Introduction

Notes Introduction 1. Likewise, borders and self-marginalization have long informed the imagined shape of American subjectivity and the art that tries to represent it. Giles Gunn and Leslie Fielder offer two well-known approaches to the topic. Gunn’s goal is to elucidate the ethical dimensions of otherness and how it can “make us a little more human” by pushing the self “to transcend its own perimeters” (207). Since the contact in the texts I examine occurs in the name of self-interested individuality, I find his overarching claim of expanded humanity tenuous. Fiedler’s thesis is that the major American texts used to uphold the individualism discourse are meditations on “the mutual love of a white man and a colored ” (with all its implications of latent homosexuality) (“Raft” 146). The racial Other holds out a masculine freedom for the white character, while the autho- rial impetus is one of guilt—the desire to be loved by those the nation has offended. By labeling the characters’ motivations as self-interest, not remorse, I see the authors exploring the possibilities and fallacies of self-marginalization, so the “mood” of appropriation is quite different from Fiedler’s warmer aura. 2. The clearest absences in my choice of Othered categories are sexuality and gender. I do not examine males who choose homosexuality or femininity for a transgressive persona. Feminism (along with the civil rights movement) helped lay the groundwork for critiquing the center’s invisibility, but the misogyny tying women to the domestic sphere makes the feminine a rare choice for self- marginalization. Furthermore, using the feminine for an oppositional subject position depends on the rationale and assumptions underlying the choice: is a male appropriating accepted markers of femaleness or femininity to challenge the patriarchy by confusing gender binaries, or does he believe he is embracing his “true self.” Either may provoke the same response from the dominant culture, but the motive determines whether norms are being attacked or perpetuated. 3. The rise of the urban spawns a related anxiety over the state of white gender because the discourse of the independent “self-made man” that defined masculinity for earlier generations no longer seemed applicable in the domesticated city. The dominant version of whiteness is itself often feminized by ascribing a Dionysian freedom to nonwhites that can help white males break the restraints civilization places upon their “natural” manly desires, sexual and otherwise. 166 Notes As the city spreads ever further across the landscape, and deeper into people’s lives, the possibility of finding a wilderness against which to define and prove one’s manhood also vanishes. I make reference to the anxiety of masculinity where useful, but the topic has been covered by others; see Baym (“Melodramas”), Fiedler, Kolodny, and Joyce Warren. Little, if any, outright questioning of the patriarchy occurs in the texts, even if individual male characters are criticized—another layer of collusion that keeps them attached to the center. 4. For intellectual histories of individualism consider Bercovitch, Dallmayr, Mansfield, and Taylor. See Bellah et al., Glazer, and Lukes to get a sense of how broadly conceived individualism can be. Patell offers an overview and critical analysis of contemporary debates concerning the idea. Briefly, individualism, at the root of liberalism, defines freedom as the unquestioned right to self- interest and self-aggrandizement in competition with others. Barry Shain reveals that individualism was not always the reigning assumption in American sociopolitical philosophy. A spirit of communalism held sway while individu- alistic tendencies were censured as a sin against self-control and self-sacrifice (86, 115). He accuses nineteenth-century thinkers influenced by Romanticism, such as Emerson, of making individualism the new hegemony. This is also when the word begins to enter the social vocabulary by way of Alexis de Tocqueville—although 1839, a year before him, is the earliest known usage in American writing (Patell 36). 5. Poststructuralism denounces the possibility of an autonomous subject but Marxists gave them their cue. Marx could claim a conviction in the existence of individuals as he condemned individualism (Grundrisse 83–84). Horkheimer and Adorno propose that capitalism survives by selling products that promise uniqueness, and consumers are so mired in private desires they become incapable of collective action. 6. A contradiction in some postmodernist theories is that the deconstruction of the individual reconstructs a subject that still wants to be separate and free of the internal effects of external power (as aesthetic selves, schizos, and nomads). Another irony is their call for pluralism, increasing the number of recognized voices and perspectives, even as they situate themselves against believing in individuality. See George Yúdice’s inquiry into the likely political (in)effects of postmodern marginality, and his genealogy of marginality in notes 2 and 3 is relevant to border theory. Winfried Fluck interprets self-fashioning as substi- tuting fantasies of radical subjectivities in lieu of real political praxis, a philosophy concerned foremost with the self that can be reincorporated to support the center’s power (61). 7. I follow the Lacanian model of distinguishing between the other—as a marginal- ized person with control over her subjectivity (simply a difference amongst others)—and the Other who lacks that autonomy (is represented and spoken for). 8. Chicano studies exploration of mestizaje is where many locate the field’s “ori- gins,” refer to Calderón and Jóse Saldívar’s Criticism in the Borderlands. The com- mon element in border studies is liberating being and thought from either/or paradigms through physical and psychic dislocations. Edward Soja adopts this as a foundational tenet in his call to join diverse resistant communities in the Notes 167 margins. He argues that physical space inherently influences mental space, which influences one’s politics. Soja claims to have an effective strategy for resisting binarisms “by interjecting an-Other set of choices” built from materi- als found in the margins (Thirdspace 5). Victor Turner’s earlier theories of limi- nality posit a place “betwixt and between” two modes of being, namely, the enforced order of culture and the disorder one experiences outside its laws and worldview (Dramas 14). Yet Turner disdains those marginals who reject rein- corporation. Border theorists treat that refusal, and its concomitant mobility, as the point from which radical subjectivities can find the necessary agency to resist hegemony. What is more interesting and politically useful to them are the experiences of liminars who choose that space to make their own cognitive maps. Such sites of resistance present the chance to build an alliance politics working to affect shared issues of domination. For a critique of border studies’ broad assumptions see Johnson and Michaelsen’s “Border Secrets.” 9. A partial source on appropriating otherness is found in Judith Butler’s theory of performativity. She advocates manipulating the identities available to us to denaturalize categories of sex, gender, class, and race; this can enable people to assume subjectivities that transgress the lines of identity. Crossing into marginal territory for an oppositional identity is exactly what the protagonists and writers I discuss thrive on—negotiating permissible boundaries to construct a sense of self. I would deemphasize her strategy of parody, how- ever, since it necessitates finding instances where people occupy roles identi- fied with the center. The protagonists do not “play” with the idea of the Other. They work from the premise that a truer self exists somewhere in the world—it can be found and lived—so it cannot be read as the adoption of a parodic persona. 10. Ruth Frankenberg summarizes the field’s shared tenets: “whiteness refers to a set of locations that are historically, socially, and culturally produced and, moreover, are intrinsically linked to unfolding relations of domination. Naming ‘whiteness’ displaces it from the unmarked, unnamed status that is itself an effect of its dom- inance” (White Women 6). Some sources for guideposts to whiteness studies include Hill’s Whiteness; Delgado and Stefancic’s Critical White Studies; and Fishkin’s “Interrogating ‘Whiteness,’ Complicating ‘Blackness.’ ” Literary studies turns to Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark for its indictment of an unnamed whiteness in canonical American literature (the assumption that characters, and readers, are white unless noted otherwise) that asks, “What parts do the inven- tion and development of whiteness play in the construction of what is loosely described as ‘American’?” (9). For a critique of whiteness studies’ assumptions see the articles by Walter Benn Michaels and Robyn Wiegman. 11. Of course, if whiteness is the concept then its sum total of social or cultural attributes cannot be disconnected from how race influences the social appara- tuses that make subjectivities available. Ian Haney López brings it back to the living bodies those institutions inculcate: “Race exists alongside a multitude of social identities[.]...We live race through class, religion, nationality, gender, sexual identity, and so on” (xiii). On a related issue, “nonwhite” is a dubious word because whiteness remains the ideal against which everything is 168 Notes compared to be understood, to make sense. I still use the term since whiteness is repeatedly named and marked as the normative center in these texts. 12. There are varied approaches to this issue. Frankenberg warns against eliding the problem of structural racism by homogenizing whiteness into an undif- ferentiated group of like tastes and beliefs (Displacing 19). Fishkin makes the hybridity argument in “Interrogating ‘Whiteness’ ” that white and black cul- tures are so intertwined it is impossible to call either one pure. Finally, there is the opinion that it is always false to think there is such a thing as white culture since it is based on absence and emptiness—defined according to what it is “not” (Dyer White 78).

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