Introduction

Notes

Introduction

1. Paul Gilroy. Postcolonial Melancholia (2005). See also the debates on “The Future of the Humanities in a Fragmented World,”(Morrison, “Guest Column”) in which Toni Morrison uses the first person plural to argue that “art’s appeal is humanistic and helps us think about and recall the ways we are indeed a singu- lar species” (717). Gayatri Spivak’s subsequent discussion of the South African writer Bessie Smith presents a reconfiguration of the role of art and the humanities. The volume’s editor extends this revisionist debate by alluding to the emergence of what he calls neo-humanism. More recently, Spivak refers to herself as a feminist alter-humanist. 2. For other attempts to bridge the separatism see Literature on the Move: Compar- ing Diasporic Ethnicities in Europe and the Americas (2002), edited by Dominique Marçais, or Robert Lee’s Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and Asian American Fictions (2003). His chapter “Landmarks,” brings together four classics of ethnic literature (Ellison, Momaday, Anaya, Kingston), and the chapter entitled “Sites” explores literary representations of the barrio, Harlem, Asia town, and the Reservation. 3. For further discussion on the demand for a comparative approach see pages 34–38. 4. Although Kanake, as it relates to variations in the German language, was initially used in a defamatory, xenophobic manner within Germany, many Turkish and Arabic immigrants within the country have since reclaimed the term, emancipat- ing it from its troubled usage. 5. For a detailed discussion of Jonathan Arac’s assessment, see Chapter 1. 6. None of these literary dictionaries holds an entry on vernacular literature: The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Alex Preminger, ed.); Criti- cal Te r m s for Literary Study (Frank Lentricchia, ed.); A Dictionary of Literary and Thematic Te r m s (Quinn); The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Te r m s (Peter Childs, ed.). 7. An MLA database search on articles and books that have “vernacular” in their titles produces hundreds of entries. One of them, Vernacular Bodies: The Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern England, by Mary E. Fissell (2004), deals with ordinary people’s ideas about reproduction in seventeenth-century England. Again, the vernacular is used to highlight a particular space and time. Moreover, it focuses on “ordinary people” instead of “the elite,” but in this case, the term is applied to ideas about the female body. 136 Notes

8. See, for example, Taruskin “Authenticity Now,” which provides an overview of musical vernaculars during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Europe, or “Pursuing Authenticity: The Vernacular Moment in Contemporary American Art” (Sayre). For an account on the difference between racial authenticity and sincerity, see Real Black. Adventures in Racial Sincerity (Jackson). 9. “How should we define vernacular literature?” asked the classicist Martin Hin- terberger in 2006, who concluded that “I have no definitive answer. . . . [It] will have to await the completion of the Cambridge Medieval Grammar project.” 10. Marx’s “The Vernacular Traditions in American Literature,” which was originally written to explicate the specific features of American literature to a German audience, first appeared in the German journal Die Neueren Sprachen (1958). Two years later, it was published in the landmark volume Studies in American Culture: Dominant Ideas and Images (1960). 11. For an excellent reconsideration of these early accounts of Twain’s rendering of the vernacular, see Gert Hurm’s Rewriting the Vernacular Mark Twain (2003). 12. The graduate program offered there is composed of eight thematic interdisciplinary foci. According to Winfried Fluck, “It is hard to imagine such a com- prehensive approach taken in an American Studies program in the U.S. at the present time, where American Studies has progressively dissolved into programs the study of particular ethnic or gendered groups” (Fluck 75). 13. Perhaps this has to do with the fact that the European Union is technically and legally a united body although it lacks a shared language and culture. 14. The editor Dohra Ahmad explained in an interview that her preference for the term vernacular over dialect, patois, or creole is based on her conviction that the notion of the vernacular “gives a sense of neutrality but also encapsulates that movement from something that had been negative to something that’s being really made positive by these authors.” In fact, Vernacular Matters reveals that vernacular literature has the potential for emergence. Vernacular Matters also responds to Ahmad’s challenge that we university professors leave our “little bubbles” to engage texts that are usually not considered together. Her words merit a lengthy quotation: “I am a university professor and we live in these little bubbles where somebody does African American literature and somebody studies colonial literature and someone else might study, for example, Pygmalion and the cockney poetry of Rudyard Kipling, but they don’t all get looked at together.” (cf. Koval; Ahmad).

Chapter 1

1. His lecture was published in Die Neueren Sprachen and reprinted in the groundbreaking anthology Studies in American Culture and in Marx’s collection of essays The Pilot and the Passenger: Essays on Literature, Technology, and Culture in the United States. Die Neueren Sprachen, Beiheft [N.F.] 3 (1959), 46–57. 2. In this lecture, Marx does not refer to the scene where the raft is hit and destroyed by the steamboat that is so crucial to the argument he makes in The Machine in the Garden (1964). Instead of discussing the impact of industrialization, the Notes 137

concept of the vernacular foregrounds the personal and interracial aspect of the raft scene. Similarly, Marx claims that Walt Whitman represents the vernacular not only because of the poetic style of “Song of Myself” but also because it includes the scene in which the narrator invites a runaway slave into his home to give him a bath and new clothes—a bold political act during the antebellum period. In other words, Whitman and Twain wrote vernacular literature because their informal protomodernist style supported a political (in this case, an aboli- tionist) statement. 3. Given that Marx hardly made any changes for the 1988 printing of his article, one can only induce that Marx believes that the egalitarian faith of the vernacular and its subversive treatment of race were radical even by late 1980s standards. By the standards of the late 1990s, however, this has been contested as will be discussed later with regard to Jonathan Arac’s objections to Marx’s use of the vernacular. 4. Marx’s work can be seen in the tradition of sociological studies such as Denis W. Brogan’s The American Character (1944), Geoffrey Gorer’s The American People: A Study in National Character (1948), and David Potter’s The People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (1954). While his approach bears resemblances to celebratory assertions about American exceptionalism, he was neither praising nor flattering American virtues but promoting a leftist politics in the radical tradition, as I will argue. 5. Matthiessen had been Marx’s advisor since his enrollment in the fall of 1937. To understand the idealistic and radical premise underlying Marx’s definition of the vernacular, it is helpful to situate him within the context of “the radical tradition” in American studies, as Günter Lenz has done for Matthiessen. While Lenz does not discuss Marx’s work on the vernacular, I believe that Marx’s engagement with the vernacular is a good example of what Lenz calls “the radical tradition.” 6. This was not a projection on Marx’s part; Matthiessen was subversive and noncon- formist in more than one respect. He was one of the few Catholic professors, and in the 1950s, he was interrogated by the House Un-American Activities Commit- tee for his socialist commitments. Not to mention the fact that he was gay. 7. Smith, who was among the earliest scholars to hold a Ph.D. in American Studies (instead of in English literature), was one of the most prominent scholars within the first generation of Americanists. Given his prominent position as a forefather in the field, it is not surprising that he felt compelled to develop and express his ideas on the future of American studies. 8. The question that suggests itself at this point, one which Thomas Claviez has so poignantly raised, is: “Why did he [Twain] out of all authors serve as a starting point for the call to consider extra-textual factors?” (Claviez 211). According to Claviez, Smith privileged Twain because he was “an author of the people.” This observation, of course, hardly substantiates the claim that Twain should serve as a starting point for inventing a socioliterary method for American studies. When this method was later developed into the myth-and-symbol approach, it provided the first real contribution to literary criticism by American studies scholars. It should be remembered, however, that this method originated in an analysis of the vernacular. 138 Notes

9. Given that Smith praised Huckleberry Finn for serving as a role model “against conformity and for the autonomy of the individual” (Smith xxix), his research on the vernacular was also politically motivated, especially, if we consider that he made this statement at the height of the McCarthy era. 10. It is not quite clear why Bridgman changed the title. When distinguishing the two terms, he declared the following: “As a fact of usage, vernacular normally appears as a noun and colloquial as an adjective—a helpful distinction to begin with. The vernacular is the substance, the verbal clay to be shaped. One way in which that clay is shaped in speech and in writing is designated colloquial” (ital. R. B., 17). This statement is obviously contradictory, since Bridgman himself repeatedly uses vernacular as an adjective—e.g., he refers to “vernacular words” (22), “vernacular stories” (23), “vernacular life” (24) “vernacular tricks” (25), and “vernacular writing” (25). Moreover, his use of metaphor sits at odds with his assertion “rocks make up the vernacular world—hard, individual, rough, heavy, intractable” (24). The catachresis of solid rocks and shapeable, soft, malleable clay is indicative of his befuddled terminology. 11. Interestingly, Bridgman does not discuss Marx’s seminal essay; he quotes him only once in a passage that is not at all related to the notion of the vernacular. Neither does he mention the work on the vernacular that his Ph.D. supervisor at Berkeley, Smith, had produced. 12. Had Smith and Marx, pivotal players in the early phase of American studies, sustained their interest in the vernacular, they could have established it as a key concept in the field. Henry Nash Smith assumed a unique role, since he was among the first graduate students to be awarded a Ph.D. from Harvard’s newly founded History of American Civilization program. In 1954 he was elected vice- president of the newly established American Studies Association. As a cofounder of the myth-and-symbol school, he was among those who made a contribution to the field of literary criticism that was considered genuinely “American.” And Marx is “one of the few figures still active who reaches back to the beginnings of organized American studies” (Arac 156). Surprisingly, the work carried out by Smith and Marx on the vernacular was never considered important. 13. Among the many “vernacular masterpieces” (14) that the pioneers or later Amer- ican engineers and architects created was the muley-saw mill, the Corliss Engine, and an architectural style exemplified by buildings such as Raymond Hood’s Chicago Tribune Tower. Kouwenhoven also includes artistic expression (jazz) among the “purely vernacular” (257). 14. His assertions respond to received accounts of technological history that ignore America’s contribution to the history of technology before the twentieth century, and to claims that critics of American art and culture mostly ignored vernacular expressions, i.e., objects made by common people. 15. His list of quintessentially American things includes the skyscraper, the Model T Ford, jazz, the Constitution, Mark Twain’s writing, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, comic strips, soap operas, assembly-line production, and chewing gum (Kouwenhoven 42). Obviously, one could just as well think of many other objects that qualify as distinctively American, such as Levi’s jeans, baseball, Notes 139

the Golden Gate Bridge, Coca-Cola, minstrel shows, drive-in movie theaters, popcorn, or McDonalds. Since Kouwenhoven’s inventory is so vast—including objects of high and popular art, a political structure, a building, a car, and Afri- can American music—he never clearly defines this assumed common American denominator. 16. While Marx and Smith located the nongenteel tradition of American literature in Twain, they were perhaps not inclined to ground America’s national literature in such “crude” figures as Davy Crockett. 17. In one of the rare instances in which Baker explicitly uses the term vernacular, he calls Dunbar “a brilliant energetic craftsman of the vernacular” because he “ges- tures towards what I call ‘a blues book most excellent’” (115). This tautological formulation uses the term vernacular indeterminately. The linkage to the blues, so it seems, is just a way to turn it into a term of praise. 18. When Baker claims that Ellison chooses “the railroad way-station as his topos for the American ‘little man,’” he distorts Ellison’s cautionary tale, since Ellison’s essay is not concerned with the railroad way-station, nor with the common or “little” man, rather it is about his teacher’s reminder to “always play your best, even if it’s only in the waiting room of the Chehaw Station, because in this country, there is always a little man hidden behind the stove” (Ellison 4). By that he meant that there was always someone judging one’s performance even in the most remote of places such as Chehaw Station. Ellison used that image as a metaphor of the general American audience: “The little man draws upon the uncodified Americanness of experience,” he writes (7). 19. Baker puts high demands on his colleagues: “The task of present-day scholars is to situate themselves inventively and daringly at the crossing sign in order to materialize vernacular faces. If scholars are successful, their response to literature, criticism, and culture in the United States will be as wonderfully energetic and engrossing as the response of the bluesman Sonny Terry to the injunction of his guitar-strumming partner Brownie McGhee. Brownie intones: ‘Let me hear you squall, boy, like you never squalled before!’ The answer is a whooping, racing, moaning harmonic stretch that takes one’s breath away, invoking forms, faces and places whose significance was unknown prior to the song’s formidable inscriptions” (Baker 202–3). His cryptic manifesto does not define the scholarly equivalent to the whooping, racing, and moaning harmonic stretch. 20. Gates’ rhetorical question, “And what do we make of the relation between the black vernacular tradition and the black formal tradition, as these inform the shape of a black text?” (Gates, Black Literature 3), presupposes that African American literature is the synthesis of vernacular and formal styles. 21. Gates explicitly says that “[the vernacular] informs and becomes the foundation for formal black literature” (xxii), and he also believes that “the vernacular is the source from which black theory springs” (92). 22. In an interview, Gates was asked, “Does ‘signifying’ differ from so-called ‘mainstream’ intertextuality?” to which he admitted the tenuousness of his argument: “It doesn’t: all texts talk to some other text or set of texts, so that the process of 140 Notes

intertextuality is not inherently different for us than for other people. What’s curious for us, though, is how many black authors ground their texts in other texts by African Americans” (450). The claim that black American authors tend to draw more on other black authors, than, for example, French authors draw on other French authors, is not convincing. Claiming intertextuality as a black characteristic serves primarily strategic functions because it provides a structural principle for Gates to construct a black vernacular literary criticism. 23. In the 1990s, Gates confessed that The Signifying Monkey “reeks of New Haven. It is very much a Yale late seventies and early eighties kind of book” (Gates 448). The apologetic tone does not diminish Gates’s effort, like that of Baker before him, to invent a sophisticated, “genuinely” African American literary criticism by borrowing from, and signifying on, deconstructionist criticism. 24. Likewise Charles Frye argued that in the early 1980s the study of African Ameri- can literature “received expanding legitimacy through the recent efforts by Henry Louis Gates, Houston Baker, Arnold Rampersad, and Margaret Walker” (Frye 23). In its wake, a growing number of black critics (e.g., Mary Helen Wash- ington, Hortense Spillers, Michael Cooke, Robert O’Meally) made important theoretical contributions to the field of literary criticism. 25. It says, “Black Literature and Literary Theory is of the first importance, not only for scholars of black literature, but also for literary critics and theorists in the traditional fields of Western literature” (W. Mitchell, University of Chicago). 26. Joyce A. Joyce, for example, argued against poststructuralist influences on black American literary criticism. Joyce thinks that Baker and Gates are apolitical and “antiblack.” As “black postructuralists,” they are traitors to the race, committing “intellectual indenture.” Gates, in turn, indicts Joyce’s “resistance to theory,” while Baker detects in her position a “new black conservatism” (Gates “Critical Theory” 345, 366). 27. The anthology In the Vernacular: Interviews at Yale with Sculptors of Culture, for example, includes works of renowned artists and writers such as E. L. Doctorow, Eudora Welty, Hanif Kureishi, Toni Morrison, Wendy Wasserstein, and Arthur Miller (Biggs). Curiously, the editor Melissa E. Biggs neither justifies grouping these individuals under this particular term nor clarifies their connections to one another. 28. Gilroy draws attention to “the boundaries that have been placed between high and low, vernacular and refined, respectable and disreputable” (30) that have given the vernacular the reputation for being “low” art in contrast to “refined,” i.e., white, forms. Although never abandoning the elitist subtext, Gilroy acknowledges that the vernacular cannot be understood purely through this one-dimensional relationship: “The living, non-traditional tradition of black vernacular self-fashioning, culture-making, play and antiphonic communal conversation is complex and complicated by its historic relationship to the covert public worlds of a subaltern modernity” (13). Since he does not elaborate on this vernacular “subaltern modernity,” we can only speculate about the nature of this hidden “covert public.” Like- wise, we are left with the implied opposition between a “black vernacular cultural criticism” (23) and dominant forms of black cultural criticism. Notes 141

29. Bhabha, B13. This article broadcasts the position of the postcolonial subject to the academic mainstream. 30. See his forthcoming book Vernacular Cosmopolitanism (Harvard University Press). 31. Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s Was Huck Black? explores the interracial dimensions in Huckleberry Finn. In The Dialect of Modernism (1994) Michael North shows that the modernist style is often informed by black dialect. Ann Douglas’s Ter- rible Honesty (1995) creolizes the cultural history of the 1920s and demonstrates how “mongrel” Manhattan was. Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic (1993) combines the Creole and transnational perspectives in exploring cultural interrelations between America, Africa, and Europe. My book Primitivist Modernism: Black Cultures and The Origins of Transatlantic Modernism (1998) reveals the hybrid nature of modernism shaped by symbolic entanglements between these three continents. 32. The title of his book consciously plays on Cornel West’s bestseller Race Matters, which proves the continuity and a commonality between minority scholars of different cultural backgrounds. 33. Although he mentions an older text, The Dance of the Moquis of Arizona (1884), by John Gregory Bourke, a lieutenant at West Point and ethnologist, Saldívar does not consider Bourke’s ethnographic writings on U.S.-Mexican border culture a vernacular text because it was written by an outsider and fails to express a genuinely Chicano perspective. 34. Rasquachismo, first and foremost, expresses a sense of belonging, as Tomás Ybasrra-Frausto argues in Rasquachismo: A Chicano Sensibility (1990). 35. He riffs on Elaine Showalter and Henry Louis Gates when substituting criticism in the “wilderness” (Showalter) or the jungle (Gates) for borderlands. 36. Hall describes the relation between the “vernacular base” and “black American popular vernacular traditions” as two ends of one spectrum: “In its expressivity, its musicality, its orality, in its rich, deep, and varied attention to speech, in its inflections toward the vernacular, and the local, in its rich production of coun- ternarratives, and above all, in its metaphorical use of the musical vocabulary, black popular culture has enabled the surfacing, inside the mixed and contradictory modes even of some mainstream popular culture, of elements of a discourse that is different—other forms of life, other traditions of representation” (27). The inflection toward the vernacular and the indigenous, then, plays a crucial role in what makes black popular culture essentially black. The answer to his rhetorical question, “What is this ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?” is that it is the vernacular, both the authentic and hybridized forms, that makes black popular culture black. 37. For lack of a better term, I use the label “minority scholar,” although it carries the unfortunate and inadvertent implication that this scholarship is somehow minor. 38. Hortense J. Spillers praises this “exquisitely modulated revisionist project. Arac is one of our greatest teachers, and I am not at all surprised that he has taught me a great deal” (quoted from the cover of Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target). 142 Notes

39. Both labels, “post-Americanist” (Pease, Cultures) and “post-nationalist” (Rowe, Post-Nationalist), are somewhat confusing, since both the nation state and the legacy of (old) American studies cannot—or should not—be dismissed. To designate revisions in our understanding of nationalism in a global age and of American studies in the process of becoming a more international field, it might be wise to grapple with new terms instead just adding prefixes. 40. Jacques Derrida’s elaboration on différance might have served as an intellectual spark. In many respects, Derrida laid the groundwork for the fields of race, class, and gender studies. These discourses transpose the notion of difference from the textual to the social world and extend Derrida’s critique of Western metaphysics to a postcolonial critique of Euro-centrism. With the privilege of hindsight, his observation that truth was acclaimed by privileging a leading term over a deriva- tive term had consequences he had not foreseen. The same year that Derrida’s translation of L’Ecriture et la Différence was published in English under the title Writing and Difference (1978), Edward Said published his groundbreaking book Orientalism. His main thesis that the Occident constructed “the Orient” through relations of difference builds on the same idea. And Said also draws on Foucault’s discourse analysis to show how the Orient is represented in Western philology, ethnography, political science, art, and literature through a binary logic of iden- tifying Europeans against non-Europeans. This hierarchy legitimized the subor- dination of the Orient through the presumed superiority of the Occident. 41. Hall tried to put his academic work to political ends in the Campaign Against Racism in the Media (CARM). His fight against racist imagery on television is complicated by his awareness that the media, although functioning in a system- atically racist manner, is not produced by a group of racists, nor are the viewers necessarily manipulated by the media. 42. In Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, Robert J. C. Young extends this argument to a global perspective: “Postcolonial critique focuses on forces of oppression and coercive domination. . . . The assumption of postcolonial studies is that many of the wrongs, if not crimes, against humanity are a product of the economic dominance of the north over the south” (11, 6). 43. Michel North and Ann Douglas made important contributions in showing how complex American modernism is and how mongrelized America’s cultural land- scape has become. And, Henry Wonham’s Criticism and the Colorline: Desegre- gating American Literary Studies “celebrates the hybridity of American literary culture by examining the dynamic relationship between ‘mainstream’ and Afri- can American expressive traditions in America” (2). 44. Hybridity is also the constitutive term in border studies instigated by Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1987). Her study broke new ground in Ameri- can studies because it drew attention to the hybrid identity of Mexican Americans. Anzaldúa made general claims that people of mixed race are people who cross cultures and possess “a mestiza consciousness . . . a consciousness of the Borderlands” (99). Anzaldúa’s book itself deploys mestizaje by fusing genres and languages. Bor- derlands/La Frontera is a classic postcolonial studies text that has been taught in literature departments as well as feminist studies and cultural studies courses. Notes 143

45. Paul Gilroy’s widely read study The Black Atlantic, for example, refigures older accounts of modernity because it explores the culturally hybridized and transnational space of the Atlantic. And Robert Young’s Colonial Desire: Hybridity Theory, Culture and Race (1995) demonstrates that the Western self has never been an “essential, core identity from which the other is excluded” (Young 3). In both studies, the notion of hybridity defies antagonistic accounts of difference and deconstructs claims to white superiority. 46. Elizabeth Abel’s Writing and Sexual Difference (1982) and Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine’s The Future of Difference: The Scholar and the Feminists (1980) were among earlier books to explicitly use the concept to explore the specificity of women’s texts. 47. The foreword puts forth the aim of exploring cross-cultural connections: “But while women, people of color, gay men and lesbians, the physically handi- capped, the aged (among others), have tried to address each other and examine these issues among themselves, it is only recently that attempts are being made to find our common ground” (Ferguson et al., Out There 7). 48. For example, the queer critic Martha Gever quotes Hall in a discussion of lesbian cultures, and the black American critic James A. Snead refers to Hegel in his discussion of black culture. 49. The volume includes discussions of Chinese (Chen), English (Abel), and African American (Carby) literature. It brings together Americanists (Benn Michaels), philosophers (Butler and Appiah), and postcolonialist scholars (Spivak), as well as feminists and queer theorists (Rothenberg and Valente). 50. This volume brings together scholars from anthropology (Gewertz and Err- ington), political science (Rogin), women’s studies (Haraway, Jeffords), romance languages (Sommer), business studies (Brannen), and history (Gaines, Diaz) departments. 51. The term refers to Pease’s anthology National Identities and Post-Americanist Nar- ratives (1994), which replaces the label “new” with the prefix “post” to signal that Americanists conceive of national identity as “a purely contingent social construction rather than a meta-social universal” (5). Related to his above-cited 1990 critique of nationalism for excluding minorities (an important manifesto of the new Americanists), this collection of post-Americanist narratives expands the scope of ethnic minorities to address e.g., “Queer Nationality” while his 1993 anthology Cultures of United States Imperialism qualifies as “post-Americanist” because it extends the national to a global outlook. 52. Again, the agreement with other disciplines is striking; in her review of feminist discourse, or should we say post-feminist discourse, Rita Felski concludes that “any appeal to general ideals or norms can only be considered questionable and theoretically naïve” (208). 53. Radway’s presidential address of 1998 illustrates that the postnationalist paradigm had become the new norm. With a demanding tone of voice, she formu- lates the new doxa of American studies ex negativo: “If intellectual practice in the field does not examine the ways in which the construction of a national subject works to the economic and political advantage of some and precisely against the 144 Notes

interests of others, then American studies runs the risk of functioning as just another technology of nationalism” (221). 54. Comparative American Studies is the publication organ of the International Association of American Studies. Founded in 2000, CAS is a global network of scholars committed to the study of American culture and society. Most of its contributions primarily succeed in expanding the scope rather than—as any comparative approach should—creating connections. 55. Their volume, U.S. Studies and Postcolonial Theory (2000), reflects the differences within American studies. It includes essays on Native American, Arab American, Asian American, Mexican American issues. The editors announce that their collection “will facilitate the much needed comparative discussions . . . [and calls for] more intra-ethnic or multiracial comparison of, say Asian Americans, blacks, Latinos, and whites in ways that will not treat their cultural histories as if they developed autonomously. ‘Borders’ analyses must be able to focus on what con- nects such groups as well as what separates them.” (ital. A.S. and W.S. 7). A closer look at the volume, however, reveals its failure to live up to its promise; hardly any of its contributors investigate similarities or connections between and across different groups. Thus, it falls short of realizing a comparative approach.

Chapter 2

1. Twain’s contemporary, the preeminent realist William Dean Howells, called Twain “the Lincoln of American Literature” and the famous literary critic Lionel Trilling thought Huckleberry Finn as “not less than definitive in American literature” (Trilling xvi). Among Germans, the fascination and interest is so extensive that the annotated bibliography of the German critical reception from 1875 to 1986 of Mark Twain’s works grew into a book of several hundred pages (Kinch), in which Ursula Brumm, one of the founding figures in the German American studies movement, proclaimed Twain the “model American, a representative of an irreverent democratic humor and a believer in a progressive, American culture” (Kinch 164). 2. I read Huckleberry Finn as a child when I was living in Hamburg, and like many of my friends, I identified with Huck even though his world seemed very foreign to me. Due to the intimate sound of his voice I felt close to his world, although it seemed (at the time) to be light years away from mine. For examples of Japanese scholars reading Twain as a synecdoche of America, see Kiyohiko Murayama Masago’s Ima “Huck Finn” wo Do Yomuka. 3. Many of its (young) readers living outside of the United States are probably unaware of the fact that Missouri was a slave-holding and Illinois a slave-free state. 4. I am referring back to Jonathan Arac’s critique of Huckleberry Finn as an example of literary nationalism as elaborated in Chapter 1. 5. Among the dialect literature published before Huckleberry Finn there are George Washington Harris’s Sut Lovingwood’s Yarns in the Southwest idiom, James Rus- sell Lowell’s Biglow Papers in Yankee dialect, and the humorous political satire Hoosier School Master by Edward Eggleston (which is considered the first proper Notes 145

dialect novel in American literature; Gavin Jones 53). Joel Chandler Harris’ extremely popular Uncle Remus stories represent an early example of black dialect literature written by a Euro-American author. 6. Luedtke proclaims that “the humor and vernacular style of Mark Twain not only opened the cultural and literary establishment to the voices of the Western fron- tier, but also cleared a path for stories of the Dakota-Minnesota and Nebraska frontiers by Ole Rolvaag, Willa Cather, and Wright Morris, for the New England local colorism of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Sarah Orne Jewett, and for the rich harvest of Black folklore and Southern writings by Charles W. Chesnutt, Joel Chandler Harris, Kate Chopin, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy” (188). 7. For Rampersad, “Mark Twain anticipated Dunbar, Hughes, Hurston, Fisher, Thurman, Ellison, Gaines, Childress, Reed, and Alice Walker . . . Richard Wright, Chester Himes, Ann Petry, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison” (Leonard 227). 8. Sewell refers to Twain’s “note” or “explanatory” that the seven dialects were necessary because “without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.” Sewell differentiates among three vernacular voices: “the speech of pretentious ignorance” (expressed by the King and the Grangerfords), “ornery speech” (expressed by Pap Finn), and Huck’s “folk speech” (Sewell 101). 9. William M. Gibson suggestively links Twain’s sense of music to his “extraordinary grasp of the American vernacular” and his “donning the vernacular mask,” but any extension of his argument is left up to the reader’s imagination (Gibson 3). 10. In her discussion of “Huck’s vernacular speech,” Shelley Fisher Fishkin suggests that, “the voice with which Twain captured our national imagination in Huckleberry Finn [is] in large measure a voice that is ‘black’” (3–4). Downplay- ing the “white” sources (e.g., Southwestern humor) as well as the narratological aspects of Huck’s voice, Fishkin foregrounds the role African Americans played in Twain’s rendering of his unique voice. Drawing on biographical evidence, she argues that Twain made substantial use of the African American folk tradition and was fond of minstrel shows as well as of African American singing voices (inviting the Fisk Jubilee Singers to his home). Fishkin also mentions four African Americans with whom Twain had personal contact: John Lewis (Twain’s black servant at Quarry Farm), Mary Ann Cord (his servant in Elmira), a black boy whom he was to write about in “Sociable Jimmy” (1874), and the teenager Jerry, whom he considered “the greatest orator” (55) due to his verbal brilliance. 11. The 2001 edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from which I have been quoting, is based on the original manuscript, the first part of which was discovered in a Hollywood attic. The original draft version restored by Victor Fisher departs from the first edition “nearly one hundred times in its wording and nearly eleven hundred times in its spelling, punctuation, and other details” (quoted in Twain, Huckleberry Finn 549). His excessive use of punctuation and misspellings, which the first editor felt compelled to correct, was crucial to Twain’s strategy in devis- ing a vernacular style. 146 Notes

12. I am referring here to the second paragraph: “The Widow Douglas she took me for her son, and allowed she would sivilize me; but it was rough living in the house all the time, considering how dismal regular and decent the widow was in all her ways; and so when I couldn’t stand it no longer I lit out” (1). 13. Among the critics who have commented on Twain’s nonlinear, improvised narrative structure, De Voto also referred to the concept of the vernacular: “Half way through writing the book [Twain] suddenly realized that he wasn’t getting anywhere . . . . Probably he lost his touch, produced some scenes wholly at random and fell off into improvisation. He had the superb vernacular and in the stuff already written there was latent the purpose he had subsequently found.” (Marks 30). I would agree with Fluck at this point by arguing that Twain’s vernacular was superb, as it were, because of its improvised fragmented style. 14. In one such passage, the narrator relates Janie’s return after the hurricane: “So the beginning of this was a woman and she had come back from burying the dead. Not the dead of sick and ailing with friends at the pillow and the feet. She had come back from the sodden and the bloated; sudden dead, their eyes flung wide open in judgment” (9). This detached description of swollen human carcasses with wide open, hollow eyes is devoid of vernacular qualities. 15. Ms. Their Eyes Were Watching God, Box 1, Folder 3, Hurston special collection, James Weldon Johnson Collection, Beineke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. 16. What Hurston calls an “oral hieroglyph” is, in literary critical terms, synesthesia. Whereas the Penguin Dictionary of Literary Te r m s and Literary Theory (1999) defines synesthesia broadly as “the concurrent appeal to more than one sense,” Hurston artfully combines the visual and oral dimension. 17. Maria Tai Wolff puts this succinctly in an essay entitled “Listening and Living: Reading and Experience in Their Eyes Were Watching God.”: “The listener must form an ‘understanding.’ Yet telling must become experience in order for this to happen; the listener must ‘see’ the story . . . . For telling to be successful, it must become a presentation of sights with words [emphasis S. L.]. The best talkers are ‘big picture talkers.’ In this way the opposition between listening or reading and experience is broken down” (quoted in Appiah and Gates 226). 18. Apart from these interspersed negative responses, Their Eyes was ignored by her contemporaries. In a poll taken of the best fiction on “American life by an Amer- ican author” taken in 1937, Kenneth Robert’s Northwest Passage outperformed John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not (Saturday Review, 2 Apr. 1938, 9). This brings to mind Robert Hemen- way’s observation that “Zora Neale Hurston is one of the most significant unread authors in America” (215). 19. The Nation, 16 Oct. 1937 quoted in Appiah and Gates, xxx. 20. See: http://etext.virginia.edu/railton/enam854/summer/hurston.html. 25 Sept. 2008. 21. Again, Stevens came to a different conclusion. In his review “Negroes by Them- selves” he maintains that Their Eyes offers a “realistic” representation of black life in the South (Saturday Review, 18 Sep. 1937, 3). Notes 147

22. Mary Helen Washington’s introduction to the 1990 edition of Their Eyes deserves to be quoted at length: “If there is anything the outpouring of scholarship on Their Eyes teaches us, it is that this is a rich and complicated text and that each generation of readers will bring something new to our understanding of it. If we were protective of this text and unwilling to subject it to literary analysis during the first years of its rebirth, that was because it was a beloved text for those of us who discovered in it something of our own experiences, our own language, our own history” (Washington ix). It was beloved, I think, not primarily because it reminded these scholars of their own experiences, but mainly because of its bold and artistic use of black vernacular English. 23. The editions were from Perennial Library, 1990; Borgo Press, 1991; University of Illinois Press, 1991; Perennial Classics, 1998; HarperCollins, 2000. 24. Traditional black literary genres such as the slave narrative and black dialect novel hardly represent a distinctly African American prose style since their authors were often influenced by their white co-authors. Writers of black dialect literature modeled their works on the white regionalist and plantation tradition. 25. The term “speakerly” he borrows from Roland Barthes’s opposition between the readerly and the writerly text (183) as well as from Russian Formalism, which called skaz “the phonetic, grammatical, the lexical patterns of actual speech” (Appiah and Gates 165). Arguing that Their Eyes is “a paradigmatic Signifyin(g) text” as well as a speakerly text, Gates uses the two concepts synonymously. In fact, he equates skaz, the speakerly, free indirect discourse, and signifyin(g), and in doing so, ignores the differences between skaz, which is defined as a stylistic modification of one’s own speech, and free indirect discourse, which is based on a narrator ventriloquizing someone else’s speech. 26. To Williams, Their Eyes is also “the mother text for such classic Afro-Ameri- can works as Richard Wright’s Native Son and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man” (1991, xxi). 27. Among those critics who link the concept of voice to identity politics are Maria Racine: “Voice and Interiority in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watch- ing God,” Pearlie M. Peters’s “Ah Got the Law in My Mouth”: Black Women and Assertive Voice in Hurston’s Fiction and Folklore,” and Ayana I. Karanja’s Zora Neale Hurston; The Breath of Her Voice. Racine’s comment about Janie’s self-assured voice, that “having a voice means owning one’s self and living as an independent person who makes her own decisions and determines her own life” (Racine 290) is a telling example of the understanding of “voice” that highlights the novel’s gender politics. 28. Awkward also examines the import of “action” and “silence” in relation to “voice.” He aptly points out that Janie, after realizing her dissatisfaction with her marriage to Joe Starks, remains silent for nearly twenty years before finally daring to raise her voice and talk back to Joe. Contrasting the empty gossipy rhetoric of the porch-sitters and Joe’s “big voice,” Awkward argues that Janie learns to coordinate her inner voice with meaningful action and that her dialogue with Pheoby represents a more meaningful form of interaction while also reflecting the distinctly black call-and-response pattern. 148 Notes

29. Callahan presupposes that women, or black women, are less domineering when interacting with each other, equating “womanist” (i.e., black feminist) with democratic speech communication. 30. Gerd Hurm has made a similar argument for the vernacular in Huckleberry Finn. 31. In its setting, narrative perspective, plot, and use of African American oral traditions, Their Eyes differs fundamentally from Anglo-American novels and the majority of African American novels of the 1920s and 1930s. According to Mary Katherine Wainwright, Hurston accomplished “what so many black fiction writers of the Harlem Renaissance failed to do. When she chose to dramatize the indigenous elements of an all-black world, Hurston refused to participate in an either/or logic (black versus white) that underlies much black fiction” (240–1). 32. Needless to say, it also differs from The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson, which describes the privileged urban black class. Given its setting and its style, Their Eyes shares many aspects with Jean Toomer’s Cane, but differs significantly in its representation of African American women. Janie and Pheoby are far more active than the largely vulnerable and nurturing characters Karintha, Carma, and Fern. 33. For more detail on the postmodern element in her work, see my essay “Zora Neale Hurston; A Writer of Fiction and Anthropologist.” REAL: The Anthropological Turn in Literary Studies, ed. Jürgen Schläger, Tübingen: Narr, 1996, 163–78. 34. The notion of a frame is helpful for illustrating that Their Eyes emancipated colloquial speech from under the shadow of linguistic and moral inferiority. What John Widemann argues in his interpretation of Hurston in “Frame and Dialect: The Evolution of the Black Voice” can be equally applied to Twain’s use of dialect. 35. Lillie P. Howard once observed that Janie Crawford “strikes out, like Huck Finn, for the territory in search of her dreams and possibility of a better life beyond the horizon” (93). She establishes a metaphorical relation between two adventurous characters that ignores the fact that Huck searches for independence and Janie looks for the right man. Rampersad asserts an indirect influence between Hur- ston and Twain, suggesting that she was one among many who were influenced by Mark Twain. Rampersad delineates the ways Twain’s influence manifests in Hurston’s work, or for that matter, how the stylistic legacy has influenced the works of other writers. (For Rampersad’s discussion on Twain, see Leonard 227.) 36. Ana Castillo was awarded the American Book Award for The Mixquiahuala Let- ters. The fact that she published this novel with Doubleday is remarkable because Chicano/a fiction was mostly published by smaller or regional presses. Even San- dra Cisnero’s classic The House on Mango Street was published by a small firm called Arte Público. In 1991, Julia Alvarez published How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent with Algonquin Books and Cisnero published Woman Hollering Creek with Random House. While Castillo’s first novel appeared with Double- day, the hardcover version of So Far from God (1993) was published with Norton and the paperback edition with Plume Books, a division of Penguin Books. 37. This, in addition to the following quotes, is taken from the jacket and the first page of the Penguin Books edition. 38. In his assessment of narrative techniques characteristic of border literature, John Christie briefly remarks that, “the vernacular variety of their language in no way Notes 149

reflects any sort of intellectual deficiency, rather the opposite: individuality, cre- ativity, and strength in the face of oppressive powers” (95). He approves of the vernacular variety of border fiction and its alleged counterhegemonic potential without clarifying his definition of the term vernacular. 39. It seems conventional in comparison to Castillo’s epistolary novel The Mixquia- huala Letters, which consists of forty letters. Preceding these letters is a note to the reader encouraging us not to read the text in a linear manner. Explicitly call- ing for the reader’s participation, Castillo proposes three kinds of readings: “For the Conformist; For the Cynic; For the Quixotic” (7). 40. None of the publications that praised the novel as “exuberant and slangy . . . a chili mix of the conventional and poetic” (The Boston Globe), or lauded its “radical politics and storytelling skill” (Ms.) referred to its vernacular qualities. 41. The term, therefore, extends Anzaldúa’s collective self-definition—”we are a syn- ergy of two cultures with various degrees of Mexicanness or Angloness” (85)— to the level of language. To distinguish these practices of molding English and Spanish, Juan Bruce-Novoa uses the concept “interlingualism.” He differentiates between the juxtaposition of words from both languages and the fusion of grammar and syntax in ways “that monolingual readers will hardly notice” (50). 42. A good example is the heading to Chapter 15: “La Loca Santa Returns to the World via Albuquerque Before Her Transcendental Departure; and a Few Ran- dom Political Remarks from the Highly Opinionated Narrator.” The first part of the sentence introduces a distanced and impersonal authoritative voice; the second part is more informal, personal, and ironic because the narrator mocks his or her own predilection to judge and comment on the events she or he relates. 43. For more detailed information see Steele (59). 44. This scene is a good example of the magico-realist elements in the text. In 1955, Angel Flores defined this genre as “an amalgamation of realism and fantasy” (Flores 189). The following argument will reveal that the magic realism in So Far from God exceeds this definition, since there is more involved than the accep- tance of a worldview in which the real and the surreal blend together. 45. Fiona Mills argues that through the depiction of Francisco stalking Caridad and Esmeralda, “Castillo uses their deaths to illustrate the destructive homophobia that often accompanies heterosexist ideologies” (322). 46. A good illustration of the similarity shared with Huckleberry Finn can be found in the scene in which the priest warns La Loca that “she would surely burn in hell” if she did not go to church regularly to which she responds simply, “I’ve already been there. . . . And actually, it’s overrated” (221). 47. Aparicio suggests that this encounter with unassimilated difference is employed by many U.S. Latino/a writers as a means of marginalizing and potentially excluding the monolingual reader “by producing texts whose poetic and cultural signifying require crosscultural competency” (800). 48. Aparicio’s article “On Sub-Versive Signifiers: U.S. Latina/o Writers Tropicalize English,” is a prime example because in it she argues that tropicalized English constitutes, “a rewriting of Anglo signifiers from the Latino cultural vantage point. As such it becomes a textual diferencia from the linguistic repertoires of Anglo U. S. authors” (796). 150 Notes Chapter 3

1. See: CliffsNotes, http://www.cliffsnotes.com/WileyCDA/LitNote/The-Adventures -of-Huckleberry-Finn-Critical-Essays-Freedom-versus-Civilization-in-The -Adventures-of-Huckleberry-Finn.id-20,pageNum-456.html (20 Oct. 2008); Johnson, Claudia D., Understanding ‘Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’; See also BookRags, http://www.bookrags.com/studyguide-huckleberryfinn/themes.html (20 Oct. 2008). 2. Cited in Leonard (116). Although one could argue that Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Frederick Douglass’s slave narrative were also very effective in criticizing Ameri- can society, Huckleberry Finn certainly shows that in this presumably democratic nation, freedom and human dignity remained a privilege of white Americans. African Americans were unable to find “real individual freedom” because Euro- Americans enslaved and exploited them. 3. If indicted and convicted before the District Court of the United States, he would have been subject to a fine of up to one thousand dollars, years of hard labor, or imprisonment for up to six months. In 1841, Twain’s own father, John Clemens, served on a jury in a trial that sentenced three abolitionists who helped three slaves escape to Canada to twelve years of hard labor (Blair 110). 4. In retrospect, Twain himself once aptly described the severe psychological effect such an offense had in antebellum America. “In those old slave-holding days the whole community was agreed as to one thing—the awful sacredness of slave property. To help steal a horse or a cow was a low crime, but to help a hunted slave, or feed him, or shelter him, or hide him, or comfort him, in his troubles, his terrors, his despair, or hesitate to promptly betray him to the slave-catcher when opportunity offered was a much baser crime, & carried with it a stain, a moral smirch which nothing could wipe away” (cited in Beaver 4, 5). 5. Walter Blair draws on biographical evidence to suggest that Twain (at the time he was writing this passage) endorsed a school of thought on morality that favored the selfish principle. Blair cites the interesting distinction, formulated by the nineteenth-century philosopher W. E. H. Lecky, between two schools of morality: the stoical, intuitive, independent school and the epicurean, inductive, utilitarian, and selfish school. The former stoical school was supported by the noble “intuitive moralists” who believed not only that an innate natural power guides our moral conduct, but also that it is our duty to follow these intuitions as well as cultivate this innate sense of morality. Blair infers that Twain favored the epicurean selfish position and therefore wrote a story in which Huck’s expedient and self-centered morality motivated him to act nobly. Huckleberry Finn critiques the noble intuitive philosophers and endorses a utilitarian model (Blair 143). 6. Being struck by this paradox, Twain felt increasingly ambivalent toward his own narrative. Caught between his sense of dissatisfaction and his inability to for- mulate an alternative, Twain became so distressed that he wanted to burn the entire manuscript. In the fall of 1879, after his return from Europe, Twain felt prepared to confront this aporia. He took up writing. His immediate response was to evade the problem by introducing the raft-steamboat crash. After that, he resumed a more aggressive attitude and attacked America’s immorality head-on. Notes 151

7. Jonathan Arac believes that this funny statement is making hell a joke rather than suggesting that Huck seriously believed he had to go there (Arac 53). In his notorious reading, Leslie Fiedler reads it as a sign of “mutual love of a white man and a colored” (Fiedler 667). His disclosure of “innocent homosexuality” is anachronistic, as Phelan observes, because a clear demarcation between homo- and heterosexuals did not yet exist in the 1840s. It was only toward the end of the century that the heterosexual norm was constructed (Phelan 539). 8. This refers to those critics who have used an essentialist rhetoric to argue for Huck’s “innate humanity” (Blair 145), his “innate goodness” (Salomon 144), or his “innate sense of right” (Roberts 38). 9. Americanists of the early generation were mostly disappointed about the ending of the novel. Many new Americanists, however, have read the burlesque ending as Twain’s critique of the humiliation of black Americans during Reconstruction. In this view, Huck should be held responsible for Jim’s fate in a way that America should be held responsible for its racist and separatist practices. 10. Charles Pierce first introduced pragmatism around the time Twain wrote the second half of Huckleberry Finn. In the 1880s and 90s, William James further elaborated on the pragmatic value of truth claims. There are interesting overlaps between the pragmatist position and the expedient, spontaneous vernacular model as James’s description of a pragmatist suggests: a pragmatist “turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori rea- sons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and towards power” (James, Essays in Pragmatism 144). 11. See also Toni Morrison, “Huckleberry Finn: An Amazing, Troubling Book.” Morrison also finds value in its difficult and troubling narrative structure. She specifically talks about the accumulation of gaps and silences in this novel. 12. Most critical assessments of the past have criticized the novel for its choppy, hap- hazard composition. Even recently, Arac objected to “the self-undoing plot of the novel [because it] prevents either Jim or Huck from effective action, and the mise- en-scène and language of the book carefully shield it from politics” (Arac 61). 13. This passage matches Twain’s dismissals of American racism as he expressed it in his essay “The United States of Lyncherdom” (Zwick 111–31). Harold Beaver claims that Twain felt so guilty over “the wrong the white race had done to the black race in slavery,” that he paid his dues to a black American student (Beaver 7). Shelley Fisher Fishkin also detects a sense of anger operating behind Huck- leberry Finn. To her, Twain’s novel shows that “there was nothing a black man could do . . . that would make white society see beyond the color of his skin” (Fishkin 6). 14. Apart from Lowry’s essay “Mark Twain and Whiteness” (57, 58) see also Fishkin’s Was Huck Black?, which argues that the character Huck and his voice emulated the voice of African American slaves (e.g., Jimmy) Twain had known personally. In her pioneering study Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagi- nation, Toni Morrison argues that Huckleberry Finn reveals the dependency of white freedom on black oppression: “Freedom has no meaning to Huck or to 152 Notes

the text without the specter of enslavement, the anodyne to individualism; the yardstick of absolute power over the life of another” (Playing in the Dark 56). In that sense, (white) individualism is constructed through (black) enslavement as well as a general blindness toward African American citizens and their culture. 15. See for example: Lupton, “Survival” 45–54; Kubritschek, “Female Quest” 109– 15; Bethel, “Black Female Literary Tradition” 176–88; and Mary Helen Wash- ington 110 (cited in Appiah and Gates, Hurston). 16. For Davie, “the text’s deliberately undermining of hierarchy as an unquestion- able perspective—its habit of surprising readers with their own ignorance—is a profoundly political act” (448). And Kaplan argues that the framing dialogue between the two black women, although politically ambiguous, “has political bite” (133). These deployments of the term political indicate a rather metaphorical usage typical of the critical discourse of the 1990s. 17. Among them are Michael Awkward, who argues that Tea Cake is “an exceed- ingly charming, but nonetheless dominant, husband” (90, 83). Likewise, Todd McGrowan observes that Tea Cake, who seemed to be a liberating force, ultimately, “inaugurates a new kind of domination” (117). And Eva Boesenberg criticizes Tea Cake for treating “Janie like a child, just as the other men in her life” (56). While all three critics impeach Tea Cake for his patronizing and sexist behavior, Ann DuCille argues that Tea Cake is more “a patriarchical father than equal partner” (121), thereby ignoring that Janie loved him precisely because she thought that he respected her as an equal. 18. This passage from Chapter 2 reveals the town’s disdain for their physical attraction: “It was after the picnic that the town began to notice things and got mad. Tea Cake and Mrs. Mayor Starks! . . . here she goes sashaying off to a picnic in pink linen. . . . Gone off to Sanford in a car with Tea Cake and her all dressed in blue! It was a shame” (166). 19. Hurston had contact with the founder of the National Council of Negro Women and president of Bethune-Cookman College, Mary McLeod Bethune, who intended to employ Hurston in the drama department. Their contact, however, ended abruptly because Hurston “was very soon at odds with Mrs. Bethune” (Hemenway 201). 20. On lesbian sexuality in Their Eyes, see Rohy, Impossible Women; Carla Kaplan, “The Erotics of Talk”; Gallop, Around 1981; Hull, Smith, Some of Us Are Brave. 21. Here I agree with DuCille that “Their Eyes critiques, challenges, and subverts male authority, ultimately eliminating the male oppressor, but female subjectivity does not win out over patriarchical ideology” (121). 22. Hurston’s representation of female sexuality obviously differs from the sub- merged sexuality we find in novels by other black women writers such as Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy, Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun, and Quicksand or Passing by Nella Larsen (DuCille 116). 23. Susan Edwards Meisenhelder aptly argues that Nanny, unable to imagine a world beyond the logics of domination, equates whiteness with social status and blackness with living a low life. To spare her granddaughter from the fate of most black women, Nanny “embraces an ideal that from her experience seems the Notes 153

only alternative, one drawn from a romanticized conception of the lives of white women” (63, 66). On Joe Stark’s whiteness, see also Awkward (75) and Wall (385). 24. Their Eyes performs a deconstructivist move similar to the one Gert Hurm observed in Huckleberry Finn when he argued that “Clemens conceives the vernacular both as a tool and an object, a medium and a target of his cultural criticism” (182). 25. I am referring to the aptly titled portrait of Hurston—“Fighter against Compla- cency and Ignorance”—that was published in Barnard College Alumnae Maga- zine 36 (Autumn 1946): 6–7. 26. Janie plays on the metaphor of space and voice when she complains that “mah own mind had to be squeezed and crowded out tuh make room for yours in me” (133). 27. Maria J. Racine argues that “Janie’s marriage to Tea Cake shows the inability of males to express themselves verbally” (289). Tea Cake and Joe certainly exem- plify the nondialogical mode, but the text does not propose that an inability to communicate is an essentially male character trait. 28. Wright’s statement reads as follows:

“Miss Hurston seems to have no desire whatever to move into serious fiction . . . her prose is cloaked in that facile sensuality that has dogged Negro expression since the days of Phillis Wheatley. Her dialogue man- ages to catch the psychological movements of the Negro folk-mind in their pure simplicity, but that’s as far as it goes. Miss Hurston volun- tarily continues in her novel the tradition which was forced upon the Negro in the theatre, that is, the minstrel technique that makes the ‘white folks’ laugh. Her characters eat and laugh and cry and work and kill; they swing like a pendulum eternally in that safe and narrow orbit in which America likes to see the Negro live: between laughter and tears . . . the sensory sweep of her novel carries no theme, no message, no thought. In the main her novel is not addressed to the Negro, but to a white audience whose chauvinistic tastes she knows how to satisfy.” (Appiah and Gates 16, 17)

29. On the socioeconomic context see Todd McGowan’s “Liberation and Domina- tion: Their Eyes Were Watching God and the Evolution of Capitalism” in which McGowan relates Janie’s marriages to different versions of gender oppression and different forms of capitalism. In her marriage with Joe Starks, Janie is confronted with “a logocentric structure of domination—representative of monopoly capitalism” and with Tea Cake she experiences “a type of domination endemic to late capitalism” (117). 30. Although her husband returned, Domingo did not support the family financially. Somehow Sofi and her daughters never suffered from a lack of money. According to the 1987 Department of Labor Report, one out of three Hispanic households was female-headed, and 52 percent of those households lived in poverty. 154 Notes

31. Reading it as a “counterhegemony in the Chicano borderlands,” Roland Walter analyzes the novel’s “cultural politics of dislocation and relocation.” He praises So Far from God for investing in a “nonessentialized consciousness based on radical mestiza subjectivity” (92) that creates “an identity based on difference with the capacity to relocate a ‘differential consciousness’” (92). His account of Castillo’s politics overlaps with McCracken’s assessment because the latter examines what she calls a “politics of signification” based on “disarticulating signifiers from dominant meaning systems and rearticulating them in new connotational chains” (McCracken 42). Instead of discussing Castillo’s strategies of “significa- tory resignification” (McCracken) or politics of relocation (Walter), the following paragraphs will elaborate on the concern with realpolitik. 32. As the novel proceeds, the female protagonists, however, “experience loss in the collision of their need to create a home space with the destructive forces outside,” which ultimately turns them into “victims of patriarchy” (Lanza 68, 78). Accordingly, the protagonists are either enthroned as heroines or as victims of patriarchy. Lanza’s account, like Ellen McCracken’s, oscillates between the judg- ments that the text is either subversive and self-empowering or losing out in its counterhegemonic struggle to displace the powers that be. 33. In the previous chapter, I discussed the use of irony and the fact that these alle- gories turn into parody. In this chapter, I intend to elaborate on the characters themselves, to discuss the specific values each of them personifies, and to explore the ways in which they are undermined, questioned, and transformed. 34. This name goes back to her near death at age three, when she resurrected at her own funeral and insulted the priest. Ever since La Loca suffered from a “phobia of people” (38). 35. His observation is worth quoting at length:

The characters act out the attribute of the virtue of their names until they experience a catastrophe of ‘life’ or until they interact with the macho male characters. Under these two circumstances, the women no longer embody the virtue of their allegorical name. For example . . . Fe’s faith in the capitalist system and her ambition to possess a house, car, and social status are curtailed because her dedication to her job is based on her desire to make more and more money, so much that she blinds herself to her poisonous surroundings. [ . . . ] The virtue of charity is also undermined by life and men [la vida y los machos]. Caridad’s loving and charitable aspirations are stifled by an erotic obsession with Memo that results in promiscuity and later after her miraculous recovery, a naïve homoerotic attraction for Esmeralda, her lesbian lover” (Man- riquez 42).

36. While such working conditions seem outrageous, they are factually based. A small contract assembly company with the name U.S.M. Technology had its employees handle hazardous solvents without providing masks, gloves, or safety sheets (Platt 150). U.S.M. was only one among several companies violating state safety and health laws. Downriver from the National Laboratory in Los Alamos, Notes 155

New Mexico, about 2,400 sites were suspected of contamination with uranium, plutonium, tritium, strontium 90, and other highly toxic chemicals. Thus, it is not a coincidence that the actual town of Tome is located seventy-five miles downriver from Los Alamitos. 37. Fe does not consider Acme to be a class enemy, and for years she denies that a ruthlessly exploitative company was to blame for her illness. Thus, the text’s critique of capitalism mocks the notion of a conscious proletariat. 38. Castillo’s acknowledgment in So Far from God reads as follows: “I am indebted to the members of the Southwest Organizing Project who assisted in my research; above all, for the inspiration I received from their consciousness, ongoing com- mitment, and hope.” 39. Platt further defines virtual realism in contrast to virtual reality, arguing that the latter is about escaping reality through a simulation of reality, whereas the former refers to fictional texts that document “real world” conditions. Thus, she ignores the active and imaginative element involved in the act of literary representation. 40. In the 1990s, one out of every four Chicano families, and one out of every three children, was reported to be living below the poverty line. 41. One Navajo woman complains that, “we, as a people, are being eliminated from the ecosystem, too . . . like the dolphins, like the eagle” (242). 42. Reporting on the vicious attack on Caridad, the narrator asserts that “it was not a man with a face and a name who had attacked and left Caridad mangled like a run-down rabbit” (77). Caridad was raped by what the narrator refers to as a “thing.” Instead of laying blame on individual perpetrators, the text criticizes sexist structures, institutionalized disregard for women. 43. Castillo quotes a report of the Center for Health Promotion and from Howard’s International AIDS 1994 index that also states that 70 percent of HIV new infections occur in heterosexual relationships (Castillo, Xicanisma 225). 44. Her cooperative is modeled “after the one started by the group up north that had also saved its community from destruction” (146); the narrator suggests drawing an analogy between the fictional co-op and the actual Ganados del Valle, located in northern New Mexico, which is also organized by women. Platt makes an important observation about the women organizing Ganados del Valle. Prior to their economic intervention they saw themselves only as housewives. But as they acquired various talents and skills, they became more politicized (151). In other words, the political process also changed them as people. 45. If her presidency lasted 38 years, she must have been in her eighties when retiring from this prestigious and demanding office. Again, this hints at the make-believe and magico-realist quality of So Far from God. 46. This group of female activists is probably modeled after the mothers who pro- test the disappearance of their children under the Argentinean dictatorship, The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, or, the Mothers of East Los Angeles, a group of Latinas who also successfully fought the installation of a hazardous-waste incin- erator in the L.A. basin. Their support of the grass-root politician Gloria Molina contributed to her overall popularity. In 1992, Molina became the first Latina to be elected to the Los Angeles City Council and later became a county supervisor, 156 Notes

controlling a budget of over thirteen billion dollars. Molina in fact might serve as a model for the fictional character Sofi. 47. “One man said that when he laid eyes on her, he saw a beautiful halo radiate around the whole body, like the Virgin de Guadalupe” (Castillo, So Far From God 90). Commenting on the textual analogy between Caridad and la Virgin of Guadalupe, Thereasa Delgadillo suggests that So Far from God, “asks us to see in the worship of Our Lady of Guadalupe not the ever-brilliant colonizers dup- ing those poor Indians, but instead the possibility [of] an indigenous practice” (898–9). By linking the worship of Guadalupe not to Catholic traditions but to indigenous goddesses, Delgadillo reads it as a counterhegemonic force against the Catholic Church, the colonial legacy, and a phallocentric logos. Although this is certainly the case, Castillo herself once argued that the Virgin is “not as much a manifestation of the Church but of the women’s culture and ethnic identity” (Castillo, Xicanisma 48). And one might add that the novel turns her also into a manifestation of nonrigid (mestiza) thinking. 48. The majority of images depict her as a young woman clad in a red dress with a blue robe covering her from head to toe. She is surrounded by a halo-like aura of gold rays. Underneath her is a half moon held up by a winged angel. Some representations of this legendary incident also show the peasant Juan. As the story goes, Coatlalopeuh told Juan that she wished for a temple to be built on the Tepeyec hill. In return, she promised to help the newly conquered Indian people. Juan approached the Bishop in this matter, telling him about the encounter, but the Spanish prelate refused to believe him. After Juan was sent away, the Virgin appeared again and told him to pick roses from the hill (which had grown there out of season). As Juan was delivering the roses to the Bishop, the image of the Virgin suddenly appeared, and the prelate ordered that a temple be built there in her name. See Brading. 49. See Wolf and Rodriguez. 50. Yolanda M. López’s Portrait of the Artists: Tableau Vivant. Guadalupe series depicts the Virgin dressed in gym clothes holding paint brushes. In a painting by Ester Hernández, the Virgin is tattooed on the back of a tough-looking Chicana. 51. Gloria Anzaldúa’s groundbreaking study Borderlands attributes a crucial role to the Virgin, bringing her to the attention of scholars in Chicano, feminist, and cultural studies. As such, the academic interest in this figure exceeds the disci- plinary confines of anthropology and theology. A prime example of its critical presence in the humanities was a MLA workshop entitled “La Virgen de Guada- lupe: Icon, Identity, Text” (see: MLA Newsletter Spring 2002 20). 52. La Llorona is associated with Malintzín (also known by her Spanish name “La Malinche”), a Nahuatl woman of noble birth who was the personal slave and translator of Hernán Cortés. She was also the mother of his children. Cortés broke off their relationship when his wife arrived from Spain and made plans to take the boys he had had with Malinche back to Europe with him. Out of despair, she killed her children by drowning them. Thereafter, Malinche was Notes 157

often seen near the lake wailing for her children (hence the name La Llorona). Her agonizing pain as well as sense of guilt and loss was heard mostly at night when she wandered through the streets or along rivers. In the public imagination, her sexual relationship with the conqueror of Mesoamerica made her a whore and a traitor to the Indians, and she is thus vul- garly referred to as la chingada (“the fucked woman”). Apart from being accused of betraying her people, she was blamed for the fall of the Aztec Empire. More generally, a malinchista refers to a sellout, one who turns her back on her own culture. Octavio Paz argues that the image of Malinche and the concept of la chingada is essential to the self-understanding of Mexicans (see also Castillo, Writings 197–208). 53. This binary originated in religious patriarchical traditions but was perpetuated in the male-dominated Chicano nationalist discourse of the 1960s. In the 1980s and 1990s Chicana feminists objected to the fact that “Chicanas can occupy only one position, either as the self-renounced female, la madre abnegada (suf- fering mother), the passive virgin, or the embodiment of female treachery and sexual promiscuity, respectively, sublimated into the either/or binary of ‘virgen de Guadalupe/la malinche’” (Rosa Linda Fregoso 78). 54. Another example of male binary thinking can be seen in Ruben instructing Esperanza as to “the role of women and the role of men and how they were not to be questioned” (36). 55. Her call for a mestiza consciousness is very explicit about the need to reject logocentric and Manichean modes of thinking:

La mestiza constantly has to shift out of habitual formations; from con- vergent thinking, analytical reasoning that tends to use rationality to move towards a single goal (a Western mode), to divergent thinking, characterized by movement away from set patterns and goals and toward a more whole perspective, one that includes rather than excludes. The new mestiza copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity. She learns to be an Indian in Mexican culture, to be Mexican from an Anglo point of view. She learns to juggle cultures. She has a plural personality, she operates in a plural mode— nothing is thrust out, the good, the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned. (Anzaldúa 101)

56. Anzaldúa’s call to see Coatlalopeuh-Coatlicue in Guadalupe foregrounds the indigenous origins. One could also argue that it is necessary to see Cihuacoatl (woman serpent), who in turn is associated with Malintzin, La Malinche, and La Llorona in the virtuous Guadalupe. In fact, the text even suggests that “La Llorona may have been nothing short of a loving mother goddess” (Castillo So Far 163). 57. Coatlicue personifies destructive and awesome natural forces; she is “the monster who devoured the sun at night [and] brought it to life in the morning” (Anton 59). 158 Notes Conclusion

1. Regarding the important insights that reader-response criticism has produced, see Wolfgang Iser’s Der Akt des Lesens and Der Implizite Leser as well as the overview by Robert L. Holub, Reception Theory. For a pioneering attempt to capture the sound of literature, see Philipp Schweighauser, The Noises of American Litera- ture, 1890—1985. 2. Apart from those novels mentioned in the introduction (Sapphire’s Push, Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger), Rita Dove’s Sonata Mulattica is a good example of a poetic rendering of vernacular literature in that her narrative poem expresses its political message in a highly informal and musical style. 3. The fact that the United States, unlike Europe, is a nation of immigrants that brings together multiple national, religious, and ethnic backgrounds has for a long time fascinated European Americanists. As early as 1969, the German-born Harvard professor Werner Sollors indicted American racism: “Zur Rassenjustiz in den USA”; the Swiss scholar Fritz Gysin wrote about The Grotesque in Ameri- can Negro Fiction; not to mention the pioneering work of Stuart Hall in Britain. In other words, at a time when the few American scholars working in the field were themselves minority scholars, a number of European Americanists were working on issues related to what would later be called multiculturalism. And in the 1980s, the heyday of multiculturalism, a host of European scholars published works on black and ethnic literature. Among them were Michel and Gen- eviève Fabre, Maria Diedrich, Bernd Ostendorf, Günther Lenz, Justine Tally, Carl Pedersen, and William Boelhower. 4. It therefore differs from the recent publication by that same title because Ameri- can Literary Studies is a collection of essays that covers a wide range of different topics focusing on race, class, gender, and media without trying to reveal interconnections. 5. In his essay “Comparative American Studies: Hybridity and Beyond,” Cyrus R. K Patell contributes to the shift of multiculturalism from pluralism toward cosmopolitanism. He quotes Sylvia Wynter’s contribution to Poetics of the Americas. Assessing Christopher Columbus’s 1492 voyage, she chooses an approach that is not ethnicity based but closer to approaches favored in the initial phase of black studies, in which “the call for Black studies joined with the calls for a series of other non-White studies—American Indian (the Red), Chicanos, Asian—as well as for feminist studies” (Wynter, 148). 6. This pursuit has little in common with the sort of neoconservative attempts to reunite America that Arthur M. Schlesinger suggested in The Disuniting of Amer- ica. A genuine concern for commonalities also repudiates conservative attempts (à la Allan Bloom, Lynne Cheney, Newt Gingrich) to promote nonintegrationist models for American society. Neither does it try to rescue a national consensus as Richard Rorty does in Saving Our Country. 7. Frederick L. Aldama’s cross-cultural study Postethnic Narrative Criticism: Magi- corealism in Oscar “Zeta” Acosta, Ana Castillo, Julie Dash, Hanif Kureishi, and Notes 159

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Books

Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism. New York: Oxford UP, 1998. Cultural Studies Bibliography. John F. Kennedy Institute Working Papers. Berlin: Zentrale Universitätsdruckerei, 1996.

Edited Volumes

Eye-catcher: Visual Culture in 19th Century America. Tübingen: Stauffenberg Verlag, forthcoming (coedited with Anette Jael Lehmann). Aesthetic Transgressions: Modernity, Liberalism, and the Function of Literature: Festschrift für Winfried Fluck zum 60. Geburtstag. Heidelberg: Winter, 2006 (coedited with Thomas Claviez und Ulla Haselstein). Zora Neale Hurston: The Complete Stories. New York: Harper Collins, 1995 (coedited with Henry Louis Gates Jr.).

Articles

“Liberty: A Transnational Icon par excellence.” Transnational American Studies: Edited Collection. Ed. Winfried Fluck, Don Pease, and John Rowe. UP of New England, forthcoming. “Du Bois: Of the Coming of John.” The Oxford Companion to The Souls of Black Folk. Ed. Shamoon Zamir. Oxford UP, 2008. “Diaspora Aesthetics: Exploring the African Diaspora in the Works of Aaron Douglas, Jacob Lawrence and Jean-Michel Basquiat.” Exiles, Diasporas, and Strangers. Ed. Kobena Mercer. Cambridge: MIT P, 2007. 122–45. “Aesthetics of Transgression: Awe, Alterity, and Apprehension in The Scarlet Letter.” Aesthetic Transgressions: Modernity, Liberalism, and the Function of Literature: Fest- schrift für Winfried Fluck zum 60. Geburtstag. Ed. Thomas Claviez, Ulla Hasel- stein, and Sieglinde Lemke. Heidelberg: Winter, 2006. 163–94. “Vernacular Aesthetics.” Cultural Interactions: 50 Years of American Studies in Germany. Ed. Bernd Ostendorf and Ulla Haselstein. Heidelberg: Winter, 2005. 139–59. “Theories of American Culture in the Name of the Vernacular.” Theories of American Culture: Theories of American Studies. Ed. Winfried Fluck and Thomas Claviez. 182 Publications by the Author

Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 19. Tübingen: Narr, 2003. 155–74. “Primitivist Modernism.” Primitivism and 20th Century Art: A Documentary History. Ed. Jack Flam and Miriam Deutsch. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003. 240–55. “Response to Todd Gitlin and Susan Armitage.” Transnational America: The Fading of Borders in the Western Hemisphere. Ed. Bernd Ostendorf. Heidelberg: Winter, 2002. 231–37. “Transatlantic Relations: The German Du Bois.” German? American? Literature? New Directions in German–American Studies. Ed. Winfried Fluck und Werner Sollors. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. 207–16. “Review of Gender–Voice–Vernacular: The Formation of Female Subjectivity in Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker.” ZAA XLIX, Heft 2/2 (2001): 197–8. “Trans-Culturalism.” Double-Crossings: Entrecruzamientos. Ed. Carlos Von Son. San Diego: Ediciones Nuevo Espacio, 2001. 22–37. “Hybridity the Subtext of Modernism.” Crossover: Cultural Hybridity and Ethnicity, Gender, Ethics. Ed. Therese Steffen. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2000. 49–60. “Berlin and Boundaries: Sollen vs. Geschehen.” Boundary 2 27.3 (WS 2000): 45–78. “Hamlin Garland,” “Joel Chandler Harris,” “James Weldon Johnson,” “Nella Larsen.” Metzler Lexikon amerikanischer Autoren. Ed. Bernd Engler und Kurt Müller. Stutt- gart: Metzler, 2000. “Mapping the Harlem Renaissance.” Mapping African America: History, Narrative For- mation and the Production of Knowledge. Ed. Maria Diedrich, Carl Pedersen, und Justine Tally. FORECAAST 1. Hamburg: LIT, 1999. 119–28. “A Forgotten Legacy.” Introduction. Lifting as They Climb: The History of the National Association of Colored Women. By Elizabeth Lindsay Davis. Schomburg Library Series. New York: MacMillan, 1996. xv-xxxiii. “Blurring Generic Boundaries: Zora Neale Hurston: A Writer of Fiction and Anthro- pologist.” The Anthropological Turn in Literary Studies. Ed. Jürgen Schläger. Year- book of Research in English and American Literature 12. Tübingen: Narr, 1996. 163–78. “Josephine Baker.” Dictionary of American Negro Biography. Ed. Rayford W. Logan and Michael R. Winston. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995. 233–34. “White on White Act 2.” Transition 64 (1994): 110–12. “White on White: When the West Represents the Rest, Who Comes off Worse?” Transition 59 (1993): 145–54. “Im Zeichen des FORDschritts.” Amerikastudien 38.38 (1993): 251–63. “Schwarze (Über-) Lebenskunst.” Perspectives on Multiculturalism in North America. Ed. Carol W. Pfaff. Materialien 33. Berlin: John F. Kennedy P, 1992. 121–38. Index

aesthetics, vernacular, 5, 8, 127–29 comparative American studies, 50, critical reception of, within 144, 158 African American studies, 6, new and post-Americanists, 38, 21–26, 39–40 44–45, 143, 151 Chicano and border studies, 42, transnational American studies, 2, 6, 89–90 38, 42–43, 49, 141, 143 formal features See also African American studies, fragmented, improvised composi- history of; Chicano: studies; myth- tion, 61, 77–79, 90, 94, 102, and-symbol school 127 anthropology, 24, 26, 104, 143, 156 informal colloquial style, 5, 8, Anzaldúa, Gloria, 84, 124–25, 142, 13–14, 58–60, 82, 86, 132, 149, 156, 157 149, 158 (see also vernacular: Aparicio, Frances, 84, 90–91, 149 sounds in fiction) Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 58, 73, 143 multifaceted deconstructionist Arac, Jonathan A., 11, 18, 33, 35–38, aspects, 24–26, 29, 32, 81, 90, 43–44, 51 101–2, 121–22, 140 authenticity, 4, 34, 43, 55–56, 82, 96, See also black aesthetics school 113, 136 African American English vernacular Awkward, Michael, 76, 147, 152, 153 (AAEV, BEV), 27, 68, 75 African American feminism, 73, 75, 105 Baker, Houston A., Jr., 6, 20–26, African American literary history, 21, 28–33, 39, 42, 51, 139, 140 28–30, 43, 73, 78 Basquiat, Jean-Michel, 34 African American studies, history of, 2, Bell, Michael David, 96 25, 33, 34, 47–48, 131 Bhabha, Homi, 33–35, 46, 141 Agee, James, 56 bilingualism, 85, 90 AIDS, 34, 89, 119, 155 binary logic and dualistic thinking, 14, Aldama, Frederick Luis, 7, 91, 158 113, 121, 125, 132, 142 altruism, 109 black aesthetics school, 25, 26, 29 Alvarez, Julia, 79, 90, 148 black English vernacular (BEV). See ambiguity, 124–25, 157 African American studies, history American dream, 89, 117–18 of American exceptionalism, 137 black feminist literary criticism. See American studies, 3–11, 15–18, 32–34, African American feminism; liter- 37–38, 44–50, 131, 134, 136, ary criticism 137, 138, 142, 143, 144, 159 Bloom, Allan, 158 184 Index

Bloom, Harold, 94 cultural studies, 49, 80, 122 Blount, Marcell, 21, 27 paradigms of difference, 44–51, Boesenberg, Eva, 75–76, 152 132–33 border culture aesthetics (see aesthetics, vernacular) cultural ignorance studies, 6–7, 49–50, 74, 142 cultural pluralism, 4, 46, 131 Bridgman, Richard, 17–18, 31, 56, 58, intercultural, 43, 46 65, 138 monocultural, 23, 44, 46 Brown, Sterling, 39, 72, 73 multiculturalism, 4, 6, 9, 15, 20, 33, 38, 56, 131–32, 134 Callahan, John, 75–77, 113, 148 pop culture, 42, 43, 122, 141 Caló, 81, 84 See also diversity canonization, 32, 35 hypercanonization, 36–37, 44, 74 definitions of the vernacular by capitalism, 41, 114–15, 118, 153, 155 Arac, Jonathan, 35–38 Castillo, Ana, 79–80, 84, 114, 118, Baker, Houston A., 20–26 119, 125, 148, 155, 156. See also Bhabha, Homi, 35 So Far from God Bridgman, Richard, 17 Chicana feminism, 122, 124 Ellison, Ralph, 24 Chicano Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 26–29 code-switching, 6, 35, 41, 81, 84–85 Kouwenhoven, John A., 18–19 literature, 41–43, 79 Kymlicka, Will, 4 Renaissance, 46 Lemke, Sieglinde, 8–9, 128–30 studies, 50, 79, 124–25, 141, 155, Marx, Leo, 5, 11–15 157 McLaughlin, Thomas, 34–35 Christian ethics, 87, 89, 101, 115 Mercer, Kobena, 4–5 citizenship rights, 4, 94 O’Meally, Robert, 39–41, 43–44 Civil War, 103, 116 Oxford English Dictionary, 3–4 class, 5–8, 10, 12, 15, 17, 21, 24, 31, Rourke, Constance, 19–20 41, 50, 58, 96, 117, 129 Saldívar, José David, 41–44 Clemens, Samuel Langhorne. See also Smith, Henry Nash, 15–17 Twain, Mark various critics from the 1990s, 4 Columbus, Christopher, 158 democratic coming-of-age novel, 76, 79, 104, 105, communication, 2, 5, 38, 76–79, 113 104–5, 112, 114, 129, 130, 144, communication, 76, 88, 105, 111–12. 148 (see also communication) See also democratic: communica- idealism, 94–96 tion; individual novels process, 4, 76–79, 95 comparative American studies. See under DeVoto, Bernard, 54–55 American studies dialect, 3, 14, 17, 28, 54–56, 58, comparative approach, 105, 108, 113, 62–64, 68, 69, 71–72, 77–78, 125, 131–32 105, 108, 115, 127, 136, 144–45, cosmopolitanism, 35, 37, 46, 132, 141, 147, 148. See also linguistic 158 inferiority Creole, 37–38, 136 Díaz, Junot, 9, 158 Index 185 diction, 18, 56, 60, 64–65, 69–72, 127 genteel culture, 8, 32, 78, 96, 100, 103, diversity, 6–8, 47, 49, 51, 71, 125, 133 109, 111, 128, 130, 139. See also Donyo, Victor, 57–59, 95 Victorianism Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 21, 39, 56, 139, Gilroy, Paul, 2, 33–34, 43, 131–32, 145 135, 140, 141, 143 globalization, 3, 4 egalitarianism, 12–13, 30–31, 36, 129. Great Depression, 70 See also elitism Eliot, T. S., 10 Hall, Stuart, 33, 43, 45, 47, 141, 142, elitism, 14, 31 143, 158 Ellison, Ralph, 1, 2, 10, 21, 23–24, 28, Harlem Renaissance, 77, 148 31–32, 36, 37–41, 55, 77, 95–96, Hemingway, Ernest, 17, 18, 56, 146 99, 139 heteroglossia, 58, 61–62 environmentalism. See under politics polyvocality (see under narrative ethnicity, 2, 47–50, 132, 158 voices) ethnic chauvinism, 45–46 tropicalized English, 84, 91, 149 ethnic literature, 91, 135, 158, 159 heteronormativity, 45, 109, 119, 149, ethnic separatism, 2, 34, 117, 135 151 heterosexuality, 45, 109, 119, 125, 129, ethnography, 77, 142 149, 151, 155. See also heteronormativity; homosexuality fantasy, 87, 125, 149 hip-hop, 4, 35, 42 Faulkner, William, 39, 40 homosexuality, 45, 89, 109, 125, Fauset, Jessie, 78, 152 151. See also heteronormativity; female heterosexuality self-actualization, 130 Huckleberry Finn victimization, 115 critical reception of, 11, 53–55 feminism. See African American femi- democratic values, 95–96 nism; Chicana feminism episodes, specific Fluck, Winfried, ix, 16–17, 38, 49, 61, Grangerford-Shepherdson, 103 136, 146 King and Duke, 103 focalization, 82, 83, 85 raft scene, 12 folk moral evolution, pragmatist attitude, hero, 107, 110 97–102 literature and culture, 14, 22, 24, racism, 94–95 27–28, 39, 41, 72–73, 110–13, rhythm and polyvocal structure, 123, 145 58–65 free indirect discourse (FID). See under use of nonstandard language, 55–56 narrative voices whiteness, 104 Fugitive Slave Law, 97 Hughes, Langston, 39, 56, 145 Fusco, Coco, 34–35 humanism, 2, 10, 132, 134, 135 human solidarity, 12–14 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., ix, 6, 26–33, neohumanism, 2 39, 42, 48–51, 68, 74–75, 139, planetary humanism, 2, 131–32 140, 141, 147 See also vernacular: humanism 186 Index humanities, the, 1–2, 4, 7, 30, 49, 135, postcolonialism, 48, 49, 74, 122, 156 132, 141, 142 humor, 19–20, 55, 61–62, 86, 90, 128, translation studies, 2, 35, 84–85 144, 145. See also irony; parody See also whiteness studies Hurm, Gert, 56, 136, 148, 153 literary regionalism. See local color Hurston, Zora Neale, 39, 70, 73–78, fiction 104–5, 110–13, 146, 148. See also literature Their Eyes Were Watching God African American, 22, 25–31, 39–41, hybridity, 38, 42–43, 46, 51, 132–33, 74, 139 142, 143, 158 Anglo-American, 15, 21–22, 35, 43, 148 identity British, 12–13, 15, 32, 159 conflict, 98, 111, 129 comic, 20 politics, 42, 48, 129, 147 Mexican American, 84, 125 idiomatic expressions, 31, 60, 65, popular, 20, 31–32 67–68, 85 Llorona, La, and La Malinche, 123, inflection, 58, 60, 141 156, 157 interior monologue. See under narrative local color fiction, 4, 41, 55, 145 Locke, Alain, 77, 109 voices irony, 10, 38, 82, 86–88, 154 Mailloux, Steven, 101–2 Iser, Wolfgang, 158 Manríquez, B. J., 89–90, 116, 154 Martínez, Rubén, 41–42, 44 James, Henry, 17–18, 20, 56 Marx, Leo Jewett, Sarah Orne, 56, 145 definition of the vernacular, 5, 11–15 John F. Kennedy Institute for North on Huckleberry Finn, 5–6, 11–13, 17 American Studies, 7 role in American studies, 15–20 Johnson, James Weldon, 77, 146, 148 masculinity Jones, Gavin, 56, 145 in Huckleberry Finn, 102–4 Jordan, June, 29, 73 in So Far from God, 116, 124 in Their Eyes Were Watching God, Kingsolver, Barbara, 79 106–8 Kingston, Maxine Hong, 9, 135 See also ethnicity: ethnic chauvinism Kouwenhoven, John A., 18–19, 22, 40, Matthews, Brander, 53, 57, 75 138, 139 Matthiessen, F. O., 14–15, 137 McCracken, Ellen, 80, 91, 154 Larsen, Nella, 78, 152 McKay, Janet Holmgren, 57 linguistic inferiority, 55 McLaughlin, Thomas, 34–35 literary criticism Mencken, H. L., 53, 54, 56 comparativist approach, 4, 7, 9, 43, metaphor, 22–23, 26, 70–71, 75, 90, 44–51 96, 114, 138, 139, 141, 153 interdisciplinary approaches, 2, metaphysics, 12, 13, 142 16–17, 30, 136 metonymy, 22–23, 54, 70 New Criticism, 14, 16 Mexican Revolution, 122 New Historicism, 80 Michaels, Walter Benn, 6, 143 Index 187 modernism orality, 109, 127–28, 141. See also story- alternative, 112–13 telling tradition; tall tale experimental, 17–18, 42 (see also Osorio, Pepón, 34, 35 Eliot, T. S.; Hemingway, Ernest; Stein, Gertrude) Paredes, Américo, 41–42 postmodernism, 5, 77 parody, 89–91, 119, 128. See also Primitivist Modernism, 141 humor; symbolism protomodern, 132 (see also Twain, pastoral, the, 36 Mark) patriarchal structures, 87, 102, 106–8, moral 119, 124, 129, 152, 154, 157 conscience, 97, 100 Pease, Donald, ix, 48, 49, 142, 143 dilemma, 95, 98, 105 politics relativism, 113 environmental, 8, 12–13, 115, Morgan, Elizabeth, 102 118–21 Morrison, Toni, 7, 135. See also white- gender, 77, 114–15, 121, 147, 195 ness studies multifaceted and deconstructionist multiculturalism. See under culture aspects, 76, 102, 113, 121, 129 myth-and-symbol school, 33, 137, 138 sexual, 75–76, 89–90, 104–9, 120–21 Naipaul, V. S., 35 social critique, 103, 111, 113, 117, narrative structure, 127 129 in Huckleberry Finn, 61–62, 114, subversiveness, 35, 77–79, 104–9, 114 146, 151 polyvocality. See under narrative voices in So Far from God, 79–80, 85, 121 pop culture. See under culture in Their Eyes Were Watching God, postmodernism, 5, 77 67–69, 76–77, 114 psycho-narration, 65. See also narrative narrative voices, 28, 55, 63–69, 74, 75, voices 79–82, 85–88, 90, 128 free indirect discourse (FID), 64, race, 30–31, 50, 94, 103, 109, 113, 67–69, 83–86, 147 131, 137, 140, 142, 151. See also interior monologue, 63–64, 68–69, ethnicity 88, 98 Radway, Janice, 45, 143 polyvocality, 61–66, 69, 76, 77, Rampersad, Arnold, 21, 25, 29, 46, 81–91 145, 148 psycho-narration, 69 reader stream of consciousness, 42 (see also act of reading, 58–59, 90, 128 vernacular: sounds in fiction) as listener in Huckleberry Finn, national identity 58–60, 62–64 in literary history, 31–32, 36–37, 45, as listener in So Far from God, 81–91 51, 143 as listener in Their Eyes Were Watch- nationalism, 13, 55 ing God, 65–72, 76, 112 realism, 61 Obama, Barack, 1, 10, 131 magico-realism, 87–89, 91, 149, O’Meally, Robert, ix, 33–34, 35, 39–44 155, 159 definition of vernacular, 39–41, 43–44 virtual realism, 118–19, 155 188 Index

Reconstruction era, 94–95, 103, 151 subversion, 35, 104–9, 114 Reed, Ishmael, 27, 28, 75 symbolism, 15, 26, 39, 44–45, 94, 101, revisions, 27–28, 44, 49, 57, 59, 72, 103, 111, 119, 122–24, 128. See 135, 142 also parody Rorty, Richard, 158 Rosaldo, Renato, 7 tall tale, 20, 61, 72. See also orality; Rourke, Constance, 19–20 storytelling tradition Their Eyes Were Watching God Saldívar, José David, 6–7, 35, 41–44, critical reception, 73–75 46, 50–51, 79, 141 use of nonstandard language, 66–69 satire, 94, 103, 144 visual imagery, 69–71 Sewell, David, 58, 145 whiteness, 110–11 Showalter, Elaine, 46–47, 141 Thomas, Brook, 38 Signifying Monkey, 26–29, 68, 140. See Thurber, James, 56 also Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. tone similarities among the novels, 113, 105, sarcastic tone, 87, 118 108, 125, 131. See also compara- tone of voice, 59, 65–66, 81–85, 143 tive approach See also narrative voices Singh, Amritjit, 50 transnational American studies. See slavery under American studies slave-holding mentality, 97–100 Trilling, Lionel, 35, 53–54, 75, 144 slave narratives, 24, 28, 34, 39, 147, Twain, Mark, 17–18, 53–58, 59, 72, 150 94, 96, 102–4, 136, 144, 145, Smith, Henry Nash, 5, 6, 15–18, 20, 146, 150, 151. See also Huckle- 32–33, 36, 51, 55–56, 96–97, berry Finn 137, 138, 139 Smitherman, Geneva, 28–29 utopia, 2, 15, 121 sociolect, 3 So Far from God values, 8, 93–125 critical reception, 79–81 vernacular irony, 86–87 African American literary tradition, magic(o) realism, 87–89 21–22, 25–28, 27, 64, 66–68, 72, narrative voices, 81–84 75, 84 use of nonstandard language, 84–85 Chicano vernacular literary tradition, Virgen de Guadalupe, 117, 121–24, 6, 35, 41–44, 79–80, 90, 141 156, 157 Euro-American vernacular literary speakerly text. See narrative voices tradition, 10, 56 Stein, Gertrude, 17, 56 humanism, 10, 134 Stepto, Robert B., 26 modernism, 43, 113 storytelling tradition, 72, 81, 127. See performative vernacular, 24 also orality; tall tale politics, 12, 77, 80, 105, 108–11, stream of consciousness. See under nar- 120 (see also politics) rative voices polyrhythmic form, 40, 76–77 (see subaltern, the, 3, 8–9, 43, 132–33, 140 also narrative voices) Index 189

process, 32, 37, 55, 95, 99–105, voice. See narrative voices 129–30 (see also Ellison, Ralph) vulgarity, 55, 157 sounds in fiction cadence, 58, 60, 64, 128 Walker, Alice, 28, 73, 75 call-and-response, 39, 62, 75–76 Walter, Roland, 88, 154 onomatopoeia, 18, 57, 64 Warren, Robert Penn, 14 timbre, 60–62, 65–66, 69, 71, 74, Washington, Mary Helen, 29, 73–74, 85, 127 140, 147, 152 See also narrative voices West, Cornel, 7, 47–48, 50, 141 See also aesthetics, vernacular; defini- whiteness studies, 7, 104, 110, 133, tions of the vernacular by vernacularity, 12, 90, 93, 117 151, 153 Victorianism, 15, 94, 109. See also Williams, Shirley Anne, 75, 147 genteel culture Williams, William Carlos, 34 Viramontes, Helena, 42, 44 Wright, Richard, 21, 77, 113, 153 Virgen de Guadalupe. See under So Far from God xicanisma, 124 visual arts, 4, 34, 122 visual imagery in literature, 69–71 Yankee culture, 17, 19, 144