities the Flash design tool has afforded the two creators during the design of the specific online work. This can be explained by the fact that the Flash software revolutionized the way animations worked for the World Wide Web at the start of the twenty-first century, offering artists the opportunity to design interactive and kinetic animations in addition to exploring these animations’ capability to create transitions between animations (what Coverley calls “timeline” in the previous citation), wordplays and thought-provoking visual, verbal, and sound juxtapositions that aimed at transforming digital works from simply colorful and superficial structures into deeply engaging and synaesthetic compositions.3 But most importantly, what Flash did make possible was the emergence of a number of networked but independent artistic collaborations that led to its development away from the confines of the commercial market where it had

3 Jessica Pressman describes the gradual evolution of the web that led to the dominance of Flash as follows: “In the mid-1990s innovations in graphical interfaces transformed the text-based Internet into the image-laden web, exponentially expanding its users and possibilities. The nature of electronic literature changed dramatically. First generation electronic literature, the lengthy text-based hypertexts built in Storyspace or HTML […] gave way to a second generation of dynamic, visual, and animated works. Second generation works explore and exploit the features of new authoring software packages. Most dominant among them was Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash), which enables the production of multimedia, multimodal, and interactive aesthetics. First generation text-based narratives quickly looked outdated in comparison to the flashy facades of new, Flash-based works” (2014, 6–7).

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initially appeared.4 Donna Leishman describes the Flash-bound community as “instrumental in fostering a particular state of creative mind. For Flash it provided a simultaneously discursive and practical open sharing of ideas and code […] in principle free from geographic politics and/or the traditional logistics of production and distribution” (qtd. in Rettberg 2019, 128). In the case of Strasser and Coverley’s transatlantic collaboration, it is worth highlighting once again their effort to tackle a personal delicate experience through the creative use of the Flash medium. This is exactly where the emphasis must be placed: on how something so technical, as is the use of a web-supported tool, can be used as a means through which a personal and emotionally charged experience can be captured, expressed, and mediated as well as transformed into a series of animating elements on the screen. On the basis of the examples from ii-in the white darkness that have been commented on and Coverley’s own comments about Flash’s structural features (layers and timeline), one understands that Flash presents itself as a tool flexible enough to allow users to interact with the animating material used, whose kinetics, time and space dynamics affect how, what is presented on a digital interface, can be understood and interpreted in an imaginative, artistic, and even metaphorical manner. This point can be highlighted if one takes into consideration, for instance, the double lowercase “i” that is used in the title of Strasser and Coverley’s work: this could be read as a visual metaphor implying the minimization of human subjectivity as it slides towards the “white darkness” that could stand for the liminality of human existence when human memory lapses and is eventually lost. Coverley in an online interview says that the “double ii is a code. It signals the personal interface, [stands for] interactive, intimate, illness, internet, involvement” (Grigar 2021), which also emphasizes the fact that ii-in the white darkness is not a superficial display of verbal, visual, and auditory data but a dynamic Flash-operating platform of animating and layered content that can enter into multiple combinations, which can then trigger multiple metaphorical associations in the users’ mind. Such an effect can also be evidenced, for example, when one decides to click on multiple pulsing dots at once while navigating on the interface of the ii-in the white darkness. As all images, 4 Flash is described as follows: “A commercial system particularly useful for vectorbased animation. It was first developed and sold by Macromedia; that company has been acquired by Adobe, which currently sells Flash” (Hayles et al. 2006).

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sounds, and verbal segments are retrieved almost simultaneously from the e-lit work’s database, one can appreciate how the pace of clicking and the layering effect that this activates affects the way the work’s interface is perceived and understood. According to Pressman, the “tension between the visible and the obfuscated, the legible and the illegible, at the levels both of the screen and the code” (2009, 319) helps one understand both the complex mechanisms at work and the juxtapositions created as all the sensory and textual material is flashing on and fading out from the interface in the context of the main theme elaborated on here, that of remembrance and forgetfulness. All this would not have been possible if Flash itself would not have the ability to offer the creators themselves the flexibility to experiment with its animation mechanisms, layering and timescale, multimedia, and interactivity. Salter and Murray state that artists using Flash for the creation of expressive works can experiment with the form in several ways. The most obvious is through the content itself, on which the platform inherently places no limitations, and thus the artist can freely manipulate within the range of his or her own procedural literacy. However, experimental work can further exploit the affordances of the platform itself, extending or reworking elements of those underlying boundaries to create something unexpected. (2014, 94)

What is stated here becomes evident in the ii-in the white darkness as well, since its overall structure and effects constitute a manifestation of the creators’ experimentations with the Flash-platform so as to make it work on the basis of their own needs with regard to the theme to be dealt with and the subtlety of emotions to be conveyed. All these opportunities for expression offered by Flash in the 2000s widened the horizons of individual creators and enabled alternative but digitally driven means of creation to emerge and digital aesthetics to be formulated. In such a context, Strasser and Coverley’s Flash-generated work gains in cultural value and importance, since it is not what it says but how it says it that matters with regard to the ideas, feelings, and sense impressions that it attempts to communicate to those who decide to engage/interact with it. Even if its various synaesthetic effects of images, sounds, and texts appear to be automated, one cannot ignore the different animating processes at work, as is the case with flashing, fading, sliding, slicing, and overlaying, which have been coded in the Flash-programming environment by the creators themselves before being executed by the computer.

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For example, in the case of the fading phrase from the ii-in the white darkness, “We build our history thru/ the experience of our life// Do we lose our history/ when we lose our memory?”, which appears on the righthand side of the screen, with the words “identity” and “soul” flashing dimly on the bottom left-hand side of the screen as well, one becomes aware of the multiple actions activated here when the users click on the dot that sets this particular mechanism in motion. It should be pointed out though that it is the fading and flashing effects, which should be considered alongside the words and textual snippets mentioned in the example above, that motivate users to get involved into a hyper reading/ hyper attention and close reading/deep attention process. Hayles defines these two processes as follows: “hyper attention is useful for its flexibility in switching between different information streams, its quick grasp of the gist of material, and its ability to move rapidly among and between different kinds of texts” (2012, 69) and “deep attention, [is] the cognitive mode traditionally associated with the humanities that prefers a single information stream, focuses on a single cultural object for a relatively long time” (12). These two kinds of attention mark a turning point as to how the singular (print-bound) and multiple (digitally generated) information media can be connected as early as at the start of the 2000s, which is where the electronic work examined in the current essay, that of the iiin the white darkness, is situated. Going back to the example mentioned, one can notice that the digitally alternating stimuli on the screen call for hyper reading, while the metaphorical meanings that derive from the associations that can be built, for instance, between the pronoun “we” and the words “history,” “experience,” “memory,” “identity,” and “soul” require close reading. In addition, the pronoun “we,” viewed together with the Flash-generated animating effects, reveals the human agent intervention and its reciprocal connection with the machine code that regulates all functions, which sheds light on another stream of thought emerging at the dawn of the twenty-first century, that of wanting humans and machines to be co-agents and co-facilitators. All these further extend the expressive variations that the specific work opens up as to how its main theme (memory loss) can be understood and the variable points of view it can be approached from. However, the users’ impulsive movements in the e-lit work’s online space and the sporadic activation of data (as it would happen with actual memories) that come on the surface uncontextually and non-linearly are not superficial. Such a hyper engagement intensifies the users’ feeling of

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loss and disorientation because of the non-ordinary focus now required on one’s constant shifts between the Flash-generated multimedia effects and animations. C. T. Funkhouser claims that such kinetic works “promote a sense of looseness and ephemerality in what appears on the screen […] suspending ordinary reading practices […]. At any moment, a reader can shift focus of concentration to a different line and continue reading as such” (2012, 46). Such a realization offers an insight into the distinct changes, as it has been mentioned, that had started emerging in the 2000s with regard to the reading (hyper and close) practices that were now steered by the surfacing web-driven operations, which, combined with digital sensorial stimulation, demanded a different cognitive response. Thomas writes that [w]hen we read something online, we see text that is formatted in a particular way on the screen; for example, it’s arranged in one or two columns, it’s presented using a specific font, or it includes a headline or a title that is larger than the rest of the text. While these formal aspects of a web page appear to be wholly integrated with the page’s content – there is no visible structural distinction between form and content – a website looks a particular way on the screen due to the operation of markup text, text we don’t see but that functions “behind the scenes” to structure a page so that it appears in a particular way. (2018, 185–186)

The ii-in the white darkness constitutes a good example of this observation, as evidenced by the way its sensorial input and Flash-operated animations have been orchestrated online. But it should not be overlooked the fact that what Flash displays have been programmed and coded by those who initially conceptualized the creation of the specific work, with these processes being algorithmically replicated when the work was later published online. With ii-in the white darkness serving as an elaboration on what can be remembered and forgotten, Strasser and Coverley effectively capture in their e-lit work the ephemerality of human memory through the seemingly random generation of fragmentary sensory input. But what happens when the software program itself becomes ephemeral? In 2014 Mark Sample at the MLA conference announced that “Flash is dying. And with it, potentially an entire generation of e-lit work that cannot be accessed without [it]” (Salter and Murray 2014, 143). With the ii-in the white darkness being currently no longer available via Flash but via a different

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platform (Ruffle), one realizes that what appeared to be omnipresent in the early 2000s now in the 2020s appears to be vulnerable and inadequate. By highlighting the digressive quality of technological processes and software support in the course of time, one is confronted with a different kind of fragility that is bound to the machine’s own operable sustenance and economic viability. Possibly at the dawning of the twentyfirst century any change in the life of an emerging software tool, as is Flash, seemed to be part of its evolutionary development and growth, and certainly not part of its demise and eventual eradication. However, one comes to the realization that the more the need for information, the more the need for powerful systems; and the more powerful the systems, the more voracious and less graspable their workings. Kamilla Pietrzyk argues that “information technology companies perpetually have to innovate their products – and […] are supposed to make computers and the capitalist system that relies on them run faster and more efficiently, contributing to the general speed-up and exacerbating the cultural neglect of time and duration” (2012, 130). Such a comment makes one comprehend that nothing can stay intact from the rapid expansion of an internet-reliant market and an all-encompassing web. As for the network technologies that emerged in the early 2000s and heralded the emergence of an openly accessible net, they have by now become extinct as they have been superseded by far more advanced operation systems that have encompassed almost all human activities and needs. Consequently, ephemerality, if thought-out in the context of Strasser and Coverley’s work, gains an additional layer of signification that moves beyond human vulnerability by unveiling digital technology’s own perilous status. What is now at stake is what the World Wide Web and network technologies had promised to create at the start of the twentyfirst century: vast and global communities of readers/users/viewers that can come together through the use of the always-available online tools and platform services. However, with the dying out of Flash and what had been created with it (unless rescued and retrieved or migrated to another platform and online environment), it becomes clear that the technological future that had been guaranteed cannot be sustained. In this context, the ii-in the white darkness and its Flash construction invites current users to look at the digital future that was promised at the opening of the 2000s with a pinch of irony that derives from the realization that nothing is invincible not even the all-powerful and omnipresent digital technologies. But possibly this is where the importance of such digital tools and

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creations can be traced: in helping us formulate a critical stance as to how the socio-cultural changes that they have brought forward can be evaluated and the influence they have impacted on the shaping of current web technologies can be assessed.

Final Thoughts Reflecting on what has been written so far, one realizes that the ii-in the white darkness confronts us with issues that pertain both to human and technological creative ingenuity and frailty. In such a context, Strasser and Coverley’s e-lit work could be seen as a Flash-designed response towards the transience of information, which in the work itself could be perceived by the users either as a sense of elusiveness and abstraction as to how the visual, verbal and audio input is reiterated on the screen or as a metaphorical stance with regard to the human inability to fully grasp and hold on to various moments in time. Certainly, the ability digital mechanisms, as is Flash and its web host, have in their attempt to generate such a multiplicity of reactions on a cognitive, intellectual, and technical level proves their progressive design. As for the existence of an evolutionary internet model at the opening of the twenty-first century, it marks the beginning of an expansive way of experiencing reality and the world at large. Taking into consideration not only the malleability of Flash but also Strasser and Coverley’s transcontinental collaboration, one can claim that the information technologies at the start of the millennium had led to the emergence both of a period of rapid interconnectivity, which is now fostered between readers/users/viewers, artists, and programmers anywhere in the world, and efficient interactive machines. Kristian Shaw remarks that the “rapid acceleration of digital communicative technologies is a distinguishing feature of contemporary globalization. … [It] connects disparate peoples, creating new virtual communities that overcome territorial divides and destabilize notions of proximity and distance” (2019, 31). All these lead to the realization that this is the reality that has emerged at the dawn of the twenty-first century with digital technologies prescribing a world that appears accessible, immediate, and user-friendly but, at the same time, globally expansive. Just the thought that the ii-in the white darkness is a globally accessed work by the personal and webwired computers of a vast number of users, does shed light on the one hand on the paradoxical co-existence of what is personal alongside what is globally public and on the other hand on a life that is totally enmeshed in

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digitality. It is for all these reasons that the e-lit and Flash-conceptualized works that were generated at the opening of the 2000s do deserve the attention of the literary scholars who need to widen the scope of their analysis as well as reorient their perspective in relation to digitality. It is essential that this kind of digital creativity is approached not as a technical symptom that should only be viewed in isolation, but as a practice intertwined with the changing socio-cultural, political, and economic reality of the time. This is exactly what defines, from a technological point of view, the departure from the late twentieth to the post- or after-reality of the twenty-first century. This is the period during which internationally geared internet networks, global audiences, and digital narratives come together, which calls for a far more synthesizing, multileveled, and interdisciplinary examination of the changes that have taken place in both human and machine communication potential and performance. Whether the emergent ubiquitous online networks, software, and platforms have led to a far more perceptive engagement and interaction between human and machine agents, which at the beginning of the new millennium was enthusiastically welcomed, or to a suspicious mediation of individuality and enormity of corporate structures, it remains to be seen.

References Castells, Manuel. 2000. The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Volume I: The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Funkhouser, C.T. 2012. New Directions in Digital Poetry. New York: Continuum. Greenwald Smith, Rachel. 2018. Introduction. In American Literature in Transition, 2000–2010, ed. Greenwald Smith, 1–16. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grigar, Dene. 2021. A Toast to the Flash Generation. Vimeo. https://vimeo. com/496283125. Accessed 20 July 2022 Hayles, N. Katherine. 2006. The Time of Digital Poetry: Form Object to Event. In New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts and Theories, ed. Adalaide Morris and Thomas Swiss, 181–210. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press. Hayles, N. Katherine. 2008. Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. Hayles, N. Katherine. 2016. Influences of the Digital. In Postmodern | Postwar— And After: Rethinking American Literature, ed. Jason Gladstone, Andrew Hoberek, and Daniel Worden, 209–216. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.

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Hayles, N. Katherine. 2012. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Hayles et al., eds. 2006. Electronic Literature Collection Volume One. https:// collection.eliterature.org/1/. Accessed 20 December 2023. Hoberek, Andrew. 2007. Introduction: After Postmodernism. After Postmodernism: Form and History in Contemporary American Fiction, special issue of Twentieth-Century Literature 53 (3): 233–247. Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Luesebrink, Marjorie. 2014. Electronic Literature Organization. In The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media, ed. Lori Emerson, et al., 174–178. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Manovich, Lev. 2013. Interaction as a Designed Experience. In Throughout: Art and Culture Emerging with Ubiquitous Computing, ed. Ulrik Ekman, 311– 320. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Pietrzyk, Kamilla. 2012. Preserving Digital Narratives in an Age of PresentMindedness. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 18 (2): 127–133. Pressman, Jessica. 2014. Digital Modernism: Making it New in New Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pressman, Jessica. 2009. Pacific Rim Digital Modernism: The Electronic Literature of Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries. In Pacific Rim Modernisms, ed. Steve Yao, Mary Ann Gillies, and Helen Sword, 316–334. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press. Rettberg, Scott. 2014. Electronic Literature. In The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media, ed. Lori Emerson, et al., 169–174. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Rettberg, Scott. 2019. Electronic Literature. Cambridge: Polity. Salter, Anastasia, and John Murray. 2014. Flash: Building the Interactive Web. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Shaw, Kristian. 2019. Globalization. In The Routledge Companion to TwentyFirst Century Literary Fiction, ed. Daniel O’Gorman and Robert Eaglestone, 25–35. London and New York: Routledge. Stefans, Brian Kim. 2018. Electronic Literature. In American Literature in Transition, 2000–2010, ed. Rachel Greenwald Smith, 192–210. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strasser, Reiner, and Marjorie Luesebrink [Coverley, M. D., pseud.]. ii — in the white darkness: about [the fragility of] memory. 2004. Web. The NEXT, Vancouver, WA. https://the-next.eliterature.org/works/644/0/0/. Accessed September 1, 2023.

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Thomas, Lindsay. 2018. Information. In American Literature in Transition, 2000–2010, ed. Rachel Greenwald Smith, 181–192. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 16

Paradigms of Cyberculturalism in Post-postmodernity Mehdi Ghasemi

Introduction Post-postmodernism is the age of click. As Alan Kirby notes, in postmodernism, one read, listened and watched, while in post-postmodernism, one clicks, surfs and downloads (2006, 1). Thus, the new age is characterized by human–computer symbiosis. Artificial intelligence, which is the simulation of human intelligence, exemplifies such a symbiotic relationship between human and machine. Google Translate services, which instantly translate words, phrases and web pages between over 100 languages, is another manifestation of human–machine collaboration. Moreover, as interactive internet-based technologies, social media mark post-postmodernity by digitalism. Social media entice and invite individuals into themselves, and consequently, day in and day out, more

M. Ghasemi (B) Department of English, School of Languages and Translation Studies, Turku University, Turku, Finland e-mail: [email protected] University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland © The Author(s) 2024 T. Tsimpouki et al. (eds.), American Studies after Postmodernism, Renewing the American Narrative, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41448-0_16

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people subscribe to social media sites, which are growing in number. With the ever-growing advancement of digital technology, a myriad of different on-demand apps has been introduced for different purposes, helping users to find their favorite or needed services. The apps have affected art and literature, too, and hence, nowadays, digital art and literature are on the frontiers of cyberculturalism. Not all of these are feasible without the internet which is wide-spreading even to farfetched regions. The growth and evolution of the internet, particularly during the last decade, which has advanced to 5G technology and Starlink, bring wider bandwidths by expanding the usage of spectrum resources. In such a cybercultural climate, our life depends on the ubiquitous internet, without which, several features in our personal and working life stop operating. The United States has had a major stake in creating and shaping the digital revolution. Because of its digital infrastructure and the global role of its technology, as Gabriele Schwab notes, “the United States is a leading country in technologizing and ‘cybernetifying’ the human realm, a process that affects practically all social spheres” (1989, 193). With top American social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram, cyberculturalism has also been more pronounced in the United States. However, as a result of the rise of the internet and the expansion of cybertechnologies to other countries, cyberculturalism has exceeded national boundaries and constituted itself as one of the global trends in the twenty-first century. Based on this discussion, I argue that we have moved into a new global, social, media, cultural and economic period, wherein cyberculture reigns at the crossroads of real and virtual spaces and affects our means of communication, economic transactions, literary and artistic productions and publication outlets. In what follows, I elaborate on paradigms of cyberculturalism, including artificial intelligence, multimediality, Twitterature, the omnipresence of social media, cybercommerce and cryptocurrency in art, literature, culture and economics. I also discuss how the paradigms of cyberculturalism create new re-arrangements in the world and affect our perspectives, communications and transactions in post-postmodernity. To show the rapid diffusion of cyberculturalism as a global phenomenon, along with examining several literary works by American writers, I discuss a number of associated literary and artistic works produced by international authors and artists in different parts of the world.

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Paradigm One: Artificial Intelligence, Multimediality and Twitterature Artificial intelligence (AI) has added to human intelligence in different fields. Through mimicking human cognitive activity, AI handles different situations and carries out some of our tasks without human intervention. For instance, self-driving cars, incorporating vehicular automation capable of sensing their environments with little or no human inputs, are on their wheels on roads. The usage of AI in self-driving cars reduces or even removes the demand for drivers. This is to say that in cyberculturality several jobs totally disappear from the list of employers, and people might not need to acquire those job skills. The utilization of AI is not confined to industry and business, and it also affects artistic and literary work production. AI enables authors and artists, even amateur ones, to produce art and literature in other ways. For instance, the recent introduction of numerous computer software and programs, generating art with AI-powered applications, enables all people without any background knowledge and experience to create artistic works. At the 2019 launch of AI artists, the Polish artist Dariusz Gross predicted that soon “we will all be AI artists” (qtd. in Rtology 2022). To prove this claim, Natasha Lomas, who is a senior British reporter, has used an art generator app to produce several paintings and exhibited them on the TechCrunch magazine. These super-tools in everyone’s arsenal offer plenty of templates and numerous pre-made elements for creating awesome visuals and, thus, enable even beginners to manipulate images, mimic hand drawing and create 3D modeling. In literature, writers benefit from AI features and human–machine symbiosis, too. As machine-assisted authoring, AI narrative systems generate stories from scratch. AI story generator tools such as Jasper, Rytr, AI Dungeon, Novel AI, etc. help fiction writers specify the genre, style and length of their stories, create characters, points of view and plots and generate compelling stories. For example, Montreal-based David Jhave Johnston has created ReRites, a boxset of twelve poetry volumes. To generate the poems, Jhave used AI, trained to imitate contemporary poetry and then he edited the AI-generated poems into the ReRites poetry collections. This means that AI-enabled Jhave to produce one book of poetry per month between May 2017 and May 2018. More recently, in November 2022, San Francisco-based Open AI launched ChatGPT, which is also able to write short stories, fairy tales and poems

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based on the provided information and inputs. One can specify the genre, characters, setting, mood, tone, etc. in the chat box and receive the ordered literary work in a couple of minutes. It is worth noting that ChatGPT service, which is freely available to everyone, interacts with users in a conversational way across many domains of knowledge, provides detailed and articulate responses to users’ questions, solves problems, writes codes and produces texts such as cover letters and essays promptly based on vast materials found online. With the emergence of AI technologies, we witness post-professional turns in literature and art and transformation in the patterns and practices of literary and artistic works. In addition to the introduction of numerous generative art and literature software, cyberculturalism provides authors and artists with numerous outlet options to release their works. Multimediality means that artists and authors, who have had difficulty to publish their works with commercial publishers, now have a variety of other means to publish their texts. As I discuss in “Post-postmodernism and the Emergence of Heterolinational Literatures,” “in post-postmodernity, writing is no longer about publishing but writing, and owing to diversity of publishing outlets, one can find a publishing venue” (Ghasemi 2022, 23). For example, self-publishing means offering venues to such authors and artists to release their works. According to Indian cyber journalist Piyush Pandey, self-publication reveals that the age of stifled creative expression has ended. As he puts it, “IT platforms have democratised literature, which today has mass appeal and participation, unlike even two decades ago, when monopoly presses or publishers’ autocracy stifled creative expression. Each person can now be his own editor, writer and publisher” (Nandalike 2013). It is worth noting that despite a stigma around self-publishing, the Amazon’s 2019 review of its Kindle sales reveals that thousands of self-published authors earn a living from their book sales. As an example, after writing his novel The Martian, the American novelist Andy Weir was turned down by literary agents. Thus, he opted to publish his book serially on his website. Later, he published the book on Amazon Kindle, and to his surprise, the book rose to the top of Amazon’s list of best-selling titles and debuted on the Best Seller list of the New York Times. This grabbed the attention of traditional publishers, and eventually, Weir sold the rights to Crown in 2013 (Barron 2022). Furthermore, cyberculturalism provides the possibility to release literary works on social media platforms. Serialized fiction, released in installments in social media outlets, has surged in popularity, and since

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numerous people do not have time or interest to pore over ponderous novels in hard copies, some writers offer their stories in limited character installments on social media platforms. For example, Twitterature enables writers to write and share their stories with readers through the medium of social media in serialized manners. Twitterature has been employed, for example, by the American Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and short story writer Jennifer Egan. She used the Twitter account of The New Yorker magazine to tweet her entire short story “Black Box” (2012) as a series of single tweets. By the same token, American musician and writer John Roderick has composed his entire novel Electric Aphorisms in 365 transmissions of 140 characters each and disseminated them serially during December 2008 and May 2009. The book’s preface, an introduction by John Hodgman, has also been written in a similar format on Twitter. Similarly, the American poet and novelist, Nicholas Belardes has written his novel Small Places based on an imaginative love story in 900 tweets between 2008 and 2010. In this climate of extreme brevity, flash fictions or micro-fictions, a style of writing which involves producing very short pieces of fictional literature, have come into existence. Unlike short stories, which are usually several pages long and can notch up thousands of words, works of flash fiction dribble for, for example, 50-word pieces. Owing to social media attractions, people spend a lot of time browsing their pages, and their appetite is satisfied by reading short passages of books on those platforms. Alan Kirby claims that “Young people today don’t know about books, don’t understand them, don’t enjoy them; in short, they don’t read” (2009, 67). Unlike Kirby, I believe that young people still read and enjoy reading; however, their modes of reading have changed, and the traditional methods of reading are no longer appealing to them (Ghasemi 2020, 162). In this cybercultural climate, many writers use the potential of social media as public and universal venues to receive or increase their popularity and readership among techno-savvy readers. The publication of literary works in social media outlets makes literature global, and literary works, which are not confined to a single state, are widely read and universally evaluated. It is worth noting that the possibility of publishing works in diverse venues has increased the number of literary works in post-postmodernity. In the past, it was possible for a literary critic to read a great proportion of literary works published in a year; however, nowadays, because of the countless number of publications in different outlets, critics limit

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themselves to the outputs by a number of well-known publishers. Departments of English and comparative literature departments also stick to their age-old established syllabi, believing that every student should be familiar with a selected number of well-known authors and their masterpieces, and should they decide to replace authors, owing to the limited number of courses offered, they replace them with other well-known ones, who are “routinely celebrated in the press and in the prize awards” (Childs 2005, 274). This way a great number of self-published and digital literary works are left without notice and judgment, and there is uncertainty about their growth and popularity. In such a cybercultural climate, the dissemination of literary works in social media platforms and the publication of e-books, online magazines and journals make libraries less crowded in cyberculturality. Some authors use their social media pages to ask readers for their opinions about the names of their characters, plot developments and story endings. The British author Miranda Dickinson is an example, who asked for readers’ opinions while writing the second edition of her novel Take a Look at Me Now (2020). As her letter to readers at the very beginning of the book reads, the first edition, published in 2013, was a failure, so she decides to rewrite the book, this time with the help of her potential readers: “As I wrote the new novel in a four-and-a-half-week blind panic, I asked for suggestions on social media—a character’s name, an object in someone’s apartment, the name of a shop, and so on. It began as a game to make the writing process more fun and less lonely. But it changed everything” (Dickinson 2020, vii–viii). Her communication with readers in the process of rewriting the book has provided her with an opportunity to benefit from users’ contributions, comments and suggestions. It is worth noting that like postmodernism, which paid attention to readers’ participation in the creation of meanings and process of decodification, cyberculturalism favors the reactions and comments of readers, followers and users. However, unlike social media platforms in cyberculturalism, which allow users’ direct comments, the unilateral pattern of communication in traditional media—such as TV, radio and newspaper—with readers and viewers in postmodernism left little and controlled possibility for the audience to express their comments and criticism (Ghasemi 2016, 67–68). In social media, users are also able to create, edit and share posts. Since in cyberculturalism the agency is transferred to users, copyright issues are sometimes violated. Users have the possibility to edit forms and contents

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of posts they receive and then forward them to other users. This can be seen as the reformation of textuality. In such popular and populated environments, numerous posts are created and sent out, and consequently, receivers have no idea whether senders have originally created the posts, retouched or simply forwarded them. Thus, to live in cyberculturality is to have no sense of ownership for posts and cultural products exchanged in social media platforms, and authorship and copyright issues are usually under question in such outlets. In these collaborative platforms, several cooperative websites, including “We Are Smarter Than Me” and “Watt Pad,” have been launched for community book writing projects. In these group writing pads, writers from anywhere with any orientations have the possibility to try their hands and contribute to writing stories. The co-authors begin and continue stories, add their own narratives, introduce and name new characters and write endings. In addition, the collaborators mix elements of two or more different works together and create hyper-hybrid works. As co-authors expand on stories based on their imaginations and orientations, they naturally write differently and repeatedly make changes in the directions of works in process. This is not to “treat authorship as a unified phenomenon of culture that emerged in a single historical or theoretical space” (Saunders 1992, 8). This is to say that authorship is not confined to a single stream, setting, perspective, culture and geography. Based on this discussion, the conventional notion of authors as single individuals and creators in charge of their works change in cyberculturalism. The use of digital technologies facilitates co-authoring, providing online environments for multiple authors to work on a shared multi-perspectival manuscript and collaborate to produce multimedia contents. Novelling (2016), an online novel, is another recent example of collaborative cyberliterature. The work, which has won the Coover Award, is a generative system that algorithmically arranges fragments of text, video and sound in six-minute cycles, and the interface changes every 30 seconds; however, readers have the possibility to click at any time to change the page. As Inderjeet Mani notes, “stories can now easily embed multimedia information, allowing a mix of writing, audio, images, and video, which can be presented and animated to create works like never before” (2010, 177). In addition to being a digitally synthesized work, Novelling is the fruit of a collaboration between the Australian author Hazel Smith, writing the text, the American digital media artist and writer Will Luers, conducting video and coding, and the Australian composer

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Roger Dean, producing sound. Andrew Bennett refers to such works as “collaborative and multiple authorship” (2005, 98), which makes us take distance from “solitary authorship” (95). Wikipedia is another example where everyone can create a page, edit and/or translate the existing pages into other languages. In such collaborative atmospheres, multiple anonymous writers hammer main ideas based on their mindsets and knowledge. Naturally, the impersonality of collaborators happens, simply because the locus of attention moves away from creators to works. Additionally, joint projects with collaborators from different locations have reached their zenith. With the use of educational apps and social media, teachers and learners, scholars and researchers benefit from the connectivity feature of social media, and they can easily communicate and share a level of global knowledge with each other. Nowadays, in joint multidisciplinary projects, co-authors create Google Drive files and write their texts together at the same or different times from different locations. Likewise, in Zoom and Teams, several parties have the possibility to simultaneously work on a single file, write, edit, add, trim, comment and move forward, and no one possesses the sole ownership of documents. International online courses, seminars and conferences as well as surgeries conducted by several surgeons from different parts of the world reveal how close we stand in cyberculturalism.

Paradigm Two: Omnipresence of Social Media The omnipresence of the social media has turned societies into mediatized spaces in post-postmodernity. Images of people, who always have their cellphones in hand and browse or flick through their social media pages, signify a media-saturated society. These are platforms, wherein all peoples, regardless of their ranks, races, religions and other orientations, can sign/ log in and use. Thus, presidents and ordinary people, educated and illiterate, haves and have-nots, famous and unknown, have the possibility to share their views with others. In these outlets, one can see and read posts about almost everything. However, this is not to say that these platforms stand all views, and they block those posts which are against policies set by both themselves and their governments. Despite this, compared to traditional mass media, social media pads are less at the peril of censorship. As a cyberspace, Elaine C. Graham sees social media as “a populist and dynamic realm, free of centralized or bureaucratic control” (2002, 160). Ephemerality, however, is applied to them. For example, posts as

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well as text and voice messages that one receives today in social media can be deleted by receivers and senders. Moreover, because of lacking permanent identifiers, several internet pages and weblogs visited today might vanish tomorrow. Accordingly, researchers, who cite them in their research outputs, usually insert the dates they retrieved materials from them. The ubiquity of social media and their key parts in our life have affected fiction writing, too. A survey shows that numerous contemporary literary works ooze social media. For example, in How I Became a W Finn: A Noveramatry, I employ a character, or as I call it “figment,” named “The Social Media.” The figment always accompanies the main figment, called The Dean’s Sweetie, and converses with her. The Dean’s Sweetie opens all valves of her heart to The Social Media, and in return, it comments, advises and even urges The Dean’s Sweetie to (re)act on some occasions throughout the noveramatry. For instance, The Dean’s Sweetie informs: The Dean’s Sweetie The head of de|part|men|t and OUR uni.versity staff were always for me. Now everybody knew knows who I am was. Every day I receive lots of friend requests in my social media and I have numerous friends there. The Social Media Right. I love you. You’ve created a marvelous page ☺ Suffice to post a picture of your BIG toe and receive 100 Likes and 10Comments. Other PhD students didon’t receive more than 10 Likes and 1 Comment for their great academic achievements! (Ghasemi 2017, 5–6)

Later, The Dean’s Sweetie notifies The Social Media of her relationship with The Boyfriend: The Dean’s Sweetie My parents wanted me to keep our relationship dark until after he gets a promotion. It was really hard not to post any of our pics on my social media. The Social Media True! It’s really hard not to inform The Social Media of your thoughts, events, plans and activities. I’m an integral part of your daily life. The Dean’s Sweetie

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I tell you a secret but promise to keep it dark. Ok? The Social Media Sure. I never tell anybody. You can choose “Only Me” option, so no 1 will learn about it. (7)

As the above passage shows, The Social Media is fully aware of the main figment’s secrets, plans and desires and has become a close associate of hers. As Christopher K. Brooks notes, in cyberspaces, “nothing is private in spite of the efforts to undo the Patriot Act, as millions of people willingly reveal their innermost thoughts and provide detailed accounts of their most mundane routines” (2013, 150). It is worth noting that the noveramatry challenges the definition of the term “friend” used in social media. It shows that despite having numerous friends in social media platforms, one can be lonely. Real friends, as we all admit, know each other, frequently meet face to face and have strong bonds. However, social media has minimized real and physical human interactions and changed the meaning of friend even to those whom we have never met but received and accepted their friendship requests. Accordingly, as Brooks writes, “people are friended and unfriended in the click of a mouse, are told of the end of their love affairs by text message, find intimacy in computer chat rooms, and link their pasts to their presents via Facebook” (150; emphases in original). Furthermore, because of the great impact of the social media in our lives, we have embraced cyberculture even in our writings, and for instance, the use of emojis and associated dictions are prevalent not only in the above excerpts but also in our daily written communications, including text messages, emails, etc. As another example, Don’t Read the Comments (2020) by American contemporary author Eric Smith draws upon social media from another perspective. It represents both the joys and concerns of social media usage. The novel depicts the life of Divya Sharma, known as D1V online. She is a teen girl who has gained many followers because of her video game stream. She financially supports her mother, who is under economic pressure, through the sale of products she receives in exchange for doing sponsorships and advertisements on her popular channel. Despite this, her mother is irritated by insulting messages and comments that her daughter receives every day. The novel begins with these lines: “Mom. We’ve been over this. Don’t read the comments,” I say, sighing as my mother stares at me with her fretful deep-set eyes […]. Wrinkle lines

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trail out from the corners like thin tree branches grown over a lifetime of worrying. I wish I could wash away all of her worries, but I only seem to be causing her more lately. “I’m just not comfortable with it anymore,” my mom counters. “I appreciate what you’re doing with…you know, your earnings or however that sponsor stuff works, but I can’t stand seeing what they’re saying about you on the Internet.” “So don’t read the comments!” I exclaim, reaching out and taking her hands in mine […]. “How am I supposed to do that?” she asks, giving my hands a squeeze. “You’re my daughter. And they say such awful things. They don’t even know you. Breaks my heart.” (Smith 2020, 1)

This short conversation reveals some of the ethical ills in social media environments. Users with digitally generated fake and real identities and alternative subjectivities have the possibility to share their feelings with other users, and in this multilateral open climate, some of them feel free to insult others. In these virtual environments, Divya Sharma, who gains fame and earns money feels defenseless against cyber harassment, and her only strategy is to avoid reading nasty comments. Smith shows that women are more vulnerable in such environments and are usually insulted in sexist manner. The anonymity of electronic communication provides the ground for some male users to bombard women with sexual comments, belittling them or asking them for sexual favors. The novelist also shows that the dependency on social media makes users addicted and turn the prodigious social media users into mediaholic, and since they spend more time on social media platforms, they find less time to do their studies, works and their associated assignments. In Don’t Read the Comments, Aaron’s mother wishes that her son studies hard and becomes a doctor; however, Aaron has zero interest in becoming a doctor, and he spends his time on social media and writes games for a local developer. As the novel illustrates, social media is distractive, too. New messages and notifications frequently distract the attention of characters and even detour them from their main assignments, since they offer an impetus to constantly check their pages, devices, emails and messages. In a similar manner to Smith, British author Nikesh Shukla demonstrates some of the disadvantages of social media in his novel Meatspace

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(2015). The novel depicts typical daily life of Kitab Balasubramanyam as follows: The first and last thing I do everyday is see what strangers are saying about me. I pull the laptop closer from the other side of the bed and press refresh on my inboxes. I have a Google calendar alert that tells me I have no events scheduled today, an assortment of Twitter and Facebook notifications, alerting me to 7 new followers, a favourite of a tweet thanking someone for liking my book, an invite to an event I’ll never go to, spam from Play and Guardian Jobs […]. Amazon recommends I buy the book I wrote […]. I think about tweeting ‘will write copy for food’ but decide against it. There’s an email from my dad. He doesn’t usually send me emails; he prefers text messages. It’s a forwarded message from a woman on a dating website […]. I tweet: “Feet hurt. Too much bogling last night. #boglingrelatedinjuries” This is a lie. I was in bed by 10 last night. I had 4 beers on an empty stomach, felt pissed and irritated, shouted a lot in our front room. (2015, 1–2)

The passage shows how one’s life can be controlled by social media. Kitab, who is a writer, starts and ends his days with what people write about him, and in-between, he is either tweeting or messaging or checking his plans on his Google calendar. The novel shows how one can be so obsessed with and defined by their online persona. In addition, decisions over relationships are made based on people’s profiles, including photos, videos and provided information, on dating apps. To look seductive on their manipulative profiles, users modify their photos via some apps, enabling even amateur users to edit, filter, upscale and enhance image and video qualities. Accordingly, what people see in someone’s profile as their personal photos might be totally different from what they see in reality. This is to say that people’s and places’ virtual identities might be different from their real identities. As Kitab discloses, people tell lies in such environments and even he himself does so. This is to say that because of their plural users with the possibility of content creating and sharing, a conduit for lies, pretentious claims, misleading and false information recurs in social media. Like Shukla, the American author Jessi Kirby shows in her novel The Other Side of Lost (2018) that telling lies is part and parcel of social media environments. Kirby portrays the life of Mari, a popular social media influencer, who shares posts with her fans on

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Instagram and YouTube and infiltrates even secrets of her life. She tells lies about her boyfriend—another social media star—who is not in any relationship with Mari. Later, when Mari gets real about her life, and the truth is revealed, she suddenly loses her fans, showing how fame in social media can be like a flash in the pan. The Hive (2019), co-written by the American author Barry Lyga and his wife Morgan Baden, also conveys that the improper use of social media in cyberculturalism can ruin one’s credit and position in their communities and even in the whole world. In this story, set in the near future, users are held accountable for their online activities. Right after users turn 13, they receive a social media ID, and their online misconducts are reported to the Hive mob via phone notifications. In the novel, Cassie McKinney joins the Hive mob to penalize perpetrators such as a man who has written an anonymous post against his family: He’d humiliated his family in public by writing an anonymous blog in which he’d detailed his ambivalence about his relationships with his wife and his children. Honesty on social media was admirable, but there were limits. After a particular post with the confession that his response to his wife’s cancer diagnosis was to tell her he didn’t love her anymore, his blog went viral, and the usual doxx gangs quickly uncovered his identity. His Dislikes and Condemns skyrocketed […]. Overnight, Hive Justice was declared, and #publicjunk was agreed to be an appropriate sentence. So justice would be served, right here, right now. As punishment for his indiscretion, he’d be forced to parade around town naked, with the words “World’s Worst Husband and Father” written on his chest. (15)

The novel reveals the high speed of virality in social media and how one’s viral posts, photos or commentaries affect their lives. It also shows that no one can create fake identities and fictitious profiles on social media as before, and users and their activities are rated by the number of Likes and Dislikes they receive from other users. In a similar manner, American writer Dave Eggers discusses the transparency of users’ identity in his dystopian novel The Circle (2013). In the novel, which paraphrases George Orwell’s 1984, the Circle, which is the world’s most powerful social media company, devises a system, called “the Unified Operating System,” which combines users’ social media profiles, payment systems, email accounts, usernames and passwords. The system obliges everyone to have one single account, identity, password and payment system. Even

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users’ names are engraved on the back of their tablets and phones. Thus, users are unable to mask their real identities. As the novel reads, The era of false identities, identity theft, multiple usernames, complicated passwords and payment systems was over. Anytime you wanted to see anything, use anything, comment on anything or buy anything, it was one button, one account, everything tied together and trackable and simple, all of it operable via mobile or laptop, tablet or retinal. (28)

Meanwhile, the company’s range of other sophisticated technologies, named “SeeChange,” including portable cameras worn by people all day long, put them under constant surveillance. In such a highly surveillanceoriented society, the use of VPN to change or disguise one’s online identities, IP addresses and geographical locations are impossible for users. It is worth noting that in virtual environments, fake and real are so mixed that it would be hard to distinguish them. Some techniques and apps are used to alter real videos and deceive the viewers. For instance, in one video clip, two cats generously offer a dish of food to each other with their paws; however, the original video shows that the cats pull the dish toward themselves with hostility. Through reversing the video and decreasing its normal speed, the editor has totally changed the reality, showing that we are in alter-reality age. This shows that “cyberspace is indeterminate,” and “it suspends ‘normal’ conventions of body, space, time and place” (Graham 2002, 170).

Paradigm Three: Cybercommerce and Cryptocurrency The world has become saturated with commercial advertisements in the cybercultural era. With the application of AI technologies, marketing teams have automated certain cognitive tasks to identify their audiences, classify them based on myriad variants, including their interests, demands, surfing behaviors, searching histories on the internet, languages and territorial locations and send them advertisements. In this light, advertisements have become an integral part of every program we listen to or watch. The frequent use of commercials between TV and radio programs, YouTube videos as well as Facebook, Instagram and Telegram posts cause interruptions, and since they disrupt the joy of watching and listening, they become annoying. In addition to their reappearance on TV, radio

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and social media, they are also on billboards in streets, on buses and trains and in almost all public places. The repetition of advertisements shows that consumerism and capitalism cultures have become more prevalent in post-postmodernity. Companies, which seek for more visibility to increase their sales and profits, also use social media to advertise their services and products, and sometimes they use it as a weapon against their rivals. In one clip, a “customer” appears in front of his cellphone camera and opens a fish tuna can, and to his surprise, he finds a dead cockroach in it! The video, which is later revealed to be made by a rival company, is seen widely in social media platforms, and the sales of the victimized company drop overnight. Like companies, some countries use social media as a weapon against each other. Their cyber teams actively create contents to attack their enemies’ values, highlight their weak points and address the areas that make the existing rifts wider among different groups and communities in those nations. Wrong decisions and actions of their governments are bold out and harshly criticized. Thus, people of the counter-countries are bombarded with negative videos and pessimistic posts, and some people who are unhappy with their governments or ruling systems eagerly forward or share the posts with other users on social media. This creates a sense of disappointment and frustration among members of target nations. In parallel, the attackers’ cyber teams create contents to magnify their own merits, cherish hopes and build self-confidence in their own people. This is to say that social media deeply affect peoples’ self-esteem. In the cybercultural era, cell phones are multifunctional. They have also become our company at all times and places. People create videos, audios and other products and offer them in social media like Tik Tok and YouTube, and depending on the number of views they receive, they earn money, showing that in cybercommerce physical offices can be replaced by virtual environments. In such virtual environments, influencers use different ways to increase or maintain their followers. Thus, viewers are of high significance, and influencers and content producers fetishize them. To attract them, they must always be active and follow what their followers’ desire. They even reveal their private life to appeal to followers and increase their views. To this end, they use different techniques, just like fishermen who use attractive baits. Some use appealing names for their videos, while others even use deceit. They think of each viewer and follower as money and fame, and even negative comments, which add to the baskets of their feedback and improve their status. To

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verify their accounts, several social media activists buy followers, simply because more followers make one’s account more credible, and credibility attracts more advertising sponsorship. Hackers are the other cyber groups, who utilize phishing tactics—a form of social engineering where cybercriminals deceive people into revealing sensitive information via fraudulent communications, malware installation, etc.—to achieve financial gains in post-postmodernity. In the past, robbers stole money from banks and their armored vehicles. The criminals used weapons to threaten and even physically harm bank staff and customers. However, in cyberculturality, hackers use different approaches to trick people and break into their bank accounts. This is another form of transition from physicality to virtuality in cyberculturalism. Moreover, in cyberculturalism, working policies and systems further alter, and the lifelong permanent contracts, which are prevalent in postmodernity, are mostly replaced by temporary ones. Accordingly, people are hired for a short period of time, and they frequently need to change their jobs. As a result, many people try their hands in different jobs and acquire experience in miscellaneous fields, related or unrelated to their studies and interests. One who was a secretary in a law company yesterday serves as a city librarian today and might become an influencer tomorrow. The AI tools also assist job seekers to learn about open positions and apply for them. This transitory condition enhances people’s mobility, as they need to change their locations according to their workplaces. The constant movement and relocation create rootlessness, disintegration and poly-consciousness. People who know that based on their short-term contracts are going to work in a workplace for a short period of time do not thoroughly invest to make connections. It also offers them a plurality of identities, as their roles, positions, salaries, co-workers, managers, nature of work, clients and neighbors repeatedly change. Thus, in addition to ever-shifting or multi-perspectival settings, their experiences and identities are not monolithic. It is impossible to write about cyberculturalism without taking stock of new trends in global economics. For example, the introduction of digital currencies, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Thether, Binance, Cardano, etc., operating free of full control of governments, has caused several challenges to the authority of world banking systems and the monopoly of some dominant currencies. Almost all countries first declared all transactions involving Bitcoin and other virtual currencies illicit and stepped up

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strong campaigns to block the use of “unofficial” digital money. Accordingly, they banned all their citizens from handling cryptocurrencies in their transactions. Even though such cryptocurrencies have never been backed by banks and governments, they have now and after more than a decade become part of the world economic systems. Eventually, some governments, including the United States, Canada, the EU, etc., have declared them legal. After the partial success of the existing virtual currencies, several other currencies have been introduced to the world trade. This is to say that, in cyberculturality, any measures, which aim to create unification in the world, are doomed to failure. For the same reason, TV companies that found their industry in decline in cyberculturalism have decided to make TV sets smart and equipped them with different digital systems and tools to maintain their age-old established positions in households. It is worth noting that while TV as a prevalent telecommunication medium in postmodernity has been a group device, and there has been usually one in every household, the cell phone as a common ubiquitous medium in post-postmodernity is a lone device, and every member of the household has a cell phone through which they also use social media. Thus, unlike TV programs or movies watched by members of a family in postmodernity, cell phones and social media push people toward loneliness and isolation. Unlike the TV, the cell phone is a private device, and one needs passwords or other personal biometric authentication methods, including fingerprints, face and voice recognition, hand geometry, retinal identification, keystroke dynamics and handwritten signature, to use it. To sum up, as a boundless phenomenon, cyberculturalism has transformed the artistic, literary, social and economic worlds. Despite the United States’ pioneering move in creating and promoting cyberspace, cyberculturalism has rendered territorial boundaries obsolete soon after its emergence and rapidly changed the international landscape, allowing everyone—users and programmers—to benefit from cybertechnologies. In cyberculturalism, our world is on the cusp of human–machine collaboration and AI expansion, and consequently, a proliferation of literary, artistic, cultural and economic neo-trends occurs within the existing dominant systems. The rapidly evolving and culturally expanding neotrends of digital literature, including Twitterature, provide authors with a plethora of new ways to express their arts and literary skills and interact with the world. Authors and artists, professional and amateur, academic and non-academic with different backgrounds produce works, and their

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products make art and literature polylithic. This trend manifests that, like other fields, art and literature conventions in our digitally mediated world do not remain untouched. Accordingly, it is impossible to cram cybercultural arts and literatures into a single unit, as it is not feasible to confine social media platforms, firms, publication venues, currencies and companies to one. Writers, who usually have difficulty breaking into print by commercial publishers, find miscellaneous outlets, including social media platforms and self-publishing means, to release their literary and cultural products. As a result, the number of writers and artists grow, and their works gain popularity via social media. Moreover, cyberculturalism provides the ground for collaborative works, and hence, co-authors sometimes replace a single author, and their works, produced in collaborative atmospheres, include different outlooks and vantage points, showing that authorship and its products are prone to change. The widespread of digital literature has also created unprecedented possibilities to diversify (plat)forms of reading. Thus, readers are not confined to reading merely books’ hard copies but have plurality of reading loci, including reading on their cell phones, laptops, etc. Additionally, the diversity of such multimodule and interactive tools, signifying cyberculturalism per se, facilitates communication, socialization, education, business transaction and news transmission.

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Eggers, Dave. 2013. The Circle. New York: Vintage Books. Ghasemi, Mehdi. 2016. Quest/ion of Identities in African American Feminist Postmodern Drama. Turku: University of Turku Press. Ghasemi, Mehdi. 2017. How I Became a W Finn: A Noveramatry. Helsinki: BoD Publisher. Ghasemi, Mehdi. 2020. Hyperhybridism: Postmodernism Is Old but Not Old Fashioned. In Movement and Change in Literature, Language and Society, ed. J. Kuortti and S. Ruokkeinen, 153–70. Baden-Baden: Nomos, Academia Philosophical Studies. Ghasemi, Mehdi. 2022. Post-postmodernism and the Emergence of Heterolinational Literatures. Contemporary Aesthetics 20: 15–30. Graham, Elaine L. 2002. Representations of the Post/Human. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Johnston, David Jhave. 2019. ReRites. Anteism Books. Kirby, Alan. 2006. The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond. Philosophy Now 58, November/December: 34–37. https://philosophynow.org/issues/58. Accessed 8 November 2020. Kirby, Alan. 2009. Digimodernism: How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern and Reconfigure Our Culture. New York: Continuum. Kirby, Jessi. 2018. The Other Side of Lost. London: HarperCollins Publishers. Lomas, Natasha. 2021. This AI-Powered Art App Lets You Paint Pictures with Words. The TechCrunch, December 23. https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/ 23/wombo-dream-app/. Accessed 14 December 2022. Luers, Will, Hazel Smith, and Roger Dean. 2016. Novelling. New Binary Press. Lyga, Barry, and Morgan Baden. 2019. The Hive. Toronto: Kids Can Press. Nandalike, Walter. 2013. Instant Social Media Outbursts New ‘Literature’? The Daijiworld, February 4. https://daijiworld.com/news/newsDisplay?newsID= 162881. Accessed 15 December 2022. Mani, Inderjeet. 2010. The Imagined Moment: Time, Narrative, and Computation. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Roderick, John. 2010. Electric Aphorisms. Publication Studio. Rtology, Eva. 2022. Machine Learning Art: We Are All AI Artists. The Medium, July. https://medium.com/mlearning-ai/we-are-all-ai-artists-f4c16c28712c. Accessed 16 December 2022. Saunders, David. 1992. Authorship and Copyright. New York: Routledge. Schwab, Gabriele. 1989. Cyborgs and Cybernetic Intertexts: On Postmodern Phantasms of Body and Mind. In Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction, ed. P. O’Donnell and R. Con Davis, 191–213. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press Ltd. Shukla, Nikesh. 2015. Meatspace. London: HarperCollins Publishers. Smith, Eric. 2020. Don’t Read the Comments. Toronto: Inkyard Press. Weir, Andy. 2014. The Martian Paperback. Broadway Books.

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Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

Index

A Adichie, Ngozi Chimamanda, Americanah, 15, 222, 228, 230 aesthetics, 2, 14, 47, 104, 122, 130, 132, 137, 232, 233 affect, 10, 16, 102, 105, 109, 225, 265–268, 273, 274, 281, 299, 310, 321, 323 affective ecocriticism, 105 affective hypothesis, 266, 267 agency, 102, 110, 113, 114, 125, 129, 133, 137, 147, 155, 195, 196, 198, 226–228, 235, 314 consumer agency, 192 altermodernism, 10 animal studies, 102, 107 Anthropocene, 3, 12, 101 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 123, 126 Arbus, Diane, 56, 57, 67, 69, 71 Armstrong, Philip, "Litter", 106, 109, 111, 112 art-comics, 206, 212, 213, 217 Ashland Creek Press, 103 Auster, Paul, 14, 144, 165, 166, 175

City of Glass , 165, 172, 175 The Locked Room, 14, 165–169, 171–176, 178–180 authenticity, 10, 133, 145, 174, 175, 181, 225, 271, 275 author, 10, 12, 13, 16, 46, 63, 104, 107, 110, 112, 121, 123–129, 131, 132, 134–138, 144, 155, 175, 183, 196, 207, 208, 211–213, 221, 225, 228, 243, 259, 265–273, 275–279, 281, 282, 310–312, 314, 315, 325 authorship, 7, 147, 315, 316, 326 B Ba, Gabriel & Fábio Moon, 206 Balkans, the, 265, 269, 270, 278 Barad, Karen, 114 Barry Lyga, 321 Bauman, Zygmunt, 2, 3 belonging, 14, 69, 79, 111, 145, 147–149, 160, 161, 228, 229, 231, 234, 250, 255, 256, 259 Bennett, Jane, 114

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 T. Tsimpouki et al. (eds.), American Studies after Postmodernism, Renewing the American Narrative, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41448-0

329

330

INDEX

Beuys, Joseph, 82, 87–95 BEUYS-LAND, 13, 91–93 blog, 39, 104, 231, 235, 298, 321 blogger, 231 Braidotti, Rosi, 102, 114 Braschi, Giannina, 14, 122, 128–138 Buell, Lawrence, 75, 78, 79, 96 C Calarco, Matthew, 107, 108 calquing, 281 ChatGPT, 311, 312 Chénetier, Marc, 172 climate change, 8, 12, 26, 76–78, 88, 91, 92, 94–96 cosmodernism, 8, 263 Coverley, M.D. & Reiner Strasser, ii-in the white darkness: about [the fragility of] memory, 16, 287, 288, 290, 291, 293, 296, 298 creative writing, 103 Cruz, Angie, Dominicana, 14, 148, 149, 151, 154, 157–160 cryptocurrency, 310, 322 cultural mobility, 223, 225, 229 culture Culture Industry, 206, 211 Mass High Culture, 15, 206, 211, 216, 218 cyberculturalism, 16, 310, 312, 314–316, 321, 324–326 cyberliterature, 315 D dataveillance, 167, 175, 179 Daytripper, 15, 205–212, 214–217 DC Comics, 205, 211, 212 Deleuze, Gilles, 107, 108, 113, 126, 283 democratic demographic determinism, 42

Democratic Party, 42, 47, 51 Derrida, Jacques, pharmakos , 173 desire, triangular, 166–168 diaspora, 265, 268 diasporic literature, 221 diasporic writing, 145, 160 digimodernism, 7, 8, 174, 263 digital gaming, 186, 198 digitalism, 295, 309 digital turn, 290 digital media, 7, 167, 175, 291, 294, 296, 315 digital mediation, 14, 167 digital technologies, 288, 289, 296, 303, 304, 315 digital textuality, 290 Dinnen, Zara, 167, 176–178, 181 discourse hybridization, 277 displacement, 226, 227, 230 Dominicana, 14, 148, 149, 151, 154, 157–160 Don’t Look Up, 76 Donoghue, Emma, 246, 249, 250, 252, 254, 256, 258, 259 Akin, 15, 242, 244 double perspective, 223, 228 Dungeons and Dragons, 186

E ecofiction, 104 EcoLit, 103 Ecoglobalism ecocriticism, 101, 102, 105, 109 effacement, 167, 175, 178, 179, 181 Eggers, Dave, The Circle, 321 election campaigns, 45 electoral coalitions, 46, 47, 50 e-literature e-lit work, 294, 296, 300–302, 304 emergent narratives, 184, 187, 188, 193, 195, 196

INDEX

environmental crisis, 78, 106 ethics, 64, 78, 104, 115, 137, 148 Evans, Walker, 56, 59, 62, 63, 66–68 American Photographs , 57–60, 62, 66, 68 exile, 125, 132, 227, 228, 268, 271 exilic narratives, 268 F Felman, Shoshana, 172 feminism, 146 feminist urban geographers, 146 feminist urbanism, 146 flash fiction, 313 Flash (platform), 288, 291, 292, 296, 297, 300, 302–304 Foer, Jonathan Safran, 26, 27, 255, 257 Frank, Robert, 56, 57, 60–63, 66–68 G gameplay, 189, 190 Game Text narratives, 187, 200 gaze, 234, 252, 270 Genre Turn, the, 213 gimmick, 210, 211, 217 Girard, René, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, 166 global global economy, 4, 324 global empire, 25 globalization, 6, 9, 101, 192, 193, 221, 226, 227, 263, 264 globalized world, 2, 6, 15, 223, 229 GOP electorates, 40 graphic novel, 13, 15, 79, 188, 193, 205, 207, 208, 212, 215, 217 grounding, 79, 81, 82, 91, 96, 225, 273

331

grounded theory, 81 H Hassan, Ihab, 121, 144 hedgehog, 20, 21, 28, 30, 31 Hemon, Aleksandar, 16, 242, 249, 257, 265, 268, 271, 272, 278–281, 283 The Book of My Lives , 269, 271, 272, 278, 282 heteroglossia, 277 Hoberek, Andrew, 2, 4, 289 Huber, Irmtraud, 145, 174, 175 Hutcheon, Linda, 4, 6, 121, 174, 263 hybridity, 122, 124, 223, 228, 229, 241, 242 hyper attention, 301 hyper reading, 301 hypertext fiction, 289 I icon, acheiropoiites eikones , 59 images, Kodacolor, 64 immersion storytelling, 196, 198 indistinction (zones of), 108, 113 informationalism Manuel Castells, 297 interactive, 81, 195, 288, 289, 291, 292, 294, 295, 297–299, 304, 309, 326 interface, 291–294, 299, 300, 315 intersectionality, 146, 147 intersectionally aware realism, 147–149, 159, 160 intertextuality, 121, 129 irony, 121, 153, 303 J James, Henry, The American Scene, 65 Jameson, Fredric

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INDEX

Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 266

K Kellman, Steven G., translingualism, 269, 282 Kelly, Adam new sincerity, 145, 174 Kerouac, Jack, 60–62, 64, 68 kinship, 252, 254, 255, 258–260 Kirby, Alan, digimodernism, 7

L language topophilia, 79, 81, 90, 92, 96 latinx fiction/literature, 121, 124 Latour, Bruno, 106, 114 Lerner, Ben, 1 literature, e-lit, 290, 294, 296, 300–302, 304, 305 Lyotard, Jean François, 192

M Mass High Culture, 206, 211, 216, 218 materiality, 7, 62, 280 Meatspace, 319 mediation, 166–169, 171, 172, 174–176, 178–181, 228, 267, 305 intermediality, 78, 79, 257 material mediality, 79 memory, 132, 134, 137, 171, 180, 241, 252, 254, 269, 273, 274, 278, 288, 291, 301, 302 memory loss, 288, 291, 301 metafiction, 10, 121, 207 metamodernism, 4–6, 8, 208, 263 migrant (experience), 146, 227, 230, 231, 235, 258

migration, 44, 80, 133, 149, 227, 229, 230, 264, 268 modernism, 6, 57, 144, 207–209, 211, 214, 216 Moon, Fabio & Gabriel Bá, 15, 206–209, 212–215, 217 Moraru, Christian, cosmodernism, 263 Morgan Baden, 321 multiculturalism, 146, 223, 264 multimediality, 310–312 multimodal narratives, 184

N narrative narrative voice, 110, 175 narrative empathy, 107, 111, 115 neo-realism, 145, 174 New York Trilogy, 165, 166, 173 Nikesh Shukla, 319 novel, 5, 9, 14, 15, 131, 133, 134, 144, 148–151, 154, 158, 159, 161, 165–168, 174, 177, 181, 185, 188, 194, 196, 207, 208, 216, 222, 223, 228–230, 234, 235, 240, 249, 250, 269, 271, 296, 313, 314, 318–322 noveramatry, 317, 318

O omnipresence, 310, 316 Other, 166–168, 172, 179

P paraliterature, 213, 216 Penkov, Miroslav, 16, 265, 268, 270–272, 274–279, 281, 283 East of the West: A Country in Stories , 269, 273 Stork Mountain, 269

INDEX

photograph(y), 57–68, 71, 79, 91–93, 95, 126, 233, 239–244, 246–252, 254–256, 259, 260 photographic representation, 56, 57, 72 photo-novel, 15, 240–242, 246, 248–250, 252–260 photo-text, 240–242 platform, 135, 300, 303 collaborative platforms, 315 IT platform, 312 Plumwood, Val, 108, 113 point of view, 59, 106, 108–112, 115, 148, 223, 291, 305 politics Democrats, 22, 42, 43, 45–51 GOP, 38–40, 42, 43, 47, 48, 50, 51 party politics, 39, 47 Republicans, 22, 42, 43, 45, 47–50 postcolonialism, 268 posthumanism, 13, 102 postmodernism, 1–11, 13–15, 38, 39, 57, 101, 122–129, 132, 133, 137, 138, 144, 145, 148, 149, 159, 161, 166, 173, 174, 176, 184, 192, 208, 221, 222, 225, 236, 263, 265, 289, 295, 309, 312, 314 projection, 112, 178 R race, racism, 27, 80, 124, 184, 191, 194, 199, 231, 234, 235 racial ambivalence, 233 racialization, 149, 154, 157, 231 reader, reader/viewer, 244, 249, 250, 252, 254, 258, 260 realignment, 12, 38, 40–44, 47, 50, 51 realism neo-realism, 145, 174

333

reality, 39, 58, 62, 95, 131, 133, 147, 159, 166, 167, 197, 217, 222, 228, 242, 247, 253, 265, 271, 280, 291, 304, 305, 320, 322 Speculative Realism, 145 relationality, 8, 13, 15 remediation, 193, 194 repeatable epiphany, 209 Republican Party, 38, 39, 43, 48 republican retrenchment, 42 resistance, 13, 19, 24, 25, 31, 124, 127, 133, 138, 146, 147, 155, 158, 159, 189, 224 S Said, Edward, 222, 223, 225, 227, 228 selective reproduction, 277 self, 27, 114, 136, 145, 166–168, 171, 174, 177–180, 234, 271, 272, 291 selfhood, 167, 173, 241, 242 September 11, 252 serialization, 217 Shore, Stephen, 56, 59, 63–68, 70, 72 American Surfaces , 57, 63, 65–68 "The Road Trip", 63 Smith, Eric, 318, 319 social media, 38, 45, 80, 167, 178, 179, 194, 246, 253, 255, 309, 310, 312–321, 323–326 solidarity, 31, 157, 159 Sontag, Susan, 57, 67 On Photography, 246 Soth, Alec Sleeping by the Mississippi, 57, 67–69 space, 146–150, 152–161, 171, 175, 206, 222, 228, 231, 234, 248, 249, 252, 257, 260, 264, 267,

334

INDEX

268, 272, 290, 301, 310, 316, 322 spatial, 56, 127, 146, 151–154, 156, 157, 160, 242, 288, 292 speculative fiction, 183, 184, 190, 195, 200 subjectivity, 14, 102, 107, 113, 125, 166, 175, 181, 197, 222, 260, 271, 299 surveillance, 6, 14, 135, 179, 180, 258, 322 sustainability, 77, 78, 80 synaesthetic, 294, 298, 300 T tabletop role playing games (TRPGs), 14, 184, 185 therapy, 22 Thoreau, Henry David, 13, 75, 78, 83–86, 90, 91, 95, 96 Walden Pond, 78 topophilia, 13, 79, 81, 90, 92, 96 TOPO, 80, 82, 90, 93, 96 Trachtenberg, Alan, 58 transculturalism, 15, 222, 225, 236 translational effects, 278 translational mimesis, 277, 281 translingualism, 16, 264, 268, 269, 282, 283 translocal identities, 145 transmedial narratives, 194 transnational, 79, 90, 95, 96, 121, 221, 223, 224, 236, 264, 268, 270, 271, 275, 277, 279, 281, 283

trauma, 171, 241, 254, 275, 277 triangular desire, 166, 168 Trump, Donald, 25, 37–40, 42, 43, 45, 47–51, 76 Twitterature, 310, 311, 313, 325

U Umwelt , 110–112 United States of Banana, 14, 122, 128, 130–134, 136, 137 urbanism urban experience, 143, 144, 146 urban space, 14, 143, 146, 148, 149, 154, 156–158, 160 urban environment, 88 urban novel, 144 U.S. election campaigns, 37, 45

V Vertigo publishing Press, 205, 211, 212 viewer, 57, 67, 88, 250, 291, 292, 303, 304, 314, 322, 323 visual art, 249, 250, 258, 292, 304 visual poem, 291, 293

W War on Terror, 23, 134, 288 Wolfe, Cary, 102, 113 women writers, 145 world literature, 13, 101, 103, 268 Weltliteratur, 103