Thursday, October 28, 2004

Readings/Assignments for Tuesday, November 2, 2004

Remember that Paper Proposals will be due on Tuesday, November 2. This means that you will not be responsible for posting/writing responses to the readings listed below. I will go over expectations for the Paper Proposals in class on Tuesday, October 26, 2004. Responses to Junot Diaz's Drown should be posted to the course blog no later than midnight on Wednesday, October 27, 2004.

Please read the following materials:

Introduction and Chapter 1 ("The Scope of Orientalism") from Orientalism, by Edward Said (in three PDF files below) (Several hard copies of Orientalism are also available on reserve in the main library):
"Click here for Part One
"Click here for Part Two
"Click here for Part Three

A very short snippet from Homi Bhabha's "The Other Question," distributed in class via Xerox handout.

If you should have any difficulties with the clickable links below, the following materials are full-text articles which can be located via WilsonSelectPlus, in the USD Library Research Databases. To access the articles, Click Here to go to USD's library page, click to the Research Databases link in the right column, and then click Arts and Humanities on the next screen, Language and Literature on the screen after that, Arts and Humanities Search (AH Search) on the screen after that (at which point you may be prompted for your Network ID and Password). On the next screen, you will find a small pull-down menu next to the words Search in Database, and here you will want to pull down WilsonSelectPlus, then put a check in the Limit to Full Text box, at which point you can search for the articles by author or title. The articles are available in both HTML and PDF format:

"Tourism, Hybridity, and Ambiguity: The Relevance of Bhabha's 'Third Space' Cultures", by Keith Hollinshead

"James Welch's Fool's Crow and the Imagination of Precolonial Space: A Translator's Approach, by Andrea Opitz

"Placing the Ancestors: Postmodernism, 'Realism,' and American Indian Identity in James Welch's Winter in the Blood, by Sean Teuton

"'Remember Wounded Knee': AIM's Use of Metonymy in 21st Century Protest, by Elizabeth Rich

Wednesday, October 27, 2004

A passing thought...

In reference to our interesting Ysrael discussion last night, I think the Jacob (Israel) story has significance beyond what we talked about. There's an adolescent fiction novel titled Jacob Have I Loved, which is about twin sisters, the oldest of which struggles throughout her life with the knowledge that her parents loved her sister more. I think that same idea applies to Drown insofar as Ramon 1 can certainly be seen as Esau, who did 'sell' (was conned out of is more like, but who should judge the mysterious ways of God?) his birthright to Jacob (Ramon 2). Jacob's name means 'deceiver,' or 'one who grabs.' Jacob went on to be renamed 'Israel' after he has a dream during which he wrestles with God or the angel of the Lord. Remember the wrestling and the superheroes in the novel? His new name, as someone in class astutely noted, means 'one who struggles against God and prevails.' Jacob/Israel's sons (with two mothers, interestingly enough) were the patriarchs of the twelve tribes of Israel; thus, Jacob is both 'Israel' and the father of the nation of Israel. It makes sense, then, that the "Ysrael" chapter discusses the notions of both the child who is beloved and the place that is beloved--neither of which includes Ramon 1. The younger son 'grabs' the birthright from the elder, leaving him with basically nothing. If nothing else, the reference to the OT story illuminates Ramon 1's feelings of being disposessed and unclaimed, and further, underscores the unspoken questions in the novel about what is 'blessed,' who is 'beloved,' and the primal importance of naming and inheritance.

The Pinnacle(?) of Postmodern Storytelling: Drown as Anti-Narrative

Whose narrative is this?

This question is likely foremost on the minds of many, if not most readers of Junot Diaz’s novel, Drown, and it seems that the question is valid. Beginning with a section on “Ysrael,” and containing loosely-related (if at all) stories throughout, the novel makes one feel as though one is literally drowning. Yunior’s voice drives some of the sections, or maybe all, his older brother’s voice may be behind at least one of the sections—or he may just disappear altogether, along with the sister, and even in the sections (short stories?) that Yunior narrates, he is not always a main character—or is he? Is Aurora even a character to discuss? What about the woman Yunior ‘saves’ from the wealthy man’s home? And is she the subject of “Girlfriend,” or is Aurora, or is some other woman not named anywhere else? Is “Yunior” the narrator of Papi’s story? And is it Papi’s story? What about Ysrael, who bookends the novel? What part does he play? Questions give rise to more questions, until there seem to be so many that, as the reader, I do feel as though I’m drowning.

While Diaz’s intent is indiscernible (and unnecessary to decipher), that the reader identify with the characters in the sensation of drowning—thrashing about madly in an attempt to regain one’s balance and ability to tread the treacherous water of the novel—is certainly part of the ordering of the text; for while threads of narrative are hardly, if at all, present, the novel is nothing if not carefully crafted. Thus, it is useful to explore the reasons for writing a story that isn’t really a story—an anti-narrative, if you will.

Perhaps a study of which characters are ‘drowning’ will help to shed some light on the novel, but then, what character isn’t? Yunior, narrating the short story that shares the novel’s title, comments on his literal feeling, and interestingly, he doesn’t seem to fear it as much as one might expect. Indeed, the way that he feels about being under the water—that it is a quiet, protected space unlike the noise and chaos above water—is positive, and it becomes difficult, then, to understand the negativity that pervades the book, unless one understands the actual drowning to take place paradoxically above the water. The description of Papi’s arrival in Florida mimics the sense of confusion and panic that is reminiscent of drowning, and Mami’s inability to speak recalls the muffled sound that voices make underwater. Mami’s retreat into herself causes one to think of the silence and isolation of being trapped underwater; the absolute blackness of Yunior’s highs evoke the same images. As well, Aurora’s drug-wasted body and mind are drowning, as is the unnamed woman Yunior ‘rescues’ from the pool-table delivery. Beto, Yunior’s friend, comments just before he leaves for school, that “no one can touch me now,” which one can interpret in several different ways: literally no one can touch him, likely his father, with whom he regularly watches porn flicks; and metaphorically no one can touch him, or hold him back from getting out of the neighborhood. Furthermore, the comment, occurring as it does immediately subsequent to Beto holding Yunior under the water, is indicative of Beto’s desire to survive, not to be held under by ‘touch.’

Just think, all this and I haven’t even started on the direct effects of immigration and the notion v. reality of the ‘American dream.” Or have I? Is that maybe a function of the feeling of drowning--to allow the reader into the experience of the immigrant?

Interesting, isn’t it, that although the sections, short stories, parts, what have you of the novel seem so little related—an anti-narrative, it is virtually impossible to speak of only one without referencing at least one of the others. Thus, the novel takes postmodernism to its next level: narrative becomes anti-narrative and intertextuality becomes intratextuality (somehow uniquely more than homophorically referential), making it all the more difficult to discern when one narrative ends and another begins; and whose narrative any one narrative is, since there is no one narrative. The stories are uniquely interconnected and conflated, ultimately resulting in overlapping and / or mis/unrecognized identities (think of the three Ramons), as well as completely disappearing and / or disassociated characters.

Sunday, October 17, 2004

READ BEFORE POSTING! IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENTS!

Hello everybody!

First of all, my apologies for not posting the readings for this week sooner. Things got hectic, and I'm chagrined to say that it slipped my mind. In truth, it slipped my mind several times.

That said, please don't worry about reading the Junot Diaz interview, as I obviously did not post it in a timely manner. If you would like to take a look at the interview either now or later on, however, the interview is titled "Fiction is the Poor Man's Cinema: An Interview with Junot Diaz," by Diogenes Cespedes and Silvio Torres-Saillant, and it can be located via Project Muse in the USD Electronic Research Databases.

The second part of the announcement is that I'd like to have you bring hard copies of your response papers to class as usual, but hold off posting your blog responses to Drown for the time being. I'd like to try having the blog postings go up after the class meets this week to see if that creates a preferable discussion dynamic.

It's been suggested, and I think I agree, that perhaps you may feel as if you've already shared your salient discussion points with the class via the blog and that reiterating these points verbally in the class may feel somewhat duplicative/redundant. This is the first time I've used a course blog to post weekly response papers before the class meets in this way, and having taken things under consideration, I think that we may, perhaps, be going into the discussions somewhat "overprepared."

We can discuss this as a class a bit further on Tuesday. See you then!

Monday, October 11, 2004

Appropriating the ‘Textual Attitude’ in “Ethnic Writing/Writing Ethnicity”

“A text purporting to contain knowledge about something actual, and arising out of circumstances [in which the author has shown him or herself to be correct] is not easily dismissed. Expertise is attributed to it. This authority of academics, institutions, and governments can accrue to it, surrounding it with still greater prestige than its practical successes warrant. Most important, such texts can create not only knowledge but also the very reality they appear to describe. In time such knowledge and reality produce a tradition, or what Michel Foucault calls a discourse, whose material presence or weight, not the originality of a given author, is really responsible for the texts produced out of it.”
---Edward Said, _Orientalism_ p. 94

Dean Franco, in writing about how “Chicano ethnicity is formed, codified, and institutionalized in Chicano criticism,” notes that “race and genetic makeup, though undoubtedly significant for the ethnic subject, cannot be the defining category for ethnicity. Thus, he must search for some other way to define the Chicano/a subject, grounding it in resistance, particularly considering the complexities of the contested boundaries and borderlands that the Chicano/a subject must negotiate, especially in reference to the subject’s history as Hispanic, Mexican, Tejano (or Texano), American, Chicano, etc. Franco invokes Said’s ‘textual attitude,’ remarking that “mental formations and cultural constructions (the codes, beliefs, rites, and rituals) are palpably performed in imaginative literature of the most diverse ethnic provenance as well as in nonfiction, including academic discussions of the field.” Text as history may seem acceptable, perhaps even necessary (to the theorist, anyway, who believes that the only history is to be found in representations of history) for formation of ethnic subjectivity, but please note from the section taken from Orientalism (above) that Said was not at all a proponent of the ‘textual attitude.’ Said argues that the textual attitude is one that allows an ‘expert’ to define something that readers subsequently believe to be true and accept as fact. Readers then will not test this ‘knowledge,’ either because they have no other knowledge against which to test (or any other knowledge they have is also ‘textual’ and therefore will likely agree), or because the writer has been ‘proven’ an expert and therefore is a credible source. And therein lies the danger, according to Said, for the ‘knowledge’ is nothing more than subjective discourse—especially when ‘the lion’ of Said’s example—or the culture, since what he is exploring is the textual attitude that formed 19th century beliefs of and toward the Orient—cannot talk back.

I’m fully aware that what Franco is doing is, in a sense, ‘talking back’ by appropriating the textual attitude so that the Chicano/a writes his or her own ethnicity. What is odd, though, is that rather than writing Chicano/a ethnicity so that the colonizer learns what comprises Chicano/a subjectivity, Franco asserts that writing ethnicity is the way in which the Chicano/a subject learns his or her ethnicity. He notes that “[ethnicity] is readable” and that not only does the writer read the “self as the ethnic subject” but also the Chicano/a reader reads the self as ethnic subject. However, because of the negativity Said attaches to the idea of textual attitude, it seems useful to examine this idea further.

Why was Said so strident about the destructive nature of the textual attitude? In part because it gave the power of definition to the writer, in part because it allowed the culture to be categorized metonymically (if that’s not a word already, it is now), and in part because it, in a sense, froze the culture. Clearly Franco’s reasoning for appropriating the textual attitude is concerned with the first reason, and I fully understand and support that. A culture should have the power to write / read itself. But ought any one culture to be the only voice about itself? Textualized representations create a scenario in which, unless one wishes to be labeled ‘colonizer,’ one must be of the certain ethnicity in order to write about the culture. However, this seems to present its own set of dangers. For example, what if the only writers allowed to write colonial American culture were white? Oh, yes, that’s right, for a while that was the case, though it didn’t go over very well, and rightfully so. Why? Because, as Holly told us last week, the writers chose to depict certain aspects of what they considered their culture (like it or not, colonial America DID consider itself a culture), including the Native Americans as savage, simple, childlike, etc. Notable here is the fact that colonial writers felt the need to describe Native Americans, which suggests that they needed something against which to define themselves. But if one can only write one's own culture / ethnicity, there can be no Other, for the moment one begins to show 'difference' (read Franco's use in italics, which I can't reproduce here), what the difference is necessarily includes the / an Other, which has been summarily dismissed. Moreover, when the only ones writing / reading a culture are members of a specific culture, aspects of a culture are certain to be elided or glossed over. Neither one of these situations is in any way to be considered the ideal. I don’t think any one perspective should be given complete authority—primacy, perhaps, belongs to a member of a culture, but I do believe that other (read as different and ‘Other’) perspectives have a place, as well. For the truth, if there is one (and plenty would disagree), is to be found somewhere in between the lines of all representing perspectives.

I think a small example will help to show what I mean. Franco discusses a novel written by Cherrie Moraga, _The Last Generation_, in which the writer “engage[s] in mediating and negotiating between two cultural systems, constructing a cultural and feminist identiy as she works to deconstruct the predominantly male cultural paradigms that have worked to suppress a female perspective within Chicano criticism.” Franco gives this excerpt to support his contention:
We are no Moses, no Malcolm, no Queztalcoatl, but we are all our own
Gods. And our liberation won’t happen by some man leading the way and
Parting the Red Sea for us. We are the Red Sea, we women. (114)
Franco notes in this passage that Moraga has “st[olen] the trope of resistance from traditional power-holders (men, Anglos)”; however, it seems to me that she has conflated Chicana with Anglo (at least women) by the use of a shared Judeo-Christian religious tradition, for certainly I as an Anglo can relate to her use of Moses and the parting of the Red Sea. Thus, she has created unity between us not only as women but also as Chicana and Anglo, and that, I believe, is constructive.

Writers, it seems, seek to break down walls, celebrating 'difference' by writing a specific ethnicity while at the same time making connections with other cultures, while theorists want to claim ethnicity as a product of one culture—with no connections to any O/other. Inherent in this desire is the necessity of definition or description of a culture, which according to theory can only be accomplished against the gaze of an Other, but by doing this, one eradicates any possibility of unity or shared experience between cultures. And honestly, I’m not aware that there is any theorist who can find a culture that doesn’t have shared experiences with another culture, for even Franco finds himself in territory difficult to negotiate when he tries to posit the shared experience of the “Mexicans living in the Rio Grande valley [who were] subject to the same ethnic gaze of the other—the Anglo oppressor” Now, aside from the fact that once again the Anglo is the Other, which calls to mind the question of what exactly other cultures would do if the Anglo culture, which they deride regularly, didn’t exist (for then who would cultures define themselves against?), the ethnic gaze of the Anglo Other / oppressor not only is a shared one as demonstrated by Moraga’s novel, it is also a shared one based on the fact that Mexicans living in the Rio Grande valley were themselves once colonizers and oppressors of the indigenous cultures of Latin America. Thus, what Franco frames as singularly Chicano/a ethnicity is actually a shared experience between Chicano/a and Anglo. Certainly there is 'difference,' but there is unity as well.

Wednesday, October 06, 2004

Readings for Tuesday, October 12, 2004

Please read the following materials:

"Ethnic Writing/Writing Ethnicity: The Critical Conceptualization of Chicano Identity," by Dean Franco (from Post Identity, 2.1 (Winter 1999) 104-122). (Scroll down volume index to click directly onto article).

"Global Fragments: A Second Latinamericanism," by Alberto Moreiras (from The Cultures of Globalization, eds. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi).

The following materials are full-text articles which can be located via Project Muse, in the USD Library Research Databases. To access the articles, Click Here to go to USD's library page, click to the Research Databases link in the right column, and then type in Project Muse in the Search by Database prompt. (If you are working off-campus, note that you will be prompted for your Network ID and Password prior to being given access to the Research Databases). Once in Project Muse, you can search for the articles using title or author's last name, etc. The articles are available in both HTML and PDF format:

"The Tribulations of Blackness: Stages in Dominican Racial Identity," by Silvio Torres-Saillant (from Callaloo, 23.3 (2000) 1086-1111).

"A Search for Identity in Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents," by William Luis (from Callaloo, 23.3 (2000) 839-849).

"Remaking Identity, Unmaking Nation: Historical Recovery and the Reconstruction of Community in In the Time of the Butterflies and The Farming of Bones," by Lynn Chun Ink (from Callaloo, 27.3 (2004) 788-807).

Monday, October 04, 2004

Lost Animals and Magical Realism in Blu's Hanging

"You are all a lost generation."
Gertrude Stein

While Jamie James does seem to make a point about the “redundancy of scenes of cruelty to animals” in Blu’s Hanging, I think there may be more to the animal scenes than simply “to create a symbol of the maltreatment of poor children on Molokai.” The scenes are certainly, as James notes, “repellent”; however, what the text illuminates through the scenes is not only a symbolic representation of children, but also a symbolic representation of the loss of a native, natural connection with the land. The animals are symptomatic of the loss of connection with the land. Leslie Marmon Silko’s text, Almanac of the Dead, uses a similar motif to demonstrate the ultimate and utter downfall of humanity when it takes animals away from their instinctive, natural environments. Thus, I don’t think the reader should focus solely on the animals as symbols for the children. It’s more complicated: the animals also represent and simultaneously demonstrate the supernatural, narrated through the motif of magical realism. And in Blu’s Hanging, that the animals have been removed from the natural / supernatural realm causes the humans’ inability to negotiate their world.

Ivah, Blu (later), Maisie, and Poppy all realize that Ka-San is, somehow, in the magical realism sense, their mother, and Hoppy Creetat is clearly also a spirit creature, sent to take away some of Poppy’s sadness. Both Big Sis and Sandi Ito recognize at least the cat as having power. The Reyes sisters, Uncle Paulo, and Mrs. Ikeda, however, don’t see the animals’ power. It is possible that “the Kuro-chan” with too many dogs does, but we aren’t ever really certain. The characters who don’t ‘recognize’ the animals remove them from their natural contexts and the animals’ connection to the natural / spirit world is desecrated and ultimately severed. Hoppy Creetat’s first litter of kittens is killed by the “cat killers”—the Reyes sisters, Paulo kills any number of other cats, and Mrs. Ikeda deserts her ‘beloved’ dogs in the cellar and lets them die horrible deaths (though Blu would like to bring them home “ For make friends with Ka-San” (112), which perhaps demonstrates his latent understanding of Ka-San’s identity and the dogs’ innate power).

Furthermore, Mrs. Ikeda’s dog-breeding business and Blu’s business of washing dogs and cars demonstrate the commodification of the animals that is, at least in part, the reason for removing them from their natural environment. And, from the number of customers that Blu gains in a short time, the commodification seems to be a societal norm. The damage to both animal and human, though, is severe. Having been domesticated by the children, Hoppy’s instinctive protective nature is compromised, her kittens are killed, and the children must wait longer for the black kitten that will heal Poppy. The dogs in the basement are forced to suffer enormous physical pain, and their owner, who refuses to admit that she is abusing them, does represent all of the adults who ignore the damage done to innocent young children, such as Miss Owens’ treatment of Maisie, interestingly the first character to ‘recognize’ Ka-San; but more than simple allegory for children, the dogs also point to the caging that keeps Eleanor from going ‘home.’ If the animals can’t find their way because of loss of supernatural capability, then neither can the humans.

The animals’ inability to function as representations of the supernatural gives the novel an unexpected complexity: there are moments in the text, as my good friend Jeremy noted, when although one expects magical realism to be woven into the fabric, one notes that it is not there and the text is curiously flat. I would like to argue that the reason for this is because of the fact that the animals have been so compromised. Magical realism depends on animals that hold some element of the supernatural, and in the novel, the animals are no longer able to exist completely in that capacity. Ka-San, for example, is not only the family dog but also in some very real sense Eleanor, the children’s’ mother. But Ka-San suffers from the same cultural malaise as all of the other characters—both human and animal, and thus cannot function on the instinctive level that should not only be instinctive but also be infused with magical realism. There are times when Ivah takes Ka-San’s tears and rubs them into her eyes, seeing Mama, and there are also times when Poppy just pats the dog on the head and walks down the street.

Moreover, Ka-San / Mama cannot let go of her children and find her way to heaven. Rather than it lighting the way for her, the light draws her back to her ‘home’. And the dog stays with the children instead of leaving, as her instinct should lead her. In a sense, then, Ivah’s recurring wish to fly is an interesting one, insofar as metaphorically speaking, the animals in the book don’t seem to know how anymore, either, and cannot teach her. Hence, Blu’s pre-adolescent sexual experience is a debased, commodified substitute, as is Poppy’s drug addiction.

Animals should never be lost. They are supremely instinctive beings that don’t need the compass in my Chrysler van. When they are taken out of their natural environments, caged, abused, and commodified, animals are subject to the same sense of loss or ‘lost’ as many of the characters in Blu’s Hanging. Moreover, the text suggests that the supernatural or magical realism that does actually exist, interconnected with the land and the animals, enriching and guiding, will be lost, too, and humans will reap what they have sown.