University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Race, ethnicity, and the ideology of marginality

(USC Thesis Other)

Race, ethnicity, and the ideology of marginality

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content RACE, ETHNICITY, AND
THE IDEOLOGY OF MARGINALITY
by
RUTH YVONNE HSU
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
August 1992
Copyright 1992 Ruth Yvonne Hsu
UMI Number: DP23169
All rights reserved
INFORMATION TO ALL USERS
The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted.
In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript
and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed,
a note will indicate the deletion.
Published by ProQuest LLC (2014). Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author.
Dissertation Publishing
UMI DP23169
Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC.
All rights reserved. This work is protected against
unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code
ProQuest LLC.
789 East Eisenhower Parkway
P.O. Box 1346
Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
TH E GRADUATE SCHOOL
UN IVER SITY PARK
LOS ANGELES, C A LIFO R NIA 90007
Ph.D.
’C]2..
H813
This dissertation, written by
RUTH YVONNE HSU
under the direction of h&XZ..... Dissertation
Committee, and approved by all its members,
has been presented to and accepted by The
Graduate School, in partial fulfillment of re
quirements for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILO SO PHY
Date
Dean of Graduate Studies
June 11, 1992
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
hairperson
ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I. wish to thank Professor Vincent Cheng, Professor
Thomas Gustafson, Professor James Kincaid, Professor
Theresa McKenna, and Professor Barrie Thorne for their
invaluable guidance. Their expertise made this project
possible, and their sense of humor helped put everything
in perspective.
I also owe much gratitude to family and friends,
whose love and concern make it all worthwhile.
iii
I
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter One: Introduction 1
Chapter Two ..........................28
Chapter Three ....................... 121
Chapter F o u r .........................181
Chapter F i v e .........................254
Conclusion ............ ..... 309
I
LIST OF FIGURE
I
Figure 1. 179
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
. . . philosophers will conduct
their discussions of Locke, Hume,
and empiricism without ever taking
into account that there is an
explicit connection in these classic
writers between their "philosophic"
doctrines and racial theory,
justifications of slavery, or
arguments for colonial exploitation.
— Edward Said1
For a woman-of-color such as myself, the most
natural topic to think and write about might seem to be
that of race or ethnicity. Yet, there is no imperative
in life, except perhaps that life holds no imperative.
I
Growing up in Hong Kong, I found race, if my memory is
at all close to actuality, to be a non-issue, which is
not to say racism did not exist, but that it showed
itself in different ways from what I have since observed j
in the United States. American friends have asked me j
I
about this aspect of Hong Kong, and what they would like '
i
to hear are perhaps tragic stories about racial
i
confrontation between the British and the Chinese. I
suspect that this curiosity derives in part from the '
I
need to hear that America is not the only culprit, that
disparaging other "races" is a universal pastime.
I
I
However, I am always at a loss when confronted wxth |
such questions, for I find myself unable to talk about [
an issue that is, on the one hand, non-existent except !
as a cultural construct, and which, on the other hand,
is not translatable. That is, there are two issues that
need to be considered here. Firstly, biologists and
geneticists in recent years have shown that "race" is
not a determinant for human behavior or traits. What
people in Western-based societies take to be indications
i
of racial membership— skin color, hair, eye color, j
facial features, height, and so on— cannot be correlated
to intelligence, moral standards, or any other of the
i
nebulous, hard-to-define aspects of what makes us
identify ourselves as human. I position myself with
those critics who assert that "race" is a cultural
construct, a form of ideation that is a function of the
social structure, and as such, since society is a
collection of individuals, can be connected to the
needs, and perhaps for the West, the psychological j
drives of the people who are the dominant group of that
society. The problem, however, is that for one such as
myself, growing up thousands of miles away from America, ^
even in a predominantly Chinese culture, of '
"conservative" parents, the Chinese-ness of Hong Kong i
i
was nonetheless pervaded with all manner of foreign
i
influences. I went to a Catholic school (an Italian
order) and was told about Christopher Columbus, Vasco De
Gama and the Straits of Magellan at an early age. It
1
was only much later that I was moved to wonder what the |
"natives" of "Indo-China" or "Malaysia" used to call I
those Straits before the "Age of Discovery" and European 1
I
colonialism. We were barely taught about China's past;
history meant Western history. Colonialism could be
physical enslavement; but of course, an equally lethal ;
kind is cultural/mental. I suppose the latter is what I !
am most familiar with. And part of that condition lies !
in the inability to re-tell what the "natives" might ;
have said, for colonialism has expunged their words,
myths and versions of history. So that, although the
physical entities of America and Britain were quite a
distance from Hong Kong, their cultures were ubiquitous.
The second issue with regards to race consciousness
is that despite the omnipresence of American and British
culture, "race," as we understand it today in the United
States, is not the same creature in the cultural context
of Hong Kong. The key lies buried in culture (an
unfortunate metaphor from a deconstructionist's point of
view); for, culture— the ways in which a people
perceive, say, family, or skin color— is unique, a
development of numerous and complex, dialogically
interpenetrated circumstances. And culture is unique
just as the language which has grown out of it is fine-
tuned to its needs, and carries its psychic landscape.
What and how a people see is specific enough that the
cultural meaningfulness of, say, skin color, cannot for
the most part be adequately translated into another
culture or language. So that I am at a loss when asked
to describe the "race" issue in Hong Kong. All of this
is to say that my choice of this topic was not
inevitable; I know an African American woman who spends
her time on William Wordsworth.
I can see how for some people it might seem strange
if my dissertation were on the Elizabethan sonnet.
However, this is itself a form of racialist thinking,
for it is tantamount to naming me colored, a Third World
woman, whose only proper interest should be with issues
of race or colonialism. However, I resist being thusly
|
named or defined by such preconceptions. And, while it
might be fashionable to say so, I do not think that the
pursuit of this project resulted from my colonial past;
rather, it is more likely that the colonialism of that
past stands revealed in the light of the present. Or
possibly, the past has everything to do with my choice, i
Perhaps, this interest began when I first became aware
I
of a Western-educated, Chinese historian named Immanuel
Hsu. Or, it could have come from wondering one day why I
i
Hong Kong needs red, double-decker buses. Or, my j
i
interest may have come from any of a number of past
"influences" that I can no longer name, spurred on by
some hardy and honest souls in graduate school. I
I
In any event, the ideology of marginality, j
specifically in relation to race and ethnicity, form^the
focus of this project. And the past has become very
relevant if only because this study has come to be (was
all along?) about redefining the past. I have found
I
I
that marginality, race, and ethnicity are indivisible j
I
from a critique of Western textual and academic |
i
conventions, as well as of the idea that culture is j
"natural." As I hope to show through a close reading ofj
6
selected academic and literary texts, the
conceptualization of marginality is symptomatic of a
phallo-, Euro-centric ideology that accompanies a I
capitalistic and consumeristic societal structure.
To me, one of the "truths" primarily inculcated J
I
through a Western-education has to do with the idea that j
!
words, and language as a whole, are accurate tools for j
communication. "Freedom," "individual," "national ;
destiny," and especially simple words such as "I," "you,
I
and "we" circulate with such nonchalance in daily usage, i
as if they admit of no controversy. We are taught to
think of words as mundane, natural occurrences, like the J
sun, or the sky. And like the natural world, they
appear to have always existed. In addition, we know to
trust that words can convey exactly what we mean, and
that they can name, reveal, and define, in spite of our
also understanding that they have the proclivity to
change their sounds and looks, their value and meaning. ■
In fact, if we consider the transformations that j
languages have undergone in historical memory, we should J
»
wonder that we treat words with such trust and invest j
I
them with this sense of permanence and inevitability. !
[
Yet, we do. And such is the extent of this frame of j
mind that a speech community collectively perceives I
words as having life of their own, capable of greater ;
truth. It is as if words can release themselves from
corporeal bondage, allowing them to home in uncannily
toward the truth. Once having left the writers' pen, or
become ensconced on a computer screen, words assume a
seemingly independent vitality, a pseudo-magical
quality. Consequently, we do not merely store books in
libraries, we enshrine them; in academe, we worship
words; we scrutinize billboards, video screens, j
i
pamphlets, doctors' prescriptions for the secrets
contained in the signs. We trust that words have the
ability to be objectively precise, and yet, we also
I
invest them with a sense of the mystical, as if the
source of their power derives from some faraway fount,
some ultimate linguistic nirvana. Such a belief in
shadowy realms derives in part from the Platonic
tradition in Western civilization, a tradition that is
devoted to the search for some form of reality, but ;
i
!
which finally can only resort to metaphor to describe
the Truth. To a large extent, it is the |
conceptualization of truth as ideas, as essences, which [
has permeated our attitude towards words and language.
However, even though one may suggest Plato as the start
of a pattern, that is still an insufficient explanation !
I
for the tenacity with which his concepts have permeated
Western culture, domesticated as it were and used for
multiple areas of life. Whatever the origin of this
desire to retain this aspect of Platonic philosophy may
8
be, it must arise from the very innermost deep
structures of this cxvilxzatxon. !
We are also acculturated to treat words as free-
floating tools of communication, accessible equally to
everyone, by which all forms of information are openly
exchanged. We feel that we may select any word out of
the available pool, that the selection process is j
i
democratic, and contingent only upon the will and j
intention of the individual. However, such an attitude i
needs to be called into doubt. For, words are far from i
neutral, but attain meaningfulness as part of a social
dynamic, "meaningfulness" in the sense of being '
saturated with the thingness of that culture. Arguably,
I
the "true" meaning of words, as much as any truth can be J
i
determined, is an existence that goes beyond what can be
i
catalogued into dictionaries; hence, words, such as
"race," function as instruments of cultural exchange
that effect the will of a culture. Stated differently, j
I
I
words or signs are always already loaded with the drives |
and desires of the cultural environment. This !
i
environment, however, is itself not a democratic arena—
i
although an essential aspect of the American cultural !
ethos holds that it is, as indicated by the almost-
obsessive recirculation of the image of this country as
various forms of the melting pot. Rather, I agree with ;
j
Mikhail Bakhtin's conception of culture as laid out in >
The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (1985).
According to Bakhtin, culture is an ideological process
largely within the hands of the ruling class, who
maintains control by positing culture as a proposition,
open to debate and the influence of those along the
margins of power. The right to culture production is
embedded in power, both political and economic. The
true colonial status of the Hong Kong Chinese is
indicated by their powerlessness to play out their own
culture; instead, they must always contend with the
material and psychic presence (displays of power) of the
West.
Therefore, a main assumption of this project is
that the words we wield with such apparent freedom
always carry with them, as unwritten history, the
intentions and voices of the center. So that when a
Puerto Rican working-class woman uses "freedom," or
"individual," even though she infuses these words with
her own personal inflections of meaning, she is also
engaged in a dialogue with all that such words mean
within the context of this Anglo-American, phallocentric
culture.2 And for her, "freedom" is not the freedom
that belongs to a white, middle-class male. Words, even
the most innocuous ones like "I" and "you," are
permeated with the culture in which they exist. Indeed,
a cultural environment ought to be re-visioned as what
10
I
Bakhtin calls a socio-ideological environment. And as I
i
such, words, as cultural instruments, are deeply
ideological to the extent that even "I" and "you" mean
what they do exactly because they have a particular life j
within the culture which has created their
meaningfulness, and which has invested in them an I-ness
I and you-ness unique to that culture. So that for a j
j Puertorriquena to refer to herself with "I" is to call .
I '
forth from societal discourse a whole set of economical
and political positions that together construct her !
subjectivity in Anglo-American society. Her "I," and !
the way she understands that "I," uses it, and feels
I
about it is quite different from how a white, middle-
class male would understand and feel about his "I." \
i !
Similarly, "aunt" in Chinese (Hong Kong) culture ■ ,
t
contains a complex network of understandings about the '
individual and his or her place in a social structure
that is quite different from what the term would mean in :
I
American culture. Hence, a word has no meaning outside ,
i
of its culture, is its culture. It is also deeply
I
I ideological if only simply because culture itself is
1
ideological. One of Raymond Williams’s points in
Culture and Society (1983) is that culture is a matrix
I
i
of the self-image of a dominant group; and the group is j
dominant primarily because of its ability to monopolize j
i , '
i the means of culture production.
11
Consequently, words within a culture need to be
critically examined not for how closely they arrive at a i
I
Platonic realm of ideas but for the dominant group's
political investment in a word, and hence its
ideological weight. However, words and their existence
in society are a matter of some complexity, and have an
existence that is more intricate than that of simple \
I
complicity with the desires and motivations of the '
dominant group. In fact, to think of words and culture
i
as arenas of cultural struggle would afford us a more
fruitful path of study, resulting in a more
i
comprehensive sense of the texture of a culture.
Therefore, although linguistic signs recirculate the ;
existing power structure by carrying always the voices,
the will, the desires of the dominant group, and hence
never leaving the way clear for users of these signs to
speak totally and freely with their own voices and j
intentions, but always engage them in a hegemonic ;
dialogue, yet, these signs also can defy the boundaries J
of that dialogue by testing or questioning or attempting .
to explode this oppressive discourse even when an act of
resistance, intentional or not, sometimes merely ends in :
a reversion.
This project tries to explore the word
1
"marginality" as found in certain literary and academic i
texts roughly between the years 1910 and 1945. My I
12
j intention is to contextualize this word so as to draw
j • • « 1
out its meanmgfulness with regards to attempts by the
I
I
dominant culture to reiterate its own position of I
dominance while maintaining the disenfranchisement of
I
those along the margins of culture and society.
!
/ "Marginality" was first used by sociologists Robert Park i
/ j
J and Everett Stonequist in the 1920s and 1930s to denote
\ . ;
\ what they perceived to be an emerging phenomenon m
American society brought on by the immense influx of
immigrants into the country in the early part of this i
century.3 For Park and later for historians like Oscar
' I
I i Handlin, "marginality" described the personality
! |
! , conflicts suffered by immigrants as a result of being j
1 \ !
| \ uprooted from their ancestral cultures and subsequent
| \
clashes with the new, adopted culture. In The
f\ Marginal Man; A Study in Personality and Culture
? L
i
j Conflict (1937), Stonequist extended the concept to
^ |
h ; include the racially mixed as well as cultural "hybrids" ,
in locations like the United States, Jamaica, India, and |
South Africa.1 Not only did these academicians see
t
themselves as objective social scientists, but also as '
■ i
liberal defenders of the idea of America as melting pot. 1
The word "marginality" therefore was, in their eyes,
1 merely a neutral description of reality, and brought
into the service of a political stance that was anti- j
racist, and supremely democratic. ;
Words, however, are saturated with the thingness of
the culture from which they emerge, coming into societal j
consciousness with an attendant history, and composed of |
I
the voices and intentions of an already existing !
cultural discourse that even while refusing to address j
I
the marginalized, in that very non-acknowledgement !
signifies their existence. Indeed, "marginality" came |
into being already part of a cultural discourse on race, :
ethnicity, and national identity. For, when Park and I
I
Stonequist spoke about marginality, they had in mind !
j
politicians, editors of the Overland, the Nation. i
nativists, and segregationists, historians trained in
Germany, and beyond that, to those who founded the
i
country with a certain vision of what it was to be. In !
that sense, "marginality" arrived on the scene having
I
always been a part of it, had always existed in a ;
I
manner, translucent but palpable, manifested through the ’
I
other signifying elements of the total discourse, j
I
present in its very absence.
Indeed, the discourse on marginality could have
come about only to the extent that the cultural ;
I
environment contained such potential. According to |
Fredric Jameson in The Political Unconscious (1981), one |
(
could only work within the "objective, a priori
conditions of [the historical] possibility" (148).
Indeed, the main contention of this project is that
14
"marginality" has to be looked at not for how closely it
reflects any supposed reality but for its manifestation
of the deep structures of that culture, its hidden
drives and desires. This is what Louis Althusser would
call Darstellunq. which in Reading Capital (1970), he
defines to be designating:
the mode of presence of the structure in
its effects, and therefore to designate
structural causality itself. . . . the !
effects are not outside of the structure,
are not a pre-existing object, element or
space in which the structure arrives to
imprint its mark: on the contrary, it j
implies that the structure is immanent in |
its effects, a cause immanent in its i
effects in the Spinozist sense of the [
term, that the whole existence of the 1
structure consists in its effects, in
short, that the structure, which is
merely a specific combination of its
peculiar elements, is nothing outside of
its effects. (186-189) i
Similarly, Jameson argues that the Final Cause j
cannot be conclusively ensnared just as Althusser j
contends that the structure can only be immanent in its
effects. By extension, then, Jameson suggests that
i
"literature, no matter how weakly, must be informed by
what we have called a political unconscious, that all
literature must be read as a symbolic mediation on the
I
destiny of community" (70). This project attempts to
study the discourse of marginality in light of such a |
I
critical perspective.
15
The work that Park, Stonequist, and Handlin
unfolded arose from a socio-ideological environment that
sought to resolve an increasing hostility towards the
I
masses of immigrants and people of color within its ;
borders. What is more, such a conceptualization could j
I
only have arisen from a cultural psyche based upon
binary opposites. Such a psyche constructs its own
identity as a series of thesis and antithesis, with ,
itself centered as the norm. And it grants subjectivity I
to these others (not male, not Anglo-American) by I
j
defining them as the inferior or debased negatives of '
i
itself. Despite their overt and well-meaning
motivations, these writers could only work within the
i
consciousness of their times, their words and ideas as j
I
much an effect of the political unconscious as the
I
phenomenon they had supposedly isolated and named.
Therefore, even though these academicians' attempted to
i
construct a theory that opposed the racism of the
i
nativists, they unwittingly reinforced the abiding j
national myths of individualism, of racism, and of I
i
America as the chosen land. These writers also
inadvertently gave new life to old stereotypes.
Furthermore, this discourse of marginality, occurring in
academe as it did, only served to legitimize and codify
the ghettoization of already disenfranchised peoples in
I
• « • 1
the national imagination. j
16
Meanwhile, writers such as Abraham Cahan and Zora
Neale Hurston were attempting to represent the
marginalized others that Park and Handlin theorized
about. Edith Eaton in "Leaves from the Mental Portfolio
of an Eurasian" (1909) and Dhan Mukerji in Caste and
Outcast (1923) articulated the alienation and
discrimination that many bi-racial Americans and
immigrants experienced.5 These stories were an attempt
i
to make sense of those experiences, and to locate
I
themselves in a culture that ostensibly welcomed them, !
yet, in its deepest recesses, in language and all
I
aspects of mass culture, persisted in conceptualizing j
i
them as the outsider, as forever not quite of the J
I
center. Indeed, the source of their writing was i
radically different from that of the academicians. For,
they did not assume they had possession of the right to
categorize and name, to lay bare and dissect; instead,
these writers wrote out of a personal aspiration to
pursue the trail of their own identity, and to have that |
writing be a kind of self-definition. Hence, these j
authors speak of cultural alienation and loss, and the
i
i
hardships of assimilation, as well as about a much more i
profound need to create a self, as if the act of
I
choosing the words and the metaphors can itself enter '
into its formation. Hence, the following questions
17
occur repeatedly in their work, "What is America?" "Who
is an American?", in short, "Who am I?"
Even too endeavor questions like those above
i
presupposes that the author has democratic access to
language and its components, and that she in fact has a
I
free, untrammelled avenue to an "I," which can be
f
uncovered through language and the act of writing.
However, even as the writers cited in Stonequist's work,
I
writers like Santayana, Lewishon, and Du Bois, attempted j
to speak the self, and to establish the legitimacy of
their voices in Anglo-American culture, this effort was
anchored in a socio-ideological environment that already ;
contained a certain discourse of race, ethnicity, and \
!
gender. So that Alain Locke's assertions, in The New j
Negro (1925) and other writings, on behalf of Black
cultural independence could be made only within the j
j
parameters of a discourse of race and ethnicity that |
predetermined the terms, the images, and the very words j
available to him in order to make his case.6
Eventually, when Black Americans like Alain Locke and W.
E. B. Du Bois proclaimed their respectability, they |
merely found themselves reconstructed in the image of j
white respectability. When they tried to dispel
!
traditional stereotypes, new ones sprang up in their 1
place. Each new assertion of independence seemingly j
dissipated into the old positions of marginality.
18
Essentially, Anglo-American culture was able to maintain
I
cultural hegemony. Accordingly, in separate chapters, I 1
I
will be exploring the depictions of marginality by
Jewish American, Asian American, and African American
I
writers, as well as their attempts to effect independent J
voices, and the extent to which this goal has been !
i
undercut by the dominant ideology.
!
i
"Marginality" as used by these academicians is
problematical in another sense. Sociologists and
I
I
historians like Park and Handlin were overtly j
participating in a national debate about immigrant
policy, but this debate arose from an older, lengthier
discussion that commenced when the thirteen colonies
I
declared independence from Britain. Questions as to who ■
and what were Americans had to do with essential queries j
I
about the ideals and values of the nation. They had, in i
fact, to do with the ethical tapestry of the country,
with matters of identity, and of a national persona.
The issue of immigrant policy, in this sense, was just
i
one more manifestation of this perennial, national soul- i
searching. It is a preoccupation with the self that is |
I
narcissistic in more ways than one. For inasmuch as the j
means of culture production has always centered ;
1
overwhelmingly in the hands of men, the writings about
America, from the very earliest to those by De
Creveceour, Jefferson, and even Thoreau, and with
19
particular relevance for this study, historians like
Frederick Turner, had always evinced values that were
male-oriented and patriarchal. America looked into the
reflecting pool of the national soul and saw only rugged
individualism, youth, virility, and adventurousness.
Americans were strong, according to Frederick Turner,
because the frontier had molded their soul; the
wilderness and its challenges had made America great.7 |
I
It is no wonder that, despite being radical for their <
times, Park, Stonequist, and Handlin yet wove a
discourse of marginality that also grew from a 1
phallocentric cultural consciousness. Park in his
article about marginality spoke of conquests, and of
aggressive migrations. Stonequist used only male 1
immigrant and Black American writers to reinforce his
theories of marginality. Handlin also did his research j
on America's immigrant population with most of his focus
on the men. Hence, even though the works of women
writers like Anzia Yezierska, Elizabeth Stern, and Mary ,
Antin, like those of Lewishon and Cahan, are highly
reflective of their experiences of marginality, they
i
i
have been much less studied. The fact that these female
i
writers are doubly marginalized because of their ethnic
identity and their gender should ensure their inclusion
in any discussion of marginality; however, the opposite j
is true. It might make us pause when we consider that ■
20
theories of marginality are an important aspect of i
"ethnic" literary studies, and that male writers have |
ascended into this canon of "ethnic" literature largely
due to these theories. They are accorded serious
academic attention whereas many women writers are not. !
I
In other words, male "ethnic" writers, because of their
status of marginality, have been given a certain
I
legitimacy in an area of American literary studies that, !
however, is itself still marginalized, whereas female
writers continue to be excluded from even that dubious j
I
position. i
Accordingly, a main contention of this study is '
that textual conventions, ethics, and goals cannot
escape the socio-ideological environment of which they ,
are a part. Western scholarship is particularly ^
implicated in the larger social processes that, for one, !
have been realized into global capitalistic expansion. \
I
Edward Said, in Orientalism (1979), has discussed the i
imperialism of Western academe, wherein a set of
|
conventions governs the accumulation of "knowledge."
Said's argument is relevant here even though his focus j
was on Western scholarship on the Middle East. In early
American sociology, academicians such as Park tried to 1
i
prove their point by using as examples the work of
immigrants. Theorists and texts engender more texts,
i
until, they seemingly assume a life of their own, an_____1
enclosed system that does not need to refer to any
actuality outside of academe. And the narratives of
writers such as Yezierska are mined for what they can
give to the academic industry instead of being studied
for what they contain of individual identity, voice, or j
I
the other-than-mainstream apprehension of America.
These texts, then, are exploited, the voices they ;
i
contain appropriated by academic theorists whose j
concern, as I will discuss in more detail in the i
relevant chapter, was with what they believed America to I
be. To me, such a move confuses art with life, and only
serves to elide some of the perhaps more central issues
I
with regards to ethnicity, race, gender, and
marginality. To use literary texts for scientific
i
evidence may liven up what are perhaps dry, academic j
treatises, but could hardly be considered compelling
validation for a theory. To do so is to misunderstand >
i
literary texts. Secondly, and more crucially, in my
i
opinion, such a move would eventually transform the
i
stories of immigrants and African Americans into case '
studies for either a psychoanalyst or a criminologist. j
Marginality as conceived by these academicians in the
I
end only resulted in reinstituting dominant values.
More importantly, Park's "marginality" is suspect
not only for the reasons already briefly discussed in ;
i
i
the preceding paragraphs, but also because such a j
22
conception elides the more profound cultural
displacement suffered by the fictive characters. For,
marginalization has been accomplished even before these
texts were written. Arguably, the need of authors, such
as Yezierska, to create characters who question their
own identities profoundly belies a dis-ease with their
own selves, and a yearning to "discover" who they really
are, as if human consciousness is this vast wilderness
and the self is a hidden treasure waiting to be
unearthed. The need, the phrases used to articulate j
this need, the perception of the world and the self that
underlies the desire seemingly reveal an infusion of the
New World idea of individualism, this belief in the
existence of a supreme self, free and inviolate.
Learning the language is itself a process of inculcation
into the culture, to see, feel, think according to the
worldview of that culture. So that when these writers
attempt to define an "I," an American "I" linguistically
i
I
and "spiritually," they participate in a supremely !
I
American quest that rests upon the notion of |
i
individualism, and of this country as the new Eden,
i
where there is an innocence, and rebirth and new
identities can be secured. Therefore, contained in the
very act of self-reference, in that simple naming of the
self is a form of colonization of these others by the
(
dominant ideology.
23
In Problems in General Linguistics (1971), Emile
Benveniste writes, "language is so deeply marked by the
expression of subjectivity that one might ask if it
could still function and be called language if it were
constructed otherwise" (255). For, it contains the
i
"linguistic forms appropriate to the expression of j
subjectivity, and discourse provokes the emergence of
subjectivity" (227). In other words, language allows
I
the possibility of speech, of self-reference because
there exist the appropriate signs: pronouns, proper
names, nouns, and so on. The speaking subject, what
i
Benveniste calls the "referent," however, exists only in
relation to the subject of speech, the "I" which is
composed of all the social, political, and economical ,
i
coordinates that designate the place that a member of |
i
the community has in a societal grid. In Kaja
i
Silverman’s words, the subject of the speech "consists |
of the discursive element with which that discoursing
individual identifies, and in so doing finds his or her j
I
subjectivity" (46). It is that discursive moment, when j
the "I" of the speaking subject attempts to instantiate
the self by uttering the word "I," that she most deeply
marks her subjectivity. So that when these authors
i
question who they are and attempt to uncover an "I,"
they do so with the assumption that they undertake a
self-initiated search, and that language is merely a
24
tool for everyone's use. However, to reiterate,
language and words are not free, neutral signifiers but j
exist linked to other signs in a signifying network !
saturated with what is usually the will and the voices
of the dominant socio-ideological environment.
According to Derrida in Of Grammatoloqy (1976), any j
signifying element is always already saturated with |
traces of other signifying elements (7). To say "I"
B , i
then for these authors and the characters depicted m |
their works is immediately to locate themselves within a |
socio-ideological matrix that interpolates them at the
moment of utterance of that "I," as the marginalized j
i
other. !
Therefore, I would like to view both these academic
and literary texts as profoundly implicated by their j
contextual existence within the specific socio- !
ideological environment of an Anglo-Saxon,
phallocentric, capitalistic, industrialized, Protestant j
cultural hegemony. What is called for involves a shift i
in the study of language and its components to include a
certain self-reflexivity, one in which we emphasize the
need to contextualize all the processes of language i
construction, in particular the process of reification.
I
A crucial step in apperception was provided by Ferdinand
de Saussure, who re-focuses our attention from the
search for essences to one of the arbitrary nature of j
25
the link between the sign and the object.8 In doing
so, he reconceptualizes the relationship between
language and the human construction of it by de-
I
I
emphasizing the element of ideation and foregrounding
the notion of language construction as a system. !
Implied in that is the assertion of the societal, and j
not ethical, nature of language. For contained within J
I
the belief that words have this mystical, natural
ability to name and reveal the truth of things is the j
identification of such essences with an ultimate,
i
supernatural source. Instead, a Sausserian-based model j
of language would center attention on the crucial
mechanisms that inform words and their occurrence in a j
particular social fabric. j
i
Such a re-centering is far from laissez-faire, but
i
l
rather it is to argue the most profound meaning for
words. For it places the onus on human agency. What j
becomes central is no longer the goal of matching up a
I
word with the essence of a thing, the perfect sign, but j
[
the unarticulated motivation that gives a word its life,
its texture, its animus. We thereby focus our attention ;
i
on perhaps a more central concern— the social dynamics
that are essentially the context of words and metaphors,
the real containers of the psychic character of a ;
society. The object then is certainly not to !
investigate why certain sounds and graphics are chosen J
to indicate a particular object but to redefine language
as a system, its use by us as a system, and all the
implications of such a re-visioning for Western society.
The emphasis shifts from a so-called purely linguistic
or philological consideration to one in which, again,
context plays the primary role. Context, in this case,
is to be understood differently from the way it is used
in New Critical theory; here, I mean by that the
awareness that a word exists dynamically within its
culture, and always partakes in, is grounded in its
drives, its desires, and its psychic character. The
study of language, then, assumes a different critical
range, one which presumes language to be a mode of
thought marking the "deep structure(s)" of the culture
itself.
27
Notes
1 Edward Said, Orientalism (NY: Vintage Books,
1979) 13.
2 Puertorriquenas may be one of the most
disempowered and disenfranchised groups in the United
States. See Lourdes Miranda King, "Puertorriquenas in
the United States: The Impact of Double Discrimination,"
Ronald Takaki, ed., From Different Shores. Perspectives
on Race and Ethnicity in America (NY: Oxford UP, 1987)
192-196.
3 Robert E. Park, "Human Migration and the Marginal
Man," The American Journal of Sociology 6(May 1928):
881-893. Everett Stonequist, The Marginal Man: A Study
in Personality and Culture Conflict (NY: Russell &
Russell, 1937).
4 Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted (1951; Boston:
Little, Brown and Co., 1973) 234-240.
5 Edith Eaton, "Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of
an Eurasian," Independent 66(21 Jan., 1909): 125-132.
Dhan Gopal Mukerji, Caste and Outcast (NY: E.P. Dutton &
Co., 1923).
6 Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro. Studies in
American Negro Life (NY: Albert & Charles Boni, 1925).
7 Frederick Turner, The Frontier in American
History (NY: H. Holt & Co., 1920).
8 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General
Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (NY: McGraw-Hill, 1966).
CHAPTER TWO
THE COLONIZATION OF "ETHNIC" LITERATURE
THE FICTION OF ANZIA YEZIERSKA
There is no language so vigilant and
self-aware that it can effectively
escape the conditions placed upon
thought by its own prehistory and
ruling metaphysics.
Christopher Norris1
29
I. THE HEGEMONY OF GOOD INTENTIONS
I
I
Miss Pat, the airlxne stewardess in George C. j
!
Wolfe's play The Colored Museum (1987), oozes !
professional cheerfulness as she attempts to elicit the
passengers' cooperation on the Celebrity Slaveship. She
i
informs them of the airline's few simple rules: please
"wear your shackles at all times" until the desired [
altitude has been reached, then the Captain will turn J
i
off the "Fasten Your Shackles" sign "allowing you a j
chance to stretch and dance in the aisles a bit" (and
here the actress playing Miss Pat efficiently indicates j
the appropriate sign); no call-and-response singing |
between cabins, please; no drums (1-2). When drums and \
!
chanting are heard, Miss Pat reappears, and asks the !
Cabin A (first class) passengers to refrain from joining
i
the rabble from Coach, and to hold up their spirits with j
I
the knowledge that: !
the songs you will sing in the cotton
fields, under the burning heat and the
stinging lash, will metamorphose and give j
birth to the likes of James Brown and the
Fabulous Flames. And you, yes you, are 1
going to come up with some of the best
dances. The best dances! The Watusi!
The Funky Chicken! And just think what j
you are going to mean to William
Faulkner. (3) |
I
She displays a basketball, beams them a bright j
smile and says: "you'll become millionaires!" (3). j
30
Wolfe's The Colored Museum is a comical and
satirical bricolage of Black experience in the United
I
States, firmly anchored in a post-Civil Rights, post- 1
modernist era, but carrying irrevocable memories of the
past. To me, the play does not argue for an exorcism of
those painful memories; rather, it suggests that the j
past is interwoven with the present, that indeed, it is
important to have knowledge of that past as context for
decisions on the future course of African Americans, who ;
are now in a society that still oppresses and j
marginalizes them, despite the apparent gains of the I
sixties and seventies. Miss Pat is, for example, in one |
sense, indistinguishable from the mass of corporate
soldiers. Her vivacious smile and reasonable tone
represent the epitome of modern professionalism; and,
her success rests in the ability to replace reality with ;
image. She is Wolfe's metaphor for what Guy Debord
calls "the society of the image or of the spectacle" '
(qtd. in Jameson 11). And like Disneyland, the j
inordinate metaphor of such a society, Miss Pat's j
vocation is to sell the concept of happiness even though i
I
it is an empty concept; and even though, in the process, :
she perpetuates oppression. Similarly, the land of Snow
White and the Seven Dwarfs (a Euro-, phallocentric myth
par excellence) is blithely touted as the happiest place i
on earth despite the fact that it is a mere forty
minutes from one of the most depressed and violent urban I
arenas in the nation. Miss Pat deserves a slot on "The
I
Cosby Show," and there lies the irony of the situation.
She has internalized the voice of the father, but she
does not and never will be of the center— assuming, to
begin with, that such a goal is a desirable one. Her J
position parallels that of the female protagonist in j
Bharati Mukherjee's "The Lady from Lucknow," whd
recognizes that despite her British education and \
I
I
Western values, she remains an alien in Western society, ;
consigned to being always "not quite" (Darkness 25). In 1
Wolfe's play, Miss Pat is a victim in the profoundest
sense of the word; for, she has been seduced into being >
I
the oppressor's representative. She assumes as her own, |
as natural and not to be questioned, the values of the
dominant culture, even as she remains a marginalized i
i
woman of color, in dual categories of domination and j
i
oppression. Hence, she coaxes with a promise of future !
success ("you'll become millionaires"), but the
chanting, the drums, and the shackles belie her efforts. J
Wrapped into the very cadences of her corporate being !
are the material reality of enslavement and death, j
voices and lives from the past, a presence never to be '
I
erased.
And what of her promise of future success to the
travellers on the Celebrity Slaveship? Once again, her
speech uses the tropes of the society of consumption,
evoking the cultural codes of egalitarianism and !
democracy. According to Miss Pat, the suffering they
will endure is certainly a small price for material
wealth and celebrity status. In addition, their lives ;
will inspire great literature and music and dance; they j
will have a place in American culture. Yet, the past, a 1
ubiquitous voice in Wolfe's play, refuses to be tamed by
her propaganda. No sooner does she attend to other j
i
duties than the chanting and drums grow louder. Her j
attempts to get everyone to "cooperate" meet increasing
I
resistance. Her desperation mounts as she tries to have
the passengers repeat: "I don't hear any drums and I
will not rebel. I will not rebel" (5). Unfortunately, I
her words actually describe present actuality in African !
American life, at least as Wolfe sees it to be. For
i
this playwright, literature has appropriated Black I
i
experiences, recycling them into Faulknerian myths of ;
race, human nature, and destiny. And even as soul, jazz j
I
and the blues have made their way into the canon of [
"American" music, the reality of the origins of such |
tunes is rapidly on the way to being forgotten or
romanticized, recuperated, like media images of the
33
multi-millionaire Black basketball player, into a white
i
mythology of freedom, democracy, and egalitarianism.
African American bourgeoisie represented by celebrities
!
such as Bill Cosby and fictive creations like Miss Pat I
i
have no thought of rebellion, but indeed, aid in the
dissemination of the white myth of success.
I think that most people who view this scene from
Wolfe's play would find it difficult to agree with those
writers who argue that the correct goal for African j
Americans is to merge into the mainstream, to assume the
socio-economic goals of middle-class America. This is i
i
especially the case given the evidence that the
institution of slavery was crucial in the development of I
!
American industrial capitalism. Ronald Takaki, in Iron
Cages. Race and Culture in Nineteenth Century America
(1979), asserts that the tremendous economic growth in i
the nineteenth century was largely due to the
appropriation of Indian lands and the establishment of a
Black "internal colony" (79) .2 The income in the
Southern states from cotton was paramount in
establishing the Northeastern manufacturing and Western j
I
1
foodstuff industries. In other words, profits from ;
I
slave labor were an important stimulus for the national
economy, and accelerated the Market Revolution. And the
34
Civil War was only a momentary disruption to economic
growth.
Given this background, the stance of certain
African Americans, such as Shelby Steele, who favor the
assumption of the values and goals of the white middle-
class, needs more critical attention. Their contention
seems tantamount to buttressing the very system that has
exploited one's group. Indeed, I believe that one of
the issues brought up by Wolfe's play is how the past is
a profound and irrevocable part of the present, a part
of the identity of African Americans. Hence, what we do
now must derive from the lessons of history. In Maxine
Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1977), one of the
narrator's anecdotes is about No-Name Aunt, whose sin
was as much in having a child out of wedlock as in
having dared to be different, to have an individual
identity that departs from the norm. Hence, the Aunt's
punishment is to be unnamed, forgotten, and thereby
presumedly erased from existence. Her real story does
remain untold. Was it rape or passion? Instead, what
survives is the No-Name Aunt as cautionary symbol for a
Chinese girl— she stands for all shameless women who
forget the rules. The reality of the actual woman, her
facial features, her fear perhaps, certainly her sorrow,
have been expunged. Instead, she is a metaphor, and as
such is an item freely circulated to affirm and
perpetuate the very rules that led to her unnaming. The i
narrator refuses to accept the official portrait of her |
Aunt disseminated by her mother because she senses a
betrayal of sorts in doing so. To erase the past is to
be unwitting collaborators in one's own oppression j
because that past is the source of the injustices of I
today. And, to accept the metaphor and to delete the J
i
actuality is to be reinstituted herself in the 1
oppression of women, and it is "to participate in her
i
[the Aunt's] punishment" (18). And so, she chooses to
tell her own version of the story of No-Name Aunt.
To forget the past is also to consent to another ;
form of enslavement; that is, to be named and
categorized by others. For the captive Africans were
I
given new, Western names; and, in that re-naming their j
i
identities were reconstituted, as property. Similarly,
I
the narrator in The Woman Warrior refuses to be known as 1
Chinese; she senses, in her mother's story-telling,
i
attempts to constitute her in a subjectivity that is a
!
form of alienation. She writes: "Those of us in the j
first American generations have had to figure out how j
the invisible world the emigrants built around our
childhoods fits in solid America" (6). Consequently,
for the narrator to create her own talk-story about No-
36
Name Aunt is to assume a measure of autonomy in the
making of her own identity. For Wolfe, the
contradictions in such an assertion are not lost. For
| even as images of millionaire basketball players flash
I
in the minds of his audience, the past experiences of
slavery erupt into the present in the form of the
chanting and the drums. Even as Miss Pat assumes her
I brightest professional smile, her blackness marks her as
the other in a socio-ideological environment that has
always already defined her, who is non-white, non-male,
as the outsider, the alien. Wolfe is aware of the
contradictions, the never-to-be-resolved double-bind of
African American lives seeking to be free from the
terrible memories of the past, yet which in actual fact,
| can never afford to forget those memories; for only when
one accepts and holds the past close is there a chance
for a fuller understanding of the present, which in
turn, perhaps, leads to a more complete emancipation.
In another scene of The Colored Museum, two upwardly
mobile African Americans enact a vignette in which they
I
j are models for Ebony.
Guy: We couldn't resolve the
contradictions of our existence.
Girl: And we couldn't resolve yesterday's
pain.
Guy: So we gave away our life and we now
live inside Ebony Magazine. (9)
The title of Wolfe's play is an act of signifying
upon museums as used by Ishmael Reed in Mumbo-Jumbo
(1972).3 As Reed implies, museums are the West's
monument to itself: its military prowess, its image of
itself as the objective scientist. But I wish to add
that the idea of museums also contains a nod to the
past, the barest gesture to what gave life to the
present, even as simultaneously, that acknowledgement is
an assertion of the death of that past, chased away by
the advance of civilization. Contained in the notion of
museums is not so much an homage as a dirge to the past.
And in that sense, the colonizing desire to acquire and
display the treasures of other nations is also an
imputation that these conquered cultures have become
irrelevant; for the future (Western culture) has
certainly arrived.4 Therefore, this institution can be
thought of as a distillation of the cultural drives of
the dominant ideology (in its configurations of that
period), indicative of the Western urge for global
conquest and expansion. It is also illustrative of the
cultural faculty to create a self-image, an identity
that is far removed from such gross ambitions as the
subjugation of others. Indeed, the concept of museums
suppressws any hint of blood, but rather, overlays the
events leading to the taking of these "artifacts" with a
myth (in Barthes’s sense) of an intense investment in
i
cultural and scientific studies. Museums are gestures ;
toward Culture, a demonstration of Civilization. But, j
(
more significantly, it is through such "mythic" self
representations that the dominant ideology "distorts" j
and "naturalizes" the actual processes of Empire (
building, inserting its presence in the cultural j
consciousness, minus the smell and taint of blood, and '
I
5 >
the guilt (Mythologies 129). The concept of museums
contains this duality, in which its overt symbolism for
the populace, this mythic self-representation of Culture '
and Civilization, acts to slip out of sight the reality !
I
of Empire, strives to un-name it, to un-identify it, j
|
even though the reality is ever present, albeit shadowy
and retiring. Indeed, I suggest that the libidinal
charge of this concept derives not simply from this j
i
self-representation but from the presence of the other j
I
I
in this duality, the dim, but, indeed, irrevocable
presence of Empire, of the hint of conquest and
domination, the martial prowess lending the rhetoric of
Culture and Civilization its truly irresistible flavor.
I
It is small wonder that Berbelang, the revolutionist in ;
Mumbo Jumbo. evinces such fervor in trying to liberate
the artifacts "imprisoned" in museums. J
Arguably, then, museums historicized reveal the
stench of colonialism. Wolfe in his play conceives
contemporary African-American lives as becoming
increasingly like museum displays, sculptured into poses
of cultural icons of success, framed into congealed
}
\
multi-media images (the models for Ebony Magazine); Miss I
i
Pat re-presents herself as part of mainstream corporate
America, and in the process lends her image to the
American myth of democracy and equal opportunity.
Again, I am reminded of Reed's Mumbo Jumbo. In reply to I
Hinckle Von Vampton's ad, "Negro Viewpoint Wanted," |
1
Woodrow Wilson, young, eager and unquestioning, meets 1
I
with Von Vampton at the offices of the newspaper, Benign
Monster, ready to be the Negro point of view. Von
!
Vampton "starts licking his chops" for he has found it— j
the token presence, muted, distorted, cooperating in its j
own reappropriation by the dominant ideology (76). In ;
that sense, Wolfe's play not only criticizes African- '
Americans for allowing their lives to become disembodied
!
icons, but also the increasing tendency to forget and to j
divorce from the past, to treat their own history as ;
irrelevant and deserving only of a superficial i
i
acknowledgement, for the present (Anglo-American models
of success) is here. It is Wolfe's building upon Reed's
demythologizing of museums, on his conception of museums !
40 j
as a colonial symbol, which brings an added poignancy to
The Colored Museum: for, it is because they have
forgotten that past that African-Americans have allowed
I
themselves to be re-colonized. The injustices of
i
yesterday persist today, albeit in a more distorted and
i
I
subtle form, because we fail to recognize that the past !
i
(the chanting and the drums) is yet irretrievably
enmeshed in the very texture of the present. So, Hong
Kingston's No-Name Aunt may be simultaneously erased and ;
a disembodied symbol, but, in a sense, she always J
already remains signified. And for Wolfe, Black
inclusion into, mainstream America is an ambivalent
proposition, one in which the price is too exorbitant, 1
i
for it is the renunciation of one's past. ;
In their own ways, Hong Kingston, Wolfe, and Reed j
all struggle against the monopolization of culture |
I
production by Anglo-America; they struggle for freedom j
in self-definition, not only in the articulation of I
goals and aspirations, but especially in one's identity,
in how one is named and conceptualized. The latter is
I
imperative, especially perhaps, in this post-modernist 1
era of the image and the spectacle, when the media has
such power to disseminate images. It is this capability ;
that facilitates the transformation of real and actual
I
lives and achievements into homogenized symbols, or
metaphors used to reaffirm the American Dream. Black
athletes and artists become disembodied signifiers of
the cultural myth of freedom, equal opportunity, the
Puritan work ethic, undergoing what Fredric Jameson
calls a "process of legitimation" (87), in which their
aesthetics, their achievements and artforms, their
i
voices are "universalized" and re-appropriated to [
perpetuate the "illusion that there is only one genuine ;
culture" (87); or more particularly, that the American ;
Dream does work. Asian Americans are stereotyped as j
diligent, successful, and quiet. This perception J
probably began when the Chinese and Japanese first came |
here mostly as railroad workers, miners, farmers, and !
I
small businessmen. Their labor was often used to
depress the wages of Black or Irish labor. On the
railroads, company officials pitted Chinese workers
against the other racial groups to see who would be the
first to finish a certain stretch of track. Ronald
Takaki recounts a particular episode in the New England
town of North Adams, where seventy-five Chinese were j
i
brought in to break the union of the Secret Order of the 1
I
Knights of St. Crispin (Strangers 95-99). Asians |
(Chinese) were chosen because they had been already j
stereotyped as meek and cooperative. Moreover, rarely !
is there an appreciation of the fact that "Asia" may be
42
adequate as a geographical term, but not as either a
political or cultural designation. As Edward Said !
points out in Orientalism, such terms reveal the West's I
attempt to tame that which it does not understand. To
I
essentialize is to unveil; to assume the right to name
is also to assume the right to own, to manipulate, and
I
to govern. Whether or not Chinese Americans or Japanese !
Americans are really diligent or not is hardly the issue j
here. Rather, the concern is with how these images are i
appropriated by the dominant ideology. Hence, during
the race riots of the sixties, "Asian Americans" were
I
held up as the model minority, and once again, used to !
I
put other ethnic and racial groups in their "proper" '
places.
It is these stereotypes and images that serve the
desires and drives of the dominant ideology. It is j
I
these images, according to Barthes, which are taken up ;
i
into the cultural "myths," which fuel the semic codes, j
t
I
allowing us to "read" societal texts. He defines j
"myths" as a form of "depoliticized speech," which does j
I
not merely elide the intentions of the center, but j
"naturalizes" them, thereby placing the center's actions ;
and behavior beyond scrutiny (Mythologies 129). Myth,
according to Barthes:
1
i
transforms history into nature. We now j
understand why, in the eves of the myth- j
43
consumer, the intention, the adhomination
of the concept can remain manifest
without appearing to have an interest in
the matter: what causes mythical speech
to be uttered is perfectly explicit, but
it is immediately frozen into something !
natural; it is not read as motive, but as ■
a reason. (129)
Therefore, the image of the saluting Negro soldier
in front of the French flag not only hides imperialism,
or more accurately, makes such intentions transparent, !
but serves to affirm and circulate national ideals and
I
self-image. Myths and the images which transmit them
naturalize the ideology of culture, indeed, distort the
fact that culture is, in Bakhtin's words, a socio-
ideological environment (The Formal Method 14). j
I
i
Assuredly, the struggle for economic parity and for i
j
fair political representation are two important areas of |
I
concern for people of color in the United States. j
However, these areas are indivisible, and indeed, trace
back to the ability to empower ourselves through the way j
we perceive ourselves, and the way our images are
conceptualized and located in the semic codes. In other
words, the primary confrontation must be with a
discourse of race and ethnicity that is specific to this
i
Euro-American, phallo-centric dominant ideology. Wolfe,
Reed, and Hong Kingston contend with a culture that, in
differing and subtle ways, undercuts, rehabilitates, and ,
t
reinstitutionalizes their attempts at self- |
determination. They seem aware that this occurs
primarily through the very language, through the images,
the symbols and metaphors that circulate in the
collective consciousness, images which convey the
agenda, or more accurately, the libidinal drives of the
dominant ideology.
Another aspect of the issues brought forward by my
reading of Wolfe resides in the way "ethnic" literary
studies is today primarily conducted. If one agrees
with Gramsci's concept of "cultural hegemony," then
academe cannot be immune from the socio-ideological
environment to which it belongs. Indeed, what is
problematically termed as "ethnic" literary studies, in
order to adequately deal with the "political
unconscious" of the Anglo-American culture that
underwrites the literature it deals with, would have to
re-figure its rubric of studies so as to account for its
own reinstitutionalization by the dominant culture. As
a start, what requires critique are the very terms of
discussion: why do we focus on certain writers and not
others? (Hong Kingston versus Frank Chin); why is some
writing called "ethnic" but not others? (Paule Marhsall
versus Nathaniel Hawthorne); how is Thoreau also an
ethnic writer, but why is he never viewed as one? Why
45
indeed is so much attention paid to the "marginalized"
identity of ethnic writers and writers of color? What
is the ideological investment behind an apparently
|
careless conflation of two distinct concepts, race and !
i
ethnicity? "Ethnic" studies carry a great deal of
subversive potential, one which could allow a radical
critique of Western metaphysics; but, which at present,
I
to a certain extent, is colonized, its concerns still ,
dominated or influenced by the agenda of Anglo-American, ,
phallo-centric culture. And it is the ability of the ‘
hegemony of this socio-ideological environment to re-
appropriate and re-institutionalize resistance,
marginalities, disruptions, protesting voices that is a j
j
demonstration of Anglo-American, phallo-centric j
!
imperialism.
I
The crucial battle, indeed, lies in the ultimate '
i
form of self-empowerment— the capacity to defxne one's J
I
own identity, which must include a radical inquiry into
the processes by which Anglo-America constructs its I
j
identity, as well as the very content of that identity.
However, contained within such a goal is surely a
utopian desire. And although Jameson conceives of the
utopian quest as a positive Marxist hermeneutic, he also
notes its totalizing drives and assumptions (291-292). j
I would add that any such project must also necessarily
posit an ethics which in turn can only subsist on a set
of universalizing and essentializing beliefs of what is ;
i
human. For to speak of any form of utopia, whether a j
Marxian "perfect society" or another, is to assert a set
I
i
of beliefs of what the ideal is in human relationships,
i
and for that, one must surely also have incontrovertible
I
knowledge of what is universally human. The ;
i
unsatisfactory nature of all this lies not merely in the !
utopianism of such an endeavor— and, surely there is a 1
strange circularity in attempting to arrive at a utopian
polity through another utopian desire of perfect j
|
prescience and perfect understanding. But such a drive |
i
also resounds with imperialism. After all, whose
I
humanity are we speaking about? Should ideal human !
traits be those as indicated in the person of a Peruvian
Indian or a native of Beverly Hills? And, is not what I
have done here— opposing the Indian to the rich
American, assuming that Beverly Hills only harbors the
rich— indicative of a too-easy generalization, of a ;
i
certain bias towards "Indians" as well as against the
i
"rich?" The unsatisfactory nature of utopianism is
further compounded by the fact that Western ideas of
humanity have always been seen by the West as the only
criteria for what is human. So, early missionaries and ;
explorers routinely described the peoples they :
47
encountered as savages, or as lower on the evolutionary
scale, since the latter did not meet the Western
definition of what is civilized and human, while
actually their only sin was that they were not J
European.6 Surely, it is arguable that what underlies [
the utopian desire is a patriarchal drive to assert one
view, its own; it is a will to power under the guise of
i
liberation. Consequently, the crucial issue arising j
i
from such considerations is the need to be aware that i
even as disenfranchised groups struggle against the j
hegemony of the dominant culture, care is also needed to I
guard against that endeavor being reappropriated in the 1
form of the reemergence of totalizing drives, in the j
form of the need to define a monolithic perspective of
t
domination or the effective means of resistance to that :
i
domination.
As has been noted previously, the desire of those
who today would speak of themselves as the marginalized J
to resist domination or oppression affords scant j
i
protection against reappropriation by a hegemonic
culture, even among those who are supposedly the most
conscious of how the game is played. The situation ^
depicted in The Colored Museum is a case in point.
I
I
However, a similar problem in feminism has been noted by !
writers such as Angela Davis.7 The lack of a coalition j
48
along gender lines in the United States has long been a
matter of controversy. An additional dimension to this
I
issue has arisen with the apparently increasing '
i
awareness that there is perhaps more need than ever now
to forge alliances not merely among the feminists of one '
i
nation, but across political boundary lines. This j
awareness has come about partially as a result of the |
i
understanding that this period has been miscast as post
colonial, that while colonial governments per se are ;
almost extinct, Western imperialism, as indicated in the i
i
actions of American multi-national corporations in Third I
i
World countries, is very much alive. Economic
imperialism is a matter of cultural and political ,
imperialism as well, all of which are differing but
complex facets of Anglo-American, phallocentric ;
domination. The search by Western capital for natural
resources, cheap labor, and markets for its goods has
i
not ceased with the disappearance of the British Raj, j
but has taken on perhaps more complex and subtle forms. !
Hence, some American feminists have called for an
I
international coalition. For example, Lisa Albrecht and ;
I
Rose M. Bower in Bridges of Power. Women's !
i
Multicultural Alliances (1990) note that: j
the internationalization of the economy,
the dramatic plunge in power for
disenfranchised peoples who made gains in
the 1960s, and the climate of racial J
hatred and intolerance that has emerged
in the eighties (15) j
make the present an ideal time for the establishment of
multinational alliances. They align themselves with
Audre Lorde when they call for "supporting those radical I
I
institutions that connect us to global social change.
For Black women, especially, it means making alliances
»
across the diaspora" (5). Albrecht and Bowers further 1
contend:
i
As we cross the threshold of the 1990s, ;
diverse groups of feminists appear ready I
to seriously engage in alliance formation j
to create social change. To forge these ,
kinds of practical connections, we need i
to embark on theoretical investigations !
that aid us in our understanding of ;
coalitions and alliances. (4) ;
i
While I agree with such suggestions in principle, |
1
this collection of essays itself reveals the !
difficulties inherent in such a goal. Out of twenty-
four authors, possibly only three would identify j
I
themselves as women from the Third World: one is from j
I
I
Hong Kong, one from Peru, and the other from the Middle |
East. Only one other author lives and works in a Third
World country. Brief biographies indicate strong
feminist interests but little that would suggest a
comparable knowledge of feminist concerns in other ;
nations. However, a more crucial issue is the editors' I
proposals to link American labor struggles with those in I
50
other countries. This aim, unfortunately, fails to take j
into account the multiplicity of global feminism, as it
assumes that economic parity, a primarily Anglo-American
middle-class feminist concern, would also be that of
women from Third World countries. None of the authors i
mention the most comprehensive study of Third World
feminism by a Third World scholar to date: Feminism and '
Nationalism in the Third World by Kumari Jayawardena.8 :
i
Jayawardena's discussion demonstrates that women in j
i
these countries have many concerns other than the ^
economic. Some of these are connected to nationalism,
to what the women see as the continual expansion of j
Western cultural hegemony. In addition, they are also
|
concerned with literacy, the arts, democracy, religion, j
I
dress codes, and so on.
The objection registered here resides in the
authors' assumption that what concerns white, middle-
class feminists are necessarily also the major concern
of Third World women. Unfortunately, what appears to be !
operative in this instance is a utopian desire to effect
change, to impart the good news of women's rights, as it j
were, this time to the women of other nations, but j
i
apparently without any in-depth understanding of the j
immense diversity of needs residing in equally diverse
socio-political situations. The women's struggle in
51
other countries arises from unique intersections of
race, gender, and class, within their own specific
cultural environments, and with the additional issue of
the need to resolve nationalistic concerns vis-a-vis the I
United States and the West. Hence, nationalism is a
major concern of many Third World feminists, whereas it
is not the same issue with American feminists. The
point to be underscored here is, again, as with the
concerns depicted in The Colored Museum, the apparent
ease with which the dominant ideology re-emerges into j
even the most well-intentioned of resistance movements;
in this case, it is, once again, the move to homogenize j
experience, to posit oneself as the norm, the center,
I
and all the implications thereof; the patriarchal voice, :
at least in the instances already brought forth here, |
I
continues to subvert the endeavor of the marginalized to •
speak themselves.
Clearly, the issue of marginality is a complex one. j
For me, the central concern in the narratives of [
writers, such as Wolfe, Maxine Hong Kingston, or Anzia
Yezierska, is the confrontation with the problem of
identity. These authors are concerned with |
"discovering" what it means to be an African American or j
to be of Chinese heritage in American society. Wolfe's I
(de)construction of media images on stage is a profound
52
commentary on the increasing disintegration of the hard-
fought war for a unique African American self, even as
African Americans continue to suffer discrimination due
i
to the socially constructed identity of race. :
Yezierska's works repetitively depict an adolescent j
I
female protagonist who struggles to define herself. And
i
Maxine Hong Kingston's preoccupation in The Woman
Warrior is a similar grappling with the issue of
individual identity in an Anglo-American, phallocentric
cultural environment. I further suggest that the need ;
I
«
to define the self in these narratives is a form of !
self-determination that is to be distinguished from what
might appear a similar concern in works like Crane's The 1
i
i
Red Badge of Courage (1895). Crane’s narrative is a :
representation of a ritual of maturation, a mystical
shedding of youth and an assumption of the mantle of
manhood. It is a Western phallocentric Bildungsroman of
a young man who must struggle for his identity but only
so as to be worthy to ascend to his predestined place j
i
beside the patriarchs. In contrast, the struggle for
i
identity, in the writings of Wolfe and Yezierska, is not
i
a birthright; rather, it is a necessity that goes to the |
i
very heart of their survival. And, whereas Crane's !
narrative reveals an unquestioned progress through a
rites of passage, the characters in Yezierska and Wolfe
must deal with threats to their most basic survival as i
human beings, threats based upon incontrovertible
elements like color and gender. j
As I hope to show in a more detailed discussion of
Yezierska's narratives later in this chapter, her
fictive characters search for a self that is a teasing, t
I
amorphous entity, forever out of reach. The search |
I
itself is a tenuous and ambivalent affair, conducted |
I
covertly at times, and always accompanied with a dis
ease from a sense of having betrayed one's ancestral
culture. Yezierska's narratives contain unconvincing
endings in which the female protagonist rhapsodizes j
about "America," yet, still evinces an undercurrent of
(
tension, of issues unresolved, of a threatened entropy, j
The search for empowerment by attaining a positive, j
I
self-affirming identity is a uniquely agonizing one that ,
somehow never concludes, but is merely deferred till the '
next story about the immigrant ghetto. Understandably,
then, Yezierska repeatedly depicts the same protagonist |
in similar narratives which after a while appear to
merge into each other, becoming an indistinguishable
single story, an inconclusive odyssey for identity.
I
Gloria Anzaldua's work is especially relevant, in j
|
my view, in this discussion of the reappropriation of
various attempts by marginalized authors to define self- ■
54
empowering identities. However, while Yezierska's
search for a viable identity is tenuous and filled with
guilt and ambiguity, Anzaldua boldly, defiantly, asserts
her marginality. In This Bridge Called My Back,
subtitled Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981), co
edited with Cherrie Moraga, she and the other writers
proudly affirm their identities as
Black/Yellow/Brown/lesbian/straight/Marxist. They mark
their marginalization, much as in Anzaldua's next
volume, Borderlands/La Frontera; The New Mestiza (1987).
Most recently, she has edited another essay collection,
entitled Making Face. Making Soul/Haciendo Caras (1990).
In it, she writes about wearing masks in Anglo-American
society, and how:
las mascaras . . . drive a wedge between
our intersubjective personhood and the
persona we present to the world* "Over
my mask/is your mask of me. . . . We are
all bleeding, rubbed raw behind our
masks." (Mitsuye Yamada) (xv).
She notes that these essays not only constitute a
call to arms for all marginalized women, but also serve
to notify the "white" world to learn how "to read in
nonwhite narrative traditions" (xviii). Anzaldua
declares:
Contrary to the norm, it [the collection]
does not address itself primarily to
whites, but invites them "to listen in"
to women-of-color talking to each other
55 '
and, in some instances, to and ''against*' j
white people. (xviii) j
i
For Anzaldua, "white people" who need to listen to ;
i
women-of-color include white feminists who, in various
ways, unwittingly continue to participate in the
oppression of women-of-color by the dominant culture.
For Anzaldua, this volume is an attempt by marginalized j
women to "decolonize" themselves, to speak about the j
t
"silencing strategies of the privileged, the repression
of our voices and our painful passage from psychic ;
i
numbing into utterance and creation of our own paroles" I
I
(xvii).
Anzaldua thus attempts to turn her marginality into j
(
a badge of courage, to forge her own creative and j
!
intellectual space by proclaiming that marginality, in a
manner that is uncompromising and militant, perceiving
i
i
in that, or, perhaps, in the very manner of the j
assertion, the attainment of a iouissance of being that (
i
affords her ultimate independence and departure beyond j
the dominant ideology. In her articulation of that j
goal, Anzaldua has attempted to speak to the struggle of j
I
all those who endeavor to construct an identity that
resists colonization, that truly departs from a ■
i
metaphysics based upon an oppositional duality, and a |
definition of self that subjugates others. It is this
same desire to be proud of who one is that fueled the i
Black nationalist movements of the sixties, and the
search for a Black aesthetic. Perhaps, Trinh T. Minh- j
i
ha, who is sensitive to the power of images and of the j
i
media in disseminating cultural ideology, puts it best
when she writes:
I
You who understand the dehumanization of
forced removal-relocation-reeducation- '
redefinition, the humiliation of having
to falsify . . . your voice— you know.
. . . You try and keep on trying to say
it, for if you don't . . . you will be
said. (80) j
I see Anzaldua's adamant insistence on an identity
of marginality as an attempt to act against an ^
internalized belief in the father's judgment of one's !
i
I
own inferiority. Frantz Fanon, in Black Skin. White ;
Masks (1967), describes the propensity of the colonized
to assume the voice and the ideas of the colonizer. The
i
colonized learn to hate themselves, and to accept as the |
norm the standards of the oppressor. Hence, for |
example, Westernized Africans took great pride in
1
knowing French while affecting ignorance of their own !
language and "native" customs. Aime Cesaire describes
this thinking in the following words: "I am talking of
i
the millions of men who have been skillfully injected j
with fear, inferiority, complexes, trepidation . . .
abasement" (qtd. in Fanon). Africans learn to hate the j
color of their skin, their traditions, any link to their .
57
real identity. It is this self-hate that writers such
as Alain Locke and W.E.B. Du Bois tried to combat; and, !
it is this form of internalized oppression that Anzaldua
wishes to combat with such a fervent assertion of pride
j
in the marginalized identity. That assertion of ;
I
identity is an act of self-determination. The following
paragraph illustrates Anzaldua's posture of
independence, her defiance, the call to arms: .
i
I
What does being a thinking subject, an j
intellectual, mean for women-of-color j
from working class origins? It means not !
fulfilling our parents' expectations, it I
means going against their expectations. !
. . . being in alien territory and
suspicious of the laws and walls . . . !
challenging institutionalized discourses. I
. . . It means being what Judy Baca terms
"internal exiles". (xxv) (Emphasis
mine.)
However, to assert one's independence is not
!
necessarily to have achieved it. To write, to speak of j
having created and established a self-affirming identity !
i
might still be a far remove from having effected an 1
existence that can be truly a celebration of that
identity. In the preceding quote, every line, every war j
cry yet evinces the presence of the father, for her |
t
attempt at self-affirmation is built upon a binary j
!
opposition. Her words exist only in relation to the
center; she is the antithesis, the antagonist, merely
speaking because she has been spoken to. She can only ;
58
"'not fulfill," or "go against" expectations. She can
merely react to the "challenges" initiated by the j
dominant ideology. j
Furthermore, the author sees liberation in i
f
acknowledging her alien status, her internal exile. J
I
However, it is exactly such a positioning and the
rhetoric of reaction/opposition she uses which allow the j
re-emergence of binarism. She does not fundamentally |
i
question Western binary opposition, but indeed, depends
upon it in her self-positioning. As such, Anzaldua has
not altered an ideology that, through various types of j
signification, still manages to sidestep attempts at a
j
radical re-figuring of itself. Unfortunately, [
i
therefore, this author's political stance
reinstitutionalizes her marginality in the old
i
configurations. But perhaps, the most disturbing of all j
is Anzaldua's self-inscription as an "internal exile." j
Such a designation is disturbing for it suggests that J
I
the marginalized may speak but only within certain J
I
boundaries, the very ones that oppress and confine them. (
t
Such is the indelible and pervasive presence of the ,
center, ubiquitous, even in that moment of resistance.
Indeed, Anzaldua's stance is a most ambivalent
guerilla tactic, for she wishes it to be understood that
this collection "does not address itself primarily to !
59
whites" (xviii). Understandably, the author is
frustrated at the presumption held by many white
American feminists that women-of-color have the primary
responsibility of explaining Third World issues. I
suggest, however, that to speak to one’s own is
necessary but only half of the job. Anzaldua's
introduction to this collection of essays is an exercise
in courage. However, again, to proclaim the need to
take pride in one's identity of marginality is of
limited value if such a position fails to dissolve the
oppositional duality of the dominant ideology, a duality
which continues to recirculate even within discourses of
resistance. Under this Anglo-American cultural
hegemony, words such as "difference" and "marginality"
are signifiers of the other, alien, inferior, always
"not quite," and to be named as "difference," albeit by
oneself, is to a certain extent to be reinscribed in the
existing power relations.
In comparison, Trinh Minh-ha, whose Woman Native
Other (1989) is a declaration of her incontrovertible
presence, the post-colonial other, subversive, resolute,
unerasable, perceives the need for self-affirmation of
one's identity, yet writes:
The constant need to refer to the "male
model" for comparisons unavoidably
maintains the subject under tutelage.
For the point is not to carve one's space
60 I
i
in "identity theories that ignore women"
. . . but patiently to dismantle the very
notion of core (be it static or not) and
identity. (96)
While I feel that Trinh Minh-ha's position of doing
away with the very notion of a core and identity needs |
to be looked at more critically, I agree that it is
necessary to stop referring to the "male model." It '
might be more productive to attempt to dissolve the
metaphysics of duality, this binary opposition, and not ;
the very notion of identity. Gramsci in discussing j
i
possible ways to subvert and overthrow cultural hegemony
argues for a "war of position," in which the emerging
class achieves its goal only through its ability to
"satisfy certain objective needs of a society like legal I
t
administration . . . cultural production, elaboration of
models of exemplary behavior" (qtd. in Pellicani 32).
Not only would the consent of the subordinate classes I
depend on the ability of the hegemonic class to convince |
that its ideals are the "correct" intellectual and moral I
I
direction for society, but also that it is "the motive
force of a universal expansion; of a development of all
# i
the "natural" energies" (qtd. in Pellicani 30). I think J
i
that power configurations in the West today are more i
complex than this model of hegemony allows. However, |
. 1
with regards to the immediate discussion, the point is
that any such moral or intellectual leadership needs to
61
be a truly radical departure from the present direction,
one which questions the fundamental assumptions of ■
culture and identity, one which re-visions the
definitions of humanity, but most importantly, which re
visions and critiques the very processes by which these
i
goals are achieved, for there is the need to guard j
i
against strategies of resistance and change becoming
i
solidified into dogma. However, these words themselves
resound with sheer utopian aspiration, and as such,
»
attest to the ease with which old habits re-emerge. |
I
In their various ways, Anzaldua, Wolfe, Yezierska, !
and academics like Albrecht evince a similar concern.
I
I
It should give us pause, however, when we consider that I
over a century after the first Black narratives were |
I
written, the struggle to define one's own identity is as '
{
urgent as ever. As Wolfe argues in The Colored Museum, i
the economic, political, and social enfranchisement of '
minority groups have only reinstituted the dominant
ideology. The women's and Civil Rights movements of the j
sixties appear to have facilitated an increasingly j
liberal consciousness in academe. In recent years,
critics such as Anzaldua, Trinh, Helene Cixous, and
i
Audre Lorde, have added their voices to this
I
institution, voices based upon various configurations of
marginality. But texts and words do not mean just what
62 j
we wish for them to mean; no word is a free agent, t
innocuous and unbiased, but is an element in a
signifying chain that always already carries traces of
other signifiers, other intentions, from other contexts, i
i
and always within a specific socio-ideological
environment which immerses that word with a particular
ideological weight. That is, the concept of
"marginality," despite attempts to revision it, to j
disconnect it from the master’s rhetoric, carries the I
sense that it is a segregation, a marking off, a
confinement within boundaries. Therefore, in terms of
an equalization of the male-dominated, Anglo-Saxon- j
dominated academe, the inclusion of marginal voices into ;
>
the power structure is an ironic affair, for such i
incorporation seems to be itself based upon the
reinscription of just such an identity of marginality.
Indeed, for the marginalized position to be legitimate,
the marginalized must apparently remain marginalized.
Such a situation cannot succeed in fully overturning !
hierarchial structures of domination. To simply assert
that the concept of marginality is a positive form of
identity is not the same as having refigured a thinking
l
based upon a process of binarism, much less to have j
I
effected an emancipation of the way identity is now j
I
constructed by culture. i
Words are not free agents; they exist in a specific
socio-ideological environment, and are permeated by the
drives of the dominant ideology. As such, they never
abide solely in the present but are indivisible from the
past. Even though one may attempt to "read" a text like
Wolfe's or Anzaldua's only in their contemporary
context, it is the realization of the presence of the
insistent voices of the past residing in those texts
that brings a fuller understanding of what is at stake
with the strategic assumption of positions of
marginality, with, indeed, the ease with which the
dominant ideology yet subverts, contains, and co-opts
these marginalities. It is when we enable the past that
is always already extant in these writings of the
present that we can refigure the contemporary conception
of marginality so as to address more effectively a
continuing cultural hegemony.
II. THE CASE OF ANZIA YEZIERSKA
Anzia Yezierska's works include Hungry Hearts
(1920), Salome of the Tenements (1923), Children of
Loneliness (1923), Bread Givers (1925), Arrogant Beggar
(1927), All I Could Never Be (1932), Red Ribbon an a
White Horse (1950), and a short story collection, edited
by Alice Kesslar Harris, entitled The Open Cage: An
Anzia Yezierska Collection (1979). She probably
published her first short story in 1915, although Carol j
J
Schoen notes that Yezierska worked hard to omit that
fact, preferring to let it be known that her first
I
publication was in 1918, after her alleged affair with
i
John Dewey ("'Sweatshop Cinderalla'" 3-4). Several of |
Yezierska's female protagonists, also uneducated but j
# I
aspiring writers, have brief but passionate encounters j
J
with men who are invariably Anglo-Saxon, older, and j
highly educated. These so-called "affairs" are never
consummated, but do "inspire" the impressionable main j
character to undertake a great deal of soul-searching, j
which eventually lead to publication. For a writer who
supposedly based her fiction upon fact, remarkably j
little about her life can be ascertained. Even her i
I
*
birthdate and year can only be placed between 1880 and
1885. Yezierska, according to biographer Schoen, •
i
1
emigrated with her family from the Pale around 1890 [
("'Sweatshop Cinderalla'" 4).9 Other aspects of her j
life are equally sketchy; for example, she hardly ever
t
spoke about her education (Columbia University's •
Teachers College), siblings (nine) or marriages (two). i
!
Indeed, the author consistently put forward the j
impression that she was self-taught, without family, and
quite alone in a strange land, an image that coalesces t
with the characterization of her recurrent protagonist. ' •
In fact, Yezierska portrays herself as such even in what
is supposedly her autobiography, Red Ribbon on a White
Horse.
Yezierska's apparent reticence with details of her
life is interpreted by scholars such as Schoen, as well
as her own daughter, to be a shrewd attempt to foster in
the press the image of her work as autobiographical
(Schoen, "'Sweatshop Cinderalla'" 3-4; Henriksen 141-
143). The suggestion is that Yezierska was extremely
media-savvy and undertook the building of this myth— the
unlettered immigrant transformed into successful writer,
the American Dream realized— in order to boost book
sales. The depiction of her as the "Sweatshop
Cinderella" by Metro Goldwyn Meyer as part of a
publicity campaign for the film version of the Bread
Givers would lend credence to that argument, although in
her "autobiography," Yezierska mentions this aspect of
her Hollywood experience with disdain. Which itself
could, of course, be merely disingenuousness on the part
of the author; in fact, academic commentators have
recently pointed out the fictive elements in that text.
Clearly, this issue can never be objectively proved or
disproved; and, questions as to the correspondence of
her stories with biographical data are quickly mired in
unresolvable speculations. Her alleged affair with John
66
Dewey is a case in point. Carol Schoen in Anzia
Yezierska (1982) writes:
While Dewey's response to Yezierska
was that of a man to a woman, she seems
to have visualized him in a more ideal
fashion. The innumerable portraits in
her fiction of a Dewey-like figure
exaggerate his age and accentuate his
kindly but lofty nature. There are many
poignant retellings of a love story
between an older man and a younger woman,
but these often have about them the aura
of hero-worship, and even a mention of
him as godlike. (12-13)
It is unclear how Schoen ascertained that Dewey
indeed responded to her in such a fashion, or more
importantly, what that response was. The smooth
transition from that suggestion into a discussion of
Yezierska's fiction is shared by most scholars who have
written about this aspect of Yezierska. Indeed, her
daughter, Louise Levitas Henriksen, in Anzia Yezierska.
A Writer's Life (1988), weaves an even more compelling
tale of thwarted romance. She describes Dewey's
feelings about Yezierska in the following way:
Dewey had recognized the truth of her—
that Anzia could not love him. But she
had desperately needed him as a father, a
lover, a brother to care for her and make
her whole. Without his love and
acceptance, she had nothing, she was
nothing. That was why she now fought to
tell her stories. She had to be
something. (121)
This passage is disturbing to say the least. How
does Henriksen know Dewey's thoughts on Yezierska?
Furthermore, are these actually Dewey's thoughts, or is j
that Yezierska's version of the relationship to her j
daughter, or is this passage, in fact, Henriksen's !
interpretation of her mother's thoughts at the time?
Henriksen's sleight of hand here also fails to erase the
i
contradiction created by her own description of J
Yezierska. According to her, Yezierska was a very ;
independent person, who had begun to rebel against her
father and his Jewish culture when she was sixteen (16-
' i
17). Biographer Mary Dearborn is also at pains to point :
out Yezierska's feminist beliefs and her friendships
with prominent feminists of the time (67-82). If so,
then it seems unlikely that Yezierska, thirty-five when
the affair allegedly occurred, would have felt that
i
"Without his love and acceptance, she had nothing, she
was nothing" (121). |
Most commentators rely heavily on two types of j
I
evidence purporting to prove that the affair happened:
letters that Dewey wrote to Yezierska, and poems that he j
i
wrote about her. As argument that the letters existed, j
i
most critics point to one such supposed letter in All I
Could Never Be. In a number of other shorter fiction,
Yezierska describes the heroine dramatically j
relinquishing to her lover the letters he had written to |
I
her, after holding out for years. Most critics see this 1
act as a symbol of the protagonist's maturation, as she ;
faces up to the realization that the romance has ended, j
In All I Could Never Be, Yezierska apparently uses one |
I
of Dewey's letters and one of his poems to her. The |
poems that are supposedly about Yezierska have been
published in 1979 as part of a collection (Boydston).
i
Since Yezierska had access to these (two) poems, and in
light of her plots, scholars are justified in assuming |
t
I
that Yezierska was indeed referring to Dewey. However,
the veracity of all this is still questionable because
I
the poet never mentions Yezierska by name, and knowledge i
i
about this particular connection derives from j
Yezierska's fiction "backed up" by her own assertions.
As for her accounts of herself, scholars such as Schoen
often point to Yezierska's unreliability on this score, 1
i
and to her propensity to blur the distinction between
her life and her fiction. In other words, critics and
commentators are willing to take Yezierska's word with 1
I
regards to Dewey but not so with other aspects of her '
life.
Unless new evidence surfaces, this alleged '
I
relationship with John Dewey cannot be confirmed. The i
j
attention towards this issue is understandable since |
I
there is the need for scholarly detective work on a !
relatively obscure author; however, one unfortunate
result of this attention is that it obfuscates the
issues with regards to literature by those such as
Yezierska, and by the attendant scholarship. The Dewey
^connection is suggested as the source of her plots, 1
1 I
\ creating a proliferation of articles and books built
/
^ upon each other, texts enclosed in a self-perpetuating
/ dance, the endgame of which is an academic discourse ^
I :
i
{ that is surprisingly not so much about Yezierska's work ,
as it is about the nation itself. This narrative [
i
peculiar to academe uses, as would any fictive !
narrative, the literary tropes of destiny, romance,
i
courage, passion— the young, dreamy immigrant and the ■
I
famous American philosopher, the teeming ghettos and !
pristine America beyond, soaring ambitions and,
tragically, hopes deferred. However, the tale is the .
more compelling because it is woven within a cultural j
myth, a myth that defines America as the land of
promise, romance, the land of unforeseen, unlimited
possibility. Indeed, this academic discourse is written ,
|
and to be read with the semic codes that place it among |
other texts delineating the cultural codes of the j
American Dream. What has occurred to this aspect of ,
Yezierska's work, therefore, is tantamount to a co
option by these academic narratives into the service of
the cultural myth of the American Dream. Whatever else
a writer such as Yezierska has to say is elided,
eclipsed by this larger drama, in which both thesis and
antithesis are defined by the dominant ideology. And,
voices of the alien other are homogenized into the
requisite totality by the various drives and desires of
the center.
In other words, Yezierska*s work is not dealt with
as a text that exists as a form of culture production in
a dominant ideology. They are not read for what they
can intimate of the political unconscious and its
libidinal drives; instead, their inscription by the
semic codes has apparently successfully emptied them of
ideological intent, un-names them as participant in a
"depoliticized speech" (Barthes, Mythologies 143).
Indeed, existing scholarship discusses Yezierska*s work
solely within the academic rubric used for much of
ethnic literature; it is a single-minded focus on her
depictions of the lives of immigrant characters, their
hopes and hardships, and gradual assimilation into
American culture. Any mention of her narrative
technique soon becomes a mere gesture that quickly gives
way to discussions resembling sociological commentary,
with the fictive work as the case study. And art is
again used to corroborate life and vice versa. The
focus on these characters, much like the attention given
to John Dewey and his alleged relationship with
Yezierska, is actually driven by national concerns, and
dealt with using the rhetoric and tropes and cultural
themes that diffuse whatever else Yezierska's stories
might have to say. In other words, even though academe
attempts to deal with the issues as delineated in this
fiction, the words and phrases used, and the moral
assumptions underlying them are the cultural themes
which, it can be argued, characterize American-ness.
Ethnic literary scholarship, in dealing with writings
such as Yezierska's, thus discuss the characters'
reactions to the American Dream, to the ideas of
individualism, self-reliance, innovation,
egalitarianism, the benefit of a disaffection with
tradition, all of which re-focus attention on American
concerns. Scholarship is thus inscribed within a
narcissism which appears not to be so, which un-names
itself as such; for, after all, this literature is about
people coming into America. However, such an
Americanization of "ethnic" studies strips the subject
of world history, of world politics and economics, of a
global material reality that is a history of expanding
Western capital. Hence, voices such as Anzaldua's and
Yezierska's are the result of Spanish and British
imperialism. Hence, Audre Lorde points out to African-
72
Americans that they are part of a black diaspora, J
victims of global colonialism and imperialism, which
include their experiences in this country ("Diaspora" !
206-209). American economic-political policy is j
arguably an offshoot of Western imperialism as a whole !
I
that began with the first voyages of "discovery," and i
continued with the colonization of North America.
Indeed, much as the British went about taking over parts ,
of Africa and Asia, the first "immigrants" to the New
World undertook its colonization, conveniently ignoring
the fact that the North American continent was new only i
to them, and that it already had inhabitants. Just as
the French justified their subjugation of Africans by j
refiguring them as sub-humans, so too did the early I
colonists set about re-appropriating Native Americans
into a primarily Anglo-Saxon culture as variously '
I
children, savages, earth mother, nature, but seldom as j
simply humans. Objectifying others is a means of !
distancing oneself from them, dehumanizing them, and ,
I
thereby relieving guilt, and facilitating the process of
I
turning them into beasts of burden. It also soothes the i
desires of Western Culture and Civilization; for after
all, as the British pointed out, the Indians can be
brought up to the level of Europe (Britain) through ,
railroads and Shakespeare. A variation of this belief [
is found in Charles H. Pearson's National Life and
Character (1893), in which he states:
We are bound, wherever we go, to
establish peace and order; to make roads,
and open rivers to commerce; to
familiarize other nations with a self-
government which one day would make them
independent of ourselves. (13)
The connection between American and European
imperialism and colonialism is not simply one of
similarity, but the American thrust into the New World
is a continuation, a part of global Western imperialis:
Moreover, culture production is not distinct from
economic and political needs but flows with and into
those needs. Louis Althusser's work might be useful
here in offering a model for discussion. In "Ideology
and Ideological State Apparatuses," he posits a number
of institutions, or state apparatuses, both in the
private and public domains, which transmit the ruling
ideology as a process of reproducing the " capitalist
relations of exploitation" (154). In addition:
Each of them contributes towards this
single result in the way proper to it.
The political apparatus by subjecting
individuals to the political State
ideology. . . . The communications
apparatus by cramming every "citizen"
with daily doses of nationalism . . .
moralism. . . . The same goes for the
cultural apparatus. (154)
State apparatuses, despite their apparent
"diversity and contradictions," are always "unified .
beneath the ruling ideology" (146), and the cultural
i
apparatus (including literature and one would assume ;
i
literary studies) is an "educational ideological J
|
apparatus" (152), which legitimates and transmits the j
I
dominant ideology. Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi have
i
also gone into some detail with regards to cultural
imperialism and its role in buttressing European
I
political and economic colonial structures. The point
to note here is that American "ethnic" studies by and
|
large ignore the colonial context of this literature by :
these others; in fact, the very focus of these studies—
the concentration on certain cultural tropes and themes- ,
-reinserts the center and its agenda. Hence, the John >
Dewey connection in Yezierska scholarship becomes
inscribed within the cultural trope of the American
Dream. Instead, the focus might be on the history that !
i
has led to such writing, and the loss of culture, of
national identity, and of self that forms a central
theme in Yezierska's work, an issue that apparently was j
I
never happily resolved. To recenter the text on these j
topics would bring to the fore the political unconscious 1
that informs the text, and not on text and immigrant as
sociological case studies, or art as verification of
life.
To explore this issue further, I suggest an
examination of the configurations of identity in
Yezierska's work, specifically with regards to the
concept of marginality. One of her central themes is j
the "chasm" between the Jewish immigrant and America, j
|
and the resultant emotional or psychological conflict !
suffered by the former, as she is torn between the old
culture and the new. The protagonist is astride both j
worlds, but belongs fully in neither. From this
perspective, the alleged affair between Yezierska and j
i
Dewey would interest scholars because the focus consists |
of more than just the love affair of two people. The ,
story becomes a symbol of the abortive meeting between
two opposing cultures, the Jewish and the American, the
Old World and the New, a passionate race versus one that
I
is cool-headed and self-controlled. In "Wild Winter I
Love" (Hungry Hearts). for example, Ruth Raefsky commits j
suicide when her affair ends unhappily. And the j
narrator says: j
How could they [neighbors] know the real
Ruth Raefsky? . . . How could they f
understand the all-consuming urge that
drove her to voice her way across the
chasm between the ghetto and America?
A lonely, losing fight it was from the
very beginning. Only for a moment, a
hand of love stretched a magic bridge ‘
across the chasm. Inevitably, the man j
went back to the safety of his own world.
(335) ;
Yezierska"s immigrant protagonist is alone even in j
death, alienated from both her heritage and American
culture; the affair is not between two individuals, but I
rather, two worlds. j
I
Tellingly, Schoen and others, often use the concept [
of marginality to discuss the author as well as the
fictive characters:
She [Yezierska] was always to find j
herself torn between her love for her j
heritage and her resentment at its ;
demands; she would always feel the pull
to become part of American life, yet rail
at its materialism and hypocrisy. . . .
These conflicts would mar her fiction, ■
tie her to a limited group of characters \
and situations. . . . But at her best !
they would provide the raw material for a [
portrait of struggles of an immigrant
woman to find a role for herself in
America. ("'Sweatshop Cinderalla"" 14)
Mary Dearborn, in Love in the Promised Land: The
Story of Anzia Yezierska and John Dewey, traces 1
i
Yezierska"s rebellion against her father's Jewish
i
culture, and suggests that her "renunciation of her past
caused her considerable guilt" (38). Dearborn |
corroborates this suggestion by referring to an episode
in Yezierska's "autobiography" which calls this j
perceived betrayal of her heritage a "double-murder"
(38). W. H. Auden, in his preface for that work, also
discusses the friction between Yezierska and her father: |
"had she simply desired money and a good marriage, there j
would have been less friction between them, but she,
too, was seeking for a dedicated life of her own, which
in his eyes, was impious" (330-331). Other works of the
period on the immigrant experience also seem to center
on this theme: Leah Morton's (Elizabeth Stern) I Am a
Woman— and a Jew (1926), Mary Antin's The Promised Land
(1912), Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinskv.
among others. Marginality is also the theme in Theodore
Dreiser's "Old Rogaum and His Theresa" (1912). Theresa,
the daughter, would "whimper, sometimes cry or sulk.
She hated her father for his cruelty" (790) in
forbidding her to be with "Connie" Almerting. Old World
values clash with the New, as Rogaum, the father, with
his pronounced German accent, and his authoritarian
manner, tries to instill restraint in his Americanized
daughter, who wants her freedom and is unconcerned with
the strictures of the Old Country with regards to her
"virtue." She is also caught between two worlds,
between the sense of loyalty and duty to her father, and
an already existent apprehension of herself as an
individual with needs and desires separate from those of
her family.
This literary approach is paralleled in sociology.
In a 1928 article entitled, "Human Migration and the
Marginal Man," Robert E. Park coined the term "cultural
hybrid" (892) to describe a representative European Jew,
who was, he wrote:
a man living and sharing intimately in
the cultural life and traditions of two
distinct peoples; never quite willing to
break, even if he were permitted to do
so, with his past and his traditions, and
not quite accepted, because of racial j
prejudice . . . a man on the margin of
two cultures and two societies, which j
never completely interpenetrated and
fused. (892)
Everett Stonequist, who studied with Park, later
extended this hypothesis in The Marginal Man: A Study in i
i
Personality and Culture Conflict (1937) to include
people of all races and cultures. For him, the marginal ■
I
man is "One whom fate has condemned to live in two (
I
I
societies and in two, not merely different but
antagonistic cultures" (xv). Either a cultural hybrid
or of mixed blood, he is estranged from both cultures,
(
hypersensitive, and constantly adjusting himself between
the two cultures. In other words, the feeling of
I
marginality results when one perceives a conflict \
between two sets of social rules, those of his heritage
and those from his adopted culture. According to j
I
Stonequist, it also exists once that person is j
I
confronted with discrimination, or is otherwise made J
aware that he is not accepted among those whom he !
i
perceives as the social norm. He cites various literary ,
works as evidence for this hypothesis: George
79
t
Santayana's The Last Puritan (1936) , of course, Ludwig i
Lewisohn's Up Stream (1922), as well as William Du
I
Bois's The Souls of Black Folks (1922). |
i
Again, much like the attention given |
Yezierska's alleged relationship with Dewey, such
speculation diverts attention away from the question of
the ideological underpinnings which inform a text, as
well as the scholarly works that have arisen around it.
Just as Yezierska's narratives inevitably partake in the
socio-ideological environment of which they are a part,
so too do academic considerations of those texts.
I
Bakhtin's thoughts on this matter are especially J
germane. He writes in The Formal Method;
Social man is surrounded by {
ideological phenomena, by objects-signs ;
of various types and categories: by words !
in the multifarious forms of their j
realization . . . by scientific
statements, religious symbols and
beliefs, works of art. . . . All of
these things in their totality comprise !
the ideological environment, which forms
a solid ring around man. And man's !
consciousness lives and develops in this J
environment. . . . In fact, the I
individual consciousness can only become ' <
a consciousness by being realized in the j
forms of the ideological environment ...
in language, in the conventional gesture, ‘
in artistic image, in myth, and so on.
. . . The politics of social upbringing
and education, cultural propaganda, and
educational work are all forms of ;
organized influence on the ideological <
environment. (14) i
80
Both Yezierska's ostensibly fictive works and the
self-described autobiographical narratives, need to be
seen in a dynamic, organic relationship with the socio-
ideological environment. Even though Yezierska attempts
to speak an independent self through her writing, her
characters, plots, themes, her construction of an
immigrant identity is yet permeated with the meaning and
the drives of the dominant ideology; even as she tries
to speak with a voice of authenticity, her parole may
come into fruition only through the pre-existing words,
images, tropes, and myths extant in the socio-
ideological environment. Yezierska's works, therefore,
need to be explored for the intervention of the dominant
ideology in the construction of what is felt to be an
identity of the self, especially as that identity is
defined as marginalized. They need to be examined for
how the immigrant myth itself, as well as national myths
of individualism, egalitarianism, authorship, the
American Dream and so on, comprise this intervention,
undercutting these attempts at self-definition. It is
an intervention that is a form of colonization, in not
just the literature, but also the criticism arising from
it.
At first glance, Yezierska's stories and characters
certainly appear to be the perfect illustrations of j
I
Park's and Stonequist's definitions of marginality. j
"Wings," in her first short story collection and
publication Hungry Hearts (1920), describes a young
Russian Jewess, who has a lonely, tortured existence in 1
America as she struggles to discover her identity. j
Shenah Pessah longs for surety as she wars with both the
Jewish and American cultures. Her consciousness is '
I
i
grounded in ghetto life, the cadences of the tenements,
the teeming streetcorners, the smell of geffulte fish;
yet, in that awareness resides a different set of j
»
imperatives consisting of the world beyond the ghetto, |
I
4 I
ubiquitous and inevitable. It is an overarching
presence, slightly threatening, slightly attractive, and ;
i
the ultimate arbiter of what is "American." The heroine
constantly compares her speech, her manners, her clothes
I
to this American presence, always with the sense that
she is different and hence lacking. Hence, in many of i
I
Yezierska's narratives, including "Wings," the female >
I
characters are impassioned searchers, intense, and full |
i
I
of energy. For example, Salome in Salome of the j
Tenements, is the female counterpart to Abraham Cahan's
David Levinsky. But whereas, the latter is after
material success, Salome's American Dream is confused,
82
and at times contradictory. Like many of Yezierska's
other characters, she also rails against the America I
that she yet wishes to reach for. The situation
resembles a love-hate affair, in which America both
rejects and seduces, or perhaps, seduces through its
very act of rejection. Characters such as Salome often j
complain that mainstream Americans do not "see"
i
i
immigrants as human beings but rather as types. The j
I
immigrant is categorized as either a specimen for
sociological papers or as burdensome charity cases. For ;
i
example, in "Wings," Shenah Pessah mistakes the
friendliness shown her by an American, John Barnes, for (
personal interest when in reality he, a sociology j
student, merely sees her as the opportunity to study the j
I
Russian Jewish immigrant first hand. In "The Free J
I
i
Vacation House" (Hungry Hearts) and several other
stories, Yezierska describes the demeaning treatment
accorded immigrants by young, white women from the 1
i
middle-class who in all probability have no real |
i
understanding of these "charity cases."
Yezierska's narratives certainly reveal an j
identification with the characters' complaints about |
America; however, as in "The Free Vacation House," her
»
impassioned indignation does not go beyond mere
criticism of this propensity to stereotype. She fails
to perceive in the Anglo-American proclivity to
categorize and define others within boundaries
acceptable to white, dominant culture a fundamental
contradiction between the expressed ideal of equality
and actual behavior. For Yezierska, at least as could
be determined from her narratives, the solution simply
requires increased social interchange between Anglo-
Saxons and immigrants; that is, once Americans get to
know people like Shenah Pessah better then they will
naturally accept them as fellow human beings.10 In "My
Own People," (Hungry Hearts) Sophie Sapinsky works at
her writing amidst the chaos of a tenement building.
Unhappy at her progress, she attempts to divorce herself
from the noise, the everpresent landlady, Hannah
Breineh, her brood of children, the other boarders, and
their troubles. But through a series of events
involving a "charity lady," Sophie discovers that her
true calling is to write about and for her own people.
Sophie's epiphany is recounted in typically passionate
speech:
For a long time she lay rigid. . . .
Something in her began to pour itself
out. She felt for her pencil — paper —
and began to write. Whether she reached
out to God or man she knew not, but she
wrote on and on all through the night.
. . . "It's not me — it's their cries —
my own people — crying in me! . . .
they will not be stilled in me, till all
America stops to listen." (249)
84
The narrative is based upon the premise that Sophie
is at first unable to write because she is adrift
between two cultures. She is unsure of her footing in
either world, and struggles with questions about who she j
is. Forced to live with other immigrants in the ghetto,
she yet rejects their poverty, their manners, and the
old traditions. She yearns to be understood, to reach I
I
for a larger ken, which, however, remains unnamed and
unspecified. Her struggle is partially with this Anglo- ,
Saxon world that rejects her and yet speaks a rhetoric |
of acceptance and equality. Driven by an insatiable
need to find her place in this country and her "true" J
identity, she changes from being impassioned but adrift
into a determined spokeswoman for the ghettoized Jew.
The displaced immigrant has found her place, her ;
I
identity, as an interpreter for her people, as one j
reviewer said also of Maxine Hong Kingston, the "bridge"
between cultural barriers (Frye 300). With a similar j
I
crusading fervor, Shenah Pessah in "Wings" transforms j
the hurt and bitterness at her rejection by John Barnes
into the resolve to work "with the strength of a million
bodies and a million brains," so as to be able to "look
him in his face eye to eye" (34). It is unclear as to
i
how she will be actually devoting the energy contained |
t
in those words. However, Yezierska here seems to be I
depicting more than just Shenah's personal endeavor to
better herself. In the scene where she makes this vow
is implied a similar resolve of millions of other
immigrants, as they too determine to push themselves up
to the status of mainstream America. Shenah*s
determined words echo the energy and the drive that
motivate these millions who come to America. Her
personal tussle is transformed into an archetypal
conflict.
Indeed, Yezierska's pattern in these and other
texts rests on such an attempt to broaden the scope of
her immigrant stories into a nationally resonant
narrative, so that these characters, with their energy,
ambition, and diligence, suggest a cultural icon that
embody the American dream, and in a larger sense, the
American spirit. The implication is apparently that
they are as American as the next person if not more so.
Such an attempt at re-figuring the place of immigrants
in America at the time is understandable, given the
intense nativist agitation against people from Southern
and Eastern Europe, and especially with the virulent
opposition to Asian immigration focused in the Western
States. In fact, Oscar Handlin's foreword to Mary
Antin's The Promised Land (1912) mentions the 42-volume
Dillingham Commission report to Congress which tried to
86
establish the inferiority of these immigrants from
Southern and Eastern Europe as compared to those from
Europe's North and West (v-xv). Significantly, Handlin ;
1
did not think it germane to discuss the situation with
Asian immigration, even as he praises Antin's book for
reaffirming to the American people the centrality of the
concept of America as a nation of immigrants. He
writes: j
I
Mary Antin explained that the American '
formula did work. . . . Telling the i
story of a single life, but through it
speaking for millions of other
immigrants, she affirmed that there were
still power and hope in the nineteenth
century dream of the new nation. She
offered her own life to prove that >
education and reform could sustain the
blessings of freedom. (vii)
In other words, immigration was an asset to the
country, but only if these would-be Americans went !
j
through the acculturation necessary to make them into I
real Americans. Handlin's foreword also refers to
Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier hypothesis. He
seems to agree with Turner's suggestion that the j
f
wilderness which had molded generations of American men j
had been tapped out; however, Handlin still seemed to
believe that somewhere could be found the cauldron of
trials and hardships, the (male) rites of passage, which
would create future greatness. The importance of
i
academic works of the period in conceptions of the i
87
American identity requires that a fuller discussion of
writers such as Handlin be postponed to the following j
chapter of this study. For now, suffice it to say that
> j
underlying Handlin's foreword, and his subscription to
Turner's hypothesis are numerous assumptions that rest
on Anglo-American, phallo-centric privilege. The author
appears comfortable with the idea that nature was in I
service to American manifest destiny, as well as with
the conception of the nation as white and European.
Equally interesting of course is his attempt to reassure |
readers that the American dream will work, that is, as
long as "education and reform" are present to civilize
the uncivilized of Europe. Hence, this passage that
might be seen as welcoming diversity and difference yet
reveals a slippage, indicating a totalizing and j
i
homogenizing impulse.
Given the temper of the times, it is not surprising |
I
that Antin's autobiographical work is, in a sense, an
apologia for the immigrant presence, as well as an
attempt to reassure Americans that "their" values and j
beliefs will remain substantially unchanged. But, 1
Antin's writing in both The Promised Land and an earlier ;
!
work, From Plotsk to Boston (1899), seeks also to J
establish a voice, a unique identity that proclaims the j
existence and the legitimacy of the self.11 However,
88
such an endeavor can only be anchored in ambivalence, a !
simultaneous discharge of energy in opposite directions,
for this voice must bring forth an identity of
individuality at the same time as it attempts to merge j
in the mainstream. The result is a constant camouflage !
i
of perhaps an existing authentic self, which, in any j
i
case, cannot be accounted for with any surety. For,
this persona for public consumption, has not the means
to explore whether that which speaks is truly an
authentic self, or merely a voice co-opted by the '
center. Texts like Antin's The Promised Land and j
Yezierska's works are illustrations of how endeavors at \
self-creation can be undercut and re-appropriated by the j
dominant ideology. Handlin's foreword is the master's
voice legitimizing the work of the protege, the
apprentice. It approves, it makes respectable, but most i
importantly, Antin's text is the strategic space for the ,
project of speaking an American identity based upon a j
discourse of egalitarianism, democracy, and manifest '
destiny. Handlin's ultimate thrust is in the
reiteration of the identity of America as indeed the
Promised Land.
Consequently, for both Antin and Yezierska, their
contention is not so much with overt public opinion, but |
j
with a Western cultural metaphysics that conceive and
define people in terms of a matrix of ideational, j
essentialized categories, primarily based upon binary
opposites, with itself as always the center and the
norm. Yezierska's narratives suggest a driving need to
plead the immigrant's cause, and to create an individual !
identity or voice that is authentic, that is a self-
determined presence, that would thereby resist
I
stereotyping. Yet her stories and protagonists reveal a i
crisscross of fissures, a series of counter-subversions
by the dominant ideology. First and foremost, the j
characterizations of the female protagonist is based j
l
upon generalizations about individual character traits, |
which are less a reflection of truth than they are an
indication of a process of acculturation that connotes |
I
the presence of the dominant ideology. The Sophies and !
!
1
Shenahs are always conceived as passionate, emotional, j
I
hot-headed, driven by the visceral. But such a
characterization indeed only gains a sense of fullness
j
in meaning, becomes suggestive of essences, as they are j
meant to be, because they are always already illuminated ,
in a binary opposition. Yezierska's narratives set up
whole groups of people in totalizing and irretrievably
linked oppositional units of identity, named and defined ;
according to amorphous national character traits.
Hence, the Jewish "race" is unique only because they are j
placed in distinction to the Anglo-Saxon "race," which
1
is cool, controlled and rational. Even the heroines' !
relationships with these Anglo-Saxon men subsist on an ■
|
oppositional nature. There is no happy meeting place, j
1
only inconclusive conflict, in which the protagonist's
"nature" is alternately attracted and repelled by the
Anglo-Saxon "nature."
Interestingly, any satisfying rapprochement is j
mostly with American women— Miss Latham, the teacher, in !
"How I Found America" (Hungry Hearts); the mother and
daughter in All I Could Never Be. However, the j
protagonists' relationships to these "American" women J
exist on the same logic— she can only construct them in
terms of essentialized, abstract qualities, weaving them
i
into her private odyssey, her search for America. She '
does not see them as individuals with problems similar
to hers, but as a complex symbol, not just of the "true"
!
America, but, also, of her own endeavors and j
frustrations. For example, in "How I Found America,"
the protagonist is disappointed by the elusiveness of
America. Factory work dulls the mind. And, schools are
not much better: "A dull course of study and the j
I
lifeless, tired teachers— no more interested in their j
pupils than in the wooden benches in front of them" \
(290). She feels that her "'dream America is more far
91
away from me than it was in the old country. Always !
something comes between the immigrant and the American’"
(294). She feels alienated. Indeed, in the typically .
impassioned and compelling speech that Yezierska writes
for her characters, this young woman says: "I felt
I
I
sometimes that I was only burning out my heart for a j
j
shadow, an echo, a wild dream. But I couldn’t help it. j
Nothing was real to me but my hope of finding a friend"
(290). This protagonist then comes across a poem that
Miss Latham had given to her sister, Bessie, to read.
I
Interestingly, it is by Kipling. The lines include the
following:
Then only the Master shall praise us,
And only the Master shall blame,
And no one shall work for money,
And no one shall work for fame;
But each for the joy of the working. j
(291) j
From this poem and from what Bessie tells her about
Miss Latham, the protagonist feels irresistibly drawn to ;
her, "almost as strongly as America had on the way over i
in the boat" (292). Finally, she gets enough courage to
go see her. Much like Yezierska's portrayal of the !
meetings of other female protagonists with the John
Dewey characters, an intensity and a sense of j
i
momentousness pervade this one with Miss Latham. She j
pours out her heart, recounting the terrible pogroms,
the fearful journey out of Russia, and the hardships of j
92
American life. But her most ardent words are about her
lonely, desperate search for a niche in the "real"
|
America: I
I feel shut out from everything that's
going on. . . . I'm always fighting —
fighting — with myself and everything
around me. . . . I hate me when I want j
to love and I make people hate me when I
want to make them love me. (294) i
Although, she seeks a friend, the protagonist can
only perceive Miss Latham as a symbol, filled with the
abstract, totalizing qualities that the protagonist
desperately yearns for America to be. Miss Latham is
kind, understanding, accepting, and unpretentious— in j
the mind of this young woman, certainly, these compose I
i
the democratic ideal of the nation. Her whole encounter !
with this teacher is a ritualized affair, a re-enactment
of the immigrant coming to America; the meeting of
desire and that which assuages the desire; spiritual ;
pain offered as sacrifice and the acceptance of that j
t
offering. When it is "casually" revealed that Latham is j
>
a direct descendant of the Pilgrim fathers, her
legitimacy is even more assured in the eyes of the
protagonist. The young Jewish woman does not see Latham
as a person, but transmutes her into a symbol of ;
American culture. Ironically, then, even as the ]
protagonist struggles against her own alienation, she
fails to perceive that although Miss Latham seems to be |
93
the "real" America, and so is more of the Center than
herself, she too is marginalized, a woman living in a
patriarchy. Indeed, the protagonist does what the
Father does, empties her of meaning only so as to
objectivize her, to encode her as symbol, indeed,
recasts her as the other. Thus, she plays into the
hands of this phallo-centric ideology, which
conceptualizes women as vessels, holes, merely there to
contain what the male desires.
Similarly, in All I Could Never Be. the
Farnsworths, mother and daughter, are conceived as the
epitome of what it is to be American. Even their
address seems to the protagonist to carry the essence of
America. She thinks:
Sutton Place. The very name of the
place had distinction. No crowds. No
tenements. Every house was different.
. . . Music came from the open window. A
duet, piano and violin. Music— not the
raucous shrillness of a worn-out
phonograph. Songs that she could never
sing, thoughts that she could never
voice, suddenly grew clear. (18)
The interior of the house embodies the American
spirit. The walls are white, the furnishings old, and
suggestive of long tradition; they even have roses on
the dining table. In this scene, the America that Fanya
wishes to belong to is so near and yet unattainable.
She senses it in the flowers, the music, the house, and
94
certainly, in the persons of the Farnsworths. However,
though Fanya may one day be able to intone the words of J
the song, to even buy a piano, or to live at Sutton
Place, there is an element to an existence as an
American that she feels will never be hers. In the ,
midst of welcome, she realizes more poignantly her |
alienness, her irreconcilable difference. The piano and
the violin achieve a harmony that she can never hope to
do. Even her effusive appreciation of the roses strikes j
a discord in this Anglo-Saxon home— she is too
emotional, too unrestrained for the mother and daughter, 1
the sedate, orderly rooms. Sutton Place, or America, ,
i
pervades the pages of the narrative; but, ironically, it j
i
is felt so strongly, so profoundly only because of the j
existence of the "other," the immigrant ghetto, in
contradistinction to it. The two are irretrievably j
linked in opposition, illuminating each other.
Indeed, Yezierska's depiction of this young,
(
immigrant woman and her marginality is not only based
fundamentally upon essentializing the Americans in the
i
narratives, but also in a similar characterization of
i
the other immigrants and their milieu. "The Lost |
I
Beautifulness" (Hungry Hearts) is one of the few stories |
that features a protagonist other than this passionate, |
young woman. Hannah Hayyeh is a character who appears
95 I
<
I
recurrently in Yezierska's fiction, and comes to embody
the Jewish immigrant woman, who is mother, wife,
neighborhood confidante. She is alienated from the i
mainstream, and struggles with the rent, the children
(always depicted as a brood), as well as this strange
new world. The title of this story refers to Hannah
Hayyeh's dream of being able to repaint her kitchen
white. Her much-loved eldest son is returning home !
after having fought for America, in the First World War, !
and she does not want him "to shame himself" by coming
home to a filthy tenement dwelling. But more I
I
importantly, a white kitchen has come to mean that she
too has at last come home to America, that she too is, j
almost, an American: J
I
Ever since she first began to wash the
fine silks and linens for Mrs. Preston, j
years ago, it had been Hannah Hayyeh's ;
ambition to have a white-painted kitchen
exactly like that in the old Stuyvesant ,
Square mansion. Now, her own kitchen was
a dream come true. (66)
Unfortunately, the slumlord gets wind of the new j
kitchen, decides that his property value has increased, j
and accordingly, raises her rent. Hannah manages to j
meet the new rent for a while, but finally gets evicted, j
|
The story ends dramatically with the son returning in
time to witness the eviction.
Hannah Hayyeh is unique in the portrayals of the
Jewish immigrant experience of the time in that the
character is a woman with concerns specific to her
status in Anglo-American, phallo-centric society.
Unlike Cahan's David Levinsky, who predicates the
formation of his identity upon American male norms,
Hannah must evolve a sense of her self while beset with
the specific socio-economic disadvantages facing a
Russian Jewish immigrant woman in America. The mother
in The Bread Givers is Yezierska's fullest exploration
of this issue. Not only does she contend with a
heritage in which "the prayers of . . . daughters didn't
count because God didn't listen to women" (9), but she
has to struggle against oppression in male-oriented
America as well. Within this context of dual
domination, a character like Hannah makes for compelling
story-telling in that she exhibits such strength and
aspirations that go beyond the merely material. To her,
the new kitchen is her bit of "beautifulness" (67); it
is a little of the American spirit. This character
contains a passion and intensity that make her
interesting; however, Hannah is also built upon
stereotypical categories that undercut her
distinctiveness. Her image is also that of a loud,
uneducated woman, seemingly always surrounded by her
97
brood of children, who, in this and other similar
stories, are generally depicted as a faceless mass of
hands and mouths crying to be fed. Hannah, despite her
passion and intensity, is also perhaps like the other
tenement dwellers. The narrator describes one scene in
the following manner:
At the busy gossiping hour of the
following morning when the butcher-shop
was crowded with women in dressing-sacks
and wrappers covered over with shawls,
Hannah Hayyeh elbowed her way into the
clamorous babel of her neighbors. (69—
70) !
Not only are these women depicted as gossips and j
busybodies, but like Hannah, they are usually
"protesting and gesticulating" (73), or cooking meager
meals in misshapen pots, with a baby on one arm. And
the tenements in other stories are invariably similar to
the one described in "The Lost Beautifulness": "Through
the hallway of a dark, ill-smelling tenement, up two
flights of crooked, rickety stairs, they filed" (73).
Shenah, in "Wings," lives in a small, windowless
basement room, literally and metaphorically, shut off j
from the America she so yearns for; her physical j
boundaries mirror her status as woman and immigrant. As j
a result of such portraits, the reader is left with the i
I
image of an inchoate mass of female tenement life. And ;
unlike Dreiser's portrayal of the urban underclass, a i
98
I
portrayal based as much upon a psychological exploration
of humanity in the midst of economic-political
domination, as upon the description of the actual
physicality of slums and tenements, Yezierska's
depictions of her world congeal into stereotypes; and
immigrant humanity becomes disembodied gestures,
clamoring voices and hungry mouths. The ghetto itself
seems simply picturesque, much like the people who
inhabit them. Yezierska's portrayal of immigrant ghetto
life rests on the same stereotypes that her fictive
characters accuse Americans of harboring about them.
Yezierska's male characters are also an unfortunate
blend of distinctiveness and stereotype. The local
fishmonger appears in several of her narratives. He is
depicted as smelling perpetually like fish, mud- |
I
splattered, harassed by bills, and with a loud booming j
voice. In The Bread Givers, Zalmon shows up to court |
one of the protagonist's sisters "with his beard off,
his new-bought bridegroom clothes, and his hair barbered
short and pasted down with vaseline, and soaked in
perfume in place of the old fish smells" (100). He may
have "shined like a rich Grand Street millionaire" (100)
in the eyes of the money-hungry father, but the
protagonist/narrator clearly sees him as still the
fishpeddler. His new clothes are unconvincing; the fish
99
smell is present, even more strongly perhaps because of
the perfume. To her, he is dressed for a part in a
play. A similar character is in Red Ribbon on a White
Horse. He is Zalmon Shlomoh, "a hunchbacked fish
peddler" (102), who is also a connoisseur of classical
music, and one of the few in the ghetto neighborhood who
understands Yezierska, the protagonist of this
autofictography. According to the author, he consoles '
her after her disillusioning visit to Hollywood:
In Zalmon Shlomoh's eyes was such a
naked look of comprehension that it
silenced me. Unmindful of the hurrying
crowd, the shrill cries of the hucksters
and the housewives pushing past us with
their market baskets, we stood looking at
each other. We belonged to the shadowy
company of those who were withdrawn from
their fellows by grief, illness, or the
torment of frustrations. (103)
This second character is less of a type than the j
I
Zalmon in The Bread Givers. Yezierska here attempts to j
I
draw a more realistic character by giving him a taste
for music, and by placing him in the role of friend and
confidant. However, this second Zalmon is still
unconvincing in terms of the realistic fiction that
Yezierska attempts to write. For, the author sketches
the externals of the character, rather than offers
psychological depth or complexity. Both Zalmons are
i
types— the hardworking, grappling Russian Jewish
j
immigrant, poor, unrefined (usually), and marginalized ;
100
in their ghettos. At times, their struggles and
diligence cease to connote the existence of aspirations,
but become metaphorized into an unquenchable hunger.
For example, in "Hunger" (Hungry Hearts), Sam Arkin is
the "quintessential" Jew. Through hard work, he has
become the most experienced cutter in the garment
factory where he is employed. He goes without in order
to save every penny he can; one day he hopes to have his j
t
own factory. He is single-minded, and shrewd, though
not dishonest. Arkin is a portrait of the Jewish tycoon
as a young man. This character is the parallel of Jaky
Solomon in Salome of the Tenements. The narrator
explains:
Every now and then the Ghetto gives birth
to an embryonic virtuoso. Out of the
crucible of privation and want, from
hovels, basements, and black tenement
holes, the unconquerable soul of the
Jewish race rises in defiance of its
environment. (33)
Solomon had changed his name to Jacque Hollins upon
opening his haute couture shop. He began his rise as an
apprentice cutter in the factory of another tailor. j
I
But, he quickly discovers his talent, in the words of i
I
the protagonist, his artist's soul, whereupon, he goes |
to Paris, and.returns as Jacque, who caters only to the
richest. He is characterized as not merely talented in (
j
making clothes, but as an artistic genius. In that j
101
sense, he shares an imperceptible but unbreakable bond
with the female protagonist— they are both artists in
search of the proper medium. Solomon/Hollins is also
built upon stereotypical character traits; he is shrewd,
miserly, and ruthless. Most notably, however, is the
narrator's assertion that these are indeed inherent
racial qualities, which environment cannot stifle: "The
Jew in him measured her. The rapacious greed of his
race for money, power, leaped up in his dark eye" (37—
38). Salome, in her ambitiousness, is his female
counterpart. However, for me, the object of that
ambition is never clearly delineated. The novel begins
with her casting a mercenary eye on John Manning— a
philanthropist, older, educated, and Anglo-Saxon. The
narrator suggests that Salome wants wealth only as a
means to aid her fellow immigrants. However, her
ambition is also portrayed as akin to an artistic urge.
Still later, as the marriage to Manning fails, she
attempts to return to the Jewish culture she had
rejected. She quickly realizes, however, that she can
never go back to the ghettos either. Hence, the novel
begins and ends with Salome still in a marginalized
position. Her relationship with Manning is similar to
those depicted in Yezierska's other narratives. She is
the passionate Jew while he is the cool-headed, self-
--------------------------------------------------------------------------i
102
controlled Puritan. At one point, Manning says to her,
"You have the burning fire of the Russian Jew in you,
while I am motivated by a sickly conscience, trying to
heal myself by the application of cold logic and cold
cash" (10). The conflicts within the novel arise from
this fundamental concept of the two "races." Whether
she depicts poor women in the ghettos or ambitious
"artists" like Salome, who tries to leave the immigrant j
life, Yezierska totalizes and essentializes peoples and
cultures; motivation is a matter of genetics and not of j
surroundings. And just as importantly, these totalized
units are always locked in an oppositional correlation,
as if one can be defined with a sense of fullness only
in relation to the other, a binarism in Western
metaphysics which Derrida and others have explored at
length.
Indeed, Yezierska’s depiction of immigrant life and
the female protagonist rests on this binary opposition
based upon the conception of race and culture as
composed of inherent, definitive essences. The Sophies
and Shenahs are cast adrift between the two worlds of
passion versus puritanical control, the teeming ghettos
and Sutton Place. The protagonist's struggle to attain
a permanent membership in either group becomes a
struggle against amorphous yet seemingly undeniable
103
essences. Not only is her marginality embodied in the
embattled relationship with the Anglo-Saxon man, but is
also symbolized, at the other end, in her antagonistic
relationship with her father. The Bread Givers is
tellingly subtitled "A Struggle Between a Father of the
Old World and a Daughter of the New." Much as in "Old
Rogaum and His Theresa," this narrative is about a
daughter's rebellion against the father's Old World
traditions. Sara has one passionate war cry: "no
fathers, no mothers, no sweatshops, no herrings"; what
she seeks is an "American born man who was his own boss"
(66). In the Old Country, the father would not have to
work, for a Rabbi was considered a holy man, and as
such, neighbors and friends would contribute food and so
on for his and his family's upkeep. In America, this
practice has stopped; but, the father still refuses to
change. The family is starving. The mother constantly
worries about food; they are never on time with the
rent; and the grocers refuse to extend any more credit.
Still, the father insists on keeping up the old life.
He bullies his family. And, while wife and daughters
I
often only have bread and thin soup, he gets chicken; he j
also has a room for himself so that he can pray
undisturbed, even though the rest of the family has to
share the remaining one room. Sara comes to despise the j
104
father and his ways, a feeling that develops alongside
her yearnings for a better life. She thinks:
More and more I began to think inside
myself, I don't want to sell herring for
the rest of my days. I want to learn
something. I want to do something. I
want some day to make myself for a person
to come among people. But how can I if I
live in this hell house of Father's
preaching and Mother's complaining? (66)
Her life becomes a struggle to reach beyond the
\ J
ghetto to America. Against incredible odds, she makes j
it to Teachers' College, graduates, and ironically, |
I
returns to work with the people in the ghetto. She
teaches in a school for immigrant children. There, she
meets Hugo Seelig, the principal, whom she describes as:
all fineness and strength. The keen,
kind gray eyes. A Jewish face, and yet
none of the greedy eagerness of Hester
Street any more. It was the face of a
dreamer, set free in the new air of
America. Not like Father with his eyes
on the past, but a dreamer who had found
his work among us of the East Side.
(273)
She discovers that Hugo is from the same region
that her family is from. However, the crucial points in
»
his favor are that he is sophisticated and educated; but j
more importantly, he is "set free," with none of the
"greedy eagerness of Hester Street" (273). To her, he
is an American. There is instant rapport between them
because, not surprisingly, in Hugo's words, "'You and I- ;
-we are of the same blood'" (280). The suggestion of I
105
course is that racial ties will persist through any
transformation— again, Yezierska resorts to racialism as
explanation for human behavior. However, Sara's
attraction to Hugo is not based on their common
heritage, but on his "American" qualities. She sees
Hugo as being America. And, in terms of the narrative
as a whole, just as her departure from her father
symbolizes a rejection of the Old Country and its ways,
her union with Hugo is a symbol of her connection with
the New World.
Yezierska has appropriated a traditional Western
literary trope in order to play out her own drama of the
Jewish immigrant in early twentieth century American
society. However, in her version, the daughter never
successfully resolves her conflict with the father.
Indeed, The Bread Givers is a study in marginality, as
the protagonist is continually caught between the Old
World and the New. Every step away from her heritage
evinces feelings of betrayal and guilt, while rejection
characterizes her life in the New World. Memories of
her mother's self-sacrifice become■accusations in her
mind of her own selfishness. In leaving the ghetto, she
also cut herself off from the whole family. Yet, the
Anglo-Saxon world holds little welcome. Her encounters
with fellow college students only serve to reinforce the
sense of her alienation. Sara describes one episode:
But how quickly her eyes sized me up!
It was not an unkind glance. And yet, it
said more plainly than words, 'From where
do you come? How did you get in here?' ■
Sitting side by side with them through
the whole hour, I felt stranger to them
than if I had passed them in Hester
Street. (213-214)
The mention of the ghetto at that moment of
apparent inclusion into the center reiterates the
indelible presence of that other place. It is as if the
ghosts of the past have pursued Sara into the "real"
America. Hence, she never feels she belongs totally in
t
either world. She "picks" Hugo because he represents (
America, yet he is of Jewish descent. She acquires an I
I
American education only to work once again among her
people. Similarly, she never completely rejects her
father; the times when she feels that she thinks most
like an American, his words, his beliefs and values re-
emerge in her mind. At first, she refuses the example
of the mother, but in the end, assumes primary
responsibility for the care of the aging father. The
story concludes with these lines:
The voice [father's] lowered and grew 1
fainter till we could not hear the words !
any more. Still we lingered for the mere i
music of the fading chant. Then Hugo’s I
grip tightened on my arm and we walked j
on. But, I felt the shadow still there, j
over me. It wasn't just my father, but
107
the generations who made my father whose
weight was still upon me. (297)
Yezierska structures her narratives in terms of
journeys between distinct and homogenous territories, of
boundaries and the conflict, alienation, and
estrangement which such boundaries represent. Not only
the characterization but the narrative framework also
depend on such a division of the world. The female
protagonists shuttle between the borderlands of the two j
I
territories, seemingly never achieving permanent status j
i
in either. In that sense, Yezierska's work appears to
illustrate perfectly the marginalized state of her main
characters. And it is with such an understanding that
most studies of her work have been conducted.
However, it seems to me that the focus might extend
i
beyond an examination of the marginality of such
characters as Sara. For, to use the rubric of i
I
f
marginality to examine her narratives is to take them at I
!
face value and without question, as if literature is an
unhesitating reflection of reality, and as if words are
neutral and free agents, meaning only what the author
and the critic desire for them to mean. To do so is to
underrate the proposition that words are always
permeated with the ideological weight of the center, and
to elide the issue of how the socio-ideological
environment creates such psychic territories. Indeed,
108
the crucial concern should not be on what her stories
apparently say, but in the silences, the occlusions, and
the untold tensions residing in what after all are texts
that exist under a dominant ideology which attempts to
obfuscate and "naturalize" its presence. It is within
such a perspective that the concept of marginality used j
by critics in relation to Yezierska's work has so far
been re-examined in this chapter.
Indeed, the fissures and unrecognized tensions that
crisscross Yezierska's texts and the scholarship
surrounding those texts include the very concept of
marginality. The assertion that her heroines float
between two cultures creates the illusion that they
somehow share equally the worldview of both; they are
Flying Dutchmen who cannot come home because they are
unable to decide which home to finally choose. Such a
perspective suggests that the formation of individual
consciousness is purely p. matter of choice, that
societal images and symbols have as much or as little
influence on us as we wish. The socio-ideological
phenomena under consideration, which compose our daily
existence, are not about choice as consumers, but form a
subtle network of instincts, of deeply held beliefs, of
mental processes, of a sense of self and humanity that
I
seem simply a natural part of being, of existence, as if |
109
the manner in which we are has always been the way it
is, universally. This aspect of culture also goes
beyond the Western notion of moral or ethical values,
for these, to some extent, are all about choice; in
fact, the very concept of choice must be a part of the
idea of sin and moral action. Instead, culture, here
provisionally conceived, is a form of collective
consciousness that includes its myths, symbols, and
signs, which carry and transmit the deepest drives and
imperatives of the dominant ideology. The socio-
ideological environment contains a hegemony, and indeed,
according to Bakhtin, part of that domination is
inculcation into language, in all its forms:
the individual consciousness can only
become a consciousness by being realized
in the forms of the ideological
environment . . . in language, in the
conventional gesture, in artistic image,
in myth. (The Formal Method 14)
In other words, to be brought up and educated in a
culture involves the manner through which we acquire a
politicized existence; and to live daily within that
culture is to imbibe its deepest psychic patterns and
drives, affecting thought and perception, including the
way we see and articulate the self.
It is within such a perspective that we must
relocate Yezierska's narratives about this young Jewish
immigrant girl. Although, a Sara or a Shenah is
110
conceived as perpetually trapped along the margins of
two cultures, their "real" alienation and
marginalization lie elsewhere. These characters are not
so much caught between cultures as they are trapped
irrevocably within the hegemony of the American socio-
ideological environment; they look out onto a world
through the lens of an Anglo-Saxon-is-norm perspective.
The narrative conflict resides not in an inability to
choose between two equally attractive, and equally
viable cultures, as it is an inability to reach beyond
the dominant ideological purview to the heritage that
is, to a large extent, already irretrievably lost. For
rapprochement with what is past cannot be effected
through mere observance of ritual nor through linguistic
assertions. Culture is a form of consciousness; hence,
in Mumbo Jumbo, one of Reed’s primary preoccupations is
with the issue of who is to control the telling of
history, for it is partially in the stories that we
tell, through the myths, images and symbols used in
these stories of the past, that a cultural consciousness
is established.
In Yezierska's narratives, the Jewish heritage is
no longer a viable one. Consequently, her characters
persistently evince patterns in which life is a
progression away from parents and towards the American
Ill
man, or rather, away from the Old World and towards the
New. Fathers are tyrants caught within traditions that
have ceased to have meaning for the daughters; rather,
the American or Americanized man is the future. These
stories begin with the protagonists expressing vehement
dissatisfaction with their situations. They seek the
America beyond the four walls of their basement room,
beyond the ghetto streets. They perceive life as a
prison, with the tenements as the place of confinement
and nebulous America as freedom. An American education
is also seen by these protagonists as representing
progress and freedom. For instance, for Sara, one of
Hugo Seelig's attractions is that he has an American
education. In her words, he has been "set free in the
new air of America" (The Bread Givers 273). In
contrast, characters such as Hannah Hayyeh and Zalmon
are seen as hopelessly trapped within the ghettos; they
border on the picturesque, and any return to them is
only to visit old times, but the profoundest need is for
the American world. In addition, the manner in which
these protagonists perceive themselves are indicative of
their own internalized oppression; they see themselves
as the Anglo-American, phallo-centric world has named
them, as alienated and inferior, as the other. For
example, when Sara thinks that she detects disdain in
112
her classmates' eyes, what has occurred is that she is
looking at herself the way the dominant ideology
perceives her. Similarly, in "Wings" (Hungry Heartsj,
Shenah goes to the local library with John Barnes. In
that location which epitomizes Culture and Civilization,
she is confronted with all types of "evidence" of her
difference. She looks at the librarian's plain,
"tasteful" dress and sees her own as bold and garish.
In noticing the former's quiet composure, she feels even
more the unacceptability of her passionate and emotional
nature. As with Sara, Shenah looks into an internalized
mirror, thinking she sees herself as she actually is,
only to meet a reflection that is conceived and defined
by the Anglo-American world within this socio-
ideological environment.
Not only do they see immigrant ghettos, their
inhabitants, and themselves through an American
sensibility, and so, as inferior; they also define their
aspirations and through those aspirations, their own
identity in terms of American ideals. What these
protagonists want to achieve is freedom, freedom to be
what and who they wish. Old World tradition is taken to
be the antithesis of that, just as it goes against their
yearning for the identity of the individualist. The
Sophies in Yezierska's narratives do not wish to be
113
limited by the traditional Jewish female roles; they
want to be unique. Consequently, these protagonists are
depicted as budding artists, usually writers, who create
an identity for themselves through their writing. And
so the heroine in "My Own People" (Hungry Hearts)
"finds" her place by being the link between America and
the immigrant world. In numerous other stories, the
main character works against incredible odds in order to
master the English language, perceiving that goal to be
the means for self-possession, a way to articulate the
self. However, as Bakhtin notes, inculcation into the
socio-ideological environment is effected primarily
through language, in its various forms. Indeed, to
acquire a language is also to be brought into the sphere
of influence of a set of cultural beliefs, values, and
worldview. Language, and the words, images, metaphors,
and symbols that make up language, are not tools,
neutral, and innocent of any intent, but rather, are
saturated with ideological significance. And the
dominant class, in its ability to control or at least to
influence the means of culture production, prevails with
its drives and intentions. So that the protagonists’
acquisition of the language is at best an ambivalent
affair; for, even as it affords them a means to
articulate their deepest hopes, and so on, the language
actually has acquired them, in that it inculcates these
protagonists into a worldview, a set of assumptions, a
consciousness, and instincts that accord with the agenda
of the dominant ideology. In other words, the identity
of the self is realized through language. Emile
Benveniste writes in Problems in General Linguistics
(1971):
I
Language is . . . the possibility of j
subjectivity because it always contains
the linguistic forms appropriate to the
expression of subjectivity, and discourse
provokes the emergence of subjectivity.
. . . In some way language puts forth
"empty" forms which each speaker, in the
exercise of discourse, appropriates to
himself and which he relates to his
"person," at the same time defining
himself as 1 and a partner as you. The
instance of discourse is thus
constitutive of all the coordinates that
define the subject. (227)
Language allows the possibility of speech because
the appropriate signs exist: pronouns, proper names, and
so on. The crucial point is that the speaking subject,
what Benveniste calls the "referent," exists only in i
1
relation to the subject of speech, the "I" which is ’
composed of all the social, political, and economical j
coordinates that designate the subjectivity of the J
individual. When characters such as Shenah and Sara !
J
attempt to articulate their identity, they may only do {
j
so by assuming a linguistic sign that has always already j
posited them in an ideological naming and defining, as
115
the other. Louis Althusser describes the construction
of the subject in these words:
ideology "acts" or "functions" in such a
way that it "recruits" subjects among the
individuals . . . by that very precise
operation which I have called
interpellation of hailing, and which can {
be imagined along the lines of the most I
commonplace police (or other) hailing: "
'Hey, you there1'"
. . . the hailed individual will turn
around. By this mere one-hundred-and-
eighty-degree physical conversion, he
becomes a subject. Why? Because he has
recognized that the hail was "really"
addressed to him, and that "it was really
him who was hailed." ("State
Apparatuses" 174)
Yezierska's narratives contain characters who have
not only been hailed by the dominant ideology, but who
can only speak the self in predefined tropes and images.
Hence, her protagonists believe in the concept of |
individualism, in the existence of a "true" and unique ;
1
self. Also, they seek "freedom," "equality," "justice," |
and so on, ideas that are crucial elements in the j
national/cultural self-image. As part of that quest, ,
they take the Pilgrim tradition as their own, rather
than the Jewish heritage; for this would certainly
ensure them a place in America. Yezierska's heroines
may criticize aspects of America, but they willingly ,
assume the immigrant identity in an attempt to become j
part of the nation. And their desire to discover the !
true self, to find out who they really are misses the
116
mark, for their identities have always already been
defined in that seminal moment when one says "I." The
articulation of hope, aspirations, suffering is realized
only through what the language can contain; and that
language, even simple words, such as "I" and "you," are
permeated with the ideological intent of the Center.
Even as these protagonists speak of themselves as
belonging to the Pilgrim tradition, their words betray
I
them. And so Shenah dines with the Farnsworths, an !
* i
I
invitation that only serves to reinforce her fundamental !
otherness; this modern-day pilgrim is definitely not
equal to these descendants of the Pilgrims. Even as
these protagonists try to articulate hopes and dreams
that would mark their identities as unique, the images
and metaphors open to them are still indivisible from
the agenda of the Center. Yezierska's texts depict not
so much marginality as internalized domination, a
colonization in which self-identity is dependent on the
intentions and the drives of the oppressor. Hence,
!
I
characters such as Sara evolve a voice only in relation J
to the Father. Decisions are made apparently with self- |
i
volition, but actually, only as they affect her j
i
relationship with the Center. I
I
Scholarship on Yezierska's narratives, as well as j
I
on "ethnic" literature in general, do not perceive
117
writings such as Yezierska's in terms of colonization
and internalized domination; thus, they allow the
reinscription of these writings in the existing power
relations. These stories, then, become conveyors of
myths of the American Dream, of concepts like
individualism, of the belief in America as freedom,
egalitarianism, and so on. The focus is on what is
taken as the naturally inherent themes contained in the
writing, that is, upon the tropes of the immigrant
narrative: cultural displacement, assimilation,
alienation, of the immigrant's place in society, and her
marginality. However, the identity of the main
characters emerging from these stories may only
superficially be defined as marginal. As has been
shown, this concept is problematical, for it contains
the will of the Center to reinscribe these characters
along the borderlands, to reconfirm their estrangement
from American culture, and more importantly, from an
authentic self. That identity is constructed of binary
opposites, and of designations of inferiority.
Inattention to this aspect of the concept of marginality
reinforces socio-ideological constructs which create
what are basically designations of segregation and
domination. And to ignore the aspects of internal
colonization in texts like Yezierska's is also to allow
118
existing power relations to continue. Moreover, given
t
the premise that words are not free agents, but are
indeed permeated by the intent of the dominant ideology
within a cultural environment consisting of an
indivisible past and present, "marginality” as
celebrated in texts like Gloria Anzaldua's takes on an
even more problematical cast; for despite her desire to
struggle against domination by asserting her pride in
the identity of marginality, the voices of the past
intrude, voices which are incontrovertibly a part of the
words employed to effect liberation, thereby
undercutting her very intent to subvert the Father's
move to name her.
i
I
Notes
1 Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and
Practice (London and New York: Methuen, 1982) 22.
2
Takaki has also studied the importance of Asian-
Americans in the economic boom of the West; see Ronald
Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore (Boston:
Little, Brown, and Co., 1989).
3 The reference to signifying is from Henry Louis
Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey (NY: Oxford UP, 1988)
xxiv-xxvii.
4 Werner Sollors wrote in the section, "Literature
and Ethnicity," of The Harvard Encyclopedia of American
Ethnic Groups (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1980) that
Charles Brockden Brown advocated a New World literature
which would use the then widely accepted view of the
"Indians as doomed kings, a dying class of feudal lords
of the land, heroic victims of the progress of bourgeois
civilization" (655). Sollors, here, points out that the
typologies of ethnicity often become a substitute for
history.
5 Barthes's actual words are: "Myth hides nothing
and flaunts nothing; myth is neither a lie nor a
confession: it is an inflexion. . . . Entrusted with
'glossing over' an intentional concept, myth encounters
nothing but betrayal in language, for language can only
obliterate the concept if it hides it, or unmask it if
it formulates it. The elaboration of a second-order
semiological system will enable myth to escape this
dilemma: driven to having either to unveil or to
liquidate the concept, it will naturalize it" (129).
6 Patrick Brantlinger, in "Victorians and Africans:
The Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent,”
observes: "For middle- and upper-class Victorians,
dominant over a vast working class majority at home and
over increasing millions of 'uncivilized' people of
'inferior' races abroad, power was self-validating.
There might be many stages of social evolution . . . but
there was only one 'civilization,’ one path of
'progress,' one 'true religion'" (185). From Henry
Louis Gates, Jr., ed., "Race," Writing, and Difference
(Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press,
1986).
120
A similar mentality pervaded the American
colonists' dealings with the Indians. However, Werner j
Sollors conducts an interesting discussion of various j
other ways in which the identity of the Indian is i
appropriated by American culture. So, Indians were also !
conceptualized as "Mother Earth," and children. See
Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity. Consent and Descent in
American Culture (NY: Oxford UP, 1986).
7 See Angela Davis's examination of the birth of
feminism in the United States and the alienation of
Black women from that movement in Angela Davis, Women,
Race, and Class (NY: Random House, 1981).
8 Dr. Jayawardena has taught at the University of
Colombo and the Institute of Social Studies in The
Hague. Her books include The Rise of the Labor Movement
in Ceylon (Duke University Press) and Ethnic and Class
Struggles in Sri Lanka (Colombo, 1985). See also
Richard E. Lapchick and Stephanie Urdang, Oppression and
Resistance: The Struggle of Women in Southern Africa
(Westport: Greenwood, 1982); Fatima Mernissi, Bevond the
veil: Male-Female Dynamics in a Modern Muslim Society
(Cambridge: Schenkman, 1975).
9 See Carol Schoen, Anzia Yezierska (Boston: Twayne
Publishers, 1982); Mary V. Dearborn, Love in the
Promised Land: The Story of Anzia Yezierska and John
Dewey (NY: The Free Press, 1988); Louise Levitas
Henriksen, Anzia Yezierska. A Writer's Life (New
Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1988).
10 According to Ringer and Lawless, in Race.
Ethnicity and Society (NY: Routledge, 1989),
sociologists in the 1940s and 1950s elaborated a theory
of equal status contacts, which "maintained that
prejudice would be reduced and friendliness enhanced
between individuals from different ethnic and racial
groups if they were placed in functional relationships
in neighborhoods, at work, or in organizations in which
they had to interact with each other as equals" (xii).
11 In Oscar Handlin's "Foreword" to Mary Antin's
From Plotsk to Boston, he describes the work as "the
little book . . . a sensitive, girlish account of the j
journey to America" (viii). See Mary Antin, The j
Promised Land (1912; Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton i
UP, 1969).
-- 1
121 1
CHAPTER THREE
ACADEME, MARGINALITY,
AND THE DISCOURSE OF NATION:
ROBERT PARK, EVERETT STONEQUIST, AND OSCAR HANDLIN
I
I
f
They cannot represent themselves,
they must be represented.
— Karl Marx, The Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte
122
In the previous chapter, I offered an
interpretation of certain "ethnic" literary texts, such
as Anzia Yezierska's, as containing indications of
hegemonic drives underwritten by the dominant ideology. |
i
I also discussed Gloria Anzaldua's assumption of an
identity of marginality. Her discordant voice upsets
suppositions about the objectivity and prescience of
academic texts. However, despite the subversive
elements in her introduction to Making Face. Making
Soul, Anzaldua's essay also unwittingly reinstates the
dominant ideology. Although the following discussion is
far from comprehensive, I would like to offer a reading
of certain sociological and historical texts written
between the 1920s and 1950s. Not only were these
writings the first self-conscious articulations of the
concept of marginality in academe, but they also served
to establish much of "ethnic" studies as we know it
today. To me, the implications arising from a
discussion of these academic texts bring forth certain
questions both with regards to a writer-of-color, such
as Anzaldua, assuming an identity of marginality, and
with regards to the concept of marginality itself and
"ethnic" studies in general.
Anzaldua's identity of marginality goes beyond
color or gender, but includes her self-positioning as a
123
writer for a largely academic audience. Her prose style
places her on the boundaries of this community, which,
as a badge of membership, requires us to speak with a
depersonalized and dispassionate voice that is seemingly
devoid of gender, class, race, and political views. The
purpose of such textual production is scientific or, in
the case of the humanities, pseudo-scientific enquiry.
Hence, the narrative persona in a piece of literary
criticism or an article on Metternich has been, until
recently, that of an objective, non-ideological
observer. This persona purports to merely describe; the
knowledge it accumulates is essentially apolitical. And
of course, such academic texts are strictly
differentiated from overtly political writing, to be
marked as superior to what is designated as propaganda.
Literary texts are also evaluated on such terms— the
novel or play based upon aesthetic principles is
valorized as "literature." Terry Eagleton's critique of
this artificial demarcation, and the self-inflicted
illusion of academic objectivity, at least with regards
to literary criticism, is familiar enough that a review
here is unnecessary. Anzaldua, among others, would
probably agree with the premise that even the most
benign-sounding academic treatise floats atop an
ideological foundation. Her own work is anything but an
124
example of cool objectivity. The voice in, for example,
the introduction to Making Face. Making Soul, is
intense, angry, defiant. Indeed, the narrator's
"strategy" (to the extent that any writer's strategy can’
be discerned) is to confront the reader with her
subjectivity as a marginalized woman-of-color. Instead
of muting her identity, Anzaldua makes her identity the
main issue. In seeking to expose an oppressive
ideology, her prose expounds ideology. In doing so, her
writing questions the very mores of scholastic
objectivity and detachment; for it is in part those 1
textual conventions which allow the dominant ideology to ;
remain protected and unexamined. Hence, Anzaldua's work;
positions itself as marginal to mainstream academe, and,
as such, seeks to critique and undercut its very
premises.
According to Stow Persons in Ethnic Studies in
Chicago 1905-1945 (1987), the idea of marginality could 1
be traced to William Dean Howells's The Rise of Silas 1
Lapham (1885), which was supposedly the model for
Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinskv (1917).
Notwithstanding, commentators agree that the most
i
conscious conceptualization of marginality began with
J
sociologist Robert Park's work on American immigration,
i
social processes, and ethnicity at the University of j
125
Chicago. Persons notes, interestingly, that one of
Park’s creed was "that detachment was the secret of the >
academic attitude" (29). Park, joining the faculty at i
Chicago in 1914, came at a time when American
universities were undergoing a professionalization,
which expressed itself in increasing specialization and |
adherence to the scientific "principles of objectivity,
detachment, and judicious analysis" (Persons 28).
Notably, the rise of ethnic studies at Chicago also
coincided with the separation of sociology from |
i
political science, so that, scholars such as Park, :
Everett Stonequist, E. Franklin Frazier, Louis Wirth, ;
I
Everett C. Hughes, Helen Hughes, studied ethnicity by i
ignoring the role of the political system in the j
i
formation of such groups. Furthermore, as Persons
i
notes, these scholars were deeply influenced by German j
i
sociological theory, especially the "conflict school," I
which asserted that societies grow out of clashes |
between cultures and that social order originated in
racial conquest (35). These sociologists also believed
I
that human history depicted an "overall pattern of .
improvement from primitive savage beginnings to modern ■
civilized order" (Persons 37). This Progressivism
dovetailed nicely with their adherence to Ferdinand I
Toennies's theory of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, or |
"community" as contrasted to "society" or "culture" and ;
i
"civilization." Although Toennies thought that all '
societies were mixtures of both communal and societal
i
elements, the Chicago school at the time in practice j
appeared to have ignored that aspect of Toennies's idea. ;
I
In Park's writing, as I hope to show later on, human
I
history is paramount a story of progression, with Euro-
American civilization depicted as the acme of that
advance.
While the distance between writers like Anzaldua
and Park may seem to be great, it is a distance that is
arguably the result of cultural constructs concerned
with textual conventions. Indeed, I suggest that just 1
I
as with Anzaldua's work, Park and others, whether
t
consciously or not, also wrote with a specific political ;
agenda in mind. While Anzaldua tries to criticize the j
I
cultural delineation of individual identity, and in so 1
doing, asks us to rethink the definitions of self and !
country, these academic writers were also intent on
r
establishing a particular image of America and the
individual. Scholars such as Park wrote as part of j
their time and culture, as part of the socio-ideological
environment. And even though they saw themselves as
liberal and democratic opponents to the nativist agenda,
their writings were undercut by the dominant ideology.
127
To explore this issue further, I would like to turn
my attention to the quote on the cover page of this
chapter. Marx's words also appear in Edward Said's
Orientalism (1979); in fact, on an otherwise blank page,
they are companion to an equally terse saying from
Benjamin Disraeli.1 Both quotes are spare and tend
toward the cryptic, and thus, are open to our endless
musings as textual critics trained to "see" the hidden
significance of texts, to "discover" the deeper meaning
of words and linguistic patterns. I found myself
asking: To whom is Marx referring? What exactly does he
mean by "represent"? Why were Marx and Disraeli chosen?
Am I supposed to bring their Jewish ancestry into the
way I read these sentences? The encounter with these
two quotes is fraught with queries which belie the
apparent simplicity of the words themselves. And that
is because my training as a reader has conditioned me to
sense a significance, a profundity in words that goes
beyond simple definitions. I "know" that words do not
just say what they mean, for they contain patterns and
meanings hidden beneath surfaces. So, as readers, we
automatically scour our memories for anything on Marx or
Disraeli, or nineteenth century British politics in
order to attain a fuller sense of what these words mean.
To some extent, this search for significance beyond ■
t
the mere definition of words is valid. These two
quotes, for example, do not appear somewhere in
isolation, but exist in a context, specifically, in a
book about cultural hegemony and colonialism. If I know |
how to "read" the cover and title of this book, perhaps, |
or the blurbs on the jacket, then, these two sentences
will gain in meaning, will take on a reverberance beyond
the simple definition of words. I may place them within
the larger context of Said's oeuvre, or perhaps, pull inj
what I can of other texts on colonialism, so that before j
having even begun the introductory chapter, the chapter
which supposedly gives the gist of a book, I may have
arrived at a fair understanding of what to expect from
the main text: it is a discussion of colonialism (from
the cover, jacket blurbs, Disraeli and the Tancred,
table of contents) ; it is primarily about the Middle
i
East (again, garnered from the cover, or the title, or j
knowledge of Said's scholarly interests); it will be a
critique of Western imperialism and capitalism (Marx,
colonialism); it is a cultural critique (Said, Marx,
colonialism), and so forth. And in that sense, our
interaction with these words is not simply a matter of
an acquaintance with the lexicon, but is arguably,
primarily this accessing of "peripheral" information.
It is a process that is immediate, that is an apparently
indistinguishable mixture of remembering, sifting,
comparisons, acceptance and rejection, emotions, ideas,
opinions, all of which co-exist with, and is related in
one way or another by the reader with the "new" text in
question. This "new" text is itself a result of the
author's interaction with other texts. And in fact, it
is a misconstruction to conceive of writing as simply
the textual expression of an individual opinion; rather,
it is the subjective distillation of many opinions,
facts, and emotions. The act of writing is the display
of an individual relationship with other minds, with the
world of the writer. And textual production and
reception are never simply a linear, one-on-one
progression, but involve numerous voices, texts, ideas,
as well as a process whereby these "data" are selected
and managed; it bespeaks perspective and not absolute
truth. In other words, readers do not perceive a text
in isolation, but bring with them a total experiential
history with texts and life in general, just as writers
do not write except within both personal and textual
histories.
Reading, in other words, may be conceived as an act
of interpretation, an engagement with the text that is a
complex play of the reader's desires and world-view. It
130 j
can be thought of as an engagement imperceptibly i
altering that which the reading mind encounters, as if a
person cannot gaze on a forest scene without having
changed it in some way. And, even though the act of |
reading tends to be perceived as an act of reception, 1
and writing as its opposite, a holding forth, the two
are but differing aspects of the same process of
expression. Both are modes of interpretation. Reading
is more obviously so, but so is writing; for, the ;
I
latter is a scriptural tracing of the mind as it !
i
attempts to "make sense" of data, as it orders, deletes, i
and retrieves information, in short, as the mind moves
to regulate and to manage its surroundings. Writing is
merely the visible presence of such a need.
Furthermore, both activities are said to evince ;
' uniqueness, but actually resemble more so a trek over {
old haunts, in that interpretation is a kind of \
reinsertion of the past into the present, a recalling of
experience juxtaposed to the now. And it is in that
sense, also, that the past is always a part of the
present, that this immediate confrontation with the text ;
is actually a re-emergence of the myriad past and its j
voices. Furthermore, reading and writing are activities
only apparently conducted in isolation; the writer,
alone in his garret, agonizing about how to unveil a j
*
I
131
unique vision of the world, is surely but one of the
myths that characterize the Western literary tradition.
In actuality, no writer can or ever really does work in
such seclusion, for, even then, he would always carry
within him, in his consciousness an experiential history
(both textual and otherwise) composed of many voices and
visions, from the present, which, however, is ever
saturated with what has gone on before. The writer has
in his very consciousness culture, its urgings, desires,
and contradictions. Indeed, his very identity as an
artist is arguably a containment within an institution
called authorship, symptomatic of the socio-ideological
environment itself. The illumination of this
relationship of author, authorship and the ideological
environment is the set of conventions that identifies
and manages this institution, which is effective,
ironically, because it masquerades as nature and not
institution, because it aligns itself with the innately
!
human and not as a social construct based upon material ,
2 »
realities of class and power. And so, choices to do ;
with genre, narrator, voice, and so on, may be said to
arise out of aesthetic concerns, the demands of the
artistic vision, rather than as always already shunted
into certain imperialistic forms and tropes of
expression of the socio-ideological environment.
132
Indeed, textual conventions allow us to "see" a
piece of text as text, effortlessly; they prepare the
reading mind to receive a work as a conglomerate of
numerous little cues, to "know" the difference between
an essay and a poem, to know what to do with blurbs,
indexes, bibliographies, and other texts, or with
different sections of the bookstore. Readers seemingly
do not have to work to consider each cue, but the mind ;
grasps all of them as a totality. The conventions '
i
themselves are apparently beyond question, of intrinsic
value.3 For instance, we see the names of Marx and
Disraeli on that otherwise startlingly blank page and as
readers, we understand, implicitly, that the author has
thus gestured to us, has thus indicated that these two -
pieces of texts are to be treated in a specific manner.
I probably would not assume that these words are part of ;
I
the main text, yet, would "know" that they are connected
to that text in some essential way, that to comprehend !
this pithy sentence from Marx is also to grasp a :
i
fundamental point of Orientalism. Indeed, for reading
!
conventions to work, they must be so irretrievable from |
!
the total textual experience that it appears natural, so]
much so that it becomes easy for us to forget its utter
un-naturalness. For, a set of conventions is arguably a
cultural construct. In fact, ethnolinguists are
increasingly pointing out that reading and writing
differ among cultures. As Robert B. Kaplan has argued,
even the most basic writing conventions— paragraph
indentation, quotation marks, the citing of authorities,
and so on— are unique to the West (7-18). Non-native
speakers have to learn not just the lexicon, sentence
structure, and so on, but the often unspoken assumptions
underlying the whole Western notion of writing and
reading. What is an author? Why do we write? What is
originality? Why is less more (as in the case of the
selections from Marx and Disraeli)? What is effective
reading?4 What makes Western literary practice Western
includes the manner in which it conceptualizes
aesthetics, genres, styles, form. What is more, until
recently, literary criticism was willing to only
consider text-based writing as literature.
As for literary criticism, the manner in which a
culture studies and evaluates its writing derives from
the same motivations that underlie literary production
itself. In a sense, both are but opposite faces of the
same coin, the need to understand and name oneself as a
distinct people.5 The conceptualization of a text as
either an academic paper or a novel is a man-made,
cultural construct, a process of ideation, that marks
the way a people, defined ethnically, politically,
134
ethically, and linguistically, perceives itself.
Textual production is less a function of any set of
innate, universal human traits than it is of the socio-
ideological environment of individual communities.
Fredric Jameson argues in The Political Unconscious
(1981) that texts— whether they be dissertation or poem,
novel or biography— are social artifacts, bound in the
ideological, "with the function of inventing imaginary
or formal 'solutions' to unresolvable social
contradictions" (79). He illustrates this point by
referring to Claude Levi-Strauss's study of the facial
decorations of the Caduveo Indians, which the latter
sees as: "the fantasy production of a society seeking
passionately to give symbolic expression to the
institutions it might have had in reality, had not
interest and superstition stood in the way" (qtd. in
Jameson 79). Hence, Jameson would define a text (or
other cultural artifact) as "essentially a symbolic
act," and the study of such acts must take into purview
the social order, so that "our object of study will
prove to be the ideologeme, that is, the smallest
intelligible unit of the essentially antagonistic
collective discourses of social classes" (76).
Consequently, textual criticism would not be simply
an exploration of formal/aesthetic properties, but a
consideration of the socio-ideological intent that
saturates the text, that, more accurately stated, is
indivisible from the production of those texts. In
Jameson's words: "ideology is not something which
informs or invests symbolic production; rather the
aesthetic act is itself ideological" (79). The study of
texts then is conducted within a critical paradigm that
locates a poem or a novel or a dissertation as part of a
material reality, of a socio-political reality. An
important part of such a move is a similar
"contextualization" of textual conventions and
criticism. It is in this sense that the production of
texts is explored as a socially symbolic act that
illuminates the hidden drives, the fissures and
contradictions, and the power relations of a cultural
environment.6
Levi-Strauss's study of the Caduveo Indian masks
appears indeed a compelling illustration of just such a
critical approach towards cultural "texts." Yet, even
here, one perceives that academe itself may speak only
within the confines of its socio-ideological
environment, that it too unknowingly participates in a
cultural "thinking-about-the-self" by means of a
language (metaphor, rhetorical tropes, words) that is
saturated with the intent of the dominant ideology.
136
For, Levi-Strauss's assessment is rather a revelation of
Western thinking than it is necessarily a truthful
7 ■ I
portrayal of the Caduveo. His language speaks of
repressed desires and sublimation through artistic
endeavors, the subconscious workings of the mind
bubbling up in the facial decorations, indicative of |
unresolved psychic trauma and contradictions. It is
indelibly marked by the Freudian presence, which is
itself born of a specific European socio-ideological
environment, that hints of its own societal
inconsistencies— subsisting (in one possible scenario)
on the inability to confront a dying, de-naturalized
Vienna (Europe), voracious capitalism, and the
contradictions inherent in the European self- i
identification as the acme of Civilization while
colonial armies commit genocide on "primitive" peoples |
(
in the name of that same Civilization. Born in the '
I
I
West, psychoanalytic theory is informed by the very !
j
libidinal drive(s) it seeks to uncover and explain, but !
another symptom of malaise rather than the full j
understanding of it. Yet, Levi-Strauss bases his !
I
analysis of the masks on this theory, as well as on the j
assumption that the Western formulation of the human
psyche is applicable also to the Caduveo, a culture very !
different from the West. He speaks of their
"superstition," their "confusion and disquiet," their i
"dream," their "fantasy," their attempts "to project [
I
[solutions] into the imaginary" (qtd. m Jameson 78-79). ;
Unfortunately, Levi-Strauss's analysis is unverifiable, j
I
and, perhaps, more self-revelatory than anything else. |
I
!
His study seeks to define the other through Eurocentric j
j
conceptions of humanity. To a certain extent, then, j
t
Jameson's invocation of Levi-Strauss's "analysis" as j
authority, as evidence of text-as-symbolic-act is an '
unwitting self-implication, embroils him in Western j
scholarship's continual need to define others in j
relation to its own image, to define and so to contain.
!
Thus, indeed, is text a symbolic act, indicative of
!
libidinal cultural drives that lay hidden, elided by our!
1
uncritical relationship to textual conventions, which
hail us by the name of subject/vassal.8 j
|
Consequently, Said's Orientalism is especially |
relevant to this chapter for its critical perspective ;
towards Western "interest" in the Orient. He focuses on
the construction of an identity of the other by j
!
I
intellectuals, both in and outside of academe, resulting)
I
in an "Oriental" who is not so much fact as the product :
of a Western internal/psychic monologue, an admixture of
race theories, literary studies, history, and
anthropology, which is, tellingly, described as the
138
study of antiquities. It is as if the West gossips
about the Orient in its presence, with not even the
pretence of asking for the other's input, for as Marx
points out, the East is conceived as incapable of
speaking for itself. This process is the cultural !
!
complement to economic and political imperialism, as if
Western scholarship had come down on the side of Cecil
Rhodes. Said's text, then, is about the construction of
a discourse, whereby:
such texts can create not only knowledge
but also the very reality they appear to
describe. In time such knowledge and
reality produce a tradition, or what
Michel Foucault calls a discourse, whose
material presence or weight, not the
originality of a given author, is really
responsible for the texts produced out of
it. (64)
In other words, if something is presented enough
I
times as reality, then it begins to take on the aspect j
of reality. This discourse about the Orient is self- ,
I
j
engendering; for, texts give rise to other texts and one ;
critic uses another in order to support his or her
theory. This conversation soon forms a collective of
"objective" and "scientific" conclusions of definitional .
certainty about something that is more indicative of the
speaker than of the one who is being spoken about.
Again, in Said's words:
Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed ;
as the corporate institution for dealing
139
with the Orient— dealing with it by
making statements about it, authorizing
views of it, describing it, by teaching
it, settling it, ruling over it: in
short, Orientalism as a Western style for
dominating, restructuring, and having
authority over the Orient. (3)
From the 1920s to the 1950s, American sociologists
such as Robert Park and Everett Stonequist as well as
historians like Oscar Handlin were also unwittingly
engaged in their own form of orientalism, although as
Stow Persons notes:
The work of the Chicago school
coincided with the period of massive
immigration prior to World War I, with
the growing popular concern over the
loyalty of immigrants during the war,
with the Americanization movement
designed to assure that loyalty, with the
drive for immigration restriction
following the war, and with the revived
activity of the Ku Klux Klan and other
manifestations of nativism. In the
context of these public anxieties and
pressures Chicago ethnic theory
represented an enlightened and scholarly
approach to problems currently invested
with deep emotionalism. (38)
Park originated the concept of "marginality" with
his 1928 article entitled, "Human Migration and the
Marginal Man." According to this sociologist:
a new type of personality, namely, a
cultural hybrid, a man living and sharing
intimately in the cultural life and
traditions of two distinct peoples; never
quite willing to break, even if he were
permitted to do so, with his past and his
traditions, and not quite accepted,
140
because of racial prejudice, in the new I
society in which he now sought to find a
place. He was a man on the margins of
two cultures and two societies, which
never completely interpenetrated and
fused. (892)
This type of man is the true cosmopolitan; accepted,
nowhere, he actually belongs everywhere. He is artist j
and thinker, his sophistication and intelligence fed by
his very "character of spiritual conflict and
instability" (893). Park's conceptualization of
marginality derives from the influence of critics such
i
as Ludwig Gumplowicz and Georg Simmel. He contends that;
successful civilizations come from the intermixing of
different ethnic groups: "it is just as certain that
civilization . . . is a consequence of contact and
communication. . . . Every nation, upon examination,
turns out to have been a more or less successful melting
pot" (882-883). Park's writing is anticipatory of more '
recent ethnographic studies in that, to a certain 1
i
extent, his work perceives cultures as distinct, with
autonomous characteristics, and intrinsic value.
However, his text also tries to account for the
evolution of human societies without a rigorous
methodological framework.9 Rather, it is a mixture of
generalizations and speculations about human societies
and culture and human nature. More importantly, as I
hope to show later in the chapter, the article is 1
constructed upon a world-view that derives from a ;
material subjectivity in a socio-ideological environment
structured in hierarchies of color and gender. In other'
I
words, Park makes universal conclusions that are
actually based upon ethnocentric assumptions about
humanity. Despite his obvious sympathy for the
immigrant and for a more democratic vision of America,
I
Park's inability to foreground his own political
subjectivity certainly places his article some distance
from more self-conscious writings on the same topic.10
i
At times a behavioral scientist, at other times both I
sociologist and historian, Park unfortunately ends up
further ghettoizing the ethnic groups he studies with
his suggestion that immigrants (his article cites Jews
in particular) are typically racked by mental illness,
maladjustment, and unease with American society. In !
1
addition, just as with Levi-Strauss's study of the
i
Caduveo, his argument rests upon culturally-based
assumptions about humanity and methods of understanding
history. In other words, Park was engaged in a cultural,
1
"thinking-of-the-self." For, only by defining what
these others were not— Anglo-Saxon, Western European,
Protestant, bourgeois— could the designation "American"
be formulated. Despite his relatively liberal stance,
this writer unwittingly replaced old stereotypes with
142
new ones, and by using established tropes belonging to
the national mythology, he further justified those
tropes, and contributed to their continued codification.
Part of the problem lies in the very character of
academe. If writing is a manner of speaking the self, a
delineation of individual identity, then academic
writing also rests on suppositions about an academic
identity, namely, that which is objective, logical,
rational, and apolitical. The academic is a persona who
appeals to other such personas and texts as authority.
Park, therefore, writes knowing that his words will
appear in a succession of other texts. Hence, Said
places Marx's words where he does, calling into play a
whole set of academic conventions that assign a certain
value to the latter's words without the need for Said to
state such an intention. In that sense, academic
writing is a self-contained, self-sustaining eco-system,
composed of texts that reference each other, in ever-
widening ripples.
Indeed, academic tradition derives its very being
from this intertextuality. What differentiates
scholarly texts from, say, fictive narratives in
general, appears to be this prominent appeal to other
texts, this conscious appropriation of other voices,
ideas into what is essentially a monologue disguised as
143
a conversation, to conclude in a piece of writing that
speaks of itself as the pseudo-scientific. The
paramount aim is the creation of a discursive identity
that insinuates itself as unbiased, and purely in search
of truth. And in that sense, academic discourse is a
calculated self-demarcation from fictive narratives in
general; it says of itself: I present reality whereas a
novel or a play is an imaginative construct that
requires a suspension of disbelief; I am objective while
a work of art is purely subjective; I pursue universal
truths unlike fictive writing which simply reflects
individual perspectives. Thus, when academics such as
Robert Park writes about marginality and civilization,
he uses all the rhetorical ploys which define academic
writing. He cites; he documents; he reasons. In turn,
other academicians will call upon Park for academic
legitimacy.
Park's article, then, gave rise to numerous other
texts that either refuted or supported his hypothesis,
using the textual conventions of academe. Everett
Stonequist's The Marginal Man (1937), for example, takes
Park's concept of marginality and expands it into a
book, which in turn gave rise to Arnold W. Green's "A
Re-examination of the Marginal Man Concept" (1947).
Green's article asserts that Park's concept has an
"indifferent status as a scientific formulation" (168),
and tries to back up this assessment by citing the cases
of two different second generation ethnic groups: Greek
American students at a New England State college, and
Polish Americans in an industrial village. Both Park
and Stonequist suggest that marginality arising from
cultural conflict typically shows up in second
generation immigrants. Green refutes this contention by
pointing out that whereas the Greek Americans exhibit
symptoms of marginality, Polish Americans do not. He
states that Greeks seem to have little problem
identifying with American culture, an attitude
accompanied by contempt for their immigrant parents.
Although faulting Park and Stonequist for their lack of
scientific rigor, Green's own argument is far from
"scientific." For instance, he studies a limited
population, confined to a college and one "industrial
village" (170), which hardly seems an adequate basis for
any conclusive assertions to be made. In addition,
Green is unclear as to what he means by "adequate"
scientific formulation; the fact that Polish Americans
exhibit symptoms of marginality but that Greek Americans
do not is hardly enough to assert that the concept of
marginality is invalid. On the contrary, that the
latter group appears to undergo cultural conflict and
145
identity crisis seem to prove the efficacy of Park's j
thesis. At most, Green has only succeeded in showing
that the formulation lacks precision, perhaps, I
suggest, due to the difficulty that attends any
theorizing of social structures based purely on j
!
empirical evidence, for such a project could not
possibly take in all the variables that comprise social
behavior (for example, just to name a few, class,
gender, education, region, family). Empirical evidence
is itself a highly suspect tool upon which to base any :
assertions, a matter of selection and interpretation, of'
the sifting and ordering that the mind undertakes in its
effort to manage its surroundings, and not as an
evidentiary process leading to definitional certainty.
The most important issue with regards to the Park-
Stonequist-Green academic thrust and parry is that a [
discourse is created while none of the underlying ;
premises of the concept of marginality is being !
seriously questioned. Green's discontent with Park and '
Stonequist is merely one of process, an insistence on
purity; and hence, his strategy is to offer
contradictory empirical evidence that would undermine
Park's concept. In the process, Green leaves intact,
and in fact, only reinforces the propensity already
found in Park and Stonequist of stereotyping the ethnic ;
146 ;
groups being used for the studies. All three end up j
portraying people as a nameless mass, a swelter of vague ■
characteristics that include psychic problems and !
1
criminal propensities. In other words, these writers do
not question the fact that their academic process
creates stereotypes, that it blithely homogenizes the
people they "study." So that marginality, this
j
linguistic marker, only too swiftly becomes loaded with ,
r
sociopathic images, and assumes a cultural weight that
serves to marginalize these people, given that the
dominant culture defines as the norm all that these
others supposedly are not (indeed, this linguistic
marker arrives on the scene always in such oppositional
duality).
Most critically, perhaps, such studies cannot be
divorced from their life within a language that I
structures subjectivity in hierarchies of color, gender, j
and class. So that, in this instance, I find it
i
i
disturbing that Green would discuss what he terms as the '
Poles’ "reduced success drive in comparison with second ;
!
generation Greeks" (170). These "Poles," according to i
the author, "understand full well the American game of
piling up money, but the middle-class emphasis on
education, manners . . . culture is . . . simply beyond
their ken" (170). He never explains the basis of his
147
statements, thereby allowing two unfortunate
implications to be derived: Polish Americans do not have
a success drive, and are unable to assume American
manners either due to an inherent lack in the originary
Polish culture or in Polish nature itself. Both
implications revert to race as explanation for human
behavior. To me, such a stance is disturbingly
ethnocentric: it lacks appreciation for the fact that
terms like success are culture-specific, an artificial
construction that differs among communities. What is
thought to be a low success drive by one people might
really be an emphasis on a different set of ethics by
another. j
However, a more important issue than that of
i
cultural bias is the consideration that language itself
is not a neutral, objective tool that carries simply and
completely the intentions of the user. Language is
anchored in its cultural environment, a socio-
!
ideological environment, and is saturated by the
ideological intent of that world. Therefore, it seems j
to me that Green cannot speak of the Polish Americans' :
(or the Greeks') success drive and be neutral about it; !
for, such a description always already carries within it
the ethical value with which the host culture has
invested that word. Restated differently, to portray a
148
people as having or not having the attribute of success
is to actually engage in a naming, a defining, it is to
categorize that people as belonging (often "naturally"
belonging) in a certain slot which determines social
status, but more critically, identity. In short, those
slots position a person in terms of gender, class, and
color. Hence, identity or subject positioning, is a
social construct, effected through language, whether
linguistic, pictorial image, or even architectural
space, and is permeated with the ideological. A word,
then, must always be accounted for as part of a socio-
ideological totality. Green's article belongs to a
master discourse on the other, a form of orientalism
that is part of a tradition that has recently come under
much criticism. This tradition allows debate with
regards to the precision of Park's concept, but, in
fact, accepts and perpetuates the assumptions
underwriting that conceptualization which have to do
with the very understanding of the term culture, which
Park discusses in the following manner:
Changes in race . . . do inevitably
follow . . . changes in culture. The
movements and mingling of peoples which
bring rapid, sudden, and often
catastrophic changes in customs and
habits are followed, in the course of
time, as a result of interbreeding, by
corresponding modifications in
temperament and physique. (883)
149
It is this interbreeding between groups of people
that create new and vital civilizations, that make for
progress. This view is then expanded in Stonequist's
book with his discussion of "racial hybrids" (10-53).
According to this view, marginality subsists on a notion
of culture that sees it as composed of innate, essential
qualities of human nature. However, even if such
essences could be irrefutably defined, the question
remains as to the validity of comparing different
cultures; for finally, statements about culture, and
human nature are irretrievable from the value-laden
language that is used to talk about these things.
Green's own analysis of Polish Americans suggests that
he also views cultural characteristics as deriving from
inherent human qualities, a matter of genes rather than
social construction. Hence, his article conveys an image
of Polish Americans as that of a race, an inherently
backward people, who will never become attuned to the
demands of a sophisticated Anglo-Saxon culture. Under
Green's gaze, both groups are marginalized: for the
Greeks, who diligently pursue the American Dream,
exhibit the "classic marginal man symptoms" (170),
feelings of guilt and inadequacy; while the Poles, with
their slightly bovine nature, can never quite be true
150
Americans, lacking as they do the Greeks' ambition to
rise in society.11
Indeed, this author fails to meet his own criteria
(scientific). He founds his argument on generalizations
about culture and human nature that are constructed
finally on notions of innateness that are, in turn,
grounded in his own subjectivity. His "re-examination"
of the marginal man concept turns out to be less of a
corrective then a recirculation of existing cultural
bias, a thinking-of-the-self that is symptomatic of the
dominant culture. In that sense, the academic projects
of Park, Stonequist, and Green do bespeak the
orientalist perspective: they take those they study as
specimens, plumb their secrets, and define and
categorize them in order to confine them in their proper
place. These writers, then, create a discourse based
upon mutual acknowledgment, footnotes, dates,
bibliographies, statistics, academic style-sheets, all
of which comprise a sort of reality that seemingly needs
no reference (or only prejudicial "empirical" reference)
to anything outside of this eco-system.
I would like to discuss briefly one other member of
the Chicago school: Everett C. Hughes's "Social Change
and Status Protest: An Essay on the Marginal Man"
(1949). Where Green faults Park and Stonequist for not
151
being scientific enough, Hughes praises Park for turning
"a literary and poetic insight into a cluster of related
scientific hypotheses" (58). Hughes's views are also
relatively liberal. Unfortunately, he proceeds to add
even further "depth, breadth and richness" (58) to
Park's formulation of marginality by applying the
concept to American Bohemians, and "unmarried career
women in American cities" (62).12 He defines as
marginal university students and people who attempt to
rise into a higher class. In fact, Hughes sees
marginality as a phenomenon that "is not, in essence,
one of cultural and racial mixing. It is one that may
occur whenever there is sufficient social change going
on to allow the emergence of people who are in a
position of confusion of social identity" (63). It is
from here only a short step to the suggestion that
marginality stems from any "conflict of identity" (63).
Hence, American literature is filled with examples of
marginality, just as in English literature, for
instance, Trollope's novels of social mobility and class
conflict contain numerous marginalized characters (64).
This viewpoint was to resurface later in Werner
Sollors's treatment of the subject, Beyond Ethnicity
(1986). Unfortunately, just as with Sollors's text,
Hughes, in expanding the definition of Park's concept of
marginality, dilutes its potential for illuminating what
appears to be an essential characteristic of American
culture, its hierarchial structuring of identity along
the lines of race, ethnicity, and gender. Indeed, the
potential of such a term for cultural criticism lies in
its capacity to point to social inequities, more
particularly, to the ways in which culture is the
province of a dominant ideology. Indeed, Hughes's
indiscriminate application of this concept sanitizes and
depoliticizes it. For him, the issue is no different
from that of social status. So that, marginality occurs
when a person perceives a discrepancy between what he
understands to be his status and his status as defined
by the community. In practical terms, a woman physician
will likely feel herself marginalized because
traditionally doctors have been men. If one follows the
implications of this position to its logical conclusion
then the onus lies primarily with those who perceive
themselves to be marginal, in the sense that one can
alleviate this distressing situation by adjusting one's
expectations, self-perception, status, and so on. And
indeed, according to Hughes, some possible solutions
could be:
1. All such persons could give up the
struggle, by retiring completely into the
status with which they are most
stubbornly identified by society. . . .
153
3. Persons of marginal position might
individually resign from the status which
interferes with their other status aims.
(61)
Another of his solutions is "the elaboration of the
social system to include a marginal group as an
additional category of persons with their own identity
and defined position" (62). The latter suggestion seems
to be begging the question altogether, while solutions 1
and 3 work to deflect attention and possible criticism
away from the social structure at the same time that it
places the responsibility of the marginal condition on
the victim of marginalization. This criticism is
similar to that levied by those who argue that welfare
recipients only have themselves to blame.13
Hughes's article— its logical, reasonable tone, the
objective, unbiased self-image that it portrays—
comprise a narrative persona which the reader is to
understand belongs to one who seeks only the truth.
Indeed, this narrative role is irretrievably woven into
the language, and the writing and reading styles that
we, academicians, inherit. The very notion of academic
writing, then, is ideological, given that it comes into
being as part of the consciousness of those who live
within a particular socio-ideological environment, and
as such, this writing partakes and circulates the drives
and intent of the dominant group, as much as that can be
15 4 I
1
I
crystallized. Consequently, Hughes's writing intimates
the author's objectivity, and hence, the reliability of
the views articulated while eliding the presence of the
master discourse. The dominant ideology is present,
however, in various ways. For one, the solutions
outlined by Hughes are based upon culturally-specific
notions of the individual, in the sense that every
person is seen as distinct, inviolate, unique, an
imperial self who can control his destiny. (Such a
notion is also gender-biased because the "individual"
envisioned always seem to be male; women as individuals
are either conceived in the public consciousness as
freaks or mere imitations of men.) As such, each person
is responsible for his own happiness, but is also to be
blamed for his failures. Accompanying that idea is a
belief in the possibility of choice, a cardinal tenet of 1
a democratic, consumer society. Hence, Hughes betrays
no self-consciousness in his suggestion that the |
marginalized person could choose to relinquish one of !
her roles— a woman or a doctor--and thereby solve the j
problem of her marginality. Again, this "solution" begs '
the question; for, marginality results from an ideology
that maintains inequities based on identities that carry
ethical valuation determined by the dominant ideology
and sustained by its power to "regulate" culture. Part i
i__
155
of that domination lies in the very rigidity of the
names consigned to others, in the very impossibility of
changing one's skin color or abdicating sexual identity.
In addition, the society depicted in Hughes's writing is
one which is varied, and composed of numerous
subcultures, all enjoying some degree of autonomy.
Indeed, Hughes would not be able to assert this
expanded, universalized version of Park's idea, in which
women, students, Bohemians, blacks, and so on all
"enjoy" the same designation, if the form of his
thinking did not contain the democratic conception, if
his thinking was not already realized as certain
epistemological configurations. In other words, his re
formulation of this idea reveals an appreciation of
society as having a texture that is basically democratic
and pluralistic. It is in this sense that finally
Hughes's text is less about marginalized people than it
is a re-emergence of an "American" consciousness, the
identity of the dominant group once again proclaiming
its presence.
This hegemonic voice reveals itself also in Park's
writing, even though ostensibly, the article attempts to
establish the efficacy of the marginal "personality
type" for society. Park notes that Carl Bucher suggests
that: "The great founders of religion, the earliest
156
poets and philosophers, the musicians and actors of past
epochs, are all great wanderers" (qtd. in Park 882).
The author is trying to establish his contention that
cultural contact leads to the advancement of
civilizations. Referring to the views of Frederick
Teggart, Park asserts that such contact or collision of
cultures leads to "freeing the individual judgment from
the inhibitions of conventional modes of thought" (qtd.
in Park 887). As Park sees the process, the individual
is not merely brought into contact with another culture,
but "released into new social order"; he is "not merely
emancipated, but enlightened" (888). He further writes
that: "The effect of mobility and migration is to
secularize relations which were formerly sacred. One
may describe the process, in its dual aspect, perhaps,
as the secularization of society and the individuation
of the person" (888). To reiterate this point, the
author calls in reinforcements in the form of Gilbert
Murray's The Rise of the Greek Epic. According to
Murray, the Nordic invasions of the Aegean area
initially led to the shattering of an old civilization
(Murray is unclear as to which is the old civilization;
I "interpret" him to mean the people living in the
Aegean). However, the Greek civilization was born out
of the invasions and the ensuing chaos. This new
society was freed from "grosser superstitions and the
fear of the gods . . . the older world perished and . .
the freer, more enlightened social order sprang into
existence. Thought is emancipated, philosophy is born"
(889). The climax of this argument is reached when Park
parallels Murray's "historical" account of the rise and
fall of ancient civilizations with modern Western
culture. For Park:
What took place in Greece first has since
taken place in the rest of Europe and is
now going on in America. The movement
and migration of peoples, the expansion
of trade and commerce . . . the growth,
in modern times,of these vast melting-
pots of races and cultures, the
metropolitan cities, has loosened local
bonds, destroyed the cultures of tribe
and folk, and substituted for the local
loyalties the freedom of cities . . . the
rational organization which we call
civilization. (889-890)
In short, what explains the greatness of the Greeks
also accounts for the success of Europe and America.
Ostensibly, Park's article weaves a narrative of
the marginal man that offers the latter centrality in
American society, arguing that the progress and
greatness of civilizations come about because of contact
between cultures. The intermixing that results might
lead to the marginalization of certain people, but then,
it is these strangers and wanderers, the poets and
philosophers of these worlds in transition, who form the
158
great traditions of the future. Park’s article is
political in the sense that it jumps full face into the
virulent national debate with regards to immigration
policy. It places the author in opposition to
nativists, many of whom were academicians, arguing for
greater restrictions in immigration and for the
exclusion of some nationalities altogether. Restriction
meant the exclusion of "races” who were inherently
unsuited for life in a modern Anglo-Saxon state.
Italians were too emotional while the Slavs were too
clannish. In the American West, there was no attempt to
camouflage the nativists' thinking— the Japanese and
Chinese races were to be excluded because they were
perceived to be too alien and inferior. Park's
references to the "melting-pot" and the "yellow peril"
in his article were therefore not incidental. As Edward
N. Saveth has shown, in American Historians and European
Immigrants. 1875-1925 (1948), the discussion going on in
academe throughout the latter half of the nineteenth and
the first half of the twentieth centuries could be
traced to the Anglo-Protestant heritage, and the middle-
and upper-class backgrounds of most scholars. American
history departments were made up of scholars trained
mainly in German universities, while language
departments followed the European model of departments
of Philology. "American" literature itself was deemed
non-existent. To further heat up the controversy over
immigration policy, huge influxes of immigrants from
Central and Eastern Europe "invaded" the country between
the years 1880 and 1930. This and increasing
industrialization resulted in more slums, poverty,
government corruption, and trade unionism. Such
problems were not traced to capitalism; rather, the
culprit was seen to be immigration standards that let in
inferior "races." As the argument went, more Anglo-
Saxons were needed because of their inherent respect for
the law, self-discipline, diligence, and sense of high
morals, while restrictions should be placed on the
immigration of inferior races, and the Japanese and
Chinese were to be totally excluded.
Park's article not only opposed this racist stance,
but indeed, argues that cultural contact and the
interbreeding of races have been the rule throughout
history, almost a "natural" evolutionary process of
human societies. Unfortunately, he fails to offer any
convincing substantiation for most of his arguments.
For instance, while strangers and wanderers may have
been often artists, poets, and philosophers, it is a
leap of faith to assert that their talent stems from
marginality. What is more, it is certainly a
generalization to assert that cultural clashes account I
!
for "progress." Indeed, his article merely succeeds in
I
describing the death and growth of consecutive
civilizations, but fails to establish a link between the
forces that lead to cultural collision and the greatness
of social structures. In addition, Park's idea of
marginality calls for a scenario in which people and !
cultures come into contact with each other. "People," 1
however, could include racial and ethnic groups,
traders, armies, whole populations, as well as wandering
minstrels. This largesse unfortunately weakens Park's
position, especially when one considers that whole
populations cannot become marginalized, for the very
definition of marginality is that only certain people in ■
a community are set apart. And yet if, as the author
asserts, marginality can arise from the collision of
I
whole populations, but a marginalized population is an 1
|
impossibility, then other factors must account for those ■
individuals in a group who do end up as the marginal j
few.
|
Most disturbing, however, is the fact that his j
article generalizes about the condition of immigrants.
Park writes: "Something of the same sense of moral
dichotomy and conflict is probably characteristic of
every immigrant during the period of transition, when
old habits are being discarded and new ones are not yet
formed" (893). He creates an image of the immigrant as
exhibiting the following personality traits: spiritual
instability, intensified self-consciousness,
restlessness, malaise, sophistication, and idealism.
However, later, the author creates more confusion when
he asserts that instead of just during the transitional
period, the immigrant's "period of crisis is relatively
permanent" (893). As evidence, Park points to writers
such as Heinrich Heine and Ludwig Lewishon, thereby
legitimating the propensity in future commentators of
using actual publications, especially autobiographies,
to support this concept. Indeed, much of ethnic
literary criticism since Park has been shunted into a
discussion of texts centered on the issue of
marginality, of which the most prevalent definition is
still based upon this early formulation.
My analysis of Park's text does not center on how
conscientious he is as an academic, but on what his text
can tell us about the dominant ideology. In other
words, the issue is not a matter of how convincing he is
in his thesis, but in the text's unspoken desires, in
the discourse that it unwittingly articulates. In that
sense, if we displace the seduction of the familiar and
the established, if we place in critical perspective the
162
voice of academe that asserts its own objectivity and
non-ideological position, then this text reveals itself
to be yet permeated by a dominant ideology that
insinuates its needs and intent into this the "non-
ideological." Under such a perspective, this academic
text approaches another guise, that of the narrative.
And Park's disquisition on marginality, what is written
and meant to be read as a defense of the ghettoized, can
be seen as a story that retells the story of the center.
Park speaks for the immigrant only to have that voice
subverted by a master discourse on the national self. I
suggest that what is at stake is not so much the
immigrants or immigration policy as it is the American
identity. How this culture defines itself is a matter
of how it categorizes these alien others in what is
finally (in one possible scenario) an ontological quest
that ironically places the Self, this logocentric Self,
as the center and norm of humanity.
The hegemony of the center first of all reveals
itself in the unquestioned assumption that the "natural"
course of human history is a linear progress from the
traditional to the modern, from tribal society to the
"rational organization" of Western civilization. This
discourse sees the world in binary terms, linked in
unequal partnership, in which the West is the valued
163 ,
half; humanity is thereby simplistically categorized— ;
the West is modern, advanced, progressive, enlightened,
whereas, traditional societies are primitive, 1
unenlightened, and so, on the lower end of the j
evolutionary scale. Hence, Park argues that the
greatness of the Greeks stems from cultural collisions
that led to the break-up of the old, which also allowed
them to free themselves from "the grosser superstitions"
and to become a "more enlightened social order" (889) .
Western civilization is of course the end result of a
similar evolutionary process, as evidenced by "rational"
organizations such as the nation and the city. Again,
Park's text sets up a binary opposition, claiming for
the West the term of value, positioning it as the acme
of human evolution. The rational is better than the
superstitious, the nation is superior to the tribe, one
bespeaks the primitive, the dark side of humanity, while
the other is light and progress. According to this I
argument, then, surely, Western civilization has
inherited the best of what is human, is, in fact, the '
culmination of human evolution, which is tantamount to I
the assertion that it is responsible for the past and
the future.
Not only is the self-positioning implied in Park's
understanding of "history" highly ethnocentric, what
also needs to be examined are the meanings of words such
as "superstition,” "rational," "evolution." What needs
to be questioned is the assertion that the West does
represent progress, or that the Western definition of
progress is indeed correct. Similarly, Western
scholarship has never satisfactorily explained why
people such as the Caduveos would be deemed
superstitious; surely, to the Caduveos, Freudian
"psychology," the study of what cannot be "seen" but
only posited as existing, would appear equally
suspicious. Part of such a world-view also suggests a
perception of history that posits it as linear and as
truth, and not simply as a concept, a way of perceiving
the world, of interpreting and managing it; the latter
stance would ask us to acknowledge our own ideological
positions.14
Finally, Park is led to endorse the position, also
articulated by Theodor Waitz, that "the role of
migration as an agency of civilization" is rarely
peaceful (883); however, good can come out of war and
the destruction of peoples, for, and this from Waitz:
"The first consequence of war is that fixed relations
are established between peoples, which render friendly
intercourse possible" (qtd. in Park 884). Park also
proposes that if civilizations remain in isolation,
165
"stagnation, a mental inertness occurs" (qtd. in Park
884). His use of Waitz contextualizes this article for
us; for, it is the author's agreement with such a view
that allows him to make such grand historical sweeps of
whole civilizations, that allows him to re-name
capitalistic expansion, imperialism, and colonialism as
human progress and enlightenment. An example of Park's
own form of mental gymnastics is the following:
"Migration, which was formerly an invasion, followed by
the forcible displacement or subjugation of one people
by another, has assumed the character of a peaceful
penetration" (886). That invasion, subjugation,
forcible displacement, that any penetration can ever be
conceived as "peaceful" is surely a form of ingenuous
self-justification. Hence, Western colonialism is
rewritten in the most benign terms, and presented as a
most natural occurrence, a matter of normal human
evolution.
Everett Stonequist's The Marginal Man (1937)
evinces a similar perspective. In a chapter on "The
Cultural Hybrid," he writes:
During the past few centuries these semi
separated civilizations have themselves
come closely together so that the whole
world now forms a single arena of
cultural contact and diffusion,
permitting the development of what may
some day become a world civilization.
(55)
166
A world culture has certainly come about, but one
that neither Stonequist nor Park would have envisioned
perhaps. The tone of The Marginal Man is optimistic; a
"world civilization" is envisioned as mankind having
reached a developmental peak, a type of millennium.
However, the world culture that is now evident is
capitalistic and consumeristic, with the same drive for
profit and conquest that characterizes Western
capitalism.15 The issue here is that such a culture
came about only through the destruction of whole
cultures, and not as an egalitarian, democratic exchange
among equals.16
Stonequist does acknowledge the West's role in what
he terms the "Europeanization of the globe" (55): he
speaks about the ruthless subjugation of "primitive"
people, the breakdown of indigenous cultures, and the
extinction of "native" populations (56). However, this
awareness is diluted by the presence of the same
assumptions that underlie Park's writing. Again, people
and their cultures are said to be "primitive," backward;
the advance of Western culture is inevitable, a natural
outcome of its technological success, its ambition, its
thirst for knowledge. Indeed, The Marginal Man asserts
the superiority of Western culture at the same time as
it tries to see other cultures as unique and valuable.
167 i
Indeed, Stonequist's account of Western colonial |
i
expansion is given in the most objective manner. At j
(
one point, he writes as if merely describing the hunting .
I
patterns found on the Serengeti Plain: "In the course of
time the weaker group falls under the influence or
control of the stronger group" (55). Similarly, in the !
following passage on a "typical" trait of the marginal
man, the author writes:
The inferiority complex has a variety of
forms and consequences. It may lead to a
withdrawal type of response or loss of
interest in life; or it may stimulate the
further assimilation of the dominant
culture. . . . In this connection it
should be emphasized that the native
group frequently responds in a varied
manner. (58)
Indeed, the objective, non-political observer is
very evident; this authorial persona renders without
assigning blame, states but does not judge. His
neutrality is further reinforced by the manner in which
this text is structured— bibliographies, footnotes, j
citations, and so on clearly declare it to be from j
academe. Stonequist himself reiterates the relevant
i
textual conventions by piling example upon example of j
the marginalized condition; where Park builds his
argument by assembling statements from other authors,
Stonequist scouts the world for actual specimens of
marginality— the Coloreds of South Africa, the Anglo-
168
Indians of India, the Metis of Brazil, the Mulattoes of
the United States. This accumulation of examples begins
to assume a certain weight, a certain reality, so that
the reader sees the material as it is meant to be
interpreted, as mere evidence divested of ideological
implications. Such textual conventions create a certain
mind-frame from which the marginal man is to be studied,
examined and categorized. Much like the orientalists
conducting their hunt for the ever-elusive "Oriental,"
the authorial persona in this text is also the objective
academic who will unveil the secrets of human behavior.
What is more, in keeping with its identity as scientific
treatise, the text is divided into orderly, methodical
sections on the "Racial Hybrid," "The Cultural Hybrid,"
then, "The Life-Cycle of the Marginal Man," "Personality
Traits," and so on.
However, Stonequist's text can also be read as a
narrative about the West, a story undertaken to better
articulate the Self, but only by defining the other as
marginalized. The Marginal Man is the portrait of the
West as it perceives itself: rational, scientific,
knowledgeable. Not only is it capable of accessing
hidden truths but also of ordering what it learns into
systems that enlighten and advance mankind. On the
other hand, Oscar Handlin's The Uprooted (1951)
169
apparently attempts to create an opposite effect from
that of The Marginal Man. Handlin, in the 1951
introduction, writes: "My theme is emigration as the
central experience of a great many human beings . . .
seen from the perspective of the individual received
rather than of the receiving society" (4). Astutely, he
notes earlier that "immigrants were American history"
(3). His sympathy for the uprooted, and, in many cases,
alienated people who adopt America is evident and
apparently sincere from these and similar remarks found
in other writings (for example, his preface to Mary
Antin's The Promised Land). This sentiment, however,
appears to have been reserved only for immigrants from
Europe.17 In The Uprooted, Handlin accordingly weaves
a picture of the immigrant that depicts him as a fellow
human who has had to leave his ancestral land as a
result of unscrupulous landlords, or economic forces
beyond his control. These people suffer untold
hardships in order to collect enough money for the fare
to the Promised Land. On the way, they might meet up
with bandits, but certainly at least tribulation from
cold, hunger, the lack of transportation. All the
while, these simple villagers, uprooted from centuries
of tradition, sometimes having left behind parents, and
grandparents, and destined never to see the burial
ground in which rest generations of their people,
sustain their hope in the future, in America. Handlin
continues his graphic description of these immigrants'
peasant origins with characterizations of even worse
sufferings in American ghettoes. He recounts
sweatshops, slums, thievery, the depression, and the
rift between first generation immigrants and their
American-born children. Throughout, the author balances
this otherwise depressing picture with uplifting
representations of the immigrants' faith and
determination. His depiction throughout The Uprooted is
based upon the concept of marginality. He accounts for
the immigrants' sense of alienation by pointing to their
peasant beginnings; in America, these villagers are
thrust into urban slums. Traditions and family have
been replaced by the supremacy of the individual; the
old religion has been modernized in the new world so
that the simple villager feels like a stranger in the
American church; the land is gone, in its place is the
infernal hum of factory machines, and factory time, and
a routine that never changes. In other words, the true-
hearted peasant is uprooted and lost; he feels alienated
and alone in a great city, away from the village and
customs that preserved their generations. And as if to
further test their fortitude, they watch in dismay as
171
their children assume American ways and forget the Old
Country. The second generation feel themselves pulled
between two forces, the old and the new, the memories of
their parents and the future that is America; they are
lost between two worlds, belonging fully to neither one.
Handlin intersperses this vividly written narrative
not with notes, or references to other academicians, but
with what is supposed to be the peasants' own thoughts
and reactions. In that sense, The Uprooted is written
more as an internal monologue, a facsimile of what the
immigrants must have felt and said. The following
passage epitomizes Handlin's method: he represents their
feelings about life, and then, as if to reiterate the
authenticity of that representation, mixes in what is to
be taken as a paraphrase of actual speech:
The friends and relatives who had stayed
behind could not get it out of their
heads that in America the streets were
paved with gold. Send for me a coat.
. . . There is a piece of land here and
if only you could send, we could buy it.
. . . Our daughter could be married, but
we have not enough for a dowry. (233)
At times, Handlin writes as if about an actual
individual:
Sometimes, at night she'd wake and
turn to feel if he were there. She'd
reach the space across to where he lay,
sense the reassuring bulk of him.
In the morning's light the certainty
was gone. Through the day the fear came
that this most intimate part of life
172
could not remain the same. At the stove
later she paused while the long spoon in
her hand continued its mechanical
stirring. (203)
His writing consciously departs from the objective,
non-committal style of Park and Stonequist; it is
dramatic, emotional, and imaginative. It attempts to
call up sympathy for the immigrant by depicting him or
her as a human being, with hopes, feelings, and
thoughts. In that sense, this text places a human face
on the theorizing of marginality. However, while
Handlin succeeds in what is ostensibly the endeavor to
create empathy, a different agenda is at work which
undercuts this aim. For in constructing an immigrant
that one can sympathize with, the author has also placed
into circulation, stereotypical images of the immigrant
that solidify his otherness, his marginality, that place
him not in the center, but as an object, to be studied,
examined, wondered over, and finally, pitied. It is in '
this move towards pity that the reader glimpses the [
i
imperialistic desire not to dissolve boundaries between •
humans but to further congeal existing relations of
inequity; for, pity is felt for the less fortunate, for
those whom the gods frown upon. Bound up in that
signifier, irretrievably a part of its meaningfulness is
the largesse that only the master, the colonizer can
dispense; such largesse is a gesture towards the Ego, a !
manner of defining the Self as the superior. Hence,
Handlin's construction of this fictive character, the
immigrant, relies less on the rational and more on the
emotional; yet, the result seems also to be a re-
emergence of the dominant ideology. The resulting image
of the immigrant is one who has a kind-heart, but who is
also simple-minded, easily buffeted by social forces
beyond his ken, unquestioning, hardworking, with a
religiousness that borders on superstition. Handlin
says of the immigrants': "Always the start was the
village. 'I was born in such a village in such a parish’
— so the peasant invariably began the account of
himself" (8); "ties of blood" were "knotted into all the
relationships of communal life" (9). M o r e particularly,
the world of the peasants was said to be "Ponderously
balanced in a solid equilibrium for centuries, the old
structure of an old society" (7). This old society was
based upon family, the village square, market days, the
mill, the church, the burial ground, the farmland, and
so on; one's work was tied up in one's place in the
family, which, in turn, accounted for one’s identity.
Therefore, not only is the immigrant placed in binary
opposition to the enlightened American, but the old
society is also. The village is homogenized in order to
explain the peasant; it forms one of the settings in
174
this narrative, the backdrop for the drama of these
peasant lives.
Indeed, Handlin's narrative is about a holy quest,
about men's lives being a journey in search of their
particular grail. The sufferings endured only serves to
prove their worth. Handlin's text, in fact, can be
interpreted as a fictive narrative with its own
characters, a plot, a climax, and a conflict. According
to Mieke Bal in Introduction to the Theory of Narrative
(1985), "Events, actors, time, and location constitute
the material of the fabula" (7). More specifically,
actors "are provided with distinct traits. In this way,
they are individualized and transformed into
characters," and "locations where events occur are also
given distinct characteristics and are thus transformed
into specific places" (7). A fabula, as defined by Bal,
is the material that has been worked into a story, that
is structured into a series of events (6). This author
includes in this category not merely the novel, or the
fairy tale, but also works of social philosophy, a text
on ideas (27). It is in this sense that The Uprooted
can be read as form of narrative, another bid to
represent the immigrant only so as to speak the Self, to
cast the Self in the role of the hero, the rescuer of
those in distress. The emotions (sympathy, indignation,
175
etc.) called up here, therefore, form the motivation of
the protagonist, the main actant, in Bal's terminology.
This protagonist is characterized as the champion of
freedom, democracy, the dispossessed, the poor. The
villain, or the antagonist is one who sustains ignorance
and serfdom. The new and old countries are where these
actors live, and have their own characteristics. The
former is the land of hard work, but also of justice and
enlightenment; hence hard work will be eventually
rewarded (as evidenced in the sequel to this work, The
Children of the Uprooted (1966)), whereas, the old
country is mindless tradition, devised only to keep men
enchained. These forces battle for the mind (soul) of
the peasant.
The Uprooted, therefore, in its overt sympathy for
the culturally displaced, yet reinscribes their lives
with the tropes of the national mythology that defines
the Self as the center, and seeks to allow space not so
much to the dispossessed, but to the ideological drive
to reiterate the dominance of the center. As such, it
too is a part of the discourse created on the
conceptualization of marginality, a partner to those
others who assume the story of the alienated unto
themselves, in the process displacing the real stories
of the marginalized, dissipating an authenticity that
176
may be irrecoverable. The conceptualization of this
idea, in this instance, illuminates the desires of the
dominant ideology.
In a sense, the uprooted have yet to speak. For,
the concept of marginality as articulated by Park and
others still circulates uninterrogated for the most part
in academic writing. Even radical writers such as
Anzaldua, for example,.wish to see it as a viable
position from which to launch a criticism of Western
hegemony, while the tradition that the Chicago school of
ethnic studies began in the twenties has only recently
begun to be seriously critiqued in such a manner that
does not suggest merely a reform of existing theory but
a more fundamental questioning of national mythology, as
well as a more comprehensive focus on the ideological
underpinnings of academic textual conventions and the
categories of race, gender, and ethnicity.
177
Notes
1 The line is from Disraeli’s Tancred and reads:
"The East is a career."
2 A very interesting perspective is offered in
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and
Poetics of Transgression (NY: Cornell UP, 1986),
especially in the chapter entitled "The Fair, the Pig,
Authorship."
3 Jacques Derrida argues: "Language is a
possibility founded on the general possibility of
writing" (52). See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology,
trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins UP, 1976).
4 Also see Robert B. Kaplan, "Cultural Thought
Patterns Revisited," in Ulla Connor and Douglas Biber,
"Comparing Textual Features in High School Student
Writing: A Cross-cultural Study," Unpublished Paper,
1990. Also, see H. Schroeder, ed., Subiect-Oriented
Text, in press (Berlin: de Gruyter); William Grabe,
"Contrastive Rhetoric and Text-type Research," Ulla
Connor and Robert B. Kaplan, Writing Across Languages:
Analysis of L2 Text (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1987)
115-137.
5 Understandably, then, Ishmael Reed contends that
English Departments are actually departments of Ethnic
Studies.
6 Not that the goal, as I have previously stated,
is any ultimate articulation of a cultural animus, of
essence, for such an ambition, if one agrees with
Jameson, is not presently possible. Indeed, such a move
might be the re-emergence of the phallic drive (to
essentialize, to define irrefutably) under a different
political banner.
7 Also, Levi-Strauss describes the Caduveos as
internally torn by their own "superstitions," thereby
further revealing the ethnocentric bias of his "study."
It might be interesting to consider the following words
from Susan Sontag: "Anthropology conquers the estranging
function of the intellect by institutionalizing it. For
the anthropologist the world is professionally divided
into 'home' and 'out there,' the domestic and the
exotic" (Mura 13).
178 j
8 An interesting perspective on Freud, Marx, and j
the construction of their cultural theories within the
context of their own supposed marginal status in their •
respective societies can be found in Albert Meirani, "The j
Double Lesson of Freud," Dominated Man. trans. Carol
Martin-Sperry (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968) 93-109. An i
example of the application of psychoanalytic theory gone ^
terribly awry is Julia Kristeva, About Chinese Women,
trans. Anita Barrows (NY: Marion Boyers, 1986). This
was originally published as Des Chinoises (Paris:
Editions des Femmes, 1974).
9 According to Richard H. Thompson in his recent
work on ethnic theories, most writers on this topic fail
to verify their assertions. See Richard Thompson,
Theories of Ethnicity. A Critical Appraisal (NY:
Greenwood Pres, 1989) 13-17.
10 A notable example would be Richard H. Thompson's
Theories of Ethnicity. A Critical Appraisal (NY:
Greenwood Press, 1989). For a much-needed feminist
perspective in anthropology, see Mona Etienne and
Eleanor Leacock, eds., Women and Colonization. An
Anthropological Perspective (NY:Praeger Publishers,
1980).
11 Similarly, Levi-Strauss's suggestion that the
Caduveos are racked by internal conflict and
"superstition" is based upon value judgments derived
from cultural (socio-ideological) constructions of what
is normal. Similarly, Said would point out that when
Western writers speak of the Orient as "exotic,"
"mysterious," "ageless." The use of such words is less (
a matter of reality than a psychic mapping of the West1s ;
urge to categorize and so to contain the other, a drive ,
perpetually frustrated by their own in-attention, by the '
unconscious insistence of seeing the other only as they I
wish to see it, as the lesser of a binary pair, a j
contradistinction to what is self-defined as the norm. !
!
Part of the paragraph reads: "Sometimes it
happens that marginal people establish and live their
lives in a marginal group, hardly knowing that they are
doing so. There are whole segments of marginal society,
with their marginal cultures among various ethnic and
religious groups in this country, some of whom even
develop a distinguishing speech. Large numbers of
unmarried career women in American cities live in
essential isolation from other women and with only
formal contacts with men. In addition, there are other
179
marginal groups who are not quite aware of their
marginality, by virtue of living together a somewhat
insulated life, but who are, furthermore, made up of
people of the most diverse backgrounds; people who have
in common, to start with, nothing but their marginality.
These are to be found in cities and especially among
young people. They are the American Bohemians" (62).
13
In Aaron Antonovsky, "Toward a Refinement of the
Marginal Man Concept" Social Forces 35(l):57-72, the
author provides a table which details how Jewish
Americans perceive themselves to be "Active Jewish,"
"Passive Jewish," "Ambivalent," "Dual," "Passive
General." This table is an example of the attempt to
pin-down a concept with empirical evidence.
TOWARD REFINEM ENT OF “M ARG INAL M A N ” CONCEPT 61
T A B L E 2 . A SUMMARY COMPARISON OP SIX TYPES O P JEW ISH ORIENTATION: CORRELATED ATTITUDES
Attitude
I. Focus of inter
view material
2 . Picture of social
relations of
jews to Ameri
can society
3. Perception of
character of
anti-Semitism
4. Perception of
overt anti-
Semitism
5. Sources of anti-
Semitism
6. What Jews can
do against
anti-Semitism '
Active Jewish Passive Jewish Ambivalent
how Jews feel Jewish behavior
as seen by
Gentiles
a t home in America as such:
Dual
but not at home
with non-Jew
ish Americans
Gentiles arc fun
damentally
hostile
moderate
Gentiles; atti
tude is:
"Damned if
you do or if
you don’t ”
Fundamentally
nothing
friendly
separate
but
it’s not great,
but you never
can tell
moderate
maybe Jews are
in part at fault
maybe some
thing, but
don’t know
what
organized reli
gious parallel
ism
existent, but not
a clear and
present danger
Jewish-Gentile
relations
all six types
mutual tolerance
and progress
ive integration
uncomfortable,
but not
threatening
moderate moderate
stress is on social discrimination
the “kike” Jew
walk humbly,
act normally,
go with hat in
in hand
lack of educa
tion, poverty,
ignorance
individual con
tact and edu
cation
Passive General Active General
integration into
general society
are In agreement
melting pot
some hostility,
but on con
stant decline
moderate
rigidity of Jews
prevents assim
ilation
low
lack of education,
poverty, ig
norance
fight as Ameri
cans against all
discrimination
Figure 1. Table from Antonovsky's Article
14 Hence the valorization of the Western notion of
history: dates, treaties, battles. Events are studied
for cause and effect because of the belief that man can
be held accountable for his actions; hence, the notion
of the individual has always been present in Western
thinking. What is more, social structures are often a
180 I
record of Western economic evolution which underscores
the importance in the West of the economic as motive for ;
action. Other forms of history, such as oral records of :
tribal genealogy are called myths or folklore, and
studied in departments of Anthropology (not History),
and generally not accorded the respect given to Western
history. The ideological nature of language is evident
here; we have no terms other than these: history versus j
folklore. I
i
15 I
I was especially reminded of this when I read i
David Mura's Turning Japanese. Memoirs of a Sansei (NY: :
Atlantic Monthly Press, 1991). The author describes his;
impressions of Tokyo: "The first day we hit Ginza, one
of the shopping centers . . .the train line that rings
the heart of the city (other lines runout from the
center, a huge endless megalopolis fanning across the
great Kando plain: this was where the majority of
commuters lived). Tokyo seems to be one immense shop:
everywhere there were billboards, neon signs, shop
windows, crowds of shoppers clutching bags from My City, i
Seibu, or Isetan. . . . The doors opened automatically.
Mechanical and human voices greeted you . . . then
accompanied you on elevators and escalators, announcing '
sales. Video screens, sometimes even a wall of them,
displayed fashion shows, the models implacable, pale,
beautiful" (15). The same description would work for
Hong Kong, Rio de Janeiro, Paris.
16 E. Franklin Frazier, also from Chicago, wrote a
study on the effects of Western colonialism on native
peoples, published as Race and Culture Contacts in the
Modern World (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957).
17 He was without a doubt one of the most prolific j
and influential historians writing on this topic. I
have already commented on his preface to Mary Antin's j
The Promised Land (1912). In support of that point, I j
would like to note that The Uprooted was followed by j
Children of the Uprooted (1966), a volume of writings by1
first and second generation descendants of immigrants, ;
edited by Handlin. This text includes only the works of ;
Euro-Americans.
J
181
CHAPTER FOUR
A ROOM OF OUR OWN— THE IDEOLOGY OF MARGINALITY
AND ASIAN AMERICAN WRITERS
The language of the dialogue
constantly destroyed the possibility
of saying what the dialogue was
about.
— Professor Tezuka to
Heidegger
Not many women got to live out the
daydream of women— to have a room,
even a section of a room, that only
gets messed up when she messes it up
herself.
— Maxine Hong Kingston
on her mother's
experiences as a medical
student in China.
182
In her inimitable manner— eminently civilized and
unruffled— Virginia Woolf, in A Room of One 1s Own
(1929), attempts to join a male-dominated dialogue, as
well as to change its texture, its tone, the way it
beholds the world. Her essay is both a critique of the
assumptions underlying that dialogue and an endeavor to
redress the enforced silence of the female voice,
locating in that literary absence, that
institutionalized muteness, the foundation upon which a
culture carries out the subjugation of women, that is,
through the domain of the text. In the beginning was
the word, and woman as a word has always already
signified the inferior. Hence, in the literary and
intellectual world of Britain and Europe, woman, being
merely a woman, could not mean writer, poet,
philosopher, or scientist, but was and must remain
inscribed as only what men want her to be. Woolf's
essay is a cultural landmark in that it is one of the
earliest protests in the West against the male
domination of culture production. A point for us to
consider, however, is that the impact of this essay
resides not only in the author's re-vision of history,
but also in her own adeptness with the language itself.
Indeed, it is Woolf's ability to write and to read in
ways that cohere with the master's dialogue, it is
183
because of her facility with the language, which is
already saturated with the intent of the dominant
ideology, that she is accorded the opportunity to speak.
In other words, for the author (all authors) to be
heard, she has first to assume a voice and a role that
the dominant discourse will recognize as belonging to
itself.
Indeed, the tenuousness of Woolf's position is
barely hinted at in the encounter with the Beadle. For
her, the moment exists solely as a symbol of the age-old
domination of woman by man. And the proficiency with
which she must wield the tool of the master in order to
describe this encounter is a matter of course, and not
an arena of concern. And yet, it is in the linguistic
and textual apprehensions of life, wherein women, in all
their variousness, are arrested and congealed in
metaphors of lacking and darkness; it is in the field of
the text where women are homogenized through words,
imagery, and symbol that her definition as the eternal
other must be subverted and dissolved. As Audre Lorde
has stated, we cannot dismantle the house of the master
with the tools of the master ("Tools" 111-113).1
However, in Woolf's essay, the author is taken up with
the need to bring the scene vividly to life, implicated,
as we all are whether or not in the moment of textual
184
engagement, in the contract between writer and audience,
in this duplicitous relationship of convincer and the
one to be convinced.2 With a sort of wry humor, Woolf
describes her run-in with the Beadle, who materializes
before her as she is about to tread on a hallowed grass
plot, and, metaphorically, centuries of male privilege.
She writes: "Instantly a man's figure rose to intercept
me . . . in a cut-away coat and evening shirt. . . .
His face expressed horror and indignation" (6). No
words are needed in this brief moment; and indeed, the
nature of her transgression comes to her from:
[i]nstinct rather than reason . . . he
was a Beadle; I was a woman. This was
the turf; there was the path. Only the
Fellows and Scholars are allowed here;
the gravel is the place for me. Such
thoughts were the work of a moment. (6)
The author steps back onto the gravel, and is
"rewarded" with the sight of the Beadle's face regaining
its former composure, the horrified grimace gone as the
world once again enjoys equilibrium— everything is in
its proper place. In Woolf's hands, this brief
encounter resonates with a symbolic significance. For,
the Beadle is Man in general, and Woolf's encroachment
onto the grass is not so much an affront to Oxbridge
tradition as it is a threat to millennia of male rule.
He merits a title as an official representative of the
university, but more so, within Woolf's work, he is
Everyman, and hence, an official of man-kind, for every
man is potentially a spokesman and guardian for the
rights of other men. The author herself is merely a
woman, and enjoys no name other than that of woman. Her
subjugation is of such antiquity that "instinct" alerts
her to her criminality; there is no need for the Beadle
to explain to her what she has done. Surely, for him to
do so is to accord the woman too much dignity; it is to
acknowledge her as a sentient being, capable of reason
and restraint, and by extension, it is to acknowledge
her as a member of the community of man. Thus, the
Beadle silently gestures with face and hands, and the
woman obeys; the rules need no articulation, for they
have been inculcated into her very being. Indeed, the
scene evinces the primeval; it is an archetypal
confrontation between Man and Woman, and undoubtedly, a
reiteration of the former's empire.
The effect of this scene ripples throughout the
essay. Woolf's journey through Oxbridge and the
archives of the British Museum is a constant reminder of
the artistic oppression of women. Just as the Beadle
managed to send the author's "little fish into hiding"
(6), so too, had countless women writers been denied the
training, time, and other ingredients that would have
allowed for and nurtured artistic and intellectual
endeavor. But equally crucial is the consideration that
culture itself has defined woman as incapable of being
writers; women can sew, and spin, and bear children, but
they cannot write. The Beadle's silent but eloquent
presence, then, is an inscription of identity on the
deviant female. His gesticulations name Woolf; they in
effect constitute her subjectivity, as the inferior or
negative of what the phallus conceives of itself to be.
The reader is reminded of Althusser's lucid description
of the construction of the subject in "Ideology and
Ideological State Apparatuses":
ideology "acts" or "functions" in such a
way that it "recruits" subjects among the
individuals . . . by that very precise
operation which I have called
interpellation of hailing, and which can
be imagined along the lines of the most
commonplace police (or other) hailing:
'Hey, you there!'
. . . the hailed individual will turn
around. By this mere one-hundred-and-
eighty-degree physical conversion, he
becomes a subject. Why? Because he has
recognized that the hail was "really"
addressed to him, and that "it was really
him who was hailed." (174)
In a way, Woolf's essay is an attempt to offset
this interpolation; it tries to say her own name. Her
place in this chapter derives from this attempt to carve
out a space for herself in this manner, but the
connection with Asian American writers such as Maxine
Hong Kingston also resides in her search for ancestors.
187
Whereas, Western male writers can rattle off countless
predecessors, where are the matriarchal inspirations for
would-be female writers? Woolf lists the few women who
could serve as forerunners, that listing attended by a
mixture of pride and anguish, which noticeably, fail to
disrupt the civility and polish of her prose. A Room of
One's Own is a crucial text because it speaks for women,
!
and dares to name women as progenitors, artists, and ,
thinkers. The essay is also the realization of a
collective ambition; it is a memorial for female artists
who did not get to do what they wanted because society
dictated their roles and places in life. It is from
such a perspective that A Room of One's Own is
subversive, in the very fact of its existence; its very
being is a rupture of the seamless story told about
women. !
Yet, Woolf's prose is itself in a way a seamless
display of wit, verve, and upper-crust decorum. The
Beadle incident, despite its obviously radical
possibilities for anger and violence, finally allows the
reader to skate across its smooth, reflective surface, j
its wry humor accounting for much of its delightfulness
and the pleasure that it affords. The significance of
that scene, its symbolic intent, is restrained and
placed under management. To whom is this text addressed (
188
but to women and men such as Woolf— white, bourgeois,
and British? This audience would recognize in the
reserve, in the author's choice of metaphors and
examples, someone who belongs essentially to the same
tradition, to drawing rooms at tea-time, filled with
light conversation, crumpets, and civility.
Sixty years after Woolf's essay was written, David
Mura returned from a year in Japan to write about his
sojourn into alien territory. Turning Japanese.
Memoirs of a Sansei (1991) contains the reflections of
an American poet who never felt accepted as an American
and so was uneasy with his own identification as one
until he stood on a Tokyo street and contemplated
thousands of Mura-like faces that belonged to the
Japanese. As with Woolf's travels abroad into the
intellectual domain of the male, the author's sortie
into a foreign country resulted in a recognition of the
self. Just as Woolf beholds the accusatory face of the
Beadle, the images of women in books written by learned
men, and in those confrontations with her image as the
phallic alterior, and comes to an awareness of a self-
identity different from what is dictated by the center,
Mura seeks his origins in modern Japan, but finds that
his ancestors' world accuses him, holds him up for
189 i
ridicule as this ungainly American who should go home.
But, returning "home" for Mura is actually a series of
leave-takings. He backtracks to Japan only to find that
America is the only "home" he could ever have;
ironically, however, America was and can never be truly
"home" either, for "a Jewish suburb— is no home; is, in
fact, for me, an absurdity, a sham" (33). What is more, |
"American culture wanted to see me solely as Mr. Moto or
the bucktoothed gardener" (33). Japan, however, is
"lost in unreality" (33), and cannot be home either, as I
symbolized by the Americanization of his name, from
Uyemura to simply Mura. Mura means town and does not
appear alone in Japan, for that would be a designation
of non-existence. Hence, for the author, turning
Japanese is not that at all, but a recognition of his
double alienation, an identity structured in both
cultures as this other, an identity of dispossession.
The link between Woolf and Mura is not simply in
that they are both marginalized, one in terms of gender,
and the other in his ethnicity. Mura actually shares
with Woolf the construction of his identity as the
sexual other in that, within the Anglo-Saxon socio-
ideological environment, to be an Asian male is to be
signified by the center as effeminate, the less-than-
male. This author/narrator then is also imprisoned
within pre-established categories of subjectivity,
whereby his lack resides in terms of both color and
sexuality. Indeed, Turning Japanese is also an
exploration of the ideology of gender, and the cultural
structuring of libido. He himself points out that the
formation of the sexual object comes from what the
culture holds up as the most desirable (normal,
prestigious), that is, white women. The
author/narrator * s life became a constant urge to prove
to himself that he could be in turn wanted by them. The
need for this kind of self-validation is a never-to-be-
quenched desire to erase the way he perceives himself.
Therefore, the narrator's marginalization appears to
reside in this inability to cohere within himself the
contradiction between what he feels himself to be— an
American— and what the culture defines him to be— not-
American and less-than-male.
The crucial distinction between this understanding
of marginality and the "duality" suggested by Park's
definition of marginality is the contention that this
split has a reality only in that it is a cultural
construct, that, indeed, the very presence of such
behavioral "conflict" is forged as part of identity,
resulting from our subjectivity, in all senses of the
word, in a particular socio-ideological environment.
191
Not only is this "duality" a social construct, so is the
consequent desire to heal it. To be whole, to be
seamless is valorized in Western thinking; and, the
marginal identity contains this desire for wholeness as
i
part of its very construct of duality. In other words, !
this desire grounds the very sense of marginality and
dispossession.3
As for the author/narrator of Turning Japanese, his
common cause with Woolf, both being marginalized, makes
his insensitivity even more noticeable in the following
I
description of feminism in Japan:
"Japanese feminism needs to come out
of Japanese culture. It has to be
different from American feminism. . . .
You know that the ko at the end of i
women's names means child. Well, many !
Japanese feminists, like my wife, have
dropped the ko".
I could tell Susie wasn't impressed by
this. Neither was I. (107-108)
Obviously, Japanese feminists had been found
wanting. Both the narrator and his wife seem unaware !
that they had undertaken the traditional attitude of the ;
West toward the Orient, that is, as the one who knows
1
more. They forget that in a society which deems any
unconventional behavior as anti-social, such a gesture ;
I
carries weight.4 The discussion that might have ensued j
if they had voiced their opinions to their Japanese
friends would possibly parallel the disagreement between
white feminists and women-of-color in this country, for
women in the latter group point out that white feminists
cannot understand or entertain any political agenda
except their own. The narrator had, at this moment,
assumed the mind-set of superiority, of the urge to
homogenize experience, thereby revealing the presence of
the logocentric, at this very moment when the colonized
have the most opportunity to acknowledge each other.
Even though both texts show a connection in their
common source of oppression, the relationship between
them is also an oppositional one, or stated differently,
their points of conflict can afford as much indication
as their commonality of the desires and feints of the
dominant ideology. Indeed, texts such as David Mura's
or Bharati Mukherjee's or Maxine Hong Kingston’s evince
a frame of mind that contains a crucial self-reflexivity
(despite the blind spots in all texts, in this one, as
well as in Mura's), different from writing that is less
mindful of hegemonic discourses. The narrator in Mura's
text, despite, or perhaps, due to, episodes such as the
one mentioned above, is an identity that senses
commonality with the third world, that contains a third
world-ness. In contrast, the narrative consciousness in
Woolf's essay does not perceive itself as fundamentally
193
an outcast, an alien to the very roots of its being.
That narrator seeks in effect political redress and
inclusion into traditional male precincts of power.
However, writers such as Bharati Mukherjee or Jamaica
Kincaid appear to be combating an otherness that is much
more elemental. Indeed, Woolf's narrative world evinces
no awareness of other women living then who were
disenfranchised because of both their gender and color.
This world is homogenous, a mono-culture. What is more,
A Room of One's Own argues for the inclusion of women
into British or Western artistic and intellectual life,
even though it is that life, with its monopoly of the
definition and production of culture, that underwrites
Britain's colonial ambitions. Mura, in his turn,
despite an acute awareness of his own process of
alienation, reveals an inability to see the drives
indicative of the logocentric within his assumptions
about Japan, and women in particular. Just as Woolf's
narrative world does not contain an awareness of the
other, so too does Mura's text manifest an inability to
contain oppression other than that of his own. The
relationship of these two texts, therefore, is of a
mutual and multiple contextualization, wherein the
common ground and the oppositions between them help to
reveal not which one is more radical but to place in
194
greater relief the presence of the dominant ideology.
In other words, when these texts are compared, they
murmur each against the other, showing up the
weaknesses, or rather, the contradictions and fissures
in the other's position. Such a comparative approach is
better thought of as texts superimposed, with the ;
I
fissures of each disclosed as an interconnected network j
of symptoms illuminating the hidden desires of the ;
I
center. This approach also helps to bring forth a
crucial consideration for this study, this narrative on
marginality, that is, the historical expansion,
migration, and self-masking of the logocentric. Though i
i
from different cultures and times— one is British, the ,
i
other is American; one was written in the 1920s, the ;
other in the 1990s— both texts combat essentially the
same logocentric drives, although, and this is the
point, the center works and emerges in different ways, ,
adapting itself to specific cultural contexts. •
Woolf's presence in this chapter acknowledges her ,
contribution to feminism, which in turn has influenced
women's movements in many third world countries. Yet, j
from a post-colonial perspective, especially when placed
next to such self-consciously political stances such as
Gloria Anzaldua's, Woolf’s sensibilities become ,
i
inadequate though not irrelevant. The tradition that
195
she seeks in Bronte and Rossetti are ever-present,
interwoven in the culture that all users of English have
to share. But it is a tradition that now can only serve
as a point of departure. And therein lies the rub, our
apparently inescapable implication in the perpetuation
of our own domination; for, third world writers, due to
historical circumstances, must for now articulate that
departure in the very language that effects and
perpetuates the domination of the logocentric. The
irony of the situation is apparent, for even as we
acknowledge and distinguish ourselves from one such as
Woolf, we do so only through the same language and
culture; subversion has to be undertaken with great
care, and with the realization that all texts are to
some extent undercut by the very ideology they seek to
revision. The challenge for third world writers, then,
is to forge a room of our own that answers to specific
socio-political and cultural realities, that is
distinct, though not necessarily separate from the room
sought by Woolf.
This challenge remains centered on the construction
of identity, and the need to resist being said, even by
first world writers who pursue a common goal with us
(for example, Woolf's neglect to acknowledge our
existence is a way of saying that we do not exist). The
196
battle resides in the need to dissolve a mode of
thinking that structures people into oppressive center-
margin oppositions, homogenizing them, and placing such
moves under the auspices of nature. The point of
departure, therefore, is the recognition of the
specificities of "groups" and the individuals within
those groups. Just as Edward Said points out that the
term "Orient" is used to lump together disparate
peoples, so too, is the word Asian used to homogenize,
define, and so control, peoples of very different
cultures and histories. In a similar fashion, Woolf's
battle to speak the "I" in her essay certainly means
something else than what the female narrator in
Mukherjee's "A Wife's Story"— that marginalized and
caustic immigrant, a double alien, of both America and
India, the latter's present ever still politicized with
its British past— means when she speaks of herself.
Again, the "I" and its marginality is surely different
for the female protagonist in Monica Sone's Nisei
Daughter (1953). And so too for Edith Eaton’s or Maxine
Hong Kingston’s or Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto's constructions
of the self in their writings. Another necessity
rests in the need to recognize that marginalities exist
within particular socio-ideological environments, and
so, are realized and come into being as forms of those
197
environments. In other words, the conceptualization of
marginality, its inception and development, is to a
certain extent a symptom of what drives that culture; it
is a form of social categorization that is saturated by
the dominant ideology, including by necessity its
ability to reinstitute itself as well as its
contradictions. For writers such as Woolf and Anzaldua,
self-constructions are endeavors that can only be mapped
out within the confines of Western metaphysics, so that
even as they attempt to free the self by writing the
self, to revision the self by restating the self,
language stops them, words and metaphors undercut their
ambitions, belie their intent, and allow the resurfacing
of the master discourse, and the tropes of domination
and subjugation, much as how the Beadle materializes,
out of nowhere because He is everywhere, to put Woolf
back into her preinscribed place/identity.
Consequently, this chapter explores how writers such as
Edith Eaton, Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto, Maxine Hong
Kingston, and Monica Sone, attempt to articulate an
i
individual self and how the dominant ideology undercuts |
their narratives by erecting an "ethnic" discourse on
the marginality of the "Asian American".
A case in point is the fictive narratives of Asian
American writer, Edith Eaton. Most of her short stories
198
were published in magazines such as Ladies Home Journal,
Good Housekeeping, and Gentlewoman before being
collected in Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912). Eaton, who
often wrote under the pseudonym Sui Sin Far, also
published an article in the Independent (1909) entitled
"Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian," which
is about her experiences growing up as the child of an
inter-racial marriage. In that article, she recounts
the fights and stares which were constant reminders that
many saw her as a freak. Her parents taught the
children to stand up to such prejudice; and almost
predictably, and all too briefly in the article, she
describes her growing acceptance of the fact that she
had a Chinese mother. She concludes the article by
saying: "I have no nationality and am not anxious to
claim any. Individuality is more than nationality"
(132). And yet, I am reminded of the author's pain at
the countless subtle and not-so-subtle slurs. At one
point, she writes: "I look back over the years and see
myself so keenly alive to every shade of sorrow and
suffering that it is almost a pain to live" (127).
Indeed, despite her apparent comfort with her biracial
identity as expressed at the end of the article, I
wonder whether the issue was ever truly resolved for
Edith Eaton. What does it mean to say that a person
199
claims no nationality, except, perhaps, to suggest that
one is a cosmopolitan, a citizen of the world? However,
a person does not inhabit the whole world, but, at any
one time, lives in a particular country, in a particular
culture. The issue, furthermore, is not so much a
matter of residence as it is of culture in the
construction of individual identity. And as such,
Eaton’s awareness of the self, the form in which her
consciousness of herself is formulated, is not of the
world but is of phallo-centric, Western-centered
cultures (British, America and Canada) that name her as
the Other. To position herself as she does can be
thought of as an extreme form of resignation— it is as
if the only alternative to not belonging anywhere is to
assert that one belongs everywhere. Not surprisingly,
then, certain passages of the article do not cohere with
that last paragraph. Expressions of hope commingle with
abandonment; for, although she states that
"individuality is more than nationality," she also
announces that "Before long I hope to be in China. As
my life began in my father's country it may end in my
mother's" (132). And even though she asserts that she
can give her right hand to the Occidentals and her left
to the Orientals, she also writes in the previous
paragraph: "So I roam backward and forward across the
200 i
continent. When I am East, my heart is West. When I am
West, my heart is East" (132). Overall, the tone of the
last few paragraphs is not one of comfort and ease with
her global citizenship but of resignation. Her words
belie her realization that she can never truly belong in ^
I
Anglo-America, that always she is the Other. 1
The issue of a biracial identity and its own form
of double-bind is the focus of several of Eaton's
stories. In "Its Wavering Image," Pan is half-white and
half-Chinese. But she has been shielded from questions |
i
about her identity by having always lived with her 1
father in Chinatown. Then, Mark Carson, a reporter,
comes into her life, and tries to convince Pan that she
is really white. At one point, he tells her: "Pan,
don't you see that you have got to decide what you will
be— Chinese or white? You cannot be both" (90).
However, he only succeeds in driving her to declare that
she is totally Chinese. He leaves, as she retreats J
further into Chinatown, this disturbing narrative
location that sanctions the avoidance of questions to do
with self and place. I
i
Noticeably, Pan's troubles begin only with the
appearance of Mark Carson; for, previously, she had been
secure and happy being Chinese. Now, she looks into the
mirror that Carson constructs and holds up to her and
201
perceives who she is supposed to be but is not. Mark's
appeals to her to revert to her "true" self, which, of
course, is white, only underline for Pan her particular
lack— the lack of the white world. In other words,
Carson's attempted seduction of Pan is not only sexual
but also located in her ethnic or racial identity. In
addition, Carson is Eaton's version of the white knight.
And his quest is a double one: he will expose and so rid
Chinatown of its corruptions (and here I am reminded of
a similar motif in the film The Year of the Dragon), as
well as save the damsel from a fate worse than death—
being Chinese. Pan's marginality, her split, occurs at
the moment Carson inserts himself into her awareness,
into her perception of herself and her world. And
although he eventually leaves, having apparently failed
to "win" Pan, the harm is done, for her consciousness
has been irreparably altered. Her marginality is now a
part of her self-perception. Her formerly tranquil
world is now a de-Edenized one of snide whispers and
hostile looks— innocence lost, never to be regained.
Whereas the Beadle only reminds Woolf that she is woman,
what Carson does is construct Pan's subjectivity as that
of both gender and racial other. Eaton’s narrative
completes a circle when Carson departs and Pan once more
assumes her Chinese identity— she begins and ends in her
Chineseness. Chinatown encloses her, as if the surface
of the pond has finally dissipated the unwonted ripples,
and regained its formerly glassy, pacific surface.
On one level, Eaton's story is simply an indictment
of the prejudices in American society toward those of
colored mixed blood. Her sympathies are definitely with
Pan, who has lost both love and peace of mind, and now
inhabits a marginalized existence, belonging truly to
neither the Chinese nor the white world. This story,
however, is also an attempt to depict the Chinese and
the Chinese American experience in a compassionate
light. We are supposed to see Pan as only this loving,
innocent, and faithful person, and the residents of
Chinatown as benign. However, it is a picture that
still depends on stereotypical images current in
American popular culture of the time. Limin Chu has
done a study of the images of China and the Chinese in a
major publication, The Overland Monthly, between 1868
and 1935, in which the overall impression of the Chinese
is that of a faceless mass.5 This image shows up in
Eaton's work as well. Chinatown is a mysterious place
with arcane, unmentionable societies, with names like
The Water Lily Club, and the Sublimely Pure Brothers'
organization. Carson is received by the "yellow-robed
priest in the joss house, the Astrologer of Prospect
203
Place, and other conservative Chinese" (87). And, of
course, there is the obligatory feud between the Sam
Yups and the See Yups. Indeed, the Chinatown in Eaton's
narrative is normally as closed and inscrutable as
supposedly the facial expressions and the minds of its
inhabitants. Such a perception of what it means to live
in Chinatowns totally ignores the fact that many of
these ghettos sprang up partially as a defensive
response to hostility from the American population, as
Ronald Takaki reminds us in Strangers from a Different
Shore (1989). In addition, the author's desire to
create a multi-dimensional character in Pan is undercut
when she is also described with words such as "childish
little Pan" (87). Even more unfortunate is the
following line: "A white woman might pass over an
insult; a Chinese woman fail[s] to see one" (87). At
one point, we are also told: "A little Chinese boy
brought tea and saffron cakes. He was a picturesque
little fellow with a quaint manner of speech. Mark
Carson jested merrily with him, while Pan . . . laughed
and sipped" (90) . . . tea, of course. Indeed, all in
all, Chinatown and its people are quaint, picturesque,
mysterious and inscrutable. Darkness and secrecy
characterize such a place and people, whereas, the white
world is by nature the world of light and openness, and
204
freedom, as Carson's pleas to Pan to return "home"
imply.
Unfortunately, other narrative elements do little
to dispel this binarism of the two worlds. Indeed,
identity, in many of Eaton's stories, is presented both
as an either-or proposition and as composed of inherent
essences, a matter of blood and race. In other words,
one is either Chinese or white, one cannot be both. But
in any event, being born with Chinese blood is to be
forever Chinese. So that, in another short story, "The
Wisdom of the New," Adah tells Wou Sankwei: "it is a
mistake to try and make a Chinese man into an American—
if he has a wife who is to remain as she has always
been" (78). Earlier, Mrs. Dean, another American
sponsor remarks: "And yet, they are Chinese, and must,
in a sense, remain so" (71). Adah later also advises
Wou Sankwei to leave off being American and return to
being Chinese for a time. How he is supposed to effect
that change is unclear, except that in a similar
narrative entitled, "The Americanization of Pau Tze,"
Adah tells Wan Lin Fo, the main character: "For all your
clever adaptation of our American ways you are a
thorough Chinaman. Do you think an American would dare
treat his wife as you have treated yours?" (159).
205
Indeed, the Chinese as inassimilable ethnic appears
in several of Eaton's narratives. For instance, in "The
Americanization of Pau Tze," Wan Lin Fo's wife wilts in
the alien surroundings and becomes ill; eventually, she
runs away. Then in "The Wisdom of the New," Wou
Sankwei's wife, Pau Lin, stubbornly refuses to learn
English or to have their son attend English school.
Finally, she poisons the child rather than allow him to
become Americanized. Both Wou and Wan Lin Fo are forced
to return to China with their wives. Apparently, in
Eaton's fictive narratives, Chinese blood cannot be
denied, and sooner or later will clash with being
American.
Many of Eaton's characters suffer what Park would
call the classic symptoms of marginality, in that they
are caught between two worlds. Significantly this
conflict typically occurs in the realm of marriage and
family. Americanized Chinese men have to struggle with
un-Americanized wives, who stubbornly cling to the Old
Ways.6 The point worth noting here is that while the
male characters display some traits that suggest to me
that they are to be perceived as individuals, the female
characters are personifications of tradition, patience,
and duty. They come to symbolize the incompatibility of
the old and the new. And they suffer for the inability
206 .
to adjust to America by being sent back to China,
crushed in body or spirit. In the case of Pan, because
of the way Chinatown is depicted in "Its Wavering
Image," her "decision" to become completely Chinese is
not a position that could afford her real comfort;
rather, it is a form of death, a Chinese American
version of self-immolation. This is a contrast to
Mura's narrative agenda, in which the return "home"
affords a measure of internal growth.
Because Eaton's portrayal of Chinatown is basically
that of a ghetto, there is little to suggest that all of
this living is done within a larger socio-ideological
environment, which permeates even the most isolationist
Chinatown and Delancey Street. Indeed, Mrs. Spring
Fragrance appears to me to be written for an implied
audience composed of Americans, who know little about |
(
Chinese Americans, except what was circulating in a !
I
virulently nativist and isolationist popular culture. I
I
This audience would wish for the reassurance that these [
!
people are quite normal, and not that different from j
himself. Eaton's stories are designed to portray |
Chinese Americans as quaint and picturesque ethnics
concerned with the same issues that worry mainstream
America: family, work, children, etc. The descriptions
of "strange" practices in Chinatown indeed connote an :
207
ethnic otherness but only enough so as to signify to the
reader "splash of local color," partially in order to
satisfy the demands of a realist fiction. This is
similar to tourists who insist on visiting, for example,
Sunset Boulevard, as if the urge to see the "real"
thing, to acquire a piece of the spirit of a place
finally comes down to a physical locale. Natives wink j
I
smugly at their simple-mindedness, but forget that
polaroids of Mount Fuji give us very little of the
"real" Japan as well.
Indeed, to take in Chinatown necessitates taking in
the whole of America also, for it is a reality only in
that it is a cultural construct, existing as a socio-
ideological necessity, born out of and maintained in
binary relatedness to the master discourse. Chinatowns
would be anomalies in Hong Kong; they, in fact, would
not exist. Whereas, their ethnic otherness, the
indecipherable shop signs, the exotic foods, the
ancient-looking grandmas "naturally" belong in an
American city; for, they arise from the very need of the
master discourse to speak its own normalcy, its own
centrality by creating the Other. And so, Edward Said |
takes great pains to point out that the West defines the j
Orient as composed of qualities that make this other the :
opposite and the inferior of itself. As long as the
208 i
i
West's conceptualization of identity remains a center-
margin duality, Chinatowns and Chinese Americans will ;
always have a place in this cultural environment, but !
i
only as the other. Ethnicity, then, is a discourse
i
arising from the need of the center to define the Self
j
as well as the need to contain the other. To speak of '
America's ethnic groups carries a different
meaningfulness culturally than it would be to speak of
race. The latter is meant to connote the existence of a
demarcation that is insoluble, whereas, ethnicity
bespeaks an immigrant tradition that is a treasured part
of the national mythology. That tradition validates the
idea of America as a democratic nation, the sanctuary
for the dispossessed of the world. Pluralism, a
sociological term originally, is much less a neutral
descriptor than it is a word-as-metaphor, forming, along
r
with the notion of ethnicity, a discourse born out of a
national mythology, and managed by the dominant
ideology. This discourse of ethnicity and pluralism is
also the intent to make the alien more familiar, more
palatable. The discourse defines these strange ethnic ■
customs as nothing more than a nostalgic return to the
past, a stroll down memory lane via rituals that,
divorced from their fount, are mere gestures signifying
nothing. Hence, Wittman Ah Sing in Hong Kingston's
Tripmaster Monkey is moved to exclaim: "Do we have a j
culture that's not these knickknacks we sell to the bok
I
gwai? . . . backscratcher swizzle sticks, pointed
chopsticks for the hair. . . . Where's our jazz?
Where's our blues? " (27). As long as ethnic customs
remain just a way to remember the past that does not
seriously undermine existing power relations, they in
fact can be used to reinforce the notion of a
pluralistic society. This alien other, then, and his
antics can be viewed from afar, managed through the hazy
(nostalgic, poetic, self-congratulatory) discourse of
ethnicity, that thereby familiarizes and so naturalizes |
immigrants. Consequently, for now, ethnicity is too !
I
much in the hands of the dominant ideology, and so forms
a cultural trope that allows the symbolic assimilation
I
of America's alien other. It is this conceptualization !
of difference that allows a writer such as Oscar
Handlin, in The Uprooted, to come to the "realization"
that the history of America is the history of ,
immigration.
Although this issue will be discussed further in j
the subsequent chapter, what should be noted now is that,
historians such as Handlin, as well as sociologists like;
Robert Park have indeed done a great deal to legitimize
and popularize what I will call the "rehabilitative"
210
version of the concepts of ethnicity and pluralism.7
Indeed, the amount of time devoted to these ideas attest
to their importance in the cultural economy, which can
be defined as the reproduction and circulation of the
vital interests of the dominant ideology. The crucial
consideration here is that while Eaton's (and
Yezierska's) narratives appear to be Park's concept of
marginality displayed in actuality, the application of
this version of the concept indeed only serves to elide
the handprint of the logocentric. The crucial
marginalization in Eaton's narratives comes ironically
from her attempts to portray Chinese Americans in a
sympathetic light. By depicting them as benign and
picturesque, she hopes to make these immigrants seem
just like any other ethnic group, and hence, more
welcome in American society. Eaton's project is, in
effect, an attempt to display Chinese Americans in all
their ethnic familiarity. However, the discourse of
ethnicity values homogeneity; it does not really
celebrate difference, but asks those that it hails as
ethnic to display an ethnicity, a cultural construct,
that is composed of acceptable doses of otherness, that
is marked by what is different but which does not
substantially alter existing relations of power, or gain
autonomy for the Other.
When the concept of ethnicity and pluralism is seen
as informed by ideology, then the marginalities in
Eaton's narratives also assume a whole new appearance.
Marginalization results not in the way Park would have
it, but in Eaton’s attempt to depict Chinese Americans
and Chinatowns in a sympathetic manner, for her
characterizations subsist on notions of innateness.
Chinese Americans are portrayed as inherently patient,
hard-working, faithful, wise, and so on; while
Chinatowns are secretive, immovable, enclosed. Women
especially are abstractions, and unlike some of the male
characters, betray no hint of individuality, but indeed,
appear to shun it assiduously. Conservative,
subservient and dutiful, they are mere essences, and at
times, symbols of the incompatibility of the east and
the west. Consequently, the fictive life of the
Chinese American is not one of acculturation and
eventual acceptance by the mainstream, but impossible
choices. Eaton will have them either assimilate totally
or return to China, and yet, according to the logic of
her narratives, Chinese Americans cannot be anything but
Chinese, since "blood" and race is the ultimate
determinant of identity. A Chinese will always be
Chinese, and any assumption of American manners is only
role-playing. Assimilation, then, is not really a
212
possibility. Eaton's fictive conflicts not surprisingly
echo the ongoing and virulent public debate at the time
with regards to Asian immigration, with the nativist
team seemingly having the upper hand in this collection
of stories. Therefore, Eaton's narratives, in her
characterizations and denouements, display a dis-ease
with the Chinese in America. Stories written to make
them more acceptable to the mainstream yet contain this
disquieting subtext of marginalization. The fictive
rhetoric seeks to humanize Chinese Americans, but
actually only homogenizes them into essences, and places
them into untenable positions. The author appeals to
the discourse of ethnicity in order to stress that the
Chinese are similar to any other immigrant group.
However, this discourse of ethnicity constantly drifts
into racist and essentialist statements. Indeed, the
ethnicity of Chinese Americans inexplicably becomes
defined as a matter of "blood," the immovable,
unchangeable fact of race. And her texts become a
/
/repeated display of this rift between intention and
I execution, between the wish to show Chinese Americans as
Ihuman and the actual image of them as this inherently
I
]inassimilable alien, between contextualizing them as
]
just another ethnic group and the actual construction of
\this people as the racial Other. The subtext of these
213
narratives reveals itself as containing the drives of
the dominant ideology, in that it reinstitutes the
straitjacket of a center-margin duality, and only serves
to further imprison the Other along the margins of
cultural consciousness. It is cause to further argue
that the narrative stance in effect approximates that
taken by the policeman in Althusser's vignette; it
objectifies, and hails the subject under examination as
the Other. In that sense, Eaton's texts are reminiscent
of Mura's. The only dissimilarity, perhaps, is that he
is more conscious of the irony of his authorial
position, and is torn between wanting to belong to Japan !
and the opposite urge of wishing to see them only as
objects of research.
The real issue here rests in Eaton's inability to
access that which is authentic. The characterization of
i
Chinese Americans and Chinatown seeks to combat
stereotypes, but the author does so only through the use j
of other abstractions and absolutes. For instance, in
the effort to improve the image of China in the mind of
the implied reader, the author counters the impression
of that country as backward and decadent with the
opposite image, that it is wise and ancient; similarly,
the Chinese are not gamblers or opium addicts but hard
working, long-suffering, harmless. The author's appeal
214 |
to the reader's feelings of fellowship subsists finally j
on what the culture can recognize, that is, on the
images and metaphors that the collective awareness will j
know what to do with. Eaton not only opposes one set of !
stereotypes with another, she perpetuates the cultural j
tendency to construct identity in absolutes that serve \
to reinstitute the superiority of the center. In a work .
on Chinese Americans, the voice of that center is
insistently present. The cultural meaningfulness of
words such as ancient and wise resides in a binary
relatedness, so that China is ancient just as America is
young and vital, China is wise, just as America is
flexible. Within the Anglo-American socio-ideological
i
environment, words-as-metaphors, such as ancient, are
i
not the valorized half to this pair, but connote the
passing of an age, death, museum pieces, an irrelevancy
brought about by the advent of the West. This
insinuation is especially true when a reader comes J
i
I
across the signifier, "China"— ancient, in this case, |
implies an unchanging, slumbering geographical mass
(hopelessly backward), swathed in layers of tradition
(conservative, unenlightened, barbaric customs). Such a
way of constructing the identity of the Other has j
allowed the Western conquest and colonization of
numerous "native" people, under the guise of the
215
"inevitable" and "natural" advance of civilization, all
of which is a major element of Park's re-writing of his
tory, which in effect legitimizes the marginalization of
people. Indeed, the need to relate the story of the
West as one of advance versus decay, enlightenment
versus confusion, science versus superstition is so
central to the West's self-conception that it shows up
in Mura's text that otherwise so self-consciously seeks
to individuate his own story. The narrator in Turning
Japanese also uses the criteria of progress,
enlightenment, and rationality to measure Japanese
culture. Yezierska is also shunted into certain ways of
thinking of the self and society that valorize how the
center defines itself, so that Jewish family values
(described homogeneously as tradition, duty, etc.) are
compared unfavorably against Anglo-American notions of
individuality and choice. As for Eaton, her narrative
attempts to reach deep into the Chinese American soul
only results in anything but a story about Chinese
Americans; the dominant ideology governs her thematic
concerns, characterizations, and the narrative events.
In the end, Eaton's tales of Chinatown turn out to have
been an old fabula of the West.8
In contrast to Eaton's seemingly uneasy quest for a
place for Chinese Americans in America, Jade Snow Wong
216
in Fifth Chinese Daughter (1945) self-consciously, !
»
reflectively, traces her maturation and eventual self-
actualization. In the most general sense, this
autobiography is the story of growth and self-discovery,;
of a Chinese American woman who has had to create her '
I
own sense of belonging and worth in a culture that does
not see her as either the quintessential American or J
woman. Growing up in a "traditional Chinese" household,J
this author/narrator records her negotiations between
that household and the world outside, between China and
the new country, America. Her autobiography is arguably,
an exercise in self-revelation that exposes emotions,
i
I
dreams, family discord, and failure for public :
consumption. Eaton's narratives, when juxtaposed to
such writing appears even more a masking of fears and
self-doubt, of unanswered questions driven by hidden \
cultural agendas. If Levi-Strauss is correct, and j
creativity (whether the making of masks or the writing !
i
of fiction) rests in the possibility of dreaming, then, >
autobiography is partially situated in the compulsion to
confess, to air dank dreams and secret fears. Indeed,
Western textual convention asserts the truthful nature
of the autobiography; it is a form of history. However,
why would this form of narrative, utilizing the same
tools of language as fiction, differ so radically from
217
the production of novels or poetry? By the time such
nightmares have been recast into a linguistic
representation, any "truth" that remains in the light of (
i
day must be a by-product, and the reader has merely been j
given another fictive narrative that names itself as the
!
truth, a narrative from an author who is under the
conjunction of the very symbolic that informs the work
I
of the "creative" artist. As James Olney has argued, i
I
autobiography: "is not so much a mode of literature as
!
literature is a mode of autobiography" (qtd. fr. Smith
3). In addition, personal histories are perhaps
comparable to histories written about a nation, about a 1
people, about a social phenomenon such as immigration or |
marginality. As Sidonie Smith writes in A Poetics of
Women's Autobiography. Marginality and the Fictions of
Self-Representation (1987): "the sense of its
[autobiography] generic conventions, even its very
definition has begun to blur, until some now question
whether autobiography exists at all" (3). At question
I
is the very notion of truth and the referentiality of j
language, so that Smith is moved to argue: "The
I
autobiographical text becomes a narrative artifice, j
privileging a presence, or identity, that does not exist
outside language" (5).9
218
While I agree with the general import of Smith's
statement, I hasten to add that although the narrative
identity may not exist in totality outside of the
linguistic instance of a short story or an essay,
something in that identity, that presence, does exist,
if only via partial textual articulation. This is an
especially crucial point when considering narratives of
marginality based upon race, ethnicity and gender. To
question the notion of the author is a much-needed
corrective to Western aesthetics, since it is those
conventions of artistic production which help perpetuate
the dominant ideology. While we may find such a
critical perspective useful in that it highlights the
artifice in story-making, including the artifice of the
narrative identity, which seems able to convince us of
its material existence if simply from its ubiquitous
presence in the text, this perspective loses its
efficacy if we extend its skepticism to include the
lived experiences that are the subject matter of textual
productions, whether those are novels or masks used in
Peking Opera. This is especially crucial when the
subject matter centers on issues of race and gender
because the battle for redress and empowerment rests on
the ability to speak one's racial and gender-specific
experiences in a Euro-, phallo-centric culture. Part of
219
that aim is achieved simply from the victory implied in
being able to bring to light ideas and experiences, in
other words, to tell a story. It is in this sense that I
Woolf’s texts comprise such a significant moment in !
feminist history. I believe that a crucial instance of
victory lies in the very acknowledgement and celebration
of the "creator," the "artist," even though she only
seems to materialize fleetingly through the artifice of
a narrative identity. While Smith's contention is in a
way emotionally satisfying, from the perspective of one
who wishes to privilege the experiences and the voices
of the racial/ethnic/gender Other, such a position
harbors a danger and needs to be modified for the
specific needs of third world cultural critique.
Indeed, this must be part of a larger move to develop
our own tools and to demarcate our work from Western
(Continental and American) cultural and literary
i
criticism.
r
i
This modification of Smith's position, however,
does not affect the argument that autobiography is
itself a form of narrative, and as such, contains the
stresses and contradictions that inform any piece of
text. A preliminary reading of Fifth Chinese Daughter
places it alongside similar works by numerous other
immigrants or descendants of immigrants. Wong's book,
220
like theirs, focuses on the growth and maturation of a
narrator trying to find her place in society. Life is a
struggle between her ancestry— China— and the new
frontier of America. Torn between two cultures, this
author/narrator at times seems to be an uncanny replica
of Yezierska's heroines. However, while the Shenahs
attempt to bridge the gap between passion and cool
reserve, the opposite natures of the Jew and the Anglo-
Saxon, the narrator in Wong's text struggles between a
culture that supposedly values dutifulness and self-
control and one that prizes spontaneity and passion.
The image of China is that of a slumbering, backward
culture that knows only traditions and family. Fifth
Chinese Daughter is ostensibly about one Chinese woman’s
battle to come to terms with both the Chinese past and
the American present.
Unfortunately, such a battle rests upon a
stereotypical depiction of cultures and peoples, and
more importantly, upon an essentialist notion of human
nature. For instance, the opening pages contain the
following description of San Francisco's Chinatown:
one of the unique spots of this continent
. . . heart of old China . . . teems with
haunting memories, for it is wrapped in
the atmosphere, customs, and the manner
of a land across the sea. The same
Pacific Ocean laves the shores of both
worlds, a tangible link between old and
221
new, between past and present, Orient and
Occidental. (1)
Chinatown, in other words, would be a singular
expedition for the tourist. It is ancient and
mysterious, as if it were China itself. Its customs are
I
those of China; China, in fact, reveals incredible
reach, never loosening its hold on those so far away.
The author's writing here uses images in the public
consciousness that depend upon a binary relatedness and
notions of innateness. The characterization of j
!
Chinatown as "wrapped in the atmosphere, customs, and |
!
the manner of a land across the sea," as the "old" and
the "past," congeals this place in the image of a
ghetto, stubbornly insulated from the larger American
culture. Again, the picture of China and Chinatown is I
/ (
of an ancient, insouciant monolith, while its opposite, 1
[
America, is modern and progressive. In this cultural I
context, ancient, old and wise are not virtues, so it is
small wonder that the author would envision memories of
China not as moral support for Chinese Americans but as
hauntings, for after all, this ancient land, this land
of the dead, can only produce ghosts. China and
Chinatown come to signify a lack, that which is not- j
American, not-modern, something cemented in tradition, |
l
and irrelevant. Similarly, the narrator in Sugimoto's A j
Daughter of a Samurai at one point realizes that a word j
222
like "ancient" in the West is the opposite to what it
i
means in Japan:
From childhood until I met the General
the word "ancient" had commanded my
reverence. . . . After I became
acquainted with the General and heard him
talk of the wonderful development of a
nation much younger than my own family
tree, the word "ancient" lost some of its
value. . . . "Perhaps," I sometimes said
to myself, "it would be better not to
look back with such pride to a glorious j
past; but instead to look forward to a I
glorious future. One means quiet j
satisfaction; the other ambitious work."
(201)
Indeed, the Western logocentric imperative is able
to inscribe its own narrative even in writings, such as
autobiography, that are supposedly self-conscious,
reflective, truthful. For, the handprint of the I
t
master's discourse in Wong's text reveals itself not ;
just in the characterizations of Chinatown and China,
but also in the sense that such a text was felt to be
necessary. Just as with Eaton's stories, Fifth Chinese
Daughter was aimed at an implied reader who knows little
i
about Chinese Americans; it seeks to please, to convince j
that they are really quite normal human beings. Hence, j
Chinatown is not just unique, but also quaint. And J
i
descriptions of festivals and cuisine were definitely !
written to acquaint Americans with Chinese customs. In
numerous passages, the author/narrator recounts how she
prepares dishes such as egg foo young and tomato beef
223
for her American friends. She assures us that these are
typical Chinese dishes, while actually they are not at
all typical. Much of this is presented in a tone that a
tour guide would adopt. This element of Wong's
narrative is an example of rehabilitative "ethnic"
discourse at its worst.
However, she is not alone in evincing this urge to
explain one's culture in an effort to naturalize it for
the American reader. A similar need surfaces in Monica
Sone's Nisei Daughter (1953) in which the
author/narrator also details Japanese food, decor, and
dress. A useful comparison could be made here between
this aspect of the work of Wong and Sone and Etsu
Sugimoto's A Daughter of the Samurai (1925). The
latter's fortunes have been similar to Yezierska's in
that she enjoyed prominence in the 20s from her writing,
only to be quite forgotten with the advent of World War
II. She appears in a recent bibliography on Asian
American literature but has not been given any critical
attention as far as I can determine.10 The portion of
A Daughter of a Samurai in question deals with the
narrator's reaction to the misuses of Japanese culture
in America. She is shocked when she finds a macronote,
"hand-of-grandchild" in Japan but "scratch-my-back" in
America, placed nonchalantly next to a rosary of crystal
224
and coral, for to "the eye of an Oriental all beauty was
i
ruined by the strange arrangement. It was like putting
the Bible and a toothbrush side by side on a parlor
table" (184).11 This narrative contains numerous such
reflections on Japanese and American culture, dress,
decor, and customs. Yet, the narrator's self
revelations appear to derive less from the need to [
convince the American reader that the Japanese are quite ‘
normal people, although that motive is present too, and
more from her own need to understand the differences
between the two cultures. She does not narrate as if
she is eagerly putting Japanese culture on display; the
narrative consciousness is too involved with sifting,
ordering and managing reactions to both cultures for
that. The explanation for this relative independence,
this ability to resist the pressure felt from one's
subject positioning as an alien, possibly comes from the
fact that Sugimoto never thought of herself as American,
but more as a Japanese abroad. Hence, she did not write ;
i
from any hidden need to belong, but primarily to make
sense of her encounter with this strange culture.
1
When we compare Sugimoto's approach with Wong's
I
autobiography, the differences become clearer. Fifth
i
Chinese Daughter is about the coming of age of a Chinese ;
i
American girl, and her battles within herself as she j
225
attempts to find a place in a culture that values the
opposite of what her parents and their culture value.
The narrator's life is a series of crossings and
negotiations between ancient China, tradition and
innovation and the modern. The typical abstractions and
oppositions between cultures and peoples underpin the
tensions of the narrative, liberally interspersed with
I
stereotypical descriptions of quaint Chinatowns and
Chinese customs. Reminiscent of the conversion
experiences of Yezierska's protagonists, this narrator
gains a brave new vision via American schools when one
of her teachers tells her class that children have
rights just like adults. Suddenly, the young Jade Snow j
"realizes" the truth in that assertion, that children i
can have opinions and wants that differ from those of
their parents. This episode has the impact of an
epiphany; and the narrator's life from then becomes a
series of such revelations of her own individuality and
centeredness. Her "desire to be recognized as an
individual" (90-91) grows until she can no longer play
the role of the dutiful, subservient daughter. Strident
confrontations with her parents ensue. And during the j
last year of high school, over the issue of college, the ;
narrator leaves home and becomes a housekeeper for a !
white family, determined to support herself through
226
school. Eventually, she earns a degree from Mills, and
opens her own pottery shop in San Francisco. She is no
longer just the fifth daughter in a family that draws
its values from a culture widely depicted as so male-
centered that the birth of a baby girl is an occasion
for mourning. Instead, the narrator has become a
businesswoman and an artist, who pays taxes and owes
money to the bank just like other Americans.
Whereas, Sugimoto's story focuses on a Japanese
woman who must deal with a strange culture, Wong's j
(
narrative seeks to show that Chinese Americans are !
i
I
normal human beings with mainstream (middle-class)
aspirations for self-actualization and economic success.
She does this so well that the narrator in Fifth Chinese
Daughter is a sort of Horatio Alger; indeed, the story j
i
is the Chinese American version of the ethnic success
. 12
story.
Indeed, Fifth Chinese Daughter seems startlingly similar
to an American story of revolution, of a declaration of i
i
independence, the establishment of nationhood, and of j
I
the inalienable and natural human right to the pursuit j
of happiness. For the implied reader, the emotional
effect of this story would reside in his recognition of
what he conceives America to be, the recognition of a
national identity built on a mythological, ahistorical
recasting of the American soul in a cosmic morality
play, in which what is dear to the American conception
of the Self always comes out as the Good Angel. In this
light, Wong's "ethnic" narrative seems an attempt to
ascend to this mythology, to belong to it by showing
that the Chinese American ethnic story is fundamentally
similar to that larger, national story about the Self.
Notably, this Chinese American girl lost between two
worlds seems eventually to "discover" herself amongst
the qualities that Americans supposedly hold most dear:
independence, individuality, love of freedom, ingenuity,
self-reliance, strains similarly heard in
"quintessentially" American writers, such as Emerson and |
I
Thoreau. In other words, the alien Other is reborn, !
I
masked as an American. To me, Wong's narrative joins a
rehabilitative discourse of ethnicity, and is driven by !
the author's need to be accepted into mainstream
America. In contrast, Mura's narrative is so self
consciously centered on his interpolation by the
dominant culture as the marginalized that in comparison
Wong's writing seems even more evidently to mask her
alienation by offering the reader (an implied reader of
t
Anglo-Saxon, middle-class sensibilities) what is
essentially the reader's own reflection.13
I
I
I
My assessment here admittedly derives from a post
colonial perspective that undertakes a critique of
Western hegemonic discourses rather than perhaps an
accommodation with them. Within such a context, and
when juxtaposed to narratives by, say, Hong Kingston or
Mura, Wong's texts appear to exhibit more clearly the
concerns of the dominant ideology. Arguably, Fifth
Chinese Daughter is a milestone of sorts in that the
very creation of such a text disables to some extent a
dominant ideology that would name and so identify
someone like the narrator. Moreover, that this
narrative identity exists, albeit undercut by the master
discourse, is in itself a performative act that disrupts
the seamless narrative of American literature
overwhelmingly dominated by white, male concerns.
The cultural domination of these narratives is
effected not only by the depictions of Chinatown and
Chinese customs, but is buttressed by the treatment of
certain issues or topics that also occur in narratives
by Eaton, Sone and Maxine Hong Kingston. Life for their
narrator/protagonists is often an agonizing negotiation
between differing worldviews. So that, for example,
Wong's narrator must choose between family and the
world-out-there, between a traditional marriage and
229
freedom in her life choices. It is this confrontation
between ideas of life that goes into the delineation of
character; and for Wong’s narrator, the conflict is
overwhelmingly with the issue of individualism. Her
emerging sense of individuality increasingly clashes
with her role as the fifth daughter in a hierarchial
culture that also does not value girls. So that Fifth
Chinese Daughter is a chronological account of her
journey of self-discovery and maturation. This sense of
progression, however, is deliberately misleading.
Actually, Wong's text is an elaborately constructed
story that details what the author wishes to highlight;
it is as much an artifice as any novel. The author has
"created" a convincing, and actually, highly politically
motivated story without it appearing to be anything
other than an honest, apolitical account of a life. The
details, the version of events, indeed, the very
"progression" of the narrator's life is a purposeful
structuring of the story so as to convincingly portray a
particular viewpoint. This viewpoint is uncannily
similar to what sociologists, such as Milton Gordon,
have put forward as the model for ethnic relations in
this society. In a way, the narrator in Fifth Chinese
Daughter appears to go through roughly the various
stages of acculturation and assimilation as put forward
230
by Gordon. Richard Thompson in Theories of Ethnicity
has, I believe, persuasively questioned the efficacy of
various assimilationist theories.14 However, with
regards to this project, the issue is certainly not to
seek affirmation for events in stories from sociological
texts; rather, it tries to perceive all texts as forms
of narratives, as culturally symbolic acts reflective or
symptomatic of a dominant ideology. Within that j
perspective, then, I would suggest that what we have in j
Fifth Chinese Daughter is a narrative consciousness that
stands within the viewpoint of that ideology. In other
words, the cultural confrontation depicted is more the
result of a consciousness that stands with the dominant
ideology and that has difficulty accepting what is
already perceived as alien, that is, the parents'
cultural reality. This occurs even though the narrator
is seen as perceiving (has been inculcated into
believing) its own alienness. In other words, the
narrator in Fifth Chinese Daughter is torn apart, but
t
not in the way a Park would have it, as more or less
]
equally between two cultures, but from the fact that she j
desires to identify with a culture that has already
defined her as the Other.
In addition, the crux of this conflict centers on
this issue of individualism. If Bakhtin is correct,
231
then, individuality has always been a part of the socio-
ideological environment within which this narrative
consciousness, in order to even be realized as one,
exists (The Formal Method). The notion of individualism
has indeed predated the specific event in the text that
is said to be its birth, and perhaps, has existed in the
understanding of the narrator from the moment that she
i
learned to say "I" and sensed its import, its I
connotation of single, of separateness from mother and
father, and of its centering of that self always already
in relation to another. The freedom implied in this
notion is seductive; but only because the desire for it
is itself inculcated by the socio-ideological
environment as part of identity. In short, the
"individual" senses her own uniqueness as well as the
I
desirability of that uniqueness. j
I
The issue of individualism is a recurrent theme in j
I
numerous works by "ethnic" and third world writers. It
is a dominant refrain perhaps because these writers have
agonized most about this aspect of their confrontation
with Western culture. For instance, Monica Sone's Nisei
Daughter (1953) also deals with the battles between an
individualistic sensibility and a Japanese culture that
is depicted as one of order, self-control, internal
balance, decorum, and duty. The following passage about
232
being forced to attend Japanese school, or Nihon Gakko,
is representative of this clash of cultures:
Mr. Ohashi and Mrs. Matsui thought
they could work on me and gradually mold
me into an ideal Japanese ojoh-san, a
refined young maiden who is quiet, pure
in thought, polite, serene, and self-
controlled. They made little headway . . .
promptly at five-thirty every day, I shed
Nihon Gakko and returned with relief to
an environment which was the only real
one to me. Life was too urgent, too
exciting, too colorful for me to be
sitting quietly in the parlor and
contemplating a spray of chrysanthemums
in a bowl as a cousin of mine might be
doing in Osaka. (28) (Emphasis mine.)
The impatience towards the idea of quietly gazing
at flowers is muted but unmistakably present, just as
I
there is exasperation with the Japanese stress on !
reserve and serenity. In contrast to this impatience is }
the obvious attraction for America, whose image is an
exciting one of exploration and self-actualization. In
a chapter entitled "We Meet Real Japanese," she
describes the uneasy encounter with the old country,
especially with its emphasis on self-control, and this
meticulous attention to self-effacement and proper form j
<
at all times. She welcomes returning to America, for
she "had felt . . . an alien among them" (108). She
I
continues: "This was home to me, this lovely Puget Sound
Harbor stretched out before us. . . . This America,
where I was born, surrounded by people of different J
233
racial extractions, was still my home" (108). Tact and
politeness are so difficult for this American
consciousness that after one particularly trying visit
with her family to Mrs. Matsui's, the narrator thinks to
herself:
I staggered out at last into the
frosty night, feeling tight as a drum and
emotionally shaken from being too polite
for too long. I hoped that on our next
call our hostess would worry less about
being hospitable and more about her
guests' comfort, but that was an impudent
thought for a Japanese girl. (86)
The point that the narrator is trying to stress, of
course, is that she is not Japanese. Nisei Daughter is
filled with anecdotes that highlight her American-ness
■ t
]
even though I detect the very reserve and self-control ;
that she supposedly dislikes. The need to explore, to j
have the personality come through is present in the
narration, as well as the unmistakable humor with which
she faces this situation that she did not choose— to
think like an American but to look Japanese. The
critical attention in academe would be, of course, on
the bifurcation of the identity and not the humor, the
clash of cultures, and not the American-ness trying to
come through. Indeed, these aspects of the narrator—
I
the humor, the wit— reside only as undercurrents; the
more obvious characteristics are the self-control and
politeness. The narrator is supposed to be oioh-san;
234
and perhaps, parental expectations, and years of
inculcation into the Japanese culture, did somehow take
hold. But more pertinently for this project, the
reserve, and lack of anger is perhaps primarily due to
the implied author's awareness that this is what the
American reading public, in 1953, would expect to see.
The extent to which this is true could account for the
treatment of the Relocation experience in this
narrative. When compared to John Okada's No-No Bov
(1957), which locates that episode of Japanese American
history as the signifier of an American tragedy, Sone's
retelling finally only envisions it as another
opportunity for Japanese-Americans to prove that they
are not that different from other Americans. Sone's
narrative focuses on Christian faith, and crucially, the
lack of bitterness, choosing not to foreground the sense
of unresolved betrayal and anger that many Japanese-
Americans felt. Nisei Daughter received attention while
No-No Boy, first published in 1957, was ignored and
forgotten until Jeff Chan discovered it in 1970 in a San
Francisco bookstore.
Although I will not be able to give full
consideration to the Japanese-American experience during
World War II, its relevance to the present project can
best be delineated by referring to David Mura's Turning
235
1
Japanese. The searing impact of that experience on all i
Japanese Americans is a basic assumption in Mura’s work.
He views what happened as a linchpin that binds three
I
generations of Japanese-Americans together, with the !
connection residing not simply in the commonality of an
event but in the mutual recriminations. As Mura puts
it:
i
For me . . . one important meaning of !
the camps centers on the powerlessness of 1
both the Issei and the Nisei against the
government . . . some part of me believes
that they could have and should have
fought back. ■
This explains why I, and many other
Sansei, are more angry at the Nisei than
at the Issei. Despite the obstacles in
their path, the Nisei, our parents, were
in some sense able to succeed in America, t
to enter the middle class. We love the !
Issei more unequivocally because they
were defeated. They never recovered from
the camps. (226)
Monica Sone's fictive treatment of the Japanese
i
American World War II experience, although seemingly j
I
fully cognizant of its impact on Japanese-Americans and !
I
the ethical import of the action of the United States,
can perhaps best be understood by looking at Mura's
i
reaction to that experience. In a sense, Sone's writing
<
is reflective of the socio-political realities of her ,
time. However, though Mura's text highlights the
necessity for each generation to come to their own
accommodations with the past, and they can only be
236
f
accommodations, Okada and Sone are both Nisei; moreover, j
I
the two texts were published just four years apart from 1
each other. Sone’s approach, then, is perhaps also a '
result of her subject positioning as a woman.15 I am
here reminded of Woolf's depiction, in her essay, of the
I
narrator's instinctual realization that she had done !
wrong, and how easily the little fish had been sent into
i
hiding. j
i
This exploration of primarily earlier Asian j
American writers is an attempt to contextualize the I
i
inception and development of the idea of marginality
within various related cultural institutions, namely
literary production and academe, in the first few
i
decades of this century. However, the relevance of 1
history is that it is not knowledge to be safely
packaged in high school textbooks and museums. For, the I
past is part of the present, a part of words and ideas,
and our understanding of our surroundings. Sidonie
Smith has a somewhat different view of the present and
the past. In her discussion on autobiography, she >
J
writes: \
I
Precisely because self-representation I
is discursively complex and ambiguous, a 1
"radical disappropriation" of the actual !
life by the artifice of literature takes j
place at the scene of writing. The "I"
. . . becomes something other, foreign;
and the drift of the disappropriation,
the shape, that is the autobiographer's
237
narrative . . . reveal more about the
autobiographer's present experience of
the "self" than about her past, although,
of course, it tells us something about
that as well. (47)
While I would agree that autobiography is itself a
form of literature, containing its own rhetoric and
artifice, this statement by Smith, a primary tenet in
recent work on autobiography, is discomforting for two
reasons, especially when used to consider the work of
writers-of-color. Smith's argument underpins her
analysis of Maxine Hong Kingston in A Poetics of Women's
Autobiography; Marqinalitv and the Fictions of Self- ;
I
Representation. My disagreement with this stance comes j
I
partly from the impossibility of testing it. To say i
I
that autobiography tells us more about the present than
the past of the narrator is to a great extent a leap of
faith. For Smith to be able to make that statement, she
would have to know what the past in fact was, and that
is, as Smith asserts, not a possibility. The more
crucial objection perhaps derives from the position that j
the present, continued domination (culturally, \
(
politically, economically) of women is rooted in a past I
!
that has had a material reality. And indeed, one would j
think that any analysis of hegemony and resistance to
hegemony must take into account the historical
progression of economies and political structures. ;
238 I
J
i
The extent to which the study of writing by women- '
of-color should use as well as demarcate itself from
first world, Western textual critique, including post
structuralist theory, can indeed be explored by
i
referring to Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior
(1977). The following analysis is not meant to be an
I
exhaustive reading; rather, it is to suggest an !
I
alternative approach to so-called "ethnic" literature,
|
an approach that could draw the study of such texts away
from a rehabilitative discourse of "ethnicity."
Hong Kingston's narrative parallels Mura's in that
it also confronts directly the historical nature of her
present. And in that sense, I find her perspective
closer to the stance taken by writers such as Jamaica
Kincaid or Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Cultural dislocation and
an identity of dispossession is the subject of a ;
narrative that binds together the stories of several (
women in the narrator's life. Unlike Wong's narrative, ;
which tries to elide the past by giving it an American |
mask, Hong Kingston's work explores her identity in ;
terms of her Chinese ancestors.16 One of the most
vivid examples of the significant differences between
the two narratives can perhaps be found in how they deal
with the issue of using "I." For Jade Snow Wong, the
"I" cannot be used: "Although a 'first person singular'
239
book, this story is written in the third person from
Chinese habit" (vii). Then, she proceeds to further
explain this strange Chinese "habit" to the reader:
the word "I" almost never appears but is
understood. In corresponding with an
older person like my father, I would
write in words half the size of the
regular ideographs. . . . Even writing
in English, an "I" book by a Chinese
would seem outrageously immodest to
anyone raised in the spirit of Chinese
propriety. (vii)
Evidently, Wong wrote with an American reader in
mind. The prose is self-conscious; it seems driven by
this need to explain and justify Chinese culture. Hong
Kingston's description of her own encounter with this
"I" is quite different; the memory of having to say "I"
in school, of having to speak up or risk being thought
stupid, is an angry one. She writes:
It was when I found out I had to talk
that school became a misery, that the
silence became a misery. . . . "Louder,"
said the teacher, who scared the voice
away again. The other Chinese girls did
not talk either, so I knew the silence
had to do with being a Chinese girl.
I could not understand "I." The
Chinese "I" was seven strokes,
intricacies. How could the American "I,"
assuredly wearing a hat like the Chinese,
have only three strokes, the middle so
straight? . . . "I" is a capital and
"you" is a lower-case. (193)
The narrator felt violated by the assumptions that
teachers made about Chinese girls. Also, she had
ascertained, somehow, sometime in the process of
240
acculturation/ that she did not belong. Her difficulty
with the "I" signifies her sense of alienation, as well
as the inevitability of a collision course with herself.
Closely following the passage about "I" is the
equally symbolic encounter with the other Chinese girl
"who could not speak up even in Chinese school" (200).
The narrator notes that "we were the same" except that
the other girl did not have to work for a living (200).
Significantly, throughout the account of that
confrontation, the narrator has no name for the other
girl; she does notice, however, that she "would whisper-
read but not talk. Her whisper was as soft as if she
had no muscles. . . . I heard no anger or tension"
(201). The eventual confrontation in the bathroom was
not with that girl but with herself. The narrator faces
her, trying to force her to talk, saying: "Do you want
to be like this, dumb . . . your whole life? Don't you
ever want to be a cheerleader? Or a pompo[m] girl?
. . . If you don't talk, you can't have a personality"
(210). The narrator hits her, pulls her hair, screams,
threatens, entices, her anger, desperation, and panic
growing with each failure to make the other girl talk, |
i
i
loud, and so, stop behaving like a Chinese girl. She is
motivated not by the urge to help, but by her own
realization that Americans probably see all Chinese
241
girls the way she, the narrator, sees this other girl,
scared, voiceless, weak, without personality, dumb. She
wanted to purge the silence from the girl, so as to
destroy what she feared most, her self (as reflected
from teachers and American culture at large) in the
other— "we were the same" (200). The narrator here has
become the victimizer, ironically, trying to assume the
very role and behavior that accounts for her own
feelings of fear and weakness. The hate for the other j
girl is really self-hate. As Frantz Fanon has noted in
Black Skin. White Masks (1967), self-loathing is often
the mark of the colonized, for instance, as can be |
I
observed in the Europeanized African who perceives in
the mirror the reflection of one who desires to be
French (white) but who in fact is African and black.
This reaction comes partly from what he calls "affective i
|
arethism," which is "an attempt to acquire - by
internalizing them - assets that were originally
prohibited" (60). But this attempt to become the
oppressor cannot succeed, and the colonized is trapped
into a constant "effort to run away from his own I
individuality, to annihilate his own presence . . . !
having been made inferior goes from humiliating
insecurity to strongly voiced self-accusation to
despair" (60). This situation appears in Hong
242
Kingston's text. The narrator's self-hatred, stemming
from the inability to be herself or to be what the
dominant ideology tells her is desirable to be, has been
translated into this hatred towards the other.
This passage illustrates the intensity depicted in
Hong Kingston's narrative as compared to Wong's
dispassionate account of her alienation and
dispossession. It is reminiscent of Mura's own attempts
to deal with his anger and bewilderment about his place
in American society. And in that sense, Hong Kingston
and Mura (and Kincaid, Mukherjee, Anzaldua, etc.) write j
from, still, the position of the dispossessed and
alienated, still, in that almost a century after the
first Black narratives, and despite the political
movements toward democratization, as well as the
presence in society of ideas, such as the melting pot,
pluralism, and most recently, multiculturalism, the
marginalization and cultural disenfranchisement of
people-of-color still prevail. As Richard Thompson
notes in his work on ethnicity, numerous theorists have
tried to account for the continued ethnic stratification
in the United States (and other capitalist societies);
and they have done so unsatisfactorily, in Thompson's
opinion, for most of the theories rely on notions of
17 «
innateness. The point here is that race and ethnic
243
divisions persist, contradicting the cultural tropes
that appear to bespeak an America composed of all races.
One of the implications that may be drawn from
Thompson's analysis is that social scientists help
manufacture and maintain this rehabilitative discourse
of ethnicity, which is part of the dominant ideology's
production of culture. Unfortunately, the same may be
said about "ethnic” literary studies.
A case in point is the academic treatment of Maxine |
Hong Kingston's work. As far as I can determine, the
preceding analysis of those passages from The Woman
Warrior is somewhat of a departure from the way this !
author's texts have been usually discussed. The
analysis offered here is a deliberate attempt to situate
this specific narrative within what can be described as
post-colonial, third-world literature, and away from
American "ethnic" studies. The latter, simply stated,
is a study of literature written by those identified as
belonging to an American ethnic group. However, while j
most of such writing is aware that colored ethnic groups
in the United States are a subjugated class,
politically, economically, and culturally, relative
neglect is shown for the historical underpinnings of
this subjugation, namely European market expansion in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, later
244
developing into a capitalist-based colonialism and
imperialism. Moreover, oppression often becomes effaced
because of the tendency to conflate colored ethnic
groups with white ethnics, which, I suspect, is due in
part to the urge to resolve this disparity between
rhetoric and practice with regards to racism. An
example of such a conflation is the Harvard Encyclopedia
of American Ethnic Groups, for which Oscar Handlin
served as Consulting Editor. A more detailed analysis
of this publication will be attempted in the next
chapter. The point that I wish to make here is that
placing Hong Kingston's narrative within the framework
of post-colonial literature will, firstly, undercut the
propensity to treat this work as another example of
"ethnic" writing, which in turn buttresses a discourse
of ethnicity that actually goes a long way in
perpetuating the national mythology of a pluralistic
(read: democratic, egalitarian) society. Secondly, to
focus on the elements of The Woman Warrior that suggests
its compatibility to works by a Kincaid, illuminates the
nature of its reinscription by the dominant ideology,
and most importantly, the symptoms of the drives of the
logocentric. Hence, the confrontation between the
narrator and the other girl can be read as an instance
245
of the colonized individual within a hegemonic
discourse.
Such a stance would also depart from what has been
done in a great many discussions of Hong Kingston's
work, which is to see it as an attempt to draw together
two opposing cultures, that is, the Chinese and the
American. Most of such analyses are based upon the
belief that we have a pluralistic, or multicultural
i
I
society. Such a view is at heart a desire for utopia,
which leads to the elision of the workings of the socio-
ideological environment. Though generally insightful,
Sidonie Smith's analysis of Hong Kingston’s work falls
into this pattern. Although I will be unable to provide
here a comprehensive discussion of existing scholarship
on her work, the following excerpt from an article by
Joanna S. Frye is representative. She concludes her
study "The Woman Warrior: Claiming Narrative Power,
Recreating Female Selfhood" with the following words:
[L]ike Kingston's own story, [T'sai
Yen's] verse has bridged the cultures and
infused the experience with meaning . . .
Thus does Kingston claim for herself
the power of T'sai Yen . . . the power of
narrative to bridge cultural barriers and
to infuse the female identity with the
strength of an affirmed selfhood . . .
the capacity to overcome the isolation of
the outsider— without a cultural
identity. (300)
246
I suggest that this analysis is a misrepresentation
of Hong Kingston's work in that the author has not
created a narrator who has no culture. On the contrary,
the narrator in The Woman Warrior displays an American
consciousness, an American-ness that has no place for
the "ghosts" from China. Similar to Yezierska's
protagonists, the conflict does not reside in the clash
of two cultures, for the narrator is not both Chinese
and American, just as Eaton is not really a citizen of
the world. The conflict in the narrative revolves
around the construction of an identity of the Other. j
The narrator, with her immersion in the socio-
ideological environment, has been inculcated into the
belief that she is inferior in terms of both her gender
and color. What we have is the cultural colonization of
the individual, and the anguish of an American alienated
(which is different from having no culture) from the
culture she most identifies with, as well as her Chinese
heritage. This aspect of Hong Kingston's book may be
usefully compared to, say, Gish Jen's Typical American,
which centers on recent immigrants from China to
America, or Sugimoto's A Daughter of a Samurai, both of
i
which evince a narrative consciousness which is not
American. It would be interesting to note what Maxine
Hong Kingston has to say about her own work. In an
247
article, "Cultural Mis-readings by American Reviewers,"
she writes:
I am an American. I am an American
writer. . . . The Woman Warrior is an
American book. Yet, many reviewers do
not see the American-ness of it, nor the
fact of my own American-ness. . . .
Because I was born in Stockton,
California, I am an American woman . . .
but I am not a Chinese woman, never
having travelled east of Hawaii, unless
she [the reviewer] means an "ethnic
Chinese woman," in which case she should
say so. (58)
More specifically on The Woman Warrior, she writes: <
The "White Tigers" is not a Chinese
myth but one transformed by America, a
sort of Kung Fu movie parody. . . .
Don't you hear the American slang? . . .
Don't you see the way the Chinese myths
have been transmuted by America? (57-58) ;
This misrepresentation of Hong Kingston's work,
therefore, allows for the eventual substantiation of a
rehabilitative discourse of ethnicity— the stress on her
work as a bridge, a dispelling of cultural barriers, and
so forth. However, as already noted, ethnic
stratifications very much remain as an essential part of
this socio-ideological environment despite an apparent
commitment to ideas such as pluralism and
multiculturalism. Indeed, it is this type of approach
to her work, grounded in the traditional rubric of
ethnic studies, that erases the material underpinnings
of racial and ethnic stratifications, as well as
248
deflects attention away from existing racial and ethnic
problems. This move is part of a hegemonic discourse, a
self-imposed blindness, which replaces actuality with
cultural tropes that reinforce a national mythology. On
the other hand, stressing the colonized nature of the
narrator in The Woman Warrior, an obviously political
move, brings to bear critical questions about the
historical processes and roots of that colonization, of
that self-induced erasure of an authentic identity. The
contention here is that such culture production sustains
and is necessitated by economic imperialism. This type
of discussion will tell us more about not only the work
itself but also the academic treatment of literature as
itself part of a hegemonic discourse.
A measure of our double-bind as women writers-of-
color working in a Euro- and phallo-centric culture
resides in the very necessity with which we must utilize
the tools of the Father in order to free our voices and
stories from his control; yet, it is the tools
themselves— the words, metaphors, the tropes, the
textual conventions— that construct and maintain our
marginality. Within American literature, this
domination of the concerns of women-of-color has been
inscribed into the study of "ethnic" writing, so that a
discourse of ethnicity has developed which is often
249
(mis)used, resulting in those concerns being undercut by
the story that the dominant group wishes to tell about
itself. One way to combat this reappropriation is to be
aware of the nature of this sexist and colorist
language, and to be aware of textual conventions as
being part of what buttresses the house of the Father.
Moreover, texts written by people-of-color (male and
female) should be approached as performative acts that
have value in and of itself, but also with an eye to the
blind-spots that reside in all texts. The vigilance
that is thereby a necessity in textual criticism
includes an identical vigilance towards one's own
writing. It is such an assessment of authorship and
texts, as residing in specific socio-ideological,
linguistic environments, that would help to effect
cultural change.
250
Notes
1 This reference is from "The Master's Tools Will
Never Dismantle the Master's House," Sister Outsider
(Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press, 1984). Lorde also
writes in the same article: "If white american feminist
theory need not deal with the differences between us,
and the resulting difference in our oppressions, then
how do you deal with the fact that the women who clean
your houses and tend your children while you attend
conferences on feminist theory are, for the most part,
poor women and women of Color? What is the theory
behind racist feminism?" (112).
I
* Or, as Barthes says in The Pleasure of the Text
(NY: The Noonday Press, 1975): "If I read this story, or
this word with pleasure, it is because it is written
with pleasure (such pleasure does not contradict the
writer's complaints)" (4). He continues later: "what
pleasure wants is the site of a loss, the seam, the cut,
the deflation, the dissolve which seizes the subject in
the midst of bliss. Culture thus recurs as an edge: in !
no matter what form" (7).
3 Hence, Mura's (voyeuristic?) "examination" of
Japanese dating practices leads ironically back to
America, to the construction of his American self. One
of his favorite authors is Barthes. And indeed, his
description of Japanese popular culture evinces a post
structuralist influence, especially, in his depictions
of the "aesthetics" of food, architectural space, the
images of the body in dance and the media. However,
Mura's search for himself is imperceptibly "colored" by i
his origins, which cannot be defined as anything other J
than American. His explanation of what makes Japan
Japan is filled with frustration at the inability to
ultimately account for the genesis of human and societal
characteristics. Yet, his "study" of Japanese culture
must arrive at some conclusion simply because linguistic
conventions move toward closure. Mura's text, then,
seems this constant split between the inability to
fulfill the need for conclusive statements and the
haunting shadow-notion that Japanese-ness cannot be
irrefutably pinned down, that any explanation only acts
like a boomerang, referring back to the author/narrator.
Indeed, the desire for closure, a Western desire,
pervades the text, is the very raison d'etre of what is
otherwise defined as an inanimate object.
251
4 Interestingly, Mura describes numerous examples
of untraditional Japanese behavior. He includes an
account of a female doctor who divorces her husband in a
society that rarely condones personal choice; a woman
magazine editor whose favorite dress is leather pants
and jacket, and who rides a motorbike; the Japanese male I
who has "dropped out" of the corporate mouse-trap,
forgoing prestige, and social acceptance.
5 Limin Chu, The Images of China and the Chinese in
the Overland Monthly. 1868-1875. 1883-1935 (San
Francisco: R & E Research Assoc., 1974). The Chinese
were also typically described as patient, illogical,
shifty, low-wage laborers, hard-working, opium smokers,
gamblers, resistent to progress.
6 Another interesting story along similar lines is
Louis Chu's To Eat a Bowl of Tea (NY: Lyle Stuart,
1961) .
7 The most self-reflective and critical exploration
of this topic recently comes from Richard Thompson,
whose Theories of Ethnicity (NY: Greenwood Press, 1989)
is based upon a Marxist model of social dynamics.
Thompson points out that most theories on race and
ethnicity rest on speculations about biology and on
notions of human innateness. Where my study differs ;
from Thompson's sociological work is that I focus on the
role of language and textual production in the
construction of racial, ethnic, and gender identity,
treating texts from sociology and history as, to some
degree, fictive narratives, informed by the same forces
that underwrite the work of, say, Eaton. This
difference in approach lies in the assertion of the
importance of the word, the metaphor, of images, in
inculcating the individual into the domain of the
dominant ideology. Texts, then, whether they are of the
linguistic or the electronic media, recirculate cultural
patterns that order and manage personal desire, as well
as self-identity. Both Mukherjee and Mura seem very
aware of the power of various texts.
8 Mieke Bal defines a fabula as "a series of j
logically and chronologically related events that are |
caused or experienced by actors" (5). See Mieke Bal, j
Introduction to the Theory of Narratoloqy, trans.
Christine van Boheemen (Toronto: U of Toronto Press,
1988) .
252
9 According to Smith, the focus of literary
critique should be on "graphia . . . the careful teasing
out of warring forces of signification within the text
itself" (6) .
10 King-Kok Cheung and Stan Yogi, Asian American
Literature. An Annotated Bibliography (NY: The Modern
Language Association of America, 1988). Besides A
Daughter of the Samurai, Sugimoto also wrote A Daughter
of the Narikin (1932), A Daughter of the Nohfu (1935),
and Grandmother 0 Kvo (1940).
11 The narrator tries to depict the extent of her
dismay with the following account: "Whenever afterward I
entered that room, I persistently kept my eyes turned
away from the ebony cabinet. It was only after two
years of close friendship with the hostess that I had
the courage to tell her of my shocked first visit to her
home" (184).
12 Maxine Hong Kingston's most recent fictive
creation, Wittman Ah Sing, can be perceived as an
attempt to further re-write the face of American his
tory, in that this is a Chinese Whitman, a conscious
appropriation of major literary figure. However, Hong
Kingston chooses not to deal with Walt Whitman’s
homosexuality in her construction of Wittman Ah Sing. j
13 As such, when I read Fifth Chinese Daughter. j
from a post-colonial, post-structuralist perspective, I
see what to me are distortions of Chinese culture, as
well as the specificities of Wong's subject positioning.
For me, Wong's narrative attains a texture that
differentiates it from the work of writers belonging to
other Chinese-diaspora communities in other historical-
political contexts.
14 See Richard Thompson, "Assimilation and its
Discontents," Theories of Ethnicity. A Critical
Appraisal (NY: Greenwood Press, 1989) 73-106.
15 A very interesting treatment of what it was like
to be both woman and Japanese immigrant during World War
II, Relocation, and so on is Joy Kogawa's Obasan
(Boston: David R. Godine, 1982).
16 I suggest that The Woman Warrior. China Men.
Tripmaster Monkey should be read as a trilogy. They are
interlinked stories that together depict the economic
and political underpinnings of the Chinese-American
253
diaspora into America, as well as the economic and
political roots of the opposition to continued Chinese
immigration during the latter part of the nineteenth
century. Together, these texts portray the emotional
price of emigration on several generations of both women
and men.
17 My argument in these pages is greatly indebted
to Richard Thompson's treatment of race and ethnic i
divisions in Theories of Ethnicity; A Critical Appraisal j
(NY: Greenwood Press, 1989).
254
CHAPTER FIVE
BEYOND "ETHNICITY," RACE, AND THE DOUBLE-BIND
OF THOSE WHO WILL SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES
Black writers, one might say, are always on
display, writing a black renaissance and
righting a Western Renaissance that was, in
the words, of Ralph Ellison's preacher in
Invisible Man, "most black, brother, most
black" (56).
— Houston Baker in Modernism and
the Harlem Renaissance
255
Having grown up in Hong Kong, in what is a unique
Chinese/British/American culture that subdues its own
form of racial consciousness with the vernacular of
international IBM-nese, in a society containing the
muted but ubiquitous trappings of colonialism, I find
that history contains a relevance and an immediacy that
is not to be denied. In such a socio-ideological
environment, to access history is to reach for a "past,”
for a China that is strange and alien. The desired
China is only haphazardly discerned through the minds of
parents who are the real Chinese, and through history
books, most of which were written by Western authors, in
the language of the victors.1 The search arises not
merely from the need to understand one's parents, but j
also from the daily confrontation with life in a Chinese j
and colonial city that is also a blend of different
cultures and times. The immediacy of this search comes,
in less esoteric terms, from the need to know why the
British flag is there amidst all that is Chinese. Also,
the notion that my parents were more Chinese than I did
not lead to a sense of alienation, at least not the way
I have been discussing it in this project; rather, the
idea created in me a feeling of loss, as if a favorite
relative had died, but not alienation. For, Hong Kong
is, was, Chinese enough, if one could ever determine
256 j
I
what the essence of being Chinese is. And, in that
sense, when I remember how my parents talked about China
and their parents, I realize that they too were Chinese
in ways that were different from how their parents were
Chinese. Indeed, I often imagine a similar refrain
occurring in families of Chinese ancestry in Indonesia,
Singapore, Peru, the United States, and so on. Of
course, it is partly from this type of generational
confrontation, as well as the socio-political reality of
Hong Kong, that I feel the weight of my time-frame, that
history has a relevance and urgency that does not allow i
me to think of it in terms of museums or as a word that
signifies the "past."
The excerpt from Houston Baker's assessment of the
Harlem Renaissance evinces an appreciation for the
tyrannical control that our histories exert over us.
History, one might say, is ever with us, not merely as
the mind-images, but as the real effects that comprise
our present lives. The Renaissance, most critics would
agree, barely stretched through the 1920s, yet its short j
i
duration belies the length or breadth of its historical
significance. For the writings that characterize this
movement arose from the political condition of African
Americans at the time, as well as from hundreds of years
of European global colonialism. And in that sense, the
257
collected outpourings in The New Negro (1925) can be
read not just as an attempt to articulate the appearance
of a country-wide Negro national consciousness within
white America, but the recognition of the need to band
together globally with other African communities, who
are similarly victims of European history-making. The
Harlem Renaissance, at least as manifested in The New
Negro, contains a national as well as international
ambition, and as such, is an implicit acknowledgement of
the central role of the "past" in the lives of African
Americans. It is the sense that the present is rooted
in the "past" and the belief in the need to control
their own history that grounds the work of writers such
as W.E.B. DuBois, Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, Zora
Neale Hurston, E. Franklin Frazier, and so on. One j
might say that the present pursued them for an account j
of their origins, or, that for them, "yesterday" had an
urgency and relevance that permeated their lives and I
what they wrote. j
The discussion so far is not only an attempt to j
foreground my own positioning but also to highlight j
I
certain issues with regard to the concept of history as j
it concerns hegemonic discourses of race and ethnicity.
While in the previous chapter, I discussed some of the i
characteristics of a rehabilitative discourse of
258
"ethnicity," using texts from Asian American literature,
this chapter explores this issue using primarily texts
from literary criticism or history. As can be seen from
a work such as Werner Sollors's Beyond Ethnicity.
Consent and Descent in American Culture (1986), the
textual productions by or about ethnic people, what
should give voice to their experiences and concerns, are
reappropriated by the dominant ideology, and become
/
' instead, another avenue for the emergence of the master
discourse on democracy and egalitarianism. This
discourse of "ethnicity" not only seeks to rewrite the
reality of the lives of the Other in America, but
indeed, is an attempt to negate the issue of race, to
make it a non-issue within this arena of literary
discussion. This discourse of "ethnicity" in effect
marginalizes the real concerns of "ethnic" people and
people of color, and only serves to present a sanitized
version of history for public consumption. Although I
will not be able to present a comprehensive discussion
of the works of writers of color specifically in
relation to the issue of race in American culture, I
would like to explore briefly the attempts by W. E. B.
DuBois and Alain Locke within the context of the Harlem
Renaissance to engage America on the issue of race.
259
History, or the writing of history, as with other
pseudo-sciences, is itself a form of narrative that in
Said's words: "can create not only knowledge but also
the very reality they appear to describe" (94). As Said
has shown in Orientalism (1979), the combined effect of
Western writing on the Orient is a discourse that
purports to tell the truth but in fact only projects
Western neuroses and desires onto an identity of the
Other. This perspective is a basic premise of this
project, as evidenced particularly in the chapter on
Park, Stonequist, and Handlin. In other words, history
can be seen as another form of narrative that tells more
about the narrator than the overt subject of the story.
This re-consideration of history-making, however, ought
not to be merely an academic double-take, leading to a
mea culpa of sorts, but actually can be seen as
containing socio-political possibilities that could
nudge the university out of its own form of ivory-
towered marginalization.
I
Although Said's writings have cast doubt on what is
posited through various pseudo-scientific texts as
reality, that is not to say that there is no reality.
Here I must be cautious, for I sense the re-emergence of
the logocentric need to arrive at some irrefutable truth
about human nature and the "way things are." However,
it seems to me that one of the assumptions underwriting
the critical work of one such as Said is that there is a
reality of some sort, admittedly subjective, non-
essentialist, provisional, but still an actuality of
some kind. Indeed, the very assertion that this so-
called reality is a discourse can exist only if there is
also the belief that there is a more truthful
alternative(s) somewhere. With respect to race and
ethnicity, the critique of textual conventions ought to
take into account the position of such texts within
socio-economic situations. I venture to suggest that an
essential component of cultural and textual critique is
to account for the material (economic, political)
underpinnings to, for example, texts, that history
itself is a symbolic narrative which "reveals," as far
as that is possible, certain "truths" about cultural or
socio-ideological processes, if not about the humanity
that produces culture.
In an overtly political sense, then, it is not so
much history which is at stake, but whose history.
Authors such as Hong Kingston, Sone and Yezierska
certainly wrote with that in mind. And Trinh T. Minh-
ha, who is ever sensitive to her subject positioning
within a Euro-, phallo-centric culture, perhaps puts it
best when she writes:
261
You who understand the dehumanization
of forced removal-relocation-reeducation-
redefinition, the humiliation of having
to falsify your own reality, your voice—
you know. And often cannot say it, you
try and keep on trying to say it, for if
you don't, they will not fail to fill in
the blanks on your behalf, and you will
be said. (80)
An inherent difficulty in effecting a conscious re
telling of the past lies in the domination of the global
academic community by Western scholarship and
theoretical enterprises. Of course, critics such as
Trinh, Houston Baker Jr., and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
are attempting a revision of academic discourse, yet,
they must do so within Anglo-American universities and
scholarly traditions. There is the need not only for
different methods of attaining and formulating
knowledge, but also for correctives to the knowledge
already accumulated by the West. The latter concern is
gradually being addressed, for example, in Subaltern
Studies I. Writings on South Asian Studies (1982),
which according to Ranajit Guha, is meant to: "rectify
the elitist bias characteristic of much research and
academic work" on South Asian studies (Preface). Guha
traces this bias to the "ideological" rule of Britain
over India, resulting in a version of Indian history
that credits the rise of nationalism to British colonial
rule, to an Anglicized intellectual class, and which
262
views the majority of the population as typically the
passive (that is, the colonial) receptacles of Western
democratic civilization. The same motive of countering
ethnocentric biases in Western scholarship also informs
the work of Mona Etienne and Eleanor Leacock in
anthropology. They edited a collection of essays, Women
and Colonization. Anthropological Perspectives (1980),
which primarily point out the ethnocentric
presuppositions that served to distort past work in
anthropology. These essays, as well as work by third
world writers such as Kumari Jayawardena, are conscious
attempts to bring new information to light that are not
colored by Western biases.2 Some of the essays in the
collection edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "Race,"
Writing, and Difference (1986), also effectively
illustrate the ethnocentrism of much past scholarship,
particularly on race and gender.3
The point to note here is how these works are
grounded in the realization that history has to be re
told. It is the narratives about the past that affect
the present. Indeed, this motivation— of revisioning
history and historiography— is closely allied to the
understanding that academic endeavor is the means for
effecting social change and not an end in itself. While
critical theories such as Marxism, feminisms,
263
deconstruction, and so forth have contributed to an
understanding of social processes (of the West), the
structure of Western universities (tradition,
bureaucracy, funding, market pressures on curricula),
and academic tradition itself have effectively contained
what is essentially a debate about society within
academe and away from the larger society.4 In other
words, we have been unable to translate theory into
societal interest or practice. The present version of
this project also shares this shortcoming, since it is
mainly concerned with theoretical explorations, and not
with discussions of specific, pragmatic counters to
i
hegemonic discourses. I would just note at this point j
that a delineation of the problem is a necessary first
step to any possible solution.
These considerations about history-making seem
especially crucial when we are dealing with the issues
of race, ethnicity and gender in literary studies. For
narratives that deal with such classifications of
identity can be in crucial instances conscious
challenges to the dominant version of history that
circulates in culture. If we agree with Jameson's
suggestion that the narrative act is a socially symbolic ;
act, then "ethnic" literary studies may be an especially j
t
I
fruitful site for the exploration of certain cultural j
264
processes. At first, this site might appear to be a
limited one, containing as it does only certain types of
concerns, authors, and tropes defined as specific to
this area. I suggest that this perception is inaccurate
and revealing at the same time. In other words,
"ethnic" literary studies is commonly thought of as a
marginal area of study, as part of the larger concern of j
American literature. This view, however, is the result
of the domination of culture production by the
controlling ideology, part of which is the right to
write history. My feeling is that this definition of
"ethnic" studies allows the dominant ideology to manage
and isolate discussions of race, ethnicity, and gender
(at least within literary studies) under the premise
that this is a specialized, "elitist," concern belonging
to a small cadre of academics, who are on personal,
quixotic quests of various kinds. Indeed, in the
general populace, questions of race and ethnicity are
non-issues, for the belief is that, on the whole, this
society is managing to resolve its race problem. And in
that sense, the emergence of David Duke served to focus
more attention on the Japanese auto industry than on
domestic racism.5 Indeed, race and ethnicity are more
central to this social structure than appearances may
suggest. For it is racial, ethnic, and gender
265
classifications that are significant factors in the
development and maintenance of this capitalistic
culture. I do not have room to detail the various
Marxist-based models that attempt to explain the place
of race and so forth in this type of economy. I can
only observe here that it is in the end important to
have some model of the socio-economic structure that
accounts for the presence of "race" and "ethnicity" if
"ethnic" literary studies is to envision itself as a
cultural critique, and if literary theory is to be more
than an academic endeavor. For now, the point to stress
is that the status of "ethnic" literary studies within
American literature is homologous to how race,
ethnicity, and gender are handled as issues in the
larger society. Hence, an important premise in this
chapter is that literary studies, especially the study
of "ethnic" writing, should be seen as part of the
history-making processes of a community, and that such
writing is grounded in a socio-economic material
reality.
Such a lengthy preamble is an indication of the
chagrin I felt upon reading Werner Sollors's Beyond
Ethnicity. Consent and Descent in American Culture
(1986). I imagine that the ideas contained in this work
would eventually have a great deal of influence in
266
academe. Notably, Sollors also wrote the "Literature
and Ethnicity" entry in the Harvard Encyclopedia of
American Ethnic Groups (1980), a daunting tome edited by
Stephan Thernstrom, Ann Orlov, and Oscar Handlin.
First, a few remarks about the Harvard Encyclopedia
(henceforth cited as HEAEG). If genealogical listing,
itself a form of history/narrative can ever tell us
anything, then the names of (some of) the progenitors of
this work on the title page would be ample hint as to
its purpose; I have in mind especially Oscar Handlin.
The form of an encyclopedia itself prescribes the way
information is to be managed and presented. j
t
Accordingly, in this work, "facts" about American ethnic j
groups are carefully marshalled, tabulated, classified, j
I
pared down, and fitted into the handy organizational 1
frame of the English alphabet. Michel Foucault, in The
Order of Things (1973), notes the bewilderment that a
Western mind will likely feel upon encountering the
following list from a "'certain Chinese encyclopedia'"
(xv) . In this list, animals are somehow divided into
"(a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame,
(d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray
dogs" (xv), and so on. What is the logic in placing
"stray dogs" with "sucking pigs"? As Foucault points
out, the mind formed by Western logic will surely sway
267
between recoil and laughter at the sheer
incomprehensibility of such a taxonomy. And yet, the
list is composed of easy words. Of course, what the
reading mind needs is not a dictionary but the logic
behind the inventory, the reasoning that perceives
affinity among these objects. Hence, further inquiry
into the construction of lists and classifications, the
organization of data and information, places us back
into the search for essences, for a characteristic that
is perceived to define irrefutably the thing-ness of an
object. According to Foucault, the Western mind will
likely behold this list and see it as chaos, but is
actually only coming up against its own "limitations"
(xv). Reading, then, in the West, is an encounter not
only with the ostensible meaning of words, but with the
meaning that resides, or more accurately, is placed in
the logical structure of those words.
With regards to the HEAEG, this compendium of
extended definitions of people displayed in alphabetical
order, what interests me is not just what it says about
"ethnic" groups, but the logic underpinning the
organization. Seemingly, the entries are ordered merely
according to the progression of the English alphabet.
It is a "natural" choice— the alphabet— a logical one in
that it allows no bias; write-ups on ethnic groups are
268
placed not according to wealth, social status, or
similarly overtly political determinations, but solely
on the first letter of the term in question. The goal
here is clearly to be apolitical, that is its logic. In
short, this work has no motive other than the pure
pursuit of knowledge. However, organizations that
manage and display information can hardly be expected to
float free of the metaphysics, the logos in which they
are born. And in that sense, one can speculate that the
very conception of an alphabet, a progression of
letters, in contrast perhaps, to pictorial languages,
suggests underlying assumptions about time, society, and
human experience. It is perhaps no wonder that in the
West the passage of time, life itself, is regarded as a
linear progression, and humanity is ever in advance.
Along similar lines, the very concept of an
encyclopedia rests upon the premise of cultural prowess.
For the ability to amass, catalog and display culture is
surely to be taken as the sign of an advanced
civilization. The production of such a work requires
taking the Other, studying it, plumbing its depths,
knowing it in a way that allows the Other to be named
and classified. And in that sense, encyclopedias are a
form of narrative that tells the story of its own
presentness and centrality, while simultaneously
269
asserting the Other's death and irrelevancy. And in
that sense, they are much like museums; both illustrate
might, both are a way of dominating the Other.
Moreover, the organization of information according to
the alphabet is not as innocuous as it appears. Jews,
Slavs, Russians, Vietnamese, and so forth are seamlessly
and easily collected and placed between the covers of
this text; ostensibly, there is little difficulty in
knowing them, in isolating the essence of who they are
as Cambodians or German Jews and cataloguing them as
such. The logic of using the alphabet also rests on the
assumption that such an organization allows an
exhaustive coverage, as if nothing has been left out of
the net. Ironically, the ease with which one may
compile peoples for public display is a disturbing and
self-revelatory counterpoint to the actual difficulty
and ambivalence with which America has always approached
the issues of "ethnicity" and "race." For Edward Said,
encyclopedias reveal the will to power, the drive to
define and name that which is also paradoxically
conceived as inscrutable and incomprehensible. The
exotic Oriental is thereby controlled, by being said;
and, such linguistic domination is indivisible from the
attempt at political and economic domination.
270
The HEAEG presents American ethnic groups as a
"fact" of American life, a pervasive aspect of society,
while actually avoiding any hint of controversy that is
part of the issues of race and ethnicity. Sollors's
treatise on "Literature and Ethnicity," tucked away
among the "L's," of course, is particularly adept at
maintaining the demeanor that all this is merely
information, neutral words on a page. His section is a
meticulous accretion of names, date, titles, and plot
summaries. However, certain assumptions govern his
selection of minutiae. For Sollors, all Americans are
ethnic, indeed, American literature is inherently,
essentially ethnic. Tellingly, he begins his essay with j
i
f
Nathaniel Hawthorne, noting that during the years when j
t
t
the latter was in England, he "became fascinated by the
idea of tracing his roots" (647). Sollors recounts
Hawthorne's fruitless search and subsequent interest in
the legend of George Marsh. The result was "The
Ancestral Footstep," a fragmentary English-American
romance, which "is an excellent image of Hawthorne's
sense of what is now known as 'ethnicity'" (647).
Sollors continues with the explanation that for him
ethnicity:
refers to a specific tradition, born out
of protest against another tradition; it
is thick as blood; and it defies
"scrubbing" descendants. It is embedded
271
in myth and invites faith rather than
critical scrutiny. . . . The memory of
diverse pre-American pasts has instilled
a pervasive sense of "ethnicity" into the
imagination of American writers. (64 7-
648)
Moreover, according to Sollors, in order to attain
a sense of full selfhood, "one has to experience
otherness, and in that sense, ethnicity is not only in
others but also in ourselves" (649); indeed, the
American character is marked by a "formidable
expression" of "yearning for history and community"
(648). In short, after a crucial reference to Handlin's
The Uprooted, he writes:
"literature and ethnicity" in America
refers to nothing less than the whole
range of American culture, from classics
to commercials, from 17th century
migrants' letters to 19th- and 20th-
century black folk rhetoric . . . one may
say that ethnic literature is American
literature. (649)
Sollors's statements here implicitly address the
marginalization of "ethnic" writing, that is its
twilight status along the borders of American
literature, by attempting to conflate the two. For
Sollors, ethnicity is a quintessentially American trait,
as evidenced by the concerns of such an unquestionably
American writer as Hawthorne over his own "ethnic"
roots. He points out that although Hawthorne never
found the heritage that he wanted to find, the result of
272
his search was fragments of an "English-American"
romance, "The Ancestral Footstep." It is interesting to
note, however, that Hawthorne was not able to make the
story work. Sollors's democratic inclusiveness can
perhaps be seen as part of an ongoing tradition of
ethnicity that sees America as a pluralistic society,
which is defined by Milton Gordon as a "composite of
groups which have preserved their own cultural identity"
(38). Presumably, then, America is made up of ethnic
groups who are all American but have nonetheless
retained their distinct "ethnic" identities.7 Despite
the liberal intentions that underlie this position, the
problem is that Sollors’s version of society suggests a
harmony that is nonexistent. It fails to account for
the continual prejudices and oppression that are
grounded in racial and ethnic and gender identity.
While Hawthorne may have wondered whether great
grandfather came from a manor house in Staffordshire,
that is vastly different from the concerns that a
Yezierska or a Toni Morrison would have about their
"ethnicity." In other words, the problem with Sollors*s
argument is that it ignores race, as well as the
stratification of white ethnic groups. Sollors, in
fact, cites writers such as Cahan side by side with
writers like Emerson, apparently unaware of the
273
fundamental differences in their experiences of
identity.
What is equally troubling is Sollors's definition
of ethnicity as something that is "thick as blood,"
which seems to suggest that "ethnic" identity is part of
genetic makeup (649). The next lines belie this
implication, for ethnicity is then thought of as a
matter of myth and faith. To further complicate the
situation, the author also asserts that ethnicity arises
from the sense of one's own out-group status. If I am
interpreting his statement correctly, then the feeling
of marginality will engender "ethnic" identity; and
paradoxically, it is this sense of otherness that will
eventually lead to a "full selfhood" (649). The crucial
issue here is not with the bewildering array of
explanations of ethnicity but with what amounts to
Sollors's refusal or inability to see the distinction
between the experiences depicted in, for example, James
Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
(1927) and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsbv
(1925). Johnson's narrative centers on the injustices !
that people of color encounter in every aspect of life.
The narrator's opportunities for career, marriage, and
so on are in fact indivisible from his blackness. But
more importantly, in terms of this project, this text
274
can be read as the cultural construction of an identity
of marginality, that is, the psychic dispossession of a
people based upon color. Sollors*s definition of
"ethnicity" tries to re-write history by negating the
issue of race. He ignores the differences between the
history of, say, Norwegian immigration and the history
of black enslavement and Native American genocide, and
chooses instead to replace this reality with a vague,
mystical, and romantic version of "ethnicity." This
refusal to acknowledge and confront both the past and
the present is in effect a negation of the material
reality and the history that underpin the constructions
of identity and narrative, and thereby only serves to
perpetuate oppressive structures.
Sollors follows up this essay in 1986 with Beyond
Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. In
many ways, this is an expanded version of his
contribution to the HEAEG, with several important
additions. Sollors attempts to address the issue of
race in a section of the chapter entitled "Beyond
Ethnicity." He states in this section that he does not
wish to "gloss over the legacy of slavery and racism in
America. Slavery has posed a special problem to
interpretations of America and poses a special problem
to our enterprise" (37). He further admits that slavery
275
is a quandary for historians in that "it contradicts so
many of their generalizations of American life" (37).
He also acknowledges the considerable disagreement among
sociologists as to how race should be conceptualized.
While he notes that Pierre van den Berghe argues for a
clear distinction between race and ethnicity, Sollors
decides to take the position of Harold Abramson and
Milton Gordon, both of whom consider race to be merely a
category within ethnicity (alongside with religion,
kinship, government, etc.).8 His decision for doing so
is worth considering in detail:
the interpretation of the rites and
rituals of culturally dominant groups
sometimes provides the matrix for the
emergence of divergent group identities.
The ethnic system of Newburyport is as
incomplete without Anglo-Americans as
without Afro-Americans; it is also less
easily comprehensible, even though some
Yankees may resent being put into en
ethnic category. Second, the discussions
of ethnicity and the production of ethnic
literature in the United States have been
so strongly affected by Afro-Americans
. . . that an omission of the Afro-
American tradition in a discussion of
ethnic culture in America would create a
very serious gap in our reflections.
. . . I am interested in the processes of
group formation and in the naturalization
of group relationships . . . and have
found examples from Puritan New England
and Afro-America crucial to an
understanding of these processes among
other groups in America. (36-37)
My disagreement with this position is that it
acknowledges the special nature of the race issue while
276
refusing to treat it as such. Sollors is able to argue
that the literary narratives on race are merely another
aspect of "ethnic" literature because he has simply
chosen to define race as a part of ethnic identity. He
does not deal with the economic underpinnings of the
institution of slavery at all; but he does note that
slavery and later the "emergence of legalized
segregation" is a "paradox" in a country supposedly
founded upon a belief in an "achieved rather than
ascribed identity," and that favors self-determination
and independence from "ancestral, parental, and external
definitions" (37). Sollors deals with this apparent
contradiction by erasing the content of racism, by
treating it as if it were identical to "ethnicity,"
while seeming to grant it a special place in general
discussions of "ethnicity" and "ethnic" literature.
Aside from simply asserting that race is to be
considered a part of "ethnicity," Sollors also suggests
that the two are "intimately inter-related" by proposing
Louis Dumont's contention that "racism fulfills an old
function under a new form" (38). For Sollors, this
means that "the concepts of self-made man and of Jim
Crow had their origins in the same culture at about the
same time, whereas aristocratic societies had no need
for either" (38). In other words, racism is simply
277
another means of social stratification, an example of
the insatiable human appetite for marks of status and
hierarchy; in short, something had to replace the
European monarchic system. Sollors's explanation is
another example of the ahistorical, and thereby
distorted, nature of his treatise. Firstly, he fails to
distinguish between race theories and racism in its
present form. Secondly, Sollors has also conflated
I
class with race. In the first case, racial distinctions j
and theories of race predate the discovery of the New !
I
World. Thomas F. Gossett in Race: The History of an j
Idea in America (1963) notes that the Rig-Veda mentions j
I
the "Anasahs," a dark-skinned people; and the Egyptians
distinguished among four types of skin-color; the
i
Chinese and Greeks also resorted to color in
differentiating between themselves and other people. Of
course, as Michael Banton cautions in Race Relations
(1967) :
Discrimination against strangers and
particularly against dark-skinned people
is probably of equal antiquity. But
"race" as it is known today is a
relatively new idea. Only in the last
two hundred years or so has an ideology
of race claiming scientific validity been
added to the rhetoric of national,
economic, and social conflict. (12)
He traces the "modern" Western conception of race
to Aristotle (12). But the subsequent appearance of
278
race and its eventual evolution to the racial
stratifications of today is arguably a result of the
European exploitation of the New World. The Spaniards,
according to Banton, excused their behavior toward the
Indians on the grounds that they could not possibly be
descendants of Adam and Eve (14). And although the
European and later American debate about origins and
races was to continue until the present century, in
actuality, slave owners and colonizers did not wait for
the final scientific verdict to come in, so to speak,
but justified the enslavement and killing of people of
color based upon the belief that they were inferior or
subhuman. The subjugation and colonization of these
people derived from the European economic expansion and
later imperialism of the last three hundred years.
Hence, while race theories and racial distinctions are
relatively long-standing, racism as we conceive of it
today arises from a specific set of relatively recent
global economic circumstances that precede the advent of
Jim Crow laws, and surely, in America, to when the
Puritans imported the first boat-load of slaves, which
according to Gossett was in 1619 (3). Although Sollors
suggests that "the concepts of self-made man and of Jim
Crow had their origins in the same culture at about the
same time," he does not offer a more specific date.
279
This argument merely relies on the implication that all
of this was connected in some way to the Pilgrims'
rejection of European aristocracy and the attempt to
erect a different social structure.
In addition, racism can be thought of as a social
construct, a category of identity that cannot be
transcended. In other words, unlike class, racial
identity is cast in iron, and racism results from that
identity. One may choose one’s class, but not one's
race, and even with the latter classification, it is
imposed from without. Hence, while, in Britain, one may
become a member of the aristocracy, or in the United
States, a captain of industry, one cannot become not-
black (not even by passing, as we see in Johnson's The
Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man). Hence, Sollors is
surely incorrect in also suggesting that racism or
racial theories is a substitute for Old World
hierarchies.
Sollors dispatches the "problem" of race by
concluding: "The categorical separation of race and
ethnicity too easily lends itself to false
generalizations about America" (38), meaning that
theorists of "American pluralism" who exclude race have
given only a partial picture of this culture. However,
Sollors's own conclusion is not that perhaps there is
280
something fundamentally incorrect in theories of
American pluralism and ethnicity, but that "it is most
helpful not to be confused by the heavily charged term
'race' and to keep looking at race as one aspect of
ethnicity" (39). Sollors's here refuses to address the
possibility that there are substantial and fundamental
differences between the concepts of race and ethnicity,
an argument that can be supported by referring to the
actual treatment of racial versus "ethnic" minorities in
American society.
Indeed, scholarship already exists that does see
the need for basic distinctions between these two
categories, and that would not define race as just
another aspect of ethnicity. Perhaps, Oliver C. Cox in
Caste, Class and Race (1948) comes closest with what he
has to say about the matter:
The dominant group is intolerant of those
whom it can define as anti-social, while
it holds race prejudice against those
whom it can define as subsocial. . . .
Thus, we are ordinarily intolerant of
Jews but prejudiced against Negroes. In
other words, the dominant group or ruling
class does not like the Jew at all, but
likes the Negro in his place. To put it
still another way, the condition of its
liking the Jew is that he cease being a
Jew and voluntarily become like the
generality of society, while the
condition of liking the Negro is that he
cease trying to become like the
generality of society and remain
contentedly a Negro.
281
We want to assimilate the Jews, but
they, on the whole, refuse with probable
justification to be assimilated; the
Negroes want to be assimilated, but we
refuse to let them assimilate. (400-401)
(Emphasis mine.)
However, Sollors's work ignores this line of
argument, which leads him into a number of other
questionable formulations on ethnicity. But before
discussing those positions, I would like to consider one
of the theses in Beyond Ethnicity that is an important
addition to his HEAEG essay. Sollors maintains that the
essential character of America is the continuous push
and pull between consent and descent. For the author,
both are "relatively neutral" terms, which I interpret
to mean that he does not see these words as being
politically or ideologically weighted. Descent
relations "are those defined by anthropologists as
relations of 'substance' (by blood or nature); consent
relations describe those of 'law' or 'marriage'" (6).
More specifically, descent "emphasizes our positions as
heirs, our hereditary qualities, liabilities and
entitlements," while on the other hand, consent
"stresses our abilities as mature free agents and
'architects of our fates' to choose our spouses, our
destinies, and our political systems" (6). The history
of America, according to Sollors, has been the repeated
struggle and victory of consent over descent, that is
282
democracy versus hereditary privilege, freedom as
opposed to feudalistic despotism, the individual against
rigid class boundaries, and so on. These are
quintessentially American themes that define the
national identity. And "ethnicity," for Sollors, is the
ultimate paradigm of American-ness, in that the struggle
*
of "ethnic" peoples to be accepted as American is the
archetype of the battle between consent and descent.
These "ethnic" people, and here Sollors must mean only
immigrants, elect to assume this new identity and life,
while also renouncing the shackles of the Old World
(class, kings, poverty, superstition); they try to
succeed on their own merit rather than depend on
hereditary privilege. As he puts it:
we have to develop a terminology that
goes beyond the organicist imagery of
roots and can come to terms with the
pervasiveness and inventiveness of
syncretism. Seen this way, the very
assertion of the ethnic dimensions of
American culture can be understood as
part of the rites and rituals of this
land, as an expression of the persistent
conflict between consent and descent.
. . . And the rhetoric in which this
conflict is expressed . . . [is] the
symbolic construction of American kinship
[that] has helped to weld Americans of
diverse origins into one people, even if
the code at times requires the
exaggeration of differences. (15)
It might be useful to point out here that Sollors's
idea of consent and descent is in turn based upon
another assumption, that American culture is a syncretic
one, composed of diverse origins melded into a whole.
In other words, although he avoids these outdated terms,
the author's premise is that America is a "melting pot"
of "all nations and races".9 This assumption is too
simplistic a restatement of a similar position advanced
by theorists such as Milton Gordon, who suggests in
Assimilation in American Life (1964) that "structural
pluralism" is a more accurate description of American
society (159). For Gordon, America consists of a number
of subsocieties or "pots" distinct from one another and
from the dominant culture (130), wherein ethnics
maintain primary associations with their own groups
through family, church, and so on while only interacting
with Anglo-American society in the areas of jobs,
schools, and "the minimal duties of political
citizenship" (131). This pluralistic model seems to
argue against the concept of America as this vast
melting pot that eventually washes out alien difference
to convert all immigrants into erstwhile Americans.
Interestingly enough, however, Gordon's actual
explanation of what he means by "subsocieties" is
complicated by the fact that it contains numerous
references to the melting pot; the author indeed uses
"pots" interchangeably with "subsocieties." Gordon has
284
this to say about religion: "Protestant, Catholic, and
Jew" are "in the process of melting down the white
nationality background communities" (130). He also
writes that certain racial groups "are not allowed to
melt structurally" (130); or that "All these containers,
as they bubble along in the fires of American life . . .
may be called a 'multiple melting pot'" (131). In a
I
sense, Gordon is trying to have the best of both worlds. |
I
The concept of structural pluralism is incompatible with
the idea of a melting pot society. However, he is
unwilling to give up the idea that America is a melting
pot, and so tries to fuse that image with evidence that
actually refutes that notion, evidence that he
discovered himself. Gordon's final conclusion appears
to me to derive not so much from what can be observed
from actual societal conditions but from his reluctance
to abandon this notion of the melting pot; not
surprisingly his conclusion is that all ethnics will
eventually assimilate into the dominant Anglo-American
culture. Both Sollors and Gordon seem unable to discard
this concept of America as one people living in harmony;
the rhetoric of the melting pot creeps back into their
writing even though it is an idea that appears to be
based largely on faith. Indeed, evidence points in the
opposite direction. And ethnic and racial
285
stratification and division in American society is shown
to exist and is deepening, according to writers such as
Richard Thompson.
More specifically, Sollors's concept of consent and
descent rests upon the a priori assumption that America i
j
is a melting pot, and upon the assertion that the ;
I
concept is "neutral." However, I suggest that consent
i
I
and descent is not a neutral idea, but is indeed
ideologically charged. The issue here is not with what
most people believe' the culture to be, but whether this
conception of the forces that drive Anglo-American
culture is an accurate depiction of history, or whether
it is itself only a way of speaking that obfuscates the
material underpinnings of social structure and
processes. Here, my interest is in a national mythology
that defines the animus of a country as the desire for
freedom, democracy, and so forth while actually denying
those principles to people of color, and this through
the very institutions that supposedly actualize those
principles for all citizens. In Beyond Ethnicity.
Sollors mentions the "paradoxes of American
republicanism" and notes that many perceive it as
"hypocrisy" (38). However, the words— paradox and
hypocrisy— signify moral laxity, but they do so in such
a way that forgive it. The apprehension of hypocrisy
286
critically depends also on seeing the capability of
goodness that for now one has failed to achieve; it is
that accompanying recognition of possible beatitude,
that glimmer of hope dancing in attendance to the throes
of guilt, which accounts for the strange binarism that
is the apprehension of hypocrisy. One's knowledge of
having failed contains the conviction that success is
only a matter of determination; after all, one is able
to recognize hypocrisy only because goodness is also
there. Hence, the awareness of hypocrisy is the ability
of the mind to apprehend a paradox; it is never simply a
knowledge of transgression, but always also the
attendant feeling that one is good, that one just has to
wake up and perceive the incongruities between statement
and behavior and all would be well. However, this
belief does not necessarily translate into action, or
lead to substantive changes. As critics of Western
capitalism have noted, the issue is more than a
momentary moral lapse but has to do with the economic
and socio-ideological structure of the West that is now
in effect a global economy and culture.
In Sollors's text, the idea of consent and descent
is a term that describes rather than critiques. This
term becomes another cultural trope, another way to re
tell an old fabula about freedom and egalitarianism. It
287
is a term that can have a meaningfulness only within
this cultural context. For it is a semic code that
signifies in one fell swoop not just the idea of America
as outlined by Sollors; indeed, this idea is one in a
signifying chain that makes sense because it includes
also the notions of rebirth, independence,
individualism, self-reliance, initiative, and so forth.
In other words, the concept of consent and descent
requires also the belief that this is a democratic,
egalitarian society, in which every individual has equal
opportunity to put his merits to work; in short, every
one has a choice. Indeed, a capitalistic, consumer
society is based upon the belief of choice. However,
again, it is questionable whether this is an accurate
description of society. Richard Thompson writes:
Those of us in Western societies are
accustomed to thinking about behavior in
individual, cost-benefit terms. We live
in societies in which the notion of
"choice," in both economic and political
arenas, is the ultimate justification of
capitalistic democracies. . . . Such
individual choice is basic to our
cultural morality, and thus we often view
individual entitlements . . . as the
outcome of self-interested individuals
making choices. (43)
However, does "choice" really mean what we think it
means? In Thompson's view:
my decision to work or not to work is
hardly an individual matter, but one
that is shared by . . . a class of
288
individuals who, lacking ownership of
the means necessary for life, and thus
dependent upon selling their labor power
to sustain that life, are, in a very
sense, coerced into their decision.
Furthermore, it cannot be argued that
this class of individuals . . . could
have chosen to become owners of capital
rather then sellers of labor power,
since the structure of capitalism . . .
makes such a choice impossible.
Capital, viewed not as an attribute held
by certain individuals, but as a social
relation among individuals, is the
structural presupposition that governs
my (and millions of others') individual
choices. (44-45)
And yet, for this socio-economic structure to
continue, enough people must truly believe that they are
independent and free. The inculcation and protection of
this and accompanying beliefs can only succeed if one
fails to see the ideological import, if one accepts
these beliefs as being on the whole right, natural,
fair, and what America is all about. The prime method
for the accomplishment of this inculcation is through
the various institutions of culture, or in Althusser's
words, ideological state apparatuses ("State
Apparatuses" 127-186), one of which is the production of
literature, and what must also be the accompanying
critique of that production. Sollors articulates the
purpose of Beyond Ethnicity as the study of "ethnic"
literature for what it can tell "newcomers, outsiders,
and insiders . . . the often complicated mental
289
construction of American codes . . . of the 'rites and
rituals, the customs and taboos of this country'” (7-8).
Such a goal, however, would serve to recirculate the
dominant ideology if there is not also a re-examination
of the assumptions upon which this goal is based. It is
Sollors's attitude of unquestioning belief in the
premise that this is at heart a democratic society which
allows him to ignore the issue of the ideology and
history of race in the construction of his definition of
ethnicity, and generally, to avoid contextualizing the
literature he studies within a socio-economic and
I
ideological framework. j
I
i
Indeed, Sollors ignoring the implications of some |
i
of his statements lead to his position on race. In a
chapter entitled "Romantic Love, Arranged Marriages, and
Indian Melancholy," he writes: "one may say that the
central conflict in Indian-white relations has been that
between legitimacy and republicanism" (102). He
attempts to explain what he means by "legitimacy and
republicanism" with an analysis of various stories and
stage plays popular during the 18th- and 19th-centuries.
His discussion is complex and often insightful, but is
clearly restricted to an examination of the use of the
Indian as an artistic metaphor; he draws no further
evaluations from these metaphors, neither does he
address the fact that while these plays and stories were
being produced, Native Americans were in "real" life
being slowly killed off. Indeed, the treatment of
Native Americans was rationalized with the argument that
they were a savage and inferior race, and is a good
illustration of what Oliver Cox would term as racism.
Sollors's approach, however, is carefully unmindful of
race. To him, Americans saw their attempts to settle
the land as both the republican fight against Old World
aristocracies and as the battle to bring the civilizing
influence of Europe to the heathens. In the first
instance, Indians represented descent and long
residence; that is, they were the corrupt European
aristocracies. But the early Americans also saw
themselves as defying "the parental authority of the
mother country by invoking the spirit of the Indian and
by symbolically 'acting Indian' in clothing and military
strategy" (102). So that, in the popular consciousness,
in a strange re-enactment of the Oedipal impulse,
Indians paradoxically stood for what needed to be
refuted as well as what was desirable. Indians were, on
the one hand, depicted as noble savages, doomed to
extinction; but, they were also paradoxically seen as
spiritually pure, as "nature" itself. And writers cast
these combined images of pathos (the vanishing Indian)
291
and the noble savage, in Sollors's words, as "a parent
figure, an adopted ancestor who could convey curses and
blessings and choose successors— which makes these
successors chosen people" (123). Hence, these noble
ancestors, before vanishing forever, would consecrate
their replacement (the white man) as the new heirs to
this promised land. The author's suggestion is an
insightful one when he writes that these texts were "a
national allegory . . . connected with the search for
republican legitimacy in the new world (123).
This search for legitimacy, however, was done at
great cost to the indigenous people and culture.
Sollors's text, his fabula of consent and descent in
effect recounts the destruction of a civilization.
However, his analysis of Indian stories and plays
betrays no awareness that these various recastings of
the Native American, this drama of legitimacy versus
republicanism, is cultural imperialism, the
appropriation and colonization of a people and their
history. Native Americans were transformed into
metaphors (of nature, purity, decadence, descent, the
noble savage) in service to the construction of a
national identity. And in this matter, they had no
choice. This chapter on Native Americans refuses them
292
any substance as people while assiduously avoiding any
acknowledgement of their victimization.10
Sollors's conceptualization of race and "ethnicity"
leads him into another position which I find
questionable. "Ethnicity" is proffered as an intrinsic
characteristic of American-ness, which is to say all
Americans are "ethnic," even white Americans. However,
Sollors avoids assuming any definite stance on this
issue by just presenting the various opinions on this
point, and then by expanding the conception of
"ethnicity" as otherness to include poets, bohemians,
and so on. At one point, he notes that the etymology of
the word "ethnic" denotes "heathen," "non-Christian," or
"gentile," that is, the "other." He writes: "The
contrastive terminology of ethnicity thus reveals a
point of view which changes according to the speaker who
uses it" (25). Citing Fredrik Barth's Ethnic Groups and
Boundaries (1969), Sollors suggests that the word has
been used by people throughout history to denote the
uniqueness of one's own people. His implication is
apparently that this too is a "neutral" term, merely an
affirmation of community. At one point, he explains
that "ethnic" grouping is "a positively charged
antithesis" (28), which may be accurate, but is surely
also an attempt to decontextualize the whole issue. In
other words, Sollors's goal is to take the sting out of
the word.11
His stance is in opposition to Gloria Anzaldua's
posture in Making Face, Making Soul. For while Sollors
tries to effect a universal rapprochement by saying that
everyone is after all the same, Anzaldua's attitude is
one of a proud independence, a separation of sorts from
a culture that names her as the inferior and the alien.
What both fail to take into account, however, is that
the issue goes beyond what the individual should do,
important as that may be, but that the issue is with the
ability of the dominant ideology to effect its will, and
to elide or camouflage the means by which it does so.
From that perspective, neither authorial position
succeeds in dissolving the prevailing configurations of
power. Sollors's lack of position, or rather, his
seeming lack of a position on white ethnicity, only
supports the existing modes of domination, for it allows
crucial aspects of the present structure to remain
unexamined. The problem is not with whether one is
called a woman or a Jew or a Yankee, but with what the
culture, this ideologically saturated collective
consciousness, signifies those words to mean in terms of
self-esteem, occupation, autonomy, identity, and so on.
From a slightly different perspective, Sollors's seeming
294
lack of a definitive position on this issue of Anglo-
Saxon as ethnics perhaps indicates a continuing dis-ease
with the whole notion of naming certain Americans as
"ethnic" people. Jews, Rumanians, Italians can be
thought of as such, but the consciousness, inculcated in
the images and tropes of the socio-ideological
environment, "naturally" shrinks away from equating
ethnic with Anglo-American. Instead, Sollors's reaction
is to expand the definition of "ethnicity" until it
includes every conceivable group in American society,
which in effect makes the word useless. This
vacillation between largesse and reluctance finally
serves its purpose, for the center remains unnamed,
beyond knowing. By refusing to be said, choosing
instead to try to maintain its power by obscuring its
presence, the center maintains its domination.
Sollors's purpose in Beyond Ethnicity may have been
to rewrite the definition of what is American so as to
include all races and cultures. His vision of this new
community is informed by the best of intentions, and if
true would surely be one in which there would be no need
for the demarcations of race or gender. Consent and
I
descent, however, is not our common history. And while |
i
the promised land may have become reality for one such
as Mary Antin, the same could not be said for the
295
millions of those who have been disenfranchised and
alienated because of their gender or their race. One
might indeed say that the issue has to do with whose
version of history one is to believe. Partial truth
moreover is no truth at all, although it is a history of
sorts. Sollors's version of "ethnicity" seeks to
sanitize and "whiten" people of color— after all,
everyone is "ethnic." Race is "ethnics" in blackface,
so to speak, and ultimately, of minor consequence.
Hence, his thesis of consent and descent is far from
neutral; for his very inability to perceive the
essential differences between race and ethnicity, as
well as the material reality that grounds racism, is an
ideological statement. No text, including this project,
is free from its socio-ideological moorings. Sollors's
position on race and ethnicity can be seen as part of
his ahistorical and uncritical acceptance of this
picture of America as a democratic, egalitarian society.
I cannot help but contextualize Sollors's remarks
with the story of a Frederick Douglass or a Maxine Hong
Kingston, both of whom could understand so well the
self-hate that could come from one's "ethnicity." Then,
there is also the self-erasure of a Jade Snow Wong to
consider. While Sollors speaks of an all-encompassing
sense of community, these authors recount the
296
experiences of dispossession, not simply in socio
economic terms, but in terms of identity. If there is a
sense of community with an America that a Sollors would
recognize, then, it is obtained through the loss of the
possibility of achieving some sense of an authentic
self, if that is possible at all. In "Towards a Black
Aesthetic," Hoyt W. Fuller echoes the sentiments of many
writers-of-color when he writes:
Central to the problem of the
irreconcilable conflict between the black
writer and the white critic is the
failure of recognition of a fundamental
and obvious truth of American life— that
the two races are residents of two
separate and naturally antagonistic
worlds. No manner of well-meaning
rhetoric about "one country" and "one
people," and even about the two races'
long joint-occupancy of this troubled
land, can obliterate the high, thick
dividing walls which hate and history
have erected— and maintained— between
them. . . . Black Americans are, for all
practical purposes, colonized in their
native land. (7) (Emphasis mine.)
Writing nearly twenty years after Fuller, Bharati
Mukherjee would perhaps agree with this conception of
American society. To her protagonists, whether they
live in New York or Sioux Falls, life is contending with
"the tyranny of the American dream," according to the
protagonist in "A Wife's Story" (The Middleman 24). In
just one of the many monologues that have come to
constitute her life in this American melting pot, she
297
rages to herself: "First, you don't exist. Then you're
invisible. Then you're funny. Then you're disgusting.
Insult, my American friends tell me, is a kind of
acceptance" (24). The protagonist never reconciles
herself to the insult-as-welcome theory of community,
but spends time pondering the vast inconsistencies of
American culture. To her, the country is frenetic,
self-involved, and fractured. Its reactions to those
who are not mainstream is indicative of the persistent
dis-ease America feels towards them, and this despite
the apparent commitment to this idea of America as one
people composed of all races and nations. The only
sense of community which the protagonist in "A Wife's
Story" can find resides somehow in the relation felt
towards cultural images: McDonald's, 40 million served;
immense supermarkets, endless aisles; car dealerships
with rows upon rows of merchandise; over a hundred t.v.
channels; Michael Jackson. In many of Mukherjee's
stories, America is not so much one community as it is
one huge shopping network.
For writers-of-color, one fundamental concern is
with the definition of self within a community, with the
identity as the Other. Moreover, we must not allow
others to presume to know our story, history, or future.
It is surely these considerations that underpin the work
298
of writers as diverse as Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria
Anzaldua, Trinh Minh-ha, Malcolm X, W. E. B. DuBois, and
Maxine Hong Kingston. They seek to disrupt the dominant
cultural mold, and the seamless history-making of Anglo-
America. In short, they attempt to speak the self.12
Such a goal, of course, is not without its difficulties.
And although I cannot consider the various ways that
writers-of-color have tried to engage with the issue of
race, identity, and community within this socio-
ideological environment, I would like to explore some of
those issues and difficulties with a discussion of the
collection of essays entitled The New Negro (1925),
edited by Alain Locke.
On the whole, I would agree with Houston Baker's
assessment of the Harlem Renaissance, which is that it
is a supremely self-conscious move to contradict what
America had to say about black people. It was moreover
an attempt to wrest the making of history from the hands
of a white America, an attempt at self-determination in
the profoundest sense. As Baker observes in Modernism
and the Harlem Renaissance (1987): "The birth of such a
self is never simply a coming into being, but always,
also, a release from a BEING POSSESSED" (56). If the
desire for freedom and self-definition could ever really
299
be concisely documented, then The New Negro was such a
document. Again, quoting from Baker:
A nation's emergence is always
predicated on the construction of a field
of meaningful sounds. Just as infants
babble through a welter of phones to
achieve the phonemics of a native
language, so conglomerates of human
beings seeking national identity engage
myriad sounds in order to achieve a
vocabulary of national possibilities.
The codes, statutes, declarations,
articles, amendments, and constitution of
colonial America, for example. (71)
Most importantly, in Baker's words: "Simply stated,
the inner objective is to found a nation of Afro-
Americans on the basis of race" (79). And indeed,
according to Alain Locke in his introductory essay, "The
New Negro":
This deep feeling of race is at present
the mainspring of Negro life. It seems
to be the outcome of the reaction to
proscription and prejudice; an attempt,
fairly successful on the whole, to
convert a defensive into an offensive
position, a handicap into an incentive.
(11)
Locke sees Harlem as the new "race capital" (7),
and the new black man as someone who refuses to be known
as a ward of the state. His introductory essay in
effect announces the African American's "spiritual
Coming of Age" (16), whose new awareness of himself is a
"rising tide of color" that extends to an
"internationalism" which aims to "recapture contact with
300
the scattered peoples of African derivation" (14-15).
Indeed, one of the most important roles for the Negro,
as a "modern people," is their "mission" of aiding the
development of Africa. W. E. B. DuBois was instrumental
in initiating the first of several Pan-African
Congresses. The essays, stories, and poems in The New
Negro are intended to celebrate the African American.
For instance, Albert C. Barnes, in "Negro Art and
America," speaks about "his luxuriant and free
imagination" and the contributions of African Americans
to America. There are also essays on jazz, literature,
dance, Tuskegee, Howard, and so on. This collection
concludes with DuBois's essay, "The Negro Mind Reaches
Out," which is an account of European colonialism in
Africa, and the future of that continent (385-414). In
some ways, the implications contained in DuBois's work
contradict the sentiments expressed in some of the other
essays in this collection, but it is this contradiction
that affords an opportunity for a critical re
consideration of The New Negro.
Appearing in 1925, perhaps, one of the most radical
revisionings that this collection attempts is to assert
that the black community is a community based upon race.
Not only Locke's essay, but for example, William Stanley
Braithwaite's "The Negro in American Literature," is
301
also predicated upon the notion of a black race. In
Baker's view, the subversiveness of these writings lies
in that assertion; he suggests that "even with its [The
New Negro1 racially compelled character, it is still
insurgency" (81). The Other voices contained in this
collection, through sounds that are so different from
that of white America, through the mastery and
deformation of form, and the expansion of aesthetic
possibility, are a disruption of the American polity.
While I agree with Baker's stance in principle, his
endorsement of this work does represent a regression of
sorts. Anthony Appiah in "The Uncompleted Argument: Du
Bois and the Illusion of Race" (1986), points out in
some detail that "race" is an illusion, a
cultural/ideological construct that has no scientific
basis. His essay on DuBois's own problems with the
concept of race is highly informative. According to
Appiah's study of DuBois's "The Conservation of Races"
(1890-1919) and Dusk of Dawn (1940), DuBois was never
quite able to argue himself out of a biological notion
of race. In Appiah's words:
Even in the passage that follows
DuBois's explicit disavowal of the
scientific concept of race, the
references to "common history — the "one
long memory," the "social heritage of
slavery"— only lead us back into the now
familiar move of substituting a
sociohistorical conception of race for
302
the biological one; but that is simply to
bury the biological conception below the
surface, not to transcend it . . . he
[DuBois] never completed the escape from
race. (34-35)
Indeed, neither do the other authors in The New
Negro. Albert Barnes in his study of Negro art writes
that: "It is a sound art because it comes from a
primitive nature upon which a white man's education has
never been harnessed" (19). He assures the reader that
the African American is by nature a poet, for "his daily
habits of thought, speech and movement are flavored with
the picturesque, the rhythmic, and the euphonious" (20).
And of Negro spirituals, Locke writes: "The Spirituals
are really the most characteristic product of the race
genius yet in America" (199).
Baker's praise for this collection of essays is
understandable. However, because he neglects to state
clearly that the notion of race is a social construct, I
think that the reader might very well be left with the
impression that Baker himself somehow affirms what these
earlier writers had to say about race. Once again, we
are confronted with the double-bind facing the writer of
color as he or she attempts to address this status of
oppression. While Sollors would elide the issue of race
altogether, Locke or DuBois seemingly could only choose
to affirm the reality of this category of
303
identification, this means of oppression. Moreover,
Locke’s new race consciousness is one that is
fundamentally in keeping with prevailing American
values. The new Negro must repair his "damaged group
psychology" and so gain new pride in himself, but only
so as to gain his objectives, one set of which is
"happily already well formulated, for they are none
other than the ideals of American institutions and
democracy" (10). Still later, Locke writes: "The Negro
mind reaches out as yet to nothing but American wants,
American ideas" (11-12). DuBois is largely in agreement
with Locke when he writes in "Of Our Spiritual
<
Strivings" (1922) that African Americans want: j
i
Work, culture, liberty,— all these we i
need, not singly but together, not
successively but together . . . and all
striving toward that vaster ideal that
swims before the Negro people, the ideal
of human brotherhood, gained through the
unifying ideal of Race. . . . not in
opposition to or contempt for the other
races, but rather in large conformity to
the greater ideals of the American
Republic. (11)
[
For these early writers, the solidarity of race is
not so much to effect a means of opposition to the
American polity as it was to help them achieve inclusion
into that society. The irony here, of course, is that
*
in calling for a community based upon the identity of
race, writers such as Locke only reiterated their own
304
marginality. And, Baker's failure to dissolve the
illusion of race, indeed, the thesis of his text must
consign him to argue for such a "racial" positioning,
only serves to perpetuate these categories of
dispossession. The attention that he pays to the Harlem
Renaissance is warranted, but in choosing to obfuscate
some aspects of that movement, namely the issue of race,
his essay has also slipped into ahistoricity.
Finally, the goals that writers such as Locke and
DuBois wanted the African American to achieve is,
interestingly enough, what Sollors supports. Hence, we
have come full circle; and, early writers-of-color even
as they speak the self yet come too perilously close to
a recent rehabilitative discourse of "ethnicity" that
reinscribes them in existing relations of domination and
control. However, it is surely these cracks in literary
j
and critical narratives that afford us a glimpse of the
master discourse and its desires, just as it is the
telling similitude and relation between what would
appear to be two opposing discourses, that of race and
"ethnicity," which also would illuminate the presence of
the dominant ideology. This study has attempted to
concern itself with precisely the cracks in apparently
seamless narratives, both fictive and academic, with the
assumption being that it is the cracks and
contradictions in those texts which illuminate the
drives of the dominant ideology.
306
Notes
1 The only exception is the work of Immanuel Hsu.
My introduction to him in high school was a watershed in
that here was a Chinese historian, (re)writing, in
English, the history of Sino-Western relations.
2 Mona Etienne and Eleanor Leacock, Women and
Colonization. Anthropological Perspectives (NY: Praeger
Publisher, 1980); Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and
Nationalism in the Third World (London and New Jersey:
Zed Books Ltd., 1986. 1988). Also see Richard H.
Thompson, Theories of Ethnicity. A Critical Appraisal
(NY: Greenwood Press, 1989); Ronald Takaki, Strangers
from a Different Shore (Boston: Little, Brown and Co.,
1989) .
3 Sander L. Gilman’s "Black Bodies, White Bodies:
Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late
Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature" in
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed, "Race." Writing, and
Difference (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
1986) 223-261.
4 Although I disagree with some of Gerald Graff's
conclusions in Professing Literature. An Institutional
History (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1987), I believe
he has accurately described the present system in
language departments as one in which the object is to
stock the shelves of college catalogs with as many
different kinds of course offerings as possible, without
allowing any meaningful or comparative discussion of the
theories being studied. According to Graff, educational
or cultural battles are fought behind the scenes: "They
are exemplified rather than foregrounded by the
department and the curriculum and thus do not become
part of context of the average student's education or
the average professor's professional life" (6).
5 Indeed, interestingly enough, it was not so much
his bid for office but his failure to achieve that sign
of "legitimacy" which carried the crucial message, for
his lack of success was attributed to his racist
politics, which re-affirmed for America its self-
identification as a non-racist, democratic society,
despite the fact that the socio-economic structure
chronically relegates people of color into what Immanuel
Wallerstein terms the "subproletariat."
307
6 Gordon defines an "ethnic” group as: "any
group which is defined or set off by race,
religion, or national origin, or some combination
of these categories" (27).
7 Harold Abramson, Ethnic Diversity in
Catholic America (NY, London: John Wiley, 1973);
Milton Gordon, Assimilation in American Life: The
Role of Race. Religion, and National Origins (NY:
Oxford UP, 1964); Pierre van den Berghe, Race and
Racism. A Comparative Perspective (NY: Wiley,
1967) .
8 St. Jean De Crevecoeur's actual words are:
"He is an American, who, having left behind him all
his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new
ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the
new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds.
. . . Here individuals of all nations are melted
into a new race of men" (547). Of America itself,
De Crevecoeur writes that it is "a new continent; a
modern society. . . . It is not composed, as in
Europe of great lords who possess everything, and
of a herd of people who have nothing. Here are no
aristocratic families, no courts, no kings, no
bishops" (545).
9 Hoyt W. Fuller, in "Towards a Black
Aesthetic," has the following to say about the
white attitude towards the victimization of people
of color in America: "Now the late Langston Hughes
was a favorite target of some of the more
aggressive right-wing pressure groups. . . .
Explaining the opposition to the poem . . . the
school official said that 'no poem by any Negro
author can be considered permissible if it involves
suffering'. . . . Negro life, which is
characterized by suffering imposed by the
maintenance of white privilege in America, must be
denied validity and banished beyond the pale. The
facts of Negro life accuse white people" (5-6).
See Hoyt W. Fuller, "Towards a Black Aesthetic,"
The Black Aesthetic. Addison Gayle, Jr., ed.
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1972).
10 Another example of Sollors's intent to
banish controversy from certain issues can be found
in this paragraph which concludes the section on
whether whites should be considered ethnic: "some
confusions about ethnicity might be illustrated by
308
imagining that the English language had only one
word for sex and for masculinity ('mexinity'?) and
that femininity could at times be discussed as part
of this term (sex) and at other times be defined as
its negative contrast (masculinity). Fortunately,
we don't have 'mexinity', and much as some
Americans may oppose ascriptive sexual identities,
they are generally born as boys and girls. Yet we
do have ethnicity as peoplehood and as otherness in
a country where the phrase 'ethnics alii' can be
heard as a battle cry for diversity in unity" (26).
11 In Native Son, Bigger Thomas is at first
mute, as befitting his role of victim. His life
until the trial has been merely a series of
reactions to the external forces that control him.
But, it is during the trial (which is also the
trial of white society) that true freedom for him
arrives with this ability to articulate, to bring
into conscious form, the meaning of what has
happened and is happening to his life. Facing
imminent execution, he tells Max:
"What I killed for must've been good!"
Bigger*s voice was full of frenzied
anguish. "It must have been good! When
a man kills, it's for something. . . . I
didn't know I was really alive in this
world until I felt things hard enough to
kill for 'em. . . . I can say it now,
'cause I'm going to die. I know what I’m
saying real good and I know how it
sounds. But I feel all right." (392).
309
COWCLOSION
310
When Robert Park and others from the Chicago school
of social studies constructed their theories regarding
ethnicity in the United States, they thought they were
merely undertaking research that would interpret an
essential characteristic of the American spirit. To
them, literary texts such as autobiographies and fiction
could be used to confirm their ideas. And to a large
extent, these academicians epitomized the liberal
tendency of the culture when they opposed the virulent
*
campaign to restrict or even end the influx of "inferior i
I
races," which meant any people who were not Anglo-Saxon.
Writers, such as Werner Sollors, have pointed to the
"contradictory" tendencies in American culture: the
chasm between the expressed desire for a country
composed of all races and nations and the reality of
slavery and continued racist thinking; the attachment to '
(
I
the ideals of equality and the reality of discrimination
(against people of color, women, the aged, children,
etc.). However, as I have suggested, the issue goes
beyond simply a disparity between intention and
execution. To believe that a universal (that is,
American) moral awakening is what is required to carry
out social reform is a Utopian dream that ironically
derives, I think, from the myth of America as the
Promised Land and the people as the Chosen Ones. I say
311
ironically because I think that it is this myth which j
I
I
has also fueled the creation of an acquisitive,
imperialistic, narcissistic America. What is more, the
belief in such a dream absolves us of the need to look
too closely at the culture and its ethos.
From yet another perspective, the contradictions in
i
the culture may not be that at all, but a fatal tango |
that is actually what the center needs to delineate !
I
itself. In other words, the center needs the other; !
indeed, "center," "margins/border" are words that have a j
cultural meaningfulness only because they are parts of a
duality. Hence, transgressive behavior may be roundly
condemned by the respectable elements of American
i
society, yet it is telling that we never seem capable of ;
I
even remotely purging "unacceptable" behavior from our :
i
midst. This idea belongs to a growing body of cultural j
i
critique, and is not new. But perhaps, Peter j
I
I
Stallybrass and Allon White put it most clearly when
they wrote about the construction of this duality:
A recurrent pattern emerges: the
"top" attempts to reject and eliminate
the "bottom" for reasons of prestige and
status, only to discover, not only that
it is in some way frequently dependent
upon that low-Other . . . but also that
the top includes that low symbolically,
as a primary eroticized constituent of
its own fantasy life. The result is a
mobile, conflictual fusion of power,
fear and desire in the construction of
subjectivity: a psychological dependence
312
upon precisely those Others which are
being rigorously opposed and excluded at
the social level. It is for this reason
that what is so socially peripheral is
also so frequently symbolically central.
(5)
If we agree with this conception of Anglo-American
cultural processes, then the liberal agenda (if one can
be so easily identified and named) would seem even more
inadequate for addressing the problems that we now
have. This agenda merely seeks to perfect the ideals
of democracy, freedom, equality and so forth, but
avoids confronting the possibility that these ideals
have a hand in the construction of a racist and sexist,
class society. The liberal attitude is in many
respects itself responsible for a blindness with
regards to the oppression of people of color in this as
well as Third World countries. It is the latter whose
labor and resources are being exploited by Western
global capitalism. Therefore, it appears to be a
misdirection if we conceive of racial and sexual
oppression (among others) as merely the result of an
unfortunate gap between good intentions and practical
application.
The issue rests with the culture itself. And
although I have had to confine this study to a brief
discussion of cultural processes, one of the points
that I would like to stress is the importance for
313
literary studies to arrive at a comprehensive version
of the concept of culture and cultural processes.
Meanwhile, I hope I have adequately indicated the
complexities I see operating through my discussion of
critics such as Fredric Jameson, Mikhail Bakhtin,
Edward Said, Allon White, Peter Stallybrass, Trinh
Minh-ha, and so on. My analysis of liberal
academicians, such as Robert Park, Everett Stonequist,
Werner Sollors, and Oscar Handlin, was an attempt to
understand the complex workings of cultural drives,
wherein liberal tendencies are undermined by oppressive
and exploitative interests or group(s). Similarly, my
interpretation of the work of writers such as Anzia
Yezierska, Edith Eaton, and Maxine Hong Kingston was a
continued exploration of those drives as seen in
fictive narratives. "Marginality" as conceived by Park
and others, and as supposedly revealed in the writings
of Yezierska, and so on, seem problematical to me,
mainly because it elides the presence of the dominant
ideology. I feel that it is not a coincidence for this
idea to have today gained the "centrality" that it has
in cultural and literary studies. We are witnessing
the inclusion of "marginal" voices in academe, and the
blossoming interest in "multiculturalism," and writers
who, like Gloria Anzaldua, would assume with pride the
314
identity of the marginalized. Yet, alongside this
seemingly new cultural renaissance of the black,
yellow, and brown, the economic and political reality
is that people of color make up the majority of the
poor and uneducated. Apparently, the socio-ideological
environment gives us the language with which to speak a
non-reality, the words and images that depict an
egalitarian, democratic America, which is, however,
I
f
untrue. Hence, writers such as Anzaldua and Trinh
endeavor to break up this dream/fantasy production of
the dominant discourse by inserting their own voices
and realities. Yet, the struggle is a difficult one,
as I have tried to illustrate. The dominant discourse
permeates the language, the words, and images that we
might use, undercutting the "liberation" that is
sought. Accordingly, my focus has been an attempt to
1
highlight both academic and fictive writing as forms of i
socially symbolic narrative that have been undercut by
the dominant ideology; indeed, the re-emergence of the
dominant discourse in these narratives is built into
the textual conventions and institutions of both
academic and creative authorship.
In conclusion, the work ahead is apparently filled
with difficulty. I can only say briefly here that in
order to combat the global cultural imperialism that is
315
continuing, we perhaps need to focus much greater
critical attention on Anglo-American culture,
especially with regards to the various formal
institutions of culture production (academe, film,
popular music, writing, the media, etc.). A major area
of concern is in the emergence of concepts such as
"multiculturalism" and the continued (and telling)
inability to deal with the demarcation of "race" and
"ethnicity."
Works Cited
Abramson, Harold. Ethnic Diversity in Catholic
America. NY: John Wiley, 1973.
Albrecht, Lisa and Rose M. Bower. Eds. Bridges
of Power. Women's Multicultural Alliances.
Philadelphia, PA: New Society Publishers,
1990.
Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses." Lenin and Philosophy. NY and
London: Monthly Review Press, 1971. 127-186.
, et al. Reading Capital. Trans. Ben Brewster.
London: New Left Books, 1970.
Antin, Mary. From Plotsk to Boston. 1899.
Introd. Pamela S. Nadell. NY: Marcus Wiener
Publishing, Inc., 1986.
. The Promise Land. 1912. Princeton, New
Jersey: Princeton UP, 1969.
Antonovsky, Aaron. "Toward a Refinement of the
Marginal Man Concept." Social Forces.
35.1(Oct 1959): 57-62.
Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The
New Mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt
Lute Book Co., 1987.
, ed. Making Face. Making Soul/Haciendo Caras.
San Francisco: Aunt Lute Foundation Book,
1990.
Anzaldua, Gloria and Cherrie Moraga. Eds. This
Bridge Called Mv Back. Writings bv Radical
Women of Color. Watertown, MA: Persephone
Press, 1981.
Appiah, Anthony. "The Uncompleted Argument: DuBois and
the Illusion of Race." "Race," Writing and
Difference. Ed. Jr. Henry Louis Gates. Chicago
and London: Chicago UP, 1986. 21-37.
Auden, W. H. "Red Ribbon on a White Horse." The
Dyer's Hand and Other Essays. 1948. NY:
Random House, 1962. 327-334.
317
Baker, Houston A. Modernism and the Harlem
Renaissance. Chicago and London: Chicago UP,
1987.
Bakhtin, M. M. "Discourse in the Novel." The
Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1981. 259-422.
Bakhtin, M. M. and P. N. Medvedev. The Formal
Method in Literary Scholarship. 1928.
Trans. Albert J. Wehrle. Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1985.
Bal, Mieke. Introduction to the Theory of
Narratology. Trans, by Christine van
Boheemen. Toronto: U of Toronto Press, 1988.
Banton, Michael. Race Relations. NY: Basic Books,
1967.
Barnes, Albert C. "Negro Art and America." The New
Negro. 1925. Ed. Alain Locke. NY: Arno Press,
1968. 19-25.
Barth, Fredrik. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. Boston:
Little, Brown, 1969.
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. 1957. Trans.
Annette Lavers. NY: Hill and Wang, 1987.
The Pleasure of the Text. 15th ed. NY: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1989.
Benveniste, Emile. Problems in General
Linguistics. Trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek.
Coral Gables: Univ. of Miami Press, 1971.
Boydston, Jo Ann. Ed. The Poems of John Dewev.
Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1979.
Braithwaite, William Stanley. "The Negro in American
Literature." The New Negro. 1925. Ed. Alain
Locke. NY: Arno Press, 1968. 29-44.
Brantlinger, Patrick. "Victorians and Africans:
The Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark
Continent." "Race," Writing, and Difference.
Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Chicago and
London: The University of Chicago Press,
1986. 185-222.
318
Cahan, Abraham. The Rise of David Levinskv. NY:
Harper & Brothers, 1917.
Cheung, King-Kok & Stan Yogi. Asian American
Literature. An Annotated Bibliography. NY: The
Modern Language Association of America, 1988.
Chu, Limin. The Images of China and the Chinese in the
Overland Monthly. 1868-1875. 1883-1935. San
Francisco: R & E Research Association, 1974.
Chu, Louis. Eat a Bowl of Tea. NY: Lyle Street, 1961.
Cox, Oliver C. Caste. Class, and Race. A Study in j
Social Dynamics. 1948. NY: Monthly Review, 1959. j
Crane, Stephen. The Red Badge of Courage. Ed and
Introd. William M. Gibson. 3rd ed. NY:
Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1895.
De Crevecoeur, St, Jean. "Letter III. What is an
American." Letters from an American Farmer. Ed.
Albert Boni and Charles Boni. NY: Albert and
Charles Boni, 1925.
Davis, Angela. Women. Race, and Class. NY:
Random House, 1981.
Dearborn, Mary V. Love in the Promised Land: The
Story of Anzia Yezierska and John Dewey. NY:
The Free Press, 1988.
Dreiser, Theodore. "Old Rogaum and His Theresa."
The Norton Anthology of American Literature.
Ed. Nina Baym, et al. 2nd ed. 2 vols. NY:
Norton, 1979.
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,
1976.
DuBois, W. E. B. "The Conservation of Races." A
W. E. B. DuBois Reader. 1897. Ed. Andrew G.
Paschal. NY: MacMillan Co., 1971. 19-31.
• Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of j
a Race Concept. 1940. NY: Schocken Books, 1968.
319
. "The Negro Mind Reaches Out." The New Negro.
Ed. Alain Locke. NY: Arno Press and The New York
Press, 1925. 385-414.
. "Of Our Spiritual Strivings." The Soul of Black
Folks. Essays and Sketches. 13th ed. Chicago:
A. C.McClurg & Co., 1922. 1-12.
The Souls of Black Folks. Essays and Sketches.
13th ed. Chicago: A. C.McClurg & Co., 1922.
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory. An
Introduction. Minneapolis: University of
Minneapolis Press, 1983.
Eaton, Edith. "Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an
Eurasian." Independent 66 (21 Jan., 1909): 125-
132.
. "Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an
Eurasian." Independent 66 (12 January 1909): 125-
132.
Etienne, Mona and Eleanor Leacock. Eds. Women and
Colonization. An Anthropological Perspective.
NY: Praeger Publishers, 1980.
t
i
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin. White Masks. Trans. j
Charles L. Markmann. 1952. NY: Grove Press,
1987.
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things. NY: Vintage
Books, 1973.
Frye, Joanne S. "'The Woman Warrior': Claiming
Narrative Power, Recreating Female Selfhood."
Faith of a (Woman) Writer. Eds. Alice
Kessler-Harris and William McBrien. NY:
Greenwood Press, 1988. 293-301.
Fuller, Hoyt W. "Towards a Black Aesthetic." The
Black Aesthetic. Ed. Jr. Addison Gayle. Garden
City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1971. 3-11.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey.
NY: Oxford UP, 1988.
Ed. "Race." Writing and Difference. Chicago and |
London: Chicago UP, 1986. !
320
Gilman, Sander L. "Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward
an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late
Nineteenth-Century Art.” Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Ed. "Race." Writing and Difference. Chicago and
London: Chicago UP, 1986.
Gish, Jen. Typical American. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1991.
Golovensky, David I. "The Marginal Man Concept.
An Analysis and Critique." Social Forces
30.3(Mar 1952):333-339.
Gordon, Milton. Assimilation in American Life: The
Role of Race. Religion, and National Origins. NY:
Oxford UP, 1964.
Gossett, Thomas F. Race. The History of an Idea in
America. Dallas: Southern Methodist UP, 1963.
Graff, Gerald. Professing Literature. An
Institutional History. Chicago and London:
Chicago UP, 1987.
Green, Arnold W. "A Re-examination of the
Marginal Man Concept." Social Forces
26.2(Dec 1947):167-171.
Guha, Ranajit. Ed. Subaltern Studies I. Writings on
South Asian History and Society. NY and Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1982.
Handlin, Oscar. Foreword. Mary Antin. The
Promise Land. 1912. Princeton, New Jersey:
Princeton UP, 1969. v-xv.
. The Uprooted. 1951. 2nd ed. Boston:
Little, Brown and Company, 1973.
, ed. Children of the Uprooted. NY: George
Braziller, 1966i
Henriksen, Louise Levitas. Anzia Yezierska: A
Writer’s Life. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP,
1988.
Hong Kingston, Maxine. China Men. NY: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1980.
Tripmaster Monkey. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989.
321
. The Woman Warrior. NY: Vintage Books, 1977.
Hughes, Everett C. "Social Change and Status
Protest: An Essay on the Marginal Man."
Phvlon 10.1(1949):58-65.
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious.
Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1981.
Jayawardena, Kumari. Feminism and Nationalism in
the Third World. London and New Jersey: Zed
Books Ltd., 1986.
Johnson, James Weldon. The Autobiography of an Ex-
Colored Man. 1927. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961.
Kaplan, Robert B. "Writing in a
Multilingual/Multicultural Context: What's
Contrastive about Contrastive Rhetoric?" The
Writing Instructor 10.1(Fall 1990):7-18.
Kincaid, Jamaica. Lucv. NY: Farrar Straux Giroux,
1990.
King, Lourdes Miranda. "Puertorriquenas in the United
States: The Impact of Double Discrimination."
Ronald Takaki, ed. From Different Shores.
Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity in America.
NY: Oxford UP, 1987. 192-196.
Kogawa, Joy. Obasan. Boston: David R. Godine, 1982.
Lapchick, Richard E. and Stephanie Urdang.
Oppression and Resistance: The Struggle of
Women in Southern Africa. Westport:
Greenwood, 1982.
Lewishon, Ludwig. Up Stream. NY: Boni, and
Liveright, 1922.
Locke, Alain, ed. The New Negro. Studies in American
Negro Life. NY: Albert & Charles Boni, 1925.
Lorde, Audre. "African-American Women and the
Black Diaspora." Bridges of Power. Women's
Multicultural Alliances. Eds. Lisa Albrecht
and Rose M. Bower. Philadelphia, PA: New
Society Publisher, 1990. 206-209.
322
. "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the
Master's House." Sister Outsider. Trumansburg,
NY: The Crossing Press, 1980. 111-113. I
i
f
Mernissi, Fatima. Beyond the veil: Male-Female
Dynamics in a Modern Muslim Society.
Cambridge: Schenkman, 1975.
Morton, Leah. I Am a Woman and A Jew. Introd.
Ellen M. Umansky. 1926. NY: Markus Wiener
Publishing, 1986.
Mukerji, Dhan Gopal. Caste and Outcast. NY: E.P.
Dutton & Co., 1923.
Mukherjee, Bharati. Darkness. NY: Penguin, 1985.
. "A Wife's Story." The Middleman and Other
Stories. NY: Fawcett Crest, 1988. 23-41.
Mura, David. Turning Japanese. Memoirs of a
Sansei. NY: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1991.
Murray, Gilbert. The Rise of the Greek Epic. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1987.
Ngugi, wa Thiong'o. A Grain of Wheat. London:
Heinemann, 1968.
Norris, Christopher. Deconstruction: Theory and
Practice. London and New York: Methuen,
1982.
Okada, John. No-No Bov. Seattle and London: U of
Washington Press, 1990. (1957).
Olney, James. "Autobiography and the Cultural Moment."
Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical.
Ed. James Olney. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980.
3-27.
Park, Robert E. "Human Migration and the Marginal
Man." The American Journal of Sociology 6
(May 1928): 881-893.
Pearson, Charles H. National Life and Character: A
Forecast. London: Macmillan, 1893.
323
Pellicani, Luciano. Gramsci: An Alternative
Communism? Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution
Press, 1981.
Persons, Stow. Ethnic Studies at Chicago 1905-
1945. Urbana and Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1987.
Reed, Ishmael. Mumbo Jumbo. NY: Macmillan
Publishing Co., 1972.
Ringer, Benjamin B. and Elinor R. Lawless. Race,
Ethnicity and Society. NY: Routledge, 1989.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. NY: Vintage Books,
1979.
Santayana, George. The Last Puritan. NY: Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1936.
de Saussure, Ferdinand. Course in General Linguistics.
Trans. Wade Baskin. NY: McGraw-Hill, 1966.
Saveth, Edward N. American Historians and
European Immigrants, 1875-1925. NY: Columbia
UP, 1948.
Schoen, Carol. "Anzia Yezierska: New Light on the
'Sweatshop Cinderella'." MELUS 7.3 (Fall
1980): 3-11.
. Anzia Yezierska. Boston: Twayne Publishers,
1982.
Silverman, Kaja. The Subject of Semiotics. NY: Oxford
UP, 1983.
Smith, Sidonie. A Poetics of Women's Autobiography:
Marqinalitv and the Fictions of Self-
Representation . Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana UP, 1987.
Sollors, Werner. Beyond Ethnicity. Consent and
Descent in American Culture. NY: Oxford UP,
1986.
_. The Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic
Groups. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1980.
324
Sone, Monica. Nisei Daughter. Seattle and London: U
of Washington Press, 1987. (1953).
Stallybrass, Peter and Allon White. The Politics
and Poetics of Transgression. NY: Cornell
UP, 1986.
Stonequist, Everett. The Marginal Man: A Study in
Personality and Culture Conflict. NY:
Russell & Russell, 1937.
Sugimoto, Etsu Inagaki. A Daughter of the Narikin.
NY: Doubleday, 1932.
. A Daughter of the Nohfu. NY: Doubleday, 1935.
A Daughter of a Samurai. NY: Doubleday, Doran &
Co., 1929.
Grandmother 0 Kyo. NY: Doubleday, 1940.
Takaki, Ronald. Iron Cages. Race and Culture in
Nineteenth Century America. NY: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1979.
_. Strangers from a Different Shore. A History
of Asian Americans. Boston: Little, Brown
and Company, 1989.
Thernstrom, Stephan, Ann Orlov, Oscar Handlin. Eds.
Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups.
Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1980.
Thompson, Richard H. Theories of Ethnicity. A
Critical Appraisal. NY: Greenwood Press,
1989.
Trinh, T. Minh-Ha. Woman Native Other.
Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP,
1989.
Turner, Frederick. The Frontier in American History
NY: H. Holt & Co., 1920.
van den Berghe, Pierre. Race and Racism: A Comparative
Perspective. NY: Wiley, 1967.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World-Svstem:
Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the
325
European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century.
NY: Academic Press, 1974.
Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society. 1958. NY:
Columbia UP, 1983.
Wolfe, George C. The Colored Museum. NY:
Broadway Play Publishing Inc., 1987.
Wong, Jade Snow. Fifth Chinese Daughter. NY: Harper &
Brothers, 1950. (1945).
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. NY: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1929.
Wright, Richard. Native Son. NY: Harper & Row
Publishers, Inc., 1940.
Yezierska, Anzia. All I Could Never Be. NY: Brewer,
Warren & Putnam, 1932.
_ _ Arrogant Beggar. NY: Doubleday, Page,
1927.
_ _ _. Bread Givers. NY: Doubleday, Page, 1925.
_ _ _. Children of Loneliness. New York &
London: Funk & Wagnalls, 1923.
_ _ _. Hungry Hearts. Boston and New York: Houghton
Mifflin, 1920.
_ _ _. The Open Cage: An Anzia Yezierska
Collection. Ed. Alice Kessler Harris. NY:
Persea Books, 1979.
_ _ _. Red Ribbon on a White Horse. NY:
Scribners, 1950.
_ _ _. Salome of the Tenements. NY: Boni &
Liveright, 1923.

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

Signing identity: Rethinking U.S. poetry, acts of translating American Sign Language, African American, and Chicano poetry and the language of silence

PDF

Fracture subjects on the margins of identity: Race, gender, class, and sexuality in colonial and postcolonial texts

PDF

Suspicious narrative: The assassination of JFK and American way of not-knowing

PDF

Sexual Parody In American Comedic Film And Literature, 1925-1948

PDF

The real and the ideal worlds of Virginia Woolf

PDF

The will to be a writer: Caroline Gordon, Flannery O'Connor and Cecil Dawkins and influence among Southern women writers

PDF

The heroine's mother: The plot of the older woman in nineteenth-century English fiction

PDF

Collectibles, Fetishes, And Hybrid Objects: Object Discourses And Syncretic Female Identity In Recent Cross-Racial North American Women'S Representation

PDF

The imperial family domesticity and nationalism in the Victorian novel

PDF

Machismo in twentieth century American fiction

PDF

A study of Joseph Conrad's interpretation of character

PDF

Voices in the mirror: Sacrifice and the theater of the body in the dramatic monologues of Ai and Frank Bidart

PDF

Facing the camera: Dickens, photography, and the anxiety of representation

PDF

Samuel Butler's changing attitudes toward Christianity and the church

PDF

England's attitude toward American literature as expressed in some of the British periodicals between the years 1821 and 1861

PDF

Gossip, letters, phones: The scandal of female networks in film and literature

PDF

Lesbian identities, daily occupations, and health care experiences

PDF

Cointegration and the demand for crude petroleum

PDF

Self-reflexivity and minority politics in contemporary American literature and performance

PDF

The literary indebtedness of Arnold Bennett to George Gissing

Asset Metadata

Creator Hsu, Ruth Yvonne (author)

Core Title Race, ethnicity, and the ideology of marginality

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag literature, American,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor Cheng, Vincent J. (committee chair), Gustafson, Thomas (committee member), Kincaid, James R. (committee member), McKenna, Teresa (committee member), Thorne, Barrie (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c20-242375

Unique identifier UC11255685

Identifier DP23169.pdf (filename),usctheses-c20-242375 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier DP23169.pdf

Dmrecord 242375

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Hsu, Ruth Yvonne

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA