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Necessary Fictions”: Authorship and Transethnic Identity in Contemporary American Narratives

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Necessary Fictions”: Authorship and Transethnic Identity in Contemporary American Narratives MILNE, LEAH A., PhD. “Necessary Fictions”: Authorship and Transethnic Identity in Contemporary American Narratives. (2015) Directed by Dr. Christian Moraru. 352 pp. As a theory and political movement of the late 20th century, multiculturalism has emphasized recognition, tolerance, and the peaceful coexistence of cultures, while providing the groundwork for social justice and the expansion of the American literary canon. However, its sometimes uncomplicated celebrations of diversity and its focus on static, discrete ethnic identities have been seen by many as restrictive. As my project argues, contemporary ethnic American novelists are pushing against these restrictions by promoting what I call transethnicity, the process by which one formulates a dynamic conception of ethnicity that cuts across different categories of identity. Through the use of self-conscious or metafictional narratives, authors such as Louise Erdrich, Junot Díaz, and Percival Everett mobilize metafiction to expand definitions of ethnicity and to acknowledge those who have been left out of the multicultural picture. I further argue that, while metafiction is often considered the realm of white male novelists, ethnic American authors have galvanized self-conscious fiction—particularly stories depicting characters in the act of writing—to defy multiculturalism’s embrace of coherent, reducible ethnic groups who are best represented by their most exceptional members and by writing that is itself correct and “authentic.” Instead, under the transethnic model, ethnicity is self-conflicted, forged through ongoing revision and contestation and in ever- fluid responses to political, economic, and social changes. “NECESSARY FICTIONS”: AUTHORSHIP AND TRANSETHNIC IDENTITY IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN NARRATIVES by Leah A. Milne A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Greensboro 2015 Approved by _____________________ Committee Chair ©2015 Leah A. Milne To my parents and to Marc, with all of my love ii APPROVAL PAGE This dissertation has been approved by the following committee of the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Committee Chair ___________________________________________ Committee Member ___________________________________________ Committee Member ___________________________________________ _________________________________ Date of Acceptance by Committee ______________________________ Date of Final Oral Examination iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This page cannot adequately contain the gratitude I have for the teachers, mentors, friends, colleagues, students, and family members who have generously encouraged the intellectual and emotional pursuits that led to this project. The utmost thanks go to my committee, Christian Moraru, Alexandra Schultheis Moore, and María Carla Sánchez, who remained, throughout this process, my most enthusiastic advisors. I owe gratitude and friendship to Christina Romanelli, Katherine Zimmerman, Luisa Igloria, Sara Boissonneau, Sonya Blades, Rachel Bowman, Daniel Burns, Scott Gibson, Kt Leuschen, Lauren Shook, and Erin Wedehase. My husband, Marc, deserves credit for his unending positivity and love. And finally, to my wonderful parents, Emil and Letty Tarrangco: Agyamanak, apo. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................... vi CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION: MULTICULTURALISM AND POST-1989 TRANSETHNIC METAFICTION ...................................................................1 II. THE MARGINALIZATION OF THE AUTHOR: BREAKDOWN, VISIBILITY, AND THE FEMALE POSTCOLONIAL SUBJECT IN GINA APOSTOL’S GUN DEALERS’ DAUGHTER AND LOUISE ERDRICH’S SHADOW TAG ........................................................................43 III. AGAINST “AUTHENTICITY”: COLLABORATION, AUTHORITY, AND WITNESSING IN JUNOT DÍAZ’S THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO AND JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER’S EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED ................................................................99 IV. “ENLIGHTENED BY ALL MYRIAD THINGS”: MATERIAL METAFICTION IN NICOLE KRAUSS’S GREAT HOUSE AND RUTH OZEKI’S A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING ...................................163 V. “A BLANK PAGE RISES UP”: EXPANDING THE SCALES OF TRANSETHNIC AUTHORSHIP IN PERCIVAL EVERETT’S PERCIVAL EVERETT BY VIRGIL RUSSELL AND MIGUEL SYJUCO’S ILUSTRADO.............................................................................223 VI. CONCLUSION: RELEASING DOUBLES INTO THE WORLD… ...............293 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................317 v LIST OF FIGURES Page Figure 1. Homer C. Davenport’s Political Cartoon from William Randolph Hearst’s New York Evening Journal (May 5, 1902), Depicting U.S. Troops Executing Filipino Children ......................................................71 Figure 2. Balangiga Bells as Originally Exhibited at Fort D.A. Russel (Now F. E. Warren Air Force Base) ..............................................................76 Figure 3. One Wall of the George Catlin Gallery in the Smithsonian Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery ....................................................................88 Figure 4. From Catlin’s Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians, Vol. 1. ..........................................91 Figure 5. Hello Kitty Display in Washington, D.C..........................................................197 Figure 6. Early 1945 Image of Japanese Planes Preparing for a Kamikaze Attack ..........................................................................................200 Figure 7. Jurin, Julius. “Seikosha Big Pilot Watch.” .......................................................203 Figure 8. The Storyworlds of A Tale for the Time Being.................................................205 Figure 9. North Pacific Gyre ............................................................................................209 Figure 10. I, Too, Am Harvard ........................................................................................306 vi CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: MULTICULTURALISM AND POST-1989 TRANSETHNIC METAFICTION It is a waste of time hating a mirror / or its reflection / instead of stopping the hand / that makes glass with distortions. --Audre Lorde, “Good Mirrors Are Not Cheap” The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible. --Vladimir Nabokov, “The Art of Literature and Commonsense” In an interview with Harold Isaacs, Ralph Ellison compared himself to Richard Wright, Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, and other writers who had chosen exile from the United States in order to write. In contrast to those writers, Ellison remarked, “Personally, I am too vindictively American, too full of hate for the hateful aspects of this country, and too possessed by the things I love here to be too long away” (65). Isaacs was hoping to determine African American writers’ connection to the continent of Africa, which some during the Harlem Renaissance thought of as their literary—if not also ancestral—homeland. Ellison’s response confounded the anticipated connection. “I did not—and I do not—feel a lack in my cultural heritage as an American Negro. I think a lot of time is wasted trying to find a substitute in Africa,” he told Isaacs. “The thing to do,” he adds, “is to exploit the meaning of the life you have” (320). Here Ellison was not claiming satisfaction with the definition of African Americanness as it currently stood. 1 Instead, he was alluding to an ability to define his cultural heritage through his writing and his life, regardless of others’ expectations. While Ellison might have based his identity in one country (or continent) over another in order to defy expectations and discover a different meaning to his life, ethnic American writers today, I contend, seek to expand the borders of their literary homelands and, specifically, of ethnicity to encompass a multitude of histories and cultures. Echoing a character in Miguel Syjuco’s Ilustrado (discussed in the penultimate chapter) who surmises that one’s “real home country will be that common ground your work plows between you and your reader” (208), the authors—and the author-protagonists they portray in the works discussed in this dissertation—use their texts to forge unique collaborative junctures. Together, they directly confront and complicate the presumed distinctions between writer and audience in self-conscious or metafictional works of ethnic American fiction that capture the spirit of Ellison’s critical yet capacious Americanness. Actually, the need for more malleable ways of defining ethnicity is as urgent now as it was in Ellison’s era. Terrorist acts in New York and Boston, protests of police brutality and racial oppression in Ferguson and other parts of the country, and attempts to quell immigrant freedoms particularly in relation to the Mexican, South American, and Asian immigrant parents of children known as the DREAMers, have made Americanness and authenticity prominent themes of the current milieu. These and other recent momentous events are crystallizing the vital necessity for adaptable and comprehensive perspectives on identity, as well as personal interactions that destabilize hardened beliefs of whose lives
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