Infant Nation: Childhood Innocence and the Politics of Race in Contemporary American Fiction De
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ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: Infant Nation: Childhood Innocence and the Politics of Race in Contemporary American Fiction Debra T. Werrlein, Doctor of Philosophy, 2004 Dissertation directed by: Professor Linda Kauffman Department of English In fant Nation considers literary representations of childhood as sites where anxieties about race, class and gender inequalities converge. Popular and canonical representations of American childhood often revere it as a condition that precedes history, lack s knowledge, and thus, avoids accountability. I argue that invocations of this depoliticized ideal mask systems of privilege, particularly relating to white middle - class masculinity. My study highlights literature published between 1970 and 1999, a perio d marked by growing concern regarding boundaries of race and nation. With special attention to postcolonial and critical race theories, I argue that the authors here portray the United States as a nation infantilized by its desire to reclaim a mythically innocent past. In untidy formulations of nation that mirror their disjointed narrative styles, the novels interfere with the operation of nostalgia in American memory. They revise the ideal of innocent childhood to model a form of citizenship deeply engaged in acts of historical recuperation. I respond to theories of postmodern literature and cultural studies that emphasize the central role memory plays in shaping our future, presenting an analysis I feel is especially urgent at a time when neo -conservat ive policy -makers subscribe to a Trent Lott -style nostalgia for a mythically innocent pre - Civil Rights era. Chapter One examines Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters (1990). I argue that Hagedorn cedes authentic history to the corrosive powers of assimilationis m and consumerism, invoking multiple stories of history’s loss instead. In Chapter Two, I shift focus to the white middle class of Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1984). I argue that DeLillo implicates patriarchal families and profiteering universities in the cultivation of “innocent” consumer identities that ultimately turn violent. In Chapter Three I discuss Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970). Morrison challenges the myth of American meritocracy, I contend, suggesting that race, class and gender oppress ions exist not only in American culture, but in American childhoods. Finally, I examine Lois Ann Yamanaka’s Blu’s Hanging (1997). I argue that by representing children as historically savvy social critics and not as innocents, Yamanaka models a new adult citizenry. With the other novelists here, she warns a forgetful nation against embracing the infantilized present. INFANT NATION: CHILDHOOD INNOCENCE AND THE POLITICS OF RACE IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN FICTION by Debra T. Werrlein Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2004 Advisory Committee: Professor Linda Kauffman, Chair Professor Ka ndice Chuh Professor Katie King Professor Orrin Wang Professor David Wyatt ©Copyright by Debra T. Werrlein 2004 ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Nostalgia and the Utopian Past: Searching for a Race -Free America 1 Chapter One: Legacies of the “Innocent” Frontier: Failed Memory and the Infantilized Filipina Expatriate in Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters 31 Chapter Two: Consuming Families, Infant Parents and Fascism in Don DeLillo’s White Noise 62 Chapter Three: Children of the Innocent Nation: Education, Popular Culture and Family in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye 94 Chapter Four: Forging New Futures: Child -Citizens and the Power of Customer Dissatisfaction in Lois -Ann Yamanaka’s Blu’s Hanging 127 Conclusion: Post -Innocence and the “Knowing Child” 163 Works Cited 173 1 INTRODUCTION Nostalgia and the Utopian Past: Searching for a Race -Free America Americans have never even heard of history, the y still believe that legend created about the Far West, and cowboys and Indians, and cops and robbers, and black and white, and good and evil…Americans are afflicted by innocence. —James Baldwin 1 Why connect childhood innocence with oppression? Infant Nation considers literary representations of childhood as sites where anxieties about race, class and gender inequalities converge. Popular and canonical representations of American childhood often revere it as a condition that precedes history, lacks knowledge, and thus, avoids accountability. I argue instead that invocations of this depoliticized ideal mask systems of privilege, particularly relating to white middle -class masculinity. My aim is to strip away these masks and illusions of childhood. Child hood has long engaged the literary imagination. From the early European example of Jean -Jacque Rousseau’s Emile: or On Education (1762), to William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience (1789) and Charles Dickens’ nineteenth -century orphans, writers have debated questions of progress, industry, morality and family through representations of children. American literature in particular moves children into the threshold between wilderness and civilization where, as veritable outsiders, they gauge society ’s virtues and its hypocrisies in works like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1876) and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). Social and critical debate regarding childhood has circula ted for centuries. From the eighteenth -century debates regarding natural vs. disciplinary modes of childrearing, to the nineteenth -century controversies over child labor, education and 2 abandonment, to the late twentieth -century discovery of childhood as a social construction, broad questions of power have been raised.2 My dissertation both builds upon and departs from this work by highlighting the under theorized relationship between childhood’s discursive development and other Enlightenment discourses re garding race, nation, gender, family and class. While numerous studies have explored the connections between constructions of race or gender and the nation in literature, no extensive study has focused specifically on childhood. My approach will help to change the way we look at other novelistic representations of children by showing that the trope of childhood innocence can tell us more about the nation than it can about the empirical life of the child. I draw from critical race studies and related theor ies of nation, postnation and postcoloniality. Immanuel Wallerstein, Michael Omi and Howard Winant all study the construction of racial identities in capitalist societies. In addition, I am particularly indebted to the ways that George Lipsitz, David Roediger and Henry Giroux connect whiteness to institutional, ideological and economic privilege in the United States. For a better understanding of the nation as an unstable but homogenizing principle, I turn to Lauren Berlant, Norma Alarcón, Caren Kaplan, Minoo Moallem and Jenny Sharpe. These writers theorize the uneven relationships to power experienced by groups who are united by nation, but who are otherwise divided according to race, ethnicity, gender and class. Finally, postcolonial theorists such as Homi Bhabha, E. San Juan, Jr. and Rob Wilson inform my understanding of race and nation as they specifically relate to the United States as a colonial power in Hawaii and the Philippines. 3 I am indebted to the theoretical and materialist grounds of “cultu ral studies” that Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler define in their edited collection, Cultural Studies (1992). The collection both contributes to and records a volatile time in American academia. Following what Stuart Hall and others call the “linguistic turn,” theorists recognized both a multiplicity in symbolic meaning as well its representational power. The development advances an understanding of identity derived from symbolic rather than from biological or other essentialist qual ities. 3 While contributing to the evolution of studies in race, gender, ethnicity and postcoloniality, it also enables the work of cultural critics who question the ways various identities are formulated through representation in literature and other media. 4 In the tradition of theorists like Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall, I connect the social and political to the cultural. Pursuing what the editors of Cultural Studies call the “how and why” of a work, I treat the figure of the innocent child as more than a clever literary trope. 5 To understand how representations of childhood innocence function in American literature and why they occur, I consider the sociohistorical contexts of and in particular novels. I also ask how and why representations of per secuted children might affect the contemporary nation’s innocent self -concept. The myth of American innocence, I argue, stems in part from the nation’s faith in itself as a meritocracy. Americans who believe that social and economic hierarchies derive fro m merit alone must erase the varied relationships to power experienced by individual citizens. Lauren Berlant develops this idea with her discussion of “abstract citizenship.”6 She argues that Americans assume all citizens have access to the Rights of Ma n, regardless of race, class and gender differences. In reality, Berlant maintains, 4 only white male citizens possess these Rights. As the norm by which the nation defines citizenship, the white male body is the abstract body. White men only appear to su ppress their race and gender to fit a standard