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Braiding Narratives in the Face of Racial Violence a Dissertation Submi UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Santa Barbara A Child’s Call: Braiding Narratives in the Face of Racial Violence A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in English by Corinne Bancroft Committee: Professor Kay Young, Chair Professor Bishnupriya Ghosh Professor Carl Gutiérrez-Jones September 2018 The dissertation of Corinne Bancroft is approved. _____________________________________________ Bishnupriya Ghosh _____________________________________________ Carl Gutiérrez-Jones _____________________________________________ Kay Young, Committee Chair August 2018 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS “‘There is no unraveling the rope’: The Ethics of Braided Narratives” will appear as an article “The Braided Narrative” in the October 2018 issue of Narrative. It remains the final chapter of the dissertation with the permission of the journal. “A Child’s Call” is more of “A Child’s Response” to those who helped me “come of age” intellectually. To those who read to me as a child. To Kate Oubre and Nancy Rabinowitz who introduced me to Louise Erdrich, good teaching, and activism. To Peter Rabinowitz who helped me see how “Lit and Ethics” can be a way of life. To the radical women of the Literature and the Mind Initiative at UCSB who demonstrate daily that thinking and feeling are best accomplished synonymously, especially Julie Carlson. To my brilliant, generous committee, Kay, Bishnu, and Carl, whose comments and critiques kept this project always inspiring and alive. Most of all to Kay, who can somehow play Dorethea Brooke, my fairy god mother, and Cyd Charisse all at the same time. And finally to my Cappy, Nicole Dib. iii VITA OF CORINNE BANCROFT Education Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Literature, Hamilton College 2010 (Summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) Master of Arts in English, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2015 Doctor of Philosophy in English, UCSB 2018 (expected) Ph.D. Emphasis in Writing Studies, UCSB, 2018 (expected) Capstone Project: “‘Turning the Story Over’: Involving Students in Literary Research” Director: Professor Karen J. Lunsford Professional Appointments Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Victoria, 2018 Teaching Associate, Department of English, UCSB, 2015-2017 Teaching Assistant, Writing Program, UCSB, 2016-2017 Teaching Assistant, Department of English, UCSB, 2014-2016 Teacher of English, St. Gregory School, 2010-2013 Publications “The Braided Narrative” Narrative Vol. 26, No. 3 (2018): (forthcoming). “‘Thanks to all at once and to each one’: Continuing the Conversation” [with Peter J. Rabinowitz], Style Vol. 48, No. 1 (2014): 94-111. “Euclid at the Core: Recentering Literary Education” [with Peter J. Rabinowitz], Style Vol. 48, No. 1 (2014): 1-34. “Emplotting Immigration: The Rhetoric of Border Narratives” Journal of Cognitive Semiotics, Vol. 4, No. 2 (2012): 40-56. iv “Cats, Dogs, and Social Minds: Learning from Alan Palmer—and Sixth Graders” [with Peter J. Rabinowitz], Style Vol. 45, No. 2 (2011): 333-338. “A Slice of Watermelon: The Rhetoric of Digression in Chekhov’s Fiction” [with Peter J. Rabinowitz], in Digression in European Literature: From Cervantes to Sebald, edited by Alexis Grohmann and Caregh Wells. Palgreve Macmillian, (2011): 82-93. Fellowships and Honors Chancellor’s Fellowship, UCSB, 2013, 2015, 2017 Interdisciplinary Humanities Center Graduate Affiliate, UCSB, 2016-2017 South Coast Writing Project Fellow, UCSB, 2014 Chicano Studies Graduate Student Affiliate Award, UCSB, 2013 James Soper Merrill Prize, Hamilton College, 2010 Prize in Comparative Literature, Hamilton College, 2010 Milton F. Fillius, Jr. /Joseph Drown Prize Scholarship, Hamilton College, 2009 The Coleman Burke Prize Scholarship, Hamilton College, 2008 Phi Beta Kappa Book Prize, Hamilton College, 2007 Areas of Study Major Field: Contemporary American Literature Narrative Theory and Literature and the Mind with Kay Young Comparative Race and Ethnic Literature and Critical Race Studies with Carl Gutiérrez-Jones Cultural Studies with Bishnupriya Ghosh Writing Studies with Karen J. Lunsford v ABSTRACT A Child’s Call: Braiding Narratives in the Face of Racial Violence by Corinne Bancroft “Hey, Mr. Cunningham,” Scout Finch calls to the single familiar face in a crowd of white men as she stands at the door of a jail that wrongly incarcerates a Black man for a crime that she does not understand. This famous scene from Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird (1960) where an eight-year-old stops a lynch mob is both object and emblem of my dissertation project. “A Child’s Call: Braiding Narratives in the Face of Racial Violence” draws on critical race theory and cognitive approaches to literature to show how contemporary American writers focus on child characters as instruments for narrating violence and violation, and how these children’s voices call adult characters and actual readers toward a heightened sense of social responsibility. While Scout’s pleasantries move the adult characters toward an everyday responsibility of caregiving, other such child protagonists face insurmountable barriers: in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970), all adults fail to hear the cry of ten-year-old Pecola Breedlove, and many, such as the white storekeeper fail to “see” her. Despite their differing political analyses and aesthetic projects, both Lee and Morrison trust a child with the task of reimagining the world and realigning our ethical responsibilities. The figure of the child leads me through two genres that constitute community through narration: the United States’ variation on the bildungsroman, the coming of age novel, and an emerging genre I term the “braided narrative”— novels in which multiple vi narrators tell distinct, often incommensurate, stories that form a complicated constellation in the same storyworld. When Morrison pairs Claudia and Pecola with The Bluest Eye’s other narrators, she begins to forge this new genre that diverges from the style of Mockingbird’s single narrative voice. Like Morrison, Louise Erdrich, Ana Castillo, Nicole Krauss, and many others take up this strategy of casting child-narrators among a chorus of raconteurs who narrate different, conflicting stories. “A Child’s Call” proposes a developmental relationship between the coming of age novel and the braided narrative for the reading of American literature. My project proposes a feminist and anti-racist progression of ethical positions staged in these two genres; the relationship between the reader and the protagonist develops from one of identification, to one of maternal care, and finally, to one of empathy that both acknowledges and requires difference. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter One: A Theoretical Framework 24 Chapter Two: “Where is your mother?” 70 Chapter Three: “Hey, Mr. Cunningham” 126 Chapter Four: The Ethics of Killing Birds 185 Chapter Five: “There is no unraveling the rope”: The Ethics of Braided Narratives 249 Coda 309 Works Cited 326 TABLE OF FIGURES Figure 1: To Kill A Mockingbird 1962: 15:30 73 Figure 2: To Kill A Mockingbird 1962: 40:00 83 Figure 3: To Kill A Mockingbird 1962: 45:24-46:20 154 Figure 4: Drawings of the braided structure 263 Figure 5: Pages 242-243 in Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love 302 Figure 6: Footprints representing events narrated by Pauline and Nanapush 316 Figure 7: Word cloud of my students’ reactions to Pauline 321 viii INTRODUCTION “Hey, Mr. Cunningham,” Scout Finch calls to the single familiar face in a crowd of white men that she doesn’t know is a lynch mob as she stands at the door of a jail that incarcerates a Black man for a crime that he did not commit and that she does not understand (174). The eight-year-old’s call cuts through the masculine tension and attendant posturing. Her ignorance of the power distributions between the races pauses potential racist violence. Instead, her naïvely civil address activates the adult’s relational responsibilities born of everyday proximity despite her unwitting evocation of the economic relationship between the Cunninghams and the Finches. The child’s words implore the grown-up to respond to those fragile social attachments that are too easily trumped by macro-historical hierarchies of race, class, and gender. This moment of cross-generational recognition proposes relationships that call us towards a responsibility that is simultaneously necessitated and made possible by difference—both that unassailable distance between the other with whom we have chosen to be most intimate and the phenotypical distinctions that have petrified into the historical antagonisms that underwrite exploitation and genocide. In this famous scene from Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), the child’s call moves the adult towards an everyday responsibility of caregiving that forecloses that night’s violence. I begin with Scout, a child- narrator whose barefoot charm channels her nineteenth-century predecessor, Huck Finn, because her late-night pleasantries are perhaps the most famous. But other such child protagonists face insurmountable barriers: in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970), all adults fail to hear the cry of ten-year-old Pecola Breedlove, and many, such as the white storekeeper fail to “see” her. Like Jean Toomer’s “Portrait in Georgia,” Morrison’s novel exposes the uneven power relations, racial, gendered and classed, that render Pecola invisible 1 but that make white girls like Scout legible. Morrison describes the storekeeper’s “total absence of human recognition” almost as a perceptual error:
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