Between the National and the Transnational, 1980 to the Present:
Masculinities in Britain and the U.S. :: more
About the Humboldt ProjectResearch in that interdisciplinary subfield called masculinity studies can be divided into two general stages: in the first stage, masculinity was typically taken to be a monolithic phenomenon, a phenomenon understood in the singular. In the second (and indeed current) stage, masculinity studies explicitly takes as its object masculinities in the plural. Research in this area now insists that masculinity is a phenomenon that assumes a dizzyingly broad range of forms.
Most current scholarship in this area has insisted on the ways in which culturally-specific masculinities are obscured by, and wreak havoc with, older scholarly assumptions that masculinity is monolithic. It has become increasingly clear that while one could to some extent characterize white masculinity, for example, as dominant in certain nations and even, perhaps, on a global scale, the more or less exclusive focus on a normative white masculinity (though of course it was not called normative white masculinity, it was simply called masculinity) erased from view the broad range of masculinities found in a wide variety of specific racial, ethnic, national, diasporic, cultural, and subcultural locations.
The recent history of masculinity studies can then be seen as a history of the increasing differentiation of the field’s object of analysis; here, as in so many other areas of literary studies, difference has become methodologically central. If this emphasis on differentiation has clearly moved the field beyond the limitations of earlier, more generalizing modes of analysis, it has also produced its own limitations. It is exactly because of this strong focus on ever more differentiated, culturally-specific masculinities in the scholarship as it now stands that a larger analytic framework is missing within which we can begin to understand the broader contexts for diverse masculinities.
This research project considers the literary representation of masculinity within a transnational framework. We wish to examine the ways in which, in Britain and the United States since World War II, masculinities as they are represented, negotiated, and produced by literary texts are mediated by the national; we want to examine the ways in which masculine identity and national identity mutually inform each other. In Britain and the US the proliferation of differentiated masculinities becomes increasingly evident during the post-World War II period for specifically national and transnational reasons, reasons which include global patterns of decolonization and migration, and the international emergence of “new” subaltern subjects demanding various kinds of social, cultural, and political recognition. By understanding the larger, transnational context for the emergence of pluralized, culturally differentiated masculinities, and by highlighting the mediating factor of national difference within this broader horizon, we hope to nudge the discourse of masculinity studies in a new direction.
A masculinity studies that has developed the habit of automatically prioritizing difference while ignoring commonality across differences – ignoring larger transnational contexts for those differences, for example – is as one-sided as the earlier set of assumptions about masculinity’s monolithic character which this more recent set of assumptions has now largely displaced. A number of important recent interventions in the field have called for a more sustained geographical consideration of masculinities, for analysis that can account for the ways in which masculinities are defined in simultaneously local, national, and global terms, and which therefore have to be studied at a number of different levels, ranging from the most narrowly location-oriented and culturally specific to the global.
This is an important call for scholarly movement in a direction that both builds on recent work in the field of masculinity studies and moves past it, toward transnational, comparative kinds of analysis. Although literary research on masculinities in Britain and the US has certainly been rich, no comparative analysis of the literary representation and production of masculinities has ever been undertaken for these two countries whose recent histories simultaneously converge and diverge so suggestively. As the emphasis of masculinity studies has moved from its initial, universalizing claims toward its more recent, particularizing ones, the problems imposed by the lack of precisely this kind of comparative analysis have only become more evident.
In a context of increasing economic and cultural globalization, for example, the very difference between dominant and subaltern – on a global scale as well as within specific nations – is frequently mediated by national differences. Examples include the strained relation between racially and ethnically dominant groups on the one hand and immigrant groups on the other, as well as the way in which subaltern masculinities are often deeply informed by the national liberation struggles opened up by successive waves of decolonization after World War II. Comparative analysis can thus facilitate a more rigorous understanding of the similar but far from identical repercussions, within each country, of decolonization and a perceived loss of influence, after the Suez and Vietnam debacles, for example. Our comparative framework will also facilitate the scholarly understanding of the ways in which subaltern masculinities, precisely in opposing dominant white masculinities, for example, are bound together with and emerge in response to what they oppose and, further, how this boundedness or interconnectedness operates similarly and differently in two nations whose influence vis-à-vis the rest of the globe diverged after World War II.
How to understand masculinities in terms of commonality as well as difference, especially in relation to the striking combination of commonality and difference that characterizes the postwar histories of Britain and the U.S.? How do new, postwar forms of national and masculine identity in these two nations reconstruct imagined national pasts, for example, in ways which retain force in the distinctive environment in which global economic and military hegemony appears to have passed from one to the other? How are masculinities informed by the ways in which contingent national histories are retrospectively conceived as national myths, and how does this play out similarly and differently in Britain and the US?
A certain nostalgia for older forms of masculinity seems to operate in the postwar literary landscape of both countries – nostalgia for outdated class certainties in Britain, nostalgia for a frontier, individualistic masculinity in the US. How can these forms of masculine nostalgia be understood against a transnational context in which one of these countries has lost its older, imperial, national mission, while such a mission increasingly dominates the cultural life of the other country? If a longing for escape from certain kinds of social constraint informs certain forms of youthful, rebellious masculinity in both countries, how are these similarities to be understood in relation to simultaneous contextual differences – the differences between an older, artistocratic, effete manhood rejected by Britain’s “angry young man,” for example, and a contemporary, suburban, man-in-the-gray-flannel suit manhood rejected by American Beat writers?
How to understand more recent literary representations of masculinity in terms of the deindustrialization which began in both countries in the seventies, and how is this kind of masculinity related to the deeper and wider landscape of consumerism that attended this de-industrializing trend, a landscape so central to the literary production of both countries? These are the kinds of questions we want to address, questions only comparative, transnational analysis can address. This project will seek to understand the specificity of highly differentiated masculinities in relation not only to the national and cultural life of Britain and the U.S. in the decades since World War II, but in relation to transnational lines of influence between them.
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