INNOCENCE TO EXPERIENCE (AND BACK AGAIN?): Uncertain Passages through the Intercontinental Looking-Glass
INNOCENCE TO EXPERIENCE (AND BACK AGAIN?): Uncertain Passages through the Intercontinental Looking-Glass

Summary/Abstract: Our work begins with a kind of seeing. Wherever on the globe we may call home, practitioners of American Studies seek first and fundamentally to observe. As we bear witness to the life, history, and culture of the United States in all its complexities and contradictions, we seek much more than a surface knowledge. We aspire to penetrate through a resistant surface to another side of reality. Yet when we set forth in hopes of looking at and into the world around us, we are also likely to find our own image mirrored back toward us. Our best efforts at understanding do, I think, tend to double back upon us. The knowledge we seek regarding the Other comes back to us freighted with a new and different understanding of ourselves. From this both penetrating and reflected seeing—and also from the phantasmagoric legacy of Lewis Carroll—comes the metaphor for this essay’s title: the intercontinental looking-glass.As even a skim of the contents of this volume will confirm, however, one might as aptly choose another framing trope of vision: not a mirror, but a kaleidoscope. The chapters herein are transatlantic, transpacific, transnational, and transcendental. They simultaneously translate, transfix, and transform. They represent the best work of a conference that summoned the restless ghosts of Melville, Twain, Nella Larsen, Auden, Conrad and Allende. Containing multitudes in Whitmanesque fashion, the proceedings subsumed Rene Descartes, Arthur Miller, Eleanor Roosevelt, and even Whitman himself. As those who were there can well attest, the Sixth Congress of the International American Studies Association offered up some rare seeing indeed.

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