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When I was in graduate school, my advisor, Sacvan Bercovitch, used to say proudly that he counted among his students one from the oldest religion in the world (Zoroastrianism)  and one from the newest (Mormonism) .

Full disclosure: my father is a Parsi, and I had a navjote ceremony when I was in the third grade, making me -- officially -- a Zoroastrian.

We had trouble finding someone from the priest class to perform the navjote ceremony, however, because my mother was a Filipino and a Christian -- a Protestant, oddly enough, my grandmother having converted to a Pentecostal sect before my mother's birth. My parents met at the International House at Columbia University, my father coming from Pakistan to study mathematical statistics, my mother from the Philippines to study literature and drama.

We weren't religious at home, though we did celebrate Christmas and made it a point to attend the Christmas eve services at Riverside Church in New York, a few blocks up the street from where we lived. My mother sometimes liked to attend Easter services there as well. It was always assumed that I would become a Zoroastrian, as my mother explained it, so that I could keep my options open. I could convert to Christianity but not to Zoroastrianism later, because Zoroastrianism didn't accept converts.

But, when the time came during third grade for the ceremony to be performed, we couldn't find a priest. We kept hearing excuses along the lines of "I would do it, but my mother-in-law is very old-fashioned." Finally, we managed to secure the services of a priest from Bombay who was traveling in the U.S. and spending some time in New York. Four years later, we had to go to London to have my sister's ceremony done.

It was an early lesson in the dynamics of culture, though it would take me years to recognize it: my parents' marriage was an emblem of cosmopolitan cultural mixing, while the priests' belief in the importance of cultural purity might serve as an emblem of all the forces that are arrayed against cosmopolitanism.

When I was growing up, strangers would ask me, "Where are you from?" and I'd say, "New York" or "the upper West Side." They'd look vaguely disappointed and then say, "No, I meant what's your background." I wasn't really being disingenuous, though I was well aware what the first question really meant. It's just that I never particularly identified with either of my parents' cultural traditions. We spoke English at home, and my parents had gradually lost their fluency in the mother tongues (Gujarati and Tagalog, respectively). What I identified with was being mixed and being able to slip from one cultural context to another. To my Parsi relatives, I looked Filipino; to my Filipino relatives, I looked "bumbai"; and to my classmates -- well, on the rare occasions when someone wanted to launch a racial slur, the result was usually a lame attempt to insult me as if I were Puerto Rican.

So I suppose it's somewhat predictable that in recent years I have chosen to work on what I call "emergent literatures" -- literatures that express marginalized cultural identities -- and found myself increasingly interested in theories of cosmopolitanism. And that I've been fascinated for the past fifteen years with a text that combines the Zoroastrian and Christian traditions -- Moby-Dick.

I'll be writing a lot about Moby-Dick here in the coming months, as I teach my Conversations of the West class again this fall and serve as an adviser for Ric Burns's new documentary, Into the Deep: America, Whaling, and the World.

[The image above is called The Voyage of the Pequod from the book Moby Dick by Herman Melville (1956) by Everett Henry (1893-1961). Courtesy of the Geography & Map Division of the Library of Congress. Click here to see their page about it.]

Last night, in Philadelphia, I watched my mentor, Sacvan Bercovitch, receive the American Studies Association's Carl Bode - Norman Holmes Pearson Prize for lifetime achievement. It was my pleasure and my honor to have nominated Saki for the award and to have gathered supporting letters from colleagues and students.

In conferring the award, the prize committee's chairperson, Gordon Hutner (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaigne), described Saki as "the presiding spirit, in many respects, of American Studies. Through his writings, his intellectual politics, his service to the Association, Professor Bercovitch has made an unparalleled set of distinguished contributions over the past thirty years. Perhaps no single literary historian has exerted the profound influence over his field that Bercovitch has, for he has been the key figure in the ideological turn in American literary study and indeed has played a central part in galvanizing the source of its interdisciplinary practice."

Hutner noted that the American Studies Association is "infinitely more robust" than it was the last time it met in Philadelphia, in 1982 when Saki was president and suggested that this robustness may well be "the fruit of Sacvan Bercovitch's labors."

I didn't know Saki then (we wouldn't meet for another couple of years when he had relocated to Harvard), and it was a revelation for me to hear about the central role that he had played in setting the ASA back on course after a period during which it was foundering. I was struck by the fact that he was even more deserving of the Bode - Pearson prize than my letter of nomination had suggested.

What follows is the text of that letter. As a tribute it's inadequate, but at least it achieved what it was intended to achieve.

Robert Ferguson (Columbia University) wrote to me in an e-mail that the format for tonight's MLA roundtable "American Literary Historiography, Then and Now," which I am chairing, was not promising, given that we had seven people slotted to speak and then field questions -- and only 1 hour and 15 minutes to do it in. in addition to maintaining a strict time limit on each speaker's position statement (5 minutes, plus 1 minute to sum up), I'm going to forego making a statement myself, limiting myself to introducing my fellow participants -- Morris Dickstein (CUNY Grad Center); Robert A. Ferguson (Columbia University); Gerald Graff (University of Illinois, Chicago); Walter Benn Michaels, (University of Illinois, Chicago); Shira Wolosky (Hebrew University of Jerusalem); and Rafia Zafar (Washington University) -- and letting the audience know that I asked each participant to speak about one or more of the following questions: 1) What did you feel was the most pressing problem for the literary historian when you wrote your contribution to the Cambridge History of American Literature; 2) What do you feel will be the most pressing problem for the next set of literary historians who tackle your period or field? 3) What do you think the Cambridge History of American Literature as a whole has accomplished?

Were I myself to answer those three questions, I'd probably say something like this:

Last month, I gave the 2006 Rheney Lecture at Vanderbilt University at the invitation of the English Department's graduate students. The Rheney series is special because the graduate students nominate and choose which speakers they will bring, and I had a wonderful time meeting and learning about the work of quite a number of graduate students there. I'm particularly grateful to Katherine Fusco, who nominated me for the lecture and made sure that the visit went smoothly.

I've now posted a transcript of the talk that I gave. Please use the Comments link below to give me feedback or to pose questions.