Ethical Engagement

ETHICAL ENGAGEMENT: CRITICAL STRATEGIES FOR APPROACHING AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC FICTION BY Sandra Cox Copyright 2011 Submitted to the graduate degree program in English and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Dr. Marta Caminero-Santangelo, Chairperson Dr. Doreen Fowler Dr. Stephanie Fitzgerald Dr. Giselle Anatol Dr. Ann Schofield Date Accepted April 18, 2011 ii The Dissertation Committee for Sandra Cox certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: ETHICAL ENGAGEMENT: CRITICAL STRATEGIES FOR APPROACHING AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC FICTION Committee: Dr. Marta Caminero-Santangelo, Chairperson Dr. Doreen Fowler Dr. Stephanie Fitzgerald Dr. Giselle Anatol Dr. Ann Schofield Date Accepted April 18, 2011 iii Dissertation Abstract: Critics of American literature need ways to ethically interpret ethnic difference, particularly in analyses of texts that memorialize collective experiences wherein that difference is a justification for large-scale atrocity. By examining fictionalized autoethnographies—narratives wherein the author writes to represent his or her own ethnic group as a collective identity in crisis—this dissertation interrogates audiences‘ responses and authors‘ impetus for reading and producing novels that testify to experiences of cultural trauma. The first chapter synthesizes some critical strategies specific to autoethnographic fiction; the final three chapters posit a series of textual applications of those strategies. Each textual application demonstrates that outsider readers and critics can treat testimonial literatures with respect and compassion while still analyzing them critically. In the second chapter, an explication of the representations of African American women‘s experiences with the cultural trauma of slavery is brought to bear upon analyses of Toni Morrison‘s A Mercy (2009) and Alice Walker‘s Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (2003). In the third chapter, the debate between nationalist and cosmopolitanist critics in Native literary studies is adjudicated through a close reading of the same-sex desire between adolescent boys, and histories of land theft and broken treaties in Craig Womack‘s Drowning in Fire (2001) and Sherman Alexie‘s Flight (2007). Finally, the application of theoretical strategies for reading testimonio to literary texts is used to explore the long term effects of the Trujillato‘s on the personal and national identity of people from the Haitian-Dominican-American diaspora as portrayed in Junot Díaz‘s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) and Edwidge Danticat‘s The Farming of Bones (1998). Each chapter demonstrates the potential of autoethnographic narrative techniques to present didactic messages, which serve a memorializing function for insider readers and aids outsider readers in understanding those insider perspectives. iv Table of Contents Chapter 1: Whose Culture?: Autoethnographic Texts and Ethnographic Criticism, or Some Introductory Remarks on the Necessity and Practice of Ethical Ethnographic Scholarship 5-46 Chapter 2: Who‘s/Whose Writing?: Considering Intentionality, Ethics and Ethnography in Toni Morrison‘s A Mercy and Alice Walker‘s Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart 47-127 Chapter 3: Who's Reading?: 'Red' Narrators, (Un)read Narratives and Ethical Applications of Nationalist and Cosmopolitan Literary Criticism to Sherman Alexie‘s Flight and Craig Womack‘s Drowning in Fire 128-196 Chapter 4: Whose Nation in Narration?: Edwidge Danticat, Junot Díaz and the Literary Historiography of Hispaniola 197-251 5 Chapter 1: Whose Culture?: Autoethnographic Texts and Ethnographic Criticism, or Some Introductory Remarks on the Necessity and Practice of Ethical Ethnographic Scholarship The old way of dealing with the problem of many cultures was to make us e pluribus unum. Out of many cultures, to mold one. Anyone who appreciates [. .] the splendid variety of American literatures [. .] is likely to balk at such a project. And anyone who has looked at our history and seen how often the one into which we were to be made was white and Anglo-Saxon and Protestant will be skeptical that the one into which we are to be made could be anything other than the cover for the domination of one of our sectional cultures. These are, in my view, legitimate skepticisms. And the only alternative, so far as I can see, that doesn't threaten perpetual schism, is the hard work of a multiculturalism that accepts America's diversity while teaching each of us the ways and the worth of others. —K. Anthony Appiah (―Race, Pluralism and Afrocentricity‖ 118) The ―hard work of a multiculturalism‖ that accepts and celebrates diversity has been a central focus for American literary studies for some time. K. Anthony Appiah‘s article is just one of the several perspectives in an ongoing conversation about the function of cultural difference in the study of the humanities in the United States. These critical conversations have been called ―identity politics.‖ Under the umbrella of that (occasionally derisive) moniker, scholarly inquiries about the relationship of culture to identity pervade most of the criticism of American literature since the so-called ―culture wars‖ gained primacy in the late 1980s. In undertaking an approach to contemporary American fiction that aims contribute to those debates and help, even in some small way, with that ―hard work,‖ this project focuses 6 upon fictional writing by people who are not ―white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant‖ and whose fiction seeks to represent the collective identities of others of similar cultural backgrounds to their own in ways that respond to the historiography of cultural trauma. The novels by Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Sherman Alexie, Craig Womack, Edwidge Danticat and Junot Díaz analyzed in the three chapters that follow this one all present readers with a testimonial account of the traumatic events that are shared by categorical groups. As I examine African American novels that treat slavery, Native American novels that dramatize land and child theft and Dominican and Haitian American accounts of U.S. backed hegemony in the Caribbean diaspora, I hope to demonstrate how some works of contemporary American fiction function as literatures of witness. In analyzing the testimonial functions of each novel I hope to provide a model for ―reading across‖ ethnic literature under an ethical framework, which does the hard work of establishing coalitions across difference without colonization. I‘d contend that as each author crafts his or her text autethnographically, he or she generates a mechanism for speaking to readers in a manner that encourages ideological transformation in those readers. The strategies each group uses to speak to insider-readers (who share the author‘s subject position and have a personal stake in the testimony about cultural trauma) will often be based upon building group solidarity around historical perspectives that are at odds with dominant historical construction in mainstream American culture. These strategies are hard to track and to engage with on an ethical level for critics who are not also insiders. However, even as these texts speak within group identities the novels communicate across those group identities. I hope to find, in the fictive strategies that the authors employ to deliver their testimony to outsider-readers, an implicit mechanism for building coalitions for social justice around literature. One might reasonably inquire as to whether or not investigating fiction—which by its very nature lacks the veracity of historical or scientific texts—is the best vehicle for this kind of coalition building. William Harmon's Handbook to Literature defines fiction as "narrative writing drawn from the imagination of the author rather than from history or fact" (202). This seems to set up a reasonable barrier 7 between autobiography or historiography and fiction, but the extent to which an author's imaginative intervention must differ from history and fact is quite difficult to delineate.1 Maxine Hong Kingston's short story collection Woman Warrior (1975) and Tim O'Brien's collection The Things They Carried (1986) are both heavily influenced by historical situations and factual experiences in the lives of the authors, but both works are often categorized as fiction. Since the distinction between fact and fiction is difficult to adjudicate, some critics have relied upon formal distinctions. Wayne Booth argues that fiction stylistically avoids both the versification and abstruse linguistic construction intrinsic to poetry and the reliance upon spoken dialogue inherent in drama (ii). However, Booth also notes that such distinctions are not always concrete, as in the case of prose poems or experimental novels.2 Mark Spilka proposes a caveat to Holman and Harmon's simpler definition, noting that "fiction is now often used to describe any literary construction or making—any of the ways in which writing seeks to impose order on the flux of thought or experience" (xi). The order that testimonial fiction imposes on the experiences of its characters is often at odds with what is perceived as ‗factual‘ in dominant histories of instances of historical trauma. For instance, in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and The Farming of Bones both Diaz and Danticat attempt to either raise awareness or correct inaccurate perceptions of the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. Haitian and Dominican Americans, especially those born on

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