TEDDER, CHARLES, Ph.D. Utopian Discourse: Identity, Ethnicity, and Community in Post-Cold War American Narrative

TEDDER, CHARLES, Ph.D. Utopian Discourse: Identity, Ethnicity, and Community in Post-Cold War American Narrative. (2010) Directed by Dr. Christian Moraru. 272 pp. This dissertation analyzes critical utopian discourse in nine American novelists, making the claim that in American literature, at least, we have of necessity entered a postethnic stage of the communal imagination. Beginning with theories of utopia offered by Mannheim, Ricœur, Bloch, Moylan, and Jameson, this study claims, in its introduction, that a thoroughgoing critical utopia must rethink whose ideals count as the ideal toward which we all should work. Collectively raised by Werner Sollors, David Hollinger, Giles Gunn, and Caroline Rody, the problems of identity and solidarity call our attention to the urgency of interethnic or, differently, postethnic cooperation. Some principles for such cooperation are here outlined with the help of Elaine Scarry, Jean-Luc Nancy, Judith Butler, and Dipesh Chakrabarty. The three main parts of this study are organized along a temporal axis. Part one traces the critical reimagining of the past in novels by Tony Morrison, Philip Roth, and Leslie Marmon Silko; part two charts imaginative “present” cartography in novels by Michael Chabon, Richard Powers, and Gerald Vizenor; part three turns to future-writing and the prophetic voice in novels by Octavia Butler, Kurt Vonnegut, and Ursula K. Le Guin. Throughout, it is argued that, due to contemporary socio-demographic and ecological dynamics, we can no longer productively imagine our ideal worlds in the interests of only one, particular community. The afterword concludes postethnic utopias urge a recursive, compassionate, and critical imagination that h elps human beings tend to everyday and long-term tasks “ecosocially” as members of a broadly inclusive community. UTOPIAN DISCOURSE: IDENTITY, ETHNICITY, AND COMMUNITY IN POST-COLD WAR AMERICAN NARRATIVE by Charles Tedder 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 2010 Approved by ________________________ Committee Chair 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 Members ________________________________ ________________________________ ____________________________ Date of Acceptance by Committee ____________________________ Date of Final Oral Examination ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page FOREWORD / REFOUNDING UTOPIA AFTER IDENTITY .........................................1 INTRODUCTION / UTOPIAS, IDENTITIES, COMMUNITIES ...................................17 Chapter 1: The Spirit of Critique and Hope ...................................................................17 Chapter 2: Identity, Post- and Inter- ...............................................................................45 Chapter 3: What Would a Postethnic Utopia Look Like? ..............................................59 PART 1 / ALTERNATIVE HISTORIES ..........................................................................81 Inevitability and Contingency ........................................................................................81 Chapter 1: Toni Morrison: Piecing Together a Past .......................................................87 Chapter 2: Philip Roth: Contradicting History .............................................................101 Chapter 3: Leslie Marmon Silko: Cultivating History .................................................113 PART 2 / NEGOTIABLE GEOGRAPHIES ...................................................................132 Cartographies Natural and Utopian ..............................................................................132 Chapter 1: Michael Chabon: Imaginary Homelands ....................................................138 Chapter 2: Richard Powers: The Connectionist Imagination .......................................150 Chapter 3: Gerald Vizenor: The Trick of Survival.......................................................164 PART 3 / EMPTY FUTURES .........................................................................................184 Future-Writing and the Prophetic Voice ......................................................................184 Chapter 1: Octavia Butler: God is Change ...................................................................191 Chapter 2: Kurt Vonnegut: Getting Through This Thing, Whatever It Is ....................205 Chapter 3: Ursula K. Le Guin: The Ecology of Soulmaking .......................................219 AFTERWORD / ON UTOPIA, ECOLOGY, AND HOUSEKEEPING .........................240 NOTES .............................................................................................................................256 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................263 iii FOREWORD / REFOUNDING UTOPIA AFTER IDENTITY American literature continues to evolve in multiethnic and international directions. Liesl Schillinger points out that ―three of the five candidates in the fiction category‖ of the 2009 National Book Awards ―were not born in this country; two of those three live abroad‖ (2009). It seems clear that we have stopped defining the American novel only by the boundaries of descent and residency. Schillinger attributes the internationalization of American authorship to ―the American idea [that] not only translates, it disregards national boundaries.‖ Sometimes called the American dream, that idea remains one of our most persistent and fraught utopian visions. In American culture, we now see utopianism and utopian literature intersecting with new formulations of multicultural identity. I argue, in the following pages, that the recent utopian imagination in American fiction calls for a postethnic approach. More generally, late twentieth- century changes in the concept of the utopian are entangled with contemporaneous changes in our concepts of identity. As this transformation links to the broader revolutions of globalization, it pushes at the limits of ―the American.‖1 Since the late stages and end of the Cold War, we have found it less and less possible to articulate the American dream in monocultural terms. This transformation of the social imagination in American culture is determined by several often-overlapping factors. In the broadest terms, the condition called postmodernity has altered our understanding of the world we live in; separating this 1 truism into its constituent parts, we must rethink of both what it means to be ―we‖ and what it means to live in the world. The problems that we face now—ecological disaster, social injustice—require that we confront questions of identity on the one hand and utopia on the other. We can no longer imagine solutions on our own or for ourselves alone, no matter whether the epistemic ―we‖ is defined by race, class, gender, nationality, or sexuality. This claim is not intended as a challenge to the value of self-determination understood as political autonomy and decision-making. What I mean is that, at the present moment, few if any problems belong to or can be the solved by any one group of people alone. I want to make clear this is not a moral claim that we ought to be more open to racial diversity or to other kinds of inclusivity, but rather a pragmatic claim that if we want successfully to negotiate emerging issues and crises in our cultures and changes in our environments, we will of necessity have to do so together. Our identity groups remain, of course, powerful organizing principles in our lives, and problems that confront us are still shaped as they have been by race, gender, class, and nationality. As I explain in detail in my introduction, postethnic utopia is anything but a non-ethnic utopia or a blithe utopian blindness to ethnically configured problems. Although by focusing on novels in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century I limit the scope of my analysis to literature—strategically, as my introduction will show—this should not be mistaken for a sign that ethnically shaped problems are simply a matter of culture, of perception. While we may agree that we are living in new times, ones that I argue have led to a postethnic turn in utopian discourse, we probably will not agree about exactly what this entails. With the election of the first nonwhite president of a majority 2 white nation, we cannot deny that race (and with it, ethnicity) continues to change. We should not, though, rush to declare a ―postracial‖ America without taking care to qualify what this means. Fred McKissak Jr.‘s account of his family‘s reaction to the election of Barack Obama is an illustrative case in point. ―Moments after CNN declared Barack Obama the next President of the United States,‖ he writes, ―I called my parents. I could tell my father was beaming. Through Obama he could see the future for his grandsons and their peers—a collective sense of inclusion that has eluded the race for so long‖ (2008). This collective sense of inclusion, and the new future that it opens up, is precisely what is required now. Yet it may be tempered by the fear—which has since been substantiated—that this victory can be leveraged in unwelcome ways. The election clearly marks a new step forward in American society, but while this is a step that

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