"Hybridity" (an excerpt from my identity paper)

HYBRIDITY: Deep down inside, nonetheless, I feel that even this new title, “Asian American,” is too restricting for me, especially in light of the fact that I am an Angelino who inter-socializes with peoples of all cultures. As Cohen (1997) hypothesizes, as a postmodern cultural diaspora, I ultimately and inevitably have dubious political allegiances. That is, though I maintain certain sociopolitical ties with 1) my legal country U.S., 2) my mother land Korea, and 3) the host countries of Taiwan and China, by not completely assimilating to any of these national/cultural norms, I live in what Cohen (1997) calls “no-group lands” (p.189). In this no-group land, then, my existence is a composite of liminality, syncretism and ambiguity, ultimately rendering my identity geopolitically fluid and culturally amorphous. In tiny increments, I have gradually come to embrace myself as what Bhabha (1998) calls a “postcolonial cultural freak”—an indistinguishable, marginalized, and multi-cultural member in our society (pp. 1331-1344). Now, I accept and even thrive on the fact that my identity cannot be fixed to one national/cultural locale. It is in constant flux; it can never be compartmentalized into this or that category. Rather, my subjectivity is forever in the making. It is an unoccupied whirling void without a shape. It has immeasurable depth that can soak up any culture, selectively or wholeheartedly. It is thus fluid and amorphous. I simultaneously feel that I am Korean, Chinese, and American, and lately, an Angelino. Who knows what I will be tomorrow? Perhaps, a denizen of the entire world.

Why I Disagree with Both Leroi’s and Thomas’s Definition of “Race”

 Part I

         “The billion or so of the world’s people of largely European descent have a set of genetic variants  in common that are collectively rare in everyone else; they are a race.  At a smaller scale, three million Basques do as well; so they are a race as well.  Race is merely a shorthand that enables us to speak sensibly, though with no great precision, about genetic rather than cultural or political differences.”

—Armand Leroi, The New York Times 3/14/05

I disagree with Armand Leroi’s above comment.  It is scientifically inconclusive to say that race is biologically based.  However, I do recognize that race can serve as an important indicator that allows us to gain a better understanding of differences that exist among the different groups of people, such as the prevalence of certain diseases in some races but not in others.  Yet, I find Leroi’s statement to be problematic for two reasons:  First, the premise of his study is inflated and not holistic, in that the range of genetic differential that he attempts to categorize as different racial types of humans cannot exceed .01%, since according to human genome film, Homo sapiens are 99.9% genetically identical.  Second, his theory of genetic racialization is based on an inconstant and fluctuating sample of human genes.  That is, his sample base of human genes are not stable enough to make a scientific claim, in that Homo sapiens always have been, is in the process of, and will continue to be subject to evolution which involve the following unpredictable and incalculable forces: (1) external/natural environment, like climate, gene flow, and genetic drift; (2) internal/biological environment, like mutations, endemics, and blood types; (3) cultural behavior, such as various breeding patterns, migrations, diet, and beliefs. 

Bluntly put, Leroi’s scientific claim about human variation at genetic level is not based on precision over the whole population.  For instance, though the discovery of DNA has revealed human diversity with greater precision, virtually no one genotype is exclusive to one race.  For example, according to Molnar, though African-Americans show a higher frequency of sickle-cell genes, other ethnic groups also display sickle-cell genes, and they are categorized into different geographical types as they are found in locations such as Senegal, Benin, Bantu, and Asia (Molnar 162).  Also, in England, within one race of blood type-A patients who are afflicted with stomach cancer, a study of the frequency of this disease “revealed a difference between regions:  The mortality rate was higher in the North than in the South,” depending on other elements of people’s blood type (Molnar 99).  In other words, in this case of stomach cancer in England, racial type was not an indicator of why some have cancer and why some don’t.  Race is but one element of infinite number of other factors that determine the susceptibility of certain biological difference at a genetic level.  In other words, to borrow Alan Goodman’s term in his essay “Two Questions About Race” (2005), Leroi, as a scientist, is making a grave error because his concept of “genes as an indicator of different race” is based on a “shifting concept” (Goodman 3).  Goodman further critiques that Leroi “tends to forget about the 94% of variation that race fails to statistically explain (Goodman 3).  Rather, Goodman says that “race is an inherently unstable and unreliable concept, [which may be] . . . fine for local realities but not so for a scientific concept” (Goodman 3).  If, within this .01% of biological variability, certain traits are more common in one group of people than others, Leroi exaggerates this variability and postulates this tendency out of context as being a significant indicator of race disparity. 

Unlike Leroi, Molnar, on the other hand, believes that “study of biology forces us to reject perceptions of superficial differences, many of which are due to factors of nutrition, child growth, and climate” (Molnar 2).  In terms of nutrition and child growth as factors, I have personally noticed a change in appearance of Koreans brought up in US versus my other relatives who have never left Korea.  Korean immigrants in US more or less adopt American diet.  Consequently, unlike their relatives in Korea, Korean immigrants of US drink more milk and eat more pizza like the mainstream Americans.  This change in environmental and behavioral factors, in turn, affect genetic expression of the growth hormones in Korean immigrants’ children: Higher intake of dairy products causes their children to grow taller and stronger than their relatives in Korea.  As I am not a scientist, though I cannot validate my aforementioned hypothesis—that higher intake of dairy products produce taller people—Molnar cites cases in which diet seems to be a significant element in genetic makeup:  First, according to Molnar, Cross-culturally, and particularly in Asia, Africa, and in many European countries, more adults, opposed to infants, are classified as mal-absorbers of milk, because adults drink less or no milk compared to infants (Molnar 129).  However, a large percentage of adults in North America and pastoral tribes in East Africa are classified as absorbers due to their more exposure to dairy products (Molnar 129).  Thus, Molnar says that “milk-using experience . . .contribute[s] to high frequency of the gene for adult lactase persistence in some peoples of the world” (Molnar 129). 

Not only culturally specific “diet” affects human genome, but culturally particular “belief/behavior” also plays a role in genetic frequency.  For instance, albinism  type II, tyrosinase positive, is most frequently seen in Africans and Native Americans (Molnar 126).  One explanation for this phenomenon in one group—at least in the Native Americans—can be traced back to their cultural proclivity to the spread of Albinism:  In their culture, Albino males are treated well, doing lighter domestic jobs with women at home, which increase their prospect of mating and thus the chance of procreating more albinos (Miller, lecture).  In terms of both lactose tolerance and albinism, then, culturally particular human behavior—such as diet and sexuality—affect human diversity at a biological level.

 According to Molnar, climate is another indicator of human diversity.  For example, one type of protein called Haptoglobins (Hp1) which “have the capacity to combine with the oxygen-carrying pigment, hemoglobin” has the highest frequency in tropical locations (Molnar 120).  Molnar says that this is probably due to the fact that “this Haptoglobin (Hp1) type would be an advantage in populations where hemolytic anemia is very high”: the tropical areas (Molnar 121).  Another example of climate as an indicator of human diversity is that, though there are numerous exceptions, in general, “taller people [are] farther from the equator (as in northwestern European) and shorter people nearer [to] the equator” (Molnar 181).  Likewise, people are fatter and lighter in the northern cold regions versus their thinner darker counterparts in the warm humid areas (Molnar 186).  Even the various head sizes of human show correlation with the climate: In colder climates, the people on the average have “rounder heads than peoples in the tropics,” as “surface area and volume is a critical factor in heat radiation to regulate body temperature” (Molnar 188, 9).  Also, in terms of heat radiation/heat conservation, Homo sapiens’ other body parts like arms, legs, facial features, teeth, and hair are affected by climate, ultimately increasing the multiplicity and individuality of Homo sapiens, though within the .01% of human variation.  Most crucially, however, these milliard differences in human are merely correlations between climate and human variation; they are tendencies, not facts. Thus, any observation and assumptions about the phenotypical variation in humans—however genetically detailed the data may be—still do not stand as facts.  Ultimately, then, the very idea, such as that of Leroi’s—that humans are divisible into few racial types by observing their genes—is problematic, as many precursors to genetic difference, like climate cannot be measured by scientific methods.

Molnar explains that in any given population, studying its gene pool and frequencies are affected and shaped by other immeasurable factors such as “mutation,” “natural selection,” “genetic drift,” and “gene flow” (Molnar 56).  Mutation not only causes change in genetic codes but introduces a new variety of allele, increasing the number of different genotypes/phenotypes within a population (Molnar 59).  It is often driven by humans’ natural biological tendency to adapt, known as “natural selection” (Molnar 60).  For instance, polymorphism shown in human blood types is often a result of natural selection.  An allele such as Hbs, which is advantageous under harsh slavery conditions, for example, “appears more in several populations in Africa,” theoretically due to natural selection (Molnar 146).   Although its high frequency in several parts of India is hard to explain, at least in eastern Nigeria, it seems that this Hbs gene frequency was “spread by population migration and interpopulation contact, . . . because of its selective advantage” (Molnar 148).  The effect of natural selection is also seen in malarial cases—a widespread disease in mostly tropical areas.  For example, abnormal hemoglobin SCT are less able to support malarial parasite growth, and thus natural selection favors individuals with SCT, in that they are less likely to die from falciparum malaria than persons with all normal hemoglobin (Molnar 150).  The point is, how in the world Leroi can scientifically factor these natural phenomena into his truth claim—the genetic human variation?  Human variation, though parts of its aspects may be recognizable at genetic level, its holistic picture is impossible to neatly grasp, because human genes will be different tomorrow than what they are today; they are inconstant; they mutate. 

Gene flow and genetic drift are other random human social phenomena which forestall any human attempts to categorize genes into few racial types.  According to Molnar, “gene flow refers to exchanges between different population gene pools so that the next generation is a result of admixture” (Molnar 63).  Over the human history, Molnar says that invaders, colonists, travelers, and traders have all collectively contributed to this gene flow phenomenon (Molnar 63).  Thus, throughout the human history, this high rate of admixture, the phenomenon that is accelerating in our contemporary world, has been an important factor which prevents the development of unique gene combinations.  Evidence of diversification of genes due to gene flow can be seen in the case of sickle-cell traits in black populations.  According to Molnar, African-Americans in the US have, on average, less than one-fourth to one-half of the Hbs found among West African populations today (5-10 percent versus 20 percent)” (Molnar 160).  He says that “this reduction, occurring over the three-and-a-half centuries of their occupation in the New World. . . may be accounted for either by admixture with Euro-Americans or by an elimination of the selective advantage of the carrier of the sickle-cell trait.” (161).  On the other hand, Molnar states that Genetic Drift indirectly influences the course and intensity of natural selection, in that when a breeding population is too small, there is a possibility that not all gene combinations will be represented in the next generation—so called a “sampling error” (Molnar 64).  In short, smaller the population sample, higher the rate of gene frequency change between the generations (Molnar 65).  Thus, population size is another unmanageable, irregular factor which scientists like Leroi cannot accurately assess in analyzing human variation. 

   In conclusion, according to  Molnar, “the record of DNA markers tell us little about how we gained certain of these complex traits—how we acquire a certain size and appearance, a skin color, or rates of growth” (Molnar 179).  Molnar has also warned against scientists like Leroi, in that he says that “no matter how we may define or classify clusters of populations today, their composition will undoubtedly change over future generations, as a result of major alterations in evolutionary forces through human adaptation and because of continuing migrations and interbreeding,” which, I might add, has increased rapidly in our contemporary world (Molnar 2).  Likewise, Alan Goodman in his essay “Two Questions About Race” (2005) says that “we just don’t know” enough about human genes to make such a conclusive scientific claim.  Rather, human diversity is better explained in terms of “evolution and history” (Goodman 3).  Because Homo sapiens consist of enormous range of physical variability, any scheme to divide humanity into a few racial types is bound to be fallacious and misleading (Miller, lectures).  Thus, when Armand Leroi claims that race is genotypically distinguishable, he is—according to the human genome film—arguing and exaggerating the difference he sees within the narrow zone of .01% variability among different peoples, since cross-racially, humans are 99.9% genetically identical.

Part II

“Instead of obsessing about race, we could try to build a race-blind society.  Instead of feeding      the fires of neuroticism, we could start teaching people to forget about race, to move on.  But to   do that, first we must sideline the entire race relations industry—whose only function, it seems, is    to make us all deeply anxious about ‘race’—a concept they simultaneously believe has no objective reality.  “

 —Sean Thomas, Sunday Telegraph (London) 3/13/05

I also disagree with Sean Thomas’s above comment.  I find the idea behind it to be, well, wishful thinking at best.  To be “race-blind” means what?: that we forget the history of racial oppression which is so embedded in the collective unconscious?; that we do not recognize the multicultural reality of the United States?;  that we adhere to one set of ideas about American culture?;  if so, whose?  The phrase, “move on” is a phrase that Ralph Ellison has mocked in his Invisible Man.  There are people who actually fear remembrance of history and a culturally pluralistic society.  I suspect that this is what is behind Thomas’s message.

For one, the effects of imperialist colonialism of the past still linger among us.  Take India, for example, Eurocentric colonial nation building left ethnic strife among the colonized.  According to Kottak, “over a million Hindus and Muslims were killed in the violence that accompanied the division of the Indian subcontinent into India and Pakistan” (Kottak 82).  Similarly, “problems between Arabs and Jews in Palestine began during the British mandate period” (Kottak 82).  Moreover, during WW II, both Canada and US ordered expulsion of Japanese from their mainstream centers (Japanese internment).  In the history of a young nation of merely 200 some years, US has enforced numerous discriminatory immigration and property laws against those other than “white”—e.g., Chinese exclusionary Act, to name just one.  Thus, contrary to what Thomas suggests, race is not something that can be “[taught to] to forget. . . [and] move on,” because it has, it does, and it continues to affect the people of color in enormous and powerful ways.

The effect of racism is inscripted in both collective consciousness and in real life of colored people.  For instance, not only in US, but world-wide, people with darker pigmentation are the poorest (Miller, professor).  In US alone, more people of color, particularly, blacks and Latinos, are disproportionately incarcerated.  They are paid the least.  They live in and their children go to worst schools.  They are thus the least likely to succeed physically, intellectually, economically, and politically.  Their sociopolitical odds, then, are enormous.  In short, it affects every aspect of a colored person’s life: wealth, education, career, health, and the list can go on. 

Now, I would like to discuss about my personal observation/experience with racism in higher education.  Because the nature of my discussion is somewhat theoretical and subtle, before I immerse into my argument against intellectual racism within the canonical circle of Western countries, US in particular, I would like to first reiterate Kottak’s definition of racism:  According to Kottak, “when an ethnic group is assumed to have a biological basis, it is called a race.  Discrimination against such a group is called racism” (Kottak 67, emphasis added).  Well, what I have observed is that this racism against ethnic group exists even in the intellectual community, namely, among the canonizers—those who compile textbooks of higher educations.  For the purpose of this essay, I call this a “canonical racism”—the racism of anthologizers against works of ethnic writers. 

Until recently, the inclusion into or the exclusion from the Western canon was dependent upon the work’s “familiarity” and/or “durability” within the dominant culture.  Although canon debates by their very exclusionary nature can never please all sides, traditionally, they have systematically marginalized literary works of ethnic writers.  Perhaps, Samuel Johnson’s observation still holds true today: that “the reverence due to writings that have long subsisted arise…not from any credulous confidence in the superior wisdom of past ages,…but is the consequence of acknowledged and indubitable positions, that what has been longest known has been most considered, and what is most considered is best understood” (230, emphasis added).  What Johnson’s theory is implying is that what survives as “revered” (the canonized) literature owes to its “indubitable positions” (the positions of white males) within the literary circles.

For example, a decade ago, in 1995, an Asian Diaspora who was raised in America since the age of three wrote a novel claiming numerous awards, to name just one from the long list is the Hemingway Foundation/Pen Award.  Most memorably, for his novel Native Speaker, he was selected by the New Yorker as one of the twenty best “American writers” under forty.  This “American,” or should I say “Korean-American,” is Chang Rae Lee.  However, his book, Native Speaker, though he won “the twenty best American writers under forty” award, was automatically labeled under the “minor literature” in a separate American canon, because according to Deleuze and Guattari, Lee’s Native Speaker fits the definition of “minor literature”: work of a minority writer in a major language (English).  The value of this incidence for my argument is that it illustrates what I mean by canonical racism in intellectual community in US. Frankly, I believe that none of this labeling business should be espoused in the process of anthology.  If a writer is an American, then, s/he is singularly American, and his/her work is singularly an American literature.  No prefixes such as “Afro,” “Asian,” “Latino,” nor qualifiers such as “minor” or “ethnic” is needed, unless the canon is willing to equally dissect the entire culturally hybrid, transnational writers of America. 

Pertinent to canonical racism is an essay called “The More Things Change: Paradigm Shifts in Asian American Studies” written by Sumida Stephen.  Stephen, in his essay, informs that “for about a decade the critique of Asian American ‘dual identity’ empowered Asian American studies with the contravening idea that it is the concept of ‘America’ that needs to be changed so that it is understood that Asian Americans are singularly American” (Sumida 1).  In the past, if silent submissive Asian Americans can be effortlessly alienated (e.g., Japanese internment and Chinese exclusionary Act) on the basis of “phenotypically/culturally being more foreign than others”—thus requiring qualifiers and prefixes describing what type of American they are—now, such systemized alienation are no longer feasible.  With the coming-of-age of children of the Asian Diasporas, who may be the future writers/scholars, who have grown up in America, and who are mentally, culturally, and legally “Americans,” need to be dealt with.  Surely, it is inevitable that the canon debates in the U.S., in the very near future, will have to re-examine the concept of “American” in categorizing the works written by Asian Americans, and by extension, other prefixed half-Americans. 

John Guillory in “The Canon as Cultural capital,” says that much of the canonical debates stem from racist nationalism.  In his essay, Guillory states that “the ‘West’ was always the creation of nationalism,” and critiques that Western universities are involved in the discriminatory “project of constituting a national culture” largely through the process of canonization (222).  According to Guillory, the method of sustaining what he calls the West’s “imaginary cultural continuities” begins with the assumed Eurocentric superiority, weighing what is culturally “Western” more principally into the canon, while subordinating or excluding literature that represents the “other.”  Thus, in this nationalistic milieu of the Western canon, ethnographic works are often pushed out as “not [representing] our culture” (222).  However, Guillory warns that “the very distinctness of cultures, Western or non-Western, canonical or noncanonical, points to a certain insistent error…in the supposed transmission of culture” through literature (223), because the very idea of “cultural homogeneity” is an illusion—a “fiction” (221). 

Similarly, the chief spokesperson of subaltern studies, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in her essay, “Imperialism and Sexual Difference,” requests accurate, not distorted, representation of women of color in Eurocentric literature.  For example, in many literatures written by Western writers, women of color are portrayed as physically, intellectually, and culturally inferior—e.g., they are usually a slave, maid, prostitute, or mentally insane (like Rochester’s wife from Jamaica in Jane Eyre).  She challenges Western academia to stop misrepresenting the women of the third world by first deconstructing the tropological truth-claim made by the imperial masculists, meaning that this cultural violation stems from the fact that Western academia insists “the white race as a norm for universal humanity” (340).  Particularly, what troubles Spivak the most is that this cultural violation—committed by the Western male and female elitists—perpetuates through cultural ignorance of the teachers to their students, which she describes it as the “sanctioned ignorance” (345).  In order to avoid sanctioned ignorance, then, their misrepresented history written by the Eurocentric writers must be re-represented/revised; however this cannot happen without the “equal access” in the canon (347).

Like Spivak, critics like Bhabha also demands equal representation of the postcolonial cultural hybridity written by diasporas and other ethnic minorities.  He says, “The Western metropole must confront its postcolonial history, told by its influx of postwar migrants and refugees, as an indigenous or native narrative internal to its national identity” (1335, emphasis added).  He proposes that “the centre of …[our] study would [no longer] be the “sovereignty” of national cultures, nor the universalism of human cultures, but a focus on those ‘freaks’ of social and cultural displacements,”’ meaning minorities (1340).  He asks the Western canon to endow equal access into their literary circles those who in the past have been perceived as “freaks” by the dominant culture.

In conclusion, just as my personal observation of canonical racism illustrates, even though race makes little sense on the genetic level, this does not mean that it is not real in a social sense.  Thus, Tomas’s notion of a “race-blind” society is naive.  Other than teaching people to treat others as individuals and not collectively as a race or group, how do you create a “race-blind” society?  It is just not possible.  Perhaps I’m pessimistic, but it’s a utopian ideal that is not realistic.  Moreover, what does he mean by the “race relations” industry? It seems to me that the only people who obsess about race as an issue and are anxious about it are those who feel the need to overlook race.  As I have mentioned in my introduction of my first essay, race can be an important indicator and an important measurement to gain a greater understanding of other groups of individuals, not only biologically to cure diseases, but to improve our social conditions.  However, to create this race-blind society is to argue that there are no differences among us.  It is only through open dialogue (e.g., in intellectual community) not by pretending that all of us could be “race-blind,” that we can “move on” towards racial equality (Thomas 2005). 

Works Cited

Bhabba, Homi. “Locations of Culture.” The Critical Tradition. Richter, David H. Boston:

       Bedford Books, 1989.

Gilles, Deleuze, and Guattari, Felix. “What Is a Minor Literature?” Falling into Theory. Richter,

        David H. Boston:

Goodman, Alan. “Two Questions About Race” 20 April 2005

        <http://raceandgenomics.ssrc.org/Goodman&gt;

Guillory, John. “The Canon as Cultural Capital.” Falling into Theory. Richter, David H. Boston:

        Bedford Books, 2000

Johnson, Samuel. “Preface to Shakespeare.” The Critical Tradition. Richter, David H.

         Boston: Bedford Books, 1989.

Kottak, Conrad Phillip. On Being Different. 2 Boston: McGraw Hill, 2003.

Lee, Chang Rae. Native Speaker. New York: Riverhead Books, 1995.

Molnar, Stephen. Human Variation: Races, Types, and Ethnic Groups. 5 New Jersey: Prentice Hall,

          2002.

Spivak, Gayatri. “Imperialism and Sexual Difference.” Falling into Theory. Richter, David H.

         Boston: Bedford Books, 2000.

Sumida, Stephen H. “The More Things Change: Paradigm Shifts in Asian American Studies.”

         American Studies International 38 (2000): 97-114.

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Chang Rae Lee’s “Native Speaker”: Diasporic Power Art

Chang Rae Lee’s Native Speaker: Diasporic Power Art

Deleuze and Guattari in “What is a Minor Literature?” discuss the “literary struggle” of a Diasporic literature (Jewish literature), an idea borrowed from Franz Kafka, who believes that Diasporic literature is “something impossible” when it is written in the language of the host country, because its cultural authenticity is compromised in the process (Richter 167).  What Kafka’s “literary struggle” suggests, then, is that in order to retrieve a true authentic meaning of a diasporic literature, the reader must be able to de-code the culturally cryptic, narratological intensions of the author, so, too, is the Native Speaker.  Overtly, the novel is about the three protagonists’ social descent due to their Asian complex, while covertly, it is about their ascension into the three hierarchical powers of America: (1) “finance,” by Henry’s father who is an “adopter”; (2) “intelligence,” by Henry who is an “assimilator”; and (3) “politics,” by Kwang who is a “merger.”  Ultimately, the social ascent of the three diasporic characters is achieved through what I call a “diasporic power art” for two reasons:  First, because their industrial successes are rendered through intense, dynamic reinventions of their diasporic subjectivities and conditions in semi-fictitious ways.  Second, because each of their individual American becomings can be aesthetically described as a “diasporic cultural art” which entails “cultural aesthetics”—the elements that elevate/cultivate one’s cultural refinement.

Asian diasporas are adept cultural artists, who reinvent themselves in order to acclimate from one end of cultural atmosphere to another—from East to West.  The nature of diasporic condition—living not in one’s motherland but in an adopted/foreign land—requires nomadic “choices,” “versatility,” and “resilience.”  It requires constant mental, physical, and cultural adjustments, but most importantly, entails recasting of their personas.  Linguistically, culturally, and phenotypically, since the East and West are arguably not the most alike, Asian diasporic acculturation into Western decorum and society is more adversative and intense.  Their inchoate American becoming is molded and remolded into an often indeterminate subjectivity by turbulent, (at times traumatic) bipolar cultural forces, thus their new life in America is almost a fiction to their consciousness.  It is a process that requires both artful nimbleness and itinerant hardiness on their part, which can be described as a “diasporic cultural art,” something that cannot be gauged by methodical or political formulas.  Rather, its appreciation comes through the lens of “cultural aesthetics”—elements that elevate or cultivate one’s cultural refinement.  Of the infinite elements of what one considers/includes as cultural aesthetics, there are at least two prevailing traits shared by all three diasporic characters which enhance/sanctify their immigrant life: (1) their ability to make prudent or conscientious choices; and (2) their nomadic versatility—the ability to reinvent themselves as needed.  The three characters in the novel employ in varying degrees these and other diasporic cultural aesthetics, not only to cultivate their nascent American subjectivities, but more primarily to adapt to their new culture.

Just as the immigrant stories of the three characters in Native Speaker —Henry’s father, Henry, and Kwang—differ from one another, so are the colors and shapes of their diasporic arts.  To fare well in their new adopted land (America), these three characters reinvent themselves as three different types of semi-fictitious personas: (1) Henry’s father as an “adopter”; (2) Henry as an assimilator; and (3) Kwang as a “merger.”  Each of these characters half-fictitiously “chooses,” in most part, what function they want to play for the dominant in power.  For instance, Henry’s father selectively “adopts” primarily one ideology of America—capitalism—while he largely ignores the others.  He therefore chooses to “adapt” to America’s economic conditions in the ghettos for financial gains.  Henry, on the other hand, wants to be singularly American, so he chooses to assimilate by gaining American intelligence.  Finally, Kwang dreams of coalition among different ethnic groups in America, so he chooses to merge different cultures for a political reason.  These brands of diasporic characters face challenges unique to their own type, and each of their moral or sociopolitical “rise” (ascent) and “fall” (descent) involve synergy of multifaceted cultural aesthetics aforementioned.  While on the plot level, their ultimate “fall” as an “adopter,” “assimilator,” or “merger” may be merely sympathetic to the readers of Western consciousness, it is simultaneously unnerving and heartening to the diasporic readers, because behind each of the character’s “fall” is the antithetical message of “rise” (hope) for them.

I. The Father’s Fall and Rise as an “Adopter”

As an opportunistic “adopter” of Western ideologies, Henry’s father fully subscribes to American capitalism, even at the cost of demoralization and intellectual enervation.  In Henry’s words, his father considers “capitalism” to be the “unseen force” and has been “single-minded[ly] determine[ed]” to succeed “through [his] twenty-five years of green-grocering in a famous ghetto” (49).  As an owner of labor-intensive grocery chains, he is proud that he is a rich man, though not proud of the industry.  He suffers intellectual atrophy and dehumanization, not only because his high scholarship from Korea is wasted—a top “industrial engineer” with a master’s degree from the best college—but because his limited English and ethnic isolation displace him from the social and intellectual centers of the U.S. (56, 57).  Though he lives in an upper class neighborhood, the wealth he amasses merely becomes an ethnic signifier—“Oriental Jews”—which does nothing to help him blend in with the mainstream Americans (53): “he never fe[els] fully comfortable in his fine house in Ardsley (affluent neighborhood)” (52).  His American becoming is thus at the social periphery, where he is a perpetual outsider without affect.  More tragically, he is even diminished to ethical immorality.  Henry describes his father’s demoralized mentality in America: “If anything, I think my father would choose to see my deceptions in a rigidly practical light, .  .  . the need to adapt” (297, emphasis added).  Thus as an ambitious adopter of capitalism, Henry’s father “falls” (becomes dehumanized), as his subjectivity alters from his former intellectual Korean self into an American nobody—the metamorphic versatility of a diaspora.

Indeed, at a glance, the intellectual and moral “fall” of Henry’s father seems to be a high price that he pays as an adopter of American capitalism.  Worst yet, since he loses his wife early from cancer, and he himself dies rather young without fully enjoying the fruits of his hard labor, the readers get a sense that his life in America ultimately signifies “death” or nothingness.  Yet from a historical context, there is more to his immigrant story than just the cost of dehumanization and death.  Jae Min Shin’s chronological analysis of Korean immigrants in his editorial column of Korea Times sheds insight into Henry’s father’s historical background and his financial motivation.  Shin reports in his editorial that until the 1960’s, Korean immigrants in America largely consisted of poor class: students, war-orphans, and females married to Americans; but in the 70’s, it shifted to the middle class capitalists with visions of economic expansion in America; then since the 80’s, it consists of even a higher class of entrepreneur Koreans with large investments in American companies (Shin D8).  According to Shin’s data, then, as a product of the 70’s and 80’s Korean American opportunism, Henry’s father has, in fact, successfully played his role as an “adopter” of American capitalism.  In other words, his principal reason for coming to America is not to augment his scholarship, but to make “enough money [so] that he could live in a majestic white house in Westchester and call himself a rich man,” even if that debases him into laboring with “a handful of vegetable stores” (333).  Thus, the cost of dehumanization and intellectual degeneration on the part of Henry’s father are factored in as a “fair” sacrifice to fulfill his financial desires.  In a word, he “chooses” to be what he is in America—an opportunist.  Then regardless of one’s intention, this “option to choose a different nation-state” as one’s new home is the advantageous “power” of the contemporary diasporas, which eventually does translate to his financial success in America, more than what his homeland, Korea, offers.

As a former industrial engineer, Henry’s father not only realistically estimates the “most” financial success he can accrue in America as a first generation immigrant, but maps the “maximum” his son, Henry, can approximate by purchasing a house in an affluent neighborhood.  With what he can financially provide, he wishes that his son will do better than him, and Henry, too, wants to do better than his father by studying hard, obviating his mother’s “tears. . . from her concern over [his] mediocre studies” (77).  Thus as a capitalist, Henry’s father’s seemingly dehumanizing existence is actually the intended, prudent course he willingly takes to humanize his son, and between the two, there is an inextricable causality, as the father’s “fall” (dehumanization) paves a way for his son’s intellectual “rise” as an upper class American.  Henry later comes to a deeper appreciation of his father’s sacrifice for him: “I see how my father had to retool his life to the ambitions his meager knowledge of the language and culture would allow . . . I am his lone American son, blessed with every hope and quarter he could provide” (333).  Considering the fact that Lee (the author) himself has intellectually “risen” from his well meaning immigrant parents, it is helpful to know that he has respectfully dedicated his first novel, Native Speaker, to his parents: “For my mother and my father.”  If we infer from the author’s reverence paid to his own parents, then the opportunistic immigrant life of Henry’s father which is devoid of human sociality does not suggest—contrary to its face value—that it is meaningless and pathetic.  Rather, the moral of this story is about how the father’s financial success can elevate/cultivate his son’s intellectual and social refinement in their adopted land, which sanctifies the father’s immigrant struggles.

II. Henry’s Fall and Rise as an “Assimilator”

Since, Henry as a spy is immorally engaged in treacherous activity against his own people, Henry’s moral “fall,” then, is textually a valid outcome.  While Henry’s father is a single-minded adopter of American capitalism—who enjoys a certain degree of independence due to his socio-political alienation—Henry, as an “assimilator,” on the other hand, is more scrutinized by the American society.  Henry is “a linguist of the field. . . [with] the troubling, expert power” (171, emphasis added).  Henry’s intellectual status is what Crystal Parikh in his essay, “Ethnic America Undercover: The Intellectual and minority Discourse,” describes as a “gained social position” of “minority intellectuals, [who] in gaining access to the mechanisms of cultural and political representation, no longer speak from a marginalized position” (Parikh 258).  Henry relies on his “gained intellectual position” to define himself as singularly American, an ultimate “assimilator,” by pledging allegiance to the dominant in power.  In order to keep his vows with the established— though his work involves extensive racialization and exploitation of ethnic minorities, including his own—he blinds himself to the racial dynamism in his work (Dennis’s private detective agency).  As a spy, he instead abuses his own cultural insidership and familiarity to “sell out” his own people.  He fictitiously and perfunctorily performs the racial dance which his superior, Dennis Hoagland, choreographs: “I am the obedient. . . the invisible underling. . . [and] this [is] my assimilation, so many years in the making” (202, emphasis added).  Most tragically, Henry’s fictitious selves created through the “legends” at his work—the fiction that allows him to be many persons at once—are the vestiges of a schizophrenic assimilator, who has morally “fallen” (22).

Henry’s versatility of being “many persons at once,” however, is precisely the auspicious edge of postmodern Asian Americans, when interpreted from a contravening contemporary point of view.  As an assimilator, the remnant of Asian silence in Henry is a cryptic language to those around him, including his most intimate wife, Lelia, and superiors at work, Jack and Dennis.  For example, Lelia cannot decipher “Henryspeak” (Henry’s reticence), and Jack and Dennis cannot decode the silent language and affinity exchanged between Henry and Kwang.  Henry, on the other hand, can both penetrate and dismantle theirs at will: “I and my kind possess another dimension.  We will learn every lesson of accent and idiom, we will dismantle every last pretense and practice you hold, noble as well as ruinous.  You can keep nothing safe from our eyes and ears” (320, emphasis added).  What Henry articulates in this passage is, in effect, an enunciation of the cultural edge of the contemporary polyglots—the irreducible linguistic versatility of diasporas.  

In our postmodern world, the versatile polyglots also have more “options,” both publicly (occupational) and privately (moral).  Henry—as someone with intellectual and cultural edge—is  a “denizen,” a royal assimilator not to be condemned, but to be emulated for the conscientious choice he ultimately makes between the oppressor (his boss) and the oppressed (him and his people).  According to Robin Cohen in Global Diasporas, “denizen” is a privileged postmodern diaspora with “considerable wealth and portable skills—a different group from the unskilled labour migrants of the nineteenth century” (164, 168).  In other words, in contrast to “the unskilled labour migrants” of the past, postmodern diasporas no longer need to tolerate any forms of oppressions, if s/he has the proper social, professional, or legal training/resources—in other words, “intellectual power” (Cohen 168).  As an educated person, Henry finally understands that an assimilator also has “options”: that wanting to assimilate to dominant culture does not mean one must allow oppression.  Upon this epiphany, he unshackles himself from his boss’s demonical bondage (Dennis’s detective agency).  Assertively, to the messenger of his boss, Jack, who asks, “Dennis thinks you will come back,” Henry answers, “Dennis is wrong” (288).  Henry continues, “Listen, Jack.  This is my mind finally speaking” (288).  The fact that it is Henry, not Dennis or Jack, who has the last word in the final scene of their relationship, symbolically and literally diminishes the power of the institutionalized racism in America.  Thus, as a contemporary assimilator, Henry exercises this “right to choose” as a denzen—to quit, if he must, those who oppress and exploit him and his people.  Ultimately, then, Henry’s such capability to make moral choices—free from vocational insecurity—is the prerogative of the diasporic intellectuals.

As an intellectual diaspora, Henry’s “right to choose” stretches farther than rejecting oppression; it extends to disseminating his linguistic expertise to other migrants.  At the end of the novel, Henry makes a conscientious choice.  He becomes an ESL teacher to share his intellectual privilege with the underprivileged.  He disseminates “knowledge of power”— English—unto the ethnic migrants of America, to help them better entrench their future in their new land.  Clearly, the fact that Henry converts from being a treacherous assimilator (his moral “fall”) to an intellectually nurturing teacher (his moral “rise”) is the acme of contradicting moment in the novel, which Lee deliberately dramatizes for didactic implications.  One way of interpreting Lee’s antithetical narratology is to deduce that Henry’s moral “fall” and “rise” is about an assimilator—with an intellectual power in America—making conscientious “choices” between his two cultures.  Henry ultimately chooses empathy and responsibility towards his fellow diasporas, and this change of attitude in Henry exemplifies what Lee may hope to see in other diasporic elites towards their marginal counterparts.

III. Kwang’s Fall and Rise as a “Merger”

From one’s “gained position,” if Henry falls morally, so does Kwang, politically.  If Henry is a fictitious assimilator, Kwang, on the other hand, is a versatile diasporic “merger,” who is faithful to both his past and present cultures, and plays his bi-cultural roles for a higher stage—politics in America.  He is a consummate actor of both cultures.  He is in Henry’s words someone who is “effortlessly Korean [and] effortlessly American,” simultaneously (328).  Unlike Henry, who as a spy aids in the deportation and dispersion of the ethnic migrants, Kwang—“an ambitious minority politician [with]. . . unwavering agenda [and] stridency”—labors to reconcile the hostility among the variegated minority groups in New York (139).  Similarly, unlike Henry’s father who is unmindful of racial “irony,” Kwang is both sensitive and sensible to racial issues, and attempts to form a political coalition among different races (58).  His career as a New York City Councilman, however, ends tragically, as his illegitimate fund-raising apparatus—the Korean money club “ggeh”—is disclosed by his most trusted staff members, Eduardo and Henry (280).  These two, who betray Kwang, work for those who represent the major political powers in America: Dennis Hoagland (Henry’s boss), De Roos (Kwang’s opponent), and indirectly, INS.  Thus, Kwang’s “messianic” political rise—as a prototypical self-made “American [in]. . .flyer[s]”—is pulverized by his political superiors for subtly contesting and threatening the White American politics (141).  As a diasporic merger, Kwang’s political “fall” ultimately intimates the vulnerability and indeterminacy of his self-claimed American persona in the political stage.

Read literally, Kwang’s political fall is tragic and discouraging.  More than any other characters in the novel, Kwang as a politician, espouses and magnifies his diasporic consciousness—sensitivity to multi-pluralism.  Unlike Henry and his father, he rejects tertiary roles in racial plays that are strategized by the so-called superpowers of America.  Rather, from his diasporic margins, Kwang encroaches inroad to challenge the very core of the American racial politics.  He is in Henry’s words “a larger public figure who [is] willing to speak and act outside the tight sphere of his family [ethnic enclave],” and is not “afraid like [Henry’s] mother and father” (139, emphasis added).  Henry “hadn’t yet envisioned” that a public career is something that “a Korean man would find significant or worthy of energy and devotion,” but is what Lee would like to have his (fellow diasporic) readers to pay a closer attention to, as a source of America’s deep seated racism (139, emphasis added).  Thus, it is precisely the turbulent theatricality of Kwang’s public career—especially his political “fall”—which crystallizes Lee’s desire to raise political awareness in his readers.  Ultimately, Kwang, among the three diasporic characters, is the one who is portrayed by Lee as someone who reaches the highest pivot of the American hierarchical achievements: politics, which wields more influence than Henry’s father’s financial success or Henry’s intellectual aptitude.  He is the consummate diasporic cultural artist.    

Furthermore, if we flip the lens, Kwang’s “fall” in the political arena projects an inverted vision that is ineffably surreal and inspiring to the readers.  Contrary to those who think Kwang would commit suicide as a result of his political calamity, Henry as a fellow Korean American understands Kwang’s Korean way of facing life crisis, thus he believes otherwise.  Henry believes that no matter how bitter Kwang’s ignoble political defeat may be, he will choose life over death, as if Kwang is a Christ figure.  Henry solemnly narrates that “Koreans don’t take their own lives.  At least not from shame” (333, emphasis added).  Henry further explains why: “My mother said to me once that suffering is the noblest art, the quieter the better.  If you bite your lip and understand that this is the only world, you will perhaps persist and endure” (333, emphasis added).  According to the mother’s definition of “noblest art,” then, Kwang indeed is the noblest hero who suffers sublimely.  Like Christ, he bears his cross—his political fall—without saying anything and answering nothing “as if he is deaf” (342).  Though the angry crowd “scream at him like he is a child . . . and spit on his shoulder, . . . nothing registers in his face” (342).  In Henry’s words, Kwang “is already in another world” (342).  As it is demonstrated through Kwang’s Christ-like suffering that seems to transport him to another spiritual world, diasporas’s tendency to “hope” and capacity to “persist and endure” are some of the noblest “diasporic cultural aesthetics,” which sublimate their immigrant tribulations and inspire the readers. 

Thus, just when the readers of Western consciousness think that Kwang is being buried by his superior political opponents, the fact is Kwang’s political fall is largely an enactment of self-induced, masochistic punishment to himself for failing his people.  It stems from his unremitting loyalty to his political constituents.  It is Kwang’s way of “enduring crisis with Korean nobility” (333).  Because Lee pitilessly encapsulates Kwang’s political fall in a racially and socially claustrophobic denouement, it does not allow catharsis for the readers, but ingenuously does the reverse.  Psychologically and aesthetically, Kwang’s political “fall” to (fellow diasporic) readers—who similarly persist and endure social injustices in America—is liable to produce de-catharsis in varying degrees:  Mildly, it may evoke a nagging “reciprocal yearning” to counter the situation.  Powerfully, it may induce a strong “insurgent impulse” to combat the racial situation in America.  Thus, instead of the purging effect, Kwang’s political fall intoxicates the (fellow diasporic) readers with the unquenchable emotions, and that is the narratological scheme of the author—Lee’s way of producing powerful and lingering feelings of political injustice in the readers through his literary reversal psychology.  Indeed, Lee’s deployment of de-catharsis inversely stir and turn the readers’ interests towards more political awareness and participation in American minority politics.

Thus, decoding the author’s alternate intensions enlightens us with the deeper meaning of the text—a moment of revelation.  This kind of reader’s moment of intellectual and spiritual union with the author’s encoded message is delivered through the power of diasporic literature—the diasporas’s cognitive and cultural bond with its literature which is impenetrable by their predominant counterparts.  For instance, while it seems to the Western consciousness that the moral or sociopolitical “fall” of the three characters—Henry’s father, Henry, and Kwang—signifies their ultimate failure in acculturating into Americanism, its contravening interpretations suggest otherwise:  They are diasporic heroes, who reach their individual “maximums” in the three hierarchical levels of American successes: (1) finance; (2) intelligence; and (3) politics.  Then what is easily neglected, but should be paid its due recognition to these characters, is that they—as the best positioned and equipped characters to make a difference in American politics—wield their silent de-cathartic affectivity by influencing their readers to adopt sensible anti-racist measures.  Thus, “diasporic power art” is the effect of an exceptional diasporic literature.  Through its exemplary diasporic protagonists who display nomadic finesse—like versatility, bold choices, or resilience—it inflames profound cultural reflections in the reader.  

Works Cited and Consulted

Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997.

Lee, Chang Rae. Native Speaker. New York: Riverhead Books, 1995.

Gilles, Deleuze, and Guattari, Felix. “What Is a Minor Literature?” Falling into Theory. Richter,

David H. Boston:

Parikh, Crystal. “Ethnic America Undercover: The Intellectual and Minority Discourse.”

        Contemporary Literature 43 (2002): 249-84.

Shin, Jae-Min. “Desperate Immigration (Jul Mang Yi Min).”  Editorial. Korea Times. 23 Sept.

        2002, D8

Sumida, Stephen H. “The More Things Change: Paradigm Shifts in Asian American Studies.”

American Studies International 38 (2000): 97-114.

The Illogic of the American Canon that Segregates Ethnic Literature (Published in CSULA Significations 2007)

The Illogic of the American Canon that Segregates Ethnic Literature

While attempting to defend the Western literary canon, Edward W. Said in “The Politics of Knowledge,” reveals the Eurocentric mentality towards subaltern literature: “[literary] politics has needed to assume, indeed needed to firmly to believe, that what was true about Orientals or Africans was not however true about or for Europeans” (191). In essence, Said is trying to articulate his theory of “politics of knowledge”—that, in the canon war, an author’s “racial identity” translates to his/her “knowledge” and the quality of his/her work. In other words, if an author is other than “white,” then, his/her literary work is less likely to be received as equal to that of the “white” standard, thus subaltern. In this canonical dichotomy between the “White” and the “other,” America—the land of diversity—is no less a culprit to its steep division, in that, we, as well, divide our literature as either belonging to “white” (American Literature) or “other” (ethnic literature). This system of racialization in the American canon is illogical and problematic, because it is, in effect, denying the transnational subjectivity of America —the fact that America as a nation is a “nation of immigrants that produce cultural hybridity,” and thus its multiethnic literatures are, in fact, its primary building blocks. What American canon needs, then, is a re-conceptualization of “American literature” as inherently transnational, to include the works of minor/ethnic literature as its indispensable parts, categorized only by their different genres and chronology, thus obviating separate ethnic curriculum in institutions.

In order to show why ethnic literature should not be an extraneous component to, but an essential core of, an American literature, first part of this essay explores the racist and nationalistic milieu of the Western canon itself. First, it reviews the definition and the function of “ethnic” and “minor” literature to deduce why these types of literature would be marginalized by the canon. Second, it discusses cultural hybridism largely from the point of views of the critics who advocate fair and equal representation of the ethnic minorities in the Eurocentric texts. Third, it psychoanalytically probes into the notion of “foreigner” or the “other” to illustrate that the canon—by segregating ethnic literature as not part of its own—is, in fact, being self-antagonistic. Then the second part of this essay focuses on arguing against the biased practice of canon in couple of ways: First, it introduces an example of an ethnic literature (Native Speaker) in America to show how it is received and why it is labeled as a minor literature. Then the rest of this essay argues against and proves why the canonical segregation of any literature written in America as “ethnic/minor” is an act of self-negating the intrinsically hybrid, transnational “Americanism.”

I

Until recently, the inclusion into or the exclusion from the Western canon was dependent upon the work’s “familiarity” and/or “durability” within the dominant culture. Although canon debates by their very exclusionary nature can never please all sides, traditionally, they have systematically marginalized ethnic literature. Perhaps, Samuel Johnson’s observation still holds true today: that “the reverence due to writings that have long subsisted arise…not from any credulous confidence in the superior wisdom of past ages,…but is the consequence of acknowledged and indubitable positions, that what has been longest known has been most considered, and what is most considered is best understood” (230, emphasis added). Like Said, what Johnson’s theory is implying is that what survives as “revered” (the canonized) literature owes to its “indubitable positions” (the positions of white males) within the literary circles.

The canonical bias—which both Johnson and Said acknowledges—can therefore be stifling to ethic/minor literature of the colored writers. With this racism within the canonical circle in mind, I beg questions pertaining to the works by postmodern writers, particularly, those who fall into what Homi Bhabha in “Locations of Culture” calls the subjects of “liminal cultural locations.” They are those with ambiguous bi-cultural locality, or more popularly known as “diasporas”—ethnic minorities who are living, not in their homeland, but in their adopted land. Their cultural bi-locality places them in between the superior and the inferior social status. They are, for example, Americans who are not fully Americans, but “half Americans,” as their prefixes will designate: Afro, Latino, Asian-Americans. In short, they are America’s “ethnics,” and their literature is labeled as “ethnic literature.” Etymologically, “ethnic” is one who is not a Christian or Jew, but a Gentile, heathen, pagan, or simply the “other.” Similarly, according to Oxford’s contemporary definition, “ethnic minority” is a racial or other group within a larger system; hence, foreign or exotic” (emphasis added). Thus, “ethnic literature” is not really “American literature”; rather, it is a “foreign or exotic” literature of “racial or other group” within America.

It is precisely this widely accepted notion that “ethnic literature does not represent American mainstream culture, but that of the “foreigner’s,” which spurs American canonizers to rather marginalize it at its best, or exclude it at its worst. Since ethnic literature in their minds is “exotic” and “foreign,” it cannot be translated as part of an American culture, nor can it help them constitute and transmit “homogenous Americanism” through literature. John Guillory in “The Canon as Cultural capital,” says that much of the canonical debates stem from racist nationalism. In his essay, Guillory states that “the ‘West’ was always the creation of nationalism,” in that its “assertion of the continuity of Western tradition exactly corresponds in its intensity to the assertion of nationalism” (222). He further critiques that Western universities are involved in the discriminatory “project of constituting a national culture” largely through the process of canonization (222). According to Guillory, the method of sustaining what he calls the West’s “imaginary cultural continuities” begins with the assumed Eurocentric superiority, weighing what is culturally “Western” more principally into the canon, while subordinating or excluding literature that represents the “other.” Thus, in this nationalistic milieu of the Western canon, ethnographic literature is often pushed out as “not [representing] our culture” (222). However, Guillory warns that “the very distinctness of cultures, Western or non-Western, canonical or noncanonical, points to a certain insistent error…in the supposed transmission of culture” through literature (223), because the very idea of “cultural homogeneity” is an illusion—a “fiction” (221). However, Guillory admits that this fictitious conviction on the part of the canonizers—that the Western canon should represent the “great works of Western civilization only”—is “nevertheless a very powerful one (because it is ideological)” (221).

Then, what exactly is the distinctive trait of ethnic/minor literature that is more likely to be excluded from the Western canon? Deleuze and Guattari in “What is a Minor Literature?” define that “minor literature” is what “minority constructs within a major language.” They further list three other characteristics of the minor literature: (1) its language deterritorializes; (2) it is always political; and (3) the text serves as a collective enunciation. As an example, Deleuze and Guattari point to Jew’s experience of Diaspora to illustrate how their literature can de-territorialize cultural and national boundaries. They say that the act of “de-territorialization” happens as a result of a special situation where dispersed (often traumatized) Diasporas, who live in their host countries, cannot write their stories in their own language. However, left with no better way of emotional survival, they ironically write their Jewish story in the language of their oppressors, effectuating de-territorialization of the cultural and national boundaries. As it is shown in this example of Jewish Diasporas, the ultimate threat that a minor literature poses for the xenophobic authorities in the canon would be that it not merely transgresses its linguistic territory, but that it unavoidably penetrates the master’s culture, potentially undermining national solidarity.

Though the canonical authority in power may wish to bolster national solidarity through literature, critics like Bhabha demands equal representation of the postcolonial cultural hybridity written by diasporas and other ethnic minorities. He says, “The Western metropole must confront its postcolonial history, told by its influx of postwar migrants and refugees, as an indigenous or native narrative internal to its national identity” (1335, emphasis added). He proposes that “the centre of …[our] study would [no longer] be the “sovereignty” of national cultures, nor the universalism of human cultures, but a focus on those ‘freaks’ of social and cultural displacements”’ (1340). He asks that our contemporary “critic[s] must attempt to fully realize, and take responsibility for, the unspoken, unrepresented pasts that haunt the historical present” of the marginalized, hybrid postmodern subjects (1340). In other words, Bhabha is asking the Western canon to include those who in the past have been perceived as “freaks” by the dominant culture.

Similarly, the chief spokesperson of subaltern studies, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in her essay, “Imperialism and Sexual Difference,” requests accurate, not distorted, representation of women of color in Eurocentric literature. She challenges Western academia to stop misrepresenting the women of the third world by first deconstructing the tropological truth-claim made by the imperial masculists. Spivak believes that western academic institutions commit “translation-as-violation” (344) both in a literal sense (linguistic translation) and in a representational sense (fictional misrepresentation of the women of the third world). She claims that this cultural violation stems from the fact that Western academia insists “the white race as a norm for universal humanity” (340). Spivak is insulted not only by the assumed racial and intellectual superiority of the Western universal masculist, but also by its feminist counterparts. She believes that feminist writers of the first world are complicit with their masculist counterparts, in that, they, too, grossly misrepresent the women of the third world in their writings. Particularly, what troubles Spivak the most is that this cultural violation—committed by the Western male and female elitists—perpetuates through cultural ignorance of the teachers to their students, which she describes it as the “sanctioned ignorance” (345). In order to avoid sanctioned ignorance, Spivak is, in effect, insinuating that ethnographic texts should be written and critiqued by those with cultural familiarity and authority. Consequently, for these culturally appropriate writers to re-vision their misrepresented history written by the Eurocentric writers and to create a new “just representation” of their presence as equal humans, they need, according to Spivak, an “equal right” in the literary circles, which also implies an “equal access” in the canon (347).

If those in control of the canon, or more specifically, American canon perceives minor literature to be less than American, it is because they see the minorities as “foreigners,” “the others,” who in their eyes cannot and is not yet fully assimilated to their culture. However, Julia Kristeva’s analysis of “foreigner” in Strangers To Ourselves, shows how the “others” are in fact “our nocturnal selves”—the dark strangers who are repressed within ourselves. Psychoanalytically, she explains that Freud’s “Uncanny, [means that] foreignness is within us: we are our own foreigners; we are divided:” (181). Hence, she says, “foreigner is neither a race nor a nation” (181). In fact, Kristeva believes that “it is [only] through unraveling transference—the major dynamics of otherness. . . [which is] . . . the foreign component of our psyche—that, on the basis of the other, [we] become reconciled with [our] own otherness-foreignness” (182). Most significantly, according to Kristeva’s theory, the so called “the other,” “the foreigner, “the stranger,” or “the inferior” is, in fact, none other than “ourselves.” We are all “an integral part of the same” (181). Then psychoanalytically speaking, the Eurocentric canon war is, in fact, self-antagonistic, in that each time it alienates/negates entry of what they perceive as “foreign texts” into its collection, it is ironically diminishing and self-effacing its own culture. Thus, if Kristeva’s interpretation of the Freudian “uncanny” is adopted, it would drastically change our concept of “foreignness,” and this change of our mind, in turn, would ideally dissolve the canonical racism in America.

II

Whereas Kristeva in Strangers to Ourselves probes the notion of a “foreigner” in a psychoanalytical sense, a novel, Native Speaker explores the reality of being a “foreigner” in America. A decade ago, in 1995, an Asian Diaspora who was raised in America since the age of three wrote a novel claiming numerous awards, to name just one from the long list is the Hemingway Foundation/Pen Award. Most memorably, for his novel Native Speaker, he was selected by the New Yorker as one of the twenty best American writers under forty. This “American,” or should I say “Korean-American,” is Chang Rae Lee. Lee’s Native Speaker is an example of a “minor literature” which fits the definition of Deleuze and Guattari, in that it is written by a minority in a major language. Fittingly, Lee’s Native Speaker as a minor literature demonstrates how a “half American” (prefixed American), or more specifically, a Korean American writer, can write with the effect of racial, cultural, and national de-territorialization between Korea and America. Finally, as Deleuze and Guattari have pointed out, Native Speaker bears two other characteristics of a minor literature: it is “political” and “collective.” It exposes the political tension felt by the Asian immigrants in America, and one Korean protagonist’s immigrant life collectively expresses the life of all Korean Americans. Ultimately, the value of this novel is that it helps us examine how ethnic literature is received and labeled by the American canon.

On a plot level, the protagonist in the novel, Henry Park, is a second-generation, Korean-American private spy who works for a white racist, Dennis Hoagland, to spy on his own people, John Kwang. Henry is instructed by Dennis to get close enough to Kwang so he can betray him. Henry’s reports on Kwang, which of course are written in excellent English, surpass any native speaker in their fluency, form, and efficiency (Dennis rewards him for this). However, as Henry spends more time with Kwang, he identifies with Kwang, and starts to realize that he must do what he has avoided all his life: face up to and evaluate who he really is. Is he an American? Korean? Or Korean-American? Although he is an American born citizen with American education and American mentality, he is no longer sure that he is American, and thus clings to what his American wife—who is the “standard barrier”—says who he is (Lee 12). Though later she apologizes, the list she hands him cataloguing who he is, is long enough to kill the hope of any Korean-American who thinks s/he can become singularly American: “You are surreptitious / B+ student of life / first thing hummer of Wagner and Strauss / illegal alien / emotional alien / genre bug / Yellow peril: neo-American / great in bed / overrated / poppa’s boy / sentimentalist / anti-romantic / ____ analyst (you fill in) / stranger / follower / traitor / spy” (Lee 5). Her list basically sums up who Henry Park is to the dominant U.S. culture, and more specifically, by the American canon.

According to Deleuze and Guattari, Native speaker fits the genre of a minor literature, but does it really? True, it is written by a minority in a major language. Yet, Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of a “minor literature” is problematic for two reasons. First, the term “minor” implies that it is smaller in scale and/or is less significant than its “major” counterpart. Like the definition and connotation of “ethnic literature,” a “minor literature” similarly intimates something that is tangential, inauthentic second-class literature. Second, Deleuze and Guattari’s point that minor literature is “political” and “collective” in nature is also true, but these qualities are not exclusive to minor literature; rather, all literature is “political” and “collective.” Who in American/Western canon has written anything that was not political, and has not either implicitly/explicitly spoken for the group the writer represented? How is literature even possible to be written in a purely nonpolitical and noncollective manner? This is not possible, and if such a writing is possible, in that it is purely “objective” (as opposed to political) and “personal” (as opposed to collective), then, are not these two conditionals—“objective” and “personal”—mutually exclusive? In other words, can a writing be “purely objective” but “purely personal” simultaneously? Besides, is not “personal” (such as the list made by Henry’s wife) inherently “political?” Thus, the two of the three constituents of a minor work listed by Deleuze and Guattari—“political” and “collective”— cannot be used to label and place ethnographic literature under a “minor literature.” The point is that frankly none of this labeling business should be espoused. If the writer is an American, then, s/he is singularly American, and his/her work is singularly an American literature. No prefixes such as “Afro,” “Asian,” “Latino,” nor qualifiers such as “minor” or “ethnic” is needed, unless the canon is willing to equally dissect the entire culturally hybrid, transnational writers of America.

To illustrate why labeling any literary work as “minor/ethnic” is nonsensical, I would like to point to an example from the Native Speaker. On a plot level, an example of this racial categorization is again the previously mentioned list compiled by Henry’s wife, which symbolically documents in print her sundry reasons why she is impelled to de-legitimize her Korean American husband as not a true American. However, Henry’s white American wife, by writing this list, ironically creates a “minor literature,” since her list is “political” and “collective”: it politically alienates her husband from her culture; and implicitly, her list collectively makes a claim about Asian-Americans in general. Then who is to be blamed, in this case, for being political and collective? Meanwhile, Chang Rae Lee’s Native Speaker is segregated under the “minor literature” in a separate American canon.

Why can’t Henry’s American wife, who is the “standard barrier,” and metaphorically the American canon, allow Henry to be singularly American? He does what is required of him, but, her list, indicts him of being too alienated or “foreign” to be singularly American. Obviously, his wife has not been convinced by Kristeva’s theory that the “foreigner” (her husband) whom she resents is, in fact, “herself.” Pertinent to Henry’s dilemma of wanting to be singularly American is the essay called “The More Things Change: Paradigm Shifts in Asian American Studies” written by Sumida Stephen. Stephen, in his essay, informs that “for about a decade the critique of Asian American ‘dual identity’ empowered Asian American studies with the contravening idea that it is the concept of ‘America’ that needs to be changed so that it is understood that Asian Americans are singularly American” (Sumida 1). In the past, if silent submissive Asian Americans can be effortlessly alienated (e.g., Japanese internment and Chinese exclusionary Act) on the basis of “phenotypically/culturally being more foreign than others”—thus requiring qualifiers and prefixes describing what type of an American they are—now, such systemized alienation are no longer feasible. With the coming-of-age of children of the Asian Diasporas, who may be the future writers/scholars, who have grown up in America, and who are mentally, culturally, and legally “Americans,” need to be dealt with. Surely, it is inevitable that the canon debates in the U.S., in the very near future, will have to re-examine the concept of “American” in categorizing the works written by Asian Americans, and by extension, other prefixed half-Americans.

Though the canonizers intentionally or unintentionally mold “white race” as the true “American culture” through literature, just as African American history and culture cannot be cognitively nor textually segregated from “Americanism,” so is the ethnic/minor literature. For the variegated ethnic subcultures and their history are inseparable constituents of America. Although the nation’s white elitists may rather regard ethnic/minor literature as not American, more often than not, however, it overwhelmingly represents authors who are American citizens with American education and American mind (like Chang Rae Lee) invariably writing in some ways about “Americanism.” Thus, the fact that American canon routinely place literature written by its diasporic/hybrid scholars under the “ethnic category”—which automatically precludes them from being included as an essential part of the whole—is both insensitive and illogical, in that it defies the multicultural make up of the American populace.

Today, any large cosmopolitan country like England, and even China, for example, is transnational in nature, because it is made up of diverse peoples and cultures, let alone “America”—the land of liberty, equality, and diversity. Yet disturbingly, contemporary critics such as Said, Spivak, Guillory, and Bhabha would all agree that Eurocentric nationalism/racialization is the invisible force in the canon war that divides and groups, includes and excludes the wide-range of literature. However, Bhabha warns that “the very idea of a pure ‘ethnically cleansed’ national identity can only be achieved through…death” (1334). Similarly, Said in “The Politics of Knowledge” critiques that the illusion of culturally homogenous nationalism in the canon debates is that it is perceived and internalized “as if…it [is] pure and unchanging from the beginning to the end of time” (192). In other words, Said is trying to explain that (canonical) nationalism as a concept is susceptible to mutation and hybridization over time. Thus, the insistence on the part of the canonizers to forge and transmit monolithic Western culture through racially selective process of canonization not only threatens the sociopolitical harmony, but is a futile act of resisting the global currency. Instead, the authorities of the Western canon, more narrowly, those in control of the American canon need to re-assess and realign the concept of “American” as inherently transnational in scope to include the works of the prefixed American writers as singularly “American,” without qualifiers or separate curriculum.

Works Cited

Bhabba, Homi. “Locations of Culture.” The Critical Tradition. Richter, David H. Boston: Bedford Books, 1989.

Lee, Chang Rae. Native Speaker. New York: Riverhead Books, 1995.

Johnson, Samuel. “Preface to Shakespeare.” The Critical Tradition. Richter, David H. Boston: Bedford Books, 1989.

Gilles, Deleuze, and Guattari, Felix. “What Is a Minor Literature?” Falling into Theory. Richter, David H. Boston:

Guillory, John. “The Canon as Cultural Capital.” Falling into Theory. Richter, David H. Boston: Bedford Books, 2000

Kristeva, Julia. Strangers To Ourselves. Roudiez, Leon S. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.

Said, Edward W. “The Politics of Knowledge.” Falling into Theory. Richter, David H. Boston: Bedford Books, 2000.

Spivak, Gayatri. “Imperialism and Sexual Difference.” Falling into Theory. Richter, David H. Boston: Bedford Books, 2000.

Sumida, Stephen H. “The More Things Change: Paradigm Shifts in Asian American Studies.” American Studies International 38 (2000): 97-114.

Robin Cohen and Homi Bahba’s Analysis: Postmodern Diasporas as Transnationalists

Robin Cohen and Homi Bahba’s Analysis: Postmodern Diasporas as Transnationalists

In our postmodern world, the complex global economic interdependence and cultural interpenetration complicate the notion of national identity/subjectivity for those who geopolitically/culturally straddle more than one nation-state, hence the postmodern revival of diasporas.  Characteristically, according to Cohen in Global Diasporas, diasporas emotionally/physically inter-traverse between two cultures: their homeland and adopted land.  Cohen says that diasporas “are positioned somewhere between nation-states and ‘traveling cultures’ in that they involve dwelling in a nation-state in a physical sense, but traveling in an astral or spiritual sense that falls outside the nation-state’s space/time zone” (135).  The increased awareness of the postmodern diasporas who have bi-cultural locality, then, necessitates a re-conceptualization of “nation-state” as not a homogenous cultural site, but an amorphous instrumental location of plural subjectivities.  Whereas, Cohen in Global Diasporas brings the definition of “diasporas” up to date to reflect their postmodern transnational reality, Homi K. Bhabha in “Locations of Culture” locates the cultural production site of the contemporary diasporas.  Bhabha’s examination of contemporary diasporas reveal that their subjectivities are formed in an interstitial cultural space called “the space of beyond,” where one’s past and present conjoin in a pluralistic sense.  Though Cohen and Bahba’s approach may vary, both of their cultural analysis of diasporas acknowledge the complex transnational subjectivity of the postmodern diasporas, and believe that cultural cosmopolitanism, not homogenous nationalism, is the inevitable course in our international world.

As an anthropologist, Cohen sees diasporas as the “dispersed” people, but he also acknowledges the postmodern reality of diasporas as being builders of transnational community. In the past, the term has carried apocalyptic connotations.  It designated those who are victimized by being forcefully/traumatically uprooted from their homeland to another, and was commonly associated with the dispersion/extermination of the Jews, Armenians, or Africans, to name a few.  Historically, diasporas in their adopted land, literally and psychologically struggle between their old and the new cultures.  If in the past the term has had race-specific regional ramifications, Cohen says now the word “diaspora” extends to transnational scope.  It now includes all races of modern day’s “traveling cultures”—the cultures that has lost their territorial moorings due to today’s affordable and efficient means of communications and transportations (128).  Cohen states that contemporary diasporas “bridge the gap between the individual and society, between the local and the global,” syncretizing the diverse cultures in a complex ways (196).  Thus, “traveling diasporas” of the post-modernity, with the help of today’s high-tech culture, have unshackled themselves from their historically subdued/servile status to being today’s builders of transnational communities.

If postmodern diasporas, at best, are perceived as builders of transnational communities, at worst, their transnational intercrossing of cultures can be seen as a menace to national solidarity.  Cohen articulates that postmodern cultural diasporas have dubious political allegiances.  By not fully assimilating to their host countries and maintaining sociopolitical ties with their homeland, diasporas, according to Cohen, live in the “no-group lands” (189) of liminality, syncretism and ambiguity, where they both “accommodate to, but also resist, the norms and claims of nationalist” (135).  For postmodern diasporas, “the nation-state is not only (or at all) an oppressive form of social organization, but also one that protects free expression, [and] political diversity” (196).  Diasporas are thus neither assimilators nor separatists but are those with multiple cultural attachments whose subjectivity cannot be contained in one national location.  Their political and cultural ambiguity, however, can work against them: Their existence can “represent a threat to the nation-state and the liberal-democratic order” (192).  More bluntly, they can be seen as a force of dismantling nationalism.  Ultimately, the transnational nature of diasporas does aid, in varying degrees, in de-territorialization of nation-states and de-authentication of established social identities, thus rendering the nation-state “impossible to realize the nineteenth-century dream of a place for each ‘race’” (196).  

While Cohen seems bemused by and merely accepts the fact that postmodern diasporas influence and re-map national and transnational landscape, Homi K. Bhabha in “Locations of Culture” insists on legitimization of the transnational subjectivity of diasporas in contemporary cultural production.  Bhabha believes that regional/racial identification and division of people can no longer be substantiated in our cosmopolitan era. He thus proposes a “radical revision in the concept of human community itself” (1335). While it is true that capitalism on a global scale has brought different cultures geopolitically in closer proximity, Bhabha insists that unless we drastically abandon our provincial mentality, “the great connective narratives of capitalism… do not, in themselves, provide a foundational frame for those modes of cultural identification and political affect” (1335).  Instead of trying to divide and contain sundry identities into different national/cultural types, Bhabha argues that what is most critical in our contemporary cultural production is not a mere recognition but a legitimization of  complex subjects who fall out from the mainstream—the diasporas.  By legitimizing diasporas’s extra-territorial cultural location, Bhabha demystifies diasporas’s sociopolitical ambiguity, and by extension, the myth of the supposed national homogeneity.

Bhabha’s call for legitimization of the diasporas’s cultural bi-locality, then, in essence, reveals their anti-nationalistic existence.  In terms of diasporas’s cultural location, Bhabha sees that their cultural subjectivities are formed “in the…interstices—the overlap and displacement of” their past and present cultures (1332).  In other words, diasporas’s borderline subjectivities are formed “in-between” national and cultural boundaries.  Here, diasporas’s “intersubjective and collective experiences of nationness, community interest, or cultural value are negotiated” (1332).  Diasporas’s interstitial nature of their subjectivity keeps them from being fixed to any one location.  Rather, they serve as the “connective tissue…between [the] fixed identifications.” (1333). Diaporas as a connective tissue modulate the constant flux and mutability caused by bipolar national forces (1333).  In the process of their juggling act of two (or more) nation-states, they become the “cultural hybridity” that obviates national territories and “entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy” (1333).  Thus, Bahbha’s observation of diasporas confirms Cohen’s sociological concerns that diasporas are not situated in the core of one fixed geopolitical position, but in the “liminal” space where they pledge to neither of the nation-states completely, and thus becomes a potential danger to nationalism.

Both Cohen and Bhabha recognize that today’s high-tech culture and the force of cosmopolitan market contribute to cultural hybridization.  If in the past, nation-state has sought racial homogeneity, diasporas of the postmodern world challenge such pure nationalism. As Bhabha remarks, now “the very idea of a pure ‘ethnically cleansed’ national identity can only be achieved through…death” (1334).  If in one sense, contemporary diasporas’s cultural bi-locality is seen positively as builders of transnational communities, on another sense, their politically dubious subjectivity can be seen as a threat to pure nationalism.  Nonetheless, in our cyberspace age, nationalistic intolerance of cultural hybridity must be replaced by cosmopolitan pluralism.

Works Cited

Bhabha, Homi K. “Locations of Culture.” The Critical Tradition.  Ed. David H. Richter. Boston: Bedford Books, 1998. 1331-1344.

Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas. Seattle, WA: University of Wshington Press.

Outline of Spivak’s “Imperialism and Sexual Difference”

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Biography:

• Born in Calcutta
• Education: University of Calcuttan and Cornell University
• Chief spokesperson of “subaltern studies”
• Postcolonial theorist (with a global feminist Marxist perspective)
• Avalon Professor at Columbia University 1991
• Former Andrew w. Mellon Professor of English at university of Pittsburgh
• Social projects: Rural Literary Teacher Training (on grassroots level, in India and Bangladesh)
• Lit. Works:

1.  
   1. Translation of Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1967)
   2. Myself I Must Remake: The Life and Poetry of W. B. Yeats (1974)
   3. In Other worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (1988)
   4. The Postcolonial Critic (1990)
   5. Outside the Teaching Machine (1993)
   6. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (1999)

 

“Imperialism and Sexual Difference”

Objective: Point out the “racism within feminism” against the third world women of color

Claim 1:  Academic institutions insist “White Male as a Norm” for universal humanity. Therefore, needs “The Tropological Deconstruction of Masculist Universalism.” (it means that “Truth Claim,” in this case, the truth claimed by the white male universalists, is no more than a trope, a figure of speech that passes as truth.  Therefore, it needs to be deconstructed—borrowed from De Man’s theory)

Q:   What does Spivak mean by the truth claims made by the postcolonial Masculists?

A:   She is talking about colonial texts that try to justify colonialism; for instance, (1)  colonialism was an act of benevolent masculism/paternalism; (2) it was a historically appropriate event, for instance “the Conquest of India” wasn’t really a “conquest.” Imperialism, in other words is “in loco parentis,” meaning that it was “in place of the parent”—to feed the starving, childish Indians who are utterly dependent on the first world.

Claim 2:  Eurocentric feminism is complicit with the white male imperialism.

quote: “even as we feminist critics discover the troping error of the masculist truth-claim to universality or academic objectivity, we perform the lie of constituting a truth of global sisterhood where the mesmerizing model remains male and female sparring partners of generalizable or universalizable sexuality who are the chief protagonists in that European contest. In order to claim sexual difference where it makes a difference, global sisterhood must receive this articulation even if the sisters in question are Asian, African, Arrab” (341).

 

Claim 3:  Eurocentric writers commit “Translation-as-Violation” (“total ignorance of history And subject constitution,” meaning that European writers mistranslate the language orculture of the third world women; or grossly misrepresent them in terms of gender andindividuality. In their writings, they are not really individuals, but a collective mass of dark inferiors)

quote: “kipling uses many Hindusthani words in his text—pidgin Hindusthani, barbaric to the native speaker, devoid of syntactic connections, always infelicitous almost always incorrect. The narrative practice sanctions this usage and establishes it as “correct,” without, of course, any translation. This is british pidgin, originating in a decision that hindusthani is a language of servants not worth mastering “correctly”; this is the version of the language that is established textually as “correct.” By contrast, the hindusthani speech of the Indian servants is painstakingly translated into archaic and awkward English…Let us call this ensemble of moves…translation-as-violation (344). 

quote:  “the second wave of U.S. academic feminism as a “universal” model of the “natural”reactions of the female psyche. This too is an example of translation-as-violation” (345).

Claim 4:  Institutions perpetuate the “Sanctioned Inorance” (blindness of truth telling, teachers teach without the true understanding of the 3^rd world women, therefore, the ignorance perpetuates)

quote: “Our own mania for “third-world literature” anthologies, when the teacher or critic often has no sense of the original languages, or of the subject constitution of the social and gendered agents in question (and therefore the student cannot sense this as a loss), participates more in the logic of translation-as-violation than in the ideal of translation as freedom-in-troping. What is at play there is a phenomenon that can be called sanctioned ignorance” (345).

 

Conclusion: 

1. Spivak is deeply interested in “the tropological deconstruction of masculist universalism. She knows that the “correction” of one trope points to another trope—the process is endless. Yet, she insists that critics must be persistent. 

2. The subaltern writers/critics want “the chance of an entry into the vertiginous process” of de-colonialization—the equal rights of historical, geographical, linguistic specificity, and theoretical sophistication” (347).

Questions:    

1. In our campus, is there racism within feminism? For example, does literature written by women of color receive equal appreciation as to their historical, aesthetical, and theoretical sophistication?  If no, why not?

2. Who has the ultimate authority to critique literature of the third world? Can white males/females of the first worlds critique texts of the third world? Are they capable of deconstructing the false claims of the masculist universalism? Who can de-colonialize racist texts?

Presentation by: Joey Reyes & Jessie Chen

What I learned From the Film “Forget Baghdad”

What I learned From the Film “Forget Baghdad”

Professor Ella Shohat’s presentation and discussion about Iraqi Jews living in Israel was an eye-opener for me.  In the film, the views of the four leftists, the former communist Iraqi Jews, were represented in the context of both Iraq’s anti-semitism and Israel’s Zionism.  While the specific experiences of these characters in the film vary, the persecutions they suffered as a group manifest that Israel is not a monolithic, homogenous state, but a nation of diverse subcultures with its fare share of disruptive forces from within. 

While the four characters’ testimonial accounts of the brutality inflicted on them by the Iraqis nationalists are not surprising, Zionists’ social injustices against the Iraqi Jewish who are their own kinsmen, especially the suspected bombing incident, were shocking.  For example, the Iraqi’s expelled Jews whose only choice was to immigrate to Israel,” instead of compassion from their ancestor’s homeland, received a cold, inhumane welcome.  Furthermore, instead of descent housing, food, and other urgent provisions, Israel negligently allowed the Iraqi refugees to virtually starve and sleep cold in the open wilderness.  If Israel’s not providing descent shelters and fair jobs to its Iraqi refugees is a literal enactment of racism against its own kinsmen, stereotypical portrayals of Iraqiness in books, films and other communicative devices further devastate and fragment the already battered Iraqi Jewish community in Israel.  For instance, the children of Iraqi Jews, not only internalize their ethnic stereotypes, become antagonistic toward their own family members and cultures.  Arguably, then, for the Iraqi Jews who were expelled/immigrated to Israel, the worst kind of perpetrators of social injustice were, and still are, the orthodox Jewish neighbors in this so called “a holy land.”

Indeed, the film made me realize that racism is not only manifested among the obviously different races, but that it is a universal phenomenon even among one’s own cultural/religious groups.  Most notably, the stories of these four men in the film informed me and the other audience that because Iraq is Israel’s national enemy, even after many years of Iraqi Jew’s integration and assimilation into Israel’s mainstream culture, the stereotypical prejudice and mentality of the dominant group cannot be eradicated.  Overall, the film converted me into a critique of man-made ideologies, such as Nazism, Communism, and Zionism, which all have negatively affected the lives of the Iraqi Jews.

Sullivan’s versus Wilson’s Argument on Same-sex Marriage

Sullivan’s versus Wilson’s Argument on Same-sex Marriage

The issue of same-sex marriage is an ongoing, heated debate in the discourse community.  In support of same-sex marriage, Andrew Sullivan in his essay, “The Conservative Case,” challenges the traditionalists’ denunciation of homosexual marriage as something that undermines the natural function and sanctity of matrimony: He believes that regardless of one’s spouse’s gender, any intimately committed couples help stabilize human society on an emotional level and thus, on this ground, gay relationships should be deemed sacred and deserving of public respect and legal rights.  Yet, a traditionalist James Q. Wilson in his essay, “Against Homosexual Marriage,” unequivocally articulates that same-sex marriage will indeed destabilize the very cornerstone of our social structure: the heterosexual families that are endowed with the power to procreate and thereby contribute to nation-building in a very literal, physical sense.  It is obvious that the fundamental conflict between Sullivan and Wilson lies in their dichotomous interpretations of the function/purpose of human matrimony.  While Sullivan believes that the primary function of matrimony is to fulfill a “natural law” (457), which he defines as “every man’s entitlement to a caring companionship regardless of one’s partner’s sexuality/gender,” Wilson’s interpretation of marriage is grounded in a more traditional mores.  To Wilson, the foremost function of a marriage is to procreate and rear future citizens, and thus argues that the fact same-sex couples cannot on their own (biologically) produce children is an indicator that not only is same-sex marriage “unnatural,” but a “threat” to our predominantly heterosexual social order.  However, Sullivan and Wilson’s subjective moral debate based on their conflated notion of “human companionship” versus “marital procreation” lead to no practical solutions as it is; what we need, instead, is a shift in focus to objectively and civilly address legal issues pertaining to gay couples, such as their “monetary” (e.g., property, tax, inheritance) or “instrumental” (e.g., issuance of proxy) rights. 

Sullivan in his essay, “The Conservative Case,” articulates his support for same-sex marriage.  He avows that homosexuality is not inherently bad.  He further challenges the logic behind the fear of legalizing same-sex union—the publics’ concern that it would undermine the heterosexual families.  He argues that since conservatives (unlike prohibitionists) acknowledge the involuntary, biological nature of homosexuality in some of our societal members, “they must also concede that these persons are already part of ‘heterosexual’ families” (446).  In other words, homosexuals are intrinsically part of “us,” and thus they should not be set apart as “others” who pose as a threat to the heterosexual, social order.  Sullivan not only believes that same sex marriage is harmless to heterosexual society but he, in fact, encourages it for the very same reasons we encourage heterosexual marriages:  That is, if heterosexual marriage improves its participant’s psychological, physical, financial, and legal aspects, then, the same is/should be true for the homosexuals, ultimately contributing to the larger, national stability.  Hence, Sullivan pronounces that in any given society, citizens should be allowed “to combine a celebration of the traditional famil[ies] with the celebration of . . . stable homosexual relationship[s]” (450).

Contrary to Sullivan’s supportive stance, Wilson, on the other hand, opposes same-sex marriage.  Although he recognizes that not all marriages are perfect, he believes that they are, nonetheless, an institution that deserves our unqualified support, since procreation of our future citizens depend upon it.  He states that in terms of raising healthy children (our future citizens), “after much experimentation—several thousand years more or less—we have found nothing else that works as well.  Neither a gay nor a lesbian couple can of its own resources produce a child; another party must be involved” (459).  He then begs this question: “What do we call this third party?…There is no settled language for even describing, much less approving of, such persons” (459).  He deems “homosexual as a group [is] not ‘normal’ and “have tendency to be promiscuous” (460).  Wilson thus insists that we must preclude the possibility of some children being born into and raised by such potentially harmful, “radically different” (460) homosexual parents.  Wilson points out that if the notion that homosexual unions will destabilize heterosexual marriages cannot be proven on a literal level, neither is there any assurance that it will not on a psychosocial level of our future citizens.  

Although Sullivan and Wilson have opposing views on the issue of same-sex marriage, they do seem to acknowledge the sacredness of marriage as an institution.  In other words, as an institution, Sullivan and Wilson both praise marriage as something that foster responsibility and commitment.  What they differ is in deciding who deserves to partake of this sacred, institutional benefits and what should be the ultimate function of such a sacred institution.  For Sullivan, the ultimate function of a marriage is that it should endow the benefits of what he calls “natural law” (457)—that every man should have the care and support of other people.  He disagrees that the sacredness or psychosocial benefits of marriage are saved exclusively for the heterosexuals and demands a re-evaluation and/or re-contextualization of the biblical rhetoric against homosexuals.  For example, he argues that the passage in Leviticus, “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death” (456) is historically out of context.  Though Sullivan concedes to the sanctity of matrimony, he objects to the traditionalists’ employment of the religious moral code to condemningly use it against the gay community.   

Irrespective of the gay community’s objections to the biblical moral codes, Wilson maintains that in terms of marriage, one fact—the fact that only heterosexual couples can procreate—is irreversible, timeless, and hence “the most natural,” biological infrastructure of humanity.  He reasons that although “Societies differ greatly in their attitude toward the income people may have, the relations among their various races, and the distribution of political power, they differ scarcely at all over the distinctions between heterosexual and homosexual couples” (458).  That is, that people naturally and “overwhelmingly prefer [heterosexual marriage] over the [other].  The reason, [he] believes, is that for most people, “marriage is…an institution created to sustain child-rearing” (459).  Although not all marriages produce and rear children, “its function,” Wilson says, “remains what has always been” (459). Thus, according to Wilson, since homosexual marriages cannot procreate future citizens, it is inherently unnatural and thus should not be encouraged, let alone be legitimized.

In regards to same-sex marriage, both Sullivan and Wilson, in my opinion, focus too exclusively on the issue of morality rather than civility and practicality.  If we look at it from a civil point of view, it is not too difficult to see that law should be impartial, regardless of one’s sexual orientation.  That is, same-sex couples should be entitled to the same legal rights as any other citizens, especially, in terms managing their private assets and health.  For example, instead of only acknowledging direct family members as having the rights to inheritance, people of homosexual relationship should be able to become heir to the property of his/her other partner, if that is so desired by the giver (an example of one’s monetary right).  Likewise, a terminally ill partner of an affectionate homosexual relationship should have the proxy rights, in terns of issuing guardianship of his/her own frail body to be taken care of by his/her same-sex partner (an example of one’s instrumental right).  First, however, since the notion that “same-sex marriage is wrong” runs deep in our cultural psyche, I believe that a compromise of some sort is in need to ensure their rights to manage both monetary and instrumental issues.  This compromise, in my opinion, is in the term “marriage.”  The term, “marriage” should not be applied to homosexual unions, simply because this word, for thousands of years, has been exclusively designated for heterosexual matrimony.  Instead of hopelessly trying to erase this age old mores, I suggest a different term for same-sex cohabitations, perhaps even calling it a “civil union” of the same-sex.  By ascribing a separate terminology, heterosexual marriage will not be offended nor be threatened by the homosexual unions demanding the same type of legal benefits of residing together, sharing financial, health, and other responsibilities as committed couples.  To rephrase it in legal context, regardless of whether our society approves of same-sex marriage, being mindful of the fact that homosexuals have the same civil rights as any other citizens can help us redirect our debates into something that initiates practical laws that protect (not exploit) their monetary and instrumental rights.  

Although Sullivan and Wilson have opposite views on the issue of same-sex marriage, they similarly believe in the sacredness of marriage as an institution.  The fundamental difference lies in their contradicting interpretation of the function and/or purpose of human matrimony.  While Sullivan believes that the function of a marriage is to fulfill what he calls a “natural law”—a right to a loving companionship that is indiscriminate to one’s sexual orientation—Wilson believes that a marriage is an exclusive entitlement for heterosexual couples who contribute to nation-building in a physical sense, the procreation of our future citizens.  However, such subjective moral disputes can only lead to inconclusive arbitrations at best, and thus call for a more practical approach in order to find implemental resolutions in terms of gay couples’ civil rights:  While our society may not validate a same-sex cohabitation as a legally binding matrimony, we can confer them certain legal measures which afford them the prerogative to manage their monetary (property, tax, inheritance, and such) and/or instrumental matters (e.g., the issuance of proxy in lieu of one’s same-sex partner, especially in times of sickness).  Perhaps by re-inscribing the term “marriage” which is imbued with heterosexual connotations into something less territorial and incendiary like “civil union,” per se, for homosexual relationships, we might be able to mitigate this polarized issue towards a tangible resolution.  However, before we can discuss any such tangible measure, our discourses on the matter need to shift its focus from morality to civility.   

Works Cited

Sullivan, Andrew. “The Conservative Case.” Contemporary Moral Issues in a Diverse Society.        McDonald Julie M. Wadsworth: Belmont, 1998. 446-450.

Wilson, James Q. “Against Homosexual Marriage.” Contemporary Moral Issues in a Diverse    Society. McDonald Julie M. Wadsworth: Belmont, 1998. 454-461.

The Cost of Communalism: Individual Autonomy and Growth in Maxine Hong Kingston’s “No Name Woman” and Rigoberta’s “I, Rigoberta Mench”

The Cost of Communalism: Individual Autonomy and Growth

in Maxine Hong Kingston’s No Name Woman and Rigoberta’s I, Rigoberta Mench

        Patricia Hill Collins, in Shifting the Center, articulates that “Without women’s motherwork, communities would not survive, and by definition, women of color themselves would not survive” (643).  According to Collins, this communal project, however, “extracts a high cost for large numbers of women” (643).  The cost, she says, is that “there is loss of individual autonomy and there is submersion of individual growth for the benefit of the group” (643, emphasis added).  Similarly, in Asian and Native American culture, for the benefit of the community, women’s individual autonomy and individual growth are often submersed as well.  Maxine Hong Kingston’s unnamed protagonist, in No Name Woman, and Rigoberta, in I, Rigoberta Mench, both sacrifice their individual autonomies and individual growths for the benefit of their communities.  Their seemingly self-sacrificing ego-dissolutions, however, are not some conscious, individual choice they make; rather, they are unconscious choices owed to their cultural upbringings and the social systems they are born into.  Although, their willingness to lose their egos is highly noble, they are simply abiding by the powerfully effective, unstipulated moral laws operating within their communities for generations. 

For the women of color, more specifically, women of older Chinese generation and Native American women, communalism is not a choice, but a way of life they are born into and must hold on to.  For Rigoberta and Kingston’s unnamed aunt, therefore, individual autonomy and growth are not alternatives they consciously deny.  Both protagonists are oblivious to other ways of living.  To them, communities are the only support system they know.  They believe that a good life is attained only through strict adherence to their ancestral customs.  As an option, if self-autonomy was offered to Rigoberta and the unnamed aunt, they, most likely, would have rejected it for a wise reason.  For any woman, who has never known other culture nor crossed over communal boundaries, to defect her own community would be deemed suicidal and self-destructive.  It can translate to death, if not literally, then psychologically.  It is not surprising, therefore, that regardless of the severe hardships Rigoberta and the unnamed aunt encounter, they do not think to venture out of their communal boundaries; for them, communalism is not only the safest but the only way of life.   

Due to social and cultural conditioning, the sense of communal identity for Rigoberta and the unnamed aunt eclipses their sense of self identity.  In Rigoberta’s case, her communal identity starts to formulate while she is yet in her mother’s womb.  When her parents make the birth announcement to the people in their community, she becomes their collective asset because her parents promise the people that her baby “belong to the community and [that the baby] would…serve it when [he/she] grew up” (49).  In Rigoberta’s Indian culture, even the personhood is a communal asset – every person is owned and shared by one another.  On her tenth birthday, her communal identity is further reinforced.  According to her Indian traditions, she makes an oral, yet official promise to her community that she will “do many things for the [them]” (49).  Her parents make sure that she repeats the vow in front of every single person in the community.  Corollary to such cultural and social inculcations, Rigoberta grows up with a peculiar sensibility and conscience; she feels and thinks of her community before she does her selfhood.  Likewise, the fact that Kingston’s unnamed aunt, wields no significant, individual power over her life, casts her as someone lacking self identity.  Kingston articulates that Chinese, patriarchal culture and customs are responsible for her aunt’s lack of individuality.  According to Kingston, “women in the old China” (310), would naturally be more community conscious than self conscious, because her life is controlled by forces other than herself (emphasis added).  For instance, she “did not [have the right to] choose” (310), “not even the biggest event of one’s life – marriage” (310).  Kingston continues to speak for her aunt:  “When the family found a young man in the next village to be her husband, she…promised before they met that she would be his forever” (310).  In other words, her aunt’s course of life was dictated more by community customs than her individual will, thus weakening her selfhood.  Her life is owned by patriarchal authorities and maneuvered by communal customs.  Psychologically and socially, she is so repressed that she has no room to forge an identity of her own.  Thus for both Rigoberta and the unnamed aunt, the fact that their communal identities are more dominant over their individual identities is a result of social/cultural construction. 

As in the case of Rigoberta and the unnamed aunt, once their minds are culturally/socially constructed to abide by the communal ideologies, then, any inklings of individuality are deemed eccentric, problematic, and antithesis to communal solidarity.  In other words, individualism and communalism are considered to be mutually exclusive, and thus cannot coexist in one person’s mind.  In the minds of Rigoberta and the unnamed aunt, the collective, communal identities are so deeply ingrained that a concept of individual pursuit and growth is almost non-existent.  If they have any sense of self-identity, then, it is sure to be culturally suppressed and submersed, until they no longer crave it nor recognize it.  These two women’s main preoccupations and anxieties deal only with issues concerning communal values and their personal conformity to them.  Rigoberta’s elder sister echoes this notion of cultural conformity when she tells Rigoberta to “accept life as it is” (49).  Her sister exhorts Rigoberta that “[they] shouldn’t become bitter or look for diversions or escape outside the laws of [their] parents,” (49).  Likewise, according to Kingston’s mother, back in her (and the unnamed aunt’s) Chinese hometown, not only every woman in the village shared a common will, they even looked alike: “All the married women blunt-cut their hair in flaps about their ears or pulled it back in tight buns.  No nonsense” (311), she say.  In fact, Kingston’s mother continues, “a woman who tended her appearance reaped a reputation for eccentricity” (311).  Thus, for Asians and Native Americans, then, apparently, the community’s ultimate goal is that everyone blends well with the whole; no one should stand out; everyone should merge harmoniously with one another.  Under this politic of communal solidarity, individual egos must be sacrificed to sustain this utopian ideology of “oneness.”  

Interestingly, in a well-ordered community, there are unstipulated, moral laws which heightens this oneness in a perverse way because if any one member violates the law, then, that person becomes the common enemy of the entire community and receives severe punishments.  Rigoberta says that in her community, their common “enemy is someone who steals or goes into prostitution” (57).  She says that in her community, laws are formulated orally: “this is how we make our pleas and…promises” (57).  Although Rigoberta realizes that her law making customs “[do not] reflect so much to the real world” (57), she asserts that this is “[her people’s] reality” (57).  Furthermore, if a member of Rigoberta’s community endangers the lives of other members, “although it hurts us,” she says, the people “would have to execute [that person]” (146).  Likewise, in the unnamed aunt’s village, there are unwritten moral laws, too, that are more powerful and effective than any written state laws.  If in Rigoberta’s village, a prostitute is the villager’s common enemy, in the village of the unnamed aunt, an adulterer is.  Kingston tells us that her aunt became the villager’s common enemy because the people believed “that her [aunt’s] infidelity had…harmed the village” (313).  The villagers demanded that she tell the name of the impregnator, but her aunt did not disclose it, thereby paying the ultimate price of being private, for keeping “the man’s name to herself ” (312, emphasis added).  Kingston confirms that the ultimate reason why “the villagers punished her [aunt],” (313) was because she “act[ed] as if she could have a private life, secret and apart from them” (313, emphasis added).  The villagers “ripped up her clothes and shoes and broke her combs, grinding them underfoot…‘Pig.’ ‘Ghost.’ ‘Pig.’” (309).  After the villagers left, however, her own family members exacerbate her misery.  They relentlessly rebuke her, too, for being an unfit, dishonorable member of their family who has acted singularly in an infamous way: “the family broke their silence and cursed her…Death is coming. Death is coming.  Look what you’ve done.  You’ve killed us. Ghost! Dead ghost! Ghost! You’ve never been born” (314).  Her family, unable to accept her disgraceful eccentricity, disowns her, and her place in the community thus altogether disappears.  Although she is not what Rigoberta describes as someone “guilty of endangering a member of community,” she, with her newborn infant, self-executes both lives by drowning in a well.  Thus, in such a tightly-knitted community where “all [in] the village were kinsmen” (313), those who become the common enemy of the villagers by breaking the communal law, can/will suffer ignominious punishment.  The unnamed aunt literally, and perhaps heroically, loses her ego to soothe the villager’s collective shame, superstitious fear, and indignity.

If the unnamed aunt’s death is a literal dissolution of self in an attempt to lift her sexual curse from the village people, Rigoberta’s self-sacrificing decision to not marry is also a form of mental, self-dissolution for the sake of her community.  Rigoberta genuinely feels that any form of individual growth and autonomy, namely, even marriage on her part, is a selfish act that betrays the communal vows she made as a girl.  As a female bound by such communal vows, however, she admits that she, too, had her share of struggles and temptations in terms of personal aspirations:   

As I said, I was engaged once…I came to all sorts of conclusions because I loved this companero…Well, there I was between these two things – choosing him or my people’s struggle.  And [community] that’s what I chose, and I left my companero with much sadness and heavy heart.  But I told myself that I had a lot to do for my people and I didn’t need a pretty house while they lived in horrific conditions. (225-6)

Seemingly from pure altruism, Rigoberta devotes everything she has/is for the cause of her beloved community.  Her message is unequivocal: “my primary duty is to my people and then to my personal happiness” (225).  It is clear that Rigoberta’s individual autonomy and growth are the dear price she willingly pays to live up to her communal expectations.

The stories of both I, Rigoberta Menchu and No Name Woman illustrate that a woman born into a communalistic social structure has no room for individualism.  One of the key concepts of communalism is that each member in the community is inextricably weaved into the whole, as one big family.  Every one thus share one, all-inclusive identity that eclipse any individual identities.  Both the unnamed aunt and Rigoberta, mentally and literally, dissolve their sense of selves into the larger, utopian “us” concept for the sake of their communities.  Also, what these two stories have in common, is that in a sound communal system, there are unstipulated laws – though not written – govern its members more powerfully, effecting the choices and shaping the conducts of its members.  As Rigoberta’s thoughtful responses to individual autonomy and growth reveals, women who are ingrained into communal ideologies and committed to communal solidarities will willingly give up their egos and autonomies for the sake of the collective, communal good.

Works Cited

Collins, Patricia Hill. “Shifting the Center: Race, Class, and Feminist Theorizing About Motherhood.” The Longman Anthology of Women’s Literature. 

DeShazer, Mary K.  New York: Addison-Wesley Educational, 2001. 638-653.

Kingston, Maxine Hong. “No Name Woman.” The Longman Anthology of Women’s Literature.  DeShazer, Mary K.  New York: Addison-Wesley Educational, 2001. 308-315.

Menchu, Rigoberta. I, Rigoberta Menchu. Wright, Ann. New York: Verso, 1984.

Big City’s Malicious Forces in Abraham Cahan’s “Yekl” and William Howell’s “The Rise of Silas Lapham”

The City: Human Characters Tested by Its Malicious Forces

In Abraham Cahan’s Yekl and William Howell’s The Rise of Silas Lapham, protagonists struggle to cope with malicious social and economic forces in the big city.  Both novels dramatize the psychological and sociological effects of the nineteenth century metropolitan life.  The nineteenth century city symbolizes the outward vanity and greed of those who build and patronize industrialism.  The city is divided up into shares of materialistic spaces for its dwellers and those who gather the most amount of shares come out as winners of industrialism.  Yekl, a Jewish immigrant in New York, wants to increase his space in the city by expanding his cultural freedom, which he interprets to be a sexual freedom enjoyed by the Yankee.  Likewise, Lapham, a former farmer, but now a businessman, wants to increase his space in the city by gaining a bigger share of the new industrial economy, which he believes will ultimately crown him with an aristocratic prestige.  However, because enormous social and economic forces overwhelm the protagonists, they forsake their true characters, fail to expand their spaces in the city, and, ultimately, revert back to their yonder spaces.

In the city, people of extreme class differences coexist with varying amounts of space; the rich and cultivated enjoy larger spaces with greater mobility while the poor and unrefined stagnate in close quarters.  Yekl represents the lower rung of the socioeconomic ladder.  For him, city is a dense place.  “Suffolk Street is in the very thick of the battle for breath.  It is one of the most densely populated spots on the face of the earth” (13).  Regardless to this fact, Yekl still embraces his new abode eagerly, because he foresees what lies beyond the denseness of the city; he appreciates the symbolic value of the space.  “Once I live in America,” he pursued, on the defensive, “I want to know that I live in America.  Dot’sh a’ kin’ a man I am!” (5).  Yekl patronizes American values; he wants to be a Yankee.  On the other hand, Lapham, with his socioeconomic situation on the rise, has gained more space but is not yet satisfied; he wants to ride class mobility to a higher place.  When his wife enviously tells him about the regal lifestyle of the Corey’s, he remarks, “I know where they are.  I’ve got a lot of land over on the Back Bay” (29).  He then unhesitatingly commands his wife: “Why don’t you get [the girls] into society?  There’s money enough!” (30).  Lapham believes that with his economic success, he, not only can buy more space in the city, but also can uplift his status.  Both Yekl and Lapham are not deterred by socioeconomic polarization in the city and aspire to expand their space within it.

For both protagonists, ability to adapt to pre-established customs dictates their viability in the city.  According to Velikova, the social reformers of 19^th century desired the Jews to sacrifice their ethnic and national identity and embrace American culture (Velikova p11).  Yekl is not offended by this demand because cultural democracy in New York is irresistible to him.  “One must not be a greenhorn.  Here a Jew is as good as a Gentile” (5).  Yekl immediately shifts from his past ways of thought to the adoption of the American way of life.  He changes his name to Jake, ignores his religion, and leaves his background behind.  Likewise, Lapham realizes that there is a predominant socio-economic class in Boston.  If one desires association with an esteemed society, then, he/she must conform to their century-old mannerisms.  Lapham strives to meet the external values of the aristocrats.  At the Coreys’ dinner party, Lapham fusses over whether to wear gloves.  Even his wife, when Tom Corey pays a visit, tells Lapham to put on a coat.  “It don’t matter how he sees you at the office, shirt sleeves or not.  You’re in a gentleman’s house now…you shan’t see company in your dressing gown” (135-36).  Both protagonists show immense willingness to adapt to the prescribed values of the city.

Yekl and Lapham’s ultimate aspiration is to re-create their identity through cultural and commercial opportunities in metropolitan world.  “Every Jew, even the most ignorant emigrant, came to feel that [coming to America] was part of a historic event in the life of the Jewish people” (Girgus, p3).  As ignorant as Yekl is, he is aware of the new opportunities that are offered in New York and wants a cultural rebirth for himself.  “[S]ince he had shifted his abode to new York, he carefully avoided all reference to his antecedents” (24).  Perhaps, when Yekl says, “I am an American feller, a Yankee – that’s what I am” (70), it best manifests his deliberate intentions to transform his identity.  On the same token, Lapham sees how in a free-market society, the old canon of social status seems to offer a new page to make room for a new power.  He fancies that money, with its exchange value, can help him exchange his previous peasant-identity to something higher in the social ladder.  He plans to build a new identity for himself by building a new home.  “[T]here aint a prettier lot on the Back Bay than mine.  It’s on the water side of Beacon, and it’s twenty-eight feet wide and a hundred and fifty deep.  Let’s build on it” (30).  The city offers its portion of space to Yekl and Lapham to build new homes and new lives in it  – even a metamorphic transformation of their identity.

However, the lack of moral values in the city corrupts both protagonists.  A city embodies the multiplicity of opinions and convictions and is devoid of one universal truth.  In the midst of such diverse mentality, Yekl, formulates his own conviction.  He believes freedom in New York means promiscuity.  The readers are informed that “his enthusiastic nature before long found vent in dancing and in a general life of gallantry.  His proved knack with the gentle sex had turned his head and now cost him all his leisure time” (25).  Yekl, who is tired of censorship, frees his conscience and does whatever he wants in a new land; he enjoys a second bachelorhood in New York.  Similarly, Lapham also forms his own business ethics.  He gets rid of Roger, his former partner, when profit seems imminent.  He sees no ethical wrong in this: “it was a perfectly square thing. My conscience is easy as far as he’s concerned, and it always was” (46).  Evidently, due to the absence of clear ethical guidelines in the city, the protagonists’ integrities fall more readily.

Furthermore, conformity to standards of urban elites kills individuality.  The protagonists’ individualities are either sacrificed by yielding to the styles and manners of the dominant culture or by not being able to freely express due to suppression by the urban elites.  Yekl emulates the external qualities of the dominant culture.  He dresses and dances like the Yankees, patronizes Yankee sports, learns and speaks English, and yet all that he does only makes him less unique.  His wife, upon seeing him after three years of separation, feels that “she had suddenly discovered her own Yekl in an apparent stranger” (36).  His old identity has become blurred by his adopted mannerisms; he has succumbed to the commercialized dress code that makes everyone look the same.  On the other hand, the journalist Hubbard stifles Lapham’s individuality in the interview; he conducts an almost one-way dialogue where he treats Lapham as mere subject matter by never fully allowing him to speak freely.  It is a bourgeois journalism of dominating and silencing Lapham as a commodity to its articles.  Hence, individuality is the price both protagonists pay as they aspire to play by the rules of urban elites.

The loss of individuality means that the protagonists are now only left with their exteriors to be evaluated by the co-members of their city.  When Yekl’s wife arrived in New York, “the contrast between Gitl and jake was so striking that the officer wanted to make sure – partly as a matter of official duty and partly for the fun of the thing – that the two were actually man and wife” (35).  Likewise, Corey, learning of his son’s association with the Laphams, depicts Irene as “paint princess” (97) to his wife, and jokingly remarks, that “Tom’s marrying the princess,” (102) implying that Lapham is the king of the mineral paint.  To Corey, the paint best symbolizes Lapham because it seems only a covering, a material that masks the true object it decorates.  Though Lapham has proven himself successful in business, the meaning of his success is still contingent upon others’ perception.  In a populous city, judgments of external appearances from peers abound.

In addition to external judgments, character judgments by others push both protagonists to near insanity.  Mrs. Kavarsky’s constant meddling over Yekl’s extramarital affairs vexes him.  On one such occasion, Mrs. Kavarsky condemns Yekl: “Really, you ought to be ashamed of yourself.”  Yekl lose composure and cries out: “Min’ jou on businesh an’ dot’sh ull.”  “Jake’s first impulse was to strike the meddlesome woman,” (72) but he changes his mind and “with a frantic bang of the door he disappeared” (72).  As he heads out, he impetuously decides to divorce his wife.  Without giving much thought, he runs to Mamie.  With Mamie on his side, he falls into a mode of guilty conscience.  In this state of mind, he hallucinates: “The figure of his dead father, attired in burial linen, uprose to his mind” (77).  By the same token, Lapham also dreads character judgments from others.  His ignominious episode at the dinner party makes him fearfully anticipate his verdict by the upper-class mannerisms: “I was the only one that wasn’t a gentleman there!”  Lamented Lapham. “I disgraced you!  I disgraced my family!  (209).  Subsequently, his sense of inferiority propels him to fight even harder for success and enslaves him to money.  Because he seeks both vengeance and redemption, he devotes all his energy into building a lavish home.  This materialistic insanity consumes his every fiber.  “You just stop at a hundred thousand,” (129) his wife worries.  “You’ve lost your head, Silas Lapham, and if you don’t look out you’ll lose your money too” (129).  However, a wife’s admonition is useless to a man who has already lost his mind.  Although different in plot, both cases, illustrate the withering effect on the spirit in a judgmental society.

The protagonists’ obsessive desires to conform to urban customs put them in jeopardy of losing their old culture without acclimating successfully to the new.  Both protagonists are too ready to sell their old identity for a new one.  For Yekl, his rash romance with Mamie costs him his most cherished identity, the masculinity.  He becomes financially dependent and psychologically subordinate to the self-confident Mamie.  Eventually his masculinity weakens so much that, he, before Mamie, dare not express his innermost desires:  “Several times Jake was tempted to declare his ardent desire to have the child with them, and that Mamie should like him and be a mother to him” (81).  By the end of the novella, Yekl is reduced to a position from which he can only fantasize of restoring his old bravado.  On the other hand, for Lapham, the dinner party at the Corey’s symbolizes the values of the Boston’s elite society.  It serves as a means to introduce competing members of its society for evaluation.  Though he gains an entrance with a proper appearance, his crudeness leaks out during the party; unaccustomed to alcohol, he drinks too much wine, becomes obscene, and loses his only competitive edge – the image of a shrewd businessman.   Consequently, after the incident, Lapham’s enterprising spirit tumbles.  Though he has treasured Corey’s presence in his company, he now feels he is no longer worthy of such a qualified employee: “I will give you up if you want to go before anything worse happens, and I sha’n’t blame you” (210).  This incident shows how Lapham’s endeavor in altering his identity not only has failed but also has weakened his clout as a prominent entrepreneur.  Hence, rashness and over-anxiousness of Yekl and Lapham respectively lead both to forfeit a successful transition into a new culture because their foremost identity is now too ruptured to beget a new one.

With their core identities weakened, the money acts as a key agent that drives both protagonists into self-destruction.  As indispensable as money is in the city, it lures the protagonists astray from providence.  For instance, Yekl, in order to finance divorce proceedings, he turns to Mamie.  However, as immediately as he is set free from his marriage, he realizes that in so doing, he has foolishly bound himself to a worse misery – a marriage with Mamie.  “Still worse than this thirst for a taste of liberty was a feeling which was now gaining upon him, that, instead of a conqueror, he had emerged from the rabbi’s house the victim of an ignominious defeat” (89).  The money that facilitates his divorce puts him right back into a never-ending cycle of self-destruction.  Likewise, Lapham sees that the fundamental basis of much of the upper-class societal-interaction is money, and that it serves as a prerequisite for admission to their domain.  Mindful of this discovery, he believes that more money can buy him more class, so he works harder to amass more of it.  He engages in risky ventures in hopes of earning fast money.  As a result, in the end, he loses all his fortune and laments: “A year ago, six months ago, he would have laughed at the notion that it would be hard to raise the money…he thought with bitterness of the tens of thousands that he had gambled away in stocks” (319).  Thus, short-lived success with money ultimately confines Yekl and Lapham to a state of never-ending failure.

The protagonists’ financial indebtedness reflects their ultimate inability to survive in the struggle amongst capitalists.  According to Girgus, “following the Holocaust and the war, a major test for the reality of emancipation for Jews is the viability and endurance of the social and cultural structures upon which that emancipation is based – [capitalism]” (Girgus p3).  Soon after his arrival, Yekl realizes “that America was not the land they took it for, where one could ‘scoop gold by the skirtful’” (27).  Here, he is beset by competition: “artisans, merchants, teachers, rabbis, artists, beggars – all…in search of fortune” (14); he never rises above his competitors; he is always in debt.  Similarly, Lapham faces threatening competition from the younger generation.  His bookkeeper informs Corey of a doom: “I don’t mean merely in the stock of paint on hand, but in a kind of competition which has become very threatening.  You know about that West Virginia paint?” (301).  If Lapham forsakes prudence (or lose luck to be more precise), the forces of ever changing market dynamics will uproot him for a new rising power.  Hence, nothing is certain and permanent in capitalistic society; his debut in the upper-class circle guarantees nothing; his eminence in the business world is fragile and ephemeral.  Succinctly, Yekl’s persistent penury and Lapham’s ultimate loss of his towering fortune mark both as less than the fitting survivors in the city.

Barton sums up nineteenth-century American society as “a culture of character” (Barton 29).  As a naturalist of this era, both Cahan and Howells portray the vast space of the city as a battleground where one’s character is constantly put to the test by its impalpable yet destructive forces.  Both author’s intent is to realistically uncover how these subtle and distressing forces gradually tear down one’s morality and character.  Cahan unfolds these effects by uncovering Yekl’s process of acculturation in an industrialized society.  For Yekl, assimilation of a foreign culture is a battle that causes immense psychological frictions with his Jewish character.  He loses everything in this fight: his home, his son, his masculinity, and his youthful optimism.  Similarly, Howells’s mission is to expose how the greed and vanity of industrialism works against human morality and character.  For his protagonist, the Beacon Street house metaphorically represents the nineteenth-century social status that Lapham struggles to build for himself.  However, his obsessive vanity for higher status eventually leads him to excessive greed and brings ensuing financial catastrophe.  At the end, he loses immensely and retreats back to his origin with pulverized confidence but with restored character.  The fate of both Cahan and Howells’s protagonists illustrate human vulnerability and helplessness before the grandiose urban forces that readily submerge people’s morality and drown their character.

Works Cited

William Dean Howells (1885). The Rise of Silas Lapham, Penguin Books

Abrahm Cahan (1896). Yekl, Dover Publications, Inc., New York

John Cyril Barton, Northeastern University (2001) “Howells’s rhetoric of realism: The Rise of Silas Lapham and The Minister’s Charge” Studies in American Fiction, Autumn 2001 v29 i2 p159(29)  .

Roumiana Velikova, State University of new York, Buffalo (1999).“Cahan’s Yekl” The Explicator 1999 v57 i2 p91(3)

Sam B. Girgus (1984). “A Convert to America: Sex, Self, and Ideology in Abraham Cahan” The university of North Carolina Press pp.64-91