European journal of American studies

9-3 | 2014 Special Issue: Transnational Approaches to North American Regionalism

Electronic version URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/10368 DOI: 10.4000/ejas.10368 ISSN: 1991-9336

Publisher European Association for American Studies

Electronic reference European journal of American studies, 9-3 | 2014, “Special Issue: Transnational Approaches to North American Regionalism” [Online], Online since 23 December 2014, connection on 08 July 2021. URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/10368; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.10368

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: Transnational Approaches to North American Regionalism Florian Freitag and Kirsten A. Sandrock

I. Border Regionalism

Creating a Coyote Cartography: Critical Regionalism at the Border Caleb Bailey

Resisting the Inevitable: Tar Sands, Regionalism and Rhetoric Steven M. Hoffman, Paul Lorah and Joseph Janochoski

Elastic, Yet Unyielding: The U.S.-Mexico Border and Anzaldúa’s Oppositional Rearticulations of the Frontier Tereza Jiroutová Kynčlová

II. Media and the Region

“Somewhere in California”: New Regional Spaces of Mobility in Contemporary Vancouver Cinema Katherine A. Roberts

“You Must Become Dreamy”: Complicating Japanese-American Pictorialism and the Early Twentieth-Century Regional West Rachel Sailor

III. Regions of Identity

Down the River, Out to Sea: Mobility, Immobility, and Creole Identity in New Orleans Regionalist Fiction (1880-1910) Amy Doherty Mohr

Migrating Literature: Zachary Richard’s Cajun Tales Mathilde Köstler

Constructing a New Regionality: Daphne Marlatt and Writing the West Coast Michelle Hartley

On Common Ground: Translocal Attachments and Transethnic Affiliations in Agha Shahid Ali’s and Arthur Sze’s Poetry of the American Southwest Judith Rauscher

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Introduction: Transnational Approaches to North American Regionalism

Florian Freitag and Kirsten A. Sandrock

1 In the past ten to fifteen years, critical understandings of regions and, concomitantly, regionalist approaches to literature and culture have undergone considerable changes. Studies such as Laurie Ricou’s The Arbutus/Madrone Files (2002) or Claudia Sadowski-Smith’s Border Fictions (2008), for instance, have focused on spaces and cultures that cross and crystallize around North American national borders, thereby questioning traditional, which is to say national, delineations of region. Even earlier, writers such as Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) redrew the boundaries of established concepts of region and nation, thus showing that what used to be seen as the fringes of North American literary and cultural studies could become the new center. In other areas, too, regional boundaries have come under critical scrutiny: for example, recent scholarship on both the U.S.-American West and the U.S.- American South has tended to highlight the complexity, fluidity, and mobility of these spaces. In the preface to a special issue of American Literature on “Violence, the Body and ‘The South’” (2001), Houston A. Baker Jr. and Dana D. Nelson coin the term “new Southern studies” (231) and call for a “complication of old borders and terrains [as well as] wishes to construct and survey a new scholarly map of ‘The South’” (243). Numerous critics, including Martyn Bone, James L. Peacock, Scott Romine, and Michael Kreyling, have since taken up Baker’s and Nelson’s challenge, generally interrogating and deterritorializing the idea or myth of the U.S. South. As for the West, Susan Kollin, in Postwestern Cultures (2007), invites critics to work “against a narrowly conceived regionalism, one that restricts western cultures of the past and present to some predetermined entity with static borders and

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boundaries” (xi). Instead, she calls for “Postwestern studies,” which “involve a critical reassessment of those [theoretical, geographical, or political] restrictions” (xi), with scholars such as Neil Campbell (Cultures, Rhizomatic West, Post-Westerns) or Krista Comer (“Exceptionalism,” “Introduction”) readily joining the debate.

2 Border(land) studies, New Southern studies, and Postwestern studies exemplify the shifting scholarly landscape in the field of regionalism towards more border-crossing, processual, pluralistic, and rhizomatic concepts of regions.i They illustrate the newly emerging consciousness that neither borders nor literary and cultural regions are static and that the relations between them are complex. Indeed, borders and regions are recognized as being porous, changing constantly in the face of cultural mobility, and redrawing the cultural maps of North America on both a national and a transnational level.

3 This special issue of the European Journal of American Studies seeks to contribute to this development and to apply new theoretical approaches to regions as fluid imaginaries rather than static localities to various North American regions. The articles do so by considering regional writing and cultural productions in the light of transnational, hemispheric, and generally border-crossing contexts. As Krista Comer argues, it is now possible, thanks to a new diversity of theories and methodologies, to “figure regions and regionalism in far more comparative and multilingual ways” (“Taking Feminism” 117) than has traditionally been done. Similarly, Douglas Powell defines what he calls “critical regionalism” as an approach that, instead of focusing on how particular places are constructed through texts, asks what resources texts make available to understand and “recognize the dense networks of spatial relationships that intersect at any site on the landscape” (122). Already in 1996, Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake noted that the local need not embody a regressive politics of global delinkage, bounded particularity, and claims of ontological pastness, where locality becomes some backward-gazing fetish of purity to disguise how global, hybrid, compromised, and unprotected everyday identity already is. (5)

4 Transnational Approaches to North American Regionalism seeks to contribute to the exploration of how the global and the hybrid intersect with the local. We believe this is a more fruitful ground for examining North American literatures and cultures than ever.

1. Regionalism in North American Studies

5 Two main observations guide our conception of this special issue. First, we perceive that previous regionalist studies of North American literature and culture were predominantly concerned with aspects of national power. This is true for the political and economic debates about the permeability of the Mexican-U.S. border and the traditional blending of nationalist and regionalist discourses, for instance in Quebec, but first and foremost for the perceived dominance of

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nationalist discourses in the United States in contrast to (English) Canada’s presumed preference for regionalist discourses. In both the United States and Canada, the region has frequently been understood as a counterpart to the nation. To anybody familiar with Canadian literature, Northrop Frye’s famous distinction between the region and the nation will come to mind immediately. In his preface to Bush Garden (1971), Frye states that identity is “local and regional, rooted in the imagination and in works of culture” whereas unity is “national in reference…and rooted in a political feeling” (413). In Canada, then, the idea of the region has long been associated with identity and, more specifically, with literary and cultural identity. Scholars such as Herb Wyile (see Merrett), Gerald Friesen, and Lothar Hönnighausen (“Defining Regionalism”) have used this alleged Canadian preference for regionalism to establish a contrast between the United States and Canada. Hönnighausen, for instance, notes that North American Studies have the obvious advantage of entailing comparisons between the much more homogenized United States and the more regionalized Canada. The political culture of the United States, despite phases of sectionalism… has always been kept together by a strong homogenizing patriotic myth.…In contrast, Canadians seem to experience their nationhood with diffidence and a shy sense of humor, the political reason for this being…the formidable impact of the regions vis-à-vis the much debated authority of Ottawa. (“Defining Regionalism” 173)

6 Statements such as this one draw a line between a supposedly more regionalist Canada and a supposedly more nationalized United States that is not only too static but that also risks perpetuating “the neglect of regionalism as a continuous tradition in American literary history” that Hönnighausen himself has lamented (“Defining Regionalism” 162). Yet regionalism cannot be confined to a given national space. If previous regionalist studies have tended to reduce North American regionalism not only to a binary nation-region dichotomy but also to a binary U.S.- Canada dichotomy, then what is necessary today is a comparative perspective that offers an opportunity to consider regions, regional writing, and regionalism in contexts that transcend the nation or, rather, the national construct. In other words, what is necessary is a transnational perspective on North American regionalism, one that goes beyond the nation-region binary and allows us to take into consideration a variety of factors, both real and imaginary, in the construction of regions. Therefore, we would like to redress the reductionist view of North American regionalism as a counter to national power in favor of more heterogeneous and, we believe, more productive approaches to the nation-region relationship in North American literature and culture. Reminiscent of Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of the “mestiza consciousness” (see Anzaldúa), the articles gathered here illustrate how regionalist cultural and literary studies can be conceived of as empowering, pluralist discourses rather than as reductionist, dualist hegemonies.

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7 Secondly, we believe that border-crossing theoretical approaches to North American regionalism can help transcend the region-nation paradigm. These approaches include gender studies, Native Studies, borderland studies, ecocriticism/bioregionalism, and other methodological frameworks that facilitate the broadening of the scope of regionalist studies and the inclusion of previously marginalized voices. There have been a number of recent attempts to construct literary and cultural cross-border regions, not only but particularly in North America. Apart from Ricou’s Pacific Northwest (see Ricou), one of the most prominent regions explored from this perspective is the Prairie/Plains region (see Thacker, Prairie Fact and “Erasing”), and also the border-crossing regions of North American writing that emerged in the context of the “local-color” movement (see Doyle; Gerson; Mount; and Lynch) and Chicano/Chicana literature (see Anzaldúa; Martín- Junquera; Hamilton; and Hernández). In addition, gender and ethnicity studies, ecocriticism, comparative perspectives, and media studies have had an impact on the development of regionalisms. These methodologies point the way towards significant re-examinations of both regional writing and the critical category of the region in North America. With this special issue, we seek to contribute to this development and to develop new ways of thinking about regionalism and regional writing in Canada, Mexico, and the United States. Before we approach the essays of this issue, however, it is worth asking a key question: what exactly is a region?

2. Changing Concepts of Region

8 The concept of region has significantly changed over the years. Today, a variety of approaches to regionalism co-exist, but there is no single model or concept that critics agree upon. Traditionally, regions have been understood as geographical spaces that are characterized by a certain climate or by distinct topographical features. This approach towards regionalism, known as “formal regionalism,” borrows its tools from the field of geography, and it is probably the way in which the term “region” is still understood by a majority of people today. Examples for this model of regionalism would be the Prairies or the Great Lakes region, but also the Rocky Mountains or the Pacific Rim, all of which are unified by some topographical feature(s). Despite its seeming obviousness, however, formal regionalism has been criticized because it largely leaves the human factor out of consideration. This is even true for formal approaches to literary regions, which have commonly seen landscape or topography as the defining feature of a given literary tradition. In The Great Prairie Fact and Literary Imagination (1989) Robert Thacker, for example, seeks to read prairie writing as being primarily characterized by “the landscape’s effect on the human imagination” (53). “‘The great fact,’” Thacker notes, “has always been and is still ‘the land itself’” (9). Needless to say, such an

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approach reduces not only the region to its geographical features; it also reduces literature to a register of place.

9 As an alternative, scholars have proposed the so-called “structural” or “functional” approach to regionalism, where people and institutions play the most important role in identifying and researching individual regions. This means, for instance, that demographic factors—e.g. urban vs. rural regions—or political practices are taken into account when studying regions. Anyone familiar with U.S.-American politics will know that certain states have distinct voting habits, and that entire parts of the country can be clustered by their political alliances. Yet, while this formal approach to regionalism has the advantage of concentrating on humans instead of geographies, there is a danger of generalizing about the inhabitants of a location and, in so doing, devaluating their diversity. The example of voting habits serves as a good example: only because a majority of Californians traditionally votes for the Democratic Party, this does not mean that there are no Republicans living in the state. Thus, to group California as a Democratic state means to oversimplify its political structure and, hence, its internal diversity.

10 In order to remedy this oversimplification inherent in functional approaches to regionalism, there is a third perspective that is frequently taken to investigate the region in North America, and that is the one of “cultural” or “imaginary” regionalism. Here, the focus is also on the people, but not so much on their functional, i.e. operational behavior, but rather on their cultural and imaginary works and actions. Part of this approach is to look at the literature and culture of the people and to try to make out how creative productions have helped shape a region. The important point about this approach is that it assumes a reciprocal interaction between the cultural works and the region. Thus, if the images of Emily Carr are said to have been constructed upon the region of the Pacific Northwest and the people living there, then it could be equally said that the images have, in turn, helped construct the region and its people by means of their cultural impact on an international audience.

11 Yet, while this approach allows for diversity and difference, the question is in how far the recognition of a myriad of cultural productions allows for the identification of regions as critical concepts at all. Indeed, this is the question that has been frequently asked ever since the rise of postmodern and poststructuralist theories in the second half of the twentieth century. Is it still possible to conceptualize regions at a time when all unity or, indeed, identity is questioned for its alleged essentialism? Following this line of thought, one would have to reconsider the idea of regions and regionalist studies as a whole, just as one would have to reconsider any (theoretical) approach that seeks to find commonalities or points of comparison in literary and cultural studies in order to understand larger relations between people and places.

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12 This is precisely where, we think, transnational perspectives come into play. Transnational regionalism reads, and re-reads, regional texts from new perspectives while also adding new, previously marginalized texts to the debate. Thus, it enriches and diversifies the imaginary reservoir of a given region, destabilizing and deterritorializing received myths about and unified concepts of North American regions without necessarily doing away with the concept of region as such. Considering recent developments in the field of regionalist studies and North American studies, we are convinced that transnational regionalism constitutes a useful tool in the study of North American literature and culture in the post-postmodern era.

13 Transnational regionalism allows us to explore a variety of literary influences and cultural factors, including those mentioned above— physical, human, cultural, and imaginary—without having to reduce a region to a single one of these factors or, indeed, to view it as a fixed concept in the first place. For this reason, this special issue offers a variety of transnational and border-crossing perspectives on North American regionalism and embraces different theoretical approaches, all of which contribute to the study of regions without trying to reduce them to a single essence. In fact, it might be more appropriate to speak about North American regionalisms rather than regionalism because this special issue features a multiplicity of methodologies and a diversity of regionalist concepts that enrich rather than replace each other.

3. Transnational Perspectives on North American Regionalism

14 The articles gathered here investigate regionalist borderlands by offering both case studies and theoretical examinations of transnational approaches to North America regionalism. The special issue opens with Caleb Bailey’s essay “Creating a Coyote Cartography: Critical Regionalism at the Border.” In this article, Bailey examines depictions of Coyote (the trickster) and coyote (the people smuggler) in the work of Thomas King and Charles Bowden in order to open up a theoretical and cultural dialogue between the Mexican-U.S. and the Canadian-U.S. borders. Two more contributions focus on borderlands: Steven M. Hoffman’s, Paul Lorah’s, and Joseph Janochoski’s “Resisting the Inevitable: Tar Sands, Regionalism and Rhetoric” as well as Tereza Jiroutová Kynčlová’s “Elastic, Yet Unyielding: The U.S.-Mexico Border and Anzaldúa’s Oppositional Rearticulations of the Frontier.” In the former, the authors analyze the dynamics, spatial distribution, and rhetorical frames used by a variety of networks whose opposition to the extraction and production of tar sands oil has necessitated developing across the 49th parallel. The latter essay contrasts Gloria Anzaldúa’s rearticulation of the U.S.-Mexican border with established U.S. national

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myths of westward expansion and includes postcolonial and feminist readings of Anzaldúa’s poem “We Call Them Greasers.”

15 The second group of articles consists of two case studies that explore the transnational complexity of regionalism in cinema and photography. The first article provides an elegant transition from the first group since it also raises the issue of cross-border regions: in “‘Somewhere in California’: New Regional Spaces of Mobility in Contemporary Vancouver Cinema” Katherine A. Roberts examines two recent films by Vancouver auteur filmmaker Carl Bessai to discuss the emergence of what she calls a “regional space of flows” on the West Coast, a dual-city relationship between Los Angeles and Vancouver structured by the entertainment industry. Rachel Sailor’s essay, entitled “‘You Must Become Dreamy’: Complicating Japanese-American Pictorialism and the Early Twentieth-Century Regional West,” in turn, stresses the trans- Pacific aesthetic connections in Western regional photography by focusing on the work of Seattle Camera Club member Kyo Koike, one of many Japanese-American pictorialist photographers in the Pacific Northwest during the first half of the 20th century.

16 New Orleans, Cajun Country in southwest Louisiana, British Columbia, and the American Southwest are the “regions of identity” examined in the remaining four essays of this special issue. Amy Doherty Mohr’s contribution, entitled “Down the River, Out to Sea: Mobility, Immobility, and Creole Identity in New Orleans Regionalist Fiction (1880-1910),” focuses on the geographical, social, and cultural (im)mobility of selected “transnational” characters in the work of George Washington Cable, Kate Chopin, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson. In “Migrating Literature: Zachary Richard’s Cajun Tales,” Mathilde Köstler explores the interrelation of Cajun culture and the transnational space in three francophone tales by Cajun singer/songwriter and author Zachary Richard. Using the poetic work of Daphne Marlatt as an example, Michelle Hartley’s essay “Constructing a New Regionality: Daphne Marlatt and Writing the West Coast” develops “regionality” as a new way of capturing the intersection of geographical regions and writing from those regions by building on the notion of landscape as repository. Also dealing with poetry, the final essay in this special issue, Judith Rauscher’s “On Common Ground: Translocal Attachments and Transethnic Affiliations in Agha Shahid Ali’s and Arthur Sze’s Poetry of the American Southwest,” traces how the works of Ali and Sze imagine an ethics of being in and with nature that reckons with the increasing pressures of both globalization and the global environmental crisis.

17 The editors would like to thank the contributors for their stimulating essays and the peer reviewers for anonymously sharing their expertise. This special issue would not have been possible without the wonderfully reliable guidance of Marek Paryż and Andrew Gross, EJAS’s Senior and Associate Editors for literature, culture, and the arts. Special thanks go to Lisa Schmidt, student assistant at Johannes Gutenberg University

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Mainz, for reliably supporting the editors during the copyediting process.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987. Print.

Baker Jr, Houston A., and Dana D. Nelson. “Preface: Violence, the Body and ‘The South.’” American Literature 73.2 (2001): 231-44. Print.

Bone, Martyn. The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2005. Print.

Campbell, Neil. The Cultures of the American New West. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2000. Print.

—. The Rhizomatic West: Representing the American West in a Transnational, Global, Media Age. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2008. Print.

—. Post-Westerns: Cinema, Region, West. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2013. Print.

Comer, Krista. “Taking Feminism and Regionalism toward the Third Wave.” A Companion to the Regional Literatures of America. Ed. Charles L. Crow. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003. 111-28. Print.

—. “Exceptionalism, Other Wests, Critical Regionalism.” American Literary History 23.1 (2011): 159-73. Print.

—. “Introduction: Assessing the Postwestern.” Western American Literature 48.1/2 (2013): 3-15. Print.

Crow, Charles L., ed. A Companion to the Regional Literatures of America. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003. Print.

Doyle, James. “Research—Problems and Solutions: Canadian Women Writers and the American Literary Milieu of the 1890s.” Re(dis)covering Our Foremothers: Nineteenth-Century Canadian Women Writers. Ed. Lorraine McMullen. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 1990. 30-36. Print.

Freitag, Florian. “Regionalism in American and Canadian Literature.” The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative North American Literature. Ed. Reingard M. Nischik. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 199-218. Print.

Frey, Marc, Lothar Hönnighausen, James Peacock, and Niklaus Steiner, eds. Concepts of Regionalism. Madison: Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures, 2005. Print.

Friesen, Gerald. “The Evolving Meaning of Region in Canada.” Concepts of Regionalism. Ed. Marc Frey, Lothar Hönnighausen, James Peacock, and Niklaus Steiner. Madison: Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures, 2005. 101-17. Print.

Frye, Northrop. “Preface to the Bush Garden.” Northrop Frye on Canada. Ed. Jean O’Grady and David Staines. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2003 [1971]. 412-20. Print.

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Gerson, Carol. “Canadian Women Writers and American Markets, 1880-1940.” Context North America: Canadian/US Literary Relations. Ed. Camille LaBossière. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 1994. 107-18. Print.

Hamilton, Patrick Lawrence. Of Space and Mind: Cognitive Mappings of Contemporary Chicano/a Fiction. Austin: U of Texas P, 2011. Print.

Hernández, Ellie D. Postnationalism in Chicana/o Literature and Culture. Austin: U of Texas P, 2009. Print.

Hönnighausen, Lothar. “Introduction.” Regional Images and Regional Realities. Ed. Lothar Hönnighausen. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2000. 7-13. Print.

—. “Defining Regionalism in North American Studies.” Concepts of Regionalism. Ed. Marc Frey, Lothar Hönnighausen, James Peacock, and Niklaus Steiner. Madison: Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures, 2005. 159-84. Print.

Jordan, David M. New World Regionalism: Literature in the Americas. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1994. Print.

—, ed. Regionalism Reconsidered: New Approaches to the Field. New York: Garland, 1994. Print.

Kollin, Susan. “Introduction: Postwestern Studies, Dead or Alive.” Postwestern Cultures: Literature, Theory, Space. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2007. ix-xix. Print.

Kreyling, Michael. The South Wasn’t There: Postsouthern Memory and History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2010. Print.

Lynch, Gerald. “Short Fiction.” The Cambridge History of Canadian Literature. Ed. Coral Ann Howells and Eva-Marie Kröller. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. 166-84. Print.

Martín-Junquera, Imelda, ed. Landscapes of Writing in Chicano Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Print.

Merrett, Robert James (chair). “What Is Region and Nation? A Forum.” Terranglian Territories: Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on the Literature of Region and Nation. Ed. Susanne Hagemann. Frankfurt: Lang, 2000. 649-65. Print.

Mount, Nicholas J. When Canadian Literature Moved to New York. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2005. Print.

Peacock, James L. Grounded Globalism: How the U.S. South Embraces the World. Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 2007. Print.

Powell, Douglas Reichert. Critical Regionalism: Connecting Politics and Culture in the American Landscape. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2007. Print.

Ricou, Laurie. The Arbutus/Madrone Files: Reading the Pacific Northwest. Corvallis: Oregon State UP, 2002. Print.

Riegel, Christian, and Herb Wyile, eds. A Sense of Place: Re-Evaluating Regionalism in Canadian and American Writing. Edmonton: U of Alberta P, 1998. Print.

Romine, Scott. The Real South: Southern Narrative in the Age of Cultural Reproduction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2008. Print.

Sadowski-Smith, Claudia. Border Fictions: Globalization, Empire, and Writing at the Boundaries of the United States. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2008. Print.

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Sandrock, Kirsten A. Gender and Region: Maritime Fiction in English by Canadian Women, 1976-2005. Augsburg: Wißner, 2009. Print.

—. “Rethinking the Region in Canadian Postcolonial Studies.” Zeitschrift für Kanada-Studien 31.2 (2011): 78-92. Print.

Thacker, Robert. The Great Prairie Fact and Literary Imagination. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1989. Print.

—. “Erasing the Forty-Ninth Parallel: Nationalism, Prairie Criticism, and the Case of Wallace Stegner.” Essays on Canadian Writing 61 (1997): 179-202. Print.

Wilson, Rob, and Wimal Dissanayake. “Introduction: Tracking the Global/Local.” Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary. Ed. Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake. Durham: Duke UP, 1996. 1-18. Print.

Wyile, Herb. “Writing, Regionalism and Globalism in a Post-Nationalist Canada.” Diverse Landscapes. Ed. Karin Beelar and Dee Horne. Prince George, BC: UNBC P, 1996. 10-18. Print.

NOTES i. See also Crow; Freitag; Frey et al.; Sandrock, Gender and Region and “Rethinking.” See additionally the work of critics such as David M. Jordan, Lothar Hönnighausen, and Herb Wyile, particularly Jordan, New World and Regionalism Reconsidered; Hönnighausen, “Introduction”; Wyile, “Writing”; and Riegel and Wyile.

AUTHORS

FLORIAN FREITAG Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

KIRSTEN A. SANDROCK Georg-August University Göttingen

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I. Border Regionalism

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Creating a Coyote Cartography: Critical Regionalism at the Border

Caleb Bailey

1. Coyote Cartography

1 Borders and borderlands are always already transnational: regions where nations meet and intermingle. North American borders, despite the blending of cultures which occurs in these zones, are dominated by discursive constructions which emphasize, and emanate from, the ideological edifice of nationhood built by but one of the three nations of the continent: the United States. The U.S. boundary with Canada, we are told, is the longest undefended border in the world, often barely visible; its border with Mexico, we can see, is an intensely defended and increasingly physical barrier. These borders have markedly different psychological functions on either side of the cartographic marks which delineate the continental United States. The view from Mexico differs from that north of the line: the border a wall separating people from families, traditions, and ancestral lands all annexed in the mid- nineteenth century. For many Canadians the 49th parallel performs an important psychic role in defining an identity distinct from that south of the line; the border is an important line of cultural defense. Even from these external perspectives, then, the border performs a significant role in notions of nationalism, as it does from the perspective radiating from the central nation of North America.

2 Such centripetal appropriations of distinctly transnational regions by singular national concerns need to be reconfigured if regionalism is to be extricated from its relationship with nationalism. Two recent field- shaping studies point the way in this regard, informing the development of my own arguments here and offering new theoretical maps which suggest ways in which centrifugal readings might be developed to

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interrogate regions like those found at national borders: regions which appear simultaneously cartographically distinct yet also culturally indistinct. Claudia Sadowski-Smith’s Border Fictions (2008) suggests two ideas of particular pertinence to this essay. Firstly, that studying fiction which emerges from border regions can enable us to “move beyond dominant conceptualizations of who inhabits and can speak for the border” (11). And secondly, in doing so, that “an alternative inter- American framework that focuses on...borders...places into dialogue hemispheric approaches to these geographies” (17). In focusing on marginalized voices—indigenous, Chicano/a, Asian—Sadowski-Smith effectively complicates borders as demarcations of singular identities. Likewise, in developing a comparative hemispheric framework, her analysis transgresses both national and firmly entrenched disciplinary boundaries. Her provocative suggestion that “‘American studies’ has long uncritically appropriated the name of the entire hemisphere for one particular country” (19)—in much the same way as that same country dominates many existing border discourses—is one that my arguments herein will respond to.

3 Of equal importance to my approach is Neil Campbell’s The Rhizomatic West (2008) and its development of critical regionalism as an innovative and apt lens to reorient analyses of the U.S. region of the West in—as the subtitle of his book suggests—a “transnational age.” Critical regionalism—originating in the theory and practice of architecture—has gained a significant critical foothold in Postwestern Studies (the area in which Campbell predominantly works); it is a field which, Krista Comer has recently remarked, “often gestures...toward a mood, a condition, a sense of place and people as disembedded or deterritorialized” (10). Herein, the use of “deterritorialization” as a key tenet of her discipline signals the growing importance of Deleuzian theory in new conceptions of regions such as the West. This is further denoted in the central (dis)organizing principle of Campbell’s book in its aggregation and deployment of the Deleuzian metaphor of the rhizome (an organism characteristic of grasses which often have haphazard distribution) as complementary to the critically regionalist goals of his project. Campbell’s addition of the rhizomatic to the critical regionalist frame succeeds in a number of unforeseen, if not unexpected, ways.

4 Kenneth Frampton’s influential essay “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance” (1983) is the most oft-cited originating point for the theory named in its title. Frampton proposes that architecture should attempt to negotiate between the global and the local: “mediat[ing] the impact of universal civilization with elements derived indirectly from the peculiarities of a particular place” (21). Material structures thus become sites of dialogue that reconcile the seeming contradiction of being both global and local: in simultaneously having walls that contain an inside and windows that enable an outside. The rhizome—which Deleuzian philosophy invokes in opposition to the rootedness of arboreal (tree-like) approaches to

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organizing knowledge and understanding—has ‘roots’ but also travels ‘routes,’ and is open to the outside in ways that epitomize the goals of critical regionalism as a dialogical approach to regionalism.

5 If, as Campbell’s work demonstrates, the Deleuzian conception of the rhizome is one way in which regionalism might have its boundaries transgressed and reconfigured, how might critical regionalism probe further beyond the edges of regionalism if we add another Deleuzian concept—the figure of the nomad and related nomadic thought—to its theoretical framework? The nomad, in Deleuzian terms, exists in the smooth space between the striated spaces which borders—and the states that police them—construct and maintain. If we think nomadically, positioning ourselves in these in-between spaces, we can speak to the multiple positions which borders construct and avoid the hierarchical and binary structures with which regionalism—in its subservience to nationalism—seems inextricably bound. Furthermore, such an approach fosters the dialogue critical regionalism envisages, a critical conversation between the two borders at the northern and southern boundaries of the United States, a redrawing of the critical and theoretical maps which scholars use to navigate discourse on the border and its borderlands, and which I call “coyote cartography.”

6 Coyote exists at both borders—as a trickster figure in indigenous Canadian literature and as a people smuggler in Mexico. To employ these coyotes nomadically beyond the borders with which they are most often associated brings them into dialogue with each other, making our theoretical maps of the border broader and more interconnected in their scope. In this way coyote cartography seeks to uncover and decipher “an uncontainable symbolic geography of relations, [a] creative terrain on which minority subjects act and interact in fruitful ways” (Lionnet and Shih 2). The geography which a coyote cartography traces, then, is one in which readings of the coyote who is employed by undocumented migrants is reinscribed as a trickster figure, and Coyote the trickster is read in the opposite configuration: as a smuggler of undocumented understandings and perspectives, and of new theoretical stances that can be adopted when analyzing indigenous literature.

7 Should my deployment of indigenous tricksters within a Euro- Western philosophical frame be read as a recolonizing gesture, I would point to some works by indigenous scholars and writers which both echo and enhance the arguments I put forward in this essay. Firstly, while my re-reading of Coyote relies, predominantly, upon Western academic and anthropological discourse, it nonetheless echoes elements of the trickster as it occurs in tribe-specific cultures and understandings. For example, Neal McLeod (Cree) points to a tribally- specific imagining of the trickster “which denotes the notion of an older brother…assum[ing] a state of kinship” (97). This “kinship” is effectively supported and transported by coyote cartography through its own seeking out of relational moments in borderlands discourse across, between, and through, separate and disparate geographies.

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Additionally, McLeod quite rightly queries the use of the word trickster to denote the figure, noting that “[t]he concepts centred [sic] on the word in English include such words as ‘trickery,’ ‘tricky,’ and ‘trick,’ which indicate something less than the truth” (97). Etymologically, this is a moot point; however this very possible absence of veracity in Western interpretations of the trickster can nonetheless be aligned with the overarching goals of this piece: recognizing the real-and-imagined nature of the border, locating its fictions and rearticulating them.

8 Following the theme of kinship, Tol Foster (Anglo-Creek) has argued for a “relational regionality” as a starting point for Native American literary studies. Foster welcomes possible interventions in this field that stem from certain Euro-Western critics—particularly Foucault and to a lesser, though no less interesting extent, Patricia Nelson Limerick and George Lipsitz—that pay “[a]ttention to specificity, locality, and contingency”: three key tenets of critical regionalism that inform my approach (267). Whilst Foster suggests that such approaches cannot adequately provide “some theory that will liberate and explain indigenous people,” this is not my purpose here (ibid.). Replacing tribally-specific approaches with more regional ones, Foster suggests, leads “to a very different reading of some…material than now exists in the scholarship”: an outcome more akin to my approach (270). Remaining cognizant of locally specific epistemologies does not preclude, in Foster’s own terms, “imagining them as our relations” (275). As my proceeding analysis will demonstrate, the possible relationship between Coyote and coyote is a longstanding but underexplored one.

9 One further corrective: as Deanna Reder (Cree-Métis) reminds us in her preface to Troubling Tricksters, the term trickster “is the invention of a nineteenth-century anthropologist,” and we should also remember that “the Anishinaabeg told stories about Nanabush, the Cree told stories about Wesakecak, the Blackfoot told stories about Naapi, [and] the Stó:lō told stories about Coyote” (vii). As such, the critical map that I sketch here is but one of any number of cartographies that might be drawn when we interrogate regional constructions across time, space, and borders.

2. Smugglers and Tricksters

10 The late Canadian poet and writer Robert Kroetsch suggests that writers might “choose to be Coyote” (99). This is a provocative and informative observation that hints at the emergence of what some critics have labeled “coyote aesthetics” in the writings of several indigenous and non-indigenous authors, a style which “has at its heart fragmentation, deconstruction and a refiguration of ideas that stretch beyond Western conceptions” (Macpherson 182). If such deliberately disruptive tactics exist within the texts we might seek to analyze in an exploration of border discourses, then a new interpretive mode which

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mirrors this disjunctive and challenging material must be developed. If the author can become Coyote, can the critic become the same? Scholarly writings on both the Canadian and Mexican borderlands are replete with calls for the creation of just such strategies. Kroetsch’s call for the adoption of a trickster persona is based upon his own singular understanding of what Coyote represents. If a definition of what this figure and its functions represent were expanded to take in other traits, there would be abundant opportunity for developing innovative analytical stances from which to interrogate cultural constructions of border territories. Consider the biological version of coyote—Canis latrans—for instance: an animal distributed across the North American continent and one that crosses borders without impediment. Considering coyote’s canid cousin, the wolf (Canis lupus), Karen Jones suggests that “learning to think like a wolf might...be useful, at least in allowing us to see the fictions and fixtures of the border,” precisely because of the differing ways in which this creature is viewed on both sides of the 49th parallel (348). Arguing that such “movement patterns… [operate] without thought to the border patrol,” Jones posits that embracing a similarly defiant persona “allow[s] for a productive comparison of frontier cultures and attitudes” (338). And what of the other frontier under consideration here? If, as Jones speculates, a member of the animal kingdom can “become political,” then exploring the deeply political actions of the coyotes employed by those seeking to cross the Mexican border into the United States reveals further ways in which assuming elements of this other coyote might also interrupt traditional border discourses and their interpretations (347). Coyote the smuggler is a complimentary figure in this regard since, as Pérez-Torres notes, [t]hose involved in the articulation of minority discourses of all kinds act like coyotes, smuggling across national, disciplinary, and methodological boundaries...agents who already challenge the significance of those boundaries. (823)

11 Considering some of the biological and behavioral characteristics of the genus Canis latrans, Bright notes that “coyotes have their home burrows but may range widely,” leading to an increasing dispersal of the animal across the North American continent (34). Such diffusion of the species and their haphazard distribution seems reflective of much Western discourse on the mythological counterpart who displays “an uncontrollable urge to wander” (Radin 165). Additionally, much anthropological analysis of the Coyote trope focuses upon the links between the animal’s predatory instincts and cunning, and, according to Harris, their translation into the “trickery, thievery and creativity” that is often on display in indigenous storytelling (qtd. in Spener 90).Similarly, the coyotes employed by those seeking to cross the U.S.- Mexico border illegally gain such an epithet as it “refers to the wily ways of the[se] smugglers” (Martinez 27). There may be similarities between the origins of these twin deployments of the Coyote/coyote trope, but their modern-day incarnations—in myth at the United States’

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northern border, in illegal action to the south—and the strategies that they employ in both guises display a marked but subtle difference.

12 Coyote as a people smuggler is just the latest in a long line of invocations of the Mesoamerican mythic trope. Indeed, as Spener notes in his account of the relationship between smuggler and smuggled, coyotes and the services they provide—coyotaje—are commonplace; their employment by others is very much an everyday occurrence. Generally employed to assist, illegally or otherwise, a person’s passage through the bureaucracy of everyday life in Mexico, the coyote is not merely involved in illegal migration but also acts as labor broker, forger, and counterfeiter, a go-between or middleman. As such, a Mexican coyote is rarely an individual but a member of “a loosely knit network in which different individuals play different roles” (Spener 91). Such coyotaje practices are key to the low-level resistance enacted “by the disinherited members of Mexican society” (96). They function to combat exclusion from power and wealth in a way suited to people of a mestizo/ mestiza ancestry or identity. Thus it is little wonder that coyote has begun to feature heavily in such non-indigenous society and culture, whose mestizaje identity is marked by hybridity and constantly negotiated. As Wolf notes, “the ever-shifting nature of the social conditions” that the mestizo/mestiza is often subject to, forces them “to move with guile and speed through the hidden passageways of society,” never committing themselves to a particular site or territory (qtd. in Spener 96). Indeed, the term coyote is also used, in similarly everyday circumstances to its illegal operative namesake, as a racial category discernible in much the same way as mestizo/mestiza, by hybridity. These unstable categorizations and imaginings of terms etymologically related to manifestations of coyote are reflective of the folkloric origins of coyote as an ephemeral, almost temporary presence, “the one that runs from one town to another and belongs to neither” (Hyde 6). Here we move towards the use of coyote that I aim to employ, a figure of constant motion: a nomad.

13 Coyote as the trickster figure, often found at play in indigenous Canadian literature, is a similar shaper and creator of such power relations, but operates in subtly different ways. Where the Mexican coyote is a literal cultural actor involved in negotiating a way through the striated space of the state, the trickster Coyote constitutes a mythic archetype more often found in the smooth spaces between the striae of such state spaces. Gerald Vizenor, the prominent Anishnaabe writer and theorist, claims that such trickster figures represent and enact “a ‘doing’ in narrative points of view and outside the imposed structures” (13). This clearly demonstrates Coyote’s lack of subservience to striated space—which he exists outside of. But what Vizenor’s adjectival naming of Coyote’s behavior also does is to note its creation as processive, as always shifting, always moving. Just as Canis latrans inhabits the entire North American continent, so too does its mythological trickster counterpart: they “are not ‘rooted’ to a specific place but are linked to a

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wider area or region,” further enhancing the inherent mobility of “these so-called culture heroes … identified by their wanderlust” (Eigenbrod 165). The identification of such itinerant traits mirrors the deterritorialization of the nomad and, once more, ties the figure back to its biological forebear, for, like the Deleuzian principle of the rhizome itself, Canis Latrans is always “moving with a certain stealth [and is] powerful in its dispersion” (Kaplan 87). Hence, they resist incorporation into the striated space of the state through which they roam. In this roaming, “[t]he life of the nomad is the intermezzo,” the in-between (Deleuze and Guattari 380). In this sense, the Mexican coyote whose principal folkloric trait is identified as a fundamental “in-betweenness” (Spener 100) can be aligned with the indigenous Canadian configuration of Coyote, wherein it functions as “a figure of ‘open inter- relationship’ between radically different ‘worlds’” (Davidson 93). Coyote/coyote, we might say, is always between points of striated space —of the gridded and geometrical—and is therefore able to gain access to the nomadic smooth space, wherein the chosen trajectory which the nomad constantly travels “give[s] that space its peculiar quality” (Colebrook 66-67). The “peculiar qualities” of a coyote cartographic space that both tropes occupy are those in which such smooth spaces are overwritten, palimpsest-style, over the striations which border regions represent: as Davidson suggests in his readings of Canadian prairie fictions, “Coyote took smooth, straight rivers and made them twist and turn” (198).

14 Our theoretical approach must mirror the “disjunctive, disruptive, and potentially radically subversive” (Smith 59) characteristics of the mythological trickster Coyote, and we must also adopt the persona of the coyote at work in the Mexican borderlands, a vehicle for “migration…evasion…and clandestine crossing” of territorial and theoretical boundaries (Spener 87). By making both Coyote and the coyote nomadic subjects, the different interpretations, deployments, and territories of these figures might be inverted and applied to their borderland opposite, making them both specific and localized but also interrelated. Herein we might push the limits of culture and the borders that nominally restrict them and effect, as Michaelson and Johnson suggest, a theory based upon travelling logics [which] can give way to…a recognition that cultural borders are effects produced in the mental operation that pulls two groups of people together… (con)fusing them, in order to contrast them. (9)

15 Vizenor elucidates the function of Coyote in this regard when he states that “[s]ilence and separation…are the antitheses of [the] trickster,” and that this sign “wanders between narrative voices” (13). These observations cut to the very heart of the need for coyote cartography as a means by which we might decenter American Studies, bring the “margins” of North America—Canada and Mexico—more sharply into view, and allow a series of critical and theoretical gestures and exchanges to develop between them. Here we can replace “silence” with dialogue between the real-and-imagined statuses of these two

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borders, through the real-and-imagined figures of Coyote and coyote. Thus we can offer a vital divergence from regionalist discourse that takes no account of moments of convergence in the lived and cultural experiences of specific but separate regions. If regionalism elides difference and striates space, the reinstatement of indigenous voices, rendered silent by the ideological appropriation and configuration of the physical and psychical borders erected around and between them, can subvert these spaces and make them smooth once more.

16 This location, dislocation, and relocation of Coyote/coyote mirrors the de- and re-territorializing functions of Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of nomadism and nomadic thought. Krista Comer, in reviewing developments in both critical regionalism and post-regionalism, suggests that “it might be advantageous to begin and remain critically deterritorialized” in order to establish “critical footing via other genealogies” (5). This is effectively achieved here as the deployment of a coyote cartography not only creates a smooth geographical space, less subject to the imposition of the striations of the nation-state. Coyote cartography also creates a smooth theoretical space in which, in common with the rhizome, pertinent elements of a diverse range of disciplinary methodologies and their insights might reveal themselves and offer new ways in which to approach border discourses. The discursive constructions of border regions which this essay now moves on to consider come from the work of Thomas King and Charles Bowden.

3. Thomas King

17 Thomas King’s fictional works often deconstruct borders, burrowing into the spurious foundations on which they are built and destabilizing the privileged subjectivity they claim to represent. Key here is the recognition—not explicitly stated by King himself, but certainly readable in his work—that any border has a dual identity. As New attests, “[t]here is borderline...and there is borderland. The one names and divides; the other is psychic, indeterminate” (4). Further, we might suggest, a borderline is a geographical demarcation and cartographic mark which one might experience physically—a putative “reality”—and a borderland is a psychological territory experienced mentally—an “imaginary” landscape or a place and a space which are both constructs. These constructs exist in an interdependent relationship where one—the borderline—“construct[s] conceptual edges,” and the other—the borderland—“construct[s] territories of translation” (New 4).This territory—in the works of Thomas King, predominantly the Alberta-Montana border region—might provide the site for the translation of Coyote into coyote, and, simultaneously, afford the opportunity to probe the edges of the critically regionalist-inspired coyote cartographyconcept outlined here. King’s own literary constructions of these real-and-imagined border regions reflect New’s

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suggestion that such zones are “symptomatic of...a condition of ‘interstitiality,’ in-betweenness, [and] an experiential territory of intervention and revision,” and, as such, provide the setting in which we might not only translate Coyote but also revise the function of this figure and explore what such an intervention might reveal (27).In this way a coyote cartography practice proceeds in a clearly critically regionalist manner, for, as Frampton proposes, a structure inspired by critical regionalism ensures that “meaning stems from a revealed conjunction between” (22). This conjunction is not only that between the two coyote tropes but also between those real-and-imagined border regions which King and others construct in their narratives.

18 Whether reading borders as lines or lands, real or imagined, striated or smooth, Canadian or American, indigenous or colonial, King’s writing erases the dichotomous, disjunctive “or” and replaces it with the conjunctive “and.” In doing so, and in speaking of and to both positions, the physical and psychical borders of King’s narrative settings reinstate the articulating function of the “joint” between the two nation-states which the boundary at the 49th parallel represents—granting it the ability to articulate not only its geographical permeability and malleability, but also its imaginative expository function. Furthermore, such re-articulations present opportunities for a reading of the border “in terms of a north-south rather than east-west axis,” which the latitudinal function of the arbitrary boundary between Canada and the United States subtly encourages (Pérez-Torres 816). In re-orienting the axis of interpretation to north-south—especially in a study of America in its hemispheric context—a critique of North American borders which are predominantly traversed physically, following these alternative compass points, is better placed to equate experiences of these cartographic hierarchies. Such a critique also opens border studies to José David Saldívar’s call for “finding historical, ideological and cultural simultaneity in the imaginative writings of the Americas” (22). This is the fundamental purpose of coyote cartography: seeking simultaneity in the real-and-imagined statuses of border regions through the inversion of the coyote trope.

19 The story “Borders”—appearing in One Good Story, That One (1993) —is perhaps Thomas King’s most critiqued piece of short fiction.Given its potent political dimension, rendering of literal border-crossing discourse as humorous, if not faintly ridiculous, and insistence upon Native authority in matters of identity and citizenship, this is no surprise. With its narrative centering on a border crossing facilitated only through the evasion and subversion of border bureaucracy, what is surprising is that the “illegality” of these tactics has not formed part of the critical discourse. Furthermore, existing analyses do not include recourse to the protagonists’ matter-of-fact deployment of these strategies, nor to the fact that they are presented as everyday occurrences. “Borders” is narrated by a Blackfoot boy as he and his mother attempt to cross the border in order to visit his sister Laetitia in

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Salt Lake City. At the border, when asked to declare their citizenship as either “Canadian” or “American,” the mother character will only answer “Blackfoot.” As a consequence they are unable to either enter the U.S. or return to Canada and find themselves sequestered at a duty-free store in the space between the two nations.

20 The consistency of existing interpretations of “Borders” presents something which could be seen as making instantly problematic my insistence upon a “nomadic” mode of thought to open up the boundaries of critical regionalism. The interstitial setting of much of the narrative— a duty-free shop in the zone between Canada and the United States— has been claimed as a territory where King himself critiques the trend for triumphal readings of the figure of the nomad as a cultural agent not subject to the imposition of identity by the nation-state. Peters, for example, writes that in relegating his protagonists to the Duty Free zone between Canada and the US, King challenges the post-modern celebration of Western identities as decentered and nomadic. (196)

21 Yet, I would argue, this setting, by its very nature—in-between two nations—offers only the temporary territorialization which the nomad makes; certainly, the older female character’s acceptance of this situation—“my mother seemed in good spirits, and, all in all, it was as much an adventure as an inconvenience”—speaks not of disenfranchisement but of an understanding that this territory is only temporary (King, “Borders” 141). This space provides a setting in which the bricolage of identities present in thecharacters, and within these same characters, are not decentered but are able to claim a new and revitalized centrality within the margin they are forced to occupy. The “tiny” flags worn by the store’s clerk diminish the dominant position of the two nation-states in understanding what the territory represents (140). Additionally, with the boy and his mother now the predominant population of the borderland in which the store is situated, this marginal territory is reclaimed, both physically and psychically, as Blackfoot land, bridging the border which arbitrarily bisected the nation of which they claim citizenship. The indigenous lineage which the maternal character insists upon redraws the cartographic hierarchy present at the border. As one border guard remarks: “‘I know that we got Blackfeet on the American side and the Canadians got Blackfeet on their side’” (135).The characters’ attempt to evade the bureaucracy of the border collapses this opposition and recreates the smooth space which the nation-state attempts to draw its own lines across.

22 If we were to transgress the borders of the narrative of “Borders,” to look beyond the few pages in which King constructs this dynamic border discourse—to proceed nomadically in our reading of the text by viewing it as merely one point along a relay, a temporary territory for interpretation—we could build further this notion of the author and his characters as smugglers, as coyotes. Recourse to King’s The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative (2003) is hugely informative in this regard. To comprehend further the complex interweaving of the

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borderland and the borderline in “Borders,” tracing a line-of-flight to the essay “What Is It about Us That You Don’t Like?” in this volume, highlights the cultural agency enacted by King’s characters and the bureaucratic measures their attempts to cross the border also subvert. Justification for this is contained in a simple “disguise” worn by one of the characters that eventually helps to facilitate the protagonists’ eventual crossing of the border: Around noon, a good-looking guy in a dark blue suit and an orange tie with little ducks on it…talked to my mother for a little while, and, after they were done talking…we got into our car. (“Borders” 143) 23 The car drives to the border a final time, and, having declared once more their citizenship as “Blackfoot,” they are finally allowed to cross into the United States, their identity as Blackfoot intact. Significantly, this exchange is preceded by the boy’s mother spending the night in the duty free store parking lot telling stories about Coyote. The framing device King uses in “What Is It about Us That You Don’t Like?”—an essay dealing in part with legislation “that can make Indians disappear in a twinkle” (Truth 132)—is a “Coyote stor[y]…one of my favourites [sic]…the one about Coyote and the Ducks” (122).

24 The story King weaves here has Coyote convincing the ducks to slowly give up their feathers—ostensibly to keep them safe from “Human Beings”—so he might have a coat to rival that of fellow trickster Raven (Truth 125). The slow but inexorable march towards the point at which the ducks have been stripped of all of their feathers—of their very identity—mirrors what King goes on to explicate about the various pieces of legislation developed both in Canada and the United States to similarly strip Native people of their land, their rights, and their identities. King decries the many pieces of legislation that have been created by both the Canadian and American governments—most often with the aim of assimilating the Native and clothed in paternalistic rhetoric—in a complex polemic which wanders with righteous anger between the two nation-states and the bureaucratic machinery enclosing the protagonists in “Borders”: The Indian Act (1876); The General Allotment Act (1887); The Indian Reorganization Act (1934); The Termination Act (1953); and Bill C-31, Amendment to the Indian Act (1985).

25 Hence, in reading outside the linearity of the narrative, between two separate writings, across a north-south rather than east-west axis, the act of defiance at the border in the short story attains a much larger significance: it is no longer just “a legal technicality” that detains the Blackfoot pair in the liminal no-man’s-land between the borderline (“Borders” 136). Rather, their eventual passage across the physical boundary between Canada and the United States becomes a multifarious act of evasion within the narrative and a multifaceted act on the author’s part; a smuggling in to the fiction of a number of undocumented intertexts which add to the psychic borderland which the boy and his mother must negotiate. The catalyst for this negotiation —whereby the Blackfoot identity remains intact even as it evades the

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legal machinery of the state—is the man with the duck-adorned tie. Is he Coyote? There is no trickster behavior to detect in his actions. More likely, this is the Blackfoot actors’ coyote, his tie a simple reminder for the mother (and the reader) that “like the Ducks in the Coyote story… Indians had to give up most of their feathers in order to keep some of their feathers for themselves” (King, Truth 129), and that to do so again, to acquiesce to the bureaucracy of the border—which would enable a more speedy crossing of the borderline—would be to become another occupant of the borderland of history and tragedy which King outlines in his examination of the various “Indian” legislation. In this regard, the mother character seems to personify the legal counsel for the Sawridge, Tsuu T’ina, and Ermineskin First Nations of Alberta who, in response to Bill C-31, stated: “It’s not just where you draw the line… but who draws the line” (qtd. in King, Truth 150). The Blackfoot mother character in “Borders” expands this cartographic border analogy yet further, erasing both borderlines and redrawing them in a fashion which displays traits that have more in common with coyote than Coyote.

26 My analysis of King’s fiction demonstrates the possibilities of coyote cartography as a non-hierarchical means of critique that, through the re-inscription of Coyote as coyote and practitioner of coyotaje, enables us to develop a critically regionalist method in which the global-local nexus of regional cultural production is brought more sharply into focus. Furthermore it re-draws not only the spatial limits of regions but also their temporal limits through the transgression of textual boundaries: “Borders” thus becomes not only a text that challenges the notion of the spatial limits that national boundaries represent but also one that, through the re-insertion of inter- and intratextual elements, speaks directly to the aims and functions of critical regionalism as both a theoretical framework and a socio-cultural reality that demands and effects a complex mediation between the supposed binary of past and present.

27 Where this routing of regional archetypes envisaged Coyote as coyote, its primary function was one of re-inscription, a means by which new readings might be realized and new avenues for interpretation might emerge. To invert this trajectory—to disrupt any notion that this is another, merely differentiated, hierarchy—and to read coyote as Coyote requires less a re-inscription and more a reinstatement: a reinstatement of the origins of the folkloric and mythological functions of Coyote within the territory of Mexico. Since those who assist undocumented Mexican migrants to cross the border into the United States first came to be popularly known as “coyotes” in the 1920s, these origins have been increasingly marginalized—if not lost altogether—in articulations of the geopolitical power struggle of which they are an integral part. The concern encapsulated here is one of miscegenation: suspicions about what the mixing of cultures—in whatever form—might represent to the United States. One need only think of the avaricious nature of the villainous Wile E. Coyote as he pursues the innocent and

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blithely unaware Roadrunner in the popular Warner Brothers cartoon to see a reflection of the creature that approximates the mainstream opinion of what undocumented migration means to U.S. society. Yet, Coyote in its mythological incarnation appears to have vanished from much of the critical thinking and analysis directed at the Mexico-U.S. border and its discursive representations. Here, the entrenchment of a set of geopolitical ideologies and militaristic rhetoric has rendered the relationship between coyote the people smuggler and Coyote the trickster virtually extinct. Coyote, as found in many popular articulations of the ongoing struggle by elements within the United States to shore up its southern border against “the exportation of brown flesh to the United States,” becomes simply a pejorative, a linguistic device which serves only to shore up the imaginative ideological border which is also imagined to require patrolling (Bowden 1). This fact reflects, to some extent, a trend noted recently by Marta Carminero-Santangelo, who argues that the discursive construction of such “illegals” and “aliens” suggests the degree to which this population has been narratively constructed as not fitting into the boundaries of the American ‘nation’—indeed, as fundamentally threatening that nation. (158)

28 The role of coyotes would seem to me to be a primary element of such narratives, even more so when we consider that their role in such border-crossings relies upon their erasure of both the physical and psychical manifestations of the border between nations. In addition, the narrative construction of coyotes within much of the literary journalistic discourse that Carminero-Santangelo critiques is similarly focused almost exclusively on their “threatening” behaviors, both towards the integrity of the nation, its borders, and to the “pollos” who employ them. Such skewed rhetoric also belies the original meanings of both Coyote and coyotaje, which are inextricably bound to the figure of the coyote and their modus operandi: “it is at well-guarded barriers that these figures are especially tricksters,” Hyde reminds us, “god[s] of the threshold in all its forms” (7-8).

29 This erasure of the trickster functions and origins of the coyote and its coyotaje belies the very etymological roots and subsequent deviations of the word coyote. Originating in the Nahuatl dialect as coyotl—meaning “to make a hole or dugout”—the biological coyote was, it has been suggested, so named for its perceived “swiftness and ability to hide in the bush” (Castro 20). Moreover, Dobie states that the “Aztecs had a god called Coyotlinauatl...whom they dressed in coyote skins and another being called Tezcalipoca, who was supposed to be able to transform himself into a coyote” (253). Hence, Coyote is deeply embedded in the region we now know as Mexico. Further uses of coyotl as a root for other words specific to this territory and the U.S. Southwest abound: genus of tomato, melon, prickly pear, and other flora all noted for either their medicinal and healing qualities, or the appeal they hold for the omnivorous Canis latrans, are all native to the regions either side of the border.

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30 It is curious, then, that the purveyor of such “subalterns” across the line which separates two nations—the coyote—should also be barely perceptible in accounts of the lengths Mexican migrants will go to in crossing the border. However, reinstating those elements of Coyote— seemingly lost in the geopolitical obfuscation of the cultural debates that coalesce around the contested territory of the border—to the elusive figure of the coyote reveals the trickster at work in both mundane and mythical ways: a shaper of destinies and identities.

4. Charles Bowden

31 Charles Bowden’s dispatches from the low-level militarized conflict at the Mexico-U.S. border should also be considered in relation to the trickster lineage of the coyote, although the connection is not at first apparent. Just as Gerald Vizenor has suggested that Coyote acts both internally within indigenous literatures as a visible element of the characters and externally as a shaper of the ensuing discourse, so too can we perceive this double function in Bowden’s own exploration of the culture of coyotaje. This takes the author to the Sonoran Desert and a series of encounters with migrating Mexicans. That Bowden never meets nor converses with any of the coyotes might speak simply of the secretive and clandestine character of their work or their supposed brutality and links to other illicit activities carried out back and forth across the border by organized crime syndicates, but the author’s blunt, bellicose, and confrontational prose style does not seem to be the voice of an individual who would fear meeting such characters. Rather, could not coyote’s very absence from the detail of the narrative denote the presence of Coyote, as Linscott-Ricketts argues, as an ever-present “creator of the world-as-it-is” (qtd. in Dobie 21)? Such elusiveness on the part of the coyote speaks directly to the intangible nature of Coyote. Such intangibility is applicable to the ambiguous nature of Coyote: is this figure a heroic, comic, or tragic figure; a selfish or moral character; human or animal; male or female; wise or stupid? Coyote defies such categorizations and binary hierarchies of meaning and so too do the coyotes in both their moral ambiguity and in their attempted elimination of the hierarchy the border imposes. One such example occurs when Bowden describes the would-be-migrant’s situation in a temporary residence on their journey known as a “flophouse”: “Men with quick eyes look you over, the employees of coyotes, people smugglers...now you are a pollo, a chicken, and you need a pollero, a chicken herder” (4). Such allusions to livestock in the common parlance of the people-smuggling business clearly recall several of Thomas King’s own articulations of the myths of Coyote (not least “The One about Coyote and the Ducks”) and therefore similarly recall the ambivalence of the trickster and the moral dubiousness of the coyote. Amalgamating both tropes herein and reading them alongside other observations made by Bowden—such as the suggestion that coyotes “in

European journal of American studies, 9-3 | 2014 27

Mexico now earn at least $10 billion a year” (8)—emphasize the ambivalence and ambiguity that the two figures demonstrate and their often fundamentally motivating material desires. As Paul Radin notes, the character of Coyote [w]ills nothing consciously...knows neither good nor evil yet is responsible for both...[h]e possesses no values, moral or social, is at the mercy of his passions and appetites, yet through his actions all values come into being. (xxii)

32 This overtly detached view ascribed to Coyote meets its counterpart in the Mexican coyote, who is well aware that many of the “pollos” will be captured, deported, or simply die in their pursuit of work and wages in the United States. An amalgamation of Coyote and coyote epitomizes the negotiated positions that are subject to, and in existence beyond or between, the hierarchies of both the border and the identities that are founded there.

33 Despite this lack of a first-hand account of an encounter with a coyote, the author acknowledges the guiding hand that they always seem to have in the negotiation of the treacherous terrain encountered on the arduous journey from Mexico into the United States: “The top coyote remains in the shadows,” Bowden writes, “an intelligent, cunning and mysterious figure” (12). The coyote’s shadow here extends, not only over the anonymous migrant’s progress from one side of the border to the other, but also into the realm of the negotiated identity formation of their “pollos,” and further in this regard into the territory of the mythological Coyote once more. Bowden traces his subject’s exodus from the flophouse and closer to the border: There’s a dirt road a short ways to the north. The pollos have walked two days to reach this spot to meet smugglers who’ve brought American clothing so they will look normal. They rapidly strip naked—bras, panties, blouses, shirts—everything is cast aside. (13)

34 Here the mundane melds with the mythical as the everyday coyotaje provided by the coyote combines with the transformative powers offered by Coyote. The matter-of-fact action of the “pollos” as they divest themselves of their clothes—and the similarly dispassionate reporting of their actions—belie, once again, the presence of Coyote the trickster, not just in the deception that this almost ritualistic shedding of one’s identity and adoption of another will hope to enact, but also in the ways in which this superficial change, when read more deeply, epitomizes Coyote’s status as a bricoleur.

35 Again, scholars of the Native American and First Nations, rather than Mesoamerican, embodiment of Coyote have noted this facet of the figure’s character, lost amidst the predominantly “illegal” and “criminal” portrayals of the coyote. For example, Ramsey has suggested that Coyote represents “a sort of mythic handy-man who ‘cobbles’ reality in the form of a bricolage out of the available material” (qtd. in Bright 35). The material available to the coyotes in the Mexican border region may well fall short of the mythical, magical powers of Coyote, but the reality that their bricolage seeks to create is one that is designed to assist in illegally entering another nation and further

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epitomizes the constantly shifting identity politics at play in the borderland. Furthermore, this is not the only conversion that coyotes, when cast as Coyote, might effect, since “trickster frequently is also a transformer...whose accomplishments may include...the teaching of cultural skills” (Bright 35). Here, the de-stratification inherent in coyote cartography intersects with the predominant geopolitical reading and positioning of undocumented migration discourse. This theoretical stance—reading across and between borders along a nomadic relay— mirrors “the circuits of capital and labor under late-twentieth century globalization” that the fluidity of migratory identity is intertwined with and implicated in and that coyotes prey upon and profit from (Carminero-Santangelo 161). Carminero-Santangelo posits that this circuitous trajectory “creat[es] deeply entrenched migration patterns...‘assimilating’ indigenous peoples to ‘American’ ways of life before they have even arrived in the United States” (161). As a significant powerbroker in this shifting political and cultural landscape, coyotes play an integral role in this “assimilating” process, negotiating not only the physical border but also the wider local-global nexus of regional identities. In this sense, the coyotaje—the evasion of border bureaucracy—takes on this other Coyote characteristic, imparting the “cultural skills” deemed helpful in crossing the border and in remaining successfully on the other side of this boundary.

36 Is the “assimilation” which Carminero-Santangelo identifies even a possibility for the undocumented migrant? Is it an effective tactic for the coyote to impart and the “pollo” to enact? Whilst in Bowden’s account, the teaching of cultural skills which the trickster Coyote performs is crucial in gaining access to the United States, to what extent is that performance a reflection of an ongoing reality? Bowden relates one incident of coyotaje: The man sent a guide to bring him across the river. He spent two days in the coyote’s house waiting. Then the man came and said, Put on this soccer uniform. The man said, if the Border Patrol agent asks you where you are going, you say, “San Antonio.” If they ask you if you have papers, you say, “Yes,” in English. They practiced these simple answers. Then they rode up to the U.S. checkpoint. The Border Patrol agent asked the two questions, got his answers and waved them through. In San Antonio, the coyote took back the soccer uniform. The coyote has pulled the same stunt at least 50 times in the past year at the same checkpoint ... [h]e never fails. (7)

37 This performance of identity seems as temporary as the various territories in which the undocumented migrants are required to locate themselves in on their journey. Identity here is de- and re-territorialized at every turn: for the migrants as they perform “citizenship” before becoming “illegal” once more; and for the coyote who temporarily becomes the trickster before returning once more to the shadows of the geo-political battleground of the border. Yet, in both cases, we can read the re-emergence of the Mesoamerican mythology of Coyotlinauatl and this Aztec god’s ability to transform itself through the wearing of skins and masks, to pass itself off, through mimicry, as something other than itself.

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38 Such strategies are aligned with the comparative knowledge that coyote cartography makes possible since they reveal the shared history of coyote and Coyote as pan-American figures who might enable us to interrogate the ramifications of transnational identities and, concurrently, approach regionalism more critically. Both versions of Coyote are key textual and political operatives in the fictions and frictions of North American border regions. Utilizing these tropes as both objects of analysis and critique, and as shapers of methodological approaches to such tropes, reveals the interconnectedness of the margins of nations and the marginalized voices which occupy such zones. Both Thomas King and Charles Bowden’s wider oeuvre could be further interrogated through such a lens. The breadth of texts which detail the exploits of tricksters and smugglers—in indigenous storytelling, literary non-fiction, histories, and journalism—suggest that approaching such materials produced by others outside the scope of this essay, via coyote cartography, will enhance an understanding of the shared histories and cultures of North American regions, producing a map which challenges those of nation-states, dominant cultures, and academic canons and disciplines.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bowden, Charles. “Exodus: Border-Crossers Forge a New America: Coyotes, Pollos, and the Promised Van.” Mother Jones. 2006. Web. 10 Sept. 2013. .

Bright, William. A Coyote Reader. Oxford: U of California P, 1993. Print.

Campbell, Neil. The Rhizomatic West: Representing the American West in a Transnational, Global, Media Age. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2008. Print.

Carminero-Santangelo, Marta. “Narrating the Non-Nation: Literary Journalism and ‘Illegal’ Border Crossings.” Arizona Quarterly 68.3 (2012): 157-76. Print.

Castro, Rafaela. Chicano Folklore: A Guide to the Folktales, Traditions, Rituals and Religious Practices of Mexican Americans. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Print.

Colebrook, Clare. “Deterritorialization.” The Deleuze Dictionary. Ed. Adrian Parr. New York: Columbia UP, 2005. 66-67. Print.

Comer, Krista. “Introduction: Assessing the Postwestern.” Western American Literature 48.1/2 (2013): 3-15. Print.

Davidson, Arnold E. Coyote Country: Fictions of the Canadian West. London: Duke UP, 1994. Print.

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Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Bloomsbury, 2008. Print.

Dobie, Frank J. The Voice of the Coyote. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1961. Print.

Eigenbrod, Renate. Travelling Knowledges: Positioning the Im/Migrant Reader of Aboriginal Literatures. Winnipeg: U of Manitoba P, 2005. Print.

Foster, Tol. “Of One Blood: An Argument for Relations and Regionality in Native American Literary Studies.” Reading Together: The Native Critics Collective. Ed. Craig S. Womack et al. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 2008. 265-302. Print.

Frampton, Kenneth. “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance.” Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. London: Pluto, 1983. 16-30. Print.

Hyde, Lewis. Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1998. Print.

Jones, Karen. “From Big Bad Wolf to Ecological Hero: Canis Lupus and the Culture(s) of Nature in the American-Canadian West.” American Review of Canadian Studies 40.3 (2010): 338-50. Print.

Kaplan, Caren. Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Travel. London: Duke UP, 1996. Print.

King, Thomas. “Borders.” One Good Story, That One. Toronto: Harper Collins, 1993. 129-45. Print.

—. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2003. Print.

Kroetsch, Robert, Shirley Neuman, and Robert Wilson. Labyrinths of Voice: Conversations with Robert Kroetsch. Edmonton: NeWest, 1982. Print.

Lionnet, Françoise, and Shu-Mei Shih. Minor Transnationalism. Durham: Duke UP, 2005. Print.

Macpherson, Heidi Slettedahl. “Coyote as Culprit: The Coyote Aesthetics of Gail Anderson-Dargatz’s The Cure for Death by Lightning.”British Journal of Canadian Studies 17.2 (2004): 175-87. Print.

Martinez, Rubén. Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail. New York: Metropolitan, 2001. Print.

McLeod, Neal. Cree Narrative Memory: From Treaties to Contemporary Times. Saskatoon: Purich Publishing. 2009. Print.

Michaelson, Scott, and David E. Johnson. Border Theory: The Limits of Cultural Politics. London: U of Minnesota P, 1997. Print.

New, William Herbert. Borderlands: How We Talk about Canada. Vancouver: UBC Press, 1993. Print.

Pérez-Torres, Rafael. “Chicano Culture Reclaiming Our America: Coyotes at the Border.” American Literature 67.4 (1995): 815-24. Print.

Peters, Laura. “Thomas King and Contemporary Indigenous Identities.” Beyond the Borders: American Literature and Post-Colonial Theory. Ed. Deborah L. Madsen. London: Pluto, 2003. 195-206. Print.

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Radin, Paul. The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology. New York: Shocken, 1972. Print.

Reder, Deanna. “Preface.” Troubling Tricksters: Re-Envisioning Critical Conversations. Ed. Deanna Reder and Linda M. Morra. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2010. vii-ix. Print.

Sadowski-Smith, Claudia. Border Fictions: Globalization, Empire, and Writing at the Boundaries of the United States. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2008. Print.

Saldívar, José David. The Dialectics of Our America: Genealogy, Critique and Literary History. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. Print.

Smith, Carlton. Coyote Kills John Wayne: Postmodernism and Contemporary Fictions of the Transcultural Frontier. Hanover: UP of New England, 2000. Print.

Spener, David. Clandestine Crossings: Migrants and Coyotes on the Texas- Mexico Border. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2009. Print.

Vizenor, Gerald. Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1992. Print.

ABSTRACTS

This article develops and deploys critical regionalism as a theoretical framework that enables a comparative transnational critique of North American border regions. Taking its lead from developments in the field of Postwestern Studies it incorporates critical metaphors drawn from Deleuzian philosophy in the form of nomadism and nomadic thought. Examining the nomadic traits of Coyote (the trickster) and coyote (the people smuggler), the article develops a comparative literature approach that challenges the centrality of existing discursive constructions of borders in North America as well as the disciplinary borders of “American” Studies. Through readings of depictions of Coyote and coyote in the work of Thomas King and Charles Bowden, the article suggests ways in which developing dialogue between the Mexican and Canadian borders can avoid the tendency to collapse regionalism into nationalism and respond to calls for more hemispheric approaches to the discipline.

INDEX

Keywords: borders, coyote (smuggler), Coyote (trickster), Critical regionalism, nomadic thought, nomadism

AUTHOR

CALEB BAILEY University of Nottingham

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Resisting the Inevitable: Tar Sands, Regionalism and Rhetoric

Steven M. Hoffman, Paul Lorah and Joseph Janochoski

1. Introduction

1 Tar sands oil is rapidly becoming a primary means of powering the world’s petroleum- based economy. Its development is being positioned as a vital component of North American continental energy security and is increasingly a vector of transboundary cooperation and contention. While some of the infrastructure necessary for the full development of the resource is already in place, significant additional investments capable of linking a complex and expanding system of oil fields, pipelines, refineries, and marine terminals will be required in the near term. The components are or will be located in a vast region extending from Alberta, Canada to the Gulf Cost of the United States to new consumer bases in Europe and Asia.

2 Despite a number of formidable barriers, an oppositional momentum is developing that involves a disparate set of local, national, and international actors. Many of these voices, most notably the First Nations of Canada and the United States as well as environmental activists on both sides of the border, have either been historically marginalized, or more recently, castigated as treasonous by the Canadian government (see Harper; Oliver). This paper discusses the diverse nature of this opposition through an examination of 26 collective activities involving 243 organizations that occurred between April, 2013 and February, 2014 (see Appendix A). The activities were identified by the authors from e-mails and related sources received through membership in a restricted electronic distribution list. The issues addressed by the network, the types of activities in which they are engaged, and the types of organizations driving the network are described below.

3 The first part of the paper discusses the internal characteristics and the network dynamics of these activities; this is followed by a geographically-defined analysis of the relationships among the participant organizations. The final section of the paper suggests that an important mechanism for achieving collaborative integrity in the

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midst of what are oftentimes very challenging circumstances are carefully elaborated rhetorical frames designed to appeal to a diverse set of key stakeholders and policymakers.

2. Tar Sands and the Oppositional Field

4 The rapid development of Canadian tar sands has spawned vigorous oppositional activity defined, in large part, by the nature of the development process itself. While the resource is located primarily in the province of Alberta, Canada, the infrastructure required to fully exploit this resource spans the North American continent. The system begins with massive ‘plays’ or oil deposits, estimated to be the size of the American state of Florida, that are located primarily in northern Alberta. After removal, either through surface mining or through an underground process known as in situ extraction, the oil is transported through a spider web of pipelines and rail connections that begin in Alberta and radiate outward to all parts of both the United States and Canada (Valentine).i These pipelines and rail carscarry either refined tar sands crude known as syncrude or dilbit, a particularly dangerous form of unrefined crude oil (Swift, Casey-Lefkowitz, and Shope), to refineries and ports at sites ranging from the coast of British Columbia and the Gulf of Mexico to the American side of the Great Lakes and the east coast of the United States. From there, tar sand-based products are shipped throughout North America, Asia, and Europe (Oil Change International).

5 When completed, the extraction sites, pipelines, refineries, and ports will constitute an integrated energy system. This system, however, is being assembled in a highly fragmented and incremental fashion useful for minimizing both regulatory oversight and oppositional resistance. In the case of regulation, oversight involves numerous federal, state, tribal, and local jurisdictions in Canada and the United States, whose authority varies depending upon the specific issue in question (Spruyt; Muldoon, Lucas, Gibson, and Pickfield). In the United States, for instance, primary regulatory responsibility for pipelines rests with national authorities while refinery developments are more heavily influenced by state regulators, even if they involve the acquisition of federal permits or the meeting of federal environmental standards (Association of Pipelines). For a variety of reasons, this fragmented regulatory environment is of great benefit to industrial and commercial interests, including the fact that no single regulatory authority is responsible for assessing system-wide impacts (Hoffman, “Many Pieces”).

6 The nature of the development process is also reflected in the collective activities considered in this analysis. Thus, the issues addressed, the types of activities, and the types of organizations involved in oppositional work all exhibited a significant degree of diversity and variation. While the Keystone XL pipeline was prominent amongst the list of concerns, for instance, other issues included the climate-changing emissions enabled by tar sands development (Lattanzio; Brandt), generic concerns with both pipeline and rail safety, and conflict of interest claims in regards to various environmental review processes. Other activities were organized around issues of specific local concern, such as the perceived violations of property rights along various pipeline corridors or environmental justice claims associated with health impacts on communities located within the shadow of one or more mines.

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7 The types of collective activities undertaken by oppositional actors were also symptomatic of the development process. For instance, rather than directing their efforts towards one public authority, or even different public authorities in one country, organizers adopted a thematically differentiated and geographically wide- ranging set of tactics and strategies. Letters of concern were sent to a variety of public officials, including the President of the United States and the American Secretary of State, as well as national, state, and provincial agency officials, including Alberta’s chief energy regulator. Jointly-authored and/or co-sponsored reports on issues both generic and local (NRDC), collaboratively-authored testimony submitted in response to a diverse set of regulatory proceedings, and the organization of multi-site rallies in both the United States and Canada all reflected the fragmented character of the development process.

8 Finally, the diffuse nature of the existing and potential harms caused by the exploitation of tar sands stimulated participation by a diverse set of organizations. Participants included very local, and often times minimally financed, citizen-based and/or all-volunteer organizations such as the Sebago Lake Anglers Association as well as regional or state-based groups such as the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy, the Michigan Land Use Institute, Maine Rivers and the Environmental Advocates of New York. National, well-endowed legacy organizations such as the Natural Resources Defense Council and the National Audubon Society were also active players, in many cases being responsible for soliciting participation on the part of small and locally-oriented organizations. The nature of participation by these national organizations depended, in part, upon their particular organizational structure. The Sierra Club, for instance, is a ‘federated’ organization with both a central office and many local, and to some extent autonomous, local chapters. In some instances, the national office was deeply involved in a specific issue while in other cases, one or more local chapters participated in an activity without the participation of the national office.

9 Another important feature of the evolving tar sands oppositional network was the use of coalitional structures. In some cases, such as Pipe Up Against Enbridge and Bold Nebraska, these coalitions possess institutional characteristics such as an independent board of directors, a regularly published newsletter, or an actual physical location. In other cases, however, the coalition was intentionally temporary, with participants coming together only long enough to complete a particular action and having no intention of finding a way to sustain itself in any formal manner.

10 Given the diversity of the participating organizations, it is not surprising that the motivations inspiring participation were also very diverse. In some cases, it was a long- held affinity to a particular issue or normative concern that prompted action. Thus, a number of First Nation or American Indian organizations signed on to a letter objecting to the expansion of Shell Oil’s Jackpine facility out of a general concern with aboriginal issues rather than because of any particular interest in tar sands. Other such affinities included property rights, environmental justice, or the degradation of very particular local landscapes such as the sand dunes of Lake Michigan or the possible spoilage of Nebraska’s Ogalalla aquifer.

11 Another important feature of the network was the extent of participation amongst organizations. In many cases, participation was a one-off experience, with many of the individual activities being populated by numerous ‘single-issue joiners’ whose

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participation was occasioned by a specific interest or a localized impact of the sort discussed above. Indeed, of the 243 organizations identified in the analysis, some 142 (58 percent) participated in just one of the 26 collective activities (Table 1). In many cases, such organizations constituted a very high proportion of the total numbers of participants in any particular activity (Appendix B).

Table 1 Number of Collective Activities

Number of Activities Number of Organizations Participating in Number of Activities

1 142

2 45

3 14

4 13

5 9

6 6

7 4

8 2

11 2

12 1

14 2

15 1

16 1

17 1

12 In contrast to these single-issue joiners was a small subset of actors standing at the center of collaborative activity. Unlike the more than 75 percent of organizations participating in either one or two of the activities, eight organizationsii participated eleven or more times, oftentimes with a number of other dominant organizations (Table 2). In fact, almost 20 percent of the 561 connections generated by the 26 collective activities were the product of the interactions amongst the top eight joiners.

Table 2 Top Eight Joiners Interactions

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Organization 350.org Bold NE CBD FOE NRDC NWF OCI Sierra

350.org xx 10 8 10 12 12 9 11

Bold NE 10 xx 9 11 11 8 11 11

CBD 8 9 xx 8 10 6 9 9

FOE 10 11 8 Xx 10 7 10 9

NRDC 12 11 10 10 xx 10 11 13

NWF 12 8 6 7 10 xx 7 9

OCI 9 11 9 10 11 7 xx 10

Sierra 11 11 9 9 13 9 10 xx

13 The different sorts of participatory experiences are illustrated in Fig. 1. On the left side of this figure is a small slice of the overall network, one that highlights the tendency of many organizations to limit their participation to one or perhaps two activities. The right side of Fig. 1, on the other hand, illustrates the highest level of network density, a center that is rich with multiple intersecting and overlapping interactions.

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Figure 1: Elements of Total Network

Crosses indicate activities; Triangles indicate organizations

14 The ‘bi-polar’ nature of this oppositional field, i.e., repeated interactions amongst the same large, national partners combined with a host of occasional or single-issue participants, presents both challenges and opportunities for future collaborative activity. On the one hand, repeated collaboration amongst the same large, national

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actors can easily precipitate the creation of a subsystem resistant to external influence (Lowi). Policy-making officials can also become immune to the entreaties offered by these actors, seeing them as ‘the usual suspects’ that are either safe to ignore or that can be placated by relatively modest actions on the part of the state or industry.

15 However, by creating linkages that would have otherwise been left unexploited and identifying a broad and diverse set of partners, dominant actors in an emerging network can lay a strong foundation for future network expansion. 350.org, for instance, through its involvement in 17 of the 26 activities, worked with some 170 organizations, 109 of which were single-issue joiners, any or all of which might be called upon by 350.org to renew their collaboration at some point in the future. While the other dominant organizations were not quite so energetically involved with single- issue joiners, they all nonetheless allied themselves with many organizations that would have otherwise remained unconnected to the overall oppositional effort.

16 The diversity of oppositional actors sprinkled throughout the full set of activities also meant that a host of potentially significant ‘bonding’ opportunities were created. Single-issue joiners, for instance, while standing at the periphery of the web of relations created by the various activities, nonetheless have clear pathways potentially connecting them with all of the other network participants, including a great number of organizations with very different ethnic, socio-economic, or political characteristics (Woolcock 197-212). The Vegans and Vegetarians of Alberta, for instance, would be unlikely to think of partnering with an organization such as Sand Hills Beef. Yet, both were at least indirectly allied by virtue of their work with the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) through their common participation in activities C4 and C5, respectively (Fig. 2). Even if, as noted above, these single-issue joiners do not participate in any of the other tar sands-related activities, such participatory experiences may well offer them future opportunities for collective action in areas wholly unrelated to tar sands. Indeed, this is one of the great opportunities afforded to even ‘one-off’ participants in a complex and evolving network, namely, unforeseen but potentially valuable opportunities for future interactions facilitated by the familiarization occasioned by even indirect collaboration organized around a common goal.iii

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Figure 2: Selected Interactions: Activities C4 and C5

Triangle indicates Sand Hills Beef; cross indicates IEN; square indicates V/V of Alberta; left star indicates C4; right star indicates C5; circles indicate other participants

17 In addition to such bonding opportunities, more substantive bridging or linking ties were also created. Relations of this sort, that is, “between different social strata in a hierarchy where different groups access power, social status and wealth” (Voyer 31), are based on voluntary associational behaviors that connect individuals or the community with individuals or institutions that “hold different positions in a system of social hierarchy” (Iosifides, Lavrentiadou, Petracou, and Kontis 1345). Interactions amongst such diversely advantaged partners may well confer benefits to an organization no matter their location in the hierarchy. Small, local organizations with limited capacity, for instance, might acquire resources necessary to carry out their work while large, nationally prominent organizations can extend the range of their own actions by partnering with local entities, especially in the case of a project identified as having a well-understood local footprint. In agreeing to be listed as a contributing partner on a highly publicized Trailbreaker project report (NRDC), for instance, the Maine Clammers Association might well have increased their legitimacy as an oppositional organization while at the same time offering NRDC a pathway into a constituency that might have previously viewed such a prominent liberal environmental organization with some suspicion.

3. Space Matters: The Geography of Tar Sands Oppositional Activity

18 The fragmented nature of the tar sands development process is also deeply reflected in the spatial dimensions of collective activity. As Diani points out, networks “do not develop in a vacuum but are embedded in specific territories” (229). While intergroup interaction facilitated by electronic communication and social media may have

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lessened the need for in-person meetings and thus proximate location, there is no doubt that space matters and that a number of critical geographic dimensions, including very regionally-specific patterns of interaction, continue to be defined by the U.S.-Canadian border.

19 The geographic nature of the collaborative process can be illustrated in two ways, the first being standard deviational ellipses that were calculated for each coalition using the location of participating organizations.iv Individual ellipses display the directional orientation of each coalition while also providing insight into the relative dispersion or clustering of member organizations, as coalitions of nearby organizations are represented by smaller ellipses than coalitions with dispersed membership. Fig. 3 displays ellipses for each of the 26 collaborative activities. Roughly half of the ellipses have a Canadian orientation, with most including organizations resident in both Toronto and Vancouver. Collaborative activities with an American orientation generally included the top eight joiners whose headquarters are on the east coast, primarily in Washington, D.C., or on the west coast.v In both cases, the result are partnerships that are dominated by primarily U.S.- or Canadian-based organizations and ellipses that tend to demonstrate an east/west orientation.

Figure 3: Standard Deviational Ellipses

20 The bias towards finding partners in one’s home country is particularly pronounced for single-issue joiners. Indeed, for a significant number of activities, all of the single-issue joiners were of U.S. origin and in all other cases the activities were dominated either by U.S. or Canadian organizations (Fig. 4).

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Figure 4: National Partners for Single-Issue Joiners

Star indicates U.S.-based organization; triangle indicates Canadian-based organizations; pentagon indicates collective activities; C2, C13, and C18 did not have any single-issue joiners

21 In addition to their alignment with partners of a similar national pedigree, organizations were in many cases clearly biased towards regional proximity in the construction of collective activities, a preference that again reflects the piecemeal and regional nature of the tar sands development process. The preference for proximity or dispersion is expressed by the ‘nearest neighbor statistic’ (NNS), a measure used by geographers to determine whether activities are spatially clustered or dispersed based on the average distance of each organization to its nearest neighbor. This statistic is calculated by measuring the distance between the location of each organization’s office and that of its nearest neighbor. All of these nearest neighbor distances are then averaged and then divided by the expected distance of a hypothetical random distribution. If the average observed distance is less than that of a random distribution, organizations in the coalition are considered clustered, while an average distance greater than that of a hypothetical random distribution is considered dispersed (McGrew and Monroe). As can be seen in Table 3, while a number of activities demonstrated a relatively high degree of dispersion, the more common experience were activities that expressed a clear dependence upon regional neighbors, as indicated by relatively low NNS scores. Those activities that were widely dispersed were populated by a large number of the top eight joiners or by organizations with a strong affinity- or interest-driven bond that was independent of geographic location, such as a general interest in climate change.

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Table 3: Nearest Neighbor Statistic

22 When considered in combination, the standard deviational ellipses and the NNS scores can yield significant insights into the geographical nature of collective activity. For instance, a geographically dispersed activity, or an ellipse that covers a broad swath of territory, combined with a relatively lower NNS indicates the presence of both geographically distant organizations and a set of clustered partners. Such is the case with the Jackpine expansion activity (C5), where a large number of Alberta and British Columbia-based organizations collaborated with a geographically dispersed set of organizations attracted by a general affinity with First Nations issues. On the other hand, an activity that draws upon widely dispersed organizations without a significant degree of clustering yields a relatively higher NNS score, due to the great distances between the participating organizations, and an ellipse that is again geographically extensive; the Keystone Climate Analysis (C13) is such an example. These compare with activities that feature both highly clustered organizations and the absence of geographically distant participants. In this case, the ellipse will be geographically limited and the NNS score will be small, characteristics demonstrated by both the Rally for the Great Lakes (C15) and the letter regarding the Pipeline #9 (C6; Fig. 5).

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Figure 5: Standard Deviational Ellipses for Selected Activities

4. Rhetoric: The Ties That Bind (Sometimes)

23 The organizational interactions discussed to this point pose significant challenges to those hoping to build upon whatever successes have been achieved thus far. Even the most astute coalition-builder faces an array of difficulties, i.e., identifying and selecting suitable coalition partners, establishing the rules of interaction and cooperation, selecting the ‘public voice’ for the coalition, identifying the target(s) of a specific campaign, and so on. Given the extremely fragmented character of the tar sands development process, however, the most difficult challenge of all might well be the selection of a rhetorical or narrative frame, particularly one that as Croteau and Hicks say, can link “previously existing organizational frames in some complementary fashion” (253) and represent and communicate a variety of concerns to affected parties, the public at large, and decision makers. This is a particularly critical issue in a situation where geography and space matter and where, as shown above, many of the collective activities are populated by single-issue joiners in league with a subset of nationally-oriented organizations.

24 As noted by Snow and Benford, a frame is the production and maintenance of meaning for constituents, antagonists, and bystanders or observers. This productive work may involve the amplification and extension of extant meanings, the transformation of old meanings, and the generation of new meanings…. [Framing] is the politics of signification (136).

25 In this regard, frames serve several functions, including as modes of punctuation, i.e., they encode certain events with meaning; attribution, i.e., they identify responsible agents and identify potential courses of remedial action; and signification, i.e., they take

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discreet events and weave them together into a consistent and unified narrative. Thus, a frame will shape how various parties (including activists), constituents (including members of an advocacy organization), decision makers, and the general public “define problems, attribute causes, and evaluate solutions” (Foust and Murphy 153).

26 Similar to the idea of a frame is that of a discursivenarrative or a “complex differentiated practice of representation that reflects the circulations and dispersions of power/knowledge in a particular historical moment,” the development of which “permit[s] the activation of incompatible themes, or, again, the establishment of the same theme in different group statements” (Endres 924). Importantly, a discursive narrative is both “enabling and restraining” in that it “governs and opens the possibilities for resistance to discourse about a given topic” (924). In this sense, both a master frame and a dominant discursive narrative may well provide the sort of ‘rallying point’ around which an effective opposition might cohere. Conversely, both could inhibit the development of potentially useful competing narratives or thematic choices useful to that same oppositional community.

27 In some cases, particularly in the case of a well-defined and mature social movement, an especially compelling frame can become a “master frame” or an overarching sense of things into which the themes and frames employed by various organizations have to fit, at least to the extent that they care to be seen as part of ‘the movement.’ Examples of master frames are many and varied and include such examples as injustice frames, opposition frames, rights frames, and more specific frames such as the ‘growth is good’ frame, the ‘environmental justice’ frame, and the ‘free market’ frame (Benford 677-701).

28 In a collective activity composed of many diverse organizations, whether they are dispersed across an entire continent or are geographically proximate, constituent members must often spend an enormous amount of time and effort negotiating and constructing a “shared frame for the coalition as a whole” (Dahmus 17). Central to this process is the selection of a set of verbal images that can be paired with arresting visual images (DeLuca), i.e., ‘tag lines’ or short, easily recalled phrases, stories, or other narrative forms.vi In the case of tar sands, the fragmented nature of the development process and the need to construct an oppositional environment around a plethora of particular circumstances greatly complicates the search for coherent, unifying and sustainable narrative frames.

5. Case Study: A Call for New Pipeline Standards and Regulation

29 In order to better understand the relationship between such a highly fragmented development process and the selection and use of an oppositional frame or discursive narratives, a collaboratively authored petition directed to the United States Department of Transportation, Pipeline Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), and United States Environmental Protection was analyzed (Citizen Petition). The petition, which was submitted by counsel of the National Wildlife Federation along with attorneys from the Vermont Law School Environmental and Natural Resources Law Clinic and the Sierra Club, was signed by 29 organizations and several dozen individuals. The participating organizations also are representative of the broad range of local, regional, and national organizations that populate the oppositional

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environment discussed above (see Appendix C). While this petition is just one of many documents and statements that were available for analysis, given the number of participating organizations and its broad geographic scope, the petition is a particularly useful demonstration of the non-spatial, spatial and rhetorical dynamics confronting the emerging tar sands oppositional network.

30 A number of questions were addressed in the analysis of the petition, including whether there exists a distinct or consistent coalitional rhetorical theme, one “that links previously existing organizational frames in some complementary fashion” (Croteau and Hicks 253); to what extent the constituent organizations use different and/or locally-oriented themes, messages, or rhetorics that reflect local issues, landscapes features, or culturally-specific factors; and even if the coalition partners use apparently similar rhetoric, does the underlying meaning of the rhetoric diverge in ways understood by the target groups unique to each coalition partner.

31 The first of these questions concerns the rhetorical or narrative language used by the coalition as a whole. As is typical of the activities considered in this paper, the material routinely generated by an organization through which a rhetorical frame might be identified, i.e., meeting minutes, resolutions, or various communication vehicles, was not available for analysis. Instead, it is assumed that the petition itself was the mechanism through which a collective frame was derived and that participating members codified the choice of frame by agreeing to be listed as a co-signer to the petition. Should a member have strongly disagreed with either the substance of the petition or the framing rhetoric it is assumed that they would have not have signed the petition.

32 An analysis of the petition reveals an abundance of rhetorical frames that might resonate with cooperating organizations in the formation of what Croteau and Hicks refer to as a “consonant frame pyramid” that integrates “the organizational frames developed by coalition members with the coalition’s own frame” (253). For instance, the petition made numerous references to potentially significant harmful impacts on the health of the environment and the public, a theme taken up by many local participants. The petition referred to “vast areas of lush boreal forest that must be mined in order to extract tar sands, or large underground injection wells must essentially cook the tar sands using massive quantities of hot steam to melt the bitumen so it can be brought to surface” (16) and that “utilizing tar sands oil results in much greater greenhouse gas emissions and climate impacts than conventional crude oil” (39). The petition also asserted that “there is increasing evidence that the transport of diluted bitumen is putting America’s public safety at level of risks much more acute than are seen in spills of conventional crude” (17, 18). As a result, “the rapid expansion of diluted bitumen infrastructure in existing or proposed pipelines impacts significant portions of the United States, endangers countless communities, and threatens some of our most vital resources” and “numerous ecologically important natural resources from the Great Lakes to the Ogallala Aquifer to Casco Bay as well as countless communities and citizens” (18). Indeed, says the petition, “as tragic and costly as the Kalamazoo spill was and continues to be, a spill in a resource such as the Straights of Mackinaw—which is currently exposed to diluted bitumen risks—would be immeasurably higher” (47).

33 The importance of the geographical spaces noted above was paralleled by the rhetorical space used by many of the participating organization as they took up these themes

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while utilizing distinctive, localized references.vii New Hampshire Audubon, for instance, argued that tar sands is the “dirtiest oil on planet,” a language also used by the Western Organization of Resource Councils who claimed that “TransCanada, a Canadian company, wants to build a 36-inch pipeline to carry up to 37.8 million gallons daily of dirty tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada through Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska and on to the Texas Gulf Coast.” Save the Dunes, an Indiana-based organization claimed that a new pipeline “if built, could triple the amount of toxic tar sands oil moving through our region.” An even more local connection was drawn by Environment Maine in their messaging: ExxonMobil and Canadian oil giant Enbridge want to use an antiquated oil pipeline that passes right next to Sebago Lake to transport highly corrosive tar sands oil from Canada to Casco Bay for export. A tar sands spill in the Sebago watershed, or near any of Maine’s waterways, would be utterly disastrous.… Sebago Lake is a Maine treasure—we escape there on hot summer days, we drink its water, and we watch our kids grow up on its shores.

34 The theme was echoed by New Hampshire Audubon when they pointed out that “this pipeline crosses 79 rivers and streams in New Hampshire.… A tar sands spill could permanently ruin some of the best trout streams in Coos County.” The Vermont Natural Resources Council posited a similar degree of harm, telling its members that the Council has been working hard to stop a shortsighted and dangerous plan to transport the world’s dirtiest oil across Vermont’s lovely Northeast Kingdom and beyond…. It would be all risk and little to no reward, with potential catastrophic consequences for Vermont’s natural resources—the very backbone of the Northeast Kingdom’s rural economy.

35 The Michigan Student Sustainability Coalition also pointed to a deadly combination of local and planetary harm with their assertion that “our nation, world, and climate face serious threats from the TransCanada Keystone XL Pipeline and Enbridge’s planned international pipelines through the Great Lakes.” Save the Dunes claimed that a proposed tar sands-linked pipeline in their area “crosses 60 miles of Northwest Indiana through Lake, Porter, LaPorte, and St. Joseph Counties”while the Western Organization of Resource Councils argued that “TransCanada, a Canadian company, wants to build a 36-inch pipeline to carry up to 37.8 million gallons daily of dirty tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada through Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska and on to the Texas Gulf Coast.”viii

36 Another ‘consonant narrative’ was a basic mistrust of the part of oil industry brought on by its fundamental lack of integrity. In order to construct this narrative, the petition combined a deeply impersonal rhetoric, i.e., “oil giant Imperial Oil” (33), with specific actions on the part of industry leaders. Thus, the petition pointed out that “at the time of the Kalamazoo spill, Enbridge’s CEO denied that the pipeline was carrying tar sands oil. As investigations began to reveal that the substance was indeed tar sands, the CEO finally admitted that the leak was tar sands oil” (32). Third party evidence, including that offered by authoritative governmental institutions, was also used to legitimate the underlying claim of unethical behavior. For instance, the petition said that “in evaluating the Kalamazoo spill, the NTSB [National Transportation Safety Board] was highly critical of this discretion afforded pipeline operators. NTSB concluded that largely as a result of past regulatory changes made at the urging of the American Petroleum Institute” the requirements for reporting spills is ambiguous, a situation

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that favors the industry (45). At the same time, the “PHMSA [the Department of Transportation’s Pipeline Hazardous Materials Safety Administration] allows operators ample discretion to determine the adequacy of their own emergency plans with little checks to ensure those plans are indeed adequate” (49). Finally, The process around approval [of emergency spill plans] is also critically lacking. There is no public review, no opportunity for input or comment, and PHMSA is horribly understaffed. For the Enbridge pipeline that spilled in Kalamazoo, the spill response plan was approved a mere two weeks after it was submitted. The plan was approved based on company submissions attesting to the adequacy of the plan. No supplemental information was sought in PHMSA’s lightning-fast approval of the plan. (51)

37 These frames were combined with a narrative of risk and uncertainty in order to further undermine the believability and trustworthiness of the industry. The sense of uncertain, but no doubt very real, harm was heightened by the petition’s assertion that “diluted bitumen further presents many troubling unknowns that complicate spill response” (34), including the fact that such “leaks in diluted bitumen pipelines are often more difficult to detect than leaks in pipelines carrying just conventional crude… [so] real leaks may go unnoticed” (38). The result is an environment where individuals face imminent danger, the reality of which was demonstrated in the “tragic” Kalamazoo spill where “toxic fumes forced local residents to flee from their homes and over 300 people suffered from immediate illness due to benzene exposure” (36).

38 A rhetoric of danger being unleashed by irresponsible, large, and inherently threatening corporate actors was also used by numerous coalition partners, again with references specific to the local space occupied by the various participants. Environment Maine, for instance, referred to the “Canadian oil giant Enbridge,” a choice of words that coincided with New Hampshire Audubon’s reference to “Enbridge, Canada’s mega- oil pipeline company.” Environment Maine also referred to the company’s plan to use “an antiquated oil pipeline that passes right next to Sebago Lake to transport highly corrosive tar sands oil from Canada to Casco Bay for export,” a spill from which and into “Sebago watershed, or near any of Maine’s waterways, would be utterly disastrous.”ix Michigan’s Student Sustainability Coalition projected a similar degree of irresponsibility in its assertion that “our nation, world, and climate face serious threats from the TransCanada Keystone XL Pipeline and Enbridge’s planned international pipelines through the Great Lakes.”

39 While such rhetorical themes served to link “previously existing organizational frames in some complementary fashion” (Croteau and Hicks 253), the petition carefully avoided mentioning frames that could threaten the coherence of the coalitions’ messaging by offending local sensibilities. For instance, many of the signees invoked the paramount significance of local control as an important means of protecting land and its associated environmental attributes, i.e., clean air and water, healthy forests, and so on.x The Conservation Law Foundation (New England) highlighted the fact that “at town meetings across the state earlier this month, 29 Vermont communities passed resolutions opposing the transportation and use of tar sands oil.” The Midwest Environmental Advocates evinced a similar idea, arguing that “every citizen has the potential to make a difference,” while the Northern Plains Resource Council (Montana) described itself as “a grassroots conservation and family agriculture group that organizes Montana citizens to protect our water quality, family farms and ranches, and unique quality of life.”

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40 Despite its significance to many of the signees, a rhetoric of local control was avoided in the petition, perhaps because underneath this apparent agreement is a disagreement both fundamental and deeply felt, namely, a disagreement over the very thing that is to be protected and the vehicles that might be used in the course of its protection. On the one hand, Dakota Rural Action claimed that “South Dakota landowners have proven and earned their right to private property rights over multiple generations through their responsible stewardship” (emphasis added). The Nebraska Farmers Union also referenced threats to private property by calling attention to the “Nebraska Easement Action Team, a non-profit landowner rights group with the purpose of creating a standard and strong Nebraska easement designed to protect Nebraskans from all oil pipelines and oil pipeline companies.” The Northern Plains Resource Council was even more explicit in its mission of helping landowners in the path of the pipeline to protect their land and water, as well as their legal rights. Thus, Northern Plains and their affiliates Dawson Resource Council and McCone Agricultural Protection Organization, created the Northern Plains Pipeline Landowners Group as a means of organizing landowners along the route to help them gain better information and negotiate from a stronger position, including hiring a lawyer to represent it in negotiations with TransCanada.

41 An emphasis on private property and landowners’ rights contrasted sharply with a rhetoric of public lands used by many signees located in the Eastern part of the country. For these participants, the notion of public lands was a core frame that implies a number of fundamental values, including open access, responsibility to future generations independent of private ownership, and an ethic of “community decision- making to protect and restore local rivers, lakes and wetlands” (Freshwater Future). Thus, for Environment Maine, the primary danger of a tar sands-bearing pipeline is the threat it poses to a long-treasured public asset, namely, Lake Sabago, a body of water that has been “a favorite place to swim, boat, and fish for generations of Mainers” and is a source of “clean drinking water to the Greater Portland Area.” In much the same fashion, Indiana-based Save the Dunes concluded that it is the lack of appropriate safety measures and the general irresponsibility of pipeline operators that threatens the “health of our communities” and jointly shared waterways.

42 These varying perspectives were not simply disagreements over language; instead, as suggested by Snow and Benford regarding the attributive role of a framing narrative, they reflected both fundamentally different views of the problem and the remedies seen as appropriate to addressing it. A ruptured pipeline, for instance, was seen by members of Environment Maine as a threat to the right of the public to enjoy a recreational resource not only now but for many generations to come. Faced with the potential destruction of such lands, designating a proposed pipeline route as public land in order to restrict the private use of the land is a perfectly reasonable response. To constituents of Dakota Rural Action, however, the threat is largely related to a pipeline’s potential to damage private property and a landowner’s ability to use property as they see fit. In this case, appropriate remedies might include greater compensation to individual landowners or revising eminent domain laws such that property owners would have a much greater say in determining whether a pipeline will be allowed to pass through their land.

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6. Conclusion

43 For the constellation of organizations committed to reversing or slowing the development of Canadian tar sands, space clearly matters. National boundaries still present a significant line of demarcation for organizational action, and the location of a particular piece of infrastructure often compels organizations to seek out partners that are in relatively close proximity. While large, national or international organizations may be crucial in facilitating and broadening the range of organizational participation, it is the residents of actual places who suffer the direct harms imposed by the development process and who define the limits of space pertinent to many collaborative activities.

44 Equally important is rhetorical space. In an oppositional field composed of widely divergent organizations, participants in a collective activity must have the ability to develop a variety of messages using a language that speaks to their members and the diversity of interests they represent. They must do so, of course, while maintaining an essential adherence to the larger themes or the overarching master narrative embedded in a particular collective activity as well as the rhetoric and viewpoints espoused by their partners. As demonstrated in the petition calling for new pipeline standards and regulations, such rhetorical maneuvering is a vital and necessary aspect of collective activity. Whether the challenges imposed by space, place, and language can be successfully addressed in the future will, no doubt, play a very large role in determining the viability of an oppositional network that is only now taking shape.

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APPENDIXES

Appendix A

SUMMARY OF COLLECTIVE ACTIVITIES C1 10-day NoKXL comments sprint

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C2 Letter to Harold Geisel, Deputy Inspector General, Office of Inspector General, U.S. Department of State re selection of ERM for third-party contractor to evaluate Keystone DEIS C3 Letter to U.S. House members re H.R. 3 sponsored by Representative Lee Terry exempting Keystone from environmental review C4 The All Risk, No Reward Coalition C5 Shell’s Jackpine expansion project C6 Pipeline #9 reversal signees of letter to Canadian National Energy Board C7 Contributing organizations to NRDC Report on Trailbreaker project C8 National coalition on pipeline standards C9 Gary Protti appointment as Alberta energy regulator C10 NYC Rally C11 Alberta Clipper scoping comments C12 Pipe Up Against Enbridge C13 Keystone Climate Analysis C14 Tar Sands Solutions Network C15 A Rally for the Great Lakes C16 Letter re railroad safety standards C17 Letter to Kerry re REM conflict of interest C18 Letter to Alberta Energy Regulator re CNRL blowouts C19 Draw the Line protest C20 Letter to Obama–‘No Deal Mr. President’ C21 Letter to Assistant Secretary Linick–Department of State re conflict of interest C22 Defend Our Climate actions C23 NRDC Report on Tar Sands Oil and the Northeast C24 Letter to Secretary Kerry re Pipelines and joint environmental review C25 Telepresser post-KXL EIS release C26 Say No to KXL vigils

Appendix B

COMPOSITION OF ACTIVITIES

Activity # Total # # of Single % of Single # of Top Eight Joiners % of Top Eight Joiners

of Groups Issue Joiners Issue Groups

C1 19 3 15% 7 37%

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C2 12 0 0% 7 58%

C3 21 1 4% 7 33%

C4 9 4 44% 1 11%

C5 48 15 31% 4 8%

C6 17 1 5% 3 18%

C7 19 6 31% 4 21%

C8 29 8 27% 2 7%

C9 35 11 31% 0 0%

C10 20 16 80% 2 10%

C11 15 5 33% 2 13%

C12 23 7 30% 0 0%

C13 6 0 0% 6 100%

C14 28 3 10% 7 25%

C15 11 6 54% 2 18%

C16 53 22 41% 2 4%

C17 26 3 11% 6 23%

C18 22 0 0% 0 0%

C19 17 4 23% 6 35%

C20 23 5 21% 6 26%

C21 22 2 9% 8 36%

C22 32 12 37% 1 3%

C23 16 2 12% 5 31%

C24 15 4 26% 8 53%

C25 10 1 10% 7 70%

C26 17 3 17% 7 41%

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Appendix C

CASE STUDY Action: Citizen Petition Before the United States Department of Transportation, Pipeline Hazardous Materials Safety Administration and the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Participating Organizations: Appalachian Mountain Club Bold Nebraska Conservation Law Foundation Dakota Resource Council Dakota Rural Action Environment Maine Freshwater Future Fresh Energy Great Lakes Environmental Law Center Indigenous Environmental Network Michigan Student Sustainability Coalition Midwest Environmental Advocates Minnesota Conservation Federation Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy National Wildlife Federation Natural Resources Council of Maine Nebraska Farmers Union Nebraska Wildlife Federation New Hampshire Audubon New Hampshire Trout Unlimited New Hampshire Wildlife Federation Northern Plains Resource Council Save the Dunes Sebago Lake Anglers Association Sierra

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NOTES i. There are a number of additional pipelines currently in the planning stages, including Keystone XL, Northern Gateway, Energy East and a variety of related systems. Given the opposition facing many of these proposals, an increasing volume of oil is being transported by rail (see Hoffman, “If the Rivers”). ii. These organizations were 350.org, Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Bold Nebraska (Bold NE), National Wildlife Federation (NWF), Oil Change international (OCI), Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), and Friends of the Earth (FoE). iii. Whether or not such interactions actually occur is fertile ground for future research that would involve a careful analysis of the sequence of participation and the extent to which subsequent participation was determined by prior experiences. iv. Each standard deviational ellipse contains approximately 68 percent of the organizations in each collaborative activity. Three UK-based organizations participated in two of the activities. These were excluded for the analysis, given the geographic bias that would have been introduced into the calculation of the ellipses. v. The exceptions are Bold Nebraska and the Center for Biological Diversity, which has its headquarters in Tucson, Arizona. vi. BP’s Helios Power Campaign, for instance, crafted a host of commercials and websites laden with visual and verbal cues such as “green,” “clean,” “conserve energy,” “reduce waste,” “save the world,” “the environment,” and “eco-friendly” designed to align with the target community’s preexisting beliefs, including a desire to maintain a certain ‘way of life’ defined by consumerism and material satisfaction. Throughout what was by all accounts a very successful campaign, BP sought to convince consumers that small, incremental, and essentially painless actions, or what Smerecnik and Renegar call “capitalistic agency,” were all that were required of a good environmental citizen. vii. All of the quotations below come from the websites of the various organizations listed in the Works Cited. viii. In many other cases, even when there is no explicit mention of the toxic character of tar sands crude, by referencing the organization’s overarching concern with human health and safety and the protection of air and water, there is an implicit link between tar sands and the inevitable degradation of human health and air and water quality. ix. The fact that the oil is for export and hence would benefit a foreign company and consumers outside of the locality only compounds the sense of harm without any corresponding benefit. x. References to local political culture are found throughout the tar sands oppositional community. For instance, the 350.org affiliate Boston-Tar-Sands-Patriots uses a rhetoric that evokes the deepest form of regional identity when they describe themselves as a “group of patriots in the Boston area working together to fight the Keystone XL Pipeline.”

ABSTRACTS

Tar sands oil is rapidly becoming a primary means of powering the world’s petroleum-based economy. Despite some formidable barriers, an oppositional network is developing that spans the

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North American continent. This paper discusses the diverse nature of this opposition through an examination of 26 collective activities involving some 243 organizations. The first part of the analysis discusses the internal characteristics and the network dynamics of these activities; this is followed by a spatial analysis of the relationships among the participant organizations. The final section of the paper suggests that an important mechanism for achieving collaborative integrity in the midst of what are oftentimes very challenging circumstances are carefully elaborated rhetorical frames designed to appeal to a diverse set of key stakeholders and policymakers.

INDEX

Keywords: oppositional networks, regionalism, rhetoric of opposition, tar sands

AUTHORS

JOSEPH JANOCHOSKI University of St. Thomas

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Elastic, Yet Unyielding: The U.S.- Mexico Border and Anzaldúa’s Oppositional Rearticulations of the Frontier

Tereza Jiroutová Kynčlová

1. Introduction

Demarcation lines, separation lines, dividing lines, boundaries, frontiers, borders, and limits constitute some of the most productive concepts in Western thought. By highlighting difference, they give rise to power-laden categorizations based on binary oppositions and thus help to make reality knowable and imply that the knower has mastered control over the content of what is being known. These concepts, however, are at the same time elusive and problematic due to their capacity for rendering invisible and suppressing ambiguities and liminalities that occur in and/or along—to borrow Bhabha’s term—the “in-between” spaces, which defy the clear-cut distinctions supplied by Western dualism (Bhabha 13, 22, 219). Within literary postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and gender studies, it is these “grey zones” that attract attention as they are spaces where meanings and identities are constantly in the process of negotiation, becoming, and struggle for recognition. The border functions as a sign that represents the region of U.S.-Mexicani borderlands as a “contact zone” (Pratt 7-8), which symbolizes the ongoing and expediting alteration of American-ness. It is this region which is heavily identified with the browning of Americaii and it is this region where the founding myths of westward expansion and American exceptionalism get explicitly and strategically rewritten by borderland subjects. The Mexican-U.S. border is also a demarcation line that, as this article shows, in an unprecedented way resists the notion of a national border on a geographical as well as metaphorical level. It inherently stretches across the vastness of the United States as

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its existence penetrates and informs all aspects of American culture and institutions. The border can therefore be perceived as elastic in the way that it poses “a barrier and a zone of violence” for borderland subjects whose identities are readily stereotyped and othered and the space they inhabit is discursively driven off to the margins. Materially, however, the border is unyielding, as borderland subjects’ racialized and gendered bodies “continually [face] crossing the border… anywhere [they go] in the United States” (Aldama 46). Borderland subjectivity is thus characterized by “in-betweenness that goes beyond the reifying effects of national identity” (Ashcroft 20) and in Chicano/a cultural and activist tradition is eloquently framed and performed by mestizaje, i.e., the art of living on the border (in every sense of the word), the ability to navigate in/between/among/ within different cultures, languages, and epistemological systems, and to embody this hybridity consciously and constructively with respect to one’s own racial/ethnic background, gender identity, class belonging, and reflected lived experience. Exemplary rearticulations of the unifying narrative of the frontier that pushes the horizon and the limits of the American nation further West are forcefully portrayed in oppositional Chicana writing and their counter-discursive practices. They are a form of resistance “that uses language of empire to contest the dominant ideologies of colonialism” (Madsen, “Counter-Discursive” 65). In this regard, U.S.-Mexican borderlands are also the site where struggles for meaning and voice make their presence felt since, as Fisher aptly observes, “regionalism is always, in America, part of a civil war within representation” (xiv). Gloria Anzaldúa paradigmatically investigated the border theme in her multigenre book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987). The ways in which the region along the Mexican-U.S. border is represented in her writing are, in what follows, positioned in the context of social structures that inform disparities in a symbolic valuation of difference. These disparities arise from cultural, racial, class, and gender(ed) affinities and therefore shape a viable alternative image of westward expansion that competes with established representations of American history and its foundational narratives. As evidenced by her poem “We Call Them Greasers” (Borderlands156-57),iii Anzaldúa invents a new reading of the so-called civilizing mission in the border area. In this regard, her work partakes in struggles for a rightful representation of borderland experience and subjectivity, which have had a long history of silence. This puts her efforts amidst Fisher’s civil war within representation. Although often included in American literature syllabi, the poem has not—to my knowledge—been frequently analyzed; Sonia Saldívar-Hull’s and Deborah Madsen’s readings are the only exceptions. I therefore draw on the emphasis both authors put on Anzaldúa’s portrayal of colonial violence as a form of subverting canonical images of Western progress and its cultivating enterprise. In addition, however, I offer a gender- sensitive analysis of “We Call Them Greasers” since, as Loomba reminds us, the structures of colonialism and patriarchy are thouroughly intertwined and bear on women as well as men (195). I treat the poem as an example of a rendition of Anzaldúa’s theory of mestiza consciousness, for the communication of theory does not, according to Anzaldúa, depend on the genre utilized. Thus, her mestiza consciousness, I argue, is an epistemology applicable for reconceptualizing difference which is performed both by the reflexive disruption of borders of social categories and by rupturing borders of

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genres and modes of expression traditionally adopted for the (re)articulation of one’s self and one’s community. “We Call Them Greasers” fittingly illustrates this argument.

2. Border and Genre

The physical presence of the border that separates the prosperity of the United States of America from the poverty of Mexico has fostered a sensitivity to diversity, difference, and otherness in Chicana writers to such an extent that the core of their work, both literary and theoretical, is the exploration of difference—be it the various differences along the axes of race, language, religion, gender, class, and cultural conditions, or the concept of difference itself as an epistemological and philosophical prism. The ways in which borders by their very nature produce difference are elaborated on by Anzaldúa in richly symbolic language and in her rife metaphorization of the border as a wound that functions as a sign for pain and iniquity arising from the modes of othering the dividing line allows for: Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants.… Gringos in the U.S. Southwest consider the inhabitants of the borderlands transgressors, aliens—whether they possess documents or not, whether they’re Chicanos, Indians or Blacks. Do not enter, trespassers will be raped, maimed, strangled, gassed, shot.… Tension grips the inhabitants of the borderlands like a virus. (Borderlands 25-26) Anzaldúa’s tense definition of the U.S.-Mexican border can be read not only as a list of phenomena of abject undesirability, but also as the author’s feminist standpoint theory: a means to re-evaluate power interests and thus attach value to identities kept out of the limits of “normality” and “acceptability.” Linking the deconstruction of discriminatory binaries to lived experience has opened the door to the emancipation and empowerment of overlooked social groups, such as—in the case of the discussed region—Chicanos and Chicanas. In light of Anzaldúa’s belief that local and localized theories—not methods lifted from white American feminism, which, along with African American and Native American women, Chicanas have found to be insufficient and conditioned by an unequal distribution of power—are best representative of the material and symbolic barriers put in the way of discriminated groups, the Chicana (mainly feminist) community arrived at an activist stance. Self-reflexive, localized theory that is aimed at social change therefore constitutes a quintessential trait of Chicana literary and artistic production. Thus, the situated quality of the Chicana project can be summarized in the following words by Anzaldúa: “Necesitamos teorías that will rewrite history using race, class, gender and ethnicity as categories of analysis, theories that cross borders, that blur boundaries—new kinds of theories with new theorizing methods.… We need to give up the notion that there is a ‘correct’ way to write theory” (Making Face xxv-xxvi). The author’s resistance to established modes of theorizing is, for instance, mirrored in the unconventional composition and methodology of Borderlands/La Frontera. The text is divided into two parts, the latter being a poetry collection designed to lend interpretative credence to the arguments introduced in the first section of the work, in which legends, analytic essays, and descriptions of personal experiences

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mingle with the genre of autohistorías. Autohistorías do not engage in a causal, linear, and chronological explication of historical events, but describe events with both a real and a symbolic impact on one’s own lived experience and/or the life of one’s community. As Anzaldúa coins it, “Autohistoría is a term… to describe the genre of writing about one’s personal and collective history using fictive elements, a sort of fictionalized autobiography or memoir; an autohistoría-teoría is a personal essay that theorizes” (“now let us shift” 578). At the same time, the genre works to outline the realm of possibilities in the field of internal emancipation and the construction of one’s own personal spirituality. This, in Anzaldúa’s view, is achieved through a deliberate and diligent analysis of one’s own preconceptions, as well as the ways in which we experience our physical being in the world. Moreover, in Borderlands/La Frontera, autohistorías help the author reinterpret the history of the region of the Mexican-U.S. border through the lens of power relations and the categories of gender, race, and class, as seen, for example, in the passage “El cruzar del mojado/Illegal Crossing” (Borderlands31-35). Here, the treatment of illegal Mexican immigrants by the U.S. Border Patrol is read against the author’s knowledge of the habitus within which both, the incomers and officers, operate. In “We Call Them Greasers,” the intersecting categories of race, class, and gender provide a scaffolding upon which Anzaldúa builds a story that looks at the American foundational myth of westward expansion and colonial border proliferation from the perspective of a dominant protagonist. A white male colonizer narrates a single story of how he was able to acquire new land, thereby successfully complying with the imperatives of colonialism. The fact that he shamelessly speaks about the violence inflicted in the process on local farmers by his helpers and himself on the one hand testifies to the power he enjoys owing to his racial, class, and gender identity. On the other hand, it speaks of the power of the institutionalized discourse of civilizing mission that was employed to justify the colonization of Western territories by European Americans to the detriment of Native peoples or people(s) otherwise defined as Other to the American Self. However, what makes the poem remarkable is the fact that—despite the perspective being the colonizer’s—the effect of the story is reserved for the Chicano/a historical experience. This experience, then, corresponds with Anzaldúa’s appeal to refrain from internalized established practices regarding theory being written (or thought out or done) in a “correct” way. In this respect, this article perceives “We Call Them Greasers” as theory, for Anzaldúa incorporates her awareness of structural inequalities in its narrative at the background of which the border functions as a fault line illuminating ideological, cultural, epistemological, racial, and gender(ed) differences. While discussing the complex reality of the border region along the Rio Grande/Río Bravo, one must keep in mind the fact that the region has, from the Chicano perspective, historically been a site of double colonization (Acuña, Occupied 29). The original colonizing instance was the conquest of the indigenous peoples of Central America by Spanish conquistadores in the early 16th century; the later act of colonialism was the annexation of the Northern territories of Mexico by the U.S. in the mid-19th century. As illustrated by the term mestiza consciousness pioneered by Anzaldúa (Borderlands 99-113), the history and the cultural diversity on the U.S.-Mexican borderlands challenge not only the dualism characteristic of Western thought, but also

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the notion of the ethnically and culturally inclusive American Dream of immigration. The expansive Western frontier that historically exemplified the dominant culture of European settlement on the American continent is now—with the rise of what Fisher calls “new regionalism” (xiv)iv—concentrated in contemporary understandings of the Mexican-U.S. border. The latter are informed by Anzaldúa’s conceptualization of the borderlands as a space that cultivates mestiza consciousness, which is capable of transcending the original binary idea of the border. The following lines sketch out Anzaldúa’s attempts at dismantling discriminatory duality: As a mestiza I have no country… yet all countries are mine because I am every woman’s sister or potential lover. (As a lesbian I have no race, my own people disclaim me; but I am all races because there is the queer of me in all races.) I am cultureless because, as a feminist, I challenge the collective cultural/religious male- derived beliefs… yet I am cultured because I am participating in the creation of yet another culture, a new story to explain the world and our participation in it, a new value system with images and symbols that connect us to each other and to the planet. Soy un amasamiento, I am an act of kneading, of uniting, and joining that not only has produced both a creature of darkness and a creature of light, but also a creature that questions the definitions of light and dark and gives them new meanings. (Borderlands102-103) Anzaldúa’s concept of mestiza consciousness thus points to the constant becoming of one’s identity while pointing at the borderland subjects’ need of negotiating symbolic and discursive violence induced by Western binarisms.

3. Gender(ed) Identities and Colonial Encounters

Apart from reinterpreting national belonging, mestiza consciousness questions established notions of dichotomic gender identity as well. For instance, the social order of Mexican-American or Chicano society to a great extent reflects the patriarchal tenets of Mexican machismo, i.e., excessive manifestations of male dominance towards women (Baca Zinn 25; Castro 147-148). However, these macho traits are permanently undermined by virtue of their being performed by a masculinity that bears within itself the burden of double colonial conquest and is thus placed in a feminine role in relation to the white, heterosexual, American man (Loomba 128-129; Baca Zinn 25). Moreover, as Baca Zinn argues, an overt—at times almost parodic—performance of masculine traits in Chicanos may point to social structures that systematically block access to other sources of masculine identity. In this regard, machismo may be viewed as an “adaptive characteristic,” i.e., a means for resisting racial oppression (Baca Zinn 30), which on the symbolical level further subverts the consistency and power position of such a type of manhood. In other words, masculine aggression may mask internal weakness and/or lack of status. Chicano masculinity as a colonized masculinity inherently personifies the “forbidden” mixing of races, attesting to Spaniards’ “theft” of indigenous women from the domain of their colonized counterparts (Frank 29; Paz 65-87). Anzaldúa exposes this historical inheritance of Chicano manhood in her explicit story-of-rape poem “We Call Them Greasers.” When interpreted from a gender-sensitive, rather than a colonialist perspective (as shown above), the poem narrates an incident in which a husband is forced to watch the spectacle of his wife’s brutal rape and murder executed by a white Anglo. Because the Chicano husband in the poem is tied to a mesquite tree—in Saldívar- Hull’s interpretation the Chicano version of the African-American hanging tree (75)—

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he is deprived of any sort of agency and is made to be a passive, powerless onlooker of his wife’s doom, and the subject of victimization carried out by a man who not only represents the colonizer’s political, economic, and cultural domination, but also embodies hegemonic masculinity (Connell and Messerschmidt). The performance of hegemonic masculinity, as Connell points out, is not viewed as normal in terms of its statistical occurrence, but in the sense that it conveys a normative ideal to which only a minority of men can be compared and measured. Hegemonic masculinity is thought of as an embodiment of “currently the most honored way of being a man” in any given context; it also requires all men to position themselves in relation to it. Hegemony, in Connell’s terms, does not essentially imply violence, but rather a preponderance that is anchored in any given culture and its institutions (Connell and Messerschmidt 832). The Chicano in “We Call Them Greasers” is symbolically emasculated. He lacks power for—as a racialized, colonized man—he has, in the eyes of the Anglo man, never had any. If Mexican-American or Chicano masculinityv is already situated as the Other within the model of controlling Anglophone (and implicitly heterosexual and white) masculinity, the marginalization of femininity within the same androcentric societal structure is further exacerbated. Androcentric oppression is present in both the Anglophone tradition of white America and the Chicano/a community. In other words, the subjectivity of the nameless “brown”vi woman in Anzaldúa’s poem is virtually erased, for she is purely instrumental. The patriarchal system renders her the Other to both—her husband and the white colonizer. Her objectification, however, finds its ultimate expression in the rape scene. Disturbingly, it is not this violent, dehumizing act itself that effaces her personal integrity and subjectivity, but the fact that the usurper employs the Chicana’s femininity as a tool, as an instrument to humiliate and degrade the Chicano man: She lay under me whimpering. I plowed into her hard kept thrusting and thrusting felt him watching from the mesquite tree heard him keening like a wild animal in that instant I felt such contempt for her round face and beady black eyes like an Indian’s. Afterwards I sat on her face until her arms stopped flailing, didn’t want to waste a bullet on her (Borderlands156-157). As Saldívar-Hull fittingly argues, rape in the poem “is an institutionalized strategy in the war to disempower Chicano men” (75). Moreover, this sort of institutionalization is underscored by the fact that the violated and murdered woman has no name, therefore her lot might be read as a universal one for all women under both patriarchal and colonial rules.

4. Metaphors of/on the Border

After the annexation of the territory of Northern Mexico and the solidification of the border between Mexico and the U.S. along the Rio Grande by the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, the formerly Mexican inhabitants of the region were suddenly

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governed by the American side and became, due to their mestizo/mestiza racial origins, their linguistic competence, and their class belonging, de facto second-category American citizens, since the incorporation of Mexican Americans or Chicanos/as into the U.S. nation would complicate the supremacist imperative for maintaining European racial purity (Madsen, “The West” 379). The United States became the second colonizing power after Spain. This moment can retrospectively be read as a defining one with respect to Chicano/a national consciousness. Under the banner of the Chicano Movement, the descendants of the annexed Mexicans would go on to forge the “Bronze Nation” (Alurista 1). To Chicanos and Chicanas,the symbolic mental map of the American Southwest would become a native land colonized by white American culture, while their strategically construed mythical homeland of Aztlán remains more or less beyond the borders of immediate American control: in the ancestral home, i.e., in the region of Mexico. Under the influence of the border, the economic, but even more so the social, cultural, linguistic, religious, and epistemological diversity reproduced and underscored in the lived reality of borderland subjects as well as in their literary production represents a radical re-evaluation of prevailing notions of American identity. The dominant notion is based on the myth of immigration-as-homogenization, in which European immigrants are those who build a new American nation as an extension of forging a new life for themselves. The traditional immigrant “Dream of Ellis Island” (Tinnemeyer 475) is, however, deeply challenged by borderland subjects: by mestizo/a Chicanos and Chicanas, but also by members of Native communities, the original targets of colonialism. They all represent an immigration that is never conventionally “completed” (e.g. by acquiring legal citizenship, cultural integration, or an assimilated status), for they cannot by definition “land in America”; they never “arrive.” Borderland subjects have been present from the beginning. They take a conscious stance against the idea of American-ness as the product of the proverbial melting pot. Chicanos/as have never been (im)migrants, as they never crossed the U.S. border: the border crossed them.vii Thus, their non-(im)migrant belonging makes them invisible and thus uncategorizable within the concept of ideally white American-ness with a history of immigration from Europe. The employment of metaphor for the conceptualization of borderlands in Anzaldúa’sBorderlands/La Frontera opens new ways for understanding the complex region and Chicana identity. Mestiza consciousness, an epistemology generated by the proximity of the border, represents an emancipatory and self-reflecting program with the opportunity to theoretically grasp the situation in the U.S.-Mexican borderlands and to deconstruct the discriminatory binary oppositions implied by the Western conceptualization of “the border.” As already suggested, the Mexican-U.S. border operates not only on the level of its real, physical presence. Harkening back to one of the cornerstones of American cultural identity—the myth of the westward American frontier as proof of the success of the American conquest/settlement project—the border instantly takes on a metaphorical aspect that ties it to the notion of the American “us” and the Mexican “them” (Quintana 16). On the metaphorical level, the border in question is “infinitely elastic” (Aldama 46), allowing us to extend the expression “the American borderlands” to all regions, including internal ones, that show resistance to Euro-American cultural dominance. Among the symptoms of Euro-American cultural supremacy is an unshakeable belief in

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westward expansion, as celebrated by Frederick Jackson Turner and others, which gives rise to the American national narrative with its goal to legitimize the conquest of indigenous cultures: the manifest destiny lifted from Puritan tradition. This myth endows Americans of European origin with rule-power over the continent as determined by divine providence, and designates them bearers of a strict code of individualism that enables them to successfully face the trials of the New World and, thanks to this experience of adversity, become the new American nation with functional democratic institutions (Turner 5-36). This nation is, however, defined solely within the bounds of European ethnicity and cultural tradition—and any nation defined in such a way that it rests on the values of white androcentrism is “located within a powerful discourse of Anglo-Saxon superiority and inevitable racial destiny” (Madsen, “The West” 381). According to Slotkin, the Western American frontier stands for one of the major myths that generally inform the American identity—which, from the perspective of the (post)colonial center, is the supposedly desirable white, masculine, and heterosexual tradition—including its mythical belief in a vacant, uninhabited, wild continent ripe for the settling Europeans’ mission of civilization and enculturation into something “new.” This myth also serves to legitimize the violent suppression of the allegedly “uncivilized” “natives,”viiiwho are consequently labeled as a “tame” indigenous population and linked to femininity in opposition to the dominating masculinity of the white settlers. In “We Call Them Greasers,” as discussed above, the concept of the emasculated Chicano becomes evident in the lynching scene of the tied up farmer and husband who witnesses his wife’s rape and demise. The atrocities of colonialism portrayed by Anzaldúa in the poem can take place precisely because the discourse of racial supremacy and entitlement vested by the divine authority constructs an ideology of imperialism which is meant to legitimize the deeds carried out under its banner. Essentially, this is a tautological logic which is not unlike the workings of the discourse of orientalism detected by Edward Said. The heavenly assignment of manifest destiny is performed by the Anglo colonizer’s implied duress arising from his authority, which makes the Mexican-American or Chicano land owners behave as if they were in the presence of a deity (see Saldívar-Hull 75). Their gestures may be viewed as showing respect and/or fear. The poem reads: “they took off their hats / placed them over their hearts / lowered their eyes in my presence” (156). Although the colonizer’s assumption of such a god-like position equals blasphemy in Christian terms, the poem makes it clear from the matter-of-fact depiction of the treatment of the Chicanos that the Anglo perpetrator’s confidence in his actions is unshakable and his power unmatchable to such an extent that he feels no need to attenuate his explicit language of scorn, contempt for the “brown” people, and an air of boredom he is experiencing while dealing with them and their mild protests: “cowards, they were, no backbone / … oh, there were a few troublemakers / … it was a laughing stock” (Borderlands156). The narrator’s choice of words nearly makes it seem as if the criminal seizure of land from the hands of the farmers is actually a bothering task for the Anglo figure; not because he is not enjoying the exercise of his white privilege, but because the people he must dispossess of land are not even deemed as worth his effort. In his eyes they pose an obstacle to the civilizing mission of westward expansion. The interjection “oh” also emphasizes the steadfast conviction about the justification of the colonial project: on the one hand, it may be read as fleeing reminiscence of an event that is, within the mission, so generic that it cannot be easily recollected, on the other

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hand it implies Anzaldúa’s attempt at bringing into memory and discourse the representation of events which were overlooked by the dominant versions of history. The fact that Anzaldúa writes about dispossession, violence, rape, and murder significantly reinterprets and reshapes the history of the Western frontier. She is interested in what I have called above “the grey zone,” i.e., the events that occurred between the invention of the frontier destined to be pushed west and its assumed closure. Anzaldúa’s poem does exactly what (in Fisher’s term) new regionalism aims to uncover and bring into awareness: she confronts us with withheld views of colonization and with previously invisibilized images of both physical and discursive violence. The fact that in “We Call Them Greasers” the Anglo usurper does not differentiate among the Chicano rancheros, whose land he strives to confiscate under false pretenses of unpaid taxes, testifies to how, in Anzaldúa’s view, colonization deprived the colonized people of their subjectivity and relegated them into the sphere beyond the human. The Chicanos in the poem lack names and the Anglo narrator systematically uses the third person plural pronoun to speak of the farmers. Thereby he first deletes their individual identity and then he turns their suffering into a universal experience of the colonized people, discursively making such an experience prescriptive for any other clash with any colonial power they may ever face. The farmers who are eventually chased from their land become voiceless because of their linguistic background and because of the fact that within the context of American colonial expansion they lack a discourse in which they could articulate their rights and be heard (Spivak 308-309). If some of them who “had land grants / and appealed to the courts” nevertheless manage to resist the colonizing despotism, they are shut up by the institutional tyranny that does not recognize Spanish as a language, “them not even knowing English” (Borderlands156). Saldívar-Hull sums up the silencing as follows: “For the Anglo- American imperialist, literacy in Spanish or any other nonstatus language is illiteracy” (75). As Slotkin points out, the westward progression of the American frontier has been part of American national identity since the 17th century and related to the myth that the expected cultural regeneration of the continent could be realized by violence (Slotkin 5; Furniss 22). Therefore, when Anzaldúa portrays the effects of westward expansion as brutal, violent, and dehumanizing, she thwarts the ideal of westward progress as a carrier of a civilizing mission, yet she complies with Slotkin’s thesis in regards to the penetrative violence. Despite this congruence, however, her approach in general by no means agrees to the idea of violence having any regenerative potential whatsoever. If regeneration is demanded, in Western dualistic thinking it inevitably reacts to previous degeneration. Such binarism essentially links people of color with impurity and contamination, whereas dominant whiteness is aligned with purity and clearly defined edges and/or borders of identity. In other words, regeneration through violence poses a discriminatory potential for lethal practices. In this respect, the alarming outcome of Anzaldúa’s poem is grounded in a simple, but immensely efficient idea: a woman of color addresses the racial values of American colonialism through a white man’s voice but she assigns the story to the Chicanos’/as’ experience and their current lives on the border and “in-between.” Anzaldúa, through the manner in which the poem is composed and formally executed, positions the American and Chicano/a perspectives next to each other. Thus, as Madsen observes, the work tells two stories at once: “a story of colonial dispossession

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and a story of the westward advance of American civilization.… The poem then articulates what Paul de Man called an ‘aporia’—an irresolvable contradiction between two logical positions” (“Counter-Discursive” 67).Anzaldúa, however, does not seek a final solution to this encumbrance; such contradiction is the reality of mestiza consciousness. Further, Slotkin’s theoretical outlook on the westward frontier as a myth is important precisely because it identifies the functions of the border on the level of metaphor and mythology. By means of repetitive and constantly replicated cultural myths, collective historical experience is codified into a set of standardized and generally recognizable (national) narratives and metaphors, symbols and relations. As such, cultural myth does not explicitly describe a historical experience but, drawing on a rich palette of established metaphors and symbolic expressions, builds a kind of collectively construed idea of a national—or collective—identity (Slotkin 7; Furniss 9; Anderson; Bhabha). The moment the westward American frontier and the border separating Mexico from the United States—portrayed countless times by a concrete wall, metal barriers, barbed wire, electronically operated cameras, and other surveillance equipment—transform from geographical fault lines into a social concept represented by the aforementioned signifiers (among others), the border loses its real, traceable position. It becomes, to recall Deleuze and Guattari, deterritorialized and displaced (507-510). The border thus stretches and can be detected everywhere (see Aldama). As I have already argued, the geographical border has become a metaphorical concept applicable to all categories of social organization, with an emphasis on culturally construed, yet rigidly policed norms. Along with this deterritorialization, more and more locations and subjects appear that resist such strict division into categories or mix cross-categorical boundaries. The metaphorical displacement of the border paradoxically brings into focus the hitherto unnoticed heterogeneity of American society, made yet more prominent by the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Previously disregarded ethnic minorities gradually develop political and activist platforms—in the case of Chicanos/as, the most prominent is the nationalist (and also significantly androcentric) Chicano Movement orEl Movimiento (NietoGomez 98; Quintana 19). The Movement makes it possible for Chicanos/as to enter the discourse of white, middle-class, patriarchal, and heterosexual American-ness and at the same time to subvert the pantheon of traits traditionally considered to be “American.” Those traits are thus shown to have only masked a different America: an America that is multilayered and vastly hybridized, yet at the same time rife with cultural, linguistic, and racial discrimination, an America in which more than a little emotional energy has been invested into the coercive maintenance of borders of all kinds.

5. Hybridity and Mestiza Consciousness

It is precisely the double traumatic experience of discursive and cultural disenfranchisement tied to the institutional discrimination of the Chicano/a tradition that drives Chicanos and Chicanas into the ambivalent, discomforting, and hybrid space of the U.S.-Mexican border (Bhabha 7, 112). On the Mexican side of the border, the Chicano/a existence is stigmatized as it is thought to represent an Americanized and therefore alienated Mexican experience (agringado/a),while on the American side

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Chicanos’/as’ (and other Native peoples’) agrarian tradition and strong ties to land as well as their racial mestizo/mestiza otherness were exploited by American colonizers as a means of oppression. The colonized subjects were made to “appear as invaders in their own land, as enemies of Western progress” (Madsen, “The West” 377), which are techniques that facilitated both the dispossession of their land and the colonizers’ unwillingness to consider people of color as humans. Such a racial aspect can again be illustrated by “We Call Them Greasers.” Beside the dehumanization arising from racial otherness in the white usurper’s lines relating to the raped woman “I felt such contempt for her / round face and beady black eyes like an Indian’s” (157), there is another method of othering. The farmers and their families are likened to animals in the line “heard him keening like a wild animal” or as in “some loaded their chickens children wives and pigs / into rickety wagons,” where omitted punctuation renders domestic animals and family members on the level of the same, i.e., worthless value. The utter debasement of the raped woman then lies in the way she is murdered: “I sat on her face until her arms stopped flailing / didn’t want to waste a bullet on her” (156), which is a portrayal of death that goes way beyond conventional and acceptable methods of animal slaughter. The colonial dispossession of land and its securing in the hands of the colonizer also bears sexual and gender connotations. Newly acquired territories were associated with virgin lands to be conquered by male explorers and settlers and became a terrain where masculinity was put to test. This is why images of sexual assault and violence are frequently associated with Western progress and processes of colonization in general. Kolodny calls such representations “psychosexual dramas” (xiii). Not only does the rape scene in Anzaldúa’s poem, by the same token and as I have already argued, portray the victory of white, colonizing masculinity over the racialized masculinity of the Chicano farmer or the dehumanization of the land workers whom “[the colonizer] found… when [he] came [there]” (156). Most importantly, it shows a totalizing crusade of white masculine power subduing the feminine, i.e., land, colored skin, and a woman herself. Entities associated with femininity are replaced with androcentric culture and Euro-American, capitalist notions of land ownership as “the white colonizer rejects [the Chicanos’] collective farming techniques, cultural remnants of indigenous tribal traditions of the mestizo” (Saldívar-Hull 75), when he says “they didn’t even own the land but shared it” (156). The border, being the neuralgic point of the Chicano/a identity, is portrayed by Anzaldúa as an infernal generator of pain, caused by the dualism of Western thinking. At the same time, however, as Anzaldúa notes along with Bhabha, the border can also give rise to subversive yet simultaneously productive acts. While the border serves as a rationalization and legitimization of the disenfranchisement described earlier, it can also be transformed by critical reflection into a springboard for a new epistemology, such as Anzaldúa’s mestiza consciousness. Anzaldúa calls the demarcation line between the two countries—and metaphorically between American and Mexican identity, between masculinity and femininity, and between other binary oppositions—her home. In her figurative language, this home is portrayed through painful imagery such as a “1,950 mile long open wound” and “thin edge of barbed wire,” its border along the Rio Grande being “una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds”—but it is also a space where there is potential for the birth of some new,

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previously unknown quality (Borderlands 25). In Anzaldúa’s metaphorical words, the life blood of both of the neighboring worlds “form[s] a third country” (25). As suggested by Bhabha’s parallel to this situation, the role of culture in the borderlands is determined by “an encounter with ‘newness’ that is not part of the continuum of past and present [and that] creates a sense of the new as an insurgent act of cultural translation” (7). By locating what is new as well as what is past in an in- between space, a reinterpretation of both becomes possible. According to Bhabha, everything begins on the border. Anzaldúa’s borderlands and Bhabha’s “space in- between” can thus be interpreted as synonyms that contain the hybrid complexity of multiple emotional investments into all—not necessarily just two—cultures and positions relevant to any borderlands subjects and their intersecting, sometimes mutually incompatible, loyalties. On hybridity, Bhabha adds: “Hybridity is the sign of the productivity of colonial power, its shifting forces and fixities; it is the name for the strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal…. [H]ybrid is the articulation of the ambivalent space… a negative transparency” (112).An important aspect of Anzaldúa’s concept of mestiza consciousness is the fact that, in the first instance, it is based on the contextualized lived experience of a Chicana lesbian discriminated against on the basis of ethnicity, culture, and gender, a woman who came from an exceedingly poor background and who battled severe health problems throughout her life. More broadly, Anzaldúa identifies the causes of the social exclusion that she and her ethnic group have faced—but even in this area, various androcentric and hierarchical practices that disadvantage women persist, and Anzaldúa criticizes those as well. This puts her in yet another kind of symbolic borderlands: her criticism constitutes friendly fire to Chicanos, making Anzaldúa seem “disloyal” to the community. As her quote below suggests, however, discrimination and exclusion are the byproducts of the system of binaries imposed by Western epistemology, resulting even in the kind of androcentrism criticized by Anzaldúa and others, and so it is necessary to deconstruct the effects of such a system in this area as well: The work of mestiza consciousness is to break down the subject-object duality that keeps her a prisoner and to show in the flesh and through the images in her work how duality is transcended. The answer to the problem between the white race and the colored, between males and females, lies in healing the split that originates in the very foundation of our lives, our culture, our languages, our thoughts. A massive uprooting of dualistic thinking in the individual and collective consciousness is the beginning of a long struggle, but one that could, in our best hopes, bring us to the end of rape, of violence, of war. (Borderlands 102) The next phase of Anzaldúa’s work transforms mestiza consciousness as embodied by a single person, a figure of emancipated Chicana womanhood who distances herself from the disciplining patriarchal ideal of a pliable and passive femininity, into a collective epistemological project. Mestiza consciousness should symbolically evaluate the hybrid existence of the Chicano nation, which was born of “racial, ideological, cultural and biological crosspollinization” (Borderlands 99). On the epistemological level, it should collectively accept that these border-crossing mestizo/a identities “are in a state of permanent transition,” as they “juggle cultures” and cannot “hold concepts or ideas in rigid boundaries” (99-101). Mestiza consciousness integrates contradictions and “operates in a pluralistic mode—nothing is thrust out, the good, the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned. Not only does [it] sustain contradictions, [it] turns the ambivalence into something else” (101).

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This concept enables Anzaldúa to include, besides Chicanos and Chicanas, other groups of people who resist oppression into the emancipatory project and to consider (in a partly utopian fashion) the possibility that even those who hold power can be met halfway: “[we can] meet on a broader communal ground” (Borderlands109). This is the moment when the original dimension of an all-encompassing personal identity takes on a universal aspect and mestiza consciousness is transformed into a sort of horizontal manifesto of global diversity that respects and reconsiders difference while deliberately working with it.

6. Conclusion

Anzaldúa’s aim is not a simplistic “overcoming” of distinctions and a degradation of mestiza consciousness into an instrument that eradicates all difference for the sake of a bland, generalized sameness. This is a frequent misinterpretation of her work (Naples 509-511). Anzaldúa’s line of argumentation stands in opposition to the strategies employed by the dominant culture, which (ab)uses difference in order to legitimize and justify the political and social pressures exerted on marginalized minority groups in America (and elsewhere). These strategies result in symbolic stereotyping, in the proliferation of cultural and economic barriers, and in the capitalist exploitation of the subaltern. Mestiza consciousness stands for the representation of difference. It is also the image of an ideal world order where thinking in oppositions has lost its hierarchical validity and can no longer exclude, as the author mentions, “[l]os atravesados… the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato [sic], the half-breed, the half dead; in short, those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the ‘normal’” (Borderlands25). Mestiza consciousness offers a radical deconstruction of the border phenomenon, remolding it into a concept used not to divide but to create. In Western epistemology, the very notion of the border generates an interplay of differences that are in themselves boundless, infinite, and uncontrollable by any kind of power, since they are elusive.Aside from this reinterpretation of the concept of the border and the suggestion of an inclusive epistemology, Anzaldúa’s mestiza consciousness contains a distinct, though perhaps not so overt, gendered element along with the critique of dualistic thought. Western rationality, which functioned as the motor of colonial expansion as well as its advocate, is associated with masculinity under the current status quo; the same is true for the process of colonization itself. As Elenes aptly remarks:“highly educated European and Euro-American males produced science, art, and philosophy… while the rest of the world (including the poor and women) produced folklore” (50). By placing an emphasis on the conscious grounding of her intellectual-emancipatory project in a specific space and time and reinterpreting local epistemologies as well asteoríastailored to the given context, Anzaldúa questions the universalizing ambitions of Western thought and its implicitly Anglocentric, patriarchal, and hierarchical gendered imperatives. Mestiza consciousness attempts to emancipate the individual as well as the community from dichotomous thinking divided into mutually incompatible categories, the very thinking that has colonized not only Anzaldúa’s home hemmed in by 1,950 miles of barbed wire but also the local people’s minds. Theorizing the border is

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a tool of a holistic“intellectual decolonization” (Mignolo 45) of both the physical space and of the individual as well as collective psychological dimension. The concept of mestiza consciousness can thus be understood as a local epistemology that, on the level of deliberate practice, corresponds to what Tuhiwai Smith terms an indigenous projectix—a set ofactivities and/or a type of research contributing to the survival of indigenous nations, the preservation of their cultures and languages, and an acceptance of diversity as a value in and of itself (142-161). The approaches and methods employed by the projects are always situated in local conditions, self-reflexive, and up-front about their (political) agenda: their goal is to be emancipatory. In this respect, they correlate with feminist theories and methodologies, for instance in their use of experimental approaches to research that, as has been illustrated, disrupt the presumed dyad of (masculine) rationality and (feminine) knowledge, the latter supposedly gathered in areas that have historically been outside of the purview of traditional Western science. It is the sphere of local epistemologies that enable the “subaltern” to heal from the trauma inflicted by colonialism and power that most frequently mobilizes the analytical potential of Anzaldúa’s mestiza consciousness, the employment of which, as the thinker implies, is conceivable also beyond the region of U.S.-Mexico borderlands.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Baca Zinn, Maxine. “Chicano Men and Masculinity.” Men’s Lives. Ed. Michael Kimmel and Michael Messner. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2001. 24-32. Print.

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Elenes, Alejandra. Transforming Borders: Chicana/o Popular Culture and Pedagogy. Lanham: Lexington, 2010. Print.

Fisher, Philip. The New American Studies: Essays from Representations. Berkeley: U of California P, 1991. Print.

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Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. London/New York: Routledge, 2005. Print.

Madsen, Deborah. “Counter-Discursive Strategies in Contemporary Chicana Writing.” Beyond Borders: American Literature and Post-Colonial Theory. Ed. Deborah Madsen. Sterling: Pluto, 2003. 65-76. Print.

—. “The West and Manifest Destiny.” A Concise Companion to American Studies. Ed. John Carlos Rowe. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. 369-386. Print.

Mignolo, Walter. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000. Print.

Naples, Nancy. “Borderlands Studies and Border Theory: Linking Activism and Scholarship for Social Justice.” Sociology Compass 4.7 (2009): 505-518. Print.

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Saldívar-Hull, Sonia. Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender Politics and Literature. Berkeley: U of California P, 2000. Print.

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Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier 1600-1860. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, [1973] 2000. Print.

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NOTES i. To avoid binary hierarchizations that would be in stark contradiction with the content of this article, I alternate the order of the two countries in the designation of the border as Mexican-U.S. border and U.S.-Mexican border, respectively. This approach also points to the fact that the Chicano/a homeland is actually located on both sides of the border and thus the adjectives differ based on the geographical position from where one looks at the border. Moreover, this split also speaks of the constructedness of the border, be it a geographical site, a topographical marking, or a cultural and/or epistemological concept. ii. The concept of the “browning of America” points to the fact that the Hispanic/Latino population is the fastest-growing ethnic minority in the United States. According to the 2010 Census, it presently comprises over 16% of the overall U.S. population (see “Overview of Race and Hispanic Origin: 2010”). iii. The poem’s title pays tribute to a book by historian Arnoldo De León called They Called Them Greasers (1983), in which the author “investigates lynching as an institutionalized threat against Tejanos” (Saldívar-Hull 74). iv. Fisher uses this expression for approaches to studying American culture and identity in the light of political, social, and epistemological shifts of the 1960s and 1970s with respect to diversity and subjugated knowledges that “tore apart the various singular and unifying myths of America.” These new disciplines “unmask[ed] the myths of previous generations, among other things as… overwhelmingly white male [ones]” (xiv). v. Yet another multiplier of marginalization is added if a man’s (or woman’s) identity does not align with strictly heterosexual (heteronormative) imperatives. On Mexican-American/Chicano heterosexual and gay masculinities see Baca Zinn. vi. The adjective “brown” is used in this article as one that Chicanos/as themselves ascribe to their own racial, mestiza/o identity. Its use is meant to connote Chicanos’/as’ pride at their cultural and racial background, thereby subverting racial hierarchies and defying racism aimed at people of color. The appropriation of the adjective “brown” is a semantic shift in language and a parallel to gays’ and lesbians’ reclaiming of the term “queer.” It is also analogous to the adoption of the term “Chicano” (or “Chicana”) by the Chicano Movement. The term is etymologically related to Mexicano/Mexicana, but with the pronunciation referencing the Nahuatl language. It emerged as a derogatory label for people of mixed Native, Spanish, and Anglophone heritage. “Chicanos/as” thus refers to the entire community while avoiding the generic name Mexican-Americans, thereby setting Chicano/a cultural, racial, and social specificity apart.

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vii. The motto “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us” is among the rallying cries of the Chicano Movement, but has been used by other indigenous minorities in America as well. See also Acuña, Anything. viii. As opposed to the current term Native American, the generically-employed plural noun “natives” in this context would be representative of the objectification and othering of indigenous peoples of America by white settlers. ix. Tuhiwai Smith identifies the following activities—to be undertaken on the individual or collective level—as examples of such projects: claiming, testimonies, story-telling, celebrating survival, remembering, indigenizing, inventing, revitalizing, connecting, reading, writing, representing, gendering, envisioning, reframing, restoring, returning, democratizing, networking, naming, protecting, creating, negotiating, discovering, and sharing (142-162).

ABSTRACTS

Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of mestiza consciousness is presented in this article as a form of epistemology that makes non-binary and non-discriminatory reinterpretations of the Western concept of the border possible. Anzaldúa’s rearticulation of the U.S.-Mexican border is contrasted with established U.S. national myths of westward expansion. The writer’s project is further illustrated by a gender- and race-sensitive analysis of the poem “We Call Them Greasers,” carried out from a postcolonial perspective and a feminist position.

INDEX

Keywords: gender, mestiza consciousness, U.S.-Mexican borderlands, westward expansion

AUTHOR

TEREZA JIROUTOVÁ KYNČLOVÁ Charles University, Prague

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II. Media and the Region

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“Somewhere in California”: New Regional Spaces of Mobility in Contemporary Vancouver Cinema

Katherine A. Roberts

In memory of Cory Monteith (1982-2013)

1. “What Are You Doing Here?”

1 On a rainy afternoon in downtown Vancouver, would-be actress Nikki (Amanda Crew) waits in vain at a hotel bar for a sleazy film producer who has given her his phone number. Instead she meets Henry (Tom Scholte), a construction worker and smooth talker who is also “in the business” and who impresses her with tales of his younger brother’s success on a Jackass-style reality TV show entitled “Hot Dog.”i Yet he and his brother have even bigger plans. They are apparently “cooking up” a new series “down in L.A.” that will take them “into the stratosphere.” When Nikki expresses interest in the female lead, described by Henry as “the strongest alluring kick-ass femme superstar role that has ever graced the face of television,” and gushes about her passion for acting, Henry turns to her and asks: “What are you doing here?” This scene is one of the numerous comedic moments in Vancouver filmmaker Carl Bessai’s quirky independent film Sisters and Brothers (2011) and serves as a fitting and humorous introduction to the exploration of new types of transnational regionalism in North America, specifically that which connects Vancouver and Los Angeles. It brings to the fore a host of issues related to a “sense of place” in home-grown Canadian cinema, its relationship to American location filming in Vancouver, and to the entertainment world’s inescapable vertical integration, which means that for most aspiring industry professionals “dreaming in the rain”—to borrow the title of David Spaner’s 2003 monograph on film production in Vancouver—is less and less about “here” (Vancouver) and more about “going down there” (L.A.).

2 In the Pacific Northwest, as elsewhere, cultural competence tends to flow only one way, from north to south (Canadians know more about Americans than vice versa),

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while cultural products are shipped and Internet/satellite channels beamed up in exactly the opposite direction. In this article, I will examine what I see as a potential new regional space of flows governed by the hyper-volatile film and television/ entertainment industry that links Vancouver to Los Angeles in what globalization critic Saskia Sassen has called a “global network of local places” (226). Bessai’s two most recent films, Fathers and Sons (2010) and the aforementioned Sisters and Brothers (2011), indeed feature a process-based cultural imagining of “West Coastness” that moves beyond a regional identity grounded in physical geographic contiguity towards identity formations that, for better or for worse and like the goods that flow along the north- south coastal corridor, are highly mobile and fluid, determined by and through commodity culture: both films feature Vancouver-based, non-traditional families in the throes of complex identity formation processes that connect them to the wider world and to the Hollywood image machine. Key characters in these families are working or desire to work in film and television in L.A. and are thus the envy of their less “fortunate” siblings. Through caustic humor, the films engage in multiple levels of critique: of the dysfunctional nature of cross-border families, but also of the superficiality of image-culture and the “forced” migration of talent who are sucked into the entertainment vortex. Analyzing these films through the lens of critical regionalism, I will argue, foregrounds the West Coast as a region of transnational flows, of bodies in mobility/circulation yet without side-stepping the inherent complexities in Canada’s enduringly ambivalent relationship with the United States.

2. Critical Regionalism and Borderzones

3 Regional literatures and cultures in North America are currently undergoing a dynamic re-conceptualization. Scholars in American western studies, for example, have increasingly sought to re-imagine traditional, coherent, or unifying western identities as already transnational, multicultural, and perpetually mobile. This critical approach foregrounds concern for how regional inhabitants are determined by powerful economic forces, how new conceptions of regionalism emphasize a complex nexus of overlapping identities, and how these multiple identities interact and intersect with a global technological world. As Krista Comer has argued, “as an epistemological project, western critical regionalism has partially recuperated ‘the regional’ as not inevitably productive of conservative nationalisms… or essentialist/authentic definitions of place” (“Everyday Regionalism” 32), but as a site from which to interrogate present-day global economic restructuring. Attention to regional as opposed to a nation-based political economy, Comer explains, is one of the more novel ways to theorize new economic structures of production, labor, global migration, and culture (34). In this sense, “a revamped ‘regional’ perspective might be understood to underwrite American studies in its postnational or critical American phase” (Comer, “Everyday Regionalism” 35). Fellow western studies critic Steve Tatum also argues for a rethinking of the western region in terms of the “‘new geographies’ created by transnational flows” (6). “In an emergent global economy of flows,” he claims, “the ‘regional’ should be regarded more as a liminal, discursive terrain, a cultural imaginary produced at the point where the circulation of media imagery, the movement of transnational capital, and the voluntary or forced migration of peoples intersect with a particular geographic locale” (9). The American West is a particularly fruitful zone to test the idea of new regional discursivity. Tatum cites the managerial class, laboring in the advanced

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technological infrastructure of Silicon Valley and other research parks, and the workers of the advanced digital effects technology associated with cinema and computer gaming, as well as the animatronics associated with theme parks in California and Nevada, as examples of how particular industries are reconfiguring the region wherein workers “do not inhabit specific, local places” so much as they belong to a delocalized cross-border culture of city-spaces. Developments in the technology- information, aerospace, military and entertainment industries have contributed, in the West, to a “postregional” and largely post-industrial global economy of “city-regions” whose nodal points, in Tatum’s text, are Houston, Denver, Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Seattle, San Francisco Bay Area, Mexico City, and Los Angeles, cities which are in turn linked to the main trading blocks in the global economy (12-13).

4 I think it is worth revisiting, briefly, the work of Sassen that has inspired the arguments of several aforementioned contemporary western critics. In “Spatialities and Temporalities of the Global: Elements for a Theorization” (2000), Sassen examines the multiple processes that constitute economic globalization, cautioning that the global is not (yet) all-encompassing for the lived experience of actors or the domain of institutional orders and cultural formations. Instead, it persists as a “partial condition” (215) that intersects and overlaps with the domain of the national. While some scholars of the social sciences have critiqued the idea of the nation as a “container, representing a unified spatiotemporality” (215) and have contributed to a partial unbundling of national space, Sassen reminds us that global process are often “strategically located/ constituted in national spaces where they are implemented usually with the help of legal measures taken by state institutions” (218). Social actors, today, she maintains, “are likely to live, and entities likely to operate, in overlapping domains of the national and the global” (221). What is particularly interesting for our purposes here, and for scholars of critical regionalism, is the idea that the global economy “materializes” in a worldwide grid of strategic places that can be said to constitute a new economic geography of centrality that cuts across national borders (225). As she explains, “these features of the global economy underline the need to rethink the distinction between the global and the local, notably the assumption about necessity of territorial proximity to the constitution of the local” (226; emphasis added). In this global network of local places, we see emerging a “relation of intercity proximity operating without shared territory: proximity is deterritorialized” (226).

5 The reconceptualization of region in western studies has been effective in moving beyond the national/regional hierarchical dyad in American studies while simultaneously dovetailing with similar critical interrogations in U.S.-Mexico borderlands studies. This region, defined by a history of conflict and conquest, shifting populations, migration, bi-national conurbations (San Diego/Tijuana, El Paso/Juarez), transnational social, cultural, and political communities, and more recently by militarization and drug-related violence, is indeed well-posed to challenge the homogeneity of U.S. nationalism and popular culture. Several decades of research and writing on and from the U.S.-Mexico border have brought attention to these issues and confirmed the prominence of the region as a site of crossing, mixing, resistance, and circulation points (see Saldívar for an important introduction to the field). In addressing questions of assimilation, immigration, nationalism, and cultural identity around the instability of the borderzone, research on the U.S.-Mexico borderlands enables, as Neil Campbell claims, complex imaginings that have important implications

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for rethinking and reimagining the West as a “travelling” term, as part of the transnational imaginary. For him, “the deterritorialization of the borderlands, neither purely Mexican nor purely American, gives them a particularly resonant force in cultural studies and explains why the whole metaphor of ‘borders’ has become so bound up with postmodern critical writing” (Rhizomatic West 76).

6 There are two points I want to make at this stage. It has become common in reframing regionalism to focus on how the region—a complex contact zone already embedded within the universal and global—could potentially “displace” the centrality of the nation-state in accounts of U.S. cultural production (Comer, “Taking Feminism” 113). The impetus towards the extra-national in these arguments leads most often to a discussion of the U.S.-Mexico borderzone as the location of this transnational space: reframing regionalism means re-envisioning the American Southwest as “Greater Mexico.” While this critical turn is promising given the new possibilities it initiates, I am hesitant as to its pan-North American applicability. In other words, Canadian scholars have been reluctant to engage in thinking that takes their field into a postnational phase and eschews the centrality of the nation-state. American studies may well be posed, in its postnational musings—and here I paraphrase Canadian literary critic Herb Wyile—to critique insularity from a position of strength; it is quite another thing to critique insularity from a position of cultural vulnerability (50). While recent scholarship in Canadian studies engages critically with the nation as a political, social, institutional, and discursive construct (see Cormack and Cosgrave; Mackey; Wright), this work continues to acknowledge the central role the nation plays in the lives of Canadians, given the reality of sharing a border with the U.S. Added to my reservations concerning American critical regionalism’s postnational impetus is the invisibility of Canada within this new paradigm; it is to the southern and not the northern border that such regional re-mappings extend.ii

7 Second, the predominance of the U.S.-Mexico border paradigm in the critical regionalism writing has the effect of reframing border studies, literally, around a border like no other, i.e. not necessarily representative of other border regions in North America. Indeed, in her work on frontier zones or borderlands, Sassen recognizes the challenges of specifying borderlands and identifying the activities that distinguish them (220). Taking the cue from Sassen with respect to borderzone specificities, I want to bring the burgeoning critical reflection in U.S.-based critical regionalism to bear upon the study of the Canada-U.S. border in ways that could be beneficial for Canadian studies scholars. Numerous aspects of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands studies paradigm, predicated on linguistic, religious, and ethnic differences, economic discrepancies, uneven development, a sizable contiguous population (straddling the border), and a vibrant transnational community, are not always fruitful to furthering an understanding of the vast, sparsely populated, and largely unmanned line that separates the U.S. from Canada. What further complicates the discussion of the place- based, place-specific analysis of North American borderzones is the notion that all of Canada is, for some, a borderlands society (see Gibbons), the majority of its population subject to American economic, political, social, cultural, and intellectual influences. “To represent or reflect on Canada,” claims cultural critic Jody Berland, “is to write to, about and across the border” (32). To the all-pervasive nature of the border in Canadian society she adds its asymmetry: “Canadians live and write as though the border is everywhere, shadowing everything we contemplate and fear, while Americans live and

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act as if there is no border there at all” (32). How exactly should we study Canada-U.S. border culture? Where is it located?

3. Canada-U.S. Border Culture

8 The analytical possibilities offered by critical regionalism open up new ways of thinking about Canada-U.S. transnational regional and border culture, the study of which has tended to be overshadowed within Canada-U.S. border research by a focus on economics and trade dynamics. For those who argue for increasing political and economic convergence within North America, sub-national/regional areas of cross- border activity (e.g. Niagara, Great Lakes/Lake Superior, Cascadia/Pacific Northwest) seem to be the most likely places to chart such formations. For some, Cascadia/Pacific Northwest (PNW)—comprised by British Columbia and Washington State (for some encompassing also Oregon and Northern California)—best illustrates this new, rising border region. Here, a “complex ideational construct” spanning economic, social, cultural, and political elements forms a regional and transnational “symbolic” regime in which various state and non-state actors (trade groups, sub-national bureaucrats, and environmental groups) can promote their specific agendas (Brunet-Jailly 117). Cascadia/PNW is characterized by shared topographies, so-called democratic “values,” distance from Eastern metropolitan centers, and structured by an important trade corridor that stretches down into Southern California and beyond. It has been the object of many micro- and macro-level policy studies focusing on transregional trade dynamics, parallel policy developments, and cross-border environmental cooperation (Alper; Brunet-Jailly). However, Cascadia’s regionalizing potential has been critiqued for some time now, most succinctly by social geographer Mathew Sparke, who has convincingly argued that trans-border “re-mappings” like Cascadia are not geopolitics but geoeconomics, representing “a neo-liberal, market-oriented, anti-state transmutation of what is generally understood as a democratic political sovereignty” (7). Despite all the appeals to the impact of borderless free trade, Cascadia’s promoters, he counters, are unable to point to any widespread regionalizing impact, i.e. the increase in north-south flows do not indicate the rise of regionalizing tendencies in supply networks that cross the border and integrate Cascadia economically; instead, the trucks cross the border and then frequently drive on to other distant places (25). The study of the Pacific Northwest’s transnational culture also remains a challenge. Both Brunet-Jailly and other experts of the Canada-U.S. border (Konrad and Nicol, Beyond Walls) have made important gestures towards including a cultural component in their cross-border research, calling for a re-articulation of local culture in the discussion of borderlands theory, since it is culture “that ultimately sustains linkages, assures continuity and maintains prosperity between bounded states” (Konrad and Nicol, “Border Culture” 70). This cultural component has not yet involved an extended analysis of specific literary texts, films, cultural institutions, or other cultural manifestations; it remains in most Canada-U.S. border research, for the most part, embryonic.

9 Literary critic Laurie Ricou’s work constitutes a significant exception to the rule and has paved the way for imagining a “shared sense of place” in the literatures of the Pacific Northwest, pointing to new and older, underused comparative frameworks outside of the nation-based paradigm. For him, the PNW is a shared region defined and delineated by “ocean currents and species distribution” (6), drainage basins, and

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watersheds. In the Arbutus/Madrone Files, he groups texts from both sides of the border into “files” (“Salmon File,” “Raven File,” “Kuroshio File,” “Salal File,” and “Sasquatch File”) in a conscious effort to find and read writing that responds to the notion of regionalism as “local life aware of itself” (29). This sort of Canadian-American literary comparison, which remains rare in the discipline, points to the possibility of privileging “ecological and autochtonous patterns that omit national boundaries” (39).

10 As I have argued elsewhere, for this culture to materialize, to be truly transregional, these texts (or films) need to foreground not only “local life aware of itself,” but an awareness of each other, a sensibility for the “extra-national,” i.e. a taking into account the “other” socio-political reality that lies across the border with which each region supposedly shares topography, species distribution, and something akin to “West Coast” values (Roberts, “Cascadia”). It is difficult in practice for a shared regional culture to materialize in the PNW given the absence of established and sustaining transnational regional cultural institutions. I offer the following two examples to help illustrate my point. In terms of literature, the publishing industries in Canada and the U.S. remain two parallel nationally-based entities with disparate subsidy and distribution models. Canadian books are not readily available in Washington State bookstores (aside from internationally-known, award-winning authors like Margaret Atwood); certain books are also available under a different title.iii Regional writing that is most often published by smaller presses has a much more limited distribution network. Anecdotes of B.C. authors driving across the Canada-U.S. border, selling their books out of the trunk of their car after a reading at a Washington State bookseller are not uncommon. Secondly, there are also two major annual international film festivals in the region: the Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF) and the Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF). The VIFF has an important Canadian Images program which traditionally showcases local/B.C. film; B.C. film for obvious reasons receives a substantial amount of press-coverage during the festival. While American independent cinema is screened at the VIFF, no particular effort is made, on the part of the VIFF programmers, to screen American cinema of the PNW. Conversely, the Seattle Film Festival features a dynamic and entirely original Northwest Connections program that showcases local film—that is almost exclusively American (I counted one Canadian film in this program over a ten-year period). In sum, each festival effectively ignores its counterpart across the border.

11 The reasons for the lack of transnational cultural institutions are no doubt historic and linked to very different approaches to culture in Canada and the U.S., the exploration of which are outside the scope of this article. It is important also to underscore the presence of regional cross-border connections (e.g. Pacific Northwest Writers Association) and other cross-border interest groups (e.g. British Columbia-Washington Cooperative Environmental Council), and not to discount the possibilities for transnational cultural exposure: Canadian radio and television (CBC) is available in the northernmost region of Washington State while U.S. Public Broadcasting (KCTS Television and KUOW Radio) is included in the basic cable package and/or accessible in the southernmost parts of B.C. Yet, to argue, as do certain proponents of the Cascadia region, that “intense communication” (Brunet-Jailly 117) will inevitably lead to shared cultural values and to a shared regional consciousness that could possibly rethink national boundaries seems unrealistic and detached from the “social fabric” in the region. It is at this juncture that the remapping of critical regionalism, in particular the notion of new geographies formed by intercity proximity without shared territory,

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becomes useful in trying to articulate connections in Canadian-American culture, in particular the impact one city-space or city-region (L.A.) has or could have on another (Vancouver). I propose to move away from the “contiguous regions” perspective when studying the cultural aspects of the Canada-U.S. border in favor of spaces defined and shaped by particular economies, by the effects of flows.

12 One economy that has had a considerable impact on Vancouver and B.C. and that has long been a presence in the province is the L.A.-based entertainment industry. The events of the last few decades are important to review here in order to understand the depth and complexity of this “extra-national” presence. As Mike Gasher documents, British Columbia has become in the span of twenty-five years one of the largest centers of film and television production in North America (4). Early film production in B.C. was linked to Hollywood’s externalizing of production in the post-war period wherein the province’s dramatic landscapes were used in location shooting. A local (B.C.) feature film industry developed starting in the 1970s, flourishing in the 1990s, spurred by provincial government policy initiatives and a perception or recognition of cinema “as a medium, not of cultural expression, but of regional industrial development” (Gasher 20). Today a burgeoning Hollywood locations industry (major studios have established local production facilities) exists alongside a small home-grown industry (of which Bessai’s films are a part). Scholars like Gasher, Spaner, and Diane Burgess have all emphasized to varying degrees the impact that the transnationalization of Hollywood has had on the B.C. industry’s pool of skilled labour, local production facilities, and policy incentives in the province—in short, on the interconnectedness of the “service” and “indie” sectors of the industry. It is undeniable that industry professionals gain valuable experience on U.S.-funded film and television productions that they then bring to local B.C.-based filmmaking projects. Locations industry filming can also help actors build a resume that enables them to get work in L.A. (Nikki’s dream in Sisters and Brothers). The U.S. cinema and television industry is perpetually in search of cheap locales and tax subsidies; the rise in the value of the Canadian dollar in the 2000s and other factors have meant a downturn in production in Vancouver.iv Despite this recent volatility, I think it fair to argue that Vancouver’s relative proximity to L.A. (2,000 km, 2.5 hour flying time), longstanding industry connections with B.C., and the fact of sharing the same time zone have meant and will continue to mean a significant American film and television presence in Vancouver.v

4. Fathers and Sons: Trouble in “Lotusland”

13 It is my contention that the entertainment industry that links Vancouver and L.A. forges a new type of non-contiguous West Coast transnational regionalism wherein the Canada-U.S. border is not explicitly represented or thematized. Bessai’s two most recent films explore this regionalism in a particularly original and humorous manner. In 1999, Edmonton-born, Toronto-educated Bessai moved to Vancouver, where he began a career making low-budget, award-winning independent features. In 2008 he shifted his focus from serious dramas (exploring themes such as drug addiction and violence against women) to a more light-hearted, comedic examination of family dynamics. Fathers and Sons (2010) and Sisters and Brothers (2011) are part of a trilogy he began with Mothers and Daughters (2008). All three features involve an improvised, collaborative approach to filmmaking in which the actors participate in the

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development of different storylines that are woven together with staged to-camera interviews during which characters deliver their musings on key family relationships. The interviews highlight the comedic aspect of the films as there is often a contradiction between what the “characters” say in earnest and their actions. This formal technique participates in what has come to be known as the mockumentary tradition in contemporary filmmaking (see Druick), i.e. mocking the pretense and ideological content of serious documentaries, particularly relevant for Canadian national filmmaking which owes its origin to state-funded documentary/realist cinema. All three films feature multiple stories about characters connected by theme (types of relationships) that combine to form a shared narrative of Vancouver; the first two films feature several establishing shots of Vancouver (the port, the ocean) as well as recognizable cafés and other landmarks. That Vancouver is a place defined by global forces, connected to the wider world, is obvious to anyone who is familiar with the city. Bessai’s choice of narratives acknowledges the city’s diverse cultural make-up: Mothers and Daughters features an unorthodox pairing of Aboriginal women; the second film involves Jewish, African-Canadian, and South-Asian father-son narratives. In Sisters and Brothers, a seventeen-year-old only child must cope with the arrival of her adult South- Asian half-sister, the result of an affair her mother had with a cult leader twenty-five years earlier. Taken together, these stories indeed create what one critic has called a “multicultural mashup” (Takeuchi, “Cultural Mashup”), more representative perhaps of national notions of Canadian multiculturalism, and cultural communities, than one representative of contemporary demographics in Vancouver.vi

14 What is of interest here in exploring the question of new types of transnational regionalism is tracking how the expansion of one angle in this family triptych, the predominance of Vancouver-based characters that aspire to fame and fortune through some connection to the entertainment industry and to L.A., grows in importance from film to film. This aspect is hinted at in Mothers and Daughters when a middle-aged successful albeit neurotic author, Mikki (Babz Chula), is taunted by her own friends at a dinner party for writing a book that is not “great art,” but could be easily adapted to a make a successful soap opera-style TV series. The actor that plays the obnoxious dinner party guest who makes this suggestion is Tom Scholte. He will reappear in the next two films as Henry, the aforementioned smooth-talking loser and small-time schemer ready to do anything to get “down to Los Angeles” in order to take advantage of his younger brother’s new-found fame. Thus from a mere hint in the first film, the Vancouver-L.A. connection becomes a dominant theme in the Anglo-Canadian narrative in Fathers and Sons and finally, in Sisters and Brothers, overshadows all the stories but one.

15 Fathers and Sons follows four intercut stories of father-son relationships. In the one I will be examining in detail, four Anglo-Canadian brothers Michael (Vincent Gale), Sean (Tyler Labine), Henry (Tom Scholte), and David (Hrothgar Matthews) gather at the family home in West Vancouver to pay their last respects to their already deceased father and, supposedly, to collect their inheritance. This narrative is in effect about meeting (or not) paternal expectations, but also about notions of fairness and equitable treatment between siblings—and in this sense it foreshadows the themes explored in Sisters and Brothers. The opening sequences show David (who has now changed his name to Marlowe) doing yoga poses, barefoot, on the floor of the family home, New Age music in the background. The camera cuts to a jeans-wearing and lumberjack-shirted Henry, hitchhiking in Vancouver, somewhere under an overpass. Unbeknownst to the

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viewer at this point, these men are brothers heading to a family reunion of sorts, which David (Marlowe) hopes will involve a commemorative ceremony for their father, but is motivated, rather, by the reading of the father’s will. The Adams’ estate executor is Michael, the third brother, a clean-cut lawyer, married family man who has flown in from somewhere else, possibly Calgary. He is shown picking up Sean, the youngest brother, a scruffy, slightly overweight, unshaven, and sunglass-wearing “slacker” seated outside of a downtown Vancouver coffee shop, the caricature of the boorish, disheveled falsely unassuming celebrity, who is back in town from L.A. where he is the star of a reality TV show. A gaggle of young girls rush to him to ask for autographs and photos. He poses with the fans and his brother Michael; he is clearly pleased to be recognized. “Just remember Season 4 starts in three weeks. Same time,” he calls out to the girls as he gets into the car.

16 The narrative of the four brothers is fascinating in how through location, natural lighting, and landscape, it foregrounds a certain sense of place, a feeling of “being” in Vancouver while exposing through dialogue that three of the four brothers no longer in fact live in the city and, as we shall see, two construct (or would like to construct) their identities around the “elsewhere” that is the U.S. Henry appears to be living a shadowy existence in New York, supposedly “making big things happen” stateside. As the day unfolds, it is clear he is pleased to see his younger brother from California so he can pitch to him a ridiculous scheme called “virtual artist park sketch” where people can be airbrushed into a photo of Central Park. For this venture he needs, of course, to borrow money from his brother, though the latter (and the viewer) fails to understand the gist of the scheme. This brotherly exchange and the staging of Sean is an obvious commentary on the part of Bessai on the inane stupidity of contemporary celebrity culture, amply illustrated by medium shots of a Sean, sporting cheap sunglasses, both a cigarette and a joint in his mouth, asking for alcohol in what is clearly very early in the day. The uneasy truce between these four very different brothers is broken during the reading of the will after a meal in the sunshine out on the deck of the family home. Again, the resentment and unhappiness that surfaces in this scene contrasts with the spectacular scenery: layers of mountains and lush vegetation and evergreen forests surrounded by a sparkling blue ocean. What is important to underline here is Bessai’s foregrounding of a desirable and increasingly financially unattainable Vancouver. The city is known as “lotusland,” its mild weather and beauty making it the envy of much of the rest of Canada and a “luxury” destination for high-end investors from around the world.vii

17 Yet in Fathers and Sons, there is clearly trouble in paradise and, not surprisingly, it resolves around money. First and foremost, there is the house: perched up on a cliff in Lions Bay with a spectacular wraparound view of Georgia Straight and the nearby islands, this property, given its location and the state of the real estate market in Vancouver, would have netted a sizable fortune. However, the brothers learn during the reading of the will that Mr. Adams has left the house to his employer, the University of British Columbia. He has then subtracted all debts the boys owed him from their respective bequeathment, including room and board calculated at “fair- market value” from David who had stayed behind to look after him. Michael’s portion goes into a trust for the education of his own son while Henry, the son who was counting the most on the money, finds himself with virtually nothing, as the father subtracts $75,000 paid in tuition in three post-secondary institutions and “other numerous debts and financial handouts accrued during the last decade.” Henry is

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furious at Michael, who knew the contents of the will, not to have alerted him to his virtually non-existent share. “You know the risk I take every time I cross the border,” he quips, since he is no doubt living in the U.S. illegally. Ironically, the only brother who will receive full payment is the one that needs it the least, Sean, the reality TV show “star” now living in California. He also borrowed money to go to L.A. at one point, but as he reminds his brothers who begin to turn on him, he paid it off “after the first season.” Tensions mount as the reality of their financial situation sets in; the otherwise soft-spoken New Age David who wanted to enlist the brothers in a special four elements, four locations commemorative ash-spreading ceremony (in his mind each brother would spread the ashes in a place symbolizing earth, wind, fire, and water), tries, in what amounts to a moment of sheer comedic brilliance, to fling the ashes and urn over the deck railing. He has to be wrestled to the ground and restrained by the other brothers. Later on, Sean, “successful” and financially secure—though given his lackadaisical attitude his good fortune seems more accidental than linked to talent on his part—is oblivious to the anger seething around and entertains his brothers with mindless “showbiz anecdotes” from his L.A. life. Eventually the brothers break into a collective fistfight over what they see as Michael’s “orchestration” of the offending will.

18 Morning in “lotusland” brings a relative calm and, as is the custom in the family drama, a tentative reconciliation. At Sean’s suggestion, the four brothers dust off their father’s vintage 1968 Galaxy and partake in the four-part Vancouver area road trip that David had proposed in order to scatter their father’s ashes. They reflect at the foot of an ancient evergreen in the midst of a nearby old-growth forest, stand in the wind on Lions Gate Bridge that connects downtown Vancouver to the North Shore and the family home, visit an East Vancouver pizza oven and finally offer their father’s remains to the ocean. The final shot of the brothers is of the four skinny-dipping with the urn in the frigid waters. The resolution to the Adams family narrative is a nod, on the part of Bessai, to the road movie genre. Shots of the vintage car cruising B.C.’s Highway 99 and the streets of Vancouver accompanied by a bluesy guitar/rock music reference both mobility and cruising in general, long associated with California and a cinematic mobility, but also establish a rapport with the road that is specific to Canadian national cinema.

19 Ever since Donald Shebib’s 1970 classic Goin’ Down the Road, numerous Canadian filmmakers have sought to explore the mobility/masculinity nexus as it relates to landscape and the national narrative. The road movie may well be a Hollywood genre synonymous with American culture and society, but it has also been a “fertile field for the ironic intervention of Canadian filmmakers who hijack this cinematic vehicle for the expression of a rebellious American freedom to visualize Canadian road adventures” (Gittings 149). The prevalence of the road theme, from Shebib’s Goin’ Down the Road through Bruce McDonald’s road spoofs like Roadkill (1989), Highway 61 (1991), and Hard Core Logo (1996) to the more recent pan-Canadian motorbike odyssey One Week (2008), creates the impression that Canadian filmmakers, in delving into the road genre, are hoping to tap into some sort of magical essence of Canadian narrative cinema.viii In Fathers and Sons,the “road trip” allows Bessai to highlight the natural beauty of Vancouver by mapping out various places in the city (all outdoor settings, three natural, one urban), providing a temporary homosocial space that permits a bonding between the brothers while at the same time connecting with the ambiguous Canadianness of the road genre. The vintage Adams family car even recalls the

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Eldorado convertible that Butch drives up to the Okanagan in another Canadian classic: My American Cousin (1985).

20 There are a number of things to conclude at this stage about the representation of region in this film. Vancouver becomes here a fluid repository of narratives that gesture towards multiculturalism and the inclusion of various ethnic groups in the cinematic social fabric of the city. Yet, it is important to point out that though Vancouver has become a stabilizing space for other characters in these father-son stories, the Adams brothers have already left the city; the only one who has stayed behind is a caricature of a New Age yoga practitioner who does not appear to have a career outside of his care-giving role. There is no intergenerational transfer of family heritage: the house and car have been left to “research.” The film suggests with a satirical tone that despite Vancouver’s physical beauty and the general desirability of life in the city, other forces or “flows” are pulling the brothers outwards connecting them, as in the case of Sean, with L.A. (which will be further explored in the next film). This new transnational regionalism that links Vancouver southward exists as a “partial condition,” to recall Sassen’s terms in her work on globalization, that intersects and overlaps with the domain of the national, alluded to here by Bessai’s nod to Canadian national cinema through the brothers’ roundabout Vancouver road trip.

5. Sisters and Brothers: “Somewhere in California”

21 Sisters and Brothers uses members of the same ensemble cast and similar improvisation techniques and faux to-camera interviews to explore sibling rivalry. In Vancouver, as the holidays approach, guilt-ridden sister Louise (Gabrielle Miller) tries her best to take care of her brother Jerry (Benjamin Ratner), who has schizophrenia and refuses to take his medication. Then there is Nikki (Amanda Crew), the aforementioned aspiring actress, and her older half-sister, Maggie (Camille Sullivan), who berates and second- guesses her, even as she is filled with envy. As discussed, they meet Henry (Tom Scholte), the deadbeat would-be producer, now based back in Vancouver, who tries to bed both girls through his connection to his celebrity brother. With the promise of a role for Nikki in the new miniseries he is creating, Henry convinces Nikki and Maggie to drive him to L.A. to “take meetings.” But the narrative that in a sense structures the film and represents an important departure in casting from both Mothers and Daughters and Fathers and Sons is that of Rory (Dustin Milligan) and Justin (Cory Monteith), two actor brothers who spend the day together in Justin’s L.A. beach house. At the time of the filming, both Milligan and Monteith were young, Canadian-born actors who had had recent success on American television. In including them here, Bessai was no doubt hoping to attract a wider audience for this film, especially younger viewers who would appreciate the irony of Canadian actors in L.A. engaging in a critique of themselves and the industry. In Sisters and Brothers, Rory plays the earnest failed actor who, after a time spent in Africa where he tries to start a charity, meets up with his now celebrity older brother who headlines in superhero movies and who lives the life of a young Hollywood star replete with an “entourage” of doting assistants whom he treats with an air of entitled nonchalance. Monteith’s performance in Sisters and Brothers has in retrospect a chilling element of the prophetic: sadly, Monteith, who had a long history of substance abuse, died of a drug and alcohol overdose in Vancouver on July 13, 2013.

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22 Sisters and Brothers maps out this dual-city transnational region from the opening frame of the film, which shows a cartoonish map of the world and then zooms in to North America and a dotted red line connecting two cities marked with an X: Vancouver and L.A. After several frames of graphic novel panels that prefigure the stories to be told and some quick introductory to-camera interviews, the film shifts to the Justin and Rory narrative, featuring Rory’s arrival at LAX where his brother must fight free from a gaggle of screaming female fans. Rory’s “has-been” status is underlined by the fact that none of the fans recognize him as an actor; he is almost left behind at the airport in the rush: “I’m with him,” he says to Justin’s driver/bodyguard who wants to block him from getting in to the black unmarked SUV. The day in the life of these two L.A. transplants hits all of the requisite high notes of the Hollywood critique. Justin is basking in his newfound fame garnered from his role as a comic book super hero. His attitude is one of entitlement (happy to be surrounded by personal assistants and a doting housekeeper) and boredom (he yawns and looks out the window as his brother begins to tell him of his charity work in Africa). Rory, desperate for attention, tries to impress Justin’s personal assistant, Liz, with the details of his ridiculous charity—“Change for change for the children.” Their conversation only serves to expose the shameless opportunism of such ventures more designed to reboot an actor’s failing/flailing career than to offer any meaningful development for (in this case) African peoples. Rory defends celebrity humanitarianism in a to-camera interview (“It’s not about me,” Rory argues, “It’s about saying yes to change”), while Justin opines in a similar to-camera segment that, as far as he is concerned, his acting constitutes “humanitarian work.”

23 Eventually the brothers’ “reunion day” wears thin after Justin invites three girls over who fawn over him and ignore Rory, and the two argue over family. Rory is of course resentful that the vacuous Justin, whom he encouraged to come down to L.A., has found such easy showbiz success and can now “look after” their mother financially. Justin mocks Rory’s “humanitarian” endeavours: “You can take care of people in the world and your own people at the same time—here, in Los Angeles,” suggesting that, for him, L.A. is now the only “here” that counts. Rory tries to storm off on his own after lambasting Justin’s clichéd lifestyle and reminding him that for all intents and purposes, in the end, he is completely alone; the close-ups of a seemingly very sad Justin (Monteith) during these scenes is again prophetically tragic given the circumstances of Monteith’s death. The brothers eventually reconcile and enjoy some Vietnamese soup, supposedly on the way back to LAX.

24 Sisters and Brothers’s critique of Hollywood may seem for some to be an unoriginal attack on an easy target. One reviewer claimed that there was nothing in the portrait of Justin’s Hollywood life that had not already been successfully spoofed in the hit HBO series Entourage (2004-2011) and likened this aspect of the film to Bessai’s hypocritically wanting to be part of the club that he satirizes (Izay). The Justin/Rory sequences take on a much more complex meaning when they are read from a Canadian-based transnational perspective. Justin and Rory’s characters in the film are conspicuously Canadian; Rory quips upon entering the beach house that Justin is “keeping it Canadian,” perhaps a reference to a gigantic wall mural that foregrounds a totem pole (traditional iconography of West Coast Native tribes). In his final to-camera interview, Rory describes the ideal brother as a “wing-man.” While for American audiences, this term might first evoke a fighter pilot who supports another in a potentially dangerous

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flying environment, for Canadian audiences, a wing-man is a nickname for a winger, or ice hockey forward, and thus refers to Canada’s national sport. The Canadian actor brothers thus bring to the film’s imagined L.A. an outside context, a series of extraterritorial references linking that space back to Canada.

25 This transnational connection also exists on another level. There is the national origin of Cory Monteith and Dustin Milligan. Hollywood has always been a magnet for talent from around the world, yet the largest group of foreign nationals working in the entertainment industry are, unbeknownst to many, Canadian. Critics of Canadian popular culture have begun to study this phenomenon, known as the “star-system-in- exile” (Acland), wherein Canadian audiences recognize “their” own actors when they see them in U.S. productions.ix As I have argued elsewhere, the linguistic and (perceived) cultural sameness of English Canadians with respect to the United States has facilitated both their success and invisibility south of the border (Roberts, “Crossover Stars”). Of the numerous Canadians that have become household names in the industry, a significant number either come from Vancouver or have moved from places elsewhere in the Canadian West to gain experience in Vancouver before moving south.x Monteith and Milligan are not only actors playing characters in a Hollywood satire but western Canadian actors exploring a narrative about going to L.A. that dovetails with their own experiences.xi What Bessai has done with this narrative is to foreground a very particular migratory pattern of industry professionals that thus redefines the West Coast region as a network of related yet non-contiguous spaces but adds the necessary asymmetry that is part of the Canadian-American relationship: one city-space (Vancouver) is “thinking about” or “aware of” the other (L.A.); but this relationship is certainly not reciprocal.xii The Justin/Rory narrative is in many respects one long “in- joke” wherein two former Vancouver roommates play a version of themselves in L.A., hinting at the “invisibility/visibility” of English-Canadian industry professionals who masquerade as all-American heroes—Monteith as the singing football star Finn Hudson in Glee and Milligan as the surfer/lacrosse star Ethan Ward in the Beverly Hills TV drama 90210 (2008-2009)—but are still recognized as Canadian by fans at home.xiii

26 In terms of cinematic space, the film features a number of quintessential establishing shots of L.A. (freeways, sunshine, palm trees, the ocean, the exterior of a beach house), but the rest of the Justin/Rory narrative, including the airport scenes, was filmed in Vancouver; there is no mistaking the greyish muted light and lush green vegetation of the PNW, not to mention the pouring rain during the brother’s trip to the Vietnamese restaurant. The choice to substitute Vancouver for L.A. was no doubt motivated by budgetary considerations. But the effect this choice has on the “look” of the film merits our attention. Key sites in British Columbia and Vancouver have had a long career of starring as somewhere else. Numerous American films and TV shows have carefully disguised the city to look like Anywhere, USA. So-called “home-grown” independent B.C. film is expected to a certain extent to counter the displacement of Vancouver by highlighting its specificity, showcasing the city and making films that can only come from Vancouver. What Bessai is doing here is delivering a meta-commentary on the placelessness of the place that is Vancouver: even so-called “home-grown” local film such as his own ends up asking Vancouver to stand in for somewhere else because that somewhere else, L.A., has become so important for local professionals. L.A. is where two Vancouver “actor brothers” would realistically be.

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27 Bessai pursues his critique of how the entertainment industry restructures place in the Nikki and Maggie half-sister narrative. Fresh from an audition in Vancouver for a non- speaking lesbian vampire-killer role where the producer/director gives the impression that she would do well to meet with him “after hours” if she wants a chance at the part, Nikki, in a scene described at the outset of this article, instead meets Henry, the “loser brother” from the previous film who never stops talking to anyone who will listen to his talk about his brother Sean’s “success” in L.A. The Nikki/Henry meeting is preceded by establishing scenes of Henry working on construction sites, hardhat and all, boring his co-workers with his new scheme, the TV show he and his brother supposedly have “in development,” and then stealing away to talk to his brother by payphone to ask for money (we only hear one side of the conversation). Nikki and Henry’s meet-up conversation in the downtown bar on a rainy afternoon illustrates poignantly how for these characters the space of Vancouver is defined by its relationship to elsewhere (L.A.) and foregrounds the inevitable one-way migration that awaits them. Nikki admits she has not yet been to L.A. but recognizes that that is where she is headed: “I was told you need to build up your resume here first” before going down there.xiv Henry’s claim to be “in the business” is tangential at best; yet, in this new regional narrative economy, it becomes something he can barter for goods, transportation, and, in his mind, sex. He believes himself to be a star simply by association and thus irresistible and deserving of female attention. Henry’s potential connection to the business allows the otherwise seemingly levelheaded Nikki to be “played,” to give in to self-delusion: she agrees to drive the penniless Henry (he supposedly just had all his money and identification stolen) to L.A. on the promise of meeting with industry executives. Fortunately for Nikki, all of this occurs under the watchful eyes of her older half-sister Maggie, fresh out of the hospital for what appears to be depression, but not too ill to catch on to Henry’s trickery. She invites herself along on the road trip as both intermediary and bodyguard. During a stopover at a motel, preceded by a graphic novel image with the title “Somewhere in Northern California” (though the viewer can clearly see snow on the ground), Henry attempts to kiss Nikki (who naively claims to have “misunderstood”) and then succeeds, the next morning, in having sex with Maggie. Eventually the two sisters tire of stopping repeatedly so that Henry, in a superb road movie cliché, can make (collect) calls from pay phones to supposedly announce their arrival and, especially when Nikki learns he also made advances to her sister, the two decide to throw him out of the car and drive back to Vancouver. A disgruntled Henry threatens them as they drive away: “I am the brother of Sean Adams and you are no-one without me.” The camera then lingers on Henry on the side of the road hitchhiking with a hastily drawn cardboard sign that reads: Hollywood.

28 According to Paul McEwan, the Canadian version of the road movie borrows from the American genre the idea that the road is where you learn something about yourself (13). But what makes a road movie Canadian is its ability to ironize that notion as evidenced by the films of Bruce McDonald. The Canadian road is a place where you do not necessarily learn about yourself. The humor in Sisters and Brothers derives again from tapping into the comic anti-road trip vein that links the film to Canadian national cinema. There is no great revelation for Nikki and Maggie on this road to nowhere; the two sisters reconcile and return home. Yet the road trip itself is important for how it structures this transnational regional space. The viewer imagines Nikki, Maggie, and Henry’s vehicle travelling along the dotted red line shown at the beginning of the film that links Vancouver to L.A., with the sole purpose of leaving the rainy city for what

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Henry calls “The Dream Factory.” There are numerous scenes of conversations in the car, of Henry using a pay phone and of their one stopover at a motel and a morning visit to a coffee shop. The use of close-ups and conversations in closed spaces, coupled with far fewer establishing shots of Vancouver, create in this film a feeling of constraint and even claustrophobia, an unsettling of cinematic space. Bessai does not hide the fact that the stopover scenes were filmed at the “August Jack Motel” in Squamish, B.C. Otherwise the viewer sees little of the “region”; there is no interaction with local people, a staple element of the road movie genre. It is as if the space “in between”—Washington and Oregon State—does not exist. Nor is there any mention whatsoever of crossing the Canada-U.S. border (which was important in Fathers and Sons, as Henry claimed to be putting himself at risk when crossing). For Henry, Nikki, and Maggie and by inference for entertainment industry travelers, the West Coast is figured as a borderless region since the three obviously cross the line without incident. The film is fiction but its non-treatment of the border crossing is no less significant. What the viewer knows of Henry’s and even Maggie’s circumstances would make an easy crossing unlikely.xv The road trip in this film is, hence, purely ironic: it subverts the quintessential road movie tropes of the relationship to landscape, to the mapping out of regional cinematic space. It is obvious to the viewer from what we see of the landscape and the use of locations that the three hapless travelers never go anywhere but simply drive around the Lower Mainland in the rain and cold and then head up the Whistler highway (Highway 99) to Squamish. Again, not shooting the road trip “on location” was no doubt a choice dictated by funding considerations. The end result on screen, as in the Justin/Rory narrative, is no less important for how it figures both Vancouver/B.C. and L.A. as deterritorialized or decontextualized spaces: the characters live in denial of one (Vancouver) and in the dream of the other (L.A.) that never, at least in this narrative, materializes onscreen.

6. Conclusion: Mapping the Transnational Space

29 At the end of Sisters and Brothers, a newly reconciled Nikki and Maggie, back at Nikki’s apartment, giggle on the couch as they watch an interview with Henry, the sleazy television producer, and his brother Sean, supposedly in L.A. The two men are promoting their new TV series “Fembra the Huntress,” whose heroine will offer, as Henry claims, a “positive role model for young girls” and in which Sean’s role will be “darker” than his role on “Hot Dog” since he will be covered head to toe with black fur. This Entertainment Tonight-style spoof is the parting joke for this trilogy and a fitting (humorous) closing for my discussion of Vancouver-L.A. transnational connections. The sisters are back in Vancouver; Henry may have realized his dream, though the sheer lunacy and ridiculousness of the show’s content gives the sisters the last laugh. The film closes with the comic-book style dotted red line linking Vancouver and L.A.

30 In his work on British Columbia film, Mike Gasher ponders, given the transnationalism of cinema production and the heavy reliance on U.S. locations production, how one is to understand B.C. cinema’s relation to place (6). In my view, Bessai’s two films examined here go a long way in exploring that question, both satisfying and unsettling our expectations of Vancouver as a city-space and underlining its connection with both the continental and the global. What I have tried to expose here is how the films foreground a transnational regionalism that is transnational without being cross-border.

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What is central for these characters is not occurring anywhere near the border. In fact, this new regionalism structured by the entertainment industry seems to skip over Washington and Oregon State entirely, reminding us of Mathew Sparke’s misgivings on the negligible regionalizing impact of certain industries in Cascadia/PNW, of north- south flows that pass through without integrating the rest of the region. The trajectories of the characters in these films do indeed map out a north-south flow that points to a transnational regionalism or network of places, divorced from considerations of geographic contiguity, but that foregrounds at the same time a reality of one-way migration: Vancouver to L.A. This dual-city relationship has historically involved two sets of flows if you consider the south-north movement of the locations industry. Yet this U.S. industry presence is predicated on the negation of place, of portraying Vancouver as an affordable, picturesque stand-in for an American locale. This flow cannot be said to be conscious of its “other” in the way that Vancouverites in the industry are conscious of L.A.; the only “place” that counts in both of these flows, in the end, is “American.”

31 Fathers and Sons and Sisters and Brothers also gesture towards a better understanding of “Vancouver, Canada’s” relationship to Hollywood. As Acland, Gasher, and others have argued, Hollywood is not a parallel “other” cinema that can be ignored in the analysis of Canadian film. It is best understood as a cinema that Canadians (and others) “have both helped to create and have integrated into their own popular culture” (Gasher 10). Independent filmmakers in Vancouver may well seek to re-assert the distinctiveness of a city that continues to be used as a backdrop in American movie-of-the-week specials. Bessai, in using Vancouver and B.C. as a stand-in for a nebulous “Northern California” or unspecified “Los Angeles beach house,” suggests that in this hyper-mobile, globalized, and newly regionalized world, a comforting, self-closed recognizable portrait of Vancouver is no longer possible: even when starring as itself, Vancouver is always already connected to “elsewhere.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Acland, Charles. Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes and Global Culture. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003. Print. Alper, Donald K. “The Idea of Cascadia: Emergent Transborder Regionalisms in the Pacific Northwest-Western Canada.” The Journal of Borderlands Studies 9 (1996): 1-22. Print. Berland, Jody. North of Empire: Essays on the Cultural Technologies of Space. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2009. Print. Brunet-Jailly, Emmanuel. “Cascadia in Comparative Perspective: Canada-U.S. Relations and the Emergence of Cross-Border Regions.” Canadian Political Science Review 2.2 (2008): 104-24. Print.

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Burgess, Diane. “Air Bud and Stickgirl Share Leaky Condo: The Changing Landscape of B.C. Cinema since the 1980s.” Self Portraits: The Cinemas of Canada since Telefilm. Ed. André Loiselle and Tom McSorley. Ottawa: The Canadian Film Institute/ Institut canadien du film, 2006. 129-66. Print. Campbell, Neil. “‘The Compass of Possibilities’: Re-Mapping the Suburbs of Los Angeles in the Writing of D.J. Waldie.” European Journal of American Studies 6.3 (2011). Web. May 2014. —. The Rhizomatic West: Representing the American West in a Transnational, Global, Media Age. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2008. Print. “Canadian Woman Refused U.S. Entry because of Depression.” CBC News. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. 29 November 2013. Web. May 2014. Comer, Krista. “Everyday Regionalism in Contemporary Critical Practice.” Postwestern Cultures: Literature, Theory, Space. Ed. Susan Kollin. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2007. 30-58. Print. —. “Taking Feminism and Regionalism toward the Third Wave.” A Companion to the Regional Literatures of America. Ed. Charles L. Crow. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. 111-28. Print. Cormack, Patricia, and James F. Cosgrave. Desiring Canada: CBC Contests, Hockey Violence, and Other Stately Pleasures. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2013. Print. Druick, Zoë. “Cosmopolitans and Hosers: Notes on Recent Developments in English-Canadian Cinema.” How Canadians Communicate III. Context of Canadian Popular Culture. Ed. Bart Beatty et al. Edmonton: Athabasca UP, 2010. 161-82. Print. Gasher, Mike. Hollywood North: The Feature Film Industry in British Columbia. Vancouver: UBC P, 2002. Print. Gibbons, Roger. Canada as a Borderlands Society. Orono: Borderlands Project, 1989. Print. Gittings, Christopher. Canadian National Cinema: Ideology, Difference and Representation. London/New York: Routledge, 2002. Print. Izay, Ryan. “Sisters and Brothers Blu-Ray Review.” Rizayreviews. n.d. Web. May 2014. Konrad, Victor A., and Heather N. Nicol. “Border Culture, the Boundary between Canada and the United States of America, and the Advancement of Borderlands Theory.” Geopolitics 16.1 (2011): 70-90. Print. —. Beyond Walls: Re-Inventing the Canada-United States Borderlands. Burlington: Ashgate, 2008. Print.

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Leong, Melissa. “Cory Monteith and Dustin Milligan Get Brotherly in Carl Bessai’s Family Drama.” National Post. 22 March 2012. Web. May 2014. Mackey, Eva. This House of Difference: Cultural Politics and National Identity in Canada. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2002. Print. Monteith, Cory. Q. Interview by Jian Gomeshi. CBC Radio. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. 18 November 2009. Radio. McEwan, Paul. Bruce McDonald’s Hard Core Logo. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2011. Print. Ricou, Laurie. The Arbutus/Madrone Files: Reading the Pacific Northwest. Edmonton: NeWest, 2002. Print. Roberts, Katherine A. “Crossover Stars: Canadian Viewing Strategies and the Case of Callum Keith Rennie.” Celebrity in Canada. Ed. Lorraine York and Katja Lee. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP (forthcoming). —. “Cascadia Redux: Chronicle of a Return to the (Extra) West.” Canadian Literature 218 (2013): 117-33. Print. Saldívar, José David. Border Matters: Remapping American Culture Studies. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. Print. Sassen, Saskia. “Spatialities and Temporalities of the Global: Elements for a Theorization.” Public Culture 12.1 (2000): 215-32. Print. Spaner, David. Dreaming in the Rain: How Vancouver Became Hollywood North by Northwest. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp, 2003. Print. Sparke, Mathew. “Excavating the Future in Cascadia: Geoeconomics and the Imagined Geographies of Cross-Border Regions.” BC Studies 127 (2000): 5-44. Print. Takeuchi, Craig. “B.C. Drops to Fourth Largest North American Film Production Centre.” Straight.com. 5 March 2012. Web. May 2014. —. “Carl Bessai’s Fathers and Sons Is a Cultural Mashup.” Straight.com. 19 January 2011. Web. May 2014. Tatum, Steve. “Spectrality and the Postregional Interface.” Postwestern Cultures: Literature, Theory, Space. Ed. Susan Kollin. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2007. 3-29. Print. Wolak, Richard. “Carl Bessai at Fray.” Vancouver Foodster. 16 December 2011. Web. May 2014. Wright, Robin. Virtual Sovereignty: Nationalism, Culture and the Canadian Question. Toronto: Canadian Scholars P, 2004. Print.

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Wyile, Herb. “Hemispheric Studies or Scholarly NAFTA? The Case for Canadian Literary Studies.” Canada and Its Americas: Transnational Navigations. Ed. Winfried Siemerling and Sarah Phillips Casteels. Montreal/Kingston: McGill Queen’s UP, 2010. 48-61. Print. Films and TV Shows 90210. Prod. Gabe Sachs et al. CBS Productions, 2008-2013. Cas and Dylan. Dir. Jason Priestley. Montefiore Films, 2013. Down the Road Again. Dir. Donald Shebib. Triptych Media, 2011. Entourage. Prod. Doug Ellin et al. Leverage Management, 2004-2011. Fathers and Sons. Dir. Carl Bessai. Raven West Films, 2010. Foreverland. Dir. Max McGuire. Screen Siren Pictures, 2011. Glee. Prod. Ryan Murphy et al. 20th Century Fox Television, 2009-2014. Goin’ Down the Road. Dir. Donald Shebib. Edvon Films, 1970. Hard Core Logo. Dir. Bruce McDonald. Terminal City Pictures, 1996 Highway 61. Dir. Bruce McDonald. Cineplex-Odeon Films, 1991. Jackass. Cr. Johnny Knoxville. Dickhouse Productions, 2000-2002. My American Cousin. Dir. Sandy Wilson. Borderline Productions, 1985. Mothers and Daughters. Dir. Carl Bessai. Raven West Films, 2008. One Week. Dir. Michael McGowan. Mongrel Media, 2008. Roadkill. Dir. Bruce McDonald. Mr. Shack Motion Pictures, 1989. Sisters and Brothers. Dir. Carl Bessai. Raven West Films, 2011.

NOTES i. Jackass (2000-2002) was an American reality TV show, originally broadcast on MTV, that featured participants performing various dangerous, crude, and self-injuring stunts and pranks. ii. For example, Steve Tatum’s aforementioned list of city regions in the North American West excludes Canada. Given what we know about the interconnectedness of the oil and gas industry in North America, cities like Calgary and Fort McMurray, Alberta should have been included. iii. Lawrence Hill’s 2007 award-winning novel The Book of Negroes (Harper Collins), for example, was published in the United States under the title Someone Knows My Name (Norton and Company).

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iv. Faced in 2012 with an 80% drop in production, members of the B.C. Film Industry recently lobbied the B.C. government for increasing tax credits in order to attract more (foreign) productions. v. For more recent data on foreign film and television production in Vancouver see Takeuchi, “B.C.” vi. The absence of the Chinese and Aboriginal communities in the two latest films is striking given each community’s importance for the demographics of Vancouver. Bessai, no doubt aware of this, explained in an interview about Fathers and Sons that a Chinese-Canadian story “didn’t make it to camera” (see Takeuchi, “Cultural Mashup”). In my view, the multicultural aspect of Fathers and Sons and Sisters and Brothers is naturalized rather than problematized, meaning that multiculturalism is not the subject but the backdrop for these films. For example, aside from some elements of social stereotyping, particularly in the story of the drunken Russian Jewish father, Anton (Jay Brazeau), who forces his son, Bernie (Ben Ratner), to prove his manhood by drinking vodka and engaging in a knife-fight, Bessai avoids issues of conservative values and social silencing. In the South-Asian narrative it is the successful accountant-son, Kama/Cameron (Stephen Lobo), who is ashamed of his father’s sexuality and flamboyance, trumping the more standard narrative of the South-Asian son or daughter afraid to reveal his/her sexuality to more traditional parents. vii. The use of “lotusland” as a nickname for Vancouver was coined by Vancouver Sun writer Allan Fotheringham, referring of course to Homer’s Odyssey, in which the hero, Odysseus, visits a land whose inhabitants are befuddled by a narcotic lotus. The insinuation is that Vancouver is an idyllic land of contentment and self-indulgence. It sometimes is used to describe parts of coastal British Columbia. viii. Recent Canadian road movies include Down the Road Again (Donald Shebib, 2011), the sequel to his 1970 classic, Foreverland (2011), and Cas and Dylan (2013). ix. As Acland explains, “[t]he U.S. industry plays a role in the measure of accomplishment for Canadian talent. As such, it offers a way for Canadian audiences to view that success, to read a film or television program as a mark of Canadian achievement” (190-91). x. Vancouver-born or Vancouver-based stars that have had high-profile careers in the U.S. include Carrie Ann Moss, Jason Priestley, Joshua Jackson, Seth Rogen, and Ryan Reynolds. xi. Monteith and Milligan reportedly shared an apartment in Vancouver before they left the country and even worked in the same downtown dessert café (Leong). In an interview with CBC’s Jian Gomeshi, Monteith described making the 20-hour drive alone to L.A. and paying for his own hotel to be “in place” for the audition that eventually launched his short-lived career (see Monteith). xii. It is worth noting that Bessai himself admits to traveling to L.A. once a month for work- related projects (see Wolak). xiii. Vancouver-based actors have a history of playing California “heartthrobs.” One of the most popular actors in the original Beverly Hills, 90210 TV series (1990-2000) was Vancouver native Jason Priestley. Both Monteith and Milligan appear to attach a certain importance to their national origins, i.e. being Canadian gives them a different perspective on their careers. They have commented in interviews on how the improvisation-style of Sisters and Brothers differed from the commercial television work they had been doing. For Milligan, “[s]uccess means LA, but you can’t improvise anymore in your work because of the money involved.” Both relished the irony of Monteith playing the actor (Justin) that no Canadian wants to become. Canadians, for them, remain less superficial (see Leong). xiv. The need to maintain a physical presence in L.A. in order to continue to get work is well known to Canadian artists who attempt to achieve success stateside. In a recent interview, one of Canada’s best-known actors, Callum Keith Rennie, mentioned the stress of having only worked a

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few days in L.A. in the preceding year. “You have to maintain a presence [in L.A.] at all times” (see Roberts, “Crossover Stars”). xv. Henry claims to have lost his wallet and all of his identification without which he would have been unable to cross the Canada-U.S. border. Maggie has obvious mental health issues, a fact that could also result in her being denied entry into the United States (see “Canadian Woman Refused U.S. Entry because of Depression”).

ABSTRACTS

Scholars of critical regionalism have argued convincingly for a complex re-definition of regions/ regionalism that examines the inherent mobility of cultures and their re-appropriation of place. This article aims to bring American-based critical regionalism into dialogue with research on Canada-U.S. cross-border regions, specifically the Pacific Northwest (Cascadia). I will examine an emerging aspect of western culture in the Lower Mainland of Vancouver, i.e. a (post)regional space of flows governed by the hyper-volatile film and television/entertainment industry that links Vancouver to Los Angeles. The cinema of award-winning Vancouver auteur filmmaker Carl Bessai is illustrative of this phenomenon. Bessai’s two most recent films, Fathers and Sons (2010) and Sisters and Brothers (2011) feature characters in non-traditional families who desire to work in film and television in Los Angeles. Through caustic humor, the films engage in multiple levels of critique: of the dysfunctional nature of these cross-border families, but also of the superficiality of image-culture and the “forced” migration of talent who are sucked into the entertainment vortex. Analyzing these films through the lens of critical regionalism foregrounds “West Coastness” as a region of flows, of bodies in mobility/circulation yet—in the case of Bessai— without side-stepping the obvious asymmetries inherent in Canada’s complex and enduringly ambivalent relationship with the United States.

INDEX

Keywords: Canadian-American relationship, Critical regionalism, Mobility, Vancouver cinema, West Coast

AUTHOR

KATHERINE A. ROBERTS Wilfrid Laurier University

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“You Must Become Dreamy”: Complicating Japanese-American Pictorialism and the Early Twentieth-Century Regional West

Rachel Sailor

1. Introduction

1 Kyo Koike (1874-1947) was one of the most active and eager members of the Seattle Camera Club, an association of Seattle-based amateur photographers founded in 1924, in the 1920s and 1930s. His photographs present the Pacific Northwest landscapes around Seattle, with a particular focus on mountain photography, especially Mt. Rainier. Koike’s attention to the peaks, alpine meadows, and glaciers in the region fell in line with the interests of a vast army of weekend pictorialists—those who sought picturesque subjects to produce self-consciously artful photographs—from across America. These amateurs embraced the natural areas of their locales to explore the aesthetics and attitudes that defined their approach to photography and their region. Through his tenacious search for subject matter and his pointed interest in the conversations taking place about photography in his city, his nation, and the larger world, Koike left an indelible mark on the pictorialist community and typifies the photographers of the era who conflated the style of pictorialism with regionalist expression.

2 Koike was one of many Japanese-American regionalist photographers in the Pacific Northwest, along with Iwao Matsushida, Frank Asakichi Kunishige, Kusutora Matsuki, Fred Yutaka Ogasawara, and others. Similarly, Hiromu Kira, Kentaro Nakamura, and Shigemi Uyeda were working in Los Angeles in the same period, as did Japanese photographers in other cities along the coast and in Hawaii (Reed 29). These photographers were either first- or, less often, second-generation immigrants from Japan—Issei and Nissei, respectively (collectively Nikkei)—who used pictorialist

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landscape photography to explore picturesque views of their region. Like so many in America during the early twentieth century, they took up photography as a pastime, eager to use the increasing accessibility of the medium to express the sense of place that was at a height of popularity. Koike arrived in Seattle in 1916, quickly found a community of like-minded photographers, and went on to be instrumental in the establishment and operation of the Seattle Camera Club in 1924.

3 The classification of Koike and other members of the Seattle Camera Club as merely “western,” or “regional,” does not immediately convey the cultural complexity that these photographers and their images of western American places demonstrate. Rather, Koike’s pictorialist practice, his Japanese heritage, his adoption of a new locale and the era’s attending trends in regionalist thought complicates the typical understanding of what regional cultural production was at that time. In fact, his work demonstrates and exemplifies a nuanced and multifaceted transnational nexus of overlapping cultures, competing aesthetics, and colliding photographic histories that is not only representative of his particular situation, but that also reflects the much larger reality of west coast Japanese immigrant pictorialists and the even larger relationship between immigration and regionalist expression.

4 Ultimately, this essay will be devoted to the story of Koike and his work as a way to demonstrate an expanded notion of regionalism. I believe that pictorialist photographs and their relationship to places are “dense palimpsests of broader forces,” as suggested by Douglas Reichert Powell in 2007 about regionalism in general (19). Indeed, broader forces were at work in Koike’s photography. As well, I will show that the notion of “region” is not confining or limiting, but a broad and malleable parameter that can help us understand the intricacies and complexity of myriad cultural intersections. First, I will discuss the relationship between photographic pictorialism and pictorial techniques popularized in Japan. By acknowledging the evolution of “Japonisme”in the western world, we can more fully comprehend the inherent aesthetic complexity of Nikkei photography in America. Then I will explore pictorialism as a strong and largely overlooked regional mode of expression—one that found particular favor in the American West. Finally, I will show that the particularly unique photographic heritage of the American West can expand our understanding of the relationship between regional expression and the pictorial aesthetic. Overall, this case study reveals regional pictorialism as a vital force that helped shape the dynamism of early twentieth-century American culture.

2. Pictorialism and the Japanese Aesthetic

5 As an aesthetic movement, photographic pictorialism in the American West was coterminous with the rise of regionalism, which reached its height in the late 1920s and 1930s. But, despite the obvious connection at the time, pictorialism is now more commonly understood within the discourse of photographic style development instead of through its relationship to larger cultural trends in America. The photographic style as a product of the regionalist impulse has gone largely unexplored for many reasons. First, pictorialism was an approach to photography that was overthrown (seemingly) by the modernist movement, in America first mounted in art photography by Alfred Stieglitz and his famous image, The Steerage, from 1907 (Peterson 13-17). Second, the hegemony of New York and the upper East Coast in the early twentieth-century

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American art world seemed close to absolute. In the third and fourth decade of the century, despite an interest in western lands by many artists—most notably Georgia O’Keeffe, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams and Group f/64—the West was still considered a cultural backwater, its precise attraction for many modernists (Corn 253). Finally, that pictorialism in the West is not a common scholarly subject has to do with the nature of regionalism—the conceptual home for amateur and hobbyist pictorialists—that was by definition splintered and decentralized.

6 Aesthetically, pictorialism was an approach to photography that emphasized romantic artfulness. Through the use of soft focus lenses, textured paper, and self- conscious compositional techniques borrowed from trends in painting and printmaking, the style was originally an effort to legitimize the mechanical medium of photography. Begun in the late nineteenth century in Europe by Henry Peach Robinson and encouraged through organizations like the Brotherhood of the Linked Ring, pictorialism was for a time associated with the avant-garde of the fine arts. While never really accepted in the nineteenth century as artists equal to painters, pictorialists aggressively co-opted their fine art technique and conceptual approach. For example, the craftsmanship of a pictorialist photograph was a response to the pervasive Arts and Crafts Movement that championed high quality workmanship and an insistence on aesthetic beauty. Moreover, the approach to photography drew heavily on symbolist sentiment in avant-garde art from the turn-of-the-century; imagery in pictorial photography emphasized archetypes and favored universal motifs (Bunnell 5-12).

7 Koike’s ca. 1930 photograph, The Serpent, for instance, shows in soft focus the Cascade Range of Washington state with a river winding through the landscape; the terrain is rugged and the atmosphere misty (Fig. 1). The photograph looks like so many others from that time and place, and yet the cultural complexity of its making is striking. Koike’s image, for instance, highlights the hazy atmosphere that pictorialists favored, originally meant to align photography with the impasto brushwork of romantic painting generally, and turn-of-the-century symbolist work, specifically. While the Pacific Northwest lent itself to misty landscape representations, the aesthetic effect is deepened by Koike’s emphasis on dark shadows across the valley. Ironically, however, like contemporary modernist photographers, Koike intentionally emphasized visual clarity, despite the general cloudiness in the region. In “My Photographic Trip” (1934), Koike wrote that “I like straight photography and most of my enlarged prints are made out from the negative framed on the enlarging easel. I do not believe in printing-in clouds or any other ‘faking’” (130). Despite an emphasis on un-manipulated photographs, a tactic not as uncommon as one might think (Cornell 295), a pictorialist approach is also communicated through the title. Koike imagines the winding river as a serpent, anthropomorphizing the elements of this landscape and evoking a mysterious and living sublimity.

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Figure 1

Kyo Koike, The Serpent, ca. 1930 (University of Washington Special Collections, UW 29066z)

8 At the heart of the inspired art movements of the late nineteenth century was an aesthetic borrowing from the Japanese. “Japonisme,”as the craze was dubbed, consumed Europeans and Americans alike. The Japanese aesthetic of ukiyo-e pictures, of asymmetry, flat planes of color or tone that emphasize negative space, aggressive cropping, and general insistence on planes, challenged western artists to reevaluate their own constructs of pictorial space, which had been introduced and codified in the Renaissance. Along with well-known craftsmen such as William Morris and Louis Comfort Tiffany, and avant-garde painters from James Abbott McNeill Whistler in the 1860s to the Belle Epoque’s Gustav Klimt, pictorial photographers utilized the new aesthetic to make spare images that foregrounded aesthetic beauty and contrived pictorial space. These images tried to shed the emphasis on absolute clarity and accuracy that had attended photography, as a “mirror with a memory,” since its inception (Holmes 739). Despite the deeply interconnected nature of pictorialism and more condoned high art forms, it was vilified as unoriginal from its beginning. In 1898, for instance, Japanese-American art critic Sadakichi Hartmann wrote that Amateur photography, apparently accessible to every one who can press the button, and reminding one, even with the crudest handling, somewhat of pictorial art, has taken hold of the public taste to such an extent that the Kodak fiend has been made into a typical figure and has had to play his ridiculous part on the stage and in the comical magazines for years. (“A Few Reflections” 41)

9 “Since amateur photographers are as plentiful as bicyclists,” he continued, “the more astonishing it seems to one that those men who really produce something artistic can be counted on the fingers of one hand” (ibid.). Despite its critical rejection, pictorialism flourished precisely because of Eastman Kodak’s do-it-yourself technology that allowed

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such broad access to photography. When the first hand-held “Brownie” cameras were sold in 1900, photography became widely available and was taken up with enthusiasm by the masses.

10 The amateur pictorialists, eager to defend their interests against the rising tide of modernism, returned the disdain that was directed at them. In 1918, for instance, one writer for Photo-Era pondered “to what lengths adherents of straight-photography would go”: If a devotee of straight-photography were out in the woods and found a pleasing bit of landscape, would he hesitate to remove any little objectionable shrub or growth that would mar the harmony of his composition? No, he would not. Would he hesitate to plant a few reeds or twigs if he found that they would add to the beauty of them? Decidedly not. Would he have any conscientious scruples to overexpose or underexpose his plate, for the purpose of obtaining a certain mood or impression? No, of course not, why should he? Then, too, when he develops his negative, would he pause and ponder upon the advisability to overdevelop or underdevelop it to work out his idea? Why no, that is absurd. Would he stop with the straight result of his negative in the case of the society-lady with the crooked mouth? No, he would not; nor would he have any squirms of conscience about strengthening the eyebrows or lashes, or, in fact, changing the entire features so as to make her as beautiful as it is in his power to make her. He would do all these things mentioned, and more, and then calmly sit down and rant against control or interference. You who preach straight-photography should never do any of these things. (Christiansen 190)

11 Despite the tension between artists and photographers and between the two camps of photography in the first decades of the twentieth century, pictorialism was on the upswing.

12 In 1890s America, pictorialism was promoted and demonstrated by Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, and other members of New York’s own Photo-Secession group, so named for their intent to break “away from the narrow rules of custom and tradition” like the Secessionist group in Munich (Stieglitz 534). Stieglitz, especially, worked tirelessly to promote the style in particular and photography as an art form. He opened The Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession out of his home at 291, 5th Ave, New York City, in 1905, produced the Arts and Crafts-inspired periodical Camera Work to showcase the photographs, and gathered around him a group of influential artists and patrons.

13 Stieglitz was so central to the Photo-Secession group and the art photography movement in America that he remains an iconic figure. The story of his conversion to a straight aesthetic in the early twentieth century, for instance, has become synecdochic for the larger cultural transfer to modernistic photography. Stieglitz’s realization while viewing the lower deck on a ship, that he photographed a “spontaneous discovery” has ascended into legend (McCauley 30). Stieglitz did not live or work in a vacuum, however, and others, including art critic Sadakichi Hartmann, had been advocating for this turn in approach and subject matter for years prior. In 1902, the year Stieglitz formed the Photo-Secession, Hartmann bemoaned the trite and formulaic handling of subject matter by the “art photographer,” and suggested that photographers expend their efforts on the “ceaseless, ever-shifting stream of humanity in the shopping districts, the Saturday afternoon parade on Broadway after the matinees are over,” and “the bustle on the piers at the arrival or departure of an ocean steamer” (“Subject and Treatment” 180). Despite this type of early criticism of pictorialism, the narrative of the

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making of The Steerage continues to act as a crucial anecdote around which the history of American photography revolves.

14 Regardless of a broad critical onslaught within the ranks of the fine arts elite, pictorialism continued to thrive well past Stieglitz’s conversion to modernism. In fact, in the years following The Steerage, and the almost immediate esteem that “straight” photography received, pictorialism continued to flourish. Through the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s, interest in pictorialism grew as amateur camera clubs sprouted across America. In the West, as well, pictorialism gained traction, largely because of its strong connection to the rising tide of regionalism between the wars.

15 The evidence for the popularity of photographic pictorialism during this period exists in the records of camera clubs, in the number of journals dedicated to the topic, and in the success of organizing bodies like the Associated Camera Clubs of Americaand Pictorial Photographers of America, organizations that provided unity and solidarity to photographers across the country. Pictorial Photographers of Americawas formed in 1916 by Clarence White with the objective to pick up where the Photo-Secession had left off, producing five lavish Annuals of the Pictorial Photographers of America between 1920 and 1929 (Anderson 206). While those publications certainly demonstrated the popularity of pictorialism, more important were the monthly journals that served photographers. With the rise of Kodak and the weekend hobbyist, photographic journals morphed from catering to the photographic professional of the nineteenth century to addressing the broader concerns of dabblers. Journals such as Photo-Era (1898-1932), American Photography (1907-1953), Abel’s Photographic Weekly (1907-1934),and Camera Craft (1900-1942) either made a concerted effort to update their content or were developed afresh.

16 On a more local level, camera clubs proved incredibly important for the success of pictorialism. The clubs organized salons, had public programming, and sometimes even provided darkroom facilities (Peterson 127). Even as early as 1900 the club phenomenon was notable. Hartmann wrote in 1900 that “the New York Camera Club is to-day the leading photographic club of the States, whose influence is most powerful and far felt” (“New York Camera Club” 60). In 1901, however, the California Camera Club was the largest in the world with a membership topping four hundred, despite the New York club’s hegemony (“A Mistaken Impression”; Stellmann 171). Ultimately, Hartmann praised the exclusivity of the New York club and all its 340 members. As a way to establish pictorial photography as a legitimate art, the club’s strict control over taste and production helped solidify their cause. Things quickly changed, however. By 1905 Hartmann, in a statement that presaged the regionalist movement, wrote that “the mission of photography is, after all, a democratic one” and that “it answers better than other mediums of pictorial expression the special necessities of a leveling age like ours” (“A Plea” 469). In 1912, fifty clubs in the U.S. and Canada were listed. In 1925 the American Annual of Photography listed sixty-seven clubs (Brown 131). In the Seattle Camera Club of that year, Koike reported just over fifty members (“Seattle Camera Club” 186). By 1944 the Encyclopedia of Photography reported that “[d]uring the past several years there has been a marked increase in the number of amateur photographers in the United States” and that “[t]his has been accompanied by a corresponding increase in the number of camera clubs in all sections of the country” (Bent 544). By the early 1940s, camera clubs existed in every city and even in smaller towns across America. The number of clubs listed by organizations and in publications,

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however, did not account for all the clubs in small towns and on university campuses across the West. Indeed, “if agreeable to you,” wrote one advocate, “it would probably be possible to organize a camera club in your Y. M. C. A., or your church, your school, social center, or lodge” (Harter 276). Indeed, camera clubs and pictorial photographers were ubiquitous.

17 Kyo Koike was deeply involved with the organizations and publications that promoted pictorialism—in his own region and beyond. As one of the central paradoxes of regionalism and certainly of pictorialist regionalism, Koike, like so many others, regularly participated in national and international salons. Koike submitted photographs to juried exhibitions across the United States from New York, Niagara, and Buffalo to Akron, Memphis, Minneapolis, Houston, Los Angeles, and Portland. Internationally, he exhibited even more widely. He submitted, was accepted, and often won prizes in England, Sweden, Norway, Finland, France, Italy, Yugoslavia, German, Hungary, Greece, Japan, China, India, Australia, and elsewhere (Koike Photograph Collection). He also promoted and judged salons in his own Northwest region and produced an official newsletter of the Seattle Camera Club (“Pictorial Photographic Salons” 36). Notan, the name of the newsletter, was the Japanese word for “darks and lights in harmonic relations,” a central concept in the melding of the Japanese aesthetic and black and white photography (Dow 113).

3. Contested Aesthetics

18 Notan functioned as an umbrella concept that could unite all the members of the Seattle Camera Club, Japanese or not, and Koike’s use of the term demonstrated his curiosity about the manner in which he would fit into the new social schemes of his adopted home. Koike spent a significant portion of his published material defending and defining the uniquely Japanese qualities that influenced his pictorial work.

19 Despite the Japanese origins of an aesthetic favored by pictorialists, by the 1920s many photographers had lost touch with the concept. Koike’s desire to defend the Japanese approach was a response to direct criticism from within the ranks of American pictorialism. Ironically, many photographers failed to grasp the centrality that the Japanese had to the style.According to Koike, F.C. Tilney, for instance, wrote that Japanese pictorialists had “a racial bent for decoration” that “leads the Japanese photographers to select arrangements that are not pictorial in our sense of the word, but queer rather” (“Japanese Art in Photography” 113). Koike responded by writing that he was “sorry” that Tilney had “no correct knowledge about Japanese ideas” (qtd. in Reed 57). One participant criticized Seattle’s Salon, suggesting that “[i]t is considered in the East that in endeavoring to make the Seattle Salon international in character they will throw out superior American work to make room for inferior foreign work,” an accusation that Koike adamantly denied (“Pictorial Photographic Salons” 39; “Influence”). Others, however, recognized the unique Japanese aesthetic as a desirable component of pictorial expression. Sigismund Blumann, editor of Camera Craft, for instance, wrote in 1925 that “it is becoming an accepted belief that this people are not only advancing in abstract pictorialism but are impressing something national, something decidedly characteristic upon our art” and that the Japanese “are actually transforming the stereotyped Salon formula into real novelty” (109).

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20 His writing leaves no doubt that Koike felt different from “the Americans.” He referred to his sense of separation from Americans more than once and certainly took pride in his Japanese artistic heritage. He also acknowledged the hybridity in his photographs, saying that “of course my ideas are influenced by foreign conceptions” and that he was “not free from the influence of the Japanese spirit” (“Photographic Trip” 130). However, northwest Washington was his home and the mountains in the region, such as Rainier, Adams, Baker, and St. Helen’s, were his preferred subject matter (“Mountain Photography”; “Figures in Mountain Photography”; “Photographing Mountains”). His story demonstrates that being a regionalist, and the strong sense of belonging that was implied, was fluid and complex. Although others contested his aesthetic approach as “foreign,” Koike was clear about his position as an immigrant: Now we are all Japanese living in America. You see it is clear what the members of the Seattle Camera Club should do for the advancement of photographic art. Yes, we must be the best interpreters for both nations, because we are not free of Japanese ideas, and yet at the same time we understand Western ways. We should not make our pictures aimlessly, but must try hard to combine both ideas, in other words stick to our peculiar point of view. (“Seattle Camera Club” 188)

21 While these exchanges acknowledge Japanese aesthetics in general, they also emphasize the “otherness” that Americans saw in the Japanese—a difference that would be exacerbated by the Second World War.

22 In The Serpent, Koike demonstrated an aesthetic adherence to the earlier romantic traditions by employing “Japonisme” as a compositional technique. The overall tonal quality of the image emphasizes its two-dimensionality—especially when compared to the extreme depth of field sought by Koike’s contemporaries in Group f/64. As a result, the river winds across the surface of the photograph, as much as it does through the landscape. As well, its diagonal orientation creates an asymmetry that contrasts with the more canonical photographic approach to a river valley that would juxtapose near and far in a picturesque manner. Overall, Koike’s photograph achieves the desired ambiguity so stressed in the Japanese aesthetic. It is neither perfectly rendered as an illusionistically three-dimensional landscape, nor do the scales tip too far into abstraction. It is a balancing act, an aesthetic duality that denies the viewers’ ability to see it either way.

23 In another photograph from ca. 1930, Mountains and Tree Branches in the Mist, Koike employed a Japanese technique of juxtaposing the very near and the very far in an attempt to create spatial equilibrium between them (Fig. 2). In this photograph a disembodied branch from a foreground tree interrupts the view across the valley. The foregrounded tree is darker than the distant mountains and displays a delicate intricacy of branches and needles. In the Japanese approach, the branch is not simply something to look past. Rather, it has a visual weight that competes successfully with the distant view to the horizon. The effect is to bring the viewers’ attention to the picture plane. We are encouraged by this composition to look near the surface of the photograph, not into and through it in a manner more in line with approaches developed by western culture. The imposing tree, along with the curving line of the middle-ground mountain ridge in the lower right corner emphatically denies an indexical reading of the photograph, and heightens pictorial abstraction. The photograph is thus about the formal qualities of rhythm, balance, texture, and artful composition as much as it is about a specific place and landscape.

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Figure 2

Kyo Koike, Mountains and Tree Branches in the Mist,ca. 1930 (University of Washington Special Collections, UW 29038)

4. Pictorialism and Region in the American West

24 In the American West, especially, pictorial photography at first seems to exemplify the typical understanding of regional production as it related to a national context—that pits the regional margins against the cultural urban centers of the East. In this model, a vast separation exists between regional cultural production that related only to a minority of Americans, and the more expansive work that could speak broadly for all. In another approach, regional cultural production did just the opposite. That is, the work emerging from different regions acted as an exemplar of America—the part was representing the whole. The latter concept was especially related to the American West since the late-nineteenth-century ideas about the American Frontier. Frederick Jackson Turner notoriously argued that the West was the most significantly defining region for all of America, stating that “[t]he true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is the Great West” (3). This approach, rendered deeply problematic by the New Western History for the last three decades, provided support for the great narrative of the West. Despite a new critical awareness, Turner’s ideas continue to reverberate in the popular imagination (Cronon 160).

25 When Koike and other Japanese-American photographers took artful photographs in the locations around their homes along the West Coast in the 1920s and 1930s, they were joining many Americans in pursuit of regional explication. Koike and other Japanese-American pictorialists took part in regionalism, despite their seemingly

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different Japanese aesthetic and despite pictorialism’s tendencies toward the general and the universal. The special link between pictorialism and regionalism was due to its accessibility as an aesthetic style for multitudes of amateurs who took up the medium with a minimum of training and part-time approach that excluded them from the elite of fine art photography. They were part of what one critic called “the broad movement” (Lamb 76).

26 Modernists sought to distinguish themselves from these developing hordes of dilettantes, and pictorialists embraced that rejection according to their growing regionalist values. The differences between regions and more well-known cultural centers were demonstrated through the crafted political rhetoric of self-proclaimed regionalists. American Scene painter Grant Wood, for instance, wrote in “Revolt against the City” (1935) that “the great central areas of America … are not the hinterland for New York” (653). Likewise, southwestern author Mary Austin wrote “New York: Dictator of American Criticism” (1920), in which she stated that “New York is, in respect to the rest of our country, only a half-way house of immigration, a little less than a half-way house for European thinking.” She also demanded that “if decentralization is the only way to accomplish the release of the American genius, that decentralization must inevitably take place” (129). The rise of regionalist articulation resounded in newspapers and journals across America, as well. For example, one columnist wrote that A chief function of the arts is the interpretative function and it must be in a truly American art that the life of America is mirrored, realized, and critically examined. And to American arts regionalism must contribute, for New York can never symbolize America as Paris stands for France and London for England. The stretch of country is too great, sectional resources and employments are too various, the regional problems too diverse. (Dallas Morning News 8)

27 This type of regionalist sentiment certainly seemed pervasive and persuasive, clinging to notions of American exceptionalism. Moreover, the dichotomous tension expressed by these writers represents a simplified narrative of regionalism, one that did not privilege the immigrant, and failed to acknowledge the deep cultural inheritance from sources beyond their borders. Perhaps the discourse emphasized simplicity, but the cultural production did not.

28 Many in the 1920s and 1930s saw the delineation of the regionalist as provincial. For example, one columnist wrote in 1935 that “opposed to the regionalists are the ‘internationalists,’ who advocate the painting of any and all subjects, no matter what their locale,” suggesting that regionalist subject matter was only of interest to the region (“Washington Artists Observe New ‘Regionalism’ Trend” 11). But in reality, most serious regionalists were producing cultural material for the consumption of the nation and the larger European sphere. Koike participated in the national debate over photographic style, writing essays and publishing photographs in journals such as Camera Craft, Photo-Era , The American Annual of Photography, and others,as well as exhibiting widely across the United States and in Europe (Martin and Bromberg 109-110). Indeed, the success of the pictorialists was not simply due to the support of art lovers from their own locales. Instead, these self-identified regionalists sought national and international recognition for their work. This larger conversation about aesthetics and region was not a contradiction to the tenets of the regionalist movement; rather, it demonstrates the mutability that inevitably had to exist given the

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decentralized nature of regionalism. The “rules” of regionalism were flexible according to medium, political affiliation, and a host of other defining conditions.

29 Regional evangelists oversimplified notions of commonality and difference. In its most essential definition, regionalism connected people to others based on local/ regional/sectional criteria and separated them from others outside the delimiting boundaries of that region—defining identity against a national ethos. The Japanese- American regionalists, however, demonstrated the connectedness between cultural spheres of region and sub-region as well as region and nation. As immigrants, their adherence to a regional subject matter connected them to their local and regional community, but the very act of regional expression also enveloped them within the cultural sphere of the larger nation; to be a regionalist in the years around 1930 was a deeply American attitude no matter which region was represented. On the other hand, regionalism as expressed by Japanese immigrants demonstrated a broad cultural interactivity that highlighted obvious cultural differences. The aesthetics of pictorialism and “Japonisme” were an amalgamation of sources from around the world, the citizenry of pictorial camera clubs—through exhibition opportunities and published discourse—were globally engaged and the photographers themselves, culturally, politically, and ethnically were a diverse and transnationally dynamic group.

30 Despite their wide artistic purview, Koike, like others, believed in the importance of regional identity, which found expression as much in his writing as it did in his photographs. His “Photographing Mountains,” which appeared in The American Annual of Photography in 1931, is practically an advertisement for the greatness of the Cascade and Olympic ranges in Washington State. He describes his interaction with the location as much as he does the creation of photographs. Even this approach to locale, however, is not without its complicating factors. Enamored with mountains and mountain photography, Koike responded with romantic and florid language to describe the places he visited. Moreover, Koike’s personal understanding of the mountains of the Northwest was filtered through his original, cultural interaction with Japan’s Mt. Fuji. Koike noted that “[t]he snow-cap” of Mt. Rainier “is similar in the form to our holy Mount Fuji, so we Japanese often call it ‘Tacoma Fuji’” (Fig. 3; “Mount Rainier” 117). While Koike’s investment in the Pacific Northwest is clearly demonstrated, his understanding of region was profoundly multifaceted.

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Figure 3

Kyo Koike, Glacier Inferno, ca. 1930 (University of Washington Special Collections, UW 36435)

31 Besides region-oriented subject matter, however, the aesthetic of pictorialism itself began to be associated with regionalism. Often this association took on negative overtones—a retardataire style and a regionalist subject matter and intention were equated with provincialism by the elite in the art world. By the 1930s and 1940s, the modernist elite who were exhibiting in the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim in New York City and the De Young Museum in San Francisco were people like Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Paul Strand, and others who vociferously rejected the pictorial style. According to Adams, for instance, “the essential honesty and directness of the medium were nullified…when photography turned to a shallow restatement of the qualities and intentions of the painting and other graphic media of that period” (13). For him, the clarity of the photography associated with the “frontier” phase of the American West was a tradition to be revived, even as the legacy of that era had never really fallen away.

5. Pictorialism and the History of Photography in the American West

32 The relationship between the Nikkei, the pictorialist aesthetic, and American regionalism was further complicated by the entrenched photographic traditions associated with the American West. In this broad region of the United States, photography had always been used to investigate and define place. From the mid- nineteenth century, when Euro-Americans began their systematic incursions into the interior, to the end of the century, photographers were abundant across the subregions of the West. In one sense, western photographers took photographs for the nation, selling their wares in eastern, more populated locales. Other photographers settled in

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towns and cities and provided photographic services to their fellow settlers. These thousands of photographers, more so than the celebrities of nineteenth-century western photography, such as William Henry Jackson and Carleton Watkins, were responsible for a significant photographic legacy in the region (Sailor). Photography was not just a beneficial way to visibly capture a passing phase of Euro-American immigration; it was a tool for settlement. Photography allowed new residents and whole communities to imaginatively shape their conception of the new western places by applying normative aesthetic values onto an unknown landscape; by framing a place correctly, it was made to resemble something already known.

33 By the late 1920s, via this legacy, photography in the West was already intimately tied to the construction of self through place. In fact, the strong tradition of western photography supposed investigation of place by outsiders. Nineteenth-century western photographers were immigrants, using photography to investigate and construct meaning. When the Japanese Americans took up landscape photography in the twentieth century, they were thus joining a time-honored tradition. They were also confronting much of the myth that attended such an aggressive construction of regional identity. From the earliest years of the nineteenth century, the narrative of the West has largely been that of the Frontier myth, “which sees the discovery, conquest and settlement of the West as the dominant theme of American history,” where “artists saw their mission as that of transforming the base materials of national ‘history’ and scenery into an evocative mythology, rich in symbolic resonance, which they could celebrate” (Slotkin 94). Far from an antiquated approach to the American West, the Frontier myth was ever present in Koike’s era.

34 While Koike did not address the characteristics of “western-ness” in his writing, he did advocate for the natural world around Seattle, often describing in detail the best qualities of the local landscape. In “Mount Rainier,” published in Camera Craft in 1926, Koike describes Mount Rainier National Park as “the pride of our charmed land” (117). He proceeds in this article to describe the pictorial opportunities at length, advising about hiking trails, weather, etc. Scene hunting was common among pictorialists all over the country, but it had a deeper meaning in the West, where photography associated with the Frontier highlighted danger, adventure, and the rhetoric of religious experience in confronting the region’s hallowed places. Koike also associates his experience of the mountain with local legend by suggesting that Mt. Rainier was a “holy mountain which old Indians worshiped as a god,” much in the way earlier Anglo immigrants would have understood the place (“Seattle Camera Club” 182).

35 In an essay in which Koike offered advice for those who would like to make a pictorialist photograph, he wrote that to understand his photographs “you must become dreamy and wander in the land of imagination” (“Japanese Art” 115). His eloquent summation of how to achieve a pictorialist photograph offers a striking similarity to the earlier manner in which photography was used in the West. While under the guise of “documenting” or “recording,” scholars now understand much of the nineteenth-century cultural production of the West (indeed of America) as products of invention as well as imagination. Although “documentary” was not a meaningful term in the nineteenth century, it certainly describes the attitude toward photography: how immigrant settlers used the camera ostensibly emphasized accuracy and veracity in the medium. Many valued what they thought of as the truth-telling capabilities of the camera, despite its overwhelming use for promoting a particularly

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Eurocentric agenda for America. This seemingly straightforward photographic ethos from the mid-nineteenth century was rejected by late century emerging pictorialists who sought not to document but to create an overtly artful photography— overshadowing the centrality of imagination in both eras.

36 Just as artists and photographers invented the mythic West through their own set of needs and desires, so too did the Japanese-American pictorialists contemplate place through their own cultural filters. Indeed, using one’s imagination to photograph the West was directly in line with what newcomers to the West had done since the 1840s. In this way, Koike’s transnational photographs were paradoxically truly American and truly western, responding as all-western image makers to a formidable and sometimes monolithic sense of place and identity.

6. Conclusion

37 The height of the regionalist movement in the United States was delineated by the two World Wars. World War I encouraged reflection on American identity within the contentious global politics that devastated Europe and destroyed economies. The years of the Great Depression, as well, encouraged Americans to value local communities and invest domestically in more ways than just fiscally. World War II proved an end marker for what we could think of as the golden age of American regionalism, when the international citizenry of the United States could not be denied. Most agree that things changed for Americans with the advent of World War II. For Japanese-Americans, change was undeniable.

38 Kyo Koike, along with most of his Japanese-American companions, was moved to the Minidoka War Relocation Center in Idaho, one of the many internment camps set up to house those of Japanese ancestry during World War II. Minidoka operated for just over three years from 1942 to 1945. The general rule against cameras prevented Koike and others from pursuing pictorialism and he never resumed photography with the gusto he demonstrated previous to the war. He died two years after his release, in 1947.

39 An investigation into an aesthetic product of Koike, as representative of the Japanese-American photographers, and an analysis of the role of regionalism in his work is ultimately a mutually beneficial endeavor: the details of a specific instance of cultural production can illuminate the era’s larger interest in region, and a more nuanced sense of region provides a framework in which to understand and evaluate cultural production. Japanese-American pictorialists along the West Coast participated in a cultural activity that both allowed them to conform to and make sense of their new home and to preserve ties to their native country. They were embroiled in a cultural negotiation that, whether intentional or not, reconciled disparate strands of form and function that emerged across some 70 years, from the European blossoming of pictorialism to the culmination of the style in mid-century America, and from sources around the world.

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Peterson, Christian. After the Photo-Secession: American Pictorial Photography, 1910-1955. New York: W.W. Norton and Company in association with the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1997. Print.

Powell, Douglas Reichert. Critical Regionalism: Connecting Politics and Culture in the American Landscape. Chapel Hill: The U of North Carolina P, 2007. Print.

Reed, Dennis. Japanese Photography in America 1920-1940. Los Angeles: Japanese American Cultural & Community Center, 1985. Print.

Sailor, Rachel. Meaningful Places: Landscape Photographers in the Nineteenth-Century American West. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2014. Print.

Slotkin, Richard. “Visual Narrative and American Myth from Thomas Cole to John Ford.” American Victorians and Virgin Nature. Ed. T.J. Jackson Lears. Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2002. 91-112. Print.

Stieglitz, Alfred. “Pictorial Photography.” Scribner’s Magazine 26.5(1899): 528-537. Print.

Stellmann, L.J. “California Camera Club.” Photo-Era 19.4 (October 1, 1912): 171-74. Print.

Turner, Frederick Jackson. “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Major Problems in the History of the American West. Ed. Clyde A. Milner. Lexington: D.C. Heath and Company, 1989 [1894]. 2-21. Print.

“Washington Artists Observe New ‘Regionalism’ Trend.” The Seattle Sunday Times (June 30, 1935): 11. Print.

Wood, Grant. “Revolt against the City.” American is West: An Anthology of Middlewestern Life and Literature. Ed. John T. Flanagan. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1945. 648-60. Print.

ABSTRACTS

This essay contributes to the story of the Japanese immigrant pictorialists by examining the work and history of Kyo Koike, regional photographer and Seattle Camera Club member. I will

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demonstrate through this case study that historically, the notion of regionalism often embodied a transnational complexity that has gone unacknowledged. Within the details of Koike’s photographic work, regionalism becomes a broad and encompassing cultural expression.

INDEX

Keywords: Camera club, Canada, Japan, Kyo Koike, photography, pictorialism, regionalism, transnationalism

AUTHOR

RACHEL SAILOR University of Wyoming

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III. Regions of Identity

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Down the River, Out to Sea: Mobility, Immobility, and Creole Identity in New Orleans Regionalist Fiction (1880-1910)

Amy Doherty Mohr

1. Louisiana Creoles and the “Third Space”

1 To explore the intersection of regionalism and transnationalism in New Orleans fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this essay will focus on the Creole characters in George Washington Cable’s The Grandissimes (1880), Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899), and Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s “The Stones of the Village” (1900-1910). i Very broadly, “in the early colonial period … Creole signified the offspring of Old World progenitors born and raised in the New World” (Stewart 1). In New Orleans, Creoles represent the fraught transition from signifying French or Spanish heritage to the inclusion of African ancestry, lending New Orleans a distinct regional identity through their inherently transnational mixture (Davis 195-98; Disheroon-Green and Abney 2-3). French and Spanish influence and the Code Noir led to a class of gens de couleur libre, or free people of color (Davis 196-98), such as Honoré, f.m.c. and Palmyre, in The Grandissimes, who operate within a socially mobile space between black and white. In studying these works, I will focus on the Creole as representing a nexus of North American, French, Spanish, African, Latin American, and Caribbean cultures (see Davis 200-206; Gruesz 108-11), and the challenge this hybrid character presents to the racial binary structure of the United States (Davis 186).

2 Considering critical developments on the intersections of literary regionalism and transnationalism (Fetterley and Pryse 214-21; Ammons and Rohy viii-xviii; Joseph 7), I would like to study the ways in which Creoles define and continuously alter the cultural landscape of New Orleans. My claim is that despite racial policing in this era, these works represent the actual fluidity of racial identity of New Orleans, which possesses its

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own cultural values, social codes, language, and dialect based on international influences. In fiction written during a period when first-wave feminism and civil rights concerns allowed for a more positive, self-determined sense of social mobility (Ammons 3-6; Fetterley and Pryse 280-82), the Creole character, by representing racial mixture, challenges segregation as well as anti-miscegenation laws (Davis 215) and foreshadows the local/global intersections of contemporary society.ii

3 In Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, & Literature,Davis refers to “the promise and the failure of Louisiana as an alternative space for modeling a more expansive and less binary construction of race within the United States from the nineteenth century onward” (186). Her work provides an extensive cultural and historical foundation for the analysis of literature produced by a selection of black writers in the Deep South from the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries. Drawing on Davis’s concepts and expanding on her field of research, my analysis focuses on the movement of culturally hybrid characters within regionalist novels of New Orleans between 1880 and 1910. I examine the tensions between geographic mobility and immobility,iii considering that Southern identity has traditionally assumed a fixed sense of place, race, and class. Following recent developments in the conceptualization of mobility and immobility in American cultural studies (for instance in the work of Klaus Benesch), this analysis takes into consideration both the positive and negative aspects of mobility, showing that positive assumptions of mobility may ignore the experience of forced movement of slaves or the exile of Creoles of Coloriv who break the social codes, while the negative associations with immobility may fail to recognize that those who stay in the region are able to define its identity.

4 To study the various depictions of the Creole in these works, I will also take into account several definitions of “third space” as they apply to the international and multiracial influences on New Orleans (Davis 188, 286).v The Creole characters of New Orleans that appear in these works represent cultural and ethnic border crossing, although segregation limits their ability to cross racial boundaries. Existing between black and white, the Creole characters represent a “third space,” if not yet one of resistance, then at least a sign of its possibility. As Bhabha writes, It is that Third Space, though unrepresentable in itself, which constitutes the discursive conditions of enunciation that ensure that the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity; that even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read anew. (55)

5 Such signs, including references to geographical border-crossings, by land, river, or sea, suggest a fluid notion of Southern cultural identity. In reading the potential of the “third space” as a site of resistance, however, such theories might fail to consider the complications of this positioning, not as wholly positive or negative, but containing elements of both. A focus on mobility and immobility allows the reader to test the modes of movement and resistance in these stories, to consider the experience of living in New Orleans from different vantage points and to imagine the possibilities inherent in the place and in the individual, beyond prescriptive racial categories.

6 This study attends to the various representations of the Creole by addressing canonical novels by white authors of the late nineteenth century, and a short story by Alice Dunbar-Nelson from the early twentieth century. “[M]arked from the beginning by the mixed white, black, and Indian of her Creole ancestral strains,” Dunbar-Nelson was light enough “to pass occasionally for white” (Hull xxix), yet by the “one-drop rule” she

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was considered black. In previous decades, critics considered George Washington Cable the preeminent writer of the Deep South in this period, while Kate Chopin’s novel was read from a feminist perspective, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s short stories, if acknowledged, would have been read in terms of race. However, a comparative analysis of their works reveals that their representations of the Creole demonstrate a common concern with national discourses of belonging, exclusion, and social mobility, not limited to a single gender or race, but arising from the complex racial and cultural history of New Orleans.

7 Current developments in transnational and hemispheric literary studies have influenced recent critical analyses of New Orleans history and literature. This essay reflects the direction of such scholarship, with a narrower comparative focus on the geographic and social mobility of Creole characters. Davis’sSouthscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, & Literature includes analyses of Créolité in New Orleans,vi but neither addresses the work of Cable and Chopin in detail nor Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s “The Stones of the Village.” James Nagel addressesNew Orleans cultural history, regionalism, and the literary tradition of the short story cycle in Race and Culture in New Orleans Stories: Kate Chopin, Grace King, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and George Washington Cable (2014) but focuses on different texts than those analyzed in this essay. In comparison with these studies, I argue that New Orleans as a site of migration, immigration, and the slave trade motivates Cable, Chopin, and Dunbar-Nelson to explore the meaning of mobility and immobility through geographic movement, motifs of exile, and the symbolism of the sea. In sum, I will compare the ways in which these authors draw on transnationalism to represent the mobility of those who challenged the color line in “the country’s most linguistically and racially diverse city” (Gruesz 109).

8 I purposely use Creole in a broad sense, with reference to a current understanding of “syncretism” and “hybridity” (Stewart 6-7). To situate the distinct meaning of the Creole in each of the works I examine, I will explore how each author uses pairings of characters to explore the themes of mobility and immobility. Honoré and Honoré, f.m.c., a French Creole and a Creole of Color, experience integration and segregation, respectively, in The Grandissimes. The divergent experiences of exile by Honoré, f.m.c. and Palmyre, leading to his suicide by drowning and her survival, suggest the limits and possibilities inherent in geographic mobility. Interestingly, Chopin also utilizes the narrative structure of drowning and survival in The Awakening, when Edna, who denotes social and geographic mobility through her marriage to an upper-class French Creole, drowns herself out of despair for her perceived immobility in her status as wife and mother while Mariequita, who exists on the margins of the narrative and social structure, introduces a cultural and linguistic mobility that Edna fails to achieve. Finally, Victor Grabért, of West Indian ancestry, passes as white while his alter ego, Pavageau, a practicing lawyer who is considered black, reveals that he knows Grabért’s origins. While Victor collapses, haunted by his past, Pavageau maintains his ties to his community of origin. The persistence of images of life and death, drowning and survival, memory and exile, reveals the tensions between the benefits of mobility and its inherent losses. Together, these characters prefigure postmodern readings of borderland figures (Anzaldúa, 101-02) in their life and death struggles, and in their powers of translation and interpretation. They present the potential for greater social authority and economic self-sufficiency, which though desired was not yet achieved, as indicated by the persistent images of the sea and the reality or threat of drowning. Those who survive, Palmyre, Mariequita, and Pavageau, create a space for themselves

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through economic resources, cultural and linguistic fluency, self-assertion and adaptation, even as they remain on the borders of these literary narratives of New Orleans.

2. The Exile of the Creole of Color in Cable’s The Grandissimes

9 George Washington Cable, a native of New Orleans but not a French Creole himself, is what Owen Robinson calls a “classic American ‘insider-outsider’ figure” (98). “Born in New Orleans in 1844 to a mother from New England Puritan stock and a father of German descent” (98), he takes an outsider’s perspective in The Grandissimes when describing New Orleans from the point of view of a migrating German family: “A land hung in mourning, darkened by gigantic cypresses, submerged; a land of reptiles, silence, shadow, decay” (Cable 9). This exotic description captures the threat, the danger lurking in the shadows; it also evokes the unspoken internal conflicts of those who fall between the categories of black and white. Interestingly, Frowenfeld, “an American by birth, rearing and sentiment, yet German enough through his parents” (8), the sole family survivor of an outbreak of yellow fever, provides a rational perspective on the racial conundrum of New Orleans and the Grandissime family in particular. Cable interweaves national, racial, and international identities in the French origins of the Grandissime half-brothers, and the exile of Honoré, f.m.c., and Palmyre in Bordeaux. With France as a “third space” because it exists outside the racial binary of the United States, these Creole characters imagine a new home based on their transnational identity, but their divergent paths reveal that geographic mobility does not ultimately resolve their outsider status.

10 Set at the time of the Louisiana Purchase, the novel depicts the hybridity of the region, which is shown to be French in language and social manners, yet irrevocably influenced by the American institution of slavery. Cable shows the border between white and black in the social division between the French Creole, Honoré Grandissime, and Honoré Grandissime, f.m.c. While the French Creole Honoré is able to operate freely, as shown in his prosperous business, his visibility within the text, and the fluency of his speech and writing, Honoré, f.m.c., lacks the same level of mobility and self-determination, as shown in his often hidden presence, his unrequited love for Palmyre, and his lack of fluency. Their father, Numa Grandissime, apparently had a plaçage arrangement with a woman of African ancestry, the mother of Honoré, f.m.c. (Johnson 79).Before marrying a white woman from a distinguished French Creole family (Cable 108), he provides for Honoré, f.m.c., in part to compensate for the racial injustice he will experience: “The father’s will—by the law they might have set it aside, but that was not their way—left the darker Honoré the bulk of his fortune, the younger a competency” (Cable 109). Despite holding property as a rentier, as the German immigrant Frowenfeld notes, Honoré, f.m.c., does not have the freedom such a designation would suggest: ‘It seems to me,’ said Frowenfeld, ‘that you—your class—the free quadroons—are the saddest slaves of all. Your men, for a little property, and your women, for a little amorous attention, let themselves be shorn even of the virtue of discontent, and for a paltry bait of sham freedom have consented to endure a tyrannous contumely which flattens them into the dirt like grass under a slab. … As your class stands before the world to-day—free in form but slaves in spirit—you are—I do not know but I was almost ready to say—a warning to philanthropists!’ (195-96)

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11 Despite the Code Noir (Davis 196) and the system of plaçage(Davis 213), which ultimately resulted in Honoré, f.m.c.’s status as a free man of color, Frowenfeld argues that his protected status merely exists to stifle rebellion. Honoré, f.m.c., understanding this allusion, responds: “Ah cannod be one Touissaint l’Ouverture. Ah cannod trah to be. Hiv I trah, I h-only s’all soogceed to be one Bras-Coupé” (196). He rejects the possibility of rebellion with reference to the leader of the Haitian Revolution, as he compares himself to the slave Bras-Coupé whose name (literally meaning “arm cut off”) symbolizes his separation from his tribe in Africa (Cable 170-1; Foote 114-16). Foreshadowing his brother’s ultimate decision to drown himself, Honoré observes: “‘True, it is only love for which he would have just now drowned himself; yet what an accusation, my-de’- seh, is his whole life against that ‘caste’ which shuts him up within its narrow and almost solitary limits!’” (155). After stabbing the slave owner Agricola, Honoré, f.m.c. lives in exile in France, along with his beloved Palmyre. The captain, in indirect discourse, confirms, “They went to different hotels!” (330), thereby maintaining Palmyre’s chastity, referenced earlier as “that rarest of gifts in one of her tincture, the purity of true womanhood” (60). While she preserves her status as an exotic yet respectable woman in France, the statement indicates the prejudices that exist because of her African ancestry. France provides a temporary refuge from U.S. racism for both characters. However, Honoré, f.m.c.’s sudden disappearance at sea, as told from the point of view of a seaman, reveals his continued alienation: “The next morning, being at the water’s edge and seeing a number of persons gathering about something not far away, he sauntered down toward it to see how small a thing was required to draw a crowd of these Frenchmen. It was the drowned body of the f.m.c.” (331). This loss of a formerly central character emphasizes his anonymity and shifts the narrative from a tragic romance to a symbol of the scale of loss in the Black Atlantic in the passage of untold millions of slaves. In this case, the sea can be seen as a mobile entity, which carries the slaves across the Atlantic, and a static presence, which one can enter willingly. In The Black Atlantic, Gilroy references “the tales of slave suicide by drowning that appear intermittently in both African-American and Caribbean folklore” (204-5). Although Honoré, f.m.c. is not a slave, this death resounds with a history of slave crossings even as it signifies his estrangement from Palmyre. His geographical and social estrangement from Africa and the Caribbean, however, apparent in his comments to Frowenfeld, shows his personal sense of immobility, with his drowning suggesting alienation rather than solace or spiritual transformation.

12 Palmyre’s quadroon parentage resembles that of Honoré, f.m.c. (Cable 59-60), yet as Johnson argues, she resists the “tragic mulatto” stereotype (81) in her “mental acuteness, conversational adroitness, concealed cunning and noiseless but visible strength of will” along with the aforementioned chastity (Cable 60; see Johnson 85-86). In the end, she receives a generous inheritance from Honoré, f.m.c., after his death. Nevertheless, in Palmyre’s removal to France, Johnson argues that Cable emphasizes her exile and liminal existence: Outside of death, Cable uses another common alternative in American literature to resolve the miscegenation issue by condemning Palmyre to this physical isolation.… Reflecting Palmyre’s inferior status in Creole society (i.e. the South), her foreign alias “Madame Inconnue,” (since ‘inconnu’ means outsider, alien, stranger, etc.) signifies her status as a displaced Southerner. (89)

13 Although I agree with Johnson that Palmyre is displaced, I interpret her agency as carrying more symbolic weight than her liminality. Cable suggests that her elegant

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presence, linguistic facility, and spiritual knowledge derive from her mixed ancestry, “high Latin ancestry on the one side and—we might venture—Jaloff African on the other” (Cable 60; Johnson 81). Refusing to agree to a marriage with Honoré, f.m.c., she is not punished socially for her status as a single woman. In fact, she draws curiosity, as her observers in Bordeaux note that she is “apparently living at great ease, but solitarily, in the rue ——” (Cable 331). Indeed, her enigmatic social presence suggests her private mobility and financial security in France. In her vitality and potential, she provides a foil to Honoré, f.m.c., despite their common exile.

14 Palmyre and Bras-Coupé represent the possibility for rebellion against the racial hierarchy through their transnational connections to France, Haiti, and Africa, thus complicating the national story of two brothers, one black, one white, playing out their destinies according to race. In comparison with Palmyre’s escape to France as a free woman of color, the slave Bras-Coupé incurs fatal punishment when he strikes his white overseer, revealing the harsher side of the Code Noir (Cable 181) and prompting Palmyre’s visions of Haiti: “She had heard of San Domingo, and for months the fierce heart within her silent bosom had been leaping and shouting and seeing visions of fire and blood” (184). Through her visions, Cable connects Bras-Coupé’s action with revolution and explains the harsh consequences for his gesture of rebellion. When given his final rights—an ironic act considering the brutality of his punishment under the Code Noir—and asked by the priest, “Do you know where you are going?”, he answers “To—Africa” (193). He thus replaces the assumed answer designated by the Catholic Church with his stronger desire for a homeland. The references to the Haitian Revolution and, finally, Africa, serve as reminders of Bras-Coupé’s diasporic presence, showing his humanity in exile and condemning his inhumane treatment in the United States.

15 Bras-Coupé’s alienation echoes in the unstable existence of Honoré Grandissime, f.m.c., characterized by emotional pain and lack of identification. He seems to have a level of privilege, supported by his brother, but the death of Bras-Coupé serves as a potent reminder of the actual limits on his freedom. Through the Grandissime family, Cable traces racial mixing in New Orleans from the beginnings of its history, undermining the apparent racial hierarchy, and sets the stage for later writers to represent the interactions of light-skinned and dark-skinned characters. Mobile characters such as Honoré, f.m.c., and Palmyre occupy a “third space” outside of black and white and their associated class distinctions, feared and threatened with invisibility because they defy categorization. As they negotiate a place for themselves, in the literary imagination they are in exile, just out of reach of the narrative point of view; as is suggested by Frowenfeld’s image of New Orleans, they are in a shadowy place.

3. Mariequita’s Disturbing Presence in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening

16 In The Awakening, Kate Chopin represents the French Creole Léonce Pontellier, who, like Honoré Grandissime, occupies a space of privilege but as a late nineteenth-century businessman, through property ownership and active engagement in the local tourist and transnational trade economies. Edna Pontellier, who marries into the French Creole society, by contrast, occupies an outsider position, failing to fully understand either the language or the social codes (Yaeger 216), resulting in her mistaking the

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flirtations of Robert Lebrun for a more devoted love outside of marriage. The Awakening brings together the transnational and multiracial elements discussed, epitomized by a female hierarchy consisting of the white Protestant Edna, originally from Kentucky, the French Creole Adèle Ratignolle, and the quadroon figures who populate the text and who enable Edna, as Elizabeth Ammons notes, to maintain her romantic view of her life in New Orleans, since they take care of her children and her home (74-75). While the narrative point of view divides the population into white and black, those characters who resist easy racial identification disturb the text and Edna’s position within it. These figures are transnational, intrinsic to the regional identity of New Orleans, but potentially upsetting to the racial hierarchy of the nation, and by extension, the most conservative views within it, represented by Edna and her Confederate heritage.

17 These figures, I would argue, are Robert and Mariequita. Although Robert is usually read as a romantic suitor of Edna, younger and of a lower social class, his transnational experience, displayed by his linguistic facility and geographic mobility, prevent her from understanding or appropriately responding to his affections. The son of a widow who maintains a hotel and set of cottages reminiscent of plantation cabins (Birnbaum 313), he easily crosses social boundaries. Through knowledge of the cultural codes, in part through observation of those who stay at his mother’s hotel, “his equal familiarity with English, French and Spanish gave him no small value as a clerk and correspondent” (Chopin 6). While his use of French appeals to her self-image as a romantic, artistic woman with a younger lover, the fact remains that Edna cannot cross the cultural and linguistic border between them. His transnational mobility distinguishes him from Edna, raising issues about her inability to understand his perspective and experience. In particular, the omniscient third-person narrator states: “She was not accustomed to an outward and spoken expression of affection, either in herself or in others” (17). Their mutual friend, Adèle Ratignolle, reproaches Robert for flirting with Edna, referencing her cultural difference: “She is not one of us; she is not like us. She might make the unfortunate blunder of taking you seriously” (20). Robert’s youth separates him from Edna, as does his connection with “darker” places and people and the sexuality they represent (Barrish 68-69), e.g. Mariequita and Mexico, which Anderson calls “Terra Incognita” (46-47).

18 Robert’s escape within the story to Vera Cruz, Mexico serves as a reminder of the region’s transnational origins south of the border (Gruesz 109-11) and introduces the connection with a subtly disruptive figure in the text: Mariequita. As a drifting character, Mariequita causes suspicion precisely because she does not have a fixed role in society, indicated by her “Spanish” origins (32), yet she learns to use her culturally fluid identity to her advantage. She plays several roles, indicative of her socially mobile presence, appearing infrequently yet noticeably in the narrative. As a local character, she helps Robert’s family receive tourists while representing the international influence on Grand Isle. While she appears as a free and independent young woman, she does not have the level of visibility of the French Creole characters, and has drawn critical attention precisely because she exists outside of the black/white binary, with undefined national and racial origins. At first introduced in the text as a “young barefooted Spanish girl” (32), the use of “Spanish” gives a broad identification consistent with her name and language suggestive of Latin America. Anderson reads symbolic parallels between the image of Mariequita and representations of Robert’s trip to Mexico, which seems plausible given the history of migration between Mexico

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and New Orleans. Yet one must also consider the broader connections between Louisiana and the Caribbean as well as the Americas (see Davis 210-11; Gruesz 108). Certainly, as an unidentified “Spanish girl,” she fits in the space between black and white, what Barrish, drawing on the Africanist presence in Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, refers to as “Mexicanist” (65-67). As Barrish writes, “[t]he Mexicanist women are thus free to represent a wild space, one outside the regular rules and denominations of New Orleans society” (69). I would argue that Chopin’s ambiguous representation of Mariequita points to the possibility of transnational mobility, which parallels Edna’s undefined search for herself, even while her identity and her conflicts are fixed as those of a white, upper-class woman. Though the subject of gossip, Mariequita’s transnational origins influence her interpretive power, with her knowledge of different sectors of society and her ability to speak in different languages contrasting with Edna’s more mono-lingual and cultural experience.

19 Significantly, Mariequita appears at three key points: on the boat to the Chênière Caminada in chapter 12 (32-33), in Mlle. Reisz’s reference to a rivalry between Victor and Robert Lebrun in chapter 16 (47), and in the final chapter of the novel (106-8). When Edna first summons Robert for a trip to the Chênière, Mariequita is described from a distanced perspective as “other” in the text: Robert knew the girl, and he talked to her a little in the boat. No one present understood what they said. Her name was Mariequita. She had a round, sly, piquant face and pretty black eyes. Her hands were small, and she kept them folded over the handle of her basket. Her feet were broad and coarse. She did not strive to hide them. Edna looked at her feet, and noticed the sand and slime between her brown toes. (32-33)

20 “[H]er brown toes,” further indicating a difference from Edna’s whiteness, also signify an earthiness and barefoot freedom, which Edna does not possess. She communicates with Robert in Spanish, and demonstrates her knowledge of the cultural codes that evade Edna. Mariequita easily slips in and out of the scenes with Robert Lebrun, speaking their common language. “Does she understand?” (Chopin 86), Mariequita asks Robert, suggesting the possibility of Edna’s linguistic and cultural misinterpretation. Her transient presence as she comes in and out of the narrative action, while Edna presides in her home, on the beach, and at the table, suggest a kind of mobility that Edna has never known. At the same time, “the two women are mutually fascinated and mildly competitive with each other” (Birnbaum 315). In particular, Edna’s financial stability, elegance, and sensuality contribute to her social authority, while Mariequita’s sexuality leads to Mlle. Reisz’s commentary, “a sly one, and a bad one, that Mariequita!” (Chopin 47). Mariequita displays her freedom in contrast with Edna’s obsession with her marriage, which suggests a financial arrangement reminiscent of The Grandissimes rather than an individual choice. In comparison with Edna’s ruminating presence and fear of the water, Mariequita exists comfortably both at sea and on land. Her characterization allows for a reading of the “sea” not only as that nebulous place that haunts the text in its associations with slavery, as in Edna’s drowning in response to “the soul’s slavery” (108), but also in suggesting adventure and exploration beyond Edna’s experience. Mariequita, from Mlle. Reisz’s perspective of her as “a bad one,” represents the stereotypes of “Spanish” womenwho were seen primarily as sexual objects in the early twentieth century;vii and yet we see her as a self- defining, speaking, motivating character, who not only observes but acts, and whose

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actions take on a type of self-conscious performance, confronting those who would try to pin her down to a certain identity. In reality, she is quite fluid.

21 While from Edna’s perspective, Mariequita operates outside of a white, upper-class realm, her mobility enables her to exist in different settings, without surveillance though she raises criticism. She plays with traditional gender roles: she gathers shrimp, easily exists outside in the sun, and in the final chapter, hands Victor nails for the roof while confronting him about his love for Edna (106-07), complaining that “since it was the fashion to be in love with married people, why, she could run away any time she liked to New Orleans with Célina’s husband” (107). Her mobility contrasts with Edna’s apparent caged feeling, which she only partially resolves through her flirtation with Robert, and later, Alcée Arobin. Indeed, Mariequita suggests the alternative way of life Edna seeks but fails to find, first through an affair, then through finding her own home, and then, in the sea. Edna, imagining her “soul’s slavery” (108),chooses her death at sea, reminiscent of the suicides of slaves, and symbolic of the immobility of her social status as an upper-class woman in a traditional society. As one of the last people Edna sees before her death, Mariequita is not only part of the regional setting but intrinsic to the action as a foil for Edna’s increasingly problematic self-perception as a captive of some undefined captor. She is also a triangulating presence to the white Protestant and French Creole which Edna and Robert respectively represent, someone who plays the role of the servant but is well aware of her mobility and level of access in the social dynamic. Chopin shares this with the reader through Mariequita’s discussions with Robert, reminding the reader of his potential alienation from the wealthy class Edna represents and his travels south of the border.

22 The darker figures in the text, the quadroons, who support Edna’s role as a disaffected mother and wife, effectively support her search, as she awakens to both her sexual feelings and her desire for a more artistic life (Ammons 74-75). Scholars have noted that the quadroons support Toni Morrison’s view of the “Africanist presence” in canonical literature, silent and easily overlooked within the text (Ammons 76; Barrish 65-66; Birnbaum 301, 316), certainly not occupying the place of cultural authority that Davis explores in the work of contemporary writers of the Deep South. Instead, the figures with mobility are those outside either the constricting space of the white woman or the black women who serve her. Characters such as Mariequita and Palmyre find ways to function within an exclusive society even as they experience prejudice and relative social isolation. This “third space” where she is not known provides some freedom from the social dictates that define Edna’s existence. The subtle Mariequita, who comes and goes outside of Edna’s consciousness, potentially serves to undermine the worldview which she desires to be true: i.e., that Robert will return her affection, that his own feelings and motivations do not exist outside of her power of interpretation. The narrative counters this perspective through omniscient narration that combines her views and his: “She wondered why Robert had gone away and left her. It did not occur to her to think he might have grown tired of being with her the livelong day. She was not tired, and she felt that he was not” (Chopin 39). Robert and Mariequita escape Edna’s power of interpretation, suggesting a tension between their realities and her own. As transnational subjects of French and “Spanish” origin, they possess a degree of geographic and cultural mobility which disrupts her conservative Southern view of a fixed and predictable racial and class hierarchy. She ignores or

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misreads their emotional reality and fails to predict their movement; their presence exists outside the reach of her consciousness.

23 Indeed, in the final scene, haunting images of her own exile, her father’s voice and the clanging spurs of the cavalry officer appear before the final immutable symbol: the iconic flowers, the “pinks” of the feminine South (109). By leaving the traditional Southern way of life for her marriage in New Orleans, she is caught in a trap of her own creation. Her dramatic decision to drown herself recalls her devotion to a “tragedian” in her younger years (18), the tension between swimming and death, and conversely, the intentional drowning of the Creole of Color in The Grandissimes. She becomes her own tragic subject as she cannot imagine a way out which would, as the pianist Mlle. Reisz warned her, involve strength and courage: “The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings” (79). Such prejudice, Chopin shows, may be used against her, but she also may be blind to the realities and motivations of her own society. In the end, the disabled bird parallels Edna: “A bird with a broken wing was beating the air above, reeling, fluttering, circling disabled down, down to the water” (108). Despite her class and racial privilege, she is somehow broken in her view of herself and her situation; in this respect, she stands in contrast to Robert and Mariequita who have mastered the sea rather than succumbed to it. Because of their geographic mobility, they possess the cultural and linguistic skills to interpret their surroundings and survive in a broader social context than that provided by the local island. In their implicit connections with a “third space,” suggestive of Mexico, and more broadly, Latin America, they occupy a territory between black and white, a symbolic space of possibility that no longer exists for Edna.

4. Crossing the Color Line in Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s “The Stones of the Village”

24 Writing from the other side of the color line in “The Stones of the Village,” Alice Dunbar-Nelson directly criticizes the city’s racism and segregation. Indeed, the Plessy v. Ferguson case (1896) arose from a conflict in New Orleans, in which Homer Plessy, “a Creole of Color,” “was jailed for sitting in the ‘White’ car of the East Louisiana Railroad. … The Plessy decision set a precedent that ‘separate’ facilities for blacks and whites were constitutional as long as they were ‘equal’” (Wormser). This short story describes the emotional and spiritual struggle of Victor Grabért, a light-skinned Creole of Color who lives with his grandmother, an immigrant from the West Indies (Dunbar-Nelson 3), as his mother has died “and [n]o one ever spoke to him of a father” (4). His father, assumed to be white, has abandoned his son, leading to Victor’s tangential connection with home, and his struggle to find his place within a racially segregated neighborhood.

25 His West Indian grandmother, representing local and national prejudices, will not let him associate with the “little black and yellow boys of his own age”; and the “other little boys, whose faces were white like his own,” taunt him with racial epithets (5). Furthering his outsider status, his grandmother forces him to speak English rather than Creole, but she finally admits that he must leave the village for New Orleans in order to make progress in life. The ambiguity of racial identity in New Orleans, despite legalized segregation, allows his upward trajectory. While the readers know his story, his contacts suggest that racial identity cannot be easily detected and that it should not determine one’s choices and opportunities. His grandmother sends him to live with a

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friend, Mme. Guichard, and he finds work in a bookstore with an owner who does not press him about his address or racial identity. When the bookstore owner dies, he unexpectedly leaves Victor with a scholarship to a boarding school in order to enter Tulane University, which was segregated until 1963 (Jamison).

26 Victor thus follows the trajectory of a white man, familiar to those who have studied the novel of passing, and the phenomenon in New Orleans in particular (Anthony 297). Seeking upward mobility, Victor becomes a lawyer, then a judge, and finds himself in the uncomfortable position of consistently deciding against African Americans in anti- segregation cases, and marrying a white woman to whom he does not reveal his black ancestry. The ambiguity of his origins is reminiscent of Mariequita in Chopin’s novel. After years of hiding his racial background and fighting his own empathy for those in a situation he has avoided, a colleague, Pavageau, a black lawyer and “his bête noir” confronts him with the truth of his origins (Dunbar-Nelson 24). In a narrative twist, Pavageau reveals his identity as the nephew of Mme. Guichard, the friend of Grabért’s grandmother and confirms that he knows that Grabért is passing as white (28). This revelation demonstrates that the black characters live in a tightly knit community, resistant to the escape that passing would suggest. In fact, images of his grandmother sitting “on the steps of the tumble down cottage in the village” haunt Victor, suggesting that he has left her behind in a foreign land although both remain in the United States (32-33). He imagines his grandmother “bidding him give an account of his life since she had kissed him good-bye ere he had sailed down the river to New Orleans” (32), the language here evocative not only of migration but of slaves “being sold down the river.” Although he lives as a white man, Victor’s ancestral origins are never far from his mind. The incongruities of his life and the loss of his identity and connections with his former life lead to a nervous breakdown and death. Contrasting Victor and Pavageau, Dunbar-Nelson questions the viability of his choice to pursue a white way of life, or whether he could have achieved the same goal while maintaining his connections with his family of origin, represented by his grandmother.

27 The differences between this story and the previous texts reveal Dunbar-Nelson’s position and the circumstances in which she could imagine passing. Her mother was a former slave and later a seamstress who moved to New Orleans at the end of the Civil War; her father “had a limited presence in her life, if any” (Menke 81). In her essay “People of Color in Louisiana: Part II,” published in the Journal of Negro History, she describes a “caste system” in Louisiana which includes free people of color (61). In “Brass Ankles Speaks,” she writes about her awareness of the implications of passing and the harshness of intra-group racism for those who are light-skinned and identify themselves as having both black and white parentage, concluding that “there is no gain socially” in passing “though there may be some economic convenience” (321).viii In “The Stones of the Village,” Dunbar-Nelson shows that the leaders of this multicultural region ignore the varied transnational strains of identity as they impose a binary division between black and white. The foreignness of his Afro-Caribbean ancestry, referenced as West Indian, leads to Victor Grabért’s status as an outcast. When he considers telling the truth about his life, he associates his own neighborhood only with the threat of violence: “It was the old problem of his life in the village; and the boys, both white and black and yellow, stood as before, with stones in their hands to hurl at him” (17). Notably, “both” indicates the binary that does not encompass the multiracial reality. Once Victor crosses the color line, he can never return. He has effectively lost his culture of origin and the people associated with it. In his new life as a white man,

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nobody presses him for details of his earlier life, leaving him effectively without a past or history (11; 16-17). Despite the appearance of attaining a comfortable home, then, Victor’s secrecy about his ancestry actually leads to social isolation and personal alienation, a form of homelessness. Dunbar-Nelson shows that the tragedy of Victor’s life results from his desire for an education and future greater than his origins would allow, a desire irreconcilable with America’s racism at the time. The fact that he cannot return to his former life suggests the themes of migration and exile examined in the works of Cable and Chopin. A “third space” of freedom beyond black and white does not exist legally in the United States, so in his personal creation of such a space for himself, Victor lives up to his potential in educational and professional achievement at great personal cost.

28 As difficult as his journey has been, Victor has effectively mastered the codes of upper- class whiteness, represented in the educated diction which contrasts with his grandmother’s and his earlier use of dialect, “the soft, Creole patois” and English which the indirect narration retrospectively criticizes as “a confused jumble which was no language at all” (5). Victor’s cultural and linguistic fluency are reminiscent of the facility displayed by Palmyre in The Grandissimes and Mariequita in The Awakening. Indeed, his professional and personal lives run so smoothly that nobody would suspect that he is actually passing, which leads one to question the sanctity and immutability of racial codes: if one can “pass” convincingly through language, manners, education, and connections, then what substance exists in such divisions in the first place? Dunbar- Nelson’s challenge to the stereotypes associated with race, held in place by the provincial “village” and the nation, would lead the reader to question the definition of whiteness, which influences the notion of upward mobility. As Anthony writes, “[t]he frequency of passing is further evidence of the fraudulence of race as a meaningful construct for other than divisive exploitation” (310). Although Victor’s life journey could be read as a variation of the “tragic mulatto” story insofar as his decision to leave his family of origin, defined by his race, ultimately results in his death, the reader must admit that the inhospitality of the village contributes to the tragedy. Following the black lawyer Pavageau’s confrontation, when the truth has risen to the surface, Dunbar-Nelson opposes Victor’s talent and respectability with his potential ruin. Although he wants to share his truth, he cannot reconcile his past and present, and he feels he would have no home to return to: his grandmother has died; he suspects his wife would not accept his black ancestry. With the image of his grandmother as his final memory, Victor’s West Indian origins remain in the background, haunting him, and suggesting that his economic privilege leads to the suffering of permanent exile. As a foil to Victor, the “brown” (24) Pavageau also occupies a “third space” in asserting his racial status and pursuing his career within the white judicial system. As he retains his cultural and familial ties, his self-assertion and persistence inspire Victor’s “admiration and respect” (63). As a foil to Victor, Pavageau offers an alternative path, as he pursues social mobility while maintaining a sense of community. Even as he fights losing battles, his insistence on justice presages a change in laws of segregation and a reconfiguration of the racial identity of New Orleans, a city, like the nation, with roots around the world. By remaining in place, acknowledging his origins and maintaining his career in the city, Pavageau represents the positive aspects of upward mobility as he makes a viable place for himself in New Orleans.

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5. Conclusion

29 In each of these examples of New Orleans regionalism,the characters and their memories extend from the Deep South to the diaspora, representing the history of colonialism, slavery, and immigration. Light-skinned characters of European origin such as Honoré and Edna motivate the narrative plots, yet the silenced stories, those of Honoré, f.m.c., Mariequita, Victor, and his grandmother, demand further interpretation. In these narratives, the stories of the nation come together in a confluence reminiscent of the muddy, winding Mississippi river and the vibrant port of New Orleans. These regionalist authors make the local familiar through the material signs of New Orleans history, language, dialect, religion, local place names, and references to the sea. New Orleans possesses a unique place in American culture because of its transnational, multiracial history, inspiring the American literary imagination. Writing in a time of regionalism and realism, these authors allow for an intercultural reading as they express the otherwise inexpressible experience of those who occupy spaces beyond black and white. The cultural memory which these characters carry with them, in the French and African ancestry of the Grandissime brothers, Palmyre’s knowledge of voodoo and visions of Haiti, Mariequita’s ambiguous “Spanish” identity, and Victor Grabért’s West Indian grandmother, serve as reminders of the international origins of New Orleans beneath the racial divisions imposed on the region by the nation. New Orleans, then, occupies a “third space” beyond the nation, a combination of the transnational and the local, with the national laws of segregation existing uneasily alongside the fluid ethnic and cultural identity of Creoles of Color. Literary art allows for the representation and conception of place, with the spoken and unspoken memories of Creole characters in New Orleans fiction contributing to a deeper understanding of the intersections of the local and the transnational. The representations of cultural border-crossings, and the abilities suggested in multilingual fluency, intercultural negotiation, and social fluidity, prefigure the time when such mobility will become neither an uncanny peculiarity nor a resistance to unjust laws but a necessity.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, Doug. “Terra Incognita.” Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 12 (1993): 44-52. Print.

Anthony, Arthé A. “‘Lost Boundaries’: Racial Passing and Poverty in Segregated New Orleans.” Louisiana History 36.3 (1995): 291-312. Print.

Ammons, Elizabeth. Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford UP, 1992. Print.

Ammons, Elizabeth, and Valerie Rohy. Introduction to American Local Color Writing, 1880-1920. Ed. Elizabeth Ammons and Valerie Rohy. New York: Penguin, 1998. vii-xxx. Print.

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Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999 [1987]. Print.

Barrish, Phillip. “The Awakening’s Signifying ‘Mexicanist’ Presence.” Studies in American Fiction 28.1 (2000): 65-76. Print.

Benesch, Klaus. “Cultural Immobility: Place and the Tradition of an Anti-Modern Modernism.” Presentation. Research Symposium, Amerika-Institut, LMU Munich. Venice, Italy. May 12, 2014.

—. Introduction to Culture and Mobility. Ed. Klaus Benesch. Heidelberg: Winter, 2013. 1-5. Print.

—. “Mobility.” Rethinking the American City: An International Dialogue. Ed. Miles Orvell and Klaus Benesch. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2014. 143-66. Print.

Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. Print.

Birnbaum, Michele A. “‘Alien Hands’: Kate Chopin and the Colonization of Race.” American Literature 66.2 (1994): 301-23. Print.

Cable, George Washington. The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life. New York: Penguin, 1988 [1880]. Print.

Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. New York: Norton, 1994 [1899]. Print.

Davis, Thadious. Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, & Literature. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2011. Print.

Disheroon-Green, Suzanne D., and Lisa Abney, eds. Songs of the Reconstructing South: Building Literary Louisiana, 1865-1945. Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 2002. Print.

Dunbar-Nelson, Alice. “Brass Ankles Speaks.” The Works of Alice Dunbar-Nelson. Vol. 2. Ed. Gloria T. Hull. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. 311-21. Print.

—. “People of Color in Louisiana: Part II.” Journal of Negro History 2.1 (1917): 51-78. Print.

—. “The Stones of the Village.” The Works of Alice Dunbar-Nelson. Vol. 3. Ed. Gloria T. Hull. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. 3-33. Print.

Fetterley, Judith, and Marjorie Pryse. Writing Out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2003. Print.

Foote, Stephanie. “The Shadow of the Ethiopian: George Washington Cable’s The Grandissimes.” Regional Fictions: Culture and Identity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2001. 98-123. Print.

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993. Print.

Gruesz, Kirsten S. Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 2002. Print.

Hull, Gloria T. Introduction to The Works of Alice Dunbar-Nelson. Vol. 3. Ed. Gloria T. Hull. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. xxix-liv. Print.

Jamison, Kate. “University Celebrates 50th Anniversary of Desegregation.” Tulane Hullaballoo. 29 August 2013. Web. 3 May 2014.

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Johnson, Sherita L. Black Women in New South Literature and Culture. New York: Routledge, 2010. Print.

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Joseph, Philip. American Literary Regionalism in a Global Age. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2007. Print.

López, Tiffany Ana. “María Cristina Mena: Turn-of-the-Century La Malinche, and Other Tales of Cultural (Re)Construction.” Tricksterism in Turn-of-the-Century American Literature: A Multicultural Perspective. Ed. Elizabeth Ammons and Annette White-Parks. Hanover, NH: UP of New England, 1994. 21-45. Print.

Menke, Pamela Glenn. “Behind the ‘White Veil’: Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Creole Color, and The Goodness of St. Rocque.” Songs of the Reconstructing South: Building Literary Louisiana, 1865-1945. Ed. Suzanne D. Disheroon-Green and Lisa Abney. Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 2002. 77-87. Print.

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1992. Print.

Nagel, James. Race and Culture in New Orleans Stories: Kate Chopin, Grace King, Alice Dunbar-Nelson & George Washington Cable. Tuscaloosa: The U of Alabama P, 2014. Print.

Robinson, Owen. “Truly Strange New Orleans: The Unstable City in George Washington Cable’s Strange True Stories Of Louisiana.” European Journal of American Culture 26.2 (2007): 97-108. Print.

Soja, Edward W. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996. Print.

Sollors, Werner. Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1986. Print

—. Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. Print.

Stewart, Charles. Creolization: History, Ethnography, Theory. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast P, 2007. Print.

Wormser, Richard. “Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).” Educational Broadcasting Corporation. 2002. Web. 3 May 2014.

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Yaeger, Patricia S. “‘A Language Which Nobody Understood’: Emancipatory Strategies in The Awakening.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 20.3 (1987): 197-219. Print.

NOTES i. Gloria Hull writes that “The Stones of the Village,” which she identifies as a “Typescript,” appears in Stories of Women and Men, “a manuscript volume that Dunbar-Nelson probably worked on between 1900 and 1910” (Dunbar-Nelson, “Stones” 3). The story was submitted to The Atlantic Monthly and received a rejection letter in 1900, stating that “at present the American public had a ‘dislike’ for treatment of ‘the color-line’” (Hull xxxvi). ii. I am indebted to the work of Elizabeth Ammons for providing a model for comparative analyses in Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century, as well as the cultural and literary analyses of Werner Sollors, including Neither Black Nor White Yet Both and Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. iii. I would like to acknowledge Klaus Benesch’s ongoing work on mobility and, more recently, immobility, in American culture and literature, which has influenced my study of these concepts in New Orleans fiction.

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iv. Although the term is in general use in scholarship, I would like to acknowledge Davis’s use of the term in Southscapes (228-29), which I found helpful in distinguishing racially defined Creoles in this project. v. Homi Bhabha’s statement that the “productive capacities of this Third Space have a colonial or postcolonial provenance,” functioning as a hybrid space (38), as well as Edward Soja’s attention to spatial geographies (6), contribute to Davis’s reading (2-3; 31-32; 286; 377 nn5-7). Within the essay, I use the term “third space” rather than Bhabha’s “Third Space” or Soja’s “thirdspace” because the cultural and historical context of segregation in the United States in this period complicates a direct application of their concepts, though I still find their terms useful in studying hybridity and geographical borders in these works. vi. Créolité is a term often used in critical readings of the Caribbean, influenced by the works of Edouard Glissant. See also Stewart 222. vii. See López’s discussion of advertisements, illustrations, and short stories in magazines of this period (27-30); see also Birnbaum 303. viii. For the significance of racial and class mobility in passing, see Sollors, Neither 250, 259.

ABSTRACTS

This essay examines the meaning of mobility in New Orleans regionalist fiction, focusing on Creoles of Color, including Honoré, f.m.c. (free man of color) and Palmyre in George Washington Cable’s The Grandissimes (1880), the ambiguously raced Mariequita in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899), and Victor Grabért, of West Indian ancestry, in Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s “The Stones of the Village” (1900-1910). I argue that each of these characters represents a transnational identity, allowing for a degree of geographic, cultural, and social mobility, beyond the racial divisions imposed by segregation. Considering Davis’s view of New Orleans as “a potential model” (189) for a multiracial and transnational society, I analyze the potential of the hybrid, geographically and socially mobile subject to resist social norms (Bhabha, Soja) as well as the difficulties of such transience. I will address both cultural mobility and immobility, focusing on motifs of migration and exile, considering the associations of the sea with slavery (Gilroy) and the hope for a new way of life.

INDEX

Keywords: Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Creole, George Washington Cable, Kate Chopin, mobility, New Orleans, race, region, segregation, transnationalism

AUTHOR

AMY DOHERTY MOHR Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich

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Migrating Literature: Zachary Richard’s Cajun Tales

Mathilde Köstler

1. Introduction

1 The history of the Cajuns, the French-speaking minority living in Cajun Country,i or Acadiana, in southwest Louisiana, is a story about transnational migration which reaches 400 years into the past. Eighteenth-century Acadian history, especially, features prominently in the Cajuns’ collective consciousness today. In Cajun Country, local legend has it that when the Cajuns’ ancestors, the seventeenth-century French colonists called Acadians, were expelled from their homeland Acadia on the east coast of Canada in 1755 by British and New England forces, a swarm of lobsters accompanied them into exile and later to Louisiana. Boarded on ships bound for the New England colonies, France, and the Caribbean, the deportees were scattered along the Atlantic seaboard. According to the legend, the miserable conditions during the so-called Grand Dérangement(“Great Upheaval” in English) took such a toll on the lobsters that by the time they arrived in Louisiana, they had shrunk to the size of crawfish (Gutierrez 106). The origin of the legend remains unknown, but its first written evidence appeared in the 1970s when the Cajun Renaissance, an ethnic grassroots movement, was in full swing.ii With the booming tourist industry in Louisiana promoting Cajun culture, the legend was printed on souvenirs and restaurant menus, and started to circulate around southwest Louisiana (Gutierrez 106).

2 In contemporary Louisiana, the lobster-turned-crawfish legend is still very much present as attests L’histoire de Télesphore et ‘Tit Edvard dans le grand Nord (2007), the second tale in a trilogy by Cajun poet and singer-songwriter Zachary Richard, which also includes Conte cajun: L’histoire de Télesphore et de ‘Tit Edvard (1999) and Les aventures de Télesphore et ‘Tit Edvard au Vieux Pays (2010).iii Likewise, Cajun culture and French in Louisiana seem very much alive, for the tales are written in French with Cajun idioms and indicate a distinct Cajun perspective. They contribute to the littérature cadienne,iv a francophone Cajun literary genre which emerged in the 1980s, succeeding the Cajun

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oral tradition and continuing the French Creole literary tradition which flourished in nineteenth-century Louisiana. The majority of those new francophone texts, however, are published in Montreal, Quebec, not in Louisiana. This also applies to Zachary Richard’s tales, which deal with the adventures of ‘Tit Edvard, a crawfish, and Télesphore, a turtle, from Louisiana who experience various displacements and go through many adverse conditions before finding their way home.

3 In focusing on Richard’s three Cajun tales, this article explores the interrelation of Cajun culture and the transnational space Richard creates in his tales. After a brief outline of the genesis of the Cajuns and the state of francophone literature in Louisiana, I will focus on the multiple representations of migration in the tales. First, I will analyze how such elements as landscape, language, and the past contribute to a Cajun sense of place and belonging. Significantly, two characteristics determine the Cajuns’ lives today: self-assertion in a dominant society which is markedly different and a memory of the past. In emphasizing the singularity of Cajun culture, the Cajuns distance themselves from the omnipresent American mainstream culture. Indeed, the alien surroundings and unfamiliar creatures that ‘Tit Edvard and Télesphore face evoke a sense of Otherness. Also, Richard’s multiple allegorical representations of the Grand Dérangement mirror the Cajuns’ strong connection to the past and turn the tragic event into a leitmotif. I will then explore the transnational outlook of the tales. Precisely because the Cajuns’ experience has been one of expulsion and migration, place, culture, and the past play a crucial role as means of orientation and carriers of memory in the Cajuns’ collective consciousness. At the same time, though, the characters’ exemplary tolerant attitude and adaptability convey the image of a permeable culture, a culture which blends with other cultures through a process of osmosis and relies on transnational exchanges. This is particularly evident in intertextual references to Native American and African mythologies, to French literature, as well as in allusions to decisive historical events. This borrowing from both the cultural memory as well as the “memory of literature” (Lachmann 301) of other cultures in Richard’s tales provide a good illustration of Astrid Erll’s concept of “traveling memories.” A specific feature of “transcultural memory,” which is “a certain research perspective… directed towards mnemonic processes unfolding across and beyond cultures” (Erll 9),v it draws on James Clifford’s concept of “traveling cultures” to describe how memory processes are always in flux and transgress boundaries of time and space. For the purpose of this article, I propose the concept of “migrating literature.” In Richard’s tales, the interrelation of literature and migration is visible on several levels: first, the texts literally “migrated” to Montreal for publication purposes; second, the tales are literature about migration; and third, other “foreign” literary texts and allusions to historical events “migrated” into the tales. Thus, Richard’s three animal tales are a prime example of “migrating literature” and of a transnational exchange. They bring together different regions, respacializing the Acadian diaspora in a geo-cultural imaginary space and undergirding the transnational connection.

4 In reorienting the tale’s Cajun space towards other countries and fixing his vision in a written form, Richard ensures the continuing existence of Cajun culture. I argue that this new outlook transcends general assumptions about Cajun culture— engendered by its folklorization—and creates a transnational space. Richard, extending the Cajun space to Canada and France, shows that a dynamic and evolving culture is necessary for the preservation of Cajun culture. Most important, he deems

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the establishment and maintenance of the connection to the francophone world as essential for the survival of Cajun culture.

2. Stories of Migration

5 The Cajuns can look back on an eventful history of wandering around the Western hemisphere. This transnational migration actually started in the early seventeenth century, when French colonists from the Centre-Ouest region traveled to the east coast of Canada, settled along the Bay of Fundy, and founded the colony of Acadie in what is today New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island. Far removed from the world affairs for most of the century, they eventually became pawns in the French and Indian Wars between the two imperial powers Great Britain and France. While the French largely neglected the colony in North America, the British, despising the Acadians for their French background and Catholicism, coveted the fertile lands the Acadians had gained from their arduous dike building. Repeatedly, the Acadians refused to swear an unconditional oath of allegiance to the British King, emphasizing their wish to remain neutral. This noncommittal stance earned them the name of French Neutrals and finally contributed to their fateful dispersal, the Grand Dérangement. In 1755, an order was issued to deport the Acadians to the New England colonies, France, and the Caribbean. Between that year and 1763, thousands of Acadians were expelled from their homeland, separated from their families, and subjected to inhuman conditions on the deportation ships and in their lands of exile. Despite the widespread scattering, the Acadians’ strong communal ties kept small communities together. Around 1765 a group of Acadians, hearing of a land to settle where French was spoken, traveled to Louisiana by way of Saint Domingue (today Haiti) to build a new Acadia. They settled along the bayous of the Mississippi River and, by and by, were joined by other refuge-seeking Acadians (cf. Brasseaux, Founding). In intermingling with other ethnic groups, they assimilated various cultural traditions of their neighbors. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Acadians had become the Cajuns, an ethnic group with a distinct hybrid character exemplifying the constant exchanges between the various cultures existing in Louisiana for over two centuries. Today, Cajun culture boasts influences of French Creoles (French colonists born in Louisiana), Spanish, Native Americans, African and Caribbean slaves, Anglo-Americans, Germans, and Italians.vi

6 Up to the middle of the twentieth century, most Americans knew the story of the Acadians thanks to Evangeline, an Acadian literary heroine who became an American icon. The epic poem Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie (1847),written by New England poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, describes the separation of the two lovers Evangeline Bellefontaine and Gabriel Lajeunesse from Grand-Pré on their wedding day by British and New England forces. Evangeline’s subsequent search for Gabriel leads her to Louisiana, to the Acadians’ nouvelle Acadie. The story ends with Evangeline, aged and a Sister of Mercy, at Gabriel’s deathbed in Philadelphia. This Acadian saga became an immediate success in both the United States and Canada, and the wretched Acadians, symbolizing fortitude and endurance, entered the American collective memory.vii Its success notwithstanding, Longfellow’s poem is anything but a truthful account of Acadian history as it contains numerous inaccuracies and dissimulates historical details. And yet, this rose-colored account not only contributed to the strengthening of

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the American national sentiment of the time; the Cajuns, for want of a founding myth, also readily accepted the New England poet’s retelling of the Grand Dérangement and appropriated it as their own foundational story.viii Apart from the attraction that the virtuous and strong Acadians and saintly Evangeline exercised on the American public, the myth also offered the Cajuns the opportunity to distance themselves from the American foundational myth of the Pilgrim Fathers.

7 And yet, with the turn of the twentieth century, the growing Americanization movement began to greatly affect Cajun culture. The law of 1921, which had prohibited French in public schools, the two World Wars, the discovery of oil in Jennings, Louisiana, and the progressive construction of an infrastructure in Louisiana all contributed to the Americanization of Cajun Country and were the main causes for the demise of French in Louisiana. Unable to resist the lure of the American mainstream and with it the English language, the Cajuns gradually abandoned their French heritage.

8 However, encroaching Americanization was slowed down by the Cajun Renaissance, which coincided with other ethnic revivals in the 1960s. This emancipation process epitomizes the Cajuns’ growing awareness of their threatened culture. The positive echo Cajun music received at the Newport Festival in 1964 was followed by a growing academic interest in Cajun culture and cultural preservation efforts (cf. Bernard).ix Thanks to revisionist works concerning Cajun history by scholars of Cajun origin at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette, attention was drawn to the culture’s uniqueness and especially to the real events surrounding the expulsion of the Acadians.x To counter untruthful and stereotypical depictions of the Cajuns, historians started debunking the Evangeline myth—to the profit of other myths cropping up in Cajun Country.

9 Against this backdrop, the lobster-turned-crawfish legend and Richard’s tales can be considered not just counternarratives to the American myth of the Pilgrim Fathers, but also to the Evangeline myth, invented by a New Englander who had never been to either Nova Scotia or Louisiana. By appropriating the counternarratives as their founding myth, the Cajuns distanced themselves from American mainstream culture even further and strengthened their links to francophone Canada through academic exchanges and the establishment of the Acadian World Congress, held for the first time in 1994. At the same time, Louisiana witnessed the emergence of such Cajun poets and storytellers as the prolific Cajun singer-songwriter and poet Zachary Richard, who engendered a literary tradition which renewed that of the nineteenth-century created by French Creole authors such as Sidonie de la Houssaye, Alfred Mercier, and Adrien Rouquette. As a matter of fact, although Richard’s original Cajun tales have strangely been bypassed by scholars, they testify to the vitality of Cajun culture.

3. (Re)Locating Cajun Culture

10 Clearly, the legend mentioned in the introduction reflects the Cajuns’ identification with the region of Acadiana:xi the crawfish functions as the link between the place and the people. It comes as no surprise that the metaphorical solidarity between the Cajuns and the crawfish culminated in the adoption of the crawfish as the Cajuns’ very own mascot, symbolizing both Cajun power and ethnic pride.xii Similarly, Richard’s tales are grounded in Cajun space: the crawfish, representing the Cajuns, and the

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yellow-bellied turtle are typical creatures of southwest Louisiana’s fauna. Set in a predominantly natural environment, the tales are inscribed in the genre of regionalism as they present places that have “‘escaped’ the dubious improvements of a stronger and more integrated urban society” (Foote 3).xiii The frequent references to such identity markers as landscape, language, and the past create an unmistakably regionalist tone which is accentuated with the change of settings to foreign places. Significantly, it is the transnational wanderings and the experience of foreign cultures which help locate Cajun culture. As suggested by their titles (Conte cajun: L’histoire de Télesphore et de ‘Tit Edvard, L’histoire de Télesphore et ‘Tit Edvard dans le grand Nord, and Les aventures de Télesphore et ‘Tit Edvard au Vieux Pays), the tales seem to trace the Cajuns’ roots back to their origins: Louisiana, Canada, and France are the featured destinations and create a geo-cultural triangle. Considering the meaningful settings as well as the overarching themes of displacement and migration, there is no doubt that the tales allegorize the Cajuns’ history. Besides the attachment to place, the legend and the tales stress the importance today’s Cajuns ascribe to the past. The forceful dissolution of the Acadian community, in particular, is one of the most prominent characteristics of the collective memory of the Cajuns today.

11 It is important to note that Acadia as a region ceased to exist after the break-up of the Acadian community in the mid-eighteenth century, and remains absent from official maps. Still, Acadia has not disappeared from discourse: through literary references and ongoing memory work such as commemorative celebrations, it has become an imaginary space—and another site of memory which connects all Acadians scattered around the world. Although an abstract geographical space, Acadia seems to exemplify Douglas Reichert Powell’s statement concerning “sense of place”: ‘senses’ of place and region are not so much essential qualities, imparted by singular events, practices, or topographical features, as they are ongoing debates and discourses that coalesce around particular geographical spaces. Furthermore, it is by looking at those features of a place that seem, at least superficially, to be the permanent stable markers of its identity that we can begin to see the dynamic, evolving, and rhetorical qualities that create and sustain what has often been taken (reductively) to be an ineffable or ethereal, sensory property: the ‘sense of place.’ (14)

12 Acadia today exists in Cajun Country and in Maine in the United States; in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island in Canada; in South America and the Falkland Islands (Hodson 4). It is the Acadian diaspora, commemorating the Grand Dérangement and celebrating Acadia’s imaginary continuity.xiv The “dynamic, evolving, and rhetorical qualities” Powell mentions are most evident in the depiction of the expulsion in Richard’s tales: the allusions to the Grand Dérangement and Acadia develop with each unfolding tale, in different locations, from a symbolic reference to an explicit reenactment of the event.

3.1. Conte cajun: L’histoire de Télesphore et de ‘Tit Edvard (1999)

13 In Richard’s first tale the two protagonists Télesphore and ‘Tit Edvard are brought together during a hurricane.xv Unfortunately, little, helpless ‘Tit Edvard has not only lost his parents, but he has also lost one of his claws. Télesphore promises ‘Tit Edvard to help him get the claw back. They start out on an uncertain journey during which they are joined by four frogs—Jean, Jacques, Pierre, and Paul—and two grasshoppers—

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Henri and Madame La Sauterelle. They find themselves in a number of dangerous situations, but are helped by other friendly animals crossing their path, such as the spider l’Araignée Arc-en-ciel and the alligator Monsieur Le Coteau Qui Parle, a name the group gives to what they think at first sight is a “speaking hill.” Their encounter with l’Araignée Arc-en-ciel, the spider with magical powers who is supposed to solve the problem of the missing claw, is the tale’s climax. Unfortunately, the spider cannot help them and the group understands that ‘Tit Edvard’s claw is lost for good. Having failed at their endeavor, the companions return home, but not without realizing, with the help of the alligator’s wise words, that their journey has also had some benefits: not only have they forged individual identities, but they now possess a collective memory with which they can identify as a group.

14 The regionalist tone of this first tale results from allusions to Louisiana and, more specifically, Cajun culture, which help construct a Cajun sense of place. Richard’s animal characters are inhabitants of the Wetlands, the coastal marsh and swamp region in South Louisiana. Despite the scarce information about the exact setting, it is possible to identify the space the companions are traveling through. Landscape specificities such as cheniersxvi or bayous, emblematic features of Louisiana and very often linked with Cajun culture, function as geo-cultural codes and give a visual picture of the spatial setting of the tale. The animals’ northward journey to find l’Araignée Arc-en-ciel clearly hints at an invisible force driving them to a home, distant in time and space. The direction the companions follow roughly corresponds to the direction to Acadia. Acadian author Antonine Maillet wrote about the perilous journey back to Acadia in her novel Pélagie-la-charette, which won the Prix Goncourt in 1979. The novel’s heroine, Pélagie Bourg dite Le Blanc, is deported to Georgia from where, after years of misery, she travels all the way back to Acadia with her cart. Not so the eight companions in Richard’s tale: their northward journey remains incomplete. Although it is not their intention to go back to the lands of their ancestors, they have a similar goal: to look for something lost. Indeed, the cast-out Acadians had lost their land and possessions, and went on a journey to find what they had lost. Some of them, like Pélagie, went back to Canada after years of exile in the New England colonies and rebuilt their homes. Others arrived in Louisiana and founded a new Acadia there. Similarly, when the companions come back, they build Edvardville. This allusion to Acadian history, though slight, lays the foundation for the retellings of the Grand Dérangement in the other two tales.

3.2. L’histoire de Télesphore et ‘Tit Edvard dans le grand Nord (2007)

15 The second tale is set in the “big North,” in Quebec and New Brunswick, a territory unknown to Télesphore and ‘Tit Edvard. As in the first tale, their adventure starts with a tragic event: on a peaceful fall afternoon, Télesphore and ‘Tit Edvard are resting in the sugar cane fields when they are suddenly picked up by a harvester and catapulted on a hay bale into the atmosphere. Their attempt at jumping off the bale at the right time fails, and they end up somewhere in Quebec, instead of Louisiana. Fortunately, they are taken in by a hospitable beaver couple, Mario and Maria, who introduce them to the country’s—surprisingly familiar—culture. However, Télesphore and ‘Tit Edvard feel the pull of home. With the help of René le Raton, a raccoon, and Louise L’Orignal, a moose, the two companions reach a city where they hope a snowplow will propel them back to Louisiana. The experiment fails: Télesphore and ‘Tit Edvard land a little further

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south, in New Brunswick. Once more, help is nearby: Rose La baleine, a whale, leads them into “Homardie,” the land of the lobsters, who reveal to ‘Tit Edvard the ancestral connection between the crawfish and the lobsters. The lobsters, unfortunately, cannot help the two friends, but a swarm of ravens, on their south-bound journey, finally bring them back to Louisiana.

16 In Canada, Télesphore and ‘Tit Edvard are struck by the different climate and unfamiliar creatures. The beaver, Canada’s national symbol, the moose, and the lobsters contribute to the construction of a Canadian space which contrasts with the culture of the two friends. Most upsetting to them is the feeling of Otherness and the fact that nothing looks familiar. ‘Tit Edvard does not recognize the trees. All the leaves have fallen, leaving the branches naked. Moreover, there are no green oak trees and no magnolias which give the Louisiana landscape a touch of greenness even in the midst of winter. Instead, ‘Tit Edvard sees black spruces and pine trees which do not resemble the big white pines of the Louisiana forests. (Richard, L’histoire 23)

17 No wonder that the first snow comes as a shock to them, who are used to heat and humidity. When they encounter the beaver couple Mario and Maria, the two friends notice a similarity to the muskrat in Louisiana, although they are bigger and their tail looks different. However, soon enough the four animals bond and compare the fauna, flora, and cultural specificities of their respective countries. ‘Tit Edvard’s and Télesphore’s Canadian experience not only strengthens their sense of Cajun, or Louisiana identity, it also expands their horizons of knowledge.

18 The pull north alluded to in the first tale is concretized in the second tale. Set in the “big North,” the sequel focuses especially on Acadian history. After the failed attempt to reach Louisiana with the snowplow, ‘Tit Edvard and Télesphore land in Homardie, the land of the lobsters, which echoes the former Acadie thanks to its homonymous ending and comparable setting, for it is located in New Brunswick. Hermance le Homard, the chief of the lobsters, enlightens ‘Tit Edvard about his past: he is a descendant of the French lobsters! Just like the Acadians, who left France to live a better life in Canada, the lobsters left France and arrived on the banks of northeast Canada. There follows a detailed history of the lobsters, a perfect allegory of the Acadian deportation—the legend of the lobsters turning into crawfish. It is worth noting that Hermance calls the incident “Grand Déplacement” which undoubtedly constitutes a reference to the historical Grand Dérangement of the Acadians. xvii Like Acadia, Homardie has ceased to exist for the lobsters: “Today, here… is not Homardie anymore, except for in our hearts” (Richard, L’histoire 71). The tale then presents a double displacement: ‘Tit Edvard’s and Télesphore’s own displacement and the reference to the dispersal of the lobsters, which parallels the Grand Dérangement.

3.3. Les aventures de Télesphore et ‘Tit Edvard au Vieux Pays (2010)

19 The third installment resumes the narrative about Télesphore and ‘Tit Edvard. Transferring the setting to Europe—more precisely, to France—Richard makes the transatlantic connection—Louisiana, Canada, and France—come full circle. The story opens with a tragically familiar scene: Télesphore and ‘Tit Edvard, enjoying the first sunny days of the approaching spring in the waters of a rice field, are caught by a fishing boat and taken to France. In contrast to the previous tales, the two friends are not the only victims: they find themselves amidst a swarm of crawfish with whom they

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will go through a number of afflictions. Jammed in the dark and foul-smelling bilge, with no food or water, the captives endure both a distressing and emotional oversea trip. After landing in La Rochelle, on the west coast of France, they manage to escape with the help of Jacques Cocorichaud, a rooster from the region of Bresse. Sadly, in the big commotion Télesphore is left behind. The group of crawfish and Jacques start an errant life in the woods until they are arrested by the “patrouille sauvage,” a wildlife patrol controlling the border between the world of the domestic animals and the world of the wild animals. The rooster is returned to the world inhabited by the domestic animals, but the crawfish have to remain in what resembles a refugee camp. They are visited by an assigned counsel, Claude Tomate de la Beletterie, a weasel, who declares that she will find a solution to free them. Since she cannot understand the crawfish, she is helped by an interpreter who turns out to be Télesphore, now a political refugee and free. With her legal training, Claude issues a request to have the crawfish also recognized as political refugees. In order to succeed, it is necessary to prove that the crawfish are the descendants of a group of crawfish who mysteriously disappeared from France in 1632. Télesphore goes on a long quest to find the documentation needed and returns successfully. The crawfish are finally offered sanctuary.

20 Although the group from Louisiana grapples with the different cultural habits they encounter as, for example, the French custom of cheek kissing (Richard, Les aventures 78), it is the seemingly strange language of the French animals which disconcerts them most. Of course, apart from landscape and cultural habits, language is another major identity marker which contributes to creating a sense of identity. ‘Tit Edvard’s and Télésphore’s linguistic experiences recall the debate about which French is to be promoted in Louisiana: Standard French or vernacular French, i.e. Cajun or Creole French, or other dialects? Already in Canada, the two animals notice the slight differences in vocabulary and accent when they hear the beavers speak French. The most notable scene, however, occurs in the third tale when the captive crawfish and Télesphore, upon landing in La Rochelle, meet the rooster Jacques Cocorichaud, representing France. An arrogant and self-centered know-it-all, he treats his fellow animals haughtily and without respect, especially when they speak French improperly. For him, there is only one correct way to speak French. In contrast, wise Télesphore, a polyglot, notices that Jacques’ French resembles the spoken language of the fowl in Louisiana and that there is a marked difference of accents. As to the rooster, he makes no secret of his contempt for the Louisiana French accent: with a disdainful look he interrupts Télesphore and impertinently corrects his articulation. The turtle, who tries to contain his anger, cannot help making a statement in real Louisiana dialect: “Si tout quelqu’un causé pareil, li moun vini ben moins intéressant” (Richard, Les aventures 33). Jacques is at a complete loss as to what this means and Télesphore readily provides a translation: “If everybody spoke the same way, the world would be less interesting” (33).xviii

21 The discussion between Jacques and Télesphore reproduces the controversy about the French language in Louisiana. Of course, it echoes Zachary Richard’s own view of Cajun French and Cajun culture. Cultures, and languages for that matter, are in constant flux and foreign influences are a means for rejuvenation. Considering the precarious state of French—Cajun French is slowly, but surely disappearing—Richard shows that French is alive in Louisiana and that it must be preserved. Richard’s narrator uses Standard French, arguably to reach a wider audience, but includes such

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Cajun idioms as “ouaouaron” or “plantin,” which are explained in a glossary at the end of each tale. Richard’s tales thus present seemingly disparate cultures, for although Canada and France represent difference and function as foils for Louisiana, they are also mirrors showing similarities with Louisiana. Stephanie Foote notes that “[b]ecause it is a form that works to preserve local customs, local accents, and local communities, regional writing is a form about the presentation of difference” (4; emphasis original). With each displacement, ‘Tit Edvard and Télesphore face different cultures, but are reoriented by familiar cultural elements, as for instance the French language or animals.

22 Ultimately, the third tale develops the diasporic leitmotif even further, for it is a veritable reenactment of the Acadian tragedy: together with other crawfish, ‘Tit Edvard and Telesphore are captured and put on board a ship bound for France. They experience their very own dérangement. Yet, the deportation does not exactly correspond to the real Grand Dérangement, for although Acadian families were transported to France, they were not captured in Louisiana. The reenactment of the dispersal is accompanied by the reiteration of the lobsters’ tragic fate ‘Tit Edvard learned from Hermance in the second tale: the little crawfish uses every opportunity to tell his ancestor’s story. Furthermore, the tales explore the French origins of the Acadians. 1632 functions as a key date, for in that year the lobsters are said to have disappeared from France. In reality, 1632 refers to the departure of the first colonists to Canada.

23 What unites the three tales is the entangled histories of Louisiana, Canada, and France. A journey back in time and to the origins of the community, the narrated displacements become redemptive moments, moments for the recovery of roots. As literary texts, they “exemplify the fact that memorial dynamics do not just work in a linear or accumulative way. Instead they progress through all sorts of loopings back to cultural products that are not simply media of memory (relay stations and catalysts) but also objects of recall and revision” (Rigney 352). Interestingly, the stories still revolve around Cajun culture, with Louisiana acting as an anchor, but the change of settings in the tales and the historical diasporic element add a distinct transnational note.

4. Transnational Trajectories in Richard’s Tales

24 Migration not only strengthens the link to the home culture through the memory of landscape, language, and the past. It transforms a culture as foreign elements are incorporated. While Richard’s tales are portrayals of transnational migrations, they also reveal influences from other cultures. Transnationalism, according to Rocío Davis, is a “creative practice” which exemplifies “how cultures circulate through particular products… and become emblems of evolving ways of perceiving the United States and its cultures from within and outside the country” (1). Considering that Cajun culture is primarily based on oral tradition, there is a lack of original written models Cajun authors could turn to: there has been no Cajun novel in French to this day. It was only in 1980 that a group of young Cajun authors published the bilingual poetry collection Cris sur le bayou: naissance d’une poésie cadienne. Today, this collection stands for the birth of littérature cadienne. The poems express the authors’ awareness and alarm concerning the demise of French and, by extension, Cajun culture. Still, the collection

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was not published in Louisiana, but in Montreal, Canada, as were Zachary Richard’s works. The fact that even Richard’s most recent tale of 2010 was not published in Louisiana, but in Montreal, shows how hard it is for the French voice to be heard in Louisiana. Without doubt, the emerging genre of littérature cadienne, despite—or rather because of—the detour via Canada, has become an important motor in the fight for Cajun culture. The establishment of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press (1973) and Éditions Tintamarre at Centenary College (2003-2004), which promote the publication of French works in Louisiana, was another great step towards the dissemination and preservation of French Louisiana literature within the state.xix The lack of a written tradition notwithstanding Cajun authors have been inspired by French and American literature and have used familiar works as templates (Leroy and Ancelet x-ix). Also, given that Louisiana presents a rich transcultural reservoir of various folktale traditions such as animal tales, magical tales, or supernatural tales (Ancelet xxv), it is not surprising that Richard’s tales display a certain affinity for the folktale. An innovative literary mixture, the tales disclose a transnational Cajun voice.

25 This is nowhere more evident than in the use of intertextual references. Borrowings from European literary traditions, from African or Native American mythologies, or allusions to particular historical events, identify the tales as transnational—and transcultural—tales. The animal characters, who speak and think like humans, inevitably recall the canonical fables by Aesop (sixth century B.C.) or Jean de la Fontaine (seventeenth century). Although not immediately related to “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” the character of the cicada in the first tale is a distant echo of that fable. The almost blind and slightly hard-of-hearing cicada whom the companions meet, shrugs them off with an impolite and indifferent: “I can’t help you, even if I could, I don’t want to.… Leave me alone. Get you gone!” (Richard, Conte cajun 22). His tendency to trade, as we know from the fable, shines through when Télesphore offers his eyes in return for showing them the way out of the oak forest.

26 Other elements recall the philosophical tale. “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly” (Richard, Conte cajun 38) is one of Télesphore’s profound observations about life and human nature. Strikingly, his statement resembles the fox’s words in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Petit Prince which have become familiar all over the world. Conte cajun resembles this latter tale in many ways, which also conveys a philosophical message, has speaking animals, and fantastic elements. With ‘Tit Edvard sitting high up on Télesphore’s back during the whole journey, ‘Tit Edvard is like the little Prince on his small planet. Yet, Conte cajun is more than an intertextual mixture of European tales: it includes references to tales of other ethnic origins as well. This hybrid nature is especially visible in the choice of characters as they unite characteristics of African and Native American folktales. Télesphore, for instance, can be considered a universal animal symbol since the turtle figures in mythologies of many other peoples. The turtle plays a fundamental role in Native American mythology, especially in creation myths. The very beginning of Conte cajun resembles such a myth when Télesphore appears from the waters and takes ‘Tit Edvard on his back. Famous in Europe thanks to Aesop’s fable “The Tortoise and the Hare,” the turtle is also reminiscent of Uncle Remus’s tales, of African origin and published by Joel Chandler Harris in 1881, in which Brer Terrapin, the trickster, outwits other animal characters. Interestingly, the spider, an important character in African and Caribbean oral traditions, holds an exceptional position in the tale. For, despite French Louisiana’s obvious cultural connection with

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the West Indies, the spider, called Anansi, is unknown among Cajun folktales (Ancelet, Edwards, and Pitre 185).

27 Finally, Richard interweaves his narrative with events and references from other nations and cultures, which, at first glance, cannot be directly associated with Cajun culture. It is especially his third tale which reveals such transnational allusions, for instance to the French context: after their escape, the group of crawfish and the rooster live in the “maquis,” a term which, in World War II, referred to a remote place where the résistants to the German occupation gathered (“Maquis”). Like the maquisards, the animals hide in the woods, traveling only during the night and avoiding farms. When they are caught by a wildlife patrol and brought to a refugee camp, the password one of the guards utters to enter the camp is “Jean Moulin.” Jean Moulin, a French politician during the first half of the twentieth century, entered the French national memory because of his activities as the chief of the Conseil national de la Résistance (“Jean Moulin”). It is not without reason that Richard refers to World War II: it was then that the American army realized the crucial asset of the Cajuns’ linguistic abilities. In the last decades, scholars have shown a growing interest in the role of Cajun GIs in World War II. They served in France, Belgium, North Africa, and Southeast Asia; others joined the resistance movement against Germany. As Cajun historian Carl Brasseaux observes: “Cajun translators were as important to the American war effort as the much-acclaimed Native American Code Talkers” (Brasseaux qtd. in Engelbrecht). Similarly, Télesphore’s abilities as interpreter—he knows both the animal and human languages—are crucial to the tale’s positive outcome, and identify him as the tales’ code talker. Thus, Richard highlights bilingualism as the Cajuns’ consequential resource and as important identity marker.

28 Other allusions situate the tales in a postcolonial context. The very promising “A suivre...” at the end of the third tale indicates that this is not ‘Tit Edvard’s and Télésphore’s last adventure. The crawfish and the two friends pine for their home in Louisiana, but the return trip via ship in winter would prove too hazardous. It is Jacques Cocorichaud who presents them with a solution: the ringdoves are getting ready for their migration to Africa and they are willing to take the company with them. Will there be a forth tale set in Africa, exploring the African influence in Cajun culture? In any case, the African trajectory already exists subliminally in the trilogy, but the postcolonial context is most apparent in the last tale. Indeed, ‘Tit Edward’s and Télesphore’s wanderings from America to Europe, and for that matter the Cajuns’ wanderings between Europe and America, are portrayals of, to use Paul Gilroy’s term, transatlantic routes (cf. Gilroy). More specifically, the crawfish company’s passage to France on the ship does not only revisit the Acadian deportation: the scene of the animals jammed in the bilge of the ship is reminiscent of the middle passage of the slave trade: On the bottom of the metal cage, they [the crawfish] are on top of each other. As to Télesphore, he is stuck, his shell immobilized because the ceiling of the cage is so low. The silence is incommensurable. Only the breathing sound of the crawfish is to be heard. This little, almost inaudible noise amplifies until it becomes immense, the sound echoes from the metallic walls of the cage and finally transforms itself into an enormous cacophony like the fracas of a stone avalanche. (Richard, Les aventures 18)

29 Additionally, the cruel treatment, the heat, and the lack of fresh air contribute to the parallel. Regarding the Acadians and the African slaves, the circumstances of the

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capture, the transitional state during the passage, as well as their subsequent mistreatment suggest a comparison. In the tale, then, there is two-way traffic between the past—the Grand Dérangement and the middle passage—and the present—the capture of Télesphore and ‘Tit Edvard. Furthermore, when the company of crawfish escapes prison in La Rochelle and takes to the woods, they start to live a “vie marron” (Richard, Les aventures 48). Marron, Maroon in English, comes from cimarròn, a Spanish expression for “feral animal,” a domestic animal which has returned to the wild. By extension, it was used to refer to fugitive slaves during the colonial period in the American South. Today, the French expression means “to live like a vagabond” (Richard, Les aventures 154). As a matter of fact, Richard aligns himself with postcolonial writers such as Aimé Césaire (Richard, “Biography”). During his years of militancy in the 1970s, he and other young Cajuns advocated what was called Cadienitude, in the style of Césaire’s term négritude.xxOn the one hand, Cadienitude stood for the preservation of the history, language, and culture of the Cajuns and the sharing of the heritage of the Acadian diaspora (Waggoner 162). On the other hand, it was a protest against the stereotyping and discrimination the Cajuns had been subjected to since the end of the Civil War. The concept aimed at rehabilitating the Cajuns’ self- image and advocated the self-affirmation of the Cajuns in order to develop a Cajun identity.xxi The postcolonial background serves, then, to assert Cajun identity with its francophone heritage in the midst of a dominant Anglo-American society. Considering the third tale’s ending, one thing seems certain: the Cajun-Acadian-French connection will be complemented by the African connection, offering an even more comprehensive picture of Cajun culture. ‘Tit Edvard and Télesphore will discover a new country with francophone cultures and continue to spread their knowledge about Cajun culture in their function as cultural ambassadors.

5. Conclusion

30 It has been stated that [t]he most consistent element in Cajun County may well be an uncanny ability to swim in the mainstream. The Cajuns seem to have an innate understanding that culture is an ongoing process, and appear willing constantly to reinvent and renegotiate their cultural affairs on their own terms. (Ancelet, Edwards, and Pitre xviii)

31 This malleability of Cajun culture is clearly visible in Richard’s three tales. Each tale reinvents the expulsion story and re-enacts the Grand Dérangement, and the multiple migrations and transgressions of national boundaries show the circular dynamics of both literature and memory. Considering the characters’ own displacements and the references to, or mise en abîme of, an event which bears a striking resemblance to the Grand Dérangement, there is no doubt that the tales allegorize the Acadians’ expulsion and that they are a good example of “palimpsestic itineraries of migration” (Davis 3). With Télesphore and ‘Tit Edvard, the reader travels both to different places—from Louisiana, to Canada, to France—and also back in time—from the contemporary setting to the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries. In reenacting the past, Richard’s three tales portray a geo-cultural space where the cultures of the Cajuns, the French- Canadians, and the French meet and display “regional writing’s strategy of protecting local identities by preserving them in literature” (Foote 4). In this imaginary Acadian triangle of Acadiana-Acadia-France, the Acadian diaspora is reunited. Considering that

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“[r]egions are not so much places themselves but ways of describing relationships among places” (Powell 10), the concept of “migrating literature,” as explored in Zachary Richard’s three tales, highlights the contemporary interplay of the regional and transnational.

32 It becomes clear that Richard’s notion of Francophonie is more than just the preservation of the French language and francophone culture. Richard propounds a universal, humanist ideology, allowing for solving today’s social problems. This transnational humanism is also present in his Cajun tales and was most recently officially acknowledged by the Cercle Senghor Richelieu which awarded Richard the annual Prix du Cercle Senghor Richelieu de Paris in March 2014 (“Le Prix du Cercle”). xxiii The tales express the necessity of turning towards the wider francophone world for the preservation of Cajun culture, as the links established with Canada and France show. Even if the connection to the local is never lost, the transnational becomes more apparent with each tale. As the tales progress, there is a certain realignment, a shift away from southwest Louisiana to other places which turn out to be important because of their historical and cultural connections to Cajun culture. In reinventing the tragedy of the Acadians from a Cajun perspective and including the lobster-turned- crawfish legend, Richard participates in the dissemination and preservation of the Acadian memory, and thus in the endurance of imaginary Acadia. In crossing multiple boundaries, Zachary Richard not only strengthens the link between the two Acadias, l’Acadie du nord and l’Acadie du sud, and France; he also creates a francophone Cajun prose narrative: the echo of the tales, coming from the allegedly silent voice of francophone Cajun Country, bounces off Canada back to Louisiana. In Richard’s eyes, dislocation and foreign influences are not purely unfavorable; they also entail a gain of other cultural traditions. Indeed, Cajun culture can only benefit from preserving its transnational outlook.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

“2013 American Community Survey.” U.S. Census Bureau – American FactFinder. Web. 18 October 2014. .

Ancelet, Barry J. Cajun and Creole Folktales: The French Oral Tradition of South Louisiana. New York: Garland Publishing, 1994. Print.

Ancelet, Barry J., Jay Edwards, and Glen Pitre. Cajun Country. Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 1991. Print.

Brasseaux, Carl A. The Founding of New Acadia: The Beginnings of Acadian Life in Louisiana, 1765-1803. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1987. Print.

—. Acadian to Cajun: Transformation of a People, 1803-1877. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1992. Print.

Bernard, Shane K. The Cajuns: Americanization of a People. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2003. Print.

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Davis, Rocío G. The Transnationalism of American Culture: Literature, Film, and Music. New York: Routledge, 2012. Print.

Engelbrecht, Marsha. “Vintage Virtuoso.” Pat Mire Films. Web. 26 November 2013. .

Erll, Astrid. “Travelling Memory.” Parallax 17.4 (2011): 4-18. Print.

Foote, Stephanie. Regional Fictions: Culture and Identity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Madison: The U of Wisconsin P, 2001. Print.

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993. Print.

Gutierrez, C. Paige. Cajun Foodways. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1992. Print.

Henry, Jacques M., and Carl L. Bankston. Blue Collar Bayou: Louisiana Cajuns in the New Economy of Ethnicity. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2002. Print.

Hodson, Christoper. Acadian Diasporas: An Eighteenth-Century History. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. Print.

“Jean Moulin.” Larousse. Web. 26 November 2013. .

Lachmann, Renate. “Mnemonic and Intertextual Aspects of Literature.” Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Ed. Astrid Erll, Ansgar Nünning, and Sara B. Young. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008. 301-10. Print.

“Le Prix du Cercle.” Le Cercle Richelieu Senghor. Web. 11 March 2014. .

Leroy, Fabrice, and Barry J. Ancelet. Tout Bec Doux: The Complete Cajun Comics of Ken Meaux and Earl Comeaux. Lafayette, LA: U of Louisiana at Lafayette P, 2011. Print.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie. Boston: William D. Ticknor & Co., 1847. Print.

Maillet, Antonine. Pélagie-la-charette. Ottawa: Leméac, 1979. Print.

“Maquis.” Larousse. Web. 26 November 2013. .

Powell, Douglas Reichert. Critical Regionalism: Connecting Politics and Culture in the American Landscape. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2007. Print.

Richard, Zachary. “La Francophonie selon Zachary Richard.” Forum Avant-garde Québec. Jean Lapointe. Yahoo! Groupes Québec. 2001. Web. 17 March 2013. .

—. “Biography.” Zachary Richard. 2014. Web. 20 June 2014.

—. Conte cajun: L’histoire de Télesphore et de ‘Tit Edvard. Montréal: Éditions des intouchables, 1999. Print.

—. L’histoire de Télesphore et ‘Tit Edvard dans le grand Nord. Montréal: Éditions des intouchables, 2007. Print.

—. Les aventures de Télesphore et ‘Tit Edvard au Vieux Pays. Montréal: Éditions des intouchables, 2010. Print.

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Rigney, Ann. “The Dynamics of Remembrance: Texts Between Monumentality and Morphing.” Companion to Cultural Memory Studies. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2010. 345-353. Print.

Waggoner, May Rush Gwin. “Separate but Equal: État présent des recherches sur la littérature francophone louisianaise.” Études Francophones 21.1/2 (2006): 158-171. Print.

NOTES i. “Cajun” is an Anglo-American corruption of “Acadian,” or Acadien in French, and developed in Louisiana at the end of the nineteenth century through Americanization. According to the American Community Survey of 2013, about 100,000 Louisiana residents claim to speak French, including Cajun French (“2013 American Community Survey”). In contrast, the 1970 Census produced estimates of over 500,000 French-speaking persons in Louisiana, while the 2000 Census listed 250,000 persons proficient in French. Both the disappearance of the French-speaking generation as well as a new selective sampling method of the U.S. Census Bureau issued in 2000 are the causes of the wide discrepancy (Henry and Bankston 5-6). ii. The participation of Cajun musicians at the Newport Festival (1964-1967) brought Cajun music to national attention. The resulting triumph instigated the Cajun Renaissance which is regarded as a watershed in the cultural emancipation of the Cajuns. iii. The titles’ English translations are: A Cajun Tale: The Story of Télesphore and ‘Tit Edvard, The Story of Télesphore and ‘Tit Edvard in the Big North, and The Adventures of Télesphore and ‘Tit Edvard in the Old Country. Since Richard’s three Cajun tales have not yet been translated, all translated quotations are mine. iv. Several academic studies dealing with francophone texts by Cajun authors use the term from the 1990s onward. v. Erll proposes to use “‘transcultural’ as an umbrella term for what in other academic contexts might be described with concepts of the transnational, diasporic, hybrid, syncretistic, postcolonial, translocal, creolized, global, or cosmopolitan” (9). Considering this issue’s transnational focus, and the transnational crossings in the tales, I opt for the use of “transnational.” I will use “transcultural” only when referring to cultural exchanges within a delimited territory, e.g. within Louisiana. vi. This hybridization complicates any attempt at defining the Cajun identity. Generally, Acadian ancestry, a Catholic belief, and, to a lesser extent these days, knowledge of French, identify somebody as a Cajun. vii. Adaptations of Evangeline and the Grand Dérangement proliferated in the United States, Canada, and even France. In Canada, the French translation of Evangeline in 1865 by French- Canadian Pamphile Le May was even more influential: it turned Evangeline into a francophone founding myth for the Quebecois and the Canadian-Acadians. viii. Especially the Genteel Acadians venerated the Acadian heroine (Brasseaux, Acadian 153). In Louisiana Pouponne et Balthazar: nouvelle acadienne (1888), which is a retelling of Evangeline with a happier ending by the French Creole writer Sidonie de la Houssaye, and Acadian Reminiscences: The True Story of Evangeline (1907), by Felix Voorhies, consolidated the myth. ix. The Cajun Renaissance engendered the development of the academic field of Cajun Studies in the 1970s. Pioneers of the study of Cajun history and culture include Carl A. Brasseaux, Barry J. Ancelet, and Shane K. Bernard. x. Considerable support also came from Quebec, where historians and sociologists became interested in their “cousins” and started the Louisiana Project in 1976.

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xi. Acadiana is the official name given in 1972 to the 22 Louisiana parishes boasting mainly francophone environs. It aims at distinguishing the uniqueness of Cajun culture from the Anglo- American mainstream. xii. Although the crawfish constitutes one of the best-known emblems of Cajun culture today, it has even come to figure as the state crustacean of Louisiana since 1983, a necessary consequence of the increasing international popularity of Cajun culture. xiii. The tales remain vague about the exact locations and time: they are set in the present, somewhere in Louisiana, Canada, and France. xiv. The Acadian Memorial in St. Martinville, the Acadian Museum in Erath, the Acadian Village in Lafayette as well as gatherings such as the annual Festivals Acadiens et Créoles in Lafayette, the annual International Acadian Festival in Plaquemine, and the quinquennial Acadian World Congress commemorate the Acadian heritage. xv. Hurricanes are deeply ingrained in the Louisiana memory and littérature cadienne includes numerous references to hurricanes. xvi. Chênière in French, derived from chêne, meaning “oak.” The Cajuns themselves consider the cheniers a symbol of the fight for their culture: the forests of oak trees growing on sand ridges along the Gulf coast have to face terrible hurricanes, and devastation is not an uncommon event. xvii. Déplacement is less strong than Dérangement. Richard might have had “displacement” in mind when writing Grand Déplacement. xviii. Interestingly, Richard’s translation into Standard French reads: “Si tout le monde parlait de la même façon, la culture serait appauvrie.” Note the change from “moun,” meaning “world,” to “culture.” xix. French Immersion Programs and other such contemporary francophone writers as Jean Arceneaux, Beverly Matherne, Kirby Jambon, and David Cheramie, all committed to the preservation of Cajun culture and the French language, further strengthened this development. xx. The Négritude movement was initiated in Paris in the 1930s by a group of French-speaking African and Caribbean students, notably Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, and Léon Gontran Damas. They championed anti-colonialism, anti-racism, the return to the roots, and a renewed pride in African heritage. xxi. Cajun identity became a source of pride and gradually received a positive connotation. However, this rehabilitation was largely the result of the less radical Cajun Renaissance. As to Cadienitude, the movement soon declined and has not been rekindled. xxii. Francophonie refers to a group of countries sharing, fully or in part, the use of the French language. They are members of the International Organisation of La Francophonie. xxiii. This award, established in 1987, is presented to “a person whose actions have made outstanding contributions to the international influence of the French language” (“Le Prix du Cercle”).

ABSTRACTS

Focusing on three Cajun tales by Zachary Richard, this article explores the interrelation of Cajun culture and the transnational space through the lens of “migrating literature.” The interrelation of literature and migration is visible on several levels: first, the texts literally “migrated” to Montreal, Quebec, for publication purposes; second, the tales are literature about migration; and

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third, other “foreign” literary texts and allusions to historical events “migrated” into the tales. Considering the meaningful settings—Louisiana, Canada, France—as well as the overarching themes of displacement and migration, the tales reveal themselves as allegories of the Cajuns’ history. Bringing together different regions, the tales respatialize the Acadian diaspora in a geo- cultural imaginary space and undergird the transnational connection.

INDEX

Keywords: Acadian, Cajun, diaspora, francophone, memory, migrating literature, regionalism, transnationalism

AUTHOR

MATHILDE KÖSTLER JGU Mainz

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Constructing a New Regionality: Daphne Marlatt and Writing the West Coast

Michelle Hartley

1. Introduction

1 In her long poem Steveston, first published in 1974 and republished in varied form twice more (1984; 2001), Daphne Marlatt writes of the village’s site at the mouth of the South Arm of the Fraser River in British Columbia: “Washing from east to west, how the river flows, washing its / filth downstream & silting islands of work men dredge their channels thru, / grassland, sedge. The work it takes to keep men busy” (41). These lines depict an image of landscape familiar to regionalist depictions that stress local work and geography, the confluence of river and men. However, I begin this paper with these lines because the dredged channels and dykes of Steveston offer a metonymy for the kind of denaturalized process of reading region for which I advocate in the following section of this paper, “Regionalism, the West Coast, and Regionality.” While traditional regionalism has stressed rural, realist reportage, a type of writing seemingly naively authentic to a landscape, Marlatt’s lines stress how one constructs a landscape, stressing human intervention, the dredging of channels and creation of dykes in a continual process of reclamation. Moreover, Marlatt’s idiosyncratic orthography (&, thru) and repeated use of present participles and fragments foregrounds her experimentation with poetic form, emphasizing the creative labor that goes into this process. To help elaborate the connection between regions and language, human geographer Mireya Folch-Serra uses Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories to describe how human agency creates landscapes through metaphors and comparisons whose outcome is the building of roads, towns and cultures. Landscapes, in this light, can be regarded as repositories of polyphony and heteroglossia: places where social, historical and geographical conditions allow different voices to express themselves differently than they would under any other conditions. (255-56)

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2 Thus place becomes not a stable marker of community, industry, and social divisions, but a living repository of voice(s), allowing for the possibility of distancing discussions of region from naturalized and often simplified notions of what constitutes a place and its literature. In this paper I argue for regionality as a term that both addresses the intersection of regions and writing from those regions and avoids the regionalist fallacies of ruralism and realism. In order to trace a more fugitive “regionality,” especially one with transnational aesthetic affiliations, I first site Marlatt at that intersection of region and writing: the University of British Columbia’s English Department and Poetry initiatives in the early 1960s and the literary archive that has built up around that generation of West Coast writers.

2. Regionalism, the West Coast, and Regionality

3 Since the 1990s Canadian and American studies have witnessed a surge of interest in the local, the regional, the global, and their intersections. Part of the work in renewing literary regionalism as a useful category has involved examining and rejecting regionalism’s pejorative synonyms: parochial, banal, insular, and rural. This dismissive language justifies a status quo that equates the “center” (of a country, of mainstream beliefs, of established literary modes) with value. Another part of the work involves expanding the defining characteristics of a regional literary work to include the urban and the experimental. In this essay, I argue for building on regionalism’s concern for place, space, and identity, but also for attending to the critiques of regionalisms that label the aesthetic and cultural concerns of these ideologies too narrowly. For example, traditionally discussions of the West Coast as a literary region have been hindered by a prevailing regionalist attention to realism as a primary aesthetic. In On Canadian Poetry (1943), E.K. Brown called for “accuracy, not merely of fact, but accuracy of tone” as the primary criterion for evaluation (23). Regionalist art has often been seen as a lesser and inherently limited art form with mimesis as its only power. Thus, Brown dismisses it: “The advent of regionalism may be welcomed with reservations as a stage through which it may be well for us to pass, as a discipline and a purgation” (24). Since the 1940s, then, regionalist art has been distinguished as parochial rather than cosmopolitan, reportage or local-color writing rather than creative genius, and accordingly deserving of its dismissal as “purgation.”i Laurie Ricou states that his cross- border approach in The Arbutus/Madrone Files: Reading the Pacific Northwest (2002) results from a West Coast resistance to regionalism: “few if any attempts to define a regional literature within the boundaries of political units have taken strong hold … [There is] a general reluctance to define” (167). While there is a long list of book-length monographs on Prairie writing both within and across national borders, the criticism of West Coast writing offers a shorter list of essays.ii Alison Calder’s 1996 PhD dissertation critiques many of these studies for promulgating an unvarying view of the Prairies that ignores its industry, immigration patterns, and variety in landscape. Indeed, she finds that literary regionalism can border on xenophobia when it limits the characteristics of a region to homogeneity. This brand of regionalism’s “features,” then, becomes a kind of social prescription defining what is and is not acceptable as part of the Prairie. The West Coast has not suffered such homogenizing, but dominant and distinctive strands of its writing have resisted realism, and this resistance has historically made the West Coast unmanageable within the traditional discursive

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structure set out for literary regionalism: a sometimes naive equation drawn between regionalist art, its practitioners, and the land from whence it springs.

4 “Regionalist” as a descriptor implies, still, both a stylistic and an ideological conservatism, a narrow focus that pays too much attention to place as “setting” and too little attention to the imaginative and aesthetic qualities of writing. Whether due to political or aesthetic conservatism, literary criticism based on such uncontested regionalisms tends to efface difference. It looks for applicable stereotypes of region within writing, rather than attempting to discern what constitutes a region by examining its particularities in literature. As Marlatt’s fellow poet and critic Frank Davey notes in “Toward the Ends of Regionalism,” change to a regionalism, therefore, “tend[s] to replace one nostalgic mythology with another” (9).iii By contrast, regionality as a guiding principle acknowledges region as a heterogeneous and politicized space, a series of chronotopes, emphasizing the intersection of differing ideologies and standpoints within a region.

3. A Starting Point: UBC as Archive

5 Ricou’s The Arbutus/Madrone Files demonstrates that West Coast literature requires a methodology that addresses its instabilities. Ricou’s choice of various “files” designated by features of West Coast ecosystems for his regional study, rather than a single identity, attests to the productive variability of the region, especially with his addition of “Afterfiles.” These “Afterfiles” not only follow the main arguments “a supplement— complementary,” but they are “also, in their relation to the Files, alternate, resistant, approximate” (2), stressing the unfinished. I argue that examining how writers construct regionality—rather than making a “concerted claim for coherence” (167) as Ricou puts it—makes the most sense. Looking at how a writer like Marlatt discovers and re-discovers place and region through her writing and re-writing, from the 1960s into the second decade of the 21st century, offers a focused perspective on what might otherwise be a too diffuse discussion of a transnational region. Therefore, I am most interested in Marlatt’s returns to the West Coast, Vancouver, and its suburbs, her multiple versions constructing a vision of place in various times, or chronotopes, re- seeing and re-writing when the culture, landscape, or city shifts to reveal another.

6 My essay examines a web of history, dialogues, and writing, choosing to center on Marlatt as representative of the writing that emerges from the institutional site of the University of British Columbia with its rich archive of recorded poetry events and documented dialogues between poets.iv The correspondences between literary works, literary history, and the rewriting of historical materiality and ideology can be traced back and forth between creative writers and this region. While avoiding what Bakhtin cautions against in “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel”—namely, a “naive biographism” and a “naive realism” (253-54)—I will argue that the boundary between writer and writing is permeable. According to Bakhtin, [h]owever forcefully the real and the represented world resist fusion, however immutable the presence of that categorical boundary line between them, they are nevertheless indissolubly tied up with each other and find themselves in continual mutual interaction. (254)

7 Even when literary criticism chooses not to focus on the limited categories of realism and descriptive accuracy, literary regions are constructed through their authors’

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biographical ties to specific places. In using the designation regionality, I also follow Francesco Loriggio’s call for regionalism to “invert…one of Bakhtin’s neologisms, which both amends and preserves the century’s bias in favour of time,” to approach regionalism, “topochronically… privileg[ing] space but without disavowing time” (22). Times change places; therefore, mobilizing the theories of Bakhtin both “amends and preserves” the study of literary regionalism by focusing on process, genre, time and space, and their challenges to traditional modes of thought.

4. Daphne Marlatt’s Early Influences: Tish, Locus, Olson

8 UBC in the 1960s was home to a group of undergraduate writers, including poets, novelists, historians, and literary critics, who later became fundamental to Canadian poetry and its debates: George Bowering, Frank Davey, Fred Wah, Daphne Marlatt, W.H. New, Wayson Choy, and Jack Hodgins were only some of the creative writers and future scholars of Canadian literature at UBC, marking it as a useful nexus point for considering the impact of a cross-border literary regionality. The critical heritage of Bowering, Davey, Wah, and Marlatt begins with Tish, a poetry newsletter instigated by American poet Robert Duncan and produced by Davey, Bowering, and fellow undergraduate and MA students at UBC, who formed an editorial collective and disseminated writing-in-process that reflected aesthetic debates over the American New Poetry.v The community’s and the newsletter’s engagement with aesthetic theories, especially theories manifesting a concern for experiential immediacy rather than realism, and Tish’s policy of publishing work-in-progress marked members such as George Bowering and Daphne Marlatt, influencing their next 50 years of writing both critical and creative. In Davey’s “Introduction” to the reprinting of Tish issues1-19, he writes that “[t]he impulse to create Tish had been sparked by [American poet] Robert Duncan during three nights of lectures, July 23, 24, and 25, 1961” and that “the main push toward a magazine was Duncan’s” (3). Tish came at a particular moment, and a particular chronotope emerges in all the writing about it: UBC 1961-1963. That chronotope integrated national differences in contrast to the strain of fervent anti- American Canadian nationalism that followed Canada’s 1967 centennial to be found in critical works such as Keith Richardson’s Poetry and the Colonized Mind: Tish (1976). By contrast, Davey notes in The Writing Life that while the Tish poets were heavily influenced by American poet Charles Olson and encouraged to begin this publishing venture by Duncan, Olson’s teachings led the UBC students to write out of their own moment and place, not out of an “American” ethos or a timeless ahistorical geographical region: Far from encouraging imitative writings, Olson’s poetic insists upon each writer’s manifesting himself in language exactly appropriate to the person he is and to the physical and temporal circumstances in which he writes. This poetic, accurately followed, precludes the possibility of the kind of colonialist writing which [Robin] Matthews and [Milton] Acorn pretend to have been Tish’s goal. (17)

9 I would argue that Tish marks the beginning of a transnational aesthetic of regionality, written by Canadians in dialogue with American poets, to interrogate and construct the local Vancouver scene in writing.vi

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10 While the concepts of space, place, and subjectivity that emerged from Tish were influenced by Olson’s situational poetics, the resulting poetry and poetic theory emerges from local ground or, to use the word coming out of the Tish chronotope, “locus.” “Locus” is a word that means place but also signals certain philosophical and aesthetic inclinations. While its specific etymological history in contemporary poetics is difficult to track, for postmodern American poets like Duncan, Creeley, and Olson, it signifies a writer’s insistence on the “physical and temporal circumstance,” as Davey puts it (“Introduction” 17). In an interview with Caroline Bayard, Tish editor Bowering has stated: The word that we used all the time was “locus,” which we liked partly because it came out of Olson, partly because it didn’t say setting, it didn’t say place, it didn’t say landscape, it didn’t say all those things that are literary devices. Every time you use one of those terms you posit a person who is saying, OK, now how can I organize all this into a literary work. But if you said locus, it implies trying to find out where you are. (Bayard and David 79-80)

11 Examining this influence as part of a transnational regionality seems more productive than the more exclusive rhetoric of the nationalist and regionalist literary criticism of the 1970s and 1980s, especially as the influence of Duncan, Olson, and Creeley resulted in writing that emphasized the nuances of the local for Vancouver writers, and the energy of the Vancouver Poetry Conference motivated the ensuing Poetry Conference at Berkeley in 1965. Olson used the term “locus” rarely in his published writings, but it is important to his conception of “History as events”: “I think the best thing is to have yourself catch [history] up as you have to, (a) because so few even good men will bother with it; and (b) the sequence of events you will want for yourself—just as you want geography: the locus is now both place & time (typology)” (“Bibliography” 308). Olson’s dictum stresses the importance of rethinking time and space in ways that are congruent with what I call regionality.

12 Daphne Marlatt’s diverse output provides evidence of a lifetime of engaging the history and geography of the West Coast in her published process poetics, beginning with Vancouver Poems (1972), the re-issue of some of those poems in What Matters: Writing 1968-1970 (1980), and rewriting the sequence entirely in Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now (2013). Brenda Carr’s theorization of the “Steveston spiral” offers a cogent spatial trope for another of Marlatt’s ongoing projects, which has now extended over 25 years with the 2006 dramatic production of a Noh play set in Steveston, “The Gull,” and its subsequent publication in 2009: [The Steveston spiral] evolves from the uncollected little magazine poem sequence, “Steveston. Support? Fish.” (1973), to the first edition of her well-known long poem/photography collection with Robert Minden (Steveston 1974), to the aural history documentary edited by Marlatt (Steveston Recollected 1975), to the documentary radio play commissioned by and aired on the CBC (One Life. Steveston 1976), to the inclusion of the text without photographs in Michael Ondaatje’s The Long Poem Anthology (1979), to the reorganized edition, with photographic additions, of the Minden collaboration (1984). (102-3)

13 The project also includes Salvage (1991), the third edition of Steveston published by Ronsdale Press in 2001, and the performance of its poems as soundscapes with previous collaborator Robert Minden. In a third project, Marlatt’s novels Ana Historic (1988), Taken (1996), and the long poem The Given (2008) all demonstrate the intersection of Marlatt’s writing life, Vancouver’s history, and autobiography. In the following sections, I will examine a few examples from the Vancouver Poems project and Steveston.

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5. Vancouver Poems

14 Marlatt’s early poetic involves a Tish- and Olson-influenced concentration on locus, but her attempt to “locate herself” occurs through her relation to the histories of the disparate populations that make up Vancouver’s cultural and social geography, as well as its myths and mountains. Marlatt’s early work shares the current concerns of Vancouver-based critics such as Rita Wong, Glen Lowry, and Roy Miki to poetically publicize issues of racism, poverty, and classism on the West Coast. Vancouver Poems (1972) and Steveston (1974) demonstrate that historical disparities are integral to her reading of the city’s layers, her place in it, and both the poet’s and the city’s place in the world. In both works Vancouver takes on a “strangeness” in the poems due to Marlatt’s perception of it from an immigrant’s perspective.vii Marlatt explains in an interview with George Bowering that she perceives poetic form working to represent a process of moving through the city: “the line itself is a walking down a street; it’s that step-by-step, perception-by-perception thing. But as you continue to walk down it you get a sense of the character of that street” (Bowering, “Given” 69).viii The journey is complicated because simultaneous to this phenomenological, horizontal movement, Marlatt enacts a historical, what she terms “vertical,” movement that reflects her digging into the city’s archives: It’s as if I was drilling, like thru the present, & the immediate present was the people that I knew; down from that into a larger collective present, which was the streets, the city, things I was seeing on the streets, like the English Bay poem; down deeper into, quote, history, the fire & so on; deeper still, prehistory, which was before the written records that we keep, native Indian. (72)

15 This drilling follows from Olson’s urging: “Best thing to do is to dig one thing or place or man until you yourself know more abt [sic] that than is possible to any other man. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Barbed Wire or Pemmican or Paterson or Iowa. But exhaust it. Saturate it. Beat it” (“Bibliography” 306-7). In addition to recording her own personal peregrinations through a contemporary city, Marlatt digs into Vancouver and the West Coast by going through the archive at the Vancouver Public Library and examining Vancouver history in Vancouver Poems. She also recovers voices and stories through oral recordings, another form of digging in Steveston. Her various returns from Salvage (1991) to Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now (2013), in turn, add to the region’s creative archive, as Marlatt constructs versions of the coast through her writings, rewriting her earlier work with changes in time, space, and perspective. In her introduction to Liquidities, she writes about her need to rewrite rather than simply re-issue the poems. As the locus changes, even the term resonates with the 1960s and 1970s, the aesthetic and poems refract those changes: Vancouver’s incessant deconstruction and reconstruction, its quick transformations both in (re)structured ground and in urban imagining, come further into play in the new series of poems, Liquidities (from liquid assets, cash and increasingly from the incessant rain of global warming). The slower, more introspective rhythms of the city poems some forty years ago speed up as wordplay, faster image traffic, quicker jumps through milieu and temporal strata that intensify verbal collisions in the new poems. (xii)

16 Marlatt’s works from the region from the 1960s to the 21st century and her revisitings enable a focused discussion of the changes. Marlatt’s “walk” in her early work from the diary entries archived in What Matters: Writing 1968-1970, Vancouver Poems, and Steveston

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uses her own position as an immigrant to delineate Vancouver and its environs as a region of immigrants and outsiders who come to belong to a place by constructing relationships with it, rather than being born to it.

17 Vancouver Poems, as Marlatt notes in an 1974 interview with Bowering, is a sequence that results from Marlatt writing her way through “the roots of the city” (Marlatt, What Matters 74). In these poems she develops her poetic technique toward the long line that she will establish fully in Steveston, and she also moves into using historical research as “matter” for her poetry, representing Vancouver as a specifically immigrant city in the process.In its use of quotations and details from newspaper clippings in the Vancouver archives,ix “who could know” from Vancouver Poems gives readers the scene and sense of what the city’s structure has been built upon, namely, its connection to trade, Empire, and the alienated labour of working, usually racialized, bodies: VIADUCT: ‘several transcontinental trains daily’ underfoot. At foot, sea. ‘CPR’s 14-ship coastal fleet… (or) regular calls of white Empresses from the Orient.’ principally a passenger embarcation, for, he remarked, with pride, the metropolis. Thought, high-buttoned, boots a stamp of that civility, the Lions ranging, royalty on a cowcatcher (snicker) view the Rockies, O Empire. Furthest outpost cradled inland sea the ships go down to, & they crowded round as so many shadows view the new arrivals (Vancouver Poems [21]; also in Net Work 45)

18 The “VIADUCT” is a conduit for trade. Marlatt capitalizes every letter in this repetition of the word; through eye slip it becomes a secondary but emphatic title in opposition to the title that doubles as the poem’s opening clause, “who could know.” “VIADUCT” stresses the movement of people and goods through the city. The “passenger embarcation” with its flow of bodies adds money to the system, as do the labour bodies of the “terrific / coolie movements” (45), but the movements of raced migrants rather than tourists are a source of anxiety within the immigrant city almost from its inception, as Marlatt indicates through her inclusion of historical events from 1887 to her poem’s present, 1968. The poem moves from the Pier D Fire that destroyed one of the links between the CPR’s trains and its ships of the line in 1938 back to the celebratory “London 29 days out of Yokohama,” referencing the SS Abyssinia’s journey to Vancouver in 1887. Thus Marlatt understands Vancouver as a trade gateway because of its birth as a cosmopolitan “metropolis” and its place in the empire along the Yokohama-Vancouver-New York-London passage. Indeed, Marlatt reveals her awareness of what Empire has always entailed—trade, division, and conflict. Vancouver was always a transnational region, a transit point in a network of relations that allowed goods and people to flow across borders. Marlatt’s rewriting emphasizes the movement of labor, juxtapositioned more carefully against Vancouver geography: “Lions chasmic yawning” stresses the iconic mountains of the West Coast and the potential for labor to be lost in a global abyss.

19 The connection between trains and ships suggested by the viaduct, a word which etymologically relates to finding a “way through” or “past,” also suggests that the city is most important as a transitional site for transit links and transient populations of workers moving to other parts of the nation and empire. Passenger ships and trains carry commodities like the expensive orchids mentioned in the poem’s first

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incarnation or the tea and silk in the second, commodities that are “heavily insured” (What Matters 45), but lives seem less valuable to the colonial societies that Marlatt uncovered in Vancouver’s document repository. Marlatt includes pieces of history, and the poetic lines move via connection of word, thought, and image, moving between times to focus on the site of the city and its shifting contradictions. The connection between the past and future of Vancouver and Marlatt’s writings and rewritings of the poems continues to be immigrant alienation. It is the poem’s speaker who cries “wait…” amid this flood of activity in a “boomtown,” using the held moment of the ellipsis trailing off to bring up more history, more layers of the past into the site of the city and the poem.

6. Steveston

20 The notion of the boomtown seems to have piqued Marlatt’s poetic and historic curiosity. The history of the West Coast, and of British Columbia generally, is a history of the boomtown: settlements that rise and fall with single resource industries like fur, gold, lumber, or fish. Geographer Cole Harris describes North America’s West Coast as a new human geography based on the collision of resources and modern systems of capitalist extraction, but the intersections of global corporations mark the place and people too: As British Columbian resources came within range, capital poured in, often building the systems of transportation and communication it required.…In this, rather than in pioneer agriculture, was the principal momentum of settlement and economic growth in an emerging immigrant British Columbia. (257)

21 Before Canada’s West Coast became part of a nation or province, it was a transnational region subject to the vagaries of globalized capitalism not only through the ships in port but also through regional resource industries. “[C]apital pour[s] in,” as Harris suggests, but also quickly dissipates. Steveston, the town where Marlatt turned her archival/poetic intelligence in the early 1970s, was the “salmon capital of the World” in the late 19th century, a waning fishing village about to be swallowed by Vancouver’s suburban sprawl in the 1970s, a tourist destination with a cannery museum in the 21st century.

22 Steveston exhibits Olson’s influence at numerous points. Beyond her attempt to “dig” into this one place and every aspect of it, Marlatt again engages Olson’s dictum to stress perception moment by moment. In “‘Against the Source’: Daphne Marlatt’s Revision of Charles Olson,” Sabrina Reed documents the parallels between Steveston and Olson’s Maximus poems (1960), focused on Gloucester, Massachusetts; both poets “establish themselves as centres of consciousness whose movements through their respective locales allow them to comment on the lives and histories they encounter” (133). Both locales are fishing villages facing the rising regional tension with “corporate interests,” in Steveston’s case a real estate conglomerate. Reed argues that the difference between the two poets lies in their understanding of individuality, and how individuality was for Marlatt ineluctably attached to gender in the 1960s and 1970s. Olson perceived himself linked with the universal, but even in the 1970s before her later work with French feminism and attempts at lesbian utterance in Ana Historic (1988), Marlatt emphasizes the unsuitability of Olson’s poetic “sprawl” for her project. Reading backward from the feminist rewriting of Steveston in Salvage, reading Steveston through Salvage, as it were, it

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is possible to foresee Marlatt pushing the gendered boundaries of 1970s society in her focus on the female fisherman, Inez, and her resistance to the Japanese-Canadian fishermen sexualizing the “Hippie” woman poet (38).

23 Marlatt also focuses on the Native presence in her vision of Vancouver’s past and present in a way that Olson does not. Reed notes: [Olson] views the history of migration from the perspective of the Greco-Roman/ European tradition, and thus the term “manifest destiny” does not seem out of place. Olson’s celebration of the colonization of Gloucester largely ignores the displacement of Native peoples or even the slaves who made a slightly later forced migration to the ‘New’ World. (143n2)

24 By contrast, Marlatt’s own immigrant past and her interest in the intersecting demands of various demographics on the West Coast construct an immigrant city built on Native land both in Vancouver Poems and Steveston.x “Accumulation,” one of Marlatt’s tropes in Steveston, and traceable in her larger body of work, occurs not only in the layers of soil on the delta, but also in the form of her own accumulated observations. She uses the trope to positively construct a sense of belonging, to build connections to communities: Steveston’s fishermen, Vancouver’s poets, etc. She also reads it negatively when corporatization takes over from that community in the form of accumulating deposits (in a bank, in the Richmond Credit Union, in shares in BC Packers, in) a town whose main street moves, as Manoah did, from Moncton New Brunswick, west, in a vision of telephone poles, wires, cement. A straight line from east to west, from farm at its eastern end, to Steveston Hotel, knife in teeth, Canada Fish. Shadowy, this, piratical emblem of another era. Boomtown. Dream of seizing silver wealth that swims, & fixing it in solid ground, land, home. A mis-reading of the river’s push. (Steveston 42)

25 Accumulation, fish, nets, backwater, and boomtown provide the poem’s iterative structure, and evidence of Marlatt’s Olsonian “digging” in the community’s experience. The web of nets provides a physical reminder of the community’s labor in fishing the shoals, stringing nets across the mouths of sloughs to catch the fish. In addition, Marlatt’s poetic points out that the fishermen and women are also caught: in dreams of “silvery wealth” that are “[a] mis-reading of the river’s push” (42). On the delta, roots go into the river as well as the soil, reinforcing the constructed nature of claims to being rooted in a ground or in the soil. The soil on the delta must be reclaimed and protected by dykes; a sense of belonging to a place or a region must be built, re-built, and produced by claims of affinity or by writing and re-writing, as Marlatt does.

26 In Steveston, rather than being a conduit for movement beyond the boundaries of a “backwater,” the street is part of a community that accumulates bodies and their stories over time. It has depth. The delta accumulates silt and ground over the years —“Islands of it moving west, 1000 feet per century”—and the settlement acquires people, streets, a past. There becomes “here”: The edge, the edge. Settled by it. Camped rather. Cluster of fishing shacks temporary as those Japanese who slept on boats arriving, each season, for the fish, to stay, stray into settlement, believing they were only here this year, sending money home & staying on to the next, & the next… (Steveston 41-42)

27 The temporary camps and sojourners become “long-term residents” and, like many other towns in the region along the coast, create hierarchies to discipline their

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disparate populations. Different races are allocated different jobs, and the Native Canadians are deracinated, uprooted from their rightful grounds, but employed: & the natives, whose longtime summer ground this was, coming to fish, whole bands whose women & children end by working the canneries, staying in Indian tenements, & it all settles down into an order of orders, the Chinese tyee boss, & the cans hammered out by his men, orders of cash handed down thru the messhall, the gambling & fires, fire & flood. (42)

28 Marlatt’s long lines offer history through experiences, processing the latter in a fashion dictated by B.C.’s racial ideology with “sharp boundaries” (Harris 270) and discrete places. But unlike earlier B.C. histories such as G.W. Taylor’s Timber: History of the Forest Industry in B.C. (1975), Marlatt focuses on these workers in her poem and not on the profits their work brings.xi She hears the stories from the repository of documents in the Vancouver archives, the polyphonic repository of voices that the Steveston residents allow her to access through their oral stories, and her poems and rewritings allow readers to witness how the work changes the landscape. To return to Folch-Serra, “[l]andscapes, in this light, can be regarded as repositories of polyphony and heteroglossia: places where social, historical and geographical conditions allow different voices to express themselves differently than they would under any other conditions” (255-56), even when the landscape contains the ruins of three separate bunkhouses for three different sets of workers. The boom required Chinese, Japanese, and Native workers to fulfill the companies’ “orders” until technology could replace most of them and industrial efficiency depleted the fish stocks: This continues… & if the mono- chrome of white & red, the sloping roofs of Canadian fish resemble, light in the moon like old siding Chinese backs rest beside, a pipe, a break in the sun from soldering work—some cannery with its clanking stream of cans, its steam, its rot of excessive fish still on the dock of that time if, behind the dyke (tracks), there’s a ghostly clutter of Indian tenement / Japanese cannery shacks… (Steveston 70)

29 Marlatt’s reading and rewriting of Steveston in her long poem “foreground[s] the materiality of language” (Kamboureli 102) by stressing the material consequences of linguistic acts.

30 Marlatt’s use of an ephemeral document, the sign on a closed post office, provides one example of this inextricable link between language and materiality: the enunciation of a post office’s closing rewrites the “boomtown” as “backwater” and then “suburb.” Poems such as “How it goes” tell of a town’s passing: How it goes Men sleeping, lives, or lives sleeping, doors. On Moncton, in the store window, a pall draped placard reads: In Memoriam Steveston Post Office Doors closed May 13th 1972 (Steveston 28)

31 The placard performs the work of mourning for a community that is itself becoming absent. With the removal of the post office, the fishing village as it was passes into memory; Marlatt’s poem, with its use of the present tense, enacts her awareness of what that passing signifies: the closing of doors, the bust that follows the boom. In her

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poem, Marlatt attempts to replicate the living presence of the town even as she mourns its passing. Moreover, Marlatt’s mourning, as observer, makes it clear that Steveston’s loss is common in the region, which is represented by “housing development, each internal room focused on a further internal / screen, whose smaller & smaller ponds of thought these ‘channels’ bring” (22). The generic suburb—iconically linked to the individualized viewing of the television screen with its two-dimensional view and twelve channels—divorces this community that once depended on its inhabitants’ knowledge of the water, tides, and channels from its geography, from its time and space. Ricou asserts that “[t]he place names in Marlatt’s poem are truly vernacular: they are names spoken by people engaged in the same work, rather than names recorded in public documents. The parenthetic definition of Woodward landing, ‘(where the ferry ran),’ confirms this oral local history” (Arbutus/Madrone 32). Experiential knowledge not placed in any archive.

32 Without names and phenomenological knowing the landscape changes—what was once a variety of dykes, headlands, channels, and passages used for particular processes becomes a seemingly featureless landscape when the observer cannot differentiate one break from another. Time and place are vital, as is an awareness of the impact of institutions, economic or educational, on the poet and landscape. What Ricou identifies as “oral mapping,” a litany of names—Roberts Bank, Albion Dyke, Woodward Reach, Woodward Landing, Woodward Slough, Gravesend Reach, City Reach—a past recorded in Marlatt’s poem (Steveston 15), turns at the poem’s end to a vision of suburbanization. The only place name comes from the suburb itself, Richmond: no hand skims now, closing in on this life, this, or this, foreclosed at dusk now, opening the door he wanders out to sit, leaning his chair against the wall & contemplating closedup house boards, a weltering mattress or the few remaining cards: as visages, his vision is accretion uncountable (is he? accountable) or facing mountains he can’t see, wires, & the roar of Richmond skyline (money), only the falsefront silhouette ‘west’ is occupies his mind. (18)

33 The images here stress the accumulation of money or property, not knowledge of place. “‘[W]est’” is a shadow of a former self, a “falsefront silhouette,” a phrase that seems to imagine progress without accountability. The passing of the town into a suburb —“Richmond skyline (money)”—is not a natural consequence of time or geography but a direct consequence of corporate interests and actions. Marlatt immerses herself in the town to read its connections to everyday life, to somehow retain its practice, even as she writes a historical poem about the end of an era. Steveston in this view is both an individual locale and emblematic of the West Coast’s regional history of canning towns, exploitation of labor, and cross-cultural interaction. Thus, rather than returning to a regionalist figuring of landscape as determining literary production, Steveston represents regionality itself.

7. Concluding Thoughts

34 Marlatt and Steveston’s residents “interlocate” (as Bakhtin would put it) each other reciprocally;xii but Marlatt also interlocates the writers, Canadian and American, who helped her to construct her transnational poetic, a poetic that in turn offers evidence of a new understanding of region: a West Coast regionality constructed through accretion and accumulation, debate, writing and rewriting, and the materiality of time.

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One version overlays another, and the “sub-versions” in fact subvert any totalizing vision. Regionality suggests that the “region” itself is in a continual process of becoming, that any sense of belonging to place is provisional as that place too is provisional, in process, not entirely geographically determined by mountain ranges, oceans, or fjords, but affected by geography, history, immigration, institutions, and idiosyncrasies. Thus, the region is constantly being defined and redefined as writers write and re-write, with new work changing both the writers and the region in the process. In Bakhtin’s terms, the entire project is unfinalizable, not unproductive, the defining factors of the region somewhat fluid.

35 In more pragmatic but comparable terms, human geographer Doreen Massey writes, [space] is the product of the intricacies and the complexities, the interlockings and the non-interlockings of relations from the unimaginably cosmic to the intimately tiny. And precisely because it is the product of relations, relations which are active practices, material and embedded, practices which have to be carried out, space is always in a process of becoming. It is always being made. (293)

36 So, too, is region, and therefore it is productive to examine the writers who acknowledge that becoming, include it in their poetic, and respond poetically when they have again to write their way into an understanding of that new space “being made.” In Steveston, Marlatt writes “multiplicity simply there: the physical matter of / the place (what matters) meaning, don’t get theoretical now, the cannery” (23), but multiplicity is rarely simple, and theorizing a new way of articulating the multiple connections between space and time, region and writing, regionalism and poetics matters.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.Print.

Bayard, Caroline, and Jack David. “George Bowering.” Out-Posts: Interviews, Poetry, Bibliographies and a Critical Introduction to Eight Major Modern Poets. Erin: Porcépic, 1978. 77-99. Print.

Bowering, George. “Given This Body: An Interview with Daphne Marlatt.” Open Letter 4.3 (1979): 32-88. Print.

—. “Home Away: A Thematic Study of Some British Columbia Novels.” BC Studies 62 (1984): 9-28. Print.

Brown, E.K. On Canadian Poetry. Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1943. Print.

Calder, Alison. “The Lie of the Land: Regionalism, Environmental Determinism, and the Criticism of Canadian Prairie Writing.” Diss. U of Western Ontario. 1996.

Carr, Brenda. “Daphne Marlatt’s Salmon Texts: Swimming/Jumping the Margins/Barriers.” Diss. U of Western Ontario. 1989.

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Cooley, Dennis. “Three Recent Tish Items: Rev. of Frank Davey, Tish No. 1-19; C.H. Gervais, The Writing Life: Historical & Critical Views of the Tish Movement; and Keith Richardson, Poetry and the Colonized Mind:Tish.” Canadian Poetry 3 (1978): 98. Print.

Davey, Frank. “Introduction.” The Writing Life: Historical & Critical Views of the Tish Movement, by C.H. Gervais. Coatsworth: Black Moss, 1976. 117-27. Print.

—. “Toward the Ends of Regionalism.” A Sense of Place: Re-Evaluating Regionalism in Canadian and American Writing. Ed. Christian Riegel and Herb Wyile. Edmonton: U of Alberta P, 1998. 1-18. Print.

Fairbanks, Carol. Prairie Women: Images in American and Canadian Fiction. New Haven: Yale UP, 1986. Print.

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Harris, Cole. The Resettlement of British Columbia: Essays on Colonialism and Geographical Change. Vancouver: UBC P, 1997. Print.

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Holquist, Michael. “Introduction: The Architectonics of Answerability.” Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Ed. M. Holquist and Vadim Liapunov. Trans. Vadim Liapunov. Austin: U of Texas P, 1990. ix-xlix. Print.

Kamboureli, Smaro. On the Edge of Genre: The Contemporary Canadian Long Poem. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1991. Print.

Kreisel, Henry. “The Prairie: A State of Mind.” Trace: Prairie Writers on Writing. Ed. Birk Sproxton. Winnipeg: Turnstone, 1986 [1968]. Print.

Loriggio, Francesco. “Regionalism and Theory.” Regionalism Reconsidered: New Approaches to the Field. Ed. David Jordan. New York: Garland, 1994. 3-28. Print.

Mandel, Eli. Another Time. Erin: Porcépic, 1977. Print.

Marlatt, Daphne. Ana Historic. Toronto: Anansi, 1988. Print.

—. The Given. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2008. Print.

—. The Gull. With a Japanese Translation by Toyoshi Yoshihara. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2009. Print.

—. Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2013. Print.

—. Net Work: Selected Writing/Daphne Marlatt. Ed. Fred Wah. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1980. Print.

—. Salvage. Red Deer: Red Deer College P, 1991. Print.

—. Steveston. 2nd ed. Edmonton: Longspoon, 1984. Print.

—, ed. Steveston Recollected: A Japanese-Canadian History. Victoria: Aural History, Provincial Archives of British Columbia, 1975. Print.

—. Taken. Concord: Anansi, 1996. Print.

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—. What Matters: Writing 1968-70. Toronto: Coach House, 1980. Print.

Massey, Doreen. “Spaces of Politics.” Human Geography Today. Ed. Doreen Massey, John Allen, and Philip Sarre. Cambridge: Polity, 1999. 279-94. Print.

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McCourt, Edward A. The Canadian West in Fiction. Toronto: Ryerson, 1949. Print.

New, W.H. “A Piece of the Continent, A Part of the Main: Some Comments on B.C. Literature.” BC Studies 67 (1985): 3-28. Print.

Olson, Charles. “A Bibliography on America for Ed Dorn.” Collected Prose: Charles Olson. Ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997 [1964]. 297-310. Print.

—. Selected Letters. Ed. Ralph Maud. Berkeley: U of California P, 2000. Print.

Ormsby, Margaret. British Columbia: A History. Toronto: Macmillan,1958. Print.

Pritchard, Allan. “The Shapes of History in British Columbia Writing.” BC Studies 93 (1992): 48-69. Print.

Quantic, Diane Dufva. The Nature of the Place: A Study of Great Plains Fiction. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1995. Print.

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Richardson, Keith. Poetry and the Colonized Mind: Tish. Oakville: Mosaic, 1976. Print.

Ricou, Laurie. The Arbutus/Madrone Files: Reading the Pacific Northwest. Corvallis: Oregon State UP, 2002.Print.

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Taylor, G.W. Timber: History of the Forest Industry in B.C. Vancouver: J.J. Douglas, 1975. Print.

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NOTES i. This summation is not as dated as it might seem, although the attitude is contested. During that odd combination of Reality-Radio competition and Canadian belles-lettres, Canada Reads, in 2005, I heard panelist Olivia Chow dismiss one text, Rockbound, as “regionalist” and therefore unworthy of much discussion. It won the contest, nevertheless, perhaps reflecting regionalism’s new lease on critical life. ii. After early forerunner Edward McCourt (The Canadian West in Fiction [1949]) comes a long line of regional studies of Prairie literature like Ricou’s Vertical Man/Horizontal World (1973), Eli Mandel’s Another Time (1977), Dick Harrison’s Unnamed Country: The Struggle for a Canadian Prairie Fiction (1977), Robert Thacker’s The Great Prairie Fact and Literary Imagination (1989), Carol Fairbanks’s Prairie Women: Images in American and Canadian Fiction (1986), Diane Quantic’s The Nature of the Place: A Study of Great Plains Fiction (1995), and the recent turn to transnational and border regions have engendered more. By contrast, most of the articles on B.C. literature, George Bowering’s “Home Away: A Thematic Study of Some British Columbia Novels” (1984), Allan Pritchard’s “The Shapes of History in British Columbia Writing” (1992), W.H. New’s “A Piece of

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the Continent, A Part of the Main: Some Comments on B.C. Literature” (1985), George Woodcock’s “The Wild Woman: Notes on West Coast Writing” (1987), and Laurie Ricou’s overview of them all, “The Writing of British Columbia Writing” (1993), appear in a single journal, BC Studies. iii. Alternating, for example, Henry Kreisel’s “Man, the giant-conqueror, and man, the insignificant dwarf always threatened by defeat” (256) with Ricou’s “vertical man” in his horizontal world in Prairie regionalism. iv. From 1959 to the mid-1960s, UBC was a meeting ground for poets and poetics; moreover, those ephemeral meetings were recorded on audio tapes by then student Fred Wah; in interviews with poets, panelists, and students; later reworked in autobiographical fictions, etc. The holdings at Simon Fraser University, B.C. have not only the recordings but also original posters from the events. v. See Olson’s letters about the American New Poetry, especially the one to the editor, Donald Allen (Letters 273-77). vi. Dennis Cooley’s review, “Three Recent Tish Items,” supports Davey’s contention and rejects Richardson’s overwrought nationalism as early as the late 1970s. He writes, Tish poetry is proudly West Coast. Olson, chief theoretician for the editors of that magazine, insisted that poets must write in their own unique voices out of their own particular places, “foolishly ‘local,’ heavy with particulars,” as he recommends. No other places and no other voices—certainly not Olson’s world and Olson’s voice—would do. Be in Vancouver, of Vancouver—here, now (in 1962)—that is what Olson said to Lionel Kearns and Daphne Buckle [later Marlatt], David Dawson, Jamie Reid and David Cull, and all the others. It’s you and your world that go into your poetry. Writing out of Olson’s poetics, then, means anything but imitating his particular form of writing. (98) vii. Daphne Marlatt was born in Perth, Australia, spending her childhood in Penang, Malaysia until she immigrated with her family to North Vancouver, British Columbia in 1951 at the age of nine. viii. I am indebted to Fred Wah for picking up on this important explanation of Marlatt’s poetic in his introduction to Net Work (1980). ix. See Bowering, “Given This Body” 70. x. In the first poem, “wet fur wavers” she writes in its second stanza, Changes air now wet as the sea, the sh’te Comes walking up through humor in the way of Vision, salt. Cedar all over. Cedar for headdress. Beaver or bear, what is there to the touch of, you said. Come well back into view. (Liquidities 5) This version of the poem includes the Japanese word for ghost, sh’te, edited out of the original. With its inclusion Marlatt notes the changing character not only of the city, which is far more inclusive, but that of her poetic, too: her Japanese Noh influences side-by-side with Charles Olson’s dictum to dig the one place. xi. Moreover, unlike Timber, where Native peoples are dismissed after the first two chapters, or Margaret Ormsby’s more sympathetic effort, British Columbia: A History (1958), which severely limits discussion of Native peoples, Marlatt’s Steveston is more inclusive. xii. Michael Holquist writes in his introduction to “Art and Answerability”: We not only interrogate each other, we interlocate each other, and it is the interlocative or dialogic self that is the subject of Bakhtin’s architectonics. The interlocative self is one that can change places with another—that must, in fact, change places to see where it is. A logical implication of the fact that I can see things you cannot, and you can see things that I cannot, is that our excess of seeing is defined by a lack of seeing: my excess is your lack, and vice versa. If we wish to overcome this lack,

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we try to see what is there together. We must share each other’s excess in order to overcome our mutual lack. (xxvi)

ABSTRACTS

This paper argues for “regionality” as a new term to address the intersection of geographical regions and writing from those regions. The limited applicability of traditionally conceived regionalism to the poetry of the Canadian West Coast demonstrates the need for this new term. The suffix “-ity” stands not for a faith in region or region as totality, but “an instance” or “a degree of” region. These “instances” accrue a processual and multiple version of region. Building on the idea of landscape as repository, this article briefly outlines the importance of institutions (the University of British Columbia’s English Department and Poetry Conference in the early 1960s in particular) and literary archives for this methodology. In order to trace a more fugitive regionality, especially one with transnational aesthetic affiliations, one must be able to locate a writer/work among a constellation of documented influences and documented perspectives. This article then argues that Daphne Marlatt’s work from the 1970s to 2013 offers a particularly compelling example of how theorizing regionality can open up perception of regions and the writing that emerges from them.

INDEX

Keywords: American New Poetry, British Columbia, Canadian literature, Daphne Marlatt, Regionalism

AUTHOR

MICHELLE HARTLEY University of Western Ontario

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On Common Ground: Translocal Attachments and Transethnic Affiliations in Agha Shahid Ali’s and Arthur Sze’s Poetry of the American Southwest

Judith Rauscher

1. Introduction

1 Like most prose texts dealing with the immigrant experience, much of the work of contemporary U.S.-American poets with a migratory background deals with identity politics, personal memory, family histories, and issues of cultural contact and conflict, often against the backdrop of the American city.i Similarly, scholarship on American diaspora and immigrant poetry frequently focuses on the poets’ struggle to consolidate multiple, at times competing identity constructions and cultural positions, and on individuals caught between different languages and (poetic) traditions, as well as between feelings of belonging and alienation from the United States, their country of residency, and nostalgic yearning for a lost homeland (see Jenkins; Kabir; Russell; and Freitag). Following the spatial and transnational turns in literary studies, and in an attempt to broaden the scope of critical studies on U.S.-American ethnic and immigrant literature, including poetry, scholars in the field have begun to explore human-place and human-nature relations in the context of migration, pushing for a critique of traditional conceptualizations of place as a closed and stable site of human attachment (see Casteel; Zhang, Asian Diaspora Poetry 29-72; Kandiyoti; Boschmann 88-120, 175-200; Ray 139-78). It is in this context that my paper discusses the ways in which the lyric representations of the American Southwest by Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali and Chinese-American poet Arthur Sze revise notions of national and indeed regional belonging and put forward an ethics of place that acknowledges the many

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pressures of globalization, in particular those of mass migration and global environmental crisis.

2 Agha Shahid Ali’s A Nostalgist’s Map of America (1991) and Arthur Sze’s The Ginkgo Light (2009) combine, in different yet related ways, a concern for the cultural and political implications of migrancy with a preoccupation with the physical environment. In other words, Ali’s and Sze’s poems are concerned with human displacement, both voluntary and forced, while also being invested in thinking and working through the (post)modern migrant’s relationship to the natural world and non-urban places. Instead of contenting themselves with broaching issues of migration as movement between or through abstract cultural spaces, Ali’s and Sze’s poems engage with very concrete North American geographies in the American Southwest, and feature speakers who are struggling with the conflicted histories of as well as their own relationships to this region, reimagining it in the process. Both poets, while coming from vastly different backgrounds, share a profound investment in the links between cultural difference, mobility, and the natural geographies of the Southwest, inviting us to rethink issues of regionalism from perspectives that have been brought into focus by transnational and environmental literary studies.

3 The concrete landscapes discussed in Ali’s and Sze’s poems about the American Southwest reveal a complex layering of place, which includes the historical, social, cultural, as well as the physical or material world.ii Transnational and translocal movements of people, objects, and ideas come into play in all of these interconnected layers of place, constituting the Southwestern region as an imaginatively bounded yet open, processual, perspectival, relational, and inherently porous site of individual and communal identification. Agha Shahid Ali and Arthur Sze, I hope to show, create a distinctly open and dynamic sense of place in their texts, one that is meaningful not merely in spite of, but precisely because of the various histories of displacement that inform Ali’s and Sze’s individual perspectives, and that have affected the Southwest in the past and are still affecting it today. What develops from the two poets’ creative struggle to make sense of human-place and human-nature relationships in the light of migration, I argue, is a poetry that imagines decidedly inclusive and flexible notions of belonging on the basis of translocal attachments. By simultaneously emphasizing the permeability of boundaries and borders and the importance of regional attachment, Ali’s and Sze’s poems open up a space where transethnic affiliations can be imagined on the common ground of an engagement with specific places as well as with the natural world at large. Their poems suggest a profoundly ethical way of being in the world that can be called ecologically sensitive because it acknowledges the desire of and possibility for migrants and displaced peoples to form meaningful connections with the land, even if their arrival may be recent and their residence temporary. Finally, and by foregrounding the ways in whichthe intertextual references (Ali) and the multivalency of poetic language in general (Sze) reach across time and space, the poems of Agha Shahid Ali and Arthur Sze point toward the role literature might play in forging such deep yet flexible connections.

2. From Transnationalism to Translocality

4 In his 2009 study A Transnational Poetics Jahan Ramazani analyzes the works of a wide range of twentieth-century poets writing in English—among them Agha Shahid Ali—

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tracing “circuits of poetic connection and dialogue across political and geographic borders and even hemispheres” (x-xi). In his analysis of transnational poetics, Ramazani is primarily interested in moments of intertextuality, metaphorical border- crossing, the mixing of genres from different cultures, and in what he calls “new intergeographic spaces” in poetry (60). At several moments in his study, however, Ramazani also acknowledges the continued relevance of place in the “traveling poetry” (51) he discusses and proposes not a transnational poetics but “a translocal poetics as an alternative to understandings of the relation of poetry to place as either rooted or rootless, local or universal” (xiii; emphasis in the original). Defined by Ramazani as the interlacing of “localities and nationalities with one another in a globally imagined space” (15), the translocalis closely associated with the poetic technique of “translocal ‘super-position’” (101) or the fusion of different locations within one poetic image,a strategy we can for example see at work in Sze’s poem “Pinwheel,” where the speaker describes his writerly activity as pinning “there / to here”(Sze 50; emphasis in the original). Borrowed from James Clifford’s influential study Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (1997), Ramazani’s translocal also conjures up what the human geographers Katherine Brickell and Ayona Datta have described as a “grounded transnationalism” (3). Translocality here suggests a recognition of “[spatial] processes and identities as place-based rather than exclusively mobile” (Brickell and Datta 3) and an acknowledgement of the importance of “‘groundedness’ during movement, including those everyday movements that are not necessarily transnational” (4).While being linked to certain poetic strategies, the translocal is thus relevant to my analysis because it gestures toward an understanding of identities as emplaced as well as mobile, and toward an understanding of place-making as a process which depends on transnational as well as on more localized movements. Conceived in this manner, the translocal becomes a crucial category for a revision of the concept of the region in relation to literatures of migration.

5 Both in Ramazani and in Brickell and Datta, the turn from the transnational to the translocal indicates a move away from purely abstract cultural spaces to concrete places, and from too exclusive an emphasis on global mobility to a recognition of those forces of emplacement at work on different levels of spatial and indeed “palatial” imaginaries, including the nation and the region. When I use the term translocal instead of transnational in relation to Ali’s and Sze’s poetry, it is first because the term allows me to discuss the ways in which these two poets move away from the idea of the nation as a privileged site of territorial attachment and identity construction. Considering the translocal also allows me to highlight the ways in which Ali and Sze explore the region as a site of multiple local-global and local-local crossings.Finally, I use the translocal because it gestures toward the grounded, “earthy” quality of much of Arthur Sze’s and Agha Shahid Ali’s poetry on the American Southwest. This groundedness, I suggest, has little to do with deterritorialization as it is frequently evoked in the context of transnationalism, that is, as a detachment of culture from place. Instead, it has more to do with deterritorialization in the sense that Ursula Heise uses it in her study Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, namely, a variety of processes, ranging from the local to the global, that complicate the relationship of culture to place without severing it completely (10, 55-58).As a term that connotes borders as well as border crossings, and a certain concreteness or materiality rather than abstractions, the “translocal” thus becomes a suitable term to describe both the tentative ecological sensibilities expressed in Ali’s poetry of migration and the diasporic sensibilities of Sze’s nature poetry.

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Indeed, I think it is no coincidence that Lawrence Buell, one of the most eminent figures of environmental criticism, sees the world as being shaped by global and “translocal” forces (63), especially at the level of the region. “[T]he bioregional horizon,” Buell argues, “must extend beyond a merely local horizon” because, whether urban or rural, “regions remain permeable to shock waves potentially extending worldwide” in the sense that no locale can “shut itself off from translocal forces even if it wanted to” (88).

3. Where Critical Regionalism Meets Ecocriticism

6 Since the beginnings of American Studies, the region has played a central role in the discipline as the “spatial dimension of cultural pluralism” (Steiner and Mondale x). Cultural pluralism in this early Americanist understanding was considered an effect of differences between rather than within regions and thus tended to embrace the category as a decentralizing force to counter nationalist politics, often overemphasizing coherence and unity in its internal construction.iii Recent studies in the field of critical regionalism and particularly of New Western Criticism have instead come to conceive of regionalism as a “critical interrogation of the center, with its official histories and definitions, and the celebration of local multiplicity as well as national identity” (Campbell and Kean 125). From such a perspective, regions are defined and constantly redefined by “cultural history [and] the cumulative generative effect of the interplay among the various, competing definitions [of place]” (Powell 5). Reading regions in general and the American West in particular in this new critical context requires, as Stephen Tatum has argued, a “newer field imaginary for the American literary West [that] involves subaltern voices and alternative histories” (461). Both Arthur Sze’s and Agha Shahid Ali’s poetry integrate such voices and histories, first by introducing their ethnic speakers into the ethnoscape of the American Southwest, and second by weaving Native American histories into their texts.

7 In an effort to describe such a “newer field imaginary,” José E. Limón emphasizes the potential of critical regionalism as 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. (167)

8 Like Limón, Krista Comer contends that identity remains a central issue in critical regionalism. Yet,she also argues that “one unstated issue under discussion concerns identity and its politics and their relationship to an ethics of place” (160; emphasis added). Comparing her own work on the region to Ursula Heise’s practice of working with and from the contradictions of place in the latter’s groundbreaking ecocritical study Sense of Place and Sense of Planet (2008), Comer points to the similarities and differences between the field of critical regionalism and that of environmental literary criticism: The knowledge projects of WLA [the Western Literature Association] and ASLE [the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment] overlap, to be sure, but the ethics of place in which WLA and critical regionalism are invested is not so much toward “environment” as toward the interface among people, communities or places and their constitution with and through discourse, materialist geography, and in-place structures of feeling. (173)

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9 While I would not object to Comer’s argument about a difference in emphasis between the fields of critical regionalism and ecocriticism, at least not in the very general sense suggested here, one larger point I am trying to make is that, in an age of global environmental crisis and mass migration, an ethics of place invested in the natural environment always also has to be invested in the multidimensional associations between people, communities, and places—and vice versa.

10 On a theoretical level, this is why the overlap of the knowledge projects of ecocriticism and critical regionalism Comer speaks of should be further developed, something I am trying to do here. The poetry of Agha Shahid Ali and Arthur Sze is instructive in this critical and theoretical project because their texts put forward an ethics of place in which human-nature relations become the common ground for human-human connections:by exploring the ways in which the region of the American Southwest is and always has been open to translocal movements, their poems imagine non-exclusive communities across racial, ethnic, and cultural boundaries that are based on a shared experience of the land. They also imagine how migrants and victims of displacement may develop a sense of place that does not necessarily require “long association with the environment” (446), as human geographer Yi-Fu Tuan famously claimed. Or put differently, Ali’s and Sze’s poetry imagines regions as sites of transethnic affiliations and translocal attachments, attachments that depend on meaningful relationships to the natural world and thus become ecologically resonant.

4. Agha Shahid Ali’s Porous Regionalism

11 Agha Shahid Ali was a Kashmiri-American poet who grew up in Kashmir and eventually moved to the United States, where he attended Pennsylvania State University and the University of Arizona before he began teaching at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Princeton College, and in the MFA program at Warren Wilson College. Although Ali had already published poetry in India during the 1970s, his works received little critical attention before his death in 2001, the same year his eighth collection Rooms Are Never Finished (2001) was a finalist for the National Book Award and nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Much of the existing scholarship on Ali focuses on the poet’s three final collections and in particular on his ghazals, an ancient Arabic type of poetry which Ali famously worked to promote in the United States in its traditional form. Also focusing on his final collections, more recent articles on Ali have begun to discuss issues of space and dislocation in the context of transnationalism rather than postcoloniality. For the purpose of this paper I will read one of Ali’s earlier books of poetry, A Nostalgist’s Map of America (1991), which deserves critical attention in the context of transnational approaches to North American regionalism due to its preoccupation with very specific U.S.-American geographies, in particular the desert landscapes of the American Southwest. I will first explore how Ali imagines the region as a translocal formation concerned with the relation of the local to the extra-local as well as with the material dimension of place, and then analyze how Ali uses intertextuality to establish transethnic affiliations based on shared translocal attachments.

12 Throughout A Nostalgist’s Map of America, Ali’s poems feature specific locales that the reader is encouraged to think of as both metaphorical and as actual places (Needham 66; Katrak 130). One way in which Ali’s poems produce a poetic effect of

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concreteness that invites the reader to recognize the material dimension of landscapes is by using topographical markers—an aesthetic decision, Lawrence Buell has argued, that indicates an ecologically suggestive orientation toward extra-textual landscapes (33). Yet, while several of Ali’s poems are quite literally mapping the American Southwest by mentioning cities such as Tucson, Phoenix, or Las Cruces, historical sites like the Native American Pueblo of Acoma in New Mexico, or natural sites like the Superstition Mountains in Arizona, his poems also frequently refer to places outside the Southwest. The beginning of Ali’s poem “I See Chile in My Rearview Mirror,” for example, reads: The dream of water—what does it harbor? I see Argentina and Paraguay under a curfew of glass, their colors breaking, like oil. The night in Uruguay is black salt. I’m driving toward Utah, keeping the entire hemisphere in view— Colombia vermilion, Brazil blue tar, some countries wiped clean of color: Peru is titanium white.… (96)

13 “I See Chile in My Rearview Mirror” presents the speaker as a traveler, a motif which occurs quite frequently in A Nostalgist’s Map of America. In fact, Ali’s speaker Shahid is depicted en route in most poems, whether he is driving near Sedona, Arizona, as in the poem just quoted (96), on the Schuylkill Expressway in Pennsylvania, or on an unnamed road in the desert. Apart from symbolizing the perspective of the traveler, the car mirror keeps “the entire hemisphere in view” while the speaker is driving through Arizona and thus visualizes the poetic device of “translocal superposition” discussed earlier. On a more theoretical level, the car mirror can also be argued to represent the complex, refracted regionalism evoked in much of Ali’s poetry as well as the translocal attachment this revised regionalism allows. While the collection’s preoccupation with movement as well as with specific Southwestern locales bespeaks a migrant’s desire and struggle for belonging in the face of displacement, the frequency with which these locales are put in relation to places elsewhere suggests that the region is imagined as open and relational. What emerges here is the kind of regional imaginary I find in both Ali’s and Sze’s poetry, namely, one that conceives of the region as a porous object always open to translocal trajectories and constant renegotiations— renegotiations in which not only long-term residents but also migrants can participate.

14 While “I See Chile in my Rearview Mirror” employs topographical markers and thus references to extra-textual geographies in order to evoke concrete Southwestern landscapes, the poem also illustrates how a highly metaphorical poetic language can be used to evoke the material dimension of the translocal. By describing the night in Uruguay as “black salt,” Columbia as “vermilion,” Brazil as “blue tar,” and Peru as “titanium white,” while the colors of Argentina and Paraguay are “breaking, like oil” and other countries are “wiped clean of color” (Ali 96), Ali produces a rich tableau of Middle and South America in several senses of the word: his description not only sketches a portrait that hints at economic exploitation, violence, war, political unrest, and even genocide, it also conjures up a brightly colored map, which relates these histories to the colonial project and its aftermath. At the same time, the continent reflected in the poet-speaker’s mirror (of language) is presented as a painting, drawing attention to the artistic process of representation and the poem as text. The combination of the colors black, blue, and white with the words salt, tar, and titanium

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emphasizes the materiality of paint and thus, I would argue, the importance of both word and world in Ali’s poetic struggle to render the translocal geographies that lie at the heart of the porous regionalism evoked in his book of poetry.

15 Another poem from A Nostalgist’s Map of America that uses the art of painting to draw attention to both the material and imaginary dimension of Ali’s Southwest is “In Search of Evanescence.” “In Search of Evanescence” parallels the speaker’s never- ending spiritual quest for consolation after the death of a friend and the equally endless artistic quest to find adequate expression for his loss with what seem to be both remembered and imagined journeys through the American Southwest. Section 5 of the poem sequence combines allusions to Georgia O’Keeffe’s abstract and yet organic flower paintings and hyperrealist Southwestern desert landscapes with stanzas quoting letters that O’Keeffe wrote to Alfred Stieglitz (O’Keeffe 26): From the Faraway Nearby— of Georgia O’Keeffe—these words— Black Iris—Dark Iris—Abstraction, Blue— her hands—around—a skull— ‘The plains—the wonderful— great big sky—makes me— want to breathe—so deep— that I’ll break—’ From her Train—at Night—in the Desert— I its only—passenger— I see—as they pass by—her red hills— black petals—landscapes with skulls— (Ali 46; emphasis added)

16 The reference to O’Keeffe’s painting From the Faraway, Nearby (1938) in the beginning of this passage, especially with its elision of the dividing punctuation, points toward the entanglement of the close-by and the far-away, of the local and the global, which is central to Ali’s translocal regionalist imaginary. The third stanza once more casts the speaker as a traveler. Due to the countless intertextual references and the ambiguity of the poetic language used in the few lines above, it is impossible to say whether we are to imagine the speaker on a train in the desert, watching the landscapes outside pass like paintings in a museum, or in a museum, describing his visit as a train ride.

17 In fact, we do not have to imagine any scene at all. What we are invited to do in either case, though, is to acknowledge the importance of actual, painted, and written landscapes in the poem and the strong emotional response they evoke in the speaker. Through a personal and an artistic engagement with place, the poem suggests, O’Keeffe has developed an intense relationship with the land. Through a personal and artistic engagement with the same place and with O’Keeffe’s artful renderings of the place, the speaker Shahid has developed an equally intense relationship with the land, a relationship which in turn forms the grounds for a connection between the poet and the painter. Or, to take this one step further, if we accept the speaker’s identity as that of a Southeast Asian immigrant to the United States, something that is hinted at repeatedly in the collection, the poem evokes more than just different connections across time and space. On the basis of a shared attachment to the iconic desert landscapes of the American Southwest, the poem conjures up connections that transcend cultural and ethnic boundaries—it conjures up transethnic affiliations.

18 I want to end my discussion of Ali here with a poem that allows me to bring together a number of points I have tried to make about translocal attachments and transethnic affiliations in order to suggest how the porous regionalism Ali evokes by

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way of metaphorical language and intertextual references might become ecologically suggestive. “Snow on the Desert,” the last poem of A Nostalgist’s Map of America, returns to the place featured most frequently in the collection, the iconic landscape of the Sonoran Desert. The Sonoran Desert is a subtropical desert that covers large parts of Arizona and California, but extends even further into several states in Northern Mexico. Divided by the U.S.-Mexican border, the Sonoran Desert forms an extraordinarily diverse bioregion that supports many different kinds of vegetation zones and great species variety. Home to cities like Tucson and Phoenix, one of the fastest growing urban centers of the United States, as well as to several Native American reservations on both sides of the border, the region is culturally diverse and marked by a long and complicated history of settlement, displacement, and migration. This history continues to this day due to the continuing marginalization of local Native peoples in the area and the fact that the region’s vast strips of scarcely populated land have made the Sonoran Desert a popular route for illegal border crossings, especially since Southwest border enforcement strategies like Operation Gatekeeper came into effect under the Clinton administration during the 1990s (Ray 167). With certain limits —A Nostalgist’s Map of America appeared in 1991, so right before immigration policies began to push border crossers further into the dessert in the Southwest—Ali’s poetry attempts to register the complexity of this region, in terms both of its social and natural dimension. In the process the role of literature as a means to establish meaningful relationships to place comes to the fore.

19 “Snow on the Desert” begins by situating the speaker very precisely in time and space. Shahid is driving through the Sonoran Desert in order to take his sister Sameetah to Tucson International airport “on January 19, 1987” (Ali 100), a fact that, together with the speaker’s memories of a concert by Begum Akthar, the “Queen of Ghazals,” in New Delhi also mentioned in the poem, hints at the family’s migratory background. On the way, Shahid is contemplating the frozen cacti on the roadside and then muses: The Desert Smells Like Rain: in it I read: The syrup from which sacred wine is made is extracted from the saguaros each summer. The Papagos place it in jars, where the last of it softens, then darkens into a color of blood … (100-101; emphasis in the original)

20 The Desert Smells Like Rain is the title of a 1982 book by renowned agricultural ecologist, conservation biologist, and sustainability activist Gary Paul Nabhan. Nabhan’s book, which carries the subtitle A Naturalist in O’odham Country, not only describes in detail the flora of the Sonoran Desert, but also the culture of the native Tohono (Papago) and the O’odham Himdag,or the “Papago Way” of living in and cultivating the desert, a sustainable form of agriculture that has been practiced and perfected by the local Native American population for centuries (Nabhan xi). As the reference to Nabhan’s book suggests, the speaker’s perception of the natural world around him is strongly influenced by the Papago view of the desert; or, more accurately, it is influenced by his reading of The Desert Smells Like Rain, a book by a non-Papago naturalist of Lebanese- American descent.While Nabhan’s own ethnic background links him to the migrant speaker, the ethno-botanist’s commitment to recording and transmitting the environmental knowledge of the Papago echoes the speaker-poet Shahid’s interest in learning and then writing about the human and geological histories of the region. In

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“Snow on the Desert,” Shahid reflects on the strange beauty of the natural environment he encounters, the unfathomable geological age of the desert, Tohono ritual practices, and the region’s complex human history. Like the intertextual references to O’Keeffe in the poem discussed earlier, the juxtaposition of quotes from and references to Nabhan’s book with the speaker’s own impressions and thoughts in “Snow on the Desert” emphasize Shahid’s desire to engage deeply and through a wide range of different sources with his momentary place of residence.

21 By entwining descriptions of Sonoran Desert landscapes with quotes from texts about them, “Snow on the Desert” once more depicts place, and in particular natural environments, as material and textual, real and imagined. Place in the poem also has a distinctly social dimension, since it links people of very different origins through their shared experience of particular geographies and natural phenomena as well as through their contact with and production of a variety of texts about them. “Snow on the Desert” continues: the saguaros have opened themselves, stretched out their arms to rays millions of years old, in each ray a secret of the planet’s origin, the rays hurting each cactus into memory, a human memory— for they are human, the Papagos say: not only because they have arms and veins and secrets. But because they too are a tribe, vulnerable to massacre.… (101-2)

22 Probably the most iconic mega-flora of the Southwest, Saguaros are endemic to the Sonoran desert and thus threatened in particularly dramatic ways by the effects of urbanization and climate change on the region. By calling these giant cacti a “tribe,” Ali creates a metaphor that evokes a kinship between all victims of violence, oppression, and displacement, including the speaker, who later in the poem recalls scenes from the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971, and including the Papago, who suffered from Spanish colonization, Mexican occupation, as well as American settler-colonialism (Nabhan 68). This kinship of the immigrant speaker with Native American peoples in the Southwest plays a central role in several other poems in the collection, too. Again and again, Ali’s speaker travels the desert and mountains of the region in search for traces of the Anasazi and Navajo of San Juan County, the Hohokam of Sonora, or the varying Native American inhabitants of Acoma Pueblo, often finding nothing but the places they lived in to engage with (Ali 26, 29, 39). The speaker’s evocation of Papago oral tradition as the source for his metaphor of the Saguaros as a tribe—“for they are human, the Papago say” (102)—evokes transethnic affiliations with this Native American tribe through a shared engagement with the land. At the same time, this acknowledgement of the traditional Tohono worldview also draws the reader’s attention to the limits of a strictly “Western” (i.e., white/Anglophone/American) perspective on nature and on poetry. What if, the poem seems to ask, one does not read this as a metaphor? What indeed, if one were to consider the endangered Saguaros as a tribe “vulnerable to massacre” (102)? The implications would certainly be of an eco- ethical nature.

23 In terms of the poem’s possible environmental or even environmentalist implications, it is worth noting that although “Snow on the Desert” references Nabhan’s book, the text does not contain any explicitly environmentalist message, for

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example concerning the traditional Papago way of inhabiting the desert, which, if we are to believe Nabhan, provides a number of valuable lessons for a more sustainable way of living in and from the deserts of the Southwest. What makes Ali’s poem “Snow on the Desert” ecologically resonant, instead, is the fact that the speaker’s engagement with the Tohonos’ perspective on nature provides him with new tools to reimagine his own relationship to Sonoran landscapes. Interestingly, it is not histories of rootedness but of uprooting and thus of a shared struggle for emplacement that emerge as the common ground for the migrant speaker and the Native American population of the area. Although Ali is careful to acknowledge the Southwest’s violent history of colonization and its effects on the local Native American peoples, his investigation of alternative models of “palatial” belonging in A Nostalgist’s Map of America does not depend on a simplistic dichotomy of settlers versus original inhabitants of the region. Instead, Ali repeatedly hints at the ways in which migration and displacement have not only affected his speaker, but the region’s different Native American tribes as well. In the end, Ali’s poems suggest, no history of displacement, however long past or recent, automatically precludes a meaningful relationship to the land. Instead, such a meaningful human-place and human-nature relationship requires constant work, work which, especially in the case of the traveler, migrant, or victim of displacement, might have to rely heavily on an engagement with literature. An analysis of Arthur Sze’s poetry allows us to draw similar conclusions.

5. Arthur Sze’s Intimate Translocal Geographies

24 Born in New York City and educated at the University of California, Berkley, Arthur Sze is the author of eight books of poetry and a celebrated translator from the Chinese. He taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts and became the first poet laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he continues to live and write. Despite the recognition his poetry has received from fellow poets, Arthur Sze’s work has so far received very little sustained attention from scholars. This scarcity of criticism may be due to the fact that both thematically and aesthetically, his writing seems to have much less in common with the works of other diaspora poets like Meena Alexander or Naomi Shihab Nye than with the works of such nature poets as Gary Snyder. The fact that Sze, at least at first glance, reads more like a nature than a diaspora poet, let alone an immigrant poet, may explain why what is to my best knowledge the first article on Sze appeared in the essay collection Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction (2002). Concentrating on Sze’s Archipelago (1995) and The Redshifting Web (1998), Xiaojing Zhou discusses Sze’s ecopoetics, defined as a poetics which “foregrounds the interconnectedness of all things” both in content and form (180) and which explores “alternative modes for understanding the world and the self in which humans and nature exist within a single complex network or relations” (189). While Zhou acknowledges the influence of Eastern philosophy on Sze’s ecopoetics—in particular of the principle of “multiplicity in oneness”—he does not explicitly link the environmental aspects of Sze’s poetry to its simultaneous interest in questions of diaspora and displacement.

25 Conversely, Benzi Zhang’s article “Of Nonlimited Locality/Identity: Chinese Diaspora Poetry in America” (2006) reads Sze in the context of diaspora, without putting much emphasis on his significance as a nature or environmental poet. Zhang’s argument is nonetheless of interest for my reading because it touches upon the

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noticeable tension between the local and the global in Sze’s works. Focusing on processes of “cultural spacing,” Zhang argues that Chinese diaspora poetry like Sze’s “challenges the force of a singular cultural dominance by relocating the site of identity articulation in a domain of ‘nonlimited locality’” (“Of Nonlimited Locality” 133). This “nonlimited locality,” Zhang explains, is the result of cultural passages and crossings that redefine place in the context of diaspora as “a site of cultural transliteration, a dynamic body of trans-local inter-relationships” (137). Place and displacement and the way the two come together in the “trans-local” are here considered in a highly abstract manner and thus in a way that deemphasizes potential environmental implications of a poetry concerned with such dynamics.iv What I would like to demonstrate in the following is how the ecological and diasporic sensibilities of Sze’s “nature poetry” can be combined to read the “complex platiality” of Sze’s latest collection The Ginkgo Light. For it is in this collection, I argue, that Sze explores, more intensively than in his earlier books, how a meaningful relationship to the natural world may be imagined in a time of mass displacement and global environmental crisis. Similar to Ali’s poems, translocal attachments and transethnic affiliations feature centrally in the regional imaginary that derives from Sze’s poetic explorations.

26 Like Sze’s previous collections, The Ginkgo Light interweaves references to Chinese and Native American history, traditions, and philosophy with descriptions of the natural world and scenes from everyday life, using vocabulary and imagery that heavily draw from the natural sciences, especially from physics, botany, and geology. Also like in previous collections, many poems in The Ginkgo Light consist of a series of fragments; disparate yet ultimately connected moments, perceptions, and memories that reach across time and space. The geographical locations evoked in the texts range from places in Japan and China to a variety of specific sites in North America. At the same time, and more than in previous collections, the American Southwest, particularly Sze’s home in Santa Fe County, New Mexico, as well as the environing mountains and forests, feature as a center of gravity against the centrifugal, chaotic forces of a world always in motion. While Sze’s poems thus evoke multiple translocal connections, they keep returning to contemplations of the speaker’s garden and reflections about his hiking trips through the region. Apart from drawing attention to the speaker’s intensive engagement with the natural world around him and his deep knowledge of and care for the environment, the alternation of instances of stasis with instances of mobility highlights how traditional notions of being grounded in place or “staying put” as a basis for bioregional attachment actually depend on localized movement. Moreover, whenever Sze’s nature poetry points beyond Southwestern landscapes, it gestures toward an environmental perspective that emerges when a sense of place opens itself up beyond the local, the region and, at times, even the nation. The poem “Labrador Tea,” for example, begins: Labrador leaves in a jar with a kerchief lid release an arctic aroma when simmered on a stove. Yesterday when fire broke out in the bosque, the air had the stench of cauliflower in a steamer when water evaporates and the pot scalds. Although Apache plume, along with clusters of western peppergrass, makes fragrant the wash, owls that frequent the hole high up the arroyo’s bank have already come and gone.… (11)

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27 Mapping what Sze’s speaker elsewhere in the collection calls his “intimate geographies”—cf. “In the Rose Light” (18)—the quote above represents an engagement with Chinese tea culture in the age of globalization, and thus with the various translocal cultural and material passages that affect every aspect of our lives today. The Labrador leaves used by the speaker, rather than more traditional kinds of tea, point toward North American geographies far away from the speaker’s Southwestern home as well as to the tea brewing practices of Native American peoples in Alaska, Canada, and Northern California, who prepared Labrador tea long before it spread to the homes of American settlers. Just as the tea begins to release what the speaker describes as an “arctic aroma” (11), conjuring up what may be memories of a trip to Alaska, a region that appears several times in the collection, the poem turns to the specifics of the natural world of the Southwest. A family of owls, the speaker recounts, was scared away by the stench of a bushfire, for which the pleasant smells of local plants, Apache plume and peppergrass, was no match. This short episode again makes apparent the speaker’s concern and care for the environment. It also suggests that the natural world can both make a home and thus become an agent of emplacement, and destroy homes and thus turn into an agent of displacement. Such a dynamics acquires a range of new meanings in an era during which climate change produces increasing populations of climate refugees among animals as well as human beings. It also raises a range of questions concerning an ethics of place that reckons with the consequences of displacement, especially if we consider that the cause of climate change, like what may have caused the fire in the poem, is not nature’s cruelty but human carelessness.

28 “Labrador Tea,” then, like many of Sze’s poems, combines an awareness of how goods, living beings, and cultural practices travel, with close attention to the natural environment, and thus to the translocal dimensions of a revised regional imaginary. One of the textual strategies Sze uses in his poems for this purpose is a complex vegetation imagery which not only pays close attention to native flora and fauna, but also makes frequent notice of plants that were introduced to the region for agricultural or decorative purposes. The poem “Chrysalis” alone mentions three of these “migrant plants”: first, the ginkgo, a tree which, as the speaker notes, was rediscovered and then “propagated back into the world” after it had long been thought extinct (7); second, the “golden rain tree” (9), a yellow deciduous tree also known as “Pride of India” or “China Tree” due to its original provenance from Asia, China, and Korea; and, third, the “Russian Olive” (12), also known as silver berry, a thorny shrub native to central Asia and southern Russia which was brought to North American in the 19th century, quickly escaped cultivation, and is now considered an invasive species, especially in the Southwest.

29 The Ginkgo Light sometimes alludes to but does not interpret the diasporic history of these plants, which in the poems seem to have integrated rather smoothly into Sze’s Southwestern landscapes, increasing the region’s biodiversity and beauty. Nonetheless, I would argue, Sze plays with notions of nativeness and transplantation when referring to plants that arrived in the American Southwest as a result of human travel and migration. The frequent allusions to the plants’ histories of displacement, together with the lack of comment on them, allows us to read the respective passages as ecologically attentive descriptions of a specific natural environment and as metaphors for human displacement and emplacement at the same time. Confronted with these two levels of reference, the reader is asked to question ideas of “rootedness,” “natural

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habitat,” and “invasiveness” not only with regard to the Southwest as a bioregion, but also with regard to the kinds of regionalist discourse that Sze’s poetry contests.

30 Like Sze’s vegetation imagery, references to specific geographical and geological features of local landscapes by their Southwestern names draw attention to the speaker’s intimate association with the local environment on the one hand, and to the region’s complex history of settlement and displacement on the other. In the poem “Labrador Tea,” for example, Sze mentions a “bosque” (11), a special type of gallery forest to be found along the flood planes of river banks, and an “arroyo” (11), an intermittently dry creek common throughout the Southwest. Both terms come from Spanish and, as they are inserted into the otherwise English poem, testify both to the linguistic and cultural after-effects of Spanish colonization and Mexican rule in the area as well as to the subsequent takeover by the United States in the process of westward expansion. One particular way in which Sze links an interest in diasporic constellations with new ways of seeing actual places and people’s shifting ties to their environments, is by weaving into his poetry the histories of Native peoples in New Mexico and Arizona.

31 As a matter of fact, Sze’s collection, similar to Ali’s, reveals a general interest in Native American cultures, traditions, and philosophies, as well as genuine concern about the hardships and challenges of present-day Native American life on and outside the reservations. The poem “Yardangs” from The Ginkgo Light is a powerful example for this interest in Native American presence and absence in the Southwest. At the same time, the poem illustrates Sze’s tendency to expand the “intimate geographies” of his speaker’s home to include stories and places beyond the immediate environs of house and garden: She who can’t sleep takes a sleeping pill, then another, and another. A crab apple in the yard blossoms along the curve of spring. Along a stone wall, we yearn for a line of Japanese irises that does not appear, glimpse a body on a stretcher loaded into an ambulance. In the winter of spring, a neighbor frets over air-pollution vectors; a teenage girl worries her horse slashes its neck along barbed wire. Prevailing winds: west-northwest. As a physicist posits all languages have a single root, I weigh arête, yardang, strike valley, ciénega, Tsé Bit’aí: Shiprock, the rock with wings. But is there bedrock? (57)

32 “Yardangs” begins with two lines that refer back to an earlier poem in the collection, in which Sze contemplates the high suicide rates among Native American peoples, while also evoking both the American Trail of Tears and the Chinese Long March as two parallel histories of oppression (30, 32). After this introduction, the poem turns to a series of vignettes, all of which point to different instances of human suffering but also to the persistence of human desire, hope, and compassion. While exposure to air- pollution, like the experience of pain and the certainty of death, may indeed be something that unites everyone in the text, differences, the poem suggests, appear as soon as experience and perceptions are translated into words. Regardless what a “physicist” (57) might posit, the individual’s location, perspective, and interpretation

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are of key importance in the natural sciences, as the reference to “prevailing winds / west-northwest” in the poem highlights. Any argument about single origins or “a single root,” as the physicist puts it, becomes even less convincing when it concerns language, or so it seems initially. Words and proper names like “arête” or“yardang”(57; emphasis in the original) emphasize the limits of language as a means to unequivocally communicate information.The two words derive from French and Turkish, respectively, and are used in English to describe very specific geographical features, namely, a thin, saddle shaped ridge of rock which is typically formed by two parallel U- shaped valleys (the arête), and a streamlined hill or stone formation carved out of bedrock by wind erosion (the yardang). By inserting these words in his text, the poet risks obstructing effective communication at the very moment that he is struggling to render the particularities of the world before him as precisely as possible.

33 Of course, the strength of poetry does not lie in the accuracy of its descriptions, but rather in its power to evoke, sometimes with only a few words, a variety of possible meanings. In the case of Sze’s poetry, which frequently reflects on the location of the individual between cultures and on the diasporic subject’s relationship to different places as it is mediated by language, a word like yardang carries several implications. It suggests that words travel, and also that they can be used to refer to natural phenomena that exist all over the world, creating the “bedrock” Sze’s text mentions, that is, a connection between those who encounter, appreciate, and attempt to describe similar phenomena across cultures and national borders.In the poetry of a second- generation Chinese-American poet like Sze, who is concerned with Asian as well as American cultures and geographies, the example of the yardang is especially resonant. In fact, yardangs were first recorded in China, but are prevalent in most deserts of the world, including those of the American Southwest. Depending on how narrowly one defines the term, rock formations like Window Rock in Arizona may be counted as a yardang, just like “Tsé Bit’aí,” or Shiprock, also a sacred Navajo site, and one which Sze mentions in the poem. On the one hand, this reference to Shiprock can be read as alluding to the long, intensive association of the local Native American people with place as well as to the speaker’s desire for a similar connection to the land. On the other hand, however, such a reading is undercut by the poetic text in which single- word references to different translocal connections abound. In the context of the history of the American Southwest, the English name of the site, Shiprock, turns it into a formidable memorial for settler-colonialism. Moreover, the translation of the Navajo name, “rock with wings,” reveals the Native myth associated with the mountain, which recounts how the peak once sprouted wings and carried the first Navajo to what is now New Mexico, after they had to flee from their ancestral homelands further North. As in the poetry of Ali, Sze’s poetry suggests that even the place-attachment of the region’s Native people is marked by histories of displacement, a fate that, again as in the poetry of Ali, forges a connection between them and the speaker.

34 As these examples illustrate, Arthur Sze’s poetry combines a preoccupation with the details of the natural world and particular geological and geographical characteristics of the American Southwest with a more latent concern for questions of displacement and emplacement. It is in this sense that the poems in The Ginkgo Light explore the possibility and limits of a kind of place-attachment that is not environmentally suggestive because it depends on traditional notions of rootedness to explain an attunement to the natural world, but rather because it rethinks precisely

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such notions from the perspectives of a speaker who is highly aware of the multiple translocal movements that constitute the Southwest, and who is invested in the transethnic affiliations that such a sense of place enables.

6. Conclusion: Dwelling in Diaspora?

35 Starting with Heidegger, who emphasized the individual’s subjective experience and attachment to place (cf. Heise 35; Halttunen 5; Clark 59), and continuing with American ecocritical and environmentalist thought, which for a long time celebrated long-lasting association with a clearly circumscribed place as the primary mode for developing an ethical relationship with the natural environment, place-attachment or dwelling as an “authentic,” wholesome way of being in and with nature has carried with it problematic notions of racial and ethnic purity. What is more, it has often led to an uncritical privileging of sedentary forms of living over ones affected by displacement.Sze’s take on nature poetry and Ali’s take on poetry of migration illustrate that this is not a necessary logic. In The Ginkgo Light, the intimate translocal geographies the speaker maps by way of constant references to specific geographic and geological features of the Southwest always also point beyond the local and the regional. Taking advantage of the multivalency of poetic language, and in particular of vegetation imagery, Sze’s poems take note of material environments and at the same time establish translocal connections between the speaker’s immediate environment and a range of other places, places which by consequence become objects of attention, concern, and care. What makes Sze’s ecologically attuned poetics so relevant in our present times, then, is precisely that his vision of a wholesome way of being in and with nature allows for cultural difference; more than that: Sze’s intimate translocal geographies invite cultural difference and thereby give room to the uneasy, drifting perspectives of migrants, travelers, and displaced peoples.

36 Approaching the problematics of dwelling in diaspora from a slightly different angle, Agha Shahid Ali’s poetry of migration is preoccupied with the perspective of the traveler/migrant who encounters landscapes in and outside of the Southwest. Informed by such a perspective of unsettlement, Ali’s poems take pains to cast places as real and imagined, as material and textual formations by using richly metaphorical language and intertextual references. Conceived in this way, the Southwestern landscapes in A Nostalgist’s Map of America become fertile ground for transethnic affiliations, especially with local Native American peoples. Established through a shared experience of and an artistic engagement with particular natural environments, these transethnic affiliations attest to the migrant speaker’s desire for regional belonging, while also acknowledging that regions are porous constructions affected by many translocal trajectories and histories of displacement.

37 Neither the poetry of Agha Shahid Ali nor that of Arthur Sze assumes that displacement automatically prevents the individual or the community from developing meaningful relationships to place. On the contrary, the human-nature relationships their poems explore become particularly meaningful precisely because they acknowledge that diaspora experiences and histories of migration shape America’s past and present, especially in the Southwest.It is this acknowledgement of the ways in which the competing forces of emplacement and displacement play out on all levels of territorial attachment, including the local, the regional, and the national, I would

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argue, that supplements potentially problematic aspects of an ethics of proximity popular in environmentalist discourse and implicit in the notion of dwelling with a dynamic ethics of difference.On the level of poetics, the foregrounding of poetic language, intertextuality, and processes of artistic production in Ali’s and Sze’s poetry highlights the special role literature plays in the struggle for alternative modes of belonging that do not have to rely on a long, intimate association with one particular place. Literature, these texts suggest, forges translocal attachments and transethnic affiliations and thus helps to imagine a common ground from which an ecologically attuned ethics of place in the context of migration can emerge. On a more abstract level, reading texts by authors whose works combine an interest in natural environments with an interest in questions of displacement is productive because such an analysis allows us to theorize alternative regional imaginaries that factor in the local effects of global pressures related to mass migration and environmental crisis.

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NOTES i. Apart from individual collections of poetry by authors like Meena Alexander, Hayan Charara, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, Eugene Gloria, Joumana Haddad, Laila Halaby, David Mura, Aime Nezhukumatathil, Naomi Shihab Nye, Cathy Song, or Virgil Suárez, see for example anthologies like American Diaspora: Poetry of Displacement (2001), edited by Virgil Suárez and Ryan G. Van Cleave; Crossing into America: The New Literature of Immigration (2003), edited by Louis Mendoza and S. Shankar; Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation (2004), edited by Victoria Chang; Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry (2008), edited by Hayan Charara; and Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry (2010), edited by Neelanjana Banerjee, Summi Kaipa, and Pireeni Sundaralingam. ii. For a detailed discussion of reconceptualizations of “place” in recent spatial theory, see for example Eric Prieto’s monograph Literature, Geography, and the Postmodern Poetics of Place (2013). iii. For early conceptions of the region in the U.S. see for example Josiah Royce’s definition of “the province” in his 1908 book Race Questions, Provincialism and Other American Problems (61) and Donald Davidson’s description of the function of the region in his 1938 study Regionalism and Nationalism in the United States: The Attack on Leviathan (232). iv. Zhang retains this tendency toward theoretical discussion and abstraction in his 2008 study Asian Diaspora Poetry in North America. More explicitly than the article, the monograph connects Zhang’s idea of “nonlimited locality” to a discussion of the concept of “place” in the works of scholars like Edward Casey (philosophy) or Doreen Massey (human geography). Yet Zhang’s reading continues to focus on the new geographies in Asian American diaspora poetry mainly as a metaphor for multidirectional processes of identification across cultural borders that help to chart “a new land of diasporic poetics, whose topography and dimensions have not yet been fully recognized or mapped in critical terms” (156), rather than investigating the environmental implications of these new geographies.

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ABSTRACTS

Combining insights from human geography, critical regionalism, and environmental literary criticism, I argue that the concept of the translocal, rather than the transnational, is useful to describe the complex poetics of place in Agha Shahid Ali’s A Nostalgist’s Map of America (1991) and Arthur Sze’s The Ginkgo Light (2009). Engaging with landscapes of the American Southwest and elsewhere, and in particular with the natural environment, both poets reimagine the region as a site of translocal attachments and as the grounds for transethnic affiliations, especially with local Native American peoples. What emerges from this inclusive and yet open sense of belonging to place is an ethics of being in and with nature that attempts to reckon with the increasing pressures of both globalization and global environmental crisis. Literature, as Ali’s and Sze’s poetry suggest by foregrounding poetic strategies like intertextuality and metaphorical language, plays a central role in the development of such an ecologically suggestive ethics of place in the context of migration and displacement.

INDEX

Keywords: Agha Shahid Ali, Arthur Sze, Contemporary American poetry, critical regionalism, ecocriticism, ethics of displacement, ethics of place, immigrant literature, migration, Native American history, nature, the American Southwest, translocality

AUTHOR

JUDITH RAUSCHER University of Bamberg

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