The Postethnic Literary

Florian Sedlmeier

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9783110409116
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

The book explores the discursive and theoretical conditions for conceptualizing the postethnic literary. It historicizes US multicultural and postcolonial studies as institutionalized discursive formations, which constitute a paratext that regulates the reception of literary texts according to the paradigm of representativeness. Rather than following that paradigm, the study offers an alternative framework by rereading contemporary literary texts for their investment in literary form. By means of self-reflective intermedial transpositions, the writings of Sherman Alexie, Chang-rae Lee, and Jamaica Kincaid insist upon a differentiation between the representation of cultural sign systems or subject positions and the dramatization of individual gestures of authorship. As such, they form a postethnic literary constellation, further probed in the epilogue of the study focused on Dave Eggers.

1 Breaching the Autobiographical Pact: Sherman Alexie and the Ethics of Reading for Form

As with any other quality of ethnic difference solicited to construct multicultural literary histories, Native Americanness is discursively fabricated. Yet inevitably, the very notion of a Native American literature and its history is strategically reclaimed precisely because it is, as a discursive construct, internally as well as externally contested. Robert Dale Parker’s argument expresses this conundrum, albeit without delineating the paradox. On the one hand, he “identifies a series of key issues in the emerging, imaginary coherence of Native American literature over roughly the last century,” explaining that he employs the notion of “invention to suggest an air of the provisional, of ongoing process and construction, as opposed to a natural, inevitable effusion of Indian identity” (Parker 2003: 3, 5). On the other, Parker declares that he “takes[s] the presence of Indian writing for granted,” adding that he wants to “insist on the aesthetic value of Indian literature, together with its identity as Indian” (Parker 2003: 3). How can something be invented and imaginary, and yet be simply present and taken for granted? Parker wishes to have it both ways: Indian literatures and identities are givens, but they are at the same time invented and must be perpetuated in order to prevent the naturalization implied by the notion of taking-it-for-granted. Such paradoxical argumentation characterizes this discourse precisely because strategic positivism is seldom recognized and explored as the underlying premise of the politics of representation. While Parker’s “set of topics” that supposedly characterizes Native American literature – “young men’s threatened masculinity, the oral, the poetic, and Indian cultures’ aloof renegotiations of what the dominant culture understands as authority” (Parker 2003: 3) – is not entirely random, it remains based upon the paradigm of representativeness it also constitutes.

More generally, within the multicultural paradigm, such strategic marking and marketing of texts and writers as ethnic is perpetuated by a complex network of institutions and agents, including at times the authors themselves, publishing houses, the professional proxies of the respective communities, journalists, and academic critics. For how else do professional readers retrieve African American, Mexican American, or Native American writers and texts if not by searching for them as Black, Chicano/a, Indian authors and literatures? One such practice of marking and marketing, very common in the United States, is the anthology. Much has been said and written about the relationship between this particular form of publication and the discursive emergence of multicultural literatures. After all, it was not until the 1990 edition of The Heath Anthology of American Literature that the inclusion of texts written by authors of diverse ethnic backgrounds into the canon was initiated and established. The tradition of producing special anthologies for texts according to a set of extra-, intra-, and intertextual ethnic markers reaches, of course, back to Alain Locke’s famous volume The New Negro published in 1925. The inclusion of Winold Reiss’s and Walter von Ruckteschell’s paintings and illustrations in Locke’s work already complicates the ethnic marking and alludes to the problem of representativeness.⁴⁵ Fostered by the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, a renewed interest in ethnicity and race led to the publication of several anthologies.⁴⁶ However, it was not until the 1990s, and thus not until the very moment when the paradigm of representativeness became institutionalized, that volumes of ethnic literatures began to demand the installment of extra shelves in bookstores. The explosion of such anthological projects, of course, is inextricable from the advent of identity politics in U.S. scholarship. Indeed, over the course of roughly two and a half decades the anthology has become the suitable frame for the promotion of literary histories according to the politics of recognition, grounded in differential discourse and identity scripts.⁴⁷

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To historicize this process, I want to suggest that an alternative act is at stake. This chapter will consider two texts by Sherman Alexie and the contexts of their publication. The first, his short literary prose piece “The Unauthorized Autobiography of Me” was published twice in 2000. Initially included in an anthology entitled Here First: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers, edited by Arnold Krupat and Brian Swann, Alexie also published the text in One Stick Song, a collection of poems and prose pieces. Playing out notions of the autobiographical and the biographical against one other, Alexie’s own collection renames the piece in the table of contents as “The Unauthorized Biography of Me.”⁴⁸ While Krupat and Swann’s introductory essay frames Alexie’s literary prose piece according to the paradigm of representativeness, the publisher Hanging Loose Press, downplaying the ethnic marking, markets Alexie in decidedly literary terms. “The Unauthorized Autobiography of Me” itself, in a series of vignettes, self-reflectively engages formal and intermedial transpositions, mostly derived from popular culture, in order to debunk the autobiographical pact and the idea of a synecdochic self as championed by Krupat and Swann. Exposing the notion of the autobiographical as a figure of reading in Paul de Man’s sense, Alexie’s text insists upon a differentiation between the representation of ethnic subject positions and authorial gestures. With this negation of identity scripts and the paradigm of representativeness, the literary prose piece foregrounds problems of authorial positionality and literary representability as such. And it is out of this problematizing that the postethnic literary emerges.

The discussion will then turn to a reading of Sherman Alexie’s preface to Percival Everett’s novel Watershed, in which the African American Everett appropriates Native American sign systems. The preface employs the rhetorical mode of the interrogative in order to construct the notion of a literary friendship, which is contingent upon the comic mode and which cuts across the multicultural spectrum. In elaborating upon Derek Attridge’s idea of an ethics of reading, the final section of the chapter brings these two texts together. I wish to suggest that Alexie’s self-reflective formal transpositions, which express the notion of individual authorial gestures and postethnic literariness, locate such an ethics of reading in a literary performance of non-identity. Extending the argument into a discussion of the genres of the literary manifesto (“The Unauthorized Autobiography of Me”) and the essay (Alexie’s preface, read with Adorno), I contend that both texts formally and effectively negate the discursive formations structured by strategic positivism and perpetuated by paratextual frames.

The Editorial Paratext: Whose Text and What Kind of Text?

Since the paratextual frame of the anthology affects at least one of our encounters with Sherman Alexie’s prose piece, we should see how his text comments on this editorial framing. In order to understand what is at stake, a careful unraveling of the paratextual layers is necessary to trace the modes of production and reception that constitute the multicultural paradigm. From within that discursive formation, structured around the problem of self-representation and communal representativeness, it is a crucial detail that neither Arnold Krupat, the scholar, nor Brian Swann, the poet-critic, are members of the community whose literary-essayistic productions they edit and advocate. In this sense, of course, the editorial paratext may be read as a contemporary version of a lengthy tradition of collaborative autobiographies and translational projects. For the symbolic capital that is inscribed in their names and institutional positions may enable a wider circulation and distribution, albeit primarily within the confines of an academic context.

In their co-authored introduction Krupat and Swann seek to clarify their editorial project, although without at first addressing their own position as non-indigenous scholars, and as representatives of the professional culturalist economy. Starting their essay with a reference to their 1987 volume, I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers, they fashion themselves as established institutional providers of a position of enunciation for Native American writers. Notably, that earlier volume, whose title bears the very markers which link self-representational writing to a communally representative idea of authorship, was published at the very moment that multicultural discourse was about to become institutionalized. With this reference, then, they retroactively position themselves as collaborative co-founders of a discourse whose logic of strategic positivism renders such a position impossible in the first place. It is this discursive paradox that may also account for the reproduction of indigenous self-fashioning in the titles of both volumes: I Tell You Now and Here First can be read as citations of enunciative statements, which articulate a politics of experience that fosters the claim for self-representation. Furthermore, the two enunciations can be understood as written representations of oral exclamations. They thus anchor the experiential claim in what is commonly declared to be the constitutive feature of Native American literature, namely its dependency on oral modes of storytelling. Yet while the enunciations expressed in the two titles clearly cater to these modes, the signatures of the editors, Krupat’s and Swann’s names, inevitably undercut such a discursive claim in the first place.

Krupat and Swann open by legitimizing their continuing effort to provide the editorial frame for voices to be heard and for written representations of these voices. They stress that their first collection preceded “Dances with the Wolves, Blackrobe, various ‘Geronimos,’ and the Tony Hillerman explosion,” that is: a set of economically profitable appropriations of indigenousness in 1990s U.S. popular culture (Krupat and Swann 2000: xi). While they diagnose “an increase in the production of what might be called ‘cultural fast food,’” they also see “a very real, if still small, space for Native American writers, painters, and scholars to present some spiritually and intellectually nourishing fare” (Krupat and Swann 2000: xi). The implicit assumption in declaring the ‘real space’ seems to be that these self-expressions produce authentic nourishment. The adverbial conjunction “spiritually and intellectually” anchors the autobiographical essays of the volume in culturally specific belief systems as well as academic discourse. It thus reproduces the familiar notion that Native American art is necessarily invested in the realm of the spiritual – a notion whose stereotypical potential is balanced by the no less potentially patronizing approval of the texts’ intellectuality. Even if we accept the link between the spiritual and the intellectual as culturally specific, the very rhetorical strategy of ‘conjuncture-by-separation’ is suspicious since it also reproduces the idea that these two realms are necessarily distinct. The metaphor of nourishment is striking in this respect since it, no less stereotypically, positions the folklore-intellect axis as a naturalized residual for a larger project of American cultural regeneration beyond consumer capitalism. In this context, the mixed metaphor of the “nourishing fare” aligns the idea of cultural fostering with the economic realm. The irony, albeit unintended, exposes the editors as profiteers, who acquire symbolic intellectual capital by participating in the promotion of Native American literature with a disingenuous gesture of transgressing the stereotypical representations of popular cultural consumption.

In the subsequent paragraph, Krupat and Swann explain the production process and the intentions of the volume. Situating the present volume as a continuation of their earlier work, and referencing studies that construct Native American autobiography as a distinct genre, they insist that they “attempted to contact as many contemporary Native American writers as we knew of for contributions, and we asked them to speak of their lives [xi] and their relation to their art” (Krupat and Swann 2000: xi–xii). The volume is thus presented as a comprehensive survey, seeking to include the entirety of the contemporary Native American literary world. And the contributions are framed by affirming the gesture of conventional definitions of the autobiographical, namely the convergence of experienced life and writing. Moreover, the verb “speak” again anchors the contributions in oral traditions of storytelling. The narrated lives are positioned as lives spoken. In circumventing any differentiation between constructs of spoken word, written text, and experience, the introductory statement caters to the prevalent discursive formation. While Krupat and Swann carefully handle their inevitable omission of some writers with the remark that potential exclusions were not intended, they also mention various reasons why some invited writers did not submit a text. Apparently, there were several who “felt that they had spoken about themselves sufficiently” (Krupat and Swann 2000: xii). The explanation for the writers’ refusal to contribute to the volume once more reiterates the prevalent discourse, collapsing speaking, writing, and the expressive articulation of a self. Citing one response in particular, in which a writer declared many of the authors included in the volume to be “self-nominated Indians,” Krupat and Swann prepare a discussion of the question “Who is an Indian?” – a question they somewhat euphemistically describe as “a hotly debated issue of late” (Krupat and Swann 2000: xii).

The discussion repeats categories Krupat himself has identified in his analyses of Native American discourse, where he differentiates “the nationalist, the indigenist, and the cosmopolitan positions” (Krupat and Swann 2000: xii) in order to resolve the controversy (see Krupat 2002: 1–23). Gerald Vizenor, who also contributes to the volume, is explicitly mentioned as a representative of the latter position, which rejects the blood rhetoric of the nationalists and the idea of a distinct epistemology of the indigenous. The editors reference two of his studies, which employ conceptual tropes such as trickster and the notion of the post-Indian; and they cite a piece in which he redefines, in their phrasing, tribal membership to include “anyone committed to the values of healing rather than stealing tribal cultures” (Krupat and Swann 2000: xii). Vizenor’s definition seemingly eschews the pitfalls of racial discourse that govern the paradigm of representativeness. However his post-Indianness continues to position the memorialization of indigenous cultures and...

Table of contents

• Buchreihe der ANGLIA/ ANGLIA Book Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface: Read, Again
• Acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: Paratexts, Transpositions, and Postethnic Literature
• 1 Breaching the Autobiographical Pact: Sherman Alexie and the Ethics of Reading for Form
• 2 Copies, Lists, and Reading Publics in Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker
• 3 Exhaustion, Abstraction, and the Longing for Postethnic Literary Presence in Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy
• Coda - The How is the What: Constellations of the Postethnic Literary
• Works Cited
• Index