Caren Kaplan

Global Identities: Theorizing Transnational Studies of Sexuality

In modernity, identities inevitably become global. Indeed, few things remain local in the aftermath of the rise of capitalism. Just as goods and people come to circulate in new ways, so too identities emerge and come into specific relations of circulation and expansion. In this globalized framework of encounter and exchange, sexual identities are similar to other kinds of identities in that they are imbued with power relations. These power relations are connected to inequalities that result from earlier forms of globalization, but they have also generated new asymmetries. Our task is to examine both the specificities and the continuities within the globalization of sexual identities at the present juncture. For the most part, throughout the twentieth century, what we might call politically “progressive” studies of sexuality emerged as a result of identity politics and social movements. Increasingly, with the rise of ethnic and postcolonial studies and the growing emphasis on diaspora in American studies, the scholarship on sexuality is globalized.1 Yet thinking simply about global identities does not begin to get at the complex terrain of sexual politics that is at once national, regional, local, even “cross-cultural” and hybrid. In many works on globalization, the “global” is seen either as a homogenizing influence or as a neocolonial movement of ideas and capital from West to non-West.2 Debates on the nature of global identities have suggested the inadequacy of understanding globalization simply through political economy or through theories of “Western” cultural imperialism and have pushed us to probe further the relationship between globalization and culture.3 Yet how do we understand these emerging identities, given the divergent theories regarding the relationship between globalization and cultural forma-

No More Separate Spheres

No More Separate Spheres! challenges the limitations of thinking about American literature and culture within the narrow rubric of “male public” and “female private” spheres from the founders to the present. With provocative essays by an array of cutting-edge critics with diverse viewpoints, this collection examines the ways that the separate spheres binary has malingered unexamined in feminist criticism, American literary studies, and debates on the public sphere. It exemplifies new ways of analyzing gender, breaks through old paradigms, and offers a primer on feminist thinking for the twenty-first century. Using American literary studies as a way to talk about changing categories of analysis, these essays discuss the work of such major authors as Catharine Sedgwick, Herman Melville, Pauline E. Hopkins, Frederick Douglass, Catharine Beecher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Sarah Orne Jewett, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Maria Ampara Ruiz de Burton, Ann Petry, Gwendolyn Brooks, Cynthia Kadohata, Chang Rae-Lee, and Samuel Delany. No More Separate Spheres! shows scholars and students different ways that gender can be approached and incorporated into literary interpretations. Feisty and provocative, it provides a forceful analysis of the limititations of any theory of gender that applies only to women, and urges suspicion of any argument that posits “woman” as a universal or uniform category. By bringing together essays from the influential special issue of American Literatur e of the same name, a number of classic essays, and several new pieces commissioned for this volume, No More Separate Spheres! will be an ideal teaching tool, providing a key supplementary text in the American literature classroom. Contributors. Jose F. Aranda, Lauren Berlant, Cathy N. Davidson, Judith Fetterley, Jessamyn Hatcher, Amy Kaplan, Dana D. Nelson, Christopher Newfield, You-me Park, Marjorie Pryse, Elizabeth Renker, Ryan Schneider, Melissa Solomon, Siobhan Somerville, Gayle Wald , Maurice Wallace

Mobility and war: the cosmic view of US 'air power'

Air power was a contested military strategy during the first half of the 20th century. During World War 2, the doctrine of air power became a dominant part of US national defence contributing to the nationalisation of air space. In this paper I raise parallels between the rise of the doctrine of air power in the US during World War 2 and the concerns about national security following the attacks on September 11, 2001. The visual and spatial logics of air power generate a ‘cosmic view’ that unifies and fixes targets from the air. Yet, this articulation of nationalism is challenged by the current practices and conditions of warfare.

Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial

In Alimentary Tracts Parama Roy argues that who eats and with whom, who starves, and what is rejected as food are questions fundamental to empire, decolonization, and globalization. In crucial ways, she suggests, colonialism reconfigured the sensorium of colonizer and colonized, generating novel experiences of desire, taste, and appetite as well as new technologies of the embodied self. For colonizers, Indian nationalists, diasporic persons, and others in the colonial and postcolonial world orders, the alimentary tract functioned as an important corporeal, psychoaffective, and ethicopolitical contact zone, in which questions of identification, desire, difference, and responsibility were staged. Interpreting texts that have addressed cooking, dining, taste, hungers, excesses, and aversions in South Asia and its diaspora since the mid-nineteenth century, Roy relates historical events and literary figures to tropes of disgust, abstention, dearth, and appetite. She analyzes the fears of pollution and deprivation conveyed in British accounts of the so-called Mutiny of 1857, complicates understandings of Mohandas K. Gandhi’s vegetarianism, examines the “famine fictions” of the novelist-actor Mahasweta Devi, and reflects on the diasporic cookbooks and screen performances of Madhur Jaffrey. This account of richly visceral global modernity furnishes readers with a new idiom for understanding historical action and cultural transformation.

Air power’s visual legacy: Operation Orchard and aerial reconnaissance imagery as ruses de guerre

The images contained in the Operation Orchard public archive represent a convergence of technologies, politics, and warcraft that can only emerge across a century of air power. Their interpretation refers to older modes of camouflage and deceptive practices from the espionage and tactical manuals of an earlier era in modernity even as the virtual and digital practices of the twenty-first century appear to destabilize the powers of legitimation that have come to surround the iconic reconnaissance photograph. Sincerely or disingenuously, media and analysts alike accept the circulation of reconnaissance imagery as objective news imbued with the legitimating aura of documentary material. If we accept the image as full of information that can be deciphered definitively, a kind of ground truth, we close off the possibility of learning from other sources or even from the complex state of uncertainty itself. In this context, we might have to concede that deception is not so much the obliteration of facts, as Virilio maintained just after the first Persian Gulf War, but the profuse and uneven dissemination of fact as visual data.

Bureaucratic Modernity, the Indian Civil Service, and Grammars of Nationalism

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