| 中文摘要 |
While it is almost always risky to speak in hyperbole, one seems apropos here. Never, in its short history, has Transatlantic Studies (now Atlantic Studies) seemed so necessary. The refugee crisis and Brexit were the most visible of the early warning signs of the Euro-American retreat from transanything, a Hungarian-style hard right away from engagement and nuanced complexity towards closed borders and open racism. Trump is Brexit writ large, like his licensed name on the buildings and businesses he does not actually own. His is the braying voice of narcissistic American exceptionalism, the embodiment of xenophobic post-postmodern Know-Nothingism. Instead of “discursive mobility,” Trump offers walls and the enclosed space and reduced attention span of a tweet. Instead of Ralph Waldo Emerson's “energized space and its currents,” Trump and his Tory counterpart (and first Transatlantic visiting head of state) Theresa May offer Fortress America and Little Englandism. In his magisterial introduction to The Edinburgh Companion to Atlantic Literary Studies, Paul Giles charts a very different course: the rise and fall of a distinctive national, and nationalist, American literature against which “Let's Make America Great Again” sounds not so much nostalgic as cynically manipulative, not unlike the verbal eruptions of Uncle Sam in Robert Coover's Rabelaisian masterwork, The Public Burning (1977) which Coover wrote while living in England and intended as a sardonic Bicentennial birthday gift to his home country. Given the central role that slavery played in jump-starting Transatlantic Studies (Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic), it seems a further sign of these parlous times that the only African-American in Trump's cabinet has recently reimagined slaves as immigrants aspiring to a better life in America (presumably “by any means necessary”). |
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