A Transnational Poetics

A Transnational Poetics

Ramazani, Jahan, 1960American Literary History, Volume 18, Number 2, Summer 2006, pp. 332-359 (Article)

Published by Oxford University Press

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A Transnational Poetics

Jahan Ramazani

“America is my country,” remarked Gertrude Stein, only to fracture this apparently nationalist claim by adding, “and Paris is my home town” (61). Stein’s translocal claim of identity—splaying herself between the spectral context of one nation and the lived metropolis of another—accords with the transnational affiliations and identities of many other modern and contemporary poets, though she is often absorbed into nationalist narratives of “American” literature. Studies in cultural transnationalism have recently proliferated in a variety of humanistic subfields, but in studies of modern and contemporary poetry in English, single-nation genealogies remain surprisingly entrenched: an army of anthologies, job descriptions, library catalogs, books, articles, and annotations reterritorializes the cross-national mobility and migrancy of modern and contemporary poetry under the banner of the single-nation norm. If Stein were an exception among twentieth-century poets, this disciplinary paradigm—which goes back to Johann Gottfried von Herder’s pre-Romantic concept of literature as an expression of national identity and rigidifies in the Cold War American academy—could surely accommodate her; after all, humanistic disciplines must draw artificial boundaries to delimit their object of study—nation, language, period, genre, and such—and so must allow for anomalies. But the “exceptions” to mononational narratives—modern “American,” “British,” “Irish” poetry—are so abundant that they should spur a reconsideration of the conceptual structure that continues to govern much critical...