Blackwell Reference Online

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Since national borders regulate the movements of individual bodies and the shape of collective ones, the ways in which they are imagined, enforced, and (one hopes) rethought have palpable ramifications for how many Americans live their daily lives, both within and outside of that nation José Martí was fond of calling “the colossus of the North.” How national borders are viewed also has a profound impact on the formation of literary canons, intellectual constructs that, in the United States and elsewhere, have traditionally been deployed to sustain fictions of national impermeability. One of the centerpieces of the American literary canon constructed during the post-World War II institutionalization of American Studies was 1949 Nobel laureate William Faulkner, a regionalist with roots in the Old South. To the US Cold War academy, Faulkner's novels epitomized the moral integrity of liberal humanism and, along with it, a coherent vision of the nation, with all of its borders intact. What such canonizing readings conveniently ignored, however, was that Faulkner's major novels push hard against the very values they were deemed to sustain, including the idea of national integrity. I define “nation” as a provisional political construct that delineates, and restricts, cultural kinship; a “closed world,” in Wilson Harris's phrase. A nation, then, is a political construct without a necessarily ... log in or subscribe to read full text