What we call American literature is quite often a shorthand, a simplified name for an extended tangle of relations." This is the argument of Through Other Continents, Wai Chee Dimock's sustained effort to read American literature as a subset of world literature. Inspired by an unorthodox archive--ranging from epic traditions in Akkadian and Sanskrit to folk art, paintings by Veronese and Tiepolo, and the music of the Grateful Dead--Dimock constructs a long history of the world, a history she calls "deep time." The civilizations of Mesopotamia, India, Egypt, China, and West Africa, as well as Europe, leave their mark on American literature, which looks dramatically different when it is removed from a strictly national or English-language context. Key authors such as Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell, Gary Snyder, Leslie Silko, Gloria Naylor, and Gerald Vizenor are transformed in this light. Emerson emerges as a translator of Islamic culture; Henry James's novels become long-distance kin to Gilgamesh; and Black English loses its ungrammaticalness when reclassified as a creole tongue, meshing the input from Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Throughout, Dimock contends that American literature is answerable not to the nation-state, but to the human species as a whole, and that it looks dramatically different when removed from a strictly national or English-language context.
Wai Chee Dimock approaches Herman Melville not as a timeless genius, but as a historical figure caught in the politics of an imperial nation and an "imperial self." She challenges our customary view by demonstrating a link between the individualism that enabled Melville to write as a sovereign author and the nationalism that allowed America to grow into what Jefferson hoped would be an "empire for liberty.
This is a masterpiece overflowing with insight, argument, scholarship, and passion. This book will be much discussed, reviewed, and I would predict quickly acknowledged as a 'standard-setter' for interdisciplinary 'law and humanities' studies."--Robin L. West, Georgetown University Law Center "Wai Chee Dimock's brilliant book brings literature, law, and moral philosophy into kaleidoscopic interaction in order to examine concepts fundamental to all three. Stunningly clear in style yet full of unexpected turns of thought, this book will make readers think hard about the idea of justice--and it will urge them to reread the texts and traditions Dimock moves among so commandingly,"--Richard H. Brodhead, English, Yale University "Dimock's scholarship has long impressed me. Her new book only deepens my appreciation of the breadth of her scholarship, the probing and insightful nature of her analysis. Residues of Justice exemplifies the best in the new cultural studies. It fuses political philosophy and critical legal theory, literature and history without confusing distinctions between these fields--or the reader. It brilliantly grounds traditional western understandings of the nature of justice in a detailed understanding of the history and culture in which those understandings took form and then problematizes all by counterposing legal theory to literary texts. Her counterposing of Beccaria and James Fenimore Cooper, Marx and Melville, Chomsky and Whitman is dazzling. All interested in the new cultural studies, in critical legal theory, in the history of American culture will find Residues of Justice pathbreaking and invaluable."--Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Department of History, University of Pennsylvania
“Exploring weakness and vulnerability from the origins of American literature to the present, she provocatively argues for ‘collateral resilience.’” —Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Vulnerability. We see it everywhere. In once permanent institutions. In runaway pandemics. In democracy itself. And most frighteningly, in ecosystems with no sustainable future. Against these large-scale hazards of climate change, what can literature teach us? This is the question Wai Chee Dimock asks in Weak Planet, proposing a way forward, inspired by works that survive through kinship with strangers and with the nonhuman world. Drawing on Native American studies, disability studies, and environmental humanities, Dimock shows how hope can be found not in heroic statements but in incremental and unspectacular teamwork. Reversing the usual focus on hegemonic institutions, she highlights instead incomplete gestures given an afterlife with the help of others. She looks at Louise Erdrich’s and Sherman Alexie’s user-amended captivity narratives; nontragic sequels to Moby-Dick by C. L. R. James, Frank Stella, and Amitav Ghosh; induced forms of Irishness in Henry James, Colm Tóibín, W. B. Yeats, and Gish Jen; and the experimentations afforded by a blurry Islam in works by Henri Matisse, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Langston Hughes. Celebrating literature’s durability as an assisted outcome, Weak Planet gives us new ways to think about our collective future. “Weak Planet invites us to reflect on the deep interconnections between two threatened extinctions: that of the humanities and that of a host of animal species (not least our own). The book is nothing short of a radical reorientation of literary history.” —Stephen Best, author of None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life
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