Roundtable

Traversing Geographies
 

Our writers this issue have written papers that deal with movements across space: within texts, by texts, and by writers. So we asked our Roundtable panelists to query the geographical notions (spaces, sites, boundaries and frontiers) that often orient the work of literary critics and literary historians. How to we attend to differences that are geographical? And how can we think about the spatial element in our work?

  • Devin Bryson is a Visiting Assistant Professor of French at Indiana University. He 
works on the intersection of migration and gender in contemporary French 
and Francophone culture and sub-Saharan African literature. He haspublished in "Research in African Literatures" and presented at a 
number of conferences.

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  • Dianna C. Niebylski is currently working on the impact of globalization on contemporary Latin American fiction and film, focusing on Argentina, Brazil, Cuba and on narratives by Latino border writers. She is also working on representation of poverty in contemporary Latin American fiction and film. Her most recent publications include Humoring Resistance: Laughter, Bodies and Excess in latin American Women's Fictions (SUNY, 2004), and an annotated edition of Rosario Ferré’s stories from Maldito amor y otros cuentos. Recent articles include work on narratives of the new millennium, including new works by Aira, Chejfec, Kohan, Eltit, Berman and Bolaño. She serves on the editorial board of several journals, including the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, and the Journal of Research on Mothering and Poverty, and several on-line journals. Prof. Niebylski was Head of the Department of Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese at UIC from 2005-2008.

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  • Bethany Wiggin received her B.A. from Swarthmore College and her Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. Her interests lie in the intersections between the early modern period and contemporary theoretical concerns including gender and postcolonial studies. While revising her dissertation [“Fiction, France, and Other Vices: Crossing German Borders in Fictional Narratives, 1680-1720”] for a book manuscript, she is also at work on a project exploring the geography of European fashionability from the mid-sixteenth to the early-eightheenth century.

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How have questions of space, cartography, and the act of traversing boundaries informed your work?

Bryson: I’m interested in the dynamics between acts of crossing boundaries and constructions of community and identity. I don’t think we can talk about national identity or personal subjectivity or the social body or gender, to name just a few possibilities, without considering how these entities are being constantly reformulated by people passing from one space to another. In turn, it is important to remain attentive to the rapidly changing contours of what is meant by “traversing” and the impact of these changes on individuals and communities; who is being excluded, who has been allowed in?

I think such an approach opens up a wide range of critical possibilities, both in terms of objects of study and interdisciplinary research. While analyzing movement across borders, we should be aware of the barriers that are constructed around disciplines and be ready to scale them.

Niebylski: In my current project on the impacts of globalization on contemporary film and fiction, urban space is an important component of my work on certain types of violence as a by-product of globalization. The character of border geographies is equally important in my studies of migrations across borders and the kind of symbolic imaginaries that are produced or informed by such a phenomenon. In my previous work, on strategies of resistance and transgression in contemporary Latin American women’s fiction, the figure of the nomadic woman was an important aspect of my analytical interpretations of Luisa Valenzuela’s and Alicia Borinski’s fictions.

Wiggin: Such questions centrally organize my work. With alarming compulsion, I keep returning to concepts of crossings and travels. A forthcoming book, for example, attends to what happens when a genre (la nouvelle) began in late-seventeenth century Europe to rove across linguistic, political borders. While charting its travels in translations, I also wanted to document the market mechanisms (coteries of translators, piratical printers, and publishers who taunted censorship regimes) which helped to promulgate what other Europeans called “little French books” and to tease out the ways that this market for translations can help us to understand another kind of border: the line between art and commerce, literary book and fashionable ware.

More recently, I’ve been trying to think about traversals in a more global sense (beyond Europe). First, and in a very concrete sense, I have been writing about Atlantic Ocean crossings and Europeans’ experiences of disorientation and radical loss. At their most extreme, they were theorized by early modern European colonists, from Hans Staden in Brazil in the sixteenth to Christoph Saur near Philadelphia in the eighteenth century, to result in a loss of humanity. Europeans became “more Indian than the Indians” (Saur); their increasing brutality in the new world, some exceptional European witnesses worried, made them all too ready to cannibalize and enslave. And most currently, I’m considering how experiences and accounts of Turkish captivity and enslavement were mobilized in the Atlantic world, and in British America by German speakers, to condemn the enslavement of Africans. I wonder, as metaphors of captivity are mobilized across such disparate places and times, what kind of political teeth do they cut?

These multiple returns to the turns and unexpected detours of translation also prompt me to think about doing history as translating. By this, I mean partly translating the past to the present. But I am more interested in how history as translating might provide alternatives to the lineary history of empty, homogenous time (proleptic, pre-posterous, metaleptic histories).

To what extent is critical thought about culture organized around “sites” (be they geographical, communal, political, temporal, or virtual)? Is it essential that geography order our study of culture?

Wiggin: I try to read culture as organized by a dialectic between local and supra-local sites. This expansive definition of “sites” approximates structure, right? And structures organize us. Such a flexible notion of sites and structures helps to trouble some of the disciplinary boundaries which frustrate as much as they help. But I’m afraid of ending up in a world of Global English, Spanish, and Chinese.

Bryson: I think it is possible to retain the specificity of geography, community, politics, time, and space without limiting our critical view. That seems to be the real challenge today. It’s unnecessary and even counterproductive to reject cultural commonality outright. There are important generalizations to make about the postcolony, for example, in order to recognize overarching strategies of cultural hegemony, oppression, subversion, and revolution. Yet this doesn’t then mean that all postcolonial communities or identities always function in this manner. The best critical work now is accounting for “sites,” while remaining aware of the transformations, contradictions, and reversions that are evident within them.

Have globalization and industrialization trivialized the experience of “traversing” in the modern world? If so, how? If not, why not?

Niebylski: My first inkling is that globalization has not “trivialized” the experience of “traversing” as much as it has given it a broader context against which to measure the meaning and impact of who is doing the traversing and for what purpose. The phenomenon of globalization is responsible not just for different kinds of traversing (frontiers, nationalities, etc.), but also for different kinds of localized activities (outsourcing may in fact preempt the migration of whole groups of people in certain countries). This question is complex enough that it would require some statistical evidence and analysis for a convincing answer.

Bryson: “Traversing” is not the same experience that it once was in terms of culture shock and identity reconfiguration. I think it’s obvious that large populations are still migrating and being displaced throughout the world, so we cannot dismiss “traversing.” But acknowledging that more people have greater access to other cultures helps us to identify new forms of this movement. We can think the ways “traversing” takes place on local levels (the interactions between urban and non-urban culture, for example). We can look at the negotiation between new art forms and material reality (for instance, the deployment of digital and virtual cross-cultural creations, which might be more accessible to both creators and consumers than literature or film, within immigrant communities). These modern circumstances actually open up the range of possibilities.

As regards physical and conceptual spaces, what cross-disciplinary trends have you noticed? Are cultural and environmental realities forcing academics to think more globally and “traverse” disciplines more often in their work?

Bryson: It’s up to the individual academic. It’s possible to not acknowledge cross-disciplinary forces and be an astute critic. But it does seem as if the scholars who are working across disciplines are doing it much more broadly. Gender, race, sexuality, nationality, literature, and popular culture are all being thrown into the mix now, which I do think reflects some material and cultural realities.

Wiggin: I think the most important trend across disciplines is an increasingly tyrannical and hegemonic market logic: Corporate U. For those who practice in smaller (historically, linguistically, geographically remote) fields, I worry that our work is increasingly eschewed as luxury inappropriate to a time of belt-tightening.

Niebylski: It makes more sense for me to turn the question on its head. It is the way in which new forms of globalization impact physical and cultural spaces that makes it expedient for us to approach problems from a transdisciplinary perspective. Environmental problems, for example, can no longer be treated from the perspective of a single discipline – or even from the perspective of a multidisciplinarity within the sciences. Since local environmental problems can no longer be solved on a local scale, they require the concerted efforts of cross-disciplinary teams of experts (not just biologists and ecologists but communication experts, anthropologists, sociologists and educators, at the very least).

The opposite of a space or site might be a “void” or “diffusion.” Have these concepts come up productively in your work?

Bryson: In my work on migration I am aware of the “void” left when the migrant leaves his “home” to journey to his new country. At times the void is productive and contains potential: for returns, for reinvention, for replacement. Yet it can also be destructive and negating: is the migrant rejecting his “native” culture? How does his departure weaken the community? Is there a reciprocal internal void for the migrant that distances him from his home? In any act of traversing there is necessarily a void.

WP: A second meaning of traverse is an obstacle. Are there incidences when spanning or traversing multiples spaces, or working with multiple cartographical conceptions, represents a hindrance to understanding?

Wiggin: I have been thinking a lot about the phenomenon of untranslatability, when the incommensurability between languages is particularly visible. As a committed historian, I wonder a lot about how change happens and how newness enters. The problem of untranslatability, akin to what Benjamin called the project of “turning German into Hindi, Greek, English,” is, I think, key to account for historical change.

Niebylski: Yes, we seem to be forgetting or dismissing the importance of language and linguistically-bound concepts in addressing these obstacles. Of the many books and articles I have read on globalization lately (some of which are listed below), language, or linguistic considerations, is the one discipline that tends to be ignored. This seems to be a major lacuna in global studies at present.

How have our notions of the distribution of space evolved, both concretely (in national, agricultural, political, ecological, domestic and personal terms) and conceptually (in disciplinary, generic, professional, and visual terms)?

Niebylski: It has a become a cliché to note that our notions of space in the developed world have become infinitely more fluid. Having just returned from a Thanksgiving celebration in which three generations were present, I can attest to the conceptual change addressed in the question in very personal terms. I was struck by the vastly different conceptions (as articulated through metaphors and images) that inform my parents’ and my nieces’ and nephews’ notions of space. My generation appears to be responsible for mediating and interpreting that disconnect.

What is lost in our (and certainly our children’s) notions of space is the sense of anchoring, or needing to be anchored – both literally and metaphorically. What is gained is a sense of almost infinite, unstoppable mobility, but I wonder to what extent the sense of mobility is also influenced by a will-to-appropriate space on different levels -- electronically (through something as ubiquitous as “Facebook”), commercially (my sister works for a multinational company, and her concerns right now have to do with how to find new spaces not affected by the current world recession so that she can continue to market the company’s products), and politically (since political agreements, regardless of how beneficial, are never without enemies to target).

Wiggin: Indeed, I don’t think we’re done talking about the re-destribution of private and public spaces by regimes of surveillance and the colonization of everywhere by the market.

Bryson: It seems like that in both the concrete and the conceptual we are expanding our notions of space, but at the same time drawing further into our comfort zones. We are more aware of the conditions in other countries, but refuse access to ours. A greater global awareness of Islam has occurred in the last decade, but with an equal increase in fear. This is one of the inevitable results of greater cross-cultural interaction: a more rigid, even xenophobic construction of location.

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