American Literary History Advance Access originally published online on January 31, 2008
American Literary History 2008 20(1-2):160-182; doi:10.1093/alh/ajm056
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Border Literary Histories, Globalization, and Critical Regionalism
We are all, of course, only too familiar with "globalization" understood as a multinational corporate/economic world phenomenon, or more specifically, as Robert Eric Livingston reminds us, as "economic discourses commonly termed neoliberal embodied and administered by institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank." But, Livingston continues, "ethical and political discourses ... likewise aspire to global significance" (145). Today, such is also the case for critical discourses in American literary studies, which, in another time, were almost fully grounded and bounded within the US. Such a critical globalization in American literary studies is in the same universe as "the transnational," "the post-national," and "border theory"—interpretive tendencies that while discrete, nevertheless share the same basic impulse and mission of decentering American literary studies away from a nation–state focus and identity.
The purpose of this essay is to critique this tendency with some cautionary observations and with a focus on literary histories that speak to the US-Mexico border area, principally the respective works of José David Saldívar and Ramón Saldívar.
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1. Literary Globalization |
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 TOPNotes 1. Literary Globalization 2. Nuestra America?3. Critical Regionalism4. The Transnational Imaginary5. Asian Americo6. The Problem of...7. The Globalization of...Works Cited |
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As a specific academic formation, the globalization of American literary history has its arguable beginnings in Carolyn Porter's 1994 review essay, "What We Know that We Don't Know: Remapping American Literary Studies." Approximately the first two-thirds of her review, however, are only a run-up to the question of globalization. In this first part, she reviews critiques of American literary history focused on contemporary American critical works which still take the US as their central focus (albeit now at some considerable critical distance from that older tradition variously identified as the consensus school, American exceptionalism, myth and symbol, etc.) even as they also critically try to account for the post-1960s "new" American studies and its espousal of race, ethnic, and gender reconfigurations. However, these first studies seem unsatisfactory to her as articulations of a globalized American literary criticism, and so she concludes her review by examining a book that, for her, is far more germane, namely José David Saldívar's The Dialectics of Our America: Genealogy, Cultural Critique, and Literary History (1991); in a very real sense, Porter is positioning Saldívar as an early and perhaps first example of how American literary histories should be done in the global moment.
Saldívar's work also offers another feature of a globalized American literary history, namely its clear orientation toward Latin America and the Caribbean including the demographic extensions of these areas in the US, an orientation not lost on Porter, who, while noting other world linkages, particularly Asia, also lends emphasis to the Americas. For Saldívar, the globalizing path to Latin America also passes through Mexican America as he links what he calls "Chicano Border Narratives as Cultural Critique" (49) to writers in Latin America and the Caribbean such as Alejo Carpentier and Ntozake Shange, all under the umbrella of José Martí's rubric of "nuestra America" (5), and thus in critical opposition to the US. The rubric of opposition or "resistance" to the US, often construed as the American empire, has also become a feature of critical globalization, such that we can now add this second layer of definition to the "critical" in critical globalization by including a correlated attack on American exceptionalism.1 Such a linking and critical outlook also characterizes José Saldívar's second and very influential book, Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (1997). Here he brings together a great variety of mostly Chicano and Chicana writers and artists under the rubric of a dynamic US-Mexico border, that is now also understood as another way to critically globalize or remap American studies: "the invocation of the US–Mexico border as a paradigm of crossing, resistance and circulation ... that has contributed to the ‘wordling’ of American Studies and further helped to instill a new transnational literacy in the US academy" (xiii).
After these initial works, the globalization of American literary history has massively proliferated both in conceptual statements and substantive studies, with a large and influential number of such discussions in the pages of American Literary History and American Quarterly, with a high point in Shelley Fisher Fishkin's breathless, well-catalogued affirmation of the "transnational turn in American Studies" in 2005, but possibly further climaxing with the 2006 special issue of American Literary History, "Hemispheric American Literary History," edited by Caroline Levander and Robert Levine, a collection that once again lends emphasis to Latin America. We must also note the earlier appearance of a collection edited by Paula Moya and Ramón Saldívar whose essays are examples of a "transnational imaginary" and study "distinct discourses that refer to the US in relation to a variety of national entities" (1). "Transnational imaginary" is also carried over into the subtitle of Ramón Saldívar's recent study of the distinguished Mexican-American writer, Américo Paredes, a primary subject later in these pages.
Against critical globalization, we can also note some minimal critical dissent and some alternative ways of envisioning the global project of American studies. From Germany, Heinz Iscktadt offers two broad critical observations. He suggests that such globalizing often acts as so much sociology, bypassing the literary character of its chosen texts as he reminds us, quoting Sacvan Bercovitch, that a "literary text is more than the sum of the explanations, solutions, probabilities, and abstractions that it accumulates as it travels across time and space" (558). In short, Iscktadt is inviting us into closer, if not close, readings of our texts even while operating within a global context. But he also notes that while the globalization of American studies, "certainly opens up new perspectives and new areas of study, it ignores that between the local and the global there is still the ‘national’ as a category requiring continual analysis." Rather than "abandon the concept of the nation together with that of America in order to extricate the discipline from its ideological foundations ... the United States must be studied as a distinctive collective entity (however heterogeneous or divided it may perceive itself to be) within a network of global or transnational interrelatedness" (551). Departing from these cautionary observations, I turn to the work of José Saldívar.
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2. Nuestra America? |
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TOPNotes1. Literary Globalization2. Nuestra America?3. Critical Regionalism4. The Transnational Imaginary5. Asian Americo6. The Problem of...7. The Globalization of...Works Cited |
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We are somewhat preceded in this critique by Jeff Karem's own critical engagement with José Saldívar. His critique is focused on Saldívar's use of postcolonial theory to understand the literary texts of the Americas, but much of what he says is also pertinent to the perils of globalizing readings since postcolonial theory and critical globalization often overlap. Karem is particularly vexed by the manner in which Saldívar misreads his chosen texts while also putting them into unwarranted conjunctions in support of his binary theory of US hegemony versus pan-Latin American textual resistance and opposition. In his much more nuanced readings, Karem shows how Saldívar fails to grasp the full textual complexity of Gabriel García Márquez's work, which cannot be understood as simply "oppositional." Saldívar wholly misreads the character of Aureliano in One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and then wholly overlooks the novel's conclusion, both of which have "complex sources and implications that elude a binarizing postcolonial model such as Saldívar's" (99). Saldívar then creates another kind of internal binary by reading Jorge Luis Borges as a retrograde conservative writer in contrast to the resistive García Márquez. Yet according to Karem, Saldívar seems hesitant "to enter Borges's text" (99). Were he fully to do so, he might discover that "there are subversive aspects of his work that elude the stark divisions of postcolonial binarizing models" (100).
Saldívar also addresses texts from his own native region of the lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas (hereafter, the Valley), and, once again, he argues for their univocal opposition to US hegemony, placing them in alliance and alignment with García Márquez and Martí's nuestra America. Once again, for Karem, the effort is misguided in two broad respects. Saldívar lends great—indeed exclusive—emphasis to South Texas novelist Rolando Hinojosa's representation of the violent Anglo domination of the Valley beginning in 1846, but largely overlooks Hinojosa's rendering of the complex Mexican Anglo hybridity of the area and of the internal class divisions and exploitations within the Mexican-origin "community" (Karem 105–06). Once again, Saldívar's simple binary of "colonizer" and "colonized" misses too much even as it distorts another facet of Hinojosa's fiction, namely its much greater affinity with and indebtedness to William Faulkner rather than García Márquez, which subverts any easy alignments between writers from "nuestra America" that simultaneously exclude North American (in this case, "southern") and "white" connections (Karem 107–10). Karem proposes that "like Faulkner, Hinojosa is deeply invested in considering how people relate to their land and region, but the different cultural context leads him to priorities very different from Faulkner's" (108).
In thus evoking Faulkner, Karem allows us to see that what is really underwriting his critique of Saldívar's postcolonial globalization is Saldívar's inattention to region in its socio-cultural fullness as represented by Hinojosa. Karem's critical intervention also allows us to see that Hinojosa's slippage from Saldívar's binary postcolonial model is a result of a too-easy globalization of a text that is fundamentally concerned with a specific local situation over long historical time. In his minimal reading of Hinojosa's text, Saldívar does not gain full purchase on the total complexity of this author's world, one largely in critical engagement with a still dominant Anglo society, an engagement articulated in a cultural complexity of ways and not merely by recalling Texas Ranger executions.
In his second book, Border Matters, Saldívar practices another method of globalizing, "border studies," with its at least implicit gesture toward a more specific transnationalism involving Mexico. But as in much such work, it is only a gesture: we learn precious little about the other side of the border because Saldívar spends most of his time with English-language texts produced largely by Chicano and Chicana cultural elites on this side. In his analysis of such texts he attempts to produce, once again, a unity of anti-colonial "resistance" up and down a seamless border, and he places all manner of texts and performances in a politically and culturally semiotic equivalence. Once again, in encompassing so much and in his abiding concern with "resistance," he hurriedly misreads and sometimes overlooks the specificities of the local sites and texts, and the varying complexity of their interaction with the global. Although obviously more proximate than García Márquez's Colombia, specific parts of the border may be almost as socio-culturally different from one another as they are from Colombia. It is not a small matter that Américo Paredes, in the very first words of "With His Pistol in His Hand:" A Border Ballad and its Hero (1958), specifically defines his regional area of interest: "The Lower Rio Grande Border is the area lying along the river, from its mouth to the two Laredos," the two Laredos less than 200 miles from the mouth of the Rio Grande with other parts of the border being "otra gente" (other people) (7). Rolando Hinojosa is absent from Border Matters, but he is replaced as a representative from the Valley by Américo Paredes and his very large and ethnographically keyed 1990 realist novel, George Washington Gomez: A Mexico-Texan Novel (hereafter GWG).
Set in the Valley from 1915 to World War II, a period of intense Anglo penetration and social domination, GWG is a coming-of-age story that traces the cultural but ultimately political evolution of the title character, who, as part of his assimilationist evolution through the novel, begins life with the name Gualinto, although as an anti-Mexican adult he will change it to George. There is much going on in this capacious novel, but the critical jury appears to be in with a dominant verdict on the novel's thematics. In the words of Héctor Pérez, "this novel's overall vision ... seems to be that major, significant social change is unaccomplishable. ... For Chicanos, then, there is no way out of this labyrinthine social construction according to this novel's naturalistic scheme of things" (44). For Saldívar, however, all of Paredes's work is "a critique of the cultures of US imperialism" (38), a "counter-discourse to the homemade nativist discourses of US imperialism" in which "[Paredes] articulates the experiences of, the aspirations, and the vision of a people under occupation" (49).
Saldívar tends to overlook "experiences" and emphasize "aspirations" and "vision," but they are his own theoretical/ideological aspirations and visions. Paradoxically, he locates Paredes's resistive "counter-discourse" principally within the central character of Gualinto, and he makes much of one specific moment of Gualinto's alleged "resistance." As a teenager, and right before he goes away to college and to his assimilated, anti-Mexican, right-of-center future, Gualinto happens upon and is invited into a Mexican-American domestic working class party that features dancing to conjunto music, often identified as the quintessential Mexican-American working class music and dance.2 It is a moment that Saldívar reads as one of cultural resistance. In this "wonderful scene," Saldívar says, "young Gualinto relishes his mestizo/a working class culture by dancing to the local accordion-driven music of South Texas." He continues:
Here Paredes dramatizes that, for Chicanos, norteno music is synonymous with a vernacular working-class consciousness. In Gualinto's embrace of conjunto, he subtly shows how his hero's place (late in the novel) was with his local mestizo/a working class ... . In the novel, conjunto polka music becomes a political ideology by stressing local characteristics, by representing vernacular music, and by confirming everywhere the multiple dynamics of Chicano/a identity and nonidentity. (46–47)
With a seemingly totalistic precommitment to idioms of "resistance," José Saldívar badly misreads this scene, one which really wholly affirms that Gualinto is not relishing a resistive local cultural identity. This "wonderful" scene is, rather, a prelude to his decisive assimilation once he leaves for the university. A more careful reading of the scene reveals that Gualinto, emulating the apostle Peter, thrice turns down the invitation to join the dancing, saying: "I-I can't dance" (243), "But, I can't dance," and "I really must go" (246); leave he does, refusing "all exhortations to dance" as another critic, John Gonzalez, has accurately noted. Moreover, as Gonzalez further notes, a more comprehensive reading of this "wonderful" scene clearly indicates that "the working class culture out of which conjunto emerged offered no vision of communal resistance, but only leisure-oriented entertainment that fostered unfocused male violence and unregulated female sexuality" (208). (Saldívar also overlooks the un-Bakhtinian vomiting at the "wonderful" party.) When the working class crowd—especially a dark, sexually attractive young woman named Mercedes—asks him to come back anytime, Gualinto replies: "I must go ... but I will come back" (246–47). Later that night, safely in his bed, he thinks, "Yes, he would go back to her. These were his people, the real people he belonged with. His place was among them .... He would marry Mercedes and live on the farm. He would go back. Tomorrow night he would go back. He never did" (247).3
What Saldívar's misreading amply demonstrates is the manner in which a hurried globalizing reading of this complex regional experience does not reveal the full outcomes of a regionalist engagement with the global. He repeats Manuel Peña's well-known depiction of conjunto music as one of the weapons of cultural resistance, but both he and Peña might take note of the complicated class contradictions that accrue to this music in this region and that are played out by Gualinto. In the end, it is really Américo Paredes who is representing this music, not as a point of resistance, but rather one of defeat (Gonzalez 205–09). This defeat—this wanton moment of leisure in the face of social adversity—only adds to the bleak vision that I, like Gonzalez, have elsewhere identified as Paredes's sense of modernist tragedy (Limón, Dancing 60–94).4
I have been evoking ideas of "region," the "local," and "place" as part of an alternative to critical globalization as it is practiced with respect to the US-Mexico border. Indeed such interrelated, geographically bounded notions have not entered much into these discussions except as a residual and limited category, such as in Ickstadt's passing reference to the "local" in my previous citation.5 Yet we cannot return to older references that would imagine such sites as utterly distinctive, rigidly bounded, and impervious to external influence.
| Through the concept of critical regionalism, a case seems to be developing for a renewal of regionalist thinking, not in any isolated sense, but rather within yet in tension with globalization.
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What was already true for Wordsworth 200 years ago is certainly so in the twenty-first century—"the world is too much with us" to entertain such imaginaries, if indeed they ever existed. Even castaways look for useful things that may wash up on the beach, for as Hsuan L. Hsu has demonstrated, sometimes the local can also make its way out to the distant global. Through the concept of critical regionalism, a case seems to be developing for a renewal of regionalist thinking, not in any isolated sense, but rather within yet in tension with globalization.
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3. Critical Regionalism |
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TOPNotes1. Literary Globalization2. Nuestra America?3. Critical Regionalism4. The Transnational Imaginary5. Asian Americo6. The Problem of...7. The Globalization of...Works Cited |
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Fredric Jameson first reviewed the concept of critical regionalism in relation to literary studies in The Seeds of Time (1994), but at present we appear to have only two sustained explorations and applications of this concept to literary-cultural studies.6 Derived from the architectural thinking of Kenneth Frampton and a general Western Marxist tradition, critical regionalism is simultaneously a theory, methodology, and praxis for recognizing, closely examining, fostering, but also linking cultural and socioeconomic localized identities, especially as these stand in antagonistic, if also negotiated, relationships with late capitalist globalization. Such local identities, however, are not fixed practices, although they often do retain their distinction and discretion over against a globalizing "outside." Such a negotiated yet fundamentally adversarial relationship is, indeed, a relationship, tempered by an openness toward discrete globalizing elements and processes, but conducted with a critical selectiveness relative to their contribution toward the local identity and its often transformed perdurance in such a globalized existence. Not a simple enclosed and older kind of ruralized regionalism, for Herr, "critical regionalism marks less a space-and-place opposition than one that allows for some form of relation beyond that woven by capital" (18). However, a relatively bounded geographical space (in her case Midwestern Iowa but also Ireland) is not a small matter, because for her, comparability and global linkages are key: "In fact, the key to a critical regionalist methodology for cultural studies is the relationality of regionalism. This approach will always adopt at least a bifocal viewpoint," on the one hand "to establish provisional parallels," and on the other "to separate local mores from practices and administrations that exist world-wide," while always maintaining a stance of critical selectivity ultimately in the name of the region (18). As a rubric for such comparable practices, Herr, after Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari of A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1987), proposes the assemblage "to designate a construction composed variously of elements from regions that history has twinned ... that includes additive bricolage, inventive code-breaking, and other forms of amalgamation and reconstitution," or, as I take it, discernibly unified, local yet globally comparable, regional practices—both socio-economic and cultural, both residual and emergent—through which one or more regions manifest their critical difference but also their engagement with the global (11). Literary and popular cultural forms are among the practices constituting the assemblage but analyzed neither in isolation nor in a hurried, piecemeal fashion. As Powell notes, "forging, through cultural criticism, the broader cultural, political, historical, and geographical connections around a particular text, image or artifact of local cultural conflict ... enacts the new model of region that I term ‘critical regionalism’" (19). In sum, "a critical-regionalist cultural studies," Herr says, "has great potential for producing a unified but highly adaptable analysis of international flows at the local-regional level, toward the end of a more heterogeneous and tolerant future" (18).
We thus have in this concept an abiding and fulsome respect for and rendering of the complexity of local cultures in comparison to others in the world, while recognizing that all are in constant but critical interaction with the global. Such, I think, is an alternative way to render literary histories, at least those involving the US-Mexico border, a desirable goal, in my view, not achieved by the work of José Saldívar.
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4. The Transnational Imaginary |
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TOPNotes1. Literary Globalization2. Nuestra America?3. Critical Regionalism4. The Transnational Imaginary5. Asian Americo6. The Problem of...7. The Globalization of...Works Cited |
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By contrast, in his new work on Américo Paredes, Ramón Saldívar does take us in this direction as he adduces a rich and wide-ranging assemblage for two regional areas. The story of Américo Paredes, now clearly acknowledged as the leading Mexican-American scholar/intellectual/creative writer of our time, has been fully told by Ramón Saldívar in an impressive study, which is biographical but also an exemplary conceptual excursion into a transnational American studies. While there is no reference nor even an allusion to critical regionalism, it is as if Ramón Saldívar has produced just such a study, as he links the lower US-Mexico border with Asia through one biographical life and one interpretive universe, with the US playing its usual imperial role as the chief source and agency of a racialized capitalism.
After a civilian career as a newspaper reporter in South Texas, Américo Paredes was drafted into the US Army, but by the time his training period was over, the war was drawing to a close, and he wound up in Japan during the occupation. He served out his tour working for the US Army newspaper, Stars and Stripes, covering and filing stories on a myriad of small and large events happening in postwar Japan. During this period, Paredes also continued to produce creative writing as he had done in South Texas before the war. After his discharge in 1946, Paredes went to work for the Red Cross in humanitarian aid efforts and thus spent some time in Korea and China, the latter during the civil war between Chiang Kai-shek's nationalist forces and Mao Tse-tung's communist armies. As time permitted, he also continued his creative literary efforts. In 1949, he returned to Japan, and by 1951 he was back in the US to begin his studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he eventually earned his BA, MA, and PhD, all in English. Before too long, he joined the faculty of that same English department; here he would subsequently forge a distinguished scholarly career focused on the expressive culture of the Mexican-origin people of the lower border of Texas. This body of work would, for the most part, offer a critique of the Anglo-American colonial project in Mexican-American South Texas as well as an analytical account of a variety of resistive folk practices within the latter community. This critical project was already underway by way of his creative writing before Paredes left South Texas for Japan.
Saldívar, of course, offers an extensive commentary on Paredes's output as it concerns Texas, but is not content to let it rest there. His study of Paredes's remarkable career also becomes a clear example of a globalizing American literary history through what Saldívar calls Paredes's "transnational imaginary." Through a comprehensive and close examination of Paredes's various writings and oral interviews, Saldívar argues for continuities and parallels between Paredes's critical understanding of the conflict in his native South Texas Mexican community and in occupied Japan, relative to their respective though comparable Anglo-American occupiers. The political and cultural domination of South Texas Mexican Americans is thus rendered akin to the fate of Japan during, but particularly after, World War II. As much as I admire this prodigious work and think it to be a fine example of critical regionalist scholarship, I think there may be a very serious question concerning the comparability of these two "regions" as sites of resistance. Following Paredes's lead, Saldívar's reading has within it an unfortunate eliding of the historical record concerning Japan, especially in its relationship to China, a troubling misreading in which women play a critical role.7
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5. Asian Américo |
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As already noted, Paredes's critical work before and after the war was focused on Anglo-Mexican relations in South Texas. However, perhaps surprisingly the prewar Paredes also addressed Asia, if briefly, in his major work from that period: the aforementioned novel, GWG, with its assimilating protagonist, Gualinto. At one point later in the novel, Gualinto and some of his high school friends are conversing with two Japanese-American classmates, brothers who are the children of Japanese farmers who came to South Texas in the earlier part of the century. Jimmy and Bob Shigemara,
were the sons of a prosperous Japanese truck farmer ... fat, well-fed boys who talked a glib, smooth English and were much liked by all their schoolmates ... Jimmy Shigemara was saying, "Of course we're not the same race as the Chinese. We're much more civilized." ... The group talked a little longer about the relative merits of the Chinese and the Japanese, and [George] agreed enthusiastically with Jimmy and Bob Shigemara that the Japanese were a very wonderful people. (170)Given George's eventual development into an assimilated American, one cannot help but imagine that Paredes is suggesting, ironically, that as part of that development George is also learning certain racist attitudes even as, in adolescent fashion, he plays up to the prosperous and well-liked Shigemara boys. Yet as we shall see, this encounter is perhaps less ironic than predictive of Américo Paredes's later encounter with these same two Asian peoples during the immediate post-World War II period that he spent in Asia.
With almost no recorded exceptions, Paredes took very well to the Japanese during the occupation period both in cultural/aesthetic and political terms. In cultural/aesthetic terms, Paredes reports,
It was eerie and wonderful to be on Tokyo in those days. ... When I arrived it was still a half-ruined city. But what struck me most was the poetry of politeness of the Japanese. ... Really, the peacefulness of the Japanese bewildered us when we remembered Pearl Harbor, the many atrocity stories that were circulating, and the recent bitter fighting in the Pacific. (R. Saldívar 97)Only in this and one other instance does Paredes specifically refer to Japanese atrocities during the war as he gives himself over to Japanese socio-cultural poetics and postwar politics. The poetics emerge around women who, as Saldívar says, "were in everyone's mind during the occupation, in Paredes' mind no less than in anyone else's" (360). But these were women largely within one sexualized universe, one that eventually leads us back to both politics and atrocities. Saldívar tells us of one particular evening when,
the similarities between Mexican and Japanese women were also on Paredes' mind, as he describes how the geishas ... served the guests dressed in "colorful kimonos reminiscent of the costumes of our Tehuanas," an indigenous people of Oaxaca and Southern Mexico. More than the geisha's sensuous apparel, he writes, their "dark complexions and oblique eyes with long lashes" could have allowed them to pass for Mexican women. (361)The geishas also play music and sing, and Paredes, himself once a professional singer, is carried away when one geisha sings an old Mexican song translated into Japanese. He says: "I listened to the geisha as she finished her song with great satisfaction, like that of one who encounters a veiled woman, lifts her veil and encounters a former lover" (R. Saldívar 361–62).
Women are also a central part of a larger social sphere. According to Saldívar, "Paredes represents in one magnificent Stars and Stripes Sunday feature spread the sex industry as it ‘blossomed forth from the ruins’ of bombed-out Tokyo to provide night-life and ‘comfort’ to the occupying quarter-million-man American army." The Tokyo entertainment district known as the Ginza, "reports Paredes, has become a ‘Japanese cross between Broadway and a Mexican market place,’" a scene centered on night clubs, taxi dancing to American music, and prostitution (353). Saldívar then goes on to quote liberally from Paredes's "Sunday feature spread," but also from another piece that Paredes wrote for the Mexican daily, El Universal. Saldívar then comes to this conclusion, which I believe captures Paredes's views, with which Saldívar certainly seems to agree, quite accurately:
The appeal of this glittering scene of commercial and entertainment nightlife in the context of the torched desolation of metropolitan Tokyo can hardly be overestimated. Quite apart from the extraordinarily vexing matters of the commercialization of sexual desire and of the necessity of women to sell their bodies under conditions of domination, these articles tell us something else. They articulate the emergence of postwar global structures of recreational commerce. Liberated from the wartime regulatory regimes that had stifled the traditional Japanese sensuality of the body, Tokyoites began to take their first steps into the postwar structures of recreational commerce in these American-style dance halls, indulging their senses as best they could. (355–56)Yet even as they approach the Ginza with a certain enchanted admiration, both Paredes and Saldívar also want to underscore that the prostitution within the Ginza had much to do with the immediate postwar chaos and the literal hunger resulting from the destructive effects of the war on Japan, principally the infamous B-29 raids on its principal cities but also the difficulties of the Americans in administering food distribution and other forms of social support to such a large population while providing for the army of occupation (R. Saldívar 356–59).8 Yet, even in the short term and certainly by the mid-1950s, Japan would be doing very well due in no small part to substantial US support for the new Japan, especially as a developing partner in the Cold War against the Soviet Union.
Paredes also wrote a great deal concerning postwar Japanese political and legal affairs, including the major trials of Japanese military leaders charged with various war crimes such as Hideki Tojo, who had served as Prime Minister of Japan during most of the war with the US, but had also previously served as a primary military leader, including service as a field general and later as Chief of Staff of the Army in the war that Japan conducted against China and Korea in the 1930s. The general thrust of Paredes's journalism (and of a poem) is to defend Tojo against various charges of war crimes, principally atrocities by the Japanese army allegedly committed in its various theaters of war.9 As Saldívar notes, Paredes was permitted a brief interview with Tojo that proved to be inconsequential in terms of a full story, although it says much of what Paredes thought of Tojo and his evaluation of Tojo's war crimes: "There was Tojo, the great statesman and warrior, a taciturn man, trying to retain as much dignity as he could under the circumstances. ... I felt sorry for him because I knew that he was been accused of ‘war crimes’ that had in fact being committed by both sides" (R. Saldívar 385–86). Paredes's sympathetic view of Tojo is then further underscored by what Saldívar calls "Hideki Tojo's iconic gravitas and dignity being played out under the bright lights of history's judgment" (389). Together with his positive assessments of Japan's poetic politeness and the Ginza in all of its ramifications, Paredes's devotion to postwar Japan is borne out even more by his seeming admiration of Tojo.
Paredes also traveled and worked in China from 1946–48, but any such extended empathy for the Chinese is less than evident. Indeed, one is struck by how little he has to say to Saldívar in comparison to his commentary on Japan. In China, he takes note of the extreme poverty, poor health, and alienation of most of the population in comparison to Japan: "faces horribly disfigured by smallpox," while other faces "were hard even in repose, and they all seemed to hate the foreign barbarian" (R. Saldívar 100–101). Hong Kong is said to be "really rough" (101). "Housing was awful in Shanghai" where "as winter set in, things got worse. More unrest, more stealing" (102–03). Unlike his extended admiration for Japan's cultural poetics, of China Paredes speaks only of seeing a play with "weird, wailing songs" and of a street vendor's "queer musical cries," although the actors in the play do have "gorgeous costumes" and the street vendor's cries remind him of "those heavy oriental songs of the gypsies of Southern Spain" (102).
As with Japan, however, Paredes speaks of women, but only in a brief (but revealing) comment:
It was really romantic to go with a Chinese woman, following her down the street with all those Chinese men staring at me with hate in their eyes and finally going into this place where she lived and not knowing whether the papers would say the next day that a Red Cross man had been found in an alley with his throat cut. The Chinese seemed to lose no sleep loving their brothers from across the sea. (R. Saldívar 100–101)In all, Paredes says, "In China, I was homesick for Tokyo and everything that went with it" (102).
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6. The Problem of "Asia" |
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I am struck by the relative brevity and distanced character of Paredes's commentary on China in comparison to Japan, but also by his and Saldívar's asymmetrical attention to the question of society and politics in China as compared to Japan, although both seem to argue otherwise. In Paredes's case, such effort is most vividly expressed in one of his poems, "Pro Patria," where Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, and even poor whites in the US ("even if their eyes are blue") are said to be his "fatherland," "my people," presumably over against another form of dominating patria, the Western imperialist powers, especially the US (Between Two Worlds 84). Indeed, Saldívar proposes that Paredes's "fatherland" expresses "the kinship of affiliation with other races and ethnic groups that already existed in Paredes' experience of the transnational borderlands of Greater Mexico," but Saldívar then focuses this sense of kinship to one. That one "accelerates to fruition in Japan under the consciousness created by a sense of shared oppression and injustice, as mutual recipients of race prejudice, and of having experienced the catastrophe of imperial conquest (341, my emphasis).
Later Saldívar again will attempt to expand beyond this Japanese regional frame of reference: "With reference to China, Korea and Japan, [Paredes] came to understand the possibility of a shared Asian culture, bonded by differences and similarities" (392). Women, always much on Paredes's mind, are also thus subsumed by Saldívar: "From Tokyo and from China, moreover, we get disconcerting insight to the place of the Asian woman's body as a site on which new subjective identities and social imaginaries were being negotiated, possessed and occupied" (393). Thus, to judge from the word "new," it would seem that it is the new American presence that, in disconcerting fashion, is negotiating, possessing, and occupying a now homogeneous female "Asian" body in a "shared" Asian (female) culture. However, the historical facts undercut this particular gendered transnationalism.
The faces of the Chinese were "hard" as they eked out an existence in 1946–48 amid the total social disruption resulting from a major socio-political event that gets precious little focused comment either from Paredes or Saldívar. Indeed, it is often ignored in conventional accounts of the war against Japan, which tend to focus heavily on the war in the Pacific. I refer to the total war, the hyperaggression, that Japan initiated against China beginning with an initial and erratic phase from 1932 to 1937 but massively accelerating and focusing on China's total destruction from 1937 to 1945, lasting four years longer than the war with the US. No other moment in this war better exemplifies a pattern of state- and culturally-sanctioned focused, programmatic, and extended Japanese atrocities than the events known as "the rape of Nanking," which had horrific consequences for Chinese women. Salidvar cites one book, Sheathing the Sword: The Demilitarization of Japan (1987) by coauthors Meirion Harries and Susie Harries, authorities on Japan. In another book, Soldiers of the Sun: The Rise and Fall of the Imperial Japanese Army (1991), Harries and Harries are also authoritative on this appalling subject, as is the stunning work of journalist Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (1997).
On 10 December 1937, with Peking already in their hands, the Japanese military in China, known as the Kwantung Army, launched a major attack on the new Chinese capital of Nanking. After defeating the Chinese Army with many casualties on both sides, the real horror began to unfold as the Japanese entered Nanking: "There was order of a brutal kind when they first arrived. The official priorities were to secure the city, to find food, fuel and shelter from the cold, to destroy the industrial and commercial sectors of Nanking, and to kill any Chinese soldiers remaining in the city" (Harries and Harries, Soldiers 223). The "Chinese soldiers" killed soon also included prisoners, and soon thereafter many members of the population as a whole, such that "the total number of [Chinese] corpses amounted to a staggering 377,400—a figure that surpasses the death toll for the atomic blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined," all over a period of several weeks (Chang 101). According to Harries and Harries, this "official Rape [as metaphor] continued unabated but soon ... moved from center stage to become the backdrop to a worse horror as gangs of [Japanese] soldiers drunk and out of control began roaming the streets ... the first [real] rapes were reported on the sixteenth. During the previous night an estimated thousand women had been raped." An official German representative (in 1937, presumably a Nazi) "estimated that twenty thousand women had been raped in the first two weeks" (Soldiers 224). "But," Harries and Harries continue, "the bare statistics, grotesque though they are, convey little of the terror that must have possessed women trapped with nowhere to hide within Nanking's walls. The norm was gang rape" (225). In excruciating detail that even the word "horrific" fails to capture, Iris Chang tells us, not only of the rapes as such, but of the varied manner of the raping and often accompanying killing that the Japanese practiced upon these women (6, 89–99). In time, there were other kinds of casualties:
[N]ot a single Chinese woman has to this day come forward to admit that her child was the result of rape. Many such children were secretly killed. ... One can only guess at the guilt, shame and self-loathing that Chinese women endured when they faced the choice of raising a child ... a German diplomat reported that "uncounted" Chinese women were taking their own lives by flinging themselves into the Yangtze River. (Chang 89–90)And lest we think such raping is an aberration of war, Harries and Harries remind us of the culture at that time: "these young [Japanese] men came from a cultural background in which women were considered lesser beings, their thoughts and feelings totally disregarded, their rights not even conceived of" (Soldiers 230). They also warn us that "too close a focus on the Rape of Nanking obscures the fact that it was only one tidemark left by a sea of atrocities inflicted by the Imperial Army on the Chinese," an "army guilty of both controlled and indiscriminate war crimes all over China" (227).10
I submit that historical particularities such as this put China at utter cross-purposes with Japan and thwart any efforts to subsume both under some common "Asia," unless it be that of imperialist nation versus the grossly exploited, especially in respect to the latter's women. With these Chinese women, we are at some considerable distance from the land of the poetically sensual geishas and the erotic Ginza. As Paredes accompanied a Chinese woman to her home, he noticed "those Chinese men staring at me with hate in their eyes" and wondered "whether the papers would say the next day that a Red Cross man had been found in an alley with his throat cut." We can only wonder if they might have been remembering Nanking.11 In contrast to his feelings about China, Américo Paredes was obviously enchanted with Japan and its code of politeness. Iris Chang also speaks of Japanese politeness, asking how one can "reconcile the barbarism of Nanking with the exquisite politeness and good manners for which the Japanese are renowned." With greater Freudian psychological insight than Paredes, she also suggests "that these two seemingly separate behaviors are in reality entwined"(54).
Moreover, John Dower, the eminent historian of the war with Japan and its aftermath, also reminds us that Hideki Tojo, he of the "iconic gravitas and dignity," had come "out of the Kwantung Army" and "played a major role in prosecuting the war in Asia" (Embracing 510). Indeed, Tojo was the Kwantung Army's Chief of Staff in 1937 and in that capacity, as the Chinese war unfolded, he argued for a "blow first of all upon the Nanking regime to get rid of the menace at our back" (Harries and Harries, Soldiers 207). The blow was, indeed, given, and it defies even the most sympathetic imagination to believe that the Kwantung Army's Chief of Staff would not have been aware of the rape of Nanking as it unfolded over a period of several weeks. No orders were ever issued to stop it. The American military authorities who put Tojo on trial focused on atrocities committed principally upon American troops and took great pains to overlook China, in large part because China was on the verge of becoming a communist power, while Japan had been enlisted as a US ally in the developing Cold War (Dower, Embracing 504–13). A few months before Pearl Harbor, Tojo was appointed Prime Minister of Japan, and in that capacity he was in command of all Japanese forces almost to the end of the war in 1945. As Prime Minister, he might or might not have shared some responsibility for the atrocities committed against Americans—the record is unclear—but the Chinese experience is very different, and perhaps that should have been the focus of the international tribunal that tried him. In respect to China, it is difficult to see the simple-minded moralism that Paredes suggests, namely that Tojo "was being accused of ‘war crimes’ that had in fact been committed by both sides."12
Within the practice of critical regionalism, what has gone awry here is the linking of two very different socio-cultural and political experiences—Japan and the lower border—and the elision of another—China—with much greater relevance to the lower border, although the latter never experienced a Nanking. In many other respects, Saldívar has produced a magnificent book on a remarkable career, but the effort to produce this nexus between South Texas Mexicans and an imperial Japan that has yet to own up to its war record seems to me to be seriously skewed. If anything, and given their quick rapproachment after the war, the white, capitalist, dominant US may be far more directly comparable to Japan as fellow imperialist powers relative to subaltern Chinese and Mexicans.13
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The globalization of American literary studies is a welcome turn, although such readings need to be made with great care, remaining closely attentive to text and local context while linking these firmly into the global. To this latter end I have taken some account of the practice of critical regionalism as one possible alternative guide for such efforts. I have no doubt that there are some, indeed possibly many, such projects that have done so very successfully. Here I have examined two which speak to the cultural tradition that I know best and have found them wanting in these respects, although there is much about both that is admirable even when I may not always agree. I began with Robert Livingston, who offers a closing critical assessment of globalization relative to what he endorses as "agency" and "place" that seems remarkably consistent with much of what I have argued here in my critique and on behalf of critical regionalism. "To grasp the scenarios of globalization," he says, "requires resisting the impulse to set global and local into immediate opposition. Their intertwining may be made more helpfully understood [through the figure of the glocal which] has the advantage not only of making visible the mutual articulation of our two spatial coordinates but also of insisting, neologically, on the need for a more careful rereading of the means of articulation" (147).
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TOPNotes1. Literary Globalization2. Nuestra America?3. Critical Regionalism4. The Transnational Imaginary5. Asian Americo6. The Problem of...7. The Globalization of...Works Cited |
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José E. Limón is the Mody C. Boatright Regents Professor of American and English Literature at the University of Texas at Austin, as well as Professor of Anthropology and American Studies.
1 Michael Kammen has questioned the easy dismissal of an American exceptionalism by turning to empirical social scientific studies in "The Problem of American Exceptionalism: A Reconsideration," American Quarterly 45.1 (1993): 1–43. 
2 See Manuel Peña, The Texas-Mexican Conjunto: History of a Working Class Music (1985).
3 Here there is also a possible entry point for a queering of Paredes's work, as Sandra Soto argues in "Reading Like a Queer: Chicana/o Culture, Racialized Sexuality, and the De-Mastery of Desire", (unpublished book ms., 2007).
4 There may be more gain than loss in GWG if we fully consider the character of Gualinto's uncle, Feliciano, as José Saldívar does not at all. Elsewhere, I have spoken of Feliciano as a figure of "radical hope," in the words of philosopher Jonathan Lear.
5 We must note Karen Halttunen's recent call for a critical and flexible return to "place" in American studies in general in "Groundwork: American Studies in Place: Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 4, 2005," American Quarterly 58.1 (2006): 1–15.
6 See Cheryl Temple Herr's Critical Regionalism and Cultural Studies: From Ireland to the American Midwest (1996); and Douglas Reichert Powell's Critical Regionalism: Connecting Politics and Culture in the American Landscape (2007).
7 Or as my colleague, Gretchen Murphy, puts it in a personal communication, perhaps we are seeing a failure to think internationally rather than just transnationally, with a correlated lack of attention to the persistence of state national power.
8 Although Paredes and Saldívar don't say so, these difficulties were severely compounded by the relatively sudden and unanticipated end to the war following Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which preempted the anticipated prolonged continuation of the war culminating in an American invasion with tremendous casualties for both sides.
9 Along with war crimes, principally permitting the maltreatment of prisoners, Tojo, along with other Japanese leaders, was also charged with waging aggressive war (Dower, Embracing 456).
10 As to Japanese culture, Harries and Harries also offer the following: "there were far too many atrocities all to be the product of madness. More influential was a lack of moral sense, in Western eyes. Japanese war criminals rarely expressed guilt ... the Japanese soldier admitted no higher authority than the Emperor, represented in practical terms by his superior officers. ... In part this was military conditioning, but it was paralleled in civilian society by a similar lack of a transcendent moral authority comparable to God in the Judeo-Christian system—to guide the individuals' actions, to which he could appeal, by which he could be judged. There were no absolute moral values ... the lack of an overriding moral authority meant that there was little resistance to orders to commit atrocities" (Soldiers 478).
11 It is difficult though not impossible to imagine that Paredes, a newspaper reporter in the late 1930s, would not have know about Nanking and other Japanese atrocities in China, as they were covered and widely reported in the US in newsreels (Chang 143–57). This coverage contributed greatly to racist anti-Japanese sentiment going into the war in 1941 (Dower, War 28–32).
12 The atrocities committed against American troops do bear mentioning here, if only because the most infamous of these involved another Asian people, the Filipinos, in direct proximity to another part of the US-Mexico borderlands (not Southern Texas). I refer to the fate of the American and Filipino prisoners—military and civilian—taken by the Japanese after their invasion of the Philippines in 1941 and the fall of Corregidor and the Bataan Peninsula. The Allied troops had fought off superior Japanese forces from 8 December 1941 to 6 May 1942 with no support from the mainland US, which was then too busy recovering from Pearl Harbor and concerned about potential Japanese attacks on the California coast. After their surrender and in very poor condition, these prisoners were force-marched some 65 miles to a prison camp, Camp O'Donnell, on what has now come to be known as the Bataan Death March. According to Harries and Harries, "at several points along the way there were bloody motiveless massacres. Almost 11,000 American and Filipino prisoners died on the road ... thousands more died after reaching Camp O'Donnell, where the captives were forced to exist in indescribable squalor" (Soldiers 316). Among the American prisoners—and also among the dead in the battle—names such as Barela, Chavez, Garcia, Gonzalez, Gomez, Madrid, Montoya, and Rodriguez abounded. They were members of two New Mexico National Guard units—the 200th and the 515th—which had been posted in the Philippines in part because so many of them spoke Spanish. The 200th and the 515th were the first units to engage the Japanese in ground combat and the last to surrender alongside their Filipino brothers and sisters (http://www.neta.com/%7E1stbooks/bataan1.htm). This is a "transnational" relationship which oddly receives no mention either by Paredes or Ramón Saldívar. Finally, in the always-grim record of random and unsystemic atrocities carried out by Americans and the Allies against the Japanese, there is nothing even remotely comparable to Bataan, and certainly not to Nanking and the Japanese record in China (Dower, War 33–73). Ramón Saldívar quotes Paredes's ironic comment from With His Pistol in His Hand concerning the Japanese war crimes trials:
Had Santa Anna lived in the twentieth century, he would have called the atrocities with which he is charged [by contemporary American historians] ‘war crimes trials.’ There is a fundamental difference, though, between his execution of Texan prisoners and the hangings of Japanese army officers like General Yamashita at the end of the Pacific War. Santa Anna was usually in a rage when he ordered his victims shot. The Japanese were never hanged without the ceremony of a trial—a refinement, one must conclude, belonging to a more civilized age and a more enlightened people." (Paredes 18–19)However, Ramón Saldívar misreads this quote, saying that Paredes offers "an ironic parallel between the executions of Anglo-Texan prisoners by the Mexican army under Santa Anna in Texas in 1836 and those of American prisoners by the Japanese army in the Pacific at the end of the war" (391). A careful reading of the quote shows that Paredes is drawing no such parallel. Rather, Paredes is comparing the execution of Anglo-Texans to that of Japanese war criminals. As my example above shows, most American prisoners (but also other Allies) were executed early and throughout the war.
13 In a perceptive essay on the novelist Winnifred Eaton, Gretchen Murphy reminds us of the way in which US influentials, both political and scientific, made a case for the Japanese as a white race "at the beginning of the twentieth century," when "both Americans and Japanese represented Japan to US audiences as uniquely allied with the United States' new overseas mission to spread commerce, freedom and enlightenment in Asia" (36). In his fine forthcoming book, John Moran Gonzalez tells us that in the mid-1930s the state of Texas issued a "style guide" to be used by those preparing publications, advertisements, and festivities for the celebration of the Texas Centennial in 1936. In a largely failed effort to control anti-Mexican imagery and writing referencing the conflicts leading up to Texas Independence in 1836, the guide for 1936 reminded its readers that "from Mexico's point of view ... the Texas Revolution of 1836 and the US-Mexico War of 1846 appear akin to the creation of the puppet state of Manchuria and the Japanese invasion of North China" (69). Thus, even Anglo-Texans were able to sense their kinship to the Japanese at that historical moment, which analogically can only mean that the Mexicans are "Chinese."
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Chang Iris. The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (1997) New York: Basic Books.
Deleuze Gilles, Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Massumi. Brian. (1987) Minneapolis: U of Minneapolis P.
Dower John W. Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. (1999) New York: W.W. Norton.
Dower John W. War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (1986) New York: Random House.
Fishkin Shelly Fisher. Crossroads of Culture: The Transnational Turn in American Studies—Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 12, 2004. American Quarterly (2005) 57.1:17–57.
Gonzalez John Moran. Renaissance in the Borderlands: The Texas Centennial and the Emergence of Mexican-American Literature. (2009) Austin: U of Texas P. (forthcoming).
Harries Meirion, Susie Harries. Sheathing the Sword: The Demilitarization of Japan. (1987) London: Hamilton Publishers.
Harries Meirion. Soldiers of the Sun: The Rise and Fall of the Imperial Japanese Army (1991) New York: Random House.
Herr Cheryl Temple. Critical Regionalism and Cultural Studies: From Ireland to the American Midwest (1996) Gainesville: U of Florida P.
Hsu Hsuan L. Literature and Regional Production. American Literary History (2005) 17.1:36–69.
Ickstadt Heinz. American Studies in an Age of Globalization. American Quarterly (2002) 54.2:543–62.
Karem Jeff. On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Postcolonial Theory for Pan-American Study. The New Centennial Review (2001) 1.3:87–116.
Levander Caroline F., Robert S. Levine. Hemispheric American Literary History. Special issue of American Literary History (2006) 18.3.
Limón José E. Dancing with the Devil: Society and Cultural Poetics in Mexican-American South Texas (1994) Madison: U of Wisconsin P.
Limón José E. Radical Hope: Américo Paredes's George Washington Gomez and the ‘Mexican Question’ in the United States. Unpublished ms.
Livingston Robert Eric. Glocal Knowledges: Agency and Place in Literary Studies. PMLA (2001) 116.1:145–57.
Moya Paula, Ramón Saldívar. Fictions of the Trans-American Imaginary. Special issue of Modern Fiction Studies (2003) 49.1:1–180.
Murphy Gretchen. How the Irish Became Japanese: Winfred Eaton's Racial Reconstructions in a Transnational Context. American Literature (2007) 79.1:29–56.
Paredes Américo. Between Two Worlds (1991) Houston: Arte Publico.
Paredes Américo. George Washington Gomez: A Mexico-Texan Novel (1990) Houston: Arte Publico.
Paredes Américo. "With His Pistol in His Hand": A Border Ballad and its Hero (1958) Austin: U of Texas P.
Peña Manuel. The Texas-Mexican Conjunto: History of a Working Class Music (1985) Austin: U of Texas P.
Pérez Héctor. Voicing Resistance on the Border: A Reading of Américo Paredes. George Washington Gomez." MELUS (1998) 23.1:27–48.
Porter Carolyn. What We Know That We Don't Know: Remapping American Literary Studies. American Literary History (1994) 6.3:467–526.
Powell Douglas Reichert. Critical Regionalism: Connecting Politics and Culture in the American Landscape (2007) Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P.
Saldívar José. Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies. (1997) Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P.
Saldívar José. The Dialectics of our America: Genealogy, Cultural Critique and Literary History (1991) Durham: Duke UP.
Saldívar Ramón. The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary (2007) Durham: Duke UP.
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