With the semester over, I’m hoping to get back to developing this newsletter with more consistent posts. I have been both busy and struggling with motivation since my election post-mortem. Getting back into my projects will be the best way out of the malaise.

I have been doing a good job watching movies on Criterion Channel recently (instead of just surfing indecisively for an hour, giving up and playing a videogame). I’ve been making my way through the work of two quite different directors: Mike Leigh and John Waters.

My experience of Leigh dates to seeing Happy-Go-Lucky (2008) and its follow-up, Another Year (2010) in theaters when they were released in the U.S. I thought both were brilliant, but for whatever reason I never sought out Leigh’s heralded 90’s classics like Naked (1993) and Secrets and Lies (1996). Criterion has quite a few Leigh films up now, so I’ve been trying to correct that and have watched Topsy-Turvy (2000), Naked, and his first feature, Bleak Moments (1971), so far.

All three are stunning, but Topsy-Turvy is my pick for a must-watch. A period piece about the staging of Gilbert and Sullivan’s orientalist fantasia, The Mikado (1885), it is a stunningly immersive portrait of the personalities and work of the Savoy Theater. It’s also full of brilliant performances, with Leigh regulars Jim Broadbent and Timothy Spall as particular highlights. I love how long Leigh lets you sit in scenes for such extended periods. It’s the opposite of ruthless Hollywood filmmaking, where every moment has to have a clear plot and entertainment purpose. Scenes linger and let you imagine characters much more fully because we get to see them interact in all sorts of unexpected ways. There’s no one key purpose of a scene, it’s rather a glimpse into a fully realized world of humans.

Naked is great but it’s a rough watch, concerned as it is with how the misery of post-Thatcher England was breeding despair and cruelty among the downwardly mobile lower middle classes and how that was making people more vulnerable to predatory capitalists (here envisioned in the figure of a type of British Patrick Bateman landlord who preys upon and sexually assaults his poor resourceless tenants). Although, it’s quite resonant given our own social/economic collapse of the last decade in the U.S. and David Thewlis’s apocalyptic monologues can feel like the noise inside my own head sometimes, it struggles to offer the more humanist warmth that mitigates the cruelty and awkwardness in other Leigh films. It’s there, and the film is quite darkly funny, but it is a bleak masterpiece.

Bleaker than Bleak Moments, for certain, which I found mostly hilarious in its portrait of lower-middle-class inabilities to adjust to the sexual revolution. Like in all subsequent Leigh films I’ve seen, the characters are trapped in their preconceived ideas of the world, of etiquette and manners, and unable to free themselves to feel and express desires. But, importantly, they will never benefit from such extreme restraint. It’s a miniaturist study of his great themes of awkwardness, outcasts, and class. But despite giving us the most hilariously awful date and first (and last) kiss I’ve ever seen, I don’t sense the characters are forever trapped, just temporarily stuck. And while their inability to express themselves (“I should think that if we ever managed to touch each other, it would be a very good thing”) is extreme, it’s very human and relatable. Well, at least in the case of the main character Sylvie. Her teacher boyfriend is quite unrelatable in his constant barely suppressed quiet rage about everyone around him—but he is hilarious and I love watching his facial expressions as he manages a world he just can’t accept. You need a lot of patience for people barely talking and nothing really ever happening to get on the wavelength of this film, but it’s a fully developed artistic statement from a young Leigh and I loved it.

As for Waters, all the cliches about him being a genius of trash, American treasure, and queer icon, are accurate. Right from Multiple Maniacs (1970) (the earliest and most amateurish Waters film I’ve seen) the sensibility is fully developed in its mix of camp, drag diva comic genius Divine’s bipolar performances, and outrageous underground cinema provocations. I have nothing new to say. I’ve watched Maniacs, Female Trouble (1974), Desperate Living (1977), Polyester (1981), Hairspray (1988), Cry-Baby (1990), and Pecker (1998) recently and all are brilliant and hilarious. So far Female Trouble is my favorite, although all have moments that belong in some tasteless comedy hall of fame. If you can stomach the underground provocations and amateurism every film is worth it, but if you would rather avoid some of the most offensive and gross-out moments, start with Polyester, the first time Waters and company worked with a professional production company. Everything from then on stays within the boundaries of an R rating. I also watched Jackass: The Movie (2002) on Criterion (!!) recently and it fits right in with Waters even if the queerness is more suppressed. These guys are really into each other’s bodies, even if the thing has the thinnest veneer of frat boy “no homo” tagging. It’s no wonder Waters cast Johnny Knoxville in his final film, A Dirty Shame (2004). Jerry Stiller in Hairspray had me imagining an alternate universe where Divine had got to play George’s mother in Seinfeld (nothing against the amazing Estelle Harris). All of Waters’s stuff just gives me great joy and leaves me with the hope that we are not as trapped in the stale culture war antagonism between normie liberalism’s respectability politics and the right-wing scam of anti-wokeness as it would seem. Next time a right-winger claims the right is the realm of free speech now, ask them what they think of Pink Flamingos. The mask will drop quickly, I bet.

As for my reading, I’ve been trying to devise a Foundations of American Literature syllabus focused on the writing and experiences of people who were not U.S. citizens (or settlers in the colonial period) either by exclusion, flight, or expatriation. This is not in of itself a particularly radical approach. Central foundational canonical works on any American Literature survey are by people who were never documented and/or did not ever settle in what would become the U.S. Reaching back into the colonial era I think this fairly includes Christopher Columbus and John Smith who spent only short amounts of their lives in the western hemisphere, It would certainly include major definitional writers of U.S. identity, like Hector St. John De Crevecoeur (a French aristocrat who cosplayed as a yeoman farmer settler), Phillis Wheatley (an enslaved person who was born in Africa and fled the U.S. after gaining freedom to die in England), and Alexis de Tocqueville. Major expat novels are borderline cases (Melville’s British merchant marine works, the bulk of Henry James), and, of course, countless formally enslaved writers and indigenous writers existed in the legal margins of citizenship. It’s not a big stretch from any normal American Literature survey to focus on how non-citizens and expats have defined the nation and its myths.

But I want to go a little further. As Daniel Immerwahr has written in How to Hide an Empire (2019), there has always been a U.S. Empire, and that empire rules over millions of people who are not U.S. citizens. This includes various migrated laborers, from enslaved people and Chinese railroad workers to the Central and South American migrant labor of the 20th and 21st centuries. It also includes the millions of people who have lived in U.S. territories. This includes “Indian Country,” the Philippines after the U.S. captured it from Spain until its independence in 1946. Hawaii and Alaska before statehood (and arguably for some people living there, still after), the more well-known territories of Guam, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and the US Virgin Islands. Does it also include client states and states where U.S. imperial activity fundamentally shaped political and economic outcomes away from the will and direction of the people—say post-war Japan, Haiti, Guatemala, Panama, Isreal/Palestine, West Berlin, South Korea, South Vietnam, Taiwan, Iraq, Afghanistan? If we start centering non-citizens in the story of the United States and American Literature, we start needing to contend with quite an expansive, global, sphere of cultural production.

So, to not get too overwhelmed by the scope I’m introducing, I’m thinking of pairing a set of 20th and 21st-century novels that thematize looking at America or the U.S. from perspectives that we don’t normally include but are very much part of U.S. history with selections of the relevant historical material. To make my selections, I’ve been reading through a few possibilities. I just read Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (2015), a stunning novel about the aftermath of the Vietnam War from the perspective of Vietnamese exiles (which has been made into an HBO miniseries). Thanks to a recommendation from Jennie Lightweis-Goff, I am also reading a novel, The Moor’s Account (2015) by Laila Lalami. This is a rewriting of the Spanish Narvaez Expedition (1527-1536) to Florida documented by Cabeza de Vaca (a standard text in American Literature anthologies) told from the imagined perspective of an enslaved North African Muslim who is mentioned in the historical record. I will follow up by reading some classics of American Multi-Ethnic literature like Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters (1990) about the U.S. wars in the Philippines and subsequent Pilipino immigration; John Okada’s No-No Boy (1957) on Japanese internment and the men who refused to be drafted into the U.S. military during WW2; and Hector Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier (2000) about the afterlives of the trauma inflicted by CIA trained murder-squads in Guatemala and among Guatemalan migrant communities in LA.

One area I know I need to thematize or highlight is El Norte and the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands, not only because this is of such political importance right now, but because Spanish and the early years of the Mexican Republic in El Norte (modern-day Northern Mexico AND California, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas) is a foundational space for our lives today in the contemporary U.S. While this area was relatively less populated than the rest of Mexico it still had a life and culture (both Spanish and Indigenous) that was contiguous with the rest of Central and Latin America before the U.S. divided Mexico by conquest in 1845. And the border would remain porous for quite a while after that. My feeling is that more Americans need to understand that the current imaginary of a heavily securitized U.S.-Mexican border is an incredibly recent phenomenon, a racist fantasy of controlling space for whiteness that is an imperial imposition on a space that belonged to other Latin and Indigenous people long before the U.S. sliced it up in its imperial expansion. Thus, contemporary border policing represents the destruction of a life and cultural world much deeper than English-speaking white settlers often recognize (and has quite a bit in common in its ideologies and technologies as the division of Palestine by Isreal).

A cornerstone novel on this could be Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1991)—an encyclopedic epic narrative of this nation that never was but in which many still live. I love Silko and teach her other great novel, Ceremony (1977), regularly. But Almanac is simply too long for a book for an undergraduate survey course so I’m still on the lookout for an alternative novel to fill in this space. There are some interesting borderlands and El Norte novels from the 19th century. Raul Coronado’s excellent study of 19th-century Mexican Texas cultural production, A World Not to Come (2013), is a guide here. But I’d love tp find something a little more approachable for my students alongside the historical material.

My goal is not an overt political polemic, but an attempt to complicate that category of U.S. citizen that is taken as so simplistically identical with what it means to be an American in political and popular discourse. Non-Citizens have always been not just subjects of U.S. power, but also agents in the creation of our political and cultural realities. It was Crevecoeur, after all, who helped invent both the libertarian dream of a nation of small landowners and the earliest articulations of the melting pot of U.S. equality. But his American Farmer was a fictional persona, and the author was a loyalist who fled back to his nobleman’s estate in France when the Revolutionary War broke out. Millions of people have lived in U.S. territories, subject to the U.S. government, but without access to the rights of citizenship and representation. There’s not much I can do as a teacher, but trying to recenter our consciousness of history and literary culture away from the myths we take for granted and towards a more capacious and complicated sense of the past seems one area where I can contribute to maintaining a commitment to knowledge and truth as we are flooded with racist lies and nationalist myths.