Showing papers in "Melus: Multi-ethnic Literature of The U.s. in 1981"

Towards a national indian literature: Cultural authenticity in nationalism

Abstract: Uncle Steve-Dzeerlai, which was his Acqumeh name-was not a literate man and he certainly was not literary. He is gone now, into the earth and back north as the Acqumeh people say, but I remember him clearly. He was a subsistence farmer, and he labored for the railroad during his working years; I remember him in his grimy working clothes. But I remember him most vividly as he sang and danced and told stories-not literary stories, mind you, but it was all literature nevertheless. On fiesta days, Steve wore a clean, good shirt and a bright purple or blue or red neckerchief knotted at his tightly buttoned shirt collar. Prancing and dipping, he would wave his beat-up hat, and he would holler, Juana, Juana! Or Pedro, Pedro! It would depend on which fiesta day it was, and other men and younger ones would follow his lead. Juana! Pedro! It was a joyous and vigorous sight to behold, Uncle Dzeerlai expressing his vitality from within the hold of our Acqumeh Indian world. There may be some question about why Uncle Steve was shouting Juana and Pedro, obviously Spanish names, non-Indian names. I will explain. In the summer months of June, July, and August, there are in the Pueblo Indian communities of New Mexico celebrations on Catholic saints' days. Persons whose names are particular saints' names honor those names by giving to the community and its people. In turn, the people honor those names by receiving. The persons named after the saints such as John or Peter-Juan, Pedro-throw from housetops gifts like bread, cookies, crackerjacks, washcloths, other things, and the people catching and receiving dance and holler the names. It will rain then and the earth will be sustained; it will be a community fulfilled in its most complete sense of giving and receiving, in one word: sharing. And in sharing, there is strength and continuance. But there is more than that here. Obviously, there is an overtone that this is a Catholic Christian ritual celebration because of the significance of the saints' names and days on the Catholic calendar. But just as obviously, when the celebration is held within the Acqumeh community, it is an AcquMELUS, Volume 8, No. 2, Summer 1981

Sui Sin Far/Edith Eaton: First Chinese-American Fictionist

Abstract: Both her photographs and her own testimony seem to indicate that Edith Maud Eaton (1867-1914) could have "passed" into the majority society with little trouble. Moreover, although her mother was Chinese, Edith was unacquainted with her mother's native language, except for a few phrases, during her early years; in fact, she had very little contact with Asians or Eurasians, except for her own large group of siblings. Yet when she began to publish stories and articles, she chose to write chiefly about China and Chinese-Americans, and she wrote under the nom de plume of Sui Sin Far (occasionally Sui Seen or Sin Fah).2 Such public identification with a group which was treated so contemptuously in America (as her autobiography vividly depicts) must be attributed to her allegiance to the principle of Confucius who "taught 'The way of sincerity is the way of heaven.' "3 Because of her integrity, Sui Sin Far earned the encomium, "one of the first to speak for an AsianAmerican sensibility that was neither Asian or white American."4 She was not a great writer; she has only one book (a collection of her stories) to her credit, but her attempts deserve recognition. She tells us that, after she began to write, she met "some funny people" who advised her to distance herself from reality. She scoffs:

The Immigrant Novel as Genre

Abstract: Defining the immigrant genre is an important critical task for two reasons. Both at the level of the literary text and at that of literary history, one must actually recover a genre that has been diffused under other kinds of novels (the pastoral novel, the farm novel, the radical novel, the city novel, and so forth) with the result that a distinct literary thread has been left out of the weave of American literary history. In effect, this means that the interpretative model of reality inherent in this genre has been ignored, that the impact of the genre has been muted, and that its components have been left unanalyzed. By defining the genre and, therefore, isolating it in relation to other types of novels, one can uncover a "new" narrative vraisemblance at the descriptive level of analysis since the process involves identifying the constants which codify a series of texts into a model. This, of course, also requires one to construct the history of the text or to insert it, morphologically, into the history where the text's coherence proves functional. In other words, to interpret a newly formed corpus of texts, one must go beyond the strictly descriptive level and study the englobing structures, the historical reality that accounts for the genesis of a genre. Here one is speaking about the homological relationship2 between text and social group and the conditions which account for the genre's new vraisemblance-that is, a pluricultural reality in which for the first time the immigrant appears in American fiction as historical protagonist. Furthermore, the task of defining a genre formally and of establishing its characteristic vraisemblance (primarily an ideological concern) necessarily requires one to revise and call into question a tradition of literary criticism that has excluded the presence of this genre. A popular part of this tradition, for example, has developed a consensus methodology whereby concern for synthesis has tended to overlook historical particularity and specificity. The result is the construction of a monocultural world view

Interview with Gerald Vizenor

Abstract: Gerald Vizenor, who is of Anishinable-French ancestry, was born in Minneapolis in 1934. He is enrolled on the White Earth Reservation but he is a member of the first generation of his family to be born off that reservation. After the death of his father, Vizenor lived with a series of foster parents. He attended public school in Minneapolis through the eleventh grade, completing high school while he was in the army. Following his military service, part of which was spent in Japan, he studied creative writing with Louise Bogan and Eda Lou Walton at New York University. He completed his degree at the University of Minnesota and did post-graduate work there in Asian studies and library science; he later studied at the Graduate School of Education at Harvard.

Two Chinese Versions of the American Dream: The Golden Mountain in Lin Yutang and Maxine Hong Kingston

Abstract: rives, of course, from the historical moment of Chinese immigration: the worldwide gold rush to California. Three Chinese immigrated to California in 1848; by 1851, there were 25,000; and in 1884, half of California's farm workers were Chinese.1 The phrase "Golden Mountain," therefore, summarizes the dream of the first Chinese who came to America in the pursuit of frankly materialistic goals-to get rich quickly and to retire to their native villages. However, once on the land, and despite their homing instincts and the exclusionary laws erected by the United States against them, many Chinese settled in America, and the original dream of materialistic fulfillment underwent changes, taking on nuances and different ideals. Two Chinese-American authors, the sojourner Lin Yutang and the native-born Maxine Hong Kingston, illustrate how the original dream has been nuanced and broadened as successive generations of Chinese Americans evolved from sojourners to immigrants, from settlers to natives. Lin Yutang's 1948 novel, Chinatown Family,2 deals with the assimilation of the Fong family in New York during the 1930s. Lin depicts a conflict between the materialistic dream that motivated the immigrants and the Confucian ideal of the family. The novel examines this conflict through the perspectives of several ways of thought: Christianity, individualistic materialism, Confucianism, and Taoism. Elsewhere, Lin has described the family as "the root of Chinese society"3 and a Chinese person as essentially "a member of the great stream of family life"4 (implying both a fixed and Protean identity through this Taoist metaphor5). But to seek wealth on the Golden Mountain is to be uprooted from this "communitas" of the family ideal and become a

The Culture of “Internal Colonialism”: A Marxist Perspective

Abstract: After reading the papers and panelists' remarks from the December 1980 MLA program on "Ethnic Literature and Cultural Nationalism," I feel that I should devote my comments to explaining why it is important to sustain continuity in theoretical work between the highly creative era of the 1960s and our own more conservative time. While I am unhappy about criticizing co-workers who are toiling in this beleaguered area of scholarship-a stillfragile discipline that deserves support especially because it remains suspect and unorthodox in the eyes of academia-I also believe that it would be a disservice to mute my conclusion that some of the contributions to the MLA panel represent a de facto throwback to modes of discourse that are too simple in light of our collective experience over the past twenty years, Frankly, some of the material in the MLA program fails to provide fresh, incisive analysis, and falls short of treating the cultural issues with the subtlety of thought that they deserve. Other contributions are designed to educate us about principles that are correct but already familiar. However, on the positive side, I am impressed by the degree to which the more provocative and penetrating interpretations-found in parts of the contributions by Alurista, Martin, Ortiz, and Saldivar, but especially in Vivian Davis's "Black American Literature: A Cultural Interpretation"derive logically from the kinds of radical cultural analysis first worked out in the 1960s and, in some cases, more fully realized in the 1970s. Reading these particular materials reconfirms my sense that the most appropriate framework for analyzing the literary practice of blacks, Chicanos, Native American Indians, Asian Americans, and Puerto Ricans remains a politicocultural notion of "internal colonialism." In what follows I will review this

Poetic Interpretations of Urban Black Folk Culture: Langston Hughes and the "Bebop" Era

Abstract: During the early 1940s, a revolutionary new movement in black music was underway that would change the shape and direction of jazz history for an entire decade. Bebop, as the new music was called, was first introduced to the public at Minton's Playhouse, a small nightclub on 52nd Street in Harlem. In the late hours of the night, a group of avant garde black musicians would gather at this unpretentious location to perform their history-making new sounds. Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie are listed by most jazz historians as the chief innovators of this new style of music.2

The (In)humanity of Assassination: Plays by Albert Camus and Kingsley B. Bass, Jr.

Abstract: One of the most fascinating but neglected black American plays of the sixties is We Righteous Bombers (published in Newu Plays From the Black Theater, edited by Ed Bullins, 1968). Although little more than a decade has passed since the play was first published, it seems a strange work today, trapped in its own time zone. It projects the mood of madness and doom felt by so many black Americans and radicals during the 1960s and is saturated with the atmosphere of dread horror that hangs about other art of the period such as Michael Herr's Vietnam classic Dispatches (much of which was written in the 1960s). We Righteous Bombers is a violent, death-obsessed work about racial warfare in the United States and about the kind of terrorist

Euroamerican Ethnic Literature in the 1980s

Abstract: The ethnic novel is generally the tale of the stranger and his clash with America, the tale of a subculture, the tale of ethnic transplants who maintain their ethnic characteristics, or the exploration of the old and the new countries; it is the attempt to effect a balance between two ways of life with the writer's psyche. It follows, then, that a writer who is "ethnic" does not necessarily write an "ethnic book." For example, some novels by Bellow (The Adventures of Augie March), by Kosinski (The Painted Bird and Steps), by Nabokov (Pnin) could be considered "ethnic," while other books they wrote are not.

Seduction of the Innocent: Portnoy's Complaint and Popular Culture

Abstract: One of Alexander Portnoy's earliest memories is of turning from a window out of which he is watching a snowstorm and "hopefully" asking his mother, "Do we believe in winter?"' Why "hopefully"? Because, despite its dangers, winter is the world out there-large, unrestrained-as opposed to the world in here-small, confined. The two worlds are not only separate, however; they are distinct, and the bases for the distinction are clear to him. The world in here is Jewish, the world out there is gentile, not only gentile but, inevitably and synonymously, American. Portnoy is sure that "the very first distinction" he learned from his parents was "not night and day, or hot and cold, but goyische and Jewish!" (83). Jake and Sophie Portnoy are not the Schearls of Call It Sleep or the Golds of Jews Without Money or the Glicksteins of What Makes Sammy Run?. They have choices and at one time, they chose to live in an integrated world: while Uncle Hymie "still" lived in a neighborhood of Newark that is exclusively Jewish, the Portnoys settled in Jersey City where "only the building [they] lived in was exclusively Jewish" (57), where young Alexander would have gone to school with and grown up among gentiles. Had the Portnoys continued to live in Jersey City, the mystery and allure of the gentile/American world might have been early dispelled and Portnoy's attraction to it, based as it is on myth and fantasy, might have been modified by reality. The Portnoys remain in Jersey City until that world out there reveals what Jake and Sophie have to conclude is its essential nature:

Cultural Consciousness in a Multi-Cultural Society: The Uses of Literature

Abstract: To address the subject of cultural consciousness in America, particularly within the frame of multi-cultural analysis, is to address an issue central to the history of the nation and an issue of immediate and continuing concern. For, in cultural terms, the United States is still in a relatively early stage of its development. While it is true that we can now make claims to old and enduring institutions-i.e., the Democratic Party as the oldest political party in the world (a statement often intoned at that party's national conventions), etc.-the fact remains that the United States, considered in a broader cultural perspective, is a composite of peoples-red, white, black, brown, and yellow-still in the process of self-definition. In fact, many of the peoples of this nation have only recently attained their cultural voices-some within the last hundred years, some much more recently than that, some just at the point of beginning or renewing. Thus, while our political institutions, particularly the magnificent constitution at the center, can be viewed rightfully as venerable contributions to human history, other elements in our national culture are still in stages of early evolution. It is, after all, not really all that long ago that historians described the very essence of American culture as residing in a small coterie of Boston Brahmins. The geographical opening-up of American culture which permitted the recognition of writers and artists of other regions of the nation began only a little more than a century ago-not a terribly long time in terms of human history. And, of course, the continuing massive shifts in population from the North and East to the South and West bring concomitant shifts in cultural definition. In addition, the voices of a distinct Hawaiian culture, the influx of millions of Spanish-speaking people, the continuing insistence by blacks on a discrete African-American consciousness, the resurgence of American Indian cultures, and other phenomena of an ethni-geographical nature all attest to the evolvement of new definitions.

Black American Literature: A Cultural Interpretation

Abstract: The vigor and volume of all the Black American literature produced during the '60s and '70s was described by Arthur P. Davis as the "New Black Renaissance." However, in dealing with the relationship between Black literature and cultural nationalism, there is a futility in trying to single out one period to examine as if it were a phenomenon unto itself. The more one recognizes that the rhythms of the black experience are cyclic and impacted by the politics, economics and the mood and tenor of the society, the more one appreciates the need to study black disciplines from an holistic approach. Black literature, like all literature, is dynamic, each stage evolving from earlier stages. David Haberly has provided a framework for an holistic approach to the study of Black American literature. Haberly defines the literature as "postcolonial." He explains that until the independence of certain European colonies in the 18th and 19th centuries, national literatures were "almost universally defined and classified in terms of the language in which they were written." The advent of independence changed that system: "The linguistic determination of literary nationality, then, was replaced by a definition based upon the concept of common experiences and traditions." As an example, Haberly cites American literature which, though written in English, is not the same as English literature. Further, he defines American literature as a post-colonial literature which developed after American independence and is based on American experiences and traditions. Likewise, Haberly classifies Black American literature as a postcolonial literature. He defines Black American literature "simply and basically as writings of inhabitants of the invisible nation." Acceptance of the existence of a Black American literature, Haberly continues, rests on the acceptance of a belief in "the hypothetical existence of a separate black nation within white America, composed of all those of African descent within the boundaries of the United States."

The Dream Turned “Daymare”: Barry Beckham's Runner Mack

Abstract: The 1973 National Book Award for Fiction produced what Eric Pace, writing in The New York Times Book Review, called "a curious case." After a protracted period of stock-taking and vote-shifting, the Award ended up being split between John Barth, for his novella sequence, Chimera, and John Williams, for his novel, Augustus.2 The Award deliberations were hard on ethnic writers; not a few experts had anticipated that Isaac Bashevis Singer's Enemies, A Love Story or Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo would come away with the prize. A second Black-authored novel, Barry Beckham's Runner Mack, received a 1973 NBA nomination, but the book was not generally acknowledged to be among the year's top contenders and virtually no scholarly attention has been paid to the novel since the first reviewers gave it richly deserved plaudits. The remarks that follow are intended to suggest the magnitude of this neglect and to bring Runner Mack into critical focus.

The YARDBIRD READER and the Multi-Ethnic Spirit

Abstract: In the late 1960s and the early 1970s, black literature was dominated by cultural nationalism, a form of black nationalism which assumed that race was the most significant factor in a black person's life and art was the best instrument for nurturing a black consciousness. Amiri Baraka, a central figure of the movement, proclaimed in 1966 that "Black People are a race, a culture, a Nation." However, by the mid-70s black writers such as Al Young and Ishmael Reed were beginning to envision literature as multiethnic instead of mono-ethnic. They realized that there was a kinship among the literatures of the people who were not part of the dominate culture; they were all excluded from the mainstream for being different. In 1972 Young, Reed, and others established the Yardbird Reader. Significantly, the first issue was not all black; it reflected the end of a mono-ethnic consciousness and published not only black writers but also Asian-American, Hispanic-American, and Euro-American writers; later issues published native American authors as well. In Yardbird Reader 5 (1974) Reed succinctly summarizes the magazine's goals:

Cultural Nationalism and Chicano Literature in the Eighties

Abstract: eighties, I would like to present a few preliminary considerations. The first of two points made here is directed toward the inherent limitations of criticism and those of the critic's role. The second point focuses on the freedom of the artist and the essential originality of the creative act. Critics, like other readers, are certainly entitled to speculate on the future of Chicano literature in the spirit of open dialogue and critical debate. However, it should be remembered that despite the many common interests and shared activities of critics and artists, a major distinction between the two exists. This distinction serves to mark an important difference between these two closely related-possibly, to a certain degree, interdependent-functions. Critics, as opposed to creative writers, are essentially past oriented. That is, the proper function of the literary critics is to respond to what has already been produced. Critics respond to what exists as a concrete reality and a "finished product." Creative writers, on the other hand, are future oriented in that they deal in actualizing the imagined, the inspired, and, most importantly, the unique and the individual-the new. What critics may have pronounced earlier about the limits of realism, magical or otherwise, in the early seventies applied only to what they had observed before the appearance of The Road to Tamazunchale by Ron Arias. Certain stylistics only as they had been known before Arias were exhausted. Arias created anew. Critics speak necessarily of the qualities and attributes of finished works-of ideas as they have already been expressed and embodied in completed works. This contrast between the world of past experience (a world shared by both artists and critics) and the specific content and style of an individual work highlights the special nature of creative writing, distinguished from that of criticism. While artists may become involved with and utilize unoriginal and possibly even questionable intellectual attitudes or concepts, the completed work is not necessarily flawed. Artists enjoy almost unrestricted freedom because the work ultimately exists in its own right; it must be approached on its own terms. For example, ideas and terms such

The New Jewish-American Literature

Abstract: A holy day celebrated at dawn on April 8, 1981, is emblematic of the endurance of Jewish-American literature. On that day, Jews recited the Blessing of the Sun in commemoration of the fourth day of creation. The sun assumes this position in the heavens only once every 28 years, so the privilege of reciting this blessing comes only two or three times in a lifetime. The prayer that reminds us of the world's first Wednesday is transmitted from one generation to the next. The form, retrieved only thrice a century, persists. This season, so auspiciously ushered in by the Blessing of the Sun, seems to be an era of the retrieval of indigenous forms. The most vital of these traditional shapes seems to be the hasidic tale. This type of story recuperates the earliest Yiddish genre, translating it into an American setting. It authenticates itself through the thirteen tales which Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav told to his disciples between the summer of 1806 and the spring of 1810. This great-grandson of the Ba'al Shem Tov validated his enigmatic fantasies in a sophisticated narratology, recorded by his disciple Nathan in 1815. Cosmic events, like the creation of the world, and its eventual redemption, are domesticated (Nathan says "garbed" or "veiled") in folkloric motifs. Their mystical armature, the Lurianic Cabbala, has been minutely explicated through the monumental researches of Gershom Sholem. They have never ceased exerting their fascination in translations by Martin Buber, by Eli Weisel, by Meyer Levin, by Arnold Band, and by Arthur Green.

Chicano Literature and Ideology: Prospectus for the '80s

Abstract: In the decades since its contemporary renaissance, the Chicano novel has contributed to a general reassessment of the cultural-historical creativity of Mexicans in the American Southwest. Generally speaking, the Chicano novel has provided a mediated truth about a culturally determinate people in a historically determined context. The truth of the real world that Chicanos experience has thus been made to inhabit literature. Readers and critics of the literature have assumed that to know this cultural truth one

A Danish Dream of America

Abstract: Within Scandinavian immigrant literature, the Danish branch is smallest and least known of all; but a two-volume novel by Danish-born Enok Mortensen is probably the best presentation of the American Dream in this fiction. These novels, published in Danish in the 1930s, give a broad picture of the Danish community in Chicago between 1912 and the Great Depression. They and their author deserve to be better known.

Mexican American Authors and the American Dream

Abstract: For Mexican American writers, the so-called American Dream of affluence, respectability, and happiness has held little attraction, seeming at turns an essentially harmless illusion and a cruel and insidious hoax. Coming from an ethnic group with a long experience of discrimination and deprivation, Mexican American writers have been disinclined to subscribe to a myth that regards success as lying within everyone's reach and that deems those who fail to achieve it as themselves some-

A Perspective on Chinamerican Literature

Abstract: Asian-Americans were greatly affected by the events and movements of the 1960s and early '70s: Black nationalism, Feminism, and the Vietnam War. Vietnam was particularly a catalyst because here again was a war in which Asian-Americans were fighting both with and against other Asians, as they had done in World War II and the Korean Conflict. The daily television news broadcasts, showing Asians starving, escaping from burning homes, wandering as refugees, and dying in mud, revolutionized this restrained, reticent, formerly silent minority. Chinese-Americans then began to turn away from the philosophy of Lao Tze, which had served them in good stead for generations and which Dr. Lin Yu-tang recognized and expressed in the following passage from his novel, Chinatown Family (1948):

Literature and Ideology

Abstract: Art is not always fair. While Randall's critic deserves ridicule for his parochialism, it is possible he offered his prescription less blatantly than the poet reports it. What if the critic actually said something like, "Great writing always transcends the limits of its historical time and ideology."? You can work up a pretty good argument along those lines, particularly the part about great writing going beyond ideology. After all, the set of ideas usually labeled Humanism in the academy has made a tradition of the search for timeless constants, and its sophisticated adherents can adapt to its purpose the example of Karl Marx, who persisted in his love for ancient Greek literature, not to mention the conservative Balzac. Ordinarily they would not approve Marx, but here he is just fine because he seems to set literature loose from its context. On a more vulgar level the idea of transcendent literature has currency among book reviewers. Even as they express appreciation of the achievements of ethnic writers, they can foresee an era when such fine writing will not require the critic to observe that authors speak the idiom of group or gender. Writing will just be writing. This idea is anathema to the nationalist for good reasons. And for bad reasons too. Again a bit of poetry is in order, this time a stanza William J. Harris quotes from Al Young's militant versifier 0. O. Gabugah:

American Jewish Writing in the Eighties

Abstract: The phenomenal critical and popular success of the American Jewish writers of the 1960s did much to affirm the legitimate presence of Jews in American literature. Moreover, the works of such talented writers as Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth also helped to establish our definition of American Jewish fiction in particular and ethnic literature in general. But as American Jews became more and more assimilated into the majority culture and the Jewish American experience appeared less distinguishable from any other, American Jewish writing became more an expression of individual artistry than of ethnicity. For the past several years, for example, Malamud, Bellow, and Roth have gone their separate literary ways, having little to do with the old themes of marginality. Their writing has not only been accepted by the majority culture, but has become an important component of that culture. As the '70s drew to a close, it was generally acknowledged that the so-called American Jewish "Renaissance" had also come to a close. But this was only partially true, for although it is apparent that the American Jewish writers of the '60s are no longer concerned with the traditional ethnic themes of alienation and identity, it is equally apparent to many observers that Jewish writing in America is currently undergoing an interesting and exciting transformation-one that now makes it necessary for us to reevaluate our expectations of both ethnic and American Jewish literature. Several decades of successful American Jewish novels not only legitimized that particular genre, but also established an intellectual atmosphere of security for those who followed. This freedom has enabled the present generation of Jewish writers to pursue a more eclectic course. Some have chosen to ignore their Jewish heritage; others are unaffected by it. A significant number, however, no longer concerned with the anxieties of belonging, or the need of "making it" in America, have taken an interesting step "backward," toward a more traditional connection with their Jewish religion, history, and culture. In so doing, they have created a new Jewish literature, one that goes beyond our traditional concept of ethnic writing and speaks directly to the particular concerns of Jews throughout the world.