Michelle Burnham
Santa Clara University
Michelle Burnham is Professor of English at Santa Clara University. She is currently completing a book, The Revolutionary Pacific: Transoceanic American Writing and the Calculus of Risk. She is the author of Folded Selves: Colonial New England Writing in the World System and Captivity and Sentiment: Cultural Exchange in American Literature, 1681-1865. She is also editor of A Separate Star: Selected Writings of Helen Hunt Jackson and co-editor of a new edition of The Female American. She is interested in transoceanic studies, literary recovery, feminist studies, studies of the novel, and Native American studies.
“I’m closing my eyes and looking at the wind.” –Alson Kelen, ri-meto (wave pilot), Marshall IslandsLiterary history has always approached the U.S. West—temporally, geographically, narratively—from the continental... [ view full abstract ]
“I’m closing my eyes and looking at the wind.” –Alson Kelen, ri-meto (wave pilot), Marshall Islands
Literary history has always approached the U.S. West—temporally, geographically, narratively—from the continental East. What happens if we approach it instead from the oceanic West? What if we think of it not as an extension of a continental nationalism but as part of a wider amphibian Pacific? How does such a liquid framework change the temporal markers usually assigned to the region’s history? What new texts and traditions do we need to account for once we adopt this more liquid orientation? And how might such a change give new space and voice to writing by and about women (and indigenous peoples) in a literary tradition that has so often been aligned with Western masculinity and its aggressions?
The statement above by Alson Kelen comes from a New York Times Magazine feature on the indigenous practice of wave piloting, or the ability to navigate at sea with no instruments other than the human body reading the movement of waves. Kelen’s practice disrupts Western sensory assumptions: he is able to look with eyes closed, and then to see the wind, which most would assume has no discernably visible shape. The article goes on to focus on a particular type of wave, known as di-lep (or “backbone”) that connects islands to one another; it too is defined not by any clear visibility (or linearity), but by a curve left behind by the constant rocking motion felt by the canoe-borne body.
I’m interested in using this and other indigenous formulations from the wider Pacific (including Epeli Hau’ofa’s notion of a “sea of islands”) to rethink the relationship of the regional Western U.S. to larger Pacific narratives (transoceanic, global, planetary, transnational) of literary and cultural history. My paper will therefore focus on new ways of narrating American literary history so as to reposition the U.S. West within a more global and aquatic framework. Along the way, I will suggest new texts, authors, or figures that might become part of this narrative as well as how this narrative might change the way we read more familiar texts, authors or figures. But I am primarily interesting in opening up discussion with others, who may want to think about how this reorientation affects our reading of particular texts and authors of interest to them, and how it might change the way we teach and understand the U.S. West.
Feminist Critical Regionalism and the Climate of Western Literary Studies
