Alien Sedition: Anti-Semitism and Censorship in The Cantos of Ezra Pound

Abstract

At the start of this book I axiomatically posited migration as the origin of America, and thus translation as the original language of the Americas. In preceding chapters, I have worked to demonstrate how modern poets concretized translation as a language in its own right. In doing so these poets framed not just multicultural encounter, but more powerfully framed the intercultural violence of migration as inherent to their sense of Americanism. This violence registers as rhetorical dislocation, typographical schism, and outright ethnic strife. Yet several questions still remain before I finish. The first question is a matter of subjectivity: How would intercultural violence, and the interlingual language of translation, be “internalized” as origins for American subject-formation? A second set of questions concern matters of political subjectivity: In what sense does intercultural violence demand a “politics of violence” in the Americas? How would American subjects born of violence factor into such politics? From where would a “politics of violence” derive authority over its subjects? In order to find out I would now like to confront one of the most difficult characters in American history, “Ezra Pound.”