Dictators: Ethnic American Narrative and the Strongman Genre by David

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Dictators: Ethnic American Narrative and the Strongman Genre

David C. Liao

B.A., State University of New York, Binghamton 2006

M.A., Brown University

Thesis

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy in the Program of English at Brown University

Providence, Rhode Island

May 2015

by the Department of English as satisfying the

dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Date ______Deak Nabers, Advisor

Recommended to the Graduate Council

Date ______Tamar Katz, Reader

Date ______Olakunle George, Reader

Approved by the Graduate Council

Date ______Peter M. Weber, Dean of the Graduate School

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VITA

David Chang Yi Liao was born on July 20, 1984 in Taipei, Taiwan. The child of a diplomat, he has also lived in Houston, Texas and Long Island, New York, as well as spending numerous holidays with his brothers in California. He graduated magna cum laude from the State University of New York at Binghamton in 2006, earning a B.A. in

English, with a concentration in Creative Writing. He began pursuing a Master’s Degree in English at Brown University in September of 2006, and began his doctoral studies with the English Department at Brown in the fall of 2008. In the course of completing his

Ph.D., he has taught courses in literature and composition at both Brown and Bryant

University in Smithfield, R.I.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Firstly, I would like to thank the English Department at Brown University, who accepted me into their ranks on two separate occasions. From the very first day, Ellen Viola and Lorraine Mazza have been an invaluable source of logistical support, sage advice, humor, warmth and year-round good spirits. In particular, I would like to thank my adviser Deak Nabers, who not only took me on during a moment of transition, but gave my project a sense of clarity, cohesion and achievability. Through his tireless efforts to reach out and work with graduate students in the form of workshops and colloquiums, Deak had actually been advising and guiding me on my dissertation long before it became official. To Tamar Katz, I owe much of my formation and refinement as a scholar; having worked with me through seminars, independent studies and field exams, she never failed to ask the rigorous, important questions, and knew when a firm hand was required. I also had the pleasure of working with Olakunle George, whose helpful inquiries and insightful feedback helped me to apprehend anew the relevance and potential of my work. At Brown, I have also benefitted from the insights, talent and rigor of Ralph Rodriguez, Daniel Kim, Timothy Bewes and Ravit Reichman. Although I only worked with them briefly, the encouragement of Nancy Armstrong and Rey Chow was instrumental in my transition from a master’s-level scholar to a Ph.D.-worthy one. I also owe much to my advisers at SUNY Binghamton, Joseph Keith and Ingeborg Majer- O’Sickey. Their mentorship not only laid the most basic foundations for my even beginning to comprehend this undertaking, but also gave me the confidence and critical tools to embark on it in the first place. I hope I have made you both proud. More than anything, the Good Company is what has made this whole thing so rewarding. The friendships I have forged in the English Department have been simply matchless: Katherine Miller, Swetha Regunathan, Andrew Naughton, Sean Keck, Sara Pfaff, Debby “Tiger Mom” Katz, John Mulligan, Derek Ettensohn, David Hollingshead, Peter Kim, Nathan Conroy and Sarah Osment. Outside the English Department, I have been fortunate to enjoy the company of Dae-il Kim, Niki Clements, Kevin Creedon, Meredith Dunn, Hamzah Ansari, Daniel Picus, Heidi Wendt, Aaron Glaim, Bruno Penteado, and Lisbeth Trille Loft. From day one Angela Allan and Sachelle Ford have been my co-conspirators, my trench (computer lab) mates, great sources of support and

v laughter, and ultimately, my role models. I don’t know how they put up with me at times, but I do know that I could not have gotten through this without them. I also want to acknowledge Jennifer Schnepf and Khristina Gonzalez (Margaret and Helen), whom I met on my first day of graduate school, and who became the big sisters I never had, and never realized I so needed. The extraordinary wit, irreverence, musical genius and all-around brilliance of Austin Gorman have inspired me since the very beginning, and it is to him I dedicate my Al Pacino Chapter. Paul Robertson, whose scholarship was a world away from my own, but whose vitality, honesty, fearlessness and humanity have been its own indelible part of my grad school education. My appreciation also goes out to Stephanie Tilden and Tim Syme, for their unexpected yet indispensable companionship and encouragement as I rounded out the last lap. My deepest affection goes to the Dupuis family, who took me in as one of their own, and has provided such a loving and supportive structure: Paul, Suzanne, Emily, Phillip and Alex have all been truly a second family. A universe of appreciation goes to my first family, the Liaos, from where everything I am begins and ends: Vincent, who I still look up to after all these years; Ting-Ting, who first blazed the trail for me to follow; Leslie, my teammate and ally in all things, from whom I can never feel distant, and who keeps me sane and insane in all the good ways. No words can fully express my awe and gratitude for my parents, Ching Hung and May Lin Liao, without whom none of this would have been possible. Their endless reservoirs of love, understanding, encouragement and emotional and financial support have been nothing short of tremendous, and I have been blessed to be their son. Finally, I want to thank Nicole Dupuis, my best friend, partner, and the brilliant sun and star of my life. Her unconditional love and unwavering faith in me has both recharged my sense of purpose and helped me through the difficult moments. Most of all, she has made me feel truly alive, and To Her I Dedicate Everything.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1 Literary Dictators

Chapter One 18 The Authoritarian Education of Richard Wright

Chapter Two 64 Good Korean/Bad Korean: Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker and the Ghost of Syngman Rhee

Chapter Three 113 Literary Caudillos: Junot Diaz and the Latino/a American Dictator Novel

Chapter Four 170 Senator Corleone, Governor Corleone…Generalissimo Corleone? The Godfather: Part II and the Form of Dynastic Succession

Coda 208 Tyrant and the Limits of the Strongman Genre

Works Cited 215

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INTRODUCTION

Literary Dictators

When Lee Kuan Yew passed away on March 23, 2015, the international response—from heads of state past and present, policymakers, captains of industry, scholars, pundits, and the general commentariat—revealed the extent to which the former

Prime Minister of Singapore had been, as William J. Dobson notes in Foreign Policy,

“one of the most universally celebrated statesmen of the last 50 years.” Dobson appends this assessment, however, to another, more crucial one: that Lee was also “the most successful dictator of the 20th century.” Lee’s autocratic tendencies, commonly characterized as a “soft” or “pragmatic” authoritarianism or a “benevolent dictatorship,” has long been an acknowledged aspect of his rule, which saw the remote, impoverished city-state flourish into an international economic powerhouse. Nonetheless, Dobson’s charge brings into relief a subset of public opinion that takes a much darker view of the late Singaporean leader. This is a view that has been, if not exactly less popular or less vocal, then definitely less heard, due to Lee’s notorious fondness for libel suits—a testament in itself, perhaps, to his aforementioned “success” as a dictator.

Writing for Salon in the wake of Lee’s death and the glowing eulogies that followed, Patrick L. Smith reminds us that “For ruling cliques in Washington and across the Western world, Lee was an exquisite example of the developing-nation leader who gets the dirty work of political repression done with the minimum of embarrassing mess.”

In his editorial, which calls out Lee for being a “tyrant” and a “psychological monster” right in its title, Smith argues that Lee’s only distinction from his more infamous

1 counterparts—“Pinochet and the shah…Videla and the other colonels in Argentina…al-

Sisi in Egypt…the Marcoses and Suhartos and Somozas”—is solely a matter of method and degree. In the end, it might only be a matter of dramatic flair: “No machine-gun murders in the public squares for Lee. No stadiums full of dissidents awaiting their turn to be tortured, no political prisoners thrown into the ocean from helicopters. All of Lee’s opponents kept their fingernails.”1 More pointedly, even as Smith underscores Lee’s essential sameness with the American-backed dictators listed above, he also clarifies what made Lee such an “exquisite example”: his commitment to the “dirigiste errand” involving the “installation and maintenance of one form or another of neoliberal corporatism and the corresponding subversion of democratic process.” For Smith,

Singapore’s undeniable material progress—the keystone for Lee’s defenders—attests not to any fundamental incompatibility between democracy and economic advances, but rather to the mutual cancellation of democracy and neoliberal capitalism.

What Smith’s remarks highlight about Lee’s “brand of leadership,” I would propose, is almost something like a “model minority” quality on a global scale, pertaining to “a man and a nation the cliques in Washington wish the whole of the developing world would emulate.” And just as the model minority myth as applied to Asian Americans entails favorable comparisons to other minority groups such as African Americans and

Latinos, the East Asian “Tiger Economies” are frequently touted as aspirational models for African and Latin American nations, as evidenced most recently by the speculations that pop up regarding Rwanda as a potential “Singapore of Africa” or Panama as the

1 Patrick L. Smith, “Lee Kuan Yew is Finally Dead—and America’s Elites Are Eulogizing a Tyrant and Psychological Monster” at Salon.com.

“Singapore of Latin America.”2 In this vein, Smith also foregrounds the violence, epistemic and otherwise, inherent in upholding a figure like Lee as an international ideal to be emulated. This is a man, after all, who has described his own “brand” of leadership by boasting “Nobody doubts that if you take me on I will put on knuckle-dusters and catch you in the cul-de-sac […] If you think you can hurt me more than I can hurt you, try,” and even reflects in his memoir that “If nobody is afraid of me, I’m meaningless.”3

Finally, what emerges most saliently in this account of Lee is a certain comparative, as well as intermediary dimension. That is, Smith’s essay seems less interested in Lee Kuan Yew as a dictator in and of himself, than in the ways he resembles more recognizably brutal types like Pinochet, the shah, and others, or functions as a future template for the likes of Rwanda’s Paul Kagame. Even more important, I would point out, is what Lee’s dictatorship illuminates about those variously named “American policy people,” “ruling cliques in Washington,” “policy cliques” and “Washington’s neoliberals.” Smith does disclose, notably, that he had himself been Lee’s victim twice before—the first time through expulsion for his political coverage, and the second time as the accused in a costly libel suit—and that his vitriol for the former Prime Minister is borne partially of personal experience. In the end, however, his analysis couches the larger historical significance of Lee’s legacy in these relative (to other dictators) and relational (to the power centers of the West) aspects. The question becomes, from this angle: what might our recognition of Lee as among “the worst of the autocrats” in turn make us acknowledge about the entity called “Washington”?

2 See, for instance, Christian Caryl’s “Africa’s Singapore Dream” in Foreign Policy and “A Singapore for Central America?” in The Economist.

3 Quoted in Patrick L. Smith, “Lee Kuan Yew is Finally Dead.”

Although not a primary (or even, really, a secondary) figure in this study, the case of Lee Kuan Yew nevertheless provides a useful point of departure for what follows. To begin with, if Lee’s brand of dictatorship represents the kind that Washington and

Western elites love—economically efficient, mainstream-friendly and under the radar—I would suggest that these same qualities, after a fashion, also broadly characterize treatments of dictators and dictatorship in the realm of United States literatures. That is to say, if the works examined here are any indication, the engagement with dictator figures in American narratives tend not to be a matter of direct representation or overt thematics

(like those seen, for instance, in the popular and prolific “dictator novels” of the Latin

American literary tradition, which I discuss in my third chapter). Rather, stories about dictators in the U.S. context tend to be bracketed by other overarching themes and preoccupations.

At the risk of triteness, we might think of the “old verities” William Faulkner names as essential to the literary endeavor: “love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.” And yet, we should also remember, that this giant of

American letters was the creator of such characters as Thomas Sutpen, Percy Grimm, and

Jason Compson (IV)—literary tyrants of the most sensational and garish order if there ever were any, even if this facet tended to be sublated under the standard Faulknerian concerns with race, the South, the past, etc. To put the matter more straightforwardly, if the dictators that American “ruling cliques” love are those—like Lee Kuan Yew—who aren’t immediately recognizable as such, due to their effective embodiment of some other valued quality (such as economic prosperity and modernization), then the narratives about dictators that American readers respond to are also generally those that seem not to

4 be one at first glance, in which the dictator figures at their center remain secondary to more pressing and familiar stories about diasporic return, Third World liberation, immigration, assimilation, crime, family, love, and so on.

This dissertation explores the trope of the ethnic dictator, or what I term more generally the “ethnic strongman,” as it emerges in narratives by writers like Richard

Wright, Chang-rae Lee and Junot Diaz, as well as in Francis Ford Coppola’s The

Godfather films. More specifically, I examine how these works imagine the dictator figure as a vital organizing trope for holding together and working through questions of ethnic identity, transnationalism, diasporic consciousness, historical memory, and political subject-formation. On the most basic level, this project conceives of the ethnic

American writer as engaged in a dialogue with the international ethnic dictator. Indeed, my analysis in each of these chapters has its condition of possibility in the legacy and discourse around a specific political figure, such as Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana,

Syngman Rhee of South Korea, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, and the Cold

War dyad of Fulgencio Batista and Fidel Castro in Cuba. At the same time, I also use the more flexible term “ethnic strongman” to talk about those narrative instances that address themes of authoritarianism and dictatorship through figures who may not be literal dictators, such as the city councilman in Lee’s Native Speaker, the mafia don in the

Godfather films, or the hyper-macho bodybuilder-narrator of Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous

Life of Oscar Wao. Ultimately, this study aims to reveal the mutual imbrication between two different kinds of “literary dictators”: first, the literary representations of actual tyrants, both as historical personages and narrative inventions; and second, the figure of

5 the writer as precisely one who dictates a literary narrative, and in doing so exercises his own form of authoritarian power.

Much like in Smith’s account of Lee Kuan Yew, an important element of the ethnic dictator trope lies in its comparative and intermediary function—that is, in how the dictator figure in these texts mediate the horizontal relationship between different national histories and contexts of dictatorship, as well as vertical relationships to hegemonic structures of power and knowledge, namely “Washington” and those “ruling cliques” in the West. Thus the multi-ethnic nature of this project allows me to situate this literary trope within a thoroughly global milieu of U.S. imperial power deployed across a variety of regions (Africa, East Asia, Latin America), though without occluding their contextual and historical specificities. Moreover, as an account of works by ethnic

American writers, this project argues for the centrality of international dictators like

Rhee, Trujillo, Castro and all the rest to the formation of modern day ethnic populations in the U.S. It is to recognize, for instance, the correlation between the influx of Central

American migrants in the 1980s and the Reagan Administration’s support for brutal dictatorships in that region, or the close partnerships between Washington and the military strongmen in Seoul that enabled the vast immigration from South Korea beginning in the 1970s.

Thus, while this project partakes in the ongoing transnational turn in American literary studies and ethnic studies, it also invokes a version of transnationalism that has received somewhat less scholarly attention, one interested not so much to thinking beyond nations, but rather in exploring the relationship among and between them. In other words, while the fashionable recent work in transnational studies generally

6 concerns the multiplicity of social, cultural or economic flows that decenter the nation state, my dissertation embraces a definition of the transnational that focuses on political exchanges between centered nation states, and the strongmen who play a key role in brokering and mediating them. In some ways, this dimension had always been there, even in the earliest formulations on the topic. In his milestone essay “Trans-National America”

(1916), Randolph Bourne characterizes the United States as a “cosmopolitan federation of national colonies” and argues that “America is coming to be, not a nationality but a trans-nationality, a weaving back and forth, with the other lands, of many threads of all sizes and colors.” More recently, in her address to the American Studies Association,

Shelley Fisher Fishkin argues that “The complexity of our field of study…requires that we see the inside and outside, domestic and foreign, national and international, as interpenetrating” (21). Finally, speaking from an ethnic literatures perspective, Paula

M.L. Moya and Ramon Saldívar similarly assert that “‘American’ fiction…must be seen anew as a heterogeneous grouping of overlapping but distinct discourses that refer to the

U.S. in relation to a variety of national entities” (1).4

Furthermore, I would argue, the notion of what Lisa Lowe calls the “international within the national” has also been a prevalent feature of certain U.S. ethnic literatures, especially in their incipient manifestations.5 Due to their legal and social marginalization from Anglo-American national culture, early Asian American and Latino/a writers exhibited a high degree of awareness of their transnational status, largely because they could look back to homelands that were also discrete and coherent “national entities.”

4 The constitutive tension between political entities also frames José David Saldívar's theorization of “the borderlands" in Border Matters (1997), where he observes that “[as] a near inter-cultural world unto itself, the U.S.-Mexico border is dominated by two foreign powers, in Washington D.C., and Mexico City” (8).

5 See Lisa Lowe’s essay “The International within the National” (1998).

Even in narratives that endorsed assimilation into the American mainstream, authors tended to depict older cultural affiliations not only in the generalized terms of tradition, family and culture, but also as tied to specific political allegiances. This can be seen in the Chinatown community's support for China’s anti-communist Kuomintang regime in

Jade Snow Wong's memoir Fifth Chinese Daughter (1950), as well as in the patriarch

Juan Rubio's romantic nostalgia for his past life as a revolutionary ally of Pancho Villa in

Jose Antonio Villarreal's novel Pocho (1959). In both cases, the quest for an American national identity plays out against other distinct nationalist loyalties—i.e. to Nationalist

China or Revolutionary Mexico—and raises the question of how national and transnational (or rather, national and other national) subjectivities might be mutually imbricated rather than mutually exclusive. In both these examples, I would add, the alternative national attachment is actually less so to a ruling government, party or movement, but to a specific political strongman that stands as a synecdoche for the homeland “national entity,” such as the allusions to Chiang-kai Shek in Fifth Chinese

Daughter, or the explicitly-named Pancho Villa (and Emiliano Zapata) in Pocho.

It is within this specific conception of transnationalism—as “a heterogeneous grouping of overlapping but distinct discourses that refer to the U.S. in relation to a variety of national entities”—that this study highlights the figural and symbolic importance of the ethnic strongman. To this end, I also see my project as following in the steps of recent scholarship that have focused on literary fantasies of charismatic and authoritarian leadership in the works of ethnic American writers. Most of these studies have centered on the African American tradition, and include Mark Christian

Thompson’s Black Fascisms (2007) and Erica Edwards’ Charisma and the Fictions of

Black Leadership (2012). Two other critical works have taken a similar approach, while also bringing to our attention to the way specific political figures become useful tropes for articulating literary fantasies of political cohesion and action. In A Pinnacle of Feeling

(2008), Sean McCann examines twentieth century American literature’s deep fascination with the modern American president, and how writers participate in discourses of the chief executive as a national redeemer, as well as agent of state power and sovereign will.

Focusing on an entirely different sort of figure, Rychetta Watkins’ Black Power, Yellow

Power (2012) traces the emergence of the “guerilla” as a key literary and cultural trope invoked by the militant, ethnic nationalist movements of the 1960s and 1970s. For

Watkins, the figure of the guerilla exemplifies a “resistant” persona and a revolutionary subjectivity, while also serving as “an allegory for the development of a liberated consciousness and, eventually, a liberated society” (15).

In taking the trope of the dictator as its point of departure, my dissertation shares a similar founding principle and analytical approach with McCann and Watkins, even as I consider a different political creature altogether. On the most immediate level, I argue, the ethnic dictator trope can be read as a way for immigrant or second generation writers

(or, as in Richard Wright’s case, those of a much deeper diasporic descent) to partake in a dialogue with homeland “national entities.” In each of the works I look at, the diasporic subject imagines the dictator figure as a past-looking embodiment of an “authentic” homeland culture, history or memory. Thus while Wright sees in the laugh of the

Ghanaian Prime Minister a secretive “African laughter,” Lee and Diaz’s novels also posit their respective dictators as epitomizing some conception of a “fundamental” Koreanness or Dominicanness. And although I do not address this aspect of the film directly, we

9 might recall that even The Godfather: Part II posits a nostalgic ideal of Sicilian paternal authority, through its flashback sequences detailing the immigration and ascendance of the father, Vito Corleone. In these instances, the allure of the dictator figure rests in his putative connection to an “essence” associated with the diasporic homeland—even if, as a matter of historical reality, it is also his distinction from his nation’s general population that facilitates his preference and support by Western ruling cliques.

More pertinently, in addition to marking the contact points between the U.S. and a

“variety of national entities,” the ability to preside over and impose coherence upon “a heterogeneous grouping of overlapping but distinct discourses” comprises another key feature of the ethnic dictator trope. This feature has its geopolitical correlative in the figure of someone like, once again, Lee Kuan Yew, or Josip Tito of Yugoslavia— political strongmen who, through sheer authoritarian force of will, are able to hold together and organize diverse nationalities, ethnicities, religions, institutions, factions and other elements that would otherwise not cohere or coexist. Likewise, all of the writers in this study conceive of the ethnic dictator as a focal point and container for a host of heterogeneous assemblages, including social collectivities, discourses, identity formations, hermeneutic frames, languages or linguistic dialects, and intertexts.

Whatever his misgivings about Kwame Nkrumah in Black Power, for example,

Richard Wright nonetheless admires the “bewildering unity” he is able to forge, out of elements that at times read like a bewildering list indeed: “Christianity, tribalism, paganism, sex, nationalism, housing, health, and industrial schemes” (BP 88).6 By this standard, in fact, the staunchly anticommunist Wright can even begrudgingly respect someone like Mao Zedong, for having “organized what was at hand, that is, millions of

6 Richard Wright, Black Power (1954), in Three Books from Exile; hereafter abbreviated as BP.

10 starving peasants, plus Moslems, Buddhists, Protestants, and Catholics” (CC 559).7 In

Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker, the charismatic councilman John Kwang uses his campaign apparatus to fashion a multiracial and multicultural “family” out of his political constituency, one in which American democratic rhetoric coexists alongside Confucian patriarchal authority. And as the text most self-reflexively interested in how disparate parts might be narratively united into a functional (if messy) whole, Junot Diaz’s The

Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao finds a germane metaphor for the Caribbean dictator in the person of the storyteller-narrator, whose capacious linguistic and discursive repertoire operates as the instrument of his domination.

This last idea—that a dictator’s power includes to the power to determine how a story is told (consider again, for example, Lee Kuan Yew’s fondness for the libel suit)— leads me to another key component of this dissertation, which revolves around the matter of genre. On the surface, each of the works explored in this study can be broadly classified within a recognizable generic frame, such as travel narrative (Wright), spy narrative (Lee), immigrant family saga (Diaz) and crime drama (The Godfather). These frames, in turn, become central to the visibility and hermeneutic significance of the dictator figure within the narrative—for example, as the patriarch of the family saga; the target/mark of the espionage plot; or the emblem of homeland violence, or homeland liberation, in the memoir of diasporic return. Reading these texts alongside one another, I would argue, also enables us to recognize a certain generic instability that inheres in each of them. Diaz’s novel, most pertinently, places this quality front and center, in its intertextually rapacious metacommentary on storytelling and marginalized genre forms.

On the lower frequencies, Richard Wright’s travel narrative in Black Power comes to

7 Richard Wright, The Color Curtain (1956), in Three Books from Exil; hereafter abbreviated as CC.

11 resemble, at certain moments, a spy novel of sorts. In the case of Chang-rae Lee’s fusion of the immigrant narrative with the spy novel in Native Speaker, the fascinating (if ultimately inconclusive) question becomes: what kinds of spy novels does it resonate with? And how do its varying proximities to the works of Ian Fleming, Richard Condon, or John le Carré inflect its meanings and insights as an ethnic novel?

Notably, in each of these works this generic indeterminacy is signaled by the trope of the ethnic dictator, who functions as the epistemological fulcrum around which multiple interpretative frames turn. In this sense, the figure of the dictator also becomes a metaphor for the very notion of genre. In his monograph on the topic, John Frow argues that genres “actively generate and shape knowledge of the world,” and more appositely, that “generically shaped knowledges are bound up with the exercise of power, where power is understood as being exercised in discourse” (2). Throughout his discussion,

Frow expands upon this view of genre as tied to the “exercise of power,” describing generic modes as, variously, “a set of conventional and highly organized constraints on the production and interpretation of meaning,” a “regime of reading,” and a system that

“amounts to a kind of policing” (10, 139, 125, emphasis mine). Picking up on this thread of genre as a form of “unabashed political allegory,” Bruce Robbins notes that “When genre is discussed, the metaphor of the police is everywhere” (1646). Connecting issues of genre to discourses surrounding national literatures, he likens the oft-invoked figure of the “genre police” to also a sort of “border police, which is to say officials of the nation- state, bringing into relief the genre debate’s geopolitical dimensions” (1646). Crucially, as Robbins insists, “If genre is an agent of social domination, the sort of domination that most concerns us now is that of some nations over others” (1646).

This project positions the trope of the dictator within this theoretical intersection between genre, geopolitics and literary representation. Here the matter of genre is also useful because it reminds us that the category of the “dictator” is itself something of a generic form, encompassing various sub-classifications such as sultanistic regimes, personalist regimes, military dictatorships, single-party dictatorships, presidential monarchism, straightforward monarchies, and various others. More importantly, this project also contemplates how writers articulate a transnational ethnic identity through the dictator figure, in foregrounding different forms of authoritarian leadership as genres of political and social sciences. Either explicitly or implicitly, each of the works in this study engages a historically and culturally specific version of the ethnic strongman: the

African “Big Man” in Wright, the Confucian patriarch in Lee, the Latin American caudillo in Diaz, and the Italian padrone (as well as an extension of the meditation on the caudillo) in The Godfather: Part II. In the end, these texts do not purport to “explain” or contextualize these types, as per the longstanding ethnographic imperative behind ethnic literatures. Rather, what they bring to light is the ultimate emptiness of the “dictator” as a form, which the texts then fill with a certain ethnic content. As I demonstrate in my chapters, the deployment of generic modes becomes a chief means of filling in this ethnic content, which takes the forms of diasporic attachments, transnational political sympathies (i.e. with nationalist independence movements), historical memory (i.e. of war and dictatorship), and modes of writing and storytelling, among others.

The disparate analytical approaches of my readings speak to the multiethnic character of this study, as well as to the protean nature and multiple valences of the dictator trope. Taken as a whole, the chapters of this dissertation lays out a narrative

13 trajectory that begins with one of the elder statesmen of twentieth century ethnic

American letters, as well as the most historically visible U.S. ethnic group. My first chapter, “The Authoritarian Education of Richard Wright,” considers Richard Wright’s

Third World travel narratives—particularly Black Power (1954)—and how they bring his earlier thinking on authoritarian politics into conversation with a global context of decolonization and national liberation movements. Read through the generic frame of a diasporic memoir, Black Power, an account of his 1953 visit to Ghana on the eve of independence, captures Wright’s paradoxical stance toward the ancestral homeland—in particular, his feelings of ambivalence toward Africans while still being politically for

Africa.8 Finding himself in a situation where notions of “freedom” have become more tangible and immediate than they ever were during his Communist party days in Chicago,

Wright attempts to imagines new roles and “uses” for the politically-engaged writer fighting for the cause of decolonization. For Wright, the personage of Prime Minister

Nkrumah embodies a partial fulfilment of earlier fantasies of Pan-African mobilization and liberation, as well as a figure of competition against whom the author struggles to be a source of knowledge and authority. In the end, while Wright conceives of his authoritarian power as tied to a certain epistemological supremacy as an “artist,” the dictator Nkrumah—framed in some ways as the “antagonist” of Wright’s narrative— comes to represent the limits of this supremacy.

In looking at works by a Korean American and a Dominican American author, respectively, my second and third chapters focuses on two groups that not only represent more recent immigrants to the United States, but also from countries that have had long

8 I borrow this notion from Manthia Diawara, who insists that “Black Power may unsettle many readers, but one thing is certain: Wright was for Africa” (75). See Manthia Diawara’s In Search of Africa (1998).

14 histories of U.S.-backed dictatorship. In this way, these texts become ideal sites for exploring how ethnic subject-formation takes place in the shadows of the power relations between nations.9 Chapter Two, “Good Korean/Bad Korean: Chang-rae Lee’s Native

Speaker and the Ghost of Syngman Rhee,” examines how Native Speaker (1995), which has by now become the canonical Asian American novel, remains invested in a Korean national history and memory centered around the Korean War. Key to this transnational memory is Lee’s deployment of the spy genre, which links his novel to a Cold War frame, while also articulating a vision of Korean identity that transcends that frame.

Crucially, I read the character of the Korean American city councilman John Kwang as an allegory for Syngman Rhee, the dictatorial president of the Republic of Korea (South

Korea) during the Korean War, an allegory made visible by the novel’s intelligence and espionage plot. In addition, I also consider Lee’s novel alongside Bruce Cumings’ historiography on the Korean War, and reveal how both Cumings’ account of Rhee and

Lee’s depiction of Kwang imagine an “essential” Koreanness that gets rendered through a certain spy genre iconography. For Lee, the figure of the ethnic dictator exemplifies how literary genres produce and order historical and cultural knowledges, as well as enact literary fantasies about the diasporic homeland.

My third chapter turns to Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

(2007), one of the most prominent and acclaimed American novels in recent years to directly address the topic of dictatorship. In Diaz’s novel, the outsized and outlandish legacy of Rafael Trujillo’s brutal reign over the Dominican Republic serves as the

9 More broadly, Asian Americans and Latino/as both share the distinction of occupying what has been called the “racial middle,” in the black and white divide over race in the United States, as well as having much younger literary histories. For more on comparative studies between these two groups, see Nicholas De Genova’s Racial Transformations (2005) and Eileen O’Brien’s The Racial Middle (2008). The work of Claire Jean Kim is also useful in this regard.

15 impetus for a number of thematic and discursive meditations. These include, for instance, the inheritance of this legacy by subsequent generations of Dominicans and members of the Dominican diaspora, as well as its larger significance within a global pattern of dictatorship and neocolonial domination. Most importantly, Diaz’s novel is notable for dramatizing the intertwined relationship between the ethnic writer and the ethnic dictator.

Through the character of Yunior, who is also the novel’s narrator, Diaz illustrates how the storyteller emulates the figure of Trujillo—and thus asserting his connection to the homeland—through a virtuosic, aggressive and “virile” narrative voice, one that forcefully holds together a heterogeneous assemblage of linguistic codes, discourses, intertextual references and generic modes. Furthermore, while numerous commentators have noted the discursive and generic promiscuity of Diaz’s text, I single out the primacy of two literary genres, the Latin American dictator novel and U.S. Latina fiction, and argue for their centrality to Diaz’s conception of a distinctly Pan-Latino/a, identity.

Doubling as something of a tentative conclusion, my last chapter looks at one of the most visible and popular American narratives about dictator figures, while also thinking through how the broader themes of this project relates to an earlier generation of ethnic immigrants. Specifically, I offer a transnationals reading of Francis Ford

Coppola’s The Godfather: Part II (1974), and illustrate how the film—through the extended middle sequence set in Cuba—variously depicts the protagonist Michael

Corleone as a symbolic correlative for Fulgencio Batista and Fidel Castro. From this perspective, this chapter is unique in that it considers the transnational encounter and exchange between two distinct iterations of the ethnic dictator, the Sicilian mafia don and the Latin American caudillo, reminding us that this trope is an inherently comparative

16 one. In considering the film’s multiple generic frames, moreover, I underscore the import of The Godfather: Part II as a sequel—that is, as a sort of “successor” text to the first film. As I point out, the film’s Part II-ness rests not simply in its continuation of the first film’s narrative, but rather in an inherited “DNA” that manifests in Coppola’s noted use of visual and structural parallels across the different installments. Considering the

Godfather film trilogy as a whole, I locate its unique contribution to the ethnic dictator trope in this formal exploration of the theme of dynastic succession.

CHAPTER ONE

The Authoritarian Education of Richard Wright

Richard Wright’s suite of travel writings and related essays from the 1950s provide a useful point of departure for a number of reasons, not least for the straightforward and literal way they stage the encounter between writers and dictators, as well as the way that these encounters prompt us to rethink the generic framework of these texts. Along with charting his transition from an astute analyst of U.S. race relations to a globally-oriented intellectual, works such as Black Power (1954), The Color Curtain

(1956), Pagan Spain (1957) and White Man, Listen! (1957) also represent discursive spaces through which Wright parses out the intertwined relationship between the function of authorship and forms of authoritarian politics, as well as ways that the former might serve as a version of the latter.1 To this end, it bears pointing out that authoritarian leaders figure centrally in each of these works, and to varying degrees of immediacy: while

Wright never comes in contact with Francisco Franco in Pagan Spain, for instance, the

Generalísimo nonetheless function as the absent-yet-ever-present symbolic patron of

Wright’s travels through Falangist Spain; his report on the 1955 Bandung Conference in

1 Scholars have long regarded these texts as marking a crucial expansion in Wright’s political consciousness, in which his earlier preoccupation with black American subjectivity merged with an investment in global anticolonial and nationalist liberation movements. As Armitjit Singh reminds us in his afterword to The Color Curtain: “Wright’s interest in matters racial and American was still intense […] He saw the struggle for Civil Rights in the U.S. as inextricably linked to the full freedom of peoples of color throughout the world. So, while others participated in the boycotts and marches at home, he was convinced that he was fighting the same battles in global contexts by participating in debates on Negritude and Pan- Africanism and supporting movements for freedom in Africa and Asia” (CC 613). For further general perspectives on Wright’s transition from domestic preoccupations to more global concerns, see Virgin Whatley Smith’s edited collection, Richard Wright’s Travel Writings: New Reflections (2001).

The Color Curtain allowed Wright to observe many nationalist strongmen up close, though not directly interacting with them; finally, Wright’s account of Ghana’s independence movement in Black Power brings him into the inner circle and personal company of Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah. These experiences, as I argue, profoundly shape Wright’s conception of his unique role as an author among authoritarians, set against an international context of decolonization and emergent nationalisms in which both figures would have an urgent, crucial role to play.

This opening chapter examines Wright’s Third World travel writings—with a particular focus on Black Power—and how they expand upon his earlier accounts of the relation between writing and authoritarian politics, translating them from the domestic scene to an international one. While recent studies such as Mark Christian Thompson’s

Black Fascisms and Sean McCann’s A Pinnacle of Feeling have attempted to foreground

Wright’s literary engagement with non-democratic forms of politics, their readings focus primarily on his earlier, U.S.-centered novels such as Native Son (1940) and The Outsider

(1953). While these works of fiction generally enjoy a higher degree of critical regard than Wright’s later non-fiction writings, their emphasis on the U.S. national context tends to confine discussions of Wright’s treatment of authoritarian politics largely to the theoretical, allegorical or speculative realms.

One of my key aims, then, is to consider how Wright’s Third World-centered texts—and the shift to a transnational consciousness that they chronicle—further illuminate our understanding of what McCann broadly refers to as Wright’s “notorious lifelong attraction to tyrannical power” (25). Here Wright’s modal shift from fiction to non-fiction proves particularly salient for our considerations of genre, and the discursive

19 frames through which to apprehend these texts. While frequently classified as a travel narrative, Black Power can also be read as a kind of memoir, and particularly a “diasporic memoir,” in which a diasporic subject “returns” to a putative ancestral homeland. This aspect of the book emerges in several prominent features. First, I would suggest, is the notable way Wright’s perceptions of Africa are frequently inflected by visions of his

American South origins—for example, he describes the Prime Minister’s residence as “a red, two-story brick dwelling that looked remarkably like a colonial mansion in Georgia or Mississippi” (BP 73). Elsewhere, the sight of a spirited African dance reminds him of dancing he’d seen “in storefront churches, in Holly Roller Tabernacles, in God’s

Temples, in unpainted prayer-meeting houses on the plantations of the Deep South” (BP

78). Secondly, as I show in this chapter, his reflections on the nationalist movement in

Ghana take up and elaborate upon many of the same themes first broached in his memoir

Black Boy (1945), as well as his other earlier non-fiction writings.

At the same time, Wright’s narrative of diasporic return has also been notable— and notorious—for its emphasis on the author’s profound sense of alienation from what he finds in the ancestral homeland.2 As Wright muses after observing a ritualized funeral dance, “I had understood nothing. I was black and they were black, my blackness did not help me (161). As numerous commentators have noted, Wright’s reaction to the culture and peoples he encounters range from this vexed non-comprehension at best, and exasperation, revulsion and condescension at worst.3 Where Wright’s admiration and

2 As Kevin Gaines notes of Wright’s text, “Viewed as a diaspora narrative of return to one’s presumed ancestral homeland, Black Power raises expectations of romantic solidarity that Wright fails to satisfy” (77).

3 For some prominent examples, see Anthony Appiah, “A Long Way from Home: Richard Wright in the Gold Coast” (1987) and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Third World of Theory: Enlightenment’s Esau” (2008).

20 positive feelings stand out in his account, it is typically toward the charismatic figure of

Kwame Nkrumah, upon whom he pins his hopes for the future success and prosperity of the fledging Ghanaian nation. This, in turn, adumbrates a broader feature of Wright’s

Third World writings: that his dissociation from what he saw as the primitive and backward populations of the Third World is complemented by his affinity with this world’s Westernized—and thus “rational”—governing elites. As a self-styled “Twentieth

Century Western Man of Color,” Wright professed a spiritual kinship with this rising wave of Third World nationalist leaders, and in particular those whose Western education and acculturation under colonialism have rendered them, as Wright also saw himself,

“tragic and lonely and all too often misunderstood” (WML 722).4 Notably, Wright stresses that these leaders should “necessarily” use “quasi-dictatorial methods to hasten the process of social evolution and to establish order in their lands” (WML 725).

Wright’s imagined identification with these leaders anchors this chapter’s inquiry.

Namely, I explore how the nascent authoritarian leanings exhibited in works like Native

Son, Black Boy Outsider and Black Boy engage with a real-world context of anti- imperialist struggle, Cold War political maneuvering, and nation-building. This engagement is all the more salient given that Wright’s observation of Third World nationalist movements brought him into contact with the lived and practical realities of authoritarian leadership as it pertains to states, political parties, and institutions of political power. Furthermore, his admiration for these leaders often dovetailed into a broad sympathy for their ideologies and agendas, with Wright proclaiming in various forms that “Nkrumah, Nasser, Sukarno, and Nehru, and the Western-educated heads of

Nina Kressner Cobb also characterizes Wright’s attitude toward Africa in Black Power as a combination of “hostility, sympathy, repugnance and condescension” (230). 4 Richard Wright, White Man, Listen! (1957), in Three Books from Exile; hereafter abbreviated as WML.

21 these newly created national states, must be given carte blanche to modernize their lands without overlordship of the West, and we must understand the methods that they will feel compelled to use” (WML 725).

As his comments suggest, Wright regarded the project of Third World liberation as properly the domain of talented individuals, in whose hands the “overlordship” of their newly created national states should rightfully belong. In this regard, one especially germane approach to Wright’s “attraction to tyrannical power” is through the framework of charisma, and the mechanisms of charismatic authority. The recent work of Erica

Edwards proffers an especially relevant framework, in her theorization of how African

American cultural production has both bolstered and belied “one of the central fictions of black American politics: that freedom is best achieved under the direction of a single charismatic leader” (xv). In Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership (2012),

Edwards forwards a conception of charisma not as a static social structure (pace Max

Weber and his interlocutors), but rather as a “narrative and performative regime” and a

“portable scenario” involving a dynamic interplay between text, performance and political desire. For Edwards, this expression of charisma is closely bound with literary production: “If charisma functions as an official story and a portable scenario of black political engagement, literary texts reread and rewrite the ritualized narrative in new grammars. Cultural production thus shapes political desire even as it creates the potential to undo the influence of ‘official’ stories through the production of restagings” (33).

While Edwards’s study mentions Wright only tangentially, her formulations nonetheless invite us to view his work as also partaking in the broader African American cultural project of staging and re-staging what she calls the “charismatic scenario.” Not only do

Wright’s Third World writings export, after a fashion, the narrative and performative regime of charisma onto an international stage, they also foreground the scene of writing as a key element in the cultural dialogue with charismatic leadership. This can be seen in

Black Power—as I illustrate shortly—in a figurative exchange of letters through which

Wright posits himself as symbolically trading places with the Prime Minister of Ghana.

As I hope to show in the following, the “political desire” being articulated in

Wright’s non-fiction writings on the Third World goes beyond his surface wish for charismatic leaders to deliver their lands and peoples from Western domination, but rather entails the writer’s desire to appropriate the charisma of the nationalist leader and re-channel it through the medium of his art. In this sense, Wright’s reflections in Black

Power, The Color Curtain and White Man, Listen! express the confluence of his political desires with an aesthetic one, and proffer a latent theory of the author-as-authoritarian.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that Wright wishes to rule in Nkrumah’s place—though maybe a fantasy of doing so subtends his intellectual project—but rather that he conceives the tasks of the writer and dictator as sharing a set of strategic protocols.

Although this notion in and of itself is not exactly a novel development in Wright’s thinking, within the context of Third World liberation struggles it comes to take on a whole new set of political, material, and extra-literary stakes.

II.

Black Power chronicles Wright’s travels through Africa’s Gold Coast, where he observed, among other things, the independence movement led by Kwame Nkrumah that would eventually end British colonial rule and establish the present-day nation state of

Ghana. As previously mentioned, Wright’s text is bookended by two epistolary moments.

The first of these, presented immediately following the title page, is a reproduction of a letter from Nkrumah himself. Addressed “To Whom It May Concern,” the letter certifies

Nkrumah’s acquaintance with Wright, explaining that “Mr. Wright would like to come to the Gold Coast to do some research into the social and historical aspects of the country, and would be my guest during the time he is engaged in this work.” Invoking the gravity of his newly-appointed role as Prime Minster, Nkrumah affirms that “To be best of my knowledge and belief, I consider Mr. Wright a fit and proper person to be allowed to visit the Gold Coast for the reasons stated above,” effectively endowing Wright’s visit with an aura of official sanction. The second of Black Power’s epistolary interjections is the open letter to Nkrumah with which Wright concludes his travel narrative. In it, Wright provides nothing less than a full summary of his political, social and psychological diagnoses of the region, as well as outlining a set of prescriptions for how Nkrumah should go about leading his nation. Infamously, Wright decrees in his letter that “There is but one honorable course that assumes and answers the ideological, traditional, organizational, emotional, political, and productive needs of Africa at this time:

AFRICAN LIFE MUST BE MILITARIZED!” (BP 415).

Between the two epistles that comprise the beginning and ending of Black Power, a marked shift occurs in Wright’s epistemological self-positioning. He begins his narrative as a neophyte outsider who admits, from the comfort of his Paris apartment, that

“I’m of African descent…yet I’d never seen Africa; I’d never really known any Africans;

I’d hardly ever thought of Africa” (BP 18). Thus the first-page insertion of Nkrumah’s letter frames Wright’s entry into Africa, as well as the reader’s entry into his text, through

24 a tacit deference to the patronage of the Prime Minister, under whose auspices he travels as a designated “guest” in an unfamiliar land. Wright’s open letter to Nkrumah, however, stages something like a reversal of this political prerogative. By the journey’s—and text’s—end, the same narrator presents himself not only as having a firm grasp of “the

African’s mentality,” but also being in a position to advise the Prime Minister on how best to address the “ideological, traditional, organizational, emotional, political and productive needs” of his fledgling nation.

In contrast to the formal trappings of political office exhibited in the facsimile letter from Nkrumah—complete with government letterhead, royal coat of arms, and signed “Kwame Nkrumah, Prime Minister”—a decidedly informal air suffuses Wright’s concluding remarks. Beginning with a straightforward “Dear Kwame Nkrumah,”

Wright’s open letter eschews all pretenses pertaining to rank and protocol in favor of a blunt, conversational tone, often referring to Ghana’s head of government as simply

“Kwame.” The use of the first-name address augurs Wright’s familiar and didactic tone throughout the letter, as seen in the recurrence of such interjections as “Kwame, let me put it bluntly,” “But Kwame, the truth is…” and “Make no mistake, Kwame” (BP 410,

411, 413). In doing so, Wright rhetorically establishes himself as Nkrumah’s social equal

(if not superior) and abolishes the institutional and hierarchal divides insinuated by the form(alities) of Nkrumah’s letter of introduction. Whereas that official document legitimates Wright’s fitness to travel and observe as a matter of Nkrumah’s expressed best “knowledge and belief,” Wright’s coda to Black Power places, front and center, his own best knowledge and beliefs on the “social and historical aspects of the country.” In

25 doing so, Wright narratively upgrades his status from the Prime Minister’s guest to something resembling an advisor, or even mentor, to the Prime Minister.

“Your safety, your security lie in plunging full speed ahead!” Wright declaims at one point, and follows up by asking “But, how? What methods? Means? What instrumentalities? Ay, there’s the rub…” (BP 413). These musings, I would propose, represent no less than Wright’s own latent political desires: to play a role in the safety, security and progress of Nkrumah’s Ghana (and by extension, the rest of Africa), to ponder and advance methods, means and instrumentalities—in short, to govern, albeit in an abstract, distant form. What does it mean, it bears asking, for a writer and intellectual with no experience holding political office, like Wright, to participate in the stewardship of a nation? Or, to approach this question from another perspective, one suggested by

Black Power’s framing of political authority through two instances of letter writing: how might the endeavor to govern and lead national bodies take shape as a distinctly literary problem? In other words, how might controlling a narrative, or textual body, come to seem akin to controlling a national body, or a body politic?

Here is a brief caveat is in order: while writing letters might not count as

“literary” in and of itself, I would contend that Wright’s closing missive to Nkrumah does much to signal its own operation within a literary register. Most straightforwardly, perhaps, are those instances where Wright bundles the deliberation of political objectives with the invocation of an iconic poet. The above-quoted citation of Shakespeare, for instance—“What methods? Means? What instrumentalities? Ay, there’s the rub…”— frames the challenge before Nkrumah as a Hamlet-like grappling with “something rotten”

26 in the State of Ghana.5 In addition, Wright concludes his letter (and thus the entire text of

Black Power) by quoting the opening lines from Walt Whitman’s poem “Europe, the 72nd and 73rd Years of These States.” In framing his quotation, Wright utilizes Whitman to rhetorically assert his self-conscription into Nkrumah’s ‘militarized’ cause, and imagines the alliance between the American and the Ghanaian across a long historical view:

With words as our weapons, there are some few of us who will stand on the ramparts to fend off the evildoers, the slanderers, the greedy, the self- righteous! You are not alone…Your fight has been fought before. I am an American and my country too was once a colony of England…It was old Walt Whitman who felt what you and your brother fighters are now feeling when he said: […] (BP 420)6

In its figuration of the writer-soldier standing vigilant upon a rampart, armed with his weapon of choice, such passages also foreground a certain novelistic quality that subtends

Wright’s political exhortations. They subtly remind us that we are reading, at bottom, the work of a master storyteller, one who has made a long career out of fighting political battles with weaponized words (and against “evildoers, the slanderers, the greedy, the self-righteous,” categories that resonate for their evocativeness more than their specificity). What’s more, the idea of these framing letters as a literary device operates at both ends. Specifically, Nkrumah’s letter of introduction, which begins “This is to certify that I have known Mr. Richard Wright for many years, having met him in the United

States,” turns out to be a sort of fiction itself. As Hazel Rowley informs us in her recent

5 From Hamlet: “To sleep--perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub” (3.1.66). The invocation of that other recognizable line from Hamlet, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” (1.4.95), while purely my own stylistic flourish, nonetheless does gesture toward a compelling resonance with Wright’s rhetoric, specifically in his descriptions of indigenous cultures and traditions. In “Tradition and Industrialization,” for example, Wright imagines “a knowing black, brown, or yellow man” who can say “Thank you, Mr. White Man, for freeing me from the rot of my irrational traditions and customs[…]!” (WML 719).

6 In a 1953 interview with William Gardner Smith in Ebony, Wright expresses a similar idea of words as weapons, and in a similar context of transnational political projects and affiliations, stating: “I fight with words. They know no national boundaries.”

27 biography of Wright, Wright and Nkrumah had met once in the U.S. in 1940, but not since, revealing the Prime Minister’s legitimating claim as leaning upon a fabrication, or at least a stretch of the imagination.7 Thus Nkrumah’s own epistle inaugurates the text of

Black Power via a moment of “fiction,” allowing us to view the book as framed not only by an exchange of letters, but also an exchange of stories.

The literariness of these passages can also be discerned in their figural complexity, in which the content of the message appears articulated to its formal construction. Wright’s Shakespearean deliberations on means and instrumentalities above lead directly to his call to “militarize” African society, a remark that has led several commentators to note the patently authoritarian stance that runs through his vision for

African development.8 As Wright elaborates:

One simple conviction stands straight up in me: Our people must be made to walk, forced draft, into the twentieth century! The direction of their lives, the duties that they must perform to overcome the stagnancy of tribalism, the sacrifices that must yet be made – all of this must be placed under firm social discipline! […] Be merciful by being stern! If I lived under your regime, I’d ask for this hardness, this coldness…” (BP 414).

7 See Hazel Rowley’s Richard Wright: The Life and Times (2001). As Rowley also recounts, Nkrumah’s letter of introduction was crucial in expediting Wright’s visa, although its further practical uses during his travels remain unclear.

8 Kevin Gaines remarks that “with the continent plagued by coups d’état and kleptocratic military regimes, hindsight would permit some to accuse Wright of cryptofascism and hostility to the cause of African freedom” (81). See Kevin Gaines, “Revisiting Richard Wright in Ghana.” In his analysis of Wright’s essay “Tradition and Industrialization,” Henry Louis Gates, Jr. also characterizes Wright’s endorsement of militarization as tantamount to a “blueprint for a neocolonialist police state,” while adding that “still, we can at least credit him with a fair degree of historical prescience” (S193). See Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Third World of Theory: Enlightenment’s Esau.” Although Nkrumah’s regime in Ghana did eventually drift toward widespread corruption, mismanagement and an increasingly erratic and personalist rule (culminating in his ouster by a military coup in 1966), the majority of these events occurred well after Wright’s visit in 1953, and his death in 1960. Importantly, Gaines’ essay also offers a thoroughly positive interpretation of Wright’s call for “militarization,” citing the vital role of military service for black modernity. Gaines elaborates on Manthia Diawara’s own positive evaluation of Wright’s endorsement of a militarized African society, which can be found in In Search of Africa.

In passages such as this, Wright presses the stylistic techniques of the writer into the service of his political clarion call. Here the martial undertones of his rhetoric—the

“conviction” standing “straight up,” soldier-like, in him; the syntactical march of his imperative exclamations that resemble a barking of orders—coincide with the martial overtones of his appeal: for the “firm social discipline” that he prescribes for African society. His reference to this populace as our people is striking, given that Wright spends large portions of Black Power expressing his distance (and distaste) from the “stagnant” and “tribal” masses of the Gold Coast. The formulation, nonetheless, allows Wright to invoke his diasporic status as a man of African descent, while staking this affiliation—as

I had earlier shown—to Africa’s Westernized and intellectual and political elite rather than the urban and rural multitudes. Similarly, the possessive, Mosaic connotations of

“our people” serve to figuratively project Wright into a position of dominion alongside

Nkrumah, the messianic leader to whom he attributes the authority over the direction of lives, the duties to be performed and the sacrifices to be made.

Crucially, Wright letter also gestures to the ways that the political purview of the writer potentially exceed that of the politician, as seen when he assumes the hypothetical guise of a Ghanaian citizen. Further stressing the need for an authoritarian “hardness” or

“coldness” in the building of modern nation states, Wright imaginatively presents himself as speaking not merely on behalf of, but as part of, the body politic Nkrumah must lead, via the counterfactual “If I lived under your regime.” Such a stance, of course, is meant more as a narrative performance than a policy position. If anything, Wright’s hypothetical willingness to ask to be governed in this hard and cold manner only brings his dissonance from the desires of the Ghanaian people (whatever these may be) into sharper relief.

Simultaneously, we are made all the more aware of his determination to speak for this populace, and delineate to the Prime Minister the contours of their own best needs and interests. In this way, Wright’s text frames the challenge of political action as a question of inhabiting knowledges and subject positions extrinsic to oneself, as well as approaching matters through the sheer force of a “simple conviction” (as opposed to, say, a nuanced and detailed grasp of technical, sociological, economic and cultural factors).

In subordinating the heterogeneous perspectives and viewpoints that he encounters in his travels to the supremacy of his own “rational” evaluations and opinions,

Wright’s own rhetorical performance can also be said to epitomize certain dictatorial

“hardness” and “coldness.” My use of the term “hardness” here draws upon the insights of Abdul JanMohamed, who elaborates on the concept of hardness as a “multivalent trope in Wright’s work generally, as well as in Black Power” (242).9 Couching this idea in the mechanisms of subject-formation on an individual, psychic level, JanMohamed casts

Wright’s fixation on hardness as a function of “symbolic identification.” In such a process, a subject identifies with the structural conditions of its own constitution, or “the position of agency through which we are observed and through which we observe and judge ourselves” (236). This is in contrast to the process of “imaginary identification,” the identification with someone or something outside oneself, but still within the structure/position of agency—which in Wright’s work gets associated with softness,

9 See JanMohamed’s essay “Richard Wright as a Specular Border Intellectual” (2002). JanMohamed’s method is similar to my own in this chapter, in his examination of the ways this trope translates from Wright’s earlier domestic works to his later analyses on the Third World; for JanMohamed, understanding how this trope works in the former does much to illuminate its functioning in the latter. It is my hope here to show how the dimensions of this “hardness” relate to Wright’s engagement with authoritarian politics.

30 emotion and sentimentality.10 Most importantly, in JanMohamed’s formulation,

“symbolic identification permits an identification with the Law and, via the subsequent access to the process of (political) signification, the capacity to occupy an active place in an intersubjective symbolic/political network” (248). As JonMohamed argues, this trope of hardness “not only defines the entire political field in which Wright operates but also defines the core of this subjectivity”; within this “political field,” ultimately, the attachment to hardness also represents a yearning to mimetically appropriate the “hard” structure—the “Law”—of racial and colonial domination (249). By borrowing this hardness, Wright’s writings would suggest, one can begin to fashion equally hard, and thus effective, structures of antiracist and anticolonial resistance.

To return to the “hardness” of Wright’s rhetorical performance, his account of

Africa in Black Power displays precisely a sort of privileged access to the process of political signification. This can be applied even to the basic level of Wright’s “access” to the center of political power in Ghana, signaled in his text by his symbolic exchange of letters with Nkrumah. These letters, in turn, reveal Wright’s desire to influence the future direction of the nation, specifically through his signification of the necessary political methods, means and instrumentalities. Wright also demonstrates his “active place in an intersubjective symbolic/political network,” as we had seen earlier, by subsuming all other perspectives, interpretations and subject positions to the primacy of his own. This assertion of his epistemological superiority, I would suggest, can be read as an intersubjective assertion of a politicized hardness over and above the softness of others.

10 JanMohamed borrows his operative terms from Jacques Lacan, although he also offers an explanation of symbolic identification in Freudian terms. Stated simply, “in Freudian terms it is identification with the superego, and in Lacanian terms with the (negating) Law of the Father” (236).

Not surprisingly, Wright regards this softness as something endemic to the

African milieu he scrutinizes. As he informs Nkrumah in his letter (once again, in the voice of someone in a position to know better): “African culture has not developed the personalities of the people to a degree that their egos are stout, hard, sharply defined; there is too much cloudiness in the African’s mentality, a kind of sodden vagueness that makes for lack of confidence, an absence of focus that renders that mentality incapable of grasping the workaday world” (BP 410, emphasis mine). Shortly after, Wright restates this condition more succinctly as “an Africa beset with a gummy tribalism,” a phrase he would recycle in The Color Curtain, when he describes the Asians and Africans of the

Third World as a “gummy mass” (BP 412, CC 599). Wright’s choice of adjective is highly suggestive; more than mere softness, “gummy” implies a certain pliability, and susceptibility to being molded by external forces. Wright repeats it in The Color Curtain, in fact, to express his wariness toward Chou En-Lai, the envoy from Communist China, whom he suspects “would be content to snuggle as close as possible to this gummy mass and watch and wait…” (CC 599). For Wright, the perils of this “gumminess” exhibited by the newly-independent African and Asian masses rest in its malleability before the firm hands of a cunning, charismatic manipulator like Chou. Despite his gentle-seeming

“snuggling,” what Chou represents, as Wright is wont to remind us, is the hardness and

“Law” of a different oppressive structure: that of Communism.

One the one hand, Wright insinuates that the best way to forestall this danger is with the equally firm hands of more ideologically palatable statesmen, like a Nkrumah, or a Nehru. On the other, his texts also suggest another possibility, the unexpressed fantasy at the heart of his writings on the Third World: that what would benefit the gummy

32 masses most is the molding influence of a figure like Wright himself, in the role of an author-cum-authoritarian. Here the “multivalent trope” of hardness that pervades his work becomes, from a certain angle, a trope of dictatorship. In Black Power, for example, we can see how Wright marshals the expansive and often unwieldy details of his four- hundred page travel narrative into a politicized “forced draft”—in both the martial and authorial senses of the term—in the form of his concluding letter. Though he subtitles his book “A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos,” by the end Wright has diverged from this mission statement, presenting less a “record of reactions” than something resembling a government white paper. This document, notably, is also quite devoid of pathos, preferring instead to perform the very “hardness” and “coldness” it prescribes, in which alternative viewpoints from actual African subjects remained effectively silenced and neutralized. In this fashion, Black Power symbolically allies the writer’s perspective with the political leader’s sovereignty, while deploying the rhetorical arsenal of the former to serve, supplement, and occasionally supersede the prerogatives of the latter.

III.

Before delving further into Wright’s travel writings, it would be useful to revisit some passages from his earlier works that address the relationship between the practice of literature and the practice of politics, to better frame his view of authoritarian politics as a literary practice. As one of the more politically active and outspoken among twentieth century American writers—and, famously, a one-time member of the Communist Party—

Wright meditated frequently upon the conflicts and confluences of his respective duties as a writer and party operative. As he muses in Black Boy:

The artist and the politician stand at opposite poles. The artist enhances life by his prolonged concentration upon it, while the politician emphasizes the impersonal aspect of life by his attempts to fit men into groups. The artist’s enhancement of life may emphasize, at certain times, those aspects that a politician can use. But the politician, at other times, eager to do good for man, may sneer at the artist because the art product cannot be used by him. Hence, the two groups of men, driving in the same direction, committed to the same vision, often find themselves locked in a struggle more desperate than either of them wanted, while their mutual enemies gape at the spectacle in amazement. (BB 345).

Arising from a period of increasing contention between Wright’s artistic impulses as a writer and the restrictive ideological demands of the Communist Party, these comments reflect his growing sense that the two were not only separated by a wide gulf, but that they in fact stood at “opposite poles.”

Here we might examine the nature of these “opposite poles,” and the key terms at play between them. While the work of the artist is characterized by a “prolonged concentration” on life, as befitting an intellectual orientation, the politician is largely an organizer, one who “fit[s] men into groups.” Looking closer, an even more salient and fundamental distinction arises, between the artist/intellectual who “enhances” and the politician/organizer who “emphasizes.” Granted, a degree of vagueness hangs over

Wright’s use of these words, though what interests me here is not so much their technical definitions as what joins the two together. The answer, I would point out, might be found in the sentence in which both terms appear, and appear to operate in tandem: “The artist’s enhancement of life may emphasize, at certain times, those aspects that a politician can use.” For Wright, what aligns the processes of artistic “enhancement” and political

“emphasis” (at least “at certain times”) is the concept of utility, or the question of whether or not something can be “used” for concrete, practical aims. As Wright laments, the failure of this utility—when an “art product cannot be used—is what leads to discord

34 between the two groups, the “spectacle” of their struggle, and their vulnerability to the predations of “mutual enemies.” Most crucially, for the purposes of my argument, Wright associates this trope of utility with the allures of dictatorial power; elsewhere in Black

Boy, he professes that “I would have consented to live under the most rigid type of dictatorship, for I felt that dictatorships, too, defined the use of men, however degrading that use might be,” and that such a social arrangement “made use of a limited part of a man, defined him, his rank, his function in society” (BB 265).

In migrating from Black Boy to Black Power, these concepts take on a renewed sense of consequence and urgency. As we see in the latter work, Wright mobilizes all his artistic powers of “prolonged concentration,” to not only “enhance” the details and larger meaning of the African situation as he saw it. More pointedly, he aims to produce a text that might prove useful to Nkrumah, whom he characterizes as a “full-blown politician whose consciousness was anchored in concrete, practical concerns pointing toward a fondly sought goal” (BP 74). Indeed, Wright’s emphatic appeals for “a militarization of the daily, social lives of the people” in Africa invoke the very same organizing and utilitarian functions that once made dictatorship so attractive to him: “I am speaking of giving form organization, direction, meaning, and a sense of justification to those lives”

(BP 415). Thus, if as a Communist Party operative in Chicago Wright had viewed the artist and politician as locked in a “desperate,” embarrassing struggle, then in the global context of decolonization and Third World nationalism he felt more than ever the burning imperative to bridge that divide, and restore the two to a state of “driving in the same direction” and being “committed to the same vision.”

In some ways, this imperative was always there, even before Wright turned his critical eye beyond U.S. borders. In staunchly committing to his role as an artist, he never fully repudiates the “opposite pole” of the politician; even as the politician “sneers” at the artist, Wright still recognizes him as being “eager to do good for man.” In the end, Black

Boy lays out Wright’s career-long effort to negotiate the intertwined work of the artist and politician, their respective “enhancing” and “emphasizing” of various qualities of

“life,” and the ever-pressing matter of how best to make his own “art products” useful.

Describing his project to write a biographical sketch of one of his black Communist colleagues during his days in the party, Wright explains: “I felt that if I could get his story

I would make known some of the difficulties inherent in the adjustment of a folk people to an urban environment; I would make his life more intelligible to others than it was to himself. I would reclaim his disordered days and cast them into a form that people could grasp, see, understand, and accept” (BB 332). More than a simple “profound concentration” upon life, this description reveals Wright as also partaking in his own version of the politician’s organizing impulse. In particular, he envisions his work as reclaiming the “disordered” and unwieldy details of a life, and converting it, through

“story,” into a coherent and understandable form. Foreshadowing his later representational strategies toward African subjects, Wright equates his “power” (or hardness) as an artist with his superior apprehension of an individual’s existence, beyond even the capability of that individual himself. In fact, it is in making this individual’s life

“more intelligible to others” and casting it “into a form that people could grasp” that

Wright’s artistry resembles the work of the politician, turning a person’s life into

36 impersonal material to be “grasped” and “accepted” by others. The political usefulness of

Wright’s art, in this instance, resides in its rendering legible of life itself.

Even in the service of concrete political aims, however, Wright’s highest allegiance remains to his artistic and subjective autonomy. As he goes on to attest, “My writing was my way of seeing, my way of living, my way of feeling; and who could change his sight, his notion of direction, his senses?” (BB 346). Such an understanding of his art serves, I would argue, as the crux between Wright’s self-conception as a writer and his broader interest in forms of authoritarian power. In a 1944 letter, Wright restates these principles through a striking political metaphor: “In the last analysis, the artist must bow to the monitor of his own imagination; must be led by the sovereignty of his own impressions and perceptions; must be guided by the tyranny of what troubles and concerns him personally. There is no other true path” (67).11 Here Wright suggests that authoritarian politics, like artistic integrity, necessarily requires the triumph of individual will and agency over external and collective considerations. For the same reasons Wright remained devoted to the imperatives of his singular ways of seeing, living and feeling over the agendas of the Communist Party, he also admired those leaders who, like the artist, were able to impose their singular vision upon others. In both cases, Wright valued the ability of a committed, talented and charismatic individual to assert influence over his audience and achieve a unity of purpose and action.

In this vein, Wright also recognized the undervalued importance of aesthetic displays to the expression of political power and the articulation of political desires.

11 Wright to Antonio Fransconi (November 1944), qtd. in Michel Fabre’s “Beyond Naturalism?” (1985). Fabre’s citation of this letter focuses on Wright’s relationship to the aesthetic practices of American literary naturalism, and how Wright, while hewing to a “point of objectivity” in the handling of his subject matter, never defines that objectivity solely through extrinsic criteria.

Recounting his early interactions with the followers of Marcus Garvey, Wright describes them as “the one group I met during those exploring days whose lives enthralled me”:

The Garveyites had embraced a totally racialistic outlook which endows them with a dignity that I had never seen before in Negroes. On the walls of their dingy flats were maps of Africa and India and Japan, pictures of Japanese generals and admirals, portraits of Marcus Garvey in gaudy regalia, the faces of colored men and women from all parts of the world. I gave no credence to the ideology of Garveyism; it was, rather, the emotional dynamics of its adherents that evoked my admiration […] It was when the Garveyites spoke fervently of building their own country, of someday living within the boundaries of a culture of their own making, that I sensed the passionate hunger of their lives, that I caught a glimpse of the potential strength of the American Negro.” (BB 287)

In the end, Wright regards the ideology of Garvey’s United Negro Improvement

Association as too impractical and short-sighted, lamenting that “Those Garveyites I knew could never understand why I liked them but would never follow them, and I pitied them too much to tell them that they could never achieve their goal, that Africa was owned by the imperial powers of Europe” (BB 287). What captures Wright’s enthrallment is thus not the Garveyites’ ideology or practical aims, but rather its visual accoutrements: maps of Africa and Asia, pictures of the generals and admirals of the

Empire of Japan, “portraits of Marcus Garvey in gaudy regalia” (which likely resembled the attire of those same Japanese commanders)—in short, the regime of imagery and iconography that reinforces the organization’s “totally racialistic outlook,” while offering the prospect of “dignity” and redemption from the “dingy flats” they often adorned.12

Closely tied to this aesthetic component is what Wright refers to as the movement’s “emotional dynamics,” those glimpses of “passionate hunger” and “potential

12 Wright’s observations resonates with Paul Gilroy’s assessment that Garvey’s movement posits racial purity as a project, not a condition: “Neither biology nor racist oppression is sufficient to generate purity of race: martial technologies of racial becoming—drills, uniforms, medals, titles, rallies—are necessary to standardize a racial outlook that cannot arise spontaneously” (73). In Paul Gilroy, “Black Fascism” (2000).

38 strength” that stimulates his sense of political possibility, even as they serve a cause he deems unlikely to succeed. Wright associates this emotional dynamism—and the maps, pictures and icons that fuel it—with a palpable nationalist longing, in the Garveyites’s hopes of “building their own country” and “someday living within the boundaries of a culture of their own making.” Tellingly, Wright would later draw upon a similar language in The Color Curtain to describe the “emotional nationalism”—wrought of “racial consciousness”—that he observed animating the newly-independent nations of the Third

World (a context that resembles, in some distant way, the attainment of those Garveyites’ hopes noted above). Though he dismissed the Black Nationalist goals of Garvey’s organization, Wright nevertheless respected its achievement of a mass mobilization under the aegis of one man’s singular vision—in effect, “his sight, his notion of direction, his senses”—as well as the martial aesthetic that gave visual form to the “sovereignty” of

Garvey’s “own impressions and perceptions.”

In recent years, several critics have acknowledged the convergence between

Wright’s valorization of individual agency and his nationalist imaginings of community, and how this complicates traditional leftist interpretations of his political and aesthetic project. In Black Fascisms, Mark Thompson locates Wright within a matrix of African

American writers whose work articulates a “black literary fascism.” Not only does the figure of Marcus Garvey—as the most prominent embodiment of an ultranationalist, anti-

Marxist black radicalism—feature centrally in Thompson’s conception of black fascist ideology, but, similar to Wright’s remarks on Garvey’s movement, Thompson’s remarks also casts this fascism as a distinctly aesthetic (and more specifically, distinctly literary) phenomenon. As Thompson stresses, while black literary fascism drew upon forms of

“generic fascism,” it remained unique in that it emerged in the absence of any black fascist political party, any black public consensus regarding fascism, nor even any unified vision of Black Nationalism that might provide a basis for the first two elements. Rather, this black fascist ideology was articulated “almost exclusively on the individual level as a political and aesthetic fantasy of collective action” (24).13

Here should make clear that I am not reading Wright’s Third World narratives through the rubric of Thompson’s black literary fascism, which remains firmly grounded in an interwar, post-Harlem Renaissance black radical tradition. More precisely, I do not regard Wright’s writings on Third World nationalist movements as engaging with what

Thompson calls “fascist ideological imperatives” (44).14 For all of Wright’s fascination with and investment in dynamic political strongmen like Nkrumah, Nehru, Sukarno,

Nasser and others, as well as his calls for African life to be militarized, texts such as

Black Power and The Color Curtain do not exhibit any fascist characteristics, just as the valorization of charismatic leadership and “firm social discipline” alone does not constitute fascism. Rather, what I find most useful in Thompson’s analysis is the broader notion constructing an authoritarian political fantasy “centered on both the charismatic leader and an aesthetic imperative” (44).

To begin with, I simply wish to note that the “political and aesthetic fantasy” of black literary fascism likewise emphasizes the supremacy of the individual imagination in envisioning forms of collective action. That is, Thompson’s model of black fascism

13 As Thompson states elsewhere in his introductory remarks, “This is not a work of pure historiography or pure political science: it is a literary study that searches novels for political fantasy and the aesthetic form that conveys that fantasy” (2).

14 As outlined by Thompson, these include: a theory of the volk, race chauvinism, an extreme masculinist politico-cultural praxis and aesthetic, racial militarization and violence, and the subordination of reason to vitalism in the quest to recapture the mythic, originary essence of a racially coded people (44).

40 underscores the imperative of an individual’s artistic vision, or the “tyranny of what troubles and concerns him personally,” over and above any actual collective dynamic.

Moreover, the locus of this individual agency rests less so in the figure of the political leader, but rather with the writer who is able to give form to this fantasy via the literary text. In fact, for Thompson, it is precisely a sense of ambivalence toward an extant political leader—Marcus Garvey, in this case—that occasions the black fascist literary text. Because Garvey’s mixed historical legacy rendered him both “the strongest model for the presentation of the charismatic black fascist leader” as well as “the greatest obstacle to this presentation,” one of the tasks of black literary fascism was to “revere

Garvey while reviling him, to glorify certain aspects of his movement while disavowing others” (44). In this light, Thompson conceives the work of the writer as not merely supplementing the efforts of the politician, but in fact refining, clarifying and enhancing it. As seen in Wright’s own reflections on Garvey, while the figure of the (extant) charismatic leader offers a certain political promise (in the “emotional dynamics” or

“passionate hunger” he inspires), he also represents a serious deficiency or lack (“they could never achieve their goal”), for which the insight of the writer then becomes a source of recompense. Thompson’s reading of Wright’s novel The Outsider, for instance, explores how the actions of its murderer protagonist Cross Damon strips black fascism down to its “ideological kernels” of sovereignty, violence and fear (170). Through this characterization, Thompson argues, Wright forwards a vision of black fascism that substitutes the flawed Garvey with the more attractive Damon, who represents a pure fascist “essence” or “ontology” as embodied in a singular individual.

In a similar vein, Sean McCann’s A Pinnacle of Feeling also explores Wright’s literary engagement with institutions of political authority, though focusing on a distinctly American discourse on the “relations among democracy, nationality, and executive power” (23). More pertinently, McCann casts Wright’s literary output as part of a broader dialogue between twentieth-century American writers and a “rising theory of presidential government,” in which a perpetually frustrated popular sovereignty “might come to redemptive expression through the power of charismatic leadership” (32).

Tracing Wright’s intellectual debts to Walt Whitman (also on display at the end of Black

Power), McCann highlights a “rarely noted, yet central feature of [Wright’s] work—the frequency with which he, too, viewed national solidarity as the sine qua non of meaningful democracy and the degree to which he imagined that national identity being evoked by the exercise of executive power” (23).15 Much like Thompson’s theory of black literary fascism, McCann foregrounds this literary articulation of presidential executive power (to recycle Thompson’s wording) “on the individual level as a political and aesthetic fantasy of collective action.”

While Thompson and McCann approach Wright’s fiction from seemingly disparate coordinates of the political spectrum, their investigations share several key thematic preoccupations, which aid in illuminating Wright’s subsequent non-fiction writings on the Third World. Firstly, both Thompson and McCann bring renewed

15 McCann draws heavily upon Walt Whitman’s numerous writings extolling Lincoln as a “national redeemer,” and which imagines Lincoln’s presidency as turning upon two symbolic ideals of leadership: the commander and the martyr (x). While the first of these refers to the firm-handed commander-in-chief who exercised vast political and martial powers to win the Civil War, the second draws attention to the man who suffered greatly and in solitude – and who was eventually assassinated – for that very cause. As McCann stresses, these two disparate narratives of Lincoln should not be seen as functioning in opposition, or as a progressive trajectory wherein the second supplants the first. Rather, they are “aspects of a single dynamic pattern, each of which emphasizes the capacity of executive power to create, through both coercion and sympathy, an otherwise unrealized national community” (xii).

42 attention to the thoroughly nationalist orientation in Wright’s work, whether in the radical form of black fascist ideologies inspired by European fascisms, or more moderate,

American-originated notions of “national solidarity” and “meaningful democracy.” In addition, both studies articulate these nationalist imaginings of community as centered upon the symbolic import of a charismatic leader, from which group unity, ideological coherence and political agency all ostensibly emanate. While the equivalence of this charismatic leadership with dictatorship constitutes a self-evident part of Thompson’s premise, the “coercive power of government” also plays a critical role in the theory of presidential government McCann elaborates (29). Most suggestively, McCann’s analysis of the porous boundaries between state tyranny and legitimate executive leadership hinges upon the political theories of Giorgio Agamben and Carl Schmitt. As McCann explicates, Wright’s novel Native Son anticipates Agamben’s theories of the modern state, by envisioning—via the protagonist Bigger Thomas—an “executive power characterized by conquest and command” who is then “displaced, through an act of martyrdom, by a mystically bound people” (29).16

Underpinning these theoretical matrices of nationalism, authoritarianism and charismatic leadership, ultimately, is the “aesthetic imperative” that gives literary from to

16 More specifically, Agamben’s insight (from Homo Sacer [1998])—that any state that imagines its people as a spiritual source of political authority may also legitimately demand the lives of those same people— undergirds McCann’s nationalist reading of the famous final exchange between Bigger and Max in Native Son (“What I killed for I am!”). In McCann’s analysis, Max’s Communist party affiliations render him unable to appreciate the “transcendent national sovereignty” signaled by Bigger’s willingness to die, which represents an “effective desire to refound the nation” through an act of symbolic executive martyrdom (31). Even though McCann refers to “a radically authoritarian philosopher like Carl Schmitt” in conjunction with Agamben, he offers no elaboration on Schmitt’s philosophies – i.e. what they are, how they might inform the project at hand, or even why Schmitt is relevant at all, aside from being a noteworthy influence upon Agamben. This oblique invocation, then quick dismissal, of Schmitt, I would note, also appears in both Thompson’s Black Fascisms and Edwards’s Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership. This peculiar commonality not only intimates the authoritarian underpinnings shared across theories of presidential government, fascism and charismatic leadership, but also gestures toward a broader connection between Schmitt’s philosophies and black literary politics that is worth further exploration.

Wright’s political fantasy, and enthrones the author, in his view, as an equally powerful sort of dictator in his own right. As we have seen, Wright’s novelistic meditations on nationalist politics eschew depictions of any actual or fictional fascist dictator or democratic president. Rather, these political fantasies find their allegorical fulfillment in the figure of a fictional protagonist, such as Native Son’s Bigger Thomas or The

Outsider’s Cross Damon, who functions not only as a symbolic stand-in for the

“charismatic leader,” but also as a vehicle for the author’s own views—that is, “his sight, his notion of direction, his senses.” In elaborating upon Wright’s “lifelong attraction to tyrannical power,” it bears noting, McCann cites not only his expressions of affinity toward political authoritarianism, but also his stated aesthetic principles (such as his letter to Fransconi), which suggest that “the literary imagination was a close relative of tyrannical power” (25). In one compelling example, McCann quotes from a lecture in which “Wright described himself as a leader of his people who alone might inspire them put aside the caution of ordinary life and told his audience that he wished not merely to argue with or persuade them, but to literally enter their persons and through the sheer force of his rhetoric chemically transform their bodies” (24). 17 Thus even as Wright posits the artist and politician as standing at “opposite poles,” I would propose that his strident commitment to the “sovereignty” and “tyranny” of his art bespeaks a more complex view: that the artist in fact amounted to a superior form of politician, one whose rhetorical powers represented a “sheer force” more powerful than argumentation or persuasion. Where Communist directives reduced Wright to a mere party propagandist, writing on his own terms allowed him to play a sort of Weberian charismatic leader, who

17 These remarks are from Wright’s acceptance speech for the Springarn medal, given in September 1941. Because the Wright estate declines to grant permission to quote from certain of Wright’s unpublished critical writings, I rely here on McCann’s own paraphrasing in A Pinnacle of Feeling.

44 through is able to command his readers’ ways of seeing, ways of living and ways of feeling through means that are largely extra-rational.

Finally, as Thompson and McCann both emphasize, the authoritarian political and aesthetic fantasies that subtends Wright’s work emerges from a specific African

American social context of oppression, racial discrimination and political disenfranchisement. If the “aesthetics of political power” I have been outlining—ranging from the visual iconography and “gaudy regalia” of Marcus Garvey to literary invocations of fascist or presidential authority—can inspire “emotional dynamics” of an incipient nationalism, they also serve to highlight the emotional despair to be found in political reality. As Wright reflects in his essay “How Bigger Was Born”:

When the Nazis spoke of the necessity of a highly ritualized and symbolized life, I could hear Bigger Thomas on Chicago’s South Side saying: “Man, what we need is a leader like Marcus Garvey. We need a nation, a flag, an army of our own. We colored folks ought to organize into groups and have generals, captains, lieutenants, and so forth. We ought to take Africa and have a national home.” […] Those words told me that the civilization which had given birth to Bigger contained no spiritual sustenance, had created no culture which could hold and claim his allegiance and faith, had sensitized him and had left him stranded, a free agent to roam the streets of our cities, a hot and whirling vortex of undisciplined and unchannelized impulses. The results of these observations made me feel more than ever estranged from the civilization in which I lived, and more than ever resolved toward the task of creating with words a scheme of images and symbols whose direction could enlist sympathies, loyalties, and yearnings of the millions of Bigger Thomases in every land and race… (“How Bigger Was Born” 445)

In recounting the genesis of his novel, Wright elaborates a point that would become a recurrent theme throughout his writings: that the experience of racism amounted to a profound alienation from the fullness of communal life, and that racism itself can best be understood as a failure of national sovereignty. With this passage, Wright illustrates an intellectual trajectory that links the allure of European fascisms, the desire for charismatic

45 leadership and Black Nationalist political longings, the social and spiritual alienation of

African Americans, and ending, crucially, with the import of these elements to his own aesthetic project. Not only does he present his literary aspirations in terms that resemble the role of a charismatic, and even vaguely fascist, leader—namely, “the task of creating with words a scheme of images and symbols whose direction could enlist sympathies, loyalties, and yearnings”—he also imbues these aspirations with a distinctly international scope, addressing the “millions of Bigger Thomases in every land and race.”

This internationalism, while a relatively minor aspect of Wright’s work from the

30s and 40s, takes on a renewed significance in the 1950s, with the onset of decolonization, and the rapid rise of independent nations throughout the colored world.

The next section of my chapter considers the encounter between Wright’s authoritarian political and aesthetic fantasies, and their at least partial realization within the emergent context of Third World nation-building. As Thompson reminds us in regards to Bigger

Thomas’s latent fascism, “world events and the machinations of foreign leaders and powers have the ability to frame otherwise unbounded and ambiguous desires. They put into focus ill-conceived longings and confused domestic upheavals” (147). What happens, then, when the “native son” and “black boy” meets his counterparts from other lands and races—and, more crucially, discerns in these foreign lands a potential realization of those dreams that had seemed so outlandish from the streets Chicago’s

South Side? How might he react to an Africa finally freed and ready to be a proper

“national home,” complete with flags and armies, as well as the means for “spiritual sustenance” and “allegiance and faith,” and most importantly, leaders who might succeed where Garvey had failed? Above all, what role might that other charismatic leader, the

46 writer, serve for the imperatives of this unprecedented nationalist moment, and how might the artist’s task of “creating with words a scheme of images and symbols” continue to prove useful, for this brave new world and the politicians at its helm?

IV.

Throughout his numerous observations and reflection on the figure of Kwame

Nkrumah in Black Power, Wright exhibits a wide spectrum of reactions, ranging from awe to uncertainty, affection to estrangement, admiration to condescension. What remains consistent, and their core, is an appreciation of the singular and unprecedented nature of Nkrumah’s achievement, in leading the first African nation to independence from European colonial rule. While Wright avows that “only a native African could do what Nkrumah had done” he also stresses the vital influence of black American political activism upon African independence struggles, noting how the “Gold Coast boys” had

“soaked up […] a sense of racial and class solidarity derived from the American Negro’s proud and defensive nationalism” (BP 88). Thus the legacy of Marcus Garvey casts its subtle shadow over Wright’s apprehension of Nkrumah’s political movement. In White

Man, Listen!, Wright directly contrasts Garvey’s “premature” proposals to create “all- black nationalism based on color, racial pride” alongside Nkrumah’s subsequent efforts to “forge tribes into a unity based on modern political concepts [such as nationalism, instead of race]” (WML 685). While he never states so explicitly, throughout his texts

Wright gestures toward the view that Nkrumah’s political triumph represents a fulfillment, at least in part, of Garvey’s dreams of reclaiming Africa as a “national home.” As Erica Edwards reminds us, at the height of his popularity Garvey was

47 considered “an international icon of black activism,” whose vision of “Africa for the

Africans” inspired not only black Americans, but Pan-Africanist advocates the world over (27, emphasis mine). While Nkrumah himself has openly acknowledged his intellectual debt to Garvey, my interest here is not in charting the evolution of Pan-

Africanist politics from Garvey to the emergence of postcolonial Africa, but rather to place Wright’s literary treatments of Garvey and Nkrumah within the same political- aesthetic fantasy of nationalism, authoritarianism and charismatic leadership.18

As Edwards argues, within the black American context “the wish for charismatic leadership was echoed in the literary text throughout the twentieth century as much as it was constructed by events like the World’s Fair, the [UNIA] parades, and the civil rights marches” (27). From this perspective, Wright’s textual accounts of Nkrumah’s leadership in Ghana, as well as the rallies of the Convention People’s Party that buttressed it, can be said to re-stage Edwards’s “charismatic scenario” within a framework of global black freedom struggles. For Edwards, to call attention to charisma as a “scenario” is to

“understand black political history as a dynamic complex of power”:

The charismatic scenario, accessed continually in the American political repertoire – from the dais to the page – normalizes a charismatic aesthetic, a specific organization of symbolic elements as banal as the podium; the positioning of the leader in front of, in the center of, and/or above the collective; the deployment of music to create a collective ethos of resistance and change; calling upon or silencing women to authorize masculine power; the habits of black sermonizing; and the call-and- response format of black improvisatory speech. (Edwards 19, emphasis in original)

18 Not only has Garvey’s influence upon Nkrumah’s political views been well documented, they also find expression through a number of Nkrumah’s policies, such as his encouragement for African Americans and other members of the African diaspora to settle in Ghana, as well as his insistent pursuit of pan-Africanist foreign policies. See, for instance Kwame Nkrumah’s autobiography Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah (1957), Manning Marable’s African and Caribbean Politics from Kwame Nkrumah to the Grenada Revolution (1987), and Marika Sherwood’s Kwame Nkrumah: The Years Abroad (1996).

Even though Edwards attributes her theory of charisma to a distinctly American “political repertoire,” the broad outlines of this “charismatic aesthetic” nevertheless appear throughout Wright’s narrative in Black Power, most prominently in several set pieces featuring Nkrumah positioned “in front of, in the center of, and/or above the collective.”

Meeting Nkrumah for the first time, Wright recounts how, following a single order from the Prime Minister, “His personal bodyguard stood at attention; it was composed of hand- picked militants and faithfuls of the Convention People’s Party. He led the way and I followed down into the street where his motorcycle escort, dressed in scarlet, stood lined up near their machines” (BP 74). Riding in a motorcade with Nkrumah through the streets of Accra, Wright describes the crowds that immediately “rushed pellmell out of shacks, their faces breaking into wide, glad smiles and, lifting their hands upward with their elbows at the level of their hips, palms fronting forward—a kind of half-Nazi salute—they shouted a greeting to the Prime Minister in a tone of voice compounded of passion, exhortation, and contained joy: ‘Free–doom! Free–doom!’” (BP 75).

Although thousands of miles and a good number of years removed, this African iteration of the charismatic scenario speaks, in its subtle ways, directly to those black

American political yearnings that Wright sketched in “How Bigger Was Born.” Foremost among these is the longed-for leader, replete with personal bodyguard and motorized escort, riding at the vanguard of his African flag, nation and army. Within the narrative arrangement of this motorcade scene—its charismatic aesthetic—the person of the Prime

Minster serves as the focal point of the collective’s exaltation, as well as a response to the earlier text’s call: specifically, in the verbal refrain and “half-Nazi salute” (BP) that bespeaks a “highly ritualized and symbolized life” (“Bigger”) and the “passion,

49 exhortation, and contained joy” (BP) that affirms the “spiritual sustenance” and

“allegiance and faith” (“Bigger”) of Nkrumah’s followers. As this juxtaposition of these texts suggests, it is in the streets of Accra that Wright encounters the political reality that

Bigger Thomas could only vaguely dream of in the streets of Chicago.

As Wright goes on to emphasize, this gathered multitude not only elevates

Nkrumah to the role of a messianic charismatic leader, but also imbues his authority with the trappings of popular sovereignty: “The passionate loyalty of this shouting crowd had put this man in power, had given him the right to speak for them, to execute the mandate of national liberation that they had placed in his hands” (BP 76). Here Wright depicts

Nkrumah as wielding a “mandate of national liberation” that secures both his political power and the “passionate loyalty” of his followers, rendering him akin to a legitimate democratic executive. Wright’s further musings on this topic in White Man Listen!, however, reveals the other side of this sovereign popular will:

Naturally, he was qualified for this role by his superb organizing and speaking abilities; but, by his colleagues fastening their hopes on him, he was lifted to the position of a deity. Listen carefully to what I’m explaining and perhaps you’ll get some insight into the tendencies toward, and origins of, authoritarian or dictatorship governments […] We can say that Nkrumah and his talent for leadership was captured by his followers. He could not say yes or no. These masses needed someone upon whom they could project their hopes, and Nkrumah was chosen. There came moments when, had he refused to act, they would have killed him. Do you recall the story of the Dying God? Gods must serve men, or they are killed.” (WML 796).

This twinned dynamic, between firm command over a people, in the manner of a “deity,” and being at the mercy of that same populace, as a “Dying God,” recalls the presidential

“martyr chief” that McCann identifies, by way of Agamben, as an animating trope in

Wright’s Native Son. Thus, along with engaging black literary and political tradition of

50 charisma, Wright’s analyses of Nkrumah also expounds on many of the “political and aesthetic fantasies” in his earlier works: not only in the literary black fascist who heralds, in aesthetic form, a fulfillment and revision of Marcus Garvey’s legacy, but also the tyrant/martyr figure that underpins a sovereign democratic will.19

Most importantly, Wright’s assertion of his authorial voice—and its attendant intellectual authority (“Listen carefully to what I’m explaining and perhaps you’ll get some insight…”), reminds us that the true driving agency behind such literary engagements with charisma rests not with the political leader being represented. Rather, as an “interplay of text and performance” that transverses the “dais” and the “page,” the charismatic scenario remains impelled by the “aesthetic imperatives” of the writer who orchestrates the representation. Compounding this notion is the unique dual role that

Wright occupies within the travel-narrative frame of Black Power: not only is he the author of the text at hand, he also functions as a direct participant in the events being narrated. Here we might take up the approach suggested by Jack B. Moore, who invites readers to apprehend Wright’s narrative “as a novel focusing on a character named

Richard Wright playing a familiar role, the outsider, the baffled native son foreign to the land of his ancestor’s birth” (185, emphasis mine). By underscoring “Richard Wright” as both “native son” and “outsider,” Moore’s framing allows us to regard the narrator of

Black Power as a literary creation along the same continuum as Bigger Thomas and

19 The changing form of this “democratic executive” is also relevant to note here. At the time of Wright’s visit, Nkrumah’s title was that of a Westminster-style Prime Minister, a title he would hold until 1960, when he declared Ghana a republic and himself the first President of Ghana. Interestingly, it is after his transformation from Prime Minister to President that Nkrumah’s rule became increasingly dictatorial, lending a certain transnational valence to McCann’s theory of a tyrannical Presidential authority. Through this lens, the military coup that eventually removed Nkrumah from power and exiled him from Ghana can be seen as a sort of political martyrdom.

Cross Damon—and, in this capacity, as a more straightforward version of the charismatic author-authoritarian anchoring the text’s aesthetic and political fantasies.

Perhaps the most palpable manifestation of this fantasy in Black Power, on the level of narrative, occurs when Wright himself is asked to briefly address a large outdoor political rally, as a lead-in to Nkrumah’s own speech. In this rare instance, the writer- observer-protagonist finds himself at the center of the charismatic scenario, literally on both the dais and the page. Indeed, in its surrounding events, the scene functions like a checklist for the key elements of Edward’s charismatic aesthetic: “the spectacular oratory, the masculine (or masculinized) body, the position of the leader in front of or above his followers, the ecstatic call and response of political speech making and riposte”

(Edwards 27). Upon his arrival, Wright describes the ecstatic call and response between a party speaker and the crowd, in which “the dialogue between the speaker and the audience became so intimate, so prolonged, so dramatic that all sense of distance between leaders and followers ceased to exist, and a spirit of fellowship, of common identity prevailed among faces young and old, smooth and bearded, wise and simple” (BP 101).

In contrast to the intimacy and sense of nationalistic unity that the party speaker— and later, Nkrumah himself—is able to summon from the crowd, Wright’s own turn upon the dais falls short of spectacular. Wright’s speech, which he transcribes in full, offers broad words of praise for Ghana’s independence and political development, while foregrounding his unique perspective as an American observer. Although Wright declares

“I am an American and therefore cannot participate in your politician affairs,” he nonetheless identifies himself as “one of the lost sons of Africa who has come back to look upon the land of his forefathers. In a superficial sense it may be said that I’m a

52 stranger to most of you, but, in terms of a common heritage of suffering and hunger for freedom, your heart and my heart beat as one” (BP 103, 102). As S. Shankar has noted, these remarks stake Wright’s allegiance to his African audience not on any racial or cultural grounds, but upon a shared political desire. 20 That is, it is through “a common heritage of suffering and hunger for freedom” that Wright imagines his and his audience’s hearts to “beat as one,” in his attempt to capture the earlier “spirit of fellowship” and “common identity” invoked between the party speaker and the crowd.

Despite these earnest overtures of solidarity, Wright remains too much the

“outsider” and “native son” from America. His oratory is met with a lukewarm reception that only intensifies his sense of estrangement and incomprehension among his African hosts: “The handclapping was weak and scattered. Perhaps they were not used to hearing speakers who did not raise their voices, or maybe they had not understood…?” (BP 103).

Hence, the author’s literal ascension before a political collective—in the physical posture of a charismatic leader—ends on something of an anticlimax, particularly when compared to the “applause, singing, chanting” in response to the speech Nkrumah gives immediately after (BP 105). Significantly, Wright’s puzzled reaction focuses not on the content of his address, but rather on the specifically aural distance between himself and his listeners, either due to insufficient volume or barriers of language. What seems deficient to Wright here is not his choice of words but rather his aptitude as an orator. If

Wright had previously maintained a romantic image of himself as a “leader of people who might inspire them to put aside the caution of ordinary life” and “through the sheer force of his rhetoric chemically transform their bodies,” what his underwhelming turn

20 See S. Shankar’s “Richard Wright’s Black Power: Colonial Politics and the Travel Narrative,” in Richard Wright’s Travel Writings.

53 upon the dais in Ghana underscores is that the page remains—at least in his imagination—the most effective medium for his rhetoric. As his Third World narratives suggest, it is through the written word that represents his preferred mode of authoritarian

“sheer force.” Moreover, it is also in the realm of writing that this force distinguishes itself from the predominantly oratorical talents of a politician like Nkrumah.21

The notion of the written word as a site of divergence between Wright and

Nkrumah gains added resonance from an exchange that transpires directly after the two men make their speeches. After the rally, a journalist approaches Wright with a request to print the text of his speech in the next day’s paper. When Wright asks for the Prime

Minister’s clearance to share his written remarks, Nkrumah requests to first see those notes himself. Wright’s narration of this incident unfolds in slow, minimalist suspense:

I gave him my notes. He took them, looked off solemnly, then folded them slowly. The reporter waited. I waited. Then the Prime Minister came close to me and pushed the notes into the top breast pocket of my suit; he said no word and I said no word. I looked at the reporter and he looked at me. Then the Prime Minister moved silently away…The reporter took a few steps backward, looking around with embarrassment. I did not understand what was happening and I did not want to ask for any explanation in public. Had I said something wrong in my speech? No one had asked to read what I had proposed to say. If they had, I’d have gladly submitted my ideas to be censored. But then why had the Prime Minister taken my notes and given them back to me with such a meaningful gesture? (BP 105)

In this instance, a literal piece of written text occasions a moment of interpersonal disquiet and interpretative opacity between Wright and Nkrumah. The first thing we might note about this passage is way Wright refers to Nkrumah strictly as “the Prime

Minister,” positing this encounter as a clash between an artist and a politician—and over

21 It bears noting that by all measures, Nkrumah qualifies as a prolific author in his own right, having written some sixteen books throughout his life. Here I mean to emphasize Wright’s specific self-conception as a writer-by-vocation, in contrast to the “superb organizing and speaking abilities” that renders Nkrumah, in his eyes, a more “traditional” politician.

54 the “use” of an artist’s work, no less. Recalling the earlier aural disconnect between

Wright and the crowd, the dissonance between Wright and Nkrumah is also rendered through the tropes of wordlessness and silence, where “he said no word and I said no word,” and ending with the Prime Minister moving “silently” away. Finally, the specific materiality of writing stands out here, in light of Wright’s own tepidly-received effort at oratorical persuasion, and more generally, amidst Black Power’s numerous scenes depicting oration as the driving engine behind political mobilization. Offered the opportunity to disseminate his rhetoric via the printed page, as is his familiar method,

Wright instead finds his notes folded up and returned to his breast pocket, as if having his written words—the source of his rhetorical power—literally checked and pressed back into his person by the Prime Minister.

This tense, wordless exchange between the two men over a piece of text closely parallels an earlier moment in Black Power, one occurring under similar circumstances.

The scene follows meeting of the Women’s Division of the Convention People’s Party, during which the audience is asked to raise their right hands and repeat an oath pledging their allegiance to Nkrumah and the party. While Wright is initially “thunderstruck” at this sight, he finds himself privately approving, reflecting upon the oaths’ appropriateness in rendering Nkrumah into a “living symbol” of his followers’ political cohesion. When

Wright asks Nkrumah to see the slip of paper on which the oath is written, however, he is met with a similarly abstruse reaction:

He glanced off without answering, still holding the slip of paper in his hand. I knew that he knew what I had asked and he seemed to be debating. Would my rash request make him distrust me? Would he think that I’d use the oath against him and his party, his people, his cause? I gritted my teeth, scolding myself for being too forward in my zeal to account for what I saw…He was looking off into space; he had not

answered me […] Nkrumah had been educated in the United States and he must have known instinctively how such an oath had struck me. And I knew that he couldn’t imagine my being shocked and, at the same time, being in complete agreement! But, if he was reticent about this, what about the other things I’d see in the Gold Coast? Another song was sung and, as we all stood up, the Prime Minister, looking off, slowly and seemingly absent-mindedly, folded the slip of paper containing the oath and put it into his pocket. I knew then that I’d never get a chance to copy it. […] Obviously the Prime Minister did not want me to attach too much importance, politically or psychologically, to that oath. How could I make him understand that I understood, and that in general I agreed to it as being an inevitable part of the twentieth century? (BP 84)

Once again, following a boisterous political gathering, a moment of unease irrupts upon

Wright’s interaction with Nkrumah in regard to a “slip of paper.” In both cases, the paper contains a transcription of an otherwise oral piece of political rhetoric, which Nkrumah deliberately—and, to Wright, quite suspiciously—withholds from public circulation.

Wright’s palpable consternation in these passages results, I would suggest, from coming up against the limits of his authorial comprehension. As he asserts in Black

Power, “I wanted to be given the ‘green light’ to look, to know, to be shown everything. I wanted the opportunity to try to weigh a movement like this, to examine its worth as a political instrument; it was the first time in my life that I’d come in contact with a mass movement conducted by Negro leadership and I felt that I could, if given a chance, understand it” (BP 85). In the above-mentioned scenes with Nkrumah, however, the writer’s ravenous desire “to know, to look, to be shown everything,” is thwarted by a glaring red light, in the inscrutability of the politician’s motives. Here the silent enigma of the Prime Minister’s “meaningful gestures” (“He glanced off without answering”;

“looking off, slowly and seemingly absent-mindedly”) obstructs Wright’s “zeal” to account for all he saw, and instead reduces his usual certainty and “conviction” about

56 matters to a series of anxious conjectures: “Had I said something wrong in my speech?”;

“Would he think that I’d use the oath against him and his party, his people, his cause?”).

At the heart of Wright’s exasperation, I would add, is a frustrated desire to communicate to Nkrumah his general understanding, agreement, and solidarity with the

Prime Minister’s political tactics, which he considers “an inevitable part of the twentieth century.” Thus Wright frames these moments of interpersonal rift not in terms of any political or ideological qualms, but rather as a matter of medium. In staging this discord as centered around pieces of text, Wright foregrounds the materiality of the written word—that is, as opposed to the content of whatever is written—as a site of contestation between the writer and the dictator. As we have seen, the artist’s unique form of dictatorial power rests in his sight, notion of direction, and senses, as well as his ability to render “disordered” materials legible and “intelligible to others.” From this perspective, these exchanges between Wright and Nkrumah mark the failure of the artist’s power: in one scenario, he is prevented from literally seeing, and thus understanding, the writing on a slip of paper; and in the other, he is prevented from distributing his written words

(through the material circulation of newspapers, notably) and thus reaching those

“others” that he might influence.

In this way, even as Wright imagines the artist-writer as possessing his own form of authoritarian political power, Black Power also dramatizes the limits of this power.

Here the text highlights the limits of the authoritarian’s “enhanced” and superior perception, as well as his continued struggles with the “full-blown politician” over the use, or non-use, of his work—even as the two are ostensibly “driving in the same direction” and “committed to the same vision.” On a surface level, this struggle is

57 presented as a straightforward matter of mutual suspicion. As Rowley’s biography informs us, throughout his trip Wright in fact felt frequently rebuffed by Nkrumah and his party leadership, from whom he had expected much more cooperation and personal attention. Scratching beneath the delicacies of Wright’s text, Rowley reveals that “More than he dared say in Black Power, Wright distrusted Nkrumah. His methods of organization seemed blatantly Communist. Wright was convinced that Nkrumah had slighted him because he feared that Wright, as a former Communist, might understand more than Nkrumah wanted him to know” (436). As this contextual detail reveals, undergirding the distrust between the two men is not merely the issue of politics, but also a crucial problem of knowledge, which itself is tied directly to Wright’s narrative focus on the written text. Throughout Wright’s account of their confrontation over a slip of paper, he presents himself as being able to intuit many of Nkrumah’s thoughts and feelings in the face of the Prime Minister’s reticence (“he must have known instinctively how such an oath had struck me…”; “Obviously the Prime Minister did not want me to attach too much importance…”). Conversely, in Wright’s view, it is Nkrumah whose knowledge is deficient, remaining unware of the scope of Wright’s apprehension of the larger meanings and implications behind his actions (“And I knew that he couldn’t imagine my being shocked…”; “How could I make him understand that I understood...”).

For Wright, the written text enables the writer to assert the supremacy of his knowledge and comprehension over those of the politician. To this end, we might read

Wright’s concluding letter to Nkrumah as a site of recompense, through writing, for his earlier lackluster rhetorical performance upon the dais, as well as his reluctant submissions to the Prime Minister’s ad hoc censorship. In contrast to the facile praises of

58 a foreign observer conveyed in his speech, Wright’s letter presents his comprehensive vision for Ghana’s future development, including his notorious injunction to “militarize”

African society. In place of sharing his thoughts with the “disordered” masses of Ghana’s citizens, Wright now addresses himself directly to the only one who matters politically: the charismatic leader. By recasting Nkrumah’s executive prestige as “the Prime

Minister” into the more modest “Kwame,” Wright’s letter rhetorically usurps his role as the “singular voice of authority, knowledge and political promise” (Edwards xiii). In this way, Black Power revises Edwards’s observation that “the sonorous man with a text in his hand stands at the center of the charismatic scenario,” a condition that she argues

“holds true […] throughout a diasporic repertoire of modern black freedom dreams” (29, emphasis mine). Here Wright’s narrative restaging of the charismatic scenario not only emphasizes its “diasporic” character, by dramatizing it as a power-struggle between a native African and his African American counterpart, it also emphasizes the primacy of the text in the man’s hand, over the sonority of his voice, as the superior foundation of authority, knowledge and political promise.

By way of a brief coda to this chapter, and as a transition to the next one, I would now like to revisit the issue of genre. In taking up Moore’s suggestion to read Black

Power as a novel, one fascinating yet largely overlooked question remains: what kind of novel? Perhaps the answer to this question would allow us to consider afresh some of the tonal and analytical infelicities that critics often find so distasteful about Wright’s text.

Returning once more to the tense exchanges between the protagonist “Richard Wright”

59 and the character of “the Prime Minister,” I would propose that the narrative dramas unfolding over “a slip of paper” resonate with the conventions of a specific generic mode: that of the espionage narrative, and the novel of international political intrigue. Seen through this optic, Wright’s desire “to look, to know, to be shown everything” can be read as a mission of intelligence gathering, where the writer-observer resembles something of a secret agent. The broad features of Wright’s narrative certainly support this reading, with a protagonist working his way through the cities and interior of an exotic, unfamiliar country, armed with his typewriter and ammunition of words, and encountering an assortment of outlandish characters and vexing scenarios.

Even more pertinent, I would suggest, is the way this intelligence narrative coalesces around a single individual: the political leader who is both charismatic and enigmatic, and who comes to function as a sort of hermeneutic cipher for a broader collective. As with the other works considered in this study, Black Power features a version of the iconic scene in which the writer-observer-narrator-spy sketches a “profile” of the dictator-subject he is shadowing. Meeting Nkrumah for the first time, Wright notes before anything else his representative qualities: “The Prime Minister threw back his head and laughed. I got used, in time, to that African laughter. It was not caused by mirth; it was a way of indicating that, though they were not going to take you into their confidence, their attitude was not based upon anything hostile” (73). In keeping with writer’s mandate to make his subject “more intelligible to others,” Wright presents the

Prime Minister’s body, via his emphatic laughter, as a site where given interpretative codes are destabilized (where laughter signals secrecy rather than mirth), as well as for understanding a general “African” quality. As Wright reports some pages later:

On this journey I had an opportunity to observe the Prime Minister in action at close range. Among his own people he was a democrat, self- forgetfully identifying himself with the common masses in deed and word each passing hour. He slept, played, and ate with them, sharing his life in a manner that no Englishman or missionary ever could…It was his lapsing into a sudden silence that drew a line between himself and them. […] I’d not witnessed any evidence of the fury of which I’d been told that he was capable, but there was a hidden core of hardness in him which I was sure that no one could bring to the surface quicker than an Englishman… (112)

Here Wright’s “close range” observations of the Prime Minister read almost like a spy’s intelligence profile or dossier: “attitude was not based on anything hostile”; “Among his own people he was a democrat.” What makes the dictator figure truly exceptional, however, is his ability to seem an organic part of the collective, while also standing apart from this collective: “he ate, slept, played, and ate” with the “common masses,” yet was able to “draw a line between himself and them” at will. In Wright’s conception, and personal experience, this “sudden silence” represents less so a passive “lapse” than a key aspect of the Prime Minister’s active power: the power to “draw a line” between himself and others, to exclude from his confidence, to bar the artist’s imperative to see, know and understand. Enhancing these subtle shades of dictatorial malevolence that he perceives,

Wright images a “fury” and “core of hardness” concealed beneath the “surface” of

Nkrumah’s silence, even as this quality, like the “slip of paper” evades his sight.

Reading Black Power through the framework of an espionage narrative, what becomes visible is an element of intrigue that pervades the interactions between Wright and Nkrumah, what Gaines touches upon as a “sinister undercurrent,” in his analysis of the oath scene (89). This undercurrent reminds us that Wright is above all a novelist, one with a penchant for thrilling pulp stories that revolve around figures of “hard,” masculine menace. It is possible, then, to regard Wright’s narrative of diasporic return as also

61 overlaid by a sort of international political thriller, in which the diasporic “outsider” returns to embroil himself in the political intrigues of the postcolonial homeland—only to be obstructed, ominously, by the country’s shifty dictator. Whether or not Wright actively conceived of himself as writing such a text, certain extra-diegetic details suggests that he saw himself as partaking in a kind of genre narrative. While Wright’s biographers generally agree that he felt snubbed by Nkrumah and the Convention People’s Party,

Rowley’s account contains one illuminating piece of information. Shortly before departing Ghana, Wright visited the American consulate, where he spoke to the consul and volunteered a four-page memorandum. In this document, Wright offers his assessments of the CPP’s relationship to Communist organizations, noting that “leading members of the Party openly admit that they have conscientiously modeled their organization upon the Russian Communist Party,” and that Nkrumah slept with a large portrait of Lenin above his bed (437). In perhaps the most “spy novel” touch of all, he also furnishes details (gleaned from one of Nkrumah’s enemies) regarding sub rosa communications that Nkrumah’s “Secret Circle” maintained with George Padmore and other contacts in London—he even includes the names of key intermediaries, and tradecraft particulars like letters sealed “within envelope within envelope and addressed…in a barely legible scrawl to mislead governmental censorship.”22

Though omitted from Wright’s published accounts of the journey, all the same this episode casts a new light on the “usefulness” of a writer’s work, this time as practical instruments of intelligence—and also its counterpart, subterfuge—within a distinctly Cold

War context. As Rowley clarifies, “Wright’s statement could not have contained much that was new to the State Department, and Wright knew that. Nevertheless, it was an act

22 Quoted in Hazel Rowley, Richard Wright: The Life and Times, 437.

62 of betrayal, and he knew that too” (437). That is, while Wright’s contributions as an intelligence operative may not have yielded much in the way of strategic, Communist- fighting value, its valences as a purely symbolic gesture are still relevant. After twice ceding to Nkrumah’s will over a “slip of paper,” Wright’s own four-page “slip of paper” represents, in a sense, the writer’s final coup over the politician who had rebuffed and thwarted him.

CHAPTER TWO

Good Korean/Bad Korean: Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker and the Ghost of Syngman Rhee

In Ian Fleming’s 1955 novel Moonraker, British secret agent James Bond is assigned to investigate Sir Hugo Drax, a self-made millionaire industrialist and rising darling of London society. During his initial briefing, Bond remarks thus of Drax’s burgeoning national stature: “The public have taken to him…They’ve got a real feeling for him. They consider he’s one of them, but a glorified version. A sort of superman…And when you think of what he’s doing for the country…it’s really extraordinary that they don’t insist on making him Prime Minister” (334). As 007’s sleuthing eventually uncover, the very British Sir Hugo Drax is actually the very German

Graf Hugo von der Drache, a former Wehrmacht officer who was able to pass himself off as a wounded and amnesiac British soldier during the closing days of World War II.

Secretly an unrepentant Nazi, Drax’s self-reinvention as a “glorified” Briton in fact masks his unrelenting hatred of Britain, and his ‘patriotic’ plan to build a missile defense system for the United Kingdom is only an elaborate cover for his true intentions: to avenge Germany by launching a nuclear warhead at London.

In imagining a megalomaniac German Nazi who masquerades as an English gentleman, Fleming’s novel stokes prevalent Cold War fears of the “enemy within”

(among the eccentricities of Moonraker’s plot is that, despite being a Nazi, Drax/Drache also happens to be backed by the Soviet Union). Across the Atlantic, this trope would find its most famous iteration in Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate (1959),

64 which centers upon Raymond Shaw, a war hero and political scion who is brainwashed into becoming a Communist assassin. In both these popular Cold War fictions, the infiltrators assume the guise of celebrated public figures, whose proximity to institutions of political power testifies to their civic exemplarity—in Sir Drax as an imagined Prime

Minister, or Shaw’s distinction as a Medal of Honor recipient, and also stepson to a US senator and potential Vice President.

Playing upon these spy genre conventions in its exploration of Asian American political and psychic subject formation, Chang-rae Lee’s debut novel Native Speaker likewise foregrounds the intrigue surrounding a prominent, seemingly “model” citizen.

Its protagonist and narrator, Henry Park, is an intelligence operative who has been assigned to gather information on a rising New York City councilman. Early in the novel,

Henry profiles his subject in terms that resemble Bond’s comments on Drax:

John Kwang was Korean, slightly younger than my father would have been, though he spoke a beautiful, almost formal English. He had a JD- MBA from Fordham. He was a self-made millionaire. The pundits spoke of his integrity, his intelligence. His party was pressuring him for the mayoral race. He looked impressive on television. Handsome, irreproachable. Silver around the edges. A little unbeatable. (23)

While this passage augurs many of the novel’s wider themes—immigrant identity, language, and the politics of race—what stands out here is the way Henry regards Kwang as a “glorified version” of Koreans like himself and his father. A potential candidate for mayor, Kwang exceeds Henry’s notions of what a Korean American can be, and indeed seems a sort of “superman” in his grandeur. Meeting Kwang in person, Henry describes a

“kind of light that emanated from him,” and how “from any distance at all he appeared to me as though he were ascending an invisible ramp that magically preceded him” (134).

In true spy thriller fashion, of course, Henry’s investigations lead him to uncover a dark underside to this charismatic surface. An office firebombing that kills one of

Kwang’s trusted lieutenants turns out to have been orchestrated by Kwang himself, as retribution for the subordinate’s betrayal. “You see, there is horror in your face,” Kwang exclaims when he admits his guilt, his exposition redolent of a pulp villain’s dramatic confession. “Think of mine when I found him out. I loved him, Henry, I grieve for him, but he was disloyal, the most terrible thing, a traitor. I left it to Han and his gang” (311).

The fallout from this incident accelerates the collapse of Kwang’s immaculate public image, and by the novel’s closing chapters the once-esteemed city councilman has revealed not only his complicity in murder, but also a disturbing penchant for excessive drinking, adultery, fits of violent rage, and aggression towards women. Throughout the denouement, what Henry registers most poignantly about Kwang’s downfall is his regression from someone who was “such a natural American, first thing and last” to one indelibly marked by foreignness, “his Korean accent getting thicker and heavier”; the last

Henry sees of Kwang, notably, is his “wide immigrant face” as it disappears beneath an angry throng of nativist protestors (326, 297, 343).

Most critical discussions of Native Speaker have tended to gloss over its literary lineage as a spy narrative, even as they widely praise Lee’s use of spying as an innovative metaphor for the immigrant experience. By now among the most canonical of Asian

American texts, Lee’s novel has been overwhelmingly read through the lens of 1990s

U.S. multiculturalism, in keeping with its depiction of the period’s demographic shifts and racial politics.1 One early review, part of a New York Magazine cover story about

1 Various critics have noted the ways Lee’s novel comments on contemporaneous news events pertaining to issues of racial politics and immigration. While Liam Corley highlights Native Speaker’s reference to the

Korean immigrants in New York City, describes the novel as “an artful meditation on ethnic identity, fractured loyalties, and cultural confusion that is bundled inside a not- entirely-plausible political spy thriller” (Goldberg 46). Such remarks reveal a wider proclivity to view the spy genre elements of Lee’s novel as something of a curiosity, an artistic misstep, or a distraction from the customary ethnic literature themes of “fractured loyalties” and “cultural confusion.”2 Even when scholars directly address questions of genre, the inclination has been to read Native Speaker as a spy novel that is not quite one, with the spy plot standing in for broader concerns regarding minority subjectivity.3 In highlighting the familial resemblances between Lee’s novel and such “not-entirely- plausible political spy thrillers” as Moonraker and The Manchurian Candidate, this chapter considers anew the centrality of the spy genre to Lee’s “artful meditation” on ethnic identity. Specifically, how might thinking about Native Speaker as also a distant, lateral descendant of works by Fleming and Condon—works that speak forcefully, if loudly and garishly, to the geopolitical anxieties of their era—illuminate its critical engagement with an earlier historical moment? That is, even as Lee’s novel provides an

1993 grounding of the Golden Venture, a freighter carrying nearly three hundred illegal Chinese immigrants, in New York, Min Song focuses on the novel’s allegorical meditations upon the 1992 Los Angeles riots. For a recent overview of discourses around multiculturalism, including its critique by the left during the 1990s, see Timothy B. Powell’s “All Colors Flow into Rainbows and Nooses: The Struggle to Define Academic Multiculturalism” (2003).

2 Writing for the New York Times Book Review, Rand Richards Cooper comments: “Native Speaker brims with intrigue and political high jinks, but Mr. Lee…is no spy novelist. His interest lies in culture, language, and identity.” In The New Yorker, Verlyn Klinkenborg notes how Lee’s prose is “the right language for insight…but it’s the wrong language for telling a spy story…Spying seems, after all, too small a vehicle for ambitions of the kind Chang-rae Lee rightly harbors.” Similarly, Ruth Pavey asks of the novel, “But was it necessary to add in the spy story as well, fun though it is? Henry is so much more like a writer than a spy; perhaps he could just have been one.”

3 Tina Chen describes how Lee “is drawn to the ways it [the spy genre] illuminates the in/visibility of his protagonist even as he writes against the genre to reflect Henry’s ontological dilemmas” (659). James Kyung-Jin Lee, meanwhile, casts the spy as a metaphor for the model minority, and how “by constructing an Asian American spy as the novel’s protagonist, Lee alludes to the structural role that Asian Americans have served as the nation’s Ariel in contemporary racial debates” (247).

67 undeniably cogent portrait of 1990s multiculturalism, what critics have generally ignored is the way it also persistently invokes a historical memory rooted in the 1950s.

On one level, this 1950s frame is necessarily a Cold War one, with the division of the globe into a communist East and capitalist West taking on an especially stark and violent dimension for the Korean people, in the devastating Korean War (1950-1953). At the same time, scholars have also come to apprehend the Korean War as not merely an expression of bipolar Cold War hostilities, but rather through its own local context as a civil war and war of national liberation, a conflict over the future of a country in the wake of imperial domination. More precisely, the latent fifties context in Native Speaker speaks to a Korean War context, one heavily-inflected by the Cold War but not solely determined by it, and equally articulated to a narrative of decolonization and nationalist struggle. In this sense, Lee’s novel shares much with Wright’s Third World narratives, which, as we have seen, also navigate the intricacies of decolonization and post- independence nation-building alongside the ideological shadows of the Cold War.

In my discussion of Black Power in the previous chapter, I gestured only briefly toward the significance of literary genres—and particularly the spy genre—for negotiating the overlapping frames of dictatorship, decolonization, and the Cold War

(roughly in that order). In what follows, I examine more fully how the spy genre articulates these frames as part of a broader 1950s historical consciousness, one that subtends the “present” narrative action of a novel published in the 1990s. Central to my argument is the character of John Kwang who, like the “character” of Nkrumah in Black

Power (a.k.a. “the Prime Minister”), functions as the epistemological object of Native

Speaker’s spy plot. Starting out as the novel’s fantasy of a progressive, multicultural

68 politics, Kwang ends up, rather abruptly, as another kind of fantasy altogether: the sinister foreigner who must be expelled from the national body. For all the prolific commentary surrounding Lee’s novel, few have effectively addressed this final-act dramatic shift, and the way it vexes the otherwise realist mode of the ethnic novel that

Lee writes in. Kwang’s trajectory from upstanding citizen to foreign threat—or more pointedly, from model minority to “yellow peril”—makes a certain sense, however, when we approach the novel from a fifties discursive frame.4 Tellingly, Lee situates the character’s origins within one of the defining conflicts of that decade, with Kwang having suffered the violence, privation and displacement of the Korean War as a child. For

Henry, Kwang’s lived experience of the war not only stresses the remarkability of his ascent from Third World abjection to First World affluence, but also reinforces his organic connection to an “authentic” Korean national history. In this sense, the Korean

War serves as a crucial background to Kwang’s role as genre villain and ethnic dictator; his wartime past animates both his assimilationist success, as well as his exposure as an

“enemy within” who remains, in the end, too Korean to be properly American.

Moreover, as I aim to show, Kwang’s analogy to 50s literary antagonists like

Hugo Drax and Raymond Shaw adumbrates his parallels to another kind of generic figure associated with the period: that of the US-backed anticommunist strongman. Drawing upon the work of historian Bruce Cumings, I explore how Kwang’s portrayal also resonates with accounts a key personage of the Korean War, one whose legacy bestrides a wider history of U.S. military intervention and neocolonialism in Korea, as well as a closely related Korean national history of decolonization and dictatorship. While

4 For more on the interrelatedness of the “model minority” and “yellow peril” tropes in Asian American studies, see Gary Okihiro’s Margins and Mainstreams (1994), Roberg G. Lee’s Orientals (1999) and Collen Lye’s America’s Asia (2005).

Cumings’ historical accounts provide a germane and insightful framework for my discussion, this chapter also offers a critical reading of his work alongside Lee’s.

Namely, in drawing upon similar ethnographic tropes of a “traditional” Korean leader, both Lee’s fiction and Cumings’ historiography end up representing this figure as a sort of “genre villain,” whose outward affinity with U.S. state interests obscures an intractable and malevolent nature. This antagonism manifests not only as an adversarial personality, but as a fundamental opposition to an American “national ontology.”5 In fact, for Lee as well as for Cumings, the narrative allure of the ethnic strongman—whether a fictional

Korean American city councilman or a historical Korean dictator—rests in his embodiment of distinctly Korean national ontology. For if Lee’s novel does nothing else, it also enacts a literary fantasy of Koreanness, and a Korean homeland, one that links the imagination of ethnic American identity with a transnational historical memory, as well as merging the identitarian meditations of the ethnic novel with the global concerns of the spy novel. In its discursive imbrications within a Korean War context, I argue, Native

Speaker’s engagement with the spy genre might also be seen as a vital way to remember what has widely become known as “the forgotten war.”

II.

As previously established, Native Speaker chronicles Henry Park’s mission to infiltrate and gather information on city councilman John Kwang. At the same time, the novel also details Henry’s struggles with a series of personal difficulties: the recent

5 I borrow this term from Lisa Lowe, who argues that “ Asian American critique asks us to interrogate the national ontology through which the United States constructs its international ‘others’ and through which the nation-state has either sought to transform those ‘others’ into subjects of the national, or conversely, to subordinate them as objects of that national ontology” (30). See Lisa Lowe, “The International Within the National.”

70 deaths of his young son and elderly father, his estrangement from his white American wife, the ethical burdens of his profession and, most pressing of all, a lifelong feeling of alienation from the American cultural mainstream, which he regards as the legacy his

Korean ethnicity and upbringing. With a plot set largely in the mid-nineties, Native

Speaker has understandably not been thought of as addressing the Korean War, at least not in the direct manner seen in other recent Asian American literary works like Susan

Choi’s The Foreign Student (1998), Ha Jin’s War Trash (2004) and Lee’s own The

Surrendered (2010). Nonetheless, Lee’s preoccupation with the Korean War as a salient historical subtext remains evident throughout his first and still most celebrated novel. In one scene, Henry and his wife Leila discuss the war’s resonance for younger, American- born Koreans like himself, even as he is only able to encounter this history as a series of elisions, silences and redactions:

“My father never talked about the war,” I say. “He tried once. I had to write a report for social studies. I got the bright idea to do something on the Korean War. I asked him what it was like. He almost smiled and started to talk as if it was no big deal but then he choked up and left the room.” “How did you do the report?” “I read my junior encyclopedia,” I tell her. “The entry didn’t mention any Koreans except for Syngman Rhee and Kim Il Sung, the Communist leader. Kim was a bad Korean. In the volume there was a picture of him wearing a Chinese jacket. He was fat-faced and maniacal. Bayonets were in the frame behind him. He looked like an evil robot.” “The Mao lover’s Mao,” Leila answers. “Exactly,” I reply. “So I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to embarrass myself in front of the class. So my report was about the threat of Communism, the Chinese Army, how MacArthur was a visionary, that Truman should have listened to him. How lucky all of us Koreans were.” “You really felt that way?” “More or less, when I was little. Sometimes, even now. You know, it’s being with old guys like Stew that diminishes you.” (NS 242)

Here Lee illustrates how a specific Korean history mediates the difficult formation of

Henry’s American identity. That the topic was his own “bright idea” hints at the war’s lingering pull upon his childhood sense of cultural heritage, while the adult

“diminishment” he feels before Stew, his father-in-law and war veteran, affirms that

“even now” this event he never experienced fuels his perpetual sense of unbelonging. As for actual knowledge of the war, the child Henry faces two opposite poles: his father’s silence, rooted in the trauma of direct experience, and a junior encyclopedia entry, rooted in a U.S. neocolonial imaginary that registers Koreans as either “bad” or “good.” Due to the Cold War division of the Korean peninsula into a communist North and American- controlled South, such are the ideological terms available to Henry as he forms his subjectivity in relation to the U.S. state.6 That his school report ends up reciting Cold War bromides about “the threat of Communism,” “how MacArthur was a visionary” and

“How lucky all of us Koreans were” reflects Henry’s childhood desire to be identified as a “good” Korean, which prefigures his broader, lifelong attempt to be a “good”

American.

While Native Speaker delves no further into the particulars of the Korean War,

Henry’s anecdote does underscore the importance of figures like Kim Il Sung to the Cold

War imaginary that frames commonplace accounts of the conflict. For the child Henry, the prospect of embarrassment stems from the threat of being identified with the morbidly caricatured “bad Korean.” Here we see how a logic of metonymic association— or in this case, dissociation—with a symbolically-laden political leader shapes how a

Korean American subject comes to know and identify himself. Left unaddressed in this

6 Here the classroom functions as an apparatus for the student’s induction into an American national identity, as well as a synecdoche for the hegemonic state. For more on this notion, see Louis Althusser’s Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1971).

72 scene, and in critical discussions of Native Speaker at large, is the corresponding figure of the “good” Korean, whom the text explicitly names as Syngman Rhee, the anticommunist president of South Korea and Kim Il Sung’s Korean War counterpart. If the young

Henry’s attempt to be a “good” Korean (and thus a “good” Korean American) entails the rejection of Kim Il Sung, to what extent does it entail an implicit embrace of Syngman

Rhee, as per the Manichean Cold War logics into which he is interpolated? Here one might note the lopsidedness of this pedagogical moment, which asserts Kim Il Sung’s

“badness” while leaving Syngman Rhee’s “goodness” an unstated, ghostly asterisk.

This figuration, though a seemingly minor detail, indexes a contradiction endemic to the dual Cold War ideologies of containment and integration. The first, long familiar to Cold War discourse, imagined Communism as an expansionist threat that needed to be resisted at all points. As a directive of foreign policy and domestic propaganda, containment involved the conspicuous demonization of communist or communist- friendly leaders like Kim Il Sung, who were often regarded as little more than Soviet or

Chinese pawns—the “Mao lover’s Mao.”7 More recently, scholars like Christina Klein have also shown how the imperative of containment was accompanied by one of integration, which refers to efforts to incorporate Third World nations into an interconnected global system, one led by the U.S. and united under the banners of capitalism, free trade and liberal democracy.8 Yet while the U.S. projected itself as the apotheosis of freedom and democracy in the pursuit of integration, in practice it installed and supported all manners of repressive, authoritarian and brutal governments throughout

7 For an account of how central the concept of containment has been to Cold War studies, as well as to American cultural production, see Alan Nadal’s Containment Culture (1995).

8 Complicating the customary narrative of a Manichean struggle between a democratic/capitalist West and a totalitarian/communist East, Klein argues, the logic of integration frames the Cold War as a triangulated struggle over the hearts and minds of the Third World. See Klein’s Cold War Orientalism (2003).

73 the globe in the name of “collective security.” Thus as a matter of Cold War rationale, although the designation of all things communist as “bad” was a straightforward affair, it was far more difficult to sustain an unproblematic equivalence between anticommunism and “goodness,” especially under the rubric of liberal democratic ideals.

In Native Speaker, this asymmetrical logic appears in the hyperbolic image of

Kim Il Sung as an “evil robot” framed by bayonets. Here Lee’s imagined picture evokes a certain 50s pulp iconography that animated not only the literary/pop-cultural imagination, but also the bureaucratic imagination, as exemplified by the government policy paper

NSC-68. Aside from articulating the main goals of containing and reducing the Soviet sphere, this document, among others, has been noted by scholars for its “hysterical view,”

“morbid Orientalism and dehumanization” and “diabolical imagery (Cumings 1990,

217).”9 In contrast to this excess of signification (and signification of excess) is the decidedly undersignified Syngman Rhee, whom the text names but does not otherwise identify or contextualize. Had Henry’s junior encyclopedia offered a picture of the South

Korean leader, it might have depicted a gray-haired septuagenarian with a wrinkled visage and narrow gaze, with the accompanying text possibly describing his lifelong advocacy for Korean independence, his Ivy-League education in the United States, and his fierce opposition to communism. What this hypothetical entry would likely not have mentioned, most likely, is that beneath Rhee’s dignified, paternal exterior was a staunch autocrat with a volatile temperament, one who headed a repressive police state that belied official U.S. portrayals of South Korean as a bastion of democracy.

9 See Bruce Cumings’ The Origins of the Korean War, Volume II (1990). Similarly, the first chapter of Jodi Kim’s Ends of Empire also highlights the “Orientalism of anticommunist rhetorics” underlying NSC-68, as well as other canonical Cold War government documents such as NSC 48/1 and George F. Kennan’s “Long Telegram.” (2010 39).

On this basis, the historian Seth Jacobs counts Rhee among a clique of East Asian national leaders who received considerable material and ideological support from the

U.S. during the Cold War, even as their countries proved, in one American ambassador’s words, “not exactly a paragon of the democratic process” (124).10 For Americans, the most attractive quality about these leaders—which also included Ramon Magsaysay of the Philippines, Ngo Dihn Diem of South Vietnam, and most prominently, Chiang Kai-

Shek of Nationalist China, later Taiwan—was their virulent anticommunism (and to an important degree, their Christian faith). This quality alone, however, was enough to secure for these regimes such devoted and influential advocates as U.S. Secretary of State

John Foster Dulles, author James Michener and media magnate Henry Luce. Thus while

Luce’s Time magazine likened Rhee to a Korean George Washington, an American

MASH surgeon in Korea portrays a different reality in a letter to his wife, describing the

South Korean president as “a tyrant and as fascistic as Chiang” (230).11 Within this Cold

War symbolic economy, the moral clarity surrounding the “bad Korean” is often accompanied by the moral ambiguity of the putative “good Korean,” who for all intents and purposes was just a “bad Korean” in a western suit instead of a Chinese jacket.12

In her study, Ends of Empire, Jodi Kim argues that Asian American cultural productions present a vital site for critically reframing the Cold War, and probing the

10 Quoted in Seth Jacob’s America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam (2004).

11 See: “Korea: The Walnut” in the March 9, 1953 edition of Time magazine; also Dorothy G. Horowitz’s We Will Not Be Strangers: Korean War Letters Between a M.A.S.H. Surgeon and His Wife (1997). The prevalent image of Rhee as a “little Chiang Kai-shek” serves as a useful counterpoint to the notion of Kim Il Sung as the “Mao’s lover’s Mao.”

12 I would argue that this symbolic economy persists into the present day (even though South Korea is no longer a repressive dictatorship), with the American media focusing disproportionately on images of Kim Il Sung’s successors, his son Kim Jong Il and now his grandson Kim Jong Un, as modern incarnations of the “bad Korean.”

75 ways the Cold War “continues to enjoy a persisting recursiveness when seen as a structure of feeling, a knowledge project, and a hermeneutics for interpreting developments in the ‘post’-Cold War conjecture” (3). Kim urges us to view the Cold War

“not only a historical period, but also an epistemology and production of knowledge, and as such it exceeds and outlives its historical eventness” (3).13 In a similar vein, I propose that Native Speaker stages Henry’s reckoning with the Cold War “good Korean” as occurring belatedly, in his adult relationship to the charismatic John Kwang. In Kwang,

Henry finds something like a positive alternative to the embarrassing picture of Kim Il

Sung that had vexed his childhood self-identification—a highly visible Korean man who is also able to inhabit the iconography and ideals of American political culture. Contrary to the “fat-faced and maniacal” Kim in his Chinese jacket, Henry notes that Kwang’s

“warm-hued face was square,” with an “angular jaw, which carved out two perfect hollows on either side of his chin,” and that he “dressed like a power broker,” whose suits

“mostly stayed to the conservative, what the people expected of him, Paul Stuart and J.

Press, the American executive look” (134, 137).

As councilman for the diverse and multitudinous Flushing, Queens district of

New York City, Kwang also represents an expansion of American democracy, namely to include the recent immigrants of color that comprise the bulk his constituency.

Describing these constituents, Henry observes that “They were all kinds, these streaming and working and dealing, these various platoons of Koreans, Indians, Vietnamese,

Haitians, Colombians, Nigerians, these brown and yellow whatevers, whoevers, countless

13 Kim’s work has helped me more clearly articulate my own argument, particularly her analysis of Native Speaker as a “Cold War composition” in the way it reveals “how the Cold Wars has come to haunt and overdetermine not only racialized minority subjectivity and identity, but also the identity politics—and politics of identification—of the American nation in the post-World War II era” (2009 123). Also see her essay “From Mee-gook to Gook: The Cold War and Racialized Undocumented Capital in Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker” (Spring 2009).

76 unheard nobodies…John Kwang’s people” (83). Kwang’s goal of granting political visibility to these “brown and yellow whatevers, whoevers,” can be seen, in one sense, as the protracted afterlife of Cold War integration. As Klein’s study reminds us, the integration of decolonizing and developing nations into the capitalist “free world” was directly related to the domestic integration of new immigrants into the American social and political mainstream.14 In addition, the aforementioned roll-call of Third World nationalities signals a demographic reality made possible by the Immigration and

Nationality Act of 1965, also known as the Hart-Celler Act, which abolished former immigration quotas and restrictions based on race and national origin. This landmark legislation, passed with Cold War considerations at the forefront, resulted in an unprecedented influx of new immigrants from Asia, Latin America and other non-

European regions, enabling the very multiethnic urban masses that form “John Kwang’s people.” For Henry, a large part of Kwang’s “goodness” resides in his passionate, near- militant efforts to bring these “countless unheard nobodies” into the political landscape:

“This his daily order: do the good duty, go out into the street…In ten different languages you say Kwang is like you. You will be an American” (143, emphasis in original).

It is Kwang’s “good duty” of integrating myriad Third World bodies into an

American democratic way of life, I would suggest, that casts him as a sort of structural analogue to the US Cold War ally, a latter-day version of the Syngman Rhee figure that had remained a faceless lacuna during Henry’s childhood. Where the younger Henry had recoiled from the image of Kim Il Sung, his adult gaze toward Kwang is tinged with an

14 Klein’s insights on integration also draws upon the scholarship of Penny Von Eschen, Nikhil Pal Singh and Mary Dudziak, who all show how “After World War II…Cold War ideologues mobilized this idea of a racially and ethnically diverse America in the service of U.S. global expansion. The United States thus became the only Western nation that sought to legitimize its world-ordering ambitions by championing the idea (if not always the practice) of racial equality” (11).

77 identificatory desire: “I had ready connections to him, of course. He knew I was Korean, or Korean-American, though perhaps not exactly the same way he was…though taken together you might say that one was an outlying version of the other” (139). More crucially, Kwang’s structural parallel to the “Good Korean” is also an evocative one in all the less-than-benign ways, as seen in the revelation of his ruthless and dictatorial tendencies. Like many a US-aligned anticommunist strongman—with Rhee being an especially egregious example—Kwang’s deftness with the trappings and rhetoric of

American liberal democracy conceals a decidedly undemocratic political practice. As the final, spectacular decline of his campaign and public favor attests, Kwang’s volatility and authoritarianism ultimately mark him as un-American, or at least unsuited for the

American political scene. Nevertheless, Lee’s novel does suggest, in its subtle way, that these same qualities might be legible from a Korean cultural and historical context.

Specifically, it is Henry’s “ready connections” to the culture that illuminate this dimension, allowing him to explain Kwang’s political style and personal foibles as the expression of an authentically Korean mode. Key to this authentic Koreanness, the novel insinuates, is Kwang’s connection to the cultural memory of the Korean War, which inform both the content of his politics—in his appeals to keep alive the memories of such collective traumas—as well as its form, as seen in his structural consonances with a figure like Syngman Rhee. As I illustrate in the sections that follow, the Korean War provides an important discursive backdrop for Native Speaker’s literary project—as an undertaking, variously, of historiography and ethnography, as well as of genre.

III.

As Lee’s novel conceives it, the authentic Korean culture that Kwang exemplifies can also be characterized as a culture of memory. At one point, Henry calls Kwang a

“devotee of memory,” referring to his practice of memorizing lists of every voter and constituent in his district. At first Henry wonders “if he wasn’t simply odd, nervous. An uptight Korean man” (177). Discussing this practice with Henry later on, Kwang waxes both world-historic, as well as nostalgic: “In past times, a person’s education was a matter of what he could remember. It still is in Korea and Japan. I assume in China as well…I had a teacher who made us memorize scores of classical Chinese and Korean poems. We had to recite any one of them on command. He was hoping to give us knowledge, but what he actually impressed upon us was a legacy” (178). Fleshing out this idea of a “legacy,” Kwang links its urgency to the irruptive violence of the Korean

War: “Young Master Lim…He was becoming a respected writer when the war broke out.

We later heard that he was killed in the fighting. Sometime before the school was closed he said it was our solemn duty to act as vessels for our country and civilization, that we must give ourselves over to what had come before us, as much to literature as we did to our parents and ancestors” (179).

This “giving over” of oneself to what had come before suffuses the very tenor of

Kwang’s coalitional politics. In one pivotal scene, the councilman gives a public speech addressing a recent wave of black-Korean tensions throughout the city. In his pleas for conciliation, Kwang urges the two groups to recognize their mutual history of oppression and displacement. After acknowledging the historical and contemporary hardships faced by black Americans, Kwang asserts that “We Koreans know something of this tragedy.

Recall the days over fifty years ago, when Koreans were made servants and slaves in their own country by the Imperial Japanese Army. How our mothers and sisters were made the concubines of the very soldiers who enslaved us.” As he goes on to elaborate:

“I am speaking of histories that all of us should know. Remember, or now know, how Koreans were cast as the dogs of Asia, remember the way our children could not speak their own language in school, remember how they called each other by the Japanese names forced upon them, remember the public executions of patriots and the shadowy murders of collaborators, remember our feelings of disgrace and penury and shame, remember most of all the struggle to survive with one’s own identity still strong and alive. “I ask that you remember these things, or know them now. Know that what we have in common, the sadness and pain and injustice, will always be stronger than our differences.” (153)

The shared remembrance of past injuries plays a crucial role in Kwang’s efforts to forge genuine interethnic solidarity between Koreans and African Americans. More importantly, the syntax of the speech echoes the novel’s articulation of a culturally specific practice of memory. In continuously repeating the command for his listeners to

“remember…remember…,” Kwang presents the tragedies of Korean history as a list to be memorized, as he once did with scores of classical Chinese poems. Similarly, his request “that you remember these things, or know them now” calls to mind his teacher’s imperative that students be able to recite these poems on command. True to the lessons of

Young Master Lim, what Kwang desires to impress upon his audience is the notion of these tragic histories as a “legacy,” something that people might practice remembering so they can better all the better “know them now.” In overlaying his appeals for interethnic cohesion with a specifically Korean historical narrative, and evoking a memory practice

80 likewise coded as Korean (or at least East Asian), Kwang’s rhetoric can be seen as the performance of his “solemn duty” to act as a vessel for his country and civilization.15

Here it would be useful to delve into these “histories that all of us should know.”

Strictly speaking the collective injuries that Kwang describes in his speech refer not to the Korean War itself, but rather the period of Japanese colonial rule that preceded it.

Enfolded within the broader motifs of “the struggle to survive with one’s own identity still strong and alive” and “sadness and pain and injustice,” however, these two events can be seen as part of a contiguous historical consciousness. In this way, Lee’s novel resonates with the work of the historian Bruce Cumings, who argues that no understanding of the Korean War is possible without first grasping Korea’s colonial history under the Empire of Japan, which lasted from 1910 until 1945.16 When American and Soviet forces proceeded to divide and occupy the Korean peninsula upon defeating

Japan at the end of World War II, the fledging governments they respectively erected had to account for the intense lingering resentment toward pro-Japanese elements. While the

Soviets installed many leftist anti-Japanese revolutionaries in key positions, the most prominent of which was Kim Il Sung, the U.S. set up a conservative regime whose ranks were filled with numerous Koreans that had collaborated with the Japanese. Needing someone untainted by collaboration to head this new government, and thus provide an

15 It is also worth noting that for a rhetorical performance seeking to point out the shared struggles between African Americans and Koreans, Kwang’s speech merely glosses the African American experience, and instead foregrounds a Korean national history as a synecdoche for the broader themes of slavery and subjugation.

16 Cumings’ landmark two-volume The Origins of the Korean War (1981, 1990) was among the first to challenge the conventional understanding of the war as a Cold War proxy conflict. For the purposes of my analysis, I draw primarily from Cumings’ two volume study, as well the more accessible accounts he provides in Korea: The Unknown War (1988, co-authored with Jon Halliday) and Korea’s Place in the Sun (1997, updated 2005).

81 aura of nationalist legitimacy, the Americans turned to Rhee, an independence activist who had spent nearly four decades in the United States.

Eschewing conventional narratives of the Korean War as a clash between ideologically opposed rival republics, one communist and one West-aligned, Cumings’ account emphasizes above all the its postcolonial underpinnings—namely, as “a Third

World problem or a North-South problem, a conflict over how best to overcome the debilities of colonial rule and comparative backwardness” (2005 209). Within this framework, Cumings goes to great lengths to stress the underlying similarities between the two Koreas, in which “charismatic leaders in the South drew upon the same sources of strength as did leaders in the North, an appeal to complete unity at home and resistance to penetration from abroad, and an assertion of a Korean essence against all the rest”

(2005 206). In Cumings’ view, the assertions of “complete unity” and a “Korean essence,” fused with the engine of charismatic leadership, forms the basis for comprehending not just North Korea’s notorious totalitarian personality cult, but also the conservative strongman system that took hold in South Korea. For Southern leaders,

“their ideal was similar to Kim Il Sung’s, minus the revolution—a way to weld together a nation under one’s own leadership” (1990 191).

As the first President of the U.S.-backed Republic of Korea, Rhee welded his fledgling nation together by presiding over one of the worst police states in Asia.

According to CIA reports from the period, including the first “personality study” ever conducted of a foreign leader, President Rhee was “indomitably strong-willed and obstinate,” and did not hesitate to “use such totalitarian tactics as stringent censorship…police terrorism, and…extra-governmental agencies such as youth corps and

82 armed ‘patriotic’ societies to terrorize and destroy non-Communist opposition groups and parties.”17 Cumings points out, furthermore, that while Americans knew they had a

“volatile charge” in the new president, “the harsh truth is that the United States as a matter of high policy vastly preferred the southern police state to any sort of serious revolutionary regime. The repression of the Rhee regime, in other words, had a joint

Korean-American authorship” (1990 227, 189).18 This “joint” nation-building project would have far-reaching impacts for both its authors: while South Korea enjoyed

American support for its reactionary politics, sowing a decades-long legacy of authoritarian government, the U.S. had in South Korea a template for the “positive action” against communism that presaged much of its later foreign policy—in Greece,

Indochina, Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, Nicaragua—where “Americans came to defend any group calling itself anticommunist, because the alternative was thought to be worse”

(2005 200).

Even as he acknowledges the depth of American complicity in the terror of the

Southern regime, Cumings ultimately attributes the greater share of Rhee’s autocratic rule to a political culture that he identifies as distinctly Korean. In this “vintage Korean politics,” Cumings explains, stable rule derives “from the model of the well-run family,” where “the object of every Korean ruler is to inculcate proper ideas in everyone in the realm, to push a uniform pattern of thought to the point that it becomes a state of mind, and therefore impervious to logic and argument” (1990 190, 210). Elsewhere, Cumings notes how Rhee’s long years in the U.S. had failed to turn him into any kind of “Christian

17 Quoted in Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun: 345.

18Although the term “Korean-American” is used here in a strictly diplomatic context, its homonymic overlap with “Korean American” in the demographic/identitarian sense—along with the notion of authorship—is a suggestive one, evoking a discursive confluence that also informs Lee’s novel, and which I will address further on.

83 democrat, suffused with Wilsonian idealism”; rather, “his Confucian heritage would tell him that a well-run polity proceeds from a correct set of ideas…and it mattered little that the ideas often bore little resemblance to political reality” (1990 208). If the disregard for

“logic,” “argument” and an empirical “reality” signals a radical difference from a

Western Enlightenment tradition, it is a contrast that Cumings finesses throughout his account, as seen in the juxtaposition of Rhee’s Confucian heritage against the political heritage of Woodrow Wilson. Similarly, he goes on to describe the Korean political ideology as “the antithesis of liberalism: an organic politics,” which—in terms that recall the words of Kwang’s former teacher—would be repellent to “Western individualists who cannot imagine that human beings find solace and fulfillment in giving oneself over to a family, a group, a society, or to a shared state of mind” (1990 191, emphasis mine).

While Cumings denies making any sort of “cultural argument,” the opposition between Korean and American political styles nonetheless generates much of the dramatic momentum behind his narrative. To a large extent, and in keeping with his decolonization frame, the conflict that Cumings finds more compelling is not the global confrontation between Syngman Rhee and Kim Il Sung (whom he regards as products of the same “Confucian heritage”), but the behind-the-scenes jostling between Rhee and his

American handlers. If Rhee represents a traditional Confucian Korean, then the role of the “archetypal American” is epitomized by General John R. Hodge, the military governor who oversaw U.S. occupation forces in South Korea. Along with having “a typical American’s visceral disgust for anything that looked like communism,” Hodge is also described as “an honest, unpretentious military officer” who was “well known for hard work and plain living” (2005 213). By and large, it is also Hodge to whom Cumings

84 refers when he speaks in broad strokes about the political biases of “the Lockean

American,” or “an archetypal American [who] can only grasp nonliberal politics as a pathology of the Left or Right,” and “liberal Americans [to whom] the Rhee system looked like Nazism” (1990 192). For Cumings, the uneasy alliance between a Korean

“organic politics” and American liberalism bears out in the tempestuous personal relationship between Rhee and Hodge, which entailed no small amount of antipathy and distrust, as well as “long, emotional sessions…where these two hard-bitten men went at each other without restraint” (2005 213).19

Within this dramatic foil between the “honest” and “unpretentious” Hodge and the “obstinate” and “volatile” Rhee, I would argue, it is not difficult to also discern a metonymic clash between a straight-shooting American rationality and an intractable

Korean authoritarianism. In contrast to Hodge’s hard working, plain living career soldier,

Rhee is portrayed as a dictator of the most lurid and eccentric order, who alternated “a calm and fatherly demeanor with shrieking hysteria” (1990 227). While some Americans who interacted with him came away “convinced of his senility,” others would witness his angry dissolution into a “frothing drivel,” or see him “turn up in Congress and advocate thermonuclear war” (1990 224). In its complete flouting of reason and restraint, the sketch of Rhee offered here shares something of the “maniacal” and bayonet-framed quality seen in the imagined picture of Kim Il Sung Henry describes in Native Speaker— in short, an exaggerated portrait of villainous excess.

19 This mutual antagonism underscores one of Cumings’ main theses: that the tragedy of the Korean War resulted in large part from a failure of the American liberal imagination to grasp the nonliberal complexities of Korean society and politics. To his credit, Cumings invokes “Lockean” and “liberal” ideologies not as a normative stance from which to regard an archaic and “repellent” Confucianism, but rather to critique Western ethnocentrism, and encouraging readers to understand the Korean situation on its own terms.

As a historian, Cumings has spent a career challenging Cold War orthodoxies that divided Korea, and Koreans, into “bad” and “good” varieties along Communist and non- communist lines. What his analysis of Rhee’s statecraft and personality suggests, I would point out, is that Cumings does not so much dismantle Manichean categories of the “bad

Korean” and “good Korean,” as he claims that we have simply misrecognized which is which, and that the truer “bad Korean” was the one sponsored by the U.S.20 That

Americans support abhorrent dictators in pursuit of myopic strategic aims is hardly a revelation.21 Of greater interest here, rather, is the diabolical characterization that emerges in Cumings’ profile of Rhee, which at times resemble something out of a “not- entirely-plausible political spy thriller.” Cumings elaborates, for example, that Rhee was

“an inveterate gambler…who could play poker with two deuces and come away with the pot,” and that he had a “a penchant for getting his way through wild threat, an eruptive bottle of nitroglycerin who seemed always to require care in handling” (1990 228). Here

Cumings presents the image of a poker-playing intimidator who is likened to a literally explosive substance, but who is also, significantly, a schemer who knows how to win by bluffing, and prompting others to approach him with “care.” In addition to the narrative invocation of cards games and bombs redolent of many a James Bond scenario, what emerges in this account is an element of intrigue, involving an antagonist who is cunning as well as unpredictable, not unlike Wright’s exchanges with Nkrumah in Black Power.

20 This is not to say that Cumings necessarily inverts the equation by suggesting that Kim Il Sung was “good”; however, he does note that of the two Korean regimes, Kim’s did enjoy a larger measure of popular support, whereas Rhee’s remained widely unpopular. Cumings’ positive appraisals of other potential Korean leaders during the period, such as Yo Un-hyong and Chang Myon, suggest that there was indeed such a thing as a “good,” or at least better, Korean.

21 This is especially true in the wake of a transnationally-oriented American Studies that has cast American foreign policy as a fundamentally imperialistic endeavor, at least since the mid-nineteenth century. The foundational text for this trend remains Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease’s edited collection, Cultures of United States Imperialism (1994).

Indeed, as Cumings is keen to emphasize, Rhee was neither crazy nor senile, and his mercurial outbursts were signs of a “calculative ambition,” in which “his apparently frothing drivel and senility were useful ploys to mask his purposes or bargain with

Americans” (1990 224). In Cumings’ view, Rhee personified what Daniel Ellsberg called the “madman theory,” where the objective is to convince others that one is capable of anything, toeing the boundaries of mutually assured destruction in order to cow adversaries into submission (driving the point right home, Cumings alleges that Richard

Nixon actually first learned this tactic from Rhee).22

Compounding Rhee’s explosive volatility, we thus learn, was also a

“Machiavellianism that was second nature to him, coming not from his intellect but his viscera” (1990 228). The emphasis on “viscera” here is revealing, as elsewhere Cumings attributes this quality to a Korean national identity, in opposition to the “intellect” of a

“Western rationalist” (like Hodge, or Cumings himself).23 In this way, Cumings’ rendering of Rhee as a kind of genre villain turns upon what looks suspiciously like a

“cultural argument.” This ethnographic subtext is made clear in the following assessment:

[Rhee’s] personality however, does seem modal for elderly Korean men of responsibility. It is quite common to witness in the same person, often on the same day, ineffable charm and outrageous crudity; an icy Confucian demeanor of utter self-control and dignity at one point, giving way to a show of raging insanity or puerile inanity. This is often what it takes to maintain a patriarchy whose legitimation is purely traditional. As for his

22 The term “madman theory” has been frequently associated with Nixon’s foreign policy as president. Largely attributed to Ellsberg’s lecture “The Political Uses of Madness,” it has also been variously connected to strategic thinkers such as Thomas C. Schelling and Henry Kissinger. According to Cumings, Nixon, as Eisenhower’s vice president, “was quite taken with Rhee during a visit to Seoul in 1953” (1990 816n87). Other accounts, such as Conrad Black’s Nixon: A Life in Full (2007) and Geoffrey Perret’s Commander in Chief (2007) also insinuate that Rhee’s brinkmanship had somehow inspired Nixon.

23 Specifically, in Korea’s Place in the Sun, Cumings refers to the “Korean mind-heart,” a “visceral knowledge that joins thought with emotion” (22). As he continues, in his typically sweeping register: “This is the human mind connected to the viscera and the body in touch with its natural environment…It is the purest Korean tradition, infusing songs, dances, dreams, and emotions…It is the Korea that I, a Western rationalist, know least about” (22).

obstinacy and willfulness, a people that has survived for centuries under an arbitrary rule and a perennial foreign threat will have many Syngman Rhees, just as shrewd, just as Machiavellian, just as willful. (2005 346)

With this passage, Cumings effectively culturalizes Rhee’s behavior—his shrewdness, his obstinacy, his erraticism, and even his dignity and charm—as “essentially” Korean traits, rather than the expression of a unique individual personality. The passage even ends, notably, with “Syngman Rhee” no longer signifying a singular personhood, but becoming instead a recurrent and duplicable—that is, a generic—category. It would also not be difficult, I might add, to imagine many of the traits listed above as fitting descriptors for a spy novel antagonist: starting with “Machiavellian,” but also “ineffable charm,” “outrageous crudity,” “icy demeanor,” “raging insanity,” “puerile inanity.”

Andrew Salmon states it most forcefully, perhaps, in a review of Cumings’ work for The

New Republic, noting the irony that while “Cumings loves nothing more than railing against Orientalist renderings of Koreans,” his portraits of certain brutal South Korean leaders “might have been ripped from the pages of Ian Fleming.”

From here we might return to Lee’s Native Speaker, and the two points I had raised regarding its depiction of John Kwang: as, on the one hand, a literary iteration of the “many Syngman Rhees” that Cumings posits, and on the other, a figure seemingly

“ripped from the pages of Ian Fleming.” Moreover, both these figurations converge in the novel’s espionage plot, in which Henry gains Kwang’s trust in order to gather information on him, and goes on to facilitate his downfall. In the next section, I examine how Lee’s novel conceives of Korean American identity—and ethnic American identity more generally—as not only embedded in the dramas of twentieth-century geopolitics,

88 but as also a perpetual negotiation across nationalist, transnationalist, and even institutional alignments.

IV.

Central to Native Speaker’s critical renown has been Lee’s unique variation on the spy genre, in his imagining of a protagonist who is a professional “ethnic spy.” More specifically, Henry works for a private intelligence firm called Glimmer & Co., which specializes in deploying ethnic operatives to survey and collect intelligence on other ethnic persons of interest. This task is facilitated by the supposed trust borne of a shared racial-cultural identity, with each operative assigned to a broadly corresponding area of

“ethnic coverage” (18). As Henry explains, the core of his work involves writing detailed reports, or “registers,” about his targets, which Glimmer & Co. then passes on to its clients. These clients are usually “multinational corporations, bureaus of foreign governments, individuals of resource and connection,” or any entity whose vested interests the target might be working against. By now, critics have thoroughly mined the symbolic richness of this premise, especially as it pertains to questions of ethnic knowledge production. While Michelle Young-Mee Rhee analyzes the novel’s metafictional commentary on writing ethnic literature in the age of multiculturalism,

Crysta Parikh reads the figure of the intelligence worker as an allegory for the ethnic intellectual/scholar, and the ethics of betrayal endemic to this position. Similarly,

Yoonmee Chang addresses the ways Henry’s spy work reproduces “culturalist epistemologies” that distill ethnic subjects to a racial-cultural essence, which then accounts for the range of their actions, histories, personalities and possibilities. In her

89 rather efficient summation, Native Speaker is “a story of an ethnic subject spooking his own to extract reductive, ethnographic portraits for his readers’ consumption” (147).24

As spies who are also quite literal “native informants,” the agents of Glimmer &

Co. approach ethnic identity as a matter of both objective and tradecraft: Henry investigates Kwang in order to identify his ethnic characteristics, and he does so by utilizing his own “ready connections.” Crucially, it is largely through memories of his late father—a gruff, taciturn man whom the novel portrays as quintessentially Korean— that Henry is able to recognize Kwang’s own fundamental Koreanness. Early in the narrative, Henry describes his father as “a Confucian of high order,” for whom “all of life was a rigid matter of family” (7). “I know all about that fine and terrible ordering,” Henry adds, “but I know, too, of the basic comfort in this familial precision, where the relation abides no argument, no questions or quarrels” (7). Recounting an incident where Kwang kneels dramatically before a campaign volunteer in a show of gratitude, Henry at first wonders “if I had witnessed the gravest humility or conceit,” before reflecting that “I can imagine my father saying no, no, it was clearly Kwang’s Confucian training at work, his secular religion of pure hierarchy, his belief that everyone is at once a noble and a servant and then just a man” (148). Like Cumings, Lee also stresses the import of a Confucian

“training” or “heritage” as a guide to proper action, even if such actions might appear perplexing to an assimilated “Western individualist” or “Lockean American” like Henry.

Kwang himself professes a similar view later in the novel, telling Henry: “When you are someone like me, you will be many people at once. You are a father, a dictator, a

24 Chang actually makes the compelling assertion—in line with my own argument—that “Native Speaker does not fail because it is a spy story; it succeeds because it is one” (147). However, this remark serves merely to ornament her larger concerns about ethnic entrepreneurship and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, and receives no further elaboration.

90 servant, the most agile actor this land has ever known.” (293). Despite its somewhat abstruse tone, I would argue that this formulation neatly encapsulates the various

“ethnographic portraits” that Henry draws of Kwang over the course of the narrative. The first, “father,” indexes what both Lee and Cumings might consider the most Korean of virtues: namely, the “rigid matter of family” that drove Henry’s father, which also prefigures Henry’s subsequent appraisal of Kwang: “I want to say that he was a family man, that being Korean and old fashioned made him cherish and honor the institution, that his family was the basic unit of wealth in his life” (146). Importantly, Henry adds that Kwang “loved the pure idea of family as well, which in its most elemental version must have nothing to do with blood. It was how he saw all of us, and then by extension all those parts of Queens that he was now calling his” (146). If the devotion to family marks Kwang, like Henry’s father, as “Korean and old fashioned,” his broadening of the concept to encompass his staff and electoral district also render him a Confucian of high order in the political sense. As Cumings has informed us, such a politics models itself upon a “well-run family.” Having infiltrated Kwang’s political machine, Henry notes the extent to which its effectiveness derives from just such a dynamic: “All day and all night we worked without stopping, knowing we’d get to be with him at the end of the day. Oo- rhee-jip, he’d say then, just before the eating and drinking, asking for our hands around the table, speaking oo-rhee-jip for Our house. Our new life” (146).

This brings us to the second part of Kwang’s pronouncement, which turns out to be deeply intertwined with the first. At the head of this well-run political family, Henry understands, must necessarily preside a patriarch who “abides no argument, no questions or quarrels.” This is made explicit in a scene in which Henry watches Kwang mediate a

91 dispute between a Korean storeowner, Mr. Baeh, and a disgruntled black customer (also named Henry). Kwang takes Baeh aside to speak privately, and seemingly strong-arms him into a compromise in the customer’s favor. Registering the storekeeper’s visible irritation afterwards, Kwang “grimly” remarks that “He doesn’t have to like it. Right now, he doesn’t have any choice” (174). As Henry goes on to ponder:

At the time, I didn’t know what Kwang meant by that last notion, what kind of dominion or direct influence he had over people like Baeh. I only considered the fact of his position and stature in the community as what had persuaded the storekeeper to deal fairly with Henry. I assumed Baeh was honoring the traditional Confucian structure of community, where in each village a prominent elder man heard the townspeople’s grievances and arbitrated and ruled. Though in that world Baeh would have shown displeasure only in private. He would have acted as the dutiful younger until the wise man was far down the road. (188)

Such moments further underline the resonances between Lee’s fiction and Cumings’ historiography, in their recourse to a Confucian antiquity that functions as equal parts ethnographic alibi and diasporic fantasy, and rendered as a “world” apart from that of their (presumably) “liberal American” readers. Henry’s invocation of a “village” model with a “wise man” at its center foregrounds the “secular religion of pure hierarchy” that subtends Kwang’s political authority, where loyalty and obedience are the main guarantors of group cohesion. This is supported by the self-justifying “fact” of Kwang’s

“position and stature in the community,” as well as the relational dynamic between a

“prominent elder” and his “dutiful younger,” with the judgment of the former being

“impervious to logic and argument.”

And yet, as hinted in the storekeeper’s deviation from his prescribed role, a

“traditional Confucian structure of community” does not quite account for the full picture. As Henry discovers, Kwang’s political family comes with an institutional

92 correlative, in the unofficial “money club” he establishes. Once again, Henry’s memories of his father serve to contextualize Kwang’s broader political practices. He recalls that his greengrocer father “got his first infusion of capital from a ggeh, a Korean ‘money club’ in which members contributed to a pool that was given out on a rotating basis. Each week you gave the specified amount; and then one week in the cycle, all the money was yours”

(50). Whereas only Koreans participated in the ggeh to which small business owners like

Henry’s father belonged, Kwang implements his on a community-wide scale, and includes all the different ethnic and immigrant groups that comprise his constituency. As

Henry explains it, the concept of the ggeh is inherently tied to a sense of familial connection: “Small ggeh, like the one my father had, work because the members all know each other, trust one another not to run off or drop out after their turn comes up.

Reputation is always worth more than money. In this sense we are all related” (279).

Drawing upon this ethos, Kwang’s expanded version seeks to instill these familial values into its diverse members: “The larger ggeh depends solely on this notion, that the lessons of the culture will be stronger than a momentary lack, can subdue any individual weakness or want. This is the power lovely and terrible, what we try to engender in

Kwang’s giant money club, our huge ggeh for all. What John says it is about” (280).25

25 Daniel Y. Kim offers a similar analysis of the function of the ggeh and its connection to familial values, arguing that “Through his depiction of Kwang’s political project, Lee imagines a multiracial political coalition that is presided over by a charismatic Korean American figure and whose solidarity and coherence derives from an ideology that is rendered as essentially Korean” (235). See Daniel Y. Kim’s “Do I, Too, Sing America? Vernacular Representations and Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker” (2003). My own reading is indebted to Kim’s insights on the nature of this “essential” Koreanness as it emerges in Lee’s novel, and I build upon the implications of this “essentially Korean” political ideology, especially as it plays out as a form of dictatorship. Other critics have similarly noted, but do not fully explore, the importance of Kwang’s Koreanness. For Caroline Rody, Kwang represents “a Korean father who embodies the tantalizing possibility of a Korean American masculinity the hero might actually want to own” (75). Min Song reads Kwang as offering “a narrative about diaspora that sees in the history of both Koreans and non-Koreans in Queens shared accumulated historical traumas” (190).

Here the “lesson of the culture” recalls the lessons of Young Master Lim, and similar to his exhortation to “remember” historical traumas, Kwang—per Cumings’

“traditional” Korean leader—seeks to inculcate a “correct set of ideas” through his implementation of the ggeh. More significantly, as its capacity to “subdue” obliquely suggests, Kwang’s community-wide ggeh also functions as an instrument of his

“dominion” and “direct influence” over men like the shopkeeper Mr. Baeh. Even as

Henry credits Kwang’s sincere desire to aid his constituents by attenuating the hardships of immigrant life, he also remarks that “the ggeh was his one enduring vanity, a system paternal, how in the beginning people would come right to the house and ask for some money and his blessing. He wasn’t a warlord or a don, he had no real power over any of them save their trust in his wisdom” (334). This duality, between “wisdom” and “vanity,” benevolence and tyranny, is what Henry refers to as a “power lovely and terrible,” echoing his earlier comments on the “fine and terrible ordering” of his father’s Confucian principles. On one end of the spectrum, Kwang exercises this power by imposing his will on Mr. Baeh’s business decisions, asserting that “he doesn’t have to like it.” At the other extreme, he orders the murder of his campaign worker Eduardo Fermin (whose death by firebombing I mentioned at the beginning) for being “disloyal, the most terrible thing.”

Notably, Eduardo had also been managing the extensive list of participants in the large ggeh, and it was Kwang’s discovery that he had been leaking sensitive information that prompted the drastic action. Henry’s insistence, then, that Kwang “wasn’t a warlord or a don” carries no small irony, in that those things are more or less what he turns out to be, from his lethal intolerance of disloyalty to the delegation of his dirty work to a criminal gang. If the ggeh gives material form to Kwang’s expanded political family, it is also the

94 means by which he serves as this family’s Confucian father-dictator—in the end, finally, things are simply about “what John says it is about.”

Beneath his expert grasp of the trappings of American democratic pageantry,

Kwang remains a diasporic practitioner of Cumings’ “vintage Korean politics.” In this sense, his ability to present himself as “effortlessly Korean, effortlessly American” is also what renders him “the most agile actor this land has ever known” (328). Not unlike Bond exposing and thwarting the megalomaniacal Nazi under Drax’s gentlemanly façade,

Henry’s spy work entails identifying the Confucian patriarch underneath Kwang’s public guise as a “lover of the republic” (139). In Native Speaker, the interpreting and

“unveiling” of the ethnic strongman thus provides the site of convergence between the ethnographic imperatives of the ethnic novel and intrigue of the spy novel. Reading

Native Speaker alongside Cumings, it becomes clear that the qualities that make Kwang a compelling spy thriller antagonist (in addition to the unsanctioned financial network and involvement in assassination) are the same qualities that make him a “modal” Korean elder—the same vacillation, for instance, between “ineffable charm” and “utter self- control and dignity” on the one hand, and “outrageous crudity” and “raging insanity” on the other. As a useful template, we might revisit yet another of Cumings’ assessments of

Rhee: “In small doses, Rhee came off as a handsome, warm, charming gentleman; he was a past master of flattery and disarming, endearing use of the democratic symbolism that stirs American hearts. It took a measure of experience with him to disabuse Americans of their first impressions of him” (1990 226).

In many ways, Native Speaker seems to chart a fictional version of this trajectory.

Aside from being a “handsome, warm, charming gentleman,” it is the ineffability of

Kwang’s powerful charm that Henry registers: “Somehow you felt a pin-ache of unneeded love on top of the respect and hope and plain like of him, that little bit of extra feeling that must separate even a good man and politician from a natural leader of people” (132). Henry’s investigation, however, does gradually disabuse him—and the reader—of these early idealized impressions, even as his general admiration persists.

Long before the scandalous twists of the final chapters, Henry’s studied observations of

Kwang reveal an erratic and temperamental disposition, one capable of “high, manic moods” and “the foulest humor” (144). Even early in his assignment, Henry reports that

“I began to see the whip of his temper. One afternoon I watched him shout at his wife,

May, for what seemed ten straight minutes as they sat inside their white sedan. He was shaking his fist so close to her face, which had gone white…Then he stepped from the car and spoke softly to her from the open door, shutting it gently before she drove off” (145).

While such behavior would alarm “rational” American observers, Cumings might argue that the abrupt shift from fist-shaking wrath to soft voice and gentle motion is simply

“what it takes to maintain a patriarchy whose legitimation is purely traditional.”

Furthermore, this glimpse of patriarchal aggression foreshadows a later scene in which a drunk and sullen Kwang, whose career is on the downslopes, takes Henry and Sherrie

(his campaign manager with whom he is also having an affair) to a Korean “hostess bar,” where waitresses are paid to flirt with male patrons. Displaying the fullness of his

“outrageous crudity,” Kwang instructs a young waitress to fawn sexually on an uncomfortable Henry, and when Sherrie protests and tries to leave, he handles her roughly and ends up striking her. Kwang eventually departs with the Korean waitress—

96 later revealed to be an undocumented minor—only to end up in a car accident that puts her in a coma.

With set pieces like this, it almost seems odd that more critics have not addressed

Kwang’s role as a sensationalist thriller villain. Or more precisely, this plot development tends to get registered not in spy novel terms, but in ethnic novel ones, which focus on

Kwang’s structural exclusion from political ascendancy, his individual foibles, or a failure of assimilation.26 In aligning Lee’s characterization of Kwang with Cumings’ accounts of Rhee, I am not suggesting that Native Speaker somehow “confirms”

Cumings’ ethnographic descriptions, or that Lee consciously drew upon Rhee in writing his novel. Rather, by drawing parallels between the figures of the domestic ethnic politician and the foreign ethnic dictator—that is, in positing John Kwang as a sort of allegory for Syngman Rhee—I hope to show how Native Speaker represents ethnic identity as a transnational discursive construction, formed at the contact points between

“Korean American” in the identitarian sense (being a Korean-descended citizen of the

United States) and “Korean-American” in the geopolitical sense (in the longstanding neocolonial relationship between the United States and the Republic of Korea). This approach highlights an important yet overlooked aspect of Lee’s text: its exploration of domestic race politics through the wider prism of empire and international relations, and

26 For Betsy Huang, the trials and tribulations of Kwang’s campaign exposes the “ideological and material imperatives of U.S. citizenship for its ethnic and immigrant subjects, and the kinds of cultural consent…it uncompromisingly demands of them” (246). Liam Corley argues that Kwang’s personal failings of “rage, alcoholism and philandering…is not unlike many of New York’s, and the United States’s, most successful political leaders,” and that his fate is largely the result of “racial exclusion from full enfranchisement and the revanchist features of New York city politics at the time” (68, 80n4); Yoonmee Chang offers, in my opinion, the most convincing assessment: that “underneath his assimilatory sheen Kwang remains irrepressibly Korean” and thus “he remains at the core tied to a world of racial-cultural difference” (173).

97 its participation in what Susan Koshy has termed the “deterritorialization of ethnic identity” (323).27

Fittingly, it is through the mode of the spy novel that Native Speaker’s transnational preoccupations emerge most saliently. Along with the multinational corporations and foreign governments that employ Glimmer & Co., Henry describes the firm’s typical target as “a well-to-do immigrant supporting some potential insurgency in his old land…Sometimes he was simply an agitator. Maybe a writer of conscience. An expatriate artist” (18). As the Kwang-Rhee connection suggests, Henry’s spying out of the domestic ethnic strongman can also be read as the spying out of the global power arrangements that necessitated such strongmen in the first place. Henry states that the

Kwang job began with the standard objective, to “come away with some spice or flavor under my nails…As Hoagland would half-joke, whatever grit of an ethnicity,” before musing, in imagery reminiscent of the recent Mission: Impossible films, “it so happened that one of his faces fell away, and then another, and another, until he revealed to me a final level that would not strip off. The last mask” (141).

Draped in the expressive lyricism of Henry’s narration, the nature of this “last mask,” “the man he beheld in his most private mirror,” is never made explicitly clear

(140). The obvious ethnic novel analyses might point, justifiably, to the fragility of Henry and Kwang’s assimilatory sheen, and how their flawless American speech only tenuously conceals the foreignness and stigma they still feel. Reading through the lens of the spy novel, however, I propose that Lee offers an alternative, yet equally compelling possible meaning for this “final level,” one consonant with the spy genre’s geopolitical optic.

27 Lee’s second novel, A Gesture Life (1999), takes up the transnational valences of US minority subjectivity much more explicitly (and to further critical acclaim), lending credence to the notion that such concerns were present, albeit in a more subdued and nascent form, in his first novel.

Framed around a fairly archetypal spy story scene, it begins with Henry assessing the reams of intelligence he has gathered: “And now I have Kwang. There are scores and scores of his versions scattered about the room, myriad trunks of him, thistling branches, specied and catalogued, a thousand stills of him from every possible angle” (210). Yet

Henry adds that “there is one more version I want to write for Hoagland, for the client, for the entire business of our research. The greater lore that I can now see” (210):

I want to tell them that what they have here is a man named John Kwang, born in Seoul before the last world war, a boy during the Korean one, his family not mercifully sundered or refugeed but obliterated, the coordinates of his home village twice removed from the maps. That he stole away to America as the houseboy of a retiring two-star general. Where he saved enough money to leave the general’s house in Ohio and go to New York. Where he named himself John. Where he was beaten nearly to death and robbed of all his savings. Where he worked in a Chinatown noodle shop and slept outside next to the steam vent and awoke one morning to see that his feet had turned almost black with the cold. Where he knew hunger again, that unforgettable taste of his other country. Where, desperate as he was, he took to stealing from others, one of them a young priest who saw something to salvage and took him to a Catholic orphanage. Where he first went to a real school and learned to read and write and speak his new home language. And where he began to think of America as a part of him, maybe even his, and this for me was the crucial leap of his character, deep flaw or not, the leap of his identity no one in our work would find valuable but me. (211)

In his capacity as a writer-spy who composes “remote, unauthorized biographies,” what

Henry submits here is nothing less than the “final level” of Kwang’s origin, which tethers his American success story to the violent history of postcolonial Korea (18). Behind the

“greater lore” of Kwang’s Horatio Alger-esque triumph over privation, urban violence and working-class toil, Lee’s novel reminds us, are the U.S. military interventions that compelled his immigration in the first place, a fact underscored by his passage at the hands of an American general. While Kwang’s birth in the South Korean capital of Seoul further links him to the lived memory of Syngman Rhee, the circumstances of his

99 family’s obliteration alludes to the relentless American bombing campaign against the north during the war, aimed precisely at the wholesale removal of cities, villages, and just about any standing structure from the maps.28

In this manner, Lee’s novel accords with Jodi Kim’s pronouncement about Asian

America’s violent conditions of possibility, that “We are here because you were there”

(2010 12). This “last mask” that Henry uncovers, I would proffer, isn’t so much an

“identity” or even a “culture,” but what he calls “the greater truths…spanning human event and time” that is the general pattern of U.S. imperialism as it plays out through a montage of bombings, the movements of two-star generals, refugees, ethnic ghettoes such as Chinatowns, and the beneficence of the Catholic orphanage system (206).29 As I had previously shown, the demographics of Kwang’s very campaign is made possible by the history of American policies toward the Third World, driven by the ideological imperatives of containment and integration, and immigration reforms like the Hart-Celler

Act. Put another way, where Native Speaker’s ethnic novel plot foregrounds an emergent racial milieu comprised of “these various platoons of Koreans, Indians, Vietnamese,

Haitians, Colombians, Nigerians,” its spy novel plot draws our attention to the official

U.S. dealings with Korea, India, Vietnam, Haiti, Colombia and Nigeria that enable such domestic formations, often involving those other, more literal “platoons.”

By this same token, the multiracial immigrant landscape that Lee’s novel imagines is one shadowed by the myriad histories of foreign ethnic dictators who, like

Rhee, have played crucial roles in facilitating and mediating these transnational currents.

One of Henry’s previous assignments, for instance, was a Filipino psychoanalyst and

28 See Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun, 293-298.

29 See Klein and Jodi Kim for readings of transnational adoption in relation to Cold War ideologies.

100 expatriate supporter of Ferdinand Marcos. Other examples appear more subtly, such as

Kwang’s Dominican American protégée Eduardo, whose slain body calls to mind the exceptionally brutal U.S.-backed regime of Rafael Trujillo (which I explore in the next chapter). In another allusive episode, Henry recounts how he managed to placate a

“rowdy assemblage” of Peruvian laborers protesting outside Kwang’s offices, and even sending them off “carrying John-inscribed pennants and bumper stickers, oven mitts and disposable lighters” (86). When the news cameras arrive, the gathered Peruvians wave at them, and “the small crowd that had gathered in the street joined in, jumping in at the lens. Encores of flags. Fingers saying number uno” (86, emphasis in original). While mostly likely unintended by Lee, the image of a Peruvian crowd enthusiastically cheering a politician of East Asian descent evokes the controversial and authoritarian presidency of Peru’s Alberto Fuijmori.30 Cast against this context of international dictatorships, the notion of “John Kwang’s people” and “all those parts of Queens that he was now calling his” take on a starker dimension, connoting less so a multiracial democratic collective than a “traditional” Confucian village-family welded together by a charismatic leader.

The chosen language of Kwang’s detractors reinforce this idea: a news report describes the councilman as “steadily building an ‘empire’ from his ‘ethnic base’ in northern

Queens,” while the incumbent mayor admonishes on television that “This isn’t the Third

World…Americans make up their own minds (301, 149).

Fittingly, the association of Kwang’s political enterprise with a despotic “Third

World,” as opposed to the polity of proper Americans, reaches its logical conclusion

30 While Marcos’ rule over the Philippines (1965-1986) represents a standard Cold War anticommunist alliance, the dates of Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic (1930-1961) and Fujimori’s presidency in Peru (1990-2000) remind us that such power arrangements exceed the temporal framework of the Cold War, and in fact demonstrate the degree to which Cold War ideology is just an extension of longstanding American imperialism.

101 through Native Speaker’s spy narrative. After replacing Eduardo as organizer of Kwang’s large ggeh, Henry purloins and delivers a list of its participants to Glimmer & Co., who then passes it on to their clients, revealed to be the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization

Service. With the information therein, the INS is able to arrest and deport dozens of illegal immigrants, and the ensuing public scandal serves as the final blow to Kwang’s public image and political career. Despite the transnational orientation of Glimmer &

Co.’s operations, Henry’s spy mission turns out to be fairly conventional, insofar as it involves shoring up the efficacy of the U.S. state and preventing the foreign subversion of domestic power structures. In its depiction of Kwang as a volatile Syngman Rhee-like figure holding American office—an allegorical arrival of the comprador dictator upon the imperial center, building an “empire” from an “ethnic base”—Lee’s novel imagines this subversion as a contamination of “liberal” or “Lockean” American democratic processes by “Confucian” or “Third World” political forms (for Cumings, such a contamination already carries the tinge of a real-world narrative possibility, in the influence of Rhee’s

“visceral” Oriental Machiavellianism upon American politicians like Richard Nixon).

Throughout this chapter, I have attempted to show how the structures, conventions and characterizations of the spy narrative operate as a kind of discursive fulcrum, accentuating the ethnographic dimensions of Cumings’ historiographical project and the historiographical dimensions of Lee’s ethnographic project. In this respect, I concur with Wai Chee Dimock’s conception of genres as strategically constructed “fields of knowledge,” which are “best seen not flatly, as the enactment of one set of legislative norms, but as an alternation between dimensions, mediated vectors of up and down, front and back, in and out” (1380). It is precisely by highlighting Lee’s engagement with genre

102 fiction, I argue, that we might more fully apprehend the multiplicity of its epistemological vectors—as a lauded “artful meditation on ethnic identity,” undeniably, but as also, variously: a memorialization of “histories that all of us should know,” a transnational chronicle of Korea and Korean America within the wider dramas of international politics, a critique of the global and domestic orders of U.S. hegemony, an allegorical “dictator novel,” and most straightforwardly, a “not-entirely-plausible political spy thriller.”

Given its ending, and the attendant expressions of guilt and melancholy, it is no surprise that a degree of pessimism tends to pervade critical assessments of Lee’s novel.

In betraying Kwang, Henry also brings to ruin a man he had grown to admire and respect, and whose political dream he had genuinely come to believe in. The novel ends with

Henry managing an uneasy reconciliation with his wife, quitting Glimmer & Co. to work as her assistant in teaching English to immigrant children. As critics have pointed out, the novel leaves little room for imagining alternative possibilities to the structural and cultural inequities that prove such a psychic burden to Henry, and that give no quarter to a political vision like Kwang’s. By the final pages, the mood seems to remain largely one of resignation, and political and subjective impasse.31 Rather, this is especially true if one reads Native Speaker exclusively through the prism of ethnic immigrant literatures. I would now like to conclude with some further remarks on Lee’s engagement with genre, and how a maximal approach to the novel as a spy novel can prove expansive for its

31 For examples of this pessimistic outlook, see the analyses by Betsy Huang, Yoonmee Chang and Min Song.

103 meditations on ethnic identity. While the novel’s self-reflexivity and formal innovation have drawn the greater share of critical attention, its narrative is also certainly not without an appreciable degree of intrigue, high stakes and mortal danger.32 Aside from the fatal office firebombing, other such “thrilling” scenes include a public speech disrupted by smoke bombs, Henry being chloroformed and abducted by his own colleagues after compromising an earlier assignment, and the episode at the hostess bar, which erupts into fisticuffs when Henry intervenes by tackling and restraining Kwang. As Chang-rae Lee himself has averred in an interview: “I wanted to widen the stage in which my character was going to act…I wanted to put him in harm’s way, or at some kind of risk, so that he would have to put himself on the line…” (6).33

Here I would propose that the widened stage Lee erects includes not only physical or geographical spaces, but also, in the spirit of Dimock, a widened literary terrain, or interpretative “field” that genre fiction offers. At the most basic level, Henry’s mission— however much anguish and ambivalence and crisis of identity he bears in its execution— involves the successful exposure and thwarting of clandestine activities operating outside state sanction, activities which are the brainchild of a charismatic and megalomaniacal strongman . In more ways than one, Kwang’s ggeh can be read as analogous to Drax’s

Moonraker rocket in Fleming’s novel. It is the “secret plot” that, when discovered, clarifies all the other turns of intrigue: Eduardo’s murder, Kwang’s memorization of extensive voter lists, furtive whispers about “the disposition of certain funds” (200, emphasis in original). Equally significant is the idea of the ggeh as a reparative for past

32 In this sense, I read against the assessment of Crystal Parikh and Tina Chen, who regard Native Speaker as lacking the adventure elements that characterize a spy narrative.

33 Interview with Sarah Anne Johnson in The Writer’s Chronicle (2005).

104 injury or aggrievement; from this vantage, it might be seen as the vehicle of Kwang’s highly personal retribution, forging a “family of thousands” to replace the one obliterated by American bombs (326).34 Finally, Kwang’s ggeh also resembles Drax’s weapon as a potent cultural signifier, asserting Kwang’s connection to an “authentic” Korean history and folk practice, just as the Moonraker rocket calls to mind the infamous V-2 rocket program associated with Nazi Germany and the ingenuities of “German engineering.”

Yet even with these similarities, Lee also takes deliberate pains to situate his literary project against Fleming’s outsized legacy. When Henry first reveals his profession to the reader, he begins, “In a phrase, we were spies. But the sound of that is all wrong…We pledged allegiance to no government. We weren’t ourselves political creatures. We weren’t patriots. Even less, heroes” (17). Expanding upon these provisos, he draws from a familiar repertoire of Fleming-esque elements, only to repudiate them:

“Guns spooked us…We knew nothing of weaponry, torture, psychological warfare, extortion, electronics, supercomputers, explosives. Never anything like that” (17). These remarks presage a later moment in which Henry and Leila watch a movie on television,

“a new technothriller stocked with laser-guided weapons, gunboats, all flavors of machismo. Muscular agents. Give us The Third Man, we decide, give us The Manchurian

Candidate and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” (244). Through this self-reflexive commentary on the production and consumption of spy thrillers, Lee distances his work from the genre’s latter-day excesses while evincing a nostalgic affinity for certain canonical Cold War texts (even though Henry speaks of their film adaptations). This

34 Lee’s novel does make a strong case for this idea, as seen in Henry’s private remarks to a hypothetical supplicant during his stewardship of Kwang’s ggeh: “I want to see the fleshed shape of the need, I want to know the blood you’ve lost, or that someone has stolen, or tricked from you, the blood you desperately want back from the world” (281).

105 moment is also instructive for the way it hints at the specific kind of spy narrative that

Lee’s own novel seeks to “give us,” with the key reference being, I would contend, John le Carré’s influential The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963). If Henry is, by his own admission, a far cry from James Bond, he shares far more in common with the protagonist of a le Carré novel: cynical, disillusioned, morally exhausted and professionally out of his depth. The reader learns that Henry’s assignment to Kwang comes on the heels of a disastrous operation where, dogged by the recent torments of his personal life, he had “nearly blown cover” (21). In a particularly le Carré-like twist,

Henry learns that Eduardo was also an agent planted by Glimmer & Co., and that the

“something damning” he uncovered in the ggeh had been the true objective all along, with his reports and daily registers being merely “trivial prose” (225, 334).

Although I have made the case that select elements of Lee’s novel indeed seem

“ripped from the pages of Ian Fleming,” in the end it is perhaps the work of le Carré— with its psychological and moral complexities and understated depiction of espionage— that more accurately conveys the novel’s conception of its own literary, or at least generic, aspirations. From this angle, the echoes of le Carré’s 1979 novel Smiley’s People in the phrase “John Kwang’s people,” whether intended by Lee or not, becomes highly suggestive for the novel’s vision of multiethnic collectivity. The pertinent resonance, however, is not with Kwang’s campaign, but the novel’s other multiethnic coalition, the spy agency. Michelle Rhee captures the agonism between the two multicultural formations, observing that “Glimmer and Company represents one vicious form of multiculturalism outdoing and undoing another kind of multiculturalism” (164). To be

106 sure, Lee foregrounds his imagined intelligence firm as an alternative multicultural space, though equally connected to an emergent globalism:

Each of us engaged our own kind, more or less. Foreign workers, immigrants, first-generationals, neo-Americans. I worked with Koreans, Pete with Japanese. We split up the rest, the Chinese, Laotians, Singaporans, Filipinos, the whole transplanted Pacific Rim. Grace handled Eastern Europe; Jack, the Mediterranean and Middle East; the two Jimmys, Baptiste and Perez, Central America and Africa…Dennis Hoagland had established the firm in the mid seventies, when another influx of newcomers was arriving. He said he knew a growth industry when he saw one; and there were no other firms with any ethnic coverage to speak of. The same reason the CIA had such shoddy intelligence in nonwhite countries (18).

Even more explicitly than the urban masses of Kwang’s following, Glimmer & Co.’s genesis is rooted in the post-1965 “influx” of immigrants, with its unique brand of

“ethnic coverage” metonymically linked to CIA activities in “nonwhite countries.” Its multicultural personnel also resembles the diversity—after a fashion—that characterizes le Carré’s tight-knit “Circus” (his euphemism for Britain’s MI6), where the generically

English Smiley works alongside the lowland Scottish Alleline, the Hungarian émigré

Esterhase, the vaguely cockney Bland, and the half-French Guillam. In this way, Lee’s novel inhabits the spy novel trope of the “firm” as an alternative site of multicultural belonging, where one’s loyalty to the syndicate transcends ethnic group, government or political affiliations. In a related vein, the agency also functions as an important node of individual subject-formation, with Henry admitting at one point that “I had become more like Hoagland than I would have liked to admit. My years with him and the rest of them, even good Jack, had somehow colored me funny, marked me” (21).

The extent to which the novel imagines Glimmer & Co. as a foil to Kwang’s political vision is accentuated in a conversation with “good Jack”—Jack Kalantzakos,

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Henry’s only close friend at the agency—in which Jack suggests “We are brothers, yes,

Greek and Korean? Like it or not, Parky, ours is a family. Pete, Grace, the Jimmys. Me and you. I know it is a sad excuse for one, but what else do we have?” (292, emphasis mine) Much like Kwang’s multiethnic family, Hoagland’s “sad excuse” for one is forged in the furnace of geopolitics: the notion of Greeks and Koreans being “brothers,” for instance, can be read as an allusion to the Truman Doctrine, under which U.S. aid to contain communism in Greece and Turkey became the basis for its subsequent “positive action” policies in Korea.35 Elsewhere, Henry links his Japanese American colleague Pete

Ichibata to the memory of Korea’s colonial past, musing how “My mother, in her hurt, invaded Korean way, would have counseled me to distrust him, this clever Japanese”

(15).36 Although Henry retorts “It’s an orphanage, Jack…And there’s a Fagin,” the two positions are not mutually exclusive, and Henry’s nod to Dickens actually heightens their commonalities (292). As seen in my earlier analysis, Kwang’s political family is also one comprised of the transnational orphans of empire, with Kwang no less a “Fagin”—in fact,

Henry’s invocation of an “orphanage” reminds us that Kwang himself emerged, a family- less refugee, from the Catholic orphanage system before building his political family.

Even though the pressures of Henry’s conscience eventually compel him to resign from Glimmer & Co., this does not necessarily exhaust the agency’s viability as a source

35 See Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun (2005): 210. This is also supported in Native Speaker by Jack’s backstory, in which he spent much of his younger years in Greece doing piecemeal jobs for the CIA.

36 The character of Pete Ichibata is a fascinating one, and prefigures, I would argue, a distinct “type” that recurs in Lee’s subsequent works. Henry describes him as a relentless and demonically efficient spy, who was “a kind of anti-therapist, a professional who steadily ruined you session by session...a one-man crisis of faith,” and whose preferred method with a subject was to “actively seek out his weaknesses, expose and use them to take him apart, limb from limb, cell by cell” (173). If the words of Henry’s mother posits Pete as a sort of national allegory of Imperial Japan from a “hurt, invaded” Korean perspective, this is reinforced by the historical narratives in Lee’s later novels A Gesture Life (1999) and The Surrendered (2010), both of which feature a cruel Imperial Japanese officer who proves brutally adept at psychologically dismantling others, as well as literally dismembering their bodies.

108 of communal and identificatory possibility. In considerable ways, I would suggest, the intelligence firm remains the novel’s most sustainable vision of “family,” at least compared to the alternatives. Henry likens his eventual reunion with Leila to a provisional arrangement: “We play this game in which I am her long-term guest.

Permanently visiting. That she likes me okay and bears my presence, but who can know for how long?” (347) This proves a striking contrast with the novel’s other depiction of a romantic pairing between an Asian American man and a white woman: the affair between

Henry’s fellow agents Pete and Grace, which had developed, almost Ian Fleming-like, during an undercover assignment in the Bahamas. Observing their rapport over a dinner meeting, Henry notes how “Pete makes fun of her, tells her she eats like a white woman.

Grace says she is a white woman…Pete shovels back the noodles as fast as he can bear their heat. All the while Grace nudges him to slow down. They bicker and flirt and handle each other. They even kiss” (317). As a vignette of easy interracial affection—with due emphasis on Grace’s status as a “white woman”—the Pete-Grace romance suggests a certain “effortless” affiliation that the world of the spy agency offers, transcending not only ethnic divides, but also personal-professional ones. It also bears noting that Henry is there to hand over the list of Kwnag’s ggeh, framing this scene around that most standard of spy narrative rituals: “We are serious in the spook play, playing as we are…Pete stares at me and says in the most even voice: ‘You brought what you were supposed to?’ I nod.

Grace quietly finishes her soup. We are friends again, after a fashion” (319).

Such scenes direct our attention to the other identity conflict that beguiles Henry throughout Native Speaker: between his respective identifications with “John Kwang’s people” and “Hoagland’s people.” Couched within a series of authorship metaphors, this

109 division also parallels Lee’s negotiation between being a writer of ethnic fiction and a writer of spy fiction. While working on the member list of Kwang’s ggeh, Henry imagines that “I am writing a new book of the land…And the more I see and remember the more their story is the same. The story is mine. How I come by plane, come by boat.

Come climbing over a fence…Now, too, I have lost the old mother tongue. And I forget the ancestral graves I have left on a hillside of a faraway land, the loneliest stones that each year go unblessed” (279). Contrary to these notes of unbelonging and loss, it is as a spy that Henry’s ethnic identity becomes a source of exuberance rather than encumbrance, “the perfect vocation for the person I was, someone who could reside in his one place and take half-steps out whenever he wished…I found a sanction from our work, for I thought I had finally found my truest place in the culture” (127). He recalls the excitement of an early training assignment with Pete, working a Chinese dissident named Wen: “I was enjoying myself. I was thrilled with what we were doing, as with a discovery, like finding a new place you like, or a good book. I felt explicitly that secret living I’d known throughout my life, but now for the first time it took the form of a bizarre sanction being with Pete and Wen. We laughed heartily together. We three thieves American” (175, emphasis mine). Beneath this stolen glimmer of pan-ethnic harmony, we are reminded, remains an undercurrent of intrigue and danger—for Wen, ultimately, if not Henry and Pete—providing the requisite “thrill” that is every spy story’s objective.

In these moments of figurative book-writing, Lee foregrounds the productive coexistence between the imperatives of the ethnic novel (memorializing the travails of the immigrant masses and their lost mother tongues, unblessed gravestones and faraway

110 lands) and the spy novel’s “sanction” (delivering “enjoyment” and “thrills,” via “secret living,” bombs, clandestine plots, maniacal villains, and even—in Pete and Grace’s case—exotic locales and co-spy romances). In this way, Lee conceives of his novel as much more than a “vessel” for “histories that all of us should know”; more pertinently, it is a hybrid “new book of the land” with which to think through configurations of ethnic identity, family, transnational memory and the simple “enjoyment” of genre forms. In this light, it should come as no surprise that Lee’s latest novel, On Such a Full Sea

(2014), is a dystopian science fiction narrative that explores contemporary anxieties regarding class stratification and mass transnational migration. In his review of the novel for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Min Song begins with a highly apposite reflection on Lee’s career-inaugurating engagement with genre narratives, and namely the novelty of Native Speaker’s take on the spy thriller. As Song surmises, “No one, I suspect, has ever shelved this novel in the same bookstore section as Casino Royale or Tinker, Tailor,

Soldier, Spy.”37 For all his praise of Lee’s experiment, Song’s remark serves the

(familiar) critical posture of noting the dissonance between Lee’s novel and the highly conventionalized genre with which it improvises. Nonetheless, one of my implicit aims in this chapter—and at the end of the last one—has been to wonder how doing just such a thing might open up new contours, perspectives and formulations for ethnic American literary production. In both Native Speaker and Black Power, furthermore, a certain generically protean quality is signaled by the figure of the ethnic dictator, who also represents the forceful welding of disparate epistemologies, discourses and hermeneutic frames (Africa and the “West,” the Cold War and decolonization, diasporic memoir and spy narratives, spy narratives and ethnic writing, Korean and American “national

37 See Min Song’s “Between Genres: On Chang-rae Lee’s Realism” (2014).

111 ontologies,” historiography and ethnography, just to name a few). My next chapter illustrates how this logic is stretched to a stylistic extreme in Junot Diaz’s The Brief

Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Of all the works in this study, Diaz’s novel is the one that addresses theme of dictatorship most directly and prominently; to this end, it is also the most self-reflexively preoccupied with the relationships between dictators, writers, and genres as multivalent “fields of knowledge.”

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CHAPTER THREE

Literary Caudillos: Junot Diaz and the Latino/a American Dictator Novel

“You must remember…that there is a little of Trujillo in every Dominican.” –quoted in Howard J. Wiarda and Michael J. Kryzanek, “Dominican Dictatorship Revisited: The Caudillo Tradition and the Regimes of Trujillo and Balaguer”

“Dictatorships are pantheistic. The dictator manages to plant a little piece of himself in every one of us.” –Julia Alvarez, In the Time of the Butterflies

“Ten million Trujillos is all we are.” –Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

The quotations above express an insight that, for the most part, might be considered neither novel nor provocative: that, along with the modern Dominican

Republic, modern Dominican identity has been profoundly shaped by the long dictatorship of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo (1930-1961), widely recognized to be one of the most brutal and notorious regimes in Latin American history. The first epigraph, attributed to an unnamed “prominent Dominican historian and politician,” appears in a

1977 scholarly article linking Trujillo’s rule to a broader “Caudillo Tradition” in Latin

American politics.1 The second comes from Julia Alvarez’s celebrated historical novel In

1 The Spanish term caudillo translates to English roughly as leader or chief, but also more commonly—and pejoratively—as dictator, warlord or strongman. The word has roots in the Latin capitellum, the diminutive of caput or head, and generally describes an authoritarian political-military leader (the Merriam Webster Dictionary defines it as simply “a Spanish or Latin American military dictator”). While the term has a broad historical resonance in the Hispanic tradition, stretching back to the conquest of the New World, the Reconquista and even to military figures of classical antiquity, its modern usage, and the attendant concept of caudillismo, has been most commonly associated with the military strongmen who arose during the Latin American wars of independence in the early nineteenth century. By and large, these men were charismatic militia leaders who were able to seize and maintain political power by mustering a degree of

113 the Time of the Butterflies (1994), a fictionalized account of the Mirabal sisters, political dissidents who were assassinated for their vocal opposition to the Trujillo regime. For a time, Alvarez’s was perhaps the best-known work by an American novelist to address this period of Dominican history, at least until the stratospheric acclaim that greeted the

2007 publication Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Chronicling the fates and (mis)fortunes of a fictional Dominican American family from New Jersey, as well as the family's intertwined history with the violence of the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, Diaz’s novel offers its own spin on this widely-acknowledged trope of Dominican identity, as seen in the third epigraph above. Unlike the other comments that frame Trujillo’s legacy in terms of “little” pieces parceled out to and borne individually, by “every Dominican” and “every one of us,” Diaz’s iteration dramatically expands the sense of scale, to the amassed and undiluted “ten million

Trujillos” that characterize the Dominican people tout court. At the same time, his formulation also effects a diminuitizing and even reductive gesture, in its illustration of the Dominican people as a population of Trujillos-in-miniature—Trujillitos, as the implicit term might be—and the insinuation that this represents something primary about

Dominican identity, and that over and above everything else it is “all” they are.

Even more crucial, for the purposes of my discussion, is that in Diaz's novel these words are spoken not by a native Dominican who has experienced the lived reality of the

Trujillo regime, but rather a Dominican American born in the United States some years after the regime had ended. For Diaz, the reverberations of the Trujillo dictatorship reach beyond the geographic bounds of the Dominican nation-state to envelop the members of

populist support. For a thorough introduction to the topic, see Caudillos: Dictators in Spanish America (1992).

114 its diaspora, as well as beyond the temporal bounds of its historical eventness and unto subsequent generations. Finally, as we can see in the epigraphic trajectory—from Wiarda and Kryzanek's anonymous native informant to the works of Alvarez and Diaz—the idea of Trujillo as a cipher for Dominicanness is one that straddles the discursive realms between history and political science, on the one hand, and literature, on the other.2 This chapter takes the notion that “ten million Trujillos is all we are" as its starting point, and asks what follows from this relation, and how it prefigures the complex set of questions regarding the relationship between dictatorship, identity and collective subject-formation.

More specifically, I investigate how the symbolic resonance of the dictator figure animates not only the explorations of Dominican and Dominican American identity in

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, but the novel's efforts to imagine a panethnic

Latino/a identity as well. Central to Diaz's approach to the often vexing and elusive concept of a Pan-Latino/a label I will further show, is his engagement with the idea of a panethnic literary history, which his novel likewise connects to the discourses and rhetorics of dictatorship. Just as dictators like Trujillo are seen to hold sway over and give coherence to a nation, polity, or peoples, Diaz's text illustrates how a similar authoritarian impulse drives the creation of a "canonical" Latino/a literary tradition out of its disparate constituent parts. By the end of the chapter, I will have touched upon two aspects that has been largely ignored by the prolific critical commentary on Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous

Life of Oscar Wao: namely, how the figure of the dictator plays a central role in the novel’s conception of Dominicanness as a literary identity, and how this literary identity serves as an intervention into debates about Latino/a panethnicity.

2 See Ignacio López-Calvo’s God and Trujillo: Literary and Cultural Representations of the Dominican Dictator (2005).

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II.

At the center of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, of course, is the titular

Oscar, a Dominican American young man whose real name is Oscar de León. Growing in up in New Jersey in the 1970s and 1980s, Oscar is a stereotypical "nerd"—bookish and lovesick, his two driving obsessions in life are “the Genres,” which include science fiction, fantasy, comic books and role-playing games, and an aching desire to find true love (20). Oscar’s romantic longings are perpetually thwarted by his homely appearance

(particularly his obesity) and general social awkwardness, which in turn contribute to his pervasive sense of alienation from an “authentic” Dominican identity. In addition, readers are also introduced to Oscar’s assertive and independent older sister, Lola, their domineering and forceful mother Belicia, and Yunior, Oscar’s onetime college roommate and Lola’s sometime boyfriend, who is also revealed to be the novel's narrator. The reader also learns how, as a teenager, Oscar’s mother had been savagely beaten and left for dead by agents of Trujillo’s regime, prompting her to flee the Dominican Republic for

New York to become “the Empress of Diaspora” (106). The novel also devotes several chapters to the story of Oscar’s grandfather Abelard Cabral, an affluent and respectable doctor who was wrongfully imprisoned by Trujillo, and as a result lost his sanity and languished into an anonymous death.

Even before we meet this principal cast, however, Diaz insists that the “wonder” of Oscar’s life cannot be understood without first grasping the historical forces that have produced him. With the novel’s opening lines, Diaz invokes the long history of domination in the Western Hemisphere that begins with first contact, and colonialism:

They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished

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and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles. Fukú americanus, or more colloquially, fukú —generally a curse or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World”…it is believed that the arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed the fukú on the world, and we’ve all been in the shit ever since. Santo Domingo might be fukú’s Kilometer Zero, its port of entry, but we are all of us its children, whether we know it or not. (1-2)

It is against the backdrop of this deeper context, as the manifestation of a primordial curse, that the dictator Rafael Trujillo emerges as a pivotal figure in the novel’s dramatis personae. Drawing a direct line from the bloody history of enslaved Africans and decimated Tainos at the hands of Columbus, “the Admiral,” to the twentieth century horrors of the Dominican Republic under Trujillo, Diaz introduces the dictator as a

“hypeman of sorts” or “high priest” to the fukú: “No one knows whether Trujillo was the

Curse’s servant or its master, its agent or its principal, but it was clear he and it had an understanding, that them two was tight” (2-3). Framed as a folk metaphor for the historical and contemporary relations of oppression in the Americas, the concept of fukú becomes a key hermeneutic through which Diaz invites us to read the story of Oscar and his family, who are imagined as the bearers of a hereditary curse that has afflicted the entirety of the Dominican Republic.

Moreover, the framing device of fukú allows Diaz to couch his exploration of

Dominican and Dominican diasporic identity within a larger, ongoing hemispheric pattern of conquest, domination and hegemony—within what certain decolonial theorists have termed the “coloniality of power.” For scholars such as Anibal Quijano and Walter

Mignolo, the coloniality of power describes the world-system that came into being following the European colonization of the Americas during in 16th century. During this period, the colonizers created and imposed hierarchal orders of race, class, labor and

117 gender relations that prescribed value to certain peoples and societies while subordinating others. In particular, while Europe was imagined as the standard-bearer for civilization, progress and reason, non-European peoples were placed at the bottom of racial hierarchies and deemed intrinsically inferior and primitive. These hierarchical arrangements would outlive formal colonialism and become integrated into succeeding social orders, and are directly connected to the myriad forms of discrimination and disenfranchisement experienced in contemporary societies. Mignolo argues, in fact, that coloniality must be seen as constitutive of modernity itself, the dark underside that is also its condition of possibility, from which springs such features of modernity as capitalist modes of production, Enlightenment rationality, scientific discourses and the nation-state.

Importantly, as Mignolo goes on to contend, both Latin Americans and Latino/as in the

United States have been mutually, though differently, relegated to subordinate and inferior positions in relation to Europe and Anglo-America.3

From this perspective, the trope of fukú— as “the Curse and the Doom of the

New World”—signals the multiple axes of its characters’ "New World" experiences, as

Dominicans, U.S. Latino/as, and general members of the Wretched of the Earth. To be sure, Diaz’s novel does associate fukú with a uniquely Dominican heritage—as seen in its unique “understanding” and “tightness” with Trujillo, as well as Santo Domingo’s status as “fukú’s Kilometer Zero, its port of entry.” Yet at other points, the concept of fukú also comes to register a wider hemispheric experience shared by a multiplicity of nations and peoples, who are all its “children." Combing through internet discussion threads on the

3 For more on the coloniality of power, see Anibal Quijano and Michael Ennis’ “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America” (2000); Walter Mignolo’s The Idea of Latin America (2005) and Coloniality: The Darker Side of Modernity (2009). For detailed readings of Diaz's novel through the this lens, see José David Saldívar’s “Conjectures on “Americanity” and Junot Díaz's “Fukú Americanus” in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” (2012), and also Anne Garland Mahler’s “The Writer as Superhero: Fighting the Colonial Curse in Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” (2010).

118 topic, the narrator reports that fukú stories came “not just from Domos,” but that “the

Puertorocks want to talk about fufus, and the Hatians have some shit just like it,” reminding us of the curse’s trans-American provenance (6).

The transnational dimensions of fukú become even more salient, furthermore, in its function as shorthand for dictatorial figures like Trujillo. In the first of the novel’s many footnotes, the narrator provides a lengthy explanatory primer on the Dominican dictator, “for those of you who missed your mandatory two seconds of Dominican history” (2). Describing Trujillo’s regime as “one of the longest, most damaging U.S.- backed dictatorships in the Western Hemisphere,” the narrator takes care to add that “if we Latin types are skillful at anything it’s tolerating U.S.-backed dictators, so you know this was a hard-earned victory, the chilenos and argentinos are still appealing” (3). With this pointed aside that names-without-naming, Diaz casts the travails of the Dominican

Republic under Trujillo as akin to—though ultimately surpassing—other close-contest cases such as Chile under Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) and Argentina under Jorge

Rafael Videla and the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (1976-1983), envisioning a hemispheric and pan-ethnic affiliation shaped primarily by the sufferance of military strongmen and U.S. geopolitical meddling. At various points, Diaz’s text even broadens this identificatory gesture beyond “we Latin types” to encompass a larger global view. In the same footnote, the narrator underscores Trujillo’s creation of “the first modern kleptocracy” by musing that “Trujillo was Mobutu before Mobutu was Mobutu,” referring to Mobutu Sese Seko, the notorious President of Zaire (now the Democratic

Republic of the Congo) from 1965 to 1997. As U.S.-backed and destructive a dictator as any, Mobutu was similarly “tolerated” by the Congolese, while being one of many such

119 despots to plague postcolonial Africa. Elsewhere the novel adopts a more region-specific orientation in its acknowledgement of “that other Caribbean nightmare, the Haitian dictator François 'Papa Doc' Duvalier," whom the narrator posits as a sort of parallel to

Trujillo by nicknaming him "P. Daddy," in a similar vein to “T-zillo,” "T-illo," and the numerous other glib monikers he reserves for the Dominican dictator (111, 110, 225).

While both Mobutu and Duvalier certainly enjoy reputations for terror and malevolence that are arguably on par with Trujillo's, it is not my intention here to draw hasty equivalences, and elide the vast differences between peoples, nations, historical backgrounds and political contexts that produced such figures. More simply, I want to suggest that these comparative moments illuminate the transnational vision behind the novel's contextualization of the Trujillo dictatorship, as one node among many within the world-system erected by the coloniality of power. Here the constellation of Trujillo alongside Duvalier—though a minute, passing detail in the text—proves especially meaningful, reminding readers of the intertwined histories of the two nations that share the island of Hispaniola. Rather than focusing on the well-documented antagonism between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, the novel emphasizes their mutual experiences of oppression, often at the hands of their own nefarious leaders—and by implication, their geopolitical commonalities as thralls to U.S. imperial power.4 To borrow the language of the fukú mythos, we might regard the two Caribbean nightmares,

“T-zillo” and “P. Daddy,” as having emerged through the same “nightmare door that was

4 Nonetheless, Diaz's novel does draw plenty of attention to the longstanding antagonism between the peoples of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Several references are made to Trujillo's own virulent anti- Haitian views, culminating in the Parsley Massacre in October 1937, in which tens of thousands of Haitians and Haitian-Dominicans were murdered along the border regions (an event dramatized in Edwidge Danticat's 1998 novel The Farming of Bones). Diaz's novel also makes explicit the widespread prejudice against Haitians prevalent in both the Dominican Republic and the Dominican diaspora. For an in-depth analysis of this contentious history, see Michele Wucker’s Why the Cocks Fight (2000).

120 cracked open in the Antilles” when Europeans arrived on their shared island. Indeed, even as Diaz's novel proclaims Santo Domingo as “fukú's Kilometer Zero,” it might be argued that the Haitians, with their “shit just like it,” can assert an equal, if not greater legitimacy as fukú's immediate heirs, given their direct descent from those very enslaved whose screams first carried forth the Curse from Africa.5

Read in this light, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao dramatically reinterprets Julia Alvarez's claim that “dictatorships are pantheistic,” in its location of

Trujillo among a veritable “pantheon” of dictators who personifies some of the more conventionally political, visible and nakedly brutal forms that the coloniality of power has assumed in the modern era. Interestingly, even the novel's vision of liberatory opposition draws upon the symbolic import of charismatic strongmen, the most familiar examples being the scattered references to “Fidel and Revolutionary Crew,” and the prominent “book-loving argentine” (Che Guevara) among their ranks (97). Later in the novel, a footnote relates the history of the Taino chieftain Hatüey, whose ferocious battle against European conquest in the Caribbean—“When the Spaniards were committing

First Genocide in the Dominican Republic”—prompts the narrator to liken him to a

“Taino Ho Chi Minh,” as well as a precursor to the nineteenth century Dominican-Cuban independence leader Máximo Gómez (212). Linking these disparate individuals and their campaigns across a centuries- and continents- spanning continuum, Diaz's novel situates

Dominican identity within a global dialectic of (neo)colonial oppression and anticolonial

5 To this day, Haiti carries the distinction of being the world's first and only nation-state established as the result of a successful slave revolt. In this way, the concept of fukú also partakes of the ship-based chronotope Paul Gilroy elucidates in his study of the Black Atlantic.

121 struggle, anchored at both ends by figures who, if not outright authoritarians, at least bear authoritarian connotations.6

The correlation between Hatüey and Ho Chi Minh as icons of resistance also foregrounds the specific geopolitical backdrop against which Diaz writes this identity, in which the United States has succeeded the European powers as the primary agent of the coloniality of power, and its myriad forms and apparatuses of domination. On a more subtle register, the comparison also recalls the novel's introductory remarks on fukú, which posits nothing less than a Dominican origin for the U.S. defeat in Vietnam:

How about Vietnam? Why do you think the greatest power in the world lost its first war to a Third World country like Vietnam? I mean, Negro, please. It might interest you that just as the U.S. was ramping up its involvement in Vietnam, LBJ launched an illegal invasion of the Dominican Republic (April 28, 1965). (Santo Domingo was Iraq before Iraq was Iraq.) A smashing military success for the U.S., and many of the same units and intelligence teams that took part in the "democratization" of Santo Domingo were immediately shipped off to Saigon. What do you think these soldiers, technicians, and spooks carried with them, in their rucks, in their suitcases, in their shirt pockets, on the hair inside their nostrils, caked up around their shoes? Just a little gift from my people to America, a small repayment for an unjust war. That's right, folks. Fukú. (4)

Although the narrator imagines the U.S. loss to a “Third World country like Vietnam” as a sort of karmic retribution for its “unjust” occupation of the Dominican Republic (1965-

1966), the invocation of fukú enfolds these twentieth century events within a longue

6 Scholars have often cited the culture of powerful local chiefs, or caciques, among pre-Columbian tribes as an important predecessor to the tradition of caudillismo in Latin America. The term cacique originates from the Taino word kassiquan, meaning “to keep house,” though in modern Spanish the term has come to connote a local political boss who exercises significant power and influence. As just such a Taino cacique, Hatüey might be said to share something of a symbolic lineage with Trujillo, the preeminent Dominican caudillo. Similarly, although both Ho Chi Minh and Máximo Gómez are known more for leading liberation movements than being tyrants, Ho's image remains widely associated with the repressive single-party regime of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, while Gómez was a known authoritarian who demanded iron discipline and obedience above all else, with one biographer detecting in him an instinctive “inclination to dictatorship.” See Hugh M. Hamill’s introduction to Caudillos: Dictators in Spanish America”; for more on Maximo Gómez, see John Lawrence Tone’s War and Genocide in Cuba (2006).

122 durée stretching back to the Spanish conquest of the Americas and forward to the recent

Iraq War, the latter of which has likewise featured a similar rhetoric of "democratization" and “a smashing military success” (“Mission Accomplished”). In this manner, the novel effects something akin to a Dominicanization of Ho Chi Minh (as well as the Iraq War) by casting his successful resistance against U.S. military might as a continuation of

Hatüey’s originary struggle against the Spanish Empire, “the greatest power in the world” of his own time” (244).

Conversely, it is also by reframing certain traditional signifiers of the Dominican experience (Taino indigenous roots, Spanish colonial heritage, the Trujillo dictatorship) through a U.S.-centered transnational optic that Oscar Wao comes to articulate a uniquely

Dominican American perspective. Weaving a narrative landscape of mobile imperial forces (“soldiers, technicians and spooks” deployed from Santo Domingo to Saigon to

Iraq) and authoritarian figureheads arrayed within a global neocolonial matrix (Mobutu,

Duvalier, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, the unnamed Pinochet, etc.), Diaz's novel suggests that there is nothing more profoundly Dominican than American empire, and nothing more emblematic of this relationship between “my people” and “America” than the

Trujillo dictatorship. Diaz himself insinuates as much in an interview with Slate, even as he seems unsure about where to split the difference:

Trujillo was one of the U.S.’s favorite sons, one of its children. He was created and sustained by the U.S.’s political-military machine. I wanted to write about the demon child of the U.S., the one who was inflicted upon the Dominican Republic. It didn’t hurt that as a person Trujillo was so odd and terrifying, unlike anybody I’d ever read or heard about. He was so fundamentally Dominican, and for a Dominican writer writing about masculinity, about dictatorship, power, he’s indispensable.7

7 Interview with Meghan O’Rourke in Slate (Nov 2007).

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Here Diaz's remarks reveal a telling bit of ambivalence, or at least indecision, about how exactly he wants to characterize Trujillo. While casting him as “the demon child of the

U.S.” implies a degree of exceptionality to Trujillo’s embodiment of U.S.-sponsored state terror, this view is offset by the pluralizing assertion that he was “one of the U.S.’s favorite sons,” one of its many demon children—an idea reinforced throughout Oscar

Wao, as I have been demonstrating. What’s more, Diaz describes Trujillo as both

“fundamentally Dominican” and “indispensable” for a Dominican writer, while at the same time rendering him as somehow external to the Dominican Republic, something

“created and sustained” by a foreign political-military machine and “inflicted upon” the country from without.

Conceived thus, the figure of Trujillo emerges as a symbolic nexus where the national and the transnational, the singular and the structural, the fundamentally

Dominican and the inexorably American converge. As such, he is "indispensable" not just for a Dominican writer, but, speaking more accurately to Diaz's case, for a

Dominican American writer writing from a U.S. Latino/a standpoint. In The Brief

Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the U.S.-based diasporic perspective bears out through the modern-day story centered on Oscar and his family, though its early designation as a

“fukú story” assures us that Trujillo never lingers very far in the background. In the same

Slate interview cited above, when asked “How—or why—in your mind do the stories of

Trujillo and Oscar fit together?” Diaz gives the following response:

I guess the question for me is, how are they not related? It's like the history of the Dominican Republic. You can't tell the history of the U.S. without the history of the Dominican Republic, and yet people do so all the time. Oscar, like Lola, like Yunior, is one of Trujillo's children. His shadow, his legacy, is upon them all in ways that none of them understand.

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Trujillo is a local version of the legacy of the New World, which all of us who live in this hemisphere carry upon our heads.

These pronouncements are notable, I would point out, for the way they shade across the two meanings of the word “related”—both in the sense of a general association or connection, and in the sense pertaining to kinship and familial ties, as signaled by the repeated emphasis on progeny. Diaz’s description of his characters as "Trujillo's children" echoes his previous statement about Trujillo being “one of the U.S.’s favorite sons, one of its children,” all of which resonate with the novel’s originary thesis on fukú: that "we are all of us its children, whether we know it or not." While themes of family, parentage and descent have long been a hallmark of U.S. ethnic literatures, Diaz repurposes this language to accentuate his novel's focus on the relationships between individuals, on the one hand, and the nations, collectives and historical forces that are their capital-P Parents, on the other.

Taking up the genealogy sketched out in Diaz's comments, with Oscar, Lola and

Yunior as Trujillo's children and Trujillo himself the child of the U.S., what might it mean for us to regard Oscar and company as, in some sense, grandchildren to the U.S.— that is, in a more expansive way than the mere naming of a neocolonial relationship? For starters, such a lineage suggests that for Oscar, Lola and Yunior, the claim to American nationality lies not in any status of citizenship, immigration, native birth or residence, but rather constitutes an embedded part of their cultural inheritance as Dominicans. Such a perspective accords with Diaz's view that the history of the U.S. and the history of the

Dominican Republic should be seen as essentially coterminous, with former remaining somehow incomplete and less-than-truthful without the latter. The other critical element here, I would add, is mediated nature of the grandparental relation. Specifically, Oscar,

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Lola and Yunior are posited as "children" in relation to the United States only through the intercessory parental agency of Trujillo, the "favorite son" and "demon child" who is also the phantom father, in a narrative devoted to exploring his “shadow” and “legacy.” It is through the personage of the dictator, a sort of hybrid figure who encompasses both a

Dominican and U.S. historical consciousness (as both symbolic parent and child), as well as a global historical consciousness tied to the coloniality of power, that Diaz's novel delineates the multiple identitarian negotiations of its protagonists. 8

Ultimately, to assert that “ten million Trujillos is all we are”—as Lola does at the end of the novel—is to recognize the Dominican American subject as a similarly hybrid entity, itself a “local version of the legacy of the New World.” This is a subject rooted not merely to the geographic coordinates of Santo Domingo or Paterson, New Jersey, but also to a global imaginary that includes “all of us who live in this hemisphere,” and even beyond (“They say it came from Africa”; “How about Vietnam?” etc.). This is not, however, to locate the significance of the dictator figure solely in its metonymy for a vague transnationalism or globalism. Any collectivity articulated through the notion of

“ten million Trujillos,” it goes without saying, must also necessarily engage with the national and historic specificity of the Dominican Republic under Trujillo’s rule, and those unique particulars of the “local version” in all its “odd and terrifying” and comparison-defying aspects. In the following sections, I examine the nature of Trujillo's patrimony in relation to his "children": which includes not only the novel's Dominican

8 Maja Horn has argued against the tendency to equate Trujillo’s discourse of masculinity simply with that of a stereotypical Latin American caudillo, and stresses the importance of transnational and imperialist forces, including “international political discourses of sovereignty and Euro-American racism,” to its articulation (2). As she usefully reminds us, “‘Trujillo’ should not be conflated too easily with Dominican political and cultural ‘tradition.’ Indeed the Trujillato broke with many preceding Dominican formations or ‘traditions’ in ways that were greatly enabled by the impact of U.S. imperialism on the country and on the personal trajectory of the dictator” (16). In this way, “Trujillo” and his “children” are truly the progeny of the United States. See Maja Horn’s Masculinity After Trujillo (2014).

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American protagonists, but also Diaz himself. While the “fundamentally Dominican” preoccupations of masculinity, dictatorship and power that Diaz associates with Trujillo's legacy remains “indispensable” to an identity wrought in the dictator’s image, they also comprise the basis for the novel's attempt to imagine a distinctly masculine and dictatorial form of Dominican American writing. In this conception, the author functions as a mirror-image of the hypermasculine dictator, positing himself and his work as a symbolic site around which the multiple nodes of Dominican American cohere, and as a mediating force between Dominicans in the U.S. and a dominant U.S. society (“Just a little gift from my people to America”), as well as between Dominicans and other

Latino/a ethnic groups (“we Latin types”).

III.

While I have thus far been highlighting an emergent global view that subtends

Diaz’s identitarian explorations in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, it should also be noted that the novel does assign a certain exceptionality to the experience of the

Dominican Republic and its peoples (1). For the most part, this sense of Dominican exceptionalism coalesces around the figure of Trujillo, who gets figured as a sort of primus inter pares among history's tyrants, the “Dictatingest Dictator who ever Dictated"

(80). As the narrator remarks, “At first glance he was just your prototypical Latin

American caudillo, but his power was terminal in ways that few historians or writers have ever truly captured or, I would argue, imagined. He was our Sauron, our Arawn, our

Darkseid, our Once and Future Dictator, a personaje so outlandish, so perverse, so dreadful that not even a sci-fi writer could have made his ass up” (2). The contrast that

127 the narrator sets up here is quite suggestive: between the readymade, “prototypical” category of the Latin American caudillo, and the uncategorizable, ineffable nature that distinguishes Trujillo’s “terminal” power; and also, between the historians and writers that have traditionally written about the Latin American caudillo and another kind of writer potentially better suited to the task. Despite claiming that “not even a sci-fi writer could have made his ass up,” the recourse to iconic fantasy, science fiction and comic book villains as explanatory analogies nonetheless suggests that it is precisely writers of sci-fi and other genre fiction that possess the necessary insight to “capture” the extent of

Trujillo’s outlandishness, perversity and dreadfulness.

In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the character most readily associated with the figure of the “sci-fi writer” is of course Oscar, who is depicted as both an avid consumer of what he terms “the more speculative genres,” as well as an equally avid writer who dreams of being, variously, the “Dominican Stephen King” and “the

Dominican Tolkien” (43, 27, 192). The qualifier “Dominican” takes on a crucial importance here, indexing Oscar’s racial and ethnic otherness in relation to a white cultural dominant, in which he cannot simply be a “next,” or “another,” or otherwise unmarked version of Stephen King or J.R.R. Tolkien.9 Yet it’s also unclear that an escape from ethnic markers is something Oscar desires, for the label also gestures toward another of his preoccupations: his personal connection to the history and legacy of his ancestral homeland, and to the very category of Dominicanness. Compounded with his devotion to genre fiction, one might understandably imagine Oscar as originating the insight that Trujillo was “our Sauron, our Arawn, our Darkseid, our Once and Future

9 For a recent discussion by Diaz on the circumscribed possibilities for writers of color in the modern publishing industry and creative writing programs, see his essay “MFA VS. POC” (2014) in The New Yorker.

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Dictator.” But this turns out not to be the case, as the reader eventually discovers that the novel is actually narrated by character Yunior, who recounts the story of Oscar’s life and death after the fact, and writes the book in the reader's hands. In his sly way, Yunior admits that the invocation of Sauron and Darkseid to talk about Dominican history probably make more sense coming out of Oscar’s mouth than his own: “I’m not entirely sure Oscar would have liked this designation. Fukú story. He was a hardcore sci-fi and fantasy man, believed that that was the kind of story we were all living in. He’d ask:

What more sci-fi than the Santo Domingo? What more fantasy than the Antilles? […] But now that I know how it all turns out, I have to ask, in turn: What more fukú?” (6).

Exercising his epistemic dominance as the sole storyteller, and the one who knows “how it all turns out,” Yunior acknowledges Oscar’s likely preference for a sci-fi and fantasy-oriented hermeneutic, only to discard it in favor of his own predilection for the “fukú story.” Read thus, his comments represent nothing less than a struggle over the very interpretative framework through which the reader is to understand the narrative that follows—that is, over who gets to determine “the kind of story we were all living in.”

Although a decidedly one-sided affair, the moment still remains noteworthy for the way it adumbrates several prominent, interrelated elements of Diaz’s text: a competitive agonism between Yunior and Oscar, particularly over the contours of an “authentic”

Dominican identity; the way Yunior's performance of narrative control comes to resemble a form of dictatorship; and finally, the way this authorial dictatorship reverberates specifically with the figure of Trujillo.

To begin with, we might note that Yunior asserts his interpretative primacy over

Oscar not simply by rejecting Oscar's preferred mode of discourse, but by demonstrating

129 the greater capaciousness of his own discursive repertoire. As gradually becomes clear,

Oscar is not the only one fluent in “the more speculative genres”; rather, this is a fluency that Yunior also shares, as seen in the prolific use of science fiction, fantasy, comic book and popular culture references throughout his narrative, and also in the various hints that

Yunior himself is secretly an aficionado of these genres. Describing Oscar's “outsized love of genre,” Yunior states “Perhaps if like me he'd been able to hide his otakuness maybe shit would have been easier for him, but he couldn't. Dude wore his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light saber or a Lensman her lens” (21).10 Later, Yunior recalls sharing a room with Oscar in college: “Do you know what sign fool put up on our dorm door?

Speak, friend, and enter. In fucking Elvish! (Please don't ask me how I knew this.

Please.)” (172, emphasis in original.) In these moments Yunior confesses to his

"nerdiness" and distances himself from it in the same breath, whether through his admitted “hiding” or sheepish, parenthetical evasion. In any case, what becomes evident is his own literacy in the “nerd” languages of Lensmen and Jedi Knights—with the stereotypical apotheosis of this being an actual literacy in the fictional Elvish language featured in the works of Tolkien. From this angle, the comparisons between Trujillo and

Sauron read less like Yunior ventriloquizing Oscar, and instead represent examples of

Yunior speaking from his own legitimate “nerd” authority.

Ultimately, the display of his personal mastery over Oscar's preferred discourse becomes a way for Yunior to establish the supremacy of his perspective in regards to who can better tell the Dominican story. While Yunior doesn't exactly disagree with Oscar's view, that “What more sci-fi than the Santo Domingo? What more fantasy than the

10 “Otaku” refers to a Japanese term for someone with obsessive interests, or an avid collector or enthusiast, particularly in regards to anime, comic books, and video games, and often to the detriment of their social skills. Its' rough equivalent in English might be “geek” or “nerd.”

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Antilles?”, he nevertheless presents himself as being able to transcend it, by imagining

Trujillo and the “legacy of the New World” through a more expansive array of idioms

(though Yunior does exercise his prerogative to shut down Oscar's view when necessary, as when he exclaims “Negro please—this ain't a fucking comic book!”) (138). The vastness of Yunior's discursive arsenal, I would propose, figures as one of the primary ways he is presented as yet another kind of dictator figure—namely, the writer/storyteller whose control over the narrative constitutes its own form of authoritarian power. In a passage that has become one of its most popularly-cited, the novel draws a direct correlation between the political dictator and the narrative dictator:

What is it with Dictators and Writers anyway? Since before the infamous Caesar-Ovid war they’ve had beef. Like the Fantastic Four and Galactus, like the X-Men and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, like the Teen Titans and Deathstroke, Foreman and Ali, Morrison and Crouch, Sammy and Sergio, they seemed destined to be eternally linked in the Halls of Battle. Rushdie claims that tyrants and scribblers are natural antagonists, but I think that’s too simple; it lets writers off pretty easy. Dictators, in my opinion, just know competition when they see it. Same with writers. Like, after all, recognizes like” (97, emphasis in original).11

Rendered as part of Yunior's distinctive narration, these reflections on the porous boundaries between dictators and writers also exhibit his unique form of dictatorial power: an ability to inhabit, and eventually surpass, the narrative frames favored by his rivals, such as Oscar. Along with his displaying aptitude for the well-wrought comic book simile, Yunior's exposition also invoke examples that begin with classical antiquity

(Caesar and Ovid), and ranges from the literary-academic highbrow (Toni Morrison and

11 It is important to note that this aside on the relationship between dictators and writers remains an integral part of the novel's broader explorations of the Trujillo dictatorship and the history of the Dominican Republic. Specifically, the passage appears as part of an account of Jesús de Galíndez, a Basque nationalist writer who had lived in the Dominican Republic, and who was writing a doctoral thesis at Columbia University detailing the horrors and excesses of Trujillo's regime. In an infamous unsolved case, Galíndez disappeared from the streets of New York City on March 12, 1956 and was never seen again, with evidence strongly suggesting he was kidnapped and murdered by Trujillo's agents.

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Stanley Crouch, Salman Rushdie) to sports history (Foreman and Ali) and all the way to the more obscure ends of popular culture esoterica (Sammy and Sergio, most likely a reference to Mad Magazine artists Sam Viviano and Sergio Aragones). In flaunting the breadth of his erudition, as well as his idiomatic registers, Yunior distinguishes himself from what he sees as the narrow focus of Oscar's own: “In these pursuits alone Oscar showed the genius his grandmother insisted was part of the family patrimony. Could write in Elvish, could speak Chakobsa, could differentiate between a Slan, a Dorsai, and a

Lensman in acute detail, knew more about the Marvel Universe than Stan Lee, and was a role-playing fanatic” (21). The assertion of his own more capacious perspective—in which the comic book frame, while valid, is but one fabric among a larger tapestry— enables Yunior to champion his designation of “fukú story” as the more informed and judicious option for apprehending dictators and writers, Caribbean history, the “legacy of the New World,” and all the crucial themes for understanding Dominican identity.

Yunior’s ambivalence toward Oscar’s interpretation frames, I would add, also reflects the novel’s ambivalence toward the moral binaries traditionally built into the science fiction, fantasy and comic book genres. The italicized emphasis on “like, after all, recognizes like” cannot be under-stressed, as it ultimately subverts any Manichean assignation of value that comparisons to comic book superheroes and supervillains might invite. Eschewing Rushdie's idea of a “natural” antagonism between dictators and writers, and refusing to let the latter off easily, Diaz, it seems, would prefer to consider the hostility between the two as a sort of narcissism of small differences, with writers every bit as susceptible to oppressive and dictatorial tendencies as their more conventionally

132 political counterparts.12 As it plays out in Oscar Wao, the more salient analogy between writers and dictators might be less so the heroic Fantastic Four versus the villainous

Galactus, and more the like-recognizing-like clash between George Foreman and

Muhammad Ali, a rivalry in which narrative distinctions between heroism and villainy seem tenuous at best.13 As a matter of fact, the image of two prizefighters with outsized egos competing for—on a most basic and reductive level—prestige, influence, the adoration of an audience, wealth and women, presents an exceedingly fitting illustration of the idea that both dictators and writers “just know competition when they see it.” As a counterpart to the political strongman, it bears noting, the writer Yunior is also something of a literal strongman, as seen in his fondness for bodybuilding: “Me, a guy who could bench 340 pounds...who never met a little white artist freak he didn't want to smack around” and “I mean, shit, I was a weight lifter, picked up bigger piles than him [Oscar] every damn day” (170, 171). Conveying the importance of his muscular physique to his

12 On this point, I am in accordance with the insights of critics like Anne Garland Mahler and Andrew Hoberek, who both read Diaz's novel as revealing “the blurred line between the hero-writer and the forces of tyrannical power” (Mahler 133). See Mahler, “The Writer as Superhero.” I find Hoberek's analysis of Diaz's dictator-writer passage particularly spot-on: “The list of similes at the heart of this passage opens with several that seem to cast the writer in the role of the superhero (the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, the Teen Titans) versus the dictator as supervillain (Galactus, the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, Deathstroke)— or so we presume, although this actually reverses the order of the opening question and the invocation of Caesar and Ovid, and as the sequence progresses, at least some of the pairings become less clear-cut: why Foreman and Ali, and why is Ali in the second (villanous) position? By the time we get to Rushdie's assertion, the passage has already deeply confused the issue, and we are prepared for Diaz's revision...that writers and dictators are in fact difficult to distinguish” (176). See Hoberek’s Considering Watchmen (2014).

13 The clash in question—the legendary “Rumble in the Jungle” boxing match between Foreman and Ali that took place on October 30, 1974—seems particularly germane to the discussion at hand, and might even be regarded as something of a minor “fukú story.” To start with, the fight took place in Zaire at the invitation of Mobutu Sese Seko himself. Similar to Trujillo, Mobutu had come to power on the heels of a (U.S.-sponsored) coup that ousted a democratically elected government, and was eager for the positive publicity such a high-profile sporting event would bring to his regime. In many ways, the event can be seen as a rhetorical and material expression of Mobutu’s dictatorial power, with the match held at a venue named after the date of his political ascendance (20th of May Stadium, now Father Raphael Stadium in Kinshasa), and which was a known detention and torture center. Furthermore, the then unheard-of $10 million fight purse was largely footed by the impoverished Zairian population, as befitting a Trujillo-style kleptocrat. It was also on this trip that Ali, controversially, met and socialized with not only Mobutu, but also other prominent African dictators such as Libya's Mummar Gaddafi and Uganda's Idi Amin.

133 self-image, Yunior’s statements also underlines the connection between this physique and a physically aggressive and pugnacious orientation toward other male bodies, which he seems to be constantly sizing up—whether it’s the “little” white artist freaks he wants to smack around, or the obese Oscar, likened to a big “pile” that he can pick up with ease.

This pugnacity, moreover, also extends to the narrative's treatment of Trujillo, which includes numerous physical assessments that seek to mark the dictator’s body as debased and insufficiently masculine. At the start, Yunior describes Trujillo as a “portly, sadistic, pig-eyed mulato who bleached his skin, wore platform shoes, and had a fondness for Napoleon-era haberdashery” (2). Later on, while narrating the two brief scenes in the novel in which Trujillo appears in person, Yunior makes note of his “shrill voice,”

“heavily powdered face,” “porcine eyes,” and the way he “sniffed the air like a cat”

(233). The implications of such language and imagery are clear enough; in their underscoring of Trujillo’s diminutive stature (platform shoes, the image of Napoleon

Bonaparte, “portly”), his pig-like appearance (“pig-eyed,” “porcine-eyed,” “portly”) and feminine mannerisms (shrill voice, powdered face, cat-like behavior), they serve the purpose of denigrating the dictator’s body and manhood in comparison to Yunior.

Coupled with the mocking nicknames that Yunior lobs at Trujillo throughout the narrative, like “the Failed Cattle Thief” and “Fuckface,” the stance of the writer toward the dictator in Diaz’s text comes off as not merely pugnacious, but downright pugilistic, in the spirit of a boxer taunting and trash-talking his opponent, as exhibited most famously by Muhammad Ali against such adversaries as Sonny Liston, Joe Frazier and

George Foreman, among others.

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In this fashion, the agonistic struggle between the writer and dictator that Yunior engages in plays out as a form of aggressive masculine “beef.” More precisely, it is a struggle waged in the arena of what both Diaz's novel and scholarly studies have identified as a distinctly Dominican form of hegemonic masculinity, a regime of gender relations in which “men derive prestige from displays of superior virility” (Simonson

133).14 In her study of gender norms among public sector workers in the Dominican

Republic, Jenny K. Rodriguez reports how interactions between men were “based on expert knowledge and competitiveness: with practices that include challenging each other and references that link attainment to manhood or virility” (54). More than anything else,

“displays of superior virility” serve as the chief paradigm through which Yunior conceives of an authentic Dominican manhood. His account of Oscar’s life, in particular, delineates this identity through its negative image: “Our hero was not one of those

Dominican cats everybody’s always going on about—he wasn’t no home-run hitter or a fly bachatero, not a playboy with a million hots on his jock”; on the contrary, “dude never had much luck with the females (how very un-Dominican of him)” (11). The judgment of

Oscar as “un-Dominican” reappears in countless iterations, each time stressing heterosexual male promiscuity as the unequivocal norm. Oscar “had none of the Higher

Powers of your typical Dominican male, couldn’t have pulled a girl if his life depended on it,” and “Anywhere else his triple-zero batting average with the ladies might have

14 See P.G. Simonson’s dissertation “Masculinity and Femininity in the Dominican Republic (1994). E. Antonio de Moya also explores the “totalitarian image of dominant masculinity” that “produces intricate strategies (power games) for men to oppress other men” (73, 98). See his “Power Games and Totalitarian Masculinity in the Dominican Republic” (2004). For more on traditional ideologies of masculinity within Latino/a communities, see Pedro A Saez, Adonaid Casado and Jay C. Wade, “Factors Influencing Masculinity Ideology Among Latino Men” (2009). For more on the general concept of "hegemonic masculinities," defined broadly as practices that promote the dominant social position of men and the subordinate social position of women, see R.W. Connell’s Masculinities (2005).

135 passed without comment, but this is a Dominican kid we’re talking about, in a Dominican family: dude was supposed to have Atomic Level G, was supposed to be pulling in the bitches with both hands.” (20, 24).

With terms like “Higher Powers” and “Atomic Level G,” Yunior again traffics in the fantasy and science fiction argot that is generally Oscar’s area of “expert knowledge,” only to wield them, boxer-like, to discredit Oscar’s manhood—and by extension, his ability to properly represent the narrative of Dominican identity at hand. More subtly, expressions like “a million hots on his jock” and “pulling in the bitches with both hands” suggest an even more specific dimension to this Dominican hypersexuality, emphasizing not just the quantity of sexual partners, but also the simultaneous enjoyment of them.

Under this rubric, only two men in the narrative can be said to truly possess such “Higher

Powers” and “Atomic Level G,” and to the hyperbolic degree these terms would imply:

Yunior himself, and Trujillo. As the polar opposite of Oscar’s “un-Dominican” ways,

Yunior is a self-described “ill sucio” and “the biggest player of them all” (180, 186).

More importantly, his sexual habits are in vigorous keeping with the “typical Dominican male” who pulled in the bitches “with both hands.” As he relates in flamboyant, near- parodic fashion: “Me, who was fucking with not one, not two, but three fine-ass bitches at the same time and that wasn’t even counting the side-sluts I scooped at the parties and the clubs; me, who had pussy coming out my ears” (185, emphasis in original).

As Yunior goes on to assert, “Some niggers couldn’t have gotten ass on Judgment

Day; me, I couldn’t not get ass, even when I tried” (196). Clad in the language of Oscar’s beloved apocalypse narratives, this statement also quietly hints at the burden of Yunior's promiscuity, as a compulsion he seems to have little control or agency over. Combined

136 with the image of “pussy coming out my ears,” with its vague connotations of drowning, we see how the rhetoric of Yunior's boasting also bears the traces of an attendant ambivalence and self-loathing. At other moments, Yunior's capacity to turn a critical eye toward his “superior virility" flashes up more clearly: after being publicly humiliated for cheating, Yunior reflects that “what I should have done was check myself into Bootie-

Rehab. But if you thought I was going to do that, then you don’t know Dominican men”

(175). The concept of “Bootie-Rehab” seems especially loaded, in its framing of Yunior’s sexual appetite as akin to an addiction. Just as atomic power carries with it the dangers of unchecked destruction, nuclear fallout and radioactivity, the notion of “Atomic Level G,” it would seem, turns out to be a mixed blessing.

The depiction of Dominican hegemonic masculinity as a noxious and destructive force surfaces most emphatically in the novel's account of Trujllo's own notorious and near-outlandish hypersexuality. “If you think your average Dominican guy’s bad,”

Yunior informs us, “Trujillo was five thousand times worse” (217). Once again, a focus on sheer accumulated quantity seems key, with Yunior’s “not one, not two, but three fine-ass bitches” and “side-sluts” seeming utterly petty when compared to Trujillo's fame for “fucking every hot girl in sight, even the wives of his subordinates, thousands upon thousands upon thousands of women” (2). The bedding of subordinates’ wives attests to the equivalence between prestige and superior virility in the Dominican national and cultural context, insofar as “prestige” refers to the pinnacle of political power. This point is further bolstered by the way discussions of Trujillo's sexual proclivities are frequently couched in the language of states and institutions: “Trujillo might have been a Dictator, but he was a Dominican Dictator, which is another way of saying he was the Number-

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One Bellaco in the Country. Believed that all the toto in the DR was, literally, his,” and that “if the procurement of ass had been any more central to the Trujillato the regime would have been the world’s first culocracy (and maybe, in fact, it was)” (217). If “like, after all, recognizes like,” then one way we might read Yunior's chronicle is as a narrative of recognition between a self-professed “biggest player of them all” and “the Number-

One Bellaco in the Country.” Whereas Lola comes to a collectivized understanding that

“ten million Trujillos is all we are,” for Yunior this apperception assumes a much more personal focus, as a reckoning with a fellow “bellaco,” dictator—and ultimately, a surrogate father figure.

By now, numerous commentators have noted the myriad ways that Yunior functions as a parallel to Trujillo—and perhaps none more vigorously and exhaustively as

Diaz himself. As he opines at length in an interview with Katherine Miranda:

For me, this book is literally arguing that the person who is using this language, who is talking about women in this way, who is talking about men in this way, is the son of Trujillo. He is the perfect child of the Trujillato. In this book, you could draw a direct line in Dominican society from Trujillo to Yunior. Yunior takes the present role of the dictator—in the past Trujillo was the dictator, he was the only one who spoke. In this novel, in the present, Yunior's the only one who speaks. He's literally the dictator...All the stuff that Trujillo believed in, Yunior practices in one form or the other. No matter how critical or left-wing he is, his sexual politics are fucking nightmarish. (36) 15

For the most part, scholarly treatments have tended to fall in line with Diaz’s efforts to control the way his novel is read, focusing on either Yunior as the “only one who speaks,” or on his “nightmarish” sexual politics, or some combination of both. Certainly,

Diaz’s remarks presents the two realms as closely inter-articulated, with both coalescing around the figure of the dictator-storyteller-womanizer: the “son of Trujillo” who is also,

15 Interview with Katherine Miranda in Sargasso II (2008-9).

138 in the same breath, “the person who is using this language, who is talking about women in this way, who is talking about men in this way.”16 In his analysis of Yunior’s storytelling, Richard Patteson forwards the useful concepts of "textual territory and narrative power,” which he defines broadly as “the writer's ability to exercise power over the space he commands through his narration,” and more specifically as “the numerous ways that the [narrative] voice is above all an instrument of Yunior's power” (6, 7).17

Meditating on the “slippery similarities between dictators and writers” as depicted in

Diaz’s novel, Jennifer Harford Vargas reflects that “they are narrative makers and narrative controllers. Both the dictator and the novelist create metanarratives and produce meaning. They are fabulous inventors who can make the unbelievable believable. They both also control subjects and exercise their authority through words to dictate their subjects’ or characters’ actions and thoughts” (8). Elena Machado Saez deftly combines the notion of narrative power—the “similarities between fictional dictation and political dictatorship”—with the gender and sexuality angle, in her analysis of how the hypermasculine and heteronormative Yunior, through his narration, suppresses and silences “Oscar's points of queer Otherness—his virginity and sentimentality” (534, 528,

524).18 In a related vein, Katherine Weese takes up a narrative theory and gender studies

16 Diaz's frequent invocation of the parental trope, I would add, reminds us that Trujillo, for all intents and purposes, seems to be the novel's most present and functional father figure. While Oscar, Lola and Yunior's respective fathers all remain completely absent from the narrative, the novel also reveals how Oscar's grandfather, Abelard, fails to protect his family from Trujillo's persecution, largely due to his ineffectual, passive and indecisive nature.

17 Patteson begins his discussion by pointing out Diaz’s attempts, through interviews and public discussions of his work, to interpretations of his novel, exemplifying the truism that “an author’s compulsion to control does not necessary end with publication” (5). See Patteson’s “Textual Territory and Narrative Power in Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” (2012).

18 As Saez also helpfully explains, “In Diaz's view...the writer and dictator compete over who gets to shape the public imagining of a national and diasporic identity" (528). See Saez’s “Dictating Desire, Dictating Diaspora” (2011).

139 approach in her exploration of how the “unnatural” features of Yunior’s narration relates to “the novel’s relationship to traditional Dominican masculinity” (90).

More recently, Jason Cortés synthesizes the interrelated themes of dictatorship, narration and gender roles in his study Macho Ethics (2015), which argues that “the macho maintains proximity with the dictator, while the authorial figure concomitantly exhibits a perturbing similarity with both figures.” (4) As Cortés elaborates, “machismo, cast as a cultural discourse and inherently oppressive in its deployment of power politics, claims as its counterpart the discursive as well as the physical repression of the dictatorship. The threatening, and somewhat portentous, nature of the macho stems from a process of de-humanization that parallels the obscene excess of dictatorial violence, which in turn folds itself unto the figure of the author” (4).19 In Oscar Wao, as we have seen, the character Yunior not only encapsulates all three of these figures—the hypersexual macho, the dictator and the author—he does so in a way that the novel renders as essentially Dominican, as the terminus of that “direct line” that runs through

“Dominican society” and Trujillo. While the text also draws fairly direct lines between this ethnonationalist dimension and certain political institutions and sexual practices associated with the Dominican Republic, the way that these might shade into the literary sphere seem less straightforward. In fact, this identitarian element of Diaz’s text is one that critics have largely failed to address: if to be a “Dominican Dictator” equals being the “Number-One Bellaco,” how might these two conceptions of Dominicanness inform

19 Naturally, Cortés’ study includes a reading of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, although his analyses largely rehash earlier arguments made by the likes of Mahler and Machado Saez. Cortés examines the “conceptual entanglement” at the heart of Diaz’s critique of heteronormative power structures: “one the one hand, the narrator, who is also Diaz’s avatar, is enmeshed amid an indictment of Trujillo-style totalitarianism and its cultural consequences in the Dominican psyche, while, on the other, he is also trapped by his own macho behavior, which emblematically reproduces the virile discourse of the Trujillo Era” (98). See Cortés’ Macho Ethics (2015).

140 what it means to be a Dominican, or Dominican American, author? That is, how might we apprehend Diaz's novel as imagining a distinctly Dominican form of writing—a writing, in other words, inflected by a similarly dictatorialness and “virility?”20

Here it might be useful to turn to the work of Daniel Y. Kim, whose book Writing

Manhood in Black and Yellow (2005) wrestles precisely with the question of “how the sexual politics of racial identity become enmeshed in and articulated as a literary politics” (xxiii, emphasis in original). Although the focus of Kim’s book, as signaled by its title, is on African American and Asian American literary production, the applicability of his insights to the discussion at hand—that is, to sexual politics, racial identities and literary politics as it pertains to writing a Brown manhood—are difficult to miss.

Centered around the works of Ralph Ellison and Frank Chin, Kim’s study explores how certain male writers of color formulate an anti-racist cultural politics that “comes to articulate itself with instead of against homophobia,” in their depiction of the psychic injuries inflicted by white racism (xxii, emphasis in original). For these authors, the figure of the homosexual functions as a symbol for an emasculated and feminized racial subject; in the literary sphere, this “homosexual” posture take takes the form of a

“feminizing and passive assimilationist impulse” that produce insufficiently masculine and racially inauthentic works (40). As Kim argues, both Ellison and Chin champion “an idea of literary identity that allegedly takes its cues from the vibrant, muscular, and agonistic forms of cultural expression characteristic of working-class communities of color—that gives literary form to a vernacular” (xxiii, emphasis in original).

20 It is important to reiterate here that I am not reading Diaz’s novel as an essentialist expression of any actual “Dominican” national or cultural traits; rather, I am interested in the category of “Dominicaness” as it emerges as part of Oscar Wao’s internal logic, and as part the novel’s conception of its own literary aspirations (much like the way the category of “Korean” functions in Lee’s Native Speaker).

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Already, we can see how Kim’s study constellates a number of highly fruitful critical avenues for reading Diaz—many of which, unfortunately, remain outside the scope of the current analysis.21 What I wish to focus on, at present, is how Kim views

African American and Asian American authors as fashioning “wholly virile and racially distinct forms of manhood within the domain of literature,” and how Diaz’s novel might be seen as engaged in a similar fashioning of a Dominican and Latino/a literary manhood

(36). Key to this racially authentic and masculine writing, Kim asserts, is a “virile and active kind of mimetic hunger” (40):

What these writers valorize...is a masculine figure who speaks back from the racial margins, whose linguistic prowess lies in his deft capacity to repeat parodically and subversively the languages that constitute the center, none of which he should be able to claim as properly his own. He is defined by a violent and aggressive capacity to incorporate, appropriate, and mangle whatever linguistic materials enter into his verbal domain. (38, emphasis in original)

Taking a counterintuitive approach to concepts of racial “distinctiveness” and

“authenticity,” Kim conceives of these categories not as tied to any biological or cultural

“essence,” but rather as the expression of a mimetic ability par excellence, a tireless and combative appetite for consumption and appropriation. Thus the “African American or

Asian American distinctiveness” of Ellison and Chin's “ethnonationalist aesthetics” has

21 To briefly touch upon some of these: 1) The idea of a homophobic logic in which homosexuality functions as a symbolic shorthand for a failed and racially inauthentic manhood easily applies to Yunior’s view of Oscar, and is in fact signaled in the novel’s very title. The name “Oscar Wao,” we are told, comes about when Oscar dresses up as Doctor Who for Halloween, which Yunior remarks as making him look like that “fat homo” Oscar Wilde. When one of Yunior’s friends replies “Oscar Wao, quién es Oscar Wao,” the mispronunciation sticks and becomes Oscar’s permanent nickname (180); 2) In a related vein, Oscar’s love of the science fiction and fantasy genres stereotypically associated with white males (and sexual ineptitude) connects him to the ‘feminizing and assimilationist impulse” attributed to homosexuals of color, as seen in the way Yunior regards Oscar's fanboy tendencies as “un-Dominican”; 3) While the lives of “working-class communities of color” are more central to Diaz’s first short story collection Drown (which also feature Yunior as a character) than to Oscar Wao, the concept of a “vernacular masculinity” associated with these communities nonetheless remains a relevant frame for addressing the colloquial, Dominican Spanish- and urban-slang- inflected language that characterizes Yunior’s narration. In short, Kim’s insights, when applied to Diaz, raise further questions regarding the role of Spanglish in theories of the vernacular.

142 less to do with something that inheres in their respective blackness or Asianness, but is to be found instead in “the muscularity with which other cultural forms are absorbed, reworked, and remade” (39). For Kim, in the end, it is this “highly aggressive and appropriative” posture toward other texts and cultural forms that emerges as “manifestly virile.” (39) Most pressing of all, this manifest virility presents itself as a distinctly authorial agency: “As one voice striving to achieve a singular literary identity by struggling against literary antecedents and brethren of all races, the male writer of color perceives himself achieving not only a measure of manhood, but a particular form of homosocial intimacy, one that is expressed through the complex agonistic interplay of authorial voices” (39).

Returning to The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, we can see how Diaz’s novel resonates with the image of a “muscular,” aggressive, and most of all virile racial subject, as well as the articulation of this masculine subject as an author. Here I would argue that Diaz’s novel draws upon a similar conception of authorial “virility,” in which

Yunior’s rapacious sexual appetite in the bedroom has its literary analogue in a “violent and aggressive capacity to incorporate, appropriate, and mangle whatever linguistic materials enter into his verbal domain.” We have already seen a version of this agonistic and appropriative relationship to other writers, for instance, in Yunior’s suppression of

Oscar’s sci-fi and fantasy hermeneutic, which he then absorbs into his own robust narrative repertoire. This spirit of aggressive appropriation also operates on a broader level, with both Yunior the narrator—and by extension, Diaz himself—emerging as

Latino versions of the “masculine figure who speaks back from the racial margins, whose

143 linguistic prowess lies in his deft capacity to repeat parodically and subversively the languages that constitute the center.”

This “speaking back” from the racial margins to the languages and literatures of the center begins in fact bookends Diaz’s novel, and begins at the very level of its title, which refers to both Oscar Wilde and Ernest Hemingway’s short story “The Short Happy

Life of Francis Macomber”; similarly, Oscar’s closing-line exclamations of “The beauty!

The beauty!” inverts the anguished refrain of “The horror! The horror!” from Joseph

Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Other examples are less overt but nonetheless palpable; the narrative structure in which the story of Oscar’s life and death is refracted through

Yunior’s nostalgic recollections more than faintly echoes the Jay Gatsby-Nick Carraway relationship in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, complete with a similar celebratory nickname: “Years and years now and I still think about him. The incredible

Oscar Wao” (324). Thus while much critical attention has been heaped upon the novel’s resuscitation of “marginalized” genres like science fiction, fantasy and comic books,

Oscar Wao also does much to write itself alongside literary works of a more traditionally

“canonical” stature, laying out an expansive literary terrain that includes not just the obscurest of margins, but the most hallowed of mainstreams as well. In this way, Diaz’s novel can be said to express a similar racialized literary manhood in the form of “one voice striving to achieve a singular literary identity by struggling against literary antecedents and brethren of all races.”

That this struggle involves antecedents and brethren of all races is also an especially pertinent facet of Diaz’s literary project, which assumes this “virile and active mimetic hunger” not only in relation to canonical white writers like Conrad, Hemingway

144 and Fitzgerald, but also to works spanning a wide range of national and ethnic traditions.

A substantial segment of the scholarship on Diaz's novel, importantly, has argued for the centrality of certain literary traditions associated with Latin America, particularly that most enduringly popular one of all: magical realism. In Oscar Wao, readers usually point to a magical realist strain in such narrative details as the faceless man whose appearance portends tragedy or violence, as well as his counterpart, the mystical mongoose, “an

Aslan-like figure with golden eyes” that occasionally intervenes to deliver the protagonists from peril (302). Notably, the remarks on fukú in the novel’s prologue mentions that it “used to be more popular in the old days, bigger, so to speak, in Macondo than in McOndo,” in a nod to both the magical realist tradition popularized by Gabriel

Garcia Marquez and the literary movement that rose against it in the 1990s, both of which have been cited as among the novel’s dense thicket of intertextual allusions (7).22

While critics have been split on the topic, and Diaz himself remains cagey about the his novel’s connections to Garcia Marquez or the magical realist tradition, the inspirations that Diaz does acknowledge—and the language he does it in—are likewise telling. Pressed by an interviewer to address the influences “reflected” in his work, Diaz proffers a decidedly multiracial and transnational “literary genealogy,” while stressing that any such construct will be “more a fantasy than anything”; in his account, “the

22 “Macondo” refers to the fictional town featured in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s magical realist classic One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), while “McOndo” is the name of a literary movement, named after a 1996 anthology edited by Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gomez, which was essentially an urban realist backlash against magical realism’s fetishistic emphasis on underdevelopment and exoticism. Critical treatments that explore the relationship between Diaz’s novel and magical realism are legion, some of which include: Daniel Bautista, “Comic Book Realism” (2010); Monica Hanna, “‘Reassembling the Fragments’” (2010); Tim Lanzendörfer, “The Marvelous History of the Dominican Republic in Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” (2013); Ignacio López-Calvo, “A Postmodern Plátano’s Trujillo” (2009); T.S. Miller, “Preternatural Narration and the Lens of Genre Fiction in Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” (2011); Ramon Saldivar, “Historical Fantasy, Speculative Realism, and Postrace Aesthetics in Contemporary American Fiction” (2011): 574-599. Notably, both Hanna’s and Jason Cortés’ readings mention the ways that Diaz’s novel bridges the gap between Macondo and McOndo.

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African diaspora had an enormous impact, whether it was U.S. African American letters, whether it was writing from sub-Saharan Africa, whether it was Caribbean writing…but also immigrant writing across the board. I’ve read a ton of Asian-American writers”

(Sargasso 28). In keeping with this heritage, Diaz has frequently stressed the influence of

Martinican author Patrick Chamoiseau’s novel Texaco (1992) on his own work, especially in regards to his use of footnotes as a literary device.23 His consumption of

Asian American literature is also indexed in the subchapter in Oscar Wao titled “The

Gangster We Are All Looking For,” which is almost certainly a reference to the 2003 book of the same name by Vietnamese American author Thi Diem Thuy Le.24 In an interview elsewhere, Diaz further lists “comic book chingones” Los Brothers Hernandez as “the secret fathers of this book,” adding that “What I wanted to do was honor these

Chicano brothers who had a large role in teaching me how to write” (La Bloga).25 Along

23 In discussing his novel’s use of footnotes, Diaz’s recognition of Chamoiseau is occasionally paired with his disavowal of any influence from “the postmodern white-boy gang” that includes and David Foster Wallace, Mark Z. Danielewski, and William Vollman (See his interview with Danticat, Edwidge in BOMB magazine [2007]). This stance seems in keeping, I would argue, with the competitive agon that undergirds the writer of color’s masculine mimetic hunger, especially in relation to white male writers. Interestingly, Diaz would later claim Vollman as an influence alongside Chamoiseau, while disavowing Foster Wallace, in a series of personal annotations of Oscar Wao that he provides for the website Genius (http://www.genius.com/Junot-diaz-the-brief-wondrous-life-of-oscar-wao-excerpt-annotated).

24 A relationship to certain type of Asian American literary narrative is also visible, I would argue, in the novel’s depiction of the Brothers Then, Juan and José, owners of a Chinese restaurant in the Dominican Republic where Belicia worked as a youth, and where “she would always say she came of age” (105). Namely, Diaz’s depictions of the Then brothers seem to invoke a lyrical, maudlin quality that sways between Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston: “Juan, the melancholic gambler, who waxed about Shanghai as though it were a love poem sung by a beautiful woman you love but cannot have” and “José, the bravo, the guapo, his wife and children dead by warlord in the thirties…whose grief had extracted from his body all softness, idle chatter, and hope” (105, 106). The brothers spun stories “about their youth in China and the Philippines,” and in their old age would end up in Skokie, Illinois and Atlanta, Georgia respectively, a narrative touch that seems directly addressed to the recent trend in Asian American studies that focuses on the multiply-destined, trans-American migrations of the Chinese diaspora (129). See, for example, the recent work of Evelyn Hu-Dehart.

25 See Diaz’s interview with Greg Barrios in La Bloga (2007). The Hernandez Brothers—Gilbert, Jamie and Mario—are most famous for their Love and Rockets series, from which Diaz draws the phrase “Breasts of Luba,” after a similarly well-endowed character in the comics, to describe Oscar and Lola's mother Belicia (92). He revisits this reference later in the novel in the description of a prostitute whose breasts

146 with the notion of a “literary genealogy,” Diaz's desire to “honor” the “secret fathers” of his book draws upon a familiar rhetoric of fatherhood, progeny and inheritance—and more specifically, the recognition of a previously invisible patrimony—that we observed earlier in his remarks on Trujillo’s “shadow” and “legacy.”

All of this, perhaps, is simply yet another take on what has been exhaustively lauded and analyzed by scholars and casual readers alike as the wonder of Oscar Wao’s language, a distinctive narrative mélange that weaves together multiple linguistic, literary and cultural registers. In addition to the intertextual allusions noted above, these include black urban slang, Spanglish, references to popular culture, “nerd” genres, world history, and even academic jargon. Depending on the commentator, this discursive heterogeneity has been variously characterized as a “polyvocality,” “syncreticism,” “hybridity,” or a

“fragmented” quality. A common critical tendency, furthermore, has been to attribute a cultural explanation for this feature, often through a “Caribbean” lens that draws upon theories of the Caribbean as a syncretic and hybrid space. Prominent among such theories, for example, are Edouard Glissant’s conception of the Caribbean as “the estuary of the Americas,” as well as well as Antonio Benitez-Rijo's suggestion that “The literature of the Caribbean seeks to differentiate itself from the European not by excluding cultural components that influenced its formation, but rather, by moving toward the creation of an ethnologically promiscuous text” (Glissant 139; Benitez-Rijo

189).26 As evidenced by his own remarks, Diaz himself would endorse such readings of

were “bigger almost than Luba from Love and Rockets (but not as big as Beli)” (285). That Diaz acknowledges the influence of the Hernandez Brothers in his characterization of Beli, while maintaining his own character's superior endowment, might be seen as one way Diaz both honors his novel's “secret fathers” while seeking to surpass them—by drawing bigger breasts, as it were.

26 See Glissant’s Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays (1989) and Antonio Benitez-Rijo’s The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective (1992).

147 his novel: “I'm a product of a fragmented world…In my mind the book was supposed to take the shape of an archipelago; it was supposed to be a textual Caribbean. Shattered and yet somehow holding together, somehow incredibly vibrant and compelling” (Slate).

As I have been suggesting, my own reading of Oscar Wao connects this aspect of its language to a specific cultural context, namely to the vision of “Dominicanness” as conceived by Yunior—which, like Diaz's “literary genealogy,” is best understood as

“more a fantasy than anything.” By reading the novel's discursive heterogeneity as an expression of the narrator's “violent and aggressive capacity to incorporate, appropriate and whatever linguistic materials enter into his verbal domain,” I propose a structural link between the textual “promiscuity” of the narrative and the sexual promiscuity of its narrator, and argue that both exemplify a certain “superior virility” associated with hegemonic Dominican masculinity. As “one voice striving to achieve a singular literary identity,” this “virile” writing also takes on an added significance in the Dominican context, as a mark of the appearance of the dictator. As Diaz asserts in highly resonant terms, his book is “all about the dangers of dictatorship, the dangers of the single voice”

(Slate). What we see in Oscar Wao, then, is the emergence of a dictatorial “single voice” that achieves its “measure of manhood” through an aggressive appropriation and supersession of “literary antecedents.” As Diaz confesses, “in some ways I couldn't have written this book if it hadn't been for my love of other books. This book is all about a reader's love…it is a love letter to the reading I did my entire life” (La Bloga). In a subsequent interview, the gentleness of this “love,” epitomized by the image of penning love letters, is replaced by slightly more aggressive and ominous overtones, starting with the swapping of the language of love for one of obsession: “What can I tell you? I’m

148 book-obsessed and I wrote about a book-obsessed protagonist. The narrator too: book- obsessed. You better believe that I was fucking with other books written about the

Dominican Republic” (BOMB). What begins as Diaz's response to the allusions in his novel's title transitions, somewhat abruptly and without prompting, to his intent to “fuck with” other books. From here, the conversation veers down a more openly antagonistic path (which I re-cite in part, for emphasis):

You better believe that I was fucking with other books written about the Dominican Republic. I mean, have you read The Feast of the Goat? Pardon me while I hate, but people jumped on that novel like it was the greatest thing on earth! And you should have seen the Dominican elites fawning over Vargas Llosa. The Great Vargas Llosa has deigned to visit the Dominican Republic! Call me a nationalist slash hater, but Vargas Llosa’s take on the Trujillo regime was identical to Crassweller’s and Crassweller wrote his biography 40 years ago! (Danticat)

The rapidness with which paeans to a “reader's love” and being “book-obsessed” turns into an invective against another author's work attests to the agonistic substratum beneath this obsessive love, a notion deftly captured by the multiple valences of the term “fucking with.” Diaz's self-posture as a “nationalist slash hater” in relation to the Peruvian Mario

Vargas Llosa also reveals a certain ethnonationalist impulse behind this inter-author hostility. In decrying Vargas Llosa’s well-received 2000 novel about the Trujillo regime for being overrated and unoriginal, Diaz also folds into this “agonistic interplay of authorial voices” the work of American author Robert D. Crassweller, whose frequently cited Trujillo: The Life and Times of a Caribbean Dictator (1960) has significantly shaped understandings of the dictator both inside and outside the Dominican Republic

(and which Oscar Wao also directly mentions).27 For Diaz, the failure of Vargas Llosa's

27 Maja Horn stresses the way Crassweller's biography “has helped give rise to certain longstanding views of the Trujillato” (16). Key among these, Horn argues, is: “(1) that the dictatorship was an exceptional interim in the country's history driven by the exceptional (and often deemed as pathological) personality of

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“take” on the Trujillo regime is precisely that it does not deviate from the overdetermined and longstanding script already laid out by Crassweller.

In Oscar Wao, the narrator similarly finds space to “hate” on Vargas Llosa for his lack of imagination: “Let's be honest, though. The rap about The Girl Trujillo Wanted is a pretty common one on the Island. As common as krill...So common that Mario Vargas

Llosa didn't have to do much except open his mouth to sift it out of the air. There's one of these bellaco tales in almost everybody's hometown. It's one of those easy stories because in essence it explains it all” (244, emphasis in original). In this and other instances, the narrator openly acknowledges and responds to previous texts about the Trujillo regime, usually for the purpose of pointing out their narrative or epistemological shortcomings.

Another prominent example appears in the account of Belicia's school days in the

Dominican Republic, where the narrator comments “It wasn't like In the Time of the

Butterflies, where a kindly Mirabal Sister steps up and befriends the poor scholarship student. No Miranda here: everybody shunned her” (83).28 In a similar spirit to “Negro, please—this ain't a fucking comic book!” the dismissive tone in these citations are hard to miss, either in the allegation that a particular plot is “common as krill” and “one of those easy stories,” or in the pronouncement that there was “No Miranda here” to offer any sentimental narratives of redemption or consolation.29

the dictator; and 2) that it was the logical continuation of a long history of caudillismo and of a "traditional" political culture with authoritarian inclinations” (17, emphasis in original). See Horn, Masculinity After Trujillo.

28 The character from In the Time of the Butterflies to which this description corresponds is actually named Minerva, not Miranda; it is unclear whether this discrepancy was a mistake on Diaz's part, or if it was meant to highlight Yunior's own narrative fallibility.

29 For more on how Diaz's interpretation of the Era of Trujillo has been mediated by his reading of novels and historical texts about the period (including Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat and Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies), and how his novel exhibits a Bloomian “anxiety of influence” toward these texts, see Ignacio López-Calvo's essay “A Postmodern Plátano’s Trujillo.” For a more specific analysis of how

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This struggle against literary antecedents, as I have been suggesting, can also be read as a promiscuous “fucking with other books written about the Dominican Republic,” a task abetted by an author’s rapacious consumption of prior texts. Among the extensive corpus of textual precursors that Oscar Wao aggressively confronts, appropriates and supersedes, I would stress the primacy of two literary traditions that critics have largely glossed over in their analyses, and yet which are, ironically, exactly ones we have just observed as being singled out in the narrative. The first of these, as represented by Vargas

Llosa's The Feast of the Goat, is the dictator novel, perhaps the genre that is most commonly associated with Latin America after magical realism. The second, signaled in the nod to Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies, I link to a tradition of recent U.S.

Latina writing, a category whose theoretical contours are still taking shape, but which generally includes in its “canon” the works of Alvarez, Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo and

Cristina Garcia. In the next and final section, I examine how these two literary traditions inform Diaz's construction of a Dominican American literary identity, as well as the ways they also enable the articulation of broader, panethnic forms of affiliation.

IV.

As two antecedents aggressively consumed in Oscar Wao’s display of literary virility, the Latin American dictator novel and the U.S. Latina literary tradition also speaks directly to those two figures that the novel conceives as “fundamental” to

Dominican manhood: the dictator and the bellaco. In Diaz's novel, both these figures manifest through Yunior's authorial “single voice.” As the literary dictator who literally

Oscar Wao might be responding to Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat, see Victor Figueroa, “Disseminating 'El Chivo': Junot Diaz's response to Vargas Llosa in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” (2013).

151 dictates what gets represented and how it should be interpreted, Yunior's narration is highlighted throughout the novel as very much an apparatus of power, and more crucially, a power intimately connected to the written word. More than simply recounting events, Yunior's transmission of the story at hand is emphasized as an act of writing, with frequent references to “this book,” “our narrative,” “the manuscript” and “my first draft,” all of which indicate a meticulous process of composing and editing the physical text before the readers' eyes (6, 12, 114, 132). Thematically, the preoccupation with the clash and confluence between dictators and writers is precisely what aligns Oscar Wao with the genre of the Latin American dictator novel, as well as what sets it apart.30 In his influential account of this tradition in The Voice of the Masters (1985), Roberto Gonzalez

Echevarria argues that such texts inquire “not only into the nature and ways of contemporary political power, but also into the power, the energy that constitutes a literary text, particularly a novel, and the function within it of the figure of the author”

(65). His analysis of Augusto Roa Bastos's Yo el supremo (1974), considered one of the masterpieces of the genre, focuses on the image of a dictator and his amanuensis locked in an agonistic, symbiotic struggle:

Dr. Francia's fear of the pasquinade, his abuse of Policarpo Patino (to whom he dictates his own—Patino's—death sentence), his constant worry about writing, all stem from the fact that he has found and used the power implicit in language itself. The Supremo defines power as being able to do

30 By way of a quick overview: pretty much all scholarship on this tradition traces its inception to Facundo: Civilización y barbarie, a deeply influential 1845 text by the Argentinian Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. Most critics agree that while the deeper roots of this literature stretch back to the colonization of the New World, its modern trajectory began with Sarmiento, and include such works as José Mármol’s Amalia (1851), Ramón de Valle-Inclán’s El tyrano banderas(1926), Miguel Angel Asturias’s El señor presidente (1946), and Enrique Lafourca de’s La fiesta del rey acab (1959). These days, the term “dictator novel” is overwhelmingly associated with three seminal works from the 1970s that appeared as part of the “Latin American Boom”: Augusto Roa Bastos’s Yo el supremo [I, the Supreme] (1974), Alejo Carpentier’s El recurso del método [Reasons of State] (1974), and Gabriel García Márquez’s El otoño del patriarca [The Autumn of the Patriarch] (1975)

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through others what we are unable to do ourselves: language, being separate from what it designates, is the very embodiment of power, for things act and mean through it without ceasing to be themselves. Dr. Francia has also realized that he cannot control language, particularly written language, that it has a life of its own that threatens him. (79)31

For Echevarria, the dictator's recognition of language's power signals the fallibility and deconstruction of his own authority, hinted in his fear of the “pasquinade” that would make him an object of satire and or ridicule. In his own study of the genre, Robert

Spencer similarly highlights the novel's “capacity to mimic and occupy the authority of the dictator,” which ultimately serves to “advertise its unreliability, eccentricity, and susceptibility to the interruptions and rejoinders of other voices, to debunk it and deprive it of its power to compel us” (146).32 Both Echevarria and Spencer view the figure of the writer, and literary forms in general, as powerful sources of opposition against the forces of dictatorship, primarily through their strategic wielding of the shifty an ambiguous medium of language. In its exploration of the Trujillo dictatorship, Diaz's novel certainly illustrates language's power to subvert the dictator's purported omnipotence, namely through the “eccentricity,” “interruptions” and “rejoinders of other voices.” We have observed, for instance, Yunior's rendering of Trujillo precisely in parodic and pasquinade terms, and his ability to lay on the “hate” in the vibrant manner of a Muhammad Ali, deploying epithets like the “Failed Cattle Thief,” “Fuckface,” the “culocrat,” “T-illo,” and the “Dark Lord,” or more vividly as the “portly, sadistic, pig-eyed mulato” (225).

31 Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria, The Voice of the Masters (1985). For further critical perspectives on the Latin American dictator novel, see Gerald Martin, Journeys Through the Labyrinth (1989); Michael Valdez Moses, “Big Daddy: The Dictator Novel and the Liberation of Latin America” (2002); Moira Fradinger, Binding Violence (2010).

32 Robert Spencer, “Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and the African Dictator Novel” (2012). As indicated in his title, Spencer's essay reads Kenyan intellectual Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's 2006 novel Wizard of the Crow through the frame of this predominantly Latin American literary tradition, and shows how this tradition proves illuminating to an African context.

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Apart from the person of the dictator, the apparatuses of his fearsome rule—his lieutenants and sycophants, the ubiquitous secret police, the thugs who carry out the actual acts of violence—also become targets of the narrative’s mockery, referred to as

“ringwraiths,” “homunculi,” “lambesacos,” “SIMians” and “the Elvises” (90, 110, 222,

142).

In this regard, Oscar Wao would seem to accord with Echevarria’s and Spencer’s take on the dictator novel, with the supremacy of Trujillo’s power and the gravity of his legacy deflated by the counter-power of Yunior’s verbally dexterous and irreverent narration. At the same time, Diaz also inverts this script, by showing how this same dexterous linguistic facility also becomes the instrument of Yunior’s own dictatorial power, and one of the ways he comes into his inheritance as the “son of Trujillo.” Thus while Echevarria emphasizes “it is not the voice, but writing, it is not the dictator-author, but the secretary-writer, who reigns,” Diaz produces a dictator novel in which these two sides—the “voice” and “writing,” or the “dictator-author” and the “secretary-writer”— emerges as one and the same, and in fact reign together (76).

To this end, Diaz's novel foregrounds the ways the activities of this secretary- writer-editor assume pernicious forms, in fulfilling his mandate as sole storyteller. In one of the novel’s striking plot devices, what initially presents itself as a third person omniscient narrative turns out to be the first person narration of a specific character, with the reader realizing that Yunior's singular consciousness has been structuring and filtering the stories of all the other protagonists. Events outside his immediate knowledge, such as

Belicia’s personal history, are presented as the fruits of his research: “Due partially to

Beli's silence on the matter and other folks' lingering unease when it comes to talking

154 about the regime, info...is fragmented; I’ll give you what I’ve managed to unearth,” with these materials often punctuated by his distinctive macho commentary: “Even your humble Watcher, reviewing her old pictures, is struck by what a fucking babe she was”

(119, 92). At times the details of the narrative are presented as having been modified for aesthetic purposes, with one footnote revealing that “In my first draft, Samaná was actually Jarabacoa, but then my girl Leonie, resident expert in all things Domo, pointed out that there are no beaches in Jarabacoa. Beautiful rivers but no beaches” (132). In a further bit of textual self-referentiality, it was also this native informant Leonie “who informed me that the perrito (see first paragraphs of chapter one, “GhettoNerd at the End of the World”) wasn’t popularized until the late eighties, early nineties, but that was one detail I couldn’t change, just liked the image too much. Forgive me, historians of popular dance, forgive me!” (132) On other occasions, facts are either obtained underhandedly

(“Was I really reading my roommate’s journal behind his back? Of course I was”), or flat out withheld from the reader at Yunior’s discretion, as with the account of a character’s suffering in prison: “A thousand tales I could tell you…to wring the salt from your motherfucking eyes—but I’m going to spare you the anguish, the torture…spare you in fact the events and leave you with only the consequences” (185, 250).

It is precisely because his storytelling is laced with these gestures of power and control (i.e. alteration, incursion, censorship) that Yunior comes to function as what

Machado Saez rightly recognizes as the “dictator of the novel (or co-dictator, if you wish to count Trujillo as a character)” (534). In Diaz’s iteration of the dictator novel, the narrator Yunior performs the role of both Rao Bastos’ Supremo and his overworked

155 secretary-scribe Patino.33 The notion of the dictator as not just an authorial voice who dictates, but also a supreme editor and annotator, is further reinforced in Oscar Wao’s much-discussed use of footnotes. As we have seen, the footnotes in Diaz’s novel serve both the traditional function of providing relevant historical and cultural background, as well as a literary function, as an extended vehicle for Yunior’s “single voice,” and its attendant aggressions. A footnote on Trujillo’s successor, Dominican President Joaquin

Balaguer, begins: “Although not essential to our tale, per se, Balaguer is essential to the

Dominican one, so therefore we must mention him, even though I’d rather piss in his face” (90). As such, the footnotes not only supplement and sustain the novel’s thematic exploration of dictatorship, but also function as a sort of formal correlative, literally underwriting Diaz’s assertion that “the real dictatorship is in the book itself, in its telling.” Elaborating on this point, Diaz remarks: “We all dream dreams of unity, of purity; well all dream that there’s an authoritative voice out there that will explain things, including ourselves. If it wasn’t for our longing for these things, I doubt the novel or the short story would exist in its current form. I’m not going to say much more on the topic.

Just remember: In dictatorships, only one person is really allowed to speak” (Slate).

As precisely a function of literary form, the footnotes in Oscar Wao do more than mimic an “authoritative voice” typically associated with academic discourse; while they

33 In this light, Yunior and Oscar’s respective surnames prove telling. As revealed in his appearance in Diaz’s short story collections Drown and This is How You Lose Her (2012), Yunior’s last name is de las Casas, linking him to the 16th century Spanish historian, social reformer and Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas, a highly prolific writer who not only chronicled the first decades of colonization in the West Indies, but also argued vehemently against slavery and other atrocities committed upon indigenous peoples. Oscar’s surname, de León, on the other hand, invokes the conquistador Juan Ponce de León, notable for being the first colonial Governor of Puerto Rico and an early explorer of Florida. De León’s involvement in the brutal Higüey massacre on Hispaniola led Bartolomé de las Casas, who accompanied him to the New World, to notify the Spanish authorities in protest. In pointing out the significance of these intertwined surnames, I hope to gesture toward possible readings in which Oscar function as the unknowable, absent dictator at the center of the text, while Yunior is the interpreter-scribe.

156 certainly “explain things,” they do so mainly as instruments of Yunior’s dictatorial narrative voice. The gradual revelation of Yunior as “the only one speaking,” I would add, does much to complicate what has become a dominant critical stance toward Diaz’s text: the valorization of its polyvocality and discursive heterogeneity. In her essay

“Reassembling the Fragments,” for example, Monica Hanna argues that Oscar Wao

“strives for a ‘resistance history’ which acts as an alternative to traditional histories of the

Dominican Republic by invoking a multiplicity of narrative modes and genres…allowing for a representation of national history that is cognizant of its various, sometimes dissonant, elements” (500).34 Reading against these celebratory accounts, I would note here that the “multiplicity of narrative modes and genres” on display in Diaz’s novel are all ultimately disciplined by and subservient to the dominion of Yunior’s narration, which unfolds, essentially, as one long controlled monologue. As Machado Saez astutely suggests, Yunior’s monologue can be read as not only complicit with the “institutional violence and ideology of dictatorship,” but that it merely adopts “an appealing guise of polyvocality,” through which it “charms and entices the reader, especially the academic reader, into becoming complicit with the heteronormative rationale used to police male diasporic identity” (523, 526).35

If the act of “policing” identity is in large part what makes Yunior a dictator, then this “appealing guise of polyvocality” is what makes him also a charismatic one.

34 Monica Hanna, “‘Reassembling the Fragments.’”

35 For all intents and purposes, I am in agreement with Machado Saez’s general skepticism toward “dominant readings of Oscar Wao as a transgressive text that challenges the oppressive structures of the nation state.” Specifically, Machado Saez reads Diaz’s novel, in the vein of Doris Summer, as a “foundational romance” of the Dominican diaspora, but one that “emphasizes the Dominican Republic’s history of dictatorship as the decisive element shaping belonging” (523). While I am indebted to her complex readings of Yunior-as-literary dictator, my own argument looks beyond the scope of Machado Saez’s focus on topics of gender and sexuality, and diaspora.

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Seducing critics and readers alike with his deftness of language and breadth of allusion,

Yunior’s narration is littered with virtuosic bilingual formulations like “Respectability so dense in la grande that you’d need a blowtorch to cut it, and a guardedness so Minas

Tirith in la pequeña that you’d need the whole of Mordor to overcome it” (78). Yet what many commentators largely gloss over is that the novel's multiple discourses nonetheless require an authoritarian “single voice” to hold it all together, lest the work risk slipping into so many fragmented and “dissonant” parts. In his review of the novel for The New

York Times, A.O. Scott’s description of Yunior’s narrative performance subtly touches upon this precariousness: “Holding all this together—just barely, but in the end effectively—is a voice that is profane, lyrical, learned and tireless, a riot of accents and idioms coexisting within a single personality.” Even as he lauds Yunior’s “profane, lyrical, learned and tireless” narrative voice, Scott's observation that it holds together

“just barely” underscores the urgent necessity that of second element, a certain brutal

“effectiveness,” without which the whole enterprise threatens to devolve into anarchy.

For critics like Scott, it would seem, the “riot” of accents and idioms in Diaz’s novel

“works” because of the “single personality”—the dictator—holding the text together.

Such an image also calls to mind the novel’s very first footnote about the Trujillo, the text’s ur-dictator: that, along with the familiar mixture of “violence, intimidation, massacre, rape, co-optation, and terror,” his achievements also include “last, but not least, the forging of the Dominican peoples into a modern nation state” (3). The term “forge” here can be interpreted in two different ways: as an act of building or creation, but also indicating a sense of illegitimacy, as a forgery or counterfeit, especially as pertains to acts of writing. If the “modern state” that is the Dominican Republic is “forged” through

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Trujillo’s oppressive violence, then Diaz’s novelistic explorations of an identity appended to that state partakes of a similar logic, as a “textual Caribbean” forged into literary coherence by its author.

Finally, that Scott titles his review “Dreaming in Spanglish” is also highly evocative in its naked reference to Dreaming in Cuban, the acclaimed 1992 debut novel by Cuban American author Cristina Garcia. The positioning of Diaz’s novel alongside

Garcia’s reflects more than a superficial commonality based on a shared Caribbean heritage; rather, I would suggest, it speaks to the profound and intimate ways that

Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban—and to a lesser extent, other fiction by U.S. Latinas— might be considered among the most eminent of Ocar Wao’s literary bedfellows. Here I wish to return to Diaz’s characterization of the allures of both dictatorship and literature, and their shared connection to “dreams of unity, of purity.” On the literature side, particularly in the realm of American literature, nowhere is this longing for purity, unity and cohesion a more pressing prerogative than the in case of ethnic literatures, as seen in the numerous debates surrounding authenticity, canonicity and political value that cohere around works by African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, Latino/as and other minority writers. Of these, the latter category presents its own set of vexed relationships to these issues, given the relatively recent ascendance of “Latino/a” as a pan-ethnic label of affective identification, a phenomenon generally dated to around the

1980s. Before then, the dominant tendency had been the separation of political, literary and intellectual traditions by its constituent subgroups based on national origin, such as

Chicano/a, Puerto Rican, Cuban Americans and Dominican Americans, with each group occupying a unique position within relations of power and privilege in U.S. society,

159 which were in turn informed by the specific geopolitical relationship between their country of origin and the United States. These distinctions, alongside larger economic and cultural differences—for instance, within regional variations of the Spanish language—thus loom large over any attempt by writers and academics to conceive of an umbrella “Latino/a” identity, or a corresponding category of “Latino/a” literature.36

While anthologies gesturing toward a “canon” of pan-Latino/a literature began to appear the 1990s, since then two events can be regarded as monumental to signaling a panethnic consolidation of the field: the inaugural issue of the journal Latino Studies in

2003, and the publication of the Norton Anthology of Latino Literature in 2010.37 In her review of the Norton Anthology, Kirsten Silva Gruesz notes how, unlike its predecessor and professed model, the Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1996), the

Latino volume “occupies the unusual position of presenting an authoritative canon for a body of literature that doesn’t yet have a literary history”; that is, Gruesz observes, the anthology seems to have appeared “before its compilers had coherent narratives about the tradition to offer” (335, 341). Framed against this context, my goal here is to think about

Junot Diaz not only as a Dominican American writer, but also as a Latino one, with all of the requisite conflicts and contradictions that this approach implies. Namely, I read Oscar

36 For an extended discussion of how U.S. Latino/a writers have—or more often, have not—addressed the concept of a “Latino” identity that encompasses various national-origin groups, see Marta Caminero- Santangelo, On Latinidad (2007).

37 In their recent critical study of this emergent tradition, Raphael Dalleo and Elena Machado Saez’s The Latino/a Canon and the Emergence of the Post-Sixties Literature provides a list of the above-mentioned anthologies, which include: Masterpieces of Latino Literature (1994), Latina: Women’s Voices from the Borderlands (1995), The Latino Reader: An American Literary Tradition from 1542 to the Present (1997), The Prentice Hall Anthology of Latino Literature (2001), Herencia: The Anthology of Hispanic Literature of the United States (2001) and Latino Boom: An Anthology of U.S. Latino Literature (2005). Alongside these collections of Latino/a creative writing are also a number of anthologies of Latino/a literary criticism, including A Companion to Latino/a Studies (2007), edited by Juan Flores and Renato Rosaldo, as well as Contemporary U.S. Latino/a Literary Criticism (2007) edited by Richard Perez and Lyn Di Iorio Sandin.

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Wao as offering its own attempt to work through the question of a “Latino/a” literary tradition, and forward an “authoritative” response; more specifically, Diaz’s literary performance of dictatorship in the novel becomes the apparatus through which the novel seeks to “forge” something of its own “coherent narrative” of Latino/a literary history— even if the ultimate coherence of the resultant narrative remains up for debate.

Central to my argument is the novel’s sense of its own “virile” mimetic writing, a posture consonant with the hypersexual Dominican manhood embodied in its narrator- dictator. In Oscar Wao, the imagination of a “Latino/a” category that transcends nation- specific groups is frequently couched in the realm of heterosexual desire. Following a depressive funk over his perpetual singleness, Oscar “tried to polish up what remained of his Dominicanness, tried to be more like his cursing swaggering cousins, if only because he had started to suspect that in their Latin hypermaleness there might be an answer”

(30). Lola’s girlfriends, targets of Oscar’s adolescent crushes, are described as “the sort of hot-as-balls Latinas who only dated weight-lifting morenos or Latino cats with guns in their cribs” (26). While images of “Latin hypermaleness” and “weight-lifting morenos” resonate more with Yunior, it is Oscar, interestingly, whose heterosexual desire is foregrounded as generating affective attachments across different Latino/a groups.

During an aberrant childhood period when he was “something of a Casanova,” who his mother describes as “our little Porfirio Rubirosa,” Oscar briefly had “two little girlfriends at the same time”: the Peruvian Maritza Chacón and the Puerto Rican Olga Polanco (12,

13). The novel’s account of this prepubescent fling—innocent and inconsequential though it was—nonetheless provides a compelling sketch of Oscar’s childhood social field, and its attendant ethnographic boundaries. Olga, we are told, “lived in the house at

161 the end of the block that his mother complained about because it was filled with puertoricans who were always hanging out on their porch drinking beer. (What, they couldn’t have done that in Cuamo? Oscar’s mom asked crossly.)” (13). Growing up,

Maritza transforms into “the flyest guapa in Paterson, one of the Queens of New

Peru…probably the only Peruvian girl on the planet with pelo curlier than his sister’s (he hadnt’ heard of Afro-Peruvians yet, or of a town called Chincha)” (18). These vignettes illustrate an urban space that sees the commingling of Dominicans with other Latino/a groups, and also functions as a vector for various transnational, translocal connections— linking Paterson, New Jersey, for instance, to places like Cuamo and Chincha.

Later on, Yunior recounts one of Oscar’s unrequited loves in college: the formidable Jenni Muñoz, a “boricua chick from East Brick City” and “Puerto Rican goth,” and for whom “Oscar’s adoration [was] like the light of a new sun” (182, 185).

What I wish to point out here is the way the novel figures Oscar’s own rapacious and intense desires as also a desire for panethic affective bonds. This, in turn, adumbrates other moments in the text when a “Latin hypermaleness” is associated with the forging, through sex, of a conception of “we Latin types.” Although Yunior is less vocal about the ethnicities of his countless sexual conquests, at one point Oscar chastises him for cheating on Lola by saying “You should never have had carnal relations with that

Paraguayan girl” (313). The sexual tastes of Belicia’s former lover, a Pimp for the

Trujillo regime known only as “the Gangster,” are also characterized in distinctly hemispheric terms: “the Gangster might have harbored love for Venezuela and its many long-legged mulatas, and burned for the icy beauties of Argentina, and swooned over

Mexico’s incomparable brunettes, but it was Cuba that clove his heart, that felt to him

162 like home” (122). While the women of Venezuela, Argentina and Mexico are described in physical terms, it is “Cuba”—the country itself, rather than any female type found there—that cleaves the “heart” and feels like “home.” The emphasis on the affective primacy of Cuba is no mere narrative flourish, but turns out to be central to the novel’s rendering of this panethnic desire. In the story’s one example of a functional inter-

Latino/a coupling, Lola eventually marries a man Yunior refers to as “Cuban Reuben,” with whom she has a daughter named Isis. At the end of the novel, after Oscar’s murder following a doomed sexual affair in the Dominican Republic, it is the Dominican-Cuban

Isis who comes to embody all of Yunior’s maudlin hopes for dispelling the fukú: “And maybe, just maybe, if she’s as smart and as brave as I’m expecting she’ll be, she’ll take all we’ve done and all we’ve learned and add her own insights and she’ll put an end to it.

That is what, on my best days, I hope. What I dream.” (331).

The focus on Cuba, and the possibility of a joint Cuban-Dominican (American)

“insight,” brings me back to the centrality of Cristina Garcia to Diaz’s literary project, and its own invocation of a panethnic “hope” and “dream.” As previously mentioned,

Garcia’s work is often grouped among a vibrant and popular tradition of writing by U.S.

Latina authors that include Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street (1984), Ana

Castillo’s So Far From God (1993) and Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their

Accents (1991) and In the Time of the Butterflies (1994). These works have long been considered canonical among U.S. multicultural literatures, not least for their exploration of race and identity alongside themes of domesticity, patriarchy, gendered spaces, as well as transnationalism and migration.38 While Alvarez’s work might seem on the surface to

38 For a critical account of the above authors as part of a “canonical” Latina literary tradition, see Ellen McCracken, Latina Narrative (1999).

163 have the most in common with Diaz’s (both authors explore Dominican American identity and the history of the Trujillo dictatorship), I argue here that it is in fact Garcia’s

Dreaming in Cuban that resonates most powerfully in Oscar Wao, particularly in the chapters focused on Lola.

Much like the transnational shifts between the United States and the Dominican

Republic in Diaz’s novel, Dreaming in Cuban moves between the United States and

Cuba, focusing on three generations of women in the Cuban Del Pino family. The youngest of these, Pilar, is an American-born teenager whose narrative of self-discovery and political awakening is driven in large part by her conflicts with her overbearing mother, Lourdes, a relationship that often veers into the dictatorial and violent (with also a tinge of the privacy-invasion we see in Yunior’s treatment of Oscar). As Pilar tells us,

“My mother reads my diary, tracks it down under the mattress, or to the lining of my winter coat. She says it’s her responsibility to know my private thoughts” (26). When, through such surveillance, Lourdes learns that Pilar masturbates in the tub, “she beat me in the face and pulled my hair out in big clumps. She called me a desgraciada and ground her knuckles into my temples. Then she forced me to work in her bakery every day after school for twenty-five cents an hour. She leaves me nasty notes on the kitchen table reminding me to show up, or else” (27). Eventually Pilar decides to run away, hoping to end up in Cuba, but only makes it as far as Miami before she is caught by an aunt, who calls her mother to retrieve her; during her long bus journey, Pilar recalls how “back in

Cuba the nannies used to think I was possessed…They called me brujita, little witch”

(28, emphasis in original).

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In Oscar Wao, the sections that detail the relationship between Lola and Belicia also emphasize the volcanic nature of a similar daughter-mother dyad. Notably, the chapters about Lola are the only ones in the novel to be narrated in the first person by someone other than Yunior—although they are punctuated by Yunior’s narrative inflections, strongly hinting that they are transcribed by or otherwise channeled through him. This formal technique bears a striking resemblance to the way Dreaming in Cuban also shifts between myriad first and third person points of view, with the sections pertaining to Pilar remaining strictly in the first person. “For as long as you could remember you had bruja ways; even your mother will begrudge you that much,” muses an enigmatic, italicized second person narration that frames the start of Lola’s narrative, most likely a transitional voice that belongs to Yunior (53).39 Later, Lola speaks of “that crazy feeling that started the whole mess, the bruja feeling that comes singing out of my bones” (72). Like the “brujita” Pilar, the teenaged Lola’s interactions with her mother are marked by an antagonism and violence that the novel portrays as downright tyrannical:

“She would hit us anywhere, in front of anyone, always free with the chanclas and the correa…She was my Old World Dominican mother and I was her only daughter…which meant it was her duty to keep me crushed under her heel” (55). Indeed, Diaz’s novel seems to seize upon the ethnic literature trope of the “Old World” mother only to ratchet it up tenfold, depicting Lola’s life with Beli as akin to the arbitrary terror and unpredictable menace of living under a dictatorship:

39 The most compelling piece of evidence that this second-person voice is Yunior addressing Lola, rather than Lola addressing the reader, is that it contains several turns of phrase that recur throughout Yunior’s subsequent narration, and are in keeping with Yunior’s hypersexual nature. For instance, the description of Belicia’s “extraordinary train-wrecking secondary sex characteristics” in the Lola section appears later in the account of Belicia’s youth, when she is said to have experienced a “Summer of Her Secondary Sex Characteristics” (51, 52, 91).

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Most of the time she just looked at me with the stinkeye, but sometimes without warning she would grab me by my throat and hang on until I pried her fingers from me. She didn’t bother talking to me unless it was to make death threats. When you grow up you’ll meet me in a dark alley when you least expect it and then I’ll kill you and nobody will know I did it! Literally gloating as she said this. (61)40

Here the foreboding “or else” that punctuates Lourdes’ note to Pilar finds its magnified,

Dominican apotheosis in Belicia’s “death threat” against her own daughter. Lola also reaches her breaking point and runs away, and like Pilar, she is eventually caught and turned in by a relative—this time her own brother Oscar. Finally, the first Lola chapter ends with her being sent to the Dominican Republic to stay with her grandmother, a moment that the novel presents as a weighty emotional crossroads, which Lola compares to the physical thrill of a track competition: “And that’s when it hit with the force of a hurricane. The feeling...I felt like I always did at the last seconds of a race, when I was sure that I was going to explode. She [my abuela] was about to say something and I was waiting for whatever she was going to tell me. I was waiting to begin” (75). Likewise, one of Pilar’s sections in Dreaming in Cuban concludes at a similar precipice, which also gets enfolded in the sensation of an engrossing physical activity (in this case, playing a musical instrument): “The thick strings vibrate through my fingers, up my arms, down my chest. I don’t know what I’m doing but I start thumping that old spruce dresser of an instrument for all it’s worth, thumping and thumping, until I feel my life begin” (181).

It is in these female-centric chapters of Oscar Wao that Diaz’s novel starts to resemble a certain kind of Latina writing, one featuring a certain kind of Latina

40 The remarkable similarities between Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban and Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao are numerous, and could comprise an entirely separate study. Some of these include: closely paralleled scenes of travel to the island homeland; the benign and wise grandmother figure who resides there (Celia del Pino and La Inca); the pervasive, sudden threat of sexual violence; a mother physically scarred by past trauma (Lourdes’ scars on her stomach from her rape, and Belicia’s scars on her back from her childhood scalding); Pilar and Lola’s shared love for the punk music scene of the early 80s; Belicia’s and Lourdes’ shared disdain for Puerto Ricans, and so on.

166 protagonist and centered on specific tropes such as daughter-mother-grandmother dynamics, running away from home, a romantic gaze toward the diasporic homeland, survival in a heteropatriarchal world, sexual awakening, and the “beginning” of self- discovery, among others. In doing so, I would argue, Diaz writes himself into what

Raphael Dalleo has termed an “intertextual poetics of relation” that “establishes and interrogates connections to other [Latino/a] groups and traditions” (4).41 Specifically,

Dalleo argues that Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban “begins to codify a Latina literary tradition” in its intertextual links to other works by Latina authors, particularly Sandra

Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street (9). For Diaz, however, this “intertextual poetics of relation” assumes a more aggressive cast, as a “complex agonistic interplay of authorial voices” that also expresses his text’s manifest “virility.” Crudely stated, I propose that Diaz’s text approaches the Latina literary tradition in a way that parallels his male characters’ approach to the community of Latina women: that is, as a forceful erotic desire that takes the form of appropriation, possession, and a “fucking with other books.”

In other words, given Diaz’s admission of Garcia’s influence, how might we read Oscar

Wao as not merely a “love letter” to Dreaming in Cuban, but something like an aggressive and virile intertextual seduction of the Cuban American author?

In this way, Diaz’s text aggressively incorporates a tradition of Latina literature into the “coherent narrative” of Latino/a literary history it wishes to tell, while also foregrounding set of thematic and aesthetic concerns that the novel conceives as specifically Dominican: the forms of dictatorship, as well as a related “Latin

41 See Raphael Dalleo’s “How Cristina Garcia Lost Her Accent, and Other Latina Conversations” (2005). In delineating this notion of intertextuality, Dalleo draws upon both Henry Louis Gates’ notion of signifyin(g) as a (re)writing with a difference, as well as Edouard Glissant’s concept of relation and “creolization” as a way of “imagining identity as booth rooted and in process” (9). In both cases, Dalleo singles out ways of reading the relationship between texts and identities that are also tied to a specific cultural lens: namely, a black diasporic and a Caribbean lens, respectively.

167 hypermaleness” that directs its promiscuous desire across national-group lines. Like all the other “polyvocal” and “dissonant” elements reassembled by Diaz’s text, this incorporation occurs under the dictatorial imperative of Yunior’s narration, a point that

Diaz also stresses in relation to the specific issue of writing across gender lines. In an interview with LAist, when asked how hard it was for him to “get into the female subjectivity, to view things from the perspective of Lola, Belicia,” Diaz responds:

Ones of the good things is that I wasn't trying to direct it, it was all being filtered through Yunior’s voice. What I was happiest with, even though these women are being filtered through this aberrant, weirdly masculine, polymathic voice, what I wanted to get across was that the sense that you were encountering the female subjectivity despite all this white noise from Yunior. That a voice like Yunior could, without losing itself, render what it's like to be around these kinds of women.42

To conclude by way of restating one of the driving questions behind this chapter: how can we read Diaz’s literary performance of dictatorship as forging—in both senses of the term—some notion of a pan-ethnic Latino/a affiliation? Here I call our attention to two recent and influential attempts at the tricky theorization of Latinidad. Embracing the side of specificity, Juan Flores asserts that “while there is a certain inevitability in the formation of pan-ethnic concepts like ‘Latino’ or ‘Asian-American,’” the sociological validity of these constructs depends overridingly on the contextual specifics of each group. Thus, for Flores, “Latino” only holds up when it is qualified by the national-group angle or optic from which it is uttered: there is a “Chicano/Latino” or “Cuban/Latino” perspective, but no meaningful one that is simply “Latino” (8). From within this premise, however, Flores does propose several useful frameworks for conceiving of “Pan-Latino” formations—for instance, as a series of “Trans-Latino” crossings, or as a “Latino

42 From “LAist Interview: Junot Diaz, Author and Pulitzer Prize Winner” (2008).

168 imaginary” in the spirit of Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities.” From a broader scope, Juan Gonzalez begins his magisterial study of the Latino/a population in the

United States by asserting that “U.S. economic and political domination over Latin

America has always been – and continues to be – the underlying reason for the massive

Latino presence here. Quite simply, our vast Latino population is the unintended harvest of the U.S. empire” (xvii).

In a sense, Diaz’s novel straddles both of these positions, which are certainly not mutually exclusive. From his specifically Dominican/Latino optic, the Latin American-

Caribbean experience of dictatorship can certainly be taken as a defining quality from which to relate separate members to a larger whole, an imagined community of “we Latin types,” even if the unity and coherence of this trans-Latino community has to be imposed from above, dictatorially—as is also the case with any conception of literary history. As

Juan Gonzalez would also remind us, it is specifically U.S.-backed dictatorships that

“Latin types” are excellent at tolerating. It is as the focal point of these twin lenses of dictatorship and American empire, perhaps, that the Dominican American experience finds itself at the vanguard a Latino imaginary. The chilenos and argentinos, of course— and, as I begin my next chapter by showing, the cubanos—are still appealing.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Senator Corleone, Governor Corleone…Generalíssimo Corleone? The Godfather: Part II and the Form of Dynastic Succession

December 2014 brought about a rather momentous sea change in United States foreign policy, when U.S. President Barack Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro jointly announced the beginning of a process to normalize relations between the United

States and Cuba. This comes after five decades of economic sanctions and a devastating embargo against the Caribbean nation following Fidel Castro’s rise to power in 1959.

Certainly, the renewed focus and discourse on Cuba coincides fortuitously with many of the topics and contexts touched upon in this study. Like the continued division of the

Korean peninsula, for instance, the Cuban embargo represents one of the more egregious relics of Cold War geopolitics to have lingered this far into the twenty-first century; meanwhile, Fidel Castro’s authoritarian rule—now passed on to his brother—has long prompted many observers to characterize him as the last of the old school caudillos.1 As the world eagerly awaits ramifications of this unfolding development, and with an even longer incubation period before it registers in the literary-aesthetic realm, I would now like to turn our attention to another landmark cultural artifact from the last century, one that has also received a degree of renewed attention thanks to the recent U.S.-Cuba thaw.

1 See, for instance, Maurice Halperin’s “Fidel’s Power to Disrupt,” in Caudillos: Dictators in Spanish America. Interestingly, several commentators have made this connection by comparing Castro to Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, who referred to himself as “El Caudillo.” See Anne Louise Bardach, “Fidel’s fade-out” in Los Angeles Times, and Irving Louis Horowitz, “Castro and the Caudillo” (2007). More recently, Cristina Garcia’s latest novel King of Cuba (2013) depicts the modern day life of the aging “El Commandante,” paralleled with the aging cohort of Florida Cuban exiles who are his sworn enemies, as a comical, Grumpy Old Men-esque farce.

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December 2014 also marks the 40th anniversary of Paramount Pictures’ release of

The Godfather: Part II (1974) director Francis Ford Coppola’s sequel to his wildly popular and critically beloved The Godfather (1972), which was based on Mario Puzo’s bestselling novel of the same name. In the weeks following the announcements from

Washington and Havana, numerous news reports and opinion pieces have invoked The

Godfather: Part II, which features, memorably, an extended sequence set in Havana that culminates with the victory of Castro’s Cuban Revolution on New Year’s Day, 1959.2 As the headlines of some of these pieces would suggest—“‘Godfather II’ Explains Why

Dominicans Worry Over U.S.-Cuba” and “The ‘Hyman Roth’ Play: Cuba-related Stocks

Rally”—the film remains relevant not only as a history lesson, but also as a handy analytical tool for “explaining” current events, whether in its implications for Caribbean regional economies or U.S. financial markets. The very idea of a “Hyman Roth” play

(named after the character played by Lee Strasberg) for Cuba stocks—the short version: start investing, but be cautious—attest to the extent to which Coppola’s Godfather films have become a prominent part of the American cultural lexicon, and often converted into an easy hermeneutic shorthand.3

In many ways, Coppola’s films and Puzo’s novel likewise offer a productive site for tying together some of the driving threads behind this study, and for further exploring the connections between ethnic identity, dictator figures and narrative genres. Leaving

2 See Ezra Fieser, “‘Godfather II’ Explains Why Dominicans Worry Over U.S.-Cuba,” Bloomberg Business John Melloy, “The ‘Hyman Roth’ Play: Cuba-related Stocks Rally,” CNBC; John Sununu, “Opinion: Faith in Cuba Misplaced,” The Boston Globe, Karl Vick, “Fidel Loses the Race to the Grave,” Time.

3 In 2009, Princeton University Press even published a volume titled The Godfather Doctrine, which repurposes Coppola’s film as a parable for the decline of post-Cold War American power, emblematized by the aging Don Vito Corleone, while his heirs represents the three leading approaches to U.S. Foreign policy: liberal institutionalism (Tom Hagen), Bush-era neoconservatism (Sonny) and the realist school (Michael). See: John C. Hulsman and A. Wess Mitchell, The Godfather Doctrine: A Foreign Policy Parable (2009).

171 aside for now the obvious, broad-stroke resonances between the “ethnic strongman” trope and the mafia dons of American gangster narratives, I want to begin with a consideration of the aforementioned Cuba scenes from The Godfather: Part II. Just as each of my previous chapters focused on the constellation of an ethnic American subject alongside an foreign ethnic dictator—Richard Wright’s wary interactions with Kwame Nkrumah, John

Kwang’s historical analogy to Syngman Rhee (and Henry Park’s “ready connections” to both), Yunior’s narrative inheritance from his diasporic “father” Rafael Trujillo—so too does my reading of Coppola’s film begin with a moment of reckoning between a domestic ethnic strongman and a transnational political counterpart: specifically, the encounter between the Italian American mafia don and the Cuban caudillo, which becomes an expressive “primal scene” for the film’s construction of its protagonist,

Michael Corleone (played by Al Pacino). As I hope to argue, far from serving as a mere exotic backdrop for the gangster plot, the Cuban Revolution in fact plays a critical role in the film’s articulation of the mafia don-as-ethnic strongman, by further framing this figure within the transnational symbolic economy of the military dictator.

II.

Here it helps to recall what brings Michael Corleone to Cuba in time to witness the revolution in the first place: his business dealings with Castro’s predecessor and ideological nemesis, the corrupt, pro-capitalist and U.S.-backed President of Cuba,

Fulgencio Batista.4 Having succeeded his father Vito (played by Marlon Brando) as head

4 The historical Fulgencio Batista twice served as the head of state of Cuba: the first time as an elected President (1940-1944) and the second time as a military dictator (1952-1959), before being overthrown as a result of the Cuban Revolution. It was during the second period of his rule that Cuba became notorious for being a venal and repressive police state, a lucrative mafia haven, and an eager supplicant to U.S. corporate

172 of the Corleone crime family at the end of the first film, and subsequently ascending to the heights of the American underworld, Michael’s trip to Cuba represents the logical next step of his aggressive capitalist expansion, as well as his assimilation into the

American mainstream. This is a process that begins with his moving of the family business out the ethnic enclave of New York’s Little Italy to the WASP environs of

Nevada, abandoning the olive oil business that had been his father’s base of operations in exchange for the life of a casino magnate. In light of this trajectory, Michael’s plan to invest in casinos in Cuba, along with veteran Jewish gangster Hyman Roth, signifies the completion of his entrance into the U.S. power establishment—a Man in the Gray Silk

Suit who is also now a full-fledged imperialist.

In one pivotal scene, Michael and Roth arrive in Havana to attend a meeting with

Batista, as part of a delegation of executives representing various American business interests. The scene, though brief, is thematically straightforward in its indictment of U.S. economic predation in Latin America, and the mobsters and friendly dictators who abet it—it can be read, in a word, as Coppola’s take on the “fukú story.” Closely linked to the telling of this story, furthermore, is the importance of naming in this scene. After some welcoming remarks, in which the Cuban President thanks “this distinguished group of

American industrialists,” the camera pans slowly across the large conference table, first down one side, then the other, passing over the face of each attendee as the president lists their names and respective organizations: “Mr. William Shaw, representing the General

Fruit Company; Messrs. Corngold and Dant, of the United Telephone and Telegraph

interests. A staunch anticommunist, Batista, for all intents and purposes, can be likened to a Cuban Syngman Rhee.

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Company, Mr. Petty, Regional Vice President of the Pan American Mining Corporation;

Mr. Robert Allan of South American Sugar.”

Though it unfolds as an extended roll call, narratively speaking the scene is not at all interested in introducing the viewer to any characters that might advance or complicate the plot, but rather to a set of forces. For these nondescript organization men who play no further role in the film, it is the names of their respective firms that distinguish them, some of which deliberately invoke real-life companies with long histories of exploitation in Latin America (most obviously, the United Fruit Company and International Telephone & Telegraph). In his analysis of the film, Fredric Jameson reads in such scenes the unveiling of “American capitalism in its most systematized and computerized, dehumanized, ‘multinational’ and corporate form” (145).5 Within this context, Michael’s own introduction is notable for its relative obliqueness: “Mr. Michael

Corleone of Nevada, representing our associates in tourism and leisure activities.” Unlike the others, Michael remains untethered from any clear institutional or even national affiliation; he represents vague “associates” rather than a corporate entity, and his origin is tied to the sub-national Nevada rather than the United States.

But ultimately, the person whose lack of proper designation stands out most prominently in this scene is not Michael, but the figure who presides at its center: the

5 Jameson, Fredric, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” (1979). In Jameson’s reading, Coppola’s Godfather films posit the mafia as an ideological critique of capitalist excess—a critique that emerges most fully in Part II, which strips away the sentimental trappings of a “utopian” family sphere that occluded the full power of the critique in the first film. Instead, the second film reveals the romantic fantasy of mafia for what it truly is, a nightmare of big business gone wrong: “When indeed we reflect on an organized conspiracy against the public, one which reaches into every corner of our daily lives and our political structures to exercise a wanton ecocidal and genocidal violence at the behest of distant decision-makers and in the name of an abstract conception of profit—surely it is not about the Mafia, but rather about American business itself” (145). For Jameson, naturally, the Havana scenes represent the “climatic end moment of this historical development…when American business, and with it American imperialism, meet that supreme ultimate obstacle to their internal dynamism and structurally necessary expansion which is the Cuban Revolution” (147).

174 unnamed President of Cuba. Although universally accepted by audiences to be the dictator Batista, and commonly identified as such, it is important to note that film never actually refers to this character by name. Played by Panamanian actor Tito Alba, the character is listed in the credits as “Cuban President,” and in the scene he is addressed only as “Mr. President.” To be clear, I am not arguing that Coppola intended for the character to not be Batista; in fact, based on the depiction of certain historical details— the gift of a golden telephone from “United Telephone and Telegraph,” the New Year’s

Eve resignation and exile—the film makes every indication that this president absolutely is meant to be Batista, with arguments to the contrary seeming highly unlikely. Rather, I merely wish to suggest that the unnamed status of this character remains a relevant detail, especially in light of the film’s open references to U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower and, more crucially, Fidel Castro.

The first mention of Castro, notably, takes place in a scene immediately following the meeting with Batista, in which the crime genre briefly segues into an international political thriller in the Graham Greene mold. While driving through a crowded Havana street, Michael’s car is stopped at a military roadblock, while up ahead government troops line up a group of captured rebels against a wall. Here Coppola doubles down on conveying the war-zone like qualities of Havana, from the uniformed soldiers and protruding rifles lining both embankments above the inclined street, to the conspicuous troop carriers, jeep—and even a tank—visible further in the background [Figure 1].

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Figure 1. The gangster film as war film/political thriller.

As Michael observes from his car, one of the detainees breaks away from his captors and tackles a nearby commanding officer, shouting “Viva Fidel!” before detonating a concealed grenade and killing them both. Shortly after, Michael recounts this incident to a gathering of his criminal associates who, like him, are also in Cuba to invest in casinos under the auspices of Batista’s government.6 “It occurred to me,” Michael remarks, “the soldiers are paid to fight. The rebels aren’t.” When Roth, looking skeptical, asks what he thinks this means, Michael replies “they [Castro’s rebels] can win.” Here it would seem that the distinction famously raised in the first film, and in Puzo’s novel—between what’s

“business” and what’s “personal”—proves relevant even in the world of geopolitics.

While this display of prescient political savvy feels somewhat dampened by the

6 For a history of the close and profitable association between the Cuban dictator Batista and the American mafia, a relationship in which prominent organized crime figures like Meyer Lansky (whom the character of Hyman Roth is based on) played a key role, see Jack Calhoun, Gangsterismo: The United States, Cuba, and the Mafia, 1933 to 1966 (2013) and T.J. English, Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba and Then Lost It to the Revolution (2008). In an interview following the publication of his book, English asserts “Most Americans, everything they know about this era is from the movie Godfather II.”

176 easy hindsight from 1974, Michael’s intuition is contrasted against the arrogant myopia of his allies, Roth and Batista. In response to Michael’s concerns, Roth retorts that “This country has had rebels for the last fifty years. It’s in their blood. Believe me, I know. I’ve been coming here since the twenties. We were running molasses out of Havana when you were a baby.” More pointedly, Michael’s strategic acumen provides a stark counterpoint to the Cuban President. When pressed about the status of rebel activity and its implications for American businesses in the earlier meeting, the president replies “my staff indicates, with assurance, that we’ll drive them out of the city of Santa Clara before the New Year,” and follows by quipping: “I want to put you all at ease. We will tolerate no guerillas in the casinos or the swimming pools.” The irony of this statement, of course, is underscored by the famous final moments of Cuba scenes, which depict the president’s resignation and Havana’s descent into a frenzy of rioting and looting. As victorious mobs shouting Castro’s name storm the gaming houses and smash slot machines onto the ground, it seems that contrary to assurances, the guerillas would come to occupy the casinos and swimming pools after all.

What I wish to point out about these scenes from The Godfather: Part II, most importantly, is that more than simply rendering him a witness or bystander to this pivotal historical event, the film positions Michael at the forefront of the Cuban political situation. He is first positioned alongside Batista—connected through that symbol of elite power, the conference table—only to grasp the state of the nation with greater clarity than its own official president. While Batista merely passes along the secondhand assurances of his “staff,” conveying his general detachment from the military situation, Michael gleans his insight by witnessing firsthand the rebels’ visceral, violent determination. In

177 foregrounding Michael’s perceptive advantage over both Roth and Batista, the film partakes in a persistent fantasy that has its origins in Puzo’s novel: the notion of the mafia don as a superior statesman. Within the span of a single page, Puzo’s text narrates how

Michael’s father and predecessor, Don Vito Corleone, “consolidated [his] power with a far-seeing statesmanlike intelligence” and “planned for the future of his empire with all the foresight of a great national leader”; one adversary even fatally underestimates Vito for seeming more like “a Parliamentary debator than a true mafioso” (285). Driving the point home even further, the novel adds that “Don Corleone kept an eye on the affairs of the world outside his world. He noted the coming of Hitler, the fall of Spain, Germany’s strong-arming of Britain at Munich. Unblinkered by that outside world, he saw clearly the coming global war and he understood the implications” (294). Most tellingly, perhaps, is Puzo’s curious inclination for casting underworld violence through the language and imagery of Third World conflict. In response to the “guerrilla wars” that flared up in major cities due to “ambitious hoodlums trying to carve themselves a bit of empire,” Don Corleone “mounted what was in effect a colonial war against these people,” in which “the pacification of the New York area took three years” (292, 293).

Given that Puzo also co-wrote the two Godfather films, Michael Corleone’s presence in Cuba in The Godfather: Part II offers a highly evocative manifestation of this subtext from the novel, situating the mafia don in a literal world of “guerilla wars,”

“colonial wars” and “pacification” campaigns that his father had waged only metaphorically. For Puzo and Coppola, Michael’s shrewdness as a gangster (in which he perceives the future of his casino enterprises more lucidly than Roth), is exactly what renders him a potentially more effective President of Cuba (in which he perceives the

178 future of the nation more lucidly than Batista). In one sense, the second film exports to the domain of international politics what J.D. Connor highlights in the first film as the

“structuring principle of Mafia action: this has been foreseen” (85).7 If, as Connor asserts,

“the essence of leadership in The Godfather is the ability to turn recognition into anticipation,” and that “the preternatural sense of anticipation is what Don Vito and

Michael Corleone share” (as seen in both father and son’s successful forecasting of their enemies’ moves in the first film), then just as his father had previously noted the coming of Hitler and the fall of Spain, Michael seems to foresee the triumph of Castro in Cuba and, most important of all, “understood the implications” (84, 85).

In addition to bringing him face to face with Batista, The Godfather: Part II goes even further, I would argue, by symbolically transferring to Michael the role of the dictator of Cuba. More precisely, Michael is portrayed as the fulcrum between several discrete yet overlapping cabals that represent the island’s true rulers. Over the course of the Havana scenes, Michael interacts with three separate cohorts, embodying three different spheres of power: the first, of course, is the “distinguished group of American industrialists” who meet with Batista at the Presidential Palace; the second includes those

“associates in tourism and leisure activities” led by Hyman Roth, and comprised of fellow gangsters, casino shareholders, and underworld associates; the third are a party of

United States senators, judges and “some government people” that fly in from

Washington, and whom Michael escorts on a tour of Havana nightlife. While the boundaries between these cliques are shown to be porous (Roth is present at both the industrialist and mob gatherings, while one of the industrialists turns up among the

American senators) Michael is the only common denominator among all three. In his

7 J.D. Connor, The Studios After the Studios: Neoclassical Hollywood (1970-2010).

179 civilian capacity as a businessman and mafia don, Michael becomes the key facilitator and power broker between the various factions seeking to dominate Cuba—business, crime and government—a function that one would expect to be fulfilled by Batista himself (who is shown directly interacting with only one of these groups). The image of

Michael as the film’s substitute dictator is further reinforced in a conversation he has with his brother Fredo (played by John Cazale), where he once again exhibits the

“preternatural sense of anticipation” inherited from his father: after the New Year’s Eve party at the Presidential Palace, Michael predicts, “they’ll take me home in a military car, alone. For my protection. Before I reach my hotel I’ll be assassinated.”

As this prophecy of his own assassination subtly hints, the institution that matters most, in the end, is the one domain that Michael has no access to—namely the military, which remains solely under Batista’s control. Unlike an effective mafia don, however,

Batista utterly fails in the “pacification” of his territory. By the time Michael arrives on the island, the tides of history have already swelled beyond even his considerable influence, leaving him to be literally engulfed by the human tides sweeping across

Havana on New Year’s Day, 1959. As depicted in the film, the decadent revelry of the elites at the Presidential Palace is soon replaced by the revelry of Havana’s long-suffering populace, filling the air with the sounds of car horns, curses, revolutionary slogans blaring from loudspeakers, and shouts of “Viva la revolucion! Viva Fidel!”8

Nevertheless, for someone who arrives in Cuba firmly aligned with Batista’s ruling establishment, Michael remains strikingly unfazed in the face this establishment’s hostile

8 In many aspects, the film’s depiction of events in Havana following Batista’s resignation remains faithful to contemporary news reports. See, for instance, R. Hart Phillips’ account in the January 2, 1959 edition of The New York Times, which describes how “the black and red flag of the 26th of July Movement, headed by Senor Castro, appeared on automobiles and buildings,” “cars raced through the streets with horns blowing,” and “a mob destroyed the new gambling casino in the Plaza Hotel.” Other details from the film are clearly fictionalized, such as Batista’s announcement of his resignation in the middle of a New Year’s Eve party.

180 overthrow. What seems most remarkable about the Cuban Revolution scenes, I would note, is the seamlessness with which Michael Corleone transitions between the worlds of

Batista’s Cuba and Castro’s Cuba. Even as he hastens to leave the island, the manner of his departure is portrayed in marked contrast to the other Americans, Cuban elites and pro-Batista elements rushing to flee the revolution. Still dressed in their New Year’s Eve finery, this panicked crowd overruns the marina, the airport, and the U.S. Embassy. We even see some of the American senators that Michael earlier entertained as they frantically announce their credentials before being allowed past the embassy gates, which end up shut to other asylum seekers.

Juxtaposed against these scenes, Michael is shown navigating this chaotic backdrop with his characteristic detached composure, sitting in his car as it slowly makes its way through the throngs pouring into the street. As the film makes abundantly clear, the hordes surrounding Michael’s car are not fellow Americans and elites racing to flee the country, but rather the very downtrodden Cuban masses that he had come, for all intents and purposes, to exploit. And yet, rather than recognizing Michael as a bourgeois

Yankee oppressor and tearing him from the vehicle, the crowd carries on in their exuberant celebrations. Shots of Michael inside the car are intercut with scenes of the raucous multitude outside, shaking their firsts in the air, occasionally pounding on the car exterior (the extent of their encroachment upon Michael’s space), their chants of “Fidel!

Fidel! Fidel!” punctuating the soundtrack. The staging of this scene, in fact, almost makes

Michael seem like the object of the crowd’s adoration, in the fashion of a beloved head of state or celebrity riding his limousine through a sea of supporters and fans. Whereas he had earlier functioned as a symbolic stand-in for Batista, as the focal point for the

181 different string-pulling forces in pre-revolution Cuba, here Michael becomes a symbolic stand-in for Castro, as the focal point of the masses’ revolutionary fervor. Within this context, the conspicuous refrains of Castro’s name also take on a heightened significance, in its inversion of the representational logic behind the film’s depiction of Batista. That is, while Batista appears on screen but is never explicitly named, Castro is named explicitly in his followers’ cries but remains unseen. In this sense, the two Cuban strongmen are presented as both half-present and half-absent—one seen and not named, and the other named and not seen—leaving the remaining semantic space to be filled by the outsized figure of Michael Corleone, the film’s true paragon of dictatorial power.

The figuration of Michael as symbolic dictator of Cuba is perfectly encapsulated by a specific shot that appears after Michael, one step ahead of everyone as always, discreetly leaves the New Year’s party even before Batista has finished his resignation speech. As he descends the steps of the President Palace, a symmetrical arrangement of architectural frontispiece, pillars, Cuban flags and white-uniformed guards frames his lone figure, in a manner reminiscent of the aesthetic of Leni Riefenstahl [Figure 2].9

9 Interestingly, Riefenstahl herself recounts how she had met Francis Ford Coppola around the time he was editing The Godfather: Part II, and that he expressed an interest in her editing technique. See her memoir Leni Riefenstahl: A Memoir (1993). For an account of Leni Riefenstahl’s influence upon various artists of the 1970s, including Coppola, see Pages, et al., Riefenstahl Screened: An Anthology of New Criticism (2008)

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Figure 2. The Don as dictator.

The extraordinariness of this brief sequence rests in the confluence of the literal and figurative in the performance of its symbolic work. Spatially, it situates Michael at the literal center of political power in Cuba (to a close extent, anyway: in the capital city of

Havana, at the Presidential Palace, framed in the visual center of the building).

Scenically, the stillness of the shot—with the only movement being Michael’s emergence from the left doorway and brisk descent down the steps—is a literal calm before the storm, followed immediately by the scenes of Havana’s descent into chaos. Narratively,

Michael’s exit from the lights of the Presidential Palace and into the darkness of the simmering night represents him literally walking out of Batista’s world and into Castro’s, an effect heightened by the distant sounds of Batista’s speech echoing behind him.

While the film’s narrative and visual arrangement posits the mafia don as a kind of intermediary figure between the conservative Batista and the revolutionary Castro,

Michael’s characterization as a repressive and ruthless authoritarian, I would suggest, also gestures toward the ultimate lack of any meaningful distinction between Batista and

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Castro as dictators.10 More so than any inclinations toward the political right or left, what

Michael Corleone shares most palpably with both Batista and Castro is the absoluteness of his rule, the assertion of his authority through violence and terror, and the harshness with which he deals with adversaries (and even allies and family members who have displeased him).11 Narratively, it is after his emergence from the crucible of the Cuban

Revolution that Michael truly hardens into the cold, merciless tyrant that the popular imagination most commonly associates with The Godfather: Part II. While the earlier half the film focused on Michael’s activities as a businessman, strategist and power- broker, the latter half charts the completion of his transformation into a full-fledged despot: he skillfully evades the U.S. government’s efforts to prosecute him; he orchestrates the death of his enemies even after they no longer pose a threat; he overrules his wife Kay (played by Diane Keaton) when she attempts to leave him—even striking her during an altercation—and when she persists, he ostracizes her from their children; and most memorably, he responds to his brother Fredo’s unwitting betrayal by first banishing him from the family, and later ordering his murder. Michael’s proclamation to his prostrate brother in this scene is chilling not only for its cruelty, but also the sneer of cold command befitting a ruler’s edict; at bottom, it is a scene of pure dictating, laying

10 Alessandro Camon offers a compelling theory of the mafia as embodying an ideology of collective interest, via “the family,” that is inseparable from individual interest. For Camon, “this is an ideology of the proletariat or of the aristocracy,” but is “not as deeply ingrained in the bourgeoisie.” This is because “a proletarian is somebody whose only richness is in his progeny; an aristocrat is somebody whose richness lies in his name. Reproduction, not production, is in both cases the key to ‘success’: the fact of having children, or the very fact of having been the child of the right parents.” From a socioeconomic standpoint, Camon concludes, “the Mafia represent in fact a confluence of aristocratic and proletarian interests” (60). Alessandro Camon, “The Godfather and the Mythology of Mafia” (2000). While Batista might not exactly have represented “aristocratic” interests in any sense, the notion of Michael Corleone as straddling both conservative and proletarian ideologies seems especially suggestive for the discussion at hand.

11 For an influential account of the “indivisible” political power associated with Latin American caudillo— as well as the way that leaders like Castro, Batista and Trujillo (among others) all fit similarly under this category—see “The Political Dilemma in Latin America” (1960) by Frank Tannenbaum.

184 out precise terms regulating both territorial and familial borders: “Fredo, you’re nothing to me now. You’re not a brother, you’re not a friend. I don’t want to know you or what you do. I don’t want to see you at the hotels, I don’t want you near my house. When you see our mother, I want to know a day in advance so I won’t be there. You understand?”

While such scenes underscore Michael’s role as the film’s supreme dictator, the deeper context behind this exchange also raises critical questions regarding the source and legitimation of his power. As Michael learns, Fredo’s betrayal stemmed from a slow- gestating resentment at having been passed over when Michael was chosen to succeed their father as head of the Corleone family: “You’re my kid brother, and you take care of me? […] I’m your older brother, Mike, and I was stepped over!” When Michael coolly replies that “that’s the way pop wanted it,” Fredo screams “It ain’t the way I wanted it!”

This tension, between “the way pop wanted it” and “the way I wanted it,” illuminates several interrelated thematics that are central not only to my analysis of The Godfather films, but also to the works considered in this study more generally. The first of these pertains to matter of dynastic succession, and the transference of authority from one generation to the next. As Nick Browne has observed, “the first two films bring together and interlock two stories—the struggle over control of the changing postwar, Italian-

American underworld and, second, the management of the problem of generational succession—that is passing control within one family from father to the right son” (14).

The concept of the right son is key here; as Puzo’s novel also explicitly establishes, succession within the Corleone family does not operate on primogeniture (the brief leadership of the eldest brother, Sonny, in the novel and first film had arose out of practical necessity due to the Don’s incapacitation, as well as Michael’s then-refusal to be

185 part of the family business; after Sonny’s death, Vito openly deems him a “bad Don”).

Thus Fredo’s bitterness at being “stepped over” arises from his own archaic conceptions of family succession rites/rights (“the way I wanted it”), while Michael’s justification for his rule, despite being the “kid brother,” reflects the true source from which all power, order and meaning in the family emanates: “the way pop wanted it.”

Just as important as designating the right son, Coppola’s film seems to suggest, is the importance of succeeding from the right father, one powerful enough enforce a successful transition, yet wise enough to recognize when to relinquish this power. The prime contrast here is with Hyman Roth, the film’s main antagonist, who posits himself as a father figure to Michael, based largely on his longstanding associations with the late

Vito. Early in the Cuba scenes, Roth even names Michael as his heir, seemingly on this basis; he tells the gathered criminal associates, “You all know Michael Corleone, and we all remember his father. At the time of my retirement, or death, I turn over all my interest in the Havana operation to his control.” Later on, in the same conversation where he predicts his assassination, Michael reveals to Fredo what he knows: “It was Roth all along. He acts like I’m his son, his successor. But he’s think he’s gonna live forever, and he wants me out.” Later in the film, while planning his final revenge, Michael revisits this point by remarking of Roth that “he’s been dying of the same heart attack for 20 years.”

Unlike Vito in the first film, who gracefully retires and even uses his authority to muster support for his chosen successor (“Do you have faith in my judgment?” he asks his lieutenants. “Do I have your loyalty? Then be a friend to Michael. Do as he says.”),

Roth’s villainy is tied to his refusal to honor his responsibility to his adopted “son” and

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“successor,” which Michael frames as a delusion of immortality.12 In this way, the physically ailing Roth parallels the politically ailing Batista, who announces much too late to his supporters that “my position in Cuba is untenable.” While Michael fails to make good on his promise that “Hyman Roth will never see the new year”—once again, his plans are thwarted by the military—his words still seem prophetic when applied to

Batista, whose rule over Cuba turns out to be the thing that doesn’t see the New Year.

The concentration of authority within the figure of the patriarch, “pop,” rather than any external governing protocols (say, pre-exiting mafia traditions) attest to the

Corleone family as a highly personalistic regime, which further clarifies the political fantasy subtending Puzo’s novel and Coppola’s films. Read against the narrative investment in Vito and Michael as akin to “great national leaders,” I would propose, the preoccupation with familial succession in The Godfather films takes on a distinctly transnational resonance, in which the Corleones comes to resemble such global family dictatorships as the Duvaliers in Haiti, the Somozas in Nicaragua, the Kims in North

Korea, and most recently, the Castros in Cuba (though in specifics the Castros prove the opposite of the Corleones, with Fidel’s transfer of power to his younger brother Raul

12 The third installment of the trilogy, The Godfather: Part III (1990) finds the aging Michael Corleone on the other side of this dynastic equation, facing the problem of grooming a proper heir, recognizing the right moment to relinquish power, and knowing what sorts of conditions and concessions to make of his successor (“That’s the price you pay, for the life you choose” he tells his nephew and protégé, Vincent Mancini, before declaring him the new Don Corleone). Even though he steps down voluntarily, in many ways Michael’s relentless, Ahab-like pursuit of some vague notion of redemption in the third film aligns him, I would argue, more with Roth’s illusions of omnipotence than with his own father, who had exemplified the virtue of knowing one’s limits. Taking stock of his life at the end of the first film, Vito tells Michael that “I work my whole life, I don’t apologize, to take care of my family,” and in addressing his unmet goals, the old don simply sighs in resignation that there “just wasn’t enough time.” Michael’s response to his father, in light of his later character arc, hints at his tragically outsized ambitions: “We’ll get there, pop. We’ll get there.”

187 inverting Michael’s execution of his older brother Fredo).13 Though the “greatness” of their national leadership remains a subjective matter, each of these ruling families has likewise had to “manage” the problem of succession given the lack of institutional strictures, relying solely on the patriarch’s personal power and charisma. Framed thus, we might read Puzo and Coppola’s story of the “changing postwar, Italian-American underworld” as articulated to a similar story of the changing postwar geopolitical overworld—a point that I will return to further on.14

Secondly, the theme of succession also underlines another of the narrative fixations that animate The Godfather: Part II: the looming shadow of the dynastic founder and originary patriarch—a condition that applies as much to Vito Corleone as it does to Anastasio Somoza or Kim Il Sung or even Joseph Kennedy, Sr. Throughout the film, numerous characters invoke the specter of Don Vito, usually in wistful and nostalgic tones. Fredo wishes that he could, “for once in my life, be more like pop.”

Connie (played by Talia Shire), their sister, explains the Italian toast “Cent’ Anne” by

13 My framing of the Corleone dynasty through this transnational lens reads against conventional interpretations of Puzo and Coppola’s iconic mafia family, which have generally emphasized its distinctly American qualities. This domestic framework typically blends a romantic myth of origins in a premodern, feudal Sicily, on the one hand, with a narrative of capitalist modernity, on the other. The end result, of course, proves to be no less romantic in its propagation of a popular myth of Ellis Island immigration, Horatio Alger-like success, and upward mobility through the generations, with the operative archetype being the Kennedys. In a 1975 interview, Puzo gestures toward both of these strains (the feudal and the modern), declaring that “Godfather Part I is a romance about a king with three sons. It is a film about power. It could have been the Kennedys. The whole idea of a family living in a compound—that was all based on Hyannis Port.” See: Murray, William. “Playboy Interview: Francis Ford Coppola.” Playboy (July 1975): 60. Given the extensive interpretation of the Corleones along these lines, J.D Connor’s observation is worth bearing in mind, that “The Godfather has been the subject of more good criticism than perhaps any other film from its era, in part because Coppola was as voluble about the project as he was. He told anyone who would listen that the film was really about capitalism, about business, about family—about the great American themes. And writers were willing to listen to him because he was the auteur” (84).

14 As scholars have noted, personalist regimes like the ones listed above have become increasingly common in the period following World War II, growing from 10 to 25 percent of all non-democracies. For more on personalist dictatorships, as well as relevant period statistics, see Natasha Ezrow and Erica Franz, Dictators and Dictatorships: Understanding Authoritarian Regimes and Their Leaders (2011); also Juan Linz and Houchang E. Chehabi, Sultanistic Regimes (1998).

188 saying: “It means we should all live happily for a hundred years. It’d be true if my father were alive.” It is also Connie who bitterly screams at Michael, in the beginning of the film, that “you’re not my father!” Such words certainly strike a nerve, for more than any other character it is Michael who bears, Hamlet-like, the formidable weight of the absent father upon his shoulders. “It’s not easy to be a son, Fredo” he says to his brother. Later on, while struggling with this same brother’s betrayal, Michael visits his mother, asking her “What did papa think, deep in his heart? He was being strong, strong for his family.

But by being strong for his family, could he lose it?” The operative choice here, between

“being strong” and preserving the family, clearly burdens Michael in a way it never did for his father, as indicated by his mother’s failure to understand the question.

Crucially, this moment presages a later scene in which Connie makes up with

Michael, telling him “You were just being strong for all of us the way Papa was.” His sister’s conciliatory words signal the option that Michael ultimately chooses: strength.15

Yet the equating of Michael’s “being strong” to “the way Papa was” seems tragically ironic given Michael’s murder of Fredo of a few scenes later, an act that the previous

Don Corleone—who is portrayed as treasuring the bonds between family above all else— would have found unthinkable. Thus if Fredo’s transgression against the family begins with his difficulty accepting his father’s will, the film also reveals the extent of Michael’s own alienation from “the way pop wanted it.” Watching from the windows of his house as his henchman carries out Fredo’s execution, the culmination of an elaborate, multi- pronged revenge against his enemies, Michael secures his family’s safety and supremacy by destroying it. In this way, Michael Corleone, like all of the other ethnic strongmen

15 Connie’s role as arbiter of personal “strength” in relation to “Papa” persists into The Godfather: Part III, where she tells Vincent, her nephew and Michael’s eventual successor that “you’re the only one left in this family with my father’s strength.”

189 explored in this study, figures the literary dictator as both tyrant and martyr. While, like his father, Michael takes moral responsibility for the violent actions he takes to preserve the family, the murder of his own brother by blood also signifies his moral death, and the betrayal of the values upon which his father built the dynasty.

The mourning of Vito as an ever-present loss by the film’s characters is also mirrored in the critical commentary on The Godfather: Part II. This brings us to the third thematic framework, which involves the examination of these ethnic dictator narratives as literary texts. Upon its release in 1974, many contemporary reviewers made a point of lamenting the absence of Brando’s character, which had been such an integral and iconic part of the first The Godfather. In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby begins by drawing our attention to the glaring lack that characterizes the second film:

The only remarkable thing about Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘The Godfather, Part II’ is the insistent manner in which it recalls how much better his original film was. Among other things, one remembers ‘The Godfather’s’ tremendous narrative drive and the dominating presence of Marlon Brando in the title role, which, though not large, unified the film and transformed a super-gangster movie into a unique family chronicle (58).

Similarly, Molly Haskell’s review in The Village Voice notes how “Brando’s absence hangs over the new picture as his presence…hung over the previous one” (88). If one were to replace “Brando” with “Vito” in Haskell’s sentence, it would easily turn her critique of the movie into a shorthand plot summary. Thus both Canby and Haskell’s fond invocations of Brando as the dominating and unifying force behind Coppola’s first film come to echo Michael, Fredo and Connie’s fond invocations of Vito as the dominating and unifying force behind the Corleone family. Or, to frame it in Junot Diaz’s terms: Vito’s dictatorship embodies, perhaps, that dream of unity and purity, and the

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“coherent narrative” holding together and giving meaning to both the Corleones as a social unit and The Godfather films as aesthetic constructs.

In a related vein, Michael’s failure to live up to his father—and the impossible ideal of strength, authority and family he represents—also occasions much of the critical commentary on The Godfather: Part II, in which the differences between father and son become emblematic of the aesthetic difference between the two films. Such readings commonly (and not inaccurately) recognize Vito as warm and paternal, while Michael is painted as cold and patriarchal, and completely lacking in his father’s tenderness and joie de vivre. Glenn Man, for instance, points out how:

In Part I, Vito’s paternal affection, sensitivity, and tact during business meetings and family engagements blurred the underlying ruthlessness and criminality of the family’s activities and contributed to the romantic construction of the Corleones. In contrast, Michael’s cold professionalism, bluntness, and bossy attitude bare the brutality that surfaces in his dealings with business associates and family members alike in Part II. (119)

In his critical analysis of the second film, and its calculated “deterioration” in relation to the first, Todd Berliner also observes that:

Even Michael himself appears less charming than in the first Godfather, having lost his youthful idealism and acquired a sterile, icy manner, like a stolid CEO. He certainly has none of the warmth of the old don, who never treated his family coldly or manipulatively. We can see Michael’s likeness to his father, but the comparison invariably makes Michael look worse.” (114)

Berliner’s study, titled “The Pleasures of Disappointment: Sequels and The Godfather,

Part II” is unique for its scholarly treatment of the “sequel-ness” of Coppola’s film, arguing that it “incorporates into its plot the very nostalgia, dissatisfaction, and sense of loss that sequels traditionally generate in their viewers” (108). The consideration of The

Godfather: Part II through its specific status as a “Part II” also proves especially salient

191 for my discussion of dictatorship and ethnic narratives, in its thematizing of the subject of dynastic succession, and the transfer of a family’s (or, as the case may be here, a franchise’s) “power” from one “installment” to the next.16

From this perspective, my generic interest in The Godfather: Part II in this study is less so as a crime narrative or political thriller, or even a “family drama” in the conventional sense; rather, my emphasis here is on the genre of the sequel, which we might also regard as a “successor” text to a charismatic original. Indeed, the invocation of the film’s successor status begins at the level of its title, with “Part II” functioning in a similar manner to the appellations of Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier and “Dear

Leader” Kim Jong Il, nicknames that signal a relationship to a prior, and often superior, antecedent (Francois “Papa Doc” and “Great Leader” Kim Il-Sung). In the remainder of this chapter, I examine The Godfather: Part II as a “successor” to the first film, and the way its qualities as such serve as a literary correlative to the broader themes of dictatorships and political dynasties.17

III.

I now turn to a reading of The Godfather: Part II, and what it might mean to conceive of its relationship to The Godfather not merely in terms of a sequel, but as a

“successor” and a “son,” with all the connotations of relation and descent that these terms imply. To this end, this last section also takes the partial form of a “visual essay,” in

16 Another critical study of The Godfather: Part II as a sequel can be found in Barton R. Palmer’s “Before and After, Before Before and After: Godfather I, II, and III” (2010).

17 To this day, The Godfather: Part II enjoys a reputation among critics, general audiences and film scholars alike as one of the best sequels in film history, with some even arguing for its superiority to the original. Like its predecessor, it won the Academy Award for Best Picture. This enduring popularity, I would propose, can be seen as an example of a successful “succession” that is as rare for film franchises as it is for political dynasties.

192 which I analyze a series of parallel set pieces that span the first and second Godfather films (with a brief contribution from the third), as part of a common filmic “DNA” that they share. In doing so, I also highlight an latent visual economy traversing these films, one that speaks to the distinctly transnational contextualization I have been foregrounding, in which Michael Corleone comes to function as an analogue for a global, rather than domestic, conception of the ethnic dictator.

The notion of The Godfather: Part II as a “son” to the first film begins with its very first image, which is actually a recreation of the final moments of The Godfather, where Michael’s gathered subordinates kiss his hand and honor him as “Don Corleone” for the first time. Although restaged in close-up, as opposed to the long shot of the first film, the details of this opening sequence—Michael’s identical wardrobe, the henchman who kisses his hand, Michael’s touching of this man’s head—indicates that this is in fact the same “inauguration” moment that concluded the first film, providing a line of continuity in which the second film is “birthed” from the conclusion of its progenitor.

When the henchman’s torso moves aside, the camera lingers on the sight of the empty chair behind him, above which the title card finally appears. Tellingly, the words “Mario

Puzo’s The Godfather” materializes first, lingering for a good several seconds, before the appended “Part II” follows [Figure 3]. Suspended thus, this image could very well be an

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Figure 3. The king’s empty throne (before the appearance of “Part II”) alternate title card for the first film, and for a brief moment the viewer occupies an indeterminate space between the predecessor and the successor. Compounded with the image of Vito’s throne-like chair, the filling of which represents precisely Michael’s burden, these few seconds literalize the powerful, lingering hold of the first film—and the first don— upon the “dynasty” they have engendered, as further indicated by the brand marker of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather.18

The idea of a consistent brand is also one that applies especially pertinently to the films of Coppola’s Godfather trilogy, all three of which share certain parallel features that have been well-remarked by viewers and commentators. These include, most prominently: an extended opening scene at a religious ceremony, through which all the major players are introduced (a wedding, a first communion, the awarding of a Papal

Order); an elaborate murder montage in the final act, in which the Don disposes of all his

18 From a different angle, we might regard Puzo’s novel as the true textual “father” of the series. In this sense, The Godfather: Part II, like Michael Corleone himself, is not even the firstborn child (which perhaps makes the critically much-less-beloved Part III the Fredo, or perhaps Connie, of the family).

194 enemies in one strategic stroke; and a closing image that emphasizes some sort of tragic

“death” (the death of Michael’s bond with his wife in the first, Michael’s “moral” death in the second, and finally, Michael’s literal death in the third). While these comprise some of the more conspicuous examples of the “family resemblance” between the films, the moments I wish to look at closely are more subtle, and less well-trod.

The first of these is mafia conference from The Godfather, in which Vito

Corleone meets with the heads of the Five Families and other gathered affiliates to negotiate an end to the ongoing gang war. At one point during the meeting, the audience is shown a long shot from the end of the room in which all of the attending mafia dons are visible, seated around a long conference table bearing diagonally rightward across the screen [Figure 4]. Both structurally and visually, this scene has its transnational restaging in The Godfather: Part II in the meeting scene I had pointed out earlier, where Don

Michael comes face to face with his counterpart in the Cuban dictator Batista [Figure 5].

Figure 4. The meeting of the Five Families from The Godfather.

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Figure 5. The “successor” scene from The Godfather: Part II. Batista shows off his golden telephone.

What I want to note here is not simply Coppola’s fondness for repeating particular shots and spatial compositions—though this is certainly apparent—but the similar arrangements of power relations that emerge across both sequences. Both, for instance, begin with a “roll call” of those in attendance, with the camera panning slowly down the table as each mafia don or corporate executive is named. Like Michael in the second film, who sits directly across from his antagonist Hyman Roth, Vito is seated at the center of the table facing his immediate adversary, Don Tattaglia. Also important, I would add, is the detail that any movie scene involving a long conference table invites us to consider: the person at its head. In The Godfather, the gathering is presided over by Don Barzini, who is presented as the most powerful of the dons aside from Vito Corleone, and whom

Vito thanks “for helping me organize this meeting here today.” It is only after this meeting, however, that Vito realizes “it was Barzini all along,” rather than Tattaglia, who has masterminded the war against his family; subsequently, Barzini is the most prominent

196 of the targets that Michael has systematically assassinated in the film’s climax, where he is dramatically gunned down on the courthouse steps. In this context, Barzini’s occupation of Batista’s place at the table in the second film is fitting, given that Barzini functions in the first film as the background dictator, powerful purely in theory (note the uniformed military officers standing behind Batista, signifiers of his empty power), and who will soon be removed by a dramatic and unexpected coup. This connection is further accentuated in Barzini’s quip during the meeting that “after all, we are not communists,” a subtle prefiguration of Batista’s assurance that “we will tolerate no guerillas in the casinos or swimming pools”—both of which elicit smug laughter from the attendees.

The second of the parallel set pieces I wish to examine involves a sequence from the first film that has become an iconic moment in cinema history, and its “offspring” from the second film that has never been quite recognized as such—even though the genealogies between the two are quite striking. Here I am referring to the restaurant scene from The Godfather, in which Michael murders two of the family’s enemies, Virgil “the

Turk” Sollozzo and the corrupt police captain McCluskey. Whereas he had earlier refused to involve himself in the family business, this scene dramatizes Michael crossing the moral Rubicon, and his initiation from innocence to a life of crime. Famously, the moment before Michael draws his gun is preceded by a long creeping close-up, his internal struggle conveyed by the pained, uncertain expressions on his face. The sound of

Sollozzo’s voice speaking to him is slowly drowned out by the screeching crescendo of a passing subway train, signaling Michael’s irrevocable “crossing over” [Figure 6].

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Figure 6. Michael’s crossing, in The Godfather.

Figure 7. Michael’s second crossing, in The Godfather: Part II.

Much like the parallel conference room scenes, Coppola stages a version of this critical passage in The Godfather: Part II, and once again re-articulates it within a transnational context. The successor scene, in this case, is one we had earlier discussed, in which

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Michael sits quietly in the back of his car while the frenzy of the Cuban Revolution rages on outside [Figure 7]. Significantly, both these moments occur at approximately halfwaythrough the two films’ respective running times, underscoring the sense of a pivotal transition that divides the first half of the narrative from the second. Rather than the slow close-up of the first film that emphasizes Michael’s internal and external contortions, the second scene frames his face in a still shot, mirroring Michael’s impassive expression as darkened silhouettes continuously flit across the rear windshield behind him. In place of the roaring subway train from the first film, the roaring chants of

“Fidel! Fidel! Fidel!” in Part II heralds Michael’s second “crossing over” into an even darker spiritual territory. Earlier that same evening, we might recall, Michael had discovered his brother’s betrayal, and grabbed him at Batista’s New Year’s party to deliver the Kiss of Death (as well as the famous lines: “I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart”). While the first version of Michael’s “crossing” launched a trajectory that led to his assuming leadership of the Corleones and murdering the other heads of the

Five Families, this second version sets in motion a moral calculation that ends with the execution of his own brother, in effect destroying the very family he has taken responsibility for.

Finally, to reiterate a point I had argued earlier, another of the frontiers that

Michael dramatically “crosses over” in this scene is that between Batista’s Cuba and

Castro’s Cuba. Here I wish to return to the idea of Michael Corleone as a symbolic analogue for figures like Batista and Castro, and explore how this latent iconography of the Third World dictator undergirds Michael’s depiction not only in Part II, but

199 throughout Coppola’s entire trilogy.19 To illustrate this point, I will now consider three moments from the opening passages of each film, each of which marks in some way

Michael’s first appearance, and examine how this visual logic emerges as a cumulative effect across the three films. For starters, it bears recalling that our first sight of Michael

Corleone is actually in military uniform, which he wears to his sister’s wedding in the beginning of The Godfather, setting him apart from the traditional tuxedos of his father and brothers [Figure 8]. By the start of The Godfather: Part II, Michael has adopted a different kind of uniform: the gray suit of a businessman and respectable elite, which he wears while receiving a U.S. senator who honors him with a plaque for his philanthropy, during a lavish celebration for his son’s first communion [Figure 9]. Coming around full circle, The Godfather: Part III also opens with Michael in military attire, though of a much more rarefied variety; receiving a Papal Order of Knighthood in recognition for his lifetime of charitable works, Michael attends the ceremony clad in the prescribed uniform, replete with dress tunic, plumed hat, white gloves and sword [Figure 10].

19 In illuminating this dimension, I approach the Godfather films in a similar spirit to my analysis of Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker in the second chapter, and specifically my reading of John Kwang as a transnational allegory for Syngman Rhee. That is to say, while these patterns are most likely not overtly intended by Coppola, they nevertheless comprise a “political unconscious” that animates his articulation of the ethnic strongman, especially as a mediating figure in relation to the hegemonic U.S. state.

200

Figure 8. The Corleone Dynasty: Sonny, Vito, Michael, Fredo.

Figure 9. Michael and Senator Geary; “We’re both part of the same hypocrisy.”

201

Figure 10. Commendatore Michael Corleone.

Read sequentially, Michael’s various “uniforms” in these opening set pieces chart the stages of his social ascendance: from decorated war veteran to politically-connected tycoon, and finally, to the exalted heights of a Pontifical Order. What I wish to point out in the above images, firstly, is the way they all deploy a (near) symmetrical composition to accentuate Michael’s habitation of the spaces of power, as well as a certain liminality inherent in his positioning (much like the shot of Michael outside the Presidential Palace in [Figure 2]). While Michael’s Marine uniform in the wedding photograph is meant to signal his independence and outsider status in relation to the family, his place in the center beside his father hints at his eventual fate as Vito’s successor. Notably, Michael and Vito are also the only ones in the photograph wearing hats (something Michael is not shown doing again in the film until he becomes don), rendering the presence of headwear in this context akin to a symbol of leadership, almost like a crown.

In Part II, Michael’s CEO-like suit and handshake photo op with Senator Geary is meant to communicate the extent of his acceptance into the American establishment.

202

Posed before the photographers in the foreground, the grouping conveys the harmonious interlacing of Michael’s underworld origins and legitimate world foothold, with the two realms positioned in a balanced, alternating arrangement: the senator’s aide (partially out of frame), the senator’s wife, Michael, Senator Geary, Michael’s wife Kay, and

Michael’s mafia henchman (in sunglasses). Behind the closed doors of his study, however, Michael’s relationship with the senator is revealed to be one of distrust and open antagonism. For his part, Geary makes it clear that he regards Michael as more or less a foreigner, and even something like a racial other. “I don’t like your kind of people,” he sneers. “I don’t like to see you come out to this clean country with your oily hair, dressed up in those silk suits, passing yourself off as decent Americans.” While

Michael acknowledges to the senator that “We’re both part of the same hypocrisy,” he also demonstrates his superior leverage in their battle when he flatly rebuffs the senator’s attempt to extort him: “My offer is this: nothing.”

Finally, if Michael’s knighting in the beginning of Part III epitomizes the pinnacle of his social approbation, then in the same stroke it also epitomizes the pinnacle of his alienation. Framed against the baroque cathedral backdrop of niche statues, candles, white-robed clergy and black-suited officials, the image in [Figure 10] most closely resembles the earlier [Figure 2] in its arraying of Michael at the geometric center of an iconography of dictatorial power. Nonetheless, the trappings of such empyrean grandeur seem more like a cage than anything else around the spiritually despairing

Michael. Although his family and closest associates are shown to be attending the ceremony, Michael’s official debut as a Commendatore (Knight Commander) sees him ritualistically flanked by anonymous strangers. Thus while [Figure 8] presents Michael

203 alongside his beloved family (even as he remains “outside” their inner circle) and [Figure

9] positions him against those he must regularly jostle with in the halls of elite power

(itself an odd form of intimacy), [Figure 10] finds Michael for all visual intents and purposes a king, but surrounded by no one he knows.

At this point it would be useful to qualify my reference to an “iconography of dictatorial power” in the previous paragraph, which I have also designated elsewhere in this chapter in terms of a “transnational symbolic economy” of the military dictator. In place of further theoretical or technical elaborations, I instead direct our attention to a set of gathered images, from the career of a dictator considered earlier in this study:

Figure 11. Scenes from the career of a dictator.

204

These images, of course, are of the Dominican Dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, whom we had previously encountered as the symbolic father and spiritual co-author of Diaz’s

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, where he was also nominated, fittingly, for the title of “Dictatingest Dictator That Ever Dictated.” What I wish to highlight here, more precisely, is the way these scenes from Trujillo’s career provides a transnational visual template through which we might regard the arc of Michael Corleone’s role as an “ethnic dictator.” The upper left hand picture, to start with, depicts the young Trujillo as commander-in-chief of the Dominican Army, a reminder that he began his career as a dedicated soldier before muscling his way into politics. The upper middle image is dated

1937, seven years into Trujilo’s presidency, with his light suit, striped tie and determined glare suggesting, I would propose, something of the “sterile, icy manner” and corporate- cold ruthlessness that commonly accrue to descriptions of Michael Corleone (particularly in Part II). The upper right image depicts the signing of the Hull-Trujillo Treaty (1940) between Trujillo and U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and presents a version of the

“Pat Geary” moment in its foregrounding of the frequent collusion between the U.S. government and foreign dictators (as well as in the hint of distaste in Hull’s expression).

Lastly, the bottom picture commemorates Trujillo’s 1954 trip to Europe where, among other activities, he received an honor from General Francisco Franco in Spain and negotiated a Concordat with the Vatican. Here the image of an older Trujillo, clad in an elaborate embroidered uniform and plumed hat, resonates with that of the aging Michael

Corleone, who first appears in Part III in similar ceremonial regalia, attempting to secure his outward redemption by way of the Vatican.

205

None of this is to say that Coppola had these specific images in mind while producing the Godfather films. However, the notion of a certain latent geopolitical iconography seems less farfetched when we approach the trilogy’s periodization from a transnational optic, rather than the U.S.-centered interpretations they are predominantly read through. Traditionally, such accounts focus on the domestic milieu of the 1970s, and the films’ response to a set of contexts that Glenn Man concisely recounts thus:

The first two films of The Godfather trilogy hit the screens in 1972 and 1974, respectively, during a period in American history darkened by the unpopular Vietnam War and by the scandal of Watergate. Distrust of the government during the Vietnam War turned into cynicism and disillusionment during the Nixon years. It is no wonder that The Godfather films would include a critique of the American system during this time of social upheaval and dimming faith in the country’s traditional values. (127)

Turning our gaze beyond U.S. borders, however, we might note that the release of the two films in 1972 and 1974 was also roughly contemporaneous with another side of “the

American system”: the rise of Augusto Pinochet in Chile (1973-1989), martial law in the

Philippines under Ferdinand Marcos (1972-1981), the authoritarian Yushin Constitution of South Korea under Park Chung Hee (1972-1981), the regime of Idi Amin in Uganda

(1971-1979), the ailing of Francisco Franco of Spain (died 1975), and numerous other examples. From this perspective, the sight of military uniforms on ethnic bodies was a common one during this period. How, then, might such a global milieu enable us to reframe our view, for instance, of Michael’s first appearance in his olive Marine Corps uniform—especially given his later characterization as an “oily haired” foreigner despoiling this “clean country”? Even the fate of Hyman Roth, I would add, would seem imbricated in this international context. As we might recall, Michael is able to assassinate

Roth only after the latter’s petition to retire in Israel is rejected by the Israeli High Court.

206

Afterwards, Roth tries unsuccessfully to bribe the governments of Argentina and Panama for residency before being forced to return to the United States, where he is gunned down at the airport. The demise of the Jewish Roth, from a certain angle, might be seen as a failure of connection between an American ethnic strongman and his international counterparts, with the figureheads in Buenos Aires and Panama City effectively finalizing the death warrant that Michael issues.20

The efficacy of this transnational symbolic economy, I would ultimately argue, even encompasses the belated appearance of The Godfather: Part III, which was released in 1990. While the end of the Cold War and the vicissitudes of multinational high finance furnish the obvious immediate contexts, here I find the most evocative avenue for periodizing the third film in the opening act image of the gray-haired, deteriorating

Michael Corleone, a Commendatore in an elaborate ceremonial uniform. More specifically, in 1990 such a sight resonates powerfully with the spectacle the fading—yet still grandly uniformed—caudillos that saw their long reigns come to an end around this period, most notably Alfredo Stroessner in Paraguay (1954-1989) and Augusto Pinochet in Chile (1973-1990). The dictatorship of Pinochet, in particular, bears the striking distinction of being nearly perfectly coeval with the production span of the Godfather film trilogy (1972-1990); this, combined with the notorious neoliberal orientation of his regime (“we’re all part of the same hypocrisy”)—well, that remains a conversation, or dissertation, for another day.

20 The matter of the time period of the films’ production versus the time period of the narrative seems important here. In 1958-1959, when the plot of The Godfather: Part II takes place, Argentina was governed by the fragile left-wing administration of Arturo Frondizi, while Panama had long been a republic dominated by a commercially-oriented oligarchy. By the 1974 of the film’s production, however, the charismatic military strongman Juan Peron had returned to power in Argentina, while Panama was ruled by the autocratic military regime of Omar Torrijos.

207

CODA

Tyrant and the Limits of the Strongman Genre

In the end, Coppola’s Godfather films provide a relevant capstone for this project, if for no other reason than that the story of the Corleone family still represents one of the most prominent and recognizable versions of the ethnic dictator trope in the realm of

American fiction. Although all the individual works I have examined in this dissertation illustrate the deep interconnections between dictators, ethnic identity, and genre, The

Godfather is especially unique in that its long-cemented status as a cultural touchstone has made it something of a subgenre unto itself—that is, a “Godfather” genre as a sort of subset of “crime drama” or “family saga.” By way of some brief concluding remarks, I now wish to turn to an instance where genre emerges as the weak link in the discursive triumvirate I have laid out, and precisely because it overplays its hand at attempting to be the dominant one.

In June 2014, the FX network premiered a new drama series called Tyrant, a geopolitical thriller deliberately modeled after The Godfather. Tyrant centers around

Bassam “Barry” Al-Fayeed, the younger son of a repressive Middle Eastern dictator, who has been living in self-imposed exile in the United States for twenty years. Wanting nothing to do with his notorious family, Bassam maintains a quiet suburban life as a pediatrician and family man in Pasadena, in all outward appearances an assimilated

American. The narrative begins when Bassam brings his American wife, son and daughter back to his home country (a fictional nation called Abbudin) to attend his nephew’s wedding. When his father unexpectedly dies, Bassam finds himself staying

208 indefinitely in order to advise his older brother and new president Jamal, and to help the family navigate the political crises that follow.

Given such a premise, pretty much no review or commentary on Tyrant has failed to mention its debt to The Godfather, to the extent that the FX series almost seems like a meaningful creation only in relation to Coppola’s film. Indeed, it is largely through this intertextual relation that many of the narrative cues in Tyrant become legible. As with

Michael Corleone, it is made clear that the composed and intelligent Bassam has always been his father’s favorite, and will eventually embrace his unwanted destiny as the series’ titular “tyrant.” On the other hand, though Jamal succeeds their father first, he is depicted as the most compelling evidence for the certainty of Bassam’s rise: hot-tempered, erratic, violent and simple-minded, Jamal is both Sonny and Fredo Corleone combined.

If, as I argued in the last chapter, the relation between The Godfather and The

Godfather: Part II can be likened to that between a dynastic founder and his successor, then a production like Tyrant resembles a kind of distant cousin or cadet branch member, whose very existence as a relevant entity is still owed to the power and legacy of the originary patriarch. At the same time, Bassam’s dilemma in the narrative is also the series’, in that the family inheritance is both the enabling condition and the debilitating obstacle. Judging from the reviews, critics generally agree that Tyrant is a middling show at best, and not only because it tries to be The Godfather but fails, but also that its overdetermination by The Godfather prevents it from being anything else of value. Much is made, for instance, about the show’s tepid engagement with the geopolitics and social realities of the Middle East. The Al-Fayeeds are secular autocrats in the vein of Saddam

Hussein or the al-Assads of Syria (to be sure, the particulars Bassam’s story shares strong

209 resonances with the real life ophthalmologist-turned-tyrant Bashar al-Assad), who have previously been accused of using chemical weapons against their own people; a snowballing protest movement is clearly meant to invoke the Arab Spring; and nonspecific allusions are made to American military alliances and the economics and politics of Western oil dependency. But ultimately, as one reviewer puts it, “Tyrant is less interested in fomenting cultural controversy than in telling a Godfather-inspired family melodrama, with its cultural [and political] trappings forming colorful background.”1

Considered alongside the other works in this dissertation, one might begin to see how Tyrant, in proffering a contemporary, Middle Eastern take on the ethnic dictator trope, also embeds this trope within what John Frow has called the “organized constraints” and “regimes of reading” related to genre. And similar to these works,

Tyrant operates on a multiplicity of generic frames, some more visible than others, and all of which are refracted through the figure of the ethnic dictator. Not unlike Wright’s

Black Power, it foregrounds the return of a diasporic subject to his homeland, as well as this subject’s self-insertion into the politics of the home country (in Bassam’s frequent and urgent counsels for his brother to take the “Western” and “rational” course of action,

I would suggest, we can detect echoes of Wright’s entreaties to Nkrumah on the “means”

“methods” and “instrumentalities” for governing his nation). And like the dictator novel mode of Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, or even the spy novel mode of

Lee’s Native Speaker, Tyrant conceives of the ethnic dictator (in the character of Jamal, at least) as an emblem of lurid, despotic excess. Paranoid, childlike, inexplicitly brutal and a rapist to boot, the show’s depiction of Jamal has been highlighted as one of its more problematic and offensive aspects, and rightly so. Reframing this portrayal as a function

1 Dennis Perkins, “Tyrant: Pilot,” in A.V. Club.

210 of genre, however—that is, as something akin to Diaz’s rendering of Trujillo, or Lee’s rendering of Kwang—imposes a certain coherence upon the meanings and interpretations of the character. Perhaps, on the most basic level, the matter is as simple as every

Godfather narrative needing a Sonny or Fredo in order for Michael to make any sense.

And finally, just as in Lee’s novel, Tyrant also links the diasporic subject and the ethnic dictator through the intrigue of the espionage plot, which culminates in an act of betrayal. This betrayal, however, does not play out according to the “horizon of expectations” that genre forms have trained us to expect. Midway through the season,

Bassam’s conviction about Jamal’s unfitness to rule finally outstrips his fraternal love, and he switches from trying to guide and advise his older brother to secretly plotting his ouster. Much of the dramatic tension from the final episodes revolve around Bassam’s orchestration of a coup, which entails recruiting key elites and allies to his cause, as well as lobbying the U.S. State Department for their sanction and cooperation. Once again, the show’s sense of suspense is inflected by the narrative cues of The Godfather, which encourage us to anticipate Bassam’s fulfillment of the Michael Corleone narrative. And for that same reason, we can’t help but feel subverted by the final-act dramatic reversal, in which we learn that Jamal had long ferreted out the conspiracy against him, and instead lures the unsuspecting Bassam into a trap. Thus, in contrast to the ascendant

Michael having his hand kissed as the new godfather, the first season of Tyrant ends with

Bassam languishing in a dungeon cell, and sentenced to death for treason.

And yet, Jamal’s outmaneuvering of his younger brother makes a striking sense, and even seems obvious in retrospect. “We both need to pick our friends better,” he tells

Bassam. “You’ve known Hakeem [a key conspirator in Bassam’s coup] for how long?

211

Two months? I’ve known him for fifteen years. Two drinks and he confessed everything.” This revelation, though doubtlessly quite mundane as a plot development, nonetheless returns an important detail to the foreground: that Bassam, at the end of the day, is still “Barry” from Pasadena, who indeed has not been in the country more than two months and does not know its people or political culture. Like Richard Wright in

Ghana, Bassam’s desire to play an active role in governing the nation can only come off as the meddling of an arrogant American interloper. As it turns out, this is something that the series has hinted at from the beginning: for example, that Bassam resolves to remove his brother from power only after a long night of drunken deliberation, and that he is even holding a paper bagged liquor bottle as he makes assertions like “I am the one that kept the tanks out of this plaza. I can hold this country together until elections,” and “I have spent many years running away from it, but I am an Al-Fayeed.” To this last remark, the response of the incredulous U.S diplomat proves especially astute and illuminating:

“You’re a goddamn pediatrician, and you’re drunk. Go home, sleep it off.”

In such moments, Tyrant reveals Bassam’s decisive action—his attempt to fill the role of the ethnic dictator—for what it really is: not the shrewdness of a Michael

Corleone, but rather a reckless, paternalistic adventurism that seems closer, for that matter, to Sonny. But my continued use of such analogies is also precisely what misses the point: that as attractive and comforting as the familiar “constraints” of genre are, they are undoubtedly constraining when it comes to grasping complex geopolitical, and even interpersonal, states of affairs. Taking up Frow’s notion of genre as a “regime of reading,” the failure of Bassam’s coup can be attributed a series of misreadings. First, he misreads Hakeem’s loyalty and fortitude; second, he misreads his brother’s own

212 astuteness and authority; third, he misreads himself, as “an Al-Fayeed” rather than simply

“a goddamn pediatrician”; fourth, and closely related, he misreads his relationship to his home country and its structures of political power. Furthermore, the show’s deliberate invocations of The Godfather also invite viewers to commit a similar misreading: in hastily equating Jamal with Fredo and Bassam with Michael, rather than seeing a leader long-groomed for his position and his tourist American brother, we thus misrecognize the show title’s true referent.

These sets of misreadings, I would argue, might in turn be articulated to the broader critical “failure” of the show. That is, in evaluating Tyrant through familiar generic frames, what reviewers tend to miss are those perspectives that fall outside the purview of “a Godfather-inspired family melodrama” and its related forms. Here I would argue that the fixation on genre occludes at least one significant, if provocative, understanding of the “ethnic dictator” in relation to the Middle East. The crucial hint here is to be found in Bassam’s evocative American nickname, “Barry,” which also happens, of course, to be the moniker used by U.S. President Barack Obama during his younger years. It goes without saying, certainly, that in proposing a symbolic correlation between the character of Bassam Al-Fayeed and President Barack Obama (rather than, say,

President Bashar al-Assad) I am not indulging in paranoid “birther” fantasies. On the contrary, the presidential resonance of this name reminds us of Bassam’s assimilated

Americanness, and his ultimate ideological allegiance to the U.S. nation state. It is from this subject position, rather than as a returned diasporic subject, I would suggest, that

Bassam embarks on his ill-conceived mission of regime change. Compounded with our contemporary context of military entanglement and proliferating drone warfare across the

213

Middle East, Tyrant’s implication—that the proper “ethnic dictator” in this context is not the diasporic “Bassam,” but rather the Americanized “Barry”—is a deeply provocative one indeed.

214

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