Americ(K)An Dreaming

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Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming

Americ(k)an Dreaming

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming

Table of Contents

I. Paradigm Shifting (5-9)

II. Bridging Truth and Fiction: Faction? (10-18)

III. On Ethnofiction (19-37)

a. Ethical “Factious” Storytelling (19-25)

b. “Factious” Storytelling (26-28)

c. In Factious Storytellers We Trust (29-30)

d. What is Ethnofiction? (31-32)

e. Why Ethnofiction? (35-37)

IV. On Ethno-histo-fiction (38-60)

a. Ethno-histo-fiction? (37-43)

b. Ethno”histories” of the American Dream (44-48)

c. Ethno-histo-fiction, Dreamers, and Dreamworks (49-60)

V. Americ(k)a (61-88)

a. Americ(k)an Heterotopias (61-70)

b. A Tale of Two Americ(k)as (71-88)

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming

I. Paradigm Shifting

Today, like yesterday, anthropology finds itself in a state of crisis. It stares into its ever-dysmorphic reflection in the mirror: eyes never quite able to see clearly, mouth never quite able to find the right words—an ever-imperfect translation. It responds the only way it knows how: by being its own greatest critic.

Anthropology basks in an uncomfortable state of crisis, of endless self- problematising, to adapt to the present. After all, anthropologists have taken on perhaps the most complex task in the world: to study what makes us human. Just as the human race and its needs change, anthropology must be vigilant in its dynamism, ever-becoming, ever- paradigm shifting.

In The Structure of Science Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn (1962) introduces paradigm shifts as fundamental to scientific revolutions.1 A paradigm, broadly defined, refers to both an "entire constellation of beliefs, values, and techniques… shared by the members of a given community" and "one sort of element in that constellation, the concrete puzzle- solutions which, employed as models or examples, can replace explicit rules as a basis for the solution of the remaining puzzles of normal science.”2 It is both "sufficiently unprecedented" to attract adherents and "sufficiently open-ended", leaving problems for its practitioners to identify and resolve.3 While Kuhn spoke of scientific revolutions, his

1 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1970). 2 Ibid, 175. 3 Ibid. 5

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming framework applies to various inquiry-based disciplines with the goal of advancement. If anthropology ‘is’ a paradigm, and as anthropologists, we are always (and should be) pushing for paradigm shifts.

A paradigm shift is necessary when "rules (of a paradigm) no longer define a playable game."4 Its members are tasked with "conceive(ing) another set that can replace them", carpenters who "(re)design their instruments and (re)direct their thoughts" for this shift to occur so that novelties can emerge and discoveries can be generated.5 With an alteration of community perspectives, it follows that the "structure of postrevolutionary textbooks and publications" should also shift.6

Such revolutionary paradigm shifts begin when a community "rejects a one time- honoured scientific theory in favour of another incompatible with it."7 Kuhn asserts that it is often crisis—"the common awareness that something has gone wrong" that "precedes revolution", whether this crisis is brought upon by the community's work or new instruments.8 This produces a "consequent shift in the problems… for scrutiny" and standards of "problem" and "problem solution."9 The "world within which scientific work was done"10 experiences a transformation. Then, these paradigms will be composed of a

4 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1970), 15. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid, 6. 8 Ibid, 181 9 Ibid, 6 10 Ibid. 6

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming

"different bundle of experience that will thereafter be linked piecemeal to the new paradigm but not to the old."11 The paradigm has shifted.

Anthropology's history, though relatively recent, has been an endless waltzing— paradigm-shifting. I emphasise the verb component in Kuhn's term, as paradigm shifts result from a community's active "doing". He points out, “tacit knowledge" is learned by

“doing science” rather than by “acquiring rules for doing it”12. Time and time again, anthropologists have responded to our paradigms states of crises by reevaluating our ideological and methodological tool-kits and redirecting our ways of thinking, doing away with past theories and methods in favor of the new.

We have witnessed the dismantling of colonial Victorian anthropology's ‘exoticised

Other’ in favour of Bronislaw Malinowski's (1922) participant observation—ethnography with and of the everyday, only for Zora Neale Hurston (1927; 2018) to challenge this hierarchical dynamic in participant observation and use of folk fiction to convey truths about racial struggle. As it dipped into a Reflexive Turn, we watched Clifford Geertz (1973) tackle the notion of ‘universal culture’ head-on by advocating for subjective construction of cultural meaning through his use of interpretive modes and thick description. James

Clifford (1986), jumping in sync with anthropology as a literary genre while steering away from ‘fundamental truths’, offers his notion of ‘partial truths’, highlighting the ‘real’ truth- value of subjective, inherently incomplete accounts. Today, as anthropology encounters the challenges and opportunities brought upon it by new age media, it finds itself leaning into

11 Ibid. 12 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1970).

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming its next step: as new identities, voices, and issues surface, who can, or should tell these stories and how?

Before I became an anthropologist, I was a writer. Now wearing both hats, I am drawn to the anthropological discourse surrounding truth and fiction. The Reflexive Turn rendered the paradigm built on ‘universal’ truths incompatible by highlighting our subjective positionalities as ‘culture’ writers. While this put anthropologists' pens under an increasingly critical lens, the floor remains open for anthropologists to conceive novel approaches to storytelling, translating lived experiences, and ‘writing culture into being.’

Now more than ever, doing ethnography demands a set of new rules.

There is plenty of room for creative experimentation. Kuhn references Francis

Bacon, "Truth emerges more readily from error than confusion", suggesting that new theories, regardless of whether they are deemed suitable upon later evaluation, are ‘good’ in that they can aid the revolutionary process. Trials and errors are not only valuable to anthropological paradigm shifts because they ensure truths "do not evade us".13 They allow both practitioners and critics to join the anthropological waltz, evaluate our methods, discover ‘truths’ between the lines, and help us find our rhythm.

Revolutionary sociocultural and political movements have put our ideals and identities in the limelight, demanding that we contribute to these paradigm shifts by practising reflexivity in re-designing our methods and practices. To contribute to anthropology's paradigm-shifting, I explore the role of ethnofiction in walking the line

13 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1970).

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming between truth and fiction and writing ‘against’ and ‘with’ culture in exploring shifting understandings about ‘The American Dream’ and re-imagined ‘Americ(k)an Dreaming’. In the following experiment in ethnofiction, I fuse the ‘true’ with the ‘believable’ and

‘fieldwork’ with ‘poetry’ to challenge readers to problematise anthropological perspectives on biases, truth, and fiction in both sleeping and waking dreamworlds. I intend to show how this experimental mode of ethnography can effectively respond to ‘the American

Dream’—as a revered ideology or scrutinised myth, as an identity marker or cursed lucid dream, as put to the grave or as alive in as ghostly, residual breathing into waking and sleeping ‘Americ(k)an’ dreaming. Do our everyday lives challenge the dream? And, if so, how?

As this "intrinsically revolutionary process is seldom completed by a single man and overnight" 14. the aim of my thesis is not to provide answers. My greatest hope for my work is that it can serve as a route, prompting insightful seeking and critical questioning on the road to better, brighter, and perhaps more "truthful" (or believable) somewheres.

14 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1970), 7. 9

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming

II. Bridging Truth and Fiction: Faction?

In calling for paradigm shifts, Kuhn touches on ‘truth’ as a necessary point of contestation and motive behind thought revolution. The condition that “any description must be partial”15 grounds and drives theoretical advancement across disciplines. “History often omits from its immensely circumstantial accounts just those details that later scientists will find sources of important illumination” 16, Kuhn notes, remarking that while

“Observation and experience can and must drastically restrict the range of admissible scientific belief”, “they cannot alone determine a particular body of such belief.”17 He further asserts that “an apparently arbitrary element… is a formative ingredient of the beliefs espoused by a given scientific community at a given time.”18 The role and formative power of ‘arbitrary’, circumstantial accounts are what I intend to problematise and exercise in my experimental ethnofiction. Paradigm shifting is not the attempt to salvage ‘the truth’ or reach the ‘Real’. Instead, I argue, it serves to drive inquiry towards an illuminated road signposted with a multiplicity of ‘believable’ truths, continually being built by bricks of lived experiences.

What is truth? What is fiction? What is the value of believability and meaning concerning irrefutability? Are ‘partiality’ and ‘subjectivity’ synonymous with ‘arbitrary’? Are stories less valuable, or remarkably different, than ‘truthful accounts’? These questions force my anthropologist’s pen to a halt. A writer’s block, a point of confusion—precisely what

15 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1970), 18. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 10

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming

Kuhn feared. How do I write my way out? Do I have a responsibility to write with, against, or through the truth?

I interpret Clifford Geertz’s answer as “our responsibility as anthropologists lies in reading and writing meaning, not truth.” In Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture, Geertz suggests that understanding anthropology begins at unpacking “what doing ethnography is”—” an elaborate venture in “thick description.”19 A champion of culture as semiotic and not essentialist, he outlines culture as “a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge and attitudes towards life.” Moreover, “Culture is not a power to which ‘things’ can be attributed; it is a context that can be thickly described.’

20 Hence, Anthropology, or the analysis of culture, is “an interpretive one (science) in search of meaning.”21 With his comparison between a twitch and a wink, Geertz suggests it is the context, rather than the text itself, that is truthful, as much of what we observe and claim to be knowledge is mere constructions. Divorcing texts from their contexts would render them meaningless. What we should be searching for is not the truth in “social reality” but meaning constructed in inscription and “scholarly artifice.”22 Hence, understanding comes from microscopically examining our signature pens, the act of writing, and ‘doing ethnography’ as much as, if not more than, the words and accounts that come to life from our pens.

19 Clifford Geertz and Robert Darnton, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 2017), pp. 3-30, 6. 20 Ibid, 14 21 Ibid, 5. 22 Ibid, 16. 11

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming

Geertz describes culture as “ideational but not imaginary”23, emphasizing that symbols and ideas, rather than irrefutably truthful qualities, create cultural meaning.

Reading this, I found similarities to the way we discuss our dreams. What makes dreams real to us are not identifiable ‘truth markers’, but fragmented contexts, textured symbols, and interpreted meanings. In the same way, “cultural analysis is (or should be) guessing at meanings, assessing the guesses, and drawing explanatory conclusion from the better guesses, not discovering the Continent of Meaning and mapping out its bodiless landscape”.24 Still, as “cultural analysis is (and remains) intrinsically incomplete”25, we are tasked with considering what we do with, and how we communicate these fragments of truth. It is through sharing these symbolic interpretations that we can fulfil anthropology’s aim, “the enlargement of the universe of discourse”26, and aid its paradigm-shifting.

Considering how we handle and communicate these understandings goes hand in hand with reflecting on how we engage with ‘reality’ as ethnographers. Writing, Geertz argues, comes with the responsibility of making the “incorrigible assertion” that we have

“been there”.27 The writers of Crumpled Paper Boats (2017) liken Geertz’s take on thickly described writing to “a kind of mimesis”.28 They emphasise that ethnographic writing can be understood as imitating and representing, a collection of accounts that are merely

“sketches that doubt themselves”, where “the event remains elusive.” 29 If anthropological

23 Clifford Geertz and Robert Darnton, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 2017), pp. 3-30, 29 24 Ibid, 24. 25 Ibid, 29. 26 Ibid, 14. 27 Pandan, A., “Crumpled Paper Boats” (2017), 18. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 12

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming accounts are winks upon winks, meaningful in their construction and contexts, then there is indeed room for ‘faction’. Perhaps fictions, or ethnofictions, are more honest ways of asserting an ethnographer’s ‘being there’—an explicit assertion of this mimesis, the direct placing of a mirror in front of our pens. Our writing can be, in Marcel Proust’s words, a “real without being actual, ideal without being abstract.”30 “Ethnography is wagered on the possibility (of) a given reality’s difference from itself” 31, and who is to say that ‘factious’ writing is not best equipped to reveal this difference?

While admiring Geertz’ vigour for the symbolic, the idealist in me struggled with his devaluation of ‘real truths’. Especially since I use an experimental mode of ethnography, I wondered if I was indebted to ‘truth’ and ‘reality’. I turned to James Clifford’s Partial Truths in search of a less neo-nihilistic take on anthropological truth and meaning. Clifford picks up where Geertz leaves off on intrinsically incomplete cultural analysis by introducing

“Partial Truths.” 32 As “culture is contested, temporal, and emergent”33, there is an

“inherent partiality of cultural and historical truths”34, Clifford argues. Despite their partiality, these truths are ‘real’ representations of individuals’ lived experiences.

For Clifford, anthropology begins “with writing, the making of texts.”35

Anthropology is an art form. Hence, ethnography must not be separated from its “literary qualities.”36 Like art, ethnography requires the “skillful fashioning of useful artefacts” and

30 Pandan, A., “Crumpled Paper Boats” (2017), 10. 31 Ibid, 19. 32 James Clifford and George E. Marcus, “Introduction: Partial Truths,” in Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 1-26. 33 Ibid, 19. 34 Ibid, 6. 35 Ibid, 2. 36 James Clifford and George E. Marcus, “Introduction: Partial Truths,” in Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 1-26, 4. 13

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming

“is artisanal, tied to the worldly world of writing.”37 Bringing the Latin term “fingere: something made or fashioned; not merely making up, but ‘inventing things not actually real’”,38 he highlights that ‘artisanal’ ethnography makes these cultural accounts “true fictions”—“factions”. The “constructed, artificial nature of cultural accounts” (4) does not strip these makings of their truth values but begs for a more “truthful” look at the maker, who “cannot avoid expressive tropes, figures, and allegories that select and impose meaning as they translate it.”39 These tropes are also truth markers of the writer’s pen, making these subjective accounts real and believable. “Should not every accurate description be convincing?”40

Claude Levi-Strauss’s (1962) concept, “bricolage”, sheds more light on the idea of culture at the tip of our pens—culture as being composed immediately by elements ‘at hand’. “Bricolage” speaks of the relationship between the craft and its craftsman, the

“bricoleur”.41 The ideas that build individuals’ accounts and partial truths are part of

“instrumental sets”, which are used in the translations of culture anthropologists document. As “bricoleurs”, anthropologists are tasked with “addressing (themselves) to a collection of oddments left over from human endeavours… a sub-set of the culture.”42 Our craft can be described as culture-collaging, to piece together and re-assemble ethnographic ideas meaningfully and with care. Yet, as our world continues paradigm-shifting, as

37 James Clifford and George E. Marcus, “Introduction: Partial Truths,” in Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 1-26, 6. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid, 7. 40 Ibid, 4. 41 Lé vi-Strauss, Claude, “1: The Science of the Concrete,” in The Savage Mind (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), 11. 42 Ibid. 14

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming reflected in shifts in everyday life, our approaches to creating partial truth collages must also change. Ethnofiction is a way for us “bricoleurs” to respond to these cultural shifts by re-evaluating our ethnographic methods through highlighting our artisanship in our collage-making; as pieces of ‘life as we know it’ are added to our collection, our ethnographies must think through what used to be, embracing new ways of patterning constellations.

The Paper Boat Collective builds on Clifford’s notion of ethnography as “an artisanal endeavour”, remarking that it “call(s) attention to the rhythms of a practice, to the way that a body can come, over time, into proximity with something else being honed.”43 They liken ethnographic craft to a montage, which “can bring things into tension and let them spark.”44

The ethnographer possesses the power to “bring things that exist into new alignments, new arrangements, giving a new concreteness to objects and feelings below the threshold of perception” is two-fold. While it can create beauty, the “remaking and remaking of instances of life” is both “generative and destructive.” As anthropologists, we engage in a

“practice of working with words that are not our own”, and “exteriority and interiority

(are) put into play.”45 The question of ownership of these words and partial truths becomes muddled, “they weave between and among us.” 46 We have the power of “fingere”, “to mold, form, and shape” in our factious storytelling. What responsibilities come with this artisanal power? How do we exercise our craft, while avoiding perpetuating power imbalances between us and our collaborators?

43 Pandan, A., “Crumpled Paper Boats” (2017), 17. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. 15

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming

Borrowing Michel Foucault’s (1972) notion of “the archaeology of knowledge”,47 I propose that factious storytelling with care requires that as ethnographers, we use our artisanal power, namely performing a unique archaeology of ideas. Like Geertz, Foucault’s

‘archaeology’ advocates for thick description, “intrinsic description of monuments”48 —in my case of partial accounts. However, the latter uses, “The never completed, never wholly achieved uncovering of the archive forms the general horizon to which the description of discursive formations, the analysis of positivities, the mapping of the enunciative field belong…” 49to describe his concept. These concepts can be used to frame ethnographic writing. Firstly, Foucault places emphasis on the “never wholly achieved uncovering”, the

“description of discursive formations”, and “mapping” depicts an archaeological approach to unpacking ideas and ‘dealing with’ partial truths. Addressing his concept of archaeological ‘discourse’ 50 which points to a set of relations where ‘truths’ gain their conditions of possibility and ‘occurrence’ in our work, our job is not to dig for deeper meaning or ‘origins’, 51 or perform “geological excavations''52 from our collaborator’s accounts, as this could be an abuse of our pen’s power. Rather, it is to thickly describe “at their level of existence: of the enunciative function that operates within it” 53 the relational and positional context from which their truths emerge. Understanding this ‘discourse’, our

‘archives’ of collected partial truths with which we use to pattern collages are not static, but

47 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: an Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2009), 7. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid, 131. 50 Ibid, 25. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid, 131 53 Ibid. 16

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming relational and dynamic, a system reflecting the “formation and transformation of statements.”54

Ethnographies—strung together partial truths—undeniably echo discourses and relations of power, and I question what role collaborative storytelling can play to strengthen anthropological writing without stratifying respective parties.55 In Clifford’s eyes, “culture is always relational, an inscription of communicative processes that exist, historically, between subjects in relations of power”,56 and hence, accounts represent

“specific instances of discourse.”57 That the identities and realities of partakers in ethnography are negotiated, “multisubjective, power-laden, and incongruent”.58 If realities are negotiated reflections of power, I am inclined to question the implications of collectivity on ‘truthful’ storytelling and ethnography. Do these relational accounts provide more perspectives from which readers and writers can piece together their truths? Does adding up

‘partial truths’, or incomplete accounts, create a whole more ‘truthful’ than the sum of its parts—a truer true?

While I intend to explore the questions I have posed in this section more thoroughly in my ethnofiction, I believe pairing ‘collective’ with ‘fingere’, despite its possible dangers, opens an exciting avenue for creative and effective ‘truthtelling’. Clifford introduces the notion of “Cultural poesis—the constant reconstitution of selves and others through

54 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: an Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2009), 194. 55 Pandan, A., “Crumpled Paper Boats” (2017), 13. 56 James Clifford and George E. Marcus, “Introduction: Partial Truths,” in Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 1-26, 15. 57 Pandan, A., “Crumpled Paper Boats” (2017), 14. 58 Ibid, 15. 17

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming specific exclusions, conventions, and discursive practices.”59 Seeing culture as collective poetry and “ethnography as a hybrid textual activity”60 ascribes value to varied contributors and approaches to anthropological storytelling. This “inventiveness and subtlety” is essential to “fully reflexive ethnography.”61 Storytellers and ethnographers are forced to consider their positionalities, biases, and artisanal powers in ‘truthfully’ reflecting upon relational discourses. With my ethnofiction, I hope to demonstrate that this “post- literary”62 method of ethnography can be effective in conveying ‘real’ truths. I believe that sewing together lived, partial truths can create beautiful quilts of ‘faction’.

59 James Clifford and George E. Marcus, “Introduction: Partial Truths,” in Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 1-26, 24. 60 Ibid, 26. 61 Ibid, 23. 62 Ibid, 5. 18

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming

III. On Ethnofiction

Ethical “Factious” Storytelling:

How can fragments of truth be woven into what James Clifford (1986) has termed

‘factional’ storytelling? How do we, as anthropologists, navigate the line between ‘truth’ and

‘fiction’ when honing our artisanal powers to craft ethnographies that honor the truths of our informants? What are our privileges and duties to our informants/subjects/collaborators in handling and translating their truths? Do these duties conflict with our artisanal power? How can we committedly and responsibly knit together partial truths to form colorful and

‘factional’ constellated quilts? How can ethnofiction address these concerns?

The authors of Writing Anthropology: Essays on Craft and Commitment begin to explore these questions through reflecting on their own work. Carole McGranahan opens the book with “Writing and Writing Well”, addressing the roles and ethics of ethnographer, informant, and reader. She notes, “We write for, we write with, and we write against.”63

Immediately, the relations of power and artisanal, committed hand of the ethnographer are brought into focus. Ethical ethnography, for McGranahan, involves considering “Who makes up anthropological audiences? What audiences do we imagine, and how do they access our writing?” 64 The questions she asks point to relational expectations and needs of respective parties, rather than a one-size-fit-all model of what ‘ethical ethnography’ should look like. Ultimately, good and ethical ethnography is adaptive in responding to these relationships. An ethnographer must “know (their) writing needs and meet them.”65

63 Carole McGranahan, Writing Anthropology: Essays on Craft and Commitment (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 2. 64 Ibid, 4. 65 Ibid, 6. 19

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming

We must consider accessibility to our work for our varied audiences in terms of both reach and methodology. We have to consider how we write as much as how we reach our readers. How we write to reach must respond to what our readers expect from our work, which McGranahan frames as “to meet people, not just categories of them.”66 Yet, at the same time, we have to allow our readers to ‘meet people’ while fulfilling our responsibilities to our informants. What our ethical duties are to our informants and how we can best respect them remain key concerns in anthropology’s history; I can only best describe honoring this commitment as subjective, relational, and negotiated. Using ethnofiction, I set out to show how this method of anthropological storytelling, particularly

‘fingere’—inventing—can be used to address the needs of both informants and readers.

For the Paper Boat Collective, “The problem that anthropologists face is not a lack of reality, but what to do with it.”67 If reality is woven between the stories we hear and tell, then authentically evaluating and exercising ‘fingere’ in engaging with informants’ accounts is a way we can honour their multiple positionalities and truths. By creating fictional characters to anonymize informants in my storytelling, I can respect the privacy of my informants and exercise creative flexibility to invent tropes and allegories to convey truths in flux, and in turn bring readers in closer proximity with these characters as ‘real people.’

“Through artifice, you can get closer to the real.”68

Yet, even in exercising this creative flexibility, the delineation between a ‘fiction’ and

‘faction’ begs us to consider our obligation to our informants. Ethnofiction, which weaves

66 Carole McGranahan, Writing Anthropology: Essays on Craft and Commitment (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 6. 67 Pandan, A., “Crumpled Paper Boats” (2017), 20. 68 Ibid. 20

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming together ‘real observations’ with fiction, forces the writer to consider how to strike a balance between the two. “Discovering how one may strike a balance between a romantic urge for empathy, participation, and union, and a scientific insistence on detachment, observation, and neutrality is a key issue for literary anthropology”, Michael Jackson notes.

69 Striking this balance is not merely for the sake of anthropology, but for factional writing, where we constantly walk the line between honouring the ‘authenticity’ of our informants’ accounts and maintaining their anonymity. We may be tempted to disclose more details than agreed upon about our informants to make our stories seem more convincing, or fictionally romanticize a piece of context they had wanted to maintain ‘truthful’ in order to gauge a specific interpretation from our readers. Hence, in our storytelling we must never stop reflexively deliberating. We must constantly evaluate and discuss with our informants when exercising artisan power to “create order, identify causes, and connect facts”70 is appropriate, and when “communicating the experience of life as lived”71 without the embellishments would be a better fit.

In Archipelagos, the introduction to Crumpled Paper Boats, the Paper Boat Collective brings to light another aspect of ethics in ethnofiction: honoring ‘the real’. What does it mean to “honour the lifeworlds we write about? 72 and how is this tied to “do(ing) the right thing by people we write about?” 73 In attempting to answer these questions, the writers draw a line between authority gained through accuracy and authenticity, noting that the

69 Pandan, A., “Crumpled Paper Boats” (2017), 60. 70 Ibid, 61. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid, 13. 73 Ibid. 21

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming

‘narrow standard of accuracy’ used to evaluate anthropological writing concerns its proximity to the ‘real’— how closely and faithfully our writing represents a ‘world’ and translates this world to our readers.74 Yet, for these writers, the ‘truth’ experimental writing aims to honour, write towards, and convey is authenticity, rather than accuracy.

“Experimental writing, sometimes errant, at times even literary, can also know something of the world”75 Here, the writers ask us to consider our medium’s ability to frame authenticity through the lens of ‘conveying’ and ‘knowing’ through language, converging

“the literary and the lived” 76 in crafting factional ‘lived worlds’. Experimental writing aims to honor its own set of truths. Truths in experimental writing and storytelling are found in their craft, creation, life, and lived meanings. To truthfully honor our lived worlds begins at separating ‘authenticity’ and ‘accuracy’. To quote John Berger, “Authenticity comes from a single faithfulness: that to the ambiguity of experience.”77

How do we uphold and honor this authenticity? What does fidelity to the “real” look like? Faithfulness to the ‘authenticity’ of one’s lived worlds begins in a phenomenological discussion about the fluid and relative nature of truth as conveyed by experience, which speaks to the plight of the ethnographer’s work. Rooted in philosophical notions of subjective and objective human ‘lived realities’, phenomenological anthropology examines how one’s lived worlds and consciousness—the thread of mental and worldly experiences—are informed by positionality, by being ‘emplaced’ in a “world that always

74 Pandan, A., “Crumpled Paper Boats” (2017), 12. 75 Ibid, 13. 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid, 51. 22

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming outstrips the expanse of our being”. 78 We owe our partial truths and ‘lifeworlds’ to our inability to fully experience the world, yet the ability to fully immerse ourselves in experiencing aspects of the ‘world” our positionalities allow us to access. Robert Desjarlais and C. Jason Throop (2011) suggest that anthropological discussions of lived social and physical worlds begins at “embodiment”, framing the body as an “existential null”, “a locus from which experience of the world is arrayed.”79 One’s authentically ‘lived world’ is both existential and relational. Our ‘lived worlds’ are constellated with various pieces patterned from experiences engaging and negotiating with others, sociocultural, political, and economic dimensions of our world. Honouring the “authenticity” of our collaborators’ lived worlds begins at the dedication to faithfully translating their dynamic ‘life’ constellations and creatively depicting the ‘places’ from which they speak and experience.

Next, we must acknowledge that ethnographic writing is inherently altered, partial, and incomplete. “Ethnographies always alter and transfigure the worlds that motivate them, illuminating and occluding the lives and stories with which they are suffused”80 Even if we were to compile multiple accounts of ‘partial truths’, our writing would still be incomplete translation of ‘the real’. As our pens touch paper, our accounts become tales.81

“Fidelity to the real may consist in acknowledging what it will always exceed the accounts we are able to give of it.”82 Just as ‘authentic’ living for an individual begins at the realisation that their ‘realities’ are but slices of ‘the real’, their accounts and our imperfect

78 Robert Desjarlais and C. Jason Throop, “Phenomenological Approaches in Anthropology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 40, no. 1 (2011): pp. 87-102, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-092010-153345, 90. 79 Ibid, 89. 80 Pandan, A., “Crumpled Paper Boats” (2017), 14. 81 Ibid, 18. 82 Ibid, 23. 23

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming translations of them bring our writing one step further from ‘the real’. In actuality, ‘the real’ always amounts to more than the ‘here’s’ and ‘there’s’ we can document.83 The Paper Boat

Collective suggests an alternative to this dead end—to practice fidelity to ‘the real’ by

“taking part in it...rather than making a pronouncement on it.”84 We honor ‘reality’ by practicing authenticity in using dynamic methods to engage with and translate our own and others’ accounts of ‘being’, allowing narratives of our lifeworlds to be a part of ‘the real’. We honor reality by understanding and honing the revelatory power of writing, which effectively evokes the transformation of and shifts of our worlds. 85 In writing, we commit to “making and unmaking worlds” 86 through our pens, which “will be writing (their) own runes forever.”87 Perhaps honoring ‘fingere’ in our writing is the best and most powerful way we can commit to being “faithful to the real.”88

But what does employing “fingere” while being “faithful to the real look like”?

In After the Fact, Michael Jackson responds with, “fidelity and infidelity are not necessarily antithetical.” 89 He notes that this is because the objective ‘what’ and subjective

‘who’ are inseparable and mutually determining,90 yet at the same time, anthropology often assigns superiority to ‘objective’, ‘impersonal’ modes of ethnography, which reduce humans to “epiphenomenon” 91 in sociocultural, scientific, and political pictures. For

Jackson, factional storytelling may be one way of resisting this dominant ideology, where

83 Pandan, A., “Crumpled Paper Boats” (2017), 19. 84 Ibid, 23. 85 Ibid, 20. 86 Ibid, 5. 87 Ibid, 24. 88 Ibid, 20. 89 Ibid, 56. 90 Ibid, 54 91 Ibid. 24

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‘fingere’ is being “faithful to the real''. He asks us to consider storytelling as using its fabulatory and make-believe power to make ‘life’ more interesting than ‘true’ doctrines and

‘facts’. He dares us to reimagine fidelity in factious storytelling, “How (can) one can best create the appearance of truth or reality without abandoning the ethical and political demands that appearances may be judged by?” 92

I, for one, look forward to taking on this challenge.

92 Pandan, A., “Crumpled Paper Boats” (2017), 51. 25

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming

“Factious” Storytelling (How):

McGranahan describes Anthropology as “Theoretical Storytelling”, a “method of narration by both ethnographer and subject, a means of organizing writing, a way of arguing certain ethnographic points, and an ethnographically grounded way of approaching theory.”93 She explains that anthropological storytelling entails a narrative route, where characters, plots, and its purpose are made real through “thick description”.

“Thickly described” storytelling reflexively considers who tells these stories, what they are about, and how they are told, which allows the writer and reader to make apparent these stories’ penmanship, content, and form.94 This mode of storytelling also speaks of the storyteller, who’s narrative voice and position give these told stories power. 95 Moreover, these components are what ‘make’ stories in themselves purposeful. “We tell stories to get to the point, to make our points. We miss that the stories are the point. They are the getting, and they are the getting there.” 96

In Beyond Thin Description, Donna M. Goldstein likens storytelling to portraiture.

With our pens, we “provide deep, if fragmentary, biographical portraits of informants... keeping (these) portraits aligned with increasing levels of contextualization and with our theory and analyses.”97 What then, distinguishes ethnography from other art forms? The

‘texts’, or the portraits we paint of others through storytelling, are inseparable from their contexts: the anthropological plot, character development, and mise-en-scene. Following

93 Carole McGranahan, Writing Anthropology: Essays on Craft and Commitment (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 73. 94 Ibid, 75. 95 Ibid, 77. 96 Ibid. 97 Ibid, 81. 26

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Geertz’ advocacy for thickly describing ‘culture’, Goldstein suggests that by providing context to text and thereby meaning, we are able to create a unique form of intimacy in our narratives.98 Without feeding theoretical context into our portraits, we paint with our words, our readers are unable to conceive of our images as portraits of ‘real people’.

Context is what gives life to our characters, so we are brought up close and personal to the people they represent. Ethnofiction aims to use genre-bending techniques, which mix the anthropological with literary, to create more intimate and complete pictures of our collaborators through factious storytelling.99 Under the guise of it being a tinted window,

‘faction’ provides us its readers its own type of looking glass.

‘True’ stories and ‘factious’ stories are routes that inevitably overlap. ‘True’ and

‘factious’ storytelling both aim to create convincing, ‘authentic’, and intimate portraits. So where do we draw the line? Is there a line to be drawn? Can we bridge “true” ethnography and “factious” storytelling instead?

Jessica Marie Falcone addresses these concerns by introducing “The Faction

Spectrum.” 100 She references Geertz’ notion of there being an implicit boundary between

‘making and making up’,101 and suggests, “All writing is just a particular vintage of faction across a fact-fiction continuum.”102 The attempt to distinguish fact from fiction—two ends of the same stick—seems rather futile, and I argue, stems from one’s inability or unwillingness to ascribe value to ‘authenticity’ without ‘accuracy’ with respect to a

98 Carole McGranahan, Writing Anthropology: Essays on Craft and Commitment (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 81. 99 Ibid, 214. 100 Ibid. 101 Ibid. 102 Ibid. 27

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming perceived ‘real’. “Isn’t even the straightest ethnography always a little sinuous?”103 The real remains “a relation of difference”104 from the moment we put our pens to paper. Hence, as ethnographic writers, our time could be better spent daringly exploring the limits of what can be said through ‘fingere’ in our thinking and writing 105than condemning the inevitable presence of fiction.106 We can, instead build and walk on the bridge between ‘true’ stories and ‘factions’, boldly ‘fashioning’ to convey varying degrees of cultural truths. For “Facts are always still fashioned, and fictions are always still cultural.”107

103 Carole McGranahan, Writing Anthropology: Essays on Craft and Commitment (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 215. 104 Ibid, 230. 105 Pandan, A., “Crumpled Paper Boats” (2017), 228. 106 Carole McGranahan, Writing Anthropology: Essays on Craft and Commitment (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 214. 107 Ibid, 215. 28

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In Factious Storytellers We Trust (Who):

With this experimental freedom in our ‘factious’ storytelling, how then, do we prove ourselves as ‘trustworthy’ in the eyes of our readers? How do we gain credibility? “What are our strategies for trustworthy storytelling in a world that is often anything but reliable?”108

When considering these questions, my mind immediately jumped to Nick Carraway, the classic literary example of an ‘unreliable narrator’. Despite knowing of his reputation, I did not have to suspend my disbelief to be lured into the world of glitz and glam he spoke into being, to be hooked onto his every word. Why? Yes, Carraway is unreliable, but he is also believable. In fact, even critics would agree he is quite the storyteller. Fitzgerald wrote him into the novel for good reason—to demand that the reader doubt his character and read between the lines of his words in search for greater truths.

Trustworthy narration, in ethnographic writing, is not a wholly different story.

“Being an unreliable narrator is not the same as being unbelievable”,109 Sierra R. Craig argues. Even in “true” ethnography, anthropologists are unreliable narrators because their informants are unreliable. It is inevitable that stories get lost in translation, but the initial story has already departed from the factual “truth” of the experience. Moreover, an unreliable account—banking on a difference between what was said and done—should not discourage us from storytelling. We can capitalise on unreliable narration to draw the focus away from the ‘accuracy’ of one’s truth towards searching for ‘believable’ fragments of

‘authentic’ lived experiences embedded in factional stories. “When does the bitter taste of

108 Carole McGranahan, Writing Anthropology: Essays on Craft and Commitment (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 12. 109 Ibid, 96. 29

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming gossip—a form of unreliable narration—become the bite of lived experience?”110 Craig asks. “What veracity do stories gain by being told and retold?”111

The factional narrator does not have to choose between being a good storyteller and ethnographer. They begin at a point of unreliability to create believability, bearing no burden to write the ‘whole’ truth, and instead, conveying plural truths through ‘faction’.

Using their creative licenses, they are able to write the heart of the matter into focus, making their product “more compelling and more achingly true”.112 By employing our factional tools in ethnographic writing, we vow to our readers to “tell these stories the best

(we) can.”113 We ask that they put their faith in our craft and our promise to write convincing stories to earn their trust, echoing Carraway with, “I am one of the few honest people I have ever known.”114

110 Carole McGranahan, Writing Anthropology: Essays on Craft and Commitment (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 96. 111 Ibid. 112 Ibid, 213. 113 Ibid, 196. 114 F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2021). 30

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What is Ethnofiction?

In Genre Bending, Or the Love of Ethnographic Fiction, Jessica Marie Falcone provides two definitions of ethnofiction. The first, being “A narrative nurtured or inspired by lived experience”,115 and the second, a narrative “Unfettered from the bonds of the precisely observed.”116 An ethnofiction is like an unshackled vehicle fueled by experiential observations, guided by creativity and imagination that aims to convey artful truths. Its driver exercises its artisanal gears in crafting and travelling down its own invented route, one that “transcends disciplinary borders.”117 It is based on, not bound to, observed ethnographic accounts. It remains dutiful to creative invention and ‘true’ lived experiences, allowing the two to flow into, rather than contradict, each other, creating more powerful waves. Anand Pandian describes the impact of ethnofiction wonderfully, with “You think at first that these stories couldn’t be true, but then you lose your bearings in their intricate weave of hope and depravity, and your convictions begin to feel hollow.”118

Ethnofiction was namely practiced in filmmaking before it was in writing. In his surrealist ethnographic films, visual anthropologist and cinema verité pioneer Jean Rouch

(1960) examines the genre hybridity of fiction and non-fiction, popularizing non- traditional’ ethnographic modes in the anthropological field. He describes his filmmaking method as a “practice in flux”, responsive to and in dialogue with ‘real’ lived worlds. 119

115 Carole McGranahan, Writing Anthropology: Essays on Craft and Commitment (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 213. 116 Ibid. 117 Ibid, 216. 118 Ibid, 145. 119 Sjö berg Johannes, “Ethnofiction Genre Hybridity in Theory and Practice-Based Research” (dissertation, University of Manchester, 2009), 18.

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Drawing on elements of film including “projective improvisation”, collaborative narration, and cinema vérité’s revelatory camera, Rouch tests the capacity of his filmic reconstituted realities in revealing fragments of truths.120

Factional genre hybridity was the lifeblood of Italian Neorealism ethno-fictio cinema. Here, filmmakers manipulated film to negotiate the medium’s relation to reality with more profundity.121 Both observer and observed could exercise narrative control through staging and enacting their own realities in front of the camera. Fieldwork—script writing—was reflexive, and inter-subjective, where the pen could be passed from ethnographer to ‘protagonists’ who determined what was told of their story and how.122

This form of collaborative storytelling provided its spectators a “guided version of reality”,123 who witnessed the improvisation and script dichotomy. Filmmakers would pay tribute to the ‘real’ through embedded ‘true’ intimate details of individuals’ everyday life 124 in their hybrid collages.

For Rouch, Cinema Verité techniques were crucial to engaging reflexivity in ethnofiction. With surrealist methods, he created “hallucinatory (film) dreamscapes” merging dream, stage, and reality, where spectators could access partial truths in new ways. They provided spectators with illusions of witnessing the ‘real’,125 provoking their questioning of the veracity of ‘real’ truths. His camera, with an emplaced ‘third-eye’ served

120 Sjö berg Johannes, “Ethnofiction Genre Hybridity in Theory and Practice-Based Research” (dissertation, University of Manchester, 2009), 11, 41. 121 Ibid, 28. 122 Ibid, 31. 123 Ibid, 38. 124 Ibid, 26, 28. 125 Ibid, 33. 32

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming to reveal the filmmaker’s presence and positionality in these ‘documentaries’. 126 The cinematic “third eye” soon became a parallel in Geertz’ and Clifford’s work on reflexive ethnography, which drew on how anthropologists must underscore their positionalities in translating lived realities. Furthermore, ethnofiction filmmaking extends Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge discussion. Rather than digging for meaning beneath reality, the camera lens reflected its ‘performers’ metaphorical and nuanced ‘realities’ in inventive and disruptive ways. When ethnofiction endeavours expanded from camera to pen, anthropologists continued enriching the ‘factional’ discussion, and in their own ways, showed how “one (can) distort a thing to catch its true spirit.”127

Factious storytelling, or the method of narration employed in ethnofiction, aims to understand and explain the intricacies of our worlds.128 It simply approaches asking and answering anthropological questions by employing ‘fingere’ to extend, re-frame, and transfigure truths. It puts its writers, in crafting, and readers in the “in the presence of things that seem unreal yet remain unmistakably there.”129 Ethnofiction writers choose to make transparent the traversing of their factious pens from fabricated to the ‘facts’ precisely to draw attention to this space in between ‘reality’ and its translations—between a world that ‘is’ and a world that is told. In magnifying this space, ethnofiction writers are able to invite their readers to problematize the experimental medium to aid our discipline’s

‘paradigm shifting’, while distancing ‘real readers’ from factional characters to prompt

126 Sjö berg Johannes, “Ethnofiction Genre Hybridity in Theory and Practice-Based Research” (dissertation, University of Manchester, 2009). 127 Ibid, 22. 128 Carole McGranahan, Writing Anthropology: Essays on Craft and Commitment (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 220. 129 Pandan, A., “Crumpled Paper Boats” (2017), 144. 33

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming introspection. The reader is taken into a two-way-introspection, of the ‘paradigms’ and perspectives of these characters and how their thoughts could relate to their own.130

In this way, an ethnofiction is in itself a dreamworld. It is, like Ruth Behar describes,

“a heightened version of the real”, where “everything must be meaningful in present tense.”131 Despite this dreamworld coming to life at the ethnofiction writer’s pen, it also provides new avenues of engagement for the reader. The ethnofiction writer pushes the limit of their craft in creatively conveying and problematising ‘truths’ of lived experiences in their own factional worlds. The reader is challenged to reflexively navigate this contested, written space, evaluating their own positionalities, related experiences, and held ideals in their ‘lived worlds’. They are able to construct their own meanings in this hyperreal dreamworld while keeping one foot in the ‘real’ world, knowing that at any time, they can choose to ‘wake up’. “When life needs protection, needs cover, needs space to breathe and to change, there is fiction”,132 Roxanne Varzi expresses. Both readers and writers find solace in the world of ethnofiction, knowing they are protected as they embark on their next adventure.

130 Pandan, A., “Crumpled Paper Boats” (2017), 146. 131 Ibid. 132 Ibid, 22. 34

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming

Why Ethnofiction? “Why should an account of human life, which is, after all, the most interesting thing on earth, be rendered in such uninteresting ways?”133 asks The Paper Boat Collective. If human lives and experiences are cultural texts we read, then it is our duty as ethnographers to ensure the texts we craft about them are written well. As writing is an extension of the fieldwork it is based on and possesses its own magic effect; the way we write is just as important as ‘what’ and ‘who’ we write about.134 Without good writing, the magic and lifeblood of human experiences are drained, pooling into smudged ink that slides off our pages.

“We look to storytelling that imports life into the reader.”135 Ethnofiction, as a creatively charged medium, brings us into a lively world of faction and out of the ‘dead’ literal, allowing for the characters and stories on the page to feel real and convey their own truths. The Paper Boat Collective proposes a few key objectives of experimental writing.

First, it lends nuance and sensitivity in understanding those we write about in our ethnographic writing, allowing us to carefully and respectfully enter their worlds. Secondly, its experimental nature breaks conventions of representation and subjectivity, questioning what it means to be human and how our anthropological truths can be conveyed. Thirdly, it places faith in the ability of experimental and intellectually adventurous storytelling to communicate compellingly and with a broader reach. Finally, it aims to highlight that experimentation is vital to anthropology’s contemporary relevance, because it is apt for dynamically engaging with, and adjusting to, our shifting worlds.136 Essentially,

133 Pandan, A., “Crumpled Paper Boats” (2017), 11. 134 Ibid, 186. 135 Ibid, 187. 136 Pandan, A., “Crumpled Paper Boats” (2017), 8. 35

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming ethnofiction creates a factional two-way looking glass that brings us up close and personal with lived worlds and prompts us to reflect on notions of ‘truth’ and ‘being human’, allows us to exercise craftsmanship in making readable and convincing truths we hope to convey to wider audiences, and advocates for creative revolution and paradigm shifting in anthropology to re-establish its importance in and ability to adapt to our modern world.

Ethnography aims to intertwine image, language, experience, and life, by giving it a

‘body’ of words.137 Ethnofiction aims to do these things and more by speaking poetry, artistically and aesthetically providing insight to “bring a wider array of meaning to these than conventional wisdom offers” in its novel perspectives. By embedding livelihood in metaphor and simile, it provides such images to convey experiential nuances, complexities, and subtleties.138 It is not indebted to time and space, but the imaginary; it is not dutiful to rationality, but to endless possibility. Untethered, it is able to access “a whole landscape of deep emotion, unspoken inequalities, and conceptual complexity”, conveying “more elusive truths in experience”.139 Its tales re-pattern the natures and plots of our ‘realities’, allowing us to consider the many ways we act in and engage with the world.140

The Paper Boat Collective likens writing to a “paper boat… a charged form of voyaging.”141 Our experimental writing journey begins and ends with displacement, pushing ourselves and our readers to confront and become enamoured with plural realities. It displaces us, in turn allowing us to “stretch the limits of what is humanly

137 Ibid, 8. 138 Ibid, 85. 139 Ibid, 86. 140 Ibid, 7. 141 Ibid, 2. 36

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming possible.”142 In doing ethnofiction, we are embarking on a ‘high risk high reward’ endeavour of “making and unmaking worlds”,143 carrying our readers from world to world with the lifeboats we create with our pens. We can make waves with factious storytelling and challenge ourselves and our readers to think outside, past, and through what exists to what could be.

Ethnofiction allows us to ride the waves we create. Once we’ve breathed life into our characters and propelled their stories, we can put down our pens, and let the magic happen at sea.

142 Pandan, A., “Crumpled Paper Boats” (2017), 3. 143 Ibid, 5. 37

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IV. On Ethno-histo-fiction

Ethno-histo-fiction?

One can ask, is there a line between history and fiction? Similarly, is there a line

between ethnohistory and ethnofiction?

If all accounts of human life are told through a game of broken telephone, they must

fall on the spectrum of “faction”.144 As an individual’s account leaves their mouth, it is

passed on to an observer, who pens fieldnotes re-patterned into a full ethnography. At

each step of the way, there are inevitably fragments of truth ‘lost in translation’,

rendering a ‘truthful account’ factional. By being faulty and fragmenting, the pen

naturally counters the hegemony of ‘authentic’ truths. Its role and effect are especially

relevant in considering what constitutes History; there exists a spectrum that governs

‘tales’ and ‘history’, one not so different from that of ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’. In the same way

‘History’ is host to grand narratives,145 anthropological discourses are embedded with

‘totalising’ ideologies, who’s dictatorial agendas have rendered them ‘legitimised truths’

in the discipline. For this sake of my project, fact and fiction—used in experimental

ethnofiction— become their own sub-narratives, providing ‘localised’ lenses to analyse

partial truths and place them aside anthropology’s ‘grand narratives’ to re-imagine the

veracity of ‘true’ stories.

An ethnohistory makes sense of human life by using various methods to analyse

cross-disciplinary ‘historical’ documents, “encompassing both particularistic and

144 James Clifford and George E. Marcus, “Introduction: Partial Truths,” in Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 1-26. 145 Jean-Francois Lyotard and Niels Brugger, “What about the Postmodern? The Concept of the Postmodern in the Work of Lyotard,” Yale French Studies, no. 99 (2001): pp. 77-92, https://doi.org/10.2307/2903244. 38

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comparative scholarship… (embodying) productive tensions among historical,

anthropological, and indigenous perspectives on cultural and historical processes”.146

The ‘(ethno)history’ spectrum is contingent on positionality and audience. Who gets to

write these “ethnohistories”, about who, for whom, and how? “History” speaks more

about relations of power and intrinsic biases than it does an objective and Platonic

truth. Ethnofiction neither attempts to uncomplicate the validity of “ethno-history”, nor

does it claim supremacy over it. Rather, it challenges us to ignore imperfect translations

as ethnography’s Achilles’ heel, but as its opening for artisanal creativity.

In its development, the concept of ethnohistory has been re-constructed and re-

defined by a tug of war between disciplines. From anthropologist Anthony Wallace’s

The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca, which draws on archival and ethnographic

research on the Handsome Lake religion among Seneca Indians in the eighteenth

century and the notion of cultural revitalization to Richard White’s The Middle Ground,

which uses a historical framework to search for meaning in social and relational

commonalties, the structural and methodological differences in these neighboring

differences has been evident. Historians have chosen to create ethnohistories from

“crucial analysis of colonial documents”,147 while anthropologists give “credence to oral

history”, comparatively analyzing ‘contemporary cultural practices’ to make sense of

the past.148 Yet, these ethnohistories are all grounded in reflexivity and critical

146 Pauline T Strong, “Ethnohistory ,” 2015, pp. 192-197, 192. 147 Ibid, 194. 148 Ibid, 194. 39

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examination of their disciplines, united in their aim to analyse social, cultural, and

political dimensions and relations of past and present human life.

Among Anthropology’s newer contributions to ethnohistory is its push for a shift

from a synchronic to a diachronic view of human life, its subjective, ‘adaptive’ lens

eroded the notion of its studied communities ‘primitive’, as ‘static and timeless’.149

Ethnofiction pushes this shift a step further. Literary scholar M.M. Bakhtin’s notion of

the “chronotope”, 150 loosely translated to ‘time-space’, frames field discourses through

time and space configurations and how through these representations, disciplines

adopt their own narrative characters. The “chronotope” impacts our reading and

writing of anthropology and the American Dream in that it puts into challenges and

allows us to re-imagine the spatial and temporal dimensions of ‘grand’ and individual

‘true’ narratives. Without being grounded by ‘real’ time and space, ethnofiction is not

confined to speculating human life as ‘was’ and ‘is’. It pushes its writer and readers to

exercise creative imagination and utilise factional distance to understand human life as

ever becoming. It allows readers to dream of life and lifeworlds that could be. Despite

ethnofiction opening readers and writers to a new world of possibilities, given that it is

‘factional’ calls for reasonable doubt about its credibility.

An ethnohistory is constructed from data. The question of what constitutes data is

ultimately subjective and discipline specific, from quantitative studies in ‘hard sciences’

to interpretive accounts. In the case of ethnohistories, which emerge from different

149 Pauline T Strong, “Ethnohistory ,” 2015, pp. 192-197, 192. 150 F. W. Galan, Katerina Clark, and Michael Holquist, “Mikhail Bakhtin,” World Literature Today 60, no. 1 (1986): p. 136, https://doi.org/10.2307/40141318 40

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social sciences, data includes “colonial and institutional documents” and “published

narratives” gathered by a “selective and contingent nature of archiving”,151 “written

records in indigenous languages”, “archaeological evidence and artifacts”, oral

traditions and histories, and ethnographic research. Similarly, ethnofiction narratives

are constructed from a library of ‘true’ data. This includes primary verbal and written

accounts—in an informant’s own words, objects of meaning, the stories they tell, and

data gathered from participant observation traces, “situated within a particular

moment and particular ethnographic encounter.”152 In the gold we spin through

factional storytelling, we are bound to find bits of ‘truthful’ straw.

Pauline T Strong (2015) presents some important critiques of ethnohistories.

Firstly, that the disciplines that ethnohistories emerge from have “mixed

epistemologies” that ground their different “modes of explanation and validation” 153for

human accounts. The interpretations of human accounts and the way meanings are

made of it are subject to dispute and cross-disciplinary criticism. Not only this, the

“contingency and partiality of documentary sources”—the truth and relevance of these

accounts— would in themselves be frequently contested. The role and validity of these

oral histories and living memory in ethnohistories, and whether they are “supplements

or correctives to written documents”154 would also be a point of contention. Finally,

Strong questions “the ability of ethnohistory to deal adequately with plural

151 Pauline T Strong, “Ethnohistory ,” 2015, pp. 192-197, 195. 152 Ibid. 153 Ibid. 154 Ibid. 41

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interpretations, including tensions or contradictions between (and within)

archaeological, documentary, and oral histories.” 155

The experimental nature of ethnofiction allows it to address these issues by tying

together the observational approach of Anthropology, ‘translating lived experiences’

with the literary approach, ‘conveying meaning’ to highlight truths in human accounts.

That ethnofiction is grounded in ‘faction’ allows it to be propelled rather than limited by

bias and partial truths. ‘Primary’ data such as oral histories, living memory, and ‘true’

accounts are manipulated by the writer, who uses their artisanal power to handle and

use these truths as they see fit. The nature of ethnofiction means that these accounts are

not bound to, and values not determined by, their ‘true’ temporal and spatial contexts.

Ethnofiction is given the creative license to address tensions in contradicting disciplines

and accounts through faction, and in doing so, asks the reader and writer to

problematize its power and place in contemporary Anthropology. In distancing its

reader from the ‘real’, ethnofiction allows its writers and readers to navigate,

deconstruct, and scrutinize relations of power between the storyteller and their

characters that mirror those in their lived worlds. In other words, identifying these

issues in the scope of ethnofiction would help, more than harm its revolutionary

agenda.

The difference between ethnohistories and ethnofiction may lie instead in

understanding where they begin, how they run their course, and their eventual

destination. Ethnohistories begin by “close-looking” at socio-cultural texts. They run

155 Pauline T Strong, “Ethnohistory ,” 2015, pp. 192-197, 195. 42

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through contextual analysis, guided by disciplinary epistemologies, in linear search for

meaning and truths about human life. On the other hand, ethnofictions begin with

faction, creating what Clifford terms “routes”.156 Here, culture sets itself in motion,

displayed in pictures that change and reveal themselves along the way. Constructing

and traveling these hyperreal routes are twofold; each turn is written into being just as

the narrative approaches. Our fields spill into dreamworlds and our archives run

perpendicular to time. In place of high roads and roads less travelled are infinite points

on an ever-expanding map. In place of yellow brick roads to ‘truth’ built from cultural

texts are factional constellations creatively patterned from fragments of truth.

Ethnofiction goes somewhere, without needing to arrive. It takes its writers and readers

on scavenger hunts for meanings embedded between lines being written on the page,

only for us to find that its craft and route are its destinations.

156 James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 43

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Ethno”histories” of the American Dream Ethnohistories of the American Dream bring new considerations about the role of

“faction” to light. What constitutes a ‘historical’ account of the American Dream, something fundamentally intangible yet culturally and ideologically integral? Geertz’ notion of literary and semiotic data, “our own constructions of other people’s constructions”157 and Clifford’s notion of partial truths are key to unpacking this question. What the American Dream ‘is’ has remained a point of contention from its conception. Hence, more important to consider is the way that different American and ‘foreign’ individuals, based on their understandings of the American Dream, have engaged with it through time. Each of these accounts is a partial truth about an individual’s understanding of the American Dream as a construction.

They reflect their ‘truths’, observing its ideological effects in their personal lived experiences, or the social, cultural, and historical dimensions of their communities. When I asked my collaborators about their thoughts on the American Dream, many were quick to respond, “It’s not real”, “It’s dead”, “It’s a myth”, or “It’s toxic”. Yet, most, in some part of their response, alluded to its very real societal effect on a group at some point in time. This dialectical, in many ways ‘factional’ nature of the American Dream further muddles the line between identifying ‘history’ and ‘fiction’ in cultural texts written about it. Below, I explore a variation of ‘historical’, fictional, and experimental texts, to ask and answer the question:

Could these cultural texts be read as ethno-histo-fictions?

157 Clifford Geertz and Robert Darnton, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 2017), pp. 3-30, 10. 44

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Cultural historian Jim Cullen provides a provocative overview of the American

Dream in The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea That Shaped a Nation.158 He unpacks the plurality and overlapping meaning(s) of the “The American Dream(s)” through exploring its metamorphosis, shedding light on how these historical ‘dream(s)’ and its dreamers have reflexively inscribed meaning (on each other). Cullen weaves this into a discussion on ‘American identity’. Being ‘American’, he argues, has long been grounded on complex, shared ideals—freedom and mobility— since its people do not share blood culture. What ‘unites’ Americans cannot be traced back to geologically, religious, and linguistically distinct texts arising from (its lack of) ‘shared ancestry’, but rather, a continual reverence for ideological precedence. The “Dream(s)” reflect political, economic, religious, and social quests for fulfilment, and remain integral to the American historical arc despite and because of its dynamism. In tracing the root of American Patriotism from “The

Puritan Enterprise” to today’s “Dream of the Coast” as represented in Hollywood, of individualistic, lavished fulfilment, Cullen highlights the cultural significance of this pursuit which represents the ever-evolving ‘American’ perception of the relationship between effort and fate. In Cullen’s own words, “They had a dream. You don’t have to love it, but you’ll never really understand what it means to be an American of any creed, colour, or gender if you don’t try to imagine the shape of that dream—and what happened when they tried to realise it.”159

158 Jim Cullen, The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea That Shaped a Nation (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2004). 159 Ibid, 13. 45

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming

Morris Dickstein’s Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression,160 explores the American Dream as woven into the dialectic between aesthetic ‘escapist’ optimism and traumatic economic despair during the Great Depression. He describes this haunting and foreboding period with “the scene of a great cultural spectacle against the unlikely backdrop of economic misery.”161 He frames his exploration through investigating how the rekindled imagination of the American people in these times (1930s—) was manifested in the arts and society through history. Ultimately, he argues, through offering a dark, self-scrutinizing, cultural, historical retelling focused on periodical works, that the arts—literature, theatre, film, music, visual arts—were simultaneously escapes and embodiments of hardship, intertwined with myths, and a testament to individual and collective experiences that encouraged cathartic community dialogue and expression.

162More importantly, Dickstein’s work has called into question how the portrayal and circulation of the American Dream in art has shaped its image and significance in our

‘contemporary’ times.

In a similar vein, in American Culture and Great Depression (The Unpredictable Past:

Explorations in American Cultural History),163 Lawrence W. Levine provides context on the collective ‘psyche’ and identity formation of American citizens during the Great Depression.

He highlights various dimensions of the Depression decade, particularly the centrality of politics, its manifestation in everyday culture, and the shaped identities of the Americans.

160 Morris Dickstein, Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010). 161 Ibid. 162 Ibid. 163 Lawrence W. Levine, “American Culture and the Great Depression,” in The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in American Cultural History (Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 206-230. 46

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming

It is at this time, Levine argues, that because “the Americans did not enter the Depression as tabula rasa(s), but with ideals, values, and hopes”, that they “found themselves inhabiting a land whose cruel incongruities and ironies could no longer be ignored…

Everywhere there was want and yet everywhere there was plenty”.164 Where Americans

“were taught that they were architects of their own futures, masters of their own fate; that material success was a sign of virtue, and failure a sign of personal worthlessness”, individualistic materialism inevitably seeped into their notions of progress and made “fear and desire for security” particularly important to the Depression generation, who experienced volatility in the employment landscape. In summary, Levine notes, “popular culture throughout the Depression decade remained a central vehicle for dissemination and perpetuation of traditional values that emphasized personal responsibility for one’s position in the world”.165

Are these works ethnohistories? Why or why not? The socio-cultural, dynamic, media- circulated American Dreamscape Cullen paints diligently engages broader ideological themes. Both Dickstein and Levine depict, with detail, the Great Depression as the ‘context’ to the ‘text’ of the American Dream. Dickstein’s vivid exploration of citizens’ escapist experiences and artistically expressed ideals contrasts Levine’s pointed analysis of

American identity and ideals as inseparable from the socio-political. Yet, what interested me about these three works are their self-titles, ‘cultural history’, with each work, in their respective ways, struggling to grapple with ‘descriptive’ and ‘prescriptive’ analyses. Their

164 Lawrence W. Levine, “American Culture and the Great Depression,” in The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in American Cultural History (Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 206-230, 209. 165 Ibid, 218. 47

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming diverse narrative styles aside, the three texts claim histo-cultural conveyance as means of claiming some kind of ethnohistorical legitimacy. There is neither space for the reader to separate the individual from the collective ‘I’, nor space to analyse and make meaning of individual, lived accounts of the American Dream outside the analyses these writers glue to specific sociocultural, temporal backdrops. In essence, while these ‘historical texts’ can be read as cultural texts, they are not without ‘fiction’—positional biases of their writers and contextual limitations in made assertions, and hence cannot make sole claims to ‘History’.

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming

Ethno-histo-fiction, Dreamers, and Dreamworks

The “historical” texts were tremendously useful as references for intriguing literary and experimental portrayals of the American Dream. Richard Handler’s notion of “fiction of culture” suggests how fictional literary texts can too be read as ethnographic texts, embedded with cultural ideology, ethnographic position and representation, and intertwined socio-cultural realities. Drawing on traditional epics as “national narratives'' or

“monumented literature” akin to literary portrayals of ‘grand’ narratives such as that of the

American Dream, Handler argues that these texts can be read as ethnographies with insightful bearings on contemporary sociocultural concerns. These literary worlds can be read as examples of Sherry B. Ortner’s ‘key scenarios’166, whose narratives delineate pathways to navigate various cultural ideological landscapes. Furthermore, Handler suggests that fictional literary texts are suited for thematically and narratively corresponding to ‘real’ contexts and can be seen “as a means of opening anthropological theory to alternative strategies of narration, interpretation, and translation.”167

Ragged Dick,168 the novel by Horatio Alger that dubbed him “literary forefather of the American Dream” is a moralistic, rags-to-riches coming-of-age tale reflecting a reverent outlook on the Dream. Richard “Ragged Dick” Hunter, a homeless fourteen-year-old bootblack, is known for his uprightness—his “frank, straightforward manner”169, good

166 Sherry B. Ortner, “On Key Symbols,” American Anthropologist 75, no. 5 (1973): pp. 1338-1346, https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1973.75.5.02a00100, 1340. 167 Richard Handler and Daniel A. Segal, “Hierarchies of Choice: the Social Construction of Rank in Jane Austen,” American Ethnologist 12, no. 4 (1985): pp. 691-706. 168 Horatio Alger, Ragged Dick: Or, Street Life in New York with the Boot-blacks. (Michigan: John C. Winston Company, 1910). 169 Ibid. 49

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming looks, and generosity—and his profligacy. One day, he is hired by Mr. Whitney, a patron, to take his nephew Frank around New York City. Despite discovering Dick is an orphan, has had a “dismal” education and is illiterate, Frank admires his street smarts. They speak of public figures and their rags-to-rich stories, and the narrative becomes a fairy-tale, likening

New York’s buildings to palaces of kings and queens. With Mr. Whitney’s five-dollar bill in hand, Dick goes on a journey in pursuit of a “more respectful life”. Nearing the end of his journey, Dick and Frank take a ferry to Brooklyn, symbolic of their ‘climb’. Dick introduces himself as “Richard Hunter” and keeps his bootblacking box for commemoration. He returns home to find that Mickey has stolen his clothes and is "cut off from the old vagabond life which he hoped never to resume."170

Alger’s tale can be framed through the anthropological lens of a ‘key scenario’,171 an elaborating symbol that implies “clear-cut modes of action appropriate to correct and successful living in the culture”.172 ‘Key scenarios’ are valuable in their formulation of what it means to act upon culturally varied notions of “means-end relationships”. The power of

Alger’s story is magnified in its delineation of what the American conception of success— power and wealth— looks like and how it can be effectively achieved, signposting a culturally strategic and formulaic path with action steps and goals.173 Here, Alger’s tale becomes a manual in itself, embedded with cultural sequences of action individuals of his time could observe and re-enact in their daily lives.

170 Horatio Alger, Ragged Dick: Or, Street Life in New York with the Boot-blacks. (Michigan: John C. Winston Company, 1910). 171 Sherry B. Ortner, “On Key Symbols,” American Anthropologist 75, no. 5 (1973): pp. 1338-1346, https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1973.75.5.02a00100, 1340. 172 Ibid, 1341. 173 Ibid. 50

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming

The writer’s pen highlights his positionality as an everyday individual situated in

America; he casts his own perspective on the ‘cultural ideology’ of the American Dream into his fictional narrative. Protagonist Ragged Dick, who Alger describes as “our hero”, aims to through “sav(ing) from my earnin’s”, “grow up ‘spectable”,174 “ be somebody”,175 and is an idealized stand-in for the novelist himself, despite this never having been his own story.176

Alger’s positionality becomes an interesting and contested frame through which the reader can evaluate the veracity of his ‘idealised’ America and his relationship to this cultural strategy of success. Ragged Dick, written in the 1860s, illustrates Alger’s view of America as a place “made” by glorification of “moral character and hard work guarantee(ing) success”.177 When Frank and Dick stand afront the Fifth Avenue Hotel, the narrator remarks, “Though Frank did not know it, one of the queen’s palaces is far from being as fine a looking building as the Fifth Avenue Hotel. St. James’ Palace is a very ugly-looking brick structure and appears much more like a factory than like the home of royalty. There are few hotels in the world as fine-looking as this democratic institution.”178 Through cultural comparison, Alger uses the Fifth Avenue Hotel, a product of ‘reached’ success in New York

City, to supplant St. James’ Palace, to show how egalitarian America has outstripped

Victorian ideology.

174 Horatio Alger, Ragged Dick: Or, Street Life in New York with the Boot-blacks. (Michigan: John C. Winston Company, 1910), 25. 175 Ibid, 11. 176 Ibid, 7. 177 Ibid. 178 Ibid, 7. 51

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming

In his ‘key scenario’,179 Alger writes his protagonist into a literary “idyllic” space where, against all odds, the ‘moralistic’ character follows the “upward” trajectory and achieves the “Dream”. The writer signposts his formula of achieving cultural success with key stages in Dick’s character development throughout the story. At the start of the novel

Alger paints Dick in moralistic light with “Oh, I’m a rough customer... But I wouldn’t steal.

It’s mean.”180 Next, Dick climbs up the Dream ladder dressed in new attire—the next step on his formulaic path from his “rags” origins, “It was difficult to imagine that he was the same boy.” When “Ragged Dick” changes his name to “Richard Hunter” at the end of the novel, he is referred to by Fosdick as “A young gentleman on the way to fame and fortune.”

181 Along with discarding his “old” name, he trades his “ragged” lifestyle in exchange for the

“rich”; he has achieved the American Dream, reaching the apex of Alger’s ‘key scenario’.

Richard Reeves’ Saving Horatio Alger: Equality, Opportunity, and the American

Dream182 critically unpacks the relationship between the novel and its idealized portrayal of the American Dream. Reeves contrasts the reality of social mobility to the “Horatio Alger

(Dream) myth”183. He notes that “President Obama was not saying that every little girl does have that chance, but that she should. The moral claim that each individual has the right to succeed is implicit in our ‘creed’, the Declaration of Independence, which proclaims, ‘All

179 Sherry B. Ortner, “On Key Symbols,” American Anthropologist 75, no. 5 (1973): pp. 1338-1346, https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1973.75.5.02a00100, 1340. 180 Horatio Alger, Ragged Dick: Or, Street Life in New York with the Boot-blacks. (Michigan: John C. Winston Company, 1910). 181 Ibid, 27. 182 Richard V. Reeves, “Saving Horatio Alger: Equality, Opportunity, and the American Dream.” (2014): pp. 4- 24. 183 Ibid. 52

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming men are created equal.’”184 The Dream is based on the assertion that the U.S. “was to be a self-made nation comprised of self-made men” 185 Reeves distills Alger’s ‘key scenario’ into the formula, “equality plus independence adds up to the promise of upward mobility”,186

(6), noting that the writer makes a faulty cultural assumption of citizens’ equal capacity for physical and social mobility that underlies his narrative of progress. Wealth inequalities, largely stemming from inheritance, are a “direct threat to a society that aspires to be ordered by merit and marked by social mobility”,187 Reeves remarks. These present realities render the nostalgia that “once upon a time everyone ate the same food… raised their kids the same way” false.188

Susan Stewart’s On Longing189 suggests how Alger’s tale could be read as a narrative animating a version of America, feeding into reader’s nostalgia for a dreamworld that may not exist. Ragged Dick brings to surface the relationship between interiorising ‘miniatures’ and narratives, where Alger’s tale brings the cultural ‘Dream’ narrative to immediacy, “to life” and with displacement, with its locus being the nostalgia for—rather than a direct indicator of—an un-materialised ‘real’.190 Yet, the fictive allusion is so convincing that the

‘real’ it erases the presence and relevance of the (non-existent) ‘real’ it is meant to signify.191 This nostalgia for the ‘truth’ behind the magnified American Dream narrative in

Alger’s novel and ‘historical texts’ alike is not indexical but simulacral, traced back to

184 Richard V. Reeves, “Saving Horatio Alger: Equality, Opportunity, and the American Dream.” (2014): pp. 4- 24,5. 185 Ibid. 186 Ibid, 6. 187 Ibid, 22. 188 Ibid, 18. 189 Susan Stewart, On Longing (Duke University Press, 2012). 190 Ibid, 60. 191 Ibid, 61. 53

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming singular stories of success and literary tales that reflect the same illusionary ‘key scenario’.

The non-indexical nostalgia and the ways it is represented can be read as cultural texts, as ethnographic data in different ethno-histo-fictions. Reeves ends with, “abandoning Alger— giving up on the American Dream—is not an option… Equal opportunity must and will remain the quintessential American ideal. The challenge is to live up to it.”192 The critic’s work asks us to problematize Alger’s “American Dream narrative” and the role of its nostalgic pseudo-locus in his ethno-histo-fiction. What is the value of Alger’s individual truth and lived understanding of the American Dream, is it a wink to more? How does the ‘key scenario’ he creates and the non-referential nostalgia embedded in his tale affect his readers’ conception of the American Dream?

Kafka’s The Man Who Disappeared,193 a text that can be readily read as an ethno- histo-fiction novel emblematic of its author’s mind and pen, later re-titled Amerika after his death, represents his ideological travel to “America”, a place he has never been yet portrays so strongly as a hybrid setting. The term “Amerika” was used by Kafka’s friend, Czech writer Max Brod, to coin the late author’s visionary dreamland of heard accounts, and embedded fantasies and ideological critique of “Amerika” in his “unfinished” work. He ironically injects cynical protagonist Karl Rossman into this dreamworld and writes him into a literary adventure in his “American novel”194 that can be read as “an episodic picaresque tale, a bildungsroman or coming-of age novel, a story of emigration or exile, a

192 Richard V. Reeves, “Saving Horatio Alger: Equality, Opportunity, and the American Dream.” (2014): pp. 4- 24, 24. 193 Franz Kafka, The Man Who Disappeared (Amerika), trans. Ritchie Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 194 Ibid, xvi. 54

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming dark vision of urban civilisation, a self-reflective modernist novel, and finally an at times dryly humorous send-up of the American Dream”.195

Karl is exiled to America’s shores by ship, and is immediately fascinated with the

Statue of Liberty, a ‘key symbol’196 foreshadowing the rest of Karl’s journey. Before getting off the ship, Karl loses the box with his only belongings. He meets his rich uncle Senator

Jacob, who momentarily takes him into his life of luxury. This taste of wealth accentuates

Karl’s downfall. Soon, he finds himself adrift and duped by wanderers Robinson and

Delamarche, and is soon imprisoned by wealthy and obese Brunelda. He ultimately escapes when seeing an advertisement for a theatre in Oklahama looking for workers. He takes upon himself the N-word as his new identification when boarding the train, and while on it, is taken by the sublime vastness of “a high mountain range… dark, narrow, rugged valleys… people described with their fingers the direction in which they vanished…. Under the bridges along which the train travelled and they were so close that the breath of their cold made one’s face shiver…”197

Amerika can be read as a stark, witty antithesis to Ragged Dick. That Kafka refers to

Karl, his “favourite alter ego”198 as the “young hero”, and Alger refers to Dick as “our hero”, provides a fascinating anthropological context for comparison between the positionalities and truths of the writers in their cultural texts. Alger, an American novelist, inscribes his

195 Franz Kafka, The Man Who Disappeared (Amerika), trans. Ritchie Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), xv. 196 Sherry B. Ortner, “On Key Symbols,” American Anthropologist 75, no. 5 (1973): pp. 1338-1346, https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1973.75.5.02a00100, 1339. 197 Franz Kafka, The Man Who Disappeared (Amerika), trans. Ritchie Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 198 Ibid, xv. 55

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming citizen ‘insider’ position into his work, and glorifies the Dream. On the other hand, Kafka writes from a “sense of imprisonment or inner exile” rooted in his desire to craft an imaginary escape from his home Prague;199 he teases the “established tradition of German- language writing about Amerika, in which the New World was portrayed either as an idyllic refuge or as a dystopia.”200 He switches between interior monologue and unobtrusive third-person narration, deliberately putting the reader in a sense of displacement to problematize Karl and his own character and the novel’s ‘real’ happenings. Alger’s poverty- stricken insider, a social outcast, and Amerika’s protagonist Karl Rossman, a literal outsider begin and end on different pages.

While Alger’s ‘key scenario’201 depicts individuals whose moral character and perseverance are formulaic for their victory over fate, the classic ‘rags-to-riches’, Kafka’s characters are inextricably defenseless against apocalyptic fate—the individual is enslaved to ‘Amerika’s’ system, in all efforts cursed to immobility. Despite the two characters’ shared

“morals”, contrasting narrative arcs emplace the two characters in polar opposite

‘Americ(k)as’—one, ‘America’, a space fostering hope and mobility that enables Ragged

Dick’s achievement of success, the other, ‘Amerika’, a space of negation, stagnance, and suppression that ‘acts upon’ Karl. Reading Kafka’s cultural text, I was particularly fascinated by the implications of Karl’s drifting and enigmatic persona, “lack(ing) a strong

199 Franz Kafka, The Man Who Disappeared (Amerika), trans. Ritchie Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), xvi. 200 Ibid. 201 Sherry B. Ortner, “On Key Symbols,” American Anthropologist 75, no. 5 (1973): pp. 1338-1346, https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1973.75.5.02a00100, 1340. 56

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming sense of identity”202 and interactions embedded into Kafka’s take on the American Dream.

In some ways, Kafka crafts his own anti-‘key scenario’ in his narrative world to poke loopholes in the ‘American Dream’ with his own ‘realistic’ formula of immobility, disillusioning hopeful outsiders from their perceptions of America. Amerika’s hand would manipulating them and render them unable to realise their dreams. “It’s impossible to defend oneself in the absence of goodwill”,203 Kafka notes. Karl’s quest begins with realising the impossibility of the climb in the face of hostility, and soon becomes a drift.

The opening paragraph of Amerika immediately draws a line between Dick’s

America and Karl’s Amerika, delineating their contrasting perceptions of the dreamscape.

Karl Rossman is introduced as an exile, “sent to America by his poor parents because a servant girl had seduced and borne a child by him, saw the Statue of Liberty, which he had been observing for some time, as if in a sudden burst of sunlight. The arm with the sword now reached aloft, and about her figure blew the free winds.”204 The Statue of Liberty can be read as a ‘key symbol’ of ‘American’ cultural interest, and a catalyst of ‘unitary’ emotion.

Its cultural importance is interwoven with aroused feelings of patriotism, its symbolic relevance in ‘histo-cultural’ domains as seen in textbooks and art-media portrayals of

‘America’. More specifically, it can be categorised as a “summarizing symbol” in that it compounds, synthesises, and ‘stands for’ a body of ideas that represent ‘what it means to be

202 Franz Kafka, The Man Who Disappeared (Amerika), trans. Ritchie Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 203 Franz Kafka, The Man Who Disappeared (Amerika), trans. Ritchie Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), xvi. 204 Ibid, 1. 57

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming

American’ through demanding an “all-or-nothing allegiance.”205 Kafka’s ‘Amerikan’ Statue of Liberty, translator Mark Harman suggests, is a reference to Arthur Holitscher’s Blakean angel, who “reigns over ‘this’ island in a cloud of fear, whimpering, torture and blasphemy every single day that we spend in this free country”.206 The Statue can also be likened to

Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history”, with its face turned to the past, a catastrophic wreckage. A storm—progress— hurls him into the future, and the debris rises.207 When put beside these analogous angels, Kafka’s Statue is not liberated, but bound to the dystopian present and future realities perpetuated by Amerika’s oppressive past. “So high”,208 the first words Karl utters on the opening page, highlights the distance between the character and the Statue, the emblem of the American Dream. Despite Karl’s desire to continue watching the statue, “he found himself being pushed gradually toward the rail by an ever- swelling throng of porters.”209 Karl, an outsider, is stripped of his free will, with his first social interaction painting him as one “acted upon” by other characters in ‘Amerika’ rather than an “actor”, a dynamic sustained through the novel.

Karl’s (and Kafka’s) ‘Amerikan’ dreamscape directly contrasts ‘Dick’s American’ dreamscape. With Karl arriving an outsider by boat, separated from land, and Dick inscribed ‘inside’ America, standing right in front of the Fifth Avenue Hotel, the protagonists’ distinct positionalities are physically established, instilling in the reader the

205 Sherry B. Ortner, “On Key Symbols,” American Anthropologist 75, no. 5 (1973): pp. 1338-1346, https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1973.75.5.02a00100, 1340. 206 Franz Kafka, The Man Who Disappeared (Amerika), trans. Ritchie Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), xxii. 207 Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, 1942. 208 Franz Kafka, The Man Who Disappeared (Amerika), trans. Ritchie Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012),1. 209 Ibid. 58

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming understanding that their respective “Dream trajectories” fall on different scales. One cimb

“upwards”—from New York’s streets to Brooklyn—while the other drifts “towards” an uncertain end—a cross-continental journey to New York, then out into a ‘west’ that may not exist. Karl is not ‘emplaced’ with the privilege of realizing his “Dream(s)” in New York

City. At the end of the novel, he is on a train, still on his way.210

Both novels “end” with their protagonists taking on new names, with Dick taking on

“Rich”ard, and Karl identifying as the N-word,211 the notion of systematic stratification is explicitly brought into consideration. The ending of Amerika echoes the problem of a postponed dream Langston Hughes writes about in Harlem (A Dream Deferred).212 Ragged

Dick’s realization of the American Dream is put into motion from the first chapters, while

Karl’s dream begins on his train ride towards an elusive and mysterious dreamscape, “the biggest theater in the world”, which arguably represents “a social utopia”, or “a surreal version of the American dream.”213 The reader, not given the opportunity to witness Karl arrive at the theatre, distrusts the promise and credibility of the advertised Theatre of

Oklahama. On an even grimmer note, Kafka deliberately uses the same misspelling of

“Oklahoma” as Holitscher uses in his travelogue—“a photograph depicting a lynching with a group of grinning white bystanders”214 ironically titled “Idyll aus Oklahama” (Idyll from

Oklahama). This subtle ending wraps up Kafka’s anti-Alger ‘key scenario’,215 begging the

210 Franz Kafka, The Man Who Disappeared (Amerika), trans. Ritchie Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 211 Ibid. 212 Langston Hughes, Montage of a Dream Deferred (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI, 1995). 213 Franz Kafka, The Man Who Disappeared (Amerika), trans. Ritchie Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), xxv. 214 Ibid, xxvi. 215 Sherry B. Ortner, “On Key Symbols,” American Anthropologist 75, no. 5 (1973): pp. 1338-1346, https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1973.75.5.02a00100, 1340. 59

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming reader to question (doubt) whether Karl’s dream of the theatre through his train window will be realised, or if it will remain “a glass roof stretched over the street… violently smashed into fragments at every moment.”216

216 Franz Kafka, The Man Who Disappeared (Amerika), trans. Ritchie Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 60

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming

V. Americ(k)a

How is “the American Dream”, as a grand narrative, both projected onto, and stripped from, Americ(k)a? Does it reflect, distort, emplace or displace a dreamer’s sense of cultural being? What can Americ(k)a as one’s dreamscape look like and where it is able to go?

Americ(k)an Heterotopias:

What and where is Americ(k)a? This question often came to mind when engaging with ethno-histo-fictio texts on the American Dream. The Americ(k)a each writer alludes to seemed to present itself as wholly distinct places. Cullen’s Americ(k)a is made malleable by dynamic quests yet grounded in and crafted by a static set of ideals its people share. When imagining Dickstein’s Americ(k)a, I pictured it fitting right in with contemporary Berlin’s artsy, escapist underground bars, except further out West. Alger’s Americ(k)a seemed an ironic landscape painted from the roof of a dreamt Empire State Building of a man who had never truly seen the view. Kafka’s Americ(k)a was a semiotic mosaic, a dreamworld that its witty and pained crafter’s closeted dreams could not help but seep into.

Foucault’s notion of heterotopia frames Americ(k)a as “realms of cultural being”

(and storytelling).217 Americ(k)a, as a heterotopia, ‘is’ a place crafted as it is dreamed of, a

“counter-site”, “a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” without needing to have a location. This does not mean Americ(k)a doesn’t exist

217 Michel Foucault and Jay Miskowiec, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): p. 22, https://doi.org/10.2307/464648. 61

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming on a map, but its map is not its territory. Americ(k)a is plural, negotiated, relational and hence always arriving—a simulacra. It is both place and representation, in the real world and in our minds. Foucault highlights the relational properties of heterotopias by providing the example of a mirror, which “makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there”.218 Simply put, the relational properties of heterotopias allow them to function as simultaneously real and unreal, occupying place and in passing, allowing us to both see through and be here and elsewhere]. However, I propose here, that a window, or broken mirror, serves as a better analogy. Even on Americ(k)an land, we are never ‘there’; with the inevitable distortion of heterotopias, our translations of Americ(k)a are inherently incomplete.

In this manner, I propose that both the ‘American Dream’ as representational narratives and experiences, and America as a physical place are both what and where

Americ(k)a is—worlds within worlds that “suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reﬂect”. 219 The term ‘Americ(k)a’, I use here, reflects Americ(k)a as plural heterotopias on collective and individual levels. This can be tied to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of ‘becoming’, which accounts for the way individual elements, here heterotopias, are drawn into territories of each other to create something new.220 Borrowing their idea of “plateaus. Each of these heterotopias, their own plateaus

218 Michel Foucault and Jay Miskowiec, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): p. 22, https://doi.org/10.2307/464648. 219 Ibid. 220 Gilles Deleuze, Guattari Félix, and Brian Massumi, A Thousand Plateaus (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 62

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming

(chapters), would form their own relationships with other plateaus. 221 As juxtaposed relational spaces on which ideals and criticisms are cast onto and emerge from, we have one foot in the Americ(k)as in our head and the other in its physical space. As a counter-site

‘made’ of varying people-place-system interactions and bittersweet crafted Dream narratives about navigating dreamscapes, Americ(k)a is constantly negotiated, and is placed somewhere between romanticized ‘America’ and demonized ‘Amerika’. Because we cannot separate ‘Americ(k)a’ from what we believe it to be, our Americ(k)as can be said to be heterotopias upon heterotopias. Wherever we stand, our visions remain blurry.

Americ(k)a as a heterotopia can be better understood with a discussion of

Foucault’s six heterotopic principles.222 The first principle states that heterotopias are

“constants of every human group and culture”, whether they are crisis heterotopias or heterotopias of deviation.223 Americ(k)a is a crisis heterotopia in that it has historically served, for many, as an ideological and physical place ‘elsewhere’ than home, inextricably tied to negative freedoms. Whether Americ(k)a, to those in crisis, as place became their sanctuary or living hells largely depended on whether or not they were embraced by these sacred spaces, whether this heterotopia made real or rudely awoke them from the hopes they had about it. In some cases, Americ(k)a has also become a refuge for cultural

‘deviants’ . For individuals like myself, this ‘deviant’ emigration, often termed by the media as ‘Brain Drain’, when deconstructed beyond capitalist and production value layers, points to personal ideological incompatibilities with established norms. The notion of Americ(k)a

221 Gilles Deleuze, Guattari Félix, and Brian Massumi, A Thousand Plateaus (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 222 Michel Foucault and Jay Miskowiec, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): p. 22, https://doi.org/10.2307/464648. 223 Ibid. 63

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming as ‘elsewhere’, as advocated for in this first principle, reinforces the inseparability between our individually and collectively conceived Americ(k)as and its physical place. It can be catered to Othered individuals that project their hopes onto an ‘elsewhere’; they arrive in

Americ(k)a believing it is intrinsically a better place, without having asked Americ(k)a to keep any promises.

As an outsider, I wonder whether, for individuals like myself, Americ(k)a as

‘elsewhere’ can ever ideologically and ontologically transition into ‘here”’. This consideration also affects marginalized American citizens, who have been Othered and continue to struggle with not ever having been accepted as Americ(k)a’s own. They receive the short end of the relational stick, ostracized and told they do not belong here—made foreign with no other place to call home. Foucault’s fifth principle states that heterotopias are isolated and penetrable, with a presupposed system of opening and closing. He addresses the problem of human sites earlier in the text, proposing that it moves beyond

“wondering whether there will be enough space for men in the world”, but a matter of

“relations among sites.”224 Through its history, America has boasted about its mythical freedom and liberty for all while building physical and ideological walls of exclusion. And for those who are able to enter, they are not necessarily included. Foucault notes, “Either entry is compulsory, or the individual has to submit to rites and purifications.”225 The individual who hopes to be taken in by Americ(k)a has to first, enter Americ(k)a, and then perform ‘Americ(k)an-ness’ to a degree that allows them to be taken in. What does it mean

224 Michel Foucault and Jay Miskowiec, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): p. 22, https://doi.org/10.2307/464648. 225 Ibid. 64

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming to be Americ(k)an enough? Is the notion of being American an identity with indexical reference, or is American-ness a performed simulacrum?

The relational nature of these heterotopias as physical and ideological realms for cultural being can be read through ‘Americ(k)an’ identity on individual, collective, and place levels. Foucault’s second principle states that heterotopias serve different functions in society. 226 An idea highlighted by both Wenders and Baudrillard in their criticisms of

Americ(k)a and the American Dream, explored below, is how these heterotopias are negotiated with respect to how the country’s ‘History’, or lack thereof, influences how it projects its own identity. Both argue that Americ(k)a is always desperately contemporary and projected; its citizens religiously hold on to the indexicality of their ideals in fear of the

Dreams they dream are emptied simulacra. In Cullen’s short history of the American

Dream, he unpacks this idea by expressing how due to the country’s short history and population of immigrants, American citizens’ dreams and ideals are what form and inform people. Hence, in each historical period, ‘contemporary’ sociocultural and economic quests are driven by the arc of individual and collective American Dream narratives that have in themselves shifted while forcing the functional evolution of Americ(k)a. Its citizens, over time, begin to project their ideals and construed narratives of ‘The American Dream’— heterotopias upon heterotopias—onto Americ(k)a. Is Americ(k)a real, or is it simply whatever its citizens need it to be? And if it is ‘real to’, at what point will this bubble pop?

226 Michel Foucault and Jay Miskowiec, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): p. 22, https://doi.org/10.2307/464648. 65

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming

Unravelling this question takes us to the fourth principle, which describes heterotopias’ complex relationship with “hetechronies”, or slices of time. Here, Foucault suggests, “the heterotopia begins to function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time.” 227 Yet, in the case of Americ(k)a as heterotopias, it is important to consider the implications of a clean break from time.

Foucault describes two types of heterotopias: heterotopias of infinitely accumulating time, such as archives, and temporal heterotopias, such as festivals. Returning to Clifford’s partial truths, considering each person’s Americ(k)a as a partial truth—a book in the library of

Americ(k)as stacked on each other, where with time, it “never stops building up and topping its own summit” and “expression(s) of an individual choice”228 are no longer detectable. As in Jorge Luis Borges’ Library of Babel, 229 a narrative about a ‘total library’ dystopia which warns about the despair excess can bring. Americ(k)an heterotopias-upon- heterotopias can erode the search for ‘true’ truths of America, further shedding light on its simulacra. Those like Wenders and Baudrillard would doubt whether the Americ(k)a really exists underneath. On the other hand, Americ(k)an heterotopias could be read as attempting to be temporal and transitory. The notions of being in America or being

American do not depend on ‘remembering’ time. Baudrillard depicts the New York

Marathon with, “This entire society, including its active, productive part—everyone—is running straight ahead, because they have lost the formula for stopping.”230 Instead of

227 Michel Foucault and Jay Miskowiec, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): p. 22, https://doi.org/10.2307/464648. 228 James Clifford and George E. Marcus, “Introduction: Partial Truths,” in Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 1-26. 229 Jorge Luis Borges et al., The Library of Babel (Boston: David R. Godine, 2000). 230 Jean Baudrillard, America (Milano: SE, 2009), 40. 66

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming conquering space to orient themselves in time, they exhaust space. 231 One can wonder whether the mass hysteria of ‘progress’ and moving ‘towards’ is rooted in fear of what remains—or would not remain—if one were to look behind.

Is there a there there behind Americ(k)a’s image in the rearview mirror? Foucault’s third principle describes heterotopias as “capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible.”232 Americ(k)an heterotopias, guarded by the American Dream narratives, are made “sacred spaces with deep and seemingly superimposed meanings.”233 Do these Dream narratives superimpose

“Americ(k)a” as a defined/definable place? Foucault provides the example of a theatre, which brings a “whole series of places foreign to one another” onto a rectangle on stage.

Take Americ(k)a as the subject of a play, and the American Dream as the grand narrative underlying the script. The juxtaposed sites of Americ(k)an thought and identity are folded onto the staging and mise en scene; somewhere along the way, it is no longer clear what the play is about. Its viewers take home, from the layered narratives and theatrical grandeur, their ideas of what Americ(k)a ‘is’. Without suspending their disbelief, they take the

Americ(k)an heterotopia as it is presented to them as real. They cannot separate this from its reflection in their broken mirrors.

In his Road Movie trilogy234 and written work on the American Dream, Wim

Wenders paints an extensive picture of Americ(k)a that can be framed through Foucault’s

231 Jean Baudrillard, America (Milano: SE, 2009), 21. 232 Michel Foucault and Jay Miskowiec, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): p. 22, https://doi.org/10.2307/464648. 233 Ibid. 234 Wim Wenders, Alice in the Cities, 1974. 67

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming second example, of heterotopia as a cinema where “at the end of a 2D screen is projected a

3D space.”235 In his films, Wenders explicitly draws attention to the heterotopic, distorted lens, where his protagonists encounter “Americ(k)a” through their dream-driving and are protected from Americ(k)a’s projected slideshow of city lights and billboards through the windshield.236 As a preface to a more in-depth exploration of Wenders’ cultural texts, I tie the filmmaker’s notion of America as “land of images, land for images” to the above cinematic analogy. What his protagonists need protection from is Americ(k)a and its grand dream narrative as simulacra, for if one were to truly look closely, the “3D image” of

Americ(k)a at the end of the 2D screen is merely a cleverly guised 2D projection of what

Americ(k)a perceives itself to be—of heterotopias upon heterotopias. These mass

American dreamscapes are compiled in a Borgean library of ‘Americ(k)a’237 who’s glut renders its ‘Real’ elusive, and treated as un-patternable plateaus.238

As Americ(k)a problematizes and puts its identity as plural heterotopias into reflexive inquiry, we are brought to Foucault’s sixth principle, which states that heterotopias “have functions in relation to all the space that remains”,239 with the first function being to “create a space of illusion that exposes every real space” and the second to “create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect …”240 If anything, Americ(k)a as a counter-site is characterised by its certainty—a certainty of itself and its role in

235 Michel Foucault and Jay Miskowiec, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): p. 22, https://doi.org/10.2307/464648. 236 Wim Wenders, Alice in the Cities, 1974. 237 Jorge Luis Borges et al., The Library of Babel (Boston: David R. Godine, 2000). 238 Gilles Deleuze, Guattari Félix, and Brian Massumi, A Thousand Plateaus (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 239Michel Foucault and Jay Miskowiec, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): p. 22, https://doi.org/10.2307/464648. 240 Ibid. 68

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming relation to other places, through its exercise of power through propaganda. With this,

Americ(k)a’s identity struggle has been mediated by its awareness of its power and leveraging of its heterotopias upon heterotopias, moulding itself into a seamless space of illusion. Previously, many accepted this illusory space—one guarded by the constitution— as its created new, real space, a real America. Each “Americ(k)an” grand narrative and identity soliloquy strengthens this illusion that dupes its admirers, who do not dare doubt or expose its real space, or space-lessness. Yet, considering Marc Auge’s notion of a “non- place”,241 Americ(k)a flaunts its non-placeness, with ten second advertisements and celebrity billboards distancing the dreamer from the image of emplacement. It exposes its illusion with its teeth-whitened grin.

The idea that Americ(k)a is able to obscure its simulacrum under claims of ideological authenticity, deceiving both insiders and outsiders alike is explored by

Baudrillard and Wenders in their 20th century works, which form a type of neo-ethno- histo-fictions of Americ(k)a. In my ethnofictional work that follows, “Americ(k)an

Dreaming”, I extend this conversation by exploring through individual accounts how the age of new-media and protest, particularly the past two pandemic-stricken years, have forced Americ(k)a to expose itself and dismantle its heterotopias. Even as Americ(k)a meets itself and its people in their eyes in a moment of reflexivity, it attempts to change and move forwards without looking back. The American Dream may have long been dead, but as individuals today rebuild their cultural identities, they cast new heterotopias into the

241 Marc Augé. Anthropological Place; From Place to Non-Places: An Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. (New York: Verso, 1995). 69

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming ocean of always-already heterotopias; in doing so, they find themselves “Americ(k)an

Dreaming.”

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming

A Tale of Two Americ(k)as:

Like Karl Rossman, I arrived at American shores—Logan Airport— a dreamer. I saw

America as the “Land of the Free”, not for its grand narrative or boasted reverence for John

Locke, but because being an outsider rendered my betrayal impossible. I simply wouldn’t matter enough to America to be its patriot or Judas Iscariot. Untethered, I cast my pillow and lucid dreams onto billboards, only for them to drown in bottomless wishing wells.

Like Karl, I am terrified of professing my love for America because I know it could never love me back.

When engaging with Baudrillard’s America and Wenders’ American Dream and Road

Movies Trilogy, I was made aware of this shared sentiment—the inscribed lack of belonging— informed by our shared outsider relationships to Americ(k)a, which in turn shaped the direction these ethno-histo-fictions of Americ(k)a traveled. Baudrillard tackles spatial and cultural America on a more sociological scale, making acute yet somewhat harsh observations about its carefully curated, theatrical, certain, and projected ideals and identities. On the other hand, Wenders portrays his criticisms of America in a more anthropological, self-reflexive way, creating film-routes to map out his journey around, dissatisfactions with, and realisations in, America. Wenders’ work is more explicitly like an ethnofiction, in that he puts his words and insights, expressed too in his writing, into the voices of his film’s protagonists. Still, within my positionality, I found examining these outsiders’ works, their craft, and fruitful factional dreamworlds, wonderful references for my own examination of ‘Americ(k)a’, its heterotopic dream narratives, and to frame my position and pen in working with the dreamers in my ethnofiction.

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming

Jean Baudrillard’s America242 is an insightful, experimental cross-examination of

Americ(k)a in spatial terms, written in response to America as it was in a certain period; the style of his ethno-histo-fiction has served as a fascinating source of inspiration for my own. In his writing, he creates a virtual map for the reader, namely exploring whether

America is “a place to be found or created.”243 He poetically fashions a route towards two key contrasting sites: New York, semiotically read as America as an enculturated space, and

“absolute, Astral America”, where still, we find an empty yet enchanting, and often mobile, gaze. Albeit brilliantly crafted, Baudrillard’s perspective as an outsider is evident throughout his text, where his musings about Americ(k)a are often penned in comparison to his ideas about European cultural imaginaries. America concludes with Baudrillard reiterating his view of America’s sociocultural and spatial identity as one concretized by certainty in the power of its ideological simulacra, with, “Over there even theory becomes once again what it is: a fiction.”244 Still, his exasperation does not result in a tone of pure condemnation, he acknowledges the power of America’s projected identity as symbolized through its screens and uses the power of its simulacra. America does not die alongside its

Dream narrative, rather, new Americ(k)an Dreaming can cast and project new billboard narratives and ideologies that fuel America along its road toward perpetual becoming.

Baudrillard opens by using nostalgia to describe the time frame, or timelessness, used to read America as a plurality of layered cultural texts. “Nostalgia born of the immensity of the Texan hills and the sierras of New Mexico: gliding down the freeway,

242 Jean Baudrillard, America (Milano: SE, 2009). 243 Ibid, xi. 244 Ibid. 72

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming smash hits on the Chrysler stereo, heat wave. Snapshots aren’t enough. We’d need the whole film of the trip in real time, including the unbearable heat and the music.”245

Baudrillard’s words raise two key notions about what it means to know and experience

America, which he continues to address in the next chapters. The first, is that America is a rolling recording impossible to capture (an idea which Wenders, in his own work, grapples with through filmmaking). Here, both Clifford’s partial truths and Foucault’s heterotopia are implicated. Even if one’s dreamed America were to be recorded, it would be taken from a specific position; from one’s whole film, only incomplete, partial truths—angled snapshots—could be excised from it. Next, for Baudrillard, experiencing America would be to watch it on video, in real time.246 He next makes a comparison between the desert unfoldingand film’s timelessness.247 I argue that the characteristic timelessness Baudrillard suggests indicates that heterotopic America and its dream narratives are not tied to time or history, rather, they form a dynamic projection that traces its perpetual-becoming248 and adjustment to the contemporary. Furthermore, Baudrillard’s idea of watching a video in real time highlights that these dream heterotopic lenses are simulacra; that America is best experienced in front of a television renders it inseparable from the heterotopic medium through which it is viewed, and its timeless dream narratives to put on replay, simulating real liveness without buffer.

245 Jean Baudrillard, America (Milano: SE, 2009), 1. 246 Ibid. 247 Ibid. 248 Gilles Deleuze, Guattari Félix, and Brian Massumi, A Thousand Plateaus (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 73

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming

Is there a difference between History, which is “full of ruse and cunning”249 and ethno- histo-fictions, with its special effects that also ‘storytell’ by spotlighting partial truths and positionalities? For Baudrillard, with America’s “overpowering abstraction” and

“hyperreal”,250 the two are sound cultural texts. He highlights the breathtaking imminence of Salt Lake City, which lacks a past to reflect its image,251 highlighting a hyperbolic projection of “Great Lake City”, with no grand index. Moreover, he emphasises the theatricality of all these spaces. The fascinating aspect of these spatial descriptions is the clearly heterotopic lenses through which these American spaces were encountered, leading these spaces—which I term spaces of superlatives—to live in the shadow of their projections. Furthermore, these descriptions effectively intersect with Baudrillard’s ethno- histo-fictional description of the deserted, performed spaces of Hollywood greenscreens on which dream narratives could be projected, where “extraordinary sites, capitals of fiction become reality”.252

The epitome of these extraordinary factional sites, for Baudrillard, is New York,” the city that is heir to all other cities at once.”253 He describes the city as “real America”, home to “the Commodore bar, with the finest deco in the world, where Fitzgerald, they say, drank every evening. I drink there too.”254 The culturally curated New York is one Baudrillard responds to with performativity, “when in New York, doing as the Americans do.” The

“special effects” of the city, found in its “verticality”, “wall-to-wall prostitution” in its

249 Jean Baudrillard, America (Milano: SE, 2009), 2. 250 Ibid. 251 Ibid. 252 Ibid, 4-5. 253 Ibid, 14. 254 Ibid. 74

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming electric speed and advertisements, create a “magical sensation of contiguity and attraction for an artificial centrality” translated into a culturally coded sense of density that invites a unique and saddening form of social interaction—that of solitude, eating, driving, standing alone.255 He questions the nature of human relationships, and whether the need for them is supplanted with the “sheer ecstasy of being crowded together 256 ...its sacrifice of humans to pure circulation.”257

For Baudrillard, New York’s ecstatic crowdedness is irreparably tied to its space, namely its curated verticality, which juxtaposes Astral America’s horizontality. “Space (in

America) is the very form of thought”,258 he remarks. Here, Baudrillard argues, the

“arrogant” urban architecture of the metropolitan city is its chosen form of engagement with the space, dictating inhumane interactions. “Anti-architecture… the wild, inhuman type that is beyond the measure of man was made here—made itself here—in New York.”

259 What exactly does ‘more human’ architecture look like? How would this framework then dictate more ‘humanness’ in the interactions between New Yorkers and with their cityscape? Baudrillard’s response to this issue establishes his positionality, and longing for home on the intimate, narrow historic European streets.260 Conversely, he describes

American streets as filled with turbulent, kinetic, and cinematic energies.261 Implicitly,

Baudrillard’s comparison makes a case for the return to authenticity, and with his

255 Jean Baudrillard, America (Milano: SE, 2009), 15. 256 Ibid. 257 Ibid, 23. 258 Ibid, 16. 259 Ibid, 17. 260 Ibid, 18. 261 Ibid. 75

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming contextual discussion, it become possible to tie his definition of ‘human authenticity’ as the return to his ‘European’ experience with intimacy, reminiscence, and historically coded

‘traditional’ social interactions. In a similar vein, he likens America, and in this case New

York, to a “stage”—or in my interpretation ‘America’, or ‘New York’, as an immersive theatre production. The relationship between American citizens and America as a space is one of electric and mass-hysterical performativity, where citizens are tasked with

“produc(ing) the permanent scenario of the city”262 to creatively simulate ‘liveliness’.

Putting this into perspective, being American in New York, for Baudrillard, is being an apt performer and compliant curator. Not only this, it requires, borrowing Foucault’s terms, creating and performing “America” so well that the heterotopic lens seems to disappear— an America, like a reality show, that curates and performs liveliness and a strange semblance of truth so well that one could believe it to be authentic. “The entire world continues to dream of New York, even as New York dominates and exploits it.”263

Using these spaces as a starkly contrasted gateway into what he terms Astral

America, Baudrillard describes these spaces as “not the social and cultural America, but the

America of the empty, absolute freedom of freeways.”264 He searches for an authentic (yet forever elusive and illusory) America, only to find its hyperreal, horizontal America, which desires and realizes itself in its mirages and its disappearances.265 Navigating Astral

America occurs through driving, “a spectacular form of amnesia”,266 which allows for

262 Jean Baudrillard, America (Milano: SE, 2009), 18. 263 Ibid, 24. 264 Ibid, 5. 265 Ibid, 6. 266 Ibid, 10. 76

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming

Dreamers can encounter the amnesic dazzle of America from the front seat of their cars— mobile theatres. “All you need to know about American society can be gleaned from an anthropology of its driving behaviour”,267 Baudrillard adds.

In these Astral spaces, America becomes increasingly hyperreal, “a utopia which has behaved from the very beginning as though it were already achieved.”268 Here, more than dreaming, dream-drivers are fascinated by images (of America). Yet, when these dream- drivers encounter real people, places and things on the road, this spell is inevitably broken.

Hence, Baudrillard proposes that we should dream of and encounter America as a hyperreality, whose simulacra adorn its space as “the power museum for the whole world.”269 Rather than entering America to search for its indexical truth, we should approach “America (as) a giant hologram”, where “the immanence of desire on (its images) … push its dreamers to “enter the three-dimensional dream… and America as fiction”.270 Furthermore, as its spatial landscapes hold signs and metaphors, Baudrillard asks the reader to not search for America’s authenticity in its indexicality, but in its performativity— “culture as a mirage and as the perpetuity of the simulacrum.”271

Essentially, Baudrillard asks us to ‘read’ America as a theatrical, semiotic work of faction— uniting New York and Astral America in their flawless performances. He continues, “The

American desert is an extraordinary piece of drama”, performing and signifying emptiness to adhere to a cinematic vision of its own.272 Suspending our disbelief, we are able to

267 Jean Baudrillard, America (Milano: SE, 2009), 57. 268 Ibid, 28. 269 Ibid, 27. 270 Ibid, 30. 271 Ibid, 66. 272 Ibid, 73. 77

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming traverse spatial and cultural America balancing our emic and etic perspectives, one foot immersed in its projected “lucid and hallucinogenic”273 heterotopias and the other in our own lived experiences of ‘America’.

What then, is, or are, America’s “true identities”? What are the truths that build its ethno-histo-fictions? Baudrillard’s answer, addressing America’s sociocultural and spatial identities, is a direct nod to James Clifford’s concept faction. Describing America as “the land of just as it is”,274 where its people “have no sense of simulation… since they themselves are the model”,275 Baudrillard remarks, “For me, there is no truth of America. I ask of the Americans only that they be Americans.”276 By being the “original version of modernity”,277 America does not feel the need to answer to History, and hence “has no identity problem.”278 Because its identities are modelled and performed after itself, questioning what ‘America’ is does not concern a search for, or return to the ‘authentic real’. Baudrillard ties this discussion to self-referentiality, describing America as an ideal city of tinted glasses with “no interior/exterior interface… the glass facades merely reflect the environment, sending back its own image… making them much more formidable than any wall of stone.”279 The reference of America’s “true” identity is its projection; like a

Polaroid photo, his America is an “ecstatic membrane that has come away from the real object.”280 Hence, ‘America” can be best understood through examining its plural

273 Jean Baudrillard, America (Milano: SE, 2009), 59. 274 Ibid, 28. 275 Ibid. 276 Ibid, 27. 277 Ibid, 82. 278 Ibid. 279 Ibid, 62. 280 Ibid. 78

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming heterotopias—expressed in everyday dreaming and dreams—it is built on yet designed to deceive.

So what then, is True of America? Its spatial and sociocultural identity, curated through a “literal transcription into the real”,281 opening up a “true fictional space”. 282

Cinema, speed, modernity, and driving, Baudrillard argues, are ‘authentic’ cultural markers .283 His “America” is factional to its core. Its authenticity lies in the act of realizing, rather than conceptualizing, its ideals and identities,284 birthed through “materializing freedom, but also the unconscious”,285 which is exported as a dream narrative to those not in the place (America) to realise those ideals. This is not an issue for America, which is certain in its factional identity, for “Americans believe in facts, but not in facticity”.286

Hence, its “hyperreal vitality”,287 allow it to turn these ideas into reality with conviction, and theatrically enact these ideals. This conviction allows it to progress and reframe their

“perceptions of reality different from our own”, and through cinematography and advertising,288 “canonize the way of life through images”.289 Its dreamlike ideals have given it a stable factional identity independent from its indexicality.

As outsiders, we can view its retained, practically uncontested ideological power as

“special effect”, part of its “advertising scenario” and showbiz.290 Yet, Baudrillard suggests,

281 Jean Baudrillard, America (Milano: SE, 2009), 108. 282 Ibid. 283 Ibid, 110. 284 Ibid, 91. 285 Ibid. 286 Ibid, 82. 287 Ibid, 113. 288 Ibid, 90. 289 Ibid, 111. 290 Ibid, 121. 79

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming

“If America were to lose this moral perspective on itself, it would collapse.”291 Today,

America continues placing itself at the ideological forefront of the world through its self- aware protests and pushes towards utopian ideals through supplanting new heterotopias and dream narratives over its past. This way of supplanting ideals can be tied to Benjamin’s angel of history,292 who faces the past and is propelled into progress. A possible topic to explore would concern whether America could really rebrand itself, without reference to its past dream narratives. However, simultaneously, its entry into “the era of undecidability: (whether it is) really powerful or simulating power”293 has become increasingly visible to the rest of the world, with its uncontestable advertising and cinematic hegemony being challenged by other culturally relative thought systems, identity formation, and propaganda. In the past, we have allowed America’s certainty in its theatrical meaning to pass by complying with its dream narratives, suspending our disbelief for sociocultural and political purposes and taking its stage as real life. We have been complicit in allowing America to flash its wonderful teeth, “fanatics of aesthetics and meaning, of culture, of flavour and seduction.”294 Yet, globalization, and sociocultural and political changes in recent years have cast spotlights on America’s staged, factional narratives, and challenged its advertising power. Where does America go from here? How will its self-referential, non-indexical identities be challenged by the multitude of voices that are now being raised? How can the factional truths in these everyday dream narratives be communicated to help realise a better America? How can Americ(k)a reimagine itself

291 Jean Baudrillard, America (Milano: SE, 2009), 98. 292 Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, 1942. 293 Jean Baudrillard, America (Milano: SE, 2009), 125. 294 Ibid, 133. 80

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming

(through sociocultural, economic, and political paradigm shifting) into a space where these everyday dreams can come true?

For Wim Wenders, whose work builds on many of Baudrillard’s ideas, ‘Americ(k)a’ is a place portrayed by the broken, heterotopic cinematic lens of the ‘American Dream’ narrative.295 Much of the German filmmaker’s work, particularly his Road Movies trilogy, engages with the notion of the Dream as a projection and weapon, a deceptive force of betrayal, and verbalises these philosophical ponderings through his protagonists’ lines. His poem The American Dream, addresses many underlying ideas in the trilogy and provides context for his cinematic exploration of the dissonance between America as a perceived dreamland and as place ‘made’ with ideals and the reality of its being. “A country betrayed by its own dream and sold to it.”296 “America, land of imagery. Land made of images. Land for images…”,297 Wenders writes.

Building on Kafka’s critical reflections, Wenders explores the American Dream through the cinematic lens, asking, “Is ‘America’ not an invention of the movies?”298 He draws the distinction between “view” and “dream”,299 between “Amerika” as dreaming from the outside, and “America” as its dream of itself from the inside.300 This notion puts into question “who” can dream the American Dream. He suggests that the American imaginary points to its geographical place and its associated ideals, “the ‘American Dream’, then, is a dream of a country in a different country that is located where the dream takes

295 Wim Wenders, Alice in the Cities, 1974. 296 Wim Wenders, “The American Dream,” in On Film (New York: Faber and Faber, 2001), pp. 123-154, 154. 297 Ibid. 298 Ibid, 126. 299 Ibid, 123. 300 Ibid, 124. 81

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming place”.301 The ‘American Dream’ is dreamed loud by the advertising industry (149), which exploits and fails its dreamers. He concludes with, “THE DREAM IS OVER. The original title for Kafka’s novel Amerika was: The Lost One. There’s no better final word for the American

Dream: LOST.”302

In true anthropological fashion, Wenders does not attempt to hide behind his slating pen and camera; he creates with his positionality in transparency. In Talking about

Germany, he reflects viscerally on how Americanisation, namely its culture of images, was used to fill the void left in his home country by the Second World War. For him, identity formation was deeply misconstrued by the country’s “history of images that lie'' prescribed from twelve years of dictatorship, which instilled in German citizens “a deep mistrust of our own images and stories”.303 For Wenders, the result of the war void was identity negotiation, trade, and importation through images.304 This trade relationship appears as one of manipulation, as the images on Americ(k)a’s billboards were advertised to a people stripped of their patriotism and trust towards their own country and its images, resulting in the German citizens being pulled into a cultural vacuum. Hence, Wenders writes with reflexivity and asks his audience to view his literary and cinematic take on ‘Americ(k)a’ as an exploration of his own identity struggle as a German citizen and filmmaker.

Wenders’ perspective is further echoed in his reference to the Jets, “‘I want to be in

America,’ the Jets sing. They are in America already, and yet still waiting to get there. But

301 Wim Wenders, “The American Dream,” in On Film (New York: Faber and Faber, 2001), pp. 123-154. 302 Ibid, 154. 303 Wim Wenders, “Talking About Germany,” in On Film (New York: Faber and Faber, 2001), 57. 304 Ibid. 82

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming they will never reach that other, promised land…”305 This is an iteration of Deleuze and

Guattari’s plane of immanence, a non-transcendental, “image of thought” imminent only to itself.306 The premise of Wenders’ road movies is a journey in pursuit of the ‘there’ behind immanent images, of an America as its own advertised “promised land”. In Alice in the Cities

(1974),307 the first of Wenders’ trilogy, he places his male protagonist, Philip Winters, in the driver’s seat, and forces him on a ‘dream-drive’, allowing the audience to watch the narrative and scene unfold through the windshield.

This notion of ‘dream-driving’ is significant, as it is symbolic of how Wenders’ protagonists, and himself, navigate Americ(k)a as landscape and as the site of the Dream.

What Baudrillard, in America, describes as “a spectacular form of amnesia”,308 provides an apt analogy for the ‘displacement’ (from the driver’s seat) Wenders believes to be associated with those who ‘dream’ the American Dream. They are adrift, meandering, strapped to the backseat and forced to ‘dream’ and believe the images shown to them with their hands tied. The relationship between a dreamer and the Dream would not be one of free-will and agency, but one of bounded spectatorship. Notably, ‘dream-driving’, read through an alternative lens, is the signature aspect of Wenders’ road movies that attempt to both grapple with “throwback films he viewed during his youth and to the myths that inspired, above all, the American Dream—myths created by the big-screen narrative style of classical cinema” and pave way for resistance with his own cinematic vision.309 He does

305 Wim Wenders, “The American Dream,” in On Film (New York: Faber and Faber, 2001), pp. 123-154, 125. 306 Gilles Deleuze, John Rajchman, and Anne Boyman, Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life (New York: Zone Books, 2012), 27. 307 Wim Wenders, Alice in the Cities, 1974. 308 Jean Baudrillard, America (Milano: SE, 2009), 9. 309 Wim Wenders, On Film (New York: Faber and Faber, 2001), pp. 123-154. 83

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming this by disputing cinematic images of America—namely the polarization between the

American West portrayed through outlawed and revenge plots on mythical plains portrayed in Westerns and The Big Apple—where he believes America is. He does this by first, injecting ‘companion’ Alice, the voice of reason on his road movies to reject the classic loner narrative, a key scenario,310 in Westerns, and secondly, by dream-driving not ‘West’ or ‘towards NYC’, but guided along by Wenders’ extradiegetic inserted film-routes of images or rather, dissatisfaction with them, than by dream narrative routes. Wenders describes the shattering of his ‘dream’ as a filmmaker when scouting for film locations “all over the American West… not on the main roads, but far away from them, through empty and deserted landscapes, at one point on the legendary Route 66 or what remains of it here and there.”311 and not having found the indexical references he had expected. Here, both his own filmmaking and diegetic plot begin with a departure from the simulacra of billboarded

Dreams, forcing the audience to confront their own cracked heterotopic window views of

Americ(k)a.

The car’s windshield, in itself, is a visual representation of Foucault’s heterotopia, where Wenders’ protagonist—arguably a stand-in for himself— is both protected from and forced to confront Americ(k)a, amounting to no more than its images rolling by. It flattens

“The American Dream… made of images much more than words”312 onto its dream-screen, allowing the driver, as in a dream, in the enclosed space to “enjoy a relative outside of time

310 Sherry B. Ortner, “On Key Symbols,” American Anthropologist 75, no. 5 (1973): pp. 1338-1346, https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1973.75.5.02a00100, 1340. 311 Wim Wenders, “The American Dream,” in On Film (New York: Faber and Faber, 2001), pp. 123-154, 152. 312 Ibid, 129. 84

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming and space, just as the moviegoers do in the dark and air-conditioned theatre”.313 Alluding to the American Dream, Wenders says, “What kind of dream would that be, the dream of a country and of a people who have forgotten how to see, because they’ve gotten used to everything being shown to them.”314 Hence, Wenders puts the heterotopic lens of the windshield in direct juxtaposition with, and arguably in resistance to, the billboard of

America which “affirms its identity as a place through images.”315 For Wenders, these two screens serve as evidence for his argument the American Dream is “America’s self- projected image of itself” 316 hence allowing Americ(k)a to dodge obscuring its heterotopias as simulacrums by making its indexical references none other than their screens. He uses these screens to portray his complicated relationship with image and reality, and the shattering of his expectations and imagination. When not having been in America yet, he talks about visualizing America as “a country of excess, of great illuminated signs to give you wings and enlighten you. I saw America as the country where vision was set free”, 317 only to find his vision was chained. “I thought New York was America. But not for long. That evening I turned on the television and met America.”318 In the scene of Philip sleeping in front of a glowing TV, television footage is interspersed with his view out the windshield of billboards and gets no respite from driving. His amnesiac view of ‘reality’ and of TV are no different, both mediated by heterotopic screens 319 For Wenders, there is no escape from

313 Wim Wenders, On Film (New York: Faber and Faber, 2001), 218. 314 Wim Wenders, “The American Dream,” in On Film (New York: Faber and Faber, 2001), pp. 123-154, 129. 315 Wim Wenders, On Film (New York: Faber and Faber, 2001), 443. 316 Wim Wenders, “The American Dream,” in On Film (New York: Faber and Faber, 2001), pp. 123-154, 132. 317 Ibid, 134. 318 Ibid. 319 Wim Wenders, On Film (New York: Faber and Faber, 2001), 231. 85

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming vision, as he portrays being in Americ(k)a as being forced to dream with one’s eyes closed, yet, he struggles with, as an outsider, being unable to engage with Americ(k)a without dreaming of, or imagining it, “I imagine America without its superimposed self-image and without the shameless display of its dream… a country one could only dream OF, a country one only dream IN.”320

In Americ(k)a, where Wenders’ vision is chained, pitting expectations against

Americ(k)a, a non-indexical reality of images, is no fair fight. As Wenders foreshadows,

“Soon, it will be impossible to check the ‘veracity’ of any image. In a word, images have distanced themselves more and more from reality, and have almost nothing to do with it now.”321 Any search for the Real seems futile, as demonstrated in Wenders’ protagonists and own attempt to halt the image; the images of Americ(k)a appear and disappear in front of his eyes before he is able to question their authenticity, or to delineate between indexicality and simulacra. There is no space for expectation of a reality outside of its images and dreams of itself, for as Philip states in the film, “The still picture caught up with reality and overtook it.”322 Hence, perhaps to accept Americ(k)a’s self-identification as a collection of its images would suffice. Yet there is one way out of Wenders’ dead end: the only way for Americ(k)a to meet its expectations, would be for its dreamers to use dreaming to retaliate, and run alongside, its images, for them to continue “Americ(k)an

Dreaming” their way through its billboards—cracking its screens.

320 Wim Wenders, “The American Dream,” in On Film (New York: Faber and Faber, 2001), pp. 123-154, 151. 321 Wim Wenders, On Film (New York: Faber and Faber, 2001), 442. 322 Wim Wenders, Alice in the Cities, 1974. 86

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming

Wenders’ film routes, the vessels of his ethno-histo-fiction of Americ(k)a, are creative attempts to crack the screen. Despite his explicit frustration being directed towards narratives for “forcing (and) abusing pictures… draining them of their life”,323 this can also be contextualized with ‘Americ(k)a’ and the American Dream. Wenders’ cinematic film-routes allow him to counteract this effect by stringing together his own visual and narrative route of Americ(k)a. By responsively superimposing his own experimental images over billboarded dreams advertised in other American films, Wenders practices breaking free from his shackled spectatorships. This is an arduous journey, as symbolized by his diegetic stand-in Philip’s role as a photographer who produces images to “stop the uncontrolled flow of images and arrest the proliferation of signs and messages. It is their paradox—and Wenders’s— that in order to battle images they have to create them.”324

Wenders’ defiant struggle against the narrative of billboarded Dreams is two-fold, and how he engages in Americ(k)an Dreaming begins the arrest of images. Philip is forced into displacement—taking a step back—from the distorting, heterotopic dream simulacra when at the end of his dream-drive, he cannot find America. On a similar vein, this distance from the Dream as Real allows for Wenders’ extra-diegetic production and stringing together of his own images, which contradict previous cinematic images of America, into film-routes that guide Philip’s own search for reality in Europe, symbolized by the search for the indexical reference of Alice’s grandmother’s house. Despite not having found it, at the end of the film the protagonists roll down the windows of the train, the materialization

323 Wim Wenders, On Film (New York: Faber and Faber, 2001), 212. 324 Ibid, 218. 87

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming of the crack in the windshield and Wenders’ film-routes to allow the characters the Real space to begin dreaming for themselves. Still, that these images are strung together in pursuit of the ever-absent Real, and that ending is a plot resolution could be seen as

Wenders submitting to a plot resolve necessitated by the rules of narrative. Not only is he unable to ‘dream’ of images that take their own routes without the influence of narrative.

He also is unable to conceive of images that do not in some way respond, whether to contradict or stray away from, past cinematic portrayal images of America.

In Wenders’ own words, “The desire for storytelling and the deep mistrust in stories—these are just two sides of the same coin…Stories are impossible, but it’s impossible to live without them.”325 When reading stories as Dream narratives for the purpose of this study, I ask, Can one be wholly untethered from the ‘American Dream’ narrative in the context of their Americ(k)an Dreaming? For individuals, does Americ(k)an

Dreaming have to occur with some reference to (contesting, abiding by, or dreaming against)

The American Dream? What can Americ(k)an Dreaming through heterotopic, billboarded dream simulacra look like?

325 Wim Wenders, On Film (New York: Faber and Faber, 2001), 196. 88

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming

Works Cited

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blacks. Michigan: John C. Winston Company, 1910.

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4) Benjamin, Walter. Theses on the Philosophy of History, 1942.

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of Babel. Boston: David R. Godine, 2000.

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University of California Press, 1986.

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o Introduction: A Dream Country: (14-21)

o Chapter 3: Dream of the Good Life (II): Upward Mobility (70-113)

o Chapter 4: King of America: The Dream of Equality (114-142)

o Chapter 6: Dream of the Good Life (III): The Coast

o Conclusion: Extending the Dream (196-201)

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming

9) Desjarlais, Robert, and C. Jason Throop. “Phenomenological Approaches in

Anthropology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 40, no. 1 (2011): 87–102.

https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-092010-153345.

10) Deleuze, Gilles, Guattari Fé lix, and Brian Massumi. A Thousand Plateaus. London:

Bloomsbury, 2013.

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Life. New York: Zone Books, 2012.

12) Dickstein, Morris. Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression.

New York: W.W. Norton, 2010.

o Introduction: Depression Culture

o Chapter 4: The Country and the City (116-177; 124-143)

o Chapter 7: Beyond the American Dream (239-334)

o Chapter 8: What Price Hollywood? (335-365; 342-353)

o Chapter 10: Fantasy, Elegance, Mobility (381-431)

o Chapter 11: Class for the Masses: Elegance Democratized (432-463)

o Conclusion: The Work of Culture in Depression America

13) Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2021.

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22. https://doi.org/10.2307/464648.

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London: Routledge, 2009.

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Literature Today 60, no. 1 (1986): 136. https://doi.org/10.2307/40141318.

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Theory of Culture.” Essay. In The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, 3–30.

New York: Basic Books, 2.

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Construction of Rank in Jane Austen.” American Ethnologist 12, no. 4 (1985): 691–

706. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1985.12.4.02a00060.

19) Hughes, Langston. Montage of a Dream Deferred. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI, 1995.

20) Kafka, Franz. The Man Who Disappeared (Amerika). Translated by Ritchie

Robertson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

21) Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd ed. Chicago: The

University of Chicago Press, 1970.

22) Lévi-Strauss, Claude. “1: The Science of the Concrete.” Essay. In The Savage Mind.

Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010.

23) Levine, Lawrence W. “American Culture and the Great Depression.” Essay. In The

Unpredictable Past: Explorations in American Cultural History, 206–30. Oxford

University Press, 1993.

24) Lyotard, Jean-Francois, and Niels Brugger. “What about the Postmodern? The

Concept of the Postmodern in the Work of Lyotard.” Yale French Studies, no. 99

(2001): 77–92. https://doi.org/10.2307/2903244.

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25) McGranahan, Carole. Writing Anthropology: Essays on Craft and Commitment.

Durham: Duke University Press, 2020.

26) Ortner, Sherry B. “On Key Symbols.” American Anthropologist 75, no. 5 (1973):

1338–46. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1973.75.5.02a00100.

27) Pandian, Anand, and Stuart McLean, eds. Crumpled Paper Boats: Experiments in

Ethnographic Writing. Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2017. Accessed May 7,

2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1168bd2.

28) Reeves, Richard V. “Saving Horatio Alger: Equality, Opportunity, and the American

Dream.” (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2014): 4-24.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7864/j.ctt1gpccqz.2.

29) Sjöberg Johannes. “Ethnofiction Genre Hybridity in Theory and Practice-Based

Research.” Dissertation, University of Manchester, 2009.

30) Stewart, Susan. On Longing. Duke University Press, 2012.

31) Strong, Pauline T. “Ethnohistory ,” 2015, 192–97.

32) Wenders, Wim. Alice in the Cities. Germany, 1974.

33) Wenders, Wim. “The American Dream.” Poem. In On Film, 123–54. New York. Faber

and Faber, 2001.

Esther Fan ANTH 370 Americ(k)an Dreaming

America

Translated by an anthropologist

for the Dreamers

anthropologist’s confession:

she, who found America in a Whole Foods cereal aisle, bleeds dreams that seep past state lines.

she, who found America in discarded car chunks and morbid chalktoons, draws a map of her place (non-place) here in pencil.

she, who found America in keys under mats and flower-fenced backyards, and in 2-for-1 deals and blue-raspberry.

she, who found America in a gas station, lives across a gas station.

she, who found America in all these things, writes about dreamers dreaming dreams and Americas afraid of peering behind their own screens.

(if you asked her about her Dream. she’d tell you, “i’d just like an SSN so I could use my gas station”)

prologue

an Excerpt from History (selected by the anthropologist)

2020: a year even Historians hate talking about. With the COVID-19 pandemic, social movements, and UFO sightings, Eartheans were quick to point their fingers at

America—a political chaos instigator and billboard hogger.

Some years later, America, prompted by its motivated masses, signed the 2030

Post-Paris Treaty to surrender its country status for it to reflect on what it meant to be a “country”. It had been pushed to do so when it was first struck by identity crisis.

Quadrillions in debt, their ‘reparations’ were forgiven on the condition that they undergo Amaze-On rebranding, disband their army, and provide soldiers with

“marketing” training, and relocate army money into providing all American citizens with (Amaze-On branded) food, shelter, and water. Reportedly, this all began when CEO Jazz Bezar was brought to tears in a heated rap battle with Kendy Lampard

where he discovered his kitten Basics was the single survivor of Lampard’s queer felines. Moved, he decided to invest 1% into alleviating America’s identity crisis.

In accordance with the “breakout group” principle, America was divided into five Worlds, on Jupiter and four planets outside the Milky Way, built by

dream-makers who devised Dream narratives and principles. Our story begins here

Earth did not stop turning with exile of the Americans. President of China See Ping Jing, after returning from soul-searching on the Trans -Siberian, decided to live

up to the meaning of his name (See 平靜 píng jìng: see (to) calmness, serenity). After

freeing the Uyghurs, stopping trade wars, using the Belt -Road to globally distribute all items on Maslow’s checklist of needs, responding to press concerns about the Olympic synchronized swimming team, and investing in sustainable snow machines, President See went on a two-month trip to make personal amends.

See began with his oldest and dearest friend Poutine. The Russian President was the world-record grudge holder, still bitter over losing their last game of Russian draught over boozy brunch. Though the loser blamed the baijiu (Chinese alcohol), the winner attributed his victory to days of memorizing game plays. See knew his dear friend would need to be heavily appeased. So, See sent a full breakfast of buckwheat porridge, tvorog with honey, raw quail eggs, and a beetroot and horseradish cocktail to the Kremlin Palace quarters, just like his friend liked it. The “pretty please with a cherry on top” trailed in the form of four vaults. The first was a vault of Kefir, which Poutine loved to sip in the afternoon, next, a vault of Vodka, for the president to water his flowers with, and the last, of his grandfather’s fish soup, for a taste of childhood. Though he didn’t seem it, Poutine was a child at heart. After reluctantly crawling out his quarters in a food coma with his iguana Ivan, in hand, Poutine agreed to block out his day for bonding activities See had planned. They began with Matryoshka Doll painting lessons in the morning, then had a spiced lamb and fish catered picnic, and went ice-skating. They had a nice afternoon walk around the city’s historical sites and hopped on a sunset flight to Berlin to visit Angel A. Miracle, German Chancellor…

anthropologist’s note to self: *on ethical ethnofiction*

1. how do we sew dreams into story quilts? 2. how do we honour ‘real’ truths?

- fingere: invention, weaving - faction: (fact + fiction) - authenticity ≠ proximity to real - collaborative dreaming • let their narratives guide you!

the Worlds - Constitutions? Or History? - dream narratives: • (key words): 1. Jupiter: Empathy, Crypto, Trustless, Competition 2. Urhope: History, Love, Re-visiting vs. Re-writing 3. Jupiter: Empathy, Crypto, and Trustless 4. Urhope: History, Love, and Re-writing 5. Jupiter: Empathy, Crypto, Trustless, Competition - Key scenarios: what does ‘successful living’ in these Worlds look like? What does rejecting this look like? 1. Jupiter: healthy competition and aiming for happiness; what does trust-lessness look like? How does it impact human interactions? 2. Urhope: Ill-fated love? What does it aim to teach? (reach?) o Brain: anti-American Dream with pendulum effect: idleness - cross-galaxy relativism: gravity, space-time, measure, senses, love, language, mind/body/soul/heart; space- time, measure, senses, love, language, mind/body/soul/heart - mise-en-scene: BAHVEGAS, American firework and beer holidays, cinema, chef’s kitchen, American firework and beer holidays, cinema, chef’s kitchen, chocolate, wine, all the other things I haven’t thought of yet - ideas: consequences, travel, backstories, pendulum effect, so much more I will write over summer individual v.s. social worlds - how are these worlds connected? must they be? • Narrative unravelling; becoming and assembling • Plateaus!

Where would America even begin to Dream?

(asks its Dreamers)

“Competition’s human nature.

But it’s what we’ve ascribed to Money that’s made it the “A perfect world would be where monster of the American Dream. we land on Jupiter, made of We could do away with currency chocolate and more. But we don’t and become a no -barrier-to- operate with infinity. entry, trustless society with no Tarzan’s world is a perfect world. corruption, where experiences Empathy exists in the jungle don’t cost money, and we’re kind when they’d trade food and to each other. But I was made in water. But it’s scarcity that’s America. I buy and negotiate. I made us grow.” don’t know anything except capitalism.”

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1. Jupiter, of chocolate and more

History of Jupiter, by Omar:

1. Earthean terrorist group QRST-Anon uses vaccine activated 5G towers to power satellite’s penetration of Duncel Crumple’s rumoured Mars sex-club bunker.

2. Satellite images revealed the bunker is a Mars Factory vault. Here, American scientists adapt military M&M formulas to manufacturing matter- resistant chocolates in preparation of WWIII.

3. QRST-Anon, angry, drops a bomb on Mars.

4. Debris flooded Jupiter’s surface and encrusted its ring, rendering it chocadiation-immune and other planets defective. (Earthean Radiation).

5. 2030 Post- Paris Treaty results in Americans being exiled Earth to five Worlds. These World were designed according to ideas of diligent dream teams about what a “better America” would look like.

6. With the QRST explosion also released a chocolate-amnesiac into the Milky Way, that would result in complete memory loss. Unfortunately, there was only enough matter-resistant Mars residue for one hundred memory- suits. (Scarcity)

7. After this was made transparent, Americans voted for dream-makers, delegating twenty representatives to lead the five worlds. These dream- makers were given the suits. In other words, the people trusted that their memory be empathetic to effectively enforce change.

8. Dad is a dream-maker. (He is the very best crypto lawyer)

11 -----

The World of our protagonist, Omar, turns on the head of his cap.1

Bud Up. Perfect.

Loser buys the next round of beer.

Omar’s friend, Sean, heads towards the vending machine.

His eyes swim towards the holographic sea.

It’s July Fourth, the Earthean eighteenth anniversary of the Americans’ exile, and the day the Just England Iscariots fight the Buffalo Vegans for the Superlativeless Bowl Title XV. 2

Upon Anti-Concussion Decree, NFL (National Football League)3 players started protecting their heads with memory foam goldfish bowls (with the caricatured Colonel Kempernickle NFL logo). Upon Advocacy Decree, players began using their gear as billboards of protest. Today, Omar’s home team, the Iscariots, fight for equal household tap-chocolate supply.

Call him a critic, but Omar found the Idea of Equality futile. -----

When he was feet-still dangling-off-the-couch tall, Omar would watch T.V. with his father. The movie they loved most was Walt Disney’s Tarzan.

Often, while watching these movies, Rob would mumble in Earthean. At first, Omar thought his father was experiencing seizures from overdrive. Soon, he realised that these slips were how his father made sense of the World.

Note 3597: Earthean Analogies

• They compare things a lot

• They use “like” too much

• They always think in A/B and B/W.

1 In a coinless world, Bud-Light cap tosses put disputes to rest. 2 Superlatives were removed from American English after Amaze-on rebranding included a ‘humble’ aesthetic. 3 All Patriotic terms surrender signifier status

On one of their Tarzan re-runs, Rob mumbles-to-self an important question in Earthean.

Tarzan run 47:

Question: Is “nature” purer than “nurture”?

Identify: A-nature, B-nurture

Catching his child’s scribbles, the father asks a different question.

Tarzan run 47:

Question (New): What would happen if there were 200

more gorillas in Tarzan?

Answer: They would love each other but kill each other if there wasn’t enough food. (Like) in Lord of the Flies.

Dad: The jungle thrives on competition as well. We don’t know how to tell a good story without scarcity.

Whenever Rob would teach him Earthean things, Omar would feel a strange nostalgia for a world alive only in his father’s memories. But like-father-like-son, his blood boiled with a thirst for Darwinism so severe he found release at Crypto Casinos.

His desire to see more of the World through his father’s eyes drove him to study Earthean religiously. The two intellectuals would delve into thought experiments to debate about Ideas. For example, Omar learned about ‘Progress’, which Rob explained, drove America when it dreamed the American Dream.

The American Dream

“It’s like running on a treadmill.”

“To where?”

“You don’t get anywhere on treadmills honey.”

‘Empathy’ (roughly translated to ‘breath’ in Jupiterian) was his favourite Earthean word. He had learned this word when first seeing his father cry and discovering he couldn’t taste ‘salt’.

Omar was just four Jupimeters tall when his mother, Pelli, walked out. Nostalgic for “good times and dark humour”, Pelli Cross(ed) Over to Urhope to party with the demi-gods. She felt at home with the Urhopeans. With vibrant chaos, genuine laughter, and really good cheese, she couldn’t ask for more. Attached to the most recent letter from Pelli was a photo of her pole-dancing with her god-aunt Hera (during her fallout with husband Zeus) and Porbleu Pickasaw in Amsterdam’s Red-Light District.

When Rob missed Pelli, he would cry salt tears. When first witnessing this, the baffled toddler nudged an empty goldfish bowl on all fours to his father’s feet to save his tears. To his surprise, what filled the bowl to the brim was a see-through puddle of salt tears that could not be served hot as fondue.

Rob distilled this Interworld-translational story of “empathy” into toddler terms for Omar, who learned Eartheans cried salty tears that couldn’t be refrozen into Milky Way bars. An aftereffect of the Explosion was that chocolate replaced sodium in bloodstreams. Jupiterians started inhaling cocoa powder and exhaling empathy.4

When Rob missed Pelli too much, the father-and-son would take the rail to Bahvegas, the in-between strip of land, to meet Pelli. Bahvegas was built from the blueprints of Dubai’s Sustainable City, Nassau’s resorts, and Vegas’ casinos. Just as Dubai’s oil reserves ran barren, miners found caves of Globon, dimension-immune matter. During the Cross Over, Eartheans agreed to harvest all the Globon to create an inter-world vacation strip for people to meet their loved ones from different Worlds.

Since Pelli loved Earthean island hopping, in Bahvegas, they would often take its cruise, Unity of the Seas. The cruise induced in Rob a ‘déjà vu’ so terrible he would be bedridden in hiccup paralysis, in dire need of an extra spa package. Déjà vu was a common side-effect for Jupiterian travelers in Bahvegas. As residents of the Milky Way, the most primitive dimension, Jupiterians struggled to adjust to inter-dimensional lags. Not to mention, Rob would get the scrumpus5.

Like-father-like-son, Omar would get the scrumpus. He hated the tummy- churning feeling, but it orchestrated his first meet with the love of his life, Sabeana.

-----

On that fated day, a particularly bad case sent the nine-year-old Omar sprinting towards the cruise deck for fresh air. As soon as he reached the railing, he hurled into the open sea—or at least, what he thought was the sea. A wave of empathy-induced nausea rushed over from the Rock-Climbing area. It was utter chaos.

4 Here on Jupiter, we stay hydrated by drinking eight ‘eight-ounce’ glasses of chocolate a day, and sprinkle sugar and cocoa powder on our eggs. 5 extreme Earthean sea-sickness

14 There she was, in the middle of the climbing area. The sun-freckle nosed girl with wild curly hair had her hand over her mouth, eyes brimming with tears. The girl who at that moment fell into a hysterical fit, snorting at the rock-climber who hurled rain pour. He couldn’t help but laugh with her.

Though at first sight, he knew she would be his Forever, he kept it to himself.

First Impressions of Sabeana

1. I can’t tell if her laugh sounds more like hyenas or bells. 2. Her lips look like strawberries. I bet they taste like maple syrup. 3. The gap between her teeth is cute. 4. Her eyes are my favourite shade of green. Very green. 5. I’m sure I love her.

While their parents enjoyed casinos and couple gameshows, Omar and Sabeana would sit and look out into the galaxy. Sabeana, a Zagreb native, was the great- granddaughter of Milano Camembert, author of The Unbearable Gravity of Being. She was named after Camembert’s carefree female protagonist and favourite staple: the white bean.

When Rob met Sabeana, he cried salt.

“She’s just like your mother, Omar.”

Sabeana’s soul may have been born of her great-grandfather’s pages, but the poetry of her outran his pen.

The lovers would talk about everything, from their favourite galaxy- temperature-cream flavours to their greatest fears. When Sabeana, a late bloomer, finally got her period at thirteen, she showed Omar her pull-down tampon. She explained that since gravity in the Urhopean galaxy functioned as a push-up instead of the Milky Way pull-down, tampons also switched directions. They would take long walks from the ends of Bahvegas and find seashells and old Earthean coins and bury them in their sandcastle bunkers. By now, they had accumulated fifty-three different currencies and shells made of all five types of matter.

Between her tampon raising, her full lips parting when she napped on his chest, and her red-wine-tears, he found in her a love stronger than his chocolate lifeblood.

15 Now, at nineteen, they had been each other’s for ten years. Despite the long- distance seeing them only be together for one blue moon a year, a Bahvegas day would span a decade due to time-translations. They would run sweet, chocolate-and-wine-tear filled lovemaking marathons. Then, they’d order strawberries and champagne and talk about the cross-dimensional ways rain would ‘fall’.

But What they loved most of all was exchanging playlists from home.

Shazam’s new features allowed them to capture and share inter-dimensional music. Being in the Milky Way, Jupiter was relatively compliant with the Earthean sound system. However, the Jupiterian Jazz musicians, tight with the environmental protectors, made music from Jupiter’s geography. Bits of helium were distilled into mini balloons engineered to create distinct chorales when popped. Chocolate precipitation was sampled and supplanted the snare, a rock catapulted at a tree simulated the hi-hat, and traffic noises replaced the basses. He loved telling Sabeana about geo-musicology.

Sabeana, on the other hand, was a visual listener. She liked Rainbow Bop, a genre that grew from the intersection between psychedelic pop and various folklore. Sabeana’s people, in Earthean terms, were all semi-synesthetic. Upon moving to Urhope, sight and sound became united, as were smell and taste. She showed him her latest find, an experimental audio-visual orchestra arrangement of the Northern Lights.

It was utterly sublime, in E-flat minor, neon green, and purple.

Sabeana.

The girl he loved in colours he couldn’t name and songs he had yet to hear.

-----

3:4 0.1 7 (3:40.17)

Three Hours, Forty Minutes, and Seventeen Earthean seconds till he’d wrap her in his arms again.

-----

“America would be a better place if it sobered up to deal with its shit. But we can’t even convince America it’s wrong. The rest of us have history to hold us accountable. America has ideals and ‘one- time-incidents’ they cover with celebrity news. We have hundred-year-treaties. They have GoFundMe’s. If America had a different relationship with History, maybe, it’d do better.”

2. Sabeana, the Urhopean

18 Earth Y2010, M2, D4; H19, Mi4, S43

#4378: Untitled

by Sabeana.

They met in the dark. He was a tall pine tree that cast a sure shadow. She was Light. He taught her to hum with lighting and count off-beat patters on the windowpane.

He’d house her hands in the cold and twirl her around in the Rain.

Finally, he cupped her face like it was tea and kissed her. It was a kiss that demanded a tip-toe-kiss-back and enveloped her in his copper and peppermint gum lips.

He liked what he liked, and he liked her.

19 -----

anthropologist’s guide to Urhopean History

who? • Dream-makers: 20 Eartheans handpicked with Political Science degrees or Model United Nation experience, “well-equipped” to handle interworld affairs, who also knew how to have a “good time” (They also brought their I-Bank and Expat Frat friends] • citizens: previous International population in America, mostly students who were given the chance to dream • protagonist: Sabeana

what? • the fifth Dreamworld, Urhope, where Eartheans can Re-visit and liberate history • named Urhope to inspire constructive and reflexive dreaming, and to commemorate wine-drinking and island-hopping • that Urhopeans can freely access History causes many ethical problems in this Story

where? • in a linear-time resistant-galaxy where gravity is reversed, senses are muddled and intensified, and people are made of over 60% of alcohol

when? • the Cross Over

why? • to liberate and re-visit (+ re-write?) History

how? • Urhope remains the only World with access to Earth • during an international wine-and-cheese American college night, the students discovered that their F1 visas, when wine-dipped, revealed “World-Citizen Passports” that allowed them to seek asylum in Non- American countries (and access Earth) • after the Cross-Over, Earthean governments united Eurostar, Gaotie, and Shinkansen high-speed train engineering teams to create a cross- dimensional train track to Urhope. There were no train tracks to the other four Worlds, as Earth needed a break from the Americans.

20 -----

Sabena’s Guiltxiety Countdown: a. Under full disclosure, Sabeana was cheating on Omar. Well, technically, she wasn’t. Her Secret Lover was her

History (Past-Time) Lover. It was like watching porn. b. Sabeana and Omar were the same age, but she lived many more lifetimes. Urhopeans citizens had special

Access to History and could live an Earth-life in overnight. c. Sabeana Re-visited History and had many lovers. She was Mick Jagger’s groupie and Marilyn’s side piece. She

speed-dated the Disney Princesses and partied with global ambassadors. But she liked Him most.

d. Plus, despite Omar also had their vices. She loved 4-D Eartheans, and he loved gambling.

e. An Earthean Comparison Chart of Sabeana’s Lovers

With your binary thinking, you reader, will root for one Male or the other. So, pull out your popcorn. Meet-Cute Genre Impressions Rain

Omar Serendipity Geo-Musicology The Whole package; Love Talk about it (Head) (Noun)

Him In the Dark R&B All Four Seasons; Love Dance in it (Heart) (Verb)

What He and She had was a put-your-hands-in-my-sweater kind of love. where they’d cross legs under blankets, and fit like fork and spoon.

His body was designed with Sabeana-sized dents. His arms, built to hold the shape-and-weight-of-her.

They would live lifetimes through playlists, And watch old cartoons. They would go to movie theatres and make popcorn rain And drive so fast they could feel their hearts race.

They fucked like two lines sketching out each other’s silhouettes Messy smudges and shading outside lines Of a masterpiece dipped in spiced rum. Scribbles and shades and hurried strokes and eraser dust.

Then, just pillow-talk and eraser dust. And eventually, children (in 2B).

21 -----

Their love inspired Godard’s films and survived wars. In different renditions, it blossomed in fjords, atop the Himalayas, in the Forbidden City and Parisian Cafés. They raised daughters named Roma and Kane and twin boys named Fall and Winter. They owned ostrich farms and museums, recorded albums, and sailed around the world. Her favourite part was watching him walk their daughters down the aisle.

Although their love was a hundred lifetimes kind of love, it wasn’t a forever kind of love. Sabeana’s sinking realization about this always began when she’d tell him the truth. Each time they Lived, Sabeana would choose a different day to break to Him, kindly, the curse of ill-fated love. He could choose to Cross (back) Over with her, be wiped of his memories, and re-learn to love her. Or he could choose Not to, and they wouldn’t end up together Forever.

How to explain ‘Forever’ to an Earthean

Quantitative: 9999999999999999999999999 years x 99999999999999999999999999999999 lifetimes Qualitative: a really, really long staring contest, now way longer than that.

Sometimes Sabeana wished He was like the semi-devout Orthodox Christian aunties in her neighbourhood in Zagreb. All he had to do to spend Forever with her was believe in the word as a ‘Concept’.

But he was one of those people that didn’t believe things he couldn’t understand.

So, all versions of this conversation would end with a copper-peppermint- forehead kiss and a sigh a-little-too-loud.

Him: I’ve found you, the love of my Life. That’s enough for me.

Her: But we could have Forever.

Him: Baby. There’s no World past This.

And she never blamed him. She was the muse of every love song he’d heard and the star of every movie he watched. He created a perfume inspired by the nape of her neck with hints of spiced tobacco and baked-to-perfection Cinnabon’s. She was the only thing that tasted better to him than cookie dough.

He loved her as much as his six senses and 4-D existence could manage. But the Earthean body was too frail to withstand the weight of Forever-things.

-----

22 So, at the end of their Life Together, she’d wake in his ashen arms and slip out their Time Frame. The Sabeana-sized-dents from his chin to his ankle would fade away and forget her name-and-shape.

Then, she’d wake up in nausea-paralysis in her Basement Theatre with her arms strapped to a chair and dried tears glued to her face. The devil was in those Vodka tears. It was hard for Urhopeans not to get hooked on ill-fated Love Stories. After all, they were once Eartheans, and Eartheans labelled their peculiar addiction to pain a “the Human Condition”. She’d be violently brought Back-to-Life with a headache equivalent to an Earthean morning-after-downing-barrel-of-whiskey headache.

The Urhopeans did not get Hangovers, but they did get awful Heartbreaks.

Since their blood was made of wine, as the Jupiterians’ were made of chocolate, they cured Heartbreak with Hydration (Hair of the Dog). Eartheans were stupid to think they could “get over Heartbreaks” in a lifetime since each Heartbreak took three Urhopeans business days to cure.

History Excerpt 4: On Heartbreak 1. The Dream-makers didn’t adequately consider the consequences of giving all Urhopeans access passes to History. So, the 1 Urhopeans adapted their educational system to help kids “make sense of things”.

2. They built their curriculums with anthropological scaffolding, meaning that they were student-centered. Classrooms were spaces where students would process aspects of their ‘human experience’.

3. Some themes included: Finding favourite colours, dipping fingers in candles, lying, swallowing a fish-bone, thinking,

thing, understanding measure, hearing Soul for the first time, having a soul, being lost, physical attraction, jealousy, falling asleep, migraines, mass hysteria, shoplifting, death, and orgasms (the French called them la petite mort— mini 2 death, for good reason.)

4. In each classroom, they would invite Expert Thinkers from History on those ideas. They staged debates between Hume and Descartes and pit all the Abrahamic religious leaders against Santa Claus. They take trips to History to Understand

things through Real Life Scenarios.

5. Unsurprisingly, the largest speaker forum was on Heartbreak. They turned to literature, bringing in the Brontë sisters, Sylvia Plath, Gabriel García Márquez, Arundhati Roy, Justin Armstrong, and Jean-Paul Sartre. From different eras of 3 music, they reeled in Frank Sinatra, Whitney Houston, and Norah Jones. The Aerosmith members, Etta James, and

4 Lionel Richie passed out on their plane-here singing to old tunes on scotch, so they were unable to make it. 6. That humans have always been and will be love imbeciles is comforting. We don’t know anything about love outside feeling it and poorly translating it with poetry. Neither romance novelist nor seismograph approximator can anticipate

the pain of heartbreak. There’s a beauty in lessons you can only learn by doing. Footnotes: 1. History #821433. Type, primary. Source: Documenting America’s Paradigm Shifts 2. Wikipedia: Kindergarten Curriculum Revised Edition V.4.26. 3. //heartbreak_forum_source_hk6332456897// 4. parsleyhilton.com

23 -----

Anyways, back to the part of the Story where she’d wake up in her Basement Theatre. While her friends hid kinky sex escapades, she hid her Darkroom.

Darkroom, noun: A place kept out of the light.

1. Sabeana kept this Darkroom for her photography. She won awards for her collection on the Human Experience though History. Her friends never questioned her intimate relationship with History, because it’s what made her good so good at what she did. But they did worry that living in the Past stunted her Present growth.

2. The Darkroom, by night, was converted into a Basement Theatre. As part of Heartbreak recovery, Sabeana had to learn to distance herself from her feelings. So, she printed the segments of History that made her feel too much onto a filmstrip and locked it in the Darkroom. Since the Theatre was activated by her ‘everyday death’, her friends would see the film developing room when they found her the mornings after her Overnights. They all lived through Heartbreaks before, so they were willing to help her pick up her him-shaped-heart-pieces, as long as she promised to never see him again. They knew these promises were empty, but they were patient with her anyways, and brought her whiskey chocolates and spiked ambrosia.

Now, in Real-Time, Sabeana stands, sober in the Darkroom. Today would be the hundred-and-first and last time she’d visit him in that special place. If all went sour, she’d wake up, Hydrate, and make promise herself to Omar with-no-give-backs.

The Darkroom was dream-designed as a replica of the outdoor home theatre He had built her for their twentieth anniversary. He staged it on a beach, with an ocean painted the colour of his soul and sprayed with his cologne. He installed cotton candy clouds and filled them with non-stick (and repellent) pineapple-earl-grey sand. Since Sabeana would complain about the Sun, he built her a temperature-control, inflatable silicon sun. He sampled waves for her surround sounds and a stage of seashells soft on the soles of her feet. -----

Sabeana had no plan for their last Life together except to love him like the World would end, and maybe, just maybe, get him to see their Forever love with new eyes.

And maybe, just maybe, was more than enough for her.

-----

“I was just at the subway. There was a fire on the track. A ton of people waiting. People with different stories and motivations, whining ‘bout the subway not running. For a moment, we’re united, frustrated. Then, we’re hit sober, realizing not everyone can get home. Imagine an America where everyone had choices. We would have all clapped for the fire and hopped on cabs home.”

“Nobody knows anything, everything is theory. But we don’t have to stay in the circle. I love the pursuit of knowledge. I love that a monkey can learn to play Pong. And the best thing about it is it’s all public information.

But if everyone knew everything, our puppeteers would panic. It would no longer be American theatre. It’s not our knowing isn’t the problem, it’s their not knowing what we’d do with it.”

3. Babel

26 -----

Picture a small, traditional Chinese Spice Kitchen in Babel, tucked somewhere in Downtown Manhattan or Omaha, mapped by a single dim lamp on a creaky wooden door (for Regulars).

Inside, there’s a massive stove with ox-strong firepower and a cabinet decked with oils and spices you can taste from their sizzle. Its dining space is small and by reservation only. Customers eat separately but sit close enough to see chefs cook and bond over being eating things. It’s cozy and very clean.

When business would go to bed, kitchen owner Uncle Seb would pull out two wooden chairs. One for himself and one for his nephew, Brain. Brain’s parents were killed in an Inter-World Tube crash when he was just four-point-five-fetus-months-old. Thankfully, Brain was unharmed in his mother’s memory foam womb, allowing his Aunt Paloma to continue her sister’s pregnancy and carry him into Babel. As Brain’s guardians, Seb and Paloma were responsible for teaching him Life Lessons.

Uncle Seb was the best storyteller. As an actor turned journalist in his Earthean years, he gained narrative nutrition from performing identities and documenting stories. It also helped that he had a flexible moustache and award-winning teeth.

He was also an incredibly proud uncle that truly believed in the unborn child’s potential (and fetal ability to understand). While other womb fetuses were fed Mozart, Brain was fed Uncle Seb’s Stories. With only four-point-five more fetus months to prepare Brain for Life, Seb was beginning to feel stressed. So, he drafted a very dense lesson plan at the back of an order pad.

Brain’s Pre-Life Guide Month 1 2 3 4 4.5 Themes America, Categories, Empathy, History, Babel, Review; Capitalism, Systems, Choice, New Consequences What’s Dreams, Discourses, Dreams Next? Revolution, Compromise, Ideologies Relativism Lessons History: From The Self in the The Five Worlds: The Weight of Playback the Pilgrims System; Ethical Unlearning and the Worlds lessons on to the Systems(?) Re-imagining 100x Pandemic America speed Activity Earthean Play (by Seb) Sonogram Moment of New Music and with historical Simulations, e.g., Silence Theories Hollywood scenes of 412: Cereal aisle Movie systems’ and bottomless Compilation outcomes wallets

Equipped with high-intensity-fetal-mind-training, Brain was prepared to live up to his name as an apt Babelean thinker. In adult terms, he had gained learning and processing frameworks, comparative abilities, and understandings of how historical fragments belonged to different space-time sequences. In age-appropriate terms, he became really good at mental Connect-the-Dots.

27 For example, the first words he ever uttered (repeating after Uncle Seb) were ‘Dream’, in English, and ‘夢想’, in Chinese, simultaneously. The Chinese word merges ‘夢’, the ‘dreams’ one dreams, and 想 ‘to think’, the dreaming. In this Historical moment, Brain gained a few magical understandings: the difference between an idea and action, a noun and a verb, passivity and action, and English and Chinese.

-----

Brain’s fruitful upbringing was also enriched by a smart-meal-plan crafted by Aunt Paloma, a culinary and literary genius in her own right. Once, she had stumbled across a galaxy tomato—the most beautiful of edible and non-edible specimens—at the back of an old bookstore in her dreams. Next to the mysterious, deep-purple fruit was an equally curious knife. Cutting into the tomato in half, Paloma found Marxist text inscribed onto its flesh. After spending the rest of her Dream slicing halves, Paloma woke with an epiphany: The galaxy tomato had infinite pages, meaning that food could ‘know’ things too. More practically, though knowledge had no fridge life, it could be stored and shared through food. (Alphabet Pasta!)

Soon, Paloma became the Marie-Kondo of food-knowledge-storage. She began to sprinkle life lessons and knowledge into her recipes. Arithmetic principles were peppered on grains, and dense philosophical texts were preserved in rhubarb jam.

Recipes from Paloma’s Pantry

Cultural-Relativism Congee Socialism Shakshuka (Mash): - Frozen Rice - Crushed tomatoes - Ginger, Scallion - Feta cheese - Practices across eras and societies - Earthean Comparative Politics Case - Oyster Sauce, Studies - Thousand-Year Egg - Marx, Engels - Pork Shoulder - Coloured bell-peppers - A lot of white pepper - Eggs - A lot of anthropology - Garlic

Physics Pecan Pie (Mash) Ecosystem Eggplant Parmesan - Granulated Sugar - Eggplants - Inter-galactic Gravity Diagrams - Parmesan - Pecans - Oregano, Thyme - Equations - Ecosystem Diagrams - Pie Crust - Eggs - Comparative Time-Space Charts - Sociology of interactions - Corn Syrup - Marinara - Vanilla - Abiotic, Biotic Ethics - Measuring Systems - Salt - Eggs

28 -----

Thanks to Seb and Paloma, Brain was soon mentally and physically nourished enough to think and understand things on his own. He deduced the following:

Brain’s Thoughts - Society and History operate like pendulums. - Creating a World requires setting a (or a few) things ceteris paribus - Not all Humans are Good People. By systemic definition, Good People are those aware of social selves and contracts. - Earthean vocalists could only sing a small range of notes because their senses are simpler and are more limited. - Aunt Paloma and Uncle Seb’s love worked because he was a good storyteller, and she was an avid reader. She was the best at reading him. - Someone in History decided that things that happened, were said, realised, and experienced should be documented. So, we share stories. But not everyone is interested in hearing these stories. - Humans aren’t great ‘Actors’. But they are terribly dramatic ‘Reactors’.

Yet, learning all these things did not prepare Brain for facing the Real World.

Babel, the World of Utter Chaos.

-----

You see, neither the Americans nor the early Dream-makers could have predicted this descent. People condemn each other for not learning from the past without collectively thinking from, through, and outside our references. Our solution to a problem is the anti-problem. Hence, the Pendulum Effect.

To counteract the monetary, commodification hypnosis of Eartheans, Jupiter went Post-Crypto, Trustless, and drank Empathy. Still, scarcity was a given and saw to the suffering of many. So, Jupiter dreamed itself into a world of choice. At first, this was great, as it did wonders for alleviated stratification. But the Dream-makers realized humans didn’t know how to operate with abundance. The same issue arose in Urhope when people started abusing their All-Access passes to History. There were so many stories being told and written that people stopped listening. Excess sent people into overdrive and idleness. There was no point in putting everything in arm’s reach if no one would put in the effort to reach it. Furthermore, excess dismantled the citizens’ sense of obligation to society, need for Empathy, and gave them creative freedom to ‘live by their own rules’—an idea that started a new sect in the name of ‘self-actualization’.

How does one motivate a person with everything to want ‘shared’ things (ideals) with others who also have everything? (Having everything: achieving the American Dream. It baffled Brain that Eartheans, having seen the Pendulum Effect in History, still conceive of time as linear.) -----

This is where we begin.

Babel, the World of Utter Chaos (by nurture) Babel, the World of Self-Serving Potato Sacks.

interlude

31 anthropologist’s pitstop:

1. Plot: - Brain and Seb’s coming of age journey, from when Brain is a teen - The duo turns the restaurant into a knowledge library (and hides knowledge in the pantry) à Borges? - Questions: o How could collecting knowledge be ‘wrong’? o Who would try to stop them, and why? o What is the worst thing someone could do with public knowledge? 2. Conflicts: - ideals: o knowledge-police? o (return to) Totalitarianism? Un-totalitarianism? o key scenario: stop adhering to ‘being Babelean’ § individual vs. society - inter-generational: o Seb (Choice) vs. Brain: (Making choices) à chaos - possible backstories (revealed) o Brain is Sabeana and her 4-D Lover’s kid § ‘breaking the rules’, ill-fated à punished by degrading memoryà Knowledge library? à uses ‘Earthean’ dreaming faculties to help reimagine America and break the pendulum effect o Brain is Sabeana and Rob’s kid § love cannot withstand different gravities à faulty cross-cultural translations à depletion? § what dimensional challenges do their love face? 3. Narrative: o non-linear o ‘minor’ characters have own chapters, these stories continue o push reader to build their own History and question which aspects of the Worlds are ‘Real’, and to who o in print: more boxes, pictures, colours, sounds, and smells. Text in different directions.

linear non-linear

Fig 1. galaxy diagram of narrative-form

to be continued…