Monday, May 4, 2009

Immigration Long Ago

Jay Caldwell, M.D., M.P.H.
4 May 2009

[Although this may seem a stretch, I’m going to link this week’s subject, immigration, with something that goes on in my daily life. It is a stretch, but give me a moment.]

Back on November 21st, Marcia Marma, the English Department’s “Program Assistant” for the Graduate Literature Program, emailed out a notice from one of my classmates who was having to give up her job as Research Assistant to Professor Annette Kolodny, because she had accepted a position in Louisiana at The Southern Review. The notice read:

Hi everyone,

Attached is a posting for a research assistant position with Professor Annette Kolodny. I encourage you all to apply. Annette is great to work with, the work is interesting, and you'll learn a lot about research and publishing. Annette is looking for someone with an interest in American literature who can start in early December and who can commit for at least a year. You'd be working with her on a book project.

I'm leaving the position because I've just accepted a job at The Southern Review in Baton Rouge, and I'm moving December 15th. Please feel free to call or email me with any questions.

Thanks!
Cara Adams


The official job description read:

Professor Emerita Annette Kolodny is seeking a part-time research assistant beginning December 1, 2008 and continuing through—and likely beyond—December 1, 2009. The position offers an invaluable opportunity to learn professional research skills, the skills required for publishable writing, and how to prepare a book for publication by working with Professor Kolodny to complete her current book project In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and American Popular Culture, under contract to Duke University Press. The ideal candidate would be a graduate student with interests in American literature and particularly Native American literature and popular culture. The student must have excellent English language skills, excellent research skills (both in the library and online), and some experience in preparing manuscripts for publication. The student will need a laptop and an automobile and must be willing to meet with Professor Kolodny at her home (about a fifteen-twenty minute drive from campus). Professor Kolodny will employ this graduate student privately (not through University funding but through her own personal funding), so the position will represent extra employment above and beyond the student’s employment with the University of Arizona.

I answered, blowing my own horn of course, suggesting to Dr. Kolodny that I would be one primo RA. I figured the $12 hourly would be pizza money. I downplayed the fact that I was probably only five years younger than she. I did check her out, of course. She’s a heavy hitter. An important late-twentieth century feminist critic. She’s got her own Wikipedia entry (it turns out that I have a Wikipedia entry too, but on more careful review it is actually for L. Jay Caldwell, the Colgate football coach from 1893-1895). One facet of Dr. Kolodny's expertise and fame has to do with the land and its literary feminization. Her entry in the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism fills 23 pages, the personal headnote alone being 3 pages long (2143-2165). She is a heavy hitter.

So, I show up. I soon learn that Dr. Kololdny, to many, is a kind, compassionate, caring, faithful, and devoted friend and colleague. I also discover that she can be annoying, infuriating, conceited, filled with hubris, devoid of patience, tactless, irascible, and mean-spirited. To me she is direct, precise, careful, and doesn't tolerate much b.s., but is willing to listen to my editorial suggestions, even accepting an occasional one. Over the last several months I have actually refined my writing style, starting sentences with conjunctions, eschewing some commas, and incorporating more readable quotations. I have also learned to follow instructions exactly, not striking out too far on my own.

Her husband, Daniel Peters, is a novelist, apparently of Middle American historical romances, at least judging by the titles: The Luck of Huemac (1981, 422 pp), Tikal (1983, 657 pp), and The Incas (1995, 1057 pp). These are all available through amazon.com. He seems to be working on his fourth, which Dr. Kolodny alludes to occasionally. He's also a big sports fan, whereas his wife has zilch interest. He's also got a hair and scalp situation going that he could pass for Bozo the Clown. Nice guy, though, really nice guy, and fully devoted to her care, well-being, and happiness.

Dr. Kolodny has had rheumatoid arthritis since she was a teenager, and is now so crippled and deformed, that she can barely walk, her arms have about one-half the range-of-motion of John McCain’s, and her fingers and hands have assumed a permanent and disabling ulnar drift. She undergoes aggressive and regular treatment for this, but is a poster girl for courage and grit. That’s where I (and Cara and several others before me) come in.

It’s actually great work. I function as an amanuensis. I take dictation directly from her into my computer, I write emails and letters for her, I do bibliographic and biographical research, I edit, I check out books and track down articles, I print, I deliver. I think I even may have provided some outside insight and feedback to her project. The hardest part of this gig is the time frame. Temporally, I am a lark. I usually get out of bed between 4 and 5 am, though I shoot for 3:30 in the summer. I’m in bed by 8 or 9. Because of her illness and her therapy sessions she says she rarely awakens before noon and often works through the night until near daylight. That would be 12 hours off from my clock. So once a week I work for her between 7:30 and 10 or 11 or 12 . That would be p.m. I’m pretty groggy by the time I go home.

This book she is now writing connects directly to this week's subject: immigration. In a nutshell, Dr. Kolodny is showing how Christopher Columbus’s discovery of the Americas subverted the American national narrative the leaders of our country were attempting to write in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Founding Fathers, and other heavy hitters over the next century, very much wanted the United States to have a white foundational myth-story. Columbus, a swarthy Italian in the hire of the Spanish, was not the ideal candidate for our national hero. What was needed was a blond, blue-eyed Nordic type. Think Leif Erickson. Furthermore, it was important to show that the “Indians” whom the “northmen” found here were not aboriginal to the region. To some degree, they succeeded and Dr. Kolodny is now carefully and deliberately deconstructing this myth. Her book is being written for both the lay public as well as professionals.

This past week we have been working on William Gilmore Simms. He was a South Carolinian who besides being a prolific author of historical romances, published a popular, history textbook, The History of South Carolina from its First European Discovery to its Erection into a Republic (1844) that remained in use for almost a half-century. In it, for example, and in articles published in Magnolia; or Southern Monthly, he argued fervently for the idea that the burial mounds and tumuli found throughout the south were not the remains of extinct Indian tribes, but rather were the remains of white cultures that had been destroyed by living savages (today we know this to be wrong: they are very, very old remains of very, very ancient aboriginal cultures). Dr. Kolodny quotes extensively from Simms, e.g. “suddenly, the fierce red men of the south-west came down upon them in howling thousands, captured their women, slaughtered their men, and drove them to their fortresses:—how they fought to the last, and perished to a man! And, in this history, you have the history of the Tumuli, the works of defence and worship—the thousand proofs with which our land is covered, of a genius and an industry immeasurably superior to any thing that the Indian inhabitants of this country ever attempted.”

So the connection here is immigration, but in this case who immigrated where and when. I have read extensive portions of her book, but it keeps growing like Topsy. Suffice that she is showing carefully and definitively that those folks who insist that “northmen” first came to this continent in the tenth or eleventh or twelfth centuries and established permanent colonies (Vinland), and who are thus ancestral to the white races of America are, to put it coarsely, full of shit.

Immigration seems forever to be a cauldron of narrativity. Even today, the ethnohistory of the southwestern United States and northern Mexico, is struggling with the issue of who has primacy, and so who has legitimacy in the region. Such a task of partitioning and compartmentalizing within nations is, in the end, counterproductive. I shall be interested in how Dr. Kolodny's book addresses this.

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