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Race, Gender, and Embodied Identity Politics in Recent Ethnic American Fiction

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Race, Gender, and Embodied Identity Politics in Recent Ethnic American Fiction Bodies Unbound: Race, Gender, and Embodied Identity Politics in Recent Ethnic American Fiction By Deborah Koto Katz B.A., Wellesley College, 2002 M.A., Brown University, 2011 Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for The Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Program of English at Brown University May 2012 Providence, RI © 2012 by Deborah Koto Katz This dissertation by Deborah Koto Katz is accepted in its present form by the Department of English as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date _________ _____________________________________ Daniel Y. Kim, Advisor Recommended to the Graduate Council Date _________ _____________________________________ Rolland Murray, Reader Date _________ _____________________________________ Ralph Rodriguez, Reader Date _________ _____________________________________ Ellen Rooney, Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date _________ _____________________________________ Peter M. Weber, Dean of the Graduate School iii VITA Deborah Koto Katz grew up in Scarsdale, NY and graduated magna cum laude in 2002 from Wellesley College with a double major in English and Jewish Studies. After earning her B.A., she worked as a middle school English teacher in Japan for two years. As a graduate student, she has received the Phyllis Bridges Graduate Award for Best Biography Paper from the Southwest/Texas Popular Culture Associations/American Culture Association and an Honorable Mention for Brown University’s Reginald D. Archambault Award for Teaching Excellence. She has taught writing and literature at the City College of New York and at Brown, and has articles forthcoming in the journal LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory and in the critical anthology Race and Displacement, to be published by the University of Alabama Press. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation would not be possible without the invaluable guidance and support of the faculty at Brown University. In particular, I would like to thank my director, Daniel Kim, and my readers, Ellen Rooney, Rolland Murray, and Ralph Rodriguez for their insightful feedback, generosity of spirit, and dedication to my work. Thank you for accommodating me over phone and email and as I wrote my dissertation “remotely” and for challenging me to think boldly, take risks, and become the best writer and scholar I could be. Thanks are also due to the vibrant community of ethnic and Asian Americanist graduate students at Brown University: all those friends and comrades who read and commented on earlier versions of these pages and who stimulated my thinking about these texts through our conversations. I am especially grateful to the members of the English Department Graduate Student Forum who helped shape my first and third chapters into stronger, more inventive pieces of scholarship. I would not be where I am today without the unconditional support and love of my parents, Jeff and Kuniko Katz. Thank you for always encouraging me to read, write, and cultivate my imagination, for keeping all of my stories throughout the years, and for giving me the space, time, and foundation to pursue my dreams. And finally, to my best friend and life partner, Ian—thank you for believing in me, taking care of me, keeping me (relatively!) sane, and helping me see this crazy endeavor through. The next chapter is ours. v TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 Embodied Essentialism in the World of Our Fathers CHAPTER ONE 32 Black Like Me: Transforming Hybridity into Authenticity in Danzy Senna’s Caucasia CHAPTER TWO 73 The Trick is to Think About Babies: Embodied Spirituality and the Birth of Jewish Identity in Myla Goldberg’s Bee Season CHAPTER THREE 123 Listen to Your Body: Ugly Feelings and the Post-Political Japanese American Subject of Susan Choi’s American Woman CHAPTER FOUR 162 Return to Walden Pond: Reclaiming the Great White Father in Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation EPILOGUE 197 Visualizing the Hapa Body WORKS CITED 206 vi INTRODUCTION Embodied Essentialism in the World of Our Fathers I. Our Post-Beer Moment: Despite claims that we have arrived at a post-race era, many signs indicate that Americans are as invested in racial difference as ever. In recent years, this inconsistency has focused largely on the material body. At the same time that we are being told that our first African American president embodies the transcendence of older, divisive categories of race, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s website, AfricanDNA, is selling YDNA and mtDNA tests that purportedly trace African American customers’ roots “back to Africa.” As Catherine Bliss narrates, this turn to genomics, of which Gates’ work is but one example, “has resulted in a dizzying back-and-forth stance on race—first denial of any racial difference at the level of DNA, to later focusing on those differences” (“Racial Taxonomy” 1019).1 1 Bliss defines genomics as “the branch of genetics that studies the entire DNA sequence of organisms” (“Genome Sampling” 322). In “Racial Taxonomy in Genomics” (2011), she elaborates on this definition: “genomics uses patterns of shared ancestry within the human species to redefine human taxonomy and question the limits of prior notions of difference” (1019). By drawing on 732 articles on genomics and race published between 1986 and 2010, in-depth interviews, and participant observation at a “core genotyping facility that specializes in ancestry estimation” (“Racial Taxonomy” 1019), this study offers an exhaustingly comprehensive survey of the resurgence of racial biomedicine. More than simply summarizing this “dizzying” array, however, Bliss is interested in what she calls “reflexive biosociality,” whereby genomicists, who “experience the social reality of race[,] have a vested interest in scientifically ‘getting race right.’ They oscillate between policy frameworks and experiential rationales to fashion inclusion and medical equality” as their researcher-identities “are produced dialectically with the racial knowledge that they produce” (“Racial Taxonomy” 1021). The ironic result is “a science in which researchers simultaneously posit race as real but not real” and “advance social explanations for race, while asserting genomics as a plausible solution to racial dilemmas” (“Racial Taxonomy” 1019). 1 Obama’s widely discussed “speech on race” during his 2008 presidential candidacy powerfully crystallizes and illuminates these contradictions. In this speech, then-Senator Obama described his family narrative as “a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts —that out of many, we are truly one.” While Obama also makes mention of his wife’s slave and slave owner “blood,” the primary metaphorical function of genes seems to be carrying and transmitting ideology—in this case, of multiracial unity. Racial difference coded at the level of the body—in the “blood”—becomes subordinate to the blending of relatives “of every race and every hue” into one family; of many “parts” into “one” nation. Ironically, Obama’s take on blood and genetic make-ups also has the support of a branch of genomic science. “Scientists have long suspected that the racial categories recognized by society are not reflected on the genetic level,” reported The New York Times in 2000. “But the more closely that researchers examine the human genome—the complement of genetic material encased in the heart of almost every cell of the body—the more most of them are convinced that the standard labels used to distinguish people by ‘race’ have little or no biological meaning” (Angier).2 The distance between Gates’ strategy of genetics-commodification and Obama’s more politic, conciliatory approach to racial strife came to an ironic head in the Rose Garden “beer summit” of July, 2009. After Gates’ arrest in an incident that he called racial profiling, and the public attack on Obama for revealing his opinion that the 2 In quoting this particular Times article in connection with Obama’s speech, I do not mean to imply that mainstream journalism has ignored the opposite position on racial biologism in recent years; rather, my point is to demonstrate that genomic science is not monolithic, and that outside of the lab, it can be used to support an array of disparate ideological positions. 2 Cambridge Police “acted stupidly,” Obama invited Gates and the white officer who arrested the professor, Sergeant James Crowley, to the White House for beers. Obama’s description of the event as a “teaching moment”—“three folks having a drink at the end of the day and hopefully giving people an opportunity to listen to each other” (qtd. in Tapper et al)—is as conciliatory and blame-free as one might expect of a president whose electoral victory has often been cast as living proof of the triumph of “the post-racial.” (Obama’s quickness to retract his previous judgment about the Cambridge Police only perpetuated this image of a president who, despite being black, wanted to appear as neutral and disinterested in an issue of “racial conflict” as possible.) And Gates’ repeated demand for an apology from Crowley is fitting not only with his insistence that racial difference, in particular racial difference that is genetically coded within the body, still matters, but with the ethical, anti-racist appeals of projects such as his, including “freeing society from racism” and “addressing Eurocentrism” (Bliss, “Genome Sampling” 324).3 3 In a further ironic twist, Gates’ arrest occurred as he was returning home from a trip to China, where he had been researching the ancestral roots of cellist Yo-Yo Ma for the television program, Faces of America (2010). While the title of the four-part PBS series calls attention to embodied, visible difference—diverse “faces” that signal diverse genetic backgrounds—its coverage also made reference to Gates’ oppositional stance to “post-racial” reconciliation: “Some may wonder whether heritage and ethnicity really matter anymore in a society that fancies itself postracial, but Mr. Gates has his recent ‘beer summit’ experience as evidence to the contrary” (Stanley).
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