E3W Literature | University of Texas

Interview with Dr. Gretchen Murphy, Department of English, University of Texas at Austin

This interview with Gretchen Murphy, Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, was conducted on December 7, 2006 in her office.

Alberto Varon: Given the move in American studies towards a transnational approach to the field, what do you think the biggest advances or advantages have been for the field? Or, how has this move complicated the relationship of American literature to non-traditional American literature?

Gretchen Murphy: I think some of the advances come from trying to untangle what we mean when we say “American Studies.” Even in teaching basic surveys to undergraduates the problem comes up: are we supposed to be covering a representative set of texts written within the space that would become the United States; are we looking at texts that have been influenced by US culture, not geographically contained; are we looking at texts that are written in English within those spaces; are we assuming that the categories of nation, culture, and language map on to one another so we can say that American literature is English literature? When you start untangling these questions you are more able to listen to, to hear, to understand or to identify texts that had something to say other than a story of national inclusion. This kind of move allows us to hear stories about hybrid identity or people living on margins that aren’t simply arguing for inclusion within a world that is discreetly bounded within the national frame. This is especially happening in ethnic literatures, which are now being re-read against master narratives of national assimilation and inclusion.

AV: How is “hemispheric studies” a response to the more popular concern of globalization? How are these scholarly moves connected?

GM: The idea of hemispheric American studies as people are talking about it today very much comes from a moment of globalization. I think that the critics who are writing about this and thinking about this are very much self-aware that they are living in a moment in which the category of nation has been questioned in philosophical and practical ways in their lives and so, looking back, they are starting to see other stories that could be told that do not coincide or remain within the ideas surrounding the nation.

AV: What are some of the problems U.S. scholars face in trying to formulate a more hemispheric approach, one that examines the U.S. relationship to its neighbors?

GM: Perhaps the biggest danger is that much of this work is being done from the perspective of American Studies. Scholars who are new to thinking about U.S. culture in relation to, for example, Cuban history, politics, culture, and literature, have a lot of work to do in order to authorize themselves to really integrate the two or to see the context well enough that they can explain the way in which the literatures are integrated. At the American Studies Association conference the past few years there has been a lot of effort to include and to stimulate discussion between U.S. scholars (scholars who are working in U.S. institutions) and scholars at institutions more globally to try and make the conversation less one-sided. Yet it remains a very one-sided conversation despite all those efforts because many scholars, at least those I have spoken with, have been unable to participate in so far as getting work accepted in U.S. publications. Who is having this conversation, where is it happening, what kinds of gateways are there to keep it very much a unilateral approach? U.S. scholars are setting the agenda for a transnational American Studies and this is a real challenge to this area.

AV: If the nation is no longer the unifying container, and if the moment arrives in which U.S. scholars are in more open dialogue with international scholars, is there a danger that a hemispheric approach might dissolve American Studies?

GM: It is hard to foresee that in the immediate future because the idea of hemispheric literatures is by its historical origin very utopian. We have to ask ourselves why and for whom are we doing this. What stories are we looking for and for what purpose? What do we want to learn from these stories and what do we want them to do for us today? That answer was linked to nationalism for so long in literary study. American literature was something we were going to read and interpret to understand a national identity and to marshal in arguments about what U.S. national identity could be or should be. At this point, people are thinking about developing more cosmopolitan identities and trying to detach literary study from the simple (or not so simple) ideas of nationalism. Yet there is still a great amount of groundedness in institutions and in ideas that are national. I don’t see that moment of dissolution into hemispheric or even global or cosmopolitan literary study happening in any near future.

AV: What does it mean to be building a transnational archive? What are some of the scholarly implications you foresee? What, where, or who constitutes an archive for this kind of study?

GM: The idea of what can be an archive has become very open and the broadness of that set of texts speaks to the impossibility of creating a transnational or a national archive. It’s impossible because of the limitless possibility, which returns us to the question of who is selecting the archive. Scholars using that word are paying attention to how power and knowledge come together in a Foucauldian sense, which begs the question: who is creating this knowledge, under what conditions, and how is the way that things are labeled, put together, or identified an act of exerting cultural power creating meaning? Canon was a key word of cultural and literary studies in the past few decades that involved a lot of debate and precise consideration. I wonder if there is a way to think about archive as reflecting an accepted sense that our field is not anchored by a canon anymore? We have agreed that there no longer exists one unified, all-purpose list that will be our object of study. Instead we have this imaginary body of material which is much more multiple, potentially limitless, called our archive, leaving scholars with a lot of anxiety that any grouping of texts can seem arbitrary. We are beginning to see and explore the consequences of archives replacing canon as the material of literary analysis.

AV: Is the hemisphere an adequate cognitive container through which to think through questions of nationalism?

GM: Emphatically, no. The work that I did looking at the Monroe Doctrine showed me that the idea of the hemisphere was used to cordon off the U.S. from the Old World and bring together two stories essential to U.S. nationalism. One, the break from the Old World and starting anew in this essentially democratic space, escaping from the history of European colonization. And two, binding that story with the idea of the U.S. as a regenerative or active force for protecting democracy. The idea that the U.S. would be restricted to protecting democracy in its own hemisphere is a really powerful idea for U.S. nationalism, imperialism, and foreign policy. Thinking about that history makes me very suspicious that hemispheric studies will be enough to understand literature and its global interconnections. Too much gets written out of that. True hemispheric studies would also be looking at Atlantic and Pacific migrations, all which are necessary, but there are some stories that the very idea of the hemisphere as construct tries to overwrite and suppress. I don’t think anyone is interested in shaping a literary studies that would not be able to tell those stories also.

AV: How do you see the relationship between American literature and “ethnic” literature or non-American literature changing as a result of the hemispheric turn?

GM: American Literature is ethnic literature, but I think a hemispheric model reminds us that U.S. ethnic literatures also strain national narratives and identities. The frame of the hemisphere brings to the center certain dynamics of New World modernity like slavery, expansion, borderlands conflict, Creole nation building, a simultaneous identification and disidentification with Europe, flows of capital and migrant labor across the Pacific. Lisa Lowe calls the Western Hemisphere a place where the “intimacies of four continents” take place, and I think seeing it as such lets not only think comparatively but also see how the idea of the Western Hemisphere played a role in these processes.

AV: What current or future projects are you working on?

GM: I am interested in the way that thinking about the U.S. in a more global context that was happening at the turn of the twentieth century forced a number of different writers and thinkers to reexamine and redraw certain boundaries around U.S. racial categories. Especially how those concerns challenged ideas of whiteness or responded to those challenges that the global context brought. It is a project that doesn’t explicitly continue the hemispheric interest in literature but is driven by a fundamental interest of mine in thinking about the stories the writers and thinkers are telling about U.S. state power, its role in the world, and the role of race in those stories. As an example, I will specifically be looking at Winifred Eaton (who wrote under the penname Onato Watanna), an Asian American writer who challenges then-new conceptions of homogenous whiteness emerging at the turn of the century by telling stories of U.S.-Pacific alliances. The project brings together multiethnic American studies, critical race theory, and diplomatic history.