Reconstituting Americans: Liberal Multiculturalism and Identity Difference in Post-1960s Literature

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Reconstituting Amer icans

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Reconstituting Amer icans Liberal Multiculturalism and Identity Difference in Post-1960s Literature

Megan Obourn

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RECONSTITUTING AMERICANS

Copyright © Megan Obourn, 2011. All rights reserved. First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010 Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0-230–11247–6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Obourn, Megan. Reconstituting Americans : liberal multiculturalism and identity difference in post-1960s literature / Megan Obourn. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-230-11247-6 1. American literature—Minority authors—History and criticism. 2. Multiculturalism in literature. 3. Identity (Psychology) in literature. 4. American literature—20th century—History and criticism. 5. American literature—21st century—History and criticism. 6. Citizenship in literature. 7. Liberalism in literature. 8. Cultural pluralism in literature—United States. I. Title. PS153.M56O26 2011 810.9'920693—dc22

2011005481

Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: August 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction: The Liberal Multicultural Paradox and Aesthetics of Internal Distantiation 1 2 3 4

vii 1

Psychic Distantiation: Audre Lorde, Traumatic Formalism, and New Social Movement Identities

25

Hybrid Distantiation: Uses of Sexuality in the Fiction of Arturo Islas

57

Inter(national) Distantiation: Jamaica Kincaid, Reginald McKnight, and the Cosmopolitan Novel

83

Academic Investments in Liberal Multiculturalism: Bharati Mukherjee’s Representational versus Distantiative Aesthetics

123

Coda: Internal Distantiation in the 21st Century

157

Appendix: Teaching and Research on Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine and The Holder of the World

165

Notes

169

Bibliography

205

Index

221

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Acknowledgments

More people than I can acknowledge here have contributed to my thinking and scholarship over the course of writing this book including colleagues, professors, students, and friends both inside and outside the academic institutions with which I am and have been affiliated. I am grateful to them all. This book did grow from my doctoral dissertation. For tremendous help at that stage I am indebted to George Shulman, Ross Posnock, Victoria Hattam, Alyson Cole, Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman, Edmund Fong, Robert Gunn, Tania Friedel, Sigmund Shen, and Tom Jacobs of the American Literature and Politics reading group; Roy Perez, Stephanie Hsu, Stefanie Wess, André Carrington and Crystal Parikh of the Critical Race Analysis reading group; the English department dissertation group, which included Asad Raza, Thom Heise, Elizabeth Davis, Tom Jacobs, Michelle Goodin, Robert Gunn, Dave Landreth, and Will Kenton. Thank you also to the writing group organized by Phil Harper and made up of Rich Blint, Richard Kim, Aliyyah AbdurRahman, Matthew Gourlay, Jonathan Shaw, and Carmelo Larose for helping me to think through my use of cosmopolitanism in Chapter 4. I especially need to thank the members of my long-term writing group, Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman, Ifeona Fulani, and Adam Waterman, who not only read and commented on many versions of many chapters but also helped me to better understand my project as a whole. Mary Poovey helped immensely with the early stages of the Audre Lorde chapter. I am also thoroughly indebted to the administrative staff in the New York University English department Alyssa Leal, Susan McKeon, Taeesha Muhammad, Patty Okoh-Esene, and Kristen Elias. I would also like to thank Patricia Lawler, Lucy Anderson, Beth Rosenberg, Inge de Taeye, Tania Friedel, Kyung-Sook Boo, Heather Alumbaugh, Ted Sammons, Rich Blint, Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman, Jeanette Price, Tom Jacobs, Ben Turner, and Asad Raza for talking to me throughout my years in graduate school and beyond about dissertation chapters, writing, school, jobs, and life. Warmest thanks are

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acknowledgments

also due George Shulman who provided feedback, outside reading suggestions, and a fine role model for interdisciplinary work. Thank you to Annie Lee Jones for being a wonderful writing partner from whom I have learned so much about psychoanalytic thought and bravery in academic work. And many thanks of course to my invaluable dissertation committee: my advisor, Phil Harper, and my readers, Cyrus Patell, José Muñoz, Ross Posnock, and Elizabeth McHenry. To Eugene Poon, who saw me through every stage of the initial construction of this project, thank you. I am also greatly indebted to all my colleagues at The College at Brockport. My thanks in particular to Brooke Conti, Alissa Karl, and Joe Ortiz for their constant academic and personal support. Immense gratitude to my fabulous advisors Janie Hinds and Jennifer Haytock for all their help in turning this project from a dissertation into a book. My thanks to Jean Wyatt for her detailed and insightful feedback about the entire project. Thank you to Susan Vasquez for help of every kind in the department. My sincerest gratitude to James Black for his outstanding work as a copy editor. Appreciation and love to Megan and Stephanie Backer-Bertsch and Brian Deuel for getting me through the final semester of revisions. Thank you to my students, who inspire me and keep me going, particularly to Anthony Casciano, an advisee who is also a great reading partner. Infinite thanks to Drew Lichtenstein for being excited about the project and for constantly supporting and encouraging me. And as always I thank Candy, Ted, Erin, and Peter Obourn. You, of course, have my deepest love and gratitude. A shorter version of Chapter 1 appeared as “Audre Lorde: Trauma Theory and Liberal Multiculturalism” in MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 30, no. 1 (2005): 219–45. Reprinted here with permission. A version of Chapter 2 appeared as “Hybridity, Identity, and Representation in La Mollie and the King of Tears” in American Literature 80, no. 1 (2008): 141–166, Duke University Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Thank you to Norm Magnusson for letting me use his wonderful piece, “Loss of Innocence,” for the cover. Copyright Norm Magnusson, from the collection of Alison and Stephane Gerson.

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Introduction

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The Liberal Multicultural Paradox and Aesthetics of Inter nal Distantiation

Since the civil rights and other new social movements of the midto late twentieth century, modes of US citizenship1 have shifted to incorporate a politicized understanding of social identities. From this shift emerged what has come to be known as a politics of multiculturalism. Though in academia there has been a push to move “beyond” the logic of multicultural identity politics—to global, cosmopolitan, or postnational readings—our everyday understandings of American citizenship remain steeped in a nationally oriented politics of identity.2 This politics follows a logic of difference in sameness. It is simultaneously multiculturalist and liberal individualist, as these ideologies have been defined by the social and political history of the United States. Reconstituting Americans makes the case that we should stay with the questions raised by multiculturalism, that such questions were never adequately answered, and that shifting the framework away from the national does not so much answer outstanding questions and paradoxes as it allows us to cover over them in the push to escape their irritating persistence in every aspect of US cultural and political life. This book looks at literary representations of post–new social movement US citizenship that reveal to their readers the inherent contradictions of a liberal multicultural ideology that celebrates the value of “difference” and “recognition” while simultaneously limiting the ways in which persons marked as socially “different” can be represented and addressed as citizens.3

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Reconstituting Americans

The authors I address, including Audre Lorde, Arturo Islas, Reginald McKnight, Jamaica Kincaid, and Bharati Mukherjee produce texts that illuminate the paradoxical demands of contemporary liberal multicultural models of identity and examine alternatives to them. These texts suggest that liberal multicultural modes of citizenship limit political and artistic representations by reifying individual and group identities and that new ways of narrating and articulating citizenship identity are needed. The aforementioned writers use their work to develop political aesthetics that approach the representation of bodies, identities, and social and cultural contexts in ways that allow their readers to recognize the text as addressing minoritarian identity and social concerns, while simultaneously resisting incorporation into already existing structures of liberal multicultural sociocultural representation. Each writer negotiates a literary form that both makes his or her reader aware of the fact of identity difference and enables that reader to come to see the limits of liberal multicultural modes of thinking about identity difference. The way in which the texts make the reader aware of her own ideological limitations, particularly the paradoxes of liberal multicultural models of social identity, is a literary aesthetics that I call, following Louis Althusser, an aesthetics of internal distantiation. An aesthetics of internal distantiation allows readers to perceive the ideologies in which they and the text are held but does not allow them to think of themselves as able to get outside or beyond those ideological frameworks of understanding. This introduction will elaborate, first, the controversies and particular paradoxes of liberal multiculturalism with which I am most concerned in this book; second, the genealogy of thinking about relations between aesthetics and politics out of which my use of internal distantiation emerges; and third, the particular ways in which internal distantiation functions in a US literary historical context.

Liber al Multic ultural Paradoxes As many historians have argued, liberalism was a founding tenet—if not the central tenet—of US citizen ideology.4 Evelyn Glenn defines “independence” and “individual rights” as central components of the liberal theory that took hold in the United States. “For most of American history,” she writes, “the material and social condition[s] . . . necessary for people to actually exercise their rights and participate in polity” was that “a citizen must be independent—that is, able to act autonomously. In the liberal tradition, which emphasizes individual rights, independence is what enables each of us to make choices in


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The Liberal Multicultural Paradox

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the free market and to pursue our own interests.”5 At the time of their writing, there was also, however, an assumption of shared ethnocultural background underlying the liberal language of independence, equality, and natural rights informing the Declaration and the Constitution such that the only true “individuals” who could make choices and pursue interest were propertied males of Western European descent. Throughout US history, the implicit and explicit restrictions of citizenship have been challenged and politics of identity difference have come to the fore in political debates and policy. Moments of challenge to explicitly abstract but implicitly white male citizenship led to the social and political revamping of citizenship so as to legally include those who did not fit the original definition of “the people.” Mid-nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century political movements such as abolition, women’s suffrage, and legally oriented civil rights fought successful battles over rights to liberal citizenship via arguments for inclusion based on accepted liberal tenets of individual equality. Since the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, such direct appeals to inclusion within a liberal model of citizenship have become less useful and, in certain cases, less desirable avenues to social justice, as Americans reckon with systemic social and cultural inequalities unrecognized by models of inclusion and as they work to preserve valued cultural and social differences put at risk by liberal models that understand political equality to function solely at the level of the abstract individual. We have yet, however, to develop a politically viable discourse for promoting social justice within a broadly recognized multiculturalist but still politically liberal individualist United States. The post–new social movement entrance of multiculturalist ideas into hegemonic liberal ideology created paradoxes in expressions of US subjecthood, which have become something of a sticking point for liberal models of citizenship. Ayelet Shachar notes that a “multicultural understanding of citizenship . . . departs from the [liberal] perception of all citizens as individuals who are merely members of a larger political community.”6 It instead views them as “having equal rights as individuals while simultaneously meriting differentiated rights as members of identity groups. Hence . . . a multicultural citizenship model raises potential conflicts among . . . the identity group, the state, and the individual.”7 These conflicts have been addressed repeatedly from a number of different and sometimes conflicting perspectives in the work of contemporary political theorists. John Rawls makes the case that even when liberalism is combined with a program for social welfare in which economic and social equality is considered


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to be as important as individual liberties, one must still conceptualize the liberal individual as an abstract subject potentially separable from his or her race, gender, sexuality, and class. Rawls claims that in order to find the “original position” of political justice, one must begin within a “veil of ignorance.”8 This veil in many ways replicates the function of the abstraction “we the people” of the US Constitution by stripping away our social differences to create a political unity. And like the Constitutional construct of “the people,” Rawls’s veiled population is a political construction that cannot adequately address inequalities that run along social group lines such as race, gender, ethnicity, or sexuality. In continuing to forward a project of inclusion within original ideals of the subject as abstractable from history and social context, Rawlsian liberalism subtracts social identity difference and the histories that created that difference from the political individual as the core unit of a liberal democracy. Will Kymlicka has addressed some of the limitations of Rawlsian liberal theory by forwarding a politics of noncontradictory “liberal culturalism” in which group rights can be attended to within liberal structures.9 Kymlicka sees the perceived conflict between individual and group rights as mistaken in that it misreads liberalism as a theory based on abstract presocial individuals. Kymlicka proposes instead that liberalism has always been concerned with the ways in which society and culture determine individual desire and with keeping alive an active available group culture within which individuals can choose their values and lifestyles—hence, liberal education and the liberal concerns for civil liberties, free speech, and so on.10 Opposition to group rights is not inherent in liberal theories, argues Kymlicka. Rather it comes from recent shifts in the way liberalism has been used to argue for minority rights, specifically the way it has been used to argue for the rights of African Americans in the United States. Brown v. Board, the end of racial segregation, and the popularity of the ideology of a “color-blind constitution” in the United States, he argues, are all part of a universalist rhetoric that has been exported from the United States since the end of World War II, shifting international attention away from group minority rights and replacing it with “human rights.”11 Thus Kymlicka’s liberal culturalism finds its limitations in the contradictions between particular historical US conceptualizations of liberal and multicultural citizenship. Even if liberalism and multiculturalism are not inherently incompatible, Kymlicka’s suggestion that US forms of exported liberal multiculturalism are making it difficult to see them as compatible reinforces the need to become more aware of and create


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alternatives to American liberal multicultural understandings of social identities and rights. Not all political theorists agree with Kymlicka, however. Brian Barry sees Kymlicka’s and other multiculturalist political approaches as undermining liberalism’s ideal of equal distribution of rights among individuals. Barry challenges multiculturalism as incompatible with the traditional ideals of liberalism he sees underwriting justice systems in Britain, Canada, and the United States. Barry conceives of a true liberal state as one in which there is “only one status of citizen [in which] everyone enjoys the same legal and political rights. These rights should be assigned to individual citizens, with no special rights (or disabilities) accorded to some and not others on the basis of group membership.”12 Thus Barry perceives an inherent conflict between cultural claims to group rights and recognition, and the fundamental status of the individual as the political unit whose equal rights must be attended to by an equitable political structure. Charles Taylor negotiates this paradox by theorizing a “politics of recognition” that makes its claims on the level of culture rather than the level of the social or the political and therefore may not disrupt individual rights under liberalism. Taylor argues that a demand for recognition “comes to the fore in a number of ways in today’s politics, on behalf of minority or ‘subaltern’ groups, in some forms of feminism and in what is today called the politics of ‘multiculturalism.’”13 “The demand for recognition” in such cases “is given urgency by the supposed link between recognition and identity, where this latter term designates something like a person’s understanding of who they are, of their fundamental defining characteristics as a human being.”14 Thus Taylor concludes that “[n]onrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being.”15 Yet, as Nancy Fraser has pointed out, Taylor’s liberal framing of multiculturalism (liberal in that it can only conceptualize autonomous individual subjects as the beneficiaries of political change) is limited in its ability to effect substantial material, social, and political change. Fraser criticizes this type of multiculturalist politics for the erasure of a politics of redistribution from its agenda. A politics of redistribution would forward stronger group-based agendas that do not settle for the equity of group recognition within a nation of political individuals. Fraser argues that in response to the “unresolved tensions between the cultural and political-economic dimensions” of injustice in the United States, we need “a critical theory of recognition.”16 Fraser’s comments suggest that an incompatibility has


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arisen between multiculturalist discussions of difference, identity, and cultural recognition, and realpolitik discussions of political economy and redistribution within US identity politics.17 While Fraser looks to a politics of recognition that will “synergize with the politics of redistribution,”18 I argue that a critical theory of recognition also requires an interrogation and expansion of the limited forms we have for conceptualizing social identity in relation to politics. The impasses in multiculturalist discourse that Fraser points to are not due to a political impotence inherent in politics of narration, representation, or recognition but rather to the ways in which such politics have been incorporated into the logic and rhetoric of liberal conceptions of the US citizen-subject.19 As I hope this brief overview of approaches to multiculturalism in a liberal context makes clear, many political theorists see a contradiction between traditional claims of liberal rights and the more recent emergence of the politics of multiculturalism in the US context. For each of the above theorists, liberalism runs up against ideological limitations in relation to group rights in the contemporary United States. A central paradox here, and one that this book will address in its reading of the literary texts, is that multiculturalist group rights rely on cultural or social differences that become reified at the level of policy and hegemonic social recognition, in part to facilitate broad legal and social changes, and in part because under liberal theory individuals are conceptualized as equal and interchangeable and therefore as more fluid, freer, and more important political units than groups. At the same time, multiculturalism recognizes that social and cultural differences constitute (and have historically constituted) individuals as varying and complex citizen-subjects. Under liberal multiculturalism, social identity is both separated from the political individual and an inherent, historically embedded part of her politicized identity. This paradox in large part grows out of which histories can be recognized within a liberal model and which histories cannot. To make recognition of difference a viable element of a liberal discourse that ultimately sees equal and interchangeable subjects as its core political unit, such difference needs to be abstracted from the history of inequality (and the noninterchangeable bodies) that created it. To make redistribution possible along group lines, histories of difference and oppression need to become group political identities, reifying identity difference such that policy can attend to it, but also thereby stripping its members of full liberal citizenship as interchangeable equal subjects. In other words, liberal multiculturalism faces an impasse in that, when recognition of differences based on historical oppressions and


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social and economic inequalities is combined with the US conceptualization of the (inherently liberal) political subject, the citizen-subject tends to become representable only as an individual representative of a social or political group. To be truly and fully American she must, according to US liberal citizenship, be interchangeable and representational in terms of the nation as a whole; she must also be to a certain extent removed from both the history of difference within the nation and its historical social and economic injustices. When one tries to reinsert discussions of historically and discursively produced identities and the oppressions which arise from them into a liberal individualist public sphere, the logic of liberalism (which sees individual subject bodies as representative of or representable in terms of those identities) simultaneously strips those bodies of full liberal citizenship.20 In the chapters following this introduction, I will turn to contemporary American literature to look at the ways in which multiple social identities, all inextricable from histories of oppression, function in this paradoxical manner under liberal multiculturalism, and how these paradoxes prevent complex historical narratives of minoritized social identity from being available on a broad national scale.21 Faced with such a representational paradox I argue that we, as citizens and as academics, tend to either overemphasize difference at the cost of recognizing how our conceptions of difference are already based in liberal understandings of the subject or take a somewhat ahistorical universalist view of subjecthood that undervalues the importance of history, identity, and the relation between historical violences and current inequalities. We have no socially effective and politically viable way of conceptualizing the citizen-subject as complex, constructed, contingent, multivalent and as part of historically real systems of injustice in which racial, gender, sexual, ethnic, and cultural identities have real social, political, and economic consequences.

Aesthetic s and Identi ty One benefit of the success of liberal multiculturalism has been a greater interest in the literary work of authors of color, queer authors, and women authors. The interest in otherness implied by this success has, however, also limited the way these writers are read. While I do not think that critics who specialize in identity-based literary critique (and I count myself among them) are any less rigorous in their critical analyses than those with other specializations, the functioning of ideologies of liberal multiculturalism puts pressure on their work, which it does not put on the work of others, to “represent” the identity


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under which it is categorized. Our students are indoctrinated into a liberal multicultural representational ideology just as we ourselves have been and we can not control the kinds of cultural interpretive expectations we inevitably bring to identity-categorized courses, critical works, collections, and textual interactions. Lorde, Islas, McKnight, Kincaid, and Mukherjee have responded to these pressures and expectations by constructing literary texts that prompt their readers (as well as their critics, teachers, and students) to become more aware of the expectations and assumptions they bring to the text. These writers develop aesthetic techniques that provoke an internal distantiation in their readers, which makes them aware of the liberal multicultural ideologies in which they are held and which construct their reading experience. At the end of this introduction I will give an example of how such aesthetics of internal distantiation function, but to properly introduce the political import of such aesthetics I will first elaborate the relations between aesthetics and politics that underlie this project’s use of internal distantiation in relation to the social and political. Literary criticism repeatedly asks, what exactly is the relationship between the political and the literary, between a work of art and the discourses of the culture that produces and consumes it? Implicit in this question is another: of how much use are the specific disciplinary tools of literary study to the expanding interdisciplinary and cultural studies-oriented work on social identity? Despite the many thinkers throughout the history of Western philosophy who have written on connections between politics and aesthetics,22 there remains an ongoing and frequently returned to anxiety about their differences and potential incompatibilities. This question of the relation between aesthetics and politics has recently reappeared in literary studies as a response to the shift toward cultural studies-based methodologies and archives. Terry Eagleton’s 1990 The Ideology of the Aesthetic traces the emergence of Western philosophical discourses on aesthetics in tandem with the rise of capitalist ideology, ultimately seeing aesthetics as equivalent to the social order under capitalism. In a 1994 response to Eagleton’s heavily Marxist approach, George Levine wanted to reclaim the aesthetic “from its potential disappearance into culture and politics.”23 And Isobel Armstrong’s 2000 The Radical Aesthetic makes the claim that there is a radicalism inherent in the aesthetic’s power to provoke a “renegotiation of boundaries”24 and a “transformation of categories”25 for the experiencing subjectivity. Yet despite these influential projects, a 2004 special issue of American Literature still claimed it had to challenge an academic “aversion to aesthetics,” which was thought to allow criticism to concentrate on “real political


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matters.”26 A 2007 collection titled Ideology and Aesthetics in American Literature opened similarly, claiming that “many contemporary theories . . . emphasize ideological rather than artistic, literary or aesthetic values of literary texts.”27 The continued insistence on claiming that the aesthetic and the political are related and that aesthetics are important to politics implies the continued existence of the inverse assumption, that the aesthetic relates to apolitical form while the political belongs to the realm of content and real social change. I would like to map out some of the presuppositions underlying this book’s literary arguments by tracing a set of connections between the aesthetic and the political that fundamentally disrupt the aesthetics versus politics dichotomy and help define the particular ways in which literature can function as a cultural form with real political consequences. Immanuel Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment is often read as a foundational text for later ways of thinking about Romantic and formalist aesthetics that claim autonomy from the political.28 If we think of the political as a realm in which our judgments are determined by our interests (i.e., our desires or our ethics), then for Kant the political and the aesthetic must be mutually exclusive, for the political would include what he calls the “good” or the “agreeable,” whereas the aesthetic would include the “beautiful” (a judgment made free from the influences of interest).29 However, if we think of the political as a realm in which we make demands on others to perceive or understand the world from a new or different perspective, then for Kant the political and the aesthetic are intimately connected. A judgment based on desire or the moral good can be seen as individual and subjective, culturally relative, or bounded by the fact that there is a truth to be found in the object itself. A judgment of aesthetics or beauty, on the other hand, requires a claim to “subjective universality.”30 The aesthetic judgment is subjective (located in the viewer, reader, audience) and makes the claim that everyone should subjectively agree with it. Thus by making aesthetic claims, one is also making claims on her fellow citizens by announcing “supposedly generally valid (public) judgments.”31 This opens up a political space. Kant insists, “[T]hose who make those judgments do not find themselves in conflict over the possibility of such a claim, but only find it impossible to agree on the correct application of this faculty in particular cases.”32 Thus aesthetics is in fact a set of judgments around which public agreements and disagreements can take shape. It opens a realm in which we find it possible to make claims on others’ faculties of judgment.33 Kant’s third Critique, then, does not lead us in the direction of an apolitical aesthetic approach to literature. Rather, it takes us in


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two related but disciplinarily distinct directions. First, it points toward theories of the political that conceptualize the political as a realm in which one must try to articulate something in a way that can lay claim to others’ interpretations of the world. Second, it points toward literary theories of reader response, which attempt to theorize a common response to a text by looking at the individual and subjective process of reading. Jacques Rancière proves useful in addressing the former theoretical connection, while Stanley Fish proves useful for the latter. Both Fish and Rancière revise Kant’s notion of beauty by suggesting that the truly political aesthetic is not any set of formal practices nor anything that engages an audience but rather that which challenges our systems of aesthetic responses. It speaks to that which is not yet publicly valid and therefore truly has to make demands on its audience to lay claim to public validity.34 Rancière, in Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, calls the order that “defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying” (i.e., “an order of the visible and sayable”), the “police.”35 In contradistinction to the “police,” “politics” is a break in the order of the visible and sayable. Politics occurs when a space is opened “for two heterogeneous processes to meet.”36 This happens when a “part” that was previously not visible or understandable enters the political stage and opens a disagreement.37 This is not an argument over conflicts of interest between two constituted parties but a situation in which “contention over what speaking means constitutes the very rationality of the speech situation.”38 It is “an interlocution that undermines the very situation of interlocution.”39 Thus politics has to do with what kinds of representation can meaningfully function within a society. Politics is also where what counts as representation can be challenged, where what registers aesthetically shifts and thus changes the order of the visible and sayable. As Rancière argues, “[T]here is an ‘aesthetics’ at the core of politics” in the sense of “a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience.”40 It, then, is not only the case that aesthetics is political because it makes a claim on others. Politics is also aesthetic in that it is constituted in disrupting the order of what can present itself to sense experience and in changing what universally subjective claims can be heard. Thus we might ask, in what ways can people be made to see or hear something that was previously not a part of their politico-aesthetic order? It is here that we can turn to reader-response theory, which has a history of examining the processes of aesthetic, subjective responses to texts, and the relationship between the representing artist and the judging citizen, spectator, or reader. Stanley Fish sees reader response


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work as “focus[ing] on the mind in the act of making sense, rather than the sense it finally (and often reductively) makes.”41 Like Rancière, Fish is interested in the process of making, changing, and entering “sense.” In theorizing this process, he distinguishes between two modes of literary presentation: the rhetorical and the dialectical. Rhetorical literary presentation is a style of writing that satisfies the reader and is flattering to her way of seeing the world. It “mirrors and presents for approval the opinions its readers already hold.”42 This does not mean that rhetorical presentation is never unpleasant but rather that whatever one is told via the rhetorical mode can be placed and contained within the categories and assumptions of received systems of knowledge. This might include popular novels, established genres, or any text that speaks to a reader’s horizon of expectations. This form of writing would, for Rancière, fall under “police” rather than “politics.” Dialectical literary presentation, on the other hand, is disturbing. It requires of its readers a “searching and rigorous scrutiny” of everything they believe and live by.43 More importantly, this discovery is often made at the expense of the reader’s opinions, values, and selfesteem.44 This type of literary aesthetic mode lines up with Rancière’s political—it changes, disrupts, alters the existing aesthetic order. And, as Fish points out, this is not necessarily good for one’s concept of selfhood, subjectivity, or citizenship, for it disrupts our relation to received systems of knowledge and ways of thinking. Fish gives “the good physician” as a metaphor for this way of writing. The good physician “tells his patients what they don’t want to hear in the hope that by forcing them to see themselves clearly, they may be moved to change the selves they see.”45 In the contemporary United States, our orders of seeing and understanding in relation to politics and identity are reified under liberal multiculturalism in a way that makes it very difficult for certain “parts,” to use Rancière’s term, to be heard. And while we may appreciate the ways in which liberal multiculturalism is more tolerant and less oppressive than other regimes such as fascism, totalitarianism, or even earlier forms of US liberalism, we might also say, following Rancière, that “whether the police is sweet and kind does not make it any less the opposite of politics.”46 Though such forms of narrative policing are by no means limited to the field of literary studies, restrictive and reified rhetorical modes both impact literary studies and find potential tools of critique there. These tools include not only the more canonical reader response theories like Fish’s but also more contemporary work on how literary aesthetics can provoke a rethinking


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of the circulation of narratives of identity. For example, Judith Butler’s readings of Antigone and Nella Larsen’s Passing, use poststructural analysis to read Antigone and Clare Kendry as figures that allow readers to see the (often violently) limiting nature of discourses of kinship, race, gender, and sexuality.47 Similarly, feminist psychoanalytic literary critic Jean Wyatt has applied Freudian concepts to literary texts such as Toni Morrison’s Love in the service of exploring how Morrison’s aesthetic choices to “ensnare and ‘expose’ readers’ preconceptions about . . . love and gender,” thereby “provoking a radical reassessment of everything we thought we knew.”48 Reconstituting Americans aims to contribute to this ongoing work, pushing it specifically in the direction of challenging and illuminating liberal multicultural discourses. In a liberal multicultural moment in which most readers want to believe they see others as fully equal individuals, or perhaps claim not to “see” social identity difference at all, more is needed than narratives that provoke sympathy with or provide access to perspectives of members of oppressed groups. Literature that can make its reader more aware of her ideological constructs and prompt her to see herself and her own limitations more clearly is an important political tool in a liberal multicultural context. Such literature utilizes an aesthetics that resists representations of social identity as reified commodity and provokes an internal distancing that allows the reader to become aware of her habitual modes of reading social identity.

I nter nal D istanti ati on and Amer ic an Literature Louis Althusser, whose name is perhaps now most often evoked in the context of theorizing rigorous models of the limiting and inescapable effects of ideology, also sees something political (rather than merely policing) in aesthetics. In his “A Letter on Art in Reply to André Daspre,” Althusser addresses the question of “whether art and ideology are one and the same thing.”49 Given Althusser’s attention to multiple cultural ideological state apparatuses, among them the media and the arts,50 one would expect Althusser to see art as a tool for the reproduction of the conditions of production (i.e., dominant ideology). However, though he sees art as having “a quite particular and specific relation to ideology,”51 Althusser carves a Marxist political space within art (and specifically, given his example of Honore Balzac, within literary studies) by claiming that art can produce “internal distantiation,” which he defines as an effect of art that can “make us ‘perceive’ (but not know) in some sense from the inside, by an internal


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distance, the very ideology in which [we] are held.”52 Though art cannot give us “knowledge in the strict sense,” it has a relationship with knowledge, importantly “not [a relationship] of identity, but one of difference.”53 Literature, claims Althusser, is not true art if it simply claims to directly represent through identity with or knowledge of the real. Rather art maintains a relation of difference, which gives us access to “a conceptual knowledge of the complex mechanisms which eventually produce . . . ‘lived experience.’”54 Though the readings in this book do not follow Althusser’s blanket statement that all true art inherently has internally distantiating aesthetic effects, they utilize his articulation of this aesthetics as one particularly politically viable in a liberal multicultural context in which we lack conceptual knowledges of the complex mechanisms that produce our social and cultural experiences and political understandings. Althusser calls for the production of a “knowledge of the processes which produce the ‘aesthetic effect’ of a work of art,” acknowledging that “in order to answer the question of the relationship between art and knowledge we much produce a knowledge of art.”55 The production of such a knowledge, specifically about works of contemporary US literature, lies at the heart of Reconstituting Americans. Following Althusser, I am looking for the right “concepts” for thinking about the relation of this literature to its ideological moment. To do this, I look at ways in which a number of other current critical frames (including trauma theory, hybridity theory, and cosmopolitanism) work in relation to liberal multiculturalism and might also be used to think about the functioning of internally distantiating aesthetics in literary texts. Such concepts, as Althusser acknowledges, are “not necessarily new” but will hopefully prove to be “adequate to their object,”56 which in this case is to develop a knowledge of the aesthetics at work in the contemporary texts I discuss. Internal distantiation, as I see it at work in texts by Lorde, Islas, Kincaid, McKnight, and Mukherjee, is similar to Fish’s “good physician” in that it makes a claim about literature’s ability to speak in a way that can at the very least disallow the perception of transparency in relation to truths about or direct representations of social identities. It can distance us from our ways of understanding the world. However, the theory of internal distantiation recognizes that even the physician is subject to ideology. No one, says Althusser, including writers, can get outside ideology. In the case of Balzac, Althusser insists that “only because he stuck to his political ideology could he produce in it this internal ‘distance’ which gives us a critical ‘view’ of it.”57 Neither the writer nor the critic of US literature can stand outside liberal


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multiculturalism and critique it. It is not the writer but the text—or rather the reader’s aesthetic subjective process of interaction with it—that opens up a space for this understanding where one does not exactly see herself or her ideology clearly but at least becomes aware of the fact that her ways of seeing are ideologically limited. Priscilla Wald has theorized an earlier moment of aesthetic anxiety in relation to cultural nationalism and narrative form, focusing on the ways stories of national personhood construct ideological boundaries for certain citizen identities. Wald, in Constituting Americans, sees major American writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as negotiating a space between conformity to cultural prescriptions that deny them full American status, and a refusal to conform that leads to social incomprehensibility, and in so doing “confront[ing] the limits of storytelling.”58 My argument about writers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is based on a similar premise. These authors must write and be understood as subjects within an ideology of liberal multicultural citizenship; their work relies on this ideology to exist in a meaningful way at all. Yet their work also confronts the limits of liberal multicultural storytelling so as to find a way to position its reader such that she becomes aware of it as a limited, if also currently necessary, way of comprehending the world. Wald looks at the ways in which the authors she addresses are forced to negotiate the fact that in the United States “human minds—individuals—as well as ‘the people’ have been formed by the Constitution.”59 In her discussion of Frederick Douglass, Wald notes his textual desire for a “reconstituted national family”: “Only when his white ‘fellow-countrymen’ have faced their hypocrisy, Douglass suggests, will he be able to ‘unite with’ the children of their common fathers.”60 Reconstituting Americans looks at narratives that attempt such a reconstitution by prompting their readers to recognize their own complicity with American histories of hypocrisy. Where Wald addresses writers who are attempting to tell “untold stories,”61 silenced by official (white male) narratives of American identity, the works this book discusses are attempting to reconstitute Americanness in a way that does not conform to the “told stories” of identity difference that have come to stand in for nondominant racial, gender, ethnic, and sexual identities. The differences between the works Wald discusses and those examined here are due largely to shifts in ways of conceptualizing the American nation resulting from new social movements and multicultural identity politics. Wald addresses moments of nation building in which narratives of national belonging explicitly exclude, without


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being able to fully erase, certain persons. Today, our syllabi and research projects speak to and include stories of nonwhite, nonmale, non-Anglo, nonstraight America. We are now not so much at a loss for officially sanctioned narratives of minority America and Americans as we are at risk of creating celebratory but inflexible social narratives of racial, gender, ethnic, and sexual identity. Wald sees her authors as addressing the anxiety of the uncanny in national narratives of citizenship and personhood—the uncanniness of a citizenship that requires the repression of previous forms of (pre-American) cultural subjecthood and the uncanniness of “human beings excluded from personhood.”62 What has been repressed in the cultural narratives of citizenship I discuss in this book is neither a previous cultural understanding of self nor actual bodies, but rather the history of earlier violences against the minds and bodies of persons marked by racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual difference and the contemporary complexities that these overlapping histories create when thinking about social identity. These histories cannot remain repressed, however, in the wake of new social movements. The (re)entrance of these histories and complexities into contemporary stories of Americanness do not simply produce the aesthetic effect of the uncanny, they threaten actual trauma—at least to the extent that they present experiences that have no cultural narratives through which to integrate them into a broader understanding of American identity. Because of the historical differences between the texts Wald discusses and the texts discussed here, I move away from her practice of reading texts for their Freudian “anxieties” or the way they are “formally unsettled,” and look at the ways that contemporary authors consciously construct aesthetic forms that can make readers aware of the paradoxes within liberal multiculturalism and feel their own constitution as subjects within that paradoxical ideological model. I also keep in mind that internally distantiating aesthetics can feel threatening to a reader if they destabilize that reader’s understandings of personhood and belonging too radically. I would like to end this introduction with a brief look at a canonical work of American literature—Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno—for three reasons: first, to illustrate an example of internally distantiative aesthetics; second, to examine how internally distantiating aesthetics function such that they ultimately do not traumatize readers; and third, to address why such aesthetics may be more important and politically viable today than in the antebellum United States.


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Distantiative Aesthetics in Amer ic an Liter ary Hi story Benito Cereno is a highly political text in that it addresses hypocrisies of US liberalism, power structures inherent in American subjecthood, and racial identity as inextricable from understandings of US liberal citizenship. However, rather than directly represent its politics to the reader—as in the case of antislavery protest novels such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin—Benito Cereno makes its political argument using an aesthetics of internal distantiation. Benito Cereno tells the story of New England ship captain Amasa Delano who, while sailing with a ship full of valuable commodities along the coast of Chile, comes across a Spanish galleon carrying slaves. The galleon has tattered masts, few crew members, and its captain, Benito Cereno, looks half-starved and near crazy. Cereno tells Delano that a storm killed many crew members and destroyed a great portion of their supplies. It is eventually revealed that there has been a slave revolt on board Cereno’s ship orchestrated by Babo, Cereno’s black servant. But Delano is unable to see this. And since the story is focalized through Delano, the reader is unable to see it as well. Delano can only be suspicious of Cereno because the idea that black slaves are running the ship is literally unthinkable to him. When Delano finally does realize what has happened, he sends his own men after Cereno’s ship to recapture it and restore what he understands as the proper order at any cost, including the lives of the Spanish crew members. Benito Cereno has been read as a critique of slave society in the United States. Philip Fisher argues that it is a text that reveals slavery to be a historical structure that has damaged US democratic social space. “It is because of slavery,” says Fisher, that America cannot aspire to the ideal liberal model of democratic social space, which he describes as “atomistic,” “unbounded,” and “transparent.”63 I would suggest, however, that Benito Cereno reveals that slavery brought into existence (if only for a limited time) an original American social space of liberal citizens—that is, an atomistic, unbounded, transparent (if also limited by race, gender, and class) “we the people.” In Benito Cereno, it is the symbolic abolition of slavery through the slave revolt that truly disrupts “democratic social space” and the relations of its liberal subjects. When slavery is disrupted, it enables the entrance into democratic social space of racially marked noncitizens who cannot be universally representational and therefore cannot construct an atomistic, unbounded, and transparent social space and thus threatens to awaken US citizens such as Delano to a history of nondemocratic


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social and political structures. In Benito Cereno, it is Delano’s ability to use what he understands as his liberal American “impartiality,” which “always seeks one level, serving the oldest white no better than the youngest black”64 to remain oblivious to the possibility that the slaves could be actively participating in the governing of the ship. This “oblivious[ness to] any but benevolent thoughts,”65 which Delano associates with his American Northerner’s democratic perspective, allows him not only to survive but also to maintain his position as a functional American citizen. For a nation of Delanos who refuse to acknowledge American oppressions and inequalities, US liberal democracy is not damaged at all. Delano’s refusal to acknowledge slavery as part of his own history and inability to grasp the complexity of social identities prefigures many of the problems of a later liberal multiculturalism that also values the ideal of liberal equality and equivalence over acknowledging power differentials and continuing social oppression. Although Benito Cereno occurs in a social space in which Delano’s ideal liberal democracy has been “overturned,” that is, in which the slaves are now in control, it is essential to the tale that the Americans, both Amasa Delano and the reader (at least at first), not be aware of this. Delano remains doggedly fixed to his ideological framework—in which a good citizen is not mean, spiteful, untrusting; maintains proper, cordial, and “humane” social and interpersonal behavior; and above all, no matter what he sees to the contrary, upholds a belief in a social structure in which certain people are capable of acting, making decisions, and causing him harm while others are not, not because of an oppressive system but because differences in their nature66 dictate that they are docile and limited like “Newfoundland dogs.”67 Delano does not support slaveholding (at one point he attributes Cereno’s odd behavior to the fact that “slavery breeds ugly passions in man”68), yet he relies on an unacknowledged white supremacism that cannot conceptualize black bodies functioning as equal individual persons within his democratic social space. It is the system of oppression itself that allows Delano’s ideology of equal, atomistic, and transparent citizenship to go unquestioned. Delano resists the truth of the revolt for as long as possible and when he can resist no longer sees only crazed bodies dancing “like delirious black dervishes” on the poop.69 He never fully comprehends that it was Babo’s brain (the “hive of subtlety”70) that carefully planned the revolt and designed the social façade that fools Delano. He tells us in his final speech that it was “my good-nature, compassion, and charity” that “enabled me to get the better of momentary


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distrust, at times when acuteness might have cost me my life.”71 It would have cost him not only his physical life but also his mental life and his psychic relation to the world. Ultimately it is Delano’s ability not to see by maintaining his vision of an untainted democratic liberal social reality, through both ideological blindness and direct violence, that saves him from Cereno’s fate of falling under the “shadow [of] the negro.”72 The story is not narrated in the first person and, although the narrator does follow Delano and gives us for the most part his perspective and his opinions, Melville leaves room for a distance between the reader’s experience and Delano’s. It is more likely that we may feel the weight of the shadow of racism and slavery in a way that Delano does not, and this is due to Melville’s use of internally distantiating aesthetics. One way in which this aesthetics functions is that as readers we can go back and experience the story a second time with the knowledge that Delano is not seeing what is happening around him. It also functions, perhaps even more effectively, on a first reading of the story when the reader is positioned most closely to Delano through a narrative style heavily laden with free indirect discourse and focalized through Delano’s perspective. The implied reader, narrator, and Delano are inside Delano’s white American liberal Northern democratic ideology for most of the story. The only difference between the perspective of the reader and that of Delano is that the reader is reading; she is taking in the story through the language Melville has chosen, through his narrative structure and aesthetic choices. And it is these choices, not simply the critique of dominant ideology, that create the possibility for internal distantiation.73 The narrative style of Benito Cereno is laden with destabilizing rhetorical choices including seemingly nonironic litotes and either-or statements in which one option does not cancel out the other.74 Delano forces any such unclear rhetorical structures to conform to his own ideological perspective, thereby abolishing complexity from his way of seeing the situation. And Cereno, who cannot abolish the complexity, is constantly on the verge of fainting. The reader is allowed neither the blindness of Delano nor the narrative escape through fainting or insanity of Cereno. She is left with litotes that suggest irony yet do not necessarily evoke it, and with either-or grammatical structures in which one option does not rule out the other. The litotes and either-ors are not about referencing a truth, or getting down to a right answer by process of elimination; they are about pointing out that concepts such as “truth” and “right answers” may be a limited (or in the case of Delano usefully limiting) way of


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understanding the world. For example, Delano is described as having a “singularly undistrustful good nature.”75 He is not trustful but un-distrustful: a strange double negative that on one hand simply suggests that he is extraordinarily trustful (in this case the litotes retains its irony and force of description) but on the other suggests that he is something other than distrustful and this in a way that is different from, though not necessarily stronger than, other forms of nondistrustfulness (in this case there seem to be almost infinite options for what this description could mean). As the story progresses we realize Delano is not really an extraordinarily trusting person; he continually suspects Cereno of keeping secrets and plotting against him. What is “singular” about his undistrustfulness is that he can manipulate what he sees to fit his own ideological perspective on the situation and this simply requires his not being distrustful of what he sees around him and the way he feels in relation to it. It is also an undistrustfulness that allows his self-understanding (as kind and tolerant) to obscure his knowledge of violence based on inequality. His undistrustfulness is less a telling description of Delano than it is a description that opens up many possible interpretations of Delano’s character, his reasoning, and his relation to the events of the story. It does not give the reader any stable referential ground for understanding the character on which she depends for most of her information. It thereby invites the reader to question her own allegiance to Delano and her own reliance on a political ethics of kindness and tolerance. The title character, Benito Cereno, becomes the ultimate site for these narrative tropes of destabilization. When he first appears in the text, the narrator describes him in the following manner: “But as if not unwilling to let nature make known her own case among his suffering charge, or else in despair of restraining it for the time, the Spanish captain, a gentlemanly, reserved-looking, and rather young man to a stranger’s eye, dressed with singular richness, but bearing plain traces of recent sleepless cares and disquietudes, stood passively by, leaning against the main-mast, at one moment casting a dreary, spiritless look upon his excited people, at the next an unhappy glance toward his visitor.”76 Cereno is described as either not unwilling (again a phrase that appears to be a litotes but also easily assumes the literal meaning of not unwilling but not necessarily willing) to let nature make known her case or in despair of restraining nature for the time (another either/ or choice in which the options seem not to be mutually exclusive).77 Cereno is full of seeming contradictions—gentlemanly but uncommunicative, young but careworn, richly dressed but in disarray. Yet whereas the repeated parallel grammatical construction “A but B”


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suggests a contradiction between A and B, the actual traits enumerated are not incompatible, again structurally setting up an either-or that is not one. Cereno also appears to be a type of gothic character in that he is at the heart of a dark mystery, but in the end the mystery is not solved. All we are left with is a broken man whose ideological relation to the world has been destroyed. Thus Melville’s internally distantiative aesthetics is not constructed to make his readers aware of the possibility of slave revolt or the reality that black people have intelligence. Rather it opens up a space of representation for an American democratic space faced with acknowledging a national history of chattel slavery but for which the tools of representation do not yet exist. Melville relies on a character who does not recognize what is happening (Delano) to create narrative cohesion. The character who does acknowledge and recognize this history and its effects (Cereno) is thrown outside his ideological framework too suddenly and too far to hope for recovery. As someone living this experience as opposed to reading it, internal distantiation is not an option for Cereno. He experiences instead the real trauma of losing his ideological hold on the world. The despair of losing the stability of one’s ideological framework is at the center of Melville’s story. Benito Cereno is haunted by an awareness (however repressed in the narrative consciousness) of a dominant ideological framework that has built within it the seeds of its own destruction. And it is haunted by the awareness of what that destruction might do to (white) citizens in their relation to their nation, privileges, and security as citizens. It might, as it does to Cereno, turn one’s flag into a shaving bib.78 Melville’s aesthetics of internal distantiation make the liberal and progressive antislavery reader aware that her own American democratic social space would be damaged once the ex-slave enters because liberalism as a system that assumes equal, representable, and interchangeable citizens breaks down. Melville’s aesthetics of internal distantiation puts the reader within Delano’s liberal ideology while preventing her from remaining asleep to its violences. It allows her to see the logic of American liberal democracy in the mid-nineteenth century as one prohibitive to alternate logics or ways of viewing the world. Melville’s text may have been ahead of its most politically useful historical moment. Novels such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin proved much more immediately effective, largely because the incorporation of the politically, legally, and socially oppressed into existing liberal structures (through abolition of slavery and new citizen status of ex-slaves) had to occur before the limitations of US liberalism in relation to


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the representative, social, psychically embedded inequalities Melville addresses could arise in a broader national discourse. Today, however, precisely this kind of distantiating narrative is needed to conceptualize ways to effect social justice in a United States in which questions of representation, identity, and systemic and ideologically determined social inequalities demand our attention on a daily basis. In the following chapters I argue that, rather than throwing up our hands at the paradoxes and impasses of national liberal multiculturalism or trying to move beyond it by moving beyond the national frame, we (following the lead of Lorde, Islas, McKnight, Kincaid, and Mukherjee) should remain with these paradoxes and look for alternative ways to contest the policing rhetorics of identity representation. Throughout the chapters, I engage a series of secondary theoretical frames, each related to both a representative liberal multiculturalism and a more radical potential for producing internally distantiating aesthetics. Chapter 1 reads the poetry and prose of Audre Lorde against each other and examines how internal distantiation can function to destabilize a reader’s ideological framework of liberal multiculturalism without literally traumatizing her. Here, I use trauma theory for the conceptual tools and vocabulary it provides, which allow me to read Audre Lorde’s poetry as a mode of expression that provokes internal distantiation by resisting cohesive narration as a creative mode of production. Traumatic formalism, I argue, is particularly useful for thinking about how internal distantiation works to create a representative space for subjectivities that are not traumatized in the clinical psychiatric sense but that appear traumatized because they do not have access to preexisting, socially intelligible, culturally coded narratives of representation within dominant discourses of liberal multicultural citizenship. Lorde’s work functions as a foundation and transition into the later readings. Situated at a moment of ideological changes in thinking about social identities precipitated by burgeoning new social movements, Lorde’s work deals most directly with the potential trauma of the entrance of multiple, complex, and historically oppressed social identities into a liberal narrative. Therefore, it is in this chapter that I will expand on the psychoanalytic aspects of internal distantiation. All the literary texts I address, however, point to possible alternative ways of understanding the US citizen-subject and his or her relation to identity categories and provide ways to think about the paradox of liberal multicultural citizenship. As I will argue more fully in Chapter 1, these texts guide their reader into what D. W. Winnicott calls a “transitional


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space,” which is related not to “individual psychic inner reality,” nor “external reality . . . recognized as the ‘NOT-ME,’” but to “third area of existing,” which “might turn out to be the cultural life of the individual” and which is “at the very basis of symbolism.”79 In this space, which I suggest is opened via a process of internal distantiation, we can “accept the paradox”80 of human subjecthood generally and US subjecthood specifically—that is, the paradox that we are created by limiting discourses and would not exist as subjects without them and yet we exist beyond them and in some way created them. Althusser says that it is the deep entrenchment of an author within her ideology that allows her to produce a distantiative literary work that can allow us to critique it. “This is certainly a paradox,” notes Althusser, “but it is the case.”81 Winnicott tells us that the acceptance of such paradoxes of subjecthood and social identity may be “mad. But in our cultural [by which he means aesthetic] life we accept madness.”82 The remaining chapters move away from these more psychological issues of textual madness to the ways in which authors since Lorde have constructed more traditionally cohesive narratives to address the same questions of social identity representation. The works discussed in Chapters 2 through 4 are written in the 1980s or later and thus at a time when the destabilizing effects of new social movements had been somewhat assimilated into dominant narratives of multicultural citizenship. Chapters 2 and 3 both use a historicist frame in an attempt to look at contemporary social identities in their broad and rich social contexts. One of the motivations for this historicization is to allow for a reading of specific social identities without posing them as static categories or states of being, while also being attentive to the ways in which historically constructed social identities are, like the ideology of liberal multiculturalism, not something we can do away with voluntarily. In both of these chapters I use terminology from postcolonial and comparative literature studies (specifically, “hybridity” and “cosmopolitanism”) and discuss the ways in which these theories are valuable resources for looking at American literature but only if we keep in mind the ways in which they are necessarily altered by the liberal multicultural discourses and assumptions of a US context. Chapter 2 looks specifically at the fiction of Arturo Islas in relation to “hybridity”—currently a popular but still, I think, undertheorized term for discussing contemporary US identity. I argue that hybridity is both a useful and dangerous term in relation to the current US hegemony of liberal multicultural thinking; and that hybridity can most successfully challenge ideologies of liberal multiculturalism when it comes in the form of an internally distantiating aesthetics,


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such as those used in Islas’s La Mollie and the King of Tears. Islas plays on the inherent sexual implications of a term like hybridity. Robert J. C. Young has established the racial essentialist and heterosexist connotations of the history of the term, in that it implies a previous racial purity that becomes hybridized through sexual reproduction. Though Young’s readings are constructed to make us wary of our contemporary uses of the term, he also acknowledges that “at the heart of racial theory, in its most sinister, offensive move, hybridity also maps out its most anxious, vulnerable site.”83 In this chapter, I explore this site of vulnerability in which sex and sexuality are clearly, as Young puts it, “third mediating term[s]”84 in the relation between race and culture. Through representations of nonnormative male sexuality and racial identity, Islas finds ways to represent Chicano masculinity without allowing it to become a social identity that takes on the political responsibility of reified cultural representation. Chapter 3 argues that many current theories of cosmopolitanism are linked to if not derived from the same assumptions and set of historical circumstances as liberal multiculturalism, while also looking at ways that transnational representations can be used to provoke internal distantiation for American readers. I challenge the recent trends in cosmopolitanism that want to move beyond multiculturalism through shifting our frame of reference from the national to the global, not because I do not find this a useful model, but because even when we shift our frame of reference, we take our liberal multicultural ideological frameworks of interpretation with us. In this chapter, I look at the way Reginald McKnight and Jamaica Kincaid employ aesthetics of internal distantiation in an international setting to create transnational transitional spaces for both their characters and their readers, in which they might come to see the limitations of their national citizenship ideologies. The concluding chapter steps back again from the historicist frame to look specifically at the academy and at contemporary teaching and research practices. Here I look at Bharati Mukherjee’s novels, Jasmine and The Holder of the World, using them to reinforce the distinction between an aesthetics of representation and an aesthetics of internal distantiation and to look at the particular ways in which these differing aesthetic models circulate in current literary studies. I look at how and where these two novels have been taught and written on, the results of which suggest both an academic resistance to engaging internally distantiating aesthetics in relation to ethnic and racial identity and the limitations of remaining focused on a representative model. In a brief coda, I further address some of the implications of


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these findings in our contemporary political and social moment, a moment in which we are fighting real “cultural” wars with what has been termed the “Muslim world,” in which we have for the first time a nonwhite president, and in which the term “postracial” is circulating in the media to describe a highly unequal and clearly racialized society. My hope is not only that this set of investigations will provide more insight into our current state of liberal multicultural citizenship. I also intend it to function as a complement of pedagogical paradigms for teaching these and other texts that employ aesthetics of internal distantiation. It will thus make possible the implementation of more general US literature courses featuring writers who, in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, or sexuality may be “minorities,” but whose work nevertheless constitutes a deeply American literature in that it implicates and interrogates political and social issues with which American literature has always been concerned and that only become more centrally important in a liberal multicultural context.


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Chapter 1

4

Psychic Distantiation Audre L o rde, Traum at i c Fo r ma l i sm, and New Social Movement Identities

In his essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” James Baldwin harshly

critiques Harriet Beecher Stowe’s use of representative political aesthetics in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Baldwin makes the case that it is not the representative stories we tell ourselves about the stability of the world and our place within it that constitute true political writing, but rather the attempts to save ourselves from reification under the policing that those stories necessarily enforce. He writes, “Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void. Within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden. From this void—ourselves—it is the function of society to protect us; but it is only this void, our unknown selves, demanding, forever, a new act of creation, which can save us—‘from the evil that is in the world.’”1 Baldwin here suggests that the truly political is to be found in “a new act of creation.” But what might it mean to perform such an act? How do we face the void of our selves and those selves’ demands, particularly in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, when our societal myths constitute us through a powerful hegemony of racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual identities that give us—and keep us in—our place in the world? Though written in 1949, at the very threshold of the civil rights movement, “Everybody’s Protest Novel” articulates the potential downfall of an identity-based politics constructed within existing

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liberal ideologies and an emerging multiculturalism that forwarded ideals of tolerance, pride, celebration of difference, and understanding across racial lines. Published less than a year after Harry Truman won the presidency on a platform advocating civil rights and just over a year after the democratic convention that split the democratic party over the issue of civil rights legislation, Baldwin’s essay reads not so much as a critique of Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Native Son but rather as a critique that uses these novels to examine and challenge the ways that racialized citizenship was being imagined and articulated in 1949. “The American protest novel,” Baldwin argues, is problematic because of its tendency toward categorization, which “binds us within as without.” Thus “underlying” the protest novel is “a continuation, a complement of that monstrous legend it was written to destroy.”2 Baldwin here is pointing to the limits of representational aesthetics in a burgeoning liberal multicultural United States. The problem for Baldwin is that these novels rely on aesthetics that do not push readers beyond their existing ideological frameworks, and therefore risk affirming and continuing the structures of that society’s systemic and internalized oppressions by “ramifying that framework we believe to be so necessary.”3 This question of whether a literary discourse challenged or reinforced dominant frameworks of thinking about identity was of great significance to Baldwin at this turning point and mainstreaming of the civil rights movement, a movement that since its earliest days had to negotiate speaking in a public whose dominant forms of discourse dismissed and negated the voices of its members and thus risked with every discussion of race reinscribing limiting ideologies about racial difference. Baldwin is less concerned about the specifics of civil rights legislation than he is about the structures of feeling surrounding race and identity in the United States, described as “a warfare waged daily in the heart, a warfare so vast, so relentless and so powerful that the interracial handshake or the interracial marriage can be as crucifying as the public hanging or the secret rape.”4 It is this concern over structures of feeling that would emerge as one of the central debates within multiculturalism after the legal gains of civil rights had been achieved. America, says Baldwin, is a “country devoted to the death of the paradox” and a country “which may be put to death by one.”5 This paradox, which may be the death of American politics and which is consistently elided or avoided within American politics, is the paradox of liberal multiculturalism. The American citizen is called into being by a force that requires an identification with an abstract, individualized, representational (and therefore fully human and unique) citizenship, which is limited to a certain extent


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by identification with a minority group identity position (be it racial, ethnic, gendered, or sexual). Such forms of identification dictate that the only way to address issues of systemic inequality based on group identity is to recognize that identity as “different,” and under the ideals of multiculturalism to celebrate it—that is, to recognize it as a valuable identity in the present rather than to recognize the historical oppressions that were the context for its emergence. This type of recognition, then, limits our ability to see the oppressions that have historically constructed social identities, thereby limiting our understanding of political and social realities. “The business of the novelist,” claims Baldwin, is “revelation,” “a journey toward a more vast reality,” which will allow us to see the human being as more than “merely a member of a Society or a Group”6 without letting social identity drop out of the equation. What Baldwin is asking for, at the brink of what would become a liberal multicultural political era, is a way of talking about America and Americans that can address race and painful histories, but does not represent a reified set of identities. Baldwin is looking for a literary language that would allow us to see the limiting nature of our current myths, legends, and discursive coercions—a literature of what Althusser calls “internal distantiation” that can employ language such that the reader becomes able to “perceive” the limits of her ideological frameworks “from the inside” despite her reliance on them to make sense of the world.7 At the same time, Baldwin acknowledges that recognizing our social ideologies as myths and coercions risks not only losing the safety that society provides but also hurtling us into a psychic void, a void of an unknown self. Baldwin’s call for a dangerous but revelatory aesthetics of internal distantiation is responded to in the work of Audre Lorde. In a 1984 conversation between Baldwin and Lorde, published in Essence magazine, the two authors present differing gender-inflected perspectives on relations between black men and women, the need for constructing new models of black masculinity, and ways to effect radical social change. The one point on which they unconditionally agree is that the kind of social change necessary for black men and women in America can only come from turning to “look at” and “deal with” the “horror of . . . our different nightmares.”8 They agree that they must “look at [this horror] directly without embracing it.”9 Lorde, even in her criticisms of Baldwin, enacts his call to produce a more vast reality. She does this not by turning away from the reality she sees but by using her poetry to develop an aesthetic, linguistic position of internal distantiation from which she can perceive and express her own


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reality and the American social ideologies that construct it without ultimately having to embrace its horror.10 Described on the dust jacket of her biography as “a woman who personified the defining civil rights struggles of the twentieth century,”11 Lorde has become an icon and spokesperson for contemporary minority social identities of race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and class. In literary critical writing on Lorde, her work is consistently described in terms suggesting that it speaks to Baldwin’s “unknown selves” that “demand new acts of creation.” AnaLouise Keating, who has written prolifically on Lorde, says that “by speaking out [Lorde] begins constructing the world she envisions; that is, she creates a new discourse enabling her to invent a world in which those truths can materialize.”12 The majority of these arguments, however, have focused on Lorde’s prose, and the studies that do address her poetry in large part approach it from the angle of content only, rarely paying close attention to its form. In this chapter, I suggest that Lorde’s works are formally as creative as their subject matter and that Lorde’s poetry is transformational in so far as it produces alternative linguistic forms of representation in the midst of civil rights and new social movements eras. Lorde wrote over a period of time in which civil rights and black nationalisms, mainstream and marginalized feminisms, and gay and lesbian movements were creating more narratives for nonwhite, nonmale, and nonstraight American identities. At the same time, they were laying the groundwork for an ever-strengthening hegemonic discourse of liberal multiculturalism. Lorde’s need to write pieces that read as transformational is a result of the ways in which discourses surrounding the world she inhabits were historically becoming more loudly heard and simultaneously more limited in what they could articulate. Resisting potentially essentialist and reified identity categories while simultaneously identifying with and helping to construct them put Lorde in a paradoxical position to begin with. To negotiate this position and make a place for herself and her work within it, Lorde develops an aesthetics of internal distantiation that allows her readers to perceive, if not know, the limitations of their own liberal multicultural models. The attempt to speak the void of the unknown self that Baldwin calls for and to which Lorde responds with these distantiating aesthetics is a potentially traumatic act in so far as it attempts not only to make readers aware of the limitations of burgeoning ideologies of liberal multiculturalism but also to present other ways of thinking social identities for which there are no existing coherent narratives. Cathy Caruth tells us that “[t]rauma does not simply serve as a record


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of the past but precisely registers the force of an experience that is not yet fully owned.”13 In other words, trauma allows for a registering of something that does not yet fully exist in so far as it cannot yet be fully represented and therefore “owned” as a part of the self. Lorde positions her poems at this traumatic lacuna. “Our poems,” she says, “formulate the implications of ourselves, what we feel within and dare to make real . . . our fears, our hopes, our most cherished terrors.”14 It is the cherishing of these terrors in which both Baldwin and Lorde are invested. In the sections that follow, I contextualize Lorde’s poetry in relation to her biography and her prose works. I also examine the formal qualities of Lorde’s poems in relation to psychoanalytic models of trauma and transitional space to look at how a revelatory aesthetics of internal distantiation can be developed that allows readers to become aware of the limitations of emergent liberal multicultural discourse, while neither traumatizing the reader nor risking the intelligibility of the represented self. Lorde’s poetry, while employing many canonical Western poetic tropes,15 reworks these tropes such that they resist the ways in which everyday speech, narrative prose, and other cohesive, rhetorically effective modes of expression reinscribe, at least at the level of syntax and diction, hegemonic ways of representing minoritarian identity and subjecthood. When looking at Lorde’s use of form in relation to politics we cannot lose sight of the importance of identity categories in her work; as Lorde herself says, “I have to deal with identity or I don’t exist at all.”16 At the same time Lorde’s work is constantly challenging the stability and reliability of social identity categories by making the reader aware of both her reliance on them and the limitations that that reliance creates. I use tools taken from psychoanalytic theory to think about ways that this type of distantiating language—which both constructs and evades meaning—is, despite its difficulty, not antirepresentational but rather a highly useful aesthetic mode for thinking, representing, and narrating identifications, desires, and perspectives that cannot yet be contained within the historical unities and narrative continuities through which US society defines itself and its citizens.

Tr auma Theo ry, D is tanti ati on, and Liber al Multiculturali sm Recently, many literary critics have taken up the negotiation of trauma as a model for literary interpretation. These critics, following the work of theorists such as Cathy Caruth and clinicians including Judith


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Lewis Herman, Bessel van der Kolk, and Dori Laub, have focused on the ways autobiographical and fictional narratives are used to work through psychic trauma. I use trauma theory here not to look at the individual writer, persona, or character in Lorde’s work as a victim of trauma but instead to look at the ways her aesthetic modes and linguistic structures display features of trauma victims’ storytelling described by Judith Herman as “emotional, contradictory, and fragmented,”17 and by Ruth Leys as “a literal registration” of events through “perform[ances], reenact[ments], or reexperien[ces]” that fill the “gap or aporia in consciousness and representation” that characterizes traumatic memory.18 Though such traumatic textual features may fail to create fully cohesive healing narratives, they can work to produce perhaps not fully assimilable but nevertheless present representations of subjective relations to the world that would otherwise be unrepresentable. Trauma, which by definition must exceed the normal conditions for constituting linguistic survival, provides a useful theoretical tool for thinking about what discursive possibilities might look like that would exceed the interpellative call of liberal multiculturalism while simultaneously maintaining an internal sense of selfhood and an externally recognizable subject. As I will suggest in relation to hybridity theory and cosmopolitanism in Chapters 2 and 3, respectively, trauma theory is an exciting and rich theoretical model that can be used to better understand and more incisively discuss an internally distantiating aesthetics that can make us perceive the liberal multicultural ideologies in which we and the texts are held. Situated on the border between experience and nonexperience, knowing and not-knowing, trauma bears a similarity to what Althusser defines as the distantiating power of art. Neither traumatic memory nor internally distantiating art can provide direct access to knowledge or experience. They resist the security of knowing, while “maintaining a certain specific relationship” with knowledge.19 What we might attempt to know is not ideology or the psyche as such but the locations that register traces of their workings. In Althusser’s “A Letter on Art,” he calls for “an adequate (scientific) knowledge of the processes which produce the ‘aesthetic effect’ of a work of art.”20 Psychoanalysis, at least since Sigmund Freud’s work on the uncanny, has been invested in a similar project of constructing adequate (scientific) theories and terminologies to access that which registers at the level of the aesthetic. In other words, psychoanalysis investigates the ways in which we emotionally and psychologically respond to the world and to cultural objects. In my own attempt to build a set of theories and tools in relation to internal distantiation, I


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make use here of the more radical interpretive possibilities of trauma theory in its relation to linguistic form. Dori Laub and Nanette Auerhahn address the relation between trauma and narration, arguing that “[m]uch of our knowing is dependent on language—not only our knowing trauma through hearing victims’ language, but the ability of victims to grasp and recall their experiences through the process of formulating them in language. Because of the radical break between trauma and culture, victims often cannot find categories of thought or words for their experience.”21 These breaks between experience and expression and between trauma and culture are inseparable for Laub and Auerhahn. They claim it is “the pervasive, deconstructive impact on the cultural and psychological assumptions governing our lives [that] often results in a cognitive and affective paralysis.”22 I would like to pose the following question: What happens when one lacks access to a coherent language of representation for experience not because a traumatic event has caused a break between language, experience, and culture, but because there simply are no ordered, cohesive “categories of thought or words,” no preexisting, socially intelligible, culturally coded narratives, through which to “grasp and recall” experience? In such an instance, speech will always appear traumatic due to the fact that all attempts at representation will necessarily have to be linguistically registered differently. Audre Lorde’s transformational, revelatory work can be read as a form of such attempts at representation. I am not the first to read Lorde’s work through a framework of trauma. Cassie Premo Steele, in her book We Heal from Memory: Sexton, Lorde, Anzaldúa, and the Poetry of Witness, performs an extended reading of Lorde’s texts in relation to trauma. Steele’s goal, however, is to demonstrate the ways in which Lorde’s “speaking” and “witnessing” of traumatic histories “begins the process of healing” by “giv[ing] voice” to the historical trauma of black women’s sexuality and the personal trauma of Lorde’s own experiences of sexual assault as Steele extrapolates them from Lorde’s biomythography.23 While I agree with Steele that Lorde’s poems do “voice” experiences and subjectivities that cannot be narrated I do not argue that this is because of a traumatic event in Lorde’s personal history. I do not see Lorde’s poems as “getting at” or “representing” a “real” that was previously repressed but as an alternate form of expression that is not a “first step” to “healing” or narrating, but is in itself a creative poetic aesthetics of internal distantiation that replaces referential, representational narration.24 Trauma here becomes an interpretive tool that can help us think about the ways Lorde manipulates form—not to testify to a preexisting truth but to


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prompt her readers to feel or perceive the limitations of their own ideological frameworks and the ways these frameworks impact Lorde’s ability to narrate and the reader’s ability to hear.25 If there is a substantive quality of trauma in Lorde’s poems in which I am interested, it is something more along the lines of what W. E. B. Du Bois has famously called “double consciousness” or the black American’s inheritance of “always looking at [him/her]self through the eyes of others.”26 Double consciousness is a kind of perpetual trauma in that it consists of two irreconcilable ways of seeing or remembering one’s national and personal history and experiences. It is a form of subjective fragmentation, which becomes evident in the illogical way Du Bois’s relation to the metaphoric veil functions—he is simultaneously beneath, behind, above, through, and shut out by the veil. The veil as metaphor instantiates a kind of traumatic formalism itself. It is a constantly mixed and remixed metaphor; it does not make clearer the black man’s relation to the world but complicates it. Moreover, double consciousness is not only a psychically painful position but also an internally distantiating one that gives one the “gift” of “second-sight.”27 Thus it can lead to a literature that can see or represent more, and more complexly, than would otherwise be possible—not through additional knowledge that contributes to the stability of a dominant ideological perspective but through oppositional knowledge that illuminates the limitations of that perspective though a process of internal distantiation. A telling moment in relation to Lorde’s investment in internally distantiating aesthetics over narratives that represent so as to produce or communicate knowledge occurs in an interview between Lorde and fellow poet Adrienne Rich in which they discuss the power and limitations of “intuition.” Rich is afraid of “intuiting” Lorde incorrectly and says that “if [she] asks for documentation” it is because “there are times when [Rich] simply cannot know what [Lorde] knows, unless [she] shows [her] what she means.”28 Lorde, however, sees this request for documentation as “a questioning of [her] perceptions, an attempt to devalue what [she’s] in the process of discovering.”29 Lorde explains, “I have a difficult enough time making my perceptions verbal, tapping that deep place, forming that handle, and documentation at that point is often useless. Perceptions precede analysis just as visions precede action or accomplishments. It’s like getting a poem . . .”30 This sentence is never completed, which is a rare occurrence in both Lorde’s written and spoken prose. In discussing the way poetry functions, Lorde begins to address what organized, narrative speech (“documentation”) cannot access. But it


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can only be a beginning. In the prose-style communicative language in which Lorde and Rich are interacting, nothing but the silent, blank space of the ellipses can “speak” to a representation of “that deep place” Lorde is attempting to access. These ellipses refuse to do damage to her perceptions by cramming them into preexisting discourses of knowledge and display. They deny access to what Rich asks for as documented self and instead associate the self with a lack of coherent explanatory narrative form. “That deep place” is Lorde’s metaphor for the insufficiency of the dominant sociolects of representation in the late twentieth-century United States. Lorde’s references to “perceptions” that cannot be “documented” echoes Althusser’s suggestion that internally distantiating art can make us “perceive but not know,” even as her metaphor of “forming a handle” indicates a desire to access and hold onto direct knowledge of the self. In Lorde’s poems, the subjectivity or life experience that identifies itself through the categories of US citizen, woman, lesbian, mother, racial and/or ethnic minority has no complete language in which to access a fully developed perception of self and must be constructed from pieces of different ideological sociolects that often contradict one another.31 These poems allow us to explore the ways in which a writer who inhabits multiple minoritarian identity positions in a liberal multicultural society—each with a different discourse of representation, none of which directly corresponds to but all of which must speak to the hegemonic centers of culture in which ideologies of US liberal individualism produce discourses of self-identity and selfexpression—negotiates the act of self-representation at all. Ultimately there is no fully effective, socially comprehensible way of reconciling these multiple linguistically coded frames of reference within contemporary US liberal multicultural discourse. What Lorde’s negotiation does allow, however, is a distantiating perception of the historically shifting ideological boundaries of social selfhood that she and her readers are negotiating. The readings that follow attempt to determine not only what we can understand about these texts by looking at them through the theoretical lens of trauma but also the extent to which they might allow us to read Laub’s and Auerhahn’s suggestion regarding the “deconstructive impact [of trauma] on the cultural and psychological assumptions governing our lives”32 in a more constructive light. We might think of these “cultural and psychological assumptions” as “social logics,” characterized by Ernesto Laclau as “a rarified system of objects, as a ‘grammar’ or cluster of rules which make some combinations and substitutions possible and exclude others.”33 In


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the sections that follow, I explore the ways formally traumatic texts that resist offering fully organized, cohesive, or verbalized stories and that exceed the grammars of existing social logics, thereby frustrating access to a knowable “reality” might prompt readers, through a process of internal distantiation, to recognize the necessarily limited nature of the cultural, psychological, and social assumptions governing their own lives.

“G ener atio n II” and New Social Movement Politics Lorde’s “Generation II” was published in 1973, when the civil rights movement had arguably achieved its greatest political gains without having done much to address the concerns of black women and the movement had split between separatist, masculinist black power, and a more mainstream assimilationist liberal democratic politics. Second-wave feminism was still making significant advances (via Roe v. Wade, for example); and the gay and lesbian movement was beginning to gain widespread momentum. Though this combination led to a national atmosphere of “progressive” feeling, it was one in which black feminism was, in the shadows of black nationalism and mainstream white feminism, making little progress with the exception of gaining “recognition” as a coherent minority group. The National Black Feminist Organization was established in 1973, but as Michele Wallace suggests, it made no significant social or political gains and was not even properly a unified movement. “We [the NBFO] came to no compromise or agreement on a single issue,” writes Wallace, “not on abortion, birth control, daycare or welfare.” But, she adds, there was one area of agreement: “There was resounding and unanimous applause for the following proposal: ‘We recognize the oppression of our black lesbian sisters four times over—first as women, second as blacks, third as gays and fourth as gays who are women, and we advocate the revoking of all laws and practices that constrict their movement and hinder their free existence.’”34 What these comments suggest is that while black women and even black lesbians may have been receiving more attention as a recognized group or set of groups, significant support was not available for substantive political, social, and economic changes. Additionally it makes clear the way in which language was lacking even for the representational aspect of this political movement. The awkwardness of the statement “first as women, second as blacks, third as gays and fourth as gays who are women” reflects the awkward social and political positioning of black lesbians,


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and it repeats the ranking and separating by commas often pointed to as evidence of the essentializing nature of identity politics generally. From a Land Where Other People Live, the 1973 collection in which “Generation II” was published, was missing one of its original pieces, “Love Poem.” An explicitly lesbian-themed piece, “Love Poem,” was removed by Dudley Randall, editor of the alternative Broadside Press and promoter of a particular black nationalist aesthetic that did not have room for queer sensibilities.35 Lorde’s “Generation II” is written in the context of a period of both power and restriction (particularly sexual restriction) for black girls, like the girl in this poem, as they are becoming black women.36 This ten-line poem with lines between one and three words is a fragmented description of a young black woman coming of age and facing the adult anger of herself and her mother. In this poem Lorde uses a number of modernist tropes. The syntax is irregular and disorienting and the overall effect of reading is one of fragmentation. What Amitai F. Avi-Ram has noted as Lorde’s use of apo koinou—a figure of speech in which “a single word or phrase is shared between two distinct, independent syntactic units”—appears between nearly every line, again adding to the poem’s kaleidoscopic effects of multiplication and fragmentation.37 Additionally, I would argue the aesthetics of this poem are formally traumatic in that the poem’s meaning exceeds language’s ability to hold, represent, and narrate it. The poem actually registers as a number of competing descriptions, and any attempt at a single narrativization leaves out much of the poem’s meaning and also requires deciding where or how she is “going” and whether her mother prays for her, for her to become a woman, or for another woman. Thus to make this poem fit standard narrative conventions would require letting the limits of twentieth-century US English dictate its meaning as being only about a particular type of mother/daughter black female anger, one that suggests a universal problem between mothers and daughters, perhaps intensified by being black in addition to being female. Instead, through Lorde’s use of fragmented images and irregular syntax she is able to express in this very short poem multiple and overlapping themes and identity-produced frictions and connections between mother and daughter. The first three lines of the poem, via the single word second line, present simultaneously a black girl becoming a woman and a black girl penetrating a woman. Not only does this evoke and conflate issues of black womanhood as an identity (one revealed to be socially and linguistically produced by the noticeable difference between the capitalized “Black” and lower case “girl,” and simultaneously presented as a given reality or “truth,”


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since this description is presented as who the character is, without social or historical contextualization), relations between black women of different generations, and sexual desire between (black) women; it also presents the girl and the woman as simultaneously the same and separate—“going/into” as becoming, or as making love to another and/or another version of oneself. Similarly the apo koinou surrounding the single-word fifth line, “desired,” suggests simultaneously that the girl is becoming that which the mother prayed for her to be; that she is sexually engaged with a woman whom her mother desired but, we assume, could not have; and that the girl is becoming the woman her mother desired and prayed to be but could not. Thus the poem is simultaneously about frictions, competitions, and inequalities between mother and daughter; a desire and need for autonomy, as well as a mother’s desires for her black daughter; and a daughter’s dependence on those desires to become a black woman at all. In this way, it speaks to many of the paradoxes inherent in generational relationships between black women. As Patricia Hill Collins has argued, “women of color’s motherwork requires reconciling two contradictory needs concerning identity: preparing children to survive within systems of racial oppression, and equipping children to challenge systems of racial oppression.”38 Yet Collins also notes that girls of color are often “told that their lives cannot be complete without a male partner and that their educational and career obligations must be subordinated to their family obligations.”39 This not only produces an ideological orientation that challenges US liberalism’s stress on individualism and autonomy but also reproduces oppressions of women of color. Moreover, for Lorde and for the black girl in this poem, there is the element of sexual identity—simultaneously learning to become a black woman and negotiating desire for women, which may be seen as a betrayal of her identity as a socially responsible black woman (and related to Broadside Press’s reasons for omitting “Love Poem”). “Generation II” ends with an image of the girl walking and references a fear of the “angers” of herself and her mother. Again the idea of separateness is evoked by the image of walking alone, but the apo koinou at work in the earlier lines of the poem makes the reader read the enjambed “alone” and “and” together, suggesting a connection between the two words, perhaps that “alone” always requires an “and” to register as alone. Similarly, the next line—only two words long but connecting the women in a single prepositional phrase—reinforces a necessary duality and connection even in the description of one who has outgrown the mother and is now alone. The final line separates the girl even from herself. She is not only afraid of her mother’s anger


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(which is both an anger the mother has passed on to her daughter and one she may now have in relation to her daughter becoming a woman and “going/into” what she could not be or have) but also afraid of her own anger (an anger which is both in reaction to the mother and learned from her mother and the desires she has passed along to her daughter).40 The poem thus ends in a kind of irreconcilable multiplicity, but it is a multiplicity generated through a legible and cohesive poetic form, fragmented and confusing as that form may be. Lorde then captures, in a single expressive act, multiple and contradictory aspects of and positions within contemporary US identity. There are paradoxes within these multiple expressions: the poem is about black womanhood, black motherhood, and lesbian desire; about hope for, fear for, and jealousy of; and about anger, separation, and unbreakable connections between generations. More important to Lorde’s distantiative aesthetics, and more difficult to express, is the paradoxical simultaneity of identity as central to the poem’s, the girl’s and the speaker’s existence and the resistance to letting any identity “mean” as it would in hegemonic discourse surrounding black (lesbian) womanhood, which in mainstream political and social discourse had (and often has) the tendency to replace social recognition of specific and complex needs of a minority population with a recognition of it as a visible and thus “represented” group on a national scale.41 Lorde’s poetry functions as an early example of a literature that uses internally distantiating aesthetics to resist the call to represent in this way, while still addressing issues of minoritarian identity through formally traumatic tropes of lyric poetry. It thereby allows the reader to better understand the workings of her own liberal multicultural ideology. Lorde’s identification with multiple minoritarian positions means not only that her persona does not fit hegemonic identity discourses but also that each minoritarian subject position that she inhabits is creating, through various new social movements, its own language of representation that includes vocabularies and syntaxes that do not necessarily fit with each other.42

L i mits o f Natio nal S e lf- Narrati on Although Audre Lorde was in certain ways a transnational writer, a central theme of her work was the ways in which she was specifically nationally constructed and interpellated through US discourses. In the context of this project, I am most interested in her representations of experiences and perspectives that are created and informed by US sociolects yet push beyond them through an internally distantiating


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aesthetics that allows readers to become aware of them as potential limitations on their own thinking. Zami, Lorde’s “biomythography,” provides a starting point for thinking about Lorde’s particular relation to the limits of representation for identity and subjecthood in the United States. It is Lorde’s multiple “minority identities,” as defined within US social discourse, combined with her political identity as an American citizen, which often leads to the silences in Zami that mark the limitations of linguistic self-representation. Not only does Zami describe the way in which Audre (the text’s main character), when performing the identity of village “gay-girl,” is silent about race for fear of “breach[ing] some sacred bond of gayness,” while with her “straight Black girlfriends” she could be accepted as a lesbian as long as “it wasn’t too obvious and didn’t reflect upon them in any way.”43 It also demonstrates the way in which the limits of representation are codified through the processes of national identification and citizen interpellation. The following passage describes Lorde’s childhood reactions to domestic national propaganda during World War II: Even simple conversation became suspect. Silence was golden, didn’t all the posters say so? Despite the fact that I had no secrets at all to tell, I always felt a pang of self-righteous pleasure whenever I passed the corner lamp post at 140th Street and Lenox Avenue. From it hung a brightly colored sign of a white man with his fingers to his lips. Beneath his half-turned face in big block letters it warned: A SLIP OF THE LIP MAY SINK A SHIP! I felt my silences socially and patriotically endorsed.44

This anecdote suggests a direct relationship between behaving as a proper US citizen and self-imposed silences. For Lorde, this silencing is particularly related to such politically and socially volatile issues as race, gender, and sexuality. Though these parts of herself are not “secrets,” pressures of, or rather gaps in, social discourse compel her to silence them anyway. The “white man” here represents both what silences Audre (the power she lacks as neither white nor male) and the amorphous authority that allows her the freedom to speak in the first place and whose expectations she, as a national subject, most wants to satisfy. In a moment of true Althusserian hailing, Audre’s “pangs of pleasure” as a “righteous [national] self” are directly connected to a suppression of the parts of her identity that exceed that national selfhood.45


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It is not until Lorde literally removes herself from the United States to Mexico that she is able to take the desire “that had once made [her] speechless” and turn it into “courage.”46 In Mexico, Lorde writes, “[F]or the first time in my life, I had an insight into what poetry could be. I could use words to recreate [a] feeling, rather than to create a dream.”47 In Lorde’s US poetry, however, she must create rather than recreate. She describes her roots as a poet in the following way: “I was very good at [telling stories to children], and loved to do it. It reminded me of the endless poems I used to memorize as a child, and which I would retell to myself and anybody else who would listen. They were my way of talking. To express a feeling I would recite a poem. When the poems I memorized fell short of the occasion, I started to write my own.”48 Lorde’s poetry “speaks” what she as a social and political subject cannot. It might be argued that Lorde did, in fact, speak often and clearly as a full social and political subject in her many public speeches and political essays. Yet these in certain ways highly political and affectively effective prose pieces contain within their very modes of representation symptoms of the limitations of that representation. In the same way in which a patient loses direct but inexpressible access to traumatic memory through the therapeutic process of organizing it into a psychically assimilable story, Lorde’s prose, paradoxically, in its reliance on socially understandable and organizable representational language, is unable directly to represent the experiences and desires it addresses.49 The use of rhetoric, which comes from the Greek eiro, “I say,” requires that one take on a stable subject position. And to employ the rhetoric of ethos (ethical argument) in a contemporary liberal multicultural context—in which the individual is not only the basic unit of society and the level at which “equality” and “justice” are imagined to be achieved but also the basic unit for social identity representation—one must construct an identifiable “I” to do the “saying.” Consequently Lorde does employ a cohesive and identifiable “I” in her speeches, an “I” that often plays the role of authentically representing minoritarian identity positions. Her essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” for example, which begins with references to “we” and “our,” shifts in the middle section of the speech when Lorde begins to refer to herself separately from her audience, three of the earliest instances being “I am speaking here of,” “When I speak of,” “I speak of it as.”50 Here, Lorde is establishing herself as the linguistic, speaking source of valuable information in addition to supporting that information with logical argumentation. Lorde


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furthermore employs that “I” persona as a speaker whose opinions and subject position place her in a position of authority. To do this she enters the linguistic realm that Rancière calls “policing”—the realm of what is currently hearable and sayable—as opposed to the linguistic realm of the “political” in which one challenges what can be said and heard. Lorde, in her speeches, uses the very nationally constructed minoritarian positions that make a holistic representation of self so difficult in Zami as a source of argumentative strength and representational authenticity. Near the end of “Uses of the Erotic” Lorde makes the ethical basis of her argument clear: “The erotic cannot be felt second hand. As a Black lesbian feminist, I have a particular feeling, knowledge, and understanding for those sisters with whom I have danced hard, played, or even fought.”51 This rhetorical move places Lorde in the position of an expert and presents personal experience as legitimate grounds for political argument. Yet it implies that her right to speak for comes from her individual experience as a representative member of that group. This logic lends itself easily to a liberal multicultural social discourse in which Lorde represents a coherent group in need of recognition. It is difficult to reconcile this statement with the multiple internal group differences that Lorde is invested in recognizing and respecting, but it is her only recourse if she wishes to communicate with her audience. There are limits to the meaning potentials available within these politically motivated forms of hegemonic representational expression.52 Just as “the transformation of the trauma into a narrative memory that allows the story to be verbalized and communicated [and] integrated into one’s own, and others’, knowledge . . . may lose both the precision and the force that characterized traumatic recall,”53 so too does the packaging of Lorde’s political goals and subjectivity in hegemonic rhetorical discourse involve the loss of certain possibilities of representation. More importantly, however, they do not, as do Lorde’s poetic aesthetics of internal distantiation, require the reader to think about her own ideological assumptions or about the ways in which those assumptions limit Lorde’s ability to present herself as a fluid and whole US citizen-subject. These limitations to expression beyond socially endorsed structures of thinking about identity and difference are most recurrently revealed in the text’s tendency to list, particularly in reference to minoritarian identity positions. Lorde describes her subject matter as “difference[s] of race, sexuality, class, and age,” about which she desires input from “poor women, Black and Third World women, and lesbians” in “a country where racism, sexism, and homophobia are inseparable.”54


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These lists are instances of the rhetorical figure articulus—the stringing together of a series of words, separated by commas and without coordinating conjunctions—described by David Kazanjian as “at once connect[ing] and separat[ing] a series of words with commas and silences.”55 Kazanjian also points out that articulus is most likely etymologically and metaphorically related to “articulate” in the bodily sense, “which refers to a point or act of connection or juncture and to a discrete segment or segmentation (two discrete limbs that meet at a juncture).”56 Thus Lorde’s list does connect different identificatory terms but it does so in a way that suggests that they are discrete segments that meet at a “joint,” obscuring their intensely complicated and interdependent relations to one anther. Perhaps most telling in this respect is Lorde’s list describing “those who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women” as “those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older,”57 for it speaks to the fact that Lorde herself (who has been poor, is a lesbian, is black, is getting older) is one of the subjects who stands outside the circle of accepted definition, not simply because her identity is inscribed with a marker of difference but because she cannot describe her outsiderness without employing a list of separate and separating terms.

N ot a Lux ury : “Coal” and Distantiative Possibilities f o r Tr aumatic For mali sm Limited by this discourse of dis-articulation, it is to poetry that Lorde turns, which she herself describes as “a way to give name to the nameless so that it can be thought.”58 What is named in her poems, however, is often not easily accessible to her readers. Yet it is this very lack of accessibility, the “failure” to organize a cohesive, socially intelligible narrative that I read as formalistic trauma that allows the nameless to be named at all. Lorde’s biographer, Alexis De Veaux, describes 1976 as a year in which Lorde “wrestled with several paradoxes,”59 among them maintaining a sense of herself as an outsider while being published by the mainstream press W. W. Norton, feeling her writing to be both a curse and her life’s blood, and dealing with her deep commitment to poetry while also beginning to see prose as a necessary but frustratingly linear way of reaching larger audiences.60 In 1976, Lorde also finished her collection Coal, which included a reworking and republishing of the poem “Coal.” “Coal” begins with an imagistic stanza about speaking


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blackness and the multiple ways that something can be open. The stanza begins with the single character “I” on the first line, followed by six much longer (four- to nine-word) densely descriptive lines.61 This “I,” which is the first line, word, and letter of this poem, functions to split its own signification and to introduce multiple meaning-making possibilities. Although it appears to represent a unified self in the single letter “I,” it simultaneously almost does not signify linguistically at all because its positioning at the beginning of the poem on a line by itself makes it appear first as the numerical marker “I,” which would indicate not a speaker or subject but a section of the poem (the table of contents in Coal is separated into sections using just such markers). This dual signification is reinforced by the following verb “is,” which prevents “I” from registering simply as the speaking self. While it may be the speaker of the poem, the “I” must also be seen grammatically as a person or object separate from the self. Already in the first two words, then, we can see the text performing traumatic formalism in that it presents neither the self nor the word as singular and integrated but as split and unable to assimilate all the parts of itself. The double “I” speaks to the problems inherent in liberal multicultural citizenship. As Wendy Brown notes, “[C]ontemporary politicized identity contests the terms of liberal discourse insofar as it challenges liberalism’s universal ‘we’ as a strategic fiction of historically hegemonic groups and asserts liberalism’s ‘I’ as social—both relational and constructed by power—rather than contingent, private, or autarkic. Yet it reiterates the terms of liberal discourse insofar as it posits a sovereign and unified ‘I’ that is disenfranchised by an exclusive ‘we.’”62 Brown goes on to propose a political project based in the “memory of desire” that might “destabilize the formulation of identity as fixed position.” She writes, If every “I am” is something of a resolution of desire into a fixed and sovereign identity, then this project might involve not only learning to speak but to read “I am” this way, as in motion, as temporal, a notI, as deconstructable according to a genealogy of want rather than as fixed interests or experiences. The subject understood as an effect of an “ongoing” genealogy of desire, including the social processes constitutive of, fulfilling, or frustrating desire, is in this way revealed as neither sovereign nor conclusive even as it is affirmed as an “I.”63

Speaking and teaching others to read the “I” in this way is precisely what Lorde’s poem is doing. The “I” here is both the affirmed


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individual voice and a recognized formal signifier, which stands in for and is an effect of a constantly shifting genealogy of desire. Such a double expression will necessarily appear formally traumatic in so far as it not only divides the speaking subject from herself but also challenges a cohesive language of representation. Language and meaning-making meet at the “I am,” for it is constructed to eliminate the traumatic elements of fragmented subjectivity. Thus the formally traumatic opening of “Coal” is Lorde’s way of keeping the “I,” challenging the “I am,” and making readers attentive to their assumptions concerning identity and self-expression from the outset. As the stanza proceeds to fill in the predicate for this “I,” its traumatic formalism only redoubles. The reader is unable to pin down a signification: the “I,” as Lorde, is racially black; the printed “I” is a black mark on the page; and the “I” as romantic human self is also black in the sense that it is dark, obscure, and inaccessible except through acts of representation to oneself and others. The following image describing ways of being open functions similarly. We feel it should symbolically represent something specific and identifiable, especially in a poem by an African American titled “Coal.” Yet it is not possible to say exactly what it symbolizes. We know that coal and diamonds are both forms of compressed carbon and in that way they are “essentially” the same. However, the poem resists an easy interpretation that would read this chemical similarity as symbolic representation of the way in which what is black or white on the outside is made up of the same natural material. One way in which it does this is to prevent any stable relationship between diamond and coal and the light and dark with which they are associated. In this first stanza, for example, it is not possible to determine exactly what constitutes “coming into.” Is a diamond held in a flame? Is light reflecting through a diamond to create the image of a flame? And how can a “knot,” which should signify something closed, be come into? We are told nothing more than that this image is one of an unknown number of ways of being open, one of which is certainly the openness of signification within the poem itself. Nevertheless, Lorde reminds us, this openness is not a completely free play of signification, for meaning, sound, and image are always “coloured”64 by power and by who pays and what is paid in exchange for it. The diamond and the flame return as an even more powerfully visual image in the second stanza, which addresses different kinds of “words.” The return of this image in the second stanza evokes an almost unseeably brilliant sunlight reflecting off diamonds on glass— “singing” in a “crash of sun.” The concrete and sense-oriented quality


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of the image is further enriched by the synesthesia of its description. What words could she be describing and what is happening to them? Are they a fire-like powerful and pure language or is their “singing” silenced by the “crash” of the sunlight, which gives them their power in the first place? Does their brightness illuminate meaning or are they so bright as to blind their listener to their significance? One is forced to read these lines simultaneously on a linguistic level (one relies on language to access the image) and a somatosensory level (the image is most powerfully registered sensually as opposed to intellectually and, moreover, in mixed, synesthetic, sensual imagery that cannot be translated into a linear metaphor).65 In this way the line parallels traumatic memory, which, as Judith Lewis Herman tells us, “lack[s] verbal narrative and context” and is therefore “encoded in the form of vivid sensations and images.”66 She also claims that this “intense focus on fragmentary sensation, on image without context, gives the traumatic memory a heightened reality.”67 Thus we might see Lorde’s concurrently intense and obscure images as closer to what she imagines as the reality of her “deep place” than her more cohesive, linear, and multiculturally representational essays. About three-quarters of the way through “Coal,” its imagery shifts from abstract and nonidentifiably symbolic to concretely referential. Interestingly, this shift occurs at the moment the poet or speaker enters the poem. This section is by far the most accessible of the poem. It addresses the poet’s relationship to language, and the similes provide images, which function straightforwardly to reinforce the frustrations and pleasures of that relationship. What is interesting about this section is that in the simile lines, in which words are in the process of making and/or relaying meaning, the poet appears only as a body part: a throat, a tongue, lips. This synecdoche echoes the listing of parts of oneself often produced by discussion of social identity (think of the NBFO’s list of representational concerns or Lorde’s own frequent prose references to “race, sexuality, class, age” etc.68). When words appear to express meaning easily, the speaking self enters the poem only as a conglomeration of parts. However, when words “bedevil,” when they transform, possess, corrupt, or otherwise disrupt the facade of transparent linguistic expression, the speaking self can be represented as a “me,” as opposed to one of “my” parts. In other words, “me” as a whole self exists in relation to language only when that language is recognized as an unreliable, nonrational, obscure system of meaning production, which is not only a human tool for expression but an active force that has the power to act back on those using it. This distantiating aesthetic form bedevils the reader as well


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who, in her desire to decipher the poem’s meaning, becomes aware of a desire to read through the more representational culturally coded models of Lorde’s prose work, but who is here asked to read differently, without the security of stabilizing liberal multicultural identity narratives. The third and final stanza of “Coal” returns to the expressive obscurity of the first. Like the opening stanza it creates multiple and contradictory meanings and is inaccessible on the level of organized, coherent narration. It does, however, create accessible meaning within the bounds of the text by repeating and reorganizing the words and images of the first stanza, thereby altering their meanings. For example, the poem ends with another image of fire, diamond, blackness, coming (out of and into), and a request to “take my word” for “jewel.” The total black and the diamond coming into open flame, which appear in the first stanza as contrasting images, are in this final stanza inseparable, if not identical, due to the parallel constructions of their lines. Unlike the parallelism in Lorde’s essays, which employ the form “a is to b, a is to c, a is to d” (e.g., “those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older”69) not only to express the similarities between but also to literally divide on the page b, c, and d, in “Coal” the parallel construction is “as a is to b, so c is to d.” This second construction stresses a formal identity between two constructs, not simply the potential to place different entities in the same position. It thus reinforces the symbolic identity between coal and diamond as physical elements and linguistic constructions, while retaining a distinction based not on separation, but on actual difference, whether of chemical structure or verb phrase. Additionally, here the “I” is not formally and semantically separated from the rest of the text—we have “I am” and “I come,” as opposed to the initial “I / is.” Similarly, the pronoun “my” takes (a) “word” as its possessive object, as opposed to a piece of the self. It is only in this context of reconfigured signification that “black” can become “Black,” a marker of identification that always runs the risk of splitting the self into parts represented by conflicting social constructions of minoritarian identity positions. “Coal,” then, demonstrates that Lorde has some power over meaning production if only within the bounds of her own texts. It also establishes a context in which language signifies multiply—coal both does and does not reference racial blackness, the images of dark insides and openness both do and do not reference womanhood, and the flame imagery both does and does not reference sexuality. These elements can exist in the poem


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such that they reference social identity without being entirely captive to the way they register as social identity categories. Within the context of her poems, then, Lorde’s words might mean other than the way in which liberal multiculturalist discourses of identity would allow them to mean. This would require that the poems have an audience that is willing to receive signifiers differently. When Lorde asks the reader to take her word for “jewel,” it is a request to take not just “coal” the signifier as her word for “jewel” but “Coal” the poem on her conditions—that is, to take her word for the fact that it has meaning, that it is creating representations, some of which the reader must work for and some of which she may never have access to. The reader, if she wishes to engage with the poem, has little choice but to take Lorde’s word because she has been forced into a state of not knowing, of not being able fully to access Lorde’s poem due to the limitations of the reader’s own existing meaning schemes. The very difficulty or obscurity of the poem constitutes its distantiating effects and is what might provoke the reader to engage in the work of meaning construction apart from her accustomed framework of interpretation, thereby opening up her possibilities for reception. Such provocation of the reader to interact not only with language but also with identity and subjectivity in ways that push beyond the framework of liberal multicultural interpretation and narration can be seen as a creative act of formally traumatic textual production. This is because what Laub and Auerhahn call “the cultural and psychological assumptions which govern our lives”70 are not merely useful for providing a comfortable context in which to live and ways to conceptualize our world and those in it. They simultaneously function to create normative discourses of identity and subjecthood that cut off expression of certain experiences, thereby creating another kind of linguistic trauma. And yet, as useful as trauma theory is for thinking structurally about this representation, neither the poet herself nor the reader is truly traumatized either in or by the poem. Rather, Lorde’s poems create an Althusserian aesthetics of internal distantiation through which (in engagement with which) the reader is able to become aware of the limits of her ideological modes of thinking identity and its representation. So the question arises, how does internal distantiation as a Marxist term relating to social identity and political subject formation apply to the psychic, internal, and personal process of reading? I will spend the remainder of this chapter laying out some ways of thinking about the nontraumatic psychological functioning of a politically and ideologically distantiating aesthetics.


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Wr iting Potential Space: “Power” and Winni cot t The modes of psychic trauma theorized by psychiatrists and psychoanalysts obviously differ from my theoretical conception of traumatic formalism in relation to aesthetics in so far as the clinical paradox of trauma is supposed to close down access to creativity and play rather than opening new possibilities for hearing and saying. Most clinicians see trauma as dividing the self and thereby preventing entrance into psychic “potential space,” where creativity and playing occur. One might expect, then, that traumatic aesthetics would shut down meaning, as the texts would be paralyzed by the impossible paradoxes created by lack of access to discourses through which coherent narrative expression might occur. Thomas Ogden suggests that “what [a trauma victim] is not able to know is what he feels, and therefore who, if anyone, he is,” and thus he creates “the illusion of knowledge” as a defense mechanism, which unfortunately only “further alienates the individual from himself” by “fill[ing] the ‘potential space’ . . . in which desire and fear, appetite and fullness, love and hate might otherwise come into being.”71 We might say, then, that one way in which Lorde’s poems avoid shutting down meaning is by refusing to allow the reader the safety of believing that she “knows,” refusing to allow her to fill in the potential space of the poem. Her reader must be willing to not know in order to interact in any productive manner with the text. This aesthetically prompted not-knowing also resists the liberal multicultural logic that, as Angela Y. Davis suggests, tells us that “if our difference is understood, consumed, and ‘digested,’ we simultaneously can be different and perform ‘as if’ we were really middle-class, straight white males.”72 According to this logic, “difference as an object of ‘distaste,’ ‘dislike,’ or ‘hate’ must be transformed into difference as object of knowledge.”73 In opening up multiple meanings and frustrating a readers’ desire to know difference absolutely, Lorde’s poems undermine the consumptive and enlightenment models of liberal multiculturalism. Thus they keep open a potential space for more flexible meaning production both in the reader’s psyche and in ways of thinking about social and political meanings of identity and identification. D. W. Winnicott describes such a psychic potential space of flexible meaning as resulting from a “transitional phenomenon.” What I want to argue is that the aesthetic effects that I have described as traumatic formalism can effect internal distantiation through a psychic process very similar to the Winnicottian transitional phenomenon. And


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relatedly, that psychoanalytic theory can be a useful place to look for tools not only for reading texts that do not conform to the logic of liberal multiculturalism but also for tools to think beyond it, at least in so far as it provides a model to process both the dangers and the potentials of political not-knowing. Winnicott’s original transitional phenomenon occurs when the child uses an object to move from an infantile state of unacknowledged dependence and fantastic omnipotence over a world that exists only as an extension of itself to a state of subjecthood in which she can differentiate herself from objects and others around her, and must realize that she does not, in fact, have control over them. It is in this transition that a potential space opens up, in which objects are paradoxically both created and discovered by the child. Winnicott further describes what occurs in potential space as a “living experience . . . which is neither dream [omnipotent creation] nor object-relating [dependent on objects that already exist] . . . but at the same time that it is neither the one nor the other of these two it is also both. This is the essential paradox, and [it] is my claim that we need to accept the paradox.”74 Expanding on the concept of potential space, Barbara Johnson notes that in it “the naming and exemplifying functions of language [are held] in abeyance.”75 As Lorde’s poems have demonstrated, however, language itself is not absent from these paradoxical, formally traumatic representations. Language here is rather in a radical mode of play in which it gives up access to coherent, organized expression— naming and exemplifying—in order to be able to achieve psychic access to things that are unrepresentable or narratively unthinkable within existing social discourse or meaning structures. Potential or transitional space,76 then, may be a place in which the paradox of trauma, described by Caruth as “the truth of an event and the truth of its incomprehensibility,”77 can be accepted, and formally traumatic representations thus understood as meaningful representations. Such representations registered in transitional space may not change the “realities” of the world, but they do allow the possibility for a reorganization of available realities in order to create intrapsychic representations that can be spoken, and ideally heard, through formally traumatic texts. In this way objects or realities that otherwise must always only be found can also in some sense be created by the author. As for the reader, she must be willing to enter a state of not-knowing in which she can accept paradoxes, and thus “hear” the poem as a unified representation that encompasses its own contradictions. In this way internally distantiating formally traumatic aesthetics ask the reader to both find and create objects and ideas in the text.


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Winnicott himself describes the transitional phenomenon as being like “the curtain in a theatre”;78 it allows for each audience member to create what was already there to be discovered, suggesting that one can reenter transitional space through an aesthetic experience. This transitional phenomenon opens a “third area of existing.”79 In addition to “individual psychic or inner reality” and “external reality,”80 the transitional phenomenon opens a space in which we can “accept the madness”81 that our world is at once both created or imagined by our psyche and that it preexists us and dictates the boundaries of ourselves. Lorde’s poetry, then, acts like a transitional object. Using an aesthetics of internal distantiation, it opens up a psychic space for its readers between the created and the found, a space that may to a certain extent destabilize the reader but a space that is creative in which one can “accept the madness,” and therefore is not truly traumatic. The reader is able to perceive the ideology that constructs her subjective relation to the world while also acknowledging that she cannot get beyond it—it is her objective and preexisting reality. There is some risk in using Winnicott to discuss Lorde. Much of Winnicott’s work on the transitional object came from his work on the infant/mother relationship, which focused on normative (white, heterosexual, bourgeois) roles of mothers in raising children. I will do one final reading of Lorde’s poetry both to stress the “transitional” nature of her writing and to look at the ways in which, by resisting the metaphors of motherhood that Winnicott formulated in much of his work, she makes a space for motherhood as a powerful position that does not relegate female bodies to limited roles as mothers. Here Lorde develops a distantiative aesthetics that makes readers aware of the contingent, overlapping, and fluid, but also powerfully inexorable, nature of social identity and the ways in which understandings and representations of racial identity are ultimately inextricable from understandings and representations of motherhood. “Power,” the final poem I will discuss, was first published in 1976 in the appropriately Winnicottianly titled collection Between Our Selves.82 It is a powerful poem on both an emotional and a political level and, to a certain extent, seemingly more straightforward and less formally traumatic than either “Generation II” or “Coal.” It addresses a specific historical event (the acquittal of a white policeman for the shooting and killing of Clifford Glover, a ten-year-old black boy) in which race, gender, and sexuality play a large role, and it is an unabashed challenge to dominant uses of whiteness, masculinity, heterosexuality, and immediate family as the models for psychic development and societal structure. Nevertheless, it also uses some of the


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elements of traumatic formalism discussed previously to shift it from a retelling or narrativization of an event to a resignifying of that event in which certain identity positions and their relation to history and social power are both found objects to be used and objects that are imagined, created, and hallucinated by the interaction between text and reader, creating an internal distance within the reading experience. “Power” opens by differentiating “poetry” from “rhetoric” as the difference between two types of killing: suicide versus violence against one’s children. In the opening four lines, a separation is drawn between effective but possibly empty language (rhetoric) and some other kind of linguistic expression that might be more artistic, if also more abstract (poetry). At the same time, language itself is metaphorically blended with the physical body and with death, but the metaphor is slippery. Is the speaker referring to a metaphorical death—is speaking poetry or rhetoric like killing oneself or one’s children? Or is language here a metaphor for actual killing—is killing yourself or your children like speaking poetry or rhetoric? It is nearly impossible to name which element (language or death) belongs to metaphorical source domain and which to target. This is in part due to the ambiguous wording of these lines, but more importantly it is a result of the reader’s knowledge that Lorde is black combined with the reader’s cultural understanding of the public discourses surrounding the deaths of black Americans in which killing is rarely metaphorical. Thus literal death and figurative language connect speech and killing, the linguistic and the physical, putting the parental figure in the opening stanza in need of poetry to avoid an act of murder. Additionally, in this opening stanza the apo koinou around the single-word line “yourself” challenges a straightforward reading of parenting as requiring self-sacrifice over sacrifice of one’s children’s well-being. The word “yourself” functions as both the end of the preceding phrase—making it consistent with a reading of parenting as self-sacrifice—and as the beginning of the following phrase, which stresses the importance of the parental figure’s selfhood as distinct from just his or her children. Thus poetry is like killing yourself but it is also an engagement with the self, not self-denial, and not a replacement of the focus on and exploration of oneself with that of one’s children. The poem’s second stanza describes the surrealistic dreamlike symbolic experience of the persona thirsting for the blood of a dead boy, which functions as a representation of a transitional space. The persona inhabits a transitional desert space between fantasy and reality. The images of a “dead child,” a “shattered black / face” appearing on


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the “edge,” suggest that this space is on the edge between parenting as caring and the desire to turn from the horrors of that responsibility for self-protection. It is also a space of enjambed “black[ness],” on the edge of black as natural identity (the face of someone who is black), black as constructed identity (to be in black face), and black as destruction or loss (the shattered black). Finally, it is a space that encompasses both the reality of a young black boy shot and the hallucination or creation of the event by the speaker. Here, the “I” is both lost and transformed by the external event while also in some ways that “I” is the creator of the event and accordingly responsible. The persona’s thirst is a physical manifestation of a desperate need for something to fill the horrible whiteness of this space, even if that thing is the child’s blood. Here the metaphor of motherhood (rather that just parenthood generally) is evoked though not explicitly stated. The poem suggests that the alternative to giving in and spilling the blood of this boy would be to mother him; to protect, heal, and kiss him. And the anaphoric “trying” connects motherhood to transforming the destructiveness of the world into constructiveness for the child as well as stressing the continual failure faced when trying to make these transformations come to pass. Race is also evoked, though here not so much as blackness (which has been shattered) but as the whiteness of the desert that dries the poet’s mouth, soaks up the boy’s blood, and tries to “bleach” his bones. Whiteness here is both the external world that kills the boy and puts the persona in the horrible position of thirsting after children’s blood and the psychic blankness that the persona faces in the absence of “imagery or magic.” And it is this psychic state of blankness that calls for the creation of poetry. Beginning with this surreal yet viscerally and emotionally intense stanza, which both represents and asks to be read in transitional space, allows the poem to blend external enforcement with internal projection and enables the reader to establish certain conceptual relations toward care, race, protection, and parenting, without explicitly referring to race or gender. When the purely external world (the actual story of the shooting) appears in the third and fourth stanzas, then, we read it with the knowledge that it is limited, comprising only objective, external events. We also read it with the conceptual metaphors of care and creation as poetry, language as killing, and white as empty, dry, and deadly already at the front of our minds. Gender in the third and fourth stanzas is explicitly addressed, unlike in the first stanza, through the masculinization of the policeman. He is importantly a policeman who calls the dying child a “motherfucker,” reinforcing


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his own masculinity by aligning the child with the feminine through a word that makes clear the intersections between gender, sexuality, and violence possibly better than any other in the English language. Gender is also addressed in the distinction between the “white men” on the jury and the “Black Woman,” who stands out as a capitalized and marked identity and who fails in her responsibility to poetry and to motherhood by acquitting the policeman, thereby cementing the end of her possibilities for motherhood. Yet a closer look reveals that while the conceptual metaphor of mother as caretaker may be in play, Lorde complicates this metaphor with the element of race. The other words of the cop tell us that he saw nothing but racial blackness when he looked at the boy, revealing that even if gender informs the policeman’s conception of the black boy (as we see from his use of “motherfucker”), in the moment of killing race becomes the overwhelming signifier. This statement undermines the central conceptual metaphor of the poem, which has heretofore been motherhood. Age and gender are trumped by race and so a poem about black motherhood cannot be about motherhood as it functions as a conceptual metaphor in dominant discourse. Race becomes more important than biological relation, age, gender, or sexuality. Moreover, the fact that a killer can say such a thing in his own defense suggests that, while gender may be an informing factor in all linguistic and conceptual construction, it can never subsume race in the construction of either the individual psyche or the social unconscious in a culture in which such a statement is articulable, again forcing the reader to recognize her reliance on limiting, conflicting, and complex social identity categories in making sense of her world. Similarly, the “Black Woman” of the fourth stanza is a capitalized identity that is raced and gendered, but not in a way such that these conditions can simply be added together as separate identity constructing factors. The cultural history and its ensuing discourses that allow the metaphors in this stanza to have such rhetorical and emotional power is one in which race and gender are inseparable. Here, the measurements of the woman’s body evoke the selling of black women’s bodies. Black women’s gender and sexuality has been so strongly informed by the history of slavery in the United States that the metaphor of being dragged over the coals creates a transitional space where psychological and physical harm are inseparable, again suggesting that the “death” in this poem can never be entirely metaphorical. And so, when the black woman “fails,” she not only harms children but also harms herself. The end of her poetry and her power is the metaphoric end of her ability to (re)produce and to speak. The


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poem again blurs the line between killing oneself and one’s children, as here self-sacrifice is related to both providing for (making) and killing (making a graveyard for) one’s children. The Black Woman uses her remaining agency to “line her own womb,” thereby giving up bringing more children into the world, and to give herself up to make their deaths more comfortable, recognized, and possibly respected. The final stanza completes Lorde’s overturning of the standard conceptual metaphors of motherhood in relation to race and gender. Here we find out that the speaker is, at least symbolically, a young male who fears his power will be “limp,” “useless,” and “unconnected,” which could provoke him to try to regain that power by raping—violently connecting to and gaining power over—an older woman described as “somebody’s mother.” In the last stanza the rhetoric of mothering that we’ve seen throughout the poem becomes associated with the subject position of the black male teenager. The phallus is not owned by or autonomous to the individual. It is not a sword, a gun, a pen, or a woman but a wire that, unconnected, has no power. The phallus in this case is not something that dictates gender identity but rather something one can have and not have at the same time. It is both hallucinated and an actual physical and social object of power that preexists and predetermines the speaker and his options. It is powerful in its association with maleness but powerless in a society that disconnects its members though systemic racism. Of the few critical readings that have been published about this poem, all read the poem’s persona as female.83 This would imply either that the rape and beating of the white woman are the direct actions of the mother or that the mother loses the position of speaker at the end of the poem, where it is taken over by her male child. Either implication seems wrong considering the poem’s insistence on the difficulty of creating for your children while simultaneously maintaining yourself and your access to poetic expression. The insistence on seeing the persona as female is symptomatic of the assumptions surrounding motherhood, which mean that it cannot be invoked as a trope without also invoking femaleness, age, and a biological connection to a child in a domestic setting. These assumptions blind us to the fact that the speaker’s identity in terms of gender, age, family status, sexuality, and so on are never addressed in the opening stanzas and thus the final stanza may simply be identifying the heretofore unidentified “I.” Normative conceptions of motherhood associated with liberal multicultural understandings of blackness, femaleness, and heterosexuality are undercut not only by the speaker’s unexpected maleness but also by the speaker’s imagining of his potential victim as a woman who is


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both white and a mother. The dominant rhetorical constructions of womanhood and motherhood and their destructive power are made clear at this point in the poem. Womanhood and motherhood are presented as identity categories that not only dictate the proper behavior of women and mothers but also are used to reinscribe racial hierarchy. The white woman registers as “somebody’s mother” in need of protection, while the Black Woman is dragged over the coals. White womanhood cannot be separated from the raced and racist history that constructed the idea of white womanhood as so-called “lynch bait” for black men. And motherhood here is seen to function not only as a metaphor for protection, as it has throughout the poem, but as a thoroughly flawed interpretive tool. This interpretive tool overdetermines the rhetoric surrounding the black male teenager’s act, enabling the public to condemn the speaker’s act of rape by allowing it to understand the act through a conceptual framework in which gender will cover the informing factor of race—that is, it translates “an 85 year old white woman” into “somebody’s mother,” and the black teenage boy into a “motherfucker.” Ultimately, it provides for the final rhetorical construction of the poem in which the white woman is pitied as an innocent while the black child is thought of as a beast. Thus “Power” presents caretaking as a function of both males and females of any age. It treats race as a central issue in the “death” of one’s ability to care for others. And it does not require heterosexual coupling or an actual mother to produce a metaphorical mothering dynamic. In this way it both reinforces the power of motherhood and strips it of its sexist and heteronormative requirements; it provides a transitional space in which we can accept that motherhood is both a limiting position created through patriarchal racist power structures and a powerful position from which to access power of another kind. The transitional space this poem opens is one in which the reader can more fully conceptualize the differences (and similarities) between poetry and rhetoric. The persona announces that the way to prevent just connecting his/her teenage plug to the “nearest socket” to get power would be not to use poetry instead of rhetoric or to figure out the difference between these types of speech but rather to use the transitional space between poetry (a world/words created) and rhetoric (a world/words found). Real power thus comes in the end not from a poetry that would negate the self and create a new world for our children but through a distantiative poetic aesthetics that allows us to become aware of the limitations of available discourses and uses extant language to reconfigure others’ rhetoric, to expose its relation to power and to the pain, violence, oppression it covers up. In the


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context of US liberal multicultural discourse it allows for an internally distantiated position on the part of the reader in which she can think about identity as both a limiting, socially constructed category (found object) and a place from which to access subjecthood and the power to speak (created object). Lorde’s poems begin from a kind of impossible position of expression, and because of their refusal to speak within normative frameworks of liberal multicultural understanding they require the reader to perform creative acts of reading. Thus Lorde’s poems become useful as linguistic examples of the possibility for a mode of representation that can exist within, but also resist, the overarching assimilative ideologies of US liberal multicultural discourses of identity construction by making its reader aware of them and of her own reliance on them. Though creative listening seems promising in terms of resistance to hegemonic discourses of subject interpellation, we must keep in mind that it is a difficult, involved, and potentially painful process. By thinking of these texts in terms of trauma theory, we also become aware of the painful extent to which Baldwin’s request for “new acts of creation” may require a destabilization of subjectivity that threatens becoming traumatizing in and of itself. Internally distantiating aesthetics, then, can mediate possibilities of actual trauma for both reader and represented subjects. I have begun to explore here, particularly in “Power,” the ways in which internally distantiating texts can use readers’ reified and compartmentalized understandings of social identity to make them more aware of and destabilize their relation to their own liberal multicultural ideological frameworks. In the following chapter, I will look at another version of aesthetics of internal distantiation as created by Arturo Islas. Islas’s use of aesthetics of internal distantiation not only comes historically later in the construction of liberal multicultural ideology, and therefore has more access to established discourses of minoritarian identity but also has to negotiate the effects of further reification of narratives of racial, ethnic, sexual, and gender identity in social and political discourse.


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Chapter 2

4

Hybr id Distantiation Us es o f Sexualit y i n t he Fictio n o f A rturo I sl a s

I

n a 2003 American Literary History article, Cyrus Patell announced that while “[h]istorically, the concept of hybridity was a conceptual leap forward for minority discourse” allowing “us to see that what appeared to be an either/or situation is in reality a situation of both/ and,” our “next great task” is to “move beyond hybridity toward a more complex understanding of the nuances of heterogeneous identities and multiple, overlapping identities.”1 This chapter looks at Chicano novelist Arturo Islas’s La Mollie and the King of Tears (1996) to consider the ways in which attending to this next great task cannot come simply from shifting our theoretical frameworks or dropping the term hybridity from our work. Hybridity is already an embedded concept in ideologies of liberal multicultural US citizenship. In its most simplified form—the joining of one “type” to another (usually through reproduction) to form a new composite type—it is a foundational logic of US liberal multiculturalism, which celebrates the hyphenated citizen and the nonthreatening diversity of a hybridized subject population (Asian American, African American, gay American, etc.). A serious limitation of hybridity as a critical tool under liberal multiculturalism is not only that it essentializes the two “joined” identities but also that it too often constructs difference and conflict as a celebratory pluralism, thereby obscuring systemic inequalities. On the other hand, Homi Bhabha’s use of the concept of hybridity as resistant aesthetic and cultural practice can be a useful tool for


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reading texts that provoke internal distantiation, allowing their readers to become more aware of their own cultural ideologies. Hybridity, according to Bhabha, is a model in which “other ‘denied’ knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority, its rules of recognition.”2 This “estrangement” works similarly to Althusser’s aesthetics of internal distantiation in which art “makes us see . . . the ideology from which it is born, in which it bathes, from which it detaches itself as art.”3 The hegemonic “rules of recognition”4 in a liberal multicultural United States have become highly complex. Unlike the binary colonizer/colonized model from which Bhabha works and argues is always already undermined by the very fact of hybrid discourse itself, current discourses of US multiculturalism do not explicitly promote the dominance of the “colonizing” (i.e., white, male, heterosexual, Anglo) group. Rather, they maintain hegemony by being flexible and by openly incorporating nondominant identities through a flattening discourse of cultural difference, thus making themselves less vulnerable to estrangement than the more rigid colonial “rules of recognition” Bhabha formulates. Bhabha’s cultural hybrid as a fluid combination of the power of minority tradition and the power of majority authority, however resistant to that authority, risks, in the contemporary US context, becoming another championing of the liberal multiculturalist project—that is, a celebration of cultural difference that may become blind to the limits, both psychic and political, it imposes on the (dis)empowered hybrid.5 Arturo Islas’s novels have been represented as celebratory models of hybrid ethnic literature. Marta Sánchez sees in Islas’s work a mixture of “autobiography, novel, and classic ethnography” that expands the reach of American literature by “giving voice to those once voiceless” and highlight[ing] the ‘minority’ writer’s role of mediator between cultures.”6 David Rice reads Islas’s semiautobiographical character Miguel Chico as “a hybrid ethnic” who “embraces separate identities simultaneously,” allowing him to “reconcile and re-integrate the separate pieces of his family and, thus, his ethnicity.”7 I will argue later that Islas responds to liberal multicultural pressures to represent healing, mediating hybrid ethnic identities by constructing internally distantiating narratives that both make readers aware of and disallow them access to fully celebratory models of hybrid minority identity, thus disrupting liberal multicultural models for reading race, ethnicity, and hybridity. In part, Islas achieves this by making use of the inextricable but contradictory positioning of sex and sexuality within discourses of modern ethnicity and racialization. Robert J. C. Young points to the


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relation between the historical construction of the concept of hybridity and normative, policing sexual identities. He argues that hybridity “always carr[ies] with it an implicit politics of heterosexuality,” and that in the colonial context, “same-sex sex . . . posed no threat because it produced no children; its advantage was that it remained silent, covert, and unmarked.”8 On the other hand, homosexuality and hybridity have coincided historically in their similarity as forms of degeneration: “[T]he identification of racial with sexual degeneracy,” Young writes, “was clearly always overdetermined in those whose subversive bronze bodies bore witness to a transgressive act to perverse desire.”9 Young highlights these aspects of the genealogy of the term hybridity in order to make us aware of its essentializing, racist implications. Nevertheless, he also reveals sex to be a consistent and necessary “third term” in the historical construction of understandings of racial and ethnic hybridity. As such, it becomes a sight of deconstructive resistance as well as a site of policing. The “naming of human mixture as ‘degeneracy,’” writes Young, “both asserts the norm and subverts it, undoing its terms of distinction, and opening up the prospect of the evanescence of ‘race’ as such.”10 Young concludes that therefore “at the heart of racial theory, in its most sinister, offensive move, hybridity also maps out its most anxious, vulnerable site: a fulcrum at its edge and center.”11 Islas’s characters and narratives exploit sex and sexuality as a vulnerable site in the production of reified liberal multicultural racial and ethnic narratives of identity. Though Islas plays with and challenges dominant ethnic and racial narratives in order to destabilize them as reified narrative constructions, the tropes that most powerfully create an internally distantiating experience for the reader play not on the distinctions between minority and majority but rather on the way in which sex and sexuality intervene in the construction of both majority and minority identity in order to displace the interstices between racial identities to interstices within them. Islas’s narrative aesthetics thereby require the reader to become aware of the insufficient, complex, and historically constructed nature of contemporary social identity categories. In Islas’s fiction, sexuality is used to complicate hybridity and to allow the reader to see the limitations of US models of hybridity as a lived identity, particularly the way in which it can become a tool of power that psychically splits subjects and groups while incorporating them into dominant national discourses and power structures. Moreover, Islas utilizes representations of sex and sexuality to figure hybridity as a lived paradox and a position from which to approach


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the reality of abject subjecthood. In his work, abjection is central in terms of what it requires of marginalized subjects, in terms of the psychic reactions to identity positions it allows subjects to produce, and in terms of its inescapability as a part of achieving subjecthood at all (particularly a hybrid ethnic US subjecthood). The abject/subject paradox is, as Winnicott would have it, something that needs to be accepted and acknowledged not as a limitation to one’s being but as essential to one’s existence. Social identities must be recognized as forming one’s subjecthood and yet not be treated as a set of positive, fixed positions of representation or authority. In this way abjection becomes a way to think, as Patell asks us, beyond hybrid US liberal multicultural identities to how ethnic and racial difference is formed by and through Americanness and vice versa, and how sexuality and sexual identity is informed by and informs ethnic and racial identity. Islas’s work provokes internally distantiating moments for its readers in which they become aware of the paradoxes of these overlapping and at times contradictory social identity formations and the paradox of our reliance on our own abjection to negotiate our position as social subjects at the same time as we use abjection as a form of power over others.

H ybr idity in I sl as’s La Mollie and the King of Tears “Frankly, over the years I have grown tired of the word ‘identity,’” Arturo Islas claimed in 1990. “The whole question of who or what a writer ‘represents’ seems always to come back to my own heart and not anyone else’s. Nevertheless much of what I have to say . . . touches upon these issues.”12 Indeed, Islas’s career may be said in some ways to revolve around questions of “identity” insofar as he wrote semiautobiographical fiction and was among the first US scholars to expand literary studies to include Chicano/a literature. He “sought to construct theoretical bridges,” says Frederick Luis Aldama, “that were anchored in the autobiographical.”13 Islas understood that ethnic writers in the United States must negotiate calls for ethnic or identity-based representation, calls that “no longer wish to erase your difference,” but, according to Trinh Minh-ha, “demand . . . that you remember and assert it. At least, to a certain extent.”14 Islas was thoroughly familiar with this demand. It took nearly ten years to find a publisher for his first novel, The Rain God (1984), and even then it was poorly understood and marketed. As José David Saldívar points out, the mainstream presses wanted the book for its


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“‘insider’ Chicano cultural message,” while also complaining the “cultural message” was too heavy and would only be of interest to a Chicano audience.15 “The ethnic ‘cultural message’ label imposed on [Chicanos and Chicanas] by mainstream editors,” Saldívar maintains, “draws simplistic attention to their ‘otherness,’ while their place in U.S. society and the relation of their work to global literature tends to be undervalued.”16 It is not only the mainstream (white) presses that have called for Islas to “represent.” Cherrie Moraga accuses gay Chicano writers of not being “open” about sexuality in their fiction, and recalls Islas as an author whose “writing begged to boldly announce his gayness” but did not.17 Antonio Viego has countered Moraga’s interpretation, saying that these critiques, which insist “on the readability of the gay male Chicano subject in an effort to locate him . . . mimic the dominant culture’s homophobic [and I would add racist] insistence on taxonimizing deviant sexual [and nonwhite racial] identities.”18 In Islas’s posthumously published novel La Mollie and the King of Tears, these contradictions—between a desire to express identitybased experience and a resistance to the demand that writers within a multiethnic United States represent cultural, ethnic, racial, and sexual “difference”—are made intelligible to the reader through a narrative aesthetics of internal distantiation. In the mid-1980s, around the time he had completed his first draft of La Mollie, Islas writes in his journal, [t]he connection between my sexuality, which is private, and my tenuous (?) involvement with the Chicano community, I expect them to destroy me, at least to harm me in some way. I do not feel “them” to be a source of emotional support. Much of my feeling can be traced to childhood terrors about being Mexican and about Mexicans. How easily, automatically, compulsively, I turn human beings, ideas, etc., into potentially harmful monsters. May this proclivity be taken from me Lord. I am willing to live without that gun at the back of my head.19

What is identity if it is not a source of support, of subjectivity, of selfhood? Racial and sexual identities are presented by Islas as a separation from the self, as fear of the implication of what the identities “Chicano” and “gay” mean about oneself, as something potentially harmful but also as one’s own “proclivity.” Most importantly, perhaps, the “terror” is figured not as identity itself but as the “connection” between two identities—a “private” sexuality and a “public” Chicanoness. Sadly, it is in some ways fitting that La Mollie required its creator’s death to be born into the greater public realm of published literature


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in the United States, for it is a book that looks at and acknowledges the hidden, the abject, the messiness of identity and representation. It reveals a certain necessity for abjection in the creation of the US subject, which does not fit the discourses of liberal multiculturalism. La Mollie is narrated by Louie Mendoza, a jazz musician from the El Paso barrio now living with his white girlfriend, la Mollie, in San Francisco. His audience is an unnamed professor conducting an emergency room research project. Louie spills his loves, hopes, and fears into a tape recorder held by a man who, according to Louie, comes to hospitals “to pick up an accent here and . . . there to study em.”20 A series of mishaps have brought Louie to the hospital’s waiting room. After being treated the night before for a broken leg, he had dragged himself home in his cast. But the staff of the incompetently run and probably overwhelmed hospital had earlier given la Mollie the incorrect information that he had died. Encountering what she thought was a ghost, la Mollie fainted, hitting her head on the kitchen sink and sending them both back to the same hospital for treatment of her head injury. Unlike Islas’s more widely read and taught novels The Rain God and Migrant Souls (1990), La Mollie does not so overtly critique the homophobic and racist attitudes and ideologies of Mexican American communities. Whereas these first two (published) novels are semiautobiographical, with clear parallels between Islas and the main character (Miguel Chico) and between Islas’s family and the family depicted in the novels, Louie talks more about Shakespeare and Hollywood movies than he does about Chicano, Mexican, or Native American culture.21 He is in love with an upper-middle-class white woman, and in spite of his friendship with his gay younger brother, Tomás, he is blatantly homophobic. Islas often critiqued the contemporary US multicultural ethic of incorporation based on types of social identity representation that are palatable to a mainstream audience. In Migrant Souls, Miguel Chico complains, “The dumb sociologists want only positive images, whatever they are, from fiction writers. As if the whole world, especially their own little one, were one big happy collection of ethnic groups. No one knows how to read anymore.”22 La Mollie forces its readers to “read” via an aesthetics of internal distantiation. It engages its readers in an uncomfortable relation to representations of identity and forces them to read identity categories through their (always power-inflected) historically and politically constructed ideologies. In this way it disallows “hybridity” (in the form of Mexican/American, Native/European, homosexual/heterosexual, or a combination of


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these) from functioning as a comfortable way to conceptualize identity difference, while also making readers perceive the limiting ways in which these categories function as well as readers’ reliance on them. Critics have had difficulty negotiating Islas’s work as a contribution to both Chicano/a and queer literatures. David Román blames reviewers in the gay media for contributing to the “‘invisibility’ of [Islas’s] work” and Chicano studies scholars for failing to discuss “implications of homosexuality.”23 Islas’s novels, he argues, “have yet to be critically engaged on their own terms, that is, as the writings of someone who was both Chicano and gay.”24 Román’s critique points to the need for a hybrid approach to Islas’s work, but his own framing limits us to thinking about hybrid identity as two implicitly whole and preexisting identities put together—“someone who was both Chicano and gay.” Through Larry/Bryant, a side character in one of Louie’s extended tangents about his past, La Mollie provides a critique of hybridity as a model of subjectivity. Upon his return from serving in the Vietnam War, Louie meets Larry/Bryant in the V.A. hospital where he is placed for having “gone bonkers” from seeing his friend Juan and other “Mexicans and blacks” blown up by American-made grenades.25 Larry/Bryant’s face was permanently damaged on one side during a US attack on Japan at the same time the first atomic bomb was dropped, leaving him physically and psychologically split. He tells Louie that, before the split he was “a blonde lesbian from Little Rock.” Now he is “Larry and Bryant,” two black men who shine shoes in the Albuquerque airport. Both Larry/Bryant and Louie are victims of their own nation’s military forces, and both are constructed as hybrid figures. Larry/Bryant describes himself, like the bomb, as “an atom split in two,” who cannot decide “what kind of ‘bi’” he is—“bicultural,” “bisexual,” or “binominal.”26 Louie describes himself similarly as a child of the border “washed up by the Rio Grande” and as la Mollie’s “Chicanglo cause I got El Chuco written all over me but I know lots about old gringo movies.”27 For both men, historical circumstance has “split” or fractured their identity. Larry/Bryant is “good at words but paralyzed by language” and struggles to put “his bi-world down on paper.”28 Louie, on the other hand, has only words to keep him going. Sitting in the emergency room, Louie tells his story and allows the unnamed Anglo ethnographer to put his hybrid world on tape. As a representation of hybridity, Larry/Bryant, then, is a subject without a cohesive structure—“he had all them memories and he jumbled em all up in his brain trying to find patterns that made sense. Like he said something and took it away at the same time.”29


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On one hand, Larry/Bryant’s struggle is highly Bhabhaesque: the colonized other who both speaks the colonial discourse and takes it away at the same time by revealing its nonidenticality—that is, by revealing the limits of a US citizen-subject discourse that has no place for this bisected and disposable man. On the other hand, he is left with neither a voice nor a stable subject position. Larry/ Bryant challenges the celebratory model of hybridity by demonstrating the violence of hybrid subjectivity and the histories that construct it, yet this also means he can never really say anything. Without an identity-narrative that fits his ideological and discursive environment, his “hybrid discourse” can only be heard as gibberish. The multiplicity or plurality of hybridity is revealed as a potential nothingness, a nonidentity; and Larry/Bryant’s multiple bi-ness ends up making him a number (a “binomial”) more than a human being. This suggests the way in which hybrid subjects, as Rafael Pérez-Torres puts it, “[R]isk becoming a mark of absolute transformation . . . a free-floating signifier” thus “leav[ing] the mestizo body voiceless.”30 Louie, who relates to multiple forms of hybridity both inscribed on his body and projected onto others and who quite literally never shuts up, challenges the model of hybridity as either a “voiceless” and “free-floating” signifier or an ideal multicultural body. There is one element of Larry/Bryant’s hybridity that holds a certain type of power: his understanding, acknowledgement, and performance of what are characterized in the novel as the most abject subject positions available in the United States: a lesbian and a black man. “[I]n this country,” Louie points out, “being two black guys is not much better’n being a dyke,” and wonders why Larry/Bryant did not “split up into two rich Anglos.”31 Larry/Bryant’s marginalized positions are represented as simultaneously related (one “splits” out of the other) and incommensurable (he is either a white lesbian or two black men), raising the question of how hybridity relates to and constructs gender, sexuality, and race. Historically, hybridity has been an “antagonistic structure,” Robert Young explains, that “acts out the tensions of a conflictual culture which defines itself through racial ideologies. At the same time, the focus on hybridity also inscribes gender and sexual division of labour within the mode of colonial reproduction.”32 Whenever hybridity is evoked, therefore, so are essentializing racial categories, histories of racialized sexuality, and an implicit politics of heterosexuality. Yet, in the Chicano/a context, racialized heterosexual unions (mother as Indian, father as Spanish) are precisely what have been used to construct social and political identity and promote solidarity. Thus getting beyond or around the


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intersections between race, sexuality, and gender that are embodied in the term hybridity itself would again leave us with a voiceless Chicano subject. To a certain extent, explicit and sometimes troublesome racial, sexual, and gendered identities are necessary for one to speak as a Chicano/a at all. Hybridity, then, in the Larry/Bryant scene is connected not only to pain, schizophrenia, and an inability to express oneself but also to a better understanding of the multicultural United States through a recognition of the marginality, abjection, and violence inherent in its history. Larry/Bryant also allows the reader to recognize hybrid identity as an imaginary construction for the purposes of representation (race, gender, and sexuality are here revealed as fabrications for identification; plus we have no idea what race, gender, or sexuality Larry/Bryant “really” is) and as a historical and therefore unavoidable form of subjection over which the individual has no agency. Through Larry/Bryant, Islas raises questions about the relationship between hybrid race or ethnicity and hybrid sexuality; furthermore, he establishes sexuality and race as identity positions that can be inhabited, projected onto others, and used as metaphors to describe an internal space too complicated and multiple to house a single or whole “identity.” Following Islas, I turn now to examine the duality of US hybridity: its articulation both as a politically constructed subject position and as a consciously created aesthetics. This duality allows for a kind of queering of hybridity in which historical conditions and social identity do not always line up with desire or experience. Ultimately, sexuality and race in La Mollie come to exist as both identities and limits to identity. Islas utilizes the spaces in which they do not properly overlap to help construct an internally distantiating aesthetics that can speak to social identities but still does not allow us to know exactly “who or what [Islas or his characters] ‘represent[].’” This aesthetics ultimately allows readers to perceive their current discursive and ideological limitations without losing access to narrative representations of legible social identities. Islas constructs a distantiating narrative that enables the reader to acknowledge the lived pain and violence of marginalized identity positions as well as the extraordinarily complex and incommensurable relations between social identity positions in the United States, while also providing an example of how one resists “going bonkers” because of this awareness. Both a love story and a tragedy, La Mollie negotiates hybridity in overlapping and contradicting ways. It is a story of Louie’s love affair with the United States, beginning with his boyhood


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obsession with Hollywood movies and ending with his love affair with la Mollie, whose “family goes way back, all the way to the Mayflower”;33 it is a tragedy, because this love affair will not save Louie from the abjection he has experienced as a Chicano subject, though he is able to use it to negotiate a disidentificatory subject position in “Act Two” of his life34—that is, after he arrives in San Francisco from El Paso and moves in with la Mollie. El Paso, the town where Louie’s tale begins and that haunts its later episodes, is not hybrid in that same way as San Francisco. El Paso is a space of doubling, of bi-ness, the Mexican and the American—the border. It is symbolic of Louie’s difficult past (including a troubled marriage, his alcoholism, and the suicide of his teenaged daughter, Evelina, who was born with brain damage) as well as of the difficult past of Chicano identity. El Paso is the birthplace not only of Louie himself but also, in a sense, of the Chicano movement’s La Raza Unida party, which held its first national convention in El Paso in September of 1972, the year before Louie relates the events in La Mollie. During the convention no attention was paid to the 16,000 Mexican American residents of the tenements along the Rio Grande, where in the 1970s the population density was 145 persons per acre and the average family income was one-third of the nationally established figure designating poverty-level existence.35 This community was largely overlooked by a Chicano movement interested in electoral politics and social representation. The year in which La Mollie is set, 1973, was both the political high point and the cultural and economic decline of the Chicano movement. El Movimiento began in the 1960s with César Chávez’s labor union organization and Reies López Tijerina’s protests over Anglo appropriation of Mexican American land. These activities were consolidated into a nationally oriented political and social movement by Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzalez, who at a Youth Liberation Conference in 1969 gave Chicanos their name and their movement a homeland— the mythical fatherland Aztlán. The Chicano movement was built on a concept of hybridity: Chicanos were Indian on the maternal side and Spanish on the paternal. The “return” to Aztlán represented both a return to this Indio-cultural past and a recognition of the Spanish presence in the American Southwest before the arrival of Anglos. The literary aspect of the movement was particularly active in creating a hybrid collective Chicano identity. Pérez-Torres has pointed out that while this project was “an attempt to convey a pride in the mestizo heritage of Chicano identity,” it also involved a forwarding of “mythic and archetypical dimensions of literary creation” that amounted to “a


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desire to escape history (especially one of oppression and exploitation).”36 While this desire is “understandable and, to a certain degree, laudable” he notes, it is also “deeply conflicted,” universalizes Chicano experience, and celebrates a history of severe oppression.37 Thus while the Chicano movement built solidarity through hybrid identity, it glossed over some of the historical and material elements of the Chicano’s “hybrid” position that were noncelebratory (poverty, violence, enslavement) and potentially divisive (gender, sexuality, class). By 1972 the Chicano movement had begun to split between those who favored strong cultural nationalism or separatism and those who wanted to recruit more support from non-Chicanos and gain political power within the current US system. This split was occurring just as La Raza Unida, the movement’s political party, was gaining national recognition. Although 1972 marked the successful campaign of Ramiro “Ramsey” Muñiz in Texas for La Raza Unida, in which he took a significant portion of the vote, his campaign was a failure only two years later—the beginning of the end for the party, which was already being assimilated by mainstream politics. Mexican American votes began to be courted by Democrats and Republicans not so much through policy change, as Robert Kennedy had done in 1968, but with a liberal multicultural style that gave token government positions to “Hispanics” and catered to the emerging “brown middle class” concerned as much with negative portrayals of Mexican Americans in the media as with altering the living conditions of the poor. El Paso, in La Mollie, stands in for a past, a population, and a set of historical circumstances that includes not only the US conquest of Mexico and the subsequent failure of the United States to keep its promises to its newly acquired citizens of Indio-Hispanic descent but also the Chicano movement’s promises to Mexican Americans and Mexican workers in the United States. By 1986, when Islas was writing the novel, the Chicano movement had experienced failures as well. El Paso evokes a past that constructed a nonvoluntary hybridity that, while at times politically viable, was certainly not without its limitations. It is also a place of policed and restricted expression. El Paso is where Louie learns “some accents are okay and some ain’t,” and it is the birthplace of his mute daughter, Evelina.38 A 1967 National Nutritional Survey ordered by Congress found that malnutrition in Texas was so prevalent that 30 percent of children between infancy and six years had some form of retardation related to malnourishment. According to Tony Castro, this survey was suppressed because its findings revealed that the number of malnourished Americans had increased from ten million to fifteen million.39 Evelina


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symbolizes the neglect faced by the border Chicano community not only in her illness and sadness but also in her inability to speak. “The worst punishment of all,” says Louie, “must be to hurt like that and not be able to say nothing about it.”40 Louie himself is voiceless in El Paso as well. Although he loves his daughter, drinking, and going to the movies, he is unable to find happiness. His role in the movie theater is entirely passive, his drinking generally leads him to “beat up on” and yell at an “old toady tree” in the backyard, and he never learns to communicate with his daughter.41 It is Evelina’s death that brings Louie to San Francisco and opens up “Act Two” of his story, which moves him from a love affair with American movies to a love affair with la Mollie and the United States itself. Louie’s love story with la Mollie is in some respects necessarily straight, for reasons including dominant US sexual ideologies and hybridity’s reliance on heterosexuality for its very production. In this novel, however, being in love with the United States and la Mollie becomes linked to being in love with the city of San Francisco, where homosexuality, though represented as separated from Chicano identity, is constantly impinging on it. San Francisco is a town of both heterosexual romance and queerness. It is a Chicano town and a town in which Louie can act out the roles of all the Hollywood movie stars from his childhood. Its hybridity is more complicated than El Paso’s. Its Mission District, where much of the story takes place, has an IndioSpanish history in the buildings built by Spanish missionaries. For Louie this is not a history of pride, as his Mexican heritage was for him in El Paso. In San Francisco, Spanish missionaries were converting and marrying Indians as early as 1776, but as Louie sees it, “When I look at those white adobe buildings, all I can think of are all the Indians who got whipped and killed putting em up . . . And then they gotta go and name this whole part of the city after them Church buildings like the priests oughta get credit for the Chicanos who’re trying to make something of themselves when they don’t care a caca for no one.”42 For Louie, the difference is not so much in the history of Spanish colonization but in the city’s celebration of its European imperialist identity. The Mission District is a multiply hybrid and diverse location. In the early twentieth century, it was a neighborhood of German, Irish, and Italian immigrants; in the 1930s, it became a predominantly Chicano and Latino neighborhood; and now, it is covered in murals depicting Mexican American and Latin American historical figures largely inspired by the Chicano movement. It is named, however, for its colonization by white, Christian Europeans, thereby marking that aspect of its past as its official story. In fact, just two years before


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Islas began writing La Mollie, Ronald Reagan proclaimed “National Hispanic Heritage Week” in celebration of “Hispanic” culture. Reagan identified Hispanics as persons who “came [to the United States] in search of a better life for themselves and their children,” and as persons with “strong cultural and familial ties” to “our neighbors,” thereby reinforcing the othering stereotype of “good” immigrants who help keep up “our” relations with other American nations. In his speech, Reagan mentioned “a mission system built by a remarkable Franciscan priest named Father Junipero Serra, who’s now under consideration for sainthood . . . All Californians are very proud of these missions.”43 Reagan thus conflated all Spanish-speaking persons in the United States and erased the history of European colonization that led Chincanos to self-identify as racially and ethnically other than Euro-Spanish. Louie’s response to the Mission District in La Mollie rewrites Regan’s speech to acknowledge such a history. San Francisco in the 1970s was known for its mixture of gay and Chicano communities: the Castro, adjacent to the Mission District, was full of gay bars and businesses. The presence of gay men in San Francisco is referenced throughout La Mollie. A perfect San Francisco night, for example, is one in which “being in love throws fairy dust all over everything.”44 Romance is often connected to homosexuality. “At least the fairies have some romance going for em,” says Louie. “Can you imagine the world without em?”45 This interrelation between queer sexuality and Chicano identity is never incorporated within one character, unlike other contemporary writing that addresses intersections between (nonwhite) racial identity and (queer) sexuality by including a gay or lesbian character of color. Tomás, Louie’s brother, is the only character identified as both gay and Chicano and he is rather flat, functioning mostly as a lens through which Louie views the homosexual culture of the city. Minoritarian sexual, racial and ethnic identities come together through Louie’s experience of the city. Chicano and gay identity mix perhaps most fluidly in the scene in which Louie meets Sonia—a “pure Chicana” as Louie says46—in a unisex bar. As he describes it, “[T]here weren’t no U.S.A. about it.” She was “burning the place up, and everybody knew it, even the two fairies.”47 Although Louie gets upset at the “fairies” for mispronouncing Puerto Vallarta as Porto Valarta and for their “real fake cocktail laughs” (i.e., for both their Angloness and their homosexuality), when one of them says “God, I think she’s turning me on,” Louie sends them a round of drinks along with one to Sonia.48 Here, in this “un-American” setting, Chicano and Anglo and gay and straight masculinity come together. This is partly through


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the objectification of a Chicana, though the night ends with Sonia convincing Louie to buy a bottle of Champagne for her and the two men, and then drive them all home. The flexibility of gender, sexuality, and racial boundaries in the unisex bar marks the best that hybridity as a cultural component of San Francisco can provide. And 1973 marks a moment in which the Chicano movement (at least in its political form) still had some momentum, while the gay rights movement was just getting under way. The novel takes place in queer Latino San Francisco, in a preAIDS, post-Stonewall moment leading up to the 1977 election of gay activist Harvey Milk to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, which brought new momentum to the gay rights movement. But in 1978, Milk and Mayor George Moscone were assassinated by an avowedly antigay former police officer and supervisor. In the same year, the first cases of what would turn out to be AIDS were also reported. By 1986, when Islas began writing the novel, Ronald Reagan was calling for a “celebration” of Chicano business owners in California49 while saying very little about AIDS (he did not use the word in a public address until 198750) much less devoting any money to it or to the many Mexican Americans still living in poverty. Thus the novel has the hindsight to understand the limits of San Francisco’s hybrid and multicultural landscape; nevertheless, the city does become a site in which desire and identity can coexist without lining up along essentialist (fixed) or deconstructive (free-floating) models of hybridity. Moving to San Francisco, and thereby moving further inside the dominant Anglo United States, allows Louie to begin to use desire and the erotic to negotiate his hybrid narratives of racial, ethnic, and national identity.

Disidentificatory versus Distantiative Hybr idity Though La Mollie is a novel interested in Chicano identity and border politics, it has several clearly important European and European American literary and cultural influences. For Louie, mainstream Hollywood film and Shakespeare are the most important. He is fond of imagining himself and those he interacts with as figures from Hollywood films of the 1940s and 1950s. The films, all love stories and almost all tragedies, were produced in a pre-Chicano movement United States. Louie uses these films in a form of stylistic, affective hybridity that José Muñoz calls “disidentification”: “a way [of reading] oneself and one’s own life narrative in a moment, object, or


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subject that is not culturally coded to ‘connect’ with the disidentifying subject,” a process that “scrambles and reconstructs the encoded message’s universalizing and exclusionary machinations and recircuits its workings to account for, include, and empower minority identities and identifications.”51 In Louie’s early life in El Paso, these movies telling Anglo-dominated narratives and starring white actors made Louie feel “like a Martian watching a world I can’t never live in no matter how much I try.”52 In Louie’s relocation from El Paso to San Francisco, he does not so much leave Hollywood behind as he begins to live it instead of watching it. “[L]a Mollie tells me,” he says, “that my problem is that all I want to do is relive old movies stead of make new ones, and she’s absolutely right.”53 But reliving old movies does not necessarily mean making no change. Louie connects Hollywood to his own history. A connection to the past is part of what he sees as his Mexican inheritance, though it can sometimes be destructive: “What the past does to Mexicans is just as bad as what the future does to gringos. It’s just two sides of the same craziness to be anywhere except where you are.”54 Louie uses these old films not to live in the past but to find a present—a narrative—for his part-Mexican, part-American self. Writing himself into these narratives recircuits their workings to account for and include him. He describes the end of his long broken-legged walk home to la Mollie: Every love scene in every movie I ever saw went running through my head . . . The scenes and characters got all mixed up, and I was playing in em all. It was a giant Mexican mural of Hollywood starring me, Louie Mendoza, of course! I was Rhett Butler saying goodbye to Scarlett and asking her to kiss me like she was sending me off to war . . . I was even that flake Ashley Wilkes coming back to Tara with Melanie running towards him down the road . . . Then I was Rick in Paris with the Kid . . . I was Paul Henried handing Charlotte Vale a whole bunch of camellias . . . I turned into Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones hunting each other down in the desert and killing their passion cause it was too hot for them to handle. The desert faded into a jungle and I was Tarzan swimming towards Jane with Cheeta on the shore doing back flips and going into a chimpanzee ecstasy.55

This scene not only shows how Louie uses Hollywood’s exclusionary tales for his own pleasure and makes Hollywood into “a giant Mexican mural” starring himself; it also points out the ways in which figures of the other, the marginalized, and the outsider inside have


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always been central to Hollywood movie making. Louie begins his fantasy as the blockade runner and social outcast Rhett Butler; then he is Rick the outcast American expatriate; then Paul Henried, the European who falls in love with the American Bette Davis. He turns into both Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones in the story of a “halfbreed” woman who, in A Duel in the Sun, goes to live with her white relatives only to fall madly in love with two brothers. And finally he becomes Tarzan, the ultimate other coming to woo Jane/la Mollie with his wild passion. “The giant Mexican mural” evokes the murals of Mexican Americans painted in the Mission District and makes San Francisco a new hybrid: a Mexican American Hollywood and a new center of reconstituted American culture. Louie uses Shakespeare in a similar way. Romeo and Juliet serves throughout the narrative as a model for both Louie’s own love story with la Mollie and the Hollywood stories he continually references. The Shakespearian tragedy, in fact, is a model for his entire life. When his high school teacher tells him that “most everybody dies or goes crazy in a tragedy and there ain’t nothing the characters can do about it,” Louie asks, “You mean like in the projects, Miss Harper?”56 He then suggests that Ophelia is “the first wetback in the history of the English language.”57 In telling his own tragedies, Louie is unable to change their outcome but he does have control over the telling. As in Shakespeare’s plays, the importance lies in how a tragedy comes about, not in its ending. In this way, “Chakespeare Louie,” as he names himself, is able to reappropriate, through disidentification, an Anglo-identified literary and cultural history as his own.58 It belongs to him as much as to white America. Yet this disidentificatory form of hybridity has its limitations. Hybridity as a reconciliation of difference can become reincorporated into a liberal multicultural ideology willing to recognize and celebrate difference, so long as it remains at the level of the cultural and the individual. This type of hybridity allows Louie to construct a disidentificatory narrative for himself but does not necessarily challenge dominant narratives of identity. Islas’s narrative itself takes a more skeptical view of hybridity. By presenting ethnicity and sexuality as social identities that saturate our every experience in the United States, yet never stabilize in relation to individual bodies, Islas’s narrative disallows a comfortable space for celebratory hybridity. Utilizing an aesthetics of internal distantiation, it prompts its reader to become aware of the limitations of Louie’s disidentificatory narratives and of her own understandings of who or what they represent.


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Louie’s discussion of Hollywood is generally constructed through self-identification, allowing him to adopt a movie star affect (“I give her my Clark Gable smile”59) or make sense of his life in terms of Hollywood narratives (“I feel like Cary Grant right before he knocks Tracy Lord on her fancy Philadelphia cream cheese ass”60). But Louie’s Hollywood models for love are couched in a sexualized racism that caricatures Chicano cultural heritage. A Duel in the Sun, for example, features Pearl Chavez, the daughter of an Indian woman, whose sexual behavior is ultimately controlled when she is murdered by her white father. Pearl is represented as a hypersexual “half-breed,” a hybrid of genteel respectability and sensual lasciviousness. Pearl’s hybridity extends to her dual love affairs with one good and one bad son of some distant relatives of her father’s white family. Louie also mentions Rita Hayworth in Down to Earth, where Hayworth plays a Greek goddess come to fix Broadway’s representation of her and of Greek mythology by landing the role of herself in a play, making the play more true to her conception of the Greek gods, but in the process creating a complete flop. The casting of Hayworth in Down to Earth calls attention to the absence of representations of Latinas in Hollywood films of this era: Hayworth, born Margarita Carmen Casino, was “whitened” for Hollywood with hair dye and eyebrow plucking.61 Islas’s use of Down to Earth places Louie in a comparable position to Hayworth as the Chicano who writes himself into narratives of Hollywood in order to represent himself as he wants to be, reminding readers of the importance of marketing representativeness on Broadway, in Hollywood, and in the US publishing industry. Louie uses dominant narratives to represent himself but these undermine the marketability of Louie’s narrative and made it difficult to get La Mollie itself into print. Ironically, Louie’s use of Hollywood narratives does not make his story a more valuable commodity under a late twentieth-century liberal multiculturalism that would rather see him “represent” in ways that read as authentically Chicano. As Islas wrote in response to a rejection of the novel’s manuscript, publishers are “not ready for an American Hispanic voice that does not do that dance for readers who want to be entertained by ‘local color.’”62 Perhaps Islas’s most important allusion to non-Chicano culture through Louie’s Hollywood discourse is to Now Voyager, whose title is taken from the Walt Whitman poem, “The Untold Want.” Whitman is another major reference in and influence on La Mollie. In fact, one of the epigraphs is “Who goes there? Hankering, gross, mystical, nude” from “Song of Myself.” Desire in La Mollie is intimately connected to identity and the future. It is Louie’s relationship to the


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erotic that both provides him access to his hybrid narratives of selfrepresentation and produces much of the “forward” movement in his life and plotline. If alcoholism and poverty are the cucuys (“Mexican bogey men”)63 that haunt him and keep him tied to the past, the erotic is constantly moving him forward in ways beyond his control. “I love being in love,” Louie says. “It’s the biggest drug of all for me, man. All it takes is snorting one line or taking one toke of romance and it’s over.”64 And even Louie admits that “it musta been all them Hollywood movies I seen when I was a kid. I believe in that stuff.”65 The movies, of course, teach Louie not only to believe in love but to believe in a certain type of love. The films construct desire as both white and heterosexual. “I love these old movies,” Louie says, “cause they make me feel like a Martian watching a world I can’t never live in no matter how much I try. Imagine touching Betty Grable’s legs or Ava Gardner’s hair. I get turned on just thinking about it.”66 (Sexual) interpellation by these films requires learning the female body as parts, learning desire for the female body as material and heterosexual, and equating these desires with the desire of an outsider, a Martian, trying to get “in.” The movies not only teach Louie a white, heteronormative desire but also give him a sense of his own hybridity by constructing a narrative that makes him feel “like a Martian” acting out his life in San Francisco through Hollywood narratives both alien and earthly (as in Hayworth’s coming “down to earth” to represent herself in a foreign entertainment culture). These movies thus produce the hybridity that is also Louie’s strategy for making them applicable to his own life. Islas uses these movies then to construct a distantiating aesthetics in relation to his presentation of ethnicity and sexuality in the novel that makes readers aware that they are reading through the gendered, raced, and sexualized narratives of popular cultural understandings of identity. This set of interpellative desires structure and inform Louie’s love affair with la Mollie. “Act Two” of Louie’s life begins when he meets and makes love to la Mollie during a love-in at a Grateful Dead concert. Although he is still in a relationship with Sonia, a “pure Chicana,” and “wasn’t looking to get involved or nothing,” he realizes afterward that he is “in love” with the all-American la Mollie. He “didn’t wanna touch no one” else.67 Islas makes clear that this is a love affair not just with a woman but with a nation: “It was like getting to make love to the whole United States of America, man. Not only that, it was letting me teach it stuff it hadn’t dreamed up yet and letting me hurt it a little for being so mean in the past.”68 This moment is clearly one of ideal hybridity, as Chicano and Anglo come together


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in a sexual act that produces something new, an America that lets its “aliens” teach it and make reparations for its “past” acts of violence. It is also a moment that illuminates the relationship between national identity, heterosexual desire, and gender construction. Like the movies that interpellated Louie through an economy of desire that made women into legs and hair, here Louie’s entrance into a real-life Hollywood love story involves an economy of desire that equates the female body with national territory: she is both representative of the United States and inseparable from it. The text makes the reader aware that becoming American—which for Louie means not erasing his Chicano identity but being a US Chicano subject—requires entrance into specific heteronormative, Eurocentric relations: woman as land, man as conqueror. Islas makes his reader aware of how interrelated constructions of gender, racial, and sexual identities are part of the formation of national subjectivities. He also alerts us to the ways in which the construction of romantic love as natural, inevitable, and transcendent is an obfuscation of these interrelations. It is not only the Hollywood film, however, that produces a heteronormative and normatively gendered narrative. There are significant similarities between Louie’s interpellation as a US subject through film and his interpellation as a Chicano subject. In reaction to his father’s claim that Louie was “washed up by the Rio Grande” and that his parents found him under the Santa Fe Bridge, Louie responds, “Well I knew I wasn’t no wetback Moses, so I used to look right back at my mom and say, ‘That sure is some bridge,’ cause I knew already where babies came from and just wanted to make her blush.”69 In Louie’s reconfiguration, his national identity is inseparable from the sexualities and sex act that produced him; his mother’s vagina is figured as the equivalent of a bridge between his US and Mexican and Chicano and Anglo identities. Thus both his embodied hybridity as a Mexican American and his discursive hybridity as a Chicano utilizing tropes of dominant US culture are made possible by a heterosexual structure of desire in which a woman’s sexuality and body are made equivalent to national territory and identity. The Chicano movement constructed hybrid identity in such a way, equating Chicano Aztec heritage with indigenous foremothers and European Christian heritage with Spanish forefathers. Chicano is imagined as the result of the reproduction of these gendered ethnic identities, and woman is associated with the mythological homeland of Aztlán. Thus Islas provokes internal distantiation not only in relation to dominant US narratives of romantic love but also in relation to the counterhegemonic hybridity of the Chicano movement, making


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the reader aware of how both narratives use gender and (hetero)sexuality to construct seemingly natural identity positions. This becomes clear in the different ways Islas and Louie use Shakespeare. For Louie, Romeo and Juliet is the model of a classic love story and for his own desires and tragedies. Islas, however, has more at stake in modeling his novel on Romeo and Juliet, because his focus on desire is entwined with both identity and action. “[T]he American myth,” Islas has noted elsewhere, “denies the tragic and erotic imagination.”70 Shakespeare provides an Anglo but non-American literary model that does explore the tragic and the erotic. Lloyd Davis says that Romeo and Juliet “stages a paradigmatic conflict between ways of representing and interpreting desire” and that its “links between love and death unveil a dark skepticism about desire, despite bursts of romantic idealism.”71 Ultimately, the play both participates in the “canonization of heterosexuality” and reveals “personal romance and desire” as “authoritative codes which conceal and impose official sexuality.”72 Desire here, though linked to a conflict between the individual and the social, is not connected to identity. As Nicholas Radel notes, there are two “fundamental facts about early modern sexuality” that are important to understanding this play: “[E]rotic desire and sexual-object choice were not determinants of individual identity . . . and desire was not necessarily delimited by the sex or gender of the person desired.”73 Romeo and Juliet, which is often read as the quintessential heterosexual love story, is full of sexual innuendo between men and between women. Romeo and Juliet thus provides Islas with a model through which he can examine dominant interpellation through heteronormative romantic love and also explore the ways in which sexuality and desire consistently disrupt this model. In Islas’s narrative, the sexual/racial transgression that the creation of the hybrid body requires in the dominant imagination is projected by Louie onto the gay male bodies in San Francisco. These men come to represent a subjecthood acquired not through heterosexual (“natural” and legal) reproduction but through discourses of power and modes of subjection and subjectification. In this way, the gay American male is the quintessential US subject. Like Larry/Bryant, the male homosexual is a doppelgänger for Louie who is also revealed to be constructed not simply through the “natural” reproduction and hybridization of races and cultures but by the social and national discourses that produce these races and cultures. Another aspect of Islas’s distantiating aesthetics, then, is to make the reader attentive to the reproduction of subjects and the ways in which narratives of biological reproduction both underwrite and obscure these modes


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of reproduction. This allows her to perceive a Chicano identity historically constructed through colonial violence and political solidarity without relying on a strictly heterosexual and often essentialist hybrid model that functions along binary divides of sameness and difference, including male-female and European-Indian. Ramón Gutiérrez suggests that in the US national imaginary, perceived differences between Mexico and the United States are often projections of transgressive acts and perverse desires onto Mexico and Mexicans. These projected differences help to construct and hold in place Anglo, European, North American compulsory heterosexuality: Middle-class white Americans organize their kin relationships around two orders: the order of nature . . . and the order of law . . . Americans are either born into the nation (the order of nature) or they enter it through a legal process (the order of law) and become citizens through a process we call ‘naturalization.’ . . . The international boundary between Mexico and the United States has long been imagined as a border that separates a pure from an impure body, a virtuous body from a sinful one, a monogamous conjugal body regulated by the law of marriage from a criminal body given to fornication, adultery, prostitution, bestiality, and sodomy.74

In locating the sexually deviant body in San Francisco and by associating the gay male body with the United States (Louie says that his brother has “gone California” as a way of telling us he is gay75), Islas challenges constructions of both sexual identity and American identity by placing the bodies Gutiérrez names as those rejected in order to create the “virtuous body” of the United States, within and as an integral part of that body. Making the gay male body an object of concern and desire for our heterosexual main character opens up ways of rethinking the compulsory white heterosexuality that has interpellated Louie as a US subject and that informs the history of the concept of hybridity. In La Mollie, sexuality is a structural framework for envisioning the world that is never reducible to one identity or one subject. Space itself is queered, not only through the equation of California with queer sexuality (“going California”) but also through Louie’s hybrid, Hollywood-inspired vision of the city. “Being in love,” says Louie, “throws fairy dust all over everything, even sleaze, and the scummy Tenderloin glows after a rain that leaves all the lights shiny and blinking like chorus girls.”76 In this description of San Francisco’s red-light district, straight love covers the city in a fabulous queerness that allows


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Louie to enjoy and find beautiful the homosexual culture that both frightens and attracts him. As Aldama explains, Louie “comes to exist as a straight thirty-something pachuco with a vision that queers . . . world-city spaces.”77 Although Louie sees himself through a straight discourse of romantic love, his language often represents him as desiring men and as a subject of San Francisco’s queer culture. Islas hints at these desires throughout the text. Louie is aroused at one point, for example, by a man wearing a slip over his suit, and he describes Tomás’s friends as men with “faces . . . so clean they look like daisies all fresh and ready for plucking.”78 The name “la Mollie” additionally evokes the homosexual subculture in Molly houses of eighteenthcentury London. When Louie leaves the Mind Shaft, a gay bar that, as its name suggests, is literally a “mind fuck,” he stops at the corner, reflecting: “I don’t know what it was that got into my skin about that place, but it had me stuck there in the alley so’s I couldn’t of moved if Sherman’s army’d showed up.”79 The queerness of San Francisco has “gotten into his skin.” It is psychologically and physically a part of him, though not constitutive of his sexual identity. This queer-straight hybrid sexuality functions as the limit of binary sexual identity and of the (heterosexual) construction of US identity more generally. Reflecting on the Mind Shaft, Louie “recognize[s] the old demon lust winking in the background of all them pictures I couldn’t erase from my head . . . I had to keep telling myself that it was only a buncha guys doing all that stuff and not no extraterrestrials.”80 Louie recognizes in the pictures of male-male eroticism his own desire and his own alienation. Just as he was made to feel like a “Martian” watching Hollywood films, the men in the Mind Shaft seem to be extraterrestrials as well. In the Mind Shaft, identity and desire do not line up. The gay man is an identity that trumps and disrupts Louie’s other systems of identity categories, which rely on a specific male-female gendering, a heterosexual system of reproduction, and desire through difference. It is also notable that Louie would not be able to move “if Sherman’s army showed up.” This is one of only a few references in the novel to actual historical figures as opposed to the film stars who played them. At the moment of the “mind fuck”—Louie’s most extreme moment of distantiation from his own narratives of social identity—a dominant US history of war, violence, and national identity enters the narrative. Louie is imagining himself in relation to one of the most violent acts that the American nation has inflicted on itself. At the same time, there is no real place for Louie’s Chicano identity in this narrative. While he may identify with the Native Americans against


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whom General Sherman practiced his scorched-earth military tactics for the US government, he could just as easily identify with Sherman himself, whose full name, William Tecumseh Sherman, locates him as an inheritor of a hybrid history of Native American and European American “ancestry.” Thus the allusion to Sherman both references US histories of violence and places Louie in an undefinable relation to them. His inability to move does not stem from a sexual desire for men or a desire for identification but from the way in which he, like the reader, has been forced to see (and not see) himself, a sameness in something different and an alienness in something same, neither of which can be fully comprehended along the lines of either sexual or ethnic identity. It is worth discussing briefly the ways in which sadomasochism works in this scene. Aldama notes that sadomasochism is, for Islas, both a replication of the dynamics of a chauvinistic heterosexuality and a way of “working through” those dynamics.81 As a hybrid structure, sadomasochism, at its worst, replicates painful and problematic power structures within historical and embodied Chicano identity and, at its best, can be a game or a kind of aestheticized performance of consciously articulated hybridity that moves beyond the essentialist binaries of dominant and submissive, male and female, powerful and weak. This interpretation of the novel would rely almost exclusively on reading the scene through Islas’s own identity and does not fully account for the ways in which he employs sadomasochism in this scene. Leo Bersani has argued that although “masochistic jouissance is hardly a political corrective to the sadistic use of power . . . the self-shattering . . . inherent in that jouissance . . . also makes the subject undefinable as an object of discipline.”82 This self-shattering “disrupts the ego’s coherence and its boundaries” and “is intrinsic to the homo-ness in homosexuality.”83 In a similar way, sadomasochism allows Louie to have experiences that exist outside the liberal multicultural identities that normally regulate his ego’s boundaries and its coherence. His time in the Mind Shaft does not become a free-floating deconstructive hybrid experience because he maintains an internally distantiated position as both narrator and character. He remains at a distance from the action even while it takes place in relation to him. Louie’s body and narrative are not partaking in the sexual acts but rather in the Mind Shaft’s operational dynamics. The Mind Shaft replicates Islas’s novel in that it highlights the relations and distances between the embodied reality of experienced identity and aesthetic representations of identity. In the bar, Louie, wearing his giant leg cast, is read by other men as playing the erotic roles of patient, law,


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and older brother. Yet as someone who has just broken his leg, as a straight man passing judgment on this “south-of-Market Babylon for fairies,”84 and as Tomás’s brother, he is actually all of these things. The identities are both real and played; it is the scene of male homosexual desire that allows them to appear as both. This scene, then, is not so much a representation of lived gay or Chicano identity (though it is in part also that) as a conscious aesthetic use of hybrid representation to produce an aesthetics of internal distantiation. In other words, we do not lose Islas’s “gay, Chicano voice” but neither do we get an explanation, representation, or bit of “local color” about who or what it represents. Ultimately we have to be aware of the frustrating paradox of a representing voice that does not “represent.”

I d e ntity Co nsumptio n and the M i rror While the narrative voice may not represent a knowable set of identities directly, social identities as they relate to the characters’ selfunderstandings are constantly referenced in the novel, often in relation to the trope of the mirror image. The mirror both grounds one’s identity by establishing an image of the self and is the place where one confronts the other. On Louie’s way out of the Mind Shaft, for example, he tells the bouncer that he has a woman waiting for him, to which the bouncer replies, “That’s what they all say when they look in the mirror, baby. You come back soon.”85 The mirror provides Louie’s heterosexual image, yet it is also a place where his homosexual desires lurk in the background like “the old demon lust”86 that winks in the background of the pictures in his head. And significantly, it is the bouncer—that is, the law—who is reflecting Louie back to himself and clarifying the ways social identities function and the lies they tell. Louie similarly remarks of Larry/Bryant’s split subjectivity: “[W]ell, man, what else can you tell yourself when you’re looking in the mirror for the first time and seeing what happened to your face?”87 In both these instances, “looking in the mirror” implies seeing oneself anew and also seeing someone or something else—perhaps queer desire or the violence and racism inherent in one’s interpellation as a patriotic soldier. It is also in the mirror that Louie frequently sees the cucuys that haunt his life in San Francisco. “In the mirror,” then, is where one’s subjection and subject position is made most clear, where one experiences distantiation. It is where one sees oneself and other people, identities, power structures, histories of science and war, the actions one has taken—the racial, ethnic, and national past that informs one’s sense of self. Thus the


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mirror is perhaps the place where hybridity as material, historical, embodied construct and hybridity as conscious aesthetic and political creation meet. Through Islas’s conscious literary creation of hybridity he develops an internally distantiating aesthetics through which the reader becomes aware that Islas is never simply representing a lived hybridity that exists outside the text; rather, in mirroring a set of lived identities, he is always necessarily leaving out many of the contradictions and conditions of lived identity and allowing to show, in however hauntingly specular a way, those elements that are necessary to, but get left out of, representative identities. The distantiating effect of this mirroring is particularly apparent in the text’s positioning of the reader. Louie asks the unnamed ethnographer to whom he is speaking, and thereby implicitly the reader: “[Do] you ever feel that with guys like me, where you sit down to study em under your microscope and you find yourself looking in the mirror or wondering if they use the same kinda toothpaste?”88 Here the reader is forced to become aware of her own position as a consumer of this ethnographic text. The reader is consuming Louie and his representations of ethnicity in a way that is not unlike the way he consumes Hollywood identities. Islas thus constructs whiteness as an unnamed but central element in the text’s production and consumption. Readers not only are placed in the position of the white ethnographer but also are forced to recognize themselves in this position—and to confront their desire to see Louie represent difference. As la Mollie puts it, we want to see him as “a real example of ethnic and racial poverty.”89 In this way, the novel also reflects the reader herself, making her complicit in a US liberal multicultural desire for ethnic representation. Like the mirror, La Mollie reveals not only multiple and conflicting identities but the multiple places of the other within and in relation to those identities. Islas prompts readers to recognize the liberal multicultural ideologies of identity and difference that have constructed their desires in relation to the text. This internally distantiating narrative construction disrupts the possibility of a liberal multicultural diversity in which one is recognized as a member of multiple identitybased groups, with each group and member distinguishable on an equal playing field. It places readers in a transitional space where they must simultaneously recognize the historical circumstances (over which they have no control) that have produced inequality through identity and desire, and their own complicity in this reproduction. The reader must enter this space in order to accept the paradox that the example of Louie Mendoza has shown us. On one hand, hybridity, identity, and desire are already constructed and the only way to


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become a subject in the world is to accept them as such; and on the other hand, the only way to survive in such a world is to make those constructions identify, represent, and account for ourselves. If the reader is willing to do the mental and emotional work, this is also a space in which she might come to understand the limitations of her own ideological framework a little better. This would require the reader’s disidentification with the story, her reading herself into this narrative that Islas has not culturally coded to fit comfortably into her system of self-identifications. In this chapter I have argued that Islas’s fiction utilizes race, ethnicity, and sexuality in ways that resist creating taxonomized and reified identity positions, while simultaneously stressing the importance of racial, ethnic, and sexual identity to the creation of the US citizensubject. It provides the allure of social identity difference, then both confounds and satisfies (though not always in comfortable or expected ways) the reader’s desire to see that difference represented, thereby constructing an aesthetics of internal distantiation that prompts readers to become more aware of the ways in which they think about social identities themselves. In the following chapter, in which I discuss the work of Reginald McKnight and Jamaica Kincaid, I will continue this exploration of the irreconcilable nature of the abject/subject relation for minoritized subjects in the contemporary United States, not through overlaps and disjunctures between ethnicity and sexuality but between national and transnational constructions of social identity.


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Chapter 3

4

Inter(national) Distantiation Ja maica Kincaid, Regin a l d McK ni g ht, and the Cosmopolitan Novel

Jamaica Kincaid writes in the opening pages of My Garden (Book):, I wanted a garden that looked like something I had in my mind’s eye, but exactly what that might be I did not know and even now do not know. And this must be why: the garden for me is so bound up with words about the garden, with words themselves, that any set idea of the garden, any set picture, is a provocation to me [. . .]. Some years later [. . .] it dawned on me that the garden I was making [. . .] resembled a map of the Caribbean and the sea that surrounds it, I did not tell this to the gardeners who had asked me to explain the thing I was doing, or to explain what I was trying to do; I only marveled at the way the garden is for me an exercise in memory, a way of remembering my own immediate past, a way of getting to a past that is my own (Caribbean Sea) and the past as it is indirectly related to me (the conquest of Mexico and its surroundings).1

This passage evokes connections between US liberal multicultural national ideologies and recent discourses of postnationalism and cosmopolitanism in literary (particularly American literary) studies. Carol Breckenridge, Sheldon Pollock, Homi Bhabha, and Dipesh Chakrabarty suggested in a 2000 special issue of Public Culture that there is “a sense of timeliness or even urgency about the question of cosmopolitanism” constituted by the interrelation of three powerful forces: “nationalism, globalism, and multiculturalism.”2 Kincaid’s passage, by


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connecting the garden to several types of texts, reveals the importance in her work of relations between the national, the global, and the multicultural, as all three have developed out of the historical processes of colonialism and imperialism. First, the garden is her own visual and physical text through which she can grow/write her (colonized) memory and history into the land. Second, the garden is related to the literal text she is reading as she begins constructing the garden, William Prescott’s history of the conquest of Mexico. This text connects her garden to a larger history of European imperialism in the Americas and allows her to use the “words about the garden” (which had been used as tools of imperialism to rename and thereby appropriate the land, vegetation, and people of the Americas) to grow/ write her own text. Yet this history of “the conquest of Mexico” also invokes the imperialist history of the United States. It is technically a book on Spain’s conquest of the land that is now Mexico, but Kincaid constantly refers to it as “the conquest of Mexico,” suggesting the US colonization and appropriation of the northern part of Mexico in the mid-nineteenth century. This third textual history places Kincaid, as a US writer (living in Vermont and publishing through US publishing houses and magazines), in an alternate imperialist history, and in a position of national privilege. Gardening is presented by Kincaid as part of a now globalized process of horticulture, one which began as imperial domination but can now be taken up by those previously colonized. It is also a national practice—the privatizing function of Kincaid’s Vermont garden is very different from the gardens in Antigua where she grew up as well as the imperialistic greenhouses of Europe and the landscapes Kincaid finds in China. Finally, it is a multicultural garden, a place within the United States where representations of immigrant culture and minority identities can flourish and become part of the beauty of the landscape. In these ways, Kincaid’s book takes up the major concerns of cosmopolitanism as described by the editors of Public Culture. David Hollinger has coined the phrase “the new cosmopolitanism” to describe the recent sense of urgency surrounding the theorizing of identity beyond the nation. Hollinger defines this new cosmopolitanism as a set of theoretical approaches that situate themselves between universalism and pluralism. Universalists, says Hollinger, need to “find common [human] ground” while cosmopolitans “engage human diversity.” On the other hand, “cosmopolitanism is more liberal in style [than pluralism]: it is more oriented toward the individual.”3 Here it seems clear that in many ways “the new cosmopolitanism” is a globalized version of US liberal (“more oriented


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toward the individual”) multiculturalism (“engaging human diversity”). Hollinger also suggests that “the case of the United States is of special interest because the United States is a world-historical domain in which one can observe the interaction of a great variety of communities of descent.”4 Hollinger thus makes US liberal multiculturalism a model for the world, while at the same time replacing multiculturalism in a US context with the new term cosmopolitanism. Connections between US multiculturalism and international cosmopolitanism have been made by several theorists. Mary Louise Pratt equates identity-politics multiculturalism and world-culture cosmopolitanism as the “simultaneous[] implod[ing] and explod[ing]” of “the nation” as an “organizing principle for culture.”5 Will Kymlicka connects US liberal multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism when he says that “the [multicultural] debate in the United States has a special importance because of the profound influence of American ideas around the world.”6 And collectively the authors of Post-Nationalist American Studies identify a trajectory within the academy from nationalist to multicultural to cosmopolitan frameworks.7 Liberal multiculturalism and newer theories of cosmopolitanism are related, then, in at least four ways: (1) historically, through multiply emergent demands for group recognition and global cultural forms that challenge the official nation-state as a primary mode of identification; (2) through a neoimperialist exportation of US multicultural liberalism to other nations; (3) by Hollinger’s “good model” theory in which the handling of identity-based politics in the United States makes it an appropriate model for cosmopolitanism; and (4) in the multiple disciplinary moves from US-centered multiculturalism to global cosmopolitical concepts and methodologies. If cosmopolitanism in fact carries with it many of the ideological assumptions of liberal multiculturalism, becoming more aware of our ideologies of liberal multiculturalism and their connections to cosmopolitanism can provide us with more incisive and insightful political tools than a simple shift from a national multicultural to a global cosmopolitan framework—a move that may actually blind us to some of the paradoxes we bring with us to our transnational literary and cultural studies projects. This chapter explores residual liberal multicultural paradoxes within the cosmopolitan writing of Jamaica Kincaid and Reginald McKnight. Kincaid and McKnight both produce narratives that utilize transnational perspectives to construct an aesthetics of internal distantiation. This aesthetics can, as Althusser describes it, help us to “see” or “feel” not the difference of other cultures or geographic locations but rather our own US national


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ideologies—those from which the text “is born, in which it bathes, from which it detaches itself as art, and to which it alludes.”8 This distantiating aesthetics functions to make the reader more aware of her national ideologies and the ways in which they construct her ideas about and perceptions of the global. McKnight and Kincaid juxtapose the national and the transnational in their work so as to prompt their readers to perceive the national as simultaneously fluid and rigid: fluid in that it can never fully keep out the nonnational, yet rigid in the ways it participates in constructing US citizen-subjects through a repression of histories, experiences, and perspectives that lie outside national ideological boundaries. Rather than looking at the new cosmopolitanism as the next logical step in an expanding liberal multiculturalism, this chapter explores the ways in which Jamaica Kincaid uses her own (and her narrators’) position as US writer and postcolonial subject, and Reginald McKnight uses his own (and his characters’) position as a black American writing in and about Senegal, to construct an internally distantiating aesthetics that allows us to become aware of the liberal multicultural ideologies that shape our understanding of cosmopolitanism and the ways a more global perspective can challenge and expand liberal multicultural understandings of citizenship.9 One of the limitations of the new cosmopolitan theories is their tendency, like the politics of liberal multiculturalism, to promote voluntary agential political alliances and identity formations at the price of recognizing the forces of history and ideology. “Cosmopolitans,” notes Hollinger, are “inclined . . . to encourage the voluntary formation of new communities of wider scope made possible by changing historical circumstances and demographic mixtures.”10 Kwame Anthony Appiah’s cosmopolitanism “values human variety for what it makes possible for human agency” and “self-creation.”11 And Arjun Appaduri suggests that cosmopolitans see “material problems” rather than identities of descent as the most important factor in “defin[ing] those social groups and ideas for which we would be willing to live and die.”12 While each of the abovementioned theorists presents nuanced ethical approaches for thinking about individual, national, and global identities, they all tend to value individual agency, free rationality, and transparency of thought and language at the expense of considering historical constructions of power-based identity that might limit or undermine one’s rational desire to freely form communities and choose from the possibilities that human variety creates. In other words, they cannot distantiate themselves from their own internal logic enough to account for the functioning of ideology.13 Before we can be postnational or postidentity, we need to understand more


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fully the ways in which national ideologies of citizen-subject belonging continue to shape our understanding of social identity and power.14 The work of Kincaid and McKnight allows us to see the ideological limitations of characters in transnational contexts and to recognize that getting “beyond” those limitations is so difficult as to be at times psychically threatening. The texts I will look at here function to investigate the role of their characters’ Americanness in their experience beyond US borders (both physical and mental); and ultimately, through an aesthetics of internal distantiation, to make US readers aware of their own involvement in, and ways of thinking within, these nationally constructed ideological bounds.

L i ber al Multic ulturali s m beyond U S B o rder s in Mc K night’s I Get on the Bus Reginald McKnight’s novels I Get on the Bus (1990) and He Sleeps (2001) both follow African American characters through a series of surreal experiences in Senegal. Both novels can be considered cosmopolitan in that they concern characters who have come to Africa to find a community or identity that would exceed the national via the African diaspora.15 Both novels are structured as detective stories, implicating the reader in the characters’ ideological framework by playing on her desire to fantasize about Africa and to study and interpret it. They put the reader in the position of the American in Senegal, at the mercy of the narratives whose meaning and context are always unclear and that destabilize a firm ideological footing. In I Get on the Bus, Evan Norris, a young black man from Denver, goes to Senegal with the Peace Corps and finds himself feeling ill, unclear about what he is doing versus what he is imagining, and most bizarrely, constantly appearing without reason on the public bus in Dakar. Evan is angry, confused, and suspicious of nearly all the people he meets in Senegal. In a malarial stupor brought on by refusing to take his quinine, he is taken in by Aminata, a Georgetown University student, and her father, the village marabou (healer). Evan starts to believe that Aminata’s father has put a jinn (curse) on him and that a demm (soul eater) is after him. Finally, he is told by a friend that to be rid of the jinn he must kill another African American living in Senegal named Africa Ford Mambada. Despite the fact that the intrigue of the novel is based largely on the reader’s desire to figure out what all these enigmatic Senegalese happenings mean, what is most engaging about the book is the central trope of the novel—Evan’s consistent reemergence on the bus. It is


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clear that Evan is neither dreaming nor hallucinating, as he never finds himself back where he started. He simply will suddenly be on the bus instead of where he was and have to get off and start over from there. As Evan says after his first reappearance on the bus, “Nothing seems surreal. Nothing seems dreamlike. On the contrary everything seems powerfully real.”16 The bus is a matter of “believ[ing]/disbeliev[ing],”17 a space of in-betweens, of halves. As Evan says, “I am half-lost, halfbemused, half-terrified, half-aghast—half-clearheaded, half-placid, half-confident.”18 This in-between psychic space becomes one of internal distantiation represented in a way that echoes Donald Woods Winnicott’s transitional model, a psychic “potential space” between fantastic omnipotence over the world and submission to preexisting laws that one must accept to become a functioning subject in the world. Evan becomes both able and forced to reenter a kind of transitional space, not through art or literature (which for Winnicott are the usual modes for adult access to transitional space) but through the less pleasurable experience of having his framework for interpretation disrupted in a foreign space. I Get on the Bus is a first-person narrative, which begins with its narrating “I” on the bus. However, it does not begin with the title phrase, “I get on the bus,” but rather, “The bus stops. I get on.”19 “The bus stops” becomes the anaphoric refrain for the first chapter, reappearing at significant moments throughout the novel. The bus as trope represents a traveling, stopping, penetrable, changeable, communal and inescapable space where people come and go and yet where everything seems to be inside Evan’s own head.20 “All these faces,” Evan tells us, “reveal nothing but what I put there, tell no stories, tell no lies, exhibit neither fear nor boredom. Non faces.” “I am frustrated,” he says, “because the window will not open, because I stink and can do nothing about it. This world spills into me. I cannot stop it.”21 Evan is in a transitional space between the adult rational subject and the infantile fantastic nonsubject—unable to recognize others as independent beings with their own separate and self-propelled thoughts, feelings, inner lives, and at the same time lacking the fantasy of omnipotence over his environment. In “The Fate of the Transitional Object,” Winnicott argues that there are “several lines of transition” involved in the infant’s movement to independent selfhood. One line of transition entails the use of a set of intermediary objects for relating to the world: first, the use of a body part, followed by the use of an object like a blanket, after which the infant finally achieves a state in which she can function in relation


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to the world without an intermediary object. Within this “line” of transition, however, there is another, which is, “the changeover from an object which is subjective for the infant to one which is objectively perceived or external.” At first, whatever object gains a relationship with the infant is created by the infant . . . some cheating takes place and an object that is ready to hand overlaps with an hallucination.” In other words, “we are dealing with the making real of the hallucination.”22 This transition is less progressive than repetitive and it occurs in a transitional space that we do and must reenter throughout life. The very way in which the real becomes real is by continually overlapping with our perception of its reality, a process of naturalizing our ideological frames. As Winnicott puts it, “[T]he fact is that an external object has no being for you or me except in so far as you or I hallucinate it, but being sane we take care not to hallucinate except where we know what to see.”23 This is also the function of ideologies according to Stuart Hall, which “only become effective if they . . . connect with a particular constellation of social forces” but which also allow people to “render intelligible the way society works.”24 McKnight uses this representation of transitional space as part of his distantiative aesthetics to make the reader more aware of her own process of making the real real, through repeatedly utilizing liberal multicultural logics to make sense of her social and political realities as well as the identitymarked subjects circulating within them. Winnicott also argues that this process is the basis for our adult ability to use symbols. “The transitional object,” claims Winnicott, “is the first symbol [where] the symbol is at the same time both the hallucination and an objectively perceived part of external reality.”25 This symbolic realm corresponds to a “third area . . . of living,” which is neither “psychic . . . inner reality” nor “external reality, the world that is . . . recognized as the NOT-ME.”26 “This is mad,” admits Winnicott, “[b]ut in our cultural life we accept the madness, exactly as we accept the madness of the infant who claims . . . ‘I hallucinated that and it is part of the mother who was there before I came along’.”27 In McKnight’s I Get on the Bus, Evan is stuck in this madness. There is no single transitional object to regulate or contain his experience in transitional space.28 His visit to Senegal has made him aware of the paradox that he is both constituted by a national racial ideology that he cannot change and an individual subject who creates (hallucinates) his own reality. And lacking a transitional object, he is having trouble making any of his hallucinations (i.e., his constructions/projections of his environment and himself) line up with a fixed external reality and keeps returning to the unstable transitional space of the bus.


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The objectless “cultural experience” of being in Africa causes Evan’s American ideological framework to stop functioning effectively. It opens a space between Evan’s experiences and his normal modes of incorporating experience into his sense of himself and his place in the world. This transitional space is also a space of literary representation that both acknowledges the necessity of individual agency and voluntaristic identification (Evan’s ability to “aid” Africa as a Peace Corps worker and his assumed membership in a diasporic identity) and undercuts that model by demonstrating that agency and voluntaristic identification are often fantasies that rely on not recognizing the other as independent, separate, and in some sense unreadable from one’s own ideological perspective—a perspective dependent on outside discourses such as race and nationality. This acknowledgment of agency and recognition of fantasy situates the reader such that she is simultaneously aware of both of these seemingly contradictory truths, thereby adding to McKnight’s aesthetics of internal distantiation.

P eac e C o r ps Co smopoli tani sm and Rac ial ly I nf l e cted Travel Evan’s “illness” in Senegal reminds him of his Navy training for prisoner-of-war camps, during which he was locked in a drum almost filled with water.29 As Evan describes it, “I was sore; my body itched, burned, unscratchable. After several long hours I urinated in the water, and whenever water would seep past my lips, I felt like vomiting.” And what is even worse, “I felt my feet, my legs, my genitals, my belly, my back and shoulders fall apart, grain by grain [. . .] When I was finally released from the drum, it was four days before I could even acknowledge the fact that I had fingers, toes, and limbs that could move.”30 Evan’s experience in the navy is one of being forced into a transitional position between subject and object, one in which he is no longer in control of nor able to separate himself or his body from the exterior world and thus one in which his body disintegrates. Though Evan hated this aspect of the military, when he finds himself experiencing something similar in Senegal he enjoys it. “I am fascinated by this illness,” he says, “I do not doubt [it] is leading me some place literal, real.”31 In Senegal, where this experience has not been not forced on him by his own nation, he wants to explore this between-space for as long as he can. Nevertheless, in Senegal Evan has not escaped national organizations. The fact that he has access to Senegal through the Peace Corps is important to his national and racial positioning there. The Peace


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Corps is both a national and international organization. It enables McKnight to represent both US nationalism and a dominant form of Western cosmopolitanism alongside each other and to reveal the depth of their reliance on one another. The Peace Corps began both as an altruistic project and as a US strategy for gaining a foothold in postcolonial Africa during the Cold War. Pan-Africanist leaders in Africa in the early 1960s were distrustful of US neocolonial policies toward Africa as well as US historical support of the European colonizing nations.32 President Kennedy employed the discourses of the civil rights movement to legitimate and promote the Corps. Volunteers, he insisted, should be “recruited from every race and walk of life” and have “zero tolerance for racism.”33 This use of new social movement rhetoric by the liberal Democratic Kennedy administration marks an early instance of liberal multicultural discourse. And, like today’s cosmopolitanism, it was a liberal multiculturalism made to be exported and one that addressed not only national but also international differences. Composed of predominantly white Americans going to African nations where people were largely aware of the racist policies of the United States, the Peace Corps was forced to deal with the issue of racial difference. Though the Peace Corps was indeed one of the most racially progressive governmental organizations ever to exist in the United States and did educate its members in the importance of racial equality and the achievements of African Americans, its rhetorically civil rights–based agendas were ultimately pursued in the service of creating “representatives of the nation” who could “present the nation in a positive light.”34 In a move that prefigured liberal multicultural thinking in the post–civil rights era, the Peace Corps combined liberal individualism and antiracist policy to mediate potential backlash against white America and create an idealistic “color-blind” society.35 As R. Sargent Shriver, head of the Peace Corps task force, said, “The Peace Corps wants people of all races . . . This is how we see our task abroad—not to work with Africans and Asians as members of a particular race . . . but as people . . . When will the ugly incidents of Montgomery and Birmingham cease to be? Only when every man becomes a person to every other man. This is the concept toward which the Peace Corps is moving and to which we are all dedicated.”36 This forward-looking speech captures the paradoxical liberal multicultural mode of addressing national and international historical wounds. The Peace Corps addresses nonwhite bodies as representatives of a “color-blind” but clearly predominantly white nation. A future-oriented rhetoric of liberal humanism—“when every man becomes a person to every other


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man”—obscures the historical violences (slavery, lynching, segregation; and in the case of the African nations, US support of European colonization) that underlie the “ugly incidents” (not described in any detail but represented metonymically by their location) that will soon “cease to be” and will therefore no longer have any effect on liberal multicultural US democracy. In I Get on the Bus, the Peace Corps functions to locate Evan in a history of liberal multiculturalism, US neoimperialism, and cosmopolitan (as expanded from US liberal multicultural) rhetoric. It also, however, situates him racially and provides McKnight with another tool to develop his aesthetics of internal distantiation. As an African American, Evan occupies a very particular position in the history and rhetoric of the Peace Corps. Even though in the first five years of the Corps’ existence it was only 5 to 7 percent African American, its leaders considered an African American presence of great importance and recruited black Americans using American nationalist, black nationalist, and cosmopolitan rhetoric. The American nationalist recruitment of African Americans encouraged them through patriotic rhetoric to “serve their country” and to continue the civil rights movement abroad as ambassadors of a country representing freedom and equality. The racialist black nationalist recruitment was along Pan-Africanist lines, offering a way, as one volunteer put it, to “join with the Brothers and Sisters” in a place where “people have grown into Black pride naturally, where Black power is the status quo, and Black action is a working reality.”37 Finally, a rhetoric of cosmopolitan enlightenment was used, promising that black volunteers in the Peace Corps would come to see “the world as one country” and “think in terms of the universe not just America or Africa.”38 Nevertheless, the Peace Corps operated in racialist if not racist ways. The initial desire for racial minorities (particularly African Americans) to represent the United States abroad and the lack of minority applicants39 led to a rush for recruitment in traditionally black colleges and universities, Urban League bureaus, and teacher-training institutes, in essence stripping the United States of black teachers and activists in their need to represent the nation as a nonracist country.40 To enable more black Americans to participate in the Peace Corps while maintaining a “color-blind” policy, the agency began adjusting test scores for “culturally deprived” Americans, thus implicitly suggesting that they believed black Americans would test below white Americans.41 The Peace Corps’ “progressive” policies prevented volunteers from living or working together in a “segregated” manner, thereby preventing a black community from forming within the Corps. Additionally,


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the Corps sent trainees to live with “Negro farmers” and “ghetto children” so as to “educate” them and rid them of their “unconscious prejudice.”42 This practice implicitly conceives of volunteers as white, middle-class Americans; and it equates blackness with poverty. Clearly, the Corps was still reliant on and participating in racialist ideology. In I Get on the Bus, McKnight, through an aesthetics of internal distantiation, makes his readers aware of the paradoxical and contradictory position of a middle-class African American subject, formed by and within US ideologies of race, citizenship, and cosmopolitanism. He uses Evan’s Peace Corps position to construct a more complex system for representations of African American experiences, one that does not reduce it to the symbolic representation of identity required by liberal multiculturalism. This is particularly true in regard to McKnight’s representation of Evan’s Peace Corps–funded world travel, which functions as both a continuation and an undermining of Western colonial and postcolonial travel narratives. McKnight represents Evan as an imperialist travel-writer figure—he is a tourist of sorts, he has access to Africa through the Peace Corps and he wants Africa to “give him something of his own.” At the same time, Evan’s is a particular relation to the postmodern, postcolonial travel narrative. It is not in any other place that Evan could find “something of his own.” His desire to recover an African history “lost” in the colonial slave trade is clearly linked to the particularities of his racial and national identity. The bus symbolizes Evan’s paradoxically privileged and coerced relation to travel. As a privileged American tourist, he uses the bus to explore the Senegal that he did not feel he had access to through the Peace Corps. As a member of the African diaspora, he is a forced traveler who has little to no control over his reemergence on the vehicle of travel, echoing the largely nonvoluntary creation of the diaspora. In order to more fully understand the politics of location at work in I Get on the Bus, it is useful to read it against the genre of travel writing. On one hand, McKnight writes in the tradition of black diaspora travel narratives of Africa. As Paul Gilroy says of Martin Delany’s Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party, “[T]he ambivalence over exile and homecoming” in the writing of Africans of the diaspora “has a history that is probably as long as the presence of African slaves in the west.”43 Gilroy claims that the black Atlantic intellectuals, activists, and artists about whom he writes “repeatedly articulate a desire to escape the restrictive bonds of ethnicity, national identification, and sometimes even ‘race itself.”44 Whereas Gilroy claims that “travel experiences” in the black Atlantic can change “figures who


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begin as African-Americans or Caribbean people into something else which evades those specific labels and with them all fixed notions of nationality and national identity,”45 McKnight is far more wary of the ideological limitations of national identity and more convinced of the (often necessary) power of national identity and ideological frameworks to provide stable and agential subject positions, especially when that national identity is an American one. McKnight is also more concerned with the particular US ideologies that make his African American characters into neoimperialist figures. His project, then, is not only to explore the ambivalence and disappointment inherent in the diasporic African’s return to Africa but also to appropriate white travel narratives in his construction of an internally distantiating aesthetics that reveals the racialized limitations of the genre while also demonstrating how certain aspects of those narratives are of use to nonwhite American travelers. McKnight manipulates the generic Western travel narrative so as to demonstrate the need for a nationally oriented internal distantiation of his characters and to provoke one in his (American) reader. Tim Youngs writes of Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux, perhaps the best known Western (British and American, respectively) travel writers of the late twentieth century, that “national and cultural identities are usually affirmed even as [they] celebrate their ability to cross their borders. The appearance of a free, personal space marked by a cultural transcendence or betweenness and by a textual removal from the material context has become a desired image of the modern condition.”46 Though Evan is searching for a kind of cultural transcendence and does achieve a remarkable state of betweenness, this takes the form of neither a “free personal space” nor a “removal from his material context.” Evan’s minority position (both as American in Senegal and as a black person in the United States) allows neither a distanced perspective on nor an identity with the Senegalese. Theroux, in “Memory and Creation,” implicitly compares his “condition” as traveler to that of a racial minority in the United States when he says, “My own mongrel world had gone uprooted. It was like being denied my own experience, and without a model—with nothing to imitate, with the mistaken notion that my own world might not even be worth writing about . . . I devised my own remedy, I fled—I went away—as far as I could: with the Peace Corps to Central Africa.”47 Here Theroux appropriates a language that African Americans have used to describe their own feelings of invisibility and denial of legitimate experience to narrate his “escape” to Africa. For Theroux, Africa is too foreign to “live in [the] culture” and thus he is forced to “live


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in [his] head,” which provides him the opportunity and inspiration to write.48 McKnight reappropriates these models of the African American experience by making clear the difference that race makes in thinking of “escape” to Africa. The trope of “living in one’s head” means something quite different for Theroux than it does for Evan. For Theroux, it is a metaphor for safety, self-centeredness and selfcoherence in foreign space, and the freedom to write. For Evan, it means potential psychic destruction—being stuck “inside his head” while simultaneously unable to disassociate himself from the “foreign culture.” McKnight, then, is appropriating white North American and European travel writing tropes but reconfiguring them to fit the perspective of the subaltern of colonial history. This, however, does not allow for a purely nonimperialistic form of travel writing. Mary Louise Pratt argues that beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, (male) Euro-imperialist travel writing is marked by “monarch-of-all-I-see” passages in which the European traveler uses aestheticization of the landscape, density of meaning (achieved through heavy use of adjectival modifiers and material referents), and domination (presenting the scene as a painting, which has only one perspective—his own) to mark his colonial relationship to and domination over the place he writes about.49 Western travel writers, she suggests, continue to “claim authoritativeness for their vision. What they see is what there is. No sense of limitation on their interpretive powers is suggested.”50 However, in contemporary work, as there are no longer “pristine worlds” for the traveler to discover, Pratt adds, “[T]he impulse of these postcolonial metropolitan writers is to condemn what they see, trivialize it, and dissociate themselves utterly from it.”51 In an early chapter of I Get on the Bus, Evan enacts a kind of monarch-of-all-I-see aesthetic describing the village of N’Gor as [a]n odd conglomeration of two-story, five-bedroom, tile floored homes with full kitchens and indoor plumbing, on the one hand, and, on the other, crumbling shanties of cast-off lumber and roofing tin. The village smells of fruit and fish, goatskin, chicken shit, and mutton, disintegrating under the obtrusive sun. It smells of tobacco, marijuana, palm wine, cheap perfume, incense, home cooking, coffee, tea, and charcoal. Odors twisting in the air, as visible as fiesta streamers. People in red, people in blue. Greens and yellows to make the mouth pucker. They sit on benches along the pathways, drinking, smoking, talking in warm or vigorously percussive tones. People in blue jeans, khaftans, boubous, pagnes, suits and ties, going to work, coming home from


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Reconstituting Americans work. A young girl, broom in hand, chases a cat. A boy strolls toward the beach. He balances a coke bottle on his head. His arms swing smooth as ropes in the open breeze.52

Evan presents N’Gor village life as a kind of aestheticized panoramic beginning with a sweeping sentence in which we get the two types of dwellings that constitute the “odd conglomeration” of buildings that make up the backdrop of his scene. As in Pratt’s monarch-of-all-I-see scene, Evan’s perspective is the only one. Colors that make his mouth pucker, make “the mouth” pucker. He does not give us the comments of his fellow travelers and he does not question what he sees but simply lists it in a “proliferation of concrete, material references.” The class difference and poverty that one assumes underlie the difference between the “two types” of houses is not discussed but merely referenced as part of the aesthetic makeup of the landscape-like portrait. And the image seems frozen in an odd way—the girl with the broom caught in a moment of still action reminding one more of a Vermeer painting than a scene from an actual life, and the boy’s necessary stiffness as he “balances a Coke bottle on his head.” When combined, these features make the contents of the scene appear somewhat trivialized and allow Evan to distance himself from them and hold them within his gaze. On the other hand, this passage is dense not only with senses other than sight, which immerse Evan in the scene and disrupt our sense of it as portraiture, but also with synesthetic descriptions, which evoke multiple and seemingly uncontrollable senses simultaneously. Odors visibly twist in the air, greens and yellows make the mouth pucker, and people talk in warm tones. Unlike Pratt’s monarch-of-all-I-see passages, Evan is invaded bodily by the scene he describes. Likewise, the scene gets away from him. Though it does begin as a relatively static image with people and things posed as in a picture, the boy who balances the Coke bottle is described near the end of the passage as having “arms [which] swing smooth as ropes in the breeze,” thus associating his movement with natural forces over which Evan has no power. Evan’s perspective, then, cannot fully support the authoritativeness of the typical (white) Western travel narrative. McKnight points out both Evan’s claims to this perspective and the great limitations on his inability to remove himself from the world he sees. McKnight himself participates in a similarly paradoxical structure of travel writing. Like Bruce Chatwin, for whom “being away from his own address came to be a condition of his writing,”53 McKnight uses Africa as a space from which to write. He has said that Africa “allowed him finally to identify himself as a writer,” it was “the place [he] went


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inwardly to make himself write” and to “recreate [him]self . . . as a human being.”54 Youngs argues that Chatwin, in his travel writing, “seeks to recover ‘certain things,’” which “are not in fact ‘things’ at all but abstract qualities” as a result of and to compensate for “the contemporary uncertainty over British national identity.”55 McKnight’s characters are also looking for “certain things” to supplement or compensate for their “lost history” and their uncertainty over their black American identities. Thus McKnight allows his characters and the structure of his novel to be neoimperialistic, nationally centered, and appropriative, while simultaneously racially particular, diasporic, and part of a postcolonial historical narrative. This is a paradox that is difficult for Evan to deal with or make sense of, but it is a narrative paradox that becomes part of McKnight’s internally distantiating aesthetics, allowing the reader to accept the paradox by employing the novels themselves as “cultural objects” that can provide mediated access to transitional space—a space in which, as Winnicott tells us, one accepts the paradox of simultaneous power and subjection. McKnight prompts his reader to become aware of the ways in which his protagonist’s projects in Africa (and thus implicitly McKnight’s own as well as the reader’s) are nationally provoked. The “abstract qualities” that McKnight’s characters discover are the racial violences and histories of their own nation that are otherwise obscured by ideologies of US liberal multiculturalism. Through his distantiating narrative techniques, McKnight resists an unproblematic cosmopolitan position by making his story specifically transnational and stressing the importance of particular histories and power structures, and the ideological constructs citizen-subjects use to make sense of those histories. McKnight’s model, unlike other postmodern western travel writers writing in a postcolonial world, is not a cultural macrocosm of postmodern fragmentation but a microcosm of psychic fragmentation caused by a willed erasure of a national and racial history (with international implications) that creates a particular kind of nationally and racially based trauma. Evan claims that he feels psychically fragmented or at least mentally off-balance in Senegal because it is there that people confront him with his blackness. “Since I have been here,” he says, “people have said, or implied, that I am not black enough.”56 However, though Evan represents Africa as the “mother” or source of his anger and pain surrounding his black identity, we actually hear much more about Evan’s struggle with his blackness from his American cohorts than from the Senegalese. In fact, it is the American expat, Africa Ford Mambada, who teases him most often for being toubob (white or


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foreign). And ultimately it is from Evan himself that we hear the most talk of legitimate blackness. Midway through the novel, Evan’s musing on blackness in Senegal leads him directly into a diatribe on growing up in the liberal multicultural United States, where he and his siblings “did not think about [race]”; where “we would have said, if we had thought about it, our black lives were made richer by the white and brown lives that touched them”; and where “we shed no more tears for the Kings than for the Kennedys.”57 From Evan’s liberal multicultural American perspective, the Senegalese are overly concerned with blackness. However, in this same paragraph he admits “I knew a girl in grade school, who, dissatisfied with skin lighteners, hair relaxers, and perfect diction, took a Brillo pad to her arms and legs in search of the rich, creamy center of her being.” And that “I was placed, untested, in the low-achievement track in my first year in high school. My adviser in college suggested I try vocational school before I even finished the first quarter of my freshman year. I did not think for a moment that these things happened because I am tall and left-handed.”58 These interspersed comments about the intense racism that surrounded him growing up make Evan’s repeated “[we] were not this way,” “we did not think about it,” “I, myself, did not even think about it” appear a kind of mantra, an interiorized but not entirely effective means of “not thinking about it” in his privileged, middle-class, liberal community. While these remembrances of his US childhood may have been prompted by an experience of difference—“I am different here,” “I am toubob here”—McKnight does not present this difference as important for its actual content but simply for the fact of its difference from Evan’s norm. It is not a cosmopolitan moment of celebratory difference that prompts Evan to learn about other cultures. This difference instead turns Evan back on his own ideological frame, making the reader aware of the national experiences and modes of thinking that have made race for Evan such a painful subject. Evan’s experiences in Senegal displace the liberal multicultural fantasy that racism is no longer part of dominant US ideologies, and thus both allow and force him to feel the terrifying falseness of that fantasy. His experiences dislodge, disrupt, and reveal the national racial ideologies he has inherited that allowed him to make sense of race in a liberal multicultural way—that is, to claim that “it doesn’t really matter.” When these ideologies no longer function for him in a totalizing manner he is able to see more but is now missing a complete ideological framework that would allow him to return to sanity from this transitional space of madness.


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Sl avery Tour ism and the Main Narratives o f L i ber al Multic ultur a li s m i n He Sleeps He Sleeps was published approximately ten years after I Get on the Bus and is in many ways a rewriting and refining of the earlier novel. Bertrand, our Evan-like main character, is a young anthropologist from Colorado who has come to Senegal to write his dissertation and finds himself having surreal experiences that he is unable to explain. Like Evan, Bertrand stands in an imperialist relation to Africa, and wants to mine it for some kind of “truth,” having come to Africa to “help all black people by recovering our forgotten things.”59 Like Evan, Bertrand too will see that his forgotten things are not African but, in fact, American. The reasons He Sleeps is worth looking at here, despite its similarities to the earlier novel, are twofold. First, its distantiating aesthetics make clearer the specific ways in which liberal multicultural US narratives suppress certain histories, experiences, and identifications. And second, it represents Africa not only as a place that disrupts these narratives but also as a location in which entrances into and exits from transitional space might allow for alternative ways of narrating experience and more flexible ways of using symbols—that is, more flexible ways of making our “hallucinations” overlap with the outside world. In He Sleeps, transitional space takes the form, as one might expect, of Bertrand’s sleeping and dreaming, often for days at a time. Our third-person narrator describes it as a state of being “both asleep and awake.”60 Since Bertrand had never dreamt before coming to Senegal, he had always “suspected” that when people spoke of dreams they “were talking about something they’d invented, imagined.” He writes in his journal, “I always believed dreams took one’s will. But this thing happened to me.”61 The centering of the novel on Bertrand’s dreamworld marks McKnight’s departure from the cosmopolitan theorist’s focus on agency, self-identification, and control over interpretation of transnational experience. Bertrand’s experience in Senegal happens to him while what he had previously considered under the control of his will now escapes it. In exploring Bertrand’s dreamstate, He Sleeps complicates what Appiah has called a “rooted cosmopolitanism,” a way of valuing global difference while simultaneously acknowledging local attachments. He Sleeps illuminates the ways in which one’s confrontation with global difference can undermine one’s sense of rootedness, while at the same time the ideological boundaries that come with that rootedness greatly affect one’s experience of global difference. What begins for


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Bertrand as a disconcerting interaction with a foreign culture quickly turns into cataplexy, severe insomnia, narcolepsy, bodily violence, and near insanity and death. This is most fully revealed near the end of the novel when Bertrand, in one of his bouts of sleep, is suspected by a group of his male acquaintances of sleeping with Kene, another man’s wife. They steal and read his journal and letters, and eventually take him to an island where they wake him, interrogate him, and remove his foreskin against his will. McKnight, then, takes very seriously the aspects of national identity and ideology that defy conscious choices to be cosmopolitan, while at the same time, in this later novel, allowing his main character to survive the experience of losing the stability of that ideology through a successful process of internal distantiation. The relation between race and sexuality is a central theme of He Sleeps. Bertrand is constantly fantasizing about Kene, and he often reports dreaming about sex. The fact that he is married to a white American woman and is attracted to a black African woman is also a recurrent issue for Bertrand. He believes his dreams to be closely connected, if not fully derived from, a letter from his wife that said only, “Go ahead. Find your black girls. Fuck them all.”62 Over the course of the book one becomes aware that Bertrand’s fascination with Kene is only one strand in a larger theme of castration, slavery, and racial identity, one connected much more directly to US history than to any relationship to or fantasies about Africa as a site of difference. In fact, even though it is the love story between Kene and Bertrand—and the parallel story of Bertrand and his wife—that forwards the basic plot (Bertrand leaves his wife to go to Senegal; he fights with her over the possibility that he will sleep with African women and fantasizes that he has slept with Kene; he writes about these fights and fantasies in his journal, which when discovered prompts the men to bring him to the island at the end of the story), both love stories appear as narrative manifestations of (i.e., modes of linguistically and mentally linking together) the nonnarratable recurring theme of the US history of slavery and US forms of racial violence and shame. These themes take on alternate forms because, like much of what appears in Bertrand’s dreams, they do not “fit in with what he would call the main narrative.”63 Histories of racial violence terrorize, as bell hooks has put it,64 narratives of US liberal multiculturalism. They do not fit the main narrative but, like trauma, function as a “gap or aporia in [national] consciousness and representation.”65 In the context of the novel, these themes appear in dream segments, side stories about travel outside the village, and unfinished notes for Bertrand’s dissertation.


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One of the most important of these divergent moments, not fully a part of the “main narrative,” is the chapter in which Bertrand visits Goree Island, the site of a slaveholding warehouse, with Sue, a woman he met in a hotel bar. Sue is a transient character in the novel. Being an American she is a touchstone for Bertrand, someone to help him feel normal in this strange place, but her presence does not forward his story nor help him figure out the mystery of his dreams, his work, or his marriage. Her presence in fact stalls his larger narrative while she chats with him in the bar about her personal history. She is also represented as a double of Bertrand’s wife before their problems started: “[S]he spoke to me in the way Rosie used to.”66 Thus Sue as narrative figure is both superfluous and regressive, and in this way she allows for elements that do not “fit the main narrative” to emerge. The chapter in which they visit Goree begins with, “This happens every time you go to Goree. You know you won’t be able to describe it all in your journal, so following each visit you write almost nothing. Your passages on Goree are a mere catalog of abstract adjectives, and you could almost kick yourself for your lack of precision and objectivity. Perhaps you should only try to describe one single part of it.”67 Here the experience of Goree is described as literally unable to fit inside a larger narrative. It can only be written about in “catalogs” of “abstract adjectives” or “single parts,” which cannot be linked to a larger meaningful whole. This is a moment of reckoning with a history that Bertrand believed he had a narrative for—namely, that his US citizenship has brought him “past” that very history—only to find that he has none. It is telling that this scene occurs at Goree, a popular tourist site for diasporic Africans and particularly for African Americans. The very fact of using a historical monument of the slave trade as an identity-related tourist attraction raises a number of ethical questions about history, travel, and identity narratives, as well as questions about legitimate historiography (Goree has been called a “sham” by historian Philip Curtin, “an emotional shrine to the slave trade rather than a serious museum”68). What is particularly interesting for a reading of He Sleeps, however, is the contrast between Goree (and other West African slave trade sites that have been preserved and promoted as tourist sites) and the plantation tourism of the United States. “Heritage tourism,” as it is called in the United States, has been flourishing in the South since the 1950s when Southern states began restoring and redecorating old plantation houses. In the 1980s, a second wave of “African American Heritage” tourism began, marketed to black Americans. The first wave of heritage tourism tended


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to celebrate the plantation as Old South heritage and gloss over the issue of slavery, often referring to slave quarters as “servant quarters or carriage houses.”69 The second, post–new social movements wave of heritage tourism, however, focused on commodifying the “black” experience both in antebellum America and during the civil rights movement and marketing tours as “stud[ies] in black history.”70 The governor’s message on the inside front cover of a 1983 state-sponsored travel guide titled Alabama’s Black Heritage reads, “The Black heritage sites on this tour [which, incidentally, include the gravesite of ‘Harry the Slave’ who saved white students from a burning dormitory] are a testimony to hard work and constructive change in human attitudes since Blacks first came to Alabama.”71 This progressive, liberal multicultural rhetoric presents history as an ever-changing and always potentially liberating force. But it does so by commodifying a history of violence and marketing it as a history of identitarian recognition and celebration. By using such phrases as “hard work” to refer not only to slave labor but also to civil rights demonstrations in which many black Americans lost their lives and the active “since Blacks first came to Alabama” rather than “since they were traded to plantation owners here,” the pamphlet writes slavery and civil rights into a liberal multicultural narrative of national progress and multiracial democracy.72 Slave trade tourism in Africa, which became popular in the 1990s, functions along similar lines in that it markets to a predominantly African Diasporic, postcolonial, post–civil rights “black” constituency and commodifies sites of violence and racially based slavery. However, unlike the US tourism industry, slave trade tourism in West Africa highlights violence and pain, thriving on claims that these sites were the most violent, most brutal, most populated slave-trading locations.73 The Senegalese tourism industry can incorporate these sites into a colonial history unconstrained by the liberal multicultural ideology of the United States. It is profitable to recognize violence as part of a colonial transatlantic history. “The authentic moment that is being offered to the tourist,” argues Cheryl Finley, “is the memory of the enslaved Africans that left the dungeons centuries ago: the now absent black bodies that become part of the allure of these monuments.”74 At these destinations, “the concept of memory is active and fluid as in the performative, human function of re-membering that is, putting back together, restoring the body, making whole the body politic.”75 Bertrand, then, is provided with an alternate, authenticated version of his history as a member of the African diaspora. However, he is also facing a part of his own national and racial history or identity without the


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ideological narratives that could place it and make sense of it within his US liberal multicultural framework. In this sense, although Goree may be a site of remembering for members of the African diaspora, it is a site of dismembering of the US body politic, as it is constituted under contemporary liberal multiculturalism. “At these sites,” Saidiya Hartman writes, “the chronicle of dispossession and domination which is often contained, localized, and dismissed in the United States by the rubric ‘black history,’ receives official recognition.”76 This recognition is enough to create a disjuncture between Bertrand’s sense of authentic racial identity and authentic American national identity, placing him in a tenuous position with unstable ideological referents. At the same time it allows the reader to see the limitations of current US modes of understanding national and global histories of slavery. The experience of the interrogation and circumcision in the final chapter of the novel offers Bertrand and the reader the opportunity to revisit this history in ways that are neither US liberal multicultural nor Senegalese. The chapter begins as Bertrand, in a dreamstate, is being brought out to the island by one of the men. While physically he is moving toward the island, mentally he is traveling backward to Dakar, to the airport, to Denver, and ultimately to his wife’s home in “the white world”: “Small Colorado towns you understand. Women with freckles you understand. Dry air, fir trees, Chinook winds that scale down mountains, you understand. You understand the fleers of white men, the flares of black women, the head shaking, the tongue clucking of black men. These things you understand.”77 This passage, with its mantra-like repetition, demonstrates the comfort of national ideology, the desire to remain within it, to use it as protection against this moment of confrontation that Bertrand is facing, not only with the men but with himself. The epistrophe (you understand, you understand) and alliteration (freckles, fleers, flares) of this passage combined with its rocking rhythm (created through McKnight’s use of short clauses and repeated meter, e.g., the trochees in “dry air, fir trees” and dactyls in “head shaking, tongue clicking”) emphasize its soothing sound over any of its particular content.78 Bertrand goes on in this paragraph to describe this mode of existence as a “dreamlessness [which] is not metaphor.”79 This was his American life in which he did not dream because it wasn’t necessary, “Why dream, when life is so cut-and-dried, so black, so white?”80 Dreamlessness is a kind of antitransitional space, a nonmetaphorical, nonsymbolic space of ideological rigidity, which is challenged by his experiences in Senegal. When the interrogation scene begins, however, Bertrand is forced to interact in this world that for him is anything but “black and


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white”—this is manifested literally in the disjuncture between Bertrand’s and the Senegalese’s modes of racial identification. Whereas Bertrand sees “black” and “white” the Senegalese do not find it the least bit contradictory to designate him “toubob” (meaning both foreigner and white man), “half-breed,” and “black.”81 In this environment he struggles to interpret and make sense of the world symbolically. Bertrand argues, unsuccessfully, with the men over their interpretation of his dreams as evidence of his affair with Kene. Interestingly, he mentions one dream about “climbing a glass mountain,” which I read as a direct reference to Donald Barthelme’s “The Glass Mountain,” in which the main character climbs the glass mountain to “disenchant a symbol.”82 This reference stresses the importance of symbolism to Bertrand’s experience and the danger both of being unable to interpret symbolically and of oversimplifying and thus doing violence to a story/experience/dream with a rigid figurative reading. The interrogation ends when several of Bertrand’s friends hold him down on the floor and remove his foreskin, saying afterward, “‘I could have made you a woman, but I decided to make you a man.’”83 This marks the place in Bertrand’s first-person narration of the scene where quotation marks begin to be used after a series of pages in stream of consciousness,84 thus marking a return from transitional space into his position as individualized subject, distinguishable from, and without control over his environment. For the Senegalese the circumcision is understood as a ritual signifying masculinity, a rite of passage, an acceptance of Bertrand in their cultural community. Yet for Bertrand it is about his own nationally raced, gendered, and sexualized vulnerability. As an occurrence that evokes castration but is experienced in an alternate cultural context it functions much like a Winnicottian “cultural object” insofar as it establishes a more flexible relation to transitional space. Yet it is not the act of circumcision and its symbolic meaning of “manhood” that enables this new relation but rather Bertrand’s newfound ability to use symbols, to think symbolically, to live awake in a state that is not “dreamless” or without metaphor. The end of the novel is composed of a letter from Bertrand to his wife in which he tells her stories of his past using them as figurative devices that might allow feelings and experiences that do not fit the main narrative to emerge within it. One story, concerning an operation to remove kidney stones, functions as a metaphorical opportunity to talk about the “horror” of “thinking that something so painful could lie in the body and take its time to abruptly surface with such mindless violence.”85 Another story is about a white woman he knew who put a personal ad in the paper for black men and received a


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response accusing her of “breeding monsters.” Bertrand says to his wife of this incident, “I don’t think that he was merely saying that all we are interested in is sex. I think he was saying that people like you and me are no more than the ganglia that lead from the reptile brain to the soft buttons and knobs below.”86 Through his rereading of these stories from his past, Bertrand is able to tell his wife that he had been afraid to live with her because, he says, “I was afraid they’d track us down, chuck rocks at our windows, burn crosses on our yards” and “there were other times when I was also ashamed. You can’t be aware of a thing without in some small, subtle, deeply subconscious way believing it.”87 The novel ends in US history, in the inevitability of ideological confines but also in a kind of internal distantiation for Bertrand in which he is more able to see these ideological boundaries and to reestablish a relation to them, though not able to get outside of them. The reader experiences a similar internal distantiation through the novel’s aesthetics. She has, in the final chapter, been made aware of her own involvement in the narrative and the objective that drives its plot—to know others. At the beginning of the novel, she had been led to believe that she was trying to figure out, with Bertrand and through his texts, what was happening to him in the foreign location of Senegal, and what were the motivations and significations of the Senegalese characters. But by the end of the novel the reader realizes that she, like the men at the tribunal, is actually trying to figure out Bertrand himself. Like the men who take Bertrand captive, she has been reading his private journals, trying to decipher what is “really” happening to him, what his desires are and why. If at any point she feels she can assume an outsider’s position and piece these texts together to make sense of them, she is also made to see both the failure of Bertrand’s US-coded interpretations of Senegal and the failure of the Senegalese men in their attempts to know Bertrand’s story. Both of these readerly perspectives line up with certain types of harm: the first corresponds to the cultural imperialist position of Bertrand as American ethnographer and the second with the men, whose need to understand Bertrand leads them to take him captive.

K inc aid’s C o smo poli tani sm w ithin U S Borders Like McKnight, Jamaica Kincaid also produces distantiating nationalcosmopolitical texts that provoke her readers to see their own liberal multicultural ideologies at work in a transnational context. Kincaid’s


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name itself embodies the ambivalence of her position as national and cosmopolitan Afro-Caribbean American writer. Born Elaine Potter Richardson, Kincaid changed her name in the process of becoming a US–based writer. Her name evokes both her Caribbean and Scottish ancestry and indicates a history of colonial naming processes from which she can never be free (Jamaica is an English version of what Columbus called Xaymaca). At the same time, it is a reappropriation of the ability to name, marking her agency to name her own history while also functioning as a sign of marketability to a liberal multicultural audience, which consumes cosmopolitan otherness.88 Kincaid’s early work focuses mostly on colonial and postcolonial Antigua and deals with family (often mother-daughter) relationships. In her later work (particularly My Garden (Book): [1999] and My Brother [1997]), the United States itself becomes a site of investigation. In these works of creative nonfiction, Kincaid investigates her assumption of the ideologies of US liberal multiculturalism. Kincaid has explicitly noted the connection for her between the privilege to be a writer and a liberal individual selfhood attained via US subjecthood. “I feel that I am sort of lucky or privileged,” she says, “to get to do this thing called writing, in which basically all I am doing is discovering my own mind . . . but that’s all it is, discovering my own mind.”89 “I do not think I would have been allowed this act of selfinvention, which is very American, in Europe.”90 For Kincaid, writing in the United States functions as writing in Africa did for Theroux. She is able to pull herself out of the messiness of history to “discover her own mind.” In this way writing in the United States is a way of gaining psychic stability, taking on the privilege of US national identity to overcome the psychic instability of her subject position as a postcolonial Antiguan. For Kincaid, the US liberal multicultural practice of subsuming history and pain in favor of a celebration of individual differences and national diversity becomes the platform from which writing can begin. It functions for Kincaid as the mental and linguistic escape from a colonial past that is a natural right of US citizenship, part of her “naturalization” as an American. Perry Miller’s ideal that, as Amy Kaplan has put it, “America—once cut off from Europe—can be understood as a domestic question, let alone, unique, divorced from international conflicts—whether the slave trade or the Mexican War—in which that national identity takes shape,” is reconstituted in the liberal multicultural paradigm, which places value on current identity rather than the histories of power that constructed that identity.91 “Liberal multiculturalism,” Jenny Sharpe writes, “effaces the different histories


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of native and immigrant populations and the specific histories of the groups that constitute the nation.”92 It can therefore function as an ideological subject position for Kincaid that allows her the freedom to confront her history on her own terms.93 By consciously manipulating liberal multicultural ideology in such a way, Kincaid is able to construct an internally distantiative and historically more responsible narrative of cosmopolitan US subjecthood. In Kincaid’s Lucy (1990), Mariah, the woman for whom the semiautobiographical Lucy is an au pair, tells Lucy that in the spring, when the daffodils come out and “the breeze comes along and makes them do a curtsey,” she feels “so glad to be alive.”94 Lucy, who was forced to recite Wordsworth’s “Daffodils” as a child in Antigua, is stunned. For her, daffodils evoke colonial domination, false enthusiasm for the colonizing culture, and the puppet-like behavior of the colonized as the dead poet’s words come “ringing out of [their] mouths.”95 When Lucy tells Mariah this, Mariah says, “What a history you have.” And Lucy tells us, “I thought there was a little bit of envy in her voice, and so I said, ‘You are welcome to it if you like.’”96 To Mariah, history is something she as a US subject lacks but that allows her to experience the spring daffodils in no other context than that of her own pleasure. In good liberal multicultural cosmopolitan fashion, she is interested in Lucy’s history, wants to know about it—but only because she will never have to experience it, as Lucy does, as a force that could bury her alive and that must be (if possible) forgotten. Thus the voluntaristic aspect of cosmopolitanism, the ability to let one’s circumstances define the “social groups and ideas”97 with which one associates oneself, is taken full advantage of by Kincaid, who uses her international status and US subjecthood to create a subject position, which is not nationalistic in a traditional sense (as she says, “Even as I live in America and can vote and do all the things an American can do, I don’t feel I’m an American in a certain way”98) but which enables her to take advantage of the privileges of US citizenship including the position of freedom from historical determinism (she says, “when you are in America you can invent yourself”99). “I didn’t make up a past that I didn’t have,” Kincaid says, “I just made my present different from my past.”100 This is not an entirely uncritical self-positioning. The voluntaristic making different of the present requires certain blindnesses (or silences) on the part of Kincaid’s narrative voice, such as that making it possible for her to read a book about the conquest of Mexico and associate it only with the same European colonization that led to her Antiguan position as colonized subject, but not with the privileges of her US subject position. Such


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blindness is not available to the reader. Encountering these lacunas in narrative logic, the reader must become aware of what gets left out of Kincaid’s US citizen-subject narrative perspective. Anne Norton argues that the “mythic narrative of immigration” allows the US national imaginary to construct “inequalities . . . of race class, gender, and ethnicity” as “the wreckage of a defeated enemy: foreign and unsightly, holding no threat on the current order.” This reading, Norton argues, “turns on the ambivalence of the immigrant, who is at once national and foreign. Inequality, domination, coercion, and poverty are read as the residue of the Old World. Though the immigrant may suffer these (and suffer them more severely) in the New World, their condition is read as the unfortunate consequence of the Old.”101 Kincaid, as “immigrant,” embraces this position. She uses the discourse of the immigrant who “leaves the past behind [thereby] open[ing] the possibility of the refusal of history.”102 But she simultaneously demonstrates to her reader that this is never fully possible, as she returns again and again to the story of her childhood in Antigua and its history of colonization. What her narrative voice can at least suppress, if not completely refuse, is the history that her US subjecthood and privileges are built on—a history that many US readers suppress in their everyday experiences of the world. As Jane King says, “Kincaid, who went to the United States where she could buy into its myth of classlessness and believe that it did not matter to Americans where she came from and who her parents were, could develop her own voice.”103 In My Brother and My Garden (Book):, Kincaid constructs her narrative voice and the reader who identifies with it in a position of US subjecthood as opposed to the Caribbean postcolonial.104 These texts employ travel (as opposed to diaspora or displacement) narratives to follow Kincaid as US subject to Antigua and China. This generic distinction is important. As James Clifford has argued, “‘travel’ as a term of cultural comparison” is worth hanging on to “precisely because of its historical taintedness, its association with gendered, racial bodies, class privilege, specific means of conveyance, beaten paths, agents, frontiers, documents, and the like. I prefer it to the more apparently neutral, and ‘theoretical,’ terms such as ‘displacement,’ which can make the drawing of equivalences across historical experiences too easy.”105 “The drawing of equivalences across historical experiences” is precisely what liberal multiculturalism enables. In the sections that follow, I argue that Kincaid makes us see, through narrative structures that provoke internal distantiation, the ways in which “historical taintedness” disrupts these equivalences even while


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placing her autobiographical narrator in the position of the liberal multicultural US subject.

My Brother and the Cos mopoli ti cal P ressures o f Bo rde r Cros si ng My Brother is Jamaica Kincaid’s memoir of the death of her brother Devon from AIDS. It follows several of Kincaid’s visits back and forth between Vermont and Antigua to visit Devon, to bring him drugs from the United States not available in Antigua, and to see him buried. Though the events of the story are not told in chronological order,106 there is a story of progress underlying the narrative, which is Kincaid’s107 growing realization of her own limitations as a US subject who has taken on the ideologies of liberal multiculturalism. In My Brother, AIDS and its treatment is an international structure that organizes cosmopolitan identifications and that clearly (to the reader at least, if not to Kincaid as narrator) marks the differences between citizen-subjects of the United States and those of Antigua.108 AIDS, in this memoir, is the motivating factor for Kincaid’s return to Antigua. It prompts travel between the United States and the Caribbean. It joins people across national boundaries in suffering and sympathy—the people in Kincaid’s AIDS support group in Antigua have come from other countries to see their sick family members and the American doctors and pharmacies give Kincaid the much needed drug azidothymidine, or AZT, to take back to Antigua. It also reveals a kind of universal human smallness: “[T]his disease, in Antigua produces all the prejudices in people that it produces elsewhere, and like so many other places, the people afflicted with it and their families are ashamed to make their suffering known.”109 It is also clear, however, that this mobility and identification is only available to certain people. The drugs come from the United States to Antigua, just as the relatives come from more wealthy countries back to the Caribbean island. The sick Antiguans, like Devon, do not travel. This is not just a matter of global inequity; it is also a part of the liberal multicultural cosmopolitan mind-set that Kincaid’s narrator takes on in order to make sense of her border crossing experiences. “[N]arrative conventions [surrounding AIDS],” says Paula Treichler, “establish and sustain our sense of what is true.”110 Kincaid uses liberal multicultural narrative conventions to posit her own understanding of AIDS against the prejudicial perspective of Antiguans. “In Antigua,” Kincaid writes, “if you are diagnosed with the HIV virus you are considered to be dying; the drugs used for slowing the progress


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are not available there; public concern, obsession with the treatment and care of members of the AIDS-suffering community by groups in the larger non-AIDS-suffering community, does not exist . . . It is felt in general, so I am told, that since there is no cure for AIDS it is useless to spend money on a medicine that will only slow the progress of the disease.”111 The Antiguan approach (as Kincaid presents it) almost seems unthinkable to a citizen-subject of a rich country like the United States, and it is easy for the reader to align herself with a narrative that blames Antiguans alone for their lack of care facilities for AIDS patients. Kincaid’s narrative structure parallels and thus equates the fact that “drugs . . . are not available there” and “public concern . . . does not exist.” The fact that Antigua and Antiguans simply cannot afford the drugs is replaced by the passive “are not available,” and there is no mention of US or multinational pharmaceutical companies supported by US government policy and their unwillingness to sell AZT and other drugs to foreign markets at affordable prices.112 When Kincaid does mention the economic factors at work in the unavailability of AZT, she assumes another characteristic ideological position within current liberal multicultural cosmopolitanism, found often in rhetorics of AIDS as a human rights issue, which constructs the poor island as a part of the childlike “developing” world, in need of care by the larger, more capable, United States:113 “There was no AZT on the island, it was too expensive to be stocked, most people suffering from the disease could not afford to buy this medicine; most people suffering from this disease are poor or young, not too far away from being children; in a society like the one I am from, being a child is one of the definitions of vulnerability and powerlessness.”114 Here Kincaid’s narrator uses a string of associations—“unable to afford” is to “poor and young” is to “children” is to “vulnerable and powerless”—to make a metonymical connection that equates the inability to afford expensive foreign drugs to being like a child. This child demands Kincaid’s attention and she responds by bringing the drugs, which are for her, as a well-off US subject, relatively easy to obtain. The trope of the Antiguan as child is picked up and extended in Kincaid’s descriptions of Devon, whose childlikeness functions as synecdoche for the inhabitants of the island as a group. Her most vivid and extended description of him is as a toddler with “shit” in his diapers; and as an invalid adult he is presented as having, like a child, no control over his bodily functions. His demands—“I was so tired of him being in this state . . . constantly with his demands, in want, constantly with his necessities, weighing on my sympathy, at times preying


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on my sympathy”115—are connected to the demands of the past and of Antigua, a country defined by “vulnerability and powerlessness.”116 During one of her many border crossings Kincaid, while going through customs, recalls a conversation with a black British woman she had met at a workshop for AIDS counselors. Kincaid was appalled at this woman’s suggestion that if the health care in Antigua was so bad then Kincaid might bring her brother to the United States. Taking her brother to the United States, it seems, would be the equivalent of allowing back in the inequality, coercion, poverty and history that she as US citizen-subject has been able to project onto Antigua, undermining the safety of her US liberal multicultural bourgeois domestic life. “I can’t,” she says, “take this careless person into the hard-earned order of my life.” How could this woman suggest such a thing, Kincaid wonders, “without asking about my circumstances, without wondering what taking my brother into my life would mean to me.”117 What is most interesting about this scene is the way in which Kincaid evokes race and then denies its importance by recourse to her cosmopolitan status. The excuse she gives the woman is “Oh, I am sure they wouldn’t let him in,” while admitting to the reader, “I didn’t know if what I was saying was true, I was not familiar really with immigration policies and HIV.”118 To this the woman replies, “Oh yes, racism.” But this reason does not work within the liberal multicultural logic that enables Kincaid’s relief from historical pain in the United States. She writes, “How unlucky people are who cannot blame the wrong, disastrous turns life can sometimes take on racism . . . It was not racism that made my brother lie dying of an incurable disease in a hospital in the country in which he was born; it was the sheer accident of life, it was his own fault . . . it was the fact that he lived in a place in which a government, made up of people with his own complexion, his own race, was corrupt and did not care whether he or other people like him lived or died.”119 This is a stunning turn of logic. By implying that racism is just an excuse for this woman, Kincaid’s narrator suggests that there are not, in fact, well-documented connections between racial identity and US immigration policies.120 Similarly, her claim that racism has not made her brother more vulnerable to contracting and dying of AIDS seems quite a stretch for a woman who has written so much about the racist imperialist project that, as she herself argues, has left Antigua without the money or infrastructure needed to provide the care her bother needs, and who herself lives in a country in which health care is unevenly distributed along racial lines.121 It is difficult to believe that a writer so concerned with the impact of European colonization and white European American neoimperialist


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tourism could with sincerity say that her brother’s situation is simply “the sheer accident of life.” This logic requires a liberal multicultural ideology that can equalize the experience of every person, of every race, and of every country in relation to illness and disease. In liberal fashion, it places responsibility on and agency with the individual and in multicultural fashion, it denies race as a historically embedded factor that might still have the power to do something as terrible as contribute to her brother’s illness. What this logic cannot do is hold up for any reader paying close attention to the text’s other clues about racialized histories of colonization and enslavement, and thus it illuminates some of the contradictions of liberal multiculturalism through a process of internal distantiation. What is perhaps most striking about this logic, and hardest for the reader to ignore, is the way in which it must reproject the inequalities of race, class, gender, and ethnicity onto Antigua, thereby repurifying the United States and relegating something as painful and violent as racism to the realm of the foreign where it will not threaten the liberal multicultural order. It is telling that this story is related at customs, a site where Kincaid’s body and her belongings are being scrutinized; it is also interesting that it is US customs in Puerto Rico, a territory of her country of residence. This is an in-between space that blurs the boundaries between self and other, pure and impure, American and foreign and it requires of her every acrobatic feat of logic to keep her subject position intact. This border crossing marks a point of entry through which inbetweenness (between national and foreign, connected to history and cut off from history) can enter US territory. In a sense Kincaid smuggles it past customs, bringing the rejected “foreignness” of pain, colonial history, and inequality back into the nation of her adult subjecthood. This becomes clear during her layover in Miami. “Ordinarily,” she writes, “the word ‘Miami,’ representing this city, is familiar enough so that I can say it and know what I mean, and I can say it and believe that the person hearing knows what I mean, but when I am writing all this about my brother, suddenly this place and the thing I am about to say seem foreign, strange.”122 Kincaid begins experiencing the familiar (the national) as foreign and it places her in a kind of psychic transitional space in which her relation to representation of the world and other people through language is disrupted. It is also a literal transitional space in that it is not “in the tropical zone where I was from, and yet not in the temperate zone where I now live; Miami was in between.”123 This sense of in-betweenness is not pleasant for Kincaid, it makes her want to return to her home


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in Vermont. While she is in Miami, she passes the time by visiting the Fairchild Botanical Gardens and buys “two rhododendrons from Papua New Guinea at the gift shop,” which she awkwardly brings home with her on the plane. “Perhaps I looked like a very sensible woman carrying two large plants covered with trumpet-shaped brilliant orange blooms in the middle of an airport and in the middle of January because everyone I met was very kind and helped me with my plants and my various other traveling paraphernalia. I was so happy to reach my home.”124 There is something about arriving safely back in her US home that, for Kincaid, at this moment, takes the historical burden and signification from the New Guinea rhododendrons. Kincaid has already established in Lucy the relation between imperialism and pure enjoyment of horticulture without regard to its historical entanglements in colonialism. She has also established earlier in the text a relationship between her dying brother and the dying plants in the old British botanical gardens. He resembles a tree that is “halfdead, half-alive,”125 and neglected since the British left but now being restored by a foreign donation. Her act, then, of buying the rhododendrons from the multiply colonized location of New Guinea126 becomes an American act of forgetting. Kincaid’s narrator can, as US subject, go to a gift shop in Miami and bring these plants back to her home in Vermont without attaching a history to them. The reader, however, cannot. She must read some irony in the disjuncture between the image of Kincaid stumbling around airports with these giant plants while everyone is so helpful and the images of the flowers her brother carries on and inside him where, she has told us, “a death lives, flowering upon flowering, with a voraciousness that nothing seems to satisfy,” his penis “look[ing] like a bruised flower that had been cut short on stem.”127 We are unable to think of Kincaid’s visit to the gardens in Miami without being reminded of her dying brother, and of her effective empire of horticulture, which functions as a metaphorical way for her to understand his death. In this way she prompts an internal distantiation on the part of the reader who was previously secure taking Kincaid’s subject position as her own. Even Kincaid, as representative of and embodying (as nonwhite immigrant subject) the success of liberal multiculturalism, cannot avoid the paradoxes inherent in liberal multicultural ideology, and therefore the reader cannot but become more aware of them. In her use of internally distantiating aesthetics, Kincaid allows her reader to see the logic of American liberal multiculturalism as limiting to the use of other logics, because it must avoid the repressed knowledge of US history and culpability in sickness and oppression.


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Kincaid situates the reader in such a way that she is asked to acknowledge her own ideological position and become uncomfortable with it while still needing it in order to make sense of the text and the world represented in it.

My Garden (Book): and the Liber al Multic ultu ral Freedom o f Bo rder Cros si ng In My Garden (Book)—a book written in a genre that might be classified as novel, essay collection, or horticultural manual—Kincaid uses gardening as a trope to organize cosmopolitan identifications. The history of colonization and plant removal and renaming connects the gardens of people across the globe. It also connects gardens and horticulture to a history of European power that erased the histories of the places colonized by renaming them.128 Naming, Kincaid writes, is “so crucial to possession . . . that it is a murder, an erasing, and it is not surprising that when people have felt themselves prey to it (conquest), among their first acts of liberation is to change their names (Rhodesia to Zimbabwe, LeRoi Jones to Amiri Baraka).”129 One must add: Elaine Potter to Jamaica Kincaid. In this way gardening is for Kincaid a reappropriation of the things that have been taken from her; she learns their “proper” European names but uses them in the project of recreating her Caribbean past. This is a highly paradoxical position, particularly for a US subject with the money, power, and access to the other cosmopolitan aspects of the gardener’s identity, such as importing plants from around the globe, and visiting Europe and China to see gardens and collect seeds. The paradoxical nature of her position is evident in the way she describes the act of renaming as both “an impulse to reach back and reclaim a loss” and an attempt “to make what happened look as if it had not happened at all.”130 It is this paradox, which is always at work in Kincaid’s cosmopolitan identifications and travels and it marks her as a US subject whose identity as black Caribbean American in part requires recognizing difference and claiming a certain history while simultaneously rejecting that history (or rejecting its power to inform the present) as a citizen of the liberal multiculturalist United States. Kincaid’s writing about her travels in China, like McKnight’s novels set in Senegal, takes on certain aspects of European American travel writing while simultaneously making the reader aware of the limitations of this type of perspective in relation to the differences that cosmopolitanism celebrates. China functions as a geographic


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manifestation of transitional space in which Kincaid can be both imperialist figure and subaltern postcolonial. It is a space in which we can accept and therefore begin to explore the contradictions inherent in being a person in the world who is both at the mercy of historical and material forces beyond her control and in a position of immense power as a US citizen traveling to and beyond “the edge of the world.”131 Kincaid often employs tropes of abjection—the simultaneous fascination with and repulsion from what is both self and other—to represent colonial relationships. Richard Kerridge writes of abjection in relation to European American travel writing: abjection is “life at the border . . . a subjectivity menaced by the porousness of the self, its constant dissolution and reformation, its material continuity with the world.”132 This argument has significant resonances for transitional space in which one can accept the paradox of being both self and other, subject and object. It reminds us that the psychic potential generated in transitional space is directly linked to the horror of losing the self. The travel writer is always moving between “a fascination with the expelled other” and “a horrified recoil from a self seen in connection with its own waste,” a way of seeing the self that might actually put her in a transitional space.133 Kincaid identifies the space of Antigua as the abject to the privileged West. Antigua is associated with that which was taken in and expelled from particularly the English and US body politics as part of establishing their national identities. In A Small Place, her 1988 nonfiction work on tourism in Antigua, Kincaid discusses the way in which the European American tourist retains a fascination with the abject, “marveling at the harmony (ordinarily what you would say is backwardness)” of the place.134 She also describes in detail the tourists’ recoil from seeing themselves in connection to their own waste: “You must not wonder what exactly happened to the contents of your lavatory after you flushed it . . . [It] just might graze gently against your ankle as you wade carefree in the water, for you see, in Antigua there is no proper sewage-disposal system. But the Caribbean Sea is very big and the Atlantic Ocean even bigger; it would amaze you to know the number of black slaves this ocean has swallowed up.”135 Here the tourists’ waste, which is abjected from the self, is equated with the historical bodies of black slaves as well as the black bodies of the inhabitants of the island that the tourist tries not to think about as she enjoys her vacation. Kincaid, as a US immigrant, is able to free herself from this position of abjection by taking on an American position and projecting the abject onto the past from which she came. She has actually said


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that coming to the United States “was like taking an enormous purgative.”136 Kincaid as a tourist in China, however, is able to become a fully American subject, the abject here belonging to the space of China, stripped in an imperialistic way of its long, complex history and made into a new romantic frontier of travel. She writes, We were looking out on an amazing landscape of hills, mountains, valleys, and terraces carved out of the mountains, cultivated, planted with corn—mostly corn, the rice grew in the valleys where we saw many people harvesting it—and as we drove through the villages that were in the mountains and the hills and the valleys, there was that strange, rotting, fetid, unpleasant smell of other people, their shit; human feces is such a valuable commodity in China, it is why all the vegetables were so vigorous-looking in cultivation, it is why people were so able to feed themselves.137

Here Kincaid presents “shit” as being an inherent part of this landscape as well as the product and fodder of the Chinese people, metonymically making the people a part of the landscape panorama. Here, shit (which in My Brother stood in for the abjection of Antigua and its people) becomes valuable at last. It makes for vigorous cultivation and the ability to eat. Kincaid finds a place for the abject that she does not need to mourn; she can simply expel and reject. She says of the waste bucket she buys for her hotel room: “[T]hey were such handsome buckets . . . and I wished to bring them home even at the same time that I knew I never wanted to see them in any other situation besides the countryside of China again.”138 Kincaid can have a distanced relation to the abject and to history in China in a way that she could not in the United States (whereas in My Brother spaces of transition keep opening up) because she can figure it as “the edge of the world.” Kincaid appropriates this phrase from an English travel book and makes it into a trope for China as a new frontier. She describes China as “the wild,” as a “horizon beyond which I would no longer know myself,” and as “Eden, that thing that was banished, turned out into the world as I have come to know it.”139 Kincaid employs tropes of the European American colonizing text as she characterizes China as a wild, Edenic, open frontier.140 These are Kincaid’s tools for accessing a position beyond and without the historical baggage of her bodily and historically inscribed position as subaltern, female, postcolonial, black, and immigrant. Yet Kincaid makes it clear to the reader that this is not a position in which history can actually be erased. “Memory is a gardener’s


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real palette,” writes Kincaid.141 Gardening here is not about a fixed memory but an artistic project; as Kincaid says in the passage that opens this chapter, it is “an exercise in memory.” She writes, “I have never been able to grow Meconopsis betonicifolia with success . . . but the picture of it that I have in my mind, a picture made up of memory (I saw it some time ago), a picture made up of ‘to come’ (the future, which is the opposite of remembering), is so intense that whatever happens between me and this plant will never satisfy the picture I have of it (the past remembered, the past to come).”142 This “memory” associated with the garden is not one that allows access to and contemplation of the full and damaging history of imperialism and slavery. It is the American memory that Philip Fisher describes as part of a culture of creative destruction. Fisher argues that “[j]ust as the whole political history of the United States ought to be seen as a struggle to be worthy of the Declaration of Independence, so too the whole of American culture and economic life is a, so far, successful attempt to live up to [the] Emersonian manifesto for a genuine culture of newness and nextness, a manifesto for the always ‘coming’ or ‘oncoming’ world.”143 Similarly, Kincaid frames American memory here as one in which the past is not a separate event that creates the present and future but instead is “a picture made up of ‘to come,’” an image first created “some time ago” but always evoking “the future, which is the opposite of remembering.”144 This past will never be satisfied but will create, as Fisher puts it, a “permanently unsettled rhythm of creation and destruction.”145 Such a mode of remembering, however, requires that Kincaid’s narrator and her readers give up certain knowledges about history and that Kincaid’s text relegate the history of slavery and imperialism to a place other than Vermont. This can be seen in her choice of Spain’s conquest of Mexico as her paradigmatic history of imperialism that parallels her personal past, a choice that both evokes and covers up US histories of imperialism. There is one moment in the book, however, when it seems impossible not to recognize the relationship between these Caribbean and Mexican histories and the history of US slavery and imperialism. A chapter titled “Reading” ends in the following way: “On my night table now is a large stack of books and all of them concern the Atlantic slave trade and how the world in which I live sprang from it. The days will have to grow longer, warmer, and softer before I can pick one of them up.”146 This statement acknowledges the United States’ and therefore Vermont’s creation in and out of the same history of imperialism and slavery as the Caribbean.


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The next chapter of the book reinforces this acknowledgment and thereby continues to provoke an internal distantiation in its reader. It is titled “The Garden in Winter” but is not about the garden in winter at all. Rather it is about two racialized encounters that Kincaid has in gardens in the summer with “native” Vermonters—one in which a friend’s mother says that Asiatic lilies have “nigger colors”147 and another in which a landscaper tells her that his father hated black people. The garden in winter, then, is an experiential moment in which a history of slavery that affects her present life in Vermont sits next to Kincaid, reminds her of its presence but is not read, not engaged, yet cannot be entirely ignored. The winter is a season—a condition—that only occurs in Kincaid’s adult US life. It erases her Caribbean-shaped garden—“the whiteness of it is an eraser, so that I am almost in a state of disbelief.”148 This erasure parallels her inability to read the books on slavery and constructs a relation to memory that causes mourning—not the simple mourning of a death or of a history but of the death of a certain kind of relationship to history. As Kincaid writes of her garden in summer, “what am I to do with this droopy, weepy sadness . . . with its color and shape reminding me of mourning . . . but mourning the death of something that happened long ago.”149 This is specifically not a death that happened long ago or something that happened long ago, but “the death of something that happened long ago”—a mourning of the erasure of her connection to certain histories. The joy and sadness of the gardener’s future-oriented dilemma is related to the changes of season that erase the garden’s previous incarnations so that the death of plants cannot be mourned but only the lack of access or attachment to their previous states altogether. The reader also becomes aware that this dilemma parallels that of the US subject who can “escape” the burden of history but only through a willful ignorance of it and a continual focus on an ever-open future. The dilemma also erases the past (causes the death of “something that happened long ago”), thereby constituting a lack—an emptiness—in the future-oriented subject who nevertheless sees the past creep up on her then be erased, as when Kincaid’s Caribbean appears before her in Vermont and is taken away by the northern seasons. China is figured as a new, wild, Edenic, unclaimed frontier, and thus a place in which Kincaid’s narrator can fully take on a liberal multicultural US subject position without having to face its repressed history. It is only “at the edge of the world” that race can be just another form of cosmopolitan difference. In a passage that echoes James Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Village,” Kincaid writes of her


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travels in China in the following manner: “I had become used to walking around among ordinary Chinese people and causing a sensation; they had never seen a person with my complexion before; mothers and fathers would draw my presence to their children’s attention and they were not discreet about it; I did not mind, I was in their country.”150 Unlike Baldwin, who expands his story of being the only black man in a small Swiss town into a discussion of global racism and the construction of an international “blackness,” Kincaid contracts her story of traveling throughout the seemingly endless space of China back to a comfortable US citizen’s position that reads all “strangers” as “equal” from the perspective of her small-village life in Vermont.151 As Kincaid leaves China, she thinks of “all those people who stared at me, all those people I would have stared at if I had seen just one of them in my small village in Vermont. I slipped back into my life of mom, sweetie, and the garden; I was given much help by buying a fashion magazine that had on its cover the picture of that all-powerful and keenly discerning literary critic Oprah Winfrey.”152 In China, race is difference stripped of its relation to power, violence, and history. It is a surface characteristic, a “complexion” that Kincaid as a responsible liberal multicultural cosmopolitan traveler accepts as part of her experience of the otherness of China. Similarly, “difference” explains why she would have stared at them in her town, not one assumes because of their “race” or her “racism” but simply because, as Kincaid puts it, of their insistence on being “so stubbornly . . . Chinese.”153 Kincaid also suggests that this way of looking at race and otherness is specifically American by connecting it to her life as American mother, wife, and gardener. Her reading of difference here might be challenged by the fact of her racial blackness, which threatens to disrupt the liberal individualistic transparency of US citizenship, but she is saved by a liberal multiculturalism that can incorporate race into itself without breaking down, here represented by Oprah Winfrey’s picture on the cover of a fashion magazine. Kincaid’s use of the act of “buying” the image of Oprah as a vehicle through which to “slip back into” her life and subject position in the United States is worth pausing over. Oprah functions in several significant ways in relation to Kincaid’s available subject positions in the United States. Oprah Winfrey has, through her own success as well as through her book club, created a space in the US national imaginary for the professional black woman writer and public figure, for “a voice of authentically black experience that demands attention, for its words and through its sales, from black and white readers.”154 By buying and identifying with the image of the professional black woman, Kincaid


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partakes in a logic of identification with the “authentic” black subject who has a legitimate and potentially authoritative voice in the US public sphere.155 Likewise, Winfrey’s efforts to augment the sales and reading of texts by black women writers helps Kincaid’s own career, making a space for her work in the US publishing industry and US consumer culture. Kincaid’s access to this subject position is limited by the fact that it is specifically for “African American woman writers,” not black women writers of the diaspora, or US immigrant writers of color.156 Additionally, it requires that Kincaid inhabit an acceptable position within the hegemonic discourse of liberal multiculturalism, which is open to texts by nonwhite writers so long as they embody and represent a nonthreatening, authentic, and educational identity of otherness that can translate into mass consumer appeal.157 As John Young argues, the Oprah-Morrison connection has helped change the publishing industry from a place in which “black” texts had to be marketed separately to black and white audiences, into a place that can advertise the “black” text as a desirable commodity for a general, nonracialized audience.158 Thus the public subject position of the black female professional, while providing unprecedented opportunity for black women writers, also brings with it the suppression of transnational histories and divisive or threatening aspects of racial difference.159 The liberal multicultural suppression of history and divisiveness is a staple of The Oprah Winfrey Show, which has done much more to engage discussions of racism than any other talk show and most other forms of popular entertainment. Oprah’s series “Racism in 1992,” a yearlong monthly series that engaged different elements of the “problem” of racism, has been described by Janice Peck as an expression of the limits of US liberal multiculturalism. “The series,” Peck argues, “constructs an understanding of race and racism formulated within liberal politics,”160 which “produces contradictory definitions of racism. On one hand, the ‘problem’ is framed as unequal rights among different social groups; on the other, the problem is identified as violating individual rights by locating people within, or identifying oneself with, those groups. In both cases, the ‘solution’ is posed in individual terms and must not infringe on persons’ rights to believe and act as they choose. A consequence of this emphasis on individuals is to remove race relations from a sociohistorical political context.”161 Kincaid, by inhabiting and writing through a position of the “other” while utilizing an aesthetics of internal distantiation, opens up a space in which the reader can become aware of race as it functions in the sociohistorical political context of liberal multiculturalism. She can


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also become aware of the limitations of liberal multiculturalism in relation to seeing and dealing with problems of minority identity difference and structural identity-based inequalities in the United States. “Gardeners,” Kincaid writes, “always have something they like intensely and in particular, right at the moment you engage them in the reality of the borders they cultivate, the space in the garden they occupy.”162 The cosmopolitan act of gardening that connects people across and beyond borders itself always requires a process of border cultivation to create a space of occupation. As James Clifford points out, the garden is a “circumscribed place . . . where the word ‘culture’ derived its European meanings.”163 The garden here functions as a metaphor for a space of transition and stasis—gardeners are always at a border and at the same time always occupying a private, selfmade space. Entering the cosmopolitan world of gardening, which is also entering a US subject position, requires of Kincaid that she construct certain ideological boundaries to create a new space to inhabit. Likewise, crossing borders for McKnight’s characters necessitates an exploration of the ideological borders cultivated as a citizen of the United States. Both writers utilize aesthetics of internal distantiation to help their readers to become aware of not only the fact of these cultivated borders but also how and why they are constructed and why maintaining them is often necessary to maintaining the coherence of US citizen-subject identities, particularly for those subjects who must negotiate a minoritized racial identity. In the following and final chapter I turn away from the social historical contexts of the previous chapters to look more closely at how internally distantiative texts function in the US academy via a comparative reading of the aesthetics and reception of two novels by Bharati Mukherjee, Jasmine and The Holder of the World. I argue that while both novels use politicized aesthetics (aesthetic techniques in the service of politicizing readers’ perspectives), the novel that uses internally distantiating aesthetics is more politically viable not only in the broader context of popular liberal multiculturalism but also within the US academy.


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Chapter 4

4

Academic Investments in Liberal Multiculturalism B harati M u kherjee’s Representat i o na l versus Distantiative Aesthetics

In Henry Yu’s contribution to the 2000 collection Post-Nationalist

American Studies, he poses the following questions about US scholars of American literary and cultural studies: “How does their national identity, even as they act as critics of nationalism, grant them the capability of incorporating multicultural products and perspectives into their lives for their own display and benefit? How does a nationalist enterprise of incorporating knowledge in the interests of national power allow American intellectuals the fantasy of the creation of Knowledge as an unquestioned good?”1 This chapter turns from the more culturally and historically contextualized analyses of Chapters 1, 2, and 3 to address the questions that Yu raises about the US academy. I extend my argument from the previous chapters about the potential pitfalls of an overeager denationalization of American literary studies and add a discussion of the relation between academic liberal multiculturalism and the desire to incorporate knowledges of multicultural difference. In relation to current academic investments in multicultural knowledge accumulation and production, I look at the value and potential limitations of literary aesthetics of internal distantiation by comparing the academic reception of and writing on two novels by Indian-born American author Bharati Mukherjee: Jasmine (1989) and The Holder of the World (1993). The former novel deals with


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questions of ethnicity, race, gender, and citizenship identity in the United States through an aesthetics of representation, which presents the reader with new perspectives on and ways of thinking about the aforementioned themes through their representation in a single character and her experiences. The latter novel addresses the same themes through an aesthetics of internal distantiation, which, as Louis Althusser tells us, allows the reader to “‘perceive’ (if not know) . . . by an internal distance, the very ideology in which [the text] is held,” which is also the ideology through which the reader comes to understand ethnicity, race, gender, and citizenship in the first place.2 The distantiating aesthetic techniques of Holder do not “give us a knowledge” of the immigrant experience but rather “make us see” the ideology that gives rise to our understandings of that experience and the social identities it has historically constructed.3 Mukherjee herself is a critic of liberal multiculturalism, particularly as it functions in the US academy, allowing, as Yu suggests, US intellectuals to utilize multicultural products and perspectives, including literary texts, for their own benefit: “The sinister fallout of official multiculturalism and of professional multiculturalism,” says Mukherjee, “is the establishment of one culture as the norm and the rest as aberrations.” She sees multiculturalism embodied at its worst in the “academics [who] strategically position themselves as self-appointed spokespersons for their ethnic communities and as guardians . . . of ethnic cultures.”4 Mukherjee’s comments suggest that given the current liberal multicultural ideology of the United States, nonEuropean immigrants need to give up attachments to their cultural memory if they are to avoid reified models of ethnic identity and gain access to full liberal citizenship. In Jasmine, Mukherjee addresses these limitations of multicultural ideology by representing Jasmine as an immigrant character who is able to reinvent herself by giving up her attachment to her racial and cultural heritage in order to become “an American without hyphens.”5 Yet as I will argue, this narrative approach still positions Mukherjee in a liberal multicultural context as a spokesperson (even if not self-appointed) for her ethnic community. The Holder of the World takes a different approach. By employing aesthetics of internal distantiation, which do not represent “the immigrant experience” but rather make the US reader more aware of her own assumptions about that experience, Mukherjee is able to resist the reifying positioning of liberal multiculturalism, while maintaining relations to multiple and multinational cultural histories. The differences in the reception of Jasmine and Holder and the differences in the ways they are used in the academy as political and


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pedagogical tools are notable and reveal the extent to which contemporary US literary criticism is still highly informed by and entangled in national ideologies of liberal multiculturalism despite many critics’ wish to move beyond the national and the multicultural as ways of categorizing and approaching literary texts. A look at how these novels are received also reveals the value placed by US reviewers, critics, and academics on “representative” minority texts. In this chapter, I will first establish why Jasmine, which employs an aesthetics of representation and reorientation, is more widely cited in contemporary American literary criticism and used in more literature courses than Holder. I will then take a look at Holder’s employment of internally distantiating aesthetics in relation to presumptions of American whiteness and US investments in liberal multiculturalism—presumptions and investments that may in part explain the lack of interest in reading the novel as internally distantiating. Finally, I will demonstrate why Jasmine’s representational aesthetics, while in many ways more attractive to scholars and popular audiences alike, is in fact less politically useful for challenging the limitations and paradoxes of our current liberal multicultural ideologies.

Jasmine in the U S Academy Despite receiving heavy political and aesthetic criticism by literary scholars, Jasmine is widely taught in graduate and undergraduate courses and studied by Americanists, gender and sexuality critics, Asian diaspora critics, and Asian Americanists. Jasmine, narrated in the first person, tells the story of a young woman (first named Jyoti then variously Jasmine, Jazzy, Jase, and Jane) as she journeys from a village in the Indian Punjab to Florida to New York City to Baden, Iowa. When the novel begins she is a young, intelligent, poor girl from a relatively traditional family who marries a less traditional Indian man, Prakash. Prakash wants to emigrate to the United States and start an electronics business with Jasmine but, before they can leave, he is killed by a Sikh terrorist bomb. Jasmine decides to fulfill Prakash’s dream by going to the United States and sacrificing herself on the grounds of the Florida university that he had planned to attend. On her way there, she is raped by the man smuggling her in, kills him, and afterward decides not to sacrifice herself after all. An American woman finds her and helps her get to New York where she lives first with Prakash’s former professor and then as an au pair to a white American couple and their daughter. After she sees her husband’s killer in New York, she moves west to Iowa where she marries Bud, a disabled


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banker, adopts a Vietnamese son, Du, and becomes pregnant with Bud’s child. The novel ends when Taylor, the man she worked for in New York, shows up on her doorstep in Iowa and asks her to come with him further west to California—a proposal she accepts. Jasmine demonstrates much of what Mukherjee herself has described as the necessary and responsible American immigrant experience. American immigrants, says Mukherjee, “take risks they wouldn’t have taken in their old, comfortable worlds to solve their problems [and as] they change citizenship, they are reborn.”6 The novel models a progressive Americanization as Jasmine gains independence and conquers the modern American frontier. Mukherjee’s following novel, The Holder of the World, basically repeats and geographically inverts the plot of Jasmine, telling the story of a white American woman who travels from Puritan New England to London to India, reinventing herself via cultural rebellions and assimilations. However, while receiving some critical attention, Holder is less frequently taught and is generally written about in postcolonial and transnational rather than American literary contexts.7 Narrated in the present by a white American asset hunter, Beigh Masters, it tells the story of Hannah, a seventeenth-century Puritan woman, who like Jasmine goes through several shifts in identity during her journey from New England to England to the Coromandel Coast, and finally back to New England. Beigh starts out searching for the “emperor’s tear,” a diamond once owned by a seventeenthcentury Muslim emperor, as part of her job as an asset hunter. Along the way, she discovers the story of Hannah (modeled on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne), a distant relative of Beigh’s who left the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1692 to follow her husband first to England and then to the East India Company’s Fort St. Sebastian on the Indian Coromandel Coast. Following her husband’s death, Hannah becomes the lover of a Hindu raja, Jadav Singh, and ends up playing the role of peacemaker with her Hindu friend and servant Bhagmati in the Mughal Aurangzeb’s court. After a bloody battle at Devgad, in which Jadav Singh and Bhagmati are killed, Hannah returns to New England with her dark child, Pearl Singh, to live out her life as a nurse, veterinarian, and storyteller. Beigh is fascinated by Hannah’s choices and becomes somewhat obsessed with reconstructing her story, which she ultimately believes she is able to do faithfully using her Indian boyfriend Venn’s virtual reality technology to reconstruct and relive moments from Hannah’s life. Like Jasmine, Holder follows a woman’s self-reinvention in a foreign space. Unlike, Jasmine, however, it


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dislocates that experience from the American context even while Holder remains an intensely American piece of literature. Although the two novels are rarely read against one another (a project I forward in the sections that follow), the relative popularity of Jasmine has been a frequent topic of discussion for literary critics. As Kristin Carter-Sanborn notes, “[Jasmine] was received with acclaim in nearly every major review publication and has been increasingly taught since then in women’s studies, ethnic studies, and contemporary American literature courses. I would argue that the novel’s appeal can be traced in part to its readers’ complicated investment in the racial and cultural otherness of the narrator (and, of course, her author).”8 Carter-Sanborn then goes on to quote from the Los Angeles Times Book Review to illustrate the ways in which readers see Jasmine as “foreign,” “exotic,” and “authentic,” suggesting to Carter-Sanborn (with whom I concur) that Jasmine “is implicated in the neo-imperialist demands of the Western reader [. . .] demands for ‘what we can’t have,’ for an exotic diversion from the ‘monotony of sameness.’”9 While her arguments about the text’s popular appeal are well founded, Carter-Sanborn’s analysis elides the difference between the text’s general popularity and its reception in the academy. I do not think we can assume that the “acclaim” given a text in “major review publication[s]” (including Vogue, The LA Times, and USA Today) determines the reasons for its popularity in the academy, particularly in the case of Jasmine—which has been critiqued by many scholars as complicit in the exoticization of the East, in neocolonial desires for otherness, and in violent assimilatory narratives of citizenship.10 In fact, nearly half of the articles written on Jasmine produce critiques of this sort. Why, then, has Jasmine become such a popular text in the academy? In order to answer this, I think it is important to say a bit more about the types of academic articles that have been written on Jasmine. These articles tend to fall into one of three categories: (1) those that read the novel as subversive of rigid ways of defining ethnicity, arguing that Jasmine uses freedoms available in the United States to construct an agential, self-made, and strong female identity;11 (2) those that read the novel as a critique of the way in which US national ideology imposes violent assimilatory requirements on its immigrant population;12 and (3) those that, like Carter-Sanborn’s article, read the novel as complicit with hegemonic assimilatory narratives that forward the idea that success as an individual can be found by leaving “ethnicity” behind.13 Each of these arguments can be supported by the text, for, in Jasmine, Mukherjee constructs a representational narrative, the


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import of which relies heavily on her readers’ interpretations as to whether it is “subversive of” or “complicit in” hegemonic narratives of selfhood, and whether it is “celebratory” or “critical” of American ways of life. Nevertheless, each of these readings seems either to have to make concessions to an opposing argument or to be forced to strain its textual interpretation to support its reading. Each comes down on one side of an implied debate—what Rey Chow has termed the choice between “the universalist and the oppositional” approaches to ethnicity or in the terms of this book between the liberal and the multicultural.14 Yet because the logic of US liberal multiculturalism paradoxically links the universal and the oppositional rather than constructing them as a clear-cut binary, each critic finds himself or herself facing the presence of evidence that might challenge the argument he or she is forwarding. For example, Gönül Pultar argues that “the major problem posed by the novel” is “whether [Jasmine] is to be lauded . . . or despised for . . . burying [the tensions inherent in the process of Americanization] in a heap of excitement about becoming, and being ‘American.’”15 His solution to this “problem” is to read the novel as “one of the harshest indictments of nothing less than the American way of life itself.”16 The fact that the novel includes a scene in which Jasmine arrives in the United States only to be raped by the man who purports to be helping her strongly supports such a reading. However, to make his argument applicable to the novel as a whole, Pultar is forced to misread certain elements of the narrative; for example, he writes, “It is obvious that Jyoti-Jasmine-Jase’s wholesale rejection and change are just as misplaced as the Vadheras’ retention [of ethnicity]. There would have been no hot dogs and no pizza in America had German-Americans and Italian-Americans acted as she does.”17 Jasmine may be particularly open to assimilation and change, yet she explicitly does not give up ethnicity “wholesale.” The novel in fact makes a point of describing the way in which she added “flavor” to Baden, Iowa, by cooking “ethnic dishes.”18 Pultar must ultimately rely not on the text itself but on a superimposition of his own values onto it. Jasmine is a critique of “the American way of life,” he argues, because of what he sees as Mukherjee’s representation of its “moral rottenness,” illustrated by the fact that Jasmine moves from one man to another “in an amoralistic fashion, replacing in [their] bed[s] the wi[ves] who left.”19 Whether the novel codes this behavior as “morally rotten” or even “amoral” is highly questionable, as it is Jasmine’s freedom of movement between lovers (to whom she provides great care) that allows her to survive various traumatic moments in her journey


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by shifting the way in which she identifies herself and her role in the world in relation to these men. Either way, Pultar’s argument that the novel represents the moral rottenness of the American way of life has to strain its interpretation of textual evidence to keep this representation coherent throughout. A similar eliding of contradictory textual evidence occurs in Susan Koshy’s quite different critique of Jasmine in which Koshy demonstrates the novel’s complicity with liberal and capitalist discourses of assimilation, specifically the “ways in which ‘woman’ is used as a signifier to cover class discriminations.”20 Koshy forwards this argument by subtly reading Jasmine’s “progress” in the United States against the stagnation or “failure” of other immigrant women of lower classes or castes, leading Koshy to conclude that “the movement of the novel, in which Jasmine is rewarded with love and happiness” implies “that selfhood and fulfillment lie outside ethnicity.”21 Jasmine, however, never suggests that Jasmine is “rewarded with love and happiness.” In fact it ends with Jasmine moving on to yet another life further west not because this next life will necessarily provide “love and happiness,” but because Jasmine cannot stop recreating herself and her life. The book ends with the following thoughts: “[T]here is nothing I can do. Time will tell if I am a tornado, rubble-maker, arising from nowhere and disappearing into a cloud. I am out the door and in the potholed and rutted driveway, scrambling ahead of Taylor, greedy with wants and reckless from hope.”22 Thus Koshy’s excellent argument about class seems to require an equally weak argument about the novel’s narrative framework and an implication that “self-hood and fulfillment” might lie within ethnicity. Again, this evidences a strained representational interpretation. Koshy argues that Jasmine represents the theory that immigrants can only find love and happiness through a rejection of their ethnic identity but has to gloss over certain textual evidence that might disrupt the cohesion of this representation. Nearly all critical articles on Jasmine evidence similarly unsubstantiated interpretive moments insofar as they tend to produce oversimplifications as a result of their drive to prove either the novel’s subversive or its hegemonic power through its representation of the character Jasmine. My question then is, why is there such a drive to demonstrate the politics of the novel? What is it about Jasmine that suggests it represents either subversion or hegemony in the first place? The aforementioned critical readings indicate that a novel about ethnic, racial, or cultural difference in a US context tends to be read along already oversimplified lines of identity politics. I additionally suggest that the particular representative aesthetics of Jasmine fit our


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preexisting liberal multicultural models of identity difference and thus attract us as readers and critics but are also limited in their ability to challenge existing assumptions about identity and politics in the United States.

Ja s m ine’s Representational Aes theti cs Mukherjee uses representational aesthetics in Jasmine to present the powerful national imaginary construct of Americanness through a racially, ethnically, and sexually marked individual’s representative experience. The political limitations of Jasmine are not an inherent failure of representational aesthetics but rather have to do with the fact that no matter how multiple, complex, and contradictory Jasmine’s experiences and behaviors are, in a liberal multicultural context, they can be continuously incorporated into existing hegemonic understandings of citizenship, American identity, and racial and ethnic difference. It is worth taking some time to look at the ways in which this representative aesthetics functions, why readers and critics find it attractive (both to praise and to critique), and why it is not as politically efficacious as earlier models of American literary representational aesthetic approaches. Jasmine’s representational aesthetics appropriates elements of earlier American realist and sentimental literary traditions in its attempt to represent “real” or “everyday” characters with whom the reader is expected to sympathize and read as representatives of identifiable types. Philip Fisher claims that realism was “fundamental to American literature from Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin to at least the time of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.”23 Fisher’s categorization of texts as realist depends not on their difference from sentimental or modernist texts, as his inclusion of Harriet Beecher Stowe and William Faulkner indicates; but on aesthetic techniques that stress small, close-up details that put us directly in a specific time, place, and scene (creating pictorial realism), as well as the “sharing” of intimate, domestic facts that create trust between reader and character, revealing a common humanity behind local differences (creating voice-based realism).24 We can see aspects of pictorial realism in Jasmine’s detailed descriptions of place and landscape, which make the setting of the present events of the novel unmistakably and particularly “American.” For example, Jasmine’s neighbor Darrel’s farm in Iowa is described in minute and expansive detail: “The wheels of his tractor are plumed with dust as fine as talcum. The contour-plowed fields are quilts in shades of pale green and dry brown. Closer in, where our ground slopes into the


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Lutzes’, Shadow, Darrel’s huge black dog, picks his way through ankle-high tufts of corn. A farm dog knows not to damage leaves, even when it races ahead after a weasel or a field mouse.”25 Through this type of description, the reader is made to feel the familiarity of the scene and simultaneously the particularity of this realistically specific farm. This universally familiar and particularly new way of seeing the setting is reinforced narratively by zooming in from a panoramic view of the Midwestern landscape to the specific property line between these two particular farms. We also get insider information (here concerning the nature of farm dogs), thus reinforcing the idea that we are truly getting knowledge of and access to the particular culture of Midwestern farm life; this contributes to establishing a framework for voice-based realism in which we come to understand the local differences of the characters’ lives and experiences, and therefore know that there is a shared humanity through which we can access and understand others’ differences. The exploration of contemporary social issues (including the dying out of small farms in the Midwest, the exploitation of immigrant labor, and the acceptance or rejection of the “foreign” in American life) functions through a voice-based realism focused on the effects of these political and social issues on the novel’s everyday, representative characters, and the readers’ access to these characters as “witnesses” to their social world. Fisher suggests that “[w]ithin nineteenth-century realism an important . . . form of evidence for the real was possible because a witness, a person speaking in his or her own words to tell the story of a life was possible for the first time.”26 Steven J. Belluscio sees this type of testimonial realism at work in the novels of “white ethic and African American authors writing between the 1890s and the 1940s” who “chose literary social realism as an artistic means by which to represent accurately and truthfully the living experiences of their co-ethnics.”27 Jasmine employs such realist tools not only to present the reader with the relation between social and individual ills but moreover and more importantly to prompt us as readers to feel for the characters and sympathize with their experiences. Perhaps the best example of this textual evocation of empathy is Jasmine’s rape by and killing of Half-Face, the man who captains the boat that brings her to the United States. Jasmine describes this experience in the language of gothic horror: “Half-Face stood, totally naked. He was monstrously erect . . . For the first time in my life I understood what evil was about. It was about not being human. Half-Face was from an underworld of evil.”28 Using such descriptions, Mukherjee separates moments of extreme violence from the more objective descriptions of America she


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more frequently gives in the novel. These are the intimate moments of voice-based realism that invite the reader to share Jasmine’s experiences and to feel a shared bond beyond identity differences. The text asks the reader to be shocked and horrified at these aberrations from a democratic American space, to empathize with Jasmine personally, and to have a political response to the negative aspects of the American immigrant experience she endures. Another effect of this representational realist aesthetics that constructs the reader’s ability to believe in the accessibility of Jasmine’s experiences, and that I argue prompts critics to want to make a political or ethical “call” on Jasmine’s life choices, is to provoke a liberal belief in the possibility of transparency of experience and identity. In part, this transparency is represented in the novel’s American settings through the kind of pictorial realism described earlier. Not all locations are properly transparent, however. In contrast to the realist descriptions of Iowa farmland, Florida and India become mysterious, gothic scenes of otherness. These spaces lack transparency and thus are unable to foster a liberal multicultural model of identity/ identification. The novel begins with a scene in Hasnapur by a dark river full of the abject: “I hated that river bend,” says Jasmine. “The water pooled there, sludgy brown, and was choked with hyacinths and feces from the buffalos that village boys washed upstream.”29 In the water she also discovers “the soft waterlogged carcass of a small dog . . . rotten, the eyes had been eaten.”30 The stench of that dog is what introduces us to Jasmine’s desire to leave India and it is a smell that haunts her, reminding her of “what [she doesn’t] want to become.”31 Florida, a transitional location where Jasmine first enters the United States, is similarly a space of abjection and nontransparency and it is represented in similarly gothic terms: “My first night in America was spent in a motel with plywood over its windows, its pool bottomed with garbage sacks, grass growing in its parking lot.”32 In both Hasnapur and in Florida, what should be transparent is murky, dark, covered, and hides monsters that the reader understands Jasmine must fear and run from. The familiarity of American locations versus the “othering” of less-than-American locations (foreign and borderland, respectively) positions the American reader to be able to connect to Jasmine through shared fear and horror. Our access to representational transparency and ability to connect to Jasmine’s experiences is also enabled by the creation of sympathy between the novel’s narrator or main character and the reader, a sympathy that constitutes an aesthetic proof of the possibility for liberal transparency between citizen-subjects despite their multicultural


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differences. To create this sympathy, Mukherjee incorporates tropes from sentimental fiction into her representational aesthetics that, like the tropes of voice-based realism, can negotiate a liberal understanding of human sameness and a multicultural understanding of social difference. In Jane Tompkins’s discussion of the nineteenth-century sentimental novel as political enterprise, she suggests that sentimental fiction “make[s] continual and obvious appeals to the reader’s emotions” by utilizing “conceptual categories that constitute character and event” already possessed by their readers.33 Jasmine’s focus on “everyday” American types allows Mukherjee to appeal to her readers through characters that they feel they can understand and connect with. Jasmine and Du, though “foreign,” are representative of an experience of immigration that extends far beyond their immediate experience and that is represented as a common American experience even in small Midwestern towns. Bud represents the small-town all-American man. Bud and Jasmine’s neighbor Darrel is the American small farmer. Wylie, the woman Jasmine works for in New York, is the stylish, worldly city woman. Taylor, Wylie’s husband, is the American intellectual. Such characters help engage the reader in a world she feels to be familiar and help her to understand the novel’s vision of a multicultural American landscape. These accessible character types also function to teach the reader how to be an ethical liberal multiculturalist. There are characters who explicitly represent “right” Americanness. We as readers are positioned so as to want to emulate the saintliness of a character like Lillian Gordon, who does not exoticize Jasmine but gives her access to “the absolute ordinariness” that Jasmine longed for.34 Similarly, we are shown that the interest in and acceptance of Jasmine’s difference by a character like Taylor is something we as readers should emulate: “Taylor didn’t want to change me,” Jasmine tells us. “He didn’t want to scour and sanitize the foreignness.”35 Through these characters we get a liberal-multicultural model (right to be ordinary and right to be different, respectively) of ethical reading of race and ethnicity from Mukherjee through Jasmine as representative character. Mukherjee also presents us with characters who provide examples of how we should not read. Bud is a kind character but one whom Jasmine eventually leaves in part because he is not a good liberal multicultural reader of her and her experiences. “Bud courts me because I am alien. I am darkness, mystery, inscrutability,” Jasmine tells us.36 And we know that this is not the right way to read because Jasmine already feels “too exotic, too alien” in small-town Iowa.37 Bud


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exoticizes Jasmine and, in so doing, not only makes her feel her otherness too strongly but also denies her expression of her own experience of her past: “[Bud’s] always uneasy with tales of Hasnapur . . . It’s as though Hasnapur is an old husband or lover. Even memories are a sign of disloyalty.”38 Mary Web, the academic who assumes Jasmine will be a vegetarian who can tell her about reincarnation, is similarly a character that lets the reader know how not to read Jasmine’s ethnic and racial identity. Mary represents an “American need . . . to possess a vision so privately,”39 in this case to possess a personal understanding of reincarnation and to do it by appropriating what she sees as Jasmine’s bodily and cultural otherness. The reader, then, is put in the position of one who knows how to read between the lines without having to do too much interpretive work to get there. The reader is made to feel that she can read beyond the ideological limitations of a character like Bud or Mary, and see a more complex world in which one does not exoticize, commodify, or stereotype Jasmine’s racial and ethnic otherness. Perhaps the most important aspect of Jasmine’s aesthetics of representation is the structure of its narrative presentation. Similar to many nineteenth-century realist and sentimental novels, the relation between narrator and reader is structured as one of identification and understanding (establishing voice-based realism), while the relation to the main characters is one of understanding as human types (using the reader’s preexisting understanding of the world to quickly establish her relation to a situation and identify with the characters in it). In the case of Jasmine, the narrator and the main character are the same person. Rather than forcing us to choose between models of voice-based realist identification or sentimentalist types, Mukherjee constructs Jasmine so that she can function within both stylistic models. We can both identify with Jasmine and feel distanced enough from her to be able to learn about her as a type due to the narrative structures Mukherjee uses to present Jasmine’s racial and ethnic difference to the reader. The narrative voice is one that gives objective information to the reader, makes her sympathize with the main character, and makes the reader an insider to intimate experiences and cultural knowledges of that character. This insider knowledge comes through access to Jasmine’s horrific experiences of immigration, through cultural information about Punjab and Midwest farms, and through insider knowledge of proper liberal multicultural citizen behavior. The narrative voice then both establishes personal connections that can transcend racial and ethnic difference and simultaneously gives us


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information about Jasmine as an ethnic/immigrant type that we can take away as multicultural knowledge. The representational aesthetic techniques described earlier utilize aspects of American sentimental and realist fiction to engage a reader in a world with which she is familiar, make her feel as if the story could really happen, present her with characters that could really exist, connect her ethically and emotionally to a character, and then use these engagements and connections to reorient her political and social perspectives. Such representational techniques have been categorized by multiple critics as highly politically viable in the nineteenth- and earlytwentieth century United States. Jane F. Thrailkill describes such narrative techniques of “realization” as “the coming to consciousness of an experience, which entails being ‘moved’ in the dual sense of emotionally engaged and repositioned with respect to the world.”40 Tompkins sees political power in the kind of sentimental representations evidenced in Jasmine to “move its audience” and to “mold the values of its time.”41 Fisher and Belluscio likewise see a progressive and democratic politics in a representational realism that “brought into the light and into visibility the unmentioned, undercounted members of society”42 and was able to depict ethnic and racial minorities as “fully competent and capable of shouldering the burdens of American citizenship during a time when prevailing racial discourses questioned their ability to do so.”43 Why then are Jasmine’s representational aesthetics less likely to prompt changes in critics’ ways of thinking and more likely to provide a platform for presenting preexisting political positions evidenced in critics’ willingness to ignore or misread contradictory aspects of the novel? The answer to this question has to do largely with historical context. Within a liberal multicultural model, representations of experiences of difference do more to provoke a sense of knowledge and insider access than they do to make readers challenge their existing assumptions. In Jasmine, realist and sentimental tropes work to construct a representational liberal multicultural literary aesthetic. Mukherjee uses detailed characterization and description to make the novel appear objectively accessible to as wide a readership as possible, while simultaneously telling the story of a woman who embodies racial and ethnic difference. You need to neither agree nor disagree with the novel’s presentation of place and character (leaving critics free to argue the political implications of these presentations) as they appear to be realistic representations of “how things are.” Jasmine’s aesthetic is representational and atomistic (multicultural and liberal) in that the reading experience might be shared across different bodies in different


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positions revealing a common similarity behind various geographic, ethnic, and racial differences that one might encounter in “real life.” Through Jasmine’s representational aesthetic techniques, the American reader is positioned such that she is made to feel that she can see social problems clearly but is herself informed enough, progressive enough, and cosmopolitan enough to get a true understanding of Jasmine’s plight. Mukherjee’s representational narrative aesthetics invite the reader to push to change the social ills she sees represented in the novel, but they do not ask her to recognize herself as constituted in and reliant on the American liberal multicultural ideologies that construct Jasmine as a character who can represent difference for the reader in much the way she represents difference for Mary or Bud. It is an aesthetics that evokes empathy, investment, and understanding but not self-critique or awareness of one’s own participation in the structures of power at play in the novel. It is this limitation that prompts multiple literary critiques but disallows the recognition of liberal multicultural paradoxes that would prevent such critiques from needing ultimately to come down on one side of the subversive versus complicit or multicultural versus liberal fence. Jasmine functions as an allegory of what Fisher calls the American cultural ideology of “creative destruction”—an ideology that captures both the subversive and the hegemonic within the history of US liberalism. Fisher reads creative destruction as a unique cultural element that gives the United States its own cohesive identity—that is, a “permanent” though “unsettled” national selfhood, similar to the ideal of Americanization that prompts Mukherjee’s claims that immigrants must (and can) leave cultural memories and racial identifications behind to become unhyphenated Americans. Both Fisher’s and Mukherjee’s theories, however, rely on an understanding of US liberalism that does not easily incorporate post new social movements multiculturalist understandings of citizenship. Fisher suggests that in place of a national citizenship based on the European notion of a Volk (a people, nation, or race with a shared cultural history and identity), the American “problem of identity”44 came to be solved through an abandonment of difference and national conceptualization in relation to a “democratic social space.”45 Ideally, this democratic social space creates a citizenship that is “atomistic . . . and therefore identical from place to place”; that is “unbounded” and open to all; that is “transparent,” so that citizens feel familiar and intelligible to one another; and finally, that exists in “the absence of an observer [or outsider] position that makes self-awareness and criticism possible.”46 Mukherjee similarly suggests the possibility for a voluntaristic abandonment


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of difference to become a fully assimilated American subject and a transparency between individual citizens through her use of representational aesthetics in Jasmine. The United States, Fisher argues, developed an atomistic, open, and transparent liberalism to make sure that each citizen could be represented, accounted for, and thought of as an important individual, while all citizens were, at the same time, unified into a national public (lacking a Volk) through their liberal citizenship. However, Fisher pulls something of a sleight of hand here in that he blurs the line between liberalism as an ideology and as an actual historical fact. US citizens did not, as he suggests, merely “abandon” cultural difference for a new and nonproblematic “light-fitting American personality.”47 Nor did American capitalism simply steer Americans “towards a common identity by means that were—instead of religious, ideological, cultural, historical, or linguistic—fiercely economic.”48 The economic pressures of life in the United States were often precisely what precipitated intense calls for religious, ideological, cultural, historical, and linguistic definitions of US citizenship.49 The history of restrictions on immigration combined with unequal opportunities and competition for low-level jobs created tensions between a dominant “legitimate” group of American citizen-workers and those outside this group, defined as “minorities,” “ethnics,” or “aliens.” One can see in the segregationist reaction to abolition and the nativist reaction to late nineteenth-century immigration, a reenactment of the othering and oppression of Native Americans, women, and Africans on which the nation was founded. While there may not have been an old-world Volk that immigrants needed to adjust to, there was a dominant culture of “Americanness” that claimed true and complete citizenship rights for itself. Mukherjee bases her call for immigrants to claim Americanness on similar premises of liberal voluntaristic abandonment of cultural identity, premises that do not fully take into consideration the ways in which racialized national ideologies continue to interpellate certain bodies as hyphenated citizens. Jasmine’s continual re-creation of her self is represented both as required by US culture and as an agential act of self-definition: “The hardest lesson of all” for Jasmine to learn, she tells us, is that “in America, nothing lasts [. . .]. Nothing is forever, nothing is so terrible, or so wonderful, that it won’t disintegrate.”50 And yet, while this revelation is difficult, it is precisely this continual disintegration that allows for Jasmine’s and others’ continual reinvention of self and life. The reason the population of Baden, Iowa, is dying out is that as a community it has lost the philosophy of creative destruction. Tied


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to a farming life that is no longer viable, many of its inhabitants are left unable to re-create themselves. Jasmine, however, recognizing in US ideologies of creative destruction a powerful flexibility, is able to survive by employing acts of self-reinvention. These acts, though often violent (e.g., the killing of Half-Face) and to a certain extent forced on her (“I feel at times,” Jasmine tells us “like a stone hurtling through diaphanous mist, unable to grab hold, unable to slow myself, yet unwilling to abandon the ride I’m on”51), allow her not only to survive but also to interpret her own behavior as “adventure, risk, transformation,” a “re-position[ing of] the stars.”52 Thus like Fisher’s Still the New World: American Literature in a Culture of Creative Destruction, Jasmine provides a cohesive, representative, and potentially celebratory mythology of American identity while still leaving room for critiques of some of the ways in which this identity is acted out. Such dual celebration and critique have also been identified as particularly American ways of conceptualizing national selfhood. In Sacvan Bercovitch’s The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America, he claims that US citizens have a teleological relation to their cultural identity that inheres in the nation’s promise, progress, and future—a future that is based not so much on revolutionary change as on a continual, progressive reaffirmation of past ideals in spite of historical failures. Fisher echoes this when he tells us that, despite some of the destruction in the wake of American life, the ideal is a creative, continually changing national identity—always open to new people and technology yet never at risk of becoming unidentifiably American. Jasmine, too, represents a United States that may not be perfect but that continues to function according to a kind of pure logic of “adventure, risk, [and] transformation.” The violences of American society can be written off by Jasmine as historical deviations from an original ideal. In reaction to the racist, sexist comments of a US ex-military man, she laments, “I wish I’d known America before it got perverted.”53 Jasmine is thus able to represent an American national identity in which literary and cultural critics are highly invested, while simultaneously providing room for critique of how this Americanness plays itself out. The combination of Jasmine’s underlying national allegory that reinforces the unconscious assumptions we make about what being American is, with the representative aesthetics of the novel that give us a story about otherness represented through an individual representative body makes Jasmine attractive to both academic and popular audiences. The novel represents both “Americanness” and “minority” subjectivity in a way that allows the reader to identify with and


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support its main character. At the same time, it does not fully endorse the more harmful aspects of US ideologies and reorients the reader to be able to see the violence to which the immigrant is subjected in order to become properly American. Yet Jasmine does not provide a particularly viable politics in a liberal multicultural context in that its aesthetics of representation do not demand changes in their readers’ ways of thinking about race, ethnicity, identity, or citizenship. Jasmine provides a representation of, as The New York Times noted, “what it is to become an American”54 that remains a stable and cohesive way to identify the nation and its inhabitants in spite of political disagreements among both the novel’s readers and the nation’s inhabitants.

The Holder of the World’s I nter nal ly Distanti ati ng Narrative Structure Considering the argument I have forwarded thus far, it may seem strange that Holder has not received as much scholarly critical attention since it in many ways revisits the themes and plot structure of Jasmine. It too tells the story of a woman who moves through different incarnations of selfhood by partnering with different men in different cultures, it explores the nature of being a foreigner, represents confrontations between Indian and (proto-)American culture, and in some ways is an even more “American” text than Jasmine in that it revisits one of American culture’s most canonical literary works, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Nevertheless, Holder does not evoke the same debates about American ways of life or subversion of or complicity in hegemonic ideologies. Nor does it evoke the same kind of identification with a national US cultural identity. I would place the work that has been done on Holder into two general categories. The first is articles that treat the novel similarly to the way in which Jasmine has been treated—that is, as subversive of white male hegemonic norms because of the identity traits (gender and ethnicity) of its characters and author.55 These articles see Holder as a feminist cosmopolitan rewriting of Hawthorne’s white male text that opens a place for minorities within the canon of American literature. These articles, while provocative, tend to be rather vague in their claims. For example, one critic’s thesis is that “[i]n Mukherjee’s [novel], various discourses of gender, race, religion, and ethnicity clash, intersect, and coalesce [so] as to dynamically multiply, decenter, and complicate the textual and ideological structure of the Hawthornian ‘matrix.’”56 Another writes that “the novel allows


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Mukherjee as an intellectual in the postcolonial world to question the translational and transnational aspects of culture along with a critical examination of the historical contingencies that produced them by playing with the concepts of history, time, and space.”57 Part of the reason these arguments appear to lack specificity is that they look at the text as extranational and transcanonical, both of which are attractive categories but neither of which provides much stable context for interpretation, leaving the novel to be simply an “explosion” or “questioning” of hegemonic ideologies that do not seem to arise from any specific historical narrative. The other kind of article that has been written about Holder looks at the specific ways in which Mukherjee reintroduces historical facts into an American originary mythology.58 Such articles read Holder as an American novel speaking to particular US modes of thinking about the history of the continent and the country. For example, Judie Newman reads Holder as a revisionary text, explicating the ways in which Holder manipulates Hawthorne’s novel in order to critique English Puritan originary myths of America, Newman sees Holder as similar to texts like Wide Sargasso Sea in that it critiques a canonical text by reintroducing “the evidence of real history [that] is left behind,” in this case evidence left behind by Hawthorne “in favour of a fictional pre-Revolutionary artifact, and a myth of origins.”59 By reintroducing such materials, Newman argues, Mukherjee contests Hawthorne’s version of American history while simultaneously “bring[ing] the two ‘spheres’ [of] post-colonial and American literature [together and] upsetting institutional authorities in the process.”60 Despite Newman’s excellent reading and her insightful use of historical materials on Hawthorne, Salem, and colonial trade with the East India Company, I think that more than a counterdiscursive contestation of Hawthorne’s text and more than a way to break boundaries between American and postcolonial literature (after all one does not need a late twentiethcentury author to introduce global colonial history into the canon of American literature; consider Melville for example), The Holder of the World is a distantiating deconstruction of American national identity and a commentary on how history and origin stories are created through an unstable (white) national identity, both by Hawthorne in 1850 and by Beigh Masters in 1993. Ultimately, Holder puts into question not only “evidence of real history” but also evidence of any coherent or permanent national identity. This questioning, however, does not free us from the restrictions of national identity and identification. At the same time as the text uses internally distantiating aesthetics to destabilize our national ideological frameworks,


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it also focuses, unlike Jasmine, on US desires for “the perfectibility of knowledge retrieval” through the story of a white (nonethnic in contemporary terms but who traces her lineage through India), selfdescribed “searcher-after-origins.”61 Holder prompts us to recognize our reliance on liberal multicultural ideologies and our real need for stories of personal and cultural origin. As James Baldwin requested of American literature, it makes us see that “society is held together by our need” and that that need inevitably limits our understandings of ourselves and our relation to others and to the nation. Holder performs two functions that may be uncomfortable for critics and academics looking for an American novel to write on or teach: (1) it deconstructs a cohesive model of US national identity, and (2) it uses an aesthetics of internal distantiation to make the reader aware of the ideologies of white-oriented American liberal multiculturalism; and it does so not to show the seamlessness between whiteness and US national identity but to show the limitations of, as Richard Dyer has put it, “[w]hite qua white” in relation to a national understanding of identity that consciously acknowledges diversity but nevertheless is continually presupposing a common whiteness.62 Both of these functions make the reader aware of the limitations of liberal multicultural ideologies as well as her continued reliance on them to read national stories.63 The deconstruction of stable national identity is the first difficulty that many readers and academics confront when encountering The Holder of the World, and this in part explains its lack of critical and popular attention. Again, this may seem like a strange claim to make about a novel that focuses on many of the same “national” themes as Jasmine—freedom, self-creation, assimilation, and so on. Also, Holder’s rewriting of The Scarlet Letter does not take away Hester’s and Pearl’s role as originary American figures but, in fact, highlights it. We discover at the end of the novel that “Pearl Singh [the “real” figure on which Pearl Prynne was supposedly based] saw in her old age the birth of this country, an event she had spent a lifetime advocating, and suffering for.”64 Additionally, Holder introduces many modern aspects of American culture into Hawthorne’s originary myth (some of which Hawthorne, writing in 1850, might not even have understood to be part of American culture) such as international capitalism (represented in the novel by the trade between Salem, England, and the East Indies); multiculturalism (in that Pearl, the character who advocates and suffers for the establishment of the United States as an independent nation, is a product of encounters between Puritan, Native American, British, Hindu, and Muslim cultures); and liberal


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individualism (the “I” [Hannah’s mother’s “scarlet letter”] comes to stand not for “Indian lover” but rather for “Independence” for Hannah and Pearl, who announce, “We are Americans to freedom born!” Though some would be sent to jail for such sentiment, “the women had for so long indulged a liberty of eccentric dissent that their certification of certain extreme positions was considered advantageous to the maintenance of social order”65). Nevertheless, in spite of these seemingly “American” traits added to what is already a founding myth of American culture, the text does not invite one to see these traits as uniquely American. Holder actually disrupts national myth making in that all the elements of Pearl or Hannah’s experience that led to making her an ideal subject for a tale of American beginnings (capitalist exchange, individualism, multiculturalism, self-creation) are not represented as unique to the United States. The history that produces such experiences is shown to be shared with India, if not with many nations. In fact, these traits are actually prefigured in India and only imported secondhand to the Americas. The text itself makes this abundantly clear. Beigh describes the Coromandel Coast as “like Manhattan in the mid-eighties,”66 in a kind of “late-stage capitalism”67 that produces a cosmopolitan society, which seems almost a mirror image of New York City, described by Beigh in a Whitmanesque, democratizing list of occupations, personalities, classes, religions, and races all brought together by “Money: hand-over-fist money, sweat-of-brow money, burnout money, fingerto-the-bone money, under-the-table money, black money, dirty money, filthy lucre, money-changing-in-the-temple, thirty-piecesof-silver money, blasphemous, usurious, treacherous money; profits, taxes, bribes, licenses, fees, levies, octrois, tariffs; middlemen, policemen, watchmen; painters, carpenters, dyers, writer, weavers; doctors, teachers, preachers, judges, accountants, barristers; wives, widows, cooks, servants, slaves, prostitutes, concubines; lewd men, austere men, gamblers, hoarders; Catholics, Roundheads, conformists, Baptists, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, Parsis, Armenians; black men, brown men, yellow men, white; reformers saviors, visionaries, criminals: all in pursuit of money, money, money.”68 Additionally, the self-made American individual that arises not only from a “classless” capitalist society but also from the cultural legacies of the rugged colonial, westward expansion, and America as a land of immigrants are similarly prefigured in India. “Perhaps piracy on the Coromandel Coast,” writes Beigh, “—going to sea, raising a flag of one’s own, being the boss and dividing the loot . . .—was the seed of the frontier dream, the circus dream, the immigrant dream of two centuries later.”69 The United States here


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is represented not as created out of unique circumstances, spirit, and history but rather as imported from abroad—and not from Western Europe but from South Asia. The “errand,” Holder suggests, was not into the wilderness of a new continent but into the “vast new jungle” of the already constituted culture of the Coromandel Coast.70 As it turns out, the only really American thing about Hannah and Pearl as originary figures is their early exposure to a Puritanism that must be rejected or pushed beyond in order for the pluralist (though in this case imitative) nation of the United States to come into existence. Unlike Jasmine, which employs realist and sentimental literary tropes along with a single main character who is also our first-person narrator to create a representational aesthetics, Holder employs a different set of narrative and tropological devices to create an internally distantiating aesthetics. In place of the detailed descriptions of place that make the reader feel as if she is in a familiar American landscape at both a panoramic and minute level, we find in Holder very little description of present-day America. The majority of the story is given to us in the form of Beigh’s reconstruction of Hannah’s history in New England and India. Information about place and characters are presented, as is most of the story, as a collection of data—dates, lists, artifacts. Often Beigh comments on what this data might tell us about Hannah, about America, or about India. But Beigh does not tell us, as Jasmine does, how to be ethical readers. Either we take Beigh’s interpretation of events or we do not, but often Beigh’s perspective is the only access we have. We cannot assume, as we were able to with Jasmine, that Beigh’s experience makes her telling of these events more authentic than any other. Thus the reader is left in the uncomfortably distanced perspective of getting information through a narrator who is also a character but in whose life and narrative decisions we have far less investment than we did in Jasmine’s. Additionally, whereas Jasmine’s narrative reads as psychologically realistic and relatively transparent, Beigh’s narrative decisions often seem arbitrary and difficult to interpret. Why does she draw certain conclusions about Hannah’s life and personality but not others? She herself insists that there are infinite possibilities for ordering the world. Her narrative is often confusing, complex, and constructed through multiple and contradictory historical sources and interpretive layers. Both Beigh and the reader are reading a set of facts, guesses, and circumstances, and both share a liberal multicultural desire to discover a properly multicultural history of America that will disrupt dominant white male historicizations, and yet not threaten their own sense of the world, nation, or belonging. However, while Beigh moves more


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and more toward a position of transparency—ending with the conviction that she has discovered the truth of Hannah’s history, the reader is continually asked to question that position while still relying on it as her source of information. Beigh becomes simultaneously a more reliable narrator as she becomes surer of her interpretations and a less reliable narrator as the reader begins to question the personal, social, and national needs that are being filled by her storytelling choices. Additionally important to the novel’s critique of a cohesive US identity, and the level on which its aesthetics of internal distantiation come most clearly into play, is Beigh’s racialized and gendered narrative position. In having a white, middle-class, Protestant, American woman narrate this (hi)story, Mukherjee creates not simply an alternative US history, but a story about who creates the authoritative history and cultural identity of the nation and how. It is a retelling of a male American myth by a woman, yet as a result of Beigh’s education, race, socioeconomic status, and nationality, she too has great power to shape and authorize it as she wishes. Holder, however, is not simply about the fact that power writes history. It is also about threats to power and investments in otherness. It is about how recovery of denied histories can function as a production of new commodities for the group whose access to power, and therefore history construction, denied those other histories in the first place. Toward the beginning of the novel, Beigh seems to believe that there is a historical narrative to be uncovered: “Not all that survives has value or meaning,” she says, “believing that it does screens out real value, real meaning.”71 Yet as her search for “meaning” progresses, she seems to become more aware that there is not a single truth, and even if there were, it might be impossible to recover. In relation to Hannah’s stay with the Fitch family in Salem, she is forced to admit, “I am aware of multiple contingencies. It is the universe we inhabit. She might have been a prisoner; they might have been her tender guardians.”72 Ultimately, as aware as Beigh may be of her role in constructing Hannah’s story, her desire to find the truth of or in it overwhelms her academic detachment. As Beigh is our access to this history, to some extent it overwhelms us as well. Beigh identifies to a great extent with her subjects, particularly Hannah. This allows her to produce a sympathetic narrative. But it also leads her to assume she knows how they would have felt or what they would have said to the extent that she actually claims she “know[s] from [Hannah’s] captivity narrative what Sita [a mythical figure in Hindu oral history] would have written.”73 Intersubjective identification calls for


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truth over fiction and design over accident, as if what she is uncovering is inevitable, essential, absolute, and not one version of history among infinite possible versions. I would propose that we, as liberal multiculturalist readers, tend to consider US history, particularly histories of racial or ethnic otherness, in a similar fashion. Intersubjective identification and ethnic knowledges bear the weight of making US liberal democracy a true and sustainable system for the nation as a whole and the subjects within it. They function as narrative stabilizers in our understanding of US identities, thus explaining Beigh’s desire for truth and the reader’s discomfort in not getting full access to it. Eventually, it becomes difficult to know whether Beigh is writing Hannah’s story or her own. For example, she describes Hannah’s experience in an Indian battlefield as a conflicting desire both to “throw herself into nursing” all the wounded and to have them “scourged . . . from the face of the earth.”74 Considering that these are the same people that get written out of Beigh’s history, a history motivated by Beigh’s desire that she and her lover Venn (an Indian immigrant) might “remember what happened to [Hannah] so that [they] may predict what will happen to [them] within [their] lifetime,”75 it does not seem like a stretch to read this passage as a commentary on Beigh’s guilt over “scourging” these people to whom she does not feel connected from the face of her narrative. The novel, then, makes it relatively clear to the reader that Beigh’s interpretations of the meaning of Hannah’s experiences arise from an (over)identification with Hannah through gender and sexuality at the expense of historical and/or cultural difference. Still, Beigh’s interpretations align with the dominant ideologies of the US reader and are really the only access to the (hi)story that the reader has. Hawthorne’s “biased” origin story is replaced by Beigh’s, which turns out to be just as biased. However, much like Hawthorne’s story, Beigh’s too sometimes gets away from her.76 There are places in Beigh’s narration where it becomes almost schizophrenic, where her attempts to interpret Hannah’s history through identification with her cannot entirely hold the history itself. This happens to the greatest extent a few pages after the aforementioned battlefield scene when Hannah is actually living through a battle. Beigh tells us, There is a sound associated with battle scenes in that time and place, one of the few sounds in human history that have no analog . . . . It is the sound a trained elephant makes . . . as it plants a broad front foot directly on the face of each stretched-out body, grinding the head into a featureless mash with a calm, almost gentle ruthlessness.


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It is the sound of skulls caving in, of air expelled, of the human body treated like coconuts or sugarcane, a sound no different really, from any great force exerted against any soft resistance. And that is the surprise, for the very few who have ever heard it: the human body is nothing very special, or very different from any small obstruction. In the eye of Brahma, Bhagmati used to say, the world is less than a grain of sand.77

In this excerpt, the line between Beigh’s narration and Hannah’s subjectivity is blurred to such an extent that the passage approximates free indirect discourse. The phrase “Bhagmati used to say” makes Bhagmati appear to be an old friend of Beigh’s and the suggestion that Beigh understands a sound that “has no analog” implies that she herself has heard it. Yet, though it appears that Hannah and Beigh are closer to being of a single mind here than anywhere else in the novel, this is also the most confusing and internally contradictory section of the narrative. Beigh claims both that the sound “has no analog” and that it makes a sound “no different from any great force exerted against any soft resistance.” She also describes the sound, which occurs in an immense battlefield full of bodies, some of which must be only wounded and therefore still able to hear, as a privileged sound heard by “very few.” It is a sound singular to a time and place, and a sound just like many others. Like her history she wants it to be both personally unique and universally true but her narrative cannot entirely support this. This moment in the narrative gives Beigh (and the reader) the privileged knowledge that humans are in no way privileged, neither in relation to each other nor in relation to the world. This again replicates that paradox of liberal multiculturalism. According to liberal multicultural ideology, human knowledge and experience is particular to social positioning and therefore can be commodified (as in the way Jasmine is able to make us feel we are getting access to an experience of multicultural difference or otherness), and universally accessible to each individual mind (as in the way Jasmine suggests that our drive for liberal individuality and self-reliance are shared traits that can make anyone a modern American subject). One way of interpreting this paradoxical representation of the battlefield sound as unique and universal is through the final episode of Beigh’s history, which she attains not through book research but through Venn’s virtual reality program that takes her back in time to that moment on the battlefield. One might think that this virtual reality moment, since it is necessary to complete Beigh’s journey, is more reliable than her system of historical recovery in which she sympathizes with individual people and picks and chooses information


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that speaks to her personally. Unlike Beigh, Venn believes that all information is valuable—that “real” history can be perfectly reconstructed through the compilation of data fed into a computer. And Beigh eventually comes to believe this as well, in part by associating Venn’s Asianness with a kind of a futuristic past—a high-tech future that can access an infinitely complex but ultimately true version of the past. “He’s out there beyond virtual reality,” Beigh tells us, “recreating the universe one nanosecond [. . .] at a time. He comes from India.”78 She needs Venn’s data to find the “end” of her story. And she needs the end of her story to perform a connection between her own history and sense of self, and Venn’s racial and ethnic difference from that model. However, the bizarre passage about the sound of the elephant’s foot undercuts the status of her experience in virtual reality as actual history, for if the program gives her access to a sound “very few” have heard, this also implies that the sound she hears is not that which the thousands of men on the battlefield heard. As it turns out, the data that Venn feeds into his program includes Beigh’s own “literary prose” narrative, and the program itself is “interactive”: it “give[s] you what you most care about.”79 Thus, ultimately, even virtual reality cannot produce nonsubjective history. What our narrator eventually gives us is not a truer version of history but the one that she desired to find all along.

Narrative Whiteness and Discomfiting Liber al Multic ulturali s m I would argue additionally that this is not simply a critique of the subjective nature of historical narratives but of the white-privileging nature of many historical narratives of the United States. Richard Dyer has argued that “there is a specificity to white representation, but it does not reside in a set of stereotypes so much as in narrative structural positions, rhetorical tropes and habits of perception.”80 In Holder, Mukherjee uses a white first-person narration to show us the “specificity” of the white narrative, thereby allowing for an internal distantiation of the (white or white-narrative-oriented) American reader, an internal distantiation through which one comes to see whiteness thereby forwarding the project of “making whiteness strange.”81 Several reviews have noted the lack of immediate identification with the main character in Holder. Unlike Jasmine, who has been lauded as, if nothing else, a compelling character, Beigh is rarely if ever mentioned as a positive aspect of Holder, if indeed she is mentioned at all. The Publisher’s Weekly review of Holder reads as follows:


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Neither as accessible as Jasmine nor as superbly crafted as National Book Critics Circle Award-winner The Middleman and Other Stories, Mukherjee’s new novel is a challenging work that engages the intellect more than the heart. Narrator Beigh Masters is a Yale grad who has put her history degree to use in “assets research,” tracking down rare art and jewels for wealthy clients. Her pet research project involves Hannah Easton, born in Massachusetts in 1670, who went on to marry an English trader, journey with him to India at the dawn of European colonization and become the lover of a Hindu prince . . . Mukherjee writes with her customary elegant lucidity; her insights into 17thcentury America, England and India are as tough-minded and astute as anything she has written about contemporary society; and she spins a rousing narrative of greed, lust, battles and betrayals. Readers may feel somewhat aloof from Hannah, who is viewed always from a distance, but an abundance of interesting ideas partly compensates for the book’s lack of an emotional center.82

This review evidences a popular feeling that Jasmine (and I would argue Jasmine) is more “accessible” and speaks “to the heart” in a way that Holder does not. The reviewer also seems to find most of the intrigue on the level of Hannah’s story with its “rousing narrative of greed, lust, battles and betrayals,” but little if anything exciting on the level of Beigh’s narration, which fails to provide the novel with “an emotional center.” Here “lack of emotional center” can be understood as lack of a character that “represents” in her own body, as Jasmine does, the “central issues” of the text and can provide the reader’s vicarious experience. However, we do get all the experiences of the text through Beigh, and even literally through her body when she uses the virtual reality machine to travel back in time. The reason it reads as if we do not get this is precisely because of Beigh’s whiteness, which is able to register as a nothingness, a disembodiment. But this nothingness that the narrator brings to the story is not, I would argue, an artistic failure. Instead, it allows Mukherjee to tell her story without the burden of representation. She has said she is “strongly against the commodification and commercialization of ethnicity and race . . . Jasmine should not be the spokesperson for all Indians or all non-white immigrants into the [United States].”83 Yet, as we have seen, liberal multicultural critics and readers will interpellate and interpret Jasmine in just such a way. Mukherjee’s use of white-embodied narration in Holder allows her to address whiteness, not through the kind of representational aesthetics that she uses to show Jasmine as immigrant (whiteness, in fact, resists representation of this kind) but through internally distantiative


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aesthetics that allow US readers, white or not, to see the ways in which whiteness functions as an often invisible narrative frame for US history and literary history, and to see the ways in which contemporary US whiteness is heavily invested in a nonthreatening politics of liberal multiculturalism. Mukherjee does this by writing a “feminist” text. She does not choose between gender and race but reveals the ways in which white feminism can be simultaneously liberating, liberal, and retain the privileges of white power. Mike Hill says the following of white feminism and white privilege: “The importance of 1980s feminism to white critique is that it nudged to the fore the unavoidable complexity of margins and their relationship to selfhood. It made problematic both myopic claims to oppression and liberal notions of “commonality,” in which “common” precedes and contains unforeseen collectivities and alternative allegiances that might otherwise emerge at the price of (white) self-definition.”84 Hill then quotes bell hooks who argues that white women at the height of the women’s movement “did not want the issue of racism raised because they did not want to deflect attention away from their projection of white woman as ‘good,’ i.e. non racist victim, and the white man as ‘bad,’ i.e. racist oppressor . . . [They] saw feminism solely as a way to demand entrance into the white male power structure.”85 Thus, Hill concludes, “Oppositionality itself may sometimes function in order to maintain the status quo.”86 This is precisely what Beigh’s white womanhood allows. It is a feminist and oppositional rewriting of The Scarlet Letter, which simultaneously functions to maintain the power and privilege of hegemonic (if not so pure or purely masculinist) whiteness. This use of white womanhood as frame allows for a critique not only of white power as it is often understood (as racist, violent, masculinist, and aligned with dominance) but of whiteness as it functions with and through a liberal multicultural framework that invites and celebrates racial, ethnic, and gendered difference. George Lipsitz, in The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics, argues that whiteness in the post-1960s United States consists of a reconsolidation of white male heterosexual patriarchy that demonizes women, queers, and racial others. I would agree, certainly, that the identity movements of the 1960s did not succeed in wresting white heterosexual masculinity from its position of dominance, but I do think that new social movements have had a greater impact on liberal, white, male-dominated thinking than Lipsitz allows for. There was not simply a swing “back” to liberal individualism after civil rights and other identity movements, instead there was a reemergence of


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a liberalism that never actually disappeared but had to incorporate aspects of multiculturalism in order to survive. Therefore celebratory war mongering patriotic white male heterosexuality that “promotes male violence and female subordination, builds identification with outside authorities at the expense of personal integrity and responsibility, and inflames desires that can only be quenched by domination over others”87 cannot maintain hegemony as it may once have. In the liberal multicultural United States, racialized and gendered others are needed to contribute to the power of white maleness even as they simultaneously challenge it. Mukherjee’s Holder does challenge Lipsitz’s formula of white male heterosexual power, not by disabling the hegemony of whiteness, but by demonstrating the ways in which women who preach nonviolence and who are far from fearful of national and racial others can also participate in an ideology of liberal multicultural whiteness that is structured around asset accumulation and enterprise, that maintains certain national hegemonies, and that is limited in its project of forwarding equality and democracy. It is ultimately, as I have suggested, Beigh’s need to “know” the truth, to “know” her historical subjects that most severely limits her narrative. This is, I would argue, a contemporary element of white racism under liberal multiculturalism. As Yu suggests, liberal multiculturalism gives Americans and American intellectuals the fantasy of “knowledge as unquestioned good” in the pursuit of and incorporation of multicultural products. In the case of liberal multicultural literary texts, the racial other needs to represent in order to be known. Again, this is why Jasmine is popular: it purports to let the reader know Jasmine. Beigh, though aware to some extent of the historical harm done by claiming to know one’s subject absolutely and by the white Western assumptions that often underlie that need, cannot escape them. Take, for example, this strangely chiastic paragraph in which Beigh attempts to describe Jadav Singh’s silence and anger in reaction to Hannah’s demands for him to explicate his motives for killing: “I know that reaction. It is the reaction of Mr. Abraham [Beigh’s guide in India] when I offered to dry-clean his clothes, the reaction of Venn when I tell him about some new discovery I’ve made about the Coromandel, or Hannah, or even the diamond. In India, it takes a classic apprentice five years to learn how to sit at the sitar before he’s allowed to play a note. It’s not just the reaction that says How dare you know? Its something deeper: How dare you presume to know?”88 The passage is chiastic in that it begins with the declaration, “I know that,” and ends with the implication of one “that knows me.” Here the contemporary American white woman’s desire to “know” is


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presented as an explicit offense, an intrusion, an oversimplification, and potentially an extension of the white Western pride and blindness that led to the colonization of all places that could be “known” to the European colonizing world. Any feminist effort to resist this reaction becomes yet another form of violence. This puts the reader in the same position. She is warned here to be wary of the need to know. At the same time, if the reader cannot take Beigh’s word for what she knows, then the reader not only cannot make sense of Venn’s, Mr. Abraham’s, and Jadav Singh’s reactions but also cannot really experience the story at all. This narrative positioning is one of the novel’s tools for constructing internally distantiating aesthetics. Another tool Mukherjee employs is Venn’s virtual reality technology. If we think of Beigh’s need to know as a characteristic need of contemporary liberal multicultural whiteness, we can read the virtual reality in Holder as a metaphor for the virtual value and power of whiteness. Whiteness is virtually real even as it is only a construct. In the same way, Beigh’s virtual reality experience feels real and to her is reality in every important sense, even though it is merely her own story converted into data and played back to her. It is also during the virtual reality experience that her “hunger for connection” and her desire to know are translated into a literal becoming one with the nonwhite woman. The fact that she takes the body of Bhagmati as opposed to Hannah (her subject) makes her connection to Hannah complete. Ultimately, it is the absolute knowledge of (through experiencing) Bhagmati’s death that “solves” Beigh’s mystery and allows “the focus [to] narrow” and “the facts [to] grow surer.”89 What Beigh “discovers” through her virtual reality experience is that the diamond, the asset that had purportedly been only a catalyst for her obsession with Hannah and an excuse to look up information on her, has been hidden all along in Bhagmati’s body. It seems as though this would take away from the power of whiteness and would mean that assets have historically accumulated in nonwhite bodies. However, the fact that Bhagmati dies hiding the diamond inside her, whereas Beigh does not, and the fact that Beigh leaves this experience with the diamond “plunged into the deepest part of me” allows Beigh to claim the assets for herself.90 Asianness here functions as an asset for Beigh and for the reader. Whiteness has been theorized by Cheryl Harris as a kind of property based on rights of exclusion and definition.91 In Holder, Mukherjee makes her readers aware of the ways in which whiteness as property under liberal multiculturalism also constitutes a right of consumption. Rather than the use of the nonwhite racialized body as object (as in


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the case of racialized slavery, which set the stakes for whiteness as property in the United States), we see here the use of nonwhite racial form as a commodity. Beigh’s “lost” asset is access to cultural capital, a cultural capital that used to belong exclusively to whiteness but under liberal multiculturalism risks spreading to nonwhite people. One way to prevent other racial identities from becoming a kind of property (whether based on status, right to exclude, or right to define) that might challenge the value of whiteness is to construct nonwhite racial form as a commodity that in a liberal multicultural system everyone has equal right to consume. This model appears to be one of inclusion rather than exclusion, to remedy some of the injustices of unequal access and representation in US history. Though, of course, the effects of this commodification on white versus nonwhite bodies are substantially different. The Holder of the World, then, is a feminist rewriting of The Scarlet Letter but not one that simply, as Christian Moraru argues, “engenders an alternative history of empire as well as of the canon”92 but one that, through a literary aesthetics of internal distantiation, reveals the ways in which Hawthorne’s concerns still resonate in contemporary US society and especially white society. By “purloining,” as Moraru puts it, The Scarlet Letter, Mukherjee writes women into an imperialist history of whiteness and shows how this project is dependent on the attainment of property whether material (the diamond), intellectual (the history), or virtual (the experience of being a racial other while maintaining the virtual reality of the property of whiteness). Beigh, though emotionally and personally invested in her historical female subject, and therefore not guilty of a purportedly “objective” history that in fact favors a male perspective, certainly is guilty of favoring a white perspective. She utilizes and projects onto Hannah what Jane Haggis describes as the white feminist’s reliance on an “un-examined assumption of a shared woman-ness with her colonized counterparts,” which “render[s] [the white woman] irresponsible, a victim of the white male colonizing adventure, who, through this exclusion, is uniquely positioned nevertheless, to forge a different, more benevolent, colonial relation with her ‘native’ sisters in the interstices of the masculine project.”93 This is certainly true of Beigh’s representation of Hannah, also known as “‘The Salem Bibi’—meaning ‘the white wife from Salem.’”94 Hannah is described by Beigh as “a person undreamed of in Puritan society . . . She is from a different time, the first person, let alone the first woman to have had these thoughts, and this experience, to have been formed in this particular crucible.”95 From Beigh’s perspective, Hannah embodies a cosmopolitan rather


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than imperialist desire for travel, she is a Puritan woman who can take an Indian lover and befriend her Indian servant Bhagmati. She can only be “dreamed of” in a society that can celebrate these sorts of cultural and racial interactions, as can that inhabited by Beigh, whose relationship with Venn, an Indian immigrant, is never questioned as inappropriate. She is, quite literally, from “a different time” (Beigh’s) as she is literally given to us in “the first person” (Beigh’s first-person narrative perspective). Beigh in her “hunger for connectedness” makes Hannah over in her image, as a modern, feminist, multicultural white woman, a woman who might “take society with her to a new level.”96 This perspective, however, has its limitations—limitations with which Mukherjee makes the reader contend through her use of distantiative aesthetics. Bhagmati, Hannah’s friend who functions as the narrative proof of her liberal multicultural progressiveness, cannot be represented from this liberal multicultural perspective as a historical figure with real presence or effect. The reader is made aware that the narrative assumption of a shared womanness strips Bhagmati down to what Beigh or Hannah can relate to. Bhagmati also has had a crossracial love affair, she too has an abduction story, and she also holds power in her sexuality while being oppressed by a male-dominated society. Yet these similarities are not enough to give Bhagmati full and substantial personhood, and while these aspects of her story are hinted at by the text, they are ultimately trumped by Hannah’s story as originary American woman. Bhagmati functions as a kind of original other against which Beigh or Hannah’s whiteness is formed. Mukherjee makes this apparent to the reader in scenes such as that in which Hannah “catches” Bhagmati coming down from the roof terrace in “silks and gold,” which Beigh describes and imagines in the following way: “It is that two-dimensional time of the dawn, or of history, the light not yet able to endow shape with form or meaning. The woman’s long black hair looks at a distance, in the pale light and against the white silk, like a giant fissure cut across her back.”97 At this moment, when Hannah as represented by Beigh sees Bhagmati in a role other than servant, doing something that Hannah does not understand or cannot discover, she can only be a “form without meaning.” The only meaning that can be constructed seems to be an emerging racialized one, the blackness that “fissures” the pale, white lightness is metaphorical of the racial difference that is “fissuring” the connection between Hannah and Bhagmati at this moment. The “two-dimensional” setting is one in which the two-dimensional construction of whiteness and blackness comes to the fore to trump any other meanings that might be found in it.


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James Baldwin writes, “There is [in America] no white community” and this “bears terrifying witness to what happened to everyone who got here, and paid the price of the ticket. The price was to become ‘white.’ No one was white before he/she came to America. It took generations, and a vast amount of coercion, before this became a white country.”98 Mukherjee’s story is in this sense a truly “American” story as it is the tale of the creation of whiteness and blackness as the American identities through the early colonies’ “white” inhabitants’ interactions with the nonwhite world—even if this is a world that we now name “Asian” in ethnic multicultural rather than racist terms. The founding narrative of the United States is not simply the story of the dominance of whiteness but the emergence of racialized identity. Mukherjee suggests this in the novel when Hannah and her daughter return from India to the colonies and are baptized “White Pearl” and “Black Pearl,” respectively. If there is one thing that represents a cohesive US identity in Holder, this act of naming may be it, but because racial identities (and particularly whiteness as a racial identity) have been made strange by the distantiating aesthetics of the novel, this cannot function as an “emotional [national] core” of the novel. It leaves its reader unsure of both the invisibility of whiteness and the cohesiveness of a national identity at the same time that it demonstrates the way in which taxonomies of identity in the United States continue to inform our ways of identifying ourselves and thinking about the world, even in the liberal multicultural age. Black Pearl functions as Hannah’s badge, indicating her willing acceptance of and participation in a multicultural, multiracial world, and simultaneously indicating her whiteness (just as Venn is Beigh’s badge of both positions). In this way whiteness recuperates its power and its benevolence in a liberal multicultural context. Beigh’s story not only introduces a global and nonwhite or Western origin story into American national mythology but also reveals to the reader how this origin story can be reclaimed as commodity for a hegemonic, white-privileging, national ideology. At the same time, American identity is shown to be founded in the incorporation rather than the exclusion of Eastern otherness. It belongs to America, belongs in America, and belongs literally in Americans. This is nearly the inverse of the abjecting discourses of “yellow peril.” It is an active incorporation, an inhabiting, and an ingestion of Asianness that must be consistently repeated to maintain the coherence of a liberal multicultural national identity. The truth claims of stories as commodities within US ideologies is something that Susan Lanser has commented on, particularly in


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relation to white feminism in her essay, “‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ and the Politics of Color in America.” Lanser suggests that “Although—or because—we have read ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ over and over, we may have stopped short, and our readings, like the narrator’s, may have reduced the text’s complexity to what we need most: our own image reflected back to us.”99 Mukherjee prompts her readers to see that this is precisely what Beigh does with the historical text she is given. Like (white) feminist readings of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Beigh recuperates a lost female voice and a marginalized feminist text but, in so doing, she must simplify the text, “grasping . . . for the single familiar and self-confirming figure in the text” and “shutting aside textual meanings that expose feminism’s own precarious and conflicted identity.”100 Mukherjee, through an aesthetics of internal distantiation, reintroduces the “precarious and conflicted identity” of dominant white feminism without losing the recuperative power of that white feminist voice. Additionally, she does this in a political and social climate in which white feminism’s racism and classism cannot and do not function as explicitly as they did in Gilman’s day. In an age of liberal multiculturalism, Beigh writes with a certain respect and desire for the racial other as opposed to the fear and repulsion revealed in “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Nevertheless, this white, New England, professional woman is revealed by Mukherjee still to be limited by her white feminist ideologies, while the narrative does not allow its reader to feel that she can overcome or escape the assumptive bounds of those ideologies. Such a distantiated (from US national, white, feminist, and liberal multicultural ideologies) way of understanding the narrative is, however, not very flattering to an American reader and is particularly unflattering to a white American reader. And it is unflattering not just for readers with a “false ideology” of the innocence of whitedominated US citizenship but for American academics as well, who are most likely, like Beigh, well aware of the contemporary and historical violences that inhere in the construction of American identity and nationality. This explains the greater attraction to the representative aesthetics of a text like Jasmine. Like Stanley Fish’s “good physician” aesthetic, which “tells [its] patients what they don’t want to hear in the hope that by forcing them to see themselves clearly, they may be moved to change the selves they see,” facing the questions raised by Holder in relation to the reader’s own belief systems is “necessarily a painful process.”101 And, as Fish suggests, “[a] reader who is asked to judge him[or her]self may very well decline.”102 This ability to decline constitutes a potential pragmatic political limitation for aesthetics of


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internal distantiation. As Mukherjee suggests, writers who are not “entertaining and comforting the average reader by expressing the ideas and articulating the philosophies that make you feel good about yourself” will never have “a wide, popular audience.”103 Engagement with internally distantiating aesthetics requires the participation of the reader in a process that may become mentally and ideologically destabilizing. Nevertheless, what the internally distantiating aesthetics of Holder, as well as those of the texts discussed in previous chapters, do that a representative aesthetics cannot is to deny the reader the satisfaction of knowing, of seeing, as Yu puts it, “[k]nowledge as an unquestioned good” in the ways that Beigh does. The distance between reader and narrator and historical subject, between the reading of the story and the knowledge of events that Mukherjee creates (and that results in a “lack of emotional center”), also keeps the reader from feeling the entitlement to “know.” Perhaps in this way Mukherjee allows us to approach as yet unknown other ways of thinking about citizenship, identities, and society. These unknown ways of thinking constitute what James Baldwin refers to as the void which is “ourselves” and from which “it is the function of society to protect us.”104 Literature works to make the narratives of society legible so that we can function within it, but it can also create reifying narratives that limit our abilities to think complexly about social identity and its complicated relations to American politics and life. As Baldwin says, and as the authors I have discussed attend to through their use of internally distantiating aesthetics, “It is only this void, our unknown selves, demanding, forever, a new act of creation, which can save us.”105 By reconstituting American narratives so that they attend to the demands of the unknown selves of the reader as much as those of the represented characters, contemporary US writers are attempting such new acts of creation.


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Coda

4 Inter nal Distantiation in the 21st C entury

I began the initial stages of my work on Reconstituting Americans in fall of 2001, the same semester I was a teaching assistant for my first American literature survey class at New York University. On a Tuesday morning in September of that year, the twin towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan were hit by two hijacked planes. After trying unsuccessfully to get to work, finding that subways were not running, classes were cancelled, and most cellular and land telephone lines were tied up, I spent the majority of the day in my Morningside Heights apartment, glued to the television, trying both to figure out what had happened and to retain some sense of connection to the events unfolding only a few miles south of my building. At 8:30 p.m. that night, President George W. Bush formally addressed the nation and made the following seemingly obvious and empathetic statements: Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack. Today, our nation saw evil, the very worst of human nature. And we responded with the best of America—with the daring of our rescue workers, with the caring for strangers and neighbors who came to give blood and help in any way they could. Tonight, I ask for your prayers for all those who grieve, for the children whose worlds have been shattered, for all whose sense of safety and security has been threatened. And I pray they will be comforted by a power greater than any of us.

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In these three statements, Bush’s speechwriters captured many of the predominant conceptions of contemporary American citizenship. “We” are figured as citizens with a national identity based not on political decision making but on personal acts of individual heroism (“caring for strangers,” “giv[ing] blood”) and, ultimately, on the extraordinarily private act of prayer. The nation is aligned with God (not only through the statement concerning prayer but also by the fatherly, comforting statements throughout the speech, e.g., “our military is powerful,” “our financial institutions remain strong,” “I’ve directed the full resources of our intelligence and law enforcement”) as “a power greater than anyone.” Each individual gains the privilege of partaking in the “freedom and opportunity” of citizenship within that nation by recognizing herself as victim and as helpless to act in the face of a world gone politically, militarily, and socially out of control. Here, citizenship is figured not only as an individual position, identical to all other citizen positions, but also as special, unique, and valuable because of the private acts it enables. In inhabiting this position, one recognizes that the immense strength that comes with being a subject of the most powerful nation in the world is gained through being subjected (and thus protected) by the most powerful nation in the world. Such a position reinforces a powerful and stable US hegemony and makes it difficult to imagine alternative ways of conceptualizing US citizenship and nationhood. Throughout the preceding chapters, I have argued that liberal multicultural understandings have become part of hegemonic and limiting models for conceptualizing US citizenship. In our post new social movement era we must constantly read minoritized bodies and liberal citizenship together, though we have yet to construct a nuanced discourse for addressing a multiculturalist body politic. It may seem that, in the case of September 11, such a discourse was unnecessary, as the trauma of the event trumped social differences and created a politically unified nation of Americans. Bush framed the event in just such a way, closing his September 11 address by saying, “This is a day when all Americans from every walk of life unite in our resolve for justice and peace.” Yet this comment gestures toward a recognition of differences among “our fellow citizens” and within “our way of life.” Seemingly, then, it was possible to address identity differences in a discourse of citizen interpellation but only in vague paternalistic language that did not and could not address the construction of social difference in terms of history or power. It is this inability of rhetorics of dominant liberal US citizenship to recognize historical and hierarchical difference within citizenship


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that the authors I have discussed in the preceding chapters are able to interrogate. Their internally distantiating texts are a valuable source for examining subtle articulations of these rhetorical impasses and the contradictions they create in the ways we inhabit social identity. The self-recognitions such aesthetics provoke and the self-limitations they illuminate are as important for our everyday readings of our social world as they are for defining and interpreting our most profound and contested national historical moments. In Bush’s September 11 speech, if you understand yourself as being addressed, then you are an American citizen and you must therefore share the sentiments of “our” president, who throughout the speech rhetorically aligns “our way of life” with liberal individualism and Christianity. There was no mention in the president’s address of the intranational violence perpetrated against Arab and Muslim citizens and residents. These attacks were already in the news and New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani had made statements earlier that day encouraging people not to participate in reactionary acts aimed at immigrants or minorities. President Bush, however, did not make such public statements until several days later. I would suggest that this is because neither he nor his speechwriters had any available language with which to both address the speech to the nation and bring up this racially and ethnically motivated violence. Were the president to have mentioned these attacks, the unifying interpellative call would have broken down, for it would have called to mind not only the fact that some Americans were experiencing their victimization on September 11 differently than as Bush posited but also an awareness that some might not be experiencing it as victimization at all. This speech is only for those whose “very freedom” came under attack, which implies that that freedom was previously thought to be secure, a guaranteed aspect of American life, though any number of US citizens who have been victims of systemic racial oppression, homophobic assault, police brutality, and so on may already have had the experience of their “very freedoms” coming under attack. Thus liberal multicultural ideals of equality and justice made the discussion of, even the mere representation of, identity difference nearly impossible for both President Bush and the press. Before we can develop new, more fluid, more politically viable citizen narratives, we need to become more aware of the limitations and paradoxes of our current ones. I am completing this project nearly a decade after the September 11 attacks, a decade during which the United States has fought a war popularly represented as a “clash of cultures,” East versus West, Christian versus Muslim. Thus the “culture wars” of


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the late twentieth century have become, in some sense, true wars of culture described by the American public in terms of highly incompatible, unequal, and racialized cultural differences. In this same decade, we have elected our first African American and first nonwhite president of the United States, prompting a widespread popular rhetoric of postracialism in America, a rhetoric that in a much more simplistic and more disturbing way echoes some of the academic calls I have discussed to move “beyond multiculturalism,” “beyond hybridity,” or “beyond nationalism.” As many of us were well aware, this rhetoric of postracialism was hugely premature. The media recently took advantage of its chance to recognize the premature nature of this claim when Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested on the porch of his home on July 16, 2009. Gates had returned from a trip and was having trouble getting into his house. A white woman in the neighborhood saw Gates and his driver struggling with the front door and reported a possible attempted break-in. When the police arrived, Gates was already inside. Angry at the implication that a black man struggling with his own door was a criminal and that the officer would not recognize the racial biases circulating in the situation, Gates continued to yell at the officer as he left the house and was then arrested and charged with disorderly conduct that, according to the police report, “did create a hazardous or physically offensive condition by an act that served no legitimate purpose of the defendant.”1 The behaviors of both Gates and the officer have registered as hazardous and offensive acts to different political, social, and professional groups. The USA Today headline announced that the arrest “reignite[d] debate on race” in the United States. Police union leaders supported the Cambridge officer’s claim that there was no racial motivation in the arrest. The National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives believed the police had acted irrationally. And President Obama created a controversy when he said the police “acted stupidly” in arresting the prominent and respected Professor Gates.2 The conflict surrounding the Gates arrest itself replicates the most paradoxical and contradictory aspects of a liberal multicultural understanding of subjecthood. Those who support the police officer are utilizing rhetorics of liberal individualism in which individual strength of character and good decision making can trump social differences such as race. The Cambridge Police Commissioner Robert Hass, for example, said he did not believe that the officer “acted with any racial motivation at all”3 and Dennis O’Connor, president of the Cambridge Police Superior Officers Association stated, “Whatever may be


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the history, we deeply resent the implications and reject any suggestion that in this case or any other case that they’ve allowed a person’s race to direct their activities.”4 Both of these responses place liberal, transparent, individual acts and intentions at the center of any valid political or social concern. The histories that led to the construction of racial identities in the United States, the ideological ways in which we rely on racial identity to make sense of the world, and the ways race informs all our thoughts and actions must be rejected outright as even possible influences. On the other hand, those who think the arrest was racially motivated are presented in media coverage as using language that associates social identity with histories of oppression that cannot be overcome, therefore dividing the nation into (in this case) two different kinds of citizens—white and black. Houston Police Chief Harold Hurtt is described by USA Today as saying that “racial disputes involving police . . . tear at old social wounds that have never healed.”5 And Edwin Dorn, former dean of the School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas is quoted in such a way that presents the argument literally in black and white. “Blacks,” he said “feel that this was an example of something that is part of their DNA,” while whites believe “that it was Gates who behaved intemperately.”6 Clearly neither the liberal color-blind narrative nor the racial difference narrative are adequate to the representational complexities of the situation, nor can either address what might be done about the ideological contradictions in our current understandings of citizenship that created the argument in Gates’ house and led to his arrest. While this debate runs into many of the same limitations that George Bush did in his attempt to speak to the complexities of the events of September 11, I see in it two hopeful and potentially different elements. The first importantly different aspect of this event and its coverage is that the president, the national unifying symbol of a liberal body politic, did publically address historical oppression and inequality as elements factoring into a political and social reading of the ways in which we define and police bodies in the United States. In Obama’s initial remarks he noted that “there is a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately, and that’s just a fact.”7 The president’s insistence on tying a history of racial oppression into a contemporary arrest in which race was not explicitly stated as a motivating factor ultimately led to his use of the phrase “acted stupidly,” which received heavy criticism from the police and other individuals and social groups. In his formal statement on July 24, he said he


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“regretted” his choice of words but maintained his stance that the arrest was a national as opposed to a purely local issue because it “is indicative of the fact that race is still a troubling aspect of our society.” Rather than simply rescind his remarks, he asked the nation to see the event as a “teachable moment” that might encourage Americans to “spend a little more time listening to each other” and “be a little more reflective” about what we ourselves can do. An aesthetics of internal distantiation, as I have discussed here, works to open up just such kinds of “teachable moments” in which readers are prompted to listen differently and to reflect on their own ideological readings of their social and political world. The second relevant aspect of the Gates arrest and its surrounding controversy is that the media has been turning more frequently to academic perspectives to make sense of the situation. Within a week of the arrest The New York Times interviewed former professor of philosophy and English Ralph Medley; USA Today spoke to Katheryn Russell-Brown, director of the Center for the Study of Race and Race Relations at the University of Florida, David Harris, law professor at the University of Pittsburgh, and Edwin Dorn, former dean at the University of Texas; abcnews.com spoke to Margaret Burnham, a Northwestern University law professor; and The Washington Post interviewed Jelani Cobb, an associate professor of history at Spelman College in Atlanta. This may be due in part to the fact the Gates works in the academy and speaks to race in the United States from a cultural and literary studies perspective and as a humanities professor. However, much of the coverage appears to be turning to professors of law, humanities and social sciences in order to make sense not only of the event but also of the widespread and passionate responses to it. This indicates that dominant narratives of representation are at a loss to make sense of the structures of feeling surrounding social identity, citizenship, and the law brought to light by these events. My hope is that both the president’s unwillingness to disregard historical and systemic inequalities (even while addressing a presumably politically unified national audience) and the fact that the media is asking for nuanced perspectives from professionals who spend a great deal of time thinking about narratives of citizenship and social subjecthood are evidence that we are nationally recognizing a lack in current citizenship discourses. We are recognizing a need not for new narratives to fit different social identities, but for new ways of understanding and addressing the idea of citizenship and national identity that can incorporate an acknowledgment of multiple and differing social identities as part of its very construction. These new modes of


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representation and understanding, these new aesthetics if you will, of citizenship can only come with a realization of the limitations of our old discourses. I have used the concept of internally distantiating aesthetics throughout this study both to look at ways that contemporary writers address textual limitations of social identity representation and to suggest how currently popular academic frameworks are invested in a politics of internal distantiation, if at times also complicit with a representative politics of hegemonic liberal multiculturalism. In so doing, I have addressed the question of how we can use tools that come from Western academic literary studies to contribute to the current interest in interdisciplinary and social identity-based intellectual projects. I have suggested that we cannot move beyond multiculturalism by pure force of will nor can we move beyond our structures for reading literary texts, our national ideologies, and our inherited, if problematic, intellectual concepts and terminology. I have made a case to keep interrogating multiculturalism and its attendant concepts because we cannot escape the fact that multiculturalism informs our social and political thinking. As I hope I have made clear in the discussion of both the September 11 presidential response and the recent Gates arrest, liberal multiculturalism has become part of our way of registering what is visible and what is sayable. Thus an examination of how we see and hear what we see and hear is an important intellectual and political project. Looking closely at both literary and nonliterary linguistic forms and the aesthetics they use to speak to us is a central component of that examination. Embracing multiculturalism will not effect healthy academic change without consistent rigorous critique of what that term means. Nor will shifting our research frameworks beyond national boundaries answer the outstanding questions and paradoxes regarding the effects of new social movements on the ways US literature is critiqued, taught, canonized and categorized, and how we as US subjects interpret and narrate identity and politics in our everyday lives. I hope that this study will contribute to a rigorous critique of liberal multiculturalism in both an academic and a more broadly national context, particularly through its analysis of the limitations of representational aesthetics in our contemporary moment. The new acts of creation that might reconstitute our ideological understandings of America and Americans that James Baldwin called for in 1949 are still needed today. We need ways of thinking about American ideologies of social belonging, identity, and difference that make us aware of those ideologies both as something we rely on to read and interpret


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the world and as something we might be able to critique. Rather than being put to death by the paradox of liberal multiculturalism, an aesthetics of internal distantiation can point to alternative ways of understanding the US citizen-subject and her relation to identity categories. It might, in other words, provide a way to think about the paradox of liberal multicultural citizenship without attempting to either solve or destroy it.


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Appendix

4

Teaching and Research on B harati Mukherjee ’s J A S M I N E and T H E H O L D E R O F T H E W O R L D

Below are the results from an email survey and Internet searches regarding the teaching of and research on Mukherjee’s Jasmine and The Holder of the World. In 2005 I sent an emailed survey to the top15 rated English departments in the country asking professors if they taught either book and in what context. I then did both a Google search of syllabi that include these novels as well as a Modern Language Association bibliography search for publications on each. It is evident from the results that Jasmine is taught more frequently and more frequently in a national context, and written on more frequently and discussed more frequently in a national context than Holder. I repeated these searches in 2007 and 2010 and got comparable results.

Teac hing Results of Survey on Jasmine and Holder, compiled July–September 2005: English Departments Surveyed: University of Pennsylvania, Yale University, Princeton University, Harvard University, University of California Berkeley, Stanford University, Cornell University, Columbia University, University of Virginia, Duke University, University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins University, University of California Los Angeles, Brown, University of California Irvine.

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Top 15 English Departments by scholarly quality of faculty and educational effectiveness as evaluated by the National Research Council and reported in Educational Rankings Annual. Ed. Lynn C. Hattendorf Westney. New York: Thompson Gale, 2005. Scholars of American literature, postcolonial literature, Asian American literature, and 20th century literature from each department surveyed. • Total number of professors surveyed: 183 • Total number of responses: 113 • Total number of professors teaching or advising teaching on Jasmine: 14 • Total number of professors teaching or advising teaching on Holder: 3 Topics of classes in which Jasmine was taught: On the Asian American Subject (Undergrad), Freshman Literature/Writing (Undergrad), Multiethnic US Literature (Undergrad), Ethnicity in American Literature (Grad), World Literature (Undergrad), American Upward Mobility Stories (Undergrad), Feminist Theory (Grad and Undergrad), Postcolonial Women’s Writing (Undergrad), Fiction of the Americas (Undergrad), Writing and Displacement (Grad and Undergrad), Fictions of Cultural Difference (Undergrad), Ethnic Literature (Undergrad), Post–World War II American Immigration Literature (Undergrad), Asian American Literature (Grad) Topics of classes in which Holder was taught: Genre (Grad), American Literature and World Religions (Grad), American Literature in a Transnational Context (Grad and Undergrad), Contemporary Ethnic Women’s Fiction (Grad and Undergrad) Results of Google search for “Jasmine, Mukherjee, syllabus” and “Holder of the World, Mukherjee, syllabus” 2005: “Jasmine, Mukherjee, syllabus” produced 101 results; “Holder of the World, Mukherjee, syllabus” produced 36. Results of Google search for “Jasmine, Mukherjee, syllabus” and “Holder of the World, Mukherjee, syllabus” 2007:


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“Jasmine, Mukherjee, syllabus” produced 829; “Holder of the World, Mukherjee, syllabus,” produced 61. Results of Google search for “Jasmine, Mukherjee, syllabus” and “Holder of the World, Mukherjee, syllabus” 2010: “Jasmine, Mukherjee, syllabus” produced 49,700; “Holder of the World, Mukherjee, syllabus” produced 31,600. Analysis of findings: Jasmine has been taught more often to undergraduates in classes looking at identity and American literature whereas Holder is more likely to be taught in a global context and to be taught to graduate students.

Researc h Results of Modern Language Association bibliography search for articles on the two novels 2005: Jasmine 44; Holder 10 Results of Modern Language Association bibliography search for articles on the two novels 2007: Jasmine 58; Holder 17 Results of Modern Language Association bibliography search for articles on the two novels 2007: Jasmine 75; Holder 23 Locations of publication for articles on the two novels: Jasmine: Women, America, and Movement, Contemporary American Women Writers, American Literature, The Immigrant Experience in North American Literature, International Women’s Writing; Holder: Postcolonial Theory and the United States, ARIEL, Borderlands, Intercultural Encounters-Studies in English Literature. Analysis of findings: Jasmine has been treated as an “American” text, which represents a female, minority experience, whereas Holder has been categorized for the most part as postcolonial, cosmopolitan,


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multinational, or denationalized. The exceptions to this are the articles that treat Jasmine as postcolonial, published in places such as Cross-Cultures and Hybridity and Postcolonialism. However, this does not diminish the fact that of the two novels Jasmine appears more available for and amenable to a nationally oriented reading.


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Notes

I ntro duc t i on 1. I am thinking of citizenship here not simply as a patriotic category or a chosen mode of identification, but instead as something similar to Lauren Berlant’s description of it as “an index for appraising domestic national life, and for witnessing the processes of valorization that make different populations differently legitimate.” Citizenship, says Berlant, “is continually being produced out of a political, rhetorical, and economic struggle over who will count as ‘the people’ and how social membership will be measured and valued” (Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997], 20). I could have, and in places do, use the word “subjecthood” in place of citizenship but I more often choose citizenship in order to stress the modern nationalist dimensions of the rhetoric I am describing (as “subjecthood” tends to imply a position under monarchical government, as distinct from democracy); this choice also highlights the way in which the US population’s “participation” in government does not require any particular act that engages their rights as citizens such as voting but requires simply an unconscious acceptance of one’s own benefits as American and the corresponding worldview that accompanies that acceptance. Citizenship remains an important category of social analysis because, as Bernard Murchland has argued, even though “the driving forces of modern society . . . do not encourage a very strong sense of citizenship . . . [W]e are beginning to realize that this weak sense of citizenship may be at the root of many of our social pathologies.” Bernard Murchland, “The Rigors of Citizenship,” The Review of Politics 59, no. 1 (1997): 127. 2. I am not suggesting that no one is doing work on multiculturalism but rather that the term multiculturalism is often equated with the great production of work on identity and diversity in the 1990s. Part of the impetus for turning to cosmopolitan and globalized models is the frustrating ideological reification, discussed later in this introduction, of ethnic, racial, gender, and sexual identities in the broader American (multi)cultural public sphere. As early as 1995, David Hollinger was arguing that while “multiculturalism is a prodigious movement . . . its limitations are increasingly apparent” and calling for a

pal-obourn-07not.indd 169

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“cosmopolitan-inspired step beyond the multicultural.” David Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 1, 4. 3. Here, I use “the sixties” as shorthand for the civil rights movement, black nationalism, second-wave feminisms, the red power movement, the Asian American movement, the Chicano movement, and all other identity-based politics that emerged in and around that decade. Following Cornel West, I use the sixties “for interpretive purposes,” not as “chronological category which encompasses a decade, but rather a historical construct or heuristic rubric which renders noteworthy historical processes and events intelligible” (Cornell West, “The Paradox of the Afro-American Rebellion,” Social Text 0, nos. 9/10 [1984]: 44). Also, I am not suggesting that conflicts between liberal and multiculturalist political ideologies do not arise in other nations. This is a problematic ideological position shared by many nations in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. However, in this book I am focused on the particularities of the US case related to its historically idealistic rhetoric of equality and its history of racially based restrictions on citizenship. As Evelyn Glenn has argued, the “struggle [between equality and inequality] has been particularly intense in the United States, where tension between a professed ideology of equality and inclusion—the so-called American Creed—and a ‘deep and common desire to exclude and reject large groups of human beings’ has marked every stage in the history of American citizenship.” Evelyn Glenn, “Citizenship and Inequality: Historical and Global Perspectives,” Social Problems 47, no. 1 (2000): 1. 4. Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955) is the foundational work that theoretically established liberalism as a central tenet of American social and political thought. Though his thesis has been challenged by theorists such as Bernard Bailyn (The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution [Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1967]) and J. G. A. Pocock (The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975]), who have pointed out that the ideas of neoclassical republicanism were also important to the American Revolution and underlay the ideology of the writers of the Constitution, I am interested mainly in the way that specifically liberal US ideology was constructed, as it is liberalism that has remained at the center of US political, social, and legal discourse into the late twentieth century, the time period with which this book is most centrally concerned. Moreover, though republicanism did have an effect on the construction of American citizen identities, many of its ideals, which were taken up by the authors of the Constitution, overlapped with and were incorporated into a stronger liberal ideology. For more on this, see James P. Young’s Reconsidering American Liberalism:


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Notes

5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

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The Troubled Odyssey of the Liberal Idea (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), Evelyn Glenn’s “Citizenship and Inequality,” and David F. Ericson’s The Shaping of American Liberalism: The Debates over Ratification, Nullification and Slavery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), in which he argues that in the early United States, “republicanism [was] related to liberalism as a species to a genus” and that the general “nature of American political thought” has been “consensually liberal” (2, 1). Rogers M. Smith also makes a convincing argument that US citizenship is not truly liberal but in fact a conglomerate of “multiple traditions” including liberal, republican, and ascriptive elements (Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997], 8). In practice, many other traditions have been employed. My argument, however, is not that the United States is purely liberal, but that liberalism is an ideal of US citizenship and the way Americans make sense of themselves ideologically as members of a nation. Glenn, “Citizenship and Inequality,” 7; emphasis in original. Ayelet Shachar, “On Citizenship and Multicultural Vulnerability,” Political Theory 28, no. 1 (February 2000): 66. Ibid., 66–67; emphasis in original. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 136–42. Will Kymlicka, Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Citizenship (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 22–23. Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), particularly chapters 4 and 5. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, chapter 4; Will Kymlicka, “American Multiculturalism in the International Arena,” Dissent 45, no. 4 (1998): 73–79. Brian Barry, Culture and Equality: An Egalitarian Critique of Multiculturalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 7. Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 25. Ibid. Ibid. Nancy Fraser, “Recognition or Redistribution? A Critical Reading of Iris Young’s Justice and the Politics of Difference,” Journal of Political Philosophy 3, no. 2 (June 1995): 167. Most civil rights workers and feminists of the 1960s, who were some of the earliest inspirations for the academic focus on identity and recognition, saw the need to recognize the social construction of women and African Americans as a precondition for claiming certain social, political, and economic rights that had been denied them. As Joan


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18. 19.

20.

21.

Notes Scott argues, “The struggle for multiculturalism unfolds in the context of a prevailing ideology of individualism . . . In the 1960s and 70s proponents of affirmative action and identity politics took economic, political, and social structures for granted . . . but in the 1980’s and 90s the ideological pendulum has swung back to individualism.” Joan Scott, “Multiculturalism and the Politics of Identity,” October 61 (1992): 17. Ibid. As Fraser notes, “Where else but in the United States does ethnicity so regularly eclipse class, nation and party?” Nancy Fraser, “Recognition or Redistribution?” 174. Nikhil Pal Singh cites this paradox in relation to racial blackness versus concepts of ethnicity in the United States. Singh addresses the ghettoizing and historical erasing of aspects of civil rights that did not align with an American liberal model. Under what Singh calls “the regime of modern racial liberalism,” it becomes difficult not only to separate but also to reconcile narratives of successful black assimilation with histories of racial oppression. This creates “an intellectual division” between studies of race and ethnicity. Ethnicity takes on the liberal task of marking “a kind of difference that no longer makes a difference, thus contributing to the transcendent idea of America as a container of only positive and uncomplicated diversities.” Race, by contrast, does the work of representing and encoding “legacies of conquest, enslavement, and non-national status that disturb the peace, whose narrative must thus be silenced within public culture, or hived off from the national story into a separate world of their own.” This splitting results in a paradox of representation that Singh calls a “national schizophrenia in which racial difference is either shouted down . . . or shunted into zones of institutionalized marginality.” Nikhil Pal Singh, Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 41–42. The social narratives surrounding such liberal multicultural paradoxes are repeatedly illustrated in the ongoing affirmative action debates— one of the biggest post–civil rights identity-based political controversies and one in which the national public as abstract unified entity is forced to recognize itself as differentially embodied. An AP article on the 2003 Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger cases—in which white undergraduates and law students respectively filed suits against the University of Michigan alleging that the university’s use of racial preference in admissions violated the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—states, “A divided Supreme Court allowed universities to give minority applicants an edge in admissions Monday, ruling that the nation depends in part on educated leaders who respect and understand those who do not look like them” (Anne Gearan, “Supreme Court Split on Affirmative


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Notes

22.

23.

24. 25. 26.

27.

28.

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Action,” Associated Press, June 23, 2003, http://news.yahoo.com). This might be seen as a multicultural approach to education in the United States—one that values diversity and an appreciation of difference. However, what should theoretically be an argument about structural adjustment and redistribution of resources based on histories of racial oppression and systemic inequalities in access to higher education becomes, in the discourse of liberal multiculturalism, about specific individuals. Not only does it become individualistic, but it seems only to be able to address the benefits for “educated leaders” (here coded as white) who will benefit from the “multicultural exposure” to difference and become, as Justice Powell argued in the Bakke case, “better prepared for an increasingly diverse workforce and society” (Gearan). This approach is doubly limiting in that it stunts material change by erasing the historic and systemic aspects of the issue, and it disallows representation of the minority citizen, removing his or her stake in affirmative action from the discussion. The question of aesthetics’ relation to politics implicitly goes back to classical Greece but explicitly goes back at least to the eighteenth century, when Burke linked notions of political and aesthetic consensus, and it has been with us every since. Romantics, Marxists, poststructuralists and feminists have approached this question from multiple angles. Contemporary theorists such as Jacques Rancière (discussed below) continue to focus on this question. Terry Eagleton, Isobel Armstrong, and Emory Elliott, briefly mentioned in this chapter, have all done extensive work on the question of the radical power of aesthetics. This long history implies the ongoing usefulness of such interrogations as well as an anxiety about our inabilities to fully resolve the questions it poses. George Levine, “Reclaiming the Aesthetic” in Aesthetics and Ideology, ed. George Levine (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 3. Isobel Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 40. Ibid., 41. Christopher Castiglia and Russ Castronovo, “Preface: A ‘Hive of Subtlety’: Aesthetics and the End(s) of Cultural Studies,” American Literature 76, no. 3 (September 2004): 423. Kušnír, “Ideology and Aesthetics in Literature,” in Ideology and Aesthetics in American Literature and Arts, ed. Jaroslav Kušnír (Stuttgart: Verlag, 2007), 7. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism introduces the third Critique as “a compendium of the beliefs about and ideals for art that have come to be called aestheticism (the separation of artistic concerns and values into their own sphere, which is seen as superior to all others)” and as introducing a “characterization of art [which] resonate[s]


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29.

30. 31. 32. 33.

34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

Notes through the Romantic and modernist periods.” Vincent B. Leitch, William E. Cane, Laurie A. Finke, Barbara E. Johnson, John McGowan, and Jeffrey L. Williams, eds., The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York: Norton, 2001), 499. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 91–95. Ibid., 97. This is sometimes translated as “subjective universal validity.” Ibid., 99. Ibid. As Wai Chee Dimock puts it, “‘Taste,’ the most private of our senses, is singled out by Kant as the most public, its contents most universally communicable, its field of action of the largest scope.” Wai Chee Dimock, “Aesthetics at the Limits of the Nation: Kant, Pound, and the Saturday Review,” American Literature 76, no. 3 (September 2004): 530. I choose these two theorists in part because they represent rather divergent positions in relation to literary theory. Fish works in a more traditional US close-reading style of aesthetics in literary studies, while Rancière writes out of a continental, philosophical, and visual-studiesbased understanding of aesthetic theory. Additionally, Fish played a major role in twentieth-century traditions of reader-response theory, which take as their object not the text alone, but the aesthetic response to that text, theorizing a distinction between formal objective qualities of a text and the subjective (but nevertheless theorizable) effects of the text on the reader. Illuminating the parallels between Fish and Rancière reveals a similar understanding of the politics of aesthetics underlying what may in other contexts be seen as oppositional or at least divergent approaches to art, aesthetics, and politics. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 29. Ibid., 30. Ibid., 29–36. Ibid., xi. Ibid., 100. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2004), 13. Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth Century Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), xii. Ibid., 1. Ibid. Ibid., 1–2. Ibid., 2–3. Rancière, Disagreement, 31.


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47. Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); Judith Butler, “Passing, Queering: Nella Larsen’s Psychoanalytic Challenge,” in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limitations of Sex, 167–86 (New York: Routledge, 1993). 48. Jean Wyatt, “Love’s Time and the Reader: Ethical Effects of Nachträglichkeit in Toni Morrison’s Love.” Narrative 16, no. 2 (May 2008): 195,196. 49. Louis Althusser, “A Letter on Art in Reply to André Daspre,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review, 1971), 221. 50. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Toward an Investigation)” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review, 1971), 127–186. 51. Althusser, “A Letter on Art,” 221. 52. Ibid., 223. 53. Ibid., 222; emphasis in original. 54. Ibid., 224. 55. Ibid., 225; emphasis in original. 56. Ibid., 227; emphasis in original. 57. Ibid., 225; emphasis in original. 58. Priscilla Wald, Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 1. 59. Ibid., 69. 60. Ibid., 91–92. 61. Ibid., 10. 62. Ibid., 39. 63. Philip Fisher, Still the New World: American Literature in a Culture of Creative Destruction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 52. 64. Herman Melville, Benito Cereno, in Billy Bud and Other Stories (New York: Penguin, 1986), 207. 65. Ibid., 208. 66. Ibid., 198. 67. Ibid., 213. 68. Ibid., 218. 69. Ibid., 233. 70. Ibid., 258. 71. Ibid., 257. 72. Ibid. 73. For a slightly different subtle and complex reading of Benito Cereno as internally distantiating, see James Kavanagh, “‘That Hive of Subtlety:’ Benito Cereno as a Critique of Ideology,” Bucknell Review: The Arts Society and Literature 29, no. 1 (1984): 127–57.


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74. Fisher talks about this either-or construction as the construction of a riddle for which the solution is either “the abolition of complexity” or “the abolition of consciousness” (Fisher, Still the New World, 114). 75. Melville, Benito Cereno, 162. 76. Ibid., 167. 77. Eric Sundquist describes these types of descriptions as “knots” in the text that are “ironic” and “tautological.” I argue that Melville undermines our ability to read irony confidently, thus disallowing the reader the ability to separate herself from the practices and rhetoric of slavery. My reading corresponds to Sundquist’s in that he sees “the operative irony in the tale” as one “that finally goes beyond the revelation of apparent deception to verge more closely upon outright tautology, suspending meaning between possibilities that are not simply exclusive and opposite but rather dangerously equal.” Eric Sundquist, “Suspense and Tautology in Benito Cereno,” GLYPH 8 (1981): 108. 78. Melville, Benito Cereno, 213. 79. D. W. Winnicott, “The Fate of the Transitional Object,” in Psychoanalytic Explorations, eds. Clare Winnicott, Ray Shepherd, and Madeline Davis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 57. 80. D. W. Winnicott, “The Use of an Object,’” in Psychoanalytic Explorations, eds. Clare Winnicott, Ray Shepherd, and Madeline Davis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 221. 81. Louis Althusser, “A Letter on Art,” 224. 82. Winnicott, “The Fate of the Transitional Object,” 58. 83. Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (London: Routledge, 1995), 19. 84. Ibid., 97.

Chapter 1 1. James Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” in Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon, 1955), 20–21. 2. Ibid., 22. 3. Ibid., 19. 4. Ibid., 18. 5. Ibid., 21–22. 6. Ibid., 15. 7. Louis Althusser, “A Letter on Art in Reply to André Daspre” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review, 1971), 223. 8. James Baldwin and Audre Lorde, “Revolutionary Hope: A Conversation between James Baldwin and Audre Lorde,” Essence 15, no. 8 (December 1984): 74. 9. Ibid.


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10. Cheryl A. Wall also sees Lorde as taking up a “challenge that Baldwin posed,” though she suggests that Lorde responded to Baldwin’s call for a God that can “make us larger, freer, and more loving,” finding those qualities in the goddesses of Dahomey. Cheryl A. Wall, Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 51. 11. This comes from the front flap of the dust jacket of Alexis De Veaux’s Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde (New York: Norton, 2004), designed by Charlotte Strick. 12. AnaLouise Keating, Women Reading Women Writing: Self-Invention in Paula Gunn Allen, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Audre Lorde (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 157. See also Elizabeth Alexander on Lorde’s “creation of a new language to make space for the ‘new’ of the self invented body” (Elizabeth Alexander, “Coming Out Blackened and Whole: Fragmentation and Reintegration in Audre Lorde,” American Literary History 6, no. 4 [1994]: 696); Kara Provost who claims that “[Lorde’s] work helps transform difference(s) from solely points of pain into points of power as well” (Kara Provost, “Becoming Afrekete: The Trickster in the Work of Audre Lorde,” MELUS 20, no. 4 [1995]: 57); Sarah E. Chinn, who says Zami gives us a “new body language” and is “a source of a new ethics of interconnection from which we can all learn a new spelling of all our names” (Sarah E. Chin, “Feeling Her Way: Audre Lorde and the Power of Touch,” GLQ 9, no. 1–2 [2003]: 197); and Margaret Kissam Morris on Lorde’s “performative” language as “a bridge toward the possibility of organizing around difference” (Margaret Kissam Morris, “Audre Lorde: Textual Authority and the Embodied Self,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 23, no. 1 [2002]: 172). 13. Cathy Caruth, “Recapturing the Past: Introduction,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 151. 14. Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” in Sister Outsider (Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984), 39. 15. Lorde read and was influenced heavily by canonical romantic and modernist poets, including Keats, Byron, Shelley, and T. S. Elliot. See De Veaux, Warrior Poet, 25. 16. Karla Hammond, “An Interview with Audre Lorde,” American Poetry Review 9, no. 2 (1980): 18. 17. Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 2. 18. Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 266–67. 19. Althusser, “A Letter on Art,” 222. 20. Ibid., 225.


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21. Dori Laub and Nannette C. Auerhahn, “Knowing and Not Knowing Massive Psychic Trauma: Forms of Traumatic Memory,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 74 (1993): 288. 22. Ibid. 23. Cassie Premo Steele, We Heal from Memory: Sexton, Lorde, Anzaldúa, and the Poetry of Witness (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 4. 24. Ibid., 3–4. 25. Though I am not centrally concerned here with whether Lorde herself experienced personal psychological trauma, this is not to suggest that living as a black lesbian in the United States is not a potentially traumatic experience. Wahneema Lubiano argues that dominant US political and cultural narratives create the experience of being “mugged by a metaphor,” through existing “at the mercy of racist, sexist, heterosexist, and global capitalist constructions of the meaning of skin color on a daily basis” that can “physically traumatiz[e] and psychologically assault[]” one via their operations (Wahneema Lubiano, “Like Being Mugged By a Metaphor,” in Mapping Multiculturalism, eds. Avery F. Gordon and Christopher Newfield [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996], 64). Elizabeth Alexander argues, “Public rapes, beatings and lynchings . . . the Clarence Thomas senate hearings; Mike Tyson’s rape trial; Magic Johnson and Arthur Ashe’s televised press conferences about their HIV and AIDS status; and, of course, the Rodney King beating . . . and O.J. Simpson case,” are each “traumatic instances [in which] black bodies and their attendant dramas are publicly consumed by a larger populace” (Elizabeth Alexander, “‘Can You Be Black and Look at This?’ Reading the Rodney King Video(s),” Public Culture 7, no. 1 [1994]: 78–79). While this chapter in no way undermines Lubiano’s or Alexander’s arguments, it does maintain that, though Lorde deals with culturally and identity-based traumatic material and traumatic historical memory, her use of what I am calling traumatic form is not a clinically traumatized reaction to such events. It is a controlled and nonpathological use of language to capture the experience of living in the subject positions described by Lubiano and Alexander. 26. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 1903 (New York: Penguin, 1989), 5. 27. Ibid., 4–5. 28. Lorde, “An Interview: Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich,” Sister Outsider (Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984), 104. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., 105, ellipses in original. 31. Here I am thinking of self-“expression” along the lines of Roland Barthes who describes “a text” as “a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture . . .


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32. 33.

34.

35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40.

41.

179

the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others . . . Did he wish to express himself, he ought at least to know that the inner ‘thing’ he thinks to ‘translate’ is itself only a ready-formed dictionary.” Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 146. Laub and Auerhahn, “Knowing and Not Knowing,” 228. Ernesto Laclau, “Identity and Hegemony: The Role of Universality in the Constitution of Political Knowledge,” in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek (New York: Verso, 2000), 76. Michele Wallace, “On the National Black Feminist Organization,” in Feminist Revolution: An Abridged Addition with Additional Writings, ed. Kathie Sarachild (New York: Redstocking), 174. De Veaux, Warrior Poet, 130–31. Audre Lorde, From a Land Where Other People Live (Detroit: Broadside Press, 1973), 29. Amitai F. Avi-Ram, “Apo Koinou in Audre Lorde and the Moderns: Defining the Differences,” Callaloo 26 (Winter 1986): 193. Patricia Hill Collins, “Shifting the Center: Race, Class, and Feminist Theorizing about Motherhood,” in Representations of Motherhood, eds. Donna Bassin, Margaret Honey, and Meryle Mahrer Kaplan (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 68. Ibid., 69. “Generation II” suggests not only the next generation but also “second generation”—a phrase most often used to describe sons and daughters of immigrant parents. With the knowledge that Lorde’s parents were Caribbean born, we can place this poem in the additional context of conflicts and connections between mother and daughter as first and second-generation West Indian New Yorkers. Lorde said in a 1990 interview that because her parents had always planned to come to the United States for only a short time to make money and return home, she was “raised to believe that home was somewhere else” and that she and her siblings “were just sojourners in this place.” Charles H. Rowell, “Above the Wind: An Interview with Audre Lorde,” Callaloo 23, no. 1 (2000): 52. In addressing these paradoxes, Lorde turns to a number of tropes of high modernism, which also required theretofore unaccustomed modes of poetic attention and reception from its readers. Modernist poetry is often figured as traumatic, particularly in its representations of the results of World War I on individual and national psyches. The sociopolitical context of Lorde’s poetry differentiates its use of similar formal tropes from that of the modernists. Blackness is always already a part of literary modernism, but it is often there to create a white, modernist aesthetic or to reconstruct the stability of a black identity


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42.

43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51. 52.

Notes destroyed through slavery (see Michael North, The Dialectic of Modernism: Race, Language, & Twentieth-Century Literature [New York: Oxford University Press, 1994] and Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993]). Though Lorde employs tropes of canonical white modernism, she does it to create a specific political, identity-based aesthetic of internal distantiation that does not—and cannot—place itself at a distance from its sociopolitical context; rather, it prompts its reader to become aware of her own immersion in and reliance on social and political ideologies of identity. Consider the Black Arts Movement, which was contemporaneous with Lorde’s early writing. Both Black Arts poets and Lorde had access to a literary history, or syntax, of African American texts, but this history had to be mined in different ways. It was mined very warily by Lorde, whose poems could be incorporated along the lines of the Black Arts Movement for their racial content alone, flattening their multiply signifying language by making them “about” racial blackness. Access to self-expression that is socially and syntactically meaningful without being self-contradictory thus becomes an impossibility. Lorde instead negotiates a mode of expression that requires a different mode of reception from the reader, a mode in which the reader becomes aware of the limitations of social identity representation while she allows syntax and connotation to function in alternative ways so as to allow the registration of those social identities. Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Freedom, CA: Crossing, 1982), 180–81. Ibid., 54–55. As Lorde noted in her private journals, “In this country we do not speak of contradictions, we merely live them, all too often in rage or silence, unnamed and unused.” De Veaux, Warrior Poet, 347. Lorde, Zami, 162. Ibid., 160. Ibid., 215. I am thinking of Lorde’s poems as more “direct” representations of selfhood in that they, like trauma patients’ stories, function more like an immediate representation of experience than a description of it. They lack the translation between self and other, experience and expression, and speaker and audience present in Lorde’s prose works. This translation process, which requires packaging self and experience into socially intelligible and often identity-based language both makes the prose more accessible and limits its range of representation. Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” 55. Ibid., 59, emphasis added. Obviously, there are limits to all forms of expression, linguistic or otherwise. What I am getting at here is that the somewhat jarring


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Notes

53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64.

181

contradiction between Lorde’s stated goals in these essays and the linguistic representations her prose produces points to the fact that the language she has available to her in order to speak publicly on these issues is not entirely sufficient to express her personal and political goals. Thus, examining these limitations is meant not to be a discovery about language or speech itself but to point to a historical moment in which the language of representation is, for particular social and political reasons, insufficient to encompass the range of desired expression. The essays of Sister Outsider make clear that our everyday ways of thinking and talking about identity, the individual, the group, difference, cultures, and so forth are not fully adequate to address the complexities that exist in relation to lived identity within the contemporary US democratic social system. Caruth, “Recapturing,” 153. Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” 110. David Kazanjian, The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 8. The idea of the problematic character of the “list” has been around at least since the beginning of modern identity politics. I bring it up again here to reinforce the way in which identity is built into the language of its expression. Judith Butler, for example, has argued that we as critics should try to get beyond “those proverbial commas (gender, sexuality, race, class), that usually mean that we have not yet figured out how to think the relations we seek to mark.” Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 168. Ibid. Lorde, “The Master’s Tools,” 112. Ibid., 37. De Veaux, Warrior Poet, 166. Ibid., 199, 161, and 230. Audre Lorde, “Coal,” in Coal (New York: Norton, 1976), 6. Wendy Brown, “Injury, Identity, Politics,” in Mapping Multiculturalism, ed. Avery F. Gordon (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 155. Ibid., 164. It is interesting that Lorde uses the British spelling of “coloured” here. This is another of many ways she subtly points out the historical and national construction of language and identity. It evokes the interlocking national and colonial histories that appropriated the word “colo(u)red” to define/construct racial identity while also pointing out the arbitrariness and instability of an identity that relies on arbitrary and unstable language systems to create and mark it. It implicates a transAtlantic history of racial violence that extends beyond the United States


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182

65.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74.

75.

76.

77. 78.

79.

80. 81. 82. 83.

Notes (and thus “African American” history/identity) to other former British colonies, particularly in Lorde’s case the English-speaking Caribbean. One could, of course, write on a window with a diamond. But even if this is the image evoked for the reader, since Lorde does not indicate what is written there, the image of the written word must be still be understood by the reader not as linguistic code to be deciphered but as an aural and visual sensory experience. Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 38. Ibid. Lorde, “The Master’s Tools,” 110. Ibid., 112. Laub and Auerhahn, “Knowing and Not Knowing,” 288. Thomas Ogden, The Primitive Edge of Experience (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson Inc., 1989), 195. Angela Y. Davis, “Gender, Class and Multiculturalism: Rethinking ‘Race’ Politics,” in Mapping Multiculturalism, eds. Avery F. Gordon and Christopher Newfield (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 46. Ibid. D. W. Winnicott, “Playing and Culture,” in Psychoanalytic Explorations, eds. Clare Winnicott, Ray Shepherd, and Madeline Davis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 204; emphasis in original. Barbara Johnson, “Using People: Kant with Winnicott,” in The Turn to Ethics, eds. Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (New York: Routledge, 2000), 50. Most contemporary psychoanalysts use the word “potential” for this psychic space. Winnicott himself only rarely used “transitional,” but I choose to use it because it stresses the relation between that psychic space and the experience of using the transitional object. It also suggests that one reenters this space throughout life through the use of transitional objects, whereas potential space is something that exists constantly and is always available in a healthy person. Caruth, “Recapturing,” 153; emphasis in original. D. W. Winnicott, “The Child in the Family Group,” in Home is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst, eds. Claire Winnicott, Ray Shepherd and Madaline Davis (New York: Norton, 1990), 133. Winnicott, “The Fate of the Transitional Object,” in Psychoanalytic Explorations, eds. Clare Winnicott, Ray Shepherd, and Madeline Davis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 57. Ibid. Ibid., 58. Audre Lorde, “Power,” in Between Our Selves (Point Reyes, CA: Eidolon Editions, 1976), 1–2. Thomas Dilworth, for example, claims that the line “my teenaged plug” is not a phallus but the teenaged son of the female speaker whose


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183

function it would be to “acquire power” for her and “energize her ego” (Thomas Dilworth, “Lorde’s Power,” The Explicator 57, no. 1 [Fall 1998]: 57). Similarly, Lexi Rudnisky reads the “I” as a woman. She claims that the female speaker’s failure to use poetry instead of rhetoric “will have the result of metamorphosing the black-woman speaker into an angry black teenage boy,” which would “confirm the racist rhetoric that black people are ‘beasts’ and quite literally ‘motherfuckers’.” Lexi Rudnitsky, “The ‘Power’ and ‘Sequelae’ of Audre Lorde’s Syntactical Strategies,” Callaloo 26, no. 2 (2003): 480.

C hapter 2 1. Cyrus R. K. Patell, “Representing Emergent Literatures,” American Literary History 15, no. 1 (2003): 68. 2. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 114. 3. Louis Althusser, “A Letter on Art in Reply to André Daspre” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review, 1971), 222. 4. Homi Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree outside Dehi, May 1817,” in Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (1985): 152. 5. This is not to suggest that no work has been done on hybridity in an American context. Rafael Pérez-Torres has addressed the problems with using a British postcolonial vocabulary to discuss Chicano mestizaje (a term often used to describe the cultural and racial “mixing” of Spanish and American Indian people). Werner Sollors has written specifically on racially hybrid characters in American literature, highlighting their particular national roles. Nevertheless, when “hybridity” is invoked, it is often taken from postcolonial theory and imported, without enough explicit revision, into a US context. This chapter follows the example of Pérez-Torres and Sollors by attempting to consciously use postcolonial vocabulary in relation to, but also redefining it to fit, the historically distinct context of the United States. See Rafael Pérez-Torres, “Chicano Ethnicity, Cultural Hybridity, and the Mestizo Voice,” American Literature 70, no. 1 (1998):153–176; Werner Sollors, Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of InterracialLiterature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). 6. Marta E. Sánchez, “Arturo Islas’ The Rain God: An Alternative Tradition,” American Literature 62 (June 1990): 285, 303. 7. David Rice, “Sinners Among Angels, or Family History and the Ethnic Narrator in Arturo Islas’s The Rain God and Migrant Souls,” in Literature, Interpretation, Theory 11 (2000): 172. 8. Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995), 25–26.


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184 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

18. 19.

20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

Notes Ibid., 26. Ibid., 19. Ibid. Arturo Islas, “On the Bridge, At the Border: Migrants and Immigrants,” Ernesto Galzara Commemorative Lecture (Fifth Annual Lecture, Stanford Center for Chicano Research, Stanford University, 1990); see http://ccsre.stanford.edu/pdfs/5th_Annual_Lecture_1990.pdf. Frederick Louis Aldama, Dancing with Ghosts: A Critical Biography of Arturo Islas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 30. Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 89. José David Saldívar, “The Hybridity of Culture in Arturo Islas’s The Rain God,” in Cohesion and Dissent in America, eds. Carol Colatrella and Joseph Alkana (New York: State University of New York Press, 1994), 161. Ibid. Cherrie Moraga, “Queer Aztlán: The Reformation of the Chicano Tribe,” in Queer Cultures, eds. Deborah Carlin and Jennifer DiGrazia (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2004), 234. Antonio Viego, “The Place of Gay Male Chicano Literature in Queer Chicana/o Cultural Work,” Discourse 21, no. 3 (2000): 128. Quoted in Paul Skenazy, “The Long Walk Home,” Afterword to La Mollie and the King of Tears by Arturo Islas, ed. Paul Skenazy (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), 174. Arturo Islas, La Mollie and the King of Tears, ed. Paul Skenazy (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), 12. The character Louie was inspired by an exercise Islas did with his students. According to Aldama, they were asked to “imagine someone completely different from them and speak in that character’s voice alone.” Aldama, Dancing, 52. Arturo Islas, Migrant Souls (New York: Avon, 1990), 211. David Román, “Arturo Islas (1938–1991),” Contemporary Gay American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, ed. and pref. Emmanuel S. Nelson, intro. Gregory W. Bredbeck (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1993), 224. Ibid. Islas, La Mollie, 120. Ibid., 126. Ibid., 6, 9. Ibid., 126. Ibid. Rafael Pérez-Torres, “Chicano Ethnicity, Cultural Hybridity, and the Mestizo Voice,” American Literature 70, no. 1 (1998): 168, 173. Islas, La Mollie, 126. Young, Colonial Desire, 19.


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33. Islas, La Mollie, 5. 34. Ibid., 46. 35. Tony Castro, Chicano Power: The Emergence of Mexican America (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1974), 178. 36. Rafael Pérez-Torres, Movements in Chicano Poetry: Against Myths, Against Margins (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 41. 37. Ibid. 38. Islas, La Mollie, 12. 39. Castro, Chicano Power, 38. 40. Islas, La Mollie, 18. 41. Ibid., 16. 42. Ibid., 79. 43. Ronald Reagan, “Remarks on Signing the National Hispanic Heritage Week Proclamation,” September 10, 1984, The Public Papers of President Ronald W. Reagan, accessed November 2007, http://www .reagan.utexas.edu/search/speeches/speech_srch.html. 44. Islas, La Mollie, 53. 45. Ibid., 82. 46. Ibid., 47. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid., 48. 49. See Reagan, “Remarks.” 50. On Reagan’s response to AIDS, see Paula Treichler, How to Have Theory in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicles of AIDS (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 57. 51. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 12, 31. 52. Islas, La Mollie, 19–20. 53. Ibid., 19. 54. Ibid., 13. 55. Ibid., 149–50. 56. Ibid., 9. 57. Ibid., 10. 58. Ibid., 166. 59. Ibid., 30. 60. Ibid., 31. 61. My thanks to Adam Waterman for this insight about Hayworth. 62. Quoted in Aldama, Dancing, 55. 63. Islas, La Mollie, 37. 64. Ibid., 56. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid., 20. 67. Ibid., 46–47. 68. Ibid.


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Notes

69. Ibid., 6. 70. José Antonio Burciaga, “A Conversation with Arturo Islas,” Stanford Humanities Review 2, nos. 2–3 (1992): 175. 71. Lloyd Davis, “Death and Desire in Romeo and Juliet,” in Shakespeare and Sexuality, eds. Catherine M. S. Alexander and Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 37, 36. 72. Ibid., 40. 73. Nicholas F. Radel, “Queer Romeo and Juliet: Teaching Early Modern ‘Sexuality’ in Shakespeare’s ‘Heterosexual’ Tragedy,” in Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, ed. Maurice Hunt (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2000), 91. 74. Ramón Gutiérrez, “Sexual Transgression on the U.S.-Mexican Border,” in Mapping Multiculturalism, eds. Avery F. Gordon and Christopher Newfield (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 255–56. 75. Islas, La Mollie, 18. 76. Ibid., 53. 77. Fredierick Luis Aldama, “Ethnoqueer Rearchitexturing of Metropolitan Space,” Nepantla: Views from the South 1, no. 3 (2000): 591. 78. Islas, La Mollie, 71. 79. Ibid., 146. 80. Ibid., 145. 81. See Aldama, Dancing, 75–99. 82. Leo Bersani, HOMOS (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 99. 83. Ibid., 101. 84. Islas, La Mollie, 141. 85. Ibid., 143. 86. Ibid., 145. 87. Ibid., 124. 88. Ibid., 86. 89. Ibid., 30.

C hapter 3 1. Jamaica Kincaid, My Garden (Book): (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), 7–8. 2. Carol A. Breckenridge, Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Cosmopolitanisms,” Public Culture: Special Issue on Cosmopolitanism 12, no. 3 (2000): 578. 3. David Hollinger, “Not Universalists, Not Pluralists: The New Cosmopolitans Find Their Own Way,” Constellations 8, no. 2 (2001): 239. 4. Ibid., 245–46. 5. Mary Louise Pratt, “Criticism in the Contact Zone: Decentering Community and Nation,” in Critical Theory, Cultural Politics, and Latin


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Notes

6. 7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

187

American Narrative, eds. Steven M. Bell, Albert H. Le May, and Leonard Orr (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), 86. Will Kymlicka, “American Multiculturalism in the International Arena,” Dissent 45, no. 4 (1998): 73. Barbara Brinson Curiel, David Kazanjian, Katherine Kinney, Steven Mailloux, Jay Mechling, John Carlos Rowe, George Sánchez, Shelley Streeby, and Henry Yu, “Introduction,” in Post-Nationalist American Studies, ed. John Carlos Rowe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 7. Louis Althusser, “A Letter on Art in Reply to André Daspre,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review, 1971), 222. In this I am following Timothy Brennan’s suggestion that one “compelling possibility” in the atmosphere of new cosmopolitanism might be “not only to supersede the would-be universal of a ‘U.S. point of view’ by rushing to mark the margin’s counternarratives but to dwell within that universal, examining its particular manias.” Timothy Brennan, At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 27. Hollinger, “Not Universalists,” 239–40. Anthony Kwame Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 268. Arjun Appaduri. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 176. Even the editors of Post-Nationalist American Studies, who begin their book by explicitly stating that “none of us believes that the nationform has been or will any time in the near future be superseded,” do not seem to believe that this nation “form” ultimately limits modes of thinking and understanding, as they go on to say later in the introduction that “our use of the word national thus refers to a complex and irreducible array of discourses, institutions, policies and practices which, even if they are in flux or in competition with other structures and allegiances, cannot be easily wished away by the application of the post-prefix.” From there, the editors go on to speak of relation to the nation in a completely voluntaristic way: “[S]ome Americans still feel unique, others look for more specific forms of identification within the nation-state, and others reject the very idea of nationalism.” Barbara Brinson Curiel et al., “Introduction,” Post-Nationalist Studies, 1, 2, 6, emphasis added. As George J. Sánchez has put it, theories that attempt to exist outside national modes of thinking are often problematic because of “what [they] ignore: power, shaped between American groups and between the U.S. citizenry and other citizens of the world” (George J. Sánchez, “Creating the Multicultural Nation: Adventures in Post-Nationalist American Studies in the 1990s,” in Post-Nationalist American Studies,


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15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

Notes ed. John Carlos Rowe, 53; emphasis added). And George M. Fredrickson insists that “historians have to confront the world as it actually existed rather than as they would like it to have been. Nations and national identities are not facts of nature; they were socially and historically constructed, but they have become potent forces—probably the most salient sources of modern authority and consciousness.” George M. Frederickson, “From Exceptionalism to Variability: Recent Developments in Cross-National Comparative History,” The Journal of American History 82, no. 2 (1995): 590. Literary critic Bertram D. Ashe lauds McKnight for treating the “black experience” across national and continental boundaries. Ashe said of McKnight in a 2001 interview that he “translates [many different] voices into narrative. He allows these voices to tell their own stories, stories that explore race in the United States as well as Africa. In McKnight’s fiction ‘multiculturalism’ is as likely to mean a clash of cultures between black people as it is between black and white people” (Bertram D. Ashe, “‘Under the Umbrella of Black Civilization’: A Conversation with Reginald McKnight,” African American Review, 35, no. 3 [2001]: 427). While it is true that McKnight’s fiction does take on transnational questions of race and identity, Ashe’s review does not take sufficient notice of the importance of a particular US black identity in these novels. Interestingly enough, it is the popular literary reviews (invested in selling books to a US readership) that point out the importance of national identity to McKnight’s narratives. The Washington Post said of I Get on the Bus, “what becomes absolutely certain by the end of this spellbinding narrative is that Evan Norris has brought many of his problems with him [from the U.S.]” (Charles Larson, “Cultures in Collision; Three Fictional Voyages: Review of I Get on the Bus” [The Washington Post, June 17, 1990], XI). The New York Times says He Sleeps is “a sly, deep, perverse study of black [American] middle-class alienation” (Bridgette Fraise, “Catnaps: Review of He Sleeps” [The New York Times, October 28, 2001], BR31). Reginald McKnight, I Get on the Bus (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1990), 12. Ibid., 72. Ibid., 23. Ibid., 3. The bus is also a reminder of “busing” in the United States as a response to segregation. Although McKnight never explicitly raises this history, its uncomfortable relation to the bus as mode of tourist transportation underlies the entire novel and is significant in relation to Evan’s avowedly raceless, liberal, integrated childhood. McKnight, I Get on the Bus, 6.


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22. D. W. Winnicott, “The Fate of the Transitional Object,” in Psychoanalytic Explorations, eds. Clare Winnicott, Ray Shepherd, and Madeline Davis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 53. 23. Ibid., 55. 24. Stuart Hall, “The Problem of Ideology: Marxism without Guarantees,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, eds. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (New York: Routledge, 1996), 26, 43; emphasis in original. 25. Winnicott, “Fate of the Transitional Object,” 54–55. 26. Ibid., 57. 27. Ibid., 58. 28. Formally, this transitional space is indicated in I Get on the Bus by the narrative shifts between direct and indirect dialogue. For example, just after Evan wakes up from a bout of malaria, McKnight gives us the following “dialogue”: Are you Muslim? says the voice. If you are, the prayers can heal you. The room is hot and black. The room is hot and full of sun. She slips into my room. She turns on the light. She carries a covered bowl between the curve of her hip and her wrist. In her other hand is a spoon. “You hungry?” she says. “No.” (McKnight, I Get on the Bus, 40).

29.

30. 31. 32.

This is only one of the more pronounced examples of transition from (1) everything happening within Evan’s head (the voice that speaks in direct dialogue but without quotations and without a speaking subject) to (2) the exterior (fragmented description of the room) to (3) an interaction with separate quoted voices and a separate person (“she”). Even in normal conversation, Evan will switch from a direct dialogue to a first-person indirect or free indirect dialogue, constantly confusing the relationship between the narrative voice and the people and objects it describes. Here the navy is not only metonymically representative of the US nation but also metaphorically representative of its tendency to profit from, or at the very least not be substantially harmed by the death of, its young male citizens of color. This is suggested both by the implication that Evan is very likely to end up a prisoner of war and by the fact that he is literally trained through torture. McKnight, I Get on the Bus, 26. Ibid., 27. For more on this history of the formation of the Peace Corps, see Fritz Fischer, Making Them Like Us: Peace Corps Volunteers in the 1960s (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998). Fischer suggests that the Peace Corps “symbolized the desire of the United States


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33.

34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

Notes to apply liberal ideas and American experience to mold the world’s future” (1). Julius A. Amin, “The Peace Corps and the Struggle for African American Equality,” Journal of Black Studies 29, no. 6 (1999): 810, 815. The Peace Corps National Advisory Council included singer and civil rights activist Harry Belafonte, NAACP attorney Franklin Williams, and civil rights attorney and chairman of the Subcabinet Group on Civil Rights Harris Wofford. Ibid., 815. The society was so color blind, in fact, that there was no record of volunteers by race under Shriver and therefore no official record of the number of African Americans who belonged to the agency in its first decade. See Jonathan Zimmerman, “Beyond Double Consciousness: Black Peace Corps Volunteers in Africa, 1961–1971,” The Journal of American History 82, no. 2 (1995): 1002. Shriver, 1961, quoted in Amin, “Peace Corps,” 812. Zimmerman, “Beyond Double Consciousness,” 1000. Ibid., 1002, 1001. This same collection of rhetorics continued into the late twentieth century. Charles R. Baquett III, the deputy director of the Peace Corps and an African American, said in a 1997 speech titled “Finding My Village: At Home in the Peace Corps and the World” that “the same . . . desire to do something meaningful that [he] and other Peace Corps members felt in the 1960s” still moves people to volunteer. “By serving others,” he claims, “[today’s volunteers] are finding their inner villages and laying the foundations for their [American] futures.” Thus Baquett makes use of a national rhetoric of international salvation, a diasporic racial commitment, a chance to recover lost identity in Africa, and a cosmopolitan rhetoric of being “at home in the world.” Charles R. Baquett “Finding My Village: At Home in the Peace Corps and in the World,” American Visions 12, no. 3 (1997): 23. Out of the first one hundred applicants, only two were African American. See Zimmerman, “Beyond Double Conscisouness.” The outcome of this policy was that in 1965, the Corps admitted 19 “culturally deprived” candidates—almost all of whom were southern whites. Zimmerman, “Beyond Double Consciousness,” 1011–12 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 23–24. Ibid., 19. Ibid. Tim Youngs, “Punctuating Travel: Paul Theroux and Bruce Chatwin,” Literature and History 6, no. 2 (1997): 77. Quoted in Youngs, “Punctuating Travel,” 77. Ibid.


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49. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 216. 50. Ibid., 217. 51. Ibid. 52. McKnight, I Get on the Bus, 24–25. 53. Susannah Clapp, With Chatwin: Portrait of a Writer (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 157, quoted in Youngs, “Punctuating Travel,” 75. 54. Ashe, “‘Under the Umbrella,’” 428. 55. Youngs, “Punctuating Travel,” 75–76. 56. McKnight, I Get on the Bus, 161. 57. Ibid., 162. 58. Ibid. 59. Reginald McKnight, He Sleeps (New York: Picador, 2001), 112. 60. Ibid., 63. 61. Ibid., 22; emphasis in original. 62. Ibid., 21. 63. Ibid., 34. 64. See bell hooks, “Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination,” in Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White, ed. David R. Roediger (New York: Schocken, 1998), 51. 65. Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 266–67. For a fuller discussion of trauma and liberal multiculturalism see Chapter 1 on Audre Lorde and traumatic formalism. 66. McKnight, He Sleeps, 96. 67. Ibid., 139. 68. Andy Walton, “A Bridge to Africa: Tiny Island Weathers Storm of Controversy,” CNN Interactive, August 27, 2005, http://www.cnn.com/ SPECIALS/1998/africa/senegal. Curtin backs up this statement with an accusation that the number of slaves that passed through Goree was “overestimated.” How many slaves, one wonders, would have had to pass through Goree to make it a “serious museum”? 69. Graham M. S. Dann and A. V. Seaton, “Slavery, Contested Heritage and Thanatourism,” in Slavery, Contested Heritage and Thanatourism, eds. Graham M. S. Dann and A. V. Seaton (Binghamton, NY: Haworth Hospitality Press, 2001), 15. 70. Glenn T. Eskew, “From Civil War to Civil Rights: Selling Alabama as Heritage Tourism,” in Dann and Seaton, Slavery, Contested Heritage and Thanatourism, 206. 71. Ibid., 207. 72. For more on US plantation heritage tourism, see Seaton and Dann, Slavery, Contested Heritage and Thanatourism, especially the introduction and the chapters by Butler, Roushanzamir, and Kreshel and by Eskew. 73. For example, Senegal’s national tourism web page advertises Goree as having been “deeply rooted in the history of the slave trade . . . . Forts


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74.

75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

Notes and cannons attest of the island’s violent past.” http://www.senegal -tourism.com. Cheryl Finley. “Authenticating Dungeons, Whitewashing Castles: The Former Sites of the Slave Trade on the Ghanaian Coast,” in Architecture and Tourism: Perception, Performance and Place, eds. D. Medina Lasansky and Brian McLaren (New York: Berg, 2004), 111. Finley includes a quote from a white American tourist at a slave trade tourism site in Ghana that exemplifies the difference between roots tourism to Western African slave trade sites and American tourism to national monuments like plantations and sites of civil rights activism. After a tour of a castle and its dungeons where slaves were kept, this tourist commented, “Very impressive castle. Tour was very good. Great views toward the city, beach and ocean. One concern—a man during the tour was distracting and I felt offended by his anti-white sentiments, as he kept saying, ‘white people this . . .’ I couldn’t understand exactly, but he should respect other people more who are trying to follow the tour guide” (Finley, 118). What is immediately clear is what Pratt might refer to as the pure Euroimperial white male sensibility that gives this tourist the right to see without being seen. A white US abstractionism is also apparent: the white tourist not only has the right to not be seen but as a white American simply expects that this will be the case. Finally, we see the US liberal multicultural structure of “color blindness”—or at least the presumed equality of all colors—that disallows (a perhaps entitled, given the situation) anger toward white people. Moreover, this tourist’s frustrations are expressed as annoyance not about an explicitly racialized altercation, which Americans are generally encouraged to avoid at all costs, but about not being able to hear the guide over the man’s mumbling. For him there is no sense of particular racial authenticity or rights over the narrating of this castle’s history. There is only the official narrative of the tour guide. He is there to learn about a multicultural global history, and he is thus disturbed by the man’s supposedly incoherent (I have a very hard time believing that he couldn’t figure out what the man was saying about “white people”) complaints. Ibid., 114. Saidiya Hartman, “The Time of Slavery,” South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 4 (2002): 770. McKnight, He Sleeps, 178. Much like Evan’s “we were not like that.” McKnight, He Sleeps, 178. Ibid. Ibid., 197–98. Donald Barthelme, Sixty Stories (New York: Putnam, 1981), 180. McKnight, He Sleeps, 204.


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84. The novel switches between first- and third-person narration and letters. This is also the place in the novel as a whole where the first-person narration starts to use quotations to indicate speech. 85. Ibid., 206. 86. Ibid., 209. 87. Ibid., 210. 88. This is another way in which the liberal multicultural ideologies of US industry (including publishing) incorporate potentially disruptive difference by creating idealized difference. As Caren Kaplan writes, “[I]f cosmopolitan writers appear to signal the dissolution of the nation-state in favor of a new pluralism, it is crucial to keep in mind that this ‘pluralism’ is warmly welcomed in metropolitan cultural capitals that may be less interested in recognizing more overtly revolutionary nationalist struggles in former colonial locations . . . reviewers and critics construct ‘authentic public voices of the Third World’ by celebrating cosmopolitan authors who can appear exotic even when they have similar ‘tastes, training, repertoire of anecdotes, current habitation’ as those very same reviewers and critics.” Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 123–24. 89. Quoted in Jane King, “A Small Place Writes Back,” Callaloo 25, no. 3 (2002): 887. 90. Kay Bonetti, “An Interview with Jamaica Kincaid,” The Missouri Review 15, no. 2 (1992): 134. 91. Amy Kaplan, “‘Left Alone with America’: The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, eds. Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 7. 92. Jenny Sharpe, “Is the United States Post-colonial? Transnationalism, Immigration, and Race,” Diaspora 4, no. 2 (1995): 189. 93. It is also telling of Kincaid’s liberal multiculturalist approach that she claims there is “no significance”—that is, no history—attached to the name “Jamaica Kincaid.” See Bonetti, “Interview,” 132. 94. Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 17. 95. Ibid., 18. 96. Ibid., 19. 97. Appaduri, Modernity at Large, 176. 98. Eleanor Wachtel, “Eleanor Wachtel with Jamaica Kincaid: Interview,” The Malahat Review 116 (1996): 57. 99. Frank Birbalsingh, “Jamaica Kincaid: From Antigua to America,” interview, Frontiers of Caribbean Literature in English, eds. by Frank Birbalsingh (London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1996) 139. 100. Bonetti, “Interview,” 133.


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101. Anne Norton, “Reading in the Shadow of History,” Social Text 56 (1998): 49. 102. Ibid., 50. 103. Jane King, “A Small Place,” 902. 104. Kincaid’s other books foreground a postcolonial displaced Antiguan voice. In A Small Place, this puts the (white) American reader in a position of opposition to the narrative voice. But this text is so confrontational to the white European American tourist that she must either establish a position of distance to the text’s addressee or willingly ignore her own part in the tourism industry of Antigua through the tools of the liberal multicultural imagination. The nonwhite reader, on the other hand, is invited to identify with the “native” speaker as a fellow global/colonized subject. Kincaid’s autobiographical stories Annie John, Lucy and even The Autobiography of My Mother give the American reader a relatively safe position in that even in their harshest moments of critique of global inequality and the effects of European colonialism, the British are always more at fault than North Americans. 105. James Clifford, “Traveling Cultures,” in Cultural Studies, eds. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula A. Treichler (New York: Routledge, 2001), 110. 106. It imitates the trauma of grief and loss that is experienced often as cyclical, analeptic, and proleptic. 107. I use “Kincaid” as metonymy for “Kincaid’s narrator” or “Kincaid’s text” throughout this chapter. I want to be clear that what follows is an analysis of how Kincaid’s texts work to produce distantiating effects. It is not a critique of her personally, nor is it a claim that there is something wrong with her writing. 108. AIDS is often represented in cultural and medical narratives as a disease that unites people across the globe in cosmopolitan identifications. See, for example, Dennis Altman, “Globalization, Political Economy, and HIV/AIDS,” Theory and Society 28 (1999): 559–84. Altman agues that “community-based activity in United Nations AIDS programs has implications for both the creation of new forms of global co-operation and the idea of global citizenship” (559). Similarly, Paul Farmer argues that the global inequity surrounding AIDS should be considered “a human rights tragedy” that joins health care workers around the world. Paul Farmer, “Global AIDS: New Challenges for Health and Human Rights.” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 48, no. 1 (2005): 11. 109. Jamaica Kincaid, My Brother (New York: Noonday, 1997), 30. 110. Paula Treichler, How to Have Theory in an Epidemic Cultural Chronicles of AIDS (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 104. 111. Kincaid, My Brother, 31. 112. Nor is there mention of the US government’s pressure on other nations to buy exclusively from certain companies and to reject compulsory licensing and other intellectual property policies that could make drugs


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113.

114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120.

121.

122. 123. 124. 125.

195

more affordable. For more on US policies in relation to the distribution of AZT and other AIDS medicines, see Robert Weissman, “AIDS and Developing Countries U.S. Pharmaceutical Companies and the U.S. Government Have Blocked the Availability of AIDS Drugs in Developing Countries,” Enotes, June 5, 2005, http://www.enotes.com/aids -developing/38769. Treichler argues that “narrative conventions” and “visual representations” in US publications surrounding AIDS in Third World countries tend to “reinforce what we think we already know about AIDS in those regions”—“frail, wasting bodies in gloomy clinics; small children in rickety cribs; the prostitutes, who always seem to be wearing red” (Treichler, How to Have Theory, 105). Kincaid, My Brother, 32. Ibid., 108. Ibid., 32. Ibid., 48–49 Ibid., 49. Ibid., 49–50. For a recent discussion of the ways in which US “immigration policies are based on race rather than reason,” see Charles J. Ogletree Jr.’s “America’s Schizophrenic Immigration Policy: Race, Class, and Reason,” Boston College Law Review 41 (1999–2000): 755–70. The disparity in the ratio of nonwhite to white people globally who die of AIDS (mostly from sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean) has led to the belief in many parts of the world of a conspiracy theory that AIDS is part of a US-originated plan for global racial genocide. While this may not be true in a factual sense, it does reveal underlying systemic inequalities that function along racial lines and ultimately cause the mass death of nonwhite populations (see Treichler, How to Have Theory, 103, 221). Treichler also argues that the practice of testing new drugs on poorer populations as opposed to providing AZT “is consistent with a history of colonialism in which the interests of empire take precedence over those of the colonized; empire in this case has apparently nothing to gain from paying for AZT. Many black Americans, similarly, hold the belief that people of color are especially vulnerable to the projects of science, a belief consistent with such events in US history as the Tuskegee syphilis study” (221). For more on the inequalities of healthcare in relation to race in the United States, see David R. Williams and Chiquita Collins, “US Socioeconomic and Racial Differences in Health: Patterns and Explanations,” Annual Review of Sociology 21 (1995): 349–86. Kincaid, My Brother, 96. Ibid., 97; emphasis added. Ibid., 98. Ibid., 79.


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126. Named by a Spaniard in the sixteenth century, it was divided between the Dutch, British, and Germans in the nineteenth century; occupied by Australia after World War I, partially occupied by Japan during World War II, and finally independent in 1973. 127. Kincaid, My Brother, 20, 91. 128. Kincaid tells us that Carolus Linnaeus, visiting a greenhouse in the Netherlands, became “enraptured with seeing all these plants from far away . . . he saw an opportunity, and it was this: These countries in Europe shared the same botany, more or less, but each place called the same thing by a different name . . . but these new plants from far away, had no history, no names, and so they could be given names.” Kincaid, My Garden (Book):, 122. 129. Ibid., 122. 130. Ibid. 131. Ibid., 197. 132. Richard Kerridge, “Ecologies of Desire: Travel Writing and Nature Writing as Travelogue,” in Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit, ed. Steven Clark (New York: Zed Books, 1999). 171. 133. Ibid., 171. 134. Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988), 16. 135. Ibid., 14. 136. Moira Ferguson, “A Lot of Memory: An Interview with Jamaica Kincaid.” The Kenyon Review 16, no. 1 (1994): 125. 137. Kincaid, My Garden (Book):, 196. 138. Ibid., 202. 139. Ibid., 222. 140. Ironically, the way Kincaid describes China actually points out the similarities between histories of colonization in the United States and the Caribbean in that it replicates the language of colonization across the Americas. Her description of China is, in fact, very close to the way Aisha Khan argues the Caribbean is represented in everything from “literary tropes” to “advertisements for holiday vacations” as “a crucible of the wildness and beauty of nature”: a set of images that “constitutes a powerful epistemology, a way of knowing the Caribbean, where nature becomes Nature—the region’s raison d’être and common denominator” (Aisha Khan, “Portraits in the Mirror: Nature, Culture, and Women’s Travel Writing in the Caribbean,” Women’s Writing 10, no. 1 [2003]: 93). Khan also notes the way in which the Caribbean “garden” has traditionally been described as “Edenic; it is precultural in the sense of not having lost anything because it had not (yet) had to lose. But it is also extra-cultural, in the sense of being outside of culture—culture qua civilization” (111). These modes of describing the Caribbean are closely related to the early tracts on the Americas, which described it as a new Eden. Kincaid herself describes the Americas that Columbus saw as


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Notes

141.

142. 143.

144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152.

153. 154.

197

being for him “the blankness of paradise; paradise emerges from chaos and this is not history; it is not a legitimate order of things” (Kincaid, “In History,” Callaloo 20, no. 1 [1997]: 2). For more on the transition in American representations of the “wilderness” landscape from Eden to battleground, see Martin Christadler, “American Romanticism and the Meanings of Landscape,” in Myth and Enlightenment in American Literature, eds. Dieter Meindl and Friedrich W. Horlacher (Erlangen: Universitätsbund Erlangen-Nürnberg, 1985), 71–106. Kincaid, My Garden (Book):, 219. This statement is what Soto-Crespo uses to argue that the garden allows Kincaid to see “how her personal past is tied to politics, and specifically to the history of imperialism” (Ramon E. Soto-Crespo, “Death and the Diaspora Writer: Hybridity and Mourning in the Work of Jamaica Kincaid,” Contemporary Literature 43, no. 2 [2002]: 346). I would suggest, on the other hand, that Kincaid has always known this. In earlier work she makes it more than clear that she sees a deep connection between her personal past and the history of imperialism. Ibid. Philip Fisher, Still the New World: American Literature in a Culture of Creative Destruction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 18. Kincaid, My Garden (Book):, 219. Philip Fisher, Still the New World, 3. Kincaid, My Garden (Book):, 64. Ibid., 66. Ibid., 69. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 204–5. My thanks to Ross Posnock for pointing out this parallel. Kincaid, My Garden (Book):, 215. One would like, with Jane King, “to hear [Kincaid’s text’s] read so that [one] could be sure which parts were meant to be sarcastic” (Jane King, “A Small Place,” 895). Kincaid often presents us with passages that seem to ask to be read ironically, and yet the meaning they carry is literal. Even if Kincaid’s tone expressed sarcasm at Winfrey’s position as “all-powerful and keenly discerning literary critic,” this does not change the fact that Oprah’s presence on this magazine does facilitate a reentrance into her US subject position of black female writer, mother, wife, and gardener. This double reading, where the reader must take on an ironic/critical position and be forced to see the way in which this distance does not allow her to “get outside” the ideology being critiqued, is one of Kincaid’s aesthetic techniques for provoking internal distantiation. Kincaid, My Garden (Book):, 213. John Young, “Toni Morrison, Oprah Winfrey, and Postmodern Popular Audiences,” African American Review 35, no. 2 (2001): 199.


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Notes

155. Janice Peck describes Oprah as a figure who is able to function as a “comforting, nonthreatening bridge between black and white cultures.” Janice Peck, “Talk About Racism: Framing a Popular Discourse of Race on Oprah Winfrey,” Cultural Critique 27 (1994): 91. 156. Young, “Toni Morrison, Oprah Winfrey,” 182. 157. Kincaid herself has complained of this kind of requirement of “authenticity” from her black US audience: “[T]hey write those long articles about who is really black and who isn’t, and who’s part white, and this sort of nonsense, just absolute nonsense.” The way Kincaid extracts herself from this conversation is by turning to a humanist liberal multiculturalism that reincorporates a civil rights discourse invested in a history of racial difference and inequality by saying, “[T]hey’re [sic] just never really gotten beyond the question of the color of your skin to see humanity, and it’s a great problem because there was a moment when that was being done, I think with Martin Luther King.” Gerhard Dilger, “‘I Use a Cut and Slash Policy of Writing’: Jamaica Kincaid Talks to Gerhard Dilger,” Wasafiri 16 (1992): 23. 158. To illustrate this point, Young notes the change between the 1970 cover of The Bluest Eye—which describes it as a “black” and “dark” story—and the Oprah’s Book Club edition, which describes it as “an inquiry into the reasons why beauty gets wasted in this country. The beauty in this case is black” (Young, “Toni Morrison, Oprah Winfrey,” 192–93). 159. This suppression of history to sell the books of black women writers is evident in Young’s description of Winfrey’s marketing of Song of Solomon, which he says, “reads the characters entirely within the rubric of talk-show topics. ‘It’s about 10 OPRAH shows rolled into one book,’ Winfrey told her audience when announcing the selection. Within this framework Song of Solomon loses its vital political subtext, as the book club’s discussion ignores the critique of American racial history.” Young, “Toni Morrison, Oprah Winfrey,” 182. 160. Janice Peck, “Talk About Racism,” 92. 161. Ibid., 100. 162. Kincaid, My Garden (Book):, 217. 163. James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 3.

Chapter 4 1. Henry Yu, “How Tiger Woods Lost His Stripes: Post-Nationalist American Studies as a History of Race, Migration, and the Commodification of Culture,” in Post-Nationalist American Studies, ed. John Carlos Rowe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 238.


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2. Louis Althusser, “A Letter on Art in Reply to André Daspre” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review, 1971), 223. 3. Ibid. 4. Bharati Mukherjee, “Beyond Multiculturalism: Surviving the Nineties,” Journal of Modern Literature 20, no. 1 (Summer 1996): 33. 5. Ibid. 6. Quoted in John K. Hoppe, “The Technological Hybrid as PostAmerican: Cross-Cultural Genetics in Jasmine,” MELUS 24, no. 4 (Winter 1999): 137. 7. For documentation, see Appendix 1, a survey of professors in top US English departments, in which I found that most professors teach Jasmine in undergraduate courses such as freshman writing, Asian American literature, and ethnic American literature courses. Holder, on the other hand, is taught more often in graduate courses, generally in global or transnational contexts. To illustrate the way in which Jasmine has been treated as an “American” text that represents a female, minority experience—whereas Holder has been categorized for the most part as postcolonial, cosmopolitan, multinational, or denationalized—one need only look at the locations of publication for articles on the two novels (e.g., Jasmine: Women, America, and Movement, Contemporary American Women Writers, American Literature, The Immigrant Experience in North American Literature, International Women’s Writing; Holder: Postcolonial Theory and the United States, ARIEL, Borderlands, Intercultural Encounters-Studies in English Literature). The exceptions to this are the articles that treat Jasmine as postcolonial, published in places such as Cross-Cultures and Hybridity and Postcolonialism. However, this does not diminish the fact that of the two novels Jasmine appears more available for and amenable to a nationally oriented reading. 8. Kristin Carter-Sanborn, “‘We Murder Who We Were’: Jasmine and the Violence of Identity,” American Literature 66, no. 3 (1994): 575. 9. Ibid. 10. For a concise version of this argument, see Anne Brewster, “A Critique of Bharati Mukherjee’s Neo-nationalism,” SPAN: Journal of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies 34–35 (1993): 50–59. 11. For example, see Deepika Bahri, “Always Becoming: Narratives of Nation and Self in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine,” in Women, America, and Movement: Narratives of Relocation, ed. Susan L. Roberson (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998), 137–54; Suzanne Kehde, “Colonial Discourse and Female Identity: Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine,” in International Women’s Writing: New Landscapes of Identity, eds. Anne E. Brown and Marjanne E. Goozé (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995), 70–77; Jill Roberts, “Between Two


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12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

Notes Darknesses The Adoptive Condition in Ceremony and Jasmine,” MLS 25, no. 3 (1995): 77–97; Sämi Ludwig, “Cultural Identity as ‘Spouse’: Limitations and Possibilities of a Metaphor in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine,” in Fusion of Cultures? eds. Peter O. Stummer and Christopher Balme (Atlanta: Rodopi, 1996), 103–10; Kent Bales, “Walt Whitman’s Daughter, or, Postcolonial Self-Transformation in the Fiction of Bharati Mukherjee,” in Daughters of Restlessness: Women’s Literature at the End of the Millennium, eds. Sabine Coelsch-Foisner, Hanna Wallinger, Gerhild Reisner (Heidelberg, Germany: C. Winter, 1998), 187–201; and Carmen Wickramagamage’s “Relocation as Positive Act: The Immigrant Experience in Bharati Mukherjee’s Novels,” Diaspora 2, no. 2 (1992): 171–200. For example, see Gönül Pultar, “Jasmine or the Americanization of an Asian: Negotiating between ‘Cultural Arrest’ and Moral Decay in Immigrant Fictions,” in The Immigrant Experience in North American Literature: Carving Out a Niche, eds. Katherine B. Payant and Toby Rose (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 45–57; Geraldine Stoneham, “‘It’s a Free Country’: Bharati Mukherjee’s Vision of Hybridity in the Metropolis,” Wasafiri 24 (1996): 18–21; and Brigitte Scheer-Schäzler, “‘The Soul at Risk’: Identity and Morality in the Multicultural World of Bharati Mukherjee,” in Nationalism vs. Internationalism: (Inter)National Dimensions of Literatures in English, eds. Wolfgang Zach and Ken L. Goodwin (Tübingen, Germany: Stauffenburg, 1996), 351–59. For example, see Susan Koshy, “The Geography of Female Subjectivity: Ethnicity, Gender, and Diaspora,” in Contemporary American Women Writers: Gender, Class, Ethnicity, ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora (New York: Longman, 1998), 138–53; Brewster, “A Critique”; and Sangeeta Ray, “The Nation in Performance: Bhabha, Mukherjee, and Kureishi,” Hybridity and Postcolonialism: Twentieth Century Indian Literature, ed. Monika Fludernik (Tübingen, Germany: Stauffenburg, 1998), 219–38. Rey Chow, The Protestant Ethnic & The Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 51. Pultar, “Jasmine or the Americanization of an Asian,” 45–46. Ibid., 46. Ibid., 53. Bharati Mukherjee, Jasmine (New York: Grove Press, 1989), 9. Pultar, “Jasmine or the Americanization of an Asian,” 51. Koshy, “The Geography of Female Subjectivity,” 139. Ibid., 148. Mukherjee, Jasmine, 241.


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23. Philip Fisher, Still the New World: American Literature in a Culture of Creative Destruction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 192. 24. Ibid., 192–95, 231–34. 25. Mukherjee, Jasmine, 7–8. 26. Fisher, Still the New World, 228. 27. Steven J. Belluscio, To Be Suddenly White: Literary Realism and Racial Passing (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006), 4. 28. Mukherjee, Jasmine, 115–16. 29. Ibid., 4. 30. Ibid., 5. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., 109. 33. Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1970–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 126–27. 34. Mukherjee, Jasmine, 131. 35. Ibid., 185. 36. Ibid., 200. 37. Ibid., 202. 38. Ibid., 231. 39. Ibid., 125, emphasis in original. 40. Jane F. Thrailkill, Affecting Fictions: Mind, Body, and Emotion in American Literary Realism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 23. 41. Tompkins, Sensational Designs, 126. 42. Fisher, Still the New World, 197. 43. Belluscio, To Be Suddenly White, 5. 44. Fisher, Still the New World, 37. 45. Ibid., 46. 46. Ibid., 47–51. 47. Ibid., 38. 48. Ibid. 49. See Colin Greer, “The Ethnic Question” Social Text 0, nos. 9/10 (1984): 119–36. 50. Mukherjee, Jasmine, 181. 51. Ibid., 138–39. 52. Ibid., 240. 53. Ibid., 201. 54. Michael Gorra, “Call it Exile, Call it Immigration,” The New York Times, September 10, 1989. 55. In addition to Nalini Iyer and Christian Moraru, discussed later, Kent Bales sees the novel as one that “multiplies . . . possibilities for selfdiscovery and self-creation” (Kent Bales, “Walt Whitman’s Daughter,” 199). Shao-Pin Luo reads it as a “narrative of women’s travel and


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56.

57.

58.

59.

60. 61. 62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

Notes transformation” (Shao-Pin Luo “Rewriting Travel: Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love and Bharati Mukherjee’s The Holder of the World.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 38, no. 2 (2003): 87). And Florence D’Souza argues that Holder is a “reinterpretation of heterogeneous cultural elements” (Florence D’Souza, “The Paradoxical Position of an Immigrant Writer: Bharati Mukherjee, Neither Global, nor Particular?” in The Global and the Particular in the English Speaking World [Dijon, France: Editions Universitaires de Dijon, 2002], 69). Christian Moraru, “Purloining The Scarlet Letter: Bharati Mukherjee and the Apocryphal Imagination,” in He Said She Said: An RSVP to the Male Text, eds. Mica Howe and Sarah Appleton Aguiar (London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001), 256; emphasis added. Nalini Iyer, “American/Indian: Metaphors of the Self in Bharati Mukherjee’s ‘The Holder of the World,’” ARIEL 27, no.4 (1996): 35; emphasis added. Examples of such critiques are Judie Newman’s, which I discuss later, and Bruce Simon’s, which reads Holder as a revisionary text that challenges American origins in Puritanism and is “interested in subverting colonialist historiography from within” by introducing Indian influence on America’s beginnings (Bruce Simon, “Hybridity in the Americas: Reading Condé, Mukherjee, and Hawthorne,” in Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature, eds. Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt [Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2000]: 422). Judie Newman, “Spaces In-Between: The Holder of the World,” in Borderlands: Negotiations in Post-Colonial Writing, ed. Monika ReifHulser (Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi), 77. Newman, “Spaces In-Between,” 81. Bharati Mukherjee, The Holder of the World (Toronto: HarperCollins, First Edition 1993, HarperPerennial Canada Edition, 2003), 31, 8. Richard Dyer, White (New York: Routledge, 1997), 13. Please note that one does not have to “be” white to rely on hegemonic ideological forms that reinforce whiteness as an aspect of normative Americanness. Mukherjee, Holder, 293. Ibid., 293–94. Ibid., 103–04. Ibid., 103. Ibid., 105. Ibid., 170. Ibid., 107. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 61. Ibid., 183, emphasis added. Ibid., 245.


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75. Ibid., 93. 76. In Hawthorne’s case, I am thinking of the progressive passages on women’s liberation and equality that he must reign in at the end of The Scarlet Letter by domesticating Hester’s feminism. 77. Ibid., 153–54. 78. Ibid., 3. 79. Ibid., 289. 80. Dyer, White, 12. 81. Ibid., 4. 82. “The Holder of the World,”Publishers Weekly, July 26, 1993, 56. 83. Beverly Byers-Pevitts, “An Interview with Bharati Mukherjee,” in Speaking of the Short Story: Interviews with Contemporary Writers, eds. Farhat Iftekharuddin, Mary Rohrberger, and Maurice Lee (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1997) 196–97. 84. Mike Hill, “Introduction: Vipers in Shangri-la: Whiteness, Writing, and Other Ordinary Terrors,” in Whiteness: A Critical Reader, ed. Mike Hill (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 5. 85. Ibid. 86. Ibid. 87. George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 93. 88. Mukherjee, Holder, 240. 89. Ibid., 292. 90. Ibid., 291. 91. See Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993): 1707–91. 92. Moraru, “Purloining The Scarlet Letter,” 255. 93. Jane Haggis, “White Women and Colonialism: Toward a NonRecuperative History,” in Gender and Imperialism, ed. Claire Midgley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 48. 94. Mukherjee, Holder, 12. 95. Ibid., 60. 96. Ibid. 97. Ibid., 159–60. 98. James Baldwin, “On Being ‘White’ . . . And Other Lies,” in Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White, ed. David Roediger (New York: Schocken Books, 1998), 177, 178. 99. Susan S. Lanser, “Feminist Criticism, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ And the Politics of Color in America,” Feminist Studies 15, no. 3 (1989): 420. 100. Ibid., 424–25. 101. Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth Century Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 2. 102. Ibid.


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103. Tina Chen and S. X. Goudie. “Holders of the World: An Interview with Bharati Mukherjee.” Jouvert: A Journal of Post-Colonial Studies 1, no. 1 (1997): n.p. http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/ v1i1/BHARAT.HTM. 104. James Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” in Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon, 1955), 20. 105. Ibid., 20–21.

C o da 1. Cambridge Police Department, Incident Report # 9005127, July 16, 2009. 2. Kevin Johnson, Alan Gomez, and Marisol Bello, “Gates Arrest Reignites Debate on Race,” USA Today, July 23, 2009. 3. Ibid. 4. “Obama Seeks to Clarify ‘Stupidly’ Comment: Praises White Policeman,” FOXNews.com, July, 24. 2009. http://www.foxnews.com/ politics/2009/07/24/obama-seeks-clarify-stupidly-comment-praises -white-policeman/ 5. Johnson, Gomez, and Bello, “Gates Arrest.” 6. Ibid. 7. “White Policeman.”


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6/24/11 10:57 AM

Index

abjection, 60, 64–65, 82, 115–16 abolition of slavery, 3, 16, 20, 137 See also slavery aestheticism, 173n28 aesthetics and politics, 8–12 See also distantiative aesthetics; representative aesthetics affirmative action, 172n17 Africa, 87, 90–97, 99–105 African Americans, 4, 32, 43, 57, 87, 91–95, 101–2, 131, 137, 160–62 See also black Americans AIDS, 70, 109–11, 178n25, 194n108, 195n121 Aldama, Frederick Luis, 60, 78, 79 Alexander, Elizabeth, 177n12, 178n25 Althusser, Louis internal distantiation, 2, 22, 27, 33, 38, 46, 58, 85, 124 “Letter on Art in Reply to André Daspre, A,” 12–13, 30 American Literature, 8 Antigua, 84, 106–12, 115–16, 194n104 See also Caribbean apo koinou, 35–36, 50 Appaduri, Arjun, 86 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 86, 99 Arabs, 159 Armstrong, Isobel, 8, 173n22 art and ideology, 12–13, 58, 86

pal-obourn-09idx.indd 221

articulus, 41 Asians and Asian Americans, 57, 91, 125, 147, 151, 154 Auerhahn, Nanette, 31, 33, 46 Avi-Ram, Amitai F., 35 Aztlán, 66, 75 Bailyn, Bernard, 170n4 Baldwin, James, 27–29, 55, 141, 154, 156, 163 “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” 25–27 “Stranger in the Village,” 118–19 Balzac, Honore, 12, 13 Barry, Brian, 5 Barthelme, Donald, 104 Barthes, Roland, 178n31 Belluscio, Steven J., 131, 135 Benito Cereno (Melville), 15–20 Bercovitch, Sacvan, 138 Berlant, Lauren, 169n1 Bersani, Leo, 79 Between Our Selves (Lorde), 49 Bhabha, Homi, 57–58, 64, 83 black Americans Black Arts Movement, 180n42 feminism, 34 history tourism, 101–2 lesbians, 34 men, 63–64 nationalism, 92 slaves, 16–18, 20

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222

Index

black Americans (continued) women, 34–37, 52–54, 100, 119–20 See also African Americans blackness, 51, 97–98, 153–54, 172n20 borders crossing, 94, 109–15 gardening, and, 121 Mexico and United States, 63, 66, 68, 70, 77 United States, 87 Breckenridge, Carol, 83 Broadside Press, 35, 36 Brown, Wendy, 42 Brown v. Board, 4 Burnham, Margaret, 162 buses, 87–89, 93, 188n15 Bush, George W., 157–59, 161 Butler, Judith, 12, 181n55 Cambridge Police Superior Officers Association, 160 Caribbean, 83, 94, 106, 108–9, 114–15, 117–18, 196n140 See also Antigua Carter-Sanborn, Kristin, 127 Caruth, Cathy, 28, 29, 48 castration, 100, 104 Castro, Tony, 67 Castro district, 69 César Chávez, 66 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 83 Chatwin, Bruce, 94, 96–97 Chicanos Chicano movement, 66–68, 70, 75 hybridity, 64–65, 74 identity, 61, 66–70, 73, 75, 77–80 masculinity, 23 writers, 60–61, 63 China, 84, 108, 114–16, 118–19, 196n140


Chow, Rey, 128 Christianity, 68, 75, 159 circumcision, 100, 103–4 citizenship, 1–7, 21–24, 26, 106–7, 124, 136–39, 155–56, 158–64 See also national identity civil rights movement, 3, 25–26, 171n17 class, 4, 28, 40, 44, 67, 96, 108, 112, 129, 142, 155 Clifford, James, 108, 121 “Coal” (Lorde), 41–46, 49 Cobb, Jelani, 162 Collins, Patricia Hill, 36 colonialism historical, 84, 140, 142 hybridity, and, 58–59, 64 Kincaid, Jamaica, 106–8, 112–13, 115, 194n104 Senegal, 102 travel narratives, 93, 95 violence, and, 77 women, and, 152 See also neocolonialism; postcolonialism “coloured,” 181n coming of age, 35–37 Constituting Americans (Wald), 14 Coromandel Coast, 142–43 cosmopolitanism Kincaid, Jamaica, 105, 107, 109–21 McKnight, Reginald, 90–93, 99 theories of, 22, 23, 83–86 creative destruction, ideology of, 136–38 Critique of the Power of Judgment (Kant), 9–10 cucuys, 74, 80 Curtin, Philip, 101 Davis, Angela Y., 47 Davis, Lloyd, 76

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Index Delany, Martin, 93 democratic social space, 16, 20, 136 De Veaux, Alexis, 41 dialectical literary presentation, 11 diaspora, African, 87, 93–94, 102–3 Dilworth, Thomas, 182n83 Dimock, Wai Chee, 174n33 Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (Rancière), 10 disidentification and hybridity, 70–74 distantiative aesthetics defined, 2 Islas, Arturo, 58–62, 61–62, 65, 70–82 Kincaid, Jamaica, 112–14, 121 Lorde, Audre, 28–37, 54–55 McKnight, Reginald, 90, 92–94, 99, 105, 121 Melville, Herman, 16–20 Mukherjee, Bharati, 123–25, 139–47, 147–56 national ideologies, and, 85–86 social identity, and, 156 “teachable moments,” 162 traumatic formalism, and, 41–46 use in literary studies, 163–64 See also internal distantiation Dorn, Edwin, 161, 162 double consciousness, 32 Douglass, Frederick, 14 Down to Earth, 73 dreaming, 99–100 Du Bois, W. E. B., 32 Duel in the Sun, A, 73 Dyer, Richard, 141, 147 Eagleton, Terry, 8, 173n22 either-or statements, 18–20, 176n74 Elliott, Emory, 173n22 El Movimiento. See Chicano movement


223

El Paso, Texas, 66–68, 71 empathy, 131, 136 Ericson, David F., 171n4 ethnic identity, 4, 15, 28, 58–60, 82, 124, 172n20 See also minoritarian identity positions; racial identity “Everybody’s Protest Novel” (Baldwin), 25–27 “Fate of the Transitional Object, The” (Winnicott), 88–89 Faulkner, William, 130 feminism, 34, 139, 149, 152, 155, 203n76 Finley, Cheryl, 102 Fish, Stanley, 10–11, 13, 155, 174n34 Fisher, Philip, 16, 117, 130–31, 135–38 Florida, 112–13, 132 Fraser, Nancy, 5–6 Freud, Sigmund, 30 From a Land Where Other People Live (Lorde), 35 gardens, 83–84, 114, 117–18, 121, 196n140, 197n141 Gates, Henry Louis, 160–63 gay bars, 78–80 Chicanos, 61, 63, 69 gay rights movement, 70 See also homosexuality; lesbians; sexual identity gender, 4, 15, 28, 51–55, 75, 124, 144, 149 “Generation II” (Lorde), 34–37 Gilroy, Paul, 93–94 Giuliani, Rudolph, 159 “Glass Mountain, The” (Barthelme), 104 Glenn, Evelyn, 2, 170n3, 171n4 Glover, Clifford, 49

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224

Index

Gonzales, Rodolfo “Corky,” 66 “good physician,” 11, 13, 155 Goree Island, 101, 103, 191n73 Gutiérrez, Ramón, 77 Haggis, Jane, 152 Hall, Stuart, 89 Harris, Cheryl, 151 Harris, David, 162 Hartman, Saidiya, 103 Hartz, Louis, 170n4 Hass, Robert, 160 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 126, 139, 145 Hayworth, Rita, 73–74 heritage tourism, 101–2 See also slavery tourism Herman, Judith Lewis, 29–30, 44 He Sleeps (McKnight), 87, 99–105 heterosexuality, 64, 74–77 See also sexual identity Hill, Mike, 149 history, construction of, 144–47 Holder of the World, The (Mukherjee), 123–25, 139–56 Hollinger, David, 84, 86, 169n2 Hollywood films, 70–75 homosexuality, 23, 68–70, 76–80 See also gays; lesbians; sexual identity hooks, bell, 100, 149 horticulture, 84, 113, 114 Hurtt, Harold, 161 hybridity defined, 57–60 La Mollie and the King of Tears, 60–70 sexual implications, 23 theory, 13, 22 United States, 183n5 “I” (letter), 42–43 identification (in narrative structure), 134


identity politics, 1, 6, 14–15, 25–26, 35, 85, 129, 149, 172n17, 181n55 See also minoritarian identity positions; social identity Ideology and Aesthetics in American Literature, 9 Ideology of the Aesthetic (Eagleton), 8 I Get on the Bus (McKnight), 87–98, 99 immigrants, 108, 124, 126, 137 imperialism, 84, 117, 197n141 independence, 2–3, 126, 142 India, 123, 125–26, 132, 139–43, 145, 147–48, 150, 153–54 Indians (Native Americans), 64, 66, 68, 73, 77 See also Native Americans individual rights, 2–7 internal distantiation aesthetics and politics, 8, 12 American literature, and, 12–15 defined, 2, 27 Lorde, Audre, 32–33 psychoanalytic aspects, 21 trauma theory, and, 29–34 See also distantiative aesthetics interracial relationships, 153 interrogation, 100, 103–4 Iowa, 125–26, 128, 130–33, 137 irony, 176n77, 197n152 Islas, Arturo hybridity, 22 La Mollie and the King of Tears, 23, 57, 60–82 Migrant Souls, 62 Rain God, The, 60, 62 Jasmine (Mukherjee), 123–39, 146, 147, 148, 150, 155 Johnson, Barbara, 48 Kant, Immanuel, 9–10, 174n29 Kaplan, Amy, 106

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Index Kaplan, Caren, 193n88 Kazanjian, David, 41, 181n55 Keating, AnaLouise, 28 Kennedy, John F., 91 Kennedy, Robert, 67 Kerridge, Richard, 115 Khan, Aisha, 196n140 Kincaid, Jamaica cosmopolitanism, 83–87, 105–9 distantiative aesthetics, 23 Lucy, 107 My Brother, 106, 108, 109–14, 116 My Garden (Book), 83, 106, 108, 114–21 Small Place, A, 115, 194n104 King, Jane, 108, 197n152 knowing, 150–51, 156 Koshy, Susan, 129 Kymlicka, Will, 4–5, 85 Laclau, Ernesto, 33 La Mollie and the King of Tears (Islas), 23, 57, 60–82 Lanser, Susan, 154–55 La Raza Unida, 66–67 Larsen, Nella, 12 Laub, Dori, 30, 31, 33, 46 lesbians, 28, 33–34, 33–35, 37–38, 40–41, 63–64, 69 See also gay; homosexuality; sexual identity “Letter on Art in Reply to André Daspre, A” (Althusser), 12, 30 Levine, George, 8 Leys, Ruth, 30 liberal multiculturalism academic investments in, 123–25 contemporary US citizenship, and, 158 cosmopolitanism, and, 83–87 ethics of, 133 ethnic representation, and, 81 identity politics, and, 25–29


225

internal distantiation, and, 12–15 Kincaid, Jamaica, 105–21 McKnight, Reginald, 87–90, 97, 99–105 Mukherjee, Bharati, 135, 141 paradoxes of, 2–7, 21, 22–24, 26, 128, 146 social identity, and, 1–2 trauma theory, and, 29–34 US citizenship, and, 158–64 whiteness, and, 147–56 Lipsitz, George, 149, 150 literary studies, 8, 11, 60, 123, 163, 174n34 litotes, 18–19 Lorde, Audre “Coal,” 41–46, 49 “Generation II,” 34–37 From a Land Where Other People Live, 35 “Love Poem,” 35, 36 Between Our Selves, 49 poetry and prose, 27–29 “Power,” 49–55, 183n83 trauma theory, 31–34, 180n49 traumatic formalism, 21–22 “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” 39–40 Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, 38, 40 Love (Morrison), 12 “Love Poem” (Lorde), 35, 36 Lubiano, Wahneema, 178n25 Lucy (Kincaid), 107 Marxism, 8, 12, 46, 173n24 McKnight, Reginald distantiative aesthetics, 23 He Sleeps, 87, 99–105 I Get on the Bus, 87–98, 99 national identity, 188n14 transnational perspectives, 85–87 Medley, Ralph, 162 Melville, Herman, 15–20, 176n77

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226

Index

memory, 117 Mexican Americans, 62, 67 Mexicans, 61, 71, 77 Mexico, 39, 84, 117 Miami, Florida, 112–13 Migrant Souls (Islas), 62 Milk, Harvey, 70 Miller, Perry, 106 Minh-ha, Trinh, 60 minoritarian identity positions, 33, 37–38, 40–41, 45, 69–70 See also ethnic identity; identity politics; racial identity minorities, 4, 7, 14–15, 27, 28 See also ethnic identity; race mirrors, 80–81 missionaries, Spanish, 68–69 Mission District (San Francisco), 68–69 modernism, 179n41 Moraga, Cherrie, 61 Moraru, Christian, 152 Morrison, Toni, 12, 198n156 Moscone, George, 70 motherhood, 49, 51–54 Mukherjee, Bharati Holder of the World, The, 123–25, 139–56 Jasmine, 123–39, 146, 147, 148, 150, 155 representative and distantiative aesthetics, 23 multiculturalism. See liberal multiculturalism Muñiz, Ramiro “Ramsey,” 67 Muñoz, José, 70–71 Murchland, Bernard, 169n1 Muslims, 159 My Brother (Kincaid), 106, 108, 109–14, 116 My Garden (Book) (Kincaid), 83, 106, 108, 114–21, 197n141 mythology of American national identity, 140–43


name changes, 114 National Black Feminist Organization, 34 “National Hispanic Heritage Week,” 69 national identity Islas, Arturo, 70, 75, 78 Kincaid, Jamaica, 106 McKnight, Reginald, 93–94, 97, 100, 103, 188n15 Mukherjee, Bharati, 123, 138, 140–43, 141, 154 new perspectives on, 162 postnationalism, and, 187n13 speech about September 11 attacks, 158 See also citizenship nationalism, 14, 83, 91–92, 123, 160, 187n13 National Nutrition Survey (1967), 67 National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives, 160 national racial ideologies, 89, 98 national self-narration, 37–41 Native Americans, 62, 78–79, 137, 141 See also Indians (Native Americans) navy, 90, 189n29 neocolonialism, 91, 127 See also colonialism; postcolonialism Newman, Judie, 140 new social movements, 1, 3, 14–15, 21–22, 28, 34–37, 149–50, 163 Norton, Anne, 108 Now Voyager, 73 Obama, Barack, 160–61 O’Connor, Dennis, 160 Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party (Delany), 93

6/24/11 10:58 AM

Index Ogden, Thomas, 47 oppression black lesbians, 34 black women, 36 construction of social identities, 27 feminism, and, 149 histories of, 6–7, 67, 113, 137, 161 power, and, 54 racial, 36 refusal to acknowledge, 17 social identity, and, 26–27 See also racism Oprah Winfrey Show, The, 120 otherness, 7, 61, 106, 119–20, 127, 132–34, 138, 144–46, 154 Passing (Larsen), 12 Patell, Cyrus, 57, 60 Peace Corps, 87, 90–93, 94, 189n32, 190n38 Peck, Janice, 120 Pérez-Torres, Rafael, 64, 66 pictorial realism, 130, 132 pluralism, 57, 84, 193n88 Pocock, J. G. A., 170n4 Pollock, Sheldon, 83 Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics, The (Lipsitz), 149 postcolonialism Africa, 91 Holder of the World, The (Mukherjee), 126, 140 Kincaid, Jamaica, 86, 106–8, 115, 116 travel narratives, 93, 95, 97 See also colonialism; neocolonialism postnationalism, 83 Post-Nationalist American Studies, 85, 123


227

postracialism, 160 potential space, 47–48, 88 “Power” (Lorde), 49–55, 183n83 Pratt, Mary Louise, 85, 95–96 Prescott, William, 84 protest novels, 25–26 psychic fragmentation, 97 psychoanalysis, 21, 29–30, 47–48 Public Culture, 83, 84 Puerto Rico, 112 Pultar, Gönül, 128–29 Puritans, 126, 140–41, 143, 152– 53, 202n58 queer literature, 7, 35, 63 race, 4, 26–28, 38, 49–55, 90–105, 124, 159–62 racial identity, 15, 16, 23, 58–65, 154, 172n, 198n157 See also ethnic identity; minoritarian identity positions racialized narrative position, 144 racial violences, 97, 100 racism connection to sexism and homophobia, 40 global, 119 histories of, 18 Peace Corps, 91 sexualized, 73 United States, 53, 80, 97–98, 111–12, 120 white feminism, and, 149–50, 155 See also oppression Radel, Nicholas, 76 Radical Aesthetic (Armstrong), 8 Rain God, The (Islas), 60, 62 Rancière, Jacques, 10–11, 40, 173n22, 174n34 Randall, Dudley, 35 rape, 26, 53–54, 125, 128, 131

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228

Index

Rawls, John, 3–4 reader-response theory, 10, 174n34 Reagan, Ronald, 69, 70 realism, 130–33 recruitment, Peace Corps, 92 representation, 80, 148, 162 representative aesthetics, 23, 25, 124–25, 129–39, 155–56, 163 republicanism, 170n4 rhetorical literary presentation, 11 Rice, David, 58 Rich, Adrienne, 32–33 Richardson, Elaine Potter. See Kincaid, Jamaica Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America, The (Bercovitch), 138 Román, David, 63 romantic love, 75–76 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 72, 76 Rudnisky, Lexi, 183n83 Russell-Brown, Katheryn, 162 sadomasochism, 79 Saldívar, José David, 60–61 Sánchez, Marta, 58 San Francisco, California, 68–70, 71, 77–78 sarcasm, 197n152 Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne), 139, 141, 145, 149, 152, 203n76 Scott, Joan, 171n17 second generation immigrants, 179n40 segregation, 4, 92, 137, 188n20 self-expression, 178n42 Senegal, 86–87, 89, 90, 93–94, 97–105 sentimental fiction, 133 September 11 attacks, 157–59, 163


sexual identity, 15, 28, 58–60, 61, 82 See also heterosexuality; homosexuality sexuality, 49–55, 57–82, 100, 104–5 Shachar, Ayelet, 3 Shakespeare, William, 70, 72, 76 Sharpe, Jenny, 106 Sherman, William Tecumseh, 78–79 Shriver, R. Sargent, 91 Singh, Nikhil Pal, 172n20 “sixties, the,” 170n3 slavery, 16–17, 20, 52, 100–103, 117, 118 slavery tourism, 101–3, 192n74 Small Place, A (Kincaid), 115, 194n104 Smith, Rogers M., 171n4 social identity, 1–12, 15, 22–24, 27–29, 39, 46, 59–65, 80–82, 156, 158–64 See also identity politics; national identity social movements. See new social movements Sound and the Fury, The (Faulkner), 130 Spanish missionaries, 68–69 Steele, Cassie Premo, 31 Still the New World: American Literature in a Culture of Creative Destruction (Fisher), 138 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 25 “Stranger in the Village” (Baldwin), 118–19 subjective universality, 9–10 Sundquist, Eric, 176n77 tautology, 176n77 Taylor, Charles, 5 Theroux, Paul, 94–95, 106 Thrailkill, Jane F., 135

6/24/11 10:58 AM

Index

229

Tijerina, Reies López, 66 Tompkins, Jane, 133, 135 toubob, 98, 104 tourism, 101–2, 116, 194n104 See also heritage tourism; slavery tourism transitional space, 21–23, 48–55, 88–90, 97–99, 103–4, 112, 115, 182n76, 189n28 transparency of experience, 132, 144 trauma, 28–29, 31, 178n25 trauma theory, 13, 21, 29–34, 29–37 traumatic formalism, 21, 41–46, 47–48 travel narratives, 108 travel writing, 93–97, 114–15 Treichler, Paula, 109 truth, 144–45, 147, 150

virtual reality, 146–47, 148, 151 voice-based realism, 130–33, 134 Volk, 136–37

Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 16, 20, 25–26, 130 universalism, 4, 7, 84, 128 “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” (Lorde), 39–40

“‘Yellow Wallpaper,’ and the Politics of Color in America, The” (Lanser), 155 Young, James P., 170n4, 171n16 Young, John, 120 Young, Robert C. J., 23, 58–59, 64 Youngs, Tim, 94, 97 Yu, Henry, 123, 124, 150, 156

Van der Kolk, Bessel, 30 Vermont, 84, 109, 113 victimization, 159 Viego, Antonio, 61 violence, 78–79, 138–39


Wald, Priscilla, 14–15 Wall, Cheryl A., 177n10 Wallace, Michele, 34 We Heal from Memory: Sexton, Lorde, Anzaldúa, and the Poetry of Witness (Steele), 31 West, Cornel, 170n3 whiteness, 51, 141, 147–55 Whitman, Walt, 73 Winfrey, Oprah, 119–20, 197n152, 198n155 Winnicott, Donald Woods, 21–22, 47–49, 60, 88–89, 97, 104 winter, 118 women’s suffrage, 3 Wyatt, Jean, 12

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Lorde), 38, 40, 177n12

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