Indiana University Press blog

Why I Wrote “‘The Secrets of Blood and Seed’: Primo Levi’s Poetic Emergence”: A Closer Look at JML 41.3

This post is part of a series that takes a closer look at the scholarship behind IU Press Journals. Primarily written by journal editors and contributors, posts may respond to articles, provide background, document the development process, or explain why scholars are excited about the journal, theme, or article. 

Barbara Estrin’s article, “The Secrets of Blood and Seed”: Primo Levi's Poetic Emergence” from the Journal of Modern Literature’s newest issue, is now available on JSTOR & Project MUSE. Below, Barbara explores a poet who struggles to end the conflict between knowledge and feeling.

---

I have always demurred from Eli Wiesel’s pronouncement that “Primo Levi died at Auschwitz forty years later” (3). Nowhere did I find a better refutation of Wiesel’s assumption than in Levi’s own Collected Poems. The volume reflects what Levi emphasizes in The Search for Roots: the surprising realization that his “experiences in the concentration camp…weigh[ed] so little” (5) in the formation of his literary self. Most criticism of his poetry focuses on just four poems: “Buna,” “Shemà,” “Sunset at Fossoli,” and “For Adolf Eichmann.” Almost nothing has been written about more than 70 other pieces where he sought to realize himself in the full force of his creative capacity.

Those lesser-known poems place Levi squarely in the modernist context, along with other writers who began (as he did) in the European tradition and then questioned that poetic in their post-war work. These texts reflect a connection that many poets perceived between poetry and war. Especially striking to me was that Levi—a victim of that interface— categorized himself as a practitioner of the patterns that fed into the rhetoric of genocide.

I also wanted to puzzle the curious phrase in Levi’s Black Hole: “I write because I’m a chemist” (98). If that affinity formed the basis for Levi’s youthful work, this liaison would be explicitly challenged in “Memorandum Book” where the atomic bomb is linked to fourteenth-century art. Levi demonstrates that the possessive impulse in science and the poet’s “search…for the word that can contain the typhoon’s force” are both problematic (Collected Poems 72), thus exposing the downside of a reciprocity that had fueled his early poems. He cites an interdependence that Adrienne Rich emphasizes in her later work. In Midnight Salvage (1999), Rich graphically catalogues mid-twentieth century horrors, after which she overturns a younger poet’s faith in the healing of art: “Would it relieve you to decide / Poetry doesn’t make this [the Holocaust and Hiroshima] happen”? (29). In his late poems, Levi similarly “decides” that the poetics he had heretofore pursued had a bearing on the disastrous consequences of twentieth-century violence.

The model for “the sad crepuscular poems” described in The Periodic Table (128) shadows the Ovidian history—“sixty centuries old and always new” (Collected Poems 62)—to which he is indebted. Those poems turn life loss into verbal gain: the search for scientific mastery and artistic closure fuses with an aggression that applies to both love poems and scientific inquiry. As Jean-Paul Sartre writes about that conflation: “It is not enough that a certain picture which I have in mind should exist; it is necessary as well that it exists through me” (736). The denial of the other, the intractability of the material, whether in the Ovidian-Petrarchan complex or in scientific theoretical practice, will sustain the momentum to write and also engage with experiments.

Thus the “no” of resistance understood both as the sought-after other in the poetic tradition and the initial non-compliance of chemical substances in the research lab becomes the “yes” of a poetic and scientific desire to keep going. A productive absence determines lyric imagistic presence and methodically deductive experiment. Levi’s declaration in The Search for Roots that “there are no demons, that the assassins of millions of innocents are people like us. They don’t have different blood to ours” (207) can be understood in view of his two-pronged career. 

Refusing to exempt his own work from that indictment, Levi “decides” to follow a different road. His later poems reveal a poet who ends the conflict between knowledge, based on remoteness and the image of a grasping “I,” and feeling produced by a receptive rather than resistant other. His last poems echo Lucretius, a poet-scientist he admires because Lucretius rejoiced in “the body’s sense” of “touch” (Search 138).

As an example of the revisionist Levi, “The Work” centers on a poet who surrenders to, rather than usurps, the other, forgoing the mastery of the appropriative self for the modesty of his pleasure in the inspirational other: “the way a woman leads you to the dance” (Collected Poems 56). Through that new alliance, the poet moves through two states simultaneously; hence he feels doubly energized. In the late poems, Levi finds himself “lively as quicksilver” (ibid.), the chemical compound associated with the shape-changing Greek god Mercury who inspires the word-changing delight of collaboration. These poems reveal how Levi wished to be remembered.

Works Cited

Levi, Primo. The Black Hole of Auschwitz. Trans. Sharon Wood. Ed. Marco Belpoliti. Polity, 2005.

---. The Collected Poems. Trans. Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann. Faber and Faber, 1992.

---. The Periodic Table. Trans. Raymond Rosenthal. Schocken, 1984.

---. The Search for Roots. Trans. and Introd. Peter Forbes. Ivan Dee, 2003.

Rich, Adrienne. Midnight Salvage. Norton, 1999.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Trans. Hazel Barnes. Washington Square P, 1984.

Wiesel, Eli. “Con l'incubo che tutto sia accaduto invano.” La Stampa Turin, 14 Apr. 1987.

---

Barbara L. Estrin is professor emerita of English at Stonehill College.

---

More from the Journal of Modern Literature 41.3

OTHER-LATE-META-MODERNISMS

The Poet as Rhetor: A Reading of Wilfred Owen's “Dulce et Decorum Est”
Stephen Benz

Marianne Moore's Cabinets of Curiosity 
Sarah Berry

Lola Ridge, American Modernism's Forgotten Radical
Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet by Terese Svoboda
Review by: Joshua Logan Wall

 • READ FOR FREE • 
“The Secrets of Blood and Seed”: Primo Levi's Poetic Emergence
Barbara L. Estrin

Whose (Meta)modernism?: Metamodernism, Race, and the Politics of Failure
James Brunton

It is I: Robert Creeley's Deictic Subjectivity and the Sublime Self
Andy Weaver

Making Conjuncture
The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley by Robert Creeley, Rod Smith, Peter Baker, Kaplan Harris
Review by: Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Trailing through the Thicket
Intricate Thicket: Reading Late Modernist Poetries by Mark Scroggins
Review by: Zhaohui Liu

Conceptualisms in Crisis: The Fate of Late Conceptual Poetry
Michael Leong

Career Windows
The First Book: Twentieth-Century Poetic Careers in America by Jesse Zuba
Review by: Mike Chasar

A Book of Readings on Anne Carson
Anne Carson: Ecstatic Lyre by Joshua Marie Wilkinson
Review by: Calista McRae

ELIOT RETURNS

“The Eliot we have is the Eliot we make”: A Review of The New Cambridge Companion to T.S. Eliot
The New Cambridge Companion to T.S. Eliot by Jason Harding
Review by: Chen Lin

Ekphrasis, Cultural Capital, and the Cultivation of Detachment in T.S. Eliot's Early Poetry
Frank Capogna

Plasticity at the Violet Hour: Tiresias, The Waste Land, and Poetic Form
Matthew Scully

A Myriad of Critical Lenses on The Waste Land
The Cambridge Companion to The Waste Land by Gabrielle McIntire
Review by: Ping Song

Living Dangerously: Reflecting on Elaine Freedgood’s “Banishing Panic”

This post is part of a series that takes a closer look at the scholarship behind IU Press Journals. Primarily written by journal editors and contributors, posts may respond to articles, provide background, document the development process, or explain why scholars are excited about the journal, theme, or article.

Elaine Freedgood’s “Banishing Panic: Harriet Martineau and the Popularization of Political Economy,” from the Victorian Studies archives is available on JSTOR & Project MUSE. Below, guest author Mary L. Mullen explores the essay with fresh eyes in anticipation of celebrating Freedgood’s extraordinary career.

---

Elaine Freedgood has shaped the field of Victorian studies through her highly original thinking, meticulous research, beautiful, sometimes wry writing, and relentless work to support young scholars. Among other things, she has probed the shifting distance between the Victorian past and our present. In her groundbreaking book The Ideas in Things (2006), she argues for a practice of “strong metonymic reading”—or reading things in terms of their own characteristics, properties, and histories rather than as metaphoric objects subordinated to subjects—in part to acknowledge and theorize the “gulf of time and space” that separates us from Victorian readers (24). Strong metonymic reading does not simply recover lost meanings—the connections between Negro head tobacco and the elimination of Indigenous peoples, for instance—it demonstrates the very instability of interpretation: what we know, what we see, and how we read change over time.

More recently, Freedgood has been considering what Megan Ward calls the “historical middle”—the period between the Victorian past and the present we inhabit—to offer a stunning new account of the ways in which the embrace of classical realism as a coherent form has led us to forget the strangeness and messiness of the Victorian novel. In her forthcoming book, titled Worlds Enough, or Against Realism, Freedgood returns to nineteenth- and twentieth-century criticism of the novel to question just when and how the Victorian novel became ‘great.’ Hint: only retrospectively. Reconceiving the history of the Victorian novel, Freedgood rethinks the politics of the novel, literary form, and literary history as she interrogates what it means to feel at home in ontologically-flexible novelistic worlds.

Given Freedgood’s own work to reinvigorate the past to reflect on what and how we read, it is my great pleasure to return to her essay “Banishing Panic: Harriet Martineau and the Popularization of Political Economy,” first published in Victorian Studies in 1995. I do so in anticipation of a conference hosted by New York University on September 21, 2018 to celebrate Freedgood’s extraordinary career.

“Banishing Panic” became part of the first chapter of Freedgood’s Victorian Writing About Risk (2000), a book that questions the desire for safety by showing how danger is always displaced. The article turns to Harriet Martineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy to argue that in a moment of social unrest and uncertainty, Martineau seeks to assuage anxiety by naturalizing the laws of political economy. She does not teach readers to accept risk but rather to eliminate it. Martineau thus deals with the uncertainty of modernity and capitalism by doubling down on the certainty of political economic laws, in Freedgood’s account.

Reading this article now, I heard echoes of Hannah Gadsby’s recent stand-up special, Nanette. In this wildly-popular comedy act, Gadsby explains how jokes produce tension and then relieve this very tension. Teaching the audience about this two-part structure, Gadsby then refuses to reproduce it. Instead, she introduces tension that she does not alleviate so that the audience better understands the tension that “not normals carry around inside of them all of the time.” Long before Gadsby’s act, Freedgood similarly questions who feels tension and anxiety, why they feel it, how it is alleviated, and to what end. Feeling anxiety about capitalism is utterly rational: it is a cruel system that depends upon and reproduces inequality. As Freedgood shows, even most theorists of political economy in the nineteenth century understand capitalism to be tragic: they lament the conflicts capitalism produces and its deadly effects even if they ultimately embrace it. Martineau’s writing, however, works differently: it assuages anxiety—eliminates risk—by transforming anxiety about an unjust economic system into a utopian myth about the happy endings that will result if one obediently follows economic laws. However, the ease with which Martineau alleviates tension for middle class readers—the way in which she combines realism and myth—is ultimately why her writing has less of an impact over time. As Freedgood warns, there is “a need for anxiety to be heightened before it is relieved: perhaps because of this temporary heightening, the relief is more intense and more lasting” (36). Banishing panic without grappling with people’s very real anxiety about capitalism ultimately provides only fleeting comfort. Tellingly, Martineau’s text wasn’t especially popular among working class readers.

In characteristic Freedgood fashion, this article is about much more than Martineau: it thinks about reading as an affective process, analyzes literature’s short- and long-term political effects, and examines the intersection of gender, political economy, and domestic economy as well as the relationship between capitalism and colonialism. Throughout, Freedgood warns against easy solutions to complex political problems: both Martineau’s work to banish panic without representing real anxiety, and realist novels’ work to express contradictions that cannot be entirely resolved. For although realist novels assuage anxiety by having readers feel it—readers of realist novels must spend more time dwelling with difficulty—they, too, ultimately produce an illusory sense of safety by displacing danger onto others. The challenge, it seems, is to recognize the anxiety and uncertainty in the world without attempting to render it safe through fiction, myth, or displacement.

We, too, live in a historical moment when capitalism produces a great deal of anxiety and panic feels like a reasonable response. Freedgood’s article encourages us to inhabit this historical moment and grapple with its complexity without too easily replacing real dangers with fiction’s comforting narrative structures. In turn, Freedgood’s actions—her support of young scholars, willingness to fight unjust professional norms, and commitment to rigorous research while imagining the university and the profession otherwise—suggest that acknowledging anxiety, panic, and danger not only leads to a better understanding of history in all its contradictions, but also enacts forms of social relationality and collective care that refuse to follow the logic of capitalism. Through her work on and off the page, Freedgood demonstrates that although we cannot banish panic, we do not need to face it alone.

Read Elaine Freedgood’s “Banishing Panic: Harriet Martineau and the Popularization of Political Economy” for free on

---

Mary L. Mullen is assistant professor of English and faculty member in the Irish Studies program at Villanova University. Her research examines theories of history, education, and empire in the context of nineteenth-century English and Irish literature.

An Antidote to the Myth of Historical Progress: A Closer Look at JML 41.3

This post is part of a series that takes a closer look at the scholarship behind IU Press Journals. Primarily written by journal editors and contributors, posts may respond to articles, provide background, document the development process, or explain why scholars are excited about the journal, theme, or article.

James Brunton’s article, “Whose (Meta)modernism?: Metamodernism, Race, and the Politics of Failure,” from the Journal of Modern Literature’s newest issue, is now available on JSTOR & Project MUSE. Below, James elaborates on poetry as an antidote to the noise of self-righteous social media posts and crisis-fueled cable news.

---

I encountered the work of Harryette Mullen at a time when I had begun to grow cynical about the place of contemporary American poetry. It seemed that almost every new book or journal issue I picked up represented one of two extremes: the first, a plainspoken narrative aimed at the revelation of a universal truth through observation of, say, nature or some quotidian scene in a restaurant or on a city bus; the second, an academic-inflected descendant of Language poetry, with all the difficulty but none of the bite. This is an exaggeration, of course, but in light of the political landscape (the increased media visibility of police shootings of black citizens, the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, Donald Trump’s move from reality TV star to serious contender for the Republican presidential nominee), I felt that the poetry I was reading (and even the poetry I was writing) was talking past issues of urgency. Then I read Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary.

Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002) is similar stylistically to Mullen’s earlier Trimmings (1991), which mimics the formal experimentations of Gertrude Stein. But here, Mullen makes explicit the connection between our everyday lexicon and racism, showing, through her word play, how the language we inherit shapes our collective unconscious in ways that must be openly dealt with, even (and perhaps especially) in spaces that self-identify as politically progressive. The attitude of these poems reminded me of the work of Evie Shockley, another experimental poet whose work addresses US racism from a historical perspective. Like Mullen’s work, Shockley’s the new black (2011) and a half-red sea (2006) draw on the modernist tradition—most notably, of Langston Hughes—to contrast the beauty of poetry with the abject horror of racism.

Both Mullen’s and Shockley’s work fits the broad definition of “metamodern” given by Urmila Seshagiri and David James: contemporary literature that uses the formal techniques of modernism to critique the present. But much of the art and literature that has been labeled by scholars as “metamodern” is marked by a belief in historical progress, which Mullen and Shockley do not share. Their poems take precisely the opposite view, dwelling in moments of failure, whether at the interpersonal or the political level. My JML article unpacks how the techniques and perspectives of these two poets, who draw on the avant-garde strain within modernism, differ from other artists to whom the metamodernist label has been given and claims a place for Mullen and Shockley in metamodernist studies.

Mullen’s and Shockley’s poetry demonstrates that failure is our present reality, that the myth of historical progress is not worth salvaging, and that sharp-witted, adrenaline-fueled adaptation to ever changing circumstances—not congratulatory optimism—is necessary for our survival. Their poetry feels like a response and an antidote to, rather than a retreat from, the noise of self-righteous social media posts and crisis-fueled cable news. It is, I think, exactly the kind of engaged, self-critical aesthetic perspective that can help guide and sustain a political movement.

Ultimately, what I find most gratifying about these poems is their refusal to let us off the hook as readers. We don’t get to breathe a sigh of relief after reading the last line, resting assured in our own moral positions newly put to us through the beauty of poetry. What Shockley and Mullen offer is not revelation—they are not in the business of digging up the “hidden” evils of institutionalized racism, sexism, or homophobia. Rather, through recourse to avant-garde modernist techniques, they state the obvious yet unspoken failures of American democracy, pointing out how we are all complicit in systems of oppression through our very language, and leaving us to sit uncomfortably with that disavowed truth.

---

James Brunton teaches critical theory in the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

---

More from the Journal of Modern Literature 41.3

OTHER-LATE-META-MODERNISMS

The Poet as Rhetor: A Reading of Wilfred Owen's “Dulce et Decorum Est”
Stephen Benz

Marianne Moore's Cabinets of Curiosity 
Sarah Berry

Lola Ridge, American Modernism's Forgotten Radical
Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet by Terese Svoboda
Review by: Joshua Logan Wall

“The Secrets of Blood and Seed”: Primo Levi's Poetic Emergence
Barbara L. Estrin

 • READ FOR FREE • 
Whose (Meta)modernism?: Metamodernism, Race, and the Politics of Failure
James Brunton

It is I: Robert Creeley's Deictic Subjectivity and the Sublime Self
Andy Weaver

Making Conjuncture
The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley by Robert Creeley, Rod Smith, Peter Baker, Kaplan Harris
Review by: Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Trailing through the Thicket
Intricate Thicket: Reading Late Modernist Poetries by Mark Scroggins
Review by: Zhaohui Liu

Conceptualisms in Crisis: The Fate of Late Conceptual Poetry
Michael Leong

Career Windows
The First Book: Twentieth-Century Poetic Careers in America by Jesse Zuba
Review by: Mike Chasar

A Book of Readings on Anne Carson
Anne Carson: Ecstatic Lyre by Joshua Marie Wilkinson
Review by: Calista McRae

ELIOT RETURNS

“The Eliot we have is the Eliot we make”: A Review of The New Cambridge Companion to T.S. Eliot
The New Cambridge Companion to T.S. Eliot by Jason Harding
Review by: Chen Lin

Ekphrasis, Cultural Capital, and the Cultivation of Detachment in T.S. Eliot's Early Poetry
Frank Capogna

Plasticity at the Violet Hour: Tiresias, The Waste Land, and Poetic Form
Matthew Scully

A Myriad of Critical Lenses on The Waste Land
The Cambridge Companion to The Waste Land by Gabrielle McIntire
Review by: Ping Song

Hope is Hard Work: A Closer Look at JML 41.2

This post is part of a series that takes a closer look at the scholarship behind IU Press Journals. Primarily written by journal editors and contributors, posts may respond to articles, provide background, document the development process, or explain why scholars are excited about the journal, theme, or article.

James Arnett’s article, "What’s Left of Feelings? The Affective Labor of Politics in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook," from the Journal of Modern Literature’s newest issue, is now available on JSTOR & Project MUSE. Below, James elaborates on why at this political moment, it is important for readers to read Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook.

---

Only a year and change into the 45^th presidency, and many of my comrades on the Left, of all stripes, are tired. Protests and letter-writing campaigns continue, as do marches. The Left is doing serious soul-searching, churning as usual in self-criticism. Many people – on the Right as well as Left – see this moment as an opportunity to live consonantly with their politics – or “getting woke.” As much as we’ve seen an explosion of discussion and public discourse about gender and race and sexuality on the left, we’ve also seen the galvanization of white nationalism (some of whom being for the President just “good guys”) on the right. Politics has never seemed like harder work. It feels, many of my peers would argue, exhausting. It is – because politics dissonantly occupies so many spectrums and registers of life.

Painfully, the register that is most visible, governance, is so far removed from the wishes of the majority. Governance at the highest levels, in America and elsewhere has many countries experiencing new, violent forms of reactionary populism, as in Hungary, the Philippines, and Israel. In my JML article, “What’s Left of Feelings? The Affective Labor of Politics in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook,” I argue that Lessing captures the labor of political feeling, and the feeling of political work, largely in an adaptation of the myth of Sisyphus that preserves optimism against cynicism.

It has become frightfully easy to become cynical, but we are also living, perversely, in an era of optimism. Not optimism as it might manifest rhetorically, speaking of resolution and progress and development, but rather, optimism as performed in the contemporary work of politics. People write letters, and call senators. Communities organize marches, and teens start lecture tours. Alliances are formed, nurtured, and critiqued. Any utopian bent seems stymied by the sheer weight of the darkness of the present.

Similarly, The Golden Notebook is about living with calamity: the calamities of World War II, of colonialism and the African colour bar, of global inequity and Communism and Stalinism, of patriarchy and personal dissolution.  At the very beginning of Barack Obama’s presidency, it was widely circulated that The Golden Notebook was amongst his favourite books. The New York Times speculated that it was because it was about a woman’s effort to “articulate her own sense of self” (a rather bland evaluation of the novel). At the end of his presidency, as Malia headed off to college, he loaded a Kindle with books for her.  One of those selections, he explained to Michiko Kakutani, was The Golden Notebook, a book “that...[is] not on everybody’s reading list these days” and “which might not surface when she goes to college,” but which he remembers being powerful and affecting.

Admittedly, I rarely see it on colleagues’ syllabi, but I’ve taught the book twice, and students are challenged by its length and its nonlinear composition. But they’ve also found it really rewarding, and a touchstone, opening discussions about the vitality of female friendships, the unique challenges of mothering labor and work-life balance, as well as the tension between the individual and the collective.

Sometimes the work of the academic literary critic is far simpler than we’d like to admit: it’s a cry for others to read the things we’re reading, join in a conversation with us, and be affected like we were affected. And in moments of political crisis, we could do little better than harken back to writers like Lessing – or for that matter, Nadine Gordimer and Richard Rive – who represent ways through crisis and suggest paths that permit responsible hope that the forces of nationalism, racism, and xenophobia will once more be suppressed.

---

James Arnett is an assistant professor of English at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga.

---

More from the Journal of Modern Literature 41.2

ENVIRONMENTS OF INVENTION

Re-worlding the Mona Lisa: Nazim Hikmet’s Modernist Diplomacy 
Alice Xiang

Joyce Adapting Shelley: The Social Function of Lyric Form 
Tess McNulty

 • READ FOR FREE • 
Specters of Totality: Reading and Uncertainty in Joyce’s Ulysses and Borges’s Fictions 
Gabriel Renggli

“What muck & filth is normally flowing through the air”: The Cultural Politics of Atmosphere in the Work of George Orwell 
Edward King

 • READ FOR FREE • 
What’s Left of Feelings? The Affective Labor of Politics in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook
James Arnett

Indigenizing Intertextuality: Literacy and Orality in Albert Wendt’s Pouliuli
Matthew Hayward

The Partial Postcoloniality of Julian Barnes’s Arthur & George
Ed Dodson

Psychopathologies of the Island: Curses, Love and Trauma in Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents and Junot Diaz’s This is How You Lose Her
Stefania Ciocia

Sinking, Shrinking, Satin Island: Tom McCarthy, the British Novel, and the Materiality of Shame
Cynthia Quarrie

BOOK REVIEWS

Expanding Modernism: A Review of Peter Kalliney’s Modernism in a Global Context
Review by: Scott C. Thompson

From Rupture to Mediation: Unmasking Modernism
Review by: Bi Yiqing

The Dirty Green: Joshua Schuster’s The Ecology of Modernism
Review by: Joshua Myers

Shy Formalism
Review by: Benjamin Kahan

Mansfield’s Journeys and Journals
Review by: Alex Moffett

Joyce/Shakespeare: A Room of Infinite Possibilities
Review by: Roy Benjamin

Decolonizing Music Education: A Closer Look at PME 26.1

This post is part of a series that takes a closer look at the scholarship behind IU Press Journals. Primarily written by journal editors and contributors, posts may respond to articles, provide background, document the development process, or explain why scholars are excited about the journal, theme, or article.

Burke Stanton’s article, “Musicking in the Borders toward Decolonizing Methodologies,” from the Philosophy of Music Education Review’s newest issue, is now available on JSTOR & Project MUSE. Below, Burke elaborates on the ongoing struggle for decolonization and liberation in music education.

---

The idea for writing “Musicking in the Borders: Toward Decolonizing Methodologies” germinated a little more than two years ago as my undergraduate senior thesis for DePauw University. I reworked that project significantly in the first months after my graduation and sent it to PMER. At that juncture, I left for Mexico in order to continue studying philosophies and histories I had recently discovered.  During my time at University, the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico inspired my own research and journey. Travelling, studying, and collaborating in Chiapas provided the material counterpoint to research I began in the library. After participating in several months of Spanish immersion, I collaborated with two human rights organizations, learning much that the books had omitted.

Then, I received an email from PMER and found myself revisiting the prospect of publishing my article. Fortunately for me, I received illuminating criticism at every turn. Early on, this came from Dr. Elissa Harbert at DePauw who kindly supported and guided a project that was surely even more quixotic at that time. Later, the peer review process challenged and sharpened my thinking greatly. At the time of this writing, I’m beginning a guitar class as a volunteer facilitator at the Chicago-based Centro Autónomo/Mexico Solidarity Network where we will attempt to educate ourselves in part through musicking that navigates histories of resistance. I imagine that the young collaborating students will continue this trend and provide some of the starkest criticisms yet! (If you are interested in supporting us, we are seeking funds for instruments. Please go to https://ausm.community/payment/ under the “Speaking tour” option and indicate that the donation is for “Centro Autónomo- Clase de guitarra”).

This article should be approached as a reified snapshot of an ongoing process. The subtext navigates an ongoing exploration of my own positionality, subjectivity, and agency as a white cis man struggling for decolonization and liberation. As global elites opt for endless war at home and abroad while treating large swaths of the global population as a state-less surplus humanity doomed to navigate migratory and climate chaos without protection, the immediacy of embodied decolonial struggle has perhaps never been greater. I remain convinced that we can navigate the borders of our worlds to struggle for justice, transforming ourselves by cultivating critical consciousness and collective action. Decolonial musicking methodologies connect us to profound histories and can act as potent resources for forging new horizons of human flourishing.

---

Burke Stanton is a scholar of decolonizing musicking methodologies and a volunteer facilitator at the Chicago-based Centro Autónomo/Mexico Solidarity Network. 

---

More from the Philosophy of Music Education Review 26.1

 • READ FOR FREE • 
Musicking in the Borders toward Decolonizing Methodologies
Burke Stanton

A “Discomfortable” Approach to Music Education Re-envisioning the “Strange Encounter"
Juliet Hess

A “Sound” Approach: John Cage and Music Education
Stuart Chapman Hill

On Confucian Metaphysics, The Pragmatist Revolution, and Philosophy of Music Education
Leonard Tan

 • READ FOR FREE • 
The Nonidentical as a Problem of a Systemic Approach to Scientific Music Pedagogy
Stefan Orgass

IN DIALOGUE

A Response to Roger Mantie
Thomas A. Regelski

BOOK REVIEW

Children’s Home Musical Experiences Across the World by Beatriz Ilari and Susan Young
Review by: Amy Christine Beegle

Considering the "Nonidentical" and A System of Scientific Music Pedagogy: A Closer Look at PME 26.1

This post is part of a series that takes a closer look at the scholarship behind IU Press Journals. Primarily written by journal editors and contributors, posts may respond to articles, provide background, document the development process, or explain why scholars are excited about the journal, theme, or article.

Stefan Orgass’s article, “The Nonidentical as a Problem of a Systemic Approach to Scientific Music Pedagogy,” from the Philosophy of Music Education Review’s newest issue, is now available on JSTOR & Project MUSE. Below, Stefan elaborates on the limits of a systemic approach in music education and research.

---

In a world of an increasing influence of economy on life in general, practices of music education should recollect their primary sense which—above all—realizes in recollection by means of musical-aesthetical practices. The enhancement of these practices is the goal of practices of music education whose amelioration is the goal of research in music pedagogy. In this web of relationships “disciplinary identity” is at stake.

In order to strengthen this identity, a “disciplinary matrix” (Th. S. Kuhn) of scientific music pedagogy is established on the basis of reflection theory, founded by a four-dimensional sign. Its dimensions “constitution of an object,” “individual,” “interaction,” and “modification of sense” are constitutive of each other. It is used as a basis for the reconstruction of musical practices, practices of music education, interdisciplinary practices and research practices of music pedagogy. Reconstruction can also reveal neglected aspects and research gaps.

This systemic approach generates limits which become apparent by Theodor W. Adorno’s concept of the nonidentical. The meanings of this concept can be reconstructed in the aforementioned sense, as well as the categories Critical Theory applies for the description of societal practices: reification, alienation, totally administered society/culture industry and instrumental reason/context of delusion. In their negativity, these categories are particular and therefore not apt as principles of a holistic system. They represent a realization within this system built on the basis of reflection theory.

The article focusses not only on the relationship between the holistic system and its challenging by the nonidentical, but also thematizes several consequences of this relationship for practices of music education: “Disciplinary identity” should be regarded as a topic not only of science but of practitioners as well. This is why the reading public of this article should reach from students of music pedagogy through practitioners of music education to researchers.

---

Stefan Orgass is a professor of Music Education and Music Didactics at Folkwang University of Art. From 2010 to 2016 he was the first chairman of the Federal Association for Music Education, and since 2011 has been a member of the advisory board for the European Music Exchange of the German Music Council. His research interests include development of the didactic conception ‘Communicative Music Didactics’; basic questions of music education, theory of musical importance, and research on teaching and science theory of music education.

---

More from the Philosophy of Music Education Review 26.1

Musicking in the Borders toward Decolonizing Methodologies
Burke Stanton

A “Discomfortable" Approach to Music Education Re-envisioning the “Strange Encounter”
Juliet Hess

A “Sound” Approach: John Cage and Music Education
Stuart Chapman Hill

On Confucian Metaphysics, The Pragmatist Revolution, and Philosophy of Music Education
Leonard Tan

 • READ FOR FREE • 
The Nonidentical as a Problem of a Systemic Approach to Scientific Music Pedagogy
Stefan Orgass

IN DIALOGUE

A Response to Roger Mantie
Thomas A. Regelski

BOOK REVIEW

Children’s Home Musical Experiences Across the World by Beatriz Ilari and Susan Young
Review by: Amy Christine Beegle

Social Justice in the Musical Classroom: A Closer Look at PME 25.2

This post is part of a series that takes a closer look at the scholarship behind IU Press Journals. Primarily written by journal editors and contributors, posts may respond to articles, provide background, document the development process, or explain why scholars are excited about the journal, theme, or article.

Juliet Hess’s article, “Critiquing the Critical: The Casualties and Paradoxes of Critical Pedagogy in Music Education,” from the Philosophy of Music Education Review  newest issue, is now available on  JSTOR &  Project MUSE. Below, Juliet elaborates on who can and cannot engage social justice work in the classroom.

---

As a public school elementary and middle school music teacher, I worked to engage issues of social justice in my classroom. Because I did not have a car, I lacked the ability to engage in professional development with other music teachers and felt relatively isolated as the only music teacher in my school. As such, I wondered how other music teachers took up social justice work in their classrooms.

Compelled by this question, in my doctoral work, I made my own professional development. I had the privilege of sitting in the classrooms of four exceptional teachers who purposefully engaged in anti-racist and social justice work in their classrooms. Their students performed, wrote, listened to, and improvised music. Teachers also guided students to grapple meaningfully with the sociohistorical and sociopolitical contexts of all music studied. They learned a wide range of music across multiple styles, cultures, and geographies. All four teachers limited their use of Western standard notation, preferring to offer some notational literacy as a “key to the door” alongside constant aural learning.

I observed in each classroom two days a week for an eight-week period. I found the teachers’ pedagogy impressive and watched as the students wrestled with privilege and asked and responded to hard questions about context. As I observed, I began to wonder if there were limits on who could engage in critical pedagogy in the classroom. All four teachers were white women and they faced little resistance in work that one could easily consider as radical. Would people of color implementing similar pedagogy face greater resistance or be perceived as “having an agenda”? I also wondered whether there were any “casualties” of engaging in critical pedagogy in the classroom. Would the students who only received an introduction to notation, for example, be limited later in their choices for continuing in music based on this earlier anti-racist focus? I wrote this article to engage with these issues and to explore what I refer to as the paradoxes and casualties of critical pedagogy.

---

Juliet Hess is an assistant professor of music education at Michigan State University’s College of Music. Her research interests include anti-oppression education, activism in music and music education, music education for social justice, and the question of ethics in world music study.

---

More from the Philosophy of Music Education Review 25.2

Editorial 
Estelle R. Jorgensen

More than Just Music: Reconsidering the Educational Value of Music in School Rituals
Hanna M. Nikkanen and Heidi Westerlund

Wellbeing in the Secondary Music Classroom: Ideas from Hero’s Journeys and Online Gaming
June Countryman and Leslie Stewart Rose

The Phantasmagoria of Competition in School Ensembles
Joseph Michael Abramo

 • READ FOR FREE • 
Critiquing the Critical: The Casualties and Paradoxes of Critical Pedagogy in Music Education
Juliet Hess

Bauchman v. West High School Revisited: Text and Context in Music Education
William Michael Perrine

BOOK REVIEW

Communities of Musical Practice by Ailbhe Kenny 
Review by: Frank Heuser

Musical Competition and the Hidden Labor of Learning: A Closer Look at PME 25.2

This post is part of a series that takes a closer look at the scholarship behind IU Press Journals. Primarily written by journal editors and contributors, posts may respond to articles, provide background, document the development process, or explain why scholars are excited about the journal, theme, or article.

Joseph Michael Abramo’s article, "The Phantasmagoria of Competition in School Ensembles," from the Philosophy of Music Education Review  newest issue, is now available on JSTOR  &  Project MUSE. Below, Joseph elaborates on the philosophical challenge of how to measure student learning through competition and performance.

---

I wrote “The Phantasmagoria of Competition in School Ensembles” in Volume 25, number 2 of Philosophy of Music Education Review because I was interested in the widespread practice of competition in ensembles. I approached this topic with curiosity. I remember my experiences of competition as a student—auditioning for honors ensembles, competing with my school band against other schools—sometimes winning, but more often not. I remember taking trips to amusement parks with my school ensembles to compete and receive trophies. Even as a high school student, I found these practices fairly odd. I was curious to examine what is the logic of using such strategies in the process of learning music.

However, beneath the immediate interest in understanding the logic of competition in school music is a broader, and I think interesting, philosophical question—what counts as evidence of student learning? How do teachers know when a student “knows”? In competition, a performance stands in as an observable proof of some sort of learning that took place in the student—a reification of learning, as I call it in the essay. Questions of evidence of learning are usually technical questions of assessment—making sure a test has reliability and validity. But, beyond those technical questions is, I think, one of the most important conundrums of education, musical and otherwise: the very thing teachers hope to instill in students (learning and applicability to other situations) is unobservable and in some sense does not exist. Learning is something that happens in the mind and the body—others outside the mind cannot see that learning. The essay tries, through the concept of competition and performance, to think about this conundrum in education.

When I began thinking about competition and what counts as evidence of learning, I had also decided to learn about Karl Marx and Marxist theory. Much of the literature that has influenced me comes from this great tradition. Critical theorists in education, like Michael Apple, Henry Giroux, Peter McClaren, and Jean Anyon, are influenced by the Marxist tradition. Poststructuralism in general, including Bourdieu, Foucault, Spivak, and Derrida, are also influenced by Marxism. However, while these authors are influenced by Marx’s work, direct discussion of Marxists ideas, like alienation, labor power, and value, receive little direct application in education. Instead, Marx serves as a sort of inspiration rather than a direct application of the philosophical terms and concepts he wrote about. I felt it important for my own development to learn about these important ideas. As I read, I particularly became fascinated with the concept of “Phantasmagoria,” the idea that labor is hidden in products, and how Theodor Adorno extended this concept to explain how musical works hide labor.

This concept also resonated with me as I thought of my time as a middle school band director. So much of the work of rehearsals was trying our best to conceal the labor of learning. The more effortless our performance at the concert was, the better I looked as a teacher. This made me realize there are many tricks ensemble directors regularly employ to conceal the labor of learning. Altering the seating of an ensemble to improve sound, buying the correct mallets, reeds, and other equipment to improve students’ playing, seeking out playing venues with better acoustics—these do improve the sound of the ensembles, but I often wondered, “are these just tricks that improve the sound of the ensemble but have little effect on students’ learning?” I think music educators will continue to debate this question, and this essay was my attempt to begin to wrestle with these philosophical problems of practice.

---

Joseph Michael Abramo, Ed.D is an Assistant Professor of Music Education in the Neag School of Education at the University of Connecticut.

---

More from the Philosophy of Music Education Review 25.2

Editorial 
Estelle R. Jorgensen

More than Just Music: Reconsidering the Educational Value of Music in School Rituals 
Hanna M. Nikkanen and Heidi Westerlund

Wellbeing in the Secondary Music Classroom: Ideas from Hero’s Journeys and Online Gaming 
June Countryman and Leslie Stewart Rose

 • READ FOR FREE • 
The Phantasmagoria of Competition in School Ensembles 
Joseph Michael Abramo

Critiquing the Critical: The Casualties and Paradoxes of Critical Pedagogy in Music Education 
Juliet Hass

Bauchman v. West Highschool Revisited: Religious Text and Context in Music Education 
William Michael Perrine

BOOK REVIEW

Communities of Musical Practice by Ailbhe Kenny
Review by: Frank Heuser

A Wizard of Silks and Tulle: 'Phantom Thread' and Charles Worth

This post is part of a series that takes a closer look at the scholarship behind IU Press Journals. Primarily written by journal editors and contributors, posts may respond to articles, provide background, document the development process, or explain why scholars are excited about the journal, theme, or article. 

In celebration of the Oscar-nominated film, Phantom Thread, revisit Abigail Joseph’s article, “’A Wizard of Silks and Tulle’: Charles Worth and the Queer Origins of Couture,” from the Victorian Studies’ archives, available on JSTOR & Project Muse. Below, Abigail elaborates on the similarities between 19th century Parisian fashion designer, Charles Worth, and the fictional Reynolds Woodcock.

---

Towards the beginning of Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie Phantom Thread — perhaps after we had seen the eccentric couture designer Reynolds Woodcock throw one of his breakfast fits, claiming that particularly runny pastries or the sound of toast being buttered were enough to disrupt his focus for the entire day — my movie-going companion leaned over and whispered, “Was he based on Charles Worth?” The answer is no — Worth, though also British, lived and worked in 19th century Paris rather than 20th century London — but the question makes a lot of sense. The subject of my 2014 article “A Wizard of Silks and Tulle,” Worth is often credited with essentially inventing the system of haute couture fashion production; in addition to innovations like seasonal collections shown by models, he was one of the first fashion designers to become a celebrity in his own right, his lavishly expensive designs sought after by wealthy clients all over the world not only for their beauty and luxury but also for the allure of the House of Worth name. He was also one of the first men (since the 17th century) to break into the world of women’s fashion design, causing something of a scandal. He was referred to as a “man-milliner” in the English press, where well-known authors including Charles Dickens published satirical pieces questioning the propriety of this gender-role transgression as well as mocking Worth’s well-established (and, it seems, justified) reputation for arrogance, obsessiveness and fussy, bizarre habits — all qualities amply displayed by Reynolds Woodcock in Anderson’s film.

My article takes up a collection of anecdotes about Worth and his atelier from both suspicious (mostly male) journalists and from his clients, women who depict the same difficult, sometimes infuriating character, but show a great deal of patience, affection, and even love for him. One of the things that especially irritates the journalists is the adoration of the clients, their willingness to put up with his condescending and often rude behavior. Those clients, however, like some of Woodcock’s, tend to see themselves as comrades and collaborators, not merely mannequins, though at the same time they clearly enjoy the peculiar pleasures of being “worked on” by a demanding, autocratic man whose interest in the shapes of their bodies is very intense but decidedly non-sexual. Unraveling some of the complexities of that dynamic, I make the argument that Charles Worth embodied a kind of queer masculinity based in unconventional cross-gender relationships with women and feminine objects. He also, I think, initiated the idea of the couturier as a queer man, which is now so common that it is seen as a stereotype, but is more than that: in fact, although there is no evidence that Worth himself was homosexual (he was married and had two sons, though very little else is known about his personal life), the vast majority of high-fashion designers who followed in his steps throughout the 20th century and into the present have been gay men.

Reynolds Woodcock is not a gay man. Though it partakes of tropes and semi-coded language affiliated in 19th and 20th century literature with closeted homosexuality — he is a “confirmed bachelor”; women are continually frustrated by their inability to hold his romantic “attention”; scenes of dress-fittings take the place of sex scenes — Anderson’s script does not suggest even for a moment that his erotic interest might turn towards men.  At least one critic has taken issue with this, claiming that portraying Woodcock as heterosexual erases gay men from their own history. Indeed, it’s a fair point: almost all of the designers who Anderson and his collaborators have cited as inspirations for Woodcock’s character — Charles James, Cristobal Balenciaga, Christian Dior, Norman Hartnell — were gay, and as I and other scholars have argued (see, for example, the catalogue for the FIT Museum’s 2013 exhibit “A Queer History of Fashion,” edited by Valerie Steele), the queer contribution to fashion is an extraordinarily rich and very often overlooked or dismissed arena of cultural and aesthetic history.  A different Phantom Thread might have shown this; a Woodcock who becomes entranced by a young waiter named Albert rather than a waitress named Alma, who then tries to make a place for himself in to the rarefied, sanctified, troubled world of the London townhouse that is both couture house and haunted home. That film — or, perhaps, one that will be made in the future — might movingly portray the way that both closeted and open homosexualities seem somehow to have acted as catalysts for reimagining the ways that clothes might look.

But that is not the movie that Anderson made: instead, we have a love story between a man and a woman, but one that is — like Charles Worth — abundantly queer, if we take the term in the expansive theoretical sense that incorporates not just same-sex desires (and identities) but those that defy or exceed norms and conventions of all kinds. And comparing the two men lets us put the fictional Woodcock into a historic lineage of queer artists that begins with Worth in the mid-19th century. Woodcock’s strange, even bad, behaviors then become part of a cultural tapestry, in which the eccentricities and outsized personalities of designers (which often, though not always, have resisted various expectations of masculinity and femininity) take on meaning as threads, so to speak, in the art of fashion. Conversely, the film, as fiction, can take us places that historical records almost never do; it imagines for its central character an erotic life and psychological depths that illuminate, with detail both shocking and tender, the links between desire and design, between the body and its supplements.

In my article, I describe the relationships between Worth and his clients/muses as “controlling but also collaborative,” exasperating but weirdly tender, colored by a “variety of love that does not preclude prickly strains of rivalry, coercion, criticism, demand, and aggression.”  But the film goes a lot further than this. Twisting in wildly unexpected directions in its latter half — please note that spoilers follow! — it shows us the unbelievably kinky erotic textures of the relationship between a designer and a muse, or rather a woman who begins as muse and then becomes many other things.  A partial list: mistress, employee, collaborator, adversary, victim, caretaker, wife, surrogate mother, tormentor, dominatrix, and finally, it seems, soulmate. One way to think about the film would be a kind of narrative of the revenge of the muse: Reynolds Woodcock treats Alma quite wretchedly much of the time, demanding that she be subservient, physically and emotionally, to the vagaries of his needs. When we discover her using a carefully measured dose of poisonous mushrooms to make him sick and weak enough that he becomes utterly dependent on her, it seems that she has upended the power balance in their relationship, and in such a way that her monstrosity suddenly and vastly outdoes his. But the film does not end there. In the very last act, the final surprise is that he likes it: he becomes a willing participant in this dangerous play with vulnerability and strength, illness and recovery.

Some critics suggest that where things end up means that the film was never really about fashion in the first place, but I don’t think that’s right. Poisoning, which Oscar Wilde called a “subtle and secret” art, comparing it (archly) to both writing and drawing, is also the double of fashioning. Both practice the intricate, minutely calibrated manipulation of the body: Reynolds boasts, during their first dress fitting, that his skillfully constructed dresses will give Alma breasts, “if I choose to”; Alma in turn tells him, as he eats the first bites of her skillfully poisoned omelet, that he will not die, but may wish that he would. She will give him symptoms when and how she chooses to. Now each can break down and rebuild the other. Reynolds, in addition to finding erotic satisfaction in yielding to her perverse caretaking, also seems to admire Alma’s mastery of an art that perversely mirrors his own. Is the lesson, then, that fashion is deadly, or poisoning beautiful? The film does ask us to pursue these darker meditations. But it also gives entrancing life to an idea that I try to point towards in my article: that of high fashion as a queer place; one where the most inventive visions of human beauty can be materialized, and the strangest people can — whether in the brief moment of a fitting or the long one of a romance — find themselves reflected and remade in one another’s singular gaze.

---

Abigail Joseph is a Language Lecturer at New York University, and holds a PhD in English from Columbia University. Her writing on fashion history has appeared in Victorian Studies, Public Books, and the edited collection Crossings in Text and Textile. She is currently working on a book about the relationship between gay identity and material culture in nineteenth-century England. 

---

More from the Victorian Studies 56.2

“The True Meaning of the Word Restoration”: Architecture and Obsolescence in Jude the Obscure
Benjamin Cannon

Stylistic Virtue in Nineteenth-Century Criticism
Matthew Sussman

 • READ FOR FREE • 
“A Wizard of Silks and Tulle”: Charles Worth and the Queer Origins of Couture
Abigail Joseph

Refocusing Inter-American Studies: A Closer Look at JML 41.1

This post is part of a series that takes a closer look at the scholarship behind IU Press Journals. Primarily written by journal editors and contributors, posts may respond to articles, provide background, document the development process, or explain why scholars are excited about the journal, theme, or article.

Vaughn Anderson’s article, “‘Revision of the Golden Rule’: John Cage, Latin America, and the Poetics of Non-Interventionism,” from the Journal of Modern Literature’s newest issue, is now available on JSTOR & Project MUSE. Below, Vaughn explores inter-American relations characterized by willful neglect, strategic ignorance, and carefully curated silence.

---

Like many scholars who study inter-American literature and culture, my first work in the field happened mostly in archives. I wanted to explore how literature might have served as a means for debating definitions of Americanness between North and South America during the Cold War. What I could find in library stacks was limited: a few volumes of poetry translated to and from Spanish; brief descriptions of the Beats’ travels in Mexico; and selected surviving volumes of the few literary magazines that boasted readership in both the US and Latin America. The period produced innumerable calls for closer collaboration between North and South, but these calls themselves seemed to be more common (or at least more available) than the published work that they were supposed to produce.

Partly because of the rich archival material that we have from the period, the Cold War and the two decades leading up to it have become an area of focus for scholars of inter-American literary and cultural studies. This is largely where we’ve established the foundational models and material for our field: famous friendships like that between Langston Hughes and Nicolás Guillén; celebrated translations like the ones that Pablo Neruda did of Walt Whitman’s poetry; and the cultural policy initiatives that often supported these relationships, like PEN, Casa de las Americas, or the Pan American Union. Works like Harris Feinsod’s recently released Poetry of the Americas are a testament to the richness and diversity of the trans-hemispheric dialogue that developed during this era.

As I began sifting through archival collections of forgotten letters, unpublished translations, and aborted anthologies, I imagined myself reconstructing a cultural footbridge between seemingly separate American traditions. But what I gradually realized was that, by focusing on building this bridge, I was actively ignoring the chasm that it crosses. Indeed, the more I looked, the more I found a series of telling silences: Alejandra Pizarnik’s years’-long struggle to secure a fellowship in the United States; Octavio Paz’s irritation with his English translators; an abrupt end to a previously lively correspondence between John Cage and Augusto de Campos. While we tend to build inter-American studies on felicitous moments of correspondence, collaboration, and cooperation, I discovered that it is worthwhile to pay equal or greater attention to the moments in which that communication breaks down.

My current essay in the Journal of Modern Literature had its beginnings in a visit to the John Cage archives at Northwestern University. There, in a collected correspondence that spanned a period from 1973 to 1989, I found evidence of a warm friendship between Cage and Augusto de Campos. They frequently exchanged gifts and birthday wishes; they collaborated on events and publications; they scheduled dinners in Boston and New York. However, this essay is about what else I found: de Campos’s mounting frustration as he struggled to publish a Portuguese translation of Cage’s book, A Year from Monday; the increasing time delay between the letters that they exchanged; and the eventual end of the archived correspondence, some sixteen years after it began. This essay, and its investigation of Cage’s relationship with Latin America, began as an attempt to understand and contextualize the silence and miscommunication that seemed defined his correspondence with de Campos.

My essay focuses on the ways in which Cage’s interactions with Latin Americans dramatize competing notions about the ethics of silence and the value of non-interventionism. However, I should note that, since I submitted the final proof for this essay in late April of 2017, the idea of non-interventionism has regained a tragic relevance in discussions of US policy in Latin America. Since Hurricane Maria decimated Puerto Rico's infrastructure in September 2017, the US government's response largely has been to turn a newly resurrected non-interventionist rhetoric against its own citizens. This non-interventionist rhetoric that recently reemerged bears little resemblance to the non-interventionism championed by Latin Americans in the OAS at the height of the Cold War. Indeed, this administration chooses to treat Puerto Ricans’ calls for cultural and political independence as justification for neglect and extortion.

The central observation driving my recent work is that, at least since the Cold War, inter-American relations have been characterized by willful neglect, strategic ignorance, and carefully curated silence. The current US administration's non-interventionist policies exemplify this. For this aggressively white and Protestant administration, the legal status of Puerto Ricans as American citizens remains irrelevant. It is my contention that Cage’s Latin American interlocutors, and even Cage himself, provide us with alternative models and moral frameworks for understanding and practicing non-interventionism.

Works Cited

Feinsod, Harris. Poetry of the Americas: From Good Neighbors to Countercultures. Oxford UP, 2017.

---

Vaughn Anderson is an NTT assistant professor of English at Maryville University.

---

More from the Journal of Modern Literature 41.1

Editor's Introduction: Modernist Modes of Resistance
Paula Marantz Cohen

 • READ FOR FREE • 
Charlotte Salomon, Degenerate Art, and Modernism as Resistance
Ariela Freedman

Elizabeth Bowen and the Futurist Imagination
Keri Walsh

Stephen Dedalus and Nationalism without Nationalism
Aleksandar Stević

 • READ FOR FREE • 
“Revision of the Golden Rule”: John Cage, Latin America, and the Poetics of Non-Interventionism
Vaughn Anderson

War of Images or Images of War? Visualizing History in Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones
Zoë Roth

John Lanchester's Capital: A Dickensian Examination of the Condition of England
J. Russell Perkin

Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger: Birth and Demise of a Community
Raphaël Lambert

Possible Futures and Grammatical Politics in James Baldwin's Another Country
Laura R. Fisher

The 1939 State
British Writers and the Approach of World War II by Steve Ellis
Review by: Laura Blomvall

Recovering the Liberal Tradition
Bleak Liberalism by Amanda Anderson
Review by: Daniel Rosenberg Nutters

Modernist Resistance to the Surveillance State
Modernism and Mobility: The Passport and Cosmopolitan Experience by Bridget T. Chalk
Review by: Nissa Ren Cannon