Twentieth-Century Literature's Andrew J. Kappel Prize in literary criticism, 2004

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 2004

The winner of this year's prize is Loretta M. Mijares's "Distancing the Proximate Other: Hybridity and Maud Diver's Candles in the Wind." The judge is Susan Stanford Friedman, Virginia Woolf Professor of English and Women's Studies and Sally Mead Hands Bascom Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Among her books is Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter. She is working on a new book called Transnational Modernism: Contact and Travel Zones in the New Modernist Studies.

Professor Friedman writes:

    Judging the Kappel Prize for Twentieth-Century Literature is a great
    honor that brought home to me forcefully the vital role that
    journals play on the landscape of literary criticism in the twenty-
    first century. As academic book publishing becomes ever more driven
    by the bottom line, university presses have been retreating from
    their responsibility to provide a home for topnotch studies of
    literature, especially studies that are directed at specialists. The
    shocking reduction of scholarly monographs in literary criticism is
    putting an enormous strain on the evaluative processes of promotion.
    Moreover, market forces are playing too great a role in determining
    the kinds of questions and methodologies in literary studies that
    scholars can pursue in book form. In this context, refereed journals
    like Twentieth-Century Literature have become even more important
    than they were in the past. Journals are increasingly sites of
    greater intellectual freedom to pursue very different modes of
    literary criticism. Intensely researched, thought about, and argued
    scholarship for specialists in literature still has a home in
    journals like Twentieth-Century Literature.
       The essays submitted to me for the Kappel Prize are a case in
    point. All are rigorous, challenging, and well-written, exhibiting
    the best of their very different modes of criticism. Since all of
    the essays are excellent at what they do, selecting one for the
    prize was difficult--all the more so because I found myself learning
    from, admiring, but also disagreeing at points with all of them.
    Each spawned interior debate, as the best scholarship should do. And
    yet I had to choose. Worried that there was no Archimedean point
    from which I could select the absolute "best," I sensed my selection
    would simply reflect what interested me most. And perhaps that is
    true. However, in my defense, I found "Distancing the Proximate
    Other" to be the most original and persuasive of the nominees, and
    perhaps more importantly, to be the most suggestive for other
    research. The essay examines the intersection of historical and
    cultural narratives with literary ones, assuming the importance of
    each to the other. It combines the historical record of Eurasians in
    India (mixed-race people of British and Indian heritage) during the
    raj with a close reading of a representative popular novel by Maud
    Diver to question how race and gender work in the context of empire.
       The originality of "Distancing the Proximate Other" lies in its
    focus on in-betweenness--in this case, the in-betweenness of
    mixed-race people in the context of the British empire in India. In
    my view, the author's blend of historical and narrative analysis
    disrupts the prevailing meanings of hybridity in interesting ways
    and is potentially illuminating for a wide audience both within and
    beyond literary studies. Much has been made in cultural and literary
    studies of hybridity, as the author notes. But the hybridity widely
    touted or angrily attacked is typically cultural hybridity produced
    by travel, migration, and intercultural contact zones. This essay
    begins with the biological mixing of the "races" in India, which was
    initially promoted by the British East India Company and then
    disavowed as demographic pressures began to build; the uneasy
    cultural hybridity of Indian Eurasians was clearly shaped by the
    changing rhetoric and realities of the biological mixing of the
    "races" in a context where the concept of "race" took on
    increasingly fixed and oppressive meanings. The essay presents a
    compelling case for how hybridity is not an abstract social "good"
    (or "evil"), but is rather historically embedded in the evolving
    politics of multiple communities in different locations.
       Much has also been made of the racial divide between colonizer
    and colonized in postcolonial studies. This essay, however, looks at
    the history of a mixed-race community that was privileged in
    relation to Indians but disadvantaged in relation to the British.
    This situational politics of in-betweenness plays out in interesting
    ways in the ideologically driven, popular literature of empire as
    exemplified by Maud Diver's Candles in the Wind. Part of the novelty
    of the essay's argument is how it demonstrates that popular British
    representations of Euroasians were dramatically at odds with the
    historical realities of the Euroasian communities. As these mixed-
    race groups won the legal right to be termed Anglo-Indians along
    with special privileges of their in-between status, the popular
    literature of the British refused the uncanny connection between
    themselves and the Eurasians and exhibited considerable anxiety
    about this cultural and biological identification. The author's
    concept of the narrative displacement of the "proximate other" into
    the position of the "distant other" is potentially very useful for
    other research. Eurasians in novels like Diver's, the author shows,
    are relocated from "the uncannily familiar to the undeniably other."
    It would be particularly interesting to explore what more complex
    writers than Diver--British, Indian, or Eurasian--do with such
    ideologically driven cultural narratives.
       Finally, although the author draws no parallels between the
    Eurasians of the British raj to the literatures and discourses of
    American racism, the resonances are there nonetheless--the threats
    posed by individuals who "pass"; the "one-drop-of-blood" rule of
    racial taint; the repulsion against the physical traits of
    "miscegenation"; the paranoia of black-men-raping-white-women; the
    double standard for racial mixing that makes it more threatening for
    white women to "mix" with other races; the place of "new women" in
    racial transgression; and so forth. Literatures in the distinct
    contexts of the British empire and American slavery are surely not
    the same, but the transnational/transcontinental parallels bear some
    exploration.

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Twentieth-Century Literature's Andrew J. Kappel Prize in literary criticism, 2004

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 2004

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