[A couple weeks
back, we held the 48th annual Northeast MLA Convention
in Baltimore. Thanks to the work of President Hilda Chacón, Executive Director
Carine Mardorossian, and many many more, the convention went off beautifully.
This week I’ll follow up on five particular events and conversations—add your
thoughts, whether you were there or not, in comments, please!]
On
AmericanStudies takeaways from our two Book Award co-winners.
As NeMLA Past
President for the last year, my only official duty—alongside my unofficial
duties of shaking hands and kissing babies, natch—was to oversee the selection
process for our annual Book
Award, presented each year at the Membership
Brunch that concludes the Convention. I’ve had the chance to be part of the
Book Award review process in a couple prior years, and while we’ve always had a
number of impressive submissions, this year was particularly noteworthy, both
for the overall quantity (the largest number of submissions in the award’s
history, I believe) and for the quality of those submissions. NeMLA members are
producing vital scholarship, engaged in equal measure with very specific
subjects (authors, texts, literary movements, historical moments) that deserve
more attention and some of the most overarching questions and issues
confronting our society and world. Exemplifying the balance of those levels of
scholarly inquiry were our two 2017 co-winners: Katie Daily-Bruckner’s
Who Am I With?: Rejection and Disaffiliation in
Twenty-First Century Immigration Narratives and Regina Galasso’s
Translating New York: The City's Languages in Iberian Literatures.
I can’t do
justice here to either of these multi-layered and nuanced books (if you want to
know more, read the books when they’re published, to paraphrase Reading Rainbow), but I did want to note
a couple of salient takeaways from each for AmericanStudying our current
moment. As someone who has read and thought a great deal about stories of
immigration, I was particularly struck with how Daily-Bruckner’s project
manages to find new ways to frame and analyze such immigration narratives,
coupling extended close readings of individual works and voices to an important
overarching argument on the complex and crucial identity questions that such
stories include and help us engage. Many of Daily-Bruckner’s focal authors have
so much to tell us about both America and the world in the 21st
century; I would highlight in particular her readings of Edwidge Danticat
(about whom I’ve also written but still learned a great deal from her book) and
Mohsin Hamid (about whom I
knew far too little). But in a moment when immigrants are being so consistently
and thoroughly defined and debated and acted upon from the outside, by
governmental and activist forces across the political spectrum, perhaps
Daily-Bruckner’s most important work is simply to remind us of the vital need
to read and listen to and understand and learn from these authors and voices
themselves. In the process we’ll engage not only with their identities and
communities and experiences, but with all of ours.
Galasso’s
project considers two distinct but complementary forms of cross-cultural and
global movement: the transatlantic travels of a group of 20th and 21st
century Iberian writers; and the literary and philosophical movement involved
in translating both such experiences overall and the languages of New York City
in particular across at least three focal tongues (Spanish, England, and
Catalan). I’m far from an expert on Iberian literature and culture, of course,
and deferred to our excellent reviewers for their assessments of the strengths
and significance of Galasso’s manuscript. But I have thought and written a
great deal about cross-cultural
movement and transformation, about multi-lingual identities
and communities and the acts
of translation that they necessitate, and about what we all can learn from
such experiences and questions. On that last note, I might be wrong—and as
always feel free to correct me in comments!—but it seems to me that Iberian
nations, like most countries in the world, have a more overt and shared sense
of multi-lingualism and translation as fundamental components of identity and
community than does the United States (or at least far too many of our
citizens). For all too many Americans, multi-lingualism is boiled down to
complaints about “pressing 1 for English” or, far more troublingly, attacks
on those fellow Americans overheard speaking languages other than English. Despite
its Iberian focus, then, Galasso’s book has a great deal to teach us all about
language, translation, and the cross-cultural construction of all 21st
century identities.
Next recap
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other NeMLA memories to share?
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