Call me Ahab: I’m the leader of the merry band of pirates about to set sail on the Foreign Literatures in America (FLA) project. If there’s one thing I like most about this project, it’s the white whaleness of it all: none of us is sure exactly where we are headed, but we are all equipped with charts and tools, sextants and harpoons, hints and intuitions, hypotheses, methodologies, and curiosities, furled into the service of a collective determination to sail as far away from conventional understandings of “American literature” as possible, seeking new horizons of its terms in the most distant and elusive spaces—whose “foreign” composition becomes ultimately understood as a global constituent of U.S. literature and culture itself.
I expect enemies to this project—I certainly hope for some!: it would be no fun without them—but I must confess (un-Ahab-like as this sentiment may be: I fear I am growing soft) that new horizons of friendship and collaboration, far beyond what I have ever personally experienced in the humanities beyond the special teacher-student relationship, are the most exciting aspect of this project thus far. Let me explain—though do please keep this “nice” stuff between us. I have a reputation to maintain, and the whales are always listening.
At some basic level, FLA is predicated on the generative assumption and insight—one I argue for at length in my book Our Conrad: Constituting American Modernity (2010), and one I am further elaborating in a new book project on the history of foreign authored literature in the U.S., entitled On Foreign Grounds: Reimagining American Literature—that we make a mistake in traditionally defining “American literature” in terms of literary works written by national citizens of the U.S. In fact historically speaking, some of the most influential literature in the United States—as a matter of literary significance, material circulation, and social, cultural and political force—has been written by non-American authors from across the globe, as well as non-American immigrants living within the U.S. This is not a matter of “American” literature being parsable in both national and hemispheric terms, nor is it a matter of “America” being an explicit subject in planetary literature, or a place a foreign author once visited and wrote about. It’s a matter of the terrain of U.S. literature and culture—what the literature of the U.S. itself has been—being constituted just as much by "foreign” authored as “native” authored texts. This interweave between the two plays a vital role in the construction and contestation of the nation – space and – state of the fluctuating territorial expanse of the U.S. and its relation to the rest of the planet.
“Foreign Literatures in America” is not a project of reinforcing the distinction between “foreign” and “American”: it is a project of evoking so as to neutralize this very distinction. The “foreign” here becomes indigenous to, integral of, recovered as a material constituent of the U.S. itself—not filtered out through some abstract conception of “American” literature; it is restored as part of the terrain and earth of what literature has been in the U.S.
Though I had expected enemies to this project—it rifles its fingers through many controversial elements of both Americanist and world literature discourse, humanistic versus scientific inquiry, distant versus close reading, without confining itself to any opposition—I’ve noticed as we’ve moved forward, truly remarkable networks of collaboration, productivity, genuine friendship and intellectual generosity that are the defining note of our “voyage” thus far. Through the collective effort of a crack team of undergraduates in the University of Maryland Gemstone Honors Program, and different teams of remarkable doctoral students and faculty scholars at and outside the University of Maryland, FLA has begun to generate not only archives but questions that I don’t think any of us had foreseen at the outset. The friends we keep making, and depend on very much for collaborative scholarship, are absolutely integral to our project.
This raises the second element of FLA. Everything I’ve just said about dialogue and cooperation also applies to the interactive work and conversations that have been happening between us “humanists” and the digital humanities and computational experts who are—so very generously—working with us at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). The methodology of parsing both the strategic database archives we are assembling and the “big data” that is already out there, through topic modeling and sentiment analysis tools, have generated re-orientations of thinking about the reading of human culture. The bridging of American and world literary coordinates and the bridging of the humanistic and quantitative strategies come together in this project—which also allows for abrasion between these neat dyads too. But both what we understand as American literature and how we understand and interpret this new American literature becomes dramatically changed, or at least opened, by this project, as a matter of its defining mission and aspirations.
If this sounds a bit contradictory and uncertain, well, so it is, so it is. Our plan is to immerse in the destructive element, and let the deep, deep sea keep us up.
Peter Lancelot Mallios is a MITH Faculty Fellow. He directs the Foreign Literatures in America Project and is a professor in English at the University of Maryland.