Julianne Newmark

Abstract for Book Manuscript:

TITLE: "Place, Not Race: Sites of American Literary Neonativism, 1899-1933.”

Julianne Newmark, Ph.D.

This manuscript examines the “neonative” mode of textual productive in early-twentieth-century multi-ethnic American Literature and uses as an organizing principle three primary sites of inquiry from which neonative text is deployed during the period: the urban Eastern American city, primarily New York City; the Southwestern United States, primarily the artists colony near Taos, New Mexico; and the Native American reservation (and spectral) spaces throughout the nation. Americans, since the inception of the nation, have been preoccupied with what it means to be a “native” to this place and whether this modifier is one that can be chosen, whether it is only a function of ones physical location and social status at birth, or whether it can be earned or negotiated. Textually, authors from many different social echelons deployed literary neonativism in the early-twentieth century.

As a “rival nativism,” neonativism posits a textual alternative to both protectionist and primitivist nativisms as well as to an Emersonian “futurist” nativism. Neonativism recognizes that all Americans are called upon to evaluate their future in terms of their past; the temporal hybridity (or bi-directionality) that characterizes neonativism in literature reveals that the quest to secure a “native” identity to place, to America, must be a realist endeavor, an endeavor cognizant of past hegemonic transgressions, of social stratification, and of America’s inevitable heterogeneous future. The benefit that comes as a result of re-reading the texts that are the focus of this manuscript as neonativist is that we can more accurately appreciate the authors' struggles -- as well as our own -- with the roles of racial purity, hybridity, history, and future within the matrix of national ideology and in specific platial contexts.

Key theoreticians to this study include, but are not limited to, Jean Baudrillard, Homi Bhabha, Ed Casey, James Clifford, Paul Gilroy, Derek Gregory, John Higham, Bruno Latour, Walter Benn Michaels, Edward Said, Peter Schmidt, Armitijit Singh, Yi-Fu Tuan, and Gerald Vizenor. Authors whose works are primary texts in the study include, but are not limited to, Konrad Bercovici, Abraham Cahan, Willa Cather, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Charles Alexander Eastman, James Weldon Johnson, D.H. Lawrence, Mabel Dodge Luhan, and Zitkala-Sa.