13(2001):
79-84
Book Review
Holding Their Own: Perspectives on the
Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States, by Dorothea Fischer-Hornung and Heike
Raphael-Hernandez (2000), 336 pages.
Samir Dayal
Nothing more vividly reveals a culture to itself
than a recognition of itself in an outsider’s eyes. It is not too much to say
then that one of the most productive features of a collection of essays on
multi-ethnic literatures of America published in Europe, such as Holding
Their Own, is that it provides an outsider’s perspective. By the same
token, it is worth noting too that the multicultural situation in the U.S.
potentially has some light to shed on Europe’s own struggles with multi-ethnic
constituencies. Admittedly, it is not always clear in this collection that cultural
distance is really the salient feature of the comments made by the
contributors, or that there is something particularly European about a given
commentator’s analysis. Still, most of the contributors are affiliated with
universities outside of the U.S., or are not U.S. residents, and this certainly
plays a role in the rich variety of perspectives gathered together in this
publication. Such “outsider” perspectives can productively displace a
U.S.-centered understanding of U.S. multi-ethnic literatures’ significance in a
larger, international context.
What is invoked in this rich and varied collection of essays, then, is
a kind of double consciousness: an appreciation of those literatures
simultaneously within the national (U.S.) context and in a broader conceptual
frame. This is most appropriate, since double consciousness is one of the five
key themes organizing these wide-ranging essays--the other four are the various
ways of conceptualizing the intertwined notions of home, place and space,
cultural difference, the politics and poetics of opposition, and marginality.
The editors admit candidly that the volume’s twenty-four essays (not counting
the introduction or the brief Afterword) “have been divided into chapters to
unify a decidedly non-unified project” (xii-xiii). The essays appearing under
each chapter do have a rough coherence; they can be regarded as variations on
themes.
As Europe lurches into a new, “unified” era, new
tensions are emerging everywhere. Can the U.S. experience, even if it is not
exactly analogous, offer lessons for dealing with what will increasingly be a
more unified and yet more multi-cultural or multi-ethnic European polity? This
is a premise of the essay by Nellie McKay that opens the first “chapter” of the
book, entitled “That Double Consciousness and More.” Her premise is that the
case of African American literature is exemplary in any understanding of the
multi-ethnic literature of the U.S., for this literature is founded on a model
of “double consciousness” about the status of black people in America. In this
essay, therefore, McKay offers a critical history of African Americans
relocating themselves in Europe to “re-create” themselves, to become what they
could not be in the racist atmosphere at “home.” Among the figures she touches
upon briefly are W.E.B. DuBois, James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, Richard
Wright, James Baldwin, and Chester Himes. Also taking a cue from DuBois, Michel
Fabre’s essay on the New Orleans gens
libres de couleur examines the neglected writings of mixed-blood
descendants of African and French or Spanish Louisianans as a “talented tenth” avant la lettre. Fabre explores the
question whether this elite group of writers can be said to have defined a
determinate ethnic and collective identity at the edges of American society. If
so, what are the features of that hybrid identity—what exactly is the nature of
its doubleness?
Gabriele Pisarz-Ramirez studies the way in which
Mexican American subjects straddle two cultures. She suggests that many
Chicana/ o writers such as Alfredo Véa and Francisco Alarcón present a
polyglossic identity construction within a mainstream U.S. cultural topography,
and as such are destabilizing “internal others.” Ineke Bockting adopts a more
theoretical approach to the meaning of double consciousness in her essay on
Chicana/ o literature. Like Fabre, Bockting studies examples of “border” texts.
She attempts to bring (particularly) psychoanalytic models of the stranger or
the other to bear in her analysis of “twoness.” Although she tends to collapse
the different approaches of Freud, Kristeva and Lacan in her analysis (not to
mention Bakhtin), the psychoanalytic emphasis is useful in emphasizing the way
in which the incorporation of the gaze of the (culturally dominant) other creates
a splitting within the self, and helps one to see that early on, DuBois
was thinking of a pre-conscious (unconscious) process, but later on developed a
notion of a split in social identity. It is double consciousness of a different
kind that animates Tobe Levin’s critique of Gloria Naylor’s Bailey’s Café.
Levin, who describes himself as a Jew committed to combating female genital
mutilation, expresses nevertheless a deep discomfort with Naylor’s alleged
misrepresentation of the implication of Jews in the painful practice. Here the
double consciousness is a matter of trying to keep in view simultaneously the
discourse of human rights and the critique of racism, which Levin suggests
Naylor fails to do.
In this first chapter, which presents essays that
in a sense frame the collection as a whole, “double consciousness” is treated
not solely in terms of the DuBoisian model but in terms of a range of double
perspectives that highlight the tensions between “insider” and “outsider”
positions, or some variants of the latter (such as the “outsider within”).
While it is important to recognize the theoretical or conceptual danger that a
schematization relying on an opposition between insiders and outsiders may
ironically reinscribe vitiated racialist binaries, it is worth remembering that
the category of double consciousness continues to have real-world relevance
because of the persistence of just such racialist binaries even in these
so-called new times of global culture.
The second chapter of the book is organized around
the clustered themes of home, place, and space. Elaine Kim’s essay, “Myth,
Memory, and Desire: Contemporary Korean American Writing and Visual Art,”
turns, as do so many of her other writings, on a personal connection to the
issues she discusses. She considers the first novel by Heinz Insu Fenkl in
which the mixed-race author indicts U.S. imperialist intervention in Korea and
racism against Koreans “at home.” Kim juxtaposes this discussion with a
collaborative performance and installation called Angulas: Street of Gold
and the installation Turtle Boat Head as hybrid (in the strong,
postcolonial sense rather than the colloquial sense in which it often appears)
narratives that throw into sharp relief the long and often underappreciated
history of “U.S. military, political, economic, and cultural presence in Korean
lives” (83). The importance of insisting on such hybrid (in the strong sense)
perspectives cannot be overstated, because they challenge the lazy or cozy
representations of Asian groups in the U.S.—as Kim suggests when she briefly
considers a short novel by Patti Kim.
It is not as though only non-white groups are
represented in this wide-ranging collection. Following Kim’s essay, the reader
encounters not only a consideration (by Yeþim Baþarýr) of Norwegian American
immigrant writing but also an essay (by Alison Goeller) on Italian American
immigrant writing. These two contributions are fine analyses of the pain even
some putatively “white” immigrants suffered before they became assimilated.
Nevertheless, a reader might well wonder whether there is not something to be
said for making a more rigorous distinction along the divide of white/
non-white ethnicities in U.S. history. Can one really juxtapose, and therefore
risk seeming to gloss over the specific material differences in, the
trajectories of Asian American and European American struggles with
assimilation?
Consider, for the sake of making such rigorous
distinctions, two equally discriminating essays in this “chapter.” The first is
Lene Johannesen’s sophisticated analysis of the diacritical pair space/ place
in Helena Viramontes’ story of Mexican migrant workers. The second is Antje
Kley’s sensitive recuperation of the antiessentialist and the incommensurable
in Audre Lorde’s constructions of home and identity in her “autobiographical”
work, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. In the work of Viramontes and
Lorde, the presence of race has a completely different charge from the way race
might function in O.E. Rølvaag’s work (which Baþarir discusses) and Tina De
Rosa’s work (which Goeller explores). This difference ought to receive some
sustained analysis in a collection on multi-ethnic literatures. This is not to
say that the handicap of race suffered by a Mexican migrant such as Estrella,
in Viramontes’ book, is the same as the handicap of race endured by a highly
educated Black lesbian intellectual such as Audre Lorde. Even oppressed ethnic
groups should not be homogenized as if their internal differences were
immaterial in the face of their shared oppression. Indeed my point is that the
attempt to impose some coherence on essays gathered together should not
countenance the risk of assimilating all such differences of class and race or
national origin. Such collections would benefit, rather than suffer, from
registering the differences. The vicissitudes of “home,” place, and space that
are at the core of the essays in this chapter can be best appreciated in a differential context.
The third chapter, entitled “The
(Un)Translatability of Culture” begins with an essay by Mita Banerjee on
Bharati Mukherjee’s controversial novel, Jasmine. Building on Homi
Bhabha’s figure of the hybrid and undecidable chapati circulating as a token of
sly resistance in the colonial context of India, Banerjee, like Kley in the previous
chapter, argues to retain a certain incommensurabililty, over and against the
appropriation of cultural difference in “intercultural contact.” It is
interesting to contrast this essay with Cathy Waegner’s essay, “Toni Morrison
and the ‘Other-Reader: Oprah Winfrey and Marcel Reich-Ranicki as Mediators?” In
her essay Waegner inquires into the interpretive authority of a (white) “other”
reader, given that Morrison is so vehement in her assertion that she writes
exclusively for a black audience. She frames her exploration of some thorny
questions effectively by counterposing the reception of Morrison’s work by a
television “literary quartet” in Germany and by Oprah Winfrey in the U.S.: are
the white German readers, represented by the irreverent Ranicki necessarily
disqualified by virtue of their whiteness? Could someone of Morrison’s
intellectual caliber really be acceding to an unreflected essentialism?
As Dorothea Fischer-Hornung shows in her essay in
this chapter, being black is neither sufficient nor necessary qualification for
an author who wishes to “represent” black experience. Fischer-Hornung
delicately and painstakingly contrasts the “ethnographic” work of Zora Neale
Hurston and Katherine Dunham. On the face of it, both are black women who enter
as ethnographers; but as it turns out, Hurston’s response is to offer a
right-wing apologetics, whereas Dunham, whom Hurston clearly saw as an inferior
rival, comes across as rather more sympathetic. Fischer-Hornung is
cautious—perhaps overcautious—in giving Hurston the benefit of doubt wherever
possible, as she speculates on the possible reasons for Hurston’s problematic
justification of U.S. military intervention in Haiti. Hurston as right-leaning
apologist, even if we remind ourselves again of her reputation for political
conservatism, today still seems to have little in common with the author of the
justly famous classic Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Race and ethnicity are also the key categories for
the essays by Dominique Marçais and Monika Müller. Marçais illuminates the
political context within which Melville composed The Confidence Man, by
pointing up the markers of ethnicity that might be missed by readers who are
disposed to read it as innocent of racialism. Müller, by tracing the
representation of anxieties about racial mixing and particularly interracial
sexuality in the works of Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Harriet
Beecher Stowe, likewise reminds us about the hyperconsciousness of race in
nineteenth century in America. Of course many recent cultural studies scholars
have developed the racialist subtext of nineteenth-century American literature.
But Marçais and Müller are examples of an European perspective which, having a
critical distance from the U.S., might hold up the mirror to the establishmentarian
reading of American literature of the period. This chapter offers perhaps the
most coherent grouping of essays.
If it is an important task for an observer of
multi-ethnic literature of the U.S. to continually revisit and possibly re-form
the establishment narratives of race and ethnicity, then it would seem that a
review of the established canon would seem to be a first requirement. The
collection’s fourth chapter, entitled “Oppositional Poetics,” begins with a
pair of essays by Haryette Mullen and Barry Maxwell that seek to enlarge the
canon to include writers who would probably be considered marginal in the
academy. Mullen presents Erica Hunt and Will Alexander as challengers of
aesthetic convention, and Maxwell suggests that Nathaniel Mackey’s
genre-bending Bedouin Hornbook, with its fusion of jazz and philosophic
reflection, myth and literary conceit, represents the heartache as well as the
yearning for redemption of oppressed minorities. Kirsten Twelbeck reads Teresa
Hak Kyung Cha’s equally unconventional (but increasingly canonical, it might be
said) DICTEE as an example of “code-switching” reflection on a variety
of issues, ranging from U.S. imperialism and exceptionalism to
identity-construction and gender. But she also develops Gabriele Schwab’s
reflections on postmodernist writing and reader reception theory to gloss Cha’s
representation of “otherness,” and in this context she reconsiders the
questions of political representation and the ownership of culture.
Similar issues of representation (in Gayatri
Spivak’s sense, Vertretung, proxy) are taken up by Frances Smith Foster
in the context of slave narratives, and she too contextualizes her discussion
by reference to the academic establishment. Her essay appears in the fifth and
final Chapter, entitled “The Margin Sustains the Center?” Marginality,
considered from various angles, is the key theme in this last chapter. In
Daniel Walden’s essay, some very established Jewish American writers are
refigured as marginal. Bellow, Malamud and Ozick, Walden suggests, write not
only as ethnic minority writers but as writers who cast their minority Jewish
moral vision in terms of an increasingly unfashionable Existentialism and
essentialism. Yet, because they do articulate their Existentialism and
essentialism with a longstanding Jewish religious and ethical tradition, they
manage to render those categories vital even for a contemporary reader who
might expect to be reminded continually about how in a postmodern age we are
beyond good and evil because there is no transcendental Truth to which we might
cleave without embarrassment. Recent Jewish American writers, as Susanne
Klingenstein suggests in her own contribution immediately following Walden’s,
are also “eccentric” supports--marginal sources of inspiration for more
mainstream fiction.
The idea of the constitutive importance of the
marginal, the fragment, the exceptional, is an important development in
poststructuralist cultural critique and especially in postcolonial studies.
Because she presents such a variety of examples, Klingenstein regrettably
allows herself little space to examine these works in any depth, but her essay
usefully suggests the wealth of Jewish writers and cultural producers, from
Ozick to Philip Roth to Jerry Seinfeld, along with many less familiar names in
between. She also suggests that it is precisely because Jews are today
relatively well assimilated into the mainstream that Jewish tradition can once
again become a source of fresh creativity, not to mention new Jewish identities,
beyond the old traumatic stereotypes that have historically been deployed by
others against them but also beyond what the Jews themselves might have
imagined.
The imperative of seeking fresh ethnic identity
constructs also motivates other ethnic genre writing, and it is not just a
contemporary phenomenon, as Marina Cacioppo suggests in her study of Italian
American crime fiction from the first decades of the last century. Neither can
it be said that the ceaseless production of ever new constructs of identity
represents only the felt needs of marginal individuals themselves. Indeed, as
Carolyn Burmedi shows in the final essay in the collection, sometimes identity
constructs have to be revised and imposed on minorities in order to keep them
in their place. Even in popular cultural products, simplified, crudely
collectivized ethnic identities (somewhere between stereotype and fantasy) seem
to appear as if burned into the national imaginary. This imposition of identity
constructs is evident in a series such as Star Trek. Witness the
semi-Vulcan, “subhuman” otherness of Spock, the crypto-Soviet expansionist
tendencies of the Klingons like Worf (the name seems to hint with knowing wink
to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), the cyborg Borgs, and the only too obvious
alienage of the “Ferrengi”—the very name means “foreigner.” Burmedi nicely
captures some of the superficial political correctness of official or
Hollywood-establishment “multiculturalism” that undergirds such shows as Star
Trek. More importantly she suggests that even those fans who object to the
show’s political correctness may miss the important point that even political
correctness cannot evade the responsibility to take seriously the racism that
conditions the multi-ethnic space of the United States of America.
By way of conclusion one can say that this
collection as a whole offers a broad view of the multi-ethnic culture of
nineteenth- and twentieth-century America; but it also usefully points both
domestic (U.S.) and international audiences toward the future of the study of
multi-ethnic literatures of the U.S. One can sympathize with the editors’
ambition to include a wide variety of papers presented at the June 1998
Heidelberg MELUS Europe Conference, and it is hard to give shape and depth to
such a proliferation of approaches. One could ask for greater theoretical or
conceptual regularity and rigor, but that could be asking too much from such a
collection. Still, considered as a gathering of conference proceedings, this
collection offers a wide window on the literary representation of ethnicity in
the U.S. and also indirectly offers a stimulus for rethinking the meaning of
true multiple-culturalism for a more global stage and a more globalized age.