17
Ethnic Modernism
Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? (W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk)
“Civilization’s going to pieces,” broke out Tom violently. “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read ‘The Rise of the Colored Empires’ by this man Goddard?”
“Why, no,” I answered, rather surprised by his tone.
“Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.” (F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby)
Strangely, the foreigner lives within us: he is the hidden force of our identity, the space that wrecks our abode, the time in which understanding and affinity founder. By recognizing him within ourselves, we are spared detesting him in himself. A symptom that precisely turns “we” into a problem, perhaps makes it impossible. The foreigner comes in when the consciousness of my differences arises, and he disappears when we all acknowledge ourselves as foreigners, unamenable to bonds and communities. (Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves)
Tom Buchanan’s view of the nation’s changing racial makeup in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby expresses the anxiety many felt during the early 1920s over the white race being overrun by the “colored” and immigrant masses. Similarly, advocates of literary high modernism have been unable and sometimes unwilling to account for ethnic and minority texts as modern. Du Bois’s lament about the status of African Americans at the turn of the twentieth century and Kristeva’s later recognition of the “stranger within” are vivid and accurate depictions of the position ethnic and minority others have occupied within the nation-state in general, and within American modernist literary discourse in particular.
The term “ethnic modernism” attempts to reframe the way we conceive of modernist literature of this period and, at the same time, challenge conventional images of America and American literary history. By engaging with modernist literary studies from the perspective of minority discourse, we may achieve two main goals. First, we rethink modernism with the help of critical tools that postmodernism and ethnic and postcolonial studies have introduced and, consequently, we question the validity of modernism’s claim to the neutrality of culture, the leftover cosmopolitanism from the Enlightenment project. Second, we re-evaluate American literary high modernism as a product of a racially biased and often xenophobic historical environment that therefore necessitated a politically conservative and often prejudiced definition of modernism in America (for a fuller version of the argument in this essay see Keresztesi 2005).
American ethnic modernism embraces texts written by African-American, Native American, and immigrant writers during the era of cultural modernism. In the first half of the twentieth century new groups of American authors entered the literary scene with an unprecedented force and called into question the aesthetics and politics of high modernism. Up to the 1970s, critics once focused their analyses of high modernism, both in Europe and the United States, on middle-class male white writers, who were often sympathetic to racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, and authoritarian politics, even while being radical in the formal and thematic aspects of their art. But several ethnic groups wrote alongside and sometimes in direct response to high modernism’s discriminatory politics and to its restless impulse to formal innovation.
Many ethnic modernist texts exhibit aspects of language use, literary form, and address to their public closely analogous to canonical modernist works. Yet, because their writers were addressing specific ethnic communities, often outside of the metropolitan centers of modernism, and because they were drawing upon the idiolects and narrative resources of these communities, they have been inappropriately considered regionalist or otherwise marginal to the modernist project. Considering them in light of modernism not only broadens the canon of works but also more adequately reveals the defining characteristics of modernist writing, which occurred in a variety of cultural settings, not just in literary London, Paris, Vienna, and New York.
For our argument I appropriate Werner Sollors’s term of “ethnic modernism” because it best describes the historically, spatially, and culturally specific approach concerning the literary movement of high modernism, most often described as a cosmopolitan artistic phenomenon that took place in Europe and North America between 1890 and 1939. Ethnic modernism implies the converging of two literary traditions usually considered separate: the peripheral field of ethnic literatures and the literary canon of American high modernism. Ethnic modernism points to congruencies between the modernist project and ethnic writing between the two World Wars. Sollors suggests that “if ethnicity and modernity go well together, there are also important modernist writers who challenge all the clichés of ethnic discourse, if not ethnicity itself” (Sollors 1986: 255). However, our focus is aimed at how ethnic discourse poses a challenge to the critical construct of American high modernism. In the US the condition of modernity was closely connected to the emergence of an imperialistic and at the same time multicultural political economy, a factor that should be considered when defining and drawing up the literary canon of this particular brand of modernism. Because of the varied racial and ethnic makeup of the American nation and its efforts for imperialistic expansion and world dominance, American literary modernism must be judged on different terms from those of its European counterpart.
The purpose of developing the term “ethnic modernism” is to democratize the urban, Anglocentric, Eurocentric, and often elitist definition of high modernism. Traditionally, the study of modernism excludes the texts of ethnic others from the American literary canon and confines them to the peripheries of nonliterary studies such as history, ethnic studies, or American studies. For example, the novels of Countee Cullen, Nella Larsen, or Zora Neale Hurston are almost exclusively discussed within the Harlem Renaissance movement but are hardly ever included in discussions about modernism. Similarly, the works of Anzia Yezierska and Henry Roth are addressed in the context of the Jewish-American literary experience, as if they were outside of or irrelevant to the canon of American high modernism. Josephina Niggli is mentioned in American literary history only as a marginal figure of an emergent Mexican-American literature. The novels of Mourning Dove, D’Arcy McNickle, and John Joseph Mathews are regarded as precursors to the American-Indian literary renaissance of the late 1960s but not worthy of being included in discussions of early twentieth-century American national literature. The presence and contributions of these authors necessitate the need to rethink the canon and scope of American modernism in ethnic and racial terms.
Ethnic modernism also refers to a particular period that marks a transitional stage between high modernism during the first two decades of the twentieth century and postmodernism emerging after World War II.1 But most importantly, we use the term as a localized and culturally particular category that had to adapt to the cultural diversity and specific characteristics of American modernization. The term “ethnic modernism” reflects a discourse that is produced by writers living in an American landscape that was increasingly and visibly multicultural and multiethnic during the interwar era. As such, it is a particular version of literary modernism in America that defines both a literary-historical period and a more “localized” culture concept. Therefore, we would suggest that literary modernist studies should take into consideration different ethnic, racial, and cultural groups that engage with the “modern condition” in its specific American locales in unique ways.
Postmodernism and the academic disciplines of ethnic studies, American studies, and cultural studies have mostly focused on the production of culture from particular subject positions determined by situated gender, race, and class distinctions. Ethnic modernism can be viewed as a transitional period between high modernism and postmodernism that brought visibility to the writings and concerns of non-Anglo ethnic and racial groups – the literary precursors to the civil rights era and to the ethnic renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s.
From the early 1910s on, modernism in the United States was situated within an expanding imperialistic nation-state that became increasingly culturally diverse. Alienation and reification (as Georg Lukács uses the term) were not merely the generalized conditions of monopoly capitalism and modernization in the United States; they specifically involved selves and communities “other” than those that were Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, white, male, heterosexual, or middle class, whose members found their anxiety and bewilderment about the rapid changes in contemporary life expressed in the experimental literary forms and genres of high modernism. Ethnic modernist writers, however, were more concerned with specifically American social, political, and economic conditions that were unique to a spatial and culturally situated version of modernism.
Ethnic modernism could be defined based on the presence of one or more of the following four features: (1) the effects of specific historical and political events, such as the influx of a large number of immigrants from Europe, Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Central and South America during the first two decades of the twentieth century, and the migration of southern and rural blacks to the urban northeastern centers of the country – as opposed to a purely period concept of literary history in which modernism is usually defined as the decades between 1890 and 1939; (2) the importance of space or location – as opposed to high modernism’s emphasis on periodization, time, and chronology; (3) the culturally specific recycling of genres from previous eras, such as the romance narrative or the Bildungsroman – as opposed to the narrow focus on formalist innovations of high modernism; and finally, (4) the emphasis on the cultural specificity and cohesion of an ethnic or racial group – as opposed to the universalistic cosmopolitanism of Euro-Anglo high modernism.
The category of ethnic modernism forces us to rethink the project of American literary modernism from the perspectives and peripheral locales of ethnic writers. Looking at modernism from its perceived margins allows us to reconsider a number of its aspects. In particular, reading ethnic modernist fiction against and in dialogue with high modernist literary productions challenges the traditionally accepted notions of center and periphery in modernism, not only geographically but also aesthetically. Moreover, ethnic modernist authors often freely recycle previously popular genres and modes of representation to “make it new” (in a manner not quite the same as Ezra Pound’s). A focus on the ethnic peripheries exposes the ideological investments and interests served in the traditional definitions of modernism while it also widens its cultural import. The recovery of a more or less coherent ethnic modernist production that paralleled its high modernist “other” demystifies and brings to the surface the definitional processes and received ideas of high modernism.
The term “ethnic modernism” best describes a critique of the narrow focus of Anglo high modernism. Ethnic modernism implies the converging of two literary traditions usually considered separate: the peripheral field of ethnic literatures and the “centrally” positioned literary works of high modernist American writers. Ethnic modernism signals a congruence between the modernist literary project and the writings of ethnic authors – who often represented the avant-garde of modernity and progressivism – and texts written between the two World Wars. By turning the focus on modernism’s ethnic other, we aim to question the critical constructs of high modernism.2
The general concept of modernism and its companion terms, modernity and the modern, used across the disciplines, have stirred much debate and confusion (see Wohl 2002 for an overview of the use of modernism and modernity in the field of history and Friedman 2001 on the confusing usages of the modern, modernity, and modernism in the field of literary studies). It is not our goal here to settle those debates. Rather, our purpose is to explain the need for distinguishing between high or Anglo modernism and ethnic modernism. Raymond Williams defines the terms “modern,” “modernism,” and “modernist” in the twentieth century as the equivalents of “improved,” as opposed to a previous nineteenth-century sense and its associates (where “modern” was – unfavorably – compared to “ancient” or “medieval”): “Modernism and modernist have become more specialized, to particular tendencies, notably to the experimental art and writing of c.1890–c.1940, which allows a subsequent distinction between the modernist and the (newly) modern” (Williams 1983: 208). Williams situates the concept of the “modern” within a historical continuum: he not only defines it as a period concept but also as an ideological construct that is itself subject to historicization. The need to rethink modernism’s scope and place in history is even more urgent now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, because of the insights the postmodern debates have shed on modernism in literary and cultural studies, and also because our notions of “majority” or “minority” populations in political and social discourses have become problematic if not obsolete.3 Since literary modernism is often associated with the twentieth century itself, the beginning of the twenty-first may allow for a much-needed distance from and perspective upon the critical construct of “modernism.”
Lately, discussions on postmodernism have yielded to a productive re-examination of modernism itself. For example, when trying to define the “condition of postmodernity” David Harvey poses the problem through a set of questions and through various narratives about both modernism and postmodern culture (Harvey 1989: 42). Harvey points out that “somewhere between 1962 and 1972 … we see postmodernism emerge as a full-blown though still incoherent movement out of the chrysalis of the anti-modern movement of the 1960s” (Harvey 1989: 38). He then cites Ihab Hassan’s widely used chart to point out the polarities and continuities between the modernist and postmodernist phenomena in the forms of contingent dichotomies (Harvey 1989: 43, Hassan 1985: 123–4). More recently, Hassan has been much less systematic about his definition of postmodernity. He says:
Like a ghost, it eludes definition. Certainly, I know less about postmodernism today than I did thirty years ago, when I began to write about it. This may be because postmodernism has changed, I have changed, the world has changed … The term, let alone the concept, may thus belong to what philosophers call an essentially contested category.
(Hassan 2001: 1)
Hassan gives a working definition in order to distinguish postmodernism from postmodernity: “For the moment, let me simply say that I mean postmodernism to refer to the cultural sphere, especially literature, philosophy, and the various arts, including architecture, while postmodernity refers to the geopolitical scheme, less order than disorder, which has emerged in the last decades. The latter, sometimes called postcolonialism, features globalization and localization, conjoined in erratic, often lethal, ways” (p. 3).
Fredric Jameson views modernism and the history of modernist literary criticism as products of the “paradigm or epistémé” of “late monopoly capitalism” – or as prisoners of such ideology (Jameson 1988, vol. 2: 117, 132). In his analysis, which relies heavily on Georg Lukács’s theories of ideology and realism and on Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus for a critique of capitalism, Jameson sees realism and modernism as flipsides of each other in their responses to the advance of capitalist production and its impact on everyday life. According to such a paradigm the meaning-producing “machines” of both realism and modernism exclude and reject modes of expressions “such as mass or media culture, lower-class or working-class culture, but also those few surviving remnants of genuine popular or peasant culture from the precapitalist period and in particular of course the oral storytelling of tribal or primitive societies” (Jameson 1988, vol. 2: 117). He defines such “repressions” of cultural expressions from the realist and modernist canons as “the ultimate structural limits of that outlook” or as a “painful realization of the ethnocentrism in which we are all, in one way or another, caught” (Jameson 1988, vol. 2: 117). Besides his acknowledgment of the “ethnocentrism” of most definitions and critique, Jameson leaves out the elements of culture and ethnic alterity from his analysis of the ideology of modernist literary criticism, and instead he focuses on the culturally unspecific and ubiquitous notion of “history”: according to the “cultural logic of late capitalism” – an argument Jameson furthers in his later work on postmodernism – both realists and modernists “leave out history itself” and “both positions are completely ahistorical” (Jameson 1988, vol. 2: 122). Based on this logic, modernism is not a break with the older Victorian bourgeois realism, instead “it simply reinforces all the latter’s basic presuppositions, only in a world so thoroughly subjectivized that they have been driven underground beneath the surface of the work, forcing us to reconfirm the concept of a secular reality at the very moment when we imagine ourselves to be demolishing it” (Jameson 1988, vol. 2: 130–1). Since reality – Jameson’s “history” or the condition of “late monopoly capitalism” – has become impossible to be told or narrated according to the generic attributes of realist expression, modernist writers took over “this wholly subjectivized untruth” and wrote it out in fragmented images and in forms of privatized speech (Jameson 1988, vol. 2: 131). In that sense, modernism is just a more appropriate twentieth-century expression of the “truth” or mimetic principle of an outmoded nineteenth-century realist narrative mode. The form of the content has changed but the plot is still that of life under the exploitative but also liberating forces of an ever-expanding market economy. Even though Jameson recognizes the “ethnocentrism” in the ideology of modernism, he does not develop this line of argument further. Jameson’s latest book on the subject, A Singular Modernity, comes to a conclusion about postmodernism’s persistent dependence on “what remain essentially modernist categories of the new” (Jameson 2002: 5) and about the unshakable hold of modernism (and for that matter, capitalism) as an ideology upon our present.
Recently Ronald Schleifer has defined “cultural Modernism” through its most problematic, symptomatic, and inextricably intertwined attributes: abundance and time. According to Schleifer’s definition, “twentieth-century Modernism responds to the second Industrial Revolution” that took place between the late nineteenth century and World War I (Schleifer 2000: 4). During that time an “enormous multiplication of commodities” took place, fundamentally altering various disciplinary practices, such as “production,” “wealth,” and “use,” ultimately altering the conceptions of temporality in the early part of the twentieth century (p. 4). With the transition into an economy of abundance, a profound sense of crisis became normalized, disrupting previously and seemingly secure Enlightenment notions of subjectivity, agency, action, ethics, production, consumption, reason, narrative, and time (p. 232). The material abundance, which upset the previous balance between production and consumption, subject and action, and between reason and contingency, made its most visible and palpable mark on our sense of time and temporality. Accordingly, “Modernism” has come to figure as art’s “answerability” to the changes that took place in the social and technical discourses after the second Industrial Revolution (pp. 21–2). Post-Enlightenment thought and culture “replace[d] (but not altogether) the principle of contradiction with temporal alternations, the economics of sufficient reason with overdeterminations, and the aesthetics of given moments with repeated, momentary comprehensions of time” (pp. 230–1). Schleifer’s argument follows these phenomena through the various disciplines and through selected readings of British modernist fiction. While he pays attention to issues of social stratification such as class and gender, there is a noticeable lack of mention of time’s “other” dimensions, such as space and cultural difference. Thus, through his equation of modernity with temporality and abundance, he generalizes the experience of time as universal and not culturally or geographically specific.
While it is important to combine social and economic concerns with those of aesthetics and to point out temporality and abundance as the determining factors to the discussion on modernism, I find it necessary to also add the dimensions of cultural specificity and geographical location to the debate. As a result of a similar concern, Susan Hegeman incorporates spatiality and culture into her argument on modernism. She starts out by suggesting that modernism is “characterized by a nexus of related historical, intellectual, technological, and aesthetic developments,” as opposed to a more narrowly defined “set of formal traits or styles” (Hegeman 1999: 19). Hegeman then describes the devastating effects of World War I, the “scientific concepts of relativity and uncertainty,” “Freud’s theory of the unconscious and infantile sexuality,” the effects and consequences of living in a “consumer culture” and in mass societies, various technological inventions and innovations, the consolidation of “global-spanning European empires,” the emergence of the United States as an empire, the eruption of “social revolutions,” awareness of the “rapidity of change” and of a violent rupture with the past, among other developments (Hegeman 1999: 20). Ultimately, the project of modernism, according to Hegeman, is to break with previous models of “teleological progress,” linear development, and “superficial notions of evolution” in favor of “re-articulating historicity itself” (Hegeman 1999: 35). She identifies as key to the rearticulation of historical time the concept of “culture,” more specifically a spatial rethinking of modernity in relation to culture and difference.
The need for such an inclusion of a “spatial culture concept” in discussions about American modernism is substantiated by several events and trends that took place in the early decades of the twentieth century. After World War I notions of American identity, previously thought stable, became increasingly problematic: the seemingly secure hold of white supremacy was perceived to be under attack by the newly arrived “hordes” of immigrants and by the massive restructuring of the political and racial landscape of American society through internal migrations. Hegeman herself argues for a revision of the accepted terms that signify the modernist critical canon: that is, that it is international, cosmopolitan, a product of modern rootlessness, and that it “belongs to the avant-gardes of a few European capitals” (Hegeman 1999: 20). Hegeman’s work is a direct critique of Hugh Kenner’s (1975) definition of American modernism as a “homemade world.” She suggests that, instead of the clichés of apolitical cosmopolitanism, alienation, and formal experimentation, we must also pay attention to the culturally specific contents of American writing between the World Wars. She goes on to say that the “supposed opposition between formal experimentation and political activism” must be revisited and the “intercultural and interracial quality of aesthetic experimentation” be revealed and addressed, as has been done by critics, such as Ann Douglas, Houston A. Baker, Jr., Cary Nelson, Walter Kalaidjian, and others (see Hegeman 1999: 21, 220). But as Hegeman astutely points out, it is not enough to just recover a new canon, which in turn would only produce “countercanons” (Hegeman 1999: 21). Instead, she calls for the need to historicize modernism – both as the practice and the experience of modernity (Hegeman 1999: 22). Our challenge in defining ethnic modernism is to provide more than just adding more marginalized texts and writers to the list of canonical greats already promoted by Kenner and others. Therefore we need to rethink modernism as a complex set of concerns that do take into consideration particular cultures and subjectivities previously deemed marginal to the modernist project. Besides the temporal and universalizing dimensions of modernism, we must also take into consideration its spatial, cultural, or particular racial and ethnic aspects, and its specific locations.
The ethnic – spatial and cultural – dimension of modernism became a dominant feature of American literature after the Great Depression. Much as Susan Hegeman places modernism and modernity into the paradigm of the spatial rearticulation of culture, Thomas J. Ferraro also focuses on the chronological aspect of the concept that he identifies as the decade of the 1930s when the “ethnic passage” occurred in American culture (Ferraro 1990: 2). Thus he distinguishes the decade of the 1920s – which gave rise to high modernist experimentation and voice to immigrants still speaking in realist tones and through autobiographical genres – from the decade of the 1930s, which saw a peculiar convergence between modernism and ethnicity (p. 16). As Ferraro explains:
ethnic voices seem absent from the “forefront” of American literature in the crucial years, 1912–1930, because we have now accepted those years as the birth of modernism. During 1912 to 1930, the children of the immigrants shaped their literary ambitions in reference to the experimentation of the expatriates in Europe, continuing and indeed promoting the realist and naturalist techniques in self-conscious, if not always fully articulated opposition to high modernism.
(Ferraro 1990: 2)
In his argument, Ferraro reiterates the age-old debate about modernism: could formal experimentation and aesthetic mastery be reconciled with the social and political commitments of ethnic writings that traditionally have demanded older realist forms?4 Or, to put it more bluntly: could the modernists’ message of “universalistic high art” be combined with “parochial ethnicity” (Ferraro 1990: 9)? The ethnic experience “mandated the sociological treatment that only realism could provide,” and “the literary experiments of London and Paris were regarded as threats to ethnic consciousness” during the 1910s and 1920s for writers in the ethnic and immigrant ghettos (p. 3). For several of the new writers of the 1930s, however, the experimentations of high modernism became the vehicles for the ethnic experience: “Entrance into the avant-garde was now conceivable without abandoning the problems experienced during one’s ghetto past and raised by leaving the ethnic community. The politicization of American letters and the ethnicization of the avant-garde went hand in hand, feeding off one another” (pp. 4–5). Thus for Ferraro the period of the 1930s was that peculiar era when there was a democratic streak to modernism, a possibility for the “interpenetration between ethnicity and modernism” (p. 16). Ferraro’s main concern is to reconcile aesthetic value with social commitment, modernism with ethnic consciousness in the literatures of the 1930s.
Walter Kalaidjian picks up the project of “revisioning modernism” where Thomas J. Ferraro leaves it off: Kalaidjian gives voice to the century’s “contentious social context” silenced by the postwar’s academic scholarship on high modernism (Kalaidjian 1993: 2). His goal is to redirect the modernist “canon’s narrow focus on a select group of seminal careers” (p. 2) to a more varied chorus of voices, concerns, and genres. He seeks to recover the buried plurality of the modernist project within the paradigms of “transnational, racial, sexual, and class representation” and within the scope of a larger set of cultural texts that do not only involve aesthetic and formalist concerns within a limited circle of literary texts by a handful of canonized authors. Rather, he is concerned with a more interdisciplinary approach to literary modernism: that is, he places the issues of politics and social order, which are usually considered to be representatives of nonliterary genres and more symptomatic of popular or low culture, besides and against the elitist aesthetic of literary high modernism. He also foregrounds the concern with “global multiculturalism,” which postmodern cultural critical practices have introjected into the rethinking of the modernist project (p. 2). By employing the critical tools of a postmodern socioaesthetics, he is hoping for a needed “spread of a more democratic field of cultural representation” (p. 3). In defense of his “postmodern reading of American high modernism,” Kalaidjian argues that reading modernism from our own postmodernist moment would be beneficial for the following reasons:
Such an exchange would negotiate between, on the one hand, the kind of populist aesthetics that reached fruition during the Great Depression and, on the other hand, a poststructuralist understanding of language, subjectivity, and the latter’s ideological investments in discursive form. What emerges from this crossing of the historical avant-gardes and postmodernism is something that has long eluded the postwar academic canon: a post-individualistic solidarity among sexual, racial, class, and ethnic subject positions, at once formally sophisticated and critically responsive to America’s cultural diversity.
(Kalaidjian 1993: 5)
Kalaidjian’s “revisionary modernism” pays needed attention to cultural diversity and to the contestations of “nationality and aesthetic formalism. Moreover, this new map of modernity would shift the boundaries of critical reception that have segregated the interbellum avant-gardes in the United States from contemporaneous transnational, African-American, feminist, and proletarian traditions of cultural critique” (Kalaidjian 1993: 5). Kalaidjian’s “revisionary modernism” promises to take on a spatial remapping of the field, very much like modernist anthropology’s understanding of the culture concept as practiced by Franz Boas and his students at Columbia University during the early decades of the twentieth century. But instead of the narrow ethnographic meaning of culture the author adds the multigenred and multifaceted notion of culture that Raymond Williams defined as “a particular way of life” (Williams 1983: 80, quoted in Kalaidjian 1993: 4). Indeed, Kalaidjian’s book is an exciting resource that relies not only on textual but also visual icons of contemporary American as well as international popular culture. While the author aims to mend high modernism’s elitism, his book mainly focuses on the issues of nationalism, class, and gender, excluding the equally important issues of race and ethnicity.
Following but also revising Hegeman’s, Ferraro’s, and Kalaidjian’s examples, we suggest the rethinking of American modernism not just at the level of canon formation but also on a larger theoretical and critical scale. Therefore we must look at modernism in specific spatial and cultural locales that harbor just as many differences as similarities. When modernism is examined as an ideologically laden critical tool for understanding diversity during the interwar era, the critical concept itself becomes a historically and socially constructed entity which is also subject to historicization, just like its subject matter. In trying to establish a genealogy of modernism it is useful to imagine its concept in several, sometimes coexisting, stages which function as “emergent,” “dominant,” and “residual” stages of modernism (Williams 1980: 40–1). Ethnic modernism was in its “emergent” stage in the second half of the nineteenth century, and after World War II a new set of concerns emerged, making it a “localized period” in its “residual” stage.
Besides viewing modernism, both high and ethnic modernism, as a literary-historical period concept that is also spatially located and culturally situated, we draw connections between texts that are thematically, geographically, and culturally connected and produced by historical and social forces that can be loosely collected under the label of “the condition of modernity.”5 Ethnic modernism does not refer to a unified movement of writers with set aesthetic or political agendas. Rather, ethnic modernism is itself a self-conscious procedure of bringing into dialogue authors who are usually categorized as belonging to separate traditions – African-American and Native American literary traditions and the immigrant experience.6 This is not to make them members of a movement, but to highlight their “family resemblances” so that historically and aesthetically significant connections become visible that had been hidden in the high modernist attempt to “ghettoize” ethnic texts. Modernism thus becomes a category with nuance in its politics of aesthetics. By reimagining high modernism from its ethnic “other’s” perspective, this conflict-ridden and exclusionary construct may become more self-aware of its artifice and less fixed in its boundaries.
The condition of “modernity” in America refers to a broad range of interrelated historical forces including, though not limited to, the following list of characteristics: economic relations of production, distribution and consumption; the new technologies of mechanical reproduction; the effects of neocolonialism, imperialism, and the black migration from the South to Northern urban centers; the new waves of immigration from Europe, Asia, and the Americas; urbanization and democratization; and the rearticulation of normative systems based on race, class, nationality, sex, and sexuality. “Modernism,” in its broadest sense, refers to the cultural forms, practices, and relations – elite and popular, commercial urban and rural folk – through which people attempted to make sense of and represent modernity. The “modern” implies alienation from and nostalgia for an imaginary past (see Felski 1995: 60 on nostalgia). This temporal and spatial displacement is projected as a standard of “culture” (see Williams 1980) against the modern.
“Ethnic modernism” is a useful term only as long as it makes the critic aware of the pre-existing theoretical and critical biases in “modernism.” By redirecting our attention to modernism’s culturally and historically specific literary productions, we can tame the elitist streak in high modernist criticism. Following Marjorie Perloff’s suggestion, we may even “forget about centering modernism to begin with” (Perloff 1992: 171). Modernism then becomes a masquerade of different disguises in which ethnic modernism becomes one mode of self-creation among others. The monolith of modernism fractures into cultural particulars and localized productions, and “ethnic modernism” emerges as just another mask of the modernist project.
To demonstrate how to implement and use the category of ethnic modernism, we discuss a few select texts with regard to their place within the history of modern American literature. The US became an emerging multicultural state even before the modernist era, as captured in Herman Melville’s last published novel in his lifetime, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857). Melville – only known as an obscure writer of sea romances before the 1920s – became a canonical figure of American literature after the posthumous publication of his short novel, Billy Budd, Sailor (1924). Melville’s canonization constituted an effort by American modernists to solidify the status of American literature as a separate field of study. Melville’s novel also suggests an alternative conception of literary modernism that includes the questions of race and ethnicity. In The Confidence-Man Melville allegorizes the nation as a “ship of fools” and represents participation in the national project as a confidence game. Melville addresses the issue of an emerging multicultural America in his novel. Modernists found a model in his writings for addressing their own issues in the 1920s.
Besides questions concerning periodization and canon formation, our historical and political reassessment of American modernism needs to reread other literary traditions that were contemporaneous with high modernism, such as the Harlem Renaissance, writings by immigrant authors, and the emerging voices of Native American writers. Rather than merely defining modernism according to formalistic literary criteria, I would suggest that we pay particular attention to the enormous historical, political, and cultural impact caused by the sudden jump in the numbers of immigrants and internal migrants that changed the ethnic and racial makeup of the United States in the first few decades of the twentieth century. Modernism’s preoccupation with alienation, modernization, and industrialization took on a different emphasis when examined in the immigrant, African-American, and Native American literary contexts. In those communities bourgeois values of education, material prosperity, and urban living were considered positive goals.
The importance of space and locale and their close conceptual connection to ethnic and racial identity becomes even more prominent within the context of early twentieth-century Native American writing. In their novels Mourning Dove, D’Arcy McNickle, John Joseph Mathews, and others grapple with the devastating impacts of changing federal policies concerning American Indian tribes between the 1880s and 1930s. Each of these authors responds to the political climate of the so-called “assimilation period,” when the US government systematically opened up reservation lands for white settlement. Thus modernization affected Native Americans quite differently from those, mostly of Anglo-Saxon origin, who enjoyed the benefits of membership within the nation. Native Americans did not become citizens of the United States until 1924. Because of their peculiar situation, Native Americans – considered all but extinct while romanticized as the “ideal American” in popular culture – had to battle projected stereotypes in their writings. Native authors were keenly aware that Native American identity had been extensively appropriated, narrativized, and colonized.
In line with the issue of periodization within modernist studies, we would posit Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) as a border text between ethnic modernism and postmodernism. While it was necessary to create a term for ethnic modernism within modernist studies because of the formalism, cultural elitism, and the seemingly culturally neutral cosmopolitanism of Anglocentric and Eurocentric high modernism, with the postmodern cultural turn diversity and pluralism came to the forefront of debates in American literary and cultural studies. The two novels, The Confidence-Man and Invisible Man, may be viewed as representatives of the “emergent” and “residual” stages of ethnic modernism. Moreover, Ralph Ellison’s novel explicitly addresses the masked-ball atmosphere of American race relations. For Ellison the duplicitous political rhetoric of the nation that preaches unity at the expense of racial, ethnic, or cultural difference – the confidence game of America – reaches an extreme. Stripped of all options for resistance, Ellison’s nameless “hero” goes underground and accepts invisibility. A consummate confidence man, he is also the ultimate American “stranger.”
One of the most common themes ethnic modernist texts share with high modernist narratives is what I call, using Georg Simmel’s term, the “discourse of the stranger.” The figure of the stranger appears in both high modernist and ethnic modernist novels. High modernists cast the stranger in the role of the alienated figure of the artist, whereas ethnic modernist texts appropriate the figure of the stranger as the figure of the “other”: the petty con man or woman, the trickster, or the outcast. The outcast has been a recurring figure of American literature, but in ethnic writing his or her character gains a special significance. The figure of the stranger in ethnic modernist texts exposes what Fredric Jameson calls the “political unconscious” of an increasingly multiethnic America.
Melville’s The Confidence-Man did not receive a favorable critique until the modernist Melville revival in the 1920s and 1930s when a renewed interest was sparked in Herman Melville by both readers and academics in search of an “authentic” American literature. As a result, Melville’s works became the center of literary interest and the symbol of a new confident voice of “home-grown” literature. Carl Van Vechten, a patron and friend to Gertrude Stein and Nella Larsen, was one of the first admirers of The Confidence-Man. In Vechten’s interpretation Melville was satirizing Emersonian Transcendentalism as a philosophical confidence game. During the 1920s, however, there were only a few commentaries, most often by nonacademic literary people who were puzzled by its enigmatic structure and lack of plot. In the 1940s the academic study of Melville burgeoned, and Elizabeth Foster’s Yale dissertation (1942) was the first sustained interpretation of The Confidence-Man.
The coincidence of the modernist literary movement and the recovery of Melville as a major American author is of interest to the argument on ethnic modernism, since Melville’s modernity found a new audience at a time when American modernism was trying to find its own roots on the American continent. For example, Billy Budd, a short novel written in Melville’s last years, was not published till 1924. Melville achieved canonical status at the height of the modernist movement and was read increasingly as a forebear of twentieth-century sensibilities. The modernist affinity towards Melville may be explained by Melville’s foresight of what would become the dominant factor in the American Union: not its revolutionary heroic beginning and religious tolerance, but its ambiguity toward racial, ethnic, religious, and cultural alterity. The Confidence-Man conveys an apocalyptic vision of the Union and is sometimes compared to another twentieth-century apocalyptic text, Ellison’s Invisible Man. In terms of literary periodization, they are both “border” texts: Melville’s novel forecasts a new multicultural and modernist paradigm, while Ellison’s points forward to a new postmodern approach to shifting subject positionalities. They both critique American nationalism, and they both argue, indirectly, for a more inclusive and tolerant – that is, a truly democratic – multicultural state. According to such a rereading of Melville’s novel, The Confidence-Man could be viewed as an “emergent” modernist text that critiques the homogenizing tendencies of the expanding nation-state, a critique it shares with ethnic modernist texts. The novel’s interpolated tales and metanarrative chapters function as counterdiscourses and alternative critical voices to an “emergent” American modernity. By keeping the confidence man’s identity ambiguous, Melville puts on a minstrel show of the nation.
Writing against the tradition of minstrel shows, popular with white audiences at the turn of the twentieth century, was on the cultural agenda of the Harlem Renaissance movement. For example, Countee Cullen’s only novel, One Way To Heaven (1932), makes its protagonist a lower-class one-armed con man. While African-American authors attempted to discredit the racist stereotypes rampant in American culture, some also fought against the middle-class confine of promoting W. E. B. Du Bois’s “talented tenth.” While American high modernists saw themselves as iconoclasts who broke with petit bourgeois values, African Americans sought middle-class respectability against the legacy of slavery. The novel’s competing storylines function as counterdiscourses to the Harlem Renaissance’s bourgeois ideology of the “New Negro.” The question of middle-class respectability is even more acute in the case of African-American women who for centuries were viewed as either sexually available to or as caretakers of their white masters. While the white “New Woman” sought liberation from the confines of bourgeois marriage and social values, black women walked a narrow path of respectability – defined not only by whites but also by the mostly male leadership of the New Negro movement, the political precursor to the cultural renaissance that was mostly based in Harlem.
Nella Larsen’s novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) are symptomatic of the estrangement some of the women writers of the Harlem Renaissance experienced at the time of conspicuous consumption before the Crash of 1929. Larsen’s characters are strangers exiled from the imagined homeland of Africa, what Countee Cullen calls in his poem “Heritage” a place “three centuries removed.” In her novels the nineteenth-century genre of “race melodrama” is transfigured into the modernist story of loss of traditional communities. Both Countee Cullen and Nella Larsen question the feasibility of defining race in nationalistic terms, or recreating an imagined community through literary narratives and political slogans. Instead of reconciling race with unity in nationalistic terms, they both point to disunity within the urban black community based on class and gender differences. Their characters do not find salvation or community within the confines of the nation, church, or marriage. Cullen’s One Way to Heaven and Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing challenge the patriarchal middle-class and nationalistic tone and agenda of the Harlem Renaissance movement. Larsen’s characters suffer physically and mentally under the stress of ambiguous identities: in Quicksand the biracial Helga Crane feels suffocated by both groups and listlessly moves between communities and continents. Furthermore, Irene Redfield’s mounting hostility for Clare Kendry’s passing leads to an aggressive and fatal resolution to racial and gender ambiguity at the end of Passing. Larsen grapples with the issue of respectability, but it is specifically connected to issues of race, class, sexuality, and political and national belonging. Helga Crane of Quicksand is dangerously close to losing respectability because she is single and does not have the support of her birth family. Moreover, she is constantly ambivalent about affiliating with and committing to the black community or the philosophy of racial uplift. In Passing, Clare passes for white and marries a racist wealthy white man in order to escape poverty. In the marketplace of women, marriage – either in the context of a religious community, such as the Reverend Green’s congregation in Alabama in Quicksand, or in the context of the middle-class milieu and social program of racial uplift in Passing – seems to be the only solution for status and respectability. But in each case, the institution of marriage fails to fulfill its promise to provide black women with lasting financial and emotional security or with a nurturing and culturally supportive community. Larsen’s two novels, when read together and against each other, exhaust all easy political solutions. The forced middle-class patriarchal and racial unity of Harlem Renaissance ideology proved to be confining for many African-American women writers.
Zora Neale Hurston is one of the first writers to question the masculine, urban, and middle-class message of the Harlem Renaissance that confined black women to respectability exclusively through marriage. Hurston, herself a sharp critic of patriarchy and the institution of marriage, suggested that solidarity between black women was key to the agenda and success of racial uplift for African-American women. While Nella Larsen’s characters grapple with the legacy of slavery for black women, trying to find respectability through education, financial independence, marriage, and/or even passing for white, all within the middle-class values of the “talented tenth,” others, such as African-American female blues singers and performers or writers like Zora Neale Hurston critique those values and institutions altogether. Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), projects an imaginary all-black national utopia upon the “nativist,” racially segregated, and white-dominated reality of early twentieth-century America. Her points of reference are African-American folk culture and rural southern communities, which serve as alternatives to the fragmentation, modernization, urbanization, and alienation of Anglo-American culture. Before her rediscovery, Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, was an underground phenomenon. In a personal essay, “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston,” written for Ms. magazine (March 1975), Alice Walker describes going to Florida, where wading through weeds she found Hurston’s unmarked grave. She placed on it a marker inscribed: “Zora Neale Hurston / ‘A Genius of the South’/ Novelist / Folklorist / Anthropologist / 1901–1960.”7 Walker’s marking of Hurston’s grave and the publication of the personal essay launched the Hurston revival, which in turn reignited a new renaissance of black woman writers. In addition to four novels, three nonfiction works, and numerous short stories, plays, and essays, Zora Neale Hurston is acknowledged as the first black American to collect and publish African-American folklore. She studied anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University with Franz Boas, an experience that profoundly influenced her work. During this period, Hurston began publishing short stories and establishing friendships with many important black writers.
Hurston’s writings fit uneasily into the constricting, patriarchal and urban, discourse of the “New Negro.” She was criticized on all sides: for not writing detached and disinterested academic narratives of ethnography, or for not writing proper “New Negro” fiction that would help the agenda of racial uplift. Instead, she wrote stories about the “low-down” folks in black dialect. Hurston’s best-known and most successful novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, focuses on Janie’s journey to self-affirmation and freedom after two previous unhappy relationships and a third brief marriage to a fun-loving petty con man and gambler, Tea Cake. The novel is set in an all-black community where Janie returns after a long absence. This time, her return is not initiated by another romance. By not attaching herself to yet another man, she can be independent, somewhat of a stranger, and still belong to the community. She kills the man she loves in order to protect herself: Tea Cake attacks her in a delirious rage caused by rabies he contracted while saving her from the attack of a mad dog during the floods. By not ending the story in the “muck” of the Florida swamps, with Janie and Tea Cake living happily ever after, Hurston favors individuality within community over the claustrophobia of marital bliss. By not staying with the marriage plot, and by making it clear that the all-black community is constantly threatened by its surroundings, by impending natural and social disasters, Hurston subverts the literary cliché of the “tragic mulatto/a.” She rewrites the genre as a mixture of the oral and the written, of folklore and fiction, and of autobiography and modernist novel. The novel’s narrative structure is circular, the “ending” of the story is connected to the first chapter where Janie starts telling the tale of her adventures to her friend, Pheoby. Rhetorically the ending image of the horizon that Janie pulls in like a fishnet is also part of the opening image. The novel not only questions the logic of linear narrative structure, but it also asserts the “truth” of dreams and personal memories over the logic of facts and reason. Most of the narrative consists of Janie telling her story to Pheoby and, indirectly, to the larger female community of Eatonville. Hurston blends the black oral folk narrative tradition and the dialect of the South with the stylized and ritualized structure of written forms. She also blends ethnography with fiction. By centering the plot on dreams, memories, myths, and oral folk culture written in the first person, Hurston transgresses the horizon of male discourse (“ships at a distance”) and brings her memories close by, making them tangible and practical (“draped it over her shoulder”). Hurston’s thematic and narrative formal modernity justifies her place within the modernist canon. Because of her use of black dialect, borrowing from oral tradition, blending of genres and disciplines, and her experimentations with form, Hurston is more akin to the modernists than to her “New Negro” cohort or to the protest literatures of the 1940s and 1950s. She was an outsider and a stranger in the circles of the Harlem literati, because she was from the rural South and proud of it, an academic who wrote fiction, and because she held some surprisingly idiosyncratic political views.
Simultaneous with the Southern black migration to the North, millions of immigrants entered the United States between 1890 and 1924. Millions of others were barred from entry by racial exclusion laws and quotas that provided the model for the infamous immigration restriction laws of the 1920s. The successful drive against immigration tapped into the white majority’s fears over the growing numbers of Southern and Eastern European immigrants in the United States. Native-born white Americans doubted the nation’s ability to absorb the newcomers who brought different values and customs with them. Many of the new immigrants were Catholics or Jews, whose religion clashed with the country’s dominant Protestant tone. Moreover, large numbers came from peasant rural backgrounds to the urban areas. Decades earlier, prejudices against Asians had already closed off immigration from Japan and China.
In 1917 the newly established literacy test for all immigrants deterred only a few. In 1921, Congress passed a bill limiting the number of immigrants to 3 percent of each national group, based on the 1910 census. The new law produced results that same year. The National Origins Act of 1924 limited immigration further, to 2 percent of each nationality as reflected in the 1890 census (at that time there were still very few from the “undesirable” areas of South-Eastern Europe and Russia). The 1924 quotas cut the total annual immigration to 164,000 (mainly from Great Britain, Ireland, and Germany). The law admitted only 4,000 Italians, and it excluded Japanese and Chinese immigrants entirely (for historical information concerning immigration laws see Henretta et al. 1987). A more restrictive system took force in 1929, and President Herbert Hoover lowered the quota even further in 1931. During the Depression years more foreigners left than entered. In contrast, 1,285,000 immigrants had entered the country in 1907, the peak year of immigration – the year the first chapter of Henry Roth’s novel Call It Sleep (1934) is set. With the gates of immigration closing tight in the 1920s, the sole loophole that permitted unrestricted immigration from countries in the Western hemisphere let in only Canadians and Central and Latin Americans who crossed the border in increasing numbers, filling the places vacated by Asians and Eastern and Southern Europeans.
The National Origins Act was just one example of the rise of nativist prejudices during the 1920s. Colleges instituted quotas to limit the enrollment of Jewish students, and many law firms refused to hire Jewish lawyers at all. Henry Ford’s anti-Semitism, his warning against the menace of the “International Jew,” was well known. The term “cosmopolitan” became an anti-Semitic slur (Suleiman 1988: 1) and nationalism was equated with “American” self-assuring nativism. The most extreme example of nativism of the 1920s was the revival of the Ku Klux Klan at the end of 1916. The new Klan not only attacked blacks, but also Catholics, Jews, and immigrants. Confirming the power of modern media, the Klan found encouragement in D. W. Griffith’s epic film The Birth of a Nation (1915), a glorification of white Southerners fighting to overturn the social and political changes introduced by the Civil War and Reconstruction. The fear of miscegenation is encoded in the film’s melodramatic plot in which the Klan becomes the rescuer of endangered white Southern womanhood and of “native” Protestant white supremacy. Although the revived Klan was mostly a hate organization, Klan members saw themselves as the defenders of an older American order threatened by foreigners, foreign cultures and religions, and by modernity itself. Thus, indirectly and surprisingly, the ethnic threat was entangled with the threat of the modern and of the “new.”
Stopping the flow of immigration with quotas also had the unexpected consequence of prompting migratory streams of Mexicans and African Americans into regions vacated by Eastern and Southern Europeans. The result was an intense period of immigration, migration, and remigration that set into motion two seemingly contradictory movements: the racist and xenophobic sympathies of American nativism and hyperassimilationism and the creation of a multiethnic United States. In the climate of nativist hostility issues of immigration, ethnicity, and race became indivisible. In narratives written by immigrants, cultural clash is often represented as a conflict between the old and the new and in economic and political terms. Anzia Yezierska’s story of “A Struggle between a Father of the Old World and a Daughter of the New” in Bread Givers (1925) familiarizes and psychologizes (or rather “Oedipalizes”) the large-scale trends of modernization. But to identify such trends only within high modernist texts, as Kenner does, reveals an elitist bias. Cosmopolitanism in the twentieth century gains a more definite and pejorative meaning. Instead of the elusive foreboding of Melville’s stranger, the empty signifier of the “cosmopolitan” is filled with antiforeigner, antistranger, anti-immigrant, and ultimately anti-Semitic significations. Novels such as Roth’s Call It Sleep, Yezierska’s Bread Givers, Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete (1939), or Josephina Niggli’s Mexican Village (1945) all react to the modern condition of cosmopolitanism and “strangerness” in one way or another. Their narratives encode their “strangerness” or being “exiles in the American grain” in realistic, naturalistic, fairy tale-like, stream–of-consciousness first person, magical realist, autobiographical, novelistic, or in fragmented intertwining narratives. As there is no monolithic and all-inclusive “modernism,” immigrant writers also tell their stories in pluralistic plots and forms and in multiple, not easily catalogued, stories.
The early twentieth-century Native American authors, Mourning Dove, D’Arcy McNickle, and John Joseph Mathews were keenly aware that Indian identity has been extensively and historically appropriated and narrativized. Native Americans experienced a particular kind of alienation within the urbanizing, modernizing, and expanding US empire during the 1920s and 1930s. The “stranger” of Native American fiction is usually a mixed blood character who is rejected by the national discourse and often by Native tribal communities. Native American authors often address and narrativize the issue of what Lois Owens calls “contextual identity” through low-brow genres and traditional narratives that are focused on issues of race and ethnicity within a modernist context and philosophical and social framework (see Owens 1992: 5). In response to the long history of narrative appropriations of Indians within American literature, what Owens describes as “literary colonization” (1992: 23), each of these authors utilizes traditional mimetic narratives in order to subvert the very genres that have historically denied them realistic and authentic subjectivity and self-representation in fiction. Thus they purposely avoid employing the formal experimentations of Anglo high modernism. They reuse and subvert the narrative clichés used by mainstream white authors for ideological purposes which are external to Native American identity, and they write in traditional genres, such as realist or naturalist fiction or romance. Instead of representing Indians either as barbarians or as the model but absent original population of the nation (as opposed to the very visible and present growing immigrant and African-American populations in the cities), early Native American authors describe their life and culture from within. Even though they do not make use of the formal mastery and experimentation of Anglo high modernism during the height of Western literary modernism, nonetheless they still develop a poignant critique of the modern condition in the United States that is inseparable from issues of race, ethnicity, and culture. Dove, McNickle, and Mathews write in the old-fashioned nineteenth-century genres of the romance and Western dime novel, or in realist and naturalistic narratives in order to expose the destruction of indigenous cultures and the degradation of the physical environment. They explore the modernist issues of alienation, being strangers in their own lands, and the environmental degradation that were the by-products of industrialization and modernization. Thus the issues of ethnicity and modernity are intimately linked in novels such as Mourning Dove’s Cogewea, The Half-Blood (1927), McNickle’s The Surrounded (1936), or Mathews’s Sundown (1934).
Early twentieth-century Native American authors responded to the political climate of the so-called “assimilation period” (from the 1880s through 1934), when the US government forced “Indians into a cash nexus while systematically opening up reservation lands for white settlement” (Brown 1993: 274). Brown refers to the 1887 General Allotment (or Dawes) Act, which led to the loss of two-thirds of the original treaty lands by 1934. According to the Dawes Act tribal lands were individualized and “surplus” land could be appropriated by white settlers (Owens 1992: 30). During the assimilation period mission schools and boarding schools operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) violently propagated white cultural values to “eradicate Native tribal identities”: children were “removed from their homes” and “punished for speaking indigenous languages” (Brown 1993: 274). Native Americans did not gain American citizenship until 1924, when it was finally granted as a direct response to Indians’ growing enlistment in the military.
The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 (also called the Indian New Deal) was meant to reverse the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 by promoting more extensive self-government through tribal councils and constitutions. With the appointment of John Collier to direct the BIA in 1934 more humane federal Indian policies were enacted. Early Native American authors aimed to counter the literary and cultural stereotypes piled upon Native Americans since first contacts. Mourning Dove directly addresses and critiques an early twentieth-century ethnographic novel through her own version of the genre of the Western romance. D’Arcy McNickle writes in a realistic and often naturalistic style in order to give an accurate insider’s picture of the dilemmas and the fate of contemporary Indians. And finally, John Joseph Mathews gives an unflinching account of the consequences of urbanization, modernization, and industrialization on a rural Indian community through the narrative of a young Osage man. Mathews’s story is a contemporary rewriting of the Bildungsroman and an exposure of its failure as a genre for properly depicting the coming of age and maturing of Native American men during the modernist era.
Mourning Dove’s Cogewea, The Half-Blood: A Depiction of the Great Montana Cattle Range is the story of Cogewea, an educated young mixed blood (Okanogan and white) woman, who returns to her home after being sent away to Carlisle, the flagship east coast boarding school for Native American youth. She tries to readjust to life on a cattle ranch that is surrounded by tribal allotments and by the lands of white settlers on the Flathead reservation in Montana. She reconnects with her traditional grandmother, the Stemteemä, but also tries to fit into the world of the surrounding white settlers. Her dilemma is that she is between two worlds, caught between the desire to be like her traditional grandmother and younger sister and the desire to fit into a modernizing and encroaching white society with whose ways she is also familiar. Her dilemma is allegorized in the central scene of the novel, the two “races” (using both meanings of the word) in both of which she participates and wins: the horse race set up by the white settlers (the “Ladies” race) and the other for full-blood Indians of the Kootenai and Pend d’Oreille tribes (the “Squaw” race), during the Fourth of July celebrations. Even though Cogewea wins both, she cannot claim her victory and prize in either, because she is of mixed blood origin. But most of the story is taken up with the melodrama of Cogewea being courted, simultaneously, by a white stranger – the Easterner Alfred Densmore, who later turns out to be a ruthless confidence man who masquerades as Cogewea’s suitor but in reality is only interested in her assumed riches in land allotments – and by the mixed blood Jim LaGrinder, the ranch’s foreman, who not only ends up marrying her, but unexpectedly comes into a large sum of money that Cogewea inherits from her white father who searched for gold in Alaska. The novel ends with the marriage between the two mixed blood characters who are “corralled” not only in marriage but also by the United States government in reservations. Written during the heyday of high modernism, Mourning Dove recycled the traditional genre of the Western romance and used it to rephrase the narrative of historical “tragedy” as a melodramatic “farce” and to reimagine modernist urban centers in the peripheries of the cattle ranches in Montana. She also argues against the sentimental and biased depictions of Native Americans by white ethnographers whose narratives proliferated during the first few decades of the twentieth century. She ironically rewrites an earlier text, Therese Broderick’s The Brand, a Tale of the Flathead Reservation (1909), which one-sidedly dramatized the early twentieth-century literary and popular cliché of the “Vanishing American.” Mourning Dove revises this cliché through the trope of the legendary rounding-up and corralling of the last free-ranging Michel Pablo buffalo herd in 1908. While Broderick’s text reiterates the notion that Native Americans are a “vanishing race,” Mourning Dove’s novel rejects the white ethnographer’s melodramatic reading of Native American culture. Mourning Dove’s novel celebrates tolerance, hybridity, as well as racial ambiguity, even though the text commits itself clearly to the cause of the Indian as opposed to the white community culturally. In Cogewea Mourning Dove suggests that we should rethink our monologic notions of racial identity and cultural authenticity – through the hybrid and modern genre of ethnographic fiction.
The Surrounded (1936) is D’Arcy McNickle’s first novel. The novel centers on a two-year period in the life of Archilde Leon, whose mother is a full-blood Salish Indian, and whose father is a white rancher of Spanish descent. The story opens with Archilde’s return to his father’s ranch in Montana after being away for nearly a year in Portland, Oregon, where – in Archilde’s description: “I played my fiddle in a show house” (McNickle 1964: 2). His parents are estranged, even though they have been married for 40 years and had 11 children: his mother, Catharine Le Loup (Chief Running Wolf’s daughter) lives with her people in a small hut, while his father, Max Leon, lives in the big house on his ranch. Upon his return, Archilde learns that his brother stole some horses and is now hiding in the mountains. Life in the Salish community of Sniél-emen (Mountains of the Surrounded) has gradually gotten worse: “The fur trade was gone when he [the merchant George Moser] arrived and the Salish Indians were a starving lot, once their game was killed off. The only money they had was what the Government advanced them, and somebody else got that” (p. 29). Things got even worse with the Dawes Act when the government was “throwing open the Reservation to white settlement” (p. 30). For the assimilated Archilde, returning home to his reservation is an unreal, almost surreal, experience – stripped from any kind of auric significance. McNickle’s central allegory of being “surrounded” – geographically and politically – is told in a claustrophobic narrative. His story carries a sense of predetermination and inevitability, a sense of doom and unavoidable failure, similar to the generic conventions of the naturalist novel. McNickle’s use of naturalist narrative conventions is an acknowledgment of his academic distance from the subject matter. But his compassionate and intimate knowledge of the inhabitants of the Sniél-emen valley redefine and redirect the voyeurism and alienated stance of the naturalist novel.
Native American novelists in the 1920s and 1930s contributed to the modernist discourse concerning issues of ethnicity and authenticity in representation through the “low” genre of the Western romance or the naturalist novel. Both D’Arcy McNickle and Mourning Dove comment on the specific conditions Indians faced at the beginning of the century. Their accounts add historical dimensions and competing perspectives missing from texts about Native Americans written from a dominant narrative position. Their novels locate the modern experience of alienation within the colonial condition of reservation Indians. Modernists fought the phantoms of romanticism and realism as well as naturalism aesthetically and the rationalization and bureaucratization of the world politically. In addition, Native American “ethnic modernist” novelists responded to a long tradition of textual abuse and stereotyping of Indians.
High modernists aimed to subvert the romantic or mimetic representations of previous generations through restless innovation of form and expression. Native American authors often reached back to anachronistic forms, such as the dime novel romance or the naturalist novel – which may be viewed as a form of hyperrealism – in order to reuse and subvert the very genres that have historically cast Indians in stereotypical roles and images. McNickle and Mourning Dove use those genres to critique both their form and message. By reappropriating previously popular genres, they are able to create a dialogue with the very texts they critique. Their novels seem formally conservative and out of place in the modernist literary scene of compulsive innovation. By not just reusing earlier and popular genres in the context of a sometimes esoteric and elitist modernist milieu but also filling those forms with new content, the two authors challenge assumptions about the anachronistic genres and about modernism itself. They reappropriate the romance, to critique the institutions of patriarchy and white anthropological authority, and the naturalist novel, in order to subvert the genre’s voyeuristic and outsider’s perspective directed at Native others.
John Joseph Mathews’s Sundown (1934) – like the novels of Mourning Dove and D’Arcy McNickle – is concerned with the particularly American modernist themes of authenticity and ethnic identity, but within the cultural context of the Osage tribe in eastern Oklahoma. Mathews became an instant success when his Wah’Kon-Tah: The Osage and the White Man’s Road was selected for the Book-of-the-Month Club in 1932. It was the first university press book chosen for popular distribution, selling close to 50 thousand copies in its first year of publication during a period of general economic collapse. Sundown also became an aesthetic and cultural model for the modern American Indian novel. Sundown is a complex mixture of traditional Euro-American literary genres and their innovative rewriting within the ethnic modernist context of the Osage in the 1920s. The plot follows the life of Chal or Challenge Windzer from birth to young adulthood, from naive innocence to his possible integration into Osage and Anglo cultures, quite similar to the generic traditions of the Bildungsroman. But instead of the simple dichotomies of innocence versus knowledge, the “idiocy” of the countryside versus the sophistication of the city, or the final integration of a young man into the status quo of bourgeois society, Mathews’s main character must also find his place not only within mainstream Anglo-American values and hierarchies but also within a changing traditional Osage culture. The text deals with the related issues of colonization, industrialization, and forced acculturation. Sundown is set within the “postcolonial scenario” of dislocation, cultural denigration, and the erosion of the self. The novel opens with Chal’s birth and the legacy of his naming by his mixed blood father, John Windzer, in the Osage Reservation of the 1890s: “He shall be a challenge to the disinheritors of his people. We’ll call him Challenge” (Mathews 1987: 4). Chal’s childhood and young adulthood are influenced by several events: his education at the University of Oklahoma, serving as a pilot during World War I, and the white fortune seekers’ invasion of Osage lands. By the time Chal returns home the Osage Reservation has been thrown open to white settlers and entrepreneurs by the General Allotment (or Dawes Severalty) Act of 1887. What made the Osage a unique case study of forced modernization and industrialization is that their land had enormous underground resources of oil and natural gases that the tribe was able to hold on to after the allotment in 1906. Chal’s maturation coincides with the communal history of the Osage being gradually overtaken by white fortune seekers. Often, these men attempted to gain Osage headrights to the underground resources and to the oil money through marriage, miscegenation, and even murder. Mathews resets his plot of violence, corruption, and cultural bankruptcy in Osage Country during the modernist Jazz Age.
Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), a late ethnic modernist novel, self-consciously draws on the literary traditions of Melville and T. S. Eliot, both of whom he quotes in his epigraph. As the invisible man crosses over from a specific historical situation to an absurd existence that seems to be outside of historical linearity and of social hierarchy or spatial congruity, he literally enters a no man’s land. The vision of history as a “boomerang” (Ellison 1995: 6) that threatens with injury confirms the violent implications of history in Ellison’s novel. In the “Introduction” (written in 1981) the author takes on the critic’s role and comments on the meanings and sources of invisibility that inspired the text. According to Ellison, Invisible Man “erupted out of what had been conceived as a war novel” (Ellison 1995: vii). Its inspiration was the fresh memory of World War II, and Ellison intended to write a novel that:
focused upon the experiences of a captured American pilot who found himself in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp in which he was the officer of highest rank and thus by a convention of war the designated spokesman for his fellow prisoners. Predictably, the dramatic conflict arose from the fact that he was the only Negro among the Americans, and the resulting racial tension was exploited by the German camp commander for his own amusement. Having to choose between his passionate rejection of both native and foreign racisms while upholding those democratic values which he held in common with his white countrymen, my pilot was forced to find support for his morale in his sense of individual dignity and his newly awakened awareness of human loneliness.
(Ellison 1995: xi–xii)
The modern stranger finds himself outside of the support of democratic ideals where cosmopolitan agency and equality cease to exist once they are tainted by racial conflict. In the novel, Ellison’s existentialist stance of “human loneliness” becomes racially specific. The protagonist steps outside of the historical specifics of wartime black experience. Even the nostalgic backward look to the Harlem Renaissance becomes distanced as his identity fades into whitewashed invisibility. His surroundings turn foreign, more fitting for the apocalyptic visions of the postmodern genre of science or speculative fiction (as Samuel R. Delany uses the term). The invisible man steps out of historical time and space and, thus freed, he taps into the “political unconscious” of American race relations and exposes democracy to be a hoax of color-coded confidence games.
Ellison’s novel is a border text, not only politically and linguistically like Josephina Niggli’s Mexican Village, but also aesthetically. If we think of modernism as a period concept, then Invisible Man is a “residual” text in the modernist literary production, already carrying the “emergent” characteristics of a new postmodern era. The invisible man is the modern stranger on his way to a postmodern hyperreality – underground and invisible, possibly dangerous and bordering the inhuman – the cyborg, as Donna Haraway defines it. Commenting on the existential impasse of his original war story’s pilot protagonist, Ellison himself writes:
But while Hemingway’s hero managed to put the war behind him and opt for love, for my pilot there was neither escape nor a loved one waiting. Therefore he had either to affirm the transcendent ideals of democracy and his own dignity by aiding those who despised him, or accept his situation as hopelessly devoid of meaning; a choice tantamount to rejecting his own humanity.
(Ellison 1995: xii)
Here Ellison expresses a break with the romanticism of Hemingway’s modernity that leads to escapism in the forms of love and aestheticism. His narrative world is the stark alternative for the subject of postmodern radical alterity. Since romantic heroism is not a feasible political possibility for the African-American protagonist, he rejects the white bourgeois individualism of the “hero” and, instead, chooses invisibility and an apocalyptic loneliness that would permeate speculative film and fiction in the coming decades.
Ethnic modernist authors write their own counterdiscourses to the ideology of modernism and of the nation and empire, carving out new definitions for each. Ethnic modernism addresses the condition of modernity from a particularly American and peripheral subject position. Both Melville’s Confidence-Man and Ellison’s novel are “border” texts between literary eras and expressions of the shifts in discourse and consciousness. The invisible man’s response to the ghastly existence forced upon him is to tap into the power grid itself and exploit the system through the 1,369 light bulbs he burns in his underground hole of hibernation, ironically literalizing the underworld of American race relations and turning the system of “Monopolated Light & Power” against itself.
While high modernists experimented with narrative form out of a historical fatigue that required new aesthetic articulations, Ellison originates his fatigue and disillusionment from the emptied-out category of democracy that did not offer the double promise of freedom and equality to those not white. Therefore, while high modernism responded to a generalized condition of disillusionment, ethnic modernism addressed a culturally and racially specific political situation by borrowing and subverting previous forms and genres to the end of instigating radical social change: an end to racism and discrimination and a call for affirming and legitimizing diversity in both the base and the superstructure. Ellison adapts his novel’s narrative form in order to match the absurdity of reality. But he does not stop at a mimetic gesture, he also affirms his commitment to and his demand for a true democracy, one that can account for and embrace diversity. Thereby, his art becomes the means for political change. His invisible protagonist stays underground to learn the workings of an unfair society, but this artistic and contemplative distance is only temporary, only a preparation for pending political action:
And, as I said before, a decision has been made. I’m shaking off the old skin and I’ll leave it here in the hole. I’m coming out, no less invisible without it, but coming out nevertheless. And I suppose it’s damn well time. Even hibernations can be overdone, come to think of it. Perhaps that is my greatest social crime, I’ve overstayed my hibernation, since there’s a possibility that even an invisible man has a socially responsible role to play.
(Ellison 1995: 581)
With Ellison’s novel the hibernation of ethnic modernism has given way to the more overt political commitments of the civil rights era and to a new literary era of postwar and postmodern fiction that reflects a much more diverse chorus of voices and a contested literary canon dominated by writers of color.
NOTES
This chapter was previously published in different form in Stranger at Home: American Ethnic Modernism between the World Wars by the University of Nebraska Press.
1 Werner Sollors suggests that we use the conceptual tool of “ethnic modernism” as a period concept as well. He marks the temporal boundaries as between 1910 and 1950 (see Sollors 2003: 70–7). Thomas J. Ferraro also quotes Sollors, though somewhat differently, when explaining his inspiration for exploring the connections “between ethnicity and modernism” (Ferraro 1990: 1).
2 When I use the term “ethnic,” I mean non-Anglo-Saxon and non-Anglocentric texts and identities. I am aware of the slippage between the categories of “race” and “ethnicity,” but my primary goal is to make visible the pseudoscience of early twentieth-century theories of race. By using the terms of race, culture, and ethnicity interchangeably, I wish to retain the signification of “otherness” or “difference” involved in all three terms.
3 According to the Census Bureau’s “Census 2000” survey, California, Hawaii, and New Mexico have no racial majorities, thus making the demographic, as well as economic, political, and/or social terms of racial “majority” or “minority” highly problematic (see Ritter 2001).
4 In another article, Marjorie Perloff voices a similar concern in her response to Walter Benn Michaels’s Our America. When discussing Michaels’s choice of “modernists” she faults him for the nonliterary criteria directing his agenda to equate modernism with racist home-grown “nativism”: “No matter that no one outside the American Studies classroom would so much as read the many minor ethnic novels that provide Michaels with his exempla” (Perloff 1996: 102). She then goes on to call Michaels an “anti-aestheticist” (Perloff 1996: 103), and argues that:
Michaels’s brand of cultural studies would like to save literature, to preserve it as a field of study. But it will not do. For why do we need to study literature in order to learn about the identity politics of the 1920s? Surely there are more informative and efficient ways than to read dozens of what are largely undistinguished novels. What, in other words, can “literature” teach us that the study of American history, culture, and politics can’t? Indeed, I would posit that if literature has no other function than to be the privileged “carrier of cultural heritage,” its study will soon be anachronism. If we can offer our students nothing better than the moral imperative to read the novels of Nella Larsen and Jean Toomer and Willa Cather because they will teach us about the “cultural heritage” that they “carry,” the response is likely to be a collective and extended yawn. What nineteen-year-old will be impelled to read lesser novels written seventy years ago on that argument?
(Perloff 1996: 104)
I have quoted Perloff’s argument extensively in order to demonstrate the kind of elitism and aesthetic bias that has been long part of the modernist canon formation. Besides her obvious discontent with a cultural studies or American studies approach to literary texts, it is also clear that the institution of the university – in this case Stanford University – is committed to the reproduction of the critical discourse of high modernism.
5 Cyraina Johnson-Roullier uses the term “spatiotemporal perspective” when offering her revision of “Euro-American modernism” from a comparative literary and culture studies perspective (see Johnson-Roullier 2000: 47). She uses the trope of “exile” in order to bring issues of modernism and racial as well as sexual differences together in her critique of traditional Euro-American modernism. Her goal is to give voice to previously silenced subject positions of “hybridity, heterogeneity, and multiplicity” (Johnson-Roullier 2000: 39).
6 When defining ethnic modernism, I mostly discuss African-American, Native American, and Jewish or Mexican immigrant writers. Asian-American immigrants faced somewhat different circumstances once in the United States. The Chinese-American, Japanese-American, and Korean-American writers of the early twentieth century – such as Pearl Buck, Sui Sin Far, Jade Snow Wong, Louis Chu (of Chinese descent); Toshio Mori, John Okada, Mine Okubo, Hisaye Yamamoto (of Japanese descent); Younghill Kang (of Korean descent); and Carlos Bulosan (of Filipino descent), among others – produced a body of work that deserves a much more extensive study within ethnic modernism, even though we can make useful comparisons between the experiences and writings of European and Asian immigrants. For an overview of and introduction to Asian American Literature see Baker (1982).
7 Alice Walker marked Hurston’s own fabrication of her birth year as 1901 on the grave, instead of the actual year of 1891 used by her biographers.
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