Dean J. Franco. Ethnic American Literature: Comparing Chicano, Jewish, and African American Writing.

Dean J. Franco. Ethnic American Literature: Comparing Chicano, Jewish, and African American Writing. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2006. 219 pp. $49.50 cloth/$19.50 paper.

Probably the biggest failure of postcolonial theory, t least in its post-Orientalism phase, has been its failure to translate into meaningful political practice. Postcolonialism's keywords remain more or less confined to the academy, while the social effects of its celebrations of hybridity pale in comparison to those once brought about by Black Power among other post-civil rights and post-Independence movements whose "essentialist" premises it now deems suspect. U. S. scholars continue to turn to Homi K. Bhabha, Paul Gilroy and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak for inspiration, embedding their baroque and exuberant phrases deeper and deeper into the American discourse; but as they do so, postcolonialism has come to look more and more like a mixed blessing, even a Pandora's Box, that rejuvenates our criticism but only at the risk of losing our claims to audience or action.

If Americanist scholars find the interface with postcolonialism problematic, you would hardly know it from their work. The desire to present one's postnationalist credentials, like the need to parade one's interdisciplinary practices, more often propels scholars into the arms of this pleasingly international and anything but Eurocentric field. Difficulties of implementation, if any are encountered, are like so many fallen trees across a road; one hardly doubts that they will be cleared, and the destiny of the path leading to the "postcolonial U. S. studies" of the future seems assured. In this transatlantic encounter, postcolonialism rarely undergoes as much scrutiny as orthodox American Studies; Spivak and Bhabha among others seem beyond criticism, their words inviolable and sacrosanct.

Two studies have recently presented a welcome challenge to this tendency to see "pre-posmationalist" American Studies as the problem and postcolonialism as its ipso facto solution. John Cullen Gruesser's Confluences: Postcolonialism, African American Literary Studies, and the Black Atlantic (2005) argues well for the need to "deterritorialize" the three fields of its subtitle, powerfully exposing the English biases hidden within the Black Atlantic matrix. Another work mining this more nuanced comparative seam is Dean J. Franco's Ethnic American Literature: Comparing Chicano, Jewish, and African American Writing (2006). Throughout Ethnic American Literature, the postcolonial field that is one of the general objects of Confluences' inquiries acquires a more practical aspect, becoming the source of the tools and techniques by which Franco restores edge to his somewhat hoary keyword. By the end of this monograph ethnicity still smells a little of the industrial age, but its association with Emma Lazarus, Abraham Cahan and Anzia Yezierska now mingles with the more modish language that Franco inherits from postcolonial landmarks and from Bhabha's The Location of Culture (1994) in particular. Ethnic American Literature's final chapter, a cross-cultural discussion of Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) and Tony Kushner's 1990's writings on Yiddish culture, greatly benefits from this approach, Bhabha's theories allowing Franco to grasp the connections between liminal positions drawn from sharply different contexts. More generally, Franco's full absorption of postcolonial models of identification his realization that "the encounter with identity" must amount to "a coming upon an absence, the absence at once of the authentic ethnic or subaltern subject"--lets him scrutinize anew the melting-pot among those other dominant U. S. myths that have classically hidden their nationalism under the egalitarian cloak of democratic progress.

Indeed, postcolonialism helps Franco to develop an impressively sharp eye for dominant U. S. ideology and the way its assumptions can produce facile explanations of historic atrocity. A surefooted chapter on Philip Roth and representations of Anne Frank in American culture memorably skewers the creed of individualism for its habit of explaining survival in terms of individual heroism, as though Holocaust survivors somehow had the "right stuff." Resurfacing, this critique develops in novel directions as Franco turns to the many interpretations of Beloved (1988) produced under the sign of trauma theory. Franco's belief that the literary text does not "solve" so much as it rehearses cultural anxieties--a belief, again, surely indebted to The Location of Culture--leads him to draw useful distinctions between these diffuse interpretations. Some fall foul of individualist assumption: something close to the impulse to valorize Holocaust survivors, Franco explains, animates the similarly facile account in which Beloved "creates" history in order to "heal" us of it. Seeing that such readings of Beloved empty it of radicalism, turning it into little more than an exercise in racial therapy, Franco rightly and persuasively insists that the novel in fact demands that we "take historical consciousness seriously" and deal with trauma in social and ethical terms. An underlying engagement with Bhabha thus enables Franco to see beyond boundaries of race and grasp the pitfalls as well as the possibilities that unite Jewish and African American responses to loss.

The sight of an American scholar drawing inspiration from the postcolonial field, then, is growing ever more familiar. Nothing, after all, confirms an ability to rise above the old nationalist mantras quite like one or two strategic references to postcolonialism's Marxist and revolutionary archive. But the irony of this phenomenon is that it is occurring at the same time as India, the Caribbean and other traditional hubs of postcolonial culture undergo major changes and appear daily less defined by their historic overthrow of European authority. The postcolonial theories that seem so radical in American discourse accordingly grow a little dull, a little grey around the edges, back home. The careful negotiations and the refusal to take sides that characterize Ethnic American Literature seem a good way to respond to this uncertain, transitional moment. Unlike other scholars Franco seems reluctant to condemn his home nation outright. The legacy of postcolonialism may enable him to see through America's old claim to offer sanctuary to the tired and huddled masses of the world, drawing his attention to the black and Mexican experiences of injustice that this resonant democratic narrative has long masked. On the other hand, some of America's admirable democratic traditions, and particularly its signature belief that novels like Beloved are democratic interventions that can force audiences into action, continue to underwrite Franco's work. The result is a study that weds postcolonialism's liberation theory to the American commitment to democratic practices. Here, the more optimistic among us might feel, is something like the way ahead.

Reviewed by

Andrew Warnes

University of Leeds, UK