The promise of Lauren Berlant: An interview

Abstract

Lauren Berlant is Professor of̂ English and the Humanities at the University of Chicago. Berlant's research and published work reflect an inter-disciplinary trajectory and a (counter) political agenda. She works between several academic disciplines, English, Law, Cultural studies, Politics, Queer studies, and Women's studies. What binds her different projects together is her interest in the force of optimism in peoples' attachments to each other and to concepts, for example, of the good life, good intentions, political worlds, and transparent affects (such as love and pain). These attachments are especially animated in proximity to the formal institutions of collective life, such as the family, academia, and the nation, but are engendered in conventional practices as well. Berlant is soon to complete a trilogy of books which focus on questions of national fantasy and citizenship. In the first, The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia and Everyday Life (University of Chicago Press, 1991) Berlant argues that citizenship is the place where nationality, subjectivity, and agency meet. In the final book in the trilogy, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Duke University Press, 1997), Berlant focuses more explicitly on the question of the citizen, via an analysis of the privatisation of national culture in the Reaganite period. This book uses the pilgrimage to Washington narrative as its structuring trope and asks why things that cannot act as citizens foetuses and children, for example bear so much of the burden of defining official and popular discussions of citizenship in contemporary mass national culture. She analyses the relationship between the hegemonic politics of intimacy that places sex and family at the centre of national life and structural economic and cultural forces that also engender subjectivity, fantasy, and value. The trilogy will soon be completed by The Female Complaint: the Unfinished Business of American Sentimentality, a book about 'women's culture' and its historic role in the production of national/capitalist norms of affect and identity. Along with this trilogy, she has recently edited Intimacy (University of Chicago Press, 2000), an elaboration of an issue of Critical Inquiry, of which she is co-editor. In the interview we have tried to engage with the promise that emerged out of our conversations with Berlant, which involved initial face to face meetings in Lancaster and Chicago and culminated in the 'live' transatlantic e-mail interview transcribed here. We have directed