UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Brownness: Mixed Identifications in Minority Immigrant Literature, 1900-1960 Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1h43b9hg Author Rana, Swati Publication Date 2012 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Brownness: Mixed Identifications in Minority Immigrant Literature, 1900-1960 by Swati Rana A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Colleen Lye, Chair Professor Gautam Premnath Professor Marcial González Professor Rebecca McLennan Spring 2012 Copyright © 2012 by Swati Rana Abstract Brownness: Mixed Identifications in Minority Immigrant Literature, 1900-1960 by Swati Rana Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley Professor Colleen Lye, Chair My dissertation challenges our preconceptions of the ethnic literary tradition in the United States. Minority literature is generally read within a framework of resistance that prioritizes anti-hegemonic and anti-racist writings. I focus on a set of recalcitrant texts, written in the first part of the twentieth century, that do not fit neatly within this framework. My chapters trace an arc from Ameen Rihani’s !e Book of Khalid (1911), which personifies a universal citizen who refuses to be either Arab or American, to Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), which dramatizes the appeal of white identification for upwardly mobile Barbadian immigrants. I present the first comparative analysis of Afro-Caribbean, Arab, Filipino, Latino, and South Asian immigrant writings. !is archive includes familiar figures such as Claude McKay and William Carlos Williams as well as understudied writers such as Abraham Rihbany and Dalip Singh Saund. I argue that these texts feature a common character: a character who does not want to be exclusively minor, who seeks to identify as widely as possible with majoritarian formations. I propose that this archetype of mixed identification be understood as “brown.” Brownness is not a racial category but a literary characterization. It represents the unwieldy paradox of the majority-identified minority subject, a paradox that criticism of ethnic literature has largely ignored. I chart the complex attachments of these brown characters, their Orientalist mediations, asymptotic Americanisms, approximations of whiteness—in sum, their disidentification with minoritization itself. By exploring these vexed desires, I help to explain the perennial attraction of brown characters not only for racialized minorities but also for narratives of U.S. exceptionalism. 1 For My Family i Table of Contents 1 Introduction: CHARACTERIZING BROWNNESS 19 Chapter 1: PROPHETS OF THE HOLY LAND Abraham Rihbany and Ameen Rihani’s Arab Americanism 22 Being Born Again 26 Superman of America 30 Syria’s Uncle Sam 35 Nearing the East 45 Chapter 2: COLUMBUS’S MISTAKE Dhan Gopal Mukerji and Dalip Singh Saund Rediscover America 47 Mukerji’s Seed Continent 54 Syncretism in Crisis 58 Congressman from India 66 Bridge of Blood and Flesh 76 Chapter 3: SPEAKING UNITED STATES Stateside Writings of William Carlos Williams, José Garcia Villa, and José Antonio Villarreal 80 Elena’s Williams 87 Villa’s White Cool Birth 96 Part of Everything 105 !e Cosmic Race 113 Chapter 4: BROWN SKIN BLUES Claude McKay and Paule Marshall’s Stories of Success 116 Finding Gingertown 122 McKay’s Lost Brown 126 Brown Girls, Brownstones 135 Changing Color Line 143 Conclusion: RED, BROWN, AND BLUE 152 Bibliography ii Acknowledgments As I sit down to write this note of thanks, I am deeply conscious of how much I rely on words and yet how inadequate they are to express my feelings of gratitude for everyone who has helped me with this project. It takes a village, or so the saying goes. !is dissertation has truly been a shared endeavor. I am profoundly grateful for the unfailing support and rigorous criticism of Colleen Lye, who has shown me by her own shining example what it means to develop and sustain an intellectual career. For Gautam Premnath’s unparalleled wisdom, astute readings, and care for my own ambitions for the project, I am truly thankful. Marcial González has helped me every step of the way to discover my argumentative voice, and for this I am very grateful. I am also thankful to Rebecca McLennan for encouraging me to develop an intuitive sense of history. I would like to thank my dear friends and colleagues, Nadia Ellis and Namwali Serpell, for their love, support, and intellectual and worldly grace. Marisa Libbon has been there from prospective weekend to graduation, and I am very grateful for her inestimable elegance and wisdom along the way. For their intellectual camaraderie and friendship, I am grateful to Christopher Chen, Annie Hill, Monica Huerta, Andrew Leong, Marcelle Maese-Cohen, Cody Marrs, !eodore Martin, Annie McClanahan, and Tom McEnaney. I am also very grateful to Elizabeth Abel, Kathleen Donegan, Ian Duncan, Eric Falci, Mark Goble, Kevis Goodman, Steven Lee, Jennifer Miller, Steven Justice, Samuel Otter, Katherine Snyder, and Emily !ornbury, who have all read my work in one form or another and helped me to develop my thinking. For their creative guidance and critical rigor, I am also thankful to Lyn Hejinian and Geoffrey G. O’Brien. I am very grateful to Lee Parsons for his steadfast support and inimitable expertise and for making this whole process navigable. I am also grateful for the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Bancroft Library, the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities, as well as the English Department and the University of California, Berkeley. Words cannot convey my gratitude for my family, to whom this dissertation is dedicated. Mummy and Papa have been there from the very beginning, and to them I owe everything. In Aarti, I am blessed to have a kindred spirit, and I am thankful for her brilliance and perspicacity. I am deeply grateful to Mom and Dad for their steadfast support, understanding, and enthusiasm. For their high spirits and uncommonly good company, I would like to thank Dan and Matt. And finally, I am immensely grateful to Chris for our many long and fruitful conversations, for his inspired guidance day by day, and for his deep and abiding love. iii Introduction CHARACTERIZING BROWNNESS In a speech delivered in Abu Dhabi in January of 2008, then president George W. Bush addressed the people of the Middle East, vowing that the United States would support economic and democratic freedom in the region. It is no surprise that the entente proposed by Bush was not received warmly by an audience subject to the violence and hypocrisies of U.S. neocolonial intervention.1 What interests me is his closing evocation of Ameen Rihani, an immigrant from Ottoman Syria who lived in the United States in the early decades of the twentieth century: For most of the world, there’s no greater symbol of America than the Statue of Liberty. It was designed by a man who traveled widely in this part of the world—and who had originally envisioned his woman bearing a torch as standing over the Suez Canal. Ultimately, of course, it was erected in New York Harbor, where it has been an inspiration to generations of immigrants. One of these immigrants was a poet-writer named Ameen Rihani. Gazing at her lamp held high, he wondered whether her sister might be erected in the lands of his Arab forefathers. Here is how he put it: “When will you turn your face toward the East, oh Liberty?” My friends, a future of liberty stands before you. It is your right. It is your dream. And it is your destiny.2 In the context of a war on terror ruled by the polarizing logics of the “clash of civilizations,” Bush deploys the symbology of immigration to close the gap between the United States and the “East.” He emphasizes the Eastern provenance of the Statue of Liberty, which was originally conceived atop the entrance to the Suez Canal.3 !e Canal’s mention is appropriate, for its construction (famously lauded by Walt Whitman) literally and symbolically channeled the cultural and geopolitical attentions of Western imperial powers towards a new region that would come to be known as the “Middle East.”4 Having immigrated from this region, Rihani is somehow better equipped to bring “the lands of his Arab forefathers” within the reach of the United States. Helped by Rihani’s literary mediations, the Statue of Liberty threatens to leave her customary post at the gateway to the nation of immigrants and illuminate the entire Arab world. In effect, the Statue of Liberty becomes the emblem and the Arab immigrant the herald of U.S. imperial gains. Bush’s appropriation of Rihani prompts the study of Rihani’s work on its own terms. For Rihani is part of a generation of early twentieth-century immigrant writers who are difficult to incorporate into the field of ethnic literature. From the perspective of ethnic studies, formed in the crucible of the struggle for civil rights, it is difficult to know what to do with literature that is not principally anti-hegemonic and anti-racist. Writings that do not fulfill these imperatives have been largely ignored. My research is motivated by an interest in texts that thwart our categorical choices. What do we make of authors whose identifications are muddled and confusing? How should we read texts that are not resistant but recalcitrant, that reside outside the paradigms we develop for studying ethnic literature, that challenge our own investments in why we read literature, frustrating our desire 1 to find a site of illumination in the literary? What should we do with characters that are treacherous or compromised, characters that seem to constitute the rearguard of ethnic literature? I pursue these questions in my dissertation, which focuses on the period from 1900 to 1960 and on writings by Afro-Caribbean, Arab, Filipino, Latino, and South Asian immigrants.