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Wai Chee Dimock

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"In Through Other Continents Wai Chee Dimock has created a provocative and altogether compelling vision of American literature as a global phenomenon. At once a set of wide-ranging illustrations and a map for the future, her study will permanently alter the boundaries, and therefore the national implications, of American literary scholarship."--Eric J. Sundquist, UCLA

"This is a wonderful book, of the highest importance, which brings to fruition Dimock's recent proposals in a number of articles. I expect the book to be very widely read, discussed, and no doubt debated. The book offers a model not merely for a new way to study American literature, but also the beginnings of a new relation between comparative literature and the study of American literature."--Jonathan Arac, Columbia University

"Dimock's timely and wide-ranging book will change the discussion of the effect of globalization on the field of American literary studies. Invoking the historical depth of what she calls planetary literature to redraw the map of American literature, Dimock argues that this literature has not been disrupted by globalization. Rather, American literature is one of the tributaries of the planet's literary system."--Donald E. Pease, Dartmouth College

"Through Other Continents makes good on Dimock's proposal for a more imaginative and more capacious reading of not only American literature, but literature in general. It adds a unique voice to current discussions of global culture, literary studies in a postnational frame, transnational cultural studies, and the disciplines of American studies and comparative literature. This is a highly original and thoroughly engaging piece of scholarship."--David Palumbo-Liu, Stanford University

"In a series of bold and brilliant thought experiments, Through Other Continents extends the horizons of 'American literature' as no one has done before. It accomplishes nothing less than the creation of a genuinely new critical framework and idiom for reconceiving the field on a planetary scale. For years Americanists have been calling for a new transnationalism. No one has responded to that call more eloquently and originally than Wai Chee Dimock."--Lawrence Buell, Harvard University

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Through Other Continents

Princeton University Press

Introduction

On April 14, 2003, the Iraqi National Library and the Islamic library in the Religious Ministry were burned to the ground. For months before this happened, archaeologists had been warning the United States government that an invasion of Iraq would pose the gravest threat to legacies from the Sumerian, Babylonian, and Assyrian civilizations, going back ten thousand years. After the invasion, the same archaeologists urged the U.S.-led coalition to observe the "international law of belligerent occupation" and protect the artifacts and archives left vulnerable by the conduct of war. The coalition forces had in fact been protecting a number of selective sites, notably the oilfields. But buildings housing ancient manuscripts were not on that valued list. No military personnel was present when the looters and arsonists came. When a journalist, Robert Fisk of the London Independent, ran over to report the attack to the U.S. Marines Civil Affairs Bureau, mentioning that the buildings were only five minutes away, easily identifiable by the hundred-foot flames leaping from the windows and the smoke visible from a distance of three miles, still no action was taken.

The entire contents of the two libraries were reduced to ashes. According to the Associated Press, these included one of the oldest surviving copies of the Qur'an, ancient Arabic linguistic treatises, records from the caliphate when Iraq was part of the Ottoman Empire, as well as records from the Abbasid period, an archive "dating back a millennium." These documents, produced when Baghdad was the cultural center of the Arab world, had survived by sheer luck for a length of time that said something about the human species as a whole: its extended sojourn on this earth, its ability to care for objects in its safekeeping. The destruction of these records in 2003 says something about the human species as well, in ways we might not care to think about.

The marines certainly did not think about it. Operating under a military timetable, and under the short chronology of a young nation, they were largely indifferent to the history of the world. That history, in existence long before the United States came into being, has an uncanny way of multiplying references for current events. For the archives of Baghdad had in fact been destroyed once before. In 1258, the Mongols, led by Genghis Khan's grandson Hulegu, had sacked the city and emptied the contents of its libraries into the Tigris River, so much so that the water turned black. Modern Iraqis see the actions of the United States as yet another installment of that long-running saga: "The modern Mongols, the new Mongols did that. The Americans did that." All of these made no sense to the marines. The year 1258 was long ago and far away. It is separated by 745 years from 2003. The United States has nothing to do with it.

This book is an extended argument against that view, and against the all-too-common image of time underwriting it. This is a spatialized image: time here looks a bit like a measuring tape, with fixed segments, fixed unit lengths, each assignable to a number. The distance between any two events is measured by the distance between these numbers, telling us whether they are remote or proximate, pertinent or not pertinent. Standardization reigns. Benedict Anderson and Anthony Giddens see this as the mark of modernity, linked to the rise of the nation-state and the rule of the mechanical clock. These two, the nation and the clock, not only unify time but also "dis-embed" it, removing it from local contexts, local irregularities, and abstracting it into a metric, at once "empty and homogeneous." The guiding spirit is serial numbers, doubling here as chronological dates. On the strength of these dates, the ancient and the modern can be certified to be worlds apart, never to be in contact. An immutable gulf separates them, as immutable as, say, the gulf between 1258 and 2003.

Is this always the case? Are the properties of time truly identical to the properties of number? And do modern human beings always experience time as a measuring tape, uniform and abstract, untouched by locality, and untouched by the differential weight of the past? I would like to argue not. The uneven pace of modernity suggests that standardization is not everywhere the rule. In many parts of the non-Western world, a very different ontology of time prevails. And since, thanks to global military ventures, this non-Western world is now inexorably present to the West, these alternate durations are inexorably present as well. For an Iraqi, the distance between 1258 and 2003 is nothing like the distance between these dates for an American. There is nothing empty about this stretch of time. It cannot be rationalized and fitted into the semantic scope of American English. The dates are not just numbers; they are bound up with Arabic, with the long history of a turbulent locale, and saturated by its passions. The short chronology of the United States is not adequate to that history, just as its numerical order is not adequate to those passions.

It is in this context, against the glaring inadequacy of a nation-based model in world politics, that I would like to point to its parallel inadequacy in literary studies. For too long, American literature has been seen as a world apart, sufficient unto itself, not burdened by the chronology and geography outside the nation, and not making any intellectual demands on that score. An Americanist hardly needs any knowledge of English literature, let alone Persian literature, Hindu literature, Chinese literature. It is as if the borders of knowledge were simply the replicas of national borders. And yet, what does it mean to set aside a body of writing as "American"? What assumptions enable us to take an adjective derived from a territorial jurisdiction and turn it into a mode of literary causality, making the latter reflexive of and indeed coincidental with the former?

Nationhood, on this view, is endlessly reproduced in all spheres of life. This reproductive logic assumes that there is a seamless correspondence between the temporal and spatial boundaries of the nation and the boundaries of all other expressive domains. And, because this correspondence takes the form of a strict entailment-because its causality goes all the way up and all the way down-it is also assumed that there is a literary domain lining up in just the same way. This is why the adjective "American" can serve as a literary epithet. Using it, we limit ourselves, with or without explicit acknowledgment, to an analytic domain foreclosed by definition, a kind of scholarly unilateralism. Literature here is the product of one nation and one nation alone, analyzable within its confines.

American literary studies as a discipline began with this premise. And yet, as witnessed by the recent outpouring of work aspiring to the "transnational" and the "postnational," the analytic adequacy of the sovereign state has been increasingly called into question. Through Other Continents reflects this sea change. The preposition "through" is especially important to my argument. I have in mind a form of indebtedness: what we called "American" literature is quite often a shorthand, a simplified name for a much more complex tangle of relations. Rather than being a discrete entity, it is better seen as a crisscrossing set...