Global Beatworks Vol.2 WAV REX
Katja Gains
In "Aftermath: the Philosophy of the Beat Generation," first published in 1958, Jack Kerouac explained how he and his fellow travellers were "prophesying a new style for American culture, a new style (we thought) free from European influences..." (48). During his life Kerouac maintained a deep reverence for American culture and love for his country--even as he became an international countercultural icon--while over the last 20 years or so the wider work of the Beat Generation has undergone a critical expansion. As A. Robert Lee argues in his Introduction to The Routledge Handbook of International Beat Literature, "Time has long installed 'The Beats' as a familiar, even fixed, pantheon" (1), and the work of the original triumvirate--Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs--has gained a kind of countercultural canonicity, aided by the contributions of other leading Beat players, among them Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Neal Cassady, and Gary Snyder. As Lee points out, however, in recent years the field of Beat Studies has widened the scope of critical inquiry beyond the usual suspects, as well as bringing the contributions of female, African American, and LGBTQ Beat poets and novelists to light. Contemporary scholarship has also explored the Beat Generation as a transnational phenomenon, examining the ways in which these writers played a central role in the global counterculture. "Beat, in other words," Lee reminds us, "has long moved on not only from the one pre-emptive canon but also from the one geocentric location" (15).
Chapters of the first section (I) present a considerable push for equal attention to Central Eurasian steppe nomads in comparative historical discussions of political traditions (1) and large-scale geopolitics (3), with the lead editor of the volume, Kim, cautioning against "equating nomadism with decentralization and absence of political order" (p.17).3 The primary goal of this volume, similar to Kim's previous book,4 is to demonstrate how the institutions of steppe societies are of equal importance to global historical developments as those of the classic civilizations of the Mediterranean West and Central Plains East. Frontiers of culture contact between steppe nomads and the regimes of China (2) and the Near East (3) are given robust narratives that account for mediations and large-scale consequences of those interactions.
The editors of the volume astutely note that the many disparate regions and peoples of Eurasia repeatedly show intense degrees of "entanglement."8 But connectivity does not necessarily create a cohesive "cultural synthesis" (p.316). For example, Bopearachchi's (10) study of overlapping Scythian, Hellenistic, Indian, and Kushan traditions illustrates the complex cultural mediations and hybridities that often formed in areas of Central Eurasia like Ghandara.9 Although this volume proposes that "Eurasia was in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages an interconnected totality" (p.29), such a totality should not be seen as a synthesized singularity. In this case, we should heed the warning of modern sociologists that even amidst current globalization trends of technologies and interactions that make our world smaller, we are not hurdling toward a singular global culture.10
There are millions of non-Anglophone followers of the Beat buzz, reading the original texts or in translation, and Rock and the Beat Generation has been endeavouring, in recent months, to draw attention to that diversity and bring some fresh global angles to the conversation.
The book will be published in January. This collection of scholarly essays maps the Beat Generation movement globally by exploring American Beat writers and parallel movements/writers in other countries that shared with the Beats both a critique of global capitalism and a sense of the permeability of national and cultural boundaries. Thirteen essays by established and newer scholars in the field and an interview with poet Anne Waldman discuss not only iconic Beat authors Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Ferlinghetti, but less well-known writers such as Kyger, di Prima, Frazer, Kaufman, Joans, Whalen, and Trocchi. Contributors also discuss Beat-related writers in Britain, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Greece, and Japan.