A Review of Ethnic Modernism by Werner Sollors (original) (raw)

A Metahistory of Alexis de Tocqueville's Work in America

Hayden White's Metahistory attempts to give structure to the work of the most influential and diverse minds of Europe of the 19 th century. Hayden White categorizes historians' work by modes of emplotment, argumentation and ideologies. It is exceedingly difficult to comprehensibly distinguish the different categories as each group seems to overlap. Only by looking at White's broad characterizations of writing styles and then by a closer analysis of Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville's work can we see the beauty and the flaws in this unorthodox metahistorical analysis.

Review Essay, Andrew Curran's The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment

2012

forthcoming. Review essay by Madeleine Dobie, Columbia University The Anatomy of Blackness is a major contribution to the history of racial thought, and in particular to the study of its scientific dimensions. Through wide-ranging readings of seventeenth-and eighteenthcentury travel narratives and ethnographic and scientific texts, Andrew Curran explores how European discourses on skin color and human diversity took shape in the age of Enlightenment science and colonial slavery. Though it is focused on France, the book also considers Iberian, British, and German sources, charting the transfer of ideas across borders, languages, and literary genres. Taking issue with "rigid genealogies and single legacy histories" (p. xi), it characterizes the definition of blackness as a "shifting mosaic" of diverse and often contradictory ideas (p. 6). At the center of the study is a challenge to the widely shared assumption that the category of race rests on principles of immutable difference and radical alterity. Curran shows persuasively that eighteenthcentury scientists and philosophers predominantly accepted the monogenist vision of human origins articulated by the Christian church, though they understood human unity in secular rather than theological terms. He also affirms that the division of mankind into fixed taxonomic categories proposed by Carl Linnaeus in the 1758 edition of Systema naturae was rejected by many of his contemporaries, not least the Comte de Buffon, who argued instead for the fluidity of human "varieties" formed and transformed by climate and environment. The point of this rereading is not, however, to defend Enlightenment science and philosophy against the criticism that it introduced racial and indeed racist thought. Rather, Curran shows that environmentalist arguments were rapidly combined with accounts of deep-seated physiological difference. He also notes that arguments for the unity of the species and the plasticity of human subgroups did not prove to be incompatible with acceptance of the regime of Atlantic slavery.

D(NA) Coding the Ethnic: Jeffrey Eugenides'sMiddlesex

Novel, 2009

This essay discusses Jeffrey Eugenides's novel Middlesex as a project in the American immigrant tradition, about the (self) making of its protagonist. The project is narrative (Callie/Cal is the narrator, even of things that happened before she/he was born), biological (Cal must negotiate the determinism of the DNA that gives him the condition of hermaphroditism), economic (the family fortunes sit precariously atop Detroit in the 1970s), racial (the immigrants “become white”), and cultural (she/he is Greek American). The novel uses new biological epistemologies to alleviate both anxiety about determinism and, paradoxically, anxiety about lack of clear identities, a tug of war that is of course intrinsic to American ethnic literature. Eugenides could be said to recoup the old American immigrant novel promising self-making within the political context of a city of race riots and a declining manufacturing economy. The new biology allows Cal to imagine his condition and his conditio...

Emergent U.S. Literatures: From Multiculturalism to Cosmopolitanism in the Late Twentieth Century. Cyrus R. K. Patell

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, 2015

We are at a moment in which the overview as a critical genre has a new, even sexy, status. The granddaddy of this shift is Franco Moretti's 2005 book Graphs, Maps, Trees, which takes the very, very large and long view, transhistorically and transnationally, charting the emergence of genres and of entire literary traditions by using enormous data sets. We can also thank Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus for championing "surface reading," an element of which they defined as dealing with patterns within and across texts over time. Older models of the overview often saw themselves as creating canons or setting critical agendas-R. W. B. Lewis's The American Adam (1955), F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance (1941), and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) come to mind. The two books under review here, Cyrus R. K. Patell's Emergent US Literatures and Caren Irr's Toward the Geopolitical Novel, do not have such lofty ambitions, but they do propose new generic models that enlist multiple texts to construct a critical narrative. Both studies are ambitious in their range, and argue convincingly for classifying a set of US-based texts rooted in difference, marginality, and a transnational worldview as a coherent body of work. Patell's definition of "a literature" is instructive here: literatures are "an institution of culture.. .. A group of writings becomes a literature when those who produce it (the writers) or those who consume it (a group that includes readers, critics, teachers, and publishers) regard it as such" (3). While this definition strikes the reader as recursive-a literature is a literature when its writers or readers say it is-it also gets to the heart of the mechanisms of canonization. Patell's terminology, "emergent" rather than "multicultural," is also useful, especially since his purview extends beyond the usual subjects of multiculturalism: African American writing, and women's writing, which, he argues, have successfully "established themselves as legitimate academic fields" (11). Instead he focuses on Asian American, Latino, gay, and Native American literatures. Significantly for his argument, emergent writers are often explicitly invested in the mechanisms of colonialism and migration, "less interested in strategies of assimilation than in strategies of negotiation," embracing hybridity (14).