The New North American Studies

Culture, Writing and the Politics of Re/Cognition

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by Winfried Siemerling

Routledge

Due/Published March 2005, 224 pages, paper

ISBN 0415335981

In this study, Winfried Siemerling examines the complexities of recognition and identity, rejecting previous nationalized thinking to approach North American cultural transformations from transnational and interdisciplinary perspectives.

Using material from the United States and Canada as case studies and drawing on a wide range of texts and theorists, he examines postcoloniality and cultural emergence from the sixties to the present against earlier backgrounds. Siemerling's argument for a retheorization of the field takes on the full history of multiculturalism debates, including radical readings of W.E.B. Du Bois and Charles Taylor and their relation to G.W.F. Hegel, and challenging many of the models of multiculturalism in use today.

Tackling controversial subjects such as identity politics, The New North American Studies proposes a fresh outlook on the most central issues of North American cultural politics, from debates on canon formation to the role of racial and linguistic difference. Concluding with a look at the future of cultural difference, Winfried Siemerling's study is an innovative rethinking of the whole field of North American Studies.

Contents

1) Introduction

i). New World Returns
ii). <"Who Cuts the Border?>": National Approaches, Comparative Literature, Postcolonial Studies
iii). Cultural Difference and National Canons
iv). Orality, Emergence, Futures


2) Comparative North American Literary History, Alterity, and a Hermeneutics of Non-Transcendence

i). The <"Newness>" of the New World
ii). From conscience excluante to the Anxieties of Comparison
iii). Sacvan Bercovitch and the Inclusions of Dissent
iv). E.D. Blodgett: Dialogues of Reorigination and Negotiation
v). Pierre Nepveu and the (Re)reading of National Culture


3) W.E.B. Du Bois, Hegel, and the Staging of Alterity

i). Du Bois and Hegelian Teleology
ii). <"Assimilation>" and Recognition
iii). Relation and Non-Transparency


4). Double Consciousness, African American Tradition, and the Vernacular: Henry Louis Gates and Houston Baker

i). Doubled Doubles: The Sentence of Tradition and Double Consciousness in Henry Louis Gates
ii). Democratic Blues: Houston Baker and the Representation of Culture


5) Native Writing, Orality, and Anti-Imperial Translation: Thomas King and Gerald Vizenor

1. Anti-Imperial Translation
2. Thomas King, Coyote, and Columbus: <"Two Different Dimensions of Time or Consciousness>"
3. Gerald Vizenor: The Postindian and The Heirs of Columbus


6) Genealogies of Difference

i). Multiculturalisms, Transculturalism, Difference in North (of) America
ii). From Narratives of Emergence to Transculture: Parti pris and Vice Versa
iii). Charles Taylor, Desire, and the Limits of Self-Certainty
iv). Cultural Difference: The Future of an Illusion?


7) NOTES


8) Works Cited