Ethnic American Literature: in Search of Identity - Essay Example

Ethnic American Literature: In Search of Identity In the US, 'ethnic' is generally understood as a blanket term to include all communities and races that lie outside the ambit of the founding European communities of the country, mainly the Anglo-Protestants and the French Catholics. Since a strand of racial identity is integral to an understanding of this group, it is also primarily the 'non-white' communities in the US. As such African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Hispanics and the Native Americans, all are 'ethnic' groups: groups comprising people who are not European in origin, or white in color; either or both. Based on the same logic, migrant groups that have reached America after the end of the World War, also become a part of the 'ethnic' group. The relationship between the ethnic and the mainstream is not a static one. Especially in a multiethnic nation like the US, this relationship is continually changing. The relationship between the mainstream and ethnic communities, as well as their literary utterances, always goes through a process of mutual commentary and refashioning. We can apply Trivedi's formulation in defining the phenomenon as a 'transactionas an interactive, dialogic, two-way process rather than a simple active-passive one; as a process involving complex negotiation and exchange'. (Trivedi,1993 p.125) Language and Domination: In Search of Hybridization The question of language and literary production is integrally linked to the issue of power and political control and domination. Noted Spanish American author Richard Rodriguez' 'Hunger of Memory' foregrounds this association of language with the centralization of power structure. For Rodriguez, language is a conduit of social power, and the notion of 'public identity' is largely dependant on one's mastery of academic English. Similarly with literature, political domination is closely connected with canon formation. As a result, literature produced by the 'mainstream', following codes of European aesthetics, comes to be accepted as the 'mainstream' literature, or simply 'literature' of America. On the other hand, literary works produced outside the scope of this central literary corpus is designated as 'ethnic literature': the 'margin' to the American 'center'. Long relegated only to the second ranks of literary practice, ethnic literature at present takes a much appreciable position vis--vis what is usually considered to be mainstream literature. An interest towards an understanding of 'ethnic' voices in literature and relocating them within the range of mainstream academic practice has also been observed in the present times. However, this attempt has attracted a certain degree of hostility: a kind of academic hostility that is not an uncommon reaction to the center's attention towards ethnography and ethnic literature. The Chicana/o communities have been prominent in their conflictual engagement with the role and function of 'ethnic' intellectual/ academic identities, as defined by the 'academic' center. Angie Chabran has been particular suspicious of this whole enterprise of 'Chicana/o' studies - stating that it uncritically assists in the anthropoligation of the Chicana/o people. (Chabran 228-47) This attitude is now gaining currency, that ethnic study, in the form of literature or sociology, or within any other academic discipline, is basically a kind of re-instatement of categories rather than an attempt to obliteration. However, on the flip side of hostility, there have also been attempts towards reaching a cultural middle point, towards 'hybridization'. This hybridization has also been brought about by a dynamic relationship between the mainstream and the ethnic literary practices. The aesthetic and the consequent economic dictates of mainstream literary practice has influenced the narrative style and aesthetic stylizations of the ethnic forms. They have retained some of the literary forms that have ethnic roots, but have been adopted to fit the more linear and accepted forms of mainstream literary practice. This attempt to reach a middle point, this attempt towards a cultural 'hybridization' is one aspect that, despite internal differences, all ethnic literature strongly exhibits. This search for a cultural adaptation and a cerebral 'location of culture' among diverse and at times hostile cultural forces usually play the central role in ethnic literary works. Usually, this cultural adaptation takes two different forms, which are complementary and always happen almost simultaneously. The first is the most apparent work of linguistic adaptation. The ethnic groups have languages of their own, a language that once was an integral part of their lives, but is now in constant search of space within the dominant linguistic practice of the 'mainstream' English. Rodriguez brings up this issue of the bilingual self in ethnic identities and its relationship to the academic system in the US in 'The Hunger of Memories'. The bilingual education system, according to Rodriguez is basically a reassertion of the categories of the 'private' and the 'public' on linguistic terms, thus exposing middle class American prejudices towards the marginal and the ethnic: the 'public' identity, has to, at least in certain ways, be reached through a compromise on the private life. This dissociation lies at the core of identity formation of an ethnic individual. If we, however, problematize Rodriguez' premise and relocate it within the ambit of fiction, then we see that the attempt of accommodation of the ethnic tongue within the larger linguistic power structure operate in two different forms. First, there can be traces, traces in the form of words whose semantic import have changed over the times to adapt to a changed linguistic super structure. 'The Joy Luck Club' by Amy Tan, an Asian American work, clearly elucidates this process of internalization of linguistic traces very clearly. Syntactic organizations of the mother language, Cantonese in this novel, as well as particular words; presumably untranslatable retain themselves within the academic English sentence constructions to reach a linguistic middle point. The second process of linguistic hybridity, which the novel clearly defines, is what Homi S. Bhabha, in The Location of Culture calls 'mimicry': adaptation of the mother language and adapting it to the changing needs and linguistic demands and emotional peculiarities of the ethnic group. This is what Jing Mei Woo; one of the daughters has to say about her mother after they have an altercation regarding a 'mah-jong' round of games: These kind of explanations made me feel my mother and I spoke two different languages, which we did. I spoke to her in English, she answered back in Chinese. (Tan, 1989 p.23) This is a reassertion of Rodriguez' bilingualism, but relocated within the private, it aims towards hybridization. Two important strands of ethnic literary practice are in evidence over here. First, hybridity and the theme of linguistic accommodation, secondly, a dissociation of the subject from her communal and ethnic past in an attempt to fit in within the mother culture. However, we will soon see, that it not through an obliteration but a reinstatement of one's past, that identity is to be arrived at. Memory and Identity The adaptation of ethnic literary tropes, like circular time schemes and traces of oral literary practices, within the dictates laid down by the mainstream literary aesthetics is only a step away from linguistic hybridization. However, it is more apt to treat it with the question of memory, racial memory, communal memory and ethnic memory that play such an important role in ethnic literature. Memory itself is an extremely problematic question, and there have been attempts to define and understand it in both psychoanalytic and historic terms, often bringing the two together, in order to understand one's past in context of the present. 'In the process of forging the reparative continuity between cultural identity and the historical past, the theorist/analyst is also required to recognize the qualitative difference between two types of amnesia'. (Gandhi, 1998 p.10) These amnesias, namely the Freudian 'Verwerfung' and 'Verdrangung' are not important to us for our present brief overview, but what is important is the emphasis on memory within every community to discover the chain of continuity between its past and the present. Thus, it becomes very clear that this memory is an intrinsically linked to the central concern of all ethnic literary activity, the search for an identity. The 'Song of Solomon' by Toni Morrison beautifully illustrates this connection between a search for identity and the role of memory in directing that search. This is the context within which we can relocate the question of the adaptation of ethnic tropes within the aesthetic demands of mainstream literature. The maintenance and dissemination of local history, communal history in the form of an oral tradition, through songs and rhymes, in direct contrast to the linear form of documented historiography that has it root within the European belief of the 'logos', is heightened. Pilate Dead, Macon's sister heightens this sense of circularity of time and history, in direct contrast to Milkman's view, which is linear and, in some sense, unsympathetic. This oral tradition makes the history a living entity for the present subject. 'Instead of repressing the past, she carries it with her in the form of her songs, her stories, and her bag of bones. She believes that one's identity is rooted in the capacity to look back to the past and synthesize it with the present'. (Smith, 2003 p.23) To put it in Pilate's own words: You can't take a life and walk off and leave it. Life is life. Precious. And athe dead you kill is yours. They stay with you anyway, in your mind. So it's a better thing, a more better thing to have the bones right there with you wherever you go. That way it frees up your mind. (Morisson, 1998 p.210 ) It is through a relocation of one's self within this memory, this history which lives, that one finally finds and decides on one's identity. Similarly, in Tan's novel, it is through a journey back to one's land and one's people and reclaiming one's past, that identity is finally decided upon and arrived at. This is what Jing-Mei Woo says when she finds her relatives in the airport in Beijing, waiting to receive her, her sisters in China whom she has never seen, and in fact never acknowledged during her stay in the US with much warmth: I look at their faces again and I see no trace of my mother in them. Yet they all look familiar. And now I also see what part of me is Chinese. It is so obvious. It is my family. It is in our blood. After all these years, it can finally be let go. (Tan, 1998 p.288) Thus the arrival at one's identity within is usually the final point of most ethnic literature. This identity is arrived at through certain processes of linguistic adaptation, cultural hybridization, and most importantly, through a reclamation of one's past for an understanding of the present. Though the attitudes change from the hostile to the benign, yet the problematics and the differences in approach only add to the richness of this unique branch of American literature. However, the validily of bracketing it out as 'ethnic' may be questioned, as it is very much a part of 'American literature', without any need of exclusivist categorization. Works Cited Chabran, A. 'Chicana/o studies as oppositional ethnography'. Cultural Critique, vol. 4, no. 3. Gandhi, Leela. (1998). Postcolonia Theory: A Critical Introduction. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Morrison, Toni. (1998). Song of Solomon. Vintage: 1998. Smith, Valerie. (2003). 'The Quest for and Discovery of Identity in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon'. Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon: A Casebook. ed. Jean Furman & Toni Morrison. Oxford University Press. Tan, Amy. (1989). The Joy Luck Club. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons. Trivedi, Harish. (1993). Colonial Transactions: English Literature and India, Calcutta: Papyrus. Read More