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| Lene M. Johannessen |
Lene M. Johannessen is a Professor of American Literature
and Culture in the Department of Foreign Languages at the University of Bergen,
Norway. She is the author of Threshold
Time: Passage of Crisis in Chicano Literature (Rodopi, Amsterdam-New York,
2008) and Horizons of Enchantment (U Press of New England, 2011). She has
edited and co-edited numerous books on American studies. Emerging Aesthetics Imaginaries, co-edited, is forthcoming from
Lexington Press.
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| Lucrecia Guerrero |
LG: Please share
with our readers how you were first introduced to Chicano literature and which
authors you read?
LMJ: Normally one
chooses one’s Master program according to the specialization in the BA degree,
but for various reasons I had two majors in addition to English: Spanish and
Russian. On the advice of one of
my Russian professors I decided to go with English. However, I thought it would
be a shame to just ignore my two other “languages,” and my supervisor at the
time suggested I look into Mexican American literature as a way of at least
making some use of Spanish. After reading around a little, it would be Richard
Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory that got
my attention. This was both because of the controversy which at the time
surrounded the book, but also because I saw a really interesting way I could
bring my third major, Russian, into the mix. This went via Mikhail Bakhtin’s
work, which I had read a little in the original.
Of course, doing research for a MA
thesis on Hunger of Memory inevitably
included doing research in the burgeoning field of Chicano/a studies. Among the
authors I read back then were mostly the canonical writers, Gonzales, Rivera,
Paredes, Anzaldúa, Anaya, Castillo, and all provided wonderful encounters with
what was for me a new tradition.
LG: Did you continue to read Chicano/a
authors on your own or did you follow a directed program? Which authors most appealed to you
initially, and why?
LMJ: It was
really only during the work on the MA thesis that I became acquainted with
Chicano/a lit; on our readings lists in both undergraduate and graduate courses
in the English program this literature was not included. I think that one
reason why Rodriguez appealed back then was the universality of its appeal,
across temporal, geographical, racial, gender boundaries, which I think still
holds. The other writer specifically I was attracted to was Tomás Rivera,
himself one of Rodriguez’ critics of course, but it was a similar aspect of his
And the Earth that stood out, a
poetics of community and singularity that can stand on its own no matter what
political, social and cultural parameters you come to it from.
LG: As a scholar you read with an
objective and analytical mindset; also, as a Norwegian, Chicano/a literature is
“foreign” to your cultural and political experience. Both of the aforementioned
factors, it seems to me, distance you from the narrative and increase your
reading experience as an “outsider.” As such, I wonder if you have ever found
yourself pulled into a story by universal themes and identifying with the
narrative on a personal level? How would you say your experience reading
Chicano literature differs—if indeed it does—from reading “mainstream” U.S.
literature?
LMJ: The question
about outside-ness is actually one I have thought about a lot. It is a question
that goes into the foundations also of how we think about aesthetics. When I
got the PhD position here in Bergen (in Norway PhD grants are advertised as
four years positions, integrated into daily department life, and they are and
were few and far between!) it was to do a project in Chicano/a literature. In
the course of the PhD years I never found my position as an “outsider” to be
much of a problem. In some ways, quite the contrary. In the 1990s, Chicano/a
studies, as many other so-called “ethnic studies” programs could be quite
politicized, in the sense that ideological frameworks also tended to work their
sometimes domineering way into questions of aesthetics and aesthetic function.
This was something I didn’t really have to take into account in my own
readings, and this is mostly because, don’t forget, from where I stand, Chicano/a lit is American literature. What I mean is
that all American literature is equally “foreign” or familiar to me as a
Norwegian.
Chicano/a
lit is, to me, one of a number of components, expressions, if you will, that
circulate within the field of Am lit as different manifestations of regionalist
perspectives within the larger region. Chicano culture and aesthetics find its
place among the multiple components that make up American (and the Americas’)
literatures and cultures – a composite that in its turn already comes tangled in drawn-out networks. So, from a
non-American perspective, from “afar,” Chicano/a presents itself not
essentially unlike how Chinese-American, African-American, Southern, Midwestern
cultures and aesthetics do –the products so-far of historical vectors in what
Doreen Massey calls a “space of loose ends and missing links.” In a sense, looking at American
literature this way is to see horizontally, to see the various articulations of
irreducible historic-cultural beings constituting differently formed threads in
a large and complicated fabric within the geographical body we know as the
United States.
I guess this also answers your
question about whether reading Chicano literature differs from reading
“mainstream” U.S. literature? I would say it does not, because that assumes we
know the mainstream, and, honestly, I don’t know that I do, unless we have in
mind writers like Faulkner (who is a Southern writer first and foremost).
LG: As a professor of English, I believe you
have included Chicano/a literature, as well of that of other minorities, in a
U.S. literature survey course. On
the syllabus I reviewed, the Chicano/a selection is Under the Feet of Jesus by Helena María Viramontes. First, what
factors led to your selecting this particular work? Second, what special
preparation, if any, do you give your students in order to help them with the
reading? And last, have you noticed your Bergen students reacting differently
to Chicano/a literature than to the more traditionally taught U.S. literature?
LJM: One thing
students must have is a general sense of the historical and cultural routes
that lead into first Mexican American and then Chicano literature/culture. But
again, from their standpoint, this is not essentially different from how the
same applies to all American literature. I mentioned Faulkner: without a sense
of the mesh of routes he writes in and from, the depth and drama of Sutpen’s “design”
in Absalom, Absalom! is not graspable.
So, too, with e.g. Rivera’s And the Earth Did not Devour Him:
without an understanding of the history of migrant workers in the US Southwest,
the book’s true power goes unnoticed.
When I include Chicano/a authors I consequently
make sure the students also read history. I chose Viramontes’ Under the Feet of Jesus for several
reasons, but most importantly because it is essentially a coming of age story. The
novel is an excellent example of the universality of literature, because it is
through genre and poetics that the story lures the students into a landscape
packed with tropes in American culture generally, and in California society
specifically. It is also painfully timely, what with the “beautiful wall” and
talk about immigration and deportation that have intensified again lately. In
its portrayal of the anxieties of immigration I think also it I transposes well
to other places, for instance Norway.
LG: In Threshold Time: Crisis in Chicano Literature you discuss how a
literary canon—in this case, that of the U.S.--reflects how the dominant
cultural chooses to see itself. Minority
literatures continue to be ignored to a “significant extent,” you state,
because these literatures “do not fit [that] desired projection of self.”
For
geographical and historical reasons, the roots of Mexican and Chicano/a
cultures grow deep and inextricably intertwined with those of the greater U.S.
culture, yet those roots that bind also twist into knots that have yet to be
worked out. In your opinion, do these
conflicts, and likely contradictions in perception of the past, make it more or
less likely that Chicano/a literature will be welcomed into the literary canon?
LMJ: I honestly
don’t know, although my own instinct is that there eventually isn’t much of a
choice. The problem with talking about a literary canon in the first place is
that we are talking about a cultural canon, which means talking about cultural
heritage and legacy. And right there, and especially now in the US, I don’t see
how there can be any agreement on much of anything. The polarization we have
seen intensifying is all about definitions and heritage, which brings back the
question of region again: maybe it makes more sense to think in terms of
regional canons, although even then any kind of consensus would be
hypothetical. If the canon aims at helping us understand our present by
anchoring itself in e.g. literary works from the past, then the question pops
up again: whose past, and when? This is explicitly or implicitly part of
Chicano/a literature now as well as then, if only because the Borderland
figures prominently in so many works, including your own, like for instance in the
story “Even in Heaven,” wouldn’t you say? A similar concern was a thread in
Rodriguez’ Brown: The Last Discovery of
America, and is one that has to be addressed. Ultimately any discussion of
a canon is a discussion of identity, and, well, I’m not terribly optimistic
that that discussion goes well. We are thrown back to the Preamble, right? “In
order to create a more perfect Union
… “ It’s a work in progress.
LG: You’re currently working on a new
project which goes into detail on “aesthetic imaginaries.” I believe you are
particularly interested in the connection and development of the latter within
Chicano/a “borderland” literature. In layman’s terms, please explain the term and
its relationship to this literature. Is there more you would like to share
about this upcoming project or another?
LMJ: I like
thinking about aesthetic imaginaries because it has the potential of making out
the contours of that tricky bridge between how we imagine our ways of fitting together - our claims to place, sense
of origin etc., how these imaginations are given shape in various aesthetics, and how ultimately these both
constitute and are constituted by something more real, which is the imaginary. In this project I don’t think
I will be focusing on Chicano/a lit specifically, but it is still very early in
the process. I hope by next year to be closer to getting funding to a
thoroughly interdisciplinary project where questions of diaspora, tradition,
and nostalgia are being posed from perspectives of film, curating,
anthropology, digital culture, and a wide range of literary studies, all in
relation to the challenges that trail aesthetic imaginaries. What Eliot calls the
“present moment of the past” seems to me to provide a path that more generally
applies to comparative studies, and a kind of “threshold” thinking. I am
however working on another book that “reads” various locations in California as
performative, among them Chavez Ravine (Dodgers Stadium), Fort Ross, and
Chinese Camp, and what I find so fascinating in this project are the incredibly
“messy” routes that crisscross the state from so early on, and, again, how
their traces all speak to that present moment of the past.
BOOKS:
- Johannessen, Lene M. 2011. Horizons of Enchantment : Essays in the
American Imaginary. University Press of New England. 166 pages. ISBN:
978-1-58465-999-0.
- Johannessen, Lene M; Sillars,
Stuart; Dipio, Dominica, editors. 2009. Performing Change: Identity, Ownership and Tradition in Ugandan
Oral Culture. Novus Forlag. 230 pages. ISBN: 978-82-7099-552-3.
- Johannessen, Lene M. 2008. Threshold Time: Passage of Crisis in
Chicano Literature. Rodopi. 204 pages. ISBN: 978-90-420-2332-1.
- Johannessen, Lene M; Sillars,
Stuart John; Dipio, Dominica, editors. 2008. Performing Community. Novus Forlag. 275 pages. ISBN:
9788270994991.
- Johannessen, Lene M; Cahill,
Kevin M. editors. 2007. Considering
Class: Essays on the Discourse of the American Dream. LIT Verlag. 224
pages. ISBN: 978-3-8258-0259-2.
- Rønning, Anne Holden;
Johannessen, Lene M., editors 2007. Readings
of the Particular: The Postcolonial in the Postnational. Rodopi. 262
pages. ISBN: 978-90-420-2163-1.
- Grønstad, Asbjørn;
Johannessen, Lene M., editors 2005. To Become the Self One Is: A Critical
Companion to Drude Krog Janson's A Saloonkeeper's Daughter. Nova Science
Publishers, Inc. 210 pages. ISBN: 82-7099-405-7.
Essays (relevant
to Chicano/a studies:
"Regional Singularity and
Decolonial Chicana/o Studies," Routledge Handbook of Chicana/o Studies,"
eds. Denise Segura, Francisco Lomeli, Elyette Benjamin-Labarthe, Routledge.
Forthcoming 2017.
"Poetics of Peril," CounterText,
special edition Thinking Literature
across Continents, Edinburg University Press. Forthcoming.
“Russia's Californio Romance: The Other Shores of Whitman's Pacific,"
in The Imaginary
and Its Worlds: American Studies after the Transnational Turn,
eds Laura Bieger, Ramón Saldívar, Johannes Volz,University Press of New
England, 2013.
"Postcolonial Palimpsest:
Hybridity and Writing," Cambridge
History of Postcolonial Literatures. CUP 2012
