American Multiculturalism in Context : Views from at Home and Abroad [1 ed.] 9781443874823

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American Multiculturalism in Context

American Multiculturalism in Context: Views from at Home and Abroad Edited by

Sämi Ludwig

American Multiculturalism in Context: Views from at Home and Abroad Edited by Sämi Ludwig This book first published 2017 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2017 by Sämi Ludwig and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-1691-4 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-1691-5

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements .................................................................................... xi Introduction .............................................................................................. xiii Sämi Ludwig (UHA Mulhouse, France) Aesthetics, Literature, the Arts: Theoretical Beginnings Multiculturalism as a Challenge to Aesthetic Theory.................................. 3 Natalia Vysotska (Kiev National Linguistic University, Ukraine) Multiculturalism versus Inequality: A False Opposition ........................... 15 Meili Steele (University of South Carolina, U.S.A.) Democratic Doxa: Toward a Genealogy of Typicality in American Nationalist Literature ................................................................................. 33 Christopher G. Diller (Berry College, GA, U.S.A.) Minority Literature Arab Americans: The Example of Naomi Shihab Nye .............................. 51 Bouchra Bouterra and Toufik Lachouri (Université 20 août 1955, Skikda, Algeria) ‘D’ici et d’ailleurs’: Hybridity, Double Standards and the Western Arab-Muslim Woman ................................................................................ 63 Rim Khaled (University of Tunis, Tunisia) Ex/tension Of/In ‘A Nation Peopled by the World’: Re-evaluating Kaleidoscopic Feasts in Arab American and Asian American Texts ........ 85 Sihem Arfaoui (ISSH University of Jendouba, Tunisia, and Northern Borders University, KSA) Asian Birthright and Anglo Bequest: Chang-rae Lee and Bich Minh Nguyen.............................................................................. 99 Sheng-mei Ma (Michigan State University, U.S.A.)

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Transnationalism, Multiculturalism, and Cosmopolitanism: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz ........................... 113 Fernando Valerio-Holguín (Colorado State University, U.S.A.) Straddling Worlds: A Comparative Study of the Multicultural Experiences of Anurag Mathur and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie........... 121 Arpa Ghosh (Vivekananda College for Women, Kolkata, India) On Ishmael Reed Multiculturalizing America: Ishmael Reed and the Cultural Mosaic ...... 131 Wendy Hayes-Jones (Swansea Metropolitan University, U.K.) The First Rainbow Coalition and the End of Multi-cultural Politics in Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo............................................................ 145 Stephen Casmier (St. Louis University, U.S.A.) Didn’t I Tell You?: The Hoodoo Conjurer of Japanese by Spring .......... 165 Yuqing Lin (China University of Political Science and Law, Beijing, China) The New Irony of Ishmael Reed against the New Racism of Postracial America ................................................................................................... 177 JiĜí Šalamoun (Masaryk University, Czech Republic) Jazz Musicians as Pioneer Multi-Culturalists, the Co-Optation of Them, and the Reason Jazz Survives .................................................................. 189 Ishmael Reed (writer, publisher, activist, Oakland, U.S.A.) Poetry Craig Santos Perez and Myung Mi Kim: Voicing the Integral Divide: Transcending Suffering by Reshaping American History and Language... 203 Jennifer K. Dick (UHA Mulhouse, France) By Tennessee Reed.................................................................................. 221 (editor, writer, Oakland, U.S.A.) “The Avalanche of Sils im Engadin” “Mulhouse, France”

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By Ishmael Reed...................................................................................... 225 (writer, publisher, activist, Oakland, U.S.A.) “Eavesdropping on the Gods” By V. Jean Tahdooahnippah .................................................................... 231 (Comanche Nation, U.S.A.) “The Freshman” “Haskell” “White Indians” “The Question” “Together Separately” Beyond Literature: Dance, Art, Tradition and Commodification Suzushi Hanayagi at Mulhouse ............................................................... 239 Carla Blank (dancer, director, writer, Oakland, U.S.A.) Multiculturalism in Art: The African American Tradition Continues ..... 261 Paul von Blum (UC Los Angeles, U.S.A.) Multiculturalism in Color: Zuni Colors and the Non-Native American Art Market ............................................................................................... 273 Charlaine Ostmann (UHA Mulhouse, France) Multicultural or Destitute Hawai’i? Re-visioning the Symbolism of the Aloha Shirt .................................................................................... 281 Roxane Hughes (University of Lausanne, Switzerland) Multicultural Education Rethinking Multiculturalism: Critical Pedagogy and Critical Literacy in Education ............................................................................................. 303 M. Kamel Igoudjil (American University in Washington, DC, U.S.A.) Identity Politics in the ESL Classroom .................................................... 317 Amanda de Varona and Saghar Leslie Naghib (University of Miami, U.S.A.)

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Migration and Ethnic History Guests or Comrades? The Rights of Migrants in the Workplace ............ 335 Edward Mortimer (CMG Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford; Senior Program Advisor, Salzburg Global Seminar) The Latino Condition: Understanding Multiculturalism and Pan-Latino Ethnicity in the USA ............................................................................... 347 Marc S. Rodriguez (Portland State University, U.S.A.) Bricolage of Protest: Unveiling the Multicultural Dimensions of the Chicano Movement through its Murals of Protest ......................... 371 Atalie Gerhard (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen, Germany) Yiddish and American Multiculturalism: A ‘Postvernacular’ Language on the Margin .......................................................................... 387 Astrid Starck-Adler (UHA Mulhouse, France) American Politics Multiculturalism in the United States: A fait accompli? ......................... 413 Christèle Le Bihan (Université de Poitiers, France) American Multiculturalism in the 21st Century: Achieving Domestic and International Goals in a Globalized World ....................................... 435 Saïd Ouaked (Université de Limoges, France) The Evolution of Political Multiculturalism in the United States: Barack Obama, Affirmative Action, and the Affordable Care Act .......... 449 Lea Stephan (Université Toulouse 2 Jean-Jaurès, France) Other Multiculturalisms Should I Stay or Should I Go? Multiculturalism in Mulhouse ................ 471 Evelyne Troxler (Université Populaire, Mulhouse, France) André Weckmann and the Influence of African American Culture on Modern Alsatian Poetry ...................................................................... 477 Peter André Bloch (UHA Mulhouse, France)

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Managing Cultural Diversity: Multiculturalism and Citizenship in America and Algeria............................................................................ 491 Abderrezak Dourari (Algiers 2 University, Director of CNPLET, Ministry of Education, Algeria) From Snowball to Pomegranate Seeds: The Troubled Position of Han within Chinese Multiculturalism ................................................. 507 Chang Liu (Jilin University Institute for Chinese Studies, China) Contributors ............................................................................................. 519

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many people have been involved in the production of this book. Mainly the authors, of course, but multiple other people and organizations have helped in its gestation. At the beginning of the process was a conference on multiculturalism inspired by Ishmael Reed’s promise to visit Mulhouse, France. He came with his whole family, Carla Blank, his wife, and their daughter Tennessee. I was lucky enough to recruit as a second plenary speaker Edward Mortimer, a highly decorated journalist and one time press speaker of Kofi Annan, whom I’d met at the Salzburg Seminar. Still, I needed more help in the organization of this event. With the support of the Basle Jazz School it was possible to make things doubly international—not only the speakers but also the locations. For hosting us in Switzerland, I thank Philipp Schweighauser, Veit Arlt and Berni Ley— they also helped organizing a wonderful jazz reading accompanied by musicians from the school!1 The day in Basle would not have been possible without financial support from the Freie Akademische Gesellschaft. At home in Mulhouse, we received help from many organizations and people. The list is long: the Conseil Scientifique of the UHA Mulhouse, our research labo ILLE (EA4363), the English department, the LEA department, the Faculté des lettres, langues et sciences humaines (FLSH), the label EUCOR and its trinational support from NOVATRIS (Mulhouse, France), the University of Freiburg (Germany) and the University of Basle (Switzerland). The American Consulate in Strasbourg and the U.S. Embassy generously sponsored two flights from the West Coast. We also received support from the government in Alsace: from the City of Mulhouse, which hosted us in its Hôtel de Ville, from the Conseil Général du HautRhin, and from the Conseil Régional d’Alsace. Friederike Schulte of the Carl-Schurz-Haus invited Ishmael Reed to Freiburg and organized great newspaper coverage. The individual people to thank to are numerous: Wolfgang Hochbruck, Philipp Schweighauser, Ewa Luczak and Cindy Hamilton on the Comité Scientifique. Virginie Fiesinger from the Conseil Recherche briefed me on the importance of vulgarization—which gave me the idea of the jazz con1 For Ishmael Reed’s performance, scroll all the way down on the facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1433389346974155/

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cert and Carla Blank’s film screening. Peter Schnyder of ILLE gave me all the contacts I needed locally—he’s a real pro when it comes to organizing academic events (hotels, restaurants, printing shops…). The nonpareil Martine Souiki patiently led me through all the complex issues of budgeting and university accounting. And my colleagues in the English department helped chair the atéliers. Many of our students supported me, most actively among them Anne-Sophie Foltzer, Wassila Hacid, Alexandra Kraeva, Mahan Saatchi, Mélanie Wastine (who designed the wonderful poster for the conference and the cover of this book!) and Lamya Yamani—but there were many more! The book would not exists without the help of Cambridge Scholars Publishing, which gave me great freedom in organizing the manuscript and the possibility to include poems and such a great variety of multicultural issues. I am very grateful to have received some additional manuscripts for this collection from fantastic scholars across the globe. Cindy Hamilton gave us feedback on many of the articles—thank you! If it has taken longer than I hoped to put all of this in print, it is of course my fault, and so are all the infelicities and typos. Sämi Ludwig

INTRODUCTION SÄMI LUDWIG

Though I teach in France, I am a Swiss German-speaking Swiss, born and raised in a small country with four official languages and more foreigners than the United States (about 25% non-naturalized inhabitants). When I spent a year as an AFS High School exchange student1 in the United States (I am a 1978 HS graduate of The Pingry School—a rather posh NJ prep school), I was overwhelmed by the opportunities of English that made it possible for me to talk to and interact with so many exotic people like Jews, Blacks … but ultimately all Americans were strangers and hard to figure out anyway. English also made it possible to talk with all the other exchange students (“Walk together, talk together”), who came from Iceland, Indonesia, South Africa, Australia, Brazil, Ecuador, Denmark, the UK, you name it. Like everybody else, I took for granted that the United States, the territory on which we all had that wonderful experience, was the perfect role model for multiculturalism. My experience of that year is one of the reasons why I became an Americanist. At the University in Berne this trend continued and we studied minority literature. While they studied Maori and Australians in the English section, the American literature chair Fritz Gysin was an African American specialist. It was clear that the “hot” issues, the interesting debates and texts had to do with minorities. Maybe this is also because for “white” Europeans the so-called literatures in English provide access to many of the postcolonial worlds, to that “other” we all want to know more about. In short, the function of “English” in Europe is very different from the United States. Instead of imposed standardization it means opening doors to other experiences (and I guess this is generally a function of foreign literatures of any kind2). It has been my experience at conferences of CAAR, for

1

See http://www.afs.org/afs-and-intercultural-learning/ This may even apply to temporal foreignness, only that such historical material remains “Other” tout court in the sense that its representationalist quality will never be challenged by a living subject…

2

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example (the Collegium for African American Research 3 ), that many Black American scholars were nonplussed that there is so much interest in their culture in Europe and to find out that for many European scholars, the American culture worth studying is mainly a matter of minority voices. Whereas these perspectives were struggling for recognition against traditional curricula and syllabi at home, they were relished in Europe.4 In the meantime of course minority studies of all kinds have become established and institutionalized in Ethnic Studies departments, Black Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Asian American Studies, Chicano Studies, Native American Studies, and specialized chairs, journals, and a very particular critical discourse dominated by United States institutions and their specific debates, and by Anglo-American university presses on both sides of the Atlantic and their “high standards” of research. This has developed into a certain kind of hegemonic pressure to see things and approach issues as established by this kind of critical discourse and its high priests, whose terminology has been relentlessly regurgitated—especially in the age of theory. It is only with this perspective in mind that in hindsight I understand Marc Chénetier’s remark (the former president of EAAS, the European Americanists5) that “fortunately” in France there is a strong tradition to publish the work of anglicistes and américanistes in French! As a Swiss I had made fun of the provincialism of such a habit.6 But Marc’s point was precisely that the overwhelming influence of AngloAmerican publishing needed to be kept in check by some kind of alternative discourse. As Prof. Dourari writes in our collection: “The superpower USA is not restricted to weaponry, but encompasses the intellectual leadership they inspire to other nations.” It is precisely this issue that has inspired our collection. The American discourse about multiculturalism may be very sophisticated and dense, but it is nevertheless domestic, and therefore subject to local habits of standardization. And if the debate on multiculturalism has been intense and dominated by an agenda of American “exceptionalism,” there are certainly alternatives to the Anglo kind of multiculturalism and its debates in the age of Brexit and President Trump. Americans should know that most other countries today are multicultural as well, even though they don’t make such a fuss about it. When my gay colleague from bourgeois Berne, 3

See http://caar-web.org/ I remember decades ago when the Detroit jazz festival advertised its cooperation with the Montreux Jazz Festival and the same lineup of musicians... 5 See http://www.eaas.eu/ 6 Since the community of English scholars in Switzerland is so small and even linguistically divided, all publications are in the target language, English. 4

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Switzerland went to San Francisco with his partner, of course they made a pilgrimage to the Castro. “It’s like an outdoor museum,” he said when he returned. The United States is not the only interesting multicultural nation nowadays. I dare you look around at the faces and languages you find at Zurich Hauptbahnhof and compare this to Grand Central station in New York (I am not even considering Los Angeles—not enough trains there). Or look at the Swiss football team and its lineup of secondos. When they played Albania at the recent World Cup in France, the lingua franca between the two teams was Swiss German. Even brothers played on the different teams… (see Ames).7 Or look at big business: The CEOs of the Swiss multinationals are mostly foreigners—NOVARTIS’s Joe Jimenez (American), ROCHE CEO Severin Schwan (Austrian), NESTLE’s Paul Bulke (Belgian). The UBS CEO is Swiss (Sergio Ermotti), but Credit Suisse’s Brady Dougan (American) has recently been replaced by Tidjane Thiam (French and Ivorian). Multinational capitalism means lots of expats on the high-income level as well. Though Switzerland may not be the role model when it comes to refugees, there are certainly more refugees per capita in Scandinavia than in North America. And concerning linguistic competence, also consider that the European Union is a complex entity that sports a fantastic crew of translators in its headquarters, an “international” cooperation that struggles with many legal and institutional issues beyond the softer “intercultural” concerns.8 In view of this perspective, the present collection also offers contributions about other nations’ multiculturalism in order to confront the Anglo-American reading community with alternative multiculturalisms existing in other countries. Good and bad examples of intense multiculturalism abound in the whole world—just as in the United States. Thus when I teach interculturalité in American literature, we often read captivity narratives ranging from Captain Smith (Pocahontas) to John Walker Lindh and Jessica Lynch (Afghanistan and Iraq), of course slave narratives, and much other minority literature in order to learn what interethnic relations should not be. My 7

Here are the names of the eleven players of the team before the last World Cup: Djourou, Xhaka, Rodriguez, Behrami, Seferovic, Sommer, Inler, Lichtsteiner, van Bergen, Mehmedi, Shaqiri… There are very few French, Italian, and German names. Another interesting source of information on Swiss ethnicity is the page with the birth announcements of my local hospital. Again, search for the “traditional” Swiss names: https://www.so-h.ch/kantonsspital-olten/aktuell/babygalerie.html 8 Also note the many interesting intercultural learning materials published by the Council of Europe: http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/linguistic/EducInter_en.asp

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point is simply that American multiculturalism is one among many multiculturalisms. Here in Alsace I once had to teach intercultural skills to a small class of students consisting of Algerians, of which some were actually Berber and/or French citizens (like the only girl with a head scarf) or Christians (from Algeria); in the same group I had a Russian, an Afghani woman, a Chinese student, a stunningly bilingual German girl, and some “white” French (but no Alsatian speakers). Of course they had more to teach me than the other way round. All I could do is make them aware of their own skills that had gotten them to university in the first place and encourage them to learn from each other. I made these students write papers on “critical incidents” that have to do with their intercultural experience—and the material I received is simply marvelous. I hope to publish it in a little book some time.9 Whereas some students wrote on exotic cultural differences between faraway places, others found incidents within their own culture at home, between generations. One Muslim girl described how a Lebanese boy at the French student dorm closed the door after inviting her in, and how much she had been afraid of this gesture—until she learned that Lebanese Muslims are more casual about such things. Another critical incident (which I don’t have on file, unfortunately) describes the attitude towards dogs and how a French girl’s grandparents, used to farm dogs on chains, were scandalized when they found dogs indoors and even sleeping on the family sofas in the apartment of their children and grandchildren. I conclude from this that cultural variety exists on all levels along the axis from the private to the public. Which reminds me of T.S. Eliot’s line “That is not what I meant at all” in “Prufrock.” If we look at Eliot as the quintessential monoculturalist Anglo (he has very much been made into that), we notice that even within his supposedly so culturally uniform universe, difference is a crucial issue. The frustration of not understanding the other is simply universal. Being a scholar, this means that I have to express myself with as much precision as possible and be clear what I’m talking about. As a human being it means that I expect not to be understood immediately but hope that there are, sometimes, these lucky moments when we get through to the other person anyway… A further dimension of multiculturalism I want to mention here is technology. I remember how I wanted to share Ernstfall in Havanna, a Swiss screwball comedy about international diplomacy,10 with an American friend of Cuban origin. Sadly, he couldn’t watch my present because 9

See https://www.e-formation.uha.fr/moodle/mod/folder/view.php?id=81634 See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-l3eIdY5wZQ

10

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his American DVD player (Code 1) could not read the European film (Code 2)… Though Americans are proud of their own domestic variety, they are simply deaf when the message comes from outside of their habitat. On Swiss railroad trains, in contrast, we find not only Swiss power sockets but also European ones (well, continental Western European) to accommodate foreign passengers, or appliances that our own people bought abroad. Ditto for the public Swiss phone booths which accept foreign Euro coins, or money machines at the bank. In Europe (and in my case in Switzerland) these technical challenges are intense and we try to meet them. A related example is the anecdote of my former California neighbor, a painter, whom I once showed a Swiss ten-franc bill. He looked at it with a specialist’s eye, turned it around, felt it, and concluded that this was very beautiful graphic work. He was impressed and asked: “It is real money? Can I really buy things with it?” I conclude from this that the ultimate bottom line when it comes to value seems to be the greenback. Whatever varieties Americans find among themselves, they all rely on the same kind of money, banking, phone system, legal rights, technological standardization (which Silicon Valley is imposing on the rest of the world, including NSA surveillance), homologized university syllabi, MLA standards,11 etc. Working in American minority studies, one sometimes gets the impression that Americans are in a state of Freudian denial about all the things they have in common… Let me propose that one of the main conceptual differences between Europe and the United States when it comes to defining difference is the issue of race vs. language. To simplify the contrast provocatively, in Europe the people are “white” but speak different languages, whereas in the US they are of different “races” but speak the same language. We are mainly multicultural—you are primarily multiracial. Immigration lore has made Americans fetishize all kinds of differences at the expense of admitting how much they have in common (including their domestic quarrels)— an aspect much more obvious to foreigners. But there is a more important point here. The racialist approach on the American side of the Atlantic, which has its origins in colonialism and slavery and the legal discourse emanating from that experience is primarily visual, judging people by their phenotype. To be sure, looks are very important and we all make decisions based on exterior prejudices. After all, we do not always have the time to

11

The editing of the present volume is a good example of the additional work it takes to meet printing demands when your clientele’s standards of writing differ considerably...

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go deeper. But my personal conviction and my research on cognition tell me that identity, the self (so much denied by hopeless poststructuralist theoreticians), is better expressed through a person’s interiority, i.e., his or her own language behavior. You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, as we say.12 In “Thin Pluralism” I gave the example of the ex-wife of the Swiss exambassador to the United States, Shawn Fielding (or: Mrs. Thomas Borer), a former Texas beauty queen, who may look white or “European,” but who will be recognized as a foreign American as soon as she opens her mouth, no matter how lavishly she dresses up with Swiss crosses (google her!). In contrast to her, former track athlete Dave Dollé is black and used to look very much like his competitors from Jamaica when in competition. But when he speaks on the radio, his dialect is most certainly ours. There is not doubt that he belongs, because you can only speak the authentic local language if you have grown up here. I have a daughter who looks Vietnamese, was born in California, but considers herself Swiss German, and a son who looks Ethiopian but was born here and identifies with his parents’ language as well.13 Thus Switzerland, where dialects are extremely important, categorizes differently. Voice is more real than skin. You bet that Minnesotans, Bostonians, certain Southerners and even New Yorkers also honor that kind of difference, but still, “local sound” has not been on the central radar of American identity discussions for a while. Multiculturalism is a very complicated affair, and one of the claims of this collection is that there are many different approaches and that we should compare notes. Everybody is exceptionalist. Still, when it comes to institutionalizing things, there is another point. As a European, I am worried about American violence in general, the lack of gun control, the prison-industrial complex, the death penalty in Texas. I wouldn’t want to live there. After the election of Donald Trump, the United States is certainly no longer a progressive role model. I think there are alternatives and we need more competition. In my own Swiss canton, Solothurn, the last official

12

Ultimately, this is a matter of digitalization, of conceptual representation (cognitive result), as opposed to mere analogic imagery (perception, WYSIWYG); see my discussion of this issue in CONCRETE LANGUAGE (“Theoretical Premises: Digital Essences and Analogic Images” 18-44) and later in Pragmatist Realism (“The Cognitive Paradigm: Or, an Alternative Lineage of Pragmatism” 27-88). 13 Curiously Amharic was entered as his language and Christian Orthodox as his religion in Jonathan’s birth certificate (!). As if language and religion were part of your genetic heritage…

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execution took place in 1855 and the death penalty was abolished in 1874 (Swiss Historical Lexicon14). The percentage of prisoners is much lower. If multiculturalism is supposed to be a desirable state of things beyond the experience of slave narratives, we certainly need to agree on some kinds of human rights as a common goal. And though Humanism has been deconstructed by the new theorists and exposed as a colonializing device to impose European culture, the continuous immigration “pull” factor to Europe and the United States speaks otherwise. There is obviously still something desirable about certain Western values beyond mere wealth or power even though, in parallel acts of slandering, Western neo-liberal capitalism has opened up (or rather sold out) its own “market economy” of the formerly so-called “free world” to a host of new entrepreneurs from China, Saudi, Russia, and many other governments whose cronies rank low in the Transparency International corruption index 15 and who have bought some crown jewels of our economy beyond big football teams, undermining a free trading system that has formerly emphasized its ties with democracy and human rights. Tempi passati. Obviously, global capitalism without human rights is not a cure-all. In Human Rights Without Democracy? Gret Haller, once president of the Swiss parliament and later OSCE Human Rights Ombudsperson for Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo, compares American and European approaches and makes some astute comments on the legal predicaments of “ethnic rights” and the imposition of American identity issues in the Dayton Accords that have lead to a virtual gridlock in Bosnian politics. Her point is that there are only “human rights” and she insists on that common denominator above any ethnic declinations. This will allow for a multiculturalism without fragmentation, a form of essentialism that allows for empathy and the recognition of the other as “equal” in the sense of “equally human,” a positive force of self-determination and self-expression that eludes “negativity,” that cankerous dark backside of formalist logic enamored with its own discourse. Thus we need multiple positives, as we need to accept multiple superlatives. We should not be guided by want but by our curiosity. In our final discussion at the international conference on American multiculturalism in Mulhouse,16 we agreed that one of the issues was to avoid defining the other in terms of negativity and our own projections, and instead to opt for a multiplicity of positives. Instead of defining

14

See http://www.hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/d/D9617.php See http://www.transparency.org/cpi2015 16 See our facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1433389346974155/ 15

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the other by the darkness of our own mind, we should listen to what the others have in their mind (and listen to the “dark” people).17 It is for this reason that the present collection cannot be comprehensive (a preposterous claim), but simply aims to create a forum of different approaches, different disciplines and different opinions. Organizing our contributions has been challenging and ultimately somewhat arbitrary. The collection begins with a section on art and culture, and a series of more general articles that make a theoretical contribution. The first is Natalia Vysotska’s “Multiculturalism as a Challenge to Aesthetic Theory.” Natalia is a major figure in American studies in the Ukraine, and in her paper she sets out to explore the uneasy relations between the tenets of classical aesthetic theory and the realities of cultural diversity. She looks at the complex relations of multiculturalism “with the category of the aesthetic linked to the issues of cultural identity and canon formation,” discussing the work of conservatives, theoreticians, and a “third group of thinkers […] still seeking ways of non-reductive preservation of both universal and particular, objective and subjective, to provide adequate response to cultural diversity.” This kind of quest has for her the greatest appeal. Vygotska gives us a history of the formulation of modern aesthetic concepts and how this has lead to a debate between the aesthetic and the political. Looking at the work of Elliott, Ickstadt, Mohanty, and many others, she moves on to the “concept of transculture” as a new episteme that refuses complete cultural translation. This is where she can also bring in the contribution of multiple Eastern European scholars. Next is Meili Steele’s contribution to a very American debate of “Multiculturalism versus Inequality: A False Opposition,” in which he discusses the problem that “[m]any in the American Left have gone from advocating attention to cultural and social differences, or multiculturalism, to criticizing it as a distraction from social stratification.” He discusses two major approaches to normativity employed by critics of multiculturalism, namely the “constructivist” approach, which finds expression in the work of legal and political philosophers, such as Habermas, Rawls, Korsgaard, and Benhabib, and the “antisubordination” approach in American political theory, which “looks at patterns of subordination, at the effects of laws and not at the intentions of the authors.” He then sketches “an alternative approach to normativity that enables us to speak of the normativity bound up with texts and discursive forms,” followed by a discussion of Barack 17 Also see Snead, who states: “Blacks still ‘represent’ otherness and/or dark areas of the white mind” (49).

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Obama’s famous “race speech” entitled “A More Perfect Union” and the way it relates to the discursive form of normativity laid down by Brown v. Board. Steele concludes: “Multiculturalism is necessary to protect equality, for equality must be understood through discursive forms and not just through the application of a principle.” In “Democratic Doxa: Toward a Genealogy of Typicality in American Nationalist Literature” Christopher G. Diller approaches American multiculturalism from a particular historical perspective, discussing the work of the Beecher family, moving via Tocqueville to Harriett Beecher Stowe and her twentieth-century descendent John Beecher (1904-1980), discussing their different notions of “democracy.” Analyzing the “type” in antebellum America, many of Diller’s subtle observations are based on the fact that “Darwin’s new paradigm inverted the relationship between the individual and the typical that had undergirded the antebellum literary type.” Starting out from Walter Lippmann, Diller then discusses the modern definition stereotype, which “became the dominant understanding of typicality—ironically, a kind of stereotype of the stereotype—and one that informs American literary studies to this day.” Thus he suggests differentiation because types “are pre-rational ideas and images deeply saturated by emotional and cultural predispositions.” The next section directly moves into specifics and covers a newly rediscovered multicultural group: Arabs in America—and that in readings from outside, by authors working outside the American campus discourse. The Algerians Bouchra Bouterra and Toufik Lachouri proudly celebrate “Arab Americans: The example of Naomi Shihab Nye” and give us a great sense of the importance of having a voice of one’s own! They associate the Arabs in America with “neo-Puritans” who have “escaped segregation, terrorism, and all sorts of problems in their own countries and fled to this Promised Land in an attempt to have a better life.” Discussing Arab American literature Bouterra and Lachouri observe that it “has been influenced by difference and the principle of acceptance of differences.” The lines of Palestinian American Naomi Shihab Nye “stress the most sensitive side of humanity; how we can feel each other and carefully listen to each other. When we listen, and understand each other’s suffering, it will be impossible for us to hurt each other.” I hope their optimism is contagious when they conclude that “Nye’s ‘kindness’ theory, or therapy, solves all multicultural and ethnocentric issues.” In “‘D’ici et d’ailleurs’: Hybridity, Double Standards and the Western Arab-Muslim Woman,” Rim Khaled provides a comparative Tunisian perspective on the hyphenated Arab life in in France and the United States,

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based on the biography Née en France. Histoire d’une Jeune Beur by Aicha Benaissa, a French woman of Algerian descent, and the American television show All-American Muslim, which focuses on a group of families of Lebanese descent living in Dearborn, Michigan. Khaled observes how her heroines advance “one culture or the other depending on the context and on which culture feels closer at that moment. This is a tendency typical of hybrids, and it demonstrates how the process of selfidentification is quite relative and contextual.” She notes that these women experience the “idea of ‘polyphonous identity,’ as […] a form of cultural schizophrenia” reminding us of Bateson’s notion of the “double bind.” The liminal “third space” is not celebrated but rather like Ralph Ellison’s invisible identity experienced outside of history. Another comparative contribution comes from Sihem Arfaoui. In “Ex/tension Of/In ‘A Nation Peopled by the World’: Re-evaluating the Kaleidoscope in Arab American and Asian American Texts,” she traces similarities in Mona in the Promised Land (1996) by Chinese American Gish Jen and Crescent (2003) as well as The Language of Baklava (2005) by Arab American Diana Abu-Jaber. Arfaoui criticizes strategies of fetishism in which “ethnic writers end up overlooking that the very process of accentuating the worth and distinctiveness of ethnic idiosyncrasies also involves pinning them down” to gestures of commodification. Instead Arfaoui suggests that “ethnic writers, individuals and communities […] look for and ponder upon less ambivalent alternatives in ways which could allow them to disrupt the order of domination while also resisting and transcending stereotypes.” Arfaoui’s comparison piece serves as transition to our section on American minority literature, which starts with an astute analysis on the commercial Orientalizing tendencies in Asian American literature. Sheng-Mei Ma’s “Asian Birthright and Anglo Bequest—Chang-rae Lee and Bich Minh Nguyen” discusses the frequent abuse of the label “immigrant writer” as a “race card” being played by the publishing industry: …immigrant’s linguistic dis-ability is as a rule suppressed in Asian American writings featuring immigrant characters. Only in novelists with a musician’s ears and a linguist’s skills of transcribing un-English sounds and rhythm can we expect to hear the mangled speech pattern of a large portion of immigrants, such gifted novelists as Louis Chu, Chang-rae Lee, and Patricia Park.

Thus he suggests that “[b]y the standard of the word test that diagnoses Alzheimer’s in Still Alice (2014), I, an immigrant from a non-English

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speaking background with a career in academe, having written my share of books in English, would be deemed exhibiting symptoms of Alzheimer’s.” Discussing the danger of using the terms “immigrant” and “refugee” interchangeably, Ma find his material in surprising places, like when he observes that “[e]xcerpts from Nguyen’s books are compiled into ‘The Good Immigrant Student’ on a U.S. Department of State website pitching multiculturalism, ‘Immigrants Joining the Mainstream.’” Yet another perspective is presented by the poet and Latin American literature professor Fernando Valerio-Holguín, who discusses in “Multiculturalism and Transnationalism: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz” the failure of “integrationist multiculturalism” in that book. He finds that Oscar Wao “evokes an archetypal racial solitude of numerous black characters from the Western world.” Invoking Homi Bhabha among others, Valerio-Holguín concludes that “[t]he privileged status conferred by Bhabha to the concept of ‘third space’ with respect to the hybrid becomes a disadvantage as Oscar lives in a status of double marginality.” He rather sides with Fanon’s notion of the “anxious man who cannot escape his body.” In “Straddling Worlds: A Comparative Study of the Multicultural Experiences of Anurag Mathur and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie,” Arpa Ghosh looks at the example of ethnic visitors’ experience in United States academia and how they are keeping their distance: Americanah, a pejorative term in the onset of the novel meaning a Nigerian student blindly and snobbishly enamoured of America and the cultural liberalism it stands for, takes on a multicultural dimension at the end, signifying an independent, experienced woman who has earned wealth and self-confidence during her stay in America and who is capable of holding her own in the patriarchal culture of modern day Nigeria.

Yet Ghosh observes that America, as culture and nation state, offers an essential open-mindedness and valuable democratic freedoms to its guests and citizens: the freedom to question and criticize its shortfalls as unbiased nation state, as is evident from Mathur’s and Adichie’s novels. Both criticize Americans for their naïveté and lack of interest regarding minority cultures, yet read against the grain their texts portray America as a land of opportunity and openmindedness.

The crucial issue seems to be a supra-nationality that Ghosh even finds … in Karl Marx.

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The fourth section is dedicated to the work of a specific contemporary writer, honoring Ishmael Reed’s lifelong commitment to American multiculturalism. It presents a stunning array of new comparative insights on his work, starting out with Wendy Hayes-Jones’s “Multiculturalizing America: Ishmael Reed and the Cultural Mosaic.” She reminds us that Reed “is in many ways the quintessential American patriot finding his artistic inspiration within the cosmopolitanism and pluralism of U.S. life.” Surveying his career and its development, Hayes-Jones lays out “how Reed establishes his own particular take on combining cosmopolitan values within the creed of American Exceptionalism.” Thus the writings of Ishmael Reed draw our attention to a central irony. For if the discourse of ‘multiculturalism’ emerged due to the ethnic resilience of African Americans, it now functions as a term that allows white Americans to embrace their diverse ethnicities (Irish-American, ItalianAmerican, Jewish-American etc.), while denying that diversity to African Americans who are rendered homogeneously as ‘black’.

Hayes-Jones discusses this conceptual paradox in a memorable discussion of Reed’s claiming his Irish roots. An outstanding contribution with historical scope and literary sensibility is Stephen Casmier’s “The First Rainbow Coalition and the End of Multiculturalism in Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo,” in which he starts out from the imagery associated with the death of a character and then moves to the history of the Black Panthers and their newspaper coverage: “Indeed, turning to the morgue of a paper such as The Chicago Tribune reveals that Mumbo Jumbo’s newspaper stories are more pastiche than invention.” Introducing us to a “revolutionary, theatrical art group—The Motherfuckers—who took their name from Baraka’s poem” and Tom Wolfe’s “Radical Chic” new journalism, Casmier makes the case that “[b]y the end of the 1960s, mainstream media representations of Black radicalism seemed inescapably entrenched in and controlled by the minstrel aesthetic.” In Yuqing Lin’s “Didn’t I Tell You?—The Hoodoo Conjurer of Japanese by Spring,” we learn that Reed’s “essay ‘America: The Multinational Society’ has been excerpted in the most widely used College English textbook in China, as a testimony of American multiculturalism. His trademark Neo-Hoodooism brings a new consciousness of folk culture into American multicultural writing.” One of her most interesting observations is when she finds that Reed’s “idea of multicultural syncretism is similar to the Confucian notion of “seeking harmony without uniformity” (઼㘼н ਼), which means people should tolerate disparate ideologies and contrib-

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ute different opinions.” As she observes, “uniformity [is] like mixing water with water, or playing the same tune over and over.” Thus Chinese Harmony is like Ishmael Reed’s gumbo, like cooking soup, “using right amounts of water, fire, wood, vinegar, meat sauce, salt, and plum to cook fish or meat”: “the cooks add ingredients to complement the taste, adding condiments if it’s too mild or adding water if it’s too rich.” JiĜí Šalamoun is a young scholar from Masaryk University in the Czech Republic, who has extensively worked on the function of humor and irony in Reed’s work. In “The New Irony of Ishmael Reed against the New Racism of Postracial America,” he writes that “satire is vitally dependent on social norms” and observes that Reed’s humor has changed in his work, moving from contrast-based irony in his early novels to an argument-based irony that coincides with the beginnings of the so-called postracial period: “[A]rgument-based irony provides the reader with more explanation as to why a type of behavior or thinking may be objectionable than contrast-based irony.” Šalamoun’s examples show that nowadays racism “has to be proven in the first place before it can be attacked. In this respect, argument-based irony eases the process of recognition of racism and anti-multiculturalist sentiments.” The icing on the cake in this section is of course the contribution by Ishmael Reed himself. In “Jazz Musicians as Pioneer Multi-Culturalists, the Co-Optation of Them, and the Reason Jazz Survives,” he moves from painting and literature to jazz, arguing that many of the jazz musicians have embraced foreign influences earlier than other artists, in particular when it comes to their religious orientation: “Like their predecessors, these musicians not only performed a mixing and sampling of other musical traditions, but they were avant-garde in fashion, philosophy, language and religion.” Covering bepop, Afrosurrealism, and statements by many jazzmen and critics, Reed once more provides a host of facts: “In the 1960s, Black poets would make important breakthroughs. They would end the copying of the ‘masters’ T.S. Eliot, Henry James, and Hemingway, and begin to explore other languages, Arabic and African languages. But the musicians were there first.” Reed provides statistics, personal testimony, the works. And as always, he has something to say: “Kalamu was saying that Jazz is the most influential. I was saying words. I said what would have happened if Martin Luther King, Jr. had played his ‘I have a dream speech’ on the saxophone. Bullins thought this funny. But Kalamu had a point.” From this intensive contact with contemporary fiction and Ishmael Reed in particular, we move on to a next section on poetry. Jennifer K. Dick dis-

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cusses “Craig Santos Perez and Myung Mi Kim Voicing the Integral Divide: Reshaping American History through Multi-lingualism.” She explores “how Perez and Kim’s making of a new English within their poetry collections seeks to account for the experience of the multicultural and polyvalent self, for their lost or vanishing cultures as those are absorbed into America.” We read, for example, that “Kim delights in this untranslatable, naming it not as a space of division, of a lack of communicative possibility, of that which is forgotten or lost, but rather she announces that this blank line is a link, it is something we share in, that spans across languages and peoples.” As Dick concludes: “In each of us, certainly, there are many things we simply cannot say even in our own language, let alone in the language of someone else.” Nevertheless, poets are trying to express their multicultural experiences. This is why this section also contains poetry—first two poems by Tennessee Reed on her experiences in Mulhouse, France, and in the Engadin mountains in Switzerland. This is followed by her father Ishmael’s poem dedicated to Professor Peter André Bloch, on his impressions of staying in the house in Sils where Nietzsche wrote some of his most important works.18 And I am especially pleased that we also received some wonderful poems from Linda Sue Warner, a Comanche Indian who writes under the name of V. Jean Tahdooahnippah: Your traditions and mine are not forgotten. The past can not be changed and it is not our right to forgive. You ask me to be Indian, but, I dare you to be.

These creative contributions demonstrate the common efforts of artists and critics to come to grips with our transcultural world. One of the aims of the inclusiveness of this collection is also to present issues of multiculturalism beyond the word. In “Suzushi Hanayagi at Mulhouse” Carla Blank, distinguished author, dancer, and choreographer, presents the work of her late friend, the extraordinary Japanese artist Suzushi Hanayagi, who combined traditional dance training with highly experimental modern expressionism: “Hanayagi created and performed dance and theater works based within Japanese performance traditions and from disciplines culled from various cultures and times.” Multiculturalism is 18

See http://nietzschehaus.ch/en/

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obviously also a matter of bodily expression—and Hanayagi was promiscuous in her cultural contacts: “For over fifty years she actively continued to perform, choreograph and teach classic Japanese and contemporary dance forms in the United States, Europe and Japan.” In the United States, she cooperated with some of the best-known choreographers of her time, such as Robert Wilson. Blank cooperated with Hanayagi in several projects and gives us a very detailed report on these activities—Hanayagi “uniquely bridged East and West in multicultural work that expanded what classical or modern dance is and could be.” In “Multiculturalism in Art: The African American Tradition Continues,” Paul Von Blum discusses the work of Los Angeles artists George Evans, the muralist Noni Olabisi, an installation by Tony Scott, and Derrick Maddox—because the work of black artists “still remains less visible than that of their white colleagues and contemporaries of comparable talent and achievement.” All of these works are unfortunately preoccupied with racism and police brutality—an issue that will further be traced in politics in the later contributions in this volume. Writes Von Blum: “Other racial and ethnic minority artist in the United States, including Latinos, Asian Americans, and American Indians, have likewise produced engaging artworks that reflect their struggles and their aspirations in an often hostile society,” however, they “are routinely ignored in mainstream art institutions like museums and commercial galleries, despite some modest progress in recent years.” Moving from artistic issues to culture in a more anthropologcal sense, Charlaine Ostmann discusses the use of color in the Zuni universe and Zuni artwork. In “Multiculturalism in Color: Zuni Colors and the NonNative American Art Market” she focuses on the effects of the circulation of culture-specific Zuni colors in non-Native American cultures. Far from the European system of colors based on the color wheel, the colors in Zuni culture represent benevolent animal deities and the sacred natural life, which both embody the core of Zuni beliefs. Ostmann observes that “the translation of color terms in legends of something as ordinary as Zuni dress code goes beyond the comprehension of any average non-Native American reader. For instance, in Zuni legends, a being associated with the color white becomes a supernatural being, a ‘bringer of life’.” Because of the often restrictive translation of color-terms in legends and in the commercial exchange of colored Zuni carvings of animal-deities, the Zuni colors have first been misunderstood and then alienated, giving birth to something new, which is neither Zuni nor Western. The issue of ethnic art is carried into yet a different dimension in Roxane Hughes’s “Multicultural or Destitute Hawai’i? Re-visioning the Sym-

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bolism of the Aloha Shirt,” in which she looks at the commercial manufacturing of a symbolic item that reflects on the identity of Native Hawaiians: “The now common use of aloha in the English language further epitomizes the appropriation of the Hawaiian language and the resulting cultural dispossession of Native Hawaiians.” Hughes writes: “The aloha shirt thus speaks as much about Hawaiian multiculturalism, as it speaks of American imperialism, and Asian settlers’ colonialism.” In this article she traces the history and function of the aloha shirt from its origins to its appropriation by Hollywood and mass manufacturing back to the recent arrival of organic brands, and many steps in between. She summarizes: “As seen with Hawaiian-based garment companies, the aloha shirt can contribute to teaching the richness of the aina and perpetuating its aloha—in the precolonial sense of the term—binding Native Hawaiians to the land, in the past, present and future.” This is the ultimate story of the aloha shirt! Next is a short but important section on teaching, on multiculturalism in the classroom. First, in “Rethinking Multiculturalism: Critical Pedagogy and Critical Literacy in Education,” M. Kamel Igoudjil theorizes the fact that “multiculturalism as a theoretical approach is veiled by New Criticism, which covertly imposes a specific curriculum on diverse students” by claiming to provide what an educated person allegedly should know about the world in general and the United States in particular. Such ideological construction targets the very essence of one’s identity with a specific purpose to eradicate the foundation of one’s heritage and impose an exclusively Eurocentric ethos. Igoudjil rethinks multiculturalism at the levels of critical pedagogy and critical literacy using a Derridean approach to deconstruct texts in the classroom to facilitate the critical discourse/diversity. Starting out from the work of Paolo Freire, he moves via “universal humanness” to Anthony Appiah’s “cosmopolitanism,” arguing that “educators and students should […] more effectively utilize literacy as a culturally intertextual practice where multicultural approaches to literacy prove to be necessary more than ever.” Igoudjil advocates “authentic intellectual learning [which] fosters the students’ continued search for the truth by telling and retelling their personal story and perspectives, which ultimately transcend to a more humanistic and multicultural community and culture.” A solid empirical contribution is Amanda de Varona and S. Leslie Naghib’s “Identity Politics in the ESOL Classroom,” in which they describe an action-research project conducted with students enrolled in Level 5 Reading, Writing, and Oral Communication courses, the most advanced and final level of English instruction, in the Intensive English Program at

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the University of Miami. Drawing on their intensive teaching experience, they demonstrate how to begin and to sustain the redefinition of multiculturalism to focus more on individual identity in international contexts in the classroom. They give many examples of activities that deal with communication about identity. Verona and Naghib observe that it seems easier to talk about the other than the self: “While at the beginning of the semester, we hypothesized that ESL students were more attuned to the term identity politics than the term multiculturalism, the data from the level 5 RW class demonstrated the opposite. The term multiculturalism was a more relatable and linguistically accessible word for the students as opposed to the term identity politics.” Yet they clarify that “multicultural education is a term better left behind. If teachers truly wish to advocate acceptance in their classrooms and make multiculturalism an action rather than a cliché, it should come as a result of self-awareness and analysis of one’s own personal identity.” Starting with Edward Mortimer’s “Guests or Comrades? The Rights of Migrants in the Workplace,” there is another change in the focus of contributions, which now move in the direction of migration and ethnic history. Analyzing claims of the “failure” of multiculturalism in Europe and the emergence of “parallel societies,” Mortimer maintains that “these failures may reflect, in some cases, […] a mixture of well meant but ill thought out tolerance of diversity and not so benign neglect.” Citing multiple liberal, conservative, “practical” and ethical positions on the issue of “basic rights,” he observes that “we are not cosmopolitan to the point of saying that we are prepared to give up our own rights, and change the very nature of our societies, in order to give people throughout the world a slightly better chance of improving their standard of living.” One of the crucial issues in this is the question of theory and practice: “While the political pressure on governments to restrict immigration is plain for all to see, the political and economic pressures on them to turn a blind eye to irregular employment of immigrants are less visible, but probably no less powerful—and this is unlikely to change.” Mortimer’s discussion of migrants is followed by Marc S. Rodriguez’ historical survey on “The Latino Condition: Understanding Multiculturalism and Pan-Latino Ethnicity in the USA.” Starting out from issues of definition (Who are the Latinos? How have they been defined by the US Census?), he covers concerns of language and class, and the rising awareness of the Chicano movement: Mexican American civil rights politics ran parallel to but did not often overlap with the African American civil rights movement until the 1960s,

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Introduction as the states often deemed African Americans a separate racial group, allowing for their legal segregation (‘Jim Crow’) from whites. Without the backing of either the state or racially conscious philanthropists, Mexican Americans existed in a racially ‘in-between’ space.

And he continues: “Because of this ambiguity, civil rights organizations adopted a litigation approach to defend their meager rights as ‘Caucasians,’ (whites), even though they lived in segregated neighborhoods, worked in segregated workplaces, were paid ‘Mexican’ wages, attended segregated schools, and lived almost universally in abject poverty.” Rodriguez also discusses Spanish-English bilingualism and its expansion into a multicultural Latino movement. He concludes: “In many important ways, the Chicano Movement created the foundation for the development of the immigration rights movement and educational, criminal justice, and political reform movements nationwide.” Atalie Gerhard’s “Bricolage of Protest—Unveiling the Multicultural Dimensions of the Chicano Movement through its Murals” looks more specifically at the artwork of Chicanos and observes a close-knit association with other North and Latin American civil rights histories. In two close readings of Chicano murals by Antonio Bernal and by Willie Herrón III and Gronk, she uses Claude Lévi-Strauss’s notion of “bricolage” to probe into the intricate semiotics of this art form. Thus the murals use the “capacity of signifiers ‘borrowed’ by contemporary cultural productions from more traditional myths to retain their reference as a means of suggesting an analogy.” Gerhard argues that it is no coincidence that bricolage also rhymes with “Chicanos’ mestizaje identity as a source of inspiration.” Another minority is targeted by Astrid Starck-Adler in “Yiddish and American Multiculturalism: a ‘postvernacular’ language on the margin.” Being one of the few European Yiddish scholars, she gives us an outside view of that language in the United States and its melancholy survival: “Faced with the multicultural empires doomed to disappear after WWI, European enlightenment ideology was based on monolingualism and monoculturalism, imposed upon colonies worldwide and thus valid as well within the Anglo-Saxon establishment of the United States.” Starck-Adler gives a survey of the original cultural influences and literary and social developments of Yiddish in the New World, such as the leftist discourse and the solidarity with the African American cause, but also covers film stereotypes, parodies, and other cultural appropriations, among them even a Yiddish translation of Hiawatha, demonstrating that solidarity with Native America was a rather complex affair. Ultimately, she touches upon post-Shoah literature and the Israeli challenge of Hebrew, which has made

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the position of such Yiddish figureheads as Isaac Bashevis Singer even more tenuous. After these specific contributions on American minority studies there is finally a section on American politics, introduced by Christèle Le Bihan and her French civilisation approach in “Multiculturalism in the United States: A fait accompli?” In order to reassess the controversial dimension of multiculturalism, she offers a genealogy tracing its roots “back to the debate over immigration at the beginning of the 20th century and its development in the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, so as to then analyze the movement for multiculturalism, notably on American campuses, and its link with ‘political correctness.’” This is an approach full of numbers, comparative surveys, facts. Though the editor of this collection is a literary scholar, it is clear that other disciplinary approaches are relevant as well if we want to escape the mixed metaphor of a tunnel vision from our ivory towers. Le Bihan registers progress as well as resistance going through the developments under different administrations, ending with the recent conflicts during the Obama presidency: “If we cannot talk about a post-racial America, as racial problems have surfaced again and reignited the conversation about race, the presidency of Barack Obama has nevertheless changed the perception of the American identity by making it more multicultural.” A critical tone can be found in Saïd Ouaked’s contribution, entitled “American Multiculturalism in the 21st Century: Achieving Domestic and International Goals in a Globalized World,” which is based on the premise that “recent developments require a reassessment of this ‘special relationship’ between the United States and international migrants.” According to him, [n]ew priorities, primarily regarding the economy and the security of the nation, have put at odds the traditional—if not mythical—American approach towards international communities, seriously questioning the American society’s ability and desire to welcome and accept immigrants regardless of their cultural and religious backgrounds.

Ouaked even claims that the current debates over ethnic tolerance and immigration politics “have played against the American interests, both domestic and international” because “the international community has become more sensitive to American policy, both domestic and international.” Referring to the post-Ferguson events, he notes that violating the civil rights of immigrants and ethnic minorities “undermines the image of the

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U.S. abroad and therefore undermines public diplomacy as well as foreign public opinions.” Our American politics section ends with Lea Stephan’s case study “The Evolution of Political Multiculturalism in the United States: Barack Obama, Affirmative Action, and the Affordable Care Act.” She observes that the American acceptance of diversity “insufficiently takes racism, discrimination, sexism, and homophobia into account, particularly when promoted in the corporate sector. A diverse staff may be promoted, but little time is spent addressing issues of discrimination.” Noting that President Obama’s opposition to affirmative action “does not reflect a conservative interpretation of colorblindness but a progressive approach focused on political feasibility and outcome efficiency,” Stephan finds in affirmative action an “unsuitability to the more recent evolution of the African American community.” She presents the Affordable Care Act as “multicultural policy in the sense that it has a race-specific impact, although it does not operate in a race-specific framework.” Hence in her conclusion she raises the question of the definition of a race-conscious policy: “Must a race-conscious policy absolutely contain some race-related vocabulary to be considered as such? Or should a race-conscious policy be judged more on its race-conscious outcome? It appears that Obama redefines multiculturalism in a politically pragmatic way.” The book ends with international comparisons. What is multiculturalism elsewhere? Teaching in Alsace as a Swiss German-speaking foreigner has made me observe all kinds things about Alsatian, the original patois spoken in these lands, as the post-war French linguistic ruling chose to call it. If Alsatian sounds like a cousin dialect of Swiss German, the Alsatians themselves often don’t even know that because they were told to cut all associations with German history and gladly dissociated themselves from Nazism. As a result we have a voluntary kind of “language genocide” (as native Americans or Australian aborigines would call it): the parents no longer spoke Alsatian with their children and the grandchildren (who often have a French a first name and a German family name) no longer speak the language of their local ancestors. In “Should I Stay or Should I Go? Multiculturalism in Mulhouse,” Evelyn Troxler, a former town councilor and deputy mayor of Mulhouse, describes this history of Alsatian speakers and their struggle of becoming a minority at home: “France actively aims at being a monolingual country: it’s French for everybody and only French (no wonder we’re the worst nation at speaking foreign languages)! All regional languages have been murdered … though they’re not really dead yet.” At the same time, the relationship with immigrant minorities from

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the Maghreb is tenuous as well. Thus she asks: “Should I go or should I stay … in Mulhouse?” Nowadays Troxler is thinking of teaching Alsatian to immigrants from Turkey celebrating multiculturalism in a festival for children… This political survey of the situation is followed by Peter André Bloch’s “André Weckmann and the Influence of African American Culture on Modern Alsatian Poetry.” Significantly, it was a Swiss frontalier who introduced Alsatian literature in the German department in Mulhouse: “I spoke short sentences and the students repeated them—like parrots: first as a group, then individually, until they could pronounce the words correctly. Then we translated some sentences into High German and into French. This way they learned Alsatian and at the same time German.” As the editor of the six-volume edition of Weckmann’s work, Bloch is an expert in the field and he can tease out amazing connections between this Alsatian’s minority experience and the United States, well documented in André Weckmann’s blues poetry, strongly influenced by his serving in the 7th US Army, FFI Steinburg, and close contact with black American soldiers. These poems are powerful and moving—the presentation in four languages (Alsatian, German, French, English) pays tribute to the polyglot experience in Alsace. Weckmann very much identified with the oppression of American Americans, as he writes in “Redd wiss”: “Speak white, / black Alsatian, / speaking white is beautiful, / noble, / intelligent. / White is French, / French is white, / white and elegant.” The two contributions on Alsace are followed by two articles on Multiculturalism in Africa and in China. First Abderrezak Dourari, one of the world’s experts on Tamazight (the Berber language) reports on “Managing Cultural Diversity: Multiculturalism and Citizenship in America and Algeria”: “Like the United States, Algeria has also been a land of immigration, and that through a much longer history. According to historical evidence, Algeria has been the land of Amazighs (Berbers) when the Phoenicians arrived around the 11th century BC. Other peoples, seeking to dominate North Africa arrived, such as the Romans, the Byzantines, the Arabs, the Turks and the French.” He describes the conflict of specific ethnic and religious groups over the recognition of their specificity, causing cracks in the official monolithism of the Algerian state, trying to assess such a multicultural citizenship perspective in the schooling system, media and polity for the Algerian diversity perspective, through an account of the recent

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Ghardaïa19 conflict. Most exciting for English speakers is the rare glimpse into another world that we get in Dourari’s detailed discussion of “two quite opposite perspectives over the future independent State: ‘an Arab Algeria’ vs. an ‘Algerian Algeria.’ The latter trend has been accused of ‘Berberism’ (Berber separatism) and of nurturing discreetly the will to create a Kabyle party.” As he concludes: “The official hegemonic Arab and Islamic identity equation imposed long before Independence and expected to produce unity inside Algeria and even at a broader level (the Arab nation), is indeed generating disarray.” Our final contribution comes from China. In “From Snowball to Pomegranate Seeds: The Troubled Position of Han within Chinese Multiculturalism” Chang Liu discusses the official Chinese policy towards multiculturalism, using as an example popular songs promoted by the government. Liu, who has his own blog on music, looks at the metaphors in these songs and what they imply. Educated in China and Europe, he notes: “Different from ‘whiteness,’ Han privilege does not exist alone: it is often coupled with the Chinese Communist Party and the state—though included in one dominant group, a connection between the two is yet to be drawn and mapped out.” Starting out from the centripetal “snowball theory” of Hancentrism, Liu moves on to other images of Chinese national identity in the song “Love of China” and its metaphors of “constellations,” “flowers,” or “siblings,” which avoid “the risk of enforcing ethnic stereotypes and thus shatter[] the distinction between Han majority and non-Han minority Other, offering equal weight to each one of the fifty-six ethnic groups.” As a result, [c]ompared with ethnic minorities, the Han do not enjoy similar freedom, when their native tongue is a dialect or variety other than the Beijing dialect. Rather than being viewed as additionally being able to speak such a dialect, these speakers are frequently viewed as incapable of speaking the Chinese language properly—thus the lingual diversity within Han Chinese language is further suppressed.

Hence curiously, “[w]hen detached from the party-state, Han Chinese is voiceless and deeply repressed.” Obviously, all of these articles don’t fit into a single formal framework. Multiculturalism is no formalism. It hides in all kinds of places and es-

19

Ghardaïa is an Algerian town, 600 kilometres south of Algiers, peopled with Mzabi Ibadite Amazighs and Arab speaking Malikites who have lived side by side for more than ten centuries.

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capes definition. A while ago I had a student who wanted to write a PhD on “multiculturalism” discussing the differences between the French and the Algerians. We ultimately had to reject the project at the Ecole Doctorale because we could not fit it in a discipline. As a literary scholar with a basic interest in everything that surrounds cultural texts, I simply didn’t feel competent to supervise research that would possibly include sociology, psychology, law, political science, another foreign language (Arabic— and what about Berber?), international history … and so on. I was überfordert by too disciplinary variety. We can learn from this that multiculturalism is a meta-concern. There are no “Departments of Multiculturalism” and I think there will never be. To be sure, much good work has been done on intercultural relations and communication, but as an ongoing challenge multiculturalism needs no delimitations. Multiculturalism has no limits—it is life, and like Ishmael Reed’s “Jes Grew,” it is ahead of our understanding of it, always à la recherche of its textual expression. Thus all definitional approaches will be too exclusive. And if we want to be more inclusive, we have to admit an openness that goes beyond our reasoning, a simple richness that Reed once compared to the beauty of King Tut’s tomb.20 Kappel, 9th November 2016

20 See the description in his anthology of California poetry: “I was the lucky one who first saw this ‘heterongeneous mass’ wriggling together between two covers. It was brilliant. I felt like the first man to enter Tut’s tomb concealed in golden darkness all those years, and when someone asked what it looked like, he said, ‘wonderful. It’s wonderful’” (xlii). I see my refusal of on authoritative definition in the tradition of the great William James who, being in his time the most famous medical doctor in America, refused to become a member of the newly founded American Medical Association (AMA), which wanted to create standards for American medicine. James scandalously argued against a bill that required the “examination and licensing of medical practitioners. Medical knowledge, he said, is highly imperfect and rapidly changing, and experience should be welcomed from any source” (Perry 243).

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Works Cited Ames, Nick, “The Xhaka brothers braced to lock horns—for Albania and Switzerland.” The Guardian Sportblog 10 June 2016. Web. Haller, Gret. Human Rights Without Democracy? Reconciling Freedom with Equality. 2007. Trl. Cynthia Klohr. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2012. Ludwig, Sämi. CONCRETE LANGUAGE: Intercultural Communication in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1996. —. Pragmatist Realism: The Cognitive Paradigm in American Realist Texts. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2002. —. “Thin Pluralism: Some Observations on American Multiculturalism.” REAL. Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 19 (2003): 225-245. Reprinted in KONCH Magazine, April/May 2015. http://ishmaelreedpub.com/Did-James-Baldwin-Get-the-Swiss-Wrong. Perry, Ralph Barton. The Thought and Character of William James. 1948. Nashville and London: Vanderbilt UP, 1996. Reed, Ishmael, ed. Califia. The California Poetry. Berkeley: Y’Bird Books, 1979. Snead, James. “Racist Traces in Postmodernist Theory and Literature.” Critical Quarterly 33.1 (1991): 31-39.

AESTHETICS, LITERATURE, THE ARTS: THEORETICAL BEGINNINGS

MULTICULTURALISM AS A CHALLENGE TO AESTHETIC THEORY NATALIA VYSOTSKA

Since its first emergence on the American public arena in the 1960s, the concept of multiculturalism in its various avatars has caused a fierce confrontation referred to as “culture wars.” This is no wonder, since the transformation of the sociocultural paradigm from monistic to pluralistic coupled with the need to revise the national model of identity, that is, “the revolution of plurality,” affected each and every American and the nation as a whole in an unprecedented way. Tempestuous debate, conflicts and controversies have centered on a number of key issues. To begin with, the lack of an all-embracing definition of “multiculturalism” turned it into “a slippery signifier onto which diverse groups project their hopes and fears” (Stam and Shohat 299). Dozens of existing definitions of multiculturalism can be roughly classified into demographic, programmatic, ideological, socio-reconstructionist, historical, cultural, and so on, leading one scholar to remark: “There is something deeply disturbing in the existence of a whole school of thought that is so imprecise about its own language” (Ceaser150). Other contentious issues include different interpretations of “culture” in the discourse of multiculturalism; the significance of communal (racial, ethnic, national etc.) components in identity formation; (in)compatibility of polycultural approaches with fundamental tenets of liberal democracy built around the individual and not a group; the task of inscribing diversity into the communal space without reducing it to the familiar and the customary; the pros and contras of applying multicultural strategies in education; the canon debate; and, no less important, the ways to give multi- or cross-cultural works and artifacts their due without necessarily having to sacrifice traditional humanitarian guidelines. In the field of literary studies, in particular, aesthetical dimensions of the multicultural turn require close attention. Recent years have seen a remarkable accumulation of case studies addressing the ways heterogeneous cultural elements come into all sorts of interaction (combination, juxtaposition, synthesis or confrontation) in specific works of fiction, poetry or drama. This micro-level exploration paves the way for further theoretical

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generalizations in the realm of multicultural aesthetics. Still, it is my belief that alongside the inductive approach, the problem might be tackled from the other end, relying upon a deductive method and moving from the general (macro-level) to the concrete. Thus, this paper aims at looking at one particular aspect of multiculturalism, that is, its complex relations with the category of the aesthetic linked to the issues of cultural identity and canon formation. In art and literature, accepting cultural pluralism meant that many texts and artworks whose creators proceeded from different aesthetic premises than their Western counterparts made their way into curricula and syllabi. Boundaries between “the center” and “the periphery” have been increasingly blurred, frequently crossed, or altogether demolished. These developments were bound to enhance already strong feeling of confusion and loss of axiological guidelines generated in the humanitarian community by the advent of postmodernism. Simultaneously, they promoted questioning accepted beliefs about art and movements towards extending its limits or even cardinally revising its theoretical foundations. For us as teachers and researchers these issues go far beyond the domain of pure theory, acquiring instead urgent practical importance, since the answers we go by determine the ways we read, interpret or teach a large body of texts produced under new cultural conditions. As Emory Elliott pointed out in his introduction to the seminal volume Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age (2002), “[n]ow is the moment to formulate new assessments of the relationships between minority cultures and the dominant culture…” (6). The categories most open to debate in this context are universality and norm/standard, artistic value and aesthetic judgments—current theory being keenly aware of the inevitable impact of the evaluator’s ideological stance upon the latter. De-absolutizing truth, objectivity, universality, and norm and denying the existence of an unbridgeable gap between high and low, elitist and popular culture, postmodern theory has even passed its vote of no confidence to aesthetics per se, as unavoidably presupposing judgment and choice, which, in their turn, rely on certain criteria. While traditionalists postulate the standards of the beautiful as “timeless” and “universal,” their opponents refute this statement as ignoring cultural and historical differences and seeking to impose tastes and values of the cultural (and social) elite upon the rest of society. From the historical perspective, “what is posited as universal and essential is nothing more than the classical Western canons of art and literature, which were primarily constructed by white male anthologists, literary editors, and genteel intellectuals in the last two centuries” (Elliott 10).

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In this situation more or less distinct positions have taken shape. Adepts of “culture” in its conventional humanitarian meaning referred to by their opponents as conservatives (exemplified, for one, by Harold Bloom) rush to the defense of the supremacy of aesthetic value against the politicization of art by what Bloom alludes to as “The School of Resentment,” i.e., postmodernists and multiculturalists. Thus, Bloom seems to perceive the relations between aesthetics and diversity in “either-or” terms: “Either there were aesthetic values, or there are only the overdeterminations of race, class, and gender” (522). Even though Bloom’s determination to stand up for aesthetic excellence as leading criterion in evaluating an artwork is appealing, his position seems somewhat narrow in addressing many phenomena of present-day culture. The opposite pole is occupied by theoreticians who, having accused aesthetics of seven mortal sins, including a-historicity and ideological bias, suggest dumping it as a piece of garbage. As a result, John Guillory notes that “the refusal of the aesthetic is an epistemic feature of current critical practice” (274). An example can be provided by Barabara Hernstein Smith arguing, in particular, that since there are no functions performed by artworks that may be specified as generically unique and also no way to distinguish the ‘rewards’ provided by art-related experience or behavior from those provided by innumerable other kinds of experience and behavior, any distinctions drawn between ‘aesthetic’ and ‘non-aesthetic’ (or ‘extra-aesthetic’) value must be regarded as fundamentally problematic. (34)

However, in addition to the fact that giving up the category of aesthetic value would result in total (and therefore destructive) relativity, this course of action is virtually impossible due to the daily necessity to pass aesthetic judgments both in public and private spheres. For this reason, conceding that our aesthetic notions are to no small extent relative and constructed, as well as ideologically and politically colored, the third group of thinkers are still seeking ways of non-reductive preservation of both universal and particular, objective and subjective, to provide adequate response to cultural diversity. This kind of quest has for me the greatest appeal. Hence the rest of the paper will look at specific strategies proposed to harmonize the precepts of aesthetic theory and practices of cultural pluralism. To historicize and contextualize the discussion, however, we shall first cast a glance at what classical aesthetic theory had to say on the subject of universality and the objectivity of human judgments.

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Ad fontes: universal or particular? Objective or subjective? As is well-known, the formulation of modern aesthetic concepts dates back to the mid-18th century. Left-wing sociologists and cultural scholars (Ɍerry Eagleton, Pierre Bourdieu, John Guillory, and others) demonstrate the ways this process was linked to political and economic transformations in society, proving that the autonomisation of the aesthetic, its isolation from the cognitive and the ethical were, paradoxical as it may sound, made possible by the integration of culture into the sphere of general capitalist production. “Pure” aesthetics performed the function of legitimizing a market economy supplying the bourgeoisie, in addition to material, also with symbolic “cultural capital,” to use Pierre Bourdieu’s term. In The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990) the Neo-Marxist philosopher Terry Eagleton attributes rapid development of aesthetic thought in mid-18th-century Germany to political necessity consisting in bringing the previously uncontrollable world of emotions and sensations within the realm of Reason. Aesthetic perception acts as a mediator between generalizations of reasons and specificity of emotions. Thus, aesthetics becomes a tool enabling reason to extend its influence on formerly (and in other ways) inaccessible human spheres, thereby more fully subjecting the human being to state control. It is for this reason, according to Eagleton, that aesthetic concepts “begin to play, however tacitly, an unusually central, intensive part in the constitution of a dominant [that is, bourgeois—N.V.] ideology” (4). At the same time, however, the idea of the autonomy of the aesthetic has a huge protest potential. Even though its model of subjectivity as self-regulatory and self-determining was primarily needed by the middle class for its successful operations, it also comprises a liberating vision of human nature as an ultimate goal opposing any forms of domination and instrumentalization. Therefore, aesthetics “becomes the guerilla tactics of secret subversion, of silent resistance, of stubborn refusal” (Eagleton 369). Delving into primary sources, it is worth recalling that the concept of the aesthetic was first formulated through the discourse of taste that already contained the germs of its key issues—the antinomy of universal versus particular, acknowledgement of the objectivity or subjectivity of the sense of beauty, the problem of aesthetic judgment. Generally, the trajectory of the theory development may be presented as moving from the concept of taste to the concept of aesthetic value. For centuries, specific emotions experienced by homo sapiens when encountering the beautiful or the sublime had no accurate expression in human vocabulary. When the word “aesthetic” was first used in the 18th century (in the German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten’s treatise Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad

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poema pertinentibus, 1735), it was deliberately coined from the Greek root referring to sense perception. Thus, the word’s original meaning referred to cognition through direct sensual contact preceding ratiocination. It is to this meaning that some contemporary theorists (among them, J. Habermas) appeal in their desire to position the aesthetic as a counterbalance for the technological and instrumental rationality of modernity. Later, when through intense intellectual efforts “the aesthetics” was fighting for its place under the sun as a legitimate branch of philosophy, it was doing so by trying to delimitate its subject, in particular, to define the sphere of aesthetic pleasure. With this end in view, it had to be isolated from all other types of pleasure—sensual, pragmatic, even moral (though the connection to the latter dating back to Plato was the last to go as testified by the staunch tendency to identify “the beautiful” with “the good” as, for example, in E.E.K. Shaftsbury’s and F. Hutcheson’s theory of moral feeling). Drawing a demarcation line between “sensation/emotion” (sensualemotional level) and “judgment” (rational/intellectual level) was seen as a milestone on the road leading to aesthetics’ relative independence as a realm of human experience in its own right. Arguing that “beauty is no quality in things themselves,” that “it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty,” David Hume in his essay Of the Standard of Taste (1757) emphasized the subjective and individual nature of our aesthetic judgments. He, however, was seemingly contradicting himself, calling beautiful “what has been universally found to please in all countries and in all ages” (italics mine). His conclusion, declaring “the principles of taste [to] be universal, and, nearly, if not entirely the same in all men,” de-historizes and universalizes the aesthetic feeling. Moreover, he corrects his own statement concerning the inevitable subjectivity of any judgment, admitting that “there are certain qualities in objects, which are fitted by nature to produce those particular feelings.” In his treatise on the origin of the ideas of the sublime and the beautiful, also published in the mid-18th century (1757), Edmund Burke arrives at similar conclusions. Notwithstanding the broad variety of tastes, he thinks, “if there were not some principles of judgment as well as of sentiment common to all mankind, no hold could possibly be taken either on their reason or their passions, sufficient to maintain the ordinary correspondence of life.” For the philosopher the aesthetic taste is inextricably bound up to primary sensations received by a person from the outside world by means of sense organs, and complemented by his imagination; and since “the conformation of their organs are nearly or altogether the same in all men, so the manner of perceiving external objects is in all men the same, or with little difference.”

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Multiculturalism as a Challenge to Aesthetic Theory

In his much more intricate aesthetic theory laid out primarily in the Critique of Judgment (1790), Immanuel Kant relies on the adjective “disinterested,” that is, devoid of any lucrative impulse or personal profit, as his key epithet to define “pure,” “absolute” aesthetical pleasure: “Every interest spoils the judgment of taste and takes from its impartiality...” Moreover, the beautiful has no purpose subject to logical definition (to stress this point the philosopher makes use of the oxymoron “purposiveness without a purpose”). At the very outset of his detailed argument he emphasizes the idea that “[t]he judgment of taste is therefore not a judgment of cognition, and is consequently not logical but aesthetical, by which we understand that whose determining ground can be no other than subjective.” Further on, however, Kant somewhat shifts the accent binding up with the judgment of taste “a title to subjective universality,” that is, universality of the perception of the beautiful solely as experience, and not as a phenomenon subject to logical explanation. And all the more so, since the common sense resulting from the free play of our cognitive powers is declared to be the necessary presupposition for laying down a judgment of taste. As can be seen from the above, the discourse of universality was embedded in the underlying texts of modern aesthetic theory; it is another matter that it was not all-inclusive. Its shapers would not think of this category as embracing German peasants, Africans or even their own wives. That is, the category was conceived in limited class, racial, gender, and/or educational parameters automatically leaving behind those who fell short of meeting certain requirements. According to Pierre Bourdieu, Kant’s aesthetics universalized attitudes associated with specific social and economic conditions (493). It is precisely this ambit of the aesthetic theory that current scholars are striving to broaden while keeping intact the idea of universality as democratic and therefore potentially empowering.

Squaring the circle: how to bring aesthetics back without sacrificing cultural differences? Getting back to our times, it can be seen that quite a few scholars champion the exoneration of aesthetics in cultural studies, though with substantial reservations and amendments. As usual, one of the most well-balanced and non-extremist positions is held by Emory Elliott. Advocating high-quality multicultural humanitarian education, he emphasizes the insufficiency of a mere inclusion of ethnically or racially marked texts into university curricula or syllabi. The way they are taught is no less important. A common situation of isolating these texts from “real literature,” their disciplinary

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“ghettoization,” or their treatment by the teacher only as political or social statements does a disservice to the multicultural cause. Such an approach suggests their second-rate aesthetic inferiority, with their value confined to their ideological message. Elliott stresses the need of getting back to aesthetic criteria, albeit on different grounds, as well as to close reading techniques somewhat compromised by “new criticism’s” supercilious eliticism. To avoid the mistakes of the past, present-day humanitarians should do their best to expand their cultural horizons to the utmost: “Now that courses and anthologies include many writers previously excluded for reasons of race, ethnicity, and gender, and now that we are taking up questions of artistic forms and methods again,” Elliott argues, “we need to develop the tools that will help us to understand what those writers are doing as artists so that we can teach their works more effectively” (14). The only way to achieve this goal is to increase our knowledge of languages, cultures, and aesthetic traditions of the parts of the world whence the artists come who have made such considerable contributions to shaping American culture; in this manner “we will be much more competent to demonstrate to our students why texts by authors who are of African, Asian, and Hispanic descent are as rich and esthetically pleasing as they are” (16). Elliott’s vision is shared by Heinz Ickstadt, who believes that aesthetic discourse should find its way back to America Studies, “since the aesthetic does not deny the political, ethical, or historical dimensions of literary texts but engages them and mediates between them” (265). He is positive that “the value of a literary text can never be determined by its politics alone, or by the cultural work it does, since all the values it projects are aesthetically mediated or staged” (269). After all, Ickstadt reminds us, and I cannot but agree with him, the very essence of literature, as well as the condition of its social and economic existence and survival, is the text’s ability for “crossing boundaries, going off limits, imaginatively taking the place of the Other, or exploring oneself in the Other” (273). Here the scholar seems to be seeing eye-to-eye with Charles Altieri, who argues that [i]nsistence on the sectarian commitments […] is hard to reconcile with some basic phenomenological features of reading and with expectations about the authority literary texts might wield. Many readers see their interest in reading precisely as an opportunity to escape the empirical self, to undergo in imagination protean changes of identity and sympathy. Thus, the pleasure in the text is a pleasure in forms of consciousness or eloquent responses to experience we can only hope to have and to discover in imaginary worlds not congruent with our sectarian commitments. (43-44, my italics)

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Even though this process inevitably includes elements of self-projection and self-invention, it still opens possibilities for understanding and common experience. It is the word “common” that determines the direction of the pursuits undertaken by other thinkers, too. They hold that critical revision of the concept of universality is a condition sine qua non for developing a more open theory that would incorporate within the sphere of the aesthetic the phenomena previously pushed to its margins. Thus, Satya Mohanty aims at combining the understanding of any values, aesthetical included, as socially and historically variable, with their treatment as reflecting deeper features in human nature, namely, “our species-wide needs and capacities” (41). Such an approach validates the idea that despite their being determined by many factors, values can still be objective. Mohanty’s argumentation is grounded on the important, albeit incompletely implemented idea of European Enlightenment concerning “rational agency” (44) as a basis for the concept of human equality. It is the ability to assess one’s own thoughts and actions, and therefore, to direct and define one’s own life. Believing that our judgments are not 100% subjective, but relate to the qualities of objects existing independent of specific social and cultural positions, Mohanty (following in the steps of his 18th-century predecessors) sees the roots of art perception in human psychophysiology. Response to art, he claims, has to do with the genetic makeup which is common for all people—the fact that determines albeit partial objectivity of aesthetic judgments. His position marks a return to the ideas of classical aesthetics on a new convolution of the historical spiral when the original, rather narrow circle of the potential recipients of the beautiful and the sublime is expanded to include the whole humanity. Commenting upon Mohanty’s ideas, Giles Gunn states that the former is moving “back in the direction of Kant in his belief that the only way that we can secure the lessons that aesthetics, among other disciplines, teaches us about cultural diversity is by grounding them in a limited kind of moral or humanistic universalism” (74). Practical implementation of this vision calls for shifting the focus to comparative and cross-cultural dimensions in the humanities. This is the core of Mohanty’s blueprint for designing a really multicultural curriculum that would “focus centrally on the complex relationship between ethical and aesthetic values” (56, original emphasis). Terry Eagleton’s position is close to Mohanty’s in that he, too, appeals to certain trans-historical constants holding true for most human communities. His interest in aesthetics is predicated, first and foremost, on its providing the model for free creative play, access to which used to be the prerogative of an elite minority, but now has to be granted to all. By virtue of biological structure of the body, the scholar says, all human societies

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must engage in some form of labor and some kind of sexual reproduction that implicate human beings in various forms of social associations regulated by politics; “all human beings require warmth, rest, nourishment and shelter,” they are “frail, mortal, and needy,” and the fact that these truths are “always culturally specific” and “variably instantiated is no argument against their transhistoricality” (410). This “naturalization” of man should not be seen as absolute, but should suggest that the supreme values, albeit in part, are generated by human nature, and are not only the result of arbitrary choice or construction. If the goal be each human being’s right to free creative self-fulfillment, the aesthetics approached from a new perspective might be enlisted as a mighty ally in translating this goal into life.

From multi- to trans- ? Another twist in the discussion of relations between aesthetics and cultural plurality is provided by the concept of transculture. The term “transculturation” was coined by the Cuban anthropologist F.Ortiz in 1940 as an alternative to one-way acculturation. According to Ortiz, the inevitable process of the loss of autochthonous culture (deculturation) is followed by the next stage—acquisition of a new culture combining elements of several cultures (neoculturation). This concept was revitalized by contemporary theorists (such as Edouard Glissant) as most suitable for the current cultural situation. In the book coauthored by Russian-American philosopher Mikhail Epstein and Ellen Berry it is defined as “a way of expanding the limits of our ethnic, professional, linguistic, and other identities to new levels of indeterminacy and ‘virtuality’” (24-25). Transculture is, therefore, a way to transcend our “given” culture and to apply culture’s transformative forces to culture itself, liberating human beings “from the ‘prison house of language’ and the variety of artificial, self-imposed, and selfdeified cultural identities” (25). The scholar links the increasing popularity of this concept in the West in the 1990s to the crisis of a multicultural project to which new theory provided a welcome alternative. “Polyculturalism,” with its assertion of axiological equality and self-sufficiency of different cultures, is opposed to transculture, emphasizing their openness and mutual attraction (Epstein). It encompasses interference, the dissemination of symbolic meanings of one culture in the field of other cultures: “While ‘polyculturalism’ accentuates an individual’s belonging to ‘his own’, biologically determined, ‘natural’ culture (‘Black’, ‘female’, ‘youth’, etc.), transculture implies the diffusion of original cultural identities, as individuals cross the boundaries of various cultures and get assimilated in them” (my translation). The Russian scholar Madina Tlostanova emphasizes this tran-

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Multiculturalism as a Challenge to Aesthetic Theory

sition by entitling her book on the subject From the Philosophy of Multiculturalism to the Philosophy of Transculturation (2008, my translation). Tlostanova connects the development of transculturation as a new cultural episteme with globalization processes highly prioritizing the so far unresolved dichotomy of unification and diversity. It is positioned as one of the possible results of efforts towards creating an alternative episteme which, “contrary to superficial unification constantly threatening to blow the world up from within, actually works towards shaping plastic horizontal links between various locales and groups of people all over the world” (141, my translation). According to the author, in this sense transculturation opposes the neoliberal multicultural model which, ostensibly “celebrating” diversity, has not in fact escaped the paternalistic and indulgent attitude to the Other. Unlike it, transculturation vindicates the Other’s subjectivity, “questioning the notions of modernity and tradition invented in Western European culture and promoting actual dialogue between equal cultures in the present” (143). Transculturation, therefore, is “based on cultural polylogue which, however, should not lead to complete synthesis, or fusion, or complete cultural translation. It is a space where cultures meet, interact, but do not merge, preserving their right to ‘opacity’” (153, my translation). Apparently, the popular notion of “cultural hybridity” may be viewed as synonymic to these processes, provided that it does not imply complete unification and synthesis. Zeroing in on aesthetical issues, it is vital that according to Tlostanova, transculturation is grounded “on deconstructing Western European Kantian aesthetics from the perspective of border mentality and on creating artistic models alternative or parallel to Occidental” (168, my translation). Thus it is presented as an attempt at building an epistemological matrix that would facilitate constructive dialogue between cultures, societies, individuals in contemporary heterogeneous world. This kind of approach is increasingly gaining momentum in literary studies exasperated by the division of American literature into “separate spheres.” From various angles—as a quest for transculture or for cultural hybridity, seeing US cultural production as originally “mestizo or “creole,” relying upon Homi Bhabha’s ideas of “countermodernity,” A. Benitez-Rojo’s concept of “polyrhythmic literature,” or Toni Morrison’s analysis of Africanist presence in American literature—current thinkers are pursuing the elusive vision of broader aesthetic perspective encompassing as much of human variegated creative endeavor as possible. To sum up, Western, and in particular, Anglo-American theoretical thought seems to be reclaiming its ground after the confusion and even shock caused by the invasion into the domain of the aesthetic of artworks

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created by Other(s), and therefore resisting interpretation within the scope and/or in terms of traditional classical and post-classical aesthetics. While the extreme leftists deny the right to existence to any aesthetic judgments as too deeply embedded in dominant public ideology, and the extreme rightists would not hear of a more open approach to the categories of beauty and art, the representatives of aurea mediocritas are trying to find a way to broaden our ideas of these categories through overcoming Eurocentric limitations. Such an approach calls for openness to a spiritual continuum and accepting the artistic conventions of other cultures, which in its turn is inconceivable without conscientious efforts but does not deny the social value of aesthetics per se or the accomplishments of Western culture. Taking into account the steady globalization trends of today, this approach seems to be the most realistic and promising.

Works Cited Altieri, Charles. “The Idea and Ideal of a Literary Canon.” Critical Inquiry 10.1 (1983): 37-60. Berry, Ellen, and Mikhail Epstein. Transcultural Experiments: Russian and American Models of Creative Communication. New York: St.Martin’s Press, 1999. Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon. The Books and Schools of the Ages. New York, San Diego, London: Harcourt Brace & Co, 1994. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, transl. R. Nice. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Web. 3 Mar. 2015. Ceaser, James. “Multiculturalism and American Liberal Democracy.” Multiculturalism and American Democracy. Ed. Arthur M. Melzer, Jerry Weinberger, and M. Richard Zinman. Lawrence: UP of Kansas, 1998. 139-56. Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. Elliott, Emory. “Introduction: Cultural Diversity and the Problem of Aesthetics.” Ed. Elliott et al. 2-27. Elliott, Emory, Louis Freitas Caton, and Jeffrey Rhyne, eds. Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age. New York: Oxford UP, 2002. Epstein, Mikhail. Ɍɪɚɧɫɤɭɥɶɬɭɪɚ [Transculture].” ɉɪɨɟɤɬɢɜɧɵɣ ɮɢɥɨɫɨɮɫɤɢɣ ɫɥɨɜɚɪɶ [Projective Dictionary of Philosophy ]. Comp. T.V. Artemieva, I.P. Smirnov, E.A. Tropp, G.L. Tulchinskiy, M.N. Epstein. 2002. Web. 3 Mar. 2015. http://terme.ru/dictionary/951/word/ transkultura> ɌɊȺɇɋɄɍɅɖɌɍɊȺ

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Guillory, John. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago & London: The U of Chicago P, 1994. Gunn, Giles. “The Pragmatics of the Aesthetic.” Elliott et al., eds. 61-77. Hume, David. Of the Standard of Taste. Web.10 Feb. 2015. Ickstadt, Heinz. “Toward a Pluralist Aesthetics.” Elliott et al., eds. 263-78. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Transl. and with Introduction and Notes by J.H. Bernard. 2nd ed. revised. London: Macmillan, 1914. Web. 3 Jan. 2015. Mohanty, Satya P. “Can Our Values be Objective? On Ethics, Aesthetics, and Progressive Politics.” Elliott et al., eds. 31-59. Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988. Stam, Robert, and Ella Shohat. “Contested Histories: Eurocentrism, Multiculturalism, and the Media.” Multiculturalism: a Critical Reader. Ed. David T. Goldberg. Oxford, UK, & Cambridge, USA: Blackwell, 1997: 296-324. Tlostanova, Madina. Ɉɬ ɮɢɥɨɫɨɮɢɢ ɦɭɥɶɬɢɤɭɥɶɬɭɪɚɥɢɡɦɚ ɤ ɮɢɥɨɫɨɮɢɢ ɬɪɚɧɫɤɭɥɶɬɭɪɚɰɢɢ [From Philosophy of Multiculturalism to Philosophy of Transculturation]. Moscow: RUDN, 2008.

MULTICULTURALISM VERSUS INEQUALITY: A FALSE OPPOSITION MEILI STEELE

Many in the American Left have gone from advocating attention to cultural and social differences, or multiculturalism, to criticizing it as a distraction from social stratification. A typical comment can be found in Walter Benn Michaels’s book The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Equality, where he claims that the ideology of diversity “treats economic difference along the lines of racial and sexual difference, thus identifying the problem not as difference but as prejudice (racism, sexism) against the difference” (106). The ideal of a multicultural society occludes economic and social inequality: “A society free not only of racism but of sexism and of heterosexism,” he writes, “is a neoliberal utopia where all the irrelevant grounds for inequality (your identity) have been eliminated and whatever inequalities are left are therefore legitimated” (75).1 In this view, while multiculturalism may have started in opposition to the white power structure, elites now simply coopt multiculturalism for their own interests. Other critics find that multiculturalism “risks essentializing the idea of culture as the property of an ethnic group or race; it risks reifying cultures as separate entities by overemphasizing their boundedness and distinctiveness; it risks overemphasizing the internal homogeneity of cultures in terms that potentially legitimize repressive demands for communal conformity” (Terence Turner, cited in Benhabib 4). How can the concept of multiculturalism be defended against the charges that it masks inequality in its appeal to cultural difference and that it overlooks the heterogeneity of cultural identities in order to come up with a politically convenient label? Rather than dismiss multiculturalism, we should refine the definition and show how multiculturalism contributes to normativity. First, we need 1

Nancy Fraser makes a similar claim: “Questions of recognition are serving less to supplement, complicate and enrich redistributive struggles than to marginalize, eclipse and displace them” (108).

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to get rid of the assumption shared by Michaels, Benhabib and others that multiculturalism means the affirmation of difference per se. Thinking of cultural difference as a generalized alterity to the dominant culture helps block out the specificities of particular minority cultures and their historical interactions with dominant cultures. Characterizing African Americans and Chinese Americans, for instance, as “others” to the “hegemonic American imaginary” blocks the fine-grained historical, cultural, and normative analyses needed to think through intercultural dynamics. Second, there are problems with the conception of normativity used to examine the politics of multiculturalism, and I will focus on this problem rather than the first one. There are two major approaches to normativity employed by critics of multiculturalism. The first is the “constructivist” approach, which conceives of normativity only as abstract principles set above the languages and cultures in question. This way of forming normative judgments finds expression in the work of legal and political philosophers, such as Habermas, Rawls, Korsgaard, and Benhabib. This approach is “constructivist” because it says that “the moral principles we ought to accept or follow are the ones that agents would agree to or endorse were they to engage in a hypothetical or idealized process of rational deliberation” (Bagnoli). Normative concepts destined to become principles must be constructed by setting up an imaginative site of reason that is set apart from the histories and languages of the people in question—e.g., state of nature, “ideal speech situation” (Habermas), “veil of ignorance” (Rawls)-so that they can serve as a check on the languages of everyday life and the world of common sense these languages evoke. In American legal and race theory this is called the “antidiscrimination” or “difference blind” position. The other position, which we see in Michaels and Nancy Fraser, is called the “antisubordination” approach in American political theory, and it looks at patterns of subordination, at the effects of laws and not at the intentions of the authors. Antisubordination theorists claim that looking through the single lens of anti-discrimination helps to keep the cumulative historical disadvantages of minorities in place. Thus, as Jack Balkin says, “it encourages people to explain persistent inequality as the result of private choices, cultural differences, or […] inferiority rather than at least partially as the result of facially neutral legal policies that help preserve social stratification” (13). Neither of these approaches accounts for the kind of normativity at stake in many of the arguments about multiculturalism. Therefore, in the first part of my essay, I will sketch an alternative approach to normativity that enables us to speak of the normativity bound up with texts and discur-

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sive forms. I will then look at Barack Obama’s famous “race speech,” “A More Perfect Union,” and show the ways that it is tied to the discursive form of normativity laid down by Brown v. Board. In the third part of my argument, I will show how the work of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ralph Ellison exposes the ways this discursive form protects the majority from addressing the normative demands of African Americans.2 Multiculturalism is necessary to protect equality, for equality must be understood through discursive forms and not just through the application of a principle.

Normativity: Made, Found or Something Else The constructivist conception not only rests on the blindness that antisubordination theorists point out but on a philosophical mistake. It claims to build principles out of an idealized situation in which nothing is presupposed, but this is an impossible task. Constructivism ignores and blocks out the philosophical and historical conditions of its emergence and practice, as John Rawls himself admits: “Not everything can be constructed. Every construction has a basis, certain materials, as it were from which it begins” (514). The construction of moral and political principles builds on shared meanings, what I will be calling “social imaginaries,” that must already be in place before any normative constructions can begin. The normative structuring of the world is thus logically prior to the application of principles to the facts of the world.3 This ontological level of the structuring of the world remains in the background until it is thematized. The philosophical consequences of this ontological understanding of normativity have been developed best by the hermeneutic tradition, beginning with Heidegger’s “thrownness” and continuing with Charles Taylor’s

2

Ta Nehisi Coates is an African American writer for The Atlantic Monthly who has attracted widespread attention for his articles on race and for his book Between the World and Me. Toni Morrison wrote the following blurb for the book: “I’ve been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died. Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates. The language of Between the World and Me, like Coates’s journey, is visceral, eloquent, and beautifully redemptive. And its examination of the hazards and hopes of black male life is as profound as it is revelatory. This is required reading.” 3 Charles Larmore put this point well: “The world that forms the object of our thought and action is a world in which from the very start some things are seen as counting in favor of others, a world that is not normatively mute, but exhibits reasons for this or that” (132).

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work on social imaginaries.4 For Taylor, the social imaginary is a kind of background into which we are thrown in the Heideggerian sense: “The social imaginary is not a set of ideas;” rather, the imaginary forms the background that makes sense of “the practices of a society […Thus,] the notion of a moral order goes beyond some proposed schedule of norms that ought to govern our mutual relations and/or political life […] The image of order carries not only a definition of what is right, but of the context in which it makes sense to strive for and hope to realize the right” (Modern 2, 8-9).The development of such an understanding of moral order means “the coming to be of certain social forms,” forms that the problematic of the imaginary can articulate. This is the common background that informs all thought and action of a particular community. As Taylor says: “We are in fact all acting, thinking and feeling out of backgrounds and frameworks which we do not fully understand. To ascribe total personal responsibility to us for these is to want to leap out of the human condition” (Secular 387).5 In Modern Social Imaginaries and A Secular Age, Taylor focuses on epochal imaginaries of Western modernity—the modern subject, popular sovereignty, secularity, etc. These are “the conditions of belief.” For instance, the “shift to secularity consists of a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and unproblematic to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace” (Secular 3). Before people can argue about secularity, they require a background that lets “secularity” show up for them as a phenomenon. This background is the precondition to the concerns of legal and political philosophers who focus on the best way to understand the state’s relationship to religion or for sociologists who study secularization as a process (1). If we take normativity to be woven into social imaginaries that make up the worldhood of the world, then normative argument must articulate and interrogate these structures. Taylor and the hermeneutical tradition have not addressed well the cultural and ethnic divisions in the imaginaries and the ways in which individual texts argue with and through the imaginary. Nonetheless, I will critically draw on this tradition since it provides a way of articulating the ontological dimension of existence, a 4

See Heidegger: “Self and world belong together in the single entity of Dasein” (297). 5 Taylor’s argument for the social imaginaries has two components that we need to separate. First, there is the argument for the logical priority of imaginaries to distanciated understandings of our being in the world, such as political constructivism. Second, there is the argument for the inclusion of social imaginaries within the repertory of historiographical approaches to society.

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dimension ignored by arguments structured around the application of principles.6

Obama and the Discursive Constraints of Racial Politics When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, many people at the time predicted the beginning of a post-racial America; instead his two-terms as president have shown just how deeply embedded American racism is. According to a New York Times poll, Americans now have a lower opinion of race relations than they did before Obama’s election.7 Derrick Jackson provides relevant polling information: The collective optimism that African Americans had at the beginning of his presidency has collapsed. At the beginning, the percentage of African Americans saying race relations were good soared from 29 percent to 59 percent in New York Times polling. It was back down to 28 percent this past summer […]. Astonishingly, many blame Obama himself for racial dissonance. The same New York Times poll also found that white Americans were nearly three times more likely to say the Obama presidency itself has driven black and white people further apart, while African Americans were nearly three times as likely to say Obama has brought the races closer together.

Later in the essay, he writes: “Race relations scholar Charles Gallagher of La Salle University told CNN last year, ‘Whites walking down Main Street with an AK-47 are defenders of American values; a black man doing the same thing is Public Enemy No. 1.’” Rather than diminishing racial tensions, Obama’s election elicited new discourses on race that brought interpretive conflicts between African Americans and whites into public view. Violence against African Americans by police was no less frequent in 2008 than today but the protests against this violence and the media coverage of this violence are different.8 6

I have developed this notion of normativity with regard to gender in “World Disclosure and Normativity: The Social Imaginary as the Space of Argument.” 7 In “Poll Finds Most in U.S. Hold Dim View of Race Relations,” Kevin Sack and Megan Tee-Brenan say: “A New York Times/CBS News Poll conducted last week reveals that nearly six in 10 Americans, including heavy majorities of both whites and blacks, think race relations are generally bad, and that nearly four in 10 think the situation is getting worse. By comparison, two-thirds of Americans surveyed shortly after President Obama took office said they believed that race relations were generally good.” 8 Michael Tesler and David Sears argue that the election of 2008 “was anything but post-racial. Racial hopes and fears evoked by Obama divided racial conservatives

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Obama’s power and prominence seem to have empowered African Americans to speak out in ways that challenge the American tradition of silence on race, which I will discuss momentarily. Obama’s election also elicited white racism that was just beneath the surface, from Congressman Joe Wilson’s cry of “You lie” during Obama’s address to Congress on the Affordable Care Act (Sept. 9, 2009) to a federal judge’s circulating a racist joke, to the constant racist internet commentary on Obama’s Twitter account. When Obama himself addressed questions of race in his speeches, his language and reasoning were tied to the normative model of constitutional principles applied to particular situations, a model found in Rawls and others listed above, and this model harbors within it the tradition of silence on race that began with the gag orders prior to the Civil War, a model that was given its modern discursive form in Brown v. Board of Education.9 In this argument for the American conception of equality, an admirable principle was bound with certain discursive constraints that occlude the world that Ta-Nehisi Coates, and his predecessors, such as Ralph Ellison, tried to expose. During the Brown deliberations, Chief Justice Earl Warren gave explicit recommendations to the other justices on the language of the decision: It “should be short, readable by the lay public, non-rhetorical, unemotional and, above all, nonaccusatory” (quoted in Kennedy 121). As Randall Kennedy observes: “If all we knew about segregation was what is discernible from the face of that ruling, one could be forgiven for wondering what was so wrong about ‘separate but equal’” (121). The Brown decision was not only shaped by the silence about the perpetrators of racist acts, but by three other features of the discursive landscape. One was the way social scientific evidence was gathered and used. Brown’s famous footnote 11 to Kenneth Clark’s research showing that adolescent black girls preferred white dolls to black ones and to Gunnar Myrdal’s American Dilemma were used to establish the ‘damage hypothesis’ and the idea that the language of victimhood as the appropriate lenses for addressing race. While these languages may have been effective in breaking down legal segregation, they were also effective in reinforcing condescension and inequality. Discrimination thus meant that the white majority could treat blacks as an object of pity, an approach that did little to challenge their own self-understanding. The American imagination could not conceive of injustice without victims, and whites did not recogfrom racial liberals” (cited in Kennedy 11). Obama won 95 per cent of black votes, 66 percent of Latino votes and 62 of Asian American votes. He won only 42.3 percent of white votes to McCain’s 55 (cited in Kennedy 8). 9 See Stephen Holmes, and also Michael Gilmore.

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nize that they, not just African Americans, were damaged by racism. As Daryl Scott writes: “To secure victory in Brown v Board of Education, racial liberals were more than willing to stress the damaging effects of racial discrimination on black personality” (xii). The result, however, was problematic: “As [liberals] assaulted its manifestations in the law, they reinforced the belief system that made whites feel superior in the first place” (xiii). This disempowering condescension can be seen in the structure of many “progressive” literary works, such as To Kill a Mockingbird, in which we see black characters only from the point of view of whites, only as the objects of pity. The fact that this work served as a racial epiphany for many whites reveals how “recognizing” the evils of segregation can, at the same time, reinforce domination and misrecognition.10 In addition, Myrdal’s work established a pattern of disregarding African American voices and seeing their culture as a pathological product of the slavery system. He claimed that African American culture “is a distorted development, or a pathological condition, of the general American culture.” From this he concluded that “it is to the advantage of American Negroes as individuals and as a group to become assimilated into American culture […] this will be the value premise here [… that] in America, American culture is the highest in the pragmatic sense (vol.2, 928-29). Myrdal’s text authorized white leaders to ignore the voices of African Americans and urged blacks to abandon their culture and adapt to the dominant culture. The third feature of the hegemonic American imagination was interest convergence—that is, blacks gained social justice primarily when their interests converged with the interests of the white majority (Derrick Bell). At the time of Brown, the United States’ racial practices were a source of embarrassment in the Cold War because they undermined America’s image abroad.11 The Justice Department’s amicus brief in Brown v Board 10 The liberal political commentator James Carville recounts his epiphany: “I just knew, the minute I read it, that [Harper Lee] was right and I had been wrong” (cited in Sundquist 182). 11 President Eisenhower said in a 1957 televised address that the Cold War struggle and international opinion compelled him to send federal troops to Little Rock: “At a time when we face grave situations abroad because of the hatred communism bears toward a system of government based on human rights, it would be difficult to exaggerate the harm that is being done to the prestige and influence, and indeed to the safety, of our nation and the world. Our enemies are gloating over this incident and using it everywhere to misrepresent our whole nation. We are portrayed as a violator of those standards of conduct which the peoples of the world united to proclaim in the Charter of the United Nations” (cited in Osgood).

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recognized the importance of racial reform for America’s image in the world: “The United States is trying to preserve to the people of the world, of every nationality, race and color, that a free democracy is the most civilized and secure form of government devised by man” (cited in Dudziak 65). These forces joined the first two elements mentioned to push the Court and other elites to support desegregation without recognizing African American’s autonomy or their voices. Interest convergence was not just a sociological phenomenon of domination; it became part of a discursive form that systematically silenced other forms of writing and living. These three dimensions of American society hardened into a gag rule that continues today not only for the Court but for mainstream media, though not for African American media, the black public sphere and the black church. The mainstream media ignore these languages, for the most part, until such languages touch a person who is trying to succeed in the mainstream, such as a presidential candidate. The exclusion of black voices from the mainstream media did not mean that African Americans did not speak out. From the time of the Civil War, the black public sphere has split in many ways from the mainstream public sphere.12 Black writers have taken up the political responsibility of writing in ways that challenge the dominant narratives of American public life. The first writer to respond directly to Myrdal’s book was Ralph Ellison, and he directed his attack at Myrdal’s reading of black culture: “Myrdal sees Negro culture and personality simply as the product of a ‘social pathology.’” While acknowledging that “Negro” culture has some undesirable features, Ellison insists in “An America Dilemma: A Review” that “there is much of great value and richness, which because it has been secreted by living and has made their lives more meaningful, Negroes will not willingly disregard” (340). Only Myrdal’s misreadings lead him to assume that “it is to the advantage of American Negroes as a group to become assimilated into American culture, to acquire the traits held in esteem by the dominant white Americans” (339). For Ellison, neither white nor black culture can be affirmed in an unqualified way, for they are both damaged and imbricated in ways that go unnoticed: “What is needed in our country is not an exchange of pathologies but a change in the basis of society. This is a job which both Negroes and whites must perform together. In Negro culture there is much of value for America as a whole” (340). For Ellison, social apartheid did not mean that cultures were completely separate. So-called “white” culture had already incorporated Afri12 As David Blight observes: “In the half century after the war, as the sections reconciled, by and large, the races divided” (4).

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can American elements and vice-versa: “Whatever else the true American is, he is also somehow black” (583). Hence American society neither needs mere integration of bodies into the same public spaces nor gathering statistics about inequality but a transformation of the social imaginary into which whites and blacks are integrated. Thematizing the social imaginary as part of the deliberative process requires a new model for political deliberation, a model that calls the self-understanding behind Brown into question and brings new features of the world into existence. This alternative way of understanding normativity is implicit in the works of Ellison, Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison as well as Ta-Nehisi Coates when we read them through this ontological perspective. These writers are not advocating what Michaels and Fraser call a “politics of identity” or recognition but challenging the borders of America’s normative imagination—precisely what Obama is compelled to avoid. Obama’s “race speech” in 2008 veers away from writings that challenge America’s collective self-understandings and resorts to an updated version of the Brown model. The speech came after the media criticized the sermons given by Obama’s minister, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, in which Wright expressed rage at America’s failures. Wright’s sermon was in the form of a “jeremiad,” which has a long history in American and African American culture. From the Puritans to Frederick Douglas to Martin Luther King, this form has been used to criticize the promise and failures of America through a three-part structure. In the first section the speaker talks of American ideals of liberty, justice, and equality, while in the second he/she castigates America’s failures. In the third, the prophecy and hope that America can achieve its ideals are affirmed so that America can redeem its promise. Yet this genre is put to different purposes in the African American traditions than in the white traditions. Reverend Wright’s sermons were not part of a marginal, radical fringe. They were very well-known in the African American community and were even used as models for black divinity school.13 The criticism of Wright by the media displayed not only ignorance of the genre but, more importantly, a willful ignorance of the African American speech and writing, whose normative claims challenged the dominant white identities and the historical understandings that underpin them. Obama alludes to the fissure between the discursive universes of blacks and whites in his speech: “The 13 See Obery M. Hendricks, Jr. “A More Perfect (High-Tech) Lynching,” in which he discusses the demonization of Wright. Before the press attacked him, “Wright was a much-sought-after speaker at church revivals and conferences and even academic symposia […]. He was awarded eight honorary degrees […]. His four books are regularly found in course syllabi at theological institutions” (165).

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fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning” (“More Perfect” 245). The oblivion of whites to Reverend Wright’s form of speech is symptomatic of widespread oblivion about the reality of black lives. “Black lives matter” not only when they are being profiled and tased—the focus of attention in the news media—but also when black people are speaking, acting, and laughing.14 When people respond to the cry of “black lives matter” with “all lives matter,” they are simply repeating the legacy of Brown by offering an abstract normative principle while refusing to acknowledge the forceful normative structuring of American life. Since black people appear in the collective imagination as a group that must be contained, pitied, and “helped” but never listened to, it is no wonder that Darren Wilson, the police officer in Ferguson, Missouri who shot the unarmed Michael Brown, told the jury that he shot Brown because he looked “like a demon,” a force pushing back against the system.15 When mainstream media finally paid attention, their only question was to ask how anyone running for President could listen to such words regularly rather than asking how responsible media could ignore so many voices that challenged their self-understanding and conception of the world. In his speech following the release of Wright’s sermons, Obama does give voice to the anger and disappointment of blacks, but he is careful to balance it with feelings of unhappy whites. Moreover, Obama recasts the long and brutal history of systemic and institutionalized racism as mere moral lapses.16 He must affirm his patriotism and distance himself from language such as Wright’s by placing this language and its rage at an historical distance from the present: “For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white coworkers and 14

The Black Lives Matter Movement has brought attention to some of this structuring in its protests against the killings of black men by police, but it leaves out black women and profound normative problems of race. In order for black lives to matter, white society needs to do more than simply try to avoid its “negative stereotypes” and change policing tactics. It needs to attend to the language of African American lives and transform its self-understanding. 15 Quoted in the Guardian “Interview with Claudia Rankine,” where she says: “Blackness in the white imagination has nothing to do with black people.” 16 For example, Obama repudiates Wright’s “view that sees white racism as endemic” (“More Perfect” 240).

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white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or the beauty shop or around the kitchen tables […] and occasionally it finds voice in church on Sunday” (“More Perfect” 244-45). In order to support the notion of generational differences, as opposed to racial differences, Obama draws a parallel with his own white grandmother’s occasional racist remarks. Wright’s comments, like the racism on the white side of Obama’s own family, are like the racism of a family member of a previous generation, a problem we all have. We can criticize them, but we cannot “disown” them (“More Perfect” 242). Moreover, he voices the anger of whites who do not feel that they have been privileged in a way that justifies affirmative action and other preferential treatments of African Americans (245). Anger on both sides has proved “counterproductive” (246) because the realization of all Americans’ dreams is not a zero-sum game, in which realizing one dream comes at the expense of another (247). He acknowledges that “disparities that exist between the African American community and the larger American community” and that “the inequalities passed on from an earlier generation suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow” (243). However, when it comes to blame, he is careful to balance his criticism of whites with criticisms of blacks.17 Thus, when Obama notes that the Constitution “was ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery,” he quickly adds that “the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution—a Constitution that had at its very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law” (“More Perfect” 237). From his beginning with ‘we the people’ to his anecdote of racial unity, Obama affirms what Jack Balkin calls the grand progressive narrative that dominates America’s selfunderstanding: “America is continually striving for democratic ideals from its founding and eventually realizing democracy through its historical development. In this narrative, the constitution reflects America’s deepest ideals, which are gradually realized through historical struggle and acts of political courage. The basic ideals of America and American people are 17

We see a similar pattern in his address in the Ebenezer Baptist Church in which he balances black sins with white sins. Obama says: “And for most of this country’s history, we in the African-American community have been at the receiving end of man’s inhumanity to man. All of us understand intimately the insidious role that race still sometimes plays on the job and in the schools, in our health care system, and in our criminal justice system. And yet, if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that none of our hands are entirely clean. If we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll acknowledge that our own community has not always been true to King’s vision of a beloved community.”

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good, even if Americans sometimes act unjustly” (5). In Obama’s reading, Constitutional principle can serve as the basis for an overlapping consensus among major religions. As Obama comments: “In the end, then what is called for is nothing more and nothing less than what all the world’s great religions demand—that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, scripture tells.” This ethical principle can be activated to address problems of race and difference through the idea of “empathy,” in which universal principle addresses the particulars of individual lives.18 Empathy follows from the constructivist understanding of equality because it depends on the capacity of the individual subject to project himself/herself into another’s life. Defining it succinctly as a successful attempt to “stand in somebody else’s shoes and see through their eyes” (Audacity 66), Obama regards empathy not as an exceptional gesture but an organizing principle for ethical behavior and even a preferred way of being. By cultivating our capacity for empathy, he says, we are forced beyond “our limited vision,” making it possible to overcome what divides us, allowing us to “find common ground” even in the face of our sharpest disagreements. Obama makes empathy “the heart of my moral code” (66) and “a guidepost for my politics” (67) in The Audacity of Hope and in “A More Perfect Union.” He ends his speech with the story of Ashley, in which a black man draws inspiration from a young white woman. The model of empathy fits well with thinking of normativity as the application of constitutional principles since it is organized around equal respect and concern for individuals. But this way of understanding normativity has failed to come to grips with the transsubjective normative structuring of the world. We need to come to grips with this understanding of normativity if we are to bring into view the racial structuring of society.

Coates’s Response Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book has been looked on as a direct challenge to Obama’s discussions of race.19 Coates makes this challenge not by a competing argument organized around principles of justice or equality. Instead, he reveals the normative languages that imprison African American lives, languages that include narratives, images, and characters. Against Ameri18 “Overlapping consensus” is John Rawls term for how people with different philosophical and religious beliefs can support the same basic principles (see Political Liberalism 133-72). 19 See Rollert, and Mayer, for the connection between Coates and Obama, who is never mentioned by name in “Between the World and Me.”

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ca’s “progressive narrative” that Balkin identifies, Coates tells his own: “The entire narrative of this country argues against the truth of who you are” (99). To Coates, these structures are the tissues of rationalization that encase the subjectivity of a privileged group that Coates calls “the Dreamers.”20 The dreamers are a self-contained community that does not think of itself as a community, but whose inhabitants live in a distinctive normative universe. Because their privilege, empowerment and normative insularity are invisible to them, this universe is the site for pronouncements about “justice” and “equality” for society as a whole. To capture the self-understanding of the dreamers, Coates cites Solzhenitsyn’s well-known remark that “to do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a wellconsidered in conformity with natural law.” Coates then comments: “This is the foundation of the Dream—its adherents must not just believe in it but believe that it is just, believe that their possession of the dream is the natural result of grit, honor, and good works. There is a passing acknowledgment of the bad old days, which, by the way, were not so bad as to have any ongoing effect on our present. The mettle that it takes to look away from the horror of our prison system, from police forces transformed into armies, from the long war against the black body, is not forged overnight. This is the practiced habit” (98). Constitutional principles cannot root out inequality for they are woven into the language of the Dreamers’ world. No thought experiment can lift a Dreamer out of this world or bring an outsider in. A Dreamer cannot empathize with the kind of life Coates is describing because the Dreamer needs a new framework for understanding normativity so that the “facts” of a nondreamer’s life can appear. Coates is not appealing to a politics of identity but thematizing the ontological force of the reigning normative order. Thus, when he speaks of the police violence and of talk about sensitivity training, he is dismissive because such localization of the problem misses the point. It is not the police who commit the crimes but the American people locked in the dreamer imaginary: “The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country’s criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that is was imposed by a repressive minority. The abuses that have followed from these polices—the sprawling carceral state, the random detentions of black people, the torture of suspects—are the product of democratic will” (79). Coates’s 20 The subtitle of The Audacity of Hope is Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream.

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language is at once descriptive and normative. He wants to make clear the dominant collective imagination of most whites and many blacks provides a framework in which criminality is understood, a framework that is not shared by minorities. He calls this framework the product of “will” in order to insist on the collective intentionality at work here. David Brooks’s response to Coates illustrates beautifully how “Dreamers” can avoid the challenge of Between the World and Me. Brooks writes: “I think you distort American history. This country, like each person in it, is a mixture of glory and shame. There’s a Lincoln for every Jefferson Davis and a Harlem Children’s Zone for every K.K.K.—and usually vastly more than one. Violence is embedded in America, but it is not close to the totality of America.” Coates’s point is that this synoptic, academic view of the “pros and cons” of American history is not available to people with a boot on their throats, to people who live in fear outside the world of the dream. Coates insists on the insularity of black life and the fear that accompanies such isolation: “When I was your age, the only people I knew were black, and all of them were powerfully, dangerously afraid” (14). Others have questioned Coates’s apparent determinism, in which both blacks and whites are denied agency. Chatterton Williams notes: “It’s not just black kids in tough neighbourhoods who are hapless automatons. In Coates’s view, no one has agency. The young black shooter doesn’t have to think too hard about what he might do because ‘the galaxy was playing with loaded dice.’” Williams then quotes a passage in which Coates narrates an encounter in which a white woman pushes his son, and Williams objects to the language of description: “Coates sees this woman not as a morally fallible person with her own neuroses, but as a force of nature […]. It doesn’t occur to him that she may not be an avatar of white supremacy but just a nasty person who would have been as likely to push a blonde child or a Chinese one.” Williams is missing the point. Of course, people have agency, but what everyone has been overlooking are the structural properties of their world that shape that agency. Coates’ text can reveal truth not by fidelity to particularities but by bringing into relief what is surreptitiously shaping our world. Williams complains that “as long as black people have to be handled with infantilising care—for fear of dredging up barely submerged ancestral pain—we’ll never be equal or free.” By framing the issue in this way, Williams has fallen into an old trap, in which autonomy is confused with silent acceptance of the status quo. Coates is telling people—white and black—that they do not understand who they are because they are missing the frameworks that shape them. Such frameworks cannot be escaped by merely summoning a Kantian will. Coates is following James Baldwin’s advice to writers to “drive to the

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heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides” (316). The obfuscating Dreamer answer has been the discursive form of Brown v. Board. The point of my essay has been to bring to light not just the significance of Coates’s text but the importance of social imaginaries and discursive forms in understanding normativity. While antidiscrimination theorists run to principles and antisubordination theorists run to facts, texts such as Between the World and Me can expose the normative weight and shape of collective imagination that is obscured by these popular conceptions of normativity. Coates’s text is one in a long line of African American writings who have sought to shake readers loose from their frameworks. However, people do not give up frameworks easily, particularly frameworks of long standing such as the one which makes its reappearance yet again beneath the eloquence of Obama’s speech, a reappearance that displays the contemporary form of America’s continuing gag-order about race.

Works Cited Bagnoli, Carla. “Constructivism in Metaethics.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 20 Apr. 2016. Web. Baldwin, James. “The Creative Process.” 1962. In The Price of the Ticket. New York: St.Martins, 1985. 315-18. Balkin, Jack. “Brown v. Board of Education: A Critical Introduction.” What Brown Should Have Said. New York: NYU Press, 2001. 3-76. Bell, Derrick. “Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest Convergence Dilemma.” Harvard Law Review 93 (1979-80): 518-33. Benhabib, Seyla. The Claims of Culture. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2002. Blight, David. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American History. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001. Brooks, David. “Listening to Ta-Nehisi Coates While White.” The New York Times, 17 July 2015. Web. Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me. New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2015. Dudziak, Mary. “Desegregation as a Cold War Imperative.” Stanford Law Review 41 (1988): 61-120. Ellison, Ralph. Collected Essays. Ed. John Callahan. New York: Modern Library, 1995. Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking Recognition.” New Left Review 3 (2000): 10720.

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Gilmore, Michael. The War on Words: Slavery, Race, and Free Speech in American Literature. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010. The Guardian. “Interview with Claudia Rankine.” 27 Dec. 2015. Web. Heidegger, Martin. Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Ed. & trans. Albert Hofstadter. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988. Hendricks, Obery. “A More Perfect (High-Tech) Lynching: Obama, the Press, and Jeremiah Wright.” The Speech: Race and Barack Obama’s ‘A More Perfect Union.’ Ed. T. Denan Sharpley-Whiting. New York: Bloomsbury, 2009. 155-83. Holmes, Stephen. “Gag Rules, or the Politics of Omission.” Constitutionalism and Democracy. Ed. Jon Elster and Rune Slagstad. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988. 19-58. Jackson, Derrick. “Race and Representation in the Twilight of the Obama Era.” The American Prospect (Winter 2016). Web. Kennedy, Randall. The Persistence of Race: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency. New York: Random House, 2011. Larmore, Charles. Autonomy of Morality. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008. Mayer, Jeremy. “Reading Coates, Thinking Obama.” The American Prospect 11.2 (October 10, 2015). Web. Michaels, Walter Benn. The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Equality. New York: Henry Holt, 2006. Myrdal, Gunnar. American Dilemma. 2 vols. Revised ed. Piscataway: Transaction Publishers, 1995. Obama, Barack. Address in Ebenezer Baptist Church. 21 Jan. 2008. Web. —. Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream. New York: Random House, 2006. —. “A More Perfect Union.” The Speech: Race and Barack Obama’s “A More Perfect Union.” Ed. T. Denan Sharpley-Whiting. New York: Bloomsbury, 2009. 237-51. —. Dreams of My Father. New York: Times Books, 1995. Osgood, Kenneth. Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad. Lawrence: UP of Kansas, 2006. Rawls, John. Collected Papers. Revised ed. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001. —. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. Rollert, John Paul. “Between the World and Me: Empathy is a Privilege.” The Atlantic, 28 Sept. 2015. Web. Sack, Kevin, and Meagan Thee Brennan. “Poll Shows Most in U.S. Hold Negative View of Race Relations.” New York Times, 23 July 2015. Web.

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Scott, Darrell. Contempt and Pity. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1997. Steele, Meili. “World Disclosure and Normativity: The Social Imaginary as the Space of Argument.” Telos 174 (2016):1-20. Sundquist, Eric. “Blues for Atticus Finch.” The South as an American Problem. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1996. 181-209. Taylor, Charles. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham: Duke UP, 2004. —. A Secular Age. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2008. Turner, Terence. “Anthropology and Multiculturalism: What is Anthropology that Multiculturalists Should be Mindful of it?” Cultural Anthropology 8 (1993): 411-29. Williams, Thomas Chatterton. “Loaded Dice.” London Review of Books 37.2 (2015): 15-18.

DEMOCRATIC DOXA: TOWARD A GENEALOGY OF TYPICALITY IN AMERICAN NATIONALIST LITERATURE CHRISTOPHER G. DILLER

“Nothing but a newspaper can drop the same thought into a thousand minds at the same moment…” —Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1840 (2; 2; 6)1

With the ratification of the Constitution in 1787, the philosophical ideals of the American Revolution were codified yet qualified. Whereas the rhetoric of 1776 at its most radical pledged life, fortune, and honor to the proposition that all men are created equal, the Constitution predicated political representation not just on gender, and race, but on property and its origins in the disparate faculties and talents of men. Explained most famously by James Madison in Federalist #10, the danger of political faction derived from latent differences of opinions, the influence of ambitious leaders, but “the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property.” The nation required a republican rather than strictly democratic form of government and the election of enlightened representatives by the people (the latter defined by numbers and diversity of interests) to tamp the flames of faction, he believed. Through the elected representative, the so-called second founding sublimated democratic diversity in the name of both good governance and the greater good. This republican logic of representation, I believe, became a recurrent thematic and rhetorical concern in a body of American literature invested in the nation’s democratic ideals and the corollary challenge of representing and negotiating its burgeoning diversity. To do so, authors as central to the American literary tradition as Hawthorne, Emerson, Stowe, Howells, 1

The parenthetical references to Democracy in American refer to volume, section, and chapter, respectively.

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James, Stein, Wright, Ellison and others assumed the value of typicality and deployed the (literary) type as a critical and creative device to probe and sometimes to critique the deep assumption that the unmarked subject of American citizenship was necessarily white, male, and autonomous. (In The American Scene [1907], for example, a text devoted to regional and national mores, James uses the type as a definitional device some 75 times.) Types enabled these writers and others to represent and negotiate American regional, gender, class, ethnic, and racial categories, remap the boundaries of American citizenship, and interrogate the ideology of American exceptionalism itself. In contrast to the assumption that the idiosyncratic individual is the font of experience for broader forms of communal and national identity, this essay proposes the reverse: that more or less commonly shared ways of knowing and seeing can foster cross-cultural communication and do so especially at moments of national crisis. To elaborate this argument, I return to the antebellum American political culture described by Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America (1835; 1840) in which the power of public opinion induces the reception of ready-made beliefs and a kind of taxonomic thinking that creates a reciprocal relationship between the individual citizen and the amber of the democratic imagination. As illustration, I then turn to America’s most famous protest novel—Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)—and show how Stowe created not just gendered or racial character types for which her novel is now most (in)famous, but also regional ones in an (ultimately failed) attempt to broker sectional compromise on the eve of the Civil War. And finally, as a kind of modernist contrast and coda, I briefly consider the protest poetry of Stowe’s twentieth-century descendent John Beecher (1904-1980)—a Southerner raised from the age of three in Birmingham, Alabama. Beecher channeled the moral reform urgency of his nineteenth-century Congregationalist ancestors through his jeremiad-like poetic voice but, unlike his famous great, great aunt, critiqued the mythology of national whiteness even as he also called for a return to the nation’s founding democratic ideals in the wake of the 16th Street Baptist church bombing and the assassination of JFK in the fall of 1963. ~~~ During 1831-1832, the young French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville toured the United States with his friend Gustave Beaumont to gather information for their government on the American penal system. Although Tocqueville and Beaumont did publish a report of their recommendations

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for penal reform in 1834, it is Tocqueville’s monumental two-volume work Democracy in America that remains the enduring record of their trip and his career. Tocqueville wrote this book to educate his French audience about the American society that he saw as the vanguard of a “great democratic revolution” rising in the world (2; 3; 6). As one might expect, Tocqueville was impressed by the democratic assumptions and political practices that had acquired new power and visibility during the Jackson presidency. In the opening paragraph of Democracy, he asserts: “No Novelty in the United States struck me more vividly during my stay there than the equality of conditions. It was easy to see the immense influence of this basic fact on the whole course of society. It gives a particular turn to public opinion and a particular twist to the laws, new maxims to those who govern and particular habits to the governed” (1; 1; “Introductory Chapter”). Although he did comment upon exceptions to what Benjamin Franklin had called America’s “general happy Mediocrity” of economic and social station, the exceptions proved the rule for de Tocqueville. Whereas the first volume of Democracy examines the history of American egalitarianism and its influence on the slow growth of the new nation’s political institutions, the second examines how the bedrock principle of equality conditions—indeed, saturates—American social and cultural life. There, Tocqueville argues that equality leads to two interrelated if seemingly antithetical truths: equality of condition dismantles hierarchy and fosters individualism and self-reliance in thought and action; however, equality also fosters “dogmatic belief” because the will of the majority overwrites the individual to a degree not possible in aristocratic countries. The majority supplies individuals with “ready-made opinions” that create a “salutary servitude” in that the individual takes “on trust a host of facts and opinions” but is thereby freed to get on with their busy, practical life (2; 1; 2). “At periods of equality,” Tocqueville writes, “men have no faith in one another, by reason of their common resemblance; but this very resemblance gives them almost unbounded confidence in the judgment of the public; for it would seem probable that, as they are all endowed with equal means of judging, the greater truth should go with the greater numbers” (2; 1; 2). And Tocqueville goes one step further: public opinion — what he elsewhere calls “common belief”—induces a categorical mode of thinking on the part of the individual in the form of “general ideas” or the quick gathering of disparate things and observations under a common cognitive heading. Tocqueville asserts: “The chief merit of general ideas is that they enable the human mind to pass a rapid judgment on a great many objects at once; but on the other hand, the notions they convey are never other than incomplete, and they always cause the mind to lose as much in

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accuracy as it gains in comprehensiveness” (2; 1; 3). Rather than focusing on what antebellum Americans think, then, Tocqueville describes how they think—that is to say, how the condition of equality creates the nigh overwhelming power of public opinion and a feedback loop in which the individual accepts common beliefs and thereby becomes imbricated in the national ideology of egalitarianism. Tocqueville’s description above is his way of rearticulating the ancient concept of doxa that comparative literature scholar Ruth Amossy defines as “the common ground on the basis of which people can make together rational decisions and build the life of the polis” (372). As she notes, doxa is named differently in different eras and cultures—“public opinion,” “verisimilitude,” “commonsense,” “commonplace,” “idee reçu,” “stereotype,” and “cliché” (369)—and Tocqueville participates in this (re)naming without imposing a “modern consciousness of banality” that dismisses doxa merely as “accepted ideas, trite expressions, and (bourgeois) stupidity” (369). What Tocqueville’s description and Amossy’s apostrophes do not explicitly name, however, is the most pervasive form of “general ideas” in antebellum America: the type. Analogous to the modern stereotype as a form of abstraction and classification but without its a priori assumptions of reductiveness or invidiousness, the antebellum type is a singular symbol, thing, event, or person that exemplifies not its own particularity but rather a broader, even universal array of cultural associations and values. Put another way, the type reverses the modernist assumption—latent in the stereotype—that experience and knowledge necessarily stem from the richness of the personal or local, imbued with innate value, and that the job of an artist is to transform the value of the local into a more universally resonant statement. Instead, as Theo Davis explains, antebellum writers began with experience as an abstract commodity and as “a repertoire of possible responses to typical objects and events […] literature [then] uses the written text to call up and then to shape a work of art out of those conceptual, possible experiences” (2). In an era when many writers felt that there was as yet no distinct American literary tradition, the artistic challenge was to create typical American subjects that enabled a “shared vocabulary of response[s … as] authors need a medium, so to speak, of common associations in which to work” (48). This intersection of the typical and the national found no more powerful and enduring expression than Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). As this 1893 photograph of a print (nostalgically) suggests, and as Stowe’s biographer Joan Hedrick points out: “Perhaps more than any other novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is entertwined [sic] with our national history (167). And yet Hedrick also observes: “Impelled by the contradiction of slavery in a democratic

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country, Uncle Tom’s Cabin reaches something of an impasse when it comes to the issue of national identity” (181). Hedrick finally (and rather vaguely) suggests that the novel bases national identity “on the idea of liberty” (181), but Stowe is actually reticent in her invocation of a national political entity. (Indeed, the noun “America” is used only 14 times in the novel, the adjective “American” 13 times, and the word “national” a scant five times.)

“Representative Americans”

Stowe’s reticence, I believe, stems from two divergent assumptions as does much of the moral urgency and rhetorical power of the novel. First, her narrative of enslavement and freedom is at once a distinctly American narrative, rooted in specific places, groups, dialects, and mores, but also a

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transnational and finally an eschatological one as evidenced by these final (non-fictional) words: A day of grace is yet held out to us. Both North and South have been guilty before God; and the Christian church has heavy account to answer. Not by combining together, to protect the injustice and cruelty, and making a common capital of sin, is this Union to be saved,—but by repentance, justice and mercy; for, not surer is the eternal law by which the millstone sinks in the ocean, than that stronger law, by which injustice and cruelty shall bring on nations the wrath of the Almighty God! (484)

This jeremiad-like warning is the novel’s last-gasp appeal to the doxa of common Christian belief, and it subsumes mere temporal authority— specifically, the sectional authority of the North and South—with a transcendent narrative of sin and divine retribution. The novel, that is, finally views slavery as a sin that endangers everyone’s individual soul—that of master or man, black or white, male or female, Northerner or Southerner— but also the soul of the nation itself. However, Stowe conceived and wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin in direct response to the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850—a political act that required Northerners to hand over runaway slaves to local legal authorities (who had a small monetary motive to judge the runaways as property). As Frederick Douglass fiercely orated in “What is the Fourth of July to the Slave”: By an act of the American Congress, not yet two years old, slavery has been nationalized in its most horrible and revolting form. By that act, Mason and Dixon’s line has been obliterated; New York has become as Virginia; and the power to hold, hunt, and sell men, women, and children as slaves remains no longer a mere state institution, but is now an institution of the whole United States. The power is co-extensive with the StarSpangled Banner and American Christianity.

For both Douglass and Stowe, the Fugitive Slave Act effectively nationalized slavery and thereby endangered the purported Christian identity of the nation, and it did so by ceding the political autonomy of the North on the issue of slavery. Stowe’s antislavery argument is therefore in part paradoxical. On the one hand, she acknowledges and leverages the emotional and political reality of sectional differences by invoking the well-known character types of the Northern Yankee (industrious, frugal, emotionally cold, and morally strict) and the Southern Cavalier (aristocratic, indolent, temperamental, and morally lax). On the other hand, she critiques their complicity in the national sin of slavery and fashions new, more morally aware regional types that foster implied reformative actions and a rejuvenated faith in American

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exceptionalism. 2 And she does so from the first page. If most critics pay predominant attention to racial and gender characterizations in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe strategically plots her novel along geographical lines and populates it with a rich array of regionally coded characters. Tellingly, the novel’s two major plot lines begin in northern Kentucky—the site of Stowe’s only visit to the South and a liminal border state—and proceed northward and southward: northward, following the flight and eventual emancipation of the slaves George and Eliza Harris and their young son Harry; and southward following Tom, the titular character and spiritual martyr, who is quite literally sold down the river until he reaches the plantation of the vicious Simon Legree in Louisiana. (The novel also has minor plots that move west to Indiana and east to Europe and Liberia.) Moreover, Stowe offers her readers both recognizable and new regional types: the Shelbys (moderate slave holders in northern Kentucky), the Birds (antislavery advocates in Ohio), Miss Ophelia (an initially morally rigid and emotionally cold Puritan from Vermont), St. Clare (Ophelia’s conflicted and romantic slaveholding cousin in New Orleans), and perhaps most intriguingly, Simon Legree (a vicious Southern slaveholder from New England). For the sake of concision, I want to focus on the northern Kentucky slave owner Arthur Shelby, who is introduced in the novel’s first chapter, and his son George, who grows to manhood during the course of the narrative and reappears in the novel’s last moment of fictional (if not moral) imagination. For this intergenerational pair economically illustrates how Stowe transforms an older, outmoded regional type into a more morally resolute but nationally imbued Southerner willing to “feel right” and do his part to eradicate slavery. Arthur Shelby is a retread of the venerable type of the Southern cavalier that existed at least since the 18th century, but the brilliance of Stowe’s moral imagination is how she animates this figure and places it alongside new American types created under the auspices of slavery. Take, for example, the novel’s opening two paragraphs that introduce the reader to Shelby and to a slave trader named Haley, who are engaged in a conversation regarding the sale of some of Shelby’s slaves:

2

Joep Leerssen asserts: “‘Deep structures’ in national stereotyping, involving the construction of binaries around oppositional pairs such as North/South, strong/weak, and central and peripheral, should be addressed diachronically and historically. The end result of such (historically variable but unfalsifiable) stereotypical oppositions is that most imputed national characteristics will exhibit a binary nature, capable of attributing strongly contradictory characteristics to any national group (‘is a nation of contrasts’)” (267).

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Toward a Genealogy of Typicality in American Nationalist Literature Late in the afternoon of a chilly day in February, two gentlemen were sitting alone over their wine, in a well-furnished dining parlor, in the town, of P—, Kentucky. There were no servants present, and the gentlemen, with chairs closely approaching, seemed to be discussing some subject with great earnestness. For convenience sake, we have said, hitherto, two gentlemen. One of the parties, however, when critically examined, did not seem, strictly speaking, to come under the species. He was a short, thick-set man, with coarse, commonplace features, and that swaggering air of pretension which marks a low man who is trying to elbow his way upward in the world. (41, Stowe’s emphasis)

If the first paragraph offers a brief description of a regional and domestic setting in which two “gentleman” are discussing something of importance, the second quickly and playfully distinguishes a specimen (Haley) from his “species” (the gentleman) to define the new type of the American slave trader: one part Old World parvenu and one part New World man in that he makes his money and has earned his place in the parlor, so to speak, by trading slaves. An 1852 picture banner by an unknown artist vividly captures the physiognomic and social differences between the overly, even exaggerated frame of the slave trader intent on business and the aristocratic Shelby who appears more interested in his comfort and entertainment:

“Picturing Uncle Tom’s Cabin”

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By showing Shelby scandalously engaged in a commercial transaction in his parlor with a slave trader, Stowe undercuts her gentile reader’s expectations of the appropriate morality and behavior of a (Southern) gentleman. Specifically, she encapsulates here how slavery endangers the moral, social, and economic hierarchies that are supposed to distinguish one group from another and organize the public sphere. Despite Shelby’s reluctance to sell his slaves and Haley’s assurances that any slave Shelby sells will be well taken care of, the ironic force of the character comparison and chapter title is that Haley speaks for Shelby whose gambling debt he holds: Haley is a slave trader; Shelby will be one as soon as he sells any of his slaves (which he must). The novel thus poses troubling questions about the stability of social classes and the basis of “humanity” beyond economic motive in a slave economy. Shelby simply can’t help himself, as he tells his wife later, and sells Tom and Eliza’s son Harry, and whereas Tom refuses to run off even when alerted to the sale, the latter does to protect her young son. In a subtle touch that critics have overlooked in this protracted transaction, after Haley hears of the flight of Eliza and Harry, he suggests that Shelby might have known about and abetted the loss. This insinuation provokes Shelby, now feeling once again like a true Southern gentleman after the discharge of his debts, and he challenges Haley to a duel as a point of honor. “‘Devilish free, now I’ve signed those papers, cuss him!’ muttered Haley to himself; ‘quite grand, since yesterday!’” (88). With keen wit and moral intelligence, Stowe shows how slavery is a universal and dynamic condition in antebellum America that places existing social types under duress even as they jostle with new ones. The question of how the residual type of the Southern gentleman changes, though, is not developed through the character of Arthur Shelby but rather through his young son, George. As a young boy, George loves Tom and frequents his cabin to teach Tom how to read—in a reversal of yet another natural hierarchy (age) in a slave economy—and he is distraught when he learns about the sale of Tom to Haley. In fact, George tells Haley as Tom is taken away: “‘I’m ashamed, this day, that I’m a Kentuckian. I always was proud of it before;’ and George sat very straight on his horse, and looked round with an air, as if he expected the state would be impressed with his opinion” (146). As children are allocated enormous symbolic value in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, George’s declaration may be inconsequential for the moment but it is heartfelt and true feeling engenders action in the sentimental economy of the novel. By the end, George has grown to a young man, inherited the family plantation, and searches for and finds Tom dying on Legree’s plantation after he has received a brutal beating (Legree is skulk-

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ing in the background in this 1852 banner picture from the same series as the one above):

“Picturing Uncle Tom’s Cabin”

This image captures the possibility of a new Southern gentleman and literary type fashioned upon the template of the old one but now typified by more than just sectional affiliation. George remains coded as distinctly Southern when, for example, he impulsively fells Legree to the ground “with one indignant blow” after Legree insults Tom’s after he dies (457). However, George’s fiery temperament is now infused with moral resolution—not just personal honor—and he therefore swears upon Tom’s grave that “from this hour, I will do what one man can to drive out this curse of slavery from my land” (457, Stowe’s italics). In the subtle possessive at the end of this declaration (“my land”), Stowe suggests that a new generation of Southern gentlemen will not only work to eradicate slavery because it is the right thing to do but they will do so for the sake of the nation’s democratic ideals and national unity. And George does: when he returns home to northern Kentucky and sadly reports the news of Tom’s death, he frees his slaves and tells them that “‘I shall pay you wages for your work, such as we shall agree on’” (474). In contrast to his father’s paternalism, George offers his former slaves a mutual economic agreement that presup-

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poses moral if not yet legal equality. True, this optimistic conclusion is enormously complicated by other racial and political discourses in the novel, such as George Harris’s apologia for colonization (the return of American slaves to Liberia) and Stowe’s own romantic racialism of Africa and African Americans. Nevertheless, albeit only after a bloody civil war, Stowe is prescient to suggest that the national compact might be based upon moral consensus, empathy, and political union rather than a confederation of disparate racial and sectional identities. ~~~ As late as 1903, Henry James complained of a dearth of a certain kind of cosmopolitanism in the fiction of Dickens in terms of the type: “If Dickens fails to live long,” he writes, it will be because his figures are particular without being general; because they are individuals without being types; because we do not feel their continuity with the rest of humanity—see the matching of the pattern with the piece out of which all the creations of the novelist and the dramatist are cut” (n.p.). This statement echoes the logic of the nineteenth-century literary type, but it is also one of the last selfconscious and unapologetic rationalizations of the type per se. For in a pluralistic society of rising regional awareness, instant communication, mass immigration, and cultural heterogeneity that James himself describes in The American Scene (1907), typological patterns of thought and symbolism seemed outstripped by a welter of particularity. Even more influentially, after the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), a sea change in scientific method eroded the truth value of typological thinking not just in the natural sciences but also the social sciences, philosophy, and beyond. As Louis Menand describes it, typification emphasizes common properties amongst individual things but brackets out “the variations of individuals for the sake of constructing a general type. Darwin’s fundamental insight as a biologist was that among groups of sexually reproducing organisms, the variations are much more important than the similarities” (121-22). Once we scrutinize individuals rather than types, we still need to make abstractions but we do so inductively rather than deductively, and this shift has profound implications for what we see and how we think: “Relations will be more important than categories; functions, which are variable, will be more important than purposes; transitions will be more important than boundaries; sequences will be more important than hierarchies” (124). Thus, Darwin’s new paradigm inverted the relationship

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between the individual and the typical that had undergirded the antebellum literary type.3 And yet the type was not so much displaced or effaced as rechanneled in the early twentieth-century. In his influential study Public Opinion (1922), the American journalist Walter Lippman responds to the Darwinian sea change and, as his title suggests and like Tocqueville some 80 years before, assesses how the power of public opinion flows from modern democratic conditions and informs American political institutions, public discourses, forms of communication, and ways of thinking. Unlike antebellum writers who viewed experience as an abstract phenomenon composed of typical associations, for Lippman there is no substitute for the knowledge and ethical surety that stem from the personal: “Those whom we love and admire most,” he writes, “are the men and women whose consciousness is peopled thickly with persons rather than with types, who know us rather than the classification into which we might fit […] There is a taint on any contact between two people which does not affirm as an axiom the personal inviolability of both” (59). And yet, like Tocqueville, Lippman recognizes the inevitability and psychological economy of “general ideas,” and for the same reason: it is simply too overwhelming to experience everything all at the same time (pace Jack Kerouac and the Beats). Lippman writes: [M]odern life is hurried and multifarious, above all physical distance separates men who are often in vital contact with each other, such as employer and employee, official and voter. There is neither time nor opportunity for intimate acquaintance. Instead we notice a trait which marks a well known type, and fill in the rest of the picture by means of the stereotypes we carry about in our heads. (59)

3

William Dean Howell’s famous description of the difference between a “real” and “ideal” grasshopper captures this tension and transformation in the context of American literary realism. A young aspiring writer is told by his literary elder: “I see that you are looking at a grasshopper there which you have found in the grass, and I suppose you intend to describe it. Now don’t waste your time and sin against culture in that way. I’ve got a grasshopper here, which has been evolved at considerable pains and expense out of the grasshopper in general; in fact, it’s a type. It’s made up of wire and card-board, very prettily painted in a conventional tint, and it’s perfectly indestructible. It isn’t very much like a real grasshopper, but it’s a great deal nicer, and it’s served to represent the notion of a grasshopper ever since man emerged from barbarism. You may say that it’s artificial. Well, it is artificial; but then it’s ideal too; and what you want to do is to cultivate the ideal.”

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Precisely here, Lippman both assumes and subsumes the type as he almost single-handedly codifies the modern definition stereotype: types and stereotypes are both modes of abstraction that function as cognitive screens or filters, but types still correspond to some degree to empirical reality whereas stereotypes correspond not to the empirical world but to our sense of that world. In other words, stereotypes resemble types insofar as they are cognitive constructs that help us to organize and process experience, but they are different because they are pre-rational ideas and images deeply saturated by emotional and cultural predispositions. Although there is slippage between these two terms in Public Opinion, Lippman offers the first full, pragmatic account of stereotypes and how they “are an ordered, more or less consistent picture of the world, to which our habits, our tastes, our capacities, our comforts and our hopes have adjusted themselves […]. No wonder, then, that any disturbance of the stereotypes seems like an attack upon the foundations of the universe” (63). Lippman’s account of the stereotype authoritatively rearticulated theories of democratic doxa in America.4 He acknowledges the inevitability of cognitive templates and conscious forms of generalization that let in a “trickle of messages from outside” (18) and correspond to empirical reality or at least to largely undisputed conventions or opinions about reality (types). However, his description of stereotypes as “the stored up images, the preconceptions, and prejudices which interpret, fill them [types] out, and in turn powerfully direct the play of our attention” (18-19) became the dominant understanding of typicality—ironically, a kind of stereotype of the stereotype—and one that informs American literary studies to this day. The stereotype therefore didn’t so much displace the type as subdivide it into two distinct but rhetorically useful tropes, such that a modernist writer like Ralph Ellison can simultaneously offer a trenchant critique of racial stereotypes and yet invoke the representative value and prospective force of the type a la Stowe. In “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity,” for example, Ellison exposes “the Negro stereotype” as “a key figure in a magic rite by which the white American seeks to resolve the dilemma arising between his democratic beliefs and certain antidemocratic practices, between his acceptance of the sacred democratic belief that all men are created equal and his treatment of every tenth man as though he were not” (85). And yet, Ellison hopes that out of the often 4

Note the ambivalent relationship between type and stereotype in the Oxford English Dictionary definition that cites Lippman and Public Opinion as progenitor: “A preconceived and oversimplified idea of the characteristics which typify a person, situation, etc.; an attitude based on such a preconception. Also, a person who appears to conform closely to the idea of a type” (3.b)

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violent struggle to define what “American” means, “Out of this conflict the ideal American character—a type truly great enough to possess the greatness of the land, a delicately poised unity of [multicultural] divergencies—is slowly being born” (83, my emphasis). It is beyond the scope of an essay to further delineate this genealogy of democratic doxa in American nationalist literature, but there may be no more fitting coda than a single poem by twentieth-century Beecher-Stowe descendent John Beecher. Beecher was raised from the age of three in Birmingham, Alabama where he witnessed the psychological, economic, and sheer physical violence of Jim Crow. As a young man, he worked in his father’s steel mill alongside white and black day laborers and in administrative positions for migrant farm camps and New Deal programs. Beecher also worked as a journalist in Birmingham and served aboard the first ocean-going government vessel to be captained by an African American— Hugh Mulzac of the liberty ship SS Booker T Washington—in the Merchant Marine during World War Two. After the war, he helped to administer prisoner of war camps in Germany and taught at San Francisco State College before he was fired for refusing to sign a loyalty oath in 1950 during the McCarthy era. Lapsing into personal depression and poetic silence for five years, Beecher reemerged with newfound energy and purpose which he channeled into the peace and Civil Rights movements. Among other activities, he participated in the Peace March to Moscow in 1961, reported on the Civil Rights movement for several national newspapers, and taught at Miles College—a black college in Birmingham. It was the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing on September 15, 1963 in his hometown, though, that spurred Beecher to write several of his finest poems some of which were published in To Live and Die in Dixie (1966). One of these poems, “If I Forget Thee, Oh Birmingham!,” is both a lament for the loss of black lives—“Dog-torn children bled / A, B, O, AB as you. / Christ’s blood not more red.”—and a jeremiad that culminates in a prophetic warning: “Burning my house to keep / them out, you sowed wind. Hear it blow! / Soon you reap.” (259). Beecher’s most direct poetic treatment of the bombing, however, is “Escort for a President,” a poetic meditation on national mourning and memory. The poem begins by recounting the television broadcast of the return of JFK (the “Young Zeus”) in a casket from Dallas to Washington, D.C. after his murder, but it quickly dispenses with any eulogist impulse when it refers to his hardboiled politics and corporate cronyism. Similarly, the poem references the national mourning that took place during the public spectacle of JFK’s funeral procession (“Assumed into a myth more speedily / than Lincoln was or Roosevelt he floats / across the fabled river so far down / it seems the

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life-line on some ancient palm.” [252]), but once again pivots from eulogy and elegy to white violence and the murder of Medgar Evans and the deaths in Birmingham. The final stanza reads: Now swarming up the air with cries like doves Or angels come black girls from Birmingham With blood upon their Sunday finery And faces blown away. Here also wheel two black boys slain in cleanlier wise by bullets Upon that Sabbath day. May they escort A president upon his journey home? (252-53)

Interweaving past and present and invoking a more egalitarian future, Beecher critiques the construction of national memory from the typifying, synecdochic figure of the President (and the Presidency) rather than the concrete lives and deaths of its black citizens. On the egalitarian plain of death, he rhetorically inserts into a national epideictic occasion Medgar Evans, the (four) Birmingham black girls “with faces blown away,” and not least the now often forgotten two black boys slain in the rioting that followed the bombing (Johnny Robinson, 16, and Virgil Ware, 13 [“Six Dead”]). In doing so, he jarringly reminds his readers of the enormous costs of racial and social justice that are often displaced by an all too easy national narrative of democratic accomplishment. Albeit without the spectacular success of his great-great aunt, in his life and poetry Beecher spoke more powerfully than she to the truth that black lives matter.

Works Cited Amossy, Ruth. “Introduction to the Study of Doxa.” Poetics Today 23.3 (2002): 369-94. Beecher, John. Collected Poems, 1924-1974. MacMillan Publishing, 1974. De Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America. American Studies at the University of Virginia. 27 July 2016. Web. Douglass, Frederick. “‘What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?’ by Frederick Douglass.” 5 July 1852. The Nation. 4 July 2012. Web. Ellison, Ralph. “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity.” The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison. Ed. John F. Callahan. New York: Modern Library, 1995. James, Henry. “Ivan Turgenev.” 1903. Eldritch Press. 27 July 2016. Web. Franklin, Benjamin. “Information for those Who Would Remove to America.” 1782. The Founders’ Constitution. Ed. Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner. 27 July 2016. Web.

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Hedrick, Joan. “Commerce in Souls: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the State of the Nation.” Novel History: Historians and Novelists Confront America's Past (and Each Other). Ed. Mark C. Carnes. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004. 167-83. Leerssen, Joep. “The Rhetoric of National Character: A Programmatic Survey.” Poetics Today 21:2 (2000): 267-92. Lippman, Walter. Public Opinion. 1922. New York: Free Press Paperbacks, 1997. Madison, James. “The Federalist Papers #10: The Same Subject Continued: The Union as a Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection.” Congress.Gov. 27 July 2016. Web. Menand, Louis. The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. “Picturing Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Gilder Lerhman Institute of American History. 26 July 2016. Web. “Representative Americans.” 1893. The Library of Congress. 27 July 2016. Web. “Six Dead after Church Bombing.” September 16, 1963. The Washington Post. 27 July 2016. Web. “Stereotype.” The Oxford English Dictionary. Web. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. 1852. Ed. Christopher Glen Diller. Petersborough: Broadview Press, 2009.

MINORITY LITERATURE

ARAB AMERICANS: THE EXAMPLE OF NAOMI SHIHAB NYE BOUCHRA BOUTERRA AND TOUFIK LACHOURI

A man letters the sign for his grocery In Arabic and English Paint dries more quickly in English The thick swoops and curls of Arabic letters Stay moist and glistening Till tomorrow when the children Show up jingling their dimes —Nye, “Steps” (Fuel 79)

Even if many Americans today may deny the importance of American multiculturalism, history will always emphasize its importance in building the American nation. The presence of different ethnic groups has made America a very diverse place. It is the only country where we can find Italians Russians, Japanese, French and Arabs eating at the same restaurant. But multiculturalism can strengthen America only if the members of different cultures are strongly aware of who they are and how important they are. This issue also applies to the Arab American population in the United States. Finding themselves caught between the boundaries of a new society and an old tradition, Arab Americans face the dilemma of “Doubleness.” The success of African American multiculturalism has helped them calling themselves “Arab Americans.” This group of people faced the same troubles as the Puritans when they first arrived to their Promised Land: “Many travelers find themselves saying of an experience in a new country, that it wasn’t what they expected, meaning that it isn’t what a book said it would be” (Said 93). People from all over the Arab world have moved to the U.S, lured primarily by the American dream. Most of these “neo-Puritans” have escaped segregation, terrorism, and all sorts of problems in their own countries and fled to this Promised Land in an attempt to have a better life.

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Before digging into the dilemma of identity we need to know first: who are these Arab Americans? An Arab American is an immigrant or an American-born citizen with Arab ancestry. They may be Muslim, Christian or Jew, but they all share stories of war, exile, non-belonging, a lost language and a lost identity. As Shora writes: While most of the Arab world is Muslim, the Arab-Americans are overwhelmingly Christian (77%). More specifically, 43% of these Christians are Catholic, 23% Eastern Orthodox […] and roughly 11% are Protestant. Only 23% of Arab-Americans are Muslim. Arab-Americans live in every state in the nation and hold positions across society. They are taxi drivers and grocers, firefighters and law enforcement officers, nurses and dentists, businessmen and stockbrokers, designers and entertainers. Arab Americans are woven into the fabric of American life and history. (28)

The Arab community in the U.S. originates from 22 different countries, from the far East to the far West. The first Arab who came to the USA was a Moroccan slave known as Zammouri. He arrived to Florida in 1528. The immigration of Arabs to the United States of America is divided into three waves. The first wave started in 1924. There were almost 200,000 Arabs looking for the American Dream were almost 200,000 Arabs. In the 1960’s a huge second wave started consisting of two kinds of immigrants, who were either highly educated students (doctors, engineers, scientists etc) or unskilled single man (looking for jobs such as mining, automobile industry etc.). The third wave started in the 1970’s. It consists, mainly, of students seeking a better education, families or members of families who have escaped war and terrorism in their mother countries. All the troubles and the identity crash of the Arabs were intensified by the 9/11 catastrophe. Glen A. Love claims: Still in the shadow of September 11, 2001, and the catastrophic destruction of the World Trade Center, which claimed thousands of lives, I hear again and again that the world changed forever on that day. The way we conduct our daily lives, our sense of our social environment, our systems of domestic security, our foreign policy, our attitude toward strangers, toward travel, toward our families, toward the future—all has changed. (164)

The destruction of the World Trade Center was a curse that fell hard on the entire globe; everything changed. The situation and the life of Arab Americans in the U.S were the most damaging consequence of it. Arabs found themselves stranger again. The troubles that they thought they had overcome with their immigration came to life again because of this incident. So, along with the social, psychological and linguistic problems, Arabs now had to face the problem of being the enemy. Anti-Arab stereotypes

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and phobias started to develop as the new disease of the modern era. At this point, Arab Americans were forced, once more, to show America and the whole world their true nature. They wanted the world to see that they are merely another people who feel, live, think and act like any other American. One of the tools efficiently used by Arab Americans to fulfill this goal was literature. Literature has had a significant role in strengthening Arab American identity. Arab American literature has been influenced by difference and the principle of acceptance of differences. Arab-American writers have understood the importance of writing themselves in a proper way. They know that we are living in a world in which you should “write yourself” or you will be written by others: Since 9/11, Arab Americans have been the subject of much discussion in both popular and scholarly forums. Books on the suddenly visible ArabAmerican community have been published recently or are forthcoming, and courses dealing with Arab Americans are gradually entering university curricula. This interest is cross-disciplinary, having become evident in numerous humanities and social science fields. (Orfalea 107)

Arab American literature is not a new body of literature. It goes back to the early years of the twentieth century. The first Arab American writers were highly recognized and widely read. They were the first hyphenated Americans to be considered by the U.S Literary Committee as a literary force. In the early 1920’s, these Arab American writers created what we know as the New York Pen League or Al Rabitah Al Qalamiyah. They called themselves Shoaraa El Mahjar or poets of immigration. The group consisted of poets mainly from Syria and Lebanon. The most famous among them were: Elia Abu Madi, Mikhail Naimy, Gibran Khalil Gibran and Ameen Rihani, who was known as the father of Arab American literature. These poets wrote in Arabic and then helped to have their works translated into English. Gibran’s masterpiece The Prophet, for example, gained wide fame in the United States. It was a bestseller for a long period. Mikhael Naimy was nominated for the Noble prize. In “Grandmothers, Grape Leaves, and Khalil Gibran: Writing Race in Anthologies of Arab American Literature,” Michelle Hartman lists three books among a great number of books which are still easily accessible to different readers. She states that Arab American literature has a great power that has strengthened the position and perception of Arab Americans: Arab American literature began to be increasingly anthologized starting in the late 1980s and into the 1990s. Three major anthologies appeared between 1988 and 1999, making a broader range of Arab American literary

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Arab Americans: The Example of Naomi Shihab Nye works available than ever before. Grapes Leave: A Century of Arab American Poetry (Orfalea and Elmusa 2000), Food for Our Grandmothers: Writings by Arab American and Arab Canadian Feminists (Kadi 1994), A Post-Gibran Anthology of New Arab American Writing (Akash and Mattawa 1999) are all easily accessible books, published by relatively mainstream publishers. Each of these three books embraces a significantly different focus, showing the breadth of Arab American literary production… (170)

The only difference between the old Al-Mahjar writers and contemporary writers is that the former did not have an identity crisis (they did not focus on proving their Americanness), whereas the latter have been concerned with culture and identity issues: The literature of Arab American writers continues to evolve as a cultural representation and as a literary accomplishment. The new generation of writers, including spoken word performers and rap artists, attend to the matters of their time as well as to the concerns of history. They follow the great tradition of Al-Mahjar. As the children of Gibran, Naimy, Rihani, and Madi, these writers will continue to make their marks and influence American literature. (Abinader 15)

On a general scale, Arab American writers have tried to give their own picture about their identity with its stable or unstable existence. Arab American writers often place themselves behind or in-between the hyphen. Their characters are often torn between two worlds, two cultures, two understandings and two languages. The issue of Arab women has been widely tackled by non-Arab Americans. They have always been mysterious to Americans. Therefore, the non-Arabs usually mistake or misrepresent their identities in their work, and as a consequence, Arab Americans have found themselves even more invisible in America than in their own homelands. The Arab American female writers tried to challenge the Western understanding and presentation of women, being as active as the male writers. Originally, they even participated in the Al Mahjer movement. Thus, Afifa Karam is considered the first Arab American writer to gain a general audience in America and in her homeland Lebanon. Contemporary Arab American women are more aware and more focused on women’s issues in the Arab and the American worlds. The American multicultural reality has strongly influenced the development of Arab American women writers, in particular the literature of Asian Americans, Native Americans and African Americans. They have

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created a special bond between themselves and the women of other ethnic backgrounds: Arab American writers look to other ethnic American writers such as Toni Morrison or Maxine Hong Kingston as models for expressing aspects of their respective groups that reflected lived experiences. Azziz refers to such internal aspects as the ‘intimacies’ of one’s culture. Such multicultural models resonate especially with Arab American women writers who are struggling to negotiate what Majaj refers to as the ‘dual burden of both cultural and gender ambassadorship’, this burden is a shared one among ethnic women writers who attempt to redefine and challenge the stereotypes projected on their group from outside and the negative practices within their own groups. (Kaid 75)

The female Arab American poets of the twentieth century have continued the path of their Al Mahjar male ancestors. In addition to assimilating themselves to the other American ethnic groups, they always try to go back to the old in order to enrich and strengthen the new. Such diversities have made these poets neither Arabs nor Americans but fall into Bhabha’s “third space.” This has given them room to move freely and to write and talk on behalf of themselves: “In Bhabha’s conception, third spaces become a locus of new power and authority. To some extent, Bhabha’s third spaces are counter-cultural places of discourse characterized by challenge, enquiry, empowerment and creativity” (Elliott 94). In their attempt to create new spaces, women can maintain more strength and selfconfidence. Thus, Arab American women have become aware of a new place that helps them to stop being the victims—or the enemies. In the wake of 9/11, Arab American women became the target of all kinds of terror and violence. They were blamed simply for being Arab women. The rebuttal they received fell even harder on Muslim Arab Americans. Islamophobic attitudes pushed Westerners to rebuff the importance and strength of Arab women, and they were even neglected by feminists themselves. Since Islam was considered an antifeminist religion, feminists had their role in silencing and discriminating Muslim women. Yet the artists at this period decided to help women to discover their real selves and to deny any other presentation on their behalf. Susan Muaddi Darraj was one of the first Arab American feminists who fought for the appropriate presentation of women. She published Scheherazade’s Legacy in 2004. This book highlights the importance of the art of writing in empowering women’s identities. It demonstrates Darraj’s disappointment with the status, the perception, and the reception of Arab American women. Scheherazade’s Legacy fights all norms of silencing artists. It emphasizes the power of the word to enhance the survival of the marginalized:

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Arab Americans: The Example of Naomi Shihab Nye So there can be a hazardous undertow to urging the artists to self-silencing in the Salman Rushdie affair: you don’t want to be a cultural traitor like him, do you? It hangs very tacitly, very subtly, usually over the head of all Muslim artists. But you know what? The dark side of who we are will not stay covered up, nor does it help us to cover it up, and asking the disturbing, subversive questions is a noble jihad. Fear is not basic for any art and never can be. (15)

Naomi Shihab Nye is one of the leading contemporary Arab American poets. She is a highly recognized poet who was deeply inspired by her family members, especially her father and her grandmother: Palestinian American Naomi Shihab Nye is another poet who affirms and gives voice to Arab culture and tradition while at the same time making space for change. Nye, daughter of a Palestinian Muslim father and an American Christian mother, is one of the most well known Arab-American authors: a prolific writer who has earned an avid readership among ArabAmerican and mainstream American audiences, children and adults, Nye has managed to bring Arab culture and politics into the US sphere in a deeply humanistic fashion. (Majaj n.p.)

In her poetry, she tries to capture both cultures. She talks about war and peace, Arab Americans, and multicultural issues. Nye celebrates peace and unity through her lines. She stresses the happiness that arises out of harmony. According to her, when the English and the Arabic worlds merge, they can create a better person, a better identity and a better new world. In her poem “Steps,” Nye states: They have learned the currency of the New World Caring wishes for gum and candies They float through the streets Diving deep to the bottom Nosing rich layers of crusted shell (Fuel 79)

We read that Nye’s new world was once the world of a lost little girl who was wondering with her doll in her hands and searching for home. The little Naomi found herself in a crossroad between the Arabic and the English worlds. Her identity was torn between two things and she could not choose either of them. The “wondering poet” finished her twisted road as she decided neither to be an Arab nor an American, but to be an Arab American. Nye has rooted her Arab American belonging in her father’s experience as a Palestinian man living in America. She witnessed the way her father struggled to stay strong and to provide a living for his family:

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She marveled at his language ability and understood some of the problems of a Palestinian coping with a new culture. She saw his drive to maintain his otherness while trying, sometimes unsuccessfully, to make a living for his family. She was aware of the fragile balance between being the person in authority and yet failing in different ventures like his business because he did not quite have control over his environment. Nye dimly connected her sense of identity with this Palestinian-American figure representing in part the ‘uprooted fig’ who finally found a sense of belonging, and the patriarchal figure whose sense of power came largely through his verbal dexterity. (Kutrieh 13)

Nye is usually associated with Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg since they are also concerned with identity issues. Her interest in other cultures and traditions did not prevent her from focusing on the individuality of people. She has captured a wide audience with her multicultural poetry, insisting on the importance and uniqueness of each person, and urging people to share their differences. Nye believes that such a sharing will help in the making of a better world. In “Different Ways to Pray” (1952), she writes: There was the method of kneeling, a fine method, if you lived in a country Where stones were smooth. The women dreamed wistfully of bleached courtyards, Hidden corners where knee fit rock. Their prayers were weathered rib bones, Small calcium words uttered in sequence, As if this shedding of syllables could somehow Fuse them to the sky. There were the men who had been shepherds so long They walked like sheep. Under the olive trees, they raised their arms— Hear us! We have pain on earth! We have so much pain there is no place to store it! But the olives bobbed peacefully In fragrant buckets of vinegar and thyme. At night the men ate heartily, flat bread and white cheese, And were happy in spite of the pain, Because there was also happiness. (Words Under the Words 1-19)

Such poems celebrate the Arab tradition of simple ordinary people. The different approaches that people use to pray kneeling, sitting, talking … are seen by the poet as tools to connectedness. This poem shows how people come to achieve self-awareness, especially with their connection to the earth. Nye explores multiculturalism by highlighting how different

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people can pray in different ways to reach the same end. Her Islam did not affect her poem. Different non-Muslims have responded positively to “Different Ways to Pray.” Nye depends on metaphor, imagery and story to represent people’s attempts to make sense of their lives. She tries as well to convey some peaceful anti-war messages. Throughout her poetry, she seems to advocate more peace and stability rather than violence and chaos. Nye succeeds with each of her poems to reach into different parts of our humanity. Her skillful talent has made her a universal poet and taken her beyond the limits of the hyphen. Nye’s poem “Kindness” is a great example of the poet’s capacity to gather different voices around her. It highlights the sorrow and the hope for happiness, standing for an optimistic attitude towards our world: “Before you know what kindness really is / You must lose things” (Words 1-2). Kindness in this sense holds a complex meaning. These lines show that our universe is complicated. We always lose something in order to gain something more important. We need to consider the greater good and the rightful principles that we might lose things for: “Feel the future dissolve in a moment / Like salt in a weakened broth” (3-4). The above lines prove how the most important things in our lives can easily slip out of our hands. Nye focuses on the future as the most important thing that everyone is working for. She associates the future with salt. Both can dissolve in a moment. These lines prove that we can sometimes lose the most important things in our lives to possess kindness: What you held in your hand, What you counted and carefully saved, All this must go so you know How desolate the landscape can be Between the regions of kindness. (5-9)

Once again, the poem explains to us what the things we can truly lose are. The speaker says that we can lose whatever we have in our hands. The way she writes it proves this thing is close to us and that we hold tightly onto it. We can also lose money, which is something crucial in the lives of a lot of people. It is something that we work for hard; we have counted and saved carefully. All these precious things can be easily lost for the sake of kindness. In other words, we need to get rid of all our beloved things to be able to see, hear, and feel the sorrow and hardships of life. The next lines continue with the same idea, proving that all the good things are actually blinding us from the harshness of reality:

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How you ride and ride Thinking the bus will never stop, The passengers eating maize and chicken Will stare out the window forever. (10-13)

These lines show how we get tricked inside of our heads as we ride with the belief that the bus’s destination is given forever. This idea prevents us from feeling the suffering of others. It disconnects and distances us from the outer universe. Thinking that the bus will never stop puts us in a very passive attitude where we get trapped in a world with no sense and no sensibility. We feel that the other passengers are having their happy endless journey eating maize and chicken. Such a journey will keep them in the same position, “staring forever out of the window” into a world that they can never understand. Unless they give up their most precious moments: “Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness, / You must travel where the Indian in a white poncho / Lies dead by the side of the road” (14-15). Nye believes that in order to reach the deepest point of kindness, “Tender gravity of kindness” (14), we should give up our future, our property, our money and our happiness to that dead Indian. She used the dead Indian in her poem as a symbol of how life can turn its back on people, and that we can never learn to be kind unless we start to feel for others like the Indian they saw on the road. The lost of all these pleasurable things would help us to feel the way he feels. It would help us to “walk in his shoes,” that is: You must see how this could be you, How he too was someone Who journeyed through the night with plans And the simple breath that kept him alive. (18-20)

These lines are at the heart of the poem. They stress the most sensitive side of humanity; how we can feel each other and carefully listen to each other. When we listen, and understand each other’s suffering, it will be impossible for us to hurt each other. In these lines all ethnic, racial and cultural problems dissolve. And only this way can we say that we are citizens of the world, we are multicultural. Through these lines, our poet links, connects and gathers the whole humanity together. Nye’s “kindness” theory, or therapy, solves all multicultural and ethnocentric issues. When we feel each other’s pain, we will become one body with one soul, regardless of our origins and backgrounds. She goes on writing:

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Arab Americans: The Example of Naomi Shihab Nye Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, You must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice Catches the thread of all sorrows And you see the size of the cloth. (21-26)

In order to obtain kindness, we need to acknowledge sorrow as the second deepest thing inside of us. These lines show that if we want to be kind, we need to feel and understand sorrow. Both of them walk hand in hand to connect human beings. They are two faces of the same coin. It is only when you touch the sorrow and when you come to realize it as the second deepest things that the deepest thing can come to you. When you understand others’ sorrows and respond to them, kindness will accept you: Then it is only kindness that makes any sense anymore, Only kindness that ties your shoes And sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread, Only kindness that raises its head From the crowd of the world to say It is I you have been looking for, And then goes with you everywhere Like a shadow or a friend. (27-28)

Nye succeeds to merge not only the Arab with the American, but the whole of humanity together. Her holistic attitude gives her clear boundaries for her identity. Even if she is concerned with the Arab tradition, her poetry celebrates the American tragedy of storytelling. The identification with both cultures has given her a great strength. This recognition has helped her to fend off troubles and any kind of identity crisis, especially in the post 9/11 period. Multiculturalism has enriched the American society with the different multi-cultural and multi-ethnic diversities it consists of. Arab Americans have succeeded to re-establish their lives in America. Their successful story marks the rebirth of a new mixture of “Multicultural America.” The long path they took and are still taking is summarized in Nye’s poetry in a very thorough way. The “multiculturality” of Arabs that has already come with them from their homelands is an additional point in the match of the U.S.A vs. the rest of the world.

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Works Cited Abdelrazek, A.T. Contemporary Arab American Women Writers: Hyphenated Identities and Broader Crossings. New York: Cambria Press, 2007. Abinader, Elmaz. “Children of Al-Mahjar: Arab American Literature Spans a Century.” US Society and Values: Contemporary US Literature, Multicultural Perspectives 5.1 (Feb. 2000): 11-17. Darraj, Susan Muaddi, ed. Scheherozade’s Legacy: Arab and Arab American Women on Writing. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004. Elliott, Greg. “Creating Spaces for Practitioner Research: Strategic Leadership to Create a Third Space for Practioner Enquiry in an Authentic Professional Learning Community.” Rethinking Educational Practice Through Reflexive Inquiry. Ed. Nicole Mockler and Judyth Sachs. New York: Springer, 2001. 89-104. Fludernik, Monika, ed. Diaspora and Multiculturalism: Common Traditions and New Developments. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2003. Fodda-Conrey, C. Contemporary Arab American Literature: Transnational Reconfiguration. New York: New York UP, 2014. Hartman, Mitchell. “Grandmothers, Grape Leaves and Khalil Gibran: Witing Race Anthologies of Arab American Literature.” Race and Arab Americans Before and After 9/11: From Invisible Citizens to Visible Subjects. Ed. Amaney Jamal and Nadine Naber. New York: Syracuse UP, 2008. 170-203. Kadi, Joana, ed. Food For Our Grandmothers: Writing by Arab Americans and Arab Canadian Feminists. Cambridge: South End Press, 1994. Kaid, Nassima. Hyphenated Selves: Arab American Women Identity Negotiation in the Works of Contemporary Arab American Women Writers. Oran: University of Oran, 2013. PhD dissertation. Khaled, Mattawa, and Munir Akash, eds. Post-Gibran Anthology of New Arab American Writing. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1999. Kutrieh, Marcia G. “Images of Palastinians in the Work of Naomi Shehab Nye.” JKAV: Arts and Humanitites 5 (2007): 3-16. Love, G. A. Patriarchal Ecocriticism: Literature, Biology and the Environment. Virginia: U of Virginia P, 2003. Majaj, Lisa Suhair. “Arab American Literature: Origins and Development.” American Studies Journal 52 (2008): 05/07/2014. Web. Nye, Naomi Shihab. 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East. New York: Green Willow Books, 2002.

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—. Fuel: Poems by Naomi Shihab Nye. New York: BOA Editions Ltd, 1998. —. Words Under the Words: Selected Poems. Portland: Oregon: Far Corner Books, 1995. Orfalea, Gregory, and Sharif Elmusa, eds. Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab American Poetry. Vol. 15. New York: Oxford UP, 1994. Orfalea, G. The Arab Americans: A History. Olive Branch Press, 2006. Said, Edward. Orientalism. 1978. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. Shora, Nawar. The Arab American Handbook. Seattle: Cune Press, 2009.

“D’ICI ET D’AILLEURS”:1 HYBRIDITY, DOUBLE STANDARDS AND THE WESTERN ARAB MUSLIM WOMAN RIM KHALED

Intercultural and intercontinental relations have often been governed by elements of varying nature, ranging from trade and commerce, to colonization, to immigration. The movement of the latter is generally vertical, ascending from the South to the North; in other words, from developing countries towards developed countries, i.e., the West (Europe and America). Immigrants leave their countries seeking opportunities to offer their children a decent life, a good education, and more chances to success. Nevertheless, these people do not always leave their countries lightheartedly; for instance, some of them do not have the right diploma to work in their countries of origin where job opportunities are not abundant, others, flee their countries because of political turmoil and war as refugees. This is the case of Arabs who emigrated to the West. Interestingly, a certain pattern in the case of the latter can be delineated: on the one hand, Arabs from the Middle East tend to emigrate to America, usually fleeing some political unrest in their countries; and on the other hand, Arabs from North Africa tend to emigrate to Europe looking for job opportunities. Once they have emigrated, Muslim-Arab immigrants settle down in their new countries and establish families, but since they oftentimes leave their countries with a heavy heart, they try to find a balance by remaining attached to their culture. This practice—although not exclusive to Muslim Arabs—is not free of consequences as it does have certain implications, especially with regard to their children and the latter’s definition of themselves. Sons and daughters of immigrants live by the rules of two cultures; they live and are educated in the West according to Western principles and values, but are constantly reminded of their “origins” by their parents who persist in inculcating their values, traditions, cultural heritage, and religion in their children’s minds. Consequently, the children end up being torn 1

Title of a song by the French singer Sheryfa Luna about hybridity.

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between two cultures, and struggle in the process of self-definition and self-identification as either Western or Arab, or both. This is even more relevant and problematic for female descendants of Muslim-Arab immigrants living in the West as they are raised according to a set of quite conservative principles while living in liberal countries. Accordingly, the parents become exceptionally protective of, and anxious about, their daughters’ or sisters’ life choices, futures, and especially honor. Besides, women raised according to a Muslim-Arab set of principles—even if living in the West—have to meet certain expectations and abide by the rules of certain gender roles oftentimes governed by double standards. This paper is interested in studying the notion of biculturalism—often referred to as “cultural hybridity”—and it will attempt to investigate how this experience influences Western Arab Muslim women’s definition and perception of themselves and of gender roles broadly speaking. For this purpose, we will rely on a corpus of two different works: the American TV-reality show All-American Muslim and the French novel Née en France. Histoire d’une Jeune Beur written by Aicha Benaissa in collaboration with Sophie Ponchelet. The generic difference between the works of the corpus does not constitute a problem as this paper is solely interested in the testimonial nature of the content manifested, regardless of the aesthetic dimension. Besides, though different in nature, these works offer a quite interesting approach to the topic at hand, i.e., multiculturalism in context. The former, at the core of American multiculturalism, sets forth a miscellany of women’s portraits, all living and showing their faith in dissimilar ways, defining their Americanness and its relation to their religion and cultural heritage differently, thus behaving and looking disparately. This TV-show takes place in Dearborn, a city comprising one of the largest Arab-American communities. Née en France, on the other hand, is fascinating inasmuch as it propounds a quite complicated and intriguing protagonist. Aicha is a first generation French girl of Algerian descent, who is aware of her biculturalism and struggles with it, simply because she knows which part of herself she identifies with the most, but finds herself facing obstacles imposed by her cultural heritage embodied by her parents. This paper will be devoted to the study of the notion of hybridity first; how it is explained, expressed, and experienced in both works. Second it will focus on women’s gender roles, how they are shaped and defined by this notion of hybridity, ultimately raising the issue of double standards, clichés and counter-clichés. Finally, it will attempt to synthesize and underline the similarities and differences between these different intercultural testimonies and relate them to the concept of multiculturalism in their respective contexts.

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The Hybrid Experience Situations emerging from multiculturalism, immigration, colonization, post-colonization, or simply globalization, have created complex ties and relations between cultures and people. One of the most interesting outcomes of such complex relations is the impact it has on the descendants of immigrants, who are usually raised in a context of biculturalism, or hybridity. This concept has taken different meanings throughout the years and mainly gained prominence in the framework of post-colonialism. We are, however, not interested in a Homi Bhabha reading of the TV-show and the novel under study; rather, the type of hybridity to be considered is cultural hybridity also known as cultural mixing. In this context Kalra and others explain that with relation to diaspora, the most conventional accounts assert hybridity as the process of cultural mixing where the diasporic arrivals adopt aspects of the host culture and rework, reform and reconfigure this in production of a new hybrid culture or ‘hybrid identities’. (71; also see Chambers 50)

Creating this hybrid identity is not an easy process; it is rather the outcome of a complex process wherein the descendants of immigrants often feel torn between two cultures. This issue is easier to overcome when the parents’ culture and the ‘host culture’ are not multifarious; however, when they are, defining a hybrid identity of one’s own will have wider implications. This is what Muslim-Arab immigrants living in the West experience quite frequently because of the opposed nature of the two cultures. In this context, Eero Janson explains that “it is assumed that Islam in itself is incompatible with some kind of coherent understanding of ‘being Western’” (184). This brings to the foreground the already established assumption that Islam and West are inherently different, thus widening the gap between those two cultures, leading to a thornier problem for descendants of Arab Muslim immigrants. This is especially true for Muslim ArabWestern women as their culture tends to be more conservative with regard to their place in the family, their actions, and the repercussions their actions could have on the family’s reputation. In a context of biculturalism, a certain pattern can be delineated: one culture is inherited while the second one is directly experienced. Accordingly, the parents’ role in the children’s education and lives becomes primordial and vital inasmuch they are the ones responsible for the relaying of one of the cultures. In fact, taking a closer look at the Muslim Arabs’ perception of family as a social institution, and the corpus under study, the parents always emerge as an authority, but also as the only link these de-

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scendants have with their culture. Therefore, the daughters and sons of immigrants are first exposed to their culture through what their parents tell them about their history, their traditions, their language, and religion. According to Haddad and Smith, “the issue of how to raise children in the context of Western society is one of the more serious problems facing Arab Muslims. If children are sent to public schools they quickly learn values of the prevailing society that many Arab families disavow” (29). The fear of losing their identity, and seeing their own culture extinguish under their eyes is what dismays the parents. Consequently, they adopt the role of mediator between their culture and their children, a role especially important for the mothers usually responsible for childrearing. This very idea is prevalent in both All-American Muslim and Née en France. For instance, in Née en France, Aicha, the protagonist, recounts events from her parents’ past, how they used to live in Algeria, how they got married, and how her mother’s ideas were rather emancipated for her time and place. She explains that she often talks about the past with her mother ʊa past that goes back to Algeria, and by extension to her cultureʊin an attempt to understand her parents, their views, and their culture—a culture she has inherited but cannot quite understand. Her parents’ influence in shaping her identity as a Muslim-Arab girl living in France is evident in some passages, when she states, “J’ai réussi à dissocier ma personnalité, à faire cohabiter en moi deux personnages opposés: la Française que je suis, l’Algérienne que mes parents auraient voulu que je sois” (Benaissa 15),2 or when she explains, “Je ne pouvais pas non plus m’habiller comme je l’aurais voulu. Mes parents décidaient toujours pour moi” (27).3 These passages demonstrate how Aicha’s parents have wanted to raise an Algerian girl, believing they could keep her closer to their culture, traditions, and faith by imposing some rules that would govern her life, such as the respect of a certain dress code. Likewise, in All-American Muslim, the descendants of Lebanese immigrants show immense respect for the family as a social institution; they hold their eldest in the highest ranks, learn from them, and seek their approval in every step they take. Obtaining their parents’ approval seems to symbolize the approval of their community, and by extension of their religion and culture. The parents are in fact the only thread linking the children to their culture of descent; they are the spokespersons of their 2

“I managed to divide my personality, allowing two opposed individuals to coexist: the French that I am and the Algerian that my parents wanted me to be” (my translation). 3 “I couldn’t dress as I wished either. My parents always decided for me” (my translation).

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culture and faith. Consequently, having the parents’ blessing means the children’s actions are concordant with their cultural heritage. For example, when Nina Bazzy-Aliahmad decides to open a club in Dearborn, she starts her plans, looks for real estate, but the eventual realization of the project seems to depend on one factor: her mother’s approval, which is why she dreads the moment she tells her mother about it and keeps on postponing it. In episode 03 she explains: “I haven’t told my parents yet; living in Dearborn, people are gonna talk about a girl being in that type of business” (11’16”-11’22”)4. This reluctance to inform her parents about her project seems questionable and quite confusing; if Nina is the strong woman she claims to be, then why would her parents’ approval be a determining factor? This point is brought to the surface again in episode 05, when Nina discusses her mother’s concerns about her project with her sister, and the latter asks her: “If you’re gonna do it, you’re gonna do it Nina, why are you waiting for mom and her approval?” (6’32”), and Nina explains to the audience: “In this community, one individual could affect their whole family”; therefore, one’s actions could have wider implications when living in a certain community founded on biculturalism and governed by double standards. Thus there is an ostensible divergence between the parents’ and the children’s perception of life. This is where the notion of cultural hybridity is the most relevant: the parents, though living in Western countries, still think and behave according to their Muslim-Arab traditions; by contrast, their offspring share mostly Western principles and values but adhere to their culture in order to please their parents, and to maintain a certain feeling of belonging. Consequently the children often find themselves dithering and unsure about which values and principles to adopt. Interestingly, in her novel Aicha Bensaissa is quite aware of this coexistence of paradoxical selves defined by opposed cultures. In fact, she auto-defines herself as a hybrid in the very title of her book Née en France. Histoire d’une Jeune Beur, since the word “beur” means “French from Arab origins.” Furthermore, the novel opens up with the idea of cultural hybridity as it starts with the Berber sentence “Andki ala drairi,” translated into French “Attention aux garcons,”5 thus illustrating biculturalism through bilingualism from the onset; later, Aicha explains that Arabic is her mother tongue even though she was born in France,6 which points to the complex relations sons and daughters of immigrants have with both cultures, oscillating between embracing, compromising, and 4

All transcriptions from the show are mine. “Beware of the boys” (my translation) 6 “C’est ma langue maternelle, même si je suis née en France” (Benaissa 34). 5

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rejecting. Ironically, Aicha fails to grasp an important linguistic feature of her mother tongue owing to her biculturalism; in fact she uses “Arabic” and “Berber” interchangeably, assuming that it is the same, when in Algeria in particular Tamazightʊi.e., Berberʊ people insist on maintaining the distinction between the two languages. Aicha also explains how her parents have tried to offer their children a mixed education by imposing in France values and rules they had learned and lived by in Algeria, hence facing obstacles resulting from the contrasting natures of those cultures: “Ils avaient essayé d’adopter une éducation ‘mixte’, en adaptant ici, en France, le modèle qu’ils avaient reçu en Algérie. Mais trop de règles sont difficiles à transposer, quand elles ne sont pas totalement contradictoires” (Benaissa 20).7 This passage also brings to the foreground the struggles that Arab parents face when it comes to the education of their children in a Western environment, only to realize that it demands strenuous efforts since the cultures seem incompatible at times. Later, Aicha makes a powerful statement about hybridity when she avows: Mais mes parents ne pouvaient pas tout comprendre. Ils n’imaginaient même pas les difficultés que nous rencontrions en dehors de la maison à cause de cette éducation, mélange de deux cultures distinctes et souvent incompatibles. En recevant ainsi des bribes de chacune, on n’en assimile 8 aucune complètement. (21)

This passage draws attention to two major drawbacks of biculturalism. First, the sons and daughters of immigrants seem to suffer from what could be dubbed a “third space syndrome”—which is completely distinct from the medical condition sharing the same appellation. Instead, the latter sends back to that liminal space where children of immigrants often find themselves dwelling as a result of their cultural hybridity, Bhabha’s “site where cultural differences can be articulated and postcolonial people have the possibility to renegotiate their own identities outside of externallyimposed binaries” (Cawley). Despite the possibilities it offers, this space is often permeated with doubt and uncertainty; it is the grey area that separates the two cultures to which these hyphenated beings belong. Second, 7

“They have tried to adopt a ‘mixed’ education, by adapting here, in France, the same model they had received back in Algeria. But too many rules are difficult to transpose, that is, if they are not completely contradictory” (my translation). 8 “But my parents couldn’t understand everything. They couldn’t even possibly imagine the difficulties we were having outside the house because of this education; a mixture of two distinct cultures, often incompatible. By receiving bits and parts of each, we wind up assimilating none completely” (my translation).

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and of equal importance in the above-cited passage, is how Aicha describes the lack of understanding between her and her parents, which is highly reminiscent of the case of Nina’s mother and her inability to understand and accept her daughter’s ambitions in the TV-show All-American Muslim. Despite their mutual efforts, a pre-existent gap seems to hinder this process on both sides; in fact it is the combined effect of two gaps: a generational and a cultural gap. Accordingly, as cultural hybrids, first generations are neither immigrants nor typical Westerners: they seem to be lost in transition, in the space separating the two cultures, a liminal space. A last element worth noting is the dichotomy within/without that Aicha mentions when referring to her divergent worlds at home and outside the home. She explicates: Vu de l’extérieur, j’ai reçu une éducation ‘à la Française’: j’allais à l’école comme les autres, je portais les même vêtements. Mais une fois rentrée à la maison, je devais respecter des règles qui n’étaient d’ailleurs jamais 9 énoncées clairement; tout restait sous-entendu, suggéré. (Benaissa 21)

This passage underlines once again the distinction between two cultures, two worlds, each represented by a space: the public and the private. This feeling expressed by Aicha is quite common among daughters of MuslimArab immigrants in France; in fact, a study comparing Algerian young women to French young women of Algerian descent, maintains: Pour les jeunes filles d’origine algérienne, parler de la société, de l’école c’est parler d’abord de leurs différences mais aussi de leurs appartenances à la culture française car les normes aussi bien sociales que juridiques qui régissent ces espaces sont parfois en contradiction avec celles qu’elles re10 trouvent dans la famille et dans le quartier. (Hallouma 179)

Therefore, Aicha is not an exception; her case is similar to many other French women of Muslim-Arab descent living in France, and their situation and feeling has been the same ever since immigration started. The only difference arises when it comes to their reaction to such a dilemma: 9

“From the outside, I received an education ‘à la française’: I went to school like the others, wore the same clothes. But once I set a foot at home, I had to abide by certain rules which, by the way, were never clearly stated; everything was implied, suggested” (my translation). 10 “For French young women from Algerian descent, talking about society, or school, amounts to talking about their differences first, but also their belonging to the French culture because the social, as well as legal, norms that govern these spaces are often in contradiction with those they encounter in the family or in their district” (my translation).

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coping or rejecting either culture. In this specific example, Aicha decides to reject her parents’ culture after a long struggle, thus realizing that she feels rather estranged from it; this is made visible in her claim that she has always felt torn between the French that she is and the Algerian her parents want her to be. The same is clear in her rejection of Islam, and finally, in the way she talks about Algerians and people from the Maghreb (i.e., North Africa) as “Others,” never identifying as part of that group. For example, she declares, “Les Maghrébins, entre eux, ne sont pas toujours faciles à vivre. Ils se renferment sur eux-mêmes, se créent leur propre ghetto” (Bensaissa 19),11 or, “Avec les autres filles maghrébines de ma classe, j’avais des rapports plutôt distant” (30).12 Therefore, not only does Aicha always exclude herself from this ethnic minority, but she also criticizes it. As mentioned previously, the descendants of Muslim-Arab immigrants living in the U.S. experience the same feeling to varying degrees. According to Read and Bartkowski, “research has revealed that Muslim American women creatively negotiate their gender, religious, and ethnic identities in light of dominant U.S. social norms and modernist discourses that often define these women as ‘other’” (397). The female characters in AllAmerican Muslim make no exception, and do propose different portraits revealing how each one of them has creatively negotiated her identity, thus mixing her cultural heritage to the modernity that Americanness implies. A simplified classification of the characters results in a division into conservative and liberal characters, depending on how they define themselves and practice their faith. Accordingly, the fairly conservatives are: Zaynab Zabban, Nawal Aoude and Suheila Amen; and those who are not as conservative are Angela Jaafar, Shadia Amen, and Nina Bazzy-Aliahmad. Despite their differences, all these characters embrace their culture, and define themselves as Muslim Arab Americans. For example, Nina—one of the most controversial characters—describes her prospective club as “Middle Eastern … something for us” (Episode 04, 6’44”-6’48”), thus using the inclusive pronoun ‘us’ to refer to the descendants of MuslimArab immigrants, establishing this group as a distinctive entity characterized by a mixture of Arabness and Americanness, which points in turn to their need for something idiosyncratic that would combine elements from both cultures. Another fascinating element emerges in Suheila’s description of her community; in the first episode she states that “being in Dearborn has 11

“Maghrebis, are not easy to live with. They don’t let anyone in, creating their own ghettos” (my translation). 12 “With the other Maghrebi girls in my class, I had rather distant relations” (my translation).

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allowed us to practice our faith without losing our sense of American patriotism” (Episode 1, 0’18”-0’25”). By explaining how living in Dearborn has allowed them to maintain both identities or rather both sides to their dual identity, Suheila points to two factors of major importance for her as a Muslim-Arab American: her faith and her “sense of American patriotism.” What is strikingly interesting in this passage is how Suheila advances her Muslim identity first by pointing to the practice of her faith in a primary position, only to point to her Americanness in a second position. In this specific context, Suheila describes Dearbornʊa city that comprises one of the biggest Muslim-Arab communitiesʊhence, the ordering of her identity as such reflects a strong sense of community. Later, in episode 07, Suheila makes another statement that once again underlines her biculturalism, only this time to emphasize her American identity first. When recalling the attack on the Twin Towers on 9/11, she explains: “9/11 affected all of us not just as an American but as a Muslim” (Episode 07, 13’15”-13’20”); therefore it seems arguable that this time Suheila advances her American identity first owing to the nationalist aspect of the issue. The way Suheila experiences her hybridity is interesting: she advances one culture or the other depending on the context and on which culture feels closer at that moment. This is a tendency typical of hybrids, and it demonstrates how the process of self-identification is quite relative and contextual. The idea of biculturalism is further expressed through the characters’ discourse, in their repetitive use of inclusive terms such as “we,” “us,” “our culture,” or “our community”—which further distinguishes them from mainstream Americans; as well as through their bilingualism characterized by code-mixing and code-shifting, especially when they address their parents, use religious phrases such “Inshallah” or “Allah ma’ak,” or terms of endearment such as “Habibi.” The major idea that ensues from this is that they are not “simple Americans” but rather a bilingual, bicultural, hybrid version of Americans. Interestingly, their response to their biculturalism in this context contrasts sharply with Aicha’s who explicitly distinguishes herself from the Maghrebi community. This brings to our attention an important element that plays a crucial role in the process of self-definition as a social being; it is the inter-group relations and behavior, an idea developed by Henri Tajfel and John C. Turner in their Social Identity Theory. Turner states that “[s]ocial identification can refer to the process of locating oneself, or another person, within a system of social categorizations, or as a noun, to any social categorization used by a person to define him- or herself and others” (18). Turner further explains that this concept is sometimes used to “indicate the process whereby an individual internalizes some form of social categorization so that it becomes a com-

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ponent of the self-concept, whether long-lasting or ephemeral.” Therefore, their respective definition of themselves and of their relation with their community has shaped their social experience of hybridity, which explains the dissimilarity mentioned above. The difference ensuing from biculturalism is even more manifest for Muslim Arab-Western women owing to their dress code, as they are supposed to wear modest clothes and cover most of their body, and eventually wear the hijab. Nevertheless not all the female characters in All-American Muslim wear the hijab, which is where the classification previously mentioned comes into play, thus illustrating how each one of them has negotiated her identity according to what she has chosen to keep or reject from each culture. In this regard, the distinction between conservatives and liberals is sometimes accounted for by culture and other times by religion; either way, the relation between both has always been fairly intertwined, which is why some notions and concepts have become negotiable. In AllAmerican Muslim it is the characters’ definition and perception of Islam that actually governs their actions. For instance, regarding the hijab, Nawal believes that it is a religious requirement dictated in the Qur’an, unlike Angela, who believes it is a matter of choice. Shadia—who identifies herself as an American Muslim of Arab descent—explains that she has read the Qur’an three times, but has decided not to follow all of it. Therefore, these women seem to refuse one single common definition of their identity as Muslim Arab Americans, as cultural hybrids, and as women. Rather, they have managed to negotiate their own individual identities and to find a compromise which answers their needs, their perception of themselves, and their biculturalism. Interestingly, even the conservative women tend to insist on the fact that they like to partake in entertaining activities like any other American or woman their age such as attending football games (Zaynab Zabban), going on a girls’ night-out (Suheila Amen), or simply going to the gym (Nawal Aoude). Their religion and their cultural values do not restrain them from enjoying a full American experience. Consequently, these women seem to offer counter-stereotypes. In fact, they destroy the clichés about Muslim women often circulating. Nevertheless, one should be aware of the fact that for some of them, the negotiation of their identity as Muslim Arab-American women is influenced either by mainstream American society or by their ethnic community. This point brings us to the notion of social desirability bias. According to Rudmin, social desirability bias is “the tendency for individuals to portray themselves in a generally favorable fashion” (qtd. in Khan and Ecklund 3). This concept applies mainly to Samira Amen in All American Muslim, when she explains why she had stopped wearing the hijab after

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9/11: “I wore the hijab pre-9/11, after 9/11 happened I wasn’t wearing the hijab because there are still people who view Muslim and view Islam as something that’s scary” (Episode 02, 24’08”-24’17”). She had thus defined her identity as a Muslim Arab American according to what society thought, according to stereotypes and assumptions, thus letting society and her desire to be an ordinary American—despite her biculturalism—define her appearance and choices in life. Eventually, she decides to wear the hijab again, even though society’s opinion and perception of her still matter; she explains: The scariest part about me wearing the hijab is that people may not understand… If I go on vacation and I go to a spa, let’s say, you’re not usually gonna find a woman wearing a hijab; and what are people gonna think of me… But it’s also something I feel God is going to protect me in… I hope I’m not in the middle of nowhere where nobody’s ever seen a scarf and you know… People start freaking out, but you know I also want to make it where it looks friendly and you know, not to make them stand-offish. (Episode 02, 24’56”-25’20”)

This passage reveals a lot about Samira, her identity, and the role society has played—and continues to play—in her process of self-definition. The notion of social desirability bias is all the more interesting in Samira’s case because it is a cultural element that she has renounced and then adopted again—though modulated—to please society. This does not come as a surprise and it underlines once again the dilemma that hybrids face on a daily basis: they are not immigrants, but they are not common Americans either; therefore they find themselves struggling to respect and enjoy their cultural heritage without failing to adequately integrate and appear as American as they really are. Samira cares about what society thinks of her and of her religion via the image she projects, which is why she modulates how she will fashion her hijab accordingly. But to what extent can the social desirability bias be influential? Can someone reject his/her origins or cultural heritage completely in order to please society? It would seem that this is the case of Aicha, the protagonist of Née en France. Histoire d’une Jeune Beur. Although the novel does not present a clear and ostensible example, the whole plotline seems to suggest so. In fact, Aicha identifies more as French, and eventually chooses that part of her identity. Nevertheless, at the beginning she highlights the duality of her identity, only to underline the incompatibility of her Algerian cultural heritage with the French culture. She also expresses estrangement from the Maghrebi community early-on and seems willing to opt for whatever looks more Western whenever she has a chance. Her parents’ fears and assumptions about Western values which resulted in the

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application of double standards might have corroborated those feelings, and may justify her choice. It seems arguable therefore that her actions and choices are probably fueled by an unconscious desire to integrate completely, to present herself to society as authentically French, and not a first-generation, bicultural hybrid. Eventually, it is interesting to note that the dilemma is even more complex for first-generation girls and women of Muslim-Arab descent, since their lives are often governed by double standards that operate at two levels, and they constantly find themselves fighting both Western and Arab clichés and stereotypes.

Western Arab-Muslim Women and Double Standards Daughters of Muslim-Arab immigrants always try to behave in a way that would protect the family’s reputation; they try their best to please their parents and consequently live under a certain authority. Nevertheless, some of them challenge this authority and those values because of their liberal Western ideas. This point, in turn raises the issue of double standards in the sense that these women live according to two different standards of what is socially acceptable. These women face gender and cultural double standards when it comes to marriage, dating, moving out, and even dress codes. For instance, ethnic homogamy—i.e., marrying someone from the same faith or culture—is considered standard, conventional, and socially accepted among first-generation Muslims living in the West. The first episode of the American TV-reality show revolves around this concept as Jeff McDermott, born a Catholic of Irish descent, converts to Islam in order to marry Shadia Amen. Interestingly, Jeff’s non-Muslim background has not prevented Shadia from dating him and accepting his proposal. This is clearly due to her Western ideas; as a cultural hybrid, Shadia does not object to dating a non-Muslim Western man, but she still wants him to convert to Islam if they are to marry, which precisely illustrates this kind of double standards. Likewise, in Née en France Histoire d’une Jeune Beur, Aicha cares about her parents’ opinion regarding her marriage even after fleeing the parental home and deciding to reject her Algerian heritage. She explains, “je sais que mon histoire avec lui [Antonio] continue à les heurter. Peutêtre s’il se convertissait à l’Islam seraient-ils soulagés” (Benaïssa 134).13 Despite her self-definition as French and her rejection of her parents’ cultural heritage, Aicha still considers homogamy as an option to please her 13

“I know that my affair with him [Antonio] still hurts them. May be, if he converted to Islam, they would feel better about it” (my translation).

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parents. Even though she has tried to rid herself of her biculturalism, it seems to be deeply anchored within, and some Arab standards—though opposed to her Western ones—seem to be bound to accompany her through life. The idea of a cultural double standard—which opposes their cultural heritage to their Western values and ideals—operates at another level, that of the appropriate age of marriage for a girl. In the Arab community, a girl should marry quite young, ideally in her twenties; past this age she is considered a spinster. This is the case of Suheila Amen in All-American Muslim, an idea introduced from the onset via the Imam’s joke at Shadia and Jeff’s religious pre-wedding ceremony. Shadia comments on “the ongoing joke with Suheila because she’s the old maid because at her age, which is not old, at thirty-two, but in Arab years, it’s like sixty-five” (Episode 01, 30’13”-30’21”), and Suheila comments on the Imam’s joke stating: “I was like, seriously, even the Imam is co-conspiring with my parents to get rid of me” (Episode 01, 30’27”-30’31”). The joke and the comments underline the importance of marrying young in the Arab community, and how the definition of the appropriate age is cultural in this context, showing once again a discrepancy between the norms and standards of the Arab culture and those of Western society to which these women are exposed since the day they were born. This brings to the foreground the double standards that first and second generation Arabs live by in the West when it comes to marriage. Accordingly, this norm has some implications that transcend the marital status to impact their personal growth and professional lives. In an interesting scene from the last episode of All American Muslims, the Amen family debate the subject brought up by Bilal regarding his sister Suheila and the possibility of her leaving the parental home for more fulfilling job opportunities in Washington, D.C.: Mother (in an aside testimony to the camera): If anyone of my kids were not married, and decided to move out, well I wouldn’t be happy with it at all, and I wouldn’t be supportive of it in any way whatsoever. Father (back with the family): Shadia, she can go anytime, she got her husband, I’ll say that to you [addressing Samira] you can go anywhere, you got your husband, she [pointing to Suheila] doesn’t have a husband… Suheila: What if I don’t ever have a husband? [Everyone talking at once] Hold on, wait, what if I don’t ever have a husband? Father: [brief silence] Maybe when I go… you can do whatever you want [laughter]. Mother: We had this discussion before, I wonder why you bring it up now, I don’t like when you do that… Suheila: There is life outside of Dearborn…

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Hybridity, Double Standards and the Western Arab Muslim Woman Father: We understand that. Suheila: … and if I am going to actually grow professionally, it’s not gonna be here… I’ve hit the glass ceiling… Mother: Okay, and I asked a questioned you still haven’t answered, what is it that you’re expecting to meet? What is it that you’re saying? Suheila: To meet a greater opportunity than being here, and working here… Mother: It’s just not gonna happen… Suheila: Why? Shadia: Mum, it’s not 1910! Mother: I don’t care what year it is… it’s… for me I’m not gonna let that… Suheila: Well, at some point you’re just gonna have to let it go and get over it… (Episode 08, 27’31”-28’35”)

This passage is quite enlightening with respect to the notion of double standards and the influence parents exert over their children—especially their daughters—regardless of their age and situation in life. Suheila’s potential relocation to Washington, D.C. engenders a heated debate at home, where the children and the parents have opposing views on the matter; this mainly illustrates the difference between the parents who impose their Arabic values in order to meet their social standards, and their children who share Western values, and thus perceive this standard as an impediment and would rather conform to Western standards regarding this question. This issue does not only exemplify a situation where first and second generation descendants of Muslim-Arab immigrants face a double standard opposing their two cultures, but it also depicts a situation where Suheila Amen, as a woman, faces the double standard ensuing from her gender and what is expected from her as a woman. Even though her mother does not distinguish man from woman in her testimony concerning her children moving out, the father’s speech and his insistence on her marital status brings this idea to the foreground. Furthermore, Bilal—who has left and returned to Dearborn—explicitly states this normative rule when he testifies in episode 04: “Traditionally, in our culture, single women usually don’t move out of the house, you know… you stay at home because there is no reason for you to leave, you know, parents aren’t having it, so it’s not something that you’d see a single Arab woman doing is moving out on her own” (33’21”-33’34”). Following, the debate over her moving, Suheila explains that eventually it is all related to the concept of reputation. This idea seems to be common among Arab immigrants and their progeny as, in Née en France, Aicha faces similar dilemmas regarding her role in the house, and her ambitions. She confesses:

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J’avais décidé que ce qui importait avant tout, c’était la poursuite de mes études. Il fallait que j’aille le plus loin possible. J’étais très intéressée par les langues, et je rêvais d’aller en Allemagne ou en Angleterre, comme les autres filles de ma classe. Mais ce n’était même pas la peine d’en parler à 14 la maison. Je connaissais d’avance la réponse. (Benaïssa 28)

As a cultural hybrid, Aicha has learnt from a young age that her culture might represent an obstacle at times and that as a girl, she might have to renounce some dreams—which may explain her choices at the end. In this passage, Aicha states that she would like to go to neighboring countries in order to pursue her studies, but she never mentions the subject to her parents assuming that they will refuse because she is a girl. She is quite aware of the existent double standards when it comes to women, which is made clear through her brother’s attitude and behavior, as she explains: “Mon frère était bien conscient d’être le seul garcon de la famille. Il en tirait profit et n’hésitait pas à jouer de son autorité” (22).15 Eventually, in order to escape a life governed by double standards at different levels, Aicha decides to flee with her lover Antonio, thus ultimately breaking all the social rules supposed to regulate an Arab girl’s life, even if she only partly shares that cultural background. As wives and mothers, society and cultural heritage also prescribe certain traditional roles and models to women; their house, their children and their husbands are their priority, sometimes to the detriment of their professional careers. According to Haddad and Smith, “[i]mplicit in the general understanding of the woman’s role is the expectation that whether or not she works outside of the home she still has primary responsibility for the care of children and management of the household” (35). Most female characters in All-American Muslims, however, have found a way to modulate their ambitions to the gender roles assigned to them by culture. In fact, these hybrid women have managed to negotiate their own version of their role within the family with the help of their husbands—who usually share this bicultural trait—thus creating a working mechanism combining elements from the traditional roles that the Arab culture attribute to them, and other elements from their Western up-bringing. This is the case of Nawal and Nader Aoude, a young couple who praise the benefits of team work 14

“I had decided that what mattered most was finishing my studies. I had to go as far as possible. I was passionate about languages, and I dreamt of going to Germany or England, like all the other girls in my class. But bringing it up at home was useless. I already knew the answer” (my translation). 15 “My brother knew all too well that he was the only boy in the family. He profited from it, and did not hesitate to use his authority” (my translation).

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within the family; though traditional in some of their way of life, they decided to adopt a modern division of house chores based on team work. Likewise, Nina Bazzy-Aliahmad and her husband propose a modern— almost iconoclastic—definition of gender roles as a couple in a MuslimArab community. After discussing her professional project with friends and family, Nina has been discouraged under the pretext that as a wife and mother she has priorities and that she would not be able to manage both, career and domestic work; ironically, it is her husband—though aware of the stakes—who encourages her to proceed with her idea, promising that he will be supportive in all possible ways. It seems quite manifest that cultural hybridity has implications that transcend the group to influence these hyphenated beings in their quest for—and definition of—their social identity. Arab Muslim women living in the West, aside from taking into consideration their biculturalism in the negotiation of their identities, also have to consider their gender, which imposes some constraints of its own, namely double standards. In this respect, it would be interesting to borrow the concept of the “antiessentialist vision of the ‘self’” from the field of identity studies—mainly developed in gender studies—which rejects a definition of “the self as something that people possess and that represents some kind of core essence of the person” (De Fina et al. 3). This vision introduces a perception of identity as “polyphonous,” thus offering the possibility to simultaneously assume voices that are associated with different identity categories, and that they can ‘perform’ identities, i.e. represent themselves as different from what their personal ‘visible’ characteristics would suggest […], therefore concluding that there is nothing given or ‘natural’ about being part of a social category or group.

We clearly find “polyphonous identity” in the works under study. In fact, in the process of building and negotiating their identities as bicultural women, whose origins are often deemed incompatible with the Western culture, our characters seem to have found a compromise that “will permit the group to maintain its ethnic identification but to select, from among the rights and duties associated with that role, those behaviors that are most convenient and conflict least with the expectations of the larger society” (Swanson 248). However, in order to build this consensus, they sometimes need to cohabitate at least two voices within, thus leading to a “polyphonous identity.” For instance, these female characters, regardless of their degree of conservatism, adopt different attitudes at home and outside, in the presence of their elders and in their absence; this is what Aicha voices when

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she explains that she has managed to cohabitate both parts within—the Algerian, and the French. Likewise, this is what Nina’s dress code in episode four reveals, when her mother asks her to wear more modest clothes to the mosque out of religious sense of decency but also to avoid criticism from their community. Regarding this last issue, theorists speak “of the sense of ‘schizophrenia’ some women feel when they are forced to change from looking like other American women at work to clothing demanded of them when they are in contact with other Muslims” (Haddad and Smith 36). This gives further ground to the idea of “polyphonous identity,” as schizophrenia—even when bereft of any medical undertones—implies a certain duality in personality. The reference to a certain form of cultural schizophrenia in this context reminds us of Bateson’s notion of the “double bind.” In an article entitled “Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia,” Bateson and his colleagues developed this concept in an attempt to explain the roots of schizophrenia as a medical condition; later in “A Note on the Double Bindʊ1962,” Bateson concludes that “given the characteristics of schizophrenic communicationʊa confusion of message and meta-message in the patient’s discourseʊthe patient must have been reared in a learning context which included formal sequences where he was forced to respond to messages which generated paradox of this type” (154-55). A parallelism with the upbringing of Muslim-Arab descendants in the West can easily be established as they were in fact reared in an environment that generated a form of paradox owing to the contradictory nature of their cultures. Paul Gibney summarizes the critical components of the double bind situation as such: the need of many actorsʊone of whom is the victimʊ, a repeated experience, a primary negative injunction, a secondary injunction, and a “tertiary negative injunction that prohibits the victim from escaping the field” (50). Muslim-Arab Western women in this case represent the victims, who constantly suffer from a gender or cultural double-standard, wherein the primary injunction is imposed by the parentsʊand by extension cultureʊ, the secondary is stated by mainstream society and lifestyle, and the third is the community in which they live. Eventually, it seems reasonable to argue that identifying as a bicultural being and negotiating one’s identity as such is often germane to external factors such as the values and principles that govern mainstream society. People, as social beings, live within the clusters of a certain society or community which in its turn exerts an influence on their principles, values, customs, and way of life. Owing to a certain duality, cultural hybrids are subject to a double cluster, that of mainstream society and that of their more restraint community. As explained above, this double cluster usually

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leads those hyphenated beings to be torn between two cultures, two sets of values, and often wind up lost or negotiating in a liminal space, a third space. But, equally important to this issue are the attitudes and ideas advanced by mainstream society regarding biculturalism. Since the works of the corpus cover the situation in France and in America, and since the characters’ responses are multifarious—mainly characterized by an oscillation between, or the choice of, one end of the continuum, i.e., rejecting or embracing this difference—a comparison of the situations in both countries seems to be necessary.

Multiculturalism and Cosmopolitanism: two faces of the same coin? While comparing the two works under study we have come to the conclusion that despite a difference in genre and time, cultural hybridity is manifested in similar fashion, and experienced analogously by Western women from Muslim-Arab descent. In fact, they do voice comparable events, incidents, and ordeals regarding the social and cultural implications of biculturalism, namely the duality and incompatibility felt with respect to their Arab heritage and their Western up-bringing and values, the gender roles attributed to these women, and the double standards ensuing from the latter. Nevertheless, these works diverge at one crucial point, which is their response to cultural hybridity. Most female characters in AllAmerican Muslims have managed to negotiate their identities as hyphenated Americans and found a compromise; Aicha in Née en France, however, has decided to flee the parental home with her Italian lover, and realized that she does not identify as Muslim or Algerian, she is French first and foremost. Though this difference in reactions could be accounted for by multiple reasons, one of them seems to be of primordial importance: the relation these people have with mainstream society. Depending on where they live and where they have come from, immigrants may have disparate relations with their host country. Accordingly, the United States of America has always been defined and referred to as the nation of the people, a land of immigrants, hence its motto e pluribus unum, meaning “from many, one” (Bolaffi et al. 175). The nation has been illustrated by images such as the melting pot, the salad bowl, the pizza, and so on; but as those concepts somehow failed to really capture the essence of the United States and present limits of various nature, this country has come to be described as multicultural. This concept “refers to the coexistence of a range of different cultural experiences within a group or society” (Bolaffi et al. 183), and it is at the core of the American experience. Although the institutional

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reality and the lived experiences of some ethnic minorities may sometimes signal otherwise, Americanness as a set of beliefs is fundamentally built on diversity and the acceptance of difference. Being born and raised in such an environment, it seems cogent that the characters of All-American Muslim have been able to find a compromise and easily embrace their biculturalism. Notwithstanding, the situation of Maghrebi immigrants in France is fairly different, owing to the colonial past relating the two parties. The Maghreb has been under French occupation for over half a century, and Algeria in particular was not a mere colony—it was considered French territory. After the independence of this region, with Algeria being the last country to get it in 1962, France still needed immigrant labor to rebuild the country after WWII; in need of work and hoping to build a better future for their children, many men emigrated to France, and their families joined them later. Nevertheless, even after decades of immigration and having children born and educated in France, this minority finds itself facing strained relations with mainstream society because of the colonial past. Even though France is a cosmopolitan country, its immigration history is not comparable with that of the U.S.; multiculturalism is not entrenched in French values and the self-definition of the nation as it is in the U.S. To live in France, one had to conform and integrate in order not to jeopardize the French “national identity” which was in fact the subject of a heated debate a few years back. Lately, however, a change can be observed in the French scenery and it appears that it has been influenced by the American model; in fact, some minorities have become prouder and more assertive of their belonging, a phenomenon that can mainly be observed in the Parisian banlieues or suburbs. This could consequently dissipate some problems related to identity and signal the start of a new era in France. Eventually this seems to mark the emergence of a new form of multiculturalism: a global or globalized multiculturalism, inspired by the American model, and applicable elsewhere.

Works Cited Bateson, Gregory, et al. “A Note on the Double Bindʊ1962.” Family Process 2.1 (1963): 154-61. —. “Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia.” Behavioral Science 1.4 (1956): 251-54. Bolaffi, Guido, et al., eds. Dictionary of Race, Ethnicity, & Culture. London: Sage Publications, 2003.

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Cawley, Stephanie. “Hybridity as a Response to Multiculturalism.” The Stockton Postcolonial Studies Project. 21 Feb. 2015. Web. Chambers, Iain. “Signs of Silence, Lines of Listening.” The Postcolonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons. Ed. Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti. London: Routledge, 1996. 47-62. Cherif, Hallouma. “Définition de soi et para-doxes culturels: approche algérienne en France et comparative entre jeunes filles issues de l’immigration jeunes filles algériennes.” Carrefours de l'éducation 23 (2007): 171-86. De Fina, Anna, Deborah Schiffrin, and Michael Bamberg, eds. Discourse and Identity. New York: Cambridge UP, 2006. Gibney, Paul. “The Double Bind Theory: Still Crazy-Making After All These Years.” Psychotherapy in Australia 12.3 (2006): 48-55. Haddad, Yvonne Y., and Jane I. Smith. “Islamic Values among American Muslims.” Family and Gender Among American Muslims: Issues Facing Middle Eastern Immigrants and Their Descendants. Ed. Barbara C. Aswad and Barbara Bilgé. USA: Temple UP, 1996. 19-40. Janson, Eero. “Stereotypes that Define ‘Us’: The Case of Muslim Women.” ENDC Proceedings 14 (2011): 181-96. Kalra, Virinder, Raminder Kaur, and John Hutnyk, eds. Diaspora and Hybridity. London: Sage Publications, 2005. Khan, Mussarat, and Kathryn Ecklund. “Attitudes Toward Muslim Americans Post-9/11.” Journal of Muslim Mental Health 7.1 (2012): 1-16. Read, Jen’nan Ghazal. “The Sources of Gender Role Attitudes among Christian and Muslim Arab-American Women.” Sociology of Religion 64.2 (2003): 207-22. —, and John P. Bartkowski. “TO VEIL OR NOT TO VEIL? A Case Study of Identity Negotiation among Muslim Women in Austin, Texas.” Gender and Society 14.3 (2000): 395-417. Swanson, Jon C. “Ethnicity, Marriage, and Role Conflict: The Dilemma of a Second Generation Arab-American.” Family and Gender Among American Muslims: Issues Facing Middle Eastern Immigrants and their Descendants. Ed. Barbara C. Aswad and Barbara Bilgé. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1996. 241-50. Turner, John C. “Towards a Cognitive Redefinition of the Social Group.” Social Identity and Intergroup Relations. Ed. Henri Tajfel. New York: Cambridge UP, 1982. 15-40.

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Corpus Benaïssa, Aïcha, and Sophie Ponchelet. Née en France. Histoire d’une Jeune Beur. Paris: Editions Payot, 1990. All-American Muslim: 1. “How to Marry a Muslim.” All-American Muslim. TLC. 13 November 2011. Television. 2. “The Fast and the Furious.” All-American Muslim. TLC. 20 November 2011. Television. 3. “A Muslim Goes to Washington.” All-American Muslim. TLC. 27 November 2011. Television. 4. “Friday Night Bites.” All-American Muslim. TLC. 04 December 2011. Television. 5. “Muslims Moving On.” All-American Muslims. TLC. 11 December 2011. Television. 7. “The Day the World Changed.” All-American Muslim. TLC. 01 January 2012. Television. 8. “Crunch Time.” All-American Muslim. TLC. 08 January 2012. Television.

EX/TENSION OF/IN “A NATION PEOPLED BY THE WORLD”: RE-EVALUATING THE KALEIDOSCOPE IN ARAB AMERICAN AND ASIAN AMERICAN TEXTS SIHAM ARFAOUI

Introduction In American Kaleidoscope: Race, Ethnicity and the Civic Culture, Lawrence H. Fuchs relates the official/public affirmation of cultural diversity as a core value of the American national unity to the First World War (359-63). However, while pointing out the celebration of this politics in different popular festivals, holidays and cultural displays, Fuchs loses sight of the fact that the assertion and insertion of cultural diversity in the United States are subject to many other discourses, whether political, cultural or literary. In particular, American literature in its mainstream and minority divisions emerges as a major expression of cultural diversity. The present paper maintains the outstanding position of the ‘minor’/ethnic text, long deemed unworthy of literary consideration, at least before becoming the hype in English departments for the last twenty years, as a rich place to mine for the different controversies which are related to cultural pluralism.1 As two interrelated forms of multiethnic literature in the U.S., Asian American and Arab American literary articulations are informed and reshaped by American multiculturalism. Issues related to this complex arena speak indirectly to texts such as Mona in the Promised Land (1996) by Chinese American Gish Jen as well as to Crescent (2003) and The Language of Baklava (2005) by Arab American Diana Abu-Jaber. At this initial level, suffice it to indicate that the (non)-fictional worlds of the 1

I am placing ‘minor’ between single quotation marks, taking into account the questionable status of such a category, once related to contextual notions such as class, age, race, number and power which relativize and problematize the meaning and use of the concept ‘minor’.

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considered titles are peopled by characters who—pertaining to a variegation of ethnic roots, religions, cultures, classes, nations, and ages— celebrate the assets of a multiculture through a range of ritualistic events. On the basis of the texts in question, the present article takes up afresh the issue of multiculturalism, albeit with a sharper eye on evaluating the consistence of some of its markers. More precisely, it shall try to weigh up the extent to which certain multicultural indicators depicted by Jen and Abu-Jaber suffer from an array of irregularities. Nonetheless, since there are countless questions one might raise in re-visiting the impact of the kaleidoscopic culture in the U.S. on Jen’s and Abu-Jaber’s works (and while it is beyond the scope of this essay to examine them all), this paper offers to re-appraise such kaleidoscopic motifs as mixed intermarriage and multicultural cuisine and ponder upon their double implications. Mixed intermarriage and multicultural cuisine shall be discussed with a view to the limitations in the foundational values which define American diversity, as pointed out by John Hutchinson: “There is a gap between the official self-image of such multi-ethnic societies as egalitarian, and the existence of ethnically based status hierarchies” (375).

On Evaluation and Silences In broader terms, the dedication of this critical piece to an evaluative framework is, in part, elicited out by Friedrich Nietzsche’s observations that “[s]etting prices, estimating values, devising equivalents, making exchanges” are part and parcel of “human pride, man’s feeling of superiority over other animals,” hence, his self-designation “as the ‘measuring animal’” (51). Nietzsche’s premise of evaluation as a second nature to the human being remains of certain pertinence for the twenty-first century reader of pan-ethnic American literature, both as a consumer and a producer/critic. Although triggering a pragmatic parameter of evaluation, it has the advantage of bringing out the ever-lasting necessity and utility of revision and re-examination. Besides, it can even engulf the current concern with assessing the levels of logic and persuasion in the multicultural values and principles—being promoted by the involved selection of ethnic literary texts. In this respect, it should be noted that the intent to evaluate U.S. multiculturalism via these two apparently separate sets of ethnic literature— Asian American and Arab American—emanates from deep connecting threads running through the larger contexts of these fields and somehow still overlooked by present researches. In fact, to my knowledge, with the exception of “Meeting Asian/Arab American Studies,” co-written by crit-

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ics Sunaina Maira and Majid Shihade, no previous work has tried to reinforce a possible interconnection between Arab American and Asian American studies and push it further. Instead, the choice to explore the convergence of Arab American and Asian American works in articulating cultural diversity lends itself to the features of solidarity between Americans of Arab and Asian descent in their political struggle and activism against colonization, racial profiling, and militarization. History abounds with examples of these two groups forming alliances and expressing common sympathies (Maira and Shihade 126-28).

The Master-narrative of the Kaleidoscope The present article seeks to demonstrate that the enhancement of multiculturalism in the three suggested texts is undecipherable outside the tension and imperfections accompanying every multicultural meeting. Revisited, the very representations of cultural diversity by Jen and Abu-Jaber do not render a single-faceted or a utopian embodiment of the U.S. as a plural society. Thus the title’s reference to Ronald Takaki’s figurative image, “A Nation Peopled by the World.” To negotiate this controversy shall take two sections. The first one briefly comments on both writers’ tendency to enhance the values of multicultural interaction and fusion and grounds their focus on multicultural cuisine and mixed marriage in a national surge towards cross-cultural dialogues as it is entailed by the master narrative— in the sense of a corpus of well-established texts. The second section brings to the foreground the tension(s) embedded in almost each single multicultural feast and celebration wherein looms large a certain strain, malaise or conflict such as mainstream pressure, interracial conflict, the fetishization of ethnicity, and the state of apocalypse. Despite their disparate circumstances, the festivities portrayed by Jen and Abu-Jaber’s celebratory embodiments of mixed marriage and multinational cuisine lead us to decipher a salient multicultural discourse which revives and reiterates, with some variation, the master narrative. At one level, Abu-Jaber’s descriptions of what critic Nouri Gana speaks of as “the ‘thousand and one dishes’” in the folds of her cookbook-memoir have something to do with expressions of cultural diversity which extend up to eighteenth-century literary texts (244). In a similar way, Jen’s explorations of the complex American experience of diversity are strongly reminiscent of Walt Whitman’s often-quoted reference to the U.S. as a “teeming nation of nations” (284). In a sense, both writers hearken back to earlier—still dominantly WASP—conceptions of the American blood “as the blood of

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the Amazon, made up of a thousand noble currents all pouring into one” (Melville 183, italics mine). Jen’s and Abu-Jaber’s kaleidoscopic representations of American culture move away from the pioneering literature in the sense that they challenge the ethnocentric estimation of the American nation as a “promiscuous breed” which springs from just a WASP mixture (Crèvecoeur). That is to say, the prominence of such feasting events should instead be considered in a close connection to an explicit revival of ethnicity and its blessings insofar as their recurrence participates in reconciling ethnic American characters with their mother culture. On the one hand, this progressive conception counteracts the dictum that “overarching American culture—must be white” (Salaita 438). It also affirms the development of theories about identity politics “from the notion of ‘single root identity’ (identité racine unique, or identity as an exclusive and unique product inherited from one’s ancestral roots), putting forth instead that of ‘rhizome identity’ (identité rhizome)” (Tan 113).2 “The latter does not comprise one single root of culture inherited from the individual’s past,” the same critic comments, “but posits identity as a process of multiplicity informed by multiple nodes and roots of different cultural encounters that the present still interlaces together” (113). On the other hand, the celebratory motifs considered through Jen and Abu-Jaber mirror a tendency to “privilege relatively stable boundaries between groups, emphasizing internal group affirmation, cultural specificity, and the distinctiveness of ethnic groups” (Majaj 323). Principally, extolling cultural pride without remaining incarcerated in ethnic insularity forms the basis of such literary gestures as Jen’s and Abu-Jaber’s towards filling in the blanks existing in mainstream literatures. This argument brings to light another important value to the involved celebrations, i.e., the transcendence of ethnicity towards an age of ‘postethnicity’ in favour of serving interethnic relationships and reciprocities.3 In fact, if we extend Majaj’s argument about Abu-Jaber, neither her nor Jen seem deaf to the importance of “moving away from cultural insularity and toward a stance emphasizing connections with others” (Majaj 320). In this sense, Crescent plays on a range of names for the guests in Sirine’s Thanksgiving dinner which includes Schamael (North), Jenoob (South), Shark (East), and Gharb (West) (191-93). It relies on a transnational nomenclature to make “a suggestive gesture toward breaking free from the confines of geopolitical origins in favor of transnational ties,” comments critic Nouri Gana (244). In so doing, it hinges back to Jen in her endeavour 2

For an elaborate discussion of “rhizome identity,” see Glissant (23-36). As a theoretical model, “post-ethnicity” goes beyond the dominant emphasis in multiculturalism on ethnic specificity and the culture of roots (Hollinger 5). 3

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to break free from both the enclosures of ethnocentrism and the WASP melting pot. On the whole, both writers seek to re-establish what Mary Louise Pratt calls “a kind of contact zone,” i.e., “the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations” (6). Even more, their texts seem to be largely informed by Bhikhu Parekh’s statement in another context: “There is no obvious reason why a culturally plural society should not develop a sense of community, solidarity, common loyalties” (171). In view of the kaleidoscopic interweaving of inter- and multi-ethnic meals asserting crosscultural legacies, the reader of Jen and Abu-Jaber infers that “[c]ultural diversity creates a climate in which different cultures can engage in a mutually beneficial dialogue” (Parekh 168) and reciprocal enrichments. Though this is not so revolutionary, especially, in American literary contexts, the question still remains whether these ideals still hold in American life nowadays. The inference above can catalyze our re-examination of the dominant aspects conferred on the multicultural interactions which Jen and AbuJaber mirror in the selected texts. At this level, a brief review of the readings re-appraising multiculturalism in the mentioned texts is crucial. For instance, in probing ethnic diversity in Mona in the Promised Land, critic Chih-ming Wang’s two articles—“Writing on the Slash” and “An Identity Switch”—focus on one side of the critical task, by addressing only orientalism and fetishism entrenched in the negotiation of cultural plurality.4 Also, Gana’s re-assessment of multiculturalism in Abu-Jaber’s Crescent occurs in few passing remarks as part of the conclusion to his article “In Search of Andalusia.” It is in many ways resuming Wang’s same argument. Available discussions of the conversation between multiculturalism and Mona in the Promised Land or Crescent usually end up buried in terms of bulk, and remain either monolithic or limited in harkening back only to a few studies.

Fetishism, Mainstreaming and Ethnic Tensions In the endeavor to compensate for these fissures, taking a further critical distance vis-à-vis these writers’ expressions of cultural diversity shall enable us to grasp their stature not just as consumers or mere mediators 4

The use of fetishism in this article leans on its understanding as “a means of fixation, through which one either attempts to fixate himself or herself […] on a certain image” (Wang, “Switch” 145).

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and translators of American multiculturalism. Instead, it can give us a view of both as critics of the multicultural discourse, allowing us to have an insight into its multifarious shortcomings. That is why the following discussion shall expand on the problem of fetishism, which mars these writers’ attempts to consolidate the liberal values associated with racial and ethnic diversity. Equally worthy of probing is their critique of the prejudice that persists despite the amalgamation of difference, mainly, by re-addressing the same multicultural meetings as being blemished with racial tension and apocalypse. From one perspective, fetishism can be considered the most tarnishing aspect of Jen’s and Abu-Jaber’s gestures to promote differences in cultural expressions. Chih-ming Wang explains that ethnic traits are fetishized in the sense of stereotypically underpinning the individual as such: “In a capitalist society, ethnic features are reproduced as commodities that help create marketable fashion to stimulate consumption. They are fetishized as signs of glamour that bestow the consumers with a sense of sublimation to assert a unique subjectivity in subjection to an ethnic group” (“Switch” 141). As such, both writers can be reproached for what Gana calls “promoting a superficial form of multiculturalism” (244). Though intent on unraveling the WASP orbit still entrenching the dominant discourse of American diversity—either by introducing the Changs as owners of a fried chicken franchise and a pancake-house (Mona 3) or by cramming their kitchen with “unlabeled and unlabelable food” (293), Jen also ends up impinging on the reader the stereotype of the Chinese immigrant as a cook. Similarly, Abu-Jaber’s appropriation of culinary diversity overstates the everyday restaging of ethnicity and constricts its depth and richness to the cookery. This can be seen as her failure “to encourage the deep understanding to the Arab culture that it seeks to reinvent through the rhetorical powers of Andalusian conviviality,” given that cuisine multiculturalism is likely to “convert American customers into cuisine multiculturalists—that is, into a breed of multiculturalist who would only entertain a fetishistic and consumerist relationship to the culture that furnishes them with the dishes they love” (Gana 244-45). Indeed, the Arab ethno-diaspora becomes inappreciable outside these consumerist culinary performances. At a larger scale, this representation makes food salient almost in Benetton ways5 whereby there is little having to do with the Holy Communion.

5

Food in the Benetton communicative vogue is emphasized in terms of its iconic meaning “as a fetish, ritual, excess, dependence, celebration, emotion, reflection, contradiction, oppression and obsession” (“Food for Life”).

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Nonetheless, the important problem of fetishism noticeable along similar cultural representations should not lead us to lose sight of the dominance of mainstreaming, which keeps re-emerging as a major dark facet strikingly deep-rooted in the writers’ celebration of cultural diversity. As a matter of fact, even though Mona’s belated wedding stresses the victory of consent over descent in an age of post-ethnicity, the reader can reach out for several contradictions on the margins of the feast. For example, during the event, Mona’s mother makes a controversial comment hinging towards hegemonic bias rather than tolerating the array of ethnicities. Indeed, her opinion “[b]etter to turn Jewish than Asian American, [a]t least Jews don’t walk around with their midriffs showing” (Mona 302) bespeaks a situation where interethnic reconciliation is just a matter of nomenclature or artificial compromising, and not the fruition of this character’s real attitudinal fluctuation. Even the circumstances around the involved feast undermine Mona’s interracial marriage as a signifier of “a successful boundarycrossing […] conjoining different ethnicities and cultures for a common future” (Wang, “Slash” 114). Hence, Helen’s belated acceptance of Mona’s ultimate rebellion is not cogent enough to undercut her unspoken rejection of a non-European match for her daughter. It does not truly resolve the ethnic tension either in the minority / majority hierarchy or arising within the pan-ethnic circles formed in the novel. As a consequence, Jen’s text filters mixed marriage as a paragon aiming to transcend or digress from escaping ethnicity to rejecting assimilation into a predominant WASP culture. At this level, BegoĖa Simal states that “Gish Jen has opted for […] a ‘post-ethnic’ vision. Jen seems to have moved away from the pressing need to claim America that drove her predecessors” (164). However, we should bear in mind that Jen does not maintain this particular message consistently throughout the novel. In part, her narrative accounts for the impossibility of a utopian multicultural encounter, rather than featuring lack of cohesion in the plotline. In reinforcement of this argument, we should not overlook the instances of exclusion emanating here and there throughout Mona in the Promised Land. In a provocative passage, as soon as a precious flask disappears from the Gugelsteins’ sheltering the black cook the latter is the first to be incriminated by his fellows, for no reliable proof and in spite of the fact that the house is a meeting locale for a wide array of black, Chinese and Jewish American characters (Mona 203-5). Bluntly pointing out the unfeasibility of a sound and save multicultural milieu wherein the very ethnic Americans who define American diversity pass without de facto hostility, the ensuing dispute unravels that, deep down, these multiethnic fellows are too ideologically entrapped to accept the often-designated other without

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setting exclusionary boundaries (219). Hence, although the issue is no longer the white/black duality or the majority/minority cliché, but rather becomes Asians versus Jews, the variation is little and the same old question of racial profiling still remains. In the same racial vein, The Language of Baklava turns out equally entrapped in the very atmosphere of ethnic tension and intolerance. At the margins of feasting her parents’ mixed marriage and the merits of their union for the whole family, the memoirist keeps evoking the ever-lasting silenced competition going on between her father and his mother-in-law. She compares them to “mythical adversaries” and points out that their “competition—over race, culture, values—is primordial and monumental,” commenting: “The two of them struggle endlessly. Sometimes, the fight is still and quiet and sometimes loud and operatic, but it’s always there” (8990). What is at stake here is not just the fact that the Irish-German American grandmother never accepts her daughter’s marriage to an Arab immigrant. It is rather the hint that expanding the horizon of the dominant current towards mainstreaming remains undesirable, even, “a demand for the impossible” (Gana 245). Admittedly, the keen awareness of the uneasiness spoiling the climate of interethnic relations in mixed-race families is best articulated through the American-born Arab children. Often times, the daughters in Abu-Jaber express their unhappiness with their Arab origins, especially when they are required to behave like good/chaste Arab girls (Baklava 197) or when faced with Sister Helene-Therese’s iconic teaching, that “Arabic is the language of animals,” that English “is the language of mortals,” and that French “is the language of angels” (49). All these analogous incidents entail a sentiment of self-abhorrence nobody can evade, especially, when examining Diana’s susceptibility to her family’s confrontation with the Faradays upon the “inadmissible” habit of feasting in the front yard. She becomes too vulnerable even to counteract her mate’s challenge: “[Y]ou better know that in this country nobody eats in the front yard […]. If your family doesn’t know how to behave, my parents will have to find out about getting you out of this neighborhood” (80). Diana cannot help but retain “the feeling that starts somewhere at the center of [her] chest, as heavy as an iron ingot, a bit like fear or sadness or anger, but none of these exactly; it is simply there, suspended between [her] ribs” (81). At its simplest, Diana is traumatized. I feel the iron inside of me. It drives through every bit of my body. It vibrates like a bell clapper. I turn away from her and tip my forehead against the frigid pane of glass. There’s an echo in my head saying: she’s right.

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Shame fills me: I see it in the rain stroking the windows, so bright that it turns holes in the backs of my eyes. (82)

When similar racial conflicts pop up they are very likely to tarnish every multiethnic contact zone and curtail the celebratory events of cultural diversity, albeit their salience. While scrutinizing the kaleidoscopic themes described in the considered texts, the reader cannot be categorical about the viability of affirming ethnic differences. The prominence of neither mixed-race marriage nor cuisine multiculturalism thoroughly dissipates or eclipses the marring ethnic bigotry. With respect to this limitation, the considered writers seem to assume that any assertion of ethnicity should take on a matter-of-factly aspect. Crescent, Abu-Jaber’s other title which is set in a more recent time and space as a love story-within-story based on the satire of the U.N. embargoes on Iraq, picks a very telling symbol summing up the whole point of the racial clash in multicultural America. The narrative uses the ominous lamb as a metaphor to reinforce interethnic clash and suggest the impossibility of a perfect compromise between diverse ethnic cultures. In fact, it turns out that the gift with which the Syrian poet and visiting lecturer Aziz has contributed to the Thanksgiving banquet is the same lamb that the Iranian seller threw out of his shop as a bad omen. In a funny turn, Aziz brings this lamb to partake in celebrating the dinner, which gathers a wide array of origins, nationalities, cultures and nations, ranging from Europe to South America and the Middle East (191-93). Thus, it is no coincidence that the mention of the evil eye concurs with Sirine’s loss of Hanif’s scarf and the emergence of several conflicts between the Iraqi exile and the American chef.6 Even the rivalries garnered by Kurosh, an Iranian American, and Rodriguez, a Mexican immigrant and the sous-chef in UmNadia’s Café, towards Aziz are not pointless. They are deeper than a mere enmity between Sirine’s different suitors, prone to be indirectly anchored in a larger dimension which may have something to do with the legacy of “the hegemonic cultural values and assumptions of the West” (Mylan 150) and “the negative American media portrayals of the Middle East” (Field 208). In addition to this overt propensity not to accept, in particular, the new Arab immigrants without racial and political bias, the discussed literature 6

This reading is based on Robert E. Field’s explicit allusions in his interview with Abu-Jaber, where he refers to the ways in which the evil eye is likely to signal the troubling aspects surrounding this combination of difference and commonalities (217-18).

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features the apocalypse as a starkly troublesome side likely to be embedded in every multi-culture. As Parekh reminds us, the culture of diversity also runs the risk of becoming shallow and fragile. Lacking historical depth and traditions, it cannot inspire and guide choices, fails to provide a moral compass and stability, and encourages the habit of hopping from one culture to culture to avoid the rigor and discipline of any one of them. It is a culture of quotations, a babble of discordant voices, and not a culture in any meaningful sense of the term. In some but by no means all of postmodernist literature, there is a tendency to romanticize this approach to culture, based on the mistaken belief that all boundaries are reactionary and crippling and their transgressions a symbol of creativity and freedom. Boundaries structure our lives, give us a sense of rootedness and identity, and provide a point of reference. […]. Since they tend to become restrictive, we need to challenge and stretch them; but we cannot reject them altogether for we then have no fixed points of reference with which to define ourselves and decide what differences to cultivate and why. (150)

In concomitance with this view, Diana’s second self cannot help but express a great deal of sympathy for culturally-diverse people as inbetweens. In their inevitable states of chaos and indeterminacy, she compares them to “the embroideries of the sad-eyed sheep—the solitary ones, apart from their flock, trapped inside the circle of [a Bedouin’s] embroidery hoop, stitched eternally apart […] friendless, lonely, and improper, not allowed, lost somewhere in the embroidered corners between the animals, the mortals, and the angels” (Baklava 50). Even towards the closure of Mona in the Promised Land, the banished runaway who has now become a Jewish Chinese American mirrors an upside-down state of rootlessness, feeling “as though she stands at the pointy start of time. Behind her, no history” (255)—as if she came out of thin air. As Rabbi Horowitz put it to her: “It’s not so easy to get rid of your old self […]. All growth involves change, all change involves loss” (Mona 268). As such, we can say that a culturally diverse experience unties the inevitability of terrors which are undecipherable from the blessings of every patchwork-identity. This brings to mind Kathy-Ann Tan’s reference to “the much-criticized feel-good multiculturalism that actually glosses over the distinctions between different cultures and is hence a masked form of racism” (114).

Conclusion This essay has attempted to demonstrate that neither Gish Jen nor Diana Abu-Jaber is blind to the inconveniences popping up in the U.S.-American plural-culture. Rather, their texts catalyze the dark sides of multicultural-

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ism, bearing witness to a “critical multiculturalism,” one that “explores the fissures, tensions, and sometimes contradictory demands of multiple cultures, rather than (only) celebrating the plurality of cultures by passing through them appreciatively” (Palumbo-Liu 5). The endeavor to carry out a similar critique of multiculturalism in Mona in the Promised Land, Crescent and The Language of Baklava points out, among other issues, the assimilationist WASP compass along which the very characters who claim multicultural affiliations still move. Ambivalently, ethnic and racial differences become not only fetishized but, at times, contained and kept marginal to the mainstream, rather than respected and fully integrated. Besides, the re-appraisal of cultural diversity in the folds of these works allows deciphering the states of dislocation and exile and the culture of unstable quotation as a “Manifest Destiny” inseparable from the hybrid positioning of ethnic Americans. At another level of the discussion, the inevitability of fetishism amounts to a twofold strategy for claiming ethnic diversity. Fetishism is more of a trap, since in the aim of highlighting ethnic identity, ethnic writers end up orientalizing the larger group and overlooking that the very process of accentuating the worth and distinctiveness of ethnic idiosyncrasies also involves pinning them down “to fixed ethnic categories that duplicate stereotypical images through commodification” (Wang, “Switch” 143). As such, the events designed to celebrate Arabness or Chineseness fuse into the very junctures which shape different forms of a cultural commodity, i.e., “a disposable, displaceable object in the relations of exchange” (Wang, “Switch” 142). Ironically, similar strategies reconfigure ethnic identification as “more constraining than liberating,” in short, a necessary evil. In consequence, ethnic writers, individuals and communities are required to look for and ponder upon less ambivalent alternatives in ways which could allow them to disrupt the order of domination while also resisting and transcending stereotypes. Furthermore, the mere fact that both writers invest in multiculturalism is not tantamount to saying that they are uncritical of its foundations, hazards and inconveniences. In the particular contexts of Crescent and The Language of Baklava, both of which shaded by the 9/11 events, Abu-Jaber seems to suggest that there is more work to do in order “to create conditions in which no community feels so besieged, frightened and alienated from the wider society as to lack the confidence and the willingness to participate in the ongoing intercultural conversation that forms the lifeblood of a multicultural society,” to borrow from Parekh’s insightful study of multicultural societies (351). Taking the instance of Abu-Jaber’s writings, the work to be done involves not just politicians and associative

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efforts but also Arab American creative and critical writings. All of these bodies need to raise an awareness that “the re-writing of history to make cultural diversity a part of the American founding myth and the glorification of diversity to help unify the country” (Fuchs 371) is neither unproblematic nor should be achieved to the detriment of overlooking more serious issues and challenges which determine the present and future of the Arab American. Among the challenges that need to be faced is the blurred, hazy classification of Arab Americans as “whites” which, ironically, “often excludes [them] from both mainstream and marginalized groups” (Saliba 316) and, more precisely, “from resources aimed at improving minority educational, economic, social, and political conditions” (Majaj 322). In short, stepping over a mere superficial appreciation of cultural coexistence towards a deeper self-evaluative scrutiny and interethnic coalitions is an urgent requirement.

Works Cited Abu-Jaber, Diana. Crescent. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2003. —. The Language of Baklava: A Memoir. New York: Anchor, 2006. Crèvecoeur, Hector St. John. Letters from an American Farmer: Letter III—What Is An American. London: T. Davies, 1782. Yale School. The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History, and Diplomacy. Web. 20 Feb. 2016. Field, Robin E. “A Prophet in Her Own Town: An Interview with Diana Abu-Jaber.” MELUS 31.4 (Winter 2006): 207-25. United Colors of Benetton. “Food for Life.” 20 July 2017. Web. Fuchs, Lawrence H. American Kaleidoscope: Race, Ethnicity and the Civic Culture. London: UP of New England, 1990. Gana, Nouri. “In Search of Andalusia: Reconfiguring Arabness in Diana Abu-Jaber’s Crescent.” Comparative Literature Studies 45.2 (2008): 228-46. Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997. Hollinger, David A. Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism. New York: Basic Books, 1995. Hutchinson, John. “Ethnicity and Multiculturalism in Immigrant Societies.” Ethnicity. Ed. John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. 374-77. Jen, Gish. Mona in the Promised Land. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.

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Maira, Sunaina, and Majid Shihade. “Meeting Asian/Arab American Studies.” JAAS 9.2 (June 2006): 117-40. Majaj, Lisa Suhair. “Arab-American Ethnicity: Locations, Coalitions, and Cultural Negotiations.” Suleiman 320-36. Melville, Herman. Redburn. Chicago: Northwestern UP, 1969. Mylan, Sheryl A. “The Mother as Other: Orientalism in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior.” Women of Color: Mother-Daughter Relationships in Twentieth-Century Literature. Ed. Elizabeth BrownGuillory. Austin: U of Texas P, 1996. 132-50. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of the Morals, A Polemic. Trans. Douglas Smith. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. Palumbo-Liu, David, ed. The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions and Interventions. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1995. Parekh, Bhiku. 2001. Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory. Palgrave: Macmillan, 2008. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge, 1992. Salaita, Steven. “Sand Niggers, Small Shops, and Uncle Sam: Cultural Negotiation in the Fiction of Joseph Geha and Diana Abu-Jaber.” Criticism 43.4 (Fall 2001): 423-44. Saliba, Therese. “Resisting Invisibility: Arab Americans in Academia and Activism.” Suleiman 304-19. Simal, BegoĖa. “‘Moving Selves’: Immigration and Transnationalism in Gish Jen and Chitra Divakaruni.” Transnational, National, and Personal Voices: New Perspectives on Asian American and Asian Diasporic Women Writers. Ed. BegoĖa Simal and Elisabetta Marino. Münster: Lit Verlag, 2004. 151-74. Suleiman, Michael W., ed. Arabs in America: Building a New Future. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1999. Takaki, Ronald. A Different Mirror. New York: Back Bay Boys, 2008. Tan, Kathy-Ann. “‘All the difficult names of who we are’: Transnational Identity Politics in Chang-Rae Lee’s and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Fiction.” A Fluid Sense of Self: The Politics of Transnational Identity. Ed. Sylvia Schultermandl and Sebnem Toplu. Münster: Lit Verlag, 2010. 113-14. Wang, Chih-ming. “An Identity Switch: A Critique of Multiculturalism in Gish Jen’s Mona in the Promised Land.” Reconfiguring American Literary Studies in the Pacific Rim. Ed. Chow Williams, Noelle Brada and Karen Chow. Hong Kong: Hong Kong UP, 2004. 139-45.

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—. “Writing on the Slash: Experience, Identification, and Subjectivity in Gish Jen’s Novels.” Sun-Yat-sen-Journal-of-Humanities 13 (Oct 2001): 103-17. Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass and Selected Prose. New York: Greenwood Press, 1985.

ASIAN BIRTHRIGHT AND ANGLO BEQUEST IN CHANG-RAE LEE AND BICH MINH NGUYEN SHENG-MEI MA

Like all minorities, Asian American writers constantly struggle between ethnicity and mainstream assimilation. That ethnicity is said to be part of one’s identity as innate as Asian physical features, an Asian birthright, as it were, inherited from parents and ancestors. But ethnicity is subject to social construction within the exigencies of contemporary American culture, particularly the publishing industry. While this Asian birthright is alleged to be intrinsic, intuited somehow by Asian Americans, it could arguably be a self-essentializing move to fashion an identity for a foothold in the multiethnic American community. To assume an Asian birthright then secures an Anglo-American bequest, which consummates the minority quest for acceptance, and which let Asian Americans be a guest at the banquet in honor of Americanness. This implicit tie between Asian birthright to be instinctively grasped and Anglo bequest to be earned recurs in Asian American writers, from Chang-rae Lee’s torturous guilt-ridden stories to Bich Minh Nguyen’s memoir and novels trafficking among Vietnamese refugee, immigrant, Asian American, and all-American identities. Neither Lee nor Nguyen, or any other Asian American writer, for that matter, could have accomplished this cultural project alone; they have had considerable help from the American public. In an America that flaunts itself as “a nation of immigrants,” there exists a thirst for testimonies that both confirm the nation’s immigrant roots and its melting pot-cum-salad bowl transformative power. From the many of America’s racial and ethnic multiplicities is alchemized, theoretically, a perfect union of Americanness. The more the ideal is unsettled by nightmares of social injustice and racial strife, the more the public clutches to its heart this security blanket of Americanness. To establish narrative perspectives of non-American alterity awaiting assimilation or self-erasure, novelists, the publishing industry, critics, and the public work in concert to conflate immigrant and American-born characters, the Other and the Self. In an epoch of multiculturalism and globali-

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zation, U.S.-born Asian American writers and those who arrived on these shores at a tender age pose, autobiographically, as immigrant and foreign by stressing in their books’ blurbs and publicity materials that the authors were born in ____ (fill in the blank), as if one’s birthplace outside of the U.S. underwrites shape-shifting amongst subjectivities of the immigrant other, the American ethnic, and the mainstream American. Such paratexts as the author’s note, blurb, book tours, social media publicity, and even reviews lauding the immigrant narratives come to anchor the marketing of ethnicity and the mainstream reader’s reception. The race card is being played by the publishing industry, and Asian Americans play along by kneading, pun intended, immigrant (grand)parent characters in ways that promote Asian American narratological and psychological needs. Whereas imagination and craftsmanship rather than birthplace and bloodline guarantee otherworldly, “out-of-body” narratives, American writers, critics, and public in this salad bowl of a country collude in rubbing off on their immigrant ancestors, willing themselves into an identity conflation to experience, vicariously, the national discourse of immigrant roots via these so-called “immigrant” writers. When it comes to immigrants as opposed to minorities, one ought to be as precise as Pope Francis in his September 23, 2015 speech at the White House: “As the son of an immigrant family…” Pope Francis never claims that he is an immigrant himself, but his proximity to immigration leads to a strong empathy for the immigrant crisis in Europe. By contrast, selfdesignated “immigrant native-born Americans,” an oxymoron if there ever was one, are blithely oblivious to the true immigrant condition: lifelong linguistic, emotional, and cultural “dis-abilities,” mostly elided in writings by those arriving in the West at the age of five (Kazuo Ishiguro), three (Chang-rae Lee), a few months shy of one (Bich Minh Nguyen), or zero (U.S.-born Asian American writers with the license to raise the specter of immigrants). Legitimized by their chic, foreign-sounding Christian and family names, be it “Kazuo,” “Chang-rae,” or “Bich Minh,” these Asian American writers tend to deploy immigrants as the backdrop, even stereotypical caricatures, to their ethnic bildungsroman. The simple fact is that most immigrants arrived in their adulthood, far too set in the brain’s linguistic imprints to ever claim English as the spontaneous, instinctive native tongue. They are as a rule too busy eking out a living for themselves and their family anyway to indulge in the luxury of writing in what remains, at best, a professional rather than personal language. The immigrant’s linguistic dis-ability is as a rule suppressed in Asian American writings featuring immigrant characters. Only in novelists with a musician’s ears and a linguist’s skills of transcribing un-English sounds

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and rhythm can we expect to hear the mangled speech pattern of a large portion of immigrants, such gifted novelists as Louis Chu, Chang-rae Lee, and Patricia Park. But even that comes across on occasion as stereotypical pidgin attributed to immigrants. In reality, these novelists tune in to the immigrant speech initially, “outgrowing” it like American actors forgetting to do their roles’ British accent (or vice versa) halfway through the films. So a paradox plagues such Asian American writings: immigrant ancestors are one of the two magnetic poles to which Asian America gravitates, yet they are channeled through their children’s dominant language, English, being rendered without their distinct accents and voices as a result. Little difference exists then between white representations and Asian American ones, both of which fail miserably in portraying their opposite, that is, immigrant characters groping for foreign (read: English) words and expressions in real life so much so that they often fall silent, hard pressed to match words and experiences. Instead, Chinglish-style stereotypes are oftentimes substituted for what borders on physical, specifically, oral, dis-ability, the immigrants’ stumbling over an unfamiliar tongue and worldview. Let me give one personal example of this dis-ability tantamount to, not to mince words, signs of Alzheimer’s disease, and the public’s ignorance of it. By the standard of the word test that diagnoses Alzheimer’s in Still Alice (2014), I, an immigrant from a non-English speaking background with a career in academe, having written my share of books in English, would be deemed exhibiting symptoms of Alzheimer’s. For instance, I hesitated in identifying “syringe” when Alice is shown the medical equipment. It is more than just a matter of medical vocabulary beyond my ken of literature and film. More poignantly, it is my hesitation and subsequent self-doubt over “syringe” that contribute to the notion of dis-ability, while a native speaker may simply shrug it off, dismissing such a momentary lapse. The filmic syringe punctures immigrants’ tenuous hold of an alien tongue and the strange world behind it exactly because immigrants already feel alienated. Being an immigrant means to be different from the mainstream—the culture as well as the language, a difference that connotes a lack, a potential dis-ease. This perceived absence incurs an “English envy” like the Freudian penis envy suffered by women until feminists came to our rescue. To return to Still Alice: the film moves us because it is our story, a universal human story, although it would not apply well to all the poor Alices from elsewhere, from non-native speaking background. An immigrant audience feels like “us,” whatever that “us” is, identifying with Alice’s condition less as a possible end-of-life fate that may befall some of us than

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as someone who would categorically fail the simple word association and memory recall tests, with or without Alzheimer’s. Ideally and for practical purposes of servicing non-English speaking patients, the medical profession ought to come up with a set of different diagnostic tools for that segment of the population. The notion of a spontaneous, reflexive recall of basic words is a luxury when one goes beyond the mother tongue into the potentially hostile stepmother tongue. Likewise, the literary profession must rethink how to do the immigrant in the global age of mass migration and multilingualism. Nevertheless, the American romance with ethnicity begins with the suspension of disbelief when, alas, Chang-rae Lee puts on the “immigrant’s” new clothes via the alter ego Henry Park. Concluding Native Speaker with the spy protagonist Park’s guilt over betraying the Korean immigrant politician John Kwang, Park confides in the reader in an intimate second-person voice: “My ugly immigrant’s truth, as was his [Kwang’s], is that I have exploited my own, and those others who can be exploited. This forever is my burden to bear. But I and my kind possess another dimension, 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. This is your own history” (319-20). Hyperboles aside, the fusing of Park, Kwang, and “you” the American reader is the climax whereby identity politics seeks to enfold all Americans empathetically under the rubric of “a nation of immigrants.” Lee’s carte blanche approach grows out of an authorial license that equates his alter ego with “my ugly immigrant’s truth,” brushing aside the questions of who and what immigrants are, and why their truth is by default ugly, unseemly, and usurping in contrast to Americans, meiguo ren, the loaded selective Chinese translation of the second syllable “me[i]” as “beautiful people,” at ease in their rightfulness and centrality. Lee’s emotionally-charged tactic obliterates experiential, existential differences between the haves—of the English language and attendant ease and privileges, including the creator of Henry Park—and the havenots. Yet this denouement has long been germinating in Lee’s rhetoric and metaphors. Recalling the shame of how he transposed English consonants such as “r” and “l” in his childhood, Park describes the verbal “conflating” as the visceral “conflagrating,” “so much rubbing and friction […] between the tongues. Friction, affliction” (234). The fiery metaphor suggests the childhood “transgressions” against the order of the English language, the self-abjection resulting from early traumas, and, finally, the adult character’s (of course, the author’s) stylistic flare of rhythm, alliteration, and the specific poetic association of words, wounds, and wonder. The magic

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of words euphorically transcends a non-native speaker’s shame and hurt. A minus has been transformed into a plus, the liability of mixed sounds into the asset of wordplay. This, however, is an English native speaker’s wish-fulfillment to gloss over what amounts to an abiding dis-ability in self-expression for immigrants for the remainder of their natural(ized) lives. The immigrant license consists of Lee expertly translating the awkwardness and humiliation felt by a school-age child, say, on the first day of school outside of home language, or even the adult having had to converse in the ancestral tongue. As Maxine Hong Kingston puts it in the closure to the classic Asian American novel The Woman Warrior (1975), Lee “translates well” his uncanny—used to be close yet distant and alienated now—relation with the Korean language into his immigrant characters’ uncanny relation with English—distant, alienating although in the midst of it every day. Alas, when one’s mother’s tongue happens to differ from one’s adopted land’s mother tongue, one is doomed to speak forever in tongues called Alienglishes.1 Temperamentally very different from Chang-rae Lee, Bich Minh Nguyen can be called the proverbial Michigan’s own, her Stealing Buddha’s Dinner (2007), Short Girls (2009), and Pioneer Girl (2014) set mostly in Michigan and what comedienne Margaret Cho jokingly dubbed the Midwaste.2 But Nguyen’s Midwest is defamiliarized by a perspective peering in from the outside, and from the bottom up. Nguyen and her characters remain alienated, the protagonists’ identity neither fixed nor mainstreamed, morphing among those of a refugee, immigrant, Asian American, and AllAmerican. Her writings chronicle an exploration from her memoir to her alter ego’s identity crisis in marriage and profession. Nguyen’s fiction thus dangles between two extremes: an essentialist Asian birthright (“Buddha,” “short”) and a search for Anglo bequest (“pioneer”). A recurring motif in Nguyen’s body of works is the American Girl, with “American” stricken through and under erasure. A daughter of a Vietnamese refugee family, one socioeconomic rung below Pope Francis’ “immigrant family,” Nguyen, and her characters, struggles to Americanize, ending up in debatable results. Bich Minh Nguyen was eight-month-old when her family fled the fall of Saigon in 1975 and eventually arrived in 1

See Sheng-mei Ma’s Alienglish (2014). Korean American comedienne Margaret Cho from the Bay area coins the “Midwaste” when she recalls her despair sitting at an Indiana gas station/restaurant, between jobs, with Hoosier farmers staring at her “in a huge leopard-skinned coat and Jackie O sunglasses eating watery chilli […] thinking about all the people in the world having a good time, times I could never have out here in the Midwaste” (I’m the One That I Want 98).

2

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Grand Rapids, Michigan, after a sojourn at a refugee camp in the Philippines. The flight opens Nguyen’s memoir Stealing Buddha’s Dinner (2007), which in turn opens her literary career. To her credit, Nguyen acknowledges that she was four months shy of one at the time and confesses in the concluding page’s “Author’s Note” that “I did need to rely on stories from my father, uncles, and grandmother to depict our escape from Saigon” (255). That Nguyen reconstructs the family’s uprooting as the genesis of her memoir belies the very definition of memoirs, life stories as lived by the memoirist, certainly not those of the collective family or Vietnamese refugees as a whole. Closing with “I came of age in the 1980s” (10), this 10-page prologue of sorts immediately demarcates the story as such that leads seamlessly to the book cover’s endorsement cited from San Francisco Chronicle: “This story resonates with anyone who’s ever felt like an outsider.” The title’s “Buddha” confirms the otherness of the subject, an Asian girl holding a red bun in her hands, supposedly pilfered offering to Buddha. This girl also happens to be flanked by glittering stars and sparkles. Asian otherness is softened, made part of the American girl culture, by the magical Pixie Dust cover design. In lieu of making off with Buddha’s food, Nguyen borrows from the refugee family lore, especially the refugee-cum-immigrant identity. This has changed but little in Nguyen’s three books, both Short Girls and Pioneer Girl set in Vietnamese refugee families in the Midwest. Like so many immigrant stories, it is pure coincidence that the Nguyens wound up in the Midwest rather than the more popular destinations of California or coastal cities. Nguyen’s grandmother Noi, “back in Saigon […] had met a woman whose son had studied at the University of Michigan” (9). Consequently, the Nguyens chose Michigan “the blank unknown” over “California: warm but had the most lunatics. Wyoming: cowboys” (9). While chance almost always determines one’s destiny, it is never so flagrant as in the case of refugees fleeing home, crossing an ocean. Having grown up in Michigan, Nguyen writes in such a way that is chock full of familiar local cities and events, yet her characters feel isolated within the conservative enclave of Dutch descendants in Grand Rapids, where people of Asian extraction are few in number and underrepresented in all walks of public life. As such, Nguyen’s identity is never fixed, morphing between that of a refugee and of an immigrant. Yet that destabilized minority sensibility lies at the heart of a nation of immigrants, attested to by another Asian American classic, Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart (1943). Just as Bulosan’s migrant Filipino protagonist comes to embody the American spirit for individual freedom and advancement, Nguyen can be viewed as not only an Asian American writer but an All-American one.

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Nguyen herself uses immigrant and refugee interchangeably. She muses on her own condition in the memoir: “Every immigrant knows the dual life, marked by a language at home and a language outside” (65). Excerpts from Nguyen’s books are compiled into “The Good Immigrant Student” on a U.S. Department of State website pitching multiculturalism, “Immigrants Joining the Mainstream.” Seemingly an immigrant, Nguyen lapses back to the family’s refugee past when one refugee showed up in her Grand Rapids home. Her activist Latina stepmother Rosa adopted a Vietnamese teenager from a refugee camp, and Nguyen “resented his presence, reminding me […] of my own refugee status. I had almost convinced myself that I wasn’t an immigrant at all” (205). Note the seamless, subconscious segue from her “refugee status” to “an immigrant,” from a legal definition to a felt identity, both repressed by one who craves Americanization! In denial, Nguyen has almost convinced herself that she is neither a refugee nor an immigrant, but a true American. There exists in her mind a descending scale of otherness, sliding from the desired American self to a transitional immigrant to the foreign refugee. Writing her books in English to bare her foreignness demonstrates how American she has become or is in the process of becoming. Hence, her protagonists continue to be haunted by a sense of inadequacy and illicitness—“short girls” falling short of Americanness, not up to par even in terms of Asian Americanness; “pioneer girl” in search of her “Little House,” a homestead. Translated from white pioneer entitlement to land into the mindset of perennial aliens, a homestead suggests that instead of a home, Asians are interlopers inching their way, unawares, into white America. The alleged theft of the exotic deity’s dinner is a shortcut into the heart of mainstream readership. The most poignant moment in her memoir is actually not stealing Buddha’s dinner, which Nguyen accomplishes clandestinely, with impunity. Rather, it arrives when she is invited to the pristine, perfectly arranged dinner table of her American classmates. Her public humiliation over eating utensils, table manners, and Western etiquette in general is so searing that Nguyen escapes into total Americanization through books. Even that, however, has to be initiated by her frenemy Jennifer Vander Wal, a hated idol embodying whiteness to a grade-school minority. Wal gave her the American classic Little House on the Prairie (1935), in which the American girl wannabe Nguyen identifies with the protagonist Laura Ingalls with “dull, dirt brown” hair, an adventurous middle child overshadowed by a beautiful elder sister Mary, similar to Nguyen’s own case in relation to her beautiful sister Anh (155). The prepubescent Nguyen has already sensed that “pioneer life reminded me of immigrant life” (159), a seed that sprouts in Pioneer Girl. The yearning to be Laura Ingalls, the

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pioneer girl, consumes Nguyen the not quite American girl. Given that “deep down, I thought I could prove that I could be a more thorough and competent white girl than any of the white girls I knew. I gave my dolls and stuffed animals names like Polly, Vanessa, Elspeth and Anastasia,” Laura may well be the name of Nguyen’s favorite doll, a dream self of what she wishes to be (163).3 The memoir concludes with family reunions of sorts. Nguyen meets her long-lost mother, whose version of what happened during the flight from Vietnam in 1975 diverges drastically from the version told by Nguyen’s father and grandmother Noi. The two accounts of the family leaving Vietnam without the mother do not gel, a fertile ground for postmodernist, deconstructive narratives that befit Asian America’s problematic past. For instance, faced with the racist Chinese Exclusion Act (1882-1943), paper sons and forged identities are deployed by Cantonese coolies to circumvent the U.S. authorities. This history frames Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. Its first chapter “No Name Woman” gives vent to the conflicting “talk-stories” of the extramarital transgression committed by the protagonist’s aunt—whether a love affair or a rape. In the case of Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, rather than presenting family stories told by her father and others as her own lived experience, Nguyen could have moved the ending to the beginning, radically unsettling the genre of memoir, human memories, and the mishmash of “refugee, immigrant, Vietnamese American, and All-American” identities. But doing so would have run the risk of detracting from the market for multicultural “chick lit,” to borrow from marketing lingo, let alone a brisk sale and a PEN/Jerard Fund Award. Nguyen followed her memoir with Short Girls. The two eponymous Vietnamese American sisters in Short Girls are so obsessed with their physique that their exact heights—5’1/8” and 4’11”—are given (61). They are ironically surnamed Luong: Van and Linny, daughters of Dinh Luong, a self-proclaimed inventor of the Luong Arm, the Luong Eye, and the Luong Wall to service short people. The tinkerer of a father is a variation of the typical Asian American gambler males, frustrated after a lifetime of prospecting in the “Gold Mountain” of America and ever dreaming of striking gold. Van and Linny chart the two extremes of good and bad immigrant daughter, the geek and the “slut” (62), their difference lying in their methods rather than their goal, which is the pursuit of whiteness. Linny fraternizes with a married man Gary, despite the suspicion that “most white guys who hit on her were possible fetishists,” not out of love 3

See Adrienne Raphel’s “Our Dolls, Ourselves?” Raphel’s question mark may well be a period.

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for Linny, but out of a lust for hyperfeminine Asian females (242). Van, the good immigrant student turned immigration attorney, is awed by her colleague Miles Oh, fourth-generation Bay Area Asian American with a “trust fund.” His jazzy name, his ease and self-assurance, signifies “nonimmigrant,” native-born, affluent “[i]mmigrant dream of immersion and status” (42, 46). Once Miles proposes, Van is so flattered that she immediately accepts. But Miles remains a mystery to Van and to the reader, suave yet distant, culminating in Miles’ decision to divorce her for another woman, Grace, so named because she is “perfectly Asian American in a poised, smooth-skinned way that Van had never been. […]. Van, standing near her, felt every ounce of her own smallness” (232). Miles’ polite and impeccable manners even as he abandons Van makes him a chilling character. His white culture, with its inherent superiority to minority existence, excludes Van from its fold. Abject and ashamed, Van is a stray from a dysfunctional refugee family and an indifferent white America, suffering lifelong “core insecurity” (183). Nguyen’s focus of alienation is on Van and, to a lesser degree, Linny. Their failure of a refugee-immigrant father Dinh receives a modicum of half-hearted treatment. Occasionally, Dinh speaks nonstandard English, “cut me some slacks” (60), the additional “s” a haphazard gesture toward the speech pattern of a part-time working class immigrant laying tiles for Vietnamese families. As Dinh faces his once-in-a-lifetime chance of winning a spot on a TV talent show, his English supposedly begins to falter: “This is my Luong Arm. […]. It’s very useful. I can demonstrate on many things how useful it is. All my inventions are very useful. I have the Luong Arm, which is right here.” One of the judges cuts him short: “Listen, man, I can hardly understand you.” In response, Linny takes over: “Let me explain. May I? There are three great inventions here, all designed to help short people make their lives a little easier” (255-56). But other than Dinh’s repetitions out of nervousness, there is little difference between Dinh’s non-native speaking and Linny’s native speaking sales pitches. A reader can understand Dinh’s every word, even applaud the use of “which is,” except the words do not move forward. The judge’s frustration over not comprehending Dinh the “dunce” must have come from another source altogether: Dinh’s mangled articulation, which Nguyen fails to capture, as in “Ziz iz mai lan ahm…” in the vein of Mark Twain’s African American lingo and Huck Finn’s regional dialect. Like the various versions of the flight from Vietnam destabilizing the genre of memoir and human memory, the suggested changes in Dinh’s remarks sharpen how a refugee trips over English. It raises the specter, though, that potential readers of chick lit may trip over non-English English and lose patience. Linny could have provid-

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ed “simultaneous interpretation,” as it were, to her father’s “alienglish,” translating “Ziz iz mai lan Ahm” back to “This is my Luong Arm.” Instead, Linny subs for Dinh, with Dinh’s tacit approval. Nguyen does exactly that in speaking for refugee and immigrant characters in an English that English speakers would not only grasp but identify with. Short Girls focuses on the drawbacks of Asian birthright, including but not limited to: not white enough, not tall enough, not American enough, not woman enough. The book, nonetheless, concludes with the formulaic ethnic home-coming to Vietnameseness and immigrant subjectivity for both sisters. Van is about to return to the practice of immigration laws; Linny is going steady with a Vietnamese dentist, also a childhood friend, after the string of white men. If Short Girls seeks Anglo bequest in Miles’ whiteness, which remains miles and miles apart from his bedfellow, Pioneer Girl reprises that in the protagonist Lee Lien’s carefree white boyfriend Alex and her one-night stand, Gregory Stelleson. Masculinity in Nguyen tends to lapse into the stereotypes of the irresponsible Asian American male Miles, of the ineffectual Vietnamese father relying on monthly checks from Van, or of the mystique of white men. Accordingly, Pioneer Girl shifts Anglo bequest in the direction of matrilineage, simultaneously retracing Laura Ingalls’s footsteps in the American girl classic Little House on the Prairie and following the tradition of American road fiction, ranging far from the Midwest to the Great Plains to San Francisco to Philadelphia and on to Colorado and beyond. In keeping with the 10-page reimagining of the flight from Vietnam in Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, the Prologue of Pioneer Girl opens with a fairy tale-like epigraph set in the East with Eastern characters, the two crutches of Western Orientalism to prop up tales of the Orient. In Pioneer Girl, however, this Orientalist epigraph throbs with an Occidentalist family heirloom left behind by an American named Rose. Having been a frequent patron of the Saigon café owned by Lee Lien’s father in 1965, this Rose left on the café table a gold pin etched with a little house. Citing These Happy Golden Years (1943), Lee muses that Almanzo Wilder, Laura Ingalls’ husband, gave her a gold pin as a Christmas present, engraved precisely with a little house (43). On this most tenuous of links, Nguyen erects her novel on the search for what she believes to be the Laura Ingalls Wilder legacy in the form of the gold pin serendipitously entrusted to the Liens by Laura’s alleged daughter Rose. Lee self-consciously confesses that she has “pretended the pin was Laura’s secret gift to me” throughout her adolescence (46). This process of deduction or fanciful association defies logic; it is as willful and self-serving as Chang-rae Lee’s wedding of Korean American and immigrant identities, while making perfect sense in

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terms of the twin poles of Asian birthright and Anglo bequest that jointly launch Asian American imaginary. The twin poles map out Lee Lien’s double heritage, each of which induces its own page-turning suspense. With a doctoral dissertation on Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1920), Lee remains unemployed and returns to help out in her family’s buffet business. The graduate school and Wharton’s “wealth porn—opulent Gilded New York” (252) comprise Lee’s temporary escape from family obligations and her “fresh-off-theboat […] total immigrant” mother Tran (31). Haunted by “immigrant guilt,” Lee feels “beholden to” her family (108). Her grandfather Ong Hai is as kind and idealized as Noi the grandmother in Stealing Buddha’s Dinner. Her brother Sam is as unscrupulous as Nguyen’s other male characters, a habitual thief of restaurant receipts and family jewelry. Worst of all, her mother Tran is even more unreasonable and controlling than Kingston’s Brave Orchid in The Woman Warrior and a number of Amy Tan’s mother characters. The love-hate relationship with such typecast mothers stretches tautly between duty and sacrifice, at one end, versus selfhood and pleasure, at the other. The latter half of the tension is far from pure self-gratification, the kind purportedly indulged in by whites and whitened characters, such as Linny’s Gary and Van’s Miles. Rather, Sam’s and Lee’s enjoyment are mixed with guilt, secretly feeling like thieves, appropriating Anglo and Asian heirlooms. The Anglo legacy is inscribed in the literary culture. Lee embarks on a road trip to a number of museums in the Great Plains devoted to Laura Ingalls Wilder, to track down Rose and the mystery gold pin. In the process, Lee surreptitiously removes from a museum archive a photograph— and a book to boot—of a young Asian man who resembles Ong Hai. By contrast, the Asian legacy is primarily family lore, orally transmitted, rarely committed to paper, let alone in the ancestral tongue, subject to all the capricious plays of chance and individual whims. The oral tradition is most weak in comparison to the literary tradition, evidenced by the total erasure of immigrant speech patterns. Ong Hai’s Americanism “Well, geez” exemplifies the Anglicizing of refugee voices (287). Nguyen appears to abandon even the paltry attempt at linguistic authenticity in Short Girls’ Dinh Luong. While Rose is alleged to conduct a “double life” with a possible child born out of wedlock and given up for adoption (87), the Liens have their own dark secret. The father was drowned on a fishing trip with Chu Hieu (Uncle Hieu), whom Sam believes to have been financing Tran’s restaurants ever since with his “blood money” out of a sense of indebtedness and a growing attachment to Tran. Rose’s possible affair parallels Tran and

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Hieu’s. The two investigations of Rose’s and Tran’s romances converge when Lee gives the obligatory Hollywood love-making performance with Gregory Stelleson, putative descendant of Rose’s biological son adopted by the Stellesons. Although Lee would finally reach her Holy Grail of whiteness at the moment of ecstasy, uniting with Rose, Laura, and all the pioneers via Gregory, Gregory does carry on his person a condom! Hence, there is little chance of Lee siring the next generation of pioneers. Indeed, immigrants and refugees are pioneers without any claim to little houses, without the Anglo birthright to a homestead. Pa, Laura, and Rose’s restlessness that drove their mobility are akin to Sam’s and Lee’s. Whereas the Ingalls and Wilders manifest the pioneers’ manifest destiny, the Liens degenerate into trespassers feeding off their own kind: Sam steals from his mother and Lee from her “godmothers” of Laura and Rose, which are fantasies within her mind. The unexpected, even casual and gratuitous, sex prompts Lee to quip: “Little Whore on the Prairie. Gives new meaning to the phrase westward ho” (239, italicized in the original). This self-reflexiveness and the satirical tone jar with the somber, self-sacrificing, guilt-ridden Lee waitressing silently at the family buffet. Furthermore, whenever Lee sleeps with Alex or Gregory, she does so without any compunction or second thought. The polarity grows out of a split self that Nguyen sees fit to attribute to her protagonist and Vietnamese American characters in her corpus. The selfmocking, self-prostituting image also encapsulates Lee’s critical distance from the subject of her investigation, Little House on the Prairie. No longer a teenager enamored with pioneers, Lee the researcher offers trenchant critique of Ma’s racism against “Indians,” whose settlements the white settlers unsettled. Not content with the idealizing of strong males like Pa and Almanzo, Lee squarely exposes their character flaws (129). Lee also points out the books’ and the TV series’ romanticization of the beautiful Mary Ingalls, who had gone blind and relied on her family for the rest of her life (69). The most significant yield from Nguyen’s own reading and reflection is William Holtz’s The Ghost in the Little House (1993), the scholarly monograph from University of Missouri Press’ Missouri Biography Series. Holtz contends that Rose Wilder Lane had ghostwritten her mother’s Little House series, which forms the foundational conceit for Nguyen’s novel. In a rare sibling argument, Lee accuses Sam of enjoying the privilege and entitlement of a male heir. Sam retorts, “you don’t get it. You never will,” concerning Asian males’ deficits (short boys?) in the U.S. In the heat of their quarrel, Sam abruptly asks: “Do you remember […] how I went to the prom with Kirsten Lonski?” Lee’s response echoes the readers’

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over this non sequitur: “Surprised, I nodded.” Much to Sam’s own surprise years ago, Kirsten, “pretty, blond, normal,” agreed to be Sam’s prom date, but only as a ruse to make up with her beau Jim, with whom she “slowdanced toward reconciliation.” This proof of Sam’s injured manhood prompts Lee to generalize that “[e]very Asian or Asian American person knows what it means to feel like a freak” (186-87). Rhetorical exaggeration at first blush, Asian freakishness, which resonates with aforementioned “dis-ability,” “dis-ease,” and “signs of Alzheimer’s,” must be taken in the context of Kirsten’s “normal” exploitation of the anomalous date with Sam to win back her rightful beau. Nguyen plays with a psychological yo-yo between majority normalcy and minority deviation. It may be too much of a coincidence that Kirsten is named after Janet Shaw’s Meet Kirsten: An American Girl (1986), one of the three dolls in the first wave of Pleasant Company’s successful campaign to produce and market American Girl dolls and tie-in products. As Molly Rosner analyzes, “each of the first three dolls produced by the original Pleasant Company— Kirsten, Samantha, and Molly—represents a specific era: pioneer (1854), Victorian (1904), and the Second World War (1944), respectively” (39). The designation of “Pioneer” for Kirsten Larson’s mid-nineteenth century immigrant family from Sweden is questionable. Crossing the Atlantic on an immigrant ship at the age of nine would make Kirsten a 1.5-generation by Asian American studies’ reckoning. Halfway through the story when the Larsons stop in Chicago on their way to Minnesota, they are to “join a big group of pioneers traveling to the Mississippi River in wagons” (Shaw 30). The immigrants transfer not only from the immigrant ship to the prairie schooner but their identities metamorphose as well. By coming to America, Kirsten shape-shifts from an outsider to the quintessential American pioneer. Kirsten the Pleasant Company doll and Kirsten the prom date symbolize the Anglo bequest that Lee and Sam seek—to little avail. Aided by the publishing industry and the public at large, Asian American novelists have taken for granted Asian birthright and have felt compelled to pursue Anglo bequest. This bipolar pull results in a cross-cultural paradox: Lee’s native speakers who feel like foreigners; Nguyen’s pioneer girls barred from the Promised Land. The immigrant license these writers assume allows them to present their immigrant characters in a way that befits the multiethnic needs of this “nation of immigrants.” Lest we forget, let us return to the feel-good Hollywood title of Still Alice when the protagonist is clearly no longer Alice, her living memories wiped clean. Asian American writers can take this to heart when they claim any birthright of “Still Asian,” with little or no living memories in the first place. In the pursuit of Anglo bequest, such purported Asian birthright intersects only

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tangentially with what trauma studies posits as secondary memories or postmemory.

Works Cited Bhabha, Homi. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. 8592. Bulosan, Carlos. America is in the Heart. 1943. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1973. Cho, Margaret. I’m the One that I Want. New York: Fox Lorber CenterStage: Distributed by Winstar TV & Video, 2001. Film. Holtz, William. The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1993. Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts. 1975. New York: Vintage, 1986. Ma, Sheng-mei. Alienglish: Eastern Diasporas in Anglo-American Tongues. Amherst, NY: Cambria P, 2014. Nguyen, Bich Minh. “The Good Immigrant Student.” Accessed 1 Oct. 2015. Web. —. Pioneer Girl. New York: Viking, 2014. —. Short Girls. New York: Viking, 2009. —. Stealing Buddha’s Dinner. New York: Penguin, 2007. Park, Patricia. Re Jane. New York: Viking, 2015. Raphel, Adrienne. “Our Dolls, Ourselves?” The New Yorker October 9, 2013. Accessed 1 Oct. 2015. Web. Rosner, Molly. “The American Girl Company and the Uses of Nostalgia in Children’s Consumer Culture.” Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 6.2 (2014): 35-53. Shaw, Janet. Meet Kirsten: An American Girl. New York: American Girl, 1986. Still Alice. Dir. Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland. Perf. Julianne Moore, Alec Baldwin, and Kristen Stewart. Sony Pictures, 2015. Film. Wilder, Laura Ingalls. Little House on the Prairie. 1935. New York: HarperCollins, 2002. —. These Happy Golden Years. 1943. New York: HarperCollins, 2006.

MULTICULTURALISM AND TRANSNATIONALISM: THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO BY JUNOT DÍAZ FERNANDO VALERIO-HOLGUÍN

The Coca-Cola commercial “It’s Beautiful” portrays the United States as an integrated multicultural society. Under the motto of “E pluribus unum,” different races, religions, ethnic groups, and age groups are represented partaking in recreational activities. All are singing “America the Beautiful” in various languages while, at the same time, sharing the American values that Coca-Cola symbolizes. This national beverage has become a “merchandise-fetish” that enables all who drink it to absorb “America’s essence.” The commercial alarmed monocultural conservative circles, condemning it outright as herein quoted from the Webpage PewResearchCenter: “Me [sic] thinks Coke a Cola presumes far too much. They do not speak for me. I find the song grating my American value system. Far too much divisiveness in all the languages. Does anyone recall the lesson of ‘The Tower of Babel’? Leave the song alone. If something isn’t broke, stop trying to fix it.”1 And this additional comment in Tweeter: “That Coke commercial sucked. Mexicans, terrorists, jews, and niggers are no ‘America’ [sic]” (TV Tweets). So much for American internet multiculturalism. These are only two out of 22 negative comments on the web and Tweeter. It is true that 22 or even 100 racist comments don’t represent the American society. However, they are indications that racism is alive in the United States, as shown by the police killings of Michael Brown and Eric Gardner, racist songs reported from an Oklahoma University fraternity, and the massive protests against racism throughout the USA over the last two years. In citing these curious comments my intention is not to discredit the efforts made toward

1

The quote is by Sahgal.

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multiculturalism in the United States, but to argue against what I would label “integrationist multiculturalism.” In his review of “The Multiculturalist Misunderstanding,” Anthony K. Appiah comments on American multicultural integration at the turn of the century: “One way—the old way—of describing what has happened would be to say that the families that arrived during the turn of the century wave of immigration have assimilated, become American. But, from another perspective, we might say that they became white” (30). Appiah acknowledges, however, that, in contrast to European immigrants, African Americans have not become “white.” Moreover, their blackness extended to the groups of African immigrants who, rather than integrate “became blacks in the U.S.” (30). Appiah’s argument, pointing to the racialization and whitening of European immigrants, interesting as it is, fails to take into account the experience of the Latino population in the U.S. White European integration, understood as the ethnic group’s loss of ethnic marking and an acquisition of new racial identity, may be true. Yet it says little of the Latino immigrant population, which has traditionally been perceived as neither white not black. Such is the case, for example, in the case of Dominicans, who often are branded because of their skin color. One may hide one’s Jewish, gay or Muslim identity, but this is never possible when it comes to one’s skin color. Race continues to be the ruling marker of one’s difference in the U.S. Moreover, it operates along a binary opposition between black and white, reducing all other nuances to an either/or logic. In this article, I would like to focus on the characters in Junot Diaz’ novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and set them against the multiculturalist discourse and transnationalism studies. I will argue that while Yunior assimilates into mainstream American culture, Oscar Wao, the protagonist, fails to integrate into the multicultural American space and, as a consequence, becomes the victim of two societies: the Dominican and the American one. When Junot Díaz won the Pulitzer Prize (2008) for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, readers were already familiar with Yunior, an important character-narrator in the novel. In this novel, however, Díaz introduces a new character: the protagonist Oscar Wao. The Brief Wondrous Life unfolds in Washington Heights, New York, and in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where immigrant families from various Latin American countries share their lives. Here we find Oscar Wao, the protagonist, his mother Belicia, and his sister Lola. In addition, we come across Yunior, Lola’s former boyfriend and Oscar’s friend. Not all these characters negotiate their cultural identities in the same manner. Yunior is a typical case of

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integrationist multiculturalism. In the novel and in several of the short stories, Yunior, Diaz’ alter ego, goes to college and later becomes a professor. He thus overcomes the abjection of the space of social marginalization. Yunior becomes the witness and narrator of Oscar Wao’s vicissitudes. While the latter cannot cope with the monstrosity that his skin color and cultural hybridity represent, Yunior, as storyteller, manages to assimilate into mainstream American culture. Yunior limits his citizenship to the USA, whereas Oscar strives to be transnational. Neither American nor Dominican he becomes stateless. The concept of “transnationalism” proposed by Elisabeth Maria Mermann-Jozwiak can be used to challenge multiculturalism. In her article, she states that Junot Díaz’s novel is “a response to uncritical celebrations of difference and multiculturalism’s narrative of the integration of ethnic subjects” (1). According to Mermann-Jozwiak, the concept of transnationalism is a tool used to analyze the break in thinking from the country of origin and to reflect on both the domestic and the international (17). The critic talks about Diaz’s novel as a response to the integrationist multiculturalism in the United States. If I find her argument about Díaz critique of unreflective celebration of American multiculturalism interesting, I cannot share her conviction that the novel replaces multiculturalism with transculturalism. I think that Oscar Wao not only fails in assimilating to a multicultural society but he is also a failure in attempting to become a transnational subject. While transnationalism leads the reader to think about the two cultures as a hybrid, Oscar is “neither ... nor,” he does not feel “at home” in either society and thus ends up being a victim of both. Neither Dominican nor American, Oscar will have to face the “fragmented and schizophrenic experience where ‘the truth of the (lived) experience no longer coincides with the place in which it takes place’” (Jameson quoted in Mitchell 268). Instead of the hospitality with which, according to Jacques Derrida, an immigrant should be treated, Oscar finds both societies to be inhospitable. His experience of alienation and social rejection manifests itself as early as his college experience. While attending Rutgers University in Brunswick, New Jersey, Oscar has to face racism and uncertainty about his hybridity: The white kids looked at his black skin and his afro and treated him with inhuman cheeriness. The kids of color, upon hearing him speak and seeing him move his body, shook their heads. You’re not Dominican. And he said over and over again, But I am. ‘Soy dominicano. Dominicano soy.’ After a spate of parties that led to nothing but being threatened by some white

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Years later, after graduating from Rutgers, Oscar gets a job as a teacher at Don Bosco High School, in the United States. This time, black students make fun of him: “In the old days it had been the white kids who had been the Chief tormentors, but now it was kids of color who performed the necessaries” (264). Wao’s racial estrangement evokes an archetypal racial solitude of numerous black characters from the Western world, the most famous of which is René Maran from Martinique, who is cited by Fanon. Wao’s predicament is that of René when “the white race would not accept him as one of its own and the black virtually repudiated him” (Fanon 67). As students make fun of him because of his obesity and his color, Oscar is also called Haitian several times, the worst possible racial slur for Dominicans who have interiorized the logic of white supremacy and invented their own racial hierarchy. Paradoxically, it is two Haitians who end up saving Wao after the beating he receives from a character named The Captain in the Dominican Republic. In a chapter entitled “The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars,” published in 1998 in The New Yorker, Yunior indulges in a bitter digression which seems to capture Oscar’s racial estrangement: “What is it with us niggers and our bodies? Not even Fanon can explain it to me” (Díaz 106). And it is precisely Fanon, who, in Black Skin, White Masks, expresses with regard to the character Jean Veneuse: “He does not understand his own race and the whites do not understand him” (64). Rejected in the two countries because of his racial and cultural lack of definition, Oscar can only inhabit a monstrous third space made up of video games and science-fiction novels. There is a teratology of the HybridOther that resists definition in American culture. Like the cannibals and men with one eye on their foreheads and dog muzzles purportedly seen by Spanish conquistadors at their arrival in the Caribbean, Oscar is seen and sees himself as a monster: “…and there was Oscar, keeping me up at night talking about the Green Lantern. Wondering aloud, if we were orcs, would not we, at a racial level, imagine ourselves to look like elves?” (178). Orcs are greenish brown monsters in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings; they are villains serving the “powers of darkness.” Elves, on the contrary, are white and endowed with great beauty and supernatural powers. Oscar might think of himself as a Latino orc who turns into an American elf. Oscar is also seen as a nerd, who represents another type of a monster: the intellectual (in Walter Benjamin’s sense). For this and other reasons, he cannot find a girlfriend. When Jenni, with whom he used to hang out, dumps him, Oscar tries to commit suicide. The narrator comments: “[B]ut

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Jenni must have had brain damage or been really into fat loser nerds...” (183). Neither American nor Dominican, and immersed in the world of fantasy novels, Oscar decides to become an English writer, but not the Anglo-Irish writer Oscar Wilde, who could hardly serve as a model of masculinity to Oscar. On the contrary, such identification would suggest the loss of his masculinity. Wao would rather be “A Dominican Tolkien.” (In different interviews, Diaz has expressed his fascination with the science fiction genre.) Through mimicry, in the sense of an imitation of the colonizer’s culture, by trying to compete with them, Oscar expresses his double articulation of hybridity, as well as his ambivalence towards using the English language and identifying with American culture. But Oscar is neither gay, like Oscar Wilde, nor is he Dominican or American, let alone English. As the book progresses, Oscar’s inner conflicts worsen: if, on the one hand he struggles to belong to both American and Dominican cultures, on the other he attempts to assert his masculinity. According to Maja Horn, in the Dominican Republic, “today’s hegemonic notions of masculinity were consolidated during the dictatorship of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo” (1). The Dominican dictator was well known for his insatiable sexual appetite. Moreover, Horn argues that Trujillo’s masculinity discourse was an attempt to address the racist notions that arose during the U.S. occupation of the Dominican Republic (1916-1924). Such is the context for Oscar’s desire to assert his masculinity in Santo Domingo. Being obese, brown and nerdy, Oscar has no success when it comes to women. After a few failed attempts at attracting girls, he returns to the Dominican Republic and falls for Ybón, a former prostitute in a sexual relationship with an army officer. After a long courtship, Oscar manages to become intimate with Ybón. The obstacle between his desire and the girl, however, is her boyfriend, a captain who rose in the ranks during the second U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965, and distinguished himself as an agent of the repressive force of the paramilitary group “La Banda Colorá.” The triangulation of the Ybón affair is essentially a pretext for competition, a test of masculinity between Oscar, attempting to adhere to the hegemonic patriarchal Dominican culture, and a Dominican military stud. In a conversation with Oscar, Ybón asks him to go back to his country (meaning the USA), but Oscar insists that his home is the Dominican Republic. When Ybón replies, “Your real home, mi amor,” Oscar persists in his national choice and teaches Ybón his newly acquired lesson in cultural identity: “A person can’t have two homes” (318). Finally, Oscar dies as a result of the second beating he receives at the hands of The Captain. Maja Horn provides a de-romanticized reading of Oscar’s death in the Domini-

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can Republic. According to her, “Oscar’s death was neither wondrous nor mysterious—no fukú here—but rather he is killed as a result of his overstepping the scripts of hegemonic masculinity in the Dominican Republic” (128). As a failed integrated multiculturalist and transnationalist, Oscar is a character caught in the net of meanings that this novel exposes. One is tempted to speculate if Junot Díaz does not share with Oscar Wao the same voice that straddles two cultures, two worlds (DR/US) and two time sequences, (past/present). In one of his interviews, Diaz concedes: “I always lived in a situation of simultaneity” (Lewis), thus asserting the possibility of simultaneous existence in two different languages, nations and cultures. But Ybón’s warning to Oscar seems to shatter this idealized picture of a successful transnational existence: Consequently, one cannot dwell in two languages (two cultures), because if it is indeed true that residing in a second language may release one from the prison of one’s native language, language, as Iain Chambers observes, “does not merely reflect culture, history and differences but also produces them” (12). On the one hand, Yunior manages to assimilate into mainstream American culture, due not only to his mastery of the English language, but also to his success at school and his masculinity. On the other, Oscar fails to succeed in a multicultural society and become a transnational citizen. His hybridity does not “shift the dual logic Self/Other of the identities of difference” (Bhabha 3). As a hybrid, he is “neither one nor the other” (10). The privileged status conferred by Bhabha to the concept of “third space” with respect to hybridity becomes a disadvantage to Oscar, living in a state of double marginality. As Fanon would say, Oscar Wao is “An anxious man who cannot escape his body” (65).

Works Cited Appiah, K. Anthony. “The Multiculturalist Misunderstanding.” New York Review of Books 44 (1997): 30-36. Bhabha, Homi. “The Commitment to Theory.” New Formations 4 (1988): 5-23. Chambers, Iain. Migrancy, Culture, Identity. London & New York: Routledge, 1994. Coca-Cola. “It’s beautiful…” Commercial for the Super Bowl 2014. Web. Derrida, Jacques. Of Hospitality. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000. Díaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead Books, 2007.

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—. “The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars.” New Yorker February 2 (1998): 66-71. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 1967. Horn, Maja. Masculinity after Trujillo: The Politics of Gender in Dominican Literature. Gainsville, FL: UP of Florida, 2014. Lewis, Marina. “Interview with Junot Diaz.” Other Voices 36. 20 Apr. 2016. Web. Mermann-Jozwiak, Elisabeth. “Beyound Multiculturalism: Ethnic Studies, Transnationalism, and Junot Díaz’s Oscar Wao.” Ariel 43.2 (2012): 124. Mitchell, Katharyne. “Multiculturalism, or the United Colors of Caoitalism.” Antipode 25.4 (1993): 263-294. Sahgal, Neha. “Coke, ‘America the Beautiful,’ and the language of diversity.” PewResearchCenter. Web. 20 Apr. 2016. TV Tweets. “Coke Thinks ‘America is beautiful,’ but Americans May Not Be.” 20 Apr. 2016. Web.

STRADDLING WORLDS: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE MULTICULTURAL EXPERIENCES OF ANURAG MATHUR AND CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE ARPA GHOSH

Two decades separate Anurag Mathur’s 1991 novel The Inscrutable Americans from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2013 novel Americanah. In both, educated third world youths on their visit to the States primarily for educational purpose closely observe the habits and attitudes of Americans. To start with the first one, in a mode of comic exaggeration, Anurag Mathur writes about the chasm between expectation and experience. His protagonist Gopal is a caricature of a New Age small town young Indian adult, obsessed with sex and superstition. His friend Sunil’s assessment of America bears out his outrageously stereotyped preconceptions of American life: All cultures developed […] names to distinguish the shadings of any element of which there was an abundance in the environment. So the Eskimos apparently had half a dozen names for snow and Indians similarly had names for a nearly endless number of specific relationships […]. I wonder what it is that has the largest number of synonyms in America? Sex…the sex act has more names in America than anything else. Problem is not only are they obsessed with sex, they’re making the rest of the world equally crazy. Look at this poor guy [Gopal], he’s read Penthouse Letters and seen Deep Throat and he thinks that’s America. (17-18)

The Inscrutable Americans is pluralistic in its loose juxtaposition of lives lived by diverse individuals and communities within the body of the nation-state: lives that interface without interacting. There is no sympathetic and painstaking attempt to understand alien cultures, only random observations about the American attitude towards sex, colour, race and gender.

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Within the body of nation-states, pluralism is the tolerance of diverse cultures by the dominant culture without any consolidated effort to grant them equality of status under the law. It is a society which is a “medley of peoples [….] for they mix but do not combine. Each group holds by its own religion, its own culture and language, its own ideas and ways. As individuals they meet, but only in the market-place, in buying and selling” (Watson 19). The term multicultural means celebration of diverse modes of living as in food and sartorial habits, quirks in speech and accents, and so on. Multiculturalism is a serious political process of granting equal status under law to distinctive cultural groups without compelling them to assimilate with the dominant culture, as much it is a deep philosophical query into the possibilities of equality while maintaining distinction in cultural and religious norms. Multicultural points to the visible and universally accessible products of cultural diversity—food, clothes, music, theatre, and sometimes specialist occupations—and on the whole it has very positive resonance. Multiculturalism however also directs our attention away from these purely visible aspects of diversity, to the deeper philosophical and political implications of the coexistence of different orientations to engagement with the world and the way in which these differences struggle for recognition within national and global boundaries, sometimes in relative harmony with each other, sometimes in real conflict. Though what we get in Mathur’s novel are instances of the pluralistic bent of the university ambiance of Eversville, the university town Gopal visits for a year (the Americans there extend friendship, but make no effort to understand Gopal’s fears and prejudices about them and neither does he), it is unsettling to note that pluralism, at least in the confines of the novel, also extends to the white Americans’ indifference to the poor black. At least during his brief stay Gopal sees no effort on the part of powerful white American to draw the black into the fold of mainstream success. The sole black student, Peacock by his very name, his jangling ornaments, and massive physical strength, stands apart from the rest of the campus students. Gopal’s black college footballer friend takes him on a tour of the local black township separated from white quarters by a junkyard and alerts him to the fact that America has failed/refused to extend its privileges to poor blacks who are largely stereotyped as being more strong than sharpbrained. Surveying the township a shocked Gopal exclaims: “It is not even looking like America. No one is working, there is so much dirt, it is so poor” (166). Peacock hints at racism when he replies: “They don’t think it’s part of America either. The white boys keep the junkyard between

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them and us and they don’t want to see us or hear about us […]. The black man’s the lowest on the pole everywhere.” More than twenty years later, in Adichie’s novel Americanah the Nigerian heroine Ifemelu visiting America observes in her blog: “There’s a ladder of racial hierarchy in America. White is always on top, specifically White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, otherwise known as WASP, and American Black is always on the bottom, and what’s in the middle depends on time and place […]. Americans assume that everyone will get their tribalism” (185). Though the novels are spaced out by twenty years, Ifemelu’s and Peacock’s opinions cohere. But, at the same time, Adichie’s novel is also a documentation of America welcoming its first black President Barack Obama within this space of twenty years. So some things must have changed. Adichie’s more nuanced and voluminous novel Americanah addresses the issues of racism in serious and interesting ways. As a Nigerian student who stays back as a blogger for fifteen years in the States during which time she engages in two love relationships (one with a blonde, blazingly handsome, rich White Anglo Saxon American called Curt, and the other with the educated, good-looking Black American Blaine who is uncompromisingly committed to the cause of black equality), Ifemelu fails to notice any consolidated effort on the part of mainstream America to put the black in ease or even pay attention to the specifics of his cultural and economic background. As is evident from her blogs, blacks are either invisible or stereotypes of an exotic oriental culture that is either indifferently tolerated or mindlessly eulogized. In the final count, while whites generously celebrate multiculturalism—a white girl braiding her hair like Africans in a black salon; a white woman indiscriminately referring to all black women as “beautiful,” there is no real effort—at least from Ifemelu’s point of view, to historicize and seriously comprehend the black immigrant’s situation in America. Though initially attracted to Curt, the rich Anglo Saxon American and the good life his immense wealth affords her, Ifemelu is never comfortable in the presence of his white friends, who she feels keep pushing her into boxes of race and colour, monochromatic identities she is unwilling to accept. When a Black American woman tries to simplify her love relationship with a white man, Ifemelu bursts out: The only reason you say that race is not an issue is because you wish it was not. We all wish it was not. But it’s a lie. I came from a country where race was not an issue; I did not think of myself as black and I only became black when I came to America. When you are black in America and you fall in love with a white person race doesn’t matter when you’re alone to-

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The intellectual Ifemelu feels that Curt de-historicizes her by lumping her with all black migrants to America, incapable of and unwilling to delve into the singularity of her history. According to the critic C. W. Watson, This de-historicization of non-western cultures is a necessary, even if unintended consequence of the multicultural logic. Indeed, the issue of preserving cultures and traditional practices is predicated upon such a perspective. If non-western cultures are treated as entities that are evolving and redefining their value systems in the process of responding to new challenges, then the question of preserving cultural practices does not even arise. The de-historicized picture makes minority cultures exotic. They surface as upholders of quaint customs and primordial identities. The idea that minority cultures are historical entities that undergo change, that their customs are prone to recent provenance and contested history, are aspects that are never adequately accommodated within multiculturalism. (162)

With the Black American Blaine, Ifemelu’s problem is that of ideological distance. She fails to sympathize with his aggressive stance towards the slightest racial slurs that he or his ilk might face. His lifestyle she feels is too clinically American, and clashes with her more African tastes. His history too is different from hers. The realization that they are completely different people sharing little more than colour gradually dawns. Whereas Curt seeks to gloss over Ifemelu’s blackness accusing her of overreaction whenever she points out myriad instances of discrimination and insult, Blaine tries to co-opt Ifemelu into his causes, treating her as a future Black American. Ifemelu rebels against his reductionist attitude. In her blog she says: “Don’t say ‘Oh, racism is over, slavery was so long ago.’ […] racism is about the power of a group and in America it’s white folks who have that power” (326-27). Probably it is the problem of covert racism that prevents men like Blaine from shedding race concerns and moving on in life. Blaine’s sister, Shan clarifies: You can’t write an honest novel about race in this country. If you write about how people are really affected by race, it’ll be too obvious… So if you’re going to write about race, you have to make sure it’s so lyrical and

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subtle that the reader who doesn’t read between the lines won’t even know it’s about race. You know, a Proustian meditation, all watery and fuzzy, that at the end just leaves you feeling watery and fuzzy. (335-36)

Though Ifemelu dislikes Shan’s brittle, attention-seeking nature and finds race embroidered in the fabric of Shan’s history etched on her soul, she agrees with Shan’s viewpoint. As a Nigerian visitor, Ifemelu begins to distance herself from the concerns of the Black Americans, since she has already begun to toy with the idea of returning home. Keenly observant of the diverse societies she inhabits, being among poor black immigrants struggling to find a foothold in the expensive, consumerist economy, among super-rich whites, among educated Black Americans, Ifemelu discovers clear divisions of power, demarcations of space, unspoken yet blatant. In her blog she writes: “In America, racism exists but racists are all gone [….] maybe its time to just scrap the word ‘racist’. Find something new. Like Racial Disorder Syndrome. And we could have different categories for sufferers of this syndrome: mild, medium and acute” (315). Deeply restless and dissatisfied with what America has to offer her, which is considerable money, power and status issuing from her blisteringly honest blog that in itself is a tribute to America’s openness to self-criticism, Ifemelu, like Gopal, seems uncertain of and insecure in her own emigrant self. Her return to Nigeria as Americanah (the nickname Nigerians give to returnees) firms up her personality. The best of her American experience is brought to play in her handling of career and personal challenges. Compared to her friends who have been in Nigeria throughout, Ifemelu finds herself far more confident and empowered by her American experience. Americanah, a pejorative term at the outset of the novel, gets transformed to a positive connotation. Adichie’s novel also celebrates Barrack Obama’s rise as a candidate and final swearing in as the first black American president. As a Nigerian emigrant, Ifemelu finds herself drawn into a hub of black zeal and sympathy perhaps for the only time in her fifteen-year stint in America. For a short time she gets together with the blacks believing in and finally celebrating the miracle of a black president: “Ifemelu watched Blaine and the other people around them, all glowing with a strange phosphorescence, all treading a single line of unbroken emotion. They believed. They truly believed” (157). Yet though there is excitement, passion, celebration, there is also an informed, clear-eyed assessment of the situation. As the educated black American Blaine sees it: To the extent that Obama is benefitting, and the idea of benefitting is very problematic […] it’s not because he’s black, it’s because he’s a different

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Blaine’s summation points to the black American’s skepticism with Barack Obama’s ascension to presidenthood once the initial excitement subsides. In these parts of the novel the epithets that reiterated are “belief,” “believer” and “‘believing,” almost as if Obama’s rise were a flouting of logic, a miracle rather than an evolving logical step in the route towards healthy American multiculturalism. Ifemelu’s return to Nigeria is an informed decision on her part as a globalized person who brings a certain international liberalism to the understanding of native trade and business. Americanah, a pejorative term in the onset of the novel meaning a Nigerian student blindly and snobbishly enamoured of America and the cultural liberalism it stands for, takes on a multicultural dimension at the end, signifying an independent, experienced woman who has earned wealth and self-confidence during her stay in America and who is capable of holding her own in the patriarchal culture of modern day Nigeria. Ifemelu’s thrust throughout the novel is towards self-improvement and self-realization. Though her stay in America is spotted with heartbreak, it encourages her to engage in questions and comments on race, colour, class and gender with the people she meets and in the blog she maintains. The questions raised find resonance and reverberation in her listeners, real and virtual. According to Amartya Sen, these are queries form the very basis of multiculturalism. Says Sen: There is a compelling need in the contemporary world to ask questions not only about the economics and politics of globalization, but also about the values, ethics, and sense of belonging that shape our conception of the global world. In a non-solarist understanding of human identity, involvement with such issues need not demand that our national allegiances and local loyalties be altogether replaced by a global sense of belonging, to be reflected in the working of a colossal ‘world state.’ In fact, global identity can begin to receive its due without eliminating our other loyalties. (185)

The economist-thinker sees multiculturalism as an extension of democracy and founded solidly on the spirit of gregarious dialogues and exchanges between groups, communities, and even individuals. America, as culture and nation-state, offers an essential open-mindedness and valuable demo-

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cratic freedom to its guests and citizens: the freedom to question and criticize its shortfalls as unbiased nation-state, as is evident from Mathur’s and Adichie’s novels. Both criticize Americans for their naïveté and lack of interest regarding minority cultures, yet read against the grain their texts portray America as a land of opportunity and open-mindedness. While in America, Gopal does pay a rich tribute to American friendliness, tolerance and civility towards foreign students, an attitude basic to multiculturalism, when he says: Here […] they [the Americans] loved questions. They didn’t care if they were insane, in fact the crazier the better, so long as they were also intelligent. Even the students, astonishingly, didn’t seem to resent his clearly superior abilities. At least, he amended, most of them didn’t. They said they enjoyed his sallies and they spoke to him, asked to study with him and expressed their admiration to him with a frankness that was staggering, yet deeply touching. Initially he was so incredulous at their straightforward talk that he suspected they were being sarcastic. But very quickly he realized they were transparently honest. (133-34)

American liberalism comes through in its essential welcoming of querying minds in Mathur’s novel. In fact, as Indians it is our financial gain and demographic loss that America has been one of the first countries to recognize the power and value of human resource and entice our best brains into settling in their country and serving their intellectual and industrial interests. Today if we discuss American multiculturalism it is because of the extent to which America has welcomed, even enticed, generations of aliens from Third World countries to settle and flourish in its territories. Similarly, Ifemelu is not only appreciated for her blistering blogs, she in fact grows rich and famous for writing them. But whenever she wishes to break away from a relationship or a group she is given a free path. Her final exit option is also an organic part of American multiculturalism, for she can return to America whenever she wishes. As Gurpreet Singh says in her thesis The Multicultural Path: If cultures are valuable only to the extent that they give meaning to the life of the agents, individuals alone must determine for themselves whether they feel attracted to a given way of life and whether they wish to abide by it. If for some reason, they wish to make different choices or opt for another way of life, they must have the option of making that choice. They must have the right to exit from that culture and community. What also follows from this line of reasoning is that individuals should have the opportunity ‘to live within the culture of their choice, to decide on their social affiliations, to re-create the culture of the community they belong to, and to redefine its borders.’ (148)

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It is being pigeonholed as a de-historicized black that Ifemelu resents about her American experience. As Americanah she straddles both worlds, effectively, productively. The novel makes it evident that as a nation committed to the ideals of multiculturalism America has gained ground in the past forty years. Suspicions and obstacles remain, but America expands and enhances Ifemelu’s personality in significant ways and also gives her a democratic identity as a respectable and creative American guest-citizen. We can conclude with Karl Marx’s famous quotation on the new world order: The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country […]. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and selfsufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures there arises a world literature. (1848 Manifesto of the Communist Party)

Works Cited Aichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Americanah. London: Fourth Estate, 2013. Lazarus, Neil, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party. 1848. Trans. Samuel Moore. 20 Aug. 2015. Web. Mathur, Anurag. The Inscrutable Americans. New Delhi: Rupa Publications, 1991. Sen, Amartya. Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny. London: Penguin Books, 2006. Singh, Gurpreet. The Multicultural Path: Issues of Diversity and Discrimination in Democracy. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2002. Watson, C. W. Multiculturalism. London: Open University Press, 2000.

ON ISHMAEL REED

MULTICULTURALIZING AMERICA: ISHMAEL REED AND THE CULTURAL MOSAIC WENDY HAYES-JONES

“I am a typical multiculturalist.” —Ishmael Reed, MultiAmerica: Essays on Cultural War and Cultural Peace “Multiculturalism in the United States has come to mean everybody but blacks.” —Ishmael Reed, “The Celtic In Us”

The acclaimed African American author Ishmael Reed visualizes the U.S. as the nation of deep-rooted and unceasing multiculturalism and his writing agenda is based on a belief that literature should engage in a process of “projecting the United States as a planet-nation” (Writin’ is Fightin’ 119). He is in many ways the quintessential American patriot finding his artistic inspiration within the cosmopolitanism and pluralism of U.S. life, juxtaposed with the conviction that possibilities within America exist precisely because it “is not Europe, and it is not Africa,” but rather a unique “new civilization” with an “exciting destiny” (Shrovetide 227). By the time Reed famously declared in 1997, “I am a typical multiculturalist” (MultiAmerica xxii), he had acted as a general editor and contributor to various anthologies within the Literary Mosaic series.1 These bring together diverse writings in English into singular ethnic publications that effectively manifest Reed’s vision of multicultural space in America. Far from presenting homogeneity, the metaphorical artistry of a mosaic allows for a kaleidoscope of different, but discrete, tiles, shapes and sizes with the proviso that they will fit together as one whole image. When applied to the U.S., Reed constructs a mosaic of relations where different cultures that are themselves heterogeneous interact in a spirit of mutual respect and 1

The Mosaic belonged to a four-part Harper-Collins series presenting separate anthologies of Hispanic/ Asian/ Native and African American Literature in 1995. These were edited by Nicolas Kinellos, Shawn Wong, Gerald Vizenor and Al Young respectively. Each contains a generic “Foreword” by Reed himself.

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equality, though the distinctiveness of each ethnic group remains within the larger composite of American diversity. As a positive model of coexistence this facilitates Reed’s belief in preserving the dynamic flux of cultures and explains his particular view of an anti-assimilationist multiculturalism which attempts to reconcile the legacy of American indigeneity, slavery, immigration and the consequent creolisation of peoples through time. I propose to explore Reed’s perspectives on multiculturalism with the hope that they will throw light on the complexities of ethnically diverse relations and how they operate in various contexts. I ultimately argue, however, that the mosaic theory is in many ways a utopian palimpsest underpinned by Reed’s particular style of American Exceptionalism. His futurist optimism is difficult to maintain in practice because he has to balance this with the experience of America’s present racial divisions where multicultural complexity is ossified into the binary terms of “black” and “white.” I begin by attempting to clarify what Reed means by the label “multicultural,” since in 1996 he highlighted fears about this “term that has become a political football in the struggle between the politically correct of the left and the right” (Foreword: The Literary Mosaic Series xi). Yet, a year later, in the aptly titled anthology Multi-America, he disclosed the impossibility of achieving a sound definition due to the media-toting vagaries of public intellectuals. He disputed the view of Bharati Mukherjee who said “that the mosaic theory of multiculturalism means an American culture divided by separate cultural entities,” arguing that this was not the intellectual experience of many of his contributors (xxii). Indeed, Reed illuminates his own involvement with intercultural exchange by explaining that “we were introduced to things of our own culture that we hadn’t been aware of before. I have seen parallels in their experience to ours, and we’ve illuminated their backgrounds as well” (qtd. in Binder and Breinig 108). Reed also repudiated a tokenistic form of multiculturalism whereby a tiny minority of non-white people might be appointed within a dominant organisation of whites. His statement on American multiculturalism is best expressed as, “the world is here,” and he borrows the term “horizontal integration” to express an America where people from different groups will live and work together on an equal basis (Writin’ is Fightin’ 56, 119). Drawing on the analyses of Manning Marable, it is more apposite to link Reed with a “radical democratic multiculturalism” that can be defined by its emphasis on “the parallels between the cultural experiences of America’s minority groups with oppressed people throughout the world,” since this involves generating discussions about power inequalities and the potential means to restructure political and cultural power (190, 123-24).

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Indeed, a multiplicity of cultures is required for a genuine multiculturalism, and Reed’s work embodies the tension between a desire for commonality, fluid interaction and the necessity for minorities to develop strategies for sustaining their cultural differences. Conceptually multiculturalism is subject to a range of definitions and far from being a prescription for how society should be composed, Reed conceives of multiculturalism as being continually re-made according to social and political conditions. In his writings, Reed attempts to eradicate divisiveness and to generate free cultural exchange within ethnic America in order to promote the inclusive and internal validation of identities. His sense of cross-culturalism is constructed in opposition to what Werner Sollors calls the “blandness of the melting pot,” a term that assumes an assimilationist stance where the different elements would “melt together” into a harmonious whole within a common culture (iv).2 Reed believes this to be a dehumanizing process even exclaiming, “monoculturalism is Nazism,” in deliberately provocative terms because he wishes to highlight and compare the practices of an aggressive military movement, with the processes of assimilation in America (qtd. in Callahan 167-68). Just as Nazism was intent on eradicating those with physical disabilities or cultural and racial diversities, Reed argues that the assimilation process eradicates identity. He senses this is damaging to individual groups, even whites, since they are “supposed to mold themselves” into an American ideal of whiteness and, unlike Europeans with their ancient culture, they could become “some kind of homogenized standardized profile” (qtd. in Moore 224).3 His vision is one that supports group identities on the grounds that individual cultures are too valuable to lose, and this fuels his pledge to counter any perception of America as a common culture monolith. The 1970s were pivotal for Reed to seize the mantle of promoting cultural diversity, and with Berkeley in California as his locus operandi, he felt free to cultivate what he described as a “colourful gumbo culture” that would establish a new centre of multicultural literature to challenge the

2

The “melting pot” concept can be originally attributed to J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur. In his Letters from an American Farmer (1782) he explores the notion of immigrants being received into America, the new culture: “Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world” (55). 3 In 1917, the president, Theodore Roosevelt, insisted on “the swift assimilation of aliens” into the “language and culture that has come down to us from the builders of this republic” at a time when national unity seemed imperative in the light of America’s entry into the First World War (see Parekh 5).

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New York literary fraternity (qtd. in Henry 217).4 Championing the vitality of African/Asian/Irish/Arab American, American Indian and Chicano voices that would not normally find their way into national presses was the driving force that saw such collaborative ventures as the Yardbird publishing company (1971), the Reed, Cannon and Johnson Communications Company (1973), The Before Columbus Foundation (1976) and I. Reed Books (1978) come into being. These spawned a wealth of diverse publications and the multicultural organisation Before Columbus Foundation and Reed’s online magazine Konch continue to flourish, spurred on by the need to tell a diverse story. Reed facilitates such publications as part of the densely woven multicultural tapestry of American textuality. In wishing to challenge the dominance of Euro-American texts, he particularly attempts to avoid the binary of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture so favoured by literary canonizers’ works. The Foreword to the Mosaic series discloses a sense of the true mosaic: that “one doesn’t have to abandon the style of one’s own tradition in order to embrace styles from other traditions” rather, it is “a creative give and take between artists of different cultures” (The Literary Mosaic Series xi). In a practical sense, this exemplifies what many theorists, including Bikhu Parekh, believe multiculturalism should offer, namely “an open and equal dialogue” in human life (13). Reed claims the Mosaic series provides the “antidote to […] a version of multiculturalism” that tended to offer “the same line-up of token ethnic writers found in the policy issue of multicultural books” (Foreword: The Literary Mosaic Series xi, xiv). The point is that Reed, along with his collaborators, not only seeks to explore the landscape of traditional and experimental American autobiography, fiction, poetry and drama, they are actually attempting to recanonize American writing in the form of what Reed terms as “a more inclusive tradition” (xii). Reed’s sense of multiculturalism is underpinned by a number of key elements. Sämi Ludwig notes that “the Reedian use of syncretism” is his “inspiration” (Concrete Language 300). Nowhere is this better expressed than through Reed’s interest in the American form of “Vodoun” or, rather “HooDoo” (Shrovetide 10); already in his first essay collection Shrovetide in Old New Orleans (1978), Reed explored his fascination with this city as a prime example of a workable urban multiculturalism with its blending together of vodoun, the Catholic worship of saints, blues and jazz music. He observes the celebrations of Mardi Gras and the polytheistic, all con4

Reed’s Gumbo writing style can best be described as a metaphorical “throwing into the soup of whatever ingredients one can find.” For Reed this means drawing on and synthesising a number of literary forms and sources that can transcend time, history and place.

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suming traditions of dancing, drumming, and the “heathen and Christian rites” involving “ritual masking and costuming” (11). Approvingly, he records that “HooDoo food. Syncretic: Spanish, African, Native American, French” is “adaptable to all cultures” (25). As these associations burgeoned in Reed’s mind, his world view of America as a heterogeneous nation thriving on cultural exchange began to crystallize and he savoured the sheer mixing of different cultures on a just and egalitarian basis. Fostering the concept of a participative democracy is also very significant in Reed’s syncretic metaphor of the mosaic and this feature that also finds a strong representation in his fiction. In Mumbo Jumbo (1972) he creates a multi-ethnic gang, the “Black Yellow and Red Mu’tafikah,” who loot the contents of American and European museums in order to repatriate “the archives of ‘mankind’s’ achievements” to Africa, Asia and Latin America (15). Amongst the diverse members there is a common sense of purpose in restoration and this multicultural network becomes global as the location of works and plunder operations are meticulously plotted and timetabled from museums across the world.5 The gang’s success is so total that “sympathetic White students and intellectuals” from all over Europe aid the looters and the “South American Mu’tafikah” award the gift of a drinking vessel in the shape of an Inca Warrior’s head “to the North American branch in recognition of their work and devotion to the cause” (8384). Similarly the range of cultural references in the closing pages of Japanese by Spring (1993) offers a soothing palliative to the prospect of a monocultural regime being imposed within the confines of the university system. The reader encounters the “Festival of the Lake” in Oakland, California, attended by “ninety-eight thousand people” comprising African, African American, American Indian, South American, Caribbean, Asian and European cultures (223). Diverse forms of food, dance, costume and music are represented in this welcome celebration of multiculturalism, so that it “resembles a meeting at the General Assembly of the United Nations” (224). The spirit of inclusivity goes hand in hand with representative government and the narrator, who is also the fictional/biographical Ishmael Reed, comments that “this is the way the United States would look in twenty five years,” which means there is an anticipated future when there will be harmonious exchange and cordial interaction between all cultures (224). These factual and fictional examples comprise instances where artistic endeavour has the potential to foster universal co-operation, but signifi5

Many of the names of the ‘Mu’tafikah’ belie their origins: Berbelang, the leader, is an African American; ‘Tam’ is a Nigerian musician and writer; Jose Fuentes is a Mayan seaman; Yellow Jack, a Chinese American and Thor is Scandinavian.

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cantly they also denote how Reed establishes his own particular take on combining cosmopolitan values within the creed of American Exceptionalism. Originally this concept, predicated on the political and moral agenda of advancing America as the new and original nation, the “City on the Hill,” has been criticised by Reed for its constituent links with Puritanism and the idealistic notion that “the United States was a gift to Europeans by god” (Airing Dirty Laundry 224). He objected on the grounds that American success and the rise of a white hegemonic value system has been equated for far too long with the notion of European destiny carved out from Puritan forefathers. Yet, when this extremely resilient belief is extended to moral grounds and the prospect of serving humanity, Reed’s vision appears to shift towards embracing the notion of America having the capacity to lead the way in potentially resolving the disputes about racial and ethnic inequalities towards a “multicultural meeting of minds” (Going Too Far 234). In 2010, the essay “Watermill at Gdansk: The U.S. Puts Its Best Foot Forward” enabled Reed to record his observations about the American involvement in the celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of “Solidarnosc [sic], the freedom movement that started the fall of the iron curtain” (230).6 He notes how Robert Wilson, the founder of the Watermill Arts Center in New York, was specifically asked to direct the show in the Gdansk Shipyard in Poland by Lech Walesa, the human rights activist and former Polish president. Reed’s pride is evident when he exclaims: “At a time when Anti-Muslim Neo-Nativists are embarrassing the United States by exhibiting their ignorant behinds, American artists once again show our country at its best, its noblest, its highest spirit” (227). Reed’s conception of the mosaic sits within a nation that celebrates its inherent multi-ethnicity on the world stage, and though there have been many artistic successes, there resides a major paradox in American multiculturalism: a racialized consciousness is still inherent within this society through visible markers of difference, namely, through what Reed identifies, as the “one drop rule” of African descent (Another Day xii). Reed makes a consistent case against the oppression of blacks by the white majority throughout his work, revealing an underlying nationalist sensibility. Consequently he often assumes a black essentialist platform to counter racist issues that range from his personal experiences of suffering discrimination, institutional racism, the high incidence of black men in the prison 6

Reed was the artist in residence in the summer of 2009 at the Watermill Center, New York, when the artistic director Robert Wilson was planning the 2010 celebration of this thirtieth anniversary event. Reed notes that “the Watermill Center is a hub of creativity for artists from Europe, the Americas, Asia and the Pacific” (230).

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population, through to the representation of African Americans in the media.7 In 2010 Reed felt compelled to state that effectively “multiculturalism in the United States has come to mean everybody but blacks,” implying that African Americans are isolated by colour profiling and are not allowed the option of ethnicity because the negative associations of blackness appear to invalidate any sense of being included in multiple ethnic groupings (“Celtic” 332). He presents the idea of colour blindness so that many Americans, he argues, attempt “to hide behind whiteness,” so they do not have to “call themselves Italian Americans or English Americans or Jewish Americans. They’re all white” (qtd. in Presson 304). Furthermore he claims they are “allowed to play ethnic games […] without being obvious,” whereas “blacks have difficulty in claiming the multi-ethnicity of their heritage because such a claim renders millions of people less ‘white’ […] because it threatens people” (Presson; Reed, “ Is Ethnicity Obsolete?” 227). Reed makes no secret of his exasperation with the current racial status quo, and it is notable that he often uses the term “ethnicity” as a euphemism for “race.” Even though the former might be associated with lesser charged cultural attributes, he continually pinpoints the fact that American identity is constructed on racial and national grounds against a power relationship of whiteness which is underpinned by authority and privilege. While Reed contends that American multiculturalism is for everyone “but blacks,” Nathan Glazer, the eminent sociologist, asserts that “multiculturalism is primarily for blacks” (163). Moreover, Glazer insists that this policy is “agitating and disturbing” because blacks do “not become part of the assimilatory process,” and that they show a sharper distinction in “religion, language, original nationality and culture” from the other ethnic minorities, who, he maintains, do “not stay a minority for more than two or three generations” (186, 189). Glazer’s evidence is based on his observations that ethnic conflicts have little to do with immigration, or with European ethnic groups since so many were intermarried and assimilated by the 1960s. He also notes that even most Asian and Middle Eastern migrants now opt to integrate in some way and become part of the majority. He claims that conflicts have everything to do with people of African or Caribbean descent because “they still show a degree of residential separation from others […] that has no parallel” (191). Glazer even reveals a 7

In the essay, “Another Day at the Front,” in the collection of the same name, Reed details his experiences of white harassment at some length. He argues that while his contentions might present a perspective that sounds “too black,” his encounters can be understood as forcing him “to engage in ‘essentialism’ from time to time” (Another Day xliii, 56-75; Barack Obama 63-72).

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sense of exasperation that these distinctions will almost certainly be challenged by the advocates of multiculturalism who argue that “all the ‘people of color’ (those who are non-white and non-European) are oppressed by the majority whites, all have had their cultures denigrated […] and all must receive recognition and respect” (191). In light of this analysis, the writings of Ishmael Reed draw our attention to a central irony. For if the discourse of “multiculturalism” emerged due to the ethnic resilience of African Americans, it now functions as a term that allows white Americans to embrace their diverse ethnicities (Irish-American, Italian-American, Jewish-American etc.), while denying that diversity to African Americans who are rendered homogeneously as “black.” Indeed, a central problem exists that while America presents itself as outwardly tolerant under the auspices of a modern, democratic nation where citizenship is a prized possession, the representation of African Americans remains static in a narrative of a backward South, of lawless African American youths moving into inner cities, and of a minority population existing on welfare. Reed has always been clear that blacks do not possess one cultural background, nor do they present the “solid front” believed in by many who assume that constant usage of the term “Brother” implies “a community of equals” (qtd. in Domini 141). He prefers the title “Afro-American, because it implies an international culture” (137). Multiculturalism can and does extend to the black Other, those African Americans who exhibit a whole range of cultural and linguistic practices that are continually evolving and that move beyond the usual enclaves of black athleticism and music into business, politics and the media. This certainly raises the questions of whether, given the extent of his racial discourse, Reed and other African Americans can truly feel themselves to be part of any cultural mosaic formation in America. The issue of Reed’s affiliations has led Christopher Shinn to describe him as propounding a form of “discrepant multiculturalism” at best, which implies that though Reed may support a force dedicated to American pluralism he will always remain “committed politically to the margins” (71). There is scope for this argument, given Reed’s authoritative insistence on blackness, yet he finds no contradiction in his embrace of cultural harmony within diversity. Reed asserts that “black nationalists have always been more cosmopolitan than white ones,” because, he counters, African Americans comprise the most complex group in the United States, since “ethnicity is interchangeable with being black” (“Celtic” 331; “Is Ethnicity Obsolete?” 227). In other words he claims “blacks are the only ethnic group in the United States” (227). In defence of this issue, Reed reveals his own heritage as a point in case, comprising a tripartite ethnicity to be not only Afri-

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can American, but also “Native American” and “Irish American” (Airing 267, 271). This signals to Reed the exponential prospect of going beyond the boundaries of an Afrocentric or nationalist vision, inferring that blacks are more inherently allied to multiculturalism than many other ethnicities. As he sees it, “America is a land of distant cousins,” a principle that recognises the rich multi-ethnic heritage of African Americans and one that cannot allow them to live their way of life in a self-contained manner (Airing 273). It is noteworthy that Glazer also envisages multiculturalism as the “culture of minorities” who are in some way racially distinct, and therefore multiculturalism ought to be best described as a “traditional adjustment to make matters comfortable for groups on the way to assimilation” (186, 189). Overridingly, he expounds, that the view held by most Americans, regardless of ethnicity or affiliation, is that not only is it “better to be an American […] there will be no foreign enclaves in the United States […]. All should be Americans” (196). These statements infer that Glazer believes multiculturalism, as a social process, to be destructive and that the non-participation of African Americans hijacks the process of assimilation or integration, implying therefore that they are in some way unpatriotic. Yet, Reed, even when representing a minority, is a patriot, and he expounds: “I know, based upon my experiences in other countries, that the United States, despite its problems, is still one of the most creative, experimental, and dynamic societies in the world” (Airing 52). However, even when Reed embraces his “plural self” and physically attempts to gain some legitimacy for his own cultural identities, he finds this is not easily achievable. As a self-declared ethnic gate-crasher, he has attended many diverse cultural events and his American Indian ancestry has granted him welcome in the Tlingit community in Alaska.8 In the essay “Black Irishman” we learn of Reed’s Irish lineage and he writes of his invitations to San Francisco’s Irish Cultural Centre. However, his Celtic descent has not always brought him acceptance. At a meeting of the Celtic Foundation he was introduced by the “late humanitarian John Maher […] as an Irish American poet. His reasoning was that if a drop of black blood made me black, why didn’t a drop of Irish blood make me Irish?” (Airing 272). Reed nevertheless records grimly how the “Irish American celebrities” at his table “seemed stunned” and, while Pete Hamill shook his hand, the feminist Deirdre English “stunned” the audience and himself by announcing Reed as an Irish American, “liar and a thief”’ (272). In a similar situa8

See Reed’s long essay “God Made Alaska for the Indians” in the longer collection of the same name (1-34).

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tion when Reed reports mentioning his ‘“Irish-American heritage’ to a ‘Professor of Celtic Studies at Dartmouth’ […he] laughed” (qtd. in Hollinger 20-21). Thus when Reed steps away from his African American lineage and attempts to ascend what he has caustically referred to, in the past, as “a ladder of whiteness,” he is rejected, which leaves him with the indelible sense that blacks are always invariably left on the bottom rung (Another Day 104). This last point leads Reed to reject a post-ethnic position and to categorically deny the post-race theories popular within contemporary cultural criticism.9 Reed’s further response to pro-assimilationists is to provide evidence that even European ethnic groups regret their loss of contact with their heritage and this stems from his conviction that the “so-called whites receive no reinforcement in being white because there’s no white culture. There’s Italian culture and French culture, but there’s no white culture” (qtd.in Cannon et al. 373). In Multi-America, Reed proclaims the beginnings of a resistance to white supremacy and assimilation from Latinos, African, Asian and Native Americans, even from a “growing number of ‘whites’ […] and ‘Europeans’” who “realize that abandoning ethnic cultures for whiteness was too high a price to pay” (xviii). He cites examples of such disillusionment ranging from the Mayans rebelling against the Mexican government in 1996, Italian and German Americans who suffered discrimination during the Second World War, through to an Irish American writer’s conference in San Francisco in 1995, where he questioned the audience about whether “assimilation [has] been worth it?” (xix). He reveals his surprise that “not a single member answered in the affirmative. They complained that they had to change their names to Anglo names, and they had to marry Anglos in order to get a good job” (xix). Reed is keen to foreground the mutual experiences of ethnic groupings in their opposition to white supremacy rather than the frictions that inevitably exist, and he aims to find a workable definition of a common, inclusive culture within the ever-changing ethnic dynamic of the United States. In his introduction to the essays in MultiAmerica he argues that “those who say that the standard of an American common culture should be European are in fact the separatists” (xxvii). This does not mean that Reed is unaware of friction, for his MultiAmerica reverts to the language of the battlefront and is in fact edited as a series of Essays on Cultural Wars and Cultural Peace invoked by the looming forces of monoculturalism and 9

Believing that multiculturalism has too many “limitations,” the historian David A. Hollinger favours the post-ethnic standpoint and proclaims a preference to move to a “cosmopolitan-inspired step” up that embraces the “rootedness” of ethnicity but not the empowerment of specific groups (1-7).

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assimilation. The lexis of war is indeed apposite if we invoke Shinn’s term, “discrepant multiculturalism,” for in application to Reed, he expounds, “it is by definition combative and necessitates new strategies and tactics for this struggle in the arena of culture” (76). Indeed, Reed’s vision of the mosaic comes under grave threat from a form of competitive ethnic politics that he identifies as “The Model Minority” phenomenon (Writin’ 199). Reed traces the evolution of media attitudes to ethnic groups from the 18th century, when blacks were championed by “slavers who considered them to be better workers than Native Americans and European indentured servants,” through to the radically altered views of the 20th century, when “Italian Americans were encouraged to fashion their values after those held by Irish Americans” (199). To air the instability of such generalisations, Reed records how this situation changed again by the 1980s, when ‘“Hispanics” were held up to blacks as the model minority,” and he later cites the example of the Asian American community, who reportedly “through hard work and devotion to Anglo values” proved “that assimilation correlates with American success” (199; Airing xii). By 2003 Reed notes how this conviction no longer holds any value and he draws attention to the, “tough-love critics of blacks,” who wonder why African Americans could not “emulate the successes of Korean mom-and-pop store owners in New York” or even Jewish Americans (Another Day 131). These images are presumably intended to bolster ethnic pride, achievement and settlement within the U.S., but far from demonstrating positive interaction and participation, they can be viewed as hostile projections with the agenda of reinforcing a social hierarchy. In Reed’s view the idea of a model minority is a myth, yet it presents real issues for his model of multiculturalism since it has a powerful import and can be used against African American populations and other ethnic communities in terms of denying affirmative action programmes and state and federal funding for education, health and welfare. To facilitate his belief in the dynamic flux of cultures, Reed presents an ethically laden mosaic theory of multiculturalism. For many commentators multiculturalism has a role only in an educational sense, and in terms of race relations America has seen increased tensions and violence over the past ten years. Reed’s nationalist platform facilitates a way of contending with the racist reality of life on a daily basis while his cultural mosaic appears to be a goal that ethnic groups can only strive towards. His argument is that African Americans are naturally disposed to dynamic cultural exchange, because of their multi-ethnic heritage, but this is a sticking point for many other ethnic groups. Reed knows that America’s future might fall short of the ideal and it is certainly questionable whether Reed can really

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bring all these perspectives together. It might be said that this occurs only on an artistic/spiritual level which looks to a future example of reconciliation rather than one that will work in the present. Reed shows a pragmatic tendency as he attempts to persuade those who see “multiculturalism as a threat to Western values” by arguing that “multiculturalism may, in the end, do more to preserve Western values than all of the defenders of Greece or Rome” (Airing xvii). His model of the cultural mosaic offers no easy or certain pattern of resolution, yet ironically through a nascent sense of American Exceptionalism, Reed is convinced that America is the only nation in the world where a fully functioning multicultural state can possibly exist. But, let Reed have the last word, for it is one of hope: “Reforms in the media and educational establishments and the rise of a new multicultural intelligentsia will help to change the perceptions Americans of different racial and ethnic backgrounds hold of one another […]. ‘Can we get along?’ I believe we can” (Airing 51-52).

Works Cited Binder, Wolfgang, and Helmbrecht Breinig. American Contradictions: Interviews with Nine American Writers. Hanover and London: Wesleyan UP, 1995. Callahan, Bob, et al. “Before Columbus Foundation Interview.” Dick and Singh 161-80. Cannon, Steve, et al. “A Gathering of the Tribes: Conversation with Ishmael Reed.” Dick and Singh 361-81. Crevecoeur, J. Hector St. John de. Letters from an American Farmer. 1782. Carlisle MA: Applewood Books, 2003. Dick, Bruce, and Amrijit Singh, eds. Conversations with Ishmael Reed. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1995. Domini, John. “Ishmael Reed: A Conversation with John Domini.” Bruce and Singh 128-43. Glazer, Nathan. “Multiculturalism and American Exceptionalism.” Multicultural Questions. Ed. Christian Joppke and Stephen Lukes. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1999. 183-98. Henry, Joseph. “A Melus Interview: Ishmael Reed.” Bruce and Singh 20518. Hollinger, David A. Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism. New York: Basic Books, 1995. Ludwig, Sämi. Concrete Language: Intercultural Communication in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo. New York: Peter Lang, 1996.

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Marable, Manning. Beyond Black and White. London and New York: Verso, 1995. Moore, Judith. “A Conversation with Ishmael Reed.” Bruce and Singh 219-34. Parekh, Bikhu. Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000. Presson, Rebekah. “Ishmael Reed Interview.” Bruce and Singh 303-13. Reed, Ishmael. Airing Dirty Laundry. Massachusetts and New York: Addison-Wesley Publishing, 1993. —. Another Day at the Front: Dispatches from the Race War. New York: Basic Books, 2004. —. Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media: The Return of the Nigger Breakers. Montreal: Baraka Books, 2010. —. “Black Irishman.” Airing Dirty Laundry 238-41. —. “The Celtic in Us.” Comparative American Studies 8 (2010): 327-33. —. God Made Alaska for the Indians. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1982. —. Going Too Far: Essays About America’s Nervous Breakdown. Montreal: Baraka Books: 2012. —. Japanese by Spring. 1993. New York and London: Penguin Books, 1996. —. Mixing It Up: Taking on the Media Bullies and Other Reflections. Philadelphia: De Capo Press, 2008. —. Mumbo Jumbo. 1972. New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1996. Print —. Preface: The Literary Mosaic Series. General Ed. New York: Harper Collins, 1995. —. Shrovetide in Old New Orleans. 1978. New York: Atheneum Macmillan, 1989. —. “Watermill at Gdansk: The U.S. Puts Its Best Foot Forward.” Going Too Far: Essays About America’s Nervous Breakdown 227-35. —. Writin’ is Fightin’: Thirty-Seven Years of Boxing on Paper. New York: Atheneum Macmillan, 1990. —, Shawn Wong, Bob Callahan, and Andrew Hope. “Is Ethnicity Obsolete?” Sollors 226-35. —, ed. Califia. The California Poetry. Berkeley: Y’Bird Books, 1979. —. Konch 1-9 Berkeley, 1990-1998. —. MultiAmerica: Essays on Cultural War and Cultural Peace. New York and London: Viking Penguin Books, 1997. —. The Columbus Foundation Poetry Anthology. New York, London: Norton, 1992.

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—. Yardbird Reader 1-5, 1972-1976. Reed, Ishmael, and Al Young, eds. Yardbird Lives! New York: Grove Press, 1978. Reed, Ishmael, and Al Young, eds. Quilt 1-5 1981-1986. Reed, Ishmael, and Tennessee Reed, eds. Konch Magazine. 1998-fol.

Reed, Ishmael, et al., eds. The Columbus Foundation Fiction Anthology. New York, London: Norton, 1992. Shinn, A. Christopher. “The Art of War: Ishmael Reed and Frank Chin and the U.S. Black-Asian Alliance of Multicultural Satire.” Williams 62-83. Sollors, Werner, ed. The Invention of Ethnicity. New York: Oxford UP, 1989. Williams, Dana A., ed. African American Humor, Irony and Satire: Ishmael Reed, Satirically Speaking. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007.

THE FIRST RAINBOW COALITION AND THE END OF MULTICULTURALISM IN ISHMAEL REED’S MUMBO JUMBO STEPHEN CASMIER

In Ishmael Reed’s somewhat surrealistic 1972 novel, Mumbo Jumbo, one of the main characters, a young, charismatic revolutionary named Berbelang, dies a strange and incongruously violent death. He is led into a police ambush by one of his white, co-conspirators and shot in the middle of the forehead: “Berbelang’s mind has rushed out to the pavement: Yellow, Red, Blue. Fire Opals” (120). The description of these rainbow colors, not only invokes Fire! (the one-issue, anti-racial-uplift magazine produced by Harlem Renaissance mavericks), but the 1969 death of Chicago Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton, who had founded a “rainbow coalition” of white radicals and urban street gangs. As signaled by Reed’s novel, the death of Hampton was a significant moment in American, multi-cultural, and representational politics. Through Mumbo Jumbo, Reed captures the deadly epistemological panic of the early 1970s, and the threat posed by a new, radical consciousness escaping the domestic control of mainstream, white American consumerist culture. Indeed, as the novel struggles towards a new mode of literary representation, the American media (through the agency of New Journalism and the enduring tropes of minstrelsy) contained and caricatured Black, internationalist radicalism, normalizing the wholesale execution of the Panther leadership and domesticating its international revolutionary agenda. This has had an enduring legacy in the United States, where the particularistic, commoditized “identity politics” of self-esteem have deftly replaced internationalist consciousness transforming it into a vapid, consumerist multiculturalism of surface difference. Today, in the popular American imagination mostly the caricatures persist with the once radical agendas of the oppressed and marginalized devolving into an interest group and identity politics of self-esteem, transforming threatening difference into tame,

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marketable brand content.1 Through its invocation of 1960s radicalism and the dogmatic transformation of radical difference into a deceptive, consumerist sameness, Mumbo Jumbo brilliantly charts the rhythms of this transformation. According to Reed, Mumbo Jumbo is a work of African American magic or necromancy, the "black art” of communicating with the dead and predicting the future. “Necromancers used to lie in the guts of the dead or in tombs to receive visions of the future,” says Reed in a 1971 interview (O’Brien 16). So, to perform his magic, Reed turns to the dead or the guts of a “morgue.” In the old print news business, journalists called the file of defunct clippings the “morgue”—the place where dead newspaper stories, cut off from the present—were laid to their final rest. Reed brings them back to life. As a necromancer, he revisits the morgue, using these clippings to lie “in the guts of old America and make readings about the future” (O’Brien 16). The rhythms of these reanimated stories of the past haunt the novel. Reed thus acknowledges that he used the novel “to make a crude, primitive fetish and […] put a ‘writing’ on an individual” (Reed, “Writer as Seer” 59). As such, it presents a counter-fiction or a non-Western, transgressive hoodoo hex against what he has called the equally magic, “fictions” of popular journalism. The novel thus defies the epistemology of semblances that structure the Modernist Western imagination which is embodied in both the indelible tropes of minstrelsy and the conventional chronological, plot-driven narratives and semblances of monolithic multiculturalism. For its structure, Mumbo Jumbo seems to draw much of its form and inspiration from Black Atlantic cosmology and the containment of that cosmology in the comic strips of artists such as “George Herriman, Afro-American, who created Krazy Kat,” to whom Reed dedicated the novel. Superficially, the novel seems set in 1920s Harlem, and presents the plot of an aging occult, Harlem fixture, Papa LaBas, pitting himself against an ancient crusade to suppress the contagious outbreak of the freespirited, multi-centered, polyrhythmic celebration of blackness that overcame 1920s America (a time When Harlem was in Vogue, observes historian, David Levering Lewis in the title of his book about the period). “They are calling it a plague when in fact it is the anti plague,” says La Bas. “It won’t stop until it cohabits with what it’s after” (Mumbo Jumbo

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In her landmark study of the rise of corporate “megabrands,” No Logo, journalist Naomi Klein brilliantly discusses how the 1960s counter culture and the ideas of some of the most revolutionary thinkers of the West get reduced into mere content for marketing global, corporate brands.

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30). Meanwhile, the villain, Hinckle Von Vampton, representing the monolithic ethos of the West, works as an agent of the Wallflower Order and the Knights Templar (who live by the “Atonist” mantra of their original founder, the Egyptian King, Set, who rigidly decreed, “Lord, if I can't dance, no one shall,” and fights to suppress the irresistible becoming of this epidemic the novel calls: “jes’ grew” (67). Meanwhile, the young upstart Berbelang breaks away from LaBas’ outmoded ways and establishes a group of radical Mu’tafikah, dedicated to liberating the magical indigenous objects stolen from the colonized world and exhibited in Western museums, or “pirate dens called museums” (83). Yet, the novel stops and restarts polyrhythmically defying the “homogenous empty time” essential to Western notions of identity and hegemony, which is modeled by literature and elaborated by German literary theorist Walter Benjamin. Using seemingly isolated chapters, found bits of news and photographs, and fragments of stories, its collected entities resemble the isolated frames of a Krazy Kat comic strip, an African American quilt of familiars, or the disparate items of a Black Atlantic, voodoo, “bundle.” In his book, Flash of the Spirit, Robert Ferris Thompson offers quote from Cuban anthropologist Lydia Cabrera and describes such a motley structure as a magical minkisi container, which is like the entire world in miniature, a means of domination. The ritual expert places in the kettle all manner of spiritualizing forces; there he keeps the cemetery and the forest, there he keeps the river and the sea, the lightening-bolt, the whirlwind, the sun, the moon, the stars—forces in concentration. (qtd. in Thompson 123)

In Reed’s words, such a vernacular, eclectic form puts a hex or a “reading” on something. Thus, rather than represent a certain notion of reality, this collection also arrests, or saves, what Thompson calls a “flash” of an “arrested spirit” and works magically “for the denial of hurt, for the redirecting of spirit” (158). So in Mumbo Jumbo the mode of Berbelang’s death in a police ambush, and the rainbow colored blood easily manifest the containment of such a spirit as they capture the rhythms of newspaper stories describing the slaying of Black Panther Party leaders, and in particular those representing the death of Fred Hampton, the Illinois Chairman of the Black Panther Party of Self-Defense. Hampton was murdered by police in an early morning raid on December 4, 1969. He was famous as a young, charismatic community organizer who embraced a multicultural ethos radically uniting the oppressed and marginalized despite irregardless of racial difference. And though the Black Panthers seemed to wage a grave-

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ly more political and less aesthetic war than the Mu’tafikah of Mumbo Jumbo, Reed himself describes little difference between both groups who staged battles of performance against the standardized and mechanized images of an art—of a Western white magic—that engendered white supremacy.

Commodified Blackness So, to read Mumbo Jumbo, one must turn to the context, the rhythms, of the late 1960s and early 1970s and the explosion into the American imagination (and to the eventual containment) of the Panthers and Black Power (and other radical identities in their wake). Black power embraced internationalist consciousness, connecting the struggles of African Americans to those of the “developing” world. These are anti-colonial struggles, argue Kwame Ture and Charles V. Hamilton in the preface to their defining 1967 work, Black Power: “Black Power means that black people see themselves as part of a new force, sometimes called the ‘Third World’; that we see our struggle as closely related to liberation struggles around the world. We must hook up with these struggles” (xix). So, in terms of iconography and representation, Black Power and its embodiment in the Black Panther Party worked to upset the dominant, made in America images—what W.E.B. DuBois called the “anti-negro propaganda” (138)— that had nurtured and sustained slavery, Jim Crow and the racist, de facto segregation of the American North. They rejected the “cultural terrorism” (Ture and Hamilton 35) of semblance and racist caricature. We “will no longer call ourselves lazy, apathetic, dumb, good-timers, shiftless, etc.,” proclaimed Ture and Hamilton. “And they will soon learn that the Hollywood image of man-eating cannibals waiting for, and waiting on, the Great White Hunter is a lie” (39). So, their major battle was with the widely disseminated and destructive image of blackness produced for the market place and consumed as an agent of white supremacy. Their revolutionary agenda aesthetically rejected what Langston Hughes once called the “desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization” (1321). The “Panthers stood the commodity fetishism of capitalism’s ‘society of the spectacle’ on its head,” says Kimberly Benston, cribbing thoughts from French Marxist theorist Guy Debord in his introduction to the Black Arts and Black Power movement in the Norton Anthology of African American Literature. They elicited “revolutionary effects from an assemblage of signifying objects and poses,” says Benston (Benston 548). Such effects railed against the enduring, symbolic economy of the minstrel show, which had relentlessly structured the American imagina-

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tion, inherently producing widespread feelings of natural white superiority and African American subjugation. Although the construction of African inferiority was a major catalyst of the transatlantic slave trade, which was abolished in 1807, the construction and symbolic commodification of blackness had become imagined as a product destined for its own domestic ownership and consumption in the early 19th century. This construct too formed in the 1830s when industrialization in the North, a major influx of cheap European labor, and the rise of the Abolitionist movement challenged the scientific, religious, philosophical, and economic underpinnings of slavery, which rendered the violent oppression of Africans normal and necessary. In response to these challenges, the spectacle of the minstrel show emerged as one of the first, truly American forms of entertainment. Indeed, scholars have argued, the image of the black-faced minstrel figure actually arises as a soothing response to changes in the organization of life based on a slave economy. The minstrel strutted onto the stage when the boarders delimiting race and legitimizing oppression that preserve the necessary myths of white American identity, superiority and innocence began to blur. Without such secure and imagined boundaries, an epistemological and (what scholars would later call in a related context) a “moral panic” arises (see Staub 57). So, the minstrel figure emerges to restore order with a meta-fictional economy that foregrounds its own artifice while paradoxically relying on semblances and tenuous verisimilitude to delimit and contain its black original. J. Stanley Lemons describes this boarder securing aspect of minstrelsy in his study of minstrel show tropes: It is interesting to note that the black person as entertainment and comic figure has emerged twice in popular culture, and at both times race relations were extremely bad. […]. When he was being treated the worst, the Negro became the butt of the national joke, the principle comic character. In this way popular cultures’ treatment of blacks reflected the society’s humiliation of them […]. The general public tried to render one of its most fearsome problems into a funny one. (104)

Thus, in times of categorical, moral and epistemological panic—of a cognitive breakdown—the minstrel figure emerges as a familiar fiction, one that reaffirms a comforting social and moral order. The late 1960s and early 1970s were such a time of imaginative upheaval. Indeed, says says Todd Gitlin in The Sixties: Years of Hope Days of Rage, the “years 1967, 1968, 1969 and 1970 were a cyclone in a wind tunnel”: Reality was reckless […]. Images spewed forth from television every night, hyping excitement and dread and overload and the sense of America

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Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo at war with itself […]. The liberal-labor coalition fragmented past the point of recognition. Urban blacks rioted […]. Students moved to the Left, and as the youth movement grew […]. So did the idea of a single world revolution. […]. Of cultural secession: carving out zones where the new culture could feel and test its strength—Black Power, women’s power, gay power. (243)

Like “jes’ grew,” the contagion of the new Black Power seemed to be tearing society apart. And a comforting fiction from the past was used to glue it together again—to reorganize the fractured American imagination. So, the minstrel, in his well-worn, tattered rags shuffled into the “cyclone,” gathering the fragments and providing a renewed sense of “normalcy”—a neologism rhythmically coined as a 1920 campaign promise by Warren Harding after the mind and body smashing events of World War I.

Black Power and ‘Moral Panic’ So, in the mid-1960s, the images and spectacles staged by the revolutionary agents of Black Power self-consciously attempted to undermine the superior white identity produced by this commodified blackness and its characters. These were at root equally theatrical performances, says Ishmael Reed in a 1971 interview: “We’ve seen in the twentieth century political movements that were begun by artists who were brought out to the streets. The Black Panthers came out of a theater movement in San Francisco” (O’Brien 18). The Panthers thus performed counter-spectacles to those that had conjured white supremacist identity. The Panther spectacles and novels such as Mumbo Jumbo perform counter-hegemonically, producing images designed to disrupt the type of blood thirsty, suicidal 20th century identity—what often called American exceptionalism—engendered by the objects of mass-produced, white supremacist art. Such art evokes the mechanically reproduced, out-of-body-experiences conditioning Naziera Germans in the 1930s that made possible suicide and mass murder, and which alarmed prescient thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, engendering his tellingly named essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Kimberly Benston detects this in his analysis of the historic rhythms manifested by one group of 1960s African American performers, The Last Poets, who, he says, pit “authentic revolutionary action against a capitalist, imperialist society addicted to images at the expense of embodied experience, what French philosopher Guy Debord called ‘the society of the spectacle’”(546). Consequently, in terms of its self-projected images, The Black Panther Party for Self Defense also represented a radical departure. Since the times

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of slavery, newspapers, novels, plays, films and all forms of popular culture presented African Americans through the stylized caricatures of the minstrel show. With big rolling eyes, ape-like features, and oversexed rapacious appetites, they embodied all aspects of the “half-devil, halfchild” described in Rudyard Kipling’s ode to imperialism, “The White Man's Burden.” This included the instantly recognized, domesticated figures such as Zip Coon, Jim Crow, Uncle Tom, the Mammy, Rastus, Sambo, the picaninny, and a whole slew of characters (or their thinly disguised doppelgangers) from stage, screen and literature. So as black, international revolutionaries, the Panthers overthrew from this iconography. These were courageous, ascetic revolutionaries, uninterested in fried chicken, white women or civil rights. They weren’t made in America. One of their earliest, most ubiquitous images presents the exotic figure of a black man in a Basque beret and black jacket, grasping a gun and a spear while sitting in a wicker chair: all of it suggesting resistance fighters and colonial wars. With their sunglasses and sleek leather jackets, their aesthetic seemed at first distant from the “swallow-tail coat with wide lapels, gaudy shirts, striped pants, spats and top hat of Zip Coon,” the “citified dandy” described by scholars of black-face minstrelsy (Lemons 102). Nor were they pathetically dressed in the “tatters and rags and […] battered hat” (102) of Jim Crow, the original minstrel figure. To the contrary. In his book on the 1960s, Todd Gitlin describes the Panther affect as follows: Who seemed to represent those specters [of ‘Black separatism,’ the ‘black underclass,’ ‘rioting in the streets,’ ‘cross-race alliance’ and ‘revolution’] better than […] these intelligent brothers in black leather jackets, James Dean and Frantz Fanon rolled into one, the very image of indigenous revolutionary leadership risen from the underclass and certified in prison? (349)

The gun-toting, cool men in berets, sunglasses and black leather coats evoked both imperialism and the unsettled economics of slavery: they had a political agenda and had violently come to get what was theirs. At first, this didn’t seem to present a problem to the image-obsessed mainstream media. Scholars have observed that coverage of the early appearance of the Black Panther Party was somewhat conventional if not sporadic—not differing form that of the student movement. This began to change, however, as the effects of J. Edgar Hoover’s war on the Panthers and Nixon’s promise of “law and order” for the “silent majority” (a rhythmic return to the Jim Crow “normalcy” of Harding) became clear. Throughout the country, the police were kicking in doors and gunning

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down black men. In December 1969, when the New York Times reported the execution-style slaying of Mark Clark and Fred Hampton, it also quoted a lawyer for the Panthers who said that Hampton and Clark were “the 27th and 28th Black Panthers killed in clashes with the police since January of 1968” (Kifner, “Police in Chicago” E3). A follow-up commentary asserted that “Government actions appear to have at least contributed to a climate of opinion among local police […] that a virtual open season has been declared on the Panthers” (Kifner, “The War” E3). In response to this unsettling information, says Michael Staub, a disorienting “‘moral panic’ occurred in the media response to the Panthers” (57). No widely consumed fiction, image, film, song, novel, play or narrative prepared the American imagination for the emergence of the Black Panthers and their bloody suppression.

Mumbo Jumbo and the Black Panther Party In Mumbo Jumbo, Ishmael Reed responds to the deadly epistemological panic of the early 1970s, and the threat posed by an international consciousness escaping domestic control. Indeed, as the novel seems to revel in the chaos through a new (or ancient) mode of literary agency, the American media, through reenergizing the tropes of minstrelsy, contained it, domesticating and caricaturing Black, internationalist radicalism and normalizing the wholesale execution of the Panthers. Indeed, say Ture and Hamilton, in their 1992 afterward to Black Power, the “capitalist press intervened in the struggle since the 60’s with all it guns” (194). Within Mumbo Jumbo, these newspapers (often magically fetishized in mainstream culture as “history in hurry” or the “the first rough draft of history”) 2 defy their original use as a model of “homogenous empty time.”3 Instead, they immemorially drift through the narrative, both fixing and unfixing the loosely bound events of the story. At different moments

 2

It is nearly impossible to locate the first use of the “history in a hurry” quote, which often has been attributed to the maker of American mythology, Horace Greeley. Benjamin Bradlee, the charismatic executive editor of The Washington Post in the late 1960s, attributed the “rough draft” quote to his predecessor, Phil Graham in a 1991 interview in Vanity Fair. 3 In his brilliantly titled book, Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson presents newspapers as one means of providing the chronotope that produces the imagined sense of distant communal connection necessary to nationalism: “The date at the top of the newspaper, the single most important emblem on it, provides the essential connection—the steady onward clocking of homogeneous, empty time. Within that time, ‘the world’ ambles sturdily ahead” (33).

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one is picked up and read by Berbelang’s girlfriend, Earline, the night after she betrays him and sleeps with an anonymous streetcar driver; and by Charlotte, the morning she receives a visit from policeman Biff Musclewhite, Berbelang’s assassin. Charlotte reads the newspaper and screams in response to a headline that whimsically performs all of the paraded tropes of minstrelsy: MUSCLEWHITE BAGS COON War Hero Slays Art-Napper Depraved Black Mu’tafikah Dead More Arrests Predicted (123, original capitals and italics)

This story revels in its transgression of euphemisms and American, racially coded political correctness, brazenly capturing the rhythms of Ture and Hamilton’s “capitalist press” as it continues wallowing in racial slurs and conspicuously leading, evaluative language such as: "fearless curator,” “bad, cute Black bandit,” “dope-sniffing self-styled,” “wild scheme,” “ugly sausage-lipped big headed Olmec head,” “misguided tycoon's son,” “band of freaks,” “scantily clad flappers,” “demented coon,” “choose to shoot it out,” and “the spade shouted, followed by his wild, bizarre laughter” (123). The story stages the cinematic melodrama animating American journalism with a hero vs. villain organization. In the hands of Reed, this “rhythm” exposes the iconic, immemorial story of Western Civilization since the crusades. It encompasses the dominant ethos of white identity, white privilege, American exceptionalism and social-Darwinist racial allegory. It captures the containment of blackness staged by the minstrel show. Indeed, turning to the morgue of a paper such as The Chicago Tribune reveals that Mumbo Jumbo’s newspaper stories are more pastiche than invention. One December 5, 1969, the newspaper reported Fred Hampton’s murder inside, on page three, under the headline: “Attempted Murder Charges Eyed in Panthers Gun Fight.” The lead of the story, in style and substance, parallels Reed’s version of Berbelang’s murder: “Indictments charging attempted murder will be sought within a week by the state’s attorney’s office against seven alleged members of the Black Panther party who staged a wild gun battle with police yesterday in a west side apartment” (Koziol, emphasis added). As with Mumbo Jumbo’s story, no attempt is made to access an alternative version of events or sources other than those producing the police narrative. In fact, later, the story actually stages the speech of members of the Black Panther Party through minstrellike ventriloquizations and the hackneyed matinée movie language ridiculed by police. Whatever “perspective” the bandits may have is already

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contained in the pseudo-objective, officialese of terms such as “alleged” or “reputed,” which snidely question the legitimacy of the Black Panthers as an organization. In this case, Mumbo Jumbo’s pastiche parallel’s the language of the Tribune article by referring to Berbelang as the leader of the “self-styled Mu'ta fikah” (123). Indeed, the lead of the Tribune story presents the Chicago police as the defenders of civilization and the dead Panthers as threats responsible for staging “a wild gun battle.” Mumbo Jumbo uses this synonym for savage to characterize the Mu'tafikah’s “wild scheme” to exchange Musclewhite for the Olmec head and to describe Berbelang’s “wild bizarre laughter” (124). The novel continues to comment on mainstream newspaper cabalism through the use of what its readers know to be police-manufactured quotations. Berbelang says nothing before Musclewhite guns him down. Yet the newspaper story concocts its own fictional scene drawing from gangster movie tropes, presenting Berbelang menacing police and instigating his own death with the words: “Come in and get me, coppers” (124). Moreover, within the police narrative of Hampton’s death, newspapers describe a scene similar to the one concocted by Musclewhite in Mumbo Jumbo using the same language. At 4 a.m. on December 4, 1969, police kicked down the front and back doors of Fred Hampton’s apartment, spraying it with pistol, shotgun and machinegun fire. And, according to the Times: “Several times during the gunfight, Sergeant Groth said, [sic] he ordered a cease-fire, but a voice from the dark shouted, ‘Shoot it out’” (Kifner 34). The Mumbo Jumbo article directly lifts this language from the manufactured police story: “…the demented coon chose to shoot it out with the World War I combat veteran and hero” (124). With the artifice of the free indirect style of modernist novels, the narrative of the seemingly objective “historic” newspaper voice and the subjective, discursive utterance of the police meld into one in the New York Times and Chicago Tribune stories documenting the murder. In the end, the police story gets narrated as consciousness modeling, official “his-story,” while the “bandit” story gets consistently undermined and ridiculed as the non-objective, propagandistic speech of unreliable characters. Within this context, the novel, Mumbo Jumbo, posits itself as a meta-narrative, aligning its fictional rhythms—its mythical performance of events—against the “real,” manufactured rhythms of American newspaper journalism.

Minstrelsy and the New Journalism So, something very important, if not deadly was going on in 1970 following the police execution of Fred Hampton and staging the context of the

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writing of Mumbo Jumbo. According to media scholars, the death of Fred Hampton signaled a new era in media representations of the Black Panther Party and the Black Power movement. Indeed, as noted earlier, the aesthetic battle over representation was as vicious and unrelenting (perhaps more so) than the Panther’s battle against police brutality. To a large extent, the struggle of the Panthers was one over image projections. According to one media scholar, the Panthers “craved media exposure but feared that their image would be distorted by the press” (Rhodes 100). The narrative of Hampton’s murder and the staging of the murder of Berbelang, an “Art-Napper” (123), aptly recall the rhythms of minstrelsy’s beginning. Thomas D. Rice, a white man, first performed in a black face minstrel show around 1830 in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, says Eric Lott, in his work on the psychoanalytic genealogy of minstrelsy. The performance began with the literal staging of the naked plundering of African American life. For his first performance, Rice wore the sadly tattered clothes he borrowed from an impoverished African American beggar named “Cuff.” While Rice was performing, Cuff learned of an opportunity to make money from the river boats he habitually worked, so he ran out on stage naked and begged Rice for the return of his “nigga's t'ings” or his clothes. The scene, says Lott, lavishly produces feelings of guilt and fear of recrimination as it stages a “return of the repressed,” “the economics of slavery,” “racial expropriation,” and “the plundering of black culture” (41). Indeed, the staging of this rhythmic specter of perpetration and revenge structures one of the most infamous poems of the late 1960s, Amiri Baraka’s “Black People!”: “You cant steal nothing from a white man, he’s already stole it he owes you anything you want, even his life. All the stores will open if you will say the magic words. The magic words are: Up against the wall mother fucker this is a stick up!” (224). These words ignited the imaginations of the counter culture and Black Power movements. Indeed, in a 1968 speech, Black Panther Bobby Seale pronounced the manifesto, perhaps animating Reed’s Mu’tafikah, as he signified 4 on Baraka’s words, exhorting people to rise up against their oppressors: “…we’re gonna walk on this racist power structure; and we’re gonna say to the whole damn government: ‘Stick 'em up motherfucker This is a hold up We’ve come for what’s ours!”5

 4

In his Signifying Monkey, Henry Louis Gates defines “signifying” as formally repeating something with signal difference. 5 “Bobby Seale, Chairman of The Black Panther Party, speaking on 18th May 1968 at The Fillmore East, NYC, at a rally to raise awareness for arrested Minister of Information, Eldridge Cleaver. The recording was made for the writer William Burroughs with the permission of The Party and was given to London-based writer

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Indeed, in The Sixties, Todd Gitlin (perhaps inspired by many of the images of Mumbo Jumbo) describes the historical, revolutionary, theatrical art group—The Motherfuckers—who took their name from Baraka’s poem. Remarkably, Gitlin’s description of this group touches on many of the rhythms sounded by Mumbo Jumbo: Enter the Motherfuckers, postbeat, postbiker, would-be Hell’s Angels with manifestos, like the Diggers deploying direct action against strategy, extravagance against tedium. ‘Cultural revolution’ looked like a plausible alternative to the thick-headed mumbo-jumbo artists, top-heavy with jargon and Old Left ideas of organization. Direct action, that was the New Left idea at its best! (241)

Still, their name and the evocation of Baraka’s poem evoke the minstrel show and the sad figure of Cuff, who ran out on stage naked, asking for the return of his rags. According to Lott, the Atlantic magazine account of Rice’s first minstrel performance is more counter-revolutionary than revolutionary. It stages a symbolic re-enslavement of Cuff through “successive subordination of Cuff in Rice’s minstrel performance and in Nevin’s [the reporter’s] use of dialect […]. It narratologically reenslaves a black man who evidently turned out to be more competitive and enterprising than he should be” (43). Although The Motherfucker’s name resisted popular cooptation by the press because it could not be printed, the Panthers suffered the same fate as Cuff through minstrel show-like appropriation in the popular media. Indeed, after Hampton’s murder, newspaper reports began to emphasize what Jane Rhodes, in her study of the press coverage of the Black Panther Party, calls “grossly stereotyped misrepresentation” (102), which included zip-coon styled criminality, “outrageousness” (111), and an emphasis on physical appearance. In other words, they were mocked and ridiculed, becoming the “bad, cute Black bandit[s]” of Mumbo Jumbo’s raucous newspaper facsimile. Tom Wolfe’s article, “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's” was the most infamous culprit. Yet, just months after Hampton’s murder, before “Radical Chic,” the Times published a lengthy first-person piece of New Journalism with an equally snide title: “Rapping with the Panthers in White Suburbia,” by Gerald Emanuel Stearn. This very stylized piece also held the markers of New Journalism wed to minstrel caricature with erudite, confident and condescending observations seemingly anchored in middlebrow history, sociology and psychology.

 Barry Miles for general dissemination of their True Ideas and as a directly quotable source for the 60’s ‘underground paper’ International Time” (Seale liner notes).

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Says Stearn: “So much of the black historical tragedy is its vulnerability to parody. The Panther mind uses the theories of a 19th century German Jew and distorts the tactics of the son of a Russian school teacher, combining the two into a near suicidal approach to conflict” (110). This quote embodies the raucous comedy of minstrelsy with its lavish emphasis on misdirections and misappropriations. It reflects the necessary pathos, which requires the “return of the repressed”—the abject victim of a slave economy—for its ridicule and hence the cathartic effect. Stearn pities the Panthers, (“I became depressed,” he says) while mocking them, dwelling on their personal appearance, their paramilitary attire standing in for the swallow-tailed jacket of the minstrel dandy. “Soldiers, I thought, ready for inspection” (28). Meanwhile, their framed use of Marxist dialectics, “the mindless vocabulary of enraged outcasts” (110), replaces the stuttering malapropisms. In fact, just like the Mumbo Jumbo article, the Times piece conveys the notion that the police killings of the Black Panthers is only comprehended by inserting it into the laughable context of Hollywood films. “The sieges and shoot-outs in Oakland, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles may be likened to George Raft-Edward G. Robinson cell block riots,” says Stearn (110). In other words, the press relied on the all-too-familiar conventions of minstrelsy to relieve racial anxiety, to control and limit the epistemological panic occasioned by the emergence of the Black Panthers and their horrific suppression. By the end of the 1960s, mainstream media representations of Black radicalism seemed inescapably entrenched in and controlled by the minstrel aesthetic. Ultimately, says Rhodes in her study of press coverage of the Panthers, the media worked to manage the threat and “incorporate and commodify social conflict thereby defusing its political potential” (98). Within just a couple of years, she says, the Panthers “had become a commodity” (109)—an expendable commodity.

The Rainbow Coalition and Middlebrow Multiculturalism This is represented in Mumbo Jumbo by Berbelang’s rainbow colored mind, rushing to the pavement. Already, a new, vapid era of counterrevolutionary identity politics and bland, middlebrow multiculturalism had begun. Yet, identity politics were not always branded in the way they are now. Just a few years after Hampton’s death, and the publication of Mumbo Jumbo, a group of African American lesbians and feminists—the National Black Feminist Organization—published “The Combahee River Collective Statement,” a manifesto embracing a new position that they radically branded “identity politics” because: “We realize that the only

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people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us” (Combahee 267). Yet, their statement embraced all of the radical consciousness growing out of the social movements of the 1960s, exhibiting a relentless intersectional positionality and hermeneutic of solidarity with the most wretched of the earth: The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. (264)

Radical student groups also embraced this position. Gitlin, for instance, presents a similar quote by Greg Calvert of the radical student activist group SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). Calvert asserts that “radical or revolutionary consciousness [...] is the perception of oneself as unfree, as oppressed—and [...] leads to the struggle for one’s own freedom in unity with others who share the burden of oppression” (qtd. in Gitlin 384). Yet, by the 1990s, the dreams of such radical, multicultural consciousness had become caricature. For instance, even famed postcolonial scholar Edward Said began his anthologized criticism of the dangers of the “nationalist politics of identity” through his production of an immemorial, Mammy-like figure of a black woman, ventriloquized as she admonishes him at a talk and drags him into an “inconsequential academic contest” by asking a “hostile,” “negative flat-minded” question because he had “left out” some names (189-90). And, by 1995, in an article titled “Globalizing Capitalism and the Rise of Identity Politics,” Political Sociologist Frances Fox Piven, could dub (reflecting, incidentally, similar criticism made by Todd Gitlin) such identity politics as counterrevolutionary and the biggest threat to the “universalizing politics” of the left. Identity politics, she says, “makes people susceptible to the appeals of modern nationalism, to the bloody idea of loyalty to state and flag, which is surely one of the more murderous ideas to beset humankind” (105). Famed historian Eric Hobsbawm reductionistically agrees that “identity groups are about themselves, for themselves, and nobody else” (44). Berbelang’s story and its arrest of the rhythms of Fred Hampton’s murder chart this digression. In Mumbo Jumbo, Berbelang defends the inclusion of a white man, Thor, in the Mu’tafikah, saying: “A great deal of our success depends upon at least a few like him” (98). Later he presciently describes the rhythms of the popular appropriations of radical thinking: “It always seems that we talk to many and then the few and then we are down to 1 man and just as the between the races is about to begin that 1

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man becomes a few and then many until the next time around we turn our back on 1 another before the whole procedure begins again” (105). Such a rhythm occurred after the death of Fred Hampton and the cynical cooptation of his legacy by one of the most important proponents of contemporary American multiculturalism: Jesse Jackson. As noted earlier, the 21-year-old Hampton charismatically created the first “Rainbow Coalition,” similar to Berbelang’s multi-ethnic bandits. According to one scholar, “The Black Panther Party, led by its dynamic leader Fred Hampton, also met regularly with the leaders of the major street gangs, according to the Better Boys Clubs’ Euseni Perkins, who sponsored some of the meetings” (Hagedorn 202). A 1971 New York Times article about Hampton notes that he earlier said he had formed a “‘formal coalition’ with the Uptown Young Patriots, a radical group of white Southerners in the Chicago area” (Johnson 75U). Meanwhile, in his speeches Hampton fomented a consciousness of radical connection as he exhorted crowds to shout with him: “I am a revolutionary!” (Williams 203). His death left a vacuum. Before his execution in the winter of 1969, Hampton received little notice in the Times. But during the summer of that year, the newspaper used its habitual, minstrel-like descriptions to devote nearly half a page to Jesse Jackson and his economic uplift program—Operation Breadbasket— which worked, like Hampton, on the South Side of Chicago. Jackson had both mainstream appeal and watered-down radical cachet. According to the Times he “sounds a little like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and a little like a Black Panther” (Herbers). Like Berbelang and Hampton, Jackson promised to “unite blacks” and “form a coalition with whites,” offering to “change the race problem into a class fight between the haves and the have-nots” (Herbers). The article ignores Hampton’s cross-racial appeal and posits that Jackson “is one of the few militant blacks who is preaching racial reconciliation,” yet it also summarizes the views of critics that blasted his agenda (involving work for “Negro owned companies,” banks, contractors, and professionals) as serving the needs of a whitebread bourgeoisie and “too much involved with middle-class blacks” (Herbers). With the same, superior, middlebrow gaze that it used in articles such as “Rapping with the Panthers In White Suburbia,” the Times describes one of Jackson’s rallies as a major spectacle with brass bands, “deep-throated gospel singers and continuous swaying, clapping and leaping about on stage” (Herbers). It overflows with minstrel show, zip coon tropes emphasizing the eye-dialect speech and appearance of Jackson: “Mr. Jackson does not say people are hungry, he says they are ‘hongry,’ dragging out and emphasizing the first syllable in his South Carolina

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drawl. […]. After the session […] He is now wearing an open leather vest […]. His appearance is more mod than Afro” (qtd in Herbers). Then, it presents Jackson as “delineating” repeating, revising and replacing Hampton’s original revolutionary message with the now familiar, multicultural one of personal responsibility and self-esteem. The article sets the stage. Jackson “starts to chant and they shout his words back”: “I am somebody … maybe poor … maybe on welfare … maybe unemployed … maybe in jail … but I am somebody … soul power” (Herbers). The transformation is complete. Black power becomes the less threatening “soul power.” “Revolutionary” becomes “somebody.” Radicals who had known Hampton, reeled at this blatant transformation of Hampton’s radical message, observes Jakobi Williams in his book, From the Bullet to the Ballot: The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and Racial Coalition Politics in Chicago. He quotes community organizer Denise Oliver-Velez: …when you hear the words Rainbow Coalition, you think Jesse Jackson. [He] co-opted that. […]. Fred used to say, ‘I am a revolutionary, and I love all my people,’ and he would go through all the colors, black people, brown, red people and yellow people, and people would respond. And Jesse changed it to ‘I am somebody.’ There’s a very big difference between ‘I am a revolutionary’ and ‘I am somebody’ […] it’s like he studied him and watered it down. (203)

Now the transformation was complete.

1000s of Loas In a heated discussion with a monotheistic, Black nationalist and a “noted occultist” (32), Papa LaBas in Mumbo Jumbo makes an argument for the type of alternative, rainbow identity politics—anchored in African cosmology—that resists monotheistic, European homogenization. “[W]here does that leave the ancient Vodun aesthetic: pantheistic becoming, 1 which bountifully permits 1000s of spirits, as many as the imagination can hold?” LaBas asks (35). Through Mumbo Jumbo Reed magically saves and stages a particular moment—a throbbing rhythm of popular American consciousness, caught in the shattered, mirror-house epistemology of semblances, constructed on the ephemeral trace of an ever illusive, single origin, and unable to grasp the meaning of a vast emerging world outside the fragile economy of its projected reflections. Even the historic Motherfuckers, Gitlin observes, emerged as Western thought itself, voiced through philosophies like Deconstruction, lost its footing, questioning its

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supremacy and mastery over a single truth. Indeed, Gitlin observes that the historical Motherfuckers represented another philosophy critical of Western thought. Its leader, he says, was “a Dutchman from the brilliant, difficult, sectarian group of Europeans called Situationists, who liked to theorize about the ‘society of the spectacle’” (239). In a stunning analysis of the wake of the September 11 attack on the twin towers, Slavoj Žižek analyzes the state where semblances—where virtual reality—structures understanding and loses hold of meaning. Such an organization of the imagination, he observes, “provides reality itself deprived of its substance, of the hard resistant kernel of the Real—just as decaffeinated coffee smells and tastes like real coffee without being real coffee, Virtual Reality is experienced as reality without being so” (11). One trope for such a reality in the work of African American writer James Baldwin is not decaffeinated coffee but banal, American white bread. In his book of essays The Fire Next Time, written near the dawn of the Black Power movement, Baldwin prophesized (perhaps with the ancient enthusiasm of Papa LasBas acknowledging the suppressed, joyful, sensuous contagion of jes’grew): “It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it […] Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here and become as joyless as they have become” (43). Another trope lies in the ever handy, ever present economy of the minstrel show, which inexorably performs the single-handed work of the Wallflower Order, transforming everything into a projection of white desire and rendering all resistance to the banal, unifying economy of semblance temporary and ultimately futile. Mumbo Jumbo rekindles this rhythm, presenting the story of Berbelang, as it tracks the pulse of the rise and fall of Hampton, the Panthers, and a strident identity politics of oppressed unity, which “bountifully permits 1000s of spirits” but which ultimately gets lost and foreclosed through the comforting, mainstream rituals of caricature, semblance and substitution now branded as multiculturalism. This is the vacuous space of the despair propagated by the ravages of neoliberalism with its anchoring in the epistemology of semblance and an economy of meaningless brands now forgetfully divorced, for instance, from their third-world manufactured products. In his analysis of the 2005 riots of the marginalized descendants of African immigrants in Paris (Uncontrollable Societies of Disaffected Individuals), Bernard Stiegler laments this state of empty meaning produced by hegemonic market capitalism. “Disenchantment […] may have allowed capitalism to conquer the entire world,” says Stiegler, “but it eventually leads to the loss of the capi-

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talist spirit […] such capitalism, having lost its sprit or its mind, is not possible (5, original italics). As noted earlier, the counter culture and its capture within Mumbo Jumbo, shatters the effect of such semblance, attempting to turn “capitalism’s ‘society of the spectacle’ on its head” and undermine attempts, in the words of Hughes, “to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization” (1321). But Berbelang’s rainbow colored mind spills to the pavement and Hampton’s exhortations for revolutionary consciousness become Jackson’s calls for self-esteem. Yet, as a magical bundle, as a hoodoo “writing” on history, Mumbo Jumbo imposes itself as much more than a reflected representation of an era; it casts a spell that forever exposes the rhythms—ancient to the future—of an American culture plagued by its own reflections and the “anti-plague,” an infectious, indomitable jes’ grew spirit that “won’t stop until it cohabits with what it’s after.” It happened before, and it will happen again.

Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso, 1991. Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. 1962. New York: Vintage, 1993. Baraka, Amiri. The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader. Ed. William J. Harris. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections Trans. Harry Zohn. Ed. Hannah Arendt. 1968. New York: Schocken Books, 2007. 217-51. Benston, Kimberly W. “The Black Arts Era.” The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Third Edition. Vol II. Ed. Henry Louis Gates and Valerie Smith. New York: Norton 2014. 533-61. Combahee River Collective. “The Combahee River Collective Statement.” Ed. Barbara Smith. Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. 1983. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2000. 264-73. Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald NicholsonSmith. New York: Zone Books, 1995. Du Bois, W.E.B. “An Essay Toward a History of the Black Man in the Great War.” The Seventh Son: The Thought and Writings of W.E.B. Du Bois Vol. II. Ed. Julius Lester. New York: Random House, 1971, 11565.

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Fox Piven, Frances. “Globalizing Capitalism and the Rise of Identity Politics.” Socialist Register 31 (1995): 102-16. Gitlin, Todd. The sixties: years of hope, days of rage. New York: Bantam Books, 1987. Hagedorn, John M. “Race Not Space: A Revisionist History of Gangs in Chicago .” The Journal of African American History 91. 2 (Spring 2006): 194-208. Herbers, John. “Chicago’s Operation Breadbasket is Seeking Racial Solutions in Economic Problems.” New York Times Magazine, 2 June 1969: 31. Hobsbawm, Eric. “Identity Politics and the Left. New Left Review I.217 (May-June 1996): 38-47. Hughes, Langston. “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Third Edition. Vol 1. Ed. Henry Louis Gates and Valerie Smith. New York: Norton 2014, 1320-24. Johnson, Thomas A. “38 Report on Life in Black America: Hampton Before Death Told Interviewers of Struggle.” New York Times Magazine, 27 June 1971: 75U. Kifner, John. “Police in Chicago Slay 2 Panthers: Illinois Chairman of Party is Killed in Shootout.” New York Times, 5 Dec. 1969: 1 and 34. —. “The ‘War’ Between Panthers And Police.” New York Times, 21 Dec. 1969: E3. Klein, Naomi. No Logo. 1999. New York: Picador, 2000. Koziol, Ronald, and Edward Lee. “Attempted Murder Charge Eyed in Panthers Gun Fight. Chicago Tribune, 5 Dec. 1969: 3. Lemons, J. Stanley. “Black Stereotypes as Reflected in Popular Culture, 1880-1920.” American Quarterly 29.1 (Spring 1977): 102-16. Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue. 1981. New York: Penguin, 1997. Lott, Eric. “Love and Theft: The Racial Unconscious of Blackface Minstrelsy.” Representations 39 (1992): 23-50. O’Brien, John. “Ishmael Reed.” Conversations with Ishmael Reed. Eds. Bruce Dick and Amritjit Singh. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1995. Reed, Ishmael. Mumbo Jumbo. 1972. New York: Scribner, 1996. —. “The Writer as Seer: Ishmael Reed on Ishmael Reed.” Conversations with Ishmael Reed. Ed. Bruce Dick and Amritjit Singh. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1995. 59-73. Rhodes, Jane. “Fanning the Flames of Racial Discord: The National Press and the Black Panther Party.” The Harvard International Journal of Press Politics 4.4 (1999) 95-118.

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Said, Edward W. “The Politics of Knowledge.” Falling into Theory: Conflicting Views of Reading Literature. 2nd Edition. Ed. David H. Richter. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s 2000, 189-98. Seale, Bobby. Black Panthers Up Against the Wall. London: King Mob, 1998. Staub, Michael E. “Black Panthers, New Journalism, and the Rewriting of the Sixties.” Representations 57 (Winter 1997): 52-72. Stearn, Gerald Emanuel. “Rapping With The Panthers In White Suburbia.” New York Times Magazine, 8 March 1970: 28-29, 110. Stiegler, Bernard. Uncontrollable Societies of Disaffected Individuals. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013. Thompson, Robert Farris. Flash of the Spirit: African & Afro-American Art & Philosophy. 1983. New York: Vintage Books, 1984. Ture, Kwame, and Charles V. Hamilton. Black Power: The Politics of Liberation. 1967. New York: Vintage 1992. Williams, Jakobi. From the Bullet to the Ballot: The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and Racial Coalition Politics in Chicago. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2013. Žižek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates. London: Verso, 2002.

DIDN’T I TELL YOU?: THE HOODOO CONJURER OF JAPANESE BY SPRING YUQING LIN

“I think prophecy is an important part of writing, at least as important as technique or form. I think there are magical processes going on in writing.” —Ishmael Reed, Shrovetide (271)

When Ishmael Reed said he would reach for foreign readers, he meant it. His novels, poetry and essays have been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, Japanese, Hebrew, Hungarian, Dutch and Czech, among other languages. I had no clue that he was called “misogynistic” or “controversial” when I plunged into his works. His essay “America: The Multinational Society” has been excerpted in the most widely used College English textbook in China, as a testimony of American multiculturalism. His trademark Neo-Hoodooism brings a new consciousness of folk culture into American multicultural writing. And Japanese by Spring, a book in three languages, achieves the highest degree of postcolonial writing and discourse according to Mvuyekure (10). In this novel Reed uses English, Yoruba and Japanese to reveal the coexistence of disparate cultures, while at the same time satirizing multiculturalism, used or abused among intellectuals, as a degraded form of “political correctness.” As a hoodoo artist he travels through boundaries of time and space, traces America’s multicultural history, and syncretizes the diverse international cultures to predict a future for America. The prescient power of the hoodoo conjurer is mobilized to fight against corporate-funded intellectuals and empower ordinary people and multicultural reality.

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1 Japanese by Spring tells how a black junior professor, Benjamin Chappie Puttbutt, goes after tenure at Jack London College but is crassly double-crossed. He launches revenge against all his enemies when his Japanese teacher, Dr. Yamato, appoints him to the college’s most powerful position after the Japanese buy out the school. But once the campus is controlled by powerful jingoistic Japanese, even Puttbutt can’t tolerate the Japanese-centered ideology any longer and forms alliances with his former enemies. Ishmael Reed appears in the novel as an acquaintance of Puttbutt. In the end, while Puttbutt goes to Japan for more opportunities, Reed takes over the story and discusses multiculturalism. But this summary is hardly satisfying because, as always in Reed’s fictions, linear story plots and traditional narrative strategies are abandoned. The novel offers a tour of academic life and pokes fun at institutional power. Ishmael Reed the writer plays a trickster powerful enough to show “everybody has his evil” (Reed Reader xxiii), a charge that he gets from Guede, as Reed pointed out in a private interview with me, a Haitian entity who is a New World successor of the Nigerian “Saint” Iku. He criticizes Puttbutt and his kind of opportunistic scholars for depreciating ethnic culture and history to cater to white power. Reed satirizes a gallery of academic opportunists who are blinded by their ideological affiliations, be it feminism, Afrocentrism, Eurocentrism or liberalism. Reed has a great sense of irony. I chuckled when he ridiculed English Only advocates, that the tongue Jesus spoke was Aramaic, so they would have to learn this dark-skinned people’s language to go to heaven (48), or when a black and a Jewish professor argue about which group was oppressed the most, in a confrontation that dissolves into a snooty match, where the two stare each other down and up in the face, taunting, “Oh, yeah.” “Yeah.” “Oh yeah.” “Yeah” (153). Sometimes the ironies are pungent, as when Puttbutt is insulted by students and fellow colleagues, and in particular after he is double-crossed and denied tenure and “thought of all of the butt he had kissed, the boots he had licked, all for tenure” (70). At these pungent moments, even Puttbutt deserves our sympathy. Reed uses more than satire or irony. To unveil the absurdity of the monoculture ideology, he stages a farce, turning white racism into yellow racism. When the Japanese take over the campus, they claim Japanese culture as the one and only center of the universe and dismiss European literature to the Ethnic Studies department. Their IQ test, which challenges students and faculty knowledge of Japanese culture, shows Americans have

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“smaller brains than those belonging to the people of other nations” (145). If white people practice racism on minorities and take white supremacy for granted, Reed can turn the table and let Japanese discriminate against Americans in the same way, declaring “the entire history of Western philosophy could be covered in one week” (91). If yellow racism sounds absurd, then isn’t it absurd that Eurocentrism denounces African American culture? This witty use of satire is typical of Reed. In his words, an artist is “a conjurer who works juju upon his oppressors; a witch doctor who frees his fellow victims from the psychic attack launched by demons” (19 Necromancers xvii). Hoodoo religion has two main bases, the Voodoo [Hoodoo] concept of syncretism and the Voodoo [Hoodoo] concept of time (Martin 70). In Japanese by Spring Reed uses these two concepts to revisit history and predict a multicultural future. He has mentioned more than once the clairvoyance that the artist feels, as if receiving a vision or revelation in one’s work. Though early in 1998 the book was said to have “become dated” because Japan had fallen out of power (Trageser), I think that, on the contrary, the book is prophetic and Reed stands out as a Hoodoo prophet.

2 Ishmael Reed becomes a hoodoo prophet with clairvoyant knowledge because he has a different sense of time—time being fluid and fragmented, and boundaries between reality and fiction dissolved. He keeps looking at historical facts to revise historical literary texts. In his Neo-Hoodoo system, history is cyclical—“the past is contemporary” (Domini 139). He cuts loose the traditional history and then collages the pieces together. Thus in Flight to Canada (1976), when the runaway slave Raven boards a plane to Canada or when President Lincoln picks up a phone, our knowledge of time and history collapses in anachronistic surreality. In Mumbo Jumbo (1972), a detective story of the 1920s finds its clues from thousands of years ago in ancient Egypt. Time and space are both indefinite boundaries and easily breached by conjurers. Rooted in Hoodoo anachronism, Reed collects from the past and the present, and then predicts a plausible future. When Professor Tsunehiko Kato from Japan complained that in Japanese by Spring Reed didn’t have enough knowledge of modern Japan and only knew old Japanese images, he was possibly not very familiar with Ishmael Reed and his Neo-HooDoo understanding of time. Reed has insisted upon erecting a “self-consciously anachronistic text” (McHale 89)

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because one prominent feature of Hoodoo is its synchronism—the juxtaposition of events from different periods. To a hoodoo artist like Reed, time could be well synchronized into different dimensions, whether it’s Tokugawa, Meiji or modern Japan, Shakespeare’s England or Puttbutt’s contemporary America. The hoodoo artist travels easily through history and connects the past with the future. Reed applies Japan’s old Tokugawa and Meiji Shogunate to project the contrast between neo-conservative America and the possibility of a democratic multicultural America. In this context, Tokugawa is a period of “repression and censorship in arts” (193), when new ideas from the West were blocked out by the nationalists. It is under the Meiji that Japan welcomed Western ideas and industries and stepped upon the road of modernization. As Reed proposes, America and American civilization should be more cosmopolitan, more “Meiji.” According to him, the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement, and the rise of both Neo-Nazism and the English Only Movement are signs of a country lapsing into an “American intellectual Tokugawa regime” (193). The scene of Japanese Jingoism resurrected in the novel is not meant to be a realistic depiction of modern Japan. It is used to warn against the potential threat of American neo-conservatism as a “Tokugawa” mentality. Not only does Reed move back and forth in the dimension of time, he also offers new readings of Western literature, to revise and signify about the historic texts. Thus he alludes to a short fiction called “The Unparalleled Invasion” (1910) by Jack London, “the apostle of Anglo-Saxon superiority,” to show America’s deep fear of an Asian takeover (9). The irony of the story lies between London’s plot of “sterilizing China” and the reception of Jack London in China. Though his story tells about wiping out Chinese overpopulation to relieve the world of the “Chinese Problem,” Jack London has been a much admired writer in China. Equally problematic, according to Reed, Shakespeare, the great bard of Western civilization, has been used by the Eurocentric professors as a “cultural hammer” to “intimidate the infidels” (98). Reed questions the literary reception of Shakespeare, especially the silence about his race politics. Thus only a rereading of the literary texts can provide us with a different perspective on the politics of literary reception. As noted by critics in general, Ishmael Reed is oblivious to the boundary between fiction and reality. In this novel, the writer himself walks into the fiction—he appears at Jack London College, organizes Glosso United, and monitors the development of multiculturalism. Some critics have complained that Reed’s fictional appearance “threatens to dilute his very

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meaningful message regarding the dangers of mono-culturalism” (Womack 237) or that it lets “his commentary overflow the comic narrative” (Wilhelm 166). Critics have complained that this is the highest and most blatant form of author intrusion, but Reed justifies making himself part of the story on the grounds that classical filmmakers and painters do it too. In fact, this kind of character transcendence is not uncommon in postmodern experimentation. Besides, Hoodoo practice includes a kind of tribal spiritualism where the hougan could talk to the dead or ghosts. As a conjurer, Ishmael Reed doesn’t hesitate to apply transcendence in more experiments. Thus in his latest novel Juice! (2011) three layers of being coexist: Ishmael Reed the writer; the protagonist “Bear,” a cartoonist; and Badger—the cartoon character created by “Bear.” The tension between different layers of existence is dramatized in the conflicts between reality and fiction. According to Sämi Ludwig, “Reed does not try to create homogeneous discourses which keep the conceptual and the physical realities separate. It never happens that all characters in one of his novels belong to the same realm. Some of its inhabitants originate from one world, some from the other. Both realities are tapped and mix in the plot” (334). I have no doubt that Ishmael Reed could tell a good linear story about Chappie Puttbutt if he wanted to, but he refuses to do that, purposely ruffling the readers up. I agree with Daniel Punday that Reed can anticipate readers’ reaction in a trickster’s signifying way (446-47). But why is Reed (as character) there in the plot? I think there are at least three reasons. First of all, Reed (the writer) doesn’t want his readers to take characters’ words as his own or have his irony misinterpreted. Think about the misreadings of Reckless Eyeballing (1986). Some readers and critics have taken every character’s vile ideas as the writer’s and accused Reed of being anti-Semitic or misogynistic. A lot of his tongue-in-cheek comments and trickster plays have been misinterpreted. The appearance of Reed (the character) can at least distance the writer from the position of the characters. Secondly, Reed (the writer) needs to invoke a dialogue with his opponents—the talented tenth and neo-conservative backers—when black intellectuals are cut out of the conversation in the media. He has Anti-Glosso financial backer Jack Only come to Reed (the character)’s house to consult his opinion on the cultural wars. Reed (the character) now has the opportunity to recommend to Only, an old feeble business man who has already lost his voice and is half paralyzed, to get rid of his Tokugawa mind and bring forth a new Meiji era. For the multiculturalists who don’t have much power in the media or in public conversation, these dialogues provide an

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opportunity to reflect on their standpoints and contradict the corporate-financed intellectuals. Finally the character transcendence has to do with Reed’s writing style—“writin’ is fightin’.” He writes like a heavyweight champion of the literary ring, raising issues that others are reluctant or scared to raise, punching at American racism and monoculturalism. Reed is willing to take his stand in person and drive the nail in to make his points. As a fighter, he challenges his readers intellectually, not letting them get off with an easy laughter. Readers should be prepared for the intellectual exercise before they start reading. But he can also be poetically gentle as when he riffs on the notes and ends the novel with “a beautiful black butterfly with yellow spots collided with his chin and flew away” (225).

3 The last scene of the novel forebodes and celebrates the upcoming American multicultural panorama. Reed predicts what the United States will look like in twenty-five years—as multicultural as a festival at Lake Merritt, with “Cambodians, Laotians, Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Africans, Latinos (there are parts of Oakland now that resemble Mexico City)” (224). With diversified food and entertainment, ordinary people have already accepted the multicultural American society; they are smarter than the corporate-financed think-tank intellectuals. The conservative establishment is still blind to the multicultural reality, such as journalist George Will, who actually stated the multiculturalists were more of a threat than Saddam Hussein (49). Multiculturalism resonates with the Hoodoo idea of syncretism. Hoodoo as a religion is resilient in absorbing other cultures. Even when it was driven underground by Christianity during slavery, Hoodoo practitioners included Catholic saints along with their own loas, and were willing to incorporate many things to reinvigorate the African American religion. In Hoodoo religion there is no hierarchy of gods, so in Neo-HooDooism Reed doesn’t believe one culture is superior to another. He praises those hougans who use their originality to make their own talismans as well as the innovative hoodoo artists. As a hoodoo artist himself, Reed has syncretized ethnic cultures from all over the world. To me, his writings are like spider’s webs reaching out with infinite dots. If you pay close attention to the web and examine the dots of connection, there are numerous allegories and allusions from other cultures waiting to be explored.

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Ishmael Reed has been advocating multiculturalism since the early 1970s, from his collaboration with Al Young on the Yardbird and Quilt journals to his founding the Before Columbus Foundation. He has been in coalition with writers and artists from different ethnic backgrounds, proposing “a post-provincial America” and an awareness of “disparate cultures” (Dick xii). His idea of multicultural syncretism is similar to the Confucian notion of “seeking harmony without uniformity” (઼㘼н਼), which means people should tolerate disparate ideologies and contribute different opinions. In the early Chinese history book Zuo Zhuan, Yan Tzu (578-500 BC), a famous thinker in ancient China, said that uniformity was like mixing water with water, or playing the same tune over and over, and who would ever want that? Harmony is like cooking soup, “using right amounts of water, fire, wood, vinegar, meat sauce, salt, and plum to cook fish or meat”; “the cooks add ingredients to complement the taste, adding condiments if it’s too mild or adding water if it’s too rich” (Zuo 333, my translation). Sounds familiar? Most similar to Ishmael Reed’s “Gombo Févi” recipe in “The Neo-HooDoo Aesthetic.” Why is it called The Neo-HooDoo Aesthetic? “The proportions of ingredients used depend upon the cook!” (“The Neo-HooDoo Aesthetic” 34). Both Neo-HooDooism and Chinese philosophy seem to agree that harmony generates and uniformity stagnates. But Chinese philosophy values harmony because harmony generates trust and solidarity and thus transforms contestation and strife. The “soup of harmony,” according to Yan Tzu is to soothe one’s heart. In contrast, Ishmael Reed uses Neo-HooDoo syncretism as a subversive strategy, as a weapon in the cultural wars, to dismantle uniformity or the monolithic ideology of Eurocentrism. He supports critical multiculturalism, which “explores the fissures, tensions, and sometimes contradictory demands of multiple cultures, rather than (only) celebrating the plurality of cultures by passing through them appreciatively” (Anderson 380). Reed does warn against the danger of superficial cultural pluralism. Puttbutt’s former Japanese teacher Milton Miller beheads his wife for her adultery to preserve his samurai honor. And Puttbutt’s own grandfather becomes a Japanese jingoist nationalist to confront American racism. Puttbutt himself isn’t a multiculturalist either. He learns Japanese to get in the coach of Yen and power. He is willing to take on any trend as long as it’s profitable, whether it’s black power, feminism, neo-conservatism or Japanese. Everything these people have learned from another culture only results in more restricted cultural parochialism.

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Then why do people need to learn new languages and cultures? Even now, some people still believe that the main reason for learning a foreign language is the cold war ideology, to know one’s chief competitor or enemy. But multiculturalists hold different ideas. In a 1979 interview with Peter Nazareth, Ishmael Reed proposes that “learning about another group in order to discover your own background” is multiculturalism at the highest level (Dick 195).

4 Two decades after Japanese by Spring was published, the world has witnessed dramatic changes. I call the novel prophetic because most of Reed’s concerns and anticipations have come true. The corporate media, which routinely gives out stereotypes and misinformation about black people, has truly “become the electronic cardinals of a secular religion” (200). In Juice! media discourse affiliated with political power and hegemonic ideology comes to control the public’s opinion of reality. Globalization has come into full bloom with the circulation of corporate capital. Puttbutt thought that “if he couldn’t learn Spanish and Japanese he’d be obsolete in the 1990s United States” (50). At least now Spanish has become a language of California government services, and The New York Times reports a surge in Chinese teaching in America in 2011. Though the English Only movement of the 1980s seems reactionary today, it is not dead yet. Sometimes Reed’s descriptions have a cartoon-like exaggeration, but life can be more exaggerated and grotesque than fiction. After a black student of Jack London College was beaten, his skull fractured by campus skinheads, Chappie insinuates that the “Malcolm X cap” that the student wore was provocative to white students (7), but in the reality of the Trayvon Martin case,1 the hoodie worn by an African American male was seen as an invitation to disaster. Neither is the middle class spared from racism in the novel. Puttbutt may think he is above underclass blacks, but he has to live under his neighbor’s suspicious scrutiny every day. To look at history: even in the Obama era, a renowned Harvard professor was arrested under suspi1

17-year-old African American teenager Trayvon Martin was shot by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman when he visited his father in Sanford, Florida in 2012. The shooting set off a nationwide debate over racial profiling and self-defense laws. Conservative pundits, including Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly and Geraldo Rivera, blamed Martin’s wearing a hoodie for his death. Both said that the hoodie was as much responsible for Martin’s death as Zimmerman was.

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cion of breaking into his own house.2 Thus one man’s fiction is another man’s fact, and who is to say which is which? Critics’ opinions of Ishmael Reed’s work are often influenced by the “politics of literary reception” (Punday 447). After the controversy has cooled off, there is more space to reevaluate his works. Now, in the so-called “post-race” period, Americans have elected their first black president, and it is even suggested the N-word could be removed from Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. But the more things change, the more they stay the same. The anxiety of an Asian takeover is still an American concern. Puttbutt tells Ishmael Reed (character) that the “21st century will be a yellow century” (210). China, now the largest foreign holder of United States debt, is in much the same position as Japan was in the 1990s, or even much more of a threat, according to the media. No matter how the talented tenth talk about a “post-race” society, racism is still rampant in the U.S. In the 1990s Jack London College, there are still a few slogans like “Black is Back,” or “Black is the Future” (10). Yet today the American penal system of mass incarceration is a well-disguised system of racialized social control that functions similar to Jim Crow (Alexander 4). When reflecting on the atrocities of the Gulf War, Reed (the character) considers it foolish that America should “relate to the world not with trade but with the sword” (193). It seems that the anti-Glosso conservatives didn’t heed his advice and went into one war after another. Despite his disagreement with the establishment, Reed remains deeply concerned about America: “If the United States went down it would take millions of innocent victims with it” (192). He has a strong voice in “airing the dirty laundry” of America. His challenges to Neo-conservatism in the 1990s are still valid now. Life is war and Ishmael Reed never gives up fighting. He views himself as a “one-man communication center” that surveys propaganda attacks on people who don’t have the means to fight back (Barack Obama 243). In the field of cultural wars and power struggle, multiculturalism should be wary of conservative penetration, because powerful interests who dismissed them with ridicule before are now trying 2

Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., was arrested at his Cambridge, Massachusetts home in 2009. After coming home from a trip, Gates found his front door jammed, so he and his driver had to force their way in. A passerby called police, reporting a possible break-in. The responding officer Sgt. James Crowley arrived and confronted Gates. Gates showed his Harvard identification card and his driver's license, which included his address. But he was arrested on a charge of disorderly conduct, which was later dropped. The incident spurred a national debate about race relations and law enforcement.

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to buy them. Reed suggests the way out is no longer “associated with the cultural bigwigs in the establishment,” and to “stop collaborating with capitalistic institutions” (191). It is this iconoclastic attitude toward the establishment and institutions that has caused much antagonism among the feminists, talented-tenth black intellectuals and MacIntellectuals. Japanese by Spring is the conscientious effort of a writer’s search for the way out of cultural uniformity and hegemony. Reed as a hoodoo conjurer is rooted in the African American way of innovation. He challenges the rigid doctrines of traditional writing and crosses the boundaries of orthodoxy. By comparing Japanese history with American contemporary society, Ishmael Reed predicts America’s future in developing an international and multicultural society. America, as Reed said in a 1982 interview with Joseph Henry, has always been multicultural if “you interpret history properly” (Dick 214). This suggests that through the exploration of history and culture, African Americans and other ethnic groups can relocate their political identity in a more diverse society. Reed, as a pioneer of American multiculturalism, has always been encouraging readers to learn more about different cultures, to build a critical multiculturalism which values cultural integration as well as contradiction. Critics in 1990s have found “a theoretical model [of multiculturalism] in the groundbreaking works of Ishmael Reed,” “telling us what is multicultural and why we should absorb the idea of multiculturalism in our everyday lives” (Ward). In view of the cultural and ideological conflicts that disturb the 21st-century world, we need new frameworks to organize cultures, religions and ideologies for the resolution of conflicts. Both Neo-HooDooism and the Confucian “seeking harmony without uniformity” could provide some answers.

Works Cited Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: New Press, 2012. Anderson, Crystal S. “Racial Discourse and Black-Japanese Dynamics in Ishmael Reed’s Japanese by Spring.” MELUS 29.3/4 (2004): 379-96. Dick, Bruce, and Amritjit Singh, eds. Conversations with Ishmael Reed. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1995.

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Kato, Tsunehiko. “Review: Japanese by Spring by Ishmael Reed.” MELUS 18.4 (Winter 1993): 125-27. Ludwig, Sämi. Concrete Language: Intercultural Communication in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1996. Martin, Reginald. Ishmael Reed and the New Black Aesthetic Critics. Houndmills: The MacMillan Press Ltd, 1988. McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen, 1987. Mvuyekure, Pierre-Damien. The “Dark Heathenism” Of the American Novelist Ishmael Reed: African Voodoo as American Literary Hoodoo. New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2007. Punday, Daniel. “Ishmael Reed’s Rhetorical Turn: Uses of ‘Signifying’ in Reckless Eyeballing.” College English 54.4 (1992): 446-61. Reed, Ishmael. 19 Necromancers from Now. New York: Doubleday, 1970. —. Another Day at the Front: Dispatches from the Race War. New York: Basic Books, 2003. —. Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media: The Return of the Nigger Breakers. Montreal, Canada: Baraka Books, 2010. —. Japanese by Spring. New York: Atheneum, 1993. —. Juice! Champaign and London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2011. —. “The Neo-HooDoo Aesthetic.” New and Collected Poems: 1964-2007. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2007. 34. —. Private interview by Yuqing Lin. June 22, 2012. —. The Reed Reader. New York: Basic Books, 2000. —. Shrovetide in New Orleans. New York: Doubleday, 1978. Trageser, Jim. “Why use subtlety when a 2x4 will do?” Review of Japanese by Spring. Web. 6 July 2015. Ward, Jerry. “Ishmael Reed and the Idea of Multiculturalism.” Jerry Ward Blogspot. Web. 24 Nov. 2014. Wilhelm, Albert. “Japanese by Spring Review.” Library Journal 118.1 (1993): 166. Womack, Kenneth. “Campus Xenophobia and the Multicultural Project: Ethical Criticism and Ishmael Reed’s Japanese by Spring.” MELUS 26.4 (2001): 223-43. Zuo, Qiuming. Zuo zhuan. Changsha, China: Yuelu Press, 1988.

THE NEW IRONY OF ISHMAEL REED AGAINST THE NEW RACISM OF POSTRACIAL AMERICA JIěÍ ŠALAMOUN

The aim of this paper is to introduce a shift in the irony of Ishmael Reed and propose an explanation for it. The shift stems from irony based on contrast (humiliating characters that oppose multicultural values by revealing their vices) which gives way to irony based on argumentation (explaining why such behavior is objectionable). This shift can be explained by connecting it to a change of the U.S. society from post-civil rights (in which racism was overt) to postracial (in which racism is covert). In the postracial society it is no longer an efficient satirical strategy to simply reveal racist and anti-multicultural behavior and expect one’s audience to find them objectionable—as they might not recognize why such behavior is problematic. This contribution posits that the argument-based irony of Ishmael Reed attempts to deal with this situation by revealing racist and anti-multicultural behaviors first and explaining them later, so that readers can recognize the issues and draw the proper conclusions. Let me first discuss the influence which social norms have on satire, then interpret examples of both contrast- and argument-based irony, and finally examine how the emergence of the so-called postracial society has contributed to the shift from one type of irony to the other.

On the double-edged relationship of satire and social norms There is no denying that “satirists specialize in demolition projects,” as Connery and Combe claim (1), and the focus of such doing is twofold. Satirists aim to change the beliefs of their reading audience and unmask claims based on falsehood or dubious morality. There is consensus on the matter which literature and satire scholars approach from different perspectives. Bohnert claims that “satire challenges cultural perceptions” (154) while Hodgart asserts that it “contains sharp and telling comments on the problems of the world in which we live” (12). An example of such a mistaken cultural perception for Ishmael Reed is the opinion that racism

178 The New Irony of Reed against the New Racism of Postracial America

and anti-multiculturalism no longer affect current America, as he suggests in his most recent collection of essays: And so while the media, both electronic and print, might peddle the mass delusion that racism is no longer a factor in American life, I can offer a different witness because, unlike many black men who might entertain the same idea, I have many outlets, both here and abroad, both from mainstream, alternative media and my own. (Going Too Far 14)

Since according to Pollard the satirist’s ultimate goal is to “make his readers agree with him in identifying and condemning behaviour and men he regards as vicious” (1), much of Reed’s current satire targets this cultural perception in an effort to persuade his readers that support of anti-racism is still warranted. Hence, it can be said—in the words of literature scholar George Test—that satire “asserts that some person, group, or attitude is not what it should be” (5). It therefore follows that in order to judge, satire needs to rely on recognition of what is just and what is not as is demonstrated by Reed’s refusal of the idea that racism no longer affects America. Hence, it can be summarized that satire is vitally dependent on social norms. The connection between satire and social norms cannot be overemphasized for without one there can hardly be the other. Leonard Feinberg, a seminal scholar of satire, suggests that “[t]he moment one criticizes and says that something has been done in the wrong way, he is implying that there is a right way to do it” (11). Yet, here is where the nature of satire and social norms becomes double-edged. For if satirists do not choose to champion norms predominantly acknowledged by the society, their satire can turn unsuccessful in influencing its audience—which is the ultimate failure for satire as many scholars agree (see Bohnert 168; Hodgart 33; Kernan 25). It therefore follows that a change in social norms heralds a change in satire as well. To illustrate such a change in American social norms I now turn to two types of irony taken from the novels by Ishmael Reed written during different stages of current American history. I will first examine contrastbased irony from The Free-Lance Pallbearers (1967), which was written during the post-civil rights stage, and then compare it with argument-based irony from Japanese by Spring (1993), which was written during the beginnings of the postracial period. Since both novels include one type of irony to the exclusion of the other and are separated by a significant period of time, I take them to meaningfully show that the satire of Ishmael Reed has changed in order to better reflect the social reality of the U.S.

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Contrast-based irony in The Free-Lance Pallbearers The Free-Lance Pallbearers (hereafter Pallbearers) is set in a dystopian version of the U.S. governed by a villainous dictator who oversees a regime with white Americans at the top and African Americans at the bottom. The novel narrates the social rise and fall of its African American protagonist Bukka Doopeyduk as he rises from the position of a naïve lackey to the highest position in the regime at which moment he is toppled and loses everything, including his life. Perhaps this is why the novel has been reviewed as an “extravagantly satirical allegory of the journey of Bukka Doopeyduk from innocence to experience” (Kinnamon 1). Even though the novel satirizes both the oppressors and the oppressed, this chapter focuses more on the oppressed as they are the prime targets of Ishmael Reed’s contrast-based irony. Examples of contrast-based irony in the novel stem from the comparison of what oppressed characters believe to be doing and what they actually are doing (as seen by other characters who provide a corrective crosslight). Such is the case of many African American characters who believe themselves to be revolutionaries sabotaging the regime while they are in fact supporting it. The character of Elijah Raven demonstrates this behavior succinctly when he tells Bukka about his plan of bringing the regime down with recycled waste: ‘Little does the Joo know that I’m secretly collecting milk bottles and rags as I prepare for ‘Git It On’ right under my man’s nose. See, I’m a poet down here in this artistic community, going around saying mothafuka in public by night, but by day I’m stacking milk bottles in the closet instead of taking them back to the store for the two cents deposit. That’s what you might call outmanoeuvring the whitey.’ ‘There’s no two-cent deposit on milk bottles these days, and they’re disposable,’ I said. (98)

Readers can recognize the episode as ironic for there is no way that Raven’s plan to overthrow the regime by collecting milk bottles will ever work (as even the naïve Bukka is capable of pointing out). Since all of Raven’s previous effort has been in vain, the reader experiences schadenfreude at his expense and perceives his futile actions as ironic. A similar logic can also be applied to Raven’s conviction of being a rebel when he is in fact trapped in a cycle of meaningless action which is not threatening the regime at all. Hence, it is the contrast of what Raven believes and what he actually does that drives the irony behind the episode.

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Another episode shows Raven as an employee of the dictator while still believing to be a rebel. He justifies his employment with yet another revolutionary plan: “You see, I drive the truck for SAM: Doing a little moonlightin’. Little does he know that I’m collecting box tops from his cereal right under his nose so that when the revolution comes we can pull a Quaker Oats gambit on the kats” (146). As in the previous example, irony is generated by the contrast of intention and action, as no matter how many box tops Raven collects, he is in no way “outmanoeuvring the whitey.” Episodes like these satirize African Americans who proclaim to be revolutionary but are only so in their minds whilst their actions do not harm the regime. In spite of his revolutionary intentions, Raven is as much of a supporter of the regime as Bukka is, which is indeed ironic. In a similar fashion, Reed also lampoons supposedly revolutionary and pro-African American media which proclaim to fight for the rights of African Americans. Yet, as in the case of Elijah Raven, their action fails to be significant. For example, later in the novel Bukka is asked to appear on a “controversial” show (106) to discuss “how the migration of the eastern brown pelican affects the civil rights movement” (106). This ludicrous topic of the show is of course as “controversial” as Raven’s collecting of box tops and as inefficient to promote change. Again the contrast of intention and action enables us to read such a show as highly ironic. In the same spirit, Bukka is also invited to a panel discussion organized by Poison Dart magazine, the magazine of black liberation. We are having a symposium on the role of the black writer in contemporary society. […]. We shall also be discussing whether the brothers should part their hair on the side or part it down the middle. These are grave issues and you as a friend of the liberation movement shouldn’t want to miss the discussion. (107)

It is ironic that a revolutionary magazine would seek to liberate African Americans by discussing such trivial topics. Since hair parting is on a par with pelican migration as far as revolutionary relevance is concerned, both media outlets can hardly be considered efficient or even beneficial to race equality and multicultural society. Hence, irony based on contrast of intention and action is used to satirize characters which do not improve the conditions of African Americans even though they claim to do so. Even Bukka is satirized for the same reason: once he becomes the dictator he is only interested in perpetuating the status quo (and thus improving his own position) and not the situation of the regime’s minorities. Since he is ultimately overthrown and crucified by the very regime which he so enthusiastically supports, all the previous instances in

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which he has promoted the regime can be read as ironic. A fitting example is his admission that save for his work—which by definition maintains the regime—his only other activity is close-reading and contemplation of the regime’s credo. As he himself states: “[I]n my spare time I go over rather obscure passages in the Nazarene Manual and make red pencil marks in the margins of the pages. Sometimes I meditate over these issues on long walks” (72). The fact that Bukka does so in his free time and with such intensity—as the red pencil and long walks suggest—reveals that he is a naive simpleton—for the remaining African American characters can clearly recognize that they are oppressed by the regime (which Reed shows by having them live in ghettos and do third-rate work). They know that their impoverished existence is due to the regime’s existence and are mostly hostile to it. Bukka is similarly impoverished yet he cherishes the official documents of the regime, which shows how much he values its existence. Contrast at work is also involved in other episodes, for example, Bukka’s calling of the police on children who play too loud and thus disturb the peace of the regime or his giving a lecture to cinema goers who fail to applaud—as is expected of them—at seeing the obese dictator in shorts on the improper nature of their behavior. All of these examples stem from the contrast of intention (Bukka’s support of the regime) and action (the regime’s crucifixion of Bukka) and thus can be read as ironic. In sum, contrast-based irony in Pallbearers enables the readers to perceive an objectionable quality in a character (be it naivety or stupidity) as a satirical punishment for lack of multicultural effort. Interestingly, readers are allowed to induce why the characters are objectionable and are not told so directly by any of the characters nor by the narrator. I link this greater interpretative freedom with the time period in which the novel was written. During the civil-rights period racism and oppressive behavior were clearly identifiable, and the revelation of such flaws was an efficient type of satire. In other words, since the social consensus agreed on the presence of an ill (racism) it was enough to reveal behavior that did not question it and rely on the readers to reach appropriate conclusions. In contrast, the following section examines satire written 24 years later, in a society which no longer agrees on the presence of racism and where such conclusions can no longer be expected.

Argumentation-based irony in Japanese by Spring The plot of Japanese by Spring (hereafter Japanese) bears similarities to Pallbearers: the readers again follow a morally compromised African American character as he steps up and down the hierarchical ladder of an

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institution. They thus meet Charles Puttbutt—an academic who intends to secure tenure at a Californian university by spreading anti-multicultural ideas that support the white status quo. Yet, since the novel has a strong affirmative message, most of its satirical targets are characters who oppose multiculturalism or misuse it for their own profit. Nonetheless, while the reasons for satire are similar in Pallbearers and Japanese, the modes of attack differ. The following examples show that argument-based irony not only shows objectionable qualities but also tells why these are objectionable. Furthermore, this is not done through contrast but through an examination of the logical coherence of what the satirized characters say. A case in point is the following discussion between two characters: the novel’s protagonist, Puttbutt, and his opponent, Poop, who expects to be fired from the university for spreading racist ideas. Yet, the dialogue proceeds in an unexpected way, much to the surprise of the racist: ‘You can’t dismiss me.’ ‘Oh yes we can.’ ‘On what ground?’ He paused. His face lit up. ‘Oh, I get it. My lectures about blacks. That’s what you’re against. You’re using your influence [. . .] to get even with me. For telling the truth.’ ‘Not at all.’ ‘Then why?’ ‘Well, if you believe that there is a correlation between brain size and intellectual capacity, then what are we to do with your small brain?’ ‘I don’t follow.’ Puttbutt handed him a paper. Poop examined it. He began to read. ‘. . . Sandra F. Witselson of MacMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, says that her autopsies of sixty-two brains found that as men age, the size of their corpus callosum . . .’ Poop gasped before continuing, ‘. . . gets smaller.’ Poop straightened up. He looked as though somebody had thrown some cold water into his face. ‘You maintain that blacks have a smaller brain size than whites, so elderly whites such as you have smaller brains than young blacks or whites. One could say that young blacks are brighter than you are using your own theory, right? It’s on account of your own theory that you’re out of a job.’ (118)

Two sources of irony are at play in this episode. The first stems from the fact that Reed does not question the moral validity of an argument which most readers would perceive as incorrect (i.e. African Americans have smaller brains than white Americans and are thus less worthy). Instead, he uses the argument to attack its originator: once it is extended with relevant examples (brains get smaller as people age) it can be applied to the originator who due to his senior age is by extension less intelligent than

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anyone younger. At which point the racist statement does an ironic full circle and instead of attacking African Americans attacks its white originator. Interestingly enough, it is possible to imagine that had the character recanted his opinion he would be able to retain his job. Since he does not, the flaws in his logic will cost him his position at the university. The second type of irony stems from the fact that Reed does not allow Poop to be a martyr of a supposedly controversial truth. For Poop does not suffer for being a racist, he suffers for his poor logic. Using argumentationbased irony, Reed elegantly dismisses the portrayal of racism as a controversial truth and yet prevails over an openly racist character. This example shows that Reed’s irony in Japanese enters a new stage, which not only satirizes characters with anti-multicultural sentiments (as does his earlier irony) but also reveals their arguments as invalid. By doing so, it provides more evidence to readers to refuse such characters and their ideas, and hence might be more suitable in a postracial era. Even the novel’s protagonist is one of the targets of argument-based irony. This is because Chappie Puttbutt is a thinly veiled literary alter-ego of Shelby Steele, an African American scholar whom Reed satirizes for his publication of denigrating descriptions of African Americans in order to promote his own career in the right circles (Dickson-Carr 179). In the novel, the character is satirized through his speeches delivered for the media. These are often used to make him appear contemporary and not interested in racial equality, which corresponds with the key notion of the postracial society that there is no longer any need support ethnic minorities, as everyone is already equal. An illustrative example of such thinking is Puttbutt’s speech defending white aggressors who have severely beaten an African American character. Puttbutt downplays the violent act by claiming that African Americans are at fault and admonishes them with the following speech: They should stop worrying these poor whites with their excessive demands. The white students become upset with these demands. Affirmative action. Quotas. They get themselves worked up. And so it’s understandable that they go about assaulting the black students. The white students are merely giving vent to their rage. This is a healthy exercise. It is perfectly understandable. After all, the whites are the real oppressed minority. I can’t think of anybody who has as much difficulty on this campus as blondes. (6-7, emphasis added)

The quote presents a stark contrast by having Puttbutt equal mere African American existence with a provocation punishable with physical aggression. Hence, the first five sentences work as the initial premise of argumentbased irony (and they in themselves could be considered examples of

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irony based on contrast). Similarly, having Puttbutt declare that beating minorities is “a healthy exercise” which is “perfectly understandable” serves the purpose of establishing him as untrustworthy (since that is a statement which is incongruent with most readers’ knowledge of the real world). Yet, it is the tenth sentence (“the whites are the real oppressed minority”) which enables the quote to be seen as ironic. The tenth sentence functions as a trigger which enables the reader to perceive the previous claims as strongly farfetched overtures which climax in a grossly farfetched finale. Having Puttbutt utter the tenth sentence, Reed casts doubt on his previous claims, which are now seen as equally doubtful. Hence, what might be accepted by some is no longer acceptable to most by the tenth sentence and Puttbutt’s claims are thus deconstructed, ironically, by his own doing. Still, by focusing on the above examples of argument-based irony I do not want to claim that they appear to the absolute exclusion of contrastbased irony. Japanese does include irony by contrast; however, even these are changed by Reed’s new emphasis on argumentation. For example, once Puttbutt realizes that his anti-African American stance is unfounded, he switches to a radical pro-African American mode and deals with those academics who do not share his zeal. During one such example he scolds an academic who in the past made disparaging comments about African literature. Since now Puttbutt is in power, while the senior academic is not, it appears at first that Puttbutt simply wants to punish him by having him teach freshman English. The senior academic in question revolts at the idea and refuses, as this is incongruent with his rank. However, since it would equal the termination of his career, he reconsiders and comes back to Puttbutt with the following words: ‘Maybe I was a little too hasty, but it’s been a long time since I taught freshman English.’ ‘Who said anything about freshman English? We want to teach freshman Yoruba.’ ‘Freshman Yoruba?’ […]. Crabtree had written in one of those articles that if Yoruba would produce a Turgenev he would be glad to read him. Puttbutt quoted from the article. ‘In order to have made such a statement you would have required some knowledge of the language.’ (111-12)

As in the episode of the small brain argument, the targeted individual could easily find a way out of this situation by admitting his previous opinions as biased which would spare him of either ending his career or teaching a subject which he detests. Up to this point the satiric episode can

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be interpreted as contrast-based irony. Yet, even here statements and the conclusions inferred from them are vital (“In order to have made such a statement…”) which shows again how Reed’s irony has changed over the years. Puttbutt further inquires: “Being the scholar you are, you wouldn’t comment about a language of which you had no knowledge, would you?” (113). Yet, this is precisely the case as it turns out that the senior academic has no knowledge of African language and literature. Therefore, as in the previous examples, he is satirized with the help of his own statements. Since unlike Poop he is not willing to terminate his career, this conversation, in another ironic turn, results in the existence of the university’s first Yoruba lecturer with zero Yoruba knowledge. Surprisingly, it turns out that Prof. Crabtree finds much value in African literature—which shows that argument-based irony enables satirized characters some space to grow (unlike irony by contrast). Yet, all of this is achieved with Reed’s new emphasis on argumentation. In retrospect, argument-based irony provides the reader with more explanation as to why a type of behavior or thinking may be objectionable than contrast-based irony. Being a type of satire, argument-based irony naturally includes the discrediting of characters, but this is no longer done by revelation of a lack in a character but via work with statements and logic. My final comments will examine how the changed social reality may have contributed to this change in the use of irony by Ishmael Reed.

Conclusion I believe the above-described shift in irony is due to the existence of a new paradigm of race in the U.S., the so called postracial stage, which claims that race no longer matters in America. Minority ethnics are supposed to be no longer repressed because of their belonging to a particular race. Further, while it is lamentable that some racists still remain in the U.S., or so the argument goes, the proponents of the new paradigm argue that, on the whole, racism has been successfully abolished by the new laws accepted after the Civil Rights Movement.1 Glenda Carpio, a scholar of African American literature and humor, puts this new reading of the racial situation in context when she writes:

1

The theoretical basis of this argument was later codified in publications such as Shelby Steele’s A Dream Deferred (1998), Dinesh D’Souza’s The End of Racism (1995) and Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom’s America in Black and White: One Nation Indivisible (1997).

186 The New Irony of Reed against the New Racism of Postracial America A great reversal occurred almost as soon as the major Civil Rights acts passed: the focus was no longer on white racism—because segregation in public spaces, discrimination at work, and disenfranchisement had been outlawed—but on the moral deficiencies of minorities. For African Americans, this meant the return of stereotypes of blacks as lazy, irresponsible, and in ‘violation of core American values’. These stereotypes have been used to explain the undeniable inequalities in wages, access to healthcare, housing and family income that have existed between black and white Americans in the last 40 years. (326)

Consequently, even though this new reading of racism has been convincingly challenged by critical race scholars such as Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw and Jean Stefancic, this new reading of current racial reality is according to Nikhil Pal Singh, an Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, “ascendant in American law, politics, and public intellectual discourse” (11-12). And as such it has become “the foundation of a new national consensus on race,” as Brown et al. report in their monograph on what Americans think about race and racism (vii-viii). It seems natural that racist practices respond to this change, which finds itself well supported by current research in the social sciences. For example, Bonillo-Silva writes that in contemporary America “racial inequality is reproduced through ‘New Racism’ practices that are subtle, institutional, and apparently non-racial” (2). Similarly, Parks and Rachlinski speak of racism which is “subtle” and difficult to prove (197). The irony of Ishmael Reed’s prose has significantly changed and adapted itself to an understanding of racism in America that has changed as well. It is no longer sufficient just to presume that racism is evident as in the post-civil rights era, and to attack it with satire based on the revelation of vice or lack of character. Because racism has become more subtle and there is less social consensus on whether it is all present, it has to be proven in the first place before it can be attacked. In this respect, argument-based irony eases the process of recognition of racism and antimulticulturalist sentiments. Reed’s more recent argument-based irony is a better means of exposing racism since it provides more guidance to the reader who is nudged draw the correct conclusions regarding racism and anti-multicultural behavior. Satire scholar Kirk Combe writes that “[s]atire is a product of a particular person writing at a particular time for a particular audience within a particular society” (74). It hence appears natural that Reed changes his irony in order to adjust his rhetoric to the new realities of American society. Since Reed’s old, contrast-based irony relies too much on an understanding which is no longer a part of American life, it is not likely to be a

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very effective rhetoric to satirically attack racism in current America. I would like to express the hope that this is not the case for argument-based irony, which can both serve as entertainment and as a starting point for discussion in a way Reed’s previous type of irony no longer can.

Works Cited Bell, Derrick A. “After We’re Gone: Prudent Speculations on America in a Postracial Epoch.” Delgado and Stefancic 9-14. Bohnert, Christiane. “Early Modern Satire and the Satiric Novel: Genre and Cultural Transposition.” Connery and Combe 151-76. Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States. 2nd ed. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. Brown, Michael K., et al., eds. Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a ColorBlind Society. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003. Carpio, Glenda R. “Humor in African American Literature.” A Companion to African American Literature. Jarett, Gene Andrew, ed. Chichester: Blackwell, 2010. 315-31. Combe, Kirk. “The New Voice of Political Dissent: The Transition from Complaint to Satire.” Connery and Combe 73-94. Connery, Brian A., and Kirk Combe. “Introduction.” Connery and Combe 1-18. —, eds. Theorizing Satire: Essays in Literary Criticism. New York: St. Martin’s, 1995. Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams. “Color-blind Dreams and Racial Nightmares: Reconfiguring Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era.” Birth of a Nation’hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson Case. Eds. Toni Morrison and Claudia Brodsky Lacour. New York: Pantheon, 1997. 97-168. Delgado, Richard, and Jean Stefancic, eds. Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge. 3rd ed. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2013. Dickson-Carr, Darryl. African American Satire: The Sacredly Profane Novel. Missouri: P of Missouri P, 2001. D’Souza, Dinesh. The End of Racism. New York: Free Press Paperbacks, 1995. Feinberg, Leonard. Introduction to Satire. Ames: Iowa State UP, 1967. Hodgart, Matthew. Satire. Verona: Officine Grafiche Arnoldo Mondadori, 1969.

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Kinnamon, Kenneth. Rev. of The Free-lance Pallbearers, by Ishmael Reed. The Critical Response to Ishmael Reed. Ed. Bruce Allen Dick. Westport: Greenwood, 1999. 1-2. Kernan, Alvin B. The Plot of Satire. New Haven: Yale UP, 1965. Parks, Gregory S., and Jeffrey J. Rachlinski. “Implicit Bias, Election 2008, and the Myth of a Postracial America.” Delgado and Stefancic 197210. Pollard, Arthur. Satire. New York: Methuen, 1970. Reed, Ishmael. Going Too Far: Essays About America’s Nervous Breakdown. Montreal: Baraka Books, 2012. —. The Free-Lance Pallbearers. London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1968. —. Japanese by Spring. Chatham, UK: Allison & Busby, 1994. Singh, Nikhil Pal. Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2005. Steele, Shelby. A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America. New York: Harper, 1998. Test, George A. Satire: Spirit and Art. Florida: U of Florida P, 1991. Thernstrom, Stephen, and Abigail Thernstrom. America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999.

JAZZ MUSICIANS AS PIONEER MULTI-CULTURALISTS, THE CO-OPTATION OF THEIR CREATIONS AND THE REASON JAZZ SURVIVES ISHMAEL REED

When, in the summer of 1969, painter Joe Overstreet and I asked Thomas Hoving, the late director of the Metropolitan Museum, to explain why black painters were excluded from the famous exhibition, “Harlem On My Mind,” he said that if they were Abstract Expressionists he would include them. This was the atmosphere for black painters in New York of the 1960s. There was fierce competition among them as each auditioned to be anointed as a token by the New York Art establishment. I discovered this when my article about racism in the galleries and museums was published in Arts Magazine. A number of black painters were furious with me because they felt that in order to show their universality, a term created by critics, some of whom were former radicals, they had to soften their “essentialism” as it is called by academics. If they were to cater to the upper classes that was the market for painters, one had to adhere to the prevailing tastes of the New York art world, which at the time was Abstract Expressionism, which was seen as less dangerous and less political than Social Realism (see Saunders). When a payroll showed up on behalf of essentialism my same critics figuratively wallowed in Blackness. Joe Overstreet defied the tradition of black painters having to receive approval from uptown galleries by beginning his own. He and his partner, Corrine Jennings, now own two: The Kenkeleba Gallery and The Wilmer Jennings Gallery. They are part of a half block of buildings that he and Corinne Jennings developed on East 2nd street in New York. Among these properties are apartments that the partners rent out. Joe Overstreet and Corinne Jennings call their own shots. They have an independence that has been denied others: black playwrights, writers, artists, and musicians who, in order to be accepted by the mainstream media, which includes publishing, theater, film, and galleries, must conform to white bourgeois tastes.

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In February of 2015, I visited their Wilmer Jennings Gallery. On exhibit were the paintings of a black painter whose works followed the guidelines established by white critics and painters. When Social Realism was the standard, he was a social realist, when abstract painting became the standard, he became an abstract painter. The same copying of trends set by others applied to writers. While 20s and 30s black writers like Bessie Smith, Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston probed grassroots methods of storytelling like Folklore, Rock and Roll, the Blues, etc., many others were wedded to the standards set by white writers and critics. By contrast, Dizzy Gillespie’s big band recorded a tune called “Things To Come” (1946), a maddeningly fast tempo piece which featured new sounds and rhythms and ingenious improvisations. “Things To Come” was aptly named because it pointed to a new direction in music. For this essay, I asked the esteemed composer and Jazz musician Mary Watkins her take on “Things To Come.” She wrote: .

In the 1946 recording of ‘Things to Come’ by the Dizzy Gillespie Jazz Band the music is driven by a faster tempo, creating excitement, a kinetic kind of energy with shorter melodic phrases with sudden hits, percussion breaks, and less predictable harmonies. It is no longer dance music for the average Joe or Jane, and more intellectually engaging. I wouldn’t say it is a departure but that it has over time due to cultural, societal, and life influences morphed into becoming more of what it is. Jazz.

Some members of Dizzy Gillespie And His Orchestra—Kenny Dorham, Sonny Stitt, Ray Leo Parker (baritone saxophone), Milt Jackson, Thelonious Monk, Ray Brown, and Kenny Clarke—would be among those who would change Jazz scale, harmonic and rhythmic theory. Like their predecessors, these musicians not only performed a mixing and sampling of other musical traditions, but they were avant-garde in fashion, philosophy, language and religion. While the majority of black Americans were Christian, Bebop musicians were prone to accepting faiths that were unorthodox. They were opposed by those who were comfortable with older Jazz standards. (Such a split can be seen among black writers of the younger generation of the 2000s. Some are looking backward to a style that could be called dense, a slowpoke Faulknerian form of realism, and an appeal to a liberal readership on the basis of shared Judeo- Christian values. This faction is favored by mainstream critics who wish to keep black theater, and literature locked in the 1950s.) One could even consider the Post Race faction of black culture a yearning for a political and cultural yesteryear when blacks weren’t raising

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such a fuss. Others, Afro Futurists, follow the directions set by the Black Arts Movement, which included black painters musicians and artists. (Figures like Octavia Butler, the science fiction writer, Sun Ra, and George Clinton, science fiction musicians, are among central mentors for this movement.) I asked D. Scot Miller, an Afro-Futurist his concept of Afro Futurism. Miller is the author of the Afrosurreal Manifesto (2009) a key document of the Afrofuturist movement. He writes: “Afrofuturism is a term coined by cultural critic, Mark Dery, in his 1994 book Flame Wars: The Discourse Of Cyberculture (Duke University Press). In a chapter called “Black To The Future: Interviews With Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose,” Dery defines Afrofuturism as, “Speculative fiction that treats African themes and addresses African American concerns in the context of twentieth century techno-culture—and more generally, African American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future.”1 While some black painters, and writers for commercial reasons, would have to imitate those standards that were dictated by white artists and white critics, it was white musicians who learned from black jazz musicians. So, in music it was the other way around. Some like drummer Gene Krupa and Bobby Brookmeyer acknowledged this influence. Others like Stan Kenton denied it. Drummer Gene Krupa noticed this tendency when commenting on the refusal of white musicians to accept Jazz as black music: What would have happened to Gene Krupa in my early years in Chicago if I hadn’t been given a chance to learn what jazz was all about from some really great Negro musicians. It would be ridiculous for me to deny this 1

Since the release of D. Scot Miller’s Afrosurreal Manifesto in 2009, the Wikipedia definition has been constantly modified by Dery and many others and now defines Afrofuturism as “a literary and cultural aesthetic that combines elements of science fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, Afrocentricity, and magic realism with non-Western cosmologies in order to critique not only the present-day dilemmas of people of color, but also to revise, interrogate, and re-examine the historical events of the past. First coined by Mark Dery in 1993, and explored in the late 1990s through conversations led by scholar Alondra Nelson, Afrofuturism addresses themes and concerns of the African Diaspora through a technoculture and science fiction lens, encompassing a range of media and artists with a shared interest in envisioning black futures that stem from Afrodiasporic experiences. Seminal Afrofuturistic works include the novels of Samuel R. Delany and Octavia Butler; the canvases of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Angelbert Metoyer, and the photography of Renée Cox; and the explicitly extraterrestrial mythoi of Parliament-Funkadelic, the Jonzun Crew, Warp 9, Deltron 3030, and Sun Ra.”

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The worst offenders of what might be called cultural imperialism or cultural occupation have been white nationalist critics. They might neglect to mention that Lester Young influenced Stan Getz, who quit Stan Kenton’s band when Kenton dismissed Getz’s mentor, Lester Young, as “too simple.” Critics give Chet Baker credit for a cool trumpet style, when he was influenced by Miles Davis. As a result of social media however, white chauvinist critics expose themselves to criticism when they deny the black roots of Jazz. Times man Nate Chinen, who, next to Francis Davis, occupies more column space than any other jazz critic, was challenged when he gave Benny Goodman credit for the debut of Jazz. It was begun with my facebook posting where I cited Nate Chinen’s comment that Benny Goodman’s 1938 concert was a “debut for jazz”: “The concert had been billed partly as a salute to Goodman’s historic 1938 concert at Carnegie Hall, a debut for jazz as well as for his band” (Times May 29, 2009). On my Facebook page I asked: “Do any of the Facebook Jazz fans who have challenged my description of Nate Chinen (below) as an apprentice white chauvinist parading as a jazz critic agree with him that Goodman’s concert represented a ‘debut for jazz?’ I’ve been studying Jazz for nearly 20 years and have never heard such a thing. Satchmo called Benny Goodman ‘that no playin Benny Goodman.’” Some of my “friends” who were Jazz savvy weighed in: Kenneth Carroll Was his argument that it was a debut for Jazz at Carnegie Hall? I know James Reese Hall and Fletcher Henderson played there a decade earlier. Chris Isett A quick search of the Carnegie website tells us Jazz debuted at the hall in 1912. Ericka Elaine Schiche Highway robbery. Benny Goodman=/= debut for jazz ... on any count, ESPECIALLY at Carnegie if we are limiting the time

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and date parameters. And he is even omitting Bix Beiderbecke, who performed in a jazz band at Carnegie years before 1939 Askia Muhammad Amiri Baraka jokes about the white Jazz “great,” as he was proclaimed, Paul Whiteman, as in white man. Sam Hamod What Chinen does is called “revising true history” ... William Welburn Maybe somebody should send Nate a copy of Gunther Schuller’s The Swing Era to help him understand how even the most staid jazz historical establishment had dismissed that before Nate was born. Garrett Hongo This is akin to what’s going on among the newly anointed, mainstream literary critics too. They're revising history to feature their favored (white) writers and writing out the accomplishments and innovations of writers of color. This concerted “forgetting” went on through the first half into the early 60s of the 20th century, faded in the latter 20th, but now has come roaring back. Philip Henderson Ishmael, Satchmo hated Benny Goodman because Goodman wanted to do a show with Armstrong (he did several) and told Satchmo not to “clown” on stage. Armstrong got pissed off and told him, in so many words, “this is what I do, motherfucker!” Armstrong felt patronized and told Goodman that he got all his ideas sitting at the feet of Jimmie Noone and Johnny Dodds, which was true, of course.

Some have called this process Elvis Presleying, the tendency among white nationalist critics to hand over the creations of blacks to whites. The second most powerful Jazz critic, Francis Davis, has set upon a personal crusade to see to it that white musicians receive credit for their contributions to Jazz. Assessing the output of Jazz recordings for one year he boasted that “white was the new black.” Just as some white critics have a business relationship with white writers who might receive more credit for their tourist forays into the black experience than black writers who actually live black lives, Jazz musicians have been vulnerable to the same cultural embezzlement. My collaborator musician David Murray tells me that black Jazz musicians are disappearing from European Jazz festivals and Ronnie Stewart of the Oakland Blues Society says that the same thing is happening with the Blues musicians. Blues festivals are now dominated by whites. For some reason, Hip Hop resists the effort of white critics to deliver it to white artists. Yet, while Jazz musicians might have fallen upon hard times in the United States and Europe it is finding audiences elsewhere.2 2

According to Nielson’s 2014 Year-End Report, jazz is continuing to fall out of favor with American listeners and has tied with classical music as the leastconsumed music in the U.S., after children’s music. Both jazz and classical represent just 1.4% of total U.S. music consumption a piece. However, Classical album sales were higher for 2014, which puts Jazz at the bottom of the barrel. This con-

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Francis Davis, a white nationalist Jazz critic, who believes that whites are not getting enough credit for their contributions to Jazz,3 disputed my claim that Sonny Rollins received most sales for his CDs in Japan, which is something that Rollins told me. The next day Davis’s claim was challenged by a CNN report in which Japan was cited as the country with the largest sales in Jazz.4 Francis Davis was also the Village Voice critic who boasted that “white is the new black,” asserting that white Jazz musicians had somehow eclipsed black Jazz musicians. This said while Sonny Rollins, Barry Harris, Jimmy Heath, and Randy Weston are still alive and a younger generation that includes David Murray, the consensus successor to John Coltrane and Albert Ayler Joshua Redmond, Yosvany Terry, Ravi Coltrane, Renee McLean, and are creating innovative Jazz. Further proof that white Jazz critics and white performers have a partnership was the magazine article featuring Diana Krall in which the great Abbey Lincoln was only mentioned in passing. Even though there is no time limit on the classics recorded by Abbey Lincoln, critic Ben Ratliff replaced her with Diana Krall with his lines, “The strident rip in an Abbey Lincoln performance embodied jazz in the 60's—politically ambitious, its structure undergoing major tremors. Diana Krall's dusky, deadpan contralto with its hairline cracks and her studious and tasteful swing might be jazz in 2000.” Like Ratliff, who mentions Diana Krall as a contralto but doesn’t mention the category of Abbey Lincoln’s singing, both Davis and Chinen respond to Jazz in a subjective, sociological manner and unlike Ollie Wilson and Carman Moore seem incapable of judging how these musicians apply theory to their playing. Davis relies on biographical information about musicians and includes anecdotes about their personal lives, with a heavy emphasis on their drug addiction and alcoholism, but tinues an alarming trend that has seen more and more listeners move away from jazz every year (see LaRosa). 3 See Stanley Crouch, “Putting the White Man in Charge,” JazzTimes, April 2003. 4 See Frank Spignese: “Tokyo is a jazz lover’s paradise—only New York can claim to have as many clubs and live houses to choose from. Though, the high-end clubs that pull in the big acts can cost a fortune, populated with patrons who are more interested in showing off their secretaries than actively listening to the music. / On the flip side are the tiny live houses that can often feel like amateur-hour jam sessions with fledgling musicians getting their feet wet as they hone their chops. Luckily, we have the Pit Inn. / Celebrating its 50th year, Shinjuku’s Pit Inn is the oasis that keeps on giving. It showcases ear-bending avant-garde one night, more straight-ahead fare the next and throws stage time to the occasional female vocalist plowing her way through the Burt Bacharach catalog. It’s bare-bones and basic, but not such a complete dive that the soles of your shoes stick suspiciously to the floor.”

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even though he has received grants for his creative non-fiction, he hasn’t used this money to study music theory. Chauvinist critics listened to a lot of records, and know a lot about dates when recordings were made, and the bios of those who performed, but are not able to give a theoretical analysis of what they are listening to. In his article “I Hear American Scatting,” Davis implies that he knows more about Jazz than Wynton Marsalis. In the United States, white nationalist sentiments not only exist among the followers of ignorant and rabble rousing populist demagogues, but have found a place in the higher realms of intellectual life. Recently, a white critic, Alexandra Alter gave credit to a white writer, Ben Winter, for creating speculative fiction with the theme of slavery. AfroFuturists pointed out that Octavia Butler had done it before in her novel, Kindred. I pointed it out to the critic who made this claim. She didn’t respond. When I informed her that this essay might appear in book form, she finally replied that she knew of black writers who had done fantasy/or scifi takes on slavery. I then asked her why she hadn’t cited any and why she implied that a white writer was the first to attempt such a novel. She didn’t respond. At least Nate Chinen responded to me and my Facebook friends. In doing so, he played the race card. He said that I was calling him a racist. But Chinen isn’t the only critic who occasionally delivers the black experience to white artists. Michiko Kakutani, the chief daily critic for the Times ignores most of the leading black writers but gave kudos to a memoir by a young white woman which included a number of red flag clichés obvious to any person acquainted with black culture. The memoir turned out to be a fake.5 As part of the Jim Crow media, it’s not surprising that mainstream book reviews would ignore leading black critics: Mary Emma Graham, Jerry Ward, Bernard Bell, Trudier Harris, Herb Boyd, Reginald Martin and Joyce Joyce are seldom asked to review books by black authors. They would have been able to cite Kindred as a predecessor to Ben Winter’s Underground Airlines and would have been able to spot Love And Consequences as a fake. But like Overstreet and Jennings, some musicians have established their own venues and are not dependent upon middle persons, who act from chauvinistic motives. One such individual is Randy Weston. Weston, who arrived in Tangier in 1967, became interested in traditional Moroccan music. He also began to study the Sufi religion and Gnawa music. Randy Weston didn’t depend upon middle persons who feature white musicians 5

See Rich: “In ‘Love and Consequences,’ a critically acclaimed memoir published last week, Margaret B. Jones wrote about her life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods. The problem is that none of it is true.”

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in order to woo ticket buyers. He organized his own Jazz festival and opened his own Jazz club, but because he received no support from the United States or the Moroccan government the festival failed. Weston says that the concept of Pan Africanism was just too radical a concept for them. But using the musical techniques that he learned in Morocco, Weston was able to pay off his debts with a recording called “Blue Moses” (see Aidi). Both, black writers and those involved in the visual arts, were a step behind the musicians like Weston. Yet, in the 1960s, Black poets would make important breakthroughs. They would end the copying of the “masters” T.S. Eliot, Henry James, and Hemingway, and begin to explore other languages, Arabic and African languages. But the musicians were there first. Like the Be Bop musicians, and Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, in the 1960s, black poets headed into new directions, while maintaining the black vernacular or ebonics, which they might synthesize with African and Middle Eastern influences, which the musicians had already charted. The Jazz musicians beat them to it. Tenor saxophonist Lynn Hope, a Jazz saxophonist whose one hit was “Tenderly,” converted to Islam, and became noted for wearing a turban, though few ever called him Al Hajji Abdullah. Others donned the facade of Islam to confuse racists. In The Karma of Brown Folk, Vijay Prashad writes about how black musicians used an Eastern style to confuse Southern racists: Dizzy Gillespie, for instance, tells a number of stories of black musicians who either converted to Islam or who acted as if they had converted so that they might be allowed to pass as white in restaurants. ‘Man, if you join the Muslim faith,’ his friends would tell him, ‘you ain’t colored no more, you’ll be white. You get a new name and you don’t have to be a nigger no more.’

Gerald Horne reports that when Angela Davis spoke French in the South, she had fewer problems than when she presented herself as an African American. Horne says that Southern resentment of blacks is a result of the black slaves forming an alliance with the British to fight the slave owners. While some jazz musicians found spiritual solace in Islam, Sonny Rollins and others found inspiration in religions of India; John Coltrane was so inspired by Eastern music that he even named his son after his friend Ravi Shankar. In his music he also used the scale of G, which is called the Raga scale. While Black musicians chose Islam and Buddhism, Cuban Jazz musicians leaned toward African Religion. Dizzy Gillespie collaborated with Machita, the Cuban drummer one of whose song titles, “Babalu,” I found

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in my Yoruba dictionary: Babalu Aiye (Abraham). My Yoruba teacher says that Cubans mess up the Yoruba language. The Gillespie-Machito collaboration wouldn’t be the first experiment of Latinized Jazz. Jelly Roll Morton’s Tango licks can be heard in his music. The Tango can also be heard in some of the bars included in W.C. Handy’s 1926 “St. Louis Blues.” While black musicians have adopted scales and chords and rhythms of other cultures, few have preserved elements of African Religion as much as Cuban Jazz musicians. Dizzy Gillespie might have collaborated with Machito, but he didn’t adopt Santeria, the mixture Yoruba and Catholic beliefs. He became a member of the Baha’i faith. So why have Cuban musicians been able to preserve elements of African religion, while North American Jazz musicians like Sonny Rollins, have found inspiration from Islam and Eastern religions Buddhism and Hindu? Yosvany Terry, one of Cuba’s premiere Jazz musicians, commissioned me to write a poem for his CD entitled The Newly Crowned King. I was assigned to write a poem about the Dahomeyan warrior women whom some call Amazons. They were the King’s guard but fought on the battlefield against the French colonizer. Yosvany introduced me to Mase Nadodo, a Dahomeyan entity that survived the slave trade and whose descendants live in Cuba. Cuban Jazz musicians were able to maintain African gods, because some leaders of the Catholic Church, unlike the Protestants, had a live-and-let-live attitude toward other religions, as long as the practitioners came to mass once in awhile. Another reason is that Islam has failed to find a foothold in Cuba. Hip Hop has a higher world visibility than Jazz, which is still appreciated more in Asia, Europe and Africa than in the United States, whose intellectual and academic elite view giving credit to blacks for inventing artistic forms as opening the gates to barbarism and as a cerebral uprising. That’s why white imitators receive more credit for Jazz, Rock and Roll and Hip Hop than the originators. This is especially true of the awards. I’m beginning to think that the Grammys, the Oscars, the Golden Globes, the Tonys and the Billboard awards are judged by the same white middle-aged guys. The African aesthetic like African religion can vacuum up the cultural traditions of others. It can preserve features of religions that were nearly made extinct—like Haitian religion served as a harbor for the Caribbean religion that was crushed by the invaders; it can offer refuge to religions that came under attack like Islam. There is a theory that the entity called “Obatala” has something to do with Allah. There has been much collaboration between black writers and black musicians since the 1960s. Before he died, Amiri Baraka continued his partnership with David Murray, a musicians whose roots lie in the Pente-

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costal church, a stateside refuge for African religion among whose features are drumming, dance and possession. He is one of those Jazz musicians who have worked consistently with writers. He has been a member of a group of musicians called the Conjure band, which has recorded three CDs based upon my poetry and songs produced by Kip Hanrahan’s American Clave label. If for contemporary American writers, European culture is only one of the many influences upon their writings, it was the African American musicians who were the trailblazers. Randy Weston and his mentor Duke Ellington composer of “The Far East Suite,” John Coltrane, Lyn Hope, Art Blakey, Babs Gonzales, the Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie. The Miles Davis of “Sketches of Spain,” Don Cherry and others were ahead of black artists in other fields in their explorations of new modes of expression. The highest tribute to their efforts is the quoting of their work in the music of the Hip Hoppers. Hip Hop artist Snoop Dogg even thanked Herbie Hancock for “inventing hip hop,” the musical lingua franca of world youth and a music that was featured in the Rio Olympics. Sophie Ramayrat and Chris Read in their Who Sampled blog list the ten top Jazz musicians who are sampled by Hip Hop artists and the number of times they’ve been sampled: 10. Donald Byrd (135), 9. Miles Davis (146), 8. Nina Simone (148), 7. George Benson (176), 6. Lou Donaldson (201), 5. Grover Washington (241), 4. Roy Ayers Ubiquity (257), 3. Herbie Hancock (282), 2. Quincy Jones (303), 1. Bob James (734). Finally, I was discussing this issue with Kalamu Ya Salaam and Ed Bullins. Kalamu was saying that Jazz is the most influential. I was saying words. I said what would have happened if Martin Luther King, Jr. had played his “I have a dream speech” on the saxophone. Bullins though this funny. But Kalamu had a point. Yes, words in the form on poetry, fiction, nonfiction, pamphlets, broadsides, court briefs have moved the emancipation of blacks along, but words have a limited audience. Those who speak English. Music has a wider audience because as Friedrich Nietzsche said, music is the universal language.

Works Cited Abraham, R.C. Dictionary of Modern Yoruba. London: U of London P, 1958. Aidi, Hisham. Rebel Music: Race, Empire, And the New Muslim Youth Culture. London: Vintage Books, 2014. Alter, Alexandra. “An Author’s Daring Mix of Slavery and Sci-Fi.” The New York Times 5 July 2016. Web.

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Crouch, Stanley. “Putting The White Man In Charge.” Jazz Times Apr. 2003. Web. Davis, Francis. “I Hear American Scatting.” The Atlantic Online Jan 2001. Web. Dery, Mark. “Black to the future: interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose.” Flame Wars: the Discourse of Cyberculture. Ed. Mark Dery. Duke UP, 1994. 179-222. Horne, Gerald. The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America. New York: NYU Press, 2014. Kakutani, Michiko. “However Mean the Streets, Have an Exit Strategy.” The New York Times 26 Feb. 2008. Web. Kaplan, Alice. Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2012. Krupa, Gene. “Gene-Krupa-on-the-Black-Roots-of-Jazz.” Konch Magazine July/August 2016. Web. La Rosa, David. “Jazz Has Become the Least-Popular Genre in the U.S.” The Jazz Line Newsletter. 9 Mar. 2015. Web. Follow us: @TheJazzLine on Twitter | TheJazzLine on Facebook Miller, D. Scot. “Afrosurreal Manifesto.” San Francisco Bay Guardian 20 May 2009. Web. Prashad, Vijay. The Karma of Brown Folk. St. Paul: U Minnestoa P, 2001. Ratliff, Ben. “Jazz Latte.” The New York Times Magazine 20 Feb. 2000. Web. Ramayrat, Sophie, and Chris Read. “Most Sampled Jazz Artists of All Time.” 20 Aug. 2016. Web. Reed, Ishmael. “The Black Artist—Calling a Spade a Spade.” Arts Magazine 41 (May 1967): 48-49. Rich, Motoko. “Gang Memoir, Turning Page, Is Pure Fiction.” The New York Times 4 Mar. 2008. Web. Saunders, Frances Stonor. “Modern Art Was CIA ‘Weapon.’” Independent 21 October, 1995. Web. Spignese, Frank. “Tokyo jazz landmark Pit Inn celebrates 50 years.” The Japanese Times 22 Jan. 2015. Web. Wikipedia. “Afrofuturism.” 20 June 2016. Web.

POETRY

CRAIG SANTOS PEREZ AND MYUNG MI KIM VOICING THE INTEGRAL DIVIDE: RESHAPING AMERICAN HISTORY THROUGH MULTI-LINGUALISM JENNIFER K DICK

“…a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.” —Gertrude Stein, A Carafe, That is a Blind Glass, (qtd. in Perez, [Hacha] 40) “Everything is the same except composition and as the composition is different and always going to be different everything is not the same.” —Gertrude Stein

Writing about N. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, Nathaniel Mackey asks whether reordering history’s “linguistic protocols might undo or redo history itself” (Philips, cover). Even, as Juliana Spahr added, “find an answer [to Historical trauma … by] telling and not telling, ... naming and not naming” (Philips, cover). Many authors attempting to recalibrate the self within a sense of the nation and its history are using innovative forms of hybridity to write a new America, defying Anglo-centric perspectives linguistically and visually. The goal is to show personal history as part of a larger contextual History that has long been silenced, one might even argue systematically eradicated from America. These authors collage, cross-out, fragment and stutter, include visual images and diagrams on their page, incorporate foreign languages and mix or include English errors—as space for the illegible and unreadable in the reading process, and as a method of revising the History of the self and its nations. At the heart of such disjointed weaving of multitudes of cultures and languages into the loom of the American Literary tradition is the issue of resisting erasure. One might

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say, of creating a more truly inclusive multicultural, even multinational, America. Taking back the self, exploring ancestry, origins and histories that are rich with variants from codified History, this essay compares and contrasts two contemporary authors who are doing this kind of formally innovative polyphonic writing: first, Craig Santos Perez (Chamorro and Pacific Rim author from Guam of from UNINCORPORATED HISTORY [Hacha], from UNINCORPORATED HISTORY [saina] and the 2015 National Book Award winning from UNINCORPORATED HISTORY [guma’] which form a single work) and second, Myung Mi Kim (Korean-born American immigrant author of Under Flag, Dura, Bounty, Commons and Penury, which again function in many ways as a single work). The goal is to explore how Perez and Kim’s making of a new English within their poetry collections seeks to account for the experience of the multicultural and polyvalent self, for their lost or vanishing cultures as those are absorbed into America. But also to see how these works end up speaking for an inclusive “we” by allowing a space for that which cannot be expressed, an outside America within the American voice—a space of the past and the present, of the Other and the foreign in each of us. As Perez stated, “I hope ‘Guam’ (the word itself) becomes a strategic site for my own voice (and other voices) to resist the reductive tendencies of what Whitman called the ‘deformed democracy’ of America.”([Hacha] 11). What will be explored is how these two authors, like many others at the end of the 20th century, have come to reassess the place of self and difference ON and VIA the page of the book. As Kim put it, her work is the “Desire for the encyclopedic // Interrogation of archive” (Commons 107) which “[e]lides multiple sites: reading and text making, discourses and disciplines, documents and documenting. Fluctuating, proceeding by fragment, by increment. Through proposition, parataxis, contingency—approximating nerve, line, song” (107). Thus their readers are, as Kim writes: “Released into our moment, shaped as it is by geographical and cultural displacements, an exponentially hybrid state of nations, cultures and voicings” (108). Kim and Perez are attempting to “render the infinitesimally divisible moment // The meaning of becoming a historical subject” (108). Or, as Craig Santos Perez put it: “…redressed let our history be seen through watermarks heard // thru no one speech…” ([saina] 36).

Multiculturalism and the Razing of the Immigrant I want to start this exploration by directly addressing the theme of this volume. In the USA, the buzzword “multiculturalism” still generally

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evokes ideas of the immigrant, African American, Asian American or Native American being obliged to find a way to integrate into New World standards set up by primarily white Anglo-Saxons with a specific level of pronunciation of American English—as Perez wrote, they live in a “forced tongue” ([Hacha] 62), or as Myung Mi Kim shows in this passage: “...torment a sum of pieces prices. // Bodies in propulsion. Guatemalan, Korean, African-American sixteen-year olds working check-out lanes. Hard and noisy enunciation. // Banter English gathers carriers” (Dura 73). The place for most immigrants’ deeper self has been relegated to restaurant fare or days of fair-like parades and celebrations of “cultural diversity”—meaning exceptional days, not the norm. They are asked to blend in ways that are frequently impossible and always a version of erasure. As Perez writes of one of the historical conquerings of Guam by Damien de Esplaña in 1673 (at the beginning of the Spanish-Chamorro wars, 167289): “…he took orphaned children to be baptized and razed in mission schools” ([Hacha] 37). Using the spelling r-a-z-e-d, Perez implies they will literally be raised (i.e., brought up), educated, but also cut down— “destroyed to the ground” (Merriem-Webster). This razing, Perez explains in his preface to from UNINCORPORATED TERRITORY [Hacha], is related to the [...] ‘redúccion’ of ‘Guam’ [which] enacts the cultural, political, geographic, and linguistic ‘redúccion’ that has accrued from three centuries of colonialism. ‘Redúccion’ is the term the Spanish used to name their efforts of subduing, converting, and gathering natives through the establishment of missions and the stationing of soldiers to protect these missions. ([Hacha] 11)

In order to answer for their own experience of being razed, both Kim and Perez use a multilingual visual page in texts where the languages and voices of these authors is heard as they locate song “to sing // forward … to // sing past” ([guma’] 15), as Myung Mi Kim opens her very first collection of poetry: “Must it ring so true // So we must sing it” (Under Flag 13). As Perez wrote in [Hacha]: “His voices // entwine // uninvited” (56). For, as he explains earlier, “Guahån has always been captured (and thus defined) for its strategic position in the Pacific […]. My hope is that these poems provide a strategic position for ‘Guam’ to emerge from imperial ‘redúccion(s)’ into further uprisings of meaning” (11). As Kim puts it in her poem And Sing We: “To span even yawning distance” (Under Flag 13). In an unpunctuated syntax that allows this to be both question and declaration, she adds: “And would we be near then” (13).

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Such a process begins, not unsurprisingly, for both authors by a returning to the site of original linguistic erasure—their roots in history and ancestry, and their education in American English replete with anecdotes about the trauma of childhood language learning. In so doing, they contextualize their works in an emerging American literary tradition of hybrid forms. In their initial books, Perez and Kim take as an example for their works Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s writings, in particular Dictée. Perez goes so far as to quote the following lines at the start of [Hacha]: “From another epic another history. From the missing narrative. From the multitude of narratives. Missing. From the chronicles. For another telling another recitation. // Our destination is fixed on the perpetual motion of search. Fixed in its perpetual exile” (Cha, Dictée 81). Dictée is an early hybrid visualtextual work including the literal workbooks of dictation and a mixture of foreign and domestic American terms while the process in one of the several stories of this book of educating a child in such a way as to erase error, thus otherness, their other culture, is shown. Kim’s second collection Dura—meaning the dense tough, outermost membranous envelope of the brain and spinal cord, but also referring in Korean to “Dura” / “Tora” an insult used to call wartime kids who were basically street urchins, “dogs”—is the closest echo to Cha’s Dictée. Dura, like Dictée, includes scholastic images, translations, references to issues with sound for a Korean speaking American, and school rhymes (used for learning). It is about both a language being lost (Korean) and one being acquired (American). Already in her first book, Under Flag, Kim writes many lines such as the one on the initial page of the book: “What sound do we make, ‘n’, ‘h’, ‘g’ / Speak and it is sound in time /// Depletion replete with barraging / Slurred and taken over/Diaspora” (Under Flag 13). Which is echoed in such fragments from Perez’s first book as “empty maws,” “I’m frightened by what disappears,” “tonalities // buried” ([Hacha] 64) and “mute arrivals” “of no throat” (65). Perez speaks directly of his linguistic and cultural identity struggle as something that is happening between the languages themselves in his texts which engage English and Chamorro: “In the ocean of English words, the Chamorro words in this collection remain insular, struggling to emerge within their own ‘excerpted space’” ([Hacha] 12). Perez’s work in [Hacha] is peppered with Chamorro language but in this collection he also collages excerpts of his own stories and that of his relatives, paralleling these with extracts in the form of studies, law books, trade, war and airline diagrams, the Bible, poets of many nationalities and dictionary entries. For instance, on the above page where he speaks of the Chamorro language’s “excerpted space” he includes in a running line along the bottom of that

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page, which is a 1432 definition of excerpt as “ex-” or “pluck out” or “harvest,” echoing once more the sense of something being eliminated, removed or razed. The violent act of forced blending via language acquisition for a young person is implicit. In a straightforward example, Perez recalls in [Hacha] his grandfather telling him: “‘…the monitors tried to trick you and ask you something in chamoru’ he says // ‘and you got punished if you didn’t answer them in English’ // he explains how to minimize your shadow depending on the angle of the sun” ([Hacha] 37). As Perez declares in his preface to [Hacha]: “The colonial school system on Guam, when I grew up there, did not teach written Chamorro in the schools, a consequence of Americanization and a sustained desire to eradicate the native language” ([Hacha] 12). Similarly, Kim as a child quickly becomes versed in imitation, trying to mask her foreignness, as in the poem Food, Shelter, Clothing: “She could not talk without first looking at others’ mouths (which language)? // (pushed into) crevice a bluegill might lodge in” (Under Flag 21). Reaccentuating the hiding and doubling with her use of the parentheses here, Kim portrays the self as an extension of language. She is, like the fish, trying to get smaller and smaller so as to not seem out of the ordinary—but is thus confined. As she describes it elsewhere, her “Head [is] a yoke” (Dura 69). More than controlling, taming, or considering her responses, the image of the crevice for a small fish to hide in establishes a parallel with the sense of the child seeking a place to hide (or making her mouth the right shape and sound), to thus avoid larger predators; to avoid being entirely consumed. One could also read this in reverse, that her having two languages is for her partaking in a process of selecting the right one for the occasion but thus hiding the other side of the self while still having it there, secretly protected, perhaps treasured like a small, glowing fish. Regardless of which reading one selects, over and over in Kim’s and Perez’s writings portrayals of how one of the dual sides of the self must go so that these speakers may blend into the culture they reside in pervade their books. This act of needing to deny half of the self is often shown to be because the native language and culture are perceived as undesirable. Drawing reader’s attention to the way that colonial cultures redefine with negative connotations native references and terms or even historical figures is part of the program of Perez and Kim. Thus their works address redefinitions of language, which may carry within them deprecating connotations of the foreign—for example, Perez writes in [Hacha]:



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Craig Santos Perez and Myung Mi Kim Voicing the Integral Divide ‘mata‘pang’ used to mean ‘proud and brave’ used to mean ‘alert eyes’—he led the rebellion against the spanish before he was captured and killed— now it means ‘silly’ or ‘rude’ or ‘misbehaved’ or ‘uncivil’ (23)

Simply drawing our attention to these etymological to contemporary shifts in language’s meanings makes the non-native reader aware of the psychological damage such redefinitions have done to the people these words define. This experience is not unique to the autobiographical experiences of these authors. In fact, these works attempt to be inclusive of others. As Kim writes in Dura: Error gathering. Listen with your eyes because here you cannot decipher what is said out of the effort of mouths Sept and deceptory. Shook hieroglyphic. Lapse. Refrain. Emend. Collide collision. Excursion exclusion. Shunned to alert. Increasing store. Torch and fire. Translate: 38th parallel. Translate: the first shipload of African slaves was landed at Jamestown. (Dura 68)

Here, Kim returns to the image of someone trying to listen with their eyes, perhaps to figure out which language is being spoken, as in Under Flag, but also to try and comprehend the language. The image starts with a focus on error, on an inability to locate the correct cypher to decrypt the linguistic codes of the place and culture the speaker is residing in. However, as the poem expands, it begins to spiral and become increasingly inclusive of and even embody the processes and peoples it is speaking about (and the processes of translation and connection for peoples of any language)—starting with “Sept and deceptory” a combination of homophonic words where neither are contemporary English (sept is a Latin root found in all IndoEuropean languages and deceptory is a disused word meaning deceptive). Kim provides the native anglo-American reader with an experience like that of her own, where they are unable to locate the semantic meaning of a word. These familiar letters form something not quite right, not quite theirs—or ours. This is further accentuated by the suggested image and meaning of the word “hieroglyph”—bringing to bear on this poem ideas about the difficult to impossible task of translating from the visual to

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sound—which may make some readers see in their mind the walls of Egyptian tombs perhaps visited in museums; things saved and lost; things pieced back together. The three lines of fragments which follow these could be discussed at length, but for the purpose of this article, one could just argue here that these lines accrue and accentuate a sense of meaningcollision in a space of trying to revise what is heard into meaning, to rewrite it, compose it into sense, changing it as “emend” suggests, revisiting it as “refrain” implies. These fragments recall the epigraph from John at the start of Perez’s [Hacha]: “…when they were filled, he said unto his disciples, Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost. Therefore they gathered them together, and filled twelve baskets with the fragments” (John 6:12-13; qtd. in [Hacha] 7). The autobiographical splintering and reconstructing becomes part of a larger, historical trend for both authors. Thus, to return to the final couplet in the above poem by Kim, readers see how Kim references Korea’s 38th parallel, which is also a site of division and devastation for her, and then collapses the autobiographical plight and recent global history into that of the early 1600s and colonial America as she references the first slaves arrival in the colonies at Jamestown. How can these experiences and all they contain be translated? Voiced? Expressed? Whose history is this? In their shared plight for expression, Kim draws a thin line between herself brought to the U.S. by her parents, thus dragged along not by her own choice nor entirely theirs, as they were themselves being displaced by conflicts far larger than the self or self-determination. Kim and her family moved for political, ideological and economic reasons. In parallel, the slaves were brought to the North American continent by others and not by choice, and they also did not blend, had to struggle, etc. There is no narrative commentary or explanation for her juxtapositions of these references. This leaves it up to readers to decide to decipher, infer and thus to PARTICIPATE in meaningmaking. To draw the picture of the Americans Kim is speaking to, and potentially to align her and the slaves experience even on a minimal level as sharing something—one might just see that they were, or are, as she writes on the following page of Dura, “Players in the field of manipulation” (69). But are Kim and Perez turning the tables?



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Kim and Perez: Are they manipulating the manipulator? To respond to the eradication of the bilingual self, the obliteration of difference and otherness, these authors include throughout their books fragments, even at times entire pages, in their native tongues as well as in other languages. The idea is to make Americans see this as American. To express that “teaming nation of nations” as Siham Arfaoui Abidi called it. Kim argues in her essays that the American language is multiple, stating that she wants her poetry to be inclusive of that multiplicity. This is particularly visible in the poem Cosmography in Dura (see in particular text close-ups from page 13—image 1 below) or the three-columned poems such as [j] in Bounty (25) which includes in column three “ga gya guh gyuh /// to learn/ the English // of a midwest town,” or the poem Siege Document (see text close ups of pages 76 and 83 in image 2 and 3 below) from her book Commons. In these examples, Kim is still primarily writing in a language she has been obliged to use as a political refugee, American English, but she increasingly interrupts this language and partners it in her poems with the Korean she was forced to give up—a Korean she is learning (as in the first example below) or laden with errors, from the second examples, as she explains in her critical reflections on her work. She explains in her essays that she wished to echo the language that was her own—an 8-year old’s Korean, for her “an atrophied, arrested, third grade Korean writing is what was available” (Commons 110). Kim explains this kind of layering of her two languages, including the gaps between them, raising the questions: “What was missing? What was forgotten? What was never learned in the first place? What was and was not written ‘correctly’? Each of these instances is enunciative” (110). Kim goes on to say that this practice activates the English language, participates in its investigation of legibility. This means we “[c]ontemplate the generative power of the designation ‘illegible’ coming to speech. Enter language as it factors in, layers in, and crosses fields of meaning, elaborating and extending the possibilities for sense making // Consider how the polyglot, porous, transcultural presence alerts and alters what is around it” (110).

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In this manner, Kim’s readers enter the layering of languages, experience new meanings, or at the very least become “alert” to the multicultural within what might have been perceived as a unicultural America. For Perez, a similar agenda of engraving a polyglot, transcultural space onto the page begins with less of a political agenda and more of a personal one, as he states at the start of [Hacha]: “These poems are an attempt to begin re-territorializing the Chamorro language in relation to my own body, by way of the page” (12). This said, whereas Kim is writing in Korean, English and a Romanized version of Korean that she created in the middle image above, in the poem ginen tidelands [pågat, guåhan] on pages 80-81 of his book [guma’] Perez, speaking of Guam, is writing and speaking in his native languages, American English and Chamoru, at times without any translation for the Anglo reader. The poem becomes fragments of meaning, frequently associated with destruction (war, bullets) or confusion (as elicited by “caves” thus perhaps darkness and hiding and “this web” thus of meaning or a trap) but is primarily a Chamoru sound experience, a musical delight of repeated unfamiliar terms: o saina / hu ufrasen // i tano’ / i kottura // live fire / munitions in // i aire / i manglo’ // cross aim / target island // i napu / i hinengge // this web / of caves // i ababang / i latte // bullets fragment / and ricochet // pågat means / to speak // o saina / hu ufresen // i tasi / i lengguåhi // guaha means / to exist // o saina / hu ufresen (80-81)

In a similar manner, three pages from the poem from LISIENSAN GA’LAGO (images 3-5 below, [Hacha] 34-36) vacillate between languages, only at times providing the Anglo reader with translations for the Chamorro terms. Additionally, Perez uses the visual image of boxes on pages 34 and 36, introducing a non-linguistic poetic form onto his page. The entirely blank box on page 35 may be “read” as a concrete echo of the words lost and forgotten that are floating around the page nearby. Following the box on the previous page which seemed to function as a key, the empty box here suggests the key’s gone missing or doesn’t exist. The box stands in for the untranslatable and the lost in translation; it visually represents forgotten codes and dead languages. The shape that remains where language has been erased may be interpreted as a kind of rectangular tombstone for unrecoverable signs, signals, or words. As Perez writes elsewhere, at times there is “‘no lexicon’ / but ‘specters of’” ([Hacha] 92).

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Craigg Santos Perez and a Myung Mi Kim K Voicing thhe Integral Diviide

Both authorrs, in placing Anglophone readers r beforee their languaages, puts them in the position of feeling f like Kim, K Perez orr any numberr of other foreigners. T The reader is trying t to soun nd out words aand meaning in n front of what may ffeel like blankks. But if these words do not say anyth hing on a semantic levvel, do they have h meaning g? Are they ppartaking in reecovering lost histories, or merely in i pointing to the loss itsellf—as a few fragments f from Kim’s poem Anna O Addendum state? “Lost cconversations … Written successiive growth annd decay ... Destroyed D takeen over the paage” (The Bounty 41). Have these auuthors come to o bring that w which is destro oyed back to a state oof wholeness?? Or are they y merely com mplexifying th hus compounding thhe loss, estrannging readerss by demandin ing so much of them? This draws me towards the final issu ue—a concluuding reflectio on which asks, as Kim m does, once we leave a pllace, is it stilll there? Can these authors really lay claim to a literature which w gives vooice to a new multicultural Americca?

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Origins and Destinations As has been shown, for both authors, and for the speakers in their poems, there is a layering of images and elements, of autobiographical and inherited detail from their families and national and ancestral histories. But is this writing partaking in a process of recuperation, recovering what has been lost to bring it into the light once again? Certainly, the self as not one, instead multiple, quickly becomes evident, while Kim and Perez also desire to give voice to places and thus cultures that have been left behind. However, can diasporic literature re-name, claim, and locate the places left? As one of Kim’s earliest poems asks: “Once we leave a place is it there” (Under Flag 24) and “Do voices carry” (25)? In her most recent collection Penury, she states that “the place I’m from is no longer on any map” (7). Kim’s statement is preceded by a colon, a typographical mark often used in theater or prose to announce the opening of a monologue, to precede spoken words. This implies that what follows (the material quoted above) may be coming from a speaker, but as the colon is not preceded by the announcement of the speaker’s name, perhaps this voice is not only Kim’s. Her personal attempt to re-locate the site of division, to close the gap in the self by opening the gaps on her pages, refuses to partake in an exclusively binary Korean-USA perspective, instead raising that voicing of division, lost histories, etc. to the global level by giving herself, her personas and her readers the position of being the voice on and in her pages. In tandem to this gesture, Perez seeks an indication for a place that exists now, but goes unseen. As he writes: “On some maps, Guam doesn’t exist; I point to an empty space in the Pacific and say, ‘I’m from here.’ On some maps, Guam is a small, unnamed island; I say, ‘I’m from this unnamed place’” ([Hacha] 7). To which he adds, when explaining what it means for Guam to be an unincorporated territory of the USA, that in its original meaning, “territory” is from “terra” and “terrere”: “to frighten”… thus territorium would mean “a place from which people are warned off” (8). His goal is, according to Mark Novak, a “re-mapping (of) a postcolonial America” ([guma’] cover). As Perez writes: “Every poem is a navigational chant” where the chant—song—is also a vocal chart leading to Guam. Readers are steered towards a place once unknown, forgotten, shunned or feared. It is re-incorporation of the territory in its own right, as if Guam were given back to the Earth itself. And as Allison Adele Hedge Coke put it, “…we are fulsomely brought to that tiny dot and realize the centripetal force was here all along” ([guma’] cover).

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Both Kim and Perez are in these ways drawing attention to plights that are larger than that of any single individual. This can also be seen in how each writes of war. In Kim’s case, her early works speak of the inherited recollections of war, of being from a place of unresolved conflict and death. Thus she provides pages of specific casualty rates and names of weapons used, injecting within those pages lines such as: “Not to have seen it yet inheriting it” (Under Flag 17) As Michael Davidson put it, these works are testimonies to “losses incurred in a time of global war” and “in a world plastered with signs of excess and expenditures” (Penury cover). Yet the trauma, lack of acknowledgement or superficial political or governmental acknowledgement of that loss is traversed by language until, via what both authors call “song,” a trans-local and trans-temporal sense of nation begins to emerge, allowing the diasporic and local voices to converge within the specific histories of these books and, on a larger level, throughout History. These books open a space for the self and other, the known and unknown, as they open themselves paradoxically to silence and thus the unsayable. The gap, the space, the silence is the representation of the unnamable for these authors. For, as Perez, quoted above, mentioned, he comes from a land which is hard for many to name and point to on a map, and where most of the native inhabitants have been killed in wars or by colonizers. In a similar manner, the speaker in Kim’s poems talks of the way her displacement by war has instilled in her an inability to know how to name even the simplest things back in that place she is from: “What must we call each other if we meet there / Brother sister neighbor lover / Go unsaid what we are / Tens of thousands of names / Go unsaid the family name” (Under Flag 19). The power to know what or that one is is directly linked to the ability to name. To connect and find your place on Earth is in large part what these works are battling with as they point out the loss of a singular language or historical context which is sufficient to name all of the aspects of their “multicultural” selves. Yet it is the silence that does the naming, implies something is there, as Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famous aphorism implies: “Man has the urge to thrust against the limits of language, […] but the tendency, the thrust, points to something” (13). One read might be to say that these authors voice the possibility of connection by pointing to the origins of division. Readers may therefore interpret these works as “‘currents // [or] root echo’ notations” ([Hacha] 60), as Perez put it. Or, as John Beer said of Perez’s works: All the pieces in the book, like the book itself, are presented as selections ‘from’ some larger project, [which] a gesture that at once underlines the

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provisional nature of the enterprise and suggests that, like the island it depicts, the book is only the tip of an enormous submerged imaginative volcano. (Beer)

As dissimilar as these writers may be thematically and historically, both partake in voicing an Asian/Pacific language within the American one which has attempted to eradicate it for each; they both present an objective surface that reflects (deflects) in varied ways the “events” (political, personal and otherwise) which people their poems. This textual field is linked to a frequent absence or minimal use of pronouns, a frequent absence or unusual use of punctuation and capitalization, an absence of poetic devices such as metaphor, rhyme or meter (even at times alliteration and assonance), and to the use of the fragment (and occasionally columns) on the page. The lines and words in Perez and Kim’s books float between reference points and white spaces cut off from syntax or context, creating spirals of potential referentials and reflections implying the very multiplicity at the heart of language and history—personal and general, diasporic and native. Furthermore, they make physical, corporeal, the gap that is the unsayable—confronting us with it on pages which are their own kind of polyphonic musicality, dotted by silence. The white of their pages, the interruptions of their lines, are a kind of caesura within which lies a tangible space for the unsayable, an absence, as Charles Olson wrote: “…poetry is not the ‘thing’ but what happens ‘between’” (qtd. in Waldrop 54). The effect becomes a celebration for Kim, who claims at the back of her book Commons that she is creating a space where the reader must “[e]nter language as it factors in, layers, and crosses fields of meaning, elaborating and extending the possibilities for sense making” (110). The space of erasure is reclaimed as a COMMON ground—as Kim writes (in the passage here): ______________, a word that cannot be translated: it suggests, ‘what belongs to the people’ Modes, registers of

[collectivity… (Commons 109)

Here the fill-in-the blank is an unreadable, visual, workbook-like space which the author tells us should be filled in (as in by a child doing exercises) with an untranslatable word. However, Kim does not indicate from and to what language(s) this word should be making its journey. In this manner, Kim opens it to anything readers might wish to fit into that space. Kim delights in this untranslatable, naming it not as a space of division, of a lack of communicative possibility, of that which is forgotten or lost, but

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rather she announces that this blank line is a link, it is something we share in, that spans across languages and peoples—for regardless of one’s origins or history, there are collective spaces such as this one for things which cannot be translated into language. In each of us, certainly, there are many things we simply cannot say even in our own language, let alone in the language of someone else. And this space of expression without name is no longer the negative erasure this chapter began speaking of, but has now—at least for Kim—become the site for universal connection—a shared experience, i.e., what Kim calls “collectivity.” Things, events, even languages become intertwined or extend, as here, beyond language to the suggestion of both language and of silence, of felt expression before language itself has happened. English is being remade here, as Kim states: The poem may be said to reside in disrupted, dilated, circulatory spaces, and it is the means by which one notates this provisional location that evokes and demonstrates agency—the ear by which the prosody by which to calibrate the liberative potential of writing, storehouse of the human To probe the terms under which we denote, participate in, and speak of cultural and human practices— To mobilize the notion of our responsibility to one another in social space (Commons 111)

These works are read like jumping from stone to stone, as Kim puts it, the reader passes “from blank to blank / A threadless way” (Bounty) hearing, as Perez writes it at the start of [Saina], “what echoes across waters: / ...our histories remembered forgotten / in our bodies homes words in / every breath ‘in // relation to my own body by wave of the page’ and [we]1 / will continue...” (13). In this manner it is the combination of the languages, the visual images and indications and the white spaces in these works—both the literal white of the page, and the referential blanks, the semantic gaps, the white which functions as a sort of hinge allowing the linguistic layers and narratives to overlap in the mind and across the paper—which participate in a verbo-visual multicultural naming of the plural self. The white which one might have thought of as erasure that in the end takes on a force. It allows the eye/brain to hear the simultaneity of the discourse in Kim and Perez’s work. It makes a new map of the America— a new map of the world—one that is not theirs, but ours, that of a new “We the People,” where the invisible (answering Perez’s “O say can you

 1

[we] in the original

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see [us]” from [Hacha]) joins what the visible had heretofore divided. In this manner, the multicultural is in itself an opening in the gap, an emerging from our taking note of the absence. It is a mark on a map that had once gone unnoticed. As Perez writes in his poem from “Preterrain” in from UNICORPORATED TERRITORY: [saina] (36): a map dividing the land covers my mouth and ears at night i don’t know if i can say our language will survive here yet i’ve never known another place where history isn’t redressed let our history be seen through watermarks heard thru no one speech will further excavations reveal ‘voice’ in the final years of captivity [we] carry everything to the place where all mountains are visible i can’t say voice doesn’t measure what we've lost but the space that now confines us our skin points to another myth another terrain here where the visible rends

Works Cited Abidi, Siham Arfaoui. “Ex/tension Of/In a ‘Nation Peopled by the World’: Evaluating Kaleidoscopic Motifs in Arab/Asian American Novels” talk given at the American Multiculturalism in Context conference, Thursday, March 26, 2015, 4pm. Unpublished Conference Speech. Beer, John. “Unincorporated Territory [Hacha] Reviewed.” Make Literary Magazine, Published: 9 Mar. 2009. Web. Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung. Dictée. 1982. Berkeley: U of California P. —. Exilée, Temps Morts: selected works. Ed. and intro. Constance M. Lewallen, including an essay by Ed Park. Berkeley: U of California P, with Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2009. Kim, Myung Mi. Bount. Victoria, TX: Chax Press, 2000. —. Commons. Berkeley: U of California P, 2002. —. Dura. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1998.

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—. Penury. Richmond: Omnidawn Publishing, 2009. —. Under Flag. Berkeley: Kelsey Street Press, 1991. Merriam-Webster online Dictionary 22 Aug. 2016. Web. Waldrop, Rosemarie. “Alarms and Excursions.” The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy. Ed Charles Bernstein. New York: Roof Books, 1990. 45-72. Philip, M NourbeSe, and Setaey Adamu Boateng. Zong! Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2008. Perez, Craig Santos. from Unincorporated Territory [Hacha]. KƗne‘Ohe, HI: Tinfish Press, 2008. —. from Unincorporated Territory [saina]. Richmond, CA: Omnidawn Publishing, 2010. —. from Unincorporated Territory [guma’]. Richmond, CA: Omnidawn Publishing, 2014. Stein, Gertrude. Tender Buttons: Objects: Food: Rooms. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Classics, 1991. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. “Lecture on Ethics.” Philosophical Review 74 (1965): 3-12.

BY TENNESSEE REED

The Avalanche of Sils im Engadin I am the Avalanche I catch people by surprise The morning sky reflects on the snow giving it a blue tint fooling the tourists into thinking it’s a beautiful day but a half hour later it begins to snow causing me to still flow dangerously close to the roads and villages below From the distance you can see that mountains are marked with lines to warn people that I am here The power poles are braced for my arrival Black and yellow poles stick out of the snow so people know where the roads go when the snow gets deeper People walking Lake Sils hear loud explosions in the distance as I get bombed from helicopters to prevent greater danger and to flow more rapidly after a late March/early April snow storm at the 5,195 foot Swiss resort area The tourists begin to leave the Upper Engadin after spending Easter break riding in horse-drawn carriages during snow flurries up the hill towards the Hotel Waldhaus to have pizza with ham, taking the ski lifts up to 10,000 feet,

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driving down the valley to visit the medieval town of Soglio, and shop at Jimmy Choo’s in Saint Moritz A couple, fat and rich who could have been painted by George Grosz, enter the Waldhaus restaurant with a large black lab and a sheep dog The wife, her face pumpkin orange from a bad fake tan, wears a black wig, a mink coat, and a gold linked choker, so massive, she cannot lower her chin The skiers board buses in their gear of helmets, ski suits, boots and poles not knowing that their sport can cause me to flow I take them with me burying them alive until red helicopters come to rescue them I’m sure that I’ll still have my shot at them again Every year some people never make it out

By Tennessee Reed

Mulhouse, France She first heard of Mulhouse in 1992 when she flew into EuroAirport Basel Mulhouse Freiburg on a Swissair propeller plane to start a tour of Germany She didn’t know that many years later, in 2015, she would actually visit Mulhouse for an international conference at the Université de Haute-Alsace in the hills east of the town center No cars are allowed in the town center At twilight she walked cobblestoned streets from the Hotel Kyriad Mulhouse Centre past the towering steeple on Saint Stephen’s Protestant Church, a gray stone Gothic Revival renovation from the 19th century contrasting with a 19th century carousel’s brightly painted horses, lions and garlanded benches waiting for riders to appear surrounded by orange, yellow, pink and turquoise apartment buildings whose street level shop windows sported manikins modeling spring wear: floral blouses, white sports jackets and blue jeans even though it was only forty degrees outside and spring was not yet a week old She arrived at the pink and red 1553 Old Town Hall with the flag of France hanging in front Inside, terra cotta columns support the chevron patterned wood ceiling Its knots reminded her of homes in Santa Fe Upstairs in the corridor the windows with their diamond shaped panes made of glass and lead allowed her a clear view of the town center The trompe l’oeil painted ceilings reminded her of Julia Morgan’s detailing at the Berkeley City Club

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and the Wells Fargo Bank on College and Ashby In the late evening the sky looked dark gray instead of midnight black as she headed back to the hotel The lamps attached to upper floors of apartment buildings cast everything in bright yellow, gold and caramel except the steeples of Saint Stephen’s shadowed in the background and a special street lamp which captured the arched, stained glass windows of the church The shops were closed yet their lights remained on turning the cobblestones bright white Few people walked down the narrow street The completeness of this scene was something she could not find in the States

BY ISHMAEL REED

Eavesdropping on the Gods for Elisabeth and Professor Peter André Bloch Nietzsche lived so far above sea level that he eavesdropped on the gods in the bedroom of the white farm house surrounded by white mountains captured in Giovanni Giacometti’s “Snow Mountains” Which were more Olympian than the gods, he struggled with who were Apollo and Dionysus, the Ethiopian “who came from the south” the god of mass hysteria the god of the amygdala who drove Lycurgus mad who drove the daughters of Minyas mad who drove the women of Argos mad all because they didn’t want to party He drove Nietzsche mad. And by 1889 Nietzsche was signing his letters “Dionysus” but most of his time he was Apollonian Cool not hot

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He was a professor who trimmed his black mustache not blonde designed a syllabus wore Gesellschaftsanzug at faculty dinners and attended conferences where they talked about Hegel He might have wished to be roaming the world with a nasty crew Maybe like the scene in Selvin’s Altamont A bunch of winos high on rotgut Wilde Frauen in thigh-length boots dancing to Hard Rock! Everybody infused with meth, eating animals without cooking them and satyrs on Harley Davidson’s who had no need for performance enhancement But when awake Nietzsche had gastrointestinal issues He farted a lot had failing eyesight migraines, some would call him a weakling a mama’s boy like Dionysus wishing that he, Nietzsche was the Übermensch like swaggering Schwarzenegger after an injection of Primobolan, Deca Durabolin, and Dianabol

By Ishmael Reed

Schwarzenegger the grade B Zarathustra Kurt Wilhelm’s friend “I would invite him to my wedding,” Arnold said of Wilhelm Nietzsche wanted to hang out with the Mina women in Dahomey, play drums with the Halakki Gowda at Karnataka But no song and dance man, he No Teutonic Knight, either He preferred sharpening pencils to sharpening the tips of bayonets The philosopher who said “War is the health of the state” was your run in the mill chicken hawk When no student signed up For his philology class, he took to the pipe He loved the Greeks but could sound like a backwater Manichee In a long letter to his mom dated Oct. 1872, he wrote “There I dine in my hotel where I already find a few companions for the Splügen trip the next day, they include, unfortunately, a Jew.”

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Peter put us up in the cellar apartment of the Nietzsche-Haus in Sils Maria near Saint Moritz, the former farm town whose farmers’ snow sleds have been replaced by Rolls Royces At night I imagined Nietzsche upstairs thinking of Parsifal while going over a class roster But by the next morning his Dionysian dreams exhausted he was back to preparing a lecture placing papers in a briefcase wiping his glasses and lunching at Frau Dursch’s corned beef, crisp bread, sardines, eggs, tea, and hot water. At Peter’s house Elisabeth fed us Spaghetti Bolognese, Cheeses, panna cotta, fruits, and ice cream Nila, his Golden Lab barked at the places where family members once sat because the dog knows that after death we leave our scents behind He is on spirit patrol in Peter’s house where we talk about the Giacometti Diego, Alberto, Giovanni, Annetta, Ottilia all of them busy making furniture, jewelry and art when not posing for each other Pictures of their floor lamps still appear in magazines

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Unlike Nietzsche they were Swiss practical They could distinguish between myth, dreams and reality which is why Alberto was excommunicated from the Surrealists and argued with Picasso The waistline of his “Running Man” is envied by Jenny Craig Giovanni’s rep was kept in the darkness by the fame of Alberto and Diego, but when it came to painting suns, he brought the light He brought it! The sun above Peter’s house is the same as it was when Giovanni painted “Children In The Sun” or that dollop of sun in “Mountain Landscape, 1” so glaring that it could have been painted with butter The sun is so bright over Peter’s house that it takes a bite from our eyes.

Ishmael Reed, 2016

BY V. JEAN TAHDOOAHNIPPAH

The Freshman His shoes were too big, and his shirt had been worn before without washing. His eyes were tired and his books seemed heavy today. He walked in and sat close to the back, without looking at anyone directly. He sat in class behind a raven-haired texting freshman he knew belonged to a per-capita-why-bother-with-college girl who could pay someone to do her homework if she needed to. He wondered if it mattered that someday he might work for her and knew he would know more than she did, well, thought he would. Someday. He closed his eyes and tried to remember the faces of those who waited at home, well, any one of those faces whose expression would remind him that he had to finish. The people survived. He glanced around the room, seeing it for the first time from a wiser perspective, and wondered if anyone else paid as much for this class as he had paid. He picked up his pen when the professor walked in.

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Five Poems

Haskell So, you want me to be red. Today you expect me to wear buckskin and braids. You show me off to any of your friends, especially if I wear my grandma’s jewelry and my navy suit, especially if I speak my language and mention my Ph.D. You expect me to act like you. Not all Indian assimilate. Not all know enough of tradition to cast it off. Some of us just now see injustices, just now feel our heart race and the anger flush— not at the blending—at the forgetting. Some of us are not politicians. You announce your home as reservation and you wear your ribbon shirt and medallion— you would model us all if we would let you. Your traditions and mine are not forgotten. The past can not be changed and it is not our right to forgive. You ask me to be Indian, but, I dare you to be. September 28, 1984 Haskell Indian Junior College, Lawrence, Kansas celebrated 100 years of service to Indian people.

By V. Jean Tahdooahnippah

White Indians A Navajo woman from Indiana asked me why Comanches were so white. Cherokees and Comanches must be related, she said. And with her question, I knew she wasn’t Navajo.

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The Question I hurried home, frightened and alone. He had come up behind me and began talking loud. It took a while for me to understand what he was doing. I caught the last few words about prosecuting shoplifters. I remember looking around to see if anyone was watching, But no one had even seemed to notice. Still I was ashamed. It happened again. Again in a border town. Not the accusation, but the question. Then I began to notice it more and more. I guess it was my waist length hair, my dark complexion and my brown eyes. They didn’t seem to believe that Indians had money; that they could pay for things. But this I grew to expect from border town thieves. And after awhile, they all looked the same, in Anadarko, Sitka, Gallup, Lawrence, or Show Low. It was later, when the same look of distrust came from Indians, that I searched for the answer to another question. Why did Indians question the color of my sons’ heart. I was taught that it was your heart that remained red. I taught my sons that. But my sons, with Comanche hearts, learned that looking Indian was more important to Indians. What will they teach my grandchildren.

By V. Jean Tahdooahnippah

Together Separately Talk to me with your white words And I will answer with Indian silence; Show me your inventions of leisure and I will show you survival. Find the strength to change our world, And I will teach you about forever. Call me sister and I will hide my smile; Call me friend and you will find a sister. Love my children and we will grow a home.

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BEYOND LITERATURE: DANCE, ART, TRADITION AND COMMODIFICATION

SUZUSHI HANAYAGI AT MULHOUSE CARLA BLANK

An unusual pioneer, especially for Japanese women of her pre-World War II generation, the late great choreographer/dancer Suzushi Hanayagi created and performed dance and theater works based within Japanese performance traditions and from disciplines culled from various cultures and times. She embraced more than three Japanese classical dance forms. She was a master of the Hanayagi School, a traditional Kabuki Theater style founded by a lineage of Kabuki choreographers during Japan’s nineteenth century Edo Period. And she practiced in two schools of Jiuta-mai, with mai being more abstract, intimate salon dance forms which are accompanied to music with slow tempos called jiuta. The origin of Jiuta-mai can be traced to ancient Shinto practices of incorporating dance into prayers to the gods. And most unusually, she also became an important experimentalist in contemporary performance art forms, most famously working with Robert Wilson, where, between 1984 and 1999, she applied all these techniques to the opera, theater and ballet works he designed and directed. For over fifty years she actively continued to perform, choreograph and teach classic Japanese and contemporary dance forms in the United States, Europe and Japan. She was born Mitsuko Kiuchi, in Osaka, August 15, 1928, the youngest child of a successful rice merchant in the Kansai (Osaka-Kyoto) area. At the age of three, she began her dance training in the Hanayagi style by studying with her maternal aunt, Suzukinu Hanayagi. She earned the right to use a professional Hanayagi name at the age of twenty after mastering a repertoire of 100 dances. (Its founders’ perspective, as choreographers, is interesting to me in terms of her development, as other sources for the formation of the over 150 present-day schools of Kabuki dance were dancers or actor-dancers or a combination of actor-dancers and choreographers.) While majoring in Japanese literature at Osaka Women’s College, she began studying modern dance in Tokyo with Takaya Eguchi, a choreographer who had trained with Mary Wigman, a German modern dance pioneer. Around this time she also became interested in the more poetic style of Japanese classical dance called Jiuta-mai, becoming a student of Takehara Han, a legendary master dancer based in Tokyo, who developed

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her singular style of mai related to those started in the Kansai area during the Edo Period (1603-1868). In the last interview Suzushi Hanayagi gave, published in Japan in 2003 in Odori Wa Jinsei (Dance Is Life), she said that because Takehara Han “was from the geisha training school of Soemoncho in Osaka, her art was odori and not pure Jiuta-mai. She got her basics from odori because she studied with Nishikawa sensei, the generations of the Fujima family and Onoe sensei.” (In Buyo, the Classical Dance, Masakatsu Gunji writes that distinctions between the terms odori and mai are not so clear today. Odori means “leaping,” and dances classified as odori characteristically contain rhythmic movement of the feet and more leaping, jumping actions, freer than those called mai. They became refined in the process of transferring them to the stage, in connection with the beginning of Kabuki dances early in the 1700s. Jiuta-mai techniques, with their rotating or circling dance patterns, were more related to early court and religious dances and Noh theater, already a distinct form by the fourteenth century. Some forms of mai evolved into salon dances so contained in their subtleties and stillness they could exist within the limitation of a space the size of one tatami floor mat (in Kyoto that generally would be 0.955m by 1.91m), bringing the audience and dancer so close they seemed “to breathe together with some imagination.” Takehara Han remained Ms. Hanayagi’s mentor and friend until Ms. Han’s death at the age of ninety-five in 1995. And from the late 1960s, Ms. Hanayagi added studies with Yachiyo Inoue IV, headmaster of the Inoue school, a more austere Kyoto based formal salon dance style utilized by geishas that also has its origins in Noh. She continued her lessons in Inoue style until the end of the 1990s, when she ceased performing. Almost yearly, Ms. Hanayagi presented classical dance performances in Japan, frequently at Tokyo’s National Theatre. These were either solo concerts or with her older sister Suzusetsu Hanayagi, as were her classic dance tours in the United States and Europe (see figure 3). She presented her first modern choreography concert in Tokyo in 1957 with music by John Cage and contemporary Japanese and European composers. After seeing exhibitions of works by such artists as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, and hearing that artists like Robert Rauschenberg were dancing, she became interested in experiencing the new arts scene happening in New York City. At the beginning of the 1960s, with an introduction from Takehara Han, Suzushi Hanayagi arrived in the United States as a cultural exchange visitor under programs sponsored by the Martha Graham School and Japan Society. Beate Gordon, then director of performing arts at Japan Society, presented her in both traditional and contemporary dance concerts, work-

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shops and tours of the country’s universities and museums, including a national tour with koto player Kimio Eto under the sponsorship of the Asia Society’s Performing Arts Program. In 1962, she presented her U.S. contemporary dance recital debut at Hunter Playhouse consisting of solos set to music by Japanese and European contemporary composers: Kazuo Fukushima, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Toshiro Mayuzmi. Seeking out American based artists experimenting in dance and performance art, she collaborated with Yoko Ono and Ayo-O, artists creating Fluxus events, and became friends with New York based dancers Simone Forti and Trisha Brown (who said the eighth movement of her dance Primary Accumulation represented “a one-second distillation of my love for Suzushi Hanayagi”). She remained a New York resident for most of the decade, where she met and married visual artist Isamu Kawai. They returned to Osaka to be near her family for the birth of their son, Asenda Kiuchi, in 1968. By 1970 she had re-established Osaka as her main residence, to have her family’s help raising Asenda after their separation and divorce. Also during the 1960s, Ms. Hanayagi participated in the performance experiments happening at Anna Halprin’s summer workshops in the San Francisco Bay area, where, in 1964, we met. Upon our return to our New York City homes we began to collaborate, meeting in the basement of Judson Memorial Church, in Washington Square, which at the time served as a center of performance innovation known as the Judson Dance Theater Workshop (see figure 4). Over seventeen years we created fourteen works, performed in New York City, Japan and the San Francisco Bay Area in loft spaces, theaters, and museums. These included our 1966 protest work against the War in Vietnam, Wall St. Journal, the last work we performed together in New York City; Work, a meditation on alchemical philosophy and medieval dance mania forms partially funded by a 1973 choreography fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, which was performed in a three city tour of Japan; Ghost Dance (1973), further delving into the world history of dance; The Lost State of Franklin (1974-1976), a collaboration with Ishmael Reed, in a romanticized version of American history and theater forms around the time of its founding—especially Italian Commedia dell Arte; and Trickster Today (1977), a cross-cultural mix of trickster myths, among our works performed in both California and Japan. From 1984, following an introduction by Beate Gordon, Ms. Hanayagi served as choreographer in over fifteen seminal productions and projects by renowned stage director and designer Robert Wilson. Their collaborations continued throughout the rest of the 1980s and 1990s, involving

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more shared works than any of his other close collaborators to date. Mostly large-scale theater and opera productions, they were presented internationally, beginning with the Knee Plays, premiered at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1984 as part of what Wilson envisioned as a multisectioned fourteen hour work, the CIVIL warS: a tree is best measured when it is down. Originally subtitled the “American section,” Wilson intended the thirteen scenes of the Knee Plays to function as “joints,” his term for quick transitions between, and introductions to each of the fourteen larger scenes comprising the five acts of the CIVIL warS, to function similarly to entr’actes or Kyogen plays, which are short, funny plays performed between the longer, intensely serious content of two Noh dramas. Envisioned for an international audience, the five acts of its global structure were created in Rotterdam, Cologne, Rome and Minneapolis, plus workshop productions developed in Tokyo and Marseille. Wilson intended all sections to be joined together at an Olympic Arts Festival, to be held concurrently with the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. But because of lack of funds, that grand plan never came to be. Their other collaborations included Hamlet Machine, based on a Heiner Muller text (1986); the four hour Death, Destruction and Detroit II (1987); The Forest, in collaboration with composer David Byrne inspired by the Gilgamesh epic (1987); Pelleas et Melisande (1988); Le Martyre de Saint Sebastien with the Paris Opera Ballet (1988); Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly (1990); King Lear (1990); Gertrude Stein’s Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights (1992); and the 1989 film La Femme à la Cafétière inspired by Cezanne’s painting of the same title, in the permanent collection of the Musee d’Orsay, Paris. In the interview in Odori Wa Jinsei (Dance Is A Life), when asked why she could work with mixed traditions again and again with Robert Wilson, she answered: “Everything I learnt from my teachers became my flesh and blood [… and] naturally comes out from those to create works.” In addition, nearly every year from the early 1980s through 1999, she continued to present solo performances of her original work, often at Jean Jean Theatre in Tokyo, and often involving collaborations with other artists, including videographer Katsuhiro Yamaguchi, playwright Heiner Muller, and composers Nettie Simons, David Byrne, Takehisa Kosugi, and Hans Peter Kuhn. Among other artistic collaborations that occurred throughout her career were works directed by filmmaker Molly Davies, choreographer/filmmaker Elaine Summers, and director Julie Taymor, when they mounted a performance of Oedipus Rex with the Japan Philharmonic, conducted by Seiji Ozawa in 1988.

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In a 1986 interview with Suzushi Hanayagi by Japanese Dance magazine editor Roku Hasegawa, republished in Ishmael Reed’s Konch magazine in a translation by Suzushi with me, she said: [My work] is like a diary. My work is to observe myself and to receive outside stimulation or experiences. I compose my thoughts from these sources. When I used to live in New York I felt a conflict in using separate ways, because the people that I worked with were in different worlds. After returning to Japan I started to study classic dance form again. This time I tried a different way to work. I like it very much. So I feel very natural when I’m doing it. It resolved the conflict. I can use two worlds of dance without mixing. I don’t know why I came to admire the conflict. It may be because I become dull or generous. Anyway, I become two worlds with one world. I don’t criticize this in myself.

Film producer Hisami Kuroiwa pointed out multiple significances in this statement to me. In saying, “My [work] is like a diary,” Suzushi was in part referring to how she, in both her own and Wilson’s works, connected her knowledge of the postmodern/ Judson dance world with a primary tenet of Japanese dance, called furi, in which the dancer reconstructs a narrative or indicates an emotional state through a gesture language similar, although more stylized, than those used in daily life. (Hisami Kuroiwa wrote me that “Kabuki Hanayagi tradition is almost like deconstructing furi and mai. It reminded me of Judson Church’s post-modern dance.”) Throughout Suzushi’s quote is the underlying fact that she had begun to actively practice Zen Buddhism after her return to Japan, and was following its guidance to accept that everything will keep changing. (In the “With Water” section of With Son (1972, see figure 1), she reenacted a moment of deep insight while doing ablutions during a summer retreat with her Buddhist teacher, her characteristic humor manifesting in her use of her son’s wading pool, profusely decorated with his beloved Walt Disney cartoons, to contain the water she splashed over herself.) That Suzushi had made her peace with expressing herself as “two worlds with one world,” can also be perceived as a kind of multiculturalism. She was one of the pioneers of the Hip Hop aesthetic, Ishmael Reed observed, in her ability to navigate through many cultures. However, all Suzushi Hanayagi’s creative work had come to a halt by the year 2000, after she became ill with dementia and was residing in a special care facility in her family’s home city of Osaka. It was there she participated in what would be her final collaboration with Wilson and me, her artist friends who were to gather together to create KOOL-Dancing In My Mind, a poetic monument fueled by our wish to help guarantee her legacy as a great dancer and choreographer. This live work, in time, would

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become the basis of Richard Rutkowski’s documentary films, one titled KOOL-Dancing In My Mind and the other, The Space In Back Of You. For me these works took off in 2008, when Robert Wilson called me out of the blue, and after delicately establishing that we had both independently solved the mystery as to why Suzushi had disappeared—asked me to collaborate with him as choreographer, dramaturge and archivist on a new work to honor our mutual dear friend and long-time artistic collaborator. And he invited Richard Rutkowski to create the visual component of this work that would evolve into KOOL-Dancing in my Mind. Richard also had real connections with Suzushi. They had met in 1985 while he was working as Wilson’s assistant, during the time she was in residence at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, choreographing Wilson’s first production of Alcestis. The live performance of KOOL-Dancing in my Mind was set to premiere in the Works & Process series at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, April 17-18, 2009, in conjunction with their current exhibit, The Third Mind: American Arts Contemplate Asia. As dramaturge, choreographer and archivist for KOOL, the preparatory research required me to revisit over forty years of our letter exchanges and the films, photographs, programs, rehearsal notations, etc. documenting our fourteen collaborations, besides other memorabilia Suzushi Hanayagi had entrusted to my possession. In addition, it gave me access to study the same kinds of documentation of Robert Wilson’s fifteen collaborations with Ms. Hanayagi, maintained at Watermill, the laboratory for performance founded by Wilson in Water Mill, New York. I also researched the Japanese classical dance theater forms she practiced. What became clear was that Suzushi Hanayagi’s achievements, as an innovative, even radical, Japanese dancer and choreographer had uniquely bridged East and West in multicultural work that expanded what classical or modern dance is and could be. Nonetheless, I had long recognized her name and legacy were in danger of disappearing from the history of performing arts, especially after illness caused her retirement from actively performing and choreographing. In my other hat, as a writer of histories, I have learned that this fate is not uncommon, because the established historical artistic record routinely perpetuates the fame of a few individuals and will forever ignore or omit many who have made truly major contributions, unless they are championed by someone with the clout of a highly respected critic or scholar, or in this case an internationally lauded artist, as is Robert Wilson. In the United States, this practice is especially true if the person ignored is not American-born, male, and white. I had already experienced this lack of interest because my efforts to elevate Suzushi Hanayagi’s legacy through a

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proposed book about her life and work had failed to interest any American publisher, even among those who had a sterling record of releasing books about practitioners of experimental dance. I found out her obscurity was consistently maintained in publications about Judson Dance Theater Workshop, now considered a major influence in the evolution of “postmodern dance,” as it has become a hothouse or source of ideas routinely plumbed by contemporary choreographers of today. Even though this early 1960s “institution” aspired to be democratic and non-hierarchal, and was where Suzushi Hanayagi and I were offered space to create and perform some of our first collaborations, her name is not listed among those scholars associate with its history, although I have found some Americans listed who had a more tangential connection to Judson’s heyday than she (see figure 4). Her legacy was obscure to the general public in Japan also. Crossing between schools of traditional classical dance, as Suzushi Hanayagi did, was highly unusual, even frowned upon in Japan, where unquestioned loyalty to one’s school has long been the rule. Complicating matters was what could be perceived as the arcane subjects of much of her own contemporary experimental work. When an interviewer asked the cinematographer Richard Rutkowski why he made this film about a dancer who is not known to the general public he replied, “That seemed a good reason to make the film.” The live performance of KOOL-Dancing in My Mind was realized by six wonderful dancers, some long-time practitioners and some still early in their careers. They included Jonah Bokaer, a young but already highly honored international choreographer, media artist, and performer who served as dance captain and choreographer of two solos he performed; CC Chang, a Taiwanese-born dancer/choreographer who has appeared with many experimental dance companies based in New York; Sally Gross, the late, great dancer/ choreographer and longtime friend of both Hanayagi and myself, since Judson days; Illenk Gentille, a dancer from Sulawesi, Indonesia, who performed his own solo section, “Pakarena,” an ancient traditional dance from Bugis, an area of South Sulawesi, and who incorporated another traditional dance, “Badoyo/Bedoyo,” associated with the royal palace of Java or Jogjkarta, into a KOOL section performed simultaneously with one of Jonah’s solos as inspired by the “Two Face Dance” score from Work, a duet originally performed in 1973 by Hanayagi and me; Meg Harper, who has had a distinguished career performing in the companies of Merce Cunningham, Lucinda Childs and Wilson; and Yuki Kawahisa, a Japanese-born multidisciplinary performance artist who par-

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ticipated in the Watermill workshop meetings of Wilson, Rutkowski, and me, in August, 2008. At this Watermill workshop, many ideas were put on the table as possible elements of the performance. Wilson created a three part structure to have a running time of one hour, with each part consisting of two distinct A/B segments. This continued to organize how the elements finally chosen would be slotted into the work, although some ideas eventually proved too expensive or difficult to achieve within the particulars of the Guggenheim’s theater space. For funding and planning purposes, Wilson routinely creates a Project Book. His staff asked me to quickly provide various kinds of information, which I itemized in lists. For the choreography list, I set about selecting excerpts from dances Suzushi had choreographed with me (between 19641980) and Wilson (between 1984-1999), which I thought were possible to reconstruct as they required minimum hand props and no set to execute. Other lists consisted of: historical research gleaned from archival publicity materials, programs, published interviews and reviews; people who could be interviewed about their relationship with Suzushi; possible current sources of video projections—locations important to Suzushi’s family and professional life, and sources for images from still photographs, films or video documentation of works. I also transcribed excerpts from her letters to me, for Wilson to read. As a way to include Suzushi Hanayagi herself in this work, our next meeting was in October, 2008, when Wilson, Rutkowski, Hisami Kuroiwa (who was to become a producer of both films), a small film crew and I visited her in the Osaka special care facility. There, Rutkowski shot HD portraits of Suzushi’s head, hands and feet, “masked” with white make-up, as directed by Wilson. In describing this later, Rutkowski said he felt the choice of focus “maintained a stylistic consistency, as her hands, face and feet had been the only parts of her body revealed when she was dressed to perform classical Japanese theater dances.” (Whitening the face and hands, and wearing white tabi socks are familiar conventions of classical Japanese dance. In his work, Wilson frequently has all performers wear white makeup to cover any exposed skin, as he did in KOOL.) Back in the U.S., over the next few months we all communicated by emails, creating this memoir/retrospective by refining selections for the four basic elements. The final movement selection included Wilson/Hanayagi dance segments to be reconstructed from documentation videos of the Knee Plays, the first collaboration of Suzushi with Bob Wilson—mainly stage crosses that had served as transitions between the Knee Play sections, and the entire “Knee Play I” from The Forest (inspired by plates

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published in 1700 in Gregorio Lambranzi’s New and Curious School of Theatrical Dancing, a text we had used in Shadow Dance, Crowd and The Lost State of Franklin), and excerpts to be reinterpreted from scores of Blank/Hanayagi collaborations: the large white ball duet from “Part I” and the improvisation score, consisting of an arrangement of nine months of 1966 news photograph clippings during a build-up in the Vietnam War effort, from “Part III” of Wall St. Journal; “The Philosopher’s Stone” a trio from With Son; and a duet performed in crouched position, “Phony Original Men,” from The Lost State of Franklin. And because she loved props we incorporated one of Suzushi’s favorites: wooden sticks of about 6 to 8 feet in length. Sticks had appeared in our collaborations, her collaborations with Wilson and Molly Davies, and her solo works. Usually they were gathered together and tossed or dropped, thereby creating a considerable racket while falling to the floor in random patterns. So sticks became a KOOL motif. Wilson had three or four painted white sticks permanently arranged in a stack so far downstage they slightly protruded into the audience’s space from the time they entered the theater. At the end of the six sections, each of the six dancers performed unique actions with three other painted white sticks. These particular actions came from a solo, “Cat Woman w/Sticks” (see figure 2), inspired by manifestations of a female Egyptian cat-headed god—Hathor/Sekhmet—attributed to be a god of dance, which I choreographed for my 1972 version of Work. (After we left New York, Suzushi and I often created the concepts for our works through letters, drawings, shared research sources and occasional meetings. We would then realize the scores or scripts in separate performances, hers in Japan and mine in the United States, subsequently sharing what occurred via photos and video documentation.) In KOOL, for me the sticks functioned like punctuation. For arts reviewer Susan Yung who wrote about KOOL in her PBS blog, the “Wooden slats served as metaphors for life, for sanity. A short stack sat downstage with some slats askance. The performers manipulated three other slats, letting them drop, scattering them violently, restacking them, or trying to gather them up neatly, as one might a life’s detritus.” Otherwise, the sound was recorded music, mostly David Byrne’s original compositions for the Knee Plays. Jonah and Illenk’s duet was performed to the Prelude from Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in B Minor” for organ; Jonah’s solo was performed to an excerpt from Lou Reed’s “Metal Machine,” and Illenk’s solo music came from I La Galigo, a Wilson directed work inspired by a South Sulawesi creation myth. Because she could no longer speak, scripted voiceovers were read by Richard Rutkow-

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ski, of quotes gleaned from Suzushi’s published interviews and her letters to me. The rear of the stage was covered floor to ceiling by a white cyc, a curtain which Wilson saturated with his signature treatments of light, or which became the screen where projections of the HD portraits and archival and recently filmed images floated in and out. In one interview, Richard described how, “we sometimes put her onscreen twice: one side of the screen in a modern piece, and on the other, a more traditional piece. So that comparison can be viewed very directly.” In January, 2009 we held our first studio meeting with the dancers, organized under the watchful eye of the late Sue Jane Stoker, Wilson’s assistant director/stage manager extraordinaire, who kept track of our choreographic decisions. When we met again in the two weeks preceding the Guggenheim premiere, the dances were further refined after showing them to Wilson, who arrived following the premiere of another work he had been directing in Berlin. In the final week when we had access to the Guggenheim’s Peter B. Lewis Theater, rehearsals of the dances continued as Wilson set his lighting design in coordination with the projections and sound elements, the all-white uniform costumes were sewn and hand props assembled. Technical aspects continued to be tweaked almost to curtain time. The work was further developed, especially involving a choreographic addition to the ending, in August, 2009, for its next performance at Guild Hall in East Hampton, New York, when all the dancers appeared onstage, each entrance “steered” by a stick manipulated like the oar of a boat, and after facing forward while holding the sticks horizontal to the stage floor, they were dropped one by one until the last stick clattered into silence. Subsequently, KOOL was given its international premiere at Berlin’s Academy of the Arts in September 2010, and its last live performance to date occurred when Wilson chose KOOL to represent his work at his Jerome Robbins Award ceremony at New York's Baryshnikov Art Center, December 9, 2010. Following the Guggenheim premiere, Rutkowski created the 26 minute film using the same title, and incorporating the projections and his documentation of the Guggenheim rehearsals and premiere. It was first shown at the Guild Hall performance. To me, it felt mysterious, like a poem. Later he expanded this footage into the sixty-eight minute film seen in Mulhouse, The Space in Back of You. Hisami Kuroiwa explained in a letter to me, that the motivation for her and Richard, to undertake making the longer version was: “Because KOOL-Dancing in my Mind is more about Robert Wilson’s visiting Suzushi in her sad state, and reconstruction of her

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pieces, but both of us felt who Suzushi Hanayagi was, was not explained enough. That is why I went to raise money to make a longer piece.” For me, this longer version works more like a story through its interviews, which provide a narrative of Suzushi Hanayagi’s biography and clarify many of her artistic connections with Robert Wilson and myself, in addition to other American, European and Japanese artists, both contemporary and traditional, with whom she worked and whose life she touched. One artistic connection in both films had particular resonance for the Mulhouse conference: via a documentary film clip, Suzushi performs her solo choreographed to Cab Calloway’s classic, “Minnie the Moocher,” as sung a capella by Ishmael Reed on Conjure I: Music to the Texts of Ishmael Reed (American Clavé 1984), an album Ms. Hanayagi used in its entirety for “Americium / E.M.,” one of her last Tokyo concerts, in 1997. In another example, Robert Wilson speaks words to the effect that although audiences thought they saw an influence from the aesthetics of Japanese performing arts in his work, he knew nothing about traditional Japanese dance and theater before he met Suzushi Hanayagi. Through various moments in the film’s documentation of their collaborations, and particularly as he demonstrates how he wants the KOOL dancers to perform an abstract hand gesture sequence, viewers can see how Wilson, who publically referred to Suzushi Hanayagi as “my teacher,” came to translate essentially Japanese dance styles such as furi, the hand gesture language, and the posture and dynamics of mai and odori into his own famously time-expanding non-realistic style. Jeff Janisheski quotes Robert Wilson in a 1986 interview: Maybe the most difficult thing to do is to stand on a stage. How do you stand on a stage? How do you walk on a stage? The Japanese believe that the gods are beneath the floor when you make contact with the floor. But you learn to stand by standing. You learn to walk by walking. There’s no such thing as no movement; there’s always movement.

In KOOL’s Guggenheim performance, Suzushi Hanayagi’s use of suriashi, one of the key practices from Noh theater, is immediately apparent in a sequence reconstructed from her choreography for Wilson’s the Knee Plays, as all six dancers first enter massed in group formation and progress across the stage. The documentation of this opening sequence is included in both films. Suriashi requires the dancer to walk with smoothly sliding footsteps while maintaining a low center of gravity and a secure, upright position in the torso and head. Translated to English, Suriashi means you walk through the earth. It is a basic skill all students of Japanese dance must master, and is also used in martial arts including Sumo, Aikido, Ken-

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do, and even for walking at a tea ceremony. In footage recorded by Hisami Kuroiwa in the Kyoto studio of Inoue Yachiyo, viewers can observe her teaching a young girl how to walk by mastering suriashi. Suriashi is a clear example of how the origins of Japanese culture, which evolved from a predominately farming culture and Shintoism with its many gods from Nature, profoundly influenced Japanese dance forms. Some scholars have theorized that Japanese dance developed in essentially opposite dynamics to those of Western dance traditions because in Western cultures, hunting predominated. And as in scholar S. Ito’s theory, in Japan “the gods came down to earth, whereas in the West the gods are imagined to be in heaven, above the sky.” In his book Buyo, Masakatsu Gunji explains: The English word ‘dance’ derives from the Old High German word daƼson. Its original meaning was ‘to stretch the body.’ [… and] in Western dance […] there are many leaps and bounds. […]. In order to apply this definition to Japanese dance, one must invert it. Japanese dance has a great affinity for the earth, above which it hovers. Its purpose is to confirm the existence of the earth itself. Thus basically Western dance aspires toward the heavens while Eastern dance shows great love for the earth. It is from this basic difference that different kinds of movement were born, Western dance movement being radiant or extensive and that of Eastern dance being intensive [...] and closely related to everyday life. […]. Nowhere is the intimacy between dance and life itself more clearly expressed in Japan than in the rituals of rice cultivation. […]. The planting festival, taue, is one of the sources of all Japanese performing arts.

(I believe Ito and Gunji were thinking about ballet when they described “Western dance,” rather than the folk dance forms, which can be quite grounded, or modern dance, as one early and vociferous critical charge against the modern dance pioneers, both American and German, was that they were too floor bound. Even to this day, the ritual practices of many modern dance techniques begin on the floor, meaning the dancers are actually sitting or lying on the floor while doing their exercises. In fact, entire dances have been choreographed on the floor, such as Mary Wigman’s solo Hexentanz (Witch Dance, 1926), or most of a dance as in Alvin Ailey’s solo, “I Wanna be Ready,” from Revelations (1960), or seated as in Martha Graham’s solo, Lamentation (1930). So could it be, this was one of the reasons Suzushi was attracted to modern dance?) The Space in Back of You demonstrates how Suzushi Hanayagi’s complex blending of Japanese classical traditions with modern and postmodern dance continues to influence Robert Wilson’s work (and although not explicitly stated, how in turn, their work has influenced the look of

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many international companies’ opera productions). A Robert Wilson quote from Portrait, Still Life, Landscape, a 1993 exhibition catalogue of his work, reveals just how far Wilson had come from knowing nothing about Japanese dance traditions: I hate naturalism. I think to be natural on stage is to lie. That is why I like formalism. In theatre I am much more related to the eastern tradition than to the western one. To Noh or Kabuki or Bunraku more than Tennessee Williams or whatever we have done in the last two or three hundred years in western theatre.

As the Guggenheim’s KOOL program notes explained, Wilson discovered, from working with Hanayagi, that abstract movement can generate meaning and that movement can be a counterpoint to language. Hanayagi helped him open up the vocabulary of the gesture and opened Wilson’s eyes to the importance of feet and the connection of the body to the ground, impacting the ways Wilson’s actors stand and move through space, using their entire bodies to convey meaning. Without her influence, he would not have been able to master the literary texts and operatic pieces that have become such a focus of the latter part of his career.

Richard Rutkowski said “Suzushi’s legacy is in the work she did and [is] powerfully visible in any image of her incredible presence on stage. She truly understood the power of stillness and the universal language of movement.” In another interview he further explained, “What I most enjoyed [...] was seeing the interchange between the modern and the ancient, how she could make the old dance look new and embue [sic] new work with the great weight and timelessness of her traditional background.” Fortunately, her artistry can continue to be communicated through showings of Rutkowski’s films. Kool, Dancing in My Mind appeared on ARTE TV in France and Germany and was shown at Sundance and the IFC Center, a New York City cinema featuring independent films. The Space In Back of You, the documentary film directed by Richard Rutkowski between 20102011, premiered at Lincoln Center’s Dance on Camera festival in New York in 2012, was shown at CinemaAsia on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in the US and at international film and dance festivals in San Francisco, Berlin, Tokyo, Thessaloniki and Toronto. Another opportunity to show The Space In Back of You took place the evening of March 26th, 2015, when participants in the Université HauteAlsace’s international conference, “American Multiculturalism in Context / Le Multiculturalisme Américain en Contexte,” gathered with their guests at the Hôtel de Ville, the Old Town Hall of Mulhouse, in the Alsace region of France, close to the Swiss and German border. Originally constructed in

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1553 and known in Alsatian as the Rothüs (Rathaus in German), the Old Town Hall is famous for its pink and red façade, decorated with trompe l’œil allegorical paintings representing the vices and virtues. The Hall offered a fitting setting for a meeting between ancient (exterior) and modern (interior) cultural aesthetics when, after an opening reception, the conference participants and their guests watched The Space In Back Of You. Sämi Ludwig, the conference’s primary organizer, arranged for this viewing at the beginning of the conference because he saw it as an opportunity to bring attention to the inherent “issue of variety in multiculturalism”: Multiculturalism means variety, also of the means of expression! We don’t just want to have dry and abstract academic ruminations (I am not a deconstructive semiotician!). Life is much more complicated than our representations of it, thus showing dance to our literary critics, political sociologists, etc. was important to me. Dance is a different medium, and so is film. I was very happy to get these two additional dimensions into my conference! [...]. I also think that multiculturalism does not just move forward in the sense of modernizing experience or progressing knowledge. There are too many branches on that tree to give its growth a clear direction. The development is simply a matter of richness. [...]. Finally, a public viewing also opened up our gathering to a wider audience. In France this is called vulgarisation—meaning that the complex academic shoptalk should be translated to the wider public. The idea is to bring the ivory tower of academia closer to the general public. It didn’t work out perfectly in our case, but at least we were gathering in the Hôtel de Ville. The viewing did good work for the group feelings at the conference! It made each one of us think beyond our own narrow patch of expertise!

I led the Q & A that followed the showing, and shared some background about the film and my relationship to it. How Suzushi Hanayagi and I were life-long friends from the time of our meeting at Anna Halprin’s summer dance workshop session in the Kentfield woods of Marin County, California, during the summer of 1964. For me, the experience underlined how, when you are so close to someone, it can be difficult to fully communicate their significance to others, the impact of their work on their times and even the world. I did not know how the Mulhouse audience would respond to the film. So I was especially touched by the warmth of people’s feelings, as expressed to me after the showing. One person said she had never looked at dance before; another said this film surprised her with an exciting new experience. Others offered sympathy for our loss of such a great artist’s presence. As explained by the youngest conference participant, Julia Ludwig, a high school student who had recently published her first novel:

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I can remember feeling touched by Hanayagi’s words, something only a true artist would do; very awe-inspiring for me personally because I was somehow able to relate, and it made me feel sad that she could not practice her art with her entire body anymore. It was all the more inspiring to see that she was able to create a similar compelling ambience with but the movements of her fingers and toes. I believe I got a better understanding of how important space is and what it means to be moving through space and within your own space. The film generally left me with a warm feeling of tranquility and yet very much inspired me to produce my own art.

Poet and journalist Yuri Kageyama sensitively expressed the complex emotions I still experience watching and presenting this film, in her AP article celebrating the premiere of KOOL at the Guggenheim Museum: “One of the most moving aspects of ‘KOOL’ is to catch a glimpse into the vision and emotions that bond artists, how they overcome cultural differences, the passage of time and the hardships of sickness. The piece is also about how artists can see beyond what is there, to get others to see beyond what is there. It is about how life, artistic productivity and our time with our loved ones must end—and about how they never really end.”

Partial Annotated Bibliography Articles and Books Anderson, Jack. “Life Through A Glass, Darkly,” a review of “Arrivals and Departures,” a collaboration with filmmaker and director Molly Davies. The New York Times, May 10, 1988. Banes, Sally. Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post Modern Dance. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980, rpt. with a new introduction by Wesleyan UP, 1987, 2011. See page 83 for Trisha Brown’s explanation for choosing the eighth movement in her 1972 dance “Primary Accumulation.” Bernheimer, Martin. “Robert Wilson Stages an Abstract Vision of ‘Alceste’ in Chicago. The Los Angeles Times, September 17, 1990. Blank, Carla. “Suzushi Hanayagi (1928-2010),” Dance Magazine, August 08, 2012. Dunning, Jennifer. “Experiment With Mirrors and a Dancing Camera,” a review of “Bitwin: Dance in Media,” a collaboration with videographer Katsuhiro Yamaguchi. The New York Times, June 18, 1988. —. “Exploring the Art of the Solo in 2 Forms From Japan.” The New York Times, November 23, 1989. —. “2 Worlds of Dance of Suzushi Hanayagi.” The New York Times, November (day unknown), 1978.

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Fairbrother, Trevor. Robert Wilson’s Vision. Boston and New York: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, with Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 1991. Gunji, Masakatsu. Buyo: The Classical Dance. Translation by Don Kenny. New York & Tokyo: A Weatherhill book by Weatherhill/Tankosha, 1970. Hasegawa, Roku. “Suzushi Hanayagi: An Interview.” Dance Work #35, Summer 1986 as translated by Suzushi Hanayagi and Carla Blank for Konch (1.1). Janisheski, Jeff. “Empire of Stillness: The Six Essential aspects of Japanese Noh.” The Conversation, June 18, 2014. Jowitt, Deborah. “Robert Wilson Pays Homage to Suzushi Hanayagi at the Guggenheim.” A review of the Guggenheim Museum premiere performance of “KOOL-Dancing in My Mind.” The Village Voice, April 22, 2009. Kageyama, Yuri. “Wilson pays ‘last’ homage to ill Japanese Dancer,” a review of the Guggenheim Museum premiere performance of KOOLDancing in My Mind,” The Japan Times: Friday, July 24, 2009. La Rocco, Claudia. “Choreographers Reveal A ‘Last Collaboration’.” The New York Times, April 21, 2009. This reviewer somehow did not understand that the majority of the choreography included in this work was either remounted, based on archives of works by Ms. Hanayagi created in collaboration with either Blank or Wilson, or reinterpretations by the cast of scores provided by Blank. Levine, Marianna. “Robert Wilson’s Dance for a Friend.” The Sag Harbor Express, posted August 7, 2009. Mee, Erin, interviewer. “Laurie Anderson and Suzushi Hanayagi: Modernists with Classical Roots.” The A.R.T. News VI.3 (March 1986). Okamoto, Taiyo and Joseph Reid. “To Embrace the Space in Back of You.” COOL, a Bilingual Art Magazine. January 29, 2012. This interview with Richard Rutkowski originally appeared on the web site for “The Space in Back of You,” which is no longer available online. Reed, Ishmael. “Tilting Toward A Masterpiece, Take 23.” Blog posted on sfgate May 8, 2009. Richards, David. “Singular Rhythms of ‘the Knee Plays’,” review of the first collaboration by Hanayagi with Wilson in The Washington Post, November 20, 1986. Rockwell, John. “Robert Wilson Updates A Babylonian Epic,” a review of “The Forest,” a Hanayagi collaboration with Wilson. The New York Times, December 4, 1988.

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—. “Pageant: Portion of Robert Wilson’s ‘Civil Wars’.” The New York Times, April 27, 1984. Stein, Bonnie Sue, interviewer, Dance Magazine, May 1988, page 38-39. Tuohy, William. “Robert Wilson: The Theater of Timelessness,” a review of the opera “Alceste.” Los Angeles Times, December 21, 1986. Another Wilson/Hanayagi collaboration. Tsurumi, Kazuko, with Senrei Nishikawa and Suzushi Hanayagi. Odori Wa Jinsei (Dance Is Life). Tokyo: Fujiwara-Shoten, 2003. (English translations in this article by Yuri Kageyama and Hisami Kuroiwa.). Weiler, Christel. “Japanese Traces in Robert Wilson’s Productions.” The Intercultural Performance Reader, ed. Patrice Pavis. London: Routledge, 1996. Pages 105-113. Weinreich, Regina. “Turning Japanese: Tennessee Williams and Robert Wilson.” Huffington Post, August 11, 2009. Wilson, Robert. Portrait, Still Life, Landscape. Rotterdam, Netherlands: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 1993. Out of print. Yang, Chi-Hui. “The Space in Back of You: A Conversation with Director Richard Rutkowski.” Posted August 25, 2013 in Cinema Asian America Xfinity on Demand. Yung, Susan. “Robert Wilson: Mastering Time.” Blog posted on thirteen.org 04/21/09. Zieda, Margarita. “Dancing in My Mind.” Studija, Visual Art magazine. June 2010.

Film The Art of Make-Up for the Japanese classical dance; [and] Classical Dance (1975). Directed by Don MacLennan. 2 hour VHS documentary produced by Beate Gordon and Don MacLennan. Suzushi Hanayagi and her sister, Suzusetsu Hanayagi on Jiuta-mai technique, repertoire, make-up and dressing, with commentary by Beate Gordon. Available in the Performing Arts Research Collection-Dance of New York Public Library at Lincoln Center. It’s Clean, It Just Looks Dirty. (1986) Film by John Giorno that includes excerpts from documentation of Suzushi Hanayagi choreographing and performing, in 1984, in rehearsals and performance of the Knee Plays at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN. La Femme à la Cafétière. (1989) 6 minutes. Directed by Robert Wilson with Ms. Hanayagi as featured performer. Inspired by a Paul Cezanne painting of the same name, currently in the collection of the MuĞee d’Orsay.

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KOOL-Dancing in My Mind. (2009) 30 minutes. Short Documentary. Directed by Richard Rutkowski and Robert Wilson. Produced by Jorn Weisbrodt, Richard Rutkowski and Hisami Kuroiwa. Co-produced by: ARTE/France and INA. Editing by Keiko Deguchi and Brendan Russell. Researcher, archivist: Carla Blank. The Space In Back of You. (2011) 68 minutes. Documentary. Directed and with principal cinematography by Richard Rutkowski. Produced by Hisami Kuroiwa and Richard Rutkowski. Principal film editor, Keiku Deguchi. Researcher, Archivist: Carla Blank. Includes interviews with David Byrne, musician; Molly Davies, filmmaker; Anna Halprin, choreographer; Simone Forti, choreographer; Hans Peter Kuhn, composer; Yoshio Yabara, designer; Yachiyo Inoue V, the granddaughter of Ms. Hanayagi’s master teacher, Yachiyo Inoue IV, and Carla Blank, choreographer and dramaturge.

CD/DVD Byrne, David. The Knee Plays. Nonesuch303228-2. Contains Music for the Knee Plays by Robert Wilson and David Byrne from Robert Wilson’s the CIVIL warS: and sequential photographs by JoAnn Verburg, taken at the Walker Art Center premiere performance in Minneapolis in 1984.

Archives Suzushi Hanayagi’s archives that are currently held by the Kiuchi family in Osaka, Japan, and by Carla Blank in Oakland, California, consist of letters, photographs, scores and rehearsal notations, programs, films and video documentation. New York City’s Performing Arts Library at Lincoln Center also holds videos and archival materials. Robert Wilson’s documentation of his collaborations with Suzushi Hanayagi are housed by his company, RW Work LTD., 115 W 29 St, 10 fl., New York, NY 10001. Research requests can also be sent to www.robertwilson.com.

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Figure 1: Suzushi Hanayagi performing “With Son,” Deutsche Gesellschaft für Natur- und Völkerkunde Ostasiens (OAG), Tokyo, 1972

Figure 2: Carla Blank performing “Cat Woman w/Sticks” in “Work,” Mills College Concert Hall, Oakland, California, 1972

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Figure 3: Suzushi Hanayagi (left) and Suzusetsu Hanayagi (right) in a publicity photo circa 1980s

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Figure 4: Suzushi Hanayagi (left) and Carla Blank (right) in “Wall St. Journal,” Judson Memorial Church, 1966

MULTICULTURALISM IN ART: THE AFRICAN AMERICAN TRADITION CONTINUES PAUL VON BLUM

It is common, even fashionable, in some segments of white society in America to proclaim that multiculturalism is now unnecessary because the United States has become a nonracial society. Critics of multiculturalism cite the election of Barack Obama as President, the larger representation of African Americans and other racial and ethnic minorities in commerce, government, and even in the arts, and the decrease in blatant discrimination during the past several decades. They argue that separate courses, journals, and museums dedicated to specific racial and ethnic groups in the arts are no longer necessary because creative women and men can now fully access mainstream cultural and educational institutions. This view is mere wishful thinking––or worse. Racism, against all people of color and especially those of African origin, remains a huge problem; even now, overt racism, especially in dramatic examples of police brutality, has scarcely disappeared from public life in America. But most contemporary racism is largely structural and institutional. African American visual artists are only marginally represented in major institutions and their works still need expanded expression in African American and multicultural venues. Their paintings, sculptures, murals, prints, and other creative forms address slavery, segregation, physical brutality, institutional racism, and numerous other themes still neglected in mainstream sources. For well over one hundred years, African American artists have been in the forefront of their people’s struggles for justice, dignity, and racial equality. Some of the most iconic figures in this tradition, including such luminaries as Jacob Lawrence, Charles White, Romare Bearden, Lois Mailou Jones, Hale Woodruff, Elizabeth Catlett, John Biggers, Gordon Parks, and scores of others, made huge contributions to socially conscious art generally and ant-racist art specifically during their distinguished artistic careers.

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In the early 21st century, this tradition continues. African American artists throughout the United States have vigorously promoted their people’s history, identity, and political interests in a society that largely remains ignorant, indifferent, and even hostile. Black Artists in Southern California have played a huge role in this process. That region has long been recognized as a world arts center. Universally known as the hub of the American film industry, the region has also been fertile ground for thousands of visual artists. These talented women and men have produced exemplary works in every medium, including painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, cartoons and comics, photography, and several others. Their cumulative efforts have put the area on the global art map, increasingly making Los Angeles a serious focus of attention among artists, critics, scholars, and collectors. African American artists have made powerful and enduring contributions to this development for many decades, yet their work still remains less visible than that of their white colleagues and contemporaries of comparable talent and achievement. Their outstanding visual efforts, especially since the 1960s, have engaged and challenged thousands of people, especially in African American communities throughout the United States. They have stimulated audiences of all backgrounds to reflect critically about major themes of historical and social life. They have created a vibrant and powerful creative community in the Los Angeles area, using their works to call effective attention to issues of vital significance to millions of black people in America and around the world. A sample of their works reveals the vibrancy of multicultural art generally in the United States. Historical injustice, for example, remains a staple theme, especially in African American art. In a dramatic 2011 digital print, Los Angeles artist George Evans highlighted one of the worst racial murders in modern American history. Emmett Till (Figure 1) reintroduces contemporary audiences to the mutilated and disfigured body of the fourteen year-old boy who was murdered in Mississippi in 1955 by two white men. After authorities retrieved Till’s body from the Tallahatchie River, it was sent back to Chicago for the funeral. His mother, Mamie Till, insisted on an open casket, declaring, “I wanted the world to see what they did to my baby.” Jet Magazine published this gruesome image, exposing the horrific face of racial murder to a shocked nation.

Paul Von Blum Figure 1: George Evans, “Emmett Till”

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Evans’s depiction of Till’s body more than sixty years later is a stark reminder of the all-too-recent past. Scarcely new to millions of African American viewers, especially those of middle age or older, its graphic presence highlights the compelling message that history must never be forgotten. By forcing viewers to revisit the tragic 1955 murder, Evans personalizes the violence of racism in recent U.S. history. Early 21st century audiences must remember Emmett Till not simply as a distant symbol of injustice, but as a young male with hopes and aspirations, whose life was taken because he was black in a white racist society. For those who ask why now, so many years later, George Evans’s work is a valuable reminder that knowledge of the past is both concrete and crucially essential for present day understanding and future liberation. The issue of police brutality and misconduct, not surprisingly, has been a recurring theme in modern and contemporary African American visual art. Murals in particular have emphasized this issue because they are frequently painted in communities with large populations of color, with many residents who are familiar with hostile police encounters. One of America’s most militant and accomplished political muralists is Los Angeles artist Noni Olabisi. Her black-themed works focus on the struggles of her community against multiple sources of oppression. In 1995, she painted “To Protect and Serve” (Figure 2), which she restored in 2016; it chronicles the positive impact of the Black Panther Party and depicts Party leaders Huey Newton and Elaine Brown sympathetically. The effort also focuses on the Party’s well-known distribution of food, clothing, and medical care to needy members of the African American community. More controversially, the mural reveals images of police brutality and a corrupt judicial system. Its images include lynch-minded KKK members and a bound and gagged Black Panther Party leader Bobby Seale during the 1969 trial of the Chicago 8. These evoke unpleasantly accurate memories of the past. Even more provocatively, the mural shows a strong black male figure at the extreme left, holding a rifle as a quintessential expression of his commitment to self-defense and the protection of his own people. Some of the specific details in “To Protect and Serve” are directly relevant to this welcome new development in the long trajectory of African American struggle and resistance. The left side of the artwork reveals the racist violence towards black people exemplified by Ku Klux Klan violence that despoiled American life and history for many decades. The mural likewise shows police harassment of a young black man, a reality that has continued unabated since the original creation of this mural. Racial profiling remains a pervasive reality in contemporary America. Young black and brown men and women alike continue to walk the streets at

Paul Von Blum Figure 2: Noni Olabisi, “To Protect and Serve”

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their own peril, despite official protestations that law enforcement operates in color blind fashion in full compliance with U.S. constitutional requirements. This exemplary work of African American public art is powerfully representative of how multicultural art generally promotes a critical political vision in contemporary America. Lest anyone think that police mistreatment and even killings of people of color are mere aberrations, artist Tony Scott produced a disconcerting installation that is a chilling reminder of the pervasive nature of this phenomenon. “Death at the Hands of Police” (Figure 3) is a threedimensional work that features a plaster cast of a black man mounted on wood with a conspicuous target on his chest, emblematic of the deeper peril facing young African Americans and Latinos today. Over his face is a cloth reading “I Can’t Breathe.” These were the words that 43 year-old African American Eric Garner said eleven times while lying down as he was dying after being placed in a chokehold by a New York Police Department officer on July 17, 2014. On both sides of the plaster figure, the artist has written an unnerving list of people of color who have died in police custody from 1999 through 2014. Handwritten in chalk, the list contains familiar names that have been widely publicized throughout America and the world: Amadou Diallo, Oscar Grant, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Ezell Ford, as well as Eric Garner. It also contains the all too many names of less known victims. Toni Scott imbues their humanity by including them in this powerful artwork. “Death at the Hands of Police” is overpowering in its impact and reveals the power of art to contest social injustice. It compels its viewers to grasp, swiftly and viscerally, the human tragedy of police murders and the brutal human reality of the slogan “Black Lives Matter.” The chalk text suggest that the list remains incomplete, indicating that there have been many more victims since 1999 and there are many more to come, as the recent historical record has tragically confirmed. On April 4, 2015 fifty year-old African American Walter Scott was shot in the back by a Charleston, South Carolina police officer. And in November 2015, officials in Chicago revealed the video of black teenager Laquan McDonald who had been shot sixteen times by a Chicago police officer in 2014. One of the underlying reasons for this grim reality is American institutional racism, which, among its many other assumptions, continues to regard young black men as putative criminals. African American artists are well aware of this widespread attitude; indeed, many of the artists themselves have been racially profiled and harassed by police officers.

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Figure 3: Tony Scott, “Death at the Hands of Police”

Los Angeles artist Derrick Maddox has had his own unpleasant encounters with the police over the years. For example, in December 2012, late at night near his residence, he went out to mail a letter. On his return, he was

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ordered to stop by a Los Angeles Police Department squad car––not uncommon for a relatively young, dark-skinned 6’1”, 190 pound black male at night. Feeling that he had done nothing wrong and committed no crime, Maddox refused. The consequences were predictable. He was grabbed, had a gun pointed at him, forced to the ground, handcuffed, and placed in the back of the police car. It took an hour before he was released. He was told (absurdly) that he met the description of a man trying to jump off a bridge and that a police helicopter spotted him. Maddox wrote a long and eloquent complaint to the Los Angeles Police Department. Predictably, the “investigation” found no impropriety and essentially whitewashed the police conduct that December night. Maddox nevertheless used his creative impulses and artistic skills to respond to this outrage––an outlet not ordinarily available to most victims of racial profiling in the United States. He took the official LAPD envelope and turned it into an artwork, with an original drawing that added to the long history of anti-racist African American visual art. In 2015, Maddox presented two works at the art exhibition/conference Re-Significations and Black Portraiture[s] II: Imaging the Black Body and Re-Staging Histories in Florence, Italy. One of these works, “You See Sinner, I See Saint” (Figure 4) captures the strong usually unacknowledged American racial divide. Young black men, the victims of police killings in recent years, inspire fear among millions of white Americans; they are sinners, potential malevolent predators who deserve whatever they get from police officers. This deeply institutionalized racism, a legacy of America’s history, is unlikely to change in the absence of candid recognition that it even exists among the majority white population. For African Americans, the young man in Maddox’s artwork is the opposite: the hope for the future, a person on whom the race depends, a youth seeking education and opportunity in a society that will thwart him in numerous ways. With one striking image and six brief words, the artist summarizes the intractable racial dilemma of America in the early decades of the new century. Many African American artworks express pride in the intellectual and cultural contributions of their people. This is scarcely trivial; black people initially came to America involuntarily in chains and endured centuries of enslavement. Their achievements in scholarship, science, art, literature, music, and every other field occurred despite massive barriers and hardships. Celebrating these accomplishments is a different yet entirely complimentary form of artistic social commentary. In a society that devalues African American life generally, artworks that highlight the opposite are profoundly political.

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Figure 4: Derrick Maddox, “You See Sinner, I See Saint”

A major strain of this tradition, naturally, focuses on African American music. Many of the most iconic black visual artists of the past century have treated this theme in their works; some, in fact, have been musicians

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themselves. Their cumulative efforts are outstanding tributes to the black musical heritage that has deeply enriched American cultural life. In Los Angeles, Dale Davis has worked for many decades and has achieved well-justified recognition and visibility. A venerable figure in the African American artistic community, his complex assemblages often highlight the vibrant tradition of African American musical creativity. “Horn Section” (Figure 5), for example, combines genuine silver, copper, and brass instruments that Davis imaginatively constructed into an artistic whole. This work also links him to the West African sources of African American musical creation. This strikingly effective tribute to that tradition reveals how both African American music and art have enriched American culture for centuries. Moreover, like many of Dale Davis’s musical artworks, when an instrument is playable, it can be removed from the composition and actually played on the spot. That potentially transforms the work into an interactive effort that encourages the mutual participation of musicians and the audience. Figure 5: Dale Brockman Davis, “Horn Section”

His use of actual horns in this artwork underscores both the seriousness and the impact of the work. Viewers with an abstract notion of the black musical heritage often pay closer and more affectionate attention to his works when they encounter the actual instruments. The aesthetic ar-

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rangement intensifies the overall message. That two of the instruments transcend the formal boundaries of the rectangular enclosure is also significant. It highlights how black musicians in Africa and the Diaspora constantly transcend their boundaries and their socially prescribed limitations, a metaphor for the African American population as a whole. They are literally outside the box, a signifier of their outsider status that nevertheless propel them to extraordinary measures of cultural, intellectual, and political creativity and achievement. “Horn Section,” accordingly, conveys a deeper social message even without the more overt content of many other artworks found throughout the history of African American art for well over 150 years. Other racial and ethnic minority artist in the United States, including Latinos, Asian Americans, and American Indians, have likewise produced engaging artworks that reflect their struggles and their aspirations in an often hostile society. In many communities, they have joined their African American counterparts in creating multicultural murals and prints that are available to people who are routinely ignored in mainstream art institutions like museums and commercial galleries, despite some modest progress in recent years. In many urban areas, including Los Angeles, alternative exhibition venues have allowed artists of color wider opportunities to show and to sell their works. But they know as well as anyone, that full equality participation, and recognition in the cultural life of the nation requires massive political change, a process that is even now a remote prospect at the end of the second decade of the new century.

Works Cited City of Los Angeles, Department of Cultural Affairs. African American Artists in Los Angeles: A Survey. Los Angeles: 2009. Jones, Kellie, ed. Now Dig This: Art and Black Los Angeles. New York: Delmonico Books-Prestel, 2011. Lewis, Samella. African American Art and Artists. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003. Prigoff, James, and Robin Dunitz. Walls of Heritage, Walls of Pride: African American Murals: Rohnert Park, CA: Pomegranate Communications, 2000. Von Blum, Paul. “An Iconic Artistic Life: Dale Davis and His Work.” The Journal of Pan African Studies 7.3 (September 2014): 231-44. —. Resistance, Dignity, and Pride: African American Artists in Los Angeles. Los Angeles: Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies, UCLA, 2004.

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—. “Toni Scott’s Bloodlines: Remembering Yesterday, Understanding Today, and Empowering Tomorrow.” The Journal of Pan African Studies 5.3 (June 2012): 118-32.

MULTICULTURALISM IN COLOR: ZUNI COLORS AND THE NON-NATIVE AMERICAN ART MARKET CHARLAINE OSTMANN

What is a color? According to Israel Abramov, a professor specialized in optics at Brooklyn College, “color is a response of the nervous system to certain stimuli” (89). Colors are therefore mainly reactions of the body to light, working as a stimulus. Basically, when light shines on an object, the eye perceives the colors that are reflected and sends information to the brain. Thus, for most individuals, colors are related to sight and therefore are seen as universal. However, when a painter chooses a virgin white to depict a lady’s garments, or a rich vermillion for royalty’s, this means something. Similarly, in a Native American context, when a Zuni artist selects a yellowish sandstone to carve a fetish, the color holds meaning. In this case, it stands for yellow corn, symbol of life as well as the most powerful deity of the North: the Mountain Lion. However, while yellow is also light for the Zuni’s neighboring tribe, the Navajo, its meaning there is different, as it stands for San Francisco Peak, the yellow wind of the west, and females in general. Thus colors always correspond to a code which belongs to one culture and is therefore culture-specific. In that sense, colors can even be described as monocultural (from the Greek mono meaning alone, itself derived from men meaning small, isolated), as they supposedly cannot travel from one culture to another. Yet, with the rising interest in Native American culture around the world and the ensuing commercial exchanges, mainly of translated collections of legends and of Native American art, monocultural colors have been exported to non-Indian cultures and the symbolic meanings associated with them are alienated. This paper intends to analyze the effect of the cross-cultural exchanges of monocultural Native American colors. As an example, a single tribe was selected for study, the Zuni, located in New Mexico. Their color concepts are best revealed in their legends and the carving of fetishes. Thus,

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two aspects of color will be discussed, first the Zuni colors in speech as revealed by the study of the Zuni language and its translation in legends, and secondly the colors in Zuni art, which is being exported through Zuni carved fetishes. When a collection of Zuni legends is printed, the language selected for translation has to target the largest possible public of buyers. This is why most Zuni collections of legends are exclusively found in English. To study the effect of the exportation of Zuni colors into the English language, it is essential to have an understanding of the Zuni color terms and how the Zuni think colors. In his 1997 study Language Diversity and Thought, the Linguist Lucy states that “[t]here is no general term for ‘color’ in Zuni” (154). The very concept of color thus differs from Western usage: in the Zuni language, it is a culturally specific object that defines the term “color.” Thus, multiple lexical terms will be used to name red, blue or yellow. This is explained by Nancy P. Hickerson in her 1975 article “Two Studies of Colors”: Most of the nouns are names of colors: they are often translated […] by referring to a species of plant, animal, etc. Examples: shiqqamu-nne ‘maroon (like a cactus flower)’, ?oneya-nne ‘pale, yellowed (like corn pollen)’, ?amitola-nne ‘rainbow-colored (like the rainbow)’, ?alasa.nina-nne ‘reddish brown (sorrel)’, o.lona.nne ‘gold color (like gold).’ (322)

These examples show that the Zuni use a noun to create a specific shade. Hickerson then surmises that a noun associated with the particles for number “nee” with or without the suffix “na” (signifying “to be on the surface”) gives hue to a noun: for instance, the noun ?ashiwo, which means algae or moss, when placed before na-nee (i.e., ?ashiwo-na-nee), signifies “moss green” (corresponding to forest green in English). It is the plant “algae” or “moss” that evokes the shade. A more literal translation is “the color of moss” (325) or indeed “like moss.” There is no use of the lexical terms for the color “green” here, only a system of equivalents. The most common Zuni equivalences with Western color terms is available in Watson Smith’s When is a Kiva: For example, yellow […] stands for ‘the waters around the world’, an eldest sister, flowers, corn pollen, ‘yellow breasted birds, butterflies, and all beautiful things’, ‘days of sunshine and rain without wind’, and the rainbow. […]. Blue is the second eldest sister at Zuñi. […] Green […] for grass […]. Red […] is red-breasted birds, the third eldest sister, and ‘to make him feel well.’ […]. White is the sun at Zuni […]. Black […] is the earth, the sky, and the youngest sister at Zuñi […]. Mixed colors suggest

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[…] raindrops, blood, and ‘all kinds of flowers for a fine summer’. Black and yellow together are the oriole at Zuñi, and red and yellow there are for ‘all the beautiful things.’ (126-27)

Kenneth Seowtewa, a Zuni artist and himself the son of a famous Zuni painter, adds other popular equivalents during a short interview realized in spring 20141: yellow is (corn) “pollen,” blue is “water,” red is “warmth,” white is “light,” multi-color is “beauty of nature,” and black is the “unknown.”

To sum up both Smith and Seowtewa’s observations: In bold are the most common equivalents. Several observations can be made. Firstly, all Zuni color terms are linked to a certain culture-specific object. Whereas Westerners see color and shape as distinguishable, this is not possible in Zuni, as colors are specific shapes that are actually culturespecific objects. Color is corn, or water, and has a special meaning in Zuni. Thus Zuni’s equivalent for the English “yellow” is “corn,” and corn also means “Zuni life,” hence being their favorite color. Similarly, for other Zuni “color-objects,” blue or “like grass” is natural life, red or “like 1

Kenneth Seowtewa is a Zuni muralist renowned for having assisted his father Alex Seowtewa in the renovation of the old Zuni Church mission (the pueblo’s Christian church). They painted impressive larger-than-live-size Kachinas on the church’s interior walls. This short interview was realized for a masters’ thesis studying Zuni color concepts in April 2014. Here is the full quote: “For us, Yellow (north) is Pollen, Blue (west) is Water, Red (South) is Warmth, White (east) is Light, Multi-color (zenith) is Beauty of nature and Black (nadir) is the unknown.”

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the red-breasted bird” is the messenger, and white or “like light” is the bringer of life. Thus, the translation of color terms in legends of something as ordinary as Zuni dress code goes beyond the comprehension of any average nonNative American reader. For instance, in Zuni legends, a being associated with the color white becomes a supernatural being, a “bringer of life”! The garment is the only indication of this, as illustrated in the Zuni legend of the “Youth and His Eagle.” This legend, transcribed by Frank Hamilton Cushing, the first explorer converted to the Zuni religion, presents a female described as “a beautiful maiden […] in garments of dazzling whiteness, softness and beauty” (34). She is in fact, a deity able to turn into an eagle. This reveals that the translating system from what I called “Zuni color object” to Western color terms is quite restrictive. The act of attributing a Western color to Zuni color-objects loses much of the Zuni meaning. Thus when moving from Zuni culture to Western culture, the culturespecific meanings are lost in translation. Secondly, the translation adds Western meaning to a Zuni color. To go back to the example of the Zuni female deity and bringer of life dressed in white, Western readers with Western codes in mind, would replace the Zuni codes with their own, seeing the woman in white as pure, untainted, virgin. They might even think of her as a bride. This alienates the source meaning of any translated color, blending Westerner’s codes with Zuni codes. And thirdly, the Zuni “like corn” can be perceived as any shade from yellow to orange. Similarly, the Zuni blue “like water” can be perceived from blue to green and so many more hues. It seems downgrading to name “like water” a mere blue (which is what we find in many translated legends), because “like water”’ it is a very particular shade. The “yellow,” “blue,” “green,” and “white” labels demote Zuni colors of many tints to fit Western primaries plus white. These three observations show that, from one language to another, the imagined colors are changed and molded into the target culture. This creates another color entirely, sharing parts of the source-coded colors and parts of the target-coded colors. If we shift away from the imagined colors of the legends to the real colors of Zuni fetishes, it can be observed that, on the contrary, the esoteric symbolism associated with each Zuni shade is quite well-known amongst Zuni connoisseurs. Indeed, the esoteric meanings of the colors attached to a particular stone used for the carving of fetishes are detailed on any trader’s websites. This assists the costumer in choosing the color of a stone with a specific expected spiritual property. It is usually explained in less details

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that the core of the Zuni codes for each color can be found in the Zuni Creation Myth. As multiple versions of it exist, here follows a brief summary of a prototype version: At the beginning, humanity was trapped in earth’s dark underbelly. The Sun was displeased because people under the earth couldn’t worship him properly. He thus fathered two deities, the “war gods” who performed a ritual to retrieve people. They respectively placed yellow, blue, red and white prayer sticks at the north, west, south and east (see Tedlock 267-71). The sticks sprouted from the earth, allowing people to climb up to the earth’s surface. As the earth was made habitable, people started to travel across the continents. The Zuni located the Zuni village with the help of a giant male water spider which “spread his legs out until he reached the four oceans in the east, west, south and north, and also touched zenith and nadir. When he had thus spread out to find the six cardinal directions, his heart was over the long-sought middle place” (Ferguson and Hart 23) where they ultimately settled. The colored prayer sticks used to raise the human race back to the earth’s surface are related to the cardinal points. Kenneth Seowtewa states that the Zuni people “automatically think of colors in the cardinal directions as it is ingrained in our thinking from time of birth, ‘a tribe of artists,’” thus the north is tied to yellow (or “like corn”), the west to blue (“like water”), the south to red (“like red chested bird”), the east to white (“like light”), plus multi-color (like rainbow) to zenith, and black (like darkness) to nadir. These colors are also attributed to the directions’ respective deities, which are in charge of protecting the village, like guardians: the yellow mountain lion of the north, the blue bear of the west, the red badger of the south, the white wolf of the east, plus the multi-colored eagle of the sky and the black mole of the earth. They are the personification of the colored cardinal directions represented in Zuni art by carvings made out of colored stones. This means that when Western costumers order a fetish shaped like a blue bear, they are aware of the fact that this deity comes from the west. They also know that it is believed that a spirit inhabits the stone and gives it different healing properties, depending on the chosen color. Now that the esoteric meanings are made clear, what happens when these unique, monocultural colors are transported from their context to another culture? Several deviations can be denoted. Firstly, from Zuni to non-Native American cultures, there is the expected demystification of colors. The colors lose their sacred properties as the fetish is turned from a talisman into an artwork. The esoteric meanings of colors become mere knowledge of the target culture and lose any spiritual value. Secondly,

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there is an “Indian-made” brand attached to colors. In her 2008 study on Native American marketplaces, Erika Marie Bsumek defines the concept of “Indian-made” as a “made by hand” brand stamped on manufactured Native American goods (36). She states that it exposes the desire for 20thcentury costumers to reify the primitive status of the artwork. Applying this concept to colors reveals that, while Indian-made colors aren’t exactly seen as primitive anymore, there is a form of condescension in the comparison of Indian colors to the Western system of colors. From the Westerners’ point of view, Indian colors are a curiosity to be compared to their own color concepts (which can be called the “Newtonian/Da Vincian” system), meaning the color wheel based on primaries/secondaries/ complementaries with notions of temperature, such as warmth for red and coldness for blue, notions regarded as the law for Western artists. This system cannot be applied in the Zuni context, however, as their form of art is carving and not painting! So the comparison is biased, as it is made between two monocultural color concepts. Such a reduction of the complex Zuni system of color to nothing more than an exemplification of their so-called primitive use of colors is, as has been explained, far from the truth. So far, only the distorted Western appreciation of Zuni colors has been analyzed. We should, however, consider that the “cross” part of crosscultural exchanges comes from the French croisé, meaning “to lie across, intersect”; also to “place (two things) crosswise of each other.” This means that both cultures are concerned and that the Zuni artistic colors are also influenced by commercial exchanges, as the fetishes are to be sold to nonZuni costumers too. The commercial dimension of such exchanges has affected the Zuni carvers as well, especially with the arrival of new stones on the Zuni reservations, which has led to new possibilities, new colors, and generally different qualities of stones. A list of these new stones is provided by Kent McManis, an authority on Zuni fetishes and the owner of Grey Dog Trading in Albuquerque, in his Zuni Fetishes, a study that continues Frank Hamilton Cushing’s legacy: Today, artists can choose from many unusual rocks and minerals from around the world. Sugilite [dark blue/black stripped], lapis lazuli, amber, angelite [greenish gray], charoïte [purple], opal [multi-colored], jade [dark green], rhodochrosite [bright pink], and a wide array of marbles, dolomites, and onyxes have expanded the carving selection. In the past, materials were either found locally or supplied by a few regional traders. Now stone merchants frequently introduce new stones by a few regional traders. (71)

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As the Zuni favor carving activities which do not involve mixing hues, they used to depend on stones available on their reservation. Thus before the introduction of charoïte and other purple stones, for example, producing purple proved to be a complicated matter. The purple charoïte stone has become quite fashionable for its hue and is considered exotic for the Zuni, as no other stone is capable of rendering such a purple tone. Thus, they have seen their palette diversify, especially to fit the commercial end of Zuni fetishes. As McManis states, “purchasers [frequently non-Native Westerners] of fetishes generally prefer more exotic and colored stones” (54). Thus colors have also produced a shift away from their use in objects and art for ceremonial and spiritual purposes. The Zuni, like other tribes, recently have started to look for commercial outlets for their art, in some cases even causing tribal artists to abandon any sense of the masterpieces being linked back to the sacred. The fashionable fetishes that are sold to Westerners are thus themselves desacralized versions of “art-object[s]” (McManis 5). This is a definite break with earlier traditions. Before a hunt, the Zuni hunters used to breathe in the stone talisman’s powers by placing the fetish near their mouth. After catching the game, they basked their fetish in the animal’s blood (Quam 23-30). Consequently, the fetishes actually sold have little to do with the “grigris” advertised on most Zuni trader’s websites, as they do not undergo any ritual. Moreover, the new colors pertaining to the nontribal world are no longer sacred. As Seowtewa explains: “We use purple and pink in Zuni art. No special symbols are attached to it.” Even though the Zuni ancestral color system does prevail in sacred gestures, these new colors are nevertheless highly appreciated and are now proudly displayed on Zunis’ bodies in fine pieces of jewelry. Though not being used in sacred ceremonies, they are added to the palette. This showed that there is a current capitalist shift in the artistic manipulation of colors, moving away from a ritual and ceremonial use, to fit commercial ends due to the crosscultural trade. The newly imported stones’ colors, while assimilated to the Zuni palette, display the influence of Western conceptions of colors as well. To conclude, this introduction to the complex world of Zuni colors shows how uniquely an universal color can be perceived when one culture claims ownership of it. But it also shows that a monocultural color can, in fact, be borrowed from a source culture and be turned into something else. Whether it is from Zuni to the West or from the West to Zuni, both cultures are combined at some point. Apply a linguistic definition to color, and the color becomes a loan-color, meaning a color borrowed from another cul-

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ture, which is being integrated and assimilated to the target culture with added meanings. Colors are culture-specific, but they are also multicultural: they are shareable amongst cultures; they can be loaned and integrated to several degrees, to get new meaning and create another, never-seenbefore color code. This also shows that the original Zuni color scheme, while alienated, isn’t entirely eradicated either. There is no denying the influence of commercial exchanges with Western people on Zuni colors, and more generally on Native American art. But far from being destructive, this reveals that interactions can be constructive and build something new. Each culture is interacting through the trade of art works, which alters and broadens the perception of art by both, as conveyed by the expansion of the Native American palette and the discovery of a new facet of art to the Western public. Because colors are culture-specific, their circulation allows cultures to learn from one another.

Works Cited Abramov, Israel. “Physiological Mechanisms of Color Vision.” Color Categories in Thought and Language. Ed. C. L. Hardin and Luisa Maffi. Marston Gate: Cambridge UP, 1997. 99-118. Bsumek, Erika Marie. Indian-Made: Navajo Culture in the Marketplace, 1868-1940. Lawrence: UP of Kansas, 1998. Cushing, Frank Hamilton. Zuni Folk Tales. 1901. Np: Forgotten Books, 2008. Hickerson, Nancy P. “Two Studies of Colors.” Linguistic and Anthropology, in Honor of C. F. Voeglin. Np: The Peter de Ridder Press, 1975. 317-30. McManis, Kent. Zuni Fetishes and Carvings. Expanded ed. Tucson: Rio Nuevo Publishers, 2004. Lucy, John A. Language Diversity and Thought: A Reformulation of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis. Marston Gate: Cambridge UP, 1992. Quam, Alvina and the People of Zuni. The Zuni Self-Portrayals by the Zuni People: An Extraordinary Transcription of the Fascinating Oral Literature of the Zuni Tribe. Ed. Robert Cole. Scarborough: Mentor Book, 1972. Seowtewa, Kenneth. Personal interview. April 2014. Smith, Watson. When is a Kiva? Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1990. Tedlock, Dennis. Finding the Center: The Art of the Zuni Storyteller. 2nd ed. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1999.

MULTICULTURAL OR DESTITUTE HAWAI’I? RE-VISIONING THE SYMBOLISM OF THE ALOHA SHIRT ROXANE HUGHES

“When Hawaiians do begin to resist, we must start at the most elementary levels, such as challenging the preferability of Western dress or the superiority of the English language. Slowly, this kind of challenge can proceed to larger, more political resistance, such as antimilitary activity, efforts to preserve wetlands, and other wild areas, and finally, a political struggle for self-determination.” —Haunani-Kay Trask (89) “Aloha shirts may be no more basically Hawaiian than cowboy boots are of Texas origin, but wherever they came from there seems little doubt they’re here to stay in some form or other for a long time.” —“Pollster Finds Many Don’t Wear Aloha Shirts,” Honolulu Record, Oct. 25, 1956

With the colonization of Hawai’i by the British in 1778, the Americans in the early nineteenth century, as well as a subsequent wave of Asian settlers, Native Hawaiians have been dispossessed of their land, culture and language.1 The ever-growing tourist industry mainly controlled by American and Japanese elites has been implicated in this imperialist theft. The aloha spirit that tourism sells on the islands and abroad depicts Hawai’i as a place of multicultural harmony as well as a romanticized paradise on earth. Yet, its inherent sense of multiculturalism, hospitality and love covers the destruction of the Native Hawaiian sacred land for the construction of 1

As Native Hawaiian activist and scholar Haunani-Kay Trask asserts, “Modern Hawai’i, like its colonial parent the United States, is a settler society; that is Hawai’i is a society in which the indigenous culture and people have been murdered, suppressed, or marginalized for the benefit of settlers who now dominate our islands” (5).

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multi-million-dollar resorts, the racial and hierarchical conflicts dividing haole, Asian ethnic groups and the native population, as well as the commodification and prostitution2 of the Native Hawaiian culture. “Our country has been and is being plasticized, cheapened and exploited,” declared Kehau Lee in 1970 in the context of the Native Hawaiian fight for sovereignty and self-determination. “They’re selling it in plastic leis, coconut ashtrays, and cans of ‘genuine, original Aloha.’ They’ve raped us, sold us, killed us” (qtd. in Trask 1). Tourism is not alone in transforming Native Hawaiian land and culture into commodities to buy. The garment industry which developed aside tourism in the 1930s has been complicit in this project through the manufacture and sale of the aloha shirt in Hawai’i and on the U.S. mainland. Scholars who have studied the history of this garment see it as a symbol of Hawaiian multicultural harmony. Linda Arthur, associate professor of textile and clothing, argues that “to those who live in Hawaii, it is a visible symbol of their multi-ethnic heritage” (“Aloha Shirt” 10); in other words, “a unifying symbol connecting people with the unique tropical locale of Hawai’i” (Aloha Attire 6). Dale Hope, creative director of Kahala Sportswear from 1979 to 2006, and artist Gregory Tozian, similarly contend that the “history of such a marvelous popular icon, so evocative of the spirit of its home, is woven with the mystery and culture of Hawai’i and the stories of those who lived there” (xiii). For art director Thomas Steele this shirt stands as a visual symbol of aloha—a “Hawaiian word that extends the warmth, friendliness, and pride of the Hawaiian people to their islands’ visitors” (8). Yet, the aloha shirt speaks of the dangers of multiculturalism in this age of globalization. The manufacture and commercialization of this garment tell about the story of the colonizers’ and settlers’ road to success. Used to promote the tourist and Hawaiian garment industries, this popular icon resonates with what Native Hawaiian scholar and activist Haunani-Kay Trask denounces as “the grotesque commercialization of everything Hawaiian” (4). More than symbolizing multicultural harmony, the aloha shirt speaks indeed of the commodification of the Native Hawaiian land, culture and language. The first aloha shirt was manufactured in the 1920s when Asian settlers opened their own businesses to escape plantation life. The ancestor of the 2

Trask proposes to use the term prostitution—that she defines as “the entire institution that defines a woman (and by extension the female) as an object of degraded and victimized sexual value for use and exchange through the medium of money”—“as an analytic category” to talk about “the degradation of [Native Hawaiian] culture and [Native] people under corporate tourism” (140).

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shirt—the long-sleeved frock (palaka in Hawaiian)—was brought to Hawai’i by the Europeans at the end of the eighteenth century with the whaling and sandalwood trades (Arthur, “Aloha Shirt” 14). It contrasted with the colored tapa cloth made out of the inner bark of the paper mulberry tree often stamped with geometric design that Native Hawaiian men and women wrapped around their bodies (Hope and Tozian 1).3 Native Hawaiian men wore the malo, a loincloth wrapped around the pelvis, and the native women wore the pa’u, a type of pareu that covered them from their waist down.4 Shocked by the nakedness of the native population, missionaries forced Natives to cover their bodies and adopt Western clothing; a first step in their Christianizing mission (Arthur, Aloha Attire 10; Arthur and Desoto 12). The frock was quickly worn by the Hawaiian royalty and the upper classes to display their social status (Arthur, Aloha Attire 10-11). The common people was slower in accepting this new clothing, but had adopted it by the time plantations were well established and quickly became the work uniform for plantation workers.5 In their free time, Asian workers wore their traditional clothing that was more colorful and finer in fabrics than the solid and cotton plaid plantation uniform (Arthur, “Aloha Shirt” 14; Steele 9). This led to the production of colorful leisure shirts by Japanese and Chinese custom tailors that reflected the islands’ multi-ethnic population and cultural diversity in the 1920s.6 It is in this context that the first prototypes of aloha shirts were 3

Hope and Tozian give a full description of the production of such garment: “The men cut down the [mulberry] tree branches, and the women used shells to peel away the outer bark. The raw inner bark was then soaked to a pliant softness and beaten for days with round clubs on anvils of stone and wood. Eventually, each strip of ‘cloth,’ four or five feet long and two inches wide, was spread out in the sun to dry and bleach to a beautiful white. The women made bales up to 200 yards long and 4 yards from thousands of these individual cloth strips. Many pieces of the cloth, called tapa, were pieced together to make a garment” (1). Tapa cloth was then colored with “the juice of the kukui nut tree, bits of red of yellow ochre, or charcoal” and was stamped with a variety of geometric designs (1). 4 Cook describes male and female Hawaiian garments in his diary: “The malo worn by men is a long strip of thick cloth, 10 or 12 inches wide, and curiously stained with red, black and white. Women wear a piece of cloth wrapped many times around the body, reaching halfway down the thighs” (qtd. in Hope and Tozian 3). For more details on the origin of the palaka shirt, see Korn. 5 Palaka was thick, strong and rough in texture and protected against sharp sugarcane edges and pineapple tops (Arthur and Brown 16). 6 Before the 1920s clothing was usually made at home. The mass production of shirts by custom tailors started with the need to produce plantation work uniforms (Arthur, “Aloha Shirt” 14). It is only in the late 1920s and early 1930s that more

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created in local tailor shops,7 and started to attract the attention of both local people and tourists. Ellery Chun, who has often been credited for developing the manufacturing of this garment, recalls its early production in an interview conducted in 1976 for the Atlanta Journal and Constitution: “[T]here was no authentic Hawaiian material in those days so I bought the most brilliant and gaudy Japanese kimono material, designed the shirts, and had a tailor make a few dozen colorful short sleeved shirts, which I displayed in the store window with the sign ‘Hawaiian shirts.’ And they sold remarkably well” (qtd. in Hope and Tozian 15).8 In the 1930s already, only 5% of the total production of the first aloha shirts were sold locally— principally to tourists, as the population in Hawai’i could not afford them; the rest was exported to the mainland (Arthur, “Aloha Shirt” 17).9 The Hawaiian shirt was indeed a multicultural product mainly designed for tourists since its inception; a multicultural product involving “five cultures” in Arthur’s words: “[Y]ou had a Western body, a Japanese fabric, Chinese tailors, a Filipino style, and it was made in Hawaii” (Keane and Quinn n.p.). The Hawaiian culture Arthur invokes here can be debated, however, as only the shirt’s name and place of production were Hawaiian.

casual clothing was manufactured by local shopkeepers (Arthur, Aloha Attire 24). This change was made possible by the transformation of Hawai’i from “an agricultural to a service-oriented economy,” as Hope and Tozian explain, leading to the production of “sports and casual wear” instead of work uniforms (12). 7 The first production of the aloha shirt has been the subject of debates. Koichiro Miyamoto, owner of Musa-Shiya the Shirtmaker, has often been credited with the production of the first aloha shirt made in printed Japanese yukata cloth at the request of a customer in the early 1930s (Hope and Tozian 17, 19). He was also the first to use the term “aloha shirt” in print in an ad published in the Honolulu Advertiser in 1935 (http://thealohashirt.net/history). Miyamoto’s shop, thanks to the diffusion of many comic ads, gained a certain reputation in the 1930s, which might have impacted our contemporary knowledge on what is considered to be “the first” aloha shirts. His contemporaries, who may have been producing similar shirts, may not have benefitted from the same media coverage and therefore escaped attention. For more information concerning the production of the first aloha shirts see Hope and Tozian 12-14. 8 In contrast to his predecessors and contemporaries, who were producing individual shirts on demand, Chun manufactured shirts to keep in stock for local people and tourists (Arthur, Aloha Attire 14). 9 Arthur also observes in an interview that the aloha shirt was “too wild” for the locals from the start. They wore more “subtle” colors and designs, as still seen today (Keane and Quinn n.p.).

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This type of Hawaiian shirt was renamed aloha shirt in 1937 when Chun trademarked the term,10 at a time when Asian ethnic communities started gaining independence from haole. Asian settlers slowly expressed pride of their localness and belonging to Hawai’i not only in the face of haole’s exploitation, but also of the developing tourist industry (Okamura 174).11 Asian ethnic groups thus came together to create a new sense of local Hawaiian identity based, as Arthur explains, on “culture and a sense of place, rather than genealogy” (Aloha Attire 21). By transforming aloha into a symbol of their local identification with the Hawaiian land,12 Asian settlers, however, violated its original meaning in pre-colonial Hawai’i, which Trask defines as follows: Social connections between our people are through aloha, simply translated as ‘love’ but carrying with it a profoundly Hawaiian sense that is, again familial and genealogical. Hawaiians feel aloha for Hawai’i from whence they come and for their Hawaiian kin upon whom they depend. This is why we extend familial relations to those few non-Natives whom we feel understand and can reciprocate our aloha. But aloha is freely given and freely returned; it is not and cannot be demanded or commanded. Above all, aloha is a cultural feeling and practice that works among the people and between the people and their land. (141)

The term aloha originally captured Native Hawaiian feeling of love for their land and kin and was based on the premise that if people cultivated and cared for the land, it would feed and provide for the people in return. No longer symbolizing Native Hawaiian genealogical bond to the land, the Hawaiian term aloha was refashioned in the 1930s into a cultural symbol in Asian settlers’ definition and representation of Hawaiian multicultural unity and harmony. What was called the aloha spirit, as Jonathan 10 Chun designated his shirts first as “Hawaiian Shirts” in this shop’s window in 1935. He then trademarked the term “Aloha Sportswear” in 1936 to finally change it to “Aloha Shirt” in 1937 (Hope and Tozian 15). Nowadays this type of garment is known as “Aloha shirt” in Hawai’i and as “Hawaiian Shirt” on the U.S. mainland, probably due to the American lack of understanding of the concept of aloha, as Arthur stipulates (Keane and Quinn n.p.). 11 As Keiko Ohnuma also underlines, the local population, fearing to lose aloha to the tourist industry, sought to differentiate themselves from this new horde of tourists coming from various parts of the globe (370). 12 As Ohnuma explains, the term aloha was first reinterpreted by Christian missionaries who used it “to bridge the considerable lacuna between two models of community: the Western, which upholds the supremacy of the individual, and the Hawaiian, in which religion is not a set of beliefs separate from civic society, but part of the very structure of social organization” (368).

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Okamura has it, became indeed “very much part of the public code of ethnic relationships in Hawaii, which maintains that ideally such interpersonal relationships should proceed without reference to ethnic stereotypes or prejudice” (165). Yet, Okamura also points to the danger of idealizing ethnic interactions, as it obscures the “reality of ethnic conflicts.” Keiko Ohnuma similarly defines this aloha spirit as “a social lubricant and glue, sticking people together while deflecting attention from the problems of proximity” (366). Asian settlers’ appropriation of the aloha spirit, as well as assertion as kama’aina—children of the land—contributed to blending Native Hawaiians and local people; a lack of distinction that Trask denounces, however, as too often violating Natives’ “security, identity and liberty” as well as indigenous right to the land (Trask 29-30, 34). The term aloha and its kindred aloha spirit were also fundamental marketing ploys in the tourist advertisements of Hawai’i in the islands and abroad in the 1930s.13 The developing tourist industry in Hawai’i not only used the idea of hospitality inherent to the native term aloha, but also the presupposed harmony between the islands’ ethnic groups to appeal to the mainland, where internal ethnic and racial conflicts were a daily concern. Hawai’i thus became, as Ohnuma states, “an American ideal” or a model of “what America could be” on the mainland (373-74). Far from representing an ideal, however, the aloha spirit sold by the tourist industry since the 1930s has camouflaged the neocolonial sale of Native Hawaiian culture, land and language under a rhetoric of multicultural harmony. Deprived of the Hawaiian cultural context that bred it to accompany the depiction of happy Native Hawaiians ready to share their culture, the term aloha has been transformed into a myth to attract visitors. In Trask’s words, aloha has become “an aid in the constant hawking of things Hawaiian” (144) that has contributed to suppressing Natives’ resistance to tourism and the “awful exploitative truth that the industry is the major cause of environmental degradation, low wages, land dispossession.”

13 Ohnuma talks of “commodified aloha” (372). As Hope and Tozian have shown, Hawaiian tourism was enhanced as means of transportation were rendered more convenient in the 1930s. Matson Navigation cruise ships connected the mainland to Hawai’i in a six-day ocean passage, while Pan American World Airways linked the West Coast of the United States to Honolulu in an eighteen-hour flight, for instance (xiii, 16). Tourism was promoted as early as 1900. The Hawaiian Promotion Committee published in 1903 a National Magazine to promote “endless spring and romance under the hula moons, enticing some 2,000 tourists to visit Hawaii that year” (Hope and Tozian 133). It saw a considerable expansion with the development of Hawai’i as a tourist destination.

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Aloha is now part of the English vocabulary. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as being a “greeting” or “valediction” such as “welcome,” “greetings,” and “farewell.” Various uses of the term in sentences dating from 1798 to 1978 are provided, first depicting waving Natives saying farewell to the departing sailors, then referring to the use of the word as a substitute for welcome. The now common use of aloha in the English language further epitomizes the appropriation of the Hawaiian language and the resulting cultural dispossession of Native Hawaiians.14 The aloha shirt has been complicit in both the creation of settlers’ local Hawaiian identity, and in the tourist prostitution of Hawai’i. While the early designs of the aloha shirt created by Chinese and Japanese tailors were predominantly Asian (Arthur, “Aloha Shirt” 17), mainly composed of animals such as tigers, dragons, peacocks, birds or fishes, and landscapes inspired by Asian paintings, the use of Hawaiian prints was enhanced by the increasing tourist industry and the islands’ developing manufacture companies in the 1930s. As the Hawaiian tourist bureau promoted Hawai’i as “a colorful, romantic tourist destination” (17), the Asian designs were slowly replaced by bold motifs of Polynesian inspiration depicting Pacific islands’ flora and fauna (mainly fish) to enhance the sale of the Hawaiian land as a tropical tourist destination. With its multiplicity of colors and exotic designs, the aloha shirt was thus transformed into the perfect postcard in the 1930s to advertise for vacations to Hawai’i (“Aloha Shirt” 24), and soon became the preferred vacation garment worn by tourists on the islands (Keane and Quinn n.p). An extensive analysis of tourist ads diffused by major tourist and travel companies (Pan American Airlines, Matson Cruise Lines, Tourist Bureau, etc.), which is beyond the scope of this paper, would further the connection of the aloha shirt to tourism. These ads reveal indeed how the aloha shirt was used to promote the Hawaiian idyllic landscape, on the one hand by putting forward the shirt’s symbol of comfort and relaxation, and on the other, by selling the beauty of Hawai’i through the commodification of the exoticism, beauty and sexuality of women dressed in aloha attire. Capturing the imagination of male visitors, this female figure enters into the dialectic of masculine America and feminine Hawai’i at the core of colonial discourse. This type of advertisement re-imagines and sexualizes the 14

An entry for the aloha shirt is also found in the OED. No definition is given though, only examples from 1951 onwards referring to a type of Hawaiian shirt which gradually gained popularity on the mainland. While the etymology of aloha is identified as “Hawaiian or South Pacific,” the term aloha shirt is said to be “chiefly U.S.,” telling more about the evolution of aloha in the English language and the role played by the United States in the manufacture of the aloha shirt.

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brown female Other, promising white male visitors a fascinating experience. As Trask states, Hawai’i made female by the tourist industry, offers indeed an “escape from the rawness and violence of daily American life” and “a feel of soft kindness” that might last beyond their visits to the islands (136-37). For Native Hawaiians, however, the figure of the feminine Hawai’i visited by a predominantly white American man speaks of both the colonization of their Native land and the prostitution of their culture and landmarks. The idyllic representations of Hawai’i drawn to attract tourists have had a damaging effect since their inception. Native Hawaiian sacred land has been appropriated and destroyed to create resorts and accommodate a growing number of tourists, leading to the crowding of their territories and the contamination of their water sources, among other things (Trask 106). Similarly, as tourists inundate their shores, Native Hawaiians are confined to “waiting on tourists, cleaning their rooms, selling them artifacts, and smiling for a living,” as Trask denounces, and often forced to participate in the commercialization of their culture. An analysis of advertisements diffused by a variety of garment companies based both in Hawai’i and on the mainland equally reveals the way tourism has been used to promote the sale of aloha shirts since the late 1930s. As Hope and Tozian explain, shirt makers’ advertisements showing “models wearing Hawaiian clothing in semi-tropic settings,” usually fullpage in magazines and newspapers diffused on the mainland, “helped the Hawaiian Visitors Bureau to sell Hawai’i” (104). Similarly to tourist ads, these garment ads sought to appeal, sell and as a consequence colonize, not only by depicting predominantly white tourists, male and female alike, dressed in aloha attire, but also by eroticizing Hawai’i through the depiction of dark-hair and dark-skinned women lightly dressed in aloha clothing. The Hawaiian garment industry also relied on the iconic aloha shirt and its symbolism of vacation to progressively move away from local garment shops to create manufacturing factories at a larger scale.15 Suffice here to give the examples of the two main aloha shirt producers of the 1930s and beyond, Kamehameha and Kahala. Kamehameha, founded in 1936 by Californian Herb Briner, specialized in the manufacture of sportswear and T-shirts that were principally sold to American companies such as Sears and Watumull’s on the islands (Hope and Tozian 28).16 Despite its Hawaiian base and the Hawaiian name Kamehameha—after a King of Hawai’i 15

While many manufacturing companies developed in the 1930s, tailor shops were still in business. Hope and Tozian list 275 tailor shops in Honolulu in 1937 (21). 16 See also the Museum of Hawaiian Shirts, “Kamehameha,” http://themohs.org/Kamehameha.html.

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who unified the different islands in the first half of the nineteenth century—Briner’s company soon expanded and exported shirts to the mainland. By the 1960s, Kamehameha had exported approximately 20 tons of Hawaiian shirts to the mainland (Museum of Hawaiian Shirt). Kahala (originally named Branfleet), founded by Frenchman George Brangier and the American Nat Norfleet in 1936, developed the manufacturing process of the aloha shirt.17 By 1939, Kahala-labelled shirts were found in major department stores in Honolulu and on the mainland (Hope and Tozian 25). By 1959, Kahala was exporting its aloha shirts worldwide, making a profit of approximately $1 million a year (Hope and Tozian 25). Kahala also used the image of the Duke Kahanamoku, Native Hawaiian Olympic swimmer, surfer and later on American movie star, to increase its profits.18 Due to his involvement in the promotion of both tourism and aloha shirts, the Duke rapidly became what Hope and Tozian call “a public servant for Hawaii,” and the islands’ “‘Official Ambassador of Aloha,’ welcoming with leis and smiles Hawaii’s visitors, unknown and renown alike,” by the time Hawai’i had become the fiftieth state of the United States in 1959 (Hope and Tozian 121, 120). While Kamehameha and Kahala played a fundamental role in the manufacture of aloha shirts, they were products of their time, as many more aloha shirt companies flourished between the late 1930s and the mid1950s,19 culminating with the creation of the Hawaiian Garment Manufacturers Guild in 1949 (Hope and Tozian 132). Native Hawaiians were not part of this flourishing business, however. Except for the Duke who was 17

See the Museum of Hawaiian Shirts, “Kahala,” http://themohs.org/Kahala.html. After learning how to surf in California with Olympic swimmer and surfer Duke Kahanamoku, Brangier moved to Hawai’i in the early 1930s. In 1935, he opened a menswear shop in downtown Honolulu with the help of Nat Nortfleet. Together they opened their first garment factory in 1936 under the label Kahala (Hope and Tozian 117). 18 In the mid-1930s, Kahala signed a five-year contract with the Duke and created a special Duke Kahanamoku collection (Hope and Tozian 121). 19 Here are some of the main companies that developed during this timeframe: Royal Hawaiian Manufacturing Company (1937); Lauhala Sportswear (1944); Kahona (1944); Paradise Sportswear (1945); Tropicana (1945); Malihini Sportswear (1945); Hawaiian Togs (1947); Shaheen (1948); Holo-Holo (1948); Hali Hawaii (1948); Hawaiian Casuals (1948); Keoni (1951); Iolani Sportswear (1953); Sun Fashions (1953). Note that the development of the Hawaiian garment industry stagnated during the Second World War, as the import-export system was severed and attention was directed to the production of military equipment. For more details on the production of the Hawaiian garment industry during the war, see Hope and Tozian 132.

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involved in the advertising of the aloha shirt, the native population remained marginal in its production, creation and promotion. 90 percent of the work force in the Hawaiian garment industry was Japanese. The other 10 percent was composed of Chinese and Korean, with only a few Native Hawaiian seamstresses (Hope and Tozian 50). The development of the Hawaiian garment industry also led to the transnationalization of the aloha shirt at the production and consumption levels, although it was sold as a product designed and made in Hawai’i to satisfy visitors’ desire of exotic authenticity. At the production level, the companies had to send fabrics abroad (to the United States or Japan) for mass printing, as they lacked the technology to print the shirt designs locally before the advent of World War II.20 At the consumption level, the garment industry mainly targeted tourists on the islands and American customers on the mainland. As John Keoni Meigs, founder of Keoni, retrospectively stated, “I’ve been called the ‘Grand Old Man of the Aloha Shirt.’ What designs were not bought locally, I sold to the mainland firms and they wound up in Sears Roebuck. I perpetuated an American atrocity, I fear” (qtd. in Hope and Tozian 62). Keoni was not alone. Shaheen, a company created in 1948, was one of the main distributors of aloha shirts on the mainland, with its “140 different outlets in mainland stores” (such as Bullock’s, Macys, and others) (Keane and Quinn n.p.). World War II brought changes to the production of the aloha shirt. As fabrics could no longer be sent abroad for printing, local garment industries had to manufacture their clothing on the islands, leading also to the increased wear of aloha attire by the local population who could no longer benefit from cheaper imported garments. 21 Designs became also more “Hawaiian,” as Pearl Harbor rendered everything Japanese—and to a larger extend, Asian—less desirable (Ball 743). Hawaiian motifs (including patterns such as palm trees, hula dancers, surfers, local fruits, etc.) rose to 57 percent of the total production while Chinese and Japanese designs decreased to 15 percent (Arthur, “Aloha Shirt” 20, 22). These new Hawaiian prints became known in the 1950s as the “new authentic Hawaiian 20

As Hope and Tozian note, “a shirtmaker had to send designs to New York and then wait 30 days for the designs to be engraved on machine rollers. Another 30 days were needed for the designs to be approved, printed and finished. After a final 30 days, the printed goods were finally received back home” (89). 21 As Arthur explains: “Shipping between Hawaii and the US was curtailed during the Second World War and has prepared the way for an industry that could no longer import or export garments. Fabrics had to be printed locally. […]. Due to the scarcity of Western-styled clothing, aloha attire became more popular on the islands for the local population” (“Aloha Shirt” 21).

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prints” (Hope and Tozian 62). Kahala’s line of Duke Kahanamoku’s aloha shirts sold remarkably well precisely because it spoke of authenticity for a public of tourists and mainlanders (Steele 40). Yet, as Arthur and Brown underline, the tapa pattern considered the “epitome of Hawaiian tradition” in the 1950s were “copies of Samoan material” (11), complicating aloha shirts’ authentic Hawaiianness taken as their mark of approval. Although the aloha shirt became more Hawaiian in design, production and consumption during the war, it simultaneously became a “hot commodity” on the U.S. mainland (Arthur, “Aloha Shirt” 24). The heavy presence of U.S. military personnel in Hawai’i furthered the Americanization of the aloha shirt. Brought back home by American soldiers at the end of their military duty, the aloha shirt was seen not only as a personal “proof” that they had been to Hawai’i, but also as a “postcard” with its more daring color,22 Hawaiian patterns and finer fabrics (rayon shirts) (see Hope and Tozian 32; Arthur, “Aloha Shirt” 24). Shirts were not only made available in general department stores (Arthur, “Aloha Shirt” 23), but many garment industries developed their own aloha shirt lines. The mainland thus slowly created its own version of Hawaiian shirts, re-interpreting and re-imagining Hawaiian flora and fauna, as well as Hawaiian idyllic beaches and lifestyle (Hope and Tozian 192). As Steele also explains, “after the war tourism escalated, for Pearl Harbor and Hawaii were part of the American vocabulary” (14). From 1950 to 1959, tourism increased from 50,000 to 250,000 visitors a year. Similarly, more people settled in Hawai’i leading to a growth of the population from 350,000 to 500,000 during the same period of time (Hope and Tozian 47).23 As tourism rocketed, so did the sale of the aloha shirt: while the annual sale before the war amounted to 50,000 dollars, it reached 2.5 million dollars a year in 1947 (Arthur, “Aloha Shirt 66), making of the aloha shirt one of the best ads for Hawai’i on the mainland. This expansion was also linked to the legal establishment of Aloha Week in 1947 that successively led to Aloha Wednesdays in 194824 and

22

The colors of the aloha shirts were revived and made flashier in reaction to “years of drab military uniforms and wartime clothing” (Steele 14–15). 23 Tourism has substantially increased since then. While at statehood “Hawai’i residents outnumbered tourists by more than 2 to 1,” in the late 1980s, “tourists outnumber[ed] residents by 6 to 1” and Native Hawaiians “by 30 to 1.” See Trask 138, referring to Nordyke 134–72. 24 Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, businessmen were allowed to wear aloha shirts to work on Wednesdays (Hope and Tozian 43).

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Aloha Fridays in 1965.25 During this special “week”—in reality a monthlong celebration—the aloha shirt was worn in the office by local people. Although this legislation was originally designed, as Hope and Tozian note, “to preserve Hawaiian culture and traditions through an extended annual celebration,” running from October to November, it was meant not only to introduce the wear of the more casual clothing in the business environment to match with the Hawaiian tropical climate, but especially to upgrade the economy of Hawai’i (43). Indeed, legislating the wear of the aloha shirt did not preserve Hawaiian culture or profit Native Hawaiians, but clearly benefitted the Hawaiian fashion industry, which was not to the taste of all (Arthur and Brown 49-50). A seaman reporting for a poll about the aloha shirt conducted in 1956 shared his lack of enthusiasm: “I am not going to please those guys up in Waikiki. They’re making all the money out of it. Why should I help them out for nothing? Where my wife works, they make her buy some new stuff every year to wear during Aloha Week. As far as I’m concerned, they can take Aloha Week and shove it” (“Pollster” 1).26 This anonymous participant, more than resisting to buy an aloha shirt for the occasion, denounces the capitalistic system ruling the islands, always privileging the wealthy over the poor. As it entered the business world, the aloha shirts worn by local people became more reserved and conservative in designs and colors (Arthur, “Aloha Shirt” 27), furthering the gap separating local people and tourists. It equally looked more Western or in Arthur’s words, like “American dress with Hawaiian fabrics” (28). Being more business-appropriate, the aloha shirt was commonly worn on the mainland by elite figures such as President Harry Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower, who contributed to advertising for the shirts (Hope and Tozian 138). Such an alteration in the shirt’s pattern and cut can be seen with the introduction of a new type of shirt that was more elegant than certain bold color floral-patterned or overdecorated shirts (Arthur and Brown 39). That was the case of the more conservative button-down reverse pullover shirt created by Tim McCullough, president of Reyn Company until 2008, and the new Pineapple tweed 25

In 1965, Bill Foster, president of the Hawaiian Fashion Guild, promoted the wear of aloha attire on Fridays during the warmest months of the year (Hope and Tozian 45). 26 Another pollster identified as a “democratic campaigner” refuses to wear aloha shirts for not having “any aloha spirit” as “too many people still vote Republican.” This satiric answer similarly hints at a darker reality in Hawai’i covered by the aloha spirit of the islands promoted by both tourism and aloha shirts. By evoking the dominance of republican ideals in the islands, this pollster equally alludes to the social and economic inequalities and injustices permeating in Hawai’i.

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design created by Kahala (Hope and Tozian 48). Kahala’s tweed shirts were ironically accompanied by the motto “The life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness” (Arthur and Brown 39), a motto which once again covers up the disturbing history of American colonialism and imperialism that the production of the aloha shirt as well as the legislation of aloha attire have sustained. The irony of Kahala’s motto is made more evident with the “forcible territorial incorporation” of Hawai’i as the fiftieth State of the United States in 1959 and its resulting economic dependence on tourism and multinational corporations (Trask 18, 66). Statehood furthered the Westernization of the aloha shirt indeed. Hollywood, television and numerous ads presented this new exotic state through romanticized versions of the islands, thus bringing Hawai’i and the shirt to international attention (Hope and Tozian 49).27 The 1950s saw the production of several movies filmed in Hawai’i showcasing famous actors in aloha shirts, such as From Here to Eternity (1953) starring Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift and Frank Sinatra, and Naked Paradise (1957) with Richard Denning, among other productions.28 With the revival of surfing in the 1960s, Hollywood gave further publicity to both Hawai’i and the aloha shirts in its surf movies. A case in point is Blue Hawaii starring Elvis Presley in the role of Chad Gates, a U.S. soldier who returns to Hawai’i with his surfboard shortly after the end of World War II.29 Furthermore, no longer exclusively made on the islands, the aloha shirt “went international, leaving the spirit of local design far behind,” as Steele asserts (16). More garment manufacture companies started imitating Hawaiian sportswear on the mainland (15), further depriving the aloha shirt of its presupposed aloha spirit. Adapted to the American context of the 1960s and 70s, the aloha shirt, first associated on the mainland with Californian surfers (Keane and Quinn n.p.), progressively came to symbolize a rebellious personality trait during the Korean and Vietnam Wars. As Arthur observes, “the aloha shirt became associated in California with being young and hip, and wearing Hawaiian shirts in suburban high school and colleges became a fad that led to a more casual style of dress overall” 27

Steele draws attention to the impact of American “beach and surfing movies” from the 1950s and 1960s on creating, what he calls, an “island fever” on the mainland (20). 28 For more information see Hope and Tozian’s chapter “Celebrities and Their Shirts” (133-39). These two movies promoted Cisco Casuals’ Duke Kahanamoku line and Alfred Shaheen’s collection respectively (135-36). 29 For more information concerning cast and plot, see http://www.imdb.com. The photograph of Elvis in a red tapa aloha shirt with white floral design used for the album cover of Blue Hawaii is known worldwide.

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(“Aloha Shirt” 27). Re-appropriated by the United States, the aloha shirt was, however, less an Ambassador of Aloha in the 1970s than a symbol of a rebel, hippie American identity advocating for peace. The irony is evident, however, if we consider the shirt’s production history and its complicity in the colonization and destitution of Hawai’i. Hollywood contributed once again to propagating Hawaiian shirts’ new symbolism in the 1980s. Movies and TV shows increasingly showed actors in aloha shirts in the roles of detectives and criminals alike; from Tom Selleck in the role of Hawaiian-based detective in Magnum P.I. (1980-88), to Al Pacino in Scarface and the Cuban drug cartel (1983), to Nicolas Cage in the crime/comedy Raising Arizona (1987), to name a few. Other movies focused on the shirt’s symbol of laid-back, cool identity. Weekend at Bernie’s (1989), with its macabre comedy in which two young men dressed in aloha shirts pretend that their boss is still alive during this latter’s party, interweaves aloha shirts’ symbolism of rebellious identity to that of the cool, laid-back party people—two intertwined symbols that have lasted to these days.30 As the aloha shirt found resonance in the political, social and cultural changes happening on the mainland in the 1970s, it was equally influenced by the Hawaiian political movements occurring in Hawai’i. In reaction to the colonization of their native land and to the commodification of their indigenous culture, Native Hawaiians started protesting for their rights, demanding recognition and self-determination, leading to the creation of two movements, the Native Hawaiian nationalistic movement at the political level,31 and the Hawaiian Renaissance at the cultural level.32 The rec30 An analysis of recent movie productions filmed in Hawai’i or on the mainland, would testify to this. Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994) and Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls (1995), Romeo + Juliet (1996), Burn Notice (2007-2011), Pineapple Express (2008), Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008), Rango (2011), Descendants (2011), or more recently Blended (2014) offer cases in point. 31 Trask gives sense to Native Hawaiians’ effort in the last 40 years to achieve independence through the proposition of various office action strategies that she lists as follows: “…active education of Hawaiians about their history and Native rights and about the need for a land base; litigation for reparations; offensive political demonstrations such as land seizures, illegal protests at restricted places, including military sites, and disruptions of institutional activity; offensive cultural actions such as religious worship on sacred sites closed to such worship, the construction of fishing villages and taro patches on lands scheduled for other economic activity, and the disruption of tourist attractions that commodify and degrade Hawaiian culture” (37). 32 The Hawaiian Renaissance seeks to oppose “cultural hegemony”—“the worst cultural habits of the colonial society” that Trask sees as having alienated the

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lamation of their land, government, culture and language not only targeted haole and settlers in Hawai’i, but also tourists, for whom they showed more antipathy (Takagi 277). Native Hawaiian cultural nationalism addressed indeed the problems of the commercialization of Hawaiian culture for mass tourism. It sought to debunk, in Trask’s words, the idea that “Hawaiian culture—including the hula, Hawaiian values of generosity and love such as aloha, and the Hawaiian extended family—is particularly suited to the ‘visitor’ industry, which, in turn encourages and preserves Hawaiian culture” (42). However, the Hawaiian Renaissance gave elites renewed opportunities to use the pretext of cultural revival to make more profit. Trask once again defines elites’ appropriation of this new interest in Hawaiian culture as an “insidious form of cultural prostitution” that has further transformed indigenous culture into a “tourist artifact” (17). The Hawaiianness of the aloha shirt’s designs dating from this period of cultural revival needs therefore to be analyzed with caution. Although Native Hawaiian protest gave rise to proto-Hawaiian designs meant to recapture the native spirit and culture of the islands (canoes, quilt, Hawaiian flora, monarchy, etc.), many shirts celebrated the islands’ multiculturalism as designs took inspiration from various cultures around the globe (Arthur, Aloha Attire 10, 132).33 Both types of patterns were equally diffused by elite-run garment companies that remained in control of the production and distribution of aloha attires in Hawai’i. If Native Hawaiians wore these proto-Hawaiian aloha shirts created by elite companies during their protest against the colonialism of their land and culture can be debated, as even local groups did not wear aloha shirts but palaka—the work uniforms Asian settlers wore on plantation in the late nineteenth century—to protest against their peripheral status in Hawai’i as well as their economic and political exploitation (Ohnuma 174).34 What the aloha shirts produced during the Hawainative population from their indigenous culture; making of cultural nationalism a fundamental tool in the decolonization of Hawai’i (42). 33 The simultaneous diffusion of Hawaiian prints and more-Asian patterns in the early 1970s can be explained, at the political level, by the fight led by local people—that included both Native Hawaiians and old-timers—against “the state, corporations, and private estates,” as Trask explains (67). However, by the end of the 1970s, Native Hawaiians led their own fight for the reclamation of their indigenous land and culture, thus differentiating their struggle from local people’s (67). In terms of design, the resurgent interest in some Asian patterns gave way as well to a hunt for vintage shirts, transforming the vintage aloha shirt into an art to collect. 34 According to the Honolulu Advertiser journalist Bob Krauss, local groups did not wear aloha shirts during the Hawaiian Renaissance, but wore instead the older

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ian Renaissance accomplished, however, was to “visually separat[e] insiders from outsiders” (Arthur, “Aloha Shirt” 10) through their different designs and colors, thus distinguishing Hawai’i’s multi-ethnic community from the horde of tourists coming to its shore (“Aloha Shirt” 10, 12, 2728). Yet, the Hawaiian Renaissance and the decades following it led to the production of Hawaiian-based local garment shops run by Native Hawaiian cultural practitioners. Sig Zane Designs, Kealopiko, the Hawaiian Force, Manuheali’i as well as Na Maku are cases in point. With the creation of eco-friendly garments and designs connecting with the aina (land), these local businesses seek to preserve ancestral traditions and cultural practices, as well as honor and respect their native land. The aloha shirts produced by these companies have nothing to do with the bold and colorful aloha shirts with presupposed Hawaiian prints, massively produced in Hawai’i and on the mainland for tourists and Americans alike. Instead, these new lines of Native Hawaiian aloha garments, because they connect with cultural practices and resources, can have cultural significance for the Native Hawaiian community. A sense of cultural identity is transmitted by both Sig Zane Designs and Kealopiko. Sig Zane Designs (Hilo), a small-family business created in 1985 by “fisherman, surfer, dancer, artist cultural practitioner” Sig Zane,35 bases its designs of pareus and shirts on culture, nature and plants and more traditional palaka, “but if a man wished to stand out in such a gathering, if he wished to subtly one-up his rivals, if he wishes to proclaim his undisputed standing as a native he will wear palaka. To wear palaka is to trade on the snobbery of the Island elite, an exclusive fraternity who called themselves kama’aina… which means children of the land” (qtd. in Arthur, Aloha Attire 164). The kama’aina or children of the land, that Bob Krauss talks about here do not include Native Hawaiians (kanaka maoli in the Hawaiian language), but refers exclusively to the local population born in Hawai’i and the islands’ old-time residents. Indeed, local groups fighting for their rights created an organization—Palaka power—in the late 1970s (Okamura 174). By naming themselves after the work uniform Asian settlers wore on plantation, they reclaimed an identity and a clothing that differentiated them from both tourists and haole. 35 Sig Zane is a Chinese kama’aina-born in O’ahu. He moved to Hilo in the 1970s where he became a “a student of Hawaiian culture.” He joined Halau O Kekuhi in 1981 where he got immersed in the hula tradition, which led to his understanding of the inseparable nature of the hula and the natural world, from which is derived his knowledge of Hawaiian plants and their use. He married Nalani Kanaka’ole, the daughter of his hula teacher, for whom he started designing clothing with land and culture-inspired designs. For this and further references to Sig Zane designs below, see his official website, http://sigzane.com/.

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valued by Native Hawaiians (taro, hala, ‘ie’ie, kukui) to “teach the symbolism of the Hawaiian name of the plant, and giving insight to other aspects of our lifestyle that we build upon experience: all to express gratitude, appreciation, and compassion for allowing a life in this island environment along with the hosts of this culture.” Sig Zane’s goal is not only to “pay homage to Hawaii’s native greenery,” in the words of Francesca Di Meglio, but also to pass on awareness and respect for the land to the next generation for people to appreciate and care for their surroundings (101). Sig Zane’s clothing is not, however, exclusively destined to Native Hawaiians, but reaches out to tourists, in the hope of sensibilizing them to Native Hawaiian bond to the land and fostering their understanding, respect and care for the land.36 Kealopiko, with its first collection launched in 2006, provides a more recent example of Hawaiian-based garments and shirts produced with ecofriendly materials (mostly water-based ink and organic cotton) dyed and printed locally. This shirt company seeks to preserve Native Hawaiian culture, land and beliefs and perpetuate their ancestors. Kealopiko was created by three women of Hawaiian ancestry, Janie Makasobe, Ane Bakutis, Hina Kneubuhl. From the start, their project has sought to change the approaches of certain movements of cultural revival and celebration that “weren’t really true reflections of who we are as a people and what Hawai’i is as our home,” says Makasobe (Navares n.p.). As a result, their designs have taken inspiration from their “aloha for the natural, cultural and historical landscapes of Hawai’i,” to portray, in their words, “native plants and animals, olelo Hawaii (Hawaiian language), our alii (chiefs and monarchs) and the moolelo (history) of our existence in these islands.”37 Botanists in training (Bakutis and Kneubuhl), the owners also use their garments as manifesto for the islands’ environment, as some of their patterns include Hawaiian endangered flora and fauna. Equally instructing on Hawaiian nature, each garment is accompanied by a tag explaining the nature and meaning of its design. Echoing Sig Zane’s desire to bring awareness and respect for the land to the next generation, Makasobe explains: “A big thing for us is education. Even if people know the background on some of our drawings, it’s important to bring these things back. This way the knowledge can be passed on to others” (Sharangi n.p.). Their 36

Sig Zane designed, for instance, the work uniforms to be worn at the Outrigger resort in Waikiki and Keauhou Beach in 2008 in appreciation of the resorts’ environment sustainability and respect for Hawaiian culture and land, in spite of its tourist-oriented business (Terry 19). 37 See their official website for this and further references to Kealopiko’s mission: http://www.kealopiko.com/

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mission does not stop here. In addition to preserving land and culture as well as to instructing and remembering their Hawaiian ancestors, their company “gives back” to the islands by donating a part of their profit to “organizations that support cultural education and environmental conservation in Hawaii,” going a step further than other Hawaiian local garment shops. In spite of the environmental and cultural mission advanced by Sig Zane and Kealopiko, as well as their desire to recover, preserve, and transmit a sense of Hawaiian cultural identity through the creation and wear of a modern, yet, conservative Hawaiian garment, the question remains: can the native population afford it? Sold for approximately 75 to 130 dollars a piece,38 the Native Hawaiian aloha shirt addresses a wealthy population, if not the more eco-friendly tourists, thus questioning the real impact of these Native-Hawaiian-based aloha attires on the Native Hawaiian community.

Coda Haunani-Kay Trask gives sense of Natives’ anger at seeing their culture appropriated and prostituted for tourism; anger at seeing their land destroyed for the construction of new tourist resorts, military bases or any types of industries. While Steele mentions the warmth and friendliness of the islanders welcoming visitors, or while tourist ads depict happy Hawaiians welcoming tourists with their leis and hula dance, Trask gives a different idea of tourism. She warns her reader: “If you are thinking of visiting my homeland, please do not. We do not want or need any more tourists, and we certainly do not like them. If you want to help our cause, pass this message on to your friends” (146). The production of the aloha shirt and its involvement in the development of the tourist industry has contributed to the commodification of Native Hawaiian land, culture and language. The aloha shirt thus speaks as much about Hawaiian multiculturalism, as it speaks of American imperialism, and Asian settlers’ colonialism. However, despite its Western body and colonial history, the aloha shirt can be of cultural significance for the Native Hawaiians if produced and created in respect of their native land and culture. Culture is not immutable, but changes with time. Past and present fuse in Native Hawaiians’ endeavor at preserving their ancestral land, culture and beliefs in their daily prac38

Sig Zane’s aloha shirts range from 110 to 145$. The Hawaiian Force sells aloha T-shirts for 20 to 30$ and aloha shirts for approximately 80$. Kealopiko has Tshirts for 35 to 45$ and aloha shirts for the approximate price of 75$.

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tices, to instruct on the legacy of the land and ancestors, and to pass on this knowledge to the next generation. As seen with Hawaiian-based garment companies, the aloha shirt can contribute to teaching the richness of the aina and perpetuating its aloha—in the pre-colonial sense of the term— binding Native Hawaiians to the land, in the past, present and future. Dissociated from its counterparts produced and sold to tourists, this aloha attire can tell a different story as it connects with the land and begs to remember, preserve and cherish Native Hawaiian values.

Works Cited Arthur, Linda. “The Aloha Shirt and Ethnicity in Hawaii.” Textile. 4.1 (2006): 8-35. —. Aloha Attire: Hawaiian Dress in the Twentieth Century. Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing Ltd, 2000. Ball, Jennifer. “United States: Hawaii.” Encyclopedia of National Dress: Traditional Clothing around the World. Ed. Jill Condra. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2013. 740-45. Brown, Desoto, and Linda Arthur. The Art of the Aloha Shirt. Waipahu: Island Heritage Publishing, 2003. Caves, James. “The Hawaiian Shirt Is the Comeback Kid We’re All Rooting For.” The Huffington Post. 12 Aug. 2014. Updated September 12, 2014. Web. Di Meglio, Francesca. “Pattern Recognition: Sig Zane’s Company Is Dedicated to Protecting and Sharing Hawaiian Heritage and Culture.” ATA Airlines Sights: Your Inflight Travel Guide (Jan/Feb/March 2008): 101-3. Hope, Dale, and Gregory Tozian. The Aloha Shirt: Spirit of the Islands. Hillsboro, OR: Beyond Words Publishing, 2000. Keane, Maribeth and Brad Quinn. “Hawaiian Style: The Roots of the Aloha Shirt.” Interview with Linda Arthur. The Collectors Weekly. 23 July 2010. Web. Korn, Alfons L. “Some Notes on the Origin of Certain Hawaiian Shirts: Frock, Summer-Frock, Block and Palaka.” Ocean Linguistics 15.1-2 (1976): 14-38. Navares, Alissa. “Kealopiko: Three Wahine Bring ‘Fashion with Mana’o’ to the Masses.” Mana: The Meaning of Mahu. Mar. 2014. Web. Nordyke, Eleanor C. The Peopling of Hawai’i. 2nd ed. Honolulu: U of Hawai’i P, 1989.

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Ohnuma. Keiko. “‘Aloha Spirit’ and the Cultural Politics of Sentiment as National Belonging.” The Contemporary Pacific 20.2 (Fall 2008): 36594. Okamura, Jonathan. “Why There Are No Asian Americans in Hawai’i: The Continuing Significance of Local Identity.” Social Process in Hawai’i 35 (1994): 161-78. “Pollster Finds Many Don’t Wear Aloha Shirts; Tell Stories of Origin.” Honolulu Record 9.13 (October 25, 1956): 1. Sarhangi, Sheila. “Style and Substance: The Designers of Kealopiko Teach Native Hawaiian Values Through Their Clothing Line.” Honolulu Magazine. 1 Sept. 2007. Web. Steele, Thomas. The Hawaiian Shirt: Its Art and History. New York: Abbeville Press Publishers, 1984. Takagi, Dana Y. “Faith, Race and Nationalism.” JAAS 7.3 (Oct 2004): 271-78. Terry, Elaine. “Rooted in Ohana.” Hawai’i Hospitality (Sept/Oct 2008): 19. Trask, Haunani-Kay. From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai’i. Honolulu: U of Hawaii P, 1993, rev. ed. 1999.

Websites Hawaiian Force: http://hawaiianforce.com/ Hawaiian Shirt History: http://thealohashirt.net/history Kealopiko: http://www.kealopiko.com/ Manueheali’i: https://www.manuhealii.com/ The Museum of Hawaiian Shirts: http://themohs.org/Home.html Na Makua: http://www.namakua.com/nelson-makua-design Sig Zane Designs: http://sigzane.com/

MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION

RETHINKING MULTICULTURALISM: CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AND CRITICAL LITERACY IN EDUCATION M. KAMEL IGOUDJIL

Introduction Speaking the word is not a true act if it is not at the same time associated with the right of self-expression and worldexpression, of creating and recreating, of deciding and choosing and ultimately participating in society’s historical processes. —Paulo Freire, Cultural Action for Freedom

According to Paulo Freire, the cultural dimension of critical dialogue represents the vehicle for liberation. People hold different philosophical positions about concepts of diversity, inclusion, cross-cultural understanding, and multiculturalism. In fact, for Freire, the cultural dimension of dialogue defines the nature of the human beings. Independent of our philosophical comfort or discomfort with such concepts, however, we increasingly face on a daily basis the reality that we live in a world of “strangers.” We live in a world of people who look and behave differently from ourselves and with whom we are expected to interact constructively and productively, be it in school, workplace, or civic life. Indeed, the human capacity of “speaking a true world” illustrates Freire’s framework on the sociohistorical process, as described in Cultural Action for Freedom, in which he states that “thought and language, constituting a whole, always refer to the reality of the thinking subject. Authentic thought-language is generated in the dialectical relationship between the subject and his concrete historical and cultural reality” (7). How do we, and how should we, behave in a world of strangers? The initial approach to developing effective ideas that might help us answer this fundamental question of ethics in a world of strangers can be summarized in Freire’s framework as a meaningful culture of cosmos. He further develops his praxis based on a genuine critical dialogue, which

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enables us to deconstruct the conventional reality we live in and, therefore, to transform it to find balance and regain our humanity. In the face of a culture of silence, Freire insists on a theory based on universal humanness. In this era of globalization, also known as the global village of the 21st century, there have been migrations around the world, transporting and transmitting cultures and ideas. This concept has been under scrutiny lately as many countries around the world experience the same cultural realities: the openness to a greater cultural diversity. Kwame Anthony Appiah describes the idea in Cosmopolitanism as follows: So there are two strands that intertwine in the notion of cosmopolitanism. One is the idea that we have obligations to others, obligations that stretch beyond those to whom we are related by the ties of kith and kind. […]. The other is that we take seriously the value not just of human life but of particular human lives, which means taking an interest in the practices and beliefs that lend them significance. (xv)

These seem useful guidelines to me. This paper attempts to reflect upon personal experiences, beliefs, class discussions, and debates on education in the United States. My primary purpose contemplates on the importance of critical literacy, critical pedagogy, and multicultural education. This latter can be seen as the backbone particularly for disadvantaged and minority students. Indeed, cultural and critical pedagogy is significant to the education of different minority students. Our classrooms are becoming increasingly inclusive, encompassing not only the diversity of students’ learning abilities but their language proficiency as well (Greene 1993). I believe it is necessary that all educators become familiar with effective strategies for teaching meaningfully content area, such as literature, to diverse students. My intention is to show that teachers and students should engage in a fair reflection about education in order to utilize literacy more efficiently as a culturally intertextual practice where multicultural approaches prove to be necessary for critical pedagogy. In the 21st century, any society where a dominant social class is in charge of the values and the social stability, the minorities or the “oppressed” are always searching to destabilize the social conformity and the status quo. The United States value system is shaken on a daily basis by social inequalities, which can result in an open violence searching for change. The authority has shifted from the pole of the educators, parents, and leaders in general to the pole of the people represented by the students. Strong leadership proves to be critical to maintaining discipline and implement new ideas and reforms. An educational institution with character

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denotes the backbone for a safe environment for learning and guaranteeing the dynamic evolution of social life. Without leadership and role models, students can take advantage of flaws in the system; they treat school as a game for entertainment. Often the education system and the educators seem to focus more on entertaining students rather than educating and motivating them due to lack of education policy (see Irvine 2003). Interestingly, “individualism” does not appear any longer to be the way to define ourselves in history—it is one of the principle tools of the American dominant discourse, which is very oppressive—thus, the importance of each person within society to gain agency. National identity is also oppressive, especially in a multi-cultural context it should be inclusive, not divisive. Engaging the students in a critical dialogue translates into discovering the various divisions of society into individual groups, provides them with a platform to question the social reproduction (see Pierre Bourdieu et al.), and allows them to examine the opposing views in the United States society. Using United States multicultural texts,1 world literature, and theories in the classroom to teach conflicts and social schisms all ease the discovery of truth and our humanity. As Gerald Graff declares: “Teaching the conflicts has nothing to do with relativism or denying the existence of truth. The best way to make relativists of students is to expose them to an endless series of different positions which are not debated before their eyes” (15). By viewing culture, history, and learning as a discussion, students can then search for “truth” from their perspectives, not just the “Eurocentric” one depicted in the textbooks.

Theoretical Discussion In the United Sates, literacy and literature instruction have been implemented to portray and preserve social class, race, and gender peripheries. Many schools and classrooms have applied theses frameworks of literacy and literature instruction, nurturing a singular vision of the nation, national identity, and culture. This neo-conservative rational perspective from various academic positions dates back to the “culture wars” of the 1980s and early 1990s.2 In recent years, with the mobility of world demographics and the globalization of global economies, multicultural approaches to literacy have 1

I deliberately use the notion of United States literature instead of American literature. 2 See Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind and E. D. Hirsh, Jr., Cultural Literacy.

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generated dividing views and practices among many scholars, as noted, for example, by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Toni Morrison. Thus, Gates observes: “The study of humanities is the study of the possibilities of human life in culture. It thrives on diversity. […]. The new [ethnic studies] scholarship has invigorated the traditional disciplines” (114). And Morrison regrets that “American means white…” (47). Such dichotomization denies the United States of America as one people. To denounce the emergence and continuation of Allan Bloom’s thesis of The Closing of the American Mind, many scholars—namely Ronald Takaki, James A. Banks, Christine E. Sleeter, Carl A. Grant, Sonia Nieto, Lisa Delpit, bell hooks, and Henry Giroux, just to name a few—draw on their educational philosophies and practices from their anti-imperialist scholarship based on American Exceptionalism. Hence, nationalism should transcend ethnic and racial identities. The New Criticism, which is still powerful and covertly imposes a specific curriculum on diverse students, veils multiculturalism as a theoretical approach. Despite the realization and recognition of multicultural approaches in education as an alternative epistemological perspective, much work still needs to be implemented to embrace effectively not only the domain of ethnic studies but also all other studies, including the dominant cultural categories. This global approach suggests that there is no pure literary tradition and that the notion of hybridity can be found in the traditional literary canon, in which White authorial texts incorporate African American and/or other minorities in the narrative structures as well. In this context, note Roland Barthes’s view of the text as a gathering of words: [T]he text is a fabric of quotations, resulting from a thousand sources of culture. […] the writer can only imitate an ever anterior, never original gesture; his sole power is to mingle writing, to counter some by others […] and this book itself is but a tissue of signs, endless imitation, infinitely postponed. (Rustle 53)

In other words, literacy instruction in a diverse classroom setting should not use the literature in isolation from the class composition. There is a necessity for a culturally relevant pedagogy. Postmodern critics such as Edward Said and Homi Bhabha have inspired theories in education that challenge the existing power structures. Said’s notion of “Orientalism” underscores the political implication of written texts. He demonstrates, as does Bhabha, that European rendition of the other frames people and cultures according to a European conceptual framework. Knowledge of the “Other” is discovered, described, formulated, appropriated, and manipulated in order to exert power over it. Some

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Western writers and academics make a normative point of departure for analysis and their cultural perspective assumes the authority to describe the difference. Interestingly, Bhabha suggests that the burden of culture lies in the “third space of enunciation” (54), which is located in the horizon of difference. Rather than the one describing and accounting for the other, there is an agonistic negotiation of differences. Bhabha further asserts: It is that Third Space, though unrepresentable in itself, which constitutes the discursive conditions of enunciation that ensure that the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity; that even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read anew. (55, emphasis added)

Exceptionally pertinent in the discussion of literature, Bhabha suggests that now world literatures should come from the people who have suffered the sentence of history, particularly the colonized, the diasporic, the migrant, from the “inter” or “between” places of international culture—the hybrid meeting ground. Postmodernists view any text as unfinished. In this respect, it is precisely in this “unfinishedness” that a text may provide a multiplicity of truth, by filling in its gaps and delays from an accurate perspective. In this paper, I thus formulate the importance of Derrida’s deconstruction theory in analyzing multicultural texts in the classroom. As Robert Scholes claims, “theory must be at the center of our teaching…” (qtd. in Richter 112). Literary texts depict national history, morals, aesthetic ideals, and many other spaces. This theory suggests that literature has a political function. As Bhabha argues, there is no essential difference between the theoretical and the political. Theory should negotiate cultural antagonisms. In fact, literature and theory should be in service of the postmodern enterprise to end cultural hegemony. Derrida’s concept of “deconstruction” is a method of “reading” texts to find and expose the binary opposites immanent in the text’s claims to truth, authority, and authenticity. Deconstructing a text involves three primary processes. First, the reader has to find the core binary at work in the text’s construction. Second, the reader exposes the category that is privileged in the binary, the logos upon which the truth/claim is based, as well as the secondary, debased category or the appurtenance. Last, the reader may use the terms of the truth/claim to invert the binary, showing that an equally valid truth/claim can be made if the logos is decentered and the appurtenance becomes privileged. A poststructuralist or deconstructive approach of reading focuses on the meaning of the text by undoing its bi-

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nary oppositions. For a literary text, this duality denotes the relationship of one single meaning because Derrida rejects the accuracy of such binary opposites. Thus, the deconstruction theory of reading is an effective way of refuting the illusion of any different meaning of a text. This approach clarifies how the reverse of the binary opposition can be meaningful as well. The whole point of deconstruction is to show how truth and meaning are always unstable and contingent, brought into existence by force, i.e., by stabilizing or fixing a meaning based on a binarism, by elevating a privileged category within the binary and the simultaneous suppression of its opposite. Deconstruction is a way to critique regimes of truth by way of showing how this reality is always based on logocentrism. In the context of multiculturalism, Derrida’s act of reading texts suggests that deconstruction can become a powerful tool in challenging original ideas that support regimes of truth and for dismantling powerful oppositions in politics and philosophy. This new way of reading a text using the deconstructive lens operates in a double bind of reading, and in the process the literature is made and remade anew in the act of reading. Hence, the reader makes the text, and the text makes the reader. Deconstruction investigates the space between these two possibilities. With Derrida’s help, many critics concerned with multiculturalism have developed alternative lenses and specific strategies of reading texts. They have transformed the nature of contemporary literary studies through their emphasis on questions of colonization, discrimination, ethnic difference, feminism, racial oppression, the subaltern, the West and its construction of the “other,” imperialism, and Orientalism. In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said argues for what he calls “contrapuntal reading” as follows: In practical terms, ‘contrapuntal reading’ as I have called it means reading a text with an understanding of what is involved [in the text by the taking into] account of both processes, that of imperialism and that of resistance to it, which can be done by extending our reading of the texts to include what was forcibly excluded. [...]. In reading a text, one must open it out both to what went into it and to what its author excluded. (66-67)

By looking at a text contrapuntally, readers take into account intertwined histories and perspectives. Specifically, contrapuntal analysis, as developed by Said, is used in interpreting colonial texts, considering the perspectives of both the colonizer and the colonized. This approach is not only helpful but also necessary in making meaningful connections in a literary text. Interpreting contrapuntally is interpreting different perspec-

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tives simultaneously and seeing how the text interacts with itself as well as with historical or biographical contexts. It is reading with “awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts” (51). Contrapuntal Reading takes in both accounts of an issue; it addresses both the perspective of imperialism and the resistance to it. At the same time, the act of reading also becomes a process of self-examination. Similarly, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. formulates a poetics of reading central to black literary criticism and theory when he declares that black people in the United States have had to develop particular strategies of reading and interpretation for survival: Black people have always been masters of the figurative: saying one thing to mean something quite other has been basic to black survival in oppressive Western cultures. Misreading signs could be, and indeed often was, fatal. ‘Reading,’ in this sense, was not play; it was an essential aspect of the ‘literacy’ training of a child. This sort of metaphorical literacy, the learning to decipher complex codes [I would add the ability to deconstruct…], is just about the blackest aspect of the black tradition. (Black Literature 6, emphasis added)

This approach represents a form of deconstructing the hegemony which contends that the “oppressed” actually participate in their oppression because the nature of the dominant discourse compels them to do so. Only through the “pedagogy of the oppressed,” as Freire puts it, do the oppressed (and their oppressors, according to Freire) become aware of the way in which discourse structures oppression. In fact, counter-hegemonic discourse must be subversive in order to deconstruct or unravel the dominant texts.

Critical Literacy American educators have the freedom and the intellectual capacity to create positive change for critical literacy reform. In fact, American students need an education that is relevant to their lives. All educational reforms and human-made philosophies go through changes and renewal. Educators must liberate themselves from the shackles of orthodox traditions such as Eurocentrism and the New Criticism, all of which contradict a tradition and ethics based on tolerance, divergent thinking, and critical multiculturalism. In the forward of the book edited by Schmidt and Lazar, Gunderson states that “Classrooms at all levels are becoming increasingly more culturally and linguistically diverse” (qtd. in Schmidt xii). Also, Schmidt and

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Lazar explain in the preface how their collection challenges monism, which they define as “the belief that there is but one correct looking glass for understanding the world” (xiv). They claim: For over a century, monism has been the dominant view for defining and understanding reading and literacy. Even to this day [in 2016], governmental agencies still charge elite panels of researchers to cull the research in an effort to find the ‘best theory of reading,’ the ‘best practices of literacy instructions.’ (xiv, emphasis added)

There is an urgency to shift the traditional framework of literacy to critical literacy, which considers reading from multiple perspectives and interpretations. The contemporary society with its pluralism and diversity demands a new approach to literacy to meet the needs of all members of society—multicultures—instead of the dominant culture which is oppressive as it is. The areas that need immediate attention for education reform are promoting good governance, developing critical multicultural curricula, including the rights of minorities and women, and marginalizing the ideology of compulsion. There must be a critical discourse on critical literacy and pedagogy on how to put in place proper education instead of focusing on qualitative data on how to lead in the world and regain American teaching and leadership in the world. Education discourse, particularly literacy instruction, aims to foster greater national and corporate allegiance with the context of global competition. Education must redefine its purpose in promoting social justice. To this effect, Banks states that a “major aim of multicultural education is to cement and unify a deeply divided nation rather than divide a united one” (283). In fact, critical multiculturalism should analyze the inequalities of power that results from practices of racial, ethnic, gender, class, and sexual discrimination with an official purpose to social justice and systematic change not only in the United States but also in the global context. To achieve such a goal, critical multicultural education, as well as the culturally relevant vision of literacy and culture in America, should counter the Western epistemological discourse wherein the ethnic cultures endured constant attacks. Thus, the multicultural curriculum deconstructs the dominant discourse seen in literary texts and critiques such ambiguous historical invention of whiteness. Any country that does not provide a clear vision for its students discriminates against minorities and subjugates ethnic groups is anathema to American education.

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Critical Pedagogy Educators should create small learning communities, which promote stable, close, respectful relationships for intellectual development and personal growth. Critical pedagogy must understand the students’ experience as conditioned by its cultural and historical context and avoid transmitting an intellectual tradition that does not reflect the interest of the majority of the students. However, if students’ experiences are defined by oppression, basing education on the students’ experiences alone will not transform the inequity. Indeed, critical pedagogy must create an educational context that draws students out of their “existential” everyday lives to take new perspectives on social relationships. This consciousness can be achieved through a method of critical and reflective dialogue that links students’ experiences with broader social and political problems. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paolo Freire points out that genuine dialogue allows the educator to introduce themes and structure to the discussion along with the students: Dialogue is the encounter between men, mediated by the world, in order to name the world. Hence, dialogue cannot occur between those who want to name the world and those who do not wish this naming—between those who deny others the right to speak their word and those whose right to speak has been denied them. (69)

In this sense, critical pedagogy in its attention to social justice, the empowerment of disadvantaged groups, and the social and political context of learning, often involves a critique of the tradition and a consideration of new social arrangements. If the critical pedagogy classroom employs central texts from the tradition or the dominant culture, it is, still, engaged in an interpretive task as students encounter unfamiliar concepts and questions that relate to a broader social reality than their immediate social experience (see Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom). Education should provide all students with a kind of consciousness that cultivates a sense of one’s historical nature. Freire describes the oppressed as dehumanized in part because they live “‘submerged’ in a world to which they can give no meaning, lacking a ‘tomorrow’ and a ‘today’ because they exist in an overwhelming present” (Oppressed 79).

Rethinking Multiculturalism We can no longer ignore the “heteroglossia” Mikhail Bakhtin has meticulously pointed to: the existence of many voices, some contesting, some

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cohering, all demanding and deserving attention (288-93). It is the educator’s responsibility to connect with the students and help them learn and excel. Instruction of any kind that fails to consider the students’ culture in its approach risks losing the students’ interest or comprehension for lack of a shared or collaborative context. Interestingly, the students’ participation and responses to the educators’ questions depend on their socially constructed views of individuality and voice. Related to the idea of understanding our students’ cultural context to better design our instruction is the need to learn about students’ literacy background, so we may guide them in further developing their skills. Educators, students, and parents must be open-minded and curious to learn. As Freire argues: “There could be no creativity without the curiosity that moves us and sets us patiently impatient before a world that we did not make, to add to it something of our own making” (Pedagogy of Freedom 38). We need to embrace other perspectives/cultures and be open to constructive criticism to experience and broaden our knowledge. Thus, the receptiveness must capture the idea of critical thinking, which puts emphasis on one’s willingness to listen and receive suggestions, rather than resistance. Without the key component, open-mindedness becomes credulous. Becoming open-minded involves dealing with our biases and admitting them. Educators and students should be willing to be surprised and learn from each other. The students should be taught to become active learners and be responsible for their education. The focus should be on acquiring knowledge as a goal. The educator’s role is to prepare the students to perpetuate democratic social order and values (see Dewey). In my teaching, I have put more emphasis on the students’ role in the learning process to create a positive student-learning environment by considering all their cultures. When promoting such education and excellence in teaching, students can apply themselves and discover alternatives and endless possibilities. Knowing the students’ needs will help the educator to tailor his/her units accordingly. Also, the students’ feedback will allow the teacher to reflect on the teaching style to allow the learning to thrive. With this kind of critical discourse, our students can embark on a journey of self-discovery, searching for cross-cultural understanding by debating the re-vision and deconstruction of United States history. Such authentic intellectual learning experience fosters the students’ continued search for the truth by telling and retelling their personal story and perspectives, which ultimately transcend to a more humanistic and multicultural com-

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munity and culture. By doing so, the students connect their different selves to a larger national dialogue and narrative to global perspectives.

Conclusion This paper has shown the importance of reflective teaching as a central component to both critical pedagogy and multicultural education. There are interdependence and shared goals, which should motivate collaboration in curriculum and instruction. Critical pedagogy prepares students for active participation in all domains of social life by beginning with the classroom. It fosters full intellectual development that is meant to provide the foundation, in knowledge and disposition for critical social participation in a range of social contexts. There is more than ever need to “open the American minds” to greater cultural diversity. In fact, we cannot ignore the changing of the racial composition of the student population and the larger society. There is urgent need to embrace this current intellectual opportunity to revitalize the social sciences and the humanities. In our classrooms, educators should engage the students in authentic, relevant discussions to solve pertinent issues about humanity. Our students are naturally committed to the search for intellectual openness and critical inquiry. Indeed, multiculturalism facilitates the critical spirit by transforming the classroom into “dialogic imagination” and a meeting ground for divergent thinking.

Works Cited Apple, Michael W. Cultural Politics and Education. New York: Teachers College Press, 1996. —. Ideology and Curriculum. New York: Routledge, 1990. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2007. Banks, James A. An Introduction to Multicultural Education. Upper Saddle River: Pearson, 2014. —. “African American Scholarship and the Evolution of Multicultural Education.” Journal of Negro Education 63.3 (1992): 273-86. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: The U of Texas P, 1981. Barthes, Roland. The Rustle of Language. Trans. Richard Howard. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1989. Bennett, David, ed. Multicultural States: Rethinking Difference and Identity. New York: Routledge, 1998.

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Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Birsch, David. Language, Literature and Critical Practice. New York: Routledge, 1989. Bloom, Allan. The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Jean-Claude Passeron. Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. Trans. Richard Nice. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2000. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1997. Delpit, Lisa. Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom. New York: The New P, 2006. Delpit, Lisa, and Joanne Kilgour Dowdy, eds. The Skin That We Speak: Thought on Language and Culture in the Classroom. New York: The New P, 2002. Dewey, John. Democracy and Education. New York: The Free P. 1944. Freire, Paulo. Cultural Action for Freedom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Educational Review, 2000. —. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum Publishing, 1970. —. Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage. New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2001. Freund, Elizabeth. The Return of the Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., ed. Black Literature and Literary Theory. New York: Methuen, 1984. —. Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars. New York: Oxford UP, 1992. Giroux, Henry A. Theory and Resistance in Education: A Pedagogy for the Opposition. New York: Bergin & Garvey, 1983. Graff, Gerald. Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1993. Greene, Maxine. “Diversity and Inclusion: Toward a Curriculum for Human Beings.” Teachers College Record 95.2 (1993): 211-21. Hassett, Dawnene D., and Carl A. Grant, eds. “Monocultural Literacy: The Power of Print, Pedagogy, and Epistemological Blindness.” Reconceptualizing Literacy in the New Ages of Multiculturalism and Pluralism. Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing, 2016, 77-104.

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Hirsh, E. D., Jr., Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know: Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1987, hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994. Irvine, Jacqueline Jordan. “Caring, Competent Teachers in Complex Classrooms.” Educating Teachers for Diversity: Seeing with a Cultural Eye. New York: Teachers College Press, 2003, 40-51. Lentricchia, Frank. After the New Criticism. Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1980. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark. New York: Vintage Books, 1993. Nieto, Sonia. The Light in their Eyes: Creating Multicultural Learning Communities. New York: Teachers College P, 1999. Richter, David H. Falling into Theory: Conflicting Views on Reading Literature. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. —. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979. Roberts, Kathleen Glenister, and Ronald C. Arnett, eds. Communication Ethics: Between Cosmopolitanism and Provinciality. New York: Perter Lang, 2008. Schmidt, Patricia Ruggiano, and Althier M. Lazar, eds. Reconceptualizing Literacy in the New Ages of Multiculturalism and Pluralism. Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing, 2016. Sleeter, Christine E., and Carl A. Grant. Making Choices for Multicultural Education: Five Approaches to Race, Class, and Gender. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2009. Spanos, William V. The End of Education: Toward Posthumanism. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. Takaki, Ronald. A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. New York: Little, Brown, 1993.

IDENTITY POLITICS IN THE ESOL CLASSROOM AMANDA DE VARONA AND SAGHAR LESLIE NAGHIB

The concept of American identity has expanded to embrace its multicultural roots from which it was originally established. However, from the critical perspective of two educators of English as a Second Language (ESL) who work with international students on a daily basis, the term “multiculturalism” has been exhausted because it has become generic and has lost its effectiveness in discourse. This idea is upheld by Lynne Cheney when she states “many of them [people] feel that the word [multiculturalism] has been hijacked in the same way that the word feminism has been” (8). Additionally, multiculturalism is used simply as “a procedure to make people feel good” (9). Within the international context of a student body, our focus has shifted from multiculturalism and acceptance to the role of linguistic agency in shaping identity politics. This contribution focuses on an action-research project conducted with students enrolled in a Level 5 Reading and Writing class as well as a Level 5 Oral Communication class, the most advanced and final level of English instruction, in the Intensive English Program at the University of Miami. Throughout the semester, the students completed various reflective reading, writing, speaking, and listening activities in response to the inquiry “How is identity formed and how is it transformed?” To provide background on the context of where this project took place, the Intensive English Program (IEP) at the University of Miami (UM) hosts approximately 350 students from 28 different countries. The program consists of a total 5 levels. For levels 1-3, reading and writing are taught as independent classes with an integrated speaking and listening course. In levels 4-5, the approach changes slightly as reading and writing skills are also integrated into one class. The 9 women and 6 men who participated in our 14-week project were in a level 5 Reading and Writing (RW) taught by Saghar Leslie Naghib and a level 5 Oral Communication (OC) class taught by Amanda de Varona (EdD). The age of the students ranged from 18 to “fifty-something,” as we had one older “non-traditional”

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student in the group. The students represented the countries of Angola, Bolivia, China, Kuwait, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela, and five of them were graduate students. The approach in the level 5 RW class was to provide an integrated curriculum with both skill and content, much akin to the transformative model of multicultural education curriculum design. As Ladson-Billings explains: “In the transformative model […] multicultural education is not a separate, isolated, once-a-year activity. Instead, the regular curriculum includes a range of cultural perspectives…” (para.10). The course objectives for RW are overwhelming considering the intensive nature of the UM IEP program; however, framing the skill-based objectives within a multiculturalist perspective was a streamlined method for maintaining the integrity of our action-research project and reaching student learning objectives. To further provide a unified method, the required assignments for RW and OC were established in advance of the semester to ensure that both student and teacher efforts were not duplicated across the classes. Thus, students in the level 5 RW class read, reflected, and wrote about topics concentrating on an “identity politics” theme. The core assignments included a critical reaction paper, a persuasive essay and various reader-response reflections. The assignments and activities became the method for data collection. Two prompts and a questionnaire were used to introduce the students to the concept of identity politics. At the onset of the semester and after surveying the student population in the level 5 RW class, it was hypothesized that students were firmly grounded in the concepts of identity and multiculturalism. However, after generating discussion on the semester’s overarching question and assigning the first prompt, it became apparent that the students needed a framework for writing about identity politics and forming an authentic stance. The first prompt was assigned during the first week of classes and consisted of three questions: 1) How do you identify yourself? And, what is the most important part of your identity? 2) Is it your sex, your race or ethnicity, your sexual orientation, your class status, your nationality, your religious affiliation, your age, your political beliefs? 3) Is there one part of your identity that stands out from the rest, or does your identity change depending on who you’re with, what you’re involved in, where you are in your life? The students were unresponsive and the majority did not understand the purpose of the question. As a result, the Aspects of Identity Questionnaire IV (AIQ-IV) was used as tool for inviting students into the dialogue while providing a baseline for each student. The 2013 AIQ-IV is a 45-question instrument that measures individual responses to identity based on a Likert scale ranging 1 at the lowest to 5 at

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the highest. The key phrase in the Likert scale was “…important to my sense of who I am.” Students demonstrated a more positive response to the AIQ-IV than to the initial prompt. Moreover, the results of the AIQ-IV demonstrated that the majority of our students ranked at 90% for esteeming identity when constructing self-definitions. The questionnaire results were released to the students and used to guide a student-led discussion. To generate further discussion, a second, simplified, prompt was assigned during the second week of the semester. Students were asked, “What does the term “identity politics” mean to you?” While the discussion that ensued in the first week was a promising indicator of eliciting authentic written responses from the students, the results were as dismal as the first set of responses to the previous prompt. Students wrote: • • • • • • •

What this mean? What is this? You mean the identity? I know ‘identity’ and I know ‘politics’, but I don’t know ‘the identity politics’. Is this for a grade? What the benefit of this? You. You are an identity politic.

The students faced not only a conceptual discrepancy in addressing the core question in our action-research project, but also a linguistic discrepancy as well. In order to mitigate any hesitation or disinterest in the theme, another questionnaire was used to help the students develop a basis for their responses. The 24-item National Identity Module (2003) was well-received by the students and demonstrated that the majority of our students felt strongly about religious, national, and physical characteristics that define their identity. The results were shared with the students and another student-led discussion ensued. We found that providing the students with every opportunity to rely on frameworks of identity that were already a part of their consciousness and not neatly fitted into our Western curricular frameworks was significant. Geneva Gay (2000) argues that “the cultural knowledge, prior experiences, frames of reference, and performance styles of ethnically diverse students make learning more relevant to and effective for students” (cited in Dutro et al. 272). In the level 5 RW class, students found it much easier to read and respond to a questionnaire or survey, which asked simple and direct questions, rather than to expound on a prompt within the framework of a five-paragraph essay.

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The first essay that students had to write in the RW class was a critical reaction essay during the third week of the semester. The students were required to write a two-paragraph critical reaction to the short story, “The Necklace” by Guy de Maupassant (1884). The first paragraph reflected a summary of the short story along with a thesis stating the student’s critical perspective. This particular short story was chosen to demonstrate the use of identity politics in a literary piece. One of the young, male Saudi Arabian students captured the essence of both the curricular and thematic objective by defending de Maupassant’s use of a costume-jewelry necklace to demonstrate the contrasting identities of the two main characters, Madame Loisel and Madame Forestier. Another one of our students, a young woman from Libya, also demonstrated content and curricular mastery by criticizing the use of objects, the costume-jewelry necklace, to establish one’s identity. She particularly emphasized the “shallowness” of Madame Loisel because she placed her identity in a physical object. Additionally, one young, female Angolan student used the literary element—irony—to criticize Madame Forestier for publicly showing herself as a wealthy woman when her publicly prized diamond necklace was really inauthentic. The responses were overwhelmingly detailed and critical, which demonstrated that the first written application involving identity politics in the RW class was successful. In reflection, the success in the application could have be attributed to the fact that we were three weeks into the semester and rooted in two weeks of discussions, questionnaires, surveys and classroom bonding. Overall, the students had an easier time relating to identity politics as applied to an external object than internally and personally. In the fifth week of the semester, students wrote a persuasive paper. In conjunction with their 5 OC class, students had to write a 5-paragraph essay persuading against a common stereotype of their cultural, ethnic, or religious backgrounds. After having had a framework for the topic in both in the level 5 RW and 5 OC classes, the students had a much easier time providing content that reflected their personal attitudes regarding identity politics. For instance, one of our young Kuwaiti students wrote about the misconceptions of modesty and covering oneself in Kuwaiti culture. She expounded on the differences between measures of covering oneself across the Arab states and that each state had its own stance. Another student from Venezuela persuaded against popular attitudes of Venezuelan wealth. He detailed the crises in the country and the needs of his countrymen. At this point in the semester, the students were just starting to uncover the depth of what identity politics meant and how it was applicable to their lives.

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Finally, towards the end of the semester, we surveyed the level 5 RW students with open-ended questions to determine whether their authentic response to the concepts of identity and identity politics were any different than from the beginning of the semester. The survey was teacher generated and comprised of nine questions. The following table reflects the class’s compiled responses to the survey. The first question is omitted from the table below as it asked students what their names were; since the answers are authentic to each student, the grammar and spelling has not been altered.

Questions

Table 1: Spring 2015 Level 5 Reading & Writing Identity Survey Student Responses

2. How do you define identity?

x x x x x x x x x x

Identity is what makes each person unique. Identity stands for self-examination, title that you live in the autognosis world. Identity is all the characteristics of one population that make this population different and unic. The condition of being yourself not another. It is the cognition that people think about others. People always treat others subconsciously by their identity. I love people who talk with number and analysis; I speak in this way. I don’t change my nature character. Identity reflects what the concepts and beliefes of people. The state that makes you yourself. Identity is a way to describe a person. Most people answer this question by mentioning their family ‘origin’ and their religion. But I don’t think all of these are things which can describe the identity of the person, I can define identity by their name, their thought, their manners and their believes in life.

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3. How do you define multicultural?

x

4. Do you think you are a multicultural person? If your answer is yes, how? If your answer is no, why not?

x x

x

x x x x x x x

x x x x

x x x x x

Being exposed to different cultures. Different believes. Different gods. Different language. Difference origion. Different clothes. Mixing of cultures when one population has characteristics from more of one culture. Many culture or groups in one society. I think it’s a complicated and mixed cultural. Many different customs blend together and become a new particular culture. It mean mix a culture and usually it’s a good thing It is happened when people from different places in the world live together, they interact with each other and share their mores and cultures. The state of being able to know and understand more than one culture. Multicultural is the mi of different cultural. I can define multicultural as a different two or more than one or cultural identities a unified socisty as a state or nation/country [being belong with two or more than one culture] and to be a part of your life. Yes, I don’t think you need parents from different cultures to be multicultural. I feel just knowing about different cultures and being around people from different originality makes you multicultural. Yes, I believe God is exist in the world. I believe there is Buddha. They are in somewhere looking at us supporting us. Yes, becayse I am a mix of 2 different cultures. My mother’s family is from Europe (Italy and Spain) and my father’s family is from Venezuela. Yes, Because Im came frum one cultura and I life with many culture. I think I’m a multicultural person. I can accept other countries’ culture such as Christmas holiday. “ treat or trick” and other courtesy of different culture. But I also insist own cultural custom. For example, I think I’m always gentle and use modest attitude to talk with others. Yes, Because I travel a lot around the world. Yes, Because my mother cames from the west of Libya and my father comes from the east. Also, because I travelled a lot and I have lived outside of my country for a while. Yes, because I have Saudi relatives whose culture is a bit different and furthermore, I live in the U.S. so I know their culture. Yes, because in my country we have different people from different country and now I move to Miami one of the most multicultural city in the world. No, because I do belong to only one culture and one country and one region.

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5. Define your own identity. Please explain your thoughts in detail.

x x x x x

x x

x x x

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Identity is my thoughts and feelings and most importantly my actions. I feel like it doesn’t matter where you’re from or whats your social status is. Smart. Lazy but sometimes hardworking. Stubborn but sensitiveness. Have expanding souls. Multicultural daughter of parents. Good girl within relatives and a student. I am like almost all the Venezuelan people of my generation: a mix of different cultures. My religion, culture and family. Those de limit my identity. My family education and country’s culture influence. My identity is a student who need work hard and absorb more knowledge abroad. I’m more focus on study and practice in university through I also join some activities. I have less play than other student because of my own identity. Usually I think about furure and how I can do many good. I am a Libyan Muslim girl. I like introducing myself with my religion because I think this is the most important thing in my identity. I am so proud to be Libyan as well. Being Arab is another important point; I really am proud of being Arab. My sex also reflects an aspect of my identity. I believe that I am a thinking person. I think a lot before I say or do something. My hobbi is me and the things I love too identify me. I’m from Angola and my city is Luanda. I’m single and I’m multiculture because have frindys from different country. I’m tall, I have brown eyes, I have black hair. I’m little crazy, fun, and confident. I define my identity by my first name “Rawan.” I would define with my thoughts, beleives, and the way how I see things and how I my manners with everyone and they way who I treat others. I think it all about the person itself.

Identity Politics in the ESOL Classroom 6. How does it benefit you to be a part of your cultural, religious, ethnic, professional and academic identity? Explain and provide examples.

324 x x

x x x

x x

x x x

To have people around you with something in common, who understand and make you feel like you belong. Live gets more interesting. Also. If I want to get involved with the society I must have those identity. They are strong tools. Cultural— working in multicultural companies or schools. Religious— someone to rely on when everyone abundant you. I think that I don’t have any important benefit comparing with other cultures. Each culture has positive things and negative also. There are many benefit. For instance, a sense of belonging, peculiarin, and puanding. I will have feelong of belonging. What’s more, I can insist myself by support of my cultural and ethnic identity. For example, I feel very similar and be kind to other student study abroad. They also treat me in this way. I insis and encourage myself by our country’s culture and believe that hard work people can get a good future. It give more cultural knowledge that helped me on my life and my professional academic. My religioun tald my that I should respect people and work hard to get what you want and more things. Living and raising up in a conservative society like the Libyan society has developed different great manners in my personality. This society has the mixture of Islam and the middle east’s culture and mores. In addition academic experience has influenced me a lot. For instance, I was chosen to work as a teacher assistant when I was chosen, I didn’t know that this would help me expand my perceptions later on. It affect my personality, my reality. They’ll inplant positive manners and principles in my character. It’s benefit me in the way I set more knowledge about people. For example, to study in the IEP with different people from different culture and everyday I learn something different. It benefit me a lot especially since my culture an dmy religion, which affect me in a good way it has helped me to respect other cultures it teach us how to communicate with other and respect their opinion. It has learned us what are manners and how we can use it.

7. How does it disadvantage you to be a part of your cultural, religious, ethnic, professional and academic identity?

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x

x x x

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It could lead to having a single story about other cultures and religions or being closed minded and not accepting new and different ideas. Cultural—cultural shock. People sometimes “abuse” other’s believings. Religious—different religions have different opinion. Academic—economy vs humanity. Hard to balance both. The same that the last question/answer. The disadvantage is when you are in some country, sum wil face some difficulties and racism. There are also many different customs and culture different from other countries. Base on different identity I have many different opinion with other foreigner student. For example, I think we cannot look other eyes directly when we talk with others. This is a behavior for express respect. But they will think I’m not respect them. In addition, my identity is a student. That makes me more focus on study. However, it’s very different with foreigner students. This makes us have less topic or experience to talk about. I think different people have different identity. And these difference decided people use different language style. For example, the boss in a company different from a stuff. Also, they have different opinion about the politics. To be honest, I see the advantages of my cultural; religious; ethnic and academic identity more than the negative side. However, I can say that my society has just lately been opened to the world; therefore, this migh be a wrong thing to most of my fellow Libyans. Nevertheless, I had the chance to live abroad and travel to meet new cultures. I have same red lines that I shouldn’t cross. However, after all, everybody have their own red line. The disadvantage about it is that sometimes it is difficult to adapte or adjust your life according to with other people style. It disadvantage me in the way how do people thinks about my culture, religion and ethnic. It all about the single story that people have about my culture which is wrong thoughts and based on their wrong thought they treat you bad for example many people have bad thought about Islam they describe Islam as a terrorists.

Identity Politics in the ESOL Classroom

9. What does identity politics mean to you?

8. How are identity, language and politics related? Can you provide examples? In this scenario, politics can be defined as a concept much broader than government politics.

326 x x x x x

x x

x x x

Politics can mean the way you deal with people and life. Politics and language are related to identity because it’s a part of who you are. Yes. In Tang Dinesty in China the empire use Buddism to control its citizen, telling the to obey not crime, be nice to people, do not complain. In the majority of the cases identity, language and politics are the same inside one specific population. No answer. The mean disadvantage that U.S. and Europen show the world that people from my area are bad people and like an animal. However I wish we can change this idea from good short story about us and the alike things. I have beautiful language that I love it. However, my politics related is peace and produce things for people. Language and politics are the components of identity. For example, since my mother language is Arabic, this means that I read a lot in Arabic more than any other language I can speak. As a result, I have the chance to know more about Arab and Islam more than other foreign people. In other words, this will reflect on my identity because I will express myself in Arabic and have the concepts that most Arabs have. I think that your identity will affect your politics and the language is what you explain your politics with. No answer. It mean your belonging to politics actuation for my peace.

Overall, the students in level 5 RW had an increasingly easier time in writing about their individual responses on identity politics towards the latter half of the 12-week semester than in the first half. It can be argued that this is because the students had more background knowledge, an oral communication class that integrated the same topic, and various lectures, reading excerpts, and classroom discussions on the theme of identity politics. While at the beginning of the semester, we hypothesized that ESL students were more attuned to the term identity politics than the term multiculturalism, the data from the level 5 RW class demonstrated the oppo-

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site. The term multiculturalism was a more relatable and linguistically accessible word for the students as opposed to the term identity politics. In the Oral Communication class, the approach was not to focus on fostering multiculturalism, but rather an analysis and deeper understanding of the components of each student’s personal identity and how it had changed over time. Moreover, students were required to reflect on stereotypes about their own culture in addition to stereotypes they held about the other students and other nationalities represented in the class. The overall goal of Oral Communication 5 activities was to take students outside of realm of ‘feel good’ multicultural education and to analyze and delve into themselves as individuals. As advocated by Guillory, the classroom was utilized as a place “where students are able to expose and deconstruct their assumptions no matter how difficult it might be to move forward toward deeper understanding of themselves” (1). The students documented their information throughout the semester by responding to open-ended prompts and questions that were presented in various media formats. The activities were purposefully written utilizing open-ended items as Morris recommends when she writes that “boundaries come tumbling down if teachers and students engage in real conversation where answers are always open ended” (4). Data was collected from the students through recorded presentations, journal and portfolio activities, and a final gallery-style presentation. Each presentation and activity was highly scaffolded as the teacher also participated in the project and provided models every step of the way. The process for data collection for the Oral Communication component began the first day of class. As the overall guiding question for all of the Identity Project was “Who are you?,” each student was recorded answering that question in a presentation. The students were not given a time limit; they were allowed to answer the question in any way they chose. Some of the students spoke for as little as 30 seconds while the longest speech lasted 8 minutes. At that same time, each student had their picture taken for the reflective journal and portfolio. During the first week of class, they completed the first journal activity. Students had to record their initial impression of the other students based solely on their picture from the first day of class and their home country. This was purposely done in the first week before the students had the opportunity to settle into the class and become familiar with each other. We wanted the data to reflect the students’ honest, initial response before getting to know their classmates rather than after. This activity would provide the basis to see how each student’s opinion changed throughout the semester with regards to stereotypes.

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The first major presentation of the semester was based on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s ted.com presentation called “The Dangers of the Single Story.” After watching the speech, discussing it as a class, and completing reflective questions on it, students were given the opportunity to correct their ‘single story’ by answering and presenting on the prompt “This is what you have wrong about me, and this is who I truly am.” Students were allowed to address any incorrect assumptions others held about their country, culture, religion, or them as individuals. The first presentation was given by the teacher so that students would have model off which to work. One week later, students gave their presentations on “Correcting the Single Story.” Many of the Middle Eastern students chose to focus on the differences between people from their particular region of their home country and what made them different from other areas within the same country. They wanted the class to understand that there is not one homogenous Middle Eastern culture, even within the same country. Some of the other presentation topics included the fact that Africa is not one country but a continent composed of many different ones, that Saudi women are not repressed or subjugated to men as many people believe, that they are free to choose to cover their heads or not, that Bolivia has a higher literacy rate than the United States, and that there is a vibrant Muslim community in China. The most memorable presentation from this activity was made by a young man from Saudi Arabia. While he was an excellent student, he was very quiet and didn’t talk very often in class. This young man silenced our entire classroom with his presentation on “Why All Muslims are not Terrorists.” He spoke very poignantly about how Muslims are negatively portrayed in the media and of the personal confrontations he had experienced as a young, Middle Eastern, Muslim man in the United States. After class, he confessed that many people, including other Intensive English Program instructors, advised him against speaking on this topic; however, he felt very passionate about taking advantage of the opportunity to correct this misconception of Muslims that is perpetrated by the media. This student best summarized his presentation by stating “the true Muslims are the students you see here in this class every day, not on T.V.” These presentations on “Correcting the Single Story” were not a passive listening activity for the other students in the class. In their reflective journals, the students were required to take notes on each presentation. For each speaker, the students recorded what others had wrong according to the speaker, what the speaker wanted the class to know about them, and what they learned from each presenter. The cumulative activity for the Oral Communication portion of the project came at the end of the semester. For the final presentation, students

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had to put together a scrapbook, power point presentation, poster presentation, or movie to illustrate how their identity had changed. They were allowed to include any information, life experiences, pictures, or stories they wanted; however, they were required to answer the three questions through their chosen form of media. The three guiding questions were: who did you used to be, who are you now, and who will you be in the future? As with the aforementioned presentation, the teacher also modeled with her personal presentation. These presentations were given the last week of class in a gallery-style environment open to other classes from the Intensive English Program. What was impressive with this set of presentations was the extremely personal nature, experiences, and anecdotes the students incorporated. Some of the students, including two who were very outspoken in the class, asked to present once the gallery visitors had left. They did not feel comfortable sharing their final presentations with an unknown audience. The student feedback and findings of this action-research project were multidimensional. From the students, the feedback was very positive. The overall consensus was that the project activities were fun and easy, but they required soul-searching and honesty to complete. As one young lady from Angola said: “It was like studying myself.” Another student talked about the role of time on her personal identity. While presenting on the university where she had studied dentistry and showing a picture of the student clinic, she stated: “I used to hate this place, but now I realize how much fun I actually had there. I can talk about this place and be happy now. I couldn’t do that before. Now, I am happy to say I spent so many hours in that room. It brought me here today.” Finally, other students reported that analyzing their personal identity made them feel exposed because they dealt with very personal issues in a public forum. During the final presentation, a Middle-Eastern female student spoke very candidly about the pain and public criticism she experienced as a child. Due to her taste in clothing and short haircut, she was often accused of being a lesbian. While she was always aware of how these events had helped shape her into an open, accepting adult, she reported that talking about these events as part of the final presentation helped her to confront and find peace with the pain and public shaming she had experienced. While focusing on the research side of the project, there were several significant findings. At the beginning of the project, students focused on the external factors such as nationality, career, personality, and demographic information to define their personal identity. As the project progressed, the students become much more introspective about the foundations and components of their identity. One of the most surprising changes came from

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the young man who gave the 8-minute response to the question “Who are you?” on the first day of class. He spoke very little about himself on the first day; the majority of the speech focused on the world of finance and accounting. By the end of the project, he reported that he did not want to be defined solely by his job as an auditor for a Saudi Arabian bank. He wanted people to know that he was fun-loving, flexible, always laughing, and always open to change. He proved this point to the class during the final presentation by showing pictures of exotic animals, including a cheetah, he kept as pets, and the many radical haircuts he had worn over the past few years. This was a stark change in perception from the young professional who gave an 8-minute speech on finance to a young man with long braids in his hair and a pet cheetah. Another interesting finding from this research project and the external factors of identity politics came from the focus of the “Correcting the Single Story” presentations. As previously stated, many of our Middle Eastern students chose to focus on the differences between people from their particular region and what made them different from other areas of their home country. Rather than assume their fellow countrymen and women were aware of these differences, the students were explicit and deliberate in pointing them out as a component of their personal identities. This approach not only benefitted the non-Middle Eastern students, but is also strengthens Cheney’s opinion that, “students can’t be expected to understand other cultures if they ignorant about the one in which they spent their lives” (9). Therefore, these presentations served a dual purpose. They erased the assumption that even among citizens from the same country a shared nationality makes everyone alike. Secondly, the students’ focus on regionalism rather than nationality demonstrates they had learned “to regard themselves and others as individuals—unique individuals— neither defined by nor judged according to the groups to which they belong” (Cheney 10). In conclusion, the purpose of this project was not to focus specifically on multicultural education, but rather on personal identity. Through this process of studying the components of the students’ identities, several fascinating changes occurred. The initial student responses to the question “Who are you?” were very superficial and more like a summary of their demographic information. The first presentations revealed that the components of the students’ identities centered on outsiders’ perceptions of them as people. However, the last survey in the RW class and the cumulative presentation in the OC class revealed highly private and personal components of each student’s individual identity.

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Although multicultural education was never a direct goal of this project, it became a secondary result. The shared experiences of selfreflection and analysis fostered acceptance and forged relationships among the students. The process of self-reflection as a group broke down the barriers of assumptions and stereotypes in the class. Moreover, it fostered acceptance and forged a stronger realization of ‘self’ within each student. Therefore, we can conclude that multicultural education is a term better left behind. If teachers truly wish to advocate acceptance in their classrooms and make multiculturalism an action rather than a cliché, it should come as a result of self-awareness and analysis of one’s own personal identity.

Works Cited Cheek, J. M., Smith, S.M., & Tropp, L. R. “Relational identity orientation: A fourth scale for the AIQ.” (February 2002). Web. 20 Apr. 2016. Cheney, Lynne V. “Multiculturalism done right: Taking steps to build support for change.” Change 25.1 (1993): 8-10. Diez-Medrano, J., et al. “National Identity II Questionnaire.” International Social Survey Programme (2003): 1-14. 20 Apr. 2016. Web. Dutro, E., et al. “What are you and where are you from?: Race, identity, and the vicissitudes of cultural independence.” Urban Education, 48.3 (2008): 269-300. Guillory, Nichole. A. “Moving toward a Community of Resistance through Autobiographical Inquiry: Creating Disruptive Spaces in a Multicultural Education Course.” Multicultural Education 19.3 (2012): 11-16. Web. Ladson-Billings, G. “What we can learn from multicultural education research.” Educational Leadership 51.8 (May 1994). Web. Morris, Marla. “Multiculturalism as Jagged Walking.” Multicultural Education 8.4 (2001): 2-13. Web. Ngozi Adichie, Chimamanda. “The Danger of the Single Story.” TEDGlobal (2009). Web.



MIGRATION AND ETHNIC HISTORY





GUESTS OR COMRADES? THE RIGHTS OF MIGRANTS IN THE WORKPLACE EDWARD MORTIMER

In 2011, I acted as rapporteur for a Group of Eminent Persons convened by the Council of Europe, and drafted a report entitled “Living Together: Combining diversity and freedom in 21st-century Europe.” And in 2013 I helped write another report, which is really more of a pamphlet, or even a manifesto, entitled “Freedom in Diversity—Ten Lessons for Public Policy from Britain, Canada, France, Germany and the United States.” So I suppose I now have some pretensions to talk about American multiculturalism—which is your subject at this conference—and to set it in a broader context involving other major liberal democracies. But I still do so with considerable diffidence, especially when surrounded by so many real experts on the subject. In such circumstances it is probably very unwise to begin by expressing reservations about the title of this conference itself. But I have to do so because, in both the reports I have just mentioned, my colleagues and I decided, after some discussion, to avoid using the term “multiculturalism.” We did so not because this term is unfamiliar in Europe. On the contrary, it has been very widely used, but without any clear or consistent definition. Four years ago, in the winter of 2010-11, the German Chancellor, the then French President and the British Prime Minister all took it upon themselves to declare, in quick succession, that multiculturalism had failed, or was dead. What they were really drawing attention to was the failure of integration in parts of their societies, where culturally distinct “parallel societies” had evolved, composed of people who had relatively little contact with the wider society around them, sometimes not speaking its language, sometimes cultivating different values and even obeying different laws. What these failures may reflect, in some cases, is a mixture of well meant but ill thought out tolerance of diversity and not so benign neglect. National and especially local authorities had often felt they should not interfere with the internal dynamics of “communities” they neither knew nor understood, and which may not initially even have existed in the form



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that they imagined. They preferred to deal with these communities through self-appointed “community leaders,” some of whom were actively promoted by the state in its search for interlocuteurs valables. That policy, which had indeed failed, is a version of multiculturalism, and may have been what Cameron, Merkel and Sarkozy had in mind. But their words were widely interpreted as signifying an abandonment of all attempts to recognise and manage diversity within European societies, or even as a rejection of diversity as such and a promise to eliminate it. The ensuing debate showed that, at least in a European context, the term multiculturalism is used in many different ways, meaning different things to different people and in different countries. Is it an ideology? A set of policies? A social reality? Or what? Ultimately it confuses more than it clarifies, which is why we decided not to use it, but instead to concentrate on identifying policies and approaches that will enable democratic societies to combine diversity with freedom. In the end we came up with ten “lessons,” derived from a research project on the successes and failures of attempts to manage diversity that had been tried in the five countries mentioned, followed by a full-scale academic conference in Oxford. Let me briefly recapitulate them here: 1. All long-term residents in a democratic state should be citizens of that state. 2. New citizens must be made welcome in their new country, and be willing to contribute to its success. 3. Citizenship of another country should not prevent people from being citizens of the country where they live. 4. Schools must have the curriculum and resources to perform their vital function of preparing pupils for life as active citizens in a free society. 5. Employers and colleagues must give migrants and “postmigrants” —meaning the children and grandchildren of migrants, born in the “host country”—equal opportunities, and help them integrate socially as well as economically. 6. Towns and cities have a unique role to play in creating a sense of shared community and common purpose. 7. Minorities must be fully represented both in the media and by the media. (In other words, mass media have a responsibility both to include members of minorities in their reporting and editorial teams, and also to report fully and accurately on the affairs of minority communities and how they are affected by national developments.) 8. Public figures, and people with a significant presence online,



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should challenge stereotypes and misleading generalisations about any group. 9. Active steps need to be taken, notably by political parties, to ensure that minorities and their members are fully represented through established democratic institutions. 10. For everyone in a diverse society, the feeling of belonging together depends crucially on the social and cultural signals sent and received every day—by the state, but also by civil society, in popular culture and the media, and by individuals in their everyday dealings with each other. A better common life in diverse societies ultimately depends less on legal compulsion than on how people of different cultures and persuasions feel about each other, and freely behave towards each other. Taken together, I would suggest (somewhat presumptuously perhaps) that these ten lessons provide a possible context for analysing American multiculturalism—whatever that means; a set of principles which might guide it; perhaps even a set of benchmarks against which its success could be measured. I don’t offer them as lessons from Europe to America, because Europe is certainly not in a position to give lessons. They are lessons to which most of us, on both sides of the Atlantic, would probably subscribe in principle, but which all of us seem to have great difficulty in applying in practice. Some are more wholeheartedly applied in one country, or group of countries, than in others. But none, I fear, are fully and single-mindedly applied in all Western democracies. All of us could, and should, do better. Having said that, I’d like to devote the remainder of my presentation to Lesson Five—the one that says “Employers and colleagues must give migrants and ‘postmigrants’ … equal opportunities, and help them integrate socially as well as economically.” One word that is conspicuously missing from that sentence is “rights.” And that is not an accident. There is very far from being a consensus among experts at present about the rights that migrant workers should enjoy. And this is not a simple matter of those who favour immigration wanting to give them more rights and those who oppose it wanting to give them fewer. In fact to some extent the argument is actually the other way round. Many strong advocates of immigration are opposed—in varying degrees— to giving migrant workers all the same rights as indigenous ones. And one of the things that some people most dislike about immigration is the risk that immigrant workers will take jobs away from indigenous ones because they are willing to work longer hours for lower pay, and in worse conditions—in other words, they are more attractive to employers precisely



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because they have fewer rights, and/or they are unable in practice to insist on those rights that they do have in theory. So this is one of those interesting issues, like Israel versus Palestine, on which you cannot predict someone’s position simply by placing them on a linear spectrum from left to right. Many people who like to think of themselves as left-wing or liberal are strongly pro-immigration, and some of them argue that giving migrant workers too many rights is wrong because it makes immigration more difficult—an argument which brings them into alliance with employers and businessmen who are not left-wing at all. Other people on the left see the core of their left-wing orientation as being the defence of the rights of workers, whether migrant or indigenous; and this may lead them in some circumstances to favour restricting immigration, both because immigrant workers tend to be exploited and because their presence makes the jobs and rights of indigenous workers harder to protect. Similarly, the instinctive hostility to large-scale immigration felt by many conservatives can lead some of them to champion unexpectedly progressive positions on workers’ rights, while others take a “liberal” view of immigration precisely because they see it as undermining restrictive labour market practices and thereby removing some of the shackles that impede economic growth. The core of the argument for giving restricted rights to migrant workers is that according them full equality with indigenous workers is essentially a protectionist policy, because it protects the latter from having to compete with the former, and thereby denies the former their best chance of improving their economic lot. This argument is advanced in its most extreme form by Eric A. Posner and Glen Weyl, who start from an uncompromisingly cosmopolitan position, namely that the primary objective of policy should be to reduce global inequality. They quote figures which suggest that this goal is advanced most spectacularly not by development assistance, nor yet by economic growth resulting from open markets and free flows of investment, but by the migration of individuals from poor countries to rich ones, and the remittances that these individuals send home. On this basis they claim that the countries which do most to advance global equality, and should be commended for doing so, are precisely those usually considered to be most shameless in their exploitation of immigrant labour, namely the oil-rich emirates of the Persian Gulf. And they suggest that therefore OECD countries should copy the immigration policies of those states, including “the many unappealing aspects of the system—the migrants’ limited economic, political, and social rights, their segregation from the citizenry, and an authoritarian enforcement re-



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gime”—since these “seem necessary to maintain political support for the migration policies that help to reduce global inequality.” It is not clear whether this suggestion, which bears some resemblance to Jonathan Swift’s famous “Modest Proposal For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and For Making Them Beneficial to the Public,” is put forward seriously. More probably, to judge by their opening paragraph, Posner and Weyl’s main objective is to thwart those who are concerned to reduce inequality within advanced economies—Janet Yellen, Occupy Wall Street and Thomas Piketty are mentioned—by relativizing this concern, pointing out that “inequality is a much more severe problem across borders than within countries.” Serious students of migration issues are likely to pay much more attention to the recent book by Martin Ruhs, The Price of Rights: Regulating International Labor Migration. He too argues in favour of restricting the rights of migrant workers, in order to facilitate larger-scale migration, essentially in the interests of the migrants themselves and their countries of origin. But he clearly does not want the United States or Europe to become like Qatar. Rights restrictions should, in his view, “be limited to the right to free choice of employment, equal access to means-tested public benefits, the right to family reunion, and the right to permanent residence and citizenship” (9). No labour immigration policy, he says, “should restrict migrants’ basic civil and political rights, with the crucial and widely accepted exception of the right to vote in national elections” (172). Why? Because, in his view, protecting basic civil and political rights is worth the “cost” of reduced access for migrants to labour markets. He even quotes with approval the argument of Joseph Carens that “it is morally required to create a firewall between the enforcement of immigration rules and the enforcement of other laws, so that irregular migrants could exercise their rights without risking deportation” (173, fn25). We are very far here from the situation in the Gulf states, and indeed from current realities as experienced by irregular migrants in most liberal democracies. Moreover, Ruhs does not fully share the cosmopolitan world-view which (whether seriously intended or not) informs the polemic of Posner and Weyl. He shows that, as a matter of fact, receiving states base their immigration policies on calculations of national interest, and accepts that “the construction of a country’s national identity (which he sees as one of the “fundamental building blocks that constitute the national interest” [32]) can go beyond collective outcomes and include the protection of individuals’ rights, sometimes as one of the defining features”—the United States being “one of many examples” (29). And when he comes to formu-



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late his own ethical view of what should be done he acknowledges that “the admission of more migrant workers may not always be in the interest of domestic workers as well as the economy and society as a whole” (179). On the contrary, “to be sustainable, labor immigration policies need to be based on the national interest, which [Ruhs contends] involves balancing the interests of all affected parties, including those of domestic workers” (ibid.). Still, these remarks come across as rather grudging, almost counterintuitive, within an overall argument which generally assumes that it is “idealistic” to “give more weight to the interests of migrants and their countries of origin” (8-9), and appears to assume as almost self-evident the proposition that national interest is best served by maximising the availability of immigrant labour. They appear in the body of the book, but not in the summary of the argument in the introduction, where we read: Rights restrictions need to be evidence-based in the sense that there must be a clear case that they [presumably the rights, not the restrictions] create specific costs that the receiving country wishes to avoid or minimize to enable greater openness to admitting migrant workers. In other words, restricting these rights would lead high-income countries to be more open to labor immigration than would be the case if the rights could not be restricted. (9)

Yes, Ruhs says that basic civil and political rights are worth the “cost” of reduced access for migrant workers, but he doesn’t really explain why, or to whom, such basic rights are important. He is much more concerned to show that the migrant workers themselves benefit from accepting restricted rights, and that both they and their countries of origin prefer to accept such restrictions rather than be denied access to richer countries’ labour markets. At the other extreme is the argument put forward by Carol M. Swain in the very interesting New Democracy Forum on immigration published by the Boston Review in 2009. This consisted of an article by Joseph Carens making “the case for amnesty,” followed by a wide range of responses from other experts in the field. Swain answered Carens’s moving stories of irregular immigrants living in fear of deportation with a tearjerker of her own, about an African-American worker who was laid off from a factory in Virginia, only to see a truckload of Mexicans “bused to the plant and hired at a considerably lower wage to do the work that Joe and scores of other American workers had been doing”: Because of Joe’s educational deficiencies, he was unable to get other employment at comparable wages. Financial tensions quickly caused his mar-



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riage to deteriorate, and he eventually lost his wife, their home, and his sense of dignity. Unfortunately, Joe’s story is repeated all over the South, as illegal immigrants are hired and used to displace low-skill, low-wage native workers. Many of them are African-American men like Joe, legal Hispanics, and working-class whites. (22)

“It can be argued,” Swain adds, “that illegal immigration is a form of theft in which the longest law-breakers should be given the harshest penalties— not membership rights. Instead of being rewarded with amnesty, perhaps they should be fined, sent home, and placed at the end of the line” (23). Perhaps—but the way the point is formulated suggests that Swain herself is reluctant to follow her own argument all the way to this stark conclusion. What she does establish, though—it seems to me—is that the rights accorded to migrant workers are not, and should not be, a matter of concern only to the migrants themselves. It is no doubt true, as Posner and Weyl say, that foreign migrant workers earn vastly more in the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council than they would at home in Bangladesh or India. It is also clearly true that many people in Africa and the Middle East, and in Mexico and Central America, are so desperate for jobs in Europe or the United States, that they are willing to take appalling risks crossing the Mediterranean or the Rio Grande, even knowing that if they succeed they will be at the mercy of employers, with no meaningful right of redress for any indignity that may be inflicted on them. But does that mean that we, the existing inhabitants of the receiving countries, can or should be indifferent to the way these newcomers are treated? Surely not. The fact is that these basic rights are absolutely central to the nature of our societies and our sense of who we are. We may be sufficiently cosmopolitan to believe that they are in fact universal rights, to which all human beings are in principle entitled wherever they may live. But we are not cosmopolitan to the point of saying that we are prepared to give up our own rights, and change the very nature of our societies, in order to give people throughout the world a slightly better chance of improving their standard of living. Whether or not we can find a moral justification for it, we do in the last resort care more about our own societies than we do about the world in general. That is why, before we got to labour markets and the workplace, my co-authors and I devoted the first four lessons in our “Freedom in Diversity” manifesto to citizenship and education. Citizenship is about those basic rights to which everyone living in a democracy is entitled. And education is about how people living in a democracy are, or should be, brought up to be law-abiding, creative citizens, and to respect each other as such.



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Of course in some sense we are all citizens of the world—which is what the word “cosmopolitan” originally meant. No man is an island, and we must feel some sense of solidarity and responsibility towards all our fellow human beings. If we can do something to give those who are worse off than us the chance of a better life, or if we can do something to save those threatened by the worst indignities and atrocities (and we’re confident that we won’t end up making things even worse), let’s do it. But it seems improbable that we can achieve that by sacrificing our own freedom, and our aspirations to justice within our own societies—and frankly, even it were probable, we would not be willing to do it. Ruhs would certainly argue that he is not proposing any such sacrifice. Not only does he insist that the basic civil and political rights of migrant workers (other than their right to vote in national elections) must remain unrestricted. He also says that “any rights restrictions should be time limited (e.g. limited to about four years). After this period, migrants need to be granted access to permanent residence (and thus eventually citizenship) or required to leave” (9). And he adds that the restrictions he does favour “are only acceptable […] if they are accompanied by a number of supporting policies including the transparency of policies along with the effective protection of opportunities for workers to exit TMPs (temporary migrant programmes) whenever they wish to do so” (9). It is clear, however, that exiting the programme means also exiting the country, since the example given is “policies that ensure that migrant workers do not become trapped in the host country because […] they were charged excessive recruitment fees that need to be repaid and prevent them from considering a return to their home countries” (178). In short, what Ruhs proposes is something not unlike the arrangements under which guest-workers were recruited to work in Germany in the 1950s and 60s—being admitted on short term visas, and expected to return home (and be replaced by compatriots) when these expired. But, as is well known, this system did not work out as expected, partly because employers preferred to keep workers they had already trained rather than start over with new ones. By the early 1970s, when the oil shock caused a sudden contraction of the labour market and the recruitment agreements came to an end, Germany found that it had unintentionally acquired a large resident population of foreigners, many of whom opted to stay in the country and were then allowed to bring their families to join them, even though at that time they were not offered German citizenship. Ruhs’s system is more liberal, in the sense that he does not explicitly favour sending migrants home at the end of their contract. It would be



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possible, instead, to treat the four years as a kind of trial period, or apprenticeship, leading if successful to permanent residence and full rights, including eventually citizenship. So it seems important to use that perspective when examining the four rights that he does propose to restrict. 1. The first is free choice of employment. This still seems problematic to me. A worker tied to a single employer is ipso facto vulnerable, because in a very weak position to resist any of that employer’s demands. The prospect of achieving full rights after four years does not protect the worker against this because (a) it is not certain—the worker may be “required to leave,” and this is even more likely if s/he breaks the contract before the four years is up; and (b) it gives the employer an incentive to keep workers in this temporary situation, rather than invest in integrating them into the workforce as long-term colleagues and potential fellow-citizens. 2. The worker’s position is further weakened if his or her access to public benefits is also restricted. Not only is s/he forbidden to look for another job if laid off: s/he cannot expect any other means of support if her employment is terminated. So this increases her vulnerability. That said, if the first restriction is not applied—i.e., if migrant workers are free to choose their employment—there may be a case for denying benefits to an immigrant who comes into the country simply to look for work, without any definite or immediate prospect of finding it. Even if public concern that immigrants may come into a country simply to enjoy public benefits rather than to work is exaggerated, it is not entirely unfounded, and the “indigenous” public whose taxes pay for those benefits is entitled to some reassurance. This point is mainly relevant within the European Union. 3. It may also be reasonable to restrict a migrant’s right to family reunion for an initial period of time after his or her arrival in the country, during which s/he would demonstrate that s/he can earn enough to support her family. But in this case four years seems rather a long time for a family to be split up. 4. Finally, the restriction of the migrant’s right to permanent residence is obviously inherent in the notion of a trial period. Again, it is really only within the EU that workers effectively enjoy such a right as soon as they move from one country to another. Personally I would argue that restricting it for an initial period would not infringe the fundamental principle of freedom of movement. And as far as I know no country, even within the EU, indiscriminately grants full



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citizenship to new arrivals. Moreover, Ruhs envisages that temporary migrants are to enjoy all civil and political rights other than the right to vote in national elections—which presumably means that they would be entitled to vote in local elections and (in the case of EU countries) in European ones. Thus on this point he effectively ratifies existing practice within the EU, and proposes a significant extension of migrant workers’ rights in most other parts of the world (as well as the rights of non-EU migrants in EU countries). We may perhaps conclude, then, that the restrictions he proposes—unlike those suggested, whether tongue-in-cheek or not, by Posner and Weyl— would not make an enormous difference in practice, and that his principles, if consistently enforced, would actually result in stronger rights for most migrant workers in most parts of the world. This of course means that they might not be as effective as he thinks in opening the door to increased flows of migrant workers. Indeed, if consistently enforced they would probably make immigrant labour less attractive to many employers, and thus result in a net reduction of migration rather than an increase. Whether they would in fact be consistently enforced may well be doubted, since the incentive for both employers and immigrants to evade the rules would remain—and up to now attempts by states to enforce regulations in this area have been singularly ineffective. Many would say this is because, at least in so far as they affect employers, these attempts have also been at best half-hearted. While the political pressure on governments to restrict immigration is plain for all to see, the political and economic pressures on them to turn a blind eye to irregular employment of immigrants are less visible, but probably no less powerful—and this is unlikely to change. In migration policy, perhaps more than any other area, the gap between rhetoric and practice is likely to remain wide, and the academic discussion about the rights of migrants is all too likely to remain just that—academic. Even so, I would argue that the principle of equal treatment in the workplace is one that should not be lightly sacrificed, even if—perhaps even especially if—its net effect is to reduce the total number of immigrants. Just as democracy is undermined by having a large resident population without voting rights, so justice is undermined by maintaining a large population of workers with few rights and therefore very little defence against exploitation. That may or may not be bad for them, but it is certainly bad for the society within which they live and work. If we want the indigenous population to welcome newcomers in its midst, it must be encouraged to see them as fellow workers, entitled to the same rights as everyone else in that society, and not as unfair competitors whose presence



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lowers the general standard of working conditions, makes good jobs harder to obtain, and leaves large numbers of that indigenous population dependent on public benefits.

Works Cited Garton Ash, Timothy, Edward Mortimer, and Kerem Öktem: Freedom in Diversity (Oxford, 2013), available as a pdf at http://www.sant.ox.ac.uk/esc/freedomanddiversity.html. Web. Carens, Joseph H. “The Case For Amnesty.” Boston Review, May/June 2009. 1-11. Council of Europe. Living Together: Combining Diversity and Freedom in 21st Century Europe (Strasbourg, 2011), available as pdf at http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/highereducation/2011/KYIV%20WEBSITE/ Report%20on%20diversity.pdf. Web. Posner, Eric A., and Glen Weyl. “A Radical Solution to Global Income Inequality—Make the U.S. More Like Qatar.” The New Republic, 7 Nov. 2014. https://newrepublic.com/article/120179/how-reduce-globalincome-inequality-open-immigration-policies. Web. Ruhs, Martin. The Price of Rights: Regulating International Labor Migration. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2013. Swain, Carol M. “Apply compassion offered illegal immigrants to the most vulnerable citizens.” Boston Review (May/June 2009): 21-23.



THE LATINO CONDITION: UNDERSTANDING MULTICULTURALISM AND PAN-LATINO ETHNICITY IN THE USA MARC S. RODRIGUEZ

In the first decades of the 21st century, Latinos have become the largest ethnic minority group in the United States and perhaps the most bewilderingly complex “ethnic group” in United States History. The main reason for this complexity is that national allegiances dominate within the various groups that make up the broader “Latino” or “Hispanic” population in the United States. Latinos are a multiracial and multiethnic group with origins in Europe, Africa, and among the indigenous peoples of the Americas. The Latino population includes Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans, large numbers of migrants from Central America and South America, and Spanish immigrants. The Spanish language and Latino culture tie these groups together, yet within this diverse social milieu, many U.S.-born Latinos speak English, and English language use grows over time. The Latino experience is one of parallel and comparative development within an increasingly multicultural nation. From New York City to Chicago and Los Angeles, Latinos have long been a part of the social fabric of American metropolises. Latinos were among the earliest “European” settlers in what is now Los Angeles, and among the waves of migrants that moved to places like New York and Chicago in search of work from the early 20th century onward. Spanish priests and Mestizo (mixed ancestry) soldiers settled much of what is now California (and the American Southwest) as part of the Spanish imperial project of conquest and religious evangelism. Spanish colonialism was marked by contact, conflict, and conversion and led to massive land loss for indigenous peoples from Central Mexico to the California coast, even as it led to the spread of Catholicism and the settlement of northern Mexico. In the urban centers of the eastern and midwestern United States, workers came from Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Cuba to escape revolution, poverty, and political persecution in their homelands. They came as refugees and exiles and remade portions of New York and Chicago as Latino

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homelands in diaspora from the early 20th century to the present. In the 21st century, these neighborhoods, with their distinct Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban communities, are becoming home to an ever more diverse population of Latino migrants from Central and South America. There is nothing “new” about Latinos living and making history in what is today the United States. Latinos have been a part of every major phase of human development in North America from the colonial era onward. The Latino population is the fastest growing ethnic group in the United States in the 21st century. In 2010, there were 50.5 million “Hispanics” according to the US Census, which comprised 16% of the total US population of 308.7 million people. The vast majority of these, 63%, were of Mexican ancestry, followed by Puerto Ricans (9.2%), Cubans (3.5%), Salvadorans (3.3%), Dominicans (2.8%), and Guatemalans (2.1%). Colombians, Ecuadorians, and Peruvians also made up significantly large populations, each over 500,000 with Colombians passing the 900,000 mark. The Spanish immigrant population also rose to constitute 1.3% of Hispanics in 2010 (Ennis et al. 2-3). Latino population growth had shifted in the late 20th century from immigration to birth-driven growth. In the 21st century, Latinos are increasingly native-born citizens. Much of the civil rights infrastructure that benefits Latinos in the United States today was the result of the concerted efforts of Mexican Americans acting as self-styled Chicanos during the 1960s and 1970s. The Chicano Movement developed in tandem with the African American Civil Rights movement during the late 1960s and early 1970s and expanded upon earlier efforts of Mexican American activists for civil rights. This Civil Rights movement, long overlooked by mainstream scholars, not only created opportunities for Mexican Americans, but, together with efforts led by Puerto Ricans in New York and Chicago, also created a framework for a Pan-Latino civil rights infrastructure, which would benefit the waves of new migrants entering the United States in the decades after the 1970s. This article reviews some of the key developments in this movement and its legacy.

The Chicano Movement and Modern Latino Activism The Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s changed the nature of American citizenship, defined the topography of a distinct Chicano cultural expression, and expanded the nature of what it meant to be an ethnic/racial minority in the United States. While the African American Civil Rights and Black Power movements likewise altered the meaning and representation of race in the United States, and other movements among

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Latinos, Native Americans, women, and Asian Americans expanded the terrain for equality and inclusion, the Chicano Movement pushed for alternate understandings of race and ethnicity in important ways that embraced hybridity via a mestizo understanding of self and created a framework for the expansion of rights and the expression of personhood in an increasingly multiracial, mixed-race North America (see Ignacio M. García; Mariscal; Rodriguez, Rethinking). The Chicano Movement was a radical and reformist project of imagining a Chicano nation and culture within the context of a multicultural Americanism. Whether in the form of poetry, essays, journalism, labor and political activism, student organizing, or spatially grounded artistic expression, the movement’s primary goal was the establishment of a national outlook among Mexican Americans and a rejection of the idea that there was something “new” or “recent” about the Mexican presence in the United States. It also sought recognition for Chicanos as citizens from the governmental, educational, economic, cultural, and political institutions— at both the local and national level—that often negatively affected people’s lives. By creating a space and voice for the expression of a Chicano worldview within both the mainstream and the barrio, the Chicano Movement sought to place a historically marginalized Latino people at the center of national debates.1 The Mexican American, or Chicano, community has not always been generally recognized as a historically significant presence in the United States, and the Chicano civil rights movement in particular is comparatively little known compared to the Black Freedom movement. Informed people are aware that Mexican Americans (or “Spanish Americans” or “Latins”) have populated the US Southwest as a distinct regional minority group for generations, and some would also locate Chicanos alongside Native Americans and Asian Americans as one of the smaller minority 1

While the US Census has a broad definition of Latinos and Latinas, here I speak mainly of two Latino communities. US-born domestic Latinos are those Latinos who have had a significant presence in the mainland United States. These include mainly Mexican Americans/Chicanos in the US Southwest and places like Chicago, as well as Puerto Ricans and Cubans in places like New York City and Florida respectively. These communities have deep historical roots in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth century United States. The second group of Latinos is made up of those who came in the era after immigration reforms in 1965 and 1986, which led to greater diversity among the Latino population. These communities intermarried and merged in some cases, but the deep roots of many Latinos as domestic minorities rather than immigrants has had an impact on their worldview and treatment in the United States. For the US Census definition and population profile, see Ennis et al.

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groups with a long history in the United States. However, these “lesser” minority groups often remain outside the US historical imaginary. The typical worldview among both everyday people and scholars has created a black/white binary of understanding when it comes to race and history in the United States. For example, most Americans and American Studies scholars have heard of the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case, but how many know about Hernandez v. Texas decided that same year (see Lopez)? As the second-largest long-term minority community in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, Mexican Americans, via the Chicano Movement, challenged this black/white binary of racial understanding in crucial ways.2

Who were (are) the Chicanos? Perhaps the confusing terminology employed by the government, the media, and community groups to label the Hispanic community is one of the reasons that many in the American studies field, and US residents outside the Southwest, know so little about the Chicano Movement or the long history of Mexican Americans in the United States. Today one might refer to members of Spanish-speaking or Latin American-origin communities as “Hispanics” or “Latinos.” “Hispanic” refers both to an expansive group including long-term domestic minorities, such as Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans, with long histories of domestic US discrimination, as well as recent immigrants from Spain, refugees from Cuba, and the growing number of recent immigrants from the Caribbean and Latin America.3 “Chicano” has had wide application in the scholarship on Mexican Americans in the United States. In some early texts written during and just after the 1960s, Chicano was used to encompass all Mexican ancestry people in the United States regardless of citizenship. In most cases, however, the term was used to identify those who participated in the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s and to replace the hyphenated “Mexican-American” identity. For many activists, Chicano was applied to those 2

By “black/white binary” I mean the practice of viewing social problems and solutions in terms of the historical tensions and relationships between Anglo Americans and African Americans and the resulting psychological and policy impacts this has had and continues to have on “other” long-standing domestic minorities, such as Mexican Americans. For a discussion of some of the issues related to the problem of the black/white binary, see Perea. 3 For an example of a Latino history separating Cubans as a successful group when compared to other Hispanics, see Hernández. For a discussion of affirmative action and the blurring of identity, see Graham.

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people of Mexican ancestry born in the United States (Mexican Americans) even if individuals rejected the term. Others embraced Chicano as a way to embrace a “brown” racial status and reject historical claims to a “white” identity. In this sense, Chicanos were neither Mexicans nor white Americans, but rather represented a self-fashioned US minority group with its own history and culture.4

Demographics Mexican Americans have long been the second largest domestic minority group after African Americans in the United States and continue to be so today, even as the multicultural Hispanic population has surpassed the African American population in recent years. Within the increasingly diverse modern Latino community, Mexican Americans remain the dominant group comprising nearly 60% of the Hispanic population. By 1960, the Mexican American population had reached 3.5 million people in the five southwestern states (certainly an undercount), with 85% US-born. Nearly half were the children of at least one Mexican-born parent. For much of the period between World War I and the 1960s, various programs had brought legally sanctioned guest workers from Mexico known as Braceros to the United States, where they mixed with domestic residents and the large number of unsanctioned Mexican workers. This rich mix of ancestry and citizenship groups meant that Mexican Americans born in the United States were often part of transnational (international) and translocal (US interstate) communities (see United States “We the Mexican Americans”). By 1960, nearly 4 million Mexican Americans lived in the United States and their population was rising. By 1970, there were over 4.5 million Mexican Americans mainly in the Southwest, with the vast majority still comprised of USborn residents. If one considers undercounts and the population of Mexican Americans outside the Southwestern states, a population of nearly 5 million Mexican Americans in the 1970s seems reasonable (Grebler et al. 30; United States Census of Population, 1970, 70).

Language and Class While it is true that many 21st century Mexican immigrants speak Spanish, and a majority of Chicanos in the 1960s had some Spanish language proficiency, a significant number spoke mostly English. Among the Mexican American population, Tejanos (Texas-Mexicans) and Hispanos (Colonial 4

For a current view of what it means to be Chicano, see Planas.

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descent New Mexicans) spoke distinct heritage dialects of Spanish. While people spoke English in these communities, Spanish was often the dominant language of the home. In urban areas, Spanish-speakers often blended both languages together. Significant numbers of urbanized Mexican American youth in the 1960s spoke English primarily and knew little or no Spanish even if their families included Spanish speakers. This great linguistic diversity meant that while there were Spanish language newspapers, bilingual newspapers, and even Spanish language television, many Chicano youth were most comfortable speaking English in the 1960s. Even with this linguistic variation, many Chicanos, even those who did not speak Spanish, considered bilingualism a goal of the Chicano Movement. Thus, English-speaking Chicanos and Spanish-speaking Chicanos often engaged in activism that sought bilingual and bicultural education. The Chicano Movement itself was mainly organized using English, but it was English heavily laden with Spanish, and language use varied based upon region.5 The Mexican American community was predominantly a workingclass, urbanized population in the 1960s and 1970s. Early in the 20th century, a majority of Mexican Americans were farm laborers, and a significant number continued as agricultural laborers and migratory workers after 1960. Yet the vast majority (one in six) had moved out of agricultural work as a result of increasing urbanization. As of 1960, over half of Mexican American male workers still held predominantly unskilled positions in the “factories, mines, and construction” category, and only 17% worked in the “professional and clerical” category, a number comparable to that for African Americans. While most Mexican American men were laborers, Mexican American women predominated in the clerical and sales category. And although educational rates for Mexican Americans trailed those of African Americans, Mexican American workers earned slightly higher wages than African Americans—yet these did not rival those for Anglo Americans. Half of Mexican American children failed to complete high school and trailed African Americans and Anglo Americans in college attendance, with only 6% completing one year of college as opposed to 12% and 22% respectively. However, the trend toward high school graduation and college attainment was on the upswing by 1970, as many more Mexican Americans completed high school and attended college. While the ranks of the Mexican American middle class increased over time, Mexican Americans were mainly a working-class population in the 1960s 5

On the complexity of language use among Latinos and Chicanos, see Lipski; Stavans; Morales, ed.; Beaudrie and Fairclough.

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(a fact that was also true at the start of the 21st century) during the rise of Chicano civil rights activism (“We the Mexican Americans” 6-14; Telles and Ortiz 135-58).

War, Conquest, and the Birth of the Mexican American People While its militancy and unapologetic tone were departures from past Mexican American movements for civil rights, the Chicano Movement did not “awaken” a docile community but rather expanded established traditions of domestic resistance. Mexican Americans had long fought for civil rights following the conquest and annexation of northern Mexico by the United States. Manifest Destiny, a doctrine according to which the United States should span “from sea to shining sea,” had several problems as a policy since it required the conquest of newly independent Mexico and Native American lands, both of which stood in the way of westward expansion. In the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas, recent arrivals from the United States, as well as some native Tejanos (Texas Mexicans), rebelled against Mexico in 1835 and opened the Republic of Texas to legal Anglo migration and settlement in 1836. In 1845, the United States annexed Texas and invaded Mexico, crossing what Mexico considered the international border at the Nueces River. The United States, which claimed the border was at the Rio Grande, soon conquered Mexico, occupied Mexico City, and took control of the northern half of Mexico by annexation and purchase.6 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo formally ended the Mexican-American War in 1848 and made those Mexicans remaining in the ceded territories US citizens. The treaty guaranteed the property and civil rights of these new US citizens. Despite formal legal protection, however, these former Mexicans experienced massive land loss and social discrimination under the new regime. The US conquest also resulted in Mexican Americans losing “homeland” property rights. Moreover, as Anglos poured into the region, Mexican Americans faced a rapidly established system of racial oppression, economic exploitation, and a lynch-law culture of violence that cost many of them their political voice, property, and lives in often gruesome displays of legal chicanery and racial violence. Some Mexican Americans rebelled against this oppression, and the conquered territories were disturbed by armed uprisings for the next six decades. By the early 6

For more on Manifest Destiny, the Texas Revolution, and the invasion of Mexico, see (in Spanish) Caraza and (in English) Johannsen; Matovina; Henderson; Ramos; Merry; and Horsman.

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decades of the 20th century, however, as immigration from Mexico increased exponentially following the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and the last armed uprisings ended, Mexican American activists pursued a path of nonviolent civil rights politics and litigation in a process mirroring that of African American activist groups. Many Mexican immigrants maintained emotional attachments to Mexico, and some remained foreign nationals, yet the shift among the US-born and naturalized population toward citizenship activism became dominant after 1930 (see Montejano; Almaguer; Alonzo; Zamora; Heber Johnson; Montoya). Under the provisions of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the US government granted full citizenship rights to Mexicans after the war even though local Anglo officials treated them as a racially inferior group, and many Anglos discriminated against them.7 The US government considered Mexican Americans “Caucasians,” since the treaty included naturalization provisions. By making Mexicans eligible for citizenship, the United States made all Mexican-ancestry people “white” by law. Thus, Mexican American civil rights politics ran parallel to but did not often overlap with the African American civil rights movement until the 1960s, as the states often deemed African Americans a separate racial group, allowing for their legal segregation (“Jim Crow”) from whites. Without the backing of either the state or racially conscious philanthropists, Mexican Americans existed in a racially “in-between” space. Because of this ambiguity, civil rights organizations adopted a litigation approach to defend their meager rights as “Caucasians,” (whites), even though they lived in segregated neighborhoods, worked in segregated workplaces, were paid “Mexican” wages, attended segregated schools, and lived almost universally in abject poverty. It took the racial politics of the Chicano Movement and several landmark Supreme Court cases for Mexican Americans to embrace a “brown” racial status under the law (see Montejano; Martínez; Montoya; Carrigan; Olivas, ed.; García; Foley).

The Chicano Movement Early accounts of the Chicano Movement portrayed it as part of a longue durée of Chicano history. Many early Chicano scholars, influenced by colonial theory, portrayed Mexican Americans as a colonized nation with-

7 Although an inelegant term, “Anglo” is used in this article to describe the various white ethnics in the United States and the American Southwest.

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in a nation.8 By this reasoning, Mexican Americans, following the defeat of Mexico in 1848, comprised an “internal colony” within the United States and suffered under a system of colonial exploitation in the cities and rural areas of the Southwest. This perspective played a significant role in the early development of Chicano historical scholarship in general and Chicano Movement ideology in particular.9 Chicanos had lived in what had recently become the American Southwest since the 17th century and had fought a nearly 400-year struggle to preserve their communities and culture.10 These early efforts to recover Chicano history, much like the art and poetry of the movement itself, tied the civil rights activities of the 1960s and 1970s to a long-standing legacy of persistence and resistance on the frontiers of the Spanish Empire, Mexico, and the US-Mexico borderlands.11 While dedicated to civil rights, Mexican American activism prior to the Chicano Movement operated in the ambiguous space between those rights guaranteed Mexican Americans as nominal “whites” and the policies used by Anglos to limit equality. These early efforts earned successes for Mexican Americans who won access to better education, jobs, and voting rights across the Southwest even as they lagged behind Anglos economically, socially, and in most measures of upward mobility (see M.T. García, Mexican Americans). The 1960s witnessed the abandonment of the “inbetween” ethnic status of “other” whites among young activists who embraced a new identity, relying on the Mexican concept of mestizaje. Mestizaje describes the process of racial mixture in Mexico and the Southwest that made Mexican Americans a hybrid racial and ethnic group of mixedancestry people of indigenous, African, and European origins. The new Chicano identity, in embracing this unique racial formation, set itself apart 8

The longue durée (literally, long duration) is a term originally used by the Annales School of historians that gives priority to long-term structural and social changes over short-term events. By “internal colonialism” authors meant that Mexican Americans were a people conquered by the United States and treated after this period as an internal colony—a subset population without full citizenship rights, despite their location within the United States and their formal citizenship. 9 For the classic internal colonial model, see Acuña; and Barrera. For a more recent survey following a similar model and orientation, see Navarro. 10 Eventually, historians distanced themselves from the internal colonialism model due to the difficulty of applying the concept practically because Mexican Americans settled the Southwest as Spanish or Mexican colonists on land that belonged to Native Americans and were US citizens. However, a commitment to a narrative of long-term persistence, resistance, and Chicano cultural preservation remained. 11 For excellent studies following this persistence narrative, see Camarillo; and Pitti.

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from older Mexican American civil rights groups, as it no longer sought to maintain the myth of a Caucasian racial identity in the face of obvious difference and long-term policies of discrimination.12 Identity formation and student activism were central to the Chicano Movement, as young people became participants in social movement activity in the 1960s. In the years of that decade, an increasing number of Mexican American teens graduated from high school during a period of Cold-War patriotic indoctrination. These comparatively well-educated young people (many Mexican American adults at this time had not completed elementary school) internalized notions of equality and rejected as “un-American” the racial discrimination against Mexican-ancestry people. At the same time, they increasingly proclaimed pride in a racially defined Chicano identity. Moreover, unlike older Mexican American activists, young Chicanos and Chicanas viewed their struggle as part of a broader movement of social justice linked to the African American Civil Rights and New Left movements of the era. These young activists tied their struggle for freedom to the revolutionary struggle in Cuba, as well as anticolonial movements in Africa and Asia. While there were divisions and rivalries, much bound the various social movement centers of the Chicano Movement together. The movement emerged as one driven by the shared goals of a national minority group seeking to define itself and claim social, educational, and political space. Much as scholars of the African American Civil Rights movement now portray the complexity of the Black Freedom movement, recent histories of the Chicano Movement reveal it as a complex milieu of regionally situated yet nationally focused civil rights movements with their own leaderships, goals, and intermittent internal tensions (see Carroll; Vargas; Brilliant; Rodriguez; Bernstein). What bound the Chicano Movement together was a commitment to the practice of Chicanismo, the basic ideology of Chicano nationalism. Chicano nationalism grew in tandem with and was influenced by the nationalist rhetoric of anti-colonialism in the 1960s. As former colonies in Africa and Asia threw off the yoke of European colonialism, African Americans and Mexican Americans—many attending university—drew analogies between colonial peoples’ fight for self-determination and their own struggles within the United States. Argentine-born Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara, in particular, became an inspiration by proxy, despite Guevara’s limited knowledge of the Mexican American people. Chicano nationalism, like anti-colonialism, made specific claims to nationhood and designated 12

On Chicano identity, see Rendón; Burciaga; Pérez-Torres. José Vasconcelos’s “La Raza Cósmica” served as the foundation for much thinking regarding race and ethnicity during the Chicano Movement era, see Vasconcelos and Jaén.

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the Southwestern region won by the United States through annexation and war a “homeland” named Aztlán, after the mythical home of the Aztec people. By mixing myth with reality, Chicano intellectuals and activists imagined and directed a community, seemingly marginal to the history of both Mexico and the United States, to place itself proudly at the center of history. In art, popular culture, and politics, Chicano nationalists blended elements of European, Aztec, and Mexican history, culture, and myth to create a comprehensive history of the Chicano people—shifting their location from the periphery to the core of North American history.13 Chicanismo as an ideology represented both a rejection of Mexican American identity and the effort to build a new consciousness among Chicanos. It was an explicit rejection of assimilation in favor of a focus on what Carlos Muñoz described as “self-respect and pride in one’s ethnic and cultural background” (197). Chicano nationalism, the driving intellectual force behind the movement, may appear naïve from a 21st-century perspective, yet it had a real impact on the individuals and communities who embraced its various formulations. Chicanos and Chicanas took their political and cultural work seriously. For Mexican Americans, a people who have long survived in a cultural space between the Mexican nation and the United States, their very in-between status placed them in cultural limbo. The Chicano movement sought to stake out the territory of memory, history, and culture for a group that lived between and across territories and cultures in ways that people from Mexico and those who saw themselves as Americans (AngloAmericans) did not. This accomplishment—the staking out of truly transnational and transcultural space—is one of the most lasting impacts of the Chicano Movement. The Chicano Movement incorporated many elements of earlier reform movements. Citizenship-driven movements among Mexican Ancestry Americans, despite their limitations, made the case for greater freedom and opportunity for the nation’s second largest ethnic minority. These efforts provided both the stimulus for further and more militant activism and a point of departure for radical reformulations of Mexican American identity politics. The basic tenets of this worldview lived on in the Chicano Movement in the form of demands for educational and economic opportunity within the various institutions of daily life for Mexican Americans and by extension other Latinos. Thus the farm workers’ struggle, as well as the fight for political rights in South Texas and elsewhere, expand13

Many Chicanos saw Aztlán as the homeland of not only the Mexican people but as the homeland for the Chicano people. Organizations in barrios were often considered homeland focused. See Leal; Anaya and Lomelí, eds.; and Mariscal.

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ed upon older movements within the community. Movements such as the United Farm Workers (led by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta) and militant political efforts in Texas in 1962-1963 may not have been part of the Chicano Movement per se, but they ran parallel to it and provided training and grassroots experience to the young people who made up the vanguard of the Chicano Movement.14 A mix of radical and reformist tendencies developed in reaction to 1960s-era federal government programs in Chicano neighborhoods. Activist leaders such as Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, a founder of Crusade for Justice (a Denver-based Chicano activist group), and many others worked for “War on Poverty” programs (a poverty effort of the Lyndon B. Johnson administration) in urban and rural areas alike in the mid-to-late 1960s (see Vigil). Some eventually rejected government assistance, yet many more sought to make the War on Poverty and other programs work for the benefit of barrio residents and migratory farm workers in need. Other groups such as the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO) in Texas used War on Poverty funding to provide employment and training opportunities to activists who either used these programs to accomplish the militant goals of the organization or support other work outside their employment (see Navarro). The strategic use of governmental support was a central—and often understudied—aspect of the Chicano Movement that needs further consideration.

Bilingual and Equal Opportunity Reforms One of the central demands of the student protests and high school walkouts in California, Texas, and elsewhere after 1968 was for acceptance and assistance for Chicano students. Their efforts led to the development of bilingual and bicultural curricular changes as well as an expansion of bilingual and bicultural staffing and guidance at schools nationwide.15 While many of the initial programs did not prove durable, the concept of bilingual education has found significant acceptance among educators and led to an expansion of language programs to include a variety of heritage languages, immigrant languages, and immersion programs. In the schoolyards of the US Southwest, where Spanish was once a forbidden language, the protests of the Chicano youth movement, walkouts, and 14

On Cesar Chavez, see Matt García. On activism in Texas in 1963, see Shockley. On the local uses of War on Poverty, and philanthropic funds to support the movement, see Montejano, Quixote’s Soldiers. 15 On the Los Angeles Walkouts, see Garcia and Castro. On the Crystal City, Texas walkouts, see Gutiérrez, We Won’t Back Down.

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subsequent educational reforms at the federal and state level brought about real change—not only for Spanish speakers and Chicanos seeking to reclaim a heritage language but also for other language minorities and those seeking more language options in schools nationwide. The issue of Spanish-language use in the public sphere remains controversial, yet the Chicano Movement’s efforts have helped to make Spanish an acceptable language of public discourse and instruction in places where it was once forbidden and to make it available to the waves of new immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean (see Field; Tatum; Trujillo). The mobility-focused activism of the Chicano Movement has supported not only Chicano upward mobility, but also helped to create an infrastructure for Hispanic mobility nationwide. The Chicano Movement gave Mexican Americans and other Latinos increased access to opportunities in higher education and the private sector. One of the lasting impacts of the movement was the expansion of affirmative action and diversity policies to include Mexican Americans (and all Latinos and Hispanics) as targeted groups. The activism of Mexican Americans over the course of the 20th century, culminating in the militancy of the Chicano Movement, yielded benefits for many other Latino groups and several generations of Latin American immigrants. Thus, the Chicano Movement created pathways of upward mobility for Mexican Americans and for the new Latin American and Mexican immigrants who migrated into the United States in everlarger numbers after the 1980s. The movement also contributed to the growing presence of a Mexican American middle class in Texas, California, and elsewhere, and the development of a broader Latino middle class nationally. Most scholars of the Chicano and Latino experience to date have neglected the post-movement expansion of the middle class (and Chicano and Latino professional classes). The rise of 2nd- and 3rdgeneration Chicano college enrollments, graduate and professional school attendance, political participation, and suburbanization in Texas, California, and Illinois seem to indicate that the movement facilitated the growth of the once small Mexican American middle class in important ways—yet this development awaits its historian. Other Latinos have benefitted from the civil rights efforts of the Chicano Movement. The more expansive definition of minority status Chicano activists sought, often together with Puerto Rican activists, has led to the expansion of programs such as affirmative action, minority recruitment, and small business development programs to include a more expansive “Hispanic” target group. In this way, Mexican immigrants, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Central and South Americans, and even those with roots in Spain and Portugal became eligible for minority-targeted programs. Puerto Ri-

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cans led their own civil rights movement in places like Chicago and New York City, where they established militant organizations such as the Young Lords, yet other Latino communities had little activist presence among the 1960s-1970s New Left and progressive movements.16 Some critics have argued that this was an unintended consequence, and that those domestic Latino minorities who suffered historical discrimination and exclusion and sought remedies for past discrimination have not benefitted from these new programs to the same degree as wealthy Hispanics and other newly arrived Latinos (see Gillon). Despite its many limitations, reform programs such as affirmative action, and business development programs have helped Latino individuals and communities (new and long established) thrive, while also preserving cultural centers and practices in an increasingly multicultural America. In many cases, the Chicanos’ place in the United States predates the mass immigration of European ethnics to the United States and continues to evolve within the context of an increasingly translocal and transnational Latino world (see Gutiérrez, Texas; Aguirre and Martinez).

From Chicano to Multicultural Latino The demographic revolution that followed the Chicano Movement has altered not only the ethnic and linguistic makeup of the barrio but also the United States itself. This transformation has been significant and rapid and has changed the culture of Chicano neighborhoods, remaking them in a more highly Mexican and Latin American immigrant mold. This process has revitalized traditional ties to Mexican culture and sparked new relationships (and also divisions) among Latinos, as long-term Latinos (USborn and mainly of Mexican American and Puerto Rican descent) live and work with more recent immigrants from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Mexico, who are all nominally Latino or Hispanic yet may know little about the history of the struggles of Mexican Americans (and Puerto Ricans) in the United States. The Latino presence is growing not only in traditional population centers but also in the Southern states and small towns of the Great Plains, Midwest, and Northeast, where settlement had previously been limited. The greater acceptance of Latino cultural citizenship enjoyed by new immigrants today is a direct result of the activism of those Latinos who participated in the Chicano and Puerto Rican civil

16

For a history of the Young Lords, see Wanzer-Serrano; for a pan-Latino history of Chicano and Puerto Rican activism in Chicago, see Fernandez.

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rights efforts in the 1960s and 1970s (see Clark; Mize and Delgado; Odem and Lacy). While Chicanos continue to represent a significant percentage of the broader Latino community, they have some social and cultural practices that set them apart. Many do not speak Spanish as a first language even if they are nominally bilingual. Many US-born Chicanos (especially in California and areas outside of Texas and New Mexico) have long spoken mainly English in the 2nd and 3rd generation and yet maintain ties to their ethnic community institutions including churches, social service and educational agencies, artistic venues, and local politics. Chicanos continue to live in a bilingual and bicultural milieu where a significant number may no longer speak Spanish fluently but strongly support efforts to provide Spanish-language options in public life and the media. Newly arrived immigrants may also lack the identity crisis experienced by some Chicanos in the 1960s, as they have generally arrived in the United States with clear national allegiances to Mexico or other Latin American nations and maintain a well-developed sense of their place within the world as Mexicans, Cubans, El Salvadorians, Dominicans, and other Latin Americans. These new Latino transnational identities challenge Chicano (and Puerto Rican) claims to historical position while also enlivening and strengthening ties to a broader Mexican and pan-Latino identity. The Chicano Movement created the infrastructure for these Latino groups to advance through efforts to expand the meaning of affirmative action, minority electoral representation legislation, and educational outreach to all Latinos (or Hispanics) even as these new groups do not readily identify as racial minorities in the United States but rather as members of transnational communities with distinct histories (see Pew Hispanic Center, When Labels Don’t Fit; Lopez and Gonzalez-Barrera). Even with the changing nature of intragroup dynamics, there are moments where unity drives a new pan-Latino politics. The example of community-wide participation in the immigration rights efforts of the late-20th and early 21st century have provided opportunities for both cross-Latino community organizing and greater understanding between Chicanos and more recent Mexican and other Latino immigrants and their children. The mass media covered the immigrant rights marches in 2006 in large population centers such as Los Angeles and Chicago, but the immigration rights movement mobilized protest movements in many small towns and medium-sized cities nationwide with long-term Chicano residents, as well as in the new Latino growth regions of the United States. The American South, the Pacific Northwest, and the Midwest as well as New York City and many cities of the eastern seaboard witnessed large-scale protests in favor

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of immigration reform—and in some cases European immigrants (and ethnics) and many other immigrant peoples joined the Latino protesters. The tactics and practices of the Chicano Movement, as well as Chicano Movement–era organizations such as the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), have supported the call for immigration rights and defended the rights of new immigrants (see Passel, Cohn, and Gonzalez).

The 21st Century: The Road Traveled and the Road Ahead Immigration rights—and the status of the more than 11 million unauthorized immigrants, many of whom entered the country as undocumented workers—has become the dominant issue for many Latinos and their families. This is especially true for the numerous mixed-citizenship-status families within the larger Latino community. While some of these families may be unaware of the role of the Chicano Movement in developing the organizational infrastructure and networks to support immigrant rights efforts, in fact, Chicano Movement groups and activists have supported the fight for immigrant rights in the United States (Passel, Cohn, and Gonzalez). The immigration reform issue has inspired young people to take up the activist mantle of the Chicano Movement in real ways, and this effort to support the rights of their families has led many in colleges, universities, and community organizations nationwide to seek out a greater understanding of the Chicano Movement and Latino civil rights history. Moreover, many Chicano Movement participants active in the 1960s and 1970s have supported the development of immigrant rights groups and the expansion of their civil rights orientation to include expanded rights for the undocumented and “dreamers” (undocumented children seeking educational opportunity in the United States) (see Nicholls, The Dreamers). The Chicano Movement’s impact on education cannot be overstated. Within the past fifty years, the number of Mexican American students at colleges and universities has expanded significantly. Likewise, the number of teachers, professors, and administrators of Mexican American ancestry has grown from California to New York. These changes have also meant that Chicanos hold many administrative positions in school systems that serve Mexican American populations throughout the United States. Yet, even with these reforms and the positive results of change, educational outcomes for low-income Chicanos and Latinos are still a problem. While the demographics of these communities have shifted, educational outcomes, dropout rates, and retention rates for at-risk Latino students continue to be abysmal. Whereas a Chicano middle-class family can now send

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its children to top tier and Ivy League colleges and universities, many of the high schools in Texas and East Los Angeles, as well as barrios nationwide that were the sites of protest in the 1960s and 1970s, continue to suffer from an unconscionably high dropout rate. This issue has led some observers to question the continued utility of policies that neglect the impact of persistent poverty and income stratification on low-income minority student outcomes in favor of a focus on diversity or multiculturalism. Educational reform was one of the central demands of the Chicano Movement, and while much progress has been made when it comes to expanding opportunity for middle-class and some low-income Latinos, there remain persistent problems when it comes to educational advancement for poor and disadvantaged students from elementary school to college (see Valencia). One issue of concern to many within the Chicano Movement was the issue of incarceration rates among Mexican Americans in the United States. Much like their African American counterparts, Chicano activists considered the criminal justice system deeply flawed and in need of serious reform. Now, as in the 1960s and 1970s, Chicano and Latino youth who enter the juvenile justice system tend to come from urban neighborhoods scarred by poverty and are less likely to be high school graduates. Incarceration rates tend to hover at the 3% mark for US-born Latinos (classified generally as “Hispanics” by the criminal justice system), but many consider this an undercount because many Hispanics are recorded as white. Urban young women and men are often the target of policing policies that mark them out as gang members because they are Latinos and live in urban neighborhoods where gang activity is common. While the problem of gang violence is a serious one, Chicano and Latino youth face a constant threat of arrest for minor violations that middle-class suburban youth do not often face, leading to high rates of incarceration among the former. The issue of police brutality and harassment was one of the targets of the Chicano Movement (which led many actual and potential gang members to become community activists), and there have been some improvements—increased numbers of Chicano and Latino officers on many police forces, community outreach police programs—but entrenched policing habits still result in a high rate of incarceration among urban Chicano youth (Zambrana 163-97; Oboler). Political representation has expanded significantly following the Chicano Movement and continues today. California, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Illinois, and many cities nationwide have witnessed increased numbers of Chicanos and Mexican Americans as elected officials alongside other Latinos. While the vast majority of Latino elected officials tend to be Democrats, several high profile Republicans have joined the ranks.

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Latino issues run the gamut from the traditional concerns of the Chicano Movement to the increasingly important issue of immigration reform and immigration-related policies in Mexican American and Latino majority districts. While it may seem that immigration is the dominant issue, many of the issues Latino elected officials confront are those of minority and low-income districts, as they often represent urban, immigrant, and disadvantaged areas. Most Chicano and Latino elected officials operate at the local level yet are making inroads into state government and the federal level (see Magaña; Davis; Mehta). In many important ways, the Chicano Movement created the foundation for the development of the immigration rights movement and educational, criminal justice, and political reform movements nationwide. Reforms often took place as moderate Latinos responded to the radicalism of groups such as La Raza Unida Party (RUP) in Texas—and made the case for representation and cooperation as a direct result of the hard-fought battle for representation within Chicano/Mexican-ancestry neighborhoods. The movement and its legacy have redefined the essence of what it means to be an American and tested the mainstream’s understanding of what defines Americanism and liberty within the context of a changing society. The process has taken place within contested space, as many who consider themselves “Americans” have struggled to understand and come to terms with the demographic and cultural changes brought by the rapid rise of the Latino population in the past fifty years.17 The Chicano Movement was no mere flash in the activist pan of post-World War II America; rather, along with the African American civil rights movement, it has created one of the most enduring social movement legacies of the late 20th century.

Works Cited Acuña, Rodolfo. Occupied America: The Chicano's Struggle toward Liberation. San Francisco, CA: Canfield Press, 1972. Print Aguirre, Adalberto, and Ruben O. Martinez. Chicanos in Higher Education: Issues and Dilemmas for the 21st Century. Washington DC: School of Education and Human Development, George Washington University, 1993. Almaguer, Tomás. Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994. 17

There is nothing new about this process. During past periods of massive immigration to the United States, nativism was an important political and social issue. See Higham; Billington; Editorial, “The New Nativism.”

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Alonzo, Armando C. Tejano Legacy: Rancheros and Settlers in South Texas, 1734–1900. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1998. Anaya, Rudolfo, and Francisco Lomelí, eds. Aztlán: Essays on the Chicano Homeland. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1991. Barrera, Mario. Race and Class in the Southwest: A Theory of Racial Inequality. Notre Dame, IN: U of Notre Dame P, 1979. Beaudrie, Sara M., and Marta Ana Fairclough. Spanish As a Heritage Language in the United States: The State of the Field. Washington: Georgetown UP, 2012. Bernstein, Shana. Bridges of Reform: Interracial Civil Rights Activism in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. Billington, Ray A. The Protestant Crusade, 1800–1860. New York, NY: Macmillan, 1938. Brilliant, Mark. The Color of America Has Changed: How Racial Diversity Shaped Civil Rights Reform in California, 1941–1978. New York, NY: Oxford UP, 2010. Burciaga, José Antonio. Drink Cultura: Chicanismo. Santa Barbara, CA: Joshua Odell Editions, Capra Press, 1993. Camarillo, Albert. Chicanos in a Changing Society: From Mexican Pueblos to American Barrios in Santa Barbara and Southern California, 1848–1930. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1979. Caraza, Leopoldo Martínez. La Intervención Norteamericana en México, 1846–1848: Historia Político-Militar de la Pérdida de Gran Parte del Territorio Mexicano. Mexico: Panorama Editorial, 1981. Carrigan, William D. The Making of a Lynching Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas, 1836–1916. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2004. Carroll, Patrick James. Felix Longoria's Wake: Bereavement, Racism, and the Rise of Mexican American Activism. Austin: U of Texas P, 2003. Castillo, Richard Griswold del. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo: A Legacy of Conflict. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1990. Chavez, Leo R. The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2008. Clark, William A. V. Immigrants and the American Dream: Remaking the Middle Class. New York, NY: Guilford Press, 2003. Davis, Kevin. “California Leads in Percentage Growth of Latino Officials.” Los Angeles Times 15 Sept. 1989: 3. Editorial. “The New Nativism.” The Nation, 10 Aug. 2006. Ennis, Sharon R., Merarys Ríos-Vargas, and Nora G. Albert. The Hispanic Population: 2010. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Economics and Statistics Administration, U.S. Census Bureau, 2011.

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Fernandez, Lilia. Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago. Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 2012. Field, Fredric W. Bilingualism in the USA: The Case of the ChicanoLatino Community. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Pub. Company, 2011. Foley, Neil. Quest for Equality: The Failed Promise of Black-Brown Solidarity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2010. García, Ignacio M. Chicanismo: The Forging of a Militant Ethos Among Mexican Americans. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1997. —. White But Not Equal: Mexican Americans, Jury Discrimination, and the Supreme Court. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2009. García, Mario T. Mexican Americans: Leadership, Ideology & Identity, 1930-1960. New Haven: Yale UP, 1989. García, Mario T., and Sal Castro. Blowout!: Sal Castro and the Chicano Struggle for Educational Justice. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2011. García, Matt. From the Jaws of Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Worker Movement. Berkeley: U of California P, 2012. Gillon, Steven M. That's Not What We Meant to Do: Reform and Its Unintended Consequences in Twentieth-Century America. New York: W.W. Norton, 2000. Graham, Hugh Davis. Collision Course: The Strange Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy in America. Oxford; New York: Oxford UP, 2003. Grebler, Leo, Joan W. Moore, and Ralph C. Guzman. The Mexican American People: The Nation’s Second Largest Minority. New York: Free Press, 1970. Gutiérrez, José Á. The Texas Association of Chicanos in Higher Education. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2013. —. We Won't Back Down: Severita Lara's Rise from Student Leader to Mayor . Houston, TX: Piñata Books, 2005. Henderson, Timothy J. A Glorious Defeat: Mexico and Its War with the United States. New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 2007. Hernández, Fernando. The Cubans: Our Legacy in the United States: A Collective Biography. Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Press, 2012. Higham, John. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925. New York, NY: Atheneum Press, 1963. Horsman, Reginald. Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1981. Johannsen, Robert Walter. To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination. New York, NY: Oxford UP, 1985.

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Johnson, Benjamin Heber. Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2003. Leal, Luis. “Octavio Paz and the Chicano.” Latin American Literary Review 5.10 (1977): 115–23. Lipski, John M. Varieties of Spanish in the United States. Washington: Georgetown UP, 2008. López, Ian Haney “Hernandez v. Brown.” New York Times. Web. 22 May 2004. Lopez, Mark Hugo and Ana Gonzalez-Barrera. “What Is the Future of Spanish in the United States?” Pew Research Center. N.p., n.d. Web. 3 Nov. 2015. Magaña, Lisa. Mexican Americans and the Politics of Diversity: Querer Es Poder! Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2005. Mariscal, George. Brown-eyed Children of the Sun: Lessons from the Chicano Movement, 1965-1975. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2005. Martínez, George A. “The Legal Construction of Race: MexicanAmericans and Whiteness.” Harvard Latino Law Review 2 (1997): 321. Matovina, Timothy M. The Alamo Remembered: Tejano Accounts and Perspectives. Austin: U of Texas P, 1995. Mehta, Seema. “Texas Latinos Hope to be Reflected in New District Lines; Their Growth Is Evident Everywhere but among the State’s Elected Officials.” Los Angeles Times. 24 April 2011. Mize, Ronald L., and Grace Delgado. Latino Immigrants in the United States. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2012. Muñoz, Carlos. Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement. London: Verso Press, 2007. Merry, Robert W. A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War, and the Conquest of the American Continent. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2009. Montejano, David M. Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836– 1986. Austin: U of Texas P, 1987. —. Quixote's Soldiers: A Local History of the Chicano Movement, 19661981. Austin: U of Texas P, 2010. Montoya, María. Translating Property: The Maxwell Land Grant and the Conflict over Land in the American West, 1840–1900. Lawrence: UP of Kansas, 2005. Morales, Ed. Living in Spanglish The Search for Latino Identity in America. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2013.

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Navarro, Armando. Mexican American Youth Organization: Avant-garde of the Chicano Movement in Texas. Austin, TX: U of Texas P, 1995. —. Mexicano Political Experience in Occupied Aztlán: Struggles and Change. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 2005. Nicholls, Walter. The Dreamers: How the Undocumented Youth Movement Transformed the Immigrant Rights Debate. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford UP, 2013. Oboler, Suzanne. Behind Bars: Latino/as and Prison in the United States. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Odem, Mary E., and Elaine C. Lacy. Latino Immigrants and the Transformation of the U.S. South. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2009. Olivas, Michael A., ed. “Colored Men” and “Hombres Aquí”: Hernandez v. Texas and the Emergence of Mexican-American Lawyering. Houston, TX: Arte Público Press, 2006. Pallares, Amalia, and Nilda Flores-González. ¡Marcha! Latino Chicago and the Immigrant Rights Movement. Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P, 2010. Passel Jeffrey, D’Vera Cohn, and Ana Gonzalez. “Population Decline of Unauthorized Immigrants Stalls, May Have Reversed.” Pew Research Center’s Hispanic Trends Project. N.p., n.d. Web. 3 Nov. 2015. Perea, Juan F. “Ethnicity and the Constitution: Beyond the Black and White Binary Constitution.” William and Mary Law Review 36 (1995): 571–611. Pérez-Torres, Rafael. Mestizaje: Critical Uses of Race in Chicano Culture. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2006. Pitti, Stephen J. The Devil in Silicon Valley: Northern California, Race, and Mexican Americans. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2003. Planas, Roque. “Chicano: What Does The Word Mean And Where Does It Come From?” The Huffington Post. N.p., n.d. Web. 3 Nov. 2015. Ramos, Raúl A. Beyond the Alamo: Forging Mexican Ethnicity in San Antonio, 1821–1861. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2008. Rendón, Armando B. Chicano Manifesto. New York, NY: Macmillan, 1971. Rodriguez, Marc S. Rethinking the Chicano Movement. New York: Routledge, 2014. Print —. The Tejano Diaspora: Mexican Americanism and Ethnic Politics in Texas and Wisconsin. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2011. Shockley, John S. Chicano Revolt in a Texas Town. Notre Dame, IN: U of Notre Dame P, 1974. Stavans, Ilan. Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language. New York: Rayo, 2003.

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Tatum, Charles M. Chicano Popular Culture: Que Hable El Pueblo. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2001. Taylor, Paul et al. “When Labels Don’t Fit: Hispanics and Their Views of Identity.” Pew Research Center’s Hispanic Trends Project. N.p., n.d. Web. 3 Nov. 2015. Telles, Edward Eric, and Vilma Ortiz. Generations of Exclusion: Mexican Americans, Assimilation, and Race. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2008. Trujillo, Armando L. Chicano Empowerment and Bilingual Education: Movimiento Politics in Crystal City, Texas. New York, NY: Garland Publishing, 1998. United States Bureau of the Census. Census of Population, 1970: Subject Reports, Final Report PC(2)-1A. “National Origin and Language.” Washington: Department of Commerce, The Bureau of the Census, 1973. —. We the Mexican Americans = Nosotros Los México Americanos. Washington: Department of Commerce. The Bureau of the Census, 1970. Valencia, Richard R. Chicano School Failure and Success: Past, Present, and Future. London: Routledge/Falmer, 2002. Vargas, Zaragosa. Labor Rights Are Civil Rights: Mexican American Workers in Twentieth-Century America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2005. Vasconcelos, José, and Didier Tisdel Jaén. The Cosmic Race: A Bilingual Edition. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997. Vigil, Ernesto B. The Crusade for Justice: Chicano Militancy and the Government's War on Dissent. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1999. Wanzer-Serrano, Darrel, The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2015. Zambrana, Ruth E. Latinos in American Society: Families and Communities in Transition. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2011. Zamora, Emilio. The World of the Mexican Worker in Texas, College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2000.

BRICOLAGE OF PROTEST: UNVEILING THE MULTICULTURAL DIMENSIONS OF THE CHICANO MOVEMENT THROUGH ITS MURALS ATALIE GERHARD

In this article, I discuss the multicultural background of the murals of the Chicano movement (ca. 1960-1980), referring to Antonio Bernal’s Untitled Mural (1968) and Willie Herrón III and Gronk’s Moratorium: The Black and White Mural (1973-1980) as examples. These murals were designed to mobilize economically underprivileged people of Mexican descent across the U.S. to unite as a revolutionary community on the basis of their cultural origins. However, murals that reframe Chicano identity strive to symbolically reclaim this label as empowering, because the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant U.S.-American mainstream assigns cultural ‘otherness’ to them from the outside. In so doing, Chicano1 artists have recurred to the cultural practice of bricolage that the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss first described in order to account for the ways that certain signifiers travel within and across cultural borders and at the same time inspire new communication. At this point, I would like to propose this approach to interpret the visual cultural artefacts of a minority resistance movement as messages that represent their political agenda, as it reconsid-

1

For the sake of simplicity, I use the masculine form ‘Chicano’ to refer to members of this community in general, regardless of their gender. As of my knowledge, exclusively men painted the murals analyzed in this article. With all due respect for Chicana feminist critics, I would additionally like to defend my decision on this issue by pointing to the Chicano movement’s original intention of rapprochement to the U.S.-based community’s Hispanic roots. According to the standard rules of Spanish grammar, the plural form ‘Chicanos’ can also signify either a mixedgender or an all-male group. In the vein of intercultural understanding, I adopt an analogous logic in this article when I write about ‘Chicano’ identity, history, etc. or ‘Chicanos’.

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ers the status of ‘otherness’ for not only Chicanos, but also the U.S.’s nonwhite groups in general. Bricolage already occurs when the murals align themselves with the Chicano movement, since in so doing, the artists reject identifying as hyphenated (Mexican-) Americans, but as Chicanos in the U.S instead. They had previously been urged to do the former when registering in bureaucratic contexts (see Anaya 96). In fact, the word ‘Chicano’ avoids attributing the people of combined Native American, Mexican, and AngloAmerican descent living in the U.S.A. to any particular nation-state. ‘Chicano’ yet still highlights that there is a distance between this group and their Mexican origins (‘Mexicano’), since the term phonetically assimilates the initial [t‫ ]ݕ‬sound of the pronunciation of those U.S.-based generations raised exclusively in English (see Anaya 96). In a similar way, Chicano movement murals reference their origins in the barrio culture of post-World War II when they continually incorporate the physical spaces demarcating that they are economically oppressed (cf. Loza 53). But Chicano muralistas simultaneously demanded to be recognized as artists by white élites even when they inverted the European aesthetic convention of producing paintings that portray ideas very distant from the everyday life of the working-class and withholding these from them in exclusive galleries (see Gómez-Peña 2084). In contrast, the murals that I will present in this article promote an ideal of members of the Chicano movement reimagining ‘otherness’ and uniting their voices in protest with those of multiple cultures. Chicano movement muralismo alike constructs its political discourse of protest to oppose the notion of cultural assimilation to the white leaders that underwrites the U.S.-American dream realized by non-white individuals who climb the social ladder. However, the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s-1920s already inspired this utilization of public art to mobilize the working-class, as it had sought to combat the government corruption and interventions of foreign empires (cf. García 12). Chicano movement muralistas therefore imported a clearly defined repertoire of political concerns from Mexico and adapted it to the U.S.-American context through their references (see Vargas 93). Bricolage is the cultural practice that allowed the political ideals of the Mexican Revolution to fuse with the multicultural pride that came to define Chicano identity. Hence in the case of Chicano movement muralismo, the U.S.-based artists actively created a voice for themselves, while linking the themes from their joint past to their present concerns. Against this background, this article chooses to explain how cultural signifiers travel with the help of Claude Lévi-Strauss’ notion of bricolage,

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which he identified in different traditions of the world through time as a central mode of expression (cf. 27; 49). In the development of cultural traditions, bricolage occurs when artists mimetically condense their everyday world into a miniature image that derives its meaning from its relation to commonly known pasts and imagined futures (cf. 34). Furthermore, LéviStrauss pointed out how the mimetic style of bricolage depends on the cultural producers’ recognition of analogies between contemporary and older myths that continue to circulate in their community (cf. 31-32; 48-49). Moreover, given his description of bricolage as a mode of artistic production that takes into account both the multicultural elements of a group as well as its present concerns, it particularly suits our analysis of Chicano movement murals. In this sense, the bricolage in Chicano muralismo attests to the essentially multicultural core of the U.S.-American minority resistance that it aligns itself with, as it interrogates shared national myths of egalitarianism. I find these visual references particularly surprising, since the selfempowerment rhetoric of the minority movements of the 1960s-1970s generally countered the U.S.-American mainstream imagination of the foundational American Revolution (1763-1789) as the singular event that ended colonial mass disenfranchisement in North America. While the different Civil Rights activists of the 20th century criticized the overwhelmingly white narrative of the U.S.’s liberal foundations, they still evoked comparable ideals of democratic self-determination as not yet properly realized. The fact that Chicano muralistas turned this original understanding of democratic values back on the white U.S.-Americans that name them as their cultural core proves how timeless these beliefs are as much as how easily national history has jeopardized them.2 For this reason, the bricolage behind Chicano public art especially fascinates me—the gesture of appropriating the barrio spaces of exclusion as points of depar2 At this point, I would like to kindly thank Sämi Ludwig for pointing out to me an analogous logic in the critically acclaimed Broadway musical, Hamilton (2015; written by Lin-Manuel Miranda). While based on the biography of the Founding Father Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow (Alexander Hamilton, 2004), the shows reimagine the historical setting of the narrative by casting non-white actors and actresses to play central figures that were originally white. Despite how historically inaccurate it is to imply that U.S.-Americans of color could have occupied essential administrative posts in the 18th century, this choice illustrates that the national cultural values associated with the American Revolution are no less shared by the non-white citizens who challenge systemic racism today after centuries of discrimination by just trying to live the same lives as their white compatriots.

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ture for multicultural communication actually exemplifies a realistic alternative to the institutionalized U.S.-American democracy with its frequent shortcomings at the cost of its citizens of color.

Legacies of Oppression Reworked into Countercultural Archives of Signifiers In his article, “From ‘The Chicano Movement: Some Not Too Objective Observations’” (2010), the activist-poet Abelardo ‘Lalo’ Delgado explains how the Chicano movement initially had to form a unique visual register to disseminate its political positions (cf. 991). These traces should encourage Chicano unity based foremost on the hope for a more positive future against the backdrop of a heavily criticized present moment (cf. Delgado 992). So, Chicano murals never allow being gazed at, since they challenge the viewer in a very binary manner to either identify with the whites who own the barrio estates or with the disregarded minorities that these properties enclose. The reason why subjective responses to murals as public art are so predictable is because their visual references unfold new contexts that matter to viewers in different ways depending on which older discourses they pertain to. Because Chicanos previously had no agency in defining their identity in the national bureaucracy and culture, the Chicano movement rhetoric all the more endorsed a view of them as ‘other’ than the white cultural mainstream. Indeed, the Chicano movement emerged out of a Cold War setting where Chicano cultures were suppressed along with the Spanish language in public schools (cf. Saldívar 26), and as a result Chicanos were relegated to laboring in the factories in the U.S. or those sprouting in the divided Mexican-American border region (see 19). The circumstance that a large number of Chicanos had fought in World War II on the side of AngloSaxon Protestant U.S.-Americans but were, as a cultural collective, excluded from this victory narrative further led many to encourage their children to assimilate to the whites (see Delgado 991). Next to the effects of a monolingual upbringing for numerous Chicanos, the administrative status as white that had been assigned to them additionally underlined how invisible they were as a multicultural minority within the U.S.A. (cf. Vargas 3). For this reason, the Chicano muralistas of the 1960s-1980s defied their condition when they artistically conquered their working-class neighborhoods and elaborated a unique visual style from multiple traditions to counter their everyday reality of economic domination and cultural segregation (see Loza 53). The Chicano movement muralistas’ recourse to barrio walls therefore demonstrated that a multicultural identity could also

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be embraced even when confined to a particularly bleak space of the U.S.American Southwestern cityscape (see Noriega xi). The foundational Chicano movement manifesto El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán (1969) further evidenced the special importance of the barrio for Chicano cultural identity, as it imagined the Chicanos reclaiming formerly Hispanic North American territories. In the recognizable pattern of bricolage, its political rhetoric mobilizes countercultures, but still connects to the original U.S.-American Declaration of Independence and turns the mirror on the contemporary occupiers. The reason for drawing this analogy resides in how the manifesto accuses a single metonymic ‘gringo’ (see Quintero 1) in the decidedly anti-elitist tone that it shares with the U.S.American foundational documents and finally its rejection of the patronizing white Anglo-Saxon Protestant colonizer (see Vargas 101). As a rhetorical effect, this instance of bricolage in El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán presented the Chicanos of the U.S. as an already solidified community before they had actually accomplished this ambition (see Noriega 20). Murals that occupy spaces marking Chicano discrimination at once perform a parallel act of materializing this goal and propagating it as a viable alternative for U.S.-American minorities whom political leaders traditionally overlook.

Associating U.S.-American Foundational Values to Multicultural Resistance in Antonio Bernal’s Untitled Mural (1968) At the height of the Chicano movement in 1968, the artist Antonio Bernal painted a colorful succession of historical figures on the walls of the now abandoned Teatro Campesino in Del Rey, California.3 Its bricolage expresses the origins and character of the Chicano movement’s political identity at a moment when Chicanos largely united to emancipate themselves from the stereotypes of poverty and powerlessness (see Vargas 20). The mural fictionally constructs a Chicano revolutionary past by revitalizing the narrative principle of ancient Mayan art when it symbolically aligns the armed Mexican Revolution figures alongside the U.S.-based activists Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and César Chávez (see Vargas 22). Meanwhile, the countercultural tradition that Antonio Bernal represented demands that the same democratic privileges be distributed equally to people of color, because these rights are celebrated in the U.S.American political tradition. We can see how the succession of figures that 3

See Appendix A.

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Antonio Bernal portrayed reveals more about his aspirations for the Chicano movement than their political past in the U.S. (see Vargas 22) if we apply Claude Lévi-Strauss’ notion of bricolage as dependent on drawing analogies for new mythical narratives to be assembled (cf. 31). Indeed, the kind of rapprochements that Claude Lévi-Strauss envisioned between different groups as an essential benefit of bricolage (still 31) also occurs between South American and African American efforts to broaden democracy in Antonio Bernal’s Untitled Mural. Akin to the aesthetic revaluation by diverse African American community empowerment movements that black corporeality is beautiful, Antonio Bernal’s mural transforms the shabby barrio of Chicano everyday life to show an emerging countercultural U.S.-American artistic tradition (see Vargas 12). In this context, the potential of bricolage to facilitate uprisings by minorities depends precisely on the otherwise debasing stereotypes of Chicano marginalization in the creative manner that Claude Lévi-Strauss also uncovered behind the mechanism by which new myths are formed when they draw from preexisting ones (see 32). When Antonio Bernal recurred to the figures of the pacifist Martin Luther King Jr. and the separatist Malcolm X, he thus implied that he was more interested in minority solidification in general than in the two contrasting political positions that they embody. Although originally applied to the context of African American self-empowerment movements, the more traditional ideal of W.E.B. Du Bois of a political unity bound together by its origins and its history of hope for improvement sounds through this bricolage. The bricolage that aids Antonio Bernal’s Untitled Mural in imagining politically united Chicanos inverts the ethnographic gaze that conventionally constructed the indigenous peoples of the Americas as subservient ‘others’.4 Instead, the mural creates a situation where potentially white viewers are forced to look up to, rather than upon, a procession of non-white figures that are being celebrated and the goal is to identify 4

In his book, Border Matters. Remapping American Cultural Studies (1997), José David Saldívar has explored how imperialist structures were implemented in the Americas. He credited the classic ethnographic writing of the past centuries with installing a particular white gaze upon non-white peoples that facilitated their ongoing marginalization in the U.S.-American institutions of today such as public education or heavy industry. But prior to actually colonizing the lands of the indigenous people, the ethnographer had been writing about ‘them’ from the first person and only recounting their actions from a distance, rather than allowing his subjects of pseudo-scientific observation to tell their stories in their own (even if translated) voices. Thereby, the scientists constructed the hierarchical superiority of the white colonizers of exclusively European descent (cf. Saldívar 22 f.).

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what they have in common. Rather than perpetuate the colored Americas’ minority voices being discursively silenced, the Untitled Mural visually innovates the self-representative possibilities of the Chicano movement by fabricating a story around their political values. Claude Lévi-Strauss recognized another benefit in bricolage, as it puts a bricoleur’s5 personal experience of history into an artistic miniature that provides the space in which politically specific views are included in the illustration (see 34; 49). In the case of Antonio Bernal’s Untitled Mural, this aspect of a specifically Chicano understanding of U.S.-American minority movements of the past underwrites the artist’s selection of the painted figures as well as the order they were successively arranged in. Notably, Malcolm X appears in a T-shirt bearing the emblem of the radically separationist Black Panther Party rather than being commemorated for the political positions he last endorsed before his death. Indeed, his final attempts toward intercultural and -religious solidarity contradicted separatist politics (see his Autobiography 493), but he was assassinated before he could have criticized the Black Panther Party, which was founded in 1966. Hence, Antonio Bernal’s visual reference of Malcolm X relies on the viewer to privilege the leader’s early black separatist worldview over the ideal of a culturally diverse community united in pacifism that he had been proposing since his pilgrimage to Mecca. In placing Malcolm X next to Martin Luther King Jr., Antonio Bernal further suggests that Malcolm X’s separationist political discourse may be just as relevant and inspirational to Chicanos as Martin Luther King Jr.’s pacifist integrationist efforts. I was first surprised by this depiction of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. in a mural celebrating a Chicano revolutionary tradition, since they were not Hispanic but epitomize preceding African American protest movements. An explanation why they were symbolically enlisted in the Chicano movement can again be found in the way Antonio Bernal exemplifies the technique of bricolage. The Untitled Mural contains the idea that peace between multiple cultures, in particular, should be the necessary goal of the Chicano movement, since Antonio Bernal has positioned Malcom X before Martin Luther King Jr. within a succession that suggests the development of politics through minority history (see Vargas 22). Because the mural locates Martin Luther King Jr. 5

As with the term ‘Chicano’, I have once again chosen to use the masculine form here to include artists of any gender who practice bricolage. My decision is motivated by the fact that French grammar, like Spanish, traditionally posits the masculine form as the standard to encompass even feminine members of a mixed-gender group in the plural. I am further remaining close to Claude Lévi-Strauss’ exclusive use of the word ‘bricoleur’ in the French original context of the 20th century.

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at the final position of this succession, the bricolage suggests that his strivings for universal peace are of absolute relevance in forming Chicano political consciousness. Hence, the way that Antonio Bernal’s Untitled Mural exemplifies bricolage does not only insist on a specific Chicano revolutionary political identity in the context of the Chicano movement, but also aids in showing the mechanisms of cultural borrowing that shaped its precise values and objectives. In so doing, the artwork nevertheless has concentrated its critique on the U.S.-American barrio setting that lent it its physical backdrop. In this sense, its allusion to the United Farm Workers personified by César Chavez as a sharecropper applauds his ideal of economic egalitarianism as relevant because of its implicit relation to the U.S.-American foundational democratic principle of financial self-determination. With its allusions to the territorial dispossession of Chicanos in the originally Hispanic U.S.-American Southwest, the Untitled Mural defines a specific concern for the Chicano movement relating to economic and cultural marginalization. But by evoking the legacy of non-Hispanic activists like Martin Luther King Jr., Antonio Bernal already makes a first step toward appealing to white viewers to pay attention to the demands of the Chicano movement based on its similarity to familiar icons of minority protest who had already gained public recognition in the U.S. As a result, the Untitled Mural represents a bricolée history of increasingly integrationist minority politics in the Americas that all incorporate U.S.American foundational democratic virtues but express them through exclusively non-white leaders.

Narrating Discrimination through Multicultural Histories of Racist Violence in Willie Herrón III and Gronk’s Moratorium: The Black and White Mural (1973-1980) Willie Herrón III and Glugio ‘Gronk’ Nicandro’s Moratorium: The Black and White Mural (begun in 1973)6 exemplifies the bricolage process of juxtaposing signifiers of different aspects of the Chicano movement’s attempts to gain a political voice in the U.S.A. Willie Herrón and Gronk already protested against Chicano domination by whites when they conceived the Black and White Mural, because the fact that the artwork was officially commissioned to embellish the barrio is overshadowed by the account of discrimination and violence that its images give in the style of a newspaper (see Noriega 22-23). The use of bricolage underscores that the 6

See Appendix B.

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mural’s emphasis on scenes of violence and segregation (indicated by the steel bars and barbed wire fences) merely reflected an everyday stereotype of life in the U.S. for Chicanos. Although the painting memorializes Chicanos suffering from police brutality during the anti-Vietnam War National Chicano Moratorium Committee’s Los Angeles march on August 29th, 1970 in several of its key scenes (see “Moratorium: The Black and White Mural”), its criticism of white America is not limited to this individual event. The fact that the victimized subjects are all painted in black and white rather than, for example, brown, additionally underlines the multicultural inclusiveness of the people’s movement they adhered to, since viewers of every color can identify with them even without knowing about the particular context of their pain. The way Gronk insisted on utilizing inspiration from multiple sources as a central element of his Chicano movement art further reminds me of Lévi-Strauss’ definition of ordinary perception as the main origin behind the bricoleur’s creative selection.7 In the Black and White Mural, I also want to emphasize the importance of personal experience in defining collective political aspirations to explain why Willie Herrón added the two figures of himself and his wife embracing in 1980 (see “Moratorium: The Black and White Mural”). I believe the picture of the couple relates to the colonial Americas’ foundational idealization of heterosexual marriage as a metonymic signifier for the opportunity of multicultural unification (e.g. the myth of John Smith and Pocahontas in the U.S. or Hernán Cortés and La Malinche in Mexico). The signifier of the couple as encoded within the process of bricolage here contrasts the mural’s binary division into black and white, because unlike the cutouts of scenes of brutality, it imagines harmony between two figures. In the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant U.S.-American rhetorical tradition, the figure of the Jeremiad likewise blends the voices of lamentation into the hope for general improvement when expressed by metonymic individuals who emphasize their troubled descent and moral nobility. I interpret the circumstance that Willie Herrón added the self-portrait with 7 In his 2010 interview with Latinopia.com, Gronk talked about his method of artistic creation in the following words: “I pull from many different sources because that is who I am and that’s what make [sic!] me up as a creative person utilizing information from any different places. The reason I chose to do art was not to win a popularity contest. The purpose was for exploration. I[t] was something that I was driven to do” (“Gronk—In His Own Words”). In this quotation, I find strong similarities between Gronk’s emphasis on the multiplicity of his inspiration, the mimetic intentions of his art as well as his corporeal investment and Claude Lévi-Strauss’ description of the bricoleur in La pensée sauvage (1962) that I have previously addressed.

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his wife at a later point and that they are standing at the outmost location of the Black and White Mural to envision the lasting harmony between binary contrasts in a corresponding logic. Yet, I take the use of such bricolage to include the foundational ideal of the heterosexual overcoming of differences into the mural to denote political repression in the U.S., because the flipside of this message means that minority individuals only had the power to counter racism through their personal choices. In order to elevate the discrimination of Chicanos to a national concern, the Black and White Mural countered public insouciance about the issue through yet another function of bricolage. However, the artists encountered frequent misunderstandings for featuring a scene of mass murder through gasification from the film The Children of Paradise (1945) and linking this image to the general condition of Chicanos in the U.S.A. Instead of considering a picture that typifies the violence of the Nazi occupation of France (1940-1944) as a metaphor for a parallel situation of Chicanos in East Los Angeles, Gronk has expressed his interest in having this cutout recognized for its actual identity as a fragment borrowed from another context (cf. “Gronk—In his Own Words”). Hence, when viewers attempt to draw parallels between two separate narratives, the audience’s own interpretation of the Chicanos as one of many struggling groups of the world results from Willie Herrón’s and Gronk’s bricolée implied reference to World War II. In a similar fashion, Lévi-Strauss recognizes that visual references ‘borrowed’ by one artist from older myths for new cultural productions are used to suggest an analogy between the two contexts where they are applied (cf. 31; 49). The requirements to decode the Black and White Mural’s revisionist approach to minority history lie precisely in the bricolage method of connecting multiple cultural myths by appropriating single symbols. Following in the countercultural traditions of precedent minority movements in the U.S., this mural evaded accuracy and instead privileged symbolically powerful references from more established discourses to aid in fashioning a multicultural visual language of resistance.8 For example, the very first 8

I identify a similarity with Paul Gilroy’s analysis of African American musical traditions in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993). He explains that the reciprocal address of such typical African American rhetorical patterns as call-and-response anticipated a united black community avant l’heure (cf. 102 f.). Originating in the system of plantation slavery, interactive ritualistic songs revised the situation that they emerged from, because they imagined an end of bondage and separation for the captured singers. I refer to Paul Gilroy’s idea at this point, since Chicano muralismo, like contemporary commercial African American music, still maintains ties to the original circumstances of oppression of the

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cutout image in the Black and White Mural’s top left corner evidences that the Chicano movement was culturally inclusive, since opposing a brighthaired and a dark-haired primate simultaneously underscores the artificial but ancient nature of racial division, regardless of which particular community is affected. In that sense, the mural’s evocation of Darwinism embraces the Chicanos’ barrio experience rather than perpetuating traditional U.S.-American idealizations of upward social mobility. The mural’s bricolage realizes the Chicano movement objective of communal consciousness on the grounds of the reclaimed everyday experience of being ‘othered’ by acknowledging the impact of how whites justify that the economic American dream is elusive for colored people because society has always constructed them as different.9

Constructing a Chicano Cultural Identity through the Bricolage of Multiple Traditions I hope that the above analysis has elucidated the creative processes through which preexisting cultural traditions of the U.S. have provided a basis for the Chicano movement during its developing phase from the 1960s onwards. I meant to demonstrate how fusing different symbolical registers and juxtaposing them against their conventional setting was a central element in the innovation of a revolutionary Chicano visual archive for murals that expressed both their particularity and inclusiveness. I especially hoped to show how references to the U.S.A.’s foundational imaginary in the Chicano movement murals managed to accuse white AngloSaxon Protestants of a hypocritical attitude toward democracy, while still enlisting their national past as part of a multicultural canon. In their unique way, Chicano muralistas have proven that national virtues that are comcommunity that it represents and incorporates a legacy of the respective minority’s political traditions in this way. 9 In her book, Facing Up to the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation (1995), Jennifer L. Hochschild investigates how diverse public discourses from science to popular culture maintain the myth of the American dream of upward social mobility at the cost of those who fail to accomplish it. I think that for the Chicano context, the following example from her book deserves particular consideration: living the American dream always involves that ambitious, young people move out of the ghetto they were born in and transform into self-made men (cf. 33). In contrast, the Chicano movement encouraged especially Chicano youth to embrace both their multicultural origins and their native barrios rather than assimilate to the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant élite for the sake of individual economic improvement.

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monly celebrated such as equality or solidarity also inhere in the subversive dialogues between different groups of people experiencing rejection because of their color or class. Through my reading of two selected murals, I also aspired to challenge the enduring U.S.-American mainstream tale of limitless unity and opportunity by pointing out how embracing the subject-position of being gazed upon can actually hold the mirror to national élites. Significantly, Guillermo Gómez-Peña considers the Chicanos’ mestizaje identity as a source of inspiration and a basis for demanding that they have equal opportunities (cf. 2085). After all, when Chicanos say they embody a mixture of Native American, Hispanic, and often African American origins in a country dominated by Anglo-Saxons, they are implying that they combine multiple legacies of subjugation and suffering from racism in their personal pasts (see Noriega 18). Yet, a considerable challenge to the Chicano movement’s quest for a combined voice arose from the background of self-denying former adherents of the Pachuco movement (ca. 1940s-1950s) for Mexican-American pride (see Vargas 991). In this context, Abelardo ‘Lalo’ Delgado has illustrated how the Pachucos’ experience of ongoing ethnic inequality following World War II directly connected to their emphasis on early future assimilation (see 991-92). The next generation of Chicanos born in the U.S. often lacked first-hand cultural ties (such as the language) to Mexico because their families had preferred to transmit English and the dominant Anglo-American lifestyle to their children. I want to stress that the creative practice of bricolage in the two selected murals discussed, once helped construct a particular community history by borrowing from multiple cultural contexts of the Americas. Importantly, the murals’ bricolages reclaim non-white bodies and their historical accounts to deliver countercultural narratives and thereby even invite faces from the past to contribute to the Chicano movement’s efforts toward improvement for numerous minorities. Moreover, the fact that Claude Lévi-Strauss’ original description of the bricoleur’s cultural work was formulated from his external ethnographical perspective implies that I may have performed bricolage on the theoretical level of this text to privilege the ‘other’ perspective. I hope I could thus showcase an academic possibility to acknowledge the multicultural collaboration that also imbues a U.S.based minority pride discourse like that of the Chicano movement.

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Works Cited Primary Sources Bernal, Antonio. Untitled Mural. 1968. El Teatro Campesino Office Wall, Del Rey, CA (defunct). Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC). Web. 26 Aug. 2016. Herrón, Willie III and Gronk. Black and White Moratorium Mural.197380. Estrada Courts, Los Angeles, CA. Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC). Web. 26 Aug. 2016.

Secondary Sources Anaya, Rudolfo. “A Chicano in Spain.” Multi-America. Essays on Cultural Wars and Cultural Peace. Ed. Ishmael Reed. New York, NY: Viking, 1998. 93-101. Delgado, Abelardo Lalo. “From ‘The Chicano Movement: Some Not Too Objective Observations’.” Ed. Stavans 990-1002. García, Neftalí G. The Mexican Revolution: Legacy of Courage. Bloomington, IN: Xlibris, 2010. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic. Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993. Gómez-Peña, Guillermo. “Documented/Undocumented.” Ed. Stavans 2081-86. “Gronk–In His Own Words.” Latinopia. com. 2010. Web. 19. Aug. 2016. Hochschild, Jennifer L. Facing Up to the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1995. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. La pensée sauvage. Paris, FR: Plon, 1962. Loza, Sandra de la. “La Raza Cósmica. An Investigation into the Space of Chicana/o Muralism.” L.A. Xicano. Ed. Chon A. Noriega et al. Los Angeles, CA: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center P, 2011. 53-62. Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles. “Moratorium: The Black and White Mural.” Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles, n.d. Web. 13. Aug. 2013. Noriega, Chon A. “The Orphans of Modernism.” Phantom Sightings. Art After the Chicano Movement. Ed. Rita Gonzalez et al. Los Angeles, CA: California UP, 2008. 16-45. —.“Introduction.” L.A. Xicano. Ed. Chon A. Noriega et al. Los Angeles, CA: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center P, 2011. xi-xii. Quintero, Fernando. “El Plan de Aztlán was adopted at the first National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference in Denver, Colorado, March 1969.” Web. 02. Dec. 2006.

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Saldívar, José David. Border Matters. Remapping American Cultural Studies. Berkeley, CA: California UP, 1997. Stavans, Ilan, gen. ed. The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature. New York, NY and London, UK: Norton, 2010. Vargas, George. Contemporary Chican@ Art. Color & Culture for a New America. Austin, TX: Texas UP, 2010. X, Malcolm, with Alex Haley. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. 1965. London, UK: Penguin, 2001.

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Apppendix B: Willie Herrón IIII and Gronk’ss Moratorium:: The Blacck and White Mural M (1973- 1980)

YIDDISH AND AMERICAN MULTICULTURALISM: A “POSTVERNACULAR” LANGUAGE ON THE MARGIN ASTRID STARCK-ADLER

Even as modern Yiddish culture blossomed in Europe in the late 19th / early 20th centuries, Eastern European Jewish migrants brought Yiddish to the goldene medine (Golden Land). The immigrants included poets (Jacob Glatstein), writers (Joseph Opatoshu), artists (Maurice Schwarz, Molly Picon), playwrights (Jacob Gordin), composers (Abraham Goldfaden) and political, social, economic and cultural doers (Abraham Cahan and the Forverts, Chaim Zhitlovsky) among others.1 A whole Yiddish world was imported into the United States, where this 1000 year old mameloshn, a symbol of Jewishness, not only served as a bridge between the lost “home” and the New World, but also found a fertile breeding ground for new creativity. For decades to follow, America influenced Yiddish culture and viceversa. The result was a mingling between the lost and the found culture. This symbiosis has many faces—linguistic, artistic, cultural, social, political, literary and musical. The best known linguistic symbiosis is Yinglish, a language which developed specifically in New York where the Yiddishspeaking Diaspora was most numerous, where Yiddish theatre was at its best, and where the Broadway musical, proceeding from Abraham Goldfaden’s plays, took hold. To this very day Yinglish and Fiddler on the Roof are to be heard in New York. For Shandler, Yiddish functions nowadays as a “postvernacular language,” integrating its speakers into a community. In my paper I propose to explore what Yiddish represents within post-Holocaust American multiculturalism, in which Yiddish language and culture have had to redefine themselves in a global medium: the Internet.



1 In the following, Yiddish is transliterated according to the YIVO (Institute for Jewish Research, New York).

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Carried by mid-19th-century Eastern Ashkenazic Jews, Yiddish—the Jewish language born in Europe—crossed the Atlantic and settled in the United States. There, as in other immigration countries, a buoyant Yiddish culture developed, and American Yiddish contributed significantly to the Yiddish culture which ultimately spread throughout the world and which I subsume under the concept of Yiddishophony.2 A cornerstone of Jewishness (Yiddishkeit), this thousand year old mother tongue (mameloshn) built a bridge between the past and the future, the lost “home” and the New World. Here the first generation of poets, writers, artists, playwrights, filmmakers, composers and doers—political, social, economic and cultural, benefiting from traditional knowledge and experience, found a fertile breeding ground for new creativity. Based originally on bilingualism and later on multilingualism, Yiddish culture evolved—in the context of the American Civil Rights movement—from pluralism to multiculturalism. The influence of Yiddish on American culture and vice-versa led to a many-sided symbiosis embracing at once linguistics, art, culture, society, politics, literature and music. It’s hard to imagine New York, the big center of Yiddish culture, without Yinglish 3 or Fiddler on the Roof 4 and, conversely, Jewish klezmer music without Afro-American jazz. If the Jewish community became part of the white American establishment and Judaism the third religion in the United States, Yiddish, eradicated in Europe by the Nazis, survives willingly as a marker of memory, identity and continuity. Though now a “post-vernacular language,” as Jeffrey Shandler calls it, Yiddish allows its speakers to reinvigorate a world community based on Jewishness and multilingualism rather than on Judaism and monolingualism. It enables them to perceive themselves as both “insiders and outsiders” (see Biale et al.). Thus Yiddish language and culture function as alternatives questioning Jewish-English monoculturalism. As Goldberg puts it: “Broadly conceived, multiculturalism is critical of and resistant to the necessarily reductive imperatives of monocultural assimilation” (7). In the following paper, after a short historical recall, I shall explore what Yiddish represented once and what it represents today in postHolocaust American multiculturalism and in the new media.

 2

This phenomenon embraces all the emigration countries that developed a Yiddish literature and culture. See Starck-Adler, “Das Jiddische.” 3 Use of Yiddish words in English, see Rosten. 4 Based on Sholem Aleichem’s novel, Tevye the Dairyman, set in Russia in the Pale of Settlement in 1905, it was performed first in 1964 and has lasted until today. The same year, 1964, the saxophonist Cannonball Adderley composed a jazz album with compositions based on the Broadway musical.

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Fleeing pogroms and misery, Jews from Eastern Europe and the Austro-Hungarian Empire migrated to the Unites States, the goldene medine (Golden Land), in search of a better life if not of survival itself. Their language, which Max Weinreich calls a “fusion language” (shmelzsphrakh) (29), developed around the 10th century in the Holy Roman Empire and is based on the Semitic languages Hebrew and Aramaic (the languages of the Bible and Talmud and the origin of the alphabet), the Romance languages Old French and Italian, and above all Middle High German, which provided grammar and much vocabulary. From the beginning, Jewish and Christian perception of Yiddish has been ambivalent. Whereas women spoke, wrote and read Yiddish, observant men had to know Hebrew and Aramaic in order to be able to study Holy Scripture. The Jewish Enlightenment, in the person of its most famous philosopher, Moses Mendelssohn, himself a Yiddish-speaker, considered Yiddish an unworthy dialect, a relic of the ghetto and thus an obstacle to emancipation. But at the Czernowitz Conference in 1908, the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy recognized the vernacular of Ashkenazic Jews as a major language. Whereas Central or Western European Jews adopted the German or French of their country of residence, Eastern European Jews, subject to discriminatory laws preventing emancipation and assimilation, kept the language their ancestors had brought from Central Europe when they were persecuted in the Middle Ages. In the 19th century the internal bilingualism of Jewish society became multilingualism. Jewish intellectuals and artists had initially embraced the Enlightenment by writing not only in Hebrew but in major languages like German, Russian or Polish; in time, though, they devoted themselves to the vernacular that gave them access to the Jewish masses and allowed them to educate the folks-mentsh. Thus modern Yiddish literature and culture arose in a century which saw the rise of nationalism and of nation states each with its own language. Jews being a minority without territory, and Yiddish a transnational language, Yiddish culture and literature became a national identity-building element spread over an imaginary territory called Yiddishland. This is illustrated by Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, a work influenced by Otto Bauer’s idea of a multicultural community where national identities—those of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy—are not “naturally” given and invariable, but culturally interchangeable. Incidentally the Ottoman Empire, where Ladino developed after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, is another example; as a case in point, I quote the polyglot writer and thinker Elias Canetti.5 Faced with the



5 See Lorenz: “He grew up a polyglot and a student of world cultures, including nations and groups that received no attention except perhaps from anthropologists

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multicultural empires doomed to disappear after WWI, European enlightenment ideology was based on monolingualism and monoculturalism, imposed upon colonies worldwide and thus valid too within the AngloSaxon establishment of the United States. The number of Yiddish-speaking immigrants in the United States jumped from half a million in 1880 to over three million in 1917. Thus America’s Yiddish-speaking community and attendant cultural and literary life were second only to those of pre-WWII Eastern Europe in size and dynamism. Contrary to Eurocentric notions, which applied to Yiddish too,6 relations between the Old World and New were hardly a one-way street. Recent research shows that travel to Europe for economic activity and cultural exchange opened new perspectives. The “immigrant as transnational” plays a key role (introductory commentaries to Part III by Kahn & Mendelsohn 141-43). There was this American mass—Jewish and non-Jewish, Yiddish-speaking and non-Yiddish speaking—hungry for news and events and eager for popular literature and pulp fiction. While the aim of the great Russian and Polish Yiddish writers in the main literary genres (poetry, drama, novel, short story) had been to emulate the creators of European masterpieces while focusing on Jewishness and Jewish morality, the early Modern writers saw the birth of a popular literature, mostly religious, which became more and more secular in the 19th century. Popular literature—the Kolportageroman in Germany, the roman à quatre sous in France, the “trashy” novel in England and America, the mayse bukh (chapbook) in Yiddish (see Roskies)—simply boomed, stimulated by newspaper-serializations 7 and the dime novel (see Goldstein, “Pop’em”). The stimulation of American mass culture by European Yiddish production shook-up elitist European Yiddish writers devoted to the folks-mentsh (see Goldstein, “A Taste”), among them the “fathers” of modern literature Mendele Moicher Sforim (1836-1917), Sholem Aleichem (1859-1916) and

 and ethnographers—the Lele of Kasai, the Jivaros, the Pueblo Indians, the Shi’ites in Karbala, and the Kosas. Disturbing the modern readers, he paralleled the seemingly barbarian customs of primitive peoples, ‘Naturvölker’, to accounts from Western culture and history, the supposed realm of civilization” (1-2). 6 See Shmeruk (151). 7 The Nobel Prize winner in Literature (1978), Isaac Bashevis Singer, serialized all his novels in the Yiddish newspaper Forverts, also called The Jewish Daily Forward, created in 1897 by Abe Cahan, a socialist Yiddish doer and writer. The paper exists today in a bilingual weekly edition on the internet: http://yiddish.forward.com/. Singer’s sad-humorous banquet speech in Yiddish shows what has been irrevocably annihilated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d8yeL0oEwU.

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Isaac Leibush Peretz (1852-1915), whose oeuvres span various literary genres. In return, literature for the masses was vilified. Shomer (Nochem Meyer Shaikevitz), who began as a Hebrew poet, writer and translator (he translated Les Mystères de Paris by Eugène Sue), and ended up writing Yiddish chapbooks, was severely criticized by Sholem Aleichem in Shomers mishpet (pamphlet, 1888: Shomers Trial). Shomer became emblematic for shund or trash literature. Only recently have scholars pointed out the social, historical and literary implications of his work. He left Russia for America where he became very successful. As Isaac Meyer Dick had done twenty years before, Shomer promoted Yiddish fiction for the mass market. The newcomers’ encounter with a new but pre-imagined country found linguistic, generational, social and religious expression in these writers’ work. While the influence of Russian, German, French and Scandinavian authors on the first immigrants is striking, the younger generation already explores the new continent in search of what Homi Bhabha would call a “third space” identity or Bachman an identity on the “threshold.”8 America gave writers, artists and entertainers the opportunity to develop their skills and achieve their primary goal: to educate the Jewish masses, the bulk of the newcomers, employed and exploited in sweatshops and textile factories to which they were brought as cheap labor—there was the saying “fun shif in shklaf” (from the ship into slavery), or working hard as peddlers, oddjobbers, errand boys, day laborers while living in insalubrious Lower East Side slums, in dark, unhealthy cellars and basements. In his collection of short stories Mentshn un Chayes (Men and Animals, 1938), Joseph Opatoshu depicts a wide range of desperate situations and life conditions in the New World. Particularly important was the commitment of the “sweatshop” poets, anarchists or bundists (socialists) who devoted their lives and poetry to the cause of the “wretched of the earth,” beyond the color line, like David Edelstadt (1866-1892), Joseph Bovshover (18731913), Morris Rosenfeld (1862-1923) and Morris Winchevsky (18561932), themselves proletarians (see, for example, Rosenfeld’s “Der svetshap” [The Sweatshop]). Some of their poems were made into folk songs.9 The younger, rebellious generation called itself Di Yunge (The Young Ones) and favored art for art’s sake (“pure poetry”) while extolling individualism, emotion and nature as epitomized by Walt Whitman (18191892). In free verse chanted to jazz, the Inzikhistn (Introspectivists) reflect the hectic, chaotic rush of modern urban life, especially in New York,

 8

See Bachmann: “[The threshold] is an in-between position that captures the richness of identities” (p. xxiii). 9 For example, Rosenfeld’s “Der svet-shap” (Mlotek 78) and Morris Vintshevsky’s “Di tsukunft” (The Future; Mlotek 86).

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materialized by technological innovations such as cars, trucks, bridges, the subway and big construction sites (see Harshav). 10 The leftist poets Di Linke, drawn to Bolshevist ideals, favoring communism and seeking justice against harsh American capitalism, clustered around the Proletpen, a communist journal. As Dovid Katz (born 1956), son of the LithuanianAmerican poet Menke Katz (1906-1991), points out, they “were excluded from the Yiddish canon” (see Glaser and Weintraub). 11 The anthology Proletpen, devoted to “America’s Rebel Yiddish Poets” and introduced by Dovid Katz, gives them a strong voice amidst the American-Yiddish poets. A whole cycle of poems by different poets—Sarah Barkan, Betsalel Friedman, Y.A. Rontsh, Yosl Cutler, Yosl Grinshpan, Malka Lee, Zishe Vaynper, Berish Vaynshteyn/Weinstein and Dora Teitelboim—appeared first in newspapers and journals; it deals with the Scottsboro trial in which 9 young African Americans were accused of gang-raping two white women on a Southern railway trip (see “Speaking of Scottsboro” in the anthology Proletpen 133-73). One of them was put to death as soon as the trial began (1932). In 1937 the trial ended when one of the women confessed to having invented the whole story: “Poems depicting the struggle of African Americans were already common in American Yiddish poetry, but Scottsboro prompted a series of new and more contextualized responses to racism in America” (134). Yiddish writers’ choice to write on black culture and the oppression of blacks echoes white leftist poetry. Why this topic? One shouldn’t forget the South–North, rural-urban migration of numerous blacks as well as the long-suppressed fact of black writers’,12 artists’, jazz musicians’, dramatists’ and visual artists’ contribution to urban American culture during the Harlem Renaissance (1918-1937), a flowering which was essential for American Modernism.13 This space—

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The most famous were Jacob Glatstein (1896–1971) and Aron Glantz-Leyeles (1889-1966). 11 They include Beresh Weinstein (1905-1967), Moshe Nadir (1885-1943), Dora Teitelboim (1914-1992) and Menke Katz (1906–1991). 12 The use of the sonnet by Claude McKay, Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes is “to articulate the experience of racism, especially the Du Boisian concept of ‘double-consciousness’, a sense of two-ness born of being both black and American” (see Leitner). No wonder the Yiddish poet Mani Leib was influenced by the Harlem Renaissance poets in his use of the sonnet to express both his Jewish- and American-ness. On the relationship between Langston Hughes and Yiddish writers, see also McCallum-Bonar. 13 In his film “Bird” (1988), Clint Eastwood depicts Charlie Parker playing at a Jewish wedding with Rod Rodney (Gene Krupa), whereas in the Deep South

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called “multiracial” in those days—is reflected in Meisel’s chronological anthology of American Yiddish poetry which includes poems on black Americans and yields in sum a vision of American society as a whole (see Meisel). Remembering their own persecution in Europe, avant-garde Yiddish poets (see Berish Weinstein, “Lynching” [Harshav 649) and novelists (see Opatoshu) took up the cudgels for oppressed blacks, who in their eyes represented oppression par excellence and the negation of America as a free country. They achieved powerful poems depicting violence, death and lynching (see Amelia Glaser): Negro, the fate of destruction fell not only on you Many, many die like you. Such a death is now in fashion, Like this they now die everywhere———— In Wedding, in Leopoldstadt and in Carolina.14

Many lyrics sung by black singers were written in English by Jewish authors. So for example Abe Meeropol’s “Strange Fruit” about lynching, sung by Billie Holiday.15 She performed also the emblematic Yiddish song My Yiddishe Momme (1956).16 There is a close connection between these writers and South African Yiddish writers, who were confronted with and denounced a similar situation (see Stark-Adler, “South African”). While sharing a common fate with blacks, American-Yiddish poets located themselves on the margin of American society. The question arose: can a Yiddish poet experience African-American life through empathy? In “The Strangeness of Translation, Yiddish Poets Writing Black Experience,” Merle Bachman insists on the Jewish perception of black experience and analyses the psychological projection at work in the poems (114). The “taking on” of an African-American identity, which is a kind of mise en abyme of one’s own previous situation, can be grasped as a transgressive and rebellious attempt at Americanization. Another approach current in the

 Krupa, afraid of being lynched, sings the blues “as an albino black” and shares black accommodation! 14 David Schiff writes: “As the pariahs of Europe, Jews could easily identify with the sufferings of the African-American; but they soon learned that American society would treat them far better than it would blacks” (98). Jews too were lynched in the South: the first was Samuel Bierfield in Tennessee in 1868 together with his black clerk, Lawrence Bowman, by the Ku Klux Klan; the second one was Leo Frank in Georgia in 1915. 15 See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4ZyuULy9zs 16 This song was written and set to music by Jack Yellen in the 1920s and became famous in vaudeville: see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dowy5Jdb-Yg

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Jewish world of entertainment and film—but not in Yiddish—, was the “blackface” performance, using racist clichés to humiliate “AfricanAmericans”.17 The Jazz Singer (1927) with Al Jolson (1886-1950) is the most famous example. The question arises: “Why should a member of one pariah-group hide his identity under the mask of another?” 18 Michael Rogin, the author of Blackface, White Noise, analyses the various and complex aspects of the process of “cross-race” and cross-cultural phenomenon in the film industry. Another, concomitant way of pursuing “Americanization” through entertainment and film was the “redface” masquerade performance. Played by non-natives dressed and made up as Indians, this role propagates racist American Indian stereotypes. Popular among Jewish performers—e.g. Eddie Cantor in Whoopee, it can be seen as an “Entre Billet” (Heine) to American society. 19 This role remained current for decades, long after Jews had become Americanized: in 1974 Mel Brooks played an Indian chief speaking Yiddish!20 Entering American society was the ultimate aim, not only for Jews, but for Americans in general. Faced with the overwhelming arrival of twenty-three million foreigners between 1890 and 1920, white Americans, who themselves had once come as immigrants, sought an identity which would make them a constitutive part of the country. The only true inhabitants were the Indians or “Natives.” Demonized for centuries, they had been dispossessed of their land and exterminated in colonial wars, their languages and culture eradicated. The survivors were put into reservations.21 Nothing prevented Americans from “taking on an Indian identity,” from becoming “white Indians,” from undergoing “Indianization” without Indians, so to speak—as long as it

 17

See David Schiff: “The institution of blackface is painful to discuss; it created and sustained powerful stereotypes that controlled the interaction between whites and blacks in America” (97). David Schiff is himself a composer; he composed the opera Gimpel the Fool (1974, libretto by Isaac Singer). His short story Gimpel Tam had been published in the Forverts in 1945 and translated by Saul Bellow in 1953. 18 Michael Rogin, quoted by David Schiff (98). 19 Heine, who was Jewish and converted to Christianity, spoke about “Baptism as entrebillet to European culture.” 20 In the film Blazing Saddles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6nHtEYdy2I 21 Cf. Theodora Kroeber, Ishi in Two Worlds: A biography of the last wild Indian in North America. Berkeley: U of Californis P, 2002; cf. also the documentary film by Jed Riffe and Pamela Roberts: Ishi: the last Yahi (1992). Both tell the story of the only survivor and speaker of a wiped-out tribe. Ishi’s brain, removed against his will after his death in 1916 for “phrenological investigation,” was returned in 2000 by the Smithsonian—which still holds thousands of Indian remains—at the request of the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI).

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conformed to white notions of the Indian.22 This process was as perverse as could be. Two literary examples connected to Yiddish, one far, one near, will give an idea of the process of negating or transforming Indian-ness, each a vital process of metamorphosis to the respective author. First Charles Even’s American travelogue The Lost Tribes of Israel: or The First of the Red Men (1861), based on a belief, widespread among Ashkenazic Jews, in the Ten Lost Tribes (see the apocalyptic Apocrypha 2 Esdras 13, 40-50). They called them royte yidelech (Red Jews), waiting for the Messiah who would redeem them. Mendele Moicher Sforim (Mendele the Bookseller), the so-called “grandfather” of modern Yiddish literature, uses this legend in his novel The Travels of Benjamin III (Masoes Binyomin hashlishi, 1878), a parody of Don Quixote set in the Jewish milieu of the shtetl. The travelling hero’s purpose is to keep an eye out for these Red Jews; he and his sidekick Senderl end up being taken for the ones they are looking for by old women waiting everyday for the Messiah! “Hura, royte yidelech!” everybody is claiming in the shtetl (222). Charles Even, who chose as his book’s motto “The sublimest work of our Creator is the human race,” uses biblical myths in his fiction. He strips away the Indians’ identity and provides them with Hebrew ancestors who, stranded in America, turned red after eating poisonous berries! Two couples, “turned wild” in a paradisiacal wilderness inhabited alone by animals to be hunted—a primary colonial stereotype, give their children the Indian names Chow-wauk-he (my first-born) and Mo-he-ga (the beautiful one). Later the two children marry and receive Even’s blessing: “‘Long life and prosperity to Mo-he-ga, the flower of the wilderness! Long life and prosperity to Chow-wauk-he, the bold hunter!’ / And thus, my brave companions, we will leave the first of the red men, the first natives of our glorious continent” (321). As one will notice, there is not a single Native American in this novel. The parallel between those first Hebrew comers, who turned Red Indian, and the newcomers—whites established or new immigrants—who assume an Indian identity, is obvious. The second approach is the romanticized vision of the Indian. The romantic epic poem The Song of Hiawatha (1855), translated into Yiddish in 1910 by Yehoash (Solomon Bloomgarden 1872-1927: Dos Lid fun Hayavatha), may be based on Indian oral tradition but is closer to its model, the Finnish epic Kalevala. The Song of Hiawatha, which became emblematic for the perception of Native Americans, resorts to the myth of the noble savage which took shape in the 16th century. It was developed in



22 See Raheja: “Representations of Native American identities have been fabricated out of sheer colonial fantasy” (136).

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the 18th by Rousseau (1712-1778) and illustrated by Chateaubriand (17181786) after his encounter with Native Americans, whose customs and idyllic life in a luxuriant and wild nature he shared for a while and depicts. The same perception of nature and of human nature characterizes the arts at the very time that the Yiddish translation appears. Interestingly, its source of inspiration is located at the intersection of diverse cross-currents: the idealization of Native Americans; Primitivism; the Russian popular (naïve) art of Mikhail Larionov (1881-1964) and Natalia Goncharova (1881-1962); non-European artwork; and the exotic landscapes of Henri Rousseau (1844-1910) and Paul Gauguin (1848–1903). Focusing on such a Weltanschauung, Yehoash emphasizes naivety in his Yiddish translation of Hiawatha, whereas in the original Longfellow uses the words “plain” and “simple”, which lack this philosophical dimension: [Shtimen] Azoy zis, naiv und kindersh (7)… Hert dem siper dem naivn (id.) Speak in tones so plain and childlike … Listen to this simple story

The perception of the Other, the non-Westerner, which seems idyllic at first, denotes a superciliousness and condescension inherent in Western cultures for whom all non-Westerners are or—better—have to be naive, i.e. children—and vice versa. The introduction to Yehoash’s translation, written by the socialist philosopher and literary critic Chaim Zhitlovsky, is important for the aim he attributes to the translation: to regenerate, enrich and reinvigorate the language. He establishes a connection between Europe and America, thus following Yehoash, who is himself an intermediary, an heir of the tradition (his most famous work is his translation of the Bible into Yiddish) and a pioneer. Zhitlovsky points out the European spirit of Americans, a fact which Alan Trachtenberg, a specialist in Yiddish literature featuring Native Americans, contests, pointing out that “the Indian presence helps explain how America deviates from Europe in the realm of spirit and culture” (5). 23 Furthermore, Zhitlovsky evokes the following themes: the importance of nature and of the love of nature; the ability to empathize with a foreign people; the cosmopolitan faculty of Jews; and the heuristic capacity of poetry to unify mankind. The epic’s mystical hero, Hiavatha, represents the entire Indian people as well as all

 23

Rain Songs were also popular among African Americans: cf. Langston Hughes and his “April Rain Song”! This leads to a new topic: a comparative study of the reciprocal influence of Native American poetry on African American poetry and vice versa, and its possible reflection in Yiddish poetry.

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humanity. In his argumentation, Zhitlovsky follows Longfellow step by step. Strangely enough, neither Longfellow nor Zhitlovsky nor Yehoash mention the massacres perpetrated against Indians. The question arises: why is there no awareness, no recognition by Zhitlovsky or Yehoash of the similarity of fate between Indians and Jews? After all, Yiddish poetry recognizes indeed the analogous situation of Blacks and Jews, and Yehoash himself wrote about lynching. Trachtenberg, who analyses in depth the ins and outs of Longfellow’s epic in Yehoash’s translation, poses a similar question. Why then is the attitude toward Native Americans different? Why is it more difficult to become aware of their distress? Only very few Yiddish poets integrate Indian motifs and the problems of Native Americans into their poetry. Thus they have to rely on second-hand—ethnographic— material, as does David Ignatov (1885–1954) in his poem “Indian RainSong,” published in Shriftn (“Writings,” New York 1912-1926), 24 the Yiddish journal featuring modernist poetry on or “by” Native Americans. Ignatov’s poem is a Yiddish translation of an Indian song celebrating the gift of nature: Hi-ihiya naiho-o! Lomir zikh nemen zingen. Lomir zikh nemen freyen. Hitciya yahina-a. Lomir zikh nemen zingen, lomir zikh nemen freyen. Dos gezang fun der groyser kokuruze. Hitciya yahina-a Dos gezang fun der kleyner kokuruze. Hitciya yahina-a. —“Indian Rain-Song,” translated in Shriftn, 1920

Here is the “original”: Hi-ihiya naiho-o! Let us begin our song, Let us begin, rejoicing. Hitciya yahina-a. Let us begin our song, let us begin rejoicing, Singing of the large corn. Hitciya yahina-a. Singing of the small corn. Hitciya yahina-a.25

Through the integration of repetitive Indian expressions and repetition of Yiddish sentences, the poem achieves a wonderful symbiosis between two

 24

The following poem is quoted by Rubinstein in “Jews and Native Americans.” This song is a translation of “Rain Songs I” (Cronyn 109) from the “Pima Ritual Song Cycle” (83-117). Part III of the cycle (p. 110) exemplifies par excellence “Mythic Repetitiveness and Musical Ostinato” (see Adamenko 51). There is one variation: “The blue light of evening” replaces “The darkness of evening” (original). 25

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basic means of expression: the Indian one with its hypnotic rhythm and its sound evoking the choral song of ancient Greek drama, and the Yiddish one with its folk-like mode and music. The most committed to the Indian-cause was Reuven Ludvig (18951926), a poet who traveled to the South with his wife and died young of tuberculosis; in his cycle “Indianer motivn” he identifies himself with the Pima tribe (68-78). His powerful verse evokes the humanity and tragic destiny of people pushed to the fringe of society.26 “Indian motifs” are a repetitive invocation intended for whites while bringing death to the Pima tribe of Arizona. The poems usher the reader into the midst of a distressed tribe with its “tired warriors” (“Kvadalupa,” 77-78) and destroyed culture. “Gebet nokh regn” (Prayer for Rain, 74) resembles a monotonous chant unifying men and nature in the lust and vital need for water. Rain as a natural, mystical element is typical for Native and African American poetry. In the poem “In di farnakhtn” (In the Dusk, 73), the poet evokes through concise language, precise hints, and the opposition of cultures the eradication of the Indians who speak thus: Stanchions of telegraph Stretch themselves along the way Like shadowy crosses.... With them Longings for home awake In our children. Under them The tranquility Lies buried our joy— Of our people. 27

To summarize this period, let us quote Rachel Rubinstein: Identification with Native Americans made it possible for the Yiddish writer to imaginatively inhabit the bodies of both Indians and aspirers to Indian-ness, both natives and aliens, primitives and moderns, and in the process to both imitate and critique the racism and elitism of AngloAmerican modernist literary practices. (432)



26 Like Itzik Manger before him, Reuven Ludvig integrated in his poetry the voice of minorities and their difficult life and tragic fate but also their capacity for joy, citing for example the black person who gives life and soul to inanimate objects (“Tsu a neger” [To a Negro] 91), or the rejoicing Mexicans who dance to the sound of the guitar (”Meksikaner baydlekh baym kanal” [Mexican caravans near at the canal] 87-88). 27 Translated by Trachtenberg (5).

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If persecutions against Jews established a bridge with persecuted Indians, leading to identification, the Shoah brought the American Jews face to face with the destiny of their European coreligionists. In the same way the United States had become a country “free of Indians,” after World War II Europe became a continent “free of Jews.” If Mani Leib (1883-1953) in his poem “A Bit of Land” had addressed a blue-eyed Christian from Holland with the following admonition: “Wherever you go, from each particle and fragment of dust, / The breath of the Indian follows you” (330), Dora Teitelboim (1914-1992) echoes him in her powerful and dreadful poem, “Today the Wind Spoke Yiddish to Me”:28 Smoke from gray chimneys overhead; dust of torn blossoms underneath. I stare at the ashes of six million dead. O world! It’s Jews you breathe!

Widely published and translated, this Proletpen writer devotes a long ballad to the bravery and pride shown during the non-violent demonstrations and protests against racial segregation and discrimination of AfricanAmericans during the Civil Rights Movement (1954-1968), led by Nobel Prize winner Martin Luther King (1929-1968) with the support of Jews. This movement triggered similar movements among Latinos, Native Americans, Asian Americans, women, gays and lesbians. In “The Ballad of Little Rock” (1957), set in Arkansas’ eponymous capital—a city with a slim white majority—, Teitelboim weaves an epic tapestry on the “Little Rock Nine”: nine African American students who, upon being prevented from attending Central High School, bravely defied Governor Faubus. In an expressionist way the ballad depicts the historical situation with its ins and outs, the urban setting, racist utterances from males and females, white opposition, the dangerous living conditions of poor blacks; the ballad ends by expressing the hope for a better future achieved by the younger generation to which the poet addresses herself: “You, black children” (66-67). The Aristotelian unities of time—dawn (a symbol), place (Little Rock) and action (the black struggle for education)—add to the intensity and density of the plot. In ten scenes, like paintings with vivid colors or dark-inked woodcuts, the author gives a palette of nuances reflecting the outside and inside. The scenes echo each other, unfolding in mirror image: in the “masters”’ white community, the majority’s discourse and behavior are violent (the doctor who pleads

 28

The contemporary poet Lev Berinski uses the air-metaphor in his cycle Luftblumen (Airflowers).

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against them being the lone exception), while the majority of the opoppressed black community is non-violent (except—again—one person). The length of the verses, the number of strophes and the presence of rhyme denote in turn the feverish white or resigned black attitude. In between, verses of one or two words introduce dance with the swinging rhythms of rock-and-roll and jazz (27-28). The black community’s songs, lullabies and prayers transcend time and mingle childhood and adolescence. Recurrent metaphors involving water and boats, wings and freedom, darkness and light serve as leitmotivs. Scene VI (“In the House of Reverend Benjamin Flynn,” 31-40) is the longest and the most intense: debates are engaged there on religion and struggle, and the Biblical Moses (he of the Spiritual “Go Down Moses”) incarnates resistance and liberation. “Let my people go!” resonates and shows the way to follow. “Don’t look aside, don’t look back / Lower your voice but hold your head very straight / Don’t answer provocations,” the mother advises her daughter leaving for High School (50); “If you loose me on the way, don’t stop / Keep going / Ahead,” the father exhorts his son (64). Nevermore Slaves!—to borrow from Aline Helg’s newly published study—perfectly illustrates this attitude.29 The fundamental shift in Teitlboim’s treatment of African-American issues reflects a new narrative. As a committed author, Dora Teitelboim struggled on one hand for equal rights and on the other for the enrichment, rejuvenation and preservation of post-Holocaust Yiddish language and culture. 30 For her, to write in the annihilated language is to resist eradication and loss: “As long as one Jew’s left to listen / I shall not lay aside the pen.” The horror of the “Destruction of the European Jews” (Raul Hilberg) during WWII and, connected to it, the annihilation of Yiddish determined the content of Yiddish literature and culture as well as the concomitant way of life. Two main consequences due to the Shoah can be observed: first the geographical extinction of the Old Home and thus the extrication of the Jewish/Yiddish past, leading to home- and rootlessness, i.e. to the loss of space and time; second the short-term disappearance of the language and its achievements due to discontinuity. Additionally the creation of the State of Israel, which granted all Jews a homeland, established Modern Hebrew as the national Jewish language of the New



29 The myth of submissive, oppressed peoples, sustained for centuries, is valid for Blacks and Jews. 30 Dedicated to her is an institution supporting writers, researchers, translators, educators and speakers: The Dora Teitelboim Center for Yiddish Culture: http://www.yiddishculture.org/

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Jew; it replaced Yiddish, symbol of the ghetto and Diaspora, as a world language. In the post-war first phase and thanks to immigration, America could and indeed had to occupy the leading role (shared to a lesser extent by other countries and continents: England, France, South Africa, South America, Australia, Israel). In a second phase—the post-Yiddish era— when hardly any writers or readers were left, the question of multiculturalism arose, born of the Civil Rights Movement, based on race—which replaced ethnicity—and belonging to a non-white, widely discriminated minority seeking to preserve its culture. As white insiders— which they had not always been—and more successful than other minorities, Jews don’t seem to fit into that frame. But as discriminated outsiders and speakers of an endangered language, they did fit into it. To speak and write Yiddish on Yiddish topics, to preserve the Yiddish European heritage and to commemorate the past in order to elaborate the future: all that became vital. To write about the Holocaust in English was a duty, too. See for example Cynthia Ozick in “The Shawl” and many other short stories. It was up to English-writing Jewish authors such as Malamud and Philip Roth to focus on the similarity of fate between Jews and Indians, for example, or to academics like Michael Lerner and Cornell West to establish a dialog between Jews and Blacks in the framework of the Civil Rights Movement.31 During the first post-Shoah phase, linguistic, literary and cultural reconstruction was the main preoccupation in the United States and in all countries in which Yiddish-speakers had settled and developed a vital Yiddish culture and literature. In Israel, the great poet Avrom Sutzkever (1913-2010), a survivor of the Vilna Ghetto, set up a most valuable literary journal, Di goldene keyt (The Golden Chain), which collected Yiddish writings from all over the world. In New York, Abraham Cahan (18601951), editor-in-chief of the daily Forverts (Jewish Daily Forward), continued to serialize short stories and novels. Some of them were never published in Yiddish as books, so for example Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Sonim, di geshikhte fun a libe (Enemies, a Love Story, 1966), which has been made into a film. 32 Facing the abyss, the Yiddish writer was confronted with an insurmountable challenge: How to express the inexpressible, to speak the unspeakable? In “Without Jews,” Jacob Glatstein challenges God: Without Jews, no Jewish God… Who will dream You?

 31

See Rubinstein, “Jews and Native Americans.” 1989, directed by the American filmmaker Paul Mazursky (1930-2014).

32

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Yiddish and American Multiculturalism Remember You? Deny You? Yearn after You? (434)

In Mayse Tishevits (The Last Demon), a devil’s monologue, Isaac Bashevis Singer challenges Satan, the only one left after the Holocaust. He lives in a garret in a Jewish shtetl called Tishevitz, “a God-forsaken village,” and there is no one for him to tempt anymore: “[I] draw my sustenance from a Yiddish storybook, a left-over from the days before the great catastrophe. The stories in the book are pablum and duck milk, but the Hebrew letters have a weight of their own” (113). A few letters and a pen, and an unanswerable question, this is the writer’s piece of luggage. In his fiction, Isaac Bashevis Singer—Bashevis, a form of Bathsheba, being his mother’s name—recreates, indeed literally “resurrects” the eradicated Old Home (Poland): he mingles the world of the living with the world of the dead in introducing ghosts, intermediaries of sorts: “I like to write ghost stories and nothing fits a ghost better than a dying language. The deader the language the more alive is the ghost. Ghosts love Yiddish and as far as I know, they all speak it” (Nobel speech). In a mystical mythical fresco, a Hofmannsthalian Kleines Welttheater, so to speak, of former Yiddish life (Little Theater of the World), Singer becomes a demiurge whose word possesses performative power. Under his pen, Yiddish becomes the Adamic language Walter Benjamin was yearning for, the one which in naming creates. Singer is aware that Yiddish, a “dying language,” will never recover; yet it is his “mother language, and a mother is never really dead” (Nobel speech)—and a miracle can never be entirely ruled out. Overseeing Saul Bellow’s, his nephew’s or other persons’ translations, he published his books in English—which leads, however, for the reader with no Yiddish, to an important loss of form and substance (see Wolitz).33 The Holocaust had become the literary subject and Yiddish its expression par excellence, the language of memory and destruction, of identity and continuity for Yiddish writers in America and elsewhere.34 Singer set his first post-Holocaust novel, Enemies, A Love Story (1972), in early 1950s America. It features Holocaust survivors who migrate to New York. This allowed Singer to superimpose two continents, one of which no

 33

Wolitz’s is a collection of essays dealing precisely with this topic. Cf. Faivl Zygielboim’s play Getograd, or his novel Di Uhamas dedicated to his assassinated family members and a young non-violent Zulu fighter against apartheid. He had migrated to South Africa before WWII and integrated Zulu words into his novel and Yiddish words into Zulu.

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longer exists. Omnipresent, in living memory and reconstructed in New York neighborhoods, murderous Europe and the vanished shtetl haunt the city. Time and space are suspended. There are four main characters, a man and three women, three Jewish and one non-Jewish, the latter being the only one able to face the future. Herman Broder, who was hidden in a hayloft by the Polish servant Yadwiga during WWII, escapes deportation and marries her. They go to New York where he passionately falls in love with the Holocaust and Gulag survivor Masha, when Tamara, his first wife whom he thought had died with their children in a concentration camp, reappears. Torn between the three women, he finally disappears after Masha’s suicide, leaving Jadwiga and Tamara behind with Jadwiga’s and his newborn child. The three women serve as “memory factors.” Each embodies a Jewish neighborhood of New York, which in turn—via odors, food, inscriptions, newspapers—evokes the homeland. Jadwiga represents the post-war era, a life largely bereft of Jews and entirely bereft of Jewish values. Singer’s subtle insight into a soul devastated by the Holocaust, into the compulsive behavior which paralyses the figures and makes everyday life impossible, into the unexpected intrusion of European horror upon the American present, into the survivor-guilt of one who has lost his family, and—at the same time—his depiction of absurd personal situations: the non-Jewish Jadwiga, for example, keeping Shabbes while Herman doesn’t, and cooking kosher while Herman eats treif; or Herman himself, whose existence is one lie after another and who—married three times—is terrified of arrest for polygamy: all this contributes to a very human, dense and complex picture of Holocaust survivors in post-war America. This part of history will remain a foreclosure, a hole that cannot be filled, and Yiddish language, literature and culture will never again develop in their entirety, but rather merely as a sum of revivals. Active here are artistic institutions such as the Folksbiene (People’s Stage) and the National Yiddish Theatre (NYTF), founded in the Lower East Side of New York in 1915 when Yiddish theater was at its height. Last season it staged Di Goldene Kale (The Golden Bride), a comic operetta from 1923. The first act is set in Russia and unfolds amidst traditional klezmer, Jewish cantorial and Eastern European folk music, while the second act, set in New York, introduces ragtime and jazz. Music, above all klezmer (which partially issued from Gypsy music and undergoes a fantastic revival), is a perfect multicultural conductor. The symbiosis between jazz and klezmer as a typical American phenomenon is perfectly illustrated by the African American jazz musician Don Byron improvising on the music of Mickey Katz (1909-1985), a popular Yiddish parodist of the 1950s, while the African American opera singer Anthony Russel, influenced by the African

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American bass Paul Robeson, discovered Yiddish songs and music; through them he found himself and his voice, converted to Judaism and took the name Mordechai Zvi. What is the situation of Yiddish in today’s America? While part and parcel of American Jewish culture, Yiddish—as we have seen—reflects upon non-Jewish cultures. For this alone it has to be kept alive. Several factors contribute to this aim. There are still Yiddish native speakers, American and Eastern European, who cultivate, study and teach Yiddish language, literature and culture, even as their number declines. They have founded Yiddish institutions such as the Jewish People’s Philharmonic Chorus. There are Yiddish schools and universities teaching Yiddish literature and culture; there is the YIVO, the foremost Institute for Yiddish Research, and the Max Weinreich Center for Advanced Yiddish Studies in New York.35 Linguistic and cultural programs for children and adults—not to mention numerous Yiddish festival—attract people from all over the world. Thanks to the Internet and the rich palette of Yiddish websites, there is ready access to Yiddish-relevant literary, cultural and artistic documents in written, audio and video form—but mostly from the past, rarely contemporary. 36 Aaron Lansky (born 1955), the founder of the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst MA, has collected and saved 1,5 million Yiddish books from all over the world. With Steven Spielberg’s help they are gradually being digitalized (Spielberg Digital Library). In 600+ interviews the Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project records people speaking on Jewish life and Yiddish language and culture (in English or, to a lesser extent, in Yiddish with English subtitles). The interviews depict Jewish/Yiddish life in Eastern Europe. The Book Center’s Translation Fellowship Program revives the 1920s, when world literature was being translated into Yiddish, thus developing and modernizing the language tremendously. Mendele, an important website and database for Yiddish language and literature (Yale University), has a forum for Q&A, articles,

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Max Weinreich (Professorial Doctorate: Marburg 1924, on Yiddish) founded this institute in Berlin in 1925, before it was moved to Vilnius and just before WWII to New York. Honorary board members have included Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud and Edward Sapir. 36 For example the great contemporary poet Lev Berinski (born 1939), a significant renewer of Yiddish poetry, got a 5 minute biographical video by the editor in chief of the Forward, Boris Sandler, on April 3, 2014. At Tonji University in Shanghai, I presented a Chinese rendering of his poem “Der Stereoeffekt der Moschee Dschuma-Dschami im Hafen von Eupatoria,” translated by Hongxia Shi, a former student of German Studies at Tonji University.

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forthcoming events and books by Yiddishists from all over the world. As Tatiana Soldat-Jaffe observes in her study Twenty-First Century Yiddishism, devoted to the rescue and teaching of this minority language: cultural studies must necessarily be involved. An innovative approach in this domain is Marc Caplan’s (a student of Ngugi wa Thiongo) comparison of Yiddish and African anglophone and francophone literature.37 Thiongo writes in English and Gikuyu, which gives a twofold dimension to his work. From a vibrant culture to an endangered one, from a broad multicultural literature to a shrinking one, from a rich language to an impoverished one: this is the pessimistic take on present day Yiddish. Yiddish authors are few and far between and their work is hard to get. Contemporary Yiddish plays are rarely staged. True: to establish continuity, a culture has to draw on masterpieces of the past, but in the absence of modern production, a culture’s demise is certain. In America and elsewhere there are poets, playwrights, novelists, short story writers, journalists and columnists who write in Yiddish. Where are their names mentioned, their books sold, their plays performed, their work discussed by literary and academic critics? A masterpiece builds upon many a smaller model. The only way to maintain a tradition in any genre is to transmute the events of daily life into the precious metal, so to speak, of literature. Just as the immigrants did when they arrived in the goldene medine. The future of Yiddish and yidishkayt outside the museum will depend upon the creativity of all those to whom its testimony to the human spirit is dear.

Works Cited Adamenko, Victoria. Neo-mythologism in Music: From Scriabin and Schoenberg to Schnittke and Crumb. Interplay Series No. 5. Hillsdale NY: Pendragon Press, 2007. Aleichem, Sholem. Shomers mishpet. National Yiddish Book Centre. Spielberg Digital Library. Amherst MA. 20 Aug. 2016. Web.

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This is a noteworthy idea. I once conducted an interview on the subject of South African Yiddish Literature with the poet David Wolpe (1908-1994), a Holocaust survivor of Keidan (Lithuania) and Dachau, who reorganised the Yiddish literary scene from the DP camp for Eastern Jews in Munich before migrating to South Africa in 1951. My wish was to compare his writing in Yiddish with South African writing in English, Afrikaans and Zulu (the main African National Language, of which there are 9, see Lütge et al.)

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Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 2006. Bachman, Merle L. Recovering “Yiddishland.” Threshold Moments in American Literature. Syracuse NY: Syracuse UP, 2008: xxiii. Bauer, Otto. The Question of Nationalities and Social Democracy. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000 (translation of the German edition of 1924). Berinski, Lev. Luft-blumen. Tel Aviv: I.L. Peretz Publishing House, 2001. Biale, David, Michael Galchinsky and Susannah Heschel, eds. Insider and Outsider. American Jews and Multiculturalism. Berkeley: U of California P, 1998. Cronyn, George W. The Path on the Rainbow: An Anthology of Songs and Chants from the Indians of North America. 1918. Web. 20 Aug. 2016. Even, Charles. The Lost Tribes of Israel: or The First of the Red Men. 1861. 20 Aug. 2016. Web. Glaser, Amelia. “Between Lynching and Pogroms.” From Jewish Jesus to Black Christ: Race Violence in Leftist Yiddish Poetry, Studies in American Jewish Literature 34.1 (2015): 44-69. Print. Glaser, Amelia, and David Weintraub, eds. Proletpen. America’s Rebel Yiddish Poets. Madison, WI: The U of Wisconsin P. Dora Teitelboim Center for Yiddish Culture, 2005. Glaser, Amelia, eds. “Speaking of Scottsboro.” Proletpen. 133-73. Glatstein, Jacob. “Without Jews.” The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse. English-Yiddish. Eds. Irving Howe, Ruth Wisse and Khone Shmeruk. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988: 434-437. Goldberg, David Theo, ed. Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader. Cambridge MA: Blackbell, 1994. Goldstein, Eric L. “A Taste of Freedom: American Yiddish Publications in Imperial Russia.” Transnational Traditions. New Perspectives on American Jewish History. Ed. Ava F. Kahn and Adam Mendelsohn. Detroit MI: Wayne State UP, 2014: 104-39. —. “Pop’em in Yiddish: The subterranean world of Jewish pulp fiction.” Guilt and Pleasure. 20 Aug. 2016. Web. Harshav, Benjamin, and Barbara Harshav. “Yiddish Poetry in America.” american yiddish poetry. A Bilingual Anthology. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986: 27-44. Heine, Heinrich. “Der Taufzettel ist das Entreebillet zur Europäischen Kultur” [The baptismal certificate is the entrebillet to European culture]. Prosanotizen. Düsseldorfer Heine Ausgabe, Vol X. Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 2006: 313.

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Helg, Aline. Plus jamais esclaves! De l’insoumission à la révolte, le grand récit d’une émancipation (1492-1838). Paris: La Découverte, 2016. Kahn, Ava F., and Adam Mendelsohn, eds. “The Immigrant as Transnational.” Transnational Traditions. New Perspectives on American Jewish History. Detroit MI: Wayne State UP, 2014: 141-43. Leib, Mani. “Dos shtikl erd.” Lider un baladn. Bd. 1. New York: CYCO, 1955: 330. Leitner, David J. Harlem in Shakespeare and Shakespeare in Harlem: The sonnets of Claude McKay, Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes, and Gwendolyn Brooks. Carbondale IL: Southern Illinois U, Web. 20 Aug. 2016. Lorenz, Dagmar C.G. A Companion to the Works of Elias Canetti. Rochester NY: Camden House, 2006. Ludvig, Reuven. Gezamelte shriftn [Collected Works]. Published posthumously by his friends and the Y.L. Perets Pen-club in New York, 1927. Web. 20 Aug. 2016. Lütge Coullie, Judith, Stephan Meyer, Thengani H. Ngwenya, and Thomas Olver, eds. Selves in Question. Interviews on South African Auto/Biography. Honolulu: U of Hawai’i P, 2006. McCallum-Bonar, Colleen. Black Ashkenaz and the Almost Promised Land: Yiddish Literature and the Harlem Renaissance. Ohio State UP, 2008. Meisel, Nachman. Amerike in yidishn vort. Antologye. New York: Yidisher Kultur Farband, 1955. Mlotek, Eleanor, and Joseph Mlotek. Songs of Generations. New Pearls of Yiddish Songs. New York: The Workmen’s Circle, n.d. Moicher-Sforim, Mendele [Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh]. “Masoes Binyomin ha-shlishi,” Geklibene verk, bd. 2. New York: YKUF, 1946: 221-22. Opatoshu, Joseph. Rase, lintsheray un andere dertseylungen. Varshe: Farlag Peretz Bibliotek, 1923. Steven Spielberg Digital Library. Web. 20 Aug. 2016. Raheja, Michelle H. Reservation Reelism. Redfacing, Visual Sovereignity, and Representations of Native Americans in Film. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2010. Rogin, Michael. Blackface, White Noise. Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot. Berkeley: U of California P, 1996. Rosenfeld, Morris. “Der svet-shap” [The Sweatshop]. The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse. Ed. Irving Howe, Ruth Wisse and Khone Shmeruk. New York: Viking, 1987. 84.

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Roskies, David C.“The Medium and Message of the Yiddish Chapbook.” Web. 20 Aug. 2016. Rosten, Leo. The Joys of Yiddish: a relaxed lexicon of Yiddish, Hebrew and Yinglish words often encountered in English from the days of the Bible to those of the beatnik. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968. Rubinstein, Rachel. “Going Native, Becoming Modern: American Indians, Walt Whitman, and the Yiddish Poet.” American Quarterly 58.2 (June 2006): 431-53. —. “Playing Indian, Becoming American.” Members of the Tribe. Native America in the Jewish Imagination. Detroit MI: Wayne UP, 2010: 2058. Schiff, David. Gershwin, Rhapsody in Blue. Cambridge Music Handbooks. Cambridge UP, 1997. Shandler, Jeffrey. Adventures in Yiddishland. Postvernacular Language and Culture. Berkeley: U of California P, 2006. Shmeruk, Chone. “Aspects of the History of Warsaw as a Yiddish Literary Centre.” Polin: A Journal of Polish-Jewish Studies 3 (1988): 151. Singer, Isaac Bashevis. “The Last Demon.” Short Friday. New York: Signet Books, 1965: 113-23. —. Enemies, a Love Story. 1966. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972. —. Nobel Speech. 10 Dec. 1978. Web. Soldat-Jaffe, Tatiana. Twenty-First Century Yiddishism. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2012. Starck-Adler, Astrid. “South African Yiddish Literature and the Problem of Apartheid.” Jewish Affairs 50/2 (Johannesburg 1995): 39-45. Reprint: op. cit. 65/1 (2010): 6-12. —. “Das Jiddische als Kulturvermittlung und der Begriff der Jiddischophonie.” Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften 6. 16 (2006). Web. 20 Aug. 2016. Teitelboim, Dora. “Today the Wind Spoke Yiddish to Me”: The Poetry of Dora Teitelboim. The Dora Teitelboim Center for Yiddish Culture. Web. 20 Aug. 2016. —. The Ballad of Little Rock. Paris: Pariser Tsaytshrift, 1959 (10 editions between 1959 and 1999 in 3 languages). Trachtenberg, Alan. Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1880–1930. New York: Hill and Wang, 2004. —. “Babe in the Yiddish Woods: Dos Lied fun Hiavat’a.” Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought 50.3 (2001): 5. Print. Weinreich, Max. History of the Yiddish Language. Vols. I&II. New Haven: Yale UP, 2008.

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Weinstein, Berish. Cycle on “Negroes.” Harshav 636-49. Wolitz, Seth L. The Hidden Bashevis Singer. Austin: U of Texas P, 2001. Zhitlovsky, Chaim. “Vegn dem vert fun iberzestsung” [On the virtue of translation]. Dos lid fun Hiavatha. iii-xxiv. Zvi, Mordechai. Anthony Russell, Yiddish Opera Singer. Web. 20 Aug. 2016. Zygielboim, Faivl. Getograd and Di Uhamas. Tel Aviv: Peretz Farlag, 1971.

AMERICAN POLITICS

MULTICULTURALISM IN THE UNITED STATES: A FAIT ACCOMPLI? CHRISTÈLE LE BIHAN

From the beginning the United States has been characterized by the diverse origins of its inhabitants. Indeed, if, according to the first census taken in 1790, about 75% of the American population1 had a British and Protestant background, it comprised people of other origins too, such as German, Irish, French, Dutch and Swedish, and with other religious beliefs. Out of a total of almost 4 million inhabitants, there were also 697,824 slaves (United States Census Bureau, “XIV Statistics of Slaves” 132). However, this diversity was ignored in the way the American identity and nation were defined following independence from Britain. Thus, the creation of the new nation was said to have its origins in a contract between its inhabitants, the terms of which were enunciated in its founding documents, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. This had a powerful impact on the conception of the American identity. Indeed as President Franklin D. Roosevelt reminded his fellow countrymen in 1943, “Americanism is a matter of the mind and heart; Americanism is not, and never was, a matter of race and ancestry. A good American is one who is loyal to this country and to our creed of liberty and democracy” (qtd. in Schlesinger 37).2 Being American meant embracing the principles and values put forward in the founding documents: democracy and liberty, equality, the pursuit of happiness, the common good and individualism.

1

The Census of 1790 indicated that the total American population was 3,929,214. Only free white people, free other persons, and slaves were counted. As Native Americans were not taxed, they were omitted. 2 Paradoxically, Roosevelt made this declaration before the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which was made up of Japanese Americans, many of whom had been put in internment camps because of their ancestry and had volunteered to be part of this combat team. For more information on this regiment see 442nd Regimental Combat Team Historical Society.

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However, by stressing the resulting creation of a new race, the American, through the motto “E Pluribus Unum,”3 “Out of Many One,” and later through the metaphor of the Melting Pot,4 this conception was also endowed with the characteristics associated with an organic nation, i.e. a common culture as well as a relative racial and ethnic homogeneity. Thus, racial and ethnic differences vanished from the definition the United States gave of itself and, as the vast majority of Americans had Anglo-Saxon origins, it is this genetic link which was put forward. So as to maintain this “artificial” homogeneity, all those who were too different from the AngloSaxon core (black people, Native Americans, and later Asians5) were excluded from American citizenship and those who were not were to be assimilated. Education was given the role of assimilating the successive immigrants. As the pool of immigrants started to diversify throughout the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century, notably with the arrival of Eastern and Southern Europeans at the end of the 19th century, not only was the capacity to assimilate them called into question but also the desirability of doing so. The First World War and the passage of restrictive immigration quota laws6 in the early 1920s stopped the massive flow of immigrants and solved the question of assimilation until the 1960s. Indeed, with the end of quota laws in the mid-1960s and following the various social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the assimilation model and its correlate, the Melting Pot, were once again challenged, as diverse ethnic and racial minorities7 called for the recognition of their differences

3

This motto was adopted in the early 1780s and is inscribed on the Great Seal of the United States. 4 The metaphor of the Melting Pot was made popular following the first performance of Israel Zangwill’s play, The Melting Pot, in 1908 in Washington. However, the origin of this concept goes back to the 18th century when Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur used the notion of “melting” to characterize the process through which immigrants were melted to form a homogeneous American race. 5 The Chinese exclusion act, which was adopted in 1882, put an end to immigration from China, and the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907-1908 with Japan stopped Japanese immigration, until the adoption of the Immigration Act of 1965, also known as the Hart-Cellar Act. 6 The Emergency Quota Law of 1921 restricted further immigration to the US to no more than 3% of the number of foreign-born of that nationality living in the US in 1910. In 1924, a more drastic law was passed, the National Origins Act. It pushed the year of reference back to 1890, when there were fewer Southern and Eastern Europeans in the US, and set a cap of 2%. 7 The term “racial minorities” will be used to refer to African Americans, Asian Americans and Native Americans, as it is how they are identified in the United

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notably in educational institutions, and demanded the adoption of measures taking into account diversity and conflated under the term “multiculturalism.” As these demands ran counter to the way the American identity and culture had been founded, and targeted one of the main institutions responsible for turning newcomers into Americans, namely the education system, by the end of the 1980s, a national controversy emerged centering on who should define American culture and identity and how it should be defined. This controversy also revolved around the meaning of multiculturalism and its association with “political correctness.” In order to reassess the controversial dimension of multiculturalism, this paper will first study the genealogy of multiculturalism, tracing its roots back to the debate over immigration at the beginning of the 20th century and its development in the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, so as to then analyze the movement for multiculturalism, notably on American campuses, and its link with “political correctness.” Finally, this paper will endeavor to determine whether this movement has exerted much sway in the United States through the implementation of multicultural policies. If the term “multiculturalism” itself is relatively recent, being first used in the 1960s,8 its intellectual roots are to be found in the concept of “cultural pluralism” developed by Horace Kallen (1882-1974), a Jewish American philosopher of German origins.9 In an essay in two parts entitled “Democracy versus the Melting Pot” and published in The Nation on February 18th and 25th 1915, he coined the term “cultural pluralism” in reaction to the Americanization crusade taking place at the time. Indeed, if, as John Higham explains in Strangers in the Land, “[u]ntil the twentieth century, native Americans had not supposed that national homogeneity depended, necessarily or desirably, on special pressures to assimilate the immigrants” (234), starting at the end of the 19th century, in the context of a massive immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, and intensifying during the First World War, a form of coercive Americanization was put in place. Based on the belief that the new immigrants were inassimilable— all the more so because they were very different from native-born Americans in terms of culture, language and religion—unless they went through a process of explicitly and highly directive Americanization, it aimed at States. In the same way, the term “ethnic minorities” will be used to refer to Hispanics as it is the terminology used by the US government in the census. 8 If the term “multiculturalism” started to be used only in the 1960s, the adjective “multicultural” was used as early as 1941 to refer to a person who had no prejudices and no patriotic ties (Lacorne 19-20). 9 He had immigrated to the United States when he was 5 years old.

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instilling undivided loyalty among the immigrants as well as obliterating all ethnic distinctions.10 Thus with the term “cultural pluralism,” Horace Kallen not only meant to deny that there was a uniform American nationality, but also to criticize the need to create one through the agency of the Melting Pot or what he called “Anglosaxonization,” in other words, Anglo-conformity. Indeed, he believed that ethnic identities were unalterable as they were natural, and that if assimilation did take place it was only on the surface. Therefore, he envisioned the American nation not as a people but “as a cooperation of cultural diversities, as a federation or commonwealth of national cultures” (116). By this he meant that the different nationalities making up the United States would participate in the society’s political and economic life through a harmonious and voluntary collaboration, but would retain their separateness and individuality in the federation through language, religion and culture. However, there would be a common language, i.e. English. It is because of its rejection of forced assimilation, or Americanization, and its stress on cultural diversity that “cultural pluralism” is considered the precursor of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism has its origins in the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and more precisely in the black studies, Chicano/a studies, Asian American studies, Native American studies and women’s studies programs which were set up in the late 1960s in several universities as a response to demands made by members of these racial and ethnic groups and by women. Black students on American campuses were the first to call for the creation of programs focusing on the teaching of the history and experience of black Americans. This coincided with the emergence in 1966 on the national scene of the Black Power movement, which embodied a radicalization of the Civil Rights movement. Indeed, the Black Power movement departed from the integrationist stance of the Civil Rights movement; its aim was to challenge the very nature of society, i.e. its values, beliefs and institutions, which Black Power activists equated with white power. Black people created their own power block to challenge white people’s hegemony. The concept of “black power” thus stressed group solidarity, black pride, self-determination and empowerment as well as the need for blacks to reclaim their history by tracing their roots back to Africa.11 The demands made by black students on the campuses of both white universities, including Ivy League ones, and traditional black colleges (such as Howard) in the context of wider student activism aimed at putting this “black power” ideology into practice through the agency of 10 11

For more information on the Americanization campaign see King 85-126. For more on this point see Ture and Hamilton 34-56.

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the existing black student unions so as to transform American higher education and through it American society. Indeed, as William L. Van Deburg explains, the idea was that [b]y attending a white university, Afro-Americans would gain a better understanding of majoritarian institutions. The knowledge then could be used in the cause of black liberation—to subvert the American institutional infrastructure and thereby lessen resistance to the broader Black Power quest. By linking matters of education and power in this fashion, student protestors exhibited their belief that a society’s institutions of higher learning not only reflect, but are capable of transforming a nation’s basic value system. (69)

Black Power student activists therefore demanded the creation of black studies departments and programs. The latter were to be controlled by them and their teachers and to be autonomous; the courses were to be taught by black instructors committed to the cause and to an audience of black students only (Van Deburg 75). The courses offered in these departments or programs would include courses on black history and civilization as well as on traditional subject matters such as mathematics and physics so as to turn black students into specialists who would then devote themselves to the development of black communities (Granjon 269). All this implied the recruitment of more black teachers and the enrollment of more black students, which were among the demands made by the black student activists. The black studies movement set an example for the other minorities and for women. Indeed, in the name respectively of brown power, red power, yellow power and pink power, Latino American, Native American, Asian American and women students in their turn issued grievances concerning the content of courses which ignored their group’s contributions to American history and to literature. Faced with boycotts, sit-ins, and at times violent protests, several universities, whose staff and student body was mostly white and male, gave in to the demands of the protestors, creating programs focusing on black studies,12 Chicano studies,13 Asian American studies,14 Native American studies15 and women’s studies.16

12

The first black studies programs were created at San Francisco State University and Yale in 1968 and at Cornell in 1969. 13 The first Chicano studies program was set up at California State University LA in 1968. Originally referred to as “the Mexican American studies program,” it was the nation’s first Department of Chicano Studies (“Chicano Studies department turns 45”). 14 The first Asian American studies programs were created at the University of California, Berkeley, and at San Francisco State University in 1969.

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However, the creation of these programs did not mean that student activism ended. Indeed, these programs provided minority and female students with an institutional structure to continue the struggle against the exclusion of their experiences, histories and perspectives from traditional courses or programs. At the core of this “new” struggle was the development of a new line of research on race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation, and on how the dominant group contributed to the continued marginalization of minorities and women in mainstream society. This new line of research which took into account the perspectives of minorities and women instead of that of the Anglo-Saxon male majority was developed with a political aim in mind, i.e. with a view to transforming not only American higher education but also American society. However, the university presidents who had yielded to the demands of the student activists by allowing the creation of these programs intended them to be temporary and believed that they would not last long. Because initially these new areas of study did not have the status of departments, they were in a vulnerable position. Besides, as they were isolated from the traditional departments whose courses had been criticized for being Eurocentric, racist and sexist, the latter remained intact. This could only pave the way for new demands embodied in the multiculturalist movement, which would develop on the campuses of many universities, and notably elite ones, in the 1980s. What triggered the development of the multiculturalist movement is the threat posed to the maintenance of these group-specific programs by the budget cuts implemented during the two terms of Republican President Ronald Reagan (1981-1989). Following the budget cuts in higher education which had jeopardized what minorities and women had obtained as a result of their activism in the 1960s and 1970s, students from these groups felt that the social movements of that time had not delivered their promise. Thus they reacted by reiterating their demands for the recognition of their respective experiences and history, and of the diversity of the American population not only in the curricula, but also in the student, faculty and administrative bodies. If this movement developed, it is also because the number of minority and women students had increased in American uni15

The first program of Native American studies was set up at UC Davis in 1969 and was originally in the Department of Applied Behavioral Sciences. It became a department in 1993 (“History”). 16 San Diego State University was the first one to create a women’s studies program in 1970. It became a full-fledged department in 1975 (Women’s Studies Department, “History”). For more information on the development of women’s studies, see Howe.

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versities while the contents of the courses, notably in the humanities and social sciences, had failed to take into account this new diverse student population.17 Indeed, the percentage of racial and ethnic minorities increased progressively from the 1970s onwards, with the notable exception of African Americans whose percentage in the student body decreased in the 1980s to start rising again only in the 1990s (United States Department of Education, “Table 202” 206). As for female students, their number grew steadily in the second half of the 20th century, so that by 1979 they outnumbered men in institutions of higher education (“Table 157” 167).18 This diversification was the consequence of the implementation of two policies in the mid-1960s. The first one, open admissions, was introduced in universities and notably in colleges starting in 1965. It aimed at making it possible for high school graduates from lower-income or underprivileged backgrounds to be admitted irrespective of their high school GPA. If it did not specifically target minorities, the latter did benefit from this policy, and it led to a more diverse student body. The second policy, affirmative action, was initially meant to ensure equal opportunities for black people so as to remedy the discrimination from which they had suffered, and was then extended to other minorities and women. However, it rapidly evolved to go beyond equality of opportunity and require equality as a result. This new orientation, outlined by President Lyndon Johnson in a speech he delivered on June 4th 1965 at Howard University19 and inscribed in the executive order [11246] he signed on September 24th 1965, 17 Indeed, if in the 1960s, the student population was 90% white, by 1991, when the controversy over multiculturalism was at its peak, racial and ethnic minorities represented 21.2% of all the students (blacks accounted for 9.6% of the students, Hispanics for 6.2%, Asian Americans for 4.6% and Native Americans for 0.8%). Moreover, women made up 55.2% of the student population (white women accounted for 43.2% and women belonging to a minority for 12%) (United States Department of Education, “Table 202” 206-7). 18 As women represented more than 50% of the student body in institutions of higher education in the 1990s, their demands concerned the small percentage of female students in fields of study like medicine, science and engineering. 19 This new orientation was notably outlined in the following extract of his Howard speech: “You do not take a person who for years has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates. This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result” (Johnson 594-95).

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was confirmed under the Nixon administration by the Labor Department [Order N°4] in 1970. Thus, contractors who did business with the federal government and universities which received federal funds were required to ensure that minorities were represented in their workforce and/or student bodies proportionately to their share of the American population.20 This led to an increase in the enrollment of minority students and in the recruitment of minority teachers. As affirmative action programs were extended to women in the early 1970s, the number of female students and teachers rose. The passage of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which specifically targeted sex discrimination in education, also contributed to that increase by notably outlawing such discrimination in admission and recruitment. Indeed Title IX states that “[n]o person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” Another factor, related to the diversification of the student bodies, contributed to renewed activism among minorities. Indeed, starting in the mid1980s, there was a series of racial incidents, conflated under the term “hate speech,” against blacks and other minorities at several universities, many of them elite ones. One explanation given for these numerous racial incidents was the permanence of racism not only in universities but in society in general. Female and gay students were also victims of harassment. To remedy this situation and make the university environment more welcoming, minority and women students issued a series of demands which became part of a movement for the implementation of a multicultural education for all the students. These demands included the recruitment of a multicultural faculty and more students from minorities as well as the adoption of measures to ensure respect for diversity and greater sensitivity toward minorities and women, notably in the form of sexual harassment policies and speech codes. It is the latter aspect, restrictions concerning what can be said or not about minorities and women, which came to be particularly controversial as it has been associated with “political correctness” by detractors associated mainly with the right.21 It is around this association with “political correctness” that the controversy over multiculturalism, which started at the end of the 1980s and peaked in the 1990s, revolved. Indeed the proponents of multiculturalism rejected this link, claiming that the term had been invented by conservative 20

On the history of affirmative action, see notably Anderson. It should be noted that this phenomenon has also been denounced by some liberals as well as by members of racial and ethnic minorities and of the female sex.

21

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detractors to discredit the objectives of multiculturalism in the eyes of the American public opinion so as to maintain the hegemony of the dominant group. However, this way of viewing the situation is too simplistic. If indeed its right-wing detractors had inflated and distorted the phenomenon, with help from the media and the intervention of President George H.W. Bush in the debate publicly denouncing “political correctness” as a threat to freedom of speech at the University of Michigan on May 4th 1991,22 they did not invent the phenomenon as Gerald Graff, one of the founders of Teachers for a Democratic Culture (TDC), a group set up in 1991 to counter accusations of “political correctness,” has admitted: There are those who disregard the norms of democratic debate and seek to turn the entire curriculum into an extension of a radical social agenda, with compulsory reeducation workshops thoughtfully provided for the unenlightened. There are those who justify turning their courses into consciousness-raising sessions on the ground that all teaching is inevitably political anyway. This authoritarian behavior is indeed disturbing, and it has been making enemies out of potential friends of the reform movement. (25)

Besides this association with “political correctness,” the controversy has also been about the meaning of multiculturalism. Indeed, as implied by Gerald Graff, in its normative sense23 the term refers to different sorts or degrees of multiculturalism. At one extreme, there is what some call soft or conservative multiculturalism,24 which acknowledges the existence of diversity and its recognition but within the framework of a common culture and a national identity, thus without calling into question the status quo and integration. At the other extreme, there is what some call radical or critical multiculturalism. One of its proponents, Peter McLaren, professor in critical studies at Chapman University (California), argues that “multiculturalism without a transformative political agenda can be just another form of accommodation to the larger social order” (42). Therefore 22

See George H.W. Bush, “Remarks at the University of Michigan Commencement Ceremony in Ann Arbor.” 23 As defined by Rob Reich, it implies that “certain policies must follow from the plain fact that many different cultures exist within a common political boundary. This is the idea that being a multiculturalist requires social and political change, like promoting a multicultural curriculum, or agitating for multicultural accommodations, laws or policies. Normative multiculturalism constitutes social critique or reconstruction” (12). 24 It has notably been associated with Diane Ravitch, research professor of education at New York University and former Assistant Secretary of Education in the administration of George H.W. Bush.

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he defines its purpose as being “the transformation of the social, cultural and institutional relations in which meanings are generated.” Thus, it questions the hegemonic forms of domination and promotes differences, and does not consider culture as something which is harmonious and consensual. It is this sort of multiculturalism which has been at the core of the debate over multiculturalism. Indeed, because it calls for a transformation of the content of traditional programs to put an end to the hegemony of the perspective of the dominant group, it actually challenges the way the American identity has been created and maintained through the inculcation of the values of the dominant group in all aspects of education. The fact that it has targeted all the students, and especially white mainstream students, notably through the implementation of general education diversity requirements at the undergraduate level, has also been part of the controversy.25 If multiculturalism has been at the core of a heated debate, notably for its consequences on the teaching of a common history and culture, its proponents have nevertheless managed to make some headway not only in higher education but also in American society. First, despite the challenges that they faced under Ronald Reagan’s administration and that of his successor, George H.W. Bush, in the 1980s and early 1990s, the programs of studies focusing on minorities and women have been institutionalized, notably through the creation of departments and research centers. The number of institutions where these disciplines can be studied, whether at the undergraduate level, as majors or minors, or at the graduate level through the completion of a Master’s degree or a PhD, have widely increased since the beginnings of these group-specific studies.26 Many universities have also implemented diversity requirements for undergraduate students. Thus according to a national survey conducted by the James Irvine Foundation in 2000, 54% of the 543 institutions which answered the survey had done so (Humphreys). These have taken several forms: a long 25

The implementation of a multicultural education has taken two main forms: curriculum transformation projects, which consisted in integrating content on women and racial and ethnic minorities in undergraduate courses, and general education “diversity” requirements (Lynne Goodstein 104-6). 26 Concerning black studies, for example, among the 311 institutions which grant degrees in black studies (59% of them being public institutions), 32% have black studies departments and 50% have black studies programs. Finally nine universities grant PhD degrees in black studies, 21 universities grant Master’s degrees in black studies, and most of the rest offer a major or a minor in black studies at the undergraduate level (Alkalimat 12-13, 15). On the long road to the institutionalization of ethnic studies in their various forms, see Butler.

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list of courses on diversity from which students choose a couple of courses; a specific required course dealing with diversity (as at UC-Berkeley with its American Cultures Requirement or at UW-Madison with its ethnic studies requirement)27; or the integration of material dealing with diversity into widely required courses such as Western civilization or English composition (as at Stanford or the University of Texas respectively) (Disch 196). Moreover, many have also adopted mission statements which state a commitment to diversity, a sign of the institutionalization of diversity (Meacham and Barrett). The speech codes, which were put in place as a reaction against the wave of hate speech which spread over several US campuses in the mid1980s and which were associated with the enforcement of “political correctness,” were met with several legal challenges.28 The implementation of these codes was demanded by students following racial and sexist incidents, and they aimed at prohibiting any speech or words which could hurt or offend minorities or women. Not wanting to be accused of condoning hate speech, university administrators yielded to these demands either by revising the student codes of their universities to include provisions on racial harassment or hate speech or by adopting speech codes. The implementation of these codes was also motivated by the need to maintain a welcoming environment for minorities in accordance with the principle of equality guaranteed by the 14th Amendment (1868).29 Several prestigious universities30 adopted various types of speech codes, but their common thread was their ban on all forms of demeaning speech and the concept of a “hostile environment,” such an environment being created “when unwelcome verbal, non-verbal or physical behavior of a prohibited nature is severe and pervasive enough to unreasonably interfere with an employee’s work or a student’s learning, or creates an intimidating, hostile, or offensive environment to a reasonable person” (Law Firm). Without conducting a thorough investigation of each institution’s track record, their effective implementation can only be traced through newspaper articles which have 27

For an analysis of these two cases, see Yamane. They were challenged in state courts and federal district courts. 29 Thus as Walker explains: “Hate speech, the argument went, communicated a message of exclusion, in violation of the constitutional promise of equality. Hate speech should be prohibited by law therefore, as a way of guaranteeing full participation” (32). 30 Among them, the University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin, the University of California, Brown University, Penn State, the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford. According to the American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon, in the 1980s and 1990s, over 350 universities adopted speech codes (Steinstra). 28

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related a certain number of cases involving sanctions for violating these codes. In turn these cases led to legal challenges for violation of the First Amendment upheld in several instances.31 Despite these challenges, many universities still have speech codes and according to a 2013 report by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education surveying policies maintained by 409 colleges, 62% had codes which departed from First Amendment standards (Lukianoff). Affirmative action policies, which have been used to ensure the enrollment of more minority students and the recruitment and promotion of more faculty members belonging to a minority or to the female sex and which have thus been associated with the implementation of multiculturalism in universities, have also been called into question. They have been repealed at the state level through the adoption of popular initiative measures,32 as was the case in California, the most diverse American State, with the adoption of Proposition 209 in 1996, which “prohibits the state, local governments, districts, public universities, colleges, and schools, and other government instrumentalities from discriminating against or giving preferential treatment to any individual or group in public employment, public education, or public contracting on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin” (California Online). Before the adoption of this proposition, the University of California’s Board of Regents had voted the end of the use of race, ethnicity and gender in admissions, contracting and hiring in July 1995. At other universities, the issue of affirmative action was settled in courts, as was the case for the University of Texas Law School, whose preferential admissions policy was struck down by a federal appeals court in 1996.33 The Supreme Court later overturned the 31

In 1989, a federal district court of the State of Michigan declared that the speech code of the University of Michigan was unconstitutional, because it was too vague and too broad (Doe v. University of Michigan). It was not the only one to face such a fate, as according to Greg Lukianoff, a lawyer and president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, “[f]rom 1989 to 2003, there were a half dozen successful legal challenges to campus speech codes. Since 2003, an additional 18 institutions have seen their speech codes struck down in court or abandoned in response to a lawsuit.” 32 Voters in the States of Washington and Nebraska approved a ban on affirmative action respectively in 1998 and 2008. 33 Four white students sued the University of Texas Law School because in 1992 they had been denied admission while less qualified African American and Mexican American students had been admitted. They claimed they had been discriminated against on the basis of their race. The district court ruled in favor of the law school, arguing that it “could take the race of applicants into account, both for purposes of ensuring a diverse student body and for purposes of remedying present

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decision of this federal appeals court, however, when it ruled in 2003 in Grutter v. Bollinger that the University of Michigan Law School’s consideration of race and ethnicity in admissions was not unconstitutional.34 Finally, in April 2014, the Supreme Court upheld Michigan’s ban on affirmative action in higher education, which had been approved by state voters in a 2006 referendum but had been set aside by a lower court. The fact that speech codes and affirmative action programs have been called into question has not meant, however, that multiculturalism has not had an impact on the wider American society. Indeed, it has been embraced at the executive level. Thus, during his presidential campaign in 1992, Bill Clinton pledged that he would form a government which would look like America, i.e. which would be representative of the diversity that characterized the United States. He fulfilled this promise once he was elected by nominating women and people belonging to minorities to key posts.35 Moreover, in his first victory speech as president-elect, he effects of past discrimination in the state’s system of public education” but that it “could not isolate minority and nonminority applicants and concluded that the law school would have to revise its admissions procedures” (Siegel 34). The four students appealed the decision and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in their favor, stating that the University of Texas “may not use race as a factor in law school admissions” (Hopwood v. Texas, qtd. in Siegel 34), thereby invalidating its affirmative action policies. 34 The Supreme Court notably stated that “[t]he Law School’s goal of attaining a critical mass of underrepresented minority students does not transform its program into a quota.” Besides, “[it] engages in a highly individualized, holistic review of each applicant’s file, giving serious consideration to all the ways an applicant might contribute to a diverse educational environment. The Law School affords this individualized consideration to applicants of all races. […]. The Law School’s current admissions program considers race as one factor among many, in an effort to assemble a student body that is diverse in ways broader than race.” Therefore it concluded that “[t]he Law School’s narrowly tailored use of race in admissions decisions to further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body” did not violate the Equal Protection Clause (Grutter v. Bollinger [02-241] 539 U.S. 306 [2003] 288 F.3d 732). 35 His first cabinet comprised notably two Hispanics, Henry Cisneros, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and Federico PeĖa, Secretary of Transportation; a declared lesbian, Roberta Achtenberg, Assistant Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development; women like Donna Shalala, Secretary of Health and Human Services, Hazel O’Leary, Secretary of Energy, and Laura D’Andrea Tyson, Chair of the US President’s Council of Economic Advisers; and five African Americans, Ronald Brown, Secretary of Commerce, Mike Espy, Secretary of Agriculture, Jesse Brown, Secretary of Veteran Affairs, Lee Brown, Drug Czar, and Hazel O’Leary.

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acknowledged the growing diversity of the United States, which for him was a source of strength, a theme which he would come back to in subsequent speeches, notably in a commencement speech at Portland State University in June 1998, in which he stressed the need for the new immigrants “to embrace our culture, learn our language, know our history, and when the time comes, [to] become citizens” but also said that “[e]thnic pride is a very good thing. America is one of the places which most reveres the distinctive ethnic, racial, religious heritage of our various peoples” (Clinton, 1998). This speech was delivered one year after he had launched his “One America in the 21st Century: The President’s Initiative on Race” (Executive Order 13020), whose purpose was to encourage community dialogue throughout the country so as to address racial issues in order to become “a diverse, democratic community in which we respect, even celebrate our differences, while embracing the shared values that unite us” (United States White House, “One America”).36 If one of the recommendations made in this report issued by the advisory board put in place to lead this dialogue was notably the creation of a permanent Presidential Council on Race, the report was nevertheless criticized for suggesting only modest initiatives.37 President Barack Obama has also embraced America’s diversity not only in his 2008 victory speech and 2009 inaugural address but in several other speeches.38 Like Clinton, Barack Obama has put this commitment to diversity in effect by appointing in his cabinets minorities and women. His

36

He announced this national dialogue on race during a speech at the University of California at San Diego Commencement. This dialogue was to be conducted by an advisory board of 7 people from different racial and ethnic groups (2 former governors, the executive vice-president of AFL-CIO, a reverend, an attorney and community leader, and the CEO of Nissan USA) headed by John Hope Franklin, a renowned scholar in African American history. As Bill Clinton explained, he wanted “this panel to help educate Americans about the facts surrounding issues of race, to promote a dialogue in every community of the land to confront and work through these issues, to recruit and encourage leadership at all levels to help breach racial divides, and to find, develop and recommend how to implement concrete solutions to our problems—solutions that will involve all of us in government, business, communities, and as individual citizens” (Clinton, 1997). 37 For more on this see Holmes. 38 Notably in the speech entitled “A More Perfect Union,” which he delivered in Philadelphia on March 18th 2008, following the controversy over remarks made by his former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

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first cabinet was even more diverse than Bill Clinton’s.39 Following criticism concerning the large number of whites, his second cabinet included seven women (among whom an African American and a Hispanic), two Hispanics, two African Americans and one Portuguese American. Besides, through the rhetoric he developed in his various speeches, he promoted his own conception of the national American identity, “by invoking the idea of America in an ethnically inclusive, unifying manner [that] helps neutralize the equation of America with whiteness by claiming that idea for citizens of any hue” (Reifowitz 42). This multicultural approach to American identity was confirmed by some of the positions he took, for example on same sex marriage and on the controversial building of a mosque not far from the site of 9/11, and by measures he put in place, notably in August 2011 when he established a coordinated government-wide initiative to promote diversity and inclusion in the federal workforce (Executive Order 13583). Indeed, his “Government-Wide Diversity and Inclusion Strategic Plan 2011” stressed that the United States derived its strength from its diversity as well as from its commitment to equality of opportunity. It added that it was the role of the Federal government to lead the way toward achieving a diverse, qualified workforce (United States Office of Personnel Management). This move is particularly significant as it makes diversity and inclusion a nationwide policy, with an Office of Diversity and Inclusion “responsible for reviewing and evaluating plans, reports, and programs for conformance with various laws, regulations, and directives relating to diversity and inclusion” (United States Office of Personnel Management, “Reports”). Despite this recognition at the executive level of the importance of diversity and inclusion and the election of the first African American president, the problem of race remains unresolved. Indeed, if the election of Barack Obama was seen as the advent of a post-racial America, reality has since proven otherwise. This has been particularly true concerning policing and the justice system. Thus on July 13th 2013 a jury found George Zimmerman, a Hispanic neighborhood watch captain, not guilty of the murder of Martin Trayvon, an unarmed black teenager, in Sanford, Florida. The decision of the jury, which comprised no black juror,40 to agree

39

It comprised a Lebanese American, one Italian American, seven women (among whom one Hispanic, two African Americans), two Chinese Americans and one Japanese American, one Hispanic man, two African American men. 40 There were five white women and a female Hispanic among the six jurors that made up the jury.

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with the self-defense plea of Mr Zimmerman41 triggered protests in several cities. The protesters denounced the racism they perceived notably in the way the case had been handled by the police (they did not arrest Mr Zimmerman) and been decided upon by the jury (“Trayvon’s Legacy” 35). The same outrage followed the shooting in Ferguson (Missouri) of an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, by a white policeman, Darren Wilson, on August 9th 2014, and the decision of a grand jury on November 24th not to indict him, with riots erupting in each case. A report issued on March 4th 2015 by the Justice Department, following an investigation of the Ferguson Police Department, concluded notably that “Ferguson’s approach to law enforcement both reflects and reinforces racial bias, including stereotyping. The harms of Ferguson’s police and court practices are borne disproportionately by African Americans, and there is evidence that this is due in part to intentional discrimination on the basis of race” (United States Department of Justice, Investigation 4). In its investigation regarding the acquittal of Mr Wilson, the Justice Department confirmed that “[b]ecause Wilson did not act with the requisite criminal intent, it cannot be proven beyond reasonable doubt to a jury that he violated 18 U.S.C.§ 242 when he fired his weapon at Brown” and that therefore “[t]his matter lacks prosecutive merit and should be closed” (Michael Brown 86). These conclusions have not succeeded in appeasing the black population in Ferguson and elsewhere in America. Moreover, the deaths of other unarmed African Americans at the hands of police officers, and the failure of the justice system to indict the officers involved in several cases, have even more intensified the feeling among the African American community that policing and the justice system are racially biased. It is not only the mistrust between the African American community and law enforcement officers which has widened nationwide, but the gap between how blacks and whites perceive racial discrimination. Indeed, a national survey on the state of race relations,42 conducted from February 29th to May 8th 2016 and released by the Pew Research Center on June 27th 2016, found out that more blacks than whites said that blacks were treated less fairly in dealing with the police (84% versus 50%) or in the courts (75% versus 43%). It also revealed that a greater percentage of blacks (61%) than of whites (45%) believed that race relations are generally bad, 41

In 2005, Florida was the first state to adopt a “stand your ground” law which “absolve[s] those who fear grave injury or death from any obligation to retreat before shooting someone in self-defence” (“Trayvon’s Legacy” 35). More than twenty other states have since passed such laws. 42 3,769 US adults, including 1,799 whites and 1,004 blacks, took part in this survey.

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and that while 51% of blacks said that Barack Obama had made progress toward improving race relations, only 28% of whites said so and a third believed that he had made them worse (compared with 5% for blacks) (“On Views of Race”). Besides the divergence between blacks and whites on race and inequality, what this survey underlines is that even though progress has been made in the past 50 years or so, more needs to be done, as racial tensions have come back to the surface. Barack Obama’s election has contributed to giving the impression that the United States could go beyond race. Protests for racial justice turning violent,43 the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement,44 the racially motivated shooting of nine African Americans by a white supremacist in a historic African American church in Charleston on June 17th 2015, and of five white policemen by a black man in Dallas on July 7th 2016, all show that the election of a black president has not solved the racial divide. Paradoxically, his election has not meant that race no longer mattered. Indeed, even though he has endeavored to transcend his race, only referring to it on rare occasions,45 because of his race he has been held to a higher standard, both by blacks and whites, and has been the target of both explicit and implicit racist remarks. To conclude, since the 1960s, when calls were made for the recognition of the experiences of women and minority groups in the name of multiculturalism, not only has the multicultural dimension of the United States in its descriptive sense, i.e. as a demographic reality, been recognized, but multiculturalism in its normative sense, i.e. in the form of policies, has gained more acceptance, as Professor Nathan Glazer argued in his 1997 book We Are All Multiculturalists Now. While the debate over multiculturalism seems to have abated, its most extreme expression, which calls into question a common American identity and stresses difference at the expense of unity, continues to be controversial. It is in education, and 43 Besides Ferguson, this has notably been the case in Baltimore after Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old African American, died from an injury to his spinal cord on April 19th 2015, one week after being arrested and taken to custody in a police van. Protests also turned violent in Saint Paul after Philando Castile, a 32-year-old African American, was shot dead by a white police officer on July 6th 2016 following a traffic stop. 44 The Black Lives Matter movement was created in 2013 after George Zimmerman was found not guilty of the murder of Martin Trayvon. 45 One such instance was after the killing of Martin Trayvon, when he said “when Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago” (United States White House, “Remarks by the President”).

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notably in higher education, that multiculturalism has had a significant impact. Since 1993, it has also been embraced by the executive branch. If we cannot talk about a post-racial America, as racial problems have surfaced again and reignited the conversation about race, the presidency of Barack Obama has nevertheless changed the perception of the American identity by making it more multicultural. This is not to say that this change has been welcomed by all, as illustrated by the racist overtones of Donald Trump’s campaign to become the Republican Party’s presidential candidate and the success he has encountered by tapping into deep-seated fears about terrorism and immigration notably.46 Even if in recent years the United States seems to have become more racially and politically polarized, the movement for multiculturalism has made some progress as illustrated by Obama’s election in 2008 and reelection in 2012 and the recognition of diversity in key US institutions through the implementation of multicultural policies. Multiculturalism is not a fait accompli yet, but the growing diversity of the population and the economic gains to be made from a diverse workforce, both nationally and internationally, will probably contribute to making it a reality.

Works Cited Alkalimat, Abdul. “Africana Studies in the US.” Eblackstudies.org, Mar. 2007: 1-29. Web. 23 Mar. 2015. Bush, George H.W. “Remarks at the University of Michigan Commencement Ceremony in Ann Arbor,” May 4, 1991. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Wolley, The American Presidency Project. Web. 11 July 2015. Anderson, Terry H. The Pursuit of Fairness: A History of Affirmative Action. Oxford; New York: Oxford UP, 2004. Butler, Johnnella E., ed. Color-Line to Borderlands: The Matrix of American Ethnic Studies. Seattle; London: U of Washington P, 2001. California Online Voter Guide General Election 1996. “Proposition 209. Prohibition Against Discrimination or Preferential Treatment By State and Other Public Entities. Initiative Constitutional Amendment.” The California Voter Foundation. Web. 24 Mar. 2015. 46

After a couple who had pledged allegiance to Islamic State killed 14 people in San Bernardino, California, on December 2nd 2015, Donald Trump “called for a ‘total and complete shutdown’ of America’s borders to Muslims” (“Playing with Fear” 13). On another occasion, he also said that he would build a wall on the Mexican border and that he would deport the 11 million or so illegal immigrants living in the United States (“Trump’s America” 15).

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Clinton, William J. “Commencement Address at Portland State University, Portland, Oregon,” June 13, 1998. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Wolley, The American Presidency Project. Web. 24 Mar. 2015. —. “Remarks by the President at University of California at San Diego Commencement, 1997.” Nara.gov. Washington: National Archives and Records Administration. Web. 15 July 2015. Department of Chicano Studies. “Chicano Studies department turns 45.” Cal State L.A. 2008. Updated 13 Jan. 2014. Web. 21 Mar. 2015. Disch, Estelle. “The Politics of Curricular Change.” Beyond a Dream Deferred: Multicultural Education and the Politics of Excellence. Ed. Becky W. Thompson and Sangeeta Tyagi. Minneapolis; London: U of Minnesota P, 1993. 195-213. 442nd Regimental Combat Team Historical Society. Updated 24 May 2015. Web. 13 July 2015. Glazer, Nathan. We Are All Multiculturalists Now Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard UP, 1997. Goodstein, Lynne. “Achieving a Multicultural Curriculum.” The Journal of General Education 43.2 (1994): 102-16. Graff, Gerald. Beyond the Culture Wars. New York; London: Norton, 1992. Granjon, Marie-Christine. L’Amérique de la contestation. Paris: Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1985. Grutter v. Bollinger (02-241) 539 U.S. 306 (2003) 288 F.3d 732 Higham, John. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism 1860-1925. 3rd ed. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1992. Holmes, Steven A. “Race Advisory Panel Gives Report to Clinton.” New York Times. New York Times, 19 Sept. 1998. Web. 15 July 2015. Hopwood v. Texas, 78 F.3d 932, 934-35 (5th Cir. 1996) Howe, Florence, ed. The Politics of Women’s Studies: Testimony from 30 Founding Mothers. New York: The Feminist P, 2000. Humphreys, Debra. “National Survey Finds Diversity Requirements Common Around the Country.” Diversity Digest (Fall 00). Web. 24 Mar. 2015. Johnson, Lyndon B. “Howard University Address.” The American Reader. Ed. Diane Ravitch. New York: Harper Perennial, 2000. 593-97. Kallen, Horace. Culture and Democracy in the United States: Studies in the Group Psychology of the American Peoples. New York: Boni & Liveright Publishers, 1924. King, Desmond. Making Americans: Immigration, Race, and the Origins of the Diverse Democracy. Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard UP, 2002.

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Lacorne, Denis. La crise de l’identité américaine: Du melting-pot au multiculturalisme. Paris: Fayard, 1997. Lukianoff, Greg. “Speech Codes: Alive and Well, 10 years later.” Huffingtonpost.com. Huffingtonpost.com, 15 Aug. 2013. Updated 15 Oct. 2013. Web. 24 Mar. 2015. McLaren, Peter. “White Terror and Oppositional Agency: Towards a Critical Multiculturalism.” Multicultural Education, Critical Pedagogy, and the Politics of Difference. Ed. Christine E. Sleeter and Peter McLaren. Albany: State U of New York P, 1995. 33-70. Meacham, Jack, and Crystal Barrett. “Commitment to Diversity in Institutional Mission Statements. ” Diversity Digest 7.1-2 (2003): 6. Web. 13 July 2015. Native American Studies. “History.” UCDavis. 2015. Web. 21 Mar. 2015. Pew Research Center. “On Views of Race and Inequality, Blacks and Whites Are Worlds Apart.” Pewresearch.org. Washington: Pew Research Center, 27 June 2016. Web. 15 July 2016. “Playing with Fear.” The Economist 12 Dec. 2015: 13. Reich, Rob. Bridging Liberalism and Multiculturalism in American Education. Chicago; London: U of Chicago P, 2002. Reifowitz, Ian. Obama’s America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity. Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2012. Schlesinger, Arthur M. The Disuniting of America. New York; London: Norton, 1992. Siegel, Reva B. “The Racial Rhetorics of Colorblind Constitutionalism: The Case of Hopwood v. Texas.” Race and Representation: Affirmative Action. Ed. Robert Post and Michael Rogin. New York: Zone Books, 1998. 29-72. Steinstra, Sanne. “Evaluating Hate Speech Codes.” Aclu-or.org. ACLU of Oregon, Oct. 2009. Web. 24 Mar. 2015. The Advisory Board to the President’s Initiative on Race. One America in the 21st Century: Forging a New Future. Washington: National Archives and Records Administration, Sept. 1998. Web. 15 July 2015. The Law Firm of David A.Young, LCC. “What is Hostile Work Environment?” Davidyounglaw.com. Web. 14 July 2015. “Trayvon’s Legacy.” The Economist 20 July 2013: 35-36. “Trump’s America.” The Economist 5 Sept. 2015: 15. Ture, Kwame, and Charles V. Hamilton. Black Power: The Politics of Liberation. 2nd ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1992. United States. Census Bureau. “XIV Statistics of slaves.” A Century of Population Growth, From the First Census of the United States to the

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Twelfth, 1790-1900. Washington: US Census Bureau, 1909: 132-41. Web. 22 Mar. 2015. United States. Department of Education. “Table 157: Total enrollment in institutions of higher education, by attendance status, sex of student, and control of institution: Fall 1947 to fall 1988.” Digest of Education Statistics 1990: 167. Washington: National Center for Education Statistics, Feb. 1991. Web. 21 July 2015. —. “Table 202: Total fall enrollment in institutions of higher education, by level of study, sex, and race/ethnicity of student: 1976 to 1991.” Digest of Education Statistics 1993: 206-7. Washington: National Center for Education Statistics, Oct. 1993. Web. 13 July 2015. —. “Title IX and sex discrimination.” Ed.gov.Washington: Office for Civil Rights, 29 Apr. 2015. Web. 21 July 2015. United States. Department of Justice. Department of Justice Report Regarding the Criminal Investigation into the Shooting Death of Michael Brown by the Ferguson, Missouri Police Officer Darren Wilson: 1-86. Justice.gov. Washington: Department of Justice, 4 Mar 2015. Web. 15 July 2016. —. Civil Rights Division. Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department: 1-102. Justice.gov. Washington: Department of Justice, 4 Mar 2015. Web. 14 July 2016. United States. Office of Personnel Management. Office of Diversity and Inclusion. Government-Wide Diversity and Inclusion Strategic Plan 2011. Washington: Office of Personnel Management. Web. 15 July 2015. —. “Reports: Overview.” Washington: Office of Personnel Management. Web. 15 July 2015. United States. The White House. “One America: Overview.” Washington: National Archives and Records Administration. Web. 24 Mar. 2015. —. “Remarks by the President on Trayvon Martin.” Whitehouse.gov. Washington: Office of the Press Secretary, 19 July 2013. Web. 17 July 2016. Van Deburg, William L. New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992. Walker, Samuel. Hate Speech: The History of an American Controversy. Lincoln; London: U of Nebraska P, 1994. Women’s Studies Department. “History.” San Diego State U. Updated 21 Jan. 2015. Web. 21 Mar. 2015.

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Yamane, David. Student Movements for Multiculturalism: Challenging the Curricular Color Line in Higher Education. Baltimore; London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 2001.

AMERICAN MULTICULTURALISM ST IN THE 21 CENTURY: ACHIEVING DOMESTIC AND INTERNATIONAL GOALS IN A GLOBALIZED WORLD SAÏD OUAKED

Introduction Recent debates and events in the American social and political arena have generated intense discussions about the reality and practicability of multiculturalism in the United States. Ironically, the United States celebrated in 2015 the 50th anniversary of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which put an end to a system based on racial quotas. But fifty years after the end of segregation and of ethnic considerations in immigration laws, the race problem has not disappeared despite signs of greater tolerance for ethnic diversity. The persistent inflow of immigrants and the demographics of ethnic minorities (chiefly that of the Hispanic community) continue to fuel discussions about the future of the American identity (see Huntington) and the ability of the different ethnic groups to coexist serenely. Among scholars and researchers, some have tried to determine whether the American society has finally entered a multicultural era where ethnic diversity is no longer a problem. Let’s start by clarifying the purpose of this paper: the aim is not to determine if the U.S. is a multicultural society but rather to examine how the idea that the U.S. is multicultural has served the interests of the nation. It is safe to speculate that the U.S. is widely considered a multicultural country, not necessarily in the sense that ethnic diversity is unconditionally accepted by all, but rather because the nation is de facto ethnically diverse (Alesina et al.). Even if minority ethnic groups are not given special treatment in the U.S. (as may be the case in countries such as Canada), their presence and participation in the society are usually not questioned in the mainstream media discourse. That is what recent polls seem to reveal

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about interracial relationships: by several measures, the U.S. would be classified among the more tolerant and free societies (Alesina et al. 3; Fisher). However optimistic this view may be, obvious problems remain in the area of race relations, and the broad picture should not hide recurrent tensions and disagreements on this issue. At any rate, the United States has long enjoyed the image of a tolerant society, of a country particularly open to immigrants. Academics and researchers have shown that this image is a questionable construct, although historically, the U.S. can certainly be labeled a country of immigration. The U.S. has been seen generally as a place of great ethnic diversity and has long been a magnet for international migrants. Religious and cultural tolerance has been an important pull factor since the formation of the early North American colonies and has become a fundamental thread in the fabric of the American narrative. Simply put, the perceived American openness has been a strong factor of attraction abroad. This, of course, should not obliterate other pull factors: for instance, economic opportunities, a stable polity and a positive socioeconomic differential have also been major determinants in the migration process. However, the role of the image of the United States should be emphasized on two key elements, both connected to the way foreigners/ethnic minorities are perceived or treated in the U.S. First, the state of multiculturalism, understood as the level of tolerance towards ethnic minorities, is an influential determinant of the perception of the U.S. abroad. Secondly, immigration policy and debates over the presence of migrant communities also influence the way foreigners assess the position of the U.S. as a world leader, which is crucial for the U.S. to achieve its national and international goals. The primary aim of this paper is to show that the current debates over these two dimensions (ethnic tolerance and immigration politics) have played against the American interests, both domestic and international. This places the Obama administration in a challenging position in at least two sectors: the economy and national security, two top priorities of the American government.

Obama’s top priorities: the economy and national security President Obama’s top priorities are published in the National Security Strategy, a document required by the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986 that explains the administration’s security issues and the strategies for addressing them (Council on Foreign Relations). Both the economy and national security figure prominently

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amongst the priorities of the 2015 National Security Strategy. In fact, both are even connected in an effort to improve the safety and wellbeing of the nation: economic growth and national security are described as two halves of the same nut. Obama’s strategy relies on what has been labeled as “smart power,” a mixture of soft and hard power principles. To put it simply, to achieve its goals, the U.S. needs to combine policies that involve direct concrete interventions (coercion) abroad and exercise indirect influence through what Joseph Nye calls a “power of attraction” (Nye, “Get Smart”). In other words, the approach adopted by the U.S. administration is one of global leadership that combines diplomatic and economic pressures and aims at “winning the hearts and minds” abroad (Nye, “Public Diplomacy” 108). This was clearly stated by the White House in the 2010 National Security Strategy: “[A]s we fight the wars in front of us, we must see the horizon beyond them—a world in which America is stronger, more secure and is able to overcome our challenges while appealing to the aspirations of people around the world” (2). This strategy also acknowledges the importance of the opinions expressed by the international community (state and non-state actors). Evidence of this phenomenon is the development of public opinion polls and studies assessing the perception of the image of the U.S. abroad: Gallup examines “Global Views of U.S. Leadership” and the Pew Research Center has a series of “global indicators” including the “image of the U.S.” or the “confidence in the U.S. President.” The progress made in the information technology sector has facilitated the circulation of information globally, resulting in a greater access to the debates within the political and media circles of the U.S. Also, research shows that the international community has become more sensitive to American policy, both domestic and international (Hady and Singer; Castells).1 This implies that people outside the U.S. are better informed about the terms of the debates on any given subject, and tend to focus more on matters that are likely to touch them directly: one can speculate that, as non-Americans, any subject that may affect them as “foreigners” (citizens of foreign nations) is a potentially strong concern. In any case, the Obama administration’s approach since 2008 has relied on the ability “to lead the world with purpose” so as to achieve economic and national security goals (White House, Jakarta 2). Obviously, that would mean that the international community accepts to assign that 1

Some experts like Castells speak of a “global civil society” to describe a globalized international public opinion.

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leading role to the U.S. However, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) already warned in 2007 that “the U.S. cannot ask the world to admire [it] if [they] do not behave admirably. [They] cannot as the world to follow [their] lead if [they] prove ineffective” (14). As far as national security is concerned, the Obama administration relies on two key points to fight terrorism and improve the safety of American people and interests, both in the U.S. and abroad: -

partnerships and intergovernmental cooperation are essential in gathering information and combining forces to defeat terrorist groups and prevent future attacks2 restoring the dialogue with the people in the regions considered as source countries of global terrorism

Let’s focus on the second point. In a speech made in Jakarta in 2010, President Obama declared that “relations between the United States and Muslim communities have frayed over many years. As President, I have made it a priority to begin to repair these relations. I called for a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world—one that creates a path for us to move beyond our differences” (White House). Obama had made a first step towards the Muslim community in Cairo in 2009 in a speech now known as the “A New Beginning” speech: I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect […]. I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear. […]. But that same principle must apply to Muslim perceptions of America. Just as Muslims do not fit a crude stereotype, America is not the crude stereotype of a self-interested empire. (White House)

These statements were seen as a policy of “reaching out” to the Muslim and Arab communities around the world. While initially the initiative was praised and met with considerable publicity and satisfaction, the mediumand long-term effects have been limited, precisely because the U.S. has failed to prove its credibility and real commitment in the matter. Most Middle-East countries show a very unfavorable view of the U.S., including Egypt where Obama’s campaign for restoring the dialogue started: in 2015, Jordan and Egypt showed an 85% disapproval rate.

2

This is also true for border security and the war on drugs along the Mexican border.

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In economic matters, Obama’s plan to stir economic growth is twofold: -

first, to encourage foreign countries to open their markets to American products3 secondly, to secure a strong and innovative workforce in which foreign workers, students, scientists and entrepreneurs play an important role4

In both cases, “attraction” certainly is key in the success of this plan. Opening markets and signing trade agreements would only occur in a favorable context, where the U.S. is seen as a viable trustworthy partner. Also, American exports partly rely on the confidence in and appreciation of the United States: anti-American sentiment discourages manufacturers, retailers and buyers of American goods and services (Sadik 21). As for foreign workers, students, scientists and entrepreneurs, evidence has shown that the social environment is crucial: recent research shows that more tolerant places are more attractive to migrants in general, but to highly skilled migrants in particular. A report by the Migration Policy Institute, an influential think-tank based in Washington, D.C., states that “attracting skilled immigrants is not just the domain of immigration and visa policy, but also depends on the success of policy efforts in other fields,” for example “providing a welcoming environment for immigrants and their families” (Papademetriou and Sumption 15). The report also points to “variables [that] act as facilitators of attractiveness, including […] the ability to live in a safe and tolerant society. […]. Acceptance and respect for diversity of language, ethnicity, culture and religion can be a strong element of attraction, particularly in traditional countries of immigration such as Canada and the United States” (7). On the economic level, there is a consensus that critical masses of highly educated individuals indeed foster economic growth. Moreover, diversity has a positive effect on creativity and economic growth. Thus theorist Richard Florida writes: Places that are open and possess low entry barriers for people gain creativity advantage from their ability to attract people from a wide range of backgrounds. All else equal, more open and diverse places are likely to attract greater numbers of talented and creative people—the sort of people who power innovation and growth. (319) 3

“We must drive the inclusive economic growth that creates demand for American exports” (National Security Strategy 17). 4 “We continue to attract immigrants from every corner of the world who renew our country with their energy and entrepreneurial talents” (National Security Strategy i).

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The White House has acknowledged the necessity to “continue to attract immigrants from every corner of the world who renew [the] country with their energy and entrepreneurial talents” (Council i). This view has become a cornerstone of Obama’s immigration reform which is also a response to the growing international competition for foreign students and highly skilled workers. The Obama administration’s plan to reform immigration met considerable opposition in Congress, which pushed President Obama to take executive action in order to implement measures such as stopping deportation of about 4 million undocumented immigrants (Ehrenfreund).5 The executive initiative ordered by President Obama not only infuriated Congress but also stirred a harsh debate in the public opinion as Republicans denounced a violation of the separation of powers and a suicidal measure that would only encourage further illegal immigration. This dispute is yet another illustration of the challenging position occupied not only by illegal immigrants but by all immigrants, and by extension, by all foreigners legally in the U.S. or not. Hence the 21st century has seen the resurgence of ideas that are at odds with the very idea of multiculturalism.

Recent debates over diversity and multiculturalism: nativism returns President Obama has received considerable criticism since he first announced his desire to overhaul the immigration system in 2008. During his first term, he was also criticized for not doing enough to change the current legislation. When he announced he would run for a second term, he said he would make this a priority of his administration if reelected. However, overhauling the immigration system has been a real challenge: the climate for immigration reform has not been favorable for any president since the mid-1990s, including the Republican presidents, as the failed attempt by George W. Bush in 2007—despite a strong personal commitment in the project—testifies. The climate in the United States has not been favorable to immigrants for a long time. Since the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, the issue of illegal immigration has dominated the question of immigration reform.6 The events of 5

Note that a federal judge temporarily blocked the executive order on immigration on February 16, 2015. The 4-4 split of the Supreme Court in June 2016 affirmed the decision. 6 Initiatives such as Proposition 187 (SOS—Save Our State) in California in 1994 or more recently Arizona S.B. 1070 are good examples.

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9/11 drastically changed the terms of the debate: it refocused the issue on national security rather than socioeconomic considerations. John Tirman from the MIT Center for International Studies agrees that it is the threat of terrorism that mostly shaped the debate after 9/11 and gave birth to a twoheaded Hydra, the first face being terrorism and the second, illegal immigration. Both issues were combined in The Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005, which is considered one the harshest anti-illegal immigration bills ever designed in the U.S. and which provoked the massive immigration protests of 2006, when millions of people demonstrated in the major American cities. As Daniel Sabbagh shows, most post-9/11 law-enforcement actions and the war on terrorism mainly targeted the Arab and the Muslim communities. Racial profiling has become a central issue in law enforcement. Several polls and studies were conducted on this particular question: interestingly, a majority of Americans declared they supported racial profiling especially for Arabs and Muslims (Schildkraut). Today still, a majority of Americans support racial profiling to prevent terrorism (Johnson et al.). African Americans, potential victims of racial profiling themselves, are an interesting case: they support racial profiling for Arabs and Arab Americans as a means to fight terrorism. As John Tirman analyzed, the first victim of this change is social cohesiveness, which may lead to more interethnic tensions. As far as multicultural tolerance is concerned, the picture thus is not so bright. The role of opinion leaders and social elites, including politicians and the media, play a crucial role in the way a given ethnic minority is perceived by other groups. Brader et al. have confirmed that the opposition to immigration is essentially based on the identity of the immigrants rather than the consequences of immigration, and that the opposition increases when the public discourse focuses on the costs of immigration. Daniel Hopkins shows how “hostile political reactions to neighboring immigrants are most likely when salient national rhetoric reinforces the threat” (40). In other words, when members of the U.S. Congress give interviews to TV news channels or newspapers and magazines, and say that the major problem for the U.S. is illegal immigration and that it poses security threats, they are likely to provoke increased opposition against immigrants both in discourse and in attitude. That is what the populist Tea Party’s rhetoric has done so far, and they have been quite successful if we consider the number of Americans who think that immigration is one the most important problems in the U.S.7 Therefore, the 7

According to a Gallup poll conducted in April 2015, “immigration/illegal aliens” is ranked second in the “non-economic” major concerns (after “dissatisfaction with the government”), and the fourth major concern overall.

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notion that the U.S. still is a “nation of immigrants” must nowadays be questioned. What recent events seem to show is a return of nativism, or a new form of nativism. Although signs tend to show that support for diversity is becoming more common among members of the younger generations (younger Americans say they have more daily interactions with members of other ethnic minorities), a 2006 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center found that 50% of respondents either mostly or completely agree that the American way of life needs to be protected against foreign influence. In the same survey, 47% of respondents reported that they believe that the growing number of newcomers from other countries threatens traditional American customs and values (Knoll 3). More recently, other indicators show that Americans have become more skeptical towards Muslims: in a 2011 report by the Brookings Institution, about 50% of the subjects expressed discomfort towards Muslims and the same proportion said that Islam is incompatible with American values (Cox et al.). Moreover, about half the respondents said that discrimination against Whites has become a major problem too. This downplays the multicultural scenario and tends to indicate less social cohesion. These results confirm other reports as to the worrying situation of Arab Americans and Muslims. Last February the Center for American Progress published a report showing how a wave of Islamophobia has developed in the American law enforcement and media circles. They also conclude that prejudice and hate towards a given ethnic or religious group is likely to “ultimately affect all Americans” (Duss et al. 2). This conclusion is consistent with previous findings by the Migration Policy Institute in the aftermath of 9/11: their research reported discrimination against Arab and Muslim Americans but also against other “visible minorities” such as Latino-Americans (Chishti et al.). The consequences of such practices go beyond the case of Arab- and Muslim-Americans. Again, prejudice and bias do not stop with just one ethnic group; they are likely to affect other minorities. If we go back to the priorities of the Obama administration, this is a double problem: first, it undermines the national unity and therefore affects the nation’s capacity to build a strong workforce; secondly, alienating Arab- and MuslimAmericans deprives the nation of essential allies in the fight against terrorism both within the U.S. and abroad, particularly in source countries in the Middle East (Chishti et al. 11). These problems have long-term effects in the perception of the U.S.: speaking of the opinions of young Europeans about the United States, Friedman writes:

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Many blame Mr. Bush for making America, since 9/11, into a strange new land that exports more fear than hope, and has become dark and brooding—a place whose greeting to visitors has gone from ‘Give me your tired, your poor’ to ‘Give me your fingerprints’.

We are dealing with a question that is by nature both national and international: immigration policy. The treatment of foreign nationals or naturalized foreigners has implications on the relationships with the source countries, but not only: let’s consider political initiatives such as Arizona’s Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act better known as Arizona SB 1070. This law did not only irritate Mexican officials, but it also received attention from international organizations such as Amnesty International and other foreign nations. Much remains to be studied in the foreign reception of legislative initiatives that are seen as unfavorable to immigrants, but evidence shows that Arizona SB 1070 is often considered as yet another sign of American distrust towards immigrants (Weidenhamer ). All in all, when local and national schemes seem to violate the civil rights of immigrants and ethnic minorities, the perception abroad is likely to be highly negative. But again, on a more pragmatic level, it means that it undermines the image of the U.S. abroad and therefore undermines public diplomacy as well as foreign public opinions. How can the U.S. expect Muslims in the Middle East to support Obama’s effort to fight terrorism when in the U.S. Arabs and Muslims are the victims of racial profiling and aggressive policing? But public diplomacy can be also affected by other factors. Sometimes, events that did not imply foreigners or immigrants per se can have considerable impact on foreign audiences. What happened in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014 offers an interesting case study. First, from this side of the Atlantic, it is a stone in the shoe of those who profess that the United States is post-racial, colorblind or simply a place where ethnic minorities live in perfect harmony.8 As a result of the Ferguson events, the idea that the U.S. is a multicultural society was questioned, sometimes mocked, as newspapers headlines in Europe and elsewhere showed. Also, as Philip Seib, an expert on media and foreign policy explained, “The critical foreign coverage of unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, is the latest instance reflecting perceptions abroad of American hypocrisy” (quoted in Masters).

8

Note that the U.S. Justice Department released a report that found Ferguson police was rife with racial bias, which precipitated the resignation of police Chief Tom Jackson (see Wesley and Horwitz).

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Concluding remarks In a globalized world more interconnected than ever, every incident recorded in the U.S. is likely to be reported all over the world through highspeed internet connections, social networks and international media outlets. Ironically, one may say that the U.S. too is under constant surveillance.9 Its domestic and international policies are subject to intense scrutiny, given its position as unique superpower and its self-assigned role as world leader. Yet the American leadership relies on the international community’s willingness to assign that responsibility to the United States. Obviously, anything that may affect that willingness is likely to diminish Washington’s power abroad. The treatment of foreign nationals and ethnic minorities in the U.S. is definitely an issue to which foreign governments and public opinions are sensitive. Negative reactions by foreign powers or publics in the face of racial discrimination in the U.S. can harm American interests in many sectors. However, despite a number of significant hiccups in the field of interracial relationships, America’s ethnic diversity remains a strong asset in the economic and diplomatic sectors. Today, as the American government increasingly relies on the international community to achieve its national security and economic goals, the U.S. is trying to restore its leadership by showing to the world the face of a nation deeply committed to advancing human and civil rights, which also means fighting discrimination and racism at home. Yet, the intense debates in the U.S. over identity, illegal immigration, terrorism and racial profiling tend to show that a lot remains to be done in that area. At any rate, the Obama administration seems to have understood the necessity to have coherent domestic and international policies. The measures taken to reach out to the Muslim communities, the return to multilateral dialogue with new and long-time allies, and a strong initiative to correct a painful situation for millions of immigrants constitute encouraging steps. But there are still many factors that the president cannot control and that damage the efforts made by his administration. Unless the United States Congress comes up with a comprehensive immigration bill and politicians and opinion leaders show the way towards a more tolerant 9

The difficult negotiations about the Transatlantic Trade Agreement between the U.S. and the E.U. is a good illustration of how a tarnished image of the U.S. can hinder American interests. For EU Commissioner for Trade Cecilia Malmström, one of the chief causes of these difficulties is the wave of anti-Americanism created by the Snowden scandal and the illegal NSA surveillance program (Quatremer 10).

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treatment of ethnic minorities, American leadership and diplomatic and economic success are far from being guaranteed in the future.

Works Cited Alesina, Alberto F. et al. “Fractionalization.” Journal of Economic Growth 8.2 (2003): 155-94. Amnesty International. “États-Unis: une loi sur l’immigration en Arizona menace les droits humains.” Réfugiés et Migrants. Amnesty International. 27 Apr. 2010. Web. 22 Feb. 2015. Brader, Ted, Nicholas A. Valentino, and Elizabeth Suhay. “What Triggers Public Opposition to Immigration? Anxiety, Group Cues, and Immigration Threat.” American Journal of Political Science 52.4 (October 2008): 959–78. Castells, Manuel. “The New Public Sphere: Global Civil Society, Communication Networks, and Global Governance.” Annals of the American Academy of Social Sciences 616 (2008): 78-93. Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Commission on Smart Power: A Smarter, More Secure America.” Washington (DC): Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2007. Chishti, Muzaffer A. et al. “America’s Challenge: Domestic Security, Civil Liberties, and National Unity after September 11.” Washington, D.C.: The Migration Policy Institute, 2003. Council on Foreign Relations. Obama Administration: National Security Strategy. 6 Feb. 2015. Web. 5 July 2015. Cox, Daniel, E.J. Dionne Jr., William A. Galston, and Robert P. Jones. “What It Means to Be American: Attitudes in an Increasingly Diverse America Ten Years After 9/11.” The Brookings Institution and the Public Religion Research Institute, 6 Sept. 2011. Web. 12 Jan. 2015. Duss, Matthew, Yasmine Taeb, Ken Gude, and Ken Sofer. “Fear, Inc. 2.0, The Islamophobia Network’s Efforts to Manufacture Hate.” Washington, D.C.: Center for American Progress, Feb. 2015. Ehrenfreund, Max. “Your complete guide to Obama’s immigration executive action.” The Washington Post. 20 Nov. 2014. Web. 23 Jan. 2015. Fisher, Max. “A revealing map of the world’s most and least ethnically diverse countries.” The Washington Post. 16 May 2013. Web. 8 July 2015. —. “A fascinating map of the world’s most and least racially tolerant countries.” The Washington Post. 16 May 2013. Web. 8 July 2015. Florida, Richard. “Cities and the creative class.” City & Community 2.1 (2003): 3-19.

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“Global Views of U.S. Leadership.” Gallup Online. Web. 30 June 2015. Friedman, Thomas L. “Read My Ears.” The New York Times. 27 Jan. 2005. Web. 22 Feb. 2015. Hady, Amr and P.W. Singer. “To Win the War on Terror, We must First Win the ‘War of Ideas’: Here’s How.” Terrorism: What the Next President Will Face. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 618 (2008): 212-22. Hopkins, Daniel J. “Politicized Places: Explaining Where and When Immigrants Provoke Local Opposition.” American Political Science Review 104.1 (February 2010): 40-56. Huntington, Samuel P. Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004. Johnson, Devon, Daniel Brazier, Katrina Forrest, Crispin Ketelhut, Darron Mason, and Marc Mitchell. “Attitudes Toward the Use of Racial/Ethnic Profiling to Prevent Crime and Terrorism.” Criminal Justice Policy Review 22 (December 2011): 422-47. Knoll, Benjamin Richard. Understanding the "New Nativism": causes and consequences for immigration policy attitudes in the United States, Ph.D. Diss. Graduate College of The University of Iowa, May 2010. Web. 30 Jan. 2015. Lowery, Wesley, and Sari Horwitz. “Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson resigns following scathing DOJ report.” The Washington Post. 11 Mar. 2015. The Washington Post. Web. 22 Mar. 2015. “Most important Problem.” Gallup Online. Web. 30 June 2015. Masters, Jonathan. “Countering the U.S. Image Problem.” Council on Foreign Relations, 2 Sept. 2014. Web. 16 Jan. 2015. National Public Radio. “Judge Temporarily Blocks Obama’s Executive Action On Immigration.” National Public Radio. 17 Feb. 2015. Web. 15 Jan. 2015. Nye, Joseph S. “Get Smart. Combining Hard and Soft Power.” Foreign Affairs 88.4 (July/August 2009). Web. 23 June 2015. —. “Public Diplomacy and Soft Power.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 616 (2008): 94-109. Papademetriou, Demetrios G., and Madeleine Sumption. “Attracting and Selecting from the Global Talent Pool—Policy Challenges.” Washington, D.C.: Migration Policy Institute. 2013. Web. 12 Jan. 2015. Pew Research Center. “Opinion of the United States.” Global Indicators Database. Web. 8 July 2015. Quatremer, Jean. “Avec le traité transatlantique, le règlement des différends sera transparent.” Libération. 26 August 2015: 10-11.

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Sabbagh, Daniel. “La face cachée du combat anti-terroriste: vers une légitimation du ‘profilage ethno-racial’ aux Etats-Unis?” Les Dossiers du CERI. Paris: Centre de Recherches Internationales, 2001. Sadik, Giray. American Image in Turkey: U.S. Foreign Policy Dimensions. Plymouth (UK): Lexington Books, 2009. Schildkraut, Deborah J. “The Dynamics of Public Opinion on Ethnic Profiling After 9/11, Results From a Survey Experiment.” American Behavioral Scientist 53.1 (September 2009): 61-79. Snow, Nancy. Propaganda, Inc.: Selling America’s Culture to the World. [3rd edition] New York: Seven Stories Press, 2010. The White House. National Security Strategy. Washington D.C.: The White House, 2010. —. Office of the Press Secretary. “Remarks by the President at the University of Indonesia in Jakarta.” Jakarta (Indonesia), 10 Nov. 2010. Web. 15 May 2015. —. Office of the Press Secretary. “Remarks by the President on a New Beginning.” Cairo University, Cairo (Egypt), 4 June 2009. Web. 15 May 2015. Tirman, John. “Immigration and Insecurity: Post-9/11 Fear in the United States.” Audit of the Conventional Wisdom. Cambridge: MIT Center for International Studies 6.9: June 2006. Web. 22 Dec. 2014. Weidenhamer, Deb. “When Local Politics Have Global Consequences.” The New York Times 10 Mar. 2014. Web. Jan. 13 2015.

THE EVOLUTION OF POLITICAL MULTICULTURALISM IN THE UNITED STATES: BARACK OBAMA, AFFIRMATIVE ACTION, AND THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT LEA STEPHAN

Barack Obama’s election has been heralded as the beginning of a postracial America, as the multicultural dream come true. Some more pessimistic commentators predicted that Obama’s election would make racial claims more difficult, as Obama’s election could be seen as evidence for an absence of discrimination. In a certain sense, all these remarks are correct. Multiculturalism, as a principle, is not really challenged anymore in the United States, at least not in its softer forms, such as ‘diversity’ and the opening of the human sciences to the study of women and minority issues (see Glazer 14; Citrin et al. 248). However this diversity insufficiently takes racism, discrimination, sexism, and homophobia into account, particularly when promoted in the corporate sector. A diverse staff may be promoted, but little time is spent addressing issues of discrimination (Marable 120). Multiculturalism exists at various levels and with various applications, ranging from the much-promoted diversity to ‘harder’ forms such as affirmative action. People are often confused about what’s what (Glazer 80). In this paper, the focus will be on political multiculturalism, and more precisely on the legislative expressions of hard multiculturalism favoring preferential treatment for minorities: affirmative action. Although a general support for soft multiculturalism has become part of the public doxa, harder forms of multiculturalism have long been under attack, especially by conservatives. Their discourse focuses on colorblindness and the end of race-specific policies. Ronald Reagan, for example, tried to cut back affirmative action programs (Persons 233-34). This has led to an increasing identification of the Republican Party as the party opposing race-specific policies, whereas the Democratic Party has increasingly been identified as the party of minorities (Gerring 239). However, given the high symbolic dimension that has been attached to his election, it

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may come as a surprise that Barack Obama himself, a black progressive Democrat, voiced opposition to affirmative action, the emblematic multicultural policy. His position regarding this policy is complex, but deeply rooted in a solid understanding of the current situation of race politics in the US, the needs of the nation as a whole regarding redistributive policies, and the conditions faced by the African American community and other minorities. My main argument is that Obama’s opposition does not reflect a conservative interpretation of colorblindness but a progressive approach focused on political feasibility and outcome efficiency. To get a better picture of Obama’s complex stance on multiculturalism and affirmative action, a short overview of the political and ideological debate around affirmative action will be given, before moving to a detailed analysis of Obama’s position about affirmative action. Finally, a short examination of the Affordable Care Act, viewed as a multicultural policy, will complete the analysis of his political position.

Opinions and debate on affirmative action To reach a better understanding of the particular position Obama has on multicultural or race-specific policies, his position on affirmative action will be analyzed. However, to better situate his position, an overview of opinions surrounding affirmative action will be given first. Opposition to affirmative action is widespread as shown by the existence of affirmative action bans in several states (California 1996, Washington 1998, Florida 1999, Michigan 2006, Nebraska 2008, Arizona 2010, New Hampshire 2011, Oklahoma 2012, see Desilver; the latest being Michigan in 2014, see Liptak). In specific individual anti-affirmative action lawsuits, the white plaintiffs argued mainly “reverse discrimination” (Regents 1978; Gratz; and Grutter 2003). Affirmative action is regularly portrayed that way as discrimination, as conservative Fox contributor David Webb said when commenting on the recent Michigan decision: “Now it has become a tool, especially with the state institutions in Michigan, of denying access to Americans based on ethnic identity.” Webb’s choice of words makes affirmative action sound like a discriminating policy and not like something that is designed to address the effects of past discrimination and to achieve a diverse student body. More blatantly, most of this opposition is grounded in beliefs, such as Ronald Reagan’s, that discrimination stopped in 1964 with the Civil Rights Act and that race policies have thus become superfluous (Coste). Black opposition to affirmative action is more nuanced and is composed of two major but complementary aspects. The first criticism is that

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of the creation of a double standard by affirmative action. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas defends this opinion: As much as it stung to be told that I’d done well in the seminary despite my race, it was far worse to feel that I was now at Yale because of it. I sought to vanquish the perception that I was somehow inferior to my white classmates by obtaining special permission to carry more than the maximum number of credit hours and by taking a rigorous curriculum of courses in such traditional areas as corporate law, bankruptcy, and commercial transactions. (74-75)

In the eyes of critics such as Thomas, the real purpose of affirmative action, namely to compensate for past discrimination, is ignored and has instead become a symbol of academic inferiority. This strongly echoes white accusations of lowering academic standards through affirmative action (Crosby 40). Stephen L. Carter, professor of law at Yale, vehemently defends a similar opinion. According to him, affirmative action creates a situation in which minorities are not evaluated in the same way as white people. By creating special admission slots, special evaluation slots are created as well. He termed this “the best black syndrome.” His reasoning is that affirmative action beneficiaries are not simply considered the best, but the best of their category, i.e. minorities (40-41). A more economically grounded argument against affirmative action was first and famously developed by sociologist William Julius Wilson in 1978. He demonstrated that affirmative action has a major drawback. First, he pointed to the increasing class polarization within the African American community that created a distinct black middle class while worsening the situation of the ever-growing black “underclass.”1 The major drawback of affirmative action is its lack of impact on structural elements, such as lowwage jobs that maintain people in poverty. He then pointed out the fact that affirmative action mainly benefits the black middle class, since legislation specifically stipulates that affirmative action only applies in case of equal qualification. The underclass is not affected by these measures because of what some critics have called its “lack of desirable human capital” to compete on the higher job market (Oliver and Shapiro 39). In not benefiting the underclass, affirmative action has proved limited in achieving its official goal of upward social mobility. Wilson somewhat changed his opinion by 2010, however. Though still advocating more class- and issue-focused measures and policy initiatives, he now also favors maintaining affirmative action to help secure the status of the black middle 1 Although somewhat controversial, the term underclass has now been largely accepted.

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class. He particularly invokes the current growing gap between the black and the white middle class (200, 220).2 Persisting economic inequalities is one of the major arguments of affirmative action advocates, along with the idea of compensation for past discrimination. For example, in her dissent about the Michigan decision, Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor argued past discrimination again (Liptak). However, the most commonly accepted defense is the need for diversity, as illustrated by the Bakke decision.3 When taking a look at opinion polls on affirmative action, a strange picture emerges. In a 2013 Gallup poll, there was still a majority of the population (58%) supporting affirmative action (Jones).4 It seems strange then that affirmative action should have been under such harsh attack for years. However, when the opinions are more detailed and the phrasing of the poll questions is analyzed, the opposition becomes clearer. When asked whether they wanted race or merit to be considered as admission criteria in college, people overwhelmingly rejected affirmative action and the racial opinion gap is apparent: 75% of whites prefer merit as the only criterion (vs. 22% in favor of race) whereas slightly more African Americans favored race as the only admission criterion (48% vs. 44%)—still not a majority (Jones).5 It might be assumed that blacks would overwhelmingly support affirmative action, but as shown in this Gallup poll, when confronted with an either/or question pitching merit against race, black opinion is rather divided and to a certain extent echoes the opinions voiced by Thomas and Carter. This should be completed with another element. By 2010, fewer blacks believed that “blacks not getting ahead” was caused by discrimination (34%), rather than by their not taking responsibility for

2

Recent studies have shown that the Great Recession disproportionally hit minorities. The predatory subprime loans are not the only factor. Black unemployment rates remain disproportionally higher than white rates. The old pattern of minorities being the “last hired and first fired” has been confirmed once again. Moreover, structural inequalities have made minorities less able to confront economic crises. 3 Regents of the Board of Education v. Bakke (1978) was the famous first lawsuit against affirmative action in higher education. 4 The question asked was: “Do you generally favor or oppose affirmative action programs for racial minorities?” 5 The question asked was: “Which comes closer to your view about evaluating students for admission into college or university—applicants should be admitted solely on the basis of merit, even if that results in few minority students being admitted (or) an applicant’s racial and ethnic background should be considered to promote diversity on college campuses, even if that means admitting some minority students who otherwise would not be admitted?”

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their own situation (52%) (Pew, Black Progress).6 This belief may explain why an increasing proportion of the black community favors merit as the only criterion for college admission. Another poll from 2003 gives more insight into the apparent contradiction between supporting affirmative action while at the same time rejecting affirmative action measures. It shows that although 63% of the total population pronounced themselves in favor of affirmative action, only 57% were in favor of making a special preference for minorities, and an overwhelming majority of 72% was against any preferential treatment (Pew, Affirmative Action).7 These conflicting and contradicting views can be explained by at least two factors: a general misunderstanding, misconception, and lack of information about what affirmative action actually does; and of course the phrasing of the question. Opposition towards affirmative action, it appears, can be triggered by the simple fact of framing it as “preferential treatment.”8

Obama’s opinion on affirmative action Obama is very clear on the fact that he favors racial transcendence and does not intend to do race politics: “An emphasis on universal, as opposed to race-specific, programs isn’t just good policy; it’s also good politics” (Hope 247). Although the white public heralded this transcendence, the black community criticized it (see Miletzky in Jolivette 159; Marable; Bonilla-Silva 255). Even when criticized directly for the absence of racespecific policies in his platform and agenda during his first presidential campaign, he insisted on the imperative for colorblind or universal policies (Scott). Nonetheless, he also insisted on the fact that “race is an issue that I 6

The question was: “Which of those statements comes closer to your own views— even if neither is exactly right. Racial discrimination is the main reason why many black people can’t get ahead these days, OR, blacks who can’t get ahead in this country are mostly responsible for their own condition.” 7 The questions asked were: (Favor/oppose): “In order to overcome past discrimination, do you favor or oppose affirmative action programs... ...designed to help blacks, women and other minorities get better jobs and education? ... which give special preferences to qualified blacks, women and other minorities in hiring and education?” (agree/disagree) “We should make every possible effort to improve the position of blacks and other minorities, even if it means giving them preferential treatment.” 8 Of course the question is more complex than that. Some point to the fact that respondents often want to appear politically correct in their answers, but display their rejection as soon as a “good excuse” is offered in the phrasing of the question. More on this in Bonilla-Silva, especially chapters 3 to 5.

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believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now” (Union). His speech “A More Perfect Union” details Obama’s beliefs about the American dilemma, as Gunnar Myrdal famously termed American race relations. Despite this speech, and many others, tackling issues of race, Obama has repeatedly been criticized for his colorblindness.9 Indeed, Obama’s opinion on affirmative action, for example, can be interpreted as a conservative stance on political multiculturalism if understood in the sense that political multiculturalism can only be expressed via race-specific policies. Affirmative action is often cited as the emblematic multicultural policy (Citrin et al. 253). However, it would be a mistake to interpret Obama’s position as a refusal to deal with the effects of past and present racial discrimination, as well as structural inequality. Obama’s opinion on affirmative action is twofold. Obama is against affirmative action, as he famously said in an interview. He explained that his daughters should not benefit from affirmative action when applying to college (Kuhn). On several occasions he stated that he preferred a class approach to a racial approach for affirmative action (Robinson; Obama, Hope 246-47). Despite his opinion about his daughters’ not needing affirmative action, he still supports affirmative action in higher education (Obama, Hope 244). This support for affirmative action in higher education may be grounded in two aspects. It seems that there generally is a greater support for affirmative action in higher education, as the Michigan case illustrates: although all three levels of affirmative action were threatened by Proposal 2, affirmative action supporters rallied only around defending it in higher education (Liptak).10 The other reason is the major achievement gap between white and black students.11 Moreover, education

9

For this type of criticism, see for example Bonilla-Silva. The criticism comes mainly from the black community. 10 The other two being government contracting and public employment. 11 The gap is greatest at the lowest and highest educational attainment levels. In 2010, the percentage of people with less than a high school degree was 14.1% for the total population, but only 12% for whites and 17.5% for blacks. 28.4% of the total population, 28.8% of the white population, and 31.5% of the black population had a high school graduation as highest educational attainment. The gap was similarly small for some college or associate degree: total population: 29%, whites 29.3%, blacks 32.5%. For higher educational attainment the gap widens again. 17.9% of the total population had a bachelor’s degree, that is 18.7% of the white population, but only 11.9% of the black population. Of the total population, 10.6% had a graduate or professional degree, that is 11.1% of the white population, but only 6.5% of the black population (Educational attainment for population of 25 years and older).

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reform, as advocated by Obama to close this achievement gap (Blueprint for Education Reform), would take a long time before really kicking in. Obama’s rejection of affirmative action is partly grounded in his understanding of the white point of view. In this, he is perfectly coherent with his ethos as mediator or “bridge” between the two races (Obama, Dreams 85). As he said in his “A More Perfect Union” speech, he understands how a feeling of unfairness can develop in certain cases. He particularly points to recent white immigrants who could feel unjustly disadvantaged by affirmative action:12 Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience—as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. […]. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African-American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

But taking into account white opposition to affirmative action is a more rhetorical aspect of his opinion. The deeper foundation of Obama’s opposition is affirmative action’s lack of efficiency and unsuitability to the more recent evolution of the African American community.13 The limited impact of affirmative action has been widely demonstrated, especially regarding the ongoing fragility of the black middle class,14 and its complete uselessness for the underclass. 15 Obama shares this conviction: “More minorities may be living the American Dream, but their hold on that dream remains tenuous” (Obama, Hope 243, 246).

12

This could be widely discussed. Very obviously, it is not only recent immigrants who might feel that way (and it must not be forgotten that Europe built part of its fortune on the slave trade). However, this is another topic, which is not the purpose of this paper. Nonetheless, at a rhetorical level, it was an elegant solution that allowed Obama to acknowledge white resentment and at the same time point out that white Americans are answerable for past discrimination and did benefit from the system of white supremacy. 13 The seminal works on that question are Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged (1987) and The Declining Significance of Race (1978). 14 Oliver and Shapiro demonstrate in detail the persisting gap between the white and black middle class, and the precarious status of the latter. 15 Wilson makes a detailed demonstration of the uselessness of affirmative action for the underclass.

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Wilson’s pioneering black liberal criticism of race-specific policies has been widely followed. The main argument is that the race-only focus completely obliterates class differences within the black community.16 Many problems faced by the black community at large are of an economic nature and must be tackled by appropriate means. And those means are not necessarily race policies that confer more civil rights. It is therefore mostly an intersection between a race and a class approach that is advocated. Manning Marable, historian and professor of public affairs and African American studies, for instance, supports what he terms “transformationist politics” in which race-neutral redistributive policies serve to dismantle racism (Marable 201, 243).17 This approach is not new since several activists and leaders of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement emphasized the link between race and class discrimination. During the March on Washington in 1963, John Lewis, then chairman of SNCC, had already criticized the Civil Rights Bill for its lack of focus on economic issues and he had pointed out that “We need a bill that will provide for the homeless and starving people of this nation.” Martin Luther King, Jr. adopted the same idea and turned to economic issues in his final years, for example with the Poor People’s Campaign planned for 1968. He summarized the problem very bluntly: “What good is it to be allowed to eat in a restaurant if you can’t afford a hamburger?” Obama shares this opinion about a greater emphasis on a race-neutral, but economically targeted approach: As recently as 1999, the black unemployment rate fell to record lows and black income rose to record highs not because of a surge of affirmative action hiring or a sudden change in black work ethic but because the economy was booming and government took a few modest measures—like the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit—to spread the wealth around. (Hope 246)

16

See also Dawson 1994, West 2001, Jeffries 2013, Lieberman 2001. Wilson defends the same idea. The central point is to use an intersection between race and class, but to tackle each issue by the appropriate means. This means, for example, dealing with unemployment or wages at an economic level, not at a racial level. There are various sub-approaches to this type of politics and various names. Some call them “new black politics,” other terms are “black politics of racial reconciliation,” “crossover politics,” “politics of deracialization” (Persons). Cornel West uses the term “race-transcendence.” There is broad support for this type of approach, be it under the angle of political feasibility or economic and social efficiency. For more details see: Howard Winant, “Race and racism: towards a global future,” (chapter 42) [2005] in Back and Solomons, eds.

17

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It is interesting to see that in this extract Obama attacks both classical conservative and liberal arguments about the black economic situation by pointing out that neither of the two generally advocated solutions (more work ethic vs. more affirmative action) had an impact on black unemployment figures. This highlights his distancing himself from both approaches, while still insisting on redistributive programs. The choice of stressing the EITC is not innocent either. The program targets working families, thus separating redistributive programs from the image of government handouts for supposedly lazy minorities (Gilens 207). Moreover, the program had been enacted by a Republican president, expanded by Republican presidents, and gained prominence in 1993 under Bill Clinton (Holt 2), who put the emphasis on distancing the New Democrats (like himself) from old liberal clichés of tax-and-spend Democrats (From 42). This is an attempt to foster bipartisan support for redistributive policies and avoid racial division over social programs. It was, and is, Obama’s goal to build a political coalition around specific issues of social policies, as education reform or health care, on a race-neutral basis to garner a majority to allow him to push for reform. Obama thus constructed a minutely crafted discourse around unity, but the main goal was to put group resentment aside in order to achieve reforms that would benefit everybody. It is interesting to see here that part of this discourse was devoted to convincing the African American community to stop insisting on race-policies only: For the African American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming the victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means binding our particular grievances—for better health care, better schools, and better jobs—to the larger aspirations of all Americans—the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man who’s been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family. (Union)18

The central point of Obama’s argument is that although African Americans have a particular history, the larger population also shares their current problems to various degrees. By insisting on race-specific solutions for more general problems—such as good schools—black political demands might alienate a large part of the population instead of making 18

I will not detail anything here about the part of the discourse aimed at the white population, since a significant part of the population is already opposed to racespecific policies. For a more detailed analysis of white support (and opposition to) for social policies, see Gilens. For a highly detailed analysis of the divisive conservative rhetoric around the racialization of social policies, see Edsall and Edsall.

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allies for a common cause. Given the relatively small proportion of African Americans in the general population (12%), support for policy projects must be found outside the community (Marable 228), even though it is true that particular issues often represent a bigger problem or a more pressing need in the African American community.19 Obama very carefully constructs his position and directly points to areas where he intends to apply his political ideas. As mentioned earlier, although he defends affirmative action in higher education, he supports even more fundamental reform in primary and secondary education: Even as we continue to defend affirmative action as a useful, if limited, tool to expand opportunity to underrepresented minorities, we should consider spending a lot more of our political capital convincing America to make the investments needed to ensure that all children perform at grade level and graduate from high school—a goal that, if met, would do more than affirmative action to help those black and Latino children who need it the most. (Hope 246)

As far as policy implementation goes, education must be, so far, considered a failure. During Obama’s first term, his administration came up with a targeted reform (Blueprint), but it has been blocked in Congress since 2010. Despite an uncooperative Congress, Obama managed to implement some smaller reforms for education, such as Race to the Top,20 or an extension of Pell Grants (ARRA). Other smaller programs focus on Early Learning, better childcare, and teacher training (White House). Another race-neutral redistributive program he advocates as a solution for minority plights is health care: Similarly, we should support targeted programs to eliminate existing health disparities between minorities and whites (some evidence suggests that even when income and levels of insurance are factored out, minorities may still be receiving worse care), but a plan for universal health-care coverage would do more to eliminate health disparities between whites and minorities than any race-specific programs we might design. (Hope 247)

Obama is very clear in his favoring race-neutral policies to race-specific programs, but he is still well aware that deep inequalities exist between the different racial communities in America. As health care reform is Obama’s

19

For the situation of black schools, see Kozol. Race to the Top is a competitive grant program that encourages and rewards education innovation and reform at state level. 20

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major success, I will now analyze if and how the ACA helps the African American community.

The Affordable Care Act as a multicultural policy My argument is that the ACA (Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010) can be considered a multicultural policy in the sense that it has a race-specific impact, although it does not operate in a race-specific framework. 21 Obama’s reform was constructed to especially target the middle class, although it also aims at several problems faced by the poor. Targeting the middle class is essential in order to be able to build a broad coalition in support of social policies (Skocpol 251), but it is also justified in an economic perspective. The Medicaid-Medicare system conspicuously left out the middle class, and since the 1990s, the middle class has been facing soaring health care costs (Jansson 249). Even from a racial perspective, this approach is justified, since the black middle class is by far more fragile than the white middle class.22 The core of the argument is that the inequalities between the black and the white communities are so deep that it is possible to target different communities by characteristics other than race. The black and white communities have very different socio-economic characteristics, which make it possible to identify the communities according to those characteristics. By targeting some of the socio-economic characteristics predominant in the black community, for example, it is still possible to target the black community, but without saying so in racially explicit terms. By targeting plights that disproportionately affect the black community, a racedisproportionate impact can be achieved with race-neutral measures. However, the analysis here will focus more on the intent expressed in the policy, rather than on effective results. I will only mention the impact that

21

In the same way it can be argued that Social Security, when it was created, was a racist policy, although it was not framed as a segregated policy nor was openly forbidden for minorities. Yet its exclusion of farmworkers and domestic servants effectively excluded a majority of African Americans. 65% of blacks were left out across the nation, and up to 80% in the South (Katznelson 43). For a more detailed discussion of structural racism in social policies, see Lieberman (especially p. 5-7; 12) and Feagin for the whole American political system. However, it must be noted that this technique of targeting communities through their socio-economic characteristics can be applied in order to achieve either a racially harmful or beneficial impact. In the case of the ACA, it is a beneficial impact. 22 For a detailed demonstration, see Oliver and Shapiro.

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is expected based on economic, social, and health data for the different black social classes. As mentioned earlier, the black middle class status is much more fragile than that of the white middle class, and the claim of black families to middle class status is more tenuous, in the sense that their income is lower than that of white middle class families. The link between health and economic stability has long been noticed, and one of the main reasons for the loss of middle class status is personal bankruptcy due to sickness (Katz 257). The ACA specifically targets the lower middle class, particularly thanks to the premium control and the extension of Medicaid coverage. The ACA establishes clear guidelines and caps on premiums that can be charged according to the type of health care plan (Title I sec. 1301 and sec.1311). Previously, insurance companies had no guidelines or limits to what amount of premiums they could charge for health plans, or limits on the amount of copayments they could require. Insurance companies had total freedom in designing health care plans. People consequently had to undertake long and tedious comparisons between different health care plans to find a suitable one. This not only made the choice of a health plan difficult, it also allowed for soaring prices. The health exchanges established by the ACA facilitate the comparison of different health care offers. The caps and guidelines have two effects: they control the spiraling increase of health cares and the increase of premiums that the US had been facing those past years, and that made many people abandon their health care plan. The lower income categories were targeted in particular, since one major feature of the reform was to extend Medicaid coverage up to 133% FPL (Federal Poverty Level) (ACA Title II sec. 2001). This extension favors one of the most vulnerable parts of the population, since they often have jobs without health benefits, but lack the financial means for a good private insurance. One of the major problems was that health coverage was strongly linked to employment, meaning that decent health coverage was among the benefits associated with a good job. Moreover, the privately insured people are most of the time those paying the highest premiums for plans containing most restrictions (Starr 19). The conservative attack against the ACA in the Sebelius lawsuit made this extension of the Medicaid coverage optional for the states.23 The reform also provides for an 23 In 2014, when the Medicaid extension phased in, only 28 states and Washington D.C. had opted for the now optional extension. It must be highlighted that this extension is fully federally-funded for 3 years, then goes gradually down to 90% of federal funding by 2020 (Federal Register 13). The state legislatures opting against the extension are either currently under Republican control or split (NCSL).

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improvement of Medicaid. The extension of Medicaid disproportionately benefits African Americans, as they represent the greatest proportion of people in those income levels: 17.2% of blacks compared to 5.9% of whites, and 7.7% of the total population. The African American population has a higher proportion of uninsured persons than the white population (19.2% and 13.3% respectively) (HHS). The reform also provides the possibility for states to create state health care plans for low-income people who are just above the eligibility level for the Medicaid extension (ACA Title I sec. 1331). It appears that those measures disproportionately affect African Americans, as they are disproportionately among the poorest of the nation.24 Another major impact of the ACA on the African American population is achieved through the prohibition of health care plan exclusion because of a preexisting condition. The ACA regulates many other aspects of preexisting conditions, such as the premiums that can be charged (ACA Title I sec. 2704, sec. 2701, sec. 2702, sec. 2705, and sec. 2706). Blacks disproportionately suffer from chronic diseases (which are considered preexisting conditions) such as diabetes, HIV/AIDS, or hypertension to quote a milder condition.25 However, before the ACA, insurance companies could consider serious and chronic hypertension as a pre-existing condition, along with asthma, arthritis, high cholesterol, or obesity for example (HHS pre-existing conditions). But diabetes and HIV/AIDS are particularly problematic, since their treatment is not only vital in the short term, but also very costly. The ACA revealingly devotes a whole section to diabetes (sec. 10407).

24

The income tax credit designed to make coverage affordable should largely benefit African Americans too, as a big proportion of the African American community is eligible for those tax credits (between 133% and 400% of FPL) (ACA Title I sec. 1301, sec. 1311). About 40.5% of the African American population qualifies for those tax credits, compared with 29.2% of the white population, or 31.3% of the total population. 25 The inequalities become apparent, especially when looking at the death rates. Not only do blacks disproportionally suffer from certain conditions, they also decease at higher rates because of these conditions: In 2013, the death rates for diabetes were 38.7 per hundred thousand for blacks, compared with 19 per hundred thousand for whites. For HIV/AIDS it was 11.6 per hundred thousand for blacks compared with 1.4 per hundred thousand for whites. 43.1% of blacks suffer from hypertension, compared with 29.7% of whites. The poorer overall health conditions of blacks are apparent in the general death rates for the different communities: 898.2 per hundred thousand for blacks and 741.8 per hundred thousand for whites (National Center for Health Statistics 87).

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Other problems are also targeted that are identified to disproportionately affect the black community. This is particularly true for the underclass. The ACA provides funds for assistance for pregnant and parenting teens. This program also includes education on birth control and focuses on STD prevention (sec. 2953). Considering the spread of HIV/AIDS (CDC, HIV),26 high infant mortality rates, and high youth pregnancy rates27 in the black underclass, those measures are sorely needed. Such examples, though not exhaustive, show that the ACA manages to disproportionately help African Americans by targeting specific issues that disproportionately affect the community.

Conclusion Obama’s opinion concerning affirmative action is complex and multilayered. He opposes this emblematic multicultural policy only partly, and mostly on grounds of social and economic inefficiency. Instead of favoring race-specific policies like affirmative action, he advocates, just as new black leaders or race pragmatics do, race-neutral but issue-targeted policies that directly tackle the problems faced by the African American community. This opinion also stems from a concern for greater political feasibility and the rallying of a multiracial coalition to garner enough support to achieve meaningful social reform. Obama’s health care reform, which appears race-neutral in its framing, nonetheless manages to tackle several issues that particularly affect the African American community. The non-racial targeting of the community is very efficient in the reform, be it through economic or social characteristics, or specific pathological traits. It is thus apparent that a race-specific impact can be achieved through an apparently race-neutral policy. This raises the question of the definition of a race-conscious policy. Must a race-conscious policy absolutely contain some race-related vocabulary to be considered as such? Or should a race-conscious policy be judged more on its race-conscious outcome? It appears that Obama redefines multiculturalism in a politically pragmatic way.

26 Blacks represent 41% of the people living with HIV/AIDS but they represent only 12% of the total population. 27 The rates are 51.5 per thousand for blacks and 23.5 per thousand for whites. Blacks and Hispanics together accounted for 57% of all teen births in 2012 (CDC, teen pregnancy). The infant (up to age 1) mortality rates (per hundred thousand live births) were of 5.2 for whites and 11.2 for blacks (National Center for Health Statistics 87).

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OTHER MULTICULTURALISMS

SHOULD I STAY OR SHOULD I GO? MULTICULTURALISM IN MULHOUSE EVELYNE TROXLER

Should I go or should I stay … in Mulhouse? As a former politician I hope my contribution to multiculturalism in Mulhouse won’t shatter the positive image of our town! We try hard for giving a positive image of our city, which is not considered as very pleasant in France and in Alsace: it’s the “least Alsatian” city as far as architecture and population are concerned, the poorest city in Alsace, with a high rate of people voting for the extreme right political party, the FN or Front National … I was born in Mulhouse; my family had lived there for three generations; my father was well-known; and I dedicated 20 years of my life working as a town councilor, fighting for the renewal and development of our regional culture and language (Alsatian dialect and standard German): the city-sign Mulhouse/Mìlhüsa, the bilingual street-signs you may have noticed, Alsatian offered to all students at the university … this has to do with multiculturalism in our city. I’d like to insist on the fact that this is no scientific analysis; it’s the point of view of a former town councilor and how she experienced the evolution of multiculturalism in Mulhouse. Should I stay or should I go away from Mulhouse/Mìlhüsa? That’s the question many inhabitants ask themselves because life is not always easy in Mulhouse, with 136 nationalities in town, 50% of the population being immigrants, their children and grand-children (who are French now), a high rate of unemployment (25%), and of insecurity. I recently met a young couple of Turkish origin who moved from Bordeaux in the south of France to Mulhouse two years ago (for work). They told me that when they arrived, they “didn’t feel in France”: so many languages spoken in the street, so many different ways of clothing, so many women wearing Muslim veils. In spite of the number of Turkish people living there, the young mother doesn’t really feel at ease and safe: so they intend to go … to one of the less multicultural small towns nearby. However multiculturalism should be a richness for a city, especially Mulhouse, which was born to be multicultural! Mìlhüsa, the house of the mill, allied to Switzerland from 1515 (which we celebrate this year) until

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its réunion to France in 1798, became the town of the 100 factorychimneys, growing in the 19th century from 6000 inhabitants to 90.000 within 100 years, with people coming first from the country-side, then from other parts of France and Germany, then from everywhere to work for our textile, chemistry, mechanical industry. After World War I they came from Poland to work in our potash mines. After World War II, they came from Italy and Spain … to rebuild the city. After 1960 they came from North Africa to work for the Peugeot car-factory. Then they came from Turkey, Asia, Africa, and they are still coming from the east, from Kosovo, … European borders being open … and France offering help and money to new migrants, who know how to get it in Mulhouse … Hence multiculturalism is part of Mulhouse; Mulhouse was born to be multicultural; living together has always been at the very heart of the city. In my eyes, it worked fairly well as long as the 100 chimneys were there. Rich industrials built their hidden mansions on the Rebberg, a hill apart from downtown, and factories and workers’ houses (which were considered the most modern in Europe for a long time, Mulhouse always having been a very “modern” city). The cement that held all these different people together was the regional culture and language—Alsatian—spoken in streets and factories, where everybody learned it. The same is true for regional culture: when my father recreated Carnival after World War II, it was at the same time a regional and multicultural event with Spanish, Italian, Polish costumes and music … it was no problem. In my eyes things changed in the 60s and 70s, when people came from North Africa to work with Peugeot: their culture (and religion) was very different and a feeling of strangeness and insecurity appeared: in those years, as a young girl, I was forbidden going downtown because of “North African young men” hanging around … At the same time, the cement of regional culture and language crumbled: France had succeeded within 1015 years after World War II to almost eradicate the Alsatian dialect and German in Mulhouse, much faster and better than in any other part of Alsace, because in our city , for a long time, French had meant “rich and beautiful” and Alsatian “poor worker”—our brilliant industrials were Francophile—admiring France and its ideas at that time—and they were French-speaking … in Mulhouse, “climbing the social ladder” involved climbing from Alsatian to French. After World War II, France could easily impose hatred for our German side—regional language and culture included—on us: people quickly gave up speaking Alsatian with their children, who were punished at school if they didn’t speak French. To help “de-germanize” us, we also had a good

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number of people sent from Paris to manage local businesses. This helped killing Alsatian … and it also turned out to be a very bad trick for multiculturalism and our living together: regional language and culture as a cement—something for people to share—disappeared and was not replaced. In my eyes, France is not gifted for multiculturalism: It’s a monocultural country—we’re all supposed to have the same history and culture. But our history and culture being different, this is difficult in Alsace. Moreover, France actively aims at being a monolingual country: it’s French for everybody and only French (no wonder we’re the worst nation at speaking foreign languages)! All regional languages have been murdered … though they’re not really dead yet. France cannot think multicultural … In Mulhouse, where nowadays 50% of the children have a mother tongue that is different from French— which is an incredible richness, it’s still believed that “not having French as a mother tongue” is a serious handicap for success at school … and in life. Parents are still asked not to speak their mother-tongue to their children … and worse, in Mulhouse school keeps all these children away from attending our bilingual classes French/German, definitely blocking their way to jobs in Switzerland and Germany. France has another problem as far as multiculturalism is concerned: monocultural and monolingual forever, it is also the land of “human rights—but speaking one’s mother tongue should be a human right, shouldn’t it? In France everybody’s mother tongue is supposed to be French … isn’t it? In short, it is difficult to combine monolingualism, monoculturalism, and human rights … And so, another bad trick for multiculturalism in Mulhouse was done in the 80s, when my generation and the left started leading the country under Mitterrand—and Mulhouse too— and remembered that France was the country of human rights. What we call cultures d’origine—cultures of where people are from—were suddenly brought to light, encouraged, whereas regional culture went on being despised. I’m sure this attitude increased the rate of extreme right votes in Mulhouse because extreme right political parties were the only ones to praise regional language and cultures. I fought hard to explain to my colleagues on the town council that you cannot accept other people’s cultures if your own is not respected! That became my motto. An example: we had organized a fête du monde— “festival of the world” to celebrate the many cultures we had in Mulhouse … and regional culture was absent, forgotten, not existing … in Mulhouse, in Alsace!!! I battled to introduce it!

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The job was not easy: when we started with bilingual road-signs, people said we were going back to “Nazi Germany” in Mulhouse. Fortunately our Mayor shared my point of view and allowed me to go on, working for bilingual school, modernizing the theatre in Alsatian dialect, organizing events at the library for our regional literature (we still do it). The political consequence was that votes for the extreme right stopped increasing in Mulhouse—though they are still too high (nowadays they are not higher than in other parts of France, but some years ago, Mulhouse was considered a horrible town to live in, because so many people voted for the Front National). What does multicultural Mulhouse look like nowadays? People used to come for work, but there’s no more work (1 chimney left), so unemployment grew and especially migrants and their children, who cannot speak German and work in nearby Germany or Switzerland, are the most concerned. The problem of “living together” in Mulhouse is nowadays not only cultural but also economical and social. And this is why you won’t find communitarian areas in Mulhouse, with only North African or only Turkish families living there, for instance. In Mulhouse, there are areas with social housing and many migrant families, and areas without, like the area on the hill called Rebberg mentioned above, where you’ll find no immigrants because it is far too expensive. Something special is that the town center belongs to the first type: it used to be factories and workers’ houses; the factories are closed now, but the cheap, small workers’ houses, having no modern conveniences, were almost all bought up by North African or Turkish people. “Local” people don’t appreciate that and this is why votes for the extreme right are high. At our wonderful multicultural market in this area, much visited by our Swiss and German neighbors because so exotic, the number of places selling regional food shrinks: the market reflects the composition of our population; many “local” people don’t go there any longer. “Living together” doesn’t work well in multicultural Mulhouse at the time being, but multiculturalism in a town where the number of children and young people is so important can be, it has to be, turned into something positive … So what’s being done about it in Mulhouse? The town council goes on renovating social housing, destroying our horrible huge social buildings … As far as multiculturalism is concerned, I can mention some examples of initiatives supported by the town council: There’s a program uniting all cultures around cooking with children and mothers of different cultural origins, mixing all traditions and allowing people that they can learn from each another. Something new: inhabitants of Turkish origin have just created a website and an association called “platform for living together.”

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They organize dinners with inhabitants from all cultures—including regional culture—eating and speaking together. They also organize festivals for children of different origins—where regional culture is present too … they even asked me to teach them Alsatian. They believe in multiculturalism as a chance for Mulhouse … maybe they hold one of the keys for “improving living together” in Mulhouse? Should I stay or should I go? Probably I’ll stay and take part in these activities. And you, would you stay or would you go?

ANDRÉ WECKMANN AND THE INFLUENCE OF AFRICAN AMERICAN CULTURE ON MODERN ALSATIAN POETRY PETER ANDRÉ BLOCH

How I got to know André Weckmann’s poetry When I came to Mulhouse as a professor of German and Comparative Literature, I was astonished to find nobody at the University speaking the local Alsatian dialect—which is very different from my native Switzerland, where the dialect is the common language of the region, used in conversation between friends and neighbors. Of course, we still write and read in the standard “high German” idiom, just as we speak standard German or French or Italian to foreigners who don’t understand our local talk. In Switzerland, we have no complex of inferiority about having a language of our own; we love it and sing our popular songs either in this particular idiom, i.e., in its local and regional varieties, or in High German, or even in English if we want to reach a national or international public. In Mulhouse, I had a completely different experience: even my students, who studied German language and literature, did not say a word in their local dialect, although they pronounced their learnt High German with a slight Alsatian accent which they tried to hide behind a French pronunciation… Only the staff in the student’s pub spoke Alsatian together … but French with the students. Then I made an extraordinary and most revealing experience: As a newcomer I had been given the worst of all rooms for my lectures—in the cellar, difficult to find, and very small. I went to the janitor and complained that I didn’t have enough space, ending my angry complaint with the curse, “Verdammi” [damn]! Herr Schneider answered happily and surprised: “It can’t be possible! You are an Alsatian, like me. That changes everything!” From then on I only received the best rooms! Meaning: there is still some kind of complicity between native speakers. A few weeks later I bought a leather bag as a Christmas present for my wife at the Globe store, thanking the sales lady for her friendly services in Alsatian,

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“Dank scheen!” She looked at me surprised, but friendly, took the bag and exchanged it with the words: “Look, there are small spots on the leather here. I don’t even think about selling this to an Alsatian-speaking customer. You get another one, without blemish!” Following these experiences, I decided to offer an introductory course on Alsatian poetry to my students in the German department, with the note, “No previous knowledge necessary!” I started collecting small texts from everyday life and read them with Alsatian friends in order to prepare myself for the course with the students—because as a Swiss I do not really speak the proper dialect. A miracle happened: so many students from all faculties showed up for the course that several times we had to change to a bigger room. My teaching was a kind of literary comedy: I spoke short sentences and the students repeated them—like parrots: first as a group, then individually, until they could pronounce the words correctly. Then we translated some sentences into High German and into French. This way they learned Alsatian and at the same time German. And because I didn’t speak the right accent or sentence melody, in a second step I asked the asked the students to bring along their grandparents, in order to get exposed to the genuine pronunciation. At the beginning they all laughed because repeating single sentences reminded them of kindergarten and previously they had not been allowed to speak this Alsatian language. And if they spoke it, it was only within the family circle, and that less and less. But after a while we had a small group of students who learned the language of their ancestors from a foreigner with fun and games and an option to pass it on, and also to possibly find a job in nearby Switzerland, as now they could understand the quite similar Swiss dialect… Concerning the inferiority complex: I showed them how some Alsatians reacted to this idiomatic change and created something surprising: extraordinary art. I told them about artists and emblematic personalities I had seen, met, and even talked to—who had chosen an artistic, social or political career particularly in order to make their special linguistic situation something extraordinary that no outside people could have done. I put them in contact with certain personalities who reflected in a large measure—at least to the outside observer—the Alsatian spirit or character: Alsacitude. I told them about Pierre Pflimlin, who claimed—as an Alsatian, Frenchman, and European—the right of every individual to moral resistance when facing an authoritarian dictatorship of the state. I then compared his appealing to the esprit de Strasbourg to the work of the philanthropist—theologian, musician, philosopher and physician—

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Albert Schweitzer, who had won the Peace Nobel Prize in 1952, and defended through his activities a vision of the “respect of life” for every human being and every natural or spiritual phenomenon. Instead of becoming part of an industrialized consumer society, he had taken the humanitarian and religious decision to live with the victims of colonial imperialism. He died 90 years old, in Lambarene, Gabon, globally recognized for his philanthropy and pacifism. He always spoke with a strong Alsatian accent that he didn’t feel embarrassed about and which was part of his personal charisma. I further mentioned the important role of Germain Muller as a communicator and dramatist, who founded his local theater “De Parabli,” inspired by Alfred Rasser’s small theater in Basle. Each show ended with the same song that he had composed together with Mario Hirlé: “Mir sin d’letschte, d’allerletschte von denne Laetze wo noch so babbele wie ‘ne der Schnawwel gewachsen ésch“ (We are the last, the very last, of the fools who still babble the way our beak is grown). As of 1990 the comedian added, “mir sin schînts d’letschte” (we seem to be the last ones), because in France a law had been proposed that gave more liberty to the different regional cultures. I also mentioned the art of the mime Marcel Marceau, born a Jewish child in Strasbourg whose father was murdered in Auschwitz. He moved from his experience of the unspeakable to the creation of a “mimeodramatic” art without words in his character Bip, who points in his nakedness and fragility beyond any restrictive ideology. And who will in this context not think of the drawings of Tomi Ungerer, born 1931 in Strasbourg. He grew up under the indoctrination of the Nazis, failed in school, decided after the war to spend time in Lapland, and became one the important critical observers of the new world order. In my class I also asked my students to bring me texts from home to read. This is how I learned about the writings of André Weckmann, who had a small show on Alsatian TV about “Culture and Language.” I liked his humanity and his humor, which is why I visited him in Strasbourg to make interviews. Together with the students I decided to collect his poetry and publish it with German and French translations, as a gift to Alsatian culture. Some of these poetry volumes represent the post-war life in Alsace in many episodes, perspectives and anecdotes. They also show the problems of the transition from one culture to another, together with the new experience of industrialization and the impact of technology on the landscape. Weckmann innovated Alsatian postwar poetry because of his close ties and friendship with American soldiers of the liberation army,

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with whom he worked very closely, as I am going to show in the following examples.

André Weckmann’s renewal of Alsatian poetry André Weckmann’s poetry relies on the dialect of the Alsatian population, with its many different accents and local particularities due to the complexity of the historical development of the region. This linguistic wealth became for Weckmann an important source of his poetic inspiration. The dialect with all its variations, with its local touches of fascinating authenticity and its many special expressions, sounds and rhythms, serves his imagination as a poetic instrument of extraordinary expressivity. Weckmann was born in 1924 near Strasbourg, where he went to school, fascinated by his familiar language, with which he liked to play, transforming its sounds and rhythms according to the ‘slang’ of the different speakers. 1943 he was forced to join the German Wehrmacht; he was heavily injured in the Ukraine, from where he deserted, hiding himself in the cellar of his father’s little restaurant in Alsace, reading the local authors (in French, German and the different Alsatian dialects) and starting to note down his thoughts in a diary, which became more and more plurilingual, turning into a book of poems and personal reflections, hopes and fears. Like his father, Weckmann was a member of the French Resistance and later joined the 7th US Army, FFI Steinburg, where he became acquainted with American culture and poetry, especially with the popular traditions, because he served in a unit of black soldiers. He soon became aware that the white American officers treated his new friends in ways that were similar to how he and his own were treated by the French Administration or the representatives speaking standard German. For Weckmann the imposed languages were always the standard idioms: either High German (imposed by the German State or the Protestant Church) or French (imposed by the centralized government in Paris in all political, cultural and administrative matters). His new American friends acquainted him with a new attitude towards the vernacular tradition, full of hope and selfconfidence: together they sang negro spirituals, blues, songs in the vernacular or what he called “Voodoo”-experimentations, which entirely transformed not only his style but also his themes. Instead of idyllic poems or so-called “high-brow literature,” he started to compose extraordinary “slang poems,” “love songs,” “gospel songs,” or “everyday dreams,” in which he formulated the wishes and fears of the Alsatian population in modern times in their own idiom.

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Weckmann was so impressed by the authentic—sentimental and at the same time spiritual—expressions of the so-called Negro spirituals that in 1948 he composed himself four “wissi Spirituals” (white spirituals) in the conventional American tradition: “O the Blin’ Man Stood on the Road and Cried,” “Song of the Slaves,” “Some Old Willows Down In My Valley,” and “Ol’ Black Joe Was Hangin’ on a Tree”—about a lynching. These poems have English titles but are written in Alsatian… (see Édition complète, vol. II, 46-49). Here is the first one: O blinger mànn wàs stehsch à de stross un brielsch? O blinger mànn ‘s isch nâcht u mer sahn äu nit. mer sahn nimmi, o blinger mànn, un sahn nit dàss de bling bisch dü brielsch doch wennigstens un waisch doch wennigstens dàss de bling bisch mer wises ned. O blinger mànn loss d’sunn sich in dini laare güggle laije un süg d’sunn in din harz uns schint ken sunn meh: mer hàn zu vel gsahn. O blinger mànn wàs stehsch à de stross un brielsch? O blinger mànn dü waisch nit dàss mer bling sin dü waisch nit dàss in dir ellain liecht isch o blinger mànn in de sunn. (46)1

Here is an excerpt from another example, “O Lord I Saw a Drunken Girl” of 1950 (57-58), where he writes in English: Let the night weep, let it laugh, let it inhale in a jerky way: but, please, don’t let it fall, the night ‘s got drunk. The night keeps on stumbling into this world’s history like a drunken gal and finally falls into the rill. […]

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My English translation: “O blind man, what are you standing in the street and crying? / O blind man, it’s night and we don’t see anything either / we don’t see anything anymore and we don’t see that you’re blind / you / at least you’re crying because you know at least / that you’re blind / we don’t know it. / O blind man, let the sun set in your empty eyes / and suck up the sun in our heart / there’s no more sun shining for us / we have seen too much. / O blind man, what are you standing in the street and crying? / you don’t know that we are blind / you don’t know / that in you alone there is light / oh blind man in the sun.”

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André Weckmann and African American Culture O Lord, I cry to Thee. O Lord, be merciful There’s a poor little drunken gal stumbling into the bottom of the deepest night.

Weckmann started to plead for peace and a common cultural understanding among the different parts of the Alsatian population and their neighbors: he wrote on three levels at the same time, playing with all the linguistic allusions offered by the historical situation. And he wrote in dialect in order to show how the population had lost the traditional cultural and economic background. His poems represent the problems of the common people, their loss of self-confidence or the temptation to adapt themselves to the new context imposed by history, imitating the new standard of life and its ways of thinking, speaking while at the same time losing their own traditional originality as a mere copy of the others. Weckmann speaks many languages; he often mixes different ways of speaking or thinking or feeling, playing with the contrasts of French, German, English or even Chinese, and their pronunciation. Here are some examples that show the importance of these different associations, of rhythmic and semantic social and political implications full of humoristic and tragic consequence. How can you adapt to a new world without losing your identity? How should you deal with high standard culture? Can you overcome mutism and regain self-respect and dignity? Weckmann wrote novels and poems not only in dialect, but also in French and in German in order to make himself understood in the other parts of the population. He was convinced that Alsace, but also Europe as a whole, can only exist if the different cultures start to communicate with one another by learning and mutually appreciating their different linguistic expressions, in particular with respect to the linguistic minorities. Weckmann himself pleads for the humanistic ideal of Alsatian triphony. He translated his own Alsatian poems into German and French for us—and we try to complement this with our English version here, in order to show the profound humanity of his poetic experiments. Here is a poem on the simplicity of human relationships (see Édition complète, vol. I, 9): Alsatian setz di züe mr fröj net wer i ben ich fröj äu net wer dü besch wo d harkummsch

German setz dich zu mir frag nicht wer ich bin ich frag’ auch nicht wer du bist woher du kommst

Peter André Bloch wo d ànne wottsch setz de aenfàch züe mr

wohin du möchtest setze dich einfach zu mir

French assieds-toi près de moi ne me demande pas qui je suis comme je ne te demande pas qui tu es d’où tu viens où tu voudrais aller assieds-toi simplement près de moi

English take a seat next to me do not ask who I am I don’t ask either who you are where you come from where you are going just take a seat next to me

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For Weckmann the different linguistic expressions in the same poems are like brothers and sisters of the same family, with their own particularities and character but sharing the same intention of communication and common sense. Instead of withdrawing into tradition and an idealization of the past, he opens himself—influenced by the American and English existentialists—to creativity and innovation, becoming one of the most important representatives of a European poetry:

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drej sproche2 e müeder e schweschter e liëbschti wels isch jetz welli? mànichmol verwachsli d schweschter met de liëbschti un d müeder lachelt dezüe

Drei Sprachen eine Mutter eine Schwester eine Liebste welche ist jetzt welche? manchmal verwechsle ich die Schwester mit der Liebsten und die Mutter lächelt dazu

Mes trois langues une mère une soeur une amante qui est quoi des trois? mais parfois la soeur devient l’amante et l’amante la soeur

My Three Languages a mother a sister a sweetheart but which is which of them? sometimes I mistake the sister for the sweetheart

See Édition complète, vol. V, 205.

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which makes my mother smile

Protest songs “Speak White” (Édition complète, vol. III 43-45) is one of the early poems, influenced by Weckmann’s American friends.3 It is a protest song, full of satire and irony, in which he compares the situation of the Alsatianspeaking population with the problems of his African American friends. Both are suffering from social repressions by the superiority and privileges of the so-called upper-class mentality: redd wiss nêger wiss esch scheen wiss esch nôwel wiss esch gschît wiss esch frànzeesch frànzeesch esch wiss wiss un chic elsasser elsassisch dagaje zall esch brimidiv vülgär pfui! drum redd wiss illnêger brischnêger modernêger drum redd wiss wiss wie z bàriss un dunk dini nêgersproch en formôl un schank se em müseum drum red wiss nêger dàss d wiss wursch andli wiss un gschît wiss un chic wiss wie z bàriss

Sprich weiss Neger weiss ist schön ist vornehm ist gescheit weiss ist französisch Französisch ist weiss weiss und schick Elsässer Elsässisch dagegen net ist primitiv vulgär pfui! Drum sprich weiss nêger Illneger, Breuschneger, Moderneger drum sprich weiss wie man in Paris spricht tunke deine Negersprache in Formalin und schenke sie dem Museum. Drum sprich weiss Neger damit du endlich weiss wirst weiss und gescheit weiss und chic wie in Paris

3 Also see his comments in my interview with Weckmann (Édition complète, vol. I, 157).

Peter André Bloch Parle blanc, nègre alsacien, car le parler blanc, c’est beau, distingué, intelligent. Parler blanc, c’est parler français et il est chic de parler français.4 L’alsacien par contre, c’est primitif, c’est vulgaire, pouah! Donc, parle blanc, nègre des rives de l’Ill, de la Bruche, de la Moder, parle comme on parle à Paris, plonge ton patois nègre dans un bain de formol, et fais-en cadeau au musée. Et tu deviendras blanc, enfin, intelligent et chic comme on l’est à Paris.

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Speak white, black Alsatian, speaking white is beautiful, noble, intelligent. white is French, French is white, white and elegant. Alsatian on the contrary is primitive, vulgar, fie! So speak white, negro from the Ill river, the Brisch, the Moder, white as they speak in Paris, and put your vulgar language in formalin and give it as a present to the museum. So speak white, black man, in order to become finally white and intelligent, white and elegant, white as in Paris!

This text became the basis of a protest-song by René Egles, an Alsatian songwriter inspired by the blues tradition.5 Another example of such postwar-poetry following the American blues tradition is Weckmann’s song “Märzeblues,” written at the same time when Brecht wrote his famous Three Penny Opera and Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. The intention is the same: to protest against war and racism. These texts have often been performed in the famous small theater of Germain Muller6 in Strasbourg, called De Barabli: Märzeblues7 s esch mr bluesi so bluesi en Rüsslànd hàwi e kumbel verlore 4

Blues im März I feel blue so blue in Russland habe ich einen kameraden verloren

Slogan in the public transportation system in Strasbourg after 1945 . See Egles’s website, http://eglesrene.free.fr. 6 See, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germain_Muller. 7 Weckmann, Édition complète, vol. V, 106-08. 5

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André Weckmann and African American Culture en Oslo e bibbel en Schottlànd e hemmel en Assisi e brüeder en Ditschlànd e horizunt en Frànkrich e sproch em Elsàss en àrmi seel wàs bliit noch ewri un wo brengis ànne dàss smr net genumme wurd? s esch mr bluesi so bluesi

in Oslo ein mädchen in Schottland einen himmel in Assisi einen bruder in Deutschland einen horizont in Frankreich eine sprache im Elsass eine arme seele was bleibt mir noch und wo bring‘ ich es hin damit es mir nicht genommen wird? I feel blue so blue

Le blues de mars j’ai le blues le blues parcourant le continent où j’ai perdu en Russie un copain à Oslo un amour en Ecosse un ciel à Assise un frère en Allemagne un horizon en France une langue en Alsace une pauvre âme du purgatoire que me reste-t-il maintenant et où le cacher des prédateurs ? j’ai le blues le blues

Blues in March I feel bluesy so bluesy in Russia I lost a buddy in Oslo a girlfriend in Scotland a heaven in Assisi a brother in Germany a horizon in France a language in Alsace a poor soul so what is what is left to me and where shall I bring it so that nobody can take it from me? I feel bluesy so bluesy

From Dixieland to Nixieland Weckmann became more and more inspired by the political background of his songs. Instead of complaining about the past, he started discussing the consequences of what happened, presenting the different points of views in an antagonistic style. The poet becomes provokingly involved, playing

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with the words and their meaning. Everybody is left alone in a world which has become a roundabout moving to a melody of emptiness, where every sense turns into its own nonsense. Where were we born, and where did we get lost? Who knows, and who takes the responsibility?

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Maeie-Country-Song8 I was born in Dixieland I was born in Dixieland yes I was yes I was em Wàrmlànd gebore em Kàltlànd verfrore o lànd vàn de vadder met messingne knepf em Geschejtlànd gebore em Bleedlànd verfohre o lànd vàn de miëdre met guldene zepf em Güetlànd gebore em Latzlànd verjore o lànd vàn de bratter vor se veele kepf em Ebslànd gebore em Nixlànd verlore o lànd vàn de liëder fer sprochlose drepf I got lost in Nixieland I got lost in Nixieland yes I got yes I got

Country-song im mai I was born in Dixieland I was born in Dixieland yes I was yes I was im Warmland geboren im Kaltland erfroren o land der väter mit messingnen knöpfen im Gescheitland geboren im Blödland verfahren o land der mütter mit den goldenen zöpfen im Gutland geboren im Falschland gegoren o land der bretter vor so vielen köpfen im Wasland geboren im Nixland verloren o land der lieder für sprachlose tröpfe I got lost in Nixieland I got lost in Nixieland yes I got yes I got

Mai—Un country song I was born in Dixieland I was born in Dixieland yes I was yes I was où sommes-nous nés où nous sommes-nous perdus ? de Chaudelande en Froidelande de Finelande en Sottelande de Bonnelande en Malelande de Vivelande en Mortelande en Néantie

Country-song in May I was born in Dixieland I was born in Dixieland yes I was yes I was born in warmland, frozen in coldland o country of the fathers with brass buttons born in cleverland frozen in dumbland o country of the mothers

Weckmann, Édition complète, vol. V, 111-13.

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André Weckmann and African American Culture nos père aux gilets boutonnés de laiton nos mère aux nattes dorées nos têtes niaises aux yeux bandés nos chansons pour pauv’types alingues où sommes-nous nées où nous sommes-nous perdus ?

I got lost in Nixieland I got lost in Nixieland yes I got yes I got

with golden tresses born in goodland stewed in falseland o country of boards before so many heads born in somethingland, lost in nothingland o country of songs for speechless twits I got lost in Nixieland I got lost in Nixieland yes I got yes I got

This reads like a litany without hope, without illusion, but written with pleasure to find the key to understanding. The ears have to be opened again, the songs have to be heard, the political opinions to be changed. Weckmann engages in asking questions to prevent prejudice, to make out of his poetry a means of pleasure, of understanding and of natural selfdefense—with humor and a new perception of truth—in a language without any will to power, aware of its own apparent frailty, which combines modesty and wisdom. When you read André Weckmann’s poems, you are touched by their immediacy, by the depth of the ideas and the simplicity of the expression. His language lives on the metaphors of the everyday, on the tensions between the me and the you, between yesterday and today, love and hate, light and darkness, cold and warmth. His texts have the same origin as folksongs or the expressive songs of modern fortune seekers. They know about the basic tragedy of a small life, about its limitations and lost hopes because in the big world other values count, based on other perspectives and a different language consciousness. In that sense Alsatian in its plain homespun way is the fitting idiomatic form of expression for Weckmann’s concerns, one in which statements on the border of the barely sayable can be made, on a level of the intimate, the local, the seemingly unimportant. In one of his plays, a “divertimento in four languages” called ‘Helena’—a Trojànischs Resselspeel (see Bloch), André Weckmann goes back to his American sources. Helena and Achill, the young couple, suffer from misunderstandings, being natives from different parts of Strasbourg and being the most masculine and most feminine types of their generation. Whatever they say or do is taken in a wrong way by their surroundings. Hence they decide to leave Europe in order to become members of a little community of native Indians who speak a language in which the words and their meanings are entirely identical. It’s a language of all the senses,

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and it can only be learnt by people in love. At the end of the play, you hear them laugh and shout for joy, having forgotten all the prejudice between the upper-class and lower-class idioms. They are happy without the words and notions reserved to the minority of the ‘happy few’ high and mighty…

Works Cited Bloch, Peter André. “André WECKMANN: ‘Helena’—e Trojànischs Resselspeel. Divertimento alsacien. Une pièce quadrilingue (194694).” Actes du Colloque Les spectacles en Alsace-Lorraine. De l’annexion à la décentralisation (1871-1946), organisé par Jeanne Benay, Université de Metz, 21-22 octobre 2004. Collection Convergences, ed. Michel Grunewald, vol. 39. Bern: Peter Lang, 2005. 405-24. Print. Weckmann, André. Édition complète des oeuvres poétiques en alsaciens, avec des traductions allemandes et commentaires français, 7 volumes. Ed. Peter André Bloch. Strasbourg: Oberlin/Editions Hirlé, 2000-2007. Print.

MANAGING CULTURAL DIVERSITY: MULTICULTURALISM AND CITIZENSHIP IN AMERICA AND ALGERIA ABDERREZAK DOURARI

“Every Human being bears in himself the entire form of the Human condition.” —Montaigne, Essais (my translation)

1. Introduction: First, the Name The above quotation from Montaigne epitomizes the whole debate on the acceptation/rejection of multiculturalism in America and in the world since the superpower USA is not restricted to weaponry, but encompasses the intellectual leadership they inspire to other nations. Let’s first examine the name. Naming is the first activity of humans in the process of thinking. Each epoch has its specific dominant terms describing and setting the configuration of society’s knowledge system. These terms make up what Michel Foucault calls an episteme. Communication in our epoch is dominated by the recurrent use of terms like post-modernity, gender, ethnicity, identity, minority, post-ethnicity, intercultural, multicultural, etc., which constitute together, as lexical cousins, a reading/comprehension grid of social realities and discourse, so-called semantic isotopies. As a taxonomy this conceptual grid tends to insinuate particularism and a specific historic experience as universal (Bourdieu and Wacquant 74-77). These terms embody, in fact, commonplace ideas through which other objects are thought, but they go unthought-of themselves. Let us first put some relativity in our way of thinking and in the process of human thinking in general before we proceed further. Nick Herbert argues: At its core, the process of thinking depends on our ability to tell a good lie and stick with it. Metaphors R Us. To think is to force one thing to ‘stand for’ something that it is not, to substitute simple, tame, knowable, artificial concepts for some piece of the complex, wild, ultimately unknowable natural world. [...]. Language is surely one of our most useful tools of

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Human beings think with/through language. Be it of a neurological or an economic nature, language is the best tool both to prevarication, to procrastination, and to tell the truth. As such, “Each word is a cultural enterprise, a public attempt to dissect the wordless world in one particular way” (Herbert 74). Similarly, A.-J. Greimas argues in his Sémantique structurale that scientific thinking is a mere translation of the observations of the natural world into a specific artificial language called metalanguage, itself made of predefined terms. Consequently, from a positivist point of view, the scientist is a mere translator of reality into the specific metalanguage of his own discipline. Subsequently, to avoid any misunderstanding, it seems to be fine to begin our paper with some succinct definitions.

2. Some Conceptual Definitions The following terms are presented according to the concise definitions given in (www.boundless.com/sociology/textbooks) because in their intensive use in discussions, whether between specialists or between the former and laymen, an agreement on their meaning is necessary for the clarity of any presentation. The frequent use of these terms in current speech, by specialists and non-specialists, confers to them a false appearance of transparency: Culture: “The beliefs, values, behavior and material objects that constitute a people’s way of life; the arts, customs, and habits that characterize a particular society or nation [...]. Any knowledge passed from one generation to the next [...]. The language and peculiarities of a geographical location [...]. The distinct ways in which people living in different parts of the world classified and represented their experiences.” Society: “A long-standing group of people sharing cultural aspects such as language, dress, norms of behavior and artistic forms.” Pluralism: “A social system based on mutual respect for each other’s cultures among various groups that make up a society, wherein subordinate groups do not have to forsake their lifestyle and traditions, and can express their culture and participate in the larger society free of prejudice.” Religion: “An organized collection of belief systems, cultural systems, and worldviews that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values.”

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State: “A state is a political organization with a centralized government that maintains a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence [on a specific territory].”

3. Multiculturalism: the Historical Context of Its Rise and Its Worldwide Generalization One of the main consequences of the intensification of communication in the world through the popularization of the Internet (among other ways) is the rapid circulation and sharing of ideas, values and cultural products. Another consequence, more pernicious, is the occultation of the historic and socially specific contexts of the circulated ideas and the eagerness of people to convergence by sharing symbolic products. Overall, the globalization of economies correlates with the globalization of culture and values of humanism even if it is, at a first glance, in the form of a resistance process to a devastating neoliberalism and neo-conservatism. The progressive merging of ancient sovereign States in greater ensembles, like the European Union, alongside the globalization of neoliberal economies and the massive planetary exchanges, is very rapid and enhances, paradoxically, the relative growth of specific cultural and ethnic identity claims as collateral damage. As a consequence, the term multiculturalism, meant in the USA to compensate for and to mask the historically continued harsh segregation of the black and indigenous American Indian peoples, alongside the need to respect their culture and identity, on the one hand, and the crisis of the national American myth and the “American dream,” on the other, has been propagated in Europe and elsewhere to mean cultural pluralism in the civic sphere and the necessity to take diversity into account at schools attended by immigrants from diverse cultural backgrounds so as to give them equal opportunities in the acquisition of cultural capital competition. Suffice it to say that only France in Western Europe—which calls itself the country of Human Rights—refuses the idea of multiculturalism in the civic sphere, to which it opposes the concept of integration. Nevertheless, France, as a Jacobean State, paradoxically supports the independence of Quebec whilst refusing to give the same advantage to Corsica. This paradox is good news for future developments in as much as it makes the posture of France less defensible...

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4. All-American vs. Hyphenated Identities in the USA It goes without saying that if any social, cultural or political idea has got supporters in a society, then it has necessarily opponents too. That’s what is observed in the American society, where another strand in US politics is ferociously opposing multiculturalism and considers it a divider of the nation, in the same way we have it in Algeria. Frosty Woolridge states straightforwardly: “By its very name it destroys one culture by breaking it into many...” (my italics). Additionally, with numerous cultures come multiple languages. According to Woolridge, Linguistic chaos equals unending tension.1 These words are harsh: “destroying,” “breaking into many,” “linguistic chaos,” “unending tensions”... The denigration of multiculturalism includes sarcastic expressions about “hyphenated identities,” like AfroAmerican (the American president Barak Obama is one of them). One point of view puts it ironically: “The American president is black, yet the White House is still white.” This point of view is criticized by liberals as Nativist: Many liberals hear talk of national culture and shout ‘Nativist’! [...]. They believe it is a sign of their patriotism that they hold fast to the idea that we are ‘a nation of immigrants’—forgetting that we are also a nation of immigrants who willingly assimilated and became Americans... We lose our national identity with every added citizen who calls him/herself a hyphen2 ated American. (Jonah Goldberg, my italics)

This is a matter of allegiance, they would seriously declare. The only recognized identity is, for them, the All-American one. Multiculturalism is represented as a mischievous sprite destroying a supposedly welded identity and culture that holds the moniker All-American. There is a looming disaster: Today, America’s 232 years run fractures [since Independence in 1776], falters and degrades under the march of ‘multiculturalism’. The word sounds unifying, inclusive and respectful. Yet how unifying can a nation remain when a foreign language forces its way into our national character? 1 Frosty Wooldridge is an author and journalist. One of his 13 books is entitled: Immigration’s unarmed invasion. He declares elsewhere “immigration, multiculturalism is a deadly brew” (http://www.newswithviews.com/Wooldridge/frosty344.htm). 2 Jonah Goldberg is an American conservative journalist who contributes on politics and culture in the National Review On line (NRO), of which he is the editor-atlarge.

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Los Angeles provides a peek into our future where Mexican culture ‘overtook’ its way into dominance. (Goldberg, my italics)

5. Multiculturalism: Pluralistic vs. Cosmopolitan In Post-ethnic America David Hollinger refers to two main trends of multiculturalism: A ‘pluralist’ model and a ‘cosmopolitan’ one. The pluralist model treats groups as unchanging beings/essences with clear borders that keep these borders as self-contained entities with the freedom to develop their own culture and specificity. The cosmopolitan model accepts variable cultural borders and sharing hybrid identities as well as the promotion of dynamic new cultural combinations. This idea seems to be very brilliant and pragmatic. But what about being black? Is it a/one culture? Is it many cultures, many ethnicities and identities? Is being black a matter of nature or one of culture? Since it is generally an ascribed “identity” associated with segregation and social exclusion within white majorities, being of African descent (centuries ago!) can neither be an identity nor a culture. Moreover, the African peoples today do not pretend belonging to one unique culture. Such a matter is no doubt to be considered within the framework of citizenship and not as a matter of multiculturalism, since the issue is the person’s color of skin and not his subjective group affiliation or any subjectively constructed identity. During the recent deadly raids of American white police against Black Americans, people held protest marches under the banner: “Black lives matter,” presenting themselves as human beings and citizens of different color and not culture. If being black can be considered an identity/a culture, why shouldn’t one equally consider being white a culture/identity as well? Stubborn racialism must be combated politically and educationally (see Wulf Christoph) so that no stigmatization can hold over the color of skin or origin. That’s why a modern multicultural cosmopolitan state must have to do with nothing else than citizenship: all people enjoy equal rights and duties, and it is up to individuals to decide how tight or loose they will affiliate with one or more communities (see Kymlicka) or just affiliate with the wholesale nation or even with humanity (international citizenship). Within wider nations there can be some minority nationalism that is not resolved within multiculturalism, as would be the case with nations within, as in Canada: Quebec; or in Belgium, the Dutch and the Walloons.

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6. Cultural, Inter-Cultural, Trans-Cultural, and Multicultural as Concepts: Bridges or Gaps? Paradoxically, the semantic structure of the most-often used key terms in this discussion (“cultural,” “inter-cultural,” “transcultural,” and “multicultural,” see Dourari, “Culturel, interculturel” and “Algeria”) gives way to interpretations that encourage cocooning rather than openness. The term “culture” is a construct based on the assessment of differences, and the meaning suggested by the prefixes “inter-,” “trans-,” and “multi-” bear the idea of persisting opposite shores (cultures) linkable by a bridge. These ancient terms have been imagined rather to rearrange the semantic content of the term culture which emerged in other cognitive contexts, and can no more account for the present rampant globalization of human values like Human Rights, international law, democracy and individual liberties, nor for the perceptibly increasing converging intimate life styles that come into view via the internet influence. The Arab Spring upheavals sloganeering epitomized this fact to a great extent. There is a noticeable international wave of cultural standardization manifested in the international solidarity between geographically and culturally “distant” peoples for the sake of “just causes” and contestations of, for example, the international economic order and the governments that support it (e.g., the Occupy Wall Street Movement, the Mouvement des Indignés,” etc.).

7. Multiculturalism in Algeria: Languages and Religions However, while multiculturalism can definitely be a seductive perspective to account for the situation in Algeria from a political philosophy point of view, it will give the outsider a fuzzy perception of the Algerian society as made up of contiguous distinct communities. Moreover, a schematic comparison shows that the Algerian society goes through the same discourse controversies as those undergone by the United States when it comes to the recognition and management of the multiplicity of its cultures and languages (see Dourari, “Dialectique”).

7.1 Is Algeria Multicultural? In some related recent papers,3 we tackled the multicultural and multilingual structure of the Algerian society still built on the basis of the ancient 3

See particularly Dourari, “L’enseignement.”

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Amazigh backbone, whose roots go deep in prehistory and which is actually integrated and manifested within and through the shared Algerian Arabic. The first cultural and political disarray in the Algerian Nationalist Movement that took place within the PPA/MTLD (=Algerian People’s Party/Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Liberties) and led to the well-known and ideologically founding crisis of 1949 (see Ali Yahia), made public the different nationalist tendencies’ representations of the Algerian cultural identity. The split concerned two quite opposite perspectives over the future independent State: “an Arab Algeria” vs. an “Algerian Algeria.” The latter trend has been accused of “Berberism” (Berber separatism) and of nurturing discreetly the will to create a Kabyle party. Ferhat Ali, at that time treasurer of the PPA-MTLD and member of that trend of thought, responded in Alger Républicain: A Party for the Kabyle People has never existed. For the mere reason that there exists only one Algerian people, whose components are nevertheless different in origin and language, which live brotherly united and animated by the same will of national liberation […]. As for me, I have always thought that Algeria is neither Arab, nor Berber, and could not be anything else than Algerian and that in our homeland, all the cultures as well as all the components of our common heritage deserve respect and free development. (190, my translation and italics)

In the same period of time, the authors of an historical manuscript, Idir AlWataniy, figuring out the representation of the future independent Algeria confirm: The linguistic factor has also contributed to the formation of our national conscience, the spoken language as well as the classical one […] the Algerian person, whether Arabic or Berber speaker, uses nowadays his own mother tongue proudly and feels less the desire to speak otherwise, in French for example. He seeks, on the contrary, to study classical Arabic to know Islam and the Islamic culture to which our people have contributed. (Belhocine 17, my translation).

One can easily observe the clear ideological stance of the political actors within the nationalist movement in the late forties, a part of whom promoted a multicultural but nevertheless united makeup of the Algerian society (“common heritage”). Yet one must acknowledge the fact that this was neither the mainstream thinking, nor the trendiest one. The opposite trend prevailed in fact till 1995 when, symbolically, following the bag

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strike of Kabylia,4 the authorities decreed the introduction of the teaching of Tamazight in the educative system, and an amendment of the Constitution was to follow in 2002 to declare it “equally national” with scholarly Arabic.

7.2 What are the Most Salient Features of Multiculturalism in the Algerian Society? Writing a history of North Africa, Philip C. Naylor states: North Africa is like an island located between the Mediterranean and the Sahara. Waves of human encounters and interactions have swept ashore and shaped the ‘island’s’ rich cultural and historical morphology. Accordingly, extraordinary peoples and histories have fashioned an impressive trans-cultural legacy. (2, my italics)

Algeria occupies the most important part of this territory, with more than 1200 kilometers of southern Mediterranean coasts from west to east, and more than 2450 kilometers from north to south at its most distant points. The approach of the linguistic and cultural issue in the Maghreb, and particularly in Algeria, through the concepts of unity and uniformity—a perception through which a people is said to be as uniform as one man—lacks any sense of reality. The attentive observer can make out real differences in the cultural, linguistic, political and religious practices of the Algerians.5 Differences lie in the very geographical contrasted relief and climate (the woody north, the Higher plains with smaller scattered vegetation, and the Sahara desert with small cities near dispersed palm trees oases) acting as a distinctive natural and cultural setting for inhabitants. The sheer size of the territory (around 2.5 million sq. kilometers for Algeria) cannot reasonably be inhabited by only one uniform and well-integrated kind of culture, language and people. The anthropological holistic approaches of culture and identity produce the societies’ representations as larger-than-life, so much so that some unmindful scholars would speak about “the Arab society” in the singular or of “Islam” with a capital “I” as if there existed one unique 4

The Amazigh Cultural Movement (MCB= Mouvement Culturel Berbère) decided in 1994 to boycott the Algerian schools as long as the Tamazight dimension of the identity was not recognized by the authorities and the Tamazight language not taught at school. 5 We rely here on our own observations developed in another, more extended article to be published in a 2nd collective book on Multiculturalism and Democracy in the Maghreb, edited by Moha Ennaji, Routledge, 2015

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society for all the so-called Arabs, as well as one form of religiosity in any large human society. Such statements are generally accompanied by equational predications like “the Arab world is, or isn’t…,” “in Islam women are…,” “Berbers are…,” “so, you are…,” etc.

7.3 Religious Variety 7.3.1 Sunni and Ibâdhî Islam In addition to a majority of Moslems with different trends of Islam, one can also easily observe the existence of Christians, Jews and unbelievers. Next to Sunni Islam, that’s to say the declining Mâliki and the more conquering Wahhâbi backed by the intrusive Saudi Arabian and Arab Gulf States TV preachers, lives the peaceful Ibâdhî community within the Algerian Amazigh Mzabis in Ghardaïa (600 kilometers south of Algiers). Ibâdism is dominant in the Omani Sultanate where it is still the official religion, and from where the Algerian one originates. It exists also in Zanzibar (in Tanzania, which was an Omani colony till 1964), in Libya (Djebel Nafusa), in Tunisia (Djerba Island) and in Algeria (Ghardaïa). It is named after one of its leaders, ‘Abdullah Ibn Ibâdh at-Tamîmî al-Murri (of Arabian descent), but the disciples of Ibâdhism proclaim Jâbir Ibn Zayd al-Azdî (of Omani descent) as their first founder. 6 Similar to the Sunni rites (see Messem passim), one may notice in the Ibâdhi Islam one important difference that is, nevertheless, political rather than religious: They deem the Imamate (caliphate) an open position for any Muslim regardless of his ethnic origin, given he is endowed with the required qualities for the purpose.7 The geographical space in which the Algerian Ibâdhî Mzabs live is also inhabited by other tribes of Arab descent. The tribe of Ouled Nail lives in the north of Ghardaïa town. Ouled Yahia is another tribe established in Berriane, a mixed city, the Cha’amba tribe in Metlili town, and the Medhabih tribe in Ghardaïa (invited by the Amazigh Ouled ‘Ami Aissa 6

Al-Azdî is said to have been the best disciple of Aïcha, the youngest and most preferred wife of the Prophet, and of Abdullah Ibn Abbâs, the cousin of the latter. 7 The history of Ibadhism has been confused with that of Khâridjism in the discourses of the Sunni elite, because they also happen to have left the caliph Ali whom they criticized as too unbending with the non-Muslims. But they left him peacefully, in fact before the battle of Nahrawân and that of Siffîn, and retreated to Oman. See Nâsir b. Sulaymân b. Sa’îd al-Sâbi’ (1999) about forged Hadiths against the Ibadites. In fact the Ibadites movement was born after the death of Prophet Mohammad in 632 AD.

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tribe). The Ibadites are the ancient founders of the Rostomid civilization whose capital city was Tihert, Algeria. The Rostomi Imamate, which is often presented as the symbol of an Ibâdhî golden age, is also frequently considered by the Maghribi postcolonial historiography as the foreshadowing of an Algerian nation (see Aillet 47-78). The Mzabis constitute today an Amazigh minority and, being Ibâdhîs, they are also a religious one; nonetheless, they are plainly Algerians. Some of them participate in the Algerian political parties and government and others occupy high-ranking functions in the Algerian bureaucracy. They naturally ask for the recognition of their specificity by the constitutionally monolithic State they have contributed to establish after the Independence. This demand was predictable, since the Algerian Education System (which involves more than one quarter of the population!) explicitly plays up ideological identity issues against historical ones—history is somewhat disregarded to the benefit of official ideology (see Dourari, “Politiques linguistiques” 73-90). 7.3.2 Judaism Jews have always lived in this part of the Central Maghreb. Around the 11th to 8th century B.C., the Phoenicians, coming from Syria, constituted a group with the Hebrews and had the same language and the same religious practices. They took part in the colonization of overseas countries and founded commercial settlements in the present-day Algerian territories like that of Hipo Regius (Annaba), Igilgili (Jijel), Tipaza, Iol (Cherchell), Icosium (Algiers), Cunugu (Gouraya), etc. (Chenouf 21). Concerning the Algerian Jews, Chenouf observes: One can find among them those who collaborated with French colonialism and those who nourished sympathies for the Revolution [just like the other 8 Muslim or Christian Algerians]. For the latter ones, the GPRA [ ] gave guaranties of property and personal protection […] but a lot of Jews did not stay in Algeria.” (my translation)

The Jewish community of Algeria has been historically formed through numerous waves of immigration, and it is now as an indigenous community trying to emerge in the Algerian modern society ruined by years of the

8

GPRA = Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic, 19th September 1958 to 22nd July 1962. There have been three provisional governments. The first GPRA was presided by President Ferhat Abbas from 19th September 1958 to 18th January 1960.

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FLN party’s exclusive Arab Islamic ideology aggravated by the Islamist terrorism. The widely read and trustworthy Algerian newspaper El-Watan gave the information regretting the “anonymous death” of Roger Said on 7th August 2012. He was the “representative of both the Algerian Jewish community and of the 25 Synagogues of Algeria.”9 Said was also the former dean of the Algerian barristers. In fact, in 2009 the Algerian authorities gave permission to have a specific representative body of the Algerian Jews presided by Roger Said, whose barrister’s cabinet is still in Blida (50 kilometers to the west of Algiers). During the same summer, El-Watan published an interview with 24 years-old Naïm, proclaimed “the future Algeria’s Rabin.” 10 In the heading quotation, it states: “Algeria, to the liberation of which they contributed, is their homeland. With the Algerians they share everything except […] religion. They are the Jews of Algeria. Today, they still hide to live better: Portrait of a youngster who chose to speak out.” In February 2015, Roger Hanin, a French actor of Algerian origin who lived the greatest part of his life in France, asked to be buried in Algiers’ Christian and Jewish cemetery of Bologhine. The ceremony was attended by Algerian officials and a crowd wearing kippas. But generally, the Algerian Jews live on their native soil as an underground community because of the intolerant Islamist hegemonic stance imposed on society. Multiculturalism and citizenship would certainly give them the liberty to practice their cult freely. 7.3.3 Christian Algerians The Christian Algerians—with the different modern trends of Christianity —enjoy a more visible condition than the Jews and can attend churches even though the bureaucracy does not take them and their religious needs into account. Their religious holydays are recognized and the Algerian public radio station broadcasts mass celebrations on some important religious occasions. Many Christians are of European descent but feel and are considered as entirely Algerian, like the famous Claudine and Pierre Chaulet. Pierre Chaulet (born in 1930) was a member of the FLN revolutionary party and stayed in Algeria all the time through independence until his death on 5th October 2012. His death triggered massive condolences and the presence of a great number of intellectuals and officials at his funeral. He is buried in the Christian graveyard at Algiers El-Madania. 9

El-Watan. Monday 13th August 2012: 06 (my translation). See El-Watan, July 13th August 2012: 08 (my translation). His family name was not revealed for security reasons.

10

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Some Bible texts have been translated into Kabyle 11 (e.g., Ahbib n Rebbi; Indjil n-Sidna Aisa El-Masih). There are also some DVDs introducing to the precepts of the Christian religion (see Eisa Lmasih s unagi n meryem tamagdalit). But there is still no official teaching of Christianity in Algerian schools. All proselytism of non-Islamic religion is forbidden. This fact is fundamental, beyond the stereotyped old-style truth discourse on the universe shared by all religions in the proselytism discourses put forward by the proponents of conversion to Evangelist Christianity (see, for example, the blog Lalla n Gerger www.notredame dekabylie.net), notwithstanding the fact that there may be personal and practical needs behind the conversion fascination. Islam and scholarly Arabic, which were in revolutionary times the instruments of Algerian identity against colonialism (represented as Christian and French by the official trend), have now become, at least for some other trends of thought, the instruments of dictatorship and identity denial, and are both widely rejected—to the profit of Tamazight with its friendly attitude toward Christianity and French.

7.4 The Language Issue The religions of Algerians are different although they share many common components. That is why they bear the moniker Abrahamic religions, and are born of the same geo-cultural space. But as there is no comparative historical teaching of religions at schools, these facts go unseen by the majority. The languages of Algerians differ too, but belong altogether to the Hamito-Semitic family and typology. The indigenous Berbers helped extend the use of Banû Hilâl’s Arabic—a language that progressively mixed up with Berber and Punic—as well as their folktales in the Maghrebi society (Rouighi 67-101). The spreading of Islamic religion later contributed to building a prestigious image of Arabic in general.12 The monolingual language policy of the modern postcolonial state contrasts with the multilingual reality and thus provokes socio-linguistic and cultural unease. Historically one can in fact hardly imagine a country as 11

We cite here but a few of the Christian texts in Kabyle: Ahbib n Rebbi, Tiktabin n luqa s Tamazight (=The Friend of God, the Evangels of Luke in Tamazight). Ed. ACEB: Lyon, France. ISBN 2-907191-00-4; Indjil n-Sidna Aisa El-Masih Akken ith-iktheb Matta, (= Gospel of Jesus Christ according to Mathew). There are also some DVDs in that language, dealing with the precepts of the Christian religion (see Eisa Lmasih s unagi n meryem tamagdalit, www.jaimelalgerie.net = Jesus, the Christ: The Testimony of Mary of Magdalena, my translations). 12 See Goodman 6-11, 12, 33-37, 35, 55-57 for a detailed discussion of the subject in relation to the Kabyle contestation.

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big as the Maghreb (from the Egyptian-Libyan frontiers to the Canary Islands, then to Mauritania, Mali, and Niger in the south), with human groups evolving in such distant places, to miraculously speak the same language when media and communication means were rudimentary! Two main language spheres are attested: (1) the formal domain dedicated to the scholarly Arabic and French; (2) the personal domain in which one can find Algerian Arabic and varieties of Tamazight (takbaylit, tachaouit, tumzabt, tamachaqt, taznatit, tachelhit, tachenouit…). The wholesale Amazighness (Berberness) of the Central Maghreb is no more contested and the diversity of the Tamazight varieties is beginning to be accepted as a normal fact. However, we must not forget the controversial semantic content of Berber and Berberness as essences.

8. Conclusion Nowadays, Tamazight- and Arabic-speaking Algerians, along with the different religious groups (Jews, Christians, and Muslim minorities such as the Ibadites...) claim their recognition by the monolithic State. The official hegemonic Arab and Islamic identity equation imposed long before Independence and expected to produce unity inside Algeria and even at a broader level (the Arab nation), is indeed generating disarray. Whilst the Tamazight claim—Kabylia, and the Chaouia mainly—is not settled yet, the Ibadites—a specific trend of Islam and at the same time an Amazigh Zenata group, claim publicly the recognition of their specificity within the Algerian nation, causing cracks in the official monolithic paradigm and bring forth the need to radically change the representation as well as governance of the society as a whole. Cosmopolitan Multiculturalism (as experienced in Canada for example), together with citizenship, might possibly constitute a solution for diversity in Algeria. The latter can no longer be ignored. As is the case in the United States, where discussions about this issue have taken place and ended in the conclusion that some form or other of multiculturalism is necessary for a peaceful co-existence of different citizens with different cultural backgrounds, there is a need that the society moves towards centripetal action around citizenship. Will Kymlicka states: The appropriate form of multiculturalism must be fluid in its conception of group and groups’ boundaries [...]; voluntary in its conception of groups’ affiliation [...]; and non-exclusive in its conception of group identity [...]. Only such an open-ended, fluid, and voluntary conception of multiculturalism fits with the openness of American society and its deep respect for individual choice; and the greatest challenge to creating such a fluid con-

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Such a multicultural citizenship perspective should be considered and respected in Algeria too, while designing pedagogical programs for the schooling system, for media, for Mosques as well as for polity, in such a way as to restore confidence in the different components of the society themselves, whilst permitting the Algerian citizens, regardless of their group origin, to adhere to wider ensembles. If Ibâdism were taught at schools instead of imposing Mâlikism at Ghardaïa (which is the trend of Islam followed by the other co-existing community said to be from Arab origin, the Chaanbas, the Mdhabîhs, the Ouled Yahia...), and if Tamazight were assessed correctly by the Algerian authorities, the recent Ghardaïa conflict14 and the recurring Kabyle conflicts would not have taken place at all. Since all groups adhere to the “Algerianness” and its unification symbols, societal peace can only be achieved through cosmopolitan multiculturalism and citizenship, which we have called elsewhere the “Multiplicity and Unity Dialectics.” The Algerian Arabic is the most shared symbol among Algerians, and can still be considered, as such, the cornerstone of such Algerianness.

Works Cited Aillet, Cyrille. “Tahart et les Origines de l’Imamat Rustumide.” Annales islamologiques 45 (2011): 47-78. Ali Yahia, Abdennour. La Crise Berbère de 1949, Portrait de deux Militants: Bennaï Ouali et Amar Ould-Hamouda. Quelle Identité pour l’Algérie ? Alger: Editions Barzakh, 2014. Belhocine, Mebrouk. Idir al-Watany, ou l’Algérie Libre Vivra. Alger: Edition Le « Combat Algérien », 2001. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loic Wacquant. « L’import-Export de la Soumission ». Manière de voir 137 (Octobre-Novembre 2014): 74-77. Chenouf, Aissa. Les Juifs d’Algérie, 2000 ans d’existence. Alger: Edition El-Maarifa, 1999. 13

This article is a condensed presentation by Kimlicka based on his Multicultural Citizenship. 14 A very violent clash had taken place between the Maliki and the Ibâdhî communities living side by side in Ghardaïa for more than a millenary where more than 23 persons died.

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Dourari, Aberrezak. “Algeria: Cultural Multiplicity and Unity Dialectics.” London: Routledge, 2014: 35-53. —. “Dialectique de l’Un et du Multiple dans la Culture Algérienne” [The Dialectics of the One and the Multiple in the Algerian Culture]. Cultures Populaires, Culture Nationale. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002. —. “Culturel, Interculturel, et Multiculturel: Concepts et Implications Intellectuelles et Didactiques.” Mostaganem University Conference, Mediating Languages and Cultures. (27-28/01/2015). Paper. —. “Normalization of Tamazight in Algeria: Fighting an Uphill Battle.” Science Art and Gender in The Global Rise of Indigenous Languages Symposium. Ed. Kamel Igoudjil and Sihem Arfoui-Abidi. Tunis: Sahar Editions, 2014. 91-105. —. “Politique linguistique en Algérie: entre le Monolinguisme de l’Etat et le Pluralisme de la Société.” Synergies Pays Germanophones (N spécial): Les politiques linguistiques implicites et explicites en domaine francophone. Revue du Gerflint (2012): 73-90. —. “L’enseignement de tamazight en Algérie: contexte sociopolitique et problématique d’aménagement.” Langues et Linguistique, Revue Internationale de Linguistique et Société (2011): 1-21. Goodman, Jane E. Berber Culture on the World Stage, From Village to Video. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2005. Ferhat, Ali. Alger Républicain. Alger: 21-22 August 1949. National archives. Greimas, A.-Julien. Sémantique structurale. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1986. Hollinger, David. Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism. New York: Basic Books, 1995. Herbert, Nick. Elemental Mind: Human Consciousness and the New Physics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993. Kymlicka, Will. “American Multiculturalism in the International Arena.” Dissent (Fall 1998): 73-79. —. Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. —. Politics in the Vernacular. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. Messem, Mohamed. L’Islam Tolérant et Pacifiste, Bref Aperçu sur l’Histoire et les Principes Fondamentaux de l’Ibâdisme. Algiers: Edition El-Ibriz, 2014. Nâsir b. Sulaymân b. Sa’îd al-Sâbi’. Al-Khawaridj wa l-haqîqa al-ghâ’iba [The khawâridj and the obliterated truth]. Doctorate thesis: Sultan Qabus Oman University, 1999.

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Naylor, Philip C. North Africa, a History from Antiquity to the Present. Austin: U Texas Press, 2009. Rouighi, Ramzi. “The Berbers of the Arabs, Moors and Berbers.” Studia Islamica New series 1 (2011): 47-78. Wooldridge, Frosty. “Multiculturalism—destroying American culture.” 20 Feb. 2015. Web. Wulf, Christoph. Introduction aux sciences de l’éducation. Trl. Kamila Benayad and Rémi Hess. Paris: Armand Collin, 1995.

FROM SNOWBALL TO POMEGRANATE SEEDS: THE TROUBLED POSITION OF HAN WITHIN CHINESE MULTICULTURALISM CHANG LIU

In his study of Chinese popular music, Nimrod Baranovitch observes that starting from the late 1970s there is a revival of interest in China’s ethnicity as commodities in its newly reformed market, on the one hand, and as the subject of scholarly inquiries, on the other (54). Yet ethnicity in China really means its ethnic minorities. Han Chinese—the majority of China’s population—as an ethnic group are excluded in this context, or at best they exist as a referential entity for the purpose of providing a framework of majority versus minority, a kind of binary opposition within which studies of China’s ethnic minorities are conducted. Studies of Han Chinese do exist, nevertheless, in other names. For instance, Critical Han Studies: The History, Representation, and Identity of China’s Majority, a volume edited by Thomas Mullaney, James Leibold, Stéphane Gros, and Eric Vanden Bussche, serves as a seminal work in this field. Methodologically and theoretically, some scholars look into Critical Racial Theory and Whiteness Studies from outside of China for inspiration and guidance, yet, such an approach easily assumes that “the practice of Han identity,” like whiteness, “enjoys a powerful and hegemonic neutrality all its own” (Mullaney 2-3). Different from “whiteness,” Han privilege does not exist alone: it is often coupled with the Chinese Communist Party and the state—though included in one dominant group, a connection between the two is yet to be drawn and mapped out. Focusing on “Love Our China”— a patriotic song from the early 1990s—this paper attempts to explore how Han Chinese, as an ethnic group, are represented in comparison with ethnic minorities, and how this identity is connected with the party-state. This paper begins with the theoretical debate on multiculturalism in China and, after offering a brief background information of the production and circulation of “Love Our China,” it moves on to analyze the textual representation of Han Chinese and ethnic minorities in “Love Our China.”

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It will be argued that rather than being paired up with the party-state as a hegemonic whole, Han Chinese only serves as an embodiment for the party-state, and its status is determined by particular political interests and negotiated within specific historical contexts. Han Chinese, as an ethnic group, are deprived of their ethnicity, and when detached from the partystate, they even remain voiceless and deeply repressed.

1. Chinese Multiculturalism, from Leninist Origin to Chinese Style Chinese multiculturalism has a foreign origin which can be traced back to the 1940s, before the founding of the People’s Republic of China. In order to solve China’s national question, the Chinese Communist Party sought solutions from the Soviet experience and the Leninist party-state was seen as a relevant model in their eyes. While Mao Zedong objected to Leninist ethnic “self-determination,” Zhou Enlai proposed the necessity to classify and safeguard ethnic minorities. In the 1950s the theoretical issue was soon put into action; loosely following Stalin’s “four-part definition of nationality—common language, common territory, common economic life and common culture,” the classification of ethnicity was initiated in China, and it is only by 1982 that the number of ethnic groups has been stabilized at fifty-six (Leibold, “Beijing Olympics” 4-5). Much has changed since. In a paper published in 2005 and referring to the new Chinese leadership, He Baogang loosely defines Chinese multiculturalism as a composition which consists of national unity and ethnic diversity, which is accompanied by the government’s endeavor to keep a balance between the two (56). This new way of theorizing multiculturalism in China goes back to Fei Xiaotong’s theory of “diversity in unity” (Leibold, “Beijing Olympics” 8). Despites Leninism and the former Soviet model, Fei’s theory resonates with Chinese history, geography, anthropology, sociology and archeology, and defines the Chinese nation as a unity within which many ethnic groups or nationalities co-exists (Fei 3). By tracing Chinese multiculturalism back to Fei, multiculturalism in China is transformed into a concept with Chinese characteristics. Later debates on China’s ethnicity or Chinese multiculturalism largely rely on the terms “diversity” and “unity” provided by Fei in his theory, however, the interpretation of these terms varies. Xu Jieshun, for instance, depicts Fei’s snowball metaphor and develops it into the Snowball Theory. As Xu argues, “[t]he formation and development of the Han nationality […] bears strong resemblance to that of a snowball in the sense that as it

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moves through time and space it grows more dense and compact” (113). “Diversity” and “unity” are of central importance in Xu’s theory, however, the meaning they denote radically differs from Fei’s theory. By “diversity,” Fei refers to the coexistence of the officially recognized ethnic groups, and by “unity” Fei implies the Chinese nation—a collective identity which includes all ethnic groups in China. As Fei phrases it, the two terms “diversity in unity” are located in two different realms while the later contains the former. In Xu’s Snowball Theory, however, the boundary between “diversity” and “unity” is blurred, which unstablizes the distinction between Han nationality and Chinese nationality. Xu first equates Han nationality with Chinese nationality, and then interprets “unity” as the formation of Han nationality and “diversity” as the inclusion of sinicized ethnic minorities within the Han nationality. Thus Xu’s Snowball Theory engenders a notion of assimilation, and by equating Han nationality with Chinese nationality and demonstrating the Han nationality’s assimilation power, Xu’s Snowball Theory actually develops Fei’s theory of “diversity in unity” into a theory of going “from diversity to unity.” In Xu’s theory, therefore, Han nationality is characterized with this assimilation power and depicted as the unmarked norm. A new discourse has emerged in recent years. Facing the challenge coming from the “‘three evil forces’: splittism, extremism and terrorism” and terrorist attacks such as the March 1st Kunming incident, which was primarily targeting at the “Chinese state and its Han majority” and dubbed as “China’s 9/11” (Leibold, “Xinjiang” 3), a new metaphor—pomegranate seeds—has been proposed by China’s president Xi Jinping to illustrate the ethnic relations in China: “…all ethnic groups to show mutual understanding, respect, tolerance and appreciation, and to learn and help each other, so they are tightly bound together like the seeds of pomegranate” (Leibold, “Xinjiang” 4). The metaphorical use of pomegranate seeds does not originate from Xi. In an article published in People’s Daily on 4th March 2014 which responds to the Kunming incident, Wang Huimin attributes the pomegranate seeds metaphor to an anonymous Uyghur cadre based in Kashgar. Addressing the Chinese people residing in mainland China but outside of Xinjiang Province, this Uyghur cadre claims that “[p]eople of all ethnicities in Xinjiang are the same: hard-working, kindhearted, and passionate for life; we should tightly hold onto each other just like pomegranate seeds” (Wang, my translation). Later that year, the pomegranate seeds metaphor was used by Xi Jinping in his speech at the Central Work Forum on Xinjiang and soon introduced to mass audiences with the help of Chinese media.

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As Nimrod Baranovitch has summarized it, “[t]raditionally the Han viewed their relationship with neighboring non-Han ethnic groups as a core-periphery relationship […]. The Han have always seen themselves as civilized, while minorities have traditionally been perceived as barbarians” (57). Xu Jieshun’s Snowball Theory clearly resonates with this tradition of the Han and non-Han relationship. Yet times have changed and contrary to those who demonstrate the Han culture’s assimilation power and articulate Han’s centrality and superiority and its association with cultural and political capital, Xi Jinping promotes the pomegranate seeds metaphor to underline the current ethnic relationships in China, which downplays Han’s privileged status and detaches Han from the Chinese party-state. The new image shows that within the framework of Chinese multiculturalism, the position of Han Chinese is subject to changes due to given historical and political settings rather than being stable and superior to the ethnic minorities as it has often been assumed.

2. “Love Our China”—Its Production and Circulation In 1991, the 4th National Minority Nationalities Traditional Sports Games were held in Nanning, Guangxi Province of China. Comparing to the previous Games, the 4th Games were remarkable for two reasons: first, it was the first time Taiwan participated in this event; secondly, for the first time they had an anthem of their own. The anthem is entitled “Love Our China”; its lyrics were written by Qiao Yu, and its music composed by Xu Peidong. Both Qiao and Xu are Han Chinese, nevertheless, the song was performed by Wei Wei—a Zhuang Chinese born in Inner Mongolia (Ts.cn).1 The official account claims that the choice of the anthem was made through an open call for songs (Ts.cn), however, in an later interview Xu Peidong mentions that a lot of people approached him with requests to compose anthems for different occasions, and “Love Our China” was composed due to one of such requests (News.2500sz.com). According to Wei Wei, “Love Our China” was specifically written for her (163.com). Hence, although giving the illusion of an open call for songs, “Love Our China” is in fact a politically oriented artistic work manipulated by the government. Though the production team includes Han and non-Han artists alike, it is the voice of the party-state it represents, 1

The footage of Wei Wei’s performance in 1991 at the 4th Games is not available online, however, the following link offers an alternative version of the song which was performed by Wei Wei at the gala that celebrates the 56th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China in Shanghai 2005: http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/ctSxtbRqVIQ/

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which denies agency to the artists despite their ethnic affiliation. China’s National Minority Nationalities Traditional Sports Games are their own category. Fifty-five ethnic minority groups participate in this event, each of them contributing traditional ethnic sports of their own, which makes inter-ethnic competitions unrealistic. With regard to the small number of contests it includes and the large amount of performances it contains, China’s National Minority Nationalities Traditional Sports Games are more like a massive show staged by the government to present images of happy minorities, rather than a real sports games for the participants. As the anthem of such an overtly political event, “Love Our China” did not achieve instant success and was even despised by its performer Wei Wei. Though of an ethnic minority background, Wei Wei had entered China’s pop music scene and was already a well-established pop star by the early 1990s. As she recalls in an interview, “Love Our China” appeared yokelish to her due to its strong ethnic minority flavor (163.com). Some years later, Miao Chinese singer Song Zuying got her eyes on “Love Our China.”2 Different from Wei Wei, Song Zuying valued this song very highly for its ethnic elements and got in contact with Wei Wei via the help of Xu Peidong to ask for permission to cover “Love Our China.” “I don’t like it anyway, you can cover it as you wish” was how Wei responded Song’s request (163.com, my translation). Soon after the authorization was granted and in collaboration with Xu Peidong, Song Zuying’s version of “Love Our China” was recorded and released in the late 1990s. This time, the song did not only achieve national success, but was also elected together with some other widely circulated Chinese songs to be broadcasted in China’s Chang’e 1 Spacecraft (163.com). As the contradicting views on the same song held by Wei Wei and Song Zuying indicate, “Love Our China” bridges two different historical locations between which the attitude toward ethnicity has been through dramatic changes. When Wei Wei first performed “Love Our China,” she was worried that the ethnic components in the song would not fit her image as a pop singer and it would limit her career in China’s pop music industry (163.com). Born in the early 1960s, Wei Wei has been through the turbulence of China’s Cultural Revolution. Minority ethnic identity had been through severe repression during the Cultural Revolution and Wei Wei’s experience with the Cultural Revolution had not been pleasant for her as an ethnic minority Chinese. Though in the late 1980s and early 1990s China was already post-revolutionary and at the early phase of the ambitious reform and the movement of opening up, Wei Wei’s rejection 2

The following link is the official music video of Song Zuying's cover version of the song: http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/ctSxtbRqVIQ/

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reveals the lingering legacy of China’s Cultural Revolution from which ethnic minority identity has not fully liberated. Other than that, “Love Our China” is a song composed specifically for Wei Wei, thus to a certain extent it represents how minority identity is viewed through the official gaze. Apparently, Wei Wei found such representation unsatisfying and wished not to be associated with it. Though the representation of minorities was by and large manipulated by the party-state and its Han and non-Han agents, when taking the reception of such texts into consideration—as Wei Wei’s rejection and the doomed fate of “Love Our China” in the early 1990s have demonstrated—ethnic minorities as the objects being represented remain empowered, for they have the knowledge to evaluate the authenticity of such representation and to reject and resist it. It is noteworthy that Song Zuying’s cover has achieved national success and this success is largely depending on the song’s popularity among Han Chinese audiences.3 This phenomenon echoes Baranovitch’s observation on changing Han attitudes toward ethnic minorities, which include “the obvious desire to reach out to minorities, the appreciation of their otherness, the allowance for and appreciation of diversity in general, and the acknowledgement of minorities’ ability to contribute to and enrich mainstream Chinese culture” (96).

3. “Love Our China”: Language Affiliation and Ethnic Identity 56 constellations, 56 flowers 56 ethnic groups are like siblings of one family 56 ethnic languages flow into one sentence Love our China, love our China, love our China Love our China, athletes race forward Love our China, develop our country Love our China, rejuvenate our nation Love our China! (Qiao, “Love Our China” 66-67, my translation)

3 Han Chinese's attitude towards ethnic minorities to a certain degree resembles that of American attitude towards Native Americans. Yet they differ from each other in many other ways. For example, modern China inherited its territory from the Manchu Empire which contained formerly non-Han territories, thus it differs from the territorial conflicts between Native Americans and the colonizers. Beside that, ethnic minority Chinese remain powerful and their privilege is particularly visible in transnational context.

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With regard to the representation of ethnic minorities in China—the orthodox representation in particular—though to certain extent it contains the voices of ethnic minorities, it is commonly assumed that such representation is monopolized by “the Chinese state and the Han majority” and that most such official representations are “more about minorities than by or even for minorities” (Baranovitch 66). This assumption foregrounds the importance of issues such as who is represented by whom, and for whom, yet these categories cannot always capture the complexity of the production and circulation of texts with official background. For example, when considering who is in charge of the representation, the assumption pairs up the Chinese state and the Han majority as the hegemonic whole, while the role of ethnic minorities is marginalized. Baranovitch, however, has suggested the following: It was common practice, starting before 1949 in the Communist-controlled areas and throughout the mainland after 1949, to send Han musicians to minority areas to conduct politically oriented artistic work […] minority artists and intellectuals were brought into official institutions, where they acquired politically correct knowledge about their ethnic identity and learned how to represent it artistically in politically accepted venues. (66)

Thus, while the position of both Han Chinese and ethnic minorities has been subjected to change, the party-state’s central position remains uncontested. In China’s revolutionary minority songs, very often the representation of ethnic minority is based on explicit references to their customs, traditions, etc. (Baranovitch 62-63). However, an alternative strategy is employed in “Love Our China.” Let’s take the following line as an example: “56 constellations, 56 flowers, 56 ethnic groups are like siblings of one family.” Fifty-six ethnic groups are metaphorically referred to as “constellations,” “flowers,” or “siblings,” and their state of being is pronounced as a matter of fact rather than representation based on ethnic customs or traditions. Such a strategy avoids the risk of enforcing ethnic stereotypes and thus shatters the distinction between Han majority and non-Han minority Other, offering equal weight to each one of the fifty-six ethnic groups. No ethnic group is assumed as the unmarked norm and no ethnic group is depicted as the exotic commodity to be gazed upon as the ethnic Other. Contrary to the line quoted above where ethnicity only exists in metaphorical terms, the following line chooses a different strategy for the purpose of representing ethnicity: “56 ethnic languages flow into one sentence: Love our China.” By enumerating fifty-six ethnic languages, it

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attributes to each ethnic group a language of their own, thus the representation of ethnicity is linked to language affiliation.4 But by stating all ethnic languages “flow into one sentence”—which is uttered in standard Chinese to celebrate the love of China—it urges the assimilation of ethnic groups.5 The very choice of Mandarin Chinese as the destination all ethnic languages flow into points to the Hancentricism6 of “Love Our China.” Nevertheless, the centrality of the Han Chinese language deserves reconsideration. The Chinese language, as viewed within China’s national boundary, though “spoken by close to a billion Han Chinese,” is merely “an abstraction that covers a number of mutually unintelligible forms of speech” (DeFrancis 39). When viewed in a transnational context, Mandarin “is, properly speaking, also the white man’s Chinese” and “a sign of the systematic codification and management of ethnicity that is typical of modernity, in the case through language implementation” (Chow 11, emphasis in the original).7 From neither perspective can the Han Chinese language be viewed as hegemonic. But not only that—within the discipline of Chinese studies, Rey Chow raises two further questions related to the Chinese language issue: first, the necessity of facing the plurality of the Chinese languages—which calls the myth of a standard Chinese discourse into question (12); and second, the necessity “to theorize the controversial connections among language possession, ethnicity, and culture value” (13). When the lyrics claim that “56 ethnic languages flow into one sentence,” this not only suggests the force for assimilation, but also the possibility of a choice between two languages— an ethnic language of one’s own and the Mandarin Chinese language, i.e., the possibility of bilingualism for each ethnic groups in China. Ethnicity in “Love Our China” therefore is credited with the possession of ethnic language and an official national language; nevertheless, within such a logic, it is not applicable to Han Chinese! 4

As a matter of fact, what the lyrics claim about ethnicity and language affiliation is incorrect, because some ethnic groups, such as the Hui Chinese, do not have a language of their own. I thank Prof. Zhou Zhenhe for pointing that out. 5 The song is sung in Mandarin Chinese, China's official language. 6 Mandarin Chinese is the Han Chinese language, but beside Mandarin Chinese, the Han Chinese language includes various dialects and speeches. 7 The example Rey Chow offers to support her argument originates from North America and within the academia: the spoken Chinese that most white sinologists learn, if they ever learn to speak Chinese, is Mandarin Chinese; for native Chinese scholars if their mother tongue is not Mandarin Chinese, they would be disqualified and confronted with discrimination. For a detailed discussion on this issue, read Rey Chow’s “On Chineseness as a Theoretical Problem.”

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According to Pao-chien Tseng, “[e]ven among the Han people, all of whom speak Chinese, and who generally have the same written language, there are numerous spoken dialects which vary from province to province” (178)—thus if “Love Our China’s” attributes only one ethnic language to the Han Chinese, the lingual diversity within the Han Chinese community is not recognized. The one language it attributes to them—the “so-called standard language”—is in fact “the language spoken in Beijing, Mandarin, which has been adopted as the official ‘national language’ since the early twentieth century” (Chow 10, emphasis in the original). Ethnic minority languages had a rather different fate: “In the first PRC constitution, adopted by the First National People’s Congress in 1954, it is stated that minorities shall have the ‘freedom to use and develop their own spoken and written languages, and to preserve or reform their own customs and ways’” (Mackerras 145). Compared with ethnic minorities, the Han do not enjoy similar freedom, when their native tongue is a dialect or variety other than the Beijing dialect. Rather than being viewed as additionally being able to speak such a dialect, these speakers are frequently viewed as incapable of speaking the Chinese language properly—thus the lingual diversity within Han Chinese language is further suppressed. In answering why the Beijing dialect has been chosen as the standard, Tseng gives the following reasons: first, the sounds of the Beijing dialect are clear and simple; second, the Beijing dialect has been the dominant dialect in China due to Beijing’s “political, commercial and academic” importance, as this city “has been the national capital for over 900 years”; third, comparing to other dialects, the Beijing dialect enjoys an intelligibility over a greater area; fourth, it is identical with many Chinese classic literary works and the popularity of these works further promotes the reception of the Beijing dialect (184). Other than its association with Chinese civilization, Beijing dialect is chosen as the official language mostly because of its efficiency in administrative matters. As it is sung in “Love our China,” though various ethnic languages and Han dialects exist, they have to surrender to the so-called “standard language,” and this “standard language” itself has to serve the interests of the party-state to promote patriotic sentiment. Thus in “Love Our China” the Han Chinese language is not only deprived of its own ethnicity but further used as political tool.

4. Conclusion Han Chinese and the Chinese Communist Party-state are often paired up together and characterized as the hegemonic whole while ethnic minority

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existence is considered as marginalized and placed on the opposite pole of the power-relation. This paper calls for a reconsideration of the status of Han Chinese within this power-relation and argues that it is determined by concrete political demands and contested within given historical settings. Tracing the rise of minority identity and the power to reject and resist the unconvincing official representation of minority ethnicity, I argue for the Han Chinese’s vulnerability when being confronted with this type of representations, for they have no sufficient knowledge to evaluate the authenticity of the minority images in these texts. As the textual analysis shows, language affiliation in “Love Our China” is depicted to signify ethnicity, and from this perspective Han Chinese is deprived of its ethnicity because Mandarin Chinese is used by the Chinese Communist Party-state as a means to manage ethnicity in and beyond China. Thus Han Chinese is also being used as an embodiment to convey political propaganda, and this also deprives the Han people of a political voice. When detached from the party-state, Han Chinese is voiceless and deeply repressed. Yet by demonstrating the problematic status the Han language in multicultural China, this paper is not attempting to articulate Hancentricism or re-establish the superiority of Han Chinese. It rather urges downplaying the majority versus minority binary opposition in China and looking at the Han Chinese purely as an ethnic group and ethnic identity just like the non-Han Chinese.

Works Cited 163.com. NetEase. “世ୟᴮჼᔳlj⡡ᡁѝॾNJ ᆻ⾆㤡㘫ୡ䎠㓒” [“Love Our China,” Once Despised by Wei Wei, Now Has Become Popular Due to Song Zuying’s Cover Version]. 17 Dec. 2008. Web. Baranovitch, Nimrod. China’s New Voices: Popular Music, Ethnicity, Gender, and Politics, 1978-1997. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003. Chow, Rey. “Introduction: On Chineseness as a Theoretical Problem.” boundary 2 Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field 25.3 (1998): 1-24. DeFrancis, John. The Chinese Language: Facts and Fantasy. Honolulu: U of Hawaii P, 1986. Fei, Xiaotong. “ѝॾ≁᯿Ⲵཊ‫ݳ‬аփṬተ” [The Pattern of Diversity in Unity of the Chinese Nation]. ѝॾ≁᯿ཊ‫ݳ‬аփṬተ [The Pattern of Diversity in Unity of the Chinese Nation]. Ed. Xiaotong Fei. Beijing: Minzu U of China P, 1999. 3-38. He, Baogang. “Minority Rights with Chinese Characteristics.” Multiculturalism in Asia. Ed. Will Kymlicka and Baogang He. Oxford:

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Oxford UP, 2005. 56-79. Leibold, James. “The Beijing Olympics and China’s Conflicted National Form.” The China Journal 63 (2010): 1-24. —. “Xinjiang Work Forum Marks New Policy of ‘Ethnic Mingling’.” China Brief XIV.12 (2014): 3-6. Web. 26 June 2016. Mackerras, Colin. China’s Minorities: Integration and Modernization in the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford UP, 1994. Mullaney, Thomas. “Critical Han Studies: Introduction and Prolegomenon.” Critical Han Studies—The History, Representation, and Identity of China’s Majority. Ed. Thomas Mullaney, James Leibold, Stéphane Gros, and Eric Vanden Bussche. Berkeley: U of California P, 2012. 1-20. News.2500sz.com. Suzhou News. “lj⡡ᡁѝॾNJᴢ֌㘵ᗀ⋋ьᶕ㣿࠶ӛࡋ֌㓿傼” [Xu Peidong, The Composer of “Love Our China” Visits Suzhou and Shares His Experiences in Writing Music]. 6 Nov. 2012. Web. Qiao, Yu. “⡡ᡁѝॾ” [“Love Our China”]. ⾆ഭ亲ⅼ—— ⡡ഭѫѹⅼᴢ150俆 [Ode to the Motherland–150 Patriotic Songs]. Ed. Zhang Shan and Lu Xi. Chengdu: Sichuan People’s Press, 1999. 66-67. Ts.cn. Tian Shan Net. “ㅜഋቺ‫ޘ‬ഭቁᮠ≁᯿Ր㔏փ㛢䘀ࣘՊ” [The 4th National Minority Nationalities Traditional Sports Games]. 9 Sept. 2010. Web. Tseng, Pao-chien. “Language and National Unity: China.” Language Policy and National Unity. Ed. William R. Beer and James E. Jacob. Totowa: Rowman & Allanheld, 1985. 178-97. Tudou.com. Tu Dou. “世ୟlj⡡ᡁѝॾNJ” [Wei Wei “Love Our China”]. 21 June 2010. Web. Tudou.com. Tu Dou. “ᆻ⾆㤡lj⡡ᡁѝॾNJ” [Song Zuying “Love Our China”]. 24 July 2012. Web. Wang, Huimin. “‫⸣ۿ‬ῤ㊭䛓ṧ㍗ᣡ൘а䎧” [“Like Pomegranate Seeds Tightly Hold onto Each Other”]. Ӫ≁ᰕᣕ [People’s Daily] 4 Mar. 2014: 4. Xu, Jieshun. “Snowball Theory of the Han Nationality.” Critical Han Studies—The History, Representation, and Identity of China’s Majority. Ed. Thomas Mullaney, James Leibold, Stéphane Gros, and Eric Vanden Bussche. Berkeley: U of California P, 2012. 113-27. Note: I would like to thank James Leibold for the additional materials he recommended to me in the process of writing this article; Zheng Qian for

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her critical comments and the inspiring conversations that we had in Mulhouse and Basel; and Zhang Fugui, Li Minghui, Ruth Maloszek, Michael Lackner, and my colleagues from IKGF at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and the Jilin University Institute for Chinese Studies for their help and support.

CONTRIBUTORS

Siham Arfaoui is the chairperson of the Department of English in the Girls’ College of Sciences and Arts, Turaif, in the Northern Borders University in Saudi Arabia, and a teacher-assistant in the Higher Institute of Human Sciences of Jendouba in the University of Jendouba. She received a BA in English from Carthage University, and M.A. and Ph.D. in English Literature from the Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences of Sousse. She is interested in female ethnic writings and gender studies and has published articles in different journals and volumes. Amid her recent publications is Creating Myths as Narratives of Empowerment and Disempowerment, International Conference Proceedings (2016). Carla Blank is a writer, director, dramaturge and editor. She is author and editor of the 20th century historical reference Rediscovering America (Three Rivers Press, 2003) which carries the imprimatur of Before Columbus Foundation, and co-editor with Ishmael Reed of the anthology, Powwow: Charting the Fault Lines in the American Experience, Short Fiction From Then to Now (Da Capo Books, 2009). She was contributing editor on three other anthology projects edited by Ishmael Reed: Totems to Hip-Hop: A Multicultural Anthology of Poetry Across the Americas, 19002002 (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2003); MultiAmerica, Essays on cultural Wars and Cultural Peace (Viking, 1997); and Califia, The California Poetry (Y’Bird Books, 1979); in addition to publishing topical essays related to arts and culture in the San Francisco Chronicle, El Pais, Green Magazine and online at CounterPunch and Konch magazines. Her last book is Storming the Old Boys’ Citadel: Two Pioneer Women Architects of Nineteenth Century North America, co-authored with Canadian architectural historian Tania Martin (Baraka Books 2016). Ever since making her professional debut as a choreographer/dancer in 1963 as a participant in a Judson Dance Theater Workshop performance in New York City, she has devoted much attention to helping create youth and community arts collaborative performance projects, partially funded with grants from state and local governments and private foundations. These projects provided experiences with performers from pre-school through aged adults, and were the basis for her 2-volume anthology of performing arts techniques and styles, Live OnStage! (Dale Seymour Publications, a Pearson Educa-

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tion imprint, 1997, 2000). Co-authored with Jody Roberts, and still in print, it is widely referenced in school districts throughout the U.S. and Canada.

Peter André Bloch (*1936) is a retired professor of German literature at the Université de Haute-Alsace, Mulhouse. He is head of the NietzscheHaus in Sils-Maria and has organized many international conferences on Nietzsche. He is also the co-founder and president of the Institut d’Etudes helvétiques in Mulhouse. For many years he was director of the Begegnungszentrums Waldegg in Solothurn, a center for interregional multilingual culture exchange. Peter Bloch has published and edited many articles and books on literatures in German, contemporary European literature, and comparative literature and art history; in particular on the period of Goethe and Schiller, Nietzsche, modern Swiss literature’s response to Fascism, and contemporary fundamentalist tendencies. He has organized many art exhibits and readings. He is the editor of the Alsatian poetry of André Weckmann (7 vols. with German and French translation). He received the “Kultur- und Kunstpreis” of his hometown Olten and of the Canton Solothurn; he is an Officier des Palmes Académiques de France and an honorary member of the senate of the Université de Caen.

Bouchra Bouterra graduated from Badji Mokhtar-Annaba University with a degree in English language in 2009. She worked as a part-time teacher there and at the University of August 20th 1955, at Skikda. In 2013 she wrote an MA thesis on “Postcolonial Nigerian Women Between The Social Boundaries And The Civil War Casualties, The Case Study Of Chimamanda Nguzi Adicie’s Half Of A Yellow Sun and Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra.” She is now a full-time teacher in Skikda, preparing her doctoral theses, and working on a novel entitled Sleep Walker.

Stephen Casmier is an associate professor of English at Saint Louis University where he teaches African American, American and postcolonial literature. He holds degrees in literature and political science, and has worked as a newspaper reporter in New Orleans, Louisiana and St. Louis, Missouri. He has published on jazz, African American, and postcolonial literature. Amanda de Varona holds a B.A. in Spanish from Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, Georgia and an M.A. in Spanish from Florida International University in Miami, Florida. She recently graduated with an Ed.D. in Curriculum and Instruction for ESL and Modern Languages from

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Florida International University in Miami, Florida. She is currently a fulltime faculty member in the Intensive English Program at the University of Miami in Miami, Florida.

Jennifer K Dick is MdC at the Université de Haute Alsace, Mulhouse, and member of the ILLE research lab. She completed a PhD at Paris III in Comparative Literature on the visual use of the page in the works of Myung Mi Kim, Anne Marie Albiach and Susan Howe, in which she discusses the way fragment and multilingualism act in these poetries to reclaim lost history. She recently organized the conference “Lex-ICON: treating the image as text and the text as image” (June 7-10, 2012) and a journée d’étude on Vocal Performance in Art Space (Spring 2015). She is also a poet and has published several collections of poetry. Christopher G. Diller is a Professor of English, Rhetoric, and Writing at Berry College in Rome, Georgia. He is the editor of the Broadview Press edition of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (2009) and writes in the fields of American literature and American studies. His most recent publications include articles on Ralph Ellison (in MLQ: A Journal of Literary History, December 2014) and John Beecher (in African American Review, Summer/Fall 2015).

Abderrezak Dourari is professor of translation and language sciences at Algiers 2 University, Algeria; he is currently director of the National Pedagogical Centre for the Teaching of Tamazight/Ministry of National Education/ Algeria. His interests are in sociolinguistics, sociosemiotics, management of multilingualism and multiculturalism. Atalie Gerhard is currently completing her master’s degree in the program “MA North American Studies: Culture and Literature” at the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. She already holds a B.A. degree in English and American Studies and French Romantic Studies. In the past, she worked as a research assistant and now she hopes to enroll in a postgraduate program. Her research interests include cultures of minority resistance, literary genres of mystery, and narratives of terrorism. In her pastime, she enjoys learning foreign languages (she speaks German, English, French, Spanish, Italian, and Romanian) as well as supporting refugees on a voluntary basis. Arpa Ghosh teaches English Literature at Vivekananda College for Women, Kolkata, India. She has completed her doctoral thesis on white

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South African fiction centering on the works of Nadine Gordimer, Andre Brink and J. M. Coetzee. She has published extensively in peer-reviewed journals and also presented papers in national and international seminars at home and abroad. Arpa Ghosh has travelled to Santa Clara University, San Hose and to Boca Raton, Florida to present papers in ACLALS conferences. Her special interests are postcolonialism, feminism, Foucauldian criticism, contemporary fictional prose and Indian specifically Bengali fictional prose and drama. She is also a short story writer and has published around sixty short stories in the national daily The Statesman.

Wendy Hayes-Jones is a Fellow of the Richard Burton Centre for the Study of Wales at Swansea University. She was educated at Bristol University, University College London and Swansea University. For many years Wendy worked as Senior Lecturer in English Studies at Swansea Metropolitan University, teaching a range of literatures from Romanticism to Modernism and Postmodernism. Her primary research interests include African American Literature, American literature and culture, Welsh Writing in English and Ethnicity. Her most recent publications relate to articles about Ishmael Reed, who was the main focus for her PhD. Roxane Hughes is a Ph.D candidate at the Université de Lausanne specializing in Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies. She is currently working on her dissertation thesis revolving around the representations of footbinding in the United States and especially in Chinese American literature and culture. Her research interest includes world literatures, transnationalism, the history of American imperialism and the development of cultural icons. M. Kamel Igoudjil is an Instructor of Literature at Bard College Clemente. He is also a Graduate Adjunct Instructor at American University in Washington, D.C. His research and teaching interests are in literary and cultural studies, multicultural studies, modern/postmodern narratives, postcolonial studies, comparatives studies, and critical literacy. Rim Khaled is a professeur agrégée in English Literature at the Higher Institute of Applied Studies in Humanities of Tunis, University of Tunis, Tunisia. She has an MA in English literature and has published several articles in her fields of interest, namely, Women Studies, and Intercultural Studies. She has in fact presented papers exploring the feminine body in the French culture through history; or the plight of African American women through the study of race, gender, and taboo in Ntozake Shange’s

American Multiculturalism in Context: Views from at Home and Abroad 523

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf; and on American multiculturalism by raising questions about its limitations through the examination of the film Dear White People.

Toufik Lachouri graduated from the University of Annaba. He received a BA in translation and interpretation in 2005 and an MA from the doctoral school of translation and interpretation in 2009. The thesis is entitled “La Traduction des Temps Verbeau et leur Valeur; le Roman Nedjma de Kateb Yacine comme Modele.” He has worked for 5 years as part time teacher at the University of Skikda and been a full time teacher for the module of translation since 2011. He is interested in English literature and civilization. Toufik is an official sworn translator and interpreter certified true by the Ministry of Justice. Christèle Le Bihan is currently an Assistant Professor in American Studies at the University of Poitiers. She is a member of the interdisciplinary research group MIMMOC (Mémoires, Identités, Marginalités dans le Monde Occidental Contemporain) and the author of a Ph.D. dissertation on the political correctness movement on American campuses. She works on issues related to this movement and, more broadly, on multiculturalism and its impact both on higher education and on American society. She is also interested in the history of feminism in the United States, which she has been teaching for a few years.

Yuqing Lin is a senior lecturer at China University of Political Science and Law, teaching English language and culture. She got her Ph.D. in American literature from Beijing Normal University. Her doctoral thesis Ishmael Reed’s Neo-HooDoo Multiculturalism was published in 2015. Her research interest includes American ethnic literature, and multiculturalism in general.

Chang Liu received a B.A. from a university in Manchuria, an M.A. in Intercultural Anglophone Studies from the University of Bayreuth, and studied in the Chinese Studies program and American Studies program of the University of Würzburg. Before his engagement in academia, Chang Liu was the musical affairs officer of the French Embassy in China and engaged in introducing French music to China. Beside that, Liu has been a freelance music journalist and promoter. He has organized various musical projects and published articles, to name but a few, in People’s Daily, Goethe Institute China Online, Time Out (Beijing), The Beijinger. He currently

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works at the Jilin University Institute for Chinese Studies (China) as a guest researcher.

Sämi Ludwig is an English professor at the UHA Mulhouse in the Alsace (France). He received his education at the University of Berne (Switzerland) and has published in REAL, AmerikaStudien, Mosaic, the Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison, The African American Review, and The Journal for Asian American Studies. In his Ph.D. thesis on intercultural communication in Maxine Hong Kingston and Ishmael Reed, called CONCRETE LANGUAGE (published by Peter Lang in 1996), he outlines a theory of the metaphorical tracing of the intention constructions of the other. His second book is on the convergences of American Realism and pragmatist theory: Cognitive Realism: The Pragmatist Paradigm in American Literary Realism was published by Wisconsin UP (2002). Together with Rocío Davis (City University of Hong Kong) he edits Contributions to Asian American Literary Studies, the only European book series on Asian American cultural studies (LIT Verlag, Germany). In addition to intercultural issues and questions of cognitive and pragmatist approaches to literature, he is also interested in the big picture of literary history, in colonial American culture, and occasionally even writes about poetry.

Sheng-mei Ma is Professor of English at Michigan State University in East Lansing, USA, specializing in Asian Diaspora/Asian American studies and East-West comparative studies. His seven single-authored books in English are: The Last Isle: Contemporary Film, Culture and Trauma in Global Taiwan (2015); Alienglish: Eastern Diasporas in Anglo-American Tongues (2014); Asian Diaspora and East-West Modernity (2012); Diaspora Literature and Visual Culture: Asia in Flight (2011); East-West Montage: Reflections on Asian Bodies in Diaspora (2007); The Deathly Embrace: Orientalism and Asian American Identity (2000); and Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures (1998). His co-edited book Doing English in Asia: Global Literature and Culture is published in 2016. He co-edited and translated Chenmo de shanhen (Silent Scars: History of Sexual Slavery by the Japanese Military—A Pictorial Book, bilingual edition, 2005) as well as co-edited The City and the Ocean (2011). Sanshi zuoyou [Thirty, Left and Right] is his Chinese poetry collection (Shulin 1989). He also published numerous articles and book chapters on literature, film, and global culture. He has taught at University of Washington, Indiana University, James Madison University, Korea University (Adjunct Professor), and Providence University in Taiwan (Chair Professor).

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Edward Mortimer (b. 1943) was a journalist on The Times of London (1967-85) and the Financial Times (1987-98). From 1998 to 2006 he served as Chief Speechwriter and Director of Communications to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and from 2007 to 2011 as Chief Programme Officer of the Salzburg Global Seminar. He is now a Distinguished Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, and an activist and consultant on global governance, human rights, the management of diversity in modern Western societies, and the politics and history of the Middle East. Has written, inter alia, Faith and Power: the Politics of Islam (1982); Living together. Combining diversity and freedom in 21st century Europe—Report of the Group of Eminent Persons of the Council of Europe (2011); and (with Timothy Garton Ash and Kerem Öktem) Freedom in Diversity: Ten Lessons for Public Policy from Britain, Canada, France, Germany and the United States (2013). Saghar Leslie Naghib is both faculty and Level 5 Coordinator at the University of Miami Intensive English Program in Miami, Florida. She holds a Master’s of Science in TESOL from Barry University and has taught English literature and language at the secondary and post-secondary level since 2005. Currently, Saghar is working towards finishing her PhD in Conflict Analysis and Resolution from Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale-Davie, Florida.

Charlaine Ostmann is writing a PhD thesis at the English Department at the UHA, Mulhouse, on “Indigenous and International Influences on the Native American Color System” as a comparative study of Zuni and Navaho cardinal points. She is working on the concepts of color as expressed by Native American art and oral histories. Her avenues of research include Native American oral literature and artworks, myths and legends, Native American chromatology, color theories and anthropological and ethnological studies on Native American tribes.

Saïd Ouaked, Ph.D, is associate professor at the Department of AngloAmerican Studies, University of Limoges (France), and a member of the French Association of American Studies. His research mainly focuses on immigration policies in the United States and the migration of international elites. Ishmael Reed is the winner of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship (genius award), the renowned L.A. Times Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award and the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award. He has

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been nominated for a Pulitzer and finalist for two National Book Awards and is Professor Emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley; and founder of the Before Columbus Foundation, which promotes multicultural American writing. The American Book Awards, sponsored by the foundation has been called The American League to the National Book Awards’ National League. He also founded PEN Oakland which issues the Josephine Miles Literary Awards—PEN Oakland has been called “The Blue Collar PEN” by The New York Times. Ishmael Reed is the author of over twenty titles including the acclaimed novel Mumbo Jumbo, as well as essays, plays and poetry. Titles include: The Freelance Pallbearers; The Terrible Threes; The Last Days Of Louisiana Red; Yellow Back Radio Broke Down; Reckless Eyeballing; Flight To Canada; Japanese By Spring, and Juice!.

Tennessee Reed began writing as a child. Her first poetry collection, Circus in the Sky (I. Reed Books, 1988), was published when she was eleven years old and she wrote the poems between the ages of five and eleven. Tennessee is a graduate of U.C. Berkeley (2001, B.A. in American Studies) and Mills College (2005, M.F.A. in Creative Writing). Her memoir, Spell Albuquerque: Memoir of a “Difficult” Student, was published by CounterPunch Press and AK Press in 2009. She currently has a novel, Adventures Among the X Challenged, two short stories, “The Remember Woman of Una” and “Cloud City,” and a children’s book, The Troll and the Magical Music Box, in manuscript. She also has a new poetry collections in manuscript. At present, she is assistant to writer Ishmael Reed and is the managing editor for his online magazine, Konch. From 2002-2003, she served as a consultant on high school curriculum and classroom presentations for the National Council of Teachers of English. She is the secretary of PEN Oakland, a service organization for writers and publishers.

Marc S. Rodriguez is an associate professor of history at Portland State University and the managing editor of the Pacific Historical Review. Rodriguez has just published Rethinking the Chicano Movement (2015) with Routledge, which is an examination of the Mexican American civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s. His first book, The Tejano Diaspora: Mexican Americanism and Ethnic Politics in Texas and Wisconsin (2011), won the National Association of Chicano and Chicana Studies’ Texas Nonfiction Book Award. He is also the editor of Repositioning North American Migration History: New Directions in Modern Continental Migration, Citizenship, and Community (2004) and a co-editor, with An-

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thony Grafton, of Migration in History: Human Migration in Comparative Perspective (2007).

JiĜí Šalamoun has a PhD degree in “Literatures in English” from the Department of English and American Studies, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, Czech Republic. His dissertation examines the evolution of satire in the novels of Ishmael Reed and explores its connection to current developments in African American literature. His research interests are in the areas of Ethnic American literature and the contemporary U. S. novel. He teaches literature courses at the Department of English Language and Literature at Faculty of Education, Masaryk University.

Astrid Starck-Adler is professor emerita for Yiddish literature at the University of Haute Alsace (France). She had the first and only Chair for Yiddish in France. She holds the Agrégation, a PhD in Germanic studies from the University of Strasbourg and a Habilitation on Yiddish studies from the Sorbonne. She introduced Yiddish studies at the Universities of Haute Alsace and Basel. Her main fields of research include modern German literatures and old and modern Yiddish literature. She published her PhD on Ingeborg Bachmann’s novel Malina (Peter Lang, 1987), her Habilitation on an early Yiddish print in Basel (1602), Eyn shön Mayse bukh (Basle: Schwabe Verlag 2004). Uppsala University published her lectures at the Centre for Multiethnic Research, Yiddish: Continuity and Change (2007) and she edits a journal on Alsatian Yiddish, Les Cahiers du CREDYO (Mulhouse, 1995-). She is the head of the Research Centre CREDYO (Centre de recherche, d’études et de documentation du Yiddish occidental), which is part of ILLE. She published numerous articles on Austrian, German and Swiss literatures as well as on Yiddish literature in Europe, the USA and South Africa. Meili Steele is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina, and he works on philosophy and literature in the modern period. In addition to many articles, he has published four books: Realism and the Drama of Reference: Strategies of Representation in Balzac, Flaubert, and James (Pennsylvania State UP, 1988), Theorizing Textual Subjects: Agency and Oppression (Cambridge University Press, 1997), Critical Confrontations: Literary Theories in Dialogue (University of South Carolina Press, 1997) and Hiding from History: Politics and Public Imagination (Cornell UP, 2005). The essay in this volume is part of his book project on literature and public reasoning.

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Lea Stephan is a 2nd year PhD student at University Toulouse 2 Jean Jaurès. She specializes in American Studies. Her dissertation title is Social Policies and Racial Questions: From the Great Society to Obamacare. Her advisers are Anne Stefani and Françoise Coste. She teaches British and American Civilization at University Toulouse 2 Jean Jaurès and has a CDU.

V. Jean Tahdooahnippah/Linda Sue Warner (Ph.D., General Administration, University of Oklahoma) is a member of the Comanche Tribe of Oklahoma and has extensive experience and knowledge in indigenous evaluations using native ways of knowing as the primary framework. Her degree from the University of Oklahoma-Norman is in General Administration. She has over forty-five years’ experience working with American Indian / Alaska Native / Native Hawaiian peoples. Dr. Warner is extensively published with over two hundred articles, presentations, technical reports, books and book chapters that explore processes linked to cultural knowledge bases and pedagogy. She publishes fiction and poetry under her Comanche name, V. Jean Tahdooahnippah. Evelyne Troxler, born in 1950 in Mulhouse, is the daughter of a wellknown poet, writer, comedian, artist working in and for Elsasserditsch (a German dialect spoken in Alsace): Tony Troxler. She studied English and linguistics in Strasbourg and has worked as an English teacher for adults as well as at high school and university. She was also the head of a training school in the catering industry, then the head of the language department at Université Populaire, member of EAEA (European Association for the Education of adults), teaching at the same time language teachers how to use the theater in their lessons. From 1989 to 2001 she was a town councilor in Mulhouse, in charge of regional language and culture, i.e., bilingual French/German education. From 2001-2007 she was a Deputy major in Mulhouse in charge of regional language and culture as well as of the city’s partnership with UHA, our university. Being retired, she now teaches adults Elsasserditsch at Université Populaire in Mulhouse.

Fernando Valerio-Holguín holds a Ph.D. in Hispanic Literature from Tulane University. Currently he is a Professor of Latin American Literature at Colorado State University, where he won the John N. Stern Distinguished Professor Award (2013-2014). He has been invited to lecture and read poetry at international universities and institutions such as the Smithsonian Institution, the University of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, University of Antwerp, and the Library of Congress, among others. His publications include: Poetics of Coldness (1996), Post-Modern Banality: Essays on

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Latin American Cultural Identity (2006), and Latin American Literary Bolero (2008).

Paul von Blum is Senior Lecturer in African American Studies and Communication Studies at UCLA, where he has taught since 1980, following 11 years at the University of California at Berkeley. He is a longtime activist in the civil rights movement in the United States. He is the author of over 130 articles in art, cultural history, law, politics, and education. He has published nine books and his tenth book, Creative Souls: African American Art in Greater Los Angeles, will be out in early 2017. Among his books are works on political and social themes in European and American visual art, Paul Robeson, The Civil Rights Movement, and Racism and the Law. He has lectured widely throughout the world, including in Germany, the Czech Republic, Armenia, Canada, and South Africa. At UCLA, he has won several awards for distinguished teaching.

Natalia Vysotska received her Doctoral degree in American literature from the Institute of Literature, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (1998). Her current position is Full Professor, Head, Theory and History of World Literature Department, Kiev National Linguistics University. Scholarly interests encompass African American Literature with special focus on Black American Drama; multi/transculturalism in American Literature; theatre and drama in the USA. Major publications include three books (The Concept of Multiculturalism as a Factor in US Recent Literary History, Kiev, KNLU Publishers, 2012 [in Ukrainian]; The Unity of the Plural. Late 20th - early 21st cc. American Literature in the Context of Cultural Pluralism, Kiev, KNLU Publishers, 2010 [in Ukrainian]; At the Crossroads of Civilizations: African American Drama as a Multicultural Phenomenon, Kiev, KNLU Publishers, 1997 [in Ukrainian]); – and numerous essays, articles, sections in textbooks, and dictionary entries addressing various issues of African American theater and fiction, American fiction and drama, multiculturalism and ethnic literatures and published in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Poland, Germany, and the USA. She is Deputy Chair of the Center for American Literary Studies in Ukraine (CALSU), member of the European Collegium for African American Research (CAAR), of the Belarusian Association for American Studies (BAAS), and the Russian Society for American Cultural Studies (RSACS). She is furthermore a Fulbright Program Alumna (1995) and has been president of the Ukrainian Association of Fulbright Program Alumni (2011-2014). Her current work-in-progress is a project on Shakespearean Presence in Contemporary American Drama.